Paper. Mystery. Idea. Analogy. Analysis. Logic. Quantity. Heresy.
The difference between Greek and Roman character, which is marked so plainly by the way in which Aryan myths developed among the two peoples and moulded the finer meanings of their languages, is evident in many other English words besides those which we can actually trace back to such myths. For instance, the Greek ‘scandalizein’ and the Latin ‘offendere’ both meant to ‘cause to stumble’, but for us there is a subtle difference between scandalize and offend; for while scandalize and scandal merely hint at the liveliness of an emotion, offend and offence convey a sober warning of its probable results. ‘Discere’ in Latin and ‘mathein’ in Greek both meant to ‘learn’; but the substantives which are derived from these verbs have come down into our language, the one as discipline and the other as mathematics. Rome turned instinctively to the external, Greece to the inner world as a vehicle for the expression of her impulses. And just as ‘learning’ for the Roman gradually came to mean ‘learning to be a soldier’, so the ordinary Latin word for ‘teacher’ (doctor) is now applied most commonly to a teacher of physical health. And these two are not the only Latin words which have hurried out of school in this way. ‘Magister’, for instance, has exchanged the class-room for the police-court and left behind the Greek ‘paidagόgos’ (pedagogue) to express the most schoolmasterish kind of schoolmaster that can be imagined. Perhaps the most significant of all is school itself. Words for ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough, the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not school at all. What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which we have taken school. But to a Greek all this had been merely the natural way of spending his spare time. ‘Scholē’ was the common Greek word for ‘leisure.’
Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt; and when we remember that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization and the birth of Homer is about as long as the period between Homer’s day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting, therefore, to observe that our word alphabet comes to us, through Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet—‘alpha’ and ‘beta’—which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words. Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took it from the ‘hieratic script’ or priestly writing of Egypt. Jot, in the phrase ‘jot or tittle’, is an English form invented by the translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter ‘iota’, which is also of Phoenician origin. Bible, on the other hand, is from the Greek ‘biblos’, which meant ‘the inner bark of the papyrus’, and so ‘a book’; and paper was borrowed by the Angles and Saxons from Latin ‘papyrus’, itself a transliteration of the Greek ‘papuros’, meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian origin.
External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics”. But if there was among the priests a “philosophy” in our sense of the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared to receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their philosophy to institutions called Mysteries, which were evidently felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought and feeling have passed over into our language.
We have adopted from Latin the word initiate, which meant ‘to admit a person to these Mysteries’, and the importance attached to secrecy is shown by the fact that ‘muein’, the Greek for ‘to initiate‘, meant originally ‘to keep silent’. From it the substantive ‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium’, and so the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances, and secondly, that the “initiate” attained immortality in a sense different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through symbolized dying in order to be “born again”, and when it was over, he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: “Behold, I tell you a mystery!” And it is the same whenever the word occurs elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the Christian era.[26]
The first man—as far as we know—to call himself a ‘philosophos’, or lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras, who applied the label to himself and his followers. Philosophy among the Pythagoreans, with its emphasis on astronomy, geometry, and number, was still decidedly Egyptian; but gradually, from these starry beginnings, the Greek mind built up a vast, independent edifice of thought and language. The words that have come into our language directly from Greek philosophy are numerous enough, but if we were to add those which have reached us in Latinized form, and finally those words which are actually Latin, but which take their whole meaning from the Greek thought they were used to translate, we should fill several pages with the mere enumeration of them. The list would spread itself all over the dictionary, varying from such highly technical terms as homonym and noumena to common ones like individual, method, and subject.
Perhaps a more accurate term than Greek philosophy would be “Greek thought”, for Greek thinkers took some time to arrive at the distinction, so familiar to us, between philosophy and other branches of study such as history. The Greek word ‘historia’ meant at first simply ‘knowledge gained by inquiry’, and some of the words which follow are first found in the works of Hesiod and Herodotus.
Among the words which have come to us from earlier Greek thought are cosmos[27]—the name applied by the Pythagoreans to the universe, which they perceived as a “shapely” and harmonious whole—geometrical terms such as pyramid (probably of Egyptian origin), hypotenuse and isosceles; many of the technical terms of music, as chord, harmony, melody, tone; of literature: hyperbole, metaphor, rhetoric, syntax, trope; and a host of common words of wider significance, such as academy, analogy, aristocracy, astronomy, cosmogony, critic, democracy, eclipse, economic, enthusiasm, ethical, genesis, grammatical, hypothesis, mathematical, method, phenomenon, physical, poetic, politics, rhythm, theology, theory. Of those which were translated into Latin by Cicero and other Latin writers, and possibly by Greek schoolmasters in Rome, we may mention air, element, essence, ideal, individual, quality, question, science, species, and vacuum, together with most of the terminology of grammar, such as adjective, case, gender, noun, number, verb,... Type comes from ‘tupos’, the name of the preliminary sketch made by a Greek painter before he started on the work itself.
In a sense, the thought of the earlier Greek philosophers may be said to have reached its consummation, its very fullest expression, in the writings of Plato. Among the words which are first found in his works are the Greek originals of analogy, antipodes, dialectic, enthusiasm, mathematical, synthesis, and system; while he imparted a new and special meaning to many others like method, musical, philosopher, sophist, theory, type, irony (the name he gave to Socrates’s peculiar method of simulating ignorance in order to impart knowledge), and, of course, idea and ideal. Before Plato used it, the word ἰδέα meant simply the form or semblance of anything. It is connected with ‘idein’, ‘to see’[28], and when Cicero came to translate it, he had to use the Latin word ‘species’, which had a similar meaning, being connected with ‘specere’, ‘to see’ and ‘speculum’, ‘a mirror’. To-day idea does not mean to us quite what ἰδέα did to Plato; but tracing the whole history of the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative use of these four letters, began to make it possible for us to get outside our thoughts and look at them, to separate our “ideas” about things from the things themselves.
Thus, it was not only Greek words of which he was to alter the meanings, nor only Greek and Latin words. Love and good, for instance, are neither Greek nor Latin, and beauty is only Latin remotely, yet the spirit of Plato really works more amply in them, and in a thousand others bearing on the presence or absence of these qualities, than it does in such specifically Platonic terms as idea and dialectic. Let us try and trace the origin of some of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word love. As in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato’s lucid mind brought to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual “types” or “ideas”—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions, are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away. The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality. The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the invisible and eternal. It is not only in the New Testament and the Prayer Book, in the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and all great Romantic poetry that the results of this thinking are to be seen. Through the Church and the poets to the dramatist and the novelist, and through them to the common people—there is no soulful drawing-room ballad, no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette or genteel text on the wall of a cottage parlour through which, every time the hackneyed word is brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato does not peep for a moment forlornly out upon us.
In the latter days of Plato’s life there came to the “Academy” where he taught a young man from Stagira, in Macedonia. His name was Aristotle, and after he left Plato he became for a time the tutor of Alexander the Great. In spite of their proximity in time and space, the difference between Plato’s method of thought and the Aristotelian or peripatetic system can hardly be exaggerated. While Plato had concentrated his intellectual effort on mapping out what we should now call the “inner” world of human consciousness; starting from the point of view of ancient tradition and myth, and working outward; relating his thoughts to one another in accordance, as it were, with their own inherent qualities; and deducing the sense-world from the spiritual world; Aristotle turned to the acquisition of knowledge about the outer world of matter and energy—that is to say, that part of the world which can be apprehended by the five senses and the brain. The two philosophers were alike in their emphasis on the importance of cultivating immortality—or rather of “immortalling” (for they used a special verb which we have lost), but otherwise there were few resemblances indeed. To Plato the soul of the universe had seemed inseparable from his own soul, and natural phenomena such as the revolutions of the planets had interested him rather as tangible, outward pictures of the life within that soul. To Aristotle the world outside himself was interesting more for its own sake. Plato had looked up to “Ideas”—real Beings with an existence of their own, which stood behind physical phenomena rather than within them. Aristotle deliberately attacked this doctrine, maintaining that the Ideas were immanent; they could not have existed before visible Nature, nor could they have any being apart from it; and they could only be arrived at, he said, by investigating Nature itself. When Aristotle laid down his pen after writing the Metaphysics, the word idea had taken a long step towards its present meaning.
Thus in Aristotle’s imagination the two worlds, outer and inner, met and came into contact in quite a new way. The mind was, as it were, put at the absolute disposal of matter; it ceased to brood on what arose from within, and turned its attention outwards. The result of this was, of course, an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge concerning the material processes of the outer world. But that was not the first result. For, curiously enough, the first result was a pronounced hardening and sharpening of the mind’s own outlines. Struggling to fit herself, as into a glove, to the processes of cause and effect observed in physical phenomena, the mind became suddenly conscious of her own shape. She was astonished and delighted. She had discovered logic. The actual Greek word ‘logic’ (ή λογική τέχνη) is first found with its present meaning in Cicero, but he is speaking of Aristotle; the thing itself and the technique of it was the invention of Aristotle, and it was Aristotle who first used the word syllogism in its modern sense.
Perhaps the most significant of all those words which are first found in Aristotle’s treatise on Logic is analytic. Here is indeed a new word made to express a new kind of thinking. Energy, entelechy, ethics, physiology, and synonym, are further examples of words which, as far as we know, were actually created by Aristotle, while we owe metaphysics to the accident of his having treated that subject after (‘meta’) his treatise on Physics. Axiom, category, mechanics, organic, physics, and synthesis are Greek words which take their modern meanings chiefly from Aristotle; but his emphasis on the concrete and his constant gravitation towards a kind of knowledge which might turn out to be practically useful evidently made him a favourite with the Roman mind. Consequently many of his words have come down to us translated into Latin. Among those which we can actually trace are absolute, actual, definition, equivocal, induction, instance, moral, potential, property, quintessence, subject,[29] substance, virtual, and the grammatical term particle; of the plentiful number which have flown more indirectly from his mind we may mention conceit and concept, deduction, difference, experiment, principle, and universal. In quantity (a translation of the Greek ‘posotes’—‘how-muchness’—and seemingly formed by Aristotle on the analogy of Plato’s ‘poiotēs’, from which we have quality) we can perhaps see the beginning of that interest in the calculable aspect of the objects of the visible world from which the exact sciences have arisen. The human mind had now begun to weigh and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and measuring has gone on—with intervals—for twenty-three centuries.
Thus, Platonic philosophy fades from our view in the person of Socrates, proving by analogy the immortality of the soul of man and the soul of the world; and the fatal chill has scarcely risen to his heart when Aristotelian philosophy comes over the horizon, vigorously investigating by analysis the structure and composition of the body of man and the body of the world. Thanks to his friendship with Alexander, Aristotle himself had hitherto unparalleled opportunities for collecting information on every conceivable subject. Knowledge, often inaccurate enough, was garnered from the four quarters of the civilized world, old manuscripts were edited and compared, and, above all, Nature herself was observed in a way which was quite new. After his death his followers went on putting his methods into practice. Side by side with the weighing and measuring went naming. And so to the three or four hundred years which followed we owe a good deal of the technical terminology of our arts and sciences. It was at this time, for instance, that botany first developed into a science. Many of the names of our commonest wildflowers can be traced back to writings of the period, and the following examples are all taken from the first half of the alphabet: aconite, amaranth, balsam, balm, box, calamint, celandine, cherry, chestnut, chicory, germander, heliotrope, marjoram, melilot. Moreover, nearly all the technical terms of botany are Greek, and though most of them, including the word botany itself, were created later, writers of this period may be said to have given the lead with such learned labels as calyx, perianth, and gymnosperm.
When we are “dating” a word in this way, however, we must remember that only a fragment of the whole of Greek literature has come down to us. Thus we cannot be sure, because a flower-name first occurs in a writer of the Alexandrian period, that it was actually created by him or his contemporaries. Anemone, asparagus, bugloss, celery, centaury, clematis, coriander, crocus, lily, medlar, and mint all go right back to Classical Greek, while petal and possibly spore are botanical terms which were already in use. On the whole, the Alexandrians probably collected, arranged, and renewed the meanings of more words than they actually created.
This is even truer in the case of medicine. The analytical method of thought led naturally in Alexandria to the actual dissection of bodies, living and dead. Aristotle himself is still regarded as the founder of comparative anatomy (cutting up), and it was he who first used this word in its medical sense. The peculiar meaning of the word empirical, moreover, derives from a set of physicians who held that practice was the one thing necessary in their art. It might be thought that with this foreshadowing of modern “methods” there would have been a great influx of new information and new terminology. In actual fact we find that the Greek words (and their name is legion) in the terminology of medical science were either created later by the different European peoples, or else they appear in the works of Hippocrates, a physician who had a large practice in Attica before Plato was born. Among the words found in Hippocrates are the Greek originals of arthritis, bronchial, catalepsy, catarrh, diarrhoea, dropsy, dysentery, epidemic, erysipelas, haemorrhage, hypochondriac, hysteria, nephritis, ophthalmia, paregoric, phlebotomy, phthisis, quinsy, rheum, sciatica, and hypochondriac; while apoplexy is particularly interesting because its Latin translation, ‘sideratio’, shows that it originally had the sense of ‘star-struck’ or ‘planet-struck’. Crisis is Hippocrates’s name for the crucial point at which a disease takes a turn for the worse or the better. It came to England with this meaning in the sixteenth century, and was gradually extended to cover first “the conjunction of stars on which this ‘crisis’ depended”, and then “any critical situation”. Anaemia, however, and possibly enteric, seem to have been first used by Aristotle.
The centre of all this furious intellectual activity was the city of Alexandria. Nor was it confined to scientific spheres; for the results of religious and philosophical developments which now took place in and around the cosmopolitan city in the north of Egypt were, if anything, more far-reaching than those of empirical science. Indeed, it was from this point in history that theology and science first[30] began to be two separate studies, science following eagerly in the footsteps of Aristotle and religion brooding over the profundities of Platonic philosophy and saturating them with feeling. Between Aristotle and Plato is the great divide from which flowed in two different directions two separate streams, as it were, of human outlook; and just as the modern European, whether or no he possesses any genuine scientific knowledge, can trace the general shape and method of his thinking back to the former, so, whether or no he calls himself a Christian, he must trace much of what he regards as his ordinary “feelings” back to the latter.
For the stream of Platonic thought was now to join itself with other influences coming, for the most part, from farther East. One of the few Egyptian words which have come down into our language is ammonia. It is the name of an alkali which was said to have been found near a certain spot in the Libyan desert, where there was an Egyptian temple to Zeus Ammon, and it will serve to remind us that Alexander the Great was deeply under the influence of the Egyptian priesthood when, in 332 B.C., after his brilliant career of conquests, he visited this temple to pay his devotions before founding the city of Alexandria. We find, therefore—as might be expected—a strong Egyptian element blending with what was Greek in the thoughts and feelings that began to ferment in the more enterprising Alexandrian bosoms. And that is not all. A third influence was added. In the third century B.C. a certain capable ruler of Alexandria invited a body of Egyptian Jews to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The Septuagint, as it was called, was so successful that Greek soon became the official language of the Hebrew religion. Thus, the Greek version found its way into the synagogues of Palestine, and it must have been the Greek version which was read by Jesus of Nazareth.
Without making a study of the Septuagint, it is easy to perceive how passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold and clear-cut Greek words, until classical Greek had grown slowly into the “Hellenistic” Greek of the New Testament. Seeking for words to convey such notions as ‘sin’, ‘righteousness’, ‘defilement’, ‘abomination’, ‘ungodly’, the Jewish translators had to do the best they could with vocables which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied something more like ‘folly’, ‘integrity’, ‘dirt’, ‘objectionable practice’, ‘ignorant’. Any number of such examples could be found. The harmless Greek word ‘eidōlon’ (idol), which had formerly meant any sort of mental image, including a mere mental fancy, suddenly found itself selected from its fellows to be spit upon and cast into outer darkness. ‘Paradeisos’, on the other hand—the park of a Persian nobleman—was spirited away, as though by the four Djinns of Arabian legend, first to the Garden of Eden and then to the heavens. It may well be that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, more than anywhere else, is crystallized out for us that process which went on in and about Alexandria for three or four hundred years, and which remained almost unaffected by the inclusion of the city within the Roman Empire. Language never ceases growing, but an important document such as this is like a cross-section of its stem. In it we can see clearly what an enormous part that Alexandrian mingling of Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek conceptions of the Almighty has played in determining the subtler part of the words we use every day—in building up those delicate associations of which few of us ever become fully conscious, but which we all instinctively bring into play when we are speaking under the influence of emotion.
And later, in the work of a writer like Philo the Jew, who lived and wrote about A.D. 50, we can discern some of the religious activities which had followed the translation of the Septuagint; how the Jew, with his expectation of the Messiah, the Egyptian devotee, with his reverence for Horus—the child of a virgin mother, Isis—who died and rose again as the sun-god Osiris, and the Greek, with his elaborated Platonic doctrine, met together, speaking Greek; how innumerable sects, ascetic and licentious, philosophical and superstitious, wise and foolish, had been springing up and dying down all over the Alexandrian world—all of them, to whatever extravagant lengths they may have carried their philosophies and their dreams, working unconsciously at the long task of altering the meaning, the emotional colour, the evocative power of common Greek words. Concepts such as ‘God’, ‘world’, ‘love’, ‘soul’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘spirit’, ‘self’, and a hundred others were first resolved by the chemical action upon them of similar concepts from the minds of other nations and races, and then they began to be built up anew and to take on the form in which they are presented, as he learns to speak, to the modern European child.
Greek philosophy had developed in many directions since Plato’s day. We hear of Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans, Stoics, all of which words originated as the names of different schools of philosophy. The last two, whose doctrines were to take such a firm hold on the educated classes of imperial Rome, have given us one or two important words. Apart from their moral teachings, they appear to have directed their philosophical inquiries more especially to the point of contact between thoughts and things or, as we should say, between objective and subjective. ‘Phantasia’, from which we have fantasy and fancy, was a popular word with the Stoics, who gave it much of its modern meaning; notion and comprehension are Cicero’s translations of Stoic terms; while image in the sense of ‘mental image’ and spectre are Latin renderings of Epicurean expressions. Epicurus had founded his doctrines on those of Democritus, and these last two words were employed by Cicero and one of his friends in discussing that philosopher’s odd theory of perception. He had held that the surfaces of all objects are continually throwing off ‘images’—a kind of films or husks which float about in space and at last penetrate to the mind through the pores of the body. Both the Stoic ‘phantasia’ and this Democritan word ‘eidōlon’, which Cicero translated by ‘imago’, seem to have contributed a part of their meaning to the later ‘imaginatio’, from which, of course, we have taken our imagination.
It was the Stoics, too, who gradually burdened the little Greek word ‘logos’ with the weight of a whole metaphysical theory of the relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings—‘Reason’, as it is often translated—which expresses itself by making and using words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had perceived as pervading the visible universe. They were the first to make the progressive incarnation of thought in audible sound a part of the creative working of God in the world; and it is to them accordingly, with their deep sense of the divine significance of words and their origin, that we owe the word etymology, the first half of which is composed of a poetical Greek adjective meaning ‘true’. Though he had never heard of Christianity, Philo, importing into the theory a certain Semitic awfulness, actually called this mysterious ‘logos’ the ‘only-begotten-son’.
It must not be imagined that the majority of Alexandrian citizens were interested in these matters. Israel and Egypt resembled Greece in this, that they had in the first place their inner religious traditions, and in the second their stock of popular myth and legend. And just as, in Athens, the average citizen had accepted the teachings of ordinary Greek mythology, without knowing anything at all about the thoughts of contemporary philosophy, so was it in Alexandria, where the majority lived a life of easy-going frivolity and dissipation, paying to the gods the regular outward observances demanded by the calendar, and otherwise not bothering to think much about them until they were frightened or ill. Throughout the course of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the thoughts which have been, made for them by the few in the past, and the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future.
In Palestine Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance, admitted that their Messiah had now come and gone. Egyptians and followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal life. Thus, those who had not been initiated—the poorer classes, most of the women, and the slaves—had a joyous feeling that at last the Mysteries had been revealed, that “many things which were hid had been made plain”. And some students of Platonic philosophy could admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. For they could see in Christ one who had first taught in a new and simpler way, and had then Himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying to say all their lives—that, in order to achieve immortality, it is necessary to “die” to this world of the senses and the appetites, and that he who thus “dies” is already living in eternity during his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death. “Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Lastly, followers of Philo and his school saw in the Christ the Logos itself incarnate in human form, the Word made Flesh.
Such were some of the numerous ideas and emotions which had become embedded in the Greek language by the time that, somewhere about a hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose, in the first place, the dogma and ritual of the Catholic Church, and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern Europeans and Americans.
Very early in its career the leaders of the infant Church must have realized two things—firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among themselves, but also often paid little attention to that personal life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was beginning to bind men together with marvellous new ties; secondly, that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to spread, it must be simplified. For these reasons the leading spirits gradually set their faces more and more rigidly against those long and laboriously evolved ideas which had actually created the language of the Gospels. And no doubt there were other reasons too: the most shocking immorality was rampant everywhere, and in those days opinion and behaviour were more closely bound up with one another. Moreover, in all but the strongest natures an extreme love of moral purity is often accompanied by an extreme love of exerting authority.
Therefore incredibly industrious Fathers busied themselves in editing and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and, being pursued at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution, gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal manuscripts, some of which have only been partially translated within the last twenty-five years. Thus, for more than ten centuries, creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine, and, soon after the Church’s authority was backed by that of the Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death amid excruciating tortures. The stigma which still attaches to the ordinary Greek word for ‘choosing’ (heresy) is a fair indication of the zeal with which the early Popes and Bishops set about expunging from the consciousness of Christendom all memory of its history and all understanding of its external connections; while their success may be judged from the fact that as late as the last century an Englishman of public position who should have openly interpreted the Old Testament as Origen, for instance, interpreted it in the third century, would have incurred serious disabilities.
Consequently it is not surprising if we have found ourselves digging in somewhat unfamiliar places. Later on, the Catholic outlook spanned the whole imagination of the Middle Ages like the vaulted nave of a vast cathedral. By laying bare some of the foundations of that outlook and applying to them a little knowledge of the histories of words and their meanings, we can do something which we could hardly do else but by a long and difficult study of the arcana of the Dark Ages, their Neoplatonism, their monastic traditions, their Schools, and their cults of the Virgin. We can, in some degree, be present with our own imaginations at the building of the cathedral. And this is worth while, not only for its own sake, but because, as that huge edifice slowly ruined, we filched its worn but shapely stones and began to build up with them those bridges of feeling which join us to-day to our husbands and our wives, our children, our lovers, our friends.