It is customary to measure the literature of an age by its highest products, and to measure the literary excellence of one age as compared with that of another by the highest products of each of them. We look, for example, upon the Periclean age at Athens, or the Augustan age at Rome, or the Elizabethan age in our own country, as higher than the ages respectively of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, or the early Georges. The former are “golden;” the latter, “silver.” Nor can it be doubted that from the point of view of literature in itself, as distinguished from literature in its relation to history or to social life, such a standard of measurement is correct. But the result of its application has been the doing of a certain kind of injustice to periods of history in which, though the high-water mark has been lower, there has been a wide diffusion of literary culture. This is the case with the period with which we are dealing. It produced no writer of the first rank. It was artificial rather than spontaneous. It was imitative more than original. It was appreciative rather than constructive. Its literature was born, not of the enthusiasm of free activity, but rather of the passivity which comes when there is no hope. But as to a student of science the after-glow is an object of study no less than the noon-day, so to a student of the historical development of the world the silver age of a nation’s literature is an object of study no less than its golden age.

Its most characteristic feature was one for which it is difficult to find any more exact description than the paradoxical phrase, “a viva-voce literature.” It had its birth and chief development in that part of the Empire in which Christianity and Greek life came into closest and most frequent contact. It was the product of the rhetorical schools which have been already described. In those schools the professor had been in the habit of illustrating his rules and instructing his students by model compositions of his own.[144] Such compositions were in the first instance exercises in the pleading of actual causes, and accusations or defences of real persons. The cases were necessarily supposed rather than actual, but they had a practical object in view, and came as close as possible to real life. The large growth of the habit of studying Rhetoric as a part of the education of a gentleman, and the increased devotion to the literature of the past, which came partly from the felt loss of spontaneity and partly from national pride,[145] caused these compositions in the rhetorical schools to take a wider range.[146] They began on the one hand to be divorced from even a fictitious connection with the law-courts, and on the other to be directly imitative of the styles of ancient authors. From the older Rhetoric, the study of forensic logic and speech with a view to the actual practice in the law-courts, which necessarily still went on, there branched out the new Rhetoric, which was sometimes specially known as Sophistic.

Sophistic proceeded for the most part upon the old lines. Its literary compositions preserved the old name, “exercises” (μελέται), as though they were still the rehearsals of actual pleadings. They were divided into two kinds, Theses and Hypotheses, according as a subject was argued in general terms or names were introduced.[147] The latter were the more common. Their subjects were sometimes fictitious, sometimes taken from real history. Of the first of these there is a good example in Lucian’s Tyrannicide: the situation is, that a man goes into the citadel of a town for the purpose of killing a tyrant: not finding the tyrant, the man kills the tyrant’s son: the tyrant coming in and seeing his son with the sword in his body, stabs himself: the man claims the reward as a tyrannicide. Of the second kind of subjects, there are such instances as “Demosthenes defending himself against the charge of having taken the bribe which Demades brought,”[148] and “The Athenians wounded at Syracuse beg their comrades who are returning to Athens to put them to death.”[149] The Homeric cycle was an unfailing mine of subjects: the Persian wars hardly less so. “Would you like to hear a sensible speech about Agamemnon, or are you sick of hearing speeches about Agamemnon, Atreus’ son?” asks Dio Chrysostom in one of his Dialogues.[150] “I should not take amiss even a speech about Adrastus or Tantalus or Pelops, if I were likely to get good from it,” is the polite reply. In the treatment of both kinds of subjects, stress was laid on dramatic consistency. The character, whether real or supposed, was required to speak in an appropriate style.[151] The “exercise” had to be recited with an appropriate intonation.[152] Sometimes the dramatic effect was heightened by the introduction of two or more characters: for example, one of the surviving pièces of Dio Chrysostom[153] consists of a wrangle in tragic style, and with tragic diction, between Odysseus and Philoctetes.

This kind of Sophistic has an interest in two respects, apart from its relation to contemporary life. It gave birth to the Greek romance, which is the progenitor of the mediæval romance and of the modern novel:[154] a notable example of such a sophistical romance in Christian literature is the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions; in non-Christian literature, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana. It gave birth also to the writings in the style of ancient authors which, though commonly included in the collected works of those authors, betray their later origin by either the poverty of their thought or inadvertent neologisms of expression: for example, the Eryxias of Plato.[155]

But though Sophistic grew mainly out of Rhetoric, it had its roots also in Philosophy. It was sometimes defined as Rhetoric philosophizing.[156] It threw off altogether the fiction of a law-court or an assembly, and discussed in continuous speech the larger themes of morality or theology. Its utterances were not “exercises” but “discourses” (διαλέξεις).[157] It preached sermons. It created not only a new literature, but also a new profession. The class of men against whom Plato had inveighed had become merged in the general class of educators: they were specialized partly as grammarians, partly as rhetoricians: the word “sophist,” to which the invectives had failed to attach a permanent stigma, remained partly as a generic name, and partly as a special name for the new class of public talkers. They differed from philosophers in that they did not mark themselves off from the rest of the world, and profess their devotion to a higher standard of living, by wearing a special dress.[158] They were a notable feature of their time. Some of them had a fixed residence and gave discourses regularly, like the “stated minister” of a modern congregation: some of them travelled from place to place. The audience was usually gathered by invitation. There were no newspaper advertisements in those days, and no bells; consequently the invitations were personal. They were made sometimes by a “card” or “programme,” sometimes by word of mouth: “Come and hear me lecture to-day.”[159] Sometimes a messenger was sent round; sometimes the sophist would go round himself and knock at people’s doors and promise them a fine discourse.[160]

The audience of a travelling sophist was what might be expected among a people who lived very much out of doors. When a stranger appeared who was known by his professional dress, and whose reputation had preceded him, the people clustered round him—like iron filings sticking to a magnet, says Themistius.[161] If there was a resident sophist, the two were pitted together; just as if, in modern times, a famous violinist from Paris or Vienna might be asked to play at the next concert with the leading violinist in London. It was a matter not only of professional honour, but also of obligation. A man could not refuse. There is a story in Plutarch[162] about a sophist named Niger who found himself in a town in Galatia which had a resident professor. The resident made a discourse. Niger had, unfortunately, a fish-bone in his throat and could not easily speak; but he had either to speak or to lose his reputation: he spoke, and an inflammation set in which killed him. There is a much longer story in Philostratus[163] of Alexander Peloplato going to Athens to discourse in a friendly contest with Herodes Atticus. The audience gathered together in a theatre in the Ceramicus, and waited a long time for Herodes to appear: when he did not come, they grew angry and thought that it was a trick, and insisted on Alexander coming forward to discourse before Herodes arrived. And when Herodes did arrive, Alexander suddenly changed his style—sang tenor, so to speak, instead of bass—and Herodes followed him, and there was a charming interchange of compliments: “We sophists,” said Alexander, “are all of us only slices of you, Herodes.”

Sometimes they went to show their skill at one of the great festivals, such as that of Olympia. Lucian[164] tells a story of one who had plucked feathers from many orators to make a wonderful discourse about Pythagoras. His object was to gain the glory of delivering it as an extempore oration, and he arranged with a confederate that its subject should be the subject selected for him by the audience. But the imposture was too barefaced: some of the hearers amused themselves by assigning the different passages to their several authors; and the sophist himself at last joined in the universal laughter. And Dio Chrysostom[165] draws a picture of a public place at Corinth during the Isthmian games, which he alleges to be as true of the time of Diogenes as of his own: “You might hear many poor wretches of sophists shouting and abusing one another, and their disciples, as they call them, squabbling, and many writers of books reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their poems, and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many soothsayers giving the meaning of prodigies, and ten thousand rhetoricians twisting law-suits, and no small number of traders driving their several trades.”

Of the manner of the ordinary discourse there are many indications. It was given sometimes in a private house, sometimes in a theatre, sometimes in a regular lecture-room. The professor sometimes entered already robed in his “pulpit-gown,” and sometimes put it on in the presence of his audience. He mounted the steps to his professorial chair, and took his seat upon its ample cushion.[166] He sometimes began with a preface, sometimes he proceeded at once to his discourse. He often gave the choice of a subject to his audience.[167] He was ready to discourse on any theme; and it was part of his art either to force the choice of a subject, or so to turn the subject as to bring in something which he had already prepared. “His memory is incredible,” says Pliny of Isæus; “he repeats by heart what he appears to say extempore; but he does not falter even in a single word.”[168] “When your audience have chosen a subject for you,” says Lucian,[169] in effect, in his satirical advice to rhetoricians, “go straight at it and say without hesitation whatever words come to your tongue, never minding about the first point coming first and the second second: the great thing is to go right on and not have any pauses. If you have to talk at Athens about adultery, bring in the customs of the Hindoos and Persians: above all, have passages about Marathon and Cynægirus—that is indispensable. And Athos must always be turned into sea, and the Hellespont into dry land, and the sun must be darkened by the clouds of Median arrows ... and Salamis and Artemisium and Platæa, and so forth, must come in pretty frequently; and, above all, those little Attic words I told you about must blossom on the surface of your speech—ἅττα (atta) and δήπουθεν (depouthen)—must be sprinkled about freely, whether they are wanted or not: for they are pretty words, even when they do not mean anything.”

It was a disappointment if he was not interrupted by applause. “A sophist is put out in an extempore speech,” says Philostratus,[170] “by a serious-looking audience and tardy praise and no clapping.” “They are all agape,” says Dio Chrysostom,[171] “for the murmur of the crowd ... like men walking in the dark, they move always in the direction of the clapping and the shouting.” “I want your praise,” said one of them to Epictetus.[172] “What do you mean by my praise?” asked the philosopher. “Oh, I want you to say Bravo! and Wonderful!” replied the sophist. These were the common cries; others were not infrequent—“Divine!” “Inspired!” “Unapproachable!”[173] They were accompanied by clapping of the hands and stamping of the feet and waving of the arms. “If your friends see you breaking down,” says Lucian in his satirical advice to a rhetorician,[174] “let them pay the price of the suppers you give them by stretching out their arms and giving you a chance of thinking of something to say in the interval between the rounds of applause.” Sometimes, of course, there were signs of disapproval. “It is the mark of a good hearer,” says Plutarch,[175] “that he does not howl out like a dog at everything of which he disapproves, but at any rate waits until the end of the discourse.”

After the discourse, the professor would go round: “‘What did you think of me to-day?’” says one in Epictetus.[176] “‘Upon my life, sir, I thought you were admirable.’ ‘What did you think of my best passage?’ ‘Which was that?’ ‘Where I described Pan and the Nymphs.’ ‘Oh, it was excessively well done.’” Again, to quote another anecdote from Epictetus:[177] “‘A much larger audience to-day, I think,’ says the professor. ‘Yes: much larger.’ ‘Five hundred, I should guess.’ ‘Oh, nonsense; it could not have been less than a thousand.’ ‘Why that is more than Dio ever had: I wonder why it was: they appreciated what I said, too.’ ‘Beauty, sir, can move even a stone.’”

They made both money and reputation. The more eminent of them were among the most distinguished men of the time. They were the pets of society, and sometimes its masters.[178] They were employed on affairs of state at home and on embassies abroad.[179] They were sometimes placed on the free list of their city, and lived at the public expense. They were sometimes made senators—raised, as we might say, to the House of Lords—and sometimes governors of provinces.[180] When they died, and sometimes before their death, public statues were erected in their honour.[181] The inscriptions of some of them are recorded by historians, and some remain: “The Queen of Cities to the King of Eloquence,” was inscribed on the statue of Prohæresius at Rome.[182] “One of the Seven Wise Men, though he had not fulfilled twenty-five years,” is inscribed on an existing base of a statue at Attaleia;[183] and, beneath a representation of crowning, the words, “He subjects all things to eloquence,” are found on a similar base at Parion.[184]

They naturally sometimes gave themselves great airs. There are many stories about them. Philostratus tells one of the Emperor Antoninus Pius on arriving at Smyrna going, in accordance with imperial custom, to spend the night at the house which was at once the best house in the city and the house of the most distinguished man. It was that of the sophist Polemo, who happened on the Emperor’s arrival to be away from home; but he returned from his journey at night, and with loud exclamations against being kept out of his own, turned the Emperor out of doors.[185] The common epithet for them is ἀλαζών—a word with no precise English equivalent, denoting a cross between a braggart and a mountebank.

But the real grounds on which the more earnest men objected to them were those upon which Plato had objected to their predecessors: their making a trade of knowledge, and their unreality.

1. The making of discourses, whether literary or moral, was a thriving trade.[186] The fees given to a leading sophist were on the scale of those given to a prima donna in our own day.[187] But the objection to it was not so much the fact of its thriving, as the fact of its being a trade at all. “If they do what they do,” says Dio Chrysostom,[188] “as poets and rhetoricians, there is no harm perhaps; but if they do it as philosophers, for the sake of their own personal gain and glory, and not for the sake of benefiting you, there is harm.” The defence which Themistius[189] makes for himself is more candid than effective: “I do make money,” he says; “people give me sometimes one mina, sometimes two, sometimes as much as a talent: but, since I must speak about myself, let me ask you this—Did any one ever come away the worse for having heard me? Mark, I charge nothing: it is a voluntary contribution.”

2. The stronger ground of objection to them was their unreality. They had lost touch with life. They had made philosophy itself seem unreal. “They are not philosophers, but fiddlers,” said the sturdy old Stoic Musonius.[190] It is not necessary to suppose that they were all charlatans. There was then, as now, the irrepressible young man of good morals who wished to air his opinions. But the tendency to moralize had become divorced from practice. They preached, not because they were in grim earnest about the reformation of the world, but because preaching was a respectable profession, and the listening to sermons a fashionable diversion. “The mass of men,” says Plutarch,[191] “enjoy and admire a philosopher when he is discoursing about their neighbours; but if the philosopher, leaving their neighbours alone, speaks his mind about things that are of importance to the men themselves, they take offence and vote him a bore; for they think that they ought to listen to a philosopher in his lecture-room in the same bland way that they listen to tragedians in the theatre. This, as might be expected, is what happens to them in regard to the sophists; for when a sophist gets down from his pulpit and puts aside his MSS., in the real business of life he seems but a small man, and under the thumb of the majority. They do not understand about real philosophers that both seriousness and play, grim looks and smiles, and above all the direct personal application of what they say to each individual, have a useful result for those who are in the habit of giving a patient attention to them.”

Against this whole system of veneering rhetoric with philosophy, there was a strong reaction. Apart from the early Christian writers, with whom “sophist” is always a word of scorn, there were men, especially among the new school of Stoics, who were at open war with its unreality.[192] I will ask you to listen to the expostulation which the great moral reformer Epictetus addresses to a rhetorician who came to him:

I have dwelt on this feature of the Greek life of the early Christian centuries, not with the view of giving a complete picture of it, which would be impossible within the compass of a lecture, but rather with the view of establishing a presumption, which you will find amply justified by further researches, that it was sufficient, not only in its quality and complexity, but also in its mass, to account for certain features of early Christianity.

In passing from Greek life to Christianity, I will ask you, in the first instance, to note the broad distinction which exists between what in the primitive churches was known as “prophesying,” and that which in subsequent times came to be known as “preaching.” I lay the more stress upon the distinction for the accidental reason that, in the first reaction against the idea that “prophecy” necessarily meant “prediction,” it was maintained—and with a certain reservation the contention was true—that a “prophet” meant a “preacher.” The reservation is, that the prophet was not merely a preacher but a spontaneous preacher. He preached because he could not help it, because there was a divine breath breathing within him which must needs find an utterance. It is in this sense that the prophets of the early churches were preachers. They were not church officers appointed to discharge certain functions. They were the possessors of a charisma, a divine gift which was not official but personal. “No prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.” They did not practise beforehand how or what they should say; for “the Holy Ghost taught them in that very hour what they should say.” Their language was often, from the point of view of the rhetorical schools, a barbarous patois. They were ignorant of the rules both of style and of dialectic. They paid no heed to refinements of expression. The greatest preacher of them all claimed to have come among his converts, in a city in which Rhetoric flourished, not with the persuasiveness of human logic, but with the demonstration which was afforded by spiritual power.

Of that “prophesying” of the primitive churches it is not certain that we possess any monument. The Second Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of Jude are perhaps representatives of it among the canonical books of the New Testament. The work known as the Second Epistle of Clement is perhaps a representative of the form which it took in the middle of the second century; but though it is inspired by a genuine enthusiasm, it is rather more artistic in its form than a purely prophetic utterance is likely to have been.

In the course of the second century, this original spontaneity of utterance died almost entirely away. It may almost be said to have died a violent death. The dominant parties in the Church set their faces against it. The survivals of it in Asia Minor were formally condemned. The Montanists, as they were called, who tried to fan the lingering sparks of it into a flame, are ranked among heretics. And Tertullian is not even now admitted into the calendar of the Saints, because he believed the Montanists to be in the right.

It was inevitable that it should be so. The growth of a confederation of Christian communities necessitated the definition of a basis of confederation. Such a definition, and the further necessity of guarding it, were inconsistent with that free utterance of the Spirit which had existed before the confederation began. Prophesying died when the Catholic Church was formed.

In place of prophesying came preaching. And preaching is the result of the gradual combination of different elements. In the formation of a great institution it is inevitable that, as time goes on, different elements should tend to unite. To the original functions of a bishop, for example, were added by degrees the functions—which had originally been separate—of teacher.[194] In a similar way were fused together, on the one hand, teaching—that is, the tradition and exposition of the sacred books and of the received doctrine; and, on the other hand, exhortation—that is, the endeavour to raise men to a higher level of moral and spiritual life. Each of these was a function which, assuming a certain natural aptitude, could be learned by practice. Each of them was consequently a function which might be discharged by the permanent officers of the community, and discharged habitually at regular intervals without waiting for the fitful flashes of the prophetic fire. We consequently find that with the growth of organization there grew up also, not only a fusion of teaching and exhortation, but also the gradual restriction of the liberty of addressing the community to the official class.

It was this fusion of teaching and exhortation that constituted the essence of the homily: its form came from the sophists. For it was natural that when addresses, whether expository or hortatory, came to prevail in the Christian communities, they should be affected by the similar addresses which filled a large place in contemporary Greek life. It was not only natural but inevitable that when men who had been trained in rhetorical methods came to make such addresses, they should follow the methods to which they were accustomed. It is probable that Origen is not only the earliest example whose writings have come down to us, but also one of the earliest who took into the Christian communities these methods of the schools. He lectured, as the contemporary teachers seem to have lectured, every day: his subject-matter was the text of the Scriptures, as that of the rhetoricians and sophists by his side was Homer or Chrysippus: his addresses, like those of the best professors, were carefully prepared: he was sixty years of age, we are told, before he preached an extempore sermon.[195]

When the Christian communities emerge into the clearer light of the fourth century, the influence of the rhetorical schools upon them begins to be visible on a large scale and with permanent effects. The voice of the prophet had ceased, and the voice of the preacher had begun. The greatest Christian preachers of the fourth century had been trained to rhetorical methods, and had themselves taught rhetoric. Basil and Gregory Nazianzen studied at Athens under the famous professors Himerius and Prohæresius: Chrysostom studied under the still more famous Libanius, who on his death-bed said of him that he would have been his worthiest successor “if the Christians had not stolen him.”[196] The discourses came to be called by the same names as those of the Greek professors. They had originally been called homilies—a word which was unknown in this sense in pre-Christian times, and which denoted the familiar intercourse and direct personal addresses of common life. They came to be called by the technical terms of the schools—discourses, disputations, or speeches.[197] The distinction between the two kinds of terms is clearly shown by a later writer, who, speaking of a particular volume of Chrysostom’s addresses, says, “They are called ‘speeches’ (λόγοι), but they are more like homilies, for this reason, above others, that he again and again addresses his hearers as actually present before his eyes.”[198] The form of the discourses tended to be the same: if you examine side by side a discourse of Himerius or Themistius or Libanius, and one of Basil or Chrysostom or Ambrose, you will find a similar artificiality of structure, and a similar elaboration of phraseology. They were delivered under analogous circumstances. The preacher sat in his official chair: it was an exceptional thing for him to ascend the reader’s ambo, the modern “pulpit:”[199] the audience crowded in front of him, and frequently interrupted him with shouts of acclamation. The greater preachers tried to stem the tide of applause which surged round them: again and again Chrysostom begs his hearers to be silent: what he wants is, not their acclamations, but the fruits of his preaching in their lives.[200] There is one passage which not only illustrates this point, but also affords a singular analogy to the remonstrance of Epictetus which was quoted just now:

And there is a passage near the end of Gregory Nazianzen’s greatest sermon, in which the human nature of which Chrysostom speaks bursts forth with striking force: after the famous peroration in which after bidding farewell one by one to the church and congregation which he loved, to the several companies of his fellow-workers, and to the multitudes who had thronged to hear him preach, he turns to the court and his opponents the Arian courtiers—

I will add only one more instance of the way in which the habits of the sophists flowed into the Christian churches. Christian preachers, like the sophists, were sometimes peripatetic; they went from place to place, delivering their orations and making money by delivering them. The historians Socrates and Sozomen[203] tell an instructive story of two Syrian bishops, Severianus of Gabala and Antiochus of Ptolemais (St. Jean d’Acre). They were both famous for their rhetoric, though Severianus could not quite get rid of his Syrian accent. Antiochus went to Constantinople, and stayed there a long time, preaching frequently in the churches, and making a good deal of money thereby. On his return to Syria, Severianus, hearing about the money, resolved to follow his example: he waited for some time, exercised his rhetoric, got together a large stock of sermons, and then went to Constantinople. He was kindly received by the bishop, and soon became both a great popular preacher and a favourite at court. The fate of many preachers and court favourites overtook him: he excited great jealousy, was accused of heresy and banished from the city; and only by the personal intercession of the Empress Eudoxia was he received back again into ecclesiastical favour.

Such are some of the indications of the influence of Greek Rhetoric upon the early churches. It created the Christian sermon. It added to the functions of church officers a function which is neither that of the exercise of discipline, nor of administration of the funds, nor of taking the lead in public worship, nor of the simple tradition of received truths, but that of either such an exegesis of the sacred books as the Sophists gave of Homer, or such elaborated discourses as they also gave upon the speculative and ethical aspects of religion. The result was more far-reaching than the creation of either an institution or a function. If you look more closely into history, you will find that Rhetoric killed Philosophy. Philosophy died, because for all but a small minority it ceased to be real. It passed from the sphere of thought and conduct to that of exposition and literature. Its preachers preached, not because they were bursting with truths which could not help finding expression, but because they were masters of fine phrases and lived in an age in which fine phrases had a value. It died, in short, because it had become sophistry. But sophistry is of no special age or country. It is indigenous to all soils upon which literature grows. No sooner is any special form of literature created by the genius of a great writer than there arises a class of men who cultivate the style of it for the style’s sake. No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with Christianity. It came into the educated world in the simple dress of a Prophet of Righteousness. It won that world by the stern reality of its life, by the subtle bonds of its brotherhood, by its divine message of consolation and of hope. Around it thronged the race of eloquent talkers who persuaded it to change its dress and to assimilate its language to their own. It seemed thereby to win a speedier and completer victory. But it purchased conquest at the price of reality. With that its progress stopped. There has been an element of sophistry in it ever since; and so far as in any age that element has been dominant, so far has the progress of Christianity been arrested. Its progress is arrested now, because many of its preachers live in an unreal world. The truths they set forth are truths of utterance rather than truths of their lives. But if Christianity is to be again the power that it was in its earliest ages, it must renounce its costly purchase. A class of rhetorical chemists would be thought of only to be ridiculed: a class of rhetorical religionists is only less anomalous because we are accustomed to it. The hope of Christianity is, that the class which was artificially created may ultimately disappear; and that the sophistical element in Christian preaching will melt, as a transient mist, before the preaching of the prophets of the ages to come, who, like the prophets of the ages that are long gone by, will speak only “as the Spirit gives them utterance.”