LIBRARY CALIFOWM SAN APOLLONIUS OF TYANA AND OTHER ESSAYS APOLLONIUS OF TYANA AND OTHER ESSAYS Br THOMAS WHITTAKER AUTHOR OF " THE NEO-PLATONISTS," ETC LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO, LIM. 25 HIGH STREET, BLOOMSBURY, W.C. 1906 NOTE. Of the six essays contained in this volume, the first three much the larger are his- torical ; the last three, positive. The first of the series appeared in he Monist for January, 1903 ; the fifth in Mind of the same date. The rest have not hitherto been published. CONTENTS. PACK APOLLONIUS OF TYANA, i CELSUS AND ORIGEN, - ~ 54 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA, - 123 ANIMISM, RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY, - 165 A COMPENDIOUS CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES, - 178 TELEOLOGY AND THE INDIVIDUAL, - - 192 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA. A REFORMER of Greek religion from within, whose activity may have coincided with the first emergence of the Christian propaganda from Judsea, is undoubtedly an interesting historical figure. And both in ancient and in modern times Apollonius of Tyana has been made the subject of parallels which were probably never thought of by the author of his extant Life. The first of these parallels was by Hierocles, Proconsul of Bithynia under Diocletian ; in which the attempt seems to have been made to show that the marvels attributed to Apollonius were better authenticated than those attributed to Christ. We do not possess this work itself; but we have the reply of Eusebius, Bishop of Csesarea and ecclesiastical historian, written after the triumph of the new faith. The most elaborate modern parallel is that of F. C. Baur, first published in I832. 1 Baur here attempts to show, not only that there are resemblances between the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus and the Gospels, but that Philostratus deliberately modelled his hero on the type set forth by the Evangelists. Though he was followed in this view by Zeller, it is now generally rejected ; so that there is no need to enter into con- troversy on the subject. It remains, however, none the less interesting to try to determine the character of the reforming activity of Apollonius himself. Was his predominant aim to conduct the world along the path of intensified supernaturalism, 1 Republished by Zeller with two essays on related subjects under the general title, Drei Abhandlungen zur Gtschichte der alien Philosophic una ihres Verhtiltnisscs turn Christenthum, Leipzig, 1876. I 2 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA or was it to promote the growth of a more rational and ethical religion so far as this was possible without breaking with the past? The materials for judging are contained in the Life of Apollo- nius written by Philostratus early in the third century, and in the extant letters ascribed to him, some of which Philostratus evidently knew. Whether any of these are genuine, it is im- possible to be certain; and in any case the biography of Philostratus is clearly a romance. For the composition of it, the writer professes to have used the memoirs of Damis, a disciple of Apollonius; but he tells us that, as these were wanting in literary form, he has freely worked them up. Baur argues that the introduction of " Damis the Assyrian " is simply a literary device. The obvious anachronism by which Philo- stratus represents the Babylon visited by Apollonius as identical with the Babylon of Herodotus, he also holds to be intentional. It is not, he thinks, put before the reader for serious belief, but only to bring out the ideal attitude of a Greek philosopher confronted with Oriental ostentation. There is much to be said for this view. Philostratus, who was an accomplished man of letters, has nowhere the air of disclaiming credit for the skill of presentation shown in his narrative, while occasionally he disclaims belief in the stories narrated. He was, besides, an original art-critic, as is evident from the descriptions of real or imaginary pictures in another of his works ; and he puts into the mouth of Apollonius aesthetic theories which he can scarcely have meant us to believe were not his own. He did not, of course, for a moment suppose that he was drawing up the documents of a new religion, and hence had no motive for concealing his methods. It was only necessary that they should not be obtruded. We have before us a highly mature work of literary art by an individual author who comes forward in his own name. If we cannot be sure in detail about the facts at the ground of the romance, we are saved from the labour of trying to extricate them from stratum on stratum of superimposed redactions. We know at least what type of reformer Philostratus conceived Apollonius to have been. That Apollonius was a real person born at Tyana, there is no reason to doubt ; nor is there any uncertainty about the general character of his life and teaching. He was in manner of life a Neo-Pythagorean ascetic, and taught what would now be described as a spiritualistic philosophy. The one mode of reforming activity ascribed to him with absolute consistency is APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 3 a vigorous campaign against animal sacrifices. Superhuman powers, especially those of prophetic insight and of clairvoyance, were attributed to him by common report. Dio Cassius, 1 as well as Philostratus, relates that he saw in a vision the slaying of Domitian. The fact that he had a quarrel with a Stoic philosopher named Euphrates, who is known as a historical personage, 2 is clear, though its causes can only be conjectured from the account of Philostratus. For the rest, there is no ground for supposing that Philostratus deviated in the general spirit of his representation from the authentic type of his hero ; and he must have had sources of information open to him for the details, with whatever freedom he may have treated them. Other Lives of Apollonius, now lost, are known to have existed. In the " Epistles of Apollonius," some of which, as has been mentioned, Philostratus had before him, the type is already individualised. A few points from these may be given as a preliminary to the more detailed biographical account which will follow. 3 The style of the most of them, it may be observed, is of the laconic brevity attributed by Philostratus to all the genuine letters of Apollonius. Two on the subject of sacrifices, addressed to the sacerdotal bodies at Olympia and at Delphi, may be quoted in full. " The gods need not sacrifices. What then might one gratify them by doing ? By obtaining wisdom, as I think, and by benefiting worthy men to the extent of one's power. These things are dear to the gods ; those are of the godless." 4 " Priests defile altars with blood ; then some wonder whence cities are unfortunate, while they do ill in great things. Oh folly ! Heraclitus was wise, but not even he persuaded the Ephesians not to wash out mud with mud." 5 The contrariety dwelt on between virtue and 1 Lxvii. 1 8. See Baur, Apollonius von Tyana und C/iristus (Drei Abhandlungtn, etc., ed. Zeller, pp. iio-m). 2 A laudatory reference to him in the Epistles of the younger I'liny (i. lo) is quoted by Baur, loc. cit., p. I53n. 3 The Epistles of Apollonius and the reply of Eusebius to Hieroclcs are appended to Kayser's edition of Philostratus, Vol. I. For Thilostratus himself I have used Westermann's edition. 4 Ep 26 : TOIS tv 'OXv/xwi'g 9e7jK(5/>cis. 5 Ep. 27 : TOIS tv AeXxl Ep. 68. 6 Ep. 8 : ToCr<5 irov Kal trpbs TOV 'Af\eu9epov, a.\f]0eia. yevvaiov. This may have been a repudiation of the yevvaiov -fei'oos permitted by Plato on occasion to his philosophic guardians of the State. 2 Ep. 19. S E P . 58. 4 f) Srj fs.6t>T) iroiei re Kai 7rao"x :ra6,ua(7i Kal Trpoffuwois dTos," elirev "el x/^aros et ; roi)y yap cnrovdaiovs ol Osol Ka.i &vev APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 9 the Pythagorean rule, he submitted to the probation of five years' silence. During this time, which he passed partly in Pamphylia and partly in Cilicia, he was able to calm factions about games by mere signs. This, says Philostratus, was not so difficult ; for people who quarrel about dancers and horses are easily made ashamed of themselves. It was less easy to quell a tumult caused by a famine. This Apollonius did at Aspendus in Pamphylia, where the people were going to burn the prefect, though he had taken refuge by a statue of the Emperor. And at that time, which was in the reign of Tibe- rius, the Emperor's statues were more terrible and more inviolable than those of the Olympian Zeus. The prefect, on being questioned by signs, protested his innocence, and ac- cused certain powerful citizens, who were refusing to sell corn and keeping it back to export at a profit. To them Apollo- nius addressed a note threatening expulsion from Earth, who is the mother of all, for she is just, but whom they, being unjust, have made the mother of themselves alone. In fear of this threat they yielded and filled the market-place with corn- Having completed his probation, Apollonius visited the great Antioch. He found the people there not only wanting in mental culture, but luxurious and effeminate ; and, to judge from the report of Philostratus, seems to have liked that "cradle of the Church" no better than Julian did afterwards. Philostratus here excuses himself for relating myths connected with the temple of Apollo Daphnaeus. His purpose, he remarks, is not to mythologise, 1 but to explain how Apollonius came to utter the wish that the god would turn the " semi- barbarous and uncultivated " inhabitants, with their want of all seriousness, into trees, so that thus they might give forth some sound worth listening to. Visiting the temples, he sought to bring back the Hellenic rites to their primitive form : when the rites were alien, he tried to discover their original meaning and to get them corrected in accordance with it. His mode of exposition was not disputatious but magisterial, and this at least gave him some influence with the men of Antioch. 2 From Antioch he set out with two attendants to visit the Brahmans of India, and, in the course of his journey, the Magi of Babylon and Susa. At Nineveh, Damis, a native of the 1 i. 1 6 (2) : ovx virfp (jLvBoXtryias ravra. 2 i. 17 (2) : /cat irforpt> ts eavritf dvdpuvovs a^ovcordrovs. io APOLLONIUS OF TYANA place, asks and obtains leave to become his companion. Among the Arabians, Apollonius acquires the knowledge they have of the speech of animals. Proceeding on his journey, he encounters a satrap of King Vardanes, the " Mede," who has lately recovered the empire, and whose officials are known as the King's "Eyes" and "Ears." Still, as in the days of Aristophanes, these Oriental titles seem adapted to produce an effect of the grotesque and to form part of the traditional picture of Western Asiatic despotism. We need not try to refer the whole account to the age of Apollonius, though chronologically the Parthian king Bardanes corresponds to the approximate date. The general representation is sufficiently conformable to the revival of the Persian monarchy under the Sassanidae in the time of Philostratus himself, decked out with circumstances from the historical records of the ancient empire. The narrative is obviously written with a view to contrasting the simplicity and independence of the philosopher with the combination of despotism, luxury, and elaborate mechanical art that had distinguished the old civilisations of those regions. Nor is the conception, taken broadly, untrue. The difference of attitude here and in the description of the Indian journey which follows is notable. The Greeks by the time of Philo- stratus had accumulated some knowledge of India ; and, vague as this must have been, it is evident that they had already detected the profoundly philosophical character of the Indian intellect. Thus we are told nothing of what Apollonius was able to learn from the Magi ; a whereas in the account of his stay in India there is abundance of philosophical interchange of thought. A relatively high but unspeculative religion such as Zoroastrianism or Judaism seems never to have appealed to the Greek mind as did even merely general reports on the tenets of the Brahmans and afterwards of the Buddhists. Among the decorations of the royal palace at Babylon, we are told, figures of Greek legend were to be seen, Orpheus appearing frequently. Perhaps it is his tiara and his Oriental dress that they are pleased with there : it is not the charm of his music and song. The capture of Athens was represented, and the Persian victory at Thermopylae, " and things still more Medic, rivers diverted from their course, and the bridging of 1 Questioned by Damis (i. 26), he says that they are cro^ol fj.4f, d\\' ov v&vro.. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA n the sea, and how Athos was cut through." 1 Apollonius refuses to do obeisance to the golden image of the King. The King, who knows him already by repute, is pleased to hear of his coming and sends for him. Being about to sacrifice a white horse to the Sun, he asks Apollonius to accompany him, but the Pythagorean philosopher replies : " You, O King, sacrifice in your own manner, and give me leave to sacrifice in mine." Then, having thrown frankincense on the flame, and uttered a prayer to the god, he departs, so as to have no share in an offering of blood. 2 When the King invites him to join in hunting the animals which the barbarians preserve in their parks or " paradises," he reminds him that he could not even be present at his sacrifices, and expresses disapproval of the pleasure taken in the hunting of wild animals kept for sport. 3 In accordance with the general spirit of the picture, he is represented as neither dazzled by the regal magnificence nor impressed by material marvels such as the tunnel under the Euphrates and the walls of Ecbatana. The King, when he takes leave, provides him with the means of continuing his journey to India ; and Apollonius describes him to his com- panions as an excellent man and worthy of a better fate than to rule over barbarians. Damis says that in crossing the Indian Caucasus he saw the fetters of Prometheus hanging from the rocks, though it was not easy to tell of what material they were composed. Apollo- nius frightened off a hobgoblin appearing by moonlight. Then, after these and other strange stories, there follows a remarkable disquisition on the inwardness of the Divine. 4 Apollonius questions Damis about the effect on his mind of ascending so high a mountain-range. Damis thinks that he ought to be wiser, passing over such a lofty and trackless spot : " For," said he, looking up at the summit, " you hear from our guide that the barbarians make it to be the house of the gods." Moreover, sages like Anaxagoras and Thales are said to have contemplated the heavens from just such elevations. " Yet," he confesses, " I, having ascended the loftiest height of all, shall go down no wiser than I was before." " Nor did they," replies Apollonius, " merely by such prospects, which display J i. 25. 2 i. 31. 3 i. 38 : Kal dXXwj oi>x T)5b Orjpiois /3e/3ai'Tepov ao4>ia. Hx eL - 2 ii. 29. 3 Described (ii. 30) as oL re /cat v> APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 19 preside over the parts. Of such deities, following the poets, we may admit many, of sky and sea and springs and earth and under the earth. The place beneath the earth, however, since they sing of it as an abode of horror and destruction, does not, if it exists, belong properly to the world. 1 As an illustration of the powers of the sages, some extra- ordinary cures are related. A woman comes and explains how her son is possessed by a dissembling and lying demon. One of the Brahmans gives her a formula of exorcism addressed to the demon.' 2 A cripple, and a blind man, and a man with his hand paralysed are healed, and recipes are given to effect other cures. According to his report, Damis was himself present at the dialectical discussions. The study of astrology and divination and sacrifices was pursued only by Apollonius with larchas. Philostratus mentions /J.JT' airuTTfiv iraffiv. 5 iii. 51. 2 o APOLLONIUS OF TYANA go to Antioch ; but, finding it as insolently indifferent as ever to Hellenic culture, 1 they put to sea again at Seleucia, and thence to Cyprus. From Cyprus they proceed to Ionia, where Apollonius is held in much honour. When he came to Ephesus, we are told, 2 even the artisans left their work to follow him. He delivered a discourse to the Ephesians in favour of a voluntary community of goods ; teaching by the example of a sparrow that came to call the others to join him in feasting on the corn spilt by a boy carry- ing a basket. He foresaw a threatening pestilence, but, as they did not heed his warnings, he went to the other parts of Ionia ; continuing everywhere his reforming activity and his salutary discourses. 3 A discourse at Smyrna is given 4 in which he exhorts the Smyrnseans to make themselves an object of pride even more than the beauty of their city. For although it is the fairest of all cities that are under the sun, and possesses the sea, and has the springs of the west wind, yet it is better for it to be crowned with men than with porticoes and paintings and greater abundance of gold. Buildings are seen only in that part of the earth where they are; but good men are seen everywhere and spoken of everywhere, and render the city they have sprung from as wide as the extent of land they penetrate. Cities that are fair externally are indeed like the Phidian image of Zeus at Olympia : but those that have men that reach every part of the world are like the Homeric Zeus, who is suggested to thought in various forms, and as moving through the heaven, and so is a more wonderful piece of work than the seated statue of ivory visible to the eye. Discussing politics with the Smyrnaeans, he told them that a rightly ordered city has need of concord in variance. 5 That is to say, each must make it his ambition to be better than the rest in something. The ancient Spartans were wrong in their exclusive devotion to military affairs. Each ought to do what he knows best and can do best. If one gains distinction by becoming a popular ' l iii. 58 : rfjs 'Avnoxeta-s vj^#ws vjSpifoticrrjs Kal 2 iv. I. 3 iv. 4 : diop8ovfj.fvos ra Trap' eKai\offor] " or/SotfXer i\offo<(>ia.s firl Ti>pa.vvoi> 9,i> rts 26 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA respect of wisdom, precisely because they are not told with such colouring as to give the impression that they are literally true. The didactic purpose in them is thus made obvious; whereas the poets leave it to the intelligence of their readers to discover the truth. He himself relates a story about ^Esop and Hermes, told to him as a child by his mother ; the point of the story being that the god had suggested to ^sop a line of invention that was at least his own, if it was humble. As for the myth about the contention of giants with gods for the possession of heaven, this is madness to say or to think. l The cause of these outbursts of flame from volcanoes is in reality a mixture of bitumen and sulphur blown upon by subterranean winds in the crevices of the earth. Revisiting Athens, Apollonius is initiated into the mysteries, as he had foreseen. The winter he spends in visiting the Greek temples. He projects a voyage to Egypt in the spring, and, going down to the Piraeus, finds a ship. The owner refuses to let him go on board, because, as he is conveying a cargo of images of the gods, he is afraid to admit sea-faring company, which is usually bad. Apollonius reminds him since he appears to be an Athenian that the gods themselves when they went on board the ships and took part with Athens against the barbarians, had no fear of contamination from disorderly sailors. He also censures the traffic in images. 2 At Rhodes he tells a newly-rich and uneducated youth who is building a fine house and collecting paintings and statues for it that he does not seem to possess the house, but the house to possess him. 3 Coming to Alexandria, he is treated with great reverence. Here an example was seen of his marvellous powers. Twelve men condemned for robbery were being led to execution. He perceived that one of them was innocent, and told the executioners to place this man last; meanwhile prolonging his speech so as to gain time, contrary to his custom of brief utterance. When eight had been decapitated, a horseman rode up with a reprieve for the prisoner on whose behalf Apollonius had interceded; his innocence having since been established. 4 We are told of a dispute in the temple with an Egyptian priest regarding animal sacrifices, and of a discourse reproving the Alexandrians for the sanguinary quarrels that arose from their devotion to the contests of the hippodrome. At this 1 v. 16. 2 v. 20. 3 Y. 22 (2). 4 v. 24. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 27 point of the narrative, Vespasian arrives in Alexandria from Judaea, aiming now at the Empire. The philosophers Dion and Euphrates bid the people rejoice. For, says Philostratus, the last fifty years had been a period of tyrannies so harsh that even the reign of Claudius, though he was better than the emperors before and after, had seemed to give no respite. x Apollonius was equally glad, but did not care lo obtrude himself. Vespasian, however, sought him out, and first set forth to him alone his reasons for seeking the empire ; though he had commended to him his fellow-philosophers also as advisers. Apollonius heartily approves of his purpose; and, to his astonishment, tells him that he is destined to rebuild the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome. He did not yet know that the temple had been burned down ; but it was afterwards found that this was the case, and that the conflagration had been manifested to Apollonius sooner than if it had taken place in Egypt. 2 The day after the private interview with Apollonius, the other philosophers are called in. Vespasian formally explains the motives of his action ; describing the tyranny to which the Roman world has been subject from the' reign of Tiberius, and pointing out that if Vitellius is allowed to rule, Nero will have come to life again. " You have learned how not to govern," said Apollonius, " from those who governed badly : let us now consider how a good ruler ought to act." 3 Euphrates, however, who has become jealous of the special attention paid to Apollonius, makes a long speech in Stoic phraseology: first remarking that it is premature to consider how one is to proceed in a certain course of action before it has been decided whether that is the right course. In the end he approves of the resolution of Vespasian to march against Vitellius, but advises that, if he is victorious, he should restore to the Romans the democratic form of government under which they were most prosperous, and gain for himself the glory of having begun an era of freedom. Dion partly l v. 27. Tacitus also dated the beginning of improvement from the reign of Vespasian, to whose personal example he ascribes some influence in the return from excessive luxury to a simpler mode of living : " Nisi forte rebus cunctis inest quidam velut orbis, ut quern ad modum temporum vices, ita morum vertantur ; nee omnia apud priores meliora, sed nostra quoque aetas multa laudis et artium imitanda posteris tulit." (Ann, iii. 55.) 2 T. 30. 3 v. 32(3). 2 8 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA agrees and partly disagrees with the advice of Euphrates. He agrees in particular that Vespasian would have done better to let the Jews separate if they chose ; political separation being appropriate to the singularity of their manners. Instead of spending his force in bringing them to subjection, and thus doing all that was in his power to preserve the empire for Nero, he ought to have straightway attacked him. At the same time he approves of the enterprise against Vitellius. A democracy, if inferior to an aristocracy (of Platonic type), is to be preferred to tyrannies and oligarchies : but he fears lest the Roman people, tamed as they now are by a series of tyrannies, should find the transition to liberty as unbearable as that from darkness to sudden light. Let Vespasian, however, put the question to the vote, and if the people choose democracy, grant it. In that case he will win fame universal and unparalleled. If, on the other hand, they choose monarchy, who should be Emperor but himself? Apollonius demon- strates at length the impracticability of all this. To him personally the form of political government is indifferent, since he lives under the gods; but he does not think that the human flock ought to be left to perish for want of a just and prudent pastor. As one man pre-eminent in virtue, when he becomes ruler in a democracy, makes that polity seem identical with the form of government in which the one best man rules ; so the government ot one, when it keeps steadily in view the good of the commonwealth, is in effect a democracy. 1 At Vespasian's request Apollonius, premising that the art of government is not a thing that can be taught, goes on to lay down some general maxims for the exercise of kingly power. The king is himself to be ruled by the law. Vespasian personally is advised not to let his sons take for granted that the empire will fall to them as his heirs, but to teach them to regard it as the prize of virtue. He is not to go too fast in repressing the pleasures to which the people have become accustomed ; they must be brought to temper- ance by degrees. Governors of provinces should know the language of the provinces they are sent to govern. The disadvantage of not observing this rule he illustrates from the failure in the administration of justice when he was in the Peloponnese ; the Roman governor, who did not know Greek, being at the mercy of those who had an interest in deceiving J v. 35(4)- APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 29 him. Euphrates allows that further discussion would be idle, since the course to be taken has already been resolved on; but, with an allusion glancing at Apollonius, gives the future emperor the parting advice to embrace the philosophy that is according to nature, and to have nothing to do with that which professes itself inspired by the gods, liable as such claims are to be the source of deception. 1 Vespasian perceives his animus : and, when Euphrates afterwards hands him an epistle full of requests of presents for himself and his friends, he reads it aloud ; thus giving Apollonius the oppor- tunity of retorting on Euphrates by contrasting his readiness to ask for gifts from the emperor with his counsel to establish a democracy. This, Philostratus tells us, is what he has been able to learn about the origin of the difference between the two philosophers. With Dion, Apollonius was always on good terms, though he thought Dion's philosophy too rhetorical. Euphrates, according to the story, was afterwards in favour under Domitian. When Vespasian as emperor revoked the liberty granted by Nero to Greece, Apollonius did not care to see him again ; though he approved of his good administration generally. In connexion with the story of the philosopher at Alexandria, a strange tale is recounted of his detecting the soul of King Amasis in a tame lion. 2 He left Alexandria on a journey to ^Ethiopia, accompanied by ten disciples out of the number that had again gathered round him since the dispersal under the persecution of Nero. 3 On the borderland between Egypt and Ethiopia a primitive system of barter was practised. This Apollonius praised for its moral superiority over the habits of commercial bargaining among the Greeks.* An Egyptian youth named Timasio, who had overcome a temptation similar to that of Hippolytus, guided the company to the celebrated statue of Memnon. Apollonius praises him for his continence, and regards him as of more merit than Hippolytus because, while living chastely, he nevertheless does not speak or think of the divinity of Aphrodite otherwise than with respect. 5 He and his com- 1 v. 37 ( I ) ; iav 8t, w /3euri\ei/, rovrl yap \oiirbv Trpocretpijo-eTCU, rrjr (j.fv Kara tj>6 'eTraivov Kal dffirdfov, TTJV 8 6eoK\VTetv dffKOVffav vapairov ' Kara\fffv86fjLfvoi yap rov Oeiov iro\\a Kal av^ra. ^,uas iraipovpodi opaffffat KO\W Kal TO VTrovoetffOa.1. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 33 nor any other mysteries will be safe. We can always ask " Why this and not that ? " and take offence at one thing or another. In these matters at any rate, if not in all, the Pythagorean silence is good. Apollonius accordingly, re- linquishing further argument on behalf of the Spartans, consents to go on to another topic, and proposes that they shall discuss the nature of justice. 1 Such a subject of discourse, Thespesio agrees, is suitable both for professional philosophers and for others. Apollonius then recalls the comment of the Indian sages on his notion that when, being in a former body, he had refused to betray his ship to pirates, he had performed an act of justice. They laughed at this use of the word, holding that justice involves something more than the absence of injustice. Rightly, answers Thespesio, for no virtue consists in a mere negation. And we must not expect to find men publicly rewarded for practising justice. In the cases of Socrates and of Aristides we rather find the opposite. No doubt it will seem absurd : but as a matter of fact Justice, being appointed by Zeus and the Destinies to prevent men from injuring one another, takes no measures to prevent herself from being injured. Imagine, however, that when Aristides returned from his apportionment of tribute among the allies of Athens, the proposal had been made by two orators to confer the crown upon him for his justice ; and that one had assigned as the reason his returning no richer than he went, and the other his observance of due proportion to the capacity of each allied State, and his refraining from all excessive demands : would not Aristides himself have protested against the first orator for the inadequacy of his reason, and recognised that the second was aiming at the true mark ? And indeed, in maintaining due proportion, he had regard to the advantage both of Athens and of the islands ; as was seen afterwards when the Athenians, by im- posing heavier burdens, brought about the revolt of their tributaries and the loss of their empire. He, then, is just who both acts justly himself and so orders things that others shall not act unjustly. And from this diffusive virtue which is better than oaths taken on sacrifices 2 will spring both other 1 vi. 20. 2 vi. 21 (7): SiK&fffi. /jv yap rotcffSe iroXXffi SiKai6rfpov -rj oi KO.T&. rCiv TO/J.IUV 6fJ.v6vTfS. 3 34 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA virtues and in particular those of the judge and of the legislator, which come peculiarly within the province of justice. 1 To this account of the just man Apollonius assents. After some further discourse, he informs Thespesio of his intention to go in quest of the sources of the Nile. In the account of so remote a journey the geography and zoology as usual become mixed with the marvellous, though they are not wholly fictitious. We are told of the Androphagi and the Pygmies, who are of Ethiopian race, and extend as far as to the ^Ethiopic Sea, into which no one voluntarily sails. We also hear of cataracts haunted by daemons ; and there is a curious story about the taming of a satyr in one of the villages by Apollonius. On his return, he signified his approval of the conduct of Titus after he had taken Jeruselem, in refusing to accept a crown from neighbouring nations. 2 Titus, now associated with his father in the government, invited him to Argos, and consulted him as to his future behaviour as a ruler. Apollonius says that he will send him his companion Demetrius the Cynic as a free-spoken counsellor; and Titus, though the name of the Cynic is at first disagreeable to him, assents with a good grace. 3 He is also said to have consulted Apollonius in private on his destiny. Apollonius, says Philostratus at this point, made many more journeys, but only to countries he already knew. He remained always like himself; and this is for the sage even more difficult than to know himself. Before proceeding to the account of his acts and sufferings under Domitian, the biographer brings together a few miscellaneous anecdotes. One of these throws interesting light on popular beliefs in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The cities on the left of the Hellespont, it is recorded, 4 being once troubled with earthquakes, certain Egyptians and Chaldaeans were collecting money for a sacrifice, estimated at the price of ten talents, to Earth and Poseidon, 1 It is noteworthy that the place here assigned to justice as a positive virtue coincides with that which it occupies in Dante's description of the spirts in the heaven of Jupiter, who are those of men that bore rule on earth. 2 vi. 29 : HT) yap ai/rds ralV flpyd. ^'/jpavn ^iriSfduKcvcu rdt tavrov xpcn. * vi. 31. 4 vi. 41. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 35 and declared that they would not perform the sacrifice till the money was paid down. Apollonius drove them away for their greed, and by due rites quieted the earth. Since those who adopt the philosophic life are best proved by their attitude to tyrannies, the behaviour of Apollonius in face of Domitian has now to be compared with that of elder philosophers when confronted with tyrannies in their time. Philostratus proceeds to make the comparison in set form ; maintaining the thesis that Apollonius showed his superiority to all others, high-minded as they had undoubtedly proved themselves. It is not his purpose to depreciate the rest, but it is his duty to show the greatness of his hero. 1 Some of the sayings of Apollonius against the Emperor having been recorded, we are told that he fell under suspicion through his correspondence with Nerva and his associates Orfitus and Rufus. When proceedings against them were begun, he addressed to the statue of Domitian the words : " Fool, how little you know of the Fates and Necessity ! He who is destined to reign after you, should you kill him, will come to life again." 2 This was brought to Domitian's ears by means of Euphrates. Foreknowing that the Emperor had decided on his arrest, Apollonius anticipated the summons by setting out with Damis for Italy. They arrive at Puteoli, and there fall in with Demetrius, who leads them to the seat of " the ancient Cicero," where they can converse privately. Demetrius tells Apollonius that he is to be accused of sacrificing a boy to get divinations for the conspirators ; and that further charges against him are his dress and his manner of life and the worship that is said to be paid to him by certain people. He then tries to dissuade him from staying to brave the anger of a tyrant who will be unmoved by the most just defence, and who is undistracted by that devotion to the Muses which, when Nero was singing and playing on the lyre, gave the world some relief. Damis, who till now has been unaware of the purpose of his master in coming, seconds the argument of Demetrius. Apollonius holds this timorous counsel excusable on the part of Damis, who is an Assyrian and has lived in the neighbour- hood of the Medes, where tyrannies are adored ; but as for Demetrius, he does not know how he will make his apology to philosophy. He himself intends to remain ; and in justification vii. i, 2. 2 vii. 9 (i). 36 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA he sets forth the arguments that this is the only course worthy of his character. Of despotisms he allows that that is the most dangerous kind which, like the tyranny of Domitian, pro- ceeds under forms of law. All the more, however, is he bound to appear and answer the charge against him : to flee from a legal trial would have the appearance of self-condemnation. And whither shall he flee ? It must be beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. Shall he then seek refuge with men who know him already ; to whom he will have to acknowledge that he has left his friends to be destroyed by an accusation which he has not dared to face himself? Perhaps Demetrius will tell him to go among those who do not know him. But here too, as he makes impressively clear, starting from the use of the word by Euripides in the Orestes, the power called conscience (o-iWo-is) will follow him, and will allow him no peace whether awake or asleep. 1 At the end of this address, Damis recovers courage, and Demetrius, far from continuing his opposition, cannot sufficiently express his admiration of Apollonius. The pvafectus pYcetorw at that time, the narrative continues, was ^Elianus, who had been acquainted with Apollonius in Egypt. As a diversion in his favour before he arrives, he argues to the Emperor that the "chattering sophists," having nothing to enjoy in life, deliberately try to draw death upon themselves at the hands of those who bear the sword. Per- ceiving this, Nero could not be brought by Demetrius to give him the death he desired, but let him go, not as pardoning him but out of contempt. 2 On the arrival of Apollonius as a prisoner, ^Elian uses his authority to submit him to examina- tion in secret. When they are alone, he gives expression to his friendly feeling, but explains the necessity of proceeding with caution. Apollonius asks him what he is accused of. ^Eiian repeats the heads of accusation already mentioned ; in- forming him that the most serious charge is precisely that which he himself knows must be false, but which the Emperor is most disposed to believe true : namely, that Apollonius slew J vii. 14 (8-10). This passage is of high interest philosophically, as showing how fully the ethical conception of conscience had already been brought into view. The psychological conception of consciousness (some- times expressed by the same word) was not so completely formulated till the Neo-Platonic period, with its more definite direction to abstract thought. 2 vii. 16. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 37 an Arcadian boy for sacrifice to encourage Nerva in aspiring to the empire ; the offering being made at night by the waning moon. 1 In answering the charge, however, let Apollonius avoid a contemptuous attitude. The interview being at a end, ^lian calls in the guards, and, with simulated anger, con- signs him to custody among those who are awaiting their trial. In prison, he is derided by a military tribune, who tells him that he knows what he is accused of if Apollonius does not. He is accused of being worshipped by men and thinking him- self worthy of equal honours with the gods. 2 As a test, let them go outside the walls, and he will try to cut off the head of Apollonius with his sword. If he succeeds, Apollonius is innocent of the claim to divinity. If he is terror-stricken and the sword falls from his hand, that is a proof at once of the divinity of Apollonius and of his guilt. Here the histories are given of some of the other prisoners, who are deploring their fate. The philosopher, in accordance with his professional character, calls them together and addresses to them a consolatory discourse which gives them fortitude and hope. Telling them first not to despair before their cases are decided, he proceeds in a more elevated strain. During the whole of our life, the body is the prison of the soul ; and those who dwell in palaces are more under this bondage than those whom they put in bonds. Nor is a savage mode of life a protection. The Scythian tribes are no freer than we are ; but are surrounded with hardships by rivers impassable save when frozen over by the cold of winter, and shrink even within the shelter of their wagon-huts. And, if it is not puerile to recur to the fables of the poets, 3 one might tell of gods who are said to have been bound in chains, both in heaven and on earth. Think finally of the many wise and blessed men who have suffered at the hands both of licentious peoples and tyrannies, and resolve not to be surpassed by them in courage. The next day, an emissary of Domitian comes in the guise of a much-dejected prisoner, but Apollonius sees his purpose 2 vii. 21 (l): rb yap TrpoffKWf'iffda.i fff virb TUV dvOpuTrwv tfftav aiovfj.evov TO?S foots. 3 vii. 26 (5) : et 3 ^r\ /jifipaKiwdris 6 \6yos. 38 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA of entrapping him, and discourses to his fellow-prisoners only of his travels. On the evening of the fifth day, one from -^Elian brings him the message that he is to be led before the Emperor on the morrow ; renewing the advice not to be con- temptuous, and describing Domitian's appearance and manner of speaking. The fact that Apollonius had come forward to undergo danger on behalf of others, Philostratus here remarks, made a favourable impression even on those who before were prejudiced against him. While he is being led under guard to the Emperor's presence, he rallies his Assyrian disciple on the mortal terror he is in. Damis who ingenuously confesses how terrified he is is not admitted ; and Domitian insists that the philosopher shall defend himself alone from the charges, and not Nerva, Rufus, and Orfitus, who are already condemned. Apollonius, nevertheless, declares them innocent, and protests against the injustice of assuming their guilt before their trial. Domitian, now telling him that as regards his defence he may take what course he likes, has his beard and his hair shorn, and puts him in fetters such as are reserved for the worst criminals. A letter attributed to Apollonius in which he supplicatingly entreats the Emperor to release him from his bonds, Philostratus pronounces to be spurious. 1 When Apollonius has been lodged in his new dungeon for two days, a Syracusan who is " the eye and tongue of Domitian," visits him under the pretence that he is a well- wisher and has gained access to him by payment. After much feigned commiseration he reveals his drift; hinting that Apollonius can easily obtain his release by giving information about the supposed conspiracy against the Emperor. The Syracusan having gone away without result, Apollonius tells Damis that he was once that Pytho of Byzantium who came from Philip on a mission to the Greeks, and whom Demosthenes withstood at Athens. He also predicts that they will suffer nothing more than they have suffered already ; and, to show that his submitting to bondage is voluntary, frees his leg from the fetter and then replaces it. 2 These things, says Philostratus, the more foolish sort ascribe to magic ; against the efficacy of which he again takes up the argument. Successful events attributed to charms or sacrifices 1 vii. 35. This letter is not among the extant epistles. 8 vii. 38. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 39 may be more rationally explained by chance coincidence. Nothing, however, will persuade those who have recourse to such arts that success does not result from performance of the prescribed rites, while failure is to be attributed to the omis- sion of some detail the importance of which was overlooked. Others, he adds, have ridiculed the art at large; but if the young will follow his advice, they will have nothing to do with things of the kind, even in sport. 1 As is evident, he would willingly have ascribed the superhuman powers he conceived Apollonius to have possessed to some deeper knowledge of natural causation. Imperfect as the science of the time was, and credulous as opinion was becoming, philosophic culture repudiated in theory the anti-natural conception of miracle. Apollonius is at last set free from his bonds, and conducted back to his former prison. His fellow-prisoners welcome him on his return, and he devotes himself unceasingly to giving them counsel. Damis he now sends to Dicaearchia (Puteoli) to expect with Demetrius his appearance after he has made his defence. When the philosopher is brought to the imperial judgment- seat to be tried, Domitian is to be figured as vexed with the laws because they invented courts of justice. 2 The court was decked out as for a festival oration, and all the illustrious were present. Apollonius, on entering, so disregarded the monarch as not even to glance at him. The accuser therefore crying out to him to " look towards the god of all men," he raised his eyes to the ceiling: thus indicating, says the bio- grapher, that he was looking to Zeus ; and thinking him who was impiously flattered worse than the flatterer. 3 He had prepared an oration in case this should be necessary ; but Domitian merely put to him four brief inter- rogatories. Those he triumphantly answers, and the Emperor acquits him amid applause ; telling him, however, to remain so that he may converse with him in private. Apollonius thanks him ; but adds a stern reproof. " Through the wretches who 1 vii. 39 (3) : 4fjLol 5' diroTre^ivtfw /X7j5' ticeivois 6/uXeiv T0i>t vtovs, Iva. -rai^iv TO. roiavr' fOifavro. 2 viii. I : dvanirovcrOai Si xp*l lov &-)(66ft.evov roit v6fiois, ttreitiT) tvpov SiKaffrr/pia. 3 viii. 4 : tv5iKvv/j.fvos ptv ri> ts rbv Am opav, rbv 8' d6vuv yap avaff^'iv ptv auras ^17 irpoffdwrfffOai OVK dSvvaroi^ fows dvdpl roioi/Tff, airovtyai 5' otr t^ol dwarov oSre T$ TTO.VTWV 6etf. 4 viii. 7 (46). APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 41 of reason incredible. 1 The implied view is obviously that of the Stoic determinism. If the predetermined event is infallible, its conditions are in reality equally necessitated. Uncon- ditional fate is an abstraction ; though it is an impressive and a moralising abstraction. In conclusion, he quotes the lines of Sophocles in the CEdipus Coloneus on the revolutions of human life jj.6voL$ ou ylyverai dfoiffi. yrjpas ovSe K0.rda.vetv irore, TO. 5' $\\a (rvyxfi trdvd' 6 iray/cpar))? ~)^p6vo^. Let the Emperor remember how ephemeral is good fortune, and put an end to the oppressions through which he has been made hateful to all, as all things have been made hateful to him. When Apollonius, as has been related, strangely disappeared, 2 the tyrant did not break out into a rage, as most expected, but rather gave signs of trouble. This having taken place at Rome before noon, Apollonius appeared in the afternoon of the same day at Puteoli to Damis and Demetrius, as he had promised. He came to them when they were beginning to despair of ever seeing him again ; and convinced them by having a tangible body that he had not returned from the shades. After he has slept, he tells them that he is about to sail for Greece. Demetrius is afraid that he will not he sufficiently hidden there : to which he replies that, if all the earth belongs to the tyrant, they that die in the open day have a better part than they that live in concealment. 3 To those in Greece who asked him how he had escaped, he merely said that his defence had been successful. Hence when many coming from Italy related what had really happened, he was almost worshipped ; being regarded as divine especially because he had in no way boasted of the marvellous mode of his escape. Of this residence in Greece one singular adventure is re- lated. Apollonius desired to visit the cave of Trophonius at Lebadea in Boeotia. The priests refused to admit him ; making excuses to him personally but alleging to the people as their ground his being a sorcerer. He went, however, in the 1 viii. 7 (53) : raj yap uire/^oXas rCiv \6ywv tffay6fJL(0a Sia TOI)S rots irrfavoh direidovvras. - viii. 8 : daifj.6vi6v re KOI pg.Sioi> etVeZV rpovov. 3 viii. 14. 42 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA evening with his companions and forced his way in. In this he did what was so pleasing to the god that Trophonius appeared to the priests and rebuked them. To the inquiry of Apollonius, what philosophy he regarded as the best and purest, he replied by allowing him to carry off a book contain- ing the Pythagorean precepts. This book, says Philostratus, is now at Antium ; and his own opinion is that it was brought with some of the epistles of Apollonius to the Emperor Hadrian, and left in the palace there. 1 A concourse of disciples from Ionia joined with those of Hellas to surround the philosopher ; and rhetoric lay neglected as an art that can teach only language. He kept his disciples away from the forensic orators ( T ^ Ayopaiovs) having always been hostile to them, and now, since he had seen the Roman prisons, regarding them and their money-making art as more responsible for the state of things there than the tyrant him- self. 2 About this time a crown (ai>os} was seen around the sun obscuring its rays. The portent was fulfilled when Stephanus plotted the death of Domitian, then fresh from the murder of Flavius Clemens. Stephanus, says Philostratus, being the freedman of his wife who was, like Clemens himself, a re- lation of Domitian, though not his sister, as Philostratus has it avenged his death by attacking the tyrant with a spirit equal to that of the most freeborn Athenians. He proceeds to give an account of the tyrannicide, which, as we see, he approves in entire consistency with classical ethics. While this was taking place at Rome, Apollonius having returned to Ionia after a stay of two years in Greece was speaking at Ephesus. Interrupting his discourse, which had gradually become troubled, he stepped forward three or four paces and cried out, " Strike the tyrant, strike ! " Then he told his audience that Domitian had been slain at that hour ; and this vision of his from the gods was afterwards confirmed circum- stantially. 3 1 vin. 19, 20. 2 viii. 22. Cf. Tac., Dial, afe Oratoribus, 12 : "nam lucrosae huius et sanguinantis eloquentiae usus recens et malis moribus natus, atque, ut tu dicebas, Aper, in locum teli repertus." 8 viii. 26. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 43 Near the end of Nerva's brief reign (96-98) he disappeared from among men, in some way that is not precisely known ; for he sent Dam is away when the expected time approached, on the pretext of entrusting him with a confidential letter to the Emperor. Damis does not even tell his age, which some make to have been eighty, some over ninety, and others more than a hundred. According to Philostratus, his statues in the temple at Tyana showed him to have possessed in a pre-eminent degree the charm which is sometimes found to accompany old age. Several legends are related of the manner in which he was called from earth. 1 He always taught the immortality of the soul, but did not encourage the indulgence of curiosity about its future. To a disputatious youth who, even after his departure, continued to argue against immortality, he appeared in a vision and delivered an oracle. If the verses 2 are by Apollonius, he would seem to have anticipated the attitude of Kant at the conclusion of his Traume eines Geister- sehers. Philostratus lastly tells us that he has found no tomb or cenotaph of Apollonius anywhere, but that everywhere he has met with marvellous stories. The effect of the work of Philostratus on cultivated opinion was decisive. Apollonius was henceforth recognised as at least a philosopher and perhaps something more. Not that the marvels related produced this effect. No school was led by them to call itself after the name of Apollonius, and no one appealed to his wonder-working as evidence of the truth of the doctrines attributed to him. The feeling seems to have been and, as we shall see, an adherent of the new religion was not entirely exempt from it that here was undoubtedly a genuine moral and religious teacher. When, hcwever, the struggle between Christianity and the established polytheism reached its critical point, it occurred to one advocate of the old religion to select the Life of Apollonius as containing wonders better authenticated than those appealed to by the Christians. The argument of Hierocles, so far as it can be gathered from Eusebius, was this : " You proclaim Jesus a god on account of a few prodigies recorded by your evangelists. We have writers of more education than yours and with more care for truth, who relate similar wonders of Apollonius ; and yet we, showing more solid judgment, do not make him a god l viii. 30. 2 viii. 31 (3). 44 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA on account of them, but only regard him as a man found pleasing to the gods." This is practically all that Eusebius tells us about the contents of the work written by Hierocles under the title Philalethes. Everything else in the book, he asserts, has been urged by others and has been already replied to. The parallel between Apollonius and Christ is all that is new, and this only will be taken up. What seems especially to have stung the father of ecclesiastical history is the taunt of Hierocles about the " heedlessness and lightness " (efytpeia. KO.I Kov6Ti)s) of Christian belief, to which he recurs again and again. A brief analysis of his argument will not be uninstructive. He will waive, he tells us, such points as this, that the coming of Christ alone was foretold by the wise men of the Hebrews under divine inspiration, and that to this day devils are cast out by the power of his name, as the writer can testify from experience. 1 Of the biographers referred to by Hierocles namely, Maximus of -^Egae, Damis the Assyrian, and Philostratus the Athenian it will be sufficient to consider the last. From his trustworthiness, that of the rest may be judged. Accordingly the method of Eusebius is to examine in succession the eight books of Philostratus, pointing out in each the incon- sistencies and incredibilities of the narrative. I have no objection, he says, to placing Apollonius as high as any one likes among philosophers. But when his biographer, be he Damis the Assyrian, or Philostratus, or any one else, represents him, under cover of Pythagoreanism, as going beyond the bounds of philosophy, then he is really made out to be an ass in a lion's skin, a juggling quack instead of a philosopher. There are limits set to human powers which no man may transgress ; though a higher being may condescend to the conditions of human nature. Was Apollonius then a divine being ? If so, let the bio- grapher preserve consistency through the whole narrative. He is said to have been announced to his mother before his birth as an incarnation of the god Proteus, and swans are said to have sung him into the world. Whence did the writer get this ? It cannot have been from a disciple who joined him long after in Nineveh. 2 In one place he is made to describe himself as 1 Adversus Hieroclem, 4 : eiWri xal vvv rrjs evOeov SvvdfjLfus TT)V aperr^v ^TTiSeiKwrai fj-oxflripous TIVO.S KO.I au\ovs 5ai/jLovas i/'uxa's avdpuiraiv Kal Ta.s dTreActi'pwp Sia /j,6vi]S rr/s apprirov Trpocrriyopias avrov, tbs avrrj ireipa KaTfi\ri(pafj.fv. *7Md., 8. Cf. 12. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 45 knowing all languages without learning them. Yet he is said to have acquired the Attic mode of speech by discipline and attention, and not by nature, and to have been taken by his father to a rhetorician at Tarsus. Many things related of him, Eusebius allows, are credible as belonging to the history of a wise and good man. It is the attempt to ascribe to him a nature more than human that gives ground for blaming both the author and the subject of the biography. Passing from the first to the second book, Eusebius points out inconsistencies in the account of the journey to India and the meeting with King Phraotes. He then dwells on the marvellous tales about India related in the third book. Be- hold, he exclaims, the incredibilities in which " Philalethes " glories ; preferring Philostratus to our divine evangelists not only as a man of highest education but as careful about truth J 1 larchas, the chief teacher among the Brahmans, is represented as sitting, in the manner of a satrap rather than of a philo- sopher, on a more elevated and more adorned seat than his fellows. This outward distinction by the marks of tyrannic privilege was a fitting mode of doing honour to the teacher of divine philosophy. 2 The account by Philostratus of the vegetative growth like wool that enables the philosophers to dispense with clothing made from materials furnished by animals seems to require that we should think of them as labouring at the loom, unless we are to suppose that this substance of its own accord changes into their sacred raiment. 3 That Apollonius praised the automatic mechanisms of the sages is inconsistent with his not caring to know of them in detail or to emulate them. 4 Not till the return of Apollonius from India does the biogra- pher, in the fourth book, make him begin his wonderful works. Yet, had he been of a diviner nature than that of man, one would say that he ought to have begun them long before, without need of communicating with the Arabians and the Magi and the Indians. Eusebius then scornfully comments on the account of his destroying the plague of Ephesus. The story about the ghost of Achilles, he proceeds, is also full of absurdities and inconsistencies. The ghost appears at dead of night and disappears at cockcrow ; circumstances which would be appropriate enough in the case of evil demons, but are out 1 Adversus Hierodem, 17. 2 Ibid., 18. 3 Ibid., 23. Ibid., 25. 46 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA of place when related of the soul of a hero. The " heedless- ness " of the writer in his accounts of the casting out of a demon from a young man, and of the chasing away of the lamia, does not need much elaboration of proof; for this, as they say, is a casting out of demons by demons. 1 The raising of a maiden from death to a second life is most incredible, and to Philostratus himself seems a marvel to be explained away. 2 Had such a wonder really been performed by Apol- lonius at Rome, it would hardly have escaped the attention of the Emperor and of all his subordinates, and especially of the philosopher Euphrates who at that time was there, and who would not have failed afterwards to include this among his accusations of magic. In his interviews with Vespasian, this steersman of an Egyptian ship for such Apollonius told the Indian sage that he had been in a former life gives himself the airs of a god and of a kingmaker. He commends Euphrates to Vespasian ; and afterwards, when he is at variance with him, speaks of him to Domitian as the worst of men. How does Philostratus reconcile this with the prescience he attributes to his hero ? Evidently, if the wonders related by the writer actually took place, Apollonius performed them by the aid of a demon. Had the superhuman insight he displays on some occasions been of a divine character, he would have displayed it always, and would never have needed to inquire about anything. The fact that he foreknows some things and not others is best explained by the theory of demoniac assistance. 8 As was said above, he could drive away a demon like the lamia by a more powerful demon. From the accusation of magic that was brought against Apollonius his biographer is anxious to defend him. The incident in the dungeon, however, by which Damis is said to have been first convinced of his superhuman powers, if true, plainly confirms the charge. The explanation here suggested by Eusebius is that an impression made on the imagination of Damis by his master's associate demon (fab TOV -n-aptdpov 6a.lfj.ovos) 1 Advcrsits Hie.rochi t 30 ; Sainovas yap clireXaiWt &\\r (fiv, ri]v iracrav airry n-apaSo^oiroi.lai' , os) with the things recorded of him by Philostratus. In what he says to Domitian about the words he had uttered on Necessity, he evades the true charge that he had predicted his end ; and is thus placed before us as a flatterer and a liar and anything rather than a philosopher. Perhaps, however, the falsehood comes from his biographers. In that case, where are the " men of highest education " of " Philalethes " ? The splendour of the truth has convicted them as plainly liars and uneducated men and jugglers. 2 Lastly, says Eusebius, arriving at the culmination, Philostra- tus, having thrown doubt on the place and manner of his de- parture from life, will have it that Apollonius went to heaven bodily, accompanied by an unexpected song of maiden voices. 3 Selecting now, as an example of his false doctrine,* the utterances attributed to him on the certainty of fate, Eusebius ends with some commonplace libertarian declamation : 5 re- marking finally that, should any still think fit to place Apollonius among philosophers, he does not object, if only they will clear him of the false ornaments affixed to him by the writing under examination ; the real effect of such additions being to calumniate the man himself under the guise of raising him to divinity. The moral of the Bishop of Csesarea's tract is, it may be hoped, too obvious for comment. We may go on now to consider briefly an interesting problem raised by the reforming activity of the philosopher or prophet of Tyana. Eusebius does not suggest that Philostratus himself had either a hostile or a friendly intention with regard to Christi- anity. Yet it seems likely that, living when he did, he had 1 Advtrsus Hieroclem, 39. "Ibid.) 43 : ^ei/orat ^ro/xytDs *at dircuSevrovt /cal y6i)rat TT]S d.\rj0eias TO ^yyo* 5iJ)\ey(t>. 8 /JM., 44. 4 -}) tv 56ynaffi. \fstv8oSotla. ravdpfa. s Ibid., 45-48. 48 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA some slight bias one way or the other. One passage might be adduced in support of the former view. The declaration of Apollonius, that not even the supreme Deity can wash away the stain of murder, if it were found in Julian, could safely be set down as pointed against the Christian ecclesiastical doctrine. To Philostratus, however, it probably appeared as simply a re-affirmation of the higher ethical view, at once poetic and philosophic, against the imaginations of the multitude that by prayers or ceremonies the necessary expiation to be undergone by the soul itself perhaps in a series of lives can be dispensed with. This idea of an inflexible moral order, not to be derived from arbitrary volitions, severe or indulgent, was an important part of the Hellenic conception of an ethically reformed religion ; but, to bring it into relief, no contrast was needed except that which Plato had drawn between the philosophic thinker on religion and the popular " medicine- man." The aim of Philostratus, in spite of his introduction of marvels, was to make it quite clear that Apollonius was not this kind of person ; and indeed the position about sacrifices which by universal consent was his, ought to be of itself sufficient to prove that he was not. While there is thus nothing to show hostility to Christianity on the part of Philostratus, there is some slight evidence of a not unfriendly intention. The Syrian emperors of the third century, for whom he wrote, were themselves favourably dis- posed to the new religion. And in representing Apollonius as accused of perpetrating a ritual murder, may he not have meant to hint at the absurdity of the vulgar accusations against the Christians ? This seems at least possible. That Christianity should become the exclusive religion of the State he would certainly not have desired. What he hoped for was, we may judge, a system of toleration accompanied by ethical reform of the local cults wherever such reform might be needed. Of Christianity itself he probably knew little. He was not one of those who had caught a glimpse of the theo- cratic aims of the Church. 1 Indeed Themistius the Peripatetic, 1 In spite of its defective information on the detail of Jewish antiquities, there is evidence in the fifth book of his Histories that Tacitus had gained some real insight into the spirit of intolerant theocracy which, at once dislodged and liberated by the destruction of Jerusalem, was shaping for itself a new embodiment in the incipient Catholic hierarchy. See especially c. 5. On the support furnished by theocracy to monarchy, compare what he says about the Hasmonsean kings, "qui mobilitate vulgi expulsi, APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 49 and Ammianus Marcellinus the military historian, had scarcely appreciated those aims in the latter part of the fourth century. Even after the victory of Christianity they seem to have still cherished dreams of a mutual toleration ; taking the ground natural to sensible men of the world imbued with secular culture who saw the general agreement of all the organised doctrines, philosophic or religious, on practical morals. They could hardly have imagined that what must have seemed to men of their type so moderate and obvious a solution would have to wait, not for its triumph but for a mere beginning of its effective recognition, to the time of Locke. The regime of " religious liberty," desirable as it must always have seemed to statesmen who were not bigots, has not always been practicable for governments sincerely anxious to uphold freedom of opinion. The repression of the rising Christian Church in the second century was probably, in its inception, a policy similar to the legislation of modern States against the reactionary conspiracies fomented by Catholic organisation in its death-struggle; though the exact degree of knowledge of those who attempted it, and the degree of harshness in the method used, may be for ever impossible to discern through the cloud of ecclesiastical legend. An attempt to show how a more clearly conceived policy of the kind, aided instead of thwarted by accident, might have been successful in throwing Christianity back on the East, has been made by M. Renouvierin his Uchronie. According to M. Renouvier's hypothetical reconstruction of history, the official Stoicism retains the direction of opinion ; the extra-legal power of the Emperor is gradually reduced with a view to the restoration of the Republic ; slavery is brought to an end by legislation under the continued Stoical influence, instead of being left, as it actually was, to be slowly extinguished in the Middle Ages through economical causes unassisted by directing ideas. The process of return from the type of society initiated by the Csesarean revolution being thus accelerated, Europe about the ninth century is a little in advance of what actually became its condition in the nineteenth. The empire of the West has in the meantime been resolved into a system of national republics resumpta per arma dominatione fugas civium, urbium eversiones, fratrum coniugum parentum neces aliaque solita regibus ausi superstitionem fove- bant, quia honor sacerdotii firmamentutn potentiae adsumebatur " (Hist. v. 8). 4 50 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA in friendly alliance. The Christian propaganda is re-admitted when the force of the Catholic idea has spent itself in the East in mutual massacre and abortive crusading. Thus, in the hypothetical reconstruction, formal toleration of all sects, reli- gious or philosophic, becomes at length the official system, as it is in the actual modern world after a far more wasteful struggle. It is tempting to take this sketch as a basis and to make modifi- cations in it by giving a more definite part than M. Renouvierdoes to the Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic movements. To bring about, for example, the abolition of the customs of animal sacrifice and of divination by inspection of victims, the ideas of a reformer like Apollonius were necessary ; Stoicism having somewhat derogated from its philosophical character by defending the official religion as a whole. Again, to an idealist the Neo-Platonic metaphysics ought to seem an advance on the Stoic materialism. And indeed it seems clear that, in the absence of Christianity, Neo-Platonism and not Stoicism would finally have assumed the direction of opinion in the Empire. Had this been the course of events, Graeco-Roman civilisation would have preserved its organic continuity, and the barbarian attack would doubtless have been thrown off. In the latter part of the second century the conservative patriotism of Celsus foresaw that, as things were, the latent civil war kept up by the imperium in imperio of the Church would be fatal ; that, unless the Christians could be persuaded to yield the required allegiance to the State, the whole fabric would sooner or later go down under the shock of invasion. He did not indeed foresee the recovery ; but expressed the apprehension that the religion of the Christians itself, as well as true philosophy, would be submerged in universal chaos. This, as we know, did not in the end come about ; though the prospect might seem near being realised in the dark centuries of the West between the end of antiquity and the beginning of new life in the Middle Age. What then would have been the result if the break-up had been averted ? Would Western civilisation have assumed a fixed form analogous to those of the East though superior, combining, let us say, the political order of China with the higher speculative thought of India and with a legal system that recognises rights as well as duties, but never developing new forms of freedom or new lines of art and thought ? Or would there have been such accelerated progress as M. Renouvier has imagined? A progressive movement might be conceived as starting APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 51 from interaction between the Roman Empire and the free but undisciplined tribes of the North, when these, kept at length within their own boundaries, settled down to a life of compara- tive peace and began to draw their higher culture, as they would have done, from the old civilisation of Europe. We might then suppose an ethnic republic arising in the North say, in Scandinavia and, by offering to the South a new type for imitation instead of the city-republic of the past, leading to a system of independent national States. As the imperial absolutism, according to the hypothesis, remains unconsecrated by a new hierocracy, we should naturally suppose a transition from the monarchical to the republican form less violent than the French Revolution. Thus we should come round to M. Renouvier's result in a different manner. It would be easy to fill in details and, by selecting factors with a view to the re- quired product, to show how every distinctive element in modern civilisation might have been evolved. M. Renouvier himself, however, at the conclusion of his "apocryphal sketch," has sufficiently indicated at once the possibilities and the limitations of this kind of reconstruction ; and the scientific interest of any such attempt cannot, of course, be in its positive result since the result is necessarily un- verifiable though it may suggest new ways of looking at the actual process of history. We are led to see that in the com- plexity of real circumstances factors intervene which from time to time make continuous progress impossible. 1 Perhaps it is irrational even to desire that there should have been continuous progress ; as Heraclitus thought Homer irrational for giving utterance to the aspiration " that strife might be destroyed from among gods and men " ; since this would mean the destruction of the cosmic harmony itself. It is still possible to apply the Ideological idea in Kant's sense to the historical process. That is to say, we may use it as a "regulative idea " to interpret history as it was ; though we may not use it to inform us as to what history in general must have been. Taking it in the first sense, and using the terms of post- Kantian metaphysics, we might regard the pseudo-synthesis of Athanasius and Augustine and the rest, itself entirely without 1 A recent example of this kind is the overgrowth of industrialism through- out the civilised world. It is remarkable that two poets so unlike in many respects as Wordsworth and Shelley foresaw the imminent evil of pluto- cracy in the early years of the nineteenth century. 52 APOLLONIUS OF TYANA human value, as the obstacle posited by the world-soul in order to rise more explicitly to the idea of spiritual freedom. This is not of course to deny that there are gleams of borrowed light in their Kingdom of Darkness ; but it is to deny the too anthropomorphic teleology of Comte, with its insistence that the Catholic ideal, as one expression of the "human providence," must have been a progressive phase in the history of humanity. 1 The immanent reason in things, being cosmic and not simply human, works in the affairs of man also through pauses like night and winter. Such seasons, we know, bear the germs of the future ; and the future is more than simply a return to a vanished past. To historical Christianity may be assigned on one side the merit of partially appropriating the idealistic metaphysic which was the legacy of Hellenic thought ; and, on the other side, of preserving, in the documents to which it appealed for its authoritative dogma, elements of ethical culture which, when cleared of their dogmatic superstructure, could be seen to con- tain something emotionally unique. In the Hebrew prophets there is a more ardent, though not a purer and certainly not a nobler, morality than that of classical antiquity even in its final stage ; and the teaching of the Gospel has become, when dissociated from a creed which was always extraneous to it, the inspiration of a more impassioned, though not of a wider, philanthropy. The first modern to bring out clearly the per- manent ethical value of the Christian as well as of the Hebrew documents was Spinoza, who was enabled to do it by having discarded more systematically than any one before him the whole framework of rabbinical and ecclesiastical dogma. Since, however, the problem of making a new synthesis of the ele- ments of ethical and intellectual culture still remains, there seems to be some advantage in returning for inspiration to more than one source. The movement of moral and religious reform from within the Hellenic world failed, owing to the circumstances of the time, as much through its merits as through any shortcomings that may be ascribed to it. Its philosophical idea of divine justice, as we have seen, was opposed to the doctrine of vicarious punishment distilled by Christian theology from the lower paganism. And for a time 1 Comte predicted results almost purely beneficent from modern in- dustrialism ; though it must be allowed that his disciples have no more love for the present hypertrophy of commerce than other philosophers. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 53 the original Christian teaching, such as Bibical critics now suppose it to have been, failed more tragically than the Hellenic movement. Graeco-Roman civilisation indeed was broken up ; and the Christian Church conquered : but, on the other hand, the genuine Hellenism has been easier to re- discover than the teaching of Jesus, 1 which, in its association with the ecclesiastical system, became distorted almost if not quite beyond recognition. In the endeavour after restoration, may not the " Hebraist " and the " Hellenist," in the true sense of both terms, regard themselves as co-operating to a common result ? 1 Since writing this, I have made a more special study of Christian origins, and have come to the conclusion that no personal Jesus is to be discovered as the beginner of the teaching. Still, we may continue to speak of an ethical " Teaching of Jesus," as we speak of the " Mosaic Law " or of the " Orphic Theology." This teaching, whether having its be- ginning in a personal founder or not, was at any rate in its characteristic part an outgrowth from the Hebraism of the prophets and not of the priests, and thus essentially separable from the ecclesiastical system which appropriated it. And for a long time, as is known, the claim to be the depositaries of the genuine traditional teaching was maintained by the " Ebionites," who were repudiated as heretical by Catholic Christianity. CELSUS AND ORIGEN RECENT historians of antiquity have shown how narrowly Greece, at the opening of its great period, escaped falling under the dominance of a theocracy on the Oriental model, started by the dissemination of a religion at once new and archaic, and proclaiming itself revealed. 1 The inference was perhaps too obvious to draw, that what Orphism failed to do was done by the Christian hierarchy seven or eight centuries later. In the meantime a distinctively European ideal had been determined in outline by the temporary efflorescence of republican States, and by the growth of philosophy as a power not subordinated to popular religion, but claiming to satisfy the highest aspirations of the individual after speculative insight and a moral rule of life. Thus it remained possible long afterwards to break again the spiritual dominion of the East over the West. The ambition of those who represent the system that dominated European life in the middle period is nevertheless still active. Some even think that, skilfully directed and taking advantage of the ever-renewed reaction starting up from a past embodied in institutions, it may yet prevail. Though this view seems to take too little account of the critical work of the last century, by which the whole historical basis of the old spiritual edifice has been irremediably sapped, a comparison with the situation near the close of the ancient world may show it not to be altogether chimerical. In the treatise of Origen against Celsus, we have the ablest defence that could be made in the third 1 See Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, vols. ii. and iii. ; and com- pare the view of Prof. J. B. Bury in his History of Greece. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 55 century against the attack of a well-informed opponent of Christianity in the second. Of the weight of that attack we can only judge from the fragments preserved by the apologist ; but these suffice to prove that, where learning was approximately equal on the two sides, the advocates of the new creed were at a distinctly lower level of rationality than its antagonists. Yet the religion of the "barbarians," for all that reason could say against it, triumphed. The event was made possible funda- mentally by the social conditions of the age. It may, therefore, be worth while for educated moderns to consider how far the economic order, for example, which they allow to go on, favours a revival of outworn orthodoxies that would bring with it again something like the old Eastern structure of life. The Byzantine age furnishes a warning as to the mode in which this could return and overgrow a new world that appeared to have tran- scended it once for all. In Celsus and Origen we must not expect to meet with the two ideals in what seems to us their purity. Celsus represents the particular compromise between socialauthority and individual freedom arrived at by the governing classes in the Roman Empire during the second century of the Christian era ; that is, at a time when the transition on the secular side was more than half accomplished. This attitude is philosophically liberal and politically conservative, as against revolutionaries whose aim is by no means to go back to a freer past, but to establish a new authority extending beyond action over all human thought. We must bear in mind that we are confronted with the anomaly, as it began to appear to liberal thinkers in the nine- teenth century, of a civilisation running down. The chief problem for the men that cared most for the slowly accumulated results of the thought before them was to preserve what remained. Thus we do not find in Celsus hopes for a higher order of things in the future of the world. For him as for Marcus Aurelius and Ecclesiastes, " the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be." Or, if there is a difference, it belongs only to the different phases in a cycle. Origen, on the other hand, holds that a true religious faith, formerly limited to a small people, has now been enlarged, and is to prevail over the whole earth. This presents a kind of likeness to the modern ideal of progress. But, as we can see plainly enough even in his more conciliatory version of it, his creed, while continuing the breaking down of local custom which had been begun by the cosmopolitan empires, Asiatic and European, was bound 56 CELSUS AND ORIGEN to be fatal to that unrestricted liberty of philosophising which for later antiquity was an accepted part of the inherited order. Like Eusebius afterwards, he is fully conscious that he repre- sents the " barbarians " as against the " Greeks." If his philosophical learning enables him to take much from the great Hellenic thinkers, it is to serve a cause which could never have been theirs. A lately published research of Prof. Gunkel 1 seems to show that the root-idea of the spiritual transition must be traced back finally to Babylonia. The imagination of a priest-king who is to establish his dominion everywhere, and to make one religion prevail universally, cannot at first have sprung up in a small tribal group : it must have originated in a great empire. The Jews were only the bearers of the Messianic idea, though it became strongly Judaised in the process. Now, in whatever way Christianity arose, it was, as Gunkel has shown, from the first a highly syncretistic religion. Some of the Eastern ideas it contains may not have come to it by way of Judaism : though actual Judaism was much more composite than it appears in its canonical Scriptures. In the case of this idea, however, there is no difficulty in understanding the historical process. For, as we know, the Judaised conception of world-wide theo- cracy was especially that of the powerful " Catholic " groups among the early believers. Thus (drawing again an obvious inference) we may say that the theocratic ideal migrated from Babylon to Rome, through the Messianic Jews first and then the Catholic Christians. The old civilisation which had become for the apocalyptists the symbol of the secular world-state was the original source of their own dream of all-embracing religious dominion. And the new empire of the West, having already succumbed to the Eastern institution of absolute monarchy, was the necessary recipient of the ideal which for their successors took the form, no longer of a " New Jerusalem," but of the universal " City of God." Here we have one far-reaching illustration of Dr. Tylor's the- orem regarding the immense potency of " survivals in culture." Fortunately, ideals new as well as old can be revived, and the human race has some control over the circumstances that give a field for their growth. The conceptions of the republican 1 Zum religionsgeschichtlichcn Verstandnis des Neuen Testaments (Got- tingen, 1903). Also published in translation in the Monist for April, 1903. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 57 state and of the liberty of philosophising were restored after they had gone into latency ; and they have gained a larger scope. What kind of conditions the modern world is providing for their further development is a practically important question the discussion of which would lead far. If civilisation should continue to be based on the existence of a huge mass with no instruction except what is of utility for material needs, then it seems clear that culture of a rational type will not permanently retain even such directing power as it has. 1 This remark, however, is made only in passing. My object at present is, not to bring into view all the complex issues, but to give a straightforward account, mainly from the intellectual side, of a particular controversy which throws light on the perennial strife of ideals. This account I have not subordinated to a thesis, though it might serve to illustrate more than one. What I propose is to set forth the debate itself in some detail, but with no pretention of exhausting its interest. Thus I have not attempted a complete reconstruction of Celsus, or a special study of his whole view, on the lines of Keim 2 or of Pelagaud. 3 If C. J. Neumann's promised reconstruction in Greek had already appeared, I might not have set myself to go through the treatise of Origen in full ; but, having made a study of it, I find that there is room for a supplement to other work. 4 The terse and classical style of Celsus does not admit of condensation ; though Origen calls his occasional restatement of a position tautology, and makes this the excuse for lengthy new dissertations of his own. Abbreviation of his argument can thus only be by selection. Origen, on the other hand, though sufficiently readable, has the patristic verbosity. It is quite practicable to put the whole substance of many arguments in less space than they occupy. If they do not usually gain in the process, that, I am afraid, is the fault of the arguments. I do not think the statement of them will be 1 Meyer's remarks on the rise of capitalism in the Greek world are in this, relation of extreme interest. He points out that its evil effects were for a time masked by the rapid political and economic advancement of the State. See Geschickte des Alttrthunis, iii. 305, and compare v. 884: "Wieru alien Zeiten gehen auch in Griechenland der Sieg des Capitalismus und die Proletarisirung der Massen Hand in Hand." 2 Celsus' Wahrcs Wort (1873). * Etude sur Cehe (1878). 4 Patrick's Apology of Origen (1892) is on different lines. 58 CELSUS AND ORIGEN found to be unfair. In summarising a Father of the Church, "difficile est satiram non scribere." The edition I have used is the new one by Koetschau. 1 From Koetschau's introduction I give the facts it is necessary to bear in mind as to the time and place of composition. The treatise was composed probably at Caesarea in Palestine. Its date (as established by Neumann) is 248. Celsus wrote his work against the Christians sometime between 177 and 180. Origen's reply, we learn from the dedication, was written in response to a request of his friend Ambrosius, who sent him a copy of the work of Celsus, entitled the True Word ('AX?707;s A(fyos). Who Celsus was, Origen himself does not know. He would like to identify him with an Epicurean of the same name who wrote against magic, and to whom Lucian dedicated his exposure of Alexander the "false prophet;" but he discovers by degrees that this conjecture has too little plausibility, and at length ceases to make his points dependent on it. Celsus was in fact a Platonist. As Origen was of the group of Fathers who, in their borrowings from philosophy, found most that seemed to their purpose in Plato, the opponents have to this extent something in common. Both for this and for other reasons, the apologist does not find it possible to keep up consistently the tone of contempt which he assumes in his " Proem " towards the assailant of the faith. Of Origen's reputed heterodoxy little appears in the treatise before us. Those who wish to know exactly how he mitigated his creed by a philosophic doctrine of " world-periods," or by the theory of a "restitution of all things," must consult his Principles. We find now and then hints of a less damnatory eschatology ; 2 but this does not seem to affect the position that, to whomsoever salvation comes, it must in the end be through acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Saviour. From the first it is obvious that the contest is not between rival philosophies, each to be rationally maintained. Origen assumes that Christianity is a revelation to be received by faith. Greek 1 Die gricchischen christlichen Schriflsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte herausgegeben von der Kirchenvater-Commission der Konigl. Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaflen. Origenes, I., II., Leipzig, 1899. 2 See in particular Contra Celsum, vi. 26. It is not without danger, says Origen, to commit what is meant clearly to writing (d\\' ovS 1 dnivdwoif rt]v TUV TOIOVTWV ffarjvficLv Tricrrevcrai. yparj). The mitigation cannot safely be brought to the knowledge of the multitude, hardly held in check as it is even by the fear of eternal punishment. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 59 philosophy, so far as it claims independence, is treated as a hostile power, not indeed without persuasiveness to those who are grounded in its principles, though precisely for that reason an apostolic warning (Col. ii. 8) was necessary against it. The Old and New Testaments are held unquestioningly to be the inspired word of God. If the limit between canonical and uncanonical matter was still indeterminate, that in no way affects the general principle. When Celsus speaks of " inspired " poets or philosophers, his language has not much more in common with Origen's in reference to the Scriptures than the modern literary sense of "inspiration" has in common with the sense it conveyed to a text-quoting theological disputant of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The difference is that in the early centuries of our era the man of ecclesiastical authority was the man of the future, while the man of liberal and rational culture was the man of the past. The opening of the treatise gives us an insight into the fanaticism with which the ancient world was being assailed. Celsus brings against the Christians the ordinary charge of holding unlawful assemblies. A civilised man finding himself among Scythians and unable to escape, replies Origen, would rightly live in secret in his own manner with any whom he could persuade to do likewise. Now what is lawful among "the nations" regarding statues and "godless polytheism" is as bad as the customs of the Scythians or anything more impious than these. Similarly those would do well who should secretly conspire against a tyrant that aimed at destroying their city. Thus the Christians are right in making compacts forbidden by the law against that tyrant whom they call the Devil. Celsus remarks that although the doctrine is of barbarian . that is, Oriental origin, 1 he does not blame it on this ground, for the barbarians have shown themselves competent to make discoveries ; but the Greeks are better at judging and con- firming and putting in practice the things discovered. So they can do in the case of Christianity, was the reply : but it is to be added that the Christians have a diviner mode of proving their doctrine than the Greek dialectic ; 2 namely, by " spirit 1 i. 2: fiippapov HwOev elvcu TO doy/j.a. - Ibid: o'tKeia. diroSei^is rou \6yov, deiOT^pa. irapa. TTJV airb dia\(KTiKr) j 60 CELSUS AND ORIGEN and power," as the Apostle said, or, in other words, from the fulfilment of prophecy and from miracles. Early in the treatise the difficult question is raised as to the precise grounds assigned for the repression of Christianity. Celsus expresses approval of the conduct of the Christians in so far as they cannot be brought to renounce doctrines they have sincerely embraced ; l but observes that, if they have had to undergo persecution, this is only what has happened to philosophers like Socrates. 2 In other passages also he speaks in the same tone ; but on the other hand he treats some that have been punished as merely executed criminals. These no doubt were they who (as he mentions) publicly insulted statues and abused the gods. We must remember that the Christians in the end conquered, and that they had no scruple in exercis- ing control over the sources of information. Not a single book directed against them has been allowed to reach us, except, like this of Celsus, in the fragments preserved by an opponent. Origen in a later passage puts it on record that up to this time (that is, near the middle of the third century) extremely few Christians have suffered death for their opinions. 3 He ascribes this of course to supernatural protection. The genuine dislike of a government not yet theocratic for anything that savoured of religious persecution, even when it seemed politi- cally necessary, was quite unintelligible to him. The respect of Celsus for the martyrs he supposes to be artfully assumed. Here, he says, Celsus conceals his Epicureanism, and speaks as if he believed in a divine element in man. 4 The ethical teaching of Christianity and its condemnation of images, Celsus points out, is not new. Origen partly agrees : for if these teachings had not been written under the form of " common notions," in the hearts of men generally, how could God justly have punished them for their sins? 6 The accusation of relying on the utterance of names and magical formulae, he finds to contain an allusion to the Christian exorcists. But, he replies, these cast out devils not by the power of enchantments but by the name of Jesus and by M.S. 2 i. 3. 3 iii. 8 : 6\iyoi /card Kaipous Kai 65pa. fvapidfj,r]Toi virtp TTJS U l. *i. 8. 5 i. 4, 5- CELSUS AND ORIGEN 61 declaring the histories concerning him. 1 So powerful is that name that even bad men can sometimes cast out devils by it. Celsus indeed knows this, for he asks why the Saviour con- demns those that have done works like his own. To the charge of keeping the doctrine secret 2 he replies that the chief Christian doctrines, the Virgin-birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Judgment, are better known than those of the philosophers. For the rest, the philosophers too have the distinction between exoteric and esoteric discourses. 3 And the mysteries in general, whether of Greeks or barbarians, have not been attacked for their secresy. Then why whose of Christianity ? Celsus commends rational method, apart from which those who receive dogmas by faith are subject to every kind of decep- tion. "And he compares with us those that believe without reason in the begging priests of the Mother of the gods and in observers of signs, in divinities like Mithras and Sabazius, and anything anyone has met with, apparitions of Hecate or of some other demon or demons." " He says that some, willing neither to offer a rational account nor to answer questions about the object of their faith, make use of the phrases, ' Do not examine, but believe,'* and ' Thy faith will save thee,' and ' Evil is the wisdom in the world, but folly is a good.' " To this Origen replies that doubt- less acceptance of doctrines as the result of examination is the ideal ; but it is impracticable except for the few. Among the Christians not less than among others there are those that examine ; that is, as he explains, who are skilled in the inter- pretation of what is " symbolical " in the prophets and the gospels. The Christian inculcation of doctrines to be received by faith has raised the multitude to a higher moral life. And, as a matter of fact, the ordinary adherents of philosophic schools accept the doctrines of their own teachers without systematic comparison with those of others. All human things 1 i. 6 : ov yap Ka.Ta.Kr)\ri(rtffiv ivxtetv doKoviriv dXXa r$ 6v6fj.an 'I-rjvov /j.tra. TTJJ aira~/ye\la.s T&V irepl avrbv IffTOpiur. - i. 7 : Kpvtot> T& 86yfjLa. ' Misunderstanding of this phrase had begun. The tffurepiKoi \6yoi were net a secret doctrine reserved for adepts. (See Grant's Ethics of Aristotle.) 4 i, 9 : /J.J) i^ra.'fe dXXo. irifrrevffov. 62 CELSUS AND ORIGEN depend on faith. To act, men must have faith in the recurrence of harvest after seed-time, and generally in the prosperous result of an event where the issue is doubtful. Is it not then more reasonable to have faith in God ? 1 Why, he asks, does Celsus, in asserting a community of reason among the nations, omit the Jews and treat their historians alone as unworthy of credence ? 2 His refusal to allow of an allegorical interpretation of Moses is comparable to the procedure of the Platonic Thrasymachus in refusing permission to Socrates to define justice as he likes. 3 In the assertion that there have been many conflagrations and deluges he tacitly associates himself with those who say that the world is ungenerated (dytvrjrov elvai rbv K6ff/j.ov). Let him demonstrate this. If he puts forward the dialogues of Plato, we shall tell him that it is permitted to us for our part to believe that the divine spirit dwelt in the pure and pious soul of Moses, who rose above everything generated and attached himself to the artificer of the whole, whose works he made manifest more clearly than Plato and the others. If he asks us the reasons of such faith, let him first give the reasons of that which he has asserted without demonstrations Celsus argues, Why cannot we Christians confess the one God under any customary name? Why this stress on the name of Adonai or Sabaoth as distinguished from Zeus or any other by which the supreme Deity has been called in various nations? 5 Origen replies by an appeal to those philosophers (viz., the Stoics and Epicureans) who contend for a natural element in the giving of names, in opposition to those who hold, with Aristotle, that words are merely conventional signs. Moreover, the adepts in a secret philosophy are aware of the peculiar efficacy of certain angelic names (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael). So also the name of " our Jesus " has visibly displayed its efficacy in the casting out of myriads of devils. And 1 i. 1 1 : iro;j S'OI)K ev\oywrepov, irdvTuv ruv dvffpwirivuv iria- 2 i. 14. Celsus had somehow arrived at the view that the books of Moses were a late compilation from widely-diffused pagan myths, such as that of a Flood. Cf. i. 21, and, among later passages, iv. 42 : el fj.rj &pa. ovSt MwiWws otfTai tlvai rrjv ypaT)v d\\d TLVUV Tr\ti6vw ' TOIOVTOV yap SrjXoi rb 'irapaxapATTOVTes Kai padiOvpyovvTfS rbv Aev/caXtova,' K, r. \. i. 17. 4 i. I?. 5 i. 24. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 63 those who are skilled in charms report that they lose their power when translated into another language. 1 The coming of Jesus, objects Celsus, is recent. How wonderful, then, replies Origen, have been the results of his teaching in so short a time ; so many rescued from degradation by it. Such has been the moralising effect of what Celsus and those who agree with him call a " word injurious to human life " (X6yov XvfjM.tv6fj.evov rbv TUV dvdpuiruv fiiov) that Some have even gone so far as to abstain from lawful sexual intercourse. 8 The word could not have spread everywhere against the opposition of rulers and peoples alike, unless it had been the word of God. And Celsus himself admits on occasion that it has not been received, as he would make out elsewhere, by the ignorant only. 3 From this point onward Origen changes his mode of reply .* Hitherto he has tried to bring the objections of Celsus under heads and to indicate briefly the answers to them, with a view to making in the end an organic unity of the discourse. Henceforth, " to spare time," he will put them down as they occur in the book and grapple with them as he goes on. This procedure, while no doubt lengthening the treatise of Origen (according to the well-known literary rule), has been of ad- vantage to modern readers, who are thus in a position to know approximately how Celsus ordered his argument. But for the change of plan, as Koetschau remarks, reconstructions such as have been or are to be attempted, would have been out of the question. It appears from Origen's next chapter 5 that Celsus early in his work brought forward an imaginary Jew as opposing the supernatural claims of Jesus. The reason of this is evident if the Graeco-Roman would had no trace of an independent a i. 2C. With this may be compared the very ingenious argument in the De Mysttriis vii. 4, 5, on the mystic virtue of "barbarian " as distinguished f rom Greek names in religious invocations. (Koetschau draws attention to the parallel in a note to Contra Cdsum v. 41, where the idea recurs.) 2 i. 26. If Origen here and in other passages did not dwell so strongly on this point, it might seem unfair to recall his practical interpretation of Matt. xix. 12, recorded in Church-history. The distinctive Caiholic doctrine is stated in the sequel (viii. 55) : dXXa KCLI &yttivfftv Towfrnp, ws Hva. dlnaiov virtp rod KOIVOV diro6av6vTa eicovfflws dTrorpoiria(rfj.ovs ^woielv evepyovvriav \oifJ.obs i) 5vffir\otas ij n rwv ira.pair\f). CELSUS AND ORIGEN 67 gained the courage to preach an innovating doctrine, when they had no skill in dialectic, like the Greek sages ? l Origen has anticipated more recent theologians in appealing to the zoological fact of parthenogenesis in support of the Virgin- birth. 8 He adds that if, as is the opinion of many of the Greeks also, the world had a beginning, the production of the first men must have been more paradoxical than the birth of Jesus, " half in the manner of other men." He then brings in the story that Plato was in reality the son of Apollo by a virgin birth, as a proof that the Greeks too thought it appropriate to regard a great man as not begotten by a human father. The introduction of " the Greek fables about Danae and Melanippe and Auge and Antiope," he dismisses as buf- foonery. Incredulity in relation to these, however, could not be declared out of character in a Jew. The Jew of Celsus asks : What trustworthy witness saw the dove descending on Jesus, or who heard the voice ? 3 After a prologue on the difficulty of demonstrating the truth of histories, especially when mixed with marvels, as in the case, for example, of the siege of Troy, Origen here finds fault with the " personification." If the person asking the question had been an Epicurean, or a Democritean, or a Peripatetic, it would have been in character. Attributed to a Jew, who himself believes greater marvels than that of the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove, it is out of place. 4 The reply of some might be, that the account was not written down from report, but through inspiration of that Spirit which taught Moses the history older than his own time. One who understands the spiritual meaning can show why the appearance was in the form of a dove and in no other. 5 If the Jew asks for a proof of the mission of Jesus, let him first supply a proof of the mission of Moses. 6 Traces of that Holy Spirit once seen in the form of a dove are still preserved among the Christians, who charm away demons and accomplish many cures, and sometimes have visions of future things according to the will of the Word. 7 Of the argument that the prophecies said to refer to " the things concerning Jesus" may fit other matters, he admits the plausibility ; 8 but he thinks he can furnish a satisfactory M. 38. Cf. 46. 4 i. 43- 7 i-46. 2 i. 37. 5 i. 44. 3 i. 50. i. 41- 6i - 45- 68 CELSUS AND ORIGEN answer. He mentions, for example, the existence of the cave in Bethlehem, shown by the inhabitants as the place where Jesus was born, and held to be such even by those alien to the faith. 1 The rejection of Jesus by the Jews, though he mani- festly fulfilled the prophecies, is explained by the innate con- servatism of human nature, especially as regards dogmas. 2 The suffering Christ, Origen argues, was predicted in Isaiah liii. He mentions, indeed, that the Jews interpret this as referring to the people of Israel, but contends that it is not fully explicable unless referred to a person, as by the Christians. Celsus and his Jew and all those that have not believed in Jesus fail to recognise that the prophecies speak of two comings of the Christ among men, one in which he is subject to human affections, and the other in which he is glorified. 3 He wonders why Celsus does not say anything about the star in the East, but volunteers an explanation of what is related. First, it was a new star, of the nature of a comet. Such stars, as is generally held, appear on the eve of extraordinary events. He thinks he can make the Greeks understand the visit of the Magi. The demons to whom they owed the virtue of their accustomed incantations were quelled by the greater power born into the world. Hence they desired to seek this out ; and, possessing as they did the prophecies of Balaam which Moses also wrote down, they guessed the meaning of the star (Num. xxiv. 17).* Next he undertakes to refute the incred- ulity of the Jew regarding Herod's massacre of the children. Herod was moved by the Devil, who from the beginning was plotting against the Saviour. 5 Replying to a description of the apostles as ignorant and disreputable tax-gatherers and so forth, Origen contends that the choice of unlettered men was appropriate, since the Gospel was to be preached as a divine revelation, not to be advocated as a mere philosophical doctrine with the aid of dialectic and rhetoric. 6 Perhaps, he remarks, support for the attack on the character of the Apostles was found in the Epistle of Barnabas (v. 9), where it is said that Jesus chose for his own apostles men lawless beyond all lawlessness (virtp iraiffrtjffi Kal da.lfi.ovas ijSTfj 8 Kal vfoovs, tfnroiei dt Qavpafflav rtva irpa6n)Ta Kal KaTaffTo\T]v TOV ijffovs Kal i\av0puirlav Kal xpyffTorriTa Kal ^tepoYijTo. tv rots /U.TJ 5ia ra PIWTIKO. ij rivas XP e ' as avOpumicas viroKpivaptvois dXXA TrapaSe^a/u&ois yvtjcriws rbv Trtpl 6(ov Kal XpicrroO Acai TTJS taontvr]* Kpiffews \6yov. 5 i. 68. This was urged by Philostratus in his defence of Apollonius of Ty na against the accusation of magic. (Koetschau is of opinion that Origen had read the Life of Apollonius, and that he intentionally ignored it. ) 70 CELSUS AND ORIGEN standing, on the part of Celsus, of the real position of the Jewish Christians, to whom the accusation must be assumed to be addressed. The Ebionites, as they are called, do not depart from the Jewish law. 1 A later passage, however, proves that Celsus knew of the Ebionites. 2 Of course they were not necessarily Jews by race ; nor according to the apostolic legend, which he may have thought himself entitled to follow, did Jewish converts to Christianity necessarily con- tinue the practice of the law. Here as in many other places the apologist exercises himself, not without a touch of vanity, in trying to show that he has a more accurate knowledge than his adversary of the shades of difference among Jews and Christians. However this may be in particular cases, the very effort is a tribute to the extensive information that Celsus had acquired. That he had gone beneath the surface appears sufficiently from the nullity of Origen's reply to the argument, again assigned to the Jew, that the Christians in their teaching about " the resurrection of the dead, and the judgment of God, and a reward for the just and fire for the unjust," have introduced nothing that was not already familiar, that is, to the Jewish apocalyptists. 8 " Our Jesus," he immediately answers, " seeing the Jews doing nothing worthy of the doctrines contained in the prophets, taught them by a parable that the kingdom of God should be taken from them and given to those from the nations." A proof of this transference of the kingdom to the Gentiles is the fact that the Jews have now no prophets or miracles to show, whereas some of the signs that are still found among the Christians are even greater than the former (as promised in John xiv. 12).* To the objection that the predictions assigned to Jesus were feigned after the event, Origen replies by simply (or rather doubly) begging the question. He points to the fulfil- ment, after the time of Jesus, of his predictions of (i) perse- cutions for the mere profession of Christianity, (2) the preach- ing of it to all nations, (3) the destruction of Jerusalem. These prophecies, he says, could not have been written after the event : for it is not to be supposed that the hearers of Jesus handed down the teaching of the Gospels as a 1 ii. i. 2 v. 61. 3 ii. 5. ii. 8 : Kal ei vitrroi 4fo~rdvai avrots Hfra.-xo.p6.Trav K TTJS irpurrjs ypatprjs TO evayyt\iov Tpixrj Kal rerpaxy Kal l fj.frair\drreiv, iV ix ote >' irpbs rovs Aeyx ol;J dpve'urdai. 4 At this period Aristotle was so far from being the idol of the Church that he was not even included among the relatively orthodox philosophers. 5 See the opening of the article on "Gospels" in the Encyclopedia Biblica. H ii. 30 : Oeov Sf Kal Oeov vlov ovdeis IK roiovruv ffv/j.^6\uv Kal irapaKovff/j.d- Ttav ovS 1 i oprwj dyevvuv reKfj.rjpiti>v ffvvLffrrjffiv. . . . tltsyap 6 7/Xtos, i)(ri, irdvra rci a\\a wTluv irpGrrov airrbv StiKvvfi, oin-ws txPW TrfiroirjKtrai rbv vlbv TOU Oeov. 72 CELSUS AND ORIGEN the necessary condition if the way was not to be barred to the universal preaching of a mild doctrine that did not even per- mit self-defence against enemies : accordingly the Roman peace under a monarch had been established by Augustus, in whose reign Jesus was born. To several things that the Jew is made to say, he objects that they are not in character. A Jew would not have assented to the Christian position that the Son of God is the Word. 1 He would not have been likely to quote the Baccha of Euripides. 2 To the objection, however, that the governor who condemned Jesus suffered no punishment such as befell Pentheus when he had imprisoned a Deity, Origen replies that Pilate was not so much to blame as the Jewish race; which, by the judgment of God, has been rent and scattered over the whole earth worse than Pentheus. 8 The recurrent argument against the divinity of Christ from his sufferings and death is met by the reply that those were necessarily related to the end of his coming. To try to get rid of a real crucifixion, with the succeeding death and burial, is to deny the postulate of the Christian system. This, of course, was precisely what opponents did deny. Celsus, in the person of the Jew, points out the inconsis- tency of the appeal to miracles in proof of one doctrine with the condemnation of them when they are used to prove another. 4 Origen can only appeal to ultimate success; re- marking that that which causes men to lead better lives cannot be deception. 5 If the claims of rival propagandists in the Empire are ever referred to, it is assumed that these can have nothing to say for themselves ethically. The existence of false miracles worked by magic power, he goes on to argue, proves that there must be true ones worked by divine power. To 1 11. 3 1 - * ii. 34 : ob ir&vv fikv ofiv 'lovScuoi TCI. EXX^vwi' i\o\oyovffiv. Origen might have remembered Philo, to whom he refers elsewhere as remarkable for Hellenic learning ; but by the third century, through the intensification of sectarian divisions, the Jews had no doubt closed themselves in more. 3 ii. 34 : Strep KaradedtKaffrai V7rt> 6eov ffirapa.'xO^v KCU. els iraaav TTJV v Ilevdtus (nrapayfibv Si.a,criraplv. 4 ii. 49 : irus of>v ov cr^rXtoj' airb T&V avrwv Hpyuv rbv fjv 6tbv TOI)J )Tas iiy ii. SO. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 73 infer from the former the non-existence of the latter is as if one were to infer from the existence of a sophistical dialectic the non-existence of a dialectic leading to truth. 1 Then he shows that for a Jew to adopt the line of argument ascribed to him by Celsus would lead to rejection of the prodigies recorded in his own sacred books equally with those recorded in the gospels. Moses, as well as Jesus, gives warnings against being led astray by the miracles of prophets who shall teach another doctrine. 2 A very stringent criticism of the resurrection story in the Gospels is quoted, in which it is compared to similar stories among Scythians and Egyptians and Greeks. " Or do you think that the relations of the others both are and appear fables, but that with you the catastrophe of the drama has been devised becomingly or persuasively ? " 8 As this is assigned to the Jew, Origen replies again by putting him on the defensive. What plausibility is there in the statement of Moses that he alone drew near to God, while the rest of the people stood afar off? The Jew cannot apologise for what Moses relates of himself without at the same time involuntarily apologising for what is related of Jesus. The cases of the Greek and other heroes, cited by the Jew but not appropriate in his mouth, are not comparable to that of Jesus. They indeed could with- draw themselves from men's eyes and then, when they re- turned, feign that they had been in Hades. Jesus could not, since he died publicly on the cross. And his disciples would not have faced danger and death in order to bear witness to a resurrection of which they had fabricated the account. A Jew could not consistently question whether it was possible for one who had really died to rise up with the same body ; for he would have remembered the children whom Elijah and Elisha brought back to life. " And I think that for this cause also Jesus dwelt with no other nation than the Jews, accustomed as they had become to marvels ; so that by setting the things they held in belief side by side with the things that had come to pass by him and were narrated about him, they might receive it as true that he who had been the centre of greater events and by whom more marvellous deeds had been accomplished was greater than all those of old." 4 1 ii. 51. 2 ii. 53. Origen, it is perhaps worth noting, takes for granted (c. 54) that Moses wrote the account of his own death in Deut. xxxiv. *. 55- 4 - 57. 74 CELSUS AND ORIGEN Some of the objections Origen admits to be well taken and not altogether easy to dispose of. But, he says, the notion of an illusory appearance might account for a dream (6vap), but not for a waking vision (Cirap), except in the case of madness or melancholy. Celsus indeed, in an allusion to Mary Magdalene (ywri irdpoiffrpos), insinuates that this might be the cause ; but the written history does not prove it, and he has only this to go upon. 1 If, it is said, Jesus really willed to show forth divine power, he ought to have been seen after his resurrection by those that had treated him despitefully, and by him who had condemned him, and in short by all. 2 Origen replies that Jesus after his resurrection appeared cnly to his disciples, and to them only at intervals, because only to the few who were spiritually pre- pared, and to them not always, could the vision of his glorified body be revealed. The revelation was given to such as could comprehend it. To the question, " What God becoming present to men meets with disbelief ? " 8 Origen replies that, in spite of all the miracles they had seen performed in Egypt and in the wilder- ness, the Jews themselves disbelieved and fell into idolatry. Thus, with their conduct as recorded in the Old Testament the behaviour of their descendants in rejecting Jesus was quite consistent. Jesus, the objector urges, being unable to persuade, uses threats and denunciations. 4 So also, replies Origen, does the God of the Old Testament, and even divine powers among the Greeks. The Sirens persuade with flattery and pleasant words. Leaving the personification, Celsus now states it as his own opinion that nothing can be idler than the contest between the Jews and the Christians about the Messiah. 5 The Christians, he maintains, were in the beginning simply a faction of the Jews as the Jews were of the Egyptians. 6 Here of course he has adopted, like Tacitus earlier, the inventions put forward by the Egyptian annalists to give a different turn to the legend of the exodus. On this ethnological point Origen, who knew Hebrew, is able to furnish, here and elsewhere, a satisfactory refutation. 1 ii. 60. 2 ii. 63. ii. 74 ' T^ 0ebs irapuv et'y avdpwirovs dTrtcrretrat ; 4 ii. 76. s iii. I. 6 iii. 5. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 75 The Jews, he proves as far as it can be proved by the test of language, belong to an ancient and distinct ethnical group. The Christians, says Celsus, few in number and united at the beginning, now that they are many are split up into sects. 1 Origen replies, first, that divisions had already appeared in the apostolic times, as is proved by the documents. Then he re- marks, with some liberality, that differences of opinion only manifest themselves about things of high value ; 2 citing the case's of medicine and of philosophy. Unfortunately, the tolera- tion seemingly indicated in this passage was really of a very limited kind ; as is evident from the tone towards both philosophy and "heresy" in passages where Origen speaks more conformably to the general spirit of the Church. We now come to a very interesting group of statements by Celsus which, if examined closely, may reveal a rather complex ritual as the hidden core of the earliest Church-life. He speaks successively of "fabricated terrors," 8 and of "highly superstitious worships abounding in mysteries." 4 Further, he is described as "likening the inner and mystic things of the Church of God to the cats or apes or crocodiles or he- goats or dogs of the Egyptians." 5 And this, as is shown by another citation, had some kind of reference to the " relations about Jesus." 6 Origen professes not to know what is meant ; asking what there is of all this in the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, which Celsus also desires should be preserved, or in the Gospel story (which perhaps he means) of Christ crucified. The ground, of course, is uncertain ; but does it not seem as if we are here brought into contact with the Mystery Play which has been conjectured to underlie the story in its present form ? We might even be tempted to infer from a later passage, comparing the Christians to those who 1 iii. 10. 2 iii. 12 : ovSev&s irpdy/jLaTos, o5 nty 5pairod(>}5ei.s KoXovvrwv, 2 iii. 55- 3 iii. 50. 4 iii. 51. 5 iii. 52. 6 " Greek " here, as so often, means an adherent of philosophic culture or *' Hellenism." Origen is himself described as a Greek by race. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 79 that they are only too glad to open themselves before elders who are serious-minded. 1 Would not philosophers similarly mask themselves before the frivolous ? Celsus expresses himself as willing to apologise if he has said anything too harsh ; but, to show that he has spoken under compulsion of the truth, he proceeds to quote the calls to every one who is sinful, unwise, and so forth, to come and be received into the kingdom of God. Does not the "sinful" mean the unjust, the thief, the poisoner? What different class would a robber call to his company ? In the other mysteries, the call is to those only who are pure of hand and just and of good conscience. 2 Origen does not here venture to make explicit his usual assumption that the ethical element was absent from all cults except the Christian, but replies by distinguishing between the general multitude whom the Christians receive to make them better, and those who are admitted to the peculiar mysteries of the religion. These are reserved for the just and pure not less but more rigorously than any other mysteries. We are told, continues Celsus, that God will receive the unjust man who humbles himself through baseness ; but the just man who has practised virtue and looked up to him from the beginning he will not receive. When he is represented as having to be moved by loud lamentations over past mis- deeds, he is made to judge not in response to truth but to flattery. Origen of course meets this by asserting the impos- sibility of sinlessness for man ; but here he does no more than restate in Pauline language a concession made by Celsus in words perhaps cited by him from the Book of Job (xv. 14, xxv. 4). 8 Celsus explains his meaning more fully by the observa- tion that to change the nature completely is very difficult, and that those who (in an ordinary sense) are free from fault, are better for the fellowship of life. 4 And Origen is in the end obliged to admit that he may have represented the faith of the less rational Christians correctly in saying that they regard God as 1 iii 58. 2 Hi. 59. 3 iii. 63 : TOVTO ptv eTriet/cws dX?j{?^s, STL irttpvKt TTWJ rb avOpumvov v\ov afj.apra.veiv. The equivalent, however, is to be found in Isocrates, 898 : dXXd yap airavres TrXetw Tre6ffiv yap d/tetycu reX^wj ira'Yx6.\firov ' ol 5' dyo /SeXrt'ovs Koivuvol j3iou. 8o CELSUS AND ORIGEN an unjust judge who lets off the bad if they bewail themselves and appeal to his pity, and rejects the good if they do not. 1 The charge of hostility to knowledge is one of those to which Celsus constantly returns. The Christians, he says, teach directly that "knowledge is an evil." 2 The wise, in their view, turn away from their doctrines deceived by wisdom. 3 He brings all this to a head by declaring that they thus insult the God of the universe " to the end that they may lead worthless men astray by light hopes and persuade them to despise the things that are better." 4 Origen replies by a distinction between true and false wisdom. None who have true wisdom reject Christianity when explained by a competent instructor. Any philosophy that leads men to reject it must be false.' 3 A little later, he attacks all the four recognised philosophic schools, the Epicureans, the Peripatetics and the Stoics by name, and the Platonists by implication. 6 Are any of these the skilled physicians from attention to whom Celsus accuses the Christians of withdrawing ignorant minds ? The Platonists Origen does not care to condemn by name, because he is engaged in adapting their doctrine of immortality to Christian teaching. With those who teach the permanence of the soul, he says, we have some things in common. He reserves for a more suitable occasion the proof that the blessed life to come will be only for those who accept the religion of Jesus and allow no regard for generated things to contaminate the purity of their theism. 7 By this contamination he means the per- mission of statues; in which, as he maintains elsewhere, all the philosophic schools alike have rendered themselves accomplices with the crowd, thus falling under the guilt of idolatry. Having finished three books, the apologist at length begins to be conscious of the seriousness of his task, and, at the opening of the fourth, invokes divine assistance. What he has to deal with now is a concentrated attack on the idea of a special revelation to a particular people or to their self- constituted successors. The refutation, Celsus holds, of those Mii. 71. 2 iii. 75- 3 i- T 2 - 5 iii. T2. 6 iii. 75. 7 iii. 8l: irp6s o5s Koivd TWO. tx VT Xowa fia.Ka.pia. fwr; /x6votj &rrai rots [TTJC] Kara. TOV 'Iijcrow QfOfftfifiav /ecu etj rov ruv 5\uv 8-ii/j.i.ovpybv etWjSeicu' eiXiKptvij Kal Kadapav /ecu S./MKTOV irpbs 8n TTOT' CELSUS AND ORIGEN 81 Jews or Christians who say that some God or Son of God has come down or is to come down to earth as a corrector of things here, does not need a long discourse. 1 Origen finds that the defence needs one of some length. Does God, the claimants of authority from the revealer are asked, come down to learn what is going on among men, as if he did not know all ? Or does he know, and yet not set things right, because he cannot do this by his divine power, without sending a deputy? Or does he leave his own seat because, being unknown among men and feeling himself neglected, he wishes to make trial of those who believe and those who do not, like the newly-rich exhibiting themselves in their grandeur? To say so is to lay to his charge a stock of very paltry desire for signs of honour. 2 Or, if they say that the coming down is for the salvation of men, how is it that God first thought of correcting human life after so long a period of negligence ? 8 The question why God does not set human affairs right if he knows them, replies Origen, may be retorted on Celsus if he is a believer in providence. 4 In our view, God's method of working is to be always sending those whose office it is to introduce corrections. Of old the revelation how he is to be served was committed pre-eminently to Moses and the prophets. Now Jesus has come, not to be the Saviour merely of those in " one corner " of the world, but so far as depends on him ( T i> foov ^ir' ai/n?), of all men everywhere. 5 One reason for divine revelation is that unbelievers may have no excuse. 6 It was not delayed : there were friends of God and prophets in every generation. 7 A particular race no doubt was preferred : " the Lord's portion is his people ; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance " (Deut. xxxii. 9). But this, the preparation for the coming of Christ, is a mystery too profound for the 1 iv. 2 :" Sn Ka.1 ~X.piffTia.vCiv rives Ka.1 'lovSaioi, ol /JL [\fyovfftv,] ol df; KdTa/3i7a}. The flood and the last judgment, Celsus contends, are fables having their source in misunderstanding of what the Greeks and others have told about deluges and conflagrations that occur in concomitance with certain periodic states of the universe. 8 " We," replies Origen, " attach neither the deluge nor the conflagration of the world to cycles and periods of the stars, but say that the cause of both alike is sin." 4 As for the " coming down " of God, to which Celsus makes repeated reference, this is figurative ; a reply which may serve also for the mockery that, according to the Christians, " God will come down bringing fire, like a torturer." 5 When God visits the world, he comes to purge sin. The " refiner's fire " (Mai. iii. 2) is a metaphor. To the argument that God, being perfect and unchangeable, cannot become of the nature of mortal man, Origen replies first that the Scriptures say so too ; and then points out that, according to the Christian doctrine, God the Word ceases not to exist continually in the same perfection through having taken upon him a human body and soul. 6 And yet this assumption of a human body and soul is not merely apparent, as Celsus argues that it must be, and therefore, as deceptive, must be unworthy of God, 7 if the divine is not to become of inferior nature. 8 Are "the Greeks," Origen asks in the course of the argument, 9 to be allowed to interpret metaphori- cally what is said of the tearing in pieces of Dionysus by the Titans and his coming to life again, while the Christians are not to be allowed to bring out the logical implications of their own Scriptures ? On the recriminations between the Jews and the Christians, an extremly contemptuous passage of Celsus is preserved ; in which he compares them to assemblies of bats or ants or frogs or worms declaring that the God of the universe busies him- self solely with them and their affairs, that they rank next to him, and that all things earth and water and air and stars have been subjected to them. 10 And the worms that is, a iv. 8. 2 iv. 9. 3 iv. ii. 4 iv. 12. 5 iv. 13 : 6'n 6 de&s Kara^fferai. 5lKrjv pa.^p Kivdtivov Oavdrov ovQ' virb \oyiKCiv iridavor^Tuv viKU^vrj. 3 iv. 30. 4 iv. 31 : otfre yap fwy/xi^os otfr' dyaXfj-aroiroibs ev rrj Tro\iTfla avrCiv J]v. 5 iv. 33 : Siv TOffovrov Svvarai TO, 6v6/j.ara ffwairrbiJieva. TTJ rov 6eov irpoff-riyopla, uis ov fi6vov TOI>J awb rov Hdvovs xPV ff ^ ai tv rats irpbs Oebv e^x a 'S KO.I tv rip Ka.Teirq.5eii> Sai/j-ovas ry 6 0ebs 'Afipaafj. KO.I 6 6ebs 'Icrad/c KO.I 6 Oebs 'IaKW/3 dXXd yap axeSo? /cai irdvTas roi)s TO. TUV e'lryd&i' Kal fj.ayeiHn> 84 CELSUS AND ORIGEN which Celsus relied in maintaining, as he seems to have done, that the names were those of certain deceivers of old who were in great repute for their arts, and from whom, therefore the people desired to trace its descent. Origen takes the same fact as a proof of the holiness of the ancient men whose names were thus used. In the eyes of modern comparative mythologists, it will tend to confirm the theory that the names were at first those of ancient gods of the Semitic race, and that only later did they become those of its heroes and ancestors. A similar, though not quite identical, conclusion is suggested by what Origen tells us about the use of the angelic names Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, and, it may be added, of the name of Jesus. All were at first names of gods; and how much of the supernatural character remained, or how much could be restored, depended on obscure circumstances only traceable in an imperfectly preserved literary tradition. Celsus went on to describe the stories in Genesis of the fashioning of man by God from the earth, and of his fall, as clumsily put together by the Jews in a corner of Palestine, where they had never heard that these things had been sung long ago by Hesiod and innumerable other inspired men. 1 This gives Origen an opportunity to make one of his rhetorical points. Can it really be the Epicurean Celsus who calls the poets " inspired men " (fospas tvQtow) ? Such mytho- logisers as Homer and Hesiod, the Christian Father holds, were rightly expelled by Plato from his ideal State ; but of course Celsus is a better judge than Plato ! a The account in Genesis, he proceeds, is maliciously turned into ridicule by Celsus, who does not even consider the possibility of an alle- gorical interpretation, though in the sequel he says that the more reasonable-minded Jews and Christians try to allegorise things they are ashamed of. 8 Then, provoked by the refer- ence to the formation of woman out of a rib of the first man, he quotes from the Works and Days the account of the fashioning of Pandora by Hephaestus at the command of Zeus. And this ridiculous myth, he exclaims, is to be treated as a philosophical allegory ! So also, it seems, are the stories 1 iv. 36. 2 The Hellenic Platonists respectfully dissented from their master on this point. 3 iv. 38 : KO.ITOI. ye 4v rots ei-fjs \tyuv on ol eiritiKfortpot 'lovdaiuv re nai XpiTa.l TTWS dXX-tjyopelv aura. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 85 told by Egyptians and other barbarians. The right to allego- rise is to be refused to none but those who interpret the Jewish authors. He then tries to show the allegorical nature of the occur- rences in the Garden of Eden by comparing the Platonic myth of the birth of Eros. This, he thinks, may have been borrowed by Plato when he was in Egypt from those who knew something of Judaism. He complains that the attack ignores the more edifying things in Genesis. When, however, Celsus, referring to the plot of Rebecca and Jacob against Esau, declares it absurd that God should be represented as dwelling nearest to such as these, Origen finds here no exception to the beauty and strength which he sees in the recorded actions of the friends of God. 1 If, as Celsus objects in the ancient spirit of contempt for interested morality, God is made to reward the just by abundantly satisfying their material needs, it is replied that " all these things happened unto them for types : and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come" (i Cor. x. n). On the story ("worse than Thyestean," Celsus calls it) of Lot's daughters, Origen's apology a might have served as a model for the most accom- plished of the casuists satirised by Pascal. Naturally, he does not spare a counter-attack on the Greek myths. Then he returns to the question, Who has the best right to allegorise ? Celsus maintains that the Jews and Christians have no such right, their early records being mere foolish stories without any deeper philosophical meaning. 8 It appears that he was not judging without examination, but had looked into some of the allegorising writers. " Their allegories," he says, " fit to- gether, with a kind of amazing and absolutely tasteless folly, things that can in no way be harmonised." 4 In passing, he described a disputation between " one Papiscus and Jason " as " worthy of pity and hate rather than of laughter." 8 This has not come down to us ; but it is known to have been a popular work in which the Christian view of the prophecies supposed to refer to Christ was defended against the Jews. Origen 1 iv. 43 : HyxiffTO. d TOI/TOIS iraffi ffv/j.iro\'.rev6fjLevov et i)v 6/j.oXoyov/j^vov iv. 54 ff. 60: iraXi ''iv. 6l. 4 iv. 62. 5 iv. 69. 6 iv. 63. 7 iv. 79. Origen tries to make an inconsistency out of this. 2 iv. 60 : Koivri TJ Travruv rwv irpoeipr/fitvuv ffUfj.oi.Tuv 0wris Kal fj.ia e'r a/j.oi/3r)v ira\ivTpoTrov lovffa Kal tiraviovffa. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 87 greatest of evils is ignorance how God is to be served ; and that some of the philosophers have been thus ignorant is proved by the existence of different sects in philosophy. According to the Christian view ( Ka e' ^Ss)> no one who does not know that it is an evil to think that piety is preserved in the established laws of what are commonly thought to be States, has it in his power to know the source of evils. And no one who has not an accurate knowledge regarding the Devil and his angels and how he came to be the Devil has it in his power to know the source of evils. 1 Evil in us has not matter for its cause, but the choice made by our ruling principle. 2 A periodic and necessitated cosmic movement, like that which Celsus affirms, would take away our moral responsibility ( T 6 e ^'")- 8 Miraculous interpositions, which Celsus had protested against as involving an anthropomorphic conception of Deity, 4 Origen defends as a kind of medicine periodically administered by the Creator when the world is in need of it. That evils are such only to individuals, and are part of the order of the whole, he is able to admit in his own way. 5 The Scriptural imagery about the " wrath of God," he defends as a mode of speech adapted to human weakness. When Celsus, going more into detail, argues against the view that all things were made for man, Origen points out that he is in opposition to the Stoics, and again affects to associate him with the Epicureans. 6 But in fact it was especially by the Platonists that the opposition to the narrow teleology of the Stoics was carried on. What is given of the arguments of Celsus has much in common with the treatment of the subject by Plutarch earlier and by Porphyry later. He points to the signs in the lower animals 1 iv. 65. One implication is that the Devil and his angels founded " the religion of the Gentiles." 2 Of course no one denied that moral evil is properly a wrong choice made by the will or the person. The metaphysical question was, How is this possible ? Platonic philosophers tried to solve it by the necessity of " matter" as a principle of diremption, setting one thing (in a world like ours) in rivalry with another. What Origen puts forward as a different solution, is a mere restatement of the problem. J iv. 67. 4 iv. 69 : d\X' ou5' ws &v6puiros TKrriva/j.fv6s TI evdews icai a 6e&s Trpoffdyfi Si6p6uffii> rip icfofup, K0.do.lpuv aiTbv Ka,Ta.K\vfffj.$ iv. 70. 6 iv. 75. 88 CELSUS AND ORIGEN of an innate intelligence by which they rule their actions for their own preservation, as against the view that they are simply "irrational" and created only to be subservient to man. With Origen it is a fixed dogma that no animal but man can possess reason. If any seem to perform rational actions, it is in them blind instinct of nature ; they are really moved by a divine intelligence external to them. The hexagonal cells in hives are part of an arrangement set in action that bees may provide men with honey. 1 In referring to what Celsus relates of the way in which ants help one another with burdens, Origen comments to the effect that to represent ants as having knowledge in doing this, will turn away people of the simpler sort from giving the like mutual aid, because they will no longer have the consciousness of a superiority as human beings. 2 Remembering afterwards a well-known passage in Proverbs (xxx. 24-28), he escapes from the necessity of admitting that the animals mentioned are really " wise," by treating proverbial, or "parabolic," 8 literature as consisting essentially of " enigmas." " Wherefore also it is written in our Gospels that our Saviour said : ' These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs ' (or parables)." And here he thinks it appropriate to quote the statement of Celsus that those who allegorise the books of the Jews and Christians do violence to the intention of the writers ; adding the triumphant declaration that now it may be considered as confuted. . That Celsus did not seriously found anything on what he brought together about the divinatory powers of certain animals, 4 Origen himself suspects. The argument that such animals are in closer relation to the Deity than the men who have to consult them in order to gain knowledge of the future, looks like a final and rhetorical touch in a brief literary develop- ment of the thesis, and does not seem intended to be taken for more. At any rate, it gives Origen an opening for a long disquisition, in the course of which he states it as the Christian view that certain demons of the Titan or giant race, impious and fallen from heaven, enter into the bodies of animals, preferably birds or beasts of prey, and making them the vehicles of their own fore-knowledge, lure mankind by this means from the worship of the true God. 5 Mv. 82. 2 iv. 83. fti^\lov Ha.poifj.lcu. 4 iv. 88. 5 iv. 92. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 89 The tone in which Celsus brings this portion of his argu- ment to a close seems of itself to exclude the idea that he attached any weight to his excursion into the lore of divination. " Not therefore for man have all things been made, as neither have they been made for the lion or the eagle or the dolphin ; but that this world as a work of God should become complete and perfect altogether. For the sake of this, have all things had their measure assigned, not for the sake of one another (except secondarily) but of the whole. And God cares for the whole ; and this whole providence never forsakes ; nor does it become worse ; nor does God after an interval turn it back to himself; nor does he become angry on account of men, any more than he becomes angry on account of apes or mice. Neither does he threaten those beings of which each in its particular order has received its allotted part." 1 Origen goes through this, point by point, agreeing or differ- ing as his dogma requires. Then he concludes the fourth book by again, as at the beginning, invoking divine assistance for the continuance of the work. At the opening of the fifth book, he observes that Celsus in asserting as he does that no God or Son of God has ever come down to men, 2 is in effect denying the popular mythology. The philosophical resistance to the new faith was at a tactical disadvantage here, and the Christian apologist can again profess to discover traces of the impious " Epicurean." Passing now from the nature of the supreme unity to the graduation of beings in the universe, Celsus puts questions skillfully directed to show that Christianity, and even Judaism, implied in principle as much " polytheism " as the official religion of the Grseco-Roman world. Of what nature, he asks, are the " angels," spoken of by the Jews and Christians ? Are they what others call gods, or are they " demons " ? 8 And since the Jews revere the heaven and its angels, why do they refuse all honour to the sun and moon and the other stars ? * To this Origen replies with a certain moderation. The angels are sometimes called " gods " in the Scriptures, but they are not therefore to be worshipped in place of the supreme God. 5 They are certainly not " demons," for this name is to be understood only of evil powers acting without a gross body. 6 1 iv. 99. 2 v. 3. 3 v. 4. 4 v. 6. 5 v. 4. 6 v. 5. 90 CELSUS AND ORIGEN The Jews worship a God not merely above the parts of the heaven, but above the whole heaven itself. As the chosen, people of the Supreme, they were not allowed to worship any- thing subordinate like the heavenly bodies, which were assigned to "the nations" (Deut. iv. 19, 20. ) l Yet the sun and moon and stars, as works of God, are often celebrated in the Scrip- tures. Perhaps they are guided by higher intelligences. The opinion of Anaxagoras, that the sun is merely a " red-hot mass,' r does not commend itself to Origen. Like Philo, he has here come under the influence of the later Hellenism. Accordingly he does not, in replying to the attack of Celsus on the " resurrection of the flesh," defend the literal sense of the doctrine. This was held, he seems to allow, 2 by the simple-minded believers ; but St. Paul, in what he said about the " spiritual body," had indicated a truer view. Celsus, on his part, distinguishes " some of the Christians " from those whom he is attacking ; but on the believers who cherish the " hope of earthworms," that after being long dead they are to- rise up from the ground with the bodies they formerly had, his attack is unsparing. What soul of a man would desire a putrified body ? And how can a body, once decomposed, return to its former state ? " Having nothing to answer, they flee to a most absurd subterfuge, that everything is possible to God. But God cannot do what is vile, nor does he will to- do what is against nature . . . For he is the Reason of all beings, and cannot do a work that is contrary to reason or to himself." 3 Contemptuous as the phrases are, Origen does not feel himself hurt by them. For in fact his own doctrine is the immortality of the soul, contrasted by Celsus in the same passage with that of a physical resurrection. The ideas of the earliest believers have been left behind, and those of Greek philosophy substituted, as they had begun to be in the Pauline writings. With the heretics, however, who altogether deny the Scriptural dogma of the resurrection, Origen will not make common cause. There is to be a body, but it is to be glorified. 4 And even a literal resurrection of the former body, he retorts on Celsus, is in accordance with some doctrines of the Greeks. The Stoics suppose that, after their l v. 10. 2 v 19. 3 v. 14 : avrbs ydp ta-riv 6 irdvrwv rwv &VTUV \6yos ' ovStv ovv of<5j re irapd\o- yov ovdt Trap' eavrbv 4 tr fyi CELSUS AND ORIGEN 91 world-conflagration (for they too have this), bodies exactly like those that existed before will appear in the new cycle without even the remains of these to grow from. And surely this is more paradoxical than what is really held by Christians, who suppose the new body to grow, not indeed from the old, but from a \6-yos latent in it. 1 The Jews, Celsus proceeded, whatever one may think of their religion, do at least agree with other men in practising a form of worship which is that of their ancestors. This seems expedient, not only inasmuch as they are preserving laws that were arrived at by common consent in the particular country where they are in force, but also because it is a reasonable view that the different parts of the earth have been from the be- ginning distributed among different powers. 2 Thus it is unholy to dissolve what has been established by custom in each place. To this view Origen brings as an objection unholy customs, such as incest and human sacrifice, sanctioned by various religions. Are these to be preserved where they are estab- lished? 3 Further, if religion is an affair of local custom, must not the same principle be applied to the moral virtues ? * Then he attempts a positive view. Celsus, in what he says on the distribution of the parts of the earth among the gods of the nations, has been misled by certain dim traditions " outside the divine word." To learn the truth, we must go to Deuteronomy (xxxii. 8, 9) and to the account in Genesis of the tower of Babel. This indeed has a secret meaning not to be divulged to the uninitiated, but a hint may be given. All except one race wandered " from the East " (Gen. xi. 2), that is, from the light of truth, and may be supposed to have been placed as a punishment in various localities under the government of inferior angels. The one race that was "the Lord's portion" was not, indeed, exempt from shortcomings, but for a time these were not irreparable. At length, this race too having been completely scattered abroad for its sins, the revelation of Jesus is come to all ; and, against a revelation 1 ? 23. 2 v. 25 : SoKel 8' OITUS Kal tpeii>, ov /JLOVOV Kaffori eirl vovv ^\6ev dXXois XXws vofj.lffai Kal del v\dTTeu> TO. es Koivbv Ketcvpufjitva, dXXd Kal Sri wi euds ra fjL^pt) TTJS 777$ ^ d-PXW &\\a dXXotj 4ir6irTais vfvcfj.rifi.fra. Kal Kara rtvas tiriKparelas difi.Xtjfiu.^i'a Tavrrj Kal StoocetTcu. 3 v. 27. * v. 28. 92 CELSUS AND ORIGEN from the supreme God, the customs prevailing among the dispersed portions of the human race under the penal dominion of lower powers have naturally no right to exist. Accordingly, when Celsus asks the Christians whence they in particular derive their paternal laws, and tells them that they are merely revolters from the Jews, Origen replies that now, " in the last days," " the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" (i Tim. iii. 15) is " exalted above the hills " and that " all nations shall flow unto it" (Isa. ii. 2). "And we say to those that ask us whence we are come or what leader we have, that we come according to the pledges of Jesus," from all nations, to beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning- hooks, " becoming through Jesus sons of peace." 1 Here are plainly to be seen the theocratic pretentions of the " great Church " a as against the system of local liberties and tolerance which Celsus was defending in terms of a " theologico- political " theory elaborated to meet practical exigencies. It did meet them on the whole, but it needed accommodation, as Origen was able to show. For the empire did not recognise every detail of religious custom as absolutely sacred. More than a generation before the treatise against the Christians was written, a decree of Hadrian had made all human sacrifices illegal. And the local religions, while their privileges generally were maintained, had no power of coercion over individual dissentients who chose to neglect their rites. So, when Celsus quotes the famous passage of Herodotus (ii. 18) on the inviolableness of their own customary laws to each people, Origen replies by asking what then is to be thought of the teachings of the philosophers against superstition (*<"& SeKTiSaifj.ovlas'). And if the right of those who philosophise to desert paternal custom is recognised, how can that of the Christians be denied ? Celsus and those who think with him, were they serious in their appeal to custom, would have to lay down the rule henceforth that those who in Egypt adopt the opinions of the philosophers must continue to practise all the abstinences from kinds of food and all the ritual of the Egyptian religion. Any one who did this would be a queer philosopher. 8 It seems to have been already perceived in the second ^.33. 2 Cf. v. 40. v. 35 : ye CELSUS AND ORIGEN 93 century that pleas of this form, urged on behalf of the Church, were not really for liberty but for power. Thus Celsus, as if by anticipation, had devoted the next portion of his argument to invalidating the exclusive claims of the Christians (founded on those of the Jews) by setting against them other claims that seemed a priori no less valid. Then, at the end of the section, he pointed out that those who arrogate a divine right of dominance over the world cannot even agree among themselves but differ more fiercely than other men. Origen's method of reply is simply to reaffirm the claims ; but there is some interest in observing how he does it. The god Ammon, says Celsus, has no worse claim to convey messages as to what is sacred than " the angels of the Jews." 1 Ammon, replies Origen, may command abstinence from the flesh of cows, and such a command may to a super- ficial view appear on a level with similar prescriptions in the Jewish law. If, however, Celsus had known the true meaning of such legislation as that of Deut. xxv. 4, he would have known that it is symbolical and refers to the relations of men (cf. i Cor. ix. 9), and not to " irrational animals." 2 There is record in history, Celsus pointed out, of the introduction of a new god, Serapis. s But the Son of God, Origen replies to the intended parallel, if he came but recently to dwell among men, is not therefore new ; for the Scriptures have knowledge of him as the eldest of all creatures, by whom man was made in the image of God. Serapis came in yesterday or the day before by the deceit of Ptolemy, who wished to show to the Alexandrians, as it were, a god manifest. * How he was constructed, and what various things of nature he participates in, we have read in Numenius the Pythagorean. Then, as if unaware that he is himself displaying the parallel *v. 36. 2 From a modern point of view this is an unfortunate example. Origen had an opportunity of drawing attention to the humanity of the Jewish legislation regarding animal life ; and the texts he could have quoted would have met wLh recognition from a Pythagorean or a Flatonist. Yet, so far is he from taking this line that he seems to go out of his way to enforce the characteristic hardness of the new religion, faithfully preserved in the authorised teaching of the Catholic Church as still expounded by its philosophic theologians. 3 v. 37. 4 V. 38 : irepl St Zapd'TriSos TroXXrj (cat 5idwvos Iffropia., X^ s Ka ^ "Kp&W '* H^ffov tXOovTos Kara rivas fjutyyaveias rov fiovXrjOtvTOS IlToXe/xa/oii oiovd ujcu rots 94 CELSUS AND ORIGEN syncretism, he goes on to set forth the all-comprehensive attributes of the Son of God. 1 The Jews, Celsus concedes, are not to be blamed for clinging to their own customs, but only for the claim they make to be holier than other men. 2 Though Origen's reply here repeats some positions given above, it contains one or two details worth noting. If it is true, as Celsus maintains, that neither the monotheism nor the rites of the Jews are their peculiar property, we must still distinguish. The name by which the Highest is called is not indifferent : for, as was said before, names are something more than conventional signs. This is especially the case with divine names. To call upon " the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob " has an efficacy in controlling the demons which would be entirely lost if one were to substitute in the formula translations of the names of the patriarchs. So likewise with the names of Israel, of Sabaoth, and of Adonai. Zeus is not the same as Sabaoth : for his name is not divine at all, but is that by which a certain demon pleases to be called upon, who is not friendly to man nor to the true God. 3 Circumcision, though it cannot be denied to be common as a rite to the Jews and to other nations, nevertheless differs according as the doctrines of those who practise it differ. It may have been performed because of some angel hostile to the Jewish race, who was thus deprived of his power to injure. 4 When Jesus had undergone the rite, the angel's power against the uncircumcised who worship only the Creator was altogether destroyed, so that there was no further need to avert injury by the shedding of blood. Kinds of abstinence, again, differ according to the intention. If for example, Christian ascetics abstain from the flesh of animals (though no longer required to observe the distinctions of meats according to Jewish law), this is in order to bring the body into subjection, and not, as with the Pythagoreans, because they think they are sparing their kindred. 5 Reference to the Jewish and Christian doctrine of angels led l v. 39. 2 v. 41. 3 v. 46. 4 v. 48. Following a method already adopted by Hebrew interpreters for getting rid of anthropomorphisms in the Bible, Origen substitutes an "angel" for "the Lord" in the barbaric story of Ex. iv. 24-26. Celsus would hardly have seen in this explanation a proof that the Jews and Christians were exempt from demonolatry. 5 v. 49. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 95 again to an incidental criticism of the resurrection-narratives in the Gospels. Origen begins an attempt at reconciliation of discrepancies, but cuts short the reply by hinting at a mystical significance of the number of angels at the tomb in the different narratives. Equally strange stories, he proceeds, 1 are told among the Greeks. In noting the contradictory positions of the Christian sects, Celsus brought in the speculations of the Gnostics ; though he was aware of the exclusive pretentions of the " great Church," with its acceptance of the God of the Jews as at once the creator of the world and the highest God. It appears from the account given that he knew of Christians who lived according to the Jewish law, 2 as well as of the anti-Jewish Gnostics. Origen repudiates some of the Gnostic sects on the ground that they are not Christian at all. Of some he declares that he has never come in contact with them. Here, however, what Celsus was chiefly concerned to bring into view was the unmeasured vituperation of one another by sects all of which claimed to be Christian, and their deadly mutual hate. 3 Origen tries to palliate differences, as before, by comparing with them the quarrels of philosophical and medical sects. The hatred imputed he will not admit. To hate those that have been led astray by heresies would be inconsistent with the blessings pronounced in the Gospel on peacemakers and on the meek. Celsus from his point of view had not failed to observe the same contrast ; as may be seen from his trenchant summing-up. " All those," he says, " who are so much at variance and who in their wranglings confute one another with the most shameful abuse, you will hear saying, 'The world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.' " 4 Where- upon the apologist exclaims in triumph that all cannot say this ; for some of the heretics do not accept the Pauline epistles. Now the passage cited is from Paul (Gal. vi. 14), and they would not quote the Apostle whom they reject. Though the beginning of the doctrine is naught, continues 1 v. 57- 2 v. 6l. Of these Origen writes : OVTOI S'tifflv ol Strrot 'E/Jtwycuoi, tfroi K trapOevov b/AoXoyovvres 6jU.o/ws T)/JUV rbv 'Ii)vTJT]fj.ovo'i dt, i)^p' oZv, el KO.I !-er ri)j irepl ai/roO aXrjdeias 6eo d/J.aprav6vT CELSUS AND ORIGEN 97 divine sonship ; speaking of the God of all as the Father of the ruling principle and the cause. In what Celsus had to say about faith, there occur in the form of deductions from the Christian view, put as absurdities, positions that have since been adopted seriously by the bolder apologists. Because we say that the Son of God suf- fered the most disgraceful punishment, "Believe all the more." 1 Again ; if one sect brings in one person, another another, and all alike say, " Believe if you wish to be saved, or depart," what shall they do who really wish to be saved ? Shall they decide by throwing dice ? a The first challenge was accepted in the paradox of Tertullian. 8 The second will at once suggest to modern readers " the wager of Pascal : " Stake your eternal happiness on the truth of that creed whose promises and threats are the most transcendent. The distinction between human and divine wisdom, observed Celsus, is not new, but is to be met with in Heraclitus and other philosophers. Then he points out that a fitting humility in presence of the divine law is taught by Plato (Leges iv. 715 -716 A). This the Christians have distorted into a base humility. 4 Plato had also said, before the Gospels, that no one can be extremely rich and attain the height of goodness. 5 In reference to the last point, it is interesting to note that accord- ing to the spokesman of the Church the expressions " rich and poor " in the Gospels are not to be understood literally. " For not even the first man you meet would praise the poor indis- criminately, of whom the most part have the very worst morals." 6 A tangled disputation on the sources of the idea of a heaven or heavens, and on the gnostic sects, Christian or non- Christian, and related topics, is important for ecclesiastical history, but does not contribute much to the direct argument on either side. It may be noted that, according to Origen's 1 vi. IO : rai/Tj? Kal /j.a\\ov iripCjv dffx'nf^vus Kal aTrawr/ws TO TC wot/rat, . . tirl ruiv yovdruv Kal Trpyvris ^pi/x/a^oj, tffOrjra dvffT-fjvuv dfj.urK6fj.evof 5 vi. 1 6 : aya6bv 6vra Sia^>6pus Kal TrXo&nop elvai Siaarov. 6 vi. 16 : owe SLIT yap oi)5' d T\TX&V aAcpfrwj TOVS TTTUXOVS iiryvtffev, &v oi ToXXoJ Kal av\6raTol fieri ra ijOrj. 7 98 CELSUS AND ORIGEN report, certain Oriental sects (the " Ophiani "), declared by him to be non-Christian, and perhaps representing the oldest Gnosticism, denied even the existence of Jesus ; going beyond the " docetists " who said that he had only an apparent body. l Celsus, in his investigations, had come upon strange formulae of Eastern mystagogues, in which the primeval idea recurred of a " slaying " of the heaven and earth and of many people that they might live, intermingled with ideas of the cessation of death by the death of sin. Everywhere he found the symbolism of the "tree of life," and of a "resurrection of the flesh from the tree"; but of course completely mis- interpreted it when, with vigorous sarcasm, he treated it as derived from historical circumstances. 8 Modern anthropologists know that, whether an actual Jesus died on the cross or not, the imagery is far older. The suggestion of Origen that Celsus had invented the most primitive details of it 8 is peculiarly absurd. A passage which has been thought inconsistent with the opinion that identifies Celsus with Lucian's friend who wrote against magic would by itself rather confirm this; although for the rest the evidence is decidedly against it, since the friend of Lucian was plainly an Epicurean. * Celsus quotes, as from a certain Dionysius whom he had met, 5 the view that, for those who live the life of philosophic virtue, magical arts lose the power they have over others. The fact that he quotes this, instead of giving it directly as his own view, would seem to show that he desired to avoid any except a purely hypo- thetical concession to the claims of magic. While pointing to representations derived, as he thought, by Christianity from Mithraism, Celsus does not appear to have 1 vi. 28 : Spa yovv JTUJS aXoyurarov jreiroiijKev 6 KAofJM TOV 'Iriffov, K&V 8ri 6s rts ^ fitrpios rh. ij0T) $ &i>6puTr6s TIS fy. The ^ before AvOpiairos was omitted on conjecture in the edition of Delarue (i733)i which till Koetschau's served as the basis for newer editions. (See Koetschau's textual note, vol. ii. p. 98). 2 vi. 34 : iravraxov 8t Kei rb r^y fw^j { i/Xov Ka.1 a.v&ffTcur<.v /f6s dr6 i/\. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 99 connected the idea of Satan in particular with the Persian religion. He finds that the old Greek mythologists, in their stories of Titans and Giants, offer sufficient materials for dis- tortion into the Christian notion of the Devil. This he regards as involving an impious attribution of human weakness to the highest God, who is represented as having an adversary limiting his power. 1 Origen's reply consists mainly in an attempt to show that the idea of a diabolic resistance to God is present in the Hebrew Scriptures, and therefore cannot have been derived from Greek fables, which are younger. Into his attempts at allegorising we need not try to follow him, especi- as he admits himself that they are rather beside the mark. 1 They are exceeded in irrelevancy, however, by his disquisition on the Antichrist. * The idea of the Son of God Celsus takes to have been derived from the language of "ancient men" who applied similar names to the world because God is its source. * Origen once more replies by insisting on the greater antiquity of Moses and the prophets as compared with the ancients whom Celsus has in view. Next comes a discussion on the Mosaic cosmogony, which, so far at least as the creation of man is concerned, Celsus declares to resemble the stories of world-production that the poets of the Old Comedy set forth in jest . 5 In the detailed argument, Origen evades some points by affecting uncertainty whether Celsus is aiming his darts at the cosmogony in itself or as it is interpreted by the heretics. To the description of the heterodox interpretations as "abysmal nonsense " (Xtyxv paetr^ he would have had no objection ; but Celsus, he complains, has not even discriminated heresy from heresy. 7 He does not profess here to give a full reply : for an adequate exposition whole treatises would be required. With the subject of the six days' work he has dealt in his commentary on Genesis. 8 In what follows, he appropriates as far as possible the Platonis- ing expressions of Celsus on the relation between God and the universe. Of course the most refined philosophical theses are supposed to be present in the Scriptures. No light that was 1 vi. 42. a vi. 44. * vi. 45, 46. 4 vi. 47 : S.t>8pes iraXoiol r6Se rbv /cdcr/uov ws IK 6fov ytvbuevov tralSa. re airrov KO.I rjWfov 8 vi. 49. ' vi. 50. 7 vi. 53. 8 vi. 60. This exposition is lost. ioo CELSUS AND ORIGEN not there can have been derived from the heathen. Celsus is in darkness, and wishes to cast darkness over the eyes of Christians. 1 Amid the deluge of Scripture-quotations and expositions in which it is hardly possible to detect anything that appears as if it might once have looked like the semblance of a reply to an outsider, a topic of some philosophical interest emerges. Celsus raises objection to the expression " God is spirit " (irvevfja 6 6e6s) as having a corporeal reference ; 2 and maintains that the Christians, in what they say of the " spirit of God," do not differ from the Stoics, with their notion of a divine breath that runs through and contains in itself all things. 8 Origen's reply is that when God is said to be " breath " or " spirit," this is to be taken in a metaphorical sense, just as when he is described as a "fire"; and that the Christians do not agree with the Stoics in holding the divinity to be corporeal. In reality, they understand by what they call " spirit " an incor- poreal essence (ao-upa.? ova-iav). Celsus was here of course thinking in terms of the Greek psychology, for which spirit (Tn/eC/ua) meant breath or warm air, intermediate between soul and gross matter. For the Jews and Christians, the " spirit " of man or God, coming primarily from a more archaic psychology, had acquired an application to the highest part of the soul, or principle of life and thought, conceived as a recipient of divine inspiration. Thus it could take no intermediate position, but must be made parallel with mind or intellect (vovs), the highest part of the soul in the psychology of the Greeks. The Platonising Fathers, having adopted the idea of an opposition of nature between soul (\[/vx-fi) and body, must a fortiori dematerialise " spirit." Their device, we see, was to treat the expression as figurative. For the possibility of introducing more exact distinctions into their own psychology, they had to wait till another advance had been made by independent Greek thought. It would be vain to look for an immanent development in that which, by courtesy, receives the name of patristic philosophy. A passage quoted from Celsus a little later puts briefly some 1 vi. 67 : KAtros fj.tv oZv Ka.1 ol ira.pa.Tr\-fida\fJ.uv -f]fjLuv OtXovfftv, i^tets S rtf UTi rov \6yov tt-aI> affffi&v doyndrw. TU>I> 2 Ti. 70. 3 vi. 71. rCiv CELSUS AND ORIGEN 101 characteristic objections to the Christian scheme of revelation. " If God, waking up, like the Zeus of the comic poet, from the long sleep, was willing to rescue the race of men from evils, why did he send this breath, as you call it, to one corner, when he ought to have blown through many bodies alike and despatched them throughout the whole inhabited world ? l But it was by way of raising laughter in the theatre that the poet let his Zeus be waked up, and then made him send Hermes to the Lacedaemonians and Athenians. And can you avoid the thought that you have done something more ludicrous in sending the Son of God to the Jews ? " When Origen treats it as unworthy of the dignity of philosophy to compare the awakened sender of Hermes in the comedy with God the Maker of all, 2 the retort is obvious. It is precisely the intermittent action and the partiality ascribed to the God of the universe, as distinguished from the gods of popular belief, that the philosopher regarded as more ludicrous. For the Christian apologists of those ages, as we have in part seen, the vital centre of the case was the fulfilment of what were held to be the Messianic prophecies, by the life and death of the Christ. Thus, when Celsus returns to the attack on this position, again setting the various supernaturalist claims in rivalry with one another, Origen marks the point reached in the controversy by opening another book (the seventh) ; at the beginning of which he once more invokes divine aid, adding a prayer for the destruction of words against "the truth." The Christians, says Celsus, while they take no account of the innumerable oracles among Greeks and Egyptians and others, which have benefited mankind by giving equitable decisions for the settlement of the earth, regard as miraculous the things spoken or not spoken by the men of Judaea. 8 To this Origen replies by a tirade against the " demons." Apollo's oracle at Delphi, among other discreditable circumstances, such as being uttered through women instead of men, once went so far as to call frivolous writers like the tragic poets "wise."* He notes the insinuation of Celsus in the words 1 vi. 78 : dtov TroXXii ofjLolws diavffr)ffai ffu/MTa. KO.I (carA traffav dirooretXat TT]V OlKOVfJI^VTJV. 2 Our God (rbv rov iravrfa Sri/j-iovpybv 6ebv T)/J.I>), as Origen puts it, thus emphasising the point that offended the philosophers. 8 vii. 3. 4 vii. 6. 102 CELSUS AND ORIGEN " spoken or not spoken " (\ex0tvTa ^ M Xextf&Ta) ; remarking that if Celsus thinks the Messianic prophecies were only written, without having been previously spoken, that shows his ignorance of Hebrew chronology. 1 Celsus had gone on to state that predictions such as the Christians rely upon in the Jewish writings were still, to his own knowledge, put forth in Phoenicia and Palestine. There are, he says, many kinds of prophecy ; but the most consummate is as follows. Then he gives a description of many nameless prophets, in temples and out of temples, each of whom is ready and accustomed to say : "I am God, or Son of God, or Divine Spirit. I am come; for already the world is being destroyed, and you, O men, are lost through wrong-doings. But it is my will to save you ; and you shall see me coming again with celestial power. Blessed is he that now worships me, but upon all others I will cast eternal fire, and upon cities and countries. And men who know not their own recom- penses (ot pi) rds tavrwv iroivas &ra, K&V irdvres (LvOpwirot, fjia.iv6fj.evoi Trpo\^"y(iv doKuffiv, *vii. 16, 17. 104 CELSUS AND ORIGEN Celsus next contrasts the legislation of Moses and of Jesus. If the prophets of the God of the Jews foretold the coming of Jesus, why does God through the law of Moses make it the aim of human life to be rich and powerful, and command his people to slaughter out their enemies without sparing youth or age, and to kill the whole race of them, on pain of suffering the same things themselves if they disobey ; while his Son the Nazarene (6 Nafw/>cuos &-0/>wiros) issues the contrary law, that no thought is to be taken about meat or clothing, and that the other cheek is to be turned to the smiter? "Whether does Moses or Jesus lie ? Or did the Father, when he sent him, forget what he had laid down to Moses ? Or did he he con- demn his own laws and repent ? " * Though Origen's knowledge of the Old Testament enabled him to point out texts, especially in the prophets and psalmists, containing the principles, and even the very expressions, of the teaching of Jesus, he can make no effective use of them, but soon takes refuge in allegory. For the other teachings are there also ; and the whole was held to be inspired. According to the true meaning of the old law, as penetrated by what Origen supposed to be a deeper critical insight, the enemies to be slaughtered out are sinful thoughts in the soul ; 2 while riches and poverty, just as in the New Testament, have a " spiritual " interpretation. To show that the prophets could not have made riches, in the literal sense, the reward of a righteous life, he quotes from the Epistle to the Hebrews (xi. 37, 38) the list of their sufferings. 8 This of course is doubly irrelevant. The document quoted is Christian ; and Celsus had spoken of the ethical teaching of the law in particular, and not of the prophets, as opposed to that of Jesus. An incidental remark is indeed ventured, that with a law of non-resistance to enemies it would have been impossible for the ancient Jews to maintain themselves as a separate political community ; 4 but, as this is brought into no sort of relation with what has gone before, it only makes more con- spicuous the failure of the reply as a whole. The Christian idea of a " new earth," Celsus proceeded to argue, was derived from Plato or from the ancient poets. 5 1 vii. 18. We may here detect an allusion to one of the gnostic positions about the Demiurgus, of which the mythological development is indicated in the words that follow (/cat rbv &yye\ov ccai 4irl rots tvavrlois ;) vii. 22. 3 vii. 18. 4 vii. 26. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 105 But Moses, replies Origen, was of much greater antiquity than Greek letters, not to speak of Plato and the rest of the Greek authors, who were younger not only than Moses but than most of the prophets. Now Moses had already introduced God as promising the " holy land," the " land flowing with milk and honey." And by this land he could not mean the literal Judaea, which is a part of the earth generally that was cursed for Adam's transgression. The " pure earth situated in a pure heaven," spoken of in the Phado, came therefore from the Hebrews ; Plato and " the Greeks " having either heard of or met with the sacred writings and appropriated what they said about the " better land." To modern readers, accustomed to a Platonised Christianity, the attack on the Christians for the grossness of their materia- listic conceptions will seem paradoxical : yet Origen's admis- sions make it clear that the literalness with which imagery (as he himself regarded it) was understood by the multitude of believers, did not even need to be rhetorically exaggerated for attack. Refuted on every side, continues Celsus, they will return, as if they had heard nothing, to the same question : " How then, unless he be perceptible, shall we know and see God ? And how shall we go to him ? " l Well, he comments, if bodily perception really seems to them the only means of knowing the divine, let them go to the abodes of such gods in human shape as Amphiaraus and Trophonius and Mopsus. These at any rate associate constantly with those who will; and have not merely glided once to their side. 2 In the opinion of Celsus, then, says Origen, what appeared to the disciples of Jesus after his resurrection was a phantom. But how can a phantom have been the source of so many conversions and of so many expulsions of devils ? 8 Celsus, however, introduces the Christians as again asking, " What is it possible to learn without sense-perception ? " and answers : " The voice is not that of man nor of the soul but of flesh. And yet let them hear, if indeed, craven and body-loving race as they are (us Sei\i> /col QiXoffAfj.a.Toi' ytvoi), they can give ear to anything. Shut off the vision of sense, and look up with the mind ; turn aside from flesh, and awaken the eyes of the soul : only thus will you see God." And if they are in quest of a leader on l vil 33. 2 vii. 35. 3 The " visible eods," of whom Celsus speaks, " we know to be demons" (foper 70/5 ^/uets roi/roi/y dai/j.ovas 6vras). io6 CELSUS AND ORIGEN this way, let them shun deceivers and jugglers and those that follow after idols ; taking care not to be themselves exposed to derision as having fallen to a lower level than idolatry, worshipping not even an image but a dead man, and seeking a father like unto him. 1 The last touch, as we learn from Origen's repudiation, refers to the notion that the ruling principle of the world is corporeal, 3 which historians of philosophy attribute to no less instructed a Christian than Tertullian. So far as the defence is relevant, it consists in the citation of thoughts from the New Testament that suggest a more refined interpretation, such as the Pauline distinction between things invisible and the visible things of nature. 8 We shall see, however, that Celsus did not really confound the Christians in an indiscriminate mass, but recog- nised that those who, in their own language, called themselves the " spiritual," had more philosophical ideas. Again Origen disclaims formulas that Celsus may have heard from the " Ophiani," who absolutely deny Jesus. 4 These, he gladly admits, are indeed deceivers and jugglers, and indulge in mythopreic fancies ; but they have nothing in common with true Christians. Whom then, the apologist asks, does Celsus wish us to follow ? He sends us, as he says, to inspired (tvOtovs) poets and philosophers, for whom he would have us desert Moses and the prophets. "Blind guides concerning the truth," though they may not have been wholly blind. 5 The pas- sage quoted by Celsus from the Timceus (28C), where Plato speaks of the difficulty there is in finding out " the Maker and Father of this whole," he admits to be nobly ex- pressed ; but adds that to Plato or any of the Greeks the diffi- culty was actually insurmountable, for if it had not been so they would have worshipped the Creator only. Celsus appears to think that the knowledge of God is to be attained by some process of mental synthesis or analysis or analogy. In this way, it is at most possible to arrive at the vestibule. In the true sense of knowing, " No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whom," by a certain divine grace, " the Son will reveal him." 6 1 vii. 36. 2 Cf. vii. 27. 3 vii. 37. 4 vii. 40 : '0iavol . . . wj /ecu ev TOIS avurtpu} i\tyofUi^ TOV 'Irjffovv ^ dpvoti/j.evoi. 5 vii. 41. 6 vii. 44. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 107 Pointing to the disquisition in the sixth book of the Republic on the visible and the intelligible world, Celsus thus exhorts the Christians : " These things have been said by men of intel- ligence, and if you too comprehend anything of them, it is well with you. And if you think that some spirit coming down from God announces divine things, by that spirit we may sup- pose that these are declared ; filled with which, men of old pro- claimed much that is good. But if you cannot understand this, be silent and hide your own ignorance, and do not call those blind who see, and lame who run ; yourselves being altogether lamed in soul and mutilated, and living with the body, that is, with the corpse." 1 We are careful, replies Origen, not to set ourselves in hostility with what is well said, even by those outside the faith ; and it is we, the abused Christians, who not merely in word distinguish between "being" and " birth," between the "intelligible" and the " visible," between the truth of the former and the decep- tion of the latter. " But some who, by the providence of God, have ascended to the knowledge of such things, act not worthily of the knowledge, and commit impiety." 2 That is (as he explains in the sequel with the usual embellishments from the Epistle to the Romans), the philosophers, by not dissenting from the religious use of statues, were involved in the general guilt of idolatry ; so that their superior knowledge only rendered them the more inexcusable. Further, the sacred writers have not been content with a theoretical distinction between " birth " and " being," but have applied it by treating the whole natural life of man on earth as corruption and vanity. 8 Since you were bent on some innovation, continued Celsus, why did you not take up Orpheus, if none of the other heroes would suffice ? By common consent he was in possession of a holy spirit, and he too died a violent death. But perhaps you felt that you had been anticipated. There was Anaxarchus, however, who, being cast into a mortar, and broken under most outrageous blows, said, " Go on bruising the case of Anaxarchus ; himself you cannot bruise." This was in truth the voice of a divine spirit. Or, if he too had followers already, there was still Epictetus, who, when his master was twisting his leg, said, undisturbed and with a gentle smile, " You will break it ; " and then, when he had broken it, " Did I not say you would break it ? " What speech of this kind did your God J vii. 45. 2 vii. 46. 3 vii. 50. io8 CELSUS AND OKI GEN utter when he was being punished ? Or else, since some of you can interpolate her verses why did you not put forward the Sibyl as the child of God? Or you might have taken Jonah under the gourd, or Daniel from among the wild beasts, or personages still more portentous. 1 Origen is inclined to conjecture that if Celsus had not been in search of an abusive parallel to Jesus, he would have con- demned the poems of Orpheus to be expelled from the well- regulated State ; for the Orphic is even more impious than the Homeric theology. 2 The saying of Anaxarchus to the tyrant of Cyprus, and the words of Epictetus, are undoubtedly magnanimous ; but the silence of Jesus under insult is still more impressive. 8 If, as Celsus asserts without proof, the Christians have interpolated the Sibylline verses, let the genuine uninterpolated ones be pointed out. In what he says of Jesus (whom, in accordance with the Jewish story, he speaks of as a malefactor), Origen thinks that Celsus was moved by some spirit whose power Jesus had destroyed to the end that he might no longer have blood and the reek of sacrifice, nourished on which he used to deceive the people who seek God in images. 4 The claim made to novelty on behalf of revelation, Celsus now tests first in the case of an ethical precept, and then in the prohibition of statues, so much dwelt on by Origen. The Christians, he says, have a precept, not to resist violence, but "if you are smitten on the one cheek, offer also the other." This too is ancient. All that they have done is to coarsen the expression. Plato makes Socrates, talking with Crito, argue that one ought never to inflict an injury in return for an injury. This was the opinion of Plato, as it had been the opinion of divine men before him. " But about these and the other things which they spoil in the borrowing, let what has been said suffice. He who cares to seek further will acquire the knowledge." 5 This, Origen finds, is at any rate an admission of the truth of the Christian precept. And if the substance in the gospel J vii. 53. *vii. 54. 3 It might have seemed obvious here to quote the saying of Luke xxiii. 34 ; but this does not occur in the earliest manuscripts, and was pretty certainly not extant in the time of Celsus or of Origen. Cyril, in his reply in the fifth century to Julian, who seems to have pleaded it against the Christian persecution of the Jews, declared it spurious. 4 vii. 56. e vii. 58. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 109 and in the quotation from Plato is the same, we must not think that the beautiful phrasing of Plato's Greek raises it entirely above the commoner and simpler language in use among Jews or Christians ; although, it must be said, the diction of the prophets has in the original Hebrew an elegance of its own. 1 A greater benefit has, in fact, been con- ferred on mankind by those who devoted themselves to putting moral precepts in a popular form than by the Greek philosophers, who wrote only for the few. This argument, which, in one shape or another, we have met with before, if it is intellectually a favourable specimen of apologetic reasoning, is not too ingenuous. Christianity as understood by Origen did not come forward simply with the aim of diffusing a popular version of philosophical ethics. And his Church was fundamentally more hostile to independent philosophy than to " idolatry," as was shown by the event. When it was securely in power, the schools of philosophy were suppressed and " idols " adopted. For the present, however, these were the objects of violent declamation, and intolerance of them the character on which the Christians most prided themselves. Celsus therefore, going on to the next point, tried to show that it was no such ground for pride. The same non-endurance of temples, altars and statues is found among the Scythians and among the Libyan nomads and other nations the most impious and lawless. The Persians too, as is related by Herodotus, thought the use of these external things foolish, because the gods have not human forms ; and Heraclitus speaks of the folly of those who pray to statues and cannot distinguish the nature of a hero or a god. But to take statues for actual gods is an error of the most infantile kind. No extraordinary wisdom is needed to see through this. Moreover, the Jews and Christians have no special right to condemn statues in human shape. According to their own documents, " God made man in his own image." a But, answers Origen, if others are intolerant of the same 1 vii. 59 : ov8t iraXiv i>7rd roO AcdXXous TTJJ 'EXXijvtKrJs pdfffas \ey6f*evov rb aiirb Trdvrws Kpelrrov tlvat VO/J.HTTOV rov eirre\iffTfpov dirayye\\o/ji^vov Kal aTXowTT^pcus X^ev Sia\^KTtf) Kal KO.T iKtlvovs dvaytypairrai. This is one of Origen's most judicious remarks, and may serve to remind us how much the New Testament owes to the English Translators. 3 vii. 62. no CELSUS AND ORIGEN things, their intolerance is not therefore equivalent to ours. 1 The same act in different persons may be due to the most diverse opinions. What distinguishes the Jews and Christians in their refusal to pay regard to statues, is that they are obeying a command of God, whose law forbids them to make the likeness of anything and to worship it. 8 Celsus went on to say that he was aware of the Christian view that statues are representations of demons. But why should not the orders of divine beings called "daemons" or " angels "or " heroes " receive their own share of honour ? Has not their place in the whole been assigned them by the providence of the supreme God? 8 Origen replies that all, or nearly all, who acknowledge the existence of demons acknowledge that some of them are evil. Now God does not appoint, but only permits, the part which evil beings have in the whole. This, indeed, belongs to a deeper investigation, of which Celsus had no knowledge. So far are the Christians from approving a worship of the demonic or diabolic powers served by " the nations " that they exorcise them by prayers and by lessons from the Holy Scriptures. To judge by the opening of his eighth book, Origen thought that this method might not be without efficacy as applied to the spirit or demon that animated Celsus. 4 He had before this been brought to confess that his own arguments scarcely suffice without the aid of faith divinely implanted in his hearers, and that the worth of his confutations depends on something other than the " wisdom of men." s The Christians, says Celsus, when they raise objection to the worship of the " demons " on the ground that " no man can serve two masters," are, so far as their thought is concerned, impressing a copy of their own passion on the mind of God. 6 No doubt there is among men a detraction from the service of one when another is served; and the same competition is conceivable in relation to different heroes or demons. But with the highest God, who is untouched by injury or grief, there can be none to compete. Rather, in the service of those ministers who must have received their places in the whole 1 vii. 63 : ov Trapb TOVTO fffov tarl ri> fri) d^xeafj,ev elvai uv avrobs Kal SuvaffOai tv rots 0at/\ois dia TTJV ^Kel Kaiclav, fj,Tjdtv St dvvaS Xpumwovj Xtyetv Idoii Tra/xwrA j r6apTov tW 6' TL /cat o TI Xaipovffiv 6vo(JLdoi>T5), rots TOVTO e\irL^ov Kal 5re jj.ti> rb iiyenoviKov virb rCjv 5ai/j.6vuv rapdrreffOai, tffO' 8re d Kal 'avavr/Quv drr6 TTJS vir' tKelvois dXoyiffrlas (ir' 6\Lyoi> n fiXiirtiv TOV aXrjOovs. (viii. 63.) 4 Fragm. 5 (Diels). n8 CELSUS AND ORIGEN all unmanly compliance, and partly by calling to mind that the Christians too have been taught that " the powers that be are ordained of God" (Rom. xiii. i) 1 and have been commanded to "honour the king" (i Peter ii. i7). 2 They cannot, how- ever, swear by the emperor's fortune; because "fortune" is either nothing but a name, in which case it ought not to be sworn by, or it is actually one of the evil demons. Celsus doubtless remembered that he was addressing Oriental sectaries, from whom the modes of thought that had given birth to the titles of Alexander the son of Ammon, and Ptolemy the Saviour, and Antiochus the God Manifest, and Divus Julius, were not alien ; yet he shows no disposition to override the individual conscience, but allows, and even affirms strongly, that all tortures and all deaths ought to be endured in preference to doing or saying anything impious towards God. 8 But, he says deprecatingly, and as if hoping that aesthetic feeling might count for something, you will show more reverence to God by praising the Sun or by singing a beautiful paean to Athena, thus going through the manifestations of divinity in detail, than by stopping short at a colourless devotion to the highest. 4 We have no objection, Origen replies, to praising the Sun, as a creature of God : indeed we do this of our own accord ; but, as we flee fables and seek truth, we cannot dissociate Athena (whom some may allegorise into Wisdom), 5 from the manifold adventures of the goddess. Nor may we sing hymns except to God and his only-begotten Son, whom the sun and moon and stars also hymn. Then, returning to the argument about the respect to be paid to rulers, he quotes the warning of Celsus to the Christians that, in view of their attitude, it is reasonable for the Emperor to take measures against them. " For if all should do the same as you, there will be nothing to prevent his being left alone and deserted, and the things on earth becoming the prey of the most lawless and the wildest barbarians ; no fame being left any longer among men either of true wisdom or of your religion." 6 And, he proceeded, it is no use your saying that 4 viii. 66 : t&v dt Kf\etiri TIS evrj/j.rj-ri/j,fTv, oifrw rot fftfieiv na\\oi> 5<5|eis rbv p&yav 6e6v, ta.v leal roikrSe v/jivrjs' -rb yinp Of offers dia irdvruv difl-ibv ytverai. 5 viii. 67. 6 viii. 68. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 119 if the Romans are persuaded by you, and give up their ancestral laws about things divine and human, your Most High will come down and fight for them. In spite of all the promises you attribute to him, his first worshippers, instead of being lords of the whole earth, are left without a clod or a hearthstone ; and you yourselves are in hiding and are sought out to be condemned to death. 1 You fancy indeed that you will persuade one set of rulers after another till you have brought all the world under a single authority ; a but he who thinks it possible that the inhabitants of Asia and Europe and Africa, that Greeks and barbarians to the ends of the earth, should agree in accepting the same law, knows nothing. 8 Come and help the Emperor with all your strength : be his fellow- labourers in administering justice ; fight in the army as soldiers and as commanders. 4 Take part in governing your country. 5 The extremely fragmentary character of the concluding citations is obvious on the surface. Origen's reply, here especially, fills much space but can easily be brought into small compass. " If all should do the same as I," the bar- barians will yield themselves to the word of God and be the mildest and most law-abiding of men. 6 It has been foretold in the prophetic writings that all the nations shall be brought "under one yoke." This, in its full sense, is perhaps not possible for those still in the body; but it is not impossible when they are released from the body. 7 We help the emperors by praying for them, as we are instructed to do (i Tim. ii. i, 2). You do not make the priests of your own temples serve in the army, seeing that they have to keep their hands pure for sacrifice. 8 The Christians, more than all other men, benefit their countries; for they train their fellow-citizens to piety towards the city of God, " taking up into a certain divine and heavenly city those that live well in the least cities." 9 In each city we have a fatherland of another constitution (dXXo ffforwa. varpidos), founded by the word of God ; and we call to govern- 1 viii. 69. This, it is held, fixes the time of composition of the work of Celsus after 177 (or 176), the date of the rescript of Marcus Aurelius here alluded to ; while a reference in c. 71 to " our present rulers" (ol vvv /Scwi- Xei'ovres TUJ.&V) places it within the time when Commodus was associated in the empire (177-180). (See Koetschau's Introduction, p. 1.) 2 viii. 71. 3 viii. 72. 4 viii. 73. 5 viii. 75. 6 viii. 68. 7 viii. 72 : Kal rd.x a d\i)&<*>s dSvvaTov pv rb TOIOVTO roit fri tv ffufJiafft, 01) H*]>> ddvvarov Kal a.iro\v6fi(nv afrrwv. viii. 73. 9 viii. 74. 120 CELSUS AND ORIGEN ment over the churches of God those who are unwilling to rule, but whose fitness we recognise and therefore constrain them. 1 Finally, Origen asks Ambrose whether Celsus fulfilled his promise to write another book, in which he proposed to give instructions to those who were willing to take his advice. If so, he is requested to send it, so that Origen may refute the false doctrine it contains, and at the same time bear witness to the truth of anything that is well said. It is not altogether because the event is known that readers have been impressed in the concluding passage of Celsus with the consciousness of impending defeat, and throughout the treatise of Origen with his full confidence in victory. As Plutarch said, that from the time of Caesar the whole drift of things seemed to be to monarchy, so a century or two later it might have been perceived that the drift was to its complement theocracy. Yet, if we look at the present state of the world, we shall find that, so far as there is a principle of rational order in it, it has returned to a system much more like that of Celsus than of Origen. Europe was indeed for a time brought under the "one yoke" of the "great Church," whose law, as Origen pro- claimed, was to be king to the exclusion of other laws ; a but the new reign still left " many unsubdued." In Europe itself the turn of the tide came ; and now the Western successors of those who adopted Christianity or had it imposed on them re- cognise, within limits differing little from those that Celsus and the statesmen of his time would have fixed, the autonomy of local religions. The claim of an authoritative creed to lay down the law within that which it considered its own sphere is repudiated by the principles of legislation. Take for example the government of India, and observe whether it conforms more to the model of Rome in the age of the Antonines or to the ideal of the historic Christian Church. The doctrine of the " one yoke " is of course still repre- sented. It is cherished by reactionary minds in Europe ; and it is embodied in the claims of actual institutions. The Papacy, the Caliphate and the Tsardom alike proclaim an order that is in theory universal, authoritative and revealed. The head of each is a spiritual descendant of the anointed priest-king whose phantom, hovering over the world, has more 1 viii. 75. 2 v. 40. CELSUS AND ORIGEN 121 than once organised the hopes and fears of the multitude in the interests of absolute power. This ideal, though we call it Asiatic, does not, however, extend over all Asia. Probably starting, as we have seen, from Babylonia, it moved on the whole westward. It was promoted by the denationalising process carried out by Assyrian kings. It seized the imagina- tion of Persians and of Jews, and took form in systematic religious propaganda. 1 At last it realised itself in the Christian and to a less extent in the Mohammedan religion ; in " Holy Wars" for Cross or Crescent, and in the Holy Inquisition. Eastern Asia, though not since then wholly untouched by the movement, has in the meantime preserved its own types which are different. In India, a priestly caste secured for itself the highest social rank ; but, being pre-eminently speculative, it maintained philosophic liberty, though its dis- tinctive philosophy began as a mystical development of religion, and hardly at all went through a scientific stage like philosophy in ancient Greece and in modern Europe. The more secular-minded races of China and Japan, while preserving the outward form of a political theocracy the emperor being held divine placed the idea of the State and not of a Church uppermost. Geographical extremes therefore in a manner meet. The nations that have emerged from the theocratic order of Christendom into the systematised religious tolerance of modern Europe and America have a certain common ground with those that have stood outside the process and formed themselves on a different model from the beginning. In spite of the industrial chaos and barbarism through which we are passing, a kind of " grammar," not of " assent " but of a liberal order, thus appears to be secure. And on a general survey it does not seem likely that the forces of light will be overpowered by the forces of darkness. Still, it is worth while to remind ourselves that the ancient European civilisation, even in its later and on the whole inferior phase, had some- thing which we have not. The theoretical principles to which the men who practically directed affairs openly appealed as the highest, were those of a free philosophy, not of an authoritative creed. Now the unity that may for good and not for evil embrace the world is that which is arrived at in the end by the consensus of the best minds ; not a unity imposed in the name of something outside humanity. For the order of the 1 See the works of Professors Meyer and Gunkel, referred to above. 122 CELSUS AND ORIGEN universe, so far as man is concerned, expresses itself, as Celsus may still teach us, through human reason, and not through superhuman beings coming down to live among men. JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA WHENEVER the time shall arrive for a final estimate of the doctors of Latin scholasticism, the compassion expressed by Dante for the virtuous and philosophic heathens whom he saw in Limbo l will be transferred to them. Powerful as were their intellects, not even the greatest of them could achieve work having the permanent suggestiveness or the aesthetic value we find even in much that is not of supreme rank in ancient and modern thought. Under the compressive force of authoritative revealed religion, the most that they could do was to prepare the way for happier ages by showing, through the very failure of all constructive effort, that their faith and their philosophy could not live together. In the end, positive advance came not from their results, but from fuller knowledge of the Greeks, whom they themselves, with imperfect means, had sought out as the masters of all science. The humanists and thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took the right way in breaking, as far as might be, with the middle period. Now, however, that the intellectual contest has long been decided, even those who have least sympathy with that period, ought to make some attempt at doing justice especially to the figures in it that belonged by spiritual affinity not to their own but to a past or a future age. Among these, unquestionably, the greatest is John Scotus Erigena. Born in Ireland early in the ninth century, he does more than any one else to confirm the opinion that has found favour about the adventurous genius of the Celt. For, while frequently penetrating, through the veil of its Christianised version, to the genuine thought of that Neo-Platonic philosophy which was the last expression of Hellenism, he is even more 1 Inf. iv. 43-45. 124 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA remarkable by his direct anticipations of Spinoza and Berkeley and Hegel. And these are not the casual thoughts of one who did not know whither they might tend. No one was ever more clearly conscious of what he meant to say, and of its bearing ; and no thinker was ever more audacious. Yet even this illustrates the strength of the spiritual yoke that had now been laid on the European mind. When Erigena comes down from the heights of metaphysics where he is at home to the details of his system, it is evident that for him there is no conceivable structure of life and thought but that of Catholic Christianity. Historical sense has disappeared. Boethius, who died in 524 or 525, was still an "ancient." For him, the Greek and Roman past presented itself in perspective. For Erigena, on the other side of the gulf, it is all "heathendom," with its " secular philosophers," whose intellectual authority has sunk under that of the Church and its fathers. A father like Origen, who had shown comparative independence, he places among the greatest of men. And yet to the intellect of Erigena, in an atmosphere not fatal to criticism, it would have been evident that in the kingdom of thought the least among the Greek philosophers is greater than Origen. Of his own predilection for the Greeks he was perfectly conscious, though he fancied that it was for the ecclesiastical writers whom he read, when really it was for the older thoughts they transmitted to him. He must have been one of the last in Western Europe to possess an effective knowledge of Greek before it ceased for six centuries. This he had no doubt acquired in the monastic schools of Ireland. From Ireland he found his way to the court of Charles the Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne, who placed him at the head of the royal school in Paris, and set him to translate into Latin the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. To his translation, Erigena appended some verses in which he vigorously assailed papal Rome, and declared that the glory had departed to the Greeks and to Constantinople. This was an illusion of which doubtless a visit to the Greek empire would have cured him ; as the last Neo-Platonists were cured of their illusion that they would find the ideal state in Persia. The Latin West was at any rate alive : the double-headed system of Pope and King or Emperor was less deadly than the Byzantine form of theocracy, as events have shown. Amid conflicting wills, the division of power between the spiritual and the secular chiefs allowed modern Europe to emerge. And Erigena found in practice JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 125 the advantage of the division. His imperial patron could protect him from the demand of Pope Nicholas I. that he should be sent to him to be examined, or at least should be dismissed from court. 1 The demand may not unnaturally have been provoked by such verses as these. " Constantinopolis florens nova Roma vocatur : Moribus et muris Roma vetusta cadis. Transiit imperium, mansitque superbia tecum, Cultus avaritiae te nimium superat. Vulgus ab extremis distractum partibus orbis, Servorum servi, nunc tibi sunt domini. Truncasti vivos crudeli vulnere sanctos, Vendere nunc horum mortua membra soles." 2 But of course it would be an error to regard this as an attack on the order of Western Christendom. The imagination is already that of Dante, that an ideal Christendom had once existed, and that its rulers had become corrupt. Erigena, it appears from contemporary evidence, was not an ecclesiastic. He is described as a scholasticus or man of learning. As such he had won a great reputation, accompanied by suspicions of heterodoxy. These may first have arisen from the treatise he wrote, at the request of Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, and Pardulus, Bishop of Laon, against the ultra- Augustinian doctrine of predestination put forth by the monk Gottschalk. The treatise of Erigena De Praedestinatione, which saw the light (or the darkness) in 851, was condemned by the Synod of Valence in 855, and by the Synod of Langres in 859. These condemnations, however, had no traceable effect on the fortunes of Erigena, and they certainly did not change the spirit of his philosophising. In his great work De Divisions Naturae, the distinctive views of his early tract fall into their place as part of a comprehensive system ; and still more audacious positions are added to those that had called forth even in that age the wail, " Putas Filius hominis veniens inveniet fidem in terra P " Not till the thirteenth century, however, was his later work decisively suppressed. The reason assigned for the suppression was that the " worms l /oannis Scoti Opera, Migne, Patrol. Lot. vol. cxxii., pp. 1025-6. *0pp. 1194- 3 See the " Monitum ad Lectorem " prefixed to the Liber de Praedestina- tione. (Opp. 353-4-) 126 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA of heretical pravity " with which it was found to swarm had attracted the lovers of those profane novelties that the Apostle gives instruction to avoid. In short, it was thought to have contributed to the revolt against the Church which had just been stamped out in blood and fire. After the Albigensian Crusade came the centralised Inquisition ; and, in 1225, Honorius III. ("Bishop, Slave of the Slaves of God, etc."), with the usual preamble about the enemy who ceases not to sow tares, sentenced it to the flames. 1 Thus for the later Middle Ages for typical Scholasticism the system of Erigena was unknown. If either then or at the opening of the modern period it had any influence, this must have been indirectly, through positions of his heretical successors in the twelfth century, quoted by orthodox schoolmen in order to refute them. At last, in 1681, Th. Gale, Dean of York (who also edited the book De Mysteriis), coming upon a manu- script that had escaped destruction, published the first printed edition. With no long delay, the De Divisions Naturae was placed upon the Index of Prohibited Books (1685). Since then, however, the authorities of the Roman Church have decided that, as Erigena's works are so important for the history of Scholastic theology, they may be officially reprinted. Thus the edition that students must now possesss is that of H. J. Floss (first published in 1853) in Migne's " Latin Patrology." There appears to be still important textual work to do; 3 though in the edition of Floss good use was made of the materials available at the time. It seems only fair to recognise here a certain liberality; but, as may be gathered from the notes and preliminary essays, the condemnation passed on Erigena's doctrines has been in no way withdrawn. The present study aims at giving some account of the philosophy of Erigena as set forth in his principal works. For us, the interest of these is that, in a dark period of European history, they recall the light of the past and prefigure the return to it. Yet, while in speculative power Erigena was probably inferior to no metaphysician that ever lived, we must not expect in the study of him more than historical interest. He cannot, as both late Greek and early modern thinkers still can, furnish us with hints for new paths to follow. Freer though he was than the systematisers properly called " Scholastics " who came 1 Opp. 439-4- 2 See J. Draseke, Johannes Scotus Erigena und des sen Gewdhrsmdnner (1902). JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 127 after him, the superincumbent weight of religion was too heavy to be shaken off. The freedom he could enjoy was the spiritual freedom that has been found not out of reach of a prisoner. To form an estimate of his intrinsic power, it is instructive to consider the limitations in the philosophical culture of his age. Any History of Philosophy may be consulted for the list of books that he read. He possessed a portion of the Timaeus in the Latin translation of Chalcidius, Aristotle De Interpreta- tions, the Categories with the Isagoge of Porphyry; and, for the basis of encyclopaedic knowledge as then understood, the compendia of Martianus Capella (fifth century), Boethius, Cassiodorus (sixth century), and Isidore of Seville (seventh century). Metaphysical doctrines of Aristotle he knew only at second hand. He was trained of course on the Latin Fathers, and drew much from Augustine's Confessions and City of God. Works ascribed to Augustine on Dialectic and the Ten Categories were used by him. His favourites, how- ever, were the Greek ecclesiastical writers, whom he read in the original. Of these he is especially devoted to the Pseudo- Dionysius (end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century), and to Maximus the Confessor (seventh century), who depended on Dionysius and on Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century). This Gregory, Erigena in citing him confuses with Gregory Nazianzen. Through this series he derives, on the theological side, from the school of Origen, whose Principles he quotes. Perhaps it may be thought that the very narrowness of his training gave him some advantage. The discontinuity of culture in the West was doing what Proclus had seen the need of when he expressed the wish that the mass of ancient writings might for a time be withdrawn from the eyes of men. The ancient structure of thought being broken up, it was easier for some of its separate original ideas to go on to new phases. Thus Erigena could carry forward some of the ideas of Neo- Platonism which, in its genuine Hellenic form, he probably did not know at all to what we now recognise as a more modern stage. While repeating the mystical positions, he gives the impression of being personally very little of a mystic ; and he is more explicitly a pantheist, and is a pantheist of a more naturalistic type, than the ancient Neo-Platonists. On this side he may have been inspired by the poets. As is noted by Prof. W. P. Ker, 1 he quotes the famous lines of Virgil on the 1 The Dark Ages (1904), p. 163. 128 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA immanent spirit of the world. These were afterwards the favourite quotation of Bruno (who of course cannot have read his mediaeval precursor). To the new faith no positive virtue can be attributed in bringing on this development. Bruno was in conscious opposition to the mediaeval view of life ; and Erigena deliberately puts forward this side of his thought against what he takes for granted are the received opinions. If the faith had any part in the altered point of view, it was that of Sin and Death and Hell in the philosophy of Erigena himself ; these being, according to his interpretation of theo- logical doctrine, the negative element involved in a world- process leading to perfection. Although the whole philosophy of Erigena is contained in his chief work, On the Division of Nature, it is worth while first to give a short account of what he found it possible to bring out in his refutation of Gottschalk. Theologically as the topic of predestination was conceived, he appears from the beginning as a philosopher. True philosophy and true religion, he declares, are identical. 1 The formal statement, indeed, is adopted from Augustine ; so that too much stress should not be laid on it taken by itself. But while it might have been applied in either direction, Erigena sets out to argue as a philosopher, and only in a secondary way tries to prove his agreement with the authorities. This gives colour to what in itself is a neutral assertion. In his references to Gottschalk, the philosopher descends to the conventional language of theological controversy, 2 and professedly holds himself to be defending the Catholic faith against heresy. What the orthodox representatives of the faith thought of the defence, they were not long in showing. And, if Erigena's rhetoric sometimes goes far, it must be remembered that he was protesting against what he himself describes as the " most stupid and most cruel madness " : of the position that part of the human race is, by divine decree, damned to everlasting fire. That there was in his 1 Liber de Praedestinatione, cap. i. I, 358 A : " veram esse philosophiam veram religionem, con versimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam." 2 iii. 7, 369 D : " Merito quippe in oleo atque pice ardere debuisti, qui et lumen caritatis et mysterium praedestinationis perperam docere non timuisti." 3 i. 4 : " stultissima crudelissimaque insania." JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 129 inner thought no horror of heresy as such is shown by his contention that heresies (including that of Gottschalk) are useful in stirring up inquiry. * What had drawn down on Gottschalk the condemnation of the church was not precisely the cruelty of his doctrine. Here the question could only be between lighter and darker shades. The true ground of objection was the exalted and self- confident fanaticism that would have diminished the function of the priest. If there was a " double predestination," by which every man was already assigned to hell or heaven, the mediation of the hierarchy between man and God, though not necessarily made an end of in theory, became in effect of smaller importance. Now Erigena's position was here not less dangerous than Gottschalk's. Making divine predestina- tion indistinguishable from divine foreknowledge, a he is as thoroughgoing a determinist as his antagonist can have been. On the other hand, he abolishes the real hell of the theologians, belief in which was not Gottschalk's heresy. God, he maintains, knows only the real : hence both sin and punishment, being unrealities, fall outside the divine knowledge and have no true causation. s They are to anticipate the later result passing illusions determined by the apparent separation of individualities which are never really separate, and which will in the end return in appearance also to the unity of the whole. The practical-minded prelates who had called in a dialectician to help them must have been dismayed to find him, in his opening pages, starting off from the juridical problem of the Roman theologians to speculative metaphysics. For him " the will of God " is identical with the cause of all : and the logic of this does not allow him to think of God as a person among persons, laying down laws and rewarding or punishing their observance or transgression. To necessarian antagonists it must have seemed an evasion when he argued that because the sum of things is a product of the will, which is identical with the being or nature, of God, the predestination in them is not " necessitated " ; since the will of God is free >i- 3- 2 ii. 2, 361 B : " Quod est ergo Deo esse, hoc est ei sapere, et quod e.st ei sapere, hoc est scire, et quod esi scire, id est destinare." Tho qualification that follows is not allowed essentially to affect this position. 3 This is a general philosophical statement of his doctrine. Cf. iii. 3, 366 B: " Peccatum, mors, miseria, a Deo non sunt. Eorum igitur causa Deus non est." 9 and exempt from all constraint of necessity. What he meant was, that there is no difference between the real nature of things and the nature of God, and that this is caused by no- thing outside itself. The fundamental thought of Erigena about the causal order allows no more place than that of Spinoza for the possibility that anything could be other than it is. Evils, he grants, are also foreseen in a manner, and there- fore predetermined: 1 for, as the position was afterwards de- veloped, there is no actual evil that does not contain an effort after some good, and this is real. Nor does he altogether refuse to employ the term " necessity " in relation to particular things. 2 The thought that love in all things loves God, that is, itself, 8 has received a Spinozistic turn. Of course the argument could not remain all through at this high philosophic level; and much trouble had to be taken in manipulating the authorities. Erigena, however, finds general support in the theory of Augustine, derived from Neo- Platonism, that sin by itself has no positive nature; 4 the disappearance of all good being equivalent to the disappearance of all essence. This he developed with rigorous logic on his own lines, and heroically tried to make the Father agree with him in detail. Who, he asks, can think of contradicting Paul or Augustine ? 5 He repeats that sin and death and eternal torments are nothing at all : wherefore they can neither be foreknown nor predestinated. 6 God's foreknowledge or predestination is one with the true and positive essence of things. Still, though what is proper to evil may be only privation, there is the appearance to explain. Whence comes the appearance of sin and suffering ? The answer of Erigena is that it comes not from any divinely created nature, but from a perverse motion of the individual will. As the sin arises from the will of each person, so does the punishment. 7 Neither sin nor punishment comes from God. 8 The sinner damns himself. And it is not the " nature " of the sinner, but only the perverted will, that sins and is punished. No 'ii- 4, 5- 2 ii. 6, 364 B: "Nam si omnium naturarum est necessitas Dei voluntas, erit Dei voluntas naturarum necessitas." 3 iii. 6, 368 D : " Caritas in omnibus Deum, id est, se ipsam diligit." 4 vii. 6. Quoted from De Libero Arbitrio. 'xi. 3, 7. 8 x. 5. Cf. xv. I. 7 vi. I. 8 x. 3. JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 131 nature, as such, will be punished, and therefore none will be miserable. For every nature either is God or was made by God. Now the creative nature is incapable of misery; and it cannot justly punish the natures which it created. 1 In the system of things, the evil will is prevented from finally attaining its end ; and in this its punishment consists. As no nature is punished so also no nature, whether creative or created, punishes. a It is sin itself that punishes sin. There is no separate place of punishment. 8 " Accordingly, if there is no beatitude except life eternal, and eternal life is knowledge of the truth, then there is no beatitude except knowledge of the truth. But whatever is believed of beatitude, the counterpart of this must necessarily be believed of its defect, which is misery. Thus if there is no misery except death eternal, and eternal death is ignorance of the truth, then there is no misery except ignorance of the truth."* In this particular treatise, Erigena does not go forward to his doctrine of the restitution of all things at the end of the world-process. No " nature," it is said, is damned ; and all natures, as such, enjoy happiness. Yet, as the appearance of sin and punishment, found in the present life, is not said to cease in the future, " eternal damnation " is formally retained, if in an unorthodox sense. Sin continues to punish itself in the future life. 5 A distinction exists between those that are predestined to life and those that are simply left to undergo, in their individual wills, the penalty of sin. As all have sinned, how is this " election " just ? Why should any, even so, be "reprobate?" The theory on which Erigena grounds his reply is that all individual wills were placed in the first man, and therefore can 1 xvi. I, 418 AB : " Naturam creatricem miseriae esse capacem, dementissimum c-st suspicari. Crea'rix autem natura quali justitia punitura sit naturas, quas ipsa creavit, non invenio. Nulla dehinc natura punietur, non punita non erit misera." Cf. xvi. 5, 423 A : " divina aequitas non punit, quod sua bonitas creare voluit." 2 xvi. 4. 3 xvii. 7, 428 D : " Proinde nulla universitatis parte punitur impius, sed sua propria impietate in se ipso." 4 xvii. 9, 430 AB. 6 xvi. 6, 423 C : "In onmi enim peccatore simul incipiunt oriri et peccatum, et poena ejus, quia nullum peccatum est, quod non se ipsum puniat, occulte tamen in hac vita, aperte vero in altera, quae est futura." 1 32 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA justly be punished ; for each, as thus prefigured, sinned. That which sinned was not the general nature of man. 1 A different view would make the punishment unjust, for in no one can another's sin be justly punished. And, it is repeated, what sins and is punished was not substantially created by God. a It was, however, involved somehow in the eternal order of things. To the question why the consequences of sin should be healed in some natures and not in others, an answer is assumed that appears formally orthodox. All might justiy have been left in the general mass, but free grace was given to the elect. In the later treatise this is turned into a philosophical doctrine of the necessity that there should be a scale of beings in the universe. Some must be " reprobate," in the sense that all cannot be gods or seraphim. None are deprived of happiness, but there are degrees. The foregoing exposition, of course, gives little notion of the medium through which Erigena was obliged to work his way to these theories. Yet it must be obvious that the language of the faith did not well fit them. It is interesting to observe that, rough as the time was, he could still make a point incidentally by urging the less vengeful character of human justice as against the theological hell. Even human laws do not decree that men shall sin, and then punish them for sin- ning ; but threaten punishments in order to deter them if possible, and punish to correct them. 8 The Division of Nature, to which I now proceed, is in the form of a dialogue between a master and a pupil. This dialogue is not a catechism. The pupil shares equally in the argument, both putting serious objections and from time to time taking up of his own accord the thread of the positive exposition. The conversation, indeed, is not dramatic in the sense that there is collision between different types of thought. The system expounded is that of Erigena and no other. Yet 1 xvi. 3, 419 BC : " Non itaque in eo peccavit naturae generalitas, secJ uniuscuj usque individua voluntas." 8 xvi. 3, 420 A : "In nullo quippe vindicatur juste alterius peccatun:. Proinde in nullo natura punitur, quia ex Deo est, et non peccat. Motus autem voluntarius, libidinose utens naturae bono, merito punitur, quia naturae legem transgieditur, quam procul dubio non transgrederetur, si substantialiter a Deo crearetur." 8 xiv. 5, 412 B: "Quod si ita est in legibus mutabilitate temporum transitoriis, quid putandum fieri in aeternis pietatis justitiaeque immutabili vigore rcfertis ? " JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 133 the form adopted gives the discussion a certain increased liveliness. 1 The work begins by a broad statement of the " division." " Nature is the general name of all things that are and that are not." Its " parts " or " species " are : first, that which creates and is not created ; second, that which is created and creates ; third, that which is created and does not create ; fourth, that which neither creates nor is created. 2 The first is God as principle ; the fourth is God as end. The second is the intelligible system of causal ideas or reasons by which the world was produced ; the third is the visible world as a system of effects. In reality all are substantially identical : each is the whole viewed in a certain aspect. This is to be understood when they are called parts or species or forms. We are obliged to use the words ; but here they indicate no essential division or demarcation. Not all these points are brought out at the very beginning ; but, as will be seen, they are a fair summary of Erigena's metaphysical position. And he transports us rapidly to the centre of it. A disquisition on the various kinds of "not-being" introduces the paradox, well-known later to the mystics, that that which surpasses all intellect, as well as that which falls below it, may be said not to be, or to be nothing. This can of course be traced to Plato's idea of the good beyond being ; its antithesis, which is indeterminate matter, being treated as similarly incomprehensible. In the use of this form of paradox, it may be observed, the Neo-Platonists were more cautious than the mystics of the East or of mediaeval Europe. I do not think the assertion is anywhere flatly made by Plotinus, that God, or the One, both " is and is not." The principle of things "is not" any of the particular things that have being; though in another sense (as Erigena also says) it is all of them because it produces them. Of the remaining antitheses, the most important for its bearing on the argument that follows is this. In one sense, 1 This observation has been made by Noack. the German translator of the De Divisione Naturae. See his " Schluss-Abhandlung " (1876) in J. H. v. Kirchmann's Philosophische Bibliothek, Bd. 66. In the preface to the translation, Noack oddly tries to claim Erigena as the first representa- tive of the " Christian German consciousness." As in the case of Shakespeare, the British Islands have a prior claim. 2 De Divisione Naturae, lib. i. 1. 134 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA things are said to be or not to be according as they exist at a particular place and time among products of generation, or are still latent in their causes. For example, the men that are to be born in the future, though already existent in the creative reasons that prefigure them, are said not to be. In living things the virtue of the seed is said not to be so long as it keeps silence among the secrets of nature : when it has appeared among actual births and growths of animals, or in the flowers and fruits of trees and herbs, it is said to be. 1 On the other hand, according to the philosophers, those things only that are comprehended by intellect are said truly to be ; and these are the reasons of things. Generated things that appear at particular times and places, and are subject to change and corruption, are said not to be. 3 God cannot be known in essence to any intelligence what- ever, even angelic. What is called knowledge of God is, and must always continue to be, through certain " theophanies." The height of knowledge attainable would be to view all things, whether sensible or intelligible, as manifestations of God. Thus, while in one sense the divine nature is nothing, in another it is all that exists. It not only creates but is created, " because there is nothing essentially beside itself; for it is the essence of all things." 8 A similitude may be found in our intellect, which is said to be (esse) before it arrives at thought and memory, and to be made (fieri) when it has received form from certain phantasies. As it becomes thus formed though in itself without all sensible form ; so the divine essence, itself above intellect, is self-created in all forms of intellect and sense. This self-creation is identical with the creation of things. The same positions are more elaborately developed in a discussion on the two kinds of theology, the negative (da-o^a??) and the affirmative (Kara^aTiK-f)). The first shows how nothing can be predicated of the divine essence ; the second, how all things that are can be predicated of it.' Terms like " super- essential," and so forth, positive in form, have a negative meaning. For what is definitely asserted is " not essence " ; what there may be beyond, remains undefined. As there is nothing opposite to God, so no term that has an opposite can H. 5. 2 i. 6. 3 i. 12, 454 A : " creatur autem, quia nihil essentialiter est praeter ipsam ; est enim omnium essentia." *i. 13. JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 135 be predicated of him : hence not " being," not " goodness." In reality this negative theology agrees with the affirmative. For the affirmative says, the divinity can be called this, but does not say, it is this properly : the negative says, it is not this, although it can be called this. 1 The negative theology is carried through in the form of a proof that every one of the Aristotelian categories loses all its sense when applied to the divine nature. 9 Detailed discussion of the category of place in particular leads to its resolution into " definition." Every definition is contained in some scientific discipline, and every discipline in the mind. Hence place exists properly in the mind, 3 and is therefore incorporeal ; as are indeed in the last resort all the ten categories. Erigena then goes on to prove that corporeal matter is nothing but a "composition of accidents." 4 It is, as he says afterwards, put together from incorporeal qualities. 5 If common usage asserts the essence of things to be nothing but their visible and tangible body, that is only as all things known by sense or reason or intellect are predicated of God, though the pure contemplation of truth approves him to be none of these. 6 The essence underlying the composition of accidents called body is a certain individual unity (unum quoddam individuum), to be thought of as incorporeal. Place and time are inseparable, and without them are no generated things. 7 All essence (ofola) created from nothing is local and temporal : local because it is in some manner, since it is not infinite ; temporal because it begins to be what it was not. 8 The " nothing " from which creation takes place, we are told elsewhere, is indistinguishable from the divine 'i. 14. 2 Erigena brings the categories under two genera, motion and rest ; and these again under -rb irav. See i. 22. 3 i. 28,4756: "Si enim definitio omnis in disciplina est, et omnis disciplina in animo, necessario locus omnis, quia definitio est, non alibi nisi in animo erit." 4 i. 34- 5 i. 42,484 C: "Ipsa etiam materies, si quis intentus aspexerit, ex incorporeis qualitatibus copulatur." "i. 36. 7 i. 39,482 A: " Itaque aliquo modo esse, hoc est localiter esse, et aliquo modo inchoasse esse, hoc est temporaliter esse." 8 i. 45. 487 A. 136 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA nature ; for there is in reality no other nature. What we are to understand here by the creation of particular things is that, before the local and temporal manifestation of an eternal essence, that local and temporal manifestation did not exist ; not that the eternal essence did not exist. The manifestations, however, constitute all that gives determination to the essence. 1 On matter and body, no new argument seems to be added to what may be found in the Neo-Platonists ; and the dis- tinction between the technical terms has become a little blurred. The conceptions of formed body and of merely potential matter run into one another. The advance is in the tendency, characteristic of British thought more than of modern thought in general, to single out the problem of the external world as a specially interesting one, instead of leaving it to be settled by implication as part of a total philosophical system. This leads to the pointed assertion that there is no " corporeal substance " distinguishable from the immaterial essence of the individual. When the concourse of phenomenal "accidents" is taken away, no reality at all remains in body as such. To Erigena, as to Berkeley, any other view seems almost too absurd for refutation. 2 Of course he does not anticipate Berkeley's empirical treatment of the problem. He is fully conscious of the objections that will be raised to his " negative theology," but this does not prevent him from following it out to its last results. Action and passion, he finds, can be predicated of God only by metaphor : " and so in reality God neither acts nor suffers, neither moves nor is moved, neither loves nor is loved." 3 But is not this, the pupil asks, opposed to the authority of Holy Scripture and of the Fathers ? The teacher cannot be unaware how difficult it will be to persuade simple minds, when even the ears of those that seem to be wise are horrified. " Be not afraid," the master replies. " For now we are to follow reason, which investigates the truth of things, and is put down by no authority, nor is in any manner hindered from publicly opening and declaring what the effort of studious inquiry searches into and with labour discovers." 4 While the authority of Holy Scripture is to be followed in all things, it is not to 1 i. 45, 487 B : " Nam et causa omnium, quae Deus est, ex his, quae ab ea condita sunt, solummodo cognoscitur esse ; nullo vero creaturarum argumento possumus intelligere, quid sit : atque ideo sola haec definitio de Deo praedicatur, quia est, qui plus quam esse est." 2 i. 47. 3 i. 62, 504 B. 4 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 137 be believed that its words in their obvious meaning always convey the truth : rather, certain similitudes are used in order to raise up our yet rude and infantile senses. Hear the Apostle, who says : " Lac vobis potum dedi non escam." Thus, while the faithful are provided with something definite to give a stay to their thoughts of the divine nature, reason goes beyond and shows that of God nothing can properly be asserted. And yet not irrationally, on the other side, all things from the height to the depth can be asserted. The Creator is even the cause of contraries, in virtue of what he has positively created ; and thus to the opposites of each good their place in nature is allowed till the process shall be com- pleted that ends by abolishing even the appearance of evil. 1 After these and other explanations, the disciple feels himself ready, in spite of the terrors of authority, to proclaim his open adherence to what reason clearly establishes; " especially as such things are not to be treated of except among the wise, to whom nothing is sweeter to hear than true reason, nothing more delightful to investigate whilst it is being sought, nothing fairer to contemplate when it is found." 3 In the remainder of the first book, the antithetic statements are continued. All significant terms carried over from natura condita to natura conditrix, we are told, must be understood as predicated translative only, not proprie. * It is thus when God is said to love and to be loved, to make and to be made. God is without beginning and end, therefore without motion or process, and therefore, since making implies movement, in the proper sense can neither make nor be the object of making. * But if he is conceived as a maker, then his making must be regarded as co-eternal and co-essential with him. Thus understood, his making or action is indistinguish- able from his essence. He alone truly is, and nothing else subsists by itself. 5 What is really signified by the words used in Scripture, such as, to will, to love, to see, to hear, 4s nothing but the ineffable essence, or rather, the more than essence, incomprehensible by all intellect. 6 On the other side, God is rightly said to love because he is the cause of H. 66. 2 i. 67 /;/. s i. 68. 4 i. 71. 9 i. 72, 518 A : " Cum ergo audimus, Deum omnia facere, nil aliud debemus intelligere, quam Deum in omnibus esse, hoc est, essentiam omnium subsistere." 6 i. 73- 138 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA all love : by this love all things are held together in the whole and are moved towards the end of their desire. In short, every action and passion may be affirmed and denied of him alternately. 1 Yet the denial belongs to a higher order of truth. 2 For the affirmation, as we have seen, is by metaphor (translative) ; the negation, in the proper sense (proprie). And Erigena does not try to evade the conse- quence by insisting on terms like virepdya8os, virepofoios, and so forth. " More than " goodness and essence, he has pointed out, means only " not goodness and essence as understood by us." On the other hand, when the divine essence is conceived as in all things, true reason compels us to say, in the words of Scripture but with no limited reference to the disciples of Christ : " It is not you who love, who see, who move, but the Spirit of your Father." 8 Still, however, the pupil is troubled by the question, how is this compatible with Holy Scripture and with the Catholic faith ? Philosophically, it has been proved that God is no being along with others, and yet is all beings. But in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, a series of definite assertions is made about the divine essence. Why this particular selec- tion from all possible assertions ? Whenever the difficulty recurs (and it recurs frequently), it is met with the curt reply that the object of the doctrine seems to have been that Christians might have something distinctive to say. And yet, in detail, Erigena has an elaborate philosophical interpretation of the Christian Trinity. In his historical circumstances this is, of course, perfectly intelligible. He could emphatically declare that reason is by nature prior to authority. True authority is nothing but truth found out by reason and handed down in written tradition for the benefit of posterity. * But the authority referred to was that of the Fathers (with the Scriptures). A philosopher of the ninth century might try to turn them also into philosophers to be respected by the J i. 75, 521-2: "Deus itaque per seipsum amor est, per seipsum visio, per seipsum motus : et tamen neque motus est, neque visio, neque amor, sed plus quam amor, plus quam visio, plus quam motus. . . . Amat igitur seipsum et atnatur a seipso, in nobis et in seipso : nee tamen amat seipsum nee amatur a seipso, sed plus quam amat et amatur in nobis et in seipso." And so for the rest. 2 i. 76, 522 B: "Verius enim negatur Deus quid eorum, quae de eo praedicantur es5e, quam affirmatur esse." 3 i. 76. M. 69. JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 139 after-world for their insight and discoveries ; but not thus was the " dogmatic slumber " of Europe to be definitively broken. The non-philosophical data of their system were for them its essence; and these no mediaeval thinker could in so many words set aside. Thus Erigena, after scaling the heights of reason, has to plunge again and again into the morass. Fortunately, this side of his thinking can be in great measure, though not wholly, ignored. We see how external it was to him in reality. At the opening of the second book, the teacher proves expressly that one identical ground is indicated by all the four terms of his division of nature. The division is not really of genus into forms or species, nor of whole into parts, but proceeds " by a certain intelligible contemplation of the universality by the universality I mean God and creatures." All may finally be brought back to a single individual unity, which is both cause and end. The first term and the fourth, namely, that which creates and is not created, and that which neither creates nor is created, are evidently to be understood only of God, and so refer to one subject. The first indicates the unformed principle of all; the fourth, the end which all things desire and to which all return. These are in themselves indiscernible. Only "in our theory," ac- cording to a difference of aspect, are the principle and the end two and not one. That which takes the second place in the division, namely, the nature that is created and creates, consists of the primordial causes " in created nature " ; from which primordial causes the nature created and not creating flows as effect. The reality indicated by this third term, and that which is indicated by the second, as alike included in " created nature," are there one. Further, Creator and creat- ure, the sole self-subsistent and that which, so far as it is at all, is only a participation in the sole self-subsistent, are in reality the same : so that the reduced pairs are not to be held apart, but coalesce into a single unity. In the present book is to be discussed mainly the procession of creatures from the one first cause though the primordial causes or ideas. l A warning, however, is given that, in view of the connexion of one aspect with another, the topics cannot be strictly limited. Certain distinctions of Maximus are first introduced, leading to the position that in man is represented every creature J ii. I, 2. Cf. iii. I. 140 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA visible and invisible. l Here we find ourselves involved in mythology. Man, we are told, in accordance with the theory of Maximus, was originally a sexless unity. This was divided into the two sexes and multiplied into diverse varieties in consequence of the fall, but is to be restored to unity in Jesus Christ, " in whom there is neither male nor female." A noteworthy point is the insistence of Erigena that the dignity of human nature has not been lost. Its character as the microcosm of creation is innate and indestructible. 2 The punishment due to the fall was inflicted not in anger, but as a means of bringing man back to his original state of unity. A difficulty is raised by the pupil as to the relation between the history in time thus presupposed, and the unity that never ceases to exist while the process including the lapse and the restitution is going on. For by pure intellect the world is even now contemplated not as a changing aggregate of diverse and separate parts, but as a whole immutably subsisting in its reasons. 8 To be quite clear about the solution (here only in part given), it is necessary to keep well in mind a whole series of discussions both in the present and in the later books. Particular statements might otherwise be found misleading. The general result may be thus anticipated. Erigena accepted the Neo-Platonic view of " creation ; " namely, that it does not refer to an order in time, but in " dignity." 4 It is in this sense that the cause of all precedes the ideas, and that these precede the things of time and space. The unity remains in reality unbroken. The whole is always perfect : in the universe, all contraries are harmonised. At the same time, the datum of the Christian revelation is accepted, that there is a total process of finite and temporal things, having a beginning and an end. Before and after this process there is nothing but eternity. Erigena makes no attempt to explain this away, and even declares it rational : yet he nowhere gives distinct philosophical reasons for it. His metaphysical doctrine in truth required 1 ii. 5 init. : " Est enim ex duabus conditae naturae universalibus partibus mirabili quadam adunatione compositus, ex sensibili namque et intelligibili, hoc est, ex totius creaturae extremitatibus conjunctus." 2 ii. II, 539 CD: " Non enim in mundo moles corporeas, spatiisque distentas, multiplicesque diversarum partium ejus varietates vera ratio considerat et honorificat, sed naturales et primordiales illius causas, in seipsis unitas atque pulcherrimas, in quas dura finis suus venerit, reversurus erit, et in eis aeternaliter mansurus." *ii. 14. 4 ii. 19. JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA 141 the view that there is no limit in the past or in the future to the history of appearances ; but, on this side, he never came face to face with the logic of the position. It is enough for him that all the reality of the world is prefigured in the eternal ideas. Process, involving beginning and end, can therefore be treated as really nothing. 1 But, a Neo-Platonist would have said, if the mixture of illusion arises by some necessity, is not the necessity always the same ? What ground then is there for assigning any limit in time to the world of mixture ? Erigena often puts questions bordering on this, but this precise question he never puts. The evasion, however, seems unconscious. And thus, it may be remarked, the opinion is confirmed that he did not know the original Neo-Platonists, whose treatment of the topic had been quite explicit. An attempt to sap orthodoxy by indirect methods and ironical phrases would have been impossible in his age. Where he differs from the received view, he points out the difference and openly defends his own. And, as a matter of course, any view taken is defended on the ground that it is really compatible with the orthodox and catholic faith, however strange it may appear to the vulgar. In an elaborate interpretation of the Mosaic cosmogony, contained partly in this and partly in the next book, the sacred writer is found to be setting forth in general the relation between the intelligible and the sensible world, and in detail the elements of physical science as this was understood in Erigena's time. A long disquisition on the Trinity leads to the psychological theory of man. In human nature there is found to be the derivative trinity of ofxria, Svva/j.^, Mpyeia, essentia, virtus, operatic ; again, " c *, Xa.TiK-?i) has now again been set forth; in which it is shown that God is none of the things that are and that are not, and knows not himself as any of them ; " which species of ignorance surpasses all knowledge and understanding." 9 Under the head of the theology called affirmative (KarcufxiTiicfi) we are offered further developments on the Trinity. The end of all that can be uttered about the Trinity in Unity, it is observed, is merely that we may have something to say in praise of what is ineffable. 8 Incidentally we meet with a modification of a " Johannine " thought. If human nature does not first know and love itself, how can it desire the knowledge of God ? 4 The book ends with the reaffirmation that the " primordial causes," which the Father created in the Son, are " what the Greeks call ideas." They are also called predeterminations (irpoopl