Part 8

We know nothing of Celsus’s life.(146) There is even an uncertainty as to the school of philosophy to which he belonged. External evidence seems to testify that he was an Epicurean; but internal would lead us to classify him with the Platonic. Unscrupulous in argument, confounding canonical gospels with apocryphal, and Christians with heretical sects, delighting in searching for contradictions, incapable of understanding the deeper aspects of Christianity, he has united in his attack all known objections, making use of minute criticism, philosophical theory, piquant sarcasm, and eloquent invective, as the vehicle of his passionate assault.

It is impossible to recover a continuous account of the work of Celsus from the treatise of his respondent; but a careful study of the fragments embedded in the text of Origen will perhaps restore the framework of the original sufficiently to enable us to perceive the points of his opposition to Christianity, and the manner in which his philosophy stood in the way of the reception of it. (14)

Celsus commences by introducing a Jewish rabbi to attack Christianity from the monotheistic stand-point of the earlier faith.(147) The Jew is first made to direct his criticism against the documents of Christianity, and then the facts narrated.(148) He points out inconsistencies in the gospel narratives of the genealogy of Christ;(149) utters the most blasphemous calumnies concerning the incarnation;(150) turns the narrative of the infancy into ridicule;(151) imputes our Saviour’s miracles to magic;(152) attacks his divinity;(153) and concentrates the bitterest raillery on the affecting narrative of our blessed Lord’s most holy passion. Each fact of deepening sorrow in that divine tragedy, the betrayal,(154) the mental anguish, the sacred agony,(155) is made the subject of remarks characterized no less by coarseness of taste and unfairness, than to the Christian mind by irreverence. Instead of his heart being touched by the majesty of our Saviour’s sorrow, Celsus only finds an argument against the divine character of the adorable sufferer.(156) The wonders accompanying Christ’s death are treated as legends;(157) the resurrection regarded as an invention or an optical delusion.(158)

After Celsus has thus made the Jew the means of a ruthless attack on Christianity, he himself directs a similar one against the Jewish religion itself.(159) He goes to the origin of their history; describes the Jews as having left Egypt in a sedition;(160) as being true types of the Christians in their ancient factiousness;(161) considers Moses to be only on a level with the early Greek legislators;(162) regards Jewish rites like circumcision to be borrowed from Egypt; charges anthropomorphism on Jewish theology,(163) and declines allowing the allegorical interpretation in explanation of it;(164) examines Jewish prophecy, parallels it with heathen oracles,(165) and claims that the goodness not the truth of a prophecy ought to be considered;(166) points to the ancient idolatry of the Jews as proof that they were not better than other nations;(167) and to the destruction of Jerusalem as proof that they were not special favourites of heaven. At last he arrives at their idea of creation,(168) and here reveals the real ground of his antipathy. While he objects to details in the narrative, such as the mention of days before the existence of the sun,(169) his real hatred is against the idea of the unity of God, and the freedom of Deity in the act of creation. It is the struggle of pantheism against theism.

When Celsus has thus made use of the Jew to refute Christianity from the Jewish stand-point, and afterwards refuted the Jew from his own, he proceeds to make his own attack on Christianity; in doing which, he first examines the lives of Christians,(170) and afterwards the Christian doctrine;(171) thus skilfully prejudicing the mind of his readers against the persons before attacking the doctrines. He alludes to the quarrelsomeness shown in the various sects of Christians,(172) and repeats the calumnious suspicion of disloyalty,(173) want of patriotism,(174) and political uselessness;(175) and hence defends the public persecution of them.(176) Filled with the esoteric pride of ancient philosophy, he reproaches the Christians with their carefulness to proselytize the poor,(177) and to convert the vicious;(178) thus unconsciously giving a noble testimony to one of the most divine features in our religion, and testifying to the preaching of the doctrine of a Saviour for sinners.

Having thus defamed the Christians, he passes to the examination of the Christian doctrine, in its form, its method, and its substance. His æsthetic sense, ruined with the idolatry of form, and unable to appreciate the thought, regards the Gospels as defective and rude through simplicity.(179) The method of Christian teaching also seems to him to be defective, as lacking philosophy and dialectic, and as denouncing the use of reason.(180) Lastly, he turns to the substance of the dogmas themselves. He distinguishes two elements in them, the one of which, as bearing resemblance to philosophy or to heathen religion, he regards as incontestably true, but denies its originality, and endeavours to derive it from Persia or from Platonism;(181) resolving, for example, the worship of a human being into the ordinary phenomenon of apotheosis.(182) The other class of doctrines which he attacks as false, consists of those which relate to creation,(183) the incarnation,(184) the fall,(185) redemption,(186) man’s place in creation,(187) moral conversions,(188) and the resurrection of the dead.(189) His point of view for criticising them is derived from the fundamental dualism of the Platonic system; the eternal severance of matter and mind, of God and the world; and the reference of good to the region of mind, evil to that of matter. Thus, not content with his former attack on the idea of creation in discussion with the Jew, he returns to the discussion from the philosophical side. His Platonism will not allow him to admit that the absolute God, the first Cause, can have any contact with matter. It leads him also to give importance to the idea of δαίμονες, or divine mediators, by which the chasm is filled between the ideal god and the world;(190) not being able otherwise to imagine the action of the pure ἰδέα of God on a world of matter. Hence he blames Christians for attributing an evil nature to demons, and finds a reasonable interpretation of the heathen worship.(191) The same dualist theory extinguishes the idea of the incarnation, as a degradation of God; and also the doctrine of the fall, inasmuch as psychological deterioration is impossible if the soul be pure, and if evil be a necessary attribute of matter.(192) With the fall, redemption also disappears, because the perfect cannot admit of change; Christ’s coming could only be to correct what God already knew, or rectify what ought to have been corrected before.(193) Further, Celsus argues, if Divinity did descend, that it would not assume so lowly a form as Jesus. The same rigorous logic charges on Christianity the undue elevation of man, as well as the abasement of God. Celsus can neither admit man more than the brutes to be the final cause of the universe; nor allow the possibility of man’s nearness to God.(194) His pantheism, destroying the barrier which separates the material from the moral, obliterates the perception of the fact that a single free responsible being may be of more dignity than the universe.

Such is the type of a philosophical objector against Christianity, a little later than the middle of the second century. We meet here for the first time a remarkable effort of pagan thought, endeavouring to extinguish the new religion; the definite statements of a mind that investigated its claims and rejected it. Most of the objections of Celsus are sophistical; a few are admitted difficulties; but the philosophical class of them will be seen to be the corollary from his general principle before explained.

A century intervenes before we meet with the next literary assailant, Porphyry. In the interval the new reactionary philosophy has fully taken root, and the fresh attack accordingly bears the impress of the new system.

The chief objections made in the intervening period, as we collect them from the apologies, were such as belongs fitly to a transitional time, when Christianity was exciting attention but was not understood;(195) and are chiefly the result of the second of the tendencies before named, viz., either of popular prejudice, or of the political alarm in reference to the social disorganization likely to arise out of a large defection from the religion of the empire, which expressed itself in overt acts of persecution on the part of the state. (15) Both equally lie beyond our field of investigation; the one because it does not belong to the examination of Christianity made by intelligent thought; the other because it is the struggle of deeds, not of ideas, which only have an interest for us, if, as in Julian’s case hereafter, the acts were dictated by the deliberate advice of persons who had attentively examined Christianity.

The apprehensions of prejudice gradually subsided, and objections began to be based on grounds less absurd in character. The political opposition also was henceforth founded on a more subtle policy, and on an appreciation of the nature of Christianity. Soon after the middle of the third century we meet with the next attack of a purely literary kind, viz., by Porphyry, the most distinguished opponent that Christianity has yet encountered.(196) The pupil of Longinus, perhaps of Origen,(197) and the biographer and interpreter of Plotinus, he is best known for his logical writings, and for the development of the theory of predication in his introduction to the Categories, which formed the text on which hung the mediæval speculations of scholasticism.(198) His Syrian origin and oriental culture perhaps prepared him for a fusion of East and West, and for admitting a deeper admixture of mysticism into the Neo-Platonic philosophy, of which he was a disciple. The points of his approximation to Christianity are the result of those elements in which heathen philosophy most nearly approached to Christian truth, the development of which was stimulated in minds essentially anti-christian by the effort to find a rival to it. Admirably prepared by his serious and spiritual tone to embrace Christianity, he nevertheless lived a disciple of paganism. His feelings rather than his reason led him to defend national creeds. His philosophy and the Christian, which seemed to be aspirations after the same end, being designed to elevate the spirit above the world of sense, were really radically opposed. Understanding therefore the power of the Christian religion, he felt the necessity for supplanting it; and hoped to do so by spiritualizing the old creeds, which he harmonized with philosophy by means of regarding them as symbolic.(199)

His opposition to Christianity was not however based wholly on a prejudice of feeling. He was a man cultivated in all the learning of his age, and of a more generous temper than Celsus, and seems to have exercised much critical sagacity in the investigation of the claims of Christianity. About the year 270, while in retirement in Sicily, he wrote a book against the Christians.(200) This work having been destroyed, we are left to gather its contents and the opinions of its authors from a few criticisms in Eusebius and Jerome. The entire work consisted of fifteen books; and concerning only five of these is information afforded by them. Their remarks lead us to conjecture that it was an assault on Christianity in many relations. The books however of which we know the purpose, seem to have been critical rather than philosophical, directed against the grounds of the religion rather than its character; being in fact an assault on the Bible. The existence of such a line of argument, of which a trace was already observable in Celsus, is explained by the circumstance that the faith of Christendom was already fixed on the authority of the sacred books. The church had always acknowledged the authority of the Jewish scriptures; and by the middle or close of the second century at the latest, it had come to acknowledge explicitly the co-ordinate authority of a body of Christian literature, historic, and epistolary.(201) Hence, when once the idea of a rule of faith had grown common, the investigation of the contents of the scriptures became necessary on the part of heathen opponents. The growingly critical character of Porphyry’s statements, though partly attributable to the literary culture of his mind, is a slight undesigned evidence corroborative of the authoritative nature already attributed to the scriptures in doctrine and truthfulness. Porphyry seems accordingly to have directed his critical powers to show such traces of mistakes and incorrectness as might invalidate the idea of a supernatural origin for the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and shake confidence in their truth as an authority.

The first book of his work(202) dragged to light some of the discrepancies, real or supposed, in scripture; and the examination of the dispute between St. Peter and St. Paul was quoted as an instance of the admixture of human ingredients in the body of apostolic teaching. His third book(203) was directed to the subject of scripture interpretation, especially, with some inconsistency, against the allegorical or mystical tendency which at that time marked the whole church, and especially the Alexandrian fathers. The allegorical method coincided with, if it did not arise from, the oriental instinct of symbolism, the natural poetry of the human mind. But in the minds of Jews and Christians it had been sanctified by its use in the Hebrew religion, and had become associated with the apocryphal literature of the Jewish church. It is traceable to a more limited extent in the inspired writers of the New Testament, and in most of the fathers; but in the school of Alexandria(204) it was adopted as a formal system of interpretation. It is this allegorical system which Porphyry attacked. He assaulted the writings of those who had fancifully allegorised the Old Testament in the pious desire of finding Christianity in every part of it, in spite of historic conditions; and he hastily drew the inference, with something like the feeling of doubt which rash interpretations of prophecy are in danger of producing at this day, that no consistent sense can be put upon the Old Testament. His fourth book(205) was a criticism on the Mosaic history, and on Jewish antiquities. But the most important books in his work were the twelfth(206) and thirteenth,(207) which were devoted to an examination of the prophecies of Daniel, in which he detected some of those peculiarities on which modern criticism has employed itself, and arrived at the conclusions in reference to its date, revived by the English deist Collins in the last century, and by many German critics in the present.

It is well known that half of the book of Daniel(208) is historic, half prophetic. Each of these parts is distinguished from similar portions of the Old Testament by some peculiarities. Porphyry is not recorded as noticing any of those which belong to the historic part, unless we may conjecture, from his theory of the book being originally written in Greek, that he detected the presence of those Greek words in Nebuchadnezzar’s edicts, which many modern critics have contended could not be introduced into Chaldæa antecedently to the Macedonian conquest.(209) The peculiarity alleged to belong to the prophetical part is its apocalyptic tone. It looks, it has been said, historical rather than prophetical. Definite events, and a chain of definite events, are predicted with the precision of historical narrative;(210) whereas most prophecy is a moral sermon, in which general moral predictions are given, with specific historic ones interspersed. Nor is this, which is shared in a less degree by occasional prophecies elsewhere, the only peculiarity alleged, but it is affirmed also that the definite character ceases at a particular period of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes,(211) down to which the very campaigns of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties are noted, but subsequently to which the prophetic tone becomes more vague and indefinite. Hence the conjecture has been hazarded that it was written in the reign of Antiochus by a Palestinian Jew, who gathered up the traditions of Daniel’s life, and wrote the recent history of his country in eloquent language, in an apocalyptic form; which, after the literary fashion of his age, he imputed to an ancient seer, Daniel; definite up to the period at which he composed it, indefinite as he gazed on the future. (16) It was this peculiarity, the supposed ceasing of the prophecies in the book of Daniel at a definite date, which was noticed by Porphyry, and led him to suggest the theory of its authorship just named.(212) These remarks will give an idea of the critical acuteness of Porphyry. His objections are not, it will be observed, founded on quibbles like those of Celsus, but on instructive literary characteristics, many of which are greatly exaggerated or grossly misinterpreted, but still are real, and suggest difficulties or inquiries which the best modern theological critics have honourably felt to demand candid examination and explanation.(213)

A period of about thirty years brings us to the date of the Diocletian persecution, A.D. 303; during the progress of which another noted attack was made. It was by Hierocles, then president of Bithynia, and afterwards præfect of Alexandria, himself one of the instigators of the persecution and an agent in effecting it.(214) His line of argument was more specific than those previously named, being directed against the evidence which was derived by Christians for the truth of their religion from the character and miraculous works of Christ; and his aim accordingly was to develope the character of Apollonius of Tyana,(215) as a rival to our Saviour in piety and miraculous power.

Apollonius was a Pythagorean philosopher, born in Cappadocia about four years before the Christian era. After being early educated in the circle of philosophy, and in the practice of the ascetic discipline of his predecessor Pythagoras, he imitated that philosopher in spending the next portion of his life in travel. Attracted by his mysticism to the farthest East as the source of knowledge, he set out for Persia and India; and in Nineveh on his route met Damis, the future chronicler of his actions. Returning from the East instructed in Brahminic lore, he travelled over the Roman world. The remainder of his days was spent in Asia Minor. Statues and temples were erected to his honour. He obtained vast influence, and died with the reputation of sanctity late in the century. Such is the outline of his life, if we omit the numerous legends and prodigies which attach themselves to his name. He was partly a philosopher, partly a magician; half mystic, half impostor.(216) At the distance of a century and a quarter from his death, in the reign of Septimius Severus, at the request of the wife of that emperor, the second of the three Philostrati dressed up Damis’s narrative of his life, in a work still remaining, and paved a way for the general reception of the story among the cultivated classes of Rome and Greece.(217) It has been thought that Philostratus had a polemical aim against the Christian faith,(218) as the memoir of Apollonius is in so many points a parody on the life of Christ. The annunciation of his birth to his mother, the chorus of swans which sang for joy on occasion of it, the casting out devils, the raising the dead, the healing the sick, the sudden disappearance and reappearance of Apollonius, the sacred voice which called him at his death, and his claim to be a teacher with authority to reform the world, form some of the points of similarity.

If such was the intention of Philostratus, he was really a controversialist under the form of a writer of romance; employed by those who at that time were labouring (as already named) to introduce an eclecticism largely borrowed from the East into the region both of philosophy and religion. Without settling this question, it is at least certain that about the beginning of the next century the heathen writers adopted this line of argument, and sought to exhibit a rival ideal.(219) One instance is the life of Pythagoras by Iamblichus; another that which Hierocles wrote, in part of which he used Philostratus’s untrustworthy memoir for the purpose of instituting a comparison between Apollonius and Christ. The sceptic who referred religious phenomena to fanaticism would hence avail himself of the comparison as a satisfactory account of the origin of Christianity; while others would adopt the same view as Hierocles, and deprive the Christian miracles of the force of evidence,—a line of argument which was reproduced by an English deist(220) who translated the work of Philostratus at the end of the seventeenth century. The work of Hierocles is lost, but an outline of its argument, with extracts, remains in a reply which Eusebius wrote to a portion of it (17). Though couched in a seeming spirit of fairness, the tone was such as would be expected from one who ungenerously availed himself of the very moment of a cruel persecution as the occasion of this literary attack.

But the time of the church’s sorrow was nearly past. The hour of deliverance was at hand. The emperor Constantine proclaimed toleration,(221) and subsequently established Christianity as the state-religion. Only one moment more of peril was permitted to befall it.

After an interval in which Christian emperors reigned, Julian ascended the throne, and employed his short reign of two years(222) in trying to restore heathenism; and during the last winter of his life, while halting at Antioch in the course of his Eastern war, wrote an elaborate work against Christianity.(223) The book itself has been destroyed, but the reply remains which Cyril of Alexandria thought it necessary to write more than half a century afterwards; and by this means we can gather Julian’s opinions, just as from his own letters and the contemporary history we can gather his plans. The material struggle of deeds belongs in this instance to our subject, inasmuch as it is the overt expression of the struggle of ideas.

Julian, as already observed, differed from previous opponents of Christianity, in having been educated a Christian.(224) Associating when a student at the schools of Athens with Gregory of Nazianzum and Basil, he had every opportunity for understanding the Christian religion and measuring its claims. The first cause of his apostasy from it remains uncertain. One tradition states that the shock to his creed arose from some early injury received through the fraud of a professing Christian. Something is probably due to exasperation at the severity endured from Constantius; and perhaps still more is due to the natural peculiarity of his character. He was swayed by the imagination rather than the reason, and was kindled with an enthusiastic admiration of the old heathen literature and the historic glories of the heathen world. His very style exhibits traces of imitation of the old models after which he formed himself.(225) With a spirit which the Italian writers of the Renaissance enable us to understand, his sympathies clung round heathens until they entwined in their embrace heathenism itself. To a mind of this natural bias sufficient grounds unhappily would easily be found to produce aversion to Christianity, in the quarrels among sections of the church, and in the ambition and inconsistency of the numbers of nominal converts who embraced the religion when its public establishment had rendered it their interest to do so; and prejudice would add arguments for rejecting it.