Part 26

Notwithstanding, however, our threefold chance, we have only a solitary evidence on this point. Attached to Photius's copy of the "Treatise on the Universe" was a note, to the effect that the book was not (as had been imagined) by Josephus, but by Caius, the Roman presbyter, who also composed the "Labyrinth."[37] In the absence of other external testimony, this judgment appears entitled to stand, unless the books themselves disclose some features at variance with the known character of Caius.

But, it is said, such variance we do actually find. For while our work expressly appeals to the Apocalypse as the production of John, we know from Eusebius that Caius ascribed it to Cerinthus, and, in opposing himself to Montanism, rejected the millenarian doctrine which is taught in the Revelations. This argument, we admit, would be decisive if its allegations were indisputable. It is curious, however, that the one _locus classicus_,[38] from which is inferred the presbyter's repudiation of the Apocalypse, is confessedly ambiguous; and the charge it prefers against Cerinthus may amount to either of these two propositions; that he had composed the Book of Revelations and palmed it on the world as the production of the Apostle John; or, that he had given himself the air of a great Apostle, and published accordingly some revelations affecting to be imparted, like those of John, by angels. According to this last interpretation, the work of Cerinthus would be a book distinct from our Apocalypse, written in imitation of it, and seeking to share its authority. The contents of the production are briefly described by Caius; but they present such a mixture of agreement and disagreement with our canonical book, as to leave the ambiguity unresolved. They affirm, that after the resurrection will follow an earthly kingdom of Christ, in which the lower nature of man will, in Jerusalem, be again in servitude to passion and pleasure; and that the number of a thousand years are to be spent in the indulgence of sense. So far as the _place_ and the _duration_ of the kingdom are concerned, our Apocalypse might here be referred to; but it has nothing answering to the description of a gross and luxurious millennium. Taking the passage in conjunction with the similar statement of Theodoret, that "Cerinthus invented certain revelations, pretending that they were given in vision to himself," we think it unlikely that our Apocalypse can be meant; and conceive the indictment to be, that Cerinthus had put forth a set of apocryphal visions, in which he abused the style and corrupted the teachings of a great Apostle to the purposes of a sensual fanaticism. This is a charge which Caius might bring, in consistency with the fullest acceptance of the Apocalypse as authentic and true. It was not the doctrine of a reign of Christ on earth, not the millenarian period assigned to it, to which he objected in Cerinthus; but the coarse and demoralizing picture given of its employments and delights. In proportion to his respect for the real Apocalypse and its teachings, would he be likely to resent such a miserable parody on its lofty theocratic visions. His opposition to the Montanists in no way pledged him to renounce the eschatological expectations which they were distinguished from other Christians not by entertaining, but by exaggerating. If our work, in its notice of their heresy, passes by in silence this particular element of the system, and treats their claim to special gifts of prophecy with less contemptuous emphasis than might be looked for in the antagonist of Proclus, there is nothing that ought really to surprise us in this. It does not follow that, because in our scanty knowledge we have only one idea about an historical personage, the man himself never had another. Caius did not live in a perpetual platform disputation with Proclus; and either before that controversy had waked him up, or after it was well got over, he might naturally enough dismiss the Montanists with very cursory notice; in the one case, because they had not yet adequately provoked his antipathy; in the other, because they had already had enough of it.[39]

Nothing therefore presents itself in our work which should deter us from attributing it to Caius; and the more we ponder the evidence, the more do we incline to believe it his. This result is to us an unwelcome one; both because we know how strong the presumption must be against a critical judgment condemned by the masterly genius of M. Bunsen, and because he has really made us in love with his ecclesiastical hero,--has put such an innocent and venerable life into that old effigy, that after wandering with him about the quays of Portus, and entering with listening fancy into the Basilica[40] where he preached, it is hard to return him into stone, and think of him only as a dead bishop who made a bad almanac. Should our readers have contracted no such ideal attachment, we fear that this discussion of authorship may appear as trivial as it is tedious. Somebody wrote the "Philosophumena," and whether we call him Hippolytus or Caius, whether we lodge him on the Tiber within sight of the _Pharos_, or of the _Milliarium Aureum_, may seem a thing indifferent, so long as the elements of the personal image do not materially change. This utilitarian impression is by no means just, and indeed is at variance with all true historical feeling. But it is time that we should give it its fair rights, and turn from the name upon our new book to its substances and significance.

Many sensible persons are at a loss, we believe, to understand why this refutation of thirty-two extinct heresies should be regarded with so much interest. Is it so well done, then? they ask. Far from it: better books are brought out every year; and such a controversial argument offered in manuscript to Mr. Longman or Mr. Parker to-morrow, would hardly be deemed worth the cost of printing. Does it add materially to our knowledge of the early heresies? Something of this kind it certainly contributes; but the gain is not large, and will make no essential change in the conclusions of any competent historical inquirer. Is any light thrown by it on the authenticity of our canonical books? This can hardly be expected from a production of the third century; and M. Bunsen's application of it to this purpose appears to us, for reasons which we shall assign, extremely precarious. Perhaps it supplies the want which every student of that period must have felt, and organically joins ecclesiastical to civil history, so that they no longer remain apart,--the one as the stage for saints and martyrs, bishops and books, the other for soldiers and senators, emperors and paramours,--but mingle in the common life of humanity. When we think how the author was placed, it is impossible not to go to him with an eager hope of this nature. He lived at the centre of the vast Roman world, and felt all the pulsations and paroxysms of that mighty heart. He witnessed the ominous decline of every traditional maxim and national reverence in favor of imported superstitions and degenerate barbarities. Under Commodus he saw the ancient Mars superseded by the Grecian Hercules, and Hercules represented by an emperor who sunk into a prize-fighter, and the administration of the empire in the wanton hands of a Phrygian slave, who was only less brutal than his master. In the midst of pestilence, which had become chronic in Italy from the time of M. Antoninus, and of which a Christian bishop could not but know more than others, the city was still adding to its semblance of splendor and salubrity; and the magnificent baths and grounds that were opened to the public service at the Porta Capena, with the multiplied festivities and donatives, attested how little mere physical attention to the people can arrest the miseries of a moral degradation. Nor could the Christians of that age be wholly without insight into the habits of the highest class in Rome, for, in that great _colluvies_ of heterogeneous faiths, the caprice of taste, if not some better impulse, determined now and then an inmate of the palace to favor the religion of Christ; and the favorite mistress of Commodus, who ruled him while she could, and then had him drugged and strangled in his sleep, is the very Marcia whom our presbyter describes as φιλοθεος and at whose intervention the Christian exiles were released from their banishment in Sardinia. If he was at home when the excellent Pertinax was murdered, and cared to know what tyrant was to have the world instead, he was perhaps in the throng that ran to the Quirinal, and heard the Prætorians shout from their ramparts that the empire was for sale, and saw the bargain with the foolish senator below, who bought it with his money, and paid for it with his head. Caius and his people had reason to tremble when they saw in Septimius Severus not only the implacable conqueror who suffered no political opponent to live, but the worshipper of demons, the gloomy and fitful devotee of astrology and magic, pliant only to sacerdotal hate; and when the young Origen came to be their guest awhile, and told of the terror in Alexandria which had joined his father to the band of martyrs, the post that just then brought the news of the Emperor's death in Britain would seem to take off a weight of fear; especially as one son at least of the two inheritors of the empire had in childhood been committed to a Christian nurse, and been said to shrink and turn away from the savage spectacles of the amphitheatre. They were doomed to be disappointed, if they had placed any hope in Caracalla, and to find that what they had taken in the boy for the nobleness of grace, was but the timidity of nature; the murder, before his mother's face, of his only brother, and then of his best counsellor, for refusing to justify the fratricide, would soon make them ashamed of remembering that he had ever heard the name of Christ. It would be curious to know how the Christians comported themselves when the Priest of the Sun became monarch of the world, and seemed intent on dethroning every divinity to enrich the homage to his own. The grand temple on the Palatine, which he built for the god of Emesa, every passer-by must have seen as it rose from its foundations. And when the black stone was paraded on its chariot through the streets, and the elder deities were compelled to leave their shrines and attend in escort to the Eastern idol, or when the nuptials were celebrated between the Syrian divinity and the goddess of Carthage, and Baal-peor and Astarte succeeded to the honors of Jove, no Christian presbyter could fail to witness the gorgeous and humiliating procession,--renewed as it was year by year,--or to ask himself into what deeper abomination the city of the Scipios must sink, ere the catastrophe of judgment made a sudden end. The orgies of Helagabalus were more insulting to the elder Paganism of Rome than injurious to the new faith, which equally detested both; and the offended moral feeling of the city reacted perhaps in favor of the Christian cause, and prepared the way for that more public teaching of the religion, in buildings avowedly dedicated to the purpose, which was first permitted in the succeeding reign. The natural recoil in the imperial family itself from the degradation of the court tended, perhaps, in the same direction, and drove the astute Mamæa to seek, amid the universal corruption, for some school of discipline which might save the young Alexander Severus from the ignominy of her sister's son. Whether from this motive, or from suspicion of the growing force of Christianity as a social power, she had sent for Origen, and had an interview with him at Antioch; and the Roman disciples had reason to rejoice that her intellectual impressions of their system should have been derived from such a man, and her political estimate of it formed in the East, where the crisis of conflict between the dying and the living faiths was more advanced than in the West, and afforded a less disguised augury of the result. From their fellow-believers trading with the Levant, or arriving thence, the pastors of the metropolis would learn the propitious temper of the young Cæsar and his mother; and would feel no surprise, when he succeeded to the palace of his cousin, that he not only swept out the ministers of lust and luxury, but in his private oratory enshrined, among the busts of Pagan benefactors, the images also of Abraham and of Christ. They could not, however, but observe how little the morals of the court and the wisdom of the government could now avail to arrest the progress of decay, and reach in detail the vices and miseries of a degenerate state. When they passed the door of the palace, they heard the public crier's voice proclaim, "Let only purity and innocence enter here"; they visited a Christian tradesman in a neighboring street, and found him just seized by a nobleman whom he had dunned for an outstanding debt, charged with magic or poisoning, doomed to pine in prison till he gave release, and no redress or justice to be had. The Emperor who, gazing in his chapel on the features of Christ, recognized a religion human and universal, was the first under whom a visible badge was put upon the slave, and a distinctive servile dress adopted; the slave markets were still in consecrated spots, the temple of Castor and the Via Sacra; and if ever some captive Onesimus, recommended by letters from the East to the brethren in Rome, was brought to the metropolis for sale, thither must the deacon or the pastor go to find how the auction disposes of their charge, and learn _which_ among the chalked feet it is that are "shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace." The commonwealth had never boasted of so many great jurists as in the age of Papinian and Paulus; but as the science of Law was perfected, the power of Law declined; and Alexander Severus, the justest of emperors, was unable to protect Ulpian, the greatest of civilians, from military assassination in the palace itself, or to punish the perpetrators of this outrage on popular feeling as well as public right. The three days' tumult, in which this master of jurisprudence fell the victim of Prætorian licentiousness, our presbyter Caius must have witnessed; and countless other momentous scenes, during a generation painfully affluent in vicissitude, must have passed before his eyes; and had he but known of what value his reports would be to this age of ours, he would have said more of the life he saw, and less of the speculations he denounced. To us it would have been worth anything to know just what was too close to him to catch his eye;--how the Christians lived in such a world; what thoughts stirred in them as they walked the streets and heard the news; what happened and was said when they met together, and how this could adjust itself with the real facts of an inconsistent and tyrannical present; and how, as the corrupted State became ever more incapable of vindicating moral ends, the rising Church undertook the secret governance of life, and penetrated with its authority into recesses beyond the reach, not of the arm of administration only, but of the definitions of the widest code. But in this respect also our author fails to realize our hopes. He gives us a book of fancies rather than of facts, and instead of painting existence, which is transient, and must be caught as it flies, occupies himself in describing nonsense, which is always to be had. The enormities of Helagabalus, though staring him in the face, are nothing to him in comparison with heresy in Lesser Asia, which keeps Easter on a wrong day. He is shut up within the interior circle of the community of believers, and gives but a single glimpse beyond; and builds for us no bridge to abolish the mysterious separation of ecclesiastical and ideal from civil and real existence in the early ages of our faith. He is not peculiar in this defect. We all of us live in the midst of history without knowing it, and ourselves _make_ history without feeling it; and that which will most clearly paint us in the thought of other times, which will seem our _power_ to them, our romance and nobleness, with which, therefore, they will most crave to satiate their eye, is precisely what is least consciously present to us,--the natural spirit and daily spring of our common being, through which not the will of man, but the providence of God, works its appointed ends. At all events, the insight which we should be best pleased to gain into the life of the third century is not given even incidentally, except in the scantiest measure, by the "Philosophumena," which we must rank, in this respect, below the Apologies, and with the writings of Irenæus and Epiphanius. The book is dogmatic and controversial, and the interest attached to it arises entirely from its being a _register of opinion_, a new witness to the thoughts about divine things, which the Christianity of its period owned and disowned. For those who care at all to know the state of belief a century before the Council of Nice, the work possesses a high value. But the worth of this sort of information is itself a thing disputed, at least its _religious_ worth; and will be very differently estimated, according to the preconception which occupies us as to the nature of Divine Revelation, and the sources open to us for the attainment of sacred truth. Here it is that we find M. Bunsen's great and peculiar strength. His religious philosophy, taken by itself, brings us occasionally to a pause of doubt. His historical criticism is not always convincing. But his doctrine of the _relation between_ religion and history, of the mingling of divine and human elements in the theatre of time, and of the special agency of Christianity in the spiritual education of mankind, appears to us profoundly true and beautiful. This it is that makes him attach so much importance to the creed of the second and third centuries, and to the new light now thrown upon it; an importance which, from every ordinary point of view, can scarcely fail to appear fanciful and exaggerated.

The Roman Catholic, for instance, entertains a conception about what sacred truth is, and how it is to be had, which, leaving nothing to depend on new discoveries, discharges all the richest interest from any fresh knowledge we may gain of religion in the past. With him divine truth, so far as it is special to Christendom, is something wholly foreign to the human mind, intrinsically unrelated to any faculty we have. In being supernatural, it belongs to another sphere than that to which our thought is restricted, and is totally withdrawn from all the movements of our nature. It consists, indeed, in a set of objective facts from which we are absent, and which no ratiocination of ours can seize, any more than our ear can tell whether there be music on Saturn's ring. There is no human consciousness answering to it; and to resort thither for it is like asking the dreamer or the blindfold to describe the scene in which he stands, or consulting your own feelings to learn what is going on in Pekin or Japan. On this theory, the objects of faith are conceived of as objects of _perception_, only by senses otherwise constituted than ours; we can have no surmise about them, till they are announced to us by qualified percipients, and no comprehension of them even then, but only reception of them as facts imported for us from abroad. The bearing of this doctrine of invisible realism on the treatment of ecclesiastical history is manifest. The inaccessible facts are deposited with the sacerdotal corporation; with whom alone is vested the duty and the power of stating and defining them. They are not indeed all stated and defined in their last amplitude at once; for definition is always an enclosure of the true by exclusion of the false; and it is only in proportion as the dreaming perversity of men throws forth one delusive fancy after another, that the Church draws line after line to shut the intrusion out. If the creeds seem to enlarge as the centuries pass, it is not that they have more truth to give, but only more error to remove. The divine facts were conceived aright and conceived complete in the minds of Apostles and Evangelists, but they were not contemplated then as _against_ the follies and contradictions opposed to them in later times; but as soon as the hour came for this antagonism to be felt, the infallible perception secured in perpetuity to the living hierarchy supplied the due verdict of rejection. To the Catholic, therefore, Christianity was made up and finished, its treasury was full, in the first generation; its power of development is only the refusal of deviation; and its intellectual life is tame as the story of some perfect hero, who does nothing but stand still and repel temptations. The history of doctrines thus becomes a history of heresies; the primitive stock of tradition and Scripture must, on the one hand, be maintained entire in the face of all possible exposures by critical research; and, on the other, remain in eternal barrenness and produce no more. Natural knowledge, whether of the world or of humanity, may grow continually, but the new thoughts it may lead us to entertain of God are either _not_ new, or not true; and every pretended enrichment of truth is nothing but evolution of falsehood. This removal of all variety from religion, this expulsion of life and change into the negative region of aberration and denial, eviscerates the past of its devout interest, rests the study of it on contempt instead of reverence for man; with all its pious air, it simply betrays history with a kiss, and delivers it over for scribes to buffet and chief priests to crucify. Short work is made in this way of any fresh witness, like the author of our book, who turns up unexpectedly from an early age. Does he speak in agreement with the hierarchical standards? He only flings another voice into the _consensus_ of obedient believers. Does he say anything at variance with the _regula fidei_? Then have we only to see in what class of heretics he stands. His testimony is either superfluous or misleading.