CHAPTER XIV. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY. PART II.

The mind of the next great teacher who arose in Greece after Plato presented an almost complete contrast to that of the master under whom he had so long studied. Aristotle’s power consisted in a parallel development of two forces which do not often coexist.(408) He joined together a rare degree of consistent philosophic thinking with an equally rare degree of accurate observation. This double faculty is shown in what he effected. He made the sciences of logic, ethics, and psychology: he built up those of natural history and politics with the wealth of knowledge which his experience had accumulated.(409) Thus his analytic and synthetic genius embraced the whole range of human knowledge then existing. As Plato threw his vivid fancy and imagination and his religious temper into everything which concerned the human spirit, so Aristotle fixed his gaze upon nature, which with him in all its manifestations was the ultimate fact. As Plato rose from the single being to his conception of the true, the good, the beautiful, of which the Idea to him was everything, so Aristotle, steadfastly discarding his master’s doctrine of Ideas, took his stand on the single being, examining it with the closest observation and the subtlest thought, and the knowledge thus conveyed to him is everything. Plato’s conception of God is that of the great world-former, orderer, and ruler: Aristotle’s conception of God is that of a pure intelligence, without power, an eternal, ever-active, endless, incorporeal substance, who never steps out of that everlasting rest into action: who is the world’s first cause, but is unconscious of it, his action upon the world being likened to the influence of the beloved object upon the lover. Plato’s dualism is summed up in the expression, God and Matter; Aristotle’s dualism, in God and the World. Plato represents the action of the Deity as the working-up of the original matter into the millions of forms which the world exhibits: but these millions of forms are taken by Aristotle as if they had existed for ever; the World, as it is, and the Deity, are coeternal.

Aristotle’s doctrine of the human soul is that it exists only as that which animates the body, without which its being cannot be known.(410) It is the principle which forms, moves, and developes the body; the substance which only appears in the body formed and penetrated by it, and which works continuously in it, as the life which determines and prevails over its matter. Thus the body is of itself nothing; what it is, it is only through the soul, whose being and nature it expresses, to which it is related as the medium in which the purpose, which is the soul, realises itself. Thus the soul cannot be thought of without the body, nor the body without the soul: both come into their actual state together. In the soul Aristotle distinguishes three parts, the vegetative, the sensitive, and the thinking. This last, the peculiar property of man, is further divisible into the passive and the active, of which the former is linked to the soul as the soul is to the body, as form is to matter, multiplies itself with individuals, and is extinguished with them. But the reason, or pure intelligence, has nothing in common with matter, comes from without into man, and exists in him as a self-consisting indestructible being, without multiplying or dividing itself. Accordingly this intellect or reason suffers the soul to sink back with the body into the nothing from which both have been together produced. It alone continues to subsist as what is ever the same and unchangeable, since it is nothing but the divine intelligence in an individual existence, enlightening the darkness of the human subject in the passive part of the understanding, and so must be considered as the first mover in man of his discursive thinking and knowing, as well as of his willing.(411) As that which is properly human in the soul, that which has had a beginning, must also pass away, even the understanding, and only the divine reason is immortal, and as memory belongs to the sensitive soul, and individual thinking only takes place by means of the passive intellect, all consciousness must cease with death. And again, clearly as Aristotle maintains that man is the mover and master of his own actions, and has it in his power to be good or evil, and thence repudiates the assumption of Socrates and Plato that no one is willingly evil, yet he cannot find a place for real freedom of the will between the motion which arises from sensitive desire, and that which proceeds from the divine intelligence dwelling in the soul. Necessity arises on both sides, from the things which determine the passive understanding, and from the divine intelligence.(412) Thus his physical theory, as in the case of Plato noted above,(413) prevents a clear conception of the human personality. His notion of man in this point corresponds to his notion of God: he does not concern himself with questions respecting the goodness, justice, and freedom of God, inasmuch as his God is not really personal:(414) so with regard to man we find in him no elucidation as to the question of moral freedom, nor of the origin and nature of wickedness in man. Wickedness is with Aristotle the impotence to hold the mean between too much and too little: it presents itself therefore only in this world of contingency and change, and has no relation to God, since the first or absolute good has nothing opposed to it. He has not the sense of moral perversion with regard to evil. In accordance with which the end of all moral activity with him is happiness, which consists in the well-being arising from an energy according to nature; as virtue is the observing a proper mean between two extremes. And the highest happiness is contemplative thought, the function of the divine in man, the turning away from everything external to the inner world of the conceptions.

The religious character, which belongs conspicuously to Plato’s philosophy, fails, it will be seen, in that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato strove to purify the popular belief, and urged as the highest point of virtue to become like to God by the conjunction of justice and sanctity with prudence,(415) Aristotle divides morality from religion as his God is separated off from the world.(416) His scientific inquiries have not that immediate relation to the personal life and the destiny of man in which the religiousness of Platonism most consists. His whole view of the world goes to explain things as far as possible from their natural causes.(417) Thus he admits in the whole direction of the world the ruling of a divine power, of a reason which reaches its purpose; he believes in particular that the gods care for men, take an interest in him who lives in accordance with reason; that happiness is their gift; he contradicts the notion that the godhead is envious, and so could withhold from man knowledge, the best of its gifts; but this divine providence coincides for him entirely with the working of natural causes. In his view the godhead stands in solitary self-contemplation outside the world, the object of admiration and reverence to man. The knowledge of it is the highest task for his intellect. It is the good to which in common with everything that is finite he is struggling; whose perfection calls forth his love: but little as he can expect a return of love from it, so little does he find in it any coöperation distinct from the natural connection of things, and his reason is the only point of immediate contact with it.

Religion(418) itself Aristotle treats as an unconditional moral necessity. The man who doubts whether the gods should be honoured is a subject fit not for instruction but for punishment, just as the man who asks whether he should love his parents. As the natural system of the world cannot be imagined without God, so neither can man in it be imagined without religion. But he can give us no other ground save political expediency for resting religion upon fables so apparent as the stories of the popular belief. He sometimes himself uses these fables, like other popular opinions, to illustrate some general proposition, as, for instance, Homer’s verses on the golden chain show the immobility of the first mover: just as in other cases he likes to pursue his scientific assumptions to their least apparent beginnings, and to take account of sayings and proverbs. But if we except the few general principles of religious belief, he ascribes to these fables no deeper meaning, and as little does he seem to care about purifying their character. For his state he presupposes the existing religion, as in his personal conduct he did not withdraw from its usages, and expressed his attachment to friends and relations in the forms consecrated by it. But no trace is found in him of Plato’s desire to reform religion by means of philosophy: and in his politics he allows in the existing worship even what in itself he disapproves, as the case of unseemly words, inscriptions, and statues. Thus the relation of the Aristotelic philosophy to the actual religion is generally a very loose one. It does not disdain indeed to use the points of connection which the other presents, but has no need of it whatever for itself: nor does it seek on its own side to purify and transform religion, the imperfection of which it rather seems to take as something unavoidable. The two are indifferent to each other; philosophy pursues its way without troubling itself about religion, without fearing any interruption from it.

In the seventy-seven years which elapsed from the death of Socrates, B.C. 399, to that of Aristotle, B.C. 322, Greek life had suffered a great change. That dear-loved independence which every state had cultivated, and which concentrated every energy of the mind in civil life, had vanished. During the forty years of Plato’s work as a teacher it was becoming less and less: Chæronea gave it the death-blow; while Aristotle is the son of a time at which scientific study had already begun to take the place of active political life.(419) But the conquest effected by his great pupil Alexander completed this change. He opened the East to the Greek mind, bringing it into close contact with Asiatic thought, beliefs, and customs. Under his successors Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia, Tarsus, Pergamus, and Rhodes became great centres of Greek culture: but Greek self-government was gone. Athens with the rest of the Greek cities had lost its political independence, but it remained the metropolis of Greek philosophy. From the last decade of the fourth century before Christ four great schools, the Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean, all seated here, as embodied in the dwelling-place and oral teaching of their masters, stand over against each other. The point most interesting to our present subject is this, that all these schools take up a common ground, one which we consider to belong properly to religion, that is, the question wherein the happiness of man consists, and how to attain it.(420) Thus the political circumstances of the land gave the tone to its philosophy. What the time required was something which would compensate men for the lost position of a free citizen and a self-governed fatherland. The cultivated classes looked to philosophy for consolation and support. The answers to this question which the various systems gave were very different from each other, but an answer they all attempted. What they have in common is, the drawing-back of man upon himself, his inner mind, his consciousness, as a being who thinks and wills:(421) while on the other hand the mental view was widened from the boundaries of a narrow state to that which touches man in general. The field of morality opened out beyond the range of this or that city, territory, or monarchy. Thus two hundred full years were occupied with the struggles of the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and the sceptical opposition to them of the middle and later Academy. At the very beginning of this time the man who sat first in Aristotle’s chair after him, and therefore the head of the most speculative school, Theophrastus, had shocked the students of philosophy by declaring that fortune, not wisdom, was the ruler of the world. But it was precisely against the despondence which such a conviction would work in the mind that the Stoics struggled with their doctrine of apathy, Epicurus with his self-contentment, the Sceptics with their tranquillity of indifference.(422) These all sought to cure those whom the fables of the popular religion were insufficient to satisfy, those who felt the evils and trials of life and knew not whither to turn in their need. But the Stoic and the Epicurean cures stood in the strongest contrast to each other.

Zeno(423) of Cittium in Cyprus, after listening for twenty years to the teaching of various Socratic masters in Athens, founded a school himself, and wished it to be a school of virtuous men rather than of speculative philosophers. It was a system of complete materialism rigorously carried out. He admitted only corporeal causes, and two principles, matter, and a force eternally indwelling in it and shaping it. These two principles, matter and force, were in fact to the stoic mind only one eternal being viewed in a twofold aspect. Matter for its subsistence needs a principle of unity to form and hold it together: and this, the active element, is inconceivable without matter as the subject in which it dwells, works, and moves. Thus the positive element is matter viewed as being as yet without qualities, while the active element which runs through and quickens everything is God in matter. In real truth God and matter are one thing, or, in other words, the stoic doctrine is a pantheism which views matter as instinct with life.(424) God is the unity of that force which embraces and interpenetrates the universe, assuming all forms, and as such is a subtle fluid, fire, ether, or breath, in which are contained all forms of existence belonging to the world-body which it animates, and from which they develop themselves in order: it lives and moves in all, and is the common source of all effect and all desire. God, then, is the world-soul, and the world itself no aggregate of independent elements, but a being, organised, living, filled and animated by a single soul, that is to say, by one original fire manifesting itself in various degrees of tension and heat. If in Aristotle’s theory the world is a total of single beings, which are only bound together unto a higher aim by a community of effort, in the stoic system on the contrary these beings all viewed together are members of a surpassingly perfect organisation, and as such, so bound in one, that nothing can happen to the individual being, which does not by sympathy extend its operation to all others. Thus on his physical side, God is the world-fire, the vital all-interpenetrating heat, the sole cause of all life and motion, and the necessity which rules the world: while on his moral side, inasmuch as the first general cause can only be a soul full of reason and wisdom, he is the world-reason, a blessed being, the originator of the moral law, ever occupied with the government of the world, being in fact himself the world. Thus everything is subject to the law of absolute necessity; everything eternally determined through an endless series of preceding causes, since nothing happens without a cause, and that again is the working of a cause before it. What, then, is called, or seems to be, chance, is merely the working of a cause unknown to us. The will of man is accordingly mere spontaneity. He wills, but what he wills is inevitable: he determines himself, but always in consequence of preceding causes. And since here every cause is something subject to the conditions of matter, something purely inside the world, it becomes unalterable destiny. But inasmuch as the series of causes leads back to the first, and this first cause has not only a physical side, but includes intelligence with it, and so everything in it is foreseen and predetermined, therefore that which considered under the aspect of inevitable necessity is called fate or destiny, viewed as thought may be termed Providence, a divine arrangement.

With such a doctrine it is evident that all morality was reduced to a matter of physics: and yet no sect of Greek philosophers struggled so hard to solve the great problem of moral freedom as the Stoics.(425) But the iron grasp of their leading tenet was ever too much for them. Man’s soul is of the same substance as the world-soul, that is, breath or fire, of which it is a portion: in man it manifests itself as the force from which knowledge and action proceed, as at once intelligence, will, and consciousness. It is, then, closely allied with the Divine Being, but at the same time corporeal, a being which stands in perpetual action and reaction with the human body. It is that heat-matter bound to the blood, which communicates life and motion: it is perishable, though it lasts beyond the body, perhaps to the general conflagration. It has therefore, in the most favourable view, the duration of a world-period, with the outrun of which it must return to the universal ether or godhead: its individual existence and consciousness end.

As to the popular religion,(426) the Stoics admitted that it was filled with pretended deities, false doctrines, and rank superstition; that its wilderness of fables about the gods was simply contemptible: but that it was well to retain the names of gods consecrated in public opinion, who were merely descriptions of particular incorporations of the one world-god.

The Stoics did not represent the component elements of human nature as struggling with each other, like Plato.(427) With them nature and reason is one thing. Their virtue,(428) or highest good, is life in accordance with nature, that is, the concurrence of human conduct with the all-ruling law of nature, or of man’s will with God’s will. Thus it was that the Stoic sought to reach his doctrine of philosophical impassibility: and to this system the majority of earnest and thinking minds in the two centuries before Christ inclined.(429)

At the very same time as Zeno, Epicurus set up at Athens a school destined through all its existence to wage a battle with stoicism, yet aiming by different means at the same end, the freedom of the individual man from anxiety and disturbance.(430) If Zeno’s world was an intelligent animal, that of Epicurus was a machine formed and kept in action by chance. He assumed the atomic theory of Democritus, that all bodies—and there are nothing else but corporeal things—have arisen originally from atoms moving themselves in empty space. They are eternal and indestructible, without quality, but not without quantity, and endlessly various in figure. As these from mere weight and impulse would fall like an everlasting rain in empty space without meeting each other, Epicurus devised a third motion, a slight declension from the perpendicular, in virtue of which their agglomeration is produced: and thus it is a work of pure chance that out of these, the countless worlds which frame the universe began to be. Any order or higher guidance of the universe, as directed to a purpose, is not to be thought of, any more than necessary laws, according to which the appearances of nature reproduce themselves. For a law would ultimately lead to a lawgiver, and this might reawaken fear, and disturb the wise man’s repose. He utterly denied the intervention either of one god or of many gods in the forming or the maintenance of the world: the main purpose indeed of his philosophy was to overthrow that religious view which saw in the argument from design a sure proof of a divine Providence.(431) Nothing, he thought, was more perverted than that the opinion that nature was directed for the good of man, or generally for any object at all; that we have tongues in order to speak, or ears in order to hear, for in fact just the reverse is true. We speak because we have tongues, and hear because we have ears. The powers of nature have worked purely under the law of necessity. Among their manifold productions some were necessarily composed in accordance with an end: hence resulted for man in particular many means and powers; but such result must not be viewed as intentional, rather as a purely casual consequence of naturally necessary operations. Gods, such as the people believed, he utterly repudiated. Not he who denied such gods, but he who assumed their existence, was godless. He allowed, indeed, that there existed an immense multitude of gods, beings of human form, but endued with subtle, ethereal, transparent, indestructible bodies, who occupied the intermundial spaces, free from care, regardless of human things, enjoying their own blissful repose.(432) His gods are in fact a company of Epicurean philosophers, possessing everything which they can desire, eternal life, no care, and perpetual opportunity of agreeable entertainment.

The soul of man is a body made out of the finest round and fiery atoms; a body which, like heated air, most rapidly penetrates the whole material frame. The finest portion of the soul, the feeling and thinking spirit, which as a fourth element is added to the fiery, aerial, and vaporous portions, dwells in the breast. In these elements all the soul’s passions and impulses are rooted. When death destroys the body, the sheltering and protecting home of the soul’s atoms, these evaporate at once. It was clear that in such a system the soul could not outlive the body, but Epicurus laid a special stress on this, since thereby only could men be delivered from the greatest impediment to repose and undisturbed enjoyment of life, the torturing fear of the world below, and of punishments after death. It was the crown of his system, to which ethics, physics, and such logic as he admitted were entirely subordinate, to emancipate men from four fears, the fear of death, the fear of natural things, the fear of the gods, the fear of a divine Providence, which was the same thing as fate.(433) Nevertheless, the followers of Epicurus had no scruple, after the manner of their master, who had spoken of the worship of the gods like a priest, to visit temples and take part in religious ceremonies. These, it is true, were useless, since they had nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the gods, but it was an act of reason, and could do no harm, to honour beings naturally so high and excellent.(434)

Of this school we learn that it gradually became the most numerous of all. Its social force really lay in setting forth as a model the undisturbed security of individual life. It agreed at the bottom with stoicism that man’s wisdom and highest end was to live in accordance with nature. Zeno, it is true, called this living in accordance with nature, virtue, man’s highest and only good; Epicurus called it pleasure; but Zeno’s virtue consisted essentially in the absence of passions, the pleasure of Epicurus in the mind’s undisturbedness.(435) The Epicureans were more attached to their master’s memory than any other school. They were renowned for their friendship with each other. Epicurus’s Garden at Athens meant the highest refinement of Athenian life, the enjoyment of everything that was pleasant in the society of likeminded men.(436) It was this side of his philosophy which made it popular.

While the schools of Zeno and Epicurus seated at Athens were powerfully influencing Grecian thought, the former especially drawing to it the stronger and more thinking minds, resistance arose to them both in the chair of Plato. First Arcesilaus and then Carneades, who had succeeded to this office, set up in the middle Academy the school of Scepticism. While Stoics and Epicureans alike sought peace of mind through knowledge of the world and its laws, they on the contrary maintained that this same peace of mind could only be attained by renouncing all such knowledge.(437) They held that no truth and no certainty were given to man by the representations of his senses, by his feelings, and by his consciousness of these, which do not enable him to know the real being of anything.(438) Those who held this view would not say downright that what they contradicted was untrue: they were of opinion that it might be true, only there was no certitude of this, and therefore it must be left undetermined. The uncertainty was as great on the one side as on the other. Sextus Empiricus defined the state of skepsis to be “skilfulness in so setting forth appearances and reflections against each other, as to be brought through the equilibrium of opposing facts and grounds in their favour first to a suspension of judgment, and then to imperturbable tranquillity.”

Carneades, whose life occupied the greater part of the second century before Christ, and who is extolled by Cicero as the keenest and most copious of disputants, was the man in whom this school of thought reached its highest point. He had appeared at Rome among a deputation of philosophers in the year 155, when his eloquence and earnestness made a great impression on his Roman hearers. This scepticism of the younger Academy however ran in accordance with the direction which the collective philosophy of the Greeks naturally took, and was carried out with an acuteness and a scientific ability which makes us recognise in it an important member of philosophical development.(439) Carneades subjected the stoic doctrine as to God in particular to a criticism the range of which went far beyond the dogmas of this school, and in fact tended to represent every conviction as to the existence of the godhead, and every religious belief, as something impossible and untenable.(440) This, however, as Cicero repeatedly assures us, was not done for the purpose of destroying belief in the gods, but only to point out the weakness and groundlessness of stoic doctrines. It is chiefly in his assaults on the assertions and assumptions of his adversaries that Carneades is victorious: when he attempts anything positive on his own side, it amounts to this, that a rational man will take probability for his guide, when he cannot be assured of truth: and his chief merit appears to have been in more accurately determining the degrees of probability.(441)

The contests of these schools bring us down to the middle of the second century before Christ, when Greece fell under the dominion of Rome. From this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his side obtained a sort of victory. As a rule he was anything but an original thinker. He was an essentially practical man: he had a steady instinct which led him to distrust first causes and general principles. The Greek schools were to him of value only as they might fit into his daily life, not as coherent systems of thought. The spirit therefore in which he regarded their differences was to select from them what best suited his tastes and feelings. If he had no power to originate, he could choose. But such likewise had been the result among the Greeks themselves of two centuries of conflict, in which the rival systems of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism had stood over against each other. They sprung from the same soil; they might even be termed three branches of one stem,(442) inasmuch as their common root was the desire to find for the individual man something which would give him tranquillity of mind, happiness in fact, independent of his civil circumstances. In this they all took up a practical rather than a theoretical ground, the ground indeed which is now assigned to religion. Utterly opposed, then, as they were in their means, they sought the same end, and it was not in nature that the collision of their various arguments should not at length kindle the spirit of eclecticism. Thus the temper of the Roman statesman and noble, and the course of Greek philosophy itself, combined to produce this spirit, which from the beginning of the first century before Christ pervaded the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world.(443) But eclecticism betokens a weakening of the philosophic mind, that weariness which is unable to take a firm grasp of truth, an absence of the keen aim and high desire which such a grasp betokens. It is a confession that no one system possesses the truth: in which state of things nothing remains for the individual but to choose for himself out of different systems those morsels of truth which approve themselves most to his taste or tact, or, as he would term it, his truth-seeking sincerity.

But it is not too much to say that the whole spirit of later antiquity, so far as it interested itself in the discovery of truth, from the time that Greek philosophy was diffused over the Roman world, leant more or less to eclecticism. Its most able, most distinguished, and most interesting representative is Cicero.(444) He lived at a time when rival criticism had searched out and exposed every weak point in the different systems of thought. To found new systems there was no further creative force; his eclectic position was the necessary result. His genius supplied him with no means to overcome it. His philosophical writings are scarcely more than transcripts from various Grecian sources, wherein he uses his skill as a rhetorician and his unfailing wealth of words to set forth with lawyerlike balancing the arguments of different schools. We can yet detect the originals, from which in the short intervals of enforced absence from political life before and after the death of Cæsar he transfused with such rapidity into a Latin shape the products of Greek discussion.(445) Thus his treatise on the Republic and on Laws are in form imitations of Plato’s writings with the same title, while for their contents Cicero applies Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines to his own political experiences, making also much use of Polybius. His _Paradoxa_ explain Stoic propositions. The groundwork of his _Consolatio_ is Crantor’s writing upon Grief. The _Lost Hortensius_ is drawn from an exhortation of Aristotle to Themison, a prince of a city of Cyprus, or from a similar work of the academician Philo of Larissa; his books _De Finibus_ from works of Phædrus, Chrysippus, Carneades, Antiochus, as well as the studies which Cicero himself in his youth made while attending lectures; his _Academica_ from the writings and partly also from the lectures of the best-known Academicians: his _Tusculan Disputations_ from Plato and Crantor, from Stoics and Peripatetics. The first book on the _Nature of the Gods_ from the writing of an Epicurean, which has been discovered in the rolls of Herculaneum, and was first supposed to be a treatise of Phædrus, but is now known to be a work of Philodemus: his critique on the Epicurean standing-point is drawn from the stoic Posidonius; the second book from Cleanthes and Chrysippus; the third from Carneades and Clitomachus. Of his books on _Divination_, the first is taken from Chrysippus, Posidonius, Diogenes, and Antipater; the second from Carneades, and the stoic Panætius. His treatise on _Fate_ from the writings of Chrysippus, Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Carneades: his _Elder Cato_ from Plato, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristo of Chius: his _Lælius_ mainly from a writing of Theophrastus on Friendship. His main authority for the first two books on _Offices_ is Panætius; and for the third Posidonius; while besides Plato and Aristotle he has made use of Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tyre, and Hecato.

Now in this selection from rival and antagonistic schools—this oscillation between the positive and sceptical tone of thought, this sitting as a judge rather than obeying as a disciple—Cicero very exactly represented the tone and attitude of the cultivated classes in his own time and in the century following his death. Originality of mind in philosophic studies was gone; nor was any system as a whole believed in. The sceptic and eclectic turn of mind are but the reverse sides of the same mental coinage: he who selects from all is convinced by none. Neither his doubts nor his choices satisfied Cicero, or any one of those who followed him in that most important century, the eighth of the Roman city, fifty years of which preceded and fifty followed the coming of Christ. In its philosophical productions no preceding century had been so poor as this. It had only to show the school of the Sextii, which arose at Rome about the beginning of our era, and took a sort of middle standing between Pythagorean, Cynic, and Stoic principles.(446) This school was of small importance, and soon became extinct. With this exception from Cicero to Seneca no names of distinction appear. There is a gap in philosophical thought. A period so influential on the destinies of man in its events, so celebrated for its polite literature, on which the world has since been feeding, is barren in the highest realm of inquiry. For this reason there is a particular justice in taking Cicero as an exponent of heathen thought and spirit, the living specimen of the kind, inasmuch as he is the last philosophic writer before Christian thought appears in the world, and chose for himself the function of summing up what he thought of value in the ages before him.

We omit therefore nothing in our review if we place ourselves at the end of this century, in the reign of Claudius, and cast a glance backward over that prodigious labour of human reason through which we have hastily travelled, and which had then lasted six hundred years. The problem was, given the universe, what will man’s reason in the most gifted, cultivated, inquiring, dialectic race of the ancient world do with it? And more particularly, to what results will reason come as to the power which has formed, or which rules it: as to its chief inhabitant, his nature, and the purpose for which he exists, and the end to which he is ever advancing: as to the duties by which he is bound to this creating, or at least maintaining and ruling power: as to those offices which he owes to his fellow, the individual to the individual, the civil community to the community. It was to these points especially that the greatest character in the whole movement—the single heathen who knew how to die for his convictions—turned the thoughts of those who followed him. Again, at the very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct, gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have been the original and even the only form of teaching which they recognised. What was the result in this respect also? In the four hundred and forty years following the death of Socrates had reason produced a consistent doctrine, and a society of which that doctrine should be the law and bond, a fitting body for its soul to tenant, the immortal race of that living word which Plato contemplated? Time there had been enough, and even a superfluity of genius: but there were also two great outward events which might be expected to favour and advance such a result.

The first of these was the subjection of the whole East to the influence of the Greek mind by the conquest of Alexander, the effect of which continued in the kingdoms carried on by his successors. Originally the civil position of the Greek, as the free citizen of a free state, had been all in all to him. His country was his single measure. But during the lifetime of Plato and Aristotle this position had been more and more altering. The philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus was set up by men who had lost it altogether, who were thrown back on themselves, on the intrinsic nature of man, for support. Their inmost thought was how to produce tranquillity of mind, and so far as might be, happiness, for man, in something independent of his civil position. The loss of self-government had opened to them perforce a field far wider than the narrow confines of a provincial citizenship. Henceforth the schools of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus issued their mental legislation not for the inhabitant of Attica, but for all that fusion of races which occupied the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, was ruled by Greek potentates, and spoke the Hellenic tongue. Thus the ground taken up by philosophy was at once religious and cosmopolitan; the former because it attempted to deal with the nature of man as man, and to give him inward contentment, the latter because the mind, which used as its organ the Greek language, swayed large and independent empires, embracing various races of men. Then, if ever, it might have been expected that heathenism would make a great spring,(447) would cast aside what was local and accidental in the various customs, races, and beliefs brought under the fusing influence of one spirit, and idealise out of them a religion bearing the stamp and showing the force of that human reason of which Greece was the great representative. But the three centuries which witnessed the birth, the vigorous growth, and the incessant contests of the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, together with the scepticism which from Plato’s chair passed judgment on them both, produced no such result, but rather terminated in that balancing of opposite systems, and the selection of fragments from each, which we have seen in Cicero.

The second great event which we have to note is that when the Greek mind had thus been for three hundred years in possession of society throughout the East, the Roman empire came to bind in unity of government not only all those races which the successors of Alexander had ruled, but the wide regions of the West as well, and their yet uncivilised inhabitants. Here, again, the Greek mind was not dethroned, but married, as it were, to Roman power. Philosophy made a sort of triumphal entry into Rome in spite of Cato and all the conservative force of the old Roman spirit. And if fusion had been the thought, the desire, and the attempt of the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ, even more certainly was it the only spirit by which Augustus and Tiberius could hope to rule in peace the world made subject to them. And not less than the extinction of Greek autonomy did the loss of self-government accompanying the institution of the empire force the Roman also back upon himself. When Cicero could no longer sway the senate, he studied philosophic systems at Tusculum: and certainly his book of Offices has been more valued by all posterity than his speeches against Catiline or his defence of Milo. A long train of writers from the Fathers downwards have seen in the civil unity of the Roman empire a providential preparation for a great religion. But the field on which that empire arose had already, so far as concerns the thinking classes, long been occupied by the Greek philosophy. The two forces come into operation now together: and seventy years after the battle of Actium, when Augustus and Tiberius had completely established one ruling authority, and when this second outward revolution had had full time to give its impulse to thought, and had set before the eyes of men for two whole generations the vision of an empire which seemed conterminous with civilisation itself, we may fairly ask what philosophy had done towards producing a corresponding unity of doctrine, and a society sustaining and propagating it.

If, then, we take our stand at the moment when Claudius began to reign, and count a century backwards, it is impossible to mention a time when philosophy was more impotent for good, and when the higher classes of the Roman empire were more thoroughly irreligious and unbelieving. To understand the reason of this we must take into account first the negative and then the positive action of philosophy up to that time. As to the former, there can be no doubt that the effect of philosophy in all its schools and through all its shades of thought had been hostile to a simple belief in polytheism and its mythology. Human reason had been turned with pitiless severity on its mass of fables, its discreditable stories, its manifold contradictions. As early as the sixth century before Christ it had used the key of allegory in order to infuse into these some better meaning, and this was carried out into full detail by Metrodorus, a follower of Anaxagoras. Thus if Homer, the mirror in which the Greek saw his religion reflected, described Jupiter as suspending Juno between heaven and earth, Heracleitus was indignant with the atheists who did not see that it meant how the world and the elements were formed.(448) By this process indecent personal agencies melted away into physical effects, or were even sublimated into moral lessons. Men were told that only soft Phæacians could see in the loves of Mars and Venus a consecration of adultery: to the man of sense it meant that valour and beauty were worthy of each other. Through all the following centuries this tone of mind continued. As to the stoical philosophers in particular, this physical allegorising was the perpetual instrument by which they reconciled their stern system of material Pantheism with all the stage scenery of the poet’s Olympus. Epicurus, on the contrary, recognised the existence of gods in countless numbers, but they were beings who lived in the enjoyment of his philosophy, far removed from the cares of providence and the thought of human things. On the other hand, Plato’s attempt to purify, while he recognised, polytheism, and to sweep away all its fables as purveyors of evil thoughts and desires, found little success, though his conception of the godhead as the Idea of goodness, remained the highest ever reached in that long process of thought; and through all this period the best and purest minds found in him a support against that bewilderment of the reason which the vulgar religion inflicted on them. But few and far between were those who followed Plato in this his highest conception, while the literature of that last century, in the midst of which Christ appeared, remains an abiding proof that the critical, scoffing, negative spirit of philosophy had spread itself over all the cultured classes. We seek in vain in Julius Cæsar and Cicero, in Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Manilius, Horace, Ovid, in Polybius, Dionysius, Diodorus, or Strabo, for any real belief in the immortal gods whose names appear in their writings. The poets use them for stage-effect, the statesmen as part of the machinery of government, the historians as names interwoven with the events which they recount: yet the life of all these men was filled with the frequentation of rites and ceremonies, as a matter of law and custom, having reference to a multitude of gods, concerning whom they had a contemptuous disbelief, though none of them were without many a dark superstition.

Such was the negative influence of philosophy; but what inward support had it given to minds whose ancestral belief, still entertained by the mass of men all around, was thus eaten out? What substitute had it provided for this discredited polytheism with its ridiculed mythology?

1. First, did the Greek philosophy teach the unity of the Godhead? If by this question be meant, did philosophy ever go forth into the midst of the temples and smoking sacrifices with which every city teemed, and proclaim, These gods which you worship are no gods: there is one Maker and Ruler of the universe, and the homage due to him alone is usurped by a multitude of pretended deities;—then there is no doubt about the answer, that this is what neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno, nor any other philosopher thought of doing. The philosophic god was never set in the forefront of the battle after this fashion. He dwelt in the most secret shrine of Plato’s mind, hard to be discovered, and to be confessed, if at all, in secret. If with Aristotle he was a pure spirit, yet he abode apart from the world, working on it indeed, as the magnet on the iron, but unconscious of it, not ruling it with free will.(449) And, save so far as this is an exception, the Greek mind from beginning to end never succeeded in absolutely separating God from matter. And as time went on, this original defect showed itself more and more, until in the stoic system, which, as to the conception of the power ruling the world, prevailed over all the rest, that which was called God was simply a force pervading all matter.(450) The Stoics could, indeed, as in the hymn of Cleanthes, invest this god of theirs with many beautiful, grand, and attractive attributes. His was almighty power;(451) he was the author of nature; he ruled all things with law; and the world willingly obeyed his will. And this common law passed through all things, so that evil mixed with good resulted in a general order. Thus they could address him as Father and as King, guiding all things with justice; and this being they termed Jupiter. But this is only a poetic(452) exhibition of their genuine thought and meaning, which was, that “all which was real was corporeal; matter and force are the two chief principles; matter in itself is motionless and formless, but capable of assuming every motion and every form. Force is the active, moving, and forming principle; it is indivisibly joined with matter: the operating force in the whole of the world is the Godhead.”(453) “By the names World-soul, World-reason, Nature, Universal Law, Providence, Fate, the same thing is indicated, the one Primal Force determining everything with absolute regularity, interpenetrating the whole world.” And even the opposition between the material and the spiritual description of the Godhead disappears upon closer examination, for on Stoic principles the Godhead can only then be considered as real when considered as body.(454) It was to such a unity that Greek philosophy advanced, receding more and more from that imperfect conception of personality with which it had started. Further, the idea of creation is wanting to Greek philosophy from its beginning to its end. The power which it contemplates is evermore confronted with matter, which it can permeate, fashion, move through a natural alchemy of endless changes, but in face of which it is not free to create or not to create, not even free to prevent the evil which lies therein as a sort of blind necessity. As there was always Force, so was there always Matter. To the conception of a free Creator of spirit and of matter the Greek mind never rose: nor accordingly to that of a free Ruler of the universe: and this is only to say in other words, that the conception of personality—that is, of self-consciousness and moral freedom, as applied to a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness—was imperfect and confused. Plato in his highest flight had seemed to recognise one God, whom to enjoy is the happiness of man; but Plato and all who followed him had endured, had countenanced, had taken part in the polytheistic worship. And again, neither he, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno showed any inclination to suffer for their doctrines. This philosophic god, gradually evolved by the reasoning mind, produced the very smallest effect upon the unphilosophic world. The stoic argument from final causes, which Cicero has preserved for us, and the force of which he has acknowledged in very remarkable words,(455) generated no martyrs. Was it merely from want of earnestness that the philosophers tolerated and practised the polytheism which surrounded them, and avoided all suffering for their opinions by compliance with a worship which they disbelieved? or was it that their standing-ground, in all more or less pantheistic, was identical with that which they impugned?(456) that the gods of Olympus were powers of nature personified, while their god was simply one power inhabiting nature? that they never reached the one personal creating God, and were consequently unable to maintain his absolute distinction from the world together with his relation to it as Creator and Ruler? That which they cherished as a private philosophical good, which they cared so little to exhibit to the world, was in fact incapable of conquering the world, for the human heart cannot live upon an impersonal god, and will not suffer for a conception of the reason. But it was in this conception that philosophic thought had terminated. And here we find the chief cause of its powerlessness to improve and purify the mythology which it attacked, and much more to affect the lives and conduct of those who professed its tenets. For the old mythology had at least a strong consciousness of personality in its gods. In Homer himself the original tradition, of which his religion was a corruption, still spoke of the father of gods and men as the ruler and judge of the world. In the heathen mind generally such a conception still existed; nor is it too much to say that the common people among the Greeks and Romans were nearer to the truth of one personal God than the philosopher; and the philosopher himself when he listened at any moment of danger and anxiety to the promptings “of the soul naturally Christian” within him, than when he indulged in his esoteric problems.

2. But the conception of personality in God rules the conception of personality in man. As throughout the Greek philosophy the former was weak and imperfect, until in the Stoic system it vanished, so the latter. The physical theory of the Greek overmastered and excluded the conception of freewill in his mind, first as to God and then as to man. As evil existed throughout the world, for which he had no better solution than to place its seat in that matter which was coexistent with the divine reason, and which that reason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in the smaller world of man. In him a portion of the divine reason was united with matter. If Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differently the mode of this composition, yet to all of them alike from the one side and the other the notion of physical necessity came in. The material constituent tended to evil, the reasoning constituent to good: in the man who was made up of the two there was a perpetual jar. There was no room left in their theory for the conception of the soul as a self-originating cause of action. No sect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintain a doctrine of freewill as the Stoic: but it went down before that central tenet of their system, physical necessity, the inexorable sequence of cause and effect, which made up their “common law,” by which the world was ruled. The conception of an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful personal Creator, in whose nature the eternal law is based, not being clear to their minds, so neither was the conception of sin, as the infringement of that law. The law of physical necessity took the place of the eternal moral law: that which man did he did by virtue of the physical constituents out of which he was composed. The evil which he did was physical rather than moral: and he was not responsible for what he could not prevent. The questions of freewill, of evil viewed as sin, and of responsibility, are inextricably bound up with the doctrine of the human personality; and on all these the philosophic mind was dark and confused.

But if the Greek’s physical theory stood in the way of his conceiving clearly the human personality in this life, much more did it impede his conception of that personality as continuing after death. For as the union of a portion of the divine reason with matter constituted man, and as death put an end to that union, the compound being ceased to exist, the portion of the divine reason reverted to its source, but the sensitive soul, as well as the body, was dissolved and came to nothing. There was in his mind no “individual substance of a rational nature” to form the basis of identity, and maintain the conception of personality. In the absence of this, he who had felt, thought, and acted, was no more. He could not therefore receive retribution for his deeds, since there was no personal agent on whom the retribution was to fall.

3. A god who was not personal and did not make man,—man in whom freewill, the mark of personality, was not recognised, so long as he lived, and in whom after death no personal agent continued to exist,—these correspond to each other, and these were the last result of Græco-Roman philosophic thought up to the time of Claudius. But what sort of duty did man, being such, owe to such a god? Cicero’s book on Offices had been written upwards of eighty years, but nothing that followed it during that time equalled it in reputation or ability. It was the best product that his Roman thought could draw from all the preceding Grecian schools: and it was accepted for centuries as the standard of heathen morality. Let us, then, first note that in this book(457) there is nothing like a recognition of God as the Creator and Common Father; no call upon the human soul to love him as such, and for his own perfections; no thought that the duty of man consists in becoming like to him, nor his reward in attaining that likeness. The absence of such a thought gives its character to the whole book, and measures its level. The second point to be noted is, that the happiness of man consists not in being like God, and consequently, in union with him, but in virtue, which is living according to nature. In his reasonable nature everyone possesses a sufficient standard of moral action under every circumstance which may arise. Thirdly, throughout the whole of his treatise Cicero makes no use of the doctrine of man’s immortality. His happiness, then, is left to consist in virtue—life according to reason, which again is life according to nature—without respect to any future state of existence. Now, if Cicero stood alone in these three points, his book would only represent his own authority, but he is in fact the mouthpiece herein of that whole preceding heathen philosophy which he criticised, and from which he selected. Even Plato himself, by far the highest and best of Greek philosophers in this respect, though he had in single expressions indicated that the happiness of man was to be made like to God, constructed no system of ethics in dependence on that conception, which, if it be true, is of all-constraining influence, and is to the whole moral system what the law of gravity is to the material universe. Plato’s ethical system was a strict deduction from his physical theory of the three parts in man, to each of which he assigned its virtue. Far less did Aristotle connect morality with God. The Stoics, indeed, who occupy by far the largest space in Greek philosophy, seem to be an exception. It is said that “their whole view of the world springs from the thought of the Divine Being who generates all finite beings from himself, and includes them all in himself, who penetrates them with his power, rules them with his unchangeable law, and thus merely manifests himself in them all;” so that their system “is fundamentally religious, and scarcely an important statement in it which is not in connection with their doctrine of God;” and so with them “all moral duties rest on a religious ground, all virtuous actions are a fulfilment of the divine will and law;”(458) but then this God is but a name for the sternest and most absolute system of material necessity: a God without a moral nature; without freedom; without personality; under that name, in fact, force and matter making up one thing are substituted for a living God, who, in virtue of the laws of nature, is swept out of his own universe. So, again, Cicero’s statement that man’s happiness consists in virtue, which virtue is life according to nature, is the general doctrine of philosophy, which the Stoics in particular had elaborated. If there be any one expression which would sum-up in a point the whole heathen conception of what man should do, it would be “Life according to nature.” So, again, the exclusion of any thought of immortality, and a consequent retribution, in its bearing on morality, was common to all the schools of Grecian thought, if we except the faltering accents and yearning heart of Plato, and most of all was truly stoic. The imperfection and unclearness of their view as to the divine personality, and as to the human, in the reasonable being, the image and reflection of the divine, accords but too truly, while it accounts for, this detachment of man from God in the field of moral duty.

4. What, then, remained to man after such deductions? There remained the earthly city, the human commonwealth. And when, passing beyond the bounds of any particular nation, and man’s civil position therein, philosophy grasped the moral life as the relation between man as man,(459) and conceived human society itself as one universal kingdom of gods and men, it made a real progress and reached its highest point. But this was the proper merit of the Stoics.(460) Plutarch attributes to Zeno, their founder, this precise idea, that we ought not to live in cities and towns, each divided by peculiar notions of justice, but esteem all men as tribesmen and citizens, who should make up one flock feeding in a common pasture under a common law. The grandest passages of Cicero are those in which he clothes in his Roman diction this stoic idea, as for instance:(461) “They judge the world to be ruled by the power and will of the gods, and to be a sort of city and polity common to gods and men, and that everyone of us is part of this world.” The bond of this community is the common possession of reason,(462) “in which consists the primal society of man with God. But they who have reason in common, have also right reason in common. And as this is law, we are as men to be considered as associated with the gods by law also. Now they who have community of law, have likewise community of rights. This latter makes them also to belong to the same polity. But if such pay obedience to the same commands and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of this subject-matter.” Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all equally partake of reason. All are members of one body, since the same nature has formed them out of one stuff, for the same destination.(463)

Greek philosophy has undoubtedly the merit of bringing out into clear conception this purely human and natural society. It thus expressed in language the work of Alexander, and still more the work of the Roman empire, as it was to be; and more than this, it herein supplied a point of future contact with Christian morality. The advance from the narrowness of the Greek mind in its proud rejection of all non-hellenic nations, and no less from the revolting selfishness of Roman conquest, is remarkable. And it is an advance of philosophic thought. As the older thinkers considered the political life of the city to be an immediate demand of human nature, so the Stoics considered the unitedness of man as a whole together, the dilatation of the particular political community to the whole race, in the same light. Its ground was the common possession of reason. The common law which ruled this human commonwealth was to live according to the dictation of reason, that is, according to nature, in which therefore virtue consists,(464) being one and the same in God and in man, and in them alone.(465) Such virtue branches into four parts, the prudence which discerns and practises the truth; the justice which assigns his own to each; the courage which prevails over all difficulties; the self-restraint and order which preserves temperance in all things. These being bound up together cover the whole moral domain, and embrace all those relations within which human society moves, and, as having their root in the moral nature of man, are a duty to everyone.

This human commonwealth enfolds in idea the whole earth. It is the society of man with man. But it closes with this life. It has no respect to anything beyond. It was the Stoics who most completely worked out this system of moral philosophy; who urged the duty of man’s obedience to nature, of his voluntary subjection to that one universal law and power which held all things from the highest to the lowest in its grasp; and who likewise most absolutely cut him off from any personal existence in a future state. The virtue in which they placed his happiness was to be complete in itself; it was the work of man without any assistance on the part of God.(466) It made man equal to God. It found its reward in itself. If it was objected that the highest virtue in this life sometimes met with the greatest disasters, sorrows, pains, and bereavements, the system had no reply to this mystery. It did not attempt to assert a recompense beyond the grave.

As little did it attempt to account for or to correct the conflict between man’s reason and his animal nature. That perpetual approval of the better and choice of the worse part stood before the Stoic as before us all. He admitted that the vast majority of men were bad, and his wise man was an ideal never reached. But he had no answer whatever to the question, why, if vice is so evil in the eye of our reason, it so clings to our nature; why, if so contrary to the good of the mass, it dwells within every individual.(467)

The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if vicious, he must follow it against his will. There was no real freedom for the individual in the system as philosophy. What was disguised under the name of law, reason, and God, was a relentless necessity before which everyone was to bow. But transfer this philosophy to any political community, and consider in what position it placed the individual with regard to the civil government. Human society is considered as supreme: but his own state represents to him that society, and as all things end with this life, no part of man remains withdrawn from that despotism which requires the sacrifice of the part for the good of the whole. Man’s conscience had no refuge in the thought of a future life; no reserve which the abuse of human power could not touch. And so we find that in matter of fact there was no issue out of such a difficulty but in the doctrine of self-destruction. They termed it in truth _The Issue_,(468) when disease, or disaster, or pain, or the abuse of human power, rendered it impossible any longer to lead a life in accordance with nature. In this case all the Stoic authorities justified it, praised it, and termed it the Door which divine Providence had benignantly left ever open.

While therefore it must be acknowledged that the stoical conception of the whole earth as one city(469) was a true result of Greek thought, and at the same time the highest point it reached, and a positive result of great value, yet it must also be said that it was one rather big with rich promises for the future than of any great present advantage: for it required to be impregnated and filled with another conception of which its framers had lost their hold, the doctrine, that is, of a future retribution, redressing the inequality, the injustice, the undeserved suffering so often falling upon virtue in the present life. When that conception came to complete and exalt the Stoic idea, the need of self-destruction as an issue of the wise man, as soon as he could not live according to nature, ceased, for man himself ceased to be a part of a physical whole governed by necessity. The human city relaxed its right over the individual in presence of a divine city, which embraced indeed man in his present life, but taught him to look for its complete realisation in another.

The human commonwealth, however, extended in idea to the race itself, as possessing reason in common, and individual man therein, as well as the whole aggregate, viewed as being ruled by the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, but both the commonwealth and the individual terminating with this life, was the last word of heathen philosophy up to the time of Claudius.

We have seen that from the time the Greek race was absorbed in the Roman empire the systems of philosophy were broken up by the eclectic spirit, which, engendered within already by the ferment of opinions, was strengthened and developed by the accession of the practical Roman mind. Variety of belief is indeed marked as “the essential feature of Greek philosophy” from its outset, and “the antagonist force of suspensive scepticism” as including some of its most powerful intellects from Xenophanes five hundred years before to Sextus Empiricus two hundred years after the Christian era. One of its historians stamps it as “a collection of dissenters, small sects each with its own following, each springing from a special individual as authority, each knowing itself to be only one among many.”(470) It is therefore no wonder that if Plato’s grand conception of an immortal line of the living word thus came to nought, philosophy proved itself much more incapable of founding a society impregnated with its principles than it had even been of constructing a coherent doctrine which should obtain general reception. And to judge of the actual impotence of philosophy in the century ending with the principate of Claudius, we must rest a moment on this second fact. Philosophers calling themselves Platonic, Peripatetic, Sceptic, Stoic, Epicurean, or these in various mixtures, were to be found at the various seats of learning, Athens, Rhodes, Alexandria, for instance, or at Rome as the seat of empire, or travelling like wandering stars over her vast territory, but these scattered, nebular, and disjointed luminaries shone with a varying as well as a feeble light, which rather confused than satisfied human reason. They were utterly powerless to transfer their doctrine into any number of human hearts living in accordance therein. The only exception to this statement seems to prove its real truth. By far the most united of the sects was that of the Epicureans, who held with great tenacity to their founder’s views and mode of life, which may be summed up in denial of God and Providence, and enjoyment to the utmost of this world’s goods; the fair side of it being a general benevolence, courtesy, friendship, in short, a genial appreciation of what we understand by the word civilisation. These antagonists of Stoic principles and of the highest morality which heathen thought had constructed were the most numerous of existing sects, and we are told that hundreds of years after their founder’s death they presented the appearance of a well-ordered republic, ruled without uproar or dissension by one spirit, in which they formed a favourable contrast to the Stoics. With the exception of a single fugitive, Metrodorus, never had an Epicurean detached himself from his school.(471) We must give philosophy the credit of this single instance of a capacity to create a social life in accordance with its tenets in a sect whose doctrines were a reproach among the heathens themselves. The failure of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno, was the success of Epicurus, and at the same time the announcement that the age of Augustus and Tiberius was ready to expire in sensuality and unbelief, and even in exhaustion of the philosophic mind, for no period is so barren of scientific names, which carry any weight, as the fifty years preceding Claudius.(472) We have seen above that all these philosophers aimed at forming a society which should carry out their principles; that this was their original and their only idea of teaching; that with a view to make it permanent they created a chair of teaching, a living authority who was to continue on their doctrine. But the chair of Plato alone presented(473) five Academies with dissentient doctrines; and a Platonic or Stoic city no one had seen. Thus viewing their united action upon the polytheistic idolatry we may say that while they could discredit its fables in reflecting minds, while they could even raise an altar in their thoughts “to the unknown God,” they left society in possession of the temples and observant of a worship which they pronounced to be immoral, monstrous, and ridiculous. They had destroyed in many the ancestral belief; they had awakened perhaps in some a sense of one great Power ruling the universe; but having taken up the religious ground and professed to satisfy man’s desire for happiness, they had been utterly powerless to construct a religion. They failed entirely in the union of three things,(474) a dogma and a morality founded on that dogma, both of which should be exhibited, brought before the eyes and worked into the hearts of men by a corresponding worship. To unite these three things was needed an authority of which above all they were destitute. Their dogma was without the principle of faith; their morality without binding power; but the worship which should blend the two they had not at all. And so they presented no semblance of the society which should carry these three things in its bosom, and they could not in the least satisfy the doubts or the yearnings which they had raised.

But the period beginning with the rise of Greek philosophy and ending with the principate of Claudius will ever remain of the highest interest and importance as showing what human reason, putting forth its highest powers in the race in which it culminated, but at the same time more thoroughly separated from belief, tradition, and authority than anywhere else, did actually achieve. It is in this respect that the heathen philosophers, together with the poets and historians who precede the publication of the Christian religion in the Roman world, possess a value far beyond any intrinsic merit of their own. It is a study of pathology the results of which are far as yet from being gathered in. It is only by carefully examining what the philosophers taught in theology and morals—for they aspired to be and were both the theologians and the moralists of those ages—that we can at all form an adequate judgment of the real work which the Christian Church has wrought in the world. It is only by using the historians and poets as a mirror of that general society to whose cultured classes the philosophers spoke, that we can estimate what the great mass of mankind then was, and what effect the philosophers produced on them. The difference between their world and their society and ours is the measure of Christian work. The hundred years preceding Claudius, which include in them almost all the greatest names of Roman literature, are the most important of all in this point of view, both as containing the result of scientific thought in the five preceding centuries, and as giving the depth of the moral and intellectual descent. We learn from this whole long period the fulness of the truth conveyed in those words of the angelic doctor at the commencement of his great work: “Even for those things which can be investigated concerning God by the force of human reason, it was necessary for man to be instructed by a divine revelation, because few only, and they after long inquiries, and with the admixture of many errors, would convey to man the truth concerning God as searched out by reason.”(475)

What the philosophers from the time of Thales had taken as their special work was to measure and estimate the visible world. And for the last four centuries of this period especially they made the nature and the needs, the supreme good and the happiness of man their chief concern, in subordination to which they continued their physical inquiries. And surely the judgment which an inspired writer formed of their travail must recur to the mind with great force at the end of the preceding review: “If they knew so much as to be able to estimate the visible world, why did they not more easily discover its Lord?”(476) Why from the goods which they beheld had they not power to know the sole possessor of being, nor when they gave attention to his works, recognised their artificer? Why did they esteem fire or breath, rapid air or circling stars, or the force of water, or the lights of heaven rulers of the universe? For if the visible beauty of these delighted them so that they conceived them to be gods, how did they not draw the conclusion that the Lord of these was so much better than they? for it was the Author of beauty who created them. If they were struck dumb with the sense of their power and operation, why did they not conceive how much more powerful He who made them was? For from the greatness and the beauty of creatures the parent of them is by the force of reason discerned.(477)

From their capital error in this—which the same writer declares to be inexcusable(478)—proceeded their other errors concerning man, his nature, his supreme good, and his final end. It is here sufficient to note that down to the age of Claudius there is no appearance that either of these great errors would be corrected: and still less any appearance of the rise of a great religion which would cause the multitudinous altars of heathenism to disappear before the altar of the unknown God, and would construct a City of God in the midst of that population in the thinking minds of which divergent systems of philosophy had eaten out belief in the babel of false gods without implanting belief in a personal Creator, the author and the end of man.

INDEX.

_Academies_, the five, of Plato’s school, 480.

_Adam_, his headship, 60, 62, 65; its result seen in his fall, 67.

_Alexander_ the Great, effects of his conquests on Greek life, 436, 455.

_Alexander Severus_, his treatment of Christians, 244.

_Antoninus Pius_, extension of the Church in his reign, 197; treatment of it under him, 227-233; what aspect the Church bore to him, 233-7.

_Apollonius_, a senator, martyred under Commodus, 302, 209, note 37.

_Apostolic age_, result of, 186-7.

_Aristotle_, his character as a philosopher, 429; his view of the soul, 430; relation of his philosophy to religion, 433; conception of the method of teaching, 420; what he says of Socrates, 390; his account of the generation of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, 400.

_Athanasius, S._, 26, 32, 34, 37, 98.

_Athenagoras_, 182.

_Athens_, worship at, 5.

_Augustine, S._, his contrast of Heathenism with Christianity, 172-5; on the moral influence of Polytheism, 21-4, 27, 30, 33; how the Second Divine Person is the Truth, 51; Adam and Christ, 76, 77, 84, 110; the Church Christ’s Body, 99; and at once his Temple, House, and City, 88; also the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men, 97; dowered with Christ’s Blood, 144; Christ and the Church one Man, 57, 144; believing Christ, without believing the Church, is decapitating Christ, 105; crime of denying that the Catholic Church will for ever continue in its unity, 106; the Word made flesh that He might become the Head of the Church, 107; the Holy Spirit Vicarius Redemptoris, 115, 119, 124, 125, 139; asserts the perpetual Principatus of the Roman See from the beginning, 290; describes the uses of heresy, 281-2; admits of no charity but in the unity of the Body, 130, 139; coherence of the natural and mystical Body of Christ in the Eucharist, 103; what the Church will be hereafter, 112.

_Augustus_, his idea of the Roman empire, 2; prospects of Polytheism at the end of his reign, 46.

_Aulus Gellius_, 421.

_Beugnot_, Destruction du Paganisme, 43, 44.

_Captivity_ of man to the devil, 27-30, 33-8, 69; its full reversal as seen in the Body of Christ, 112.

_Carneades_, 447.

_Catholic_, term used of the Church by S. Ignatius about A.D. 115, and by the Church of Polycarp fifty years later, 206.

_Celsus_, 179, 197, 230, 231, 234.

_Champagny_, 16, 182, 241, 243, 305, 475, 480.

_Christ_, declares Himself to be a king, 49; His kingdom that of Truth, 50-4; the counterpart of Adam as an individual, 76; as Head of a race, 77; as making one Body with His people, 79; parallel in His natural and mystical Body, 96; analogies between them, 97; coherence of both in the Eucharist, 103; His action permanent in His kingdom, 81; in His House, 86; in His Body, 88; in His Bride, 91; in the Mother of His race, 92; His five distinct loves, 93; His Body imperishable, 104; crime of imputing falsehood to it, 105; force of its corporate unity, 110; gifts which He bestows on it, 125; connection of Truth with His Person the principle of persecution, 182; His Passion repeated in His people, 185; His work summed up by S. Augustine, 172-5.

_Chrysostom, S._, 87, 101, 109, 220, 224.

_Church_, the, the Kingdom of Truth, 81; the House of Christ, 86; the Body of Christ, 88; the Bride of Christ, 91; the Mother of His race, 92; the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men, 97; as such, the treasure-house of Truth and Grace, 100, 120-2; conveys the fruits of the Incarnation, 101, 143; is imperishable and incorruptible, 105; possesses Unity, Truth, Charity, and Sanctity as coinherent gifts of the Spirit, 125-8; bestows forgiveness of sins, faith, adoption, and sanctification on the individual, 128-31; unity of its jurisdiction, 146; analogy between it and the relation of soul and body, 133; between it and the human commonwealth, 134; between it and the natural unity of man’s race, 135; transmission of truth in it, 148, 166; by a triple succession, 156-161; development of the Truth its proper work, 168; its divine life as opposed to heathenism, 171; its witness of Christ’s confession in the first ten generations, 184; its first persecution by Nero, 191; growth in the time of Antoninus Pius, 195; picture of it by S. Ignatius, 199; its treatment of heresies, 204, 206, 258, 265, 274, 276; bearing of Trajan to it, 209, 215; of Hadrian, 221; of Antoninus Pius, 226; of Marcus Aurelius, 292; of Commodus, 302; of Septimius Severus, 302; its position in the third century, 308; its organic unity as set forth by S. Cyprian, 325-334; power of its idea on Christians, 340; expresses Christ in its moral character, its worship, and its government, 341-5; persecuted by Decius, 356; by Valerian and Aurelian, 361; by Diocletian, 362; obtains freedom from Constantine, 371; how affected by Roman law between A.D. 64 and 313, 371-3.

_Church_, a mother or cathedral church only so called, 253.

_Churches_, public, when first known to exist at Rome, 308.

_Cicero_, states the work of Socrates, 391; representative of Eclecticism, 450; sources of his philosophical works, 451; what he says of the atomic theory, 464; his book _de Officiis_ the standard of heathen morality for centuries after him, 468; his statement of the Stoic idea of the world as one republic of gods and men, 471; his conception of virtue in general, 471, 473; his partition of the cardinal virtues, 473; virtue not a gift of God, but the work of man, 474.

_Cleanthes_, his hymn quoted, 461.

_Clement_, Pope S., 191, 194.

_Clement_, of Alexandria, 278, 287, 303.

_Commodus_, 243, 302.

_Cyprian, S._, his statement of the Church’s organic unity founded on the Primacy given to Peter, 326-331; puts the force of the Episcopate in its unity, 147, 332-4; repudiates a parallel between the twelve tribes of Israel and the Church, on the question of unity, 334; agreement of his witness with that of S. Paul, S. Ignatius, and S. Irenæus, 349; his conversion, described by himself, a type of heathen conversion in general, 336-8; describes the relaxation produced by the long peace of the Church before the Decian persecution, 350-2; his martyrdom, 358; says the Emperor Decius would much rather endure the appointment of a rival emperor than of a Bishop of Rome, 356.

_Cyril, S._, of Alexandria, 54, 55; on the Fall and the Restoration, 136; to become a Christian is to enter into unity with Christ both physical and spiritual, 137.

_Dante_, 422.

_Decius_, 356.

_De Rossi_, 252.

_Diocletian_, 362.

_Diognetus_, author of letter to, marks the Christians as one body and people, but diffused everywhere, circ. A.D. 100, 318.

_Dionysius, S._, archbishop of Alexandria, prizes martyrdom for the unity of the Church more highly than for resistance to idolatry, 345.

_Döllinger_, Heidenthum und Judenthum, quoted or referred to, 5-13, 25, 196, 386, 401, 402, 407, 409, 410, 429-31, 438, 441, 442, 445-47, 456, 458, 461, 479, 480; Hippolytus und Kallistus, 248, 256, 257.

_Domitian_, his persecution, 94.

_Eclecticism_, how it arose in Greek Philosophy, 448; becomes universal, 450.

_Epicurus_, his conception of the method of teaching, 424; his doctrine, 442.

_Episcopate_, the, triply defended by scripture, by institutions, and by continuous personal descent, 163; one and undivided, 327; like the unity of the Godhead, 333; which is effected by the Primacy, 334.

_Eucharist_, coherence of natural and mystical Body of Christ in, 102-3; called by S. Ignatius that flesh of our Saviour Christ which suffered for our sins, 202, note.

_Eusebius_, 150, 209, 251, 253, 302, 304, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367, 369.

_Forgiveness of sins_, doctrine of, guarded by triple succession of teaching, of men, and of sacraments, 162.

_Freewill_, no room for it in the physical theory of Greek philosophy, _e.g._ in Plato, 410, 411; in Aristotle, 432; in Stoicism, 440-1; in all the schools, as to God, 461-5; as to man, 465-7; bearing of this on civil government, 475.

_Future life_ of man as a personal being, why not held by Greek philosophy, 467, 470; absence of it from Cicero’s _de Officiis_, 468.

_Grace_, Adam created in, 62, 64; loss of this gift in the Fall, 66; grace as restored in Christ, 136; grace in the God-man, 77; as in Adam and as in the God-man compared, 53; as bestowed through the headship of the God-man, 78; as seen in the Body of Christ, the counterpart of the body of Adam, 79; grace, with truth, makes “the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men,” 97, 117; the human fountain of this double power in the created nature of Christ, 121; whence it is transfused into the Church, His Body, 122, 123-6; grace, as given to the Church complete and indefeasible, 127; as given to the individual may be withdrawn, 131; actual bestowal of this grace on the Church, 138-142; grace necessary for the acceptance and maintenance of truth, 155-6, 167, 170-2, 269; grace, truth, and unity, viewed by S. Cyprian as inseparable, 332-3.

_Greek mind_, its standing-point, 380; represents human reason more than any other ancient race, 382; aided by a matchless language, 379; ripens in the most beautiful of climates, 378; pervades the whole East from the time of Alexander, 455; is married to Roman power in the empire, 456; is the great intellectual opponent of the Christian mind and Church, 375; criticises polytheism for six hundred years, 376; its outcome up to the time of S. Peter’s founding the Roman Church, 475-484; why its philosophy disbelieved a future life, 467, 470.

_Grote_, Plato, 377, 402, 412, 413, 420, 421, 427, 478.

_Hadrian_, grandeur of Rome in his days, 240; treatment of the Church, 221-3; puts to death S. Symphorosa and her sons, 224-6.

_Hagemann_, die römische Kirche in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 209, 257, 273, 289, 352, 354.

_Hasler_, Verhältniss der heidnischen und christlichen Ethik, 468.

_Heathenism_, what it is, 59, 70, 72; contrasted with Christianity, 79, 170-2; by S. Augustine, 172-5; its disregard of the value of moral truths, 177-9.

_Heresy_, subserves the enucleation of doctrine, 281; the determining the Canon of the New Testament, 284; brings out full statements of the principle of tradition, 286; promotes extension and corroboration of the hierarchy, 288; temper of, described by Irenæus, 270; by Tertullian, 276; by Clement of Alexandria, 278, 279; by S. Augustine, 282.

_Herodotus_, the travelled Greek gentleman, 377.

_Idolatry_, Asiatic, its turpitude, 25; division of gods, how far it could go, 27.

_Ignatius, S._, Bishop of Antioch, his picture of the Church in his day, 199-203; his martyrdom, 215; his recognition of the Roman Primacy, 218; power of his intercession attested by S. Chrysostom, 219; the Eucharist, that flesh of our Saviour Christ which suffered for our sins, 202; “Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church”, 206; completeness of a diocesan church called τὸ ἴδιον σωματεῖον, of the whole church τὸ ἒν σῶμα τῆς ἐκκλησίας, 220.

_Innocent I._ Pope S., 255, 347.

_Irenæus, S._, 113, 264; guilt of those who divide the great and glorious Body of Christ, 138; on the Church’s unity of belief, 264-6; gives the descent of the Roman See to his time, 267; affirms its superior principality, 267; sets forth the Church as the treasure-house of truth and grace, 268-9; distinguishes the perpetual teaching office in her, 269, 287; contrasts her truth with the variation of heresies, 270; summary of his doctrine on the Church, heresy, the Primacy, tradition, 271-4; one of a chain between S. Paul, S. Ignatius, and S. Cyprian, 349; speaks of the number of martyrs, 339; himself martyred with many of his people, 303; speaks of “the tradition of the Apostles” as the whole body of truth which they communicated, 198; speaks of the “founding and building” of Sees, 255.

_Junius Rusticus_, 293.

_Jurisdiction_, spiritual, its unity, 146; emanates from Christ’s Person, 342; is the expression of His sovereignty, 345.

_Justin, S._, his martyrdom, 294-8; his _Apologia_ quoted, 227-30; marks Christians as one people and body, 319; censures Jewish conduct in defaming Christians, 189; describes the extension of Christianity in his time, 197.

_Kellner_, Hellenismus und Christenthum, 182, 197, 306.

_Kleutgen_, die Theologie der Vorzeit, 62, 63, 287.

_Kuhn_, Einleitung in die katholische Dogmatik, 291.

_Lactantius_, 363, 364, 365, 366.

_Lasaulæ_, Fall des Hellenismus, 192.

_Laurence, S._, his martyrdom, compared with a contemporaneous incident, 358.

_Liguori, S. Alphonso_, 141.

_Man_, various states of: state of pure nature, 60; state of integrity, 61; state of original justice, 62; state of, after the fall, 67; how summed up in Adam, 64, 71; effect of his being a race, 59; force of his social nature, when fallen, 72; when restored, 108-110; his corruption viewed as a fact of modern science, 58.

_Marcus Aurelius_, treatment of the Church, 292, 299-301.

_Martyrdom_, said by S. Irenæus to be frequent in the Church, but not deemed necessary by the sects, 339; losses to the Christian body by it contrasted with those of civil war, by Origen, 324; a continuation of Christ’s confession before Pilate, 184; its spirit the tissue of early Christian life, 238; identified with “perfect charity” by S. Ignatius, 217; termed “the chalice of Christ” by S. Polycarp, 300.

_Maximus of Tyre_, a teacher of Marcus Aurelius, his notions of God, 293.

_Merivale_, History of the Romans, 19, 203, 210.

_Möhler_, 59, 132, 135, 159.

_Nero_, importance of his act in raising the first persecution, 191.

_Newman, Dr._, the natural beauty of Greece, 381; the martyrs soldiers of Christ, 185.

_Oral teaching_, viewed as the only adequate instrument for conveying doctrine by Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and all subsequent Greek philosophers, 411-425; the means by which the Word of God declared that His kingdom should be propagated for ever, 166; which, as a fact, is fulfilled in the apostolic age, 148; and in all subsequent times, 157.

_Origen_, his heroic conduct in youth, 303; agrees with Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, in the principle of tradition, 280; states the unity of the Church, 286; treats the Church as a polity, and compares it with other polities, 320; the Christian people one people, formed on the imitation of Christ, 322; dies of ill-treatment under the Decian persecution, 323; how Christ leaves His Father and Mother to espouse the Church, 114, note 43; anticipates the universal prevalence of Christianity, 306; on the number of martyrs, 324.

_Pantheism_, Stoic, and _Polytheism_, how they fitted into each other, Zeller, 464, note.

_Passaglia_, 92, 97.

_Patriarchal Sees_, the three original all Sees of Peter, 343.

_Penance_, doctrine and practice of, in first half of third century, 351.

_Personality_, defective conception of, by Plato, in God, 409; in man, 411; by Aristotle, in both, 432; by Stoicism, in both, 439, 440; by all the Greek schools as to God, 460-5; as to man, 465-7.

_Petavius_, 90, 56, 123.

_Peter, S._, his personal work in building the Church, 346.

_Peter and Paul, SS._, their martyrdom, 191.

_Phileas_, Bishop of Thmuis, his account of persecution in Egypt, 367-9.

_Philosophy_, what it is, 376, 377; the Presocratic, 384; its second period opened by Socrates, 386; its four great schools at Athens, 436; effect of the empire’s establishment on it, 457; its negative effect, 458; its positive effect, 460; as to the divine unity and personality, 461-5; as to man’s personality, 465-7; as to man’s duties to God, 467; as to the duties of man to man, 470; its conception of the human commonwealth, 472; its failure to construct a society ruled by its principles, 477.

_Philostratus_, 306.

_Plato_, applies Socratic principles to an ethical, logical, and physical system, 398; his doctrine of Ideas, 399; his filiation with Socrates, 400; his philosophy, and his idea of God, 401-6; with which, however, he retains the inculcation and practice of the popular religion, 406; his God not absolutely personal, nor free, nor a creator, 408; his ethical system, 410; his conception of the method of teaching, 411; his contrast between oral teaching and writing, as means of imparting doctrine, 414-18; his account in his own person of how real knowledge, ἐπιστήμη, is to be attained, 425; calls the art of Socrates mental midwifery, 392; the highest point of virtue to become like to God, 433.

_Pliny_, the younger, his report of Christians to Trajan, 210; compared in his conduct to them with Trajan and Junius Rusticus, 210, note 38.

_Plutarch_, his statement of Zeno’s Politeia, 471.

_Polytheism_, of the Græco-Roman world, its multiplicity, 4; universality, 12; grasp on daily life, 13; moral influence, 19; absence of moral teaching in it, 23; its internal cause in man, 26; its external cause, 27; its injuriousness to man, 30; illogical character, 31; superhuman power, 33; relation to civilisation, 38; to the empire’s constitution, 42; to national feelings, 44; to despotism and slavery, 45; its prospects about A.U.C. 750, 46; is the summing-up of human history before Christ, 58.

_Primacy_, S. Peter’s, defended by specific scriptural proof, unbroken succession, and perpetual recognition, 164; attested by S. Ignatius, 218; by S. Irenæus, 267; by Tertullian, 352; by S. Cyprian, 326-331; necessary to the Church’s unity, 146-8; is linked with jurisdiction, and is the expression of Christ’s sovereignty, 345; brought out by the questions of penance, rebaptising heretics, and keeping Easter, 351-5; in it lies the unity of the Episcopate, 334.

_Pythagoras_, 377; his attempt to construct a philosophic religious community, 412; his conception influences Plato, and all subsequent Greek philosophy, 414.

_Real Presence_, defended by the succession of doctrine, of men, and of institutions, 162.

_Rebaptisation_ of heretics, 353.

_Ruinart_, Acta Sincera Martyrum, quoted, 184, 207, 217, 226, 294, 300, 301.

_Sabbath_, the day changed, and the observance modified, by authority of the Church alone, 165.

_Schmidt_, Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit, 194.

_Schwane_, Dogmengeschichte der vornicänischen Zeit, 261, 285, 287, 288.

_Scripture_, not used as the means for the first foundation of Christianity, 148-50; introduced as subsidiary to oral teaching, 150-2; its great value in this light, 152-4; relation hence arising of Scripture to the Church, 154; instances of this relation, 161-5; this relation set forth by our Lord for perpetual guidance of His Church, 166-8; the same, urged by Tertullian, 274; by S. Irenæus, 268, 269; by Clement of Alexandria, 278.

_Sects_, their multitude in early times, 204, 261, 270, 315.

_Septimius Severus_, maxims of government, 243, 248-50; his persecution, 302.

_Socrates_, his person, 388; influence on Greek philosophy, 387; the Stoic type of the wise man, 424; Zeller’s account of his special principle, 389; that of Ueberweg, 390; his opinion on the gods and the Godhead, 392-5; his last words to his judges, 395; last words of his life, 396; halts between unity and plurality in the Godhead, 396, 397; absence from his mind of the sense of impurity, 397, note. Plato makes an ethical, logical, and physical system from his principles, 398; the filiation between them, 400; his art termed mental midwifery by Plato, 392; one of his statements compared with that of S. Paul, 393, note.

_Stoicism_, Epicureanism, Scepticism, three branches on one stem, 449.

_Suarez_, 60-2.

_Suicide_, termed the _Issue_ in Stoic philosophy, 476.

_Tacitus_, 190, 247, 248.

_Teaching office_, created by Christ, 166; witnessed by S. Ignatius, 202; by S. Irenæus, 266, 268, 269, 272; by Tertullian, 274, 276; by Clement of Alexandria, 278; by Origen, 280; alone carries both Tradition and Scripture as a living gift of the Spirit, 287.

_Tertullian_, 4, 32, 37, 188, 192, 194, 197, 209, 246, 250, 251, 274, 276, 352.

_Thierry_, Amadée, 313, 481.

_Thomas Aquinas, S._, 28, 57, 81, 125, 483.

_Tillemont_, 209, 245, 249, 263.

_Tradition_, the whole body of Apostolic teaching so called, 149, 150; ἡ παράδοσις, by S. Irenæus, 198; Tertullian, 274-7; Clement of Alexandria, 278; Origen, 280.

_Trajan_, his treatment of Christians, 213; of S. Ignatius, 215; importance of his answer to Pliny, 221.

_Truth_, as meaning the whole body of the divine revelation, 140; committed for its propagation to a society, 155, 166; secured in it by a triple succession, 156-60; its root in the Person of Christ, 51, 121, 181; the gift of His Spirit, 121, 125, 127; development of, 168; in the hall of Pilate, 49; its first transmission by oral teaching only, 148.

_Ueberweg_, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie des Alterthums, quoted or referred to, 385, 387, 390, 398, 399, 400, 401, 412, 413, 414, 421, 422, 424, 428, 442, 450, 451, 453, 462, 479, 480.

_Varro_, divides theology into fabulous, natural, and civil, 19.

_Xenophon_, 390-5.

_Zeller_, Philosophie der Griechen, quoted or referred to, 377, 380, 381, 383, 385, 386, 388, 389, 400, 401, 403-6; 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 425, 429, 433, 434, 436, 437, 438, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 462, 469, 471, 472, 476.

_Zeno_, the Stoic, his conception of the method of teaching, 424; his doctrine upon God and the soul, 438-442; his conception of men as one flock feeding in a common pasture under a common law, 471.

_Zukrigl_, 468.

FOOTNOTES

1 Tertull. _Apolog._ xxiv, “Ideo et Ægyptiis permissa est tam vanæ superstitionis potestas, avibus et bestiis consecrandis, et capite damnandis qui aliquem hujusmodi Deum occiderint. Unicuique etiam provinciæ et civitati suus Deus est, ut Syriæ Astartes, ut Arabiæ Disares, ut Noricis Belenus, ut Africæ Cælestis, ut Mauritaniæ Reguli sui,” &c.; and Minucius Felix, Octavius vi., in like manner.

2 See Aug. _de Civ. Dei_, l. viii. 24.

3 Döllinger, _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, pp. 528, 529.

4 From _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, pp. 101-2.

_ 5 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 480.

_ 6 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 107.

_ 7 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 469.

8 Ibid. pp. 468, 480.

_ 9 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 344.

10 Ibid. p. 312.

11 “Epulæ, lectisternia, nudipedalia.”

12 These incidents are taken from various places in _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, pp. 531, 549, 550, &c.

13 Champagny, _Les Antonins_, liv. v. c. 3.

_ 14 De Divinat._ ii. 72.

15 Valerius Max. i. c. 2, 3.

16 Merivale’s _History of the Romans_, ii. 447.

17 See Varro, quoted by S. Aug. _De Civ. Dei_, lib. vi. 5.

_ 18 De Civ. Dei_, l. vi. 5, 6, 7.

19 “Illam theatricam et fabulosam theologiam ab ista civili pendere noverunt, et ei de carminibus poetarum tanquam de speculo resultare: et ideo ista exposita, quam damnare non audent, illam ejus imaginem liberius arguunt.” _De Civ. Dei_, vi. 9; id. vi. 7.

20 “Quæ sunt ergo illa sacra quibus agendis tales elegit sanctitas quales nec thymelica in se admittit obscœnitas.” _De Civ. Dei_, vi. 7.

21 “Omnes cultores talium deorum—magis intuentur quid Jupiter fecerit, quam quid docuerit Plato vel censuerit Cato.” _De Civ. Dei_, ii. 7.

_ 22 De Civ. Dei_, ii. 6. “Demonstrentur vel commemorentur loca—ubi populi audirent quid dii præciperent de cohibenda avaritia, ambitione frangenda, luxuria refrænanda.” See also sec. 28.

23 See _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 398. Herodotus, i. 199. Baruch, vi. 42-3.

24 See S. Athan, _con. Gentes_, 5-9. In like manner S. Theophilus, lib. i. ad Autolyc. c. 2.

25 In order to form a notion how far this division of gods could descend, and what an incredible depth of turpitude it reached, see _De Civ. Dei_, l. vi. c. 9, de officiis singulorum deorum. Its foulness prevents any adequate representation of it.

26 See S. Thomas, _Summa_, 2, 2, q. 94, a. 4.

27 Of this whole polytheism in the mass S. Paul pronounces the judgment: Οἵτινες μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει, καὶ ἐσεβάσθησαν καὶ ἐλάτρευσαν τῇ κτίσει παρὰ τὸν κτίσαντα. Rom. i. 25. And the Psalmist adds: Ὅτι πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια; ὁ δὲ Κύριος τοὺς οὐρανοὺς ἐποίησεν. Sept. xcv. 5. See also Ps. cv. 37.

28 See John xii. 31; xiv. 30; xvi. 11; Luke xxii. 53; x. 19; Apoc. xii. 9; Heb. ii. 14; 1 John v. 18; Ephes. vi. 12; ii. 2; 2 Cor. iv. 3.

29 These two subjects occupy respectively the first five and the second five books of S. Augustine’s _City of God_, where the argument is carried out in great detail.

30 Rom. i. 20. See the Stoical argument for the unity of the deity in Cic. _de Nat. Deor._ 2.

31 Tertullian _de Testimonio Animæ_, 2.

32 Οὔτω τοίνυν ἀλογωθέντων τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καὶ οὕτω τῆς δαιμονικῆς πλάνης ἐπισκιαζούσης τὰ πανταχοῦ, καὶ κρυπτούσης τὴν περὶ τοῦ ἀληθινοῦ Θεοῦ γνῶσιν. S. Athan. _de Incar._ 13.

33 See S. August. _de Civ. Dei_, viii. 24. “Immundi spiritus, eisdem simulacris arte illa nefaria colligati, cultorum suorum animas in suam societatem redigendo miserabiliter captivaverant.”

34 Called by S. Athan. ἡ τῶν δαιμόνων ἀπάτη—μανία—φαντασίαι. Thus _De Inc._ 47. πάλαι μὲν δαίμονες ἐφαντασιασκόπουν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους. προκαταλαμβάνοντες πηγὰς ἢ ποταμοὺς, ἢ ξύλα, ἢ λίθους, καὶ οὕτω ταῖς μαγγανείαις ἐξέπληττον τοὺς ἄφρονας. Νῦν δὲ τῆς θείας ἐπιφανείας τοῦ Λόγου γεγενημένης. πέπαυται τούτων ἡ φαντασία.

35 “Humana ante oculos fœde quam vita jaceret In terris, oppressa gravi sub religione,” &c. Lucret. i. 63.

“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.”

Virg. _Geo._ ii. 491.

36 Acts xvi. 16.

37 1 Cor. x. 21.

38 Tertullian, _Apologeticus_, 23; S. Athanas. _de Inc._ 48; S. Aug. _de Civ. Dei_, xxi. 6, who says, “Ut autem demones illiciantur ab hominibus, prius eos ipsi astutissima calliditate seducunt, vel inspirando eorum cordibus virus occultum, vel étiam fallacibus amicitiis apparendo, eorumque paucos discipulos suos faciunt, plurimorumque doctores. Neque enim potuit, nisi primum ipsis docentibus, disci quid quisque illorum appetat, quid exhorreat, quo invitetur nomine, quo cogatur, unde magicæ artes carumque artifices exstiterunt.”

39 Merivale, iii. 496.

40 Beugnot, _Destruction du Paganisme_, i. 8.

41 ῥώμη, strength; _ruma_, a mother’s breast.

42 Beugnot, i. 17.

43 Οἱ ἐγχώριοι θεοί.

44 S. Aug. _de Trin._ l. xv. c. 14, tom. viii. 984.

45 S. Cyril. Alex. tom. v. 1, pp. 544, 557 a.

46 S. Cyril. Alex. _in Joh._ x. p. 858 b.

47 Petav. _de Trin._ lib. viii. c. 7.

48 An exception must be made in favour of Persia, where the original monotheism was preserved with more or less corruption.

49 “Das Heidenthum ist nichts anderes als der gefallene und nicht wiedergeborne Mensch im Grossen.” Möhler, _Kirchengeschichte_, i. 169.

50 Suarez, _de Gratia_, Proleg. 4, cap. i. sec. 3.

51 Suarez, _de Gratia_, Proleg. cap. ii. sec. 3.

52 Kleutgen, _die Theologie der Vorzeit_, ii. p. 559.

53 Suarez, _de Grat._ Proleg. 4, cap. v. sec. 3.

54 Kleutgen, _die Theologie der Vorzeit_, vol. ii. 650.

55 This is called by S. Peter 1. i. 18 ἡ ματαία ἀναστροφὴ πατροπαράδοτος.

56 The apostle speaks here not of “wickedness,” but of a personal agent, “the wicked or malignant one;” as the context shows. “He who is born of God keeps himself, and the malignant one touches him not. We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the malignant one.” 1 John v. 18, 19.

57 Gal. iv. 4. τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου.

58 τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος. Rom. v. 14. “Forma futuri e contrario Christus ostenditur.” S. Aug. tom. x. 1335.

59 “Adam unus est, in quo omnes peccaverunt, quia non solum ejus imitatio peccatores facit, sed per carnem generans pœna: Christus unus est, in quo omnes justificentur, quia non solum ejus imitatio justos facit, sed per spiritum regenerans gratia.” S. Aug. tom. x. p. 12 c.

60 John xvii. 4.

61 S. Thomas, _Summa contra Gentiles_, l. i. c. 1.

62 John xviii. 37. “Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness unto the truth.”

63 Acts i. 8; Luke xxiv. 49.

64 See S. Aug. tom. iv. 1039 e. “Ipse ergo Adam,” &c.

65 Οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐσμὲν, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ κεῖται; οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἥκει, καὶ δέδωκεν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν ἵνα γινώσκωμεν τὸν ἀληθινόν; καὶ ἐσμὲν ἐν τῷ ἀληθινῷ, ἐν τῷ υἱῷ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. 1 Joh. v. 19. Two persons are here opposed to each other, ὁ πονηρός and ὁ ἀληθινός. Compare the Lord’s Prayer, ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ. Matt. vi. 13 and Joh. xvii. 14, 15. ἐγὼ δέδωκα αὐτοῖς τὸν λόγον σου, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ἐμίσησεν αὐτοὺς, ὅτι οὐκ εἰσὶν ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, καθὼς ἐγὼ οὐκ εἰμὶ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου. οὐκ ἐρωτῶ ἵνα ἀρῇς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα τηρησῇς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

66 Heb. iii. 1-6; Ephes. ii. 19-22; 1 Cor. iii. 9, 10-15; 2 Cor. vi. 16; 1 Peter ii. 4, 5.

67 Τοῦτο γὰρ ἐστὶ τὸ συνέχον τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὸ κήρυγμα. S. Chrys. in loc. Compare S. Irenæus, lib. i. c. 10. Τοῦτο τὸ κήρυγμα παρειληφυῖα, καὶ ταύτην τὴν πίστιν, ὡς προέφαμεν, ἡ Ἐκκλησία, καίπερ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ κόσμῳ διεσπαρμένη, ἐπιμελῶς φυλάσσει, ὡς ἕνα οἶκον οἰκοῦσα.

68 S. Aug. in Ps. ix. tom. iv. 51.

69 Ibid. in Ps. cxxxi. tom. iv. 1473.

70 Petavius on the Headship of Christ.

71 Passaglia _de Ecclesia_.

72 S. Cyprian _de Unitate_, 5.

73 All these five relations between Christ and the Church are mentioned in one passage of S. Paul, Ephes. v. 22-33.

74 Luke i. 35. Πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπί σε, καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου ἐπισκιάσει σοι. Acts i. 8. λήψεσθε δύναμιν, ἐπελθόντος τοῦ ἁγίου Πνεύματος ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς. Luke xxiv. 49. ἕως οὗ ἐνδύσησθε δύναμιν ἐξ ὕψους.

75 The Church is so called by S. Augustine.

76 These five are taken from Passaglia _de Ecclesia_, lib. i. cap. 3, p. 34, 5.

77 Compare S. Athanasius _cont. Arian. de Incarn._ p. 877 c.—καὶ ὅταν λέγῃ ὁ Πέτρος, ἀσφαλῶς οὖν γινωσκέτω πᾶς οἶκος Ἰσραὴλ ὅτι καὶ Κύριον καὶ Χριστὸν αὐτον ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τοῦτον τὸν Ἰησοῦν ὂν ὑμεῖς ἐσταυρώσατε, οὐ περὶ τῆς Θεότητος αὐτοῦ λέγει, ὅτι καὶ Κύριον αὐτὸν καὶ Χριστὸν ἐποίησεν, ἀλλὰ περὶ τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος αὐτοῦ, ἥτις ἐστι πᾶσα ἡ ἐκκλησία, ἡ ἐν αὐτῷ κυριεύουσα καὶ βασιλεύουσα, μετὰ τὸ αὐτὸν σταυρωθῆναι; καὶ χριομένη εἰς βασίλειαν οὐρανῶν, ἵνα συμβασιλεύσῃ αὐτῷ, τῷ δι᾽ αὐτὴν ἑαυτὸν κενώσαντι, καὶ ἀναλαβόντι αὐτὴν διὰ τῆς δουλικῆς μορφῆς.

78 S. Aug. serm. 267, tom. v. p. 1090 e.

79 Luke xxiv. 49 and John xvi. 13. ἐκεῖνος, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν; and 14, 15. ἐγὼ ἐρωτήσω τὸν Πατέρα, καὶ ἄλλον παράκλητον δώσει ὑμῖν, ἵνα μένῃ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας.

80 Plato.

81 πανταχοῦ συνάπτει καὶ συγκολλᾷ τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὴν ἀγάπην, θαυμαστήν τινα ξυνωρίδα. S. Chrys. 3d Hom. on Ephes. tom. xi. p. 16.

82 S. Aug. serm. 272, tom. v. p. 1104 c.

83 “Quid tibi fecit Ecclesia, ut eam velis quodammodo decollare? Tollere vis Ecclesiæ caput et capiti credere, corpus relinquere, quasi exanime corpus. Sine caussa capiti quasi famulus devotus blandiris. Qui decollare vult, et caput et corpus conatur occidere.” S. Aug. tom. v. p. 636.

84 S. Aug. in Ps. ci. tom. iv. p. 1105 d.

85 S. Augustine, tom. iv. p. 1677. “Elegit hic sibi thalamum castum, ubi conjungeretur Sponsus Sponsæ. Verbum caro factum est, ut fieret caput Ecclesiæ.”

86 By the “Gloria in excelsis,” &c. in the Mass.

87 Οὐδὲν γὰρ αὐτῶν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ σῶμα δύναται ποιεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ ὁμοίως ἕκαστον λείπεται εἰς τὸ ποιεῖν σῶμα, καὶ δεῖ τῆς συνόδου; ὅταν γὰρ τὰ πολλὰ ἓν γίνηται, τότε ἐστὶν ἓν σῶμα.... τὸ γὰρ εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι σῶμα ἐκ τοῦ ἡνῶσθαι ἢ μὴ ἡνῶσθαι γίνεται.... τῶν γὰρ μελῶν ἡμῶν ἕκαστον καὶ ἴδιαν ἐνέργειαν ἔχει καὶ κοινήν; καὶ κάλλος ὁμοίως καὶ ἴδιον καὶ κοινόν ἐστιν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ δοκεῖ μὲν διηρῆσθαι ταῦτα, συμπέπλεκται δὲ ἀκιβῶς, καὶ θατέρου διαφθαρέντος καὶ τὸ ἕτερον συναπόλλυται. S. Chrys. on 1 Cor. xii. tom. x. pp. 269, 271, 273.

88 S. Aug. _Op. imp. contr. Julian._ lib. ii. tom. x. p. 1018 d.

89 “Grana illa quæ modo gemunt inter paleas, quæ massam unam factura sunt, quando area in fine fuerit ventilata.” S. Aug. in Ps. cxxvi. tom. iv. p. 1429.

90 See Origen on Matt. xiv. 17. καὶ ὁ κτίσας γε ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς τὸν κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ὃς ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων ἄῤῥεν αὐτὸν ἐποίησε, καὶ θῆλυ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, ἓν τὸ κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ἀμφοτέροις χαρισάμενος; καὶ καταλέλοιπέ γε διὰ τὴν ἐκκλήσιαν κύριος ὁ ἀνὴρ πατέρα ὃν ἑώρα, ὅτε ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπῆρχε, καταλέλοιπε δὲ καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς ὢν τῆς ἂνω Ἱερουσαλὴμ, καὶ ἐκολλήθη τῇ ἐνταῦθα καταπεσούσῃ γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ, καὶ γεγόνασιν ἐνθάδε οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν. διὰ γὰρ αὐτὴν γέγονε καὶ αὐτὸς σὰρξ, ὅτε ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ οὐκέτι γέ εἰσι δύο, ἀλλὰ νῦν μία γέ ἐστι σὰρξ, ἔπει τῇ γυναικὶ λέγεται τὸ, ὑμεῖς δέ ἐστε σῶμα Χριστοῦ καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους, οὐ γάρ ἐστί τι ἰδιᾳ Χριστοῦ σῶμα ἕτερον παρὰ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν οὖσαν σῶμα αὐτοῦ, καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους. καὶ ὁ Θεός γε τούτους τοὺς μη δύο ἀλλὰ γεγομένους σάρκα μίαν συνέζευζεν, ἐντελλόμενος ἵνα ἄνθρωπος μὴ χωρίζη τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου.

91 As S. Irenæus, v. 20. “Omnibus unum et eundem Deum Patrem præcipientibus, et eamdem dispositionem incarnationis Filii Dei credentibus, et eamdem donationem Spiritus scientibus;” and S. Aug. tom. v. app. p. 307 f. “Ecce iterum humanis divina miscentur, id est, Vicarius Redemtoris: ut beneficia quæ Salvator Dominus inchoavit peculiari Spiritus Sancti virtute consummet, et quod ille redemit, iste sanctificet, quod ille acquisivit, iste custodiat.” This striking sermon is quoted by Petavius as genuine, but placed by the Benedictines in the appendix.

92 There is in the original words here something which is lost both in the Vulgate and in the English translation. First, c. xiv. 6. ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια, καὶ ἡ ζωή; then c. xvi. 13. ὅταν δὲ ἔλθη ἐκεῖνος τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ὁδηγίσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν. As Christ is the ὁδὸς, so His Spirit is the ὁδηγῶν. “Ego sum via et veritas; ille vos docebit omnem veritatem,” does not render this: and as little, “I am _the way_, the truth, and the life; He shall _lead_ you into all truth.”

93 S. Aug., quoted above in note.

94 This word is used as the equivalent of λόγος, _ratio_, _Vernunft_, in man.

95 See Petavius _de Trin._ vii. 7, where he states it to be the general belief of the ancient writers that a new and _substantial_ presence of the Holy Ghost began at the day of Pentecost.

96 S. Aug. tom. v. 398 g.

97 S. Aug. tom. iii. pp. 2, 527.

98 Ib. tom. v. 47.

99 Ib. tom. v. 392 e.

100 S. Thomas in Joh. i. lec. 10: “Nam unitas Spiritus Sancti facit in Ecclesia unitatem.”

101 ὁδηγεῖν.

102 Epist. 185. tom. ii. p. 663. “Proinde Ecclesia Catholica sola corpus est Christi, cujus ille caput est, Salvator corporis sui. Extra hoc corpus neminem vivificat Spiritus Sanctus, quia sicut ipse dicit Apostolus; Caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum, qui datus est nobis. Non est autem particeps divinæ caritatis, qui hostis est unitatis. Non habent itaque Spiritum Sanctum qui sunt extra Ecclesiam.”

103 Matt. xxiv. 14.

104 See Möhler, _Die Einheit in der Kirche_, p. 176. “Der Körper des Menschen ist eine Offenbarung des Geistes, der in ihm sein Dasein bekundet, und sich entwickelt. Der Staat ist eine nothwendige Erscheinung, eine Bildung und Gestaltung des von Gott gegebenen κοινωνικόν.”

105 Möhler, _Einheit_, &c. p. 8. “Wie das Leben des sinnlichen Menschen nur einmal unmittelbar aus der Hand des Schöpfers kam, und wo nun sinnliches Leben werden soll, es durch die Mittheilung der Lebenskraft eines schon Lebenden bedingt ist, so sollte das neue göttliche Leben ein Auströmen aus den schon Belebten, die Erzeugung desselben sollte ein Ueberzeugung sein.”

106 For instance, two passages on the Incarnation in S. Cyril of Alexandria, tom. iv. pp. 819-824 and 918-920, set forth the whole sequence of the Fall and the Restoration, and how wonderfully the gift of the Spirit replaces what was lost in Adam.

107 See S. Cyril. Alex. _in Joan._ p. 997 e. ἐν δὲ τούτοις ἤδη πως καὶ φυσικὴν τὴν ἑνότητα δεικνῦναι σπουδάζομεν, καθ᾽ ἢν ἡμεῖς τε ἀλλήλοισ καὶ οἱ πάντες Θεῷ συνδούμεθα; κ.τ.λ.; and p. 998. τίς γὰρ ἂν καὶ διέλοι καὶ τῆς εἰς ἀλλήλους φυσικῆς ἑνώσεως ἐξοικέοι τοὺς δι᾽ ἑνὸς τοῦ ἁγίου σώματος πρὸς ἑνότητα τὴν εἰς Χριστὸν ἀναδεσμουμένουσ?

108 S. Iren. iv. c. 33, 7. ἀνακρινεῖ τοὺς τὰ σχίσματα ἐργαζομένους, κένους ὄντας τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἀγάπης, καὶ τὸ ἴδιον λυσιτελὲς σκοποῦντας, ἀλλὰ μὴ τὴν ἕνωσιν τῆς ἐκκλησίας; καὶ διὰ μικρὰς καὶ τὰς ὑψούσας αἰτίας τὸ μέγα καὶ ἔνδοξον σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ τέμνοντας καὶ διαιροῦντας, καὶ ὅσον τὸ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἀναιροῦντας, τοὺς εἰρήνην λαλοῦντας καὶ πόλεμον ἐργαζομένους, ἀληθῶς διυλίζοντας τὸν κώνωπα, καὶ τὸν κάμηλον καταπίνοντας.

109 Acts ii. 3. ὤφθησαν αὐτοῖς διαμεριζόμεναι γλῶσσαι ὡσεὶ πυρὸς, ἐκάθισέ τε ἐφ᾽ ἕνα ἕκαστον αὐτῶν, καὶ ἐπλήσθησαν ἅπαντες Πνεύματος ἁγίου.

110 “Non jam visitator subitus, sed perpetuus consolator et habitator æternus.” S. Aug. tom. v. d. app. p. 307.

111 Con. Crescou. lib. ii. c. 14, tom. ix. p. 418. “Hic Spiritus sanctus veniens in eos tale signum primitus dedit, ut qui eum acciperent linguis omnium gentium loquerentur, quia portendebat Ecclesiam per omnes gentes futuram, nec quemquam accepturum Spiritum sanctum nisi qui ejus unitati copularetur. Hujus fontis largo atque invisibili flumine lætificat Deus civitatem suam, quia Propheta dixit: Fluminis impetus lætificat civitatem Dei. Ad hunc enim fontem nullus extraneus, quia nullus nisi vita æterna dignus accedit. Hic est proprius Ecclesiæ Christi.”

112 Ἡ ἀλήθεια: there seems to be no one word in the New Testament of more pregnant signification than this, which in a great number of instances bears the sense of _the whole body of the divine revelation_. The root of this meaning would seem to lie in Christ Himself, who as the Divine Word is the αὐτοαλήθεια, the εἰκὼν of the Father; on which title S. Athanasius and S. Cyril of Alexandria specially dwell, while S. Hilary expresses the Blessed Trinity by “Æternitas in Patre, Species in Imagine, Usus in Munere,” on which see S. Augustine’s magnificent comment, _de Trin._ l. vi. 10, p. 850; and as our Lord is from eternity the Truth, so in and by His Incarnation He becomes in a special sense the Truth to man: ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια, καὶ ἡ ζωή: and so the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, “ille ineffabilis quidam complexus Patris et Imaginis” (S. Aug.), is τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, who ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν: and again, 1 John v. 6, τὸ Πνεῦμά ἐστι τὸ μαρτυροῦν, ὅτι τὸ Πνεῦμά ἐστιν ἡ ἀλήθεια. This is the first meaning. Secondly, as derived from it, the Truth is the whole body of the divine revelation. In this sense it is used in a great many places of S. John’s Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles, _e.g._ John i. 14, 17; viii. 31; xvi. 13; xvii. 17; xviii. 37; 1 John ii. 21; iii. 19; 2 John i. 1-3; 3 John 3, 4, 8, 12; 1 Tim. iii. 15, where, because this whole body of truth dwells in the Church of Christ and there alone, it is emphatically called the “House of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the Truth;” 1 Tim. ii. 3; Rom. xv. 8; 2 Cor, iv. 2; xiii. 8; Gal. iii. 1; v. 7; Ephes. i. 13; iv. 21-24 (in which passage the Apostle contrasts heathen man with Christian, the one, τὸν φθειρόμενον κατὰ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τῆς ἁπάτης; the other, τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ὁσιότητι τῆς ἀληθείας, and again, the mass of the Gentiles, as τὰ ἔθνη περιπατεῖ ἐν ματαιότητι τοῦ νοὸς αὐτῶν, ἐσκοτισμένοι τῇ διανοίᾳ, while Christians ἐν αὐτῷ ἐδιδάχθητε, καθώς ἐστιν ἀλήθεια ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ); 2 Thess. ii. 8-13; 1 Tim. iv. 3; vi. 5; 2 Tim. ii. 15, 25; iii. 7, 8; iv. 4; Titus i. 1 and 14; Heb. x. 26; Jac. v. 19; 1 Pet. i. 22; 2 Pet. ii. 2. In this second sense, as signifying the whole body of the divine revelation, the expression has been searched for, but without success, in the Gospels of S. Matthew, S. Mark, and S. Luke, and in the Acts.

Thirdly, as the effect of this revelation to man, the Truth signifies uprightness, as equivalent to justice or sanctity, in the individual.

Fourthly, it means sincerity, absence of hypocrisy: and Fifthly, correspondence to fact.

In the Apocalypse our Lord is designated “the holy, the true,” “the Amen, the Witness faithful and true,” the rider of the white horse, “called faithful and true,” “whose name is the Word of God.” iii. 7, 14; xix. 11.

113 “La creatura, la più amabile, la più amata, e la più amante di Dio.” S. Alfonso, _Gran Mezzo della Preghiera_, p. 280.

114 Acts ii. 38.

115 “Non te fefellit sponsus tuus: non te fefellit qui suo sanguine te dotavit.” S. Aug. tom. v. 1090 b.

116 “Quod tunc faciebat unus homo accepto Spiritu sancto, ut unus homo linguis omnium loqueretur, hoc modo ipsa unitas facit, linguis omnibus loquitur. Et modo unus homo in omnibus gentibus linguis omnibus loquitur, unus homo, caput et corpus, unus homo, Christus et Ecclesia, vir perfectus, ille sponsus, illa sponsa. Sed erunt, inquit, duo in carne una; judicia Dei vera, justificata in idipsum: propter unitatem.” S. Aug. in Ps. xviii. 2, tom. iv. 85 f.

117 Ephes. iv. 11-16. ἀληθεύοντες ἐν ἀγάπῃ. Joh. xvii. 19. ἡγιασμένοι ἐν ἀληθείᾳ.

118 1 Cor. xii. 12. οὕτω καὶ ὁ Χριστός.

119 So says the great maintainer of episcopal power, S. Cyprian, in his famous aphorism: “Episcopatus unus est, cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur.”

120 Matt. xxiv. 14.

121 Rom. x. 15.

122 ἡ παράδοσις. It will be shown hereafter that the four great writers, Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, unanimously refer to Tradition in this sense.

123 See S. Irenæus, ii. 1. expressly stating this of S. Mark’s and S. Luke’s Gospel, and of the Apostles generally: “quod (Evangelium) quidem tunc præconaverunt, postea vero per Dei voluntatem in Scripturis nobis tradiderunt;” which is repeated by Euseb. _Hist._