The Legacy of Greece. Various
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most students a broad chasm between the Stoics and the Christians, ignores the later Greek philosophy of religion altogether, and traces Christian dogma back to Palestine, with which it has very little connexion.
Our sense of continuity is dulled in another way. There is a tendency to isolate certain aspects of Hellenic life and thought as characteristic, and to stamp others, which are equally found among the ancient Greeks, as untypical and exceptional. In the sphere of religion, with which we are concerned in this essay, we are bidden to regard Plato and Euripides as rebels against the national tradition, and not as normal products of their age and country. I do not feel at liberty to pick and choose in this fashion. A national character may be best exemplified in its rebels, a religion in its heretics. If Nietzsche was right in calling Plato a Christian before Christ, I do not therefore regard him as an unhellenic Greek. Rather, I trace back to him, and so to Greece, the religion and the political philosophy of the Christian Church, and the Christian type of mysticism. If Euripides anticipated to an extraordinary degree the devout agnosticism, the vague pantheism, the humanitarian sentiment of the nineteenth (rather than of the twentieth) century, I do not consider that he was a freak in fifth-century Athens, but that Greece showed us the way even in paths where we have not been used to look to her for guidance. I am equally reluctant to assume, without evidence, that the later Platonism, whether we call it religion or philosophy, is unhellenic. It is quite unnecessary to look for Asiatic influences in a school which clung close to the Attic tradition. It is more to the purpose to show how a religious philosophy of mystical revelation and introspection grew naturally out of the older nature-philosophies, just as in our own day metaphysics and science have both been driven back upon the theory of knowledge and psychology. It should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that ‘Know thyself’ passed for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical period, or that Heracleitus revealed his method in the words ‘I searched myself’.
We shall come presently to certain parts of our modern heritage which are not Greek either by origin or by affinity. These will not be found in Euripides or Plato any more than in Herodotus or Sophocles. But some developments of religion which our Hellenists particularly dislike, and are therefore anxious to disclaim as alien to Greek thought and practice, such as asceticism, sacramental magic, religious persecution, and timid reliance on authority, are maladies of the Greek spirit, and came into the Church from Hellenistic and not from Jewish sources. It was Cleanthes who wished to treat Aristarchus as the Church treated Galileo, for anticipating Galileo’s discovery. It was Plutarch, or rather his revered father, who said, ‘You seem to me to be handling a very great and dangerous subject, or rather to be raising questions which ought not to be raised at all, when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reasons and proofs for everything. The ancient and ancestral faith is enough; and if on one point its fixed and traditional character be disturbed, it will be undermined and no one will trust it’. It is true that Celsus accused the Christians of saying, ‘Do not inquire; only believe.’ But this was not the attitude of Clement and Origen, still less of that most courageous pioneer St. Paul; it was rather the attitude of the average devout pagan. At this time the defence of popular superstition was no longer a matter of mere policy but of heartfelt need. Marcus Aurelius was a great immolator of white cows. The Christians were disliked, not as superstitious, but as impious. Alexander of Abunoteichos expelled ‘Christians and Epicureans’ by name from his séances. Lucian is the Voltaire of a credulous age. As for sacerdotal magic, Ovid explicitly ascribed the ex opere operato doctrine to the Greeks.
Graecia principium moris fuit; illa nocentes
impia lustratos ponere facta putat,
a nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis
fluminea tolli posse putatis aqua.
The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of the classical culture. It is neither Asiatic nor mediaeval in its essential character. It is not Asiatic; Christianity is the least Oriental of all the great religions. The Semites either shook it off and reverted to a Judaism purged of its Hellenic elements, or enrolled themselves with fervour under the banner of Islam, which Westcott called ‘a petrified Judaism’. Christian missions have had no success in any Asiatic country. Nor is there anything specifically mediaeval about Catholicism. It preserved the idea of Roman imperialism, after the secular empire of the West had disappeared, and even kept the tradition of the secular empire alive. It modelled all its machinery on the Roman Empire, and consecrated the Roman claim to universal dominion, with the Roman law of maiestas against all who disputed its authority. Even its favourite penalty of the ‘avenging flames’ is borrowed from the later Roman codes. It maintained the official language of antiquity, and the imperial title of the autocrat who reigned on the Seven Hills. Nor were the early Christians so anxious as is often supposed to disclaim this continuity. At first, it is true, their apologetic was directed to proving their continuity with Judaism; but Judaism ceased to count for much after the destruction of the Holy City in A. D. 70, and the second-century apologists appeal for toleration on the ground that the best Greek philosophers taught very much the same as what Christians believe. ‘We teach the same as the Greeks’, says Justin Martyr, ‘though we alone are hated for what we teach.’ ‘Some among us’, says Tertullian, ‘who are versed in ancient literature, have written books to prove that we have embraced no tenets for which we have not the support of common and public literature.’ ‘The teachings of Plato’, says Justin again, ‘are not alien to those of Christ; and the same is true of the Stoics.’ ‘Heracleitus and Socrates lived in accordance with the divine Logos’, and should be reckoned as Christians. Clement says that Plato wrote ‘by inspiration of God’. Augustine, much later, finds that ‘only a few words and phrases’ need be changed to bring Platonism into complete accord with Christianity. The ethics of contemporary paganism, as Harnack shows, with special reference to Porphyry, are almost identical with those of the Christians of his day. They differ in many points from the standards of 500 years earlier and from those of 1,500 years later, but the divergences are neither racial nor credal. Catholic Christianity is historically continuous with the old civilization, which indeed continued to live in this region after its other traditions and customs had been shattered. There are few other examples in history of so great a difference between appearance and reality. Outwardly, the continuity with Judaism seems to be unbroken, that with paganism to be broken. In reality, the opposite is the fact.
This most important truth has been obscured from many causes. The gap in history made by our educational tradition has been already mentioned. And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an unfortunate bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal, and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative character of fashionable life in the capital. The modern Church historian, as Mr. Benn says, has gathered his experience in a college quadrangle or a cathedral close, and knows little enough about his own country, next to nothing about what morality was in the Middle Ages, and nothing at all about what it still is in many parts of Europe. In the most recent books, however, there is a real desire to hold the scales fairly, and Christianity has nothing to fear from an impartial judgement.
There is also an assumption, which we find even in such learned writers as Harnack and Hatch, that the Hellenic element in Christianity is an accretion which transformed the new religion from its original purity and half-paganized Europe again. They would like to prove that underneath Catholicism was a primitive Protestantism, which owed nothing to Greece. The truth is that the Church was half Greek from the first, though, as I shall say presently, the original Gospel was not. St. Paul was a Jew of the Dispersion, not of Palestine, and the Christianity to which he was converted was the Christianity of Stephen, not of James the Lord’s brother. His later epistles are steeped in the phraseology of the Greek mysteries. The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Fourth Gospel are unintelligible without some knowledge of Philo, whose theology is more Greek than Jewish. In the conflict about the nature of the future life, it was the Greek eschatology which prevailed over the Jewish. St. Paul’s famous declaration, ‘We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal’, is pure Platonism