The beginnings of Christianity

Preface

The studies and discourses that are herein offered to the public deal with some general conditions of Christian Hfe in the first three centuries of our era. Though already printed, at intervals and amid the pressure of grave academic duties, it is hoped that a certain unity of doctrine, purpose, and interest will not be found wanting to their collection as a series. In one way or another they illustrate certain phases and circumstances of those wonderful centuries before Constantine the Great, when the constitution and the institutions of the new rehgious society were developing on all sides within the vast Empire of Rome. The teachings of Jesus Christ were the pure, sweet leaven that permeated the decaying and unhappy society of antiquity, saved from its mass of corruption some germs of goodness and truth, of beauty and justice, and strengthened the State against those shocks that would otherwise have reduced it to primaeval barbarism. A perennial charm must therefore attach to any narrative of the problems and vicissitudes of this era. This is particularly true of the sufferings of the infant churches, and the social changes their rapid growth could not fail to work in the Roman society that seemed to contain them, but of which,

vii viii PREFACE.

unknown to it, they were themselves the containing and sustaining soul, according to an admirable saying of the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetus.

It is not without some diffidence and a clear sense of the shortcomings of these pages that the author commits them to the indulgence of his readers.

At the same time he seizes the occasion to thank the American Catholic Quarterly Review, the Ave Maria, the Josephite, the Catholic Times, the New Century, and the Catholic University Bulletin for the courteous permission to reprint articles that appeared originally in those publications.

Thomas J. Shahan.

Catholic University of America,

Washington, D. C, July 15, 1903.

Contents

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Preface • vii

A Bishop of Rome in the Time of Domitian (a.d.

I

When the apostles went forth to teach all nations the doctrine of the crucified Jesus, nearly all earthlypower was possessed by the City of Rome. In the course of eight hundred years she had grown from a Httle stone fort on the Palatine to the most powerful and perfect state the world has yet seen. From the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from the Rhine and the Danube to the Cataracts of the Nile, her will was supreme; and if she recognized these hmits, it was because beyond them there was little worth fighting for. Step by step, piecemeal, she had put together this massa imperii, subduing first the little towns in the surrounding plains and hills, and then breaking in turn the power of Macedonia and Carthage, of Mediterranean Asia and Parthia, of Northern Africa and Egypt, until there remained but one symbol of universal dominion — the Eagles of Rome; one supreme owner of the habitable earth and arbiter of civiHzed mankind — the Roman people. By centuries of self-sacrifice and endurance, by prodigies of patience and wisdom, by a rock-hke confidence in their city, by a kind of kenosis of self in favor of the common weal, by frugahty and foresight, these shepherds, herders, vintners, and kitchen-gardeners made themselves heirs of the vast immemorial Oriental despotisms of Egypt, Assyria, and Parthia, with a hundred minor kingdoms. The same virtues made them the masters of Gaul, Spain, and Britain, i.e., of the most fertile soil of Europe and of the two great rivers that almost bind the Black Sea to the Atlantic — ^the Rhine and the Danube.

All the golden streams of the world's commerce flowed now to one poHtical centre, bearing Homeward with equal thoroughness all the confluents of art, hterature, and luxury. The glorious dreams of Alexander the Great were translated into realities when Roman '^Conquistadori" sat at Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, Saragossa, Lyons, and York. In the eventful struggle for the Mediterranean that began with the Great Persian War the first epoch was fittingly closed by the defeat of the Orient and the creation of a self-conscious Occident. But scarcely had the City of Rome enslaved the universal earth when the chains of her own slavery were forged at her own hearth. The noise of falling kingdoms alternates with the uproar of civil discord during the century that precedes the birth of Christ, and when these ever-memorable conflicts are over, the power of Csesar is securely anchored. All the reins of empire are in the hands o£ the young Octa^dus. For a while Csesar will call himself only princeps, the foremost citizen of the city; for a while the Senate holds a formal but unsubstantial equality. All the great magistracies of the City are centred now in Csesar and his heirs. The scarred legions of a hundred battle-fields are his; his the richest provinces, uncontrolled revenues and fleets; his, too, the legislative power, since the servile Senate no longer dares to refuse registration of every desire or suggestion of Csesar. Wearied of self-government, with every enemy prostrate, at the acme of her glory and power, Rome abandoned all to the hands of one man, made perpetual and irrevocable that dictatorship to wliich in the past she had occasionally, but only occasionally, entrusted her supreme interests. The world, governed directly and immediately by Rome, reacted in turn upon the proud City, and where once a race of sturdy Italian freemen administered an humble commonwealth upon ancestral soil, there arose a new cosmopolitan government in which all the passions, vices, and interests of the captive world had a growing share.

Flattery and corruption, ambition and hatred and envy, stood guard around the imperial throne. The poHshed and conscienceless Greek, the frivolous and boastful Gaul, the debauched Syrian, an almost nameless body of ex-slaves, were the true rulers of the world. The original Roman people had in great part made way for them, being cut off in long foreign wars, greatly decimated in the civil struggles that brought about the fall of the Republic, or hopelessly confounded with the descendants of those captives and foreigners that Rome had been absorbing during more than a century of universal conquest.

But the City in turn fascinated all who came in contact with her. She hfted men to her own high level. Those born to hate her became her humble slaves, ready to die for one whom the world now called the Golden City, the City Eternal, the Royal Queen, to whose ''Genius" all the deities of all the races had done homage, and whose astoimding 'Tortune" dominated the imagination of all. Indeed, well might they call her the Golden City, the City Eternal! The stranger who entered her gates walked entranced through long rows of marble palaces, the happy homes of victorious generals, powerful lawyers, merchant-princes, when they were not hired out to a mob of Oriental kings and potentates. Splendid porticoes, temples, and baths dotted the City, and her public squares or fora were filled with forests of statues. Masterpieces of art and the curios of all past or conquered civilizations were to be seen at every turn — the fruits of foreign skill, or rather of a long robbery of the world, carried on with iron persistency for centuries. If this Rome was the abode of an army of spies and informers, she was also the home of literature and art and general human culture, such an abode as no city has ever been ; for the relations of London to England, or Paris to France, express but feebly the intellectual supremacy of the City in the palmy days of her greatness. Within her walls she sheltered perhaps a milUon and a half of people, but her empire was over two thousand miles long and over three thousand miles broad, with a calculated population of one hundred to one hundred and twenty milhons, and a subdued and docile territory in extent somewhat more than one-half that of the United States before 1870.

One may well wonder how this huge mass of empire, made up so late, by force, out of so much wreckage of nations, states, and races, could be governed with success. Rome was not a Adctorious nation, but a victorious city, and where she could she introduced her own municipal institutions, admirably fitted, as a rule, to the local circumstances of antique hfe. Then she was no doctrinaire, and where the native fierceness or raw simphcity of the vanquished forbade her usual policy, she governed them in a way suited to their temper and her real power. Her provinces were usually complexus of cities, each responsible for its own suhurhium, and in each province the chief Roman magistrate, whatever his title, wielded the entire power of Rome, civil and mihtary. He governed immediately and directly in the interests of the City, which looked on the whole world as the ^^farm of the Roman people," precisely as any subject city of hers looked on its suburban territory. These interests demanded peace and prudent administration of the sources of revenue; hence the increase of population and of the general welfare of the great provinces in the century or two that followed the birth of Christ. From the Golden Milestone in the very heart of Rome there branched out to the ends of her empire a huge network of communication, great roads paved with basaltic or lava blocks, some remnants of which yet remain and show the deep ruts of the chariot- wheels or the heavy trucks that for centuries rattled over them, bearing countless thousands on purposes of state or commerce or curiosity, or transferring war material and the rare products of the far Orient. The government post and a system of inns completed the means of transit, which was so perfect that only in our own day has it been surpassed by the discovery of the uses of steam. All this, however, was subservient to one paramount influence for unity — the Greek tongue. While the Roman kept the Latin for the use of camp and law, of administration and commerce, he adopted the Greek as the vehicle of poHte intercourse. For three or four centuries it had been the language of authority in the Orient and of refinement everywhere. Even the Jews had submitted to its charm, and outside of Judaea, in Greek lands at least, preached the Law of Moses in the accents of Homer.

The final result of such conditions could only be the gradual extinction of all national peculiarities — the cliief object of Rome, or rather of the Caesars, who aimed henceforth at a general world-citizenship, an organization of humanity under the benign direction of that City which the gods, or fate, or her own fortune and power had made supremely responsible for the welfare of men. Velleities of national independence were crushed out, as at Jerusalem, and anomalies of national religions, Hke the Druids, were sternly and thoroughly suppressed. The worsliip of the imperial '' Genius" and the general acceptance of the Roman jurisprudence, with its uniform and almost mathematical equity, helped on this process of assimilation. And when we remember the colonization en masse of abandoned or ruined cities, the generous extension of the Roman citizensliip, the cementing action of commerce, and the levelling influence of the legions, we cease to wonder that before Jesus Christ was born, pohtically the low places were filled up, the high mountains laid low, and the social ground made ready for a new city — the city of Man or the city of God, that was the problem of the future. The Peloponnesian War had wiped out all difference between Dorian and Ionian. The campaigns of Alexander had opened the Orient to Greek culture, and hellenized the enormous basin of the Mediterranean as well as the great pathways to the Orient. The last act in the preparation of that poHtical unity which facilitated the success of the Gospel was the one that placed all earthly power in the hands of Rome. It was the end and acme of state-building in antiquity, and furnished the needed basis for the subhme social and religious revolution then at hand.

How slow and uncertain might have been the spread of the Christian rehgion if its apostles had been obHged at every step to deal with new governments, new prejudices, new languages! Hence the Christian Fathers saw in the splendid unity of the empire something providential and divine. The elder Pliny might imagine that this unity was the work of the gods bestowing pohte intercourse and civiUzation on all mankind, but Christian writers hke Origen (contra Celsum, II. 30) and Prudentius (contra Symmachum, II. 609) saw in it the removal of the most difficult obstacles to the propagation of Christianity, viz., the diversity of language and the destruction of national barriers. When St. Paul tells us (Rom. x. 18): ^'Verily their sound hath gone forth into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world/ ^ he expresses a fact which the Christian society has always looked upon as an historical marvel, a prima fade evidence of the innate truth and charm of the apostolic preaching. In his apology against Celsus the erudite Origen appeals to the character of the apostles and to their circumstances as in itself a strong proof of the divine origin of Christianity.

A few poor fishermen, rustic and unlettered, go forth at the bidding of one of their countrymen to conquer for him, not the temporal authority, but, what is much more difficult, the spiritual mastery of this great Roman world! They are but a handful, and Jews at that, whom the masters of Roman literature delight in depicting as the most contemptible in the Roman state. They are of the lowest in a world where birth and wealth are everything, and they were born and bred in a remote and mountainous region, where those schemes of ambition that are easily nourished in great cities could scarcely suggest themselves to men. Their Master had died a felon's death, and they themselves had abandoned Him in the supreme hour, having hoped to the last that He would revive a temporal kingdom of Israel.

Yet suddenly they are filled with a boundless enthusiasm. The apparitions of Jesus have transformed them from rude Galilean fishermen into eloquent apostles of a universal religion. The men who could not watch an hour with their divine Master, much less withstand the taunts of the angry mob, are now fearless before the supreme council of their own national priesthood and boldly proclaim the basic principle of the new dispensation: ''It is better to obey God than men." Their discourse is strangely effective; hundreds and then thousands are carried away by it, and give up all to follow men whom but a brief while ago they passed without notice in the streets of Jerusalem. Severe persecution only strengthens them in their convictions, and before they are forced to flee the city they have converted to the society of Jesus Christ no insignificant number of the national clergy itself. Their speech and their counsel, when obliged to face great problems affecting immediately the future of this society of Christ, are stamped with a rare wisdom. In the days of transition from the old to the new, while the synagogue, in the words of St. Augustine, was breathing its last, they behaved towards it with piety and with that rare precision of tact and good sense that usually mark men of experience and judgment. The Acts tell us but little of those few years in which the apostles were founding the Church of Jerusalem, but what they reveal shows us men utterly different from the timid and doubting disciples whom Jesus led about in His hfetime, and whose rusticity and worldliness shine out so plainly in the gospels. But now they are men who have seen the risen Jesus in His glory, conversed with Him, been filled with His grace, and shared in the effusion of His holy spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

The hour comes when they must quit the Holy City and go out into a world they know not and which knows not them. Was it a light or indifferent thing for a Jew to abandon the Temple, which held all that he reputed dear and sacred? The oracles of God were there, and the pledges of His promises. There, too, were the solenm feasts of the only true religion upon earth ere the fulfilment of the prophecies. Thither came yearly from the ends of the world a multitude of Jews, to adore God after the consohng manner of their fathers. Its white walls and golden roofs shone afar from Moriah and gladdened the eyes of the weary pilgrim when they did not shine before his imagination. So deep were the roots which this extraordinary edifice had cast in the hearts of the chosen people that since its destruction, in spite of their sad vicissitudes, they have never ceased to weep bitter tears on the Friday of every week over the few remaining stones of its once proud walls. But these men of

Galilee, with never a spark of Gentile sympathies or Hellenism in their hearts, with no natural love for the cruel and oppressive eagles of Rome, go out forever from the one corner of earth that is dear to them, the sepulchres of their fathers, the homes of their families, the sites of the Resurrection and the Judgment, out into endless conflict and incalculable sufferings, out into a world of odious and repulsive idolatry. It was a sublime act of daring, and whoever reflects that neither before nor since has the hke been seen will not wonder that Christians have been prone from the beginning to surround this step with due veneration. Thereby the rehgion of Christ was carried beyond the boundaries of the Jewish state, and preached throughout the vast empire of Rome as the complement and perfection of Judaism, the alone-saving truth, the divine balm of doubt and spiritual unrest, and the saving ointment for a corrupting society. Soon wonderful missionaries are joined to the apostles — Barnabas and John, Marcus the Evangelist and Philip; married couples, too, like Andronicus and Junias, Aquila and Prisca; and in an incredibly brief time the crucified and risen Jesus has been preached on the fertile plains between the Euphrates and the Tigris, throughout the valleys and the tablelands of Syria and Asia Minor. His doctrine is known in the Delta of the Nile and up the great river in Ethiopia, in the

African oasis of Cyrene and in the island of Cyprus, in Spain and Gaul, and finally at Rome, where it was probably carried quicker than to any other site on earth. The bitterest enemy of the Christians, Saul, is converted by Jesus Himself, and made a vessel of election, thereby furnishing in one famous and superior person to the first feeble commimities an irresistible evidence of the truth and the power of their faith. If not many great and noble according to the world belong to this doctrine that is gainsaid everywhere, still men and women from every class of society are represented — ^those of Csesar^s household; the proconsul of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus; the noble women of Beroea; the principal women of Thessalonica ; Lydia, the seller of purple in Thyatira ; the physician Luke; the scholar Apollo; Dionysius, a judge of the Athenian Areopagus, as well as the nameless multitude who joined it in all the Jewries that stretched from the Tigris to the Tagus.

It is in vain that misguided men question the authority of the Acts of the Apostles, whence we learn the first conquests of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From one extravagant opinion to another they have been obliged to recede, until to-day what passes for enlightened criticism recognizes the general trustworthiness of this fascinating narrative. Its absolute rehability has never been doubted by a much greater authority, the Catholic Church, to which we owe the tradition of the text, and which is herself contemporaneous with the work. Even Renan, so ready to diminish or offset the analogies and the germs of the Church's constitution, cannot deny that the hand of St. Luke is visible in the book, that ''its view of the yet brief history of the Christian society is that of the official historians of the Court of Rome." It was read in the infant churches, which were not made up of inexperienced men of one race fixed to the soil, but were rather formed from a hundred nationahties, with a large proportion of Hellenistic Jews. These men were capable, by their tongue, their origin, and their personal experience, of detecting any imposture foisted upon them, if only by comparison with the numerous texts of this work circulated in the East and the West long before the end of the first century. St. John the Apostle was still alive, and to be consulted in Ephesus, or in any of the original sees of Asia Minor which he founded and nourished with special love.

It will not do to sneer at the Grecized Jews, at their archaic Macedonian dialect, or their uncouth pronunciation. Some remnants of inscriptions do not betray the culture of a numerous class, and long before the time of Christ there were Jews like the one whom Aristotle knew, Hellenes in all but blood.

The Asmonsean and Herodian families were often Greek at heart, and hundreds of such men were among the first disciples of the apostles. Could not the churches that produced St. Clement and the Areopagite, St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Justin, recognize a literary fraud that must have been attempted on an enormous scale? Or was that age so devoid of criticism to which we owe those perfect editions of the texts of Homer and Vergil, and so many other Greek and Latin classics, which modern scholarship aims at reproducing? Or were there wanting ripe scholars in the earliest Christian communities, men of standing and influence not unhke the Jew Philo, and that other Jew Josephus? Were not Apollo and Mark men of the rarest eloquence, the true propagandists, according to Renan? Could a confused and misleading story of the origin of the Church and their own share in it have easily obtained absolute currency during their lifetime and in their own communities, and leave behind no trace of the disturbances it necessarily created? Truly, the contradictions that follow the denial of the credibility of the Acts are so much greater than those supposed to arise from the ancient and universal belief, that we may safely wait until we are dispossessed by some arguments known to the law or the equity of imbiassed literary criticism.

II

What could it be that so charged the hearts of the apostles with unheard-of vigor and energy? What was the source of that calm, unchanging joy wliich shines from the pages of the genuine history and correspondence of the infant society? It was a colossal faith in the person of Jesus Christ and His works, His life, His doctrine, and His promises — no mere admiration of His conduct, no vague, undefined velleity of a remote imitation, no simple confidence in His power, sanctity, and future coming. It was a faith with an objective content, whose main elements and outlines are clearly set forth in the genuine writings of the apostles, faith in their mission by Him whom they never tired of preacliing, faith in the fidelity of His support and His ultimate victory, faith in the specific purpose of a society they were sent to " found and to estabhsh " in the words of the most ancient Christian writers, i.e., to organize as a self-propagating and self-preserving entity, in order to hand down to remotest times the history, doctrine, and authority of Jesus Christ. The apostles were no vapid dreamers, but men of action — elevated and transfigured, indeed, but with clear and fixed purposes that culminated in the estabhshment of a universal religious association. Hence in the New Testament one sees them everywhere; traveiling, preaching^ organizing little knots and bands of believers — an activity so marked that their immediate disciple, Clement of Rome, recalls it as their chief occupation.

This stupendous faith found expression in a personal devotion to Jesus Christ that ravished all souls and filled heart-weary multitudes with a presentiment of spiritual peace and refreshment to be had at the same source. The Temple of Janus was shut, it is true, but the external peace of Rome covered much mental commotion. '' 0 Csesar, in thy peace what things I suffer! " cries Epictetus. The minor political arenas of the world were closed, that mankind might for once watch the splendid game of world-government as conducted on a suitable scale upon the few acres of marly soil that spread on either side of the Tiber. The gods of the nations were without prestige, for they had not been able to hold their own against the fortune of Rome. The great philosophies offered consolation, as philosophy always does, but to a chosen few only, and in an insufficient way. The superb art of Greece had taken the road of exile. Henceforth it can only imitate — it will create no more. The sources of its inspiration are dried up; there is no longer in it any power of consecration. It is no longer a spiritual strength or a rehgious consolation, for the popular faith on which it stood has universally collapsed. The feeling of the powerful and opulent can be guessed from the bitter words of their chief writer, Tacitus, that man is the wretched toy of an insolent fate. The outlook of the statesman was so disheartening that Tiberius congratulated the Senate on the disruption of the Germanic Confederation of Maroboduus as an event of greater import than the Athenian defeat of Phihp, or the Roman victories over Pyrrhus or Antiochus. On this sated and wearied world the preaching of the apostles and their disciples made a vivid impression, with its assertion of a new kingdom and a new ruler in the yet unconquered province of the human heart. The eloquent universal praise and the steadfast adoration of this new personality, the great deeds done in His name, the assertion of His eternal kingship, the adhesion in every city of miscellaneous multitudes, convinced new multitudes that the person of Jesus was divine and worthy of all the devotion bestowed upon it. It was the intensity and eloquence of this devotion in St. Paul that nearly persuaded King Agrippa to become a Christian. In many a later persecution it was the personal devotion of the martyrs to Jesus Christ that moved the onlooking pagans to consider what manner of person He might be for whom men so joyfully laid down their lives. Who can read the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, especially that to the Romans, without being moved by the fine exalted mysticism of his speech, without feehng that a new and irresistible passion, the personal love of God for man and man for God, has been introduced among men, and that, like an atmosphere or a perfume, it must soon transform the hearts of all who admit it, and eventually renew from within every society in which its believers multiply?

The personal memories of Jesus worked marvels in the hearts of the apostles. To beheve this we do not need to recall the old tradition that the cheeks of Peter were furrowed by the tears that he shed when he recalled that divinely sad glance of Jesus. We do not need to recollect that Christ vouchsafed a personal apparition to St. Paul, as though this grace were needed to make him an equal apostle with the others. How could they ever forget the incomparable Master and Teacher with whom they had so long dwelt in sweet intimacy? They knew now that it was God Himself with whom they had crossed the hills of Galilee, who had walked with them through its valleys and its villages, who had sailed with poor fishing folk in their humble boats on Genesareth. With the compelling magic of affection they recalled surely His mien. His gestures. His gait, His sweet gravity, the liquid eyes, twin homes of love and sorrow, and that familiar speech that was wont to fight in the heart of every listener a flame of faith and love. He went about doing good, He spoke as one having power, grace was about Him as an atmosphere — how could the apostles fail to renew in those divinely efficient memories their hearts sore-tried in the multitudinous conflict that they were directing? What is hke unto memory? It is Hke the sword that reaches the innermost divisions of the soul, and pierces us in the remotest of our spiritual fortresses. Or again it is hke the wings of the morning on which we may fly from all that is Httle and vile and hemming, and rest in the bosom of God Himself.

The true sphere of man is himself, not the world about him, and his true wealth or poverty is the memories of the past, with their sweetness or their horror. Jesus knew that the memory of Himself would be for all time the most potent confirmation of faith. So He established on the last night of His earthly fife a simple rite, a frugal meal or banquet, fixing Himself its essentials. This He left not only to His apostles, but especially to all those who in future ages would heed their call and join themselves to His kingdom. Thus He f ocussed upon His person forever the attention of all mankind in that mystic moment when divine love emptied itself for love of man, and human hate outdid itself in the death of the God-Man. We can see from the earliest documents of Christianity that this mystic banquet was the great driving heart of the society, its vivifying sun, the secret of its inexhaustible strength. The Httle house-churches of Jerusalem, the upper chambers where the brethren met to break bread, the descriptions of such banquets in St. Paul, the confession of the Christian deaconesses to the Younger Phny, the pages of the earhest Christian writers, the numerous old frescoes of the Christian catacombs at Rome, and a long series of other indications, show that here was the chief source of the apostoHc energy, here Jesus dwelt forever among them. The momentary transfiguration on Thabor, seen by a few only, was now the daily joy of all, replete with infinite personal revelations, illuminations, and suggestions, to them who had known Him in the flesh.