Experience with the supernatural in early Christian times

Front matter

Esai teNal elie ie tnt er ene dit i = a? ene as ao a

Te van le ee feat olin |e al

Case, Shirley Jackson, 1872- 1947.

Preface

The Christians’ Bible is rich in miracles. Supernaturalism runs like a scarlet thread through the whole book from Genesis to Revelation. For centuries this phenomenon was contemplated with entire satisfaction by both laity and clergy. But in modern times a different way of thinking has been gaining favor. Many a Christian to-day passes hastily over the miracle stories in the Scriptures and dwells with greater satisfaction on the less spectacular portrayal of men’s moral ideals and spiritual struggles abundantly recorded in his sacred book. One whose inclinations move in this direction may sometimes feel at a loss to account for the prominence of the miraculous in Hebrew religion, and more particularly in early Christianity. Why did the advocates of the new religion concern themselves so extensively with the imagery of supernaturalism? To answer this question is the purpose of the present volume.

SHIRLEY JACKSON CASE University of Chicago, August I, 1929

Contents

EXPERIENCE WITH THE SUPERNATURAL IN EARLY CHRISTIAN TIMES

Chapter I An Age Of Supernaturalism

Tue sky hung low in the ancient world. Supernatural beings thronged the earth, crowding themselves uncomfortably into the society of mortals. In his description of Trimalchio’s banquet Petronius made a Cumean lady testify to such an abundance of divinities in the region where she resided that it was easier for her to meet a god than a man. As is usual with satirists, Petronius exaggerated, but only in the direction of the truth. Without seriously straining the hyperbole he might have said that the same conditions obtained generally throughout the Roman Empire.

If belief in a multiplicity of deities actively partictpating in an arbitrarily controlled world of human experience is taken to mean that men are “very religious,” then Paul was certainly correct in his appraisal of the Athenians (Acts 17:22). With equal propriety he might have applied the epithet to the peoples of Corinth, Ephesus, Antioch, or the Mediterranean lands at large in the age of Nero. Divinities were abundant and supernaturalism was rampant over the whole territory where Paul and his fellow-missionaries to the Gentiles sought to make the new Christian religion at home.

I

Gods were everywhere. Even among Jews, despite their strong monotheistic leanings, a wide variety of supernatural powers conditioned the experiences of men.

In Palestine, as elsewhere, the sky was so near to the earth that angels traversed the intervening space with the utmost ease and in a brief period of time. The Palestinian heavens had not yet been scrutinized by the hundred-inch eye that to-day necessitates the measurement of sidereal distances with the staggering yardstick of light-years. The ancient man had at hand no Outline of Science where he might learn that an angel, even though he were to travel at the undiminished speed of a shell projected from the most powerful cannon, would consume five hundred years in traversing the diameter of Neptune’s orbit, not to speak of the vast stretches of space lying beyond our relatively small solar system. Had the angel moved at the inconceivably greater speed of light — 186,000 miles per second— he would have required at least 50,000 years to fly from earth to that point in the heavens where God and his attendant spirits could dwell secure from the prying gaze of the twentieth-century telescope.

Just as the floor of heaven seemed scarcely higher than the tallest cedars on Lebanon, so also a lower world existed under ground not far below the surface of the earth. Intercourse with these nether regions was no less real than with heaven. The road to Hades was much traveled. Here all the spirits of deceased men took up their temporary abode. The people of that age were untroubled by any science of geology or geography. No Palestinian explorer had journeyed around the globe to discover that heaven and hell, as definite localities, must lie at a great variety of widely separated spots in the universe, as a spherical earth revolves on its axis in the course of a single day. The pious Jew in the time of Jesus had never been called upon to face the task of adjusting himself to a solar universe. For him both hell and heaven were as definitely local as the earth, and neither the question of distances nor the problem of time offered any difficulties for his way of thinking.

In this three-story world of popular Jewish imagery naturalism found no room to breathe. The most spacious quarters in this cosmic mansion were on the third floor where God and the angels resided. Also the appointments in the basement must have been conceived on a large scale. Provision had to be made in the lower regions for all dead men, whose numbers were rapidly multiplying with the passing of the centuries. In the intervening compartment, where mankind resided for a few brief years, not only was the space between ceiling and floor very shallow, but supernatural powers both from above and from beneath continually intruded upon this middle area. Man had no real privacy; angels and demons kept an ever watchful eye upon him. In fact, the forces of good and evil were thought to be so thoroughly at home on earth that they were quite properly engaged in a deadly struggle with one another for complete possession of the terrestrial regions. The natural world, in any modern sense of that term, was a conception quite unknown to popular Jewish thinking at the beginning of the Christian era. By common consent all of life’s most treasured experiences, and the solution of its gravest problems, were assigned to the sphere of the supernatural.

While Jews gave a great deal of attention to the plain business of correct living, they were careful to furnish all their religious traditions, practices, and ideals with a full set of divine sanctions. They maintained an elaborate system of worship in connection with their temple at Jerusalem, all in accordance with what they believed to be explicit instructions from heaven. Their priests were a special class set apart by God, and their sacrifices were established by divine appointment. The contributions made by the people to the support of their temple were not in the nature of voluntary offerings inspired by altruism or practised in the interests of self-discipline. They were taxes paid by decree of the King of Heaven, and therefore they were all the more gladly and meticulously rendered.

A conviction that the obligations of religion were Godimposed seemed to the Jew occasion for genuine gratitude. More than most people in the ancient world, the residents of Palestine took pleasure in believing | that deity was near at hand. To feel one’s self even temporarily removed from contact with the supernatural was ground for anxiety. On the contrary, when one was surest of God’s presence and favor, life took on its gayest and most festive character. The Jewish people truly rejoiced in the Lord, as the great festive seasons of their religious year amply attest. Back of all their feasts lay the fundamental notion that these occasions had been supernaturally ordered, and that they signified in the experience of the race the realization in some unique fashion of a contact between the human and the divine.

The Jews had been much more successful than many of their neighbors in devising a dependable machinery for securing the regular operation of supernatural power on behalf of mankind. They did not need to rely for divine assurances chiefly on some chance happening, like a great miracle; although the performance of a miracle, when God chose thus to manifest himself, was regarded with high esteem. In ancient times mighty works had been wrought by God and his representatives on the earth. The normal course of life had frequently been interrupted by marvelous displays of divine interference. The origin of the earth, the - genesis of the human family, and the whole historic process were given an emphatically supernatural interpretation. And the evidence of God’s presence in the affairs of the world was thought to be displayed in a very unusual manner in the history of the Hebrew people themselves. They were the great miracle race.

The supernatural element in ancient Hebrew history was amply exhibited in the Scriptures. Here one read that Abraham, the father of the Hebrews, had been explicitly commanded by God to leave his native country and take up residence in the land of Canaan. His career there and the success of his undertaking had been the special care of the deity. Sacred tradition represented that Jehovah was in constant communication with Abraham, thus sustaining him with promises of victory for his descendants and directing him with reference to his own immediate course of action. In two instances the divine intervention had especial significance. In the one case, it insured for Abraham a line of successors by giving to him and his wife Sarah a child in their old age when they were long past the normal period of fruitfulness. A second time, the divine favor expressed itself in the establishment of the rite of circumcision which was henceforth to be the distinctive mark of the Jewish race.

At many times in the history of Abraham’s descendants heaven was believed to have intervened on their behalf. The story of their deliverance from Egypt was shot through with supernaturalism. Moses had received from God a direct command to lead the afflicted people out of their bondage. When the Egyptians offered resistance God smote them with terrible plagues. When finally the Israelites escaped from their masters, the waters of the Red Sea parted, permitting the refugees to pass across on dry land, while their pursuers were engulfed in the waves. Similarly, when after long desert wanderings the Israelites arrived at their destination, the river Jordan held back its waters in order that they might pass dry-shod. While still in the wilderness God had given them for guidance a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and had delivered to Moses the two tables of stone on which God himself had inscribed the Decalogue. When death from thirst threatened the pilgrims in the desert, water was miraculously produced from a rock, or poisonous springs were made sweet, in consequence of Jehovah’s instructions to Moses. Starvation also was averted by the gift of manna from heaven. When the walled city of Jericho blocked entrance into Canaan, its fortifications were miraculously leveled. The Jew believed, on what seemed to him ample evidence, that his title to Palestine had been supernaturally guaranteed. Subsequent periods of history, particularly times of great crises, continued to display a supernatural ordering of events.

In the days of the Judges Jehovah had been very active in raising up leaders and in supervising their exploits. When the time had arrived for the establishment of a monarchy, he had taken care beforehand to provide a miraculously born prophet, Samuel, to give advice and direction to the nation in choosing its first king, Saul. David and his son Solomon had been especially sponsored by God, notwithstanding their manifest human weaknesses. Even when the nation was divided by revolution, and threatened with destruction from conquering armies of Egyptians, Babylonians, or Syrians, the Scriptures did not fail to show a golden thread of supernaturalism still manifest throughout the course of Jewish history. Prophets, who had been called forth to deliver words which God himself had placed upon their lips, encouraged the afflicted people with messages of divine authority. The hero also continued to be the man of miracle. The prophets Elijah and Elisha were famous wonder-workers. The pious Daniel in the den of lions remained unharmed by the ferocious beasts, and even the flames of the roaring furnace could do no harm to Jehovah’s faithful ones. | In a setting where all serious thinking about the greatest problems of life moved upon a dominantly supernatural plane, it is not surprising that also the maintenance of good government should have been thought the business of the deity. When properly constituted, church and state were essentially identical institutions for the Jew. He was never a precocious pupil in the school of practical politics. The more devoted he was to his traditional religion, the more difficult was it for him to reconcile himself to the order of things prevailing in Palestine when the country was ruled by the Romans. To one who believed sincerely that this territory was a holy land, which God had promised by irrevocable covenants to deliver to his chosen people for their perpetual possession, Roman domination seemed clearly to represent a temporary stay of the divine purpose. The oppressed nation needed and would be granted a supernatural restoration. This was the universal assumption, whether hope expressed itself in a fanatical outburst of revolutionary zeal like that of a Judas of Galilee, or in the program of the quietists who patiently awaited action by God himself, or in the flaming message of a reformer . like John the Baptist calling sinners to repentance in preparation for an impending Day of Judgment and a sudden establishment of the Kingdom of God.

For a people so thoroughly supernaturalistic in their thinking as were the Jews of Palestine at the beginning of the present era, they were singularly free from indulgence in magic and other gross displays of superstition that often marked the life of their Gentile neighbor. They were fortunate in possessing an elaborate institutional machinery for safeguarding and perpetuating supernatural power in their present experience. They were spared many of the inconveniences attending the operation of divine agencies in a Gentile society where superhuman forces had not been so well harnessed and so thoroughly subdued to the needs of an organized community. While miracles played an important role in Hebrew tradition, they were not now relied upon supremely for guidance in daily living. In this area of interest the study of Scripture, attendance upon the synagogue services, the instructions of the oral law received from successive generations of rabbinical scholars, all provided a much more sane, normal, and dependable guide for the shaping of ideals and the determination of character. But it would be a grave error to imagine that Jewish religionists in the time of Jesus had any thought of abandoning supernaturalism

AN AGE OF SUPERNATURALISM II for what a modern world might call an empirically based attack upon the problems of life and conduct.

According to the Jewish way of thinking, superhuman care surrounded one from the moment of birth to the hour of death, and continued in the life beyond the grave. Every male child on the eighth day was circumcised in accordance with the covenant that God had made with Abraham in a remote antiquity. The training given to the child in the course of his development was all derived from the body of divine wisdom that had been deposited in the sacred books. The life of the adult conformed to the same body of supernatural instruction, neglect of which was sure to invite God’s wrath. Satan and his demons were believed to be just as real and ever present in the affairs of men as were God and his angels. Man had no choice in this matter. He was assumed to be inextricably entangled in the meshes of supernaturalism, from which there was no escape, but which could be made a great source of comfort and profit by so conducting one’s self as to merit the divine approval.

II

The Gentiles also looked with high favor upon supernaturalism. In fact, their attachment to this way of thinking was as pronounced as that of the Jews, and in some respects was even more extravagant. There were, however, wide variations of attitudes and opinions on this subject among Greeks and Romans at the beginning of the Christian era. While it was distinctly an age of supernaturalism, the Gentiles were much more keenly aware than were Jews of the rights which naturalism might claim as its own. The work of the ancient Greek physicists had not been completely forgotten. Nor did Roman society lack men of intellectual leadership who vigorously protested against the crude superstitions that still abundantly survived in the popular religions.

In the early stages of Greek and Roman culture, mythology answered all questions regarding the origin of the world and of man. As among the Jews, it was assumed that the world, mankind, and human history were all subject to the domination of superhuman powers. The Gentile deities were legion. In accordance with their own desires they interfered constantly in the affairs of mankind. Escape from their arbitrary power was possible only through attention to more or less elaborate ceremonies performed to avert their wrath or win their favor. They controlled the fertility of the earth; they were responsible for all meteorological phenomena; they hurled the thunderbolts; earthquake, pestilence, and famine were their instruments; sickness and health depended upon their pleasure; the sea was also their domain; in short, the whole range of man’s experience upon earth was subject to the arbitrary will of gods and demons.

The rise of a Greek philosophy had tended to undermine popular mythology. Some philosophers expressed doubt about the very existence of gods, and many thinkers proposed not only a purely natural origin for the world and mankind, but also an entirely naturalistic interpretation of the history of human society. It is very true that not all philosophers were thorough-going naturalists, but the tendency of all philosophical thinking was in the direction of reducing the domains of the supernatural. A Plato with his two worlds, the ideal and the real, could not allow to gods that freakish play of their whims permitted to them in the imagery of a Homer or a Hesiod. But in the picture of an ideal world, as the pattern of all reality, Plato had a new supernaturalism and one that might prove even more oppressive just because the processes of its operation had been more thoroughly systematized and stabilized. A dualistic world-view necessarily enthrones the supernatural, and by rendering it philosophically respectable only makes it the more truly tyrannical. Philosophers who adopted a monistic world-view — the Stoics and the Epicureans — were in a more advantageous position to resist superstition. But even they were not always completely successful in eliminating all remnants of the supernatural.

Roman men of culture, like Cicero, entertained a skeptical attitude thought to be in agreement with the scientific bent of a Plato or an Aristotle. But even Cicero was not wholly free from bondage to traditional religion. He admitted that the proofs commonly offered to support the validity of his ancestral religion seemed to him logically quite inadequate, but he added that the customs of the ancestors were not therefore to be abandoned. As an academic question, even the very existence of the gods might be a subject of serious doubt, but any interference with the traditional practices of Roman religion seemed to Cicero a calamity. And there were several occasions in his own experience when he set aside his philosophic doubts and sought solace for his troubled spirit in an appeal to the supernatural.

Among the different philosophical tendencies current in the Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the most influential. Its advocates made a vigorous attempt to attain a unified view of the world by eliminating the conflict between natural and supernatural. But their program actually resulted in the adoption of a denatured supernaturalism, by which the area of the natural was virtually supernaturalized. In place of the gods and demons who, according to the popular superstition, played freakishly with the affairs of men, the Stoic substituted a sober and well-behaved divine power called the Logos, or divine reason, which was said to pervade all matter and indeed to constitute the primal material out of which the entire universe was composed. As a consequence of this essentially pantheistic philosophy, the Stoics talked a language which, to the common man at least, meant full allegiance to his religious traditions. Large portions of Cleanthes’ famous hymn could have been repeated with approval by the most orthodox member of any of the popular cults.

Most glorious of immortals, O Zeus of many names, almighty and everlasting, sovereign of nature, thee it is fitting that all mortals should address. . . . Thee, all this universe, as it rolls circling round the earth, obeys, wheresoever thou dost guide, and gladly owns thy sway. In thy invincible hand thou holdest as a minister the two-edged, fiery, everlasting thunderbolt, under whose stroke all nature shudders. No work upon earth is wrought apart from thee, O Lord, nor through the divine ethereal sphere, nor upon the sea.

Although Stoicism gained wide popularity in the Roman Empire, it never made any very serious inroads upon the widespread supernaturalism of the masses. Stoics themselves were very sober in their language when they spoke of god and divine providence. Later representatives of the school, like Seneca, Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, continued to use language which the illiterate man could adopt without essentially altering the imagery of the popular superstition to which he was fondly attached. Even in Cicero’s day a Stoic philosopher had felt no hesitation in affirming that one might properly regard as manifestations of the divine mind — indeed as gods — the firmament, the sun, the moon, the world itself and all things therein useful to mankind. Also the stories of traditional mythology were not to be rejected outright, but were thought capable of reinterpretation by an allegorical process that enabled one to find them all still true if understood in the Stoic way.

The extremes of superstition alone were subjected to vigorous Stoic criticism. To fear the gods, said Seneca, who are the source of all our good and happiness, is sheer madness on the part of men. No intelligent person would indulge in morbid fancies about the terrors of the future life: “There is no prison house, no lake of fire or river of forgetfulness, no judgment seat, no renewal of the rule of tyrants.”’ 1 Gods are not to be feared, but are to be revered; and there is no escape from their presence. A Stoic poet, Aratus, had said that the godhead of Zeus “‘fills all streets, all thronging marts of men, the boundless sea and all its parts, whose aid all mortals need, for we are his offspring.”” And a Christian preacher felt no hesitation in citing this sentiment in support of his own typeof supernaturalism (Acts 17: 28).

The most uncompromising critics of current religious beliefs were the Epicureans. They were ardent mis-

1 Dialogues, vi. 19. 4.

sionaries for their cause, and displayed a zeal on its behalf which fell little short of veritable religious enthusiasm. They declared it to be their great mission in life to deliver their fellowmen from the terrible fear which the popular religion of the day had inspired. Their material universe was a purely natural product of space and atoms. While not refusing to believe in the existence of deities, the Epicurean philosophy allowed no place for them in the world of human experience. Man had nothing to fear from divine beings, either in this life or in the hereafter. All dread of the future was removed by denying outright the current notion of the soul’s immortality. Also the gods, who, according to Epicurean speculation, were themselves composed of material atoms, were relegated to remote parts of the universe where they dwelt in an ideal state of happiness entirely undisturbed by the affairs of mankind. In Cicero’s dialogue on the nature of the gods,? the Epicurean spokesman says: “We have no dread of those beings whom we have reason to think entirely free from all troubles themselves and who do not impose any on others. We pay our adoration, indeed, with piety and reverence to that essence which is above all excellence and perfection.”

Among the intelligentsia of the Roman Empire, Epicureanism had many disciples, but it was never the faith of the majority, particularly of the common people. This fact is evident from the statements of the Epicureans themselves in their vigorous protest against what they saw in the society about them. The language of Lucretius, the great Roman exponent of the school in the middle of the first century B. c., 1s

21, 20.

most revealing in this connection. He hailed Epicurus, the founder of the school, as himself almost worthy of worship, because his philosophy delivered men from the terrors which constituted for Lucretius the quintessence of all religion. Epicurus had been a brilliant exception to the general run of men in that he had ventured to withstand religion to her face. Other people were terrified by the story of the gods, by thunderbolts, and the roar of the electric storm. But these things only gave him fresh courage, filling him with a desire to burst the fast bars of nature’s portals and bring to men a knowledge of the perfectly natural character of all physical phenomena. Yet more than two hundred years later as Lucretius looked out on the world about him, he saw the worship of the gods spread over great nations; towns were filled with their altars, and society was giving itself up to the performance of well-established sacred rites, rites “‘now in fashion on solemn occasions and in solemn places, from which even now is implanted in mortals a shuddering which raises new temples of the gods over the whole earth and prompts men to crowd them on festive days.’ * Evidently Lucretius was not disposed, like the modern atheist, to allege that empty churches presage the early demise of all religion.

Pliny the Elder, who died in the year 79 A. D., writing from an Epicurean point of view, penned a memorable chapter criticizing the prevalent beliefs regarding the deities then in vogue throughout the Roman Empire. His comments are especially valuable as indicating the popular state of mind. Believing that the sun is “the mind of the universe, nature’s chief regulator and di-

3 Nature of Things, v. 1161 ff.

vinity,” Pliny deemed it a sign of human weakness to seek to give shape and form to the deity. If, indeed, there is any god at all he is “all sense, all sight, all hearing, all life, all spirit, and wholly self-contained.” 4 This language made its appeal to the few, who, ever since the time of Xenophanes of Colophon in the sixth century B. c., here and there raised their voices against the absurdity of creating gods in man’s image. But this was still a widely popular way of making deity real and vivid to the eyes of mortals.

Pliny thought it still greater folly to pursue a custom of more recent origin, which not only made gods in human shape, but affirmed a multitude of divine counterparts for the virtues and vices of men, thus adding to the supernatural powers such divinities as Chastity, © Concord, Thought, Hope, Honor, Clemency, Fidelity. Conscious of its own infirmity, human nature in its weakness had created a deity for every experience or emergency that might be encountered in the course of life. Thus innumerable divinities with a variety of names arose, even diseases and plagues being deified in consequence of man’s anxiety to propitiate these enemies. In this way Pliny explained the presence of a temple to Fever erected at the public expense on the Palatine Hill and one to Orbona, near the temple of the Lares, and an altar dedicated to Evil Fortune on the Esquiline. “Hence we may understand how it comes to pass that there is even a greater population of the celestials than of human beings, when each individual makes a separate god for himself, adopting his own Juno and his own Genius.” ®

4Pliny, Natural History, ii. 7. 14. 5 The criticism of Cicero, following Platonic ideals, had been somewhat milder (Laws, ii. 11. 28).

In a similar manner Pliny accounted for another form of supernaturalism that had won favor among the Romans. This was the worship of the emperor, which in Pliny’s opinion took its start from the help which the first emperors rendered to mankind, and the consequent disposition on the part of their subjects to honor them with deification. It had been customary among the ancients to reward heroes with divinity in return for their services to their contemporaries, and Pliny saw this disposition perpetuated in the rise of the Imperial cult.

To assist man by man is to be a god; this is the pathway by which the Roman princes attained deity and which is now pursued by the greatest ruler of all time, Vespasian Augustus, along with his sons, who has come to the relief of an exhausted empire. This was the most ancient mode of remunerating those who deserved it, to ascribe to them divinity. For the names of all the gods, as well as of the stars that I have mentioned above, have been derived from their services to mankind.

This pragmatizing of theology may have suited Pliny, but the average man was an absolutist who tended to stress without reserve the superhuman even in the case of a man-made divinity.

Pliny was troubled by still another type of allegiance to supernaturalism now increasingly manifest among the Romans. This was the avidity with which they turned for help to strange cults, especially those that came out of the Orient. Many people were becoming “slaves to foreign rites. They carry on their fingers the gods and the monsters whom they worship. They condemn and they invent various foods, they impose on themselves dreadful ordinances, not even sleeping quietly. They neither marry, nor adopt children, nor indeed do anything else without the aid of their sacred rites.”

Still another divinity, the goddess of Fortune, seems to have enjoyed much popularity in Pliny’s day.