Fragments of Christian history

Preface

"]t /TOST of these "Fragments" have appeared, from -L*-"- time to time, in various journals, and I have been repeatedly asked to bring them together in a more convenient form. It certainly is not altogether such a form as I could wish, or as I might possibly attempt with a longer prospect of working time. The book is but a slender gleaning in a wide field, which has been well reaped by stronger hands.

Still, it exhibits, as fairly as I can give, a view of the subject which I have never seen properly worked out. In whatever way we regard the origin and early growth of Christianity, whether as special revelation or as historic evolution, it appears to me that the key to it is to be found, not in its speculative dogma, not in its ecclesiastical organization, not even in what strictly constitutes its religious life, but in its fundamentally ethical character. In either way of understanding it, it is first of all a gospel for the salvation of human life. And to this primary notion of it

IV PREFACE.

everything else lias been subordinated to a degree that astonishes me more and more as I look into its original documents. A motive so intense and so profound — however crude and misinformed — ■ as to dominate the reason and imagination for more than a thousand years, and to create a civilization which had (we may say) every great quality except that of a voice for its own interpretation, which stifled thought in the interest of morality, which reduced art after its rich classic development to a bald symbolism, and made a free science or literature impossible, — whatever else we may think of it, is certainly an amazing and unique phenomenon in human history. From Constantine to Dante that is, substantially, the fact we have to study. The Fragments that follow are designed as a contribution to the right understanding of it.

This volume is very far from claiming to be a history. Yet just as little is it a compilation. The judgments it expresses are such as have been ripening during thirty years of reasonable familiarity with most of the phases of the subject I have attempted to present ; and they rest, in all cases, upon the acquaintance I have been able to make with the original sources of the history. I was so fortunate as to begin these studies within reach of the Congressional Library at Washington, which is (or was) exceptionally rich in the earlier authorities ; and to continue them as part

PREFACE. V

of my stated labors here, with the far ampler treasures of the University Library at command. Of course I have availed myself, where I could, of modern expositors and standard historians, — of which due acknowledgment is made in the notes. My constant authorities, however, have been the volumes of the Fathers, of the early historians, and especially of Migne's Patrologia, both Greek and Latin. I have endeavored to keep true to the maxim which ought to govern such an exposition : that it should include the secular as well as the religious side of events ; that it should deal primarily with moral forces rather than speculative opinions or institutional forms ; and that it should rest at all points directly on original authorities, wherever these are accessible.

A brief Chronological Outline has been added, not as sufficient for the uses of the student, but in order to make the bearing of allusions and events more distinct to those who are not otherwise familiar with the ground. To the student the standard historians, especially Gieseler and ISTeander, to the general reader Milman's histories and Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, to those who seek sufficient information in the briefest space the excellent text-book of Philip Smith, may be recommended to fill in the sketch which is here attempted. Better still, perhaps, would be Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography, just completed, and covering almost the precise period in-

VI PREFACE.

eluded here. But it cannot be too strongly urged that some acquaintance with Catholic authorities — as Eohrbacher, Ozanam, Montalembert — is indispensable, if not to a knowledge of the facts, at least to an apprehension of the spirit and motive, of this earlytime. I may add, that this volume is, in a sense, a continuation of " Hebrew Men and Times," in which some of the earlier topics will be found presented in more detail than the present plan admits ; and that I hope to follow it by a similar review of the Mediaeval and of the Modern period.

I should not do justice to my own feeling, without adding here the acknowledgment of my constant obligation to Professor F. H. Hedge, D. ~D., my predecessor in this lectureship, whose learning and eloquence are known to many; whom fewer, perhaps, have known so well as one of the wisest of teachers, one of the kindest and most generous of friends.

Harvard Divinity School, September, 1880.

Contents

Introduction : Study of Christian History

I. The Messiah and the Christ i

IT. Saint Paul 21

Introduction

This is the study of human life itself, — its action and its passion ; of life on its personal, suffering, dramatic, rejoicing, heroic side ; of its sin and holiness, its error and its strength, its struggle and its grief. Nothing, in fact, is more dramatic than the life shown us in the field we enter, as soon as we pierce beyond the veil that distance of time or strangeness of dialect has thrown about it. The true way to know the men whose lives are the history we would learn, is to come as close to them as the barriers of time, distance, and language will allow ; to seek always the original sources first, at least under the briefest guidance and exposition ; never to satisfy ourselves with dissertations, abridgments, compends, or " standard historians " ; to listen to each man's words, so far as we have ability or opportunity, in the tongue he learned from his mother, and talked with his own kinsfolk, and wrote with his own pen. A single page, read in that way, brings us nearer to the man, gives us better (so to speak) the feel of his pulse, the light of his eye, and the complexion of his face, than whole chapters of commentary and paraphrase.

We have all learned, long ago, that faith is a very different thing from opinion. Yet we do not always reflect how wrongly mens historical judgments are colored by their opinions, or how shallow and poor those judgments often are, from the mere lack of power to comprehend — we might even say pardon — any very strong and sincere conviction at all. Thus of Gibbon — so masterly in grasp, so unwearied in research, so subtile in suggestion, our indispensable daily companion and guide in a large part of the field we have to investigate—the instances are rare in which he has not done wrong to the topic or the character he was treating, and let down the moral tone of a great man or a great event,

THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XV11

such as the record fairly gives, by his strange incapacity of historic sympathy. So that, in a very large part of it, — not only in his famous chapters on early Christianity but in his treatment of each critical epoch or heroic life, — his work, indispensable for its outlines and its facts, is a masterly and very perfect model of what our study of the history ought not to be.

Again, we must be clear of that besetting sin of theologians, a controversial motive. We are not pledged, in any sense, to uphold one set of opinions, or disparage others. Our true business is to understand, if we can, the men who held them, and why they held them. The world of thought and belief has so shifted in all its bearings, that we can never be quite sure we have the mind of the early age ; while the world of passion and motive remains fundamentally the same. Very good men have held in honesty of heart opinions wholly false and shocking to us. Their thin ghosts do not flit before our bar for judgment. Nay, when those men lived, they were drawn by the tragic and terrible logic of their opinions to acts in our view inconceivably hateful. In all history there is perhaps nothing quite so awful as the religious wars, the infernal tortures of Inquisition and dragonnade, the frightful persecutions of mere opinion, deliberately inflicted, for centuries, in the name of faith ; so that the very phrase " act of faith," translated into Spanish, is perhaps of all human phrases ghastliest in its suggestion. I have no more the will than the power to exclude these horrors from our field, for the sake of a serener view. Humanity does well to hate the name and curse the memory of them. But our task, even for these, is to see them in their causes ; to trace how they were linked in fatally with the train of opinions and events ; to see how bad men could have found means to xviii INTRODUCTION.

bring them to pass, and how good men could possibly have been led to consent to them as a pardonable alternative from something worse.

A very large part of our history is the record of controversies, in which we have no occasion whatever to take sides as partisans. Our business is rather to see, if we can, how each side was an element in the necessary evolution ; and how a gain in mind, morals, or society is brought about, not by sudden victories of the truer opinion, but by the very obstinate conflict itself, in which each party fights toughly, whether for the gold or the silver side of the shield of truth. We have our own battles to fight ; and we cannot afford to revive the passions of those ancient ones.

A word of the periods into which the history naturally falls. The main points of departure — the nodal points, so to speak, marking most visibly the coincidence of the spiritual and secular evolution — are most conveniently taken at the end of the eighth .centuiy, and at the end of the fifteenth. The three periods so given, considered in reference to the type of Christian civilization before spoken of, may be called the period of its struggle for existence, of its dominance in a definite historic form, and of its differentiation or expansion. The first extends from the origin of Christianit} 7 , through the time of its conflict with Classic paganism on one hand, and Barbaric paganism on the other, down to the founding of the Christian empire of Charlemagne. The second extends through what is called the Middle Age of European histoiy, the period of feudal society, of the crusades, of the Holy Apostolic Church dominant under the great popes and the Hoi} 7 Roman Empire dominant under the great imperial houses, down to and including the revival of art and learning, and the period of the great

THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XIX

discoveries which initiated the broader life of the modern world. The third begins with the controversies of the Protestant Reformation, and follows its results in the liberalizing of thought, the development of speculative philosophy and scientific criticism, the vast growth of natural science (far more important to us in its effect on men's habit of thought than in its wealth of fact or its practical skill) , the great movements of modern society and politics of the revolutionary period, in which we are living now.

Naturalty and rightly, these last are of vastty greater consequence to us than anj'thing in the past. Moreover, the}^ are precisely the issues to which the great evolution of religious life in the past has conducted us. But no stage of it need be followed in the spirit of dogmatists, pedants, or archaeologists. The lifestream whose course we are endeavoring to trace flows through channels, takes on forms and qualities, that enter deeply into the spirit of our own life. Not only, then, the echoes of the past are to be heard, but its footsteps traced, and its spirit felt, and its lessons heeded, on the spot where we stand, and in the moment of time when we breathe. For us, its earliest tradition is still alive. The record contained in so many ponderous volumes is not an antiquarian curioshy, like those title-deeds lately turned up in bricks and tiles of Nebuchadnezzar's time ; but is like a merchant's ledger, which lies always open to record the transactions of to-day.

The antiquarian may learn facts and dates ; but facts and dates are not histoiy. They are at best the 4 'raw materials," which must be "cooked" (as our friend in the story-book sagely says) before they are fit food for the human mind. It is the very business

XX INTRODUCTION.

of history- to turn dead facts into live truths ; to assort, co-ordinate, arrange them, find out their bearing on one another, and their relation to the life they cover, — often, it is true, as tombstones cover the forms once warm with ?ager life. It is not that we disparage facts. On the contrary, the mind in search of truth hungers and thirsts for them. But one must not be mistaken for the other. A hundred thousand facts will very likely go to the making of a single truth.

And for method, the simplest is the best: that is, to fix a few marked lives and dates, " as nails in a sure place." A very few, well fixed, will give us the latitude and longitude of our facts, and save them from being mislaid or lost. I once watched an artist beginning to draw a portrait. He measured with a straight stick one or two dimensions, marked them on his panel, took rapidly the bearings with his e} T e, made a few swift strokes ; and, almost in less time than it takes to tell, my mother's face, dim and faint, began to be shadowed out under his trained hand, -which hours and days of patient skill would be needed to complete, but with features and expression already there. In some such wa} r , if not with an artist's skill, yet with his patient accurac} r , we ma}' so outline this vast and magnificent field of our inquiiy as never to lose from memory the features and expression of that life which we accept as a continual and }*et unfinished revelation in the flesh of the Universal Life.

FRAGMENTS OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.

I. The Messiah And The Christ

OUE first task, in approaching the study of Christianity as an event and a vital force in history, is to see it on the side of Judaism, out of whose soil it sprang; and to trace — at present in its purely historical or human aspect — the connection between the old religious order and the new. This is best seen in the transition, in religious history, from the name Messiah, with all that it denotes as the culminating of the old dispensation, to the name Christ, with all that it denotes as the inspiration of the new.

No revolution that we know in the affairs of mankind, especially in its spiritual history, has been so significant as that suggested in the connotation of these two titles, of which each is a literal translation of the other. One brings before us the passionate, ever-baffled, and finally most disastrous hope of a perishing people, — the narrow, intense, fierce patriotism, that had its boundaries sharply defined in the little state of Palestine ; the other, a world-wide spiritual empire, seated on the deepest foundations of faith and reverence, and showing the ideal side of a manifold, rich, powerful, and proud civilization, which has as yet no ascertainable limit of duration.

While the name Messiah is at best the title of a hoped-for prince who might do for Jerusalem what the empire of the Caesars did for Borne, — that is, establish it as the seat of enduring dominion founded on " righteousness " in the Jewish sense of that word, as the other was built upon the Eoman Law, — the name Christ has come, by successive changes and enlargements of its meaning, to be the title of the spiritual or ideal leader of humanity. Nay, so instant and so marked was this transition, as soon as the name had passed from the local dialect into that Greek which was the tongue of all known thought and culture, that Paul (who did more than all other men to bring it about) already uses that name to mean, not simply the Person, however exalted and revered, but a Force purely spiritual and ideal, — " Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."

It belongs more properly to an appreciation .of the life and work of Paul to consider this transition as it looks to the future, and opens the way to the new, large development of a religion of Humanity. It is our immediate task to consider it as it looks to the past, and connects itself with the history of a peculiar people.

That wonderful Messianic hope, which in the ways of history was the indispensable preparation for the advent of a gospel preached to every creature, emerges amidst the desperate struggle of a little colony

THE CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLOOK. 3

in Judsea to defend its altar and temple from the stranger, and saves that struggle from despair. We need not go over here the story of that time which we call the Maccabsean period. It is, or should be, tolerably familiar. We can at best attempt to make rea^ sonably clear one or two points of view, which may help us understand its bearing on the impending revolution.

Standing at the date of the gospel history, we seem to have fairly firm ground on an island in the great ocean of the past, or at least to be swinging at a tolerably sure anchorage among its restless waves. The prophecy of Malachi, w T ith its abrupt menace of " the great and dreadful day of the Lord," — the last headland laid down on the chart that most of us have sailed by, — is four hundred years away: about as far as from us the conquest of the Eastern Empire by the Turks, the Wars of the Eoses, the break-up of feudalism in France under Louis XL, the revival of letters and arts in Italy, a few years before the discovery of America by Columbus. A few dates like these may serve to help our sluggish imagination, and show what we mean by historical perspective. Near midway, again, to where we are standing, is the glorious revolt of the Maccabees, another point in the perspective to be fixed as firmly as we may : not quite as far away as the Commonwealth in England, and the Thirty Years' War in Germany. In other words to the contemporaries of Jesus the hero of the struggle was somewhat nearer than Oliver Cromwell is to us, and the visions of Daniel were about as near as Paradise Lost.

I am probably not mistaken in thinking that this comparison of dates startles us a little by bringing the events so close. But, in fact, they are much closer than that. If our daily walk took us past Whitehall, or a stroll into the next village to the hillside where Hampden fell, the events of that time would come incomparably nearer to our imagination. How was it, then, with the Jews of Palestine in the time of Jesus, who had no other memories, who knew no other landmarks, whose only science and only dream lay within the strict limits of the interpretation of the Scripture that embodied, confirmed, and illustrated their one only hope ? Herod's wife was great-grandchild of the hero's nephew; and Herod's handiwork was there, unfinished, before their eyes. The aged Simeon might as a child (to take the average of several learned guesses) have known the writer of Enoch, and he the writer of the visions of Daniel. Three generations might thus touch hands across the whole space that separates the Old and the New.* The chasm is apt to look abrupt and impassable, like the gorge at Niagara; still, it is not so very wide but that we may fly a cord across, and that shall carry a strand, and that a cable, and the gulf is bridged.

Looking now a little more carefully at the point of time which we have succeeded in bringing so near, we see that the stream of national, or rather race

* Thus I recollect as a child going to see an old man who had been an officer in the " French and Indian War " (1750-1763) ; and he, by fair possibility, might have known some one who had seen the execution of Charles I.

THREE STREAMS OF JEWISH LIFE. 5

life, flows in three pretty well denned channels, — in fact, ever since the time of the earlier dispersion and the return of the pilgrim colony to Jerusalem, almost six hundred years ago. In Egypt that stream is widening out towards the placid lake of speculative philosophy, which w r e call the new platonism of Philo, — a great reservoir, which was pumped abundantly long afterwards into the sluiceways of Christian theology, to spread and dilute the river of the water of life till it could float the heavy-laden bark of St. Peter. Eastward in Babylon the stream loses itself, as it were, in wide marshes, where it greeds in course of time that monstrous growth of water- weed and tangle, with flowers interspersed of rare and curious perfume, which we call the Babylonish legend, or the later Talmud.

With either of these our subject lias very little to do. The learning which interprets the schools of Jewish thought in Alexandria has been thoroughly worked up, so as to be easily accessible and (I was going to say) cheap ; though it can never lose a certain charm of its own in the blandly-flowing discourse of Philo, or a very real interest to one who cares to trace the sources of Christian theology.* The more remote and intricate study of the Eastern branch has still less present concern for us : it belongs really to the strange and curious history of modern Judaism, — a

* Though Philo is called a Jew, and uses the Jewish scriptures as the text of all his fluent expositions, his cast of thought is so entirely Platonic or Grecian, that Ewald (in a conversation I had with him some years ago) insisted that he was to be counted as no Jew at all, but a Greek, quite outside the line of Hebrew development.

side-shoot, which has grown, independent of the main trunk, into a vigorous, persistent, fantastic life of its own.

So our subject narrows down to the course of the central stream, what we may call the Palestinian life of the Jewish people. This is, from the outset down, intensely national, patriotic, local, — yet none the less intensely confident in itself, disdainful of all life or thought outside, and buoyed through great tides of disaster by an immeasurable hope. Indeed, that great miracle of patriotic valor, the achieving of a real though brief independence by the Maccabees in the face of the splendid monarchy of Syria, might almost justify any extravagance of hope.

We call that hope Messianic. In a certain vague large way it dates back to the elder prophets of Judah, Isaiah and Micah, who give not only hints, but splendid pictures and symbols, of the Lord's reign in righteousness and peace. When the flood of conquest had flowed over the state of Judah, in the long Captivity of Babylon those superb strains of prophecy had been composed,* whose only fit interpretation yet is in the gorgeous and tender harmonies of Handel's Messiah. But now the prophecy becomes distinct, vivid, personal. Intelligent criticism is well agreed in setting the visions of Daniel at the precise period of time we are dealing with : in' fact, it narrows the date of their composition within some ten years, from 168 to

* Isaiah xl.-lxvi., the " Great Unknown " of the Captivity (Ewald), sometimes spoken of as the younger Isaiah. The title "Messiah" is here first given to Cyrus, as deliverer of the Jews from Babylon (xlv. 1).

SOURCE OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 7

178 before the Christian era. These visions, doubtless, it is easiest for us to bring before our minds as songs of patriotic hope and' cheer, in the strain and stress of a conflict all but desperate, rather than expound them painfully in their detail, as they apply to the nearer past and the immediate present.

What we have definitely to do with them, for the purpose now in hand, is to see how they fixed — crystallized, as it were — that patriotic hope about the person of a Deliverer, who again was (like the "man of 'sorrows " of the Prophet of the Captivity) hardly to be distinguished in our criticism from Israel himself in his great agony. " I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like a son of man came in the clouds of heaven, . . . and there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom : . . . his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." And again, "The kingdom and dominion . . . shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey Him." *

Now this promise comes close upon a description which, by the universal understanding of interpreters, points to the condition of the East among the successors of Alexander, — that is, the immediate oppressors of the Jews. There is no reason to doubt that the coming of this " Son of Man in the clouds of heaven " was passionately waited for, expected, longed for, to appear from day to day, any more than that

* Daniel vii. 13, 14, 27. Compare Stanley ("Jewish Church," Vol. III. p. 385 of Am. ed.), whose rendering is here followed.

Christ's second advent was daily expected in the Apostles' day, or has been and still is in ours. Most likely some passing triumph Of Judas, or Jonathan, or Simon, the heroic brothers, brought from time to time that fervent confidence and hope to rest on them. And again, the hope deferred lay always ready to be evoked anew, and applied to whatever champion seemed at the moment likely to accomplish the unreasoning but fervid expectation. Thus, after a century and a half of disappointment, it was 1 just as ready to centre upon Herod the Great, whom Antony and Augustus had set in secure dominion, — ■ a painful travesty, indeed, of the great Hope, when we think who and what Herod was, a son of Edom and a tyrant; but how genuine, we see in the Herodian party in the Gospels, and in a sober argument by Epiphanius, three centuries later, in its disproof.

In point of fact, we are apt to think too much of the Messianic hope in a formal, dogmatic way, or in the way, perhaps, of learned exposition. We associate it too exclusively with the august strains of prophecy on one side, and the yet more august series of events that flowed from it on the other. We do not always stop to think how simple, how natural, how human it was, after all. In one sense it is a miracle in history, a phenomenon without any exact parallel, — the brooding tenacity, the passionate resolve, the revival from defeat, the endurance through centuries of humiliation, that characterize the Jews' faith in their coming Deliverer. And so, again, it is a thing that is and must remain without example, that a national hope has been transfigured in the person of One who,

FERVOR OF THE NATIONAL PASSION. 9

after near nineteen centuries, is still looked up to as the spiritual Chief of humanity, and whose name has been received as the symbol of what is Infinite and Divine, nay, as a name of the Infinite himself.

But look at it, again, on its nearer side, and it is not so hard to see — not only that it was altogether human in its passion and limitation, not only that in its wild frenzy it led straight to a tragedy of unexampled horror ; but that in its elements it belonged quite naturally to such a time and people. In its vehement persistency, in its passionate devoutness, it is fairly matched by the four centuries' struggle in which the fighting tribe of Montenegro, under their bishopprince, have consecrated themselves to the crusade against the Turk, — a struggle whose issues it is not long since we were watching in the telegraphic bulletins of the day. In its temper of stern patriotism — sombre, tender, unyielding, pathetically hopeless — it is like that other amazing phenomenon of our time, the life that smoulders in the ashes of thrice-desolated Poland.

We do not always think how close these great historic passions may come to our own life. There was lately living quietly among us a princess of the blood of old Lithuanian heroes — Antonia Jagiello — who, with more than the heroism of a Deborah or a Judith, led the forlorn hope at the head of her regiment on the battle-fields of Hungary. Let me copy here a picture which I find in a powerful French romance : it is of the hapless insurrection of 1863, and it is a young Pole that speaks, who visits his mother in Paris, feeling himself dead to honor ever since he l* signed in prison a pledge not to persist in war against the oppressor: —