Volume 1, Chapter 3

THE FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE PAGAN RELIGIOUS WORLD

Section 1: THE RELIGIOUS WORLD OF THE SECOND CENTURY

Section 2: THE FIRST APOLOGISTS

Section 3: THE GNOSTICS AND THE CHURCH

Section 4: ST. IRENAEUS OF LYONS

Section 5: MARCION -- MONTANISM

THE RELIGIOUS WORLD OF THE SECOND CENTURY

THE history of the first contacts of the new religion with the religious thought of the Romano-hellenic world is only imperfectly known to us. The Acts of the Apostles relates, of course, the story of the conversion of the Roman officer Cornelius in the first years after Our Lord's Ascension, and describes St. Paul's varied success with the pagans of the Roman East. The Acts is, in a large part, the story of the origins of Gentile Christianity. Nevertheless it is not until the next century that we begin to have evidence in detail about the way the new religion affected the religious gentiles who occupied themselves with its teaching and promises; or the like evidence about the way the Church reacted to its contact with the world outside it.

That world outside was not, in the second century, by any means unconcerned with religious theories and practice. Religion was all important to it, and though the religious restoration of the first of the Roman emperors had not developed, as he had hoped, into a rebirth of the old classical Paganism, religion a hundred years after his death was flourishing and promised to flourish yet more. Development since Augustus had not, indeed, taken the direction he would have willed. It had left the Paganism of the classic pantheon to its inevitable end. It showed itself rather in the appearance of new cults, particularly in the cult of personified abstractions. Such were the new religions which worshipped Honour, Piety, Peace and -- the most popular cult of all -- Fortune. These new fast-spreading cults were free of the mythological foulness which had disfigured the older religion they displaced; but the gods they honoured remained, for the popular imagination, little more than abstractions before which the only attitude possible was the resignation of fatalism. Fortune might be worshipped as the supreme goddess, but Fortune was inexorable unchangeable destiny, Fate -- and before Fate what use to pray or beseech?

A like fatalistic attitude to life was bred by another series of new cults now in full emigration from the East, the cult of the Sun, of the Moon and of the Stars. According to the positions of the stars at the moment of birth, so must every man's life be; and the adepts of these cults set themselves to work out astrological codes by which each man's future and fate might be told. The emperors enacted the severest laws against these mischievous superstitions, but without any great success. The promise of this religious astrology was too much for human anxiety to resist, and the very emperors in whose name the laws were published were themselves the first to break them.

But the most important feature of the century's religious history was undoubtedly the progress of the ancient cults of the old pre- hellenic culture of the East. Below the veneer of Hellenism which had covered it now for generations, the East still remained the East. Egypt, Asia and Syria still retained their ancient identities, their ancient sensual and bloodthirsty gods. Slowly, now, that older East was coming to life again; and, in a kind of revenge for the Hellenistic centuries, its old religions seeped through the surface, steadily, increasingly, until by the middle of the third century they had done much everywhere to transform the religion of the city populations. These cults were popular now for the same reasons that the mystery religions had been popular in ancient Greece. They offered to their clients guarantees of special protection -- very notably they offered protection against the powers of evil, against Fate itself. They gained a hold on the imagination by the splendour of their rites, their secret initiations, the spectacle of their sanctifying sacred dramas. In the assemblies which were the scene of these rites a mad enthusiasm spread through the crowd. Men stabbed themselves and each other, feeling nothing; in sheer religious exultation mutilated themselves publicly and shamelessly, passed through fire, leapt unbridgeable gulfs, gave themselves to actions of unbelievable impudicity. But more potent than the attraction of these often misunderstood aberrations was the novelty of the god's familiarity with his client. The gods of the classic Olympus had been aloof. Familiarity with them was perilous. Their company no man could hope to survive. But Isis, Mithra, the Syrian Goddess, offered familiarity, friendship: offered this, even, as the very means of their protection, as the medium through which they wished to be worshipped.

As these cults slowly established themselves in the West, they underwent more than one important modification. The Syrian goddess, patron of reproduction, was seen by the Greeks as another Aphrodite, by the Romans as a Venus. With the identification a more open sensuality often crept into the old Paganism of the West, a new brutal bloodthirstiness. From Rome the new cults crossed the Alps, and revived by their presence the superstitions and the horrors of the old pre-Roman religion of the Celts. Always there is the fantasy of the legend, never exactly the same in any two places; always the rough and ready identification of the new and the old; the attraction of sensual novelty in the ritual, the promise of the god's intimacy, of his special protection and of a happy eternity. The man who has given himself to the god or goddess and is accepted has no more to fear. Though Fate dog his life Isis will effectually protect him.

These religions introduced, too, a new kind of priesthood. Their priests were a caste apart, men whose lives were wholly given to the service of the god, and who were set apart for that service in a definite ritual, often indeed of a brutal and obscene character. They had their prophets, they had their magicians, sorcerers, soothsayers; and their establishment presented the nascent religion of Christ with yet another obstacle to overcome in its mission of winning the populace to the good tidings of the Kingdom of God. Under the working of these new influences the popular inert dislike of the Christian turns to passionate, active hatred -- a hatred which skilful calumny intensifies. And as with the third century, the Eastern cults gain a hold among the aristocracy, and can claim the emperor himself as a devotee, the possibilities of the anti-Christian influence know no limit. It is, for instance, the magician, Macrian, who converts the emperor, Valerian (253-259), from his sympathy for the Christians and makes of him one of the bloodiest of persecutors.

The mystery religions, as they developed in the century between Nero and Marcus Aurelius, were to influence the pace of the Church's development in another way. Two features they all shared -- the initiation reserved to the select few and the special revelation of the god to the initiated. It was only after a laborious novitiate, and a series of tests and partial initiations, that the candidate was in the end admitted to the heart of the mystery. In every mystery religion, then, the disciples, at any given moment, were arranged in a hierarchy of knowledge, and of perfection, according to the degree of their initiation. And as knowledge of the divine secret and intimacy with the god developed together, the perfectly initiated into knowledge was alone perfectly holy, stainless and saved. This idea of a hierarchy of virtue based on degrees of knowledge was to play its part in the Church, too, once the Church came into contact with Gnosticism.

The perfection to which the initiate few thus attained was of course wholly unconcerned with moral goodness. In the dramas of the mysteries, even of the more restrained Hellenic mysteries, the subjects of the splendid spectacle were all too often the sexual relations of the god and goddess with one another and with mankind. Moral teaching they held none; nor anything of instruction about the gods except the interminable, meaningless genealogies. And if the early Christian writers used all their eloquence to denounce the mysteries for the traps they were, the Pagans were equally outspoken. Plutarch, for example, ends his description of the myth of Isis and Osiris with the comment that to those who really believe that the gods give themselves to such a way of life there is no more to be said but what Aeschylus advises, "Spit it out and rinse your mouth." Nothing in this latest development of Paganism brought it nearer to the chance of giving the world what the Gospel promised to give. It was no rival gospel that the Church had to fear in the mystery religions, or in these new cults from the East. The danger was more simple -- that the mixture of charlatanry and sensuality would find so ready a response in the weakest parts of human nature that there would not even remain a beginning of natural virtue to which the super- natural could make an appeal. "The mysteries never raised man to a belief more worthy of the divinity. Rather it was man who by his interpretation of the mysteries gave them a meaning more worthy of the gods."

Such as they were, however, these religions flourished. The army, the imperial functionaries, the officials of the civil service spread them from one end of the empire to the other. The century that begins with Marcus Aurelius and ends with Aurelian (161-275) is their golden age. The old Paganism of classical times, as a force influencing men's lives, is dead. As a ritual, as a part of the day's public life, a religious consecration of the State and its institutions, it still continues. But it has long since ceased to shape men's activities. In its place are the oriental religions just described and, for the elite who think, the religious philosophies. In the Paganism of the second century these two things alone are alive.

The religious philosophy of the day made, of itself, no appeal whatever to the senses, nor to the imagination. It attempted a reasonable explanation of religion and of the mythologies, and, more than that, it presented itself as a reasoned teaching in religious matters, offering a reasoned system of morality. The philosophers were the guides and spiritual directors of that minority who wished to live an ordered, reasonable, and, as we should say, religious life. In their teaching such souls found illumination and encouragement, and it was from the philosophers of this generation that the Church recruited those converts who were to be pioneers in the work of expounding her doctrine rationally to the intellect of the non-Christian world. The philosophy fashionable in the second century is, then, not only an important element in the non-Christian life of that time, but it has its effect within the Church itself thanks to the conversion to Christianity of so many of its devotees. Two schools of this second-century philosophic thought call principally for notice -- the Stoics and the %%% [Editor's note: this paragraph appears to be truncated in the original web site text file.]

For the Stoic all things had their origin in one single living principle, and this principle is material. From this first material principle -- the purest and most subtle matter conceivable, a kind of fiery air -- all other existing things have come, and will continue to come, by a process of continual degrading, a process inevitable and necessitated. In all these derived existing things, no matter how low the degree of their existence, there remains always some spark of that principle whence they first derive -- whether the things be, as we should say, animate or inanimate. "This fire" the definition classic among the Stoics explained "is skilled and travels a fixed road since the world's beginning. Locked up within it are all the seminal logoi in accordance with which all things necessarily come into being." From this fire all things come, to it all things return; and the evolutionary process is fixed, inevitable from the nature of the fire. Returning to the original fire, they issue forth yet again -- always in the same way, bound to the same evolution in the future which has shaped their history in the past; things, animals, men, the gods themselves, except Zeus whom the Stoics identify with the imperishable fire. All is governed by this unescapable law of necessity. Even the least of human actions necessarily follows from causes outside man's control, is fixed by the nature of things, is shaped by the one soul of the universe. "Man," said the Stoics, "is a dog tied to a car. He has no choice but to run in its wake."

This necessity, constraining human action, is and is not a slavery, for the soul of all things whence the necessity comes is man's soul too, and the necessity which constrains him is not the violence of another to which perforce he must submit, but the necessity of his own nature's deepest need. "Secure in his autonomy, why should the Stoic sigh for liberty?" The theory worked out in practice in very different ways. First of all it set man on an equality with the gods, for it is the one same divine soul that gives life to all. Whence a valuation of human personality among the Stoics higher than any other of the ancient philosophies ever accorded it. Whence, too, those beginnings of a care for personality in legislation, and the humanitarianism of which Cicero is a leading example. Whence also, on the other hand, a pride and self-exaltation that could end in mania.

Again, although the theory of the divine origin of all things could, and did, in Seneca for example, develop into a belief in something like Providence, the other half of the theory -- the necessary evolution, the unescapable force, the inevitable, individual destruction and re-absorption, -- is the very negation of Providence. This god who is in us all, who is ourselves, as he is everything, is yet unknown and unknowable, and research as to his nature can only end in ever greater obscurity. Prayer, supplication can find no place in the system -- for all things that happen must happen as they happen. No effort can change them, no flight escape them. If one type of character was helped and encouraged by the system's Pantheism, braced or consoled by the belief in fellowship with the rest of creation, assuredly there were others crushed in despair by its fatalism.

The two great names among the Stoics of the second century are Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus is no fashionable philosopher with the entertainment of a leisured audience as his highest aim. He is a man with a mission, and his hearers were earnest and devoted seekers after a higher life. He set before them an ideal of austere detachment from the chances of life. Sickness, old age, misfortune, death itself should have no power over the Stoic; no power to disturb the calm, happy freedom of this man whom reason controlled. Such ills, when they threatened his peace, should be looked in the face, understood for what they were, and, their whole power for ill thus reasonably examined, they would cease to trouble. Was not man his own only master? containing within himself the only real good? and did he not live as part of a great universe of existence? What matter if his role in that great plan was meaner than another's.

To the whole it was equally necessary, and in this consideration of his contribution to the need and welfare of the whole the reasonable man would find compensation and consolation for the chances of life. Should this Pantheism fail to console, a further solution still remained. "There is one who provides me with food and with raiment. . . when he no longer gives he signifies to me that it is time to depart, he opens the door and calls. Whither does he call me? Towards a term which cannot affright thee, for it is thence thou didst originally proceed, towards friends and kinsfolk and the elements of things. What in thee is fire, to fire will return; what in thee is earth, to earth; what air, to air; what is water, to water yet again. There is no Hades, no Acheron, no Cocytus, no Periphlegethon, but everywhere is filled with gods and with daemons." But suicide is only for the weakling, blessed even as Epictetus blesses it. The ideal is acceptance of life in an indifference to its chance, an acceptance buttressed by the belief that man, too, is divine. God is in us, we are part of God and we should be loyal to what in us is divine for so we are most truly loyal to ourselves. "As the soldier swears he will prefer Caesar before all others, the Stoic swears so to prefer himself." Prayer and theories of divine assistance can have no place in the system, and the basis of the exalted sentiments that still move whoever studies these ancient writings is self-exaltation. Epictetus presents us with a meditation on death in which the dying man reviews his life and thanks his god for all it has been. It is no act of thanksgiving for mercies and favours, still less is it a confession; and if its underlying self-satisfaction recalls anything in the Gospel it is the famous prayer of the Pharisee.

Stoicism was never popular. Its theories, no doubt, broke too soon at the contact with reality. And it had too much scorn for the unenlightened herd to make their conversion a possibility. It remained the privilege of an elite, and even there its success was not such as to encourage its prophets. "Show me a Stoic if you know one," said Epictetus. "You will show me thousands who speak like Stoics. Show me at least some one who shows promise of realising this ideal. Let my old age gaze on what so far it has never been my lot to know. Show me one at least. You cannot."

Such an one we see perhaps in Marcus Aurelius. Under Domitian Epictetus had been banished from Rome as a philosopher. Now philosophy itself was on the throne. In his Meditations Marcus Aurelius admits us to the innermost workings of his mind. We see the Stoic theory shaping his response to the demands of life. We see the progress of self-knowledge, self-discipline, the continual examination and analysis of action and motive pursued faithfully day by day in search of truth ever more profound. All the traditional Stoic theory is here, not set out in theory for a class, but in its practical application to life. Man's share in the universal life, the common logos, is to Marcus Aurelius a familiar, a personal daemon. He reveres it, serves it, obeys it and for its sake will keep his life spotless. He shares, of course, the fatalist resignation to life which is the aim of the school, though the thought of the extinction which is death moves him to angry resentment. On the other hand he believes in prayer, prayer not to the gods of the classic pantheon, but to Fortune, the Sun, the Stars, Asclepios. Inevitably he is the victim of superstition, dreams and omens playing their part in his life. And the whole life is built on a foundation that is ever in movement, on hypotheses and alternatives and the uncertainty of doubt, of sentiment and guesswork. It is the end of happiness, the end of life, and from it derives that "infinite boredom" which Renan noted as characteristic of the famous work. "Infinite boredom", in life as in the Meditations, and "an analysis of life which leaves life little better than death."

The second great school of religious philosophy was that of the Platonists, and this, unlike the school of Epictetus was not only popular, but as the century went on, grew to be one of the greatest forces in its religious life. For the Platonists there is a dual principle at the origin of things -- spirit and matter. God is not only not identical with the world, as the Stoics proclaimed, but so transcends the world as to be beyond all power of our knowing him. In ecstasy alone can man reach to the divine. This dualism, and the doctrine of the divine transcendence, go back to Plato himself. It was his immediate successor Xenocrates who developed the system's dualism, and Plutarch derived from it the other notion of the divine inaccessibility to human reason. In the succeeding centuries these two ideas came to dominate the whole teaching of the school, and thereby inevitably lowered the system's intellectual appeal and bequeathed to it the continual menace of scepticism.

Since God was inaccessible, and since all things owed to God their origin and their continuance in being, the Platonist postulated as the medium of the divine action one or more beings intermediate between God and man, beings who shared indeed in the divine nature but who were yet subordinate to God their first origin. These are the daemons, powers, spirits, the logos. For the Stoics the logos was the immanent necessary law of things. For the new Platonists, it was the divine agent, and the pattern by which all things were; it was the divine element by which the other necessary element of the universal duality was corrected -- all things being subject to the double law, i.e. of influences deriving from a thing's nature, and of influences deriving from the divine. This duality obtained in things inanimate, in man's soul too. Logos and nature, one for the Stoic, are for the Platonist rival contending forces.

Platonism had borrowed a term from the Stoics to express itself. It had borrowed elsewhere, and notably from the East. From its conception of spirit and matter as forces inevitably in conflict, a whole train of consequences were to follow. That conception was to enter the Church, to cause endless trouble in the heresies it provoked, and to be the cause, too, of more than one set-back in the development of thinkers otherwise orthodox.

These ideas of the dual principle in all reality, of a hierarchy of perfection, and of the radical opposition of matter and spirit, the Platonists popularised as Stoicism never was popularised. Around this philosophical core other doctrines gathered taken from the teachings ascribed to Pythagoras, and with them there passed to the Platonists something of that spirit which turned philosophy into a cult, with devotees, holy men, religious practices, rites and -- by no means its least important feature -- itinerant missionaries who gave their lives to the work of propaganda. There gathered, too, around the core of philosophy and idealism, something of the superstition and the magical practices which always attached to the self-styled disciples of Pythagoras. If such features detracted from the dignity of the philosophy they were, on the other hand, its very life as a force in public affairs. It was not long before Platonism, as a cult, absorbed the neo-Pythagoreans and quite ousted the Stoics. Later it was to inspire the bitterest and most skilful of all the attempts to destroy Christianity. Meanwhile, in that second century which at the moment occupies us, its leading figure, after Plutarch (50- 125) was the lecturer, Maximus of Tyre.

The subjects of the lectures which gained him fame are the questions which the public of his day debated. Is revenge noble? Is activity a higher life than contemplation? Should we pray to the gods? What is Plato's notion of God? How can we reconcile human liberty and sorcery? His theological teaching is a mixture of superstitious credulity and scepticism. Between God and man there is an intermediate hierarchy of daemons, demi-gods, who though they are passable are yet immortal. They are the companions of mankind, guiding and inspiring its life. "Some of them," he said, "cure sickness, or they tender advice in difficulties. They make known things otherwise hidden, they inspire the masterpieces of art. Some dwell in towns, others in the country, others in the sea. . . . They are sometimes the guests of human bodies, as in the case of Socrates, of Plato, of Pythagoras. . . . Some of them are scourges, others humane. . . . There is as great a diversity in the dispositions of the daemons as in those of men themselves." All the gods of the ancient mythology are seen now to be daemons, and Zeus identified with the supreme divine monarch. Prayer -- the habit of petitioning the gods-Maximus condemns as useless. If God is Providence these things will come unsought. If God is Chance prayer cannot move it. As for the desire to possess greater virtue, no god can do more here than man can do for himself, for the source of virtue is within man himself. This last point recalls Epictetus and the Stoics, and is one of the many evidences of the eclectic character of the new Platonism of the time. Its adepts borrowed as willingly from contemporaries as from the past, borrowed ideas and terminology no less readily than ritual.

The one supreme God transcends sense. The soul is raised to communication with him by contemplation and love, and the condition of this ascent is an increasing detachment from all else. The perfection of this intellectual vision of God is indeed impossible in this life. Yet, by meditation and a life of detachment, great heights may be attained even here on earth. Not all men it is true can so raise themselves. For those who are unable there remains in consolation the contemplation of the hierarchy of semi-divine intermediaries.

"How then will you escape, how come to see God? In a word, you will see him when he calls you to come. Nor will he long delay to call. Only await his invitation. Old age is at hand which will lead you; Death, whose approach affrights the coward to tears but whom the lover of God looks for with joy, receives with courage. But, if you wish, even in this present, to know his nature how shall I explain it? God is no doubt beautiful, of all beauteous things the fairest. But it is not the beauty of a body. He is what gives the body its beauty. It is not the beauty of a field, but again that whence comes the field's beauty. Beauty of streams, beauty of sea and sky, it is from the gods who dwell in the sky that all this beauty flows, running over from a spring pure and eternal. And in the measure of their sharing this eternal stream, all things are beautiful, ordered, saved. In the measure they turn from it there remains for them only shame, death, corruption. If this satisfies, you have seen God. If not, how can you be made to understand? Do not picture to yourself size, nor colour, nor form, nor indeed any material quality, but, like a lover stripping of its varied clothing the beautiful body thus hidden from his gaze, strip away with your thought all these material imaginings. There will remain, and you shall gaze upon it, what you desire to see. But if you are too weak thus to arrive at the vision of the Father -- the Demiurge, it will suffice that you actually see their works and adore their offspring in all their rich diversity. . . . Imagine a great empire, a powerful kingdom where every creature depends, and willingly, on the good will of one soul, the soul of the King, venerable, excelling in virtue. . . imagine then this King himself, immovable as law itself, communicating to those who serve, the salvation which is his. See all those who share in his power, the innumerable gods, visible some and others yet unseen. Some there are who, like guards of honour, at his side share his table and his food. Others serve them, and others there are of yet lower degree. See you not this chain, this hierarchy descending from God down to the very earth?" [11]

The charm of the vision so described, its poetry, the communication of religious emotion between master and student explain much of the system's appeal. It brought about, in the end, and made generally acceptable, an idea of the infinite that grew ever vaguer, ever more indistinct; an instinctive suspicion, indeed, of distinctness and definition and reason in religious speculation; the idea of an opposition between "mysticism" and "dogma " necessary and fundamental; an exaltation of " mysticism " at the expense of " dogma," and a surrender of reason for emotion. Closely allied to this school of Platonists were those other practical philosophers who pass under the name of neo- Pythagoreans. Little as we know of them, we know that for them also matter was a principle of death, that the perfect reality was transcendent and unknowable. Between God and man, once again, there is this world of intermediaries, and one chief mediator, daemons and the Logos. The Logos again is at once God's idea or pattern according to which all things are, and the divine instrument. But it was the neo-Pythagorean school which did most, apparently, to build upon these philosophical theories a working religion. And it did so by borrowing from the East magical rites and incantations, rites of expiation and purification, mutilations and sacrifices.

All through the second century, and increasingly as the second century passed into the third, the missionaries of these new religions moved through the empire, lecturing, explaining and translating their theories into act. They consoled souls broken with sorrow and pain, they prepared for death the unfortunate whom the tyranny of the emperors condemned to suicide. "By word and example they showed to all the way of salvation."

Religions from the East offering salvation, astral religions, new cults of Fortune and the Fates, the pantheism and magic of the philosophers, mysteries dazzling by their splendour, initiations attracting by their exclusiveness, with all this rich and active diversity we have not, even yet, come to the end of the catalogue of the second century's religious activities. More important than any one of them individually is a movement which runs through them all, drawing something from each, offering something in return -- a deeper insight, a truer vision, Knowledge in fact where, so far, no more has been possible than to see as in a glass darkly. This movement that claims to reveal to the religious themselves Knowledge, is the much discussed Gnosticism, and the history of the Church in the second century is very largely the history of its relation to Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is pre-Christian in its origins. It set itself to reinterpret Paganism and to re-interpret Judaism, and in the course of the interpretation it altered them radically. It offered Knowledge, the vision of God, actual communication with the divine here on earth. Like the philosophies, it made ecstasy the means of the most perfect knowledge and the ultimate aim of religious life. Like the mystery religions, it promised salvation. To all the thousands who sought security, in one or other of the myriad cults, it suggested a better understanding of those cults, the revelation of a deeper meaning in what they already believed or practised. It varied enormously, inevitably, from one exponent to another, varied according to whether it set itself to work on Paganism or Judaism or the religion of the Church; and it added new hybrid gnostic-inspired cults to those hundreds it found in possession. There were Gnostic-Pagan cults, and Gnostic-Jewish cults and ultimately Gnostic-Christian cults. But in all these amalgams we can trace some common features, can discover at work forces allied in character. There is for example, the claim that the Gnostic teaching is of divine origin, handed down through a secret chain of initiated disciples. There is a marked insistence on the dual origin of existence, and a hatred and scorn for the material world as a thing necessarily evil. God is of course transcendent, and so removed from the material world that creation is necessarily the work of intermediary powers. There is a preoccupation with theories about the creation, the end of creation, and the divine genealogies that borders on mania. There are rites, symbols, a mystical arithmetic, and exotic cults. Finally Knowledge is always presented as the privilege of the few. It is to an elite only that the real meaning of religion is offered.

It was simply a matter of time before the religion of the Church attracted the attention of Gnostics, and before Christians themselves began to turn to Gnosticism to explain the mysteries in their beliefs. With that, and the beginnings, inside the Church, of attempts to explain its belief "gnostically," the Church enters upon the first great crisis of its history

A rich and confused amalgam of rites and beliefs and magical practices, theories to explain the origin of evil, human destiny, the relations between matter and spirit, between God and his creation, between God and Jesus Christ -- the Gnostic movement within the Church was to win from the tradition some of the Church's first theologians and scholars, Tatian for example and Bardesanes. It also provoked a strong traditional reaction, and one of the great masterpieces of Catholic writing, the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus. In studying the history of this second century we are watching the first attempts of Christians to explain rationally their beliefs and mysteries and, in the story of the Gnostic crisis, can observe the natural, spontaneous reaction of the Church to its first great danger. The manner of that reaction throws an interesting light on the nature of the Church's organisation, and on second century theories about the Church's constitution and its powers.

THE FIRST APOLOGISTS

What was there in the religion of the Catholic Church to interest the Pagans of this century so desperately interested in religion? Had it any "message" for the enquirer who sought security of mind and peace of soul, and sought in vain from mystery cults and magic? from first one, and then another, of the day's moral philosophies? Celsus, the most informed perhaps of all its early opponents, was to sneer at Christianity as a religion that began with fishermen and publicans. Had it then nothing to offer to the educated, to the intellectuals? Was it no more than an association of mutual benevolence, a friendly society with its ritual and passwords, a kindly sentimental morality? The answer to these questions was the writings of Christianity's first publicists, the so-called Apologists.

The name Apologist is conventionally restricted to a small group of some fifteen writers. Half of them -- Quadratus, Miltiades Melito for example -- are little more than names to us, for their works, all but a few fragments, have perished. In other cases whole treatises remain from which we can discover the common aim which inspired this great literary effort, study its methods, and form some estimate of its importance in the development of Catholic theological thought and of the technical language in which it has come to be expressed. This second more important group includes the Greeks Aristides, Athenagoras, Hermias and St. Theophilus of Antioch, the Syrian Tatian, the Latins Minucius Felix and Tertullian, and St. Justin Martyr. In date their work ranges from the Apology to [the Emperor] Antoninus Pius of Aristides (between 138-161) and Hermias' A Laugh at the Heathen Philosophers of perhaps seventy years later. Tertullian, the greatest writer of them all, was something more than an apologist and will be discussed elsewhere. A more representative figure is St. Justin Martyr, and the school, with its merits and its weaknesses, is perhaps best described in him.

A double object inspires the writings of the Apologists. They hope to clear their religion of the calumnious charges which the Pagan world takes as proved against it, and so to persuade the emperors to a policy of toleration. They hope, also, to make clear to the associates and friends of their own pre-Christian life the beauty and truth of their new belief. They are converts from Paganism, converts from the Philosophical sects, who have not ceased to philosophise with their baptism but, realising now that their new faith is the goal of all thought, they burn with the desire to communicate this good news to those by whose side they sat in the lecture rooms of Rome and Athens, or those to whom they themselves once taught the consolations of Stoicism and the divine Plato. With St. Paul (Philipp. iv, 8) they made their own whatever is true, whatever is just, the virtuous and praiseworthy, wherever they found it. They carefully sought out whatever of truth or goodness there was in Pagan thought and inspiration and, made the most of it, that it might serve as a bridge for the heathens to pass from the philosophies to Christ. Christianity was the unknown good, and to it unconsciously all men of goodwill tended. The Apologists hoped then to dispose the pagan mind for Christianity. They did not set out to instruct the Pagan in the full detail of Christian belief -- and the Apologists' limited objective must be continually borne in mind when their writings are used as evidence of early Christian belief. From the nature of the Apologists' case, they prefer to elaborate those points where Christian teaching confirms Philosophy, to discuss natural virtues and those truths about God which are discoverable by the natural reason. All the stock topics of the day find treatment in their writings -- the unity of God, the unicity of God, the soul's immortality, the future life as a sanction of morality. These are the substance of their apologetic appeal.

St. Justin was born in Palestine round about the year 100. He was not only a philosopher by education and taste, but by profession too! earning his living by teaching philosophy. In his search for truth he passed from one school to another and was Stoic, Aristotelian, Neo-Pythagorean, Neo-Platonist by turn. Finally, when thirty-eight years of age, he was converted to Christianity at Ephesus, and passing to Rome opened there a school where he taught Christianity as a philosophy. At Rome he flourished for nearly thirty years, until the malice of a rival, worsted in debate, set the persecuting laws in motion against him and, under the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, thrown to the beasts, he died a martyr in 165 His surviving works are his two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. St. Justin's reasoned presentation of Christianity has for its starting point the principle that Christianity is itself a philosophy. More striking than its differences from other philosophies are the many points it has in common with them. Those differences, too, are not so much real oppositions as shades of meaning. The Faith does no more than teach with greater security what Plato and the Stoics teach. Faith teaches with divine authority, and Faith can prove with reason what it teaches. The origin of this likeness between Philosophy and Christianity is, for St. Justin, twofold. First of all, the philosophers originally learned these truths from the Old Testament -- an idea popular, before St. Justin, with the philosophising Jews of Alexandria. Then -- by a theory of St. Justin's own invention, destined to make a name for itself -- the philosophers had profited from the activity of the Divine Logos. The Logos, whose incarnation in Jesus Christ was the beginning of Christianity, had, from the beginning, made Himself known to the Pagans as well as to the Jews. To the Jews He had spoken by the prophets and the writers of the sacred books, to the Pagans through the philosophers. This revelation through the philosophers was indeed less complete than that made to the Jews. None the less it was sufficient to make possible the philosophers' discovery of the truths of natural religion. This seed of the Logos (Logos Spermatikos) planted in every man's mind from the beginning, was the true source of philosophical truth. Between Philosophy then and Christianity there could not be any real and final opposition. All who have lived according to that light are Christians, Socrates and Heraclitus as truly as Abraham. Christianity is the fulfilment of Philosophy, Jesus Christ of Socrates ! The revelation through the Logos Spermatikos was incomplete, and from its incompleteness errors were bound to follow. Hence the mistakes of even the best of philosophers. But now, the Logos has appeared incarnate, the fullness of revelation is come by which the errors of the past may be corrected. The philosopher who is logical embraces Christianity.

The argument against the sufficiency of the philosophies of the day, thus roughly summarised, is but one side of the Apologist's work. He criticises the pagan religions, their insufficiency, their puerility, their immorality. He defends the Christians from the vile calumnies which, to the man in the street, justified the persecutions. He addresses himself also to the Jews, responsible, in the eyes of St. Justin, for many of the calumnies whose refutation occupies his time. The accord of their own prophetic writings with subsequent history and the present event, proves the Church to be the divine fulfilment of the religion of Abraham and Moses. The true Israel of to-day is the Church of Christ.

It is not easy to say how much this first learned appeal for a hearing achieved. The calumnies continued, as did the persecution. Nor have we any data by which to judge of the fruit of the Apologies among the Pagan elite. They remain, however, a valuable evidence of the first contact of Christianity with the thought of the contemporary Pagan world; and, in addition, they are of absorbing interest as the first attempts of members of the Church to clothe its traditional beliefs in philosophical language. With the Apologists Catholic Theology is born -- the development of the content of Revelation by human reasoning under the guidance of that authoritative teaching which, from the beginning, has been one of the new religion's most striking features. With these fir t beginnings of speculation on the data of Revelation there begins no less surely the trouble bred in the Church by the thinker who claims for his thought, for his own carefully worked-out explanation of the revealed tradition, a superiority over the tradition itself. Here, too, is the real origin of those discussions which fill the fourth and fifth centuries, and which can never be really understood if these primitive theologians are neglected. Inevitably the Apologist's trained mind was drawn to the exploration of the meaning of the great mysteries of the Christian tradition. The urge of his own piety, the passion to explain all, to know all that is knowable, made it impossible for him not to attempt the task of describing these mysteries philosophically.

So it was with the mystery we know as that of the Trinity. God was one. Jesus Christ was God because the Logos incarnate. And yet Jesus Christ was not God the Father. Again there was the absorbing question of the relation of the Father and the Logos before the incarnation, and the question of the eternal generation of the Logos. These difficulties did not challenge in vain. The Apologists boldly showed the way to eighteen centuries of Christian thinkers. Like pioneers of every type they had to devise instruments and machinery as they went along. The road was unplotted, the obstacles unknown and, when known, for long not fully understood; the rough tools were sometimes a hindrance as well as a help. They use, for example, the concepts and language of the philosophical schools to which they at one time adhered, and thence ensues a host of new difficulties for the student of their teaching. The modern scholar picks his way easily through the difficulties of such high speculation, equipped with a tested technical language which they lacked. Of that language they were the founders. In their stumblings and gropings it was born. Inevitably there is, at times, in their speculation an uneasiness, a confusion and an obscurity which leave room for contrary interpretations of their meaning. Little wonder, then, that the efforts of these first private theologians bred a certain uneasiness on the part of the Authority whose mission it was to preserve at all costs the traditional faith, and for whom, by comparison with that high duty, the need to explain philosophically that faith's coherence was of secondary importance.

St. Justin, faithful to the tradition, explains that there is only one God and that in God there are to be distinguished the Father, the Logos or Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father is God as the source of divinity and is therefore the Creator who formed all things from nothing. Nevertheless, following St. John (i. 3), creation was, by the Father's will, through the Logos, and so too, through the Logos, has God chosen to reveal himself to man (St. John i. 18) and to redeem him. Creation, revelation and redemption are the work of the one only God. The Logos is truly God; not a creature, not an angel. "God of God Begotten" says Theophilus of Antioch. The Logos exists before all creation, is not himself made nor created, but begotten and therefore truly Son of God. The Logos then is really distinct from the Father. For all the distinction's reality, it does not imply any division of the indivisible divinity, any separation of Logos from the Father. The next two questions to suggest themselves were that of the moment of the generation of the Logos, and, deriving from this, the question of the difference in the relation of Father to Logos before and after the creation. The current philosophical theories of the day once more came to the thinker's aid. These notions the Apologists adapted to explain the Christian mystery of the Trinity.

Logos in Greek means the word as spoken, and it also means the conceived idea of which the spoken word is the manifestation. The Stoics had thence developed a theory of the Logos as immanent and as manifested. St. Justin put it to a Christian use.

The Logos existing from all eternity, did not exist from all eternity in a real distinction from the Father. As a term really distinct He exists only from the moment of the generation, and that moment was the moment of God's willingness to create. Until that moment the Divine Logos is Logos Endiathetos -- the Logos Immanent in God. At that moment, in a manner of speaking, the Logos issues forth. Thenceforward He is Logos Prophorikos -- the Logos Manifested -- and really distinct. This is the theory which has been called (none too correctly) the theory of the temporal generation of the Logos. The Logos, moreover, since He is in function the minister of the Divine Will is "subordinate" to the Father -- a subordination however not of nature, for the Logos is equally God with the Father and God is one. This is subordinationism, but only in so far as it is an attempt to describe the role of the Logos in the Divine ordering of things. It neither necessitates, nor implies, any theory of the inferiority of the Logos to the Father in nature.

Through the Logos manifested had come the Creation, and the partial revelation to the philosophers and to the Jews. Through the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ had come the fullness of revelation and the Church. It is from the Church that the disciple learns of His work and its fruits, how He died on our behalf to ransom us from the death which sin had merited. His death is the principal cause of our redemption, and, as Jesus Christ the Incarnate Logos restored what Adam the first of mankind had ruined, so Mary, consenting to be the mother of Him Who is mankind's salvation, repaired the ills that followed from Eve's disobedience.

St. Justin is primarily a polemist. He has set himself to the restricted task of the defence and explanation of special points, and this to a restricted audience of Pagans. None the less he describes the Christian life, makes clear the ritual, as well as the doctrine, of Baptism; and he has left the most precious description of the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist, in primitive times, which we possess.

THE GNOSTICS AND THE CHURCH

St. Justin is an example of the philosopher turned Christian who uses his philosophy to gain a hearing for the Church's teaching. The aim of the Gnostics was far different. Where St. Justin only strove to translate that teaching into a language understood of the non-Christian thinking world, the Gnostics urged that the Church's teaching should itself be remodelled. There was a higher knowledge than that of the traditional catechesis, and only in accordance with this higher knowledge could the revelation of God to man really be understood.

Gnosticism in its relation to Christianity is a subject of bewildering complexity. The simplest way to explain the very real danger it became is, perhaps, to describe the systems of two of the leading Christian Gnostics of the time -- Basilides and Valentine. Better so than in any other way -- in a work where space is limited -- can we see how a school of thought within the Church, inspired by an all powerful religious tendency of the time, and using its methods, hoped to find a deeper meaning in Christianity than that offered by the gospels and tradition, and to transform the religion of the Church into a mystery cult of dreams and initiations. Apart from the matter of these Gnostic- Christian speculations, the long crisis is important in another way. For Gnosticism is also, historically, an attempt on the part of the Christian "intellectuals" -- some of them thinkers of unusual power -- to usurp a right of speculating, of systematising and dogmatising in the strictest sense of the word after the manner of the pagan schools of philosophy.

To the ordinary man the detailing of the beliefs and theories of these heretics is a wearying business. Speculations seemingly as divorced from right reason as the schemes of the professors in Laputa, nightmarish mechanically-contrived fantasies, a wilderness of sounding phrases and necromantic names, a chaos where sounds abound and sense is all to seek -- in studying these systematic aberrations we have to remind ourselves at every turn that their bizarre extravagance covers a discussion, and an offered solution, of the most fundamental of all problems. The nature and origin of evil, of man, of God, the purpose of life and its attainment through living -- these are the problems, theoretical and practical, which the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity claimed to answer. Nor was Gnosticism a mere academic discussion. It offered itself as a religious system. It had its ritual and its observances, its regulations and its officials. It was a formidable competitor to traditional Christianity, and to Gnosticism the Church lost some of its best minds and most energetic spirits. Nor did the influence of the movement end with the second century. That century witnessed a life and death struggle between the Church and the Gnostics which ended in the Gnostics' expulsion from the Church, but the defeated theories survived outside the Church to provide, for centuries yet to come, an undercurrent of influences which never ceased to irritate and disturb the development of Catholic thought.

Of Basilides himself we know little except that he flourished at Alexandria in the reign of Hadrian (117-138). The beginning and first principle of all things, according to his theology, is the unbegotten Father. Thence, by a series of successive emanations, derive the eight intermediary and complementary divinities-Nous, Logos, Phronesis, Sophia and Dynamis, and from this last couple the Powers, Archons and Angels. This personification of abstractions was all in the contemporary fashion, as was also the arrangement of intermediary divine agencies between the first principle and the created universe. The ogdoad of intermediary divinities is also a familiar notion in the religions of ancient Egypt.

The Powers, Archons and Angels made the first heaven. Other Angels, issue of these first Angels, made the second, the third and the rest of the heavens to the number of 365. The origin of the world is conceived as from two opposing principles Light and Darkness, between which there is an irreducible opposition. This dualism finds its counterpart in the opposition between the Supreme God and the first of all the Archons. This Archon, the leader of the wicked Angels, is the God whom the Jews adore. The apparition of the Holy Spirit at the baptism of Our Lord bred in him a terrible fear which was for him the beginning of Wisdom. The system offers a theory about Our Lord, about the redemption, the creation of the world and the nature of the divine life. It is a miscellany in which reminiscences of biblical theology and of Egyptian and Persian religion find their place. In addition Basilides lays claim to a special knowledge deriving from the secret teaching of the Apostle St. Mathias.

In the next generation Valentine built up a system still more complete upon much the same foundation. Where and when Valentine was born, what influences shaped his early formation is not known. He came to Rome in the second quarter of the century and was sufficiently prominent in the Roman Church at the death of the pope St. Hyginus (c. 140) to hope himself to secure election as its bishop. He was disappointed and, according to Tertullian, this disappointment was the occasion of his breach with Catholicism. Tertullian's account of this crisis in the life of Valentine has been called in question. Be it true or false, there is no doubt whatever as to the success of the grandiose system of which Valentine was the founder. All contemporary writers agree that his sect was the most numerous and the most powerful of all. In time it divided and while one school ofValentinians spread through Egypt and Syria, the other filled Italy and southern Gaul. It is this western Valentinianism which is best known to us, for in Gaul it met the man who was to be its greatest adversary and in whose writings the memory of it is best preserved, the Bishop of Lyons St. Irenaeus.

In the Valentinians the Christian aspect of the movement is clearer than with the followers of Basilides. It is more apparently their object to find a solution for the paradoxes of the Christian mysteries in the fashions of contemporary ideas. Valentine supposes a dual principle at the origin of things. He has the old hatred of matter as a thing necessarily evil, and thence, in his theology, the theory of the Supreme God in necessary opposition to the divinity through whom He creates, and a theory of the Incarnation that makes the humanity of Christ Our Lord a matter of appearance only.

At the summit of all being is God, the Father, and His companion Sige (Silence). God is One, unique, known only to Himself, remote, inaccessible; and between God and the world is a whole universe of "demi-gods." From the Father and Sige proceed Intellect and Truth, and from these Word and Life, and from these again Man and the Church; these are the eight superior eons. This process of generation among the eons continues until the Pleroma is complete -- the perfect society of divine beings, thirty in all. So far all is abstraction, idea. Physical reality originates through a breach of the harmony of the ideal pleroma, "a kind of original sin". . . . The lowest of the thirty eons, Wisdom, conceives a desire to know the Father -- an inordinate desire, necessarily, since the Father is knowable only to His own first born, Intellect. This inordinate desire of Wisdom is a new being, imperfect necessarily and therefore cast out from the Pleroma. Its name is Hachamoth. To prevent any recurrence of such disorder Intellect and Truth produce a sixteenth pair of eons, Christ and the Holy Ghost to teach the rest the limits of their nature. Then in an act of Thanksgiving all the thirty-two eons unite their powers and produce the thirty-third eon, Jesus the Saviour. The thirty-third eon and the eon Christ are now dispatched by the Pleroma to Hachamoth -- the imperfect desire of Wisdom. From the eon Christ it receives a beginning of form and the elements of conscience -- whence a sense of its own inferiority. The thirty-third eon separates the passions from it. The separated passions are inanimate matter (hylike); Hachamoth, freed from them, is animate matter (psychike). Hachamoth's vision of the Saviour results in a third substance, the spiritual (pneumatike). So originate the elements of the world that is to be. Hachamoth, from the psychike, produces the Creator, Demiurge, and he gives form to the rest of creation.

Demiurge is ignorant of his own origin, believes himself supreme. He is the maker of man, material and animated, the god of the Jews and the Old Testament, a bad god and to be resisted. (Whence the common Gnostic teaching of a fundamental opposition between the Old Testament and the New.) Men are of three types, according to the element predominating in them. There are material men (hylikoi), who cannot be saved; spiritual men (pneumatikoi) who have no need of salvation (the Gnostics); and animate men (psychikoi) who need salvation and can attain to it. For these last there is the plan of Redemption. The redeemer is spiritual, he is animate, he has the appearance of the material and, a fourth element in him, he is the eon Jesus. This eon descended into him at his baptism and remained until the trial before Pilate when it returned to the Pleroma, taking with it the spiritual element. The actor in the Passion was no more than the animate element with its appearance of matter. The Passion is not the source of redemption. Salvation, the redemption of the spiritual in man from the influence of the psychic, is due to the knowledge brought by the thirty-third eon -- knowledge of the secret traditions and mysteries, knowledge of the Gospel, which can only be truly known through this esoteric knowledge. The possession of this knowledge is the key to life, and knowledge is the highest of virtues. Matter is the source of evil in man, and since the Gnostic is spiritual, his actions cannot but be good. Spirit and flesh are independent, and the spirit is not responsible for the flesh.

The system of eons proceeding the one from the other by pairs is not Valentine's own invention, and the idea of a pleroma of thirty eons is to be found in Plutarch. Peculiar to Valentine is the introduction of the two new eons Logos and Life and this, together with the presence in the lower series of the Only-begotten and the Paraclete, is no doubt explainable as a borrowing from the Gospel of St. John. But these Christian expressions are no more than trappings to decorate a pagan masquerade, mere names which have lost all their Christian meaning when they have not been distorted to a new meaning altogether. [12]

It was not through such elaborations of learned fantasy as these that the new religion was to live. This was again to show itself as primarily the tradition of an unaltered block of truth revealed once and for all. The test, for the Church, of the Gnostic theology's truth was its accord with the tradition; and the judge of that accord was to be, not the encyclopaedic erudition of the Valentines and Basilides, nor even the trained minds of convert philosophers. Victory was to lie with the tradition and its sole authorised exponent the hierarchy of bishops. The adversary par excellence of Gnosticism in the Church, is, fittingly enough, no Apologist but a bishop, St. Irenaeus of Lyons.

ST. IRENAEUS OF LYONS

St. Irenaeus is one of those sympathetic figures in whom all the tendencies of a time seem to meet. He was born, apparently, between the years 135-140 in Asia Minor, and in his youth was a disciple of the famous Bishop of Smyrna St. Polycarp who was, in turn, the disciple of St. John. From Smyrna Irenaeus passed to Rome and, possibly at this time, came under the influence of St. Justin, reminiscences of whose work are found in all his writings. But it is not until the year 177 that Irenaeus appears in history and he is then in Rome, the envoy of the Church at Lyons, recounting for the Roman Church the detail of the famous persecution. In that persecution he has himself suffered and he is by this time a priest of the Church at Lyons. By the time he returned from Rome, the persecution had given yet more martyrs to the Lyonnese Church, among them its aged bishop, Pothinus. Irenaeus was elected to succeed him, and ruled for the next twenty or thirty years. How his life ended we do not know, but, traditionally, it is as a martyr that he figures in the calendar.

St. Irenaeus -- and the fact is immediately evident from his writings -- is not an apologist. To win a sympathetic hearing from the Pagan elite whom philosophies attract is by no means his object. He is a man of affairs, the busy missionary bishop of a frontier diocese, and if he writes it is to defend his people from the ever menacing heresies. He is concerned to rout the Gnostics to shatter their claims to be followers of Christ, to state yet once again the simple truths delivered to the Apostles in which alone salvation lies. And for all his admiration for St. Justin and his use of that scholar's work, he has little patience with the attempts of philosophers to explain rationally the how and the why of the mysteries. Quasi ipsi obstetricaverint -- "as though they themselves had been the midwives" -- he says scornfully of the theorists busy with discussion on the generation of the Logos. His work marks an epoch in the development of Catholic Theology and there are not wanting scholars to see in him, in this respect, the peer of St. Augustine, the greatest force indeed between St. Augustine and St. Paul.

Yet St. Irenaeus is no innovator. He has no revolutionary theories to present, no new explanations -- explanations indeed he does not profess to give. But he so re-states the old traditional truths in relation to the particular danger of his day, that his restatement has a new, universal value and, beyond what he designed, it has stood ever since as a refutation by anticipation not of Gnosticism alone but of all and every heresy. Simply summarising the legacy of all who had preceded him, setting forth once again the traditional belief and practice of the Church as he knew it, he ends by sketching a theological theory of the Church and its teaching office which all subsequent discussions have merely developed. He is a most valuable witness to the second century Church's own theory of her own nature. He professes merely to state facts, to describe the reality before him, and the event is proof of his sincerity and his truth. The Church did not become Gnostic, although many Catholics were Gnostics. It threw off the doctrine, as a thing it could not assimilate. Gnosticism, and the religion of the Church as Christ would have it, are incompatible because the religion of Christ is essentially a religion of authority. The issue is the simple one of tradition against speculation. Two theories claiming to determine truth within the Church are in conflict -- the Gnostics base all on the depth of their learning, Irenaeus on the teaching authority in the Church. The Gnostics, witnessing to the institution they seek to subvert, gibe at "the teaching fitted for simpletons." Irenaeus accepts the gibe. Upon it he builds his work. Not by the machinery of councils, nor the aid of the State, but by the simple functioning of the authority which was its essence, the Church of the second century shook itself free of its modernising children. Upon no other hypothesis than a general belief in the traditional nature of Christian teaching, and a general acceptance of the claim of the rulers to decide what was the tradition, can the passage of the Church, scathless, through this crisis be explained. If, on the other hand, the Church was as St. Irenaeus describes it, the matter is self-evident.

Two books of his writing survive. The first which we have in a Latin translation, possibly contemporary with the author, and in a vast number of Greek fragments, is the work usually known as the Adversus Haereses -- Against Heresies. Its Greek title better describes it as A refutation and criticism of Knowledge falsely so-called. The second and much shorter work -- The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching -- is a kind of handbook for one who is already a believer, explaining the faith, with arguments and citations from Holy Scripture. It was lost for centuries and rediscovered, in an Armenian translation, as recently as 1904.

It is to the Adversus Haereses that St. Irenaeus owes his place in history. The doctrine of the book is the traditional doctrine. God is only fully knowable by revelation. God is one and there is only one God, God of the Old Testament and of the New alike. This one true God is the Creator of all. In God there are the three, Father, Son (St. Irenaeus characteristically prefers the term Son to Logos with its associations of alien philosophies and Gnostic misuse) and Holy Ghost. The Son existed before His incarnation, for the Son is God equally with the Father. As to the mode or, moment of His generation St. Irenaeus, as against the Gnostics and in marked contrast with the Apologists, has no theory to propose. These are mysteries known to God alone, and the Gnostic's elaborate explanations are mere fantasies. Nor does he offer any explanation of the origin of evil, beyond the free will of man and the fact of the first man's fall and its consequences. That falling away from God at the beginning of things has affected all subsequent humanity. From its disastrous consequences we are redeemed by the saving death of Jesus Christ-the Logos Himself, now incarnate. He is Saviour and Redeemer, as well as Revealer of God to man. He is truly God and truly man; and St. Irenaeus is again content to record the traditional belief without any attempt to show how the two realities meet in Him. From the redeeming action of the incarnate Logos there comes to man the possibility of reconciliation with God, to be achieved by faith in Christ, obedience to His precepts, and rebirth in Him by Baptism. The mystery of the Holy Eucharist in which are really received the Body and Blood of Christ, and which is also a sacrifice, consummates on earth the work of reconciliation.

In all this St. Irenaeus is not merely repeating the tradition. He is repeating it to refute thinkers whose special error it is that they claim to arrive at the fullness of Christianity by "Knowledge." Whence the special attention he gives to the fundamental question of the sources and means by which we can come to know God and His will in our regard. Here is the very heart of what is characteristic in his work. Man, because of his finite nature, can never attain to full knowledge of God. It is no matter for surprise, then, that such mysteries as the generation of the Logos, the origin of the material escape us. Perfect knowledge is more than we can expect. Yet there is open to us a sure knowledge of heavenly things and mysteries, even a sure knowledge of the Logos -- the knowledge God Himself has chosen to reveal. This knowledge is, in part, contained in the divine Scriptures. It is objected that these are often obscure, and the difficulty arises of correct interpretation, of a choice between rival interpretations. What then is the ultimate guide? Not Scripture but "the fixed, unchangeable rule of truth" which each receives in Baptism. This canon of belief is the same throughout the Church; so that the Church whether in the Germanies or in Gaul, in Spain, among the Celts, in the East, in Egypt, in Libya has but one heart and one soul, speaks with one mouth and one voice. The most eloquent of bishops cannot teach otherwise, the weakest can do nothing to lessen the tradition. So it is with the Church universal, wherever it is established. The source of this canon's value is its apostolic origin, the historically demonstrable fact that it was committed to the Church by the Apostles and has, by the Church, been ever since preserved. All those who care to know the truth can examine the apostolic tradition, shown forth clearly in every church throughout the world, guaranteed by the line of bishops which began with those whom the Apostles appointed and which continues to their successors in our own time. To trace the succession of bishops in all the churches of the world would take more space than his book can afford, he proceeds. A simpler way is to examine the succession in that see of Rome, the greatest and most venerable of all, founded by the glorious apostles Peter and Paul. By setting out the tradition it holds from the Apostles, and the faith it has taught through a succession of bishops reaching thence to our times, we bring to confusion those who, for whatever reason, gather elsewhere than they ought. And this for the simple reason that every church throughout the world is bound to bring itself into line with the Roman Church because of that Church's surer guarantees, [13] for in that Church what the Apostles handed down has ever been preserved by those who govern. In final analysis it is not human learning, not even the study of the admittedly Sacred Writings, which is the source of man's knowledge of the truths revealed., It is the teaching of the Roman Church.

Such is the famous testimony of St. Irenaeus written, not as an argument to prove the papal claims against objectors, but, as a reminder of known and accepted truths, to make it easier for his contemporaries to distinguish between truth and heresy. For a Church so constituted, and so clearly conscious of its constitution, there was little to fear in Gnosticism. The seduction of the heresy, its apparent success in giving rational explanations where the Church proposed mysteries to be believed, its ritual, its exclusivism, its suggestion that the Gnostic was one of an elite -- all these might lead many astray. But, upon the institution they deserted for the "knowledge falsely so-called", the theories could make no impression. The tradition was too rooted that the religion of the Church is itself a thing handed down, to be believed on Authority, to be taught by Authority; a religion in which the last word in controversy rests not with learning, but once again, with Authority.

It is the glory of St. Irenaeus that his genius stated the anti- Gnostic case in this universal way. His ideas are never new. They are to be found where he too found them -- in St. Polycarp of Smyrna (155) and Papias and Hegesippus and the whole line back to the Apostles themselves. But his use of these riches stamped on theology once and for all that traditional character which it still bears. He is not the inventor of the principles which he states, and thanks to the Church's acceptance of which the Gnostic influences fail -- the authority of the Rule of Faith and of the Apostolic Succession, the infallibility of the Church and the united episcopate, [14] the special doctrinal authority of the Roman See. But he is the first to set them out for what they are, the several parts of an amazing whole, and thereby he is the first founder of that treatise De Ecclesia fundamental in Catholic Theology.

MARCION -- MONTANISM

The tableau of the life of the Church in this century of its first contacts with Pagan life and thought is not yet complete. Two more deviations from the Tradition call for record. They are the heresies called, after their founders, Marcionism and Montanism, heresies of quite another spirit than Gnosticism -- organised for specific purposes all their own.

Gnosticism tended to make the traditional faith a mere introduction to the final truth of which the Gnostic alone held the key. Marcion was a revolutionary who proposed to reform the Church and to reconstitute it on entirely different foundations-an aim in which he is perhaps Luther's first precursor. That he made his own some of the ideas common to the Gnostic sects is not surprising -- they were the common coin of the day's religious life. But it is Marcion's aim which fixes his place in history, and his aim is not the Gnostic ambition to discover the hidden meaning of Christianity, but the practical business of bringing back the Church to its first mission, of restoring to men what alone could save them, the original uncorrupted gospel. This, and not any enthusiasm for a hidden and higher knowledge, motived his dissension. Marcion was born a Catholic, the son of the Bishop of Sinope. He came to Rome round about the year 135, and taught there for some twenty-five years. Valentine the Gnostic and Marcion were thus contemporary celebrities in the Roman Church. In 144 Marcion was excommunicated, but in what precise circumstances we do not know. At the basis of his system is a theory of the radical opposition between the Old and New Testaments, the Law and the Gospels. The Law, harsh and inflexible, was the work of the Creator, an imperfect God to be abandoned now for the Supreme God, God of Love and forgiveness, revealed in Jesus Christ. The Gospel, then, was meant to displace the Law; the New Testament to reverse the Old. Unfortunately the Apostles, through ignorance or prejudice or lack of courage, failed in their task of purging revealed religion from the Old Testament blemishes. Whence the Old Testament ideas which remain in the Church to harass the faithful. To this failure of the Apostles there is however one very notable exception-St. Paul. For St. Paul Marcion has the most extraordinary veneration; and Marcionism is little more, on its dogmatic side, than St. Paul's doctrine of emancipation from the Law exaggerated to caricature. In the light of what he conceived St. Paul to have taught, Marcion revised the New Testament itself. From St. Paul he cast out the "interpolations" made by the Apostle's successful opponents which had masqueraded ever since as St. Paul's own words. All the remaining books he rejected as worthless except his own, amended, version of St. Luke. A book of his own composition -- the Antitheses -- in which he set forth the opposition between the Law and the Gospel completed the Marcionite Bible. A new morality, in which the fashionable notions of the day appear, accompanied the new canon of Holy Scripture. For all believers the most rigorous asceticism was prescribed as of obligation. Fasts are multiplied, abstinence from meat is perpetual, and upon all there lies the obligation of perpetual celibacy. At the end of the world God will leave the wicked to the power of Demiurge the Creator who will, thereupon, devour them.

Marcion showed himself a capable organiser, and, with the Church as his model, he set up a rival Church with a hierarchy and sacramental ritual. The movement met with success, and by the end of the century Marcionite churches were to be found in every province of the empire. Many of the Marcionites suffered death in the persecutions rather than sacrifice to the Pagan deities, and the sect continued to flourish for long after the Catholic Church had become the official religion of the Empire. In the middle of the fifth century the problem of whole villages of Marcionites in his diocese of Cyrrhus occupied the attention of the great Theodoret, and there is mention of them even so late as the tenth century.

With Montanism we move yet further from the spirit which inspired the Gnostics. Here there is nothing of philosophising, nothing of the spirit of hellenic or oriental Paganism. It is a movement where the actors are Catholics, and the action is a revolt against one established institution bred of exaggerating the importance of another -- an effort to make private revelation supreme over the official teaching hierarchy. The movement first showed itself about the year 172, in the highlands of central Asia Minor, the neighbourhood of the modern Ancyra. Montanus, a recent convert, a one-time priest, self-mutilated, of the goddess Cybele began to experience "ecstasies", in the midst of which, to the accompaniment of bizarre gesticulations and long drawn out howlings, prophecy poured forth from him and new revelations. The Holy Ghost was speaking. The end of the world was at hand. The new Jerusalem was about to come down upon the earth, where Christ would reign with his elect for a thousand years. It was to come down at Pepusa, to be precise, some two hundred miles away to the east. So to Pepusa went the believers in their thousands; and in the plain soon to be favoured by the miracle a new city of the expectant sprang up. Montanus was there, and his assistants, the chief of whom, a notable novelty of the sect, were two women, Priscilla and Maximilla. Their pious exercises, the frequent ecstasies, with their accompaniment of "mystical" phenomena, served to console the faithful while in patience they waited.

Except for their insistence that through them the Holy Ghost was speaking, the new prophets do not seem at first to have made any innovations in doctrine. In morality they followed the current of contemporary rigorism, with its food taboos and its suspicion of marriage. The main feature of the movement was its belief that the end of the world was at hand. The founders died; the end of the world delayed to come; but the sect still grew, and rapidly; while from all over the Church came protestations -- not against prophets as such, nor against the asceticism, but against the novelty that men should claim the authority of the Holy Ghost for things said in ecstasies whose extravagance suggested mania rather, or possession. The most important achievement of Montanism was that in the first years of the third century it made a convert of one of the very greatest of all Christian writers -- Tertullian. Finally, in different parts of the Church, bishop after bishop turned to expose and denounce the sect, which thereupon showed itself a sect -- for the Montanists preferred their prophets to the bishops. It was in this, precisely, that the novelty of Montanism lay -- "its desire to impose private revelations as a supplement to the deposit of faith, and to accredit them by ecstasies and convulsions that were suspect." The action of the bishops seems to have checked the movement's further progress, but in places where it was once established it lasted into the fourth century. Montanists suffered martyrdom with the Catholics, and they survived the attempts of the Catholic Emperors to suppress them. By the sixth century, however, all trace of them has vanished.

The Montanist belief in the Millennium, in the theory that, as a first reward of their fidelity, the saints would reign with Christ for a thousand years upon this earth, was not, however, peculiar to the sect. Its affinity with some of the pre-Christian Jewish theories about the character of the triumph of Messias is evident. Not less evident is its connection with a literal interpretation of the Apocalypse. [15] Within the Church it makes its first appearance in the first years of the second century, with the heretic Cerinthus and with Papias the -- orthodox -- disciple of St. John. For Cerinthus, and for the later heretical adherents to the belief, the coming reign would be a vie de Theleme, where previous asceticism would be rewarded by, amongst other things, a lively carnival of the flesh. The Christians who were Millenarists naturally steered clear of such horrors. What they anticipated was the triumph on earth, in an earthly life, of Christian holiness. Among those who held to this belief were such illustrious writers as St. Justin and St. Irenaeus, the latter developing it as an argument against the Gnostic denial of the resurrection of the body. These very writers, however, bear witness that Millenniarism was never the general belief of the Church in their time, and it met with vigorous opposition, at Rome from the priest Caius and in the East from Origen and, especially, from St. Denis of Alexandria. By the time of St. Augustine it had disappeared from the churches of the East, and the great authority of his exposition of the texts in the Apocalypse ended, for ever, whatever hold Millenniarism still possessed in the West. Henceforward, where it does survive it is no more than an eccentricity of heretical sects. [16]

Endnotes

11: Maximus of Tyre, On the God of Plato, 11, 12, quoted LEBRETON Origines du Dogme de la Trinite II, pp. 75, 76. [back]

12: So with Love. In the system of Valentine it is the principle of all the emanations. It is not Love in the Christian sense, however, but the simple desire of the physical pleasure associated with sex. [back]

13: Propter potentiorem principalitatem. Adv. Her. III, 3, 2. For the translation of this much-discussed phrase cf. Batiffol, L'Eglise Naissante pp. 251-2, Dawson. Making of Europe, p. 33 n. [back]

14: " We must obey the elders in the Church, who hold the succession from the Apostles. . who with the episcopal succession have received the sure gift of truth. As for the rest, who are divorced from the principal succession and gather where they will, they are to be held in suspicion, as heretics and evil thinkers, faction makers, swelled-headed self-pleasing. . . " (Adv. Haereses, iv, 26, 2.) " It is through the Church that it has been arranged for us to receive what Christ communicates i.e., the Holy Spirit, the confirmation of our faith and the ladder to mount to God. ' For in the Church ' He says, ' God hath placed Apostles, prophets, teachers (I Cor. xii, 28) and all that other working of the Spirit in which none of those share who, instead of hastening to the Church, rob themselves of life by following evil opinions and a wicked way of life. For with the Church is the Spirit of God to be found, and with the Spirit of God there the Church and all grace: the Spirit indeed being truth. Those therefore who share not that Spirit are not nourished in life at the breasts of their mother nor do they receive of that most pure stream which flows from the body of Christ " (Adv. Her., iii, 24, 1). [back]

15: xx. 1-6. [back]

16: cf TIXERONT Hist. des dogmes Vol. I, ch. iv, 8; BARDY, G., art. Millenarisme [back]