History Of Ancient Civilization Part 27

[163] This estimate is too liberal. 1,500,00 is probably nearer the truth. See Friedlaender, Sittengeschichte Roms, i. 25.--ED.

[164] Cicero describes this juridical comedy which was still in force in his time.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY

=The Christ.=--He whom the Jews were expecting as their liberator and king, the Messiah, appeared in Galilee, a small province of the North, hardly regarded as Jewish, and in a humble family of carpenters. He was called Jesus, but his Greek disciples called him the Christ (the anointed), that is to say, the king consecrated by the holy oil. He was also called the Master, the Lord, and the Saviour. The religion that he came to found is that we now possess. We all know his life: it is the model of every Christian. We know his instructions by heart; they form our moral law. It is sufficient, then, to indicate what new doctrines he disseminated in the world.

=Charity.=--Before all, Christ commended love. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself.... On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The first duty is to love others and to benefit them. When G.o.d will judge men, he will set on his right hand those who have fed the hungry, given drink to those who were thirsty, and have clad those that were naked. To those who would follow him the Christ said at the beginning: "Go, ... sell all that ye have and give to the poor."

For the ancients the good man was the n.o.ble, the rich, the brave.

Since the time of Christ the word has changed its sense: the good man is he who loves others. Doing good is loving others and seeking to be of service to them. Charity (the Latin name of love) from that time has been the cardinal virtue. Charitable becomes synonymous with beneficent. To the old doctrine of vengeance the Christ formally opposes his doctrine of charity. "Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you ...

whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.... Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute you, ... that ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust." He himself on the cross prayed for his executioners, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

=Equality.=--The Christ loved all men; he died not for one people only, but for all humanity. He never made a difference between men; all are equal before G.o.d. The ancient religions, even the Jewish, were religions of peoples who kept them with jealous care, as a treasure, without wishing to communicate them to other peoples. Christ said to his disciples, "Go, and teach all nations." And the apostle Paul thus formulated the doctrine of Christian equality: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circ.u.mcision nor uncirc.u.mcision, barbarian, bond nor free."

Two centuries later Tertullian, a Christian writer, said, "The world is a republic, the common land of the human race."

=Poverty and Humility.=--The ancients thought that riches enn.o.bled a man and they regarded pride as a worthy sentiment. "Blessed are the poor," said Christ, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He that would not renounce all that he had could not be his disciple. He himself went from city to city, possessing nothing, and when his disciples were preoccupied with the future, he said, "Be not anxious for what ye shall eat, nor for what ye shall put on. Behold the birds of the heaven, they sow not neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them."

The Christian was to disdain riches, and more yet, worldly honors. One day when his disciples were disputing who should have the highest rank in heaven, he said, "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant." "Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." Till our day the successor of Saint Peter calls himself "Servant of the servants of G.o.d." Christ drew to himself by preference the poor, the sick, women, children,--in a word, the weak and the helpless. He took all his disciples from among the populace and bade them be "meek and lowly of heart."

=The Kingdom of G.o.d.=--Christ said that he had come to the earth to found the kingdom of G.o.d. His enemies believed that he wished to be a king, and when he was crucified, they placed this inscription on his cross, "Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews." This was a gross mistake. Christ himself had declared, "My kingdom is not of this world." He did not come to overturn governments nor to reform society. To him who asked if he should pay the Roman tax, he replied, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to G.o.d the things that are G.o.d's." And so the Christian accepted what he found established and himself worked to perfect it, not to remodel society.

To make himself pleasing to G.o.d and worthy of his kingdom it was not necessary to offer him sacrifices or to observe minute formulas as the pagans did: "True worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth." Their moral law is contained in this word of Christ: "Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

THE FIRST CENTURIES OF THE CHURCH

=Disciples and Apostles.=--The twelve disciples who a.s.sociated with Christ received from him the mission to preach his doctrine to all peoples. From that time they were called Apostles. The majority of them lived in Jerusalem and preached in Judaea; the first Christians were still Jews. It was Saul, a new convert, who carried Christianity to the other peoples of the Orient. Paul (for he took this name) spent his life visiting the Greek cities of Asia, Greece, and Macedonia, inviting to the new religion not only the Jews, but also and especially the Gentiles: "You were once without Christ," said he to them, "strangers to the covenant and to the promises; but you have been brought nigh by the blood of Christ, for it is he who of two peoples hath made both one." From this time it was no longer necessary to be a Jew if one would become a Christian. The other nations, disregarded by the law of Moses, are brought near by the law of Christ. This fusion was the work of St. Paul, also called the Apostle to the Gentiles.

The religion of Christ spread very slowly, as he himself had announced: "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed ...

which is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs ... and the birds of the air lodge under its branches."

=The Church.=--In every city where Christians were found they a.s.sembled to pray together, to sing the praises of G.o.d, and to celebrate the mystery of the Lord's Supper. Their meeting was called Ecclesia (a.s.sembly). Usually the Christians of the same a.s.sembly regarded themselves as brothers; they contributed of their property to support the widows, the poor, and the sick. The most eminent directed the community and celebrated the religious ceremonies. These were the Priests (their name signifies "elders"). Others were charged with the administration of the goods of the community, and were called Deacons (servants). Besides these officers, there was in each city a supreme head--the Bishop (overseer).

Later the functions of the church became so exacting that the body of Christians was divided into two cla.s.ses of people: the clergy, who were the officials of the community; the rest, the faithful, who were termed the laity.

Each city had its independent church; thus they spoke of the church of Antioch, of Corinth, of Rome; and yet they all formed but one church, the church of Christ, in which all were united in one faith. The universal or Catholic faith was regarded as the only correct body of belief; all conflicting opinions (the heresies) were condemned as errors.

=The Sacred Books.=--The sacred scripture of the Jews, the Old Testament, remained sacred for the Christians, but they had other sacred books which the church had brought into one structure (the New Testament). The four Gospels recount the life of Christ and the "good news" of salvation which he brought. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the gospel was disseminated in the world. The Epistles are the letters addressed by the apostles to the Christians of the first century. The Apocalypse (Revelation) is the revelation made through St. John to the seven churches of Asia. Many other pseudo-sacred books were current among the Christians, but the church has rejected all of these, and has termed them apocryphal.

=The Persecutions.=--The Christian religion was persecuted from its birth. Its first enemies were the Jews, who forced the Roman governor of Judaea to crucify Christ; who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr, and so set themselves against St. Paul that they almost compa.s.sed his death.

Then came the persecution by the Pagans. The Romans tolerated all the religions of the East because the devotees of Osiris, of Mithra, and of the Good G.o.ddess recognized at the same time the Roman G.o.ds. But the Christians, worshippers of the living G.o.d, scorned the petty divinities of antiquity. More serious still in the eyes of the Romans, they refused to adore the emperor as a G.o.d and to burn incense on the altar of the G.o.ddess Roma. Several emperors promulgated edicts against the Christians, bidding the governors arrest them and put them to death. A letter of Pliny the Younger, then governor in Asia, to the emperor Trajan, shows the procedure against them. "Up to this time, regarding the people who have been denounced as Christians, I have always operated as follows: I asked them if they were Christians; if they confessed it, I put the question to them a second time, and then a third time, threatening them with the penalty of death. When they persisted, I had them put to death, convinced that, whatever their fault that they avowed, their disobedience and their resolute obstinacy merited punishment. Many who have been denounced in anonymous writings have denied that they were Christians, have repeated a prayer that I p.r.o.nounced before them, have offered wine and incense to your statue, which I had set forth for this purpose together with the statues of the G.o.ds, and have even reviled the name of Christ. All these are things which it is not possible to compel any true Christians to do. Others have confessed that they were Christians, but they affirm that their crime and their error consisted only in a.s.sembling on certain days before sunrise to adore Christ as G.o.d, to sing together in his honor, and to bind themselves by oath to commit no crime, to perpetrate no theft, murder, adultery, nor to violate their word. I have believed it necessary in order to secure the truth to put to the torture two female slaves whom they called deaconesses; but I have discovered only an absurd and exaggerated superst.i.tion."

The Roman government was a persecutor,[165] but the populace were severer yet. They could not endure these people who worshipped another G.o.d than theirs and contemned their deities. Whenever famine or epidemic occurred, the well-known cry was heard, "To the lions with the Christians!" The people forced the magistrates to hunt and persecute the Christians.

=The Martyrs.=--For the two centuries and a half that the Christians were persecuted, throughout the empire there were thousands of victims, of every age, s.e.x, and condition. Roman citizens, like St.

Paul, were beheaded; the others were crucified, burned, most often sent to the beasts in the amphitheatre. If they were allowed to escape with their lives, they were set at forced labor in the mines.

Sometimes torture was aggravated by every sort of invention. In the great execution at Lyons, in 177, the Christians, after being tortured and confined in narrow prison quarters, were brought to the arena. The beasts mutilated without killing them. They were then seated in iron chairs heated red by fire. Blandina, a young slave, who survived all these torments was bound with cords and exposed to the fury of a bull.

The Christians joyfully suffered these persecutions which gave them entrance to heaven. The occasion presented an opportunity for rendering public testimony to Christ. And so they did not call themselves victims, but martyrs (witnesses); their torture was a testimony. They compared it to the combat of the Olympian games; like the victor in the athletic contests, they spoke of the palm or the crown. Even now the festal day of a martyr is the day of his death.

Frequently a Christian who was present at the persecution would draft a written account of the martyrdom--he related the arrest, the examination, the tortures, and the death. These brief accounts, filled with edifying details, were called The Acts of the Martyrs. They were circulated in the remotest communities; from one end of the empire to the other they published the glory of the martyrs and excited a desire to imitate them. Thousands of the faithful, seized by a thirst for martyrdom, pressed forward to incriminate themselves and to demand condemnation. One day a governor of Asia had decreed persecutions against some Christians: all the Christians of the city presented themselves in his tribunal and demanded to be persecuted. The governor, exasperated, had some of them executed and sent away the others. "Begone, you wretches! If you are so bent on death, you have precipices and ropes." Some of the faithful, to be surer of torture, entered the temples and threw down the idols of the G.o.ds. It was several times necessary for even the church to prohibit the solicitation of martyrdom.

=The Catacombs.=--The ancient custom of burning the dead was repugnant to the Christians. Like the Jews, they interred their dead wrapped with a shroud in a sarcophagus. Cemeteries[166] were therefore required. At Rome where land was very high in price the Christians went below ground, and in the brittle tufa on which Rome was built may be seen long galleries and subterranean chambers. There, in niches excavated along the pa.s.sages, they laid the bodies of their dead. As each generation excavated new galleries, there was formed at length a subterranean city, called the Catacombs ("to the tombs"). There were similar catacombs in several cities--Naples, Milan, Alexandria, but the most celebrated were those in Rome. These have been investigated in our day and thousands of Christian tombs and inscriptions recovered. The discovery of this subterranean world gave birth to a new department of historical science--Christian Epigraphy and Archaeology.

The sepulchral halls of the catacombs do not resemble those of the Egyptians or those of the Etruscans; they are bare and severe. The Christians knew that a corpse had no bodily wants and so they did not adorn the tombs. The most important halls are decorated with very simple ornaments and paintings which almost always represent the same scenes. The most common subjects are the faithful in prayer, and the Good Shepherd, symbolical of Christ. Some of these halls were like chapels. In them were interred the bodies of the holy martyrs and the faithful who wished to lie near them; every year Christians came here to celebrate the mysteries. During the persecutions of the third century the Christians of Rome often took refuge in these subterranean chapels to hold their services of worship, or to escape from pursuit.

The Christians could feel safe in this bewildering labyrinth of galleries whose entrance was usually marked by a pagan tomb.

THE MONKS OF THE THIRD CENTURY

=The Solitaries.=--It was an idea current among Christians, especially in the East, that one could not become a perfect Christian by remaining in the midst of other men. Christ himself had said, "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple." The faithful man or woman who thus withdrew from the world to work out his salvation the more surely, was termed an Anchorite (the man who is set apart), or a Monk (solitary). This custom began in the East in the middle of the third century. The first anchorites established themselves in the deserts and the ruins of the district of Thebes in Upper Egypt, which remained the holy land of the solitaries.

Paul (235-340), the oldest of the monks, lived to his ninetieth year in a grotto near a spring and a palm-tree which furnished him with food and clothing. The model of the monks was St Anthony.[167] At the age of twenty he heard read one day the text of the gospel, "If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thy goods and give to the poor." He was fine looking, n.o.ble, and rich, having received an inheritance from his parents. He sold all his property, distributed it in alms and buried himself in the desert of Egypt. He first betook himself to an empty tomb, then to the ruins of a fortress; he was clad in a hair-shirt, had for food only the bread that was brought to him every six months, fasted, starved himself, prayed day and night. Often sunrise found him still in prayer. "O sun," cried he, "why hast thou risen and prevented my contemplating the true light?" He felt himself surrounded by demons, who, under every form, sought to distract him from his religious thoughts. When he became old and revered by all Egypt, he returned to Alexandria for a day to preach against the Arian heretics, but soon repaired to the desert again. They besought him to remain: he replied, "The fishes die on land, the monks waste away in the city; we return to our mountains like the fish to the water."

Women also became solitaries. Alexandra, one of these, shut herself in an empty tomb and lived there for ten years without leaving it to see anybody.

=Asceticism.=--These men who had withdrawn to the desert to escape the world thought that everything that came from the world turned the soul from G.o.d and placed it in the peril of losing salvation. The Christian ought to belong entirely to G.o.d; he should forget everything behind him. "Do you not know," said St. Nilus later, "that it is a trap of Satan to be too much attached to one's family?" The monk Poemen had withdrawn to the desert with his brothers, and their mother came to visit them. As they refused to appear, she waited a little until they were going to the church; but on seeing her, they fled and would not consent to speak to her unless they were concealed. She asked to see them, but they consoled her by saying, "You will see us in the other world."

But the world is not the only danger for the monk. Every man carried about with himself an enemy from whom he could not deliver himself as he had delivered himself from the world--that is, his own body. The body prevented the soul from rising to G.o.d and drew it to worldly pleasures that came from the devil. And so the solitaries applied themselves to overcoming the body by refusing to it everything that it loved. They subsisted only on bread and water; many ate but twice a week, some went to the mountains to cut herbs which they ate raw. They dwelt in grottoes, ruins, and tombs, lying on the earth or on a mat of rushes. The most zealous of them added other tortures to mortify, or kill, the body. St. Pachomius for fifteen years slept only in an erect position, leaning against a wall. Macarius remained six months in a mora.s.s, the prey of mosquitoes "whose stings would have penetrated the hide of a wild boar." The most noted of these monks was St. Simeon, surnamed Stylites (the man of the column). For forty years he lived in the desert of Arabia on the summit of a column, exposed to the sun and the rain, compelling himself to stay in one position for a whole day; the faithful flocked from afar to behold him; he gave them audience from the top of his column, bidding creditors free their debtors, and masters liberate their slaves; he even sent reproaches to ministers and counsellors of the emperor. This form of life was called Asceticism (exercise).

=The Cen.o.bites.=--The solitaries who lived in the same desert drew together and adopted a common life for the practice of their austerities. About St. Anthony were already a.s.sembled many anchorites who gave him their obedience. St. Pachomius (272-348) in this way a.s.sembled 3,000. Their establishment was at Tabenna, near the first cataract of the Nile. He founded many other similar communities, either of men or women. In 256 a traveller said he had seen in a single city of Egypt 10,000 monks and 20,000 vowed to a religious life. There were more of them in Syria, in Palestine, in all the Orient. The monks thus united in communities became Cen.o.bites (people who live in common). They chose a chief, the abbot (the word signifies in Syriac "father"), and they implicitly obeyed him. Ca.s.sian relates that in one community in Egypt he had seen the abbot before the whole refectory give a cen.o.bite a violent blow on the head to try his obedience.

The primitive monks renounced all property and family relations; the cen.o.bites surrendered also their will. On entering the community they engaged to possess nothing, not to marry, and to obey. "The monks,"

says St. Basil, "live a spiritual life like the angels." The first union among the cen.o.bites was the construction of houses in close proximity. Later each community built a monastery, a great edifice, where each monk had his cell. A Christian compares these cells "to a hive of bees where each has in his hands the wax of work, in his mouth the honey of psalms and prayers." These great houses needed a written const.i.tution; this was the Monastic Rule. St. Pachomius was the first to prepare one. St. Basil wrote another that was adopted by almost all the monasteries of the Orient.

FOOTNOTES:

[165] The church counted ten persecutions, the first under Nero, the last under Diocletian.

[166] The word is Greek and signifies place of repose.

[167] See his biography in the "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," by Rufinus.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE LATER EMPIRE