by Will Durant
While the Gnostic and Marcionite sects were spreading rapidly in both East and West, a new heresiarch appeared in Mysia. About 156 Montanus denounced the increasing worldliness of Christians and the growing autocracy of bishops in the Church; he demanded a return to primitive Christian simplicity and austerity, and a restored right of prophecy, or inspired speech, to the members of the congregations. Two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, took him at his word and fell into religious trances; and their utterances became the living oracles of the sect. Montanus himself prophesied with such eloquent ecstasy that his Phrygian followers—with the same religious enthusiasm that had once begotten Dionysus—hailed him as the Paraclete promised by Christ. He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse would soon descend from heaven upon a neighboring plain. To the predestined spot he led so large a host that some towns were depopulated. As in early Christian days, marriage and parentage were neglected, goods were communistically shared, and an absorbed asceticism anxiously prepared the soul for Christ.39 When, about 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius persecuted Christianity in Asia Minor, hundreds of Montanists, eager for paradise, crowded before his tribunal and asked for martyrdom. He could not accommodate them all; some he executed; but most of them he dismissed with the words: “Miserable creatures! If you wish to die are there not ropes and precipices?”40 The Church banned Montanism as a heresy, and in the sixth century Justinian ordered the extinction of the sect. Some Montanists gathered in their churches, set fire to them, and let themselves be burned alive.41
Of minor heresies there was no end. The Encratites abstained from meat, wine. and sex; the Abstinents practiced self-mortification and condemned marriage as a sin; the Docetists taught that Christ’s body was merely a phantom, not human flesh; the Theodotians considered him only a man; the Adoptionists and the followers of Paul of Samosata thought that he had been born a man, but had achieved divinity through moral perfection; the Modalists, Sabellians, and Monarchians recognized in the Father and the Son only one person, the Monophysites only one nature, the Monothelites only one will. The Church overcame them by its superior organization, its doctrinal tenacity, and its better understanding of the ways and needs of men.
In the third century a new danger rose in the East. At the coronation of Shapur I (242) a young Persian mystic, Mani of Ctesiphon, proclaimed himself a Messiah sent upon earth by the True God to reform the religious and moral life of mankind. Borrowing from Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Judaism, and Gnosticism, Mani divided the world into rival realms of Darkness and Light; the earth belonged to the kingdom of Darkness, and Satan had created man. Nevertheless, the angels of the God of Light had surreptitiously introduced some elements of light into humanity—mind, intelligence, reason. Even woman, said Mani, has in her some sparks of light; but woman is Satan’s masterpiece, his chief agent in tempting man to sin. If a man will refrain from sex, idolatry, and sorcery, and lead an ascetic life of vegetarianism and fasting, the elements of light in him can overcome his Satanic impulses, and lead him, like a kindly light, to salvation. After thirty years of successful preaching Mani was crucified at the suggestion of the Magian clergy, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was hung from one of Susa’s gates. Martyrdoms enflamed the faith to wild enthusiasm; Manicheism spread into western Asia and north Africa, won Augustine for ten years, survived the persecutions of Diocletian and the conquests of Islam, and maintained a declining life for a thousand years till the coming of Genghis Khan.
The old religions still claimed a majority of the Empire’s population. Judaism gathered its impoverished exiles into scattered synagogues, and poured its piety into its Talmuds. The Syrians continued to worship their Baals under Hellenistic names, and the Egyptian priests tended faithfully their zoological pantheon. Cybele, Isis, and Mithras retained their addicts till the close of the fourth century; under Aurelian a modified Mithraism captured the Roman state. Votive offerings to the classical divinities still came to the temples, initiates and candidates journeyed to Eleusis, and throughout the Empire aspiring citizens performed the motions of the imperial cult. But life had gone out of the classic creeds. They no longer aroused, except here and there, the warm devotion that makes a religion live. It was not that the Greeks and the Romans abandoned these faiths, once so lovely or austere; they abandoned rather the will to live, and by excessive family limitation, or physiological exhaustion, or devastating wars, so reduced their own number that the temples lost their cultivators step by step with the farms.
About the year 178, while Aurelius fought the Marcomanni on the Danube, paganism made a lusty attempt to defend itself against Christianity. We know of it only through Origen’s book Against Celsus, and the quotations recklessly made there from Celsus’ True Word. This second Celsus in our story was a gentleman of the world rather than a speculative philosopher; he felt that the civilization which he enjoyed was bound up with the old Roman faith; and he resolved to defend that faith by attacking the Christianity that was now its most challenging enemy. He made so intimate a study of the new religion that the learned Origen was astounded by his erudition. Celsus assailed the credibility of the Scriptures, the character of Yahveh, the importance of Christ’s miracles, the incompatibility of Christ’s death with his omnipotent divinity. He ridiculed the Christian belief in a final conflagration, the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the body:
It is silly to suppose that when God, like a cook, brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted, and only the Christians will remain—not merely the living ones, but those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really, it is the hope of worms! ... It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless—slaves and women and children—whom Christians can persuade—wool-dressers, and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and common men, whoever is a sinner ... or a godforsaken fool.42
Celsus was alarmed by the spread of Christianity, by its scornful hostility to paganism, military service, and the state; how was the Empire to protect itself from the barbarians prowling on every frontier if its inhabitants succumbed to so pacifistic a philosophy? A good citizen, he thought, should conform to the religion of his country and his time without public criticism of its absurdities; these did not much matter; what counted was a unifying faith supporting moral character and civic loyalty. Then, forgetting the insults he had heaped upon them, he appealed to the Christians to come back to the old gods, to worship the guardian genius of the emperor, and to join in the defense of the imperiled state. No one paid much attention to him; pagan literature does not mention him; he would have been quite forgotten had not Origen undertaken to refute him. Constantine was wiser than Celsus, and knew that a dead faith could not salvage Rome.
III. PLOTINUS
Moreover, Celsus was out of step with his time; he asked men to behave like gentlemen skeptics when they were withdrawing from a society that enslaved so many of them into a mystic world that made every man a god. That consciousness of supersensible powers which is the foundation of religion was prevailing universally over the materialism and determinism of a prouder age. Philosophy was abandoning the interpretation of that sense experience which is the realm of science, and was devoting itself to a study of the unseen world. Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists developed Pythagoras’ theory of transmigration, and Plato’s contemplation of the Divine Ideas, into an asceticism that sought to sharpen spiritual perception by starving the physical senses, and to reclimb by self-purification the steps by which the soul had been degraded from heaven into man.
Plotinus was the culmination of this mystic theosophy. Born at Lycopolis in 203, he was a Coptic Egyptian with a Roman name and a Greek education. In his twenty-eighth year he discovered philosophy, passed unsatisfied from teacher to teacher, and found at last, in Alexandria, the man he sought. Ammonius Saccas, a Christian converted to paganism, was attempting to reconcile Christianity and Platonism, as his pupil Origen would do. After studying under Amm
onius for ten years, Plotinus joined a Persia-bound army in the hope of learning the wisdom of the Magi and the Brahmans at first hand. He reached Mesopotamia, turned back to Antioch, went to Rome (244), and remained there till his death. His school of philosophy became so fashionable that the Emperor Gallienus made him a court favorite, and agreed to help him establish in Campania an ideal Platonopolis, to be governed on the principles of the Republic. Gallienus later withdrew his consent, perhaps to spare Plotinus an ignominious failure.
Plotinus restored the repute of philosophy by living like a saint amid the luxuries of Rome. He had no care for his body; indeed, says Porphyry, “he was ashamed that his soul had a body.”43 He refused to sit for his portrait, on the ground that his body was the least important part of him—a hint to art to seek the soul. He ate no meat and little bread, was simple in his habits, kindly in his ways. He avoided all sexual relations, but did not condemn them. His modesty befitted a man who saw the part in the perspective of the whole. When Origen attended his class, Plotinus blushed and wished to end his lecture, saying, “The zest dies down when the speaker feels that his hearers have nothing to learn from him.”44 He was not an eloquent speaker, but his devotion to his subject, and his absorbed sincerity, were good substitutes for oratory. Reluctantly, and only late in life, he put his doctrines into writing. He never revised his first draft, and despite Porphyry’s editing, the Enneads remain among the most disorderly and difficult works in the history of philosophy.III
Plotinus was an idealist who graciously recognized the existence of matter. But matter by itself, he argued, is only the formless possibility of form. Every form that matter takes is given it by its inward energy or soul (psyche). Nature is the total of energy or soul, producing the totality of forms in the world. The lower reality does not produce the higher; the higher being, soul, produces the lower—embodied form. The growth of the individual man from his beginnings in the womb, through the slow formation of organ after organ to full maturity is the work of the psyche or vital principle within him; the body is gradually molded by the longings and directives of the soul. Everything has soul—an inward energy creating outward form. Matter is evil only insofar as it has not received mature form; it is an arrested development; and evil is the possibility of good.
We know matter only through idea—through sensation, perception, thought; what we call matter is (as Hume would say) only a bundle of ideas; at most it is an elusive hypothetical something pressing against our nerve ends (Mill’s “permanent possibility of sensation”). Ideas are not material; the notion of extension in space is obviously inapplicable to them. The capacity to have and use ideas is reason (nous); this is the peak of the human triad of body, soul, and mind. Reason is determined insofar as it depends upon sensation; it is free insofar as it is the highest form of the creative, molding soul.
The body is both the organ and the prison of the soul. The soul knows that it is a higher kind of reality than the body; it feels its kinship with some vaster soul, some cosmic creative life and power; and in the perfection of thought it aspires to join again that supreme spiritual reality from which it appears to have fallen in some primeval catastrophe and disgrace. Plotinus here surrenders discursively to the Gnosticism that he professes to reject, and describes the descent of the soul through various levels from heaven to corporeal man; generally he prefers the Hindu notion that the soul transmigrates from lower to higher, or from higher to lower, forms of life according to its virtues and vices in each incarnation. Sometimes he is playfully Pythagorean: those who have loved music too much will become songbirds in their next avatar, and overspeculative philosophers will be transformed into eagles.46 The more developed the soul is the more persistently it seeks its divine source, like a child strayed from its parent, or a wanderer longing for home. If it is capable of virtue, or true love, or devotion to the Muses, or patient philosophy, it will find the ladder down which it came, and will climb it to its God. Let the soul, then, purify itself, let it desire the unseen essence passionately, let it lose the world in meditation; suddenly, perhaps in some moment when all the noise of the senses is stilled, and matter ceases to pound on the gates of mind, the soul will feel itself absorbed in the ocean of being, the spiritual and final reality. (“Sometimes,” wrote Thoreau, idly drifting on Walden Pond, “I ceased to live, and began to be.”) “When this takes place,” says Plotinus,
The soul will see divinity as far as it is lawful. . . . And she will see herself illuminated, full of intellectual light; or, rather, she will perceive herself to be a pure light, unburdened, agile, and becoming god.47
But what is God? “He” too is a triad—of unity (hen), reason (nous), and soul (psyche). “Beyond Being there is the One”: 48 through the seeming chaos of mundane multiplicity runs a unifying life. We know almost nothing of it except its existence; any positive adjective or prejudiced pronoun applied to it would be an unwarrantable limitation; we may only call it One and First, and Good as the object of our supreme desire. Emanating from this Unity is the World Reason, corresponding to Plato’s Ideas, the formative models and ruling laws of things; they are, so to speak, the thoughts of God, the Reason in the One, the order and rationality of the world. Since these Ideas persist while matter is a kaleidoscope of passing shapes, they are the only true or enduring reality. But Unity and Reason, though they hold the universe together, do not create it; this function is performed by the third aspect of the godhead—the vitalizing principle that fills all things and gives them their power and predestined form. Everything, from atoms to planets, has an activating soul, which is itself a part of the World-Soul; every Atman is Brahman. The individual soul is eternal only as vitality or energy, not as a distinct character.49 Immortality is not the survival of personality; it is the absorption of the soul in deathless things.50
Virtue is the movement of the soul toward God. Beauty is not mere harmony and proportion, as Plato and Aristotle thought, but the living soul or unseen divinity in things; it is the predominance of soul over body, of form over matter, of reason over things; and art is the translation of this rational or spiritual beauty into another medium. The soul can be trained to rise from the pursuit of beauty in material or human forms to seeking it in the hidden soul in Nature and her laws, in science and the subtle order that it reveals, finally in the divine Unity that gathers all things, even striving and conflicting things, into a sublime and marvelous harmony.51 In the end beauty and virtue are one—the unity and co-operation of the part with the whole.
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful, yet act as does the creator of a statue ... he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, the other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked . . . and never cease chiseling your statue until . . . you see the perfect goodness established in the stainless shrine.52
We feel in this philosophy the same spiritual atmosphere as in contemporary Christianity—the withdrawal of tender minds from civic interest to religion, a flight from the state to God. It was no accident that Plotinus and Origen were fellow pupils and friends, and that Clement developed a Christian Platonism at Alexandria. Plotinus is the last of the great pagan philosophers; and like Epictetus and Aurelius, he is a Christian without Christ. Christianity accepted nearly every line of him, and many a page of Augustine echoes the ecstasy of the supreme mystic. Through Philo, John, Plotinus, and Augustine, Plato conquered Aristotle, and entered into the profoundest theology of the Church. The gap between philosophy and religion was closing, and reason for a thousand years consented to be the handmaiden of theology.
IV. THE DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
The Church now won to its support some of the finest minds in the Empire. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, began the powerful dynasty of the post-apostolic “Fathers,” who gave a philosophy to Christianity, and overwhelmed its enemies with argument. Condemned to be thrown to the beasts for refusing to
abjure his faith (108), Justin composed on his way to Rome several letters whose hot devotion reveals the spirit in which Christians could go to their death:
I give injunctions to all men that I am dying willingly for God’s sake, if you do not hinder it. I beseech you, be not an unseasonable kindness to me. Suffer me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God. . . . Rather entice the wild beasts that they may become my tomb, and leave no trace of my body, that when I fall asleep I be not burdensome to any. ... I long for the beasts that are prepared for me. . . . Let there come upon me fire and cross [crucifixion], struggles with wild beasts, cutting and tearing asunder, rackings of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, and cruel tortures of the devil, if so I may attain to Jesus Christ! 53
