THE FIRST OPPONENT OF CHRISTIANITY.*
THE interesting analysis by Mr. Froude, in the February number- of Fraser's Magazine, of the argument of Celsus against Christi- anity, answered by Origen, deserves a fuller notice than the slight allusion already made to it in these pages, or indeed, than any that our limits will now allow us to supply. The work it aims at reproducing would be one of the most interesting to our genera- tion in the whole legacy of the past. When Mr. Froude says that the argument it contained " obstructed the progress of Christianity for about a century," he will not find many to agree with him ; but every reader must share his belief that " no more valuable addition could be made to theological history than an account of the impression made by Christianity on the minds of cultivated Romans, while its message was still new." This valuable contribution to the history of thought be has done his best to supply. He has extracted from the tangled web of ortho- dox refutation and woven into a coherent whole, the scraps of dis- jointed quotation, now for the first time accessible to the mere English reader, which are all that remain to us from the argu- ment of the first intelligent Pagan who thought the new supersti- tion worth demolishing. And the value which such a work would possess for any age is much increased for a generation to whose eyes the strange eclipse that has come over the Christian faith seems to reproduce the dimness of its dawn. They are thus enabled to compare the similarities and the contrasts of the heathenism which confronted Christianity as an ephemeral upstart, and the heathenism that is in part its offspring, in part its long- trained enemy.
It may seem ungracious to receive such a contribution with anything but pure gratitude. We cannot, however, quite omit the ungracious part of the critic's office. Passing over the strange perverseness which translates caret); xOyoc, "true story," there not being a word of narrative, true or false, in the pleading of Celsus, which is generally translated "a true discourse ;" we cannot omit all expression of our disappointment at the slight and inconsistent manner in which Mr. Fronde has dealt with the surely important question of authorship. It has been the source of much controversy. The Celsus whom Origen answered is sometimes (Mr. Froude says generally) identified with a friend of Lucian's, to whom he dedicated one of his treatises, in token of their common admira- • "Origen and Celsus." Fraser's Magazine for February. London :. Longman. tion for the great liberator of the human race from the bondage of superstition—for Epicurus, "who was a saint indeed." We cannot help thinking that the dramatic propriety of finding in the same man an adversary of the most spiritual of the Fathers and a friend of the Voltaire of his age has helped out the slender amount of evidence for the theory. If, indeed, we could test it by nothing but Origen's assertions about Celsus, it would hardly be questioned, and its supporters have little more to say in its favour than asking us if a writer of the third century was not likely to know more about a writer of the second than any writer of the nine- teenth. We are, however, as little convinced as if we were told that somebody was ah Ultramontane Roman Catholic, and shown a pamphlet he had written to prove the Pope to be Antichrist. "Yes," our informant must plead, to fill out the parallel, " he hides his dangerous doctrine artfully enough, but you can distinguish it, if you will read between the lines." Surely we should all want to know the ground of our friend's opinion, before giving it much weight. And this is just what Origen never supplies. Celsus, he says, has long been dead, and he hears that he has written other books, some of which he should like to see. This is not the tone of a man who has very satis- factory reasons for some improbable view of the person of whom he thus speaks, and it seems to us about as improbable that the same man should regard the Pope as Antichrist and be a devout Roman Catholic, as that an Epicurean should have written nine out of ten of the passages quoted by Origen. Of course, neither view is impossible ; life is long enough for startling changes, and a certain amount of evidence would track the most contradictory views to the same pen. But the only certain evidence here is the apparent belief of Origen that his adversary is Lucian's friend, and the identity of a common name. About twenty Celsuses are known to us in the first three centuries, and Origen's view is so perplexing to himself, that in one passage (IV., 54) he declares himself ready to abandon it. Probably it would not need more justification to himself than the fact that some Epicurean Celsus might conceivably have written the work he was answering, and the temptation, common, we fear, to good men in all ages, to ascribe unpopular doctrine to their assailants. The belief as to matter of fact of fervent enthusiasm is no sufficient voucher for a theory which supposes a man to have held a particular creed, and brings forward in evidence a volume the greater part of which is diametrically opposed to that creed. However, we must allow that the opinion of scholars is divided on the question, and that the newest opinion does identify Lucien's friend and Origen's foe. Mr. Froude seems to us to side with one party in the text, and go over to another in the notes. Perhaps he thinks Origen's Celsus might not be Lucian's Celsus, and yet might be an Epicurean. That theory seems to us to combine the disadvantages of both its rivals. It is difficult enough to believe a man held one set of views, when every word in evidence proves him to have held the opposite. Still people do change their views, and if you have independent evidence of both, the theory may hold. But to allow that there was an Epicurean Celsus who was Lucian's friend, and also a Platonic Celsus who was Origen's opponent, and yet that this last-named Celsus held views like those of his namesake, and unlike all those which we know him to have expressed, and all this on the evidence of a man who knew nothing of Celsus but that he had long been dead, seems to us to go out of one's way to hunt improbabilities.
" Well, but what does it matter ?" the reader may ask. " The important question is, what did a heathen of the second century find to object to in Christianity, not how did he manage to reconcile these objections with other views, or did he reconcile them with other views ?" That, we suppose, is Mr. Froude's opinion. We think, on the other hand, that the view of the argument here set before us is due in a great measure to an erroneous view of its authorship. When Mr. Froude says that "the method of thought of Celsus was scientific, in the strictest modern sense," he must be forgetting the opinions which we know Celsus to have put forth, and re- membering only those he is accused of concealing. But the English critic, with candour equal to that of the Alexandrian Father, finds us in materials for his own refutation. He paints Celsus in his commentary as a prophet of our philosophic Agnostics, but his text reveals a true disciple of that thinker who of all that ever lived would have been their most strenuous opponent. " The spirit apprehends the things of the spirit, the eye apprehends the things of the eye," is not the say- ing of one who would be welcomed as an ally by our physicists. The fine passage quoted by Mr. Fronde (p. 159,—b) from which
we have extracted this sentence, is in every word a protest against his own account of the doctrine there expressed. Indeed, the premisses from which he draws the conclusion that the first attack upon Christianity was remarkably like the latest, and we that the two were remarkably unlike, are all accepted by himself. We may here, therefore, close the un- gracious part of our task, and leave his own readers to judge between us.
A huge part of our interest in the work of Celsus depends on the fact that it is the argument of a Platonist. If we took Mr. Froude's view of it, we should regard it as a very interesting expression of an individual mind ; but it gains largely in value if, and we could not do so if we took it as the work of an Epicurean, we may regard it as an utterance characteristic of its age. The second century was as far removed from being an epoch of enlightened Materialism, which we take to be the simplest popu- lar description of Epicureanism, as any period with which we are acquainted. It was an age of mystic worship, of magical rites, of superstition, and of earnest piety. We cannot think that at such a time the Epicurean—that is, the culti- vated Rationalist—would have considered Christianity worth refutation. It, then, would have appeared to him probably an insignificant variation on the mystic Deism generally prevalent, not more noxious than many other forms of the same disease, and probably rather less threatening. For the age of the Antonines repre- sents a great pause in the development of the new faith. Christianity would be, no doubt, a very obvious phenomenon to any believer in this mystic Deism, to which it would probably present itself as a dangerous foe ; but to one who stood outside the common belief in a supernatural order of things, an Alexander of Aboniteichos, an Apollonius of Tyana, were probably more striking types of the charlatan of the age than the introducer of new mysteries (so Lucian speaks of Christ), whose wonders were less obvious, and whose followers might not appear much more numerous. The disciple of Epicurus would have found much in the age to move his scorn, and the Christian would come in for a share of it, but hardly for a share sufficiently large to be made the representative of the superstition of the age.
The case, however, was widely different with the disciple of Plato. It would be by a slight distortion only that the demand for faith (which seems to have been the head and front of the offence of the Christians in the eyes of Celsus) might be re- garded as an inversion of the great lesson the Platonist had learnt from his master,—to subject all common notions to the teat of a
rigid examination, to leave no formula unquestioned, no bundle of conceptions unsearched. To the philosopher, the Christian would seem to inhabit an inverted world. The lover of wisdom was to be deposed from his pre-eminence, and the supreme fool to be installed in his place. Truth was to be found not by the patient and earnest seeker after truth, not by the man who bad purified his vision by contemplation of the eternal and abiding reali- ties of the invisible world, but by the thoughtless, the untaught, the imbecile. " Take away this preposterous demand," the Platonist might say, "aid what is left is a poor and diluted copy of my own creed." What was distinctive in Christianity seemed an inver- sion of the lesson of Plato. What was valuable in it seemed a plagiarism from the teaching of Plato. It was thus divided between what was superfluous and what was supremely hurtful.
Nor was it on intellectual ground alone that Christianity would appear to demand this inversion of every principle of sound sense. The difficulties of Celsus were, in a large measure, the difficulties of the elder brother in the parable of the Pro- digal Son. The teaching of that parable seems to us fatally misunderstood, by those who take it as a mere warning against envy. No doubt the perplexities it suggests are brought out more sharply by the keenness of self-centred feeling, but they are not created by it. Whatever can be said in answer to these difficulties, as far as we see, is said by Frederick Robert- son, in a short sermon on that parable, with a force imply- ing the fullest sense of their strength. But there are many reasons why men should have felt these difficulties more vividly in the second century than in the nineteenth. When the great idea of Redemption has been before the world for 1,800 years, it influences a larger part of man than his belief. Christianity has entered so deeply into the heart of the modern world, that even where it is most completely rejected by the intellect, its moral standard remains, at all events for a time. And thus it happens that redemption is accepted as an ideal, even when no divine redeemer is supposed to have trodden this earth. Those who have ceased to believe it a work of God, still feel no doubt that it is to be the great work of man. Thus while the elder brother represents a
perennial phase of difficulty in the aspect of Christianity, his perplexities can never be characteristic of an age in which all that is good and all that is weak alike impel us to a tenderness for the sinner, the fool, and the pauper, of which no ancient could have had any conception.
And in no time were the difficulties of a faith that seemed to set wisdom and virtue at a disadvantage brought into such prominent relief as in the first two centuries of our era, for there never was an age quite so rich in the contrasts of good and evil. Marcus Aurelius in the highest and Epictetus in the lowest social position showed how much saintly wisdom may be common to the Emperor and the slave, and the gentle tolerance and wide sympathy of Plutarch light up the intermediate zone of life with something of the same spirit. A telling background was supplied by such men as Domitian and his flatterers,—he being the worst man that ever lived, according to M. Renan, but not much more despicable than the clever men who fawned upon him. Such contrasts are hardly matched in any subsequent period of the world's history. There was never afterwards a time when the black was so black, and there have not been many times when the white was so white. But the moral sense thus stimulated was, if we have rightly judged the attack of Celsus, the very thing which rose up against Christianity, and all the pure-minded and pious men we have named rejected or ignored Christianity, while one was its persecutor.
It needs a great effort of imagination to realise the astonish- ment with which the aristocratic spirit of the old world must have recoiled before a faith which would seem, and not alto- gether untruly, to take under its especial patronage the virtues of the slave. We cannot, with all our efforts, put ourselves in their point of view. In some indirect manner, the Christian ideal of humility affects every fibre of modern life. The conventional formulas of intercourse, among a thousand more important signs, bear testimony to the degree in which Christendom has accepted the low estimate of self as the right one, and we cannot imagine this an object of contempt. We do not, indeed, believe that the branch would continue to put forth leaves long after the stem was severed from the root, but that it does so for a time there is no doubt, and the Paganism of our day can give us no gauge of the contempt for lowliness in the age when Christianity began to set its ideal before the world. And the Platonist would add to this contempt, which, in his own way, he felt as much as any -one, the intense dislike inspired by a distorted resemblance to an object of reverence. To resemble truth is the bitterest aggrava- tion of error.
The fact that one of the chief adversaries of Christianity was the spiritual teacher of the old world, represents a state of things as different as possible from ours. The lesson of Plato was the illusoriness of the sensible, the perman- ence of the intelligible world. That which was discerned through eye and ear was a fading dream ; time spent in its investigation did not only delay, but hindered the discovery of truth. He addressed the human race as a mathematical teacher who, on find- ing his pupils studying geometry by experiments on clay models, should warn them that they were setting up the inaccuracies of the eye and the hand as a barrier against the certainties of the mind, and making their investigation into the nature of form by a method which would teach them nothing but the nature of clay. And so far as the mathematician is concerned, the warning, if we can imagine it necessary, would be as dis- tinct now as it would have been then. But as a type of the attitude of the Philosopher towards the investigation of truth generally, nothing can possibly be more remote from the point of view of our day. We have come to believe that the re- ports of eye and ear form absolutely our only data. We differ as to the extent of the inferences which may be drawn from them, and no doubt there are many who still believe that the true inter- pretation of a world of sense leads to the belief in a world beyond sense, but that any faculties within us communicate with this world directly is a belief hardly contemplated as possible in a cultivated mind. And from this cause, it seems to us, helped out by a blunder of Origen's, the critic of our day has read the modern belief of the order of Nature into a treatise where his own summary enables us to discern exactly that sense of the supernatural against which the modern belief is a protest.
But the Epicurean of our day, and the Platonist of Celsus's day, have a broad common ground, so far as they are opposed to Christianity. They both alike bring in an antithesis which it is hard, perhaps impossible, to combine in one field of view with the antithesis of sin and righteousness which lies at the root of Christianity. What has made the scientific world of our day
turn away from religion is not any antagonism between the theory of the creation taught by Darwin and Lyell and that which we find in the Pentateuch ; it is the obliteration, by the influx of new ideas, of all that makes the background of Christianity. It is not possible for a finite mind to contemplate at once the idea of uninterrupted sequence, which is all that we mean by natural law, with that group of beliefs gathered up in the Christian hope of deliverance from evil, and from the stand- point of the modern man of science, tracing to their source the influences which have affected character, watching the link of cause and effect which bind wrong tempers and actions with physical misfortunes, the idea of sin disappears. But this is no less true of the Platonic beliefs which come forth in Mr. Froude's eloquent and skilful reconstruction of the " Truth- ful Discourse " of Celsus,—they shadow forth a view of good and evil that is out of harmony with the Christian view of good and evil. To a mind absorbed in the Platonic antithesis of the fleet- ing and the abiding, the antithesis of a kingdom of Heaven and a kingdom which is opposed to it must seem a radical misconcep- tion of the true good. Hatred, envy, and resentment are as real as love, pity, and forgiveness, and far more vivid. "The art of measurement," Socrates is made to say, in the Proforma, "is that which would save the soul." There are few students of Plato, probably, who have not recognised in those words at different times a profound truth and a bitter mockery. A true view of the relative magnitudes of the various aims which distract the soul seems sometimes all that it needs to be at peace. At other times, and perhaps more often, this- know- ledge is seen to be that which would only increase its misery. To distinguish the permanent from the transitory, reality from appearance, significance from insignificance,—this is what is promised to the student of Plato, and in many states of mind it seems all we need. When We are longing for deliverance from evils that seem the most real and permanent things in the world of human experience, promises like these are the bitterest mockery of the spirit's deepest needs. But this last mood does not last always. And thus the truths of the intellect once hid the truths of the spirit, just as the truths of the senses do in our day. Thus also, we believe, they will hold their place, when they are no longer accepted as the whole or the largest part of that which the human spirit needs, in the words of the scoffing Lucian, to deliver it "from vain fears, needless desires, and groundless hopes, and to breathe into it the repose of secure and absolute liberty."
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