CHAPTER VIII. WHETHER THE ROMANS ENCOURAGED TOLERATION.
Among the ancient Romans, from the days of Romulus to those in which the Christians began to dispute with the priests of the empire, we do not find a single instance of any person being persecuted on account of his sentiments. Cicero doubted everything, Lucretius denied everything, and yet neither the one nor the other underwent the least reproach from their fellow-citizens; nay, so far did this licence go, that Pliny, the naturalist, begins his book by denying the existence of a God, and saying, that if there be one, it must be the sun. Cicero, in speaking of hell, says: Non est una tam excors quæ credat (“There is not even an old woman so silly as to believe it”). Juvenal says: Nec pueri credunt (“Nor do the children believe it”). And the following maxim was publicly repeated in the Roman theatre: Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil (“Naught after death; even death itself is naught”). While we abhor these maxims, let us pardon them in a people who were never enlightened by the holy truths of the Gospel; and, while we own them to be false and impious, let us, however, confess that the Romans were great friends to toleration, seeing that such tenets never excited any commotions.
Deorum offensa diis curæ, was the grand principle of the senate and people of Rome, that illustrious nation employing their attention wholly to conquer, govern and civilize the universe. They were our legislators as well as our conquerors; and even Cæsar, who reduced us to his subjection, and gave us laws and games, never attempted to compel us to quit our Druids for him, though supreme pontiff of a nation whose subjects we were now become.
The Romans themselves did not profess all kinds of religion, therefore they did not give public sanction to all, but they permitted them. Under Numa nothing material was the object of their worship. They had neither statues nor pictures; in process of time, however, some were erected to the Dii Majorum Gentium, with which the Greeks brought them into acquaintance. That law in the twelve tables, Deos peregrinos ne colunto, was confined to the allowing no public worship to be paid, except to the superior and inferior deities, approved by the senate. The Egyptian goddess Isis had a temple in Rome at the time of Tiberius, who demolished it because its priests, having been bribed by Mundus, suffered him to lie with a lady called Paulina in the temple itself, under the name and form of the god Anubis. Indeed this story is to be found only in Josephus, who did not live at that time, and was moreover a credulous and exaggerating writer; and there is very little probability that in so enlightened an age as that of Tiberius, a lady of the first distinction in Rome could be so weak as to believe that a god cohabited with her.
But whether this anecdote be true or false, this one thing is certain, that the Egyptian idolatry was in the possession of a temple in Rome with the public consent. The Jews had also lived as traders in that city ever since the Punic war; they had their synagogues there in the time of Augustus, and almost always continued to have them in the same manner as they now have in modern Rome. Can we desire a stronger instance that the Romans looked upon toleration as the most sacred of all the laws of nations?
We are told that as soon as the Christian religion began to make its appearance, its followers were persecuted by these very Romans who persecuted no one. This fact, however, appears to me to be evidently false, and I desire no better authority than that of St. Paul himself. In the Acts of the Apostles[15] we are told that St. Paul, being accused by the Jews of attempting to overturn the Mosaic law by that of Jesus Christ, St. James proposed to him to shave his head and go into the temple with four Jews and purify himself with them, “That all men may know,” says he, “that those things whereof they were informed concerning thee, are nothing, but that thou thyself dost keep the law of Moses.”
Accordingly, we find that St. Paul, though a Christian, submitted to perform these Jewish ceremonies for the space of seven days; but before the expiration of this time, the Jews of Asia, who knew him again, seeing him in the temple, not only with Jews but Gentiles also, cried out that he had polluted the holy place, and laid hands upon him, drew him out of the temple, and carried him before the Governor Felix; they afterwards accused him at the judgment-seat of Festus, whither the Jews came in crowds demanding his death. But Festus answered them: “It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have licence to answer for himself.”[16]
These words of the Roman magistrate are the more remarkable as he appears to have been no favorer of St. Paul, but rather to have held him in contempt, for, imposed upon by the false lights of his own reason, he took him for a person beside himself; nay, he expressly says to him, “Much learning hath made thee mad.”[17] Festus then was entirely guided by the equity of the Roman law in taking under his protection a stranger for whom he could have no regard.
Here then we have the word of God itself declaring that the Romans were a just people, and no persecutors. Besides, it was not the Romans who laid violent hands on St. Paul, but the Jews. St. James, the brother of Jesus, was stoned to death by order of a Sadducee Jew, and not by that of a Roman judge. It was the Jews alone who put St. Stephen to death;[18] and though St. Paul held the clothes of those who stoned him, he certainly did not act then as a Roman citizen.
The primitive Christians had certainly no cause of complaint against the Romans; the Jews, from whom they at that time began to separate themselves, were their only enemies. Every one knows the implacable hatred all sectaries bore to those who quit their sect. There doubtless were several tumults in the synagogues in Rome. Suetonius, in his life of Claudius, has these words, Judæos impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit. He is wrong in saying that it was at the instigation of Christ they raised commotions in Rome; but he could not be acquainted with all the circumstances relating to a people who were held in such contempt in Rome as the Jews were; and, however mistaken he may have been in this particular, yet he is right as to the occasion of these commotions. Suetonius wrote in the reign of Adrian in the second century, when the Christians were not distinguished from the Jews by the Romans; therefore this passage of Suetonius is a proof that the Romans, so far from oppressing the primitive Christians, chastised the Jews who persecuted them, being desirous that the Jewish synagogue in Rome should show the same indulgence to its dissenting brethren as it received itself from the Roman Senate; and we find from Dion Cassius and Ulpian, that the Jews who were thus banished from Rome returned soon after, and even attained to several honors and dignities, notwithstanding the laws which excluded them therefrom.[19] Can it be believed, that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the emperors would have loaded the Jews with their favors, and have persecuted and put to death the Christians, whom they looked upon as a sect of the Jews?
Nero is said to have been a great persecutor of the Christians. But Tacitus tells us that they were accused of having set fire to the city of Rome, and were thereupon given up to the resentment of the populace. But had religion anything to do with this charge? No, certainly. We might as well say that the Chinese, whom the Dutch murdered a few years ago in Batavia, were slaughtered on account of their religion. And nothing but a strong desire to deceive ourselves can possibly make us attribute to persecution the sufferings of a few half-Jews and half-Christians under Nero.[20]
CHAPTER IX.
MARTYRS.
Several Christians afterwards suffered martyrdom; it is not easy to say on what particular account they were condemned, but I can venture to assert that none suffered under the first Cæsars merely on the account of religion, for they tolerated all beliefs; therefore, why should they seek out and persecute an obscure people, who had a worship peculiar to themselves, at the time they licensed all others?
The Emperors Titus, Trajan, Antoninus, and Decius were not barbarians; how then can we imagine that they would have deprived the Christians alone of that liberty with which they indulged every other nation, or that they would even have troubled them for having concealed mysteries, while the worshippers of Isis, Mithra, and the Goddess of Assyria, whose rites were all of them equally unknown to the Romans, were suffered to perform them without hindrance? Certainly, the persecutions the Christians suffered must have arisen from other causes, and from some private pique, enforced by reasons of state.
For instance, when St. Laurence refused to deliver to Cornelius Secularius, the Roman prefect, the money belonging to the Christians which he had in his custody, was it not very natural for the prefect and the emperor to be incensed at this refusal? They did not know that St. Laurence had distributed this money among the poor, in acts of charity and benevolence; therefore they considered him only as a refractory person, and punished him accordingly.[21]
Again, let us consider the martyrdom of St. Polyeuctes. Can he be said to have suffered on account of religion only? He enters a temple, where the people are employed in offering thanksgivings to their gods on account of the victory gained by the Emperor Decius; he insults the priests and overturns and breaks in pieces the altar and statues. Is there a country in the world where so gross an insult would have been passed over? The Christian who publicly tore the edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and by that act brought on the great persecution against his brethren in the two last years of this prince’s reign, had not, surely, a zeal according to knowledge, but was the unhappy cause of all the disasters that befell his party. This inconsiderate zeal, which was often breaking forth, and was condemned even by several of the Fathers of the Church, was probably the occasion of all those persecutions we read of.
Certainly, I would not make a comparison between the first sacramentarians and the primitive Christians, as error should never be ranked in the same class with truth, but it is well known that Farrel, the predecessor of Calvin, did the very same thing at Arles which St. Polyeuctes had done before him in Armenia. The townsmen were carrying the statue of St. Anthony, the hermit, in procession through the streets; Farrel and some of his followers in a fit of zeal fell upon the monks who were carrying the image, beat them, made them take to their heels, and, having seized upon St. Anthony, threw him into the river. Assuredly Farrel deserved death for this flagrant outrage upon the public peace, but he had the good luck to escape by flight. Now, had he only told those monks in the open streets that he did not believe that a raven had brought half a loaf to St. Anthony, nor that this hermit had had conversation with centaurs and satyrs, he would have deserved a severe reprimand for troubling the public peace; but if the night after the procession he had quietly examined the story in his own room, no one could have found any fault with him for it.
But, indeed, can we suppose that the Romans, after permitting the infamous Antinous to be ranked among their demi-gods, would have massacred and thrown to wild beasts those against whom they had no other cause of reproach than having peaceably worshipped a just Deity? Or would those very Romans, who worshipped a supreme and all-powerful God,[22] master of all the subordinate deities, and distinguished by the title of Deus optimus maximus, would they, I say, have persecuted such who professed to worship only one God?
There appears little reason to believe that there ever was an inquisition instituted against the Christians under the Roman emperors; I mean, that they were ever judicially examined on the subject of their faith; neither do we find that Jew, Syrian, Egyptian bards, Druids, or philosophers were ever troubled on this account. The primitive martyrs then were men who opposed the worship of false gods. But, however wise or pious they might be in rejecting the belief of such absurd fictions, if, not content with worshipping the true God in spirit and in truth, they offered a violent and public outrage to the received religion of the government under which they lived, however absurd that religion might be, impartiality obliges us to confess that they themselves were the first persecutors.
Tertullian, in his Apology,[23] says that the Christians were looked upon as a turbulent and seditious sect. This accusation is doubtless unjust; but it serves to prove that the civil power did not set itself against the Christians purely on account of their religion. In another place,[24] he says that the Christians refused to adorn the doors of their houses with laurel branches on the days of public rejoicing for the victories of the emperors. Now this blamable particularity might not, without some reason, be taken for disaffection to the government.
The first judicial act of severity we find exercised against the Christians was that of Domitian; but this extended only to banishment, which did not last above a year, for, says the author above quoted, Facile cœptum repressit restitutis quos ipse relegaverat. Lactantius, so remarkable for his passionate and pompous style, acknowledges that from the time of Domitian to that of Decius the Church continued in a peaceable and flourishing condition. This long tranquillity, says he,[25] was interrupted by that execrable animal Decius, who began to oppress the Church: Post multos annos extitit execrabile animal Decius qui vexaret ecclesiam.
I shall not here enter into a discussion of the opinion of the learned Mr. Dodwell concerning the small number of martyrs; but if the Romans had been such violent persecutors of the Christian religion, if their senate had condemned so many of its innocent votaries to perish by the most unheard-of tortures, plunging them alive in boiling oil, and exposing their wives and daughters naked to the wild beasts in the circus, how happened it that they suffered all the first bishops of Rome to live unmolested? St. Ireneus reckons only one martyr among all these bishops, namely, Telesphorus, who suffered in the year 139 of our vulgar era; nor have we any positive proof of this Telesphorus being put to death. Zephirinus governed the flock in Rome for eighteen years successively, and died peaceably in the year 219. It is true that in the ancient martyrologies we find almost all the first popes ranked as martyrs, but the word martyr is there taken only in its original and true signification, which is a witness and not a sufferer.
Moreover, we can hardly reconcile this rage of persecution with the liberty granted the Christians, of assembling no less than fifty-six councils in the course of the first three centuries, as is acknowledged by all ecclesiastical writers.
That there were persecutions, is doubtless; but if they had been as violent as represented, it is hardly probable that Tertullian, who wrote with so much energy against the established religion, would have been suffered to die peaceably in his bed. It is certain that none of the emperors ever read his “Apology,” as an obscure work composed in Africa can hardly be supposed to have come into the hands of the governors of the world; but then, it might have been shown to their proconsuls in Africa, and have drawn down their resentment upon the author; nevertheless, we do not find that he suffered martyrdom.
Origen taught the Christian religion publicly in Alexandria, and yet was not put to death for it. And this very Origen himself, who spoke with so much freedom both to the heathens and the Christians, and who, while he taught Jesus to the one, denied the triple Godhead to the other, expressly acknowledges, in his third book against Celsus, that “There were very few who suffered martyrdom, and those at a great distance of time from one another; notwithstanding,” says he, “that the Christians leave nothing undone to make their religion generally embraced, running from city to city, and from town to town, to make converts.”
It must be confessed that these continual peregrinations might readily give cause to the priests, who were their enemies, to accuse them of a design to raise disturbances; and yet we find that these missions were tolerated even among the Egyptians, who have ever been a turbulent, factious, and mean people, and who tore a Roman to death for having killed a cat; in a word, a nation at all times contemptible, whatever may have been said to the contrary by the admirers of pyramids.[26]
What person could do more to call down upon him the resentment of both ecclesiastical and civil power than St. Gregory Thaumaturgos, the disciple of Origen? This same St. Gregory had a vision during the night-time, in which an old man appeared to him sent from God, accompanied by a woman shining with glory; the first of these was St. John the Evangelist, and the other the Holy Virgin. St. John dictated to him a creed, which Gregory afterwards went about to preach. In his way he passed through Neo-Cæsarea, where the rain obliged him to stay all night, and he took up his lodging near a temple famous for its oracles. Here he made several signs of the cross. The high priest coming the next morning into the temple was surprised to find that the oracle did not give its answer as usual, upon which he invoked the spirits of the place, who appearing, told him that they could no longer inhabit that mansion, as St. Gregory had passed a night there and had made signs of the cross, upon which the high priest caused Gregory to be seized, who gave him to understand that he could drive out or cause to enter the familiar spirits wherever he pleased. “If so,” said the high priest, “pray send them back here again.” Then St. Gregory, tearing a leaf from a little book he held in his hand, wrote these words upon it: “Gregory to Satan: I command thee to enter again into this temple.” The paper being laid upon the altar, the demons, in obedience to the saint’s mandate, gave their oracles that day as usual, after which they remained silent.
This story is related by St. Gregory of Nyssa in his life of St. Gregory Thaumaturgos. Certainly, the idolatrous priests had great reason to be offended with St. Gregory, and might have delivered him over to the secular power as one who was their greatest enemy, and yet we do not find that they offered him any hurt.
The history of St. Cyprian informs us that he was the first bishop of Carthage who suffered martyrdom; this was A. D. 258, consequently no bishop of Carthage had been put to death on account of religion for a great length of time. The history of this saint does not inform us what charge was brought against him, who were his enemies, or how he incurred the displeasure of the proconsul of Africa. We find St. Cyprian thus writing to Cornelius, bishop of Rome: “There has been a tumult of the people lately at Carthage, in which it was twice proposed to throw me to the lions.” It might possibly happen that the blind resentment of the people of Carthage did at length cause Cyprian to be put to death, for, certainly, he was never condemned to suffer for his religion by the Emperor Gallus, who lived at so great a distance, and, moreover, permitted Cornelius to exercise his episcopal function under his very eye.
So many and various are the hidden causes that are frequently blended with the apparent one, in the persecution of an individual, that it is hardly possible for posterity to discover the true source of the misfortunes that befell even the most considerable personages, much less that of the sufferings of a private person, hardly known to any but those of his own sect.
And here let it be observed that neither St. Gregory Thaumaturgos nor St. Denis, bishop of Alexandria, who were both contemporaries of St. Cyprian, suffered the slightest persecution. How then happened it that, being certainly as well known as the bishop of Carthage, they were suffered to live unmolested, while he was delivered over to punishment? May we not fairly infer that the one fell a victim to personal and powerful enemies, either in consequence of a malicious accusation, or from reasons of state, which frequently interfere in religious matters, while the other had the good fortune to escape the designs of wicked men?
We cannot, with any degree of probability, suppose that the charge of being a Christian was the only cause of St. Ignatius being put to death, under the just and merciful Trajan, since we find that several of his own religion were suffered to accompany and minister comfort to him on his way to Rome.[27] There had been frequent seditions in Antioch, a city remarkable for the turbulent disposition of its inhabitants; here Ignatius privately acted as bishop over the Christians. It might happen that some of these disturbances, being maliciously imputed to the innocent Christians, had occasioned the government to take cognizance of them, and that the judge might have been mistaken, as it often happens.
St. Simeon, for example, was accused before King Sapor of being a spy to the Romans. The history of his martyrdom tells us that Sapor proposed to him to worship the sun, whereas every one knows that the Persians paid no divine honors to that planet, but only considered it as an emblem of the good principle, the Orasmades, or Sovereign Creator, whom they all adored.
Any one of the least tolerating spirit cannot help his indignation from rising against those writers who accused Diocletian of persecuting the Christians after his accession to the empire. Here we need only refer to Eusebius of Cæsarea, whose testimony certainly cannot be rejected. The favorite, the panegyrist of Constantine, and the declared enemy of the emperors his predecessors, is certainly entitled to our credit when he justifies those very emperors. The following are his own words:[28]
“The emperors had for a long time given the Christians great marks of their favor and benevolence; they had entrusted them with the care of whole provinces; many of them lived within the imperial palace; and some of the emperors even married Christian women; Diocletian, in particular, espoused Prisca, whose daughter was wife to Maximianus Galerius,” etc.
Let this authentic testimony make us cautious how we fall too readily into calumny; and from this let any impartial person judge, if the persecution raised by Galerius, after nineteen years of continued clemency and favor to the Christians, must not have been occasioned by some intrigues with which we are at present unacquainted.
From this also we may perceive the absurdity of that fabulous story of the Theban legion, said to have been all massacred for their religion. Can anything be more ridiculous than to make this legion be brought from Asia by the great St. Bernard? It is altogether impossible that this legion should have been sent for from Asia to quiet a tumult in Gaul, a year after that tumult was suppressed, and not less so that six thousand foot and seven hundred horse should have suffered themselves to be all murdered in a place where two hundred men only might have kept off a whole army. The account of this pretended butchery is introduced with all the marks of imposture: “When the earth groaned under the tyranny of Diocletian, heaven was peopled with martyrs.” Now, this event, such as it is related, is supposed to have happened in 286, the very time in which Diocletian most favored the Christians, and that the Roman Empire was in a state of the greatest tranquillity. But to cut short this matter at once, no such legion as the Theban ever existed; the Romans were too haughty and too wise to form a corps of those Egyptians, who served only as slaves in Rome, Vernæ Canopi; we may as well suppose them to have had a Jewish legion. We have the names of two and thirty legions that formed the principal military force of the Roman Empire, and it is very certain the Theban legion is not to be found among them. In a word, we may rank this story with the acrostic verses of the Sibyls, which are said to have foretold the miracles wrought by Jesus Christ, and with many other like spurious productions, which false zeal has trumped up to impose upon credulity.