The pagan revival.
452. The decay of precise philosophic thought was accompanied by a strong revival of pagan religious sentiment. The atmosphere in which Marcus Aurelius grew up, and by which his political actions were determined far more than by his philosophic profession, is thus sympathetically described by the latest editor of his Reflections.
‘In house and town, the ancestral Penates of the hearth and the Lares of the streets guarded the intercourse of life; in the individual breast, a ministering Genius shaped his destinies and responded to each mood of melancholy or of mirth. Thus all life lay under the regimen of spiritual powers, to be propitiated or appeased by appointed observances and ritual and forms of prayer. To this punctilious and devout form of Paganism Marcus was inured from childhood; at the vintage festival he took his part in chant and sacrifice; at eight years old he was admitted to the Salian priesthood; “he was observed to perform all his sacerdotal functions with a constancy and exactness unusual at that age; was soon a master of the sacred music; and had all the forms and liturgies by heart.” Our earliest statue depicts him as a youth offering incense; and in his triumphal bas-reliefs he stands before the altar, a robed and sacrificing priest. To him “prayer and sacrifice, and all observances by which we own the presence and nearness of the gods,” are “covenants and sacred ministries” admitting to “intimate communion with the divine[127].”’
The cult thus summarized is not that of the Greek mythology, much less that of the rationalized Stoic theology. It is the primitive ritualism of Italy, still dear to the hearts of the common people, and regaining its hold on the educated in proportion as they spared themselves the effort of individual criticism.
State persecution.
453. It was by no mere accident that Marcus Aurelius became the persecutor of the Christians. He was at heart no successor of the Zeno who held as essential the doctrine of a supreme deity, and absolutely rejected the use of temples and images. In the interval, official Stoicism had learnt first to tolerate superstition with a smile, next to become its advocate; now it was to become a persecutor in its name. Pontius Pilatus is said to have recognised the innocence of the founder of Christianity, and might have protected him had his instructions from Rome allowed him to stretch his authority so far; Gallio[128] was uninterested in the preaching of Paul; but Aurelius was acquainted with the Christian profession and its adherents[129], and opposed it as an obstinate resistance to authority[130]. The popular antipathy to the new religion, and the official distaste for all disturbing novelties, found in him a willing supporter[131]. Thus began a new struggle between the power of the sword and that of inward conviction. Because reason could not support the worship of the pagan deities, violence must do so[132]. It became a triumph of the civil authority and the popular will to extort a word of weakness by two years of persistent torture[133]. No endowed professor or enlightened magistrate raised his voice in protest; and in this feeble acquiescence Stoicism perished.
Revolt of the young Stoics.
454. For the consciences of the young revolted. Trained at home and in school to believe in providence, in duty, and in patient endurance of evil, they instinctively recognised the Socratic force and example not in the magistrate seated in his curule chair, nor in the rustic priest occupied in his obsolete ritual, but in the teacher on the cross and the martyr on the rack[134]. In ever increasing numbers men, who had from their Stoic education imbibed the principles of the unity of the Deity and the freedom of the will, came over to the new society which professed the one without reservation, and displayed the other without flinching. With them they brought in large measure their philosophic habits of thought, and (in far more particulars than is generally recognised) the definite tenets which the Porch had always inculcated. Stoicism began a new history, which is not yet ended, within the Christian church; and we must now attempt to give some account of this aftergrowth of the philosophy.