Roman Stoicism / being lectures on the history of the Stoic philosophy with special reference to its development within the Roman Empire

by Edward Vernon Arnold

478. This intense feeling on the part of St Paul required, as his writings assume, no justification; it was therefore an inherited feeling, as familiar to many an Oriental as it is usually strange and unsympathetic to the ancient and modern European. It appears also to be rooted in Hebrew tradition; for if we are at liberty to interpret the myth of Adam and Eve by the parallel of Yama and Yamī in the Rigveda[122], the fall of man was nothing else than the first marriage, in which Eve was the suitor and Adam the accomplice. In the dramatic poem of the Rigveda Yama corresponds to the Hebrew Adam, his sister Yamī to Eve[123]. Yamī yearns to become the mother of the human race; Yama shudders at the impiety of a sister’s embrace. Zeno had already conceived the world-problem in much the same shape[124]; but to the Oriental it is more than a problem of cosmology; it is the fundamental opposition of sex attitude, the woman who longs for the family affections against the man who seeks an ideal purity. In Genesis the prohibition of the apple appears at first sight colourless, yet the meaning is hardly obscure. After touching the forbidden fruit man and woman first feel the shame of nakedness; and Eve is punished by the coming pains of child-bearing, and a rank below her husband’s. None the less she has her wish, for she becomes the mother of all living. It is hard to think that Paul, who always traces human sin back to the offence of Adam, and finds it most shamelessly displayed in the sex-relationships of his own time, could have conceived of the Fall in any very different way.

The taint in procreation.

479. According then to a point of view which we believe to be latent in all the teaching of Paul on the subject of sin, the original taint lay in procreation, and through the begetting of children has passed on from one generation of mankind to another; ‘through the succession from Adam all men become dead[125].’ As an ethical standpoint this position is very alien from Stoicism; with the Stoic it is a first law of nature which bids all men seek for the continuance of the race; with the Apostle the same yearning leads them to enter the pathway of death. It would lead us too far to attempt here to discuss this profound moral problem, which has deeply influenced the whole history of the Christian church. We are however greatly concerned with the influence of this sentiment on Pauline doctrine. For it follows that in order to attain to a true moral or spiritual life man needs a new begetting and a new birth[126]; he must become a son of God through the outpouring of his spirit[127]. This is one of the most familiar of Pauline conceptions, and for us it is easy to link it on to the Stoico-Pauline account of the creation, according to which man was in the first instance created through the Word of God, and endowed with his spirit. But to the community at Jerusalem all conceptions of this kind appear to have been hardly intelligible, and tended to aggravate the deep distrust of the teachings and methods of St Paul and his companions, which was rooted in his disregard of national tradition.

The quarrel.

480. This difference of mental attitude soon broke out into an open quarrel. So much was inevitable; and the fact that the quarrel is recorded at length in the texts from which we are quoting is one of the strongest evidences of their general accuracy. The Christians at Jerusalem formed themselves into a nationalist party; they claimed that all the brothers should be in the first instance conformists to Hebrew institutions. Paul went up to Jerusalem[128], eager to argue the matter with men of famous name. He was disillusioned, as is so often the traveller who returns after trying experiences and much mental growth to the home to which his heart still clings. Peter and the others had no arguments to meet Paul’s; he could learn nothing from them[129]; they had not even a consistent practice[130]. At first Paul’s moral sense was outraged; he publicly rebuked Peter as double-faced. After a little time he realized that he had met with children; he remembered that he had once thought and acted in the same way[131]. Jews in heart, the home apostles still talked of marvels[132], still yearned for the return of Jesus in the flesh[133]. A philosophic religion was as much beyond their grasp as a consistent morality. Through a simple-minded application of the doctrines of the Sermon on the mount they had slipped into deep poverty[134]; they were ready to give Paul full recognition in return for charitable help. This was not refused them; but to his other teaching Paul now added a chapter on pecuniary independence[135]; and in his old age he left to his successors warnings against ‘old wives’ fables[136]’ and ‘Jewish legends[137].’

The development of Christian mythology.

481. Thus for the first time the forces of mythology within the Christian church clashed with those of philosophy. For the moment Paul appeared to be the victor; he won the formal recognition of the church, with full authority to continue his preaching on the understanding that it was primarily directed to the Gentile world[138]. External events were also unfavourable to the Hebraists: the destruction of Jerusalem deprived them of their local centre; the failure of Jesus to reappear in the flesh within the lifetime of his companions disappointed them of their most cherished hope. But their sentiments and thoughts remained to a great extent unchanged. To Paul they gave their respect, to Peter their love; and the steady tradition of the Christian church has confirmed this judgment. No saint has been so loved as Peter; to none have so many churches been dedicated by the affectionate instinct of the many; whilst even the dominant position of Paul in the sacred canon has hardly secured him much more than formal recognition except by the learned. So again it was with Paul’s teaching; formally recognised as orthodox, it remained misunderstood and unappreciated: it was even rapidly converted into that mythological form to which Paul himself was so fiercely opposed.

The Virgin birth and the resurrection.

482. This divergence of view is illustrated most strikingly in the two doctrines which for both parties were the cardinal points of Christian belief, the divine nature of the Founder and his resurrection. On the latter point the standpoint of the Hebraists is sufficiently indicated by the tradition of the gospels, all of which emphatically record as a decisive fact that the body of Jesus was not found in his grave on the third day; to the Paulists this point is entirely irrelevant, and they pass it by unmentioned[139]. To Paul again the man Jesus was of human and natural birth, born of the posterity of David, born of a woman, born subject to the law[140]; in his aspect as the Christ he was, as his followers were to be, begotten of the spirit and born anew[141]. His statement as to descent from David (which hardly means more than that he was of Jewish race) was crystallized by the mythologists in two formal genealogies, which disagree so entirely in detail that they have always been the despair of verbal apologists, but agree in tracing the pedigree through Joseph to Jesus. The phrase ‘begotten of the spirit’ was interpreted with equal literalness; but the marvel-lovers were for a time puzzled to place the ‘spirit’ in the family relationship. In the first instance the spirit seems to have been identified with the mother of Jesus[142]; but the misunderstanding of a Hebrew word which does not necessarily connote physical virginity[143] assisted to fix the function of fatherhood upon the divine parent. The antipathy to the natural process of procreation which we have traced in St Paul himself, and which was surely not less active amongst many of the Hebraists, has contributed to raise this materialisation of a philosophic tenet to a high place amongst the formal dogmas of historic Christianity.

The doctrine of the Word.