[167] See Zeller, Stoics, &c. p. 327 sq.
[168] Seneca, Epistulæ, xcv. 52.
[169] Marcus Aurelius, Commentarii, iv. 4. Cf. ibid. vi. 44, and ix. 9; Cicero, De legibus, i. 7 (23); Epictetus, Dissertationes, i. 13. 3.
[170] Marcus Aurelius, iii. 11.
[171] Seneca, De otio, iv. 1. Idem, Epistulæ, lxviii. 2. Epictetus, Dissertationes, iii. 22. 83 sqq.
But the Roman ideal of patriotism, with its utter disregard for foreign nations,[172] was not opposed by philosophy alone: it met with an even more formidable antagonist in the new religion. The Christian and the Stoic rejected it on different grounds: whilst the Stoic felt himself as a citizen of the world, the Christian felt himself as a citizen of heaven, to whom this planet was only a place of exile. Christianity was not hostile to the State.[173] At the very time when Nero committed his worst atrocities, St. Paul declared that there is no power but of God, and that whosoever resists the power resists the ordinance of God and shall be condemned;[174] and Tertullian says that all Christians send up their prayers for the life of the emperors, for their ministers, for magistrates, for the good of the State and the peace of the Empire.[175] But the emperor should be obeyed only so long as his commands do not conflict with the law of God—a Christian ought rather to suffer like Daniel in the lions’ den than sin against his religion;[176] and nothing is more entirely foreign to him than affairs of State.[177] Indeed, in the whole Roman Empire there were no men who so entirely lacked patriotism as the early Christians. They had no affection for Judea, they soon forgot Galilee, they cared nothing for the glory of Greece and Rome.[178] When the judges asked them which was their country they said in answer, “I am a Christian.”[179] And long after Christianity had become the religion of the Empire, St. Augustine declared that it matters not, in respect of this short and transitory life, under whose dominion a mortal man lives, if only he be not compelled to acts of impiety or injustice.[180] Later on, when the Church grew into a political power independent of the State, she became a positive enemy of national interests. In the seventeenth century a Jesuit general called patriotism “a plague and the most certain death of Christian love.”[181]
[172] Cf. Lactantius, Divinæ Institutiones, vi. (‘De vero cultu’), 6 (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, vi. 655).
[173] St. Matthew, xxii. 21. 1 Peter, ii. 13 sq.
[174] Romans, xiii. 1 sq. See also Titus, iii. 1.
[175] Tertullian, Apologeticus, 39 (Migne, op. cit. i. 468). See also Ludwig, Tertullian’s Ethik, p. 98 sq.