Over these earliest communities and the theory which they embodied there passed, in the last half of the second century and the first half of the third, an enormous change. The processes of the change and its immediate causes are obscure. The interests of contemporary writers are so absorbed with the struggles for soundness of doctrine, as to leave but little room for a record of the struggles for purity of life. In the last stages of those struggles, the party which endeavoured to preserve the ancient ideal was treated as schismatical. The aggregate of visible communities was no longer identical with the number of those who should be saved. The dominant party framed a new theory of the Church as a corpus permixtum, and found support for it in the Gospels themselves. Morality became subordinated to belief in Christianity by the same inevitable drift by which practice had been superseded by theory in Stoicism.
In both the production of this change and its further developments Greece played an important part. The net result of the active forces which it brought to bear upon Christianity was, that the attention of a majority of Christian men was turned to the intellectual as distinguished from the moral element in Christian life. And when the change was effected, it operated in two further ways, which have survived in large and varied forms to the present day.
1. The idea of moral reformation had from the first seized different men with a varying tenacity of grasp.[301] There were some men who had a higher moral ideal than others: there were some whose natures were stronger: there were some to whom moral life was not the perfection of human citizenship, but the struggle of the spirit to disentangle itself from its material environment, and to rise by contemplation to fellowship with God. There are proofs of the existence in the very earliest Christian communities of those who endeavoured to live on a higher plane than their fellows. Abstinence from marriage and from animal food were urged and practised as “counsels of perfection.” In some communities there was an attempt to make such counsels of perfection obligatory. In the majority of communities, though they were part of “the whole yoke of the Lord,”[302] and were specially enjoined at certain times upon all church members, they were not of universal or constant obligation. Those who habitually practised them were recognized as a church within the Church. The practice of them was known by a name which we have seen to be common in the Greek philosophical schools. It was relative to the conception of life as an athletic contest. It was that of bodily training or gymnastic exercise (ἄσκησις).[303]
The secession of the Puritan party left much of this element still within the great body of confederated communities. At the end of the third century it became important both within them and without. It was increased, partly by the growing influence of the ideas which found their highest expression outside Christianity in Neo-Platonism; partly by the growing complexity of society itself, the strain and the despair of an age of decadence; partly also by the necessity of finding a new outlet, when Christianity became a legal religion, for the passionate love of God which had led men to a sometimes ecstatic martyrdom. It was joined by the parallel tendency among professors of philosophy. It soon took a new form. Hitherto those who followed counsels of perfection lived in ordinary society, undistinguished except by their conduct from their fellow-men. The ideal “Gnostic” of Clement of Alexandria takes his part in ordinary human affairs, “acting the drama of life which God has given him to play, knowing both what is to be done and what is to be endured.”[304] But early in the fourth century the practice of the ascetic life in Christianity came to be shown in the same outward way, but with a more marked emphasis, as the similar practice in philosophy. It was indeed known as philosophy.[305] It was most akin to Cynicism, with which it had sometimes already been confused, and its badges were the badges of Cynicism, the rough blanket and the unshorn hair. To wear the blanket and to let the hair grow was to profess divine philosophy, the higher life of self-discipline and sanctity. It was to claim to stand on a higher level and to be working out a nobler ideal than average Christians. The practice soon received a further development. Just as ordinary philosophers had sometimes found life in society to be intolerable and had gone into “retreat,” so the Christian philosophers began to withdraw altogether from the world, and to live their lives of self-discipline and contemplation in solitude. The retention of the old names shows the continuity of the practice. They were still practising discipline, ἄσκησις, or philosophy, φιλοσοφία. So far as they retired from society, they were still said “to go into retreat,” ἀναχωρεῖν, whence the current appellation of ἀναχωρηταί, “anchorets.” The place of their retreat was a “school of discipline,” ἀσκητήριον, or a “place for reflection,” φροντιστήριον.[306] To these were soon added the new names which were relative to the fact that moral discipline was usually practised in solitude. Those who retired from the world were “solitaries,” μοναχοί, and the place of their retirement was a “place for solitude,” μοναστήριον. When the practice was once firmly rooted in Christian soil, it was largely developed in independent ways for which Greece was not primarily responsible, and which therefore cannot properly be described here; but the independence and enormous overgrowth of these later forms cannot wipe away the memory of the fact that to Greece, more than to any other factor, was due the place and earliest conception of that sublime individualism which centred all a man’s efforts on the development of his spiritual life, and withdrew him from his fellow-men in order to bring him near to God.
2. It was inevitable that when the Puritan party had left the main body, and when the most spiritually-minded of those who remained detached themselves from the common life of their brethren, there should be a deterioration in the average moral conceptions of the Christian Churches. It was also inevitable that those conceptions should be largely shaped by Greek influences. The Pauline ethics vanished from the Christian world. For the average members of the churches were now the average citizens of the empire, educated by Greek methods, impregnated with the dominant ethical ideas. They accepted Christian ideas, but without the enthusiasm which made them a transforming force. As in regard to metaphysics, so also in regard to ethics, the frame of mind which had been formed by education was stronger than the new ideas which it absorbed. The current ideals remained, slightly raised: the current rules of conduct continued, with modifications. Instead of the conceptions of righteousness and holiness, there was the old conception of virtue: instead of the code of morals which was “briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” there was the old enumeration of duties. At the end of the fourth century the new state of things was formally recognized by ecclesiastical writers. Love was no more “the hand-book of divine philosophy:”[307] the chief contemporary theologian of the West, Ambrose of Milan, formulated the current theory in a book which is the more important because it not merely expresses the ideas of his time and seals the proof of their prevalence, but also became the basis of the moral philosophy of the Middle Ages. But the book is less Christian than Stoical.[308] It is a rechauffée of the book which Cicero had compiled more than three centuries before, chiefly from Panætius. It is Stoical, not only in conception, but also in detail. It makes virtue the highest good. It makes the hope of the life to come a subsidiary and not a primary motive. Its ideal of life is happiness: it holds that a happy life is a life according to nature, that it is realized by virtue, and that it is capable of being realized here on earth. Its virtues are the ancient virtues of wisdom and justice, courage and temperance. It tinges each of them with a Christian, or at least with a Theistic colouring; but the conception of each of them remains what it had been to the Greek moralists. Wisdom, for example, is Greek wisdom, with the addition that no man can be wise who is ignorant of God: justice is Greek justice, with the addition that its subsidiary form of beneficence is helped by the Christian society.
The victory of Greek ethics was complete. While Christianity was being transformed into a system of doctrines, the Stoical jurists at the imperial court were slowly elaborating a system of personal rights. The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, which the earliest Christian communities endeavoured to carry into practice, have been transmuted by the slow alchemy of history into the ethics of Roman law. The basis of Christian society is not Christian, but Roman and Stoical. A fusion of the Roman conception of rights with the Stoical conception of relations involving reciprocal actions, is in possession of practically the whole field of civilized society. The transmutation is so complete that the modern question is not so much whether the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount are practicable, as whether, if practicable, they would be desirable. The socialistic theories which formulate in modern language and justify by modern conceptions such an exhortation as “Sell that thou hast and give to the poor,” meet with no less opposition within than without the Christian societies. The conversion of the Church to Christian theory must precede the conversion of the world to Christian practice. But meanwhile there is working in Christianity the same higher morality which worked in the ancient world, and the maxim, Follow God, belongs to a plane on which Epictetus and Thomas à Kempis meet.
Lecture VII.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.
I. The Creator.
Slowly there loomed through the mists of earlier Greek thought the consciousness of one God.