It claims investigation, but it has not yet been investigated. There have been inquiries, which in some cases have arrived at positive results, as to the causes of particular changes or developments in Christianity—the development, for example, of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the theory of a Catholic Church. But the main question to which I invite your attention is antecedent to all such inquiries. It asks, not how did the Christian societies come to believe one proposition rather than another, but how did they come to the frame of mind which attached importance to either the one or the other, and made the assent to the one rather than the other a condition of membership.
In investigating this problem, the first point that is obvious to an inquirer is, that the change in the centre of gravity from conduct to belief is coincident with the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil. The presumption is that it was the result of Greek influence. It will appear from the Lectures which follow that this presumption is true. Their general subject is, consequently, The Influence of Greece upon Christianity.
The difficulty, the interest, and the importance of the subject make it incumbent upon us to approach it with caution. It is necessary to bear many points in mind as we enter upon it; and I will begin by asking your attention to two considerations, which, being true of all analogous phenomena of religious development and change, may be presumed to be true of the particular phenomena before us.
1. The first is, that the religion of a given race at a given time is relative to the whole mental attitude of that time. It is impossible to separate the religious phenomena from the other phenomena, in the same way that you can separate a vein of silver from the rock in which it is embedded. They are as much determined by the general characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of a geographical area are determined by its soil, its climate, and its cultivation; and they vary with the changing characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of the tertiary system differ from those of the chalk. They are separable from the whole mass of phenomena, not in fact, but only in thought. We may concentrate our attention chiefly upon them, but they still remain part of the whole complex life of the time, and they cannot be understood except in relation to that life. If any one hesitates to accept this historical induction, I will ask him to take the instance that lies nearest to him, and to consider how he could understand the religious phenomena of our own country in our own time—its doubts, its hopes, its varied enterprises, its shifting enthusiasms, its noise, its learning, its estheticism, and its philanthropies—unless he took account of the growth of the inductive sciences and the mechanical arts, of the expansion of literature, of the social stress, of the commercial activity, of the general drift of society towards its own improvement.
In dealing, therefore, with the problem before us, we must endeavour to realize to ourselves the whole mental attitude of the Greek world in the first three centuries of our era. We must take account of the breadth and depth of its education, of the many currents of its philosophy, of its love of literature, of its scepticism and its mysticism. We must gather together whatever evidence we can find, not determining the existence or measuring the extent of drifts of thought by their literary expression, but taking note also of the testimony of the monuments of art and history, of paintings and sculptures, of inscriptions and laws. In doing so, we must be content, at any rate for the present and until the problem has been more fully elaborated, with the broader features both of the Greek world and of the early centuries. The distinctions which the precise study of history requires us to draw between the state of thought of Greece proper and that of Asia Minor, and between the age of the Antonines and that of the Severi, are not necessary for our immediate purpose, and may be left to the minuter research which has hardly yet begun.
2. The second consideration is, that no permanent change takes place in the religious beliefs or usages of a race which is not rooted in the existing beliefs and usages of that race. The truth which Aristotle enunciated, that all intellectual teaching is based upon what is previously known to the person taught,[1] is applicable to a race as well as to an individual, and to beliefs even more than to knowledge. A religious change is, like a physiological change, of the nature of assimilation by, and absorption into, existing elements. The religion which our Lord preached was rooted in Judaism. It came “not to destroy, but to fulfil.” It took the Jewish conception of a Father in heaven, and gave it a new meaning. It took existing moral precepts, and gave them a new application. The meaning and the application had already been anticipated in some degree by the Jewish prophets. There were Jewish minds which had been ripening for them; and so far as they were ripe for them, they received them. In a similar way we shall find that the Greek Christianity of the fourth century was rooted in Hellenism. The Greek minds which had been ripening for Christianity had absorbed new ideas and new motives; but there was a continuity between their present and their past; the new ideas and new motives mingled with the waters of existing currents; and it is only by examining the sources and the volume of the previous flow that we shall understand how it is that the Nicene Creed rather than the Sermon on the Mount has formed the dominant element in Aryan Christianity.
The method of the investigation, like that of all investigations, must be determined by the nature of the evidence. The special feature of the evidence which affects the method is, that it is ample in regard to the causes, and ample also in regard to the effects, but scanty in regard to the process of change.
We have ample evidence in regard to the state of Greek thought during the ante-Nicene period. The writers shine with a dim and pallid light when put side by side with the master-spirits of the Attic age; but their lesser importance in the scale of genius rather adds to than diminishes from their importance as representatives. They were more the children of their time. They are consequently better evidence as to the currents of its thought than men who supremely transcended it. I will mention those from whom we shall derive most information, in the hope that you will in course of time become familiar, not only with their names, but also with their works. Dio of Prusa, commonly known as Dio Chrysostom, “Dio of the golden mouth,” who was raised above the class of travelling orators to which he belonged, not only by his singular literary skill, but also by the nobility of his character and the vigour of his protests against political unrighteousness. Epictetus, the lame slave, the Socrates of his time, in whom the morality and the religion of the Greek world find their sublimest expression, and whose conversations and lectures at Nicopolis, taken down, probably in short-hand, by a faithful pupil, reflect exactly, as in a photograph, the interior life of a great moralist’s school. Plutarch, the prolific essayist and diligent encyclopædist, whose materials are far more valuable to us than the edifices which he erects with them. Maximus of Tyre, the eloquent preacher, in whom the cold metaphysics of the Academy are transmuted into a glowing mysticism. Marcus Aurelius, the imperial philosopher, in whose mind the fragments of many philosophies are lit by hope or darkened by despair, as the clouds float and drift in uncertain sunlight or in gathered gloom before the clearing rain. Lucian, the satirist and wit, the prose Aristophanes of later Greece. Sextus Empiricus, whose writings—or the collection of writings gathered under his name—are the richest of all mines for the investigation of later Greek philosophy. Philostratus, the author of a great religious romance, and of many sketches of the lives of contemporary teachers. It will hardly be an anachronism if we add to these the great syncretist philosopher, Philo of Alexandria; for, on the one hand, he was more Greek than Jew, and, on the other, several of the works which are gathered together under his name seem to belong to a generation subsequent to his own, and to be the only survivors of the Judæo-Greek schools which lasted on in the great cities of the empire until the verge of Christian times.