But though we must be keenly alive to the importance of a thoroughly critical attitude where definite facts of history are concerned, we should be as keenly on our guard against judging everything from the standpoint of modern preconceptions. There is but one religious literature of antiquity that has ever been treated with real sympathy in the West, and that is the Judæo-Christian; in that alone have men been trained to feel at home, and all in antiquity that treats of religion in a different mode to the Jewish or Christian way, is felt to be strange, and, if obscure or extraordinary, to be even repulsive. The sayings and doings of the Jewish prophets, of Jesus, and of the Apostles, are related with reverence, embellished with the greatest beauties of diction, and illumined with the best thought of the age; while the sayings and doings of other prophets and teachers have been for the most part subjected to the most unsympathetic criticism, in which no attempt is made to understand their standpoint. Had even-handed justice been dealt out all round, the world to-day would have been richer in sympathy, in wide-mindedness, in comprehension of nature, humanity, and God, in brief, in soul-experience.
Therefore, in reading the Life of Apollonius let us remember that we have to look at it through the eyes of a Greek, and not through those of a Jew or a Protestant. The Many in their proper sphere must be for us as authentic a manifestation of the Divine as the One or the All, for indeed the “Gods” exist in spite of commandment and creed. The Saints and Martyrs and Angels have seemingly taken the places of the Heroes and Dæmons and Gods, but the change of name and change of view-point among men affect but little the unchangeable facts. To sense the facts of universal religion under the ever-changing names which men bestow upon them, and then to enter with full sympathy and comprehension into the hopes and fears of every phase of the religious mind—to read, as it were, the past lives of our own souls—is a most difficult task. But until we can put ourselves understandingly in the places of others, we can never see more than one side of the Infinite Life of God. A student of comparative religion must not be afraid of terms; he must not shudder when he meets with “polytheism,” or draw back in horror when he encounters “dualism,” or feel an increased satisfaction when he falls in with “monotheism”; he must not feel awe when he pronounces the name of Yahweh and contempt when he utters the name of Zeus; he must not picture a satyr when he reads the word “dæmon,” and imagine a winged dream of beauty when he pronounces the word “angel.” For him heresy and orthodoxy must not exist; he sees only his own soul slowly working out its own experience, looking at life from every possible view-point, so that haply at last he may see the whole, and having seen the whole, may become at one with God.
To Apollonius the mere fashion of a man’s faith was unessential; he was at home in all lands, among all cults. He had a helpful word for all, an intimate knowledge of the particular way of each of them, which enabled him to restore them to health. Such men are rare; the records of such men are precious, and require the embellishments of no rhetorician.
Let us then, first of all, try to recover the outline of the early external life and of the travels of Apollonius shorn of Philostratus’ embellishments, and then endeavour to consider the nature of his mission, the manner of the philosophy which he so dearly loved and which was to him his religion, and last, if possible, the way of his inner life.
Section VII.
EARLY LIFE.
Apollonius was born[75] at Tyana, a city in the south of Cappadocia, somewhen in the early years of the Christian era. His parents were of ancient family and considerable fortune (i. 4). At an early age he gave signs of a very powerful memory and studious disposition, and was remarkable for his beauty. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Tarsus, a famous centre of learning of the time, to complete his studies. But mere rhetoric and style and the life of the “schools” were little suited to his serious disposition, and he speedily left for Ægæ, a town on the sea-coast east of Tarsus. Here he found surroundings more suitable to his needs, and plunged with ardour into the study of philosophy. He became intimate with the priests of the temple of Æsculapius, where cures were still wrought, and enjoyed the society and instruction of pupils and teachers of the Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean schools of philosophy; but though he studied all these systems of thought with attention, it was the lessons of the Pythagorean school upon which he seized with an extraordinary depth of comprehension,[76] and that, too, although his teacher, Euxenus, was but a parrot of the doctrines and not a practiser of the discipline. But such parrotting was not enough for the eager spirit of Apollonius; his extraordinary “memory,” which infused life into the dull utterances of his tutor, urged him on, and at the age of sixteen “he soared into the Pythagorean life, winged by some greater one.”[77] Nevertheless he retained his affection for the man who had told him of the way, and rewarded him handsomely (i. 7).
When Euxenus asked him how he would begin his new mode of life he replied: “As doctors purge their patients.” Hence he refused to touch anything that had animal life in it, on the ground that it densified the mind and rendered it impure. He considered that the only pure form of food was what the earth produced, fruits and vegetables. He also abstained from wine, for though it was made from fruit, “it rendered turbid the æther[78] in the soul” and “destroyed the composure of the mind.” Moreover, he went barefoot, let his hair grow long, and wore nothing but linen. He now lived in the temple, to the admiration of the priests and with the express approval of Æsculapius,[79] and he rapidly became so famous for his asceticism and pious life, that a saying[80] of the Cilicians about him became a proverb (i. 8).