VII
THE ASCETIC AND THE MORE PRACTICAL SCHOOLS OF TEACHING
The members of the Christian Brotherhood were not left without guidance as to their behaviour in the world of Rome. There were two schools among the Christian teachers of authority in the primitive Church.
The one which we will term the school of “Rigourists” or “ascetics” found a brilliant and able exponent in the stern African Father, Tertullian, who taught and wrote in the latter years of the second and the earlier years of the third centuries. From the burning and impassioned words of this famous African teacher we can form a generally accurate idea of what was taught and pressed home in the school of “Rigourists.”
No compromise was ever suggested by these hard, stern teachers—no “via media” was even hinted at.
The artisan must forsake his calling if it even was connected in the most remote degree with idol-worship,[77] with the games loved of the people, with anything which appeared antagonistic to any of the Master’s commands. These words must be understood in their strict literal sense, and must be obeyed.
The soldier must abandon his colours, the civil servant his profession. The slave must at all risks refuse his obedience when that obedience involved acquiescence in any form of idolatry. The Christian wife, the son or daughter in a pagan family, must gently but firmly decline to share even in the formal ancestral worship, or to be present at the public games of the arena, or the performances in the theatre. In their dress and ornaments, in their very language, in their hours of play and work, they must hold themselves aloof. We may picture to ourselves how in many a pagan household, in the Forum, in the army and civil service, gentle, pitying men and women would be found who would shield and shelter these seemingly fanatical and earnest adherents of a despised religion; but in many cases there would be no loving, pitying ones who would strive to throw a kindly veil over what seemed to them such strange, such unpatriotic and even disloyal conduct. Then would assuredly follow arrest—imprisonment—exile—the deadly mines, where the condemned toiled in a hopeless, dreary captivity. Not unfrequently torture and death would be the guerdon of the devoted Christian under circumstances of awful pain and mortal agony.
It is out of this class that the martyrs mostly came. It was to embolden and encourage these that the little known “Schools of Martyrdom” were formed, where very earnest Christians were trained to endure all and suffer for the Name’s sake.[78]
The ascetics, however, were in the minority. There was another school in the primitive Church, strict certainly in its instructions, but more ready to make allowances; less uncompromising in its views of the everyday Christian life; less literal in its interpretation of the Divine Master’s words.
This gentler and more practical school is well represented in the works still preserved to us of several of the great teachers of early Christianity. A very conspicuous example of this school of teaching is the famous Dialogue put together by the North African Latin writer, Minucius Felix. The generally received date of the writing is circa A.D. 160, in the reign of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus. It is a work of peculiar charm. One scholar terms it “a golden Book”; another (Renan) styles it “the pearl of Apologetic literature.”
It is cast in the form of a dialogue held by three persons on the then beautiful seashore of Ostia. The speakers are real historic characters of some rank and position in the Roman world in the middle years of the second century. The arguments adduced by the pagan Cæcilius are supposed to be a reproduction of a lost work of Fronto, the tutor and friend of the Emperor Marcus. The refutation of Octavius the wealthy Christian merchant, which follows and which convinced Cæcilius of the truth of the new faith, is the principal piece in the work and the part to which reference is specially made here, and it admirably voices many of the views of the second and gentler school of early Christianity. The criticism of Renan on the view of Christianity taken by Octavius is striking, and fairly accurate. It is, he says, “the conception of the new religion of amiable advocates wishful to enrol in the Christian ranks, men of culture and position. Such men as the Octavius of the Dialogue would never have written the Gospels or the Apocalypse; but, on the other hand, without such liberal interpreters, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, and the Epistles of Paul would have never penetrated beyond the circle of a narrow sect, and in the long run the sect of Christians would have disappeared.” “Minucius Felix,” the great French writer, goes on to say, “represented in those early years the preacher of Nôtre Dâme (in Paris) in our own time, addressing men of the world.”[79]