Thus Tertullian and Lactantius tell of the many who believe in a non-active and passionless God,[78] and disdain those who turn Christian out of fear of a hereafter; and again[79] of Stoics who deride the belief in demons. A third-century author quoted by Eusebius[80] speaks of ἄπιστοι who deny the divine authorship of the holy scriptures, in such a fashion as to imply that this was done by some who were not merely pagan non-Christians but deniers of inspiration. Jamblichos, too,[81] speaks of opponents of the worship of the Gods in his day (early in the fourth century).[82] In the fifth century, again, Augustine complains bitterly of those impious and reckless persons who dare to say that the evangelists differ among themselves.[83] He argues no less bitterly against the increduli and infideles who would not believe in immortality and the possibility of eternal torment;[84] and he meets them in a fashion which constantly recurs in Christian apologetics, pointing to natural anomalies, real or alleged, and concluding that since we cannot understand all we see we should believe all we hear—from the Church. Those who derided the story of Jonah and the whale he meets by accusing them of believing the story of Arion and the dolphin.[85] In the same way he meets[86] their protest against the iniquity of eternal punishment by a juggle over the ostensible anomaly of long punishments by human law for short misdeeds. Whatever may have been his indirect value of his habit of dialectic, he again and again declares for prone faith and against the resort to reason; and to this effect may be cited a long series of Fathers and ecclesiastics, all eager to show that only in a blind faith could there be any moral merit.[87]
Such arguments were doubtless potent to stupefy what remained of critical faculty in the Roman world. In the same period Salvian makes a polemic against those who in Christian Gaul denied that God exercised any government on earth.[88] They seem, however, to have been normal Christians, driven to this view by the barbarian invasions. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, again, seems to have attacked the Christians partly as rationalist, partly as conservative.[89]
In general, the orthodox polemic is interesting only insofar as it preserves that of the opposition. The Dialogue with Trypho by Justin Martyr (about 150) is a mere documental discussion between a Christian and a Jew, each founding on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Christian doing nearly all of the argument. There is not a scintilla of independent rationalism in the whole tedious work.[90] Justin was a type of the would-be “philosopher” who confessedly would take no trouble to study science or philosophize, but who found his sphere in an endless manipulation of the texts of sacred books. But the work of the learned Origen Against Celsus preserves for us a large part of the True Discourse of Celsus, a critical and extremely well-informed argument against Christianity by a pagan of the Platonic[91] school in the time of Marcus Aurelius,[92] on grounds to a considerable extent rationalistic.[93] The line of rejoinder followed by Origen, one of the most cultured of the Christian Fathers, is for the most part otherwise. When Celsus argues that it makes no difference by what name the Deity is called, Origen answers[94] that on the contrary certain God-names have a miraculous or magical virtue for the casting out of evil spirits; that this mystery is known and practised by the Egyptians and Persians; and that the mere name of Jesus has been proved potent to cast out many such demons. When, on the other hand, Celsus makes a Jew argue against the Christist creed on the basis of the Jewish story that the founder’s birth was illegitimate,[95] the Father’s answer begins in sheer amiable ineptitude,[96] which soon passes into shocked outcry.[97] In other passages he is more successful, as when he convicts Celsus’s Jew of arguing alternately that the disciples were deceived, and that they were deceivers.[98] This part of the discussion is interesting chiefly as showing how educated Jews combated the gospels in detail, at a level of criticism not always above that of the believers. Sometimes the Jew’s case is shrewdly put, as when he asks,[99] “Did Jesus come into the world for this purpose, that we should not believe him?”—a challenge not to be met by Origen’s theology. One of the acutest of Celsus’s thrusts is the remark that Jesus himself declared that miracles would be wrought after him by followers of Satan, and that the argument from miracles is thus worthless.[100] To this the rejoinder of Origen is suicidal; but at times the assailant, himself a believer in all manner of miracles, gives away his advantage completely enough.
Of a deeper interest are the sections in which Celsus (himself a believer in a Supreme Deity and a future state, and in a multitude of lower Powers, open to invocation) rests his case on grounds of general reason, arguing that the true Son of God must needs have brought home his mission to all mankind;[101] and sweeps aside as foolish the whole dispute between Jews and Christians,[102] of which he had given a sample. Most interesting of all are the chapters[103] in which the Christian cites the pagan’s argument against the homo-centric theory of things. Celsus insists on the large impartiality of Nature, and repudiates the fantasy that the whole scheme is adjusted to the well-being and the salvation of man. Here the Christian, standing for his faith, may be said to carry on, though in the spirit of a new fanaticism, the anti-scientific humanism first set up by Sokrates; while the pagan, though touched by religious apriorism, and prone to lapse from logic to mysticism in his turn, approaches the scientific standpoint of the elder thinkers who had set religion aside.[104] Not for thirteen hundred years was his standpoint to be regained among men. His protest against the Christian cultivation of blind faith,[105] which Origen tries to meet on rationalistic lines, would in a later age be regarded as conveying no imputation. Even the simple defensive subtleties of Origen are too rationalistic for the succeeding generations of the orthodox. The least embittered of the Fathers, he is in his way the most reasonable; and in his unhesitating resort to the principle of allegory, wherever his documents are too hard for belief, we see the last traces of the spirit of reason as it had been in Plato, not yet paralysed by faith. Henceforth, till a new intellectual life is set up from without, Christian thought is more and more a mere disputation over the unintelligible, in terms of documents open always to opposing constructions.
Against such minds the strictest reason would be powerless; and it was fitting enough that Lucian, the last of the great freethinkers of the Hellenistic world, should merely turn on popular Christianity some of his serene satire[106]—more, perhaps, than has come down to us; though, on the other hand, his authorship of the De Morte Peregrini, which speaks of the “crucified sophist,” has been called in question.[107] The forcible-feeble dialogue Philopatris, falsely attributed to Lucian, and clearly belonging to the reign of Julian, is the last expression of general skepticism in the ancient literature. The writer, a bad imitator of Lucian, avows disbelief alike in the old Gods and in the new, and professes to respect, if any, the “Unknown God” of the Athenians; but he makes no great impression of intellectual sincerity. Apart from this, and the lost anti-Christian work[108] of Hierocles, Governor of Bithynia under Diocletian, the last direct literary opponents of ancient Christianity were Porphyry and Julian. As both were believers in many Gods, and opposed Christianity because it opposed these, neither can well rank on that score as a freethinker, even in the sense in which the speculative Gnostics were so. The bias of both, like that of Plutarch, seems to have been to the utmost latitude of religious belief; and, apart from personal provocations and the ordinary temper of religious conservatism, it was the exiguity of the Christian creed that repelled them. Porphyry’s treatise, indeed, was answered by four Fathers,[109] all of whose replies have disappeared, doubtless in fulfilment of the imperial edict for the destruction of Porphyry’s book—a dramatic testimony to the state of mental freedom under Theodosius II.[110] What is known of his argument is preserved in the incidental replies of Jerome, Augustine, Eusebius, and others.[111] The answer of Cyril to Julian has survived, probably in virtue of Julian’s status. His argumentations against the unworthy elements, the exclusiveness, and the absurdities of the Jewish and Christian faith are often reasonable enough, as doubtless were those of Porphyry;[112] but his own theosophic positions are hardly less vulnerable; and Porphyry’s were probably no better, to judge from his preserved works. Yet it is to be said that the habitual tone and temper of the two men compares favourably with that of the polemists on the other side. They had inherited something of the elder philosophic spirit, which is so far to seek in patristic literature, outside of Origen.
The latest expressions of rationalism among churchmen were to the full as angrily met by the champions of orthodoxy as the attacks of enemies; and, indeed, there was naturally something of bitterness in the resistance of the last few critical spirits in the Church to the fast-multiplying insanities of faith. Thus, at the end of the fourth century, the Italian monk Jovinian fought against the creed of celibacy and asceticism, and was duly denounced, vituperated, ecclesiastically condemned, and banished, penal laws being at the same time passed against those who adhered to him.[113] Contemporary with him was the Eastern Aerius, who advocated priestly equality as against episcopacy, and objected to prayers for the dead, to fasts, and to the too significant practice of slaying a lamb at the Easter festival.[114] In this case matters went the length of schism. With less of practical effect, in the next century, Vigilantius of Aquitaine made a more general resistance to a more manifold superstition, condemning and ridiculing the veneration of tombs and bones of martyrs, pilgrimages to shrines, the miracle stories therewith connected, and the practices of fasting, celibacy, and the monastic life. He too was promptly put down, largely by the efforts of his former friend Jerome, the most voluble and the most scurrilous pietist of his age, who had also denounced the doctrine of Jovinian.[115] For centuries no such appeal was heard in the western Church.
The spirit of reason, however, is well marked at the beginning of the fifth century in a pagan writer who belongs more truly to the history of freethought than either Julian or Porphyry. Macrobius, a Roman patrician of the days of Honorius, works out in his Saturnalia, with an amount of knowledge and intelligence which for the time is remarkable, the principle that all the Gods are but personifications of aspects or functions of the Sun. But such doctrine must have been confined, among pagans, to the cultured few; and the monotheism of the same writer’s treatise On the Dream of Scipio was probably not general even among the remaining pagans of the upper class.[116]
After Julian, open rationalism being already extinct, anti-Christian thought was simply tabooed; and though the leading historians for centuries were pagans, they only incidentally venture to betray the fact. It is told, indeed, that in the days of Valens and Valentinian an eminent physician named Posidonius, son of a great physician and brother of another, was wont to say, “that men do not grow fanatic by the agency of evil spirits, but merely by the superfluity of certain evil humours; and that there is no power in evil spirits to assail the human race”;[117] but though that opinion may be presumed to have been held by some other physicians, the special ascription of it to Posidonius is a proof that it was rarely avowed. With public lecturing forbidden, with the philosophic schools at Athens closed and plundered by imperial force,[118] with heresy ostracized, with pagan worship, including the strong rival cult of Mithraism, outwardly suppressed by the same power,[119] unbelief was naturally little heard of after the fifth century. About its beginning we find Chrysostom boasting[120] that the works of the anti-Christian writers had persuaded nobody, and had almost disappeared. As regarded open teaching, it was only too true, though the statement clashes with Chrysostom’s own complaint that Porphyry had led many away from the faith.[121] Proclus was still to come (410–485), with his eighteen Arguments against the Christians, proceeding on the principle, still cherished from the old science, that the world was eternal. But such teaching could not reach even the majority of the more educated; and the Jewish dogma of creation ex nihilo became sacrosanct truth for the darkening world. In the east Eusebius,[122] and in the west Lactantius,[123] expressed for the whole Church a boundless contempt of everything in the nature of scientific research or discussion; and it was in fact at an end for the Christian world for well-nigh a thousand years. For Lactantius, the doctrine of a round earth and an antipodes was mere nonsense; he discusses the thesis with the horse-laughter of a self-satisfied savage.[124] Under the feet of arrogant and blatant ignorance we see trampled the first form of the doctrine of gravitation, not to be recovered for an æon. Proclus himself cherished some of the grossest pagan superstitions; and the few Christians who had in them something of the spirit of reason, as Cosmas “Indicopleustes,” “the Indian navigator,” who belongs to the sixth century, were turned away from what light they had by their sacred books. Cosmas was a Nestorian, denying the divinity of Mary, and a rational critic as regards the orthodox fashion of applying Old Testament prophecies to Jesus.[125] But whereas pagan science had inferred that the earth is a sphere, his Bible taught him that it is an oblong plain; and the great aim of his Topographia Christiana, sive Christianorum opinio de mundo, was to prove this against those who still cultivated science.
Such pleadings were not necessary for the general Christian public, who knew nothing save what their priests taught them. In Chrysostom’s day this was already the case. There remained but a few rational heresies. One of the most notable was that of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the head of the school of Antioch and the teacher of Nestorius, who taught that many of the Old Testament prophecies commonly applied to Jesus had reference to pre-Christian events, and discriminated critically among the sacred books. That of Job he pronounced to be merely a poem derived from a pagan source, and the Song of Songs he held to be a mere epithalamium of no religious significance. In his opinion Solomon had the λόγος γνώσεως the love of knowledge, but not the λόγος σοφίας the love of wisdom.[126] No less remarkable was the heresy of Photinus, who taught that the Trinity was a matter not of persons, but of modes of deity.[127] Such thinking must be pronounced the high-water mark of rational criticism in the ancient Church; and its occurrence in an age of rapid decay is memorable enough. But in the nature of things it could meet with only the scantiest support; and the only critical heresy which bulked at all largely was that of the Unitarian Anomœans or Eunomians,[128] who condemned the worship of relics,[129] and made light of scriptural inspiration when texts, especially from the Old Testament, were quoted against them.[130] Naturally Chrysostom himself denounced them as unbelievers. Save for these manifestations, the spirit of sane criticism had gone from the Christian world, with science, with art, with philosophy, with culture. But the verdict of time is given in the persistent recoil of the modern spirit from the literature of the age of faith to that of the elder age of nascent reason; and the historical outcome of the state of things in which Chrysostom rejoiced was the re-establishment of universal idolatry and practical polytheism in the name of the creed he had preached. Every species of superstition known to paganism subsisted, slightly transformed. While the emperors savagely punished the pagan soothsayers, the Christians held by the same fundamental delusion; and against the devices of pagan magic, in the reality of which they unquestioningly believed, they professed triumphantly to practise their own sorceries of holy water, relics, prayer, and exorcism, no man daring to impugn the insanities of faith.[131] On the face of religious life, critical reason was extinct.