The one thing to be said of this type of mob mind is manifestly that it is transitional. The pendulum has swung through exactly half its arc and for the brief instant presents the fallacious appearance of quiescence. How transitory this quiet was on the part of the Alexandrian mob is evidenced by the history of Athanasius. That great statesman conciliated and consolidated public opinion in Egypt. Backed by this opinion he practically cancelled the power of the civil authorities of the country and negotiated as an equal with the emperors. For the first time in more than three centuries the will of the common people again became a power able to limit the military despotism which dominated the civilized world.
The re-birth of popular government in the Fourth century through the agency of Christian mobs is the most important preliminary step in the growth of the political power of the Catholic Church. A study of the mobs of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and other great cities shows beyond question that the political power of the Church had its origin in no alliance with imperial authority, but was independent of and generally antagonistic to that authority. The history of these Christian mobs lies outside the limits of our study but it is worth while in the case of the Alexandrian populace to give two or three brief extracts illustrating the final steps of the process which changed a fanatically pagan mob into an equally fanatical Christian one. What we have to consider is only the last stage of an evolution already more than half complete at the time of the Nicene Council. Under extreme provocation and certain of imperial complacency at their excesses, the pagan mob during the reign of Julian indulged in one last outburst against the exceedingly unpopular George of Cappadocia who had been forcibly intruded into the seat of Athanasius. To quote the Historian Socrates: "The Christians on discovering these abominations went forth eagerly to expose them to the view and execration of all and therefore carried the skulls throughout the city in a kind of triumphal procession for the inspection of the people. When the pagans of Alexandria beheld this, unable to bear the insulting character of the act, they became so exasperated that they assailed the Christians with whatever weapons chanced to come to hand, in their fury destroying numbers of them in a variety of ways and, as it generally happens in such a case, neither friends or relations were spared but friends, brothers, parents, and children imbued their hands in each others blood. The pagans having dragged George out of the church, fastened him to a camel and when they had torn him to pieces they burned him together with the camel."[22] In this account we see the last expiring efforts of the pagan mob movement. Any mob movement collapses rapidly when it turns in upon itself, and the evil results of its violence react immediately upon the members of the mob. By this time it is evident that the number of Christians in Alexandria was so large that any public persecution of them brought serious and unendurable consequences upon the populace generally. Then the movement ended.
But in the two centuries or more that the pagan movement lasted, a contrary Christian mob movement had been developing along the same general lines as the other. This movement, being later in its inception, came to a head correspondingly later and reached its crisis under the patriarch Cyril. Its violence was first directed against the Jews whom the Christians appear to have hated even more than they hated the pagans. The Jews were the weaker and less numerous faction opposed to the Christians and as the Pagans seem to have liked them too little to support them against the Christians, it is not surprising that the Christian mob, which had pretty well reduced the political authorities to impotence, should vent its rage against the Jews and their synagogues. "Cyril accompanied by an immense crowd of people, going to their synagogues, took them away from them and drove the Jews out of the city, permitting the multitude to plunder their goods. Thus the Jews who had inhabited the city from the time of Alexander were expelled from it."[23]
Sometime after the expulsion of the Jews, the Christian mob, now directing its spite against the rapidly disappearing paganism, perpetrated perhaps the most atrocious crime that stains the history of Alexandria—the murder of Hypatia. This beautiful, learned, and virtuous woman, 'the fairest flower of paganism' is one of the very few members of her sex who has attained high eminence in the realm philosophical speculation. She enjoyed the deserved esteem of all the intellectual leaders of her age—Christian as well as pagan—and to the latest ages her name will be mentioned with respect by all those speculative thinkers whose respect can confer honor. Socrates describes her murder as follows: "It was calumniously reported among the Christian populace that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home and dragged her from her carriage; they took her to the church called Ceasareum where they completely stripped her and then murdered her with oyster shells. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron and there burned them."[24]
Christian crowd sentiment when hardly yet at its full power was deprived of its original object of animosity by the collapse of paganism. Being under the psychological necessity of expressing itself, this mob feeling happened to take as shibboleths some current theological catchwords. The subsequent history of Alexandria and other great cities presents therefore the strange scene of rival sects disturbing public order and profoundly agitating vast throngs of people in a struggle over the most abstruse and recondite metaphysical concepts. For the sake of clear thinking it is necessary for us to remind ourselves that these concepts are merely weird garments fortuitously snatched up to cover the nakedness of a profound social and economic revolution.
The above sketch, imperfect as it is and full of lacunae due to the inadequacy of the primary source material, is yet perhaps complete enough to enable us to summarize the chief steps in the process of the socialization in its aspect of a crowd movement. We have seen that this crowd movement, like all others, had its origin in social unrest due to shattered private and community ideals. The customary forms of expression being inhibited or repressed, the balked disposition experienced an organic demand for new stimulation. This new stimulation was sought in various ways; aimless or practically aimless travelling or local wandering, local disorder and agitation, increase in crime—and insanity. Gradually this unrest focused itself and public attention became fixed on Christianity. By the process of circular interaction, the so-called 'vicious circle', public sentiment increased in intensity, the name 'Christian' became a shibboleth. When applied to an individual it let loose upon him the pent up emotion of the mob—an emotion or unreflective rage and anger. By the further process of idealization or sublimation, using the terms in their technical sense, the populace came to believe that Christianity was the great and superhuman (daemoniac) source of all evils; earthquakes, disease epidemics, famine etc. Seeking release for psychic tensions which were not understood and largely subconscious, they found it in a reversion to the oldest of the 'releasing instincts' that of hunting. The primary thing about the persecutions is that they were man hunts. The cruelty exhibited, while also serving as a tension release for mob feeling, is psychologically a secondary form of such release—though a very old form. The discharge of the accumulated public sentiment and of the severe social tensions produced group action of two kinds: (a) Direct action: tearing the victim in pieces, gathering wood to burn him, striking him with sticks, stones, etc. (b) Expressive action, taking the form of shouts, cries and ejaculations which became customary and traditional, 'Christianos ad leones.' The very methods of lynching became ceremonial and even ritualistic. The beasts were first choice, then burning and then other forms in descending scale. The narrow range of the mob mind is illustrated by the closeness with which it adhered to contemporary judicial methods of punishment. The most obvious method of killing, and one which had the advantage of enabling a great number of people to see what was going on, the method of hanging, which is in such common use by mobs of our day, does not seem to have been employed by the ancient crowds—at any rate its use was rare in the modern form, strangling. There are some cases of hanging naked women by one foot. Expressive action also took the form of wild and fantastic legends of cannibalism, child murder and such like. The crisis of this pagan mob movement came about the middle of the third century. The Decian persecution appears to have been 'popular' in the strict etymological sense of that word. The persecution of Diolection, though the most severe, seems to have had no great force of pagan public sentiment behind it. That sentiment was not hostile; it was neutral. The populace did nothing to hinder the measures of the government and it did nothing to help them. In another generation the pagan movement had spent itself. This analysis of the pagan mob sentiment against the Christians is applicable mutatis nominibus, to the Christians' mob movement against the pagans and to the movement of the 'orthodox' Christians against the 'heretics.' Perhaps we should say here, in defense of human nature, that these mob movements were not due to human depravity; they were, in strict literalness, diseases, epidemics of nervous disorder induced by pathological social conditions. Before any persecuting attitude became habitual to the pagan populace pagan common sense had exhausted argument, persuasion, expostulation and every other intellectual device. Only after reason and religion (in the pagan sense) had been employed in vain; only after long exasperation at a hopeless situation, when absolutely nothing else could be done, was popular violence aroused. Social conditions being what they were, traditional mental attitudes common to pagan and Christians alike required that something be done and mob action was the last desperate alternative to the admission of a new intellectual concept.
The function of Chiliasm in this crowd movement is plain from its history as previously sketched. It was a Christian shibboleth peculiarly valuable for securing group cohesion, and for arousing individual staying power in times of persecution. Of the numerous characteristics of successful 'sect shibboleths' three are perhaps especially note worthy: (a) Satisfaction of the demand for mystical experience. (b) Operation as an isolating device. (c) Revolt against the prevailing moral order. In the period of greatest need Chiliasm fulfilled these requirements very well. Many a Christian of little education was lifted out of himself to endure martyrdom by somewhat crass imaginations of participation in the reign of the saints in the rebuilt Jerusalem. Many a little band of sectaries maintained their group solidarity because of the belief that they were the elect people 'chosen of God' for future glory in the millennial kingdom. Many a faithful one who would otherwise have given up in despair, must have gained strength and courage from the thought of that happy era, soon to come, when the cruel persecutors of the church would be slaves suffered to live only that their servitude might augment the dignity and honor of the saints in the beatific kingdom.
The relation of the Chiliastic expectation to that strange insensibility to pain which was so remarkable a characteristic of the early martyrs cannot be stated with exactness. It was probably close—at least in numerous cases. We have what seems to be entirely trustworthy evidence that not only strong men but even delicate and sensitive women exhibited the power of inhibiting the normal reactions to the most excruciating torments. This almost incredible power of inhibition can only be explained as the result of the building up of a pathologically intense, ecstatic, mental state. This ecstatic mental state would appear to have been acquired by a series of psychic changes and organic, neuronic adjustments requiring, ordinarily, a fairly considerable amount of time. This peculiar psychological condition had not merely to be built up. It must have attained an extraordinary degree of habituation in order to render its subjects impervious to such extreme sensory excitations. The requisite degree of imperviousness can hardly have been acquired without such permeation of consciousness by imagination as constituted a complete subjective universe. Many of the martyrs would seem to have lived, more or less habitually, in a mental world of their own which shut them off from susceptibility to external stimuli. This condition is frequently found in artists and thinkers, and with the accompanying insensibility to pain, is a common phenomenon in the 'trance' state as well as in some forms of insanity.[25]
It would go beyond the evidence to claim that Chiliastic concepts functioned exclusively, or even predominantly, in the production of the 'martyr psychosis,' but the evidence does point to the conclusion that apocalyptic expectations held a more prominent place in the consciousness of the martyrs than in that of the generality of Christians. It is certain that Chiliasm became especially manifest in times of persecution but Chiliasm must have operated even in ordinary times to produce the phenomena which persecution brought into prominence. Even today, in the entire absence of persecution, Chiliastic excitement among certain groups of secretaries produces types of religious psychosis closely similar to those exhibited by the martyrs.[26]
On the whole the conclusion appears warranted that the increasing power and progressive socialization of the church, which made persecution at first hopeless and at last impossible, rendered Chiliasm, as a crowd shibboleth, gradually useless and finally pernicious to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Had further persecutions been possible Chiliasm would no doubt have been retained longer, but its usefulness was fatally impaired when the majority of people nominally embraced Christianity. It was of little or no value in those struggles with heretical Christian sects which engaged the activities of orthodox mobs from the time of Constantine onwards. Other shibboleths such as 'The Church' and 'Catholicism' were more effective in this contest. Similarly for the larger purpose of ecclesiastical polity, agencies like monasticism and missionary enterprise were employed, which conserved the shibboleth values of Chiliasm and were free from its defects as an instrument of hierarchical ambition. The aims of the rulers of the Church became increasingly social and political and with such aims Chiliasm was fundamentally incompatible.