Tatian
There was one Christian of some note in the second century, whose attitude toward everything Greek is original and interesting. Tatian was "born in the land of the Assyrians."[[8]] He travelled widely in the Græco-Roman world,[[9]] and studied rhetoric like a Greek; he gave attention to the great collections of Greek art in Rome—monuments of shame, he called them. He was admitted to the mysteries, but he became shocked at the cruelty and licentiousness tolerated and encouraged by paganism. While in this mind, seeking for the truth, "it befel that I lit upon some barbarian writings, older than the dogmata of the Greeks, divine in their contrast with Greek error; and it befel too that I was convinced by them, because, their style was simple, because there was an absence of artifice in the speakers, because the structure of the whole was intelligible, and also because of the fore-knowledge of future events, the excellence of the precepts and the subordination of the whole universe to One Ruler (tò tôn hólôn monarchikón). My soul was taught of God, and I understood that while Greek literature (tà mèn) leads to condemnation, this ends our slavery in the world and rescues us from rulers manifold and ten thousand tyrants."[[10]] He now repudiated the Greeks and all their works, the grammarians who "set the letters of the alphabet to quarrel among themselves,"[[11]] the philosophers with their long hair and long nails and vanity,[[12]] the actors, poets and legislators; and "saying good-bye to Roman pride and Attic pedantry (psychrología) I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy."[[13]] He made the first harmony of the Gospels—an early witness to the power of their sheer simplicity in a world of literary affectations.
Another famous Syrian of the century was Ignatius of Antioch, whose story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste and excitement, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena—his guards in the meantime being as fierce as any leopards. The burden of them all is that Jesus Christ truly suffered on the cross. Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers amid the deluded Jews.—No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he truly suffered, he truly rose, ate and drank, and was no dæmon without a body (daimónion asómaton)—none of it is seeming, it is all truly, truly, truly.[[14]] He has been called hysterical, and his position might make any nervous man hysterical—death before him, his Lord's reality denied, and only time for one word—Truly. Before we pass him by, let us take a quieter saying of his to illustrate the deepest thought of himself and his age—"He that hath the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence also."[[15]]
The Roman came to the Church as he came to a new province. He gravely surveyed the situation, considered the existing arrangements, accepted them, drew up as it were a lex provinciæ to secure their proper administration, and thereafter interpreted it in accordance with the usual principles of Roman law, and, like the procurator in Achæa, left the Greeks to discuss any abstract propositions they pleased. Tertullian and Cyprian were lawyers, and gave Latin Christendom the language, in which in later days the relations of man with his Divine Sovereign were worked out by the great Latin Fathers.
Freedom from dæmons
The confession of Tatian, above cited, emphasizes as one of the great features of the barbarian literature—its "monarchic" teaching—"it sets man free from ten thousand tyrants"—and this may be our starting-point in considering the new experience. To be rid of the whole dæmon-world, to have left the dæmons behind and their "hatred of men,"[[16]] their astrology,[[17]] their immorality and cruelty, their sacrifices, and the terror of "possession" and theolepsy and enchantment,[[18]] was happiness in itself. "We are above fate," said Tatian, "and, instead of dæmons that deceive, we have learnt one master who deceiveth not."[[19]] "Christ," wrote an unknown Christian of a beautiful spirit—"Christ wished to save the perishing, and such mercy has he shown us that we the living do not serve dead gods, but through him we know the Father of truth."[[20]] "Orpheus sang to beguile men, but my Singer has come to end the tyranny of dæmons," said Clement.[[21]] The perils of "meats offered to idols" impressed some, who feared that by eating of them they would come under dæmoniac influence. With what relief they must have read Paul's free speech on the subject—"the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof"—"for us there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him."[[22]] "Even the very name of Jesus is terrible to the dæmons"[[23]]—the "name that is above every name." In no other name was there salvation from dæmons, for philosophy had made terms with them.
No one can read the Christian Apologists without remarking the stress which they lay upon the knowledge of God, which the new faith made the free and glad possession of the humblest. "They say of us that we babble nonsense among females, half-grown people, girls and old people. No! all our women are chaste and at their distaffs our maidens sing of things divine," said Tatian, and rejoined with observations on famous Greek women, Lais, Sappho and others. Justin, always kindlier, speaks of Socrates who urged men to seek God, yet owned that "it would be a hard task to find the father and maker of this All, and when one had found him, it would not be safe to declare him to all,"[[24]] but, he goes on, "our Christ did this by his power. No man ever believed Socrates so much as to die for his teaching. But Christ, who was known to Socrates in part, (for he was and is the Word that is in everything...)—on Christ, I say, not only philosophers and scholars (philólogoi) believed, but artisans, men quite without learning (idiôtai), and despised glory and fear and death." "There is not a Christian workman but finds out God and manifests him," said Tertullian.[[25]] This knowledge of God was not merely a desirable thing in theory, for it is clear that it was very earnestly sought. To Justin's quest for God, allusion has been made—"I hoped I should have the vision of God at once (katóphesthai)" he says. "Who among men had any knowledge of what God was, before he came?"[[26]] "This," wrote the fourth evangelist, "is eternal life—that they may know thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."
The holy spirit
But it is one thing to be a monotheist, and another to be a child of "Abba Father," and this is one of the notes of the early Christian. It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Christian happiness amid the strain and doubt of the early Empire. Zeno and Isis each had something to say, but who had such a message of forgiveness and reconciliation and of the love of God? "God is within you," said Seneca; but he knew nothing of such an experience as the Christian summed up as the "grace of God," "grace sufficient" and "grace abounding." It is hard to think of these familiar phrases being new and strange—the coining of Paul to express what no man had said before—and this at the moment when Seneca was writing his "moral letters" to Lucilius. Verbal coincidences may be found between Paul and Seneca, but they are essentially verbal. The Stoic Spermaticos Logos was a cold and uninspiring dogma compared with "Abba Father" and the Spirit of Jesus—it was not the same thing at all. The one doctrine made man self-sufficient—in the other, "our sufficiency (hikanótes) is of God." It was the law of nature, contrasted with the father of the prodigal son—"our kind and tender-hearted father" as Clement of Rome calls him [[27]]—the personal God, whose "problem is ever to save the flock of men; that is why the good God has sent the good shepherd."[[28]]
The more lettered of Christian writers like to quote Plato's saying that man was born to be at home with God (oikeíôs échein pròs theòn) and that he was "a heavenly plant." Falsehood, they say, and error obscured all this, but now "that ancient natural fellowship with heaven" has "leapt forth from the darkness and beams upon us."[[29]] "God," says Clement, "out of his great love for men, cleaves to man, and as when a little bird has fallen out of the nest, the mother-bird hovers over it, and if perchance some creeping beast open its mouth upon the little thing,