The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

Wheeling o'er his head, with screams the dam
Bewails her darling brood;

so God the Father seeks his image, and heals the fall, and chases away the beast, and picks up the little one again."[[30]]

God has "anointed and sealed" his child and given him a pledge of the new relation—the holy spirit. This is distinctly said by St Paul,[[31]] and the variety of the phenomena, to which he refers, is a little curious. Several things are covered by the phrase, and are classed as manifestations with a common origin. There are many allusions to "speaking with tongues"; Paul, however, clearly shows that we are not to understand a miraculous gift in using actual languages, reduced to grammar and spoken by men, as the author of the Acts suggests with a possible reminiscence of a Jewish legend of the law-giving from Sinai. The "glossolaly" was inarticulate and unintelligible; it was a feature of Greek "mantic," an accompaniment of over-strained emotion, and even to be produced by material agencies, as Plutarch lets us see. Paul himself is emphatic upon its real irrelevance to the Christian's main concern, and he deprecates the attention paid to it. Other "spiritual" manifestations were visions and prophecies. With these Dr William James has dealt in his Varieties of Religious Experience, showing that in them, as in "conversion," there is nothing distinctively Christian. The content of the vision and the outcome of the conversion are the determining factors. Where men believe that an ordinary human being can be temporarily transformed by the presence within him of a spirit, the very belief produces its own evidence. If the tenet of the holy spirit rested on nothing else, it would have filled a smaller place in Christian thought.

Jesus the saviour

But when Paul speaks of the holy spirit whereby the Christians are sealed, calling it now the spirit of God and now the spirit of Jesus, he is referring to a profounder experience. Explain conversion as we may, the word represents a real thing. Men were changed, and were conscious of it. Old desires passed away and a new life began, in which passion took a new direction, finding its centre of warmth and light, not in morality, not in religion, but in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. "To me to live is Christ," cried Paul, giving words to the experience of countless others. Life had a new centre; and duty, pain and death were turned to gladness. The early Christian was conscious of a new spirit within him. It was by this spirit that they could cry "Abba, Father"; it was the spirit that guided them into all truth; it was the spirit that united them to God,[[32]] that set them free from the law of sin and death, that meant life and peace and joy and holiness. Paul trusted everything to what we might call the Christian instinct and what he called the holy spirit, and he was justified. No force in the world has done so much as this nameless thing that has controlled and guided and illumined—whatever we call it. Any one who has breathed the quiet air of a gathering of men and women consciously surrendered to the influence of Jesus Christ, with all its sobering effect, its consecration, its power and gladness, will know what Paul and his friends meant. It is hardly to be known otherwise. In our documents the spirit is closely associated with the gathering of the community in prayer.

Freedom from dæmons, forgiveness and reconciliation with God, gladness and moral strength and peace in the holy spirit—of such things the early Christians speak, and they associate them all invariably with one name, the living centre of all. "Jesus the beloved" is a phrase that lights up one of the dullest of early Christian pages.[[33]] "No! you do not so much as listen to anyone, if he speaks of anything but Jesus Christ in truth," says Ignatius.[[34]] "What can we give him in return? He gave us light ... he saved us when we were perishing ... We were lame in understanding, and worshipped stone and wood, the works of men. Our whole life was nothing but death.... He pitied us, he had compassion, he saved us, for he saw we had no hope of salvation except from him; he called us when we were not, and from not being he willed us to be."[[35]] "The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation, has brought to all the world the grace of repentance."[[36]] "Ye see what is the pattern that has been given us; what should we do who by him have come under the yoke of his grace?"[[37]] "Let us be earnest to be imitators of the Lord."[[38]] These are a few words from Christians whose writings are not in the canon. Jesus is pre-eminently and always the Saviour; the author of the new life; the revealer of God; the bringer of immortality. It made an immense impression upon the ancient world to see the transformation of those whom it despised,—women, artisans, slaves and even slave-girls. Socrates with the hemlock cup and the brave Thrasea were figures that men loved and honoured. But here were all sorts of common people doing the same thing as Socrates and Thrasea, cheerfully facing torture and death "for the name's sake"—and it was a name of contempt, too. "Christ's people"—Christianoi—was a bantering improvisation by the people of Antioch, who were notorious in antiquity for impudent wit:[[39]] it was a happy shot and touched the very centre of the target. "The name" and "his name," are constantly recurring phrases. But it was not only that men would die for the name—men will die for anything that touches their imagination or their sympathy—but they lived for it and showed themselves to be indeed a "new creation." "Our Jesus"[[40]] was the author of a new life, and a very different one from that of Hellenistic cities. That Christianity retained its own character in the face of the most desperate efforts of its friends to turn it into a philosophy congenial to the philosophies of the day, was the result of the strong hold it had taken upon innumerable simple people, who had found in it the power of God in the transformation of their own characters and instincts, and who clung to Jesus Christ—to the great objective facts of his incarnation and his death upon the cross—as the firm foundations laid in the rock against which the floods of theory might beat in vain. For now we have to consider another side of early Christian activity—the explanation of the new experience.

The early Christian community found "the unexamined life" as impossible as Plato had, and they framed all sorts of theories to account for the change in themselves. Of most immediate interest are the accounts which they give of the holy spirit and of Jesus. Here we must remember that in all definition we try to express the less known through the more known, and that the early Christians necessarily used the best language available to them, and tried to communicate a new series of experiences by means of the terms and preconceptions of the thinking world of their day—terms and preconceptions long since obsolete.

Much in the early centuries of our era is unintelligible until we form some notion of the current belief in spiritual beings, evidence of which is found in abundance in the literature of the day, pagan and Christian. A growing consensus among philosophers made God more and more remote, and emphasized the necessity for intermediaries. We have seen how Plutarch pronounced for the delegation of rule over the universe and its functions to ministering spirits. The Jews had a parallel belief in angels, and had come to think of God's spirit and God's intelligence as somehow detachable from his being. In abstract thought this may be possible just as we think of an angle without reference to matter. The great weakness in the speculation of the early Empire was this habit of supposing that men can be as certain of their deductions as of their premisses; and God's Logos, being conceivable, passed into common religious thought as a separate and proven existence.

The holy spirit

At the same time there was abundant evidence of devil-possession as there is in China to-day. Modern medicine distinguishes four classes of cases which the ancients (and their modern followers) group under this one head:—Insanity, Epilepsy, Hysteria major and the mystical state. To men who had no knowledge of modern medicine and its distinctions, the evidence of the "possessed" was enough, and it was apt to be quite clear and emphatic as it is in such cases to-day. The man said he "had a devil"—or even a "legion of devils." The priestess at the oracle said that a god was within her (éntheos). In both cases the ocular evidence was enough to convince the onlookers of the truth of the explanation, for the persons concerned were clearly changed and were not themselves.[[41]] Plato played with the idea that poetry even might be, as poets said, a matter of inspiration. The poet could not be merely himself when he wrote or sang words of such transforming power. The Jews gave a similar account of prophecy—the Spirit of the Lord descended upon men, as we read in the Old Testament. The Spirit, says Athenagoras to the Greeks, used the Hebrew prophets, as a flute-player does a flute, while they were in ecstasy (kat ékstasin)[[42]]—the holy spirit, he adds, is an effluence (apórroia) of God.[[43]]