The Hellenico-Roman paganism offers a fruitless resistance. The persecutions on the part of the state only hasten the spread of Christianity. What the state can not do, perhaps the Hellenic culture and philosophy may do. These, once mutually hostile, are reconciled in the face of common danger. The dying lamp of antiquity flares and brightens when pure hearts and profound minds, otherwise despising the myths as superstition, now grasp them as symbols of higher truths. Philosophy goes forth, in the form of Neoplatonism.
But Neoplatonism has itself apostatized from the rational and unitarian. Plotinus and Ammonius Saccas try in vain to restore it. It only unwittingly helps its adversary, especially when, to gain the masses, it consents to compete with him in miracles. Jamblichus and others practice secret arts in order to outrival the Christian magi, and they glorify Pythagoras and Appollonius of Tyana as fit to rank with Jesus of Nazareth in miraculous gifts. By this they only contribute to the spread of magic and the principles of dualism. The current of Oriental notions proceeds all the more rapidly on its course of triumph.
Christian dualism already feels itself strong enough to battle not only against its declared enemies, but also those Occidental elements of culture which in its beginnings it had received into its bosom and which had procured its entrance among the more intelligent classes. It feels instinctively that even the school of thought which has sprung up within the Church is far too unitarian and rationalistic to be tolerated in the long run. Such men as Clemens of Alexandria and Origen, who are struck by what is external and imperishable in Christianity, and know how to separate this from its dualistic form, fight a tragical battle for the union of belief and thought. Admitting that Christ is all in all, the immediate power and wisdom of God, they nevertheless wish to save the Hellenic philosophy from the destruction which a fanaticism, revelling in the certainty and all-sufficiency of revelation, directs against every expression of an occidental culture, whether in national life, or art, or science. They point out that philosophy, if it can do nothing else that is good, can furnish rational weapons against those who assail faith, and that it can and ought to be the “real wall of defence about the vineyard.” Their argument is without effect. Philosophy is of the devil: yea, everything true and good in life and doctrine which heathendom has possessed, is declared by one of the fathers to be the imposture of Satan (ingenia diaboli quædam de divinis affectandis); and faith is so far independent of thought that it is better to say “I believe because it is improbable, absurd, impossible.”[10] In vain the dying Clemens exclaims: “Even if philosophy were of the devil, Satan could deceive men only in the garb of an angel of light: he must allure men by the appearance of truth, by the intermixture of truth and falsehood; we ought therefore to seek and recognize the truth from whatever source it come.... And even this gift to the pagans can have been theirs only by the will of God, and must consequently be included in the divine plan of educating humanity.... If sin and disorder are attributable to the devil, how absurd to make him the author and giver of so good a thing as philosophy!... God gave the Law to the Jews, and philosophy to the Gentiles, only to prepare for the coming of Christ.” Such are the words that ring out the last dying echo of Hellenic culture and humanity! It is not a mere accident that with philosophy Clemens and Origen also sought to save the unitarian principles in so far as to reject the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell, and maintain that the devil will finally become good, and God be all in all. But such a view could not command attention at a time when Christianity, only because it was not sharply and consistently dualistic, felt itself endangered by that wholly consistent and thorough-going dualism which under the name of Manicheism once more advanced against Europe from the Persian border. Although Manicheism seemed to incur defeat, nevertheless one of its former adherents, Augustine, infused its spirit into the Church. During the century which followed him the Germanic migration destroyed, along with the last schools, the last vestiges of Græco-Romaic culture. The Barbarians were persuaded to receive baptism, often by means of pomp and deceit; their divinities, as formerly the denizens of Olympus, were degraded to evil demons. Every thing antecedent to their union with the Church or disconnected with it,—the old experiences and traditions of these converted nations,—all was condemned and referred to the world of evil. The dominion of Oriental dualism in Europe was absolutely established, and the long night of the Dark Ages had set in. Six centuries separate Proclus, the last Neoplatonican of any note, and Augustine the last of the Fathers educated in philosophy, from Anselm the founder of scholasticism! Between them lies an expanse in which Gregory the Great and Scotus Erigena are almost the only stars, and these by no means of the first magnitude. “There are deserts in time, as well as space,” says Bacon.
When again a feeble attempt at scientific activity was possible, the monkish scholar was happy enough to possess a few maculated leaves of Aristotle, obtained, but not directly, from the Arabs. Upon these leaves he read with amazement and admiration the method for a logical investigation. It was, for the rest, Hermes Trismegistus, Dionysius Areopagita (the translation of Scotus Erigena), and other such mystical works from unknown hands, with here and there touches of Neoplatonism which had been inserted by the dreamy scholiast when in need of material for rounding out the cosmology, the principles of which he had found in the dogmas of the Church.
As a matter of course the Dark Ages could not perceive, still less admit, the intimate relation existing between its cosmic views and those of Zoroaster; but still a dim suspicion of it can be detected. The learned men of the Middle Ages ascribed to Zoroaster the founding of the magical sciences. Sprenger (author of Malleus Malificarum, of which fatal work hereafter), Remigius, Jean Bodin, Delrio, and several other jurists and theologians, who have acquired a sad notoriety as judges of witch-trials, in their writings ascribe the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster.
The dualistic notion was not modified after entering Christianity, but intensified. The religion of Zoroaster, which presupposes a good first principle,[11] allows the evil which has in time arisen, in the course of time to disappear; and it ends with the doctrine which shines out faintly even in the New Testament, of the final “restoration of all things” (ἀποκατάστασις πάντων), and in consequence reduces evil to something merely phenomenal. In the doctrines of the Church, however, as they were established through the influence of Augustine, the Manicheian, evil, though arisen in time, is made eternal. This difference is of great practical significance and explains why dualism did not bear the same terrible fruits in its home in the Orient as in the Occident. The awful separation and contrast with which the divina comedia of the Middle Ages ends,—the wails and curses that arise from hell to intensify the bliss of the redeemed,—form a conception so revolting that it could not be incorporated with thought and feeling without rendering them savage. Compassion, benevolence, love,—those qualities through which man feels a kinship with the divine, lose their significance and are despoiled of their eternal seal, when they are found no longer in his Maker except as limited or rather suspended by the action of another quality which the pious man will force himself to call justice, but which an irrepressible voice from the innermost recesses of his soul calls cruelty. To this must be added a further important consideration. The servant of Ormuzd is no more the property of the devil than the earth he treads upon. To be sure he is surrounded on every side by the treachery of Ahriman and all the demons, but this only because he is called and already endowed with power to be the champion of the Good upon the earth. It is as such that he is placed in the tumult of the battle. The power for good once imparted to him, and constantly renewed through prayer, is withal also his own; he may use it without losing himself in the perplexing question where liberty ceases and grace begins. Every one adhering to the doctrine of light stands on his own feet. This is true of every servant of Ormuzd; Zoroaster has made in this respect no distinction between priest and layman. Even belief upon authority, in itself an encroachment upon free personality, preserves for it in this form of religion a free and inviolable arena.
In the Church of the Middle Ages the case is different, and it cannot be presented better than in the following words of the Neo-Lutheran Vilmar, when he would preserve absolutely to the clergy “the power to keep the congregation together by the word, the sacraments and ecclesiastical authority, the power to cleave the head of sin with a single word, the power to descend into a soul in which the enemy has spread the gloom of insanity and force the defiant knees of the maniac to bend and his frenzied fists to fold in prayer, yea, the power [here we have the climax, which is rather tame after the foregoing] to descend into a soul in which the ancient enemy has established his abode, and there fight the insolent giant from the realms of darkness face to face and eye to eye. All this”—continues Vilmar, himself not unlike a frantic conjurer wishing to summon the ghost of the Dark Ages from its grave—“all this is not in the power of the congregation nor of the ministry, who are not endowed with the requisite authority, commission, mandate and power. The congregation (i. e., the laymen) is not able to look into the furious eyes of the devil; for what is prophesied of the last days, that even the elect, were it possible, should be seduced, applies with greater force to the especial apparition of Satan in this world: before it the congregation is scattered like flakes of snow, not seduced but terrified to death. Only we (the clergy) are unterrified and fearless; for he who has rejected the prince of this world has placed us before the awful serpent-eye of the arch-fiend, before his blasphemous and scornful mouth, before his infernally distorted face.”[12] These words from the pen of a fanatical dualist of our own time well represent, as indicated above, the commonly received views of the Middle Ages; and it is not therefore to be wondered at that the mediæval generations, surrendering personality, threw themselves precipitately, in order to be saved, into the arms of the magical institution of deliverance. The phenomena which are delineated in the following pages will not seem so arbitrary and strange after this introductory glance at the middle-age philosophy, as they might otherwise at first sight. Even they are a product of an inner necessity. Were it possible—and deplorable attempts are not wanting—to revive in the thoughts, feelings and imagination of humanity the dogmas of mediæval times, we should then witness a partial re-enactment of their terrible scenes. To depict them has not only a purely historic interest, but a cautionary and practical as well.