HOMILIES AGAINST PAGANS AND JEWS—CONDITION OF THE JEWS IN ANTIOCH—JUDAISING CHRISTIANS—HOMILIES ON CHRISTMAS DAY AND NEW YEAR’S DAY—CENSURE OF PAGAN SUPERSTITIONS. A.D. 386, 387.
In dealing with the Arians, the contest mainly turned, as has been pointed out in the previous chapter, on the interpretation of Scripture; but in doing battle with Pagans and Jews, with the former especially, Chrysostom had of course to take up a different attitude. The method which he adopts towards the Jew is to demonstrate the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and to insist on the consequent abrogation of the Jewish dispensation. The ground on which he mainly relies against the Pagan is the miraculous establishment and progress of Christianity in the face of unprecedented opposition, as an evidence of its divine origin.
The treatise addressed to Jews and Gentiles combined exhibits a powerful application of both these methods.[234] “He would first of all enter the lists against the Pagan. And here caution was requisite. He would not say, when the Pagan asked how the divinity of Christ was to be proved, that Christ created the world, raised the dead, healed the sick, expelled demons, promised a resurrection and a heavenly kingdom, because these were the very questions upon which they joined issue. But he would start from a ground which even the Pagan would accept: no one would venture to deny that the Christian religion was founded by Jesus Christ, and from this simple fact he would undertake to prove that Christ could be no less than God. No mere man could, in so short a time, with such feeble instruments, and in the face of such opposition arising from inveterate custom and forms of faith, have subdued so many and such various races of mankind.[235] How contrary to the common course of events, that He who was despised, weak, and put to an ignominious death, should now be honoured and adored in all regions of the earth! Emperors who have made laws, and altered the constitution of states, who have ruled nations by their nod, in whose hands was the power of life and death, pass away; their images are in time destroyed, their actions forgotten, their adherents despised, their very names buried in oblivion:—present grandeur is succeeded by nothingness. In the case of Jesus Christ all is reversed. During his lifetime, all seemed failure and degradation, but a career of glory and triumph succeeded his death.[236] Before his death Judas betrayed him, St. Peter denied him; after his death, St. Peter and the rest of the Apostles traversed the world to bear witness to his truth, and thousands of people have died rather than utter what the chief of the Apostles once uttered from fear of a maid-servant’s taunts. ‘His rest shall be glorious:’—this was true, not only of the Master, but also of his disciples. In that most royal city of Rome, monarchs, prefects, generals, flocked to the sepulchres of the fisherman and the tent-maker; and in Constantinople they who wore the diadem were content to lay their bones in the porch of the Apostles’ Church, and to become as it were the door-keepers of humble fishermen.[237] Christ had made the most ignominious death, and the instrument of it, glorious. It was written, ‘Cursed is he that hangeth on a tree,’ yet the cross had become the object of desire and love; it was more honourable than the whole world, for the imperial crown itself was not such an ornament to the head: princes and subjects, men and women, bond and free, all delighted to wear it imprinted on the brow. It was conspicuous on the Holy Table, and in the ceremony of ordaining priests; in houses, in market-places, by the wayside, and on mountain sides, on couches and on garments, on ships, on drinking vessels, in mural decorations, the cross was depicted. Whence all this extraordinary honour to a piece of wood, unless the power of him who died upon it was divine?”[238]
Christ had declared that the gates of hell should not prevail against his Rock-founded Church. How far had this prediction been verified? In a short space of time Christianity had abolished ancestral customs, plucked up deeply-rooted habits, overturned altars and temples, caused unclean rites and ceremonials to vanish away. Christian altars had been erected in Italy, in Persia, in Scythia, in Africa. “What say I? even the British Isles, which lie outside the boundaries of our world and our sea, in the midst of the ocean itself, have experienced the power of the Word, for even there churches and altars have been set up.” Thus the world had been, so to say, cleared of thorns, and purified to receive the seed of godliness. What a proof of superhuman power! The progress of the Church had been encountered by customs which were not only venerated but pleasant; yet these traditions, handed down through long lines of ancestors, were abandoned for a religion far more severe and laborious, a religion which substituted fasting for enjoyment, poverty for money-getting, temperance for lasciviousness, meekness for wrath, benevolence for ill-will. Men who had long been enervated by luxury, and accustomed to the broad way, had been converted into the narrow, rugged path, not by tens or twenties, but by multitudes under the whole heaven. By whose agency had these mighty results been wrought? By a few unlearned obscure men, without illustrious ancestors, without money, without eloquence.[239] And all this in the teeth of opposition of the most varied kind. For where the new doctrine penetrated, it excited divisions and strife; children were set at variance with parents, brother with brother, husband with wife, master with servant. Yet, in spite of persecution and disruption of social ties, the new faith grew and flourished. How could such unprecedented marvels have come to pass but through the divine power, and in obedience to that Word of God which is creative of actual results? Just as, when He said “Let the earth bring forth grass,” the wilderness became a garden, so when the expression of His purpose had gone forth, “I will build my Church,” straightway the process began, and though tyrants and people, sophists and orators, custom and religion, had been arrayed against it, yet the Word, going forth like fire, consumed the thorns, and scattered the good seed over the purified soil.[240]
In attempting to convince the Jews of the divinity of Jesus Christ by proving the exact fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in his person and work, Chrysostom displays that intimate familiarity with every part of Scripture which is his eminent characteristic.
The passages are, on the whole, most judiciously selected; some corresponding passage from the New Testament being placed, if possible, against each, with a careful attention even to verbal parallelism. For instance, against the passage in Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,” he places the verse from St. John i. 32, “I beheld the Spirit descending like a dove, and it abode upon him.”[241] He refers each event in Christ’s life, his Incarnation, his rejection by the Jews, his betrayal, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, the descent of the Holy Ghost, and the beginning of the Apostolic labours to some corresponding prediction.[242] He sometimes, however, falls into the error, less common in him than in other patristic interpreters, of seeing direct references to the Messiah and the Messianic kingdom, to the almost total exclusion of any other meaning. For instance, such passages as “Their sound is gone out into all lands,” “That thou mayest make princes in all lands,” are cited as if exclusively predictive of the propagation of Christianity. In such words as “The virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company,” he sees a distinct foreshadowing of the honour to be paid to virginity under Christianity.[243] In other passages, again, he is misled by ignorance of the Hebrew, and a too literal adherence to the Septuagint translation. In the passage, “I will make thy officers peace,” thine “exactors” being rendered in the Septuagint bishops or overseers, he extracts from this word a direct reference to the Christian priesthood.[244] “He shall descend like rain into a fleece of wool” is interpreted as significant of the extreme secrecy of Christ’s birth, and the noiseless gentleness with which his kingdom was founded.[245] Whereas, the strict translation being “like rain upon new-mown grass,” it is rather illustrative of the fruitful results of Christ’s advent.[246]
Such occasional defects, however, will not prevent us from according the praise due to the great skill with which, on the whole, he has worked out this method of argument, and the noble vindication of Christianity in this treatise has seldom if ever been surpassed by Chrysostom elsewhere. The several parts of his argument are unfolded in orderly procession, and expressed with an eloquence at once luminous and earnest, and which, though at times copious and ornate, does not degenerate into the mere redundancy, still less into the affectations and flowery artifices, of rhetoric; he is always real and earnest, he is sometimes sublime.
Closely connected with this treatise in subject, and not far distant in time of composition, are the Homilies directed against Jews and Judaising Christians. The Jews, ever since the time of Antiochus the Great, were a considerable body in Antioch, and over the Christian population exerted a seriously pernicious influence. Their position, indeed, in the Empire at large had been increasingly favourable from the reign of Hadrian to Constantine. Though they were not permitted to approach Jerusalem, yet the worship in their synagogues was freely tolerated; they were permitted to circumcise their own children though not the children of proselytes; and their religious organisation in the Empire was held together under the sway of the Patriarch of Tiberias.[247] After the recognition of Christianity by the Empire, the Jews, as a natural consequence, were less favourably treated. The statutes of Constantine and Constantius were severe. Those Jews who attempted the life of a Christian were to be burned. No Christians were to become Jews, under pain of punishment. Jews were forbidden to marry Christian women or to possess Christian slaves. The national character of the Jew seems to have deteriorated, as the race became more widely dispersed, and as their wealth and importance increased. They were no longer indeed so morosely and sullenly proud as when they gloried in the possession of a holy city and distinct religious ordinances, and a geographical position which isolated them from the rest of mankind, but neither were their faith or morals so pure. Self-indulgence, sensualism, and low cunning corrupted their life; a superstitious and material cast of thought depraved their faith. Their habits harmonised too well with that propensity to luxury and licentiousness which was the besetting vice of the people of Antioch; their materialism worked hand in hand with the prevailing Arianism, if, indeed, Arianism may not be regarded as in some sort its product. Certainly, whenever popular insurrections caused by religious dissensions occurred either in Antioch or in Alexandria, the Jews ranged themselves on the Arian side, as if the spirit and character of the Arian sect were the most congenial to their own.[248]
Allowing for some exaggerations in the preacher, carried away by the impulse of the moment, the invectives of Chrysostom must be permitted to prove that the Jewish residents in Antioch were of a low and vicious order. They seem to have been regarded by the common people with a mixture of dislike and awe; the age was superstitious, and the Jews availed themselves of superstitious terrors to make a livelihood, especially through a kind of quackery in medicine. Their quarters are denounced by Chrysostom as dens of robbers and habitations of demons.[249] A whole day would not suffice to tell the tale of their extortions, their thefts, their deceptions, their base methods of traffic, such as the sale of amulets and charms.[250] Their priests were no better than counterfeits, because they had not gone through all the elaborate rites of consecration. They had no sacred ephod, no Urim and Thummim, no altar, no sacrifice, no prophecy.
The Festival of Trumpets was a scene of great debauchery, more iniquitous than the proceedings in the theatre. Any catechumen who was detected attending that festival was to be excluded from the porch of the church; any communicant so detected was to be denied access to the Holy Table. The booths erected at the Feast of Tabernacles were like taverns, crowded with flute-players and ill-conditioned women. The synagogues were frequented by the most abandoned characters of both sexes, and dancers, actors, and charioteers were largely drawn from the Jewish population. In spite of this, many Christians were seduced to attend the Jewish festivals and fasts, and even to swear Jewish oaths in the synagogues, under the superstitious impression that such were more solemn and binding than any Christian forms. He had himself, only three days ago, rescued a woman being dragged off, against her will, to take an oath of this kind, by a man who professed himself a Christian. On stopping to rebuke him in the sternest language, Chrysostom was shocked to learn that the practice was extremely common among Christians. He passionately exhorts the faithful to reclaim their deluded brethren from these pernicious ways:—If twelve Apostles had converted the larger part of the world, it would be a shame that the Christians, who were the majority in the population of Antioch, should fail to allay the plague of Judaism. What treason! what inconsistency, that they, who worshipped the Crucified One, should associate with the race which crucified Him.[251] The synagogue ought not to be an object of reverence because it contained the Books of the Law and the Prophets, but rather of abhorrence, because those who possessed the Prophets refused to recognise Him of whom their writings spoke. Was the temple of Serapis holy because it contained the Septuagint, deposited there by Ptolemy Philadelphus?[252]