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THE history of the first contacts of the new religion with the
religious thought of the Romano-hellenic world is only imperfectly
known to us. The Acts of the Apostles relates, of course, the story of
the conversion of the Roman officer Cornelius in the first years after
Our Lord's Ascension, and describes St. Paul’s varied success with the
pagans of the Roman East. The Acts is, in a large part, the story of
the origins of Gentile Christianity. Nevertheless it is not until the
next century that we begin to have evidence in detail about the way the
new religion affected the religious gentiles who occupied themselves
with its teaching and promises; or the like evidence about the way the
Church reacted to its contact with the world outside it.
That world outside was not, in the second century, by any means
unconcerned with religious theories and practice. Religion was all
important to it, and though the religious restoration of the first of
the Roman emperors had not developed, as he had hoped, into a rebirth
of the old classical Paganism, religion a hundred years after his death
was flourishing and promised to flourish yet more. Development since
Augustus had not, indeed, taken the direction he would have willed. It
had left the Paganism of the classic pantheon to its inevitable end. It
showed itself rather in the appearance of new cults, particularly in
the cult of personified abstractions. Such were the new religions which
worshipped Honour, Piety, Peace and -- the most popular cult of all --
Fortune. These new fast-spreading cults were free of the mythological
foulness which had disfigured the older religion they displaced; but
the gods they honoured remained, for the popular imagination, little
more than abstractions before which the only attitude possible was the
resignation of fatalism. Fortune might be worshipped as the supreme
goddess, but Fortune was inexorable unchangeable destiny, Fate -- and
before Fate what use to pray or beseech?
A like fatalistic attitude to life was bred by another series of new
cults now in full emigration from the East, the cult of the Sun, of the
Moon and of the Stars. According to the positions of the stars at the
moment of birth, so must every man's life be; and the adepts of these
cults set themselves to work out astrological codes by which each man's
future and fate might be told. The emperors enacted the severest laws
against these mischievous superstitions, but without any great success.
The promise of this religious astrology was too much for human anxiety
to resist, and the very emperors in whose name the laws were published
were themselves the first to break them.
But the most important feature of the century's religious history was
undoubtedly the progress of the ancient cults of the old pre-hellenic
culture of the East. Below the veneer of Hellenism which had covered it
now for generations, the East still remained the East. Egypt, Asia and
Syria still retained their ancient identities, their ancient sensual
and bloodthirsty gods. Slowly, now, that older East was coming to life
again; and, in a kind of revenge for the Hellenistic centuries, its old
religions seeped through the surface, steadily, increasingly, until by
the middle of the third century they had done much everywhere to
transform the religion of the city populations. These cults were
popular now for the same reasons that the mystery religions had been
popular in ancient Greece. They offered to their clients guarantees of
special protection -- very notably they offered protection against the
powers of evil, against Fate itself. They gained a hold on the
imagination by the splendour of their rites, their secret initiations,
the spectacle of their sanctifying sacred dramas. In the assemblies
which were the scene of these rites a mad enthusiasm spread through the
crowd. Men stabbed themselves and each other, feeling nothing; in sheer
religious exultation mutilated themselves publicly and shamelessly,
passed through fire, leapt unbridgeable gulfs, gave themselves to
actions of unbelievable impudicity. But more potent than the attraction
of these often misunderstood aberrations was the novelty of the god's
familiarity with his client. The gods of the classic Olympus had been
aloof. Familiarity with them was perilous. Their company no man could
hope to survive. But Isis, Mithra, the Syrian Goddess, offered
familiarity, friendship: offered this, even, as the very means of their
protection, as the medium through which they wished to be worshipped.
As these cults slowly established themselves in the West, they
underwent more than one important modification. The Syrian goddess,
patron of reproduction, was seen by the Greeks as another Aphrodite, by
the Romans as a Venus. With the identification a more open sensuality
often crept into the old Paganism of the West, a new brutal
bloodthirstiness. From Rome the new cults crossed the Alps, and revived
by their presence the superstitions and the horrors of the old
pre-Roman religion of the Celts. Always there is the fantasy of the
legend, never exactly the same in any two places; always the rough and
ready identification of the new and the old; the attraction of sensual
novelty in the ritual, the promise of the god's intimacy, of his
special protection and of a happy eternity. The man who has given
himself to the god or goddess and is accepted has no more to fear.
Though Fate dog his life Isis will effectually protect him.
These religions introduced, too, a new kind of priesthood. Their
priests were a caste apart, men whose lives were wholly given to the
service of the god, and who were set apart for that service in a
definite ritual, often indeed of a brutal and obscene character. They
had their prophets, they had their magicians, sorcerers, soothsayers;
and their establishment presented the nascent religion of Christ with
yet another obstacle to overcome in its mission of winning the populace
to the good tidings of the Kingdom of God. Under the working of these
new influences the popular inert dislike of the Christian turns to
passionate, active hatred -- a hatred which skilful calumny
intensifies. And as with the third century, the Eastern cults gain a
hold among the aristocracy, and can claim the emperor himself as a
devotee, the possibilities of the anti- Christian influence know no
limit. It is, for instance, the magician, Macrian, who converts the
emperor, Valerian (253-259), from his sympathy for the Christians and
makes of him one of the bloodiest of persecutors.
The mystery religions, as they developed in the century between Nero
and Marcus Aurelius, were to influence the pace of the Church's
development in another way. Two features they all shared -- the
initiation reserved to the select few and the special revelation of the
god to the initiated. It was only after a laborious novitiate, and a
series of tests and partial initiations, that the candidate was in the
end admitted to the heart of the mystery. In every mystery religion,
then, the disciples, at any given moment, were arranged in a hierarchy
of knowledge, and of perfection, according to the degree of their
initiation. And as knowledge of the divine secret and intimacy with the
god developed together, the perfectly initiated into knowledge was
alone perfectly holy, stainless and saved. This idea of a hierarchy of
virtue based on degrees of knowledge was to play its part in the
Church, too, once the Church came into contact with Gnosticism.
The perfection to which the initiate few thus attained was of course
wholly unconcerned with moral goodness. In the dramas of the mysteries,
even of the more restrained Hellenic mysteries, the subjects of the
splendid spectacle were all too often the sexual relations of the god
and goddess with one another and with mankind. Moral teaching they held
none; nor anything of instruction about the gods except the
interminable, meaningless genealogies. And if the early Christian
writers used all their eloquence to denounce the mysteries for the
traps they were, the Pagans were equally outspoken. Plutarch, for
example, ends his description of the myth of Isis and Osiris with the
comment that to those who really believe that the gods give themselves
to such a way of life there is no more to be said but what Aeschylus
advises, "Spit it out and rinse your mouth." Nothing in this latest
development of Paganism brought it nearer to the chance of giving the
world what the Gospel promised to give. It was no rival gospel that the
Church had to fear in the mystery religions, or in these new cults from
the East. The danger was more simple -- that the mixture of charlatanry
and sensuality would find so ready a response in the weakest parts of
human nature that there would not even remain a beginning of natural
virtue to which the super-natural could make an appeal. "The mysteries
never raised man to a belief more worthy of the divinity. Rather it was
man who by his interpretation of the mysteries gave them a meaning more
worthy of the gods."
Such as they were, however, these religions flourished. The army, the
imperial functionaries, the officials of the civil service spread them
from one end of the empire to the other. The century that begins with
Marcus Aurelius and ends with Aurelian (161-275) is their golden age.
The old Paganism of classical times, as a force influencing men’s
lives, is dead. As a ritual, as a part of the day’s public life, a
religious consecration of the State and its institutions, it still
continues. But it has long since ceased to shape men’s activities. In
its place are the oriental religions just described and, for the elite
who think, the religious philosophies. In the Paganism of the second
century these two things alone are alive.
The religious philosophy of the day made, of itself, no appeal whatever
to the senses, nor to the imagination. It attempted a reasonable
explanation of religion and of the mythologies, and, more than that, it
presented itself as a reasoned teaching in religious matters, offering
a reasoned system of morality. The philosophers were the guides and
spiritual directors of that minority who wished to live an ordered,
reasonable, and, as we should say, religious life. In their teaching
such souls found illumination and encouragement, and it was from the
philosophers of this generation that the Church recruited those
converts who were to be pioneers in the work of expounding her doctrine
rationally to the intellect of the non-Christian world. The philosophy
fashionable in the second century is, then, not only an important
element in the non-Christian life of that time, but it has its effect
within the Church itself thanks to the conversion to Christianity of so
many of its devotees. Two schools of this second-century philosophic
thought call principally for notice -- the Stoics and the
For the Stoic all things had their origin in one single living
principle, and this principle is material. From this first material
principle -- the purest and most subtle matter conceivable, a kind of
fiery air -- all other existing things have come, and will continue to
come, by a process of continual degrading, a process inevitable and
necessitated. In all these derived existing things, no matter how low
the degree of their existence, there remains always some spark of that
principle whence they first derive -- whether the things be, as we
should say, animate or inanimate. "This fire" the definition classic
among the Stoics explained "is skilled and travels a fixed road since
the world's beginning. Locked up within it are all the seminal logoi in
accordance with which all things necessarily come into being." From
this fire all things come, to it all things return; and the
evolutionary process is fixed, inevitable from the nature of the fire.
Returning to the original fire, they issue forth yet again -- always in
the same way, bound to the same evolution in the future which has
shaped their history in the past; things, animals, men, the gods
themselves, except Zeus whom the Stoics identify with the imperishable
fire. All is governed by this unescapable law of necessity. Even the
least of human actions necessarily follows from causes outside man's
control, is fixed by the nature of things, is shaped by the one soul of
the universe. "Man," said the Stoics, "is a dog tied to a car. He has
no choice but to run in its wake."
This necessity, constraining human action, is and is not a slavery, for
the soul of all things whence the necessity comes is man's soul too,
and the necessity which constrains him is not the violence of another
to which perforce he must submit, but the necessity of his own nature's
deepest need. "Secure in his autonomy, why should the Stoic sigh for
liberty?" The theory worked out in practice in very different ways.
First of all it set man on an equality with the gods, for it is the one
same divine soul that gives life to all. Whence a valuation of human
personality among the Stoics higher than any other of the ancient
philosophies ever accorded it. Whence, too, those beginnings of a care
for personality in legislation, and the humanitarianism of which Cicero
is a leading example. Whence also, on the other hand, a pride and
self-exaltation that could end in mania.
Again, although the theory of the divine origin of all things could,
and did, in Seneca for example, develop into a belief in something like
Providence, the other half of the theory -- the necessary evolution,
the unescapable force, the inevitable, individual destruction and
re-absorption, -- is the very negation of Providence. This god who is
in us all, who is ourselves, as he is everything, is yet unknown and
unknowable, and research as to his nature can only end in ever greater
obscurity. Prayer, supplication can find no place in the system -- for
all things that happen must happen as they happen. No effort can change
them, no flight escape them. If one type of character was helped and
encouraged by the system's Pantheism, braced or consoled by the belief
in fellowship with the rest of creation, assuredly there were others
crushed in despair by its fatalism.
The two great names among the Stoics of the second century are
Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus is no fashionable
philosopher with the entertainment of a leisured audience as his
highest aim. He is a man with a mission, and his hearers were earnest
and devoted seekers after a higher life. He set before them an ideal of
austere detachment from the chances of life. Sickness, old age,
misfortune, death itself should have no power over the Stoic; no power
to disturb the calm, happy freedom of this man whom reason controlled.
Such ills, when they threatened his peace, should be looked in the
face, understood for what they were, and, their whole power for ill
thus reasonably examined, they would cease to trouble. Was not man his
own only master? containing within himself the only real good? and did
he not live as part of a great universe of existence? What matter if
his role in that great plan was meaner than another's.
To the whole it was equally necessary, and in this consideration of his
contribution to the need and welfare of the whole the reasonable man
would find compensation and consolation for the chances of life. Should
this Pantheism fail to console, a further solution still remained.
“There is one who provides me with food and with raiment. . . when he
no longer gives he signifies to me that it is time to depart, he opens
the door and calls. Whither does he call me? Towards a term which
cannot affright thee, for it is thence thou didst originally proceed,
towards friends and kinsfolk and the elements of things. What in thee
is fire, to fire will return; what in thee is earth, to earth; what
air, to air; what is water, to water yet again. There is no Hades, no
Acheron, no Cocytus, no Periphlegethon, but everywhere is filled with
gods and with daemons." But suicide is only for the weakling, blessed
even as Epictetus blesses it. The ideal is acceptance of life in an
indifference to its chance, an acceptance buttressed by the belief that
man, too, is divine. God is in us, we are part of God and we should be
loyal to what in us is divine for so we are most truly loyal to
ourselves. "As the soldier swears he will prefer Caesar before all
others, the Stoic swears so to prefer himself." Prayer and theories of
divine assistance can have no place in the system, and the basis of the
exalted sentiments that still move whoever studies these ancient
writings is self-exaltation. Epictetus presents us with a meditation on
death in which the dying man reviews his life and thanks his god for
all it has been. It is no act of thanksgiving for mercies and favours,
still less is it a confession; and if its underlying self-satisfaction
recalls anything in the Gospel it is the famous prayer of the Pharisee.
Stoicism was never popular. Its theories, no doubt, broke too soon at
the contact with reality. And it had too much scorn for the
unenlightened herd to make their conversion a possibility. It remained
the privilege of an elite, and even there its success was not such as
to encourage its prophets. "Show me a Stoic if you know one," said
Epictetus. "You will show me thousands who speak like Stoics. Show me
at least some one who shows promise of realising this ideal. Let my old
age gaze on what so far it has never been my lot to know. Show me one
at least. You cannot."
Such an one we see perhaps in Marcus Aurelius. Under Domitian Epictetus
had been banished from Rome as a philosopher. Now philosophy itself was
on the throne. In his Meditations Marcus Aurelius admits us to the
innermost workings of his mind. We see the Stoic theory shaping his
response to the demands of life. We see the progress of self-knowledge,
self- discipline, the continual examination and analysis of action and
motive pursued faithfully day by day in search of truth ever more
profound. All the traditional Stoic theory is here, not set out in
theory for a class, but in its practical application to life. Man's
share in the universal life, the common logos, is to Marcus Aurelius a
familiar, a personal daemon. He reveres it, serves it, obeys it and for
its sake will keep his life spotless. He shares, of course, the
fatalist resignation to life which is the aim of the school, though the
thought of the extinction which is death moves him to angry resentment.
On the other hand he believes in prayer, prayer not to the gods of the
classic pantheon, but to Fortune, the Sun, the Stars, Asclepios.
Inevitably he is the victim of superstition, dreams and omens playing
their part in his life. And the whole life is built on a foundation
that is ever in movement, on hypotheses and alternatives and the
uncertainty of doubt, of sentiment and guesswork. It is the end of
happiness, the end of life, and from it derives that "infinite boredom"
which Renan noted as characteristic of the famous work. "Infinite
boredom", in life as in the Meditations, and "an analysis of life which
leaves life little better than death."
The second great school of religious philosophy was that of the
Platonists, and this, unlike the school of Epictetus was not only
popular, but as the century went on, grew to be one of the greatest
forces in its religious life. For the Platonists there is a dual
principle at the origin of things -- spirit and matter. God is not only
not identical with the world, as the Stoics proclaimed, but so
transcends the world as to be beyond all power of our knowing him. In
ecstasy alone can man reach to the divine. This dualism, and the
doctrine of the divine transcendence, go back to Plato himself. It was
his immediate successor Xenocrates who developed the system's dualism,
and Plutarch derived from it the other notion of the divine
inaccessibility to human reason. In the succeeding centuries these two
ideas came to dominate the whole teaching of the school, and thereby
inevitably lowered the system's intellectual appeal and bequeathed to
it the continual menace of scepticism.
Since God was inaccessible, and since all things owed to God their
origin and their continuance in being, the Platonist postulated as the
medium of the divine action one or more beings intermediate between God
and man, beings who shared indeed in the divine nature but who were yet
subordinate to God their first origin. These are the daemons, powers,
spirits, the logos. For the Stoics the logos was the immanent necessary
law of things. For the new Platonists, it was the divine agent, and the
pattern by which all things were; it was the divine element by which
the other necessary element of the universal duality was corrected --
all things being subject to the double law, i.e. of influences deriving
from a thing's nature, and of influences deriving from the divine. This
duality obtained in things inanimate, in man's soul too. Logos and
nature, one for the Stoic, are for the Platonist rival contending
forces.
Platonism had borrowed a term from the Stoics to express itself. It had
borrowed elsewhere, and notably from the East. From its conception of
spirit and matter as forces inevitably in conflict, a whole train of
consequences were to follow. That conception was to enter the Church,
to cause endless trouble in the heresies it provoked, and to be the
cause, too, of more than one set-back in the development of thinkers
otherwise orthodox.
These ideas of the dual principle in all reality, of a hierarchy of
perfection, and of the radical opposition of matter and spirit, the
Platonists popularised as Stoicism never was popularised. Around this
philosophical core other doctrines gathered taken from the teachings
ascribed to Pythagoras, and with them there passed to the Platonists
something of that spirit which turned philosophy into a cult, with
devotees, holy men, religious practices, rites and -- by no means its
least important feature -- itinerant missionaries who gave their lives
to the work of propaganda. There gathered, too, around the core of
philosophy and idealism, something of the superstition and the magical
practices which always attached to the self- styled disciples of
Pythagoras. If such features detracted from the dignity of the
philosophy they were, on the other hand, its very life as a force in
public affairs. It was not long before Platonism, as a cult, absorbed
the neo-Pythagoreans and quite ousted the Stoics. Later it was to
inspire the bitterest and most skilful of all the attempts to destroy
Christianity. Meanwhile, in that second century which at the moment
occupies us, its leading figure, after Plutarch (50-125) was the
lecturer, Maximus of Tyre.
The subjects of the lectures which gained him fame are the questions
which the public of his day debated. Is revenge noble? Is activity a
higher life than contemplation? Should we pray to the gods? What is
Plato's notion of God? How can we reconcile human liberty and sorcery?
His theological teaching is a mixture of superstitious credulity and
scepticism. Between God and man there is an intermediate hierarchy of
daemons, demi-gods, who though they are passable are yet immortal. They
are the companions of mankind, guiding and inspiring its life. "Some of
them," he said, "cure sickness, or they tender advice in difficulties.
They make known things otherwise hidden, they inspire the masterpieces
of art. Some dwell in towns, others in the country, others in the sea.
. . . They are sometimes the guests of human bodies, as in the case of
Socrates, of Plato, of Pythagoras. . . . Some of them are scourges,
others humane. . . . There is as great a diversity in the dispositions
of the daemons as in those of men themselves." All the gods of the
ancient mythology are seen now to be daemons, and Zeus identified with
the supreme divine monarch. Prayer -- the habit of petitioning the
gods-Maximus condemns as useless. If God is Providence these things
will come unsought. If God is Chance prayer cannot move it. As for the
desire to possess greater virtue, no god can do more here than man can
do for himself, for the source of virtue is within man himself. This
last point recalls Epictetus and the Stoics, and is one of the many
evidences of the eclectic character of the new Platonism of the time.
Its adepts borrowed as willingly from contemporaries as from the past,
borrowed ideas and terminology no less readily than ritual.
The one supreme God transcends sense. The soul is raised to
communication with him by contemplation and love, and the condition of
this ascent is an increasing detachment from all else. The perfection
of this intellectual vision of God is indeed impossible in this life.
Yet, by meditation and a life of detachment, great heights may be
attained even here on earth. Not all men it is true can so raise
themselves. For those who are unable there remains in consolation the
contemplation of the hierarchy of semi-divine intermediaries.
"How then will you escape, how come to see God? In a word, you will see
him when he calls you to come. Nor will he long delay to call. Only
await his invitation. Old age is at hand which will lead you; Death,
whose approach affrights the coward to tears but whom the lover of God
looks for with joy, receives with courage. But, if you wish, even in
this present, to know his nature how shall I explain it? God is no
doubt beautiful, of all beauteous things the fairest. But it is not the
beauty of a body. He is what gives the body its beauty. It is not the
beauty of a field, but again that whence comes the field's beauty.
Beauty of streams, beauty of sea and sky, it is from the gods who dwell
in the sky that all this beauty flows, running over from a spring pure
and eternal. And in the measure of their sharing this eternal stream,
all things are beautiful, ordered, saved. In the measure they turn from
it there remains for them only shame, death, corruption. If this
satisfies, you have seen God. If not, how can you be made to
understand? Do not picture to yourself size, nor colour, nor form, nor
indeed any material quality, but, like a lover stripping of its varied
clothing the beautiful body thus hidden from his gaze, strip away with
your thought all these material imaginings. There will remain, and you
shall gaze upon it, what you desire to see. But if you are too weak
thus to arrive at the vision of the Father -- the Demiurge, it will
suffice that you actually see their works and adore their offspring in
all their rich diversity. . . . Imagine a great empire, a powerful
kingdom where every creature depends, and willingly, on the good will
of one soul, the soul of the King, venerable, excelling in virtue. . .
imagine then this King himself, immovable as law itself, communicating
to those who serve, the salvation which is his. See all those who share
in his power, the innumerable gods, visible some and others yet unseen.
Some there are who, like guards of honour, at his side share his table
and his food. Others serve them, and others there are of yet lower
degree. See you not this chain, this hierarchy descending from God down
to the very earth?" [ ]
The charm of the vision so described, its poetry, the communication of
religious emotion between master and student explain much of the
system's appeal. It brought about, in the end, and made generally
acceptable, an idea of the infinite that grew ever vaguer, ever more
indistinct; an instinctive suspicion, indeed, of distinctness and
definition and reason in religious speculation; the idea of an
opposition between "mysticism" and "dogma " necessary and fundamental;
an exaltation of " mysticism " at the expense of " dogma," and a
surrender of reason for emotion. Closely allied to this school of
Platonists were those other practical philosophers who pass under the
name of neo-Pythagoreans. Little as we know of them, we know that for
them also matter was a principle of death, that the perfect reality was
transcendent and unknowable. Between God and man, once again, there is
this world of intermediaries, and one chief mediator, daemons and the
Logos. The Logos again is at once God's idea or pattern according to
which all things are, and the divine instrument. But it was the
neo-Pythagorean school which did most, apparently, to build upon these
philosophical theories a working religion. And it did so by borrowing
from the East magical rites and incantations, rites of expiation and
purification, mutilations and sacrifices.
All through the second century, and increasingly as the second century
passed into the third, the missionaries of these new religions moved
through the empire, lecturing, explaining and translating their
theories into act. They consoled souls broken with sorrow and pain,
they prepared for death the unfortunate whom the tyranny of the
emperors condemned to suicide. "By word and example they showed to all
the way of salvation."
Religions from the East offering salvation, astral religions, new cults
of Fortune and the Fates, the pantheism and magic of the philosophers,
mysteries dazzling by their splendour, initiations attracting by their
exclusiveness, with all this rich and active diversity we have not,
even yet, come to the end of the catalogue of the second century's
religious activities. More important than any one of them individually
is a movement which runs through them all, drawing something from each,
offering something in return -- a deeper insight, a truer vision,
Knowledge in fact where, so far, no more has been possible than to see
as in a glass darkly. This movement that claims to reveal to the
religious themselves Knowledge, is the much discussed Gnosticism, and
the history of the Church in the second century is very largely the
history of its relation to Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is pre-Christian in its origins. It set itself to
reinterpret Paganism and to re-interpret Judaism, and in the course of
the interpretation it altered them radically. It offered Knowledge, the
vision of God, actual communication with the divine here on earth. Like
the philosophies, it made ecstasy the means of the most perfect
knowledge and the ultimate aim of religious life. Like the mystery
religions, it promised salvation. To all the thousands who sought
security, in one or other of the myriad cults, it suggested a better
understanding of those cults, the revelation of a deeper meaning in
what they already believed or practised. It varied enormously,
inevitably, from one exponent to another, varied according to whether
it set itself to work on Paganism or Judaism or the religion of the
Church; and it added new hybrid gnostic-inspired cults to those
hundreds it found in possession. There were Gnostic-Pagan cults, and
Gnostic-Jewish cults and ultimately Gnostic- Christian cults. But in
all these amalgams we can trace some common features, can discover at
work forces allied in character. There is for example, the claim that
the Gnostic teaching is of divine origin, handed down through a secret
chain of initiated disciples. There is a marked insistence on the dual
origin of existence, and a hatred and scorn for the material world as a
thing necessarily evil. God is of course transcendent, and so removed
from the material world that creation is necessarily the work of
intermediary powers. There is a preoccupation with theories about the
creation, the end of creation, and the divine genealogies that borders
on mania. There are rites, symbols, a mystical arithmetic, and exotic
cults. Finally Knowledge is always presented as the privilege of the
few. It is to an elite only that the real meaning of religion is
offered.
It was simply a matter of time before the religion of the Church
attracted the attention of Gnostics, and before Christians themselves
began to turn to Gnosticism to explain the mysteries in their beliefs.
With that, and the beginnings, inside the Church, of attempts to
explain its belief "gnostically," the Church enters upon the first
great crisis of its history
A rich and confused amalgam of rites and beliefs and magical practices,
theories to explain the origin of evil, human destiny, the relations
between matter and spirit, between God and his creation, between God
and Jesus Christ -- the Gnostic movement within the Church was to win
from the tradition some of the Church's first theologians and scholars,
Tatian for example and Bardesanes. It also provoked a strong
traditional reaction, and one of the great masterpieces of Catholic
writing, the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus. In studying the history
of this second century we are watching the first attempts of Christians
to explain rationally their beliefs and mysteries and, in the story of
the Gnostic crisis, can observe the natural, spontaneous reaction of
the Church to its first great danger. The manner of that reaction
throws an interesting light on the nature of the Church's organisation,
and on second century theories about the Church's constitution and its
powers.
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