Chapter XXXVII: The Pagan Creeds and the Rise of Christianity (2)

(2) Notwithstanding it is probable that Tacitus was born some years before the fire of Rome, he could derive only from reading and conversation the knowledge of an event which happened during his infancy. Before he gave himself to the public, he calmly waited till his genius had attained its full maturity; and he was more than forty years of age when a grateful regard for the memory of the virtuous Agricola extorted from him the most early of those historical compositions which will delight and instruct the most distant posterity. After making a trial of his strength in the life of Agricola and the description of Germany, he conceived, and at length executed, a most arduous work--the history of Rome, in thirty books, from the fall of Nero to the accession of Nerva. The administration of Nerva introduced an age of justice and prosperity, which Tacitus had destined for the occupation of his old age; but when he took a nearer view of his subject, judging, perhaps, that it was a more honourable or a less invidious office to record the vices of past tyrants than to celebrate the virtues of a reigning monarch, he chose rather to relate, under the form of annals, the actions of the four immediate successors of Augustus. To collect, to dispose, and to adorn a series of fourscore years in an immortal work, every sentence of which is pregnant with the deepest observations and the most lively images, was an undertaking sufficient to exercise the genius of Tacitus himself during the greater part of his life. In the last years of the reign of Trajan, whilst the victorious monarch extended the power of Rome beyond its ancient limits, the historian was describing, in the second and fourth books of his annals, the tyranny of Tiberius; and the emperor Hadrian must have succeeded to the throne before Tacitus, in the regular prosecution of his work, could relate the fire of the capital and the cruelty of Nero towards the unfortunate Christians. At the distance of sixty years, it was the duty of the annalist to adopt the narratives of contemporaries; but it was natural for the philosopher to indulge himself in the description of the origin, the progress, and the character of the new sect, not so much according to the knowledge or prejudices of the age of Nero, as according to those of the time of Hadrian.

(3) Tacitus very frequently trusts to the curiosity or reflection of his readers to supply those intermediate circumstances and ideas which, in his extreme conciseness, he has thought proper to suppress. We may, therefore, presume to imagine some probable cause which could direct the cruelty of Nero against the Christians of Rome, whose obscurity, as well as innocence, should have shielded them from his indignation, and even from his notice. The Jews, who were numerous in the capital, and oppressed in their own country, were a much fitter object for the suspicions of the emperor and of the people; nor did it seem unlikely that a vanquished nation, who already discovered their abhorrence of the Roman yoke, might have recourse to the most atrocious means of gratifying their implacable revenge. But the Jews possessed very powerful advocates in the palace, and even in the heart of the tyrant--his wife and mistress, the beautiful Poppæa, and a favourite player of the race of Abraham, who had already employed their intercession in behalf of the obnoxious people. In their room it was necessary to offer some other victims; and it might easily be suggested that, although the genuine followers of Moses were innocent of the fire of Rome, there had arisen among them a new and pernicious sect of Galilæans, which was capable of the most horrid crimes. Under the appellation of Galilæans, two distinctions of men were confounded, the most opposite to each other in their manners and principles; the disciples who had embraced the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, and the zealots who had followed the standard of Judas the Gaulonite. The former were the friends, the latter were the enemies, of human kind; and the only resemblance between them consisted in the same inflexible constancy which, in the defence of their cause, rendered them insensible of death and tortures. The followers of Judas, who impelled their countrymen into rebellion, were soon buried under the ruins of Jerusalem; whilst those of Jesus, known by the more celebrated name of Christians, diffused themselves over the Roman Empire. How natural was it for Tacitus, in the time of Hadrian, to appropriate to the Christians the guilt and the sufferings which he might, with far greater truth and justice, have attributed to a sect whose odious memory was almost extinguished!

(4) Whatever opinion may be entertained of this conjecture (for it is no more than a conjecture), it is evident that the effect, as well as the cause, of Nero’s persecution was confined to the walls of Rome; that the religious tenets of the Galilæans, or Christians, were never made a subject of punishment, or even of inquiry; and that, as the idea of their sufferings was for a long time connected with the idea of cruelty and injustice, the moderation of succeeding princes inclined them to spare a sect oppressed by a tyrant whose rage had been usually directed against virtue and innocence.[c]

Thus the massacre of the year 64 is not, strictly speaking, a religious persecution, although, in the opinion of the pagans, there remained a stain on the Christians. Their name came out of the darkness in an inauspicious manner. It remained linked with a great public disaster, and perhaps with a terrible crime in which authority pretended to trace their influence. The second traditional persecution took place in the last year of the reign of Domitian. We have seen to what it has been reduced. There is no trace of any edict, no explicit evidence in profane or ecclesiastical literature, until the middle of the second century. Several passages must be subtly combined to draw the inference of actions brought against many of the Christians, and we are reduced to suppositions to decide the cause. The accusation of impiety appears, but it cannot be said whether this charge is of a religious character; and it seems doubtful.

PERSECUTION UNDER TRAJAN AND THE ANTONINES

It is under the reign of Trajan that the persecution of Christianity is really inaugurated. A thick cloud hovers over this new crime, however, and over the proceedings which are to follow. Pliny does not know where to find the proof of the crime. Trajan, in his reply, points to the statute law. The Christians, from this time, are beyond the reach of the law. However, if there are no complaints and no accusers come forward, the authorities will leave them in peace. If they are impeached in the court of justice they will be condemned unless they forswear themselves. This equivocal law regulated the position of the Christians under the rule of the first three successors of Trajan. Neither Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, nor Marcus Aurelius softened or aggravated it.

Under the rule of these princes, the best, most just, and most humane the empire ever knew, the condemnations of the Christians are more frequent. It is because the Christians are more numerous, and here and there bolder, doubtless, and more imprudent; it is also because there is a new actor on the stage, an anonymous actor, passionate, capricious, easily irritated, and formidable in anger--the crowd, whose injunctions and whose cries for death sometimes take the place of that accuser required by the edict of Trajan. Or in public calamities it is on the Christians that the wrath of the crowd falls. A terrible fate overtakes their conventicles and sacred rites. They hide themselves and avoid all feasts, they smile when others weep, and seem sad in times of prosperity.

Neither their altars, the name, nor the symbol of their god is known. Blood is shed at their nocturnal meetings. Children are sacrificed, devoured by the initiated, and there are scenes of unspeakable debauchery. This is what is said, and in certain circumstances the least spark is sufficient to kindle the fury of the multitude assembled in the amphitheatres or the circus. Will the magistrates contend with the rioters? Will they take up the cause of men legally outside the common law? The voice of the public speaks, and they obey. This, together with certain enmities and private grudges, is, doubtless, the explanation of the sentences pronounced in Rome, and especially in the provinces, under the Antonines. This is what would seem to have taken place in Smyrna in the year 155, and at Lyons in 177. The crowd is the accuser. It is the crowd that singles out the Christians and sentences them to death, and it is only occasionally that the sentence which it has pronounced is not fulfilled.

Three rescripts have been drawn up which Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius successively are said to have made out in favour of the Christians, and from one to the other of these edicts there is, as it were, a _crescendo_ of kindness and toleration. The first of these princes forbids the legates to condemn the Christians to satisfy the clamouring of the people. The last, Marcus Aurelius, testifies to the power of the Christians, whose kindness he has experienced and whom he fears to see turned against him, and grants them full liberty of worship. In our opinion these edicts are manifestly apocryphal, although it is perhaps true that the emperors, supreme guardians of the law, saw with displeasure the violent caprices of popular brutality take the place of legal measures, and violate, as it were, the majesty of Roman justice; and they may have written in this sense to their agents. Hadrian especially, the most vigilant guardian of order in the provincial administration, may have done this.

But the sentences pronounced against the Christians under the rule of the Antonines, and the numerous defences in which the apologists, even at this moment, make an appeal to the justice of the emperors, claiming common law for the Christians, prove clearly that the law which condemned them on account of their profession of faith had not been repealed.

The Antonines invariably made kind and humane princes, lovers of justice, sparing of the lives of their subjects. Marcus Aurelius, in particular, went too far in his complaisance and goodness of heart. The principle of the stoical philosophy he had embraced, and which he was proud to follow, taught the inviolability of liberty in private life, and far from advising the persecution of opinions, it must rather have taught respect for them.

On the other hand, in spite of a visible tendency on the part of the authorities at this time to restore or to strengthen the old Roman discipline, in spite of the alliance entered upon between philosophy and the popular religion, multifarious worships flourished freely throughout the empire. The emperors, whose official devoutness has nothing exclusive, are admitted, like Hadrian, into the alien churches; or, like Marcus Aurelius, do not fear to make an appeal in urgent cases to all known religions. Amongst the philosophers, some, regarding such matters with contempt, state that the diversity matters but little provided that the heavenly sentiment is in the soul; others, incredulous and sceptical like Lucian, scoff with impunity at all the gods and religious symbols, sparing none. There is nothing in the empire resembling a state religion; it would even be difficult to say precisely which is the religion of the majority of the citizens.

Polytheism means diversity and confusion. There is no common formulary, or catechism, nothing resembling the doctrinal teaching of a fixed and definite theology. All the gods are accounted good, and the newest seem to possess extraordinary virtues. Whence comes it that Christianity alone is excluded from universal toleration and is legally without the rights of the law? Whilst striving to answer this question, there is the risk of defining and exaggerating ideas which hovered vaguely in the minds of the princes and statesmen of that time, and of reducing dim notions to too fixed formulas. The Christians in the second century are usually taxed with atheism and impiety. It is certain that the apologists have fair play in replying to this imputation, and answer it triumphantly. The fact however remains that Christianity was the absolute negation of all the symbols of pagan naturalism, that it condemned and repudiated without exception all the gods and all worships, and aspired to destroy and replace them. Lucian, it is true, was not more respectful to the various prevailing superstitions, but Lucian’s invectives were an individual piece of wit. He did not attempt to raise altar against altar, he did not do the work of destruction in view of propaganda. He did not work against the institutions in the name of a new community. He remained faithful to the old philosophical tradition. His burst of laughter was as the last hostile note uttered by philosophy, before disarming and offering a hand to the popular religion.

The Christian objectors, also bitter, were far more in earnest and more formidable. Their attacks amounted to a general assault, and cloaked a manifestly subversive design. They did not scoff for the mere sake of scoffing, but to overthrow and to make a distinct place for their own community, establishing it on new foundations. Authority respects the individual conscience, and grants it the greatest license, but the general conscience is what is called conspiracy.

There is here no room for doubt. Impiety and atheism are in fact not purely religious names, in the modern sense, but political imputations. Religions in the empire are matters of state, or rather religion and the state form only one commonwealth, of which the emperor is the head. Lucian was free to be impious or atheistical. No inference is to be drawn from this, however, though he may here and there have either imitators or disciples.

But the Christian is not an individual unit, his name is legion; he is a member of an association, a party which cannot be confounded with a philosophical school. He belongs to an organised body which has its members everywhere; which possesses a distinctive language, rallying signs, a hierarchy, and a common purse maintained by voluntary contributions; which holds clandestine meetings, celebrates nocturnal rites of which popular imagination is afraid, and possesses certain means of operation at a distance by means of delegates or circulars. And what an organisation it is! Its members in Gaul have communication with Rome, and with the cities of Asia and Phrygia. It covers the entire empire with an invisible network. Philosophy, the daughter of curiosity and the work of the brain, divides; Christian belief unites.

Do not these associates, these _collegiati_ of a new species, whose secret designs and whose nearest hopes are unknown, but are in any case manifestly in accordance with hatred of the morals, the customs, and the institutions of the empire, form the beginning of a state within a state? Are they not a menace to the public class, that which at all times is reported inseparable from the preservation of existing institutions? These are enemies; the more so that community of faith, hatred of the state, and the bond of a common fear in the presence of danger and of proscription holds them together.

Pertinax, on attaining to the imperial dignity, gave this for the first watchword: “Let us fight”--a virile watchword, and one suited also to the reign of Marcus Aurelius. In fact, on the frontiers the barbarians are hastening to arm. Of the thirty legions of which he has the disposal, the emperor is forced to muster twenty with numerous auxiliaries to drive them beyond the Danube, and hold them in awe. During this time, other peaceful barbarians, as they are called, profess contempt for their country, enervate their minds by an unnerving mysticism, detaching themselves from masculine duties and the rough obligations of civil and military life, and by their attacks and their counsels noiselessly lay the mine which will engulf the fortunes of Rome.

They respect, they say, the established powers, and offer up prayers to their gods on behalf of the emperor; but they are heard to say that marriage is a corruption, and a Christian slave dares to reply to the judge that Christ has freed him, and amongst the foundations on which the state and society, decency, family ties, and religion rest, there is not one institution which finds favour in their sight.

The state has need of the devotion of all. It is a critical moment. A war, which all good citizens must consider as a holy war, is added to the scourge which devastates the empire. The stake is, perhaps, civilisation itself. The Christians are reluctant to serve the country at home or abroad. They wish to be neither soldiers nor magistrates. They glory in being citizens of heaven. They wrap themselves up in meditation, controversy, and the exercises of their piety. The community is threatened. In every town they have made for themselves a city of their own choosing, a society separate and apart, of which, they say, God himself is the founder, which they call their church, and to which they dedicate all their attention and their zeal. The service of their church is the sole thing which moves them. The duties it imposes are, in their eyes, the only essential and necessary duties.

The prince, their country, the public good, civilisation, Roman splendour, are to them merely resounding names or vain idols. The church is their country, their city, and their camp. This doubtless is the meaning of the accusation, “enemies of the public,” which is applied to the Christians. Doubtless neither the princes nor the magistrates saw it in precisely that light. The Christian prophets foretold the end of the world in the year 195. They did not foresee Constantine and Theodosius, the old religion persecuted in its turn, and forced to hide from the revenge of the Christians, the apologists returned, Libanius imploring in the name of art that the temples and statues of the gods might be spared, and Simmachus in the name of Roman splendour asking mercy for the threatened altar of victory.

The danger was neither so urgent nor so clear in the second century. Melito of Sardis was wont to say with the gravity of conviction that the power and splendour of the empire had augmented with Christianity. Others, with equal sincerity, protested that the Christians did not think of agitating the state, that they had never been found amongst those who stirred up seditious and military revolutions; that, on the contrary, they kept themselves aloof from all parties, and rendered unto Cæsar that which was his due--neither adoration nor incense, but civil submission and obedience. Several times since the destruction of their temple in the year 70, the Jews had risen in arms to shake off the Roman despotism, to save or avenge their independence. The Christians could not be reproached with any revolt; it is true that, sprung from every race, and for the greater part from pagan families, they had no nationality to vindicate or re-establish. None of them, moreover, had asserted a mission to revolutionise society.

Saving the spiritual jurisdiction, they freely abandoned all other matters, or held them of small account. During the first two centuries despised, maltreated, spat upon, under the ban of opinion and of the law, and often put to death, they were everywhere seen to be patient and resigned, speaking less of the world than of heaven, and full of confidence in a master who does no wrong and who can repair injustice.

Thus no precise explanation can be advanced to account for their being styled public enemies. They were the seeds of a new society; one of their doctors stated that their presence deferred the terrestrial judgment and preserved the empire from ruin and corruption.

The true and philosophical significance of the persecutions is thus the defence of the empire and its institutions, threatened by a new and incomprehensible spirit. The emperors during the second century did not see this public danger clearly; they felt it instinctively, and on its account they strove to fortify or to awaken religion and patriotism.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[34] The history of Christianity, in its earliest stage, is only to be found in the _Acts of the Apostles_; from no other source can we learn the first persecutions inflicted on the Christians. Limited to a few individuals and a narrow space, these persecutions interested none but those who were exposed to them, and have had no other chroniclers.--GUIZOT.

[35] In Cyrene they massacred 220,000 Greeks; in Cyprus, 240,000; in Egypt, a very great multitude. Many of these unhappy victims were sawed asunder, according to a precedent to which David had given the sanction of his example. The victorious Jews devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, and twisted the entrails, like a girdle, round their bodies.[e]