Chapter III: God as the Supreme Being (3)

The earliest methods of Christian exegesis were continuations of the methods which were common at the time to both Greek and Græco-Judæan writers. They were employed on the same subject-matter. Just as the Greek philosophers had found their philosophy in Homer, so Christian writers found in him Christian theology. When he represents Odysseus as saying,[105] “The rule of many is not good: let there be one ruler,” he means to indicate that there should be but one God; and his whole poem is designed to show the mischief that comes of having many gods.[106] When he tells us that Hephæstus represented on the shield of Achilles “the earth, the heaven, the sea, the sun that rests not, and the moon full-orbed,”[107] he is teaching us the divine order of creation which he learned in Egypt from the books of Moses.[108] So Clement of Alexandria interprets the withdrawal of Oceanus and Tethys from each other to mean the separation of land and sea;[109] and he holds that Homer, when he makes Apollo ask Achilles, “Why fruitlessly pursue him, a god,” meant to show that the divinity cannot be apprehended by the bodily powers.[110] Some of the philosophical schools which hung upon the skirts of Christianity mingled such interpretations of Greek mythology with similar interpretations of the Old Testament. For example, the writer to whom the name Simon Magus is given, is said to have “interpreted in whatever way he wished both the writings of Moses and also those of the (Greek) poets;”[111] and the Ophite writer, Justin, evolves an elaborate cosmogony from a story of Herakles narrated in Herodotus,[112] combined with the story of the garden of Eden.[113] But the main application was to the Old Testament exclusively. The reasons given for believing that the Old Testament had an allegorical meaning were precisely analogous to those which had been given in respect to Homer. There were many things in the Old Testament which jarred upon the nascent Christian consciousness. “Far be it from us to believe,” says the writer of the Clementine Homilies,[114] “that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, ‘tempts’ men as though He did not know—for who then does foreknow? and if He ‘repents,’ who is perfect in thought and firm in judgment? and if He ‘hardens’ men’s hearts, who makes them wise? and if He ‘blinds’ them, who makes them to see? and if He desires ‘a fruitful hill,’ whose then are all things? and if He wants the savour of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if He delights in lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?”

One early answer to all such difficulties was, like a similar answer to difficulties about the Homeric mythology, that there was a human as well as a divine element in the Old Testament: some things in it were true, and some were false: and “this was indeed the very reason why the Master said, ‘Be genuine money-changers,’[115] testing the Scriptures like coins, and separating the good from the bad.” But the answer did not generally prevail. The more common solution, as also in the case of Homer, was that Moses had written in symbols in order to conceal his meaning from the unwise; and Clement of Alexandria, in an elaborate justification of this method, mentions as analogies not only the older Greek poetry, but also the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians.[116] The Old Testament thus came to be treated allegorically. A large part of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that such interpretations were becoming the common property of Jews and Judæo-Christians.[117] But the method was soon applied to new data. Exegesis became apologetic. Whereas Philo and his school had dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the early Christian writers came to deal mainly with the prophets and poetical books; and whereas Philo was mainly concerned to show that the writings of Moses contained Greek philosophy, the Christian writers endeavoured to show that the writings of the Hebrew preachers and poets contained Christianity; and whereas Philo had been content to speak of the writers of the Old Testament, as Dio Chrysostom spoke of the Greek poets, as having been stirred by a divine enthusiasm, the Christian writers soon came to construct an elaborate theory that the poets and preachers were but as the flutes through which the Breath of God flowed in divine music into the souls of men.[118]

The prophets, even more than the poets, lent themselves easily to this allegorical method of interpretation. The _nabi_ was in an especial sense the messenger of God and an interpreter of His will. But his message was often a parable. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He wrote, not in plain words, but in pictures. The meaning of the pictures was often purposely obscure. The Greek word “prophet” sometimes properly belonged, not to the _nabi_ himself, but to those who, in his own time or in after time, explained the riddle of his message. When the message passed into literature, the interpretation of it became linked with the growing conception of the foreknowledge and providence of God: it was believed that He not only knew all things that should come to pass, but also communicated His knowledge to men. The _nabi_, through whom He revealed His will as to the present, was also the channel through whom He revealed His intention as to the future. The prophetic writings came to be read in the light of this conception. The interpreters wandered, as it were, along vast corridors whose walls were covered with hieroglyphs and paintings. They found in them symbols which might be interpreted of their own times. They went on to infer the divine ordering of the present from the coincidence of its features with features that could be traced in the hieroglyphs of the past. A similar conception prevailed in the heathen world. It lay beneath the many forms of divination. Hence Tertullian[119] speaks of Hebrew prophecy as a special form of divination, “divinatio prophetica.” So far from being strange to the Greek world, it was accepted. Those who read the Old Testament without accepting Christianity, found in its symbols prefigurings, not of Christianity, but of events recorded in the heathen mythologies. The Shiloh of Jacob’s song was a foretelling of Dionysus: the virgin’s son of Isaiah was a picture of Perseus: the Psalmist’s “strong as a giant to run his course” was a prophecy of Herakles.[120]

The fact that this was an accepted method of interpretation enabled the Apologists to use it with great effect. It became one of the chief evidences of Christianity. Explanations of the meaning of historical events and poetical figures which sound strange or impossible to modern ears, so far from sounding strange or impossible in the second century, carried conviction with them. When it was said, “The government shall be upon his shoulder,” it was meant that Christ should be extended on the cross;[121] when it was said, “He shall dip his garment in the blood of the grape,” it was meant that his blood should be, not of human origin, but, like the red juice of the grape, from God;[122] when it was said that “He shall receive the power of Damascus,” it was meant that the power of the evil demon who dwelt at Damascus should be overcome, and the prophecy was fulfilled when the Magi came to worship Christ.[123] The convergence of a large number of such interpretations upon the Gospel history was a powerful argument against both Jews and Greeks. I need not enlarge upon them. They have formed part of the general stock of Christian teaching ever since. But I will draw your attention to the fact that the basis of this use of the Old Testament was not so much the idea of prediction as the prevalent practice of treating ancient literature as symbolical or allegorical.

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The method came to be applied to the books which were being formed into a new volume of sacred writings, side by side with the old. It was so applied, in the first instance, not by the Apologists, but by the Gnostics. It was detached from the idea of prediction. It was linked with the idea of knowledge as a secret. This extension of the method was inevitable. The earthly life of Christ presented as many difficulties to the first Christian philosophers as the Old Testament had done. The conception of Christ as the Wisdom and the Power of God seemed inconsistent with the meanness of a common human life; and that life resolved itself into a series of symbolic representations of superhuman movements, and the record of it was written in hieroglyphs. When Symeon took the young child in his arms and said the _Nunc dimittis_, he was a picture of the Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the Saviour, and who gave thanks to the Infinite Depth.[124] The raising of Jairus’ daughter was a type of Achamoth, the Eternal Wisdom, the mother of the Demiurge, whom the Saviour led anew to the perception of the light which had forsaken her. Even the passion on the Cross was a setting forth of the anguish and fear and perplexity of the Eternal Wisdom.[125]

The method was at first rejected with contumely. Irenæus and Tertullian bring to bear upon it their batteries of irony and denunciation. It was a blasphemous invention. It was one of the arts of spiritual wickedness against which a Christian must wrestle. But it was deep-seated in the habits of the time; and even while Tertullian was writing, it was establishing a lodgment inside the Christian communities which it has never ceased to hold. It did so first of all in the great school of Alexandria, in which it had grown up as the reconciliation of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. The methods of the school of Philo were applied to the New Testament even more than to the Old. When Christ said, “The foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head,” he meant that on the believer alone, who is separated from the rest, that is from the wild beasts of the world, rests the Head of the universe, the kind and gentle Word.[126] When he is said to have fed the multitude on five barley-loaves and two fishes, it is meant that he gave mankind the preparatory training of the Law, for barley, like the Law, ripens sooner than wheat, and of philosophy, which had grown, like fishes, in the waves of the Gentile world.[127] When we read of the anointing of Christ’s feet, we read of both his teaching and his passion; for the feet are a symbol of divine instruction travelling to the ends of the earth, or, it may be, of the Apostles who so travelled, having received the fragrant unction of the Holy Ghost; and the ointment, which is adulterated oil, is a symbol of the traitor Judas, “by whom the Lord was anointed on the feet, being released from his sojourn in the world: for the dead are anointed.”[128]

But it may reasonably be doubted whether the allegorical method would have obtained the place which it did in the Christian Church if it had not served an other than exegetical purpose. It is clear that after the first conflicts with Judaism had subsided, the Old Testament formed a great stumbling-block in the way of those who approached Christianity on its ideal side, and viewed it by the light of philosophical conceptions. Its anthropomorphisms, its improbabilities, the sanction which it seemed to give to immoralities, the dark picture which it sometimes presented of both God and the servants of God, seemed to many men to be irreconcilable with both the theology and the ethics of the Gospel. An important section of the Christian world rejected its authority altogether: it was the work, not of God, but of His rival, the god of this world: the contrast between the Old Testament and the New was part of the larger contrast between matter and spirit, darkness and light, evil and good.[129] Those who did not thus reject it were still conscious of its difficulties. There were many solutions of those difficulties. Among them was that which had been the Greek solution of analogous difficulties in Homer. It was adopted and elaborated by Origen expressly with an apologetic purpose. He had been trained in current methods of Greek interpretation. He is expressly said to have studied the books of Cornutus.[130] He found in the hypothesis of a spiritual meaning as complete a vindication of the Old Testament as Cornutus had found of the Greek mythology. The difficulties which men find, he tells us, arise from their lack of the spiritual sense. Without it he himself would have been a sceptic.

“What man of sense,” he asks,[131] “will suppose that the
first and the second and the third day, and the evening and
the morning, existed without a sun and moon and stars? Who
is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman,
planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life,
that might be seen and touched, so that one who tasted of the
fruit by his bodily lips obtained life? or, again, that one
was partaker of good and evil by eating that which was taken
from a tree? And if God is said to have walked in a garden in
the evening, and Adam to have hidden under a tree, I do not
suppose that any one doubts that these things figuratively
indicate certain mysteries, the history being apparently but
not literally true.... Nay, the Gospels themselves are filled
with the same kind of narratives. Take, for example, the story
of the devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain to show him
from thence the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them:
what thoughtful reader would not condemn those who teach that
it was with the eye of the body—which needs a lofty height
that even the near neighbourhood may be seen—that Jesus beheld
the kingdoms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians, and
Parthians, and the manner in which their rulers were glorified
among men?”

The spirit intended, in all such narratives, on the one hand to reveal mysteries to the wise, on the other hand to conceal them from the multitude. The whole series of narratives is constructed with a purpose, and subordinated to the exposition of mysteries. Difficulties and impossibilities were introduced in order to prevent men from being drawn into adherence to the literal meaning. Sometimes the truth was told by means of a true narrative which yielded a mystical sense: sometimes, when no such narrative of a true history existed, one was invented for the purpose.[132]

In this way, as a rationalizing expedient for solving the difficulties of Old Testament exegesis, the allegorical method established for itself a place in the Christian Church: it largely helped to prevent the Old Testament from being discarded: and the conservation of the Old Testament was the conservation of allegory, not only for the Old Testament, but also for the New.

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Against the whole tendency of symbolical interpretation there was more than one form of reaction in both the Greek and the Christian world.

1. It was attacked by the Apologists in its application to Greek mythology. With an inconsequence which is remarkable, though not singular, they found in it a weapon of both defence and offence. They used it in defence of Christianity, not only because it gave them the evidence of prediction, but also because it solved some of the difficulties which the Old Testament presented to philosophical minds. They used it, on the other hand, in their attack upon Greek religion. Allegories are an after-thought, they said sometimes, a mere pious gloss over unseemly fables.[133] Even if they were true, they said again, and the basis of Greek belief were as good as its interpreters alleged it to be, it was a work of wicked demons to wrap round it a veil of dishonourable fictions.[134] The myth and the god who is supposed to be behind it vanish together, says Tatian: if the myth be true, the gods are worthless demons; if the myth be not true, but only a symbol of the powers of nature, the godhead is gone, for the powers of nature are not gods since they constrain no worship.[135] In a similar way, in the fourth century, Eusebius treats it as a vain attempt of a younger generation to explain away (θεραπεῦσαι) the mistakes of their fathers.[136]

2. It was attacked by the Greek philosophers in its application to Christianity. There are some persons, says Porphyry,[137] who being anxious to find, not a way of being rid of the immorality of the Old Testament, but an explanation of it, have recourse to interpretations which do not hold together nor fit the words which they interpret, which serve not so much as a defence of Jewish doctrines as to bring approbation and credit for their own. It is a delusive evasion of your difficulties, said in effect Celsus;[138] you find in your sacred books narratives which shock your moral sense; you think that you get rid of the difficulty by having recourse to allegory; but you do not: in the first place, your scriptures do not admit of being so interpreted; in the second place, the explanation is often more difficult than the narrative which it explains. The answer of Origen is weak: it is partly a _Tu quoque_: Homer is worse than Genesis, and if allegory will not explain the latter, neither will it the former: it is partly that, if there had been no secret, the Psalmist would not have said, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may see the wondrous things of thy law.”

3. The method had opponents even in Alexandria itself. Origen[139] more than once speaks of those who objected to his “digging wells below the surface;” and Eusebius mentions a lost work of the learned Nepos of Arsinoê, entitled “A Refutation of the Allegorists.”[140] But it found its chief antagonist in the school of interpretation which arose at the end of the fourth century at Antioch. The dominant philosophy of Alexandria had been a fusion of Platonism with some elements of both Stoicism and revived Pythagoreanism: that of Antioch was coming to be Aristotelianism. The one was idealistic, the other realistic: the one was a philosophy of dreams and mystery, the other of logic and system: to the one, Revelation was but the earthy foothold from which speculation might soar into infinite space; to the other, it was “a positive fact given in the light of history.”[141] Allegorical interpretation was the outcome of the one; literal interpretation of the other. The precursor of the Antiochene school, Julius Africanus, of Emmaus, has left behind a letter which has been said “to contain in its two short pages more true exegesis than all the commentaries and homilies of Origen.”[142] The chief founder of the school was Lucian, a scholar who shares with Origen the honour of being the founder of Biblical philology, and whose lifetime, which was cut short by martyrdom in 311, just preceded the great Trinitarian controversies of the Nicene period. His disciples came to be leaders on the Arian side: among them were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius himself. The question of exegesis became entangled with the question of orthodoxy. The greatest of Greek interpreters, Theodore of Mopsuestia, followed, a hundred years afterwards, in the same path; but in his day also questions of canons of interpretation were so entangled with questions of Christology, and the Christology of the Antiochene school was so completely outvoted at the great ecclesiastical assemblies by the Christology of the Alexandrian school, that his reputation for scholarship has been almost wholly obscured by the ill-fame of his leanings towards Nestorianism. It has been one of the many results of the controversies into which the metaphysical tendencies of the Greeks led the churches of the fourth and fifth centuries, to postpone almost to modern times the acceptance of “the literal grammatical and historical sense” as the true sense of Scripture.

* * * * *

The allegorical method of interpretation has survived the circumstances of its birth and the gathered forces of its opponents. It has filled a large place in the literature of Christianity. But by the irony of history, though it grew out of a tendency towards rationalism, it has come in later times to be vested like a saint, and to wear an aureole round its head. It has been the chief instrument by which the dominant beliefs of every age have constructed their strongholds.[143] It was harmless so long as it was free. It was the play of innocent imagination on the surface of great truths. But when it became authoritative, when the idea prevailed that only that poetical sense was true of which the majority approved, and when moreover it became traditional, so that one generation was bound to accept the symbolical interpretations of its predecessors, it became at once the slave of dogmatism and the tyrant of souls. Outside its relation to dogmatism, it has a history and a value which rather grow than diminish with time. It has given to literature books which, though of little value for the immediate purpose of interpretation, are yet monuments of noble and inspiring thoughts. It has contributed even more to art than to literature. The poetry of life would have been infinitely less rich without it. For though without it Dante might have been stirred to write, he would not have written the _Divine Comedy_; and though without it Raffaelle would have painted, he would not have painted the St. Cecilia; and though without it we should have had Gothic cathedrals, we should not have had that sublime symbolism of their structure which is of itself a religious education. It survives because it is based upon an element in human nature which is not likely to pass away: whatever be its value in relation to the literature of the past, it is at least the expression in relation to the present that our lives are hedged round by the unknown, that there is a haze about both our birth and our departure, and that even the meaner facts of life are linked to infinity.

But two modern beliefs militate against it.

1. The one belief affects all literature, religious and secular alike. It is that the thoughts of the past are relative to the past, and must be interpreted by it. The glamour of writing has passed away. A written word is no more than a spoken word; and a spoken word is taken in the sense in which the speaker used it, at the time at which he used it. There have been writers of enigmas and painters of emblems, but they have formed an infinitesimal minority. There have been those who, as Cicero says of himself in writing to Atticus, have written allegorically lest open speech should betray them; but such cryptograms have only a temporary and transient use. The idea that ancient literature consists of riddles which it is the business of modern literature to solve, has passed for ever away.

2. The other belief affects specially religious literature. It is that the Spirit of God has not yet ceased to speak to men, and that it is important for us to know, not only what He told the men of other days, but also what He tells us now. Interpretation is of the present as well as of the past. We can believe that there is a Divine voice, but we find it hard to believe that it has died away to an echo from the Judean hills. We can believe in religious as in other progress, but we find it hard to believe that that progress was suddenly arrested fifteen hundred years ago. The study of nature and the study of history have given us another maxim for religious conduct and another axiom of religious belief. They apply to that which is divine within us the inmost secret of our knowledge and mastery of that which is divine without us: _man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God_.

LECTURE IV.

GREEK AND CHRISTIAN RHETORIC.

It is customary to measure the literature of an age by its highest products, and to measure the literary excellence of one age as compared with that of another by the highest products of each of them. We look, for example, upon the Periclean age at Athens, or the Augustan age at Rome, or the Elizabethan age in our own country, as higher than the ages respectively of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, or the early Georges. The former are “golden;” the latter, “silver.” Nor can it be doubted that from the point of view of literature in itself, as distinguished from literature in its relation to history or to social life, such a standard of measurement is correct. But the result of its application has been the doing of a certain kind of injustice to periods of history in which, though the high-water mark has been lower, there has been a wide diffusion of literary culture. This is the case with the period with which we are dealing. It produced no writer of the first rank. It was artificial rather than spontaneous. It was imitative more than original. It was appreciative rather than constructive. Its literature was born, not of the enthusiasm of free activity, but rather of the passivity which comes when there is no hope. But as to a student of science the after-glow is an object of study no less than the noon-day, so to a student of the historical development of the world the silver age of a nation’s literature is an object of study no less than its golden age.

Its most characteristic feature was one for which it is difficult to find any more exact description than the paradoxical phrase, “a _viva-voce_ literature.” It had its birth and chief development in that part of the Empire in which Christianity and Greek life came into closest and most frequent contact. It was the product of the rhetorical schools which have been already described. In those schools the professor had been in the habit of illustrating his rules and instructing his students by model compositions of his own.[144] Such compositions were in the first instance exercises in the pleading of actual causes, and accusations or defences of real persons. The cases were necessarily supposed rather than actual, but they had a practical object in view, and came as close as possible to real life. The large growth of the habit of studying Rhetoric as a part of the education of a gentleman, and the increased devotion to the literature of the past, which came partly from the felt loss of spontaneity and partly from national pride,[145] caused these compositions in the rhetorical schools to take a wider range.[146] They began on the one hand to be divorced from even a fictitious connection with the law-courts, and on the other to be directly imitative of the styles of ancient authors. From the older Rhetoric, the study of forensic logic and speech with a view to the actual practice in the law-courts, which necessarily still went on, there branched out the new Rhetoric, which was sometimes specially known as Sophistic.

* * * * *

Sophistic proceeded for the most part upon the old lines. Its literary compositions preserved the old name, “exercises” (μελέται), as though they were still the rehearsals of actual pleadings. They were divided into two kinds, _Theses_ and _Hypotheses_, according as a subject was argued in general terms or names were introduced.[147] The latter were the more common. Their subjects were sometimes fictitious, sometimes taken from real history. Of the first of these there is a good example in Lucian’s _Tyrannicide_: the situation is, that a man goes into the citadel of a town for the purpose of killing a tyrant: not finding the tyrant, the man kills the tyrant’s son: the tyrant coming in and seeing his son with the sword in his body, stabs himself: the man claims the reward as a tyrannicide. Of the second kind of subjects, there are such instances as “Demosthenes defending himself against the charge of having taken the bribe which Demades brought,”[148] and “The Athenians wounded at Syracuse beg their comrades who are returning to Athens to put them to death.”[149] The Homeric cycle was an unfailing mine of subjects: the Persian wars hardly less so. “Would you like to hear a sensible speech about Agamemnon, or are you sick of hearing speeches about Agamemnon, Atreus’ son?” asks Dio Chrysostom in one of his Dialogues.[150] “I should not take amiss even a speech about Adrastus or Tantalus or Pelops, if I were likely to get good from it,” is the polite reply. In the treatment of both kinds of subjects, stress was laid on dramatic consistency. The character, whether real or supposed, was required to speak in an appropriate style.[151] The “exercise” had to be recited with an appropriate intonation.[152] Sometimes the dramatic effect was heightened by the introduction of two or more characters: for example, one of the surviving _pièces_ of Dio Chrysostom[153] consists of a wrangle in tragic style, and with tragic diction, between Odysseus and Philoctetes.

This kind of Sophistic has an interest in two respects, apart from its relation to contemporary life. It gave birth to the Greek romance, which is the progenitor of the mediæval romance and of the modern novel:[154] a notable example of such a sophistical romance in Christian literature is the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions; in non-Christian literature, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana. It gave birth also to the writings in the style of ancient authors which, though commonly included in the collected works of those authors, betray their later origin by either the poverty of their thought or inadvertent neologisms of expression: for example, the Eryxias of Plato.[155]

But though Sophistic grew mainly out of Rhetoric, it had its roots also in Philosophy. It was sometimes defined as Rhetoric philosophizing.[156] It threw off altogether the fiction of a law-court or an assembly, and discussed in continuous speech the larger themes of morality or theology. Its utterances were not “exercises” but “discourses” (διαλέξεις).[157] It preached sermons. It created not only a new literature, but also a new profession. The class of men against whom Plato had inveighed had become merged in the general class of educators: they were specialized partly as grammarians, partly as rhetoricians: the word “sophist,” to which the invectives had failed to attach a permanent stigma, remained partly as a generic name, and partly as a special name for the new class of public talkers. They differed from philosophers in that they did not mark themselves off from the rest of the world, and profess their devotion to a higher standard of living, by wearing a special dress.[158] They were a notable feature of their time. Some of them had a fixed residence and gave discourses regularly, like the “stated minister” of a modern congregation: some of them travelled from place to place. The audience was usually gathered by invitation. There were no newspaper advertisements in those days, and no bells; consequently the invitations were personal. They were made sometimes by a “card” or “programme,” sometimes by word of mouth: “Come and hear me lecture to-day.”[159] Sometimes a messenger was sent round; sometimes the sophist would go round himself and knock at people’s doors and promise them a fine discourse.[160]

The audience of a travelling sophist was what might be expected among a people who lived very much out of doors. When a stranger appeared who was known by his professional dress, and whose reputation had preceded him, the people clustered round him—like iron filings sticking to a magnet, says Themistius.[161] If there was a resident sophist, the two were pitted together; just as if, in modern times, a famous violinist from Paris or Vienna might be asked to play at the next concert with the leading violinist in London. It was a matter not only of professional honour, but also of obligation. A man could not refuse. There is a story in Plutarch[162] about a sophist named Niger who found himself in a town in Galatia which had a resident professor. The resident made a discourse. Niger had, unfortunately, a fish-bone in his throat and could not easily speak; but he had either to speak or to lose his reputation: he spoke, and an inflammation set in which killed him. There is a much longer story in Philostratus[163] of Alexander Peloplato going to Athens to discourse in a friendly contest with Herodes Atticus. The audience gathered together in a theatre in the Ceramicus, and waited a long time for Herodes to appear: when he did not come, they grew angry and thought that it was a trick, and insisted on Alexander coming forward to discourse before Herodes arrived. And when Herodes did arrive, Alexander suddenly changed his style—sang tenor, so to speak, instead of bass—and Herodes followed him, and there was a charming interchange of compliments: “We sophists,” said Alexander, “are all of us only slices of you, Herodes.”

Sometimes they went to show their skill at one of the great festivals, such as that of Olympia. Lucian[164] tells a story of one who had plucked feathers from many orators to make a wonderful discourse about Pythagoras. His object was to gain the glory of delivering it as an extempore oration, and he arranged with a confederate that its subject should be the subject selected for him by the audience. But the imposture was too barefaced: some of the hearers amused themselves by assigning the different passages to their several authors; and the sophist himself at last joined in the universal laughter. And Dio Chrysostom[165] draws a picture of a public place at Corinth during the Isthmian games, which he alleges to be as true of the time of Diogenes as of his own: “You might hear many poor wretches of sophists shouting and abusing one another, and their disciples, as they call them, squabbling, and many writers of books reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their poems, and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many soothsayers giving the meaning of prodigies, and ten thousand rhetoricians twisting law-suits, and no small number of traders driving their several trades.”

Of the manner of the ordinary discourse there are many indications. It was given sometimes in a private house, sometimes in a theatre, sometimes in a regular lecture-room. The professor sometimes entered already robed in his “pulpit-gown,” and sometimes put it on in the presence of his audience. He mounted the steps to his professorial chair, and took his seat upon its ample cushion.[166] He sometimes began with a preface, sometimes he proceeded at once to his discourse. He often gave the choice of a subject to his audience.[167] He was ready to discourse on any theme; and it was part of his art either to force the choice of a subject, or so to turn the subject as to bring in something which he had already prepared. “His memory is incredible,” says Pliny of Isæus; “he repeats by heart what he appears to say extempore; but he does not falter even in a single word.”[168] “When your audience have chosen a subject for you,” says Lucian,[169] in effect, in his satirical advice to rhetoricians, “go straight at it and say without hesitation whatever words come to your tongue, never minding about the first point coming first and the second second: the great thing is to go right on and not have any pauses. If you have to talk at Athens about adultery, bring in the customs of the Hindoos and Persians: above all, have passages about Marathon and Cynægirus—that is indispensable. And Athos must always be turned into sea, and the Hellespont into dry land, and the sun must be darkened by the clouds of Median arrows ... and Salamis and Artemisium and Platæa, and so forth, must come in pretty frequently; and, above all, those little Attic words I told you about must blossom on the surface of your speech—ἅττα (_atta_) and δήπουθεν (_depouthen_)—must be sprinkled about freely, whether they are wanted or not: for they are pretty words, even when they do not mean anything.”

It was a disappointment if he was not interrupted by applause. “A sophist is put out in an extempore speech,” says Philostratus,[170] “by a serious-looking audience and tardy praise and no clapping.” “They are all agape,” says Dio Chrysostom,[171] “for the murmur of the crowd ... like men walking in the dark, they move always in the direction of the clapping and the shouting.” “I want your praise,” said one of them to Epictetus.[172] “What do you mean by my praise?” asked the philosopher. “Oh, I want you to say Bravo! and Wonderful!” replied the sophist. These were the common cries; others were not infrequent—“Divine!” “Inspired!” “Unapproachable!”[173] They were accompanied by clapping of the hands and stamping of the feet and waving of the arms. “If your friends see you breaking down,” says Lucian in his satirical advice to a rhetorician,[174] “let them pay the price of the suppers you give them by stretching out their arms and giving you a chance of thinking of something to say in the interval between the rounds of applause.” Sometimes, of course, there were signs of disapproval. “It is the mark of a good hearer,” says Plutarch,[175] “that he does not howl out like a dog at everything of which he disapproves, but at any rate waits until the end of the discourse.”

After the discourse, the professor would go round: “‘What did you think of me to-day?’” says one in Epictetus.[176] “‘Upon my life, sir, I thought you were admirable.’ ‘What did you think of my best passage?’ ‘Which was that?’ ‘Where I described Pan and the Nymphs.’ ‘Oh, it was excessively well done.’” Again, to quote another anecdote from Epictetus:[177] “‘A much larger audience to-day, I think,’ says the professor. ‘Yes: much larger.’ ‘Five hundred, I should guess.’ ‘Oh, nonsense; it could not have been less than a thousand.’ ‘Why that is more than Dio ever had: I wonder why it was: they appreciated what I said, too.’ ‘Beauty, sir, can move even a stone.’”

They made both money and reputation. The more eminent of them were among the most distinguished men of the time. They were the pets of society, and sometimes its masters.[178] They were employed on affairs of state at home and on embassies abroad.[179] They were sometimes placed on the free list of their city, and lived at the public expense. They were sometimes made senators—raised, as we might say, to the House of Lords—and sometimes governors of provinces.[180] When they died, and sometimes before their death, public statues were erected in their honour.[181] The inscriptions of some of them are recorded by historians, and some remain: “The Queen of Cities to the King of Eloquence,” was inscribed on the statue of Prohæresius at Rome.[182] “One of the Seven Wise Men, though he had not fulfilled twenty-five years,” is inscribed on an existing base of a statue at Attaleia;[183] and, beneath a representation of crowning, the words, “He subjects all things to eloquence,” are found on a similar base at Parion.[184]

They naturally sometimes gave themselves great airs. There are many stories about them. Philostratus tells one of the Emperor Antoninus Pius on arriving at Smyrna going, in accordance with imperial custom, to spend the night at the house which was at once the best house in the city and the house of the most distinguished man. It was that of the sophist Polemo, who happened on the Emperor’s arrival to be away from home; but he returned from his journey at night, and with loud exclamations against being kept out of his own, turned the Emperor out of doors.[185] The common epithet for them is ἀλαζών—a word with no precise English equivalent, denoting a cross between a braggart and a mountebank.

But the real grounds on which the more earnest men objected to them were those upon which Plato had objected to their predecessors: their making a trade of knowledge, and their unreality.

1. The making of discourses, whether literary or moral, was a thriving trade.[186] The fees given to a leading sophist were on the scale of those given to a _prima donna_ in our own day.[187] But the objection to it was not so much the fact of its thriving, as the fact of its being a trade at all. “If they do what they do,” says Dio Chrysostom,[188] “as poets and rhetoricians, there is no harm perhaps; but if they do it as philosophers, for the sake of their own personal gain and glory, and not for the sake of benefiting you, there is harm.” The defence which Themistius[189] makes for himself is more candid than effective: “I do make money,” he says; “people give me sometimes one _mina_, sometimes two, sometimes as much as a talent: but, since I must speak about myself, let me ask you this—Did any one ever come away the worse for having heard me? Mark, I charge nothing: it is a voluntary contribution.”

2. The stronger ground of objection to them was their unreality. They had lost touch with life. They had made philosophy itself seem unreal. “They are not philosophers, but fiddlers,” said the sturdy old Stoic Musonius.[190] It is not necessary to suppose that they were all charlatans. There was then, as now, the irrepressible young man of good morals who wished to air his opinions. But the tendency to moralize had become divorced from practice. They preached, not because they were in grim earnest about the reformation of the world, but because preaching was a respectable profession, and the listening to sermons a fashionable diversion. “The mass of men,” says Plutarch,[191] “enjoy and admire a philosopher when he is discoursing about their neighbours; but if the philosopher, leaving their neighbours alone, speaks his mind about things that are of importance to the men themselves, they take offence and vote him a bore; for they think that they ought to listen to a philosopher in his lecture-room in the same bland way that they listen to tragedians in the theatre. This, as might be expected, is what happens to them in regard to the sophists; for when a sophist gets down from his pulpit and puts aside his MSS., in the real business of life he seems but a small man, and under the thumb of the majority. They do not understand about real philosophers that both seriousness and play, grim looks and smiles, and above all the direct personal application of what they say to each individual, have a useful result for those who are in the habit of giving a patient attention to them.”

* * * * *

Against this whole system of veneering rhetoric with philosophy, there was a strong reaction. Apart from the early Christian writers, with whom “sophist” is always a word of scorn, there were men, especially among the new school of Stoics, who were at open war with its unreality.[192] I will ask you to listen to the expostulation which the great moral reformer Epictetus addresses to a rhetorician who came to him:

“First of all, tell yourself what you want to be and then act
accordingly. For this is what we see done in almost all other
cases. Men who are practising for the games first of all decide
what they mean to be, and then proceed to do the things that
follow from their decision.... So then when you say, Come
and listen to my lecture, first of all consider whether your
action be not thrown away for want of an end, and then consider
whether it be not a mistake, on account of your real end being
a wrong one. Suppose I ask a man, ‘Do you wish to do good by
your expounding, or to gain applause?’ Thereupon straightway
you hear him saying, ‘What do I care for the applause of the
multitude?’ And his sentiment is right: for in the same way,
applause is nothing to the musician _quâ_ musician, or to the
geometrician _quâ_ geometrician.

“You wish to do good, then,” I continue; “in what particular
respect? tell me, that I too may hasten to your lecture-room.
But can a man impart good to others without having previously
received good himself?

“No: just as a man is of no use to us in the way of
carpentering unless he is himself a carpenter.

“Would you like to know, then, whether you have received good
yourself? Bring me your convictions, philosopher. (Let us take
an example.) Did you not the other day praise so-and-so more
than you really thought he deserved? Did you not flatter that
senator’s son?—and yet you would not like your own sons to be
like him, would you?

“God forbid!

“Then why did you flatter him and toady to him?

“He is a clever young fellow, and a good student.

“How do you know that?

“He admires my lectures.

“Yes; that is the real reason. But don’t you think that
these very people despise you in their secret hearts? I mean
that when a man who is conscious that he has neither done
nor thought any single good thing, finds a philosopher who
tells him that he is a man of great ability, sincerity, and
genuineness, of course he says to himself, ‘This man wants to
get something out of me!’ Or (if this is not the case with
you), tell me what proof he has given of great ability. No
doubt he has attended you for a considerable time: he has heard
you discoursing and expounding: but has he become more modest
in his estimate of himself—or is he still looking for some one
to teach him?

“Yes, he is looking for some one to teach him.

“To teach him how to live? No, fool; not how to live, but how
to talk: which also is the reason why he admires you....

“[The truth is, you like applause: you care more for that than
for doing good, and so you invite people to come and hear you.]

“But does a _philosopher_ invite people to come and hear him?
Is it not that as the sun, or as food, is its own sufficient
attraction, so the philosopher also is his own sufficient
attraction to those who are to be benefited by him? Does a
physician invite people to come and let him heal them?...
(Imagine what a genuine philosopher’s invitation would be)—‘I
invite you to come and be told that you are in a bad way—that
you care for everything except what you should care for—that
you do not know what things are good and what evil—and that
you are unhappy and unfortunate.’ A nice invitation! and yet
if that is not the result of what a philosopher says, he and
his words alike are dead. (Musonius) Rufus used to say, ‘If
you have leisure to praise me, my teaching has been in vain.’
Accordingly he used to talk in such a way that each individual
one of us who sat there thought that some one had been telling
Rufus about him: he so put his finger upon what we had done, he
so set the individual faults of each one of us clearly before
our eyes.

“The philosopher’s lecture-room, gentlemen, is a surgery: when
you go away you ought to have felt not pleasure but pain. For
when you come in, something is wrong with you: one man has put
his shoulder out, another has an abscess, another a headache.
Am I—the surgeon—then, to sit down and give you a string of
fine sentences, that you may praise me—and then go away—the man
with the dislocated arm, the man with the abscess, the man with
the headache—just as you came? Is it for this that young men
come away from home, and leave their parents and their kinsmen
and their property, to say ‘Bravo!’ to you for your fine moral
conclusions? Is this what Socrates did—or Zeno—or Cleanthes?

“Well, but is there no such class of speeches as exhortations?

“Who denies it? But in what do exhortations consist? In
being able to show, whether to one man or to many men, the
contradiction in which they are involved, and that their
thoughts are given to anything but what they really mean.
For they mean to give them to the things that really tend
to happiness, but they look for those things elsewhere than
where they really are. (That is the true aim of exhortation):
but to show this, is it necessary to place a thousand chairs,
and invite people to come and listen, and dress yourself up
in a fine gown, and ascend the pulpit—and describe the death
of Achilles? Cease, I implore you, from bringing dishonour,
as far as you can, upon noble words and deeds. There can
be no stronger exhortation to duty, I suppose, than for a
speaker to make it clear to his audience that he wants to get
something out of them! Tell me who, after hearing you lecture
or discourse, became anxious about or reflected upon himself?
or who, as he went out of the room, said, ‘The philosopher put
his finger upon my faults: I must not behave in that way again’?

“You cannot: the utmost praise you get is when a man says to
another, ‘That was a beautiful passage about Xerxes,’ and
the other says, ‘No, I liked best that about the battle of
Thermopylæ.’

“This is a philosopher’s sermon!”[193]

I have dwelt on this feature of the Greek life of the early Christian centuries, not with the view of giving a complete picture of it, which would be impossible within the compass of a lecture, but rather with the view of establishing a presumption, which you will find amply justified by further researches, that it was sufficient, not only in its quality and complexity, but also in its mass, to account for certain features of early Christianity.

In passing from Greek life to Christianity, I will ask you, in the first instance, to note the broad distinction which exists between what in the primitive churches was known as “prophesying,” and that which in subsequent times came to be known as “preaching.” I lay the more stress upon the distinction for the accidental reason that, in the first reaction against the idea that “prophecy” necessarily meant “prediction,” it was maintained—and with a certain reservation the contention was true—that a “prophet” meant a “preacher.” The reservation is, that the prophet was not merely a preacher but a spontaneous preacher. He preached because he could not help it, because there was a divine breath breathing within him which must needs find an utterance. It is in this sense that the prophets of the early churches were preachers. They were not church officers appointed to discharge certain functions. They were the possessors of a _charisma_, a divine gift which was not official but personal. “No prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.” They did not practise beforehand how or what they should say; for “the Holy Ghost taught them in that very hour what they should say.” Their language was often, from the point of view of the rhetorical schools, a barbarous patois. They were ignorant of the rules both of style and of dialectic. They paid no heed to refinements of expression. The greatest preacher of them all claimed to have come among his converts, in a city in which Rhetoric flourished, not with the persuasiveness of human logic, but with the demonstration which was afforded by spiritual power.

Of that “prophesying” of the primitive churches it is not certain that we possess any monument. The Second Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of Jude are perhaps representatives of it among the canonical books of the New Testament. The work known as the Second Epistle of Clement is perhaps a representative of the form which it took in the middle of the second century; but though it is inspired by a genuine enthusiasm, it is rather more artistic in its form than a purely prophetic utterance is likely to have been.

In the course of the second century, this original spontaneity of utterance died almost entirely away. It may almost be said to have died a violent death. The dominant parties in the Church set their faces against it. The survivals of it in Asia Minor were formally condemned. The Montanists, as they were called, who tried to fan the lingering sparks of it into a flame, are ranked among heretics. And Tertullian is not even now admitted into the calendar of the Saints, because he believed the Montanists to be in the right.

It was inevitable that it should be so. The growth of a confederation of Christian communities necessitated the definition of a basis of confederation. Such a definition, and the further necessity of guarding it, were inconsistent with that free utterance of the Spirit which had existed before the confederation began. Prophesying died when the Catholic Church was formed.