11.- CORRESPONDENCIAS RECIBIDAS
11.29. Edición sobre el Consejo Central de Extensión
THE haeretics were, historically speaking, the predecessors of the Catholics, in spite of the assertions of Tertullian to the contrary. His ‘churches of apostolic census,’ like the apostles themselves, are unknown.
The writings of Justin Martyr cover the period from c. 147 to c. 167.
Casting now a glance backward through the Haze of his reminiscences, we now ask, Who preceded him as teachers? What names did they bear? What was their doctrine,? Who were the spiritual genitors of the Christiani? Our inquiry here concerns the reign of Hadrian (117-138), and Justin’s Apologia (147) reflects a certain amount of light upon that time.
Justin says that ‘after the ascension of Christ into heaven,’ the daemons put forward’ certain men to declare that they were gods; and that these men were not- only not persecuted by the Romans; but were thought worthy by them of honours. ‘ One of these was Simon the
Samaritan, who in the time of Claudius Caesar wrought magic miracles by means of the art of daemons operating in him, and this ‘in your royal [45] city of Rome! He was thought to be a god by the Romans, and honoured as such among them with a statue, which was erected on the Tiber between two bridges, and inscribed, with .the Roman inscription Simoni deo sancto.105
It is almost needless to point out that semones was the general Sabine name of tutelar genii or lares;106 and that the temple of Semo Sanctus or Sancus stood on the Quirinal at Rome,
103The distinction of an apostolic and a post-apostolic age therefore falls away. There is no age which is not
‘post-apostolic.’ Let the reader carefully consider our other earliest witnesses to ‘apostolic’ tradition, before a’ Canon’ was talked of: Irenaeus I. 8. 1, 2. 30. 9, 3. 9. 1, 17- 4. Tert. praescr. 6, &c. Clem. A. Strom. 1. 1, 9, 7. 16; Paed. 3. 12. Cf. Euseb. 6. 12. If these ‘witnesses’ be closely scrutinised, there will appear little reason for admitting the existence of a Canon in the modern sense before the fourth century. The recent
Introductions of Holtzmann (1885) and of Weiss (1886) build upon the old illusions; less so, Harnack, Dogm. Gesch.1886.
104 Haeresiotes, Justin calls them, Tryph. 80.
105 Apol. 1. 26.
106 Cf. Dius in Dius Fidius ; Preller, Röm. Myth. 79.
founded (according to Dionysius) in 466 B.C.107 There could be no more absurd anachronism than that by which Justin confounds an archaeologic fact of Roman religion.with a
reminiscence of a Samaritan ‘a hundred years since;’ no greater paralogism than that which confounds a supposed human person with a spirit, such as a Semo, Lar, or Genius was.
Mistakes as gross are constantly committed by mystical mythologists in our day; but we do not reckon men of that class as good witnesses to matters of fact.
Almost all the Samaritans, continues Justin, and some of other nations, confess that Simo sanctus is a god, and worship him. One Helena, who followed him about that time,’ and who had formerly been a common prostitute, is said by them to be his ‘first notion’ or
conception.108 It does not concern us to unravel the perplexities of these fancies, which were rife enough during our period: witness the ‘Proteus’ of Lucian and his Pseudomantis, and above all the Appollonius of Philostratus. There was an immense craving for sôteria,109 for assured weal of body and soul; and mages, [46] thaumaturges, manteis and pseudo-manteis, like the Alexandros and the Peregrinos denounced by Lucian, swarmed in the world,
practising on the wretched credulity of the ignorant. These men were regarded, like modern spiritualists, as semi-divine, and at a little distance of time were confounded with the divine.110 All that results from the allusion of Justin is, that he was aware of some heathen cult or cults widely diffused, the origin of which in his own land he knew, but which he felt to be powerfully antagonistic to the dogmas he was defending. Menander, another Samaritan, and a disciple of Simon, who was also under daemonic inspiration, deceived many at Antioch by magic art. He even persuaded his followers that they would never die;111 and there are still, says Justin, some of this confession, disciples of his, at the present day. Marcion of Pontus is still alive, and teaches his disciples to own some other god greater than the Demiurge.
Marcion ‘among every race of men has succeeded, by the assistance of daemons, in causing many to break out into blasphemies, and to deny God the Creator of all, and to profess that another greater god has wrought greater things.’112
The statement now follows, that all who take their rise from these teachers are called
Christiani, just as the various schools of philosophers bear the common name of philosophy.
Whether these Christian sects are guilty of the dark charges of Thyestean banquets [47] and Oidipodean incest or no, Justin cannot say; but this he knows, that they are not harassed nor put to death by the Romans on account of their opinions.
Later, Justin repeats himself in reference to Simon and Alexander, the Samaritans. They still hold many deluded by their magical works of power,—a delusion which in the case of the
‘sacred Senate’ and the Roman people had gone so far, that they set up a statue to Simon, as aforesaid.113 Justin hopes that the holy Senate and the Roman people will learn their error, and cast the statue down! ‘ Num furis, Justine, an prudens ludis nos, obscura canendo?’ An uneasy suspicion will steal upon the mind, as if we were being made the victims of an elaborate jest.
107 Ovid. Fast. 6. 213, with notes in Merkel, Peter, or Paley’s edition.
108G=PPQKC RTYVJ : a personification in the Gnostic system, confounded with an actual person: see the jest against the stoic Pronoia as an old woman Cic. N. D.
109 Heilssucht und Heilsmanie, Lippert terms it.
110 Lucian says the Christiani regarded Peregrinos ‘as a god,’ also as their lawgiver and prostates. Peregr. c.11.
111 ‘The wretches (the Christiani) have persuaded themselves they shall be immortal and live for ever.’ Ibid. ; Cf.
Hiat. Jos.. 26.
112 Lucian says that the ‘great one who was impaled in Palestine’ was still honoured because he brought this near religion or cultus VGNGVJ into existence, c. 11.
113 Apol. I. 56.
Still, setting aside this nonsense about Simon Magus, we must remember that Justin at all events knows of a contemporary sect of Simonians and another of Marcionites, both of them bearing the common name of Christiani. From Irenaeeus the list of these ‘Gnostic’ sectarians is considerably increased. We hear of Nicolaitans, disciples of Cerinthus, of Saturninus, of Cerdo, of Carpocrates, Basilides, Valentinus, of Ophites, Perates, and others. Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, were the centres of their activity, and their period is the reign of Hadrian and onwards. But the legendary Archimage, Simon of Samaria, is the spiritual father of them all.
Let us once more return to our old standpoint, the commencement of the reign of Hadrian.
There is now revealed to our view a swarm of teachers bearing that common name with the Roman vulgar, [48] passing from city to city on the errand of novel doctrinal disseminations.
These men were proud of the Greek gnosis, contemptuous of the Jews, of their Scriptures and of their Theology, and of their very God, the Demiurge, and eagerly bent on securing the spiritual empire for Hellenism. Or, to shun abstractions, this was the national struggle of Greeks with Jews in the heart of civilisation, and under a people whose laws afforded them a common protection. The notes of the Gnostic in general are antinomistic feeling and anti-Judaistic Theology. The attack upon the conception of the Demiurge, or Creator, in other words, the God of the Old Testament, could be regarded as nothing less than extremest
blasphemy by strict adherents to the Law. And equally opposed to the pure monotheism of the typical Ebionites were the new Christologies of Gnostic speculation!
We find ourselves, then, in the midst of a time when the common name of Christiani covered antagonisms the most violent, differences of feeling and of dogma the most irreconcileable.
The synagogue was at war with the ecclesia; Ebionites and apostles of the Sanhedrin, Jewish hagioi, prophets and teachers were ranked against Hellenic or Hellenist sophists of the type of Justin of Neapolis and his Gnostic opponents. Under such conditions the more scholastic Gnostics, with a poetical system that had relish only for a limited class of educated men; bad little chance of wide or enduring popularity.
We must now follow the clue of internal evidence. We must seek for traces of that purer Judaism or Ebionitism which preceded Catholic Christianity, and which may be detected by the, resemblance of its spirit and forms to the later prophetic and moral [49] literature of the Jews; and negatively, by the absence of Hellenic Christology and other Hellenic modes of intuition of the Divine. We must then trace; as far as the too scanty evidence permits, the process by which the material of tradition assumed the intelligible forms of popular Greek and Roman thought.
We have avoided so far knowingly taking a single step into the region of mere inference and conjecture. We have confined ourselves to named and dated witnesses. The course of our investigation has brought us back, again and again, to the standpoint of Tacitus, c. 116. The brief account he gives of the death of the Auctor some eighty years before, we must conclude to have been derived indirectly from the Christiani themselves. But it is historically without certification ; nor does the belief ascribed to Marcion (c. 138) respecting the ‘ 15 th year of Tiberius,’114 nor that of Justin (c. 147), no more than that in the anonymous and undated pseudo-Clementine ‘ Recognitions,’ furnish any additional evidence in the historical sense.115 At present, it must be maintained that at the beginning of the second century, while the time
‘Christ’ was known in the like general sense that the titles Caesar, Arsaces, Pharaoh were
114 Iren, I. 27. 2, 3. 12 ; Tert. Adv. M. I. 19.
115 I. 6, The passage describes the vague and ever-swelling rumour in the Orient which took its rise in Tiberius’s reign.
known, Jesus was, not existent for History.116 Not a single witness was then in old age forthcoming to declare, ‘ I was present at the Crucifixion’ nor ‘ I knew one who was present at the Crucifixion.’
In the time of Vespasian there was a rumour con [50] cerning the future rise of an Oriental king, fulfilled only in the Flavian house itself. Forty-five years later rumour is busy again, in a darker time, with a good message derived from a more ancient time concerning the kingdom of God, yet to be realised. Wherever hope and ambition live in oppressed hearts, the
inarticulate music from the distance will be heard; and it will gradually resolve itself into articulate words, and corresponding images of grandeur will be begotten in the general mind.
For
‘Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures;
And of so easy and so plain a step, That the blunt monster with uncounted head,
The still discordant wavering multitude Can play upon it.’
Not until late in the second century is a light cast back by Irenaeus and his disciple Hippolytus upon the mist in which Christiani are enveloped, by their informations concerning ‘the
Gnostics’ from Cerinthus (c. 115) and those who followed him. From these sources we learn that a mighty effort at spiritual innovation had been going on in Asia Minor, in Antioch, in Samaria, in Rome and Alexandria. The Gnostics had proclaimed a new religion, a new rite, a new God, at war with the Creator and God of the Old Testament, a Gospel of liberation from the present world and its ‘ beggarly elements,’ a doctrine of ‘ knowledge, faith, and
immortality,’ a sublimated creed, in which the fleshly actuality and suffering of Jesus was disdainfully denied. The ideal figure of Simon Magus doubtless represents the ‘glorification of Christianity’ in the Gnostic preaching. And the [51] conclusion is probable that in the Gnostic movement we see the real beginning of the conquests of the Christiani, in other words, the victory of Hellenic religion and speculation over the narrower and less flexible spirit of Judaism.117
116 Clem. Recog.. I. 45.
117 See Hilgenfeld, Ketzergesch., and R. A. Lipsius, Die Apokr. Apostel Gesch., 1883.
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