Hellenism and Christianity (Routledge Revivals)

Edwyn Bevan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138026063
• eBook ISBN: 9781317684824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

First published in 1921, this title examines the relationship between what the author labels the 'rationalist' element in Western culture on the one hand, derived from the ancient Greeks, and Christianity, on the other. Bevan contends that these two traditions are distinct, but not mutually exclusive, and that to understand fully their mutuality and reciprocity it is necessary to examine the distinct history of both: their individual provenances, their fusion and interpenetration, and also, their future together.

The first chapter attempts to indicate the significance of Hellenic culture in its relation to Eastern civilisation. The extinction of Paganism at the time of Augustine is examined, as is a selection of moral issues associated with the Christian life, as that is interpreted by the author. Finally, the notion of 'progress' is investigated with specific reference to the position of Christianity in the modern world.

VI

Between Two Worlds

AN eminent scholar and man of letters once wrote a book on Ancient Greek Literature, and in its concluding paragraph glanced at the final destiny of the ancient culture and at that which took its place. “The search for Truth,” he wrote, “was finally made hopeless when the world, mistrusting Reason, weary of argument and wonder, flung itself passionately under the spell of a system of authoritative Revelation, which claimed a censorship over all Truth, and stamped free questioning as sin.”

These words seem to give expression in an admirably concise and telling way to a sentiment very general among classical scholars. In passing from the products of the human mind in the old pagan environment to the products of the human mind under the influence of Christ, they have a sense of coming to something markedly inferior. It is not only a question of some conventional literary standard which has set up a particular phase in the evolution of a language as classical, and regards everything written in other forms of the language as essentially debased. We have all smiled, of course, at the professor who warned his pupils against reading the New Testament in the original for fear of spoiling their Greek; but it is not only scholastic prejudice. It is not a mere whim which has made one form of Greek and Latin classical; the fashion is based upon an estimate of a greater inherent value in some respect belonging to the literary products of the classical age. Can it be denied that in passing from classical to patristic literature the ordinary humanist must perforce feel that the mind of these writers is working within restricted limits; that their outlook is narrowed by ecclesiastical conventions which have no universal interest for mankind; that their acuteness and originality have play only within a field bounded by premises which are never themselves examined by free thought? We imagine Plato and Aristotle, if they had been confronted with their Christian descendants, brushing away a mass of ecclesiastical cobwebs with an unsparing hand and recalling thought to the broad basal facts of reality.

If we are concerned to maintain that with Christianity something new of unique value entered the world, we must face fairly the aspect of deterioration which the Christian world offers to the classical humanist. And I suppose we may allow that deterioration as a fact and yet not believe that it was due to Christianity. There was a complex of causes bringing about the intellectual decline of the ancient world at the moment when Christianity entered the field; and if it is the Divine plan that the good of mankind should be worked out only in a process of ages, there is nothing to forbid a man’s holding that a new principle of life came into the world with Christianity, and that nevertheless its operation was not designed to be so rapid as to prevent the downfall of that particular society into which it was first introduced. As a matter of fact it has been pointed out—by Dr. Bigg, I think—that if the Christian writers are compared, not with Plato and Aristotle, but with the non-Christian writers of their own time, they show no inferiority on the intellectual side. Origen is not on a lower level than Porphyry, nor Basil than Libanius. Everywhere in the agony of ancient civilization, beaten upon and penetrated by the barbarian mass around it, it seemed the supreme task to maintain as far as possible the tradition of the past—to be stationary seemed an achievement, when the forces making for retrogression were so strong — “having done all, to stand.” The authority of the past became the watchword in all departments of spiritual and intellectual activity—in the dry scholasticism of the later Roman Empire, no less than in the tradition of the Church. We may believe that Christianity had enriched life with a new experience, and yet recognize that the minds at work upon the matter of life had not the same elasticity and liberty of movement as the minds which in the fourth century B.C. had been brought to play upon the experience, poorer in this particular, of the ancient Athenian. No theological prejudice need therefore induce us to minimize, no anti-theological prejudice to magnify, the relative truth of the words with which the scholar we quoted concluded his survey of ancient Greek literature.

And yet, as we transport ourselves in imagination back into those times when the ecclesiastical tradition is forming which is destined to confine the human spirit for so many centuries to come, we may feel a desire to force upon these minds, before the shell hardens, some of those ultimate questions which their ancestors had begun to consider. Is there no one at once sensible of the new thing inshrined in the life of the Christian society and able to look at things with the freedom of the ancient philosophy? It is all very well to see the operation of Christianity upon minds willing to take a mass of traditional doctrine for granted, but how much more interesting if we could discover some mind really quickened with the ancient scepticism and see it confronted with this new thing!

And here we meet the figure of the African professor of rhetoric, Aurelius Augustinus, the figure which embodies for us more than any other the transition from that classical world about to pass away to the world of Christendom. He is the child of the past, awakened to spiritual aspirations by Cicero, steeped to his finger ends in Virgil, one upon whom the rich heritage of the old pagan philosophy has come and whom it stimulates to original thought. And then this same man becomes the Christian doctor who, according to Harnack, more than any other one man shaped the theology and ruled the ecclesiastical practice of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Nay more—for here too, as in the case of some other great typical figures at crucial points of the world’s history, elements are transmitted which remain for the immediately succeeding ages undeveloped germs and only unfold their significance under the conditions of a later day—Augustine’s influence counted for much in giving its initial impulse to the Reformation, and yet further, through the revelation of personality, the introspective psychological analysis embodied in his “Confessions,” Augustine may appear, as some one has called him, the “first modern man.” Here surely is some one with whom at this moment of transition it would be interesting to converse.

And most interesting, we may add, at the moment of transition in his own individual history—while his outlook has not yet been hemmed in by such doctrines as that the act of two individuals some 4,780 years before is sufficient ground for assigning the whole of mankind to eternal torment—doctrines which have ceased to have much actuality for us—while he can still feel the power and charm of that culture upon which he is going to turn his back, while he is still occupied with the great basal questions—What is Truth, and how can man find it? Wherein does man’s good lie?—the old questions which had come down to him from ages of unsatisfied search, the questions that are living issues with men to-day—if at this moment of his history we might have speech with Aurelius Augustinus!

And we may—in the most pleasant surroundings. We are at Casciago, on the slopes which go from the uplands called Campo dei Fiori to the Lago di Varese. In our daily walks we have a view to the north-east of the full magnificence of the Pennine Alps dominated by Monte Rosa. It is August, and in the summer evenings the white peaks change to a wonderful rose. The spectacle seems hardly to arrest the attention of Augustine, and his eye passes without interest over the eternal snows. But we may remember that he is a man of the ancient world after all, and that our modern admiration for mountain heights is something quite alien to him. On the other hand, he is quite alive to the charm of the green meadows round about us, still fresh even in the late summer. “In monte incaseato” (the mountain of good things of the dairy), “monte tuo, monte uberi,” he quotes, playing on the name of the place—a quaint text of the Old Latin Psalter, not justified by anything in the Hebrew.¹

The estate at Casciago,² upon which we are staying, belongs to one Verecundus, a worthy citizen of Milan, whose profession of grammaticus, professor of literature, in the great city of North Italy, one supposes to have been lucrative. His wife is a Christian, and also, strangely enough, it is she who is the great obstacle to his becoming one himself. For he would be a poor sort of Christian, according to the perverted standards of the time, if after conversion he failed to break off the marital relation. Verecundus wished to be a Christian in the full degree, if he were one at all, and he could not face the sacrifice —” Nec christianum esse alio modo se velle dicebat, quam illo quo non poterat.”³

Neither Verecundus nor his wife has come to enjoy the refreshment of a villeggiatura this August of the year 386 A.D. at Casciago. Verecundus has put the house at the disposition of his friend Augustine, and here accordingly we meet him and the group of persons who have come up from Milan to keep him company. For Augustine has been for two years teaching rhetoric in Milan and is much sought after by young men. He has recently passed through that inner crisis which he will some years hence describe in his “Confessions” as his definite decision for the Christian life. It has been thought that when he looked back upon the experience from a later date his memory presented the change as a more abrupt and radical breach with the past than in fact it was. The letters he wrote soon after the event seem to show him still only half a Christian. If, however, we have to allow something for the transfiguration of past experience in memory, we have on the other hand to allow something for the opaqueness of a conventional literary style, which might not allow at first a new experience to show through in all its fullness. If the “Confessions” possibly exaggerate the rapidity of the change, it may well be that the letters reveal it imperfectly, and that the truth is somewhere between the two.

We must see who the others of the group are, gathered round Augustine at Casciago. There is first Alypius, an old pupil of Augustine’s long ago in the African township of Tagaste, from which they both came—a small, vigorous man rather younger than Augustine. His parents belonged to the upper circle of society in Tagaste (primates municipales). For Augustine since those early days he seems to have had a dog-like affection. He followed him from Tagaste to Carthage. Then the old friendship was knit up again in Rome. When Augustine came to Rome in 383 he found Alypius already there, following his career in the Roman courts. Thenceforward they have been continually together, and when Augustine removed the following year to Milan, Alypius went too. One of those people almost naturally ascetic, we may gather; in the days when he and Augustine were Manichæans together, Alypius contrasted with his friend in making the celibate life, recommended by that religion, a reality. On the legal bench Alypius showed an incorruptibility above the common standard of the time. Next winter, if we are still observing him, we shall see him walking with bare feet over the frozen soil of North Italy. Not that this man, so rigidly self-schooled, has been without his temptations. It was he who was taken to a gladiatorial show against his will and determined to keep his eyes shut, but could not resist opening them at the sound of a great shout; then caught the infection of the horrible madness, and only escaped from it later on, and with pain. He has been affected too with the vanity of literary purism, and till lately had been unable to spoil the beautiful Latin of his correspondence with Augustine by inserting the barbarian name “Iesus Christus.” But in these latter days the two friends have been going through a common experience, and the barbarian name has begun to exercise a strange power upon Alypius.

Then the group includes two young men who have been studying rhetoric under Augustine at Milan, and to whom the retirement to Casciago is of the nature of a reading-party—Licentius and Trygetius. Licentius is the son of a man whom Augustine has known from childhood, and whose help has counted for something in his life. That man is Romanianus, himself too of Tagaste (be is a cousin indeed of Alypius), one of those reckoned very rich according to the measure of those days and honoured with statues and tablets in his native place. The great questions of religion and philosophy have come within his field of vision, but the vast extent of his worldly business leaves him little time and thought to spare. His son Licentius is of an ardent temperament, which will one day run into evil courses, but now fires him mainly with literary ambitions. “Accepisti a Deo ingenium spiritualiter aureurn, et ministras inde libidinibus,” his old master will write to him at a later date. Now it is especially as a poet he wants to shine, though he is capable of feeling sometimes the superior attractiveness of philosophy. Augustine even writes to his father at this happy moment that to this divine mistress “totus a juvenilibus illecebris voluptatibusque conversus est.” His fellow-pupil Trygetius, of Tagaste, like the rest of the party, has come back to rhetoric and philosophy, after a spell of service with the eagles, but finds history, if the truth be told, with its trumpets and clash of arms, more congenial than abstract thought or literary elegancies— “tanquam veteranus adamavit historiam”—” he loved history like an old soldier.”

There is also here at Casciago Augustine’s brother, Navigius, whom we never get to know well enough to pronounce what he has in him, and two who come and go quietly in the background—Lastidianus and Rusticus, Augustine’s cousins—saying little, for indeed, though Augustine respects their native common sense, they have hardly had the education to intervene in a philosophical discussion—they have not even passed through the hands of the grammaticus; “Nullum vel grammaticum passi sunt”⁴ There are lastly two figures to complete the group, each with its own peculiar pathos—the figure of the mother, Monica, and the figure of the boy of fifteen, Augustine’s illegitimate son, Adeodatus, in whom so much hope centres and who is destined so soon to pass from this sphere of things.⁵

The days in this delightful environment pass pleasantly. On a specially cloudless morning the party will leave their beds early and engage in some sort of country pursuits.⁶ But for a good part of most days Augustine’s two pupils, Licentius and Trygetius, are working hard at their books under his direction.⁷ They are going through Virgil with him—half a book every day before supper is the usual measure⁸—and this part of their studies threatens to inflame the poetical ambitions of Licentius to a degree which the master finds excessive.⁹ For him the interest of their intercourse belongs rather to those hours when the little company turns to discuss the large problems of life and its meaning, which in his new phase have come to override all literary and worldly enthusiasms. These discussions take place at no fixed time, as the mood and the circumstances of the day suggest. Sometimes days go past without t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• I. The East and the West
• II. Bacchylides
• III. The Greek Anthology
• IV. The First Contact of Christianity and Paganism
• V. The Gnostic Redeemer
• VI. Between Two Worlds
• VII. The Prophet of Personality
• VIII. Dirt
• IX. A Paradox of Christianity
• X. Human Progress
• XI. The Problem of Eschatology
• XII. Reason and Dogma
• XIII. Christianity in the Modern World