It would have been surprising if, in the multitude of relatively independent centers of Christianity, subject to different traditions and environments, there had failed to develop a diversity of customs and creeds. Greek Christianity in particular was destined to a flood of heresies by the metaphysical and argumentative habits of the Greek mind. Christianity can be understood only in the perspective of these heresies, for even in defeating them it took something of their color and form.
One faith united the scattered congregations: that Christ was the son of God, that he would return to establish his Kingdom on earth, and that all who believed in him would at the Last Judgment be rewarded with eternal bliss. But Christians differed as to the date of the second advent. When Nero died and Titus demolished the Temple, and again when Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem, many Christians hailed these calamities as signs of the second coming. When chaos threatened the Empire at the close of the second century, Tertullian and others thought that the end of the world was at hand;34 a Syrian bishop led his flock into the desert to meet Christ halfway, and a bishop in Pontus disorganized the life of his community by announcing that Christ would return within a year.35 As all signs failed, and Christ did not come, wiser Christians sought to soften the disappointment by reinterpreting the date of his return. He would come in a thousand years, said an epistle ascribed to Barnabas;36 he would come, said the most cautious, when the “generation” or race of the Jews was quite extinct, or when the Gospel had been preached to all gentiles; or, said the Gospel of John, he would send in his stead the Holy Spirit or Paraclete. Finally the Kingdom was transferred from earth to heaven, from the years of our life to a paradise beyond the grave. Even the belief in the millennium—in the return of Jesus after a thousand years—was discouraged by the Church, and was ultimately condemned. The faith in the second advent had established Christianity; the hope of heaven preserved it.II
Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three centuries, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of history—which is to illuminate the present through the past—were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing Church, and which the Church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies. Gnosticism—the quest of godlike knowledge (gnosis) through mystic means—was not a heresy so much as a rival; it antedated Christianity, and had proclaimed theories of a Soter, or Savior, before Christ was born.37 That same Simon Magus of Samaria, whom Peter rebuked for “simony,” was probably the author of a Great Exposition which gathered together a maze of Oriental notions about the complicated steps that could lead the human mind to a divine comprehension of all things. In Alexandria the Orphic, Neo-Pythagorean, and Neoplatonist traditions, fusing with the Logos philosophy of Philo, stirred Basilides (117), Valentinus (160), and others to form weird systems of divine emanations and personified “aeons” of the world. In Edessa Bardesanes (200) created literary Syriac by describing these aeons in prose and verse. In Gaul the Gnostic Marcus offered to reveal to women the secrets of their guardian angels; his revelations were flattering, and he accepted their persons as his reward.38
The greatest of the early heretics was not quite a Gnostic, but was influenced by their mythology. About 140 Marcion, a rich youth of Sinope, came to Rome vowing to complete Paul’s work of divorcing Christianity from Judaism. The Christ of the Gospels, said Marcion, had described as his father a God of tenderness, forgiveness, and love; but the Yahveh of the Old Testament was a harsh god of unrelenting justice, tyranny, and war; this Yahveh could not be the father of the gentle Christ. What good god, asked Marcion, would have condemned all mankind to misery for eating an apple, or desiring knowledge, or loving woman? Yahveh exists, and is the creator of the world; but he made the flesh and bones of man from matter, and therefore left man’s soul imprisoned in an evil frame. To release the soul of man a greater god sent his son to earth; Christ appeared, already thirty years of age, in a phantasmal, unreal body, and by his death won for good men the privilege of a purely spiritual resurrection. The good, said Marcion, are those who, following Paul, renounce Yahveh and the Jewish Law, reject the Hebrew Scriptures, shun marriage and all sensual enjoyment, and overcome the flesh by a stern asceticism. To propagate these ideas Marcion issued a New Testament composed of Luke’s Gospel and the letters of Paul. The Church excommunicated him, and returned to him the substantial sum that he had presented to it on coming to Rome.
While the Gnostic and Marcionite sects were spreading rapidly in both East and West, a new heresiarch appeared in Mysia. About 156 Montanus denounced the increasing worldliness of Christians and the growing autocracy of bishops in the Church; he demanded a return to primitive Christian simplicity and austerity, and a restored right of prophecy, or inspired speech, to the members of the congregations. Two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, took him at his word and fell into religious trances; and their utterances became the living oracles of the sect. Montanus himself prophesied with such eloquent ecstasy that his Phrygian followers—with the same religious enthusiasm that had once begotten Dionysus—hailed him as the Paraclete promised by Christ. He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse would soon descend from heaven upon a neighboring plain. To the predestined spot he led so large a host that some towns were depopulated. As in early Christian days, marriage and parentage were neglected, goods were communistically shared, and an absorbed asceticism anxiously prepared the soul for Christ.39 When, about 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius persecuted Christianity in Asia Minor, hundreds of Montanists, eager for paradise, crowded before his tribunal and asked for martyrdom. He could not accommodate them all; some he executed; but most of them he dismissed with the words: “Miserable creatures! If you wish to die are there not ropes and precipices?”40 The Church banned Montanism as a heresy, and in the sixth century Justinian ordered the extinction of the sect. Some Montanists gathered in their churches, set fire to them, and let themselves be burned alive.41
Of minor heresies there was no end. The Encratites abstained from meat, wine. and sex; the Abstinents practiced self-mortification and condemned marriage as a sin; the Docetists taught that Christ’s body was merely a phantom, not human flesh; the Theodotians considered him only a man; the Adoptionists and the followers of Paul of Samosata thought that he had been born a man, but had achieved divinity through moral perfection; the Modalists, Sabellians, and Monarchians recognized in the Father and the Son only one person, the Monophysites only one nature, the Monothelites only one will. The Church overcame them by its superior organization, its doctrinal tenacity, and its better understanding of the ways and needs of men.
In the third century a new danger rose in the East. At the coronation of Shapur I (242) a young Persian mystic, Mani of Ctesiphon, proclaimed himself a Messiah sent upon earth by the True God to reform the religious and moral life of mankind. Borrowing from Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Judaism, and Gnosticism, Mani divided the world into rival realms of Darkness and Light; the earth belonged to the kingdom of Darkness, and Satan had created man. Nevertheless, the angels of the God of Light had surreptitiously introduced some elements of light into humanity—mind, intelligence, reason. Even woman, said Mani, has in her some sparks of light; but woman is Satan’s masterpiece, his chief agent in tempting man to sin. If a man will refrain from sex, idolatry, and sorcery, and lead an ascetic life of vegetarianism and fasting, the elements of light in him can overcome his Satanic impulses, and lead him, like a kindly light, to salvation. After thirty years of successful preaching Mani was crucified at the suggestion of the Magian clergy, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was hung from one of Susa’s gates. Martyrdoms enflamed the faith to wild enthusiasm; Manicheism spread into western Asia and north Africa, won Augustine for ten years, survived the persecutions of Diocletian and the conquests of Islam, and maintained a declining life for a thousand years till the coming of Genghis Khan.
The old religions still claimed a majority of the Empire’s population. Judaism gathered its impoverished exiles into scattered synagogues, and poured its piety into its Talmuds. The Syrians continued to worship their Baals under Hellenistic names, and the Egyptian priests tended faithfully their zoological pantheon. Cybele, Isis, and Mithras retained their addicts till the close of the fourth century; under Aurelian a modified Mithraism captured the Roman state. Votive offerings to the classical divinities still came to the temples, initiates and candidates journeyed to Eleusis, and throughout the Empire aspiring citizens performed the motions of the imperial cult. But life had gone out of the classic creeds. They no longer aroused, except here and there, the warm devotion that makes a religion live. It was not that the Greeks and the Romans abandoned these faiths, once so lovely or austere; they abandoned rather the will to live, and by excessive family limitation, or physiological exhaustion, or devastating wars, so reduced their own number that the temples lost their cultivators step by step with the farms.
About the year 178, while Aurelius fought the Marcomanni on the Danube, paganism made a lusty attempt to defend itself against Christianity. We know of it only through Origen’s book Against Celsus, and the quotations recklessly made there from Celsus’ True Word. This second Celsus in our story was a gentleman of the world rather than a speculative philosopher; he felt that the civilization which he enjoyed was bound up with the old Roman faith; and he resolved to defend that faith by attacking the Christianity that was now its most challenging enemy. He made so intimate a study of the new religion that the learned Origen was astounded by his erudition. Celsus assailed the credibility of the Scriptures, the character of Yahveh, the importance of Christ’s miracles, the incompatibility of Christ’s death with his omnipotent divinity. He ridiculed the Christian belief in a final conflagration, the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the body:
It is silly to suppose that when God, like a cook, brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted, and only the Christians will remain—not merely the living ones, but those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really, it is the hope of worms! … It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless—slaves and women and children—whom Christians can persuade—wool-dressers, and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and common men, whoever is a sinner … or a godforsaken fool.42
Celsus was alarmed by the spread of Christianity, by its scornful hostility to paganism, military service, and the state; how was the Empire to protect itself from the barbarians prowling on every frontier if its inhabitants succumbed to so pacifistic a philosophy? A good citizen, he thought, should conform to the religion of his country and his time without public criticism of its absurdities; these did not much matter; what counted was a unifying faith supporting moral character and civic loyalty. Then, forgetting the insults he had heaped upon them, he appealed to the Christians to come back to the old gods, to worship the guardian genius of the emperor, and to join in the defense of the imperiled state. No one paid much attention to him; pagan literature does not mention him; he would have been quite forgotten had not Origen undertaken to refute him. Constantine was wiser than Celsus, and knew that a dead faith could not salvage Rome.