then, was their standing point? Might some of them be Porphyrians, and some of them Iamblichans? Or, did their faith hang in an uncertain balance between the two?

conclusions,

57. These who speak of Christianity as a religion, or a col- General lection of dogmas, and of the Church as a set of doctors, will, if they are faithful to the facts, return the most various answers to these questions. Those who regard the Church in the light in which it presented itself to the Roman Emperors, and in which it was proclaimed by Christ himself and his apostles, as a kingdom, can understand why it was possible that its subjects should have been utterly unable to represent their position adequately in a theory, and should have exhibited in their writings many of the confusions which were incidental to all existing theories, yet should have maintained their ground and enlarged their borders in the midst of the most tremendous persecutions from without, and of their own imperfections and contradictions within. The root, it would seem, of Porphyry's inability to reach to Heaven by philosophy, the warrant for the theurgy of Abammon, and for the infinite superstitions which lay within it, was the same. If there was no one living person in whom the Creator and the creature met, one of these schemes was inevitable, neither could attain its result. If there was, the history of the world would shew, what Christian as little as Heathen teachers could shew, where the philosophical and theological methods really coincide, how impracticable and how useless to mankind are any artificial experiments for bringing them into harmony.

G

82

The new

æra.

Constantine

Neo

CHAPTER III.

THE FOURTH CENTURY.

1. THE transition from the reign of Diocletian to the reign of Constantine strikes the ecclesiastical historian as the most violent in history. He speaks of the age of persecution as terminating in the age of patronage, the most violent and systematic effort ever made to exterminate a society in the acknowledgment of it to the exclusion of every other. The civil historian finds more points of resemblance between the periods; Diocletian had weakened the prestige of the ancient capital before Constantine established the new one. The forms of the Republic were already giving place to oriental habits and arrangements which were to be adopted and consecrated by the new faith in Byzantium. The historian of philosophy finds the later period evolving itself very naturally out of the previous one; yet no one is more compelled than he is to take notice of the great crisis which separates them.

2. The Neo-Platonic philosophy has been called in of late how far a years to explain some phenomena in the life of the first Christian Platonist. Emperor. It may serve that purpose if we are careful to recollect that Constantine was a Roman and not a Greek, a soldier and not a sophist. Whatever influence he received from the schools, came to him changed and transformed by the world's atmosphere. He probably believed, as the teachers of the new sect believed, that there was a supreme and universal God; he believed that that supreme God had subordinate gods and dæmons through whom his power was exercised, his existence and character manifested to men. But there is no reason to suppose that he had ever formally embraced these tenets, or that he knew that they were maintained by any celebrated teachers, or that he had remoulded his traditional Paganism in conformity with them. They were in all probability the common, prevalent notions among men of ordinary education, who were capable of receiving the impressions of the age to which they belonged, and who, without comparing them or reducing them into system, had eyes open to read the commentaries upon them which experience supplied. The old forms, simply as forms, had lost their hold upon men of this character. Galerius or Maxi

ordinary

mianus might uphold them as part of the military code which it was a breach of discipline to transgress; Diocletian might support them as an imperial theory: but a young man bred under the moderate and liberal Constantius, observing the failure of their experiments though made on so large a scale, and on the whole Tobejudged with so much skill, might, even if his personal feelings had not as an been disgusted, have arrived gradually at the conclusion that Roman. they were pledged to a hopeless cause. Yet no doctrine, we may be sure, could ever commend itself to his mind as having a special claim upon his devotion and sympathy; he never could have exchanged that belief which was bound up with the history of his country and of the world, for the most reasonable theosophy or dæmonology. He was only discontented with that belief because it was evidently weak, too weak to uphold a polity such as Rome ought to be; he tried it by such a standard, not because he was insincere, or regarded religious sanctions as the inventions of priests or sages, but because he had no other proof that they were more than this, that they were fixed and divine, except so far as they sufficed for the political end.

gradual.

3. To suppose all these processes for a long time at work in his mind, is not to pronounce an opinion whether he actually saw the vision which he spoke of in his later years, on the eve of his battle with Maxentius; far less is it to suggest the thought that he did not really arrive at the conclusion that the cross was His the sign in which he must conquer, or that he was not led to conversion that conclusion by the highest of all teachers. What we wish to intimate is, that the conviction, however suddenly brought home in its full power to Constantine-and it may be quite consistent with reason and experience that there should have been a critical moment which decided his whole after-course-that the eagle must stoop to the symbol of ignominy and crime, had been working itself out in the mind of a man, by all the experiences of his life, and in the mind of a people by the experiences of several generations. What we would wish Christians, and those who are not Christians, equally to consider, is whether all such thoughts, and the circumstances which suggested them, do not more imply a spiritual guide of man, and one who uses events for man's education, than the apparition of the Labarum, were it authenticated by the most absolute evidence, could possibly do.

and the

Empire in

4. Henceforth, then, that polity which confessed a moral and metaphysical basis-which affirmed that there was a supernatural The Church Will and a righteous Will, who was holding its members together and binding them into one-was acknowledged by the polity their umor. which seemed to rest on a mere arbitrary and earthly will, as necessarily yoked with it, as in some sense its superior. The Empire which could not gratify the modest ambition of Plotinus

Its effects on the Platonic school.

Connection

controversy

with philosophy.

by allowing him to set up a Platonopolis in Campania, had deliberately conceded to a set of men whom they had persecuted perseveringly for ten years, and at intervals for two hundred, the right of establishing their city in every province of the Empire; of reorganising the institutions of Rome, and of introducing their own at its very outset into the new Constantinople. The blow to the tottering idols of the east and west was tremendous ; but it was scarcely a less severe blow to the rising philosophy. For Ammonius, if not a deserter from the Christian ranks, had at least hoped that his occult philosophy would have undermined its broad and popular statements: Plotinus had substituted the ascent of the divine man into the original and absolute divinity, for the idea of the Son of God stooping to take Man's nature. Porphyry had felt and expressed the opposition which was latent in his master; Iamblichus, and the school most opposed to Porphyry, were deliberately trying to resuscitate Polytheism, and to make its notions of divine descents into earthly natures harmonise with the Greek wisdom, which they said had originally been borrowed from the Egyptian Hermes. By the middle of Constantine's reign, Licinius had gathered together some of the ruder elements of Paganism, and had engaged them in a religious war. But it needed some other head to associate polytheism, Greek philosophy, the dream of old Roman glory, in one valiant effort against the new faith: nor could such a person appear till that faith had already been mightily shaken from within, and till some of the strange effects of the union of the Empire and the Church had made themselves apparent.

5. The Arian controversy, which affected so seriously the civil of the Arian condition of the Empire, is no less involved with the history of philosophy. We have seen how much all questions of this time turned upon the relation between the highest being and some power or powers at some distance below him, more nearly related to man. The faith of Constantine had probably assigned some indistinct place of this kind to Him whom he nevertheless had acknowledged as supreme over himself and the Roman world. When Arius, in language not very intelligible to the Emperor, affirmed the inferiority of Christ to the Father of All, he could feel no serious objection to the statement, though he was anxious that the subject should not be stirred. When the earnestness of the combatants made his mode of reconciliation ineffectual, he wisely appealed to a council, and enforced its decrees though they asserted the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. But he repented of that course when he perceived that the dispute was not at rest, and readily embraced the dexterous suggestion of Eusebius, so well fitted for the temper

Feelings of

of the monarch, and indicating such an accurate judgment of the desire for quiet in the better sort of the Clergy-of promotion in the worse that the addition of a single iota to the formula would satisfy the minds of all reasonable people. Athanasius had courage to resist that proposition, believing that it involved Athanasius. nothing less than the inroad of all the Neo-Platonic dæmonology and with that, of all Heathenism; believing that the church stood as a Society and a Kingdom upon the acknowledgment of a person in whom the Godhead and Manhood were actually reconciled. The Emperor and his son Constantius treated him as an enemy and as the disturber of the world. A majority of the Eastern Bishops agreed with them, and Semi-Arianism triumphed in the palace of the Caesars and in the councils of the Church-every where except in the deserts of the Thebais and amidst some, not all, the Bishops of the West-till the time of Julian.

6. That young man had enough of reason for hating the memory of his uncle, and the acts of his cousin; enough of excuse for regarding the prelates of Constantinople with contempt. He might have dreamed, he probably did dream, while he was yet in the court where his nearest relations had been murdered, that the days of the older Cæsars would return, if the faith which they professed returned also. He might have the most plausible reasons for thinking that the house which seemed to him to stand on such a new and feeble foundation, would not stand now that it was divided against itself. Athens was needed to ripen these thoughts into maturity; Julian Education had enough of knowledge to recall something of its ancient of Julian. greatness, enough of imagination to feel that that glory was not departed while there were still philosophers to teach in its gardens. These philosophers opened to him the Neo-Platonic mysteries; mixed with them lay the brilliant forms of the old Mythology, which they could again bring to light. His strength might have evaporated in these visions; his commission to Gaul, and his campaign there, made him conscious of more active powers, and shewed him that he was qualified to rule an army or a people. The three conditions which were necessary for the representative and champion of the world that had fallen, met in him. He entered all armed with the sympathies of a great multitude, with the abilities of a man of letters, and with the command of an Empire, upon the task which he had assigned himself. 7. Julian lived only thirty-three years, and reigned only Importance two. But a great part of the thought and mind of his age is ex- of his pressed in that brief life. The experiment which philosophers had been making in their closets, and continued to make for two centuries, began to be tried on a scale commensurate with

history.