Читать книгу Paganism Surviving in Christianity - Abram Herbert Lewis - Страница 8

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Whatever touches the Bible and its interpretation touches Christianity at a vital point. The fundamental difference between the pagan gnosticism and Christianity lay in the fact that Christianity was a revealed religion, finding its beginning and end in the divine love and life unfolded in Christ Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. On the contrary, gnosticism found its source in human reasoning, human philosophy, and speculations.

Dr. Schaff describes its influence when he says:

“It exaggerates the Pauline view of the distinction of Christianity from Judaism, sunders Christianity from its historical basis, resolves the real humanity of the Saviour into a doketistic illusion, and perverts the freedom of the Gospel into Antinomian licentiousness. The author or first representative of this baptized heathenism, according to the uniform testimony of Christian antiquity, is Simon Magus, who unquestionably adulterated Christianity with pagan ideas and practices, and gave himself out, in pantheistic style, for an emanation of God. Plain traces of [of the existence of] this error appear in the later epistles of Paul to the Colossians, to Timothy, and to Titus, the second epistle of Peter, and the first two epistles of John, the epistle of Jude, and the messages of the Apocalypse to the seven churches.”[28]

This rapid survey of the field shows us that gnostic influences represent what Professor Harnack calls “The acute vulgarization of Christianity, or its Hellenization.” We are therefore prepared to accept his testimony relative to the influence of the Gnostics as formulators of Christian doctrine. The following are his words:

“Under this view the Gnostics should be given their place in the history of dogmas as has not been done hitherto. They are simply the theologians of the first century; they were the first to transform Christianity into a system of doctrines. They were the first to elaborate tradition systematically; they undertook to prove Christianity to be the absolute religion, and by it to hunt down all other religions, including Judaism; but to them the absolute religion, so far as its content was concerned, was identical with the results of religious philosophy, for which a revelation was to be sought as a foundation. Thus they became Christians who tried by quick measures to win Christianity for the Hellenic culture, and the Hellenic culture for Christianity. To this end they would surrender the Old Testament that they might make it more easy to establish the union between the two powers, and to gain the possibility of proclaiming the absoluteness of Christianity. …

“We may also consider the majority of the gnostic efforts as efforts to transform Christianity into a theosophy, or, so to say, into a system of revealed metaphysics, with a complete disregard for the Jewish Old Testament foundation, on which it originated, and by the use of the Pauline ideas. We can also compare later writers, such as Barnabas and Ignatius, with the so-called Gnostics, by which the latter will be seen to possess a well formulated theory, and the former to be in possession of fragments which bear a remarkable likeness to said theory.”[29]

Bauer, a careful student of gnosticism, gives a description of its mission and methods which shows how it was prepared to exert such a controlling influence on the history of early Christianity, and how destructive that influence was in the matter of biblical interpretation. He says:

“Gnosis and allegory are essentially allied conceptions; and this affords us a very marked indication of the path which will really lead us to the origin of gnosticism; for we shall find that allegory plays an important part in most of its systems, especially in those which exhibit its original form.

“It is well known that allegory is the soul of the Alexandrian religious philosophy. Nothing else, indeed, can enable us to understand the rise of the latter, so closely is allegory interwoven with its very nature. Allegory is in general the mediator between philosophy and the religion which rests upon positive tradition. Wherever it is seen on a large scale, we notice that philosophical views have arisen side by side with, and independently of, the existing religion; and that the need has arisen to bring the ideas and doctrines of philosophy into harmony with the contents of the religious belief. In such circumstances, allegory appears in the character of mediator. It brings about the desired conformity by simply interpreting the belief in the sense of the philosophy. Religious ideas and narratives are thus clothed with a figurative sense, which is entirely different from their literal meaning. It was thus that allegory arose before the Christian time among the Greeks. The desire was felt first by Plato, and afterward still more strongly by the Stoics, to turn the myths of the popular religion to account on behalf of their philosophical ideas, and so to bridge over the gulf between the philosophical and the popular mind; and with this view they struck out the path of allegory, of allegorical interpretation of the myths. It is well known what extensive use the Stoics made of allegory when they wished to trace their own ideas of the philosophy of nature in the gods of popular belief, and the narratives concerning them.

“But in Alexandria, this mode of interpretation assumed still greater importance. Here it had to solve the weighty problem, how the new ideas that had forced their way into the mind and consciousness of the Jew, were to be reconciled with his belief in the authority of his sacred religious books. Allegory alone made it possible to him, on the one hand, to admire the philosophy of the Greeks, and in particular of Plato, and to make its ideas his own; and, on the other, to reverence the Scripture of the Old Testament as the one source of divinely revealed truth. The sacred books needed but to be explained allegorically, and then all that was wished for, even the boldest speculative ideas of the Greek mind, could be found in the books themselves. How widely this method was practised in Alexandria, may be judged from the writings of Philo, in which we see the most extensive use made of allegorical interpretation, and find the contents of the Old Testament blended intimately with everything that the systems of Greek philosophy could offer. But it would be quite erroneous to think that it was nothing but caprice and the unchecked play of fancy, that called forth this allegorical explanation of the Scriptures, which came to exercise such influence. For to the Alexandrian Jew, at the stage of scriptural development which he had now reached, with his consciousness divided between his ancestral Hebraism and modern Hellenism, this allegorizing was a necessary form of consciousness; and so little did he dream that the artificial link by which he bound together such diverse elements was a thing he had himself created, that all the truth which he accepted in the systems of Greek philosophy seemed to him to be nothing but an emanation from the Old Testament revelation.

“Now the gnostic systems also, for the most part, make very free use of the allegorical method of interpretation; and this is enough to apprise us that we must regard them under the same aspect as the Alexandrian religious philosophy. As far as we are acquainted with the writings of the Gnostics, we see them to have been full of allegorical interpretations, not indeed referring, as with Philo, to the books of the Old Testament (for their attitude toward the Old Testament was entirely different from his); but to those of the New, which were for the Gnostics what the books of the Old Testament were for Philo.

“In order to give their own ideas a Christian stamp, they applied the allegorical method, as much as possible, to the persons and events of the Gospel history, and especially to the numbers that occur in it. Thus for the Valentinians the number thirty in the New Testament, especially in the life of Jesus, was made to signify the number of their æons; the lost wandering sheep was for them their Achamoth; and even the utterances of Jesus, which contain a perfectly simple religious truth, received from them a sense referring to the doctrines of their system.

“The lately discovered Philosophoumena of the pseudo-Origen who undertook the task of refuting all the heresies show us even more clearly than before what an extensive use the Gnostics made of allegory.

“They applied it not merely to the books of the Old and New Testaments, but even the products of Greek literature, for instance, to the Homeric poems; their whole mode of view was entirely allegorical.

“The whole field of ancient mythology, astronomy, and physics, was laid under contribution to support their views. They thought that the ideas that were the highest objects of their thought and knowledge were to be found expressed everywhere.”[30]

Hatch offers important testimony as to the pagan elements in early exegesis, in these words:

“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,[31] ‘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.[32] 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,’[33] he is teaching the divine order of creation which he learned in Egypt from the books of Moses.[34] So Clement of Alexandria interprets the withdrawal of Oceanus and Tethys from each other to mean the separation of land and sea.[35] 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.[36]

“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’[37]; and the Ophite writer, Justin, evolves an elaborate cosmogony from a story of Herakles narrated in Herodotus,[38] combined with the story of the Garden of Eden.[39] …

“A large part of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that such interpretation were becoming the common property of Jews and Judæo-Christians. 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 endeavored 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 soul.”[40]