Читать книгу Church History (Vol.1-3) - J. H. Kurtz - Страница 28

All its own more thoughtful adherents had long acknowledged that paganism must undergo a thorough reform and reconstruction if it were to continue any longer in existence. In the Augustan Age an effort was made to bolster up Neopythagoreanism by means of theurgy and magic. The chief representative of this movement was Apollonius of Tyana. In the second century an attempt was made to revivify the secret rites of the ancient mysteries, of Dea Syra, and Mithras. Yet all this was not enough. What was needed was the setting up of a pagan system which would meet the religious cravings of men in the same measure as Christianity with its supernaturalism, monotheism and universalism had done, and would have the absurdities and impurities that had disfigured the popular religion stripped off. Such a regeneration of paganism was undertaken in the beginning of the third century by Neoplatonism. But even this was no more able than pagan polemics had been to check the victorious career of Christianity.

§ 24.1. Apollonius of Tyana in Cappadocia, a contemporary of Christ and the Apostles, was a philosopher, ascetic and magician esteemed among the people as a worker of miracles. As an earnest adherent of the doctrine of Pythagoras, whom he also imitated in his dress and manner of life, claiming the possession of the gifts of prophecy and miracle working, he assumed the role of a moral and religious reformer of the pagan religion of his fathers. Accompanied by numerous scholars, teaching and working miracles, he travelled through the whole of the then known world until he reached the wonderland of India. He settled down at last in Ephesus where he died at an advanced age, having at least passed his ninety-sixth year. At the wish of the Empress Julia, wife of Septimius Severus, in the third century, Philostratus the elder composed in the form of a romance in eight books based upon written and oral sources, a biography of Apollonius, in which he is represented as a heathen counterpart of Christ, who is otherwise completely ignored, excelling Him in completeness of life, doctrine and miraculous powers.30

§ 24.2. In Neo-platonism, by the combination of all that was noblest and best in the exoteric and esoteric religion, in the philosophy, theosophy and theurgy of earlier and later times in East and West, we are presented with a universal religion in which faith and knowledge, philosophy and theology, theory and practice, were so perfectly united and reconciled, and all religious needs so fully met, that in comparison with its wealth and fulness, the gnosis as well as the faith, the worship and the mysteries of the Christians must have seemed one-sided, commonplace and incomplete. The first to introduce and commend this tendency, which was carried out in three successive schools of philosophy, the Alexandrian-Roman, the Syrian and the Athenian, was the Alexandrian Ammonius Saccas—this surname being derived from his occupation as a porter. He lived and taught in Alexandria till about A.D. 250. He sought to combine in a higher unity the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophies, giving to the former a normative authority, and he did not hesitate to enrich his system by the incorporation of Christian ideas. His knowledge of Christianity came from Clement of Alexandria and from Origen, whose teacher in philosophy he had been. Porphyry indeed affirms that he had previously been himself a Christian, but had at a later period of life returned to paganism.—The most distinguished of his scholars, and also the most talented and profound of all the Neo-platonists, was Plotinus, who was in A.D. 254 a teacher of philosophy at Rome, and died in A.D. 270. His philosophico-theological system in its characteristic features is a combination of the Platonic antithesis of the finite world of sense and the eternal world of ideas with the stoical doctrine of the world soul. The eternal ground of all being is the one supramundane, unintelligible and indescribable good (τὸ ἕν, τὸ ἀγαθόν), from which all stages of being are radiated forth; first; spirit or the world of ideas (νοῦς, κόσμος νοητός), the eternal type of all being; and then, from this the world soul (ψυχή); and from this, finally, the world of phenomena. The outermost fringe of this evolution, the forms of which the further they are removed from the original ground become more and more imperfect, is matter, just as the shadow is the outermost fringe of the light. It is conceived of as the finite, the fleeting, even as evil in itself. But imperfect as the world of sense is, it is nevertheless the vehicle of the ideal world and in many ways penetrated by the ideas, and the lighting up imparted by the ideas affords it its beauty. In consequence of those rays shining in from the realm of ideas, a whole vast hierarchy of divine forms has arisen, with countless dæmons good and bad, which give room for the incorporation of all the divine beings of the Greek and oriental mythologies. In this way myths that were partly immoral and partly fantastic can be rehabilitated as symbolical coverings of speculative ideas. The souls of men, too, originate from the eternal world soul. By their transition, however, into the world of sense they are hampered and fettered by corporeity. They themselves complete their redemption through emancipation from the bonds of sense by means of asceticism and the practice of virtue. In this way they secure a return into the ideal world and the vision of the highest good, sometimes as moments of ecstatic mystical union with that world, even during this earthly life, but an eternally unbroken continuance thereof is only attained unto after complete emancipation from all the bonds of matter.31—Plotinus’ most celebrated scholar, who also wrote his life, and collected and arranged his literary remains, was Porphyry. He also taught in Rome and died there in A.D. 304. His ἐκ τῶν λογίων φιλοσοφία, a collection of oracular utterances, was a positive supplement to his polemic against Christianity (§ 23, 3), and afforded to paganism a book of revelation, a heathen bible, as Philostratus had before sought to portray a heathen saviour. Of greater importance for the development of mediæval scholasticism was his Commentary on the logical works of Aristotle, published in several editions of the Aristotelian Organon.—His scholar Iamblichus of Chalcis in Cœle-Syria, who died A.D. 333, was the founder of the Syrian school. The development which he gave to the Neo-platonic doctrine consisted chiefly in the incorporation of a fantastic oriental mythology and theurgy. This also brought him the reputation of being a magician.—Finally, the Athenian school had in Proclus, who died in A.D. 485, its most distinguished representative. While on the one hand, he proceeded along the path opened by Iamblichus to develop vagaries about dæmons and theurgical fancies, on the other hand, he gave to his school an impulse in the direction of scholarly and encyclopædic culture.—The Neo-platonic speculation exercised no small influence on the development of Christian philosophy. The philosophizing church fathers, whose darling was Plato, got acquaintance with his philosophical views from its relatively pure reproduction met with in the works of the older Neo-platonists. The influence of their mystico-theosophic doctrine, especially as conveyed in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius (§ 47, 11), is particularly discernible in the Christian mysticism of the middle ages, and has been thence transmitted to modern times.32