A Short History Of Christianity - free ebook by J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson

Read as playlist

A Short History Of Christianity

J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson

69 chapters

19 hour read

Read as playlist

Selected Chapters

69 chapters

CORRIGENDA

CORRIGENDA

P. 55 , line 2, and p. 56, footnote: Miss Harrison has latterly (in Themis , 1912) given up the etymologies on which this opinion was founded. P. 251 , line 4 from bottom, for “that” read “than.” An attempt to write the history of Christianity in the space of an average novel is so obviously open to objections that, instead of trying to parry them, I will merely state what seems to me the possible compensation of brevity in such a matter. It is or may be conducive to total comprehension, to cohe

4 minute read

Read Chapter

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

1 Subsequently, on other lines, in the volume entitled Pagan Christs . ↑ In the dozen years that have passed since this book was written there has probably been some change in the outlook of the more critical of the readers to whom it might be said to be addressed. It challenges criticism on two main issues: that of Christian origins, and that of the sociological interpretation of Christian history. Twelve years ago, the thesis of the non-historicity of the gospel story in respect of its “natur

10 minute read

Read Chapter

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

This, it must be observed, is a different thing from the purpose of what is called “edification,” so often acted on, and even professed, by professional theologians. Recently, for instance, the Dean of Durham preached a special sermon to miners, in which he urged, not that the Christian religion is true and the disregard of it fatal to future salvation, but that “we are so fashioned that a religion we must have.” All the while, the confessed motive for the declaration was that so many actually f

4 minute read

Read Chapter

PART I PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

PART I PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

In the ancient history of religions, as in the ancient history of nations, the first account given of origins is almost always a myth. A divine or worshipful founder is craved by the primitive imagination no less for cults and institutions, tribes and polities, than for the forms of life and the universe itself; and history, like science, may roughly be said to begin only when that craving for first causes has been discredited, or controlled, by the later arising instinct of exact observation. S

7 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Documentary Clues

§ 1. Documentary Clues

The first properly historical as distinct from the “scriptural” notices of the Church at Jerusalem tell of a quasi-Christian sect there, known as Ebionites or Ebionim , a Hebrew word which signified simply “the poor.” From the point of view of the Gentile Christians of the end of the second century they were heretics, seeing that they used a form of the Gospel of Matthew lacking the first two chapters, denied the divinity of Jesus, and rejected the apostleship of Paul. As they likewise rejected

7 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. The Earliest Christian Sects

§ 2. The Earliest Christian Sects

Hence, however, arose the Greek form “Nazarenos,” which finally became to a certain extent imposed on the canonical gospels, but especially on that of Mark, which appears to have been redacted under Roman authority in the interests of ecclesiastical order. Naturally, the Latin Vulgate adopted the same term throughout the gospels and Acts, save in the crucial text, Matt. ii, 23 . Otherwise the texts are almost wholly in favour of the form “Nazoraios”—that is, Nazaræan or Nazirite. Even for minds

10 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Personality of the Nominal Founder

§ 3. Personality of the Nominal Founder

Such a clearly dramatic composition can be accounted for only as a development, after the fashion of the pagan mystery-dramas, from a remote, primitive rite of human sacrifice, such as we know to have been long habitual among the Jews as among other Semites. To the ancient rite the very name of Jesus probably belonged; and the existing document is presumptively an adaptation, made after the fall of Jerusalem by Gentile Christists, of a simpler and earlier Judaic ritual-drama. We are thus left fa

9 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Myth of the Twelve Apostles

§ 4. Myth of the Twelve Apostles

In its first traceable historic form Christianity was simply a phase of Judaism, being the creed of a small number of Jews and Jewish proselytes who believed that the long-desired Messiah had come in the person of one Jesus, who had been so slain as to constitute an atoning sacrifice. Such believers were wont to meet at simple religious banquets, of a kind common in the Greco-Roman world, where they ate and drank in a semi-ceremonial way. A sacrificial banquet of this kind was one of the most un

14 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 5. Primary Forms of the Cult

§ 5. Primary Forms of the Cult

In the nature of the case, the controversy was insoluble by argument. The Easterns had always taken the Holy Supper at the time of the Passover, and they had the gospel story telling them to repeat it “in remembrance” of the Lord who so supped at the Passover. The Westerns had the fourth gospel as their evidence that Jesus actually died at the time of the Passover, thus constituting a universal substitute for the Jewish sacrifice; and as in this gospel there is no use of bread and wine, but mere

20 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 6. Rise of Gentile Christism

§ 6. Rise of Gentile Christism

In any case, the first-cited passage seems to tell of either a dramatic or a pictorial representation of the crucified Christ in connection with the sacrament; a procedure which would probably not be favoured by the art-hating Jews, but which, gradually developed among the Gentiles in the fashion of the drama-loving Greeks, is the probable origin of several of the gospel narratives. It belonged to the conception of all such mysteries that their details should never be divulged to outsiders; henc

13 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 7. Growth of the Christ Myth

§ 7. Growth of the Christ Myth

The artificial organism which we have seen beginning to take shape is to be conceived, like organisms properly so called, as depending on and adjusting itself to its environment. Of this the nature has been partly set forth in tracing the beginnings of the cult, but it must be considered in itself if the relation is to be at all fully understood. The world in which Christianity grew up was above all things one of extinguished nationalities, of obliterated democracies, of decaying intellectual en

44 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Social and Mental Conditions in the Roman Empire

§ 1. Social and Mental Conditions in the Roman Empire

The determining political condition everywhere was the social sway of the empire, keeping all men impotent in the higher public affairs. Exclusion from public life, broadly speaking, had been the cause of the special addiction of the women, the slaves, and the unenfranchised foreigners of the Greek cities and of Rome to private cults and communions. Under the empire, all the lay classes alike were excluded from public power; and new interests must be found to take the place of the old. Within th

5 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Jewish Orthodoxy

§ 2. Jewish Orthodoxy

While Josephus specifies four Jewish “sects,” there was in Jewry really only one dissenting sect in the modern sense of the term, apart from the Jesuists. Pharisees and Sadducees were analogous rather to the sections or “schools” of the Churches of Rome and England, the former being “orthodox and more,” inasmuch as they held by the law, but further insisted on the doctrine of a future state, which was not contained in the Mosaic books; while the Sadducees, either from pre-Maccabean conservatism

3 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Jewish Sects: the Essenes

§ 3. Jewish Sects: the Essenes

What Christism had to compete with in the Greco-Roman world was not so much the collective principle of polytheism or the public worship of the endowed temples, as the class of semi-private cults to which itself belonged, and the popular worships equally associated with suffering and dying Saviour-Gods. Of these the most prominent were the ancient worships of the Syrian Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, Dionysos, and the Egyptian Osiris, all of which had become partly assimilated in theory, in ritual,

15 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Gentile Cults

§ 4. Gentile Cults

Of his cult in particular it is difficult to grasp any general significance, so inextricably did it become entwined with others, in particular with the Phrygian cult of Sabazios, 4 and with the Corybantic mysteries, in connection with which are to be traced a whole series of local deities of the same stamp as those under notice, just as the myth of Apollo can be seen to have absorbed a whole series of local Sun-Gods. Thus the mortal Jasion or Iasious is slain by Zeus for being the lover of Cybel

17 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 5. Ethics: Popular and Philosophic

§ 5. Ethics: Popular and Philosophic

Even as regards the moral ideal itself, finally, it is important to realize that what passes for the high-water mark of Christian ethic is really pre-Christian doctrine. It is customary to name the so-called Sermon on the Mount as the fine flower of gospel teaching; and of that document the precept of love to enemies is felt to be the finest word. Without asking how often it has been obeyed, Christians are wont to regard it as marking the difference in moral ideal between their lore and that of

25 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Popular Appeal

§ 1. Popular Appeal

The play of economic interest in the establishment and maintenance of religions is one of the constant forces in their history. In the simplest forms of savage life the medicine-man or priest makes a superior living out of his function; and every powerful cult in antiquity enriched its priests. The developed worships of Assyria and Babylon, Phœnicia and Egypt, were carried on by great priestly corporations, with enormous revenues; those of the Egyptian priesthood in particular being reckoned eve

5 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Economic Causation

§ 2. Economic Causation

It was finally to the joined influences of ecclesiastical organization and of popular sacred books that Christism owed its measure of success as against the freely-competing pagan cults; and on both sides its primary advantage, as we have seen, came from its Judaic basis. For nearly two centuries the Hebrew Bible, made widely accessible in the Septuagint version, was its literary mainstay, by reason of the prestige attaching to such a mass of ancient religious literature in the Greco-Roman world

5 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Organization and Sacred Books

§ 3. Organization and Sacred Books

It is not to be supposed that any abnormal sagacity presided over the formation of either the creed and canon or the official system of the Church; but insofar as it survived it can be seen to have done so in virtue alike of assimilation and of refusal to assimilate. Much expansion was needed to make an area broad enough for the pagan populace; and on the side of custom and myth hardly any pagan element was ultimately refused. At the outset the great cause of strife between Christian and pagan w

4 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Concession and Fixation

§ 4. Concession and Fixation

As we have seen, Gentile philosophy did actually enter into the sacred books of the new faith, notably in the doctrine of the Logos or “Word,” which in the fourth gospel virtually reshapes the entire Jesuist system. That gospel, rather than the preaching of Paul, is the doctrinal foundation of Gentile Christianity. In the synoptics the founder broadly figures as a Judaic Messiah, who is shortly to come again, at the world’s end, to judge the quick and the dead; and only for a community convinced

3 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 5. Cosmic Philosophy

§ 5. Cosmic Philosophy

When the “Catholic” Christian Church becomes politically and socially distinguishable in the second century, it is a much less numerous body than is pretended in the literature of its champions. Formulas such as those used in the Acts of the Apostles (chs. ii, iv, v, vi) greatly falsify the state of the case. The first “churches” in the cities of Asia Minor, like the groups addressed by “Paul” in the epistles, were but small conventicles, meeting in private houses. Even in the fourth century, si

41 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Numbers and Inner Life

§ 1. Numbers and Inner Life

During those ages in which the Christian Church was so spreading as to become at length the fit cultus of the decaying State, its history is almost wholly one of internal and external strifes, conflicts between the Church and its pagan persecutors, between its literary champions and pagan criticism, between the champions of orthodoxy and the innovating heretics, between the partisans of dogmas whose life-and-death struggle was to determine what orthodoxy was to be. The central sociological fact

8 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Growth of the Priesthood

§ 2. Growth of the Priesthood

In New Testament Greek the same word has to stand for “sect” and “heresy,” a fact premonitory of what must happen to every new idea in religion. Any process of reasoning whatever must have led to differences of opinion among the converts of Paul or of the Pauline epistles; and such differences, leading necessarily, among zealots, to animosities, are among the first phenomena of Christism. As we have seen, the chief “heresies” of the first century, stigmatized as such by the later Church, were re

11 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. The Gnostic Movement in the Second Century

§ 3. The Gnostic Movement in the Second Century

Systems such as the bulk of those above described, drawing as they did on any documents rather than the Old and New Testaments, are obviously not so much Christian schisms as differentiations from historic Christianity—developments, in most cases, of an abstract Christism on lines not merely Gentile but based on Gentile religions, as against the Jewish. Broadly speaking, therefore, they tended to disappear from the Christist field, inasmuch as paganism had other deities better suited to the part

9 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Marcionism and Montanism

§ 4. Marcionism and Montanism

Apart from the habit of doctrinal discussion, derived from Judaism, the Christianity of the third century had distinctly become as much a matter of ritual and ceremonial as any of the older pagan cults. Churches built for worship, rare in the second century, had become common, and images had already begun to appear in them, while incense was coming into general use, despite the earlier detestation of it as a feature of idolatry. In the wealthier churches gold and silver medals were often seen. P

1 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 5. Rites and Ceremonies

§ 5. Rites and Ceremonies

The nucleus for a theistic-Christist creed, as we have seen, was given to the Church in the fourth gospel. The first Jewish Jesuists were simple Unitarians; and the Jesus of Paul, so far as can be safely inferred from epistles indefinitely interpolated, was certainly no part of a trinity in unity. At the beginning of the second century the “orthodox” Christists had no more definite theology than had the unlettered believers in any pagan Saviour-God; and at most the gospels taught them to regard

4 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 6. Strifes over Primary Dogma

§ 6. Strifes over Primary Dogma

1 Compare the Second Epistle of John, v. 7, as to the “many deceivers” who “confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh.” ↑ 2 As to Montanus, see Montanus and the Primitive Church , Hulsean Prize Essay, by John De Soyres, 1878. ↑ It was involved in the aggressive attitude of the Christist movement that it should be persecuted by a partly countervailing fanaticism. The original bias of all ancient religion, indeed, in virtue of the simple self-interest of priesthoods, had been to resent a

2 hour read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Persecutions

§ 1. Persecutions

Imperialism being thus an official religion in itself, the cult of the emperor lay to the hands of any magistrate who should be disposed to put a test to a member of the sect which decried all established customs and blasphemed all established Gods. It was the recognized way of imposing the oath of allegiance apart from any specific law. Where such a procedure was possible, any malicious pagan might bring about a stedfast Christian’s death. There is Christian testimony, however, that many frenzi

28 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Establishment and Creed-Making

§ 2. Establishment and Creed-Making

It would seem as if whatever mental impulse was left in men must needs run in the new channels opened up for ignorant energy by ecclesiasticism and theology in that world of deepening ignorance and waning civilization. Literature as such was vanishing; art was growing more impotent reign by reign; and the physical sciences, revived for a time in their refuge at Alexandria by the Antonines and Flavians, were being lost from the hands of the living. To attribute the universal decadence to Christia

25 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Reaction under Julian

§ 3. Reaction under Julian

Had Julian lived to learn in Persia the methods so successfully used by Ardeshir, he might no less successfully have copied them. Only an idealist like Julian, of course, would have thought the effort on peaceful lines worth while. A much abler and better man than Jovian would reasonably decide in his place that the religion of Mithra, having come from the now triumphant Persian enemy, could hardly continue to be that of the Roman army; and that the most politic course was to revert to the cult

14 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Re-establishment: Disestablishment of Paganism

§ 4. Re-establishment: Disestablishment of Paganism

A sample of the process of adaptation lies in the ecclesiastical calendar, where in the month of October are (or were) commemorated on three successive days Saint Bacchus, Saint Demetrius, and Saints Dionysius, Rusticus, and Eleutherius, all described as martyrs. The five names are simply those of the God Dionysos, whose rustic festival was held at that season. In the same way, Osiris becomes St. Onuphrius, from his Coptic name, Onufri. It is probable, again, that from the year 376, when the shr

43 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. The Overthrow of Arianism

§ 1. The Overthrow of Arianism

The constant law of theological development was that all stirrings of reason were anathematized as heresy, and that dogmas became orthodox in the ratio of their extravagance. Paganizing and polytheistic heresy such as that of the Collyridians of Arabia (4th c.), who worshipped Mary as a Goddess and offered her cakes ( collyridæ ) as their mothers had done to Ashtaroth, ran little risk: their heresy in fact was on the way to be orthodoxy. Saner heresies fared differently. Late in the fourth centu

13 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. The Cost of Orthodoxy

§ 2. The Cost of Orthodoxy

It is not to be supposed, indeed, that the creed of Christianity was the sole or primary cause of such a miserable evolution. The very insanity of the strifes of Christians over meaningless dogmas is primarily to be traced to the fatal constriction of life and energy represented by the imperial system. It was because men had no rational interests to strive over if they would that they strove insanely over abracadabras of creed, and made war flags of the two colours of the charioteers of the circ

16 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Moral and Intellectual Stagnation

§ 3. Moral and Intellectual Stagnation

On the side of science in particular and education in general the Christian tendency was increasingly repressive. When Christianity was established there were still grammar schools in every considerable town in the empire, and many higher schools in the great cities; and though for long the Christians were fain to use these schools, pagan as they were in character, by reason of their almost purely literary or rhetorical curriculum, the Church gradually let them die out, never even attempting a C

11 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. The Social Failure

§ 4. The Social Failure

Dream for dream, the child-like creed of the God-crowded Hellas of Pheidias’ day, peopled with statues and crowned with temples of glorious symmetry, is an incomparably fairer thing than the tortured dogma of the Byzantine church, visually expressing itself in wretched icons, barbaric trappings, and infinite mummeries of ceremonial. Idolatry for idolatry, the adoration of noble statues by chanting bands of youths and maidens can have wrought less harm to head and heart than the prostration of th

33 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Position in the Seventh Century

§ 1. Position in the Seventh Century

Every extension of the Church being a means of power and revenue to priests, the process was furthered at once by motives of selfishness and by motives of self-sacrifice. In some cases the latter were effectual, as when a pious hermit won repute among barbarians for sanctity, and so acquired spiritual influence; but the normal mode of conversion seems to have been by way of appeal to chiefs or kings. When these were convinced that Christianity was to their interest, the baptism of their more doc

10 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Methods of Expansion

§ 2. Methods of Expansion

One marked result of the triumph of Islam in the East and of barbarism in the West was the growth of the Roman Papacy as the supreme ecclesiastical power in Latin Christendom. So long as an emperor had his seat in Italy, the bishop or patriarch of Rome was kept in subordination to the State; and at Constantinople the subordination of the patriarch never ceased. But even in the period from the reconquest of Italy under Justinian to the final renunciation of Byzantine rule, though the Roman patria

16 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Growth of the Papacy

§ 3. Growth of the Papacy

It is in this period, however, that there begins the process of documentary fraud by which the Church, wielding the power of the pen, gradually circumvented that of the sword. Centuries before, the Roman see had made use of forged documents in its disputes with Constantinople; and the Greeks of the day declared such forgeries to be a special Roman industry. As a matter of fact, most of the early ecclesiastical forgeries had been of eastern origin: for instance, the so-called Apostles’ Creed and

45 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Growth of Idolatry and Polytheism

§ 1. Growth of Idolatry and Polytheism

In the first ages of the Church, the notion of the divinity of the “body and blood” of the communion meal was vague and undefined. The partakers certainly regarded the consecrated bread and wine as carrying some supernatural virtue, since they took away portions for medicinal use; but they thought of the meal very much as devout pagans thought of one of the some kind in their mysteries or temple ritual. When their ritual phraseology was challenged as giving colour to the charge of cannibalism, t

9 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Doctrines of the Eucharist, Purgatory, and Confession

§ 2. Doctrines of the Eucharist, Purgatory, and Confession

The earlier papal indulgences were remissions of penance, and were often given on such tolerable grounds as pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and loyal observance of the papal institution of a “Truce of God” on certain days of the week; indeed, one of the original motives may even have been that of controlling the mercenary proceedings of bishops. But when once the popes had proffered plenary indulgence to all crusaders, decency was at an end. It was obvious that the effect was demoralizing to the l

7 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Rationalistic Heresies

§ 3. Rationalistic Heresies

The kind of heresy which first stirred the Church to murderous repression was naturally that which struck at its monopolies. After the ancient schism of the Donatists, which so organized itself as to set up a rival Church, the sect which was most bloodily persecuted in the period of established Christianity from Theodosius onwards was the Manichæan, visibly the Church’s most serious rival. So, in the Dark Ages, the heresies which roused most priestly anger were the movement against image-worship

11 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Anti-clerical Heresies

§ 4. Anti-clerical Heresies

At this stage there came to the front the sectaries known in history as the Vaudois or Waldenses, a name standing properly for the inhabitants of the Vaux or Valleys of Piedmont, but further connected with the teaching of one Peter Waldus, a Lyons merchant, whose followers received also the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. How far the anti-Catholic tenets of the Waldenses derive from ancient heresy is uncertain; but it is clear that late in the twelfth century they were acted on by the immense fer

38 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. The Clergy, Regular and Secular

§ 1. The Clergy, Regular and Secular

Those tendencies may indeed be regarded as operating in the intellectual life, which, though it is in reality only a side of the sociological whole, we shall conveniently consider apart. Under that head too we shall note the influence of the Church for culture on the side of art. But on the side of ordinary life the influence of the clergy as teachers had two specific tendencies which may here be noted. One was the disparagement of women; the other the encouragement of cruelty. On the first head

8 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. The Higher Theology and its Effects

§ 2. The Higher Theology and its Effects

We have seen, in studying the expansion of the Church, how it grew by lending itself to the interests of kings and chiefs as against subjects. On the same grounds, it made for empires as against self-governing States. But inasmuch as the papacy ere long fell out with the emperors of the new line it had itself consecrated, it also contributed to the break-up of feudalism, in the widest sense of the term; and it is possible to claim for the Church, further, a restraining influence on the oppressiv

7 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Christianity and Feudalism

§ 3. Christianity and Feudalism

The legal change was thus made from economic motives; but one moral gain did indirectly accrue from the existence of the Church as such. Under Justinian the empire was re-expanded after having been for a time curtailed; and this would under paganism have meant a large addition to the number of slaves. The recovered lands, however, were peopled by Christians; and all bishops were bound in their own interest to resist the enslavement and deportation of their flocks; so that Christianity at this po

12 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Influence of the Crusades

§ 4. Influence of the Crusades

It is true that from the East the later crusaders learned what chivalry they evolved; that Saladin became a kind of model hero for Christian knights; and that he could hold knightly friendship with Richard of England. But Richard nevertheless could massacre two thousand hostages in cold blood for an unpaid debt; and his crusading left him as it found him, a faithless ruffian, whom to honour is to be cheated by a romance. Nor did passages of chivalry ever root out of crusaders’ hearts the creed t

25 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Superstition and Intolerance

§ 1. Superstition and Intolerance

Though all the heresy hunts of the ancient Church had implied an inquisitorial ideal, nothing in the nature of a “Holy Office” had existed in the Church till the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It was felt that the faithful could as a rule be trusted to raise the cry of heresy wherever it could be scented. Such prompt action we have seen taken in the cases of Jovinian, Pelagius, Gottschalk, and Berengar. But in the twelfth century the spirit of militant orthodoxy, as seen in zealots li

7 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. The Inquisition

§ 2. The Inquisition

It should be remembered that the Inquisition’s purpose was to destroy books no less than men; and until printing overpowered the effort, the check thus put on the spread of rational thought bade fair to be fatal. In a single auto-da-fé (“act of faith”) at Salamanca, near the end of the fifteenth century, six thousand volumes were burned, on the pretence that they contained Judaic errors, or were concerned with magic and witchcraft. It is certain that many of them were of another character. Elsew

8 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Classic Survivals and Saracen Contacts

§ 3. Classic Survivals and Saracen Contacts

With the fall of Constantinople came the final decisive impulse to new culture in western Europe. Ecclesiastical hates, and those aroused by the crusading conquest of Byzantium, had for centuries sundered the Greek and Latin worlds more completely than even those of Christian Europe and Islam, setting up a Chinese wall where paganism, albeit by fatal means, had effected mutual intercourse. But on the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1452 numbers of despairing Greek scholars sought refug

3 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Religion and Art

§ 4. Religion and Art

The history of Christian Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the fall of Constantinople, is the typical instance of mental stagnation. During a period of eight hundred years, even friendly research professes to discover in Byzantine annals only one writer’s name per century which posterity can be expected to keep in memory. Such a history is the complete confutation of the common theory that Christianity is in itself a force of progress; but once more we must take note that Christianity was not

10 minute read

Read Chapter

Chapter V BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY

Chapter V BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY

The attempts at change, indeed, were many. Conspiracies were chronic; and when one failed the conspirators were blinded according to Byzantine rule: emperors on the other hand were often unmade; but the political machinery remained the same. In the period to Heraclius, the ruling class at Constantinople were mainly of Roman stock; under the Iconoclastic emperors, who were Asiatics, it was mainly Asiatic; later it became substantially Greek, as each party drove out the other; but all alike mainta

59 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Moral and Intellectual Forces

§ 1. Moral and Intellectual Forces

Even the grievance of indulgence-selling, which gave the immediate impulse to Luther’s action, was an economic as well as a moral question. Many of the best Catholics were entirely at one with him and such of his predecessors as Wesel and Wessel in deploring and denouncing the form the traffic had taken. The process of farming out the sale of indulgences to districts, as governments farmed out the taxes, was enough to stagger all men capable of independent judgment; and the expedition of the Dom

13 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Political and Economic Forces

§ 2. Political and Economic Forces

In the case of England, on the other hand, the primary factor in the repudiation of papal rule was the personal insistence of Henry VIII on a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the emperor, Charles V. Henry was so far from being inclined to Protestantism that he caused to be compiled by his bishops (1521) a treatise in reply to Luther, to which he put his name, thereupon receiving from Leo X the title of “Defender of the Faith.” To the very last, he burned doctrinal Pr

21 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Social and Political Results

§ 3. Social and Political Results

In the course of this inconceivable struggle children grew to middle age, and men grew from youth to grey hairs; most of those who began the strife passed away ere it had ended; the French Richelieu rose to greatness and died; and the English Civil War passed through nearly its whole course, a mere episode in comparison. When at length there was signed the Peace of Westphalia (1648) the German world was reduced to mortal exhaustion. The armies on both sides had been to the common people as the m

26 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 4. Intellectual Results

§ 4. Intellectual Results

In particular, they everywhere turned with a new zest to the burning of witches, the old superstitions being frightfully reinforced by the newly current doctrine of the Pentateuch. No argument—though it was tried by some—could countervail the testimony of the Sacred Book against witchcraft, and its decree of the death penalty. As the frenzy of witch-burning was equally intense in the Catholic countries in the Lutheran period, the mania may be traced in the first instance to the Inquisition, whic

37 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. The Physical Sciences

§ 1. The Physical Sciences

While the literary movement of English Deism in the eighteenth century was not ostensibly grounded on physical philosophy, being rather critical and logical, it always kept the new science in view; and the movement in France, as set up by the young Voltaire, connected itself from the first with the Newtonian philosophy, which there had to drive out the Cartesian, now become orthodox. In the hands of La Mettrie biological science pointed to even deeper heresy; and for such propagandists as Didero

7 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Philosophy, Cosmic and Moral

§ 2. Philosophy, Cosmic and Moral

Most men, in short, accept or reject religious creeds on the strength not of any systematically philosophic reasoning, but of either emotional bias or common-sense examination of concrete evidence. The former is as a rule, though not always, susceptible of influence from the latter. Thus the main instruments in turning men from Christian credences have been the documentary and historical forms of criticism. Such criticism, secretly frequent among educated men in the sixteenth century, never vent

8 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Biblical and Historical Criticism

§ 3. Biblical and Historical Criticism

The general result of two generations of critical research and controversy is that practically all Biblical students have accepted the main results of the “higher criticism,” whatever debate there may still be over details. There is tacit or overt agreement that the Hexateuch is a composite body of writings of many periods; that the Mosaic authorship is a myth; that the quasi-historical books are similarly works of redaction; that the Psalms are not Davidic and the Solomonic books not Solomonic;

32 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Catholic Christianity

§ 1. Catholic Christianity

Thus the age which saw the promulgation of the formal decree of Papal Infallibility (1870) has seen the most vital decline that has ever taken place in the total life and power of the Church of Rome. It preserves its full hold to-day only on (1) the most ignorant or most rural sections of the population of Catholic countries, (2) the unintellectual sections of their middle and upper classes, and (3) the emotionally religious or pietistic types, who are still, by reason of the total circumstances

11 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Protestant Christianity

§ 2. Protestant Christianity

That the same general movement of things goes on in England may be proved by reference to the almost daily complaints of the clergy. Rationalism and secularism have advanced in all classes during half a century, until their propaganda is accepted as a quite normal activity; such writers as Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and Clifford being read by the more studious of all ranks. In recent years the cheap reprints of the Rationalist Press Association have had millions of readers. Churchgoing constantly

16 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Greek Christianity

§ 3. Greek Christianity

Since the achievement of Greek independence, however, the people have remained substantially orthodox. Though they are no longer withheld from intercourse with the West, but have on the contrary shown a large measure of cosmopolitanism, their intellectual life has remained relatively fixed till the other day, the new complacency of independence backing the old complacency of orthodoxy. An excessive devotion to politics and political intrigue has absorbed the mental activity of the people; and li

25 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 1. Moral Influence

§ 1. Moral Influence

Such tests are of course not those that will be first put by a scrupulous mind seeking to know whether the Christian creed be true. Rather they are forced on such a mind by the tactics of believers, who as a rule seek to evade the fundamental issue. It is not unlikely, therefore, in view of present painful experience, that for some time to come the stress of defence will shift to the attempt, never entirely abandoned, to defend the faith on evidential or philosophic grounds. We have thus to cons

8 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 2. Intellectual Influence

§ 2. Intellectual Influence

In the highest degree does this seem to be true of the land where it has had the longest continuous life. Alone among the nations Greece contributes nothing to the world’s renovation. Italy, despite the papacy, has a swarm of eager and questioning thinkers, working at the human sciences; Spain stirs under all the leaden folds of clericalism; but Greece, where the faith has never undergone eclipse since Justinian’s day, remains intellectually almost Byzantine, vainly divided between Christian dog

5 minute read

Read Chapter

§ 3. Conclusion and Prognosis

§ 3. Conclusion and Prognosis

1 I.e. , the South African War, in 1901. ↑ 2 A beginning has since been made. ↑ A good introduction to the rational discussion of the whole problem of origins is furnished in Radical Views about the New Testament , by Dr. G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, trans. from the Dutch by S. B. Slack (R. P. A., 1912). The Unitarian view is freshly put by Wilhelm Soltau in The Birth of Jesus Christ (Eng. tr., Black, 1903). Of the countless works discussing early Christian literature and the formation of

34 minute read

Read Chapter

Part I—PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

Part I—PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

Of the more rationalistic Lives of Jesus, so-called, that of Renan is the most charming and the least scientific; those by Strauss the most systematic and educative; that of Thomas Scott, “The English Life of Jesus,” the most compendious view of the conflicts of the gospel narratives. Evan Meredith’s Prophet of Nazareth (1864) is rather a stringent criticism of the whole Christian system of ethics, evidences, and theology (rejecting supernaturalism but assuming a historical Christ) than a scient

28 minute read

Read Chapter

Part II—CHRISTIANITY FROM THE SECOND CENTURY TO THE RISE OF ISLAM

Part II—CHRISTIANITY FROM THE SECOND CENTURY TO THE RISE OF ISLAM

Hatch, as before cited, is here a specially good guide; and Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church (trans. in Bohn Lib.), gives a copious narrative (vol. i, sect. ii). On episcopal policy compare the series of popular monographs under the title “The Fathers for English Readers” (S.P.C.K.) and the anonymous treatise On the State of Man Subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity (1852), Part II, ch. iv. Mosheim (Reid’s ed. of Murdock’s trans.) here deserves study. The qu

9 minute read

Read Chapter

Part III—MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY

Part III—MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY

In addition to the general histories consult Gregorovius’ Geschichte der Stadt Rom (Eng. tr. 2nd ed. 1901) and The Pope and the Councils , by “Janus” (tr. 1869 from German). Hefele’s History of the Christian Councils (Eng. tr., 1871–1896, five vols.), though by a Catholic scholar, is generally accepted as the standard modern work on its subject. Hallam’s View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages is still valuable for its general views. Fuller details may be had from monographs on leadin

6 minute read

Read Chapter

Part IV—MODERN CHRISTIANITY

Part IV—MODERN CHRISTIANITY

For the history of Catholicism since the seventeenth century consult Mosheim and Neander, also the History of the Fall of the Jesuits , by Count A. de Saint-Priest (Eng. tr. 1845), and Mr. Joseph McCabe’s The Decay of the Church of Rome (1909). There is an extensive literature on the controversy between Anglicanism and Catholicism in the middle of the nineteenth century, following on the Tractarian movement, as to the latest phases of which see the Secret History of the Oxford Movement , by Walt

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Corrections

Corrections

The following corrections have been applied to the text:...

2 minute read

Read Chapter