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Chapter IX
The last great system of defence was the New Platonism. It had not very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him as a great authority. The Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato did. They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great thinkers as some of them were. They pictured the universe as one vast unity. Far beyond all things is God. Of God man can form no conception. Think, they would say, of all the exalted and wonderful and beautiful concepts you can imagine; then deny them. God is beyond. God is beyond being; you can conceive of being, and therefore to predicate being of God is to limit him. You cannot think of God; for, if you could think of God, God would be in relation with you; God is insusceptible of relation with man. He neither wills, nor thinks of man, nor can man think of him. A modern philosopher has summed up their God as the deification of the word "not." This God, then, who is not, willed—no! not "willed"; he could not will; but whether he willed or did not will, in some way or other there was an emanation; not God, but very much of God; very divine, but not all God; from this another and another in a descending series, down to the daemons, and down to men. All that is, is God; evil is not-being. One of the great features of the system was that it guaranteed all the old religions—for the crowd; while for the initiated, for the esoteric, it had something more—it had mystic trance, mystic vision, mystic comprehension. Twice or three times, Plotinus, by a great leap away from all mortal things, saw God. In the meantime, the philosophy justified all the old rites.
Side by side with this great defence were what are known as the Christian heresies. They are not exactly Christian. Groups of people endeavoured to combine Christianity with the old thought, with philosophy, theosophy, theurgy, and magic. They were eclectics; they compromised. The German thinker, Novalis, said very justly that all eclectics are sceptics, and the more eclectic the more sceptic. These mixtures could not prevail.
But religions have, historically, a wonderful way of living in spite of their weaknesses—yes, and in spite of their apologetics. A religion may be stained with all sorts of evil, and may communicate it; and yet it will survive, until there is an alternative with more truth and more dynamic. The old paganism outlived Plato's criticisms and Plutarch's defences. For the great masses of people neither might have written.
Into this world came the Christian Church. I have tried to draw the picture of the great pagan religion, with its enormous strength, its universal acceptance, its great traditions, its splendours of art and ceremony, its manifest proofs of its gods—everything that, to the ordinary mind, could make for reality and for power; to show how absolutely inconceivable it was that it could ever pass away. Then comes the Christian Church—a ludicrous collection of trivial people, very ignorant and very common; fishermen and publicans, as the Gospels show us, "the baker and the fuller," as Celsus said with a sneer. Yes, and every kind of unclean and disreputable person they urged to join them, quite unlike all decent and established religions. And they took the children and women of the family away into a corner, and whispered to them and misled them—"Only believe!" was their one great word. The whole thing was incredibly silly. Paul went to Athens, and they asked him there about his religion; and when he spoke to them about Jesus rising from the dead, they sniggered, and the more polite suggested "another day." Everybody knew that dead men do not rise. It was a silly religion. Celsus pictured the frogs in symposium round a swamp, croaking to one another how God forsakes the whole universe, the spheres of heaven, to dwell with us; we frogs are so like God; he never ceases to seek how we may dwell with him for ever; but some of us are sinners, so God will come—or send his son—and burn them up; and the rest of us will live with him for eternity. Is not that very like the Christian religion? Celsus asked. It has been replied that, if the frogs really could say this and did say this, then their statement might be quite reasonable. But our main purpose for the moment is to realize the utterly inconceivable absurdity of this bunch of Galilean fishermen—and fools and rascals and maniacs—setting out to capture the world. One of them wrote an Apocalypse. He was in a penal settlement on Patmos, when he wrote it. The sect was in a fair way of being stamped out in blood, as a matter of fact; but this dreamer saw a triumphant Church of ten thousand times ten thousand—and thousands of thousands—there were hardly as many people in the world at that time; the great Rome had fallen and the "Lamb" ruled. Imagine the amusement of a Roman pagan of 100 A.D. who read the absurd book. Yet the dream has come true; that Church has triumphed. Where is the old religion? Christ has conquered, and all the gods have gone, utterly gone—they are memories now, and nothing more. Why did they go? The Christian Church refused to compromise. A pagan could have seen no real reason why Jesus should not be a demi-god like Herakles or Dionysos; no reason, either, why a man should not worship Jesus as well as these. One of the Roman Emperors, a little after 200 A.D., had in his private sanctuary four or five statues of gods, and one of them was Jesus. Why not? The Roman world had open arms for Jesus as well as any other god or demi-god, if people would be sensible; but the Christian said, No. He would not allow Jesus to be put into that pantheon, nor would he worship the gods himself, not even the "genius" of the Emperor, his guardian spirit. The Christian proclaimed a war of religion in which there shall be no compromise and no peace, till Christ is lord of all; the thing shall be fought out to the bitter end. And it has been. He was resolved that the old gods should go; and they have gone. How was it done?