NOTICES OF BOOKS.

[L'Eglise et l'Empire Romain au IV. Siecle. Par M. A. DE BROGLIE.

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SECOND NOTICE.

E have brought our review of this history down to the death of Constantine in 335. The remainder of the century is politically the most singular and critical epoch in the fall of Paganism, and the decline of the Western Empire. The Empire was in full decay, but there were not wanting vigorous hands which attempted to arrest its ruin. Paganism dragged on a sort of life in death, but it was still supported by its old recollections, for the senators of the Capitol were the last to relinquish a system so closely entwined with the glories of Rome; and at last one powerful mind arose from the ashes," says M. de Broglie, "of the Curii and Camilli," to make a desperate attempt to avenge the old gods upon Christianity. The period embraces the lives of emperors, mostly men of some mark and vigour the sons of Constantine, Julian, Valens and Valentinian, Gratian, and the able and vigorous, if not actually great, Theodosius. We cannot say that M. de Broglie has succeeded in combining the political interest of their reigns with the ecclesiastical; to do so is an almost insuperable difficulty in a church history. We shall follow his own order in describing, first, the character of church history under the sons of Constantine; secondly, the last attempts to revive Paganism; thirdly, the career of Julian. Valentinian and Theodosius may deserve a separate notice.

1. The three sons of Constantine were the worst and feeblest of any of the princes we have mentioned, and for a period of twenty years (335-355), there was but one human being in the Empire whose history excites the slightest interestAthanasius. The Empire had been capriciously and accidentally divided, on principles which led to perpetual disputes, or rather on no principles at all; for Constantine, the eldest, had Gaul, Spain, and Britain, with the curious addition of Constantinople. His brother Constantius had the East, with the equally strange addition of Thrace; while Constans, the youngest, abutted on the dominions of his two brothers by holding Italy, Africa, and the Western Illyricum. They were all three mere boys; and it is no matter of wonder that the result of this zigzag and ill-arranged division was the death of Constantine and the murder of Constans, so that the whole Empire, for a few years before the accession of Julian, was in the hands of the worst and weakest of the brothers

Constantius, who became the warm supporter of Arianism, at that time the favourite religion of the ladies and eunuchs of his court. One very curious result of this strange division is seen in the romantic exile and wanderings of Athanasius, who, like our old friend the Ancient Mariner, might truly be said

"To pass like night, from land to land,

With his strange power of speech."

He had twenty years of wandering, out of which he scarcely spent a single year in his own see. When he was driven out of Egypt by Constantius, he betook himself to his brother Constantine at Treves. When Constantine was killed, we find him in Italy at the court of Constans. Council after council, Antioch, Sardica, Arles, Milan, Rimini, seem to have had for their one object the desire to get rid of this unconquerable man. But it was always Ου πῶ 'δὴ Τέθνηκεν ἐπὶ xoóví dios 'Odvogevs. At one moment, when he was believed to be at Tyre, he flung himself in the way of the startled emperor as he passed on horseback to his palace at Constantinople. At Tyre his enemies accused him of the murder of one of their bishops. He let them speak on, and suddenly produced the murdered bishop alive and well. He was driven to Treves, but his very appearance was enough to convert the young Constantine. He took refuge in Rome, then the headquarters of heathenism, and of a mixed Christianity almost as dissolute. He converted some of the most eminent of the Patricians, and founded that great society of the "devout women" of Rome, which afterwards played such a remarkable part in the history of Jerome and early monasticism. He was for a time almost literally an Athanasius contra mundum," and the greatest bishops, Hosius of Cordova, and Liberius of Rome, deserted him; but he continued throughout as unshaken, as temperate, and as calm as ever, and remained in impenetrable seclusion for six years among his old and almost his only friends, the monks of Egypt.

The life of this truly great man, and his struggles against the miserable factions of the Arians, who appear to deserve as little sympathy on grounds of morality as of theology, is the real history of the sons of Constantine. The following passage of M. de Broglie may give some idea of one period of his exile:

On

"Athanase etoit à Rome. Sa présence dans la capitale de l'Occident excitoit un vif mouvement d'attrait et de curiosité. Sa reputation, ses malheurs, son courage, tout le designait a l'attention publique. D'illustres patriciens, de grandes dames se pressaient autours de lui pour l'entendre. Il nomme lui-même, parmi ses hôtes de predilection, la Princesse Eutropie, sœur de Constantin, les senateurs Abutère et Spérance. pressait Athanase de questions pour appendre les details d'une institution si étrange, que celle des moines. Athanase racontait a ses auditeurs, surpris autant que charmés, les details de la vie d'Antoine au fond des Montagnes. Seduite par l'attrait de ses recits une dame de qualité, du nom de Marcelle, plus tard l'amie de Saint Jérome, concut l'ideó de transporter sur le nouveau theatre les exemples du saint exercise. Athanase devenait ainsi le lien des deux societés chretiennes; il representait presque seul en Orient, la saine et simple doctrine de l'eglise Latine: il apprenait a la pieté de l'Europe les saintes pratiques de la devotion orientale."

In spite, or, perhaps, in consequence, of this great character, Athanasius died, if not in exile, at least in obscurity and neglect. He was at once feared and persecuted both by Julian and by Valens; and the question may occur to many whether his long life of struggle was not a failure. But, in reality, no man of a less vigorous character could have resisted the enormous amount of court influence which was enlisted on the side of Arianism. He seems to have been at once a statesman, a theologian, and to have combined with a lawyer-like clearness of view those high personal qualities which gain an irresistible ascendancy over other men. And thus, having really borne the brunt of the battle, it was he who won the victory over Arianism, which was completed in the next generation by men of scarcely inferior powers-Basil and Hilary, of Poictiers. M. de Broglie has thus described the conclusion of his labours :

"Ce fut sa dernière épreuve : le temps de l'eternel repos approchait pour lui, et son role d'ailleurs etoit fini. D'autres champions etoient prets a le remplacer, plus jeunes, mieux appropriés peut-étre a la face nouvelle des temps. La politique strictement defensive par laquelle Athanase avait contenu le despotisme encore respecté de Constantin

et de ses fils, son attitude de froide réserve devenaient moins necessaires et moins utiles en face d'un souverain plus faible, qui conservait les mêmes pretentions sans disposer des mêmes moyens de se faire obeir.~ Athanase n'avait eté qu' Evêque; d'autres, elevés a la meme dignité, devaient engager au service de la meme cause les ressources plus variées du philosophe, de l'orateur, et même la science politique de l'homme d'etat."

2. One of the most interesting subjects of the fourth and fifth centuries is the gradual extinction of Paganism. Rome was naturally the headquarters of the old religion, and the foundation of the rival Constantinople rather strengthened than weakened this feeling. In the days of Constantine the majority of the senate were heathen; and the letters of Jerome and Augustin are full of graphic sketches of houses divided against themselves, such as that of the old Pontifex Albinus, whom Jerome describes with great beauty as playing with his Christian grandchild while it lisps its hymns. The emperors were themselves obliged to yield to the feeling. Constantine remained Pontifex Maximus to the end of his days; and the destruction of the statue of Victory in the temple of the senate by the command of Gratian, was the occasion of a pitched battle between the orator Symmachus and St. Ambrose. Ambrose was victorious; but there is some truth in Gibbon's sarcasm that it was not till "the gods of antiquity had been dragged at the chariot-wheels of Theodosius, that on a regular division of the senate, Jupiter was condemned and degraded by the sense of a very large majority." Augustin's Civitas Dei, written thirty years later, may be said to have given the final blow to Paganism, and it certainly implies that the old religion could still make a respectable appearance, both in writers and supporters.

M. de Broglie has discussed this subject somewhat inadequately, and has chiefly confined himself to a single point, although one of undoubted importance -the attempt of the Neo-Platonists to give a moral meaning to the old mythical fables of the gods. After dwelling on the extent to which magic almost universally prevailed, he gives the following account of the curious worship of Mithra, which for a time became the great opponent to Christianity :

"C'est a cette epoque qu'on voit un rameau detaché du culte des Perses prendre un developement considerable; c'est le culte de Mithra, dieu de soleil, le premier des bons génies, le médiateur entre l'homme et le principe supreme de tout bien. Le fait à la fois certain et curieux que tous les monuments demontrent c'est que, presque seule de toutes les religions de l'Empire, l'adoration de Mithra croissait, au milieu de la decadence universelle des dieux, en publicité et en importance. . . Le temple ou, comme on l'appellait, l'autre de Mithra, subsistait dans les souterrains du Capitole, et ne fut fermé que sons le regne de Gratien. Cette popularité n'etait pas due a l'appât du plaisir, ou de la license. Nulle initiation, au contraire, n'etait plus longue et plus laborieuse: douze epreuves tentaient la patience et le courage des novices. Il fallait traverser une riviere à la nage, se précipiter dans le feu, souffrir la faim et la soif, endurer la fatigue et le froid, s'exposer à des coups de fouet répétés. A chacune de ces cpreuves correspondait un degré d'initiation figuré par l'image d'un animal symbolique On y retrouvait une sorte de baptême pour la purification des péchés, une onction d'huile sainte qui rappelait la confirmation; deux ordres de sacrifice, l'un sanglant, consistant dans l'immolation d'un taureau et reproduisant ceux de l'ancienne loi Juive, l'autre se bornant a une oblation de pain et de vin pareille a celle de l'Eucharistie. Et en effet les esperances d'une vie future plus nettement exprimées que dans les religions ordinaires de l'antiquité; des aspirations ardentes vers une regeneration morale, les promesses de la remission des péchés et de la purification de l'ame, faisaient du culte de Mithra comme une contre-epreuve affaiblie du Christianisme. Pour tenter de nouveau les combats contre le Christ, on esperait trouver en Mithra un puissant auxiliaire."

But the desperate attempt to revive heathenism was not the most powerful weapon employed against Christianity. Its greatest opponents were, and had been from the time of Celsus, the philosophers of the school of Alexandria, and above all, Plotinus and Porphyry. It is a school of which the very name is scarcely known, except to the students of church history; but it was a great power in its day, and it had this real merit, that after the fall of Stoicism it was the only school of thought in the Roman Empire, apart from Christianity, which was in earnest. With Plotinus and Porphyry, it was a sort of unity of Platonicism and Gnosticism--a Platonic Trinity of Unity, Intelligence, and Soul, through the last of which the Deity was supposed to communicate with mankind by a series of emanations. But its peculiar feature was an attempt to

realise the Christian doctrine of inspiration by what Porphyry called the Ecstacy. This was expressed almost in the terms of Scripture. It was to be by mortifying the body, by overcoming the senses, that the wise man, according to Plotinus, could alone attain to immortality. In the language of Porphyry, man must purify his body as a temple for the glory of God. So stern was he in his own asceticism, that Plotinus could scarcely prevent him from "doing to death" his body by suicide. 'I have never," he said, "attained to a state of Union with God but once, when I was forty-eight years of age."

Practically, of course, the system was a total failure. It was a philosophy, not a religion. Its ecstacy was soon corrupted into what was called the art of Theurgia, in reality a sort of magic. Its last great disciple, Iamblichus, attempted a still closer union with Paganism, by classifying the heathen deities and their functions under their different heads of gods, demons, and heroes. This is the system which Augustin-who, strangely enough, is not mentioned by M. de Broglie-demolishes with so much zest. But anything like a rationale of Paganism possessed an attraction for a man who, like Julian, was a thorough hater of Christianity. Before we notice him, we will quote M. de Broglie's account of Porphyry's acknowledgment that his own system was a failure:

"Porphyre vecut assez pour voir poindre, et pour déplorer cette metamorphose. Cet art nouveau recut un nom particulier. On l'appela la theurgie, l'action de Dieu ou l'art de produire Dieu. Il y eut une science, plus mecanique que morale, ayant pour but avoué d'appeler Dieu sur la terre. Le vieux maitre s'en effraya: cette grossiere traduction de ses reveries lui causa une indignation qu'il exprima presque sans prudence. Dans une lettre adressée au pretre Egyptien Anébon il fit assez rudement le procès aux adeptes du nouvel art, et, a leure mythologie toute entière. Les dieux sont impossibles, dit il; c'est donc vainement qu'on pense les concilier, les flechir par des invocations, des expiations, des priéres. Je vois des gens qui croient deviner l'avenir par une sorte d'enthousiasme et de transport divin, et bien qu'ils veillent et aient tous leurs sens en action, ils ne semblent pas maitres d'eux mêmes; et ils arrivent a cet etat pour avoir entendu le son des cymbals ou des tambours, ou quelque chant consacré .. on pour avoir bu d'une certaine eau, on respiré une certaine vapeur, on s'ètre servis des certains caractères sacrés. Et je me demande si la Divinité est a ce point aux ordres des hommes, qu'on puisse connaitre sa volonté par des moyens si vulgaires.”

3. The last great believer in Paganism was the Emperor Julian. His character was so singular, that it is difficult to find epithets in which to describe a combination of such varied kinds of ability with such extravagant superstition, and rash folly in the practical conduct of life. Gibbon, who would gladly have made him a sort of anti-Christian hero if his historical honesty had not deterred him from the attempt, says with truth, that "when we inspect the portrait, something seems wanting to the grace and perfection of the figure." He seems to us to have been a man of immense versatility, but with a want of judgment which almost amounted to madness. His first achievements, happening in the worst days of the Empire, quite astonished us by their genius; his last are as startling by their extravagance. A puny, sickly young man of twentyfive, who had spent his whole time amongst books and philosophers, takes the command of an army in the ruined province of Gaul, wins campaign after campaign against the bravest of the barbarians; and alone, in spite of every sort of opposition and jealousy, restores the finances, becomes almost the founder of Paris, and (as Gibbon says) even delays for a considerable period the fall of the Western Empire. The same man, within five years, undertakes a mad and hopeless expedition into a country where the Roman arms had never penetrated without being shamefully repulsed, and after redeeming his folly by many fruitless deeds of valour, perishes, as Crassus had done centuries before, at Carrhoe.

This same ability, superstition, and wildness marked the character in which Julian appears in church history as the last great enemy of Christianity. He was evidently from childhood, even while professing Christianity, an unbeliever; and had devoted himself especially to the worship of the great "Sun-God," who had been also Constantine's favourite deity in the days of his Paganism. He studied, along with Basil and Gregory, at Athens; and they easily detected his ill-disguised Polytheism. When he came to the throne the one desire of his heart was to uproot Christianity, and to restore the old religion. But he was so

far a true philosopher that he professed, and probably believed, that he hated persecution; and how was Christianity, now firmly fixed in the affections of his subjects, to be uprooted without persecution? It is impossible now to enumerate the inconsistencies, and indeed cruelties, into which the attempt led him. The Christians assailed him with no measured indignation; and he, in return, shut up their schools, compelled or tricked his soldiers into sacrificing, and honoured Athanasius with his peculiar hatred. But his chief opposition came from his Pagan subjects. The Romans hated him because he was a Greek, and cared for nothing but the Greek philosophers, and, it may be added, the worship of the Grecian deities. When he attempted to restore the worship of Apollo at Daphne, a solitary priest appeared with a single goose as the only offering of Antioch to its favourite deity. His own friends and officers-Ammianus Marcellinus, for example-condemned his violence. In fact, spite of his vast energy and ability, his whole reign was a failure, and only furnished a final demonstration that Paganism had utterly died out from the hearts even of its nominal votaries.

The characteristic faults and merits of M. de Broglie's history come out in his account of Julian. He is lengthy and somewhat tedious; but, on the other hand, he is candid, and appreciates Julian well. The feelings which led him to Paganism are well described in the following letter to his friend Sallust:

"Le Soleil est mon roi, je suis son serviteur. Ma confiance en lui repose sur des motifs secréts que je garde en moi meme, mais voici ce je que je puis dire sans offenser ma religion ni ma conscience. Des mes premiers ans j'ai eté saisi d'amour pour l'eclat du soleil. ... On disant meme que je portais a ce spectacle trop d'ardeur et d'attention, et quoique encore imberbe, on m'accusat de faire le devin. Et cependant aucun livre de divination n'était encore tombé entre mes mains, et je ne savais meme quelle chose c'etait. Mais a quoi bon rappeler ces souvenirs? J'aurais bien d'autres choses a dire si je racontais, par exemple, quelle idée je me faisais alors des Dieux. Ce debut est suivi d'une exposition toute empreinte de philosophie Alexandrine, et mise explicitement sous la protection de Platon et de Jamblique, sur le role du soleil dans l'organisation du monde. Le Soleil est dans le monde visible ce qu'est Dieu dans le monde intelligible le principe immuable de toute perfection, de toute beauté, de toute connaissance. C'est Dieu, le bien supreme, qui l'a constitué Maitre du Monde visible,'" &c. &c.

By far the most singular event in the history of Julian is his failure to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem. It had every appearance of being miraculous, and the miracle is not essentially altered if we suppose it to have been worked, as in the case of the passage of the Red Sea, by the intervention of natural phenomena. M. de Broglie, agreeing with Döllinger, explains it thus:

"Peu de faits de l'histoire sont mieux avérés, quoiqu'il y en ait peu qui aient donné lieu à plus de discussion. Voltaire, il n'y a pas un siecle, declairait avec hauteur que le recit d'Ammien Marcellin était impossible à admettre, attendu que jamais globe de pierre ne sortait de la terre ni de la pierre, et que cela suffisait pour demontrer la sottise de ceux qui y avaient cru.' Les physiciens d'aujourd'hui sont moins positifs, et trouvent parfaitement naturel ce que Voltaire supposait absurde. Suivant eux, l'inflammation subite des gaz contenus dans les souterrains longtemps fermés suffit à tout expliquer. Plus d'une difficulté pourroit encore entre elevée contre cette interpretation, qui ne concorde point exactement avec les textes; mais l'interet de la religion n'exige point que nous intervenions dans de tels debats. Il n'importe pas de savoir si c'etoit en suspendant momentanement le cours de ses lois ordinaires, ou en révélant au dehors par une explosion inattendue quelqu'une des forces mystérieuses qui résident toujours dans son sein."

On the whole, M. de Broglie appears to us to have judged Julian's character rightly. He thinks him greater as a soldier than as a politician. Regarded as the latter, he says with justice that "he failed in the first requisite for a governor-common sense; "and he contrasts him in this respect with Constantine, who, with all his faults, had the true instinct of a ruler for discerning the wants of his time. Julian was, in fact, a man of great natural genius, but one who, like many similar characters, was never able to harmonise and concentrate his remarkable gifts. His real work in history was to prove the absurdity of the objects on which he wasted his life,

W. C. LAKE.