Apollonius of Tyana - The Pagan Christ of the Third Century/Section 3
III.
It is a noticeable circumstance that before the time of Philostratus, Apollonius had been but little heard of, whereas, both during his lifetime and after it, the sage of Tyana could count many and warm admirers. A temple was erected to his honour by Caracalla; Alexander Severus placed him by the side of Christ, and Abraham, and Orpheus, amongst his household gods. At Ephesus he was worshipped under the title of Hercules, the warder off of evil (Ἀλεξίκακος). The Emperor Aurelian spares the city of Tyana, which he had sworn to destroy, out of regard for Apollonius, who appears to him the day before the one on which he had determined to massacre the inhabitants. The historians Dion Cassius and Vopiscus, the former a contemporary of Philostratus, and the latter one of the writers of the Augustan history, hold him in the same veneration. His reputation as a holy man is so well established that Sidonius Apollinaris and Cassiodorus, both Christians, speak loudly and eloquently in his praise. The former, more of a rhetorician and a man of letters than a bishop, translated his biography into Latin. It is somewhat extraordinary that the philosophical school of Alexandria which was represented by Porphyry and Iamblichus did not esteem him more than they did, but they probably had their reasons. On the other hand, however, Hierocles, one of the last and most brilliant champions of expiring Paganism, in his Discursus Philalethes, seized eagerly upon the character of Apollonius, and set it up in opposition to the Christ of the Gospels. He succeeded, it appears, to some extent, for his opponent, Eusebius of Caesarea, states that this portion of the attacks of Hierocles requires a special reply, whilst the rest of his work is a mere repetition of the old objections made against Christianity from the earliest times. Lactantius also deems it necessary to write against the parallel which had been drawn by Hierocles, and he does it with such warmth and energy that the importance which was attached to the controversies of the period may be easily imagined. Arnobius and the fathers of the fourth century agree in attributing the miracles of Apollonius to magic, which would imply that the miracles themselves were recorded as being opposed to it. As late as the fifth century we find one Volusian, a proconsul of Africa, descended from an old Roman family and still strongly attached to the religion of his ancestors, almost worshipping Apollonius of Tyana as a supernatural being. All these circumstances combined tend to prove that the work of Philostratus, far from being read as a mere romance, held a much more important place in the religious discussions of the third and fourth centuries than any book could have done which had only been written to amuse a select circle of wits.
From the fifth century downwards, little is said about the book or its hero, at least in the West. The undoubted triumph of the Church deprives it of all positive interest. The night of the Middle Ages had set in. Not till the time of the Renaissance do we see the life of Apollonius brought to light again with many other specimens of ancient art, all of them doubtless surprised to see the light of day once more. Even then, however, there was something suspicious about this resuscitated Apollonius, so much so that the learned Aldus Manutius hesitated for a time before he granted the publicity of the press to the work of Philostratus. At last he resolved to do so, but took care to publish at the same time the reply of Eusebius to Hierocles, and thus to give, as he expressed it himself, the bane with the antidote. Subsequently, Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth century, and Jean Bodin and Baronius in the sixteenth, denounced Apollonius as a vile and detestable magician. Without entirely reversing so sweeping a verdict, the seventeenth century seemed to think that the biography of the philosopher of Tyana was something more than a record of sorcery, and accordingly Daniel Huet, the famous Bishop of Avranches, expressed an opinion on the subject which ever since that time has had great weight with all thoughtful minds. "Philostratus," he says, "seems to have made it his chief aim to depreciate both the Christian faith and Christian doctrine, both of which were progressing wonderfully at that time, by the exhibition on the opposite side of that shallow representation of a miraculous science, holiness, and virtue. He invented a character in imitation of Christ, and introduced almost all the incidents in the life of Jesus Christ into the history of Apollonius in order that the Pagans might have no cause to envy the Christians; by doing which he inadvertently enhanced the glory of Christ, for by falsely attributing to another the real character of the Saviour, he gave to the latter the praise which is His just due, and indirectly held Him up to the admiration and praise of others."
Again in the eighteenth century the Deists renewed the attacks made of old by Hierocles. Resting their arguments on the undeniable similarity between the Christ of the Gospels and Apollonius of Tyana, they maintained that both histories were equally apocryphal. In 1680, Charles Blount, an English Deist, pushed this dilemma still further, and said that we must either admit the truth of the miracles of Apollonius as well as those of Jesus Christ, or if the former are untrue, he maintained that there was no better ground for believing the latter to be true. Voltaire, Le Grand d’Aussy, and Castillon all wrote to the same effect. It is even said by some that Castillon’s French translation was dedicated to Pope Clement XIV., with an ironical preface, signed Philalethes, and supposed to have been written by Frederick II. As a natural consequence, in Germany more especially, numberless refutations were written in answer to these modern imitators of Hierocles. But it was agreed on both sides that the work of Philostratus was written and published in a spirit decidedly hostile to Christianity.
There was no doubt that a reaction would take place in so exaggerated a notion, and that reaction is now visible in the writings of Buhle, Jacobs, and Neander. It is quite true that they have gone into the opposite extreme. It has been denied of late that there ever was any intentional reference in the life of Apollonius to Christianity or to the Gospel writings. Great stress has been laid upon the circumstance that there is the most complete silence in the book as regards Jesus and His disciples. They are never mentioned; the existence of the Christian Church is ignored; and yet the book contains attacks upon all kinds of religious and moral errors; hence, it is argued, any similarity which may exist between the life of Christ and that of the Pagan reformer is either accidental or forced. Can we agree with these opinions? Are there no other proofs that the life of Apollonius is moulded on a pattern which is almost identical with the Gospel story? Apollonius is born in a mysterious way about the same time as Christ. Like Him he went through a period of preparation during which he displayed wonderful precocity in religious matters; then came a season of public and positive activity; then a passion, a kind of resurrection, and an ascension. The messengers of Apollo sang at his birth as the angels did at that of Jesus. He is exposed to the attacks of enemies, though always engaged in doing good. He goes about from place to place whilst carrying out his work of reform; he is accompanied by his favourite disciples, amongst whom, however, disaffection, discouragement, and even treachery make their appearance. When the hour of danger is at hand, in spite of the prudent advice of his friends, he goes straight to Rome, where Domitian is seeking to kill him, just as Jesus went up to Jerusalem and to certain death. Before that he had been the victim of the murderous jealousy of Nero, as Jesus had been exposed to the machinations of Herod Antipas. Like Jesus, he is accused of working his miracles of mercy by the aid of magic and unlawful arts, whereas he can only succeed in working them because he is the friend of the gods, and worthy to be esteemed as such. Like Jesus, on the road to Damascus, he fills an avowed enemy with wondering dismay by a triumphant apparition several years after his ascension.
One very remarkable circumstance in a Greek work, written in a Greek spirit, is the great number of cases in which evil spirits are driven out at the bidding of Apollonius. He speaks to them, as it is said that Christ did, with authority. The young man who was possessed, at Athens, through whom the devil utters cries of fear and rage, and who cannot face the look of Apollonius, reminds the attentive reader of the Gospel narrative of the demoniac of Gadara. Neither is cured until some outward visible circumstance has taken place which gives the people reason to believe that the devil has really gone out. In the one case the herd of swine rush down into the lake; in the other, a statue falls, overthrown by the violence of the evil spirit as he departed out of the young man. Again, another case of possession is singularly like the one of the epileptic child in the three first gospels. In Rome, Apollonius restores a young girl to life under circumstances which immediately remind us of the return to life of the daughter of Jairus. It may be remarked even still further, that the two stories are so recorded that a careful critic may ask himself with respect to each whether the young girl who was brought to life again had really been dead at all. The lame, the halt, and the blind come in crowds to be healed by the laying on hands of Iarchas, the chief of the Indian sages, from whom we know that Apollonius derives his knowledge and his power. His miraculous appearances to his friends Damis and Demetrius, who think at first that he is a spirit, remind us at once, by the way in which they are told, of the appearances of Jesus after His death, and, like the appearances of Apollonius, they are no longer subject to the laws which regulate the movements of matter in space.
This astonishing similarity must not be exaggerated as though Philostratus had always and throughout his work kept his artistic and rhetorical taste and his imaginative love of the marvellous in a kind of subjection to a desire to reproduce the person of Jesus Christ in all its exact minuteness of detail. But surely all the points of resemblance which we have glanced at can neither be accidental nor imaginary. It is all the more difficult to believe this to be the case when we reflect that it can be stated positively that Philostratus evidently devotes much attention to Christianity, if he does not allude to it. Christian forms, traditions, and objections are mirrored upon his written thoughts, and very frequently determine the language in which those thoughts are expressed. Apollonius is not only like Jesus Christ, but he combines in his own person many of the characteristics of the Apostles. Like Paul he travels up and down the world from east to west, and like him, too, he is the victim of Nero’s tyranny. Like John, according to a tradition which prevailed even in his time, he is persecuted by Domitian. He understands and speaks all the languages in the world, and consequently had nothing to be envious of as regards the earliest disciples in what was called the gift of tongues. He is accused of sacrificing children with certain mysterious ceremonies: the early Christians were charged with the same offence by the ignorant of their day. In Sicily he witnessed the birth of a three-headed monster, and inferred from this that the three immediate successors of Nero, Galba, Vitellius, and Otho would reign at the same time, and for a short period only; this might almost be a symbolical vision from the Apocalypse. Apollonius holds the Jews and Judaea in supreme contempt. Titus is, in his eyes, an instrument of Divine wrath, and he refuses to go into a country which is polluted by the crimes and vices of its inhabitants, with whom he could do no good. This leads us to make another observation of a somewhat similar character. In a general way the towns which are known to have been the chief centres of Christianity in the earliest days are either imperfectly noticed, or are said to have been converted by Apollonius. He received his earlier education at Tarsus, Paul’s native city, but he left it on account of the corruption of its morals. Ephesus, Antioch, Smyrna, Alexandria, all of them great centres of Christianity, are the objects of a like censure. To him, Ephesus, the head-quarters of Paul, and afterwards of John, owes its salvation. Apollonius did much good there, we are told, but learnt nothing. A Christian, reading his biography, will easily understand the possibility of remaining attached to the old religion without its being necessary to approve of immoral practices, such as the combats of gladiators, or to believe in such absurd fables as were imagined by the poets. Who knows but that there may be a bright light thrown upon the question of the divinity of Christ in that answer of Apollouius to Domitian, when he is questioning him after the manner of Caiaphas, "Why art thou called God?" To which the philosopher replies, "Because the name of God is the title due to every man who is believed to be virtuous."
We must bear in mind now that at the time when Philostratus wrote, Christianity and the Church had outlived the period during which the brutal outrages of the populace in certain large cities only contrasted with the contemptuous indifference with which they were treated elsewhere. The scornful disdain of a Tacitus or a Pliny was a thing of the past. Celsus had aimed the sharp-pointed weapons of his acute reasoning at the Gospel, Lucian had attacked it with his biting sarcasms. Numbers of the followers of Plato had been baptised. The Christians of Rome and their bishop had been in high favour at the court of Commodus. Many distinguished martyrs had engaged the public attention by their sufferings, and contemporary historians were beginning to mention, as they related the lives of the emperors, whether they had tolerated or persecuted the Christians. Can it be admitted, then, that Philostratus, at a time like this, when he had to write a work on the religious movement which was affecting the whole world, should never have once thought of Christianity? And if he did think of it, and systematically avoided all mention of the subject, we are forced to infer that his very silence is anything but a sign of indifference. An apparent want of interest in a system which it is the writer's object to destroy is one of the ordinary phases of ancient controversy. The Epistle of James does not say a word about Paul or his school, and yet its aim is most certainly to refute the doctrine, of justification by faith as taught by Paul. Another theological work, more like a romance than a treatise on divinity (the Clementine Homilies), was certainly prompted by a desire to refute Paul and Marcion, and yet they are neither of them mentioned by name in the work.
One thing which is undeniably certain is that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were equally mistaken when they pronounced the work of Philostratus to be decidedly and essentially hostile to Christianity. It contains no evidences either of indifference or hostility to Christianity, but rather of jealousy. It is inspired by a desire to turn the advantages and the superiority possessed by Christianity over ordinary Paganism to the profit of a reformed Paganism, and if we consider the following words of the Bishop of Avranches, "Ne quid ethnici Christianis invidere possent" (that the Pagans may have no cause to envy the Christians in anything), apart from the stronger expressions of feeling which accompany them in the passage already quoted, they will be found to express the exact truth. To have indicated with such nicety the true nature of the book and its many varying and changeful shades is one more proof of that character for learning to which Professor Baur of Tubingen is so justly entitled. It was necessary that Apollonius should be like Christ, but it was also necessary that he should be different from, and superior to, Him. This circumstance alone can explain the various curious phenomena which require explanation, and its reasonableness assumes the form of absolute certainty when we fancy ourselves living in the same political and religious atmosphere as Philostratus when he wrote his book.
Julia Domna was, as everybody knows, the Egeria of that Pagan reform which was more or less skilfully, but at any rate perseveringly, conducted (as such mattersare when undertaken by women) by the empresses who were related to her, and wo succeeded her in the supreme management of affairs. It would appear, then, that this priestly family, who had come from the Temple of El-Gebal (the god of the mountain or high place), animated by a spirit of religious domination hardly known to the Paganism of the West, hoped to reform Paganism and to establish the supremacy of the Eastern deity, who was none other than the sun, the coarse image or symbol of which Elagabalus had brought to Rome. It was one of those black stones (probably an aerolite) which had been at all times worshipped in the East as symbols of the stars from which they were supposed to have fallen. Time and space would fail to enumerate the eccentricities which the young emperor perpetrated in serious earnest, in hopes of consolidating the supremacy of the sun-god. The first exercise of his authority consisted in a command that every priest, when sacrificing, should mention his name before that of any other god in the public invocations. He declared him superior to Jupiter. He wished to marry him to the Roman Pallas, and even profaned the much-revered shrine of the goddess by entering into it with his idolatrous priests to remove her statue, with which he intended to do honour to his idol: but fearing that she was of too warlike a nature, and remembering that there was an Astarte of true Phœnician origin at Carthage, he sent for her. The whole of Italy was to rejoice at the celebration of these splendid nuptials. He himself was guilty of a most scandalous outrage against public morality, marrying, as he did on that occasion, a vestal, having informed the senate of his intention, and explained to them that it was lawful for a priest to marry a priestess. He invited over a number of Phœnician women, and danced with them publicly before the sacred stone which he had set up to be worshipped by the universe. Unhappily the symbols of this worship were revoltingly indecent, and, in fact, some of the almost incredible details which are recorded of the private life of Elagabalus may be attributed to the ignorance that prevailed respecting the symbolical character of the rites he practised. It may be remembered, too, by the way, that his mother, Soemis, and his grandmother, Maesa, joined in the same form of worship. Herodianus, however, informs us that Maesa would willingly have checked this feverish and bigoted zeal for sun-worship, which she easily foresaw would expose the foolish young emperor to ridicule and endanger his position on the throne; and as nothing is said of Soemis, we may fairly presume that if she had not been the first to inoculate her son with that fanatical infatuation for the god of his fathers, she at all events participated in it then. This opinion is strengthened when we find that she eventually became as unpopular as her son, and was put to death at the same time. We must not, however, dwell too much upon this caricature of a religious conception, which, after all, was not wholly without some redeeming features of greatness. By his fanaticism Elagabalus destroyed the idea which lies at the very foundation of the biography of Apollonius by Philostratus. That idea was, that Greco-Roman Paganism needed reform, and that, without throwing its principles entirely overboard, its legends might be modified, and its nature altered into a kind of monotheism in which the sun would occupy the first place and be worshipped as the source of physical as well as moral light, and so embrace in one and the same worship the most beautiful and the most popular divinities of ancient Paganism, such as Apollo, Æsculapius, Esmoun, Melkart, Mithras, and many other heroes of a solar type. The address "Soli invicto" would thus have become the universal prayer.
Hence the worship of one god under different names, and the pre-eminence of virtue amongst the elements of religious life, is the foundation on which this theology rests; its toleration is evident, and its nature such that it might easily have viewed Christianity as an approximation—a distant one, perhaps, but still an endurable approximation—to the ideal conceived by the new Pagan school. There is only a step between this and the comprehensive religious scheme which was fully developed in the reign of Alexander Severus, the young pupil of Julia Mamaea, who, with his mother’s consent, placed Christ by the side of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana. The only thing is that Christianity seems to be held in higher estimation by Julia Mamaea than by her parents.
There is a tradition extant that Mamaea sent for the great Origen in order that she might hear him speak on religious topics, and certainly by none better than the philosophical theologian could the Christian doctrines have been explained to the female philosopher who then ruled the empire. It has been maintained that both she and her son secretly embraced the Christian faith, and although this is contradicted by facts, it still remains true that Alexander Severus proved himself, by his conduct, by his words, and by repeated imperial acts, as favourably disposed towards the Christians as a sovereign could be who retained his allegiance to the principles of Paganism.
Hence we see that from the time of Julia Domna to that of Julia Mamaea, the certainty that a reformation of Paganism had become a necessity resulted first in the toleration of the Christian religion; secondly, in a certain degree of respect, mingled in secret with jealousy; and at last it went so far as to allow Christianity an acknowledged position in the broad light of day, by the side of the old traditional religions, such as Judaism and Paganism. One might have imagined that Alexander and his mother were establishing some such connection between Abraham and Jesus Christ as that which existed possibly in their minds between Orpheus, the poet and revealer of the remotest periods of antiquity, and Apollonius, the modern reformer, the Greek Christ, whose teachings had recently been enlightening the world.
The gospel of Philostratus (for in reality his work may he so termed) did not go sufficiently far for so comprehensive a system of religion. The aristocratic spirit of the Pagan Greek still breathed throughout it, and Julia Domna, who had fostered the writing of the work, was not as yet so well disposed towards the religion which had sprung from the ancient soil of Judaea as her niece, Julia Mamaea, would afterwards become. If the reform she dreamt of was ever realised, Paganism would have its son of God, pure, blameless, devoted to his mission, and adding to his doctrines the weight of influence which a bodily manifestation and a real life alone can give to an ideal theory. Hence this reform must be a positive religion, and not only a system of philosophy. This is why Apollonius, though a great friend of the philosophers, must be superior to them all, even to Socrates. Their rational monotheism, by dint of a little symbolical interpretation, will be reconciled with the polytheism of the majority. The most absurd of their legends will have to be put aside. Their sacrifices must cease to be distinguished by the shedding of blood and by acts of impurity, and for the future they must represent acts of submission and gratitude to the Deity, the source of all good, not clumsily-contrived means of working upon the Divine will, and propitiating it for the obtainment of gross and selfish objects. The upright intention and the moral character of the worshipper must alone determine the true worth of all religious acts. Now all these conditions were already peculiar to Christianity, but reformed Paganism was to enjoy them too; and further, to possess other advantages which Christianity had not. Jesus was only the offspring of an obscure and contemptible people; His doctrine was but the refinement of a paltry local tradition; His life, of which little was known by the great majority of his contemporaries, was extremely short. He soon fell a victim to the attacks of two or three priests, a petty king, and a procurator, and a few remarkable prodigies alone distinguished Him from a crowd of other existences which had nothing whatever to do with the destinies of humanity. Apollonius, on the contrary, a Greek by birth, had stored his vast intellect with the religious doctrines of the whole world, from India to Spain; his life extended over a century. Like a luminous meteor he traversed the universe, in constant intercourse with kings and the powerful ones of the earth, who venerate and fear him; and if he ever meets with hostility and opposition, he triumphs over it majestically, always stronger than his tyrants, never subject to humiliations, never brought into contact with public executioners. The most wonderful miracles are performed at every step; and although the partial greatness which was enjoyed for a time by the Jewish Christ cannot be denied, and the partial truth which He taught cannot be gainsayed, and although those who have been driven into His small Church by the abuse of popular Paganism are tolerated, yet it would be absurd to hail Him as the founder of the universal religion; and it remains an obvious fact that He must play a very secondary part by the side of the glorious and Divine Apollonius. Such was the position which Julia Domna took when she asked Philostratus to write the life of Apollonius. Philostratus may have been less impressed than his royal mistress with the greatness and truth of Christianity, but he scrupulously kept in view the idea she had formed of religious truth—an idea which is perceptible in the lives both of Maesa and Soemis, with a decided bias in favour of Pagan superstition in the case of Soemis, and in favour of Christianity in the case of Maesa, with a clearly-expressed appreciation of its higher character. There are two isolated facts in the lives of Septimius Severus and Caracalla which to all appearance are of trifling importance, but which can only be explained by such a train of thought as we have been describing. These two emperors allowed the Pagans to make Hercules their heir; hence great riches soon accrued to the temples and priests of that popular deity. At the same time, while refusing to persecute the Christians, Septimius Severus threatened that severe penalties should be inflicted on any Pagan who became a Christian. The law seems to have ended in a threat, but the intention by which it was dictated is evident. On the one hand, it was not thought desirable that Christianity should make any rapid conquests; on the other, all facilities were afforded to the proselytism of a confirmed Pagan worship. And what was that worship? The worship of Hercules, of a sun-god, or rather of many gods under one name, who, as Philostratus informs us, are the liberators, the benefactors, and the enlighteners of mankind.