The Greek and Eastern Churches/Introduction

by Walter Frederic Adeney

 

THE

GREEK AND EASTERN CHURCHES

INTRODUCTION

 

An adequate and independent history of the Greek and Eastern Churches would begin with the origin of Christianity, and trace from its commencement the development of the faith, which arose in the East and flourished for a considerable time most conspicuously in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt. But since two previous volumes of this Series^[1] have been devoted to the earlier periods of General Church History, the present writer is relieved from the necessity of treating the first three centuries with any fulness of detail. Here the only requisite will be to take a rapid survey of the story viewed from the standpoint of the East, remembering that for our present purpose the centre of gravity is at Antioch, Ephesus, or Alexandria, rather than at Rome or Carthage. When, however, we come to the fourth century the scale of proportion must be reversed, and subjects which the exigencies of space only permitted to be discussed with comparative brevity in the volume on The Ancient Catholic Church will now demand a somewhat more extensive exposition. The age of the great Fathers, with its essentially Oriental controversies on the doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ, is by far the most important epoch in the whole history of Eastern Christendom. This age was the crown and flower of the earlier period, and it produced the seeds of nearly all that was of vital interest in succeeding ages. With the exception of Hosius of Cordova, whose activity was chiefly witnessed in the East, and Hilary of Poitiers, the solitary theologian of first rank who discussed the Trinitarian problem in the West during the fourth century, all the great writers and teachers of that wonderful age of theological dialectics were in the Greek Church. Ambrose at the end of this century, and Augustine and Jerome in the early part of the following century, restored the balance to the West; but by their time ominous signs of the coming severance between Eastern and Western Christendom were already appearing, and each branch was now becoming more and more distinct and separate in its life and history.

When we look back at the early period of Catholic unity we cannot but recognise the preponderance of its Oriental characteristics. Externally regarded, in its origin and primitive development, Christianity must be reckoned an Eastern religion. In fulfilling its amazing destiny it quickly turned to the West for its richest missionary harvests, for there it found its most fertile soil, and its efforts at extension in the Farther East were long comparatively infructuous.

To-day it is specifically the religion of the West, and as such at length it is being introduced by slow and painful efforts to the ancient civilisations of India and China. We know it in a Latin or a Teutonic garb, so that its original Eastern form is disguised by its Western habiliments. Protestant Christendom sees it in the last of four stages through which it has passed, the first being Aramaic, the second Greek, the third Latin, and the fourth Teutonic. These four stages may be especially represented by the primitive apostles, the councils and creeds, the mediæval papal Church, and Martin Luther and Protestantism. Now the Greek and Eastern Churches belong to the two earliest of these stages, or rather, to be more exact, especially to the second; for even the later Syrian Church was fundamentally dependent on the Greek. But we begin with a thoroughly Oriental situation. Christianity sprang up out of the soil of an ancient Semitic religion. The Judaism of the rabbis only represented the faded glory of the superb faith proclaimed by the ancient prophets, and the gospel realised one of those prophets' predictions by appearing as "a root out of a dry ground." Still, it needed its soil, impoverished by neglect and ill-usage as this was We cannot regard the fact that Jesus was a Jew as due to a freak of nature or a caprice of Providence. Then, all the apostles were Jews; so apparently were all the writers of the New Testament except one, and probably he was a proselyte. The gospel of the kingdom of heaven was first preached in Aramaic, in the local Syrian dialect spoken at the time by our Lord and His disciples. The earliest record of the teachings of Jesus Christ of which we have any knowledge was written in Hebrew, or Aramaic.^[2] The Scriptures used by the primitive Churches and appealed to for the authentication of their message consisted of Hebrew writings; and although the Old Testament was commonly read in a Greek translation, its Semitic ideas and imagery coloured the whole presentation of Christian truth. In the present day, not only our theology, our sermons, our prayers and hymns, but our literature and political oratory are steeped in Biblical Orientalism. When, as is often the case in his most pathetic scenes, Sir Walter Scott adopts the language of the Bible, or when one of our statesmen graces his diction by drawing from that "well of English undefiled," the Authorised Version of the English Bible, it is generally some Semitism that gives its choice flavour to the passage.

Directly we pass on to the second stage of development, the Greek, we have an immensely enlarged field of observation. The Semitic period was quite temporary and provincial, although, as the earliest, it left its mark on all that followed. But no sooner was the gospel launched on the sea of the great world's life than it passed into a Hellenic form, being at once expounded in the Greek language and becoming gradually shaped in the mould of Greek thought. It is probable that Jesus Christ knew the popular Greek dialect of His day, although it is nearly certain that He habitually spoke in Aramaic, the language of His home and people. The apostles must have preached in Greek when they passed the narrow bounds of Palestine. Paul, Barnabas, Stephen, Philip the Evangelist, Apollos, Timothy—in fact, all the early missionaries of whom we know anything, except the Twelve, James, and Mark—were Hellenists, or even in some cases actually Greeks by race, such as Luke and Titus. All the books of the New Testament were written in Greek, in spite of the fact that two of them seem to have been intended for Jews, and one was addressed to Rome and another to a Roman colony. All the writings of the Apostolic Fathers are in the Greek language, although they originated in places so far apart as Rome, Asia Minor, and probably Egypt and Syria. Greek was the literary language of the Church in the West as well as in the East down to the end of the second century, except in North Africa where Latin was used, and in the Valley of the Euphrates where Syriac was employed. Until we reach the third century we meet with no Latin writing of importance in the Roman Church.^[3] Hippolytus, whose martyrdom is dated between a.d. 233 and 239, wrote in Greek. The early bishops of Rome bear Greek names. Justin Martyr, a native of Samaria, but a travelling evangelist who carried his mission as far as Rome where he ended it by death, wrote his appeals to the emperors and the Senate, as well as his dialogue with a Jew, in Greek. In Gaul we have the Churches of Lyonne and Vienne sending an account of the persecution they had passed through under Marcus Aurelius to their brethren in the East in the Greek language. Irenæus their bishop published his famous work Against all the Heresies in Greek. It seems probable that Christianity first made its way in Western Europe among the Jewish, Greek, and Syrian residents—colonists, merchants, and slaves. We know that at Rome it first appeared in the Ghetto among Hellenistic Jews. The Churches of Lyonne and Vienna seem to have sprung up in an offshoot from the Greek colony at Marseilles. Their famous bishop Irenæus had come to them from Asia Minor, and they took care to keep themselves in touch with the Greeks of that Eastern region.

Now the importance of these facts can scarcely be overestimated, although it has been overshadowed by another series of facts. Church historians have often called attention to the deep significance of the establishment of the Roman Empire just before the appearance of Christianity in the world. The Pax Romana which encircled the whole Mediterranean gave the first missionaries freedom to travel and admitted of an attentive hearing wherever they went. Everywhere they appeared as subjects of one vast empire preaching to fellow-subjects of the same empire. They were protected from uprisings of fanatical mobs by the strong, just Roman magistracy; and they could travel with ease and safety along the well-made and well-guarded Roman roads. Choosing the great towns for their chief centres of work, they found provincialism disappearing before enlarged cosmopolitan ideas, and so an atmosphere in which a gospel that overstepped the bounds of national jealousies might most readily receive sympathetic attention. Moreover, from the second century onwards, we see the growth of Roman law into a strong body of jurisprudence which is destined to combine with Christian doctrine in forming the two fundamental factors of mediæval and modern civilisation. Gradually the genius of Rome in government passed over from the empire to the Church, and popes came in for the inheritance of the power that had dropped from the enfeebled hands of emperors. It is a truism to say that the contribution of Rome to the development—and subsequent degeneration—of the Church is a factor of immense importance.^[4] Nevertheless it is an unfortunate fact that reiterated insistence on the Roman influence has distracted attention from the Grecian. Until recently it was supposed that the New Testament was composed in a peculiar provincial and theological dialect. But the discovery of contemporary papyri at Oxyrhynchus and the study of inscriptions found in Egypt, Asia Minor, and indeed scattered over a wide area of the empire, have shown that this "Hellenistic" Greek was the common language for business documents and private correspondence—bills of lading, receipts, family letters—throughout all those widely scattered regions. This is a new and convincing proof that the "common dialect" of Greek was very much more used than had been imagined hitherto. It is quite sufficient to account for the fact that the earliest Christian literature is in Greek, and it disposes of the erroneous idea that the authors were following a literary convention like the mediæval monks in their use of Latin.^[5] They wrote in Greek simply because everybody wrote in Greek, whether in business or in social intercourse. The consequences of this fact are many and various. In the first place, the Christian missionaries found a lingua franca in which they could proclaim their message wherever they went, at all events on the main roads which they usually followed, and in the large centres of population where for the most part they carried on their work. Thus the widespread use of this one language co-operated with the common government of the one empire in providing such conditions for the dissemination of a universal faith as the world had never witnessed before. In the second place, the fact that this language was Greek had as strong intensive effects on the missionary work as its extensive influence due to the general use of it throughout so large a part of the Roman dominion. There is no such thing as a "dead language" for people who read and speak intelligently; and certainly in early Christian times, although the splendour of the classic period had passed, the language in which Plato wrote, degenerate as it now was, came into the Church "trailing clouds of glory." For better or for worse, Greek ideas invaded the Church under the cloak of the Greek language. With the more scholarly writers this was allowed consciously.^[6]

Even St. Paul shows traces of the Hellenic influence, especially in his doctrine of the flesh, which was not found in purely Jewish or earlier Christian teaching, and in the language with which he describes the exalted Christ, which reads like an echo of Philo, as well as in his evident allusions to the Hellenistic Book of Wisdom. This tendency is much more apparent in the Epistle to the Hebrews. There are traces of it in the so-called "Epistle of Barnabas." Most of the earlier Christian writers known as the Apostolic Fathers wrote simply and practically with little reference to the world outside. But the Greek influence blossomed out in the Apologists, men who made it their business to bring the gospel into contact with the thought of their age. Aristides appeared in Athens wearing the conventional philosopher's cloak; Justin Martyr came to Christianity through Platonism. and he made the first serious attempt to reconcile Philosophy to the Gospel, by combining St. John's Logos with the Logos of Philo and the Stoics. In Clement of Alexandria we have classic literary scholarship, and in his successor Origen Platonic philosophy, brought over bodily into the exposition of Christian truth. Henceforth the elaboration of doctrine in the Church becomes a process of applying Greek thought to the elucidation of the data supplied by the facts of the gospel history and the truths of Scripture and experience. Even the dialectical methods of the sophists were adopted by the Christian theologians, and the oratorical services of the rhetoricians employed by the Church's preachers. Biblical exegesis followed the lines laid down by Alexandrian grammarians in their interpretation of Homer, and the very form of the Christian sermon based on a brief "text," which has been stereotyped apparently for all time, is an imitation of the sophists' cvmningly elaborated oration as the development of the hidden meaning of a single line of Homer.^[7]

The Græco-Roman world on which the vessel of the gospel was launched by the apostles and their followers was a seething ocean of restless life and thought, in a period of transition after the old national and racial boundaries had been swept away and before any tide had been felt setting strongly in one definite direction. We might compare it to a choppy sea, broken by the clash of cross currents and tossed about by a whirl of winds from all quarters of the compass. In literature, in art, in philosophy, and worst of all in morals, it was a decadent age; its society was like that which was recently characterised among ourselves as fin de siècle. And yet, while bestial gluttony and monstrous vice ran riot among the plutocracy, no doubt there were many innocent folk who were living simple lives in remote country places. Certainly not a few in the cities were wistfully groping after the light of truth and the power of purity. But no one clear answer rang out in response to their eager questioning. Their ears were assailed by a babel of voices. The quest for truth and goodness was baffled by the many bewildering avenues that opened out before it; and seekers after the summum bonum were lost in a vast maze of ideas. Philosophy was eclectic, religion syncretic. Both skimmed a wide surface; neither touched bottom. So there was no settlement, no conclusion. The almost identical experience of Justin Martyr in the second century and Augustine in the fourth, their going from teacher to teacher and from school to school but finding rest in none, was the inevitable fate of earnest souls in the centuries that followed the break-up of the old world, but had not yet seen the consolidation of the new world.

Nevertheless the age was essentially constructive. The theoretical scepticism of the Academy, the bold unbelief of Julius Cæsar, and the practical atheism of Nero, had given place to a revival of belief in the Unseen. This often took the form of superstition, which is the Nemesis of outraged faith. Magic was widely practised by its pretenders and widely believed in by its dupes. People regulated their lives by omens. While the venerable oracles of Delphi and other ancient shrines were comparatively neglected, augury from the flight of birds or the inspection of entrails was more widely prevalent than ever. Nor was this all. Magic is the mockery of religion, the materialistic substitute for the spiritual truth that has been discarded. The heart of mankind "abhors a vacuum." If it has not spirituality it will welcome sorcery, accepting demonology in place of theology, and giving the conjurer the seat from which the prophet has been ejected. All this was seen in the age that also witnessed the advent of the new faith destined to regenerate the world. Men were making frantic efforts to save themselves from drowning in a black ocean of spiritual corruption by catching at the floating wreckage of derelict cults. Meanwhile there were serious attempts to stimulate a real religious life. Augustus, alarmed at the mordant scepticism which that astute ruler perceived to be undermining the foundations of society and corroding the institutions of civilisation, carried on a great work of temple-building and reinstated sacrificial rites at neglected altars. This State religion, however, never touched the life of the people, who remained cold and indifferent. The Lares and Penates were still honoured in out-of-the-way old-fashioned places; but Zeus and Athene, Jupiter and Minerva, were no longer names to thrill the Greeks and Romans with awe. For the first century almost as much as for the twentieth, among the cultivated, they were the titles of the classical divinities of the poets. Still less was the worship of the genius of Rome in the person of the emperor, first the dead emperor, then the reigning despot, anything more than a State function assiduously observed in fear of the dread accusation of læsæ majestatis.

But it was not from this quarter that the awakening came. That arose in the East and swept in wave after wave of religious excitement across to the demoralised, enervated West. We might almost say that Christianity itself was carried over the empire on the crest of a wave of religious revival, if we did not know that it moved on by virtue of its own superb spiritual life. Still, it is just to affirm that it appeared in an age of revivalism, and was the one successful among many rival efforts to bring back the world to a sense of the Unseen. From Asia Minor came the worship of the "great mother,"^[8] with which was associated the ancient sacrifice of the taurobolium and its purifying bath of blood. From Egypt was brought the cult of Isis and Serapis by troops of white-robed, shaven priests, who were to be seen going in procession through the streets of the cities of Europe, introducing mysteries of a dim antiquity to the wondering West—telling of the tenderness of Isis, Queen of Heaven, who prepared the way for the Church's worship of her Queen of Heaven, the Theotokos, the "mother of God"—proclaiming the wonders of Serapis, the god of the unseen world of the dead, with his promise of eternal life. Above all, from Persia came the worship of Mithra, who, from being the angel Messiah of the earlier Zoroastrian religion, having absorbed the Babylonian worship of Bel, became the great Sun-god, the chief divinity of Roman emperors for generations, so that even Constantine had his image on the reverse of coins which bore on the obverse the Christian labarum. So potent was this cult, that Renan has said, "If the world had not become Christian it would have become Mithrastic." Its rites of baptism and of communion of bread and wine were denounced by Christian writers as impious imitations of the Christian sacraments. While the coarser Asiatic cults ran rampant in the West, the Greeks were more attracted by the milder rites of Adonis. These Oriental religions had their societies of members, with clergy called "presbyters," so that when the apostles founded churches for their converts, superficial observers in the Greek and Roman world would see at first in the Christian brotherhoods only what was to be expected from the organisers of a new religion.

Lastly, this religious revival was accompanied by attempts at moral reformation and a marked advance in ethical teaching. At Rome Seneca, the tutor and the mentor of Nero and subsequently the mad emperor's subservient minister, taught the loftiest principles of duty that the pagan world had ever known, principles so like much that we find in the New Testament that ready currency was given to the forgeries which supported the erroneous legend of the Roman Stoic's connection with St. Paul.^[9] In the East Plutarch was expounding the ancient virtues, basing them on religious faith, and adding to the stern, strenuous rigour of Stoicism a new humanitarianism that was to have a marked effect in softening the brutality of society. This would have attracted more attention in later ages if it had not been outshone by the greater glory of the enthusiasm of humanity that was glowing in the breasts of the new sect from Galilee. The next century saw the lame slave Epictetus teaching bracing lessons of moral independence, and the melancholy Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting up at night by his camp fire on the Danube to write meditations on duty and resignation. Stoicism was winning the adhesion of the strongest, finest natures to a very high type of duty. But its glory was the secret of its failure. Only the strongest, finest natures could breathe the keen air of its lonely heights. The mass of the people never attained to it; and it had no power for recovering the failures. The world was not so utterly bad as the satirists Juvenal and Martial might lead us to suppose; nor must we judge it by the character of the court gossip Suetonius served up for a public eager to feast on scandals of high life, or the sardonic irony of Tacitus who wrote as the critic in opposition. Happily Rome was not the measure of the empire. Not only was there much serious effort after better things, but the monuments in the cemeteries contain touching records of simple family affections that could not flourish in a world that was utterly corrupt. And yet a deep sense of failure gave a mournful tone to the speculations of the most earnest men who were labouring for the social welfare. "No flight of imagination," says Harnack, writing of a later period, equally corrupt, "can form any idea of what would have come over the ancient world or the Roman Empire during the third century, had it not been for the Church.^[10]

 

1. McGiffert, History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age; Rainy, The Ancient Catholic Church.
2. Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii. 39.
3. There is the insignificant anti-gambling tract De Aleatoribus in Latin, for the benefit of the uneducated.
4. See Renan, Hibbert Lectures (1880).
5. See Deissman, Bible Studies, passim; Moulton, Grammar of New Test. Greek, vol. i. ch. i.; Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei Ersten Evangelien, 9.
6. See Pfleiderer, Urchristenthum, for an extreme view of this fact, which we must admit while avoiding the danger of exaggerating it.
7. See Hatch, Hibbert Lectures: The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, Lecture iv.
8. Magna Mater, the Roman devotee's name for Cybele.
9. See Lightfoot, Theological Essays, "St. Paul and Seneca."
10. Expansion of Christianity, voL i. p. 158 (Eng. edit.).