Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety
E.R. Dodds
Number of quotes: 20
Book ID: 167 Page: 30/31
Section: 2E2
Other men in this time (and Marcus himself in other moods) were enabled to endure themselves by making a sharp dichotomy between the self and the body, and diverting their resentment on to the latter. That dichotomy comes, of course, from classical Greece {2}--the most far-reaching, and perhaps the most questionable, of all her gifts to human culture. But in our period it was put to strange uses. Pagans and Christians (though not all pagans or all Christians) vied with each other in heaping abuse on the body; it was ‘clay and gore’, ‘a filthy bag of excrement and urine’; man is plunged in it as in a bath of dirty water. Plotinus appeared ashamed of having a body at all; St Anthony blushed every time he had to eat or satisfy any other bodily function. {3} Because the body’s life was the soul’s death, salvation lay in mortifying it; as a Desert Father expressed it, ‘I am killing it because it was killing me’. {1} The psychophysical unity was split in two not only in theory but in practice; one half found its satisfaction in tormenting the other.
Quote ID: 3499
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 167 Page: 33
Section: 2E2
Justin Martyr quotes with approval a case of attempted self-castration, and Origen (if we can believe Eusebius) castrated himself while little more than a boy. At a later date such acts were not infrequent among the Desert Fathers; in the fourth century it was found necessary to prohibit them by canon law. {3} Of continuous physical self-torture the lives of the Desert Father provide numerous and repulsive examples.
Quote ID: 3500
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 167 Page: 34
Section: 2E2
When Tertullian (Praescr. haer., 40) tells us that the Devil too has his virgins and continentes he is probably thinking of the ritual requirements of certain pagan cults--taboo rather than asceticism.
Quote ID: 3501
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 167 Page: 35
Section: 2E2
but a strong injection of fanatical rigorism had been absorbed into the Church’s system. It lingered there like a slow poison, and (if an outsider can judge) has not yet been expelled from it.
Quote ID: 3502
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 167 Page: 37
Section: 4B
For the present chapter I shall take as my text that passage in the Symposium where Plato defines the daemonic. ‘Everything that is daemonic’, says Diotima to Socrates, ‘is intermediate between God and mortal. Interpreting and conveying the wishes of men to gods and the will of gods to men, it stands between the two and fills the gap. . . God has no contact with man; only through the daemonic is there intercourse and conversation between men and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep. And the man who is expert in such intercourse is a daemonic man, compared with whom the experts in the arts or handicrafts are but journeymen.’ {1} This precise definition of the vague terms ‘daemon’ and ‘daemonios’ was something of a novelty in Plato’s day, but the in second century after Christ it was the expression of a truism. Virtually every one, pagan, Jewish, Christian or Gnostic , believed in the existence of these beings and in their function as mediators, whether he called the daemons or angels or aions of simply ‘spirits’ Greek word: pnuemata. In the eyes of many pious pagans even the gods of Greek mythology were by this time no more than mediating daemon, satraps of an invisible supramundane King. {1} And the ‘daemonic man’, who knew how to establish contact with them, was correspondingly esteemed.
Quote ID: 3503
Time Periods: 02
Book ID: 167 Page: 63/64
Section: 2D3A
A Phrygian by birth, Montanus is said to have been a priest either of Apollo or of Magna Mater before his conversion to Christianity; but it does not appear that his prophecy owed much to his Phrygian origins. {2} It was probably about the year 172 {3} that a voice, not his own, began to speak in the first person through Montanus. It said: ‘I am the Lord God Almighty dwelling at this moment within a man’; and again, ‘It is no angel that is here, nor a human spokesman, but the Lord, God the Father’. And the voice further explained how this could be: ‘Look,’ it said, ‘man is like a lyre, and I play upon him like the plectrum: while the human being sleeps, I am awake. Look, it is the Lord, who takes away the hearts of men and puts in them other hearts.’ {1} Montanus was not, of course, claiming to be God.PJ Note: Is that last sentence mine?
Quote ID: 3504
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 167 Page: 66
Section: 2D3A
The Bishops, stung by Montanus’ criticism and reluctant to admit any further Testaments, responded by excommunicating him and attempting to exorcise the evil spirits which possessed his followers. But Montanism was not easily killed either by the Bishops or by the failure to keep the appointment at Pepuza. From Phrygia it spread throughout the East, and thence to Rome, to North Africa, and even to distant Spain.COPIED
Quote ID: 3505
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 167 Page: 67
Section: 2D3A
After the triumph of Constantine such hopes appeared anachronistic, yet Montanism lingered on in its original strongholds throughout the fourth and fifth centuries. Arcadius ordered the Montanist books to be burnt and their assemblies suppressed; but it was not until the reign of Justinian that the last Montanists locked themselves into their churches and burned themselves to death rather than fall into the hands of their fellow-Christians. {1}The eventual defeat of Montanism was inevitable. It is already foreshadowed in the sage advice whispered by the Holy Spirit to Ignatius: ‘Do nothing without the Bishop.’ {2} In vain did Tertullian protest that the Church is not a collection of Bishops; in vain did Irenaeus plead against the expulsion of prophecy. {3} From the point of view of the hierarchy the Third Person of the Trinity had outlived his primitive function. {4} He was too deeply entrenched in the New Testament to be demoted, but he ceased in practice to play any audible part in the counsels of the Church. The old tradition of the inspired prophets who spoke what came to him was replaced by the more convenient idea of a continuous divine guidance which was granted, without their noticing it, to the principal Church dignitaries. Prophecy went underground, to reappear in the chiliastic manias of the later Middle Ages {1} and in many subsequent evangelical movements: John Wesley was to recognise a kindred spirit in Montanus, whom he judged to be ‘one of the holiest men in the second century’. {2} With that epitaph we may leave him.
Quote ID: 3506
Time Periods: 234567
Book ID: 167 Page: 74
Section: 4B
In popular Greek tradition a god differed from a man chiefly in being exempt from death and in the supernatural power which this exemption conferred on him. Hence the favourite saying that ‘Man is a mortal god, and a god an immortal man’; hence also the possibility of mistaking a man for a god if he appears to display supernatural powers, as is said to have happened to Paul and Barnabas to Lystra and on several occasions to Apollonius of Tyana. {1}
Quote ID: 3507
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 167 Page: 92
Section: 4A
There is a well-known testimony to this in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, where the author describes such a quest-after seeking in vain to learn about God from a Stoic, an Aristotelian and a Pythagorean, he finally attends the lectures of a Platonist, who at least gives him the hope of seeing God face to face, ‘for this’, he says, ‘is the aim of the philosophy of Plato’. {1}
Quote ID: 3508
Time Periods: 02
Book ID: 167 Page: 105
Section: 4A
The ‘Apostolic Fathers’ had written only for their fellow-Christians. Now the ‘Apologists’ emerge from their ideological ghetto and for the first time state the case for Christianity to the world of educated pagans--not so much in the expectation of converting them as in the hope of persuading them to call off the intermittent local persecutions from which the Church at this period suffered. And it was also in the latter part of second century that a pagan intellectual for the first time took Christianity seriously. What to Pliny the Younger had been only a tiresome administrative nuisance, what to Lucian and even to Galen was no more than a psychological curiosity, appeared to Celsus as an actual menace to the stability and security of the Empire: with remarkable prescience he saw the Church as a potential State within the State, whose continued growth threatened in his opinion to disrupt the bonds of society and would end by letting in the barbarians. {1}
Quote ID: 3509
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 167 Page: 105/106
Section: 4A
The second phase extends from 203, the year in which the youthful Origen began to teach at Alexandria, to 248 or thereabouts, when as an elderly man he published his Contra Celsum. For the people of the Empire it was a time of increasing insecurity and misery; for the Church it was a time of relative freedom from persecution, of steady numerical growth, and above all of swift intellectual advance. Clement of Alexandria had perceived that if Christianity was to be more than a religion for the uneducated it must come to terms with Greek philosophy and Greek science; simple-minded Christians must no longer ‘fear philosophy as children fear a scarecrow’ {1}
Quote ID: 3510
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 167 Page: 107
Section: 4B
On the pagan side there are signs at this time of a desire to absorb Christ into the Establishment, as so many earlier gods had been absorbed, or at any rate to state the terms on which peaceful coexistence could be considered. It may well have been with some such purpose in mind that Julia Mamaea, the Empress Mother, invited Origen to her court; we are told that her son, the Emperor Alexander Severus, kept in his private chapel statues of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ and Apollonius of Tyana, four mighty phophetai to all of whom he paid the same reverence. {1}
Quote ID: 3511
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 167 Page: 107/108
Section: 4B
To the same period probably belong the two oracles of Hecate quoted by Porphyry in his early work On the Philosophy of Oracles. In answer to the question whether Christ were a god, Hecate replied in substance, that Christ was a man of outstanding piety but that in mistaking him for a god his followers had fallen into grave error. From which Porphyry concluded that ‘we should not speak ill of Christ but should pity the folly of mankind’. {1}
Quote ID: 3512
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 167 Page: 108/109
Section: 2E3,4A
It was in this interval, probably in 270, that Porphyry produced his bitter book Against the Christians, which found many imitators in the following years but also provoked many replies from the Christian side. In it he expressed the alarm which was now felt by all religious-minded pagans. He speaks of Christianity as a doctrine which is preached in the remotest corners of the world; he notes how at Rome the cult of Jesus is replacing that of Asclepius; and he notes also a new sign of Christian confidence and Christian wealth--they are building themselves large churches everywhere. {1}
Quote ID: 3513
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 167 Page: 110
Section: 4B
All our authorities, from Tacitus to Origen, testify to the bitter feelings of hostility which Christianity aroused in the pagan masses. The Christians, say Tacitus, were ‘hated for their vices’; they were considered enemies of the human race: that was why the story of their responsibility for the Great Fire was so readily accepted. {1} ‘The people of Christ’, says Origen with a touch of pride, ‘are hated by all nations, even by those who dwell in the remotest parts of the world.’ {2} At Lyons in 177 the entire Christian community would have been dragged from their houses and beaten to death by the mob if the authorities had not intervened and substituted legal torture for lynching. It seems likely that many of the local persecutions in the second century were forced on reluctant Provincial Governors by popular feeling.
Quote ID: 3514
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 167 Page: 111
Section: 4B
it seems that their first appearance in pagan records was as a dissident Jewish sect who at the instigation of one ‘Chrestos’ had engaged in faction-fights with their fellow Jews in the streets of Rome. {1} Like the Jews, they appeared to be ‘godless’ people who paid no proper respect to images and temples. But whereas the Jews were an ancient nation, and as such legally entitled to follow their ancestral custom in matters of religion, the Christians as an upstart set of mixed nationality could claim no such privilege.
Quote ID: 3515
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 167 Page: 116/117
Section: 2B
What was the debate about? It touched on far more problems than I can mention here; but the main issues were not those which a modern Christian might expect. In the first place, it was not a debate between monotheism and polytheism. It has been said with some justification that Celsus was a stricter monotheist than Origen...
Quote ID: 3516
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 167 Page: 120
Section: 4A
Celsus finds Christian ethics banal: they ‘contain no teaching that is impressive or new’; the advice about turning the other cheek is old stuff, better expressed by Plato. And Origen for his part does not deny this: the difference, he says, is that the Christian preachers ‘cook for the multitude’, whereas Plato is read only by the learned--Christianity, he seems at times to suggest, is Platonism for the many.
Quote ID: 3517
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 167 Page: 133
Section: 4B
The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman practice had resulted by accumulation in a bewildering mass of alternatives. They were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, you not feel safe. {2} Christianity made a clean sweep.
Quote ID: 3518
Time Periods: 234
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