Note 65 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

The Latin Church thus finally maintained in religion the tradition of sworn adherence to sectarian formulas which has been already noted in the Roman philosophic sects, and in so doing reduced to a minimum the exercise of the reason, alike in ethics and in philosophy. Its dogmatic code was shaped under the influence of (1) Irenæus and Tertullian, who set scripture above reason and, when pressed by heretics, tradition above even scripture,65 and (2) Augustine, who had the same tendencies, and whose incessant energy secured him a large influence. That influence was used not only to dogmatize every possible item of the faith, but to enforce in religion another Roman tradition, formerly confined to politics—that of systematic coercion of heretics. Before and around Augustine there had indeed been abundant mutual persecution of the bitterest kind between the parties of the Church as well as against pagans; the Donatists, in particular, with their organization of armed fanatics, the Circumcelliones, had inflicted and suffered at intervals all the worst horrors of civil war in Africa during a hundred years; Arians and Athanasians came again and again to mutual bloodshed; and the slaying of the pagan girl-philosopher, Hypatia,66 by the Christian monks of Alexandria is one of the vilest episodes in the whole history of religion. On the whole, it is past question that the amount of homicide wrought by all the pagan persecution of the earlier Christians was not a tithe of that wrought by their successors in their own quarrels. But the spirit which had so operated, and which had been repudiated even by the bitter Tertullian, was raised by Augustine to the status of a Christian dogma,67 which, of course, had sufficient support in the sacred books, Judaic and Jesuist, and which henceforth inspired such an amount of murderous persecution in Christendom as the ancient world had never seen. When, the temple revenues having been already confiscated, the pagan worships were finally overthrown and the temples appropriated by the edict of Honorius in the year 408, Augustine, “though not entirely consistent, disapproved of the forcible demolition of the temples.”68 But he had nothing to say against the forcible suppression of their worship, and of the festivals. Ambrose went as far;69 and such men as Firmicus Maternus would have had the emperors go much further.70