Note 106 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

Against such minds the strictest reason would be powerless; and it was fitting enough that Lucian, the last of the great freethinkers of the Hellenistic world, should merely turn on popular Christianity some of his serene satire106—more, perhaps, than has come down to us; though, on the other hand, his authorship of the De Morte Peregrini, which speaks of the “crucified sophist,” has been called in question.107 The forcible-feeble dialogue Philopatris, falsely attributed to Lucian, and clearly belonging to the reign of Julian, is the last expression of general skepticism in the ancient literature. The writer, a bad imitator of Lucian, avows disbelief alike in the old Gods and in the new, and professes to respect, if any, the “Unknown God” of the Athenians; but he makes no great impression of intellectual sincerity. Apart from this, and the lost anti-Christian work108 of Hierocles, Governor of Bithynia under Diocletian, the last direct literary opponents of ancient Christianity were Porphyry and Julian. As both were believers in many Gods, and opposed Christianity because it opposed these, neither can well rank on that score as a freethinker, even in the sense in which the speculative Gnostics were so. The bias of both, like that of Plutarch, seems to have been to the utmost latitude of religious belief; and, apart from personal provocations and the ordinary temper of religious conservatism, it was the exiguity of the Christian creed that repelled them. Porphyry’s treatise, indeed, was answered by four Fathers,109 all of whose replies have disappeared, doubtless in fulfilment of the imperial edict for the destruction of Porphyry’s book—a dramatic testimony to the state of mental freedom under Theodosius II.110 What is known of his argument is preserved in the incidental replies of Jerome, Augustine, Eusebius, and others.111 The answer of Cyril to Julian has survived, probably in virtue of Julian’s status. His argumentations against the unworthy elements, the exclusiveness, and the absurdities of the Jewish and Christian faith are often reasonable enough, as doubtless were those of Porphyry;112 but his own theosophic positions are hardly less vulnerable; and Porphyry’s were probably no better, to judge from his preserved works. Yet it is to be said that the habitual tone and temper of the two men compares favourably with that of the polemists on the other side. They had inherited something of the elder philosophic spirit, which is so far to seek in patristic literature, outside of Origen.