Note 126 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

Such pleadings were not necessary for the general Christian public, who knew nothing save what their priests taught them. In Chrysostom’s day this was already the case. There remained but a few rational heresies. One of the most notable was that of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the head of the school of Antioch and the teacher of Nestorius, who taught that many of the Old Testament prophecies commonly applied to Jesus had reference to pre-Christian events, and discriminated critically among the sacred books. That of Job he pronounced to be merely a poem derived from a pagan source, and the Song of Songs he held to be a mere epithalamium of no religious significance. In his opinion Solomon had the λόγος γνώσεως the love of knowledge, but not the λόγος σοφίας the love of wisdom.126 No less remarkable was the heresy of Photinus, who taught that the Trinity was a matter not of persons, but of modes of deity.127 Such thinking must be pronounced the high-water mark of rational criticism in the ancient Church; and its occurrence in an age of rapid decay is memorable enough. But in the nature of things it could meet with only the scantiest support; and the only critical heresy which bulked at all largely was that of the Unitarian Anomœans or Eunomians,128 who condemned the worship of relics,129 and made light of scriptural inspiration when texts, especially from the Old Testament, were quoted against them.130 Naturally Chrysostom himself denounced them as unbelievers. Save for these manifestations, the spirit of sane criticism had gone from the Christian world, with science, with art, with philosophy, with culture. But the verdict of time is given in the persistent recoil of the modern spirit from the literature of the age of faith to that of the elder age of nascent reason; and the historical outcome of the state of things in which Chrysostom rejoiced was the re-establishment of universal idolatry and practical polytheism in the name of the creed he had preached. Every species of superstition known to paganism subsisted, slightly transformed. While the emperors savagely punished the pagan soothsayers, the Christians held by the same fundamental delusion; and against the devices of pagan magic, in the reality of which they unquestioningly believed, they professed triumphantly to practise their own sorceries of holy water, relics, prayer, and exorcism, no man daring to impugn the insanities of faith.131 On the face of religious life, critical reason was extinct.