THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 299
The Christian Church's Rejection of Neoplatonist Magic
20.7. The Christian Church's Rejection of Neoplatonist Magic
It is mere futility to find a pagan source for every Christian saint and festival, but a study of hagiographic literature reveals a very large amount of heathen reminiscence, and even of formal adoption, in the Church's Calendar. Doubtless there were other factors in the growth of the cultus of the saints and their relics — human instinct, the Jewish theory of merit, the veneration of confessors and martyrs, and the strong confidence which from an early date was placed in the virtue of their intercessions. But the extraordinary development of the cultus between A.D. 325 and 450 can only be explained by the polytheistic or rather the polydaemoniac tendencies of the mass of Gentile converts with the memories of hero and daemon worship in their minds.
Again, Neoplatonism involved the use of magic; the Christianity of the day admitted belief in it; for while the Bible forbade the practice, it did not deny its potency. Closely connected with magic stood divination, whether by astrology and haruspication, or by dreams and oracles. The Neoplatonists, following earlier thinkers, were committed to a theory of inward illumination, and ascribed the various phenomena of divination to the agency of spiritual forces working upon responsive souls. Christians allowed the supernatural inspiration of pagan oracles but held that it came, not from God like the inspiration of the Prophets, but from the fellowship of wicked men with evil daemons, of whose real existence they had no manner of doubt. The fact that Scripture referred to an evil spirit was immediate evidence of his existence and his wickedness.
Philosophers might plead that there were beneficent daemon, but the word had only one sense in the Bible, and that was enough to condemn all that bear the name. The daemons, in the worship of whom, as Eusebius said, the whole religion of the heathen world consisted, were the object of the Christian's deepest fear and hate as being the source of all material and spiritual evil, and the avowed enemies of God. To them were due ail the errors and sins of men, all the cruelty of nature.
Wind and storm fulfilled God's word; but when mischief followed in their train, it was the work of Satan and his angels. Intercourse with these was stringently forbidden, but no one questioned its possibility.
Augustine records the various charms and rites by which daemons can be attracted; he was a firm believer in his mother's dreams and in her power to distinguish between subjective impressions and heaven-sent visions. And Synesius (writing, it is true, before his conversion) states his conviction that divination is one of the best things practised among men.
Magic had been the object of penal legislation from the early days of the Empire, but the very violence of the laws passed by Christian emperors against it points to the prevalence of the belief in it, a belief which the lawgiver shared with his subjects. Constantine and Theodosius may have really looked to their anti-magical measures as a means to destroy polytheism and purify the Church, but the former emperor expressly excluded from the scope of his edict rites whose object was to save men from disease and the fields from harm, while his son Constantius, and Valens and Valentinian, were persuaded that magic might be turned against their life or power, and by way of self-defence fell to persecuting the magicians as fiercely as their predecessors had persecuted the Church. The title, "enemies of the human race," formerly applied to Christians was now transferred to the adepts in magical arts.
But present punishment and future warning were powerless to check practices that were the natural results of all-prevailing credulity. What this was in heathen circles may be learnt from the pages in which Ammianus Marcellinus (A.D. 325-395) describes the Rome of his day; "many who deny that there are powers supernal will not go abroad nor breakfast nor bathe till they have consulted the calendar to find the position of a planet." In Christian circles the credulity took also another form, that of an easy belief in miracles, not only of serious import such as the discovery of the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius — which is still a problem to the historian — but trivialities such as the winning of a horse race through the judicious use of holy water, the gift of reading without letters, and all the marvels of the Thebaid.
The truth is that amid the universal ignorance of natural laws men were ready to believe anything. And it must be confessed that what greatly fostered credulity and error among educated Christians was the literal interpretation of Scripture which held the field in spite of Alexandrian allegorism. The scientific and the common sense of Augustine were alike shocked by the interminable fables of the Manichaeans concerning sky and stars, sun and moon; but it was their sacrilegious folly that finally turned him from the sect. "The authority of Scripture is higher than all the efforts of the human intelligence," he wrote, and the words exactly express the mind of churchmen whenever there was a conflict between physical theory and the faith. The erroneous speculations of early philosophers, from whatever source derived, were taken up and readily adopted, provided that they did not contradict the Bible.
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