till to-day. He spoke with the bitterness of a conviction of long standing. If—contrary to his own rules—he could be ‘troubled,’ I should say our Master felt a real ‘trouble’ in being forced to confess that the Jew is above the Greek in steadfastness and constancy. As to your second question, I think he means that, whereas Greeks attain to wisdom through the reason (or logos) these Jews follow their God, or Christus, through what we Greeks call emotion or affection (i.e. pathos). And I am half disposed to think that this word pathos was used by him on the other occasion when he spoke of the Christian Jews as Galilæans.” “Could you quote it?” said I. “No, not accurately,” said Arrian, “it is rather long, and has difficulties. I should prefer you to have it exactly. Come into my rooms. I am going out on business, so that we cannot talk about it at present. But you shall copy it down.”
So I went in to copy it down. Arrian left me after finding the place for me in his notes. “You will see,” he said, “that the Galilæans are there described as being made intrepid ‘by habit.’ Well, that is certainly how I took the words down. But I am inclined to think it might have been ‘by feeling’—which seems to me to make better sense. But read the whole context and judge for yourself. The two phrases are easily confused. Now I leave you to your copying. Prosit! More about this, to-morrow.”
CHAPTER VI
PAUL ON THE LOVE OF CHRIST
The lecture from which I was transcribing was on “fearlessness.” What, it asked, makes a tyrant terrible? The answer was, “his armed guards.” A child, or madman, not knowing what guards and weapons mean, would not fear him. Men fear because they love life, and a tyrant can take life. Men also love wealth, wife, children. These things, too, a tyrant can take; so men fear him. But a madman, caring for none of these things, and ready to throw them away as a child might throw a handful of sand—a madman does not fear. Now came the words about “custom” and “Galilæans” to which Arrian had called my attention: “Well, then, is not this astonishing? Madness can now and then make a man thus fearless! Custom can make the Galilæans fearless! Yet—strange to say—reason and demonstration cannot make anyone understand that God has made all that is in the world, and has made the world itself, in its entirety, absolutely complete in itself and unimpeded in its motions, and has also made its separate parts individually for the use of all the parts collectively!”
The context made me see the force of Arrian’s remark. Epictetus appeared to be mentioning three influences under which men might resist the threats and tortures of a tyrant. In the first place was the “madness” of a lunatic. In the third place was the “logic,” or demonstration, of philosophy. In the second place, it would make good sense to suppose that Epictetus meant “feeling,” or “passionate enthusiasm.” This passage would then accord with the one mentioned above. Both passages would then affirm that the Christian Jews or Galilæans can do under the influence of “feeling” what the Greek Philosophers, or “lovers of wisdom,” cannot do with all the aid of reason (or “logos”). “Custom” would not make good sense unless the “Galilæans,” or Christians, had made a “custom” of hardening their bodies by severe asceticism. This (I had gathered from Arrian) was not the fact. In any case, it seemed clear that Epictetus was here again contrasting some kind of Jew with the Greek to the disadvantage of the latter.
Curiosity led me to read on a little further. The text dealt with Man’s place in the Cosmos, or Universe, as follows: “All the other parts of the Cosmos except man are far removed from the power of intelligently following its administration. But the living being that is endowed with logos, or reason, has therein a kind of ladder by which he may reason the way up to all these things. Thus he, and he alone, can understand that he is a part, and what kind of part, and that it is right and fit that the parts should yield to the whole.” This reminded me of the saying I have quoted above, “Will you not make a contribution of your leg to the Universe?” I think he meant “Will you not offer up your lameness, as a decreed part of the whole system of things, and as a sacrifice from you to the Supreme?”
This reasonable part of the Cosmos, this “living being that is endowed with logos,” Epictetus declared to be “by nature noble, magnanimous, and free.” Consequently, said he, it discerns that, of the things around it, some are at its disposal, while others are not; and that, if it will learn to find its profit and its good in the former class, it will be perfectly free and happy, “being thankful always for all things to God.”
This puzzled me not a little. I could not understand how Epictetus explained the means by which these “noble, magnanimous, and free” creatures, created so “by nature,” had degenerated into the weaklings, fools, profligates, and oppressors, upon whom he was constantly pouring scorn. Was not each man a “part” of the Cosmos? Was not the Cosmos “perfect and exempt from all disorder or impediment in any of its motions”? Did not each “part” in it—and consequently man—partake in this perfection and exemption, being “made for the service of the whole”? What cause did Epictetus find for the folly, vice, and injustice that he so often satirised and condemned as “subject to the wrath of God”? Man was a compound of “clay” and “logos.” The fault could not lie in the “logos.” Was it, after all, the mere “clay” that caused all this mischief? And then, lost in thought, turning over the loose sheets of Arrian’s notes, one after the other, I came again on the passage I have quoted above from Epictetus, “If I could have, I would have”—laying the fault, as it seemed, upon the “clay.” I could not help asking, “If God ‘could’ not remedy it, how much less ‘could’ I, being ‘clay,’ remedy myself, ‘clay’?”
Musing on these things I returned to my rooms, and was sitting down to write to Scaurus, when my servant entered with a parcel, from Rome, he said, forwarded by Sosia our bookseller. It contained the books I had ordered from Flaccus, with a letter from him, describing in detail the pains he had taken in having some of the rolls of Chrysippus and Cleanthes transcribed and ornamented, and saying that in addition to the “curious little volume containing the epistles of Paulus,” which, as I no doubt anticipated, were “not in the choicest Greek,” he had forwarded an epistle to the Hebrews. “This,” he said, “does not include in the commencement the usual mention of Paulus’s name, and it is not in his style. But I understand that it originated from the school of Paulus.”
There was more to the same effect, for Flaccus and I were on very friendly terms; and he was a good deal more than a mere seller of books. But I passed over it, for I was in haste to open the parcel. At the top were the copies of Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and others, in Flaccus’s best style. At the bottom of all were two rolls of flimsy papyrus. The larger and shabbier of the two fell to the ground open, and as I took it up, my eye lit on the following passage:—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or suffering or persecution or hunger or nakedness or peril or the sword? As it is written:
‘For thy sake are we done to death all the day long:
We were accounted as sheep of the shambles.’
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor sovereignties, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from that love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“This, at all events,” said I, “Scaurus cannot say that Epictetus has borrowed from Paul. Never have I heard Epictetus mention the word ‘love’; and here, in this one short passage, Paul uses it twice!” My next thought was that Scaurus was quite right in his estimate of Paul’s style. It was
