The Emergence of Christianity

REVIEWS representing 'them as reactionaries who deny the element of changefulness in life, who see the One but not the Jv1any. On the contrary, Babbitt has expressed their position in unmistakable words: "Strictly speaking, I have said, life does not give here an element of oneness and there an element of change; it gives a oneness that is always changing. Moreover, man does not contempiate this oneness from without; he is himself a oneness that is always changing." Some may think that the hum anists, as compared with the naturalists, nevertheless underestimate the element of change as revealed by modern science. But can these critics, castirig their eyes on the world-scene as it is to-day, deny the practical truth of these words of Goethe: "Everything that liberates the spirit without corresponding growth in self-mastery is pernicious"? In the noble equilibrium of that utterance perhaps this famous controversy may some day come to rest. THE EMERGENCE OF CHRISTIANITY* G. S. BRETT The years that fali between the death of Alexander in 322 B.C. 'and the birth of St. Augustine in 354 A.D. made up a period which to us seems complex and confused . It is hard to say whether it seemed so to the men of that day. They often complained of the vices, superstitions , and sorrows of their age: but every generation has produced some self-tormenting spirits who bewailed the evil times on which they had falien, just as it produced its laughing philosophers, its satirists, or those who say with Montaigne that it is never possible to make the *C(}I1oerJion: The Old and the NerD in Re/ig;on from AJlXlJlIder ,lie Great 10 AugtlJ/iTJt of Hippo, by A. D. Nock, Oxford University Press. 537 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY world either very much better Or very much worse. Certainly in those six centuries great events happened and there was an embarrassing richness of experience. New horizons became visible: the old simplicity of local religions which knew no competition was ruined by the coming and going of strange prophets: democracy was crushed by the weight of imperialism and at the same time the conflict of beliefs in the new empires disintegrated their unity: the individual found himself free in a new sense, emancipated from his home and his town to be a citizen of the world. Like the young man who finds himself for the first time alone in a great city, these uprooted wanderers seem uncertain whether to rejoice in their escape from bondage or faintly console themselves for being "fragments of the Divine" and insignificant orphans in the guardianship of necessity! Historical research seems to be guided by interests which arise imperceptibly and then reach out into the past for parallels or precedents, hoping to make themselves intelligible. When democracy became significant at the end of the eighteenth century, the first great histories of Greece appeared: the growth of science in the last fifty years has stimulated research in to the origins of scientific thought: economics has had a similar effect in modifying the narrowness of political history and emphasizing the significance of social changes. Without producing more proofs, we may poin t the moral by adding that what is rather loosely called the Alexandrian age has attracted increasing attention during the past quarter of a century and this seems due to a· dim sense of kinship with that epoch, urging scholars to examine the records and define the characteristics of that variegated civilization. One obvious reason for this acute interest is the fact REVIEWS that Christianity emerged from this background. It is easy to regard this .event as a miracle; but even a miracle has its historical setting, and it may be that the preparation for a crisis is as miraculous as the crisis itself. This idea occurred to the earlier writers who suggested by the phrase "preparation for the Gospel" the importance of the historical background. Unfortunately the phrase tended to restrict the ou tlook. At this distance of time it is not easy to construct a faithful picture of the way a new sect, still insignificant, was regarded as only another oriental cult or suspected of...