Reading: Methods, Chapter 4: Moral and Social Condition

Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?
By Roland Allen

Chapter 4: Moral and Social Condition

The places at which St. Paul established his churches were centers of Roman and Greek civilization. Now when we speak of Graeco-Roman civilization we generally have in mind the lofty teachings of the great philosophers, and we imagine a world permeated with those teachings. But as a matter of fact there was in the empire no common standard of civilization. The great cities were the homes of a bewildering variety of religions, and of an amazing assortment of people in every stage of civilization or barbarism. Their inhabitants differed one from another in manners and religion as widely as the Kaffir differs from the Englishman. Dr. Bigg tells us that the state of the empire in the first century can only be compared with the state of India since the conquests of Clive and Warren Hastings.

This is a circumstance of the first importance when we turn to consider the moral surroundings of the churches founded by St. Paul in the Four Provinces. We are sometimes apt to think that the social condition of those to whom St. Paul preached may account for his success in establishing the Church, and the answer comes with irresistible force that the majority of St. Paul's converts were born and bred in an atmosphere certainly not better, and in some respects even worse, than that with which we have to deal today in India or China.

There were of course lofty philosophies: there were profound mysteries: there were simple religious people like some of those whom Dion Chrysostom met in his wanderings. These are everywhere to be met in all ages, the people of profound thought or of simple faith; but such people were not really typical of the religion and morals of the Four Provinces in St. Paul's day. They were no more typical than Chang Chih Tung was typical of the Chinese Mandarinate, or Tulsi Dâs typical of the Hindus, or Alfred the Great of the Saxons of his day. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were as far removed from the religious life of the empire as the doctrines of Seneca were from his practice.

So Friedlander contrasts the evidence afforded by the literature and the monuments of the early centuries of our era. 'The literature was chiefly the work of unbelievers or indifferentists, or of those who strove to spiritualize, purify or transform, the popular beliefs by reflection and interpretation. The monuments, on the other hand, to a great extent, at least, had their origin in those classes of society which were little affected by literature and its prevailing tendencies... thus in the majority of cases they are witnesses of a positive belief in a system of polytheism, of a faith which is free from doubt and subtlety alike.'

I cannot here, of course, attempt to depict the moral and social conditions of the provinces, but to a right understanding of St. Paul's work it is essential that we should remember four elements in the life of the people.

(1) The first of these is the prevalence of belief in demons. 'In times of distress heathenism turned naturally to devil worship.' 'Not merely idolatry, but every phase and form of life was ruled by them, they sat on thrones, they hovered round cradles, the earth was literally a hell.' 'The whole world lieth in the Evil One.' Not only Barbarians, not only Phrygians, but Romans, Greeks, and Jews all alike believed this. Not only the uneducated, but the most cultured were as fully persuaded of this universal power of devils as are the Chinese or the Gonds today. And the consequences of that belief were then what they are today -- physical and psychical disease, cruelty, bondage, vice. Men like Pliny the EIder, who argued that it was the height of impiety to attribute to the gods adultery and strife and to believe in divinities of theft and crime, believed in the most horrible forms of magic. Human sacrifice was not unknown and belief in witchcraft was universal. Educated men believed that any enemy could practice in secret upon their lives by means of incantations. Plutarch was a good and learned man but he was quite serious, when, speaking of rites associated with unlucky and evil days, the devouring of raw flesh, mangling of bodies, fastings and beatings of the breast, obscene cries at the altars, ragings and ravings, he said that he did not suppose any god was worshipped with these rites, but that they were instituted to propitiate and keep off evil demons. To this cause are to be traced the magic incantations of which so many have recently been found, and of which the formulae probably filled those magical books (worth 50,000 pieces of silver) which were publicly burnt at Ephesus under the influence of St. Paul's preaching.

From this root spring the leaden tablets, the bits of bones, the belief in dreams and omens, the magical love-potions, the epitaphs on children carried away by spiritual beings, in a word, a whole world of abject superstition. When we read the treatises of the philosophers we think of religion in the empire as we think of religion in the East when we read the books of Sir Edwin Arnold or Mrs. Besant. When we hear Dr. Bigg tell us that 'it is probably not too hard a thing to say that demon worship was the really operative religion of the vast mass of the people of the empire', we think of the religion of the empire as we think of the religion of the East when we read Dr. Copleston's account of Buddhism in Ceylon, or Professor de Groot's description of the religion of the Chinese. Professor de Groot takes the lowest possible view of the character of Chinese religion, but whole chapters of his descriptions of Chinese demonolatry might be incorporated in Dr. Bigg's or Dr. Friedlander's account of popular religion in the empire without affecting in any way the general impression which those accounts are calculated to produce upon our minds.

Before conversion every one of St. Paul's hearers was born and bred in this atmosphere of superstitious terror, and even after conversion the vast majority of them were still 'used to the idol' and did not cease to believe in demons. The preaching of St. Paul and the other apostles was not a denial of this belief; it provided those who accepted it with invincible weapons wherewith to meet the armies of evil, but it did not deny the existence of those armies. It was only the constant sense of the presence of the Spirit of Christ, before whom all spiritual powers must bow, that enabled Christians to banish these demons from their hearts and from the world in which they lived. Deliverance came not by denial but by conquest. Incidentally, I should like to remark that in heathen lands it might still perhaps be the wiser course to preach constantly the supremacy of Christ over all things spiritual and material, than to deny or deride the very notion of these spirits. Some of our missionaries know, and it was well for others if they did know, that it is much easier to make a man hide from us his belief in devils than it is to eradicate the belief from his heart. By denying their existence or by scoffing at those who believe in them we do not help our converts to overcome them, but only to conceal their fears from us. By preaching the supremacy of Christ we give them a real antidote, we take to them a real Saviour who helps them in their dark hours.

(2) The second circumstance which it is impossible to ignore in considering the work of St. Paul in the Four Provinces is the moral character of the religious rites. Some of the mysteries were no doubt capable of a highly moral interpretation. Harnack has collected in two or three pages the most important elements of the intellectual and religious tendencies in which the mingling of Hellenism and Orientalism, prepared the way for the preaching of the Gospel. 'The sharp division between the soul and the body, and the more or less exclusive importance attached to the spirit; the sharp division between God and the world, and the recognition that the Godhead is incomprehensible and indescribable yet great and good; the depreciation of the material world and of the body; the yearning for redemption from the world, the flesh and death; the conviction that redemption is dependent on knowledge and expiation; that life eternal is to be found in return to God, that the means are at hand and can be sought, that the seeker can be initiated into the secret knowledge by which the redemption is brought to him.' 'The soul, God, knowledge, expiation, asceticism, redemption, eternal life, with individualism and with humanity substituted for nationality -- these were the sublime thoughts which were living and operative....Wherever vital religion existed it was in this circle of thought and existence that it drew breath.' And he goes on, 'The actual number of those who lived within the circle is a matter of no moment ....The history of religion, so far as it is really a history of vital religion, runs always in a very narrow groove.' But for our present inquiry the number of those who lived within the circle is a matter of first importance. A few elect souls understood a spiritual purpose in the mysteries of Ceres or of Isis or of Cybele; but, to the vast majority, these rites did not suggest profound truths any more than the dancing and self-mutilation of the wandering priest -- who made the round of the villages with his little shrine and idol and went through his performance of penance and expiation whilst a collection was being made on his behalf -- suggested to the villagers any profound truths concerning sin and redemption. And the religious rites performed in the temples, both in respect of the filthy objects of devotion and the indecent concomitants of worship were disgusting beyond all words. It is as impossible to quote the legends of the gods so worshipped, as it is to quote the stories of the Incarnations of Krishna, whilst the accompanying circumstances of the worship were only less filthy than the lives of the divinities in whose honor they were performed. Suffice it to say that the temples of Ephesus and Corinth were no more the homes of virtue than the temples in Benares or Peking. The language of St. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians exactly describes the condition of the people from whom his converts came, and amongst whom they lived.

It is upon these two conditions, superstition and uncleanness, that nearly all our arguments for our modern methods of conducting missionary enterprise in heathen lands today are based, and it is necessary that we should remind ourselves that, whatever may be the merits of St. Paul's methods, they do not rest upon social and religious conditions superior to those under which most of our modern missions are conducted.

(3) But in addition to these there were two evils, the like of which are not now to be found throughout the world, slavery and the amphitheater. It is not necessary here to repeat what is perfectly familiar to all men concerning the shows in the amphitheater. What is more important for us is to note the attitude adopted even by the very best men towards these inhuman spectacles. Dr. Bigg tells us that there are 'but three passages in which heathen writers express anything like adequate condemnation' of these shows. And Friedlander says, 'In all Roman literature there is scarcely one note of the horror of today at these inhuman delights.' For the most part they were spoken of with absolute indifference. People like Pliny and Cicero defended them as 'affording a splendid training for the eye, though perhaps not for the ear, in the endurance of pain and as inspiring disdain of death and love of honorable wounds'. Even Marcus Aurelius was simply bored by them and complains that they were 'always the same'; whilst that model of Pagan virtue, Symmachus, was moved to bitter complaints by the heartless conduct of some Saxons who committed suicide in their cells rather than kill one another in public at the show which he had prepared in honor of his son's praetorship.

The extraordinary fascination which they exercised over the minds even of those who considered themselves far superior to such temptations is best illustrated by the oft-repeated tale of Alypius.

Alypius was dragged into the theatre by some college friends. '"If you drag me thither and put me there can you force me to give my eyes or put my mind to such a show?" he cried. "I shall be absent from it in spirit though present in body, and thus I shall overcome both you and it." When they had found their places he shut his eyes tight and forbade his thoughts to dally with such crimes. Would he could have scaled his ears also! For at some turn in the fight, the whole people broke into a roar of shouting and overcome by curiosity, confident that whatever happened he could despise and forget even though he saw it, he opened his eyes. Then was he struck with a deadlier wound in his soul than the Gladiator whom he lusted to behold received in his flesh, and fell more miserably than the poor wretch over whose fall arose that bellow which pierced his ears and unlocked his eyes, and laid open his soul to the fatal thrust .... For, with the sight of blood, he drank in ruthlessness; no longer did he turn away, but fixed his gaze, and drank the cup of fury, and knew it not; he was fascinated by the din of battle, and drunk with murderous joy. He was no longer the Alypius who had come, but one of the crowd to which he had come, and the hardened accomplice of those who had brought him! Why should I say more? He gazed, he shouted, he raved, he carried home with him a frenzy which goaded him to return, not only with those who at first had dragged him thither but before them dragging others in his turn.' 'No one,' says Tertullian, 'partakes of such pleasures without their strong excitements, no one comes under their excitement without their natural lapses.'

These shows had two very disastrous results: (1) They kept before all people's minds the division of humanity into two classes, men who had rights and men who had none, which was the great curse of slavery, and (2) this excitement made all other more reasonable forms of amusement seem tame. In particular they had a most disastrous influence over the theatre. 'What with the powerful excitement of the circus and the arena, the stage could only draw its audience by ignoble means, rough jokes and sensual by-play.' Nothing was too gross, nothing too indecent, to be displayed in the theatre, nothing too sacred to be parodied there. The legends of the gods often supplied the subjects of the most horrible and degrading scenes. 'When Bathyllus, a beautiful boy, was dancing, Leda, the most impudent actress of mimes, felt like a mere country novice on seeing such mastership in the art of refined sensuality.'

Apuleius describes a Pyrrhic dance which he saw at a festival at Corinth. There was a lofty mountain built of wood to resemble Mount Ida, covered with trees from which a fountain poured down a stream of clear water. A few goats were feeding on the grass and Paris, a young man dressed in flowing robes and crowned with a tiara, was tending them. Presently a beautiful boy, representing Mercury, whose only covering was a mantle thrown over his left shoulder, danced forward, holding in his hand a golden apple which he gave to Paris. Then a girl appeared dressed as Juno, having on her head a white diadem and carrying a scepter. She was followed by another whom you could guess to be Minerva, for she had on her head a shining helmet encircled with an olive wreath. She raised her shield and brandished her spear like the goddess engaged in war. After these came another whose surpassing beauty and grace of color proclaimed her to be Venus, and Venus in her youth. She was quite naked except for a transparent blue gauze scarf, with which the wind played lovingly. Her two colors, the white of her limbs and the blue of her scarf, showed that she was descended from the heavens and had come up from the sea. Juno, accompanied by Castor and Pollux, then danced with a quiet and unaffected grace and showed by gestures that she was offering to Paris the sovereignty of Asia if he would give her the prize. Next Minerva, attended by Terror and Fear, who leaped before her brandishing drawn swords, rushed forward with tossing head and threatening glance and showed by quick animated gestures that she would make him renowned for valor if he would give her the prize of beauty. Lastly Venus, who was greeted with loud applause, advanced with a sweet smile and stood in the middle of the stage surrounded by a throng of little boys so delicate and fair that they looked exactly like cupids just flown from heaven or from the sea. They had little bows and arrows and they carried torches before their mistress as if lighting her to the nuptial feast. Presently the flutes began to breathe soft Lydian airs which thrilled the audience with delight. But greater still was their delight when Venus began a slow sensuous dance which, to judge from his description, evidently appealed strongly to Apuleius. He particularly noted the play of her eyes, at one moment full of languor, at another flashing with passion. 'Sometimes,' he says, 'she seemed to dance only with her eyes.' She came before the judge and by movements of her arms were seen to promise that she would give him a bride of surpassing beauty like herself. He then gladly gave her the apple which he held in his hand in token of victory. After the judgment, Juno and Minerva, sad and angry, retired from the stage, showing their indignation by their gestures. But Venus, full of joy and delight, showed her pleasure by dancing with all her choir. Then from some secret pipe in the top of the mountain there broke out a fountain of wine that filled the theatre with fragrance. Finally the whole scene disappeared into the ground sinking out of sight.

After quoting this story Friedlander proceeds to explain that these classic themes were altogether too refined for the vast majority. The chief delight of the educated was the pantomime; the common crowd preferred the boisterous rudeness and crude indecency of the mimes.

The moral influence of those spectacles in the circus, the amphitheater, or the theatre is more easily imagined than described. And it is not easily imagined. We instinctively beautify the past. We can hardly believe the descriptions of its vices. I suppose it is necessary to have lived long in intimate touch with heathen society to be able to understand at all what these things mean. But in the world today we can find no parallel to them. There are indeed vile religious plays, there are representations of divine beings, superhuman chiefly in their vices; but there are no gladiatorial shows, there are no criminals thrown to wild beasts.

(4) Finally there was slavery, and slavery in St. Paul's days were very different from any slavery known to us, and that not for the better.

It differed from slavery in America or the West Indies in that the slaves of the Empire were of the same color and very often of the same race, with the same education, as their masters. They were slaves today; tomorrow, if set free, they might take their place with perfect propriety and ease in the society of their master and mistress. There was no great barrier of blood, no great gulf of social habit or thought and cultivation.

In this it may, perhaps, be compared with slavery in China today. In China slaves are of the same color and race as their masters, but there they are always of the lowest class and generally wholly uneducated. They are nearly all girls, and they are not a numerous class. But in the Empire the males were in a vast majority, and the numbers were appalling. Not only was the actual multitude of slaves in some of the great houses amazing, but the number of people living in some of the cities in whose families there was no servile taint, must have been comparatively small. Corinth was colonized by Caesar with freed-men. The whole fabric of society in the cities of the Empire was built upon slavery and was penetrated through and through with that peculiar infection of slavery, servility, and insolence. It is true that at this time the condition of slaves in the cities was somewhat mitigated. They were well educated often, and often kindly treated, but they had no rights. Women, girls and boys had no protection against their masters: their master's will was their only law of virtue. And there was nothing between any slave and the lash, except his master's will. Wealthy gentlemen, who had made their fortunes and secured their freedom, gave great sums to their physicians to remove the scars of the lash, or covered themselves with costly ointments to conceal them from the eyes of their guests.

Now consider for a moment the effect of these conditions on the education of those with whom St. Paul had to do. From birth the child was in the care of a nurse who was a slave, 'steeped as a matter of course in the grossest and most horrible superstition'. When he was of age to go to school, the child was in the care of a pedagogue also a slave, whose interest it was to pander to his young master's vices and to conceal his misdemeanors. He attended a private school kept by a freed-man. There he received an education which, Dr. Bigg says, was admirably designed. The system of education adopted in the best of these schools was 'probably much better than any to be found in our own schools down to the time of Dr. Arnold, but it was thoroughly pagan. It is true that a great many of the best classical authors treat the legends of the gods as mere legends, and children in England read the stories of Jupiter, Venus and Aesculapius with no more sense of reality than they feel in reading the story of Bluebeard; but the children of St. Paul's day were in a very different case. They read about Venus in Corinth beneath the shadow of the Temple of Venus with its 1,000 priestesses, whose deceits and arts were known to all the city. They read about Aesculapius with the knowledge that if they fell sick their parents would go to the Temple of Aesculapius to make an offering for their recovery. They read about Diana in Ephesus, where the silversmiths sold her shrines, and that impure image which fell down from Jupiter had its seat.

They understood a great deal too much; and the home influence was then, as ever in heathen lands, far from being what it ought to be. Even a good teacher could hardly counteract the influence of the nurse, the pedagogue and the parents, and all teachers were not good teachers.

When he left the grammar school, if he could afford it, the child went to the teacher of rhetoric, where he learned to speak on any topic under any circumstances with grace, fluency, and at least an appearance of erudition. There were set problems and characters which the scholar discussed, and he learned not only to censure the adulterer, the pander, and the gamester, but to defend them. He learned also a nice judgment in all things literary. Then he went out into the world with this education in the history of the gods and the character of men, with the fear of demons as the one strong religious influence, if there was any strong religious influence at all; to attend the games, the circus, and the theatre, in which he found every possible incitement to his animal nature; to visit the temples on a feast day and to find them the homes of riot; whilst slaves were ever at his elbow ready to minister to his slightest wish. Every man of any education (except the Jews) in the churches of St. Paul during these ten years had attended those schools, read that literature, visited those temples, and most of them had seen those games -- and every Christian child of the parents who were St. Paul's first converts passed through that same training. They received that education or they received none.

If the moral atmosphere in Greece was bad, in Asia Minor it was even worse. The character of the native religion was such that 'Greek education was pure in comparison, and the Greek moralists, philosophers and politicians inveighed against the Phrygian religion as the worst enemy of the Greek ideals of life. Greek society and life were at least founded on marriage; but the religion of Asia Minor maintained as a central principle that all organized and settled social life on the basis of marriage was an outrage on the free, unfettered divine life of nature, the type of which was found in the favorites of the great goddesses, the wild animals of the fields and the mountains. The Greek and Roman law which recognized as citizens only those born from the legitimate marriage of two citizens had no existence in Phrygian cities.'

This is not, of course, a complete account of the social condition of the provinces in which St. Paul preached; but these elements were there, and they cannot be ignored if we are rightly to understand the character of the task which lay before the Apostle. Devil worship, immemorial religious rites, gladiatorial games, slavery -- these things cannot be set on one side. How can a man behave properly to his sick friend when he believes that he has a demon? How can the most lofty philosophic doctrines avail to produce rectitude when trouble sends a man to pray to a devil? How can a man preserve a true devotion and a reverent attitude towards the Divine, when the divinities known to him are described as the basest of creatures? How can a man walk aright when he and all his world take it for granted that there is a class of men, and that class the most numerous class, which has no rights of any kind, to whom nothing can be wrong which their master says is right, who were designed and created solely to give service and amusement to their owners, whether by their life or by their death? Professor Harnack tells us that 'it is a mistake to suppose that any "slave question" occupied the early Church. The primitive Christians looked on slavery with neither a more friendly nor a more hostile eye than they did upon the State and legal ties. They never dreamt of working for the abolition of the State, nor did it occur to them to abolish slavery for human or other reasons -- not even amongst themselves. Large numbers of the members of the churches founded by St. Paul were slaves, some of them were slave-owners. Christian masters are exhorted to clemency, Christian slaves to faithfulness. The fact that there was no 'slave question' simply emphasizes the universal acceptance of the conditions. What those conditions have always been wherever slavery has existed, what those conditions must have been where there was no color or customary barrier between master and slave, is only too well known.

Whatever advantages of education, civilization, philosophy, religion, the Empire possessed, so long as it was defiled by slavery, the games, the temples and the magicians, it is, I think, impossible to argue that St. Paul's converts had any exceptional advantages, in the moral character of the society in which they were brought up, which are not given to our converts today.