Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/334

Rh 31G from the creation, that at the beginning of the Sabbath (the seventh millennium) the Son of God appears, to put an end to the time of &quot;the unjust one,&quot; to judge the ungodly and renew the earth. But he does not indulge, like Papias, in sensuous descriptions of this seventh millennium; to Barnabas it is a time of rest, of sinlessness, and of a holy peace. It is not the end&quot;, however; it is followed by an eighth day of eternal duration, &quot;the beginning of another world.&quot; So that in the view of Barnabas the Messianic reign still belongs to ovros 6 alwv. Justin (Dial., 80) speaks of chiliasm as a necessary part of complete orthodoxy, although he knows Christians who do not accept it. He believes, with the Jews, in a restoration and extension of the city of Jerusalem; he assumes that this city will be the seat of the Messianic kingdom, and he takes it as a matter of course that there all believers (here he is at one with Barnabas) along with patriarchs and prophets will enjoy perfect felicity for one thousand years. In fact he reads this view into the Apocalypse of John, which he understands to mean that before the general resurrection all believers are to rule for a time with Christ on earth. That a philosopher like Justin, with a bias towards an Hellenic construction of the Christian religion, should nevertheless have accepted its chiliastic elements is the strongest proof that these enthusiastic expectations were inseparably bound up with the Christian faith down to the middle of the 2d century. And another proof is found in the fact that even a speculative Jewish Christian like Cerinthus not only did not renounce the chiliastic hope, but pictured the future kingdom of Christ as a kingdom of sensual pleasures, of eating and drinking and marriage festivities (Euseb., //. E., iii. 28, vii. 25). 3. After the middle of the 2d century these ex pectations were gradually thrust into the background. They would never have died out, however, had not circumstances altered, and a new mental attitude been taken up. The spirit of philosophical and theological speculation and of ethical reflexion, which began to spread through the churches, did not know what to make of the old hopes of the future. To a new generation they seemed paltry, earthly, and fantastic, and far-seeing men had good reason to regard them as a source of political danger. But more than this, these wild dreams about the glorious king dom of Christ began to disturb the organization which the churches had seen fit to introduce. In the interests of self-preservation against the world, the state, and the heretics, the Christian communities had formed themselves into compact societies with a definite creed and constitu tion, and they felt that their existence was threatened by the white heat of religious subjectivity. So early as the year 170, a church party in Asia Minor the so-called Alogi rejected the whole body of apocalyptic writings and denounced the Apocalypse of John as a book of fables. All the more powerful was the reaction. In the so-called Montanistic controversy (c. 160-220) one of the principal issues involved was the continuance of the chiliastic expectations in the churches. The Montanists of Asia Minor defended them in their integrity, with one slight modification : they announced that Pepuza, the city of Montanus, would be the site of the New Jerusalem and the millennial kingdom. Modifications of this kind, which have often appeared in later times in connexion with the revival of millennarianism, are a striking evidence of the tendency of every sect to regard its own little membership as the centre of the world and its fortunes as the kernel of universal history. After the Montanistic controversy, chiliastic views were more and more discredited in the Greek Church ; they were, in fact, stigmatized as &quot; Jewish &quot; and consequently &quot; heretical.&quot; It was the Alexandrian theology that superseded them ; that is to say, Neo-Platonic mysticism triumphed over the early Christian hope of the future, first amoug the &quot; cultured,&quot; and then, when the theology of the &quot; cultured &quot; had taken the faith of the &quot; uncultured &quot; under its protec tion, amongst the latter also. About the year 260 au Egyptian bishop, Nepos, in a treatise called eAey^o? dXA^yoptcTTwv, endeavoured to overthrow the Origenistic theology and vindicate chiliasm by exegetical methods. Several congregations took his part ; but ultimately Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, succeeded in healing the schism and asserting the allegorical interpretation of the prophets as the only legitimate exegesis. During this controversy Dionysius became convinced that the victory of mystical theology over &quot; Jewish &quot; chiliasm would never be secure so long as the Apocalypse of John passed for an apostolic writing and kept its place among the homologoumena of the canon. He accordingly raised the question of the apostolic origin of the Apocalypse; and by reviving old difficulties, with ingenious arguments of his own, he carried his point. At the time of Eusebius the Greek Church was saturated with prejudice against the book and with doubts as to its canonicity. In the course of the 4th century it was removed from the Greek canon, and thus the troublesome foundation on Avhich chiliasm might have continued to build was got rid of. The attempts of Methodius of Tyre at the beginning of the 4th century and Apollinarius of Laodicea about 360 to defend chiliasm and assail the theology of Origen had no result. For many centuries the Greek Church kept the Johannine Apocalypse out of its canon, and consequently chiliasm remained in its grave. It was considered a sufficient safeguard against the spiritualizing eschatology of Origen and his school to have rescued the main doctrines of the creed and the regula fidei (the visible advent of Christ ; eternal misery and hell-fire for the wicked). Anything beyond this was held to be Jewish. It was only the chronologists and historians of the church who, following Julius Africanus, made use of apocalyptic numbers in their calculations, while court theologians like Eusebius entertained the imperial table with discussions as to whether the dining-hall of the emperor the second David and Solomon, the beloved of God might not be the New Jerusalem of John s Apocalypse. Eusebius was not the first who dabbled in such speculations. Dionysius of Alexandria had already referred a Messianic prediction of the Old Testament to the emperor Gallienus. But mysticism and political servility between them gave the death-blow to chiliasm in the Greek Church. It never again obtained a footing there ; for, although, late in the Middle Ages, the Book of Revelation by what means we cannot tell did recover its authority, the church was by that time so hopelessly trammelled by a magical cultus as to be incapable of fresh developments. In the Semitic churches of the East (the Syrian, Arabian, and ^Ethiopian), and in that of Armenia, the apocalyptic literature was preserved much longer than in the Greek Church. They were very conservative of ancient traditions in general, and hence chiliasm survived amongst them to a later date than in Alexandria or Constantinople. It is to these churches that we are mainly indebted for the extensive remains of the old apocalyptic literature which we now possess. From remote cloisters of the East Europe has recovered within the last forty years many works of this kind which once enjoyed the highest repute throughout Christendom. 4. But the Western Church was also more conservative than the Greek. Her theologians had, to begin with, little turn for mystical speculation ; their tendency was rather to reduce the gospel to a system of morals. Now for the moralists chiliasm had a special significance as the one distinguishing feature of the gospel, and the only thing