rchontes, leads them
captive in his triumph, strips them of their armour (Col. ii. 15; cf.
the previous verse), sometimes even crucifies them for ever in their
places in the sky.[164:2] The epistles to the Colossians and the
Ephesians are much influenced by these doctrines. Paul himself
constantly uses the language of them, but in the main we find him
discouraging the excesses of superstition, reforming, ignoring,
rejecting. His Jewish blood was perhaps enough to keep him to strict
monotheism. Though he admits Angels and Archontes, Principalities and
Powers, he scorns the Elements and he seems deliberately to reverse the
doctrine of the first and second Man.[164:3] He says nothing about the
Trinity of Divine Beings that was usual in Gnosticism, nothing about the
Divine Mother. His mind, for all its vehement mysticism, has something
of that clean antiseptic quality that makes such early Christian works
as the Octavius of Minucius Felix and the Epistle to Diognetus so
infinitely refreshing. He is certainly one of the great figures in Greek
literature, but his system lies outside the subject of this essay. We
are concerned only with those last manifestations of Hellenistic
religion which probably formed the background of his philosophy. It is a
strange experience, and it shows what queer stuff we humans are made of,
to study these obscure congregations, drawn from the proletariate of the
Levant, superstitious, charlatan-ridden, and helplessly ignorant, who
still believed in Gods begetting children of mortal mothers, who took
the 'Word', the 'Spirit', and the 'Divine Wisdom', to be persons called
by those names, and turned the Immortality of the Soul into 'the
standing up of the corpses';[165:1] and to reflect that it was these who
held the main road of advance towards the greatest religion of the
western world.

* * * * *

I have tried to sketch in outline the main forms of belief to which
Hellenistic philosophy moved or drifted. Let me dwell for a few pages
more upon the characteristic method by which it reached them. It may be
summed up in one word, Allegory. All Hellenistic philosophy from the
first Stoics onward is permeated by allegory. It is applied to Homer, to
the religious traditions, to the ancient rituals, to the whole world. To
Sallustius after the end of our period the whole material world is only
a great myth, a thing whose value lies not in itself but in the
spiritual meaning