For the literary form exemplified in the Wanderings of the Apostles was not an innovation of the Christian heretics, but had already enjoyed a vast popularity in the heathen romances which swarmed under the empire, and the best known names of which are Antonius Diogenes's Incredible Tales of Beyond Thule, Jamblicus's Babylonian Tales, the Ephesian Stories of the later Xenophon, the Ethiopians of Heliodorus, the romances of Achiles Tatius and of Chari- ton, not to mention the Metamorphoses of Apuleius.40 R. Reitzenstein no doubt insists that we shall draw into a somewhat narrower category and no longer speak of these wonder-tales with which we have here especially to do, broadly, as romances. He wishes to retain that term to describe a highly artistic literary form which, developing out of the historical monograph, was strictly governed by technical laws of composition derived ultimately from the drama. With the romance in this narrow sense, the collec- tions of marvellous stories loosely strung together in the wonder-tales have but a distant relationship. We must not confuse, Reitzenstein counsels us, two kinds of fiction,
CHRISTIAN WONDER-TALES 19
which were sharply distinguished in ancient aesthetics, TrXdo-fia and i/reuSo?,41 or mix up two literary forms which were quite distinct in their whole technic and style — merely because they were born together and grew up side by side. The romance plays on every string of human emotion; the wonder-tale — arelalogy is the name which Reitzenstein gives to this literary form — strikes but one note, and has as its single end to arouse astonishment.42 It represented in the ancient world, though in an immensely more serious vein, our modern Gulliver's Travels or Adven- tures of Baron Munchausen, which in fact are parodies of it, like their inimitable forerunners with which Lucian has delighted the centuries. It will be readily understood that the wonder-tale — the motives of the travelling prophet or philosopher having been fairly worked out — should eagerly seize on the new material offered it by Christianity. But as Von Dobschiitz remarks,43 the matter did not end by its seizing on Christianity. Christianity turned the tables on it and seized on it, and produced out of it the mission aretalogy which we know in general as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.
With its passage thus into Christian hands this literary form lost none of its marvel-mongery — to have lost which would have been to have lost its soul. " 'Teratology,' 'marvellousness,'" explains Von Dobschiitz,44 "is the fun- damental element of these Christian romances also. This is made very clear," he goes on to say, " by the circumstance that it is regularly magic of which the Apostles are rep- resented as being accused. Of course they do not admit that the accusation is just. Magical arts are demonic arts, and it was precisely every kind of demonic power against which they set themselves in the almighty name of Jesus Christ. It is most impressively shown that to this name every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth is to bow. We cannot help seeing, however, that only another form of magic, a Christian magic, steps here into the place
20 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
of the heathen. The name of Jesus serves as the all- powerful spell, the cross as the irresistible charm, by which bolts can be sprung, doors opened, idols overturned, poi- son rendered harmless, the sick healed, the dead raised. The demonic flight of the magician is confounded by the prayer of the Apostles ; they are none the less themselves carried home on the clouds, through the air." Something new entered Christianity in these wonder-tales ; something unknown to the Christianity of the Apostles, unknown to the Apostolic churches, and unknown to their sober successors; and it entered Christianity from without, not through the door, but climbing up some other way. It brought an abundance of miracle-working with it; and, un- fortunately, it brought it to stay. But from a contempla- tion of the swelling flood of marvels thus introduced into Christianity, obviously, the theory of the gradual cessation of miracle-working in the church through three centuries, which we are now examining, can derive no support.45