The second of the great African fathers ad- mired Tertullian and on this point agreed with him. Cj')irian, in A.D. '246, invites his friend and fellow-rhetorician Donatus {Ep. 1. 'adDonatum,' 6)t to look at the state of the world : ' roads ren- dered impassable by brigands, seas infested with pirates, wars waged on every side with the bloody horror of camps, the world drenched with inter- necine bloodshed (mntuo sanguine), and murder — a crime, when committed by an individual — a virtue when committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for crimes not because they are free from guilt but because of the large scale of their cruelty.' There is a tinge of sentimental melancholy and weariness of the world in these words penned amid the charming ease and quiet of bis gardens at Carthage. I>ut Cyprian's position amounts to a discouragement of war in general. He has no room for it in his scheme of things. Half a century later the trenchant African objection to war was repeated by Arnobius of Sicca (i. 6), from whom Lactantius may have learned his paeilism as well as his rhetoric. Arnobius claims, however, that wars have abated in the Empire since the coming of Christ, though he insists that Christians ' would rather shed their own blood than stain their hands and conscience with the blood of other people.' One of the points which he makes later (vii. 12) is the absurd situation created by two nations at war sacriticing to the same gods for victory. What are the poor gods to do? To side with each, time about, or with neither ? But he uses this illustra- tion to bring out tlie futility of imagining that the divine favour can be iniluenced by human oller- ings, not to emphasize the incongruities of war and religion. Neither Cyprian nor Arnobius nor even Lactantius and Athanasius,t however, dinted Christian opinion like Tertullian and Origen.
* Seneca (Ep. Mor, xcv.) also holds up animals in order to slianie men out of their pugnacity and niilitarisui. * We forbid homicide and individual elauirhter. What ot wars and the " frlorious " crime of slaying" nations? . . . Man, the mildest of beings, is not ashamed of roioicin^ in a fellow-man's blood, or of waging wars and handing them on to posterity to wa^e, when even dumb, wild beasts are at peace among themselves. . . . Man, a sacred thing to man, is now killed in sport and jest.' The entire passage agrees with the pleas of Lactantius (see above, p. 602).
t He addresses Donatus in military terms : ' Tu tantum quern iam spiritalibus castris militia coelestis signavit ' (1.")).
J In the de Incam. Verbi Dei (50-.'j:i) he attributes war to the machinations of demons, and, as the.se are being routed by ' the faith of Christ and the sign of the Cross,* the predictioti of
7. The pressure of the problem. — Yet the dint was neither deep nor permanent. Fortunately for the early Church, the views of Tertullian, Origen, anil Cyprian did not alter the situation. Tertullian and Origen, like Tatian, happened to be suspected by the orthodox on other grounds. Cyprian's inlluence might have been expected to exercise far more inlluence ; ap- parently it did not. Of the four great African fathers, only the last, Augustine, recognized the sad, stern necessity of war as a sphere for Christian civic loyalty ; Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactan- tius take the opposite position. Yet Christians still continued to serve in the army. Had the extremists succeeded in their policy of tabuing military service, it is very doubtful if the victory of ('bristiaiiity in the next century would have been possible; had the Church committed her.self to an ojien line of disloyaltj', by forbidding her members to join or to remain in the legions, the perils of the new religion would have been seriously increased, and Constantine would hartllj' have felt justified in raising it to the position of the State-religion. One of the factors of the Cliurch's triumph in the 4th cent, was that the Christiiins had nuide themselves necessary to the well-being of the Kmpire and proved themselves in deed as well as in word loyal citizens. A saving instinct kept the Church from yielding to the (inostie and Manichiean tendency which was im- plicit in the fanaf ical anti-civic repudiation of force voiced by Tertullian and Origen. By the end of the 3rd cent. Christian soldiers were so consider- able an element that one of the aims of Diocletian, in bis ruthless policy, was to purge the army of their presence. The fact speaks for itself.
To it we may add, more for the sake of interest than of import- ance, that in the first half of the third cent, a Christian actually wrote on military tactics. (An incidental p.irallel occurs in the advice of Ep, Arist^afi, pp. 193 f., 2S1, where a Jew gives Ptolemy Philadelphus some good counsel on military matters.) This was Sextus Julius Africanus, the versatile and indefatigable friend of Origen, who not only travelled widely in the East and studied science, but composed pages on subjects as diverse aa chronology and agriculture. The recent discovery (cf. Gren- fell .and IJunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iii. 36 f.) of a papyrus con- taining the end of the ISth book of his Keoroi ri naptiSo^a r-^nioves any reason for scepticism as to his authorship of the latter work. The KttrToi were, like the Stronuita of Clement, a miscellany or encyclopjedia, but of a more secular character ; they discussed all manner of topics from charms and medicines to strategy, from literary criticism to methods of warfare. Africanus seems to have been on intimate terms with the emjieror, Alexander Severus ; he arranged a library for liim at the Pantheon, and his interests, theoretiiial as well as practical, were by no means confined to ecclesiastical afTairs. He stood in the front rank of contemporary culture, and was a man of affairs as well as a scholar. Whether or not he had served in the army, it is signiticant that he could transcribe from his note-books information about matters of military science such as poisoning wells and provisions or the best methods of attack.