Occultists & mystics of all ages

The difficulty of treating of such a subject as the life and activities of the Philosopher of Tyana lies in the fact that the story of Apollonius’s career has been overlaid with legends of the miraculous on the one hand, and distorted by religious prejudices on the other; while the only authoritative account of this great religious reformer is marred by the glaring deficiencies of the writer for the task which he had in hand, and his inability to appreciate the life-work of the subject of his biography. Indeed he fills many pages with literary padding of the worst kind, while he fails to give us over and over again the very facts which it is of value and importance for us to know. Philostratus, the author of this life, was one of the literary coterie that gathered round the presiding genius of the Empress Julia Domna, the wife of Septimus Severus and mother of Caracalla. Julia Domna was a generous patroness of art and literature, and her husband Severus was devoted to the study of occult science. Gibbon, in his usual sceptical vein, observes that “he was passionately addicted to the vain studies of magic and divination, deeply versed in the interpretation of dreams and omens, and perfectly acquainted with the science of judicial astrology.” The Empress, who was a daughter of the Priest of the Sun at Emesa in Syria, was an enthusiastic bibliophile and had collected, among her other literary treasures, the note-books of Damis, the companion and fellow traveller of Apollonius. These note-books or tablets contained the records of his journeys and other details concerning the life of Apollonius, who was as great a hero to Damis as ever Johnson was to Boswell. If these notes were as full of detail as Philostratus asserts, one can only regret that the biographer did not turn them to more useful account. Damis was a native of Ninus or Nineveh, and Philostratus speaks somewhat contemptuously of his defective Greek style. But it is probable that with all their grammatical errors the note-books of Damis would have given us a truer portrait of the great philosopher than the more finished phrases and elaborate oratorical devices of Philostratus. The biographer had also access to a book written by Maximus of Ægæ, containing a record of Apollonius’s doings at that place. It requires an acute critic to gauge how much of Philostratus’s narrative is literary embellishment and interpolated matter, and how much is actually derived from the original records. Even the Gospels of the Evangelists hardly present a more difficult task to the critic anxious to discriminate between the original and the glosses with which it is overlaid.

The other difficulty from which the record of Apollonius’s life and teachings has suffered is due to the religious disputes which arose through the rapid growth of Christianity and its conflict with the previously existing religions of the Roman world. We may argue legitimately enough that the power of working miracles is no proof of the truth of the doctrines expounded by any religious teacher. But the fact remains that in proselytising for Christianity the fullest use was made of the miracles recorded as accomplished by Jesus in the Gospels, in support of the contention in favour of the Divine origin of their worker, and of his work. Illogical though this argument may appear to the philosophic mind, it is not surprising that it should have carried great weight, and indeed it must be admitted that it does so even at the present day. What more natural, then, than that one of the disputants on the other side should have produced a polemical pamphlet in which he attempted to show that such an argument was a two-edged weapon, and that in fact it was possible to produce better evidence in favour of the miracles attributed to the pagan philosopher Apollonius than for those of Jesus of Nazareth, and to argue that, this being the case, even assuming the authenticity of the Gospel narrative, there was no more justification for regarding the Jewish prophet as a God than the Tyanian philosopher? Such a criticism of the claims of the Christians was in fact written by Hierocles, a philosopher of some note and successively governor of Palmyra, Bithynia, and Alexandria, about the first decade of the fourth century A.D., under the title of Philalethes, or The Truth-lover.

This pamphlet was not long in provoking a rejoinder from a leading light of the Christian community. The reply, the author of which was Eusebius, Bishop of Cæsarea, is still extant, though Hierocles’s contribution to the controversy was destroyed, like much other evidence hostile to Christianity, by the ecclesiastical authorities, when the new religion finally became triumphant. Eusebius was able to show that Philostratus was not a reliable authority, and that his judgment, where the credibility of a narrative was in question, was clearly at fault. Though the criticisms of Eusebius might have been applied with equal force to much of the Gospel record, it is plain that his retort to Hierocles did not lack point, the veracity of Philostratus being obviously not above suspicion, and some of his narratives urgently calling for evidential corroboration, indeed, in certain cases, being mere legend or romance. This applies in especial to the account given of Apollonius’s journey to India, which is interspersed with numerous fantastic stories which appear to be derived by Philostratus from other sources and interpolated in an unscrupulous manner, with the idea, presumably, of giving local colour. There are, however, numerous records given which are clearly taken direct from the narrative of Damis, and the general accuracy of which there appears to be no adequate reason to call in question. One of these offers a parallel to the various accounts of the raising of the dead to life given in the Gospel story, as, for instance, the recalling to life of the son of the widow of Nain; the raising from the dead of Jairus’s daughter, and last but not least, the case of Martha and Mary’s brother Lazarus, which, owing to the circumstances surrounding it, has caught hold of the popular imagination to a greater extent than either of the others. The record of the incident referred to is given in Philostratus’s life[1] as follows:—