Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.60

c13.60

Did Christianity owe anything to Hindu and Buddhist thought? Many rash statements, which prove, on minute investigation, to be based on coincidences more or less remote, have been made upon this subject¹. Thus the doctrine of the Logos, introduced into Christianity from Philo, superficially resembles the personification of *Vāch* ‘Speech’ as a goddess in the *Rig Veda*². But there is no *Vāch* doctrine, *Vāch* being merely an unimportant abstraction. And moreover Philo borrowed his Logos doctrine from Heraklitus and not from the East at all. The immense popularity of asceticism, on the other hand, and the extravagant forms it assumed in the Thebaid, may very well be traced to the stories of the Hylobioi and Sramanaioi which are so prominent in patristic literature. The first of the great hermits was Paul of Alexandria, who fled to the Egyptian desert in 251 A.D. to escape the Decian persecution. His famous follower St Anthony died in 356 A.D. This is just the time when Indian influence in Alexandrian literature is most in evidence. Of course, monasticism was also practised among the Jews,—the Essenes of the Dead Sea and the Therapeutae in Egypt belong to the first century B.C. One cannot help wondering whether *relic-worship* (mentioned as we have seen by Clement as a Buddhist practice) and the use of the rosary, are not both Eastern survivals.