POST-CHRISTIAN PANTHEISM.
In speaking of Neo-Platonism I incidentally mentioned its apparent
subjection to "extraneous influences," These, of course, included the
rising power of Christianity and its Jewish traditions.
[Sidenote: The Hebrew Tradition.]
Even before the advent of the new revelation, the Jewish settlements
existing in all great cities of the Graeco-Roman world excited interest
at any rate among sentimentalists touched by the fascination at that
time beginning to be exerted by oriental religions. And this influence
of Jewish traditions was much facilitated by the existence of a Greek
translation of the Hebrew scriptures.
[Sidenote: Its Influence on Greek Philosophy.]
[Sidenote: To Inspire Devotion, Not Solve Problems.]
Now, what the Hebrew tradition did for Greek philosophy was, of course,
not to favour its Pantheistic trend, where that existed, but much more
to convert such semi-Pantheism from a mere intellectual speculation to
contemplative devotion. For Hebraism itself had become almost as
intensely monotheistic as the later Islam. And, though monotheism may be
a stage in the progress of religion from Animism to Pantheism, it may,
also, by the peculiar intensity of the personal devotion it sometimes
inspires, cause the very idea of any farther expansion of faith to be
counted a sin.
[Sidenote: Philo, the Jew of Alexandria.]
Perhaps the influence of Hebraism on Hellenism may be illustrated by the
Alexandrian Philo's pathetic endeavour not only to trace the wisdom of
the Greeks to Moses, but to show that this derived lore is much mightier
for good when re-invested with the spiritual power and ardent devotion
of the Jewish faith.
"If any one will speak plainly," he writes,[12] "he might say that the
intelligible world is nothing other than the word (se. [Greek: logos],
reason) of the world-making God. For neither is the intelligible city
anything other than the thought [Greek: logismos] of the architect
already intending to build the city. This is the teaching of Moses, not
mine. At any rate in what follows, when he records the origin of man, he
declares outright that man was made in the image of God. But if a part
(of creation) reflects the type, so also must the entire manifestation,
this intelligible ordered world, which is a reproduction of the divine
image on a larger scale than that of man."[13]
[Sidenote: Motives Underlying his Distortion of Hebraism.]
[Sidenote: Not Pantheistic.]
How Philo managed to extort this out of the Pentateuch is a question of
interest, but one on which I cannot delay. Suffice it, that while he
thus showed his reverence for the traditions of his race, his whole aim
is to fire philosophy with religious devotion. But he was not, in any
strict sense of the word, a Pantheist, though he regarded the Logos as
an emanation from the Eternal, and the kosmos, the ordered world, as in
some way emanating from the Logos. Perhaps, indeed, if we could exclude
from emanation the idea of time, as Christians are supposed to do when
they speak of the "eternal generation" of the Divine Son or the
"procession" of the Holy Ghost, we might regard Philo, with the
succeeding Neo-Platonists and some of the Gnostics, as approximately
Pantheistic. But his vagueness and uncertainty about matter forbid such
a conclusion. For whether he regarded matter as eternally existing apart
from the divine substance, or whether he looked upon it as the opposite
of Being, as a sort of positive nothing, in either case, it cannot be
said that for him the whole Universe was God, and nothing but God.
[Sidenote: Neo-Platonism.]
[Sidenote: Resultant of Contact between East and West.]
If I have given more space to the great Alexandrian Jew than my narrow
limits ought to afford, it is because I think I may thus avoid the
necessity of saying much about the philosophic schemes of the
Neo-Platonists, the phantasies of the Gnostics, or the occasionally
daring speculations of the Christian Fathers. For whether the works of
Philo were much studied by the Greeks or not, they certainly described
the spiritual resultant--so to speak--emerging from the mutual impact of
Western and Oriental, especially Jewish, ideas. Which resultant was "in
the air" from the first century of the Christian age; and the later
epistles ascribed to St. Paul, as well as the Fourth Gospel, show clear
traces of it.[14]
[Sidenote: Its Religious Inspiration.]
[Sidenote: Suggestive of Pantheism, but not such in Spinoza's Sense.]
But the inspiration of the time-spirit was not confined to the Christian
Church. For the city of Alexandria, where that spirit seems to have been
peculiarly potent as shown in the transfigured Judaism of Philo, was the
birthplace of the Neo-Platonic school already mentioned above. And among
its greatest members, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, the religious
influence of the East was distinctly apparent. True, they followed
Socrates and Plato in reverence for knowledge as the unfailing begetter
of virtue. But their speculations about the divine Being were touched by
Oriental emotion. And we may with some confidence believe that their
development of the Platonic Trinity owed a good deal to the rapid spread
of Christianity. Thus the sentiment, the fervour, the yearning for
"salvation," the worship and devotion taught by the best of the
Neo-Platonists were not so much, from Athens as from Sinai and Galilee.
Yet, though there were in their world-conception many anticipations of
the gospel of the "God-intoxicated man," whom the counsels of the
Eternal reserved for the fulness of times, it would scarcely be accurate
to describe the system of any of them as strictly Pantheistic. For they
were always troubled about "matter" as an anomalous thing in a divine
universe, and in treating of it they hesitated between the notion of an
eternal nuisance which the Demiurgus, or acting God, could only modify,
not destroy, and, on the other hand, a strained theory of an evil
nothing, which is yet something. Again, so far from realising Spinoza's
faith in God as so literally All in All that there is nothing else but
He, they would not tolerate the contact of the Infinite with the finite,
of God with the world. Consistently with such prepossessions, they held
obstinately to the notion of some beginning, and therefore some ending
of the ordered world. And this beginning was effected by emanations such
as the Logos, or, as others had it, the world-soul and other divine
energies, between the Eternal and creation; a phantasy which, however
poetically wrought out, is not really consistent with Pantheism.
[Sidenote: The Gnostics.]
Such ideas of a hierarchy of subordinate emanations to fill the supposed
abyss between the Infinite and the Finite were eagerly adopted and
developed by the pseudo-philosophers called Gnostics, on both sides of
the boundary between the Church and the World. Suffice it that, like
most, though by no means all of their predecessors, they regarded the
world of earth, sun, planet, stars, and animated nature with man at its
head, as the whole Universe; and, assuming that it must have had a
beginning, they vexed their souls with futile attempts to frame some
gradual transition from the uncreated to the created, from the eternal
to the mortal. The grotesque chimaeras engendered thus are remembered
now only as illustrations of the facile transition from the sublime to
the ridiculous and from philosophy to folly.
[Sidenote: The Church Fathers.]
[Sidenote: Augustine.]
The orthodox Christian fathers were not less conscious than the
Neo-Platonists or Gnostics of the perennial problem of the Many and the
One. But they were restrained, perhaps, by the "faith that comes of
self-control," perhaps by mere common sense, from indulging in attempts
to connect the Infinite with the Finite by "vain genealogies." Indeed,
for the most part they confessed that whatever light the Gospel might
shed on moral issues, it left untouched the ultimate question of the
relation of the Infinite to the Finite. And the only aspect of their
most venturesome speculations which I need recall is their insistence,
even when apparently verging toward Pantheism, on a transcendent as well
as an immanent God, that is on a Creator existing, so to speak, outside
the Universe and apart from it as well as permeating every part. Thus,
for example, Augustine would seem to deny to the world any separate
creature existence when he says, that but for the divinity everywhere in
it, creation would cease to be. But in his insistence on the creation of
the world from nothing, he directly contradicts Pantheism, because he
must necessarily be taken to mean that there is now something other than
God.
That there have been devout Christians whose mystic speculations on the
relations of the soul to the Eternal logically involved Pantheism--if
logic in such a case had any function--there can be no doubt. But for
most of them "God's word written" seemed to confirm God's word in
heaven and earth as known to them, proclaiming that there had been a
beginning and there must be an end. Therefore, whatever might be the
immanence of the Creator in His works, God could not, in their minds, be
identified with "the fashion of this world" which "passeth away."
Yet the time was coming when the Divine word both in Scripture and in
Nature was to be otherwise read. For men began to learn that the Bible
was other than they had supposed and the Universe immeasurably greater
than they had conceived.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: _De Mundi Opificio_, p. 5B. I take him to mean by [Greek:
kosmos noêtos]--the world as apperceived--realised in our
consciousness.]
[Footnote 13: It should be noted that Philo, who was contemporary with
Jesus, often uses the title "the Father" [Greek: ho Pataer] as a
sufficient designation of the Eternal. It was not very usual, and is
suggestive of certain spiritual sympathies amidst enormous intellectual
divergencies between the Alexandrian philosopher and the Galilean
prophet.]
[Footnote 14: See Col. i. 15-17 and refs. John i. 1-3; iii. 13; viii.
58.]