The tendency to dogmatize was met by the tendency to doubt; and the
tendency to doubt flowed in many streams, which can with difficulty
be traced in minute detail, but whose general course is sufficiently
described for the ordinary student in the _Academics_ of Cicero. In the
second and third centuries of our era there had come to be three main
groups of schools. “Some men,” writes Sextus Empiricus,[207] “say that
they have found the truth; some say that it is impossible for truth to
be apprehended; some still search for it. The first class consists of
those who are specially designated Dogmatics, the followers of Aristotle
and Epicurus, the Stoics, and some others: the second class consists of
the followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, and other Academics: the
third class consists of the Sceptics.” They may be distinguished as the
philosophy of assertion, the philosophy of denial, and the philosophy of
research.[208] But the first of these was in an overwhelming majority.
The Dogmatics, especially in the form either of pure Stoicism or of
Stoicism largely infused with Platonism, were in possession of the field
of educated thought. It is a convincing proof of the completeness with
which that thought was saturated with their methods and their fundamental
conceptions, that those methods and conceptions are found even among
the philosophers of research who claimed to have wholly disentangled
themselves from them.[209]
* * * * *
The philosophy of assertion, the philosophy of denial, and the philosophy
of research, were all alike outside the earliest forms of Christianity.
In those forms the moral and spiritual elements were not only supreme
but exclusive. They reflected the philosophy, not of Greece, but of
Palestine. That philosophy was almost entirely ethical. It dealt with
the problems, not of being in the abstract, but of human life. It was
stated for the most part in short antithetical sentences, with a symbol
or parable to enforce them. It was a philosophy of proverbs. It had no
eye for the minute anatomy of thought. It had no system, for the sense of
system was not yet awakened. It had no taste for verbal distinctions. It
was content with the symmetry of balanced sentences, without attempting
to construct a perfect whole. It reflected as in a mirror, and not
unconsciously, the difficulties, the contradictions, the unsolved enigmas
of the world of fact.
When this Palestinian philosophy became more self-conscious than it had
been, it remained still within its own sphere, the enigmas of the moral
world were still its subject-matter, and it became in the Fathers of the
Talmud on the one hand fatalism, and on the other casuistry.
The earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of
Greek philosophy, but they also appealed, on the one hand, mainly to
the classes which philosophy did not reach, and, on the other hand, to
a standard which philosophy did not recognize. “Not many wise men after
the flesh” were called in St. Paul’s time: and more than a century
afterwards, Celsus sarcastically declared the law of admission to the
Christian communities to be—“Let no educated man enter, no wise man,
no prudent man, for such things we deem evil; but whoever is ignorant,
whoever is unintelligent, whoever is uneducated, whoever is simple,
let him come and be welcome.”[210] It proclaimed, moreover, that “the
philosophy of the world was foolishness with God.” It appealed to
prophecy and to testimony. “Instead of logical demonstration, it produced
living witnesses of the words and wonderful doings of Jesus Christ.” The
philosophers from the point of view of “worldly education” made sport of
it: Celsus[211] declared that the Christian teachers were no better than
the priests of Mithra or of Hekaté, leading men wherever they willed with
the maxims of a blind belief.
* * * * *
It is therefore the more remarkable that within a century and a half
after Christianity and philosophy first came into close contact,
the ideas and methods of philosophy had flowed in such mass into
Christianity, and filled so large a place in it, as to have made it no
less a philosophy than a religion.
The question which arises, and which should properly be discussed before
the influences of particular ideas are traced in particular doctrines,
is, how this result is to be accounted for as a whole. The answer must
explain both how Christianity and philosophy came into contact, and how
when in contact the one exercised upon the other the influence of a
moulding force.
The explanation is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the apparent
and superficial antagonism, between certain leading ideas of current
philosophy and the leading ideas of Christianity there was a special and
real kinship. Christianity gave to the problems of philosophy a new
solution which was cognate to the old, and to its doubts the certainty
of a revelation. The kinship of ideas is admitted, and explanations of
it are offered by both Christian writers and their opponents. “We teach
the same as the Greeks,” says Justin Martyr,[212] “though we alone are
hated for what we teach.” “Some of our number,” says Tertullian,[213]
“who are versed in ancient literature, have composed books by means
of which it may be clearly seen that we have embraced nothing new or
monstrous, nothing in which we have not the support of common and public
literature.” Elsewhere[214] the same writer founds an argument for the
toleration of Christianity on the fact that its opponents maintained it
to be but a kind of philosophy, teaching the very same doctrines as the
philosophers—innocence, justice, endurance, soberness, and chastity: he
claims on that ground the same liberty for Christians which was enjoyed
by philosophers.
The general recognition of this kinship of ideas is even more
conclusively shown by the fact that explanations of it were offered on
both the one side and the other.
(_a_) It was argued by some Christian apologists that the best doctrines
of philosophy were due to the inworking in the world of the same Divine
Word who had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. “The teachings of Plato,”
says Justin Martyr,[215] “are not alien to those of Christ, though not in
all respects similar.... For all the writers (of antiquity) were able
to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the
implanted Word.” It was argued by others that philosophers had borrowed
or “stolen” their doctrines from the Scriptures. “From the divine
preachings of the prophets,” says Minucius Felix,[216] “they imitated the
shadow of half-truths.” “What poet or sophist,” says Tertullian,[217]
“has not drunk at the fountain of the prophets? From thence it is,
therefore, that philosophers have quenched the thirst of their minds, so
that it is the very things which they have of ours which bring us into
comparison with them.” “They have borrowed from our books,” says Clement
of Alexandria,[218] “the chief doctrines they hold, both on faith and
knowledge and science, on hope and love, on repentance and temperance
and the fear of God:” and he goes in detail through many doctrines,
speculative as well as ethical, either to show that they were borrowed
from revelation, or to uphold the truer thesis that philosophy was no
less the schoolmaster of the Greeks than the Law was of the Jews to bring
them to Christ.
(_b_) It was argued, on the other hand, by the opponents of Christianity
that it was a mere mimicry of philosophy or a blurred copy of it. “They
weave a web of misunderstandings of the old doctrine,” says Celsus,[219]
“and sound them forth with a loud trumpet before men, like hierophants
booming round those who are being initiated in mysteries.” Christianity
was but a misunderstood Platonism. Whatever in it was true had been
better expressed before.[220] Even the striking and distinctive saying
of the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right
cheek, turn to him the other also,” was but a coarser and more homely way
of saying what had been extremely well said by Plato’s Socrates.[221]
* * * * *
It was through this kinship of ideas that Christianity was readily
absorbed by some of the higher natures in the Greek world. The two
classes of ideas probably came into contact in philosophical Judaism.
For it is clear on the one hand that the Jews of the dispersion had a
literature, and on the other hand that that literature was clothing
itself in Greek forms and attracting the attention of the Greek world.
Some of that literature was philosophical. In the Sibylline verses, the
poem of Phocylides, and the letters of Heraclitus, there is a blending of
theology and ethics: in some of the writings which are ascribed to Philo,
but which in reality bridge the interval between Philo and the Christian
Fathers, there is a blending of theology and metaphysics. None of them
are “very far from the kingdom of God.” The hypothesis that they paved
the way for Christian philosophy is confirmed by the fact that in the
first articulate expressions of that philosophy precisely those elements
are dominant which were dominant in Jewish philosophy. Two such elements
may specially be mentioned: (1) the allegorical method of interpretation
which was common to both Jews and Greeks, and by means of which both the
Gnostics who were without, and the Alexandrians who were within, the pale
of the associated communities, were able to find their philosophy in the
Old Testament as well as in the New; (2) the cosmological speculations,
which occupied only a small space in the thoughts of earlier Greek
thinkers, but which were already widening to a larger circle on the
surface of Greek philosophy, and which became so prominent in the first
Christian philosophies as to have thrust aside almost all other elements
in the current representations of them.
* * * * *
The Christian philosophy which thus rose out of philosophical Judaism
was partly apologetic and partly speculative. The apologetic part of
it arose from the necessity of defence. The educated world tended to
scout Christianity when it was first presented to them, as an immoral
and barbarous atheism. It was necessary to show that it was neither the
one nor the other. The defence naturally fell into the hands of those
Christians who were versed in Greek methods; and they not less naturally
sought for points of agreement rather than of difference, and presented
Christian truths in a Greek form. The speculative part of it arose from
some of its elements having found an especial affinity with some of the
new developments of Pythagoreanism and Platonism. Inside the original
communities were men who began to build great edifices of speculation
upon the narrow basis of one or other of the pinnacles of the Christian
temple; and outside those communities were men who began to coalesce into
communities which had the same moral aims as the original communities,
and which appealed in the main to the same authorities, but in which
the simpler forms of worship were elaborated into a thaumaturgic ritual,
and the solid facts of Scripture history evaporated into mist. They were
linked on the one hand with the cults of the Greek mysteries, and on the
other with philosophical idealism. The tendency to conceive of abstract
ideas as substances, with form and real existence, received in them its
extreme development. Wisdom and vice, silence and desire, were real
beings: they were not, as they had been to earlier thinkers, mere thin
vapours which had floated upwards from the world of sensible existences,
and hung like clouds in an uncertain twilight. The real world was indeed
not the world of sensible existences, of thoughts and utterances about
sensible things, but a world in which sensible existences were the
shadows and not the substance, the waves and not the sea.[222]
* * * * *
It was natural that those who held to the earlier forms of Christianity
should take alarm. “I am not unaware,” says Clement of Alexandria, in
setting forth the design of his _Stromateis_,[223] “of what is dinned
in our ears by the ignorant timidity of those who tell us that we
ought to occupy ourselves with the most necessary matters, those in
which the Faith consists: and that we should pass by the superfluous
matters that lie outside them, which vex and detain us in vain over
points that contribute nothing to the end in view. There are others
who think that philosophy will prove to have been introduced into life
from an evil source, at the hands of a mischievous inventor, for the
ruin of men.” “The simpler-minded,” says Tertullian,[224] “not to say
ignorant and unlearned men, who always form the majority of believers,
are frightened at the Economy” [the philosophical explanation of the
doctrine of the Trinity]. “These men,” says a contemporary writer,[225]
of some of the early philosophical schools at Rome, “have fearlessly
perverted the divine Scriptures, and set aside the rule of the ancient
faith, and have not known Christ, seeking as they do, not what the divine
Scriptures say, but what form of syllogism may be found to support their
godlessness; and if one advances any express statement of the divine
Scripture, they try to find out whether it can form a conjunctive or a
disjunctive hypothetical. And having deserted the holy Scriptures of God,
they study geometry, being of the earth and speaking of the earth, and
ignoring Him who comes from above. Some of them, at any rate, give their
minds to Euclid: some of them are admiring disciples of Aristotle and
Theophrastus: as for Galen, some of them go so far as actually to worship
him.”
The history of the second century is the history of the clash and
conflict between these new mystical and philosophical elements of
Christianity and its earlier forms. On the one hand were the majority
of the original communities, holding in the main the conception of
Christianity which probably finds its best contemporary exposition in the
first two books of the Apostolical Constitutions, a religion of stern
moral practice and of strict moral discipline, of the simple love of
God and the unelaborated faith in Jesus Christ. On the other hand were
the new communities, and the new members of the older communities, with
their conception of knowledge side by side with faith, and with their
tendency to speculate side by side with their acceptance of tradition.
The conflict was inevitable. In the current state of educated opinion it
would have been as impossible for the original communities to ignore the
existence of philosophical elements either in their own body, or in the
new communities which were growing up around them, as it would be for the
Christian churches of our own day to ignore physical science. The result
of the conflict was, that the extreme wing of each of the contending
parties dropped off from the main body. The old-fashioned Christians, who
would admit of no compromise, and maintained the old usages unchanged,
were gradually detached as Ebionites, or Nazaræans. The old orthodoxy
became a new heresy. In the lists of the early hand-books they are ranked
as the first heretics. The more philosophical Gnostics also passed one
by one outside the Christian lines. Their ideas gradually lost their
Christian colour. They lived in another, but non-Christian, form. The
true Gnostic, though he repudiates the name, is Plotinus. The logical
development of the thoughts of Basilides and Justin, of Valentinus and
the Naassenes, is to be found in Neo-Platonism—that splendid vision
of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek
philosophy set.
* * * * *
The struggle really ended, as almost all great conflicts end, in a
compromise. There was apparently so complete a victory of the original
communities and of the principles which they embodied, that their
opponents seem to vanish from Christian literature and Christian history.
It was in reality a victory in which the victors were the vanquished.
There was so large an absorption by the original communities of the
principles of their opponents as to destroy the main reason for a
separate existence. The absorption was less of speculations than of the
tendency to speculate. The residuum of permanent effect was mainly a
certain habit of mind. This is at once a consequence and a proof of the
general argument which has been advanced above, that certain elements of
education in philosophy had been so widely diffused, and in the course of
centuries had become so strongly rooted, as to have caused an instinctive
tendency to throw ideas into a philosophical form, and to test assertions
by philosophical canons. The existence of such a tendency is shown in
the first instance by the mode in which the earliest “defenders of the
faith” met their opponents; and the supposition that it was instinctive
is a legitimate inference from the fact that it was unconscious. For
Tatian,[226] though he ridicules Greek philosophy and professes to have
abandoned it, yet builds up theories of the Logos, of free-will, and
of the nature of spirit, out of the elements of current philosophical
conceptions. Tertullian, though he asks,[227] “What resemblance is there
between a philosopher and a Christian, between a disciple of Greece
and a disciple of heaven?” expresses Christian truths in philosophical
terms, and argues against his opponents—for example, against Marcion—by
methods which might serve as typical examples of the current methods of
controversy between philosophical schools. And Hippolytus,[228] though
he reproves another Christian writer for listening to Gentile teaching,
and so disobeying the injunction, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles,”
is himself saturated with philosophical conceptions and philosophical
literature.
* * * * *
The answer, in short, to the main question which has been before us is
that Christianity came into a ground which was already prepared for
it. Education was widely diffused over the Greek world, and among all
classes of the community. It had not merely aroused the habit of inquiry
which is the foundation of philosophy, but had also taught certain
philosophical methods. Certain elements of the philosophical temper had
come into existence on a large scale, penetrating all classes of society
and inwrought into the general intellectual fibre of the time. They had
produced a certain habit of mind. When, through the kinship of ideas,
Christianity had been absorbed by the educated classes, the habit of
mind which had preceded it remained and dominated. It showed itself
mainly in three ways:
1. The first of these was the tendency to define. The earliest Christians
had been content to believe in God and to worship Him, without
endeavouring to define precisely the conception of Him which lay beneath
their faith and their worship. They looked up to Him as their Father in
heaven. They thought of Him as one, as beneficent, and as supreme. But
they drew no fence of words round their idea of Him, and still less did
they attempt to demonstrate by processes of reason that their idea of Him
was true. But there is an anecdote quoted with approval by Eusebius[229]
from Rhodon, a controversialist of the latter part of the second century,
which furnishes a striking proof of the growing strength at that time
of the philosophical temper. It relates the main points of a short
controversy between Rhodon and Apelles. Apelles was in some respects in
sympathy with Marcion, and in some respects followed the older Christian
tradition. He refused to be drawn into the new philosophizing current;
and Rhodon attacked him for his conservatism. “He was often refuted for
his errors, which indeed made him say that we ought not to inquire too
closely into doctrine; but that as every one had believed, so he should
remain. For he declared that those who set their hopes on the Crucified
One would be saved, if only they were found in good works. But the most
uncertain thing of all that he said was what he said about God. He held
no doubt that there is One Principle, just as we hold too: but when I
said to him, ‘Tell us how you demonstrate that, or on what grounds you
are able to assert that there is One Principle,’ ... he said that he did
not know, but that that was his conviction. When I thereupon adjured him
to tell the truth, he swore that he was telling the truth, that he did
not know _how_ there is one unbegotten God, but that nevertheless so
he believed. Then I laughed at him and denounced him, for that, giving
himself out to be a teacher, he did not know how to prove what he taught.”
2. The second manifestation of the philosophical habit of mind was the
tendency to speculate, that is, to draw inferences from definitions,
to weave the inferences into systems, and to test assertions by their
logical consistency or inconsistency with those systems. The earliest
Christians had but little conception of a system. The inconsistency of
one apparently true statement with another did not vex their souls. Their
beliefs reflected the variety of the world and of men’s thoughts about
the world. It was one of the secrets of the first great successes of
Christianity. There were different and apparently irreconcilable elements
in it. It appealed to men of various mould. It furnished a basis for
the construction of strangely diverse edifices. But the result of the
ascendency of philosophy was, that in the fourth and fifth centuries
the majority of churches insisted not only upon a unity of belief in
the fundamental facts of Christianity, but also upon a uniformity of
speculations in regard to those facts. The premises of those speculations
were assumed; the conclusions logically followed: the propositions which
were contrary or contradictory to them were measured, not by the greater
or less probability of the premises, but by the logical certainty of the
conclusions; and symmetry became a test of truth.
3. The new habit of mind manifested itself not less in the importance
which came to be attached to it. The holding of approved opinions was
elevated to a position at first co-ordinate with, and at last superior
to, trust in God and the effort to live a holy life. There had been
indeed from the first an element of knowledge in the conception of the
means of salvation. The knowledge of the facts of the life of Jesus
Christ necessarily precedes faith in him. But under the touch of Greek
philosophy, knowledge had become speculation: whatever obligation
attached to faith in its original sense was conceived to attach to it
in its new sense: the new form of knowledge was held to be not less
necessary than the old.
* * * * *
The Western communities not only took over the greater part of the
inheritance, but also proceeded to assume in a still greater degree the
correspondence of ideas with realities, and of inferences about ideas
with truths about realities. It added such large groups to the sum of
them, that in the dogmatic theology of Latin and Teutonic Christendom
the content is more Western than Eastern. But the conception of such
a theology and its underlying assumptions are Greek. They come from
the Greek tendency to attach the same certainty to metaphysical as to
physical ideas. They are in reality built upon a quicksand. There is no
more reason to suppose that God has revealed metaphysics than that He has
revealed chemistry. The Christian revelation is, at least primarily, a
setting forth of certain facts. It does not in itself afford a guarantee
of the certainty of the speculations which are built upon those facts.
All such speculations are _dogmas_ in the original sense of the word.
They are simply personal convictions. To the statement of one man’s
convictions other men may assent: but they can never be quite sure that
they understand its terms in the precise sense in which the original
framer of the statement understood them.
* * * * *
The belief that metaphysical theology is more than this, is the chief
bequest of Greece to religious thought, and it has been a _damnosa
hereditas_. It has given to later Christianity that part of it which is
doomed to perish, and which yet, while it lives, holds the key of the
prison-house of many souls.
LECTURE VI.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS.