a son of God.[260] Just as our bodies are linked to the
material universe,[261] subject while we live to the same
forces, resolved when we die into the same elements,[262] so by
virtue of reason our souls are linked to and continuous with
Him, being in reality parts and offshoots of Him.[263] There is
no movement of which He is not conscious, because we and He are
part of one birth and growth;[264] to Him ‘all hearts are open,
all desires known;’[265] as we walk or talk or eat, He Himself
is within us, so that we are His shrines, living temples and
incarnations of Him.[266] By virtue of this communion with Him
we are in the first rank of created things:[267] we and He
together form the greatest and chiefest and most comprehensive
of all organizations.[268]
“If we once realize this kinship, no mean or unworthy thought
of ourselves can enter our souls.[269] The sense of it forms
a rule and standard for our lives. If God be faithful, we
also must be faithful: if God be beneficent, we also must be
beneficent. If God be highminded, we also must be highminded,
doing and saying whatever we do and say in imitation of and
union with Him.[270]
“Why did He make us?
“He made us, first of all, to complete His conception of the
universe: He had need for such completion of some beings who
should be intelligent.[271] He made us, secondly, to behold and
understand and interpret His administration of the universe:
to be His witnesses and ministers.[272] He made us, thirdly,
to be happy in ourselves: like a true Father and Guardian, he
has placed good and evil in those things which are within our
own power.[273] What He says to each one of us is, ‘If thou
wilt have any good, take it from within thyself.’[274] To this
end He has given us freedom of will; there is no power in
heaven or earth that can bar our freedom.[275] We cry out in
our sorrow, ‘O Lord God, grant that I may not feel sorrow;’
and all the time He has given us the means of not feeling
it.[276] He has given us the power of bearing and turning to
account whatever happens, the spirit of manliness and fortitude
and high-mindedness, so that the greater the difficulty, the
greater the opportunity of adorning our character by meeting
it. If, for example, fever comes, it brings from Him this
message, ‘Give me a proof that your moral training has been
real.’ There is a time for learning, and a time for practising
what we have learnt: in the lecture-room we learn: and then
God brings us to the difficulties of real life and says to us,
‘It is time now for the real contest.’ Life is in reality an
Olympic festival: we are God’s athletes, to whom He has given
an opportunity of showing of what stuff we are made.[277]
“What is our duty to Him?
“It is simply to follow Him:[278] to be of one mind with
Him:[279] to acquiesce in His administration:[280] to accept
what His bounty gives, to resign ourselves to the absence of
what He withholds.[281] The only thought of a good man is,
remembering who he is, and whence he came, and to Whom he
owes his being, to fill the place which God has assigned to
him,[282] to will things to be as they are, and to say what
Socrates used to say, ‘If this be God’s will, so be it.’[283]
Submission must be thy law: thou must dare to lift up your eyes
to God and say, ‘Employ me henceforth for what service Thou
wilt: I am of one mind with Thee: I am Thine: I ask not that
Thou shouldest keep from me one thing of all that Thou hast
decreed for me.’[284]
‘Lead Thou me, God, and Thou, O Fate,
Thy appointment I await:
Only lead me, I shall go
With no flagging steps nor slow:
Even though I degenerate be,
And consent reluctantly,
None the less I follow Thee.’[285]
“We can only do this when we keep our eyes fixed on Him,
joined in close communion with Him, absolutely consecrated to
His commandments. If we will not do it, we suffer loss. There
are penalties imposed, not by a vindictive tyranny, but by
a self-acting law. If we will not take what He gives under
the conditions under which He gives it, we reap the fruit of
wretchedness and sorrow, of jealousy and fear, of thwarted
effort and unsatisfied desire.[286]
“Above all, we must bide His time. He has given to every one
of us a post to keep in the battle of life, and we must not
leave it until He bids us.[287] His bidding is indicated
by circumstances. When He does not give us what our bodies
need, when He sends us where life according to nature is
impossible, He, the Supreme Captain, is sounding the bugle for
retreat,[288] He, the Master of the Great Household, is opening
the door and saying to us, ‘Come.’[289] And when He does so,
instead of bewailing your misfortunes, obey and follow: come
forth, not murmuring, but as God’s servant who has finished
His work, conscious that He has no more present need of
you.[290]
“This, therefore, should take the place of every other
pleasure, the consciousness of obeying God. Think what it is to
be able to say, ‘What others preach, I am doing: their praise
of virtue is a praise of me: God has sent me into the world to
be His soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and
fears are vain, that to a good man no evil can happen whether
he live or die. He sends me at one time here, at another time
there: He disciplines me by poverty and by prison, that I
may be the better witness to mankind. With such a ministry
committed to me, can I any longer care in what place I am, or
who my companions are, or what they say about me: nay, rather,
does not my whole nature strain after God, His laws and His
commandments?’”[291]
Between the current ethics of the Greek world and the ethics of the
earliest forms of Christianity were many points both of difference and of
contact.
The main point of difference was that Christianity rested morality
on a divine command. It took over the fundamental idea of the Jewish
theocracy.[292] Its ultimate appeal was not to the reasonableness of
the moral law in itself, but to the fact that God had enacted it. Greek
morality, on the contrary, was “independent.” The idea that the moral
laws are laws of God is, no doubt, found in the Stoics; but they are so
in another than either the Jewish or the Christian sense: they are laws
of God, not as being expressions of His personal will, but as being laws
of nature, part of the whole constitution of the world.
Consequent upon the conception of the moral law as a positive enactment
of God, the breach of moral law was conceived as sin. Into the early
Christian conception of sin several elements entered. It was probably not
in the popular mind what it was in the mind of St. Paul, still less what
it became in the mind of St. Augustine. But one element was constant. It
was a trespass against God. As such, it was on the one hand something
for which God must be appeased, and on the other hand something which
He could forgive. To the Stoics it was shortcoming, failure, and loss:
the chief sufferer was the man himself: amendment was possible for the
future, but there was no forgiveness for the past.
Beyond these and other points of difference there was a wide area of
agreement. The former became accentuated as time went on: it was by
virtue of the latter that in the earliest ages the minds of many persons
had been predisposed to accept Christianity, and that, having accepted
it, they tended to fuse some elements of the new teaching with some
elements of the old. The agreement is most conspicuous in those respects
which were the chief aims of the contemporary moral reformation; and
above all in the importance which was attached to moral conduct. This
importance was overshadowed in the later Christian communities by the
importance which came to be attached to doctrine: its existence in the
earliest communities is shown by two classes of proofs.
1. The first of these proofs is the place which moral conduct holds
in the earliest Christian writers. The documents which deal with the
Christian life are almost wholly moral. They enforce the ancient code of
the Ten Words. They raise those Ten Words from being the lowest and most
necessary level of a legal code, to being the expression of the highest
moral ideal, expanding and amplifying them so as to make them embrace
thoughts and desires as well as words and actions. The most interesting
of such documents is that which is known as the “Two Ways.”[293] It has
recently acquired a fresh significance by having been found as part of
the Teaching of the Apostles. It is there prefixed to the regulations
for ceremonial and discipline which constitute the new part of that
work. It proves to be a manual of instruction to be taught to those who
were to be admitted as members of a Christian community. It may thus be
considered to express the current ideal of Christian practice. In the
“Way of Life” which it sets forth, doctrine has no place. It is summed
up in the two commandments: “First, thou shalt love God who made thee;
secondly, thy neighbour as thyself: whatsoever things thou wouldest not
have done to thyself, do not thou to another.”[294] These commandments
are amplified in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. “Thou shalt not
forswear thyself: thou shalt not bear false witness: thou shalt not
speak evil: thou shalt not bear malice: thou shalt not be double-minded
nor double-tongued, for double-tonguedness is a snare of death. Thy
speech shall not be false or hollow, but filled to the full with deed.
Thou shalt not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor evilly
disposed, nor haughty: thou shalt not take mischievous counsel against
thy neighbour. Thou shalt not hate any man, but some thou shalt rebuke,
and for some thou shalt pray, and some thou shalt love more than thine
own soul.[295]... My child, be not a murmurer, for murmuring is on
the path to blasphemy: nor self-willed nor evil-minded, for from all
these things blasphemies are born. But be thou meek, for the meek shall
inherit the earth: be long-suffering, and pitiful, and guileless, and
quiet, and kind, and trembling continually at the words which thou hast
heard.[296]... Thou shalt not hesitate to give, nor in giving shalt thou
murmur; for thou shalt know who is the good paymaster of what thou hast
earned. Thou shalt not turn away him that needeth, but thou shalt share
all things with thy brother and shalt not say that they are thine own;
for if ye be fellow-sharers in that which is immortal, how much more in
mortal things.”[297]
Another such document is the first book of the collection known as the
Apostolical Constitutions: it begins at once with an exhortation to
morality.
“Listen to holy teaching, ye who lay hold on His promise, in accordance
with the command of the Saviour, in harmony with his glorious utterances.
Take heed, ye sons of God, to do all things so as to be obedient to God
and to be well-pleasing in all things to the Lord our God. For if any one
follow after wickedness and do things contrary to the will of God, such a
one will be counted as a nation that transgresses against God. Abstain
then from all covetousness and unrighteousness.”[298]
2. The second proof is afforded by the place which discipline held in
contemporary Christian life. The Christians were drawn together into
communities. Isolation was discouraged and soon passed away. To be a
Christian was to be a member of a community. The basis of the community
was not only a common belief, but also a common practice. It was the task
of the community as an organization to keep itself pure. The offences
against which it had to guard were not only the open crimes which fell
within the cognizance of public law, but also and more especially sins
of moral conduct and of the inner life. The qualifications which in
later times were the ideal standard for church officers, were also in
the earliest times the ideal standard for ordinary members. “If any man
who has sinned sees the bishop and the deacons free from fault, and the
flock abiding pure, first of all he will not venture to enter into the
assembly of God, being smitten by his own conscience: but if, secondly,
setting lightly by his sin he should venture to enter, he will forthwith
be taken to task ... and either be punished, or being admonished by the
pastor will be drawn to repentance. For looking round upon the assembly
one by one, and finding no blemish either in the bishop or in the ranks
of the people under him, with shame and many tears he will go out in
peace, pricked in heart, and the flock will have been cleansed, and
he will cry with tears to God and will repent of his sin, and will
have hope: and the whole flock beholding his tears will be admonished
that he who has sinned and repented is not lost.”[299] In other cases
expulsion was a solemn and formal act: the sinful member was cast into
outer darkness: re-admission was accompanied with the same rites as the
original admission. In other words, the earliest communities endeavoured,
both in the theory which they embodied in their manuals of Christian
life, and in the practice which they enforced by discipline, to realize
what has since been known as the Puritan ideal. Each one of them was a
community of saints. “Passing their days upon earth, they were in reality
citizens of heaven.”[300] The earthly community reflected in all but
its glory and its everlastingness the life of the “new Jerusalem.” Its
bishop was the visible representative of Jesus Christ himself sitting
on the throne of heaven, with the white-robed elders round him: its
members were the “elect,” the “holy ones,” the “saved.” “Without were
the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the murderers, and the idolators, and
every one that loveth and maketh a lie:” within were “they which were
written in the Lamb’s book of life.” To be a member of the community was
to be in reality, and not merely in conception, a child of God and heir
of everlasting salvation: to be excluded from the community was to pass
again into the outer darkness, the realm of Satan and eternal death.
Over these earliest communities and the theory which they embodied there
passed, in the last half of the second century and the first half of the
third, an enormous change. The processes of the change and its immediate
causes are obscure. The interests of contemporary writers are so absorbed
with the struggles for soundness of doctrine, as to leave but little room
for a record of the struggles for purity of life. In the last stages of
those struggles, the party which endeavoured to preserve the ancient
ideal was treated as schismatical. The aggregate of visible communities
was no longer identical with the number of those who should be saved. The
dominant party framed a new theory of the Church as a _corpus permixtum_,
and found support for it in the Gospels themselves. Morality became
subordinated to belief in Christianity by the same inevitable drift by
which practice had been superseded by theory in Stoicism.
In both the production of this change and its further developments Greece
played an important part. The net result of the active forces which it
brought to bear upon Christianity was, that the attention of a majority
of Christian men was turned to the intellectual as distinguished from
the moral element in Christian life. And when the change was effected,
it operated in two further ways, which have survived in large and varied
forms to the present day.
1. The idea of moral reformation had from the first seized different
men with a varying tenacity of grasp.[301] There were some men who had
a higher moral ideal than others: there were some whose natures were
stronger: there were some to whom moral life was not the perfection of
human citizenship, but the struggle of the spirit to disentangle itself
from its material environment, and to rise by contemplation to fellowship
with God. There are proofs of the existence in the very earliest
Christian communities of those who endeavoured to live on a higher plane
than their fellows. Abstinence from marriage and from animal food were
urged and practised as “counsels of perfection.” In some communities
there was an attempt to make such counsels of perfection obligatory. In
the majority of communities, though they were part of “the whole yoke
of the Lord,”[302] and were specially enjoined at certain times upon
all church members, they were not of universal or constant obligation.
Those who habitually practised them were recognized as a church within
the Church. The practice of them was known by a name which we have seen
to be common in the Greek philosophical schools. It was relative to the
conception of life as an athletic contest. It was that of bodily training
or gymnastic exercise (ἄσκησις).[303]
The secession of the Puritan party left much of this element still
within the great body of confederated communities. At the end of the
third century it became important both within them and without. It was
increased, partly by the growing influence of the ideas which found
their highest expression outside Christianity in Neo-Platonism; partly
by the growing complexity of society itself, the strain and the despair
of an age of decadence; partly also by the necessity of finding a new
outlet, when Christianity became a legal religion, for the passionate
love of God which had led men to a sometimes ecstatic martyrdom. It was
joined by the parallel tendency among professors of philosophy. It soon
took a new form. Hitherto those who followed counsels of perfection
lived in ordinary society, undistinguished except by their conduct from
their fellow-men. The ideal “Gnostic” of Clement of Alexandria takes
his part in ordinary human affairs, “acting the drama of life which God
has given him to play, knowing both what is to be done and what is to
be endured.”[304] But early in the fourth century the practice of the
ascetic life in Christianity came to be shown in the same outward way,
but with a more marked emphasis, as the similar practice in philosophy.
It was indeed known as philosophy.[305] It was most akin to Cynicism,
with which it had sometimes already been confused, and its badges were
the badges of Cynicism, the rough blanket and the unshorn hair. To wear
the blanket and to let the hair grow was to profess divine philosophy,
the higher life of self-discipline and sanctity. It was to claim to
stand on a higher level and to be working out a nobler ideal than
average Christians. The practice soon received a further development.
Just as ordinary philosophers had sometimes found life in society to be
intolerable and had gone into “retreat,” so the Christian philosophers
began to withdraw altogether from the world, and to live their lives
of self-discipline and contemplation in solitude. The retention of
the old names shows the continuity of the practice. They were still
practising discipline, ἄσκησις, or philosophy, φιλοσοφία. So far as
they retired from society, they were still said “to go into retreat,”
ἀναχωρεῖν, whence the current appellation of ἀναχωρηταί, “anchorets.”
The place of their retreat was a “school of discipline,” ἀσκητήριον, or
a “place for reflection,” φροντιστήριον.[306] To these were soon added
the new names which were relative to the fact that moral discipline was
usually practised in solitude. Those who retired from the world were
“solitaries,” μοναχοί, and the place of their retirement was a “place
for solitude,” μοναστήριον. When the practice was once firmly rooted in
Christian soil, it was largely developed in independent ways for which
Greece was not primarily responsible, and which therefore cannot properly
be described here; but the independence and enormous overgrowth of these
later forms cannot wipe away the memory of the fact that to Greece, more
than to any other factor, was due the place and earliest conception of
that sublime individualism which centred all a man’s efforts on the
development of his spiritual life, and withdrew him from his fellow-men
in order to bring him near to God.
2. It was inevitable that when the Puritan party had left the main body,
and when the most spiritually-minded of those who remained detached
themselves from the common life of their brethren, there should be a
deterioration in the average moral conceptions of the Christian Churches.
It was also inevitable that those conceptions should be largely shaped by
Greek influences. The Pauline ethics vanished from the Christian world.
For the average members of the churches were now the average citizens
of the empire, educated by Greek methods, impregnated with the dominant
ethical ideas. They accepted Christian ideas, but without the enthusiasm
which made them a transforming force. As in regard to metaphysics, so
also in regard to ethics, the frame of mind which had been formed by
education was stronger than the new ideas which it absorbed. The current
ideals remained, slightly raised: the current rules of conduct continued,
with modifications. Instead of the conceptions of righteousness and
holiness, there was the old conception of virtue: instead of the code of
morals which was “briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself,” there was the old enumeration of duties.
At the end of the fourth century the new state of things was formally
recognized by ecclesiastical writers. Love was no more “the hand-book of
divine philosophy:”[307] the chief contemporary theologian of the West,
Ambrose of Milan, formulated the current theory in a book which is the
more important because it not merely expresses the ideas of his time
and seals the proof of their prevalence, but also became the basis of
the moral philosophy of the Middle Ages. But the book is less Christian
than Stoical.[308] It is a _rechauffée_ of the book which Cicero had
compiled more than three centuries before, chiefly from Panætius. It is
Stoical, not only in conception, but also in detail. It makes virtue the
highest good. It makes the hope of the life to come a subsidiary and not
a primary motive. Its ideal of life is happiness: it holds that a happy
life is a life according to nature, that it is realized by virtue, and
that it is capable of being realized here on earth. Its virtues are the
ancient virtues of wisdom and justice, courage and temperance. It tinges
each of them with a Christian, or at least with a Theistic colouring;
but the conception of each of them remains what it had been to the Greek
moralists. Wisdom, for example, is Greek wisdom, with the addition that
no man can be wise who is ignorant of God: justice is Greek justice, with
the addition that its subsidiary form of beneficence is helped by the
Christian society.
The victory of Greek ethics was complete. While Christianity was being
transformed into a system of doctrines, the Stoical jurists at the
imperial court were slowly elaborating a system of personal rights.
The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, which the earliest Christian
communities endeavoured to carry into practice, have been transmuted by
the slow alchemy of history into the ethics of Roman law. The basis of
Christian society is not Christian, but Roman and Stoical. A fusion of
the Roman conception of rights with the Stoical conception of relations
involving reciprocal actions, is in possession of practically the whole
field of civilized society. The transmutation is so complete that the
modern question is not so much whether the ethics of the Sermon on
the Mount are practicable, as whether, if practicable, they would be
desirable. The socialistic theories which formulate in modern language
and justify by modern conceptions such an exhortation as “Sell that
thou hast and give to the poor,” meet with no less opposition within
than without the Christian societies. The conversion of the Church to
Christian theory must precede the conversion of the world to Christian
practice. But meanwhile there is working in Christianity the same higher
morality which worked in the ancient world, and the maxim, Follow God,
belongs to a plane on which Epictetus and Thomas à Kempis meet.
LECTURE VII.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.
I. THE CREATOR.
Slowly there loomed through the mists of earlier Greek thought the
consciousness of one God.
It came with the sense of the unity of the world. That sense had not
always been awakened. The varied phenomena of earth and sea and sky had
not always been brought under a single expression. The groups into which
the mind tended to arrange them were conceived as separate, belonging
to different kingdoms and controlled by independent divinities. It
was by the unconscious alchemy of thought, working through successive
generations, that the separate groups came to be combined into a whole
and conceived as forming a universe.