by day rose and set, the moon which month by month waxed and waned, the
stars which year by year came back to the same stations in the sky, were
like a marshalled army moving in obedience to a fixed command. There
was order, not only above but also beneath. The sea, which for all its
storms and murmurings, could not pass its bounds, the earth upon which
seed-time and harvest never failed, but spring after spring the buds
burst into blossom, and summer after summer the blossom ripened into
fruit, were part of the same great system. The conception was that not
merely of a universe, but of a universe moving in obedience to a law. The
earliest form of the conception is probably that of Anaxagoras, which was
formulated by a later writer in the expression, “The origins of matter
are infinite, the origin of movement and birth is one.”[309]
This conception of an ordered whole was intertwined, as it slowly
elaborated itself, with one or other of two kindred conceptions, of which
one had preceded it and the other grew with it.
The one was the sense of personality. By a transference of ideas which
has been so universal that it may be called natural, all things that move
have been invested with personality. The stars and rivers were persons.
Movement meant life, and life meant everywhere something analogous to
human life. It was by an inevitable application of the conception that
when the sum of movements was conceived as a whole, it should be also
conceived that behind the totality of the phenomena and the unity of
their movements there was a single Person.
The other was the conception of mind. It was a conception which had but
slowly disentangled itself from that of bodily powers. It was like the
preaching of a revelation, and almost as fruitful, when Epicharmus
proclaimed:[310] “It is not the eye that sees, but the mind: it is not
the ear that hears, but the mind: all things except mind are blind and
deaf.” It was the mind that not only saw but thought, and that not only
thought but willed. It alone was the real self: and the Person who is
behind nature or within it was like the personality which is behind the
bodily activities of each one of us: His essence was mind.
There was one God. The gods of the old mythology were passing away, like
a splendid pageantry of clouds moving across the horizon to be absorbed
in the clear and infinite heaven. “But though God is one,” it was
said,[311] “He has many names, deriving a name from each of the spheres
of His government.... He is called the Son of Kronos, that is of Time,
because He continues from eternity to eternity; and Lightning-God, and
Thunder-God, and Rain-God, from the lightnings and thunders and rains;
and Fruit-God, from the fruits (which he sends); and City-God, from the
cities (which he protects); and the God of births, and homesteads, and
kinsmen, and families, of companions, and friends, and armies.... God, in
short, of heaven and earth, named after all forms of nature and events
as being Himself the cause of all.” “There are not different gods among
different peoples,” says Plutarch,[312] “nor foreign gods and Greek gods,
nor gods of the south and gods of the north; but just as sun and moon
and sky and earth and sea are common to all mankind, but have different
names among different races, so, though there be one Reason who orders
these things and one Providence who administers them ... there are
different honours and appellations among different races; and men use
consecrated symbols, some of them obscure and some more clear, so leading
their thoughts on the path to the Divine: but it is not without risk; for
some men, wholly missing their foothold, have slipped into superstition,
and others, avoiding the slough of superstition, have in their turn
fallen over the precipice of atheism.”
In the conception of God as it thus uncoiled itself in Greek history,
three strands of thought are constantly intertwined—the thought of a
Creator, the thought of a Moral Governor, and the thought of a Supreme
or Absolute Being. It is desirable to trace the history of each of these
thoughts, as far as possible, separately, and to consider their separate
effects upon the development of Christian theology. The present Lecture
will deal mainly with the first: the two following Lectures with the
other two.
* * * * *
It was at a comparatively late stage in its history that Greek thought
came to the conception of a beginning of all things. The conception was
first formulated by Anaximander, in the sixth century B.C.[313] The
earlier conception was that of a chaos, out of which gods and all things
alike proceeded. The first remove from that earlier conception was
hylozoism, the belief that life and matter were the same. The conception
of mind was not yet evolved. When it was evolved, two lines of thought
began to diverge. The one, following the conception of human personality
as absolutely single, conceived of both reason and force as inherent in
matter: it is the theory which is known as _Monism_. The other, following
the conception of human personality as a separable compound, body and
soul, conceived of reason and force as external to matter: it is the
theory which is known as _Dualism_. These two theories run through all
subsequent Greek philosophy.
1. The chief philosophical expression of Monism was Stoicism. The Stoics
followed the Ionians in believing that the world consists of a single
substance. They followed Heraclitus in believing that the movements
and modifications of that substance are due neither to a blind impulse
from within nor to an arbitrary impact from without. It moved, he had
thought, with a kind of rhythmic motion, a fire that was kindling and
being quenched with regulated limits of degree and time.[314] The
substance is one, but immanent and inherent in it is a force that acts
with intelligence. The antithesis between the two was expressed by the
Stoics in various forms. It was sometimes the bare and neutral contrast
of the Active and the Passive. For the Passive was sometimes substituted
Matter, a term which, signifying, as it originally does, the timber which
a carpenter uses for the purposes of his craft, properly belongs to
another order of ideas; and for the Active was frequently substituted
the term _Logos_, which, signifying as it does, on the one hand, partly
thought and partly will, and, on the other hand, also the expression of
thought in a sentence and the expression of will in a law, has no single
equivalent in modern language. But the majority of Stoics used neither
the colourless term the Active, nor the impersonal term the _Logos_. The
_Logos_ was vested with personality: the antithesis was between matter
and God. This latter term was used to cover a wide range of conceptions.
The two terms of the antithesis being regarded as expressing modes of
a single substance, separable in thought and name but not in reality,
there was a natural drift of some minds towards regarding God as a mode
of matter, and of others towards regarding matter as a mode of God. The
former conceived of Him as the _natura naturata_: “Jupiter est quodcunque
vides quodcunque moveris.”[315] The latter conceived of Him as the
_natura naturans_. This became the governing conception. He is the sum of
an infinite number of rational forces which are continually striving to
express themselves through the matter with which they are in union. He
is through them and in them working to realize an end. The teleological
idea controls the whole conception. He is always moving with purpose and
system, and always thereby producing the world. The products are all
divine, but not all equally divine. In His purest essence, He is the
highest form of mind in union with the most attenuated form of matter.
In the lowest form of His essence, He is the cohesive force which holds
together the atoms of a stone. Between these two poles are infinite
gradations of being. Nearest of all to the purest essence of God is the
human soul. It is in an especial sense His offspring: it is described by
the metaphors of an emanation or outflow from Him, of a sapling which is
separate from and yet continues the life of its parent tree, of a colony
in which some members of the mother state have settled.[316]
If all this were expressed in modern terms, and by the help of later
conceptions, it would probably be most suitably gathered into the
proposition that the world is the self-evolution of God. Into such a
conception the idea of a beginning does not necessarily enter: it is
consistent with the idea of an eternal process of differentiation: that
which is, always has been, under changed and changing forms: the theory
is cosmological rather than cosmogonical: it rather explains the world as
it is than gives an account of its origin.
2. The chief philosophical expression of Dualism was Platonism. Plato
followed Anaxagoras in believing that mind is separate from matter and
acts upon it: he went beyond him in founding upon this separation a
universal distinction between the real and the phenomenal, and between
God and the world. God was regarded as being outside the world. The world
was in its origin only potential being (τὸ μὴ ὄν). The action of God upon
it was that of a craftsman upon his material, shaping it as a carpenter
shapes wood, or moulding it as a statuary moulds clay. In so acting, He
acted with reason, following out thoughts in His mind. Sometimes His
reason, or His mind, is spoken of as being itself the fashioner of the
world.[317] Each thought shows itself in a group of material objects.
Such objects, so far as they admit of being grouped, may be viewed as
imitations or embodiments of a form or pattern, existing either as a
thought in the mind of the Divine Workman, or as a force proceeding from
His mind and acting outside it. As the conception of these forms was
developed more and more, they tended to be regarded in the latter light
rather than in the former. They were cosmic forces which had the power
of impressing themselves upon matter. They were less types than causes.
They came midway between God and the rude material of the universe, so
that its changing phenomena were united with an unchanging element. They
were themselves grouped in a vast gradation, reaching its highest point
in the Form of Perfection, which was higher than the Form of Being. The
highest and most perfect of types is conceived as the most powerful and
most active of forces. In the elaborate cosmology of the _Timæus_, it
is further conceived as a person. The creative energy of God is spoken
of as the _Demiurgus_, who himself made an ideal world, and employed
subordinate agents in the construction of the actual world. The matter
upon which the Demiurgus or his agents work is sometimes conceived as
potential being,[318] the bare capacity of receiving qualities and forms,
and sometimes as chaotic substance which was reduced to order.[319] The
agents were gods who, having been themselves created, were bidden to
create living beings, capable of growth and decay.[320] The distinction
between the two spheres of creation, that of a world in which nothing was
imperfect since it was the work of a Perfect Being, and that of a world
which was full of imperfections as being the work of created beings,
came, as we shall see, to be of importance in some phases of Christian
thought.
* * * * *
It was inevitable, in the syncretism which results when an age of
philosophical reflection succeeds an age of philosophical origination,
that these two great drifts of thought should tend in some points to
approach each other. The elements in them which were most readily fused
together were the theories of the processes by which the actual world
came into being, and of the nature of the forces which lay behind those
processes. In Stoicism, there was the theory of the one Law or _Logos_
expressing itself in an infinite variety of material forms: in Platonism,
there was the theory of the one God, shaping matter according to an
infinite variety of patterns. In the one, the processes of nature were
the operations of active forces, containing in themselves the law of
the forms in which they exhibit themselves, self-developing seeds, each
of them a portion of the one _Logos_ which runs through the whole.[321]
In the other, they were the operations of the infinitely various and
eternally active energy of God, moving always in the direction of His
thoughts, so that those thoughts might themselves be conceived as the
causes of the operations.[322] In both the one theory and the other,
the processes were sometimes regarded in their apparent multiplicity,
and sometimes in their underlying unity: and in both also the unity was
expressed sometimes by the impersonal term _Logos_, and sometimes by the
personal term God.
But while the monism of the Stoics, by laying stress upon the antithesis
between the two phases of the one substance, was tending to dualism,
the dualism of the Platonists, by laying stress upon the distinction
between the creative energy of God and the form in the mind of God which
His energy embodied in the material universe, was tending to introduce
a third factor into the conception of creation. It became common to
speak, not of two principles, but of three—God, Matter, and the Form,
or Pattern.[323] Hence came a new fusion of conceptions. The Platonic
Forms in the mind of God, conceived, as they sometimes were, as causes
operating outside Him, were more or less identified with the Stoical
_Logoi_, and, being viewed as the manifold expressions of a single
_Logos_, were expressed by a singular rather than a plural term, the
_Logos_ rather than the _Logoi_ of God.
It is at this point that the writings of Philo become of special
importance. They gather together, without fusing into a symmetrical
system, the two dominant theories of the past, and they contain the
seeds of nearly all that afterwards grew up on Christian soil. It is
possible that those writings cover a much larger period of time than is
commonly supposed, and that if we could find a key to their chronological
arrangement, we should find in them a perfect bridge from philosophical
Judaism to Christian theology. And even without such a key we are able to
see in them a large representation of the processes of thought that were
going on, and can better understand by the analogies which they offer
both the tentative theories and those that ultimately became dominant in
the sphere of Christianity. It is consequently desirable to give a brief
account of the view which they present.
The ultimate cause of the world is to be found in the nature of God. As
in Plato, though perhaps in a different sense, God is regarded as good.
By His goodness He was impelled to make the world: He was able to make it
by virtue of His power. “If any one wished to search out the reason why
the universe was made, I think that he would not be far from the mark if
he were to say, what, in fact, one of the ancients said, that the Father
and Maker is good, and that being good He did not grudge the best kind of
nature to matter (οὔσίᾳ) which of itself had nothing excellent, though
it was capable of becoming all things.”[324] And again: “My soul once
told me a more serious story (than that of the Greek mythology), when
seized, as it often was, with a divine ecstasy.... It told me that in
the one really existing God there are two chief and primary faculties,
Goodness and Power, and that by Goodness He begat the universe, and
by Power He governs it.”[325] God is thus the Creator, the Fashioner
and Maker of the world, its Builder and Artificer.[326] But when the
conception of His relation to the world is more precisely examined, it
is found to be based upon a recognition of a sharp distinction between
the world of thought and that of sense; and to be monistic in regard to
the one, dualistic in regard to the other. God is mind. From Him, as
from a fountain, proceed all forms of mind and reason. Reason, whether
unconscious in the form of natural law, or conscious in the form of
human thought, is like a river that flows forth from Him and fills the
universe.[327] In man the two worlds meet. The body is fashioned by the
Artificer from the dust of the earth: “The soul came from nothing that
is created, but from the Father and Leader of all things. For what He
breathed into Adam was nothing else than a divine breath, a colony from
that blissful and happy nature, placed here below for the benefit of
our race; so that granting man to be mortal in respect of his visible
part, yet in respect of that which is invisible he is the heir of
immortality.”[328] And again: “The mind is an offshoot from the divine
and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from Him, for nothing
divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.”[329] And again,
in expounding the words, “They have forsaken me, the fountain of life”
(Jeremiah ii. 13), he says: “Only God is the cause of soul and life,
especially of rational soul and reasonable life; but He Himself is more
than life, being the ever-flowing fountain of life.”[330]
This is monistic. But the theory of the origin of the sensible world is
dualistic. The matter upon which He acted was outside Him. “It was in
itself without order, without quality, without soul, full of difference,
disproportion, and discord: it received a change and transformation
into what was opposite and best, order, quality, animation, identity,
proportion, harmony, all that is characteristic of a better form.”[331]
He himself did not touch it. “Out of it God begat all things, Himself
not touching it: for it was not right that the all-knowing and blessed
One should touch unlimited and confused matter: but He used the unbodied
Forces whose true name is the Forms (ἰδέαι), that each class of things
should receive its fitting shape.”[332] These unbodied Forces, which are
here called by the Platonic name of Forms, are elsewhere spoken of in
Stoical language as Reasons (λόγοι), sometimes in Pythagorean language
as Numbers or Limits, sometimes in the language of the Old Testament
as Angels, and sometimes in the language of popular mythology as
Dæmons.[333] The use of the two names Force and Form, with the synonyms
which are interchanged with each of them, expresses the two sides of the
conception of them. They are at once the agents or instruments by means
of which God fashioned the world, and also the types or patterns after
which He fashioned it.[334]
In both respects they are frequently viewed, not in the plurality of
their manifestations, but in the unity of their essence. On the one
hand, they collectively form the world which the Divine Architect of
the great City of the Universe fashioned in His mind before His thought
went outside Him to stamp with its impress the chaotic and unformed
mass. The place of this world is the _Logos_, the Reason or Will or
Word of God: more precisely, it constitutes that _Logos_ in a special
form of its activity:[335] for in the building of an ordinary city the
ideal which precedes it “is no other than the mind of the architect,
planning to realize in a visible city the city of his thought.... The
archetypal seal, which we call the ideal world, is itself the archetypal
pattern, the Form of Forms, the Reason of God.”[336] On the other hand,
the Reason of God is sometimes viewed not as a Form but as a Force. It
is His creative energy.[337] It is the instrument by which He made all
things.[338] It is the “river of God” that is “full of waters,” and that
flows forth to “make glad the city of God,” the universe.[339] From it,
as from a fountain, all lower Forms and Forces flow. By another and even
sublimer figure, it, the eldest born of the “I am,” robes itself with the
world as with a vesture, the high-priest’s robe, embroidered by all the
Forces of the seen and unseen worlds.[340]
But in all this, Philo never loses sight of the primary truth that the
world was made not by inferior or opposing beings, but by God. It is the
expression of His Thought. His Thought went forth from Him, impressing
itself in infinite Forms and by means of infinite Forces: but though His
Thought was the charioteer, it is God Himself who gives the orders.[341]
By a different conception of the genesis of the world, and one that is
of singular interest in view of the similar conceptions which we shall
find in some Gnostic schools, God is the Father of the world:[342] and
the metaphor of Fatherhood is expanded into that of a marriage: God is
conceived as the Father, His Wisdom as the Mother: “and she, receiving
the seed of God, with fruitful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His
visible son, only and well-beloved.”[343]
* * * * *
We have now the main elements of the current conceptions out of which the
philosophers of early Christianity constructed new fabrics.
Christianity had no need to borrow from Greek philosophy either the idea
of the unity of God, or the belief that He made the world. Its ultimate
basis was the belief in one God. It rode in upon the wave of the reaction
against polytheism. The Scriptures to which it appealed began with the
sublime declaration, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth.” It accepted that declaration as being both final and complete. It
saw therein the picture of a single supreme Artificer: and it elaborated
the picture by the aid of anthropomorphic conceptions: “By His almighty
power He fixed firm the heavens, and by His incomprehensible wisdom He
set them in order: He separated the earth from the water that encompassed
it ... and last of all He formed man with His sacred and spotless hands,
the impress of His own image.”[344]
The belief that the one God was the Creator of heaven and earth came,
though not without a struggle, to be a foremost and permanent element
in the Christian creed. The various forms of ditheism which grew up
with it and around it, finding their roots in its unsolved problems and
their nutriment in the very love of God which it fostered, gradually
withered away. But in proportion as the belief spread widely over the
Greek world, the simple Semitic cosmogony became insufficient. The
questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God
to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as
a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with
an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious
conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth
among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the
crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty
God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain?
These questions of the mode of creation and of the relation of God to
the material world, and the underlying question which any answer to
them must at the same time solve, fill a large place in the history of
the first three centuries. The compromise which ultimately resulted has
formed the basis of Christian theology to the present day.
* * * * *
The first answers were necessarily tentative. Thinkers of all schools,
within the original communities and outside them, introduced conceptions
which were afterwards discarded. One group of philosophers, treating the
facts of Christianity as symbols, like the tableaux of the mysteries,
framed cosmogonies which were symbolical also, and fantastic in
proportion as they were symbolical. Another group of philosophers,
dealing rather with the ideal than with the actual, framed cosmogonies in
which abstract ideas were invested with substance and personality. The
philosophers of all schools were met, not only by the common sense of the
Christian communities, but also by caricature. Their opponents, after the
manner of controversialists, accentuated their weak points, and handed on
to later times only those parts of the theories which were most exposed
to attack, and which were also least intelligible except in relation
to the whole system. But so far as the underlying conceptions can be
disentangled from the details, they may be clearly seen to have drifted
in the direction of the main drifts of Greek philosophy.