of evolution. In some way it had come forth from God. The belief
expressed itself in many forms. It was in all cases syncretist. The
same writers frequently made use of different metaphors; but all the
metaphors assumed vast grades and distances between God in Himself and
the sensible world. One metaphor was that of an outflow, as of a stream
from its source.[345] Other metaphors were taken from the phenomena of
vegetable growth, the evolution of a plant from a seed, or the putting
forth of leaves by a tree.[346] The metaphors of other writers were taken
from the phenomena of human generation:[347] they were an elaboration of
the conception of God as the Father of the world. They were sometimes
pressed: there was not only a Father, but also a Mother of the world,
Wisdom or Silence or some other abstraction. In one elaborate system it
was held that, though God Himself was unwedded, all the powers that came
forth from Him came forth in pairs, and all existing things were the
offspring of their union.[348] That which came forth was also conceived
in various ways. The common expression in one group of philosophers is
_æon_ (αἰών), a term which is of uncertain origin in this application. In
other groups of philosophers the expressions are relative to the metaphor
of growth and development, and repeat the Stoical term _seed_. In the
syncretism of Marcus the several expressions are gathered together,
and made more intelligible by the use of the synonym _logoi_;[349] the
thoughts of God were conceived as active forces, embodying themselves
in material forms. In the conception of one school of thinkers, the
invisible forces of the world acted in the same way that the art of a
craftsman acts upon his materials.[350] In the conception of another
school, the distinction between intellectual and material existence
tended to vanish. The powers which flowed forth from God were at once
intellectual and material, corresponding to the monistic conception
of God Himself. They were subtler and more active forms of matter
acting upon its grosser but plastic forms. In the conception of another
school, God is the unbegotten seed of which the Tree of Being is the
leaves and fruit,[351] and the fruit again contains in itself infinite
possibilities of renewing the original seed.[352]
The obvious difficulty which the actual world, with its failures and
imperfections, presents to all theories of evolution which assume the
existence of a good and perfect God, was bridged over by the hypothesis
of a lapse. The “fall from original righteousness” was carried back
from the earthly Paradise to the sphere of divinity itself. The theory
was shaped in various ways, some of which are expressed by almost
unintelligible symbols. That of the widely-spread school of Valentinus
was, that the Divine Wisdom herself had become subject to passion, and
that, having both ambition and desire, she had produced from herself a
shapeless mass, in ignorance that the Unbegotten One alone can, without
the aid of another, produce what is perfect. Out of this shapeless mass,
and the passions that came forth from her, arose the material world and
the Demiurgus who fashioned it.[353] Another theory was that of revolt
and insurrection among the supernal powers.[354] Both theories simply
pushed the difficulty farther back: they gave no solution of it: they
were opposed as strongly by philosophers outside Christianity as they
were by polemical theologians within it:[355] they helped to pave the way
for the Augustinian theology of succeeding centuries, but they did not
themselves win permanent acceptance either in philosophy or in theology,
in either the Eastern or the Western world.
2. Side by side with these hypotheses of evolution was a tendency, which
ultimately became supreme, to account for the world by the hypothesis of
creation. It was the result of the action of God upon already existing
matter. It was not evolved, but ordered or shaped. God was the Builder or
Framer: the universe was a work of art.[356]
But this, no less than the monistic hypothesis, contained grave
difficulties, arising partly from the metaphysical conception of God,
and partly from the conception of moral evil. Three main questions were
discussed in connection with it: (i.) What was the ultimate relation of
matter to God? (ii.) How did God come into contact with it so as to shape
it? (iii.) How did a God who was almighty as well as beneficent come to
create what is imperfect and evil?
(i.) The dualistic hypothesis assumed a co-existence of matter and God.
The assumption was more frequently tacit than explicit. The difficulty
of the assumption varied according to the degree to which matter was
regarded as having positive qualities. There was a universal belief
that beneath the qualities of all existing things lay a substratum or
substance on which they were grafted, and which gave to each thing
its unity. But the conception of the nature of this substance varied
from that of gross and tangible material to that of empty and formless
space. The metaphysical conception of substance tended to be confused
with the physical conception of matter. Matter was sometimes conceived
as a mass of atoms not coalescing according to any principle or order
of arrangement:[357] the action of the Creator upon them was that of
a general changing a rabble of individuals into an organized army. It
was sometimes conceived as a vast shapeless but plastic mass, to which
the Creator gave form, partly by moulding it as a potter moulds clay,
partly by combining various elements as a builder combines his materials
in the construction of a house.[358] Both these conceptions of matter
tended to regard it as more or less gross. It was plastic in the hands
of the Divine Workman, but still possessed the quality of resistance.
With Basilides, the conception of matter was raised to a higher plane.
The distinction of subject and object was preserved, so that the action
of the Transcendent God was still that of creation and not of evolution;
but it was “out of that which was not” that He made things to be. That
which He made was expressed by the metaphor of a seed which contained
in itself possibilities, not only of growth, but of different kinds of
growth. Three worlds were involved in it: the world of spirit, and the
world of matter, and between the two the world of life. The metaphor
is sometimes explained by the help of the Aristotelian conception of
_genera_ and _species_.[359] The original seed which God made is the
ultimate _summum genus_. The process by which all things came into being
followed in inverse order the process of our knowledge. The steps by
which our ideas ascend, by an almost infinite stairway of subordinated
groups, from the visible objects of sense to the highest of all
abstractions, the Absolute Being and the Absolute Unity, are the steps
by which that Absolute Being and Absolute Unity, who is God, evolved
or made the world from that which was not. The basis of the theory was
Platonic, though some of the terms were borrowed from both Aristotle and
the Stoics. It became itself the basis of the theory which ultimately
prevailed in the Church. The transition appears in Tatian. In him, God is
the author, not only of the form or qualities, but also of the substance
or underlying ground of all things.[360] “The Lord of the universe
being Himself the substance of the whole, not yet having brought any
creature into being, was alone: and since all power over both visible and
invisible things was with Him, He Himself by the power of His word gave
substance to all things with Himself.” This theory is found in another
form in Athenagoras:[361] he makes a point in defence of Christianity
that, so far from denying the existence of God, it made Him the Author
of all existence, He alone being unborn and imperishable. It is found
also in Theophilus,[362] who, however, does not lay stress upon it. But
its importance was soon seen. It had probably been for a long time the
unreasoned belief of Hebrew monotheism: the development of the Platonic
conception within the Christian sphere gave it a philosophical form: and
early in the third century it had become the prevailing theory in the
Christian Church. God had created matter. He was not merely the Architect
of the universe, but its Source.[363]
But the theory did not immediately win its way to acceptance. It rather
set aside the moral difficulties than solved them. It was attacked by
those who felt those difficulties strongly. There are two chief literary
records of the controversy: one is the treatise of Tertullian against
Hermogenes, the other is a dialogue of about the same date which is
ascribed to an otherwise unknown Maximus.[364] Both treatises are
interesting as examples not only of contemporary polemics, but of the
insoluble difficulties which beset any attempt to explain the origin
of moral evil on metaphysical grounds. The attempt was soon afterwards
practically abandoned. The solution of the moral difficulties was
found in the doctrine of Free-will: the solution of the metaphysical
difficulties was found in the general acceptance of the belief that God
created all things out of nothing.
(ii.) How, under any conception of matter, short of its having been
created by God, did God come into contact with it so as to give it
qualities and form? The difficulty of the question became greater as the
tide of thought receded from anthropomorphism. The dominant idea was
that of mediation. Sometimes, as in Philo, the mediation was regarded
from the point of view of the plurality and variety of the effects, and
the agents were conceived as being more than one in number. They were
the angels of the Hebrews, the dæmons of the Greeks. Those who appealed
to Scripture saw an indication of this in the use of the plural in the
first chapter of Genesis, “Let _us_ make man.”[365] Another current of
speculation flowed in the channel, which had been first formed by the
_Timæus_ of Plato, of supposing a single Creator and Ruler of the world
who, in subordination to the transcendent God, fashioned the things that
exist. In some schools of thought this theory was combined with the
theory of creation by the Son.[366] The uncontrolled play of imagination
in the region of the unknown constructed more than one strange
speculation which it is not necessary to revive.
The view into which the Christian consciousness ultimately settled
down had meanwhile been building itself up out of elements which were
partly Jewish and partly Greek. On the one hand, there had long been
among the Jews a belief in the power of the _word_ of God: and the
belief in His wisdom had shaped itself into a conception of that wisdom
as a substantive force. On the other hand, the original conception of
Greek philosophy that Mind or Reason had marshalled into order the
confused and warring elements of the primæval chaos, had passed into the
conception of the _Logos_ as a mode of the activity of God. These several
elements, which had a natural affinity for each other, had already been
combined by Philo, as we have seen, into a comprehensive system: and in
the second century they were entering into new combinations both outside
and inside the Christian communities.[367] The vagueness of conception
which we have found in Philo is found also in the earliest expressions
of these combinations. It is not always clear whether the _Logos_
is regarded as a mode of God’s activity, or as having a substantive
existence. In either view, God was regarded as the Creator; His supremacy
was as absolute as His unity: there was no rival, because in either view
the Logos was God.
(iii.) How could a God who was at once beneficent and almighty create
a world which contained imperfection and moral evil? The question was
answered, as we have seen, on the monistic theory of creation by the
hypothesis of a lapse. It was answered on the dualistic theory, sometimes
by the hypothesis of evil inherent in matter, and sometimes by the
hypothesis of creation by subordinate and imperfect agents.
The former of these hypotheses came rather from the East than from
Greece; but it harmonized with and was supported by the Greek conception
of matter as the seat of formlessness and disorder.
The latter hypothesis is an extension of the Platonic distinction between
the perfect world which God created directly through the operation of His
own powers, and the world of mortal and imperfect existences the creation
of which He entrusted to inferior agents. In the Platonic conception, God
Himself, in a certain mode of His activity, was the Creator (Demiurgus),
and the inferior agents were beings whom He had created.[368] In the
conception which grew up early in the second century, and which was first
formulated by Marcion, the Creator was detached from the Supreme God, and
conceived as doing the work of the inferior agents. He was subordinate
to the Supreme God and ultimately derived from Him:[369] but looming
large in the horizon of finite thought, He seemed to be a rival and an
adversary. The contradictions, the imperfections, the inequalities of
both condition and ability, which meet us in both the material and the
moral world, were solved by the hypothesis of two worlds in conflict,
each of them moving under the impulse of a separate Power. The same
solution applied also to the contrast of the Old and New Testaments. It
had been already thought that the God of the Jews was different from the
Father of Jesus Christ; but, with an exaggerated Paulinism, Marcion made
so deep a chasm between the Law and the Gospel, the Flesh and the Spirit,
that the two were regarded as inherently hostile, and the work of the
Saviour was regarded as bringing back into the world from which he had
been shut out the God of love and grace.[370]
The objection to all this was that, in spite of its reservations and
safeguards, it tended to ditheism. The philosophical difficulties
of monotheism were enormous, but the knot was not to be cut by the
hypothesis of either a co-existent and resisting matter or an independent
and rival God. The enormous wave of belief in the Divine Unity, which
had gathered its strength from the whole sea of contemporary thought,
swept away the barriers in its path. The moral difficulty was solved, as
we shall see in the next Lecture, by the conception of free-will: the
metaphysical difficulties of the contact of God with matter were solved,
partly by the conception that God created matter, and partly by the
conception that He moulded it into form by His Logos, who is also His
Son, eternally co-existent with Him.
The first patristic statement of this view is in Irenæus; it stands in
the forefront of his theology: and it seems to have been so generally
accepted in the communities of which he was cognizant, that he states it
as part of the recognized “rule of truth:” the following is only one of
several passages in which he so states it:[371]
“There is one Almighty God who created all things by His Word
and fashioned them, and caused that out of what was not all
things should be: as saith the Scripture, By the Word of
the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by
the Breath of His mouth: and again, All things were made by
Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.
There is no exception: the Father made _all_ things by Him,
whether visible or invisible, objects of sense or objects of
intelligence, things temporal or things eternal. He made them
not by angels or by any powers separated from His Thought: for
God needs none of all these beings: but it is by His Word and
His Spirit that He makes and disposes and governs and presides
over all things. This God who made the world, this God who
fashioned man, this God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God
of Jacob, above whom there is no other God, nor Beginning nor
Power nor Fulness: this God, as we shall show, is the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The same view is expressed with equal prominence and emphasis by
a disciple of Irenæus, who shows an even stronger impress of the
philosophical speculations of his time:[372]
“The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and
Lord, had nothing coeval with him, not infinite chaos, not
measureless water, or solid earth, or dense air, or warm fire,
or subtle breath, nor the azure cope of the vast heaven: but He
was one, alone by Himself, and by His will He made the things
that are, that before were not, except so far as they existed
in His foreknowledge.... This supreme and only God begets
Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a
spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe.
Him alone did He beget from existing things: for the Father
himself constituted existence, and from it came that which was
begotten. The cause of the things that came into being was the
Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat
him, and not being without knowledge of the Father’s thought
... so that when the Father bade the world come into being,
the Reason brought each thing to perfection one by one, thus
pleasing God.”
This creed of Irenæus and his school became the basis of the theology
of later Christendom. It appealed, as time went on, to a widening
sphere, and summed up the judgment of average Christians on the main
philosophical questions of the second century. The questions were not
seriously re-opened. The idealists of Alexandria, no less than the
rhetoricians of Gaul, accepted, with all its difficulties, the belief
that there was one God who revealed Himself to mankind by the Word by
whom He had created them, and that this Word was manifested in Jesus
Christ. But the Alexandrians were concerned less with the metaphysical
than with the moral difficulties; and their view of those difficulties
modified also their view of creation. The cosmogony of Origen was a
theodicy. His aim was less to show in detail how the world came into
existence, than to “justify the ways of God to man.” He proceeded
strictly on the lines of the older philosophies, justifying in this
part of his theology even more than in other respects the criticism of
Porphyry,[373] that though in his manner of life he was a Christian,
in his opinions about God he was a Greek. He followed the school of
Philo in believing that the original creation was of a world of ideal
or “intelligible” existences, and that the cause of creation was the
goodness of God.[374] He differed from, or expanded, the teaching of
that school in believing that the Word or Wisdom of God, by whom He
made the world, was not impersonal, but His Son, and that both the
existence of the Son and the creation of the ideal world had been from
all eternity.[375] For it is impious to think that God ever existed
without His Wisdom, possessing the power to create but not the will; and
it is inconceivable either that Wisdom should ever have been without
the conception of the world that was to be, or that there should ever
have been a time at which God was not omnipotent from having no world
to govern.[376] The relation of each to the world is stated in varying
ways: one mode of statement is, that from the Father and the Son, thus
eternally co-existent, came the actual world; the Father caused it to
be, the Son caused it to be rational:[377] another is, that the whole
world, visible and invisible, was made by the agency of the only begotten
Son, who conveyed a share in himself to certain parts of the things so
created and caused them thereby to become rational creatures.[378] This
visible world, which, as also Philo and the Platonists had taught, is a
copy of the ideal world, took its beginning in time: but it is not the
first, nor will it be the last, of such worlds.[379] The matter of it
as well as the form was created by God.[380] It was made by Him, and to
Him it will return. The Stoical theory had conceived of the universe
as analogous to a seed which expands to flower and fruit and withers
away, but leaves behind it a similar seed which has a similar life and a
similar succession: so did one universal order spring from its beginning
and pass through its appointed period to the end which was like the
beginning in that after it all things began anew. Origen’s theory was a
modification of this: it recognized an absolute beginning and an absolute
end: both the beginning and the end were God: poised as it were between
these two divine eternities were the worlds of which we are part. In
them, all rational creatures were originally equal and free: they are
equal no longer because they have variously used their freedom: and the
hypothesis of more worlds than one is a complement, on the one hand of
the hypothesis of human freedom, on the other hand of the hypothesis of
the divine justice, because it accounts for the infinite diversities of
condition, and gives scope for the discipline of reformation.
Large elements of this theory dominated in the theology of the Eastern
Churches during the fourth century. But ultimately those parts of it
which distinguished it from the theory of Irenæus faded away. The mass
of Christians were content with a simpler creed. More than one question
remained unsolved; and the hypothesis of creation by a rival God was
part of the creed of a Church which flourished for several centuries
before it faded away, and it also left its traces in many inconsistent
usages within the circle of the communities which rejected it. But the
belief in the unity of God, and in the identity of the one God with the
Creator of the world, was never again seriously disturbed. The close of
the controversy was marked by its transference to a different, though
allied, area. It was no longer Theological but Christological. The
expression “Monarchy,” which had been used of the sole government of
the one God, in distinction from the divided government of many gods,
came to be applied to the sole government of the Father, in distinction
from the “economy” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In this
new area of controversy the old conceptions re-appear. The monistic and
dualistic theories of the origin of the world lie beneath the two schools
of Monarchianism, in one of which Christ was conceived as a mode of God,
and in the other as His exalted creature. In the determination of these
Christological controversies Greek philosophy had a no less important
influence than it had upon the controversies which preceded them: and
with some elements of that determination we shall be concerned in a
future Lecture.
* * * * *