the large underlying variations in the conception of God as supra-cosmic
or as transcendental, and partly with the greater or less development of
the tendency to give a concrete shape to abstract ideas. They varied also
according as the forms were viewed in relation to the universe, as its
types and formative forces; or in relation to the Supreme Being and His
rational creatures, as manifestations of the one and means of knowledge
to the other. The variations are found to exist, not only between one
school of philosophers and another, but also in the same school. For
example, Tertullian distinguishes between two schools of Valentinians,
that of Valentinus himself and that of his great, though independent,
follower Ptolemy.[518] The former regarded the Æons as simply modes
of God’s existence, abiding within His essence: the latter, in common
with the great majority of the school, looked upon them as “personal
substances” which had come forth from God and remained outside Him. And
again, most philosophers of the same school made a genealogy of Æons, and
furnished their opponents thereby with one of their chief handles for
ridicule: but Colorbasus regarded the production of the Æons as a single
momentary act.[519] Sometimes, however, the expressions, which came from
different sources, were blended.
Almost all these conceptions of the means by which God communicated
Himself to the world were relative to the conception of Him as Mind. It
is as inherent a necessity for thought to reveal itself as it is for
light to shine. Following the tendency of current psychology to regard
the different manifestations of mind as relative to different elements
in mind itself, some schools of philosophers gave a separate personality
to each supposed element in the mind of God. There came forth thought
and reflexion, voice and name, reasoning and intention:[520] or from
the original Will and Thought came forth Mind and Truth (Reality) as
visible forms and images of the invisible qualities (διαθέσεων) of the
Father.[521]
(ii.) But side by side with this tendency to individualize and
hypostatize the separate elements or modes of the Divine Mind, there
was a tendency to regard the mind of God as a unity existing either as
a distinct element in His essence or objective to Him. On one theory,
mind is the only-begotten of God.[522] He alone knows God and wishes to
reveal Him. On another theory, mind is born from the unborn Father, and
from Mind are born _Logos_ and Prudence, Wisdom and Force, and thence
in their order all the long series of Powers by whom the universe was
formed.[523] Another theory, that of Marcus, probably contains the key
to some of the others; the meaning of the conception of Mind as the
only-begotten of God, is that Mind is the revelation of God to Himself:
His self-consciousness is, so to speak, projected out of Him. It is at
once a revelation and a creation—the only immediate revelation and the
only immediate creation. The Father, “resolving to bring forth that which
is ineffable in Him, and to endow with form that which is invisible,
opened His mouth and sent forth the _Logos_” which is the image of Him,
and revealed Him to Himself.[524] The _Logos_, or Word, which was so sent
forth was made up of distinct utterances: each utterance was an _æon_, a
_logos_, a root and seed of being: in other words, each was a part and
phase of God’s nature which expressed and reflected itself in a part and
phase of the world, so that collectively the _logoi_ are equivalent to
the _Logos_, who is the image and reflection of God.
The theory is not far distant from that which is found in the earlier
Apologists, and which passed through more than one phase before it won
its way to general acceptance. The leading point in both is the relation
of the individual _logoi_ to the _Logos_. We have already become
acquainted with the syncretism which had blended the Platonic _ideas_
with the Stoical _logoi_, the former being regarded as forces as well
as forms, and the latter being not only productive forces, but also the
laws of those forces; and which had viewed them both in their unity,
rather than in their plurality, as expressions of a single _Logos_. We
have also seen that the solution of the problem, How could God create?
was found in the doctrine that He created by means of His _Logos_,
who impressed himself in the innumerable forms of created things. The
solution of the metaphysical difficulty, How can a transcendent God know
and be known? was found to lie in the solution which had already been
given to the cosmogonical difficulty, How could God come into contact
with matter?[525] The Forces were also Reasons: they were activities and
also thoughts: in men they woke to consciousness: and the mind of man
knew the mind of God, as like knows like, by virtue of containing within
it “a seed of the _Logos_,” a particle of the divine _Logos_ itself. That
divine _Logos_ “of which the whole human race is partaker,” “which had
at one time appeared in the form of fire, and at another in the form of
angels, now by the will of God, on behalf of the human race, had become
a man, and endured to suffer all that the dæmons effected that he should
suffer at the hands of the foolish Jews.”[526] The difference between
Christ and other men was thought to be, that other men have only a “seed
of the _Logos_,” whereas in him the whole _Logos_ was manifest: and the
difference between Christians and philosophers was, that the latter lived
by the light of a part only of the divine _Logos_, whereas the former
lived by the knowledge and contemplation of the whole _Logos_.[527]
Within half a century after these tentative efforts,[528] and largely
helped by the dissemination of the Fourth Gospel, which had probably at
first only a local influence, the mass of Christians were tending to
acquiesce not only in the belief of the transcendental nature of God, but
also in the belief that, in some way which was not yet closely defined,
Jesus Christ was the _Logos_ by whom the world had been made, and who
revealed the unknown Father to men.
The form in which the belief is stated by Irenæus is the following:
“No one can know the Father except by the Word of God, that is
by the Son revealing Him: nor can any one know the Son except
by the good pleasure of the Father. But the Son performs the
good pleasure of the Father: for the Father sends, and the Son
is sent and comes. And His Word knows that the Father is, as
far as concerns us, invisible and unlimited: and since He is
ineffable, He himself declares Him to us: and, on the other
hand, it is the Father alone who knows His own Word: both these
truths has the Lord made known to us. Wherefore the Son reveals
the knowledge of the Father by manifesting Himself: for the
manifestation of the Son is the knowledge of the Father: for
all things are manifested by the Word.... The Father therefore
has revealed Himself to all by making His Word visible to all:
and conversely the Word showed to all the Father and the Son,
since He was seen by all. And therefore the righteous judgment
of God comes upon all who, though they have seen as others,
have not believed as others. For by means of the creation
itself the Word reveals God the Creator; by means of the world,
the Lord who is the Fashioner of the world; and by means of His
handiwork (man), the Workman who formed it; and by the Son,
that Father who begat the Son.”[529]
(3) _The Distinctions in the Nature of God, or the Mediation and
Mediator._—It was by a natural process of development that Christian
philosophers, while acquiescing in the general proposition that Jesus
Christ was the _Logos_ in human form, should go on to frame large
theories as to the nature of the _Logos_. It was an age of definition and
dialectic. It was no more possible for the mass of educated men to leave
a metaphysical problem untouched, than it is possible in our own days
for chemists to leave a natural product unanalyzed. Two main questions
engaged attention: (i.) what was the genesis, (ii.) what was the nature,
of the _Logos_. In the speculations which rose out of each of these
questions, the influence of Greek thought is even more conspicuous than
before.
(i.) The question of the genesis of the _Logos_ was mainly answered by
theories which were separated from one another by the same broad line of
distinction which separated theories as to the genesis of the world.
The philosophers of the school of Basilides, who, as we have seen, had
been the first to formulate the doctrine of an absolute creation, that
is, of a creation of all things out of nothing, conceived that whatever
in their theory corresponded to the _Logos_ was equally included with all
other things in the original seed. Hence came the definite proposition,
which played a large part in the controversies of the fourth century,
that the _Logos_ was made “out of the things that were not.”[530]
But the majority of theories expressed under various metaphors the idea,
which was relative to the other theory of creation, that in some way the
_Logos_ had come forth from God. The rival hypotheses as to the nature
of creation were reconciled by the hypothesis that, though the world
was created out of nothing, it was so created by the _Logos_, who was
not created by God, but came forth from Him. The metaphors were chiefly
those of the “putting forth” (προβολή, _prolatio_), as of the leaves or
fruit of a plant, and of the begetting of a son. They were in use before
the doctrine of the _Logos_ had established itself, and some of them
were originally relative, not to the _Logos_, but to other conceptions
of mediation between God and the world. They were supplemented by the
metaphors, which also were in earlier use, of the flowing of water from a
spring, and of the radiation of light.[531] That there was not originally
any important distinction between them, is shown both by the express
disclaimer of Irenæus and by the fact of their use in combination in the
same passages of the same writers. The combination was important. The
metaphors supplemented each other. Each of them contained an element
in the theory which ultimately expressed the settled judgment of the
Christian world.
The main difficulty which they presented was that of an apparent
inconsistency with the belief in the unity of God. The doctrine of the
“sole monarchy” of God, which had been strongly maintained against those
who explained the difficulties of the world by the hypothesis of two Gods
in conflict, seemed to be running another kind of danger in the very
ranks of its defenders. The _Logos_ who reflected God and revealed Him
to rational creatures, who also contained in himself the form and forces
of the material world, must be in some sense God. In Athenagoras there
is a pure monism: “God is Himself all things to Himself, unapproachable
light, a perfect universe, spirit, force, _logos_.”[532] But in other
writers the idea of development or generation, however lightly the
metaphor might be pressed, seemed to involve an existence of the _Logos_
both outside God and posterior to Him.[533] He was the “first-born,”
the “first offspring of God,” the “first force after the Father of all
and the Lord God;” for “as the beginning, before all created things,
God begat from Himself a kind of rational Force, which is called by the
Holy Spirit (i.e. the Old Testament) sometimes ‘the Glory of the Lord,’
sometimes ‘Son,’ sometimes ‘Wisdom,’ sometimes ‘Angel,’ sometimes ‘God,’
sometimes ‘Lord and _Logos_,’ sometimes he speaks of himself as ‘Captain
of the Lord’s host:’ for he has all these appellations, both from his
ministering to the Father’s purpose and from his having been begotten by
the Father’s pleasure.”[534] It follows that “there is, and is spoken of,
another God and Lord beneath the Maker of the universe.”[535] The theory
thus formulated tended to ditheism and was openly accused of it.[536] It
was saved from the charge by the gradual formulating of two distinctions,
both of which came from external philosophy, one of them being an
inheritance from Stoicism, the other from Neo-Platonism.[537] The one
was that the generation or development had taken place within the sphere
of Deity itself: the generation had not taken place by the severing
of a part from the whole, as though the Divine nature admitted of a
division,[538] but by distinction of function or by multiplication, as
many torches may be lit from one without diminishing the light of that
one.[539] The other was that the generation had been eternal. In an early
statement of the theory it was held that it had taken place in time: it
was argued that “God could not have been a Father before there was a Son,
but there was a time when there was not a Son.”[540] But the influence of
the other metaphors in which the relation was expressed overpowered the
influences which came from pressing the conception of paternity. Light,
it was argued, could never have been without its capacity to shine.[541]
The Supreme Mind could never have been without His Thought. The Father
Eternal was always a Father, the Son was always a Son.[542]
(ii.) The question of the nature of the eternally-begotten _Logos_ was
answered variously, according as the supra-cosmic or the transcendental
idea of God was dominant in a writer’s mind.[543] To Justin Martyr,
God is conceived as supra-cosmic. He abides “in the places that are
above the heavens:” the “first-begotten,” the _Logos_, is the “first
force after the Father:” he is “a second God, second numerically but
not in will,” doing only the Father’s pleasure.[544] It is uncertain
how far the idea of personality entered into this view. There is a
similar uncertainty in the view of Theophilus, who introduced the
Stoical distinction between the two aspects of the _Logos_, thought
and speech—“ratio” and “oratio;”[545] while Tertullian still speaks of
“virtus” side by side with these.
It was only gradually that the subject was raised to the higher plane,
from which it never afterwards descended, by the spread and dominance
of the transcendental as distinguished from the supra-cosmic conception
of God. It came, as we have already seen, mainly from the schools of
Alexandria. It is in Basilides, in whom thought advanced to the belief
that God transcended not merely phenomena but being, that the conception
of a quasi-physical influence emanating from Him is seen to be first
expressly abandoned.[546] But the place of the later doctrine in the
Christian Church is mainly due to Origen. He uses many of the same
expressions as Tertullian, but with another meaning. The Saviour is God,
not by partaking, but by essence.[547] He is begotten of the very essence
of the Father. The generation is an outflow as of light from light.
But the controversies did not so much end with Origen as begin with him.
From that time they were mostly internal to Christianity. But their
elements were Greek in origin. The conceptions which were introduced into
the sphere of Christian thought were the current ones of philosophy. In
Christian theology that philosophy has survived.
But although it would be beyond our present purpose to describe the
Christological controversies which followed the final dominance in the
Church of the transcendental idea of God, it is within that purpose to
point out the Greek elements, confining ourselves as far as possible to
the later Greek uses of the terms.
_Ousia_ (οὐσία) is used in at least three distinct senses: the
distinction is clearly phrased by Aristotle.[548]
(_a_) It is used as a synonym of _hylê_, to designate the material part
of a thing. The use is most common among the Stoics. In their monistic
conception of the universe, the visible world was regarded as the
_ousia_ of God.[549] In the same way Philo speaks of the blood as the
material vehicle, τὸ οὐσιῶδες, of the vital force.[550] Hence in both
philosophical and Christian cosmologies, _ousia_ was sometimes used as
interchangeable with _hylê_, to denote the matter out of which the world
was made.
(_b_) It is used of matter embodied in a certain form: this has since
been distinguished as the _substantia concreta_. In Aristotle, a sensible
material thing, a particular man or a particular horse, which in a
predication must always be the subject and cannot be a predicate, is an
_ousia_ in the strictest sense.[551]
(_c_) It is used of the common element in the classes into which sensible
material things may be grouped: this has since been distinguished as the
_substantia abstracta_: in the language of Aristotle, it was the form
(εἶδος), or ideal essence (τὸ τί ἦv εἶναι).[552] This sense branched
out into other senses, according as the term was used by a realist or a
nominalist: to the former it was the common essence which exists in the
individual members of a class (τὸ εἶδος τὸ ἐνόν),[553] and not outside
them (since ἀδύνατον χωρὶς εἶναι τὴν οὐσίαν καὶ οὗ ἡ οὐσία);[554] or
which exists outside them, and by participation in which they are what
they are: this latter is Plato’s conception of εἶδος,[555] and of its
equivalent οὐσία.
To a nominalist, on the other hand, _ousia_ is only the common name
which is predicable in the same sense to a number of individual
existences.[556]
The Platonic form of realism grew out of a distinction between the real
and the phenomenal, which in its turn it tended to accentuate. The
visible world of concrete individuals was regarded as phenomenal and
transitory: the invisible world of intelligible essences was real and
permanent: the one was _genesis_, or “becoming;” the other, _ousia_, or
“being.”[557] The distinction played a large part in the later history
of Platonism:[558] and whereas in the view of Aristotle the species, or
smaller class, as being nearer to the concrete individuals, was more
_ousia_ than the genus, or wider class, in the later philosophy, on the
contrary, that was _ousia_ in its highest sense which was at the farthest
remove from the concrete, and filled the widest sphere, and contained
the largest number of other classes in itself: it was the _summum
genus_.[559] Hence Plotinus says that in respect of the body we are
farthest from _ousia_, but that we partake of it in respect of our soul;
and our soul is itself a compound, not pure _ousia_, but _ousia_ with an
added difference, and hence not absolutely under our control.[560]
Of these two meanings of _ousia_, namely “species” and “genus,” the
former expressing the whole essence of a class-name or concept, the
latter part of the essence, the former tended to prevail in earlier,
the latter in later Greek philosophy. In the one, the knowledge of the
_ousia_ was completely unfolded in the definition, so that a definition
was itself defined as “a proposition which expresses the _ousia_:”[561]
in the latter, it was only in part so unfolded, so that it is necessary
for us to know not only the _ousia_ of objects of thought, for example,
whether they fall within or without the class “body,” but also the
species (εἴδη).[562]
But in the one meaning as in the other, the members of the same class, or
the sub-classes of the same wider class, were spoken of as _homoousioi_:
for example, there was an argument that animals should not be killed for
food, on the ground that they belong to the same class as men, their
souls being _homoousioi_ with our own:[563] so men are _homoousioi_ with
one another, and Abraham washed the feet of the three strangers who came
to him, thinking them to be men “of like substance” with himself.[564]
The difficulty of the whole conception in its application to God was
felt and expressed. Some philosophers, as we have already seen, denied
that such an application was possible. The tide of which Neo-Platonism
was the most prominent wave placed God beyond _ousia_. Origen meets
Celsus’s statement of that view by a recognition of the uncertainty which
flowed from the uncertain meaning of the term.[565] The Christological
controversies of the fourth century were complicated to no small extent
from the existence of a neutral and conservative party, who met the
dogmatists on both sides with the assertion that neither _ousia_ nor
_hypostasis_ was predicable of God.[566] And, in spite of the acceptance
of the Nicene formula, the great Christian mystic who most fully
represents Neo-Platonism within the Christian Church, ventured more than
a century later on to recur to the position that God has no _ousia_, but
is _hyperousios_.[567] Even those who maintained the applicability of the
term to God, denied the possibility of defining it when so applied to
Him. In this they followed Philo: “Those who do not know the _ousia_ of
their own soul, how shall they give an accurate account of the soul of
the universe?”[568] But in spite of these difficulties, the conservative
feeling against the introduction of metaphysical terms into theology,
and the philosophical doctrine of absolute transcendence, were overborne
by the practical necessity of declaring that He _is_, and by the
corollary that since He is, there must be an _ousia_ of Him.
But when the conception of the one God as transcending numerical
unity became dominant in the Christian Church, the term _homoousios_
(ὁμοούσιος) was not unnaturally adopted to express the relation of God
the Father to God the Son. It accentuated the doctrine that the Son
was not a creature (κτίσμα); and so of the term as applied to the Holy
Spirit. Those who maintained that the Holy Spirit was a creature, thereby
maintained that He was severed from the essence of the Father.[569] The
term occurs first in the sphere of Gnosticism, and expresses part of one
of the two great conceptions as to the origin of the world.[570] It was
rejected in its application to the world, but accepted within the sphere
of Deity as an account of the origin of His plurality. But _homoousios_,
though true, was insufficient. It expressed the unity, but did not give
sufficient definition to the conception of the plurality. It was capable
of being used by those who held the plurality to be merely modal or
phenomenal.[571] It thus led to the use of another term, of which it is
necessary to trace the history.
The term _ousia_ in most of its senses had come to be convertible with
two other terms, _hypostasis_ (ὑπόστασις) and _hyparxis_ (ὕπαρξις). The
latter of these played but a small part in Christian theology, and may be
disregarded here.[572] The term _hypostasis_ is the conjugate of the verb
ὑφιστάναι, which had come into use as a more emphatic form than εἶναι. It
followed almost all the senses of _ousia_. Thus it was contrasted with
phenomenal existence not merely in the Platonic but in the conventional
sense; e.g. of things that take place in the sky, some are appearances,
some have a substantial existence, καθ’ ὑπόστασιν.[573] It also,
like _ousia_, is used of that which has an actual as compared with a
potential existence;[574] also of that which has an objective existence
in the world, and not merely exists in the thinking subject.[575] Hence
when things came into being, οὐσία was said ὑφιστάναι.[576] Moreover,
in one of its chief uses, namely that in which it designated the
permanent element in objects of thought, the term ὀυσία had sometimes
been replaced by the term ὑπόστασις.[577] When, therefore, the use of
_ousia_ in its Neo-Platonic sense prevailed, there arose a tendency to
differentiate the two terms, and to designate that which in Aristotle had
been πρώτη οὐσία by the term ὑπόστασις. This is expressed by Athanasius
when he says: “Ousia signifies community,” while “hypostasis has property
which is not common to the hypostases of the same ousia;”[578] and even
more clearly by Basil.[579]