_The Idea of God as immanent in the World._
We have seen that since the primitive savage philosophy did not
distinguish between the human ghost and the elemental demon or
deity, the religion of antiquity was an inextricable tangle of
ancestor-worship with nature-worship. Nevertheless, among some
peoples the one, among others the other, became predominant. I think
it can hardly be an accidental coincidence that nature-worship
predominated with the Greeks and Hindus, the only peoples of antiquity
who accomplished anything in the exact sciences, or in metaphysics.
The capacity for abstract thinking which led the Hindu to originate
algebra, and the Greek to originate geometry, and both to attempt
elaborate scientific theories of the universe,--this same capacity
revealed itself in the manner in which they deified the powers of
nature. They were able to imagine the indwelling spirit of the sun or
the storm without help from the conception of an individual ghost. Such
being the general capacity of the people, we can readily understand
how, when it came to monotheism, their most eminent thinkers should
have been able to frame the conception of God acting in and through
the powers of nature, without the aid of any grossly anthropomorphic
symbolism. In this connection it is interesting to observe the
characteristics of the idea of God as conceived by the three greatest
fathers of the Greek church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and
Athanasius. The philosophy of these profound and vigorous thinkers
was in large measure derived from the Stoics. They regarded Deity as
immanent in the universe, and eternally operating through natural laws.
In their view God is not a localizable personality, remote from the
world, and acting upon it only by means of occasional portent and
prodigy; nor is the world a lifeless machine blindly working after
some preordained method, and only feeling the presence of God in so
far as he now and then sees fit to interfere with its normal course
of procedure. On the contrary, God is the ever-present life of the
world; it is through him that all things exist from moment to moment,
and the natural sequence of events is a perpetual revelation of the
divine wisdom and goodness. In accordance with this fundamental view,
Clement, for example, repudiated the Gnostic theory of the vileness
of matter, condemned asceticism, and regarded the world as hallowed
by the presence of indwelling Deity. Knowing no distinction "between
what man discovers and what God reveals," he explained Christianity
as a natural development from the earlier religious thought of
mankind. It was essential to his idea of the divine perfection that
the past should contain within itself all the germs of the future;
and accordingly he attached but slight value to tales of miracle, and
looked upon salvation as the normal ripening of the higher spiritual
qualities of man "under the guidance of immanent Deity." The views of
Clement's disciple Origen are much like those of his master. Athanasius
ventured much farther into the bewildering regions of metaphysics.
Yet in his doctrine of the Trinity, by which he overcame the visible
tendency toward polytheism in the theories of Arius, and averted the
threatened danger of a compromise between Christianity and Paganism,
he proceeded upon the lines which Clement had marked out. In his very
suggestive work on "The Continuity of Christian Thought," Professor
Alexander Allen thus sets forth the Athanasian point of view: "In
the formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as three distinct and
coequal members in the one divine essence, there was the recognition
and the reconciliation of the philosophical schools which had divided
the ancient world. In the idea of the eternal Father the Oriental
mind recognized what it liked to call the profound abyss of being,
that which lies back of all phenomena, the hidden mystery which lends
awe to human minds seeking to know the divine. In the doctrine of the
eternal Son revealing the Father, immanent in nature and humanity as
the life and light shining through all created things, the divine
reason in which the human reason shares, there was the recognition
of the truth after which Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were
struggling,--the tie which binds the creation to God in the closest
organic relationship. In the doctrine of the Holy Spirit the church
guarded against any pantheistic confusion of God with the world by
upholding the life of the manifested Deity as essentially ethical or
spiritual, revealing itself in humanity in its highest form, only in so
far as humanity recognized its calling and through the Spirit entered
into communion with the Father and the Son."
Great as was the service which these views of Athanasius rendered in
the fourth century of our era, they are scarcely to be regarded as a
permanent or essential feature of Christian theism. The metaphysic in
which they are couched is alien to the metaphysic of our time, yet
through this vast difference it is all the more instructive to note
how closely Athanasius approaches the confines of modern scientific
thought, simply through his fundamental conception of God as the
indwelling life of the universe. We shall be still more forcibly struck
with this similarity when we come to consider the character impressed
upon our idea of God by the modern doctrine of evolution.