to important results. We should have had goodness as the criterion of
divinity, to the exclusion of power. God would have become avowedly an
ideal, a pattern to which the world might or might not conform. Such
potential conformity would have remained dependent on causes, natural
or free, with which God, not being a power, could have nothing to do.
Plato and Aristotle did, in fact, construct a theology on these lines,
but they obscured its purity in their well-meant attempts to connect
(more or less mythically or magically) their own Socratic principle
of excellence with the cosmic principles of the earlier philosophers.
The elements of confusion and pantheism which were thus introduced
into the Socratic philosophy made it more acceptable, perhaps, to the
theologians of later times, in whose religion a pantheistic tendency
was also latent. In the hands of Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan
commentators the mythical and magical part of the Greek conceptions
was naturally emphasized and the rational part reinterpreted and
obscured. Plato had spoken, in one of his myths, of a Demiurgos, a
personification of the Idea of the Good, who directly or indirectly
made the world in his own image, rendering it as perfect as the
indeterminate Chaos he worked on would allow. Aristotle had spoken of
an intelligence, happy and self-contemplative, who was the principle of
movement in the heavens, and through the heavens in the rest of Nature.
Such expressions had a sound far too congruous with Mosaic doctrine not
to be seized upon with joy by the apologists of the new faiths, who
were glad to invoke the authority of classic poets and philosophers in
favour of doctrines that in their Hebrew expression might so easily
seem crude and irrational to the Gentiles. This assimilation gave to
the casual myths of Plato and to the meagre though bold argumentation
of Aristotle a turn and a significance which they hardly had to their
authors. If we approach these philosophers as we should from the point
of view of Greek literature and life, and prepare ourselves to see
in them the disciples of Socrates rather than (what Plato was once
actually declared to be) the disciples of Moses, we shall see that
they were simply, mythologists of the Ideal; they refined the gods of
tradition into patrons of civic discipline and art, the gods of natural
philosophy into principles of intelligibility and beauty.
The creation described in the Timæus is a transparent parable. Elements
which ethical reflection distinguishes in the field of experience
are turned in that dialogue, with undisguised freedom of fancy, into
so many half-personified primitive powers; the Ideas, the Demiurgos,
Chaos, the Indeterminate, and the "gods of gods." Plato has not
forgotten the lessons of Socrates and Parmenides. He distrusts as much
as they any natural or genetic philosophy of existence. He virtually
tells us that, if we must have a history of creation, we can hardly
do better than to take ideal or moral principles, combine them as we
might so many material elements, and see how the intelligible part
of existence may thus receive a quasi-explanation. God remains the
creator of the good only, because what he is mythically said to create
is merely that in Nature which spontaneously resembles him or conforms
to his idea; only this element in Nature is intelligible or good, and
therefore the principle of goodness may be said to be its cause. Thus,
for example, if we chose to write an Anatomy of Melancholy, we might
attribute to the Demon of Spleen or to the Blue Devils only the sombre
elements of that soulful compound, which, however, the evil imps would
eternally tend to make as absolutely dyspeptic and like unto themselves
as its primordial texture would allow. In exactly such a way Plato,
in his allegorical manner, constructed a universe with a poetical
machinery of moral forces, personified and treated as agents. When
the thin veil of allegory is drawn aside, there remains nothing but a
splendid illustration of the Socratic philosophy; we are taught that
the only science is moral science, and that, if we wish to understand
the world, we must bend our minds to the definition of its qualities
and values, which are all that is intelligible in it. Essences and
values alone are knowable and fixed and amenable to science. If we
insist on history and cosmogony, we must be satisfied with having them
presented to us in allegorical form, and made to follow ethics as the
Timæus follows the Republic. Natural philosophy can be nothing but a
sort of analytic retrospect by which we trace the first glimmerings
and the progressive manifestation in Nature of those ideas which have
authority over our own minds.
Phenomena had for Plato existence without reality, that is, without
intelligibility or value. They were a mere appearance. We need not be
surprised, then, that he refused altogether to construct a theology
by the poetic interpretation of phenomena and preferred to construct
one allegorically out of his moral conceptions, the good and the
ideal. Aristotle, too, while adhering incidentally, as we have seen,
to a purified astronomical theology, capped this with a purified moral
theology of his own. The Platonic picture-gallery of ideas, with
the abstract principle of excellence that unified them, gave place
in his philosophy to an Ideal realized in the concrete and existing
as an individual. We may venture to say that among the thinkers of
all nations Aristotle was the first to reach the conception of what
may fitly be called God. Neither the national deity of the Hebrews,
as then conceived, nor the natural deities of the Gentiles, nor
the half-physical, half-logical abstractions of the earlier Greek
philosophers really corresponded to the notion of a being spiritual,
personal, and perfect, immutable without being abstract, and omnipotent
without effort and without degradation. Aristotle first constructed
this ideal, not out of his fancy, but by building on the solid ground
of human nature and following to their point of union the lines
which moral aspiration and effort actually follow. Nay, the ideal he
pointed to was to be the goal not of human life only but of natural
life in all its forms. The analytic study of Nature (a study which at
the same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) could guide us to
the conception of her inner needs and tendencies and of what their
proper fulfilment would be. We could then see that this fulfilment
would lie in intelligence and thought. Growth is for the sake of the
fruition of life, and the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and
attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong to the pursuit, the
intellectual to the attainment. Knowledge is the end of all endeavour,
the justification and fulfilment of all growth. Intelligence is the
clarification of love.
A being, then, whose life should be a life of pure and complete
knowledge, would embody the goal toward which all Nature strives.
When we ponder duly the short phrases in which Aristotle propounds
his conception of God we find that he has called up before us the
noblest possible object of human thought, the presentiment of that
thought's perfect fulfilment. There is no alloy of naturalism in this
conception, and at the same time no suspicion of irrelevancy. This
God is not a mere title of honour for the psycho-physical universe,
confusedly conceived and lumped together; he is an ultra-mundane ideal,
to be an inviolate standard and goal for all moving reality. Yet he
is not irrelevant to the facts and forces of the world, not the dream
of an abstracted poet. He is an idea which reality everywhere evokes
in evoking its own deepest craving and need. Nothing is so pertinent
and momentous in life as the object we are trying to attain by thought
or action, since that object is the source of our inspiration and
the standard of our success. Thus Aristotle's God is not superfluous,
not invented. This theology is a true idealism, I mean an idealism
itself purely ideal, which establishes the authority of human demands,
ethical, and logical, without impugning the existence or efficacy of
that material universe which it endows with a meaning and a standard.
Yet this rational conception, the natural out-growth of the Socratic
philosophy, establishes a dualism between the actual and the ideal
against which the human mind easily rebels. Aristotle himself was
hardly faithful to it. He tried to prove the existence of his God, and
existence is something quite irrelevant to an ideal. This confusion is
very excusable, especially in an age when the strictly mechanical view
of Nature still seemed hopelessly inadequate. Aristotle consequently
tried to understand the natural world by viewing it systematically
from the point of view of moral science, as Plato had done less
coherently in his myths; and hence came what we must regard as the
great error of Aristotle's philosophy, the belief in the efficacy
of final causes and in the preëxistence of entelechies. But, apart
from this unhappy question of existence, which is, as we have said,
irrelevant to an ideal, Aristotle's conception of God remains, perhaps,
the most philosophical that has yet been constructed. Without any
concessions to sentiment or superstition, it presents us with a sublime
vision of the essentially human, of a nature as free from an unworthy
anthropomorphism as from an inhuman abstractness. It is made both human
and superhuman by the same principle of idealization. It is the final
cause of Nature and man, the realization of their imminent upward
effort, the essence that would contain all their values and escape all
their imperfections.
We may well doubt, however, whether men in general will ever be ready
to accept so austere a theology in guise of a religion; they were
certainly not ready to do so at the end of the classical period. The
inheritance of Paganism fell instead to Christianity, in which ethical
and naturalistic elements were again united, although united in a new
way. For, while the scheme of Paganism, and of all the philosophies
that sought to rationalize Paganism, was cosmic and static, the scheme
of Christianity was historical. They spoke of the dynamic relations of
heaven and earth, or of the immutable hierarchy of ideas and essences;
even Aristotle's God was somehow in spatial relations to the Universe
which he set in motion. The religion of the Hebrews, on the other
hand, had been essentially historical and civic: it had been concerned
with the moral destinies of Israel and the dealings of Jehovah with
his people. Christianity inherited this historical character; its
mysteries occurred in time. Not only the redemption of the world but
the vocation and sanctification of the individual were progressive,
and when the habits and problems of Christian theology were carried
over by the German idealists into the region of pure metaphysics, the
systems they conceived were still systems of evolution. God was to be
manifest in the development of things. For Christianity in its own way
had spoken from the beginning of a gradual and yet to be completed
descent of the divine into the natural by the agency of prophecy, law,
and sacramental institutions; it had represented the relations of God
to man in a vast historic drama, of which creation constituted the
opening, the fall and redemption the nexus, and the last judgment the
unravelling.
Thus appeared a new scheme for the unification of the natural and the
moral. The harmony which the old religion had failed to establish
in space and in Nature, the new sought to establish in history and
in time. It was hoped that life and experience, sin and redemption,
might manifest that divinity which had fled out of the sea and sky,
and which it seemed sacrilege to identify any longer with the animal
vitality of the universe. Whether the same criticism that disintegrated
mythology and isolated its elements of science and of poetry would
not be fatal to the new combination of the moral and the factual in
the history of man, is hardly a question for us here. Suffice it to
point out the problem and to register the solution which was found
in the ancient world to the analogous problem that presented itself
there. The first impulse of the imagination is always to combine
in the object all the elements which lie together in the mind, to
project them indiscriminately into a single conception of reality,
enriched with as many qualities as there are phases and values in our
experience. But these phases and values have diverse origins and do not
permanently hang together. It becomes after a while impossible to keep
them attached to a single image; they have to be distributed according
to their true order and connections, some objectified into a physical
universe of mechanism and law, others built into a system of rational
objects, into a hierarchy of logical and moral ideas. So the lovely
pantheon of the Greeks yielded in time to analysis and was dissolved
into abstract science and conscious fable. So, too, the body and soul
of later religions may come to be divided, when they render back to
earth what they contain of positive history and to the heaven of man's
indomitable idealism what they contain of aspiration and hope.
IV
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA
The deathbed of Paganism was surrounded by doctors. Some, the Stoics,
advised a conversion into pantheism (with an allegorical interpretation
of mythology to serve the purposes of edification); others, the
Neo-Platonists, prescribed instead a supernatural philosophy, where the
efficacy of all traditional rites would be justified by incorporation
into a system of universal magic, and the gods would find their
place among the legions of spirits and demons that were to people
the concentric spheres. But these doctors had no knowledge of the
patient's natural constitution; their medicines, prescribed with the
best intentions, were in truth poisons and only hastened the inevitable
end. Nor had the unfortunate doctors the consolation of being heirs.
Parasites that they were, they perished with the patron on whose
substance they had fed, and Christianity, their despised rival, came
into sole possession.
Yet Neo-Platonism, for all we can see, responded as well as
Christianity to the needs of the time, and had besides great external
advantages in its alliance with tradition, with civil power, and with
philosophy. If the demands of the age were for a revealed religion and
an ascetic morality, Neo-Platonism could satisfy them to the full.
Why, then, should the Hellenic world have broken with the creations
of its own genius, so plastic, eloquent, and full of resource, to
run after foreign gods and new doctrines that must naturally have
been stumbling-blocks to its prejudices, and foolishness to its
intelligence? Shall we say that the triumph of Christianity was a
miracle? Is it not a doubtful encomium on a religion to say that only
by miracle could it come to be believed? Perhaps the forces of human
reason and emotion suffice to explain this faith. We prefer to think
so; otherwise, however complete and final the triumph of Christianity
might be, it would not be justified or beneficent.
Neo-Platonism arose in the midst of the same conditions as
Christianity. There was weariness and disgust with the life of nature,
decay of political virtue, desire for some personal and supernatural
good. It was hardly necessary to preach the doctrine of original
sin to that society; the visible blight that had fallen on classic
civilization was proof enough of that. What it was necessary to preach
was redemption. It was necessary to point to some sphere of refuge and
of healthful resort, where the ignominies and the frivolities of this
world might be forgotten, and where the hunger of a heart left empty
by its corroding passions might be finally satisfied. But where find
such a supernatural world? By what revelation learn its nature and be
assured of its existence?
Neo-Platonism opened vistas into the supernatural, but the avenues of
approach which it had chosen and the principle which had given form
to its system foredoomed it to failure as a religion. This avenue was
dialectic, and this principle the hypostasis of abstractions. Plato
had pointed out this path in his genial allegories. He had, by a
poetical figure, turned the ideas of reason into the component forces
of creation. This was, with him, a method of expression, but being
the only method he was inclined to employ, it naturally entangled
and occasionally, perhaps, deceived his intelligence; for a poet
easily mistakes his inspired tropes for the physiology of Nature. Yet
Platonic dogma, even when meant as such, retained the transparency
and significance of a myth; philosophy was still a language for the
expression of experience, and dialectic a method and not a creed. But
the master's counters, current during six centuries of intellectual
decadence, had become his disciples' money. Each of his abstractions
seemed to them a discovery, each of his metaphors a revelation. The
myths of the great dialogues, and, above all, the fanciful machinery
of the Timæus, interpreted with an incredible literalness and naive
earnestness, such as only Biblical exegesis can rival, formed the
starting point of the new revelation. The method and insight thus
obtained were then employed in filling the _lacunæ_ of the system and
spreading its wings wider and wider, until a prodigious hierarchy of
supernatural existences had been invented, from which the natural world
was made to depend as a last link and lowest emanation.
The baselessness and elaboration of this theology were, of course, far
from being obstacles to its success in such an age. On the contrary,
the less evidence could be found in common experience for what a man
appeared to know, the more deeply, people inferred, must he be versed
in supernatural lore, and the greater, accordingly, was his authority.
Nor was the spell of personal genius and even holiness wanting in the
leaders of the new philosophy to lend it colour and persuasiveness with
the many, to whom metaphysical conceptions are less impressive than
is an eloquent personality, or a reputation for miraculous powers.
Plotinus, to speak only of the greatest of the sect, had, in fact, a
notable success in his day. His lectures at Rome, we are told, were
attended by all the fashion and intellect of the capital; and his large
and systematic thought, his subtlety and precision, his comparatively
sober eloquence, and his assurance, if we may say so, in treading the
clouds, have made him at all times a great authority with those persons
who look in philosophy rather for impressive results than for solid
foundations. His contemporaries were eminently persons of that type. A
hungry man, when you bring him bread, does not stop to make scrupulous
inquiries about the mill or the oven from which you bring it.
But the trouble was that the bread of Plotinus was a stone. The heart
cannot feed on thin and elaborate abstractions, irrelevant to its
needs and divorced from the natural objects of its interest. Men will
often accept the baldest fictions as truths; but it is impossible
for them to give a human meaning to vacuous conceptions, or to grow
to love the categories of logic, interweaving their image with the
actions and emotions of daily life. Religion must spring from the
people; it must draw its form from tradition and its substance from
the national imagination and conscience. Neo-Platonism drew both
form and substance from a system of abstract thought. Its gods were
still-born, being generated by logical dichotomy. Only in the lower
purlieus of the system, filled in by accepting current superstitions,
was there any contact with something like vital religious forces. But
those minor elements--hopes and fears about another world, fasts and
penances, ecstasies and marvels--had no necessary relation to that
metaphysical system. Such practices could be found in every religion,
in every philosophical sect of the time. The Alexandrian dialectic of
the supernatural accordingly remained a mere schema or skeleton, to be
filled in with the materials of some real religion, if such a religion
should arise. As such a schema the Neo-Platonic system actually passed
over to Christian theology, furnishing the latter with its categories,
its language, and its speculative method. But that dialectic served in
Christianity to give form to a religious substance furnished by Hebrew
and apostolic tradition, a religious substance such as, after the Pagan
religion was discredited, Neo-Platonism necessarily lacked and was
powerless to generate.
We have mentioned apostolic tradition. It is fortunately not requisite
for our purpose to discuss the origin of this tradition, much less to
decide how much of what the Christian Church eventually taught might
be traced to its Founder. That is a point which even the most thorough
scholars seem still to decide mainly by their prejudices, perhaps
because other material is lacking on which to base a decision. For our
present object we may admit the most extreme hypotheses as equally
possible. The whole body of Catholic doctrine may have been contained
in the oral teaching of Christ; or, on the other hand, a historical
Jesus may not have existed at all, or may have been one among many
obscure Jewish revolutionists, the one who, by accident, came afterward
to be regarded as the initiator of a movement to which all sorts of
forces contributed, and with which he had really had nothing to do. In
either case the fact remains which alone interests us here; that after
three or four centuries of confused struggles, an institution emerged
which called itself the Catholic Church. This church, possessed of
a recognized hierarchy and a recognized dogma, triumphed, both over
the ancient religion, which it called Paganism, and over its many
collateral rivals, which it called heresies. Why did it triumph? What
was there in its novel dogma and practice that enchained the minds that
Paganism could retain no longer, and that would not be content with
Neo-Platonism, native, philosophical, and pliable as that system was?
The answer, to be adequate, would have to be long; but perhaps we
may indicate the spirit in which it ought to be conceived. Paganism
was a religion, but was discarded because it was not supernatural:
Neo-Platonism could not be maintained because it was not a religion.
Christianity was both. It had its roots in a national faith, moulded
by the trials and passions of a singularly religious people; that
connection with Judaism gave Christianity a foothold in history, a
definite dogmatic nucleus, which it was a true instinct in the Church
never to abandon, much as certain speculative heresies might cry out
against the unnatural union of a theory of redemption with one of
creation, and of a world-denying ascetic idealism, which Christianity
was essentially, with the national laws, the crude deism, and the
strenuous worldliness of the ancient Jews. However, had the Gnostic
or Manichæan heresies been victorious, Christianity would have been
reduced to a floating speculation: its hard kernel of positive dogma,
of Scripture, and of hieratic tradition would have been dissolved. It
would have ceased to represent antiquity or to hand down an ancestral
piety: in fine, by its eagerness to express itself as a perfect
philosophy, it would have ceased to be a religion. How essential an
element its Hebraism was, we can see now by the study of Protestantism,
a group of heresies in which the practical instincts and sentimental
needs of the Teutonic race found expression, by throwing over more or
less completely the Catholic dogma and ritual. Yet in this revolution
the Protestants maintained, or rather increased, the intensity of their
religious consciousness, chiefly by absorbing the elements of Hebrew
law and prophecy which they could find in the Bible and casting into
that traditional form their personal conscience or their national
ideals.