the actual fact of the collision. We may say with Lacordaire, 'God is
the proper name of truth, as truth is the abstract name of God.' But
it is not a matter of indifference from which point we start, whether
with religion we approach God first as a moral Being, or with
philosophy seek for Him as the truth of man and nature. The motto of
Oxford University, _Dominus Illuminatio mea_, altogether changes its
meaning if we read it _Illuminatio Dominus meus_. As Réville says, 'A
religion may become philosophical, but no philosophy has ever founded
a religion possessing real historical power[97].' And it is a fact
patent to the observation of all, that it is easier to make religion
philosophical than to make philosophy in any real sense religious. The
reason of this is obvious. Religion is not only first in the field, it
covers the whole ground before either morals or science have attained
their full development, or even emerged into conscious life. But when
we speak of philosophy, we have reached a stage in which the reason
has already separated itself from, and set itself over against, the
religious consciousness, and must either absorb religion into itself,
in which case religion ceases to be religion, or must leave religion
outside, though it may borrow and appropriate religious terms. If,
then, the idea of God is to appeal to both the religious consciousness
and the speculative reason it must be by claiming philosophy for
religion, not by claiming religion for philosophy. It is from within,
not from without, that religion must be defended.
In Greece the traditional polytheism was challenged, as we have seen,
at once on the side both of morals and metaphysics. To Xenophanes,
indeed, the unity of God is even more essential than His morality, and
the attack on anthropomorphism is as much an attack upon the number of
the gods of Hesiod as upon the immoral character attributed to them.
In the unity, however, which Xenophanes contends for, the religious
idea of God is so attenuated, that we hardly know whether the One God
is a person, or an abstraction. Indeed, it is hard to see how a
champion of Eleaticism could consistently have held the personality of
God, as we understand it, without falling under his own charge of
anthropomorphism. In Plato the same difficulty appears, only
complicated or relieved by the fact that while from the moral side he
talks like a theist, from the metaphysical his teaching is
pantheistic. Is the 'Idea of Good' personal? Is it a God we can love
and worship, or only a God we can talk about? Is the vision of Er a
concession to popular views, or the vehicle of moral and religious
truth? The question is hardly more easy to decide with regard to
Aristotle. The religious atmosphere, which lingers on in Plato, has
disappeared. What of the religious belief? Did Aristotle in any
intelligible sense hold the personality of God? Great names are ranged
on both sides of the mediaeval controversy. Who shall decide? But
whether or no anything of religion survived in philosophy, it was not
strong enough to withstand the attack of the moral and the speculative
reason, still less to claim these as its own. It is not on the side of
religion, but of speculation, that we are debtors to the Greeks.
Among the Jews, on the other hand, speculation seems hardly to have
existed. Religion was satisfied to make good her claim to the region
of morals. God was One, and He was Righteous, but the mystery which
enveloped His nature the Old Testament does not attempt to fathom.
'Clouds and darkness are round about Him,' yet out of the thick
darkness comes the clear unfaltering truth that 'Righteousness and
judgment are the habitation of His seat.' Jewish religion and Greek
speculation had little contact, and less kinship, till the best days
of both were passed. But in the days of the dispersion we get the
beginning of the mingling of those streams which were only united
under the higher unity of Christianity. 'With the Jews of the East,'
it has been said, 'rested the future of Judaism: with them of the
West, in a sense, that of the world. The one represented old Israel,
groping back into the darkness of the past; the other young Israel,
stretching forth its hands to where the dawn of a new day was about to
break[98].' The Septuagint translation threw open to the Greek world
the sacred books of Israel. The Apocrypha, with all its glorification
of Judaism, was both an apology and an eirenicon[99]. It seemed as if
in Wisdom personified might be found a middle term between the
religion of Israel and the philosophy of Greece, and the life of
righteousness might be identified with the life of true wisdom. The
Jews of Alexandria were thus willing to find a strain of truth in
Greek philosophy, and Alexandrian Greeks were found ready 'to
spiritualize their sensuous divinities[100].' But the result was a
compromise, in which the distinctive elements of each were not
harmonized but lost. There was no fusion as yet of Jewish and Greek
thought, only each was learning to understand the other, and
unconsciously preparing for the higher synthesis of Christianity.
Whether we think of Christ as the 'Son of Man,' or as the Revealer of
God, Christianity is bound to transcend national distinctions, and to
claim not only the whole of humanity, but the whole of man, his
reason, no less than his heart and will. And this Christ did in a
special way. He not only speaks of Himself as 'the Truth,' and as
having come 'to bear witness to the Truth,' but the very complement
(if we may say so) of His revelation of the Father was the sending
'the Spirit of Truth,' who should teach His disciples all things. This
possession of 'truth' is always spoken of by Christ as a future thing,
implicit indeed in Himself, Who is the Truth, but only to be
explicitly declared and brought to remembrance when the Spirit of
Truth should come. He was to guide them 'into all truth.' 'Ye shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' It was inevitable,
then, that the question should arise,--Will this religion, which has
broken through the narrowness of Judaism, and yet by its belief in a
God of righteousness and love combated and triumphed over heathen
immorality, have the power to assimilate and absorb the philosophy of
Greece? The great crisis in the world's history, as we see it, looking
back from the security of eighteen centuries, was this:--Will
Christianity, with all its moral triumphs, become a tributary to Greek
philosophy, as represented by the Schools of Alexandria, or will it
claim and transform the rational, as it has transformed the moral,
progress of humanity? The answer of Christianity is unhesitating.
Christianity is truth, and there is only one truth. Christianity is
wisdom, and there is only one wisdom; for the wisdom of the world is
not wisdom but folly. And at once the rival claim is made. Why not a
division of territory? Knowledge for the philosopher; faith for the
Christian. The Gnostics taught, as a modern philosopher teaches, that
religion is 'reason talking naively,' and that, good as it is for
ordinary people, the Gnostic can afford to do without it. Every one
knows the answer of the Apostles to the insidious suggestions of
Gnosticism. To S. Peter it is 'a damnable heresy, even denying the
Lord who bought us[101].' To S. Paul it is the 'science falsely so
called[102]' the 'knowledge which puffs up[103];' the 'wisdom of this
world[104].' To S. John, Cerinthus was 'the enemy of the truth[105].'
To S. Polycarp, Marcion is 'the firstborn of Satan.' It never occurred
to the Apostles, or the Apologists after them, to retreat into the
fastnesses of a reasonless faith. For with them faith was implicit
knowledge, and the only knowledge that was true.
It was the collision of Christianity with Greek thought which gave
rise to Christian theology in the strict sense of the term. Its
necessity was the claiming of Greek as well as Jew; its justification
was the belief in the presence of the Spirit of truth; its impulse the
desire 'to know the things which are freely given to us by God[106].'
The first Christians were not theologians. They were 'unlearned and
ignorant men.' When Christ preached, the common people heard Him
gladly, the publicans and the harlots believed Him, the poor found in
His teaching 'good news,' and a few fishermen devoted their lives to
Him. But the Scribes and Pharisees stood aloof; and the rationalistic
Sadducees asked Him captious questions; and the Herodians, the
Erastians of the day, tried to involve Him with the secular power. It
was only when challenged by an earnest, but non-religious philosophy,
that reason came forward, in the strength of the Spirit of truth, to
interpret to itself and to the world the revelation of Christ.
Religion and theology in different ways have to do with the knowledge
of God and of spiritual truth. They have the same object, God, but
their aims and their methods are different. Religion knows God;
theology is concerned with the idea of God. Religion sees; theology
thinks. Religion begins and ends in an almost instinctive attitude of
worship; theology rationalizes and defines the characteristics of the
Object of worship. As reason seeks to interpret feeling, so theology
interprets religion. It makes explicit what is implicit in religion.
'As the intellect is cultivated and expanded, it cannot refrain from
the attempt to analyse the vision which influences the heart, and the
object in which it centres; nor does it stop till it has, in some
sort, succeeded in expressing in words, what has all along been a
principle both of the affections and of practical obedience[107].' It
takes the facts which the religious consciousness has seized, seeks to
bring them into distinctness before the mental vision, to connect them
with one another in a coherent system, and find in them the
explanation and unity of all that is. Christian theology grows
naturally out of the Christian religion. But religion is a divine
life; theology a divine science.
This explains the fact that though both religion and theology have to
do with the knowledge of God, and ideally work in perfect harmony, yet
they are often found opposed. Theology is always in danger of becoming
unreal. What is an interpretation for one age becomes 'a tongue not
understanded' in the next. Hence when a revival of religious life
comes, it frequently shews itself in an attack on the received
theology. Theology is no longer regarded as the scientific expression
of the very truths which religion values; it is conceived of as the
antithesis of religion, and reformers dream of a new theology which
shall be for them what, though they know it not, the old theology was
to their predecessors, the handmaid and guardian of religious truth.
When Martin Luther said that 'an old woman who reads her Bible in the
chimney corner knows more about God than the great doctors of
theology,' he was emphasising the severance which, in his day, had
come, to exist between a religious life and theological orthodoxy. And
when in his _Table Talk_ he says, 'A Jurist may be a rogue, but a
theologian must be a man of piety,' he touches a real truth. A hundred
years later, amid the confusions and unrealities of the seventeenth
century, John Smith[108], the Cambridge Platonist, said the same:
'They are not always the best skilled in divinity,' he says, 'that are
most studied in those pandects into which it is sometimes digested.'
'Were I to define divinity, I should rather call it _a divine life_
than _a divine science_.' Technically, no doubt, he was wrong, for
theology is a science and not a life, but, like Luther, he was
vindicating the truth that it is possible for quite simple people to
_know God_, though they have no knowledge of theology, and that
theology, when it becomes speculative and abstract, ceases to be
theology. A theologian, as Mazzini says of an artist, 'must be a
high-priest or a charlatan.'
But the world dislikes a high-priest, and good people dislike a
charlatan. And the consequence is that theology, ancient or modern, is
attacked from two very different points of view, by those who look
upon it as the antithesis of 'the simple Gospel,' and by those who
approach it from the side of speculative thought. Theology claims to
be a divine science. Religious people attack it because it is a
science; philosophers because it claims to be divine. To the former,
religion expressed in rational terms ceases to be religion; to the
latter, that science is no science which claims for itself unique
conditions. Yet S. Paul seems to recognise both the necessity and the
uniqueness of theology when he says to the Greeks of Corinth, 'We
received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God,
that we might know the things that are freely given us by God.'
It is the relation of Christian theology to philosophy and science
with which we are specially concerned. But it is impossible to pass
by the objection to theology which comes as it were _ab intra_ from
the side of religion. For if it is valid, then Christianity may as
well give up at once any idea of being the religion of man. Yet people
say, 'Why have a theology? Human reason cannot search out "the deep
things of God;" it will only put new difficulties in a brother's way;
why not rest content with the words of Holy Scripture, with simple
truths like "God is love," and simple duties like "Love one another,"
and leave theology alone?' Now without denying what George Eliot calls
'the right of the individual to general haziness,' or asserting that
every Christian must be a theologian, we may surely say that
Christianity is bound to have a theology. And even individual
Christians, if they ever grow into the manhood of reason, must have a
theology, or cease to be religious. The protest against theology from
the side of religion looks modest and charitable enough till we
remember that religious haziness is generally, if not always, the
outcome of moral laziness; that it implies the neglect of a duty and
the neglect of a gift;--the duty of realizing to the reason the
revelation of Christ, and the gift of the Spirit of Truth to enable us
to do it. More than this, the protest against theology in the
interests of religion is irrational and suicidal. To tell a thinking
man that he need not interpret to his reason what religion tells him
of God, is like saying to him, 'Be religious if you will, but you need
not let your religion influence your conduct.' If Christianity had
been content to be a moral religion, if it had abandoned its claim to
rationality and had left Greek speculation alone, it must have
accepted either the Gnostic division of territory, or recognised an
internecine conflict between religion and philosophy. And it did
neither; but, under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, Christian
theology arose and claimed the reason of the ancient world.
Thus as the religion of the Old Testament claims morality for God, so
Christianity goes further and claims to hold the key to the
intellectual problems of the world. So far as the nature of God is
concerned, Christianity met the intellectual difficulties of the first
centuries by the _Doctrine of the Trinity_.
From time to time people make the discovery that the doctrine of the
Trinity is older than Christianity. If the discoverer is a Christian
apologist, he usually explains that God has given anticipatory
revelations to men of old, and points out how they fall short of the
revelation of Christianity. If he is an opponent of Christianity, he
triumphantly claims to have unmasked the doctrine and tracked it down
to a purely natural origin. 'People think,' says Hegel, 'that by
pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have _ipso facto_
banished it from Christianity[109].' Men have found the doctrine, or
something like it, not only in the Old Testament but in Plato and
Neo-Platonism, and among the Ophite Gnostics, in the Chinese
Tao-Té-Ching and the 'Three Holy Ones' of Bouddhism, in the Tri-mûrti
of Hinduism and elsewhere. Why not? Revelation never advances for
itself the claim which its apologists sometimes make for it, the claim
to be something absolutely new. A truth revealed by God is never a
truth out of relation with previous thought. He leads men to feel
their moral and intellectual needs before He satisfies either. There
was a preparation for Hebrew monotheism, as there was a preparation
for the Gospel of Christ. There was an intellectual preparation for
the doctrine of the Trinity, as there was a moral preparation for the
doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation is distinguished from the _avatars_ of Hinduism, and the
incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative moral force, the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less distinguished from the
pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and its modern developments by the
fact that for eighteen centuries it has been the safeguard of a pure
Monotheism against everything which menaces the life of religion.
But Christian theology is not 'a philosophy without assumptions.' It
does not attempt to prove _sola ratione_ the doctrine of the Trinity,
but to shew how that which reason demands is met and satisfied by the
Christian doctrine of God. Starting with the inheritance of faith, the
belief in the Divinity of Christ, and trusting in the guidance of the
Spirit of Truth, it throws itself boldly into the rational problem,
fights its way through every form of Unitarianism, and interprets its
faith to itself and to the world at large in the doctrine of the
Triune God. Its charter is the formula of Baptism, where the
'treasures of immediate faith are gathered up into a sentence, though
not yet formulated into a doctrine[110].'
To the Greek mind two things had become clear before Christianity came
into the world, and it would be easy to trace the steps by which the
conclusions were reached. First, Reason, as relation-giving, seeks for
unity in the manifoldness of which it is conscious, and will be
satisfied with nothing less. But Eleaticism had convincingly proved
that an abstract unity can explain nothing. Quite apart from questions
of religion and morals, the Eleatic unity was metaphysically a
failure. Plato had seen this, and yet the 'dead hand' of Eleaticism
rested on Platonism, and the dialogue _Parmenides_ shewed how
powerless the Doctrine of Ideas was to evade the difficulty. Thus the
Greeks more than 2000 years ago had realized, what is nowadays
proclaimed, as if it were a new discovery, that an absolute unit is
unthinkable, because, as Plato puts it in the _Philebus_, the union of
the one and the many is 'an everlasting quality in thought itself
which never grows old in us.' The Greeks, like the Jews, had thus had
their 'schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.' They had not solved, but
they had felt, the rational difficulty; as the Jews had felt, but had
not overcome, except through the Messianic hope, the separation of man
from God. But as the Trinitarian doctrine took shape, Christian
teachers realized how the Christian, as opposed to the Jewish, idea of
God, not only held the truth of the Divine Unity as against all
polytheistic religions, but claimed reason on its side against all
Unitarian theories. They did not, however, argue that it was true
because it satisfied reason, but that it satisfied reason because it
was true.
They started, indeed, not with a metaphysical problem to be solved,
but with a historical fact to proclaim, the fact of the Resurrection,
and a doctrinal truth to maintain, the Divinity of Him who rose. And
starting from that basis of fact revealed in Christ, they found
themselves in possession of an answer to difficulties which at first
they had not felt, and thus their belief was justified and verified in
the speculative region.
The truth for which they contended, which was enshrined in their
sacred writings, was that 'the Father is God, the Son is God, and the
Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.' But
the Fathers do not treat this doctrine merely as a revealed mystery,
still less as something which complicates the simple teaching of
Monotheism, but as the condition of rationally holding the Unity of
God. 'The Unity which derives the Trinity out of its own self,' says
Tertullian, 'so far from being destroyed, is actually supported by
it[111].' 'We cannot otherwise think of One God,' says Hippolytus,
'but by truly believing in Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost[112].' 'The
supreme and only God,' says Lactantius, 'cannot be worshipped except
through the Son. He who thinks that he worships the Father only, in
that he does not worship the Son also, does not worship the
Father[113]. 'Without the Son the Father is not,' says Clement of
Alexandria, 'for in that He is a Father He is the Father of the Son,
and the Son is the true teacher about the Father[114].' So Origen
argues,--If God had ever existed alone in simple unity and solitary
grandeur, apart from some object upon which from all eternity to pour
forth His love, He could not have been always God. His love, His
Fatherhood, His very omnipotence would have been added in time, and
there would then have been a time when He was imperfect. 'The
Fatherhood of God must be coeval with His omnipotence; for it is
through the Son that the Father is Almighty[115].' This was the line
of argument afterwards developed by S. Athanasius when he contended
against the Arians that the Son was the reality or truth[116] of the
Father, without whom the Father could not exist; and by S. Augustine,
when he argues that love implies one who loves and one who is loved,
and love to bind them together[117]. Even one so unphilosophically
minded as Irenaeus[118], cannot but see in the Christian doctrine of
the relation of the Father and the Son, the solution of the difficulty
about the infinity of God: 'Immensus Pater in Filio mensuratus;
mensura Patris Filius.' While philosophy with increasing hopelessness
was asking, How can we have a real unity which shall be not a barren
and dead unity, but shall include differences? Christianity, with its
doctrine of God, was arguing that that which was an unsolved
contradiction for non-Christian thought, was a necessary corollary of
the Christian Faith[119].
The other truth which Greek thought had realized was the immanence of
reason in nature and in man. When Anaxagoras first declared that the
universe was the work of intelligence, we are told that he seemed
'like a sober man amongst random talkers.' But both Plato and
Aristotle accuse him of losing the truth which he had gained because
he made intelligence appear only on occasions in the world, dragged
in, like a stage-god, when naturalistic explanations failed[120]. The
conception of creation out of nothing was of course unknown to
Anaxagoras. Intelligence is only the arranger of materials already
given in a chaotic condition. With Aristotle too it is reason which
makes everything what it is. But the reason is in things, not outside
them. Nature is rational from end to end. In spite of failures and
mistakes, due to her materials, nature does the best she can and
always aims at a good end[121]. She works like an artist with an ideal
in view[122]. Only there is this marked difference,--Nature has the
principle of growth within herself, while the artist is external to
his materials[123]. Here we have a clear and consistent statement of
the doctrine of immanent reason as against the Anaxagorean doctrine of
a transcendent intelligence. If we translate both into the theological
language of our own day, we should call the latter the deistic, the
former the pantheistic, view; or, adopting a distinction of supreme
importance in the history of science, we might say that we have here,
face to face, the mechanical and the organic view of nature. Both were
teleological, but to the one, reason was an extra-mundane cause, to
the other, an internal principle. It was the contrast between external
and inner design, as we know it in Kant and Hegel; between the
teleology of Paley and the 'wider teleology' of Darwin and Huxley and
Fiske; between the transcendent and immanent views of God, when so
held as to be mutually exclusive.