fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true, there stands
before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of the whole
situation, the co-existence of the two preparations, the one general,
indirect, contributory, and consisting only in an impressive
convergence and centering of the lines of ordinary historical
sequences; the other special, directly introductory, and characterized
by the presence of a distinctive power, call it what we may, a genius
for religion, or more truly and adequately a special grace of the
Spirit of God, which is new and above ordinary experience, even as
life is when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when it
appears in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their course
unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another. Greek
wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming to receive from the
narrow national cult of humbled and subject Israel. And Israel, even
taught by the great prophets, could hardly find a place in her vision
of the future for any destiny of the nations of the world. To this
antagonism, or more strictly this ignoring of one another, there are
exceptions, exceptions of the kind which emphasize the character of
the situation which they hardly modify. Two streams of such force and
volume as those of Jewish religion and classical life or culture could
not touch and leave one another altogether uninfluenced, though the
influence was characteristically different. On the side of the world
the spiritual needs of individuals caused numbers, not inconsiderable,
to receive influences which made them ready to act as seeding ground
and ferment for the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of
mission and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the
ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to acknowledge
and witness to the God of Israel, who was God of the whole earth: and
the results, in the Greek of the Septuagint and in the Helleno-Judaic
writings of Alexandria and elsewhere, were invaluable in fashioning
language and thought for Christ's service. But all the more
distinctly, in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed,
the mutual aversion, the impossibility humanly speaking of fusion
between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And, in the second
case, the unreal romancings of the Sibylline works, the apparently
isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism of a politician like
Josephus, have all the character of hybrids, and shew no sign of the
vital fusion by which out of a great wedlock a new thing comes to be.
The two preparations stand apart: they go their own way. There is
indeed in them a strange parallelism of common human experience and
human need. Both have tried their experiments, made their ventures,
won their successes, gone through their disciplines of disenchantment
and failure. Both are conscious of the dying of life: in Israel there
is 'no prophet more'; outside it philosophy has not the creativeness
and energy of youth but the quiet acquiescence and mild prudence of
age, and life, public and private, is without adequate scope or aim.
In both the 'tendencies towards' a Gospel are as far as possible from
making a 'tendency to produce' one. In both there is the same desire
for which the Jew alone can find conscious expression: it is 'Quicken
me!' Both need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the lines
which they follow and the hopes which they frame there is neither
likeness nor compatibility. 'The Greeks seek after wisdom[189].' The
intellect, and those who are distinctively men of the intellect, can
hardly imagine human advance otherwise than in terms of the intellect.
Philosophy conceives of it as a conquest of philosophical result, or
even as an increase of philosophical material. It is the pain of an
advanced and critical time, like that of which we speak, to feel this,
and yet to feel that the experiments of speculation have gone far
enough to shew that by none of their alternative ways can there be any
way out to the peace of certain truth. And yet it seems that, without
abdication of reason, there is no possibility of going any other way:
the Greeks (and in this sense all the world was Greek) could only look
for what they wanted in the form of a new philosophy.
But 'the Jews require a sign.' Totally different, but equally
exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could conceive of a
new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources did not haunt him, for he
looked not to human capacity but to Divine gift and interposition. But
he thought that he knew the form in which such interposition would
come; it was not to be primarily a teaching, (it is the Samaritan and
not the Jew who is recorded as expecting in Messiah one who, 'when He
is come, will tell us all things[190]'); it must appear in action,
'with observation[191],' with pomp and scenic display, with signs, and
signs which, in a very visible and tangible sense, should seem to be
from heaven[192], in particular with circumstances of triumph and
conquest, and with an exaltation of Israel to the glories of her
monarchy many times enlarged.
Such are the demands; the things sought and needed; the conditions
prescribed; definite, severally uncompromising, mutually unlike, and
even conflicting. And then from out of Israel, without moral or
political earthquake, without overwhelming display of supernatural
force, nay even, to a superficial eye, with all the appearance of
weakness and failure, without any rescue for Israel, with no attempt
to present itself in philosophical form, with none of the strain and
elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many in one, but rather
with a paradoxical and offending 'simplicity' and 'foolishness' of
mere assertion:--there comes forth a Thing in which on the one side
Jews--whom we all recognise to be the best Jews, Jews in the truest
and deepest sense--find the whole spirit and meaning, even down to its
detail, of the life and the hope of Israel summed up and fulfilled;
which left them no sense of disappointment, but rather a consciousness
of having had hopes only too narrow and low; which gave them the
exulting sense of 'reigning as kings,' with a 'King of Israel': while
on the other side this same Thing was felt by 'Greeks' as a 'wisdom'
flooding their reasons with a light of truth and wisdom (_sophia_),
which met the search of philosophy (_philo-sophia_)[193], but also in
simple and wise alike drew forth and ministered to needs which
philosophy had but half seen and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling
conscience to be candid and yet at peace, building up a new
cosmopolitan fellowship, and restoring to human life dignity and
value, not only in phrase and theory, but in truth. 'There came forth
a Thing,' or rather there came forth One, in Whom all this was done.
The question rises, 'Whom say we that He is?' And though the answer
must be reached in different ways by different men, and the witness to
Him in Whom is the sum of all, must needs be of many kinds; yet the
convergence of many lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) to
One in whom they are all combined and yet transcended, to One whom
they can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no slight
corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have to
remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity: 'Thou art the
Christ,' the Fulfiller of all high and inspired Jewish hope; 'the Son
of the Living God[194],' His Son,--as the Son of Man, in whom all that
is human reaches fulness; and as the Son of God, who brings down to
man what he has been allowed to prove to himself that he cannot
discover or create.
[150] S. Matt. xiii. 52; v. 17.
[151] S. Matt. xxi. 33-38.
[152] S. Matt. v. 12; xxiii. 30-37.
[153] S. Mark xiv. 49; S. Luke xxii. 37.
[154] S. Luke xxiv. 25, 26, 44.
[155] Gal. iv. 9.
[156] Rom. xvi. 26. So the pages of the early apologists are to our
feeling almost cumbered by the profuseness of their appeal to these
Scriptures.
[157] S. John i. 1, 14, 9, 10.
[158] _Ep._ cii. 12.
[159] _De Carne Christi_ vi. Eum Christum qui jam tunc et adloqui ...
humanum genus ediscebat in carnis habitu: cp. _adv. Prax._ xvi.
ediscebat Deus in terris cum hominibus conversari.
[160] S. Matt. xi. 4, 5; xii. 39; xvi. 3.
[161] Hdt. i. 142.
[162] Clem. Alex. _Protrept._ cx. init.
[163] 1 Cor. i. 21.
[164] Wordsworth, _Excursion_ iv.
[165] Ἀταραξία (Epicurean): αὐτάρκεια.
[166] The words 'era of Christianity' are used intentionally rather
than the more precise 'era of Christ,' because anything which (without
being influenced unless in the most impalpable way by Christianity)
prepared the world through the first and even the second century of
the era to receive the Gospel may be fairly included as preparation
for the revelation of Christ.
[167] Capes, _Age of Antonines_.
[168] _Philosophy of the Greeks: Eclectics_, p. 20 (tr. Alleyne).
[169] _Gospel of the Resurrection_ (3rd ed.), p. 72. It is interesting
to notice that according to so dispassionate an observer as M. Gaston
Boissier (_La Religion Romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_), who has done
so much to trace the better tendencies of the Imperial period, the
evidence suggests some such distinction, even as regards some of the
main practical results of Christianity. For example, there was a
tendency to ameliorate slavery on principles of general humanity, but
there was no hint of a possibility of an end to slavery. There were
some signs of mutual interest between classes, but no progress towards
the effective appearance of a true philanthropy such as the Christian.
In such cases, however, the validity of the distinctions must be
debatable and fluctuating. It is absolute as regards the Incarnation.
[170] Bk. V. c. xi. _The New Monarchy._
[171] Edersheim's _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_: Schürer,
_History of the Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ_.
[172] Schürer, II. ii. 273.
[173] Schürer, II. ii. 297.
[174] Tac. _Hist._ v. 4.
[175] Schürer, II. ii. 308.
[176] Acts xvii. 5, xiv. 5, xiii. 50, 44.
[177] Acts xiii. 43, &c.
[178] Acts xv. 21.
[179] Isaiah xxxvi. 18.
[180] _Hibbert Lectures_, 1882, p. 231.
[181] _Nineteenth Century_, April, 1886.
[182] Isaiah x. 15; xi. 1; Zeph. iii. 12.
[183] Hosea xi. 1.
[184] Amos ix. 7.
[185] Ezekiel xvi. 3.
[186] It is interesting to note that, according to the record
preserved by Israel of their own history, that which Kuenen says of
later time,--that 'at each turning-point of the history stands a man
who claims to bring a word from God.'--is exactly true of the older
history too; Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, are all in this sense
prophets. Yet there is no appearance of a later age forming a past in
its own likeness. The prophets do not imagine an earlier row of
prophets like themselves, put in like the portraits of the early
Scottish kings at Holyrood, to fill the blanks of history. The early
figures are not cut to prophetic pattern; they have each their
distinct individuality of character and office, only they have a unity
of Divine commission and service.
[187] _Pensées_, ii, 7 § 2.
[188] S. Matt. xii 45. It should be observed that the words were
spoken of 'this wicked generation.'
[189] 1 Cor. i. 22.
[190] S. John iv. 25.
[191] S. Luke xvii. 20.
[192] S. Matt. xii. 38; S. John vi. 30, 31, in each case following
some of our Lord's own signs.
[193] This comes before us vividly in Justin Martyr's account of his
own conversion. _Dial. c. Tryph._ 3 ff. 'Thus and for this reason I am
a philosopher.'
[194] S. Matt. xvi. 16.
V.
_THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT._
J. R. ILLINGWORTH.
I. The last few years have witnessed the gradual acceptance by
Christian thinkers of the great scientific generalization of our age,
which is briefly, if somewhat vaguely, described as the Theory of
Evolution. History has repeated itself, and another of the
'oppositions of science' to theology has proved upon inquiry to be no
opposition at all. Such oppositions and reconciliations are older than
Christianity, and are part of what is often called the dialectical
movement; the movement, that is to say, by question and answer, out of
which all progress comes. But the result of such a process is
something more than the mere repetition of a twice-told tale. It is an
advance in our theological thinking; a definite increase of insight; a
fresh and fuller appreciation of those 'many ways' in which 'God
fulfils Himself.' For great scientific discoveries, like the
heliocentric astronomy, are not merely new facts to be assimilated;
they involve new ways of looking at things. And this has been
pre-eminently the case with the law of evolution; which, once
observed, has rapidly extended to every department of thought and
history, and altered our attitude towards all knowledge. Organisms,
nations, languages, institutions, customs, creeds, have all come to be
regarded in the light of their development, and we feel that to
understand what a thing really is, we must examine how it came to be.
Evolution is in the air. It is the category of the age; a 'partus
temporis'; a necessary consequence of our wider field of comparison.
We cannot place ourselves outside it, or limit the scope of its
operation. And our religious opinions, like all things else that have
come down on the current of development, must justify their existence
by an appeal to the past.
It is the object of the following pages to consider what popular
misconceptions of the central doctrine of our religion, the
Incarnation, have been remedied; what more or less forgotten aspects
of it have been restored to their due place; what new lights have been
thrown upon the fulness of its meaning, in the course of our
discussion of the various views of evolution.
In face of the historical spirit of the age, the study of past
theology can never again be regarded as merely a piece of religious
antiquarianism. And there are two classes of mind to which it should
be of especial service. Many an earnest worker in the Christian cause,
conscious how little the refinements of philosophy can influence for
good or evil the majority of men, and generously impatient of all
labour wasted, when the labourers are so few, is apt to under-estimate
what he considers the less practical departments of theology;
forgetful that there are souls, and those among the noblest, to whom
the primary avenue of access is the intellect, and who can only be led
homeward by the illuminative way. The Christian of this type may be
materially helped towards welcoming wider views, by being convinced
that what he has been too easily apt to regard as metaphysical
subtleties, or as dangerous innovations, or as questionable
accommodations of the Gospel to the exigencies of passing controversy,
are after all an integral part of the great Catholic tradition. On the
other hand, many plausible attacks upon the Christian creed are due to
the inadequate methods of its professed interpreters. Fragments of
doctrine, torn from their context and deprived of their due
proportions, are brandished in the eyes of men by well-meaning but
ignorant apologists as containing the sum total of the Christian
faith, with the lamentable consequence that even earnest seekers after
truth, and much more its unearnest and merely factious adversaries,
mislead themselves and others into thinking Christianity discredited,
when in reality they have all along been only criticising its
caricature. Such men need reminding that Christianity is greater than
its isolated interpreters or misinterpreters in any age; that in the
course of its long history it has accumulated answers to many an
objection which they in their ignorance think new; and that, in the
confidence of its universal mission and the memory of its many
victories, it still claims to be sympathetic, adequate, adaptable to
the problems and perplexities of each successive age.
The general tendency of thought since the Reformation has been in the
direction of these partial presentations of Christianity. The
Reformers, from various causes, were so occupied with what is now
called Soteriology, or the scheme of salvation, that they paid but
scant attention to the other aspects of the Gospel. And the
consequence was that a whole side of the great Christian tradition,
and one on which many of its greatest thinkers had lavished the
labours of a lifetime, was allowed almost unconsciously to lapse into
comparative oblivion; and the religion of the Incarnation was narrowed
into the religion of the Atonement. Men's views of the faith dwindled
and became subjective and self-regarding, while the gulf was daily
widened between things sacred and things secular; among which latter,
art and science, and the whole political and social order, gradually
came to be classed.
Far otherwise was it with the great thinkers of the early Church; and
that not from an under-estimate of the saving power of the Cross,
which was bearing daily fruit around them, of penitence, and sanctity,
and martyrdom; but from their regarding Christian salvation in its
context. They realized that redemption was a means to an end, and that
end the reconsecration of the whole universe to God. And so the very
completeness of their grasp on the Atonement led them to dwell upon
the cosmical significance of the Incarnation, its purpose to 'gather
together all things in one.' For it was an age in which the problems
of the universe were keenly felt. Philosophical thinking, if less
mature, was not less exuberant than now, and had already a great past
behind it. And the natural world, though its structural secrets were
little understood, fascinated the imagination and strained the heart
with its appealing beauty. Spiritualism, superstition, scepticism,
were tried in turn but could not satisfy. The questionings of the
intellect still pressed for a solution. And the souls of Christians
were stirred to proclaim that the new power which they felt within
them, restoring, quickening, harmonizing the whole of their inner
life, would also prove the key to all these mysteries of matter and of
mind.
So it was that the theology of the Incarnation was gradually drawn
out, from the teaching of S. Paul and of S. John. The identity of Him
Who was made man and dwelt among us, with Him by Whom all things were
made and by Whom all things consist; His eternal pre-existence as the
reason and the word of God, the Logos; His indwelling presence in the
universe as the source and condition of all its life, and in man as
the light of His intellectual being; His Resurrection, His
Ascension,--all these thoughts were woven into one magnificent
picture, wherein creation was viewed as the embodiment of the Divine
ideas, and therefore the revelation of the Divine character;
manifesting its Maker with increasing clearness at each successive
stage in the great scale of being, till in the fulness of time He
Himself became man, and thereby lifted human nature, and with it the
material universe to which man is so intimately linked; and triumphing
over the sin and death under which creation groaned and travailed,
opened by His Resurrection and then by His Ascension vistas of the
glorious destiny purposed for His creatures before the world was.
'Factus est quod sumus nos, uti nos perficeret esse quod est
ipse[195].'
Such is the view of the Incarnation in what may be called its
intellectual aspect, which we find gradually expressed with increasing
clearness by the Fathers, from Justin to Athanasius. And with all its
deep suggestiveness, it is still a severely simple picture, drawn in
but few outlines, and those strictly scriptural. It was born of no
abstract love of metaphysic, and stands in striking contrast to the
wild speculations of the time. Its motive and its method were both
intensely practical; its motive being to present Christianity to the
mind as well as to the heart; and its method no more than to connect
and interpret and explain the definite statements of S. Paul and
S. John. Passing over the dark ages, when thought was in comparative
abeyance, and the energies of the Church absorbed in the work of
conversion and organization, we come, in the twelfth and following
centuries, to a second period of intellectual ferment, less brilliant
than that which characterized the decadence of the old civilization,
but instinct with all the fire and restlessness of youth. Unsobered as
yet by experience, and unsupplied with adequate material from without,
thought preyed upon itself and revelled in its new-found powers of
speculation. Fragments of the various heresies which the Fathers had
answered and outlived reappeared with all the halo of novelty around
them. Religions were crudely compared and sceptical inferences drawn.
Popular unbelief, checked in a measure by authority, avenged itself by
ridicule of all things sacred. It was a period of intense intellectual
unrest, too many-sided and inconsequent to be easily described. But as
far as the anti-Christian influences of the time can be summarized
they were mainly two:--the Arabic pantheism, and the materialism which
was fostered in the medical schools; kindred errors, both concerned
with an undue estimate of matter. And how did Christian theology meet
them? Not by laying stress, like the later Deists, upon God's infinite
distance from the world, but upon the closeness of His intimacy with
it: by reviving, that is, with increased emphasis the Patristic
doctrine of the Incarnation, as the climax and the keystone of the
whole visible creation. There is a greater divergence of opinion,
perhaps, among the Schoolmen than among the Fathers; and a far greater
amount of that unprofitable subtlety for which they are apt to be
somewhat too unintelligently ridiculed. But on the point before us, as
on all others of primary importance, they are substantially unanimous,
and never fail in dignity.
'As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word, Who is the Son,
so the unfolding of that thought in external action (per opera
exteriora) is named the word of the Word[196].'
'The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of that Word
by which it was created[197].'
'Every creature is a theophany[198].'
'Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God[199].'
'The wisdom of God, when first it issued in creation, came not to us
naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things. And then when the
same wisdom would manifest Himself to us as the Son of God, and so was
seen of men[200].'
'The Incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and consummation of
the Universe[201].'
Such quotations might be multiplied indefinitely from the pages of the
Schoolmen and scholastic theologians. And the line of thought which
they indicate seems to lead us by a natural sequence to view the
Incarnation as being the predestined climax of creation, independently
of human sin. The thought is of course a mere speculation, 'beyond
that which is written,' but from its first appearance in the twelfth
century it has been regarded with increasing favour; for it is full of
rich suggestiveness, and seems to throw a deeper meaning into all our
investigations of the world's gradual development.
Again, from the relation of the Word to the universe follows His
relation to the human mind. For 'that life was the light of men.'
'The created intellect is the imparted likeness of God,' says
S. Thomas; and again, 'Every intellectual process has its origin in
the Word of God Who is the Divine Reason.' 'The light of intellect is
imprinted upon us by God Himself (immediate a Deo).' 'God continually
works in the mind, as being both the cause and the guide of its
natural light.' 'In every object of sensitive or rational experience
God Himself lies hid[202].' All intelligences know God implicitly, in
every object of their knowledge[203].' 'Christ is our internal
teacher, and no truth of any kind is known but through Him; though He
speaks not in language as we do, but by interior illumination[204].'
'The philosophers have taught us the sciences, for God revealed them
to them[205].'
II. The point to be noticed in the teaching of which such passages are
scattered samples, is that the Schoolmen and orthodox mystics of the
middle age, with Pantheism, materialism, rationalism surging all
around them, and perfectly conscious of the fact, met these errors,
not by denying the reality of matter, or the capacity of reason, as
later apologists have often done, but by claiming for both a place in
the Theology of the Word. And this Theology of the Word was, in
reality, quite independent of, and unaffected by, the subtleties and
fallacies and false opinions of the age, cobwebs of the unfurnished
intellect which time has swept away. It was a magnificent framework,
outside and above the limited knowledge of the day and the
peculiarities of individual thinkers; an inheritance from the
Patristic tradition, which the Fathers, in their turn, had not
invented, but received as Apostolic doctrine from Apostolic men, and
only made more explicit by gradual definition, during centuries when,
it has been fairly said, 'the highest reason, as independently
exercised by the wise of the world, was entirely coincident with the
highest reason as inspiring the Church[206].' We have now to consider
whether this view of the Incarnation, which, though in the countries
most influenced by the Reformation it has dropped too much out of
sight, has yet never really died out of the Church at large, is in any
way incompatible with the results of modern science; or whether, on
the contrary, it does not provide an outline to which science is
slowly but surely giving reality and content.