UNIVERSITY LIBRARY I UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO from the collection of Professor Koppel S. Pinson THE HIBBBET LECTUEES 1888 N r\ THE Hibbert Trustees cannot add this volume to theii series without a few lines of grateful acknowledgment. It is impossible to forget either the courteous readiness with which the accomplished author undertook the task originally, or the admirable qualities he brought to it. When he died without completing the MS. for the press, the anxiety of the Trustees was at once relieved by the kind effort of his family to obtain adequate assistance. The public will learn from the Preface how much had to be done, and will join the Trustees in grateful apprecia- tion of the services of the gentlemen who responded to the occasion. That Dr. Hatch's friend, Dr. Fairbairn, consented to edit the volume, with the valuable aid of Mr. Bartlet and Professor Sanday, was an ample pledge that the want would be most efficiently met. To those gentlemen the Trustees are greatly indebted for the learned and earnest care with which the laborioug revision was made. THE HIBBERT LECTURES, 1888. THE INFLUENCE OF GREEK IDEAS AND USAGES UPON THB CHRISTIAN CHURCH. BY THB LATK \ EDWIN HATCH, D.D. RBADBR'IN EOOLE3IASTIOAT. HISTORY IN THB aNIVlRSITT Or KDITRD BY A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D.D. LATE PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD. WILLTAMS AND NORGATE, 14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON. 1914. RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.K., AND BUNGAY, SOFFOi.K. PREFACE. THE fittest introduction to these Lectures will be a few words of explanation. Before his death, Dr. Hatch had written out and sent to press the first eight Lectures. Of these he had cor- rected six. while the proofs of the seventh and eighth, with some corrections in his own hand, were found among his papers. As regards these two, the duties of the editor were simple : he had only to correct them for the press. But as regards the remaining four Lectures, the work was much more arduous and responsible. A continuous MS., or even a connected outline of any one of the Lectures, could not be said to exist. The Lectures had indeed been delivered a year and a half before, but the delivery had been as it were of selected passages, with the connections orally supplied, while the Lecturer did not always follow the order of his notes, or, as we know from the Lectures he himself prepared for the press, the one into which he meant to work his finished material. What came into the editor's hands was a series of note- vi PREFACE. books, which seemed at first sight but an amorphous mass or collection of hurried and disconnected jottings, now in ink, now in pencil ; with a multitude of cross references made by symbols and abbreviations whose very significance had to be laboriously learned ; with abrupt beginnings and still more abrupt endings ; with pages crowded with successive strata, as it were, of reflections and references, followed by pages almost or entirely blank, speaking of sections or fields meant to be further explored ; with an equal multitude of erasures, now complete, now incom- plete, now cancelled; with passages marked as trans- posed or as to be transposed, or with a sign of interroga- tion which indicated, now a suspicion as to the validity or accuracy of a statement, now a simple suspense of judgment, now a doubt as to position or relevance, now a simple query as of one asking, Have I not said this, or something like this, before ? In a word, what we had were the note-books of the scholar and the literary work- man, well ordered, perhaps, as a garden to him who made it and had the clue to it, but at once a wilderness and a labyrinth to him who had no hand in its making, and who had to discover the way through it and out of it by research and experiment. But patient, and, I will add, loving and sympathetic work, rewarded the editor and his kind helpers. The clue was found, the work proved more connected and continuous than under the PREFACE. Til conditions could have been thought to be possible, and the result is now presented to the world. A considerable proportion of the material for the ninth Lecture had been carefully elaborated ; but some of it, and the whole of the material for the other three, was in the state just described. This of course added even more to the responsibilities than to the labours of the editor. In the body of the Lectures most scrupulous care has been taken to preserve the author's ipsissima verba, and, wherever possible, the structure and form of his sen- tences. But from the very necessities of the case, the hand had now and then to be allowed a little more free- dom ; connecting words, headings, and even here and there a transitional sentence or explanatory clause, had to be added ; but in no single instance has a word, phrase or sentence been inserted in the text without warrant from some one part or another of these crowded note-books. With the foot-notes it has been different. One of our earliest and most serious difficulties was to find whence many of the quotations, especially in the ninth Lecture, came. The author's name was given, but often no clue to the book or chapter. We have been, I think, in every case successful in tracing the quotation to its source. Another difficulty was to connect the various references with the paragraph, sentence or state- ment, each was meant to prove. This involved a new Vlll PREFACE. labour; the sources had to be consulted alike for the purposes of verification and determination of relevance and place. The references, too, in the note-books were often of the briefest, given, as it were, in algebraics, and they had frequently to be expanded and corrected; while the search into the originals led now to the making of excerpts, and now to the discovery of new authorities which it seemed a pity not to use. As a result, the notes to Lecture IX. are mainly the author's, though all as verified by other hands ; but the notes to Lecture X., and in part also XI., are largely the editor's. This is stated in order that all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies may be laid at the proper door. It seemed to the editor that, while he could do little to make the text what the author would have made it if it had been by his own hand prepared for the press, he was bound, in the region where the state of the MSS. made a discreet use of freedom not only possible but compulsory, to make the book as little unworthy of the scholarship and scrupulous accuracy of the author as it was in his power to do. The pleasant duty remains of thanking two friends who have greatly lightened my labours. The first is Vernon Bartlet, M.A. ; the second, Professor Sanday. Mr. Bartlet's part has been the heaviest ; without him the work could never have been done. He laboured at PREFACE. IX the MSS. till the broken sentences became whole, and the disconnected paragraphs wove themselves together ; and then he transcribed the black and bewildering pages into clear and legible copy for the printer. He had heard the Lectures, and had happily taken a few notes, which, supplemented from other sources, proved most helpful, especially in the way of determining the order to be followed. He has indeed been in every way a most unwearied and diligent co-worker. To him we also owe the Synopsis of Contents and the Index. Professor Sanday has kindly read over all the Lectures that have passed under the hands of the editor, and has furnished him with most helpful criticisms, suggestions, and emen- dations. The work is sent out with a sad gratitude. I am grateful that it has been possible so far to fulfil the author's design, but sad because he no longer lives to serve the cause he loved so well. This is not the place to say a word either in criticism or in praise of him or his work. Those of us who knew hiir know how little a book like this expresses his whole mind, or represents all that in this field he had it in him to do. The book is an admirable illustration of his method ; in order to be judged aright, it ought to be judged within the limits he himself has drawn. It is a study in historical development, an analysis of some of the fc PREFACE. formal factors that conditioned a given process and de- termined a given result ; but it deals throughout solely with these rbrmal factors and the historical conditions under which they operated. He never intended to dis- cover or discuss the transcendental causes of the process on the one hand, or to pronounce on the value or validity of the result on the other. His purpose, like his method, was scientific; and as an attempt at the scientific treatment of the growth and formulation of ideas, of the evolution and establishment of usages within the Christian Church, it ought to be studied and criticised. Behind and be- neath his analytical method was a constructive intellect, and beyond his conclusions was a positive and co-ordi- nating conception of the largest and noblest order. To his mind every species of mechanical Deism was alien ; and if his method bears hardly upon the traditions and assumptions by which such a Deism still lives in the region of early ecclesiastical history, it was only that he might prepare the way for the coming of a faith and a society that should be worthier of the Master he loved and the Church he served. A. M. FAIRBAIRN. OXFORD, July, 1890. SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. LKCTURB I. INTRODUCTORY. The Problem : How the Church passed from the Sermon on the Mount to the Nicene Creed ; the change in spirit coincident with a change in soil ... ... ... ... ... 1,2 The need of caution : two preliminary considerations ... 2 1. A religion relative to the whole mental attitude of an age: hence need to estimate the general attitude of the Greek mind during the first three centuries A.D. ... ... 3, 4 2. Every permanent change in religious belief and usage rooted in historical conditions : roots of the Gospel in Judaism, but of fourth century Christianity the key to historical in Hellenism ... ... ... ... 4, 5 The Method : Evidence as to process of change scanty, but ample and representative as to ante-Nicene Greek thought and post-Nicene Christian thought. Respects in which evi- dence defective ... ... ... ... ... 6 10 Two resulting tendencies : 1. To overrate the value of the surviving evidence. 2. To under-estimate opinions no longer accessible or known only through opponents ... ... ... ... 10 (fence method, the correlation of antecedents and consequents 11 13 Antecedents : sketch of the phenomena of Hellenism ... 13, \4 Consequents : changes in original Christian ideas and usages 14 Xll SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. PAGE Attitude of mind required ... ... ... ... ... 15 1. Demand upon attention and imagination ... ... 15, 16 2. Personal prepossessions to be allowed for ... ... 17, 18 3. Need to observe under-currents, e.g. (a) The dualistic hypothesis, its bearing on baptism and exorcism ... ... ... ... ... 19, 20 (b) The nature of religion, e.g. its relation to conscience 21 History as a scientific study : the true apologia in religion 21 24 LECTURE II. GEEEK EDUCATION. The first step a study of environment, particularly as literary. The contemporary Greek world an educated world in a special literary sense ... ... ... ... ... ... 25 27 I. Its forms varied, but all literary : Grammar 2830 Ehetoric 3032 A "lecture-room" Philosophy ... ... 32 35 II. Its influence shown by : 1. Direct literary evidence ... ... ... 35 37 2. Recognized and lucrative position of the teaching profession ... ... ... ... 37 40 3. Social position of its professors ... ... 40 42 4. Its persistent survival up to to-day in general education, in special terms and usages ... 42 48 Into such an artificial habit of mind Christianity came ... 48, 49 LECTURE III. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS. To the Greek the mystery of writing, the reverence for antiquity, the belief in inspiration, gave the ancient poets a unique value ., 50, 51 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. Xlll PAGE Homer, his place in moral education ; used by the Sophists in ethics, physics, metaphysics, &c. ... ... ... 52 57 Apologies for this use culminate in allegory, especially mong the Stoics ... ... ... ... 57 64 The Allegoric temper widespread, particularly in things religious. Adopted by Hellenistic Jews, especially at Alexandria ; Philo 6569 Continued by early Christian exegesis in varied schools, chiefly as regards the Prophets, in harmony with Greek thought, and as a main line of apologetic ... 69 74 Application to the New Testament writings by the Gnostics and the Alexandrines ... ... ... ... ... 75, 76 Its aid as solution of the Old Testament problem, especially in Origen 7779 Reactions both Hellenic and Christian : viz. in 1. The Apologists' polemic against Greek mythology ... 79, 80 2. The Philosophers' polemic against Christianity ... 80 3. Certain Christian Schools, especially the Antiochene 81, 82 Here hampered by dogmatic complications ... ... .. 82 Use and abuse of allegory the poetry of life ... ... ... 82, 83 Alien to certain drifts of the modern spirit, viz. 1. Historic handling of literature ... ... ... ... 84 2. Recognition of the living voice of God ... ... 84, 85 LECTURE IV. GEEEK AND CHRISTIAN RHETORIC. The period one of widely diffused literary culture. The Rhetorical Schools, old and new 8688 Sophistic largely pursued the old lines of Rhetoric, but also philosophized and preached professionally ... ... 88 94 Its manner of discourse ; its rewards ... ... 94 99 Objections of earnest men ; reaction led by Stoics like Epic- tetus . 99105 Xi v SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. PA OK Significance for Christianity ... ... ... ... ... 105 Primitive Christian "prophesying" v. later "preaching." Preaching of composite origin: its essence and form, e.g. in fourth century, A.D. : preachers sometimes itinerant 105 1 1 3 Summary and conclusions ... .. ... ... 113 115 LECTURE V. CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY. Abstract ideas among the Greeks, who were hardly aware of the different degrees of precision possible in mathematics and philosophy ... ... ... ... ... ... 116 lid Tendency to define strong with them, anart from any criterion; nence dogmas ... ... ... 118 120 Dogmatism, amid decay of originality : reaction towards doubt; yet Dogmatism regnant ... ... ... ... 120 123 " Palestinian Philosophy," a complete contrast ... 123,124 Fusion of these in the Old Catholic Church achieved through an underlying kinship of ideas ... .. ... 125,126 Explanations of this from both sides ... ... 126 128 Philosophical Judaism as a bridge, e.g., in allegorism and cosmology 128, 129 Christian philosophy partly apologetic, partly speculative. Alarm of Conservatives : the second century one of tran- sition and conflict ... ... ... ... 130 133 The issue, compromise, and a certain habit of mind ... 133, 134 Summary answer to the main question .,.. .,, ... 134 Th Greek mind seen in : 1. The tendency to define ... ... ... ... 135 2. The tendency to speculate ... ... ... ... 136 3. The point of emphasis, i.e. Orthodoxy ... ... 137 Further development in the West. But Greece the source of the true damnoaa hereditas ... ... ... ... 137, 138 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. XV LECTURE VI. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS. PAGE The average morality of the age: its moral philosophy 139, 140 An age of moral reformation ... ... ... ... 140 142 1. Relation of ethics to philosophy and life ... ... 142 Revived practical bent of Stoicism ; Epictetus 143 147 A moral gymnastic cultivated ... ... ... ... 147 (1) Askesis (acnopts) : Philo, Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom 148150 (2) The "philosopher" or moral reformer ... 160152 2. The contents of ethical teaching, marked by a religious reference. Epictetus' two maxims, " Follow Nature," "Follow God" 152155 Christian ethics show agreement amid difference ; based upon the Divine command ; idea of sin : agreement most empha- sized at first, i.e. the importance of conduct ... 158, 159 1. Tone of earliest Christian writings : the "Two Ways :" Apostolical Constitutions, Bk. i. ... ... 159 162 2. Place of discipline in Christian life : Puritan ideal v. \atercorpu8permixtum ... ... ... 162 164 Further developments due to Greece : 1. A Church within the Church : askesis, Monas- ticism ... ... ... ... ... ... 164 168 2- Resulting deterioration of average ethics : Ambrose of Milan 168. 169 Complete victory of Greek ethics seen in the basis of modern society ^ ... ... ... ... ... IG&, 170 XVI SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS, LECTURE VII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, L THE CREATOR. PAGE The idea of One God, begotten of the unity and order of the world, and connected with the ideas of personality and mind. Three elements in the idea Creator, Moral Governor, Abso- lute Being 171174 Growth of idea of a beginning: Monism and Dualism 174, 175 1. Monism of the Stoics : natura naturata and naturans : a beginning not necessarily involved ... 175 177 2. Dualism, Platonic : creation recognized ... 177 180 Syncretistic blending of these as to process : Logos idea common. Hence Philo's significance : God as Creator : Monistic and Dualistic aspects ; his terms for the Forces in their plurality and unity : after all, God is Creator, even Father, ol the nrorld 180188 Early Christian idea of a single supreme Artificer took perma- nent root ; but questions as to mode emerged, and the first answers were tentative ... ... ... ... 188 190 1. Evolutional type ; supplemented by idea of a lapse 190 194 2. Creational type accepted .. ... ... ... 194 There remained : (i.) The ultimate relation of matter to God : Dualistic solutions : Basilides' Platonic theory the basis of the later doctrine, though not at once recognized 194 198 (ii.) The Creator's contact with matter : Mediation hypo- thesis: the Logos solution ... ... .. 198 200 (iii.) Imperfection and evil : Monistic and Dualistic answers, especially Marcion's ... ... ... 'WO, 201 But the Divine Unity overcomes all : position of Irenseus, &c., widely accepted : Origen's cosmogony a theodicy. Prevalence of the simpler view seen in Monarchianism ... 202 207 Result* ... 207, 208 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. LBCTURE VIII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOG1 U THE MORAL GOVERNOR. \.~ The Greek Idea. FAG E 1. Unity of God and Unity of the world : will and order 200 Order, number, necessity and destiny : intelligent force and law 209211 The Cosmos as a city-state (71-0X15) ... ... 211,212 2. New conceptions of the Divine Nature : Justice and Gnodness in connection with Providence ... 213 215 Tims about the Christian era we find Destiny and Providence, and a tendency to synthesis through two stages in the use ol the term God 215217 3. The problem of evil emerges : attempts at solution. (a) Universality of Providence denied (Platonic and Oriental) 217 (6) Realitv of apparent evils denied (Stoic} 217 220 Ihis not pertinent to moral evil, hence : (e) Theory of human freedom ... ... 220, 221 Its relation to Universality of Providence : the Stoical theodicy exemplified in Epictetus 221 223 B. The Christian Idea. Primitive Christianity a contrast : two main conceptions. 1. Wages for work done ... ... ... ... ... 224 2. Positive Law God a Lawgiver and Judge . .. ... 225 Difficulties in fusing the two typea. (L) Forgiveness and Law ... ... ... ... ... 226 Marcion's ditheism 227, 228 Solution in Irenaeus, Tertullian, &c. : result 228 230 (ii.) The Moral Governor and Free-will. Marcion's dualistic view of moral evil ... 230, 231 Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus 231, 232 Tertullian and the Alexandrines ... ... ... 232 Origen's comprehensive theodicy by aid of Stoicism and Neo-Platonism ... 233237 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. LECTURE IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. III. GOD AS THE SUPREME BEING. PAOB Christian Theology shaped by Greece, though on a Jewish basis 238, 239 A. The Idea and its Development in Greek Philosophy. Parallel to Christian speculation in three stages. 1. Transcendence of God. History of the idea before and after Plato ... 240 243 Its two forms, transcendent proper and supra -cosmic 244 Blending with religious feeling, e.g. in Philo ... 244, 245 2. Revelation of the Transcendent. Through intermediaries : (i.) Mythological 246 (ii.) Philosophical, e.g. in Philo 246, 247 3. Distinctions in the nature of God. Philo's Logos 247, 248 Conceived both monistically and dualistically in rela- tion to God 249 But especially under metaphor of generation ... 250 B. The Idea and its Development in Christian Theology. 1. Here the idea of Transcendence is at first absent 250 252 Present in the Apologists ... ... ... 252, 255 "R^t Go' 4 as transcendent (v. supra-cosmic) first empha- sized by Basilides and the Alexandrines ... 254 256 2. Mediation ( = Revelation) of the Transcendent, a vital problem 256, 257 Theories of modal manifestat ion ... ... 257,258 Dominant idea that of modal existence : (i) As manifold : so among certain Gnostics ... 258 (ii.) As constituting a unity ... ... ... 259 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. C1X PA9E Its Gnostic forms 259, 260 Relation of the logoi to the Logos, especially in Justin 260262 The issue is the Logos doctrine of Irenaeus ... 262, 263 8. Distinctions in the nature of God based on the Logos. (i) Theories as to the genesis of the Logos, ana- logous to those as to the world ... 263, 264 Theories guarding the "sole monarchy," thus endangered, culminate in Origen's idea of eternal generation 265 267 (ii.) Theories of the nature of the Logos determined by either the supra-cosmic or transcendental idea of God 267,268 Origen marks a stage and but a stage in the contro- versies 268, 269 jrreek elements in the subsequent developments. Ousia ; its history 269 272 Difficulty felt in applying it to God 273, 274 As also with homooitsios : need of another term ... 274. 275 H ypostasis : its history ... ... ... ... 275 277 Comes to need definition by a third term (7rpocrt7roy) 277, 278 Resume" of the use of these terms; the reign of dogma- tism 278280 Three underlying assumptions a legacy of the Greek spirit 280, 281 1. The importance of metaphysical distinctions. 2. Their absolute truth. 3. The nature of God's perfection. Conclusion ... ... 289 XX SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. LECTURE X. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES UPON CHRISTIAN USAGES. PAGK A. The Greek Mysteries and Related Cults. Mysteries a"nd religious associations side by side with ordinary Greek religion. 1. The Mysteries, e.g. at Eleusis 283,284 (i.) Initial Purification, through confession and lustra- tion (baptism) 285 287 (ii.) Sacrifices, with procession, &c. ... ... 287, 288 (iii.) Mystic Drama, of nature and human life 288 290 2. Other religious associations : condition of entrance, sacri- fice and common meal ... ... ... 290, 291 Wide extent of the above 291, 292 B. The Mysteries and the Church. Transition to the Christian Sacraments ; influence, general and special 292294 1. Baptism : Its primitive simplicity ... ... ... ... 294,295 Later period marked by : (i.) Change of name 295,296 (ii.) Change of time and conception ... ... 296,297 Minor confirmations of the parallelism... ... 298 300 2. The Lord's Supper : Stages of extra-biblical development, e.g. in DidacW, Apost. Const., the "altar," its offerings as "mys- teries" 300303 Culmination of tendency in fifth century in Dionysius 308 305 The tendency strongest in the most Hellenic circles, viz. Gnostics 305, 306 Secrecy and long catechumenate ... ... 306, 307 Anointing ... ... ... ... ... 307, 308 Realistic change of conception ... ... ... 308. 309 Conclusion ... ... ... ... .. .. 309 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 3UCI LECTURE XI. THE INCORPORATION OF CHRISTIAN IDEAS, AS MODIFIED BY GREEK, INTO A BODY OF DOCTRINE. PAHB " Faith" in Old Testament = trust trust in a person. In Greek philosophy = intellectual conviction 310, 31 1 In Philo, these blend into trust in God in His vera- city, i.e. in the Holy Writings 311, 312 Contemporary longing for certainty based on fact ... ... 312 Here we have the germs of (1) the Creed, (2) the New Testa- ment Canon ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 313 1. At first emphasis on its ethical purpose and revealed basis ; then the latent intellectual element emerges, though not uniformly ... ... ... ... 315 The baptismal formula becomes a test. Expansion by "apostolic teaching" ... 316, 317 The "Apostles' Creed" and the Bishops 317319 U. Uelated question as to sources of the Creed and the materials for its interpretation. Value of written tradition : influence of Old Testament and common idea of prophecy : apostolicity as limit ' 319,320 Marcion and the idea of a Canon ... ... 320,321 " Faith " assumes the sense it had in Philo ... ... 321 3. But the speculative temper remained active upon the "rule of faith:" yvwo-is alongside 7rn-is, especially at Alexandria : Origen 321323 Hence tendency to : (1) Identify a fact with speculations upon it ... 323, 324 (2) Check individual speculations in favour of those of the majority 324326 JCX11 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. Results : (i. ) Such speculations formulated and inserted in the Creed, formally as interpretations : belief changed, but not the importance attached to it ... ... 327,328 (ii.) Distinction between "majority" and "minority" views at a meeting, on points of metaphysical speculation 329 Resume^ of the stages of belief ... ... .. ... 329,330 Underlying conceptions to be noted ... ... ... 330, 331 (1) Philosophic regard for exact definition. (2) Political belief in a majority. (3) Belief in the finality of the views of an age so ascer- tained. Development, if admitted, cannot be arrested ... ... 332 Place of speculation in Christianity ... ... ... 332, 333 LECTURE XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION : DOCTRINE IN THE PLACE OF CONDUCT. Association at first voluntary, according to the genius of Chris- tianity 334, 335 Its basis primarily moral and spiritual: Holiness its charac- teristic : the " Two Ways," Apost. Const. (Bk. i.), the Elchasaites .. t ... 335337 Also a common Hope : its changing form ... 337, 338 Coincident relaxation of bonds of discipline and change in idea of the Church 338,339 Growing stress also upon the intellectural element ... 339, 340 Causes for this, primary and collateral ... ... 340, 341 (1) Importance given to Baptism realistically conceived : its relation to the ministrant ... ... 341, 342 (2) Intercommunion : the necessary test at first moral (e.g. Didache), subsequently a doctrinal for- mula 343345 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. XX111 PAGE This elevation of doctrine due to causes internal to the Christian communities : but an external factor enters with case of Paul of Samosata : its results ... ... ... ... 345 34 7 Lines of reaction against this transformation : (1) Puritan or conservative tendency : Novatianism 347,348 (2) Formation of esoteric class with higher moral ideal : Monachism 348, 349 Conclusion : The Greek spirit still lives in Christian Churches : the vital question is its relation to Christianity ... 349, 350 Two theories permanence of the primitive, assimilative development: no logical third ... ... ... 350,351 On either theory, the Greek element may largely go ... 351 The problem pressing : our study a necessary preliminary and truly conservative ... ... ... ... ... ... 352 New ground here broken : a pioneer's forecast : the Christianity of the future ... ... . . i>62, 363 LXCTUBE 1. INTRODUCTORY. IT is impossible for any one, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct ; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them ; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Mcene Creed is a statement partly of his- torical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences ; the meta- physical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples ; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers. The contrast is patent. If any one thinks that it is sufficiently explained by saying that the one is a sermon and the other a creed, it must be pointed out in reply that the question why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and a meta- physical creed in the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century, is a problem which claims investigation. It claims investigation, but it has not yet been inves- 2 I. INTRODUCTORY. tigated. There have been inquiries, which in some casei have arrived at positive results, as to the causes of par- ticular changes or developments in Christianity the development, for example, of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the theory of a Catholic Church. But the main question to which I invite your attention is antecedent to all such inquiries. It asks, not how did the Christian societies come to believe one proposition rather than another, but how did they come to the frame of mind which attached importance to either the one or the other, and made the assent to the one rather than the other a condition of membership. In investigating this problem, the first point that is obvious to an inquirer is, that the change in the centre of gravity from conduct to belief is coincident with the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil. The presumption is that it was the result of Greek influence. It will appear from the Lectures which follow that this presumption is true. Their general subject is, consequently, The Influence of Greece upon Christianity. The difficulty, the interest, and the importance of the subject make it incumbent upon las to approach it with caution. It is necessary to bear many points in mind as we enter upon it; and I will begin by asking your attention to two considerations, which, being true of all analogous phenomena of religious development and change, may be presumed to be true of the particular phenomena before us. 1. The first is, that the religion of a given race at a given time is relative to the whole mental attitude of I. INTRODUCTORY. 3 that time. It is impossible to separate the religious phenomena from the other phenomena, in the same way that you can separate a vein of silver from the rock in which it is embedded. They are as much determined by the general characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of a geographical area are determined by its soil, its climate, and its cultivation ; and they vary with the changing characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of the tertiary system differ from those of the chalk. They are separable from the whole mass of phenomena, not in fact, but only in thought. We may concentrate our attention chiefly upon them, but they still remain part of the whole complex life of the time, and they cannot be understood except in relation to that life. If any one hesitates to accept this historical induction, I will ask him to take the instance that lies nearest to him, and to consider how he could understand the religious phenomena of our own country in our own time its doubts, its hopes, its varied enterprises, its shifting enthusiasms, its noise, its learning, its aestheticism, and its philanthropies unless he took account of the growth of the inductive sciences and the mechanical arts, of the expansion of literature, of the social stress, of the com- mercial activity, of the general drift of society towards its own improvement. In dealing, therefore, with the problem before us, we must endeavour to realize to ourselves the whole mental attitude of the Greek world in the first three centuries of our era. We must take account of the breadth and depth of its education, of the many currents of its philo- sophy, of its love of literature, of its scepticism and its B2 4 I. INTRODUCTORY. mysticism. We must gather together whatever evidence we can find, not determining the existence or measuring the extent of drifts of thought by their literary expres- sion, but taking note also of the testimony of the monu- ments of art and history, of paintings and sculptures, of inscriptions and laws. In doing so, we must be content, at any rate for the present and until the problem has been more fully elaborated, with the broader features both of the Greek world and of the early centuries. The distinctions which the precise study of history requires us to draw between the state of thought of Greece proper and that of Asia Minor, and between the age of the Antonines and that of the Severi, are not necessary for our immediate purpose, and may be left to the minuter research which has hardly yet begun. 2. The second consideration is, that no permanent change takes place in the religious beliefs or usages of a race which is not rooted in the existing beliefs and usages of that race. The truth which Aristotle enun- ciated, that all intellectual teaching is based upon what is previously known to the person taught, 1 is applicable to a race as well as to an in lividual, and to beliefs even more than to knowledge. A religious change is, like a physiological change, of the nature of assimilation by, and absorption into, existing elements. The religion which our Lord preached was rooted in Judaism. It came " not to destroy, but to fulfil." It took the Jewish 1 jrcura SiSacrKaAia xai iraara. fidOrjaris SiavorjTiKr) IK TrpoiJ7rap)(OVvraAcu7ra)/)ov, Tert. adv. Marc. 4. 9). 2 Examples are the accounts of Basilides in Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus, compared with those in Irenseus and Epiphanius ; and the accounts of the Ophites in Hippolytus, compared with those of Irenseus and Epiphanius. The literature of the subject is considerable : see especially A. Hilgenfeld, die Ketzwgeschichte des Urchristenthums (e.g. p. 202); R. A. Lipsius, zur Quellenkritik deft Epiphanios ; and A. Harnack, zur Quellenkritik der Geschichte des Gnosticismus. 8 The very names of most of the heathen opponents are lost : Lac- tantius (5. 4) speaks of "plurimos et multis in locis et non modo Grsecis sed etiam Latinis litteris." But for the ordinary student, Keini's remarkable restoration of the work of Celsus from the quotations of Origen, with its wealth of illustrative notes, compensates for many losses (Th. Keim, Celsius' Wahres Wort, Zurich, 1873). 10 I. INTRODUCTORY. important exception, we cannot tell how the new religion struck a dispassionate outside observer, or why it was that it left so many philosophers outside its fold. Then, as now, the forces of human nature were at work. The tendency to disparage and suppress an opponent is not peculiar to the early ages of Christianity. When the associated Christian communities won at length their hard-fought battle, they burned the enemy's camp. This fact of the scantiness and inadequacy of the evidence as to the process of transformation has led to two results which constitute difficulties and dangers in our path. 1. The one is the tendency to overrate the value of the evidence that has survived. When only two or three monuments of a great movement remain, it is difficult to appreciate the degree in which those monuments are representative. We tend at almost all times to attach an exaggerated importance to individual writers ; the writers who have moulded the thoughts of their contem- poraries, instead of being moulded by them, are always few in number and exceptional. We tend also to attach an undue importance to phrases which occur in such writers ; few, if any, writers write with the precision of a legal document, and the inverted pyramids which have been built upon chance phrases of Clement or Justin are monuments of caution which we shall do well to keep before our eyes. 2. The other is the tendency to under-estimate the importance of the opinions that have disappeared from sight, or which we know only in the form and to the extent of their quotation by their opponents. If we were I. INTRODUCTORY. 11 to trust the histories that are commonly current, we should believe that there was from the first a body of doctrine of which certain writers were the recognized exponents ; and that outside this body of doctrine there 'was only the play of more or less insignificant opinions, like a fitful guerilla warfare on the flanks of a great army. Whereas what we really find on examining the evidence is, that out of a mass of opinions which for a long time fought as equals upon equal ground, there was formed a vast alliance which was strong enough to shake off the extremes at once of conservatism and of specu- lation, but in which the speculation whose monuments have perished had no less a share than the conservatism of which some monuments have survived. This survey of the nature of the evidence enables us to determine the method which we should follow. We can trace the causes and we can see the effects ; but we have only scanty information as to the intermediate processes. If the evidence as to those processes existed in greater mass, if the writings of those who made the first tenta- tive efforts to give to Christianity a Greek form had been preserved to us, it might have been possible to follow in order of time and country the influence of the several groups of ideas upon the several groups of Christians. This method hasbeen attempted, with questionable success, by some of those who have investigated the history of particular doctrines. But it is impossible to deprecate too strongly the habit of erecting theories upon historical quicksands ; and I propose to pursue the surer path to which the nature of the evidence points, by stating the 12 I. INTRODUCTORY. jauses, by viewing them in relation to the effects, and by considering how far they were adequate in respect of both mass and complexity to produce those effects. There is a consideration in favour of this method which is in entire harmony with that which arises from the nature of the evidence. It is, that the changes that took place were gradual and at first hardly perceptible. It would probably be impossible, even if we were in posses- sion of ampler evidence, to assign a definite cause and a definite date for the introduction of each separate idea. For the early years of Christianity were in some respects like the early years of our lives. It has sometimes been thought that those early years are the most important years in the education of all of us. We learn then, we hardly know how, through effort and struggle and inno- cent mistakes, to use our eyes and our ears, to measure distance and direction, by a process which ascends by unconscious steps to the certainty which we feel in our maturity. We are helped in doing so, to an incalculable degree, by the accumulated experience of mankind which is stored up in language ; but the growth is our own, the unconscious development of our own powers. It was in some such unconscious way that the Christian thought of the earlier centuries gradually acquired the form which we find when it emerges, as it were, into the developed manhood of the fourth century. Greek philosophy helped its development, as language helps a child ; but the assi- milation of it can no more be traced from year to year than the growth of the body can be traced from day to day. We shall begin, therefore, by looking at the several I. INTRODUCTORY. 13 groups of facts of the age in which Christianity grew, and endeavour, when we have looked at them, to estimate their influence upon it. We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of education: we shall find that it was an age that was penetrated with culture, and that necessarily gave to all ideas which it absorbed a cultured and, so to speak, scholastic form. We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of literature : we shall find that it was an age of great lite- rary activity, which was proud of its ancient monuments, and which spent a large part of its industry in endea- vouring to interpret and to imitate them. We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of philosophy : we shall find that it was an age in which metaphysical conceptions had come to occupy relatively the same place which the conceptions of natural science occupy among ourselves; and that just as we tend to look upon external things in their chemical and physical relations, so there was then, as it were, a chemistry and physics of ideas. We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of moral ideas : we shall find that it was an age in which the ethical forces of human nature were struggling with an altogether unprecedented force against the degradation of contemporary society and contemporary religion, and in which the ethical instincts were creating the new ideal of "following God," and were solving the old question whether there was or was not an art of life by practising self-discipline. We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of 14 I. INTRODUCTORY. theological ideas : we shall find that it was an age in which men were feeling after God and not feeling in vain, and that from the domains of ethics, physics, meta- physics alike, from the depths of the moral consciousness, and from the cloud-lands of poets' dreams, the ideas of men were trooping in one vast host to proclaim with a united voice that there are not many gods, but only One, one First Cause by whom all things were made, one Moral Governor whose providence was over all His works, one Supreme Being " of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness." "We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of religion : we shall find that it was an age in which the beliefs that had for centuries been evolving themselves from the old religions were showing themselves in new forms of worship and new conceptions of what God needed in the worshipper ; in which also the older ani- malism was passing into mysticism, and mysticism was the preparation of the soul for the spiritual religion of the time to come. We shall then, in the case of each great group of ideas, endeavour to ascertain from the earliest Christian docu- ments the original Christian ideas upon which they acted; and then compare the later with the earlier form of those Christian ideas ; and finally examine the combined result of all the influences that were at work upon the mental attitude of the Christian world and upon the basis of Christian association. L should be glad if I could at once proceed to examine some of these groups of facts. But since the object I. INTRODUCTORY. ]/) which I have in view is not so much to lead you to any conclusions of my own, as to invite you to walk with me in comparatively untrodden paths, and to urge those of you who have leisure for historical investigations to explore them for yourselves more fully than I have been able to do and since the main difficulties of the investi- gation lie less in the facts themselves than in the attitude of mind in which they are approached I feel that I should fail of my purpose if I did not linger still upon the threshold to say something of the "personal equa- tion" that we must make before we can become either accurate observers or impartial judges. There is the more reason for doing so, because the study of Christian history is no doubt discredited by the dissonance in the voices of its exponents. An ill-informed writer may state almost any propositions he pleases, with the certainty of finding listeners ; a well-informed writer may state propositions which are as demonstrably true as any his- torical proposition can be, with the certainty of being contradicted. There is no court of appeal, nor will there be until more than one generation has been engaged upon the task to which I am inviting you. 1. In the first place, it is necessary to take account of the demand which the study makes upon the attention and the imagination of the student. The scientific, that is the accurate, study of history is comparatively new. The minute care which is required in the examination of the evidence for the facts, and the painful caution which is required in the forming of inferences, are but inadequately appreciated. The study requires not only attention, but also imagination. A student must have ..6 I. INTRODUCTORY. something analogous to the power of a dramatist before he can realize the scenery of a vanished age, or watch, as in a moving panorama, the series and sequence of its events. He must have that power in a still greater degree before he can so throw himself into a bygone time as to be able to*enter into the motives of the actors, and to imagine how, having such and such a character, and surrounded by such and such circumstances, he would himself have thought and felt and acted. But the greatest demand that can be made upon either the attention or the imagination of a student is that which is made by such a problem as the present, which requires as to realize the attitude of mind, not of one man, but of a generation of men, to move with their movements, to float upon the current of their thoughts, and to pass with them from one attitude of mind into another. 2. In the second place, it is necessary to take account of our own personal prepossessions. Most of us come to the study of the subject already knowing something about it. It is a comparatively easy task for a lecturer to present, and for a hearer to realize, an accurate picture of, for example, the religion of Mexico or of Peru, because the mind of the student when he begins the study is a comparatively blank sheet. But most of us bring to the study of Christian history a number of con- clusions already formed. We tend to beg the question before we examine it. We have before us, on the one hand, the ideas and usages of early Christianity; on the other hand, the ideas and usages of imperial Greece. We bring to the former the thoughts, the associations, I. INTRODUCTORY. 17 the sacred memories, the happy dreams, which have been rising up round us, one by one, since our childhood. Even if there be some among us who in the maturity of their years have broken away from their earlier moorings, these associations still tend to remain. They are not confined to those of us who not only consciously retain them, but also hold their basis to be true. They linger unconsciously in the minds of those who seem most reso- lutely to have abandoned them. We bring to the latter, most of us, a similar wealth of associations which have come to us through our educa- tion. The ideas with which we have to deal are mostly expressed in terms which are common to the early cen- turies of Christianity, and to the Greek literature of five centuries before. The terms are the same, but then meaning is different. Those of us who have studied Greek literature tend to attach to them the connotation which they had at Athens when Greek literature was in its most perfect flower. We ignore the long interval of time, and the new connotation which, by an inevitable law of language, had in the course of centuries clustered round the old nucleus of meaning. The terms have in some cases come down by direct transmission into our own language. They have in such cases gathered to themselves wholly new meanings, which, until we con- sciously hold them up to the light, seem to us to form part of the original meaning, and are with difficulty disentangled. We bring to both the Christian and the Greek world the inductions respecting them which have been already made by ourselves and by others. We have in those 18 I. INTRODUCTORY. iDrtnctions so many moulds, so to speak, into which we press the plastic statements of early writers. We assume the primitiveness of distinctions which for the most part represent only the provisional conclusions of earlier gene- rations of scholars, and stages in our own historical edu- cation ; and we arrange facts in the categories which we find ready to hand, as Jewish or Gentile, orthodox or heretical, Catholic or Gnostic, while the question of the reality of such distinctions and such categories is one of the main points which our inquiries have to solve. 3. In the third place, it is necessary to take account of the under-currents, not only of our own age, but of the past ages with which we have to deal. Every age has such under-currents, and every age tends to be un- conscious of them. We ourselves have succeeded to a splendid heritage. Behind us are the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits of mind, which have been in process of formation since the first beginning of our race. They are inwrought, for the most part, into the texture of our nature. We cannot transcend them. To them the mass of our thoughts are relative, and by them the thoughts of other generations tend to be judged. The importance of recognizing them as an element in our judgments of other generations increases in proportion as those genera- tions recede from our own. In dealing with a country or a period not very remote, we may not go far wrong in assuming that its inheritance of ideas is cognate to our own. But in dealing with a remote country, or a remote period of time, it becomes of extreme importance to allow for the difference, so to speak, of mental longitude. The men of earlier days had other mental scenery round them. I. INTRODUCTORY. 19 Fewer streams of thought had converged upon them. Consequently, many ideas which were in entire harmony with the mental fabric of their time, are unintelligible when referred to the standard of our own ; nor can we understand them until we have been at the pains to find out the underlying ideas to which they were actually relative. I will briefly illustrate this point by two instances : () We tend to take with us, as we travel into bygone times, the dualistic hypothesis which to most of us is no hypothesis, but an axiomatic truth of the existence of an unbridged chasm between body and soul, matter and spirit. The relation in our minds of the idea of matter to the idea of spirit is such, that though we readily con- ceive matter to act upon matter, and spirit upon spirit, we find it difficult or impossible to conceive a direct action either of matter upon spirit or of spirit upon matter. "When, therefore, in studying, for example, the ancient rites of baptism, we find expressions which seem to attribute a virtue to the material element, we measure such expressions by a modern standard, and regard them as containing only an analogy or a symbol. They belong, in reality, to another phase of thought than our own. They are an outflow of the earlier conception of matter and spirit as varying forms of a single substance. 1 1 This was the common view of the Stoics, probably following Anaxagoras or his school ; cf. Plutarch [Aetius], de Plac. PhUos. 4. 3 (Diels, Doxographi Greed, p. 387). It was stated by Chrysippus, ov8v ocrw/xarov (rv/iTrdwr^ei (rw/iart ovSk da-tap-drw (raJ/zan .... (rw/tia apa -ff ^v^y (Chrysipp. Fragm. ap. Nemes. de Nat. Horn. 33) ; by Zeiio, i* tic. 20 I. INTRODUCTORY. "Whatever acts, is body," it was said. Mind is the subtlest form of body, but it is body nevertheless. The conception of a direct action of the one upon the other presented no difficulty. It was imagined, for instance, that demons might be the direct causes of diseases, because the extreme tenuity of their substance enabled them to enter, and to exercise a malignant influence upon, the bodies of men. So water, when exorcized from all the evil influences which might reside in it, actually cleansed the soul. 1 The conception of the process as symbolical came with the growth of later ideas of the relation of matter to spirit. It is, so to speak, a ration- alizing explanation of a conception which the world was tending to outgrow. Academ. 1. 11. 39; by their followers, Plutarch [Aetius], de Plac. PhUos. 1. 11. 4 (Diels, p. 310), 01 STOHKO! iravra. TO. atria crayiaT6Ka irvevfiara yap; so by Seneca, Epist. 117. 2, "quicquid facit corpus est;" so among some Christian writers, ag. Tertullian, de Anima, 5. 1 The conception underlies the whole of Tertullian's treatise, de Sap- tismo : it accounts for the rites of exorcism and benediction of both the oil and the water which are found in the older Latin service-books, e.g. in what is known as the Gelasian Sacramentary, i. 73 (in Muratori, Liturgia Romano, vetus, vol. i. p. 594), " exaudi nos omnipotens Deus et in hujus aquat substantiam immitte virtutem ut abluendus per earn et sanitatem simul et vitam mereatur seternam." This prayer is imme- diately followed by an address to the water, " exorcizo te creatura aquae per Deum vivum . . . adjuro te per Jesum Christum filium ejus unicum dominum nostrum ut efficiaris in eo qui in te baptizandus erit fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam, regenerans eum Deo Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto . . ." So in the Gallican Sacramentary published by Mabillon (de Liturgia Gallicana libri ires, p. 362), " exorcizo te fons aquae perennis per Deum sanctum et Deum verum qui te in principle b arida separavit et in quatuor fluminibus terram rigore praecepit : sia qua sancta, aqua benedicta, abluent sordee et dimittens peccata, . . ." I. INTRODUCTORY. 21 (#) We take with us in our travels into the past the underlying conception of religion as a personal bond between God and the individual soul. We cannot believe that there is any virtue in an act of worship in which the conscience has no place. We can understand, how- ever much we may deplore, such persecutions as those of the sixteenth century, because they ultimately rest upon the same conception : men were so profoundly convinced of the truth of their own personal beliefs as to deem it of supreme importance that other men should hold those beliefs also. But we find it difficult to understand why, in the second century of our era, a great emperor who was also a great philosopher should have deliberately per- secuted Christianity. The difficulty arises from our over- looking the entirely different aspect under which religion presented itself to a Roman mind. It was a matter which lay, not between the soul and God, but between the indi- vidual and the State. Conscience had no place in it. Worship was an ancestral usage which the State sanc- tioned and enforced. It was one of the ordinary duties of life. 1 The neglect of it, and still more the disavowal 1 These conceptions are found in Xenophon's account of Socrates, who quotes more than once the Delphic oracle, ^ re yap Hvdia v6fj.(f TroXews dvaipft Troiouvras ewr/3<3s av irotetv, Xen. Mem. 1. 3. 1, and again 4. 3. 16 : in Epictet. Ench. 31, - * Dio Chrys. Or at. xxxvi. vol. ii. p. 51, ed. Dind. II. GREEK EDUCATION. 31 passages of ancient authors, or he read such passages with comments upon the style, or he delivered model speeches of his own. The first of these methods has its literary monument in the hand-books which remain. 1 The second survives as an institution in modern times, and on a large scale, in the University " lecture," and it has also left important literary monuments in the Scholia upon Homer and other great writers. The third method gave birth to an institution which also survives in modern times. Each of these methods was followed by the stu- dent. He began by committing to memory both the professor's rules and also selected passages of good authors : the latter he recited, with appropriate modula- tions and gestures, in the presence of the professor. In the next stage, he made his comments upon them. Here is a short example which is embedded in Epictetus : 2 the student reads the first sentence of Xenophon's Memora- bilia, and makes his criticism upon it : " ' I have often wondered what in the world were the grounds on which . . . .' Kather . . . . ' the ground on which . . . .' It is neater." From this, or concurrently with this, the student pro- ceeded to compositions of his own. Beginning with mere imitation of style, he was gradually led to invent the 1 These are printed in Walz, Rhetorcs Greed, vol. i. : the account here followed is mainly that of the Progymnasmata of Theo of Smyrna (circ. A.D. 130). There is a letter of Dio Chrysostom, printed among his speeches, Orat. xvii. irepl Aoyov do-K^o-ews, ed. Bind. i. 279, con- sisting of advice to a man who was beginning the study of Rhetoric late in life, which, without being a formal treatise, gives as good a view as could be found of the general course of training. 8 Di*s. 3. 23. J4u. 32 II. GREEK EDUCATION. structure as well as the style of what he wrote, and to vary both the style and the subject-matter. Sometimes he had the use of the professor's library; 1 and though writ- ing in his native language, he had to construct his periods according to rules of art, and to avoid all words for which an authority could not be quoted, just as if he were an English undergraduate writing his Greek prose. The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore. A student's education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed. But whether he recited a pre- pared speech or spoke off-hand, he was expected to show the same artificiality of structure and the same pedantry of diction. " You must strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped round you," says Charon to the rhetorician who is just stepping into his boat, " and those antitheses of yours, and balancings of clauses, and strange expressions, and all the other heavy weights of speech (or you will make my boat too heavy)." 2 To a considerable extent there prevailed, in addition to Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, a teaching of Philoso- phy. It was the highest element in the education of the average Greek of the period. Logic, in the form of Dialectic, was common to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Every one learnt to argue : a large number learnt, in addition, the technical terms of Philosophy and the out- lines of its history. Lucian 3 tells a tale of a country gentleman of the old school, whose nephew went home from lecture night after night, and regaled his mother 1 Philostr. V.S. 2. 21. 3, of Proclas. 1 Lucian, Dial Mart. 10. 10. * Hermotim. 81. II. GREEK EDUCATION. 33 and himself with fallacies and dilemmas, talking about * relations" and " comprehensions" and " mental presen- tations," and jargon of that sort; nay, worse than that, saying, " that God does not live in heaven, but goes about among stocks and stones and such-like." As far as Logic was concerned, it was almost natural to a Greek mind: Dialectic was but the conversation of a sharp- witted people conducted under recognized rules. But f was a comparatively new phase of Philosophy that it nould have a literary side. It had shared in the common degeneracy. It had come to take wisdom at second-hand. It was not the evolution of a man's own thoughts, but an acquaintance with the recorded thoughts of others. It was divorced from practice. It was degraded to a system of lectures and disputations. It was taught in ihe same general way as the studies which preceded it. But lectures had a more important place. Sometimes the professor read a passage from a philosopher, and gave his interpretation of it ; sometimes he gave a discourse of his own. Sometimes a student read an essay of his own, or interpreted a passage of a philosopher, in the presence of the professor, and the professor afterwards pronounced his opinion upon the correctness of the rea- soning or the interpretation. 1 The Discourses of Epictetus have a singular interest in this respect, apart from their contents; for they are in great measure notes of such 1 There is a good example of the former of these methods in Maximus of Tyre, Dissert. 33, where 1 is part of a student's essay, and the following sections are the professor's comments ; and of the latter in Epictetus, Diss. 1. 10. 8, where the student fa said dva-yvtavat legere, the professor ravayi/ 2 . 21. 12; 3. 24. 54. 4 Ib. 2. 21. 12, 13, 15; 3. 24. 22, 24. H. GREEK EDUCATION. 87 from the lecture-room to athletic sports or the theatre ; "and the consequence is," says Epictetus, 1 "that you don't get out of your old habits or make moral progress." Then, as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the "alderman" who sat next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms. 2 And then, as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed by their manner that they were there against their will. " You should sit upright," says Plutarch, 3 in his advice to hearers in general, "not lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker." In a similar way Philo, 4 also speak- ing of hearers in general, says: "Many persons who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand different subjects family affairs, other people's affairs, private affairs, .... and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of men but of statues, which have ears but hear not." 2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual teachers, 5 who 1 Ib. 3. 16. U, 15. * Ib. 1. 26. 9. ' De audiendo, 13, voL ii. p. 45. The passage is abridged abova. 4 Quis rer. div. heres. 3, voL\ p. 474. 6 For example, Verrius Flaccus, the father of the system of " prize ," who received an annual salary of 100,000 sesterces from 38 II. GREEK EDUCATION. might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities. The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens. (a) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Ehetoric at Eome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenaeum or University at Eome, like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income, and with a building of sufficient im- portance to be sometimes used as a Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens : in this he was followed by Antoninus Pius : but the first per- manent endowment at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added one of the new or literary Ehetoric, and one of the old or forensic Ehetoric. 1 Augustus (Suet, de illustr. Gramm. 17). The inscriptions of Asia Minor furnish several instances of teachers who had left their homes to teach in other provinces of the Empire, and had returned rich enough to make presents to their native cities. 1 The evidence for the above paragraph, with ample accounts of additional facts relative to the same subject, but unnecessary for the present purpose, will be found in F. H. L. Ahrens, de Athenarum statu politico et literario inde db Achaici foederis interitu usque ad Antoninorum fempora, Gb'ttingen, 1829 ; K. O. Mu'ller, Quam curam respublica apud Grcecos et Romanos literis dodrinisque colendis et promovendis impendent, Gb'ttingen (Programm zur Sacularfeier), 1837; P. Seidel, de scholarum quce florente Romanorum imperio Athenis exstiterunt condition^ Glogau, 1838 ; C. G. Zumpt, Ueber den Bestand der philosophiachen Schulen in Athen und die Succession der Scholar- chen, Berlin (Alihandl. der Akademie der Wissenschaften), 1843; L, n. GREEK EDUCATION. 89 (#) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Csesar, and appear to have been so amply recog- nized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature ; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of lite- rature ; but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a form of indirect endowment. 1 They exempted those whom they affected from all the Weber, Commentatio de academia literaria Atheniensium, Marburg, 1858. There is an interesting Roman inscription of the end of the second century A.D. which almost seems to show that the endowments were sometimes diverted for the benefit of others besides philosophers : it is to an athlete, who was at once " canon of Serapis," and entitled to free commons at the museum, j/ew/cd/aov rov /*eya[Aou Sa/oavrtSjos KCU TWV iv T(j> Movcm'ip [creirovj/xevwi/ areAwv wv, Corpus Inner. Grcec. 5914. 1 The edict of Antoninus Pius is contained in L. 6, 2, D. de ex- cusat. 27. 1 : the number of philosophers is not prescribed, "quia rari sunt qui philosophantur :" and if they make stipulations about pay, "inde iam manifest! fient non philosophantes." The nature of the immunities is described, ibid. 8 : "a ludorum publicorum regimine, ab sedilitate, a sacerdotio, a receptione militum, ab emtione frumenti, olei, et neque judicare neque legates esse neque in militia numerari nolentes neque ad alium famulatum cogi." The immunities were some- times further extended to the lower classes of teachers, e.g. the ludi magistri at Vipascum in Portugal : cf. Hiibuer and Mommsen in the Ephemeris Epirjrapliica, vol. iii. pp. 185, 188. For the regulations of the later empire, aee Cod. Theodos. 14. 9, de studiis libcralibus urbis Romce et Constantinopolitanw ; and for a good popular account of the whole subject, see G. Boissier, L 'instruction publiqne dans I'empin Remain, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, mars 15, 1884. 40 II. GREEK EDUCATION. burdens which tended in the later empire to impoverish the middle and upper classes. They were consequently equivalent to the gift from the municipality of a consi- derable annual income. 3. A third indication of the hold of education upon contemporary society is the place which its professors held in social intercourse. They were not only a recog- nized class ; they also mingled largely, by virtue of their profession, with ordinary life. If a dinner of any pre- tensions were given, the professor of Belles Lettres must be there to recite and expound passages of poetry, the professor of Ehetoric to speak upon any theme which might be proposed to him, and the professor of Philoso- phy to read a discourse upon morals. A "sermonette" from one of these professional philosophers after dinner was as much in fashion as a piece of vocal or instrumental music is with us. 1 All three kinds of professors were sometimes part of the permanent retinue of a great house- hold. But the philosophers were even more in fashion than their brother professors. They were petted by great ladies. They became " domestic chaplains." 2 They were 1 Lucian's Convivium is a humorous and satirical description of such a dinner. The philosopher reads his discourse from a small, finely-written manuscript, c. 17. The Deipnosopfiista of Athenseus, and the Quastioneg Conviviales of Plutarch, are important literary monuments of the practice. 2 An interesting corroboration of the literary references is afforded by the mosaic pavement of a large villa at Hammam Grous, near Milev, in North Africa, where " the philosopher's apartment," or " chaplain's room" (filosophi locus), is specially marked, and near it is a lady (the mistress of the house ?) sitting under a palm-tree. (The inscription is given in the Gorpu* Inscr. Lot. vol. viii. No. 10890, where reference is made to a drawing of the pavement in Kousset, Let Bains df Pom- peianut, Constantine, 1879). H. GREEK EDUCATION. 41 sometimes, indeed, singularly like the chaplains of whom we read in novels of the last century. Lucian, in his essay " On Persons who give their Society for Pay," has some amusing vignettes of their life. One is of a philo- sopher who has to accompany his patroness on a tour : he is put into a waggon with the cook and the lady's- maid, and there is but a scanty allowance of leaves thrown in to ease his limbs against the jolting. 1 Another is of a philosopher who is summoned by his lady and complimented, and asked as an especial favour, "You are so very kind and careful : will you take my lapdog into the waggon with you, and see that the poor creature does not want for anything?" 2 Another is of a philoso- pher who has to discourse on temperance while his lady is having her hair braided : her maid comes in with a billet-doux, and the discourse on temperance is suspended until she has written an answer to her lover. 3 Another is of a philosopher who only gets his pay in doles of two or three pence at a time, and is thought a bore if he asks for it, and whose tailor or shoemaker is meanwhile wait- ing to be paid, so that even when the money comes it seems to do him no good. 4 It is natural to find that Philosophy, which had thus become a profession, had also become degenerate. It afforded an easy means of livelihood. It was natural that some of those who adopted it should be a disgrace to their profession. And although it would be unsafe to take every description of the great satirist literally, yet it is difficult to believe that there is not a substantial foundation of truth in his frequent 1 Lucian, de mere. cond. 32. Ib. 34. 8 Ib. 36. Ib. 38. 4 H. GREEK EDUCATION. caricatures. The fact of their frequency, and also the fact that such men as he describes could exist, strengthen the inference which other facts enable us to draw, as to the large place which the professional philosophers occupied in contemporary society. The following is his picture of Thrasycles : l " He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure : then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much gusto as if it were the water of Lethe : and he behaves in exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them ; and he goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation, until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the way of lying and braggadocio and avarice : he is the first of flatterers and the readiest of perjurers : chicanery leads the way, and impudence follows after : in fact, he is clever all round, doing to perfection whatever he touches." 4. But nothing could more conclusively prove the great hold which these forms of education had upon their time than the fact of their persistent survival. It migKt be maintained that the prominence which is given to them in literature, their endowment by the (State, and 1 Timon, 50, 51. II. GREEK EDUCATION. 43 their social influence, represented only a superficial and passing phase. But when the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Eoman and then upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul ; and from the Gallican schools it has come, proba- bly by direct descent, to our own country and our own time. Two things especially have come : (i.) The place which literature holds in general edu- cation. We educate our sons in grammar, and in doing so we feed them upon ancient rather than upon English literature, by simple continuation of the first branch of the mediaeval trivium, which was itself a continuation of the Greek habit which has been described above. (ii.) The other point, though less important in itself, is even more important as indicating the strength of the Greek educational system. It is that we retain still its technical terms and many of its scholastic usages, either in their original Greek form or as translated into Latin and modified by Latin habits, in the schools of the West. The designation "professor" comes to us from the Greek sophists, who drew their pupils by promises : to "profess" was to "promise," and to promise was the characteristic of the class of teachers with whom in the fourth century B.C. Greek education began. The title 44 II. GREEK EDUCATION. lost its original force, and became the general designation of a public teacher, superseding the special titles, "phi- losopher," "sophist," "rhetorician," "grammarian," and ending by being the synonym of "doctor." 1 The practice of lecturing, that is of giving instruction by reading an ancient author, with longer or shorter comments upon his meaning, comes to us from the schools in which a passage of Homer or Plato or Chrysippus was read and explained. The "lecture" was probably in the first instance a student's exercise : the function of the teacher was to make remarks or to give his judgment upon the explanation that was given : it was not so much leg ere as prcelegere, whence the existing title of "pra3 lector." 2 The use of the word " chair" to designate the teacher's office, and of the word "faculty" to denote the branch of knowledge which he teaches, are similar survivals of Greek terms. 8 1 Profiteri, professio^ are the Latin translations of eVayyeAAe

ta/Aa (Liban. de fort, sua, vol. i. p. 59), which points to an assimi- lation of Athenian usage in his time to that which is mentioned in the following note. 1 This was fixed by a law of Julian in 362, which, however, states it as a concession on the part of the Emperor : " quia singulis civitati- bus adesse ipse non possum, jubeo quisquis docere vult non repente nee temere prosiliat ad hoc munus sed judicio ordinis probatus decretum curialium mereatur, optimorum conspirante consilio," Cod. Theodos. 13. 3. 5 ; but the nomination was still sometimes left to the Emperor or his chief officer, the prefect of the city. This has an especial interest in connection with the history of St. Augustine : a request was sent from Milan to the prefect of the city at Rome for the nomination of a magister rhetorics: St Augustine was sent, and so came under the influence of St. Ambrose, S. Aug. Confess. 5. 13. 3 This is mentioned in a law of Gordian : "grammaticos seu oratores decreto ordinis probatos, si noil se utiles studentibus praabeant, denuo ab eodem ordine reprobari posse incogniturn non est," Cod. Justin. 10. 52. 2. A professor was sometimes removed for other reasons besides incompetency, e.g. Prohaeresius was removed by Julian for being a Christian, Eunap. Prolianres. p. 92. n. GREEK EDUCATION. 47 office. Tt was sometimes superseded by a sort of congl d'elire from the Emperor; 1 but in ordinary cases it con- sisted in the candidate's giving a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor's representative or the City Council. 2 It was the small beginning of that system of " examination" which in our own country and time has grown to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the "examiners," just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a " grand compounder" might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors. 3 In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon teaching, but also upon studying : a student might probably go to a lecture, but he might not formally announce his devo- tion to learning by putting on the student's gown without the leave of the professors, as in a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can assume the academical dress. 4 The survival of these terms and usages, as indicating 1 Alexander of Aphrodisias, de Fato, 1, says that he obtained his professorship on the testimony, varo TT)S papTvpias, of Severus and Caracalla. 2 The existence of a competition appears in Lucian, EunucJius, 3, 5 : the fullest account is that of Eunapius, Proltceres. pp. 79 sqq. * Eunapius, ibid. p. 84. 4 Olympiodorus, ap. Phot. BiUiofh. 80; S. Greg. Naz. Orat. 43 (20). 16, vol. i. p. 782 ; Liban. de fort, sua, vol. i. p. 14. The admission was probably the occasion of some academical sport : the novice was marched in mock procession to the baths, whence he came out with his gown on. It was something like initiation into a religious guild or order. There was a law against any one who assumed the philosopher'a dr*ss without authority, "indebite et insolenter," Cod. Tlieodoa. 13. 3. 7. 48 II. GREM EDUCATION. the strength of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of them. 1 They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large scale in the tenth century they then appear, not as new creations, but as terms aad usages which had lasted all through what has been called " the Benedictine era," 2 without special nurture and with out literary expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots. This is the feature of the Greek life into which Chris- tianity came to which I first invite your attention. Ther was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely dif- fused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Its 1 The last traces are in the Christian poets : for example, in Sidoniua Apollinaris (t482), Carm. xxiii. 211, ed. Luetjohann, "quicquid rhe- toricae institutionis, quicquid grammaticalis aut palaestrae est;" >u Ennodius (t521), Carm. ccxxxiv. p. 182, ed. Vogel, and in Ep. ^4, which is a letter of thanks to a grammarian for having successfully instructed the writer's nephew ; in Venantius Fortunatus (t 603), who speaks of himself as " Parvula grammaticae lambens refluamina guttae, Rhetorici exiguui^ praelibans gurgitis haustum," V. Martini, i. 29, 30, ed. Leo ; but there are traces in the same poets of the antagonism between classical and Christian learning which ultimately led to the disappearance of tne former, e.g. Fortunatus speaks of Martin as "doctor apostolicus vacuans ratione sophistas," V Martini, i. 139. J "La periode be"nediotine," Leon Maitre, Lea tcoles episcopalei tit monostiques de I' Occident, p. 173. II. GREEK EDUCATION. 49 effect in the second century ot our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action ; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modi- fied by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive sim- plicity. Their own life had become complex and arti- ficial : it had its fixed ideas and its permanent categories : it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own form. The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds. . but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated earnest- ness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream. LECTURE III. GBEEK AND CHKISTIAN EXEGESIS. Two thousand years ago, the Greek world was nearer than we are now to the first wonder of the invention of writing. The mystery of it still seemed divine. The fact that certain signs, of little or no meaning in themselves, could communicate what a man felt or thought, not only to the generation of his fellows, but also to the generations that came afterwards, threw a kind of glamour over written words. It gave them an importance and an im- pressiveuess which did not attach to any spoken words. They came in time to have, as it were, an existence of their own. Their precise relation to the person who first uttered them, and their literal meaning at the time of their utterance, tended to be overlooked or obscured. In the case of the ancient poets, especially Homer, this glamour of written words was accompanied, and perhaps had been preceded, by two other feelings. The one was the reverence for antiquity. The voice of the past sounded with a fuller note than that of the present. It came from the age of the heroes who had become divinities. It expressed the national legends and the current mythology, the primitive types of noble lite and the simple maxims of awakening reflection, the III. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS. 51 "wisdom of the ancients," which has sometimes itself taken the place of religion. The other was the belief in inspiration. With the glamour of writing was blended the glamour of rhythm and melody. When the gods spoke, they spoke in verse. 1 The poets sang under the impulse of a divine enthusiasm. It was a god who gave the words : the poet was but the interpreter. 2 The belief was not merely popular, but was found in the best minds of the imperial age. " Whatever wise and true words were spoken in the world about God and the universe, came into the souls of men not without the Divine will and intervention through the agency of divine and pro- phetic men." 8 " To the poets sometimes, I mean the very ancient poets, there came a brief utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and truth, like a flash of light from an unseen fire." 4 The combination of these three feelings, the mystery of writing, the reverence for antiquity, the belief in inspiration, tended to give the writings of the ancient poets a unique value. It lifted them above the common limitations of place and time and circumstance. The verses of Homer were not simply the utterances of a particular person with a particular meaning for a par- 1 "Dictse per carmina sortes," Hor. A. P. 403. But it may be infernal from the title of Plutarch's treatise, Htpl TOV /XT) XP"" s/x/xerpa vvv rr>v TLvdiav, that the practice had ceased in the second century. 2 Cf. e.g. Pindar, Frag. 127(118), pavrevto polva. irpo^arfwrfa 8' <7< ; and, in later times, ^Elius Aristides, vol. iii. p. 22, ed. Cant. ' Dio Chrysostom, Orat. L vol. i. p. 12, ed. Bind. * Id. Orat. xxxvL vol. ii p. 59 : KCU TTOU rts firarvoia. 6eias T Kal dAqdei'us na.6d.irtp avyrj Trupos e davous Ad/x^avrot 12 52 III. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS. ticular time. They had a universal validity. They were the voice of an undying wisdom. They were the Bible of the Greek races. 1 When the unconscious imitation of heroic ideals passed into a conscious philosophy of life, it was necessary that that philosophy should be shown to be consonant with current beliefs, by being formulated, so to speak, in terms of the current standards ; and when, soon afterwards, the conception of education, in the sense in which the term has ever since been understood, arose, it was inevitable that the ancient poets should be the basis of that educa- tion. Literature consisted, in effect, of the ancient poets. Literary education necessarily meant the understanding of them. " I consider," says Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue which bears his name, 2 " that the chief part of a man's education is to be skilled in epic poetry ; and this means that he should be able to understand what the 1 It was a natural result of the estimation in which he was held that he should sometimes have been regarded as being not only inspired, but divine : the passages which refer to this are collected in G. Cuper, Apotheosis vel consecratio Homeri (in vol. ii. of Polenus's Supplement to Gronovius's Thesaurus), which is primarily a commentary on the bas-relief by A rchelaus of Priene, now in the British Museum (figured, e.g. in Overbeck, Geschichte der griecMschen Plastik, ii. 333). The idea has existed in much more recent times, not indeed that he was divine, but that so much truth and wisdom could not have existed outside Judaea. There is, for example, a treatise by G. Croesus, en- titled, ofj.r)pos e/3paios sive historia Hebrezorum ab Homero Hebraici* nominibus ac sententiis conscripta in Odyssea et Iliade, Dordraci, 1704, which endeavours to prove both that the name Homer is a Hebrew word, that the Iliad is an account of the conquest of Canaan, and that the Odysssy is a narrative of the wanderings of the children of Israel Up to the death of Moses. Flat. Protag. 72, p. 339 a. III. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS. 63 poets have said, and whether they have said it rightly or not, and to know how to draw distinctions, and to give an answer when a question is put to him." The educators recognized in Homer one of themselves: he, too, was a " sophist," and had aimed at educating men. 1 Homer was the common text-book of the grammar-schools as long as Greek continued to be taught, far on into imperial times. The study of him branched out in more than one direction. It was the beginning of that study of literature for its own sake which still holds its ground. It was continued until far on in the Christian era, partly by the schools of textual critics, and partly by the suc- cessors of the first sophists, who sharpened their wits by disputations as to Homer's meaning, posing difficulties ;tnd solving them : of these disputations some relics sur- vive in the Scholia, especially such as are based upon the Questions of Porphyry. 2 But in the first conception, lite- rary and moral education had been inseparable. It was impossible to regard Homer simply as literature. Literary education was not an end in itself, but a means. The end was moral training. It was imagined that virtue, no less than literature, could be taught, and Homer was the basis of the one kind of education no less than of the other. Nor was it difficult for him to become so. For though the thoughts of men had changed, and the new 1 Ibid. 22, p. 3176 : 6/ioAoyw T (ro

dvOpuirwv vocrot Kara vcriv yivovTcu, and his answer was that diseases come Kara irap- aKo\ov6i]o-iv, ' non per naturam sed per sequellas quasdam necessarias,' Aul. Gell. 7 (6). 1. 9. So also in the long fragment of Philo in Euseb. Prcep. Ev. 8. 13 (Philo, ii. 643, 644), 0eos yap ovSevbs afrios KO.KOV rb irapdirav d\\' at TWV (TTOi^fiwv fj,eraf3oXal TO.VTO. yevvwcrtv, ov uva epya avAois /coAacrecuf \dpiv dAA.a KO.T dAAr^v oucoyo/xiav CUOTT/J iv rats 7roA.rm 8 Diss. 2. 5. 24. 220 VIII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. sick and dying and being maimed, being conscious that this is the particular portion that is assigned to him in the arrangement of the universe, and that the whole is supreme over the part, and the city over the citizen." 1 This Stoical solution, if the teleological conception which underlies it be assumed, may have been adequate as an explanation both of physical pain and of social inequality. But it was clearly inadequate as an explanation of misery and moral evil. And the sense of misery and moral evil was growing. The increased complexity of social life revealed the distress which it helped to create, and the intensified consciousness of individual life quickened also the sense of disappointment and moral shortcoming. The solution of the difficulties which these facts of life pre- sented, was found in a belief which was correlative to the growing belief in the goodness of God, though logi- cally inconsistent with the belief in the universality of His Providence. It was, that men were the authors of their own misery. Their sorrows, so far as they were not punitive or remedial, came from their own folly or perversity. They belonged to a margin of life which was outside the will of the gods or the ordinances of fate. The belief was repeatedly expressed by Homer, but does not appear in philosophy until the time of the Stoics : it is found in both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and the latter also quotes it as a belief of the Pythagoreans. 2 Out of it came the solution of a problem not less important than that from which it had itself sprung. The conception that men were free to bring ruin upon themselves, led to the wider conception that they were altogether free. 1 Dixt. 2. 10. 5. Aul. Ge'l. 7 (6). 2. 1215. Vltl. GREEK AND CfiRiSTIAN THEOLOGY. 221 There emerged for the first time into prominence the idea which has filled a large place in all later theology and ethics, that of the freedom of the will. The freedom which was denied to external nature was asserted of human nature. It was within a man's own power to do right or wrong, to be happy or miserable. " Of all things that are," says Epictetus, 1 " one part is in our control, the other out of it ; in our control are opinion, impulse to do, effort to obtain, effort to avoid in a word, our own proper activities ; out of our control are our bodies, property, reputation, office in a word, all things except our proper activities. Things in our control are in their nature free, not liable to hindrance in the doing or to frustration of the attainment ; things out of our control are weak, dependent, liable to hindrance, belonging to others. Bear in mind, then, that if you mistake what is depen- dent for what is free, and what belongs to others for what is your own, you will meet with obstacles in your way, you will be regretful and disquieted, you will find fault "with both gods and men. If, on the contrary, you think that only to be your own which is really your own, and that which is another's to be, as it really is, another's, no one will thwart you, you will find fault with no one, you will reproach no one, you will do no single thing against your will, no one will harm you, you will not have an enemy." The incompatibility of this doctrine with that of the universality of Destiny or Eeason or Providence the "antinomy of the practical understanding" was not always observed. 2 The two doctrines marched on parallel lines, and each of them was sometimes stated as though it had no limitations. The harmony of them, which is indicated by both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and which underlies a large part of both the theology and the ethics 1 Ench. 1. " Kg. Sext. Empir. Pyrr. 3. a 222 VIII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. of Epictetus, is in effect this : The world marches or to its end, realizing its own perfection, with absolute cer- tainty. The majority of its parts move in that march unconsciously, with no sense of pleasure or pain, no idea of good or evil. To man is given the consciousness of action, the sense of pleasure and pain, the idea of good and evil, and freedom of choice between them. If he chooses that which is against the movement of nature, he chooses for himself misery ; if he chooses that which is in accordance with that movement, he finds happiness. In either case the movement of nature goes on, and the man fulfils his destiny : " Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt" 1 It is a man's true function and high privilege so to educate his mind and discipline his will, as to think that to be best which is really best, and that to be avoided which nature has not willed : in other words, to acqui- esce in the will of God, not as submitting in passive resignation to the power of one who is stronger, but as having made that will his own. 2 If a man realizes this, instead of bemoaning the diffi- culties of life, he will not only ask God to send them, but thank Him for them. This is the Stoical theodicy. The life and teaching of Epictetus are for the most part a commentary upon it. 1 Seneca, Ep. 107. 11 : a free Latin rendering of one of the verses of Cleanthes quoted from Epictetus in Lecture VI. p. 157. 2 Seneca, Dial. 1. 5. 8 : quid est boni viri? praebere se fato. grande solatium est cum universo rapi. quicquid est quod DOS sic vivere, sic mori jussit, eadeoi necessitate et deos adligat. inrevocs bilis humana pariter ac divina oursus rehit. ille ipse omnium condHor et rector scrips! t quidem fata, sed sequitur. semper paret, semel jussit. Vfir. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 223 " Look at the powers you have ; and when you have looked at them, say, ' Bring me, God, what difficulty Thou wilt ; for I have the equipment which Thou hast given me, and the means for making all things that happen contribute to my adornment.' Nay, but that is not what you do : you sit sometimes shuddering at the thought of what may happen, sometimes bewailing and grieving and groaning over what does happen. Then you find fault with the gods ! For what but impiety is the consequence of such degeneracy ? And yet God has not merely given you these powers by which we may bear whatever happens without being lowered or crushed by it, but also, like the good King and true Father that He is, has given to this part of you the capacity of not being thwarted, or forced, or hindered, and has made it absolutely your own, not even reserving to Himself the power of thwarting or hindering it." 1 " What words are sufficient to praise or worthily describe the gifts of Providence to us ? If we were really wise, what should we have been doing in public or in private but sing hymns to God, and bless Him and recount His gifts (rot? ^dpiTa?) ? Digging or ploughing or eating, ought we not to be singing this hymn to God, 'Great is God for having given us these tools for tilling the ground ; great is God for having given us hands to work with and throat to swallow with, for that we grow unconsciously and breathe while we sleep ' ? This ought to be our hymn for every- thing: but the chiefest and divinest hymn should be for His having given us the power of understanding and of dealing rationally with ideas. Nay since most of you are utterly blind to this ought there not to be some one to make this his special function, and to sing the hymn to God for all the rest ? What else can a lame old man like me do but sing hymns to God ? If I were a nightingale, I should do the work of a nightingale ; if a swan, the work of a swan ; but being as I am a rational being, I must sing hymns to God. This is my work : this I do : this rank as far as I can I will not leave ; and I invite you to join with me in this same song." 2 1 Epict. Diss. 1. 6. 3740. Ibid. 1 16. 16 2L 224 VIII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOUI. B. THE CHRISTIAN IDEA- In primitive Christianity we find ourselves in anothei sphere of ideas : we seem to be breathing the air of Syria, with Syrian forms moving round us, and speaking a lan- guage which is not familiar to us. For the Greek city, with its orderly government, we have to substitute the picture of an Eastern sheyk, at once the paymaster of his dependents and their judge. Two conceptions are dominant, that of wages for work done, and that of posi- tive law. 1. The idea of moral conduct as work done for a master who will in due time pay wages for it, was a natural growth on Semitic soil. It grew up among the fellahin, to whom the day's work brought the day's wages, and whose work was scrutinized before the wages were paid. It is found in many passages of the New Testa- ment, and not least of all in the discourses of our Lord. The ethical problems which had vexed the souls of the writers of Job and the Psalms, are solved by the teaching that the wages are not all paid now, but that some of them are in the keeping of the Father in heaven. The persecuted are consoled by the thought, " Great are your wages in heaven." 1 Those who do their alms before men receive tbeir wages in present reputation, and have no wages stored up for them in heaven. 2 The smallest act of casual charity, the giving of a cup of cold water, will not go without its wages. 3 The payment will be made at the return of the Son of Man, whose " wages are with 1 8. Matthew, 5. 12; 8. Luke, 6. 23. 8 Ibid. 6. 1. 1 Ibid. 10. 42 ; S. Mark, 9. 41. VIII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 225 him to give to every man according as his work is. 1 ' 1 So fundamental is the conception that u he that cometh to God must believe," not only " that He is," but also that He "pays their due to them that seek after Him." 2 So also in the early Christian literature which moved still within the sphere of Syrian ideas. In the " Two Ways," what is given in charity should be given without murmuring, for God will repay it : 3 in the Epistle of Barnabas, the conception of the paymaster is blended with that of the judge. 4 "The Lord judges without respect of persons : every one shall receive according as he has done : if he be good, his righteousness shall go before him : if he be wicked, the wages of his wicked- ness are before his face." 2. God is at once the Lawgiver and the Judge. The underlying conception is that of an Oriental sovereign who issues definite commands, who is gratified by obe- dience and made angry by disobedience, who gives pre- sents to those who please him and punishes those with whom he is angry. The punishments which he inflicts are vindictive and not remedial. They are the mani- festation of his vengeance against unrighteousness. They are external to the offender. They follow on the offence by the sentence of the judge, and not by a self-acting law. He sends men into punishment. The introduction into this primitive Christianity of 1 Revelation, 22. 12 : so Barnab. 21. 3 : fyyus 6 KU/DCOS KOI 6 O.VTOV. * Hebrews, 11. 6 1 Did'tche, 4. 7, j >UXT-Q yap ri? rrrv 6 TOV /uo-Oov /ca * Barnab. 4. 12. vat hilos. 1. 7, Euseb. Prcep. evang. 14. 16 (Diels, Doxoyraphi Greed, p. 304). The briefest and most expressive statement of the transcendence of God (TO dyaOov) in Plato's own writings is probably Republic, p. 509, OVK ouo-tae OKTOS TOV dyadov, aAA* In eVe/ceiva -nys owias irpfv aper&v ijSr? d.va./3a.iv(.i.v rt vovv, ri TO ov, KaKti /JaSurrcov TVJV am 1*2. E2 244 tX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. But the conception of transcendence is capable oi taking two forms. It may be that of a God who passes beyond all the classes into which sensible phenomena are divisible, by virtue of His being pure Mind, cognizable only by mind ; or it may be that of a God who exists extra flammantia mocnia mundi, filling the infinite space which surrounds and contains all the spheres of material existence. The one God is transcendent in the proper sense of the term ; the other is supra-cosmic. In either case He is said to be unborn, undying, uncontained ; and since the same terms are thus used to express the ele- ments of both forms of the conception, it is natural that these forms should readily pass into each other, and that the distinction between them should not always be present to a writer's mind or perceptible in his writings. But the conception in one or other of its forms fills a large place in later Greek philosophy. It blended in a common stream with the new currents of religious feel- ing. [The process is well illustrated by Philo.] The words " I am thy God" are used not in a proper but in a secondary sense. For Being, qua Being, is out of relation : itself is full of itself and sufficient for itself, both before the birth of the world and equally so after it 1 He transcends all quality, being better than virtue, better than knowledge, and better even than the good itself and the beautiful itself. 2 He is not in space, but beyond it ; for He contains it. He is not in time, for He is the Father of the universe, which is itself the father of time, since from its movement time proceeds. 3 He is " without body, 1 De inut. nom. 4 ; i. 582, ed. Maugey. * De mund, op. 2 ; i. 2. 3 Dvyust. Gain, 5; i. 228, 229. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 245 parts or passions": without feet, for whither should He walk who fills all things : without hands, for from whom should He receive anything who possesses all thing? : without eyes, for how should He need eyes who made the light. 1 He is invisible, for how can eyes that are too weak to gaze upon the sun be strong enough to gaze upon its Maker. 2 He is incomprehensible : not even the whole universe, much less the human mind, can contain the conception of Him : s we know that He is, we cannot know what He is: 4 we may see the manifestations of Him in His works, but it were monstrous folly to go behind His works and inquire into His essence. 5 He is hence unnamed : for names are the symbols of created things, whereas His only attribute is to be. 6 (2) The Revelation of the Transcendent. Side by side with this conception of the transcendence of God, and intimately connected with it, was the idea of beings or forces coming between God and men. A transcendent God was in Himself incommunicable : the more the con- ception of His transcendence was developed, the stronger was the necessity for conceiving of the existence of inter- mediate links. 7 1 Quod deus immut. 12; i. 281. * De Abrah. 16; ii. 12. 3 i. 224, 281, 566 ; ii. 12, 654 ; Frag, ap Joan. Dam. ii. 654. 4 De proem, et posn. 7; ii. 415. 5 De post. Cain, 48; i. 258. Demut. nom. 2; i. 580; cf. 630, 648, 655; ii. 8-9, 19, 92-93, 597. Cf. in general Heinze, Die Lehre vom Logos in der griechischen Philosophic, Oldenburg, 1872, pp. 206, 207, n. 6. 7 The necessity for such intermediate links is not affected by the question how far, outside the Platonic schools, there was a belief in a real transcendence of God, or only in His existence outside the solar system. In this connection, note the allegory in the Phcudrus. The Epicureans coarsely expressed the transcendence of God by the express- eion, Si-Qpyrai 17 owrla, Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. p. 114, 5; cf. Ocellus Lucanus, cited above, p. 242. Hippolytus describes Aristotle's Meta- physics as dealing with things beyond the moon, 7. 19, p. 354; cf 246 IX. GREEK ANT> CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. i. A basis for such a conception was afforded in the popular mythology by the belief in daemons spirits inferior to the gods, but superior to men. The belief was probably "a survival of the primitive psychism which peopled the whole universe with life and anima- tion." 1 There was an enormous contemporary develop- ment of the idea of daemons or genii. They are found in Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom, Maximus, and Celsus. In the latter some are good, some bad, most of them of mixed nature ; to them is due the creation of all things except the human soul ; they are the rulers of day and night, of the sunlight and the cold. 2 ii. A philosophical basis for the theory was afforded by the Platonic Ideal or Forms, and the Stoical Logoi or Eeasons. We have already seen the place which those Forms, viewed also as Forces, and those Eeasons, viewed also as productive Seeds, filled in the later Greek cosmo- logies and cosmogonies. They were not less important in relation to the theory of the transcendence of God. The Forms according to which He shaped the world, the Forces by which He made and sustains it, the Reasons which inhere in it and, like laws, control its movements, Origen's idea of the heavens in de princ. ii. 3, 7, and Celsus' objection that Christians misunderstand Plato by confusing his heaven with the Jewish heavens. Origen, c. Gels. vi. 19; cf. Keim, p. 84. 1 Benn, Greek Philosophers, 2. 252. 2 Cf. Hesiod in Sext Emp. ix. 86. Similarly, Thales, TO irav e/x^v^ov apa KOI Scu/iovwv TrArJpes (Diels, 301); Pythagoras, Empedocles in Hippolytus, SioiKowTts rot Kara TT)V yfjv (Diels, 558) ; Plato and the Stoics (Diels, 307), e.g. Plutarch, Epictetus, 1. 14. 12; 3. 13. 15 (Diels, 1307) ; Athenagoras, 23 ; Philo, ii. 635 ; Frag. ap. Eus. Prcep. Evan, 8. 13; see references in Keim's Celsus, p. 120; cf. Wachsmuth, Die Atuichten der Stoiker tiler Mantik u. Ddmonen, Berlin, 1860. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 247 are outflows from and reflexions of His nature, and communicate a knowledge of it to His intelligent crea- tures. In the philosophy of Philo, these philosophical conceptions are combined with both the Greek conception of Daemons and the Hebrew conception of Angels. The four conceptions, Forms, Logoi, Daemons, and Angels, pass into one another, and the expressions which are relative to them are interchangeable. The most common expression for them is Logoi, and it is more commonly found in the singular, Logos. (3) The Distinctions in the Nature of God. The Logos is able to reveal the nature of God because it is itself the reflexion of that nature. It is able to reveal that nature to intelligent creatures because the human intelli- gence is itself an offshoot of the Divine. As the eye of sense sees the sensible world, which also is a revelation of God, 1 since it is His thought impressed upon matter, so the reason sees the intelligible world, the world of His thoughts conceived as intelligible realities, existing separate from Him. "The wise man, longing to apprehend God, and travelling along the path of wisdom and knowledge, first of all meets with the divine Reasons, and with them abides as a guest ; but when he resolves to pursue the further journey, he is compelled to abstain, for the eyes of his understanding being opened, he sees that the object of his quest is afar off and always receding, an infinite distance in advance of him." 2 "Wisdom leads him first into the antechamber of the Divine Reason, and when he is there he does not at once enter into the Divine Presence; but sees Him afar off, or rather not even afar off can he behold Him, but 1 Philo, de confus. ling. 20 (i. 41 ( J). De post. Cain. & (i. 229). 248 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGl. only he sees that the place where he stands is still infinitely far from the unnamed, unspeakable, and incomprehensible God." 1 What he sees is not God Himself but the likeness of Him, " just as those who cannot gaze upon the sun may yet gaze upon a reflexion of it." 2 The Logos, reflecting not only the Divine nature, but also the Divine will and the Divine goodness, becomes to men a messenger of help ; like the angel to Hagar, it brings advice and encouragement; 3 like the angel who redeemed Jacob (Gen. xlviii. 16), it rescues men from all kinds of evil; 4 like the angel who delivered Lot from Sodom, it succours the kinsmen of virtue and provides for them a refuge. 5 " Like a king, it announces by decree what men ought to do ; like a teacher, it instructs its disciples in what will benefit them ; like a counsellor, it suggests the wisest plans, and so greatly benefits those who do not of themselves know what is best ; like a friend, it tells many secrets which it is not lawful for the uninitiated to hear." 6 And standing midway between God and man, it not only reflects God downwards to man, but also reflects man upwards to God. "It stands on the border-line between the Creator and the creation, not unbegotten like God, not begotten like ourselves, and so becomes not only an ambassador from the Kuler to His subjects, but also a suppliant from mortal man yearning after the immortal." 7 The relation of the Logos to God, as distinguished from its functions, is expressed by several metaphors, all 1 De somn. 1. 11 (i. 630). 2 Ibid. 1. 41 (L 656). 8 Deprofug. 1 (i. 547); so de Cherub. 1 (i. 139), * Leg. Alleg. 3. 62 (i. 122). 6 De somn. 1. 15 (i. 633). Ibid. 1. 33 (i. 649). 7 Quis rer. div. her. 42 (i. 501> IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 249 of which are important in view of later theology. They may be gathered into two classes, corresponding to the two great conceptions of the relation of the universe to God which were held respectively by the two great sources of Philo's philosophy, the Stoics and the Plato- nists. The one class of metaphors belongs to the monistic, the other to the dualistic, conception of the universe. In the former, the Logos is evolved from God ; in the other, created by Him. 1 The chief metaphors of the former class are those of a phantom, or image, or outflow : the Logos is projected by God as a man's shadow or phantom was sometimes conceived as thrown off by his body, 2 expressing its every feature, and abiding as a separate existence after the body was dead; it is a reflexion cast by God upon the space which He contains, as a parhelion is cast by the sun; 3 it is an outflow as from a spring. 4 The chief metaphor of the second clas* 1 De sacrif. Abel, et Cain. 18 (i. 175), 6 yap Oebpa rrjv (jtiavijv, he justifies it on the ground ort oo-a av Aeyy o $tos ov pi/jfiaTa. TTIV ctAA, spy a, airep 6^>daXfj.ol Trpb coTWv oiopi^ovcri : de mund. opif. 6 (i. 5), ovoev av frepov farQL rbv vorjTov fivai /cooyzov f] Oeov \6yov r)8r) KOCT POTTO IOVVTOS. 2 The word o-/aa seems to be used, in relation to the Logos, not of the shadow cast by a solid object in the sunlight, but rather, as in Homer, Odyss. 10. 495, and frequently in classical writers, of a ghost or phantom : hence God is the Trapdoeiyfj.a, the substance of which the Logjs is the unsubstantial form, Leg. Alley. 3. 31 (i. 106) : hence also er/c*i is used as convertible with etxwv (ibid.), in its sense of either a portrait-statue or a reflexion in a mirror : in de confus. ling. 28 (i. 427), the Logos is the eternal Vwv of God. 8 De somn. 1. 41 (i. 656). 4 Quod del. pot. ins. 23 (i. 207). 250 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. is that of a son ; the Logos is the first-begotten of God ;' and by an elaboration of the metaphor which reappears in later theology, God is in one passage spoken of as its Father, Wisdom as its Mother. 2 It hence tends some- times to be viewed as separate from God, neither God nor man, but " inferior to God though greater than man." 8 The earlier conception had already passed through several forms : it had begun with that which was itself the greatest leap that any one thinker had yet made, the conception that Eeason made the world : the conception of Eeason led to the conception of God as Personal Eeason : out of that grew the thought of God as greater than Eeason and using it as His instrument : and at last had come the conception of the Eeason of God as in some way detached from Him, working in the world as a sub- ordinate but self-acting law. It was natural that this should lead to the further conception of Eeason as the offspring of God and Wisdom, the metaphor of a human birth being transferred to the highest sphere of heaven. B. THE IDEA AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. (1) The Transcendence of God. All the conceptions which we have seen to exist in the sphere of philosophy were reproduced in the sphere of Christianity. They 1 De agric. 12 (i. 308): de cunfus. ling. 28 (i. 427) : spoken of as yevvj?0ei's, ibid. 14 (i. 414). 2 De orofug. 20 (i. 562) : so God is spoken of as the husband of cro Dial. c. Tryph. c. 127. ' Legatio, 10. 264 IX. GKEEK ANf) CttRtStiAN THEOLO(Jt. I mention His goodness : if I speak of His kingdom, I mentior His glory." 1 It is not easy to determine in regard to many of these expressions whether they are relative in the writer's mind to a supra-cosmic or to a transcendental conception of God. The case of Tertullian clearly shows that they are compatible with the former conception no less than with the latter; for though he speaks of God as "the great Supreme, existing in eternity, unborn, unmade, without beginning, and without end," 2 yet he argues that He is material; for "how could one who is empty have made things that are solid, and one who is void have made things that are full, and one who is incorporeal have made things that have body?" 8 But there were some schools of philosophers in which the transcendental cha- racter of the conception is clearly apparent. The earliest of such schools, and the most remarkable, is that of Basi- lides. It anticipated, and perhaps helped to form, the later developments of Neo-Platonism. It conceived of God as transcending being. He was absolutely beyond all predication. Not even negative predicates are predi- cable of Him. The language of the school becomes para- doxical and almost unmeaning in the extremity of its effort to express the transcendence of God, and at the same time to reconcile the belief in His transcendence with the belief that He is the Creator of the world. " When there was nothing, neither material, nor essen- tial, nor non-essential, nor simple, nor compound, nor 1 Ad Autolycum. 1. 3 ; cfc Mimic. .Felix, Octaviue, 18, aud Kovatiau, ie Trin. 1. 2. 1 Ado. Marc. 1. 3. ' Adv. Prax. 7. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 255 unthoughfc, nor unperceived, nor man, nor angel, nor god, nor absolutely any of the things that are named or per- ceived or thought, .... God who was not (owe &v 0eo'?}, without thought, without perception, without will, with- out purpose, without passion, without desire, willed to make a world. In saying ' willed,' I use the word only because some word is necessary, but I mean without volition, without thought, and without perception; and in saying l world,' I do not mean the extended and divi- sible world which afterwards came into being, with its capacity of division, but the seed of the world." l This was said more briefly, but probably with the same mean- ing, by Marcus : There is no conception and no essence of God. 2 These exalted ideas of His transcendence, which had especially thriven on Alexandrian soil, were further ela- borated at the end of the second century by the Christian philosophers of the Alexandrian schools, who inherited the wealth at once of regenerated Platonism, of Gnos- ticism, and of theosophic Judaism. Clement anticipated Plotinus in conceiving of God as being ^beyond the One and higher than the Monad itself," 3 which was the highest abstraction of current philosophy. 4 There is no name that can properly be named of Him : " neither the One, nor the Good, nor Mind, nor Absolute Being, nor Father, nor Creator, nor Lord." No science can attain 1 ap. Hippol. 7. 21, p. 358. 2 avevvoTjTos KCU dvowrios, ibid. 6. 42, p. 302; cf. 12 ff., pp. 424 ff., for Monoimus, and aho Ptolemseus, ad Floram, 7. 3 Pcedag. 1. 8. 4 Moller, Kosmoloyie, p. 26, cf. 124 129, 130. 256 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. unto Him; "for all science depends on antecedent prin- ciples ; but UX^e is nothing antecedent to the Unbegot- ten." 1 Origen expressly protests against the conceptions of God which regarded Him as supra-cosmic rather than transcendent, 2 and as having a material substance though not a human form. 3 His own conception is that of a nature which is absolutely simple and intelligent, or which transcends both intelligence and existence. Being absolutely simple, He has no more or less, no before or after, and consequently has no need of either space or time. Being absolutely intelligent, His only attribute is to know and to be known. But only "like knows like." He is to be apprehended through the intelligence which is made in His image : the human mind is capable of knowing the Divine by virtue of its participation in it. But in the strict sense of the word He is beyond our knowledge : our knowledge is like the vision of a spark as compared with the splendour of the sun. 4 (2) Revelation or Mediation of the Transcendent. But as in Greek philosophy, so also in Christian theology, the doctrine whether of a supra- cosmic or of a tran- scendent God necessitated the further question, How could He pass into the sphere of the phenomenal ? The rougher sort of objectors ridiculed a God who was " soli- tary and destitute" in his unapproachable uniqueness: 5 the more serious heathen philosophers asked, If like knows like, how can your God know the world? and 1 Strom. 5. 12. 2 c. (Jels. 6. 19 sqq. 8 Deprinc. 1. 1. 2, 5, 7. 4 Ibid. 1. \,2)asaim; c 4. 1. 36. ' e.g. Min. .Felix, c. 10 ; ci Keim, Celsus, 158. n. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 257 the mass of Christian philosophers, 1 both within and without the associated communities, felt this question, or one of the questions that are cognate to it, to be the cardinal point of their theology. 2 The tentative answers were innumerable. One early group of them maintained the existence of a capacity in the Supreme Being to manifest Himself in different forms. The conception had some elements of Stoical and some of popular Greek theology, in both of which anthropomor- phism had been possible. 3 It came to an especial promi- nence in the earlier stages of the Christological contro- versies, as an explanation of the nature of Jesus Christ. It lay beneath what is known as Modal Monarchianism, the theory that Christ was a temporary mode of the existence of the one God. It was simply His will to exist in one mode rather than in another. 4 " One and the same God/' said Noetus, " is the Creator and Father of all things, and, because it was His good pleasure, He 1 The older sort, who clung to tradition pure and simple, were dubious of the introduction of dialectic methods into Christianity : see Eus. v. 28; cf. v. 13. "Expavescunt ad ot/covo/Aiav," Tert. adv. Prax. 3. Cf. Weingarten, p. 25. 2 Pantenus, when asked by outside philosophers, " How can God know the world, if like knows like ?" replied (Routh, Rel. Sac. i. p. 379) : pyre cucr^TjTws ra aio~6i]Ta prfTf. voepws TO vorjra' ov yap etvai 8vvarov rov inrep ra ovra Kara ra ovra TWV OVTCOV \a/j.ftdvfo-dat, d\\ (is iSta OeXn']fj.ara yivuxTKeiv avrov ra ovra a[j.ev . . . for if he made all things by His will, no one can deny that He knows His own will, and hence knows what His will has made. Cf. Julius Africanus (Routh, ii. 239), Xeyerai yap 6/icovv/i,a>s 6 Ofo *al ei/u o eipi, as used by the Naassenes, ap. Hipp. 5. 7. 4 Cf. Harnack, art. in Encycl. Brit. "Sabellitw." ? 258 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. appeared to righteous men of old. For when He is not seen Ha is invisible, and when He is seen He is visible : He is uncon- tained when He wills not to be contained, and contained when He is contained When the Father had not been born, He was rightly styled Father: when it was His good pleasure to undergo birth, He became on being born His own son, not another's." 1 But the dominant conception was in a line with that of both Greek philosophy and Greek religion. From the Supreme God came forth, or in Him existed, special forms and modifications by which He both made the world and revealed Himself to it. (i.) The speculations as to the nature of these forms varied partly with 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, Ter- tullian distinguishes between two schools of Yalentinians, that of Valentinus himself and that of his great, though independent, follower Ptolemy. 2 The former regarded the jiEons as simply modes of God's existence, abiding within His essence : the latter, in common with the great 1 Hipp. 9. 1 ; Schmid, Dogmeng, 47, . c, Valent. 4 ; cf. &a0eo-eis of Ptol. ap. ban. 1. 18. 1 . IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 259 majority of the school, looked upon them as " personal substances" which had come forth from God and re- named outside Him. And again, most philosophers of the same school made a genealogy of ^ons, and fur- nished their opponents thereby with one of their chief handles for ridicule : but Colorbasus regarded the pro- duction of the ^Eons as a single momentary act. 1 Some- times, however, the expressions, which came from dif- ferent 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 phi- losophers 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 : 2 or from the original Will and Thought came forth Mind and Truth (Reality) as visible forms and images of the invisible qualities (dtad&roMr) of the Father. 3 (ii.) But side by side with this tendency to indivi- dualize 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. 4 He alone 1 ap. Iren. 1. 12. 3. ! Hipp. 6. 12. 3 Ptolemy ap. Iren. 1. 12. 1; cf. Hipp. c. Noet. 10, WOAUS 9* * ap. Iren. 1. 2. 1, 5 (Yalentinians). 82 280 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 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. 1 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. 2 The Logos, or Word, which was so sent forth was made up of distinct utterances : each utterance was an ceon, 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 accept- ance. The leading point in both is the relation of the individual logoi to the Logos. We have already become 1 ap. Iren. 1. 24. 3 (Basilides) : cf. Clem. Al. Protrep. 10, the Logca \s the Son of vovs. 2 Ireu. 1. 14. 1, irporjKaro \6yov o/xotov aurv in relation to eternal generation. 2 Philo applied the phrase "Son of God" to the world : cf, Keim, Cduus, 95. 266 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, sometimes ' Wisdom,' sometimes ' Angel,' sometimes 'G-od,' sometimes ' Lord and Logos' sometimes he speaks of himself as l 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." 1 It follows that "there is, and is spoken of, another God and Lord beneath the Maker of the universe." 2 The theory thus formulated tended to ditheism and was openly accused of it. 3 It was saved from the charge by the gradual formulating of two dis- tinctions, both of which came from external philosophy, one of them being an inheritance from Stoicism, the other from Neo-Platonism. 4 The one was that the generation or development had taken place within the sphere of Deity itself: the generation had not taken place by thp severing of a part from the whole, as though the Divine nature admitted of a division, 5 but by distinction of function or by multiplication, as many torches may be 1 Justin, Dial. c. Tryph. 61 A, cf. 62 E, irpo(3 \rjdev yew^jua; and Hipp. c. Noet. 8, 10, 16 ; Tatian, c. 5 ; Irenseus ap. Schiuid, p. 31. 2 Justin, Dial. c. Tryph. 56 C, p. 180. 8 Hipp. 9. 12 ; Callistus, while excommunicating the Sabellians (cf. Schmid, 48 ; Weing. 31), also called Hippolytus and his party ditheists. For Callistus' own view, cf. ibid. 8. 11. See Schmid, p. 50 ; also p. 45 for Praxeas ap. Tert. 4 The Gnostic controversies in regard to the relation to God of the Powers who were intermediate between Him and the world, had helped to forge such intellectual instruments. 6 Justin, c. Tryph. 128 : 8vvdfj.fi KCU fiovXy avrov aAA' ov KO.T diro- TO/J.r)V a)S a7TO/i/)t^o/^V7js TT)S TOV Trarpos ovcrias ; cf. Plotinus ap. Ham. Dogm. 493 : Kara fj.fpicrfj.ov ov KO.T dvoTofj,r)v in Tatian, 5, is different; cf. Hipp. c. Noet. 10. IX GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 267 lit from one without diminishing the light of that one. 1 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." 2 But the influ- ence 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. 3 The Supreme Mind could never have been with- out His Thought. The Father Eternal was always a Father, the Son was always a Son. 4 (ii.) The question of the nature of the eternally -be- gotten Logos was answered variously, according as the supra-cosmic or the transcendental idea of God was domi- nant in a writer's mind. 5 To Justin Martyr, God is con- 1 Justin, Dial. c. Tryph. 61 C, where the metaphor of "speech" is also employed. 2 ap. Tert. c. Hermog. 3. 3 For metaphor of light, cf. Monoimus ap. Hipp. 8. 12 ; also Tatian, c. 5. 4 There is uncertainty as to eternal generation in Justin ; see Engel- hardt, p. 118. It is not in Hippolytus, c. Noet. 10. Though implied in Irenaeus (Harn. p. 495), it is in Origen that this solution attains clear expression, e.g. deprinc. 1. 2 IF., though his view is not through- out steady and uniform. Emanation seemed to him to imply division into parts. But he hovers between the Logos as thought and as substance. For Clement and Origen in this connection, see Harnack, pp. 579, 581. 5 God unchangeable in Himself comes into contact with human affairs : Ty irpovoiy. KCU Tjf oucovo/tup, c. Gels. 4. 14. His Word changes according to the nature of the individuals into whom he comes, c. Celt. 4. 18. 268 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. ceived 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. 1 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;" 2 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 de- scended, by the spread and dominance of the transcen- dental as distinguished frem 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. 3 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 par- taking, but by essence. 4 He is begotten of the very essence of the Father. The generation is an outflow as of light from light. 1 Justin, Apol. i. 22. 23. 32, e. Try. 5t ad Autolyc. ii. 22. 8 He held that side by side with God existed, net eowta, but owrta, Se$, of the vital force. 3 Hence in both philosophical and Christian cosmologies, ousia was some- 1 over to. 17 re v\rj KO.I TO e?Sos KCU TO /c TOVTWV, Metaph. 6. 10, p. 1035 a, " ousia is matter, form, and the compound of matter and form." 2 ova-lav 8e 6eov Zr)V(ov fJLfv <^? TO evoV), 3 and not outside them (since aSvvaTOV \opls elvai Ttjv oixrlav KOI ov fj ovtriaj J 4 or which exists outside them, and by participation in which they are what they are: this latter is Plato's conception of e?^o?, 5 and of its equivalent ova-la. To a nominalist, on the other hand, ousia is only the 1 ovtria Se eortv rj Kvpnarard re KCU Trpwrws KCU paXurra Xeyofifvrj 77 fj.y']T Ko.6 {nroKeifJievov TIVOS Aeyercu {J-rfff. ev iwoKei/xei/o) rivi TTIV' ofov o rts avQpwiros Kal 6 TIS TTTTTOS, Categ. 5, p. 2 a : but in the Metaphysics a different point of view is taken, and the term irp^rj ova-ia is used in the following sense, i.e. of the form, e.g. 6, 11, p. 1037. 3 Frequently in the Metaphysics, e.g. 6. 7, p. 1032 6, 7. 1, p. 1042 a. 3 Arist. Metaph. 6. 11, p. 1037 a. 4 Ibid. 12. 5, p. 1079 b. 5 e.g. Parmen. p. 132e. o 5' av ra ofioia iLtrtyovra o'/xoia y, OVK ccrrai avro TO tidos. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 271 common name which is predicable in the same sense to a number of individual existences. 1 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." 2 The distioction played a large part in the later history of Platonism : 3 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.* 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 abso- lutely under our control. 5 1 ovtri'a to~Tiv ovofia. KOIVOV KOU dopurrov Kara Trcurwv rwv VTT OVTJ UTTOcrrcurewv op.oTcp.ws (f>epop,evov, KOU (rvvwi/v/icos Ka.Trjyopovfj.tvov, Suidas, s. v. 2 VOIJTO. O.TTO. /cat acrw/xara etSij . . . Tyv d\.r)6ivr)v ovo-iav ftvaC TO. 8( Ku/u)v o~u>fJMTa . . . yvc(T6V O.VT oucrtois (f>pop*vT)v TWO. irpoo~a.yopfvovo~i, Plat. Sophist, p. 246. 8 e.g. it is stated by Celsus and adopted by Origen : Origen, c. Gels. 7. 45 sq. 4 rj ova-La. avwraTO) oucra, T( fJ.t]B(v ttVai irpo airnjs, yei/os ty ri yevtKwroiTov, Porphyr. Eisag. 2. 24. iicaoTOS p*v iJ/Mov Kara p,ev TO OpaS KOU OUCTiaS, OVKOVV ovcria oi58' avToovvia' Sto ov8e Kvpioi T^S avT<3y oucrias, Plotin. Enn. 6. 8. 12. 1 Arist. Anal. post. 2. 3, p. 90 b ; Top. 5. 2, p. 130 b; Metaph. 6. 4, p. 1030 b. ? Sext. Empir. Pyrrli. Hypotyp. 3. 1. 2. 3 cf ye. op-oovcnoi at Tv i/'v^at rats ^ere/aatSi Porphyr. de Abstin. 1. 19. 4 roil? TroSas ws o/ioowiwv a.vOpwirwv avOpanroi tvt^av, Clement. Horn 20. 7, p. 192. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 273 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'3 statement of that view by a recognition of the uncertainty which flowed from the uncertain meaning of the term. 1 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. 2 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 hyperousins* Even those who main- tained the applicability of the term to God, denied the possibility of denning 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 ?" 4 But in spite of these diffi- culties, the conservative feeling against the introduction 1 e. Cels. 6. 64. 3 e.g. in S. Athanas. ad Afr. episc. 4, vol. i. 714. 8 Dionys. Areop. de div. vu>m. 5. 4 Philo, Leg. Alleg. 1. 30, vol. i. 62 ; cf. de post. Cain. 8, vol. i. 229 : there is a remarkable Christian application of this in a dialogue between a Christian and a Jew who was curious as to the Trinity, Hieronymi Theologi Graeci, Dialogue de sancta Trinitate, in Gallandi, Vet. Pott Bibl. vol. vii., reprinted in Migne, Patrol. Or. vol. xL 845. T 274 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. of metaphysical terms into theology, and the philosophical doctrine of absolute transcendence, were overborne by tho 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 transcend- ing numerical unity became dominant in the Christian. Church, the term homoousios (6/u.oova-ios) was not unnatu- rally adopted to express the relation of God the Father to God the Son. It accentuated the doctrine that the Son was not a creature (/cr/oyia) ; 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. 1 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. 2 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 IK T^S oixrt'as TOU Trar/oos, Athan. ad Antioch, 3, vol. i. 616. 2 Cf. Harnack, i. 191, 219, 476 sqq., 580. In the Valentinian system, the spiritual existence which Achamoth brought forth was of the same essence as herself, Iren. 1. 5. 1. In that of Basilides, the three-fold sonship which was in the seed which God made, was KOTO jravra Ty OVK ovri #e< o/iooucrios, Hippolytus, 7. 22 : so as regards TO (v in Epiphanes (Valentinian?), ap. Iren. 1. 11. 3 (Hipp. 6. 38), it (ruvvirdpx** Ty ^OVOTTJTJ, as Suva/us 6/iooi'crios avrg. Cf. Clem. Horn, 20.7; Iren. ap. Harn. 481, "ejusdem substantiae;" Tert Apol 21, "ex unitate substantiae ;" Harn. 488, 491. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 275 who held the plurality to be merely modal or phenome- nal. 1 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 (vTroo-raa-tr) and hyparxis (v-n-apfys). The latter of these played but a small part in Christian theology, and may be disregarded here. 2 The term hypostasis is the conjugate of the verb vfyivTavai, which had come into use as a more emphatic form than elvai. 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 appear- ances, some have a substantial existence, KCL& unoa-rao-tv. 3 It also, like ousia, is used of that which has an actual as compared with a potential existence ; 4 also of that which has an objective existence in the world, and not merely exists in the thinking subject. 5 Hence when things came into being, ova-la was said ixpia-ravai. 6 Moreover, in one of its chief uses, namely that in which it designated the permanent element in objects of thought, the term 1 It was expressly rejected at the Council of Antioch in connection with Paul of Samosata ; and Basil, Ep. 9, says that Dionysius of Alex- andria gave it up because of its use by the Sabellians : cf. Ep. 52 (300). 8 It is found, e.g., in Athan. ad Afr. epuc. 4, vol. i. 714, ^ yap vTrocrrfluris Kal -q owria. virapiV rrys arr^s owrtas wroorao-ecov. He elsewhere identifies it with TT/JOO-WTTOV in Ath. et Cyril, in Expos, orthod.fid. : vrrocrTaa-i's fepovara.' Totrrecrrt TT/xxrwTi'ov 6/iooveriov. Still the identity of the two terms was allowed even after they were tending to be differentiated : cf. Athan. ad Afr. Ep. 4, vol. i. 714, 17 8c wnxrracris outria ecrri xai ovSfv aAAo o"r)fiaivofj.fvov fX fi *] avTO TO ov. So ad Antioch, 6. (i. 617), he tolerates the view that there was only one VJTOOTCIO-IS in the Godhead, on the ground that wroVroo-is might be regarded as synonymous with owria. Cf. objection at Council of Sardica, against three iVoo-rao-ets in the Godhead, instead of one vrroorraorts, of Father, Son and Spirit. Cf. Harn. Dogm. 693. * iSiav WOO-TOO-IV, Sext. Empir. de Pyrrh. 2. 219. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 277 of thought to be the term for the sulstantia concreta, the individual, the ova-la aro/xo9 of Galen. 1 The distinction, however, was far from being universally recognized. The clearest and most elaborate exposition of it is contained in a letter of Basil to his brother Gregory, who was evi- dently not quite clear upon the point. 2 The result was, that just as Ma-rao-i? had been used to express one of the senses of oiWa, so a new term came into use to define more precisely the sense of uTroo-rao-tf. Its origin is pro- babiy to be traced to the interchange of documents be- tween East and West, which leading to a difficulty in regard to this use of vTroaraa-is, ended in the introduction of a third term. So long as ova-la and inToa-ravis had been convertible terms, the one Latin word substantia, the etymological equivalent of uTroVracn?, had sufficed for both. When the two words became differentiated in Greek, it became advisable to mark the difference. However, the word essentia, the natural equivalent for ova-la, jarred upon a Latin ear. 3 Consequently substantia was claimed for ova-lay while for uTroo-rao-f? a fresh equivalent had to be sought. This was found in persona, whose antecedents may be those of " a character in a play," or of " person" in the juristic sense, a possible party to a contract, in which case Tertullian may have originated this usage. 4 1 Ed. Ktihn, 5. 662. 2 Ep. 210; Harn. Dogm. 693. 3 Cf. Quintilian, who ascribes it in turn to Plautus and to Sergius Flavins, 2. 14. 2; 3. 6. 23; 8. 3. 33 : Seneca, Ep. 58. 6, to Cicero, and more recently Fabianus. For substantia, ef. Quint. 7. 2. 6, " nam et substantia ejus sub oculos cadit." 4 Cf. Harnack, 489, 543 ; for its use by Sabellius, &c., ib. 679 ; also Orig. de princ. 1. 2. 8. 278 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. Such Western practice would tend to stimulate the em- ployment of the corresponding Greek term -n-poa-wTrov, whose use hitherto seems to have been subordinate to that of vTroo-rao-if. 1 And, finally, the philosophic terms vcns is distinguished from ouo-ia TO>V oAcoy : so 7. 75, 17 TOV oAov raa > ets Kai, fuel's. * dyvoovfjLtvov wo TWV Aawv, Athan. de Synod. 8 (i. 577). 280 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. the resolutions of the majority upon the deepest subjects of human speculation to the factitious rank of laws which must be accepted on pain of forfeiture, banishment or death. Philosophy branched off from theology. It became its handmaid and its rival. It postulated doctrines instead of investigating them. It had to show their reasonableness or to find reasons for them. And for ages afterwards philosophy was dead. I feel as strongly as you can feel the weariness of the discussions to which I have tried to direct your attention. But it is only by seeing how minute and how purely speculative they are, that we can properly estimate their place in Christian theology. Whether we do or do not accept the conclu- sions in which the greater part of the Christian world ultimately acquiesced, we must at least recognize that chey rest upon large assumptions. Three may be indi- cated which are all due to the influence of Greek philo- sophy. 1 1 [As this summing up never underwent the author's final revision, and the notes which follow stand in his MS. parallel with the corre- sponding portion of the Lecture as originally delivered, it has been thought well to place them here. ED.] (1) The tendency to abstract has combined with the tendency to regard matter as evil or impure, in the production of a tendency to form rather a negative than a positive conception of God. The majority of formularies define God by negative terms, and yet they have claimed for conceptions which are negative a positive value. (2) We owe to Greek philosophy to the hypothesis of the chasm between spirit and matter the tendency to interpose powers between the Creator and His creation. It may be held that the attempt to solve the insoluble problem, how God, who is pure spirit, made and sustains us, has darkened the relations which it has attempted to explain by introducing abstract metaphysical conceptions. IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 281 (1) It is assumed that metaphysical distinctions are important. I am far from saying that they are not : but it is not less important to recognize that much of what we believe rests upon this assumption that they are. There is other- wise no justification whatever for drawing men's thoughts away from the positive knowledge which we may gain both of ourselves and of the world around us, to contem- plate, even at far distance, the conception of Essence. (2) The second is the assumption that these metaphy- sical distinctions which we make in our minds correspond to realities in the world around us, or in God who is beyond the world and within it. Again, I am far from saying that they do not ; but it is at least important for us to recognize the fact that, in speaking of the essence of either the world or God, we are assuming the existence of something corresponding to our conception of essence in the one or the other. 1 (3) The third assumption is that the idea of perfection which we transfer from ourselves to God, really corre- sponds to the nature of His being. It is assumed that rest is better than motion, that passionlessness is better than feeling, that changelessness is better than change. We know these things of our- selves : we cannot know them of One who is unlike our- selves, who has no body that can be tired, who has no 1 It may be noted that even in the later Greek philosophy there was a view, apparently identical with that of Bishop Berkeley, that matter or substance merely represented the sum of the qualities Origen, ile Princ. 4. 1. 34. 282 IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. imperfection that can miss its aim, with whom unhindered movement may conceivably be perfect life. I have spoken of these assumptions because, although it would be difficult to over-estimate the importance of the conceptions by which Greek thought lifted men from the conception of God as a Being with human form and i~c! man passions, to the lofty height on whicii they can feel around them an awful and infinite Presence, the time may have come when in face of the large knowledge of His ways which has come to us through both thought and research. we may be destined to transcend the as- sumptions of Greek speculation by new assumptions, which will lead us at once to a diviner knowledge and the sense of a diviner life. 1 1 These Lectures are the history of a genesis : it would otherwise h-we been interesting to show in how many points theories which have DC en thought out in modern times revive theories of the remote paat of JLctatlm antiquity. LECTURE X. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTEEIES UPON CHRISTIAN USAGES. A. THE GREEK MYSTERIES AND RELATED CULTS. SIDE by side in Greece with the religion which was openly professed and with the religious rites which were practised in the temples, not in antagonism to them, but intensifying their better elements and elaborating their ritual, were the splendid rites which were known 8? ihe Mysteries. Side by side also with the great political communities, and sheltered within them by the common law and drawn together by a stronger than political brotherhood, were innumerable associations for the prac- tice of the new forms of worship which came in with foreign commerce, and for the expression in a common worship of the religious feelings which the public religion did not satisfy. These associations were known as Qlao-oi, epai'oi Or opyeuwes. I will speak first of the mysteries, and then of the associations for the practice of other cults. 1. The mysteries were probably the survival of the oldest religions of the Greek races and of the races which preceded them. They were the worship not of the gods 284 x. of the sky, Zeus and Apollo and Athene, but of the gods of the earth and the under- world, the gods of the pro- ductive forces of nature and of death. 1 The most important of them were celebrated at Eleusis, near Athens, and the scattered information which exists about them has been made more impressive and more intelligible to us by excavations, which have brought to light large remains of the great temple the largest in Greece in which they were celebrated. It had been a cult common to the Ionian tribes, probably borrowed from the earlier races among whom they had settled. It was originally the cult of the powers which produce the harvest, conceived as a triad of divinities a god and two goddesses, Pluto, Demeter and Kore, of whom the "latter became so dominant in the worship, that the god almost disappeared from view, and was replaced by a divinity, lacchus, who had no place in the original myth." 2 Its chief elements were the initiation, the sacri- fice, and the scenic representation of the great facts of natural life and human life, of which the histories of the gods were themselves symbols. 3 1 For what follows, reference in general may be made to Keil, Attische Quite, aus Inschriften, Philologus, Bd. xxiii. 212 259, 592 622 : and Weingarten, Histcr. Zeitschrift, Bd. xlv. 1881, p. 441 sqq as well as to the authorities cited in the notes. 2 Foucart, Le culte de Pluton dans la religion eleusinienne, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique, 1883, pp. 401 sqq. 8 The successive stages or acts of initiation are variously described and enumerated, but there were at least four: *-a#a/xris the preparatory purification ; o-vcrracris the initiatory rites and sacrifices ; TeAer?) or /Ltvryo-is the prior initiation ; and oroTrreta, the higher or greater initiation, which admitted to the TrapaSoo-ts TWV u/><3j/, or holiest act of the ritual Cf. Lobeck, Aglaoph. pp. 39 fi\ UPON CHRISTIAN USAGES. 285 (i.) The main underlying conception of initiation was, that there were elements in human life from which the candidate must purify himself before he could be fit to approach God. There was a distinction between those who were not purified, and those who, in consequence of being purified, were admitted to a diviner life and to the hope of a resurrection. The creation of this distinction is itself remarkable. The race of mankind was lifted on to a higher plane when it came to be taught that only the pure in heart can see God. The rites of Eleusis were originally confined to the inhabitants of Attica : but they came in time to be open to all Greeks, later to all Romans, and were open to women as welt as to men. 1 The bar at the entrance came to be only a moral bar. The whole ceremonial began with a solemn proclama- tion : " Let no one enter whose hands are not clean and whose tongue is not prudent." In .other mysteries it was : " He only may enter who is pure from all defile- ment, and whose soul is conscious of no wrong, and who has lived well and justly." 2 The proclamation was probably accompanied by some words or sights of terror. When Nero went to Eleusis and thought at first of being initiated, he was deterred by it. Here is another instance of exclusion, which is not less important in its bearing upon Christian rites. Apollonius of Tyana was excluded because he was a 1 An interesting inscription has recently come to light, which shows that the public slaves of the city were initiated at the public expense. Foucart, Lc. p. 394. * Ci Origen, e, Celt. 3. 59. 286 X. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES magician (70/79) and not pure in respect of TO. he had intercourse with other divinities than those of the mysteries, and practised magical rites. 1 We learn something from the parody of the mysteries in Lucian's romance of the pseudo-prophet Alexander, in it Alexander institutes a celebration of mysteries and torchlights and sacred shows, which go on for three suc- cessive days. On the first there is a proclamation of a similar kind to that at Athens. " If any Atheist or Christian or Epicurean has come as a spy upon the festi- val, let him flee ; let the initiation of those who believe in the god go on successfully." Then forthwith at the very beginning a chasing away takes place. The prophet himself sets the example, saying, " Christians, away ! " and the whole crowd responds, " Epicureans, away ! " Then the show begins the birth of Apollo, the marriage of Coronis, the coming of ^Esculapius, are represented ; the ceremonies proceed through several days in imitation of the mysteries and in glorification of Alexander. 2 The proclamation was thus intended to exclude notorious sinners from the first or initial ceremonial. 3 The rest was 1 Philostratus, Vita Apoll. 4. 18, p. 138. 2 Alex. 38. 3 Cf. Lobeck, Aglaoph. pp. 39 if. and 89 ff. ; Welcker, Griech. Got- terl. ii. 530 532. " The first and most important condition required of those who would enter the temple at Lindus is that they be pure in heart and not conscious of any crime." Professor W. M. Ramsay in Ency. Brit. s. v. " Mysteries." For purification before admission to the worship of a temple, see, in G.I. A. iii. Pt. i. 73. 74, instances of regu- lation prescribed at the temple of Men Tyrannus at Laurium in Attica, e.g. prjOfva aKadaprov 7r/>ocrayeiv, various periods of purification being specified, Cf. Reinach, Traite d'^pigr. Grecque, p. 133, on the inscr. of Andania in Messenia, B.O. 91 ; the mysteries of the Cabin in Le Bas and Foucart, Inscr. du Peloponnese, ii. 5, p. 161; and Sauppe, die Mysterieninschr. von Andania. TTPON CHRISTIAN USAGES. 287 thrown upon a man's own conscience. He was asked to confess his sins, or at least to confess the greatest crime that he had ever committed. " To whom am I to confess it ?" said Lysander to the mystagogoi who were conducting him. "To the gods." "Then if you will go away," said he, " I will tell them." Confession was followed by a kind of baptism. 1 The candidates for initiation bathed in the pure waters of the sea. The manner of bathing and the number of immersions varied with the degree of guilt which they had confessed. They came from the bath new men. It was a icdQapo-is, a \ovrpov, a laver of regeneration. They had to practise certain forms of abstinence : they had to fast ; and when they ate they had to abstain from certain kinds of food. 2 (ii.) The purification was followed by a sacrifice which was known as a-wrnpia a sacrifice of salvation : and in addition to the great public sacrifice, each of the candi- dates for initiation sacrificed a pig for himself. 8 Then 1 Tertullian, de Baptismo, 5, " Nam et sacris quibusdam per lava- crum initiantur. . . ipsos etiam deos suos lavationibus efferunt;" Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk. 5. 4 : " The mysteries are not exhibited incontinently to all, but only after certain purifications and previous instructions." Ibid. 5. 11 : "It is not without reason that in the mysteries that obtain among the Greeks, lustrations hold the first place, as also the laver among the Barbarians. After these are the minor mysteries, which have some foundation of instruction and of preliminary preparation for what is to come after ; and the great mysteries, in which nothing remains to be learned of the universe, but only to contemplate and comprehend nature and things." We have thus a sort of baptism and catechumenate. 2 The fast lasted nine days, and during it certain kinds of food were wholly forbidden. Cf. Lobeck, Aglaoph. pp. 189197. 8 There was a lesser and a greater initiation : " It is a regulation of law that those who have been admitted to the lesser should again be initiated into the greater mysteries." HippoL 5, 8 : see the whole chapter, as also cc. 9, 20. 288 X. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES there was an interval of two days before the more solemn sacrifices and shows began. They began with a great procession each of those who were to be initiated carrying a long lighted torch, and singing loud paeans in honour of the god. 1 It set out from Athens at sunrise and reached Eleusis at night. The next day there was another great sacrifice. Then followed three days and nights in which the initiated shared the mourning of Demeter for her daughter, and broke their fast only by drinking the mystic KVKCWV a drink of flour and water and pounded mint, and by eating the sacred cakes. 2 (iii.) And at night there were the mystic plays : the scenic representation, the drama in symbol and for sight. Their torches were extinguished : they stood outside the temple in the silence and the darkness. The doors opened there was a blaze of light and before them was acted the drama of Demeter and Kore* the loss of the daughter, the wanderings of the mother, the birth of the child. It was a symbol of the earth passing through its yearly periods. It was the poetry of Nature. It was the drama which is acted every year, of summer and winter and spring. Winter by winter the fruits and flowers and grain die down into the darkness, and spring after spring they come forth again to new life. Winter after winter the sorrowing earth is seeking for 1 Cf. Clem. Alex. Protrept. 12: "0 truly sacred mysteries! stainless light ! My way is lighted with torches and I survey the heavens and God : I am become holy whilst I am initiated. The Lord is the hierophant, and seals while illuminating him who is initiated," &c. Ib. 2 : " Their (Demeter's and Proserpine's) wanderings, and seizure, and grief, Eleusis celebrates by torchlight processions;" and again p. 32. So ^llius Aristid. i. p. 454 (ed. Canter), ras axr6pov$ vrWas. 2 "I have fasted, I have drunk the cup," &c. Clem. Alex. Protrept. 2. UPON CHRISTIAN USAGES. 289 her lost child ; the hopes of men look forward to the new blossoming of spring. It was a drama also of human life. It was the poetry of the hope of a world to come. Death gave place to life. It was a purgatio animce, by which the soul might be fit for the presence of God. Those who had been baptized and initiated were lifted into a new life. Death had no terrors for them. The blaze of light after darkness, the symbolic scenery of the life of the gods, were a foreshadowing of the life to come. 1 There is a passage in Plutarch which so clearly shows this, that I will quote it. 2 " When a man dies, he is like those who are being initiated into the mysteries. The one expression, reAevrav the other. Tf\fia-6ai, correspond. . . . Our whole life is but a succession of wanderings, of painful courses, of long journeys by tortuous ways without outlet. At the moment of quitting it, fears, terrors, quiverings, mortal sweats, and a lethargic stupor, come over us and overwhelm us ; but as soon as we are out of it, pure spots and meadows receive us, with voices and dances and the solemnities of sacred words and holy sights. It is there that man, having become perfect and initiated restored to liberty, really master of himself celebrates, crowned with myrtle, the most august mysteries, holds converse with just and pure souls, looking down upon the impure multitude of the profane or uninitiated, sinking in the mire and mist beneath him through fear of death and through disbelief in the life to come, abiding in its miseries." There was probably no dogmatic teaching there were possibly no words spoken it was all an acted 1 Cf. ^Elius Aristid. i. 454, on the burning of the temple at Eleusia. The gain of the festival was not for this life only, but that hereafter they would not lie in darkness and mire like the uninitiated. * Fragm, ap. Stob. Florileg. 120 Lenormant, Cont. Rev. Sepl 1880, p. 430. 9 290 J.. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES parable. 1 But it was all kept in silence. There was an awful individuality about it. They saw the sight in com- mon, but they saw it each man for himself. It was his personal communion with the divine life. The glamour and the glory of it were gone when it was published to all the world. 2 The effect of it was conceived to be a change both of character and of relation to the gods. The initiated were by virtue of their initiation made partakers of a life to come. " Thrice happy they who go to the world below having seen these mysteries : to them alone is life there, to all others is misery." 3 2. In time, however, new myths and new forms of worship were added. It is not easy to draw a definite line between the mysteries, strictly so called, and the forms of worship which went on side by side with them. Not only are they sometimes spoken of in common as mysteries, but there is a remarkable syncretist painting in a non-Chris- tian catacomb at Eome, in which the elements of the Greek mysteries of Demeter are blended with those of Sabazius and Mithra, in a way which shows that the worship was blended also. 4 These forms of worship 1 Synes. Orat. p. 48 (ed. Petav.), ov paOeiv TI Seiv dXXa iraOciv /cai Sia.TeOf)vai yevo/zevovs SijAovort cTriTjySeiovs. But the /ivcrraycDyoi pos- sibly gave some private instruction to the groups of pwrrau. who were committed to them. 2 Cf. Lenonnant, Cont. Rev. Sept. 1880, p. 414 sq. 3 Soph. frag. 719, ed. Dind. : so in effect Pindar, frag, thren. 9 ', Cic. Legg. 2. 14. 36 ; Plato, Gorg. p. 493 B, Phcedo. 69 C (the lot of the uninitiated). They were bound to make their life on earth correspond to their initiation ; see Lenormant, ut sup. p. 429 sqq. In later tiu;3d it was supposed actually to make them better; Sopatros in Walz, Rliet. Gr. viii. 114. 4 See Garrucci, Les Mystkres du Syncretitme Phryyien dan* let Romainet de Proetextat. Paris, 1854. UPON CHRISTIAN USAGES. 291 also had an initiation : they also aimed at a pure religion. The condition of entrance was : " Let no one enter the most venerable assembly of the association unless he be pure and pious and good." Nor was it left to the individual conscience : a man had to be tested and examined by the officers. 1 But the main element in the association was not so much the initiation as the sacrifice and the common meal which followed it. The offerings were brought by individuals and offered in com- mon : they were offered upon what is sometimes spoken of as the " holy table." They were distributed by the servants (the deacons), and the offerer shared with the rest in the distribution. In one association, at Xanthos in Lycia, of which the rules remain on an inscription, the offerer had the right to half of what he had brought. The feast which followed was an effort after real fellow- ship. 2 There was in it, as there is in Christian times, a sense of communion with one another in a communion with God. During the earliest centuries of Christianity, the mysteries, and the religious societies which were akin to the mysteries, 3 existed on an enormous scale throughout the eastern part of the Empire. There were elements in some of them from which Christianity recoiled, and against which the Christian Apologists use the language 1 There was a further and larger process before a man was rtAeios. Tert. adv. Valent. c. 1, says that it took five years to become reAetos- '* The most elaborate account is that of the Arval feast at Rome : cf. flenzen, Ada fratrum Arvalium. 8 fivffTai is used of members of a religious association at Teoe (Inscr. in Bullet, de Corresp. Helleniqut, 1880, p. 164), and of the Koinan Monarchians in Epiph. 55. 8 ; cf. Harnack, Dogm. 628. u2 292 X. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES of strong invective. 1 But, on the other hand, the majority of them had the same aims as Christianity itself the aim of worshipping a pure God, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of cultivating the spirit of brotherhood. 2 They were part of a great religious revival which distin. guishes the age. 3 B. THE MYSTERIES AND THE CHURCH. It was inevitable when a new group of associations came to exist side by side with a large existing body of associations, from which it was continually detaching members, introducing them into its own midst with the practices of their original societies impressed upon their minds, that this new group should tend to assimilate, with the assimilation of their members, some of the elements of these existing groups. 4 This is what we 1 Clem. Alex. Protrep. 2 ; Hippol. 1, procem. Cf. Philo, de sacrif. 12 (ii. 260), ri yap i KaXa TO.VT rni/ w /mrrat K. r. X. 2 They also had the same sanction the fear of future punishments, cf. Celsus in Orig. 8. 48. Origen does not controvert this statement, but appeals to the greater moral effect of Christianity as an argument for its truth. They possibly also communicated divine knowledge. There is an inscription of Dionysiac artists at Nysa, of the time of the Antonines, in honour of one who was 0eoAoyos of the temples at Pergamos, as 0av/ia

ecris: as in Sext. Empir. (Pyrrh. p. 13, 16) it meant only adherence to a system of dogmas (no standard implied). * Ad Scap. 2. 8 Philosophers had abused each other. Theologians followed In their track. The "cart-loads of abuse they emptied upon one another" (5Aas d/iaas /JAacr^Tj/Mtcov KaTfcrKtSaarav aAXiJXwv, Lucian, Eunuch. 2) are paralleled in, e. g. Gregory of Nyssa. 330 XI. THE INCORPORATION OP CHRISTIAN IDEAS other by a slow evolution, that the idea of trust in God, which is the basis of all religion, changed into the idea of a creed, blending theory with fact, and metaphysical speculation with spiritual truth. It began by being (1) a simple trust in God; then followed (2) a simple expansion of that trust into the assent to the proposition that God is good, and (3) a simple acceptance of the proposition that Jesus Christ was His Son ; then (4) came in the definition of terms, and each definition of terms involved a new theory; finally, (5) the theories were gathered together into systems, and the martyrs and witnesses of Christ died for their faith, not outside but inside the Christian sphere ; and instead of a world of religious belief, which resembled the world of actual fact in the sublime unsym- metry of its foliage and the deep harmony of its discords, there prevailed the most fatal assumption of all, that the symmetry of a system is the test of its truth and a proof thereof. I am far from saying that those theories are not true. The point to which I would draw attention is, first, that they are speculations ; secondly, that their place in Chris- tian thought arises from the fact that they are the specu- lations of a majority at certain meetings. The importance which attaches to the whole subject with which we are dealing, lies less in the history of the formation of a body of doctrine, than in the growth and permanence of the conceptions which underlie that formation. (1) The first conception comes from the antecedent belief which was rooted in the Greek mind, that, giva certain primary beliefs which are admitted on all side to be necessary, it is requisite that a man should defin* INTO A BODY OP DOCTRINE. 831 those beliefs 1 that it is as necessary that a man should be able to say with minute exactness what he means by God, as that he should say, I believe in God. It is purely philosophical. A philosopher cannot be satisfied with unanalyzed ideas. (2) The second conception comes rather from politics than from philosophy. It is the belief in a majority of a meeting. It is the conception that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which are made by the majority of church officers assembled under certain con- ditions, are in all cases and so certainly true, that the duty of the individual is, not to endeavour, by whatever light of nature or whatever illumination of the Holy Spirit may be given to him, to understand them, but to acquiesce in the verdict of the majority. The theory assumes that God never speaks to men except through the voice of the majority. It is a large assumption. It is a transference to the transcendental sphere in which the highest conceptions of the Divine Nature move, of what is a convenient practical rule for conducting the business of human society: "Let the majority decide." I do not say that it is untrue, or that it has not some arguments in its favour ; but I do venture to point out that the fact of its being an assumption must at least be recognized. (3) The third conception is, that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which were made by the majority, or even by the unanimous voice of a church assembly, in a particular age, and which were both rela- tive to the dominant mental tendencies of that age and adequately expressed them, are not only true but final. 1 See Lecture V. p. 135. 332 XI. THE INCORPORATION OF CHRISTIAN IDEAS It is a conceivable view that once, and once only, did God speak to men, and that the revelation of Himself in the Gospels is a unique fact in the history of the universe. It is also a conceivable view that God is continually speaking to men, and that now, no less than in the early ages of Christianity, there is a divine Voice that whispers in men's souls, and a divine interpretation of the meaning of the Gospel history. The difficulty is in the assump- tion which is sometimes made, that the interpretation of the divine Voice was developed gradually through three centuries, and that it was then suddenly arrested. The difficulty has sometimes been evaded by the further assumption that there was no development of the truth, and that the Nicene theology was part of the original revelation a theology divinely communicated to the apostles by Jesus Christ himself. The point of most importance in the line of study which we have been following together, is the demonstration which it affords that this latter assumption is wholly untenable. We have been able to see, not only that the several elements of what is distinctive in the Nicene theology were gra- dually formed, but also that the whole temper and frame of mind which led to the formation of those elements were extraneous to the first form of Christianity, and were added to it by the operation of causes which can be traced. If this be so, the assumption of the finality of the Nicene theology is the hypothesis of a development which went on for three centuries, and was then suddenly and for ever arrested. Such a hypothesis, even if it be a priori conceivable, would require an overwhelming amount of positive testimony. Of such testimony there is absolutely none. But it may be that the time INTO A BODY OP DOCTRINE. 833 come in which, instead of travelling once more along the beaten tracks of these ancient controversies as to parti- cular speculations, we should rather consider the prior question of the place which speculation as such should occupy in the economy of religion and of the criterion by which speculations are to be judged. We have to learn also that although for the needs of this life, for the solace of its sorrow, for the development of its possibilities, we must combine into societies and frame our rules of conduct, and possibly our articles of belief, by striking un average, yet for the highest knowledge we must go alone upon the mountain-top ; and that though the moral law is thundered forth so that even the deaf may hear, the deepest secrets of God's nature and of our own are whispered still in the silence of the night to the indivi- dual soul. It may be that too much time has been spent upon speculations about Christianity, whether true or false, and that that which is essential consists not of specu- lations but of facts, and not in technical accuracy on questions of metaphysics, but in the attitude of mind in which we regard them. It would be a cold world in which no sun shone until the inhabitants thereof had arrived at a true chemical analysis of sunlight. And it may be that the knowledge and thought of our time, which is drawing us away from the speculative elements in religion to that conception of it which builds it upon the character and not only upon the intellect, is drawing us thereby to that conception of it which the life of Christ was intended to set forth, and which will yet regenerate the world. LECTURE XIL THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION: DOCTRINE IN THE PLACE OF CONDUCT. I SPOKE in the last Lecture of the gradual formation under Greek influence of a body of doctrine. I propose to speak in the present Lecture of that enormous change in the Christian communities by which an assent to that body of doctrine became the basis of union. I shall have to speak less of the direct influence of Greece than in previous Lectures: but it is necessary to show not only the separate causes and the separate effects, but also their general sum in the changed basis of Christian communion. There is no adequate evidence that, in the first age of Christianity, association was other than voluntary. It was profoundly individual. It assumed for the first time in human history the infinite worth of the individual soul. The ground of that individual worth was a divine sonship. And the sons of God were brethren. They were drawn together by the constraining force of love. But the clustering together under that constraining force was not necessarily the formation of an association. XII. THE TRANSFORMATION CF CHRISTIAN UNION. 835 There was not necessarily any organization. 1 The ten- dency to organization came partly from the tendency of the Jewish colonies in the great cities of the empire to combine, and to a far greater extent from the large ten- dency of the Greek and Roman world to form societies for both religious and social purposes. But though there is no evidence that associations were in the first instance universal, there is ample evidence that, when once they began to be formed, they were formed on a basis which was less intellectual than moral and spiritual. An intellectual element existed : but it existed as an element, not by itself but as an essential ingredient in the whole spiritual life. It was not separable from the spiritual element. Of the same spiritual clement, " faith" and "works" were two sides. The associations, like the primitive clusters which were not yet crystallized into associations, were held together by faith and love and hope, and fused, as it were, by a common enthusiasm. They were baptized, not only into one body, but also by one spirit, by the common belief in Jesus Christ as their Saviour, by the overpowering sense of brotherhood, by the common hope of immortality. Their individual mem- bers were the saints, that is, the holy ones. The collective unity which they formed the Church of God was holy. It was regarded as holy before it was regarded as catholic. The order of the attributes in the creed is historically correct the holy Catholic Church. The pictures which remain of the earliest Christian communities show that there was a real effort to justify their name. The earliest 1 Socrates, H.E. p. 177, tvu. 1. 6. 3 " We Christians are remarkable," says Tertullian (Ad Scap. 2), "only for the reformation of our former vices." The plea of the Apologists was based on the fact that the Christians led blarnele* lives : de causa innocentice consistam, Tert. ApoL c. 4. 4 The Elchasaites, ap. Hipp. 9. 15. Z iii. THE TRANSFORMATION Of TITS ception that the ideal society which they were endea- vouring to realize would be actually realized on earth. ^The Son of Man would come again, and the regenerated would die no more. The kingdoms of this world would become the kingdom of the Messiah. The lust and hate, the strife and conflict, the iniquity and vice, which dominated in current society, would be cast outl'or ever; and over the new earth there would be the arching spheres of a new heaven, into which the saints, like the angels, might ascend. But as the generations passed, and all things continued as they had been, and the sign of the Son of Man sent no premonitory ray from the far-off heaven, this hopeof anew earth, without changing its force, began to change its form. It was no longer conceived as sudden, but as gradual. The nations of the world were to be brought one by one into the vast com- munion. There grew up the magnificent conception of a universal assembly, a KatfoXi^ cK/cX^o-ia. 1 There vould be a universal religion and a universal society, and not until then would the end come : it would Le a ti ans- formed and holy world. The first point which I will ask you to note is, that this very tiansformation of the idea of a particular reli- gion into that of a universal religion this conception of an all-embracing human society, naturally, if uncon- sciously, carried with it a relaxation of the bonds of discipline. The very earnestness which led men to preach the Gospel and to hasten the Kingdom, led them 1 Weingarten, Zeittajdn, p. 12. See also Lightfoot, Ignatiu^ vol. ii. pp. 310312. BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION. 339 *1so to gather into the net fish of erery kind. There was always a test, but the rigour of the test was softened. The old Adam asserted itself. There were social influ- ences, and weakness of character in the officers, and a condonation by the community. It became less and less practicable to eject every offender against the Christian code. It was against this whole tendency that Montanism was a rebellion not only against the officialism of Chris- tianity, but also against its worldliness. 1 The earlier conception of that code, in which it embraced sins of thought, came to be narrowed. The first narrowing was the limitation to open sins. The Christian societies fell under the common law which governs all human organ- izations, that no cognizance can be taken of the secret thoughts of the heart. The second limitation was, that even when a man had committed an open sin, and had been therefore excluded from the community, he might be re-admitted. The limitation was not accepted without a controversy which lasted over a great part of two cen- turies, and which at one time threatened to rend the whole Christian communities into fragments. The Church was gradually transformed from being a community of saints of men who were bound together by the bond of a holy life, separated from the mass of society, and in antagonism to it to a community of men whose moral ideal and moral practice differed in but few respects from those of their Gentile neighbours. The Church of Christ, which floated upon the waves of this troublesome world was a Noah's ark, in which there were unclean as wnll as clean. 1 Weingarten, p. 17 z2 340 XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OP TttE Side by side with this diminution in the strictness of the moral tests of admission and of continued member- ship, was a growth in the importance of the intellectual elements, of which I spoke in a previous Lecture. The idea of holiness and purity came to include in early times the idea of sound doctrine. Hegesippus, 1 in speaking of a church as a virgin, gives as his reason, not its moral purity, but the fact that it was not corrupted by foolish doctrines. The growth, both within the Church and on its outskirts, of opinions which were not the opinions of the majority the tendency of all majorities to assert their power the flocking into the Christian fold of the educated Greeks and Eomans, who brought with them the intellec- tual habits of mind which dominated in the age gave to the intellectual element an importance which it had not previously possessed. Knowledge, which had always been in some sort an element in Christianity, though not as a basis of association, came to assert its place side by side with love. Agreement in opinion, which had been the basis of union in the Greek philosophical schools, and later in the Gnostic societies, now came to form a new element in the bond of union within and between the Churches. 2 But the practical necessity, when once 1 Eusebius, H. E. 4. 22, 4. 2 The very terms heresy and heterodox bear witness to the action of the Greek philosophical schools on the Christian Church : ut/>m is used in Sext. Empir. Pyrrh. p. 13, of any system of dogmas, or the principle which is distinctive of a philosophical school : cf. Diels, Doxogr. Gr. pp. 276, 573, 388. In Clem. Alex. Strom. 7. 15, it is used to denote the orthodox system. 'ErepoSd^ovs is used of the dog- matics from point of view of a sceptic : Sext. Empir. adv. Math. p. 771, 40. Joseph us uses it of the men of the other schools or parties as distinguished from the Essenes, de Bell. Jud. 2. 8. 5. For the place BASIS OP CHRISTIAN UNION. 341 an intellectual element was admitted, of giving some limitations to that element by establishing a rule of faith and a standard list of apostolic documents, caused stress to be laid at once upon the intellect and the region within which it moved. It was, that is to say, necessary to ensure that the intellectual element was of the right kind, and this of itself gave emphasis to the new temper and tendency. The profession of belief in Christ which had been in the first instance subordinate to love and hope, and which had consisted in a simple recognition of him as the Son of God, became enucleated and elabo- rated into an explicit creed; and assent to that creed became the condition, or, so to speak, the contract of membership. The profession of faith must be in the words of the Christian rule. 1 The teaching of the cate- chumens was no longer that which we find in the " Two Ways" the inculcation of the higher morality; it was the traditio symboli, the teaching of the pass-word and of its meaning. The creed and teaching were the creed and teaching of the average members of the communities. In religion, as in society, it is the average that rules. The law of life is compromise. of opinion in Gnostic societies, with its curious counterpart in laxity of discipline, see Tert. de prase. 42 44. He speaks of the Valentinians, adv. Val., as " frequentissimum plane collegium inter hsereticos." Cf. Harnack, 190 ff., also 211. The very cultivation of the Gnosis means the supremacy of the intellect. 1 Tertullian, de Spectaculis, c. 4. If yvwo-w was important as an element in salvation side by side with TTIOTIS or if jrurm included yi/oxris then also the rejection of the right faith was a bar to salva- tion : hence heresy vas regarded as involving eternal death : Tert d* prase. 2. 342 , XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE There were two collateral causes which contributed to the change and gave emphasis to it. (1) The one arose from, the importance which was attached to baptism. There is no doubt that baptism was conceived to have in itself an efficacy which in later times has been rarely attached to it. The expressions which the more literary ages have tended to construe metaphorically were taken literally. It was a real wash- ing away of sins ; it was a real birth into a new life ; it was a real adoption into a divine sonship. The renun- ciatio diaboli the abjuring of false gods and their wicked worship was also an important element. 1 These elements were indeed even more strongly emphasized by certain Gnostic societies than by the more orthodox writers ; but they directly suggested a question which soon became vital, viz. whether all baptism had this efficacy. Was the mere act or ceremonial enough, or did it depend on the place where, the person by whom, and the ritual with which it was administered ? In particular, the question of the minister of baptism became important. It came to be doubted whether baptism had its awful efficacy, if the baptizer were cut off from the general society of Christians on the ground of either his teaching or his practice. It became important to ensure that those who baptized held the right faith, lest the baptism they administered should be invalid, and should carry with it all the evil consequences of a vitiated baptism. The rules which were laid down were minute. There were grave controversies as to the precise amount of difference of opinion which vitiated baptism, and the very fact of 1 Tert. de Sped. c. 4. BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION. 343 tlie controversies about opinion accentuated the stress which was laid upon such opinion. It drew away attention from a man's character to his mental attitude towards the general average of beliefs. (2) There was another feature of early Christian life which probably contributed more than anything else to strengthen this tendency. It was the habit of inter- course and intercommunion. Christians, like Jews, tra- velled widely more for trade and commerce than for pleasure. The new brotherhood of Christians, like the ancient brotherhood of the Jews, gave to all the travelling brethren a welcome and hospitality. A test had been necessary in the earliest times in regard to the prophets and teachers. It is mentioned in the Teaching of the Apostles. But the test was of moral rather than of intellectual teaching. " Whoever comes to you and teaches you all these things" (i.e. the moral precepts of the "Two Ways"), receive him. But in case he who teaches, himself turns and teaches you another teach- ing 1 so as to destroy (this teaching), listen not to him : but if he teaches you so as to add to your righteous- ness and knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord." 2 So of the prophets: "Not every one who speaks in the spirit is a prophet, but only he who has the moral ways of the Lord (TOV? rpoTrovsKvpiov} : by these ways shall be known the false prophet and the true prophet E irery prophet who teaches the truth, if he does not what he teaches, is a false prophet." 8 So also of the travelling 1 Sioax^, here expressly used of the moral precepts in a 2. 1. 8 c. 11. 1, 2. c. 11. 8, 10; cf. Henn. M'tnd. 11. 7 and 16. 344 XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE brethren : " Let every one who comes in the name of the Lord be received ; afterwards ye shall test him and find out .... If he wish to settle among you and is a craftsman, let him work and so eat. If he be not a craftsman, provide some way of his living among you as a Christian, but not being idle. If he be unwilling so to do, he is xp l(TT &' 7ro p $ making a gain of godliness." 1 The test here also is a test of character and not of belief. But when the intellectual elements had asserted a pro- minence in Christianity, and when the acceptance of the baptismal formula had been made a test of admission to a Christian community, it gradually became a custom to make the acceptance of that formula also a condition of admission to hospitality. 2 It was, so to speak, a tessera or pass-word. By being a pass-word to hospitality, it became also a form which a man might easily strain his conscience to accept, and in religion no less than in politics there are no such strenuous upholders of current opinion as those who are hypocrites. The importance of the formula as a passport attached not only to indi- viduals, but also to whole communities. 3 The fact that the Teaching of the Apostles makes the test personal and individual, shows that in the country and at the time when that book was written the later system had not yet begun to prevail. This later system was for a com- munity to furnish its travelling members with a circular 1 c. 12. 1, 35. 2 The Jura, i.e. the communicatio pacis et appellatio fratemitatis et contesseratio hospitalitati-s, were controlled (regit) by the tradition of the creed (unim sacramenti traditio), Tert. de prcesc. 20. 3 Communicamus cum ecclesiis apostolids, quod nulla doctrina diversa;, hoc est testimonium veritatis, Tert. ibid. 21. BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION. 346 letter of recommendation. Such a letter served as a pass- port. The travelling Christian who brought it received an immediate and ungrudging hospitality. But when churches had wide points of difference, they would not receive each other's letters. The points of difference which thus led to the renunciation of fellowship, related in the first instance to discipline or practice. They came to relate to belief. Points of doctrine, no less than points of dis- cipline, came to be discussed at the meetings of the representatives of the churches in a district, concerning which I spoke in the last Lecture. Doctrine came to be thus co-ordinate with character as the basis on which the churches joined together in local or general confedera- tions, and accepted each other's certificates. The hier- archical tendency grew with it and out of it. The position of the bishops, which had grown out of the assumed desirability of guarding the tradition of truth, tended to emphasize that tradition. It gave to tradition not only a new importance, but also a new sanction. It rested belief upon living authority. Men were no longer free to interpret for themselves. This elevation of doctrine to a co-ordinate position with life in the Christian communities was the effect of causes internal to those communities. Those causes were in themselves the effects of other causes, the influence of which I have traced in previous Lectures : but in their direct operation within the churches they were altogether internal. But that which gave importance to their operation was not internal, but external. It was the interposition of the State. The first instance of that 346 XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE interposition was in the days of Aurelian, in the case of Paul of Samosata. The principle which was then esta- blished has been of enormous importance to the Christian communities ever since. It is clear that confederation of churches was so far established in Syria in the middle of the third century, that the bishops of a district claimed a right to interfere in the affairs of a neighbouring church. There was not yet the complete confederation, on the basis of the organization of the Empire, which we find after the Nicene Council ; it was a question only of neighbourhood. The Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who was a statesman as well as a theologian, had a difference of opinion with the leading bishops of Syria on one of the new questions of the metaphysical theology, which was forcing its way into the Christian churches. Meetings were held, at the first of which there appears to have been a compromise. At the second, Paul was condemned. He was formally deposed from his see. He refused to recognize the authority of the meeting, and probably with the support of his people, remained in possession of the church-buildings. An appeal as of "civil right" was made by his opponents to the Emperor. The answer of the Emperor determined the principle already referred to. The tenant of the buildings held them on condition of being a Christian. The Emperor did not determine what Christianity was. But he determined that what- ever was taught by the bishops of Italy might be properly taken as the standard. This determined Roman policy, and it went far to determine Christian doctrine for the future. When Christianity came to be recognized by the State, BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION. 347 Constantine adopted the plan of assembling the bishops on his own authority, and of giving whatever sanction the State could give to their resolutions. He said in effect, "I, as Emperor, cannot determine what Christian doctrine is, but I will take the opinion of the majority, and I will so far recognize that opinion that no one shall have the privileges of Christians, a right to hold property and an exemption from civil burdens, who does not assent to that opinion." The succeeding Christian Emperors followed in his track. The test of being a Christian was conformity to the resolutions of the Councils. One who accepted them received immunity and privileges. One who did not was liable to confiscation, to banishment, to death. I need hardly draw out for you, who know what human nature is, the importance which those resolutions of the Councils assumed. Against this whole transformation of the basis of union there were two great lines of reaction. 1. The one was the reaction of the Puritan party in the Church the conservative party, which was always smouldering, and sometimes burst forth into flame. The most important of such reactionary outbursts were those of the Novatians in the third century, and of the Donatists in the fourth. I will speak now only of the former. Its first cause was the action of the Eoman bishop, Callistus, who allowed the return to the Church of those who had been excluded on account of sins of the flesh, and of return to idolatry. The policy was continued. In 250, a determined stand was made against it. The election of a bishop who belonged to the lax party forced 348 XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE on a schism. The schism was strong. It had sym- pathizers all over the Christian world in Egypt, in Armenia, in Asia Minor, in Italy and Spain. It involved the whole theory of the Church the power of the Keys. It lasted long. It was so strong that the State had to recognize it. It did not die out until at least five cen- turies after its birth. It lingered on in detached com- munities, but it ceased to be a power. The majority, with the support not only of the State, but also of human nature, dominated the Christian world. 2. The other reaction was stronger and even more permanent. It consisted of the formation within the Christian community of an inner class, who framed for themselves and endeavoured to realize a higher than the common ideal. They stood to the rest of the community as the community itself stood to the rest of the world. The tendency itself came, as I have tried to point out in a previous Lecture, 1 mainly from the Greek philosophical schools, and was fostered to a large extent by the influ- ence on the main body of Christians of the philosophic parties upon its borders. But it asserted its place as a permanent element in the Christian world mainly as a reaction against the change of the basis of the Christian communities, and the lowering of the current standard of their morality. Henceforward there was, side by side with the Tayjuia TU>V K\rjpiK(ov and the rd'y/ua TU>V XaiKu>v ) a third rank, Tajfia rS>v ao-Krjrcov. The ideal has been obscured by its history : but that ideal was sublime. It was impracticable and undesirable ; and yet sometimes in human life room must be found for impossible ideals. 1 Lect. yi. p. 164 sq. BASIS OP CHRISTIAN UNION. 349 And the blurred and blotted picture of it which has survived to our own times, cannot take the place of the historical fact that it began as a reaction against Chris- tianity as it was and as it is an effort to regenerate human society. But Monachism, by the very fact of its separation, did not leaven the Church and raise the current morality. The Church became, not an assembly of devout men, grimly earnest about living a holy life- its bishops were statesmen ; its officers were men of the world; its members were of the world, basing their conduct on the current maxims of society, held together by the loose bond of a common name, and of a creed which they did not understand. In such a society, an intellectual basis is the only possible basis. In such a society also, in which officialism must necessarily have an important place, the insistence on that intellectual basis comes from the instinct of self-preservation. But it checked the progress of Christianity. Christianity has won no great victories since its basis was changed. The victories that it has won, it has won by preaching, not Greek metaphysics, but the love of God and the love of man. Its darkest pages are those which record the story of its endeavouring to force its transformed Greek meta- physics upon men or upon races to whom they were alien. The only ground of despair in those who accept Christianity now, is the fear which I for one cannot entertain that the dominance of the metaphysical ele- ment in it will be perpetual. I have now brought these Lectures to a close. The aet result is the introduction into Christianity of the 350 *n THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE three chief products of the Greek mind Rhetoric, Logic, and Metaphysics. I venture to claim to have shown that a large part of what are sometimes called Christian doctrines, and many usages which have prevailed and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in reality Greek theories and Greek usages changed in form and colour by the influence of primitive Christianity, but in their essence Greek still. Greece lives; not only its dying life in the lecture-rooms of Universities, but also with a more vigorous growth in the Christian Churches. It lives there, not by virtue of the survival within them of this or that fragment of ancient teaching, and this or that fragment of an ancient usage, but by the continu- ance in them of great modes and phases of thought, of great drifts and tendencies, of large assumptions. Its ethics of right and duty, rather than of love and self- sacrifice ; its theology, whose God is more metaphysical than spiritual whose essence it is important to define ; its creation of a class of men whose main duty in life is that of moral exhortation, and whose utterances are not the spontaneous outflow of a prophet's soul, but the artistic periods of a rhetorician ; its religious ceremonial, with the darkness and the light, the initiation and the solemn enactment of a symbolic drama-; its conception of intellectual assent rather than of moral earnestness as the basis of religious society in all these, and the ideas that underlie them, Greece lives. It is an argument for the divine life of Christianity that it has been able to assimilate so much that was at first alien to it. It is an argument for the truth of much of that which has been assimilated, that it has been BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION. 351 strong enough to oust many of the earlier elements. But the question which forces itself upon our attention as the phenomena pass before us in review, is the question uf the relation of these Greek elements in Christianity to the nature of Christianity itself. The question is vital. Its importance can hardly be over-estimated. It claims a foremost place in the consideration of earnest men. The theories which rise out of it are two in number. It is possible to urge, on the one hand, that Christianity, which began without them which grew on a soil whereon metaphysics never throve which won its first victories over the world by the simple moral force of the Sermon on the Mount, and by the sublime influence of the life and death of Jesus Christ, may throw off Hellen- ism and be none the loser, but rather stand out again before the world in the uncoloured majesty of the Gospels. It is possible to urge that what was absent from the early form cannot be essential, and that the Sermon on the Mount is not an outlying part of the Gospel, but its sum. It is possible to urge, on the other hand, that the tree of life, which was planted by the hand of God Himself in the soil of human society, was intended from the first to grow by assimilating to itself whatever elements it found there. It is possible to maintain that Christianity was intended to be a development, and that its successive growths are for the time at which they exist integral and essential. It is possible to hold that it is the duty of each succeeding age at once to accept the developments of the past, and to do its part in bringing on the developments of the future. Between these two main views it does not seem possible 352 XII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE to find a logical basis for a third. The one or the other must be accepted, with the consequences which it involves. But whether we accept the one or the other, it seems clear that much of the Greek element may be abandoned. On the former hypothesis, it is not essential ; on the latter, it is an incomplete development and has no claim to permanence. I believe the consideration of this question, and practical action on the determination of it, to be the work that lies before the theologians of our generation. I claim for the subject which we have been considering an exceptional importance, because it will enable us, if on the one hand we accept the theory that the primitive should be permanent, to disentangle the primitive from the later elements, and to trace the assumptions on which these later elements are based ; and if on the other hand we adopt the theory of development, it will enable us, by tracing the lines of development, to weld the new thoughts of our time with the old by that historical continuity which in human societies is the condition of permanence. I am not unaware that there are many who deprecate the ana- lysis of Christian history, and are content to accept the deposit. There has been a similar timidity in regard to the Bible. It seemed a generation ago as though the whole fabric of belief depended on the acceptance of the belief that Genesis is the work of a single author. The timidity has virtually ceased. The recognition of the fact that the Book of Genesis was not made, but grew,' so far from having been a danger to religion, has become a new support of the faith. So it will be with the analysis of Christian doctrine and of Christian history ; and there- fore I am earnest in urging its study. For though the BASIS OP CHRISTIAN UNION. 353 Lectures are ended, the study of the subject has only begun. I have ventured as a pioneer into comparatively unexplored ground : I feel that I shall no doubt be found to have made the mistakes of a pioneer ; but I feel also the certainty of a pioneer who after wandering by devious paths through the forest and the morass, looks out from the height which he has reached upon the fair landscape and speaking as one who has so stood and so looked, I am sure that you will find the country to be in the main what I have described it to be, and that you will find also that it is but the entrance to a still fairer landscape beyond. For though you may believe that I am but a dreamer of dreams, I seem to see, though it be on the far horizon the horizon beyond the fields which either we or our children will tread a Christianity which is not new but old, which is not old but new, a Christianity in which the moral and spiritual elements will again hold their place, in which men will be bound together by the bond of mutual service, which is the bond of the sons of God, a Christianity which will actually realize the brotherhood of men, the ideal of its first communities. CONTAINING THE CHIEF TOPICS, PROPER NAMES, AND TKCHNICAL TERMS, REFERRED TO IN THE LEOTUKES. Italicized tubdivisions of a title are elsewhere treated in more detail at teparate title* Abstract ideas, Greek tendency to, 116 118. JEon, common Gnostic idea, 190; two ' ways of viewing the .Sons, 258 fin., 259. African us, Julius, as an exegete, 81. Alexandrine School, its philosophy, 81 ; on moral probation, 232 ; on God's transcendence, 255. See also Philo and Origen. Allegorism, 58 ff. ; connection with the " mysteries," 59, cf. 66 ; ethical, 60 ; physical, 61 ; the Stoics, 6163 ; later exponents, 64. The temper widespread in religion, 65 ; Hellenistic Jews, 65 ff., e.g. Aristobulus and Philo, 6669, 72, 128 ; early Christian exegesis, especially Gnostic, 69 ff. ; compared with Philo's, 72 ; prophecy its main subject, 72 74; an 0. T. Apologetic, 7779. Re- actions, 79 82 ; dogmatic complica- tion, 82 ; irony of its history, ib. ; use and abuse, 83 ; its place in modern life, 8385. Alogi, 252, n. a . Ambrose of Milan, his ethics Stoic, 169. Antiochene School, its exegesis, 81, 82. Apologists mark transition, e.g. 126 131 ; idea of creation, 196 ; free-will, 231 ; transcendence of God, 252, 253; Logos doctrine, 261263, 267, 268. Apostolic doctrine, idea of, 316, 317 ; " Apostles' Creed,' 317319. Apostolical Constitutions, Bk.i., its ethical type of teaching, 161, cf. 13'2, 336 ; Bk. ii., on place of discipline, 162, 163 ; Bks. ii. and viii., on Lord's Supper, 301. Aristobulus, his allegorism, 66 fin. Aristotle, his use of ouria, 269, 270 ; of pistis, 311. Askesis (damjai^), Greek, 148 ff. : in Philo, 148 ; reduced to system, e.g. "retreat*, 148 150. Christian, 164 ff. : its germ, 164, 165 ; ran parallel to Greek, 166, 167 ; Monachism, 167, 168. Association at first voluntary, 334, 335. Associations, Greek religions, 290 ff. Syn- cretistic, akin to "mysteries," 290, 291 ; purity of life required, 141 ; mixed elements, 291, 292 ; effects on Chris- tianity, 292295, cf. 141. Athenagoras on absolute creation, 196; transcendence of God, 253 ; his Monism, 265. Baptism and dualism, 19. Primitive sim- plicity, 294, 295 ; its formula, 315 ; its ethical character among the Elchasaites, 337 ; later change in name, 295, 296 ; in time, 296, 297; minor features "symbolum," lights, &c., 298, 29&; late ritual, 299, 300 ; Gnostic realism, 306 ; and unction, 307. Its importance, 34 J , 342. H;isiliilt- characterized, 9, n. ; hi 356 INDEX. of creation, 195, 196 ; of transcendence, 254, 255; genesis of the Logos, 263. Bishops, and the "rule of faith," 317, 318; speculative interpretation by con- sensus, 326, 327 ; results, 327 ff. Canon of N. T., development of the idea, 319321. Catholic Church, its genesis, 11, 132 ; put an end to "prophesying," 107; a fusion of Christianity and Greek philosophy, 125 ; unconsciously Hellenized, 132 135; as a " corpus permixtum," 164. Celsus, his and Porphyry's polemic against Christian allegorism, 80 ; on relation of Christianity and philosophy, 127, 128, cf. 11 init. Christianity, primitive : the New Law, 158162 ; its ethical idea of God, 224, 225 ; its theological basis, 238, 239, 251, 252. Church, its early character, 335 ; holiness, 335337 ; hope, 337, 338. Clement of Alexandria, his allegorism, 70 ; appeal to hieroglyphics, 71 ; and N. T. allegories, 76 : on Christianity and philosophy, 127 : on the Conserva- tives, 130, 131. Clementines, the : their Old Testament criticism, 71 ; God just and good, 229, 230. Consecration of the elements : the formula secret, 302, n. 6 . Conservatism : Clement and Tertullian on it, 130, 131 ; in Ebionues and Elcha- saites, 252, 337 ; often not recognized as such (cf. Ebionites), e.jr. in Origen, 323; the simpler sort, 324; Paul of Sainosata, 327, cf. 345, 346 ; in Puri- tanism, 347, 348; Monachism, 348, 349. Creed, the, 313 ff: its germs, 313, 314; the baptismal formula, 314, 315 ; be- comes a test, 315 ; expanded, 315, 316 ; by "Apostolic teaching," 316, 317 ; the "Apostles' Creed" of the Bishops (jrapd- oWtf iicK^tiffiaariKr]), 317 319. Cyprian characterized, 8. 246, especially n. Definition among the Greeks, 118; influ- ence on Catholic Church, 135, 330, 331. Development not arrested, 332, 351, 352. Dialectic, Greek, 118 fin. Didache', the: the "Two Ways" empha- sizes conduct, 160, 161, 335, 336 ; and the idea of wages, 225 : its simple theo- bgy 251, 252; Baptism, 294, 295, cf, 315 ; the Lord's Supper, 300, 301 ; in- tercommunion based on moral test 343, 344. Dio Chrysostom characterized, 6 ; on "aslcesis," 150. Dionysius Areopagites sums up the influ- ence of the " mysteries," 303, 304. Discipline, early Christian, 162 ff : in Apost. Const. Bk. ii. 162, 163 ; its Puritan ideal, 163; later " corpus per- mixtum" idea, 164. Dogma (Sofna), its original sense, 119, 120 ; later Dogmatism, 1211 23 ; the age of Dogmatism, 280. Dualism and Baptism, 19 ; and Stoicism, ib. ; its basis, 175; Platonic, 177; vari- ously expressed, 178 180 ; later modi- fied, 181 ; in Christian theories of crea- tion, 194, 195; transition in Tatian, 195. Ebionites become " heretics," 132 ; as Conservatives, 252, n. a . Education, Greek, 26 ff. : its forms literary, 27 ; mainly Grammar and Rhetoric, 28 ff. ; the poets its main study, 30 ; also a litterateur philosophy, 32 ff. ; spite of protest, 34; its extent, 35 ff. Epictetus characterized, 6 ; as moral re- former, 142 ff.; his attitude, 143, 144; quoted, 144 147 ; on " atkent" 1 49 ; his two planes of ethics, 152: " follow Nature," 152 155; "follow God," 155158. Essentia : its bad Latinity a source of dis- use, 277, especially n. *. Ethics, Greek, 139 ff. Average morality, 139 ; philosophic ethics, 140; moral reformation in first centuries A.D., 140, 141 ; in religioui guilds and philosophy, 141 ; its relation to Logic and Literature, 142, 143; ic INDEX. 857 Epietetus, 148 ft*.; moral gymnastic, 147 ; askesit, 148 ff. ; the " philsopher," 150 ff. ; contents of ethical teaching, e.g. in Epictetus, 152 fl. Ethics, Christian, 158 170. Compared with Greek, 158 ; its basis and characteristic idea (sin), 158, 159; agreement upon value of conduct, 159 ; the "Two Ways," 160, 161; Apost. Const. Bk. i. 161 ; discipline, earlier and later, 162 164 ; Christian askesis, 164 168 ; deterioration of average ethics, 168, 169 ; victory of Greek ethics in Roman Law of Rights, 169, 170. Evolutionary ideas among the Gnostics, as regards creation, 177, 190 193; reve- lation, 257 ff. ; genesis of the Logos, 263 ff. Exorcism in relation to Monism, 20, espe- cially n. ; in Baptism, 307, 308, n. 1 . Faith (iriang), history of its usage, 310 ff. : in Old Testament, 310, 311; Greek philosophy, 311 ; Philo, 311, 312. Christian form issuing in the Creed, 313 ff. ; relation to New Testament Canon, 319 ff. Further speculative development, 321, 322; "gnosit" by the side of "pistis," 323 ff. and 339 341 ; check found in consensus of Bishops, 326 ; expansion of Creed, 327 ; contrasted uses of term " belief, " 328 ; majority and minority views, 329 ; re- capitulation, 330. Fitting, the, as a Stoic category, 153, 154 ; root of "officium" and "debitvm," 154. 155. " Generation, eternal," 267 ; essential, 268 ; Origen's contributions, ib. Gnosii (fvwfftc) as a tendency, 129, 180; tide by side with "piatis" in Catholi- cism, 130134, cf. 323 ff. and 339 341 ; as well as in Neo-Platonism, 138. Snosticism between two fires, 9 ; allego- rizes the Old Testament, 70 ; also the Gospel, 75. Its cosmogonies, 190; evolutional types, 190198; hypothe- ris of a lap*}, 103 J opposition from without and within, 193 fin. ; Rasilides on matter and God, 195, 196. Idea of transcendence, 251 : e.g. Basilides and Marcus, 254. Modalism, 257 ff. Con- necting link with the Mysteries, 305 ff. ; e.g. unction and sacramental realism, 306, 308, 309. Attitude to tradition and the Scriptures, 325. Grammar in Greek education, 28 ff. ypa/i/xarueq, and ypa/^/ioncmjcij, 28 fin. ; its elements, 29, 30. Guilds : see Association*. Hellenism characterized, 13, 14. Heresy, original use of term, 340, n. *. Hippolytus, 6 ; his theory of creation, 203. History, its difficulties and rewards, 22 24. Homer in Greek thought, 51 ff. ; in Chris- tian theology, 69, 70. Homily, the, 109113. Jfumoousios (bfioovffioc) shared senses of " o^ls^a," 272 ; first used of God by the Gnostics, 274 ; its ambiguity, 274 276. Hyparxi(viraplii)="hypottasi, n 275, especially n. a . Ifypostasit (vitoaraaiq}, relation to "ou- sia," 275; gradually specialized = irpurri 6vaia, 276 f. : further defined by aid of "prosdpon" ( Trpoawiroc ) through use of "pertona," 277, 278; usage often doubtful, 278. IfpflpxfC an( l cognate terms for minis- trants, 308, n. '. Immortality in the Mysteries, 289, 290. Initiation (rtXerjj) : its stages, 284, n. ; its idea, 285. Proclamation, 285, 28C ; confession and baptism (icdOapoic, \ov- rpov), 287; sacrifice, procession, tc., 287, 288 ; mystic drama, its nature, 288290. Inspiration in Greece, connected with rhythm, 61. Irenteus, 8 : his theory of creation, 202, 203 ; on Justice and Goodnesa in God, 228; on free-will, 281 ; his Logot doc- trine, 262, 263. at 266, B., 267, n. 4 ; 358 INDEX. view of the Eucharistic elements, 802, n. 1 . Judaism as basis of Christian theology, 238, 239. Justin Martyr, 8 ; on Christianity and philosophy, 126; on free-will, 231; on God's transcendence, 253 ; Logos doc- trine, 261, 262; genesis of the Logos, 266 ; nature of the Logos, 267, 268. Logoi (Xoyot), Stoical (= laws), 180 ; compared with Platonic "ideas," 181, 182, cf. 180 ; appear in Philo's "forces," 185; their sum the Logos, 176, 180, 182. Logos, the, in Philo, 247 ff. ; relation to God, 249, 250 ; and "logoi," 259261 ; growth of Logos doctrine, 261 263 ; i genesis of the Logos, 263, 264 ; irpofyo- piKoc and ivSidOeroe , 265, n. 1 ; nature of the Logos, 267, 268. Lucian and the Antiochene exegesis, 81, 82. Marcion, his ditheistic tendency, 227, 230 ; I his idea of a Canon, 321 ; his literal method, 325. Marcus : syncretistic grouping of meta- phors under term "logoi," 190; God's transcendence, 255. Maximus of Tyre, 6 ; quoted for God's transcendence, 242. Mediation of God's transcendence : see Logos. Metaphysics and revelation, 137, 138. Modalism, its two types, 257 ff. Monachism : parallel of Greek and Chris- tian, 167, 168; a reaction, 348, 349. Monarchianism a witness to older " Mo- narchia," 206, 207. Monism, in baptism and exorcism, 20 ; its basis, 175; Stoic, 175177; self- evolution of God, 177. Montanism : a survival of " prophecy, " 107 ; a reaction, 339. Mysteries : their connection with allegory, 66 ; Greek, 283 : initiation at Eleusis, 284 ff. ; together with religious guilds affect Christianity, 292 ff. ; generally, 293 ; specially as to Baptism, 294 ff. ; and Lord s Supper, 300 ff. ; culmina- tion of influence, 303305; Gnostics a bridge, 305 ff. General result, 309. fivr)ffi.(;, fivarayuyos, 296, 297. Natura : see (j>vai^. VO/J.OG icaivoG, 158, of. 159 162 (espe- cially note). Novatianism a Puritan reaction, 347, 348. Ocellus Lucanus on idea of transcendence (supra-cosmic), 242, n. 1 . Origen, 8 : his apologetic use of allegorism, 77, 78 ; defence of it, 80 ; his cosmogony a theodicy, 204 206 ; its grand scale, 233237 ; shapes Logos doctrine, 267 (especially n. 4 ), 268 ; his Deprincipiis the first dogmatic system, 323. Ousia (ovaia), three Aristotelian senses [(i.) =hyU; (ii.) =substantiaconcreta; (iii.) = subst. abstracta], 269, 270. Its later history in Platonic realism, 271, 272. Difficulties in its application to God, 273 f. ; not popularly understood, 279. Paul of Samosata, his case, 345, 346, cf. 326. Persona appropriated for hypostasis, 277, 278. Philo and Philonian writings a valuable bridge, 7, 128, 182 ; his allegorism, 67 69; his "literal" v. "deeper" sense compared with Christian exegesis, 72; God the ultimate cause, 182, 183; monistic elements, 183, 184; dualistic, 184, 185; his "forces," in plurality, 185, 186; and unity, 186, 187; but God is Creator or Father, 187, 188; God's transcendence, 244 ff.; interme- diaries, 247 ; distinctions in God's na- ture, 247 fl. Philosophy in Greek education, 32 ff. ; as a profession, 40 ff. ; its " damnosa here- ditas," 138 ; its decay amid dogma, and legacy to Christendom, 280, 281. Philosopher, the, as moral reformer, 150; outward marks, 151, Platonism and Christianity, 81, 129; hi theological affinity, 238 ; Plato author INDEX. 359 ef transcendence proper, 240, 241, and n. l ; God's transcendence, 241 243; daemons, 246. Plotinus on transcendence, 243 ; genesis of Logos, 266, n. e . Plutarch, 6 ; quoted for transcendence, 242 ; immortality through " initiation," 289. Poetry, its place in the Greek mind, 51 S. Political analogies in the Church, 331. Breaching and "prophesying," 105 ff. ; of composite origin, 107 109; the "ho- mily," 109113. Prophecy and divination, 72, 73 ; and apologetic, 74 ; died with formation of Catholic Church, 107. jrpoffwrrov, how used, 278, especially n. l . see hypostasis. Ptolemseus, on God's transcendence, 251 ; his idea of " JSons," 258 fin., 259 Puritanism in early Church, 347, 348. Pythagoreanism and Christianity, 81, 129. Keligion, its political aspect to the Roman, 21; connected with usage (j/o/joe), 21, n. Revelation and metaphysics, 137, 138. Rhetoric, Greek, 87, 88. "Rule of Faith :" see Faith. , n. 1 and n. 5 , 267, n. 3 . Teaching profession, 37 ff. ; endowed, 38 excused public burdens, 39. reXenj, TtXilaQai : see initiation, cf. 296. Tertullian, 8; his Stoic view of substance, 19, n., 20, n., cf. 254; on Christianity and philosophy, 126, 127 ; the Conser- vatives, 131, 257, n. 1 ; on creation, iff; on God as just and good, 229, on free-will, 232 ; transcendence in him supra-cosmic, 254 ; genesis of the Logo*, 265, n. l ; nature of the Logtt, 268 ; on ecclesiastical tradition and specula- tion, 322. Theodore of Mopsuestia as exegete, 82. Theophilus on creation, 196; God's tran- scendence, 253; on genesis of Logo*, 265, n. l , cf. 268. Transcendence, as of absolute Unity, Being, Mind, 240 ; in Plutarch and Maximus, 242 ; Plotinus, 243 ; its two forms, 244 ; Philo, 244, 245. Absent from earliest Christian teaching, 251 f. ; appears in Apologists, 252, 253 ; Gnostics, 254 f.; Alexandrines, 255 f. ; mediation of, 256 ff., especially 257, n. * Unction of (1) exorcism, (2) thanksgiving, 307, 308, especially n. l . = natura), later use = ou*ia, 278; sometimes = kypottusit, ib. t;, of baptism, 295. 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