Part 23

[313] _Gal._ I, 16; II, 20; III, 27; IV, 19. So _Rom._ VIII, 10. Cf. also _2 Cor._ IV, 6-7.

[314] _Col._ III, 1-3.

[315] Cf. _Rom._ VII, 4 ff.; _Phil._ III, 10 f.; and the passages referred to p. 314.

[316] _2 Cor._ III, 17; _Rom._ VIII, 10 f.

[317] _Rom._ VIII, 15; _Gal._ III, 26 f.; IV, 6; _1 Cor._ III, 16 f.; VI, 19.

[318] _Gal._ V, 22 f. Cf. _Rom._ XIV, 17.

[319] _1 Cor._ XII-XIV.

[320] _John_ I, 1-14.

[321] Harnack and some other scholars incline to regard the prologue as “not the key to [the Gospel’s] comprehension”; but when we consider the importance which John attaches to the incarnation, it is difficult to separate the body of the book from the opening passage.

[322] Cf. _1 John_ IV, 2-3.

[323] _John_ I, 9; III, 19-21; V, 35; VIII, 12; IX, 5; XII, 35-36.

[324] _John_ XIV, 9-11.

[325] _John_ VIII, 31 ff.

[326] _1 John_ IV, 8, 16.

[327] _John_ III, 16-17; _1 John_ IV, 9-10.

[328] _John_ XIII, 34-35.

[329] Cf. _John_ XX, 31.

[330] _John_ III, 3, 6; cf. V, 24.

[331] _John_ XV, 1 ff.; IV, 7 ff.; VI, 33 ff.

[332] Theophilus, _Ad Autol._ 2, 15 (c. 180 A.D.), is the first among our extant Greek sources to use the word Trinity (τριάς) of the nature of God; Tertullian, _Adv. Valent._ 17 (c. 200), the first Latin writer to employ trinitas in the same sense.

[333] The preparatory discourse put into the mouth of Jesus in _John_ XIV-XVI contains the Johannine doctrine. This discourse may be built up from traditional sayings of Jesus, but in its present form it bears unmistakable marks of its literary origin.

[334] _John_ XX, 31.

[335] _John_ V, 24; _1 John_ III, 14.

X

CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM

In the last lecture we traced the growth of Christianity through the three stages that are represented in the New Testament, and we saw that when the new religion passed beyond the bounds of Palestine and entered on a campaign for converts among the Gentiles, it came into contact with Greek philosophic thought and perforce began to state its doctrines in terms which should be intelligible to educated men. For in spite of the fact that the majority of its adherents—like those of every other contemporary religion—were naturally of humble birth and station, it is certain that from the first it appealed also to men of position and education, and that such were among its followers. Therefore when it put forth its claims to be the universal religion, it had to meet and satisfy the demands of the intellectual classes.

Not only were the various forms of Greek philosophy rivals of Christianity, but the oriental mysteries also proved serious opponents. In our discussion of the most important of these mystery religions in an earlier lecture we tried to show the reasons for the wide appeal which they made during the first two centuries and a half of our era. Christianity therefore had to offer a greater assurance and satisfaction than these religions if it was to make headway against them. Thus Christianity was forced to meet two classes of opponents.

But it was inevitable that while the new religion was seeking to influence the environment into which it had come, it should itself be influenced by the world it had entered. No living belief or institution can exist without being affected by the life of which it is a part. Christianity accordingly ran many dangers, received many accretions, and was in some ways transformed during the first few centuries of its history. In this final lecture we shall consider briefly, by means of significant illustrations, first, the way in which Christianity during the second and third centuries accommodated itself to the intellectual world; secondly, the influence which the pagan environment had on Christian thought; and finally, the causes of its triumph.

By the beginning of the second century it was evident that in its conflict with pagan polytheism and philosophy Christianity could hope to win the victory only by taking into itself the fundamental elements of that intellectual life and civilization which the Greco-Roman world had been establishing through centuries. Its claim that the gospel was universal, that it solved the deepest mysteries and satisfied the highest human aspirations, inevitably brought it into the arena of contemporaneous life. It not only was obliged to defend itself in terms current in Greek thought, and to carry on a successful polemic against polytheism, but it had to prove that it offered the fullest, indeed the only true satisfaction of that longing for salvation which men felt. From these necessities of attack and defense came the Greek Apologists of the second century, the most important of whom were Aristides, Justin, Tatian, and Athenagoras.

Moreover as the Christian communities multiplied, their members were exposed to many influences which tended to injure or destroy the unity and purity of their belief, so that for self-protection Christianity was forced to develop a formal statement of its faith, that is, to create a dogmatic theology. By formal dogma the common doctrine of the church could be maintained comparatively unimpaired and at the same time the faith could be made intelligible and attractive to the learned of the pagan world. But to give philosophic expression to Christianity’s beliefs meant the Hellenization of this religion.

The Gnostics—to whom we shall presently return—were perhaps the first to undertake the construction of a Christian theology, but their aberrations were so extreme and violent that the growing church had to rid itself of them so far as possible. The work of building up a dogmatic system was carried on more slowly in the great catechetical school of Alexandria.

We have already seen the beginning of both the apologetic and the theological movements in the Pauline and Johannine writings of the New Testament. Let us now consider the work of the Apologists of the second century.

These defenders were all educated converts; indeed some of them, like Aristides and Athenagoras, called themselves philosophers. Naturally they did not give up their philosophic custom when they went over to Christianity, but rather applied their intellectual habit to their new faith. We should be wrong, however, in thinking that they wished to reconcile Greek philosophy and Christianity; on the contrary they wished to show that Christianity was the only true philosophy. Still all, with the exception of Tatian, treated Greek philosophy and civilization with respect and were ready to recognize God’s revelations among the Greeks as well as the Jews. They labored, however, with the fundamental antagonism between revelation and reason, and were often obliged somewhat illogically to blame Greek thinkers while praising them. Yet the sway of Hellenic philosophy was so complete and the means of defense which it furnished so powerful, that the Christians readily disregarded logical difficulties and gladly used the weapons which pagan thought had forged.

It is impossible here to distinguish in full detail the contributions of the several Apologists; we must therefore be content with a summarized statement of their positions.

First of all they accepted the historic tradition of the person, work, and teachings of Christ as authentic, and made no attempt to enlarge or diminish that tradition. They endeavored rather to present Christianity as a rational religion in such a way as to win the approval of the intellectual world. As Harnack says: “These Christian philosophers formulated the content of the Gospel in a manner which appealed to the common sense of all the serious thinkers and intelligent men of the age. Moreover, they contrived to use the positive material of tradition, including the life and worship of Christ, in such a way as to furnish this reasonable religion with a confirmation and proof that had hitherto been eagerly sought, but sought in vain.”[336]

They all set forth Christianity as a revelation from God, given in the Old Testament through the inspired prophets, who had foretold the supreme revelation in Jesus Christ. Christianity therefore was something which had existed from the beginning of the world; it was a thing which revelation had continuously attested, and which consequently was ultimate truth.[337] According to Justin not only the prophets of the Old Testament but also the Greek philosophers had borne witness to the truth and had been in a measure Christians. This power of insight and of prophecy he would ascribe in the latter case as in the former to the operation of the reason of God, a seed of which was granted to every man by nature; all therefore that was reasonable in Greek thought was due to divine inspiration. He found the cause of the Greeks’ failure to expound the whole truth in the view that man’s natural endowment was insufficient to enable him to resist the evil demons which beset him.[338] Although Athenagoras did not say that every man had within him a germ of the divine wisdom, he no less than Justin granted that the pagan poets and philosophers had known the truth in part;[339] their errors had been due to their dependence on themselves. The full truth then was to be found in revelation, which gave the Apologists the sole and sufficient warrant of their faith and the complete rule of life.

But, as I have said, the Apologists represented Christianity as the one valid philosophy. We must now examine briefly its principles.

First as to the nature of God. In dealing with this subject the Apologists used a method of thought and of expression very much like that employed by Philo and the later Platonists. They contrasted God and the world: the latter they said was created, temporal, and conditioned; the former, unconditioned, eternal, and self-existent; the material world was apprehended by the senses, God by the mind and reason alone.[340] God, therefore, to them was the One, pure spirit, unchanging, requiring nothing. It followed from this idea of God that he must be regarded as supramundane, if not transcendent. As a matter of fact, these writers were perhaps unconsciously trying to reconcile the personal attributes of God the Father, which the common Christian faith ascribed to the Godhead, and the current concept of God as a transcendent and ineffable being. A variety of expressions, too numerous to be quoted here, was employed to suggest God’s exalted and perfect nature. Furthermore God was not regarded as a passive, but as a living and active spirit, who must express himself in creations; he was therefore the First Cause, the Lord, Father, and Creator of all. The perfection of his nature made him also the source of moral good.

The complete contrast between the perfect, supramundane God and the imperfect, transient world required the Apologists, like the later pagan philosophers, to postulate some agent connecting the two, and they, like Philo and others, found this in the Logos, which to them was the operative reason of God, regarded as a person. But there is this significant fact to be noted, that the Apologists reached their views with regard to God and the Logos from a contemplation of the world itself in which they saw reason and order, and detected spiritual forces working toward good ends. Therefore they believed that the world was created and directed by God’s reason. Reflection on the chain of rational causation had led them to their conclusions. But Philo and the later Platonists we might say conceived of the Logos as a remedial being, for through his mediation they saved the perfection of God from contamination with evil matter. To the Apologists, however, matter was only an indifferent finite substance.

The Logos, as the reason of God, was identical with God in essence; but as a projection by God from himself, made for the purpose of creation and revelation, the Logos had a being distinct from God, not in essence but in number, so that he was a second God; yet at the same time the Logos, being a mode of God, God’s operative reason, was included in God; therefore no polytheistic ideas were admitted here.[341]

The Logos then was regarded as a creature and a servant of God, but he was held to be above all other creatures, being one in essence with the Divine. Moreover being created and therefore finite from the point of view of time, the Logos could enter into the finite and thus do the work of creation and revelation; by the Logos the world was made out of finite matter, and man was endowed with reason and freedom of the will. It is a striking fact, however, that with the exception of Justin, the Apologists betray comparatively little interest in the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ. Their efforts were directed rather to establishing against the pagan world their claim that God is One and that the Logos is the operative reason of God which exercises his powers. Furthermore they had little or nothing to say about the Holy Spirit as a separate person, but for the most part they identified the Logos and the Spirit.[342]

The problem of evil the Apologists solved by connecting it with a belief in the freedom of choice given spirits or angels who chose to depart from righteousness, and, thus becoming evil demons, have from the first beset man and still do beset him with temptations which cause him to sin. They regarded man, by virtue of his endowments of reason and of freedom of the will, as capable of immortal life or of complete death. The conditions of immortality were first, the maintenance of the knowledge of God and of his relation through the Logos to the created world, and secondly, persistence in a life aimed at moral perfection, a life which followed after the Spirit and did not yield to the bodily passions. In Tatian especially there is a distinct ascetic strain.[343]

The best exposition of man’s moral obligations the Apologists believed to be found in the words of Jesus, but at the same time they agreed in holding that the essential element in a life of virtue was a clear knowledge of divine things through which man was at once raised above the things of this world into a pure and noble existence. Thus man was assured now of salvation, and in the future life was destined to enjoy immortality and the perfection of knowledge which would come with the direct vision of God.[344]

But such a doctrine presupposes a revelation of God. This, as I have already pointed out, the Apologists said had been made in the beginning by the Logos who disclosed himself in the created universe and in man as a part thereof. Man, however, by yielding to sin, had lost that divine knowledge which had been his through the original revelation, with the result that repeated revelations had been necessary. The agents of these had been the inspired prophets of the Old Testament and to a slight degree the philosophers of Greece. The revelation of the Logos in Jesus Christ was simply an attestation and guarantee of the truths and predictions of the prophets, the highest stage in the history of revelation, confirming that revelation without changing its content in any way.

But all this is something very different from the teachings of Jesus, or of Paul, or of the Fourth Gospel; indeed the relations of the Apologists to Stoicism, to Philo and the later Platonists, seem fully as close as to the New Testament. Of the writers in question Justin alone—and he somewhat unsuccessfully—tried to set forth Jesus as the redeemer in the strict sense of the word and to see in him a unique revelation of the Logos.[345] Side by side with the tendency to seek religious satisfaction in mysticism there existed even more strongly in intellectual circles a desire to find the principles of right conduct in a correct theory of the world. Such was, for example, the aim of the Stoic. In attempting to satisfy this desire the Apologists probably represented the views of the majority of educated Christians of their day who felt that the noble morality of Christianity was its most edifying characteristic; at any rate they knew that it was the strongest argument for the validity of their religion.

* * * * *

We have already seen many times that the idea that supreme knowledge was conferred by direct revelation and that such knowledge led to perfection was widespread not only among later Greek thinkers and Hellenized Jews like Philo, but also among the devotees of the oriental mysteries. Lucius, the hero of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, believed that through the rites of initiation into the mysteries of Isis he had been allowed to see the gods face to face and to acquire a knowledge which only such revelation could convey.[346] Magical papyri describe their contents as knowledge (γνῶσις), meaning thereby the supernatural knowledge which they impart. From the other extreme we can cite the case of the Apostle Paul, who claimed that his knowledge and the gospel which he preached had come to him not from man, but “by the revelation of Jesus Christ.”[347] It was then a common belief of the day that through direct revelation one might obtain a secret knowledge (γνῶσις) of divine things which no teaching could give. Such a revelation, however gained, was recognized as an act of grace toward men, whereby they attained salvation.

It was this idea of a secret revealed knowledge which gave the name of Gnostic to a series of movements in the early Christian centuries to which we must now turn.

The Gnostics never formed any single community or school, but they comprised groups which exhibited the greatest diversity and range of beliefs and of morals; the most famous and influential individuals were Basilides, who taught at Alexandria in the time of Hadrian, and Valentinus, who was active at Rome in the middle of the second century (c. 140-c. 165). Gnosticism did not originate within Christianity, but rather antedated it. All its forms arose from some combination of oriental religions and mythologies with Greek modes of philosophic thought, which in many ways remind one of later Neoplatonism. When Christianity was taken into the Gnostic systems, it was inevitable that it should be modified, reshaped, and stated in forms which might contain gross error. Yet it would be a mistake to regard the Gnostics as fundamentally foes of Christianity. Even if we cannot go so far as Harnack and call them “the theologians of the first century,” and attribute to them the first place in the early formation of a Christian theology,[348] we must recognize that they did a great, and in some ways a permanent, service to the new faith. They were seekers after a philosophy of history; they interpreted Christianity as the religion which replaced both paganism and Judaism, and they held that the appearance of the redeemer had completed the development of the human race and had consummated the history of the universe. Such a view, which in itself was quite in accord with the views of Christians generally, led the Gnostics to reject the Old Testament because it was supplanted by the new revelation; the Apostolic writings they believed to contain first of all the rule of faith when taken at their face value, and secondly to hold a secret and deeper meaning, which could be obtained only by allegorical, that is, by esoteric interpretation. But thus far the Gnostics and the mass of Christians were still in essential agreement, although the latter held to faith (πίστις) as the basic element in their religion, while the former exalted knowledge (γνῶσις) above it.

The Christians, however, commonly believed the world to be the creation of God and wholly subject to him, as we just now saw when examining the position of the Apologists. The Gnostics on the other hand almost universally adopted some form of dualism which set off God and matter against each other as more or less independent entities. In matter they saw the basis of evil; at the other pole was the perfect supreme Being who was wholly transcendent, above all thought; from this Being, according to Basilides, proceeded a series of emanations, no less than three hundred and sixty-five in number, the lowest of which were the angels who occupy the visible heaven; they were the creators and rulers of all things on earth. The chief of these angels was the God of the Jews, as he was made known in the Old Testament.[349] Valentinus, too, described a series of thirty Eons, descended from the perfect, pre-existent Eon and his feminine counterpart, Ennoea, in which appear fantastic combinations of abstract ideas, mathematical concepts, and conjugal relations, betraying the manifold origin of this bizarre system.[350] Yet such doctrines represent only extravagant efforts to bridge the gap between a transcendent God and the world, a task which Philo and the later Platonists accomplished in a more restrained manner.

The common Gnostic explanation of the origin of the universe was that the cosmos arose from the descent into matter of some sparks of the divine. The Creator of the cosmos, the Demiurge, was regarded as an intermediate creature, sometimes as an evil one; but he is never identical with the supreme Being.[351]

Man, also, in their views, was a dual creature, made up of corruptible flesh and divine spirit. Some Gnostics also divided mankind into two classes: the spiritual who were capable of salvation, and the material who were doomed to perish. The Valentinians, however, conceived of three kinds, corresponding to the three forms of existence found throughout the world: the spiritual, the animal, and the material. Of these the material men were predestined to destruction; the animal by right choice might find rest in an “intermediate space”; but the spiritual were to attain perfection and become “as brides to the angels of the Saviour.”[352] The Gnostics of course were spiritual and destined for the supreme bliss.

As regards their views concerning the person of Christ we may not now go into detail. We can simply state the views of the two chief Gnostics. Basilides identified Christ with the first-born of the Father, the emanation Mind (Νοῦς), who came to destroy the God of the Jews and all evil men, but to save those who believed on him.[353] Valentinus made Christ one of the Eons, forming a conjugal pair of Christ and the Holy Spirit; but Jesus who appeared on earth was another, the perfect product of the whole pleroma of Eons.[354] We may say that generally Christ was regarded by the Gnostics as one of the emanations of the supreme Being, by which the divine principle entered the visible world and made God known, whereas he had been hidden hitherto. Christ, therefore, was a power, a heavenly Eon, which was to be distinguished from his earthly appearance as the man Jesus. This view was in accord with other beliefs that Christ had not actually appeared and suffered in the flesh, to which is given the name docetism.

The Gnostic ethics were based on the dual concept of man, with the natural result that in many groups a marked asceticism was practised. On the other hand the belief that the revelation brought by Christ had freed men from law—an exaggeration of Paul’s position, unchecked by Paul’s good-sense—led to the extremes of libertinism.

The Gnostics laid much stress also on the magic value of the sacraments of baptism, the Lord’s supper, and anointing with oil. They treated them as the means of initiation into the holy mysteries of Christianity, whereby the initiate obtained, as in pagan mysteries, the higher knowledge (γνῶσις), which was salvation. Beyond this they resorted to the crassest magic, playing with names and numbers, employing images, incantations, invocations, and many kinds of curious arts.[355] But in this respect they were hardly in disaccord with their contemporaries.