The Basis of Early Christian Theism Part 1

The Basis of Early Christian Theism.

by Lawrence Thomas Cole.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A question which every author ought to ask of himself before he sends forth his work, and one which must occur to every thoughtful reader, is the inquiry, _Cui bono?_--what justification has one for treating the subject at all, and why in the particular way which he has chosen? To the pertinency of this question to the present treatise the author has been deeply sensible, and therefore cannot forbear a few prefatory words of explanation of his object and method.

In accounts of the theistic argument, as in the history of philosophy in general, it has been customary to pa.s.s over a s.p.a.ce of well-nigh ten centuries of the Christian era in silence, or with such scanty and unsympathetic notice as to make silence the better alternative. Largely through the influence of such treatment as this, we moderns have almost forgotten at times that during this period there lived men inferior to none in history in endowments of mind and influence on succeeding generations, and that there then took place some of the most significant and far-reaching intellectual conflicts in the history of thought. "With Cicero," says Professor Stirling, "we reached in our course a most important and critical halting-place.... We have still ... to wait those thousand years yet before Anselm shall arrive with what is to be named the new proof, the proof ontological, and during the entire interval it is the Fathers of the Church and their immediate followers who, in repet.i.tion of the old, or suggestion of the new, connect thinker with thinker, philosopher with philosopher, pagan with Christian."[1] To attempt to account for even one of the details of thought during this period cannot be without its advantages.

For Christianity gave a new and unique turn to thought. It brought with it a new set of data, and a new subject-matter. The Christian doctrine of G.o.d, the distinctions in the Trinity, the great doctrines centering around the person of Jesus Christ, though, perhaps, faintly foreshadowed in some of the earlier speculations, are, in their fulness and completeness, first given to the world by the Founder of Christianity.

The claims made for these doctrines, too, gave them a unique character.

In contrast with the half-hearted, faltering conclusions of the prevalent philosophical schools, Christianity a.s.serted that its teachings were absolute truth; it claimed to be nothing less than a revelation from the Creator of the world. It will be readily seen that the introduction of such a system as this into the Greek world would be attended with important results, not only in its effects upon the intellectual life of the times, but also in the influence of the current philosophical conceptions on the statement of its doctrine. The significance of this early period lies in the fact that, in the positive, definite system of Christianity, systematic thought, which was fast becoming disorganized and sceptical, found a center about which it might rally and focus itself, and the scattered fragments of philosophy were all collected together, by either friends or foes, about the new religion. The new point of view and the new relations would be most significant, too, in that department of thought with which the contact of this new central system had most to do, and thus the treatment of the theistic problem exhibits in a special degree the alteration in the standpoint and method of philosophy. It threw into bold relief the old basis of belief in the divine, and aroused a comparison and discussion of the validity of the various arguments. .h.i.therto used by speculative thought, and set them over in sharp contrast to the claims of the new revelation. In the early period when this contrast was most clearly felt, and time had not yet permitted a complete fusion and blending of the two points of view, we find a simplicity of situation which will aid a.n.a.lysis and facilitate the study of the relation of the old arguments for the existence of a G.o.d to the Christian doctrine, and which will help in determining the elements due to each and in interpreting the reasons for the direction of thought on this subject, which characterized the whole of the Mediaeval period.

In the representations of early Christian thought, however, we find great differences in the emphasis laid upon the speculative side of the theistic problem. Christian philosophy is no exception to the rule that the thought of the race develops through the needs, temperaments and tendencies with which it comes into contact, and unfolds itself naturally in response to internal or external stimuli--the doubts, intellectual needs and growing consciousness and experience of the believer, and the cavils, objections and attacks of his opponent. The first Christian teachers had to meet simple problems, and the mission of the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic Church was to "the people." Its first task, determined by the conditions in which the Christians found themselves, as well as by the command of their Master, was to convert the Jews, who, by their long training as a "peculiar people," were especially adapted for receiving this new revelation, based, as it was, on that monotheistic idea to the preservation of which their national life had been devoted. Upon them the primitive Christians, most of whom, like St. Paul, were "Hebrews of the Hebrews," brought to bear the instrument most adapted to their conversion, namely, the argument deduced from the sacred Scriptures of their race.

And when the Church finally turned towards the Gentile world, it was still the popular religion, the religion of the poets, rather than the philosophy of the schools, with which its apologists first came into contact, and it is very evident from such writings as the recently recovered _Apology_ of Aristides, "philosopher of Athens," and many other works extending over the whole Ante-Nicene period, that much of the energy of the early exponents of Christianity was directed towards the conversion of the populace who still adhered, at least formally, to the religion of their own poets.

The function of the primitive Christians, so far as the content of their belief was concerned, was to preserve and transmit to their successors an _implicit_ faith. The value of this faith they attempted to show chiefly by practical, ethical demonstration. Thus they preached chiefly by example, and it is on the ground of _life_ rather than that of _thought_ that they made their plea to the Gentiles. In their struggle for existence, threatened on every side by official persecution and popular fury, they had no opportunity for speculation on fundamentals--they pleaded merely to be allowed to live the life to which they were pledged. With the Eastern training, which most of them had had, so foreign to the ideals of Greek philosophy, and so tenacious of the idea of G.o.d, and with the person of Christ so near to them as to blind their eyes to the possibility of any other standard of truth than His words, they naturally afford us no material for the question under discussion.

Thus we must wait for the rise of Christian philosophy, and take as our _terminus a quo_ the middle of the second century, when first there appears that literature which bears evidence to the conversion of philosophers to the Christian Church, and affords us examples of their attempts to present the new doctrines to the schools which they had abandoned.

Our _terminus ad quem_ will be the Council of Nicea. The reason for this is in part the demands of time and s.p.a.ce, and in part the fact that it will avoid needless and tedious repet.i.tion. The use of the theistic argument for some time after the Nicene period is fairly h.o.m.ogeneous, and presents no important new considerations. The apologetic work of the patristic writers was chiefly done in the ante-Nicene age; after that discussion turned more upon questions within the scope of the Christian Faith. The function of the age of the Councils was the formulation and definition of Christian dogma upon the admitted basis of the revelation of Jesus Christ.

This inquiry, therefore, will have to do with that interesting period when the doctrines of the Christian Church were finding their connection with and relation to the speculations of Greek philosophy, and when the Christian philosophers and apologists were determining the att.i.tude which, for many centuries, revealed religion a.s.sumed toward the demonstrations of natural theology.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Philosophy and Theology_, p. 176.

CHAPTER II

GREEK AND ROMAN THEISTIC ARGUMENTS

The first question that confronts us as we enter upon the discussion is the preliminary inquiry: What had been done already in the way of theistic argument, and in what condition did the Christian Church find this argument when it first began to develop a system of apologetics?

And from the conditions of ancient thought, or, at least, from what we know of it, this resolves itself into the question: How far had the Greek philosophers advanced by means of speculative thought toward a conscious theism, and by what means did the various individuals and schools among them seek to prove the existence of the Divine? The answer to this inquiry will involve a brief examination of the contributions of the pre-Socratic philosophers (especially Anaxagoras), Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, Cicero, and the h.e.l.lenizing Jews of Alexandria.

The thought of Greece before the time of Socrates, from the very nature of its problem, and the material at its disposal, yields us but little that can, without doing violence to the facts, be construed as bearing on the theistic argument. The search of these early philosophers was, indeed, for an ????, but their interest in the inquiry, as a perusal of the extant fragments of their writings will prove, was pre-eminently cosmological. They strove to discover the eternal ground of all things, but it was a principle to account for the phenomena of _physical_ nature that they sought, and they had not attained to a realization of even a rude form of the theistic problem. All they sought for was a primary substance which should satisfy the needs of a rudimentary physical science, which would enable them to co-ordinate the scanty data which they had acc.u.mulated from their contact with the world in which they lived, and to whose secrets they seem at times, in spite of their limited knowledge, to have come very close. And even granting that the problem involved in their search for the ???? was at bottom identical with that of theism, they attempt to give no proof or argument for their conclusions with regard to it. They are as yet merely _seers_, who report the vision that comes to them as they gaze upon the stress and strain and ever-changing spectacle of earth's phenomena. Even the teleology of Anaxagoras (often mentioned as the germ of the theistic argument) gives us nothing more than a poet's dream, expressed, as Diogenes Laertius informs us, in a "lofty and agreeable style."[2]

"Nous," Anaxagoras tells us, "is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself.... It has all knowledge about everything, and the greatest strength; and Nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have life. And Nous had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the beginning.... And Nous set in order all things that were to be and that were, and all things that are not now, and that are, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the aether that are separated off."[3] This, however, amounts to no argument, and it is extremely doubtful whether Anaxagoras ever meant anything more by his Nous than Empedocles did by his Love and Strife, of which it was the historical successor, and we may safely, I think, endorse the judgment of Aristotle when he says that "Anaxagoras, also, employs mind as a machine" (_i.e._, as the Laurentian MS. indicates, as a theatrical _deus ex machina_) "for the production of the cosmos; and when he finds himself in a perplexity as to the cause of its being necessarily so, he then drags it in by force to his a.s.sistance; but, in the other instances, he a.s.signs as a cause of the things that are being produced, everything else in preference to mind (Nous)."[4] This criticism will, I am confident, apply fully as well to any apparent theism in the other pre-Socratic writers,[5] so that we shall be justified in a.s.signing to them as their part in the development of the theistic argument, the mere undefined feeling and growing conviction of a permanent behind the changing, a "one" behind the "many."

We find the natural deep and practical piety of Socrates reinforcing itself with a very full and complete statement of a teleological argument, based upon final cause, or adaptation of means to ends. It is in the _Memorabilia_[6] that we get the clear statement of this, and, therefore, it is a Socratic teaching which can, fortunately, be definitely distinguished from the Platonic treatment of the subject.

"But which," he asks, "seemed to you most worthy of admiration, Aristodemus--the artist who forms images void of motion and intelligence, or one who has the skill to produce animals that are endued not only with activity, but understanding?" Then as Aristodemus answers, "The latter," Socrates proceeds to a detailed description of the adaptations of the eye, ear, teeth, mouth and nose to their several uses, and concludes with the question: "And canst thou still doubt, Aristodemus, whether a disposition of parts like this should be a work of chance, or of wisdom and contrivance?" He also argues in like manner from the existence of intelligence in man, the soul, and the general adaptability of man's powers and conditions to the furthering of his life. This argument to design has appropriately been called "peculiarly the Socratic proof,"[7] and to his treatment of it, so in keeping with the practical, st.u.r.dy common-sense of the man, nothing essential or important, except in multiplication of applications and details, has been added since his time. In the opinion of the writer, however, Socrates, so far as one can judge from his recorded utterances, developed merely the form of the Argument to Design, but it cannot be positively a.s.serted that he used it as a _theistic_ argument. In the _Memorabilia_ it is always "the G.o.ds" to which the argument leads, and the worship of them that he urges. He may have had a more theistic conception, but the context warrants no further meaning of ?e?? than the generic one of an object of worship--in this case the national G.o.ds. In the _Apology_ "? ?e??" is used almost invariably of the local divinity of the oracle at Delphi, and of the "daemon" which, at the instigation of the Delphian divinity, as he was convinced, guided his actions. The present writer is strongly of the opinion that much violence has been done the words of Socrates by translators and interpreters, and that this fact will account for much of the alleged theistic teaching which is, without warrant, ascribed to the Athenian sage.

The contribution of Plato to the theistic argument was, characteristically, the form of the "Ontological proof" which has been called "Idealogical." This process is a very natural development for Plato's Dialectic.[8] Once divide the universe, as he did, into the two cla.s.ses of permanent existence and transient phenomena, and identify the former with the ideas (which are nothing else than universals, each of which expresses the essence of many phenomena), and it is a very easy process to conceive of these ideas themselves being united in another more inclusive idea, and so, by a process of generalization, to reach at length the "Idea of Ideas"--the absolute Idea, in which lies the essence of all in the universe. Thus from any one fact of beauty, harmony, etc., the human mind may rise to the notion of a common quality in all objects of beauty, etc.: "from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others; from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until, from thought to thought, we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the perfect, absolute, Divine Beauty."[9] The "ideas," too, and especially the "Good" or "absolute Idea," have in them a teleological element, "since the Idea not only states as what, but also for what a thing exists."[10] The absolute Idea is not only the first principle of the universe, but also its final purpose, and thus we have indicated in various places a teleological argument. Traces of other forms of the theistic argument have been detected in Plato's writings, but none of them are at all explicitly developed, and one cannot but feel that some writers on the subject have claimed altogether too much for Plato's theology.[11] The poetical and allegorical form into which he so constantly throws his discussion makes it extremely difficult to determine his exact position, especially on such a subject as his theology, in which he is constantly adapting his metaphysical doctrines to the prevailing polytheistic religious ideas; and at the same time this method of expression gives a good opportunity for the collection of isolated quotations which may support almost any theory.

The religious character of Plato's philosophy is, as Zeller says, to be found much more on the moral than on the scientific side, and hence he was content to leave the more exact formulation of such arguments as these to his successors. As to the results to which this method led him, the statement of Zeller, in view of the many conflicting opinions, seems satisfactory: "In everything that he states concerning the Divinity the leading point of view is the idea of the Good, the highest metaphysical and ethical perfection. As this highest Idea stands over all ideas as the cause of all being and knowing, so over all G.o.ds, alike hard to find and to describe, stands the one, eternal, invisible G.o.d, the Framer and Father of all things."[12] Of the personality of G.o.d Plato had no conception,[13] and it would be a very difficult undertaking to prove from his extant works that he was, in any real sense of the word, a theist.

Of the three divisions of the speculative sciences--physical, mathematical and theological--Aristotle makes the last the "most excellent,"[14] "for it is conversant about that one amongst ent.i.ties which is more ent.i.tled to respect than the rest."[15] It is to the discussion of this subject in Book XI. that the greater part of the _Metaphysics_ leads up. He has established in the previous portions of the work the two substances which he calls "natural or physical"--namely, matter and form--and now he proceeds to justify the hints he has given of a third substance which is "immovable."[16] It has been customary to divide this discussion of Aristotle into several formal theistic arguments,[17] but in the opinion of the writer the text of the _Metaphysics_ does not lend itself readily to any such cut and dried arrangement of its argument. Aristotle does, indeed, to avoid the absurdity of an endless regress, argue from the ?????e?a and the ??????ta of the physical World to a p??t?? ?????? which is a pure ?????e?a, ?????t??, ??e? ????, and hence foreign to all the pa.s.sivity and contingency of matter;[18] concludes from motion in the world that there must be a First Mover;[19] and a.s.serts the actuality of the eternal as opposed to potentiality; but these arguments are so blended together, and take each one so much from the others, that I cannot be convinced that Aristotle had ever clearly differentiated them.

But it is clear enough that the crown of Aristotle's whole system is this "prime mover," "unmoved" and "apart from matter," and that this conception, up to which his thought leads from every side, as the necessary implication from the motion everywhere seen in the world, is his chief contribution to the argument for the existence of the Divine.

Aristotle's chief interest lay in the cosmological problem, and his form of proof and the result which he reached by it were moulded by this fact. His argument did not lead him to a Creator of the world, for the universe, no less than the prime mover, was eternal, and the latter is nothing more than a principle of reason immanent in the world--pervading it, not distinguished from it--and the author of motion only in a pa.s.sive way, after all, as a sort of magnetic object of desire.[20] In other places Aristotle makes pa.s.sing references to different forms of the argument to prove the existence of the G.o.ds,[21] but it is evident that his own interest centered around this unmoved final cause, and it is in his proof of its existence from cosmological considerations that his significance for us lies.

In the post-Aristotelian schools we have an entire change of the point of view, and instead of a philosophy of nature, such as occupied the attention of the pre-Socratic thinkers, or a philosophy of mind, such as Socrates, Plato, and to a large extent, Aristotle attempted to construct, we find the interest of men in speculative questions centered in a philosophy of life, of morals. Corresponding to this change in the point of view, we may easily detect an alteration in the manner of dealing with the arguments for the existence of the G.o.ds.

There was, in the first place, an increased emphasis laid upon this line of thought, in common with religious subjects in general, and the reasons for the belief in the existence of the G.o.ds (for the Greek schools never transcended polytheism--when they speak of ?e?? they mean simply the abstract divinity of the many separate divinities) seems, so far as we may judge from the comparatively scanty remains that have come down to us, to have been discussed at great length; critically and negatively by the Sceptics, positively and apparently with full conviction by the Stoics, and with a curious mixture of both of these att.i.tudes by the Epicureans. These latter, if the reported doctrine of Epicurus himself be trustworthy, denied the popular G.o.ds, and, in order to insure freedom, rejected the Stoic doctrine of providence; but, on the other hand, a.s.serted a belief in G.o.ds whose essential characteristics are immortality and perfect happiness (to insure which they must care nothing for the world or for men), and whose existence was held to be proven on the basis of the common consent of all men ("_Argumentum e Consensu Gentium_"). This argument is the result of a "natural idea" or "pre-notion," which Epicurus called p???????;--"that is, an antecedent conception of the fact in the mind, without which nothing can be understood, inquired after, or discoursed on."[22]

The Stoics, on the other hand, with their strong conviction of providence working in the world, were rather inclined to deny the validity of this argument from common consent, and rested their belief in the G.o.ds, as Cicero makes his Stoic do in _De Natura Deorum_,[23] on the evidence of design and purpose in the universe, but by this process succeeded only in proving to their own satisfaction that the world is divine--a fatalistic pantheism which roused the ire of the Epicurean and Sceptic alike, and which even Cicero seemed hardly to be able to accept.

From this necessarily brief review of the development of the argument for the existence of a Divinity in Greek and Roman thought, it will be seen that, at one time or another, in a more or less fully developed form, each one of the princ.i.p.al types of the theistic argument received the chief emphasis and had its method enunciated. The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, on the basis of the maxim as old as philosophy itself--?d??at?? ???es?a? t? ?? ?de??? p???p?????t??--pointed to an ????--a real behind phenomena, a permanent behind the change--and thus pointed to the so-called Aetiological argument founded on the principle of causality. Socrates, with his pre-eminently practical disposition and ethical point of view, saw above all things intention in nature, and so from the consideration of this choice and adaptation of means to their end, and the resultant Final Cause he constructs a very complete Teleological argument for the existence of some intelligence behind the visible world. Plato's Ideas, as we have seen, determine the method by which he arrives at his abstract divinity, namely, by the "Idealogical"

form of argument based upon a process of generalization. Aristotle, struck by the phenomena of motion in the universe, lays most stress on the course of reasoning which would lead back to the Prime Mover. The Epicureans, subordinating their theology to their ethical theory, and unwilling to allow their deity to interfere with the world or with men's affairs, developed and placed their dependence on the argument from common consent. The Stoics, laying great stress upon the order, proportion and harmony in the world, argued to mind as the reason for this condition of things. But none of these philosophers, in the opinion of the writer, attained to a conception of G.o.d which could in any real or accepted sense of the word be called theistic, or which would satisfy a mind accustomed to the idea of the Christian doctrine of G.o.d.

For the Greek writers never make any accurate distinction between ?

?e??, ?? ?e??, t? ?e??? and t? ?e?a. They never conceive of their ?e??

as anything more than a rather larger and more majestic member of the innumerable family of the divinities of which the poets had sung--more spiritual only in so far as it was more vague and indefinite, a sort of mysterious, mythical being to which is sometimes attributed the same kind of personality possessed by the inferior G.o.ds, and sometimes regarded as simply the abstract divinity which characterized all of the G.o.ds. But that to which the arguments that we have been discussing generally lead is not even so near to the theistic conception as this modified polytheism, for they usually conduct us, as we have already indicated, to nothing more than a (sometimes) personified force of nature, principle of order, or abstract conception--not a G.o.d. Take away the inaccurate and misleading terms by which the original Greek is rendered in most of the English versions, in which the enthusiasm of the student of comparative religions has taken the place of the careful and accurate translator, and, aside from frequent apostrophes, such as are continually addressed by the poets to the many G.o.ds of the popular religion, the end of the arguments we have been considering will be found to be as depicted above. In a word: Greek philosophy, independent of Semitic influences, developed the _form_ of the chief types of the theistic argument, but it failed utterly to deduce from them a theism, being throughout in its theology either polytheistic or pantheistic.

While considering this branch of our subject it would be impossible to ignore another school of thought, which, while neither Greek nor Roman in its nationality, yet derives so much of its philosophical stand-point from the former of these races as to be often cla.s.sed under the same head. This is the school of h.e.l.lenizing Jews, in which there is built up on the foundation of the traditional faith of the Hebrew race, to the truth and authority of which they always held, a superstructure of philosophical speculation which follows closely the models afforded them by Greek thought. To effect a reconciliation between these two elements it was necessary for them to resort to the allegorical interpretation of the ancient inspired history of the race, and hence to the Oriental mind that wished to engage in speculative thought it was naturally Platonic and Pythagorean, rather than Aristotelian, methods that were most attractive.

The chief and probably the earliest developed example of this combination of Oriental and Occidental thought is found in the writings of Philo Judaeus.[24] To him the powers of man seemed to be wholly unreliable and delusive, and only the special grace of G.o.d enables one to perceive any truth--"??t?? ?e?? ???? ?a? p??? te???? ?a? ?p?st???

????????ta?." To approach G.o.d one must flee from one's self--"e? ???

??t??? ?e?? ??e????sa ap? sa?t?? ??a??te?." Neither reason nor any other function of the soul can conduct us to G.o.d, nor can we attain to a conception of Him as the supreme cause of all by regarding the manifold perfections and powers of nature, for such a process can give us only shadows. It is only by a "superior faculty" which is a grace of G.o.d that one can attain some idea of the divine, but even by this means we arrive at only negative knowledge--we can know only what G.o.d is not.[25] Yet in spite of all this Philo uses quite an elaborate teleological argument drawn from the order in the world.[26] This inconsistency, which, as Erdmann remarks,[27] may be explained by the fact that Philo makes G.o.d only the orderer of the world, and, furthermore, interposes an intermediate being, the famous Philonian Logos, we have thought it worth while to mention in this place, as it forms a connecting link between the Greek philosophers and the Alexandrian Fathers, and foreshadows, in some degree, the direction in which their thought was to be led.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] D. L., I, 16; II, 6.

[3] Ritter and Preller, 123. Translated by Burnet; _Early Greek Philosophy_, p. 283, 4.

[4] _Metaphysics_, I, 4.

[5] The "one G.o.d, the greatest among G.o.ds and men" of Xenophanes has led men to call him the first monotheist, but an examination of the fragments attributed to him will, I am sure, confirm the verdict of Burnet (_ut supra_, p. 123) that "what Xenophanes proclaimed as the 'greatest G.o.d' was nothing more nor less than what we call the material world."

[6] Xenophon: _Memorabilia_, I, 4.

[7] c.o.c.ker: _Christianity and Greek Philosophy_, p. 491.

[8] "La dialectique et le systeme des idees conduisaient directement Platon a la demonstration de l'existence de Dieu; et son Dieu porte en quelque facon l'empreinte de cette origine, puisqu'il est a la fois l'unite absolue et l'intelligence parfaite." Jules Simon: _Etudes sur la Theodicee de Platon et d'Aristote_, p. 29.

[9] _Banquet_, -- 34.

[10] Erdmann: _History of Philosophy_, -- 77, 4.

[11] E.g. c.o.c.ker: _Christianity and Greek Philosophy_, pp. 377, ff.