CHAPTER XIV

PATRISTICS.—THE HELLENIZING OF THE GOSPEL

The Early Situation of Christianity. The Orient was the source of the Gospel, as of the other religions of this time. The power of Christianity lay in the spontaneous force of its pure religious feeling, with which it entered the lists for the conquest of the world. Christianity was not a philosophy, but a religion. It appealed to a different class than did the Alexandrian schools. The lower class received it first, and so the questions of science and philosophy occupied the early Christians but little. They were neither the friends nor the foes of Hellenism, and they took no interest in political theories. The Christian society was a spiritual cosmopolitanism, which was inspired and united by belief in God, faith in Christ, and in immediate communion with Christ. Conviction of the Second Coming of the Lord determined the conduct of the early Christians. Indeed, that moral reformation and moral conduct were the dominating aims of the Christian communities is proved by the following facts: the documents dealing with Christian life of that time are almost wholly moral; the discipline upon the members was for moral and not doctrinal reasons. Still these early Christians had some simple doctrines, which were seemingly taken for granted; and the danger is, to conceive the early Christians as either (1) too simple or (2) too ignorant. They believed that there is one God, that man has personal relations to God, that history has a dramatic course, that right was God’s command and absolutely different from wrong, that the Last Judgment would surely come.

But about the middle of the second century Christianity was obliged to change its attitude towards both science and the State. Between 150 and 250 a great change took place among the Christians. The documentary records are full of doctrinal struggles, so that little room was left for recording the struggles for moral purity. Morality became subordinated to belief, and the intellectual side of Christianity was emphasized at the expense of the ethical. The Second Coming of our Lord was less emphasized. This doctrine was either pushed into the background or its realization was looked upon as not immediate. Furthermore, the Christian sect had spread over the empire and had come into positive relations both with circles of culture and with political affairs. Various statistics of the numerical growth of the Christians are given; among them is the following statement: in 30 A. D. they numbered 500, in 100 A. D. 500,000, in 311 A. D. 30,000,000. In the second century the self-justification of Christianity could no longer be put upon the basis of the feelings and inner convictions. It must justify itself to the world without, and to its own cultured communicants as well. It was being attacked by philosophy, and, unless its own further growth were to be thwarted, it found that it must use the weapons of philosophy. Its increase of power antagonized both the Roman state and Hellenistic culture, and from 150 to 300 the fight between Christianity and the old world of things was to the death. Christianity eventually conquered Rome and Hellenism; but this would have been impossible if it had maintained its original attitude of indifference to culture. Its success was due to the wisdom that it has since so often shown. It adapted itself to its new situation by taking over and making its own the culture of the old world, and by fighting the old world with that culture. Christianity thereby shaped its own constitution into such strength that it could obtain possession of the state with Constantine in 300. From this impregnable political position, it was able to deal with its rivals on an entirely different footing. When old Rome fell in 476, the church did not fall with it, but on the contrary it came into possession of the city.

But this political success was the result and not the cause of the growth of Christianity. It could never have conquered so intrenched a government as Rome, if it had not first been victorious over the more persistent civilization of Greece. It made itself inherently strong by Hellenizing itself—strong both for polemical and for constructive purposes. But it is obvious that little philosophical originality may be expected during this period. When the church fathers began to employ Hellenistic philosophy, they took it on the whole as they found it. They varied it only to suit their own legitimate purposes. Christianity entered the religious controversies of the time when victory would belong to the sect which could use Greek civilization most effectively in defending itself against the hostility of other religions, and in constantly renewing the confidence of its devotees.

But in the adoption of Hellenistic culture the church created a new danger to itself. It must guard its own conceptions lest they be smothered by this same Hellenism. It must keep its fundamental beliefs in their integrity. Greek philosophy must be a servant so constrained as to bring out only the implicit meaning of the fundamental Christian doctrines. Philosophy must not corrupt these doctrines and transmute them into Hellenism. The simple faith of the first century and its doctrines must be so formulated by Hellenic wisdom that it would be stated for all time. The church needed a dogmatic system, a creed that could forestall any future innovations. The long series of œcumenical councils of the church, beginning with the Council of Nicæa in 325, were united efforts in this direction. After that first council, dogma became more gradually fixed and, from time to time, this and that group of men were separated from the church as heretical.

Patristics is this philosophical secularizing of the Gospel which accompanied the internal and external development of the church body during the two or three centuries after the year 150 A. D.

The Philosophies influencing Christian Thought. The Greek philosophies most influential upon the development of Christian doctrine were Stoicism and neo-Platonism. The philosophy of Philo was also influential, but it was really only a bridge from philosophical Judaism to Christian theology. It contained both Stoicism and Platonism in an unsymmetrical form, and Philo’s writings “contain the seeds of nearly all that afterwards grew up on Christian soil.”44 Greek philosophical influence upon the early Christian world was felt in two ways: in ethical theory and practice; in the construction of theology. During the fourth century Stoic ethics of a Cynic type replaced the early Christian ethics. The basis of Christian society was no longer the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, but rather that of Roman Stoicism. This is shown by the character of that book on morals (De Officiis Ministrorum) by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (340–397). In theology the Christian doctrine had no need to borrow from the Greeks the conception of the unity of God or that of the creation of the world by God. But the Greek influence is seen in the doctrines on subjects allied to these: mainly on the questions of the mode of creation and the relation of God to the material world. In the discussion of these questions the influence of the Stoic monism, tending toward dualism, and the influence of Platonic dualism, tending toward a threefold conception of God, Matter, and Form, will appear in the examples which subsequently follow.

The most formidable opponent of Christianity during this time was neo-Platonism, but neo-Platonism and Christianity were not, however, long separated. Although neo-Platonism met its fate at the hands of scholasticism, it influenced in a thousand ways both orthodox and heretical Christianity. The rivalry of these two bodies ended—and with it came the ending of the Hellenic-Roman period of philosophy—in a complete and original theology. This was the theology of St. Augustine, who marks the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

The Periods of Early Christianity (30 A. D.–476 A. D.).

1. Introductory Period, 30–200.

(1) Period of Primitive Faith (during the 1st century A. D.). With great simplicity of doctrine and ceremonies the Christians were preparing through faith and the practice of virtue for the Second Coming of our Lord.

(2) Period of the Earlier Formulation and Defense of Christian Doctrine (during the 2d century A. D.).

(a) The Apologists (2d century).

(b) The Gnostics (2d century).

(c) The Old Catholic Theologians (2d and 3d centuries).

2. Development Period (200–476).

(1) The Period of Actual Formulation of Doctrine (200–325). The Catechetical School of Alexandria—Origen (3d century).

(2) The Period of the Establishment of Dogma (325–modern times) as seen in the Council of Nicæa and other œcumenical councils. It was a period in which church dogma was developed on the basis of doctrine already established.

While the origin and development of the Christian church is an interesting story in itself, only one aspect of it is germane to the history of philosophy. That is the influence of Hellenism upon the formation of the theology of the church. The origin and development of the church organization lies beyond our field. Also the periods before the influence of Hellenism—the Period of Primitive Faith during the first century, and the period after dogma had become well established, the time after the Council of Nicæa in 325—will be omitted from our discussion here. Only the period of the Earlier Formulation and that of the Actual Formulation of Doctrine, that is, the one hundred and seventy-five years (150–325), are of interest to us. This time is known in history by the name of the period of Patristics.

The Apologists. Only such Christians as were trained in Greek philosophy could rally to the first defense of the Christian doctrine. The new faith was, on the one hand, on the defensive against the mockery of Greek wisdom, and, on the other hand, it was obliged to take a positive stand to show that it was the fulfillment of the human need of salvation. The Apologists tried to make the Christian teaching as consistent as possible with the results of Greek philosophy and, at the same time, to read into Greek philosophy Christian meanings. They did not at all intend to Hellenize the Gospel, but they wanted to make it seem a rational one to the cultured world. “Christianity is philosophy and revelation. This is the thesis of every Apologist from Aristides to Minucius Felix.”45 Their very act of defense was unintentionally the first step toward the incorporation of Greek philosophy as a part of Christian teaching. The most important Apologists were Justin Martyr (100–166), Athenagoras (d. 180), and among the Romans Minucius Felix (about 200) and Lactantius (d. 320). The life of Justin Martyr is characteristic. He was born in Sichem, Samaria, but was Greek in origin and education. Having investigated several systems of philosophy and religion, he came to the conclusion that the Christian religion was the only true philosophy, and he died in defense of it at Rome.

To prove that Christianity is the only true philosophy, the Apologists asserted that it alone guaranteed correct knowledge and true holiness here and hereafter. They proclaimed its preëminence because it is a perfect revelation of God through Jesus Christ. Since man is imprisoned in the world of the senses and ruled by dæmons, he can never be saved except through a perfect revelation. To be saved is to become rational, and man can become rational only by divine aid. Revelation has not been restricted to Christianity, but God’s inspiration has been at work in all mankind. The truth in Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras has not been their own, but has sprung from this same divine inspiration, for truth never is the product of man’s unaided reason. Socrates and Plato got their truth in part from God’s direct revelation to them, in part indirectly from reading the works of Moses and the prophets. But revelation outside of Christianity has not been complete nor continuous. The first perfect revelation was in Jesus Christ, for He is the first to reveal the divine Logos completely. He is the first in whom the Logos has become man. He is the Son of God because the complete essence of the inexpressible Deity is unfolded in Him.

The Apologists thus identified reason and revelation. The Logos is the same in revelation, nature, or history. The Stoic conception of the Logos, which Philo had stripped of its materialistic character, was identified with Christ and revelation. Justin could regard as inspired what the Greeks had looked upon as natural in their own doctrines. Christ is the world-reason, in whom the divine has been incarnated, and the Apologists had the enormous advantage over the neo-Platonists of being able to point to Jesus as the definite and historical incarnation of God. The Apologists could summon the prevailing Platonic dualism of God and matter to their aid in showing the need of such a revelation; for matter is altogether without reason and goodness. Thus a summary of their doctrine is as follows: the world is bad and needs a revelation; the Logos of God has always been present in history, but has especially appeared in Jesus Christ, the man, in order to redeem men from their sin and establish the kingdom of God.

The Gnostics. Gnosticism is the name applied to a movement of hostile reconstruction of Old Testament tradition instead of a spiritual interpretation of it. It was a great syncretic movement in the second and third centuries, which sought to form a world religion in which men should be rated on the basis of what they intellectually and morally knew. The Gnostics tried to transform the Christian faith in a large way into knowledge that would still be Christian; and their efforts show how strong the philosophical interest among the Christians was beginning to be. The conditions for the development of such a doctrine as Gnosticism were everywhere present in the empire, yet two principal centres are pointed out: one at Alexandria and the other in Syria. Gnosticism was a most fanciful mixture of Oriental and Occidental cults and mythologies, very much more fantastic than either neo-Pythagoreanism or neo-Platonism. It was a philosophy in which the essential Christian principles were lost under the weight of esoteric knowledge. The Gnostics themselves were steeped in Hellenic culture, and in many localities formed only bands of Mysteries. They finally lost all sympathy with the Christians, and were classed as heretics by the church. The leading Gnostics were Saturninus, Carpocrates (about 130), Basilides, Valentinus (about 160), and Bardesanes (155–225). Only a few fragments of their many writings remain, and about all that we know of their doctrines is what their opponents say of them. Valentinus, the most notable, was born at Rome and died at Cyprus. Bardesanes was born in Mesopotamia. Carpocrates lived at Alexandria and was a contemporary of Basilides, who was a Syrian. The records of their careers are very meagre.

The Gnostics were the first philosophers of history.46 They undertook to make Christianity a world religion by conquering Hellenic culture for Christianity and Christianity for Hellenic culture. The only way they could do this was by dislodging Christianity from its historical anchorage in the Old Testament. The Gnostics were in open hostility to Judaism. They transformed every ethical problem into a cosmological problem, they regarded human history as the continuation of natural history, they viewed the Redemption as the last act in the cosmic drama. This shows how closely related their teaching was to that of Philo and Plotinus and how consistent with the theoretic spirit of the time. Since the salvation of the world by Christ stands as the central point of their philosophy of history, their philosophy of history amounted to a philosophy of Christian history.

The victory of Christianity over paganism and Judaism was conceived allegorically by the Gnostics as the battle of the gods of these religions. The Redeemer was then conceived to appear at the psychological moment and to win the victory; and this appearance of Christ as Redeemer is not only the highest point in the development of the human race, but it is the dénouement in the drama of the universe. Nature was therefore conceived by them to be a battle-ground of the gods and the strife to be waged between the forces of good and evil. The good gets the victory by means of Christ. The battle was conceived in the neo-Pythagorean form of the dualism of matter and spirit, but was expressed in mythical terms. The heathen gods and the god of the Old Testament, who took the form of the Platonic demiurge, were the powers in the world which the highest God had to overcome.

The dualism of good and evil was conceived to be the same as between spirit and matter, and was elaborated in a fashion true to the Alexandrian school. The space between God and matter was conceived to be filled in by a whole race of dæmons and angels, arranged according to the Pythagorean numbers. The lowest was so far from the divine perfectness as to be in touch with matter, and he is the demiurge who formed the world. The battle then was between good and evil, light and darkness, until the Logos, the Nous, Christ, the most perfect of the intermediary beings, came down and by incarnation released from matter the imprisoned spirits of men and even of the fallen angels, like the demiurge. This is, in brief, the Gnostic explanation of history.

This dualism was quite consistent with contemporary Christian ethics, which had then become Stoic. But this dualism was not consistent with monotheism, the fundamental Christian principle. The internal danger in Patristics—of swamping the fundamentals of Christianity through Hellenizing them—appears thus early. The early Christian found at the beginning an antagonism between his fundamental monotheistic metaphysics and Greek dualistic ethics.

The Reaction against Gnosticism.—The Old Catholic Theologians. We have seen that the original position of the Christians was one of indifference to both politics and philosophy; that then came the employment of Hellenism in the defense of the Gospel. This resulted in the extreme attempt of the Gnostics to transform Christianity into a factor in a cosmic theosophy. Gnosticism had tried to capture the new religion by force and make it subserve the interests of Hellenic and Oriental philosophy. This danger was averted only after years of controversy. Gnosticism was the gravest danger that the early church had to meet, and the Gnostics left their mark upon the church, although they were expelled; for the church never returned to its original simplicity of doctrine. Gnosticism, however, produced an extreme reaction, for a time, against the use of philosophy, and was represented by the “Old Catholic Theologians,”—Irenæus (140–200), Tertullian (160–220), and Hippolytus. These theologians stood against turning faith into a science and tried to limit dogma to the articles of the baptismal confession interpreted as a rule of faith. Tatian (170) saw in Hellenism the work of the devil. Irenæus conceived a unity in the process of creation and redemption,—creation as a divine method of bringing humanity up into the church by way of redemption. Tertullian went so far as to affirm that the Gospel is confirmed by its being in a certain sense contradictory to reason. Credo quia absurdum. By this he means, not that faith rests in things absurd, but that faith rests in things so far above reason as to make reason absurd. This reaction was against Gnosticism and not against rationalism, for these men used both philosophy and tradition to support their arguments.

The reaction against a systematic theology failed to establish itself, for the need of Greek philosophy was found to be necessary. The result was that a median position was taken by the help of Greek philosophy in the formulation of the dogma of the church. This was scientifically stated by the Alexandrian School of Catechists, of which Clement and Origen were the leaders.

Origen (185–254) and the School of Catechists. Origen, whose surname was Adamantine, was an early teacher in the School of Catechists, which had been under the direction of Clement. Like Plotinus, Origen had been a pupil of Ammonius Saccas. Origen endured much persecution on account of his teaching, and had to flee from Alexandria to Cæsarea and Tyre, where he spent his old age. He was the most influential theologian of the Eastern church, and he was the father of Christian theological science.

In manner of life Origen was a Christian; in his thought he was a Greek. He was the Christian Philo, although he was a rival to the neo-Platonic philosophers. His Christian theology competed with the philosophical systems of his time. It was founded on both Testaments, and it also united in a peculiar way toward a practical end the theology of both the Apologists and the Gnostics. He was convinced that Christianity could be expressed only as a science, and that any form of Christianity without scientific expression is not clear to itself. Although the church was offended at some of his doctrines, it made his philosophical principle and his theory of development its own. In trying to state Christianity in terms of intellectual knowledge, Origen did not make the mistake of burying its principles under philosophy or mythology, as was the case with the Gnostics. The Gnostics had created a new Christianity; Origen developed Christianity from within itself. He was an orthodox traditionalist, a strong Biblical theologian and idealistic philosopher. He maintained that there were several ways of interpreting the Scriptures (allegorical interpretation). The masses see only the somatic or outward meaning as it has been developed in history. A deeper or moral interpretation gives a psychical meaning to the Gospel truth. More profound still is the spiritual interpretation, which gives to the Gospels a pneumatic or spiritually esoteric meaning. Christianity is superior to all other religions because it is a religion for all classes, even for the common man. Christianity is the only religion which, without being polytheistic, can have its truth in mythical dress.

The aim of Origen was less to show how the world came to be, than to justify the ways of God to men in the world’s creation and history. The central principle in his teaching is spiritual monotheism. God is an unchanging spirit, the author of all things, and He transcends human knowledge. What distinguishes Him most is the absolute causality of His will. He is essentially creative, and this creative activity is co-eternal with Himself. God can have no dealings with changing individuals directly, since although creative He is unchanging. He has direct connection only with the eternal revelation of His own image, the Logos. The Logos is a person, a special hypostasis, the perfect likeness of God with nothing corporeal about him. He is not the God, but still God, yet a second God, with no sharing of divinity.47 The Holy Spirit bears the same relation to the Logos as the Logos to the Father. In his relation to the world the Logos is the Idea of Ideas, the norm according to which things are created.

Origen followed Philo in believing that the original creation consists of a world of beings that are pure intelligences, and that the cause of creation is God’s goodness. He further believed that the Logos or Wisdom of God is God’s Son. Both the creation of the ideal world of intelligences and the existence of the Son is from eternity. The origin of the visible world is to be contrasted with this eternal creation. The visible world had its beginning in time and is only one of a series of worlds. It will finally return to God, and has in God its beginning and end. Thus man lives in a visible world of time with eternities on either side. Creation, viewed as a whole, is everlasting, and consists of an endless number of beings who are destined to become a part of the divine holiness and to participate in the divine blessedness. These beings are endowed with freedom of will, and they fall away from God. The visible world of matter has been created to purify the fallen spirits, and in consequence we find materialized spirits graded into angels, stars, mankind, and evil dæmons.

In his emphasis on the will as the fundamental mental part of man, Origen is distinctly Christian and opposed to Greek intellectualism. The will of God and the will of man form the corner stone in his system. The will of God is the eternal development of His being, but the will of spirits is their temporal free choice. The will of God is reality itself; the will of spirits is phenomenal and changing. Freedom of the will of the spirits is the ground of their sin, and consequently of their materiality. Thus it is by the freedom of the spirits that Origen explains evil and the existence of imperfect matter without impeaching the eternal purity of God. Origen thus reconciled the ethical transcendence of God as creator with his immanence in the material world. God is the creator without being the creator of sin. Through the conception of free-will Origen reconciled the two antithetical principles of Christian metaphysics: faith in divine omnipotence and consciousness of sin.

The function of the church is thus an important one in the divine plan. For the fallen spirits try to rise by their own wills from the matter to which they are condemned for purification. They never lose their divine essence, however low they may fall. They cannot rise alone, nor are they compelled to, but they always have the help of divine grace, which is always active within man and has also been perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. After the manner of the Apologists, Origen makes use of the Stoic and Platonic conceptions, for the eternal Logos takes form in the divine-human unity of Jesus. Through His physical suffering redemption is made possible to all believers, and through His essence illumination has been brought to those especially inspired. There are different grades of redemption: faith, or a religious understanding of the perceptual world; knowledge of the Logos; final absorption in God. All shall finally be saved through the combined forces of freedom and Grace, and then shall all material existence disappear.

The controversies within the church during the succeeding centuries over the theory of Origen are theological rather than philosophical, and so our account of the relation of Greek philosophy to Christianity in the Hellenic-Roman period closes here. Origen’s undertaking was a private one, approved at first in only limited circles and on the whole disapproved by the church. In his scientific dogmatics the particular changes which he planned pertain especially to the conception of salvation and the place of Christ in the universe. In his teaching about Christ he emphasized more the cosmological than the soteriological aspect, but neither was fully developed. The history of the early church shows that Christianity seized the ideas of ancient philosophy and insisted on revising them with its own religious principle before it used them. We shall find that the next period is introduced by a greater than Origen, in whom again the Christian and the ancient worlds will meet in new and richer combination,—St. Augustine.