Slowly there loomed through the mists of earlier Greek thought the consciousness of one God.

It came with the sense of the unity of the world. That sense had not always been awakened. The varied phenomena of earth and sea and sky had not always been brought under a single expression. The groups into which the mind tended to arrange them were conceived as separate, belonging to different kingdoms and controlled by independent divinities. It was by the unconscious alchemy of thought, working through successive generations, that the separate groups came to be combined into a whole and conceived as forming a universe.

It came also with the sense of the order of the world. The sun which day by day rose and set, the moon which month by month waxed and waned, the stars which year by year came back to the same stations in the sky, were like a marshalled army moving in obedience to a fixed command. There was order, not only above but also beneath. The sea, which for all its storms and murmurings, could not pass its bounds, the earth upon which seed-time and harvest never failed, but spring after spring the buds burst into blossom, and summer after summer the blossom ripened into fruit, were part of the same great system. The conception was that not merely of a universe, but of a universe moving in obedience to a law. The earliest form of the conception is probably that of Anaxagoras, which was formulated by a later writer in the expression, “The origins of matter are infinite, the origin of movement and birth is one.”[309]

This conception of an ordered whole was intertwined, as it slowly elaborated itself, with one or other of two kindred conceptions, of which one had preceded it and the other grew with it.

The one was the sense of personality. By a transference of ideas which has been so universal that it may be called natural, all things that move have been invested with personality. The stars and rivers were persons. Movement meant life, and life meant everywhere something analogous to human life. It was by an inevitable application of the conception that when the sum of movements was conceived as a whole, it should be also conceived that behind the totality of the phenomena and the unity of their movements there was a single Person.

The other was the conception of mind. It was a conception which had but slowly disentangled itself from that of bodily powers. It was like the preaching of a revelation, and almost as fruitful, when Epicharmus proclaimed:[310] “It is not the eye that sees, but the mind: it is not the ear that hears, but the mind: all things except mind are blind and deaf.” It was the mind that not only saw but thought, and that not only thought but willed. It alone was the real self: and the Person who is behind nature or within it was like the personality which is behind the bodily activities of each one of us: His essence was mind.

There was one God. The gods of the old mythology were passing away, like a splendid pageantry of clouds moving across the horizon to be absorbed in the clear and infinite heaven. “But though God is one,” it was said,[311] “He has many names, deriving a name from each of the spheres of His government.... He is called the Son of Kronos, that is of Time, because He continues from eternity to eternity; and Lightning-God, and Thunder-God, and Rain-God, from the lightnings and thunders and rains; and Fruit-God, from the fruits (which he sends); and City-God, from the cities (which he protects); and the God of births, and homesteads, and kinsmen, and families, of companions, and friends, and armies.... God, in short, of heaven and earth, named after all forms of nature and events as being Himself the cause of all.” “There are not different gods among different peoples,” says Plutarch,[312] “nor foreign gods and Greek gods, nor gods of the south and gods of the north; but just as sun and moon and sky and earth and sea are common to all mankind, but have different names among different races, so, though there be one Reason who orders these things and one Providence who administers them ... there are different honours and appellations among different races; and men use consecrated symbols, some of them obscure and some more clear, so leading their thoughts on the path to the Divine: but it is not without risk; for some men, wholly missing their foothold, have slipped into superstition, and others, avoiding the slough of superstition, have in their turn fallen over the precipice of atheism.”

In the conception of God as it thus uncoiled itself in Greek history, three strands of thought are constantly intertwined—the thought of a Creator, the thought of a Moral Governor, and the thought of a Supreme or Absolute Being. It is desirable to trace the history of each of these thoughts, as far as possible, separately, and to consider their separate effects upon the development of Christian theology. The present Lecture will deal mainly with the first: the two following Lectures with the other two.

It was at a comparatively late stage in its history that Greek thought came to the conception of a beginning of all things. The conception was first formulated by Anaximander, in the sixth century B.C.[313] The earlier conception was that of a chaos, out of which gods and all things alike proceeded. The first remove from that earlier conception was hylozoism, the belief that life and matter were the same. The conception of mind was not yet evolved. When it was evolved, two lines of thought began to diverge. The one, following the conception of human personality as absolutely single, conceived of both reason and force as inherent in matter: it is the theory which is known as Monism. The other, following the conception of human personality as a separable compound, body and soul, conceived of reason and force as external to matter: it is the theory which is known as Dualism. These two theories run through all subsequent Greek philosophy.

1. The chief philosophical expression of Monism was Stoicism. The Stoics followed the Ionians in believing that the world consists of a single substance. They followed Heraclitus in believing that the movements and modifications of that substance are due neither to a blind impulse from within nor to an arbitrary impact from without. It moved, he had thought, with a kind of rhythmic motion, a fire that was kindling and being quenched with regulated limits of degree and time.[314] The substance is one, but immanent and inherent in it is a force that acts with intelligence. The antithesis between the two was expressed by the Stoics in various forms. It was sometimes the bare and neutral contrast of the Active and the Passive. For the Passive was sometimes substituted Matter, a term which, signifying, as it originally does, the timber which a carpenter uses for the purposes of his craft, properly belongs to another order of ideas; and for the Active was frequently substituted the term Logos, which, signifying as it does, on the one hand, partly thought and partly will, and, on the other hand, also the expression of thought in a sentence and the expression of will in a law, has no single equivalent in modern language. But the majority of Stoics used neither the colourless term the Active, nor the impersonal term the Logos. The Logos was vested with personality: the antithesis was between matter and God. This latter term was used to cover a wide range of conceptions. The two terms of the antithesis being regarded as expressing modes of a single substance, separable in thought and name but not in reality, there was a natural drift of some minds towards regarding God as a mode of matter, and of others towards regarding matter as a mode of God. The former conceived of Him as the natura naturata: “Jupiter est quodcunque vides quodcunque moveris.”[315] The latter conceived of Him as the natura naturans. This became the governing conception. He is the sum of an infinite number of rational forces which are continually striving to express themselves through the matter with which they are in union. He is through them and in them working to realize an end. The teleological idea controls the whole conception. He is always moving with purpose and system, and always thereby producing the world. The products are all divine, but not all equally divine. In His purest essence, He is the highest form of mind in union with the most attenuated form of matter. In the lowest form of His essence, He is the cohesive force which holds together the atoms of a stone. Between these two poles are infinite gradations of being. Nearest of all to the purest essence of God is the human soul. It is in an especial sense His offspring: it is described by the metaphors of an emanation or outflow from Him, of a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of its parent tree, of a colony in which some members of the mother state have settled.[316]

If all this were expressed in modern terms, and by the help of later conceptions, it would probably be most suitably gathered into the proposition that the world is the self-evolution of God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not necessarily enter: it is consistent with the idea of an eternal process of differentiation: that which is, always has been, under changed and changing forms: the theory is cosmological rather than cosmogonical: it rather explains the world as it is than gives an account of its origin.

2. The chief philosophical expression of Dualism was Platonism. Plato followed Anaxagoras in believing that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it: he went beyond him in founding upon this separation a universal distinction between the real and the phenomenal, and between God and the world. God was regarded as being outside the world. The world was in its origin only potential being (τὸ μὴ ὄν). The action of God upon it was that of a craftsman upon his material, shaping it as a carpenter shapes wood, or moulding it as a statuary moulds clay. In so acting, He acted with reason, following out thoughts in His mind. Sometimes His reason, or His mind, is spoken of as being itself the fashioner of the world.[317] Each thought shows itself in a group of material objects. Such objects, so far as they admit of being grouped, may be viewed as imitations or embodiments of a form or pattern, existing either as a thought in the mind of the Divine Workman, or as a force proceeding from His mind and acting outside it. As the conception of these forms was developed more and more, they tended to be regarded in the latter light rather than in the former. They were cosmic forces which had the power of impressing themselves upon matter. They were less types than causes. They came midway between God and the rude material of the universe, so that its changing phenomena were united with an unchanging element. They were themselves grouped in a vast gradation, reaching its highest point in the Form of Perfection, which was higher than the Form of Being. The highest and most perfect of types is conceived as the most powerful and most active of forces. In the elaborate cosmology of the Timæus, it is further conceived as a person. The creative energy of God is spoken of as the Demiurgus, who himself made an ideal world, and employed subordinate agents in the construction of the actual world. The matter upon which the Demiurgus or his agents work is sometimes conceived as potential being,[318] the bare capacity of receiving qualities and forms, and sometimes as chaotic substance which was reduced to order.[319] The agents were gods who, having been themselves created, were bidden to create living beings, capable of growth and decay.[320] The distinction between the two spheres of creation, that of a world in which nothing was imperfect since it was the work of a Perfect Being, and that of a world which was full of imperfections as being the work of created beings, came, as we shall see, to be of importance in some phases of Christian thought.

It was inevitable, in the syncretism which results when an age of philosophical reflection succeeds an age of philosophical origination, that these two great drifts of thought should tend in some points to approach each other. The elements in them which were most readily fused together were the theories of the processes by which the actual world came into being, and of the nature of the forces which lay behind those processes. In Stoicism, there was the theory of the one Law or Logos expressing itself in an infinite variety of material forms: in Platonism, there was the theory of the one God, shaping matter according to an infinite variety of patterns. In the one, the processes of nature were the operations of active forces, containing in themselves the law of the forms in which they exhibit themselves, self-developing seeds, each of them a portion of the one Logos which runs through the whole.[321] In the other, they were the operations of the infinitely various and eternally active energy of God, moving always in the direction of His thoughts, so that those thoughts might themselves be conceived as the causes of the operations.[322] In both the one theory and the other, the processes were sometimes regarded in their apparent multiplicity, and sometimes in their underlying unity: and in both also the unity was expressed sometimes by the impersonal term Logos, and sometimes by the personal term God.

But while the monism of the Stoics, by laying stress upon the antithesis between the two phases of the one substance, was tending to dualism, the dualism of the Platonists, by laying stress upon the distinction between the creative energy of God and the form in the mind of God which His energy embodied in the material universe, was tending to introduce a third factor into the conception of creation. It became common to speak, not of two principles, but of three—God, Matter, and the Form, or Pattern.[323] Hence came a new fusion of conceptions. The Platonic Forms in the mind of God, conceived, as they sometimes were, as causes operating outside Him, were more or less identified with the Stoical Logoi, and, being viewed as the manifold expressions of a single Logos, were expressed by a singular rather than a plural term, the Logos rather than the Logoi of God.

It is at this point that the writings of Philo become of special importance. They gather together, without fusing into a symmetrical system, the two dominant theories of the past, and they contain the seeds of nearly all that afterwards grew up on Christian soil. It is possible that those writings cover a much larger period of time than is commonly supposed, and that if we could find a key to their chronological arrangement, we should find in them a perfect bridge from philosophical Judaism to Christian theology. And even without such a key we are able to see in them a large representation of the processes of thought that were going on, and can better understand by the analogies which they offer both the tentative theories and those that ultimately became dominant in the sphere of Christianity. It is consequently desirable to give a brief account of the view which they present.

The ultimate cause of the world is to be found in the nature of God. As in Plato, though perhaps in a different sense, God is regarded as good. By His goodness He was impelled to make the world: He was able to make it by virtue of His power. “If any one wished to search out the reason why the universe was made, I think that he would not be far from the mark if he were to say, what, in fact, one of the ancients said, that the Father and Maker is good, and that being good He did not grudge the best kind of nature to matter (οὔσίᾳ) which of itself had nothing excellent, though it was capable of becoming all things.”[324] And again: “My soul once told me a more serious story (than that of the Greek mythology), when seized, as it often was, with a divine ecstasy.... It told me that in the one really existing God there are two chief and primary faculties, Goodness and Power, and that by Goodness He begat the universe, and by Power He governs it.”[325] God is thus the Creator, the Fashioner and Maker of the world, its Builder and Artificer.[326] But when the conception of His relation to the world is more precisely examined, it is found to be based upon a recognition of a sharp distinction between the world of thought and that of sense; and to be monistic in regard to the one, dualistic in regard to the other. God is mind. From Him, as from a fountain, proceed all forms of mind and reason. Reason, whether unconscious in the form of natural law, or conscious in the form of human thought, is like a river that flows forth from Him and fills the universe.[327] In man the two worlds meet. The body is fashioned by the Artificer from the dust of the earth: “The soul came from nothing that is created, but from the Father and Leader of all things. For what He breathed into Adam was nothing else than a divine breath, a colony from that blissful and happy nature, placed here below for the benefit of our race; so that granting man to be mortal in respect of his visible part, yet in respect of that which is invisible he is the heir of immortality.”[328] And again: “The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from Him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.”[329] And again, in expounding the words, “They have forsaken me, the fountain of life” (Jeremiah ii. 13), he says: “Only God is the cause of soul and life, especially of rational soul and reasonable life; but He Himself is more than life, being the ever-flowing fountain of life.”[330]

This is monistic. But the theory of the origin of the sensible world is dualistic. The matter upon which He acted was outside Him. “It was in itself without order, without quality, without soul, full of difference, disproportion, and discord: it received a change and transformation into what was opposite and best, order, quality, animation, identity, proportion, harmony, all that is characteristic of a better form.”[331] He himself did not touch it. “Out of it God begat all things, Himself not touching it: for it was not right that the all-knowing and blessed One should touch unlimited and confused matter: but He used the unbodied Forces whose true name is the Forms (ἰδέαι), that each class of things should receive its fitting shape.”[332] These unbodied Forces, which are here called by the Platonic name of Forms, are elsewhere spoken of in Stoical language as Reasons (λόγοι), sometimes in Pythagorean language as Numbers or Limits, sometimes in the language of the Old Testament as Angels, and sometimes in the language of popular mythology as Dæmons.[333] The use of the two names Force and Form, with the synonyms which are interchanged with each of them, expresses the two sides of the conception of them. They are at once the agents or instruments by means of which God fashioned the world, and also the types or patterns after which He fashioned it.[334]

In both respects they are frequently viewed, not in the plurality of their manifestations, but in the unity of their essence. On the one hand, they collectively form the world which the Divine Architect of the great City of the Universe fashioned in His mind before His thought went outside Him to stamp with its impress the chaotic and unformed mass. The place of this world is the Logos, the Reason or Will or Word of God: more precisely, it constitutes that Logos in a special form of its activity:[335] for in the building of an ordinary city the ideal which precedes it “is no other than the mind of the architect, planning to realize in a visible city the city of his thought.... The archetypal seal, which we call the ideal world, is itself the archetypal pattern, the Form of Forms, the Reason of God.”[336] On the other hand, the Reason of God is sometimes viewed not as a Form but as a Force. It is His creative energy.[337] It is the instrument by which He made all things.[338] It is the “river of God” that is “full of waters,” and that flows forth to “make glad the city of God,” the universe.[339] From it, as from a fountain, all lower Forms and Forces flow. By another and even sublimer figure, it, the eldest born of the “I am,” robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high-priest’s robe, embroidered by all the Forces of the seen and unseen worlds.[340]

But in all this, Philo never loses sight of the primary truth that the world was made not by inferior or opposing beings, but by God. It is the expression of His Thought. His Thought went forth from Him, impressing itself in infinite Forms and by means of infinite Forces: but though His Thought was the charioteer, it is God Himself who gives the orders.[341] By a different conception of the genesis of the world, and one that is of singular interest in view of the similar conceptions which we shall find in some Gnostic schools, God is the Father of the world:[342] and the metaphor of Fatherhood is expanded into that of a marriage: God is conceived as the Father, His Wisdom as the Mother: “and she, receiving the seed of God, with fruitful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His visible son, only and well-beloved.”[343]

We have now the main elements of the current conceptions out of which the philosophers of early Christianity constructed new fabrics.

Christianity had no need to borrow from Greek philosophy either the idea of the unity of God, or the belief that He made the world. Its ultimate basis was the belief in one God. It rode in upon the wave of the reaction against polytheism. The Scriptures to which it appealed began with the sublime declaration, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It accepted that declaration as being both final and complete. It saw therein the picture of a single supreme Artificer: and it elaborated the picture by the aid of anthropomorphic conceptions: “By His almighty power He fixed firm the heavens, and by His incomprehensible wisdom He set them in order: He separated the earth from the water that encompassed it ... and last of all He formed man with His sacred and spotless hands, the impress of His own image.”[344]

The belief that the one God was the Creator of heaven and earth came, though not without a struggle, to be a foremost and permanent element in the Christian creed. The various forms of ditheism which grew up with it and around it, finding their roots in its unsolved problems and their nutriment in the very love of God which it fostered, gradually withered away. But in proportion as the belief spread widely over the Greek world, the simple Semitic cosmogony became insufficient. The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain?

These questions of the mode of creation and of the relation of God to the material world, and the underlying question which any answer to them must at the same time solve, fill a large place in the history of the first three centuries. The compromise which ultimately resulted has formed the basis of Christian theology to the present day.

The first answers were necessarily tentative. Thinkers of all schools, within the original communities and outside them, introduced conceptions which were afterwards discarded. One group of philosophers, treating the facts of Christianity as symbols, like the tableaux of the mysteries, framed cosmogonies which were symbolical also, and fantastic in proportion as they were symbolical. Another group of philosophers, dealing rather with the ideal than with the actual, framed cosmogonies in which abstract ideas were invested with substance and personality. The philosophers of all schools were met, not only by the common sense of the Christian communities, but also by caricature. Their opponents, after the manner of controversialists, accentuated their weak points, and handed on to later times only those parts of the theories which were most exposed to attack, and which were also least intelligible except in relation to the whole system. But so far as the underlying conceptions can be disentangled from the details, they may be clearly seen to have drifted in the direction of the main drifts of Greek philosophy.

1. There was a large tendency to account for the world by the hypothesis of evolution. In some way it had come forth from God. The belief expressed itself in many forms. It was in all cases syncretist. The same writers frequently made use of different metaphors; but all the metaphors assumed vast grades and distances between God in Himself and the sensible world. One metaphor was that of an outflow, as of a stream from its source.[345] Other metaphors were taken from the phenomena of vegetable growth, the evolution of a plant from a seed, or the putting forth of leaves by a tree.[346] The metaphors of other writers were taken from the phenomena of human generation:[347] they were an elaboration of the conception of God as the Father of the world. They were sometimes pressed: there was not only a Father, but also a Mother of the world, Wisdom or Silence or some other abstraction. In one elaborate system it was held that, though God Himself was unwedded, all the powers that came forth from Him came forth in pairs, and all existing things were the offspring of their union.[348] That which came forth was also conceived in various ways. The common expression in one group of philosophers is æon (αἰών), a term which is of uncertain origin in this application. In other groups of philosophers the expressions are relative to the metaphor of growth and development, and repeat the Stoical term seed. In the syncretism of Marcus the several expressions are gathered together, and made more intelligible by the use of the synonym logoi;[349] the thoughts of God were conceived as active forces, embodying themselves in material forms. In the conception of one school of thinkers, the invisible forces of the world acted in the same way that the art of a craftsman acts upon his materials.[350] In the conception of another school, the distinction between intellectual and material existence tended to vanish. The powers which flowed forth from God were at once intellectual and material, corresponding to the monistic conception of God Himself. They were subtler and more active forms of matter acting upon its grosser but plastic forms. In the conception of another school, God is the unbegotten seed of which the Tree of Being is the leaves and fruit,[351] and the fruit again contains in itself infinite possibilities of renewing the original seed.[352]

The obvious difficulty which the actual world, with its failures and imperfections, presents to all theories of evolution which assume the existence of a good and perfect God, was bridged over by the hypothesis of a lapse. The “fall from original righteousness” was carried back from the earthly Paradise to the sphere of divinity itself. The theory was shaped in various ways, some of which are expressed by almost unintelligible symbols. That of the widely-spread school of Valentinus was, that the Divine Wisdom herself had become subject to passion, and that, having both ambition and desire, she had produced from herself a shapeless mass, in ignorance that the Unbegotten One alone can, without the aid of another, produce what is perfect. Out of this shapeless mass, and the passions that came forth from her, arose the material world and the Demiurgus who fashioned it.[353] Another theory was that of revolt and insurrection among the supernal powers.[354] Both theories simply pushed the difficulty farther back: they gave no solution of it: they were opposed as strongly by philosophers outside Christianity as they were by polemical theologians within it:[355] they helped to pave the way for the Augustinian theology of succeeding centuries, but they did not themselves win permanent acceptance either in philosophy or in theology, in either the Eastern or the Western world.

2. Side by side with these hypotheses of evolution was a tendency, which ultimately became supreme, to account for the world by the hypothesis of creation. It was the result of the action of God upon already existing matter. It was not evolved, but ordered or shaped. God was the Builder or Framer: the universe was a work of art.[356]

But this, no less than the monistic hypothesis, contained grave difficulties, arising partly from the metaphysical conception of God, and partly from the conception of moral evil. Three main questions were discussed in connection with it: (i.) What was the ultimate relation of matter to God? (ii.) How did God come into contact with it so as to shape it? (iii.) How did a God who was almighty as well as beneficent come to create what is imperfect and evil?

(i.) The dualistic hypothesis assumed a co-existence of matter and God. The assumption was more frequently tacit than explicit. The difficulty of the assumption varied according to the degree to which matter was regarded as having positive qualities. There was a universal belief that beneath the qualities of all existing things lay a substratum or substance on which they were grafted, and which gave to each thing its unity. But the conception of the nature of this substance varied from that of gross and tangible material to that of empty and formless space. The metaphysical conception of substance tended to be confused with the physical conception of matter. Matter was sometimes conceived as a mass of atoms not coalescing according to any principle or order of arrangement:[357] the action of the Creator upon them was that of a general changing a rabble of individuals into an organized army. It was sometimes conceived as a vast shapeless but plastic mass, to which the Creator gave form, partly by moulding it as a potter moulds clay, partly by combining various elements as a builder combines his materials in the construction of a house.[358] Both these conceptions of matter tended to regard it as more or less gross. It was plastic in the hands of the Divine Workman, but still possessed the quality of resistance. With Basilides, the conception of matter was raised to a higher plane. The distinction of subject and object was preserved, so that the action of the Transcendent God was still that of creation and not of evolution; but it was “out of that which was not” that He made things to be. That which He made was expressed by the metaphor of a seed which contained in itself possibilities, not only of growth, but of different kinds of growth. Three worlds were involved in it: the world of spirit, and the world of matter, and between the two the world of life. The metaphor is sometimes explained by the help of the Aristotelian conception of genera and species.[359] The original seed which God made is the ultimate summum genus. The process by which all things came into being followed in inverse order the process of our knowledge. The steps by which our ideas ascend, by an almost infinite stairway of subordinated groups, from the visible objects of sense to the highest of all abstractions, the Absolute Being and the Absolute Unity, are the steps by which that Absolute Being and Absolute Unity, who is God, evolved or made the world from that which was not. The basis of the theory was Platonic, though some of the terms were borrowed from both Aristotle and the Stoics. It became itself the basis of the theory which ultimately prevailed in the Church. The transition appears in Tatian. In him, God is the author, not only of the form or qualities, but also of the substance or underlying ground of all things.[360] “The Lord of the universe being Himself the substance of the whole, not yet having brought any creature into being, was alone: and since all power over both visible and invisible things was with Him, He Himself by the power of His word gave substance to all things with Himself.” This theory is found in another form in Athenagoras:[361] he makes a point in defence of Christianity that, so far from denying the existence of God, it made Him the Author of all existence, He alone being unborn and imperishable. It is found also in Theophilus,[362] who, however, does not lay stress upon it. But its importance was soon seen. It had probably been for a long time the unreasoned belief of Hebrew monotheism: the development of the Platonic conception within the Christian sphere gave it a philosophical form: and early in the third century it had become the prevailing theory in the Christian Church. God had created matter. He was not merely the Architect of the universe, but its Source.[363]

But the theory did not immediately win its way to acceptance. It rather set aside the moral difficulties than solved them. It was attacked by those who felt those difficulties strongly. There are two chief literary records of the controversy: one is the treatise of Tertullian against Hermogenes, the other is a dialogue of about the same date which is ascribed to an otherwise unknown Maximus.[364] Both treatises are interesting as examples not only of contemporary polemics, but of the insoluble difficulties which beset any attempt to explain the origin of moral evil on metaphysical grounds. The attempt was soon afterwards practically abandoned. The solution of the moral difficulties was found in the doctrine of Free-will: the solution of the metaphysical difficulties was found in the general acceptance of the belief that God created all things out of nothing.

(ii.) How, under any conception of matter, short of its having been created by God, did God come into contact with it so as to give it qualities and form? The difficulty of the question became greater as the tide of thought receded from anthropomorphism. The dominant idea was that of mediation. Sometimes, as in Philo, the mediation was regarded from the point of view of the plurality and variety of the effects, and the agents were conceived as being more than one in number. They were the angels of the Hebrews, the dæmons of the Greeks. Those who appealed to Scripture saw an indication of this in the use of the plural in the first chapter of Genesis, “Let us make man.”[365] Another current of speculation flowed in the channel, which had been first formed by the Timæus of Plato, of supposing a single Creator and Ruler of the world who, in subordination to the transcendent God, fashioned the things that exist. In some schools of thought this theory was combined with the theory of creation by the Son.[366] The uncontrolled play of imagination in the region of the unknown constructed more than one strange speculation which it is not necessary to revive.

The view into which the Christian consciousness ultimately settled down had meanwhile been building itself up out of elements which were partly Jewish and partly Greek. On the one hand, there had long been among the Jews a belief in the power of the word of God: and the belief in His wisdom had shaped itself into a conception of that wisdom as a substantive force. On the other hand, the original conception of Greek philosophy that Mind or Reason had marshalled into order the confused and warring elements of the primæval chaos, had passed into the conception of the Logos as a mode of the activity of God. These several elements, which had a natural affinity for each other, had already been combined by Philo, as we have seen, into a comprehensive system: and in the second century they were entering into new combinations both outside and inside the Christian communities.[367] The vagueness of conception which we have found in Philo is found also in the earliest expressions of these combinations. It is not always clear whether the Logos is regarded as a mode of God’s activity, or as having a substantive existence. In either view, God was regarded as the Creator; His supremacy was as absolute as His unity: there was no rival, because in either view the Logos was God.

(iii.) How could a God who was at once beneficent and almighty create a world which contained imperfection and moral evil? The question was answered, as we have seen, on the monistic theory of creation by the hypothesis of a lapse. It was answered on the dualistic theory, sometimes by the hypothesis of evil inherent in matter, and sometimes by the hypothesis of creation by subordinate and imperfect agents.

The former of these hypotheses came rather from the East than from Greece; but it harmonized with and was supported by the Greek conception of matter as the seat of formlessness and disorder.

The latter hypothesis is an extension of the Platonic distinction between the perfect world which God created directly through the operation of His own powers, and the world of mortal and imperfect existences the creation of which He entrusted to inferior agents. In the Platonic conception, God Himself, in a certain mode of His activity, was the Creator (Demiurgus), and the inferior agents were beings whom He had created.[368] In the conception which grew up early in the second century, and which was first formulated by Marcion, the Creator was detached from the Supreme God, and conceived as doing the work of the inferior agents. He was subordinate to the Supreme God and ultimately derived from Him:[369] but looming large in the horizon of finite thought, He seemed to be a rival and an adversary. The contradictions, the imperfections, the inequalities of both condition and ability, which meet us in both the material and the moral world, were solved by the hypothesis of two worlds in conflict, each of them moving under the impulse of a separate Power. The same solution applied also to the contrast of the Old and New Testaments. It had been already thought that the God of the Jews was different from the Father of Jesus Christ; but, with an exaggerated Paulinism, Marcion made so deep a chasm between the Law and the Gospel, the Flesh and the Spirit, that the two were regarded as inherently hostile, and the work of the Saviour was regarded as bringing back into the world from which he had been shut out the God of love and grace.[370]

The objection to all this was that, in spite of its reservations and safeguards, it tended to ditheism. The philosophical difficulties of monotheism were enormous, but the knot was not to be cut by the hypothesis of either a co-existent and resisting matter or an independent and rival God. The enormous wave of belief in the Divine Unity, which had gathered its strength from the whole sea of contemporary thought, swept away the barriers in its path. The moral difficulty was solved, as we shall see in the next Lecture, by the conception of free-will: the metaphysical difficulties of the contact of God with matter were solved, partly by the conception that God created matter, and partly by the conception that He moulded it into form by His Logos, who is also His Son, eternally co-existent with Him.

The first patristic statement of this view is in Irenæus; it stands in the forefront of his theology: and it seems to have been so generally accepted in the communities of which he was cognizant, that he states it as part of the recognized “rule of truth:” the following is only one of several passages in which he so states it:[371]