B. The Idea and its Development in Christian Theology.
(1) The Transcendence of God.—All the conceptions which we have seen to exist in the sphere of philosophy were reproduced in the sphere of Christianity. They are sometimes relative to God, in contrast to the world of sensible phenomena: phenomena come into being, God is unbegotten and without beginning: phenomena are visible and tangible, God is unseen and untouched. They are sometimes relative to the idea of perfection: God is unchangeable, indivisible, unending. He has no name: for a name implies the existence of something prior to that to which a name is given, whereas He is prior to all things. These conceptions are all negative: the positive conceptions are that He is the infinite depth (βύθος) which contains and embosoms all things, that He is self-existent, and that He is light. “The Father of all,” said one school of philosophers,[492] “is a primal light, blessed, incorruptible, and infinite.” “The essence of the unbegotten Father of the universe is incorruptibility and self-existing light, simple and uniform.”[493]
From the earliest Christian teaching, indeed, the conception of the transcendence of God is absent. God is near to men and speaks to them: He is angry with them and punishes them: He is merciful to them and pardons them. He does all this through His angels and prophets, and last of all through His Son. But he needs such mediators rather because a heavenly Being is invisible, than because He is transcendent. The conception which underlies the earliest expression of the belief of a Christian community is the simple conception of children.
“We give Thee thanks, Holy Father, for Thy holy name which Thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which Thou hast made known to us through Jesus Christ, Thy servant. To Thee be glory for ever. Thou, Almighty Master, hast created all things for Thy name’s sake, hast given food and drink to men for their enjoyment, that they may give thanks to Thee: and upon us hast Thou bestowed spiritual food and drink and eternal life through Thy servant. Before all things we give Thee thanks for that Thou art mighty: to Thee be glory for ever.”[494]
In the original sphere of Christianity there does not appear to have been any great advance upon these simple conceptions. The doctrine upon which stress was laid was, that God is, that He is one, that He is almighty and everlasting, that He made the world, that His mercy is over all His works.[495] There was no taste for metaphysical discussion: there was possibly no appreciation of metaphysical conceptions. It is quite possible that some Christians laid themselves open to the accusation which Celsus brings, of believing that God is only cognizable through the senses.[496] They were influenced by Stoicism, which denied all intellectual existences, and regarded spirit itself as material.[497] This tendency resulted in Adoptian Christology.[498]
But most of the philosophical conceptions above described were adopted by the Apologists, and through such adoption found acceptance in the associated Christian communities. They are for the most part stated, not as in a dogmatic system, but incidentally. For example, Justin thus protests against a literal interpretation of the anthropomorphic expressions of the Old Testament:
“You are not to think that the unbegotten God ‘came down’ from anywhere or ‘went up.’ For the unutterable Father and Lord of all things neither comes to any place nor walks nor sleeps nor rises, but abides in His own place wherever that place may be, seeing keenly and hearing keenly, not with eyes or ears, but with His unspeakable power, so that He sees all things and knows all things, nor is any one of us hid from Him: nor does He move, He who is uncontained by space and by the whole world, seeing that He was before the world was born.”[499]
And Athenagoras thus sums up his defence of Christianity against the charge of atheism:
“I have sufficiently demonstrated that they are not atheists who believe in One who is unbegotten, eternal, unseen, impassible, incomprehensible and uncontained: comprehended by mind and reason only, invested with ineffable light and beauty and spirit and power, by whom the universe is brought into being and set in order and held firm, through the agency of his own Logos.”[500]
Theophilus replies thus to his heathen interlocutor who asked him to describe the form of the Christian God:
“Listen, my friend: the form of God is unutterable and indescribable, nor can it be seen with fleshly eyes: for His glory is uncontained, His size is incomprehensible, His loftiness is inconceivable, His strength is incomparable, His wisdom is unrivalled, His goodness beyond imitation, His beneficence beyond description. If I speak of Him as light, I mention His handiwork: if I speak of Him as reason, I mention His government: if I speak of Him as spirit, I mention His breath: if I speak of Him as wisdom, I mention His offspring: if I speak of Him as strength, I mention His might: if I speak of Him as providence, I mention His goodness: if I speak of His kingdom, I mention His glory.”[501]
It is not easy to determine in regard to many of these expressions whether they are relative in the writer’s mind to a supra-cosmic or to a transcendental conception of God. The case of Tertullian clearly shows that they are compatible with the former conception no less than with the latter; for though he speaks of God as “the great Supreme, existing in eternity, unborn, unmade, without beginning, and without end,”[502] yet he argues that He is material; for “how could one who is empty have made things that are solid, and one who is void have made things that are full, and one who is incorporeal have made things that have body?”[503] But there were some schools of philosophers in which the transcendental character of the conception is clearly apparent. The earliest of such schools, and the most remarkable, is that of Basilides. It anticipated, and perhaps helped to form, the later developments of Neo-Platonism. It conceived of God as transcending being. He was absolutely beyond all predication. Not even negative predicates are predicable of Him. The language of the school becomes paradoxical and almost unmeaning in the extremity of its effort to express the transcendence of God, and at the same time to reconcile the belief in His transcendence with the belief that He is the Creator of the world. “When there was nothing, neither material, nor essential, nor non-essential, nor simple, nor compound, nor unthought, nor unperceived, nor man, nor angel, nor god, nor absolutely any of the things that are named or perceived or thought, ... God who was not (οὐκ ὢν θεός), without thought, without perception, without will, without purpose, without passion, without desire, willed to make a world. In saying ‘willed,’ I use the word only because some word is necessary, but I mean without volition, without thought, and without perception; and in saying ‘world,’ I do not mean the extended and divisible world which afterwards came into being, with its capacity of division, but the seed of the world.”[504] This was said more briefly, but probably with the same meaning, by Marcus: There is no conception and no essence of God.[505]
These exalted ideas of His transcendence, which had especially thriven on Alexandrian soil, were further elaborated at the end of the second century by the Christian philosophers of the Alexandrian schools, who inherited the wealth at once of regenerated Platonism, of Gnosticism, and of theosophic Judaism. Clement anticipated Plotinus in conceiving of God as being “beyond the One and higher than the Monad itself,”[506] which was the highest abstraction of current philosophy.[507] There is no name that can properly be named of Him: “neither the One, nor the Good, nor Mind, nor Absolute Being, nor Father, nor Creator, nor Lord.” No science can attain unto Him; “for all science depends on antecedent principles; but there is nothing antecedent to the Unbegotten.”[508] Origen expressly protests against the conceptions of God which regarded Him as supra-cosmic rather than transcendent,[509] and as having a material substance though not a human form.[510] His own conception is that of a nature which is absolutely simple and intelligent, or which transcends both intelligence and existence. Being absolutely simple, He has no more or less, no before or after, and consequently has no need of either space or time. Being absolutely intelligent, His only attribute is to know and to be known. But only “like knows like.” He is to be apprehended through the intelligence which is made in His image: the human mind is capable of knowing the Divine by virtue of its participation in it. But in the strict sense of the word He is beyond our knowledge: our knowledge is like the vision of a spark as compared with the splendour of the sun.[511]
(2) Revelation or Mediation of the Transcendent.—But as in Greek philosophy, so also in Christian theology, the doctrine whether of a supra-cosmic or of a transcendent God necessitated the further question, How could He pass into the sphere of the phenomenal? The rougher sort of objectors ridiculed a God who was “solitary and destitute” in his unapproachable uniqueness:[512] the more serious heathen philosophers asked, If like knows like, how can your God know the world? and the mass of Christian philosophers,[513] both within and without the associated communities, felt this question, or one of the questions that are cognate to it, to be the cardinal point of their theology.[514]
The tentative answers were innumerable. One early group of them maintained the existence of a capacity in the Supreme Being to manifest Himself in different forms. The conception had some elements of Stoical and some of popular Greek theology, in both of which anthropomorphism had been possible.[515] It came to an especial prominence in the earlier stages of the Christological controversies, as an explanation of the nature of Jesus Christ. It lay beneath what is known as Modal Monarchianism, the theory that Christ was a temporary mode of the existence of the one God. It was simply His will to exist in one mode rather than in another.[516]
“One and the same God,” said Noetus, “is the Creator and Father of all things, and, because it was His good pleasure, He appeared to righteous men of old. For when He is not seen He is invisible, and when He is seen He is visible: He is uncontained when He wills not to be contained, and contained when He is contained.... When the Father had not been born, He was rightly styled Father: when it was His good pleasure to undergo birth, He became on being born His own son, not another’s.”[517]
But the dominant conception was in a line with that of both Greek philosophy and Greek religion. From the Supreme God came forth, or in Him existed, special forms and modifications by which He both made the world and revealed Himself to it.
(i.) The speculations as to the nature of these forms varied partly with the large underlying variations in the conception of God as supra-cosmic or as transcendental, and partly with the greater or less development of the tendency to give a concrete shape to abstract ideas. They varied also according as the forms were viewed in relation to the universe, as its types and formative forces; or in relation to the Supreme Being and His rational creatures, as manifestations of the one and means of knowledge to the other. The variations are found to exist, not only between one school of philosophers and another, but also in the same school. For example, Tertullian distinguishes between two schools of Valentinians, that of Valentinus himself and that of his great, though independent, follower Ptolemy.[518] The former regarded the Æons as simply modes of God’s existence, abiding within His essence: the latter, in common with the great majority of the school, looked upon them as “personal substances” which had come forth from God and remained outside Him. And again, most philosophers of the same school made a genealogy of Æons, and furnished their opponents thereby with one of their chief handles for ridicule: but Colorbasus regarded the production of the Æons as a single momentary act.[519] Sometimes, however, the expressions, which came from different sources, were blended.
Almost all these conceptions of the means by which God communicated Himself to the world were relative to the conception of Him as Mind. It is as inherent a necessity for thought to reveal itself as it is for light to shine. Following the tendency of current psychology to regard the different manifestations of mind as relative to different elements in mind itself, some schools of philosophers gave a separate personality to each supposed element in the mind of God. There came forth thought and reflexion, voice and name, reasoning and intention:[520] or from the original Will and Thought came forth Mind and Truth (Reality) as visible forms and images of the invisible qualities (διαθέσεων) of the Father.[521]
(ii.) But side by side with this tendency to individualize and hypostatize the separate elements or modes of the Divine Mind, there was a tendency to regard the mind of God as a unity existing either as a distinct element in His essence or objective to Him. On one theory, mind is the only-begotten of God.[522] He alone knows God and wishes to reveal Him. On another theory, mind is born from the unborn Father, and from Mind are born Logos and Prudence, Wisdom and Force, and thence in their order all the long series of Powers by whom the universe was formed.[523] Another theory, that of Marcus, probably contains the key to some of the others; the meaning of the conception of Mind as the only-begotten of God, is that Mind is the revelation of God to Himself: His self-consciousness is, so to speak, projected out of Him. It is at once a revelation and a creation—the only immediate revelation and the only immediate creation. The Father, “resolving to bring forth that which is ineffable in Him, and to endow with form that which is invisible, opened His mouth and sent forth the Logos” which is the image of Him, and revealed Him to Himself.[524] The Logos, or Word, which was so sent forth was made up of distinct utterances: each utterance was an æon, a logos, a root and seed of being: in other words, each was a part and phase of God’s nature which expressed and reflected itself in a part and phase of the world, so that collectively the logoi are equivalent to the Logos, who is the image and reflection of God.
The theory is not far distant from that which is found in the earlier Apologists, and which passed through more than one phase before it won its way to general acceptance. The leading point in both is the relation of the individual logoi to the Logos. We have already become acquainted with the syncretism which had blended the Platonic ideas with the Stoical logoi, the former being regarded as forces as well as forms, and the latter being not only productive forces, but also the laws of those forces; and which had viewed them both in their unity, rather than in their plurality, as expressions of a single Logos. We have also seen that the solution of the problem, How could God create? was found in the doctrine that He created by means of His Logos, who impressed himself in the innumerable forms of created things. The solution of the metaphysical difficulty, How can a transcendent God know and be known? was found to lie in the solution which had already been given to the cosmogonical difficulty, How could God come into contact with matter?[525] The Forces were also Reasons: they were activities and also thoughts: in men they woke to consciousness: and the mind of man knew the mind of God, as like knows like, by virtue of containing within it “a seed of the Logos,” a particle of the divine Logos itself. That divine Logos “of which the whole human race is partaker,” “which had at one time appeared in the form of fire, and at another in the form of angels, now by the will of God, on behalf of the human race, had become a man, and endured to suffer all that the dæmons effected that he should suffer at the hands of the foolish Jews.”[526] The difference between Christ and other men was thought to be, that other men have only a “seed of the Logos,” whereas in him the whole Logos was manifest: and the difference between Christians and philosophers was, that the latter lived by the light of a part only of the divine Logos, whereas the former lived by the knowledge and contemplation of the whole Logos.[527]
Within half a century after these tentative efforts,[528] and largely helped by the dissemination of the Fourth Gospel, which had probably at first only a local influence, the mass of Christians were tending to acquiesce not only in the belief of the transcendental nature of God, but also in the belief that, in some way which was not yet closely defined, Jesus Christ was the Logos by whom the world had been made, and who revealed the unknown Father to men.
The form in which the belief is stated by Irenæus is the following:
“No one can know the Father except by the Word of God, that is by the Son revealing Him: nor can any one know the Son except by the good pleasure of the Father. But the Son performs the good pleasure of the Father: for the Father sends, and the Son is sent and comes. And His Word knows that the Father is, as far as concerns us, invisible and unlimited: and since He is ineffable, He himself declares Him to us: and, on the other hand, it is the Father alone who knows His own Word: both these truths has the Lord made known to us. Wherefore the Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by manifesting Himself: for the manifestation of the Son is the knowledge of the Father: for all things are manifested by the Word.... The Father therefore has revealed Himself to all by making His Word visible to all: and conversely the Word showed to all the Father and the Son, since He was seen by all. And therefore the righteous judgment of God comes upon all who, though they have seen as others, have not believed as others. For by means of the creation itself the Word reveals God the Creator; by means of the world, the Lord who is the Fashioner of the world; and by means of His handiwork (man), the Workman who formed it; and by the Son, that Father who begat the Son.”[529]
(3) The Distinctions in the Nature of God, or the Mediation and Mediator.—It was by a natural process of development that Christian philosophers, while acquiescing in the general proposition that Jesus Christ was the Logos in human form, should go on to frame large theories as to the nature of the Logos. It was an age of definition and dialectic. It was no more possible for the mass of educated men to leave a metaphysical problem untouched, than it is possible in our own days for chemists to leave a natural product unanalyzed. Two main questions engaged attention: (i.) what was the genesis, (ii.) what was the nature, of the Logos. In the speculations which rose out of each of these questions, the influence of Greek thought is even more conspicuous than before.
(i.) The question of the genesis of the Logos was mainly answered by theories which were separated from one another by the same broad line of distinction which separated theories as to the genesis of the world.
The philosophers of the school of Basilides, who, as we have seen, had been the first to formulate the doctrine of an absolute creation, that is, of a creation of all things out of nothing, conceived that whatever in their theory corresponded to the Logos was equally included with all other things in the original seed. Hence came the definite proposition, which played a large part in the controversies of the fourth century, that the Logos was made “out of the things that were not.”[530]
But the majority of theories expressed under various metaphors the idea, which was relative to the other theory of creation, that in some way the Logos had come forth from God. The rival hypotheses as to the nature of creation were reconciled by the hypothesis that, though the world was created out of nothing, it was so created by the Logos, who was not created by God, but came forth from Him. The metaphors were chiefly those of the “putting forth” (προβολή, prolatio), as of the leaves or fruit of a plant, and of the begetting of a son. They were in use before the doctrine of the Logos had established itself, and some of them were originally relative, not to the Logos, but to other conceptions of mediation between God and the world. They were supplemented by the metaphors, which also were in earlier use, of the flowing of water from a spring, and of the radiation of light.[531] That there was not originally any important distinction between them, is shown both by the express disclaimer of Irenæus and by the fact of their use in combination in the same passages of the same writers. The combination was important. The metaphors supplemented each other. Each of them contained an element in the theory which ultimately expressed the settled judgment of the Christian world.
The main difficulty which they presented was that of an apparent inconsistency with the belief in the unity of God. The doctrine of the “sole monarchy” of God, which had been strongly maintained against those who explained the difficulties of the world by the hypothesis of two Gods in conflict, seemed to be running another kind of danger in the very ranks of its defenders. The Logos who reflected God and revealed Him to rational creatures, who also contained in himself the form and forces of the material world, must be in some sense God. In Athenagoras there is a pure monism: “God is Himself all things to Himself, unapproachable light, a perfect universe, spirit, force, logos.”[532] But in other writers the idea of development or generation, however lightly the metaphor might be pressed, seemed to involve an existence of the Logos both outside God and posterior to Him.[533] He was the “first-born,” the “first offspring of God,” the “first force after the Father of all and the Lord God;” for “as the beginning, before all created things, God begat from Himself a kind of rational Force, which is called by the Holy Spirit (i.e. the Old Testament) sometimes ‘the Glory of the Lord,’ sometimes ‘Son,’ sometimes ‘Wisdom,’ sometimes ‘Angel,’ sometimes ‘God,’ sometimes ‘Lord and Logos,’ sometimes he speaks of himself as ‘Captain of the Lord’s host:’ for he has all these appellations, both from his ministering to the Father’s purpose and from his having been begotten by the Father’s pleasure.”[534] It follows that “there is, and is spoken of, another God and Lord beneath the Maker of the universe.”[535] The theory thus formulated tended to ditheism and was openly accused of it.[536] It was saved from the charge by the gradual formulating of two distinctions, both of which came from external philosophy, one of them being an inheritance from Stoicism, the other from Neo-Platonism.[537] The one was that the generation or development had taken place within the sphere of Deity itself: the generation had not taken place by the severing of a part from the whole, as though the Divine nature admitted of a division,[538] but by distinction of function or by multiplication, as many torches may be lit from one without diminishing the light of that one.[539] The other was that the generation had been eternal. In an early statement of the theory it was held that it had taken place in time: it was argued that “God could not have been a Father before there was a Son, but there was a time when there was not a Son.”[540] But the influence of the other metaphors in which the relation was expressed overpowered the influences which came from pressing the conception of paternity. Light, it was argued, could never have been without its capacity to shine.[541] The Supreme Mind could never have been without His Thought. The Father Eternal was always a Father, the Son was always a Son.[542]
(ii.) The question of the nature of the eternally-begotten Logos was answered variously, according as the supra-cosmic or the transcendental idea of God was dominant in a writer’s mind.[543] To Justin Martyr, God is conceived as supra-cosmic. He abides “in the places that are above the heavens:” the “first-begotten,” the Logos, is the “first force after the Father:” he is “a second God, second numerically but not in will,” doing only the Father’s pleasure.[544] It is uncertain how far the idea of personality entered into this view. There is a similar uncertainty in the view of Theophilus, who introduced the Stoical distinction between the two aspects of the Logos, thought and speech—“ratio” and “oratio;”[545] while Tertullian still speaks of “virtus” side by side with these.
It was only gradually that the subject was raised to the higher plane, from which it never afterwards descended, by the spread and dominance of the transcendental as distinguished from the supra-cosmic conception of God. It came, as we have already seen, mainly from the schools of Alexandria. It is in Basilides, in whom thought advanced to the belief that God transcended not merely phenomena but being, that the conception of a quasi-physical influence emanating from Him is seen to be first expressly abandoned.[546] But the place of the later doctrine in the Christian Church is mainly due to Origen. He uses many of the same expressions as Tertullian, but with another meaning. The Saviour is God, not by partaking, but by essence.[547] He is begotten of the very essence of the Father. The generation is an outflow as of light from light.
But the controversies did not so much end with Origen as begin with him. From that time they were mostly internal to Christianity. But their elements were Greek in origin. The conceptions which were introduced into the sphere of Christian thought were the current ones of philosophy. In Christian theology that philosophy has survived.
But although it would be beyond our present purpose to describe the Christological controversies which followed the final dominance in the Church of the transcendental idea of God, it is within that purpose to point out the Greek elements, confining ourselves as far as possible to the later Greek uses of the terms.
Ousia (οὐσία) is used in at least three distinct senses: the distinction is clearly phrased by Aristotle.[548]
(a) It is used as a synonym of hylê, to designate the material part of a thing. The use is most common among the Stoics. In their monistic conception of the universe, the visible world was regarded as the ousia of God.[549] In the same way Philo speaks of the blood as the material vehicle, τὸ οὐσιῶδες, of the vital force.[550] Hence in both philosophical and Christian cosmologies, ousia was sometimes used as interchangeable with hylê, to denote the matter out of which the world was made.
(b) It is used of matter embodied in a certain form: this has since been distinguished as the substantia concreta. In Aristotle, a sensible material thing, a particular man or a particular horse, which in a predication must always be the subject and cannot be a predicate, is an ousia in the strictest sense.[551]
(c) It is used of the common element in the classes into which sensible material things may be grouped: this has since been distinguished as the substantia abstracta: in the language of Aristotle, it was the form (εἶδος), or ideal essence (τὸ τί ἦv εἶναι).[552] This sense branched out into other senses, according as the term was used by a realist or a nominalist: to the former it was the common essence which exists in the individual members of a class (τὸ εἶδος τὸ ἐνόν),[553] and not outside them (since ἀδύνατον χωρὶς εἶναι τὴν οὐσίαν καὶ οὗ ἡ οὐσία);[554] or which exists outside them, and by participation in which they are what they are: this latter is Plato’s conception of εἶδος,[555] and of its equivalent οὐσία.
To a nominalist, on the other hand, ousia is only the common name which is predicable in the same sense to a number of individual existences.[556]
The Platonic form of realism grew out of a distinction between the real and the phenomenal, which in its turn it tended to accentuate. The visible world of concrete individuals was regarded as phenomenal and transitory: the invisible world of intelligible essences was real and permanent: the one was genesis, or “becoming;” the other, ousia, or “being.”[557] The distinction played a large part in the later history of Platonism:[558] and whereas in the view of Aristotle the species, or smaller class, as being nearer to the concrete individuals, was more ousia than the genus, or wider class, in the later philosophy, on the contrary, that was ousia in its highest sense which was at the farthest remove from the concrete, and filled the widest sphere, and contained the largest number of other classes in itself: it was the summum genus.[559] Hence Plotinus says that in respect of the body we are farthest from ousia, but that we partake of it in respect of our soul; and our soul is itself a compound, not pure ousia, but ousia with an added difference, and hence not absolutely under our control.[560]
Of these two meanings of ousia, namely “species” and “genus,” the former expressing the whole essence of a class-name or concept, the latter part of the essence, the former tended to prevail in earlier, the latter in later Greek philosophy. In the one, the knowledge of the ousia was completely unfolded in the definition, so that a definition was itself defined as “a proposition which expresses the ousia:”[561] in the latter, it was only in part so unfolded, so that it is necessary for us to know not only the ousia of objects of thought, for example, whether they fall within or without the class “body,” but also the species (εἴδη).[562]
But in the one meaning as in the other, the members of the same class, or the sub-classes of the same wider class, were spoken of as homoousioi: for example, there was an argument that animals should not be killed for food, on the ground that they belong to the same class as men, their souls being homoousioi with our own:[563] so men are homoousioi with one another, and Abraham washed the feet of the three strangers who came to him, thinking them to be men “of like substance” with himself.[564]
The difficulty of the whole conception in its application to God was felt and expressed. Some philosophers, as we have already seen, denied that such an application was possible. The tide of which Neo-Platonism was the most prominent wave placed God beyond ousia. Origen meets Celsus’s statement of that view by a recognition of the uncertainty which flowed from the uncertain meaning of the term.[565] The Christological controversies of the fourth century were complicated to no small extent from the existence of a neutral and conservative party, who met the dogmatists on both sides with the assertion that neither ousia nor hypostasis was predicable of God.[566] And, in spite of the acceptance of the Nicene formula, the great Christian mystic who most fully represents Neo-Platonism within the Christian Church, ventured more than a century later on to recur to the position that God has no ousia, but is hyperousios.[567] Even those who maintained the applicability of the term to God, denied the possibility of defining it when so applied to Him. In this they followed Philo: “Those who do not know the ousia of their own soul, how shall they give an accurate account of the soul of the universe?”[568] But in spite of these difficulties, the conservative feeling against the introduction of metaphysical terms into theology, and the philosophical doctrine of absolute transcendence, were overborne by the practical necessity of declaring that He is, and by the corollary that since He is, there must be an ousia of Him.
But when the conception of the one God as transcending numerical unity became dominant in the Christian Church, the term homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) was not unnaturally adopted to express the relation of God the Father to God the Son. It accentuated the doctrine that the Son was not a creature (κτίσμα); and so of the term as applied to the Holy Spirit. Those who maintained that the Holy Spirit was a creature, thereby maintained that He was severed from the essence of the Father.[569] The term occurs first in the sphere of Gnosticism, and expresses part of one of the two great conceptions as to the origin of the world.[570] It was rejected in its application to the world, but accepted within the sphere of Deity as an account of the origin of His plurality. But homoousios, though true, was insufficient. It expressed the unity, but did not give sufficient definition to the conception of the plurality. It was capable of being used by those who held the plurality to be merely modal or phenomenal.[571] It thus led to the use of another term, of which it is necessary to trace the history.
The term ousia in most of its senses had come to be convertible with two other terms, hypostasis (ὑπόστασις) and hyparxis (ὕπαρξις). The latter of these played but a small part in Christian theology, and may be disregarded here.[572] The term hypostasis is the conjugate of the verb ὑφιστάναι, which had come into use as a more emphatic form than εἶναι. It followed almost all the senses of ousia. Thus it was contrasted with phenomenal existence not merely in the Platonic but in the conventional sense; e.g. of things that take place in the sky, some are appearances, some have a substantial existence, καθ’ ὑπόστασιν.[573] It also, like ousia, is used of that which has an actual as compared with a potential existence;[574] also of that which has an objective existence in the world, and not merely exists in the thinking subject.[575] Hence when things came into being, οὐσία was said ὑφιστάναι.[576] Moreover, in one of its chief uses, namely that in which it designated the permanent element in objects of thought, the term ὀυσία had sometimes been replaced by the term ὑπόστασις.[577] When, therefore, the use of ousia in its Neo-Platonic sense prevailed, there arose a tendency to differentiate the two terms, and to designate that which in Aristotle had been πρώτη οὐσία by the term ὑπόστασις. This is expressed by Athanasius when he says: “Ousia signifies community,” while “hypostasis has property which is not common to the hypostases of the same ousia;”[578] and even more clearly by Basil.[579]
There was the more reason for the growth of the distinction, because the term homoousios lent itself more readily to a Sabellian Christology. This was anticipated by Irenæus in his polemic against the Valentinian heresy of the emission of Æons. Ousiai, in the sense of genera and species, might be merely conceptions in the mind: the alternative was that of their having an existence of their own.[580] So that hypostasis came in certain schools of thought to be the term for the substantia concreta, the individual, the οὐσία ἄτομος of Galen.[581] The distinction, however, was far from being universally recognized. The clearest and most elaborate exposition of it is contained in a letter of Basil to his brother Gregory, who was evidently not quite clear upon the point.[582] The result was, that just as ὑπόστασις had been used to express one of the senses of οὐσία, so a new term came into use to define more precisely the sense of ὑπόστασις. Its origin is probably to be traced to the interchange of documents between East and West, which leading to a difficulty in regard to this use of ὑπόστασις, ended in the introduction of a third term.
So long as οὐσία and ὑπόστασις had been convertible terms, the one Latin word substantia, the etymological equivalent of ὑπόστασις, had sufficed for both. When the two words became differentiated in Greek, it became advisable to mark the difference. However, the word essentia, the natural equivalent for οὐσία, jarred upon a Latin ear.[583] Consequently substantia was claimed for οὐσία, while for ὑπόστασις a fresh equivalent had to be sought. This was found in persona, whose antecedents may be those of “a character in a play,” or of “person” in the juristic sense, a possible party to a contract, in which case Tertullian may have originated this usage.[584] Such Western practice would tend to stimulate the employment of the corresponding Greek term πρόσωπον, whose use hitherto seems to have been subordinate to that of ὑπόστασις.[585] And, finally, the philosophic terms φύσις and natura came into use. In the second century φύσις had been distinct from οὐσία and identical with Reason.[586] But in the fourth century it came to be identified with οὐσία,[587] and afterwards again distinguished from it, whereas the Monophysites identified it with ὑπόστασις.
To sum up, then. We have in Greek four terms, οὐσία, ὑπόστασις, πρόσωπον, φύσις, and in Latin three, substantia, persona, natura, the two series not being actually parallel even to the extent to which they are so in appearance. Times have changed since Tertullian’s[588] loose and vague usage caused no remark; when Jerome, thinking as a Latin, hesitates to speak of τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις, by which he understood tres substantias, and complains that he is looked upon as a heretic in the East in consequence. There is a remarkable saying of Athanasius which is capable of a wider application than he gave it: it runs as follows:[589] “They seemed to be ignorant of the fact that when we deal with words that require some training to understand them, different people may take them in senses not only differing but absolutely opposed to each other.”[590] Thus there was an indisposition to accept οὐσία. The phrase was not understanded of the people.[591] A reaction took place against the multiplicity of terms; but the simple and unstudied language of the childhood of Christianity, with its awe-struck sense of the ineffable nature of God, was but a fading memory, and on the other hand the tendency to trust in and insist upon the results of speculation was strong. Once indeed the Catholic doctrine was formulated, then, though not till then, the majority began to deprecate investigations as to the nature of God.
But I do not propose to dwell upon the sad and weary history of the way in which for more than a century these metaphysical distinctions formed the watchwords of political as well as of ecclesiastical parties—of the strife and murder, the devastation of fair fields, the flame and sword, therewith connected. For all this, Greek philosophy was not responsible. These evils mostly came from that which has been a permanently disastrous fact in Christian history, the interference of the State, which gave the decrees of Councils that sanction which elevated the resolutions of the majority upon the deepest subjects of human speculation to the factitious rank of laws which must be accepted on pain of forfeiture, banishment or death.
Philosophy branched off from theology. It became its handmaid and its rival. It postulated doctrines instead of investigating them. It had to show their reasonableness or to find reasons for them. And for ages afterwards philosophy was dead. I feel as strongly as you can feel the weariness of the discussions to which I have tried to direct your attention. But it is only by seeing how minute and how purely speculative they are, that we can properly estimate their place in Christian theology. Whether we do or do not accept the conclusions in which the greater part of the Christian world ultimately acquiesced, we must at least recognize that they rest upon large assumptions. Three may be indicated which are all due to the influence of Greek philosophy.[592]
(1) It is assumed that metaphysical distinctions are important.
I am far from saying that they are not: but it is not less important to recognize that much of what we believe rests upon this assumption that they are. There is otherwise no justification whatever for drawing men’s thoughts away from the positive knowledge which we may gain both of ourselves and of the world around us, to contemplate, even at far distance, the conception of Essence.
(2) The second is the assumption that these metaphysical distinctions which we make in our minds correspond to realities in the world around us, or in God who is beyond the world and within it.
Again, I am far from saying that they do not; but it is at least important for us to recognize the fact that, in speaking of the essence of either the world or God, we are assuming the existence of something corresponding to our conception of essence in the one or the other.[593]
(3) The third assumption is that the idea of perfection which we transfer from ourselves to God, really corresponds to the nature of His being.
It is assumed that rest is better than motion, that passionlessness is better than feeling, that changelessness is better than change. We know these things of ourselves: we cannot know them of One who is unlike ourselves, who has no body that can be tired, who has no imperfection that can miss its aim, with whom unhindered movement may conceivably be perfect life.
I have spoken of these assumptions because, although it would be difficult to over-estimate the importance of the conceptions by which Greek thought lifted men from the conception of God as a Being with human form and human passions, to the lofty height on which they can feel around them an awful and infinite Presence, the time may have come when—in face of the large knowledge of His ways which has come to us through both thought and research—we may be destined to transcend the assumptions of Greek speculation by new assumptions, which will lead us at once to a diviner knowledge and the sense of a diviner life.[594]