III
The doctrine of the early church underwent as great a modification as its cult. The studies of Hatch were directed by the reflection expressed in the first paragraph of his Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church. "It is impossible for anyone, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers." The simple first formula of the creed dealt with matters of fact only, "Jesus Christ and him crucified." At the end of the second century it included various philosophical ideas, the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the revelation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father and of both to men. The Word—the logos of Heraclitus and Philo—threatened to supplant the Messiah, and originated the endless and bitter controversies of the early church about the Trinity and the Incarnation. Christian scholars take pleasure and apparently pride in deriving the philosophical and ontological elements of their faith from the Greeks. Dr. Caird says, "In this case we can see that conquered Greece laid spiritual fetters on its victor. Greece provided Christianity with the weapons of culture which enabled it to subdue the minds of its opponents, but at the same time it did much to determine the main bias and direction of the religious consciousness which was established by its means. It gave its own form to the life and doctrines of the Church."
The very word "faith" changed its meaning under Greek influence. When the Hebrews spoke of having faith in Jehovah they meant that they had confidence in his character and good intentions. They used the word as people used it when they said that they had faith in Mr. Gladstone. Of course the formula assumed the existence of Jehovah, as of Mr. Gladstone, but that was supposed to be an object of knowledge, not of faith. The disciples again meant by faith the knowledge, direct or based on direct evidence, of certain historical facts. It was the Greeks, with their reliance on the processes of reason, who developed the doctrine that since the reflective action of the mind is at least as authoritative as the reports of the senses, the results of its cogitations are the objects of positive knowledge and faith is the evidence of things not seen. In a word the reasoned monotheism of the Greeks, originating, as far as we are concerned, with Plato, afforded a dialectic basis for the naive monotheism of the Hebrews. A passage from the writings of Hippolytus, of the third Christian century, puts the matter clearly before us: "The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coaeval with him, ... but he was one, alone by himself.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe.... The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection thus pleasing God." Obviously persons interested in tracing the pedigree of the God of Hippolytus will do well to turn not to Genesis but to Plato's Timaeus.
The fact that the Greek philosophers were the real fathers of the church, that the theological systems which have played so dominating a social and political role in Europe are rooted in the speculations of the great pagans, is a tribute to the power of Hellas. But the circumstances under which that power was exerted were unfavorable. It is interesting to consider what might have been the religious history of our civilisation if Christianity had appeared while the Greek was still not only mythopoeic but mythocrates, still the master of his creation; if Socrates, for instance, perhaps the only religious teacher in history who could have dominated Saint Paul, had been the apostle to the gentiles, and if the great dynamic power of Christianity had been attached to the mechanism of Greek thought at its best. The Greek thought of early Christian times had become stereotyped; it is often characterized as sterile, but no adjective could be less apt in view of the mass and power of the doctrines that sprang from it. And stereotyped as it was, it was still flexible in comparison with its Christian offspring. The history of the word "dogma" is an instructive one. Beginning with a modest connotation, since it meant only "my impression," it stiffened gradually as accumulated authority adhered to it, yet even to the last in pre-Christian usage it meant simply a doctrine which one might take or leave. The union of the Christian notion of divine authority with the Greek notion of hard and fast definition made ruinous combination, and gave birth to the Christian belief that it is sometimes necessary to put a man to the torture or to the death to correct his ideas.