History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion

by Adam Storey Farrar

Cyril has already come before us as the respondent to Julian. It is enough to refer to Lecture [II]. and Note [19], in relation to him. It is worthy of observation, that the circumstance that he should consider it necessary to reply to Julian's work, at so long a period after the death of the author, and the frustration of his schemes, seems to show the continued existence of a wavering in the faith of Christians, of which we seldom have the opportunity of finding the traces at so late a period.

If Cyril marks the apology of the Alexandrian church at the commencement of the fifth century, Augustin similarly exhibits that of the African in presence of the new woes which were bursting upon the world. Christianity had long lived down the charges made against it by prejudice, and shown itself to be the philosophy which the educated craved. The charges of treason too had ceased, for it had become the established religion; but one prejudice still remained. Victorious with man; triumphant over the prejudices of the vulgar, the opinions of the philosophers, and the power of the state; it still was not, it seemed, victorious in heaven; and at last the heathen gods were arousing themselves to take vengeance on the earth for the overthrow of their worship, by a series of terrible calamities. Apprehensions like these haunted the imagination; and it was the object of Augustin, in his work, De Civitate Dei, to remove them. That work was a philosophy of society; it was the history of the church and of the world, viewed in presence of the dissolution, social and political, which seemed impending.

These brief remarks will suffice to give a faint idea of the line of argument adopted by the early Apologists. Further information in regard to them may be found in the following sources:—

In a history of this period written by Tzchirner, Geschichte der Apologetik, 1805; also another by Van Senden, 1831, translated into German from the Dutch, 1841; Clausen, Apologetæ Ecc. Chr. ante-Theodosiani, 1817; and a brief account in Stein, Die Apologetik des Christenthum, § 6. p. 13. Other references may be found in Hase's Church History, E. T. § 52; Hagenbach's Dogmengeschichte, § 29, 117; and in J. A. Fabricius, Delectus Argument, ch. i. In the same work (ch. ii-v.) is an account of the chief Apologists, and of the fragments of their lost writings. In reference to the character of the apologetic works of the early fathers, information may also be obtained in Walch's Biblioth. Patristic. (ed. Danz. 1834.) § 97-100. ch. x; and concerning some of them in P. G. Lumper's Hist. Theol.-Crit. de Sanct. Patr. 1785; Moehler's Patrologie, 1840; Ritter's Chr. Phil. i and ii; Neander's Kirchengeschichte, i. 242 seq.; ii. 411 seq.; Kaye'a works on Justin, Clement, and Tertullian; and Dr. A. Clarke's Succession of Ecclesiastical Literature, 1832.

On a review of these early apologies, some peculiarities are observable.

First, with the exception of Origen's treatise, and some parts of Eusebius, they are inferior as works of mind to many of modern times.[1076] This was to be expected from the character of the age; the literature of that period being poor in tone, compared with the earlier and with the modern. In works of encyclopædic history and geography, and in a reconsideration of philosophy by the light of the past, it had indeed some excellences; but the literature as a whole, not only the Latin, but even the Greek, was debased by the substitution of rhetoric for the healthy freshness of thought and poetry of older times: and the apologetic literature partakes of the tone of its age. The Christian writers, when looked at in a literary point of view, must be compared with authors of their own times. The Alexandrian apologies rise sometimes to philosophy; but those of the Greek nation sink to rhetoric. In later times, men who were giants in mind and learning have written on behalf of Christianity; and it would be unfair to the apologetic fathers to compare them with these.

Secondly, we cannot fail to remark the abundant use of what is now called the philosophical argument for Christianity, the conviction that prejudice must be removed, and antecedent probabilities [pg 461] be suggested, before the hearer could be expected to submit to Christianity. The just inference from this is not that which some would draw, the depreciation of the argument from external evidence, but rather a corroboration of the importance of the emotional element, as an ingredient in the judgment formed on religion. The only practical inference that can be drawn in reference to ourselves is, that if it be true that our age resembles theirs, as has been suggested by Pressensé (see Lecture [VIII]. p. [356]), we must adopt the same plan; not because we admit that the external evidence is uncertain or unreal, but because the other kind of evidence is best adapted, from philosophical reasons, to such a state of society as ours.

Several centuries pass before we again meet with works of evidence. In the dark ages, the public mind and thought were nominally Christian; and at least were not sufficiently educated to admit of the generation of doubts which might create a demand for apologetic works. Accordingly we pass over this interval, and proceed at once to the middle ages.

II. The scepticism of the second period of free thought possessed so largely the character of a tendency rather than an attitude of fixed antagonism, that it gave no opportunity for direct works of refutation. But the spirit of apologetic is seen in two respects; in the special refutation of particular points of teaching, as in Bernard's controversy with Abélard, and more especially in the works of the scholastic theology.

This theology, especially as seen in the works of the great realist Aquinas, and of others who took their method from him, was essentially, as has been before said (pp. [11] and [92]), a work of defence. In the two centuries before his time we already find the spirit of reverent inquiry working. Anselm's two celebrated works, the Monologium and Proslogium, a kind of soliloquy on the Trinity, and the Cur Deus Homo, or theory of the Atonement, are the work of a mind that was reconsidering its own beliefs, and restating the grounds of the immemorial doctrines of the church. (See J. A. Hasse, Anselm, 1843, 52.) In the following century (viz. the twelfth), the work of Peter Lombard, called the Sententiæ, marks an age when inquiry was active; and the material was supplied for its satisfaction by means of searching amid the opinions of the past for the witness of authority. But in the thirteenth century, the grand advance made by Aquinas in his Summa, is no less than the result of the conviction that religion admitted of a philosophy; that theological truth was a science; and so, commencing with the plan of first discussing God; then man; then redemption; then ethics; he created a method, which had been indeed suggested by his predecessors, but was more fully displayed by him, for arranging the truths of theology in a systematic form, in which their reasonableness might appear, and [pg 462] through which they might commend themselves to the judgment of a philosophical age.