483. But if the tendency to myth-making was still alive in the Christian church, that in the direction of philosophy had become self-confident and active. The Paulists had taken the measure of their former opponents; they felt themselves superior in intellectual and moral vigour, and they knew that they had won this superiority by contact with the Gentile world. More than before they applied themselves to plead the cause of the Christ before the Gentiles; but the storm and stress of the Pauline epistles gave way in time to a serener atmosphere, in which the truths of Stoicism were more generously acknowledged. A Stoic visitor of the reign of Trajan would meet in Christian circles the attitude represented to us by the fourth gospel, in which the problem of the Christ-nature stands to the front, and is treated on consistently Stoic lines. St Paul had spoken of Jesus as ‘for us a wisdom which is from God[144]’ and had asserted that ‘from the beginning he had the nature of God[145]’; his successors declared frankly that Christ was the Logos, the Word[146]; and in place of the myth of the Virgin Birth they deliberately set in the beginning of their account of Christ the foundation-principles of Stoic physics and the Paulist account of the spiritual procreation of all Christians.
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing that exists came into being[147].’
‘To all who have received him, to them—that is, to those who trust in his name—he has given the privilege of becoming children of God; who were begotten as such not by human descent, nor through an impulse of their own nature, nor through the will of a human father, but from God.
‘And the Word came in the flesh, and lived for a time in our midst, so that we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, sent from his presence. He was full of grace and truth[148].’
The Stoic character of this teaching is no longer latent, but proclaimed; and the Church Fathers recognise this in no doubtful terms[149].
The doctrine of the Trinity.
484. During the whole of the second century A.D. men trained in Stoic principles crowded into the Christian community. Within it they felt they had a special work to do in building up Christian doctrine so that it might face all storms of criticism. This effort gradually took the shape of schools modelled upon those of the philosophic sects. Such a school was founded by an ex-Stoic named Pantaenus at Alexandria in 181 A.D.; and his successors Clemens of Alexandria (ob. c. 215 A.D.) and Origenes (c. 186-253 A.D.) specially devoted themselves to developing the theory of the divine nature upon Stoic lines. Not all the particulars they suggested were accepted by the general feeling of the Christian body, but from the discussion was developed gradually the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity[150]. The elements of this doctrine have been already traced in St Paul’s epistles, in which the dominating conceptions are those of God the Father, the Christ, and the divine spirit. For these in the next generation we find the Father, the Word, and the Spirit; and the last term of the triad becomes increasingly identified with the ‘holy spirit’ of Stoicism. But these three conceptions (with others) are in Stoic doctrine varying names or aspects of the divine unity. Seneca, for instance, had written in the following tone:
‘To whatever country we are banished, two things go with us, our part in the starry heavens above and the world around, our sole right in the moral instincts of our own hearts. Such is the gift to us of the supreme power which shaped the universe. That power we sometimes call “the all-ruling God,” sometimes “the incorporeal Wisdom” which is the creator of mighty works, sometimes the “divine spirit” which spreads through things great and small with duly strung tone, sometimes “destiny” or the changeless succession of causes linked one to another[151].’
Here the larger variety of terms used by the early Stoic teachers[152] is reduced to four aspects of the first cause, namely God, the Word, the divine spirit, and destiny. The Christian writers struck out from the series the fourth member, and the doctrine of the Trinity was there. Its stiff formulation for school purposes in the shape ‘these three are one’ has given it the appearance of a paradox; but to persons conversant with philosophic terminology such a phrase was almost commonplace, and is indeed found in various associations[153]. The subsequent conversion of the members of the triad into three ‘persons’ introduced a simplification which is only apparent, for the doctrine must always remain meaningless except as a typical solution of the old problem of ‘the One and the many,’ carried up to the level of ultimate Being[154].
Subsequent history.