The Christian philosophy which thus rose out of philosophical Judaism was partly apologetic and partly speculative. The apologetic part of it arose from the necessity of defence. The educated world tended to scout Christianity when it was first presented to them, as an immoral and barbarous atheism. It was necessary to show that it was neither the one nor the other. The defence naturally fell into the hands of those Christians who were versed in Greek methods; and they not less naturally sought for points of agreement rather than of difference, and presented Christian truths in a Greek form. The speculative part of it arose from some of its elements having found an especial affinity with some of the new developments of Pythagoreanism and Platonism. Inside the original communities were men who began to build great edifices of speculation upon the narrow basis of one or other of the pinnacles of the Christian temple; and outside those communities were men who began to coalesce into communities which had the same moral aims as the original communities, and which appealed in the main to the same authorities, but in which the simpler forms of worship were elaborated into a thaumaturgic ritual, and the solid facts of Scripture history evaporated into mist. They were linked on the one hand with the cults of the Greek mysteries, and on the other with philosophical idealism. The tendency to conceive of abstract ideas as substances, with form and real existence, received in them its extreme development. Wisdom and vice, silence and desire, were real beings: they were not, as they had been to earlier thinkers, mere thin vapours which had floated upwards from the world of sensible existences, and hung like clouds in an uncertain twilight. The real world was indeed not the world of sensible existences, of thoughts and utterances about sensible things, but a world in which sensible existences were the shadows and not the substance, the waves and not the sea.[222]
It was natural that those who held to the earlier forms of Christianity should take alarm. “I am not unaware,” says Clement of Alexandria, in setting forth the design of his Stromateis,[223] “of what is dinned in our ears by the ignorant timidity of those who tell us that we ought to occupy ourselves with the most necessary matters, those in which the Faith consists: and that we should pass by the superfluous matters that lie outside them, which vex and detain us in vain over points that contribute nothing to the end in view. There are others who think that philosophy will prove to have been introduced into life from an evil source, at the hands of a mischievous inventor, for the ruin of men.” “The simpler-minded,” says Tertullian,[224] “not to say ignorant and unlearned men, who always form the majority of believers, are frightened at the Economy” [the philosophical explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity]. “These men,” says a contemporary writer,[225] of some of the early philosophical schools at Rome, “have fearlessly perverted the divine Scriptures, and set aside the rule of the ancient faith, and have not known Christ, seeking as they do, not what the divine Scriptures say, but what form of syllogism may be found to support their godlessness; and if one advances any express statement of the divine Scripture, they try to find out whether it can form a conjunctive or a disjunctive hypothetical. And having deserted the holy Scriptures of God, they study geometry, being of the earth and speaking of the earth, and ignoring Him who comes from above. Some of them, at any rate, give their minds to Euclid: some of them are admiring disciples of Aristotle and Theophrastus: as for Galen, some of them go so far as actually to worship him.”
The history of the second century is the history of the clash and conflict between these new mystical and philosophical elements of Christianity and its earlier forms. On the one hand were the majority of the original communities, holding in the main the conception of Christianity which probably finds its best contemporary exposition in the first two books of the Apostolical Constitutions, a religion of stern moral practice and of strict moral discipline, of the simple love of God and the unelaborated faith in Jesus Christ. On the other hand were the new communities, and the new members of the older communities, with their conception of knowledge side by side with faith, and with their tendency to speculate side by side with their acceptance of tradition. The conflict was inevitable. In the current state of educated opinion it would have been as impossible for the original communities to ignore the existence of philosophical elements either in their own body, or in the new communities which were growing up around them, as it would be for the Christian churches of our own day to ignore physical science. The result of the conflict was, that the extreme wing of each of the contending parties dropped off from the main body. The old-fashioned Christians, who would admit of no compromise, and maintained the old usages unchanged, were gradually detached as Ebionites, or Nazaræans. The old orthodoxy became a new heresy. In the lists of the early hand-books they are ranked as the first heretics. The more philosophical Gnostics also passed one by one outside the Christian lines. Their ideas gradually lost their Christian colour. They lived in another, but non-Christian, form. The true Gnostic, though he repudiates the name, is Plotinus. The logical development of the thoughts of Basilides and Justin, of Valentinus and the Naassenes, is to be found in Neo-Platonism—that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek philosophy set.
The struggle really ended, as almost all great conflicts end, in a compromise. There was apparently so complete a victory of the original communities and of the principles which they embodied, that their opponents seem to vanish from Christian literature and Christian history. It was in reality a victory in which the victors were the vanquished. There was so large an absorption by the original communities of the principles of their opponents as to destroy the main reason for a separate existence. The absorption was less of speculations than of the tendency to speculate. The residuum of permanent effect was mainly a certain habit of mind. This is at once a consequence and a proof of the general argument which has been advanced above, that certain elements of education in philosophy had been so widely diffused, and in the course of centuries had become so strongly rooted, as to have caused an instinctive tendency to throw ideas into a philosophical form, and to test assertions by philosophical canons. The existence of such a tendency is shown in the first instance by the mode in which the earliest “defenders of the faith” met their opponents; and the supposition that it was instinctive is a legitimate inference from the fact that it was unconscious. For Tatian,[226] though he ridicules Greek philosophy and professes to have abandoned it, yet builds up theories of the Logos, of free-will, and of the nature of spirit, out of the elements of current philosophical conceptions. Tertullian, though he asks,[227] “What resemblance is there between a philosopher and a Christian, between a disciple of Greece and a disciple of heaven?” expresses Christian truths in philosophical terms, and argues against his opponents—for example, against Marcion—by methods which might serve as typical examples of the current methods of controversy between philosophical schools. And Hippolytus,[228] though he reproves another Christian writer for listening to Gentile teaching, and so disobeying the injunction, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles,” is himself saturated with philosophical conceptions and philosophical literature.
The answer, in short, to the main question which has been before us is that Christianity came into a ground which was already prepared for it. Education was widely diffused over the Greek world, and among all classes of the community. It had not merely aroused the habit of inquiry which is the foundation of philosophy, but had also taught certain philosophical methods. Certain elements of the philosophical temper had come into existence on a large scale, penetrating all classes of society and inwrought into the general intellectual fibre of the time. They had produced a certain habit of mind. When, through the kinship of ideas, Christianity had been absorbed by the educated classes, the habit of mind which had preceded it remained and dominated. It showed itself mainly in three ways:
1. The first of these was the tendency to define. The earliest Christians had been content to believe in God and to worship Him, without endeavouring to define precisely the conception of Him which lay beneath their faith and their worship. They looked up to Him as their Father in heaven. They thought of Him as one, as beneficent, and as supreme. But they drew no fence of words round their idea of Him, and still less did they attempt to demonstrate by processes of reason that their idea of Him was true. But there is an anecdote quoted with approval by Eusebius[229] from Rhodon, a controversialist of the latter part of the second century, which furnishes a striking proof of the growing strength at that time of the philosophical temper. It relates the main points of a short controversy between Rhodon and Apelles. Apelles was in some respects in sympathy with Marcion, and in some respects followed the older Christian tradition. He refused to be drawn into the new philosophizing current; and Rhodon attacked him for his conservatism. “He was often refuted for his errors, which indeed made him say that we ought not to inquire too closely into doctrine; but that as every one had believed, so he should remain. For he declared that those who set their hopes on the Crucified One would be saved, if only they were found in good works. But the most uncertain thing of all that he said was what he said about God. He held no doubt that there is One Principle, just as we hold too: but when I said to him, ‘Tell us how you demonstrate that, or on what grounds you are able to assert that there is One Principle,’ ... he said that he did not know, but that that was his conviction. When I thereupon adjured him to tell the truth, he swore that he was telling the truth, that he did not know how there is one unbegotten God, but that nevertheless so he believed. Then I laughed at him and denounced him, for that, giving himself out to be a teacher, he did not know how to prove what he taught.”
2. The second manifestation of the philosophical habit of mind was the tendency to speculate, that is, to draw inferences from definitions, to weave the inferences into systems, and to test assertions by their logical consistency or inconsistency with those systems. The earliest Christians had but little conception of a system. The inconsistency of one apparently true statement with another did not vex their souls. Their beliefs reflected the variety of the world and of men’s thoughts about the world. It was one of the secrets of the first great successes of Christianity. There were different and apparently irreconcilable elements in it. It appealed to men of various mould. It furnished a basis for the construction of strangely diverse edifices. But the result of the ascendency of philosophy was, that in the fourth and fifth centuries the majority of churches insisted not only upon a unity of belief in the fundamental facts of Christianity, but also upon a uniformity of speculations in regard to those facts. The premises of those speculations were assumed; the conclusions logically followed: the propositions which were contrary or contradictory to them were measured, not by the greater or less probability of the premises, but by the logical certainty of the conclusions; and symmetry became a test of truth.