It came with the sense of the unity of the world. That sense had not always been awakened. The varied phenomena of earth and sea and sky had not always been brought under a single expression. The groups into which the mind tended to arrange them were conceived as separate, belonging to different kingdoms and controlled by independent divinities. It was by the unconscious alchemy of thought, working through successive generations, that the separate groups came to be combined into a whole and conceived as forming a universe.
It came also with the sense of the order of the world. The sun which day by day rose and set, the moon which month by month waxed and waned, the stars which year by year came back to the same stations in the sky, were like a marshalled army moving in obedience to a fixed command. There was order, not only above but also beneath. The sea, which for all its storms and murmurings, could not pass its bounds, the earth upon which seed-time and harvest never failed, but spring after spring the buds burst into blossom, and summer after summer the blossom ripened into fruit, were part of the same great system. The conception was that not merely of a universe, but of a universe moving in obedience to a law. The earliest form of the conception is probably that of Anaxagoras, which was formulated by a later writer in the expression, “The origins of matter are infinite, the origin of movement and birth is one.”[309]
This conception of an ordered whole was intertwined, as it slowly elaborated itself, with one or other of two kindred conceptions, of which one had preceded it and the other grew with it.
The one was the sense of personality. By a transference of ideas which has been so universal that it may be called natural, all things that move have been invested with personality. The stars and rivers were persons. Movement meant life, and life meant everywhere something analogous to human life. It was by an inevitable application of the conception that when the sum of movements was conceived as a whole, it should be also conceived that behind the totality of the phenomena and the unity of their movements there was a single Person.
The other was the conception of mind. It was a conception which had but slowly disentangled itself from that of bodily powers. It was like the preaching of a revelation, and almost as fruitful, when Epicharmus proclaimed:[310] “It is not the eye that sees, but the mind: it is not the ear that hears, but the mind: all things except mind are blind and deaf.” It was the mind that not only saw but thought, and that not only thought but willed. It alone was the real self: and the Person who is behind nature or within it was like the personality which is behind the bodily activities of each one of us: His essence was mind.
There was one God. The gods of the old mythology were passing away, like a splendid pageantry of clouds moving across the horizon to be absorbed in the clear and infinite heaven. “But though God is one,” it was said,[311] “He has many names, deriving a name from each of the spheres of His government.... He is called the Son of Kronos, that is of Time, because He continues from eternity to eternity; and Lightning-God, and Thunder-God, and Rain-God, from the lightnings and thunders and rains; and Fruit-God, from the fruits (which he sends); and City-God, from the cities (which he protects); and the God of births, and homesteads, and kinsmen, and families, of companions, and friends, and armies.... God, in short, of heaven and earth, named after all forms of nature and events as being Himself the cause of all.” “There are not different gods among different peoples,” says Plutarch,[312] “nor foreign gods and Greek gods, nor gods of the south and gods of the north; but just as sun and moon and sky and earth and sea are common to all mankind, but have different names among different races, so, though there be one Reason who orders these things and one Providence who administers them ... there are different honours and appellations among different races; and men use consecrated symbols, some of them obscure and some more clear, so leading their thoughts on the path to the Divine: but it is not without risk; for some men, wholly missing their foothold, have slipped into superstition, and others, avoiding the slough of superstition, have in their turn fallen over the precipice of atheism.”
In the conception of God as it thus uncoiled itself in Greek history, three strands of thought are constantly intertwined—the thought of a Creator, the thought of a Moral Governor, and the thought of a Supreme or Absolute Being. It is desirable to trace the history of each of these thoughts, as far as possible, separately, and to consider their separate effects upon the development of Christian theology. The present Lecture will deal mainly with the first: the two following Lectures with the other two.
It was at a comparatively late stage in its history that Greek thought came to the conception of a beginning of all things. The conception was first formulated by Anaximander, in the sixth century B.C.[313] The earlier conception was that of a chaos, out of which gods and all things alike proceeded. The first remove from that earlier conception was hylozoism, the belief that life and matter were the same. The conception of mind was not yet evolved. When it was evolved, two lines of thought began to diverge. The one, following the conception of human personality as absolutely single, conceived of both reason and force as inherent in matter: it is the theory which is known as Monism. The other, following the conception of human personality as a separable compound, body and soul, conceived of reason and force as external to matter: it is the theory which is known as Dualism. These two theories run through all subsequent Greek philosophy.
1. The chief philosophical expression of Monism was Stoicism. The Stoics followed the Ionians in believing that the world consists of a single substance. They followed Heraclitus in believing that the movements and modifications of that substance are due neither to a blind impulse from within nor to an arbitrary impact from without. It moved, he had thought, with a kind of rhythmic motion, a fire that was kindling and being quenched with regulated limits of degree and time.[314] The substance is one, but immanent and inherent in it is a force that acts with intelligence. The antithesis between the two was expressed by the Stoics in various forms. It was sometimes the bare and neutral contrast of the Active and the Passive. For the Passive was sometimes substituted Matter, a term which, signifying, as it originally does, the timber which a carpenter uses for the purposes of his craft, properly belongs to another order of ideas; and for the Active was frequently substituted the term Logos, which, signifying as it does, on the one hand, partly thought and partly will, and, on the other hand, also the expression of thought in a sentence and the expression of will in a law, has no single equivalent in modern language. But the majority of Stoics used neither the colourless term the Active, nor the impersonal term the Logos. The Logos was vested with personality: the antithesis was between matter and God. This latter term was used to cover a wide range of conceptions. The two terms of the antithesis being regarded as expressing modes of a single substance, separable in thought and name but not in reality, there was a natural drift of some minds towards regarding God as a mode of matter, and of others towards regarding matter as a mode of God. The former conceived of Him as the natura naturata: “Jupiter est quodcunque vides quodcunque moveris.”[315] The latter conceived of Him as the natura naturans. This became the governing conception. He is the sum of an infinite number of rational forces which are continually striving to express themselves through the matter with which they are in union. He is through them and in them working to realize an end. The teleological idea controls the whole conception. He is always moving with purpose and system, and always thereby producing the world. The products are all divine, but not all equally divine. In His purest essence, He is the highest form of mind in union with the most attenuated form of matter. In the lowest form of His essence, He is the cohesive force which holds together the atoms of a stone. Between these two poles are infinite gradations of being. Nearest of all to the purest essence of God is the human soul. It is in an especial sense His offspring: it is described by the metaphors of an emanation or outflow from Him, of a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of its parent tree, of a colony in which some members of the mother state have settled.[316]