We have now the main elements of the current conceptions out of which the philosophers of early Christianity constructed new fabrics.
Christianity had no need to borrow from Greek philosophy either the idea of the unity of God, or the belief that He made the world. Its ultimate basis was the belief in one God. It rode in upon the wave of the reaction against polytheism. The Scriptures to which it appealed began with the sublime declaration, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It accepted that declaration as being both final and complete. It saw therein the picture of a single supreme Artificer: and it elaborated the picture by the aid of anthropomorphic conceptions: “By His almighty power He fixed firm the heavens, and by His incomprehensible wisdom He set them in order: He separated the earth from the water that encompassed it ... and last of all He formed man with His sacred and spotless hands, the impress of His own image.”[344]
The belief that the one God was the Creator of heaven and earth came, though not without a struggle, to be a foremost and permanent element in the Christian creed. The various forms of ditheism which grew up with it and around it, finding their roots in its unsolved problems and their nutriment in the very love of God which it fostered, gradually withered away. But in proportion as the belief spread widely over the Greek world, the simple Semitic cosmogony became insufficient. The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain?
These questions of the mode of creation and of the relation of God to the material world, and the underlying question which any answer to them must at the same time solve, fill a large place in the history of the first three centuries. The compromise which ultimately resulted has formed the basis of Christian theology to the present day.
The first answers were necessarily tentative. Thinkers of all schools, within the original communities and outside them, introduced conceptions which were afterwards discarded. One group of philosophers, treating the facts of Christianity as symbols, like the tableaux of the mysteries, framed cosmogonies which were symbolical also, and fantastic in proportion as they were symbolical. Another group of philosophers, dealing rather with the ideal than with the actual, framed cosmogonies in which abstract ideas were invested with substance and personality. The philosophers of all schools were met, not only by the common sense of the Christian communities, but also by caricature. Their opponents, after the manner of controversialists, accentuated their weak points, and handed on to later times only those parts of the theories which were most exposed to attack, and which were also least intelligible except in relation to the whole system. But so far as the underlying conceptions can be disentangled from the details, they may be clearly seen to have drifted in the direction of the main drifts of Greek philosophy.
1. There was a large tendency to account for the world by the hypothesis of evolution. In some way it had come forth from God. The belief expressed itself in many forms. It was in all cases syncretist. The same writers frequently made use of different metaphors; but all the metaphors assumed vast grades and distances between God in Himself and the sensible world. One metaphor was that of an outflow, as of a stream from its source.[345] Other metaphors were taken from the phenomena of vegetable growth, the evolution of a plant from a seed, or the putting forth of leaves by a tree.[346] The metaphors of other writers were taken from the phenomena of human generation:[347] they were an elaboration of the conception of God as the Father of the world. They were sometimes pressed: there was not only a Father, but also a Mother of the world, Wisdom or Silence or some other abstraction. In one elaborate system it was held that, though God Himself was unwedded, all the powers that came forth from Him came forth in pairs, and all existing things were the offspring of their union.[348] That which came forth was also conceived in various ways. The common expression in one group of philosophers is æon (αἰών), a term which is of uncertain origin in this application. In other groups of philosophers the expressions are relative to the metaphor of growth and development, and repeat the Stoical term seed. In the syncretism of Marcus the several expressions are gathered together, and made more intelligible by the use of the synonym logoi;[349] the thoughts of God were conceived as active forces, embodying themselves in material forms. In the conception of one school of thinkers, the invisible forces of the world acted in the same way that the art of a craftsman acts upon his materials.[350] In the conception of another school, the distinction between intellectual and material existence tended to vanish. The powers which flowed forth from God were at once intellectual and material, corresponding to the monistic conception of God Himself. They were subtler and more active forms of matter acting upon its grosser but plastic forms. In the conception of another school, God is the unbegotten seed of which the Tree of Being is the leaves and fruit,[351] and the fruit again contains in itself infinite possibilities of renewing the original seed.[352]
The obvious difficulty which the actual world, with its failures and imperfections, presents to all theories of evolution which assume the existence of a good and perfect God, was bridged over by the hypothesis of a lapse. The “fall from original righteousness” was carried back from the earthly Paradise to the sphere of divinity itself. The theory was shaped in various ways, some of which are expressed by almost unintelligible symbols. That of the widely-spread school of Valentinus was, that the Divine Wisdom herself had become subject to passion, and that, having both ambition and desire, she had produced from herself a shapeless mass, in ignorance that the Unbegotten One alone can, without the aid of another, produce what is perfect. Out of this shapeless mass, and the passions that came forth from her, arose the material world and the Demiurgus who fashioned it.[353] Another theory was that of revolt and insurrection among the supernal powers.[354] Both theories simply pushed the difficulty farther back: they gave no solution of it: they were opposed as strongly by philosophers outside Christianity as they were by polemical theologians within it:[355] they helped to pave the way for the Augustinian theology of succeeding centuries, but they did not themselves win permanent acceptance either in philosophy or in theology, in either the Eastern or the Western world.
2. Side by side with these hypotheses of evolution was a tendency, which ultimately became supreme, to account for the world by the hypothesis of creation. It was the result of the action of God upon already existing matter. It was not evolved, but ordered or shaped. God was the Builder or Framer: the universe was a work of art.[356]