The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church

by Edwin Hatch

But this, no less than the monistic hypothesis, contained grave difficulties, arising partly from the metaphysical conception of God, and partly from the conception of moral evil. Three main questions were discussed in connection with it: (i.) What was the ultimate relation of matter to God? (ii.) How did God come into contact with it so as to shape it? (iii.) How did a God who was almighty as well as beneficent come to create what is imperfect and evil?

(i.) The dualistic hypothesis assumed a co-existence of matter and God. The assumption was more frequently tacit than explicit. The difficulty of the assumption varied according to the degree to which matter was regarded as having positive qualities. There was a universal belief that beneath the qualities of all existing things lay a substratum or substance on which they were grafted, and which gave to each thing its unity. But the conception of the nature of this substance varied from that of gross and tangible material to that of empty and formless space. The metaphysical conception of substance tended to be confused with the physical conception of matter. Matter was sometimes conceived as a mass of atoms not coalescing according to any principle or order of arrangement:[357] the action of the Creator upon them was that of a general changing a rabble of individuals into an organized army. It was sometimes conceived as a vast shapeless but plastic mass, to which the Creator gave form, partly by moulding it as a potter moulds clay, partly by combining various elements as a builder combines his materials in the construction of a house.[358] Both these conceptions of matter tended to regard it as more or less gross. It was plastic in the hands of the Divine Workman, but still possessed the quality of resistance. With Basilides, the conception of matter was raised to a higher plane. The distinction of subject and object was preserved, so that the action of the Transcendent God was still that of creation and not of evolution; but it was “out of that which was not” that He made things to be. That which He made was expressed by the metaphor of a seed which contained in itself possibilities, not only of growth, but of different kinds of growth. Three worlds were involved in it: the world of spirit, and the world of matter, and between the two the world of life. The metaphor is sometimes explained by the help of the Aristotelian conception of genera and species.[359] The original seed which God made is the ultimate summum genus. The process by which all things came into being followed in inverse order the process of our knowledge. The steps by which our ideas ascend, by an almost infinite stairway of subordinated groups, from the visible objects of sense to the highest of all abstractions, the Absolute Being and the Absolute Unity, are the steps by which that Absolute Being and Absolute Unity, who is God, evolved or made the world from that which was not. The basis of the theory was Platonic, though some of the terms were borrowed from both Aristotle and the Stoics. It became itself the basis of the theory which ultimately prevailed in the Church. The transition appears in Tatian. In him, God is the author, not only of the form or qualities, but also of the substance or underlying ground of all things.[360] “The Lord of the universe being Himself the substance of the whole, not yet having brought any creature into being, was alone: and since all power over both visible and invisible things was with Him, He Himself by the power of His word gave substance to all things with Himself.” This theory is found in another form in Athenagoras:[361] he makes a point in defence of Christianity that, so far from denying the existence of God, it made Him the Author of all existence, He alone being unborn and imperishable. It is found also in Theophilus,[362] who, however, does not lay stress upon it. But its importance was soon seen. It had probably been for a long time the unreasoned belief of Hebrew monotheism: the development of the Platonic conception within the Christian sphere gave it a philosophical form: and early in the third century it had become the prevailing theory in the Christian Church. God had created matter. He was not merely the Architect of the universe, but its Source.[363]

But the theory did not immediately win its way to acceptance. It rather set aside the moral difficulties than solved them. It was attacked by those who felt those difficulties strongly. There are two chief literary records of the controversy: one is the treatise of Tertullian against Hermogenes, the other is a dialogue of about the same date which is ascribed to an otherwise unknown Maximus.[364] Both treatises are interesting as examples not only of contemporary polemics, but of the insoluble difficulties which beset any attempt to explain the origin of moral evil on metaphysical grounds. The attempt was soon afterwards practically abandoned. The solution of the moral difficulties was found in the doctrine of Free-will: the solution of the metaphysical difficulties was found in the general acceptance of the belief that God created all things out of nothing.

(ii.) How, under any conception of matter, short of its having been created by God, did God come into contact with it so as to give it qualities and form? The difficulty of the question became greater as the tide of thought receded from anthropomorphism. The dominant idea was that of mediation. Sometimes, as in Philo, the mediation was regarded from the point of view of the plurality and variety of the effects, and the agents were conceived as being more than one in number. They were the angels of the Hebrews, the dæmons of the Greeks. Those who appealed to Scripture saw an indication of this in the use of the plural in the first chapter of Genesis, “Let us make man.”[365] Another current of speculation flowed in the channel, which had been first formed by the Timæus of Plato, of supposing a single Creator and Ruler of the world who, in subordination to the transcendent God, fashioned the things that exist. In some schools of thought this theory was combined with the theory of creation by the Son.[366] The uncontrolled play of imagination in the region of the unknown constructed more than one strange speculation which it is not necessary to revive.

The view into which the Christian consciousness ultimately settled down had meanwhile been building itself up out of elements which were partly Jewish and partly Greek. On the one hand, there had long been among the Jews a belief in the power of the word of God: and the belief in His wisdom had shaped itself into a conception of that wisdom as a substantive force. On the other hand, the original conception of Greek philosophy that Mind or Reason had marshalled into order the confused and warring elements of the primæval chaos, had passed into the conception of the Logos as a mode of the activity of God. These several elements, which had a natural affinity for each other, had already been combined by Philo, as we have seen, into a comprehensive system: and in the second century they were entering into new combinations both outside and inside the Christian communities.[367] The vagueness of conception which we have found in Philo is found also in the earliest expressions of these combinations. It is not always clear whether the Logos is regarded as a mode of God’s activity, or as having a substantive existence. In either view, God was regarded as the Creator; His supremacy was as absolute as His unity: there was no rival, because in either view the Logos was God.

(iii.) How could a God who was at once beneficent and almighty create a world which contained imperfection and moral evil? The question was answered, as we have seen, on the monistic theory of creation by the hypothesis of a lapse. It was answered on the dualistic theory, sometimes by the hypothesis of evil inherent in matter, and sometimes by the hypothesis of creation by subordinate and imperfect agents.

The former of these hypotheses came rather from the East than from Greece; but it harmonized with and was supported by the Greek conception of matter as the seat of formlessness and disorder.

The latter hypothesis is an extension of the Platonic distinction between the perfect world which God created directly through the operation of His own powers, and the world of mortal and imperfect existences the creation of which He entrusted to inferior agents. In the Platonic conception, God Himself, in a certain mode of His activity, was the Creator (Demiurgus), and the inferior agents were beings whom He had created.[368] In the conception which grew up early in the second century, and which was first formulated by Marcion, the Creator was detached from the Supreme God, and conceived as doing the work of the inferior agents. He was subordinate to the Supreme God and ultimately derived from Him:[369] but looming large in the horizon of finite thought, He seemed to be a rival and an adversary. The contradictions, the imperfections, the inequalities of both condition and ability, which meet us in both the material and the moral world, were solved by the hypothesis of two worlds in conflict, each of them moving under the impulse of a separate Power. The same solution applied also to the contrast of the Old and New Testaments. It had been already thought that the God of the Jews was different from the Father of Jesus Christ; but, with an exaggerated Paulinism, Marcion made so deep a chasm between the Law and the Gospel, the Flesh and the Spirit, that the two were regarded as inherently hostile, and the work of the Saviour was regarded as bringing back into the world from which he had been shut out the God of love and grace.[370]