We have ample evidence also as to the state of Christian thought in the post-Nicene period. The Fathers Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Jerusalem, the decrees of general and local Councils, the apocryphal and pseudonymous literature, enable us to form a clear conception of the change which Greek influences had wrought.
But the evidence as to the mode in which the causes operated within the Christian sphere before the final effects were produced is singularly imperfect. If we look at the literature of the schools of thought which ultimately became dominant, we find that it consists for the most part of some accidental survivals.[2] It tells us about some parts of the Christian world, but not about others. It represents a few phases of thought with adequate fulness, and of others it presents only a few fossils. In regard to Palestine, which in the third and fourth centuries was a great centre of culture, we have only the evidence of Justin Martyr. In regard to Asia Minor, which seems to have been the chief crucible for the alchemy of transmutation, we have but such scanty fragments as those of Melito and Gregory of Neocæsarea. The largest and most important monuments are those of Alexandria, the works of Clement and Origen, which represent a stage of singular interest in the process of philosophical development. Of the Italian writers, we have little that is genuine besides Hippolytus. Of Gallican writers, we have chiefly Irenæus, whose results are important as being the earliest formulating of the opinions which ultimately became dominant, but whose method is mainly interesting as an example of the dreary polemics of the rhetorical schools. Of African writers, we have Tertullian, a skilled lawyer, who would in modern times have taken high rank as a pleader at the bar or as a leader of Parliamentary debate; and Cyprian, who survives chiefly as a champion of the sacerdotal hypothesis, and whose vigorous personality gave him a moral influence which was far beyond the measure of his intellectual powers. The evidence is not only imperfect, but also insufficient in relation to the effects that were produced. Writers of the stamp of Justin and Irenæus are wholly inadequate to account for either the conversion of the educated world to Christianity, or for the forms which Christianity assumed when the educated world had moulded it.
And if we look for the literature of the schools of thought which were ultimately branded as heretical, we look almost wholly in vain. What the earliest Christian philosophers thought, we know, with comparatively insignificant exceptions, only from the writings of their opponents. They were subject to a double hate—that of the heathen schools which they had left, and that of the Christians who were saying “Non possumus” to philosophy.[3] The little trust that we can place in the accounts which their opponents give of them is shown by the wide differences in those accounts. Each opponent, with the dialectical skill which was common at the time, selected, paraphrased, distorted, and re-combined the points which seemed to him to be weakest. The result is, naturally, that the accounts which the several opponents give are so different in form and feature as to be irreconcilable with one another.[4] It was so also with the heathen opponents of Christianity.[5] With one important exception, we cannot tell how the new religion struck a dispassionate outside observer, or why it was that it left so many philosophers outside its fold. Then, as now, the forces of human nature were at work. The tendency to disparage and suppress an opponent is not peculiar to the early ages of Christianity. When the associated Christian communities won at length their hard-fought battle, they burned the enemy’s camp.
This fact of the scantiness and inadequacy of the evidence as to the process of transformation has led to two results which constitute difficulties and dangers in our path.
1. The one is the tendency to overrate the value of the evidence that has survived. When only two or three monuments of a great movement remain, it is difficult to appreciate the degree in which those monuments are representative. We tend at almost all times to attach an exaggerated importance to individual writers; the writers who have moulded the thoughts of their contemporaries, instead of being moulded by them, are always few in number and exceptional. We tend also to attach an undue importance to phrases which occur in such writers; few, if any, writers write with the precision of a legal document, and the inverted pyramids which have been built upon chance phrases of Clement or Justin are monuments of caution which we shall do well to keep before our eyes.
2. The other is the tendency to under-estimate the importance of the opinions that have disappeared from sight, or which we know only in the form and to the extent of their quotation by their opponents. If we were to trust the histories that are commonly current, we should believe that there was from the first a body of doctrine of which certain writers were the recognized exponents; and that outside this body of doctrine there was only the play of more or less insignificant opinions, like a fitful guerilla warfare on the flanks of a great army. Whereas what we really find on examining the evidence is, that out of a mass of opinions which for a long time fought as equals upon equal ground, there was formed a vast alliance which was strong enough to shake off the extremes at once of conservatism and of speculation, but in which the speculation whose monuments have perished had no less a share than the conservatism of which some monuments have survived.
This survey of the nature of the evidence enables us to determine the method which we should follow. We can trace the causes and we can see the effects; but we have only scanty information as to the intermediate processes. If the evidence as to those processes existed in greater mass, if the writings of those who made the first tentative efforts to give to Christianity a Greek form had been preserved to us, it might have been possible to follow in order of time and country the influence of the several groups of ideas upon the several groups of Christians. This method has been attempted, with questionable success, by some of those who have investigated the history of particular doctrines. But it is impossible to deprecate too strongly the habit of erecting theories upon historical quicksands; and I propose to pursue the surer path to which the nature of the evidence points, by stating the causes, by viewing them in relation to the effects, and by considering how far they were adequate in respect of both mass and complexity to produce those effects.
There is a consideration in favour of this method which is in entire harmony with that which arises from the nature of the evidence. It is, that the changes that took place were gradual and at first hardly perceptible. It would probably be impossible, even if we were in possession of ampler evidence, to assign a definite cause and a definite date for the introduction of each separate idea. For the early years of Christianity were in some respects like the early years of our lives. It has sometimes been thought that those early years are the most important years in the education of all of us. We learn then, we hardly know how, through effort and struggle and innocent mistakes, to use our eyes and our ears, to measure distance and direction, by a process which ascends by unconscious steps to the certainty which we feel in our maturity. We are helped in doing go, to an incalculable degree, by the accumulated experience of mankind which is stored up in language; but the growth is our own, the unconscious development of our own powers. It was in some such unconscious way that the Christian thought of the earlier centuries gradually acquired the form which we find when it emerges, as it were, into the developed manhood of the fourth century. Greek philosophy helped its development, as language helps a child; but the assimilation of it can no more be traced from year to year than the growth of the body can be traced from day to day.
We shall begin, therefore, by looking at the several groups of facts of the age in which Christianity grew, and endeavour, when we have looked at them, to estimate their influence upon it.