Philip Schaff (ed.) · 14 of 412

The situation after the Council of Nicæa. · Part 2

The third great name associated with the end of the second century, that of Clement, is important to us chiefly as that of the teacher of Origen, whose influence we must now attempt to estimate. Origen (185–254) was the first theologian in the full sense of the term; the first, that is, to erect upon the basis of the rule of faith (Preface to de Princ.) a complete theological system, synthesising revealed religion with a theory of the Universe, of God, of man, which should take into account the entire range of truth and knowledge, of faith and philosophy. And in this sense for the Eastern Church he was the last theologian as well. In the case of Origen the Vincentian epigram, absolvuntur magistri condemnantur discipuli (too often applicable in the history of doctrine) is reversed. In a modified form his theology from the first took possession of the Eastern Church; in the Cappadocian fathers it took out a new lease of power, in spite of many vicissitudes it conquered opposing forces (the sixth general council crushed the party who had prevailed at the fifth); John of Damascus, in whom the Eastern Church says its last word, depends upon the Origenist theology of Basil and the Gregories. But this theology was Origenism with a difference. What was the Origenism of Origen? To condense into the compass of our present purpose the many-sidedness of Origen is a hopeless task. The reader will turn to the fifth and sixth of Bigg’s Bampton Lectures for the best recent presentation; to Newman’s Arians (I. §3), especially the ‘apology’ at the end); to Harnack (ed. 1, pp. 510–556) and Loofs (§28); Shedd (vol. i. 288–305, should be read before Bigg and corrected by him) and Dorner; to the sections in Bull (Defens. ii. 9, iii. 3) and Petavius (who in Trin. I. iv. pursues with fluent malignity ‘omnigenis errorum portentis infamem scriptorem’); to the Origeniana of Huet and the dissertations of the standard editors; to the article Origenist Controversies, and to the comprehensive, exact, and sympathetic article Origen in the Dictionary of Christian Biography. The fundamental works of Origen for our purpose are the de Principiis, the contra Celsum, and the de Oratione; but the exegetical works are necessary to fill out and correct first impressions.

The general position of Origen with regard to the Person of Christ is akin to that of Hippolytus and Tertullian. It is to some extent determined by opposition to Gnosticism and to Monarchianism. His visit to Rome (Eus. H. E., vi. 14) coincided with the battle of Hippolytus against Zephyrinus and his destined successor: on practical as well as on doctrinal points he was at one with Hippolytus. His doctrine of God is reached by the soteriological rather than the cosmological method. God is known to us in the Word; ‘his point of view is moral, not…pseudo-metaphysical.’ The impassibility of the abstract philosophical idea of God is broken into by ‘the passion of Love’ (Bigg, p. 158). In opposition to the perfection of God lies the material world, conditioned by evil, the result of the exercise of will. This cause of evil is antecedent to the genesis of the material universe, the καταβολὴ κόσμου; materiality is the penalty and measure of evil. (This part of Origen’s doctrine is markedly Platonic. Plotinus, we read, refused to observe his own birthday; in like manner Origen quaintly notes that only wicked men are recorded in Scripture to have kept their birthdays; Bigg, 203, note; cf. Harnack, p. 523, note.) The soul (ψυχή as if from ψύχεσθαι) has in a previous state ‘waxed cold,’ i.e. lost its original integrity, and in this condition enters the body, i.e. ‘is subjected to ’ in common with the rest of the creature, and needs (qualify this by Bigg, pp. 202 sqq., on Origen’s belief in ). To meet this need the Word takes a Soul (but one that has never swerved from Him in its pre-existent state: on this antinomy Bigg, 190, note, 199) and mediante Anima, or rather mediante hac substantia animæ (Prin. II. vi.) unites the nature of God and of Man in One. (On the union of the two natures in the θεάνθρωπος, in Ezek. iii. 3, he is as precise as Tertullian: we find the Hypostatic Union and Communicatio Idiomatum formally explicit; Bigg, 190.) The Word ‘deifies’ Human Nature, first His Own, then in others as well (Cels. iii. 28, ἵνα γένητυι θεία: he does not use θεοποιεῖσθαι; the thought is subtly but really different from that which we found in Irenæus: see Harnack, p. 551), by that perfect apprehension of Him ὅπερ ἦν πρὶν γένηται σάρξ, of which faith in the is the earliest but not the final stage (applying 2 Cor. v. 16; cf. the Commentary on the Song of Songs).

What account then does Origen give of the beginning and the end of the great Drama of existence? He starts from the end, which is the more clearly revealed; ‘God shall be all in all.’ But ‘the end must be like the beginning;’ One is the end of all, One is the beginning. From 1 Cor. xv. he works back to Romans viii.: the one is his key to the eternity after, the other, to the eternity before (Bigg pp. 193 sq.). Into this scheme he brings creation, evil, the history of Revelation, the Church and its life, the final consummation of all things. The Universe is eternal: God is prior to it in conception, yet He was never other than Creator. But in the history of the Universe the material world which we know is but a small episode. It began, and will end. It began with the estrangement of Will from God, will end with its : God, from Whom is the beginning of all, ‘will be all in all.’ (For Origen’s eschatology see Bigg, 228–234.) From this point of view we must approach the two-sided Christology of Origen. To him the two sides were aspects of the same thing: but if the subtle presupposition as to God and the Universe is withdrawn, they become alternative and inconsistent Christologies, as we shall see to have actually happened. As God is eternally Creator, so He is eternally Father (Bigg, 160, note). The Son proceeds from Him not as a part of His Essence, but as the Ray from the Light; it cannot be rightly or piously said that He had a beginning, ἦν ὅτε οὐκ ἦν (cf. De Princ. i. 2, iv. 28, and infr. p. 168); He is begotten from the Essence of the Father, He is of the same essence (ὁμοούσιος) (Fragm. 3 in Heb., but see Bigg, p. 179), there is no unlikeness whatever between the Son and the Father (Princ. i. 2, 12). He was begotten ἐκ τοῦ θελήματος τοῦ Πατρός (but to Origen the θέλημα was inherent in the Divine Nature, cf. Bigg. 161, Harnack, p. 534 against Shedd, p. 301, note) not by προβολή or emanation (Princ. iv. 28, i. 2. 4), as though the Son’s generation were something that took place once for all, instead of existing continuously. The Father is in the Son, the Son in the Father: there is ‘coinherence.’ On the other hand, the Word is God derivatively not absolutely, ῾Ο λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος. The Son is Θεός, the Father alone ὁ Θεός. He is of one οὐσία with the Father as compared with the creatures; but as contrasted with the Father, Who may be regarded as ἐπ™κεινα οὐσίας, and Who alone is αὐτόθεος, αὐτοαγαθός, ἀληθινὸς θεός, the Son is ὁ δεύτερος θεός (Cels. v. 39, cf. Philo’s δευτερεύων θεός). As the Son of God, He is contrasted with all γενητά; as contrasted with the Ingenerate Father, He stands at the head of the series of γεννητά; He is μεταξὺ τῆς τοῦ ἀγεν[ν]ήτου καὶ τῆς τῶν γενητῶν φύσεως. He even explains the Unity of the Father and the Son as moral (δύο τῇ ὑποστάσει πράγματα ἓν δὲ τῇ ὁμονοί& 139· καὶ τῇ ταύτότητι τοῦ βουλήματος, Cels. viii. 12). The Son takes His place even in the cosmic process from Unity to Unity through Plurality, ‘God is in every respect One and Simple, but the Saviour by reason of the Many becomes Many’ (on John i. 22, cf. Index to this vol., s.v. Christ). The Spirit is subordinated to the Son, the Son to the Father (ἐλάττων παρὰ τὸν πατέρα ὁ υἱ& 232·ς…ἔτι δὲ ἧττον τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, Princ. I. 3, 5 Gk.), while to the Spirit are subordinated created spirits, whose goodness is relative in comparison with God, and the fall of some of whom led to the creation of matter (see above). Unlike the Son and the Spirit they are mutable in will, subject to προκοπή, capable of embodiment even if in themselves immaterial.

The above slender sketch of the leading thoughts of Origen will suffice to show how intimately his doctrine of the Person of Christ hangs together with his philosophy of Religion and Nature. That philosophy is the philosophy of his age, and must be judged relatively. His deeply religious, candid, piercing spirit embodies the highest effort of the Christian intellect conditioned by the categories of the best thought of his age. Everywhere, while evading no difficulty, his strenuous speculative search is steadied by ethical and religious instinct. As against Valentinian and the Platonists, with both of whom he is in close affinity, he inexorably insists on the self-consciousness and moral nature of God, on human freewill. As against all contemporary non-Christian thought his system is pure monism. Yet the problem of evil, in which he merges the antithesis of matter and spirit, brings with it a necessary dualism, a dualism, however, which belongs but to a moment in the limitless eternity of God’s all-in-allness before and after. Is he then a pantheist? No, for to him God is Love (in Ezek. vi. 6), and the rational creature is to be made divine and united to God by the of Will and by conscious apprehension of Him. The idea of Will is the pivot of Origen’s system, the centripetal force which forbids it to follow the pantheistic line which it yet undoubtedly touches. The ‘moral’ unity of the Father and the Son (see above, ταὐτότης βουλήματος and ἐκ τοῦ θελήματος) is Unity in that very respect in which the Creator stands over against the self-determining rational creature. Yet the immutability, the Oneness of God, must be with the plurality, the mutability of the creature; here the Logos mediates; διὰ τὰ πολλὰ γίνεται πολλά: but this must be from eternity:—accordingly creation is eternal too. Here we see that the cosmological idea has prevailed over the religious, the Logos of Origen is still in important particulars the Logos of the Apologists, of Philo and the philosophers. The difference lies in His co-eternity, upon which Origen insists without wavering. The resemblance lies in the intermediate position ascribed to Him between the ἀγέννητος, (ὁ Θεός), and the γενητά; He is, as Hypostasis, subordinate to the Father.

Now it is evident that the mere intellectual apprehension of a system which combines so many opposite tendencies, which touches every variety of the theological thought of the age (even modalism, for to Origen the Father is the Μονάς, the αὐτόθεος, while yet He is no abstraction but a God who exists in moral activity, supra) and subtly harmonises them all, must have involved no ordinary philosophical power. When we add to this fact the further consideration that precisely the fundamental ideas of Origen were those which called forth the liveliest opposition and were gradually dropped by his followers, we can easily understand that in the next generation Origenism was no longer either the system of Origen, or a single system at all.

In one direction it could lend itself to no compromise; in spite of the justice done by Origen to the fundamental ideas both of modalism and of emanative adoptionism (cf. Harnack, pp. 548, note, and 586), to Monarchianism in either form he is diametrically opposed. The hypostatic distinctness of Son and Spirit is once for all made good for the theology of Eastern Christendom. We see his disciples exterminate Monarchianism in the East. On the left wing Dionysius refutes the Sabellians of Libya, on the right Gregory Thaumaturgus, Firmilian, and their brethren, after a long struggle, oust the adoptionist Paul from the See of Antioch. But its influence on the existing Catholic theology, however great (and in the East it was very great), inevitably made its way in the face of opposition, and at the cost of its original subtle consistency. The principal opposition came from Asia Minor, where the traditions of theological thought (see above, on Ignatius and Irenæus, below on Marcellus) were not in sympathy with Origen. We cannot demonstrate the existence of a continuous theological school in Asia; but Methodius (270–300) certainly speaks with the voice of Ignatius and Irenæus. He deals with Origen much as Irenæus dealt with the Gnostics, defending against him the current sense of the regula fidei, and especially the literal meaning of Scripture, the origination of the soul along with the body, the resurrection of the body in the material sense, and generally opposing realism to the spiritualism of Origen. But in thus opposing Origen, Methodius is not uninfluenced by him (see Socr. vi. 13). He, too, is a student of Plato (with ‘little of his style or spirit’); his ‘realism’ is ‘speculative.’ He no longer defends the Asiatic Chiliasm, his doctrine of the Logos is coloured by Origen as that of Irenæus was by the Apologists. The legacy of Methodius and of his Origenist contemporaries to the Eastern Church was a modified Origenism, that is a theology systematised on the intellectual basis of the Platonic philosophy, but expurgated by the standard of the regula fidei. This result was a compromise, and was at first attended with great confusion. Origen’s immediate following seized some one side, some another of his system; some were more, some less influenced by the ‘orthodox’ reaction against his teaching. We may distinguish an Origenist ‘right’ and an Origenist ‘left.’ If the Origenist view of the Universe was given up, the coeternity of the Son and Spirit with the Father was less firmly grasped. Origen had, if we may use the expression, ‘levelled up.’ The Son was between the Ingenerate God and the created, but eternal Universe. If the latter was not eternal, and if at the same time the Word stood in some essential correlation to the creative energy of God, Origen’s system no longer implied the strict coeternity of the Word. Accordingly we find Dionysius (see below, p. 173 sqq.) uncertain on this point, and on the essential relation of the Son to the Father. More cautious in this respect, but tenacious of other startling features of Origen, were Pierius and Theognostus, who presided over the Catechetical School at the end of the century.

On the other hand, very many of Origen’s pupils, especially among the bishops, started from the other side of Origen’s teaching, and held tenaciously to the coeternity of the Son, while they abandoned the Origenist ‘paradoxes’ with regard to the Universe, matter, pre-existence, and restitution. Typical of this class is Gregory Thaumaturgus, also Peter the martyr bishop of Alexandria, who expressly opposed many of Origen’s positions (though hardly with the violence ascribed to him in certain supposed fragments in Routh, Rell. iv. 81) and Alexander himself. It was this ‘wing’ of the Origenist following that, in combination with the opposition represented by Methodius, bequeathed to the generation contemporary with Nicæa its average theological tone. The coeternity of the Son with the Father was not (as a rule) questioned, but the essential relation of the Logos to the Creation involved a strong subordination of the Son to the Father, and by consequence of the Spirit to the Son. Monarchianism was the heresy most dreaded, the theology of the Church was based on the philosophical categories of Plato applied to the explanation and systematisation of the rule of faith. This was very far from Arianism. It lacked the logical definiteness of that system on the one hand, it rested on the other hand on a different conception of God; the hypostatic subordination of the Son was insisted upon, but His true Sonship as of one Nature with the Father, was held fast. In the slow process of time this neo-Asiatic theology found its way partly to the Nicene formula, partly to the illogical acceptance of it with regard to the Son, with refusal to apply it to the Spirit (Macedonius). To the men who thought thus, the blunt assertion that the Son was a creature, not coeternal, alien to the Essence of the Father, was a novelty, and wholly abhorrent. Arius drew a sharper line than they had been accustomed to draw between God and the creature; so did Athanasius. But Arius drew his line without flinching between the Father and the Son. This to the instinct of any Origenist was as revolting as it would have been to the clear mind and Biblical sympathy of Origen himself. In theological and philosophical principles alike Arius was opposed even to the tempered Origenism of the Nicene age. The latter was at the furthest remove from Monarchianism, Arianism was in its essential core Monarchian; the common theology borrowed its philosophical principles and method from the Platonists, Arius from Aristotle. To anticipate, Arianism and (so-called) semi-Arianism have in reality very little in common except the historical fact of common action for a time. Arianism guarded the transcendence of the divine nature (at the expense of revelation and ) in a way that ‘semi-Arianism,’ admitting as it did inherent inequality in the Godhead, did not. They therefore tended in opposite directions; Arianism to Anomœanism, ‘semi-Arianism’ to the Nicene faith; their source was different. ‘Aristotle made men Arians,’ says Newman with truth, ‘Plato, semi-Arians’ (Arians4, p. 335, note): but to say this is to allow that if Arianism goes back to Lucian and so to Paul of Samosata, semi-Arianism is a fragment from the wreck of Origen.

The Origenist bishops of Syria and Asia Minor had in the years 269–272, after several efforts, succeeded in deposing Paul of Samosata from the See of Antioch. This remarkable man was the ablest pre-Nicene representative of Adoptionist Monarchianism. The Man Jesus was inhabited by the ‘Word,’ i.e. by an impersonal power of God, distinct from the Λόγος or reason (wisdom) inherent in God as an attribute, which descended upon him at His Baptism. His union with God, a union of Will, was unswerving, and by virtue of it He overcame the sin of mankind, worked miracles, and entered on a condition of Deification. He is God ἐκ προκοπῆς (cf. Luke ii. 52) by virtue of progress in perfection. That is in brief the system of Paul, and we cannot wonder at his deposition. For the striking points of contact with Arianism (two ‘Wisdoms,’ two ‘Words,’ προκοπή: cf. Orat. c. Ar. i. 5, &c.) we have to account. The theology of Arius is a compromise between the Origenist doctrine of the Person of Christ and the pure Monarchian Adoptionism of Paul of Samosata; or rather it engrafts the former upon the latter as the foundation principle, seriously modifying each to suit the necessity of combining the two. This compromise was not due to Arius himself but to his teacher, Lucian the Martyr. A native himself of Samosata, he stood in some relation of attachment (not clearly defineable) to Paul. Under him, he was at the head of a critical, exegetical, and theological school at Antioch. Upon the deposition of Paul he appears not so much to have been formally excommunicated as to have refused to acquiesce in the new order of things. Under Domnus and his two successors, he was in a state of suspended communion; but eventually was with the bishop (Cyril?) and died as a martyr at Nicomedia, Jan. 7, 312. The latter fact, his ascetic life, and his learning secured him widespread honour in the Church; his pupils formed a compact and enthusiastic brotherhood, and filled many of the most influential Sees after the persecution. That such a man should be involved in the reproach of having given birth to Arianism is an unwelcome result of history, but one not to be evaded. The history of the Lucianic compromise and its result in the Lucianic type of theology, are both matters of inference rather than of direct knowledge. As to the first, whatever evidence there is connects Lucian’s original position with Paul. His with Bishop Cyril must have involved a reapproachment to the formula of the bishops who deposed Paul,—a thoroughly Origenist document. We may therefore suppose that the identification of Christ with the Logos, or cosmic divine principle, was adopted by him from Origenist sources. But he could not bring himself to admit that He was thus essentially identified with God the eternal; he held fast to the idea of προκοπή as the path by which the Lord attained to Divinity; he distinguished the Word or Son who was Christ from the immanent impersonal Reason or Wisdom of God, as an offspring of the Father’s Will, an idea which he may have derived straight from Origen, with whom of course it had a different sense. For to Origen Will was the very essence of God; Lucian fell back upon an arid philosophical Monotheism, upon an abstract God fenced about with negations (Harnack 22, 195, note) and remote from the Universe. It was counted a departure from Lucian’s principles if a pupil held that the Son was the ‘perfect Image of the Father’s Essence’ (Philost. ii. 15); Origen’s formula, ‘distinct in hypostasis, but one in will,’ was apparently exploited in a Samosatene sense to express the relation of the Son to the Father. The only two points in fact in which Lucian appears to have modified the system of Paul were, firstly in hypostatising the Logos, which to Paul was an impersonal divine power, secondly in abandoning Paul’s purely human doctrine of the historical Christ. To Lucian, the Logos assumed a body (or rather ‘Deus sapientiam suam misit in hunc mundum carne vestitam, ubi infra, p. 6), but itself took the place of a soul; hence all the ταπειναὶ λέξεις of the Gospels applied to the Logos as such, and the inferiority and essential difference of the Son from the Father rigidly followed.

The above account of Lucian is based on that of Harnack, Dogmg. ii. 184, sqq. It is at once in harmony with all our somewhat scanty data (Alexander, Epiphanius, Philostorgius, and the fragment of his last confession of faith preserved by Rufin. in Eus. H. E. ix. 9, Routh, Rell. iv. pp. 5–7, from which Harnack rightly starts) and is the only one which accounts for the phenomena of the rise of Arianism. We find a number of leading Churchmen in agreement with Arius, but in no way dependent on him. They are Eusebius of Nicomedia, Maris, Theognis, Athanasius of Anazarba, Menophantus; all Lucianists. The first Arian writer, Asterius (see below), is a Lucianist. (The Egyptian bishops Secundus and Theonas cannot be put down to any school; we do not know their history; but they are distinguished from the Lucianists by Philost. ii. 3.) It has been urged that, although Arius brought away heresy from the school of Lucian, yet he was not the only one that did so. True; but then the heresy was all of the same kind (list of pupils of Lucian in Philost. ii. 14, iii. 15). Aetius, the founder of logical ultra-Arianism and teacher of Eunomius, was taught the exegesis of the New Testament by the Lucianists Athanasius of Anazarba and Antony of Tarsus, of the Old by the Lucianist Leontius. This fairly covers the area of Arianism proper. But it may be noted that some Origenists of the ‘left wing,’ whose theology emphasized the subordination, and vacillated as to the eternity of the Son, would find little to shock them in Arianism (Eusebius of Cæsarea, Paulinus of Tyre), while on the other hand there are traces of a Lucianist ‘right wing,’ men like Asterius, who while essentially Arian, made concessions to the ‘conservative’ position chiefly by emphasising the cosmic mediation of the Word and His ‘exact likeness’ to the Father. The Theology of the Eastern Church was suffering from the effort to assimilate the Origenist theology: it could not do so without eliminating the underlying and unifying idea of Origenism; this done, the overwhelming influence of the great teacher remained, while dissonant fragments of his system, vaguely comprehended in many cases, permeated some here, some there. Meanwhile the school of Lucian had a method and a system; they knew their own minds, and relied on reason and exegesis. This was the secret of their power. Had Arius never existed, Arianism must have tried its strength under such conditions. But the age was ready for Arius; and Arius was ready. The system of Arius was in effect that of Lucian: its formulation appears to have been as much the work of Asterius as of Arius himself. (Cf. p. 155, §8, ὁ δὲ ᾽Αρ. μεταγράψας δέδωκε τοῖς ἰδίοις. The extant writings of Arius are his letters to Eus. Nic. and to Alexander, preserved by Theodoret and Epiph. Hær. 69, and the extracts from the ‘Thalia’ in Ath., pp. 308–311, 457, 458; also the ‘confession’ in Socr. i. 26, Soz. ii. 27. Cf. also references to his dicta in Ath. pp. 185, 229, &c.) Arius started from the idea of God and the predicate ‘Son.’ God is above all things uncreated, or unoriginate, ἀγέν[ν]ητος, (the ambiguity of the derivatives of γεννᾶσθαι and γενέσθαι are a very important element in the controversy. See p. 475, note 5, and Lightfoot, Ignat. ii. p. 90 sqq.) Everything else is created, γενητόν. The name ‘Son’ implies an act of procreation. Therefore, before such act, there was no Son, nor was God properly speaking a Father. The Son is not coeternal with Him. He was originated by the Father’s will, as indeed were all things. He is, then, τῶν γενητῶν, He came into being from non-existence (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων), and before that did not exist (οὐκ ἦν πρὶν γένηται). But His relation to God differs from that of the Universe generally. Created nature cannot bear the awful touch of bare Deity. God therefore created the Son that He in turn might be the agent in the Creation of the Universe—‘created Him as the beginning of His ways,’ (Prov. viii. 22, LXX.). This being so, the nature of the Son was in the essential point of ἀγεννησία unlike that of the Father; (ξένος τοῦ υἱοῦ κατ᾽ οὐσίαν ὁ Πατὴρ ὅτι ἄναρχος): their substances (ὑποστάσεις) are ἀνεπίμικτοι,—have nothing in common. The Son therefore does not possess the fundamental property of sonship, identity of nature with the Father. He is a Son by , not by Nature; He has advanced by moral probation to be Son, even to be μονογενὴς θεός (Joh. i. 14). He is not the eternal Λόγος, reason, of God, but a Word (and God has spoken many): but yet He is the Word by ; is no longer, what He is by nature, subject to change. He cannot know the Father, much less make Him known to others. Lastly, He dwells in flesh, not in full human nature (see above, p. xxviii. and note 2). The doctrine of Arius as to the Holy Spirit is not recorded, but probably He was placed between the Son and the other κτίσματα (yet see Harnack ii. 199, note 2).

Arian Literature. Beside the above-mentioned letters and fragments of Arius, our early Arian documents are scanty. Very important is the letter of Eus. Nic. to Paulinus, referred to above, §3 (1), pp. xvi., xviii., other fragments of letters, p. 458 sq. The writings of Asterius, if preserved, would have been an invaluable source of information. Asterius seems to have written before the Nicene Council; he may have modified his language in later treatises. He was replied to by Marcellus in a work which brought him into controversy (336) with Eusebius of Cæsarea. With the creeds and Arian literature after the death of Constantine we are not at present concerned.

Arianism was a novelty. Yet it combines in an inconsistent whole elements of almost every previous attempt to formulate the doctrine of the Person of Christ. Its sharpest antithesis was Modalism: yet with the modalist Arius maintained the strict personal unity of the Godhead. With dynamic monarchianism it held the adoptionist principle in addition; but it personified the Word and sacrificed the entire humanity of Christ. In this latter respect it sided with the Docetæ, most Gnostics, and Manichæans, to all of whom it yet opposes a sharply-cut doctrine of creation and of the transcendence of God. With Origen and the Apologists before him it made much of the cosmic mediation of the Word in contrast to the redemptive work of Jesus; with the Apologists, though not with Origen, it enthroned in the highest place the God of the Philosophers: but against both alike it drew a sharp broad line between the Creator and the Universe, and drew it between the Father and the Son. Least of all is Arianism in sympathy with the theology of Asia,—that of Ignatius, Irenæus, Methodius, founded upon the Joannine tradition. The profound Ignatian idea of Christ as the Λόγος ἀπὸ σιγῆς προελθών is in impressive contrast with the shallow challenge of the Thalia, ‘Many words hath God spoken, which of these was manifested in the flesh?’

Throughout the controversies of the pre-Nicene age the question felt rather than seen in the background is that of the Idea of God. The question of Monotheism and Polytheism which separated Christians from was not so much a question of abstract theology as of religion, not one of speculative belief, but of worship. The was prepared to recognise in the background of his pantheon the shadowy form of one supreme God, Father of gods and men, from whom all the rest derived their being. But his religion required the pantheon as well; he could not worship a philosophic supreme abstraction. The Christian on the other hand was prepared in many cases to recognise the existence of beings corresponding to the gods of the (whether 1 Cor. viii. 5 can be quoted here is open to question). But such beings he would not worship. To him, as an object of religion, there was one God. The one God of the was no object of practical personal religion; the One God of the Christian was. He was the God of the Old Testament, the God who was known to His people not under philosophical categories, but in His dealings with them as a Father, Deliverer, He who would accomplish all things for them that waited on Him, the God of the . He was the God of the New Testament, God in Christ the world to Himself, manifesting His in the Gospel of Christ to whosoever believed. In Christ the Christian learned that God is Love. Now this knowledge of God is essentially religious; it lies in a different plane from the speculative ἀπορίαι as to God’s transcendence or immanence, while yet it steadies the religious mind in the face of speculations tending either way. A God who is Love, if immanent, must yet be personal, if transcendent, must yet manifest His Love in such a way that we can know it and not merely guess it. Now as Christian instinct began to be forced to reflexion, in other words, as faith began to strive for expression in a theology, it could not but be that men, however personally religious, seized hold of religious problems by their speculative side. We have seen this exemplified in the influence of Platonic philosophy on the Apologists and Alexandrine Fathers. But to Origen, with all his Platonism, belongs the honour of enthroning the God of Love at the head and centre of a systematic theology. Yet the theology of the end of the third century assimilated secondary results of Origen’s system rather than his underlying idea. On the one hand was the rule of faith with the whole round of Christian life and worship, determining the religious instinct of the Church; on the other, the inability to formulate this instinct in a coherent system so long as the central problem was overlooked or inadequately dealt with. God is One, not more; yet how is the One God to be conceived of, what is His relation to the Universe of γένεσις and φθόρα? and the Son is God, and the Spirit; how are they One, and if One how distinct? How do we avoid the relapse into a polytheism of secondary gods? What is—not the essential nature of Godhead, for all agreed that that is beyond our ken—but the πρῶτον ἡμῖν, the essential idea for us to begin from if we are to synthesise belief and theology, πίστις and γνῶσις?