1937 Ofthe Gnostics Valentinus and Basilides the truest and best account is given in H. L. Mansel’s Gnostics, and in the articles upon them in the Dictionary of Christian Biography. It is there shown how all their visions of celestial Hierarchies, and the romances connected with them, were born of the attempt to solve the insoluble problem, i.e. how that which in modern philosophy would be called the Infinite is to pass into the Finite. They fell into the fatalism of the Emanationist view of the Deity, but still the attempt was an honest one.
Prologue.
us!?98 right by the same instruction as would benefit the Anomcean!*°”. The controversy with the Manichee is profitless against the Jew!" It is necessary, therefore, as I have said, to regard the opinions which the persons have taken up, and to frame your argument in accordance with the error into which each has fallen, by advancing in each discussion certain principles and reasonable propositions, that thus, through what is agreed upon on both sides, the truth may conclusively be brought to light. When, then, a discussion is held with one of those who favour Greek ideas, it would be well to make the ascertaining of this the commencement of the reasoning, i.e. whether he presupposes the existence of a God, or concurs with the atheistic view. Should he say there is no God, then, from the consideration of the skilful and wise economy of the Universe he will be brought to acknowledge that there is a certain overmastering power manifested through these channels. If, on the other hand, he should have no doubt as to the existence of Deity, but should be inclined to entertain the presumption of a plurality of Gods, then we will adopt against him some such train of reasoning as this: “does he think Deity is perfect or defective?” and if, as is likely, he bears testimony to the perfection in the Divine nature, then we will demand of him to grant a perfection throughout in everything that is observable in that divinity, in order that Deity may not be regarded as a mixture of opposites, defect and perfection. But whether as respects power, or the conception of goodness, or wisdom and imperishability and eternal existence, or any other notion besides suitable to the nature of Deity, that is found to lie close to the subject of our contemplation, in all he will agree that perfection is the idea to be entertained of the Divine nature, as being a just inference from these premises. If this, then, be granted 1938 Sabellius. The Sabellian heresy was rife in the century preceding: i.e. that Personality is attributed to the Deity only from the exigency of human language, that consequently He is sometimes characterized as the Father, when operations and works more appropriate to the paternal relation are spoken of; and so in like manner of the Son, and the Holy Ghost; as when Redemption is the subject, or Sanctification. In making the Son the Father, it is the opposite pole to Arianism.
1939 “We see also the rise (i.e. a.d. 350) of a new and more defiant Arian school, more in earnest than the older generation, impatient of their shuffling diplomacy, and less pliant to court influences. Aetius...came to rest in a clear and simple form of Arianism. Christianity without mystery seems to have been his aim. The Anomcean leaders took their stand on the doctrine of Arius himself and dwelt with emphasis on its most offensive aspects. Arius had long ago laid down the absolute unlikeness of the Son to the Father, but for years past the Arianizers had prudently softened it down. Now, however, ‘unlike’ became the watchword of Aetius and Euno- mius”: Gwatkin’s Arians. For the way in which this school treated the Trinity see Against Eunomius, p. 50. 1940 [ean argument against Dualism would only confirm the Jew in his stern monotheism. Manes had taught also that “those souls who believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God renounce the worship of the God of the Jews, who is the Prince of Darkness,” and that “the Old Testament was the work of this Prince, who was substituted by the Jews in the place of the true God.”
Prologue.
us, it would not be difficult to bring round these scattered notions of a plurality of Gods to the acknowledgment of a unity of Deity. For if he admits that perfection is in every respect to be ascribed to the subject before us, though there is a plurality of these perfect things which are marked with the same character, he must be required by a logical necessity, either to point out the particularity in each of these things which present no distinctive variation, but are found always with the same marks, or, if (he cannot do that, and) the mind can grasp nothing in them in the way of particular, to give up the idea of any distinction. For if neither as regards “more and less” a person can detect a difference (in as much as the idea of perfec- tion does not admit of it), nor as regards “worse” and “better” (for he cannot entertain a notion of Deity at all where the term “worse” is not got rid of), nor as regards “ancient” and “modern” (for what exists not for ever is foreign to the notion of Deity), but on the contrary the idea of Godhead is one and the same, no peculiarity being on any ground of reason to be discovered in any one point, it is an absolute necessity that the mistaken fancy of a plur- ality of Gods would be forced to the acknowledgment of a unity of Deity. For if goodness, and justice, and wisdom, and power may be equally predicated of it, then also imperishability and eternal existence, and every orthodox idea would be in the same way admitted. As then all distinctive difference in any aspect whatever has been gradually removed, it necessarily follows that together with it a plurality of Gods has been removed from his belief, the gen- eral identity bringing round conviction to the Unity.
Chapter I Chapter I.
But since our system of religion is wont to observe a distinction of persons in the unity of the Nature, to prevent our argument in our contention with Greeks sinking to the level of Judaism there is need again of a distinct technical statement in order to correct all error on this point.
For not even by those who are external to our doctrine is the Deity held to be without Logos’**". Now this admission of theirs will quite enable our argument to be unfolded. For he who admits that God is not without Logos, will agree that a being who is not without Logos (or word) certainly possesses Logos. Now it is to be observed that the utterance of man is expressed by the same term. If, then, he should say that he understands what the Logos of God is according to the analogy of things with us, he will thus be led on to a loftier idea, it being an absolute necessity for him to believe that the utterance, just as everything else, corresponds with the nature. Though, that is, there is a certain sort of force, and life, and wisdom, observed in the human subject, yet no one from the similarity of the terms would suppose that the life, or power, or wisdom, were in the case of God of such a sort as that, but the significations of all such terms are lowered to accord with the standard of our nature. For since our nature is liable to corruption and weak, therefore is our life short, our strength unsubstantial, our word unstable!”4”, But in that transcendent nature, through the greatness of the subject contemplated, every thing that is said about it is elevated with it. Therefore though mention be made of God’s Word it will not be thought of as having its realization in the utterance of what is spoken, and as then vanishing away, like our speech, into the nonexistent. On the contrary, as our nature, liable as it is to come to an end, is endued with speech which likewise comes to an end, so that, imperishable and ever-existing nature has eternal, and substantial speech. If, then, logic requires him to admit this eternal subsistence of God’s Word, it is altogether necessary to admit also that the subsistence! of that 1941 the Deity...without Logos. In another treatise (De Fide, p. 40) Gregory bases the argument for the eternity of the Adyoc on John i. 1, where it is not said, “after the beginning,” but “in the beginning.” The beginning, therefore, never was without the Adyoc.
1942 unstable: anayng (the reading &pmayic is manifestly wrong). So afterwards human speech is called éntknpos. Cf. Athanasius (Contr. Arian. 3): “Since man came from the non-existent, therefore his ‘word’ also has a pause, and does not last. From man we get, day after day, many different words, because the first abide not, but are forgotten.”
1943 vmndotaoiv. About this oft repeated word the question arises whether we are indebted to Christians or to Platonists for the first skilful use of it in expressing that which is neither substance nor quality. Abraham Tucker (Light of Nature, ii. p. 191) hazards the following remark with regard to the Platonic Triad, i.e. Goodness, Intelligence, Activity, viz. that quality would not do as a general name for these principles, because the ideas and abstract essences existed in the Intelligence, &c., and qualities cannot exist in one another, e.g. yellowness Chapter I word consists in a living state; for it is an impiety to suppose that the Word has a soulless subsistence after the manner of stones. But if it subsists, being as it is something with intellect and without body, then certainly it lives, whereas if it be divorced from life, then as certainly it does not subsist; but this idea that the Word of God does not subsist, has been shown to be blasphemy. By consequence, therefore, it has also been shown that the Word is to be considered as in a living condition. And since the nature of the Logos is reasonably believed to be simple, and exhibits in itself no duplicity or combination, no one would contemplate the existence of the living Logos as dependent on a mere participation of life, for such a supposition, which is to say that one thing is within another, would not exclude the idea of compositeness; but, since the simplicity has been admitted, we are compelled to think that the Logos has an independent life, and not a mere participation of life. If, then, the Logos, as being life, lives!?#4 , it certainly has the faculty of will, for no one of living creatures is without such a faculty. Moreover that such a will has also capacity to act must be the conclusion of a devout mind. For if you admit not this potency, you prove the reverse to exist.
cannot be soft: nor could substance be the term, for then they must have been component parts of the Existent, which would have destroyed the unity of the Godhead: “therefore, he (Plato) styled them Hypostases or Subsist- encies, which is something between substance and quality, inexisting in the one, and serving as a receptacle for the other’s inexistency within it.” But he adds, “I do not recommend this explanation to anybody”; nor does he state the authority for this Platonic use, so lucidly explained, of the word. Indeed, if the word had ever been applied to the principles of the Platonic triad, to express in the case of each of them “the distinct subsistence in a common ovota,” it would have falsified the very conception of the first, i.e. Goodness, which was never relative. So that this very word seems to emphasize, so far, the antagonism between Christianity and Platonism. Socrates (E. H. iii. 7) bears witness to the absence of the word from the ancient Greek philosophy: “it appears to us that the Greek philosophers have given us various definitions of ovota, but have not taken the slightest notice of UmdotaHOIG...it is not found in any of the ancients except occasionally in a sense quite different from that which is attached to it at the present day (i.e. fifth century). Thus Sophocles in his tragedy entitled Phaenix uses it to signify ‘treachery’; in Menander it implies ‘sauces’ (ie. sediment). But although the ancient philosophical writers scarcely noticed the word, the more modern ones have frequently used it instead of ovoia.” But it was, as far as can be traced, the unerring genius of Origen that first threw around the Adyog that atmosphere of a new term, i.e. UMOOTAOIG, as well as GUOOVOLOG, avtTd8E0¢, which afterward made it possible to present the Second Person to the Greek-speaking world as the member of an equal and indivisible Trinity. It was he who first selected such words and saw what they were capable of; though he did not insist on that fuller meaning which was put upon them when all danger within the Church of Sabellianism had disappeared, and error passed in the guise of Arianism to the opposite extreme.
1944 lives. This doctrine is far removed from that of Philo, i.e. from the Alexandrine philosophy. The very first statement of S. John represents the Adyoc as having a backward movement towards the Deity, as well as a forward movement from Him; as held there, and yet sent thence by a force which he calls Love, so that the Chapter I But no; impotence is quite removed from our conception of Deity. Nothing of incongruity primal movement towards the world does not come from the Adyog, but from the Father Himself. The Adyoc here is the Word, and not the Reason; He is the living effect of a living cause, not a theory or hypothesis standing at the gateway of an insoluble mystery. The Adyog speaks because the Father speaks, not because the Supreme cannot and will not speak; and their relations are often the reverse of those they hold in Philo; for the Father becomes at times the meditator between the Adyos and the world drawing men towards Him and subduing portions of the Creation before His path. Psychology seems to pour a light straight into the Council-chamber of the Eternal; while Metaphysics had turned away from it, with her finger on her lips. Philo may have used, as Tholuck thinks, those very texts of the Old Testament which support the Christian doctrine of the Word, and in the translation of which the LXX. supplied him with the Greek word. But, however derived, his theology eventually ranged itself with those pantheistic views of the universe which subdued all thinking minds not Christianized, for more than three centuries after him. The majority of recent critics certainly favour the sup- position that the Adyog of Philo is a being numerically distinct from the Supreme; but when the relation of the Supreme is attentively traced in each, the actual antagonism of the Christian system and his begins to be apparent.
The Supreme of Philo is not and can never be related to the world. The Adyoc isa logical necessity as a mediator between the two; a spiritual being certainly, but only the head of a long series of such beings, who succeed at last in filling the passage between the finite and the infinite. In this system there is no mission of love and of free will; such beings are but as the milestones to mark the distance between man and the Great Unknown. It is sig- nificant that Vacherot, the leading historian of the Alexandrine school of philosophy, doubts whether John the Evangelist ever even heard of the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria. It is pretty much the same with the members of the Neoplatonic Triad as with the Adyog of Philo. The God of Plotinus and Proclus is not a God in three hy- postases: he is simply one, Intelligence and Soul being his necessary emanations; they are in God, but they are not God: Soul is but a hypostasis of a hypostasis. The One is not a hypostasis, but above it. This “Trinity” depends on the distinction and succession of the necessary movements of the Deity; it consists of three distinct and sep- arate principles of things. The Trinity is really peculiar to Christianity. Three inseparable Hypostases make equally a part of the Divine nature, so that to take away one would be to destroy the whole. The Word and Spirit are Divine, not intermediaries disposed in a hierarchy on the route of the world to God. As Plotinus re- proached the Gnostics, the Christian mysticism despises the world, and suppressing the intermediaries who in other doctrines serve to elevate the soul gradually to God, it transports it by one impulse as it were into the Divine nature. The Christian goes straight to God by Faith. The Imagination, Reason, and Contemplation of the Neo- platonists, i.e. the three movements of the soul which correspond to their lower “trinity” of Nature, Soul, Intel- ligence, are no longer necessary. There is an antipathy profound between the two systems; How then could the one be said to influence the other? Neoplatonism may have tinged Christianity, while it was still seeking for language in which to express its inner self: but it never influenced the intrinsically moral character of the Christian Creeds. The Alexandrine philosophy is all metaphysics, and its rock was pantheism; all, even matter, proceeds from God necessarily and eternally. The Church never hesitated: she saw the abyss that opens upon that path; and by severe decrees she has closed the way to pantheism.
Chapter I is to be observed in connection with the Divine nature, but it is absolutely necessary to admit that the power of that word is as great as the purpose, lest mixture, or concurrence, of con- tradictions be found in an existence that is incomposite, as would be the case if, in the same purpose, we were to detect both impotence and power, if, that is, there were power to do one thing, but no power to do something else. Also we must suppose that this will in its power to do all things will have no tendency to anything that is evil (for impulse towards evil is foreign to the Divine nature), but that whatever is good, this it also wishes, and, wishing, is able to perform, and, being able, will not fail to perform); but that it will bring all its proposals for good to effectual accomplishment. Now the world is good, and all its contents are seen to be wisely and skilfully ordered. All of them, therefore, are the works of the Word, of one who, while He lives and subsists, in that He is God’s Word, has a will too, in that He lives; of one too who has power to effect what He wills, and who wills what is absolutely good and wise and all else that connotes superiority. Whereas, then, the world is admitted to be something good, and from what has been said the world has been shown to be the work of the Word, who both wills and is able to effect the good, this Word is other than He of whom He is the Word. For this, too, to a certain extent is a term of “relation,” inasmuch as the Father of the Word must needs be thought of with the Word, for it would not be word were it not a word of some one. If, then, the mind of the hearers, from the rel- ative meaning of the term, makes a distinction between the Word and Him from whom He proceeds, we should find that the Gospel mystery, in its contention with the Greek concep- tions, would not be in danger of coinciding with those who prefer the beliefs of the Jews. But it will equally escape the absurdity of either party, by acknowledging both that the living Word of God is an effective and creative being, which is what the Jew refuses to receive, and also that the Word itself, and He from whom He is, do not differ in their nature. As in our own case we say that the word is from the mind, and no more entirely the same as the mind, than altogether other than it (for, by its being from it, it is something else, and not it; still by its bringing the mind in evidence it can no longer be considered as something other than it; and so it is in its essence one with mind, while as a subject it is different), in like manner, too, the Word of God by its self-subsistence is distinct from Him from whom it has its subsistence; and yet by exhibiting in itself those qualities which are recognized in God it is the same in nature with Him who is recognizable by the same distinctive marks. For whether one adopts goodness’ **”, or power, or wisdom, or eternal existence, or the incap- 1945 will not fail to perform; wi) &vevepyntov etvan. This is a favourite word with Gregory, and the Platonist Synesius.
1946 goodness. “God is love;” but how is this love above or equal to the Power? “Infinite Goodness, according to our apprehension, requires that it should exhaust omnipotence: that it should give capacities of enjoyment and confer blessings until there were no more to be conferred: but our idea of omnipotence requires that it should be inexhaustible; that nothing should limit its operation, so that it should do no more than it has done.
Chapter I ability of vice, death, and decay, or an entire perfection, or anything whatever of the kind, to mark one’s conception of the Father, by means of the same marks he will find the Word that subsists from Him.
Therefore, it is much easier to conceive an imperfect creature completely good, than a perfect Being who is so...Since, then, we find our understanding incapable of comprehending infinite goodness joined with infinite power, we need not be surprised at finding our thoughts perplexed concerning them...we may presume that the obscurity rises from something wrong in our ideas, not from any inconsistencies in the subjects themselves.” Abraham Tucker, L. of N., i. 355.
Chapter IT Chapter II.
As, then, by the higher mystical ascent!?“” from matters that concern ourselves to that transcendent nature we gain a knowledge of the Word, by the same method we shall be led on to aconception of the Spirit, by observing in our own nature certain shadows and resemb- lances of His ineffable power. Now in us the spirit (or breath) is the drawing of the air, a matter other than ourselves, inhaled and breathed out for the necessary sustainment of the body. This, on the occasion of uttering the word, becomes an utterance which expresses in itself the meaning of the word. And in the case of the Divine nature it has been deemed a point of our religion that there is a Spirit of God, just as it has been allowed that there is a Word of God, because of the inconsistency of the Word of God being deficient as compared with our word, if, while this word of ours is contemplated in connection with spirit, that other Word were to be believed to be quite unconnected with spirit. Not indeed that it is a thought proper to entertain of Deity, that after the manner of our breath something foreign from without flows into God, and in Him becomes the Spirit; but when we think of God’s Word we do not deem the Word to be something unsubstantial, nor the result of instruction, nor an utterance of the voice, nor what after being uttered passes away, nor what is subject to any other condition such as those which are observed in our word, but to be essentially self-subsisting, with a faculty of will ever-working, all-powerful. The like doctrine have we received as to God’s Spirit; we regard it as that which goes with the Word and manifests its energy, and not as a mere effluence of the breath; for by such a conception the grandeur of the Divine power would be reduced and humiliated, that is, if the Spirit that is in it were 1947 _ by the higher mystical ascent, d&vaywy Kc. The common reading was d&vaAoyiKdc, which Hervetus and Morell have translated. But Krabinger, from all his Codd. but one, has rightly restored avaywy1kdc. It is not “analogy,” but rather “induction,” that is here meant; i.e. the arguing from the known to the unknown, from the facts of human nature (td Ka" nds) to those of the Godhead, or from history to spiritual events. ’Avaywyt| is the chief instrument in Origen’s interpretation of the Bible; it is more important than allegory. It alone gives the “heavenly” meaning, as opposed to the moral and practical though still mystical (cf. Guericke, Hist. Schol. Catech. ii. p. 60) meaning. Speaking of the Tower of Babel, he says that there is a “riddle” in the account. “A competent exposition will have a more convenient season for dealing with this, when there is a direct necessity to explain the passage in its higher mystical meaning” (c. Cels. iv. p. 173). Gregory imitates his master in constantly thus dealing with the Old Testament, i.e. making inductions about the highest spiritual truths from the “history.” So Basil would treat the prophecies (in Isai. v. p. 948). Chrysostom, on the Songs of “Degrees” in the Psalms, says that they are so called because they speak of the going up from Babylon, according to history; but, according to their high mysticism, because they lift us into the way of excellence. Here Gregory uses the facts of human nature neither in the way of mere analogy nor of allegory: he argues straight from them, as one reality, to another reality almost of the same class, as it were, as the first, man being “in the image of God”; and so dvaywyr here comes nearer induction than anything else.
Chapter IT supposed to resemble ours. But we conceive of it as an essential power, regarded as self- centred in its own proper person, yet equally incapable of being separated from God in Whon it is, or from the Word of God whom it accompanies, as from melting into nothingse able to will, ness; but as being, after the likeness of God’s Word, existing as a person self-moved, efficient, ever choosing the good, and for its every purpose having its power concurrent with its will.
1948 ka®’ Undotactv. Ueberweg (Hist. of Philosophy, vol. i. 329) remarks: “That the same argumentation, which in the last analysis reposes only on the double sense of bndotaots (viz.: (a) real subsistence; (b) individually independent, not attributive subsistence), could be used with reference to each of the Divine attributes, and so for the complete restoration of polytheism, Gregory leaves unnoticed.” Yet Gregory doubtless was well aware of this, for he says, just below, that even a severe study of the mystery can only result in a moderate amount of apprehension of it.
Chapter IIT Chapter HI.
And so one who severely studies the depths of the mystery, receives secretly in his spirit, indeed, a moderate amount of apprehension of the doctrine of God’s nature, yet he is unable to explain clearly in words the ineffable depth of this mystery. As, for instance, how the same thing is capable of being numbered and yet rejects numeration, how it is ob- served with distinctions yet is apprehended as a monad, how it is separate as to personality yet is not divided as to subject matter!?*. For, in personality, the Spirit is one thing and the Word another, and yet again that from which the Word and Spirit is, another. But when you have gained the conception of what the distinction is in these, the oneness, again, of the nature admits not division, so that the supremacy of the one First Cause is not split and cut up into differing Godships, neither does the statement harmonize with the Jewish dogma, but the truth passes in the mean between these two conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet accepting what is useful to it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed by the ac- ceptance of the Word, and by the belief in the Spirit; while the polytheistic error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the unity of the Nature abrogating this imagination of plurality. While yet again, of the Jewish conception, let the unity of the Nature stand; and of the Hel- lenistic, only the distinction as to persons; the remedy against a profane view being thus applied, as required, on either side. For it is as if the number of the triad were a remedy in the case of those who are in error as to the One, and the assertion of the unity for those whose beliefs are dispersed among a number of divinities.