“There is one Almighty God who created all things by His Word and fashioned them, and caused that out of what was notall things should be: as saith the Scripture, By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the Breath of His mouth: and again, All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. There is no exception: the Father madeallthings by Him, whether visible or invisible, objects of sense or objects of intelligence, things temporal or things eternal. He made them not by angels or by any powers separated from His Thought: for God needs none of all these beings: but it is by His Word and His Spirit that He makes and disposes and governs and presides over all things. This God who made the world, this God who fashioned man, this God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, above whom there is no other God, nor Beginning nor Power nor Fulness: this God, as we shall show, is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“There is one Almighty God who created all things by His Word and fashioned them, and caused that out of what was notall things should be: as saith the Scripture, By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the Breath of His mouth: and again, All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. There is no exception: the Father madeallthings by Him, whether visible or invisible, objects of sense or objects of intelligence, things temporal or things eternal. He made them not by angels or by any powers separated from His Thought: for God needs none of all these beings: but it is by His Word and His Spirit that He makes and disposes and governs and presides over all things. This God who made the world, this God who fashioned man, this God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, above whom there is no other God, nor Beginning nor Power nor Fulness: this God, as we shall show, is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The same view is expressed with equal prominence and emphasis by a disciple of Irenæus, who shows an even stronger impress of the philosophical speculations of his time:[372]
“The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coeval with him, not infinite chaos, not measureless water, or solid earth, or dense air, or warm fire, or subtle breath, nor the azure cope of the vast heaven: but He was one, alone by Himself, and by His will He made the things that are, that before were not, except so far as they existed in His foreknowledge.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe. Him alone did He beget from existing things: for the Father himself constituted existence, and from it came that which was begotten. The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him, and not being without knowledge of the Father’s thought ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, theReason brought each thing to perfection one by one, thus pleasing God.”
“The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coeval with him, not infinite chaos, not measureless water, or solid earth, or dense air, or warm fire, or subtle breath, nor the azure cope of the vast heaven: but He was one, alone by Himself, and by His will He made the things that are, that before were not, except so far as they existed in His foreknowledge.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe. Him alone did He beget from existing things: for the Father himself constituted existence, and from it came that which was begotten. The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him, and not being without knowledge of the Father’s thought ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, theReason brought each thing to perfection one by one, thus pleasing God.”
This creed of Irenæus and his school became the basis of the theology of later Christendom. It appealed, as time went on, to a widening sphere, and summed up the judgment of average Christians on the main philosophical questions of the second century. The questions were not seriously re-opened. The idealists of Alexandria, no less than the rhetoricians of Gaul, accepted, with all its difficulties, the belief that there was one God who revealed Himself to mankind by the Word by whom He had created them, and that this Word was manifested in Jesus Christ. But the Alexandrians were concerned less with the metaphysical than with the moral difficulties; and their view of those difficulties modified also their view of creation. The cosmogony of Origen was a theodicy. His aim was less to show in detail how the world came into existence, than to “justify the ways of God to man.” He proceeded strictly on the lines of the older philosophies, justifying in this part of his theology even more than in other respects the criticism of Porphyry,[373]that though in his manner of life he was a Christian, in his opinions about God he was a Greek. He followed the school of Philo in believing that the original creation was of a world of ideal or “intelligible” existences, and that the cause of creation was the goodness of God.[374]He differed from, or expanded, the teaching of that school in believing that the Word or Wisdom of God, by whom He made the world, was not impersonal, but His Son, and that both the existence of the Son and thecreation of the ideal world had been from all eternity.[375]For it is impious to think that God ever existed without His Wisdom, possessing the power to create but not the will; and it is inconceivable either that Wisdom should ever have been without the conception of the world that was to be, or that there should ever have been a time at which God was not omnipotent from having no world to govern.[376]The relation of each to the world is stated in varying ways: one mode of statement is, that from the Father and the Son, thus eternally co-existent, came the actual world; the Father caused it to be, the Son caused it to be rational:[377]another is, that the whole world, visible and invisible, was made by the agency of the only begotten Son, who conveyed a share in himself to certain parts of the things so created and caused them thereby to become rational creatures.[378]This visible world, which, as also Philo and the Platonists had taught, is a copy of the ideal world, took its beginning in time: but it is not the first, nor will it be the last, of such worlds.[379]The matter of it as well as the form was created by God.[380]It was made by Him, and to Him it will return. The Stoical theory had conceived of the universe as analogous to a seed which expands to flower and fruit and withers away, but leaves behind it a similar seed which has a similar life and a similar succession: so did one universal order spring from its beginning and pass through its appointed period to the end which was like the beginning in that after it all things began anew.Origen’s theory was a modification of this: it recognized an absolute beginning and an absolute end: both the beginning and the end were God: poised as it were between these two divine eternities were the worlds of which we are part. In them, all rational creatures were originally equal and free: they are equal no longer because they have variously used their freedom: and the hypothesis of more worlds than one is a complement, on the one hand of the hypothesis of human freedom, on the other hand of the hypothesis of the divine justice, because it accounts for the infinite diversities of condition, and gives scope for the discipline of reformation.
Large elements of this theory dominated in the theology of the Eastern Churches during the fourth century. But ultimately those parts of it which distinguished it from the theory of Irenæus faded away. The mass of Christians were content with a simpler creed. More than one question remained unsolved; and the hypothesis of creation by a rival God was part of the creed of a Church which flourished for several centuries before it faded away, and it also left its traces in many inconsistent usages within the circle of the communities which rejected it. But the belief in the unity of God, and in the identity of the one God with the Creator of the world, was never again seriously disturbed. The close of the controversy was marked by its transference to a different, though allied, area. It was no longer Theological but Christological. The expression “Monarchy,” which had been used of the sole government of the one God, in distinction from the divided government of many gods, came to be applied to the sole government of theFather, in distinction from the “economy” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In this new area of controversy the old conceptions re-appear. The monistic and dualistic theories of the origin of the world lie beneath the two schools of Monarchianism, in one of which Christ was conceived as a mode of God, and in the other as His exalted creature. In the determination of these Christological controversies Greek philosophy had a no less important influence than it had upon the controversies which preceded them: and with some elements of that determination we shall be concerned in a future Lecture.
We may sum up the result of the influence of Greece on the conception of God in His relation to the material universe, by saying that it found a reasoned basis for Hebrew monotheism. It helped the Christian communities to believe as an intellectual conviction that which they had first accepted as a spiritual revelation. The moral difficulties of human life, and the Oriental influences which were flowing in large mass over some parts of the Christian world, tended towards ditheism. But the average opinion of thinking men, which is the ultimate solvent of all philosophical theories, had for centuries past been settling down into the belief in the unity of God. With a conviction which has been as permanent as it was of slow growth, it believed that the difficulties in the hypothesis of the existence of a Power limited by the existence of a rival Power, are greater even than the great difficulties in the belief in a God who allows evil to be. The dominant Theistic philosophyof Greece became the dominant philosophy of Christianity. It prevailed in form as well as in substance. It laid emphasis on the conception of God as the Artificer and Architect of the universe rather than as its immanent Cause. But though the substance will remain, the form may change. Platonism is not the only theory that is consistent with the fundamental thesis that “of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things:” and it is not impossible that, even after this long lapse of centuries, the Christian world may come back to that conception of Him which was shadowed in the far-off ages, and which has never been wholly without a witness, that He is “not far off but very nigh;” that “He is in us and we in Him;” that He is changeless and yet changing in and with His creatures; and that He who “rested from His creation,” yet so “worketh hitherto” that the moving universe itself is the eternal and unfolding manifestation of Him.