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Chapter I.





the Deity…without Logos. In another treatise (De Fide, p. 40) Gregory bases the argument for the eternity of the Λόγος on John i. 1, where it is not said, “after the beginning,” but “in the beginning.” The beginning, therefore, never was without the Λόγος.


unstable: παγὴς (the reading ρπαγις is manifestly wrong). So afterwards human speech is called πίκηρος. 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.”


πόστασιν. 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 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 Subsistencies, 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 οὐσία,” 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 οὐσία, but have not taken the slightest notice of πόστασις.…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 Phœnix uses it to signify ‘treachery’; in Menander it implies ‘sauces’ (i e. sediment). But although the ancient philosophical writers scarcely noticed the word, the more modern ones have frequently used it instead of οὐσία.” But it was, as far as can be traced, the unerring genius of Origen that first threw around the Λόγος that atmosphere of a new term, i.e. πόστασις, as well as μοούσιος, αὐτόθεος, 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.


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 Λόγος 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 primal movement towards the world does not come from the Λόγος, but from the Father Himself. The Λόγος 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 Λόγος 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 Λόγος 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 supposition that the Λόγος 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 Λόγος is a 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 significant 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 Λόγος of Philo. The God of Plotinus and Proclus is not a God in three hypostases: 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 separate 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 reproached 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 Neoplatonists, i.e. the three movements of the soul which correspond to their lower “trinity” of Nature, Soul, Intelligence, 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.


will not fail to perform; μὴ ἀνενεργητον εἶναι. This is a favourite word with Gregory, and the Platonist Synesius.


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. 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.

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