CHRISTIANITY
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CHRISTIANITY
religion, that when the first generation of converts
who have been in contact, more or less immediate,
with the founder, and endowed with his spirit, have
passed away, their successors, having no personal
grasp of their creed, must depend on formulae and
dogmas; (2) the union of the Gospel with the Greek
spirit (a) due to the conquests of Alexander and the
consequent mingling of Jew and Gentile, (b) further
strengthened about a. d. 130, when Greek converts
brought into Christianity the philosophy in which
they were educated, (c) again, about a century later,
when Greek mysteries and Creek civilization in its
widest range were admitted, and finally, (d) about the
middle of the fourth century, when the Greek spirit
finally prevailed and polytheism and mythology (i. e.
the worship of the saints) were admitted; (3) the in-
ternal struggles with Gnosticism, which aimed at a
synthesis ofall existing creeds. "The struggle with
Gnosticism compelled the Church to put its teaching,
its worship, and its discipline into fixed forms and
ordinances, and to exclude everyone who would not
yield them obedience" (Das Wesen des Christen-
thums, Lect. xi. p. 210).
It is the second of these reasons for the birth and growth of dogma that concerns us immediately; but we may remark in regard- to the first that it ignores the direct working of God on the soul of the individ- ual, the perpetual renewal of fervour through prayer and the use of the sacraments, that have always marked the course of Christianity. Herein, the spirit of its first days is seen still to be energetic, notwith- standing the comparative elaborateness of creed and ritual of modern Christianity. The saints are admit- ted to be the most perfect exponents of practical i Ihristianity; they are not exceptions or accidents or by-products of the system; yet they did not find dogma any hindrance to their perfect service of God and man. As regards the third cause above men- tioned, we may grant that it has always been the providential function of heresy to bring about a clearer definition of the Christian creed, and that Gnosticism in its many varieties undoubtedly had this effect. Rut long before Gnosticism had suffi- ciently developed to necessitate the safeguarding of doctrine by conciliar definition, we find traces of an organized Church with a very definite creed. Not to mention the traditional form of doctrine" spoken of by St. Paul (Rom., vi, 17) and the act of faith required by Philip from the eunuch (Acts, viii, 37), many crit- ic s. including the Protestants Zahn and Kattenbusch (Das Apostolische Symbol., Leipzig, 1894-1900), agree that the present Apostles' Creed represents a formula which took shape in the Apostolic Age and was unin- fluenced by Gnosticism, which Protean heresy first became formidable about a. d. 130. And as regards organization, we know that the episcopate was a fully recognized institution in the time of Ignatius (c. 110), whilst the Canon of New Testament Scripture, the final establishment of which was undoubtedly helped by Gnosticism, was in process of recognition even in Apostolic tines. St. Peter (assuming the Second Epistle to be hisi classifies St. Paul's Epistles with the "other Scriptures" (II Pet., iii. Hi), and St. Poly- carp, early in the second century, quotes as Scripture nil t those thirteen Pauline documents- Concerning the "'union of the Gospel with the Greek spirit" which, according to Hatch and Har- nack. resulted in such profound modifications of the former, we may admit many of the statements made, without drawing from them the rationalistic infer- ences. We readily grant that Greek thought and Greek culture had thoroughly permeated the society into which Christianity was born. Alexander's con- quests had brought about a diffusion of Creek ideals throughout the Easl . The Jews were dispersed west- wards, both from Palestine and from the towns of the Captivity, and established in colonies in the chief
cities of the empire, especially in Alexandria. The
extent of this dispersion may be gathered from Acts,
ii, 9-11. Greek became the language of commerce and
social intercourse, and Palestine itself, more particu-
larly Galilee, was to a great extent hellenized. The
Jewish Scriptures were best known in a Greek version,
and the last additions to the Old Testament — the
Book of Wisdom and the Second Book of Machabees
— were entirely composed in that tongue. In addi-
tion to this peaceful permeation of the Hebraic by the
Greek genius, formal efforts were made from time to
time, both in the political and the philosophical sphere
to hcllenize the Jews altogether.
It is with the latter attempt that we are concerned ; for the writings of Philo, its chief and earliest advo- cate, coincided with the birth of Christianity. Philo was a Jew of Alexandria, well versed in Greek philos- ophy and literature, and at the same time a devout believer in the Old Testament revelation. The gen- eral purpose of his principal writings was to show that the admirable wisdom of the Greeks was contained in substance in the Jewish Scriptures, and his method was to read allegory into the simple narratives of the Pentateuch. To the pure and certain monotheism of Judaism he wedded various ideas taken from Plato and the Stoics, trying thus to solve the problem, with which all philosophy is ultimately confronted, how to bridge the gulf between mind ami matter, the infinite and the finite, the absolute and the conditioned. Philo's writings were, no doubt, widely known amongst the Jews, both at home and abroad, at the time when the Apostles began to preach, but it is ex- tremely unlikely that the latter, who were not edu- cated men, were acquainted with them. Not until the conversion of St. Paul and the beginning of his apostolate can Christianity be said to have come, in the mind of one of its chief exponents, into immediate contact with Greek religious and philosophical theo- ries. St. Paul was learned, not only in Hebrew, but also in Hellenistic lore, and a singularly apt instrument in the design of Providence, on account of his Jewish origin and education, his Greek learning, and his Roman citizenship, to aid Christianity to throw off the swaddling-bands of its infancy and go forth to the conquest of the nations. But whilst recognizing this providential dispensation in the election of St. Paul, we cannot, in face of his own express and emphatic testimony, go on to assert that he universalized Chris- tianity, as Philo attempted to universalize Judaism, by adding to its ethical content the merely natural religion of the Greek thinkers or his own more sub- lime and pure conceptions. In one of his earliest letters, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul rebukes their factious spirit, whereby some of them had styled themselves partisans of Apollos, a learned Alexandrian, and repudiates again and again that very attempt to make Christianity plausible by trick- ing it out in the garb of current speculations. "But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness" (1 Cor., i, 23; see chaps, i and ii, passim, and Col., ii, 8). St. Paul, at any rate, was not indebted for his Christ- ology to Philo or his school, and any similarity of terminology which may occur in the works of the two authors may quite reasonably be ascribed to the meta- phors already embodied in the language they both used.
More insistence has been laid, perhaps, on the re- semblance between the Christology set forth by St. John in the opening chapters of his Gospel and in the Apocalypse, and the Logos theories which Philo elab orated," and which he is said to have taken from Greek sources. If he did so, we may remark, he neglected others older and Dearer to hand, for the conception of a Divine Word of Cod, by which the Deity enters into relation with tie' created universe, is by no means exclusively or originally Greek. The
