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From The Contemporary Review. ORIGEN AND THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY.*

I.

The object of this and a following paper is to indicate some features in the second of these victories, the victory of thought. And, before going further, we would ask the reader to observe that this victory of thought is the second, and not the first, in

involves a principle. The Christian victory of common life was wrought out in silence and patience and nameless agonies. It was the victory of the soldiers and not of the captains of Christ's army. But in due time another conflict had to be sustained, not by the masses, but by great men, the consequence and the completion of that which had gone before.

THE progress of Christianity can best be represented as a series of victories. But when we speak of victories we imply re-order of accomplishment. The succession sistance, suffering, loss: the triumph of a great cause, but the triumph through effort and sacrifice. Such in fact, has been the history of the faith: a sad and yet a glorious succession of battles, often hardly fought, and sometimes indecisive, between the new life and the old life. We know that the struggle can never be ended in this visible order; but we know also that more of the total powers of humanity, and It is with the society as with the individmore of the fulness of the individual manual. The discipline of action precedes the are brought from age to age within the effort of reason. The work of the many domain of the truth. Each age has to prepares the medium for the subtler operasustain its own part in the conflict, and tions of the few. So it came to pass that the retrospect of earlier successes gives to the period during which this second conthose who have to face new antagonists flict of the faith was waged was, roughly and to occupy new positions, patience and speaking, from the middle of the second the certainty of hope. to the middle of the third century.

In this respect the history of the first three centuries- the first complete period, and that a period of spontaneous evolution in the Christian body is an epitome or a figure of the whole work of the faith. It is the history of a threefold contest between Christianity and the powers of the Old World, closed by a threefold victory. The Church and the Empire started from the same point and advanced side by side. They met in the market and the house; they met in the discussions of the schools; they met in the institutions of political government; and in each place the Church was triumphant. In this way Christianity asserted, once for all, its sovereign power among men by the victory of common life, by the victory of thought, by the victory of civil organization. These first victories contain the promise of all that later ages have to reap.

* A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the chief of his Opinions.. 1661. By G. RUST,

afterwards Bishop of Dromore.

HUET, P.D. (Bishop of Avranches+1721): Orige

niana, 1668.

SCHNITZER, K.F.: Origenes ueber die Grundlehren
der Glaubenswissenschaft, 1835.
THOMASIUS, G.: Origenes, 1837.
REDEPENNING, E. R.: Origenes, 1841.

HUBER, J.: Philosophie d. Kirchenväter, 1859.

This period, from the accession of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161) to the accession of Valerian (A.D. 253) was for the Gentile world a period of unrest and exhaustion, of ferment and of indecision. The time of great hopes and creative minds was gone. The most conspicuous men were, with few exceptions, busied with the past. There is not among them a single writer who can be called a poet. They were lawyers, or antiquarians, or commentators, or grammarians, or rhetoricians. One indeed, the greatest of all, Galen, would be ranked, perhaps, in modern times, as a "positivist." Latin literature had almost ceased to exist: even the meditations of an emperor were in Greek. The fact is full of meaning. Greek was the language not of a people, but of the world. Local beliefs had lost their power. Even old Rome ceased to exercise an unquestioned moral supremacy. Men strove to be cosmopolitan. They strove vaguely after a unity in which the scattered elements of ancient experience should be harmonized. The effect can be seen both in the policy of statesmen and in the speculations of philosophers, in Marcus Aurelius, or Alexander Severus, or Decius, no less than in Plotinus or

The inhabitants are most seditious, inconstant, insolent: the city is wealthy and productive, seeing that no one lives there in idleness.

...

Some make glass, others make paper. The lame have their occupation; the blind follow a craft; even the crippled lead a busy life. Money is their god. Christians, Jews, and Gentiles combine unanimously in the worship of this deity. . . ."

Porphyry. As a necessary consequence, | confident in their resources, and trusting the teaching of the Bible accessible in to the future. Greek began to attract serious attention We have a picture of the people from among the heathen. The assailants of an imperial pen. The emperor Hadrian, Christianity, even if they affected conempt, who himself entered the lists with the showed that they were deeply moved by professors at the Museum,* has left in a its doctrines. The memorable saying of private letter a vivid account of the imNumenius, "What is Plato but Moses pression which they produced upon him as speaking in the language of Athens?" he saw them from the outside. "There shows at once the feeling after spiritual is" [at Alexandria], he writes,† no ruler sympathy which began to be entertained, of the synagogue among the Jews, no and the want of spiritual insight in the rep- Samaritan, no Christian, who is not also resentatives of Gentile thought. Though an astrologer, a soothsayer, a trainer. there is no evidence that Numenius studied or taught at Alexandria, his words express the form of feeling which prevailed there. Nowhere else were the characteristic tendencies of the age more marked than in that marvellous city. Alexandria had been from its foundation a meeting-place of the East and West-of old and new. the home of learning, of criticism, of syncretism. It presented a unique example in the Old World of that mixture of races One element in this confusion, indicated which forms one of the most important by Hadrian, is too remarkable to be passed features of modern society. Indians, Jews, over without remark. The practice of Greeks, Romans, met there on common magic, which gained an evil prominence in ground. Their characteristic ideas were the later Alexandrine schools, was already discussed, exchanged, combined. The ex- coming into vogue. Celsus compared the tremes of luxury and asceticism existed miracles of the Lord with "the feats of side by side. Over all the excitement and those who have been taught by Egypturmoil of the recent city rested the solemn tians." ‡ Such a passion, even in its shadow of Egypt. The thoughtful Alex- grosser forms, is never without some moral, andrine inherited, in the history of count- we may perhaps say, some spiritual, imporless ages, sympathy with a vast life. For tance. Its spread at this crisis can hardly him, as for the priest who is said to have be misinterpreted. There was a longing rebuked the pride of Solon, the annals of among men for some sensible revelation other nations were but episodes in a greater of the unseen; and a conviction that such drama in which he played his part with a a revelation was possible. Even Origen full consciousness of its grandeur. The appears to admit the statement that demons pyramids and the tombs repeated to him were vanquished by the use of certain the reproof of isolated assumption often names which lost their virtue if translated,§ quoted from Plato by Christian apolo- and he mentions one interesting symptom gists: * "You Greeks are always children; of the general excitement which belongs you have no doctrine hoary with age." to the better side of the feeling. "Many," While it was so with the thoughtful Alex- he says, "embraced Christianity, as andrines, others found in restless scepti- were, against their will. Some spirit cism or fitful superstition or fanatical turned their mind (rò hyeμоVLкóv) suddenly passion, frequent occasions for violence. from hating the Word to being ready to All alike are eager for movement, sympa- die for it, and showed them visions either thizing with change, easily impressed and bold in giving utterance to their feelings,

*Comp. Potter, CLEM. ALEX. Strom. i. 15, p. 356.

*Spartianus, Hadr. p. 10.

† Vopiscus, Saturn. c. 8.
Orig., c. Cels. i. 68.

§ Ibid., v. 45.

it

waking or sleeping." * One who is reck- | How did rational creatures come into oned among the martyrs whom Origen being? How, that is, can we reconcile the himself trained furnishes an example.t co-existence of the absolute and the Basilides, a young soldier, shielded a finite? And again: How did rational creatChristian maiden from insult on her way to ures fall? how, that is, can we conceive of death. She promised to recompense him. the origin of evil? Or, indeed, are not A few days after he confessed himself a both these questions in the end one? and Christian. He said that Potamiæna, such is not limitation itself evil? To some perwas the maiden's name, had appeared to haps such questions may appear to be him three days after her martyrdom, and wholly foreign to true human work, but placed a crown upon his head, and as- they were the questions which were uppersured him that he, in answer to her most in men's minds at the time of which prayers, would shortly share her victory. we speak; and for the sake of clearness it So then it was that argumentative scepti- will be well to distinguish at once the three cism and stern dogmatism, spiritualism, as different types of answers which are renit would be called at the present day, and dered to them, two partial and tentative, materialistic pantheism, each in its meas- answering respectively to the East and ure a symptom of instability and spiritual West, the gnostic and neo-Platonic: the unrest, existed side by side at Alexandria third provisionally complete for man, the in the second century, just as may be the Christian. The differences will be most case in one of our cities now, where the clearly seen if we refer the other answers many streams of life converge. But in all to the Christian as a standard of comparithis variety there was a point of agreement, son. As against the gnostic, then, the as there is, I believe, among ourselves. Christian maintained that the universe was Speculation was being turned more and created, not by any subordinate or rival more in a theological direction. Philoso- power, but by an act of love of the one phers were learning to concentrate their Infinite God, and that evil is not inherent thoughts on questions which lie at the ba- in matter but due to the will of free creatsis of religion. In very different schools ures. As against the neo-Platonist, he they were listening for the voice, as Plato maintained the separate, personal existsaid, "of some divine Word." ence of God as one to be approached and worshipped, who thinks and loves; the reality of a redemption consequent on the incarnation; the historical progress of the sum of life to an appointed end. As against both he maintained that God is immanent in the world, and separate though not alien from it: that the world was originally and essentially good: that it has been and is disturbed by unseen forces: that man is the crown and end of creation.

It is easy to see what was the natural office of Christianity in such a society. Alexandria offered an epitome of that Old World which the faith had to quicken in all its parts. The work had been already recognized. Early in the second century manifold attempts were made there to shape a Christian solution of the enigmas of life which thought and experience had brought into a definite form. The result was seen in the various systems of gnosticism, which present in a strange and repellent dialect many anticipations of the transcendentalism of the last generation. Such speculations were premature and ended in failure; but they rendered an important service to Christian philosophy. They fixed attention upon those final problems of life, of which a religion which claims to be universal must take account.

* c. Cels. i. 46.

† Euseb. H, E. vi. 5.

And yet further: gnostic and Platonist despaired of the world and of the mass of men. Both placed safety in flight: they knew of no salvation for the multitude. The Christian, on the other hand, spoke, argued, lived, with the spirit of a conqueror who possessed the power of transfiguring to nobler service what he was charged to subdue. Others sought for an abstraction which was beyond and above all comprehension and all worship, an abstraction which ever escaped from them: