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THE CHURCH HISTORY OF THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES. VOL. I. Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924092345531 THE CHURCH HISTORY OF THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES. DK. FERDINAND CHRISTIAN RAUR, Sometime PKorEssoK of Theology in the University or Tubinoen". THIRD EDITION. %ht 'translation txam ih.t ®£rman fliiteb bg THE EEV. ALLAN MENZIES, B.D. Minister of Abernyte. VOL. I. WILLIAMS AND NOEGATE, 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON; AND 20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 1878. CONTENTS. PART FIEST. PAGE The Entrance of Christianity into the World : Primitive Gli/ristianity, . . . . 1-43 The Universalism of the Eoman Empire as a preparation for Christianity, . . 1-5 Christianity and the old Eeligions, 6-10 Greek Philosophy, 10-17 Judaism, ..... 17-23 Primitive Christianity : The Gospels, 23-26 The original Christian Principle, 26-33 The Kingdom of God, . . . 33-36 The Person of Jesus — The Messianic Idea, 37-41 The Death and Eesurrection of Jesus, . 41-43 PAET SECOND. Christianity as a universal principle of Salvation : the conflict between Paulinism and Judaism, and its adjustment in the idea of the Catholic Church, 44-183 I. The Conflict, .... 44-98 The Church of Jerusalem and Stephen, . . 44-46 Paul the Apostle of the Gentiles, and the older Apostles, 46-55 b CONTENTS. PAGE The Apostle Paul and his opponents, . 56-65 In Galatia, ..... 56-60 In Corinth, ... . 60-65 The Epistle to the Eomans, . . 65-73 The last journey to Jerusalem, . . 73-76 The height of the Conflict, . 76-98 The Gospel of Luke, . 77-82 The Paulinism of Marcion, . 82-84 The Judaism of the Apocalypse, . 84-87 Papias and Hegesippus, . . . 87-89 The Ebionites of the Clementines, . 89 Simon Magus, 90-98 II. The Eeconciliation, . 99-152 Different views on the subject, . 99-104 Points of the Reconciliation, . 105-106 Baptism in place of Circumcision, . 106-109 Peter the Apostle of the Gentiles, . . 109-111 Influence of Jewish Christianity on the forma- tion of the Church, . . . ] 12-114 Mediating tendency of the post-apostolic works included in the Canon, . 114-136 The Epistle to the Hebrews, . 114-121 The Epistles to the Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians, , 122-128 The Pastoral Epistles, . . . 1 28 The Epistle of James and the First Epistle of Peter, 128-131 The Acts of the Apostles, . . . . 131-136 The Apostolic Fathers, . . . 137-142 Justin Martyr, .... . 142-147 Peter and Paul united, . . . 147-152 mN'TENTS. vii PAGE III. Johanniue Christianity, . . 153-]83 The Apostle John. The writer of the Apocalypse aud the Evangelist, . 153-155 The Gospel of John, 155-181 The complete rupture with Judaism, 155-159 Christ the true Passover, 159-163 The Paschal Controversy, 163-177 The higher form of the Christian consciousness, 177-180 Eetrospect. The Ebionites, . 180-183 PAET THIKD. Christianity as an ideal principle of the world ; and as a real phenomenon existing under historical conditions ; or, Gnosticism aiid Montanism, and their Antithesis, the Catholic Church, . 185 Gnosticism and Montanism, . 185-255 I. Gnosticism, . 185-244 Notion and Essence of Gnosticism, 185-190 Its Origin, .... 190-193 Its main elements : spirit and matter, the Demiurgus and Christ, . . 193-199 Different sects, forms, and systems of Gnos- ticism, 199-236 Cerinthus, Simon Magus, the Ophites, the Perates, ... . . 199-204 Valentinus, 204-213 Basilides, 213-222 Marcion, . . ■ 223-228 The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, . 228-235 The Three Types, .... 235-236 Docetism, . . . 237-244 GONTEiTTi^ PAGE II. Montanism, ..... 245-256 Gnosticism and Montauisni, 245 The Belief in the Parousia, 246-248 Chiliasm and Prophecy, . 248-250 Eeactionary Tendency, 250-255 Origin of Montanism, 255-256 PEEFACE TO THE EIEST EDITION. A DESiEE has existed for some time and in various quarters to have the results which have been emerging from the most recent critical investigations in the field of primitive Church History brought together in a compendious form. And such a work cannot fail to promote the success of these investigations. On this field of historical inquiry, which requires to be again and again, and more and more thoroughly, discussed, there are many points which, when looked at in themselves, appear unimportant or of doubtful certainty, and which can only be seen in their true light when placed in their proper connection in the history, where the unity of the whole supports and holds fast the parts. This is the chief object of the following work. But this is not its only object ; it is by no means a mere repetition of views which have already been put forward. Even in those sections where, from the nature of the case, little more was necessary than to recapitulate and sum up the main points of my earlier investigations into particular questions, I have not only examined and sifted the materials afresh, and placed the questions under new points of view, but I have also enriched the discussion by the new contributions afforded both by recent examinations of the sources, and by sources which have been recently discovered. Of these latter I have chiefly, to mention the PMlosophoumena, known under the name of Origen which are of great importance in connection with the history X FKEFACE TO THE FIBUT EDITION. of Gnosticism and of the earliest Christian doctrine ; and extensive use is here made of them for the first time in the discussion of these subjects. Anotlier Gnostic work to which little attention has hitherto been paid, but which is also a very remarkable one, is Pistis Sophia ; and it also has been used here. The principal thing to be mentioned, however, is, that in addition to the work of arrangement and completion which had to be done for these earlier parts, I have in the two last sections of this work advanced beyond the line of my previous works on the apostolic and post- apostolic age. There are certain other sides of the genesis of the Church whicli have to be taken into consideration in a general description of the Christian Church of the first three centuries, and without which such a description must fall short in completeness and comprehensiveness, as well as in clearness and vividness ; and these sides of the subject have also been set forth in this work. The standpoint which I have occupied for a long series of years is well known. I adhere to it still as firmly and with as sincere conviction as I have always done ; and there is no need at this time to enter into explanations on the subject. In my work which appeared last year, Die Epochen der Kirchlichen Geschicht- schreibung, Tubingen, 1852, I have stated my view regarding the treatment of Church History in general, and the leading principles by which writers of Church History have to be guided. That work may thus be regarded as an introduction to this one, in which accordingly these general considerations are omitted. My stand- point is in one word the purely historical one : namely, that the one thing to be aimed at is to place before ourselves the materials given in the history as they are objectively, and not otherwise, as far as that is possible. How far I may have succeeded in this is not for me to say ; but I am not conscious of having followed any other aim, and this consciousness sufficiently protects me against PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. xi all insinuations, against those perverted and ill-natured judgments which are unfortunately the fashion of a time which cannot see beyond its own limited party interests. It is needless to refer to writings which bear the most evident marks of one-sidedness, and in which the shallow treatment of history is imperfectly concealed by arrogance of tone. No one can possibly ignore the demands which this, the most important period of the history of the Chris- tian Church, still puts forward for historical investigation. It is confessed on all hands that a great task still confronts us here, and that many questions still await a more satisfactory solution than has hitherto been found for them. Even if we take the best and most accepted works on the liistory of primitive Christianity, and examine them with a view to see how far they succeed in com- bining the historical materials which are of so heterogeneous a nature, and have to be collected from such diiferent quarters, to the unity of a whole, how isolated and fragmentary, how destitute of inner principle and motive, how vague and dim do they appear in many respects ! And, as we might expect, this want of unity becomes the more apparent the further we go back to those points with regard to which it is first of all required of the historian that he should have made up his mind and formed a definite opinion ; since, without definite views with regard to them, no historical conception of the way in which Christianity grew into the Church is possible at all. Every attempt to obtain accuracy and depth in the foundation, which is the first requirement of the historian, and which no one can lay otherwise than as history herself has laid it in her own unchangeable truth, to bring connection, proportion, and unity into the whole woof of the narrative ; to separate, accord- ing to their different character, the various elements which here co-operate, and the moving forces and principles, the product of which is the result of the first three centuries ; to trace the action xii PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. of these forces and principles upon each other, and to unite, as far as possible into one harmonious picture, all the individual features which belong to the character of a time so rich in life and movement, — every attempt to do all this must, if it at all fulfils the first require- ments for the discharge of such a task, derive its justification from no other source than from itself. It is from this point of view that I would have this work judged by those who are sufficiently impartial, and sufficiently acquainted with the subject, to appre- ciate the importance of the attempt here made. Whether I shall afterwards go further on the road I have here begun, I cannot yet distinctly say. It is possible that I may, while not attempting a detailed history, yet indicate the points which my studies and investigations, so far as they have gone, lead me to think most important, in order to follow the general course of the development of the Christian Church. In any case the present work forms a history in itself. Tdbingen, Sept. 1853. PART rmsT. THE ENTRANCE OF CHKISTIANITY INTO THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD : PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY. In no field of historical study are the whole scope and charac- ter of the successive events of which the history is composed so largely determined by the starting-point from which the move- ment issues, as in the history of the Christian Church : nowhere therefore does so much depend on the conception which we form of that first point with which the whole historical development begins. The historian who approaches his subject imbued with the faith of the Church finds himself confronted at the very out- set with the most stupendous of miracles, the fact which lies at the root of Christianity being in his eyes that the only-begotten Son of God descended from the eternal throne of the Godhead to the earth, and became man in the womb of the Virgin. He who regards this as simply and absolutely a miracle, steps at once out- side of all historical connection. Miracle is an absolute beginning, and since as such it must needs qualify all that follows, the whole series of phenomena which fall within the range of Christianity must bear the same miraculous character. Historical connection having once been severed at the outset, the same interruption of the historical process is equally possible at any further point. Thus, on the part of those who are interested in the scientific study of history, the desire has naturally arisen to show how the miracle of the absolute beginning may itself be regarded as a link of the chain of history, and to resolve it, so far as the case admits, into 2 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. its natural elements. This has often been attempted, and the attempts made in this direction have been subjected to many and various criticisms ; but whatever our judgment on this point may be, it cannot really alter the nature of our task. Though we go no further than to ask, why the miracle with which the history of Christianity begins was brought to bear on the world's history at this particular point of time, j'^et we have raised a series of questions which can only be answered by historical treatment. Our first task, then, in a history of Christianity or of the Christian Church, must be to place ourselves at the point where Christianity enters into the stream of the world's history, and to gain a general idea of its relation to the other elements of the history of the time. With this end we have first of all to ask, whether there is anything in Chris- tianity which we may recognise as, on the one hand, belonging to the essence of that religion, and, on the other, expressive of the general character of the age in which it appeared ? If any such points of contact can be distinctly recognised, a ray of light will at once be shed on the historical origin of Christianity. Now some of the early Christian apologists considered it to be a fact of great significance that their religion had appeared pre- cisely at the time at which the Roman empire arrived at the summit of its power, and came to embrace the whole world in its dominion. All that they inferred from this was, that even in the eyes of the heathen a religion could not but appear auspicious whose epoch coincided with the culmination of the prosperity of the Eoman empire.^ Even on this ground the coincidence of Chris- tianity with the universal empire of Eome appeared to them too remarkable to be ascribed to chance. The true point of contact, however, between Christianity and the Empire is the universal tendency which is common to both. It is a consideration of real significance for the history of the world, that the epoch which saw the Eoman empire complete the union of all the nations of the world as it then was in a universal monarchy, also witnessed the 1 Cf. the Fragment of the Apology of Melito of Sardes, given by Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. iv. 26 ; and Origen, contra Celsum, ii. 30. POLITICAL UNIVERSALISM. 3 beginning of the religion in which all religious particularism disappeared and gave way to universalism. Christianity thus stood, in respect of its universalism, at the stage which had already been attained by the power and genius of Eome in its world-wide monarchy. In fact we may say that the time had come when the human spirit was to make this momentous advance. As the barriers and divisions between different countries and nationalities were dissolved before the ever- advancing power of the Eomans, and their general subjection to a common head caused men to be aware of the unity in which their differences disappeared, the whole spiritual consciousness was proportionately enlarged, and found itself led more and more to disregard the distinctions and exclusive- ness which separated men from each other, and to lay hold of what was universal. The general tendency of the age towards an all-embracing unity, in which all that was separate and exclusive might be taken up and disappear, found its greatest and most imposing expression in the universalism of the Eoman empire. But this universalism was the very goal to which the history of the world had been tending for centuries before. The conquests of Alexander the Great had opened to the "West the portals of the East, and the new routes to the East had developed an active traffic which brought men of all races in contact with each other, and thus diffused the Greek language and culture over the whole of the known world. It was but another step in the same path of historical development when the dominion of the Eomans cast over the nations of the world the new bond of political unity. The forms which made this unity possible had never existed before : it arose on the broad basis of Eoman civilisation and law, and operated through the vast and well-articulated organism of the Eoman state. The nations thus found themselves placed in relations to each other which tended inevitably not only to melt away the stiffness and unsociableness of their previous attitude to one another, but even to obliterate all merely national or indivi- dual distinctions, and to produce a broad sense of universality in which minor differences ceased to be felt. The union was not a 4 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. merely political one : it also bound the different races of the world together in a new bond of mental sympathy. The influence which was working to this end was not to be escaped even by that race which had always been most broadly distinguished from the rest by its peculiar national character, and which had always maintained its own national peculiarities most obstinately and persistently. By the double destruction of their state the Jews were cast out among other nations throughout the wide world. When the successors of Alexander founded their kingdoms, the Jews became an important element of the new population which arose in these new towns, which were to be the chief centres of the political and intellectual intercourse of difi'erent races. Here they became Hellenists, and assimilated all the various elements of Greek culture. Finally they were drawn into the ever- widening net of the Eoman dominion : and so it came about that Christianity, arising as it did on Jewish soil, stood even at its birthplace in contact with the power that was destined to be its forerunner on the road to the conquest of the world. Thus the universalism of Christianity necessarily presupposes tlie universalism of the Eoman empire. But in considering how these two great powers now came into contact with each other, we must not rest content with the ordinary view, which starting from the standpoint of teleology, considering merely the outward circum- stances and relations amidst which Christianity entered into the world, sees in them the special favour of divine Providence, which, it is thought, could have selected no fitter time than this for the accomplishment of its designs. In this view the great fact in connection with the subject is thought to be nothing more than that the opening up of so many new routes for traffic facilitated the diffusion of Christianity throughout the provinces of the Eoman empire, and that the protection of the Eoman police and civil order removed many hindrances which might otherwise have obstructed the progress of the messengers of the gospel.^ ^ Of. Origen, in loc. cit. To the objection of Celsus, that the sun first displays himself by illuminating all other things, and that the Son of God ought to have POLITICAL UNIVERSALISM. 5 But the bond of connection between the religion and the polity is a much deeper and more intimate one than this, and is to be looked for in the general spiritual movement of the time of which both are manifestations. "What we have to keep in mind is, that Christianity never could have been that general form of the religious consciousness which it is, had not the whole develop- ment of the world's history, up to the time when it appeared, been preparing for it. First came the general intellectual culture which the Greeks made the common property of the world, and then the Eoman rule uniting the nations, and introducing political institu- tions, which served as a basis for universal civilisation. By these agencies the barriers raised by national sentiment had been broken down, and many differences softened which had tended to keep the nations apart from each other, not only in their outward relations, but in the inner sphere of thought and feeling. The universalism of Christianity could never have become a part of the general consciousness of the nations, had not political univer- salism prepared the way for it. The universalism of Christianity is essentially nothing but that universal form of consciousness at which the development of mankind had arrived at the time when Christianity appeared. displayed himself Id tlie same way, Origen answers, that such had been his mani- festation. " Righteousness arose in his days, and the fulness of peace was at hand from the moment of his birth : while God was preparing the nations for his doctrine, and providing that all men should obey the one Koman emperor : lest, if there were a number of kings and nations strange to each other, it might be more difl&cult for the Apostles to do what Jesus commanded them, saying, Go, teach all nations. It is well known, however, that Jesus was born under the reign of Augustus, who had bound together in one empire the great multitude of the dispersed inhabitants of the world. A plurahty of kingdoms would have been a hindrance to the free dissemination of the doctrine of Jesus throughout the whole world ; both from what we have said above, and especially because men would have been obliged to make wars for the defence of their particular countries : as had been the case before the times of Augustus and even earlier, when war was unavoidable between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, and in the case of other nations also. How then could this peaceful doctrine which does not even allow men to revenge the injuries of their enemies, ever have made way, had not the affairs of the world been composed, at the time of the advent of Jesus, to a more peacefid state 2 " 6 CEUBGS HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. Thus, when we place ourselves at the point at which Christianity enters into the world's history, and inquire into its general his- torical bearing, we find that it is a universal form of the religious consciousness which answers to the spirit of the age, and for which the history of the nations had long been preparing. But how comes Christianity to be this universal form of religion ? Its claim to be so called is founded on the fact, that it has more and more pressed back the other religions, resolving them into itself, and has risen above them to the most wide-spread dominion over the world. As against those special forms of religion it is therefore the absolute religion. But what is it in Christianity that gives it its absolute character ? The first and obvious answer to this question is, that Christianity is elevated above the defects and limitations, the one-sidedness and finiteness, which constitute the particularism of other forms of religion. It is not polytheistic like Paganism : it does not, like Judaism, attach itself to outward rites and ordinances, nor identify itself with the positive authority of a purely traditional religion. To speak broadly, it is a more spiritual form of the religious consciousness than these are, and stands above them. This, however, is saying very little: this is self-evident as soon as we begin to compare Christianity with the two other religions which it had to encounter. When Christi- anity first made itself felt as a power of permanent importance, Judaism and Paganism had long fallen into decay. They had lost their deeper application to the religious life of their peoples, and had become mere external forms, devoid of substance and vitality. Paganism had sunk into the mindless religion of the vulgar. With all educated men belief in the old gods had become more or less disconnected with the religious feelings. The myths in which the simpler faith of the earlier world had found expression for its fairest religious intuitions, seemed now mere fables, in which there was no spiritual bond^ to join form and contents in harmonious union : or they were mere symbols to represent ideas which had arisen on a totally different soil. What alone continued to engage men's interest in the maintenance of the national religion, was. THJB OLD BELiaiONS. 7 that as the religion of the State it was closely intertwined with all the functions of the national life, and could only with great difficulty have been separated from them. Judaism, no doubt, had a deeper religious foundation to rest on. To the Jew the religion of his fathers was never a mere name : there was no failure of the veneration with which the worship of the temple, with its vast array of elaborate ceremonies, was regarded. But the appearance of numerous sects and parties, at variance with one another on the most fundamental questions, showed unmistakably that here also the national religion was tending to dissolution. These two religions had thus been making way for a new religion ; and if we look at the subject from the teleological point of view, we cannot but hold it to have been by the special arrangement of divine Providence that Christianity appeared precisely at the time at which there was so great a void to be filled up in the religious life of the ancient world. But this view fails, as much as that to which we formerly referred, to give us any further insight into the connection in which Christianity, as a new form of the religious consciousness, stands to the previous development of religion. Now the main connection between the old religions and Chris- tianity has generally been taken to consist in the absence from the former of what Christianity supplied. In many respects, it is said there is a positive antagonism between it and them. But apart from this, we may find the point of connection in the religious feelings and cravings which the old religions failed to satisfy. The unbelief and superstition which were present in Paganism and Judaism were certainly opposed to Christianity; yet there were elements present in that unbelief and superstition which facilitated a transition to Christianity, arising as they did from a state of feeling which was very favourable to its reception. There were various kinds of unbelief. There was an unbelief which sprang from a craving for belief which received no satisfac- tion from all that the philosophy and religion of the old world gave. The human heart has a desire which wiU not be denied 8 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. to know and to have intercourse with the supernatural. The prevalence of an all-denying scepticism does not quench the desire, but rather intensifies if. The same was the case with the correla- tive of unbelief, superstition. At the root of much of it there lay a need which looked for satisfaction, and which could find it only in Christianity, the need of deliverance from the deep-felt schism within, and of atonement with an unknown God. This was what men were seeking, whether or not they were consciously aware of it.-^ Here we are referred to the immediate religious sense as the ground why men were prepared to receive Christianity. Now Christianity indubitably has its roots, as every other religion has, in this primary ground of all religious life. But to refer Christianity to nothing but this is no explanation at all of the general question : this is merely a vague and general speculation how individuals might be affected. The question is not what peculiar frame of mind or position of circumstances might dispose this or that individual to adopt Christianity. We have to regard Christianity not as it affected individuals, but objectively, as an influence affecting the world. It must have had some connection with the previous religious development of the world, not merely in the way of difference, but also in the way of similarity and of adopting what it found. And we have to inquire what this connection was. "We have seen that the universal tendency of Christianity presupposed the universalism to which the general consciousness of the age had broadened out under the influence of the Eoman empire. Now, if this be the case, it must be no less true that those elements of Christianity which make it an absolute as well as a universal religion stood in the same vital and necessary connection with the previous religious and spiritual development of the world. Here, however, it is of the first importance not to take up any narrow or one-sided notion of what the absolute character of Christianity consists in. Some ^ Compare Neauder's General History of the Christian Keligion and Church, i. 5, sq. and 46. (Bohn's translation.) THE OLD RELIGIONS. 9 have thought to find it in the fact that Christianity gives so full and welcome a satisfaction to man's longing for belief, or in the fact that it is a supernatural revelation, a system of universal efficacy for the reconciliation of man with God, or in the fact that it places before us in the person of its founder one who is the Son of God and the God-man, in the sense in which the Church uses these words. But this only leads to the question what there is in these features of Christianity to place it so high above the old religions. For in one way or another these elements of religion were believed to be present in them all. Every religion claimed to be a super- natural revelation ; there was no want of arrangements for bringing about the reconciliation of man with God, and the communion of man with God was believed before Christianity to be provided for by beings whose functions were nearly the same as those of the Christian Son of God. What is it, then, that gives Christianity its peculiar and specific superiority above all that more or less resembled it in the ancient world ? Again, Christianity may be regarded under various points of view, each of which will only exhibit to us one of its various sides. But what is Christianity itself ? What common unity underlies these different aspects, and combines them into a whole ? We answer in a word, its spirituality. We find Christianity to be far more free than any other religion from every- thing merely external, sensuous, or material. It lays its foundations more deeply in the inmost essence of man's nature and in the principles of the moral consciousness. It knows, as it says of itself, no worship of God but the worship in spirit and in truth. When we inquire what constitutes the absolute character of Christianity, we must point to its spirituality. In this wide view of the absolute nature of Christianity, let us inquire what points of contact it pre- sents with the movement prior to or contemporary with its appear- ance. What features do we find in the general advance of the human mind during those ages that may be said to be akin to Christianity, and to have been essentially preparing the way for its reception ? Decay and dissolution, as we have said, had completely seized 10 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. on the old religions. At the time when they came in contact with Christianity, no one who had become aware of their imper- fection and finiteness, or who had seen them as they really were, could escape the sense of an infinite void, or fail to feel a craving for a contentment which nothing in the whole ra,nge of these religions could give, and a need for something positive to which the religious instinct might attach itself But what had so thoroughly broken up the old faiths ? They were crumbling into ruins before Christianity came to touch them. Some other power must have been at work on them which was stronger than they. It is a mistake to think that ages of transition, like that immediately preceding the appearance of Christianity, are simply times of decay and disintegration, when all spiritual and religious life is completely moribund. At such a time the old forms in which religion used to move do indeed decay. What used to fill them with life and reality departs from them, till the hollow forms alone are left. But the very cause of this process is, that the spirit, whose religious feelings the forms once served to express, has expanded and risen beyond them. Where an old system decays we may be sure it is because the new truth which is to succeed it is already there ; the old would not decay if the new had not arrived, be it but in germ, and been long labouring to undermine and eat away the existing structure. It may be long before a new kind of spiritual life takes such shape as to arrest the notice of the world. But the plastic spirit is active all the while, though imobserved; the leaven is working deep out of sight, and the unresting vital process cannot be stayed, but goes evenly and regularly forward, in its successive stages, until it has produced a new creation. The decay of Paganism is not to be dated from the time when Christianity appeared, and can in no way be said to have been brought about by Christianity. It had been in course of progress ever since Greek religion began to be accompanied by Greek philosophy. Not only did this philosophy deal with the popular mythical beliefs in the way of critical reflection, and so place itself GREEK FRILOSOPHY. 11 above them, but it created a new world which arose in total independence of the popular faith, in the realm of pure thought. In this world the spirit which could no longer find its adequate expression in the myths of the popular religion, found a new sphere for its thought and intuition. Thus, next to the religious teaching of the Old Testament, Greek philosophy forms the most important spiritual antecedent of Christianity. And its relation to Chris- tianity has always been one of chief points taken up in the attempts that have been made to estimate the true position of Christianity in history. But here also it has been customary to urge the negative rather than the positive side of the relation ; and only in the case of Platonism is it perceived that along with much which was defective and one-sided it possessed elements which prepared the way for Christianity. It spiritualised religious thought; it turned away from the many gods of Paganism, and pointed to a certain spiritual Divine unity above them; it struck out many ideas which are akin to Christianity, as that of a redemption, in the sense of deliverance from the blind power of nature which opposes the divine ; it gave the elevating conception of a divine life which stood above the influence of the Nature-powers. Much more unfavourable judgments are passed not only on Epicureanism but even on Stoicism. It is self-evident, we are told, that a system like the former, offering atheism for theology, and making happiness the highest good, is utterly alien to Christianity. And it is urged that there is the strongest possible contrast between the humility of the believing Christian and the proud self-sufficiency of the Stoic sage. Such indeed must be our judgment, so long as we confine our attention to the points where the contrast is most evident and extreme. But our task is not to attend to mere parti- culars. We have rather to attempt to interpret all the phenomena in question as parts of the great historical development. The question we have to ask is, how Greek philosophy, such as it was from its principal epoch downwards, was related to Christianity ? In how different a light does this question appear when we call to mind the well-known parallel drawn by so many writers between 12 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. Socrates and Christ ! The parallel is certainly not without justice. Christianity closes a movement which arose upon the soil of Pagan religion and philosophy, and the seed of which was sown by Socrates. And if this be the case, then each of the principal forms assumed by Greek philosophy during this interval must have been a step in the preparation for Christianity. An investi- gation of the course taken by Greek thought during this most important period will contribute much to make it clear to us why Christianity entered into the world at this particular time and at no other. Those who hold the essence of Christianity to be its character as a supernatural revelation, can see little need for expatiating over so wide a field in inquiring after its origin. To go back to the epoch of Socrates must seem to them superfluous. But in any case Christianity must be acknowledged to have a genuinely human side; and when we try to form a distinct con- ception of its first beginnings, of the manner in which it made its way into the world and sought to win an entrance to men's hearts, its genuinely human character comes clearly before us. The words in which it first announces itself to the world, its call for fjuerdvoia, its bidding men go into themselves, this at once defines the relation which it takes up towards man, and the stand-point from which it interprets the relation between man and God. It begins with an earnest call to man to direct his gaze within, to turn in to himself, to become acquainted with himself in the deep places of his own self-consciousness. In this way he is to learn what his relation to God is, and what it ought to be, and to become aware of those needs in his moral nature out of which the cry for redemption proceeds, in all their depth and intensity. Looking away from all that is unessential, and asking what is the element in Christianity which makes it a religion in the absolute sense, we find that it rests on man's knowledge of himself as a moral subject. Had not man's moral consciousness been already fuUy developed in all those bearings which lend it its profounder interests, Christianity could not have gained a footing in the world in its peculiar character as an essentially moral religion. GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 13 Now when and how was it that man first recognised himself as a moral being ? It was when he awoke to the idea of himself as a subject, a being essentially distinct from and independent of the world without : when he first grasped the principle of subjec- tivity, that the true standard of thought and action is in the inner life. Socrates marks an epoch, because this step of progress is due to him.^ He first urged, that man should come back to himself, and search his own being : the mind was to withdraw from the outward world, and to concentrate itself on the world within. Thus, occupying himself with the contents of pure thought, man would find himself face to face with the only real and true existences. In the same way, in the practical sphere, by referring virtue to knowledge, by following the command ' know thyself,' and turning the moral consciousness back upon itself, man was to find in the conviction which arose out of his own nature his rule of action. From this point forward we have a long and uninterrupted series of philosophical developments. First the Platonic and Aristotelian theories of knowledge, which aimed at determining the general nature of things, then the ethical systems of the Stoics and Epicureans, and following on the last, the Sceptical and Eclectic movements, in all of which practical interests were more and more preferred to theoretical, and the moral nature of man was regarded in the same light as Christianity regards it, and made the chief object of philosophical reflection. More directly and earnestly than any other schools, the Stoics and Epicureans applied them- selves to discover man's moral end, and the conditions under which it is attained. All those questions to which so many discussions were devoted, concerning the idea of the good, the highest good, the relation of virtue to happiness, the value of moral action, etc., are but the ethical expression of the problem laid before man by Christianity as a question of religion. Divergent as the two systems were, the very opposition between them served to rouse ' Cf. my Essay : Daa Christliche d. Platonismus, oder Socrates und Christus, p. 20 ; in the Drei Abhandlungen, Leipzig, 1875, 247 sq. Zeller: die Philos. d. Griechen, 2d edition, ii. 78 ; p. 100 in Eeichel's translation. 14 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. moral thought. The moral consciousness of the age was so enlarged and educated in every direction by these discussions, that Chris- tianity found the ground prepared on which its higher moral and religious task could be accomplished. Stoicism, on the ground of the strictness and purity of its prin- ciples, may seem to claim an unquestionable superiority over Epicureanism. But it has justly been acknowledged'' that the latter system, leading man away from the outer world, and bidding him seek his highest happiness in the fair humanity of a cultivated mind content with itself, did a useful work ; that by its mildness, no less than Stoicism by its austerity, it contributed to develop and diffuse a free and universal morality. Both schools started from the common leading idea of the post- Aristotelian philosophy — the postulate, that man should withdraw himself within the sphere of his inner consciousness, and seek for his perfect content- ment there. The vocation and happiness of man, according to the one, are found in that submission of the individual to the reason and the law of the universe, which is virtue. According to the other, they consist in independence of all external things, in consciousness of this independence, in the undisturbed enjoy- ment of the life a man has to live, in freedom from pain. Thus, althoiigh by different ways, both sought to reach the same goal, namely, the freedom of the conscious self : and this led them at once to a position which is quite inconsistent with the fundamen- tal religious sentiment of Christianity. The wise man of the Stoics, and the wise man of the Epicureans, are ideals equally strange to Christianity. The common endeavour of the two sys- tems to make man free by bidding him rest on nothing but him- self, to confer upon him, in the infiniteness of his thought and self-consciousness, complete independence of all without him, in- volves both in the same contrast with the Christian feeling of dependence. But even the Stoic saw himself compelled to descend from the height of his moral idealism, and to recognise its limita- 1 Zeller : die Philos. d. Grieohen, ii. 263 ; Stoics and Epicureans (Dr. Reioliers translation), p. 445 sc[. GREEK PEILOSOFRY. 15 tions in tlie presence of practical needs. And as we mark how- Scepticism was the next stage at which Greek philosophy arrived in its development out of these systems, we see that that unbounded freedom of the inward consciousness which they claimed led to nothing but the discovery of the essential limits of knowledge. The opposing tendencies were found to be mutually destructive, knowledge was despaired of, and the mind withdrew into itself. But though drawing back into itself and seeking to suffice for itself without the support of outward positive truth, the mind could hot remain so entirely inactive as not to turn to one alterna- tive or another as the more probable. Thus Scepticism in its turn gave birth to Eclecticism. This mode of thought escaped from the harshness and one-sidedness of the earlier schools by choos- ing the best that it could find, and removing the features that it desired to retain from their logical connection in the systems to which they originally belonged. And we are concerned to notice that Eclecticism readily lent itself to promote the union of religion with practical interests. At the Christian era it was more widely diffused than any other way of thinking, and had grown into a popular philosophy and natural theology. The writings of its chief representatives, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, contain many elements allied to Christianity. Indeed, so much is this the case that their views and doctrines might appear to be something more than merely the approved result of all the ethical discussion that had gone before, as it had learned to meet the practical wants of the age. In reading their writings we seem to be upon the ground of Christian moral and religious teaching. We come upon sentences the Christian tone of which surprises us. The fixed first principle of Eclecticism (which, like other systems, required a standard whereby to test different opinions) is with Cicero, the best known and most popular writer of the school, the immediate consciousness of man, his inner self-assurance, the natural instinct for truth, or innate knowledge. The germs of morality are implanted in us. Nature has not only given us the 16 CHUBCE HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. moral faculty, but has bestowed on us the fundamental ethical con- ceptions, as an original endowment, and prior to any instruction ; our task is merely to work out these innate conceptions. The nearer a man stands to nature the more clearly will these original ideas be reflected in him : it is from children that we learn what is in conformity with nature. The belief in God rests on a like foundation. By virtue of the affinity of the human spirit to God, the knowledge of God is given to us along with the knowledge of ourselves. Man need but recollect his own origin, and he is led to his Creator. Nature itself, therefore, tells us of the existence of God : and the strongest proof of this truth is its universal recognition.' In these few sentences we see clearly traced the outlines of a natural theology, the construction of which was after- wards continued within Christianity and on a genuinely Christian foundation. The view which declares that the consciousness of self is also, and at once, the consciousness of God, will naturally arrive at the conclusion that man's original knowledge is a thing given him from without, and will look to receive in the immediate consciousness itself, but from some source of knowledge higher than our finite selves, the revelation of Deity. It was in such a longing for a higher communication of truth" and an immediate revelation that Greek philosophy finally terminated its course in ISTeo-Platonism. ' Cf. Zeller ii. 585. The natural theology which arose upon the foundation of Stoicism appears in its purest form, and attains its closest analogy to the doctrines of Christianity, in the writings of Seneca. Cf. my dissertation, Seneca und Paulus : das Verhaltniss des Stoicismus zum Christenthum nach den Sehriften Seneca's ; (originally in Hilgenfeld's Ztschr. 1858, p. 161, 441 — now re-published in the " Drei Abhandlungen" cited above). I have there pointed out a peculiar char- acteristic of Seneca's Stoicism, viz., his tendency, in proportion as he departs from the old system of the Porch, to approach the Christian religious position. I have considered this tendency under the following heads : 1. God and the feeling of dependence. 2. Man and his need of salvation. .3. The relation of man to his fellow-men. 4. The belief in a future life. 5. The difference of principle be- tween the Stoic and the Christian views of the world. I have tried to show the groundlessness of the conclusion, that the above-mentioned tendency must be ascribed to Seneca's having made acquaintance with Christianity as it was preached in his neighbourhood. ' JUDAISM. 17 Thus our survey of the progress of Greek thought shows us that Christianity, which we are considering in its relation to Paganism, entered the general stream of history at an epoch when preparation had been made for it in many and important ways. It came at a time when the heathen world had come to feel the profound significance of the moral consciousness, and all that was most spiritual and most practically important in the results arrived at during the whole long course of Greek ethical speculation had become the common belief, the essential contents of the mind of the age. All men now recognised the truth that man was a moral being called to devote his life to fulfilling a definite moral task. In Christianity the various' tendencies which had hitherto been seeking the same end by different ways meet together to be fixed in definite notions and presented in the fullest and richest expression. Such, when approached from the side of Paganism, is the position of Christianity in the chain of history. As the absolute religion, however, it unites both the older religions. Let us therefore consider that element in it which lies towards Judaism, and observe how on this side also it embraces in itself the highest spiritual attainments which Judaism had made. Christianity arose on Jewish soil, and it is connected with Judaism far more closely and directly than with Paganism. It professes to be nothing more than spiritualised Judaism : it strikes its deepest roots into the soil of the Old Testament religion. In Paganism, Greek philosophy had developed the moral consciousness tiU it reached a stage at which Christianity could combiae with it : in Judaism religion arrived at the stage at which Christianity could adopt it. The special superiority which distinguished the Hebrew religion from all the religions of the heathen world was the pure and refined monotheistic idea of God, which from the earliest times had been the essential foundation of the Old Testa- ment faith. In its consciousness of God, therefore, Christianity feels itself at one with Judaism as with no other faith. The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New, and all the teaching of the Old Testament concerning the essential distinctness of God B 18 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. from the world, and the absolute majesty and haliness of his nature, is also an essential part of Christian doctrine. But on the other hand the Old Testament conceived God as the God, not of the human race, but of a particular nation. And the particu larism, the limitation of the blessings and hopes of religion to the Jewish race, which was partly the cause and partly the effect of this con- ception of God, stood in the strongest contrast to the spirit of Christianity. If the Old Testament notion of God was ever to be a sufficient form for that consciousness of God which belonged to the universal and absolute nature of Christianity, it was necessary that it should first be freed from this national one-sidedness and defectiveness. It was necessary that it should discard all that belonged only to the narrow range of vision of the Jewish theocracy, and that it should no longer, in accordance with the conceptions of antiquity, ascribe to God a human form and human passions. The historical experiences of the Jews had an important influence on their religion. Not only did their religious conceptions undergo various modifications, their religious consciousness itself did not stand still, but became gradually wider and more spiritual. On the other hand, however, the hard fortunes of the people only made them cling more strongly to their belief that they alone were the people of God, and to their national prejudices and traditional observ- ances. In this respect the circumstances by which the Jews were surrounded in the kingdoms founded after the death of Alexander, especially in Egypt, and in such a city as Alexandria, first brought a radical change. Here first took place that transformation of Judaism by which it passed beyond the barriers of its national and political exclusiveness, and accepted the influence of new and formerly alien and repugnant ideas.^ The dispersion of the Jews among foreign nations had before this brought into existence a new class in whom Judaism was mixed, as the circumstances woiild have led us to expect, with Greek culture and manners. These formed a link, such as had hitherto been wanting, between Jew- ' Cf. Georgii : die neuesten Gegensatze in Auflfassung der alexandrinischen Eeligions-philosophie, insbesondere des jiidischeu alexandrinismus. lUgen's Ztschr. fur hist. Theologie, 1839, Nos. 3 and 4. JUDAISM. 19 and Gentile, a circumstance which could not fail to have the most important bearing on the intellectual and religious development of mankind. But the Hellenism which had thus arisen only acquired its full significance when it gave birth to an entirely new form of thought in the Grseco-Jewish philosophy which sprang up at Alexandria. At such a place the Jews experienced the full power of the Greek spirit, and the desire to gain a closer acquaintance^ with the ideas and doctrines of Greek philosophy was not to be resisted. The mere existence of such an interest implied that they had advanced beyond the standpoint of pure Judaism ; and the more they occupied themselves with Greek philoso phy, and became conscious of its charm, the more did they necessarily find themselves in conflict with the religious views and feelings of their race. On the one hand, they could not shake off their' interest in the new ideas ; on the other, their ancestral faith af&rmed its old indefeasible authority. How was the contradiction to be overcome ? The reconciliation was accomplished, as is well known, by allegorical interpretation applied to the Scriptures. According to the Jew's view of his sacred books, nothing could be true which was not to be found in them. They were the source of all truth : they must, therefore, be the source of the ideas which he had now adopted. AH that was necessary was to find the right key for the explanation of the books of the Old Testament, and then exegesis could bring forth out of those books the ideas which the commen- tator himself had unconsciously put into them. In this way there arose an entirely new form of Judaism. Men fancied that they were keeping a firm hold of the old faith, but in reality Ihey had substituted entirely new ideas in its place ; and while it was supposed that the new matter was contained in the Old Testament, the words of the text were turned into mere vehicles of a doctrine of which the writers had never dreamed. The peculiar character of this Alexandrine Judaism consisted in this, that the limits of the old Jewish particularism were broken through and set aside, as far as this could possibly be done without completely abandon- ing the standpoint of the Old Testament religion. The doctrines 20 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. of this religion received a form, modified in many respects, and generally freer and more spiritual ; new ideas were introduced which involved an entirely different theory of the world from that of Judaism ; and above all, the Old Testament conception of God was freed from all those elements which belonged merely to the narrow sphere of the Jewish theocracy, and raised to a much higher plane of thought. The profound influence which the Alexandrian philosophy of religion came afterwards, in its highest and most elaborate form as it appears in the writings of Philo, to exercise on Christian theology, shows distinctly that the mode of thought on which it was based must have had great affinity with the spirit of Christianity. Our task, however, merely requires us to trace its influence in that narrower sphere where it came into close contact with the very earliest Christianity. From this point of view the two sects of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, especially the latter, are a very noteworthy phenomenon.^ The Therapeutae are the intermediate link between the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria and the Essenes of Palestine. The latter however, closely as they are related to the Egyptian Therapeutae, cannot be classed with them, but must be reckoned among the sects into which the Judaism of Palestine was divided. They represent Judaism in the form which it assumed when the Jew of Palestine came to find in the Graeco-Alexandrian doctrine, what his brethren abroad had already found in it, a deeply religious conception of life. This is what places the Essenes in so close a 1 On the Essenes, cf. Zeller, iii. 235, Eitschl, Theol. Jahrb. 1855, p. 315, sg., and die Entstehung der alt-kathol. Kirche, 2d ed., 179, sqq., traces Essenism to an endea- vour to realise the ideal of the priestly kingdom held up before the people of Israel, Exod. xix. 6, and to form a society of priests answering to it. ZeUer opposes this view, and argues (Theol. Jahrb., 1856, p. 401, sq.) for the common supposition of a connection between Essenism and the Orphioo-pythagoreau discipline and view of life which were so widely diflfused in the ancient world, and were not without influence upon the Jews. The considerations which he adduces are enough to confute Hilgenfeld's view, that Essenism owed its origin to the apocalyptic pro- phecy which was so rife at the time (Die jiidische Apokalyptik in ihrer geschicht- lichen Bntwickelung ; Jena, 1857, p. 245, sq.), and are likely to assert themselves agaiust any similarly eccentric theories which may yet be put forth. ESSENISM. 21 relation with Christianity. Of course it cannot be thought for a moment that Christianity itself sprang from Essenism ; yet it is impossible not to see that the religious view of life held by the Essenes is far more closely allied to the original spirit of Christianity than any of the peculiar doctrines or practices which distinguished the sects of the Pharisees and Sadducees. They certainly attached great value to certain outward practices, yet they were not entangled either in the ordinances and traditions of the Judaism of the Pharisees, or in the purely external forms of the Levitic temple worship. Their religious feeling was more spiritual and inward than that of the other sects, and had a thoroughly practical tendency. The highest object of life was to them to elevate them- selves above the material and sensuous, and to turn their whole activity into a constant exercise of all such practices as could bring them nearer to this great end The name Essenes indicates that they claimed to be physicians of souls. As such they proceeded on the principle of making use of all means which seemed adapted to promote the soul's healthy and vigorous life, and to keep it ever open to receive the influences and revelations of the higher world. Essenism has many features which remind us of the spirit of primitive Christianity ; such as its prohibition of oaths, the zeal it encouraged in the practice of the duties of benevolence, and its community of goods. A peculiarly characteristic trait, however, is its principle of voluntary poverty. The view taken of poverty is, that it is better to be poor and possess as little as possible in this world, in order to be so much the richer in the good things of the world to come.^ This is the same love of poverty which we find in Christianity when its first disciples are called blessed because they are poor in spirit. We may very reasonably assume that in addition to those who carried out all the outward practices which appear in the description of the sect, Essenism had many friends 1 Cf. my Comment, de Ebionitarum origine, et doctrina ab Essenis repetenda, 1831. Notice the passages which I have there quoted from Philo, Quod omnis probus liber, ed. Mang. ii. 457, de vita contempl. p. 473; and from Josephus, de Bello Jud. ii. 8. 3. See also Dahne: die jiidiach-alexandrimsche ■Religions- phUosophie, i. p. 476. 22 CHURCH HISTOBY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. and sympathisers who did not think it necessary to declare their adherence in this way. It was not only a sect, but a widely dif- fused way of thinking and a view of life which was carried out with various modifications, in one case with more and in another with less of the element of discipline. We may say that all those who shared in the deep and general tendency of the religious spirit to leave what was outward and concentrate itself upon the inward, were touched more or less by the Essene spirit. If this be so, then Essenism is undoubtedly one of the deepest and most truly spiritual points of contact between Judaism and Christianity. And even when we look at merely outward relations, how near do these allied pheno- mena of the religious life lie to each other. The Essenes had their settlements in those same Jewish border-lands inhabited by a population mixed with Gentiles, in which Christianity first began to preach the blessedness of the poor. Where else could the gospel which was preached to the poor have found hearts so ready to receive it, as among those meek ones of the land, whose style of piety was in so many ways akin to the attitude of mind out of which Christianity itself proceeded ? Thus we find that all these various movements, starting as they do from such widely different quarters, meet each and all at the same point. When placed in its position as connected with the history of preceding times, Christianity appears as the natural unity of all those elements. Various and manifold as they are, they belong to one and the same process of development. As this process moves gradually forward, and eliminates more and more completely all that bears the stamp of particularism and subjec- tivity, we see that it can have no other issue than at the point where the origin of Christianity is found. On what grounds then can we regard Christianity itself as a phenomenon purely super- natural, as an absolute miracle introduced into the world's history without the operation of any natural causes, and therefore incap- able of being comprehended as belonging to any historical connec- tion, when we find in every direction, wherever we turn, numerous points of connection and aliinity in which it is linked with the PBEPABATIONS FOB CEBISTIANITY. 23 most intimate bonds to the wliole history of the development of mankind ? It contains nothing that was not conditioned by a series of causes and effects going before ; nothing that had not been long prepared in different ways, and carried forward towards that stage of development at which we find it in Christianity ; nothing that had not been previously recognised in one form or another, as a necessary result of reasoned thought, or as a need of the human heart, or as a requirement of the moral consciousness. What room is there then to wonder that that which had so long been in differ- ent ways the goal of all the endeavours of the human reason, and had been forcing itself upon the opening and growing human con- sciousness as its proper and necessary contents, which could not be denied, should at last have found its simplest, purest, and most natural expression in the form in which it appeared in Chris- tianity ? When, however, we go on to consider the nature of Christianity itself, we find it presented to us under many very different aspects, which do not admit of being all placed under the same point of view. The question thus arises, whether what has been said holds good of Christianity in its whole scope and extent, or only of one particular side of it, and if it applies to that which we must regard as the true core and centre of its organism 1 When Christianity is con- sidered from the point of view which we have set forth, it is of course obvious that the side of it which is meant is that on which all those points of connection and of affinity are to be found which bring it into so intimate and vital a relation with the whole pre- ceding history of human development. But, it may well be asked, is it on this side that we find the original and substantial essence of Christianity? is it not rather a secondary and subordinate feature of it on which we have been dwelling ? Is it possible to speak in any real sense of the essence and contents of Christianity without making the person of its founder the main object of our consideration 1 Must we not recognise the peculiar character of Christianity as consisting in this, that whatever it is, it is simply on account of the person of its founder? And if this be so, is it 24 CHURCH HISTOBY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. not a matter of very slight importance to seek to understand the nature and contents of Christianity in the light of the connection it may have had with the history of the world ? Is not its whole meaning and significance derived from the person of its founder ? Can our historical consideration of it set out from any other point than this ? To answer these questions we require to go back to the sources of the gospel history. The most recent critical investigations declare that a great distinction has to be drawn between some of these sources and others.'^ The sources of the Evangelical history are the four gospels. Now the great question is, in what relation we are to place the fourth to the first three. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the conception we form of Christianity will be radically and essentially different, according as we on the one hand take it for gxanted that the four gospels agree with each other throughout, or on the other recognise the divergences between the Johannine gospel and the three Synoptics as amount- ing to a contradiction which renders a historical unity impossible.^ ' Cf. my work : Kritische Untersuchungen iiber die kanonischen Evangelien, Tiib. 1847. Kostlin : der Urspruug und die Composition der synoptischen Evangelien, Stuttgart, 1853. Hilgenfeld: die Evangelien nach ihrer Entstehung und geachichtlichen Bedeutung, Leipzig, 1854. 2 The question which has to be dealt with at this stage is not the authenticity of the Johannine gospel ; whoever the writer of the gospel may have been, whether the Apostle John or some other man, it is a plain matter of fact and cannot be denied, that the evangelical history of the fourth gospel is an essenti- ally different one from that of the first three. Now as this historical differ- ence must either be admitted or denied, and no third alternative is possible, we have here the parting of two roads which lead in totally different directions, and issue in totally different conceptions of the whole of Church history. The student who in the strength of dogma overlooks this difference wOl read the whole history of the Church with other eyes than he who does not regard the interests of dogma as supreme, but makes it his principle that the materials which history has to deal with are to be treated iu a strictly historical way. As for the question of authorship, the more the critical dilemma of the Johannine authorship of the gospel and of the Apocalypse is insisted on (as is well done by Lucke in the second edition of his Introduction to the Revelation of John, 1852, p. 659-744), the less will any sophistry be able to prevent the great preponder- ance of evidence from inclining to the side of the Apocalypse, when the external testimonies for the Johannine origin of the two works are fairly and impartially weighed. THE GOSPELS. 25 If it be assumed that the four gospels agree with each other and are capable of being harmonised, then the absolute importance which the gospel of John assigns to the person of Jesus must determine our whole view of the gospel history. We must then regard Christianity as consisting in the fact of the incarnation of the eternal Logos : it is a miracle in the strictest sense, and absolutely. The human is lost in the divine, the natural in the supernatural. Whenever the first three gospels disagree with the fourth, the authority of the latter must be held to be decisive. This, however, amounts to a complete abandonment of all historical treatment of the gospel history. The history is so determined and absorbed by the element of miracle, as nowhere to afford any firm footing for the scientific inquirer. And more than this : to uphold the claim of the absolute miracle of the one gospel, the historical credibility of the other three is brought down to so low a level that they virtually forfeit their position as historical sources. The only way of escape from all these difficulties is to admit the conviction that the gospel of John stands in quite a different relation to the Synoptics from that which is generally assumed. Whether we look to its differ- ences from the Synoptics, or to its general spirit and character, we see that it is impossible to allow to such a gospel as the Johan- nine the character of a historical narrative, even in the limited sense in which the Synoptics can be called historical. When the different accounts disagree we shall accordingly take our stand on the side of the Synoptics. In this way we escape the consequences which follow inevitably when John is placed on the same level with the Synoptics ; namely, that difficulties and objections are raised on each side, and with equal right, and the whole gospel narrative brought into suspicion. We now obtain a firmer histori- cal basis. But even here we are warned by criticism that the ground on which a trustworthy history can be constructed is narrower than we thought. Eecent investigations into the rela- tions of the gospels to one another show us that the Synoptics can- not simply be placed side by side as of equal value. The gospel of Mark is so largely indebted to the other two that we cannot 26 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. regard it as an independent source at all.-' The gospel of Luke is coloured by the Paulinism of its author, and cannot be regarded as an impartial narrative. We are thus thrown back on the gospel of Matthew as comparatively the most original and trustworthy source of the Evangelical history. An examination of the contents of this Gospel shows us that there are two distinct elements present in it : the doctrine, and the purely historical narrative. The early tradition about Matthew states that he wrote down the Xdjia, the sayings and discourses of Jesus, for the Hebrews, and in the Hebrew language. Now the Greek Gospel of Matthew which we have answers to this description. The great bulk of its contents, the body of the work, consists of the discourses and sayings of Jesus. His public ministry opens very significantly with the Sermon on the Mount. We may justly conclude from this that the author's original and leading idea was to treat the life and the whole manifestation of Jesus from this point of view. There is another narrative which deals largely in the discourses of Jesus. The discourses of John's Gospel, however, turn as well as the rest of that work on the person of Jesus and his superhuman dignity, as the theme which they all help to illustrate. Such is not the case here. The whole scope and spirit of the Gospel are different. What the discourses of this Gospel present to us is the human and familiar element of Christ's teaching, the direct appeal to the moral and religious consciousness, the simple answer to the question which naturally came up first of all — in what state of mind he must be, and what he must do, who would enter into the kingdom of God. We do not mean to deny that the gospel of Matthew also ascribes its full significance to the person of Jesus. Even in the Sermon on the Mount there are some hints of such a doctrine. But in the thcjught and imagery of the Sermon on the Mount the personal element remains as it were in the background of the scene ; the discourse does not derive its importance from the person; it is 1 Cf. my work : das Markus-evangeliura nacli seinem Ursprung und Character ; Tub. 1851. Theol. Jahrb. 1853, p. 54, sq. Kostliu, op. cit. p. 310, sq. THE ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN IDEA. 27 rather tlie profound and weighty discourse that reveals to us the true character and greatness of the speaker. It is the thing itself that speaks here ; it is the inner force of truth making its way straight to men's hearts, which here amiounces itself in all its significance for the history of the world. Now what does this direct and original element, this principle of Christianity, consist in, as we find it expressed both in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the parables, and in the whole of the doctrinal contents of the Gospel of Matthew ? It may be shortly summed up under the following heads : — It is in the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount that we obtain the deepest and most comprehensive insight into the fundamental way of looking at things, the fundamental mood, out of which Christianity proceeded. What is it that finds expression in all those utterances in which blessedness is said to belong to the poor in spirit, to those who mourn, to the meek, to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, to the pure in heart, to the peacemakers, to those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake ? It is religious consciousness which is penetrated by the deepest sense of the pressure of the finite and of all the contradictions of the present, and yet is infinitely exalted, and knows itself, in spite of this, to be far superior to everything finite and limited. The most pregnant expression for this, the original Christian con- sciousness, is the poverty of the poor in spirit. They are rightly placed at the head of aU the different classes who are called blessed.-' But the poor here spoken of must not be taken to be, as the ordinary interpretation has it, merely those who feel themselves inwardly poor and empty from a sense of their spiritual needs. "We shall have an inadequate idea of what this poverty denotes if we do not take outward bodily poverty as an essential part of the conception. We are not at liberty to overlook this feature of it, since, in the first place, the parallel passage in Luke (vi. 20) gives us not the tttw^^oI Ta> irvevfiaTi of Matthew, but 1 Cf. my Kritische Untersuchungen, p. 447, sq. 28 CSVBCH BISTORT OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. simply TTTa^ol ; and in the second place, the history of the Gospel shows us that it found its first adherents almost exclusively among the poor. This being so, we see that this poverty of spirit is a poverty which, when looked at in a spiritual way, is exactly the opposite of what it appears to be outwardly. Since these poor ones accept their poverty gladly and voluntarily, and of their own free-win elect to be just what they are, their poverty becomes to them a sign and evidence that, though outwardly poor, they are not poor in reality. Here they are the poor and those that have nothing ; but there they are all the more certain to be the opposite of what they are here. They are the poor who have nothing, and yet possess all things. They have nothing, since their bodUy poverty consists in having none of the goods that go to make property in this world ; and what they may regard as their posses- sion in the world to come is for them a thing entirely in the future. They having nothing, they live and move in an atmo- sphere of longing and desire for that which they have not ; but, in this longing and desire, they virtually possess that to which their yearning and desire are going forth. Their having nothing makes them to be those who have all things; their poverty is their riches ; the kingdom of heaven is even now their sure and peculiar possession, because as surely as they have nothing here, so surely they have all things there. In this contrast of having and not having, poverty and riches, earth and heaven, the present and the future, the Christian consciousness attains its purest ideality ; it is the ideal unity of aU the contradictions which force them- selves upon the consciousness, as long as it confines itself to visible objects. All that the most developed dogmatic consciousness can comprise is already present here ; and yet the whole sig- nificance of the early Christian idea consists in the fact that it has not ceased to be the immediate unity of all antitheses. All the beatitudes, variously as they sound, are but different expres- sions of the same original idea and mood which lie at the root of the Christian consciousness. What they express is the simple feel- ing of the need of redemption, which contains in itself implicitly, THE ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLE. 29 though as yet undeveloped, the antithesis of sin and grace, and is its own sufficient evidence of the reality of the redemption which it longs for. It is because all antitheses are here held together in their unity that this original Christian consciousness is so vigorous and rich in thought. It is not only a deep and intense self-consciousness ; it is also a lofty and commanding world- consciousness. We see this from the words which Jesus uses immediately after the beatitudes, where He calls his disciples the salt of the earth, which must never lose its savour if the world is not to be deprived of the power which, in deed and truth, holds it together, and preserves it from decay; and the light of the world which must not be set under a bushel, but must shine before the whole world, that men may see the good works of those who let their light shine, and may glorify their Father which is in heaven. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount express, in an absolute manner, what constitutes the inmost self-consciousness of the Christian, as it is in itself, and apart from external rela- tions. The original and radical element of Christianity appears further in the form of absolute moral command in the con- troversial part of the discourse which is directed against the Pharisees, and in other parts of it. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus insists emphatically on purity and singleness of heart, on a morality which does not consist merely in the outward act, but in the inner disposition ; and upon such an earnest and moral observance of the law as can admit of no arbitrary exception or limitation, nor tolerate any false hypocritical pretences, or any dividedness or want of singleness of heart. Here, however, the question may arise whether this principle be new or peculiar to Christianity. Jesus declared at the outset that he was not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them, and might thus appear to have taken up an entirely affirmative position towards the Old Testament. It might be said^ that the difference iCf. Bitaohl, die Entstehung der alt-katholisohen Kirclie, Bonn 1850, p. 27, sq. Eitschl changed his views in the second edition, but this fact does not invalidate 30 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. between the teaching of Jesus and the law, or the Old Testament, is one not of quality, but of quantity. On this view no new principle is advanced in his teaching; all that is done is to widen the application of the moral precepts which the law con- tained, and assert their authority over the whole extent of the moral sphere to which they are capable of referring. That is given back to the law which should never have been taken away from it. The law is declared to be capable of expansion in its meaning and its range of application, and this is said to be done. This interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount appeals to the fact, that in the further discussion of the subject, individual injunctions of the law are taken up, and each of them brought back to the original meaning of the law, or interpreted in a sense which satisfies the moral consciousness. But though there is no enunciation of a general principle which is to apply to all cases alike, yet when we consider what is said to be the true fulfilling of the law in each separate instance, and see how in each instance what is done is to contrast the outward with the inward, to disregard the mere act as such, and lay stress on the disposition as that which alone confers any moral value on a man's acts, we cannot but recognise in this a new principle, and one which differs essentially from Mosaism. What the law contained, it is true, but only implicitly, is now said to be of most importance, and enunciated as the priaciple of morality. The expansion of the law quantitatively amounts to a qualitative difference. The inner is opposed to the outer, the disposition to the act, the spirit to the letter. This is the essential root-principle of Christianity ; and, in insisting that the absolute moral value of a man depends simply and solely on his disposition, Christianity was essentially original. In this way the affirmative relation which Jesus assumed towards the law involves in itself the opposite relation of antithesis to the law. If this be so, it is certainly difficult to the accuracy of the position described in the text as one which has been and may- be held. THE ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLE. 3] understand how Jesus could say that not the least jot of the law not one of its least commandments, should be taken away. Ho-« could he say this, when the very' opposite came about so soon afterwards, and the whole law was declared to be abolished' How can we imagine him to have affirmed the permanent validitj of all the injunctions of the law, when we think, for example, o: the one injunction of circumcision ? It is impossible to thinl that Jesus was so little aware of the principle and spirit of his own teaching as this would indicate ; and the only choice left tc us is, either to suppose him to have spoken exclusively of the moral law, and not to have had the ceremonial law before his mind at all, or to suppose that it was only later that his words received their strong Judaistic colouring. But it was not only to the Old Testament that Jesus took up as affirmative as possible an attitude. Even with respect to the traditions of the Pharisees, and their additions to the law, he did not carry his opposition to the point of encouraging open disregard of them. He paid no heed, it is true, to their exaggerations ; against these he asserted what was reasonable in itself, as having indefeasible and incon- trovertible authority. This was his position with regard to the acts which were impugned as breaches of the Sabbath law. Matt. xii. 1-14, and in defending himself against the charges of opponents, as at Matt. ix. 11 ; xv. 1. Yet he recognised the Pharisees as the legitimate successors of Moses. It is they and the Scribes, he says, who sit in the cathedra of Moses, the seat of the teacher and legislator, and the people are bound to follow their precepts, if not their example. Nor does he reject out and out even the pettiest regulations which the scrupulous spirit of Pharisaism had devised for the keeping of the law. Matt, xxiii. 1, sq., 23. It is none the less true, however, that he declares their requirements to be heavy and intolerable burdens, a mode of expres- sion, which shows that he would not have allowed the oppres- sion under which the people suffered to continue. Matt, xxiii. 3. He also said, when speaking against the Pharisees, that every plant which his heavenly Father had not planted should be rooted up. 32 CHURGH HI8T0BY OF FIRST TSREE CENTURIES. Matt. XV. 1 3. And his actions were in a great measure directed to this end. One of his chief tasks was to contend against the influence and tendencies of Pharisaism as often as any occasion for doing so arose. This shows how wide the difference really was, and enables us to understand how Jesus could feel that it was unnecessary for him to set forth the antagonism of principle expressly, in all its length and breadth, or to show what it led to, and could be sure that, as the spirit of his teaching came to be understood and realised, it would be worked out to all the results which it necessarily involved. That he himself was thoroughly aware not only of the antagonism of principle, but of the consequences to which it could not fail to lead, appears very distinctly in the saying. Matt. ix. 1 6, where he not only declares the spirit of the new teaching to be incompatible with that of the old, but also intimates that though he himself had held as far as possible to the old traditional forms, thus putting the new wine into the old bottles, he had done this with a distinct consciousness that the new contents would soon break up the old form. But what was there in the new principle to make it break through the old forms, and supersede all that had gone before ? What but its going back to the inward disposition, to that in the consciousness of man which declares itself as its self-existent and absolute contents. As the disposition is to be pure and simple, free from all self-seeking ; and as it only is the root from which the fruit of good can spring, so man's consciousness is to be directed to that alone which it recognises as its absolute contents. This is the fundamental idea which runs through the whole of the Sermon on the Mount. The sayings in it which strike us as most significant are, when we examine them, just those which express most directly this absolute character of the Christian consciousness. This consciousness rejects — so the sayings at Matt. vi. 19-24 require — all half-heartedness and dividedness, all sense of separation and limitation ; and in the light of it alone does the requirement at vii. 12, in which so many have looked for the root of Christian morality, receive its meaning as a principle. If the Christian is T3E ORIGINAL CSBISTIAN FBINCIFLE. 33 conscious of his absolute standpoint, he must be able to abstract from himself, from his own ego, and to know himself as so much one with all others, that he regards each other man as one who possesses equal rights with himself. And this is what Jesus means when he says of the requirement we are speaking of, that it is the law and the prophets, or equivalent to the Old Testament com- mand, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." He who loves his neighbour as himself must renounce everything egotistical, subjective, or peculiar to himself; above the purality of separate subjects, each of whom now is the same as we are, there comes to stand the objective universal, where everything particular and subjective is done away. This universal is that form of action in accordance with which we do to others what we wish that others should do to us. The morally good is thus that which is equally right and good for all, or which can be the object of action for all alike. Here then we meet again the characteristic feature of the Christian principle. It looks beyond the outward, the accidental, the particular, and rises to the universal, the unconditioned, the essential. It places a man's moral value only in that region of his life where he is in the presence of absolute considerations, and his acts possess absolute value. The same energy of conscious- ness which refuses to find the substantial essence of morality anywhere but in the inmost core of the disposition, asserts itself in the demand to do away with the individual ego by raising it up to the universal ego, the general self, that humanity which is present and is identical with itself in every separate individual. All the difference between this requirement and the commandment of Christ isy that in the latter the former appears in its simplest and most practical expression. Thus do the absolute contents of the Christian principle find their expression in the moral consciousness. What gives a man his highest moral value is simply the purity of a disposition which is genuinely moral, and rises above all that is finite, particular, or merely subjective. Now, this morality of disposition is also the determining standard of man's relation to God. That which gives 34 CHUBGH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. him his highest moral value also places liim in the adequate relation to God which answers to the idea of God. When man is regarded in his relation to God, the supreme task of the moral consciousness appears in the requirement to be perfect as God is perfect (Matt. V. 48). In this requirement the absolute nature of the Christian principle comes to its most direct expression. Christianity has no other standard for the perfection of man than the absolute standard of the perfection of God. If man is perfect as God is perfect, then, in this absolute perfection, he stands in that adequate relation to God which is expressed by the notion of righteousness. Eighteousness in this sense is the absolute condition for entering into the kingdom of God. In the connection in which righteous- ness is spoken of in the Sermon on the Mount, it can mean nothing but the perfect fulfilment of the law; a fulfilment of the law, however, in that sense only in which Jesus considers the law to possess permanent validity. If it be asked how man can attain this righteousness, we find it to be a peculiarity of the teaching of Jesus, that it simply takes for granted that the law can be fulfilled, and the will of God done on earth as it is in heaven, so as to attain that righteousness which places man in his adequate relation to God. It appears, however, that a forgiveness -of sins on God's part, by which the shortcomings in man's conduct may be balanced and made good, is an essential element of this adequate relation ; for in the Lord's Prayer the forgiveness of sins is the object of a separate petition. Man must have his faults and sins forgiven, else he cannot enter into the relation which God's will requires. And as the doctrine of Jesus is led by its fundamental principle to estimate a man's whole position as a moral being, not by what he does outwardly, but by what he is in his heart, it can place this righteousness, in which consists the adequate relation of man to the wiU of God, nowhere but in his inner disposition. Man has this righteousness when he comes into such a frame of mind that he entirely renounces his own will, and devotes himself unreservedly to the will of God. This is worked out in the doctrine a-fi.€vov fie Xeyeis, 0€ov aTroKoKvy^avros /ioi tov Xpia-Toi/ fcarijyopeir, Peter says to Simon Magus, with an obvious allusion to the 56 CHTJBCH HISTORY Of FIRST THREE CENTURIES. We have seen that at thfe very outset of the controversy, as soon as the question of circumcision had arisen, men once and again appeared on the scene who had come from the Church at Jerusalem, and openly sought to bring about a reaction (Gal. ii. 4, 12). We meet with the same phenomenon in the Gentile Christian Churches planted by Paul. Judaists of the same stamp appeared in these churches, and made it their business to bring Pauline Christianity into discredit, and to destroy what the apostle had founded and buHt up as his own work, without the law and in opposition to the law, in order to rear it up again on the basis of the law. The first actual proof of this systematic opposition to the apostle Paul appears in the Epistle to the Galatians, which was occasioned by that very opposition. It was written a few years after the occurrence at Antioch, after the apostle had made his second missionary journey. The whole arrangement and tendency of the Epistle show that the apostle deemed the matter to be of great importance, and saw that his principles were at stake in the contest. He therefore thinks it necessary to give a circumstantial account of his whole relation to Christ and to the earlier apostles, from the time of his conver- sion onward. He simply narrates the facts, and in this way he considers that he furnishes an irresistible proof, that from the very outset he has asserted distinctly, and in various ways, the independent right of the Gospel which he preached, and that his claim has been allowed. The opponents who had taken the field against him in the Churches of Galatia were but a new detachment of the opposition with which he had had to contend before. They had perplexed the conscience of the Galatian Christians by asserting that the work of their salvation was built words of Paul, Gal. ii. 10, Kara 7rp6(T. 381, that with Ritschl as with Lechler the development of Gentile Christianity and Jewish Christianity into Catholicism appears to be the work of blind chance. CIRCUMCISION AND BAPTISM. 105 The point of departure lies in the antitheses already pointed out : the result is that they are accommodated to each other, and disappear. In the interval between these two extremes, there must be steps of reconciliation ; and from the nature of the case nothing is more probable than that the movement towards unity proceeded, not from one side only, but from both, of course in different ways. We should expect to find that both parties, feeling more or less distinctly that they belonged together, act upon each other in the living process of development, each party modifying the other, and being modified by it in turn. Without such a pro- cess, the result, as it lies before us in history, the appearance of a Christian Catholic Church, could never have come to pass at all. But would this process have been possible if the two parties. Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians, had continued to present to each other an attitude of unyielding and repellent opposition, if Jewish Christianity in its various forms had been incapable of further development, and if, on the side of Paulinism, what bridged over the gulf between Catholic and Apostolic Christianity had been simply the incapacity of the Gentile Christians to understand Paul ? Can this have been what led them to Catholic Christianity, that the fundamental conceptions of the apostles as to the new basis of the religious relation which God hath provided in Christ were only intelligible by the help of the Old Testament, and that they could not reproduce them to themselves in a correct and living way ? It is a complete mistake, and will altogether prevent us from seeing these relations as they were, if we suppose that the point at issue between the two opposing parties was one of differ- ence in doctrine ; that the question was whether the relation between the Jewish doctrine of the law and the Pauline doctrine of faith should be formulated in this way or in that. It is in vain to seek for the principle of the movement within the sphere of abstract ideas, as if union would ensue when they came to regard each other with indifference. Prom such a combination no new or vigorous life could possibly proceed. The principle of the move- ment is to be sought in the concrete centre where questions were 106 CHUBCH HISTORY OF FIRST TRREE CENTURIES. arising which pressed for an answer : where Christianity, set in the midst of the great forces of the age, had still to struggle for a place among them and assert its own right to exist, and had, at the same time, to create the forms within which its historical development was to proceed. When Paulinism and Jewish Christianity first came to stand in open opposition to each other, we find the motive power in those Judaists who met the apostle Paul with an uncompromising resist- ance at every point of his sphere of labour. There is no stronger proof of the capacity for development which was inherent in Juda- ism, than the undeniable fact that it found no difficulty in giving up even those positions which it had defended with the greatest zeal, as soon as it became apparent that such a course would help it to a more effective assertion of its preponderance over Paulinism. This is the only possible explanation of the fact that baptism all at once appears in the place of circumcision. At first the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem asserted in absolute terms the necessity of circumcision, and demanded that the Gentiles also should submit to that rite, and we have no reason to assume that the older apostles did not originally share this view. In the Epistle to the Galatians the apostle's Jewish Christian opponents are still insisting on cir- cumcision as the absolute condition without which there can be no salvation. But after this where do we hear of the Jewish Christian party as a whole continuing to make this demand, as a matter of principle ? Even the pseudo-Clementine writings do not mention circumcision as an essential article of Judaism. Only here and there is there a hint of the importance which had been attached to it formerly, as in the directions given in the Contestatio about the writings sent by Peter to James, that they should only be com- municated to a good and pious believer who was prepared to teach, and circumcised. From this we may justly infer that the Jewish Christians themselves gave up the necessity of circumcision, a fact which can only be explained by supposing that, as they saw large and increasing numbers of Gentiles converted without submitting to circumcision, they came to feel it to be simply impossible to CIRCUMCISION AND BAPTISM. 107 insist upon a point which the history of Gentile Christianity had practically settled. How they reconciled this with their view of the necessity of the observance of the law, we need not now inquire ; in any case, we cannot but regard it as a concession made by them to Pauline universalism. And it seems to be closely connected with this, that, as circumcision ceases to be mentioned, baptism now becomes invested with a religious significance similar to that of circumcision. It was, of course, necessary to have some form or other for the admission of Gentiles to the Messianic com- munity, and what form could be more suitable for the purpose than baptism ? There can be no doubt that its general introduction and its higher religious significance are very closely connected with the conversion of the Gentiles. Even the apostle Paul seems to indi- cate as much, when, writing at a time at which circumcision was made an indispensable condition of salvation, he declares baptism to be the condition of communion with Christ (Gal. iii. 27). "Who- ever," he says, " has been baptized into Christ, has put on Christ, and there is no longer any difference between Jew and Gentile." Thus, as circumcision makes a Jew, so baptism makes a Christian. Again in Matt, xxviii. 19, the commandment of baptism which there can be no doubt belongs to the last recension of the Gospel, stands in the closest connection with the injunction to convert all nations. From the nature of the case, baptism would originally bear' this meaning only for the Gentiles ; but we see from the pseudo- Clementine Homilies how Jewish Christians came to look upon it in the same light. That work only calls baptism the means ordained by God for the putting off of heathenism {a^eWrfvua-drivai), but at the same time regards it as the necessary condition on which alone man can attain the forgiveness of his sins and future blessed- ness.^ Thus circumcision was given up by the Jewish Christians as soon as there came to be another form of attaining the assurance of salvation which they could allow to be equally significant. In the case of the Gentile Christians, baptism was naturally and at once regarded as a substitute for circumcision. Jewish Christians 1 Horn. xiii. 9, 11, 13. 108 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. were Jews by birth, and did not need any such substitute, but the number of born Jews who adopted Christianity was constantly decreasing, and so baptism came more and more to be the universal form of making the Christian confession, and to be considered the characteristic mark of the Christian, as circumcision was of the Jewish, religion.^ We see then that it was on the question of cir- cumcision that the absolute power of Judaism first gave way. It is true that there still continued to be Jewish Christians, who not only continued to regard the law as absolutely binding on them- selves, but even declined all fellowship with Gentile Christians who did not observe the law as they did. But this was the more rigid type, and there was another class of Jewish Christians, holding less extreme opinions, who made no such demand on Gentile Chris- tians, and who nevertheless recognised them as Christian brethren. Yet even this class of Jewish Christians could not altogether release the Gentile Christians from the observance of the law. The obliga- tion of the law must not be cast off altogether ; and so those ordi- nances, at least, were to remain in force, which the author of the Acts gives as the decrees of his alleged apostolic council. It has long been shown,* that the apostles cannot have drawn up these ^ According to the Kecognitions baptism came in the place of the sacrifice, which had now been discontinued {i. 39). Vt tempus adesse coepit, quo id, quod deesse Moysis institutis diximus, impleretur, et propheta quern praecinuerat, appareret, qui eos primo per misericordiam Dei moneret cesaare a sacrificiis, et ne forte putarent, cessantibus hostiis remisaionem sibi non fieri, baptisma eis per aquam statuit. In this view baptism acquired religious significance for the Jewish Christian also, who from his Jewish birth required no compensation for the loss of circumcision. This view is, there can be no doubt, of Essenic-Ebionitic origin. The religious washings of the Essenes, to which they attributed power to purify and to release from sin, rested on their rejection of the Mosaic sacrificial worship : which explains in a very natural way how, among the Elkesaites, the baptism which procured the forgiveness of sins was capable of repetition. Cf. Ritschl Zeitsohr. fur Hist. Theol. 1853, p. 582, sq. ; altkath. Kirohe., 2d ed., p. 188; Hdgenfeld, Zeitschr. fiir wisseusch. Theol., 1858, p. 422, sq. The fact that bap- tism is here connected with sacrifice (see on the passage of the Eecoguitions Uhlhom, op. cit., 251 ; Ritschl, altkath. Kirche, 2d ed., 239) is in any ease per- fectly consistent with the assumption that baptism was what actually came in the place of circumcision. ^ Cf. Justin Dial. c. Jud. Tryph. c. 47. 3 See my "Paul, etc.," i. 131. Zeller's Acts, ii. 27, sqq. CIRCUMCISION AND BAPTISM. 109 decrees as we now have them ; and that what they contain is that minimum of the demands of the law, which the Jewish Christians required from the Gentile Christians, when experience had shown what was practicable, and might be asked. The conditions are the same as those on which the Israelites admitted proselytes of the gate into their communion. (Leviticus xvii. 8, 16 ; xviii. 26.)^ This shows us how the Jewish Christians adhered to the standpoint of the law in this matter, and recognised no other standard for their relations towards the Gentile Christians than that provided in the law for the regulation of the intercourse of Jews with Gentiles. But, on the other hand, they had now conceded the very utmost that could be conceded to Gentile Christians by Jewish Christianity. If the Gentile Christians would only observe these provisions, there was no further obstacle to prevent that free intercourse of Jewish and Gentile Christians, which the question of circumcision had formerly threatened to render quite impossible. As soon as they could look upon the Gentile Christians as proselytes of the gate, the Jewish Christians felt that their objections to them were re- moved. And this is an iastance of how all that Jewish Christi- anity required, in order to enter into friendly relations with Paul- inism, was frequently nothing more than a way of putting the case, so as not to jar upon the religious susceptibilities of the Jewish Christian. In fact, when there had come to be a new Christian world outside of Judaism, and quite independent of it, when this had become a matter of fact, which could not be questioned or undone, the Jewish Christians would gladly have laid claim to the whole of Pauline universalism, had its originator only been Peter instead of Paul. Indeed Pauline universalism was actually taken from Paul and given to Peter. This is the only possible reading of the fact, that in the pseudo-Clementine writings Peter is the apostle of the Gentiles, whose mission it is, " to travel to the nations who say that there are many gods, and to preach and teach them that there is only one God, who has made heaven and earth, and all that in them is, that by loving Him they might be 1 Cf. Eitschl, op. cit. 117, sq., 2d. ed., 12.9, sq. no CHUECH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. saved." ^ The same circle in whicli Paul travelled as a missionary among the nations is in the pseudo- Clementine Homilies described by the apostle Peter : he also, as an apostle to the Gentiles, must go on from city to city, from land to land, and can finish his career nowhere but at Eome.^ It is true that in his mission to the Gen- tiles Peter is here represented as undoing the mischief wrought by an adversary : he follows on the steps of Simon Magus, to confute his false doctrine, and convert the nations from it to the doctrine of the true prophet : he is merely labouring to repair the ravages which the false apostle has made before him. This, however, is only the external form to cover the claim which the Jewish Chris- tians put forth on behalf of their apostle to the work and merit of the apostle of the Gentiles. They are perfectly willing to accept the facts such as they had now come to be : they are well aware that the time is now past when a demand could be made on the Gentiles which would render it impossible, or even difficult, for them to enter into the Messianic kingdom. The conversion of the Gentiles is an accomplished fact, and it is useless to dispute it ; it must be accepted, since it has so come about. But it could not be allowed that this was due to the labours of an apostle not recognised by the authority of the Jewish Christian apostles. It was desirable to show that the condition had been complied with which those opponents of the apostle, with whom we are acquainted from his own Epistles, had at the very outset declared in their doctrine and their acts to be indispensable before the conversion of the Gentiles could be held to have been lawfully accomplished. To accomplish this end, and at the same time to set aside the true apostle of the Gentiles, and bring him into utter oblivion, so that not even his name should go down to posterity, he is supplanted by another, a man who could not fail to be the object of universal hatred and detestation. For the name of Paul there is substituted " Horn. iii. 59. Cf. Eecogn. iii. 56 ; vii. 7 ; x. 16. 2 Cf. the Epistle of Clement to James, c. 1, where it is said of Peter that he ttjs fiucrecos to (TKoreLvorepov Tov KofTfiov ^epos o)s irdvTKOv iKavoiTepos icjiaTtcra' KeXeuo"- 6(\s Km KaTopBcoa-ai 8vur]6e).s — /if'xP"' ^vravBa rf) 'Pci/ij; yevafi^vos Oeo^ovXrjTW hidatTKoKla (ra^cov dvOpairovSj avTos tov vvv ^lov ^laltos to ^fjv fisTrjWa^ei'. PETER THE APOSTLE OF THE GENTILES. Ill that of a false teacher ; and the victory obtained over this false teacher secures to the legitimate apostle the credit of what the illegitimate and false apostle was formerly supposed to have done. The bitter and deadly hatred with which the pseudo- Clementine Homilies reproduced and exaggerated the old odious charges against the apostle Paul testiiies unmistakably to a desire to extinguish his name from the memory of men. In no other way can we explain why such charges should be dwelt on at a period when to the greatest part of the Christian world the whole dispute had become a thing of the past. And this is the more remarkable, when we consider the character and position of Clement, the important personage of these writings. He is of Gentile birth, and the first-fruits of all the Gentiles converted by the apostle Peter -^ and as such he is the natural mediator between Jewish and Gen- tile Christians. But he is also thoroughly versed in Hellenic culture;^ it is in this way that the religious interest has been awakened in him which leads him to Christianity, and brings him into the closest relations with the apostle Peter. Thus he repre- sents that more spiritual Christianity which took up into itself all the better elements it found in Paganism. Nay, even in the his- torical narrative in which these writings are framed we find Christi- anity presented to us as the religion which brings about the union of everything that is noble in human nature, where the separated and those who have wandered on the most widely different paths, meet again, find themselves to be members of one and the same family, and in virtue of their common human nature akin to one another ; so that they at once attain peace of soul, and the most perfect assurance with regard to all the dispensations of life.^ How does all this agree with the irreconcilable antipathy manifested in these writings towards the apostle Paul ?* 1 Ep. Clem, ad Jac. c. 3. 2 Horn. i. 3 ; iv. 7. KXfifirjs — Traarjs iWrjviKrjs rraiBfias e^r}Kr]va-€i KoXa koI fio-e/S^ Koi SUata, or ra xa^oXou Kol (pva-ei Kol alavia KoXa, cap. 45 : this is the chief substance of the religion of the patriarchs, and from this the rrpos iTKXrjpoKapbiav TOV \aoii SiaraxBevTa are distinguished, as the purely positive element. 144 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. Of circumcision Justin has but a low estimate : he declares it to be the sign by which the Jews were to be made recognisable among all other nations, as those who deserved to suffer all that was inflicted on them at the hands of others. What we see in this instance is characteristic of Justin. To his way of thinking, things and institutions, which had a religious significance in Judaism, were all turned into prophecies, types, and allegories, the true nature of which could only be discerned from the standpoint of Christianity. Thus his religious consciousness assumed an attitude of repulsion towards Judaism, but this by no means pre- vented it from turning towards the Old Testament. It was only by means of the Old Testament, in the contemplation of its prophetical and allegorical meaning, that he could reach the deeper, richer contents of his Christian consciousness. With all its affinity to Paulinism, his attitude towards the Old Testament is essentially different from the Pauline one : it is, as in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews, rather Alexandrine than Pauline. The stress laid upon the typical, symbolical, allegorical, interpretation of the Old Testament (and this is the great characteristic of Alexandrine Judaism) tends to preserve the position of the Old Testament as the absolute source of truth. Thus, while Judaism is veiy greatly lowered in comparison with Christianity, and the difference between the two brought out in all its breadth, yet from this point of view it is felt to be all-important to maintain the identity of Christianity with the religion of the Old Testament. Paulinism finds the absplute contents of Christianity immediately in itself, in the spiritual consciousness which is awakened by faith, and for this consciousness everything connected with the Old Testament has only a very secondary importance. The other view loses itself so completely in the Old Testament way of thinking as to consider that there is no way of arriving at the truth of Christianity but through the Old Testament. Everything Christian was in the Old Testament before. The newness of Christianity is merely the newness of the consciousness which has arisen as to the contents of the Old Testament. The absolute JUSTIN MAB.TYB. 145 antagonism which Paulinism set up between law and gospel thus became more and more relative and subjective. Still, so long as the view that historical Judaism was only meant for a certain period was not supported in a more thorough way than it is by Justin, it remained wavering and unfixed. The idea by which the relation of Christianity to the Old Testament revelation was more definitely fixed, and which arose principally out of this, namely, the idea of the Logos, is certainly to be found in Justin, but this also is a mere point of connection. This want of fixedness in his idea of the Christian consciousness is what makes Justin's position as a whole so wavering and uncertain. This appears notably in his judgment on the Jewish Christians of his time. Considering his low estimate of Judaism we should expect a severer verdict upon those Christians who were nearer Judaism than Christianity. But with regard to those who, while they believe in Christ, at the same time observe the Mosaic law, Justin is not disposed to deny to them the hope of salvation, provided only they do not seek to bind Gentile Christians to observe it. He has no censure to express except for those Jewish Christians who declined to have any sort of association with Gentile Christians. But as for those whose opinion was weak, and who thought it necessary to add to hope on Christ and the observance of the commands of eternal and natural righteousness all the ordinances given by Moses on account of the hardness of the people's hearts, while, however, living together with Christians without demanding from them that they should be circumcised and keep the Sabbaths and other such things, he has no hesitation in acknowledging them as true brethren of the Christian community.^ This view shows a liberal way of thinking in the direction of Judaism ; but in the other direction Justin repels with the greatest strictness whatever does not harmonise with his opinion, so that our commendation of his liberalism is somewhat modified. The freer Pauline view of the use of meat offered to idols is so little to his taste, that he declares it to be no less abominable than heathenism, and will hold 1 Op. cit. cap. 47. K U6 CRUBGS HISTORY OP FIBST THREE CENTURIES. no kind of communion with, those who allow themselves the use of such meat.^ This judgment is not directed against Pauline Christians, but only against Gnostics, yet it is expressed in broad and general terms ; and if we compare it with the judgment he passes on Jewish Christians, we can see that with Justin, when all is considered, the scale dips rather on the side of Jewish than on that of Pauline Christianity. In other respects, Justin presents us with the same type of doctrine which is now to be regarded as the most prevalent expression of the Christian consciousness. On the one hand, Christ has taken upon himself, according to the will of God, the curse to which all men had made themselves liable by the transgression of the law, and has cleansed by his blood those who believe in him ; but the condition of forgiveness of sins is not faith in the Pauline sense, but repentance, change of mind, observ- ance of the divine commandments. Justin insists emphatically on this last point; man is to put forth in action his own moral power.^ Christ is thus less the Eedeemer than the Teacher and Lawgiver, as Justin expressly calls him.^ After all this it is superfluous to discuss the question whether Justin belongs to the Jewish Christian or to the Pauline tendency, whether his dogmatic standpoint is to be termed Ebionitism or Paulinism. He cannot be placed distinctly either on one side or on the other ; his general position is too undefined and uncertain to allow of, a definite place being assigned to him. He marks himself off from the Jewish Christians, and declares that his agreement with them is more outward than inward ; but a much more striking thing than this is, that he nowhere gives any express recognition of Pauline Christianity. It is said to be beyond a doubt that he borrowed his view of the faith of Abraham from the Epistle to the Eomans, and wished, by laying stress on the righteousness that is by faith, to represent himself as a Paulinist.* If this be so, it is certainly remarkable that he never once mentions even the name of the apostle Paul, a fact which can scarcely be explained from his 1 Op. cit. cap. 35. ^ Eitschl, 1st ed., p. 310, sq.; 2d ed., p. 304. 3 'O Kaivos voiio6eTj]s. Dial. cap. 18. * Ritsohl, p. 309 ; 2d ed., p. 303. PETEB AND PAUL. 147 consideration for the Jews. If he be a Paulinist in fact, he does not wish to be one in name. What we have in him, though not expressly and openly declared, is just Catholic Christianity with its adjustment of those differences and party tendencies which had hitherto stood opposed to each other. The phenomenon we have before us here is entirely analogous to that which we have to deal with in the question as to Justin's Gospels. It may be beyond a doubt that Justin was acquainted with one of our Gospels or another, but he has named none of them. The thing is there, but there is no expression or name for it as yet, and as long as this is wanting, the fixity and definiteness which the conception of Catholic Chris- tianity requires are still in the future. What we have in Justin is the transition to Catholic Christianity.-' We have now to see how this transition was accomplished. Looking back to the commencement from which we started, we see ^ In the second edition of his work, p. 310, Eitschl calls in question the position which I have assigned to Justin. With Justin, so Eitsohl asserts, we have to recognise the predominant influence of Pauline ideas, though in a broken form, because this doctor is the first to bring to completeness the PauKne idea of the new law. With regard to Justin's Paulinism, I have to add the following re- marks : — Justin distinguishes only two classes of Christians (Dial, cum Tryph., cap. 35 and 80 ; cf. Theol. Jahrb., 1857, p. 219, sq.) : first, true orthodox Chris- tians, disciples of the true, pure doctrine of Jesus, who believe in a resurrection of the flesh and a millennial reign ; and second, those who confess Jesus and call themselves Christians, but eat flesh oflfered to idols, and assert that this does not compromise their Christianity, i.e. Gnostics ; Justin afterwards calls them by this name. Now, in which of these two classes did he include the Pauline Christians ? On this point it is asserted that Justin's judgment on the use of meat offered to idols cannot have been directed against Paul or against a party of Paul, because Paul himself rejected this Hcense, and directly forbade participation in heathen sacrificial meals (1 Cor. x. 20, 21). But is not this a. very one-sided interpreta- tion of the passage in which Paul deals with the question (1 Cor. viii.-x.) ? The apostle not only forbade the use of meat offered to idols, but also permitted it, and declared it to be a thing indifi'erent both in itself and for the man who prac- tised it. He certainly expressed himself in such a way as to justify an appeal to his authority on this side. On this question Paulinism and Gnosticism approach each other very nearly. And a Christian Hke Justin, who was filled with the idea of the demonic nature of heathenism, might easily come to doubt how he ought to regard Paulinism. This explains in a very natural way his silence on the subject, without requiring us to infer anything more about Justin than that his opinion was still wavering and undecided. 148 CHURCH HISTORY OP FIRST THREE CENTURIES. that what determined the course of the development was not only the opposition of two radically different tendencies, but also the division of the two apostles who stood at the head of them. The two tendencies have now gradually approached each other ; the original sharpness of the antithesis has been softened down ; from both sides there is an effort to find a middle position in which the antitheses may be as far as possible united. But it was still uncer- tain how the apostles, whom their strife divided from each other, came to be reconciled and to adjust their differences. And till the assurance could be had that the founders of the Church held out to one another the hand of peace, and mutually recognised each other as brethren, there could be no firm foundation for the union of the two parties, nor any guarantee for the continuance of the ecclesias- tical unity which had now been brought about. It was impossible to remain in doubt upon this point. And the fact that every doubt that might still be entertained upon this question disappeared just at the time when the Catholic Church came fully into existence in her chief representatives, is the clearest proof that this was the point in which the final completion of the Church was arrived at. In Irenaeus we find the first declaration of what by his time had come to be a standing fact, that the Eoman Church, the greatest and the oldest, and the universally known, had been founded and ordered by the two most glorious apostles ;' and TertuUian speaks of the Church, cui totam doctrinam apostoli cum sanguine suo profuderunt, ubi Petrus passioni dominicae adaequatur, ubi Paulus Johannis exitu coronatur.^ From this time forward we find that with Irenaeus and TertuUian, with Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and with all the Church Fathers of the period, whose entire agreement in doctrine and tradition, and in all the principles of the work of the Church, shows that the Catholic Church was now actually existing, every recollection of a dispute or of a difference of opinion between the two apostles has completely vanished, and the authority of the one is as firmly established as that of the other. During this period the canon of the New Testament writings, which ' Adv. Haer. iii. 3. '' De Praescr. Haer. o. 36. PETER AND PAUL. 149 was the essential basis of the Catholic Church now constituting itself, was gradually being settled. And the writings of the apostle Paul are those of whose canonical character there is the least doubt. This equalisation of the two apostles is no longer merely an object to be kept in view and worked out, as it was for the author of the Acts. "What he aimed at is now actually attained, and has passed into the general belief of the Church. Indeed the idea of the Church, which was now coming to be realised, necessarily presup- posed their equality. In the Eoman Church itself it was held as a historical tradition that the two apostles had suffered martyrdom at Eome together, and at the time of the Eoman Presbyter Caius, at the beginning of the third century, the places were pointed out where they had died as martyrs and were buried.-' If this were a matter of pure historical fact, we should simply have to accept it as a piece of history. But the story, whether we consider its matter or its form, is opposed to all historical probability ; indeed, there are good grounds to doubt whether Peter ever was at Eome at all ; so that the historical interest of the story lies precisely in its unhistorical character. A tradition so entirely devoid of his- torical foundation must have been designed to serve some particular interest.^ After what has been said, there is no need to discuss further what that interest was. It was felt desirable to bring the apostles as near as possible to each other — each was to have a part in the merit and the glory of the other ; and as they had worked harmoniously together in life, so their death was to testify and seal the brotherly communion of their apostolic career. If we try to pick up the traces of the formation of the story, we shall at once see the efforts, which were made to remove the various hindrances which stood in the way of the desired result. The two Petrine Epistles contain some remarkable data for such an investigation. The writer of the second Epistle, which is not only distinctly spurious, but one of the latest books of the canon, makes the apostle Peter, in drawing his Epistle to a close, speak of the apostle Paul as his beloved brother, who, according to the wisdom given unto 1 Euseb. Ecol. Hist. ii. 25. • CfTtaul, i. 239, sq. 150 CHUBCH HISTORY OF FIMT THREE CENTURIES. him, has written of the subject now under consideration, namely, the approaching catastrophe, in the same sense, — as also in all his Epistles, when he speaks of these things ; in which there are some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction (iii. 15, 16).'' In what a brotherly spirit Paul is recognised here as an apostle, and what pains does his apostolic brother take to remove the prejudice which might still exist in some quarters against his writings, and the misinterpretations they were exposed to ! Nay, the Epistles of Paul are here spoken of in the same category with the canonical Scriptures ! There are other marks of a medi- ating tendency to be found in the Epistles ; but this direct and pointed testimonial to the apostle Paul's apostolic authority is quite sufficient to prove the specific object which the writer had in view. He is merely giving utterance to a sentiment which the great majority of Christians must long have felt, that there was no reason for refusing to the apostle that recognition to which his writings and all that was remembered of his apostolic activity gave him the justest claim.^ Even in the first Epistle of Peter we may discern this tendency : and the probability that this is so rises in direct proportion to the improbability of the apostolic origin of that Epistle. Peter cannot possibly have written an Epistle which the ^ It is doubtful whether in 2 Pet. iii. 16 we ought to read iv ols or iv als. But even if we read ev ols, the expression which follows, &>i koi toe XoHras ypav Km cyvvepyw ev r« euayyeXto). At the beginning of the Epistle, the Gentile Christians are addressed by the author, speaking in the name of the Jewish Christians, as those whose faith had the same value and rested on the same foundation as that of the others. The Jewish Christian author, how- ever, who writes in Peter's name, and puts forth this recognition as his parting declaration (i. 13, sq.), stiU lets Peter's superiority appear as an eye-witness of the glory of Christ : Paul is only extolled for his (Toe\s iv ^/ifpa Trj tov TuacTxa. The proofs are of this nature. To those drawn from Hippolytus and ApoUinaris we have to add that of Clemens of Alexandria. In a fragment which is also preserved in the Chronicon Pasohale, op. cit. p. 14, he says that in the pre- ceding years the Lord ate the Passover with the Jews, but that on this occasion he announced himself as the Passover on the 13th, and then suffered on the following day (6 d/ivos tov 6€oi), as npoParov inl (T(j>ayfiv ayoji^vos, airos &v to irda-xa KoKkifprjBels vno 'lovBaiav). In all these passages the point at issue is clearly presented to us, and we see also the important bearing which the data of the Paschal controversy have upon the question of the apostolic origin of the 4th Gospel. In order to get rid of this inevitable inference Weitzel asserts, op. cit. p. 16, sq., that we have to distinguish between Catholic and heretical Quarto- deeimans, and that the evidence of Hippolytus and the others only refers to the TEE PASCHAL CONTROVERSY. 171 What the opponents of the Christians of Asia' Minor regarded as iixed before everything else was that Christ was the true and real Passover. From this it necessarily followed for them, since it was necessary that type and antitype, prophecy and fulfilment, should agree as closely as possible, that Christ died on the same teretieal party of them. There is thus an important difference between the Paschal controversy as it was in the year 170, and as it was in 190. In the year 170 Church did not stand against Church, the great representatives of the Church stood against an isolated party, against certain Judaizing Laodiceans, who appeared with their Judaizing Passover ritual in the year 170. But these pretended heretical Quartodecimans are a pure fiction. No proof of their existence can be brought forward ; on the contrary, the whole character and history of the con- test entirely excludes such a supposition. How clearly does the Epistle of Irenaeus show us that it is one and the same controversy from the very beginning ! In this Epistle we find Polycarp and Anicetus at issue about the same alternative, Trjpelv or fir) Trjpeiv, as formed the subject of dispute between Poly crates and Victor, as we gather from the Epistle of the former. Had the Quartodecimans in question been a heretical, i.e. a Judaizing party, we should have had some clearer proof of their Judaizing tendency. But the dispute was not about the Passover as such, it was not proposed to keep it with the Jews as a Jewish festival. The dispute was about the action of Jesus in connection with the Pass- over, whether it was at a Passover that he ate his last meal with his disciples. The 14th was to be kept, not for the sake of the Passover, but in remembrance of Jesus and what he had done. This is the plain meaning of the passages which we have quoted. What was there here that was specifically Judaistic, and that was not to be found with the Catholic Quartodecimans as well ? The Church knew nothing of heretical Quartodecimans in the sense here assumed. This may be seen from a passage in the newly discovered PhOosophoumena of Origen (vii. 18, ed. Miller, p. 274, sq.), where he speaks of those who keep the Passover on the 14th day of the first month, Kara ttjv tov vofiov biaTayfjv, and justify the practice by referring to the curse of the Mosaic law, but- do not consider the significance of the true Paschal sacrifice in Christ and the words of the apostle Paul, Gal. V. 3. In the same way as ApoUinaris and Hippolytus accused their opponents of contentiousness and ignorance, these persons are called ^iXdi/ciKoj TTjV (jjva-tv, l8iS>Tai tijv yvSxrtv ; but not as Judaistic heretics ; on the contrary, the testimony of perfect orthodoxy in other respects is expressly accorded to them : iv 8e tois iripois ovtoi crvfKJxovova-i irpos Ttavra to. ttj iKKkqaia vtio to>v dnoaTokoiV Trapadedofieva. Of. on the Paschal controversy my Krit. Unters. iiber die kanon. Evang. p. 269, 334, sq., 353, sq., and the essays in the Theol. Jahrb. 1847, p. 89, sq.; 1848, p. 264, sq.; Hilgenfeld : der Paschastreit und das Evangelium des Johannes mit Eiicksieht auf Weitzel's Darstellung; Theol. Jahrb. 1849, p. 209, sq., and Der Galaterbrief, Leipzig, 1852, p. 84, sq. In spite of its evidently incorrect assumption, Weitzel's view is a very convenient sanction for refusing to accept the results of recent criticism ; and it is repeated by Lechler in the work quoted, p. 52, who how- 172 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. day on which the Jewish Passover was slain. But if the 14th was only distinguished as the day of the death of Jesus, and if what was meant by Jesus dying as the Passover was that He finally and for ever removed the old, that had reached its fulfilment, by placing in its stead the new, that had now come into being, then there could be no need to retain the 1 4th as the standing anniversary of the death of Jesus. To the Christian festival-calendar the only possible fixed day was the Sunday of the resurrection. Thus, while for the Easterns the 14th was the day of a standing festival, and everything else had to be arranged with reference to that day, with the Westerns the days of these yearly festivals were fixed on the opposite principle : the day of the death depended on the day of the resurrection, and as the latter was always a Sunday, the former was always a Friday. Though the Eoman custom more and more gained the upper hand, yet the difference continued to exist even in later times, and was in fact one of the causes of the Council of Nice, for even at that time there were several ecclesiastical provinces in the ever fails to apprehend correctly the point at issue. In his second, thoroughly revised, edition of 1857, Lechler brings forward only what is quite famihar, and was refuted long ago. For the Mterature of the question cf. Steitz : die DifiFerenz der Occidentalen und der Kleinasiaten in der Passaifeier, auf's Neue kritisch uutersucht und im Zusammenhang mit der gesanunten Pestordnung der alten Kirche entwickelt, in the Theol. Stud. a. Kritiken, 1856, p. 721. Against this my Dissertation on the Johannine question in the Theol. Jahrb. 1857, p. 242, sq., and Hilgenfeld, p. 523, sq. In defence of his view or of Weitzel's hypothesis, Steitz gave certain further observations in the Stud. u. Krit. 1857, p. 741, which I did not neglect to answer; see Zeitschr. fiir wissensch. Theol., 1858, p. 298, sq. The question has been so long the subject of investigations and so thoroughly discussed on both sides that two points may now be regarded as established results against which it is not likely that any new argument of importance wiU be adduced. These are — (1.) The Passover on the 14th was not consecrated to the Redeemer dying or already dead, but to the Lord now entering into his sufferings (his irdSos), and still sitting in the midst of his disciples. (It was this, as I pointed out when I last wrote on the subject, that filled these last moments with recollections of such infinite tenderness. Hence it was that for the Christians of Asia Minor, everything was wrapped up in that one day, and that they would know nothing of any consideration that would have detached them from the sentiment so intimately connected with that day. Everything was concentrated on the few hours of the Passover held after the fast in memory of Jesus' last supper. Far from being a festival of joy, the sesthetical antithesis to the fast just brought to a conclusion, as some think it must have been, it must have been kept in the solemn THE PASCHAL CONTBOVEBSY. 173 East in which the Passover was kept at the time when the Jews kept it.^ The Judaism of the Quartodecimans had given offence from the first ; and the same anti-Jewish feeling still finds expres- sion in the declaration of the Council of Kice, that it was improper to be guided by the custom of the unbelieving and hostile Jews. All the Christians of the East, who had hitherto been keeping the Passover with the Jews, were in future to celebrate it in conformity with the usage of the Eoman Church. Indeed, so strong was the desire to have nothing in common with the Jews in this festival, that when the Easter full moon fell on a Sunday, Easter was to be celebrated not on the day of the full moon, but on the following Sunday. So lively and universal was the commotion aroused by this ques- tion not only in Asia, but among the Christian Churches of the age in general. And this makes it impossible to disregard the attitude of the Gospel of John with regard to the dispute. It takes its stand most decidedly upon the side of the Western tradi- mood appropriate to a supper of farewell, but a mood lifted above mere sorrow by the deepest sentiment of piety.) (2.) The pretended heretical Quartodecimans are utterly unvouched for by any historical evidence ; in fact they are simply a makeshift of apologetics. In his "last words," in which he (Steitz) finally wound up his investigation into the Paschal controversy viewed aesthetically and other- wise (der asthetische Charakter der Eucharistie und des Fastens in der alten Kirche, ■Theol. Stud. u. Bait. 1859, p. 716 sq.), he sums up his result as follows, p. 737 : ' ' There is every reason not to set too high a value on the statements of Polycarp and Polycrates about John. The Church of Asia Minor will have received from the beloved disciple the fact attested by the fourth Gospel, that Christ died on the 14th of Nisan, and perhaps also the usage of celebrating this day as the standing anniversary of his death ; but there is no doubt that the manner of celebration belongs to a later age, and was formed by a process of historical development, though probably upon the basis of the fourth Gospel (cf. xvi. 6, 7 ; xix. 30.)" This is a view of history dominated and limited by the "beloved disciple;" and it ends in simply denying the value of historical evidences, such as those of Polycarp and Polycrates, which do not suit the writer's purpose, while the question under discussion is no nearer a solution at the conclusion of the argument than it was at the beginning, 1 Cf. Athanas. de Syn. 5, where there is special mention of ot ano tijs 'Svptas Kol KiXiKiar, Km MctroTroTa/iiar, as those who i^oKtvov nepl ttjv ioprriu Km fiera tS>v 'lovSalav iiroiovv to Tvairxa. Cf. Eusebius, de vita Const, iii. 5. 18. Socr., H. E., i. 9. 174 CHURCH HISTORY OP FIRST THREE CENTURIES. tion. It is evidently with deliberate purpose that it arranges its account of the death of Jesus in such a way as to preclude the idea that his last meal was the Passover. In xiii. 1 it says expressly, that before the feast of the Passover Jesus ate a supper (SeIttvov, not to Seiirvov) with his disciples, which, notwithstanding its difference in many respects from the supper of the Synoptics, yet coincides with theirs in being the last he ate. The repeated allusions, again, to the festival as still approaching, as xiii. 29, xviii. 28, seem to be designed to prevent all doubt upon the point that this meal was the same meal eaten by Jesus with his disciples on the night of his arrest, as that which is described by the Synoptics, only with the difference that it was not the Passover. On this point especially, there is such a radical discrepancy between the synoptical and the Johannine narratives, that there is scarcely another exegetical result so firmly established as the utter futility of all attempts to interpret the one account into the other. And yet this same apostle John is represented as one of the chief witnesses to the genuinely apostolic origin of the tradition of Asia Minor — the apostle to whose authority the venerable Poly- crates, bishop of Ephesus, appealed. That bishop calls to witness his grey hairs and all that was holy and worthy of reverence to him, in such a way as to make it as impossible to question the. historical trustworthiness of his testimony as it is to impugn the above-mentioned exegetical result. In what other way can this obvious contradiction be overcome than by supposing that the author of the Gospel was a different man from the apostle John, the author of the Apocalypse ?^ 1 According to Gieseler, Lehrb. der E.G., 4th ed., i. 1, p. 241, sq., this contradic- tion admits of an easy solution. He says : "At tlie outset the Jewish Passover was kept up in the Christian Chm-ohes only with the diflference that it was referred to Christ, the true Passover (1 Cor. v. 7). John found this practice existing at Ephesus, and left it unchanged. He corrected it in his Gospel only so far as to preclude the belief on which it may have proceeded that Christ ate the Passover with the Jews on the day before his death : he made it appear distinctly, that Christ was crucified on the 14th of ^isan. But this did not make it necessary to THE PASCHAL CONTROVERSY. 175 The historical datum which is given to us in the information we have about the Paschal controversy does but confirm the result which rests on so many other incontrovertible grounds. These all combine to place the origin of the Gospel of John at a later date, and we now conclude, that it can only have arisen within the circle of those movements which were called forth by the Paschal controversy, and must have proceeded from the same interest which caused the Church of Eome to take up more and more an attitude of opposition to the Churches which still adhered to the original Jewish-Christian tradition. There is no doubt that historical tradition was on the side of the Quartodecimans of Asia Minor, and that in this view they were right. We have no reason for doubting the trustworthiness of the testimony to which they appealed in proof of the apostolic origin of their tradition ; and the synoptic account of the death of Jesus, which coincides with this tradition in every respect, produces the impression that it is the oldest transmitted record. All the testimony is agreed upon the point that Jesus died on the 15th of Nisan, and kept the Passover on the 14th with his disciples. The other tradition, according to which Jesus died on the 14th, the day of the Passover, and his last meal was not the Passover, proclaims itself as of a later origin. It is true that in the Church of Eome Anicetus appealed against Polycarp to the tradition of his change the celebration at Ephesua ; on the contrary, the 14th of Nisan was now shown to be the true Passover-day for Christians as well : the fulfilment of the type fell on the same day with the type itself." As if the contradiction did not lie in this very point, that he laid the utmost stress on the 14th, as the day of Christ's death, and yet was so indiflferent as to the mode in which the day was celebrated ! How could he allow the contradiction of the (payiiv and naBetv on the same day to remain unremoved ? How could he sanction that contradiction by personally taking part in the Passover of Asia Minor, while in his Gospel he did all in his power to oppose it ? And what brought him to correct the belief he found existing in Asia Minor, and thereby to run counter to the universal tradition, confirmed by the Synoptics, according to which Christ died on the 15th? One who supposes that the self-contradiction into which the apostle John would thus have been involved can be got rid of in this easy way, must have failed entirely to see how radical a difference was involved in the question of the day of the death of Jesus. 176 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. predecessors. But the Epistle of Irenaeus to Victor, the bishop of Eome, shows that the line of bishops of Eome, whom Irenaeus designated as /jltj Tijpowre? (though at the same time they stood in friendly relations to the rTjpovvTei), could not be traced further than Anicetus, Pius, Hyginus, Telesphorus, and Xystus. The last of these, Eusebius tells us (E. H. iv. 4), was bishop of Eome during the time of Hadrian from the third to the twelth year of the reign of that emperor (cir. 120-129). Whatever the causes may have been which combined to give the Church of Eome a more and more anti- Jewish tendency during the course of the second century, there is no doubt that the inner reason was the freer development of the Christian consciousness. The principal expression of this tendency was in connection with the Old Testament typology, the relation between type and antitype coming to be more exactly defined. Justin, though he holds the Passover of the Old Testament to be a type of Christ, yet agreed with the synoptic version with regard to the day of the death of Jesus.^ But when it was emphatically maintained against opponents that Jesus did not keep the Jewish Passover, it became necessary to look for grounds to justify this assertion. And the only way to justify it was to define the relation of type and antitype more accu- rately. The more completely the type and antitype coincide, the less is it possible for the type to retain any importance, when once the full reality of the antitype has taken its place. This became the fundamental and guiding thought upon the subject : we find this thought also in[the Gnostic writers of the period, when they attempt to define the exact significance of the types and symbols of the Old Testament.^ Allegorical interpretation being regarded as 1 Dial. c. Tryph. e. iii. ; cf. c. 40. In the latter passage the maimer in which Justin considers the Passover to be a type of Christ is especially deserving of notice. He sees the typical element only in the blood which was put upon the houses, and in the form of the cross, which the Iamb presented when it was being roasted. He thus leaves quite unnoticed that sign to which the evangelist, xix. 36, attaches the highest importance. How could he have done so if he had been acquainted with the Gospel of John ? 2 Of. in particular the Epistle to Flora of the Gnostic Ptolemaeus in Epiphaniua, Haer. xxxiii. 5. Havra ravTa, Ptolemaeus says of the Old Testament types, THE JOffANNINE GOSPEL. 177 the key to tte Scriptures, and as the highest knowledge, those ■who occupied this point of view, and thought it enabled them to gain a deeper insight into the relation of type and antitype, considered themselves to be standing at a higher stage of Chris- tian knowledge than others. This is the point of the charge which we find in the fragments of ApoUinaris and Hippolytus, where they speak of the ignorance and contentiousness of their opponents, since being destitute of that true insight into the subject which is possible only to those who know how to dis- tinguish correctly between type and antitype, and to place them in their true relation to each other, they yet obstinately adhere to their alleged tradition, and contend against their opponents with regard to that which the latter believe themselves to under- stand far better. In this view of it the Paschal controversy is one of the most important stages in that series of endeavours which the Church put forth in the second century to indicate the positions which had been attained in the freer development of the Christian principle, by purifying and disengaging itself from the elements of Judaism that stiU adhered to it. The Gospel of John is essentially a product of these movements, and is the purest expression of that higher form of the Christian consciousness which issued out of this process of development. It regards the breach of Christianity with Judaism as an accomplished fact, and the attitude which it takes up to Jewish Christianity is a similar one. Since Christ has been sacrificed as the Passover, the Passover no longer concerns Chris- tians. The Passover is now a purely Jewish festival : for Chris- tians it is abrogated (jo m-da-^a rav 'lovBaiwv, ii. 13, vi. 4, xi. 55). This is part of the general view of this Gospel, according to the language of which even the law is merely the law of the Jews. What led the author of the Gospel to identify himself in this way among wMch the Passover is specially named, flKoves kol crvji^oXa ovra ttjs oK-qBelas (f>avfpai6eia-ris iisreredrj, Kara fikv to <^aiv6fievov Koi (TafiaTiKas €KTf\els- 6ai avrjpeSri, Kara 8e to irvfVfiaTiKov aveXrjCpdr], Ta>v fiiv ovofiarav t5>v avrmv ofvovrav, ivqWayjievaiv 8e tSiv irpayfiaTav. M 178 CEUROE HISTOBY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. with the apostle John can have been nothing but his conscious- ness that he had reached a higher stage of development, where all particularism was left far behind. John alone — but only John as spiritualised in the sense of this Gospel — is for the author the highest e?:pression of the Christian consciousness. In the Johannine Gospel, then, John is distinguished as the most intimate disciple, as the beloved disciple who was nearest to Jesus — a thing which is quite peculiar to this Gospel. Indeed this is carried so far as to assign to John a position in which Peter himself has need of his mediation, and is designedly represented in a subordinate position to him. This is a most obvious protest against the primacy attributed to the apostle Peter by the Jewish Christians.^ The John who thus claims a position above Peter himself is not a historical but a merely ideal person. The evangelist's conception of the Spirit tends in the same direction. The Spirit only comes in his fulness after the close of the earthly life of Jesus, and thus stands, as the universal Christian prin- ciple, high above the personal authority even of the apostles. In the difference which existed between Paulinism and Judaism on this subject, the Johannine Gospel goes a step beyond even Paulinism.^ The same is the case with his doctrinal system. The Jewish- Christian and the Pauline doctrine are here blended together in a higher unity. Faith has the same inwardness in which its value consists with Paul ; but its object is not the death of Jesus with its efficacy for the forgiveness of sins, but the whole person of Jesus as the incarnate Logos ; or, since Jesus as one sent cannot be thought 1 Cf. my Krit. Untersuch. p. 320, sq., 377, sq. ^ The Spirit is sent fortlx to operate unrestrictedly after the glorification of Jesus, and represents the person of Jesus himself. He who believes on him, the Jesus of John says, out of him flow rivers of living water (vii. 38). It is the sphere of pure spirituality into which this Gospel transports us. As Paul by his vocation broke in upon the old apostolic circle, so the bearers and possessors of the apostolic spirit are now said to be the believing disciples in general : cf. xvii. 20, sq. According to the Johannine view, therefore, it is by no means an essential condition with regard to the origin of such a Gospel as that of John, that its author should be an apostle. TEE JOHANNINE GOSPEL. 179 of apart from his intimate oneness with him who sends him, the object of faith is God himself. The relation of Jesus, as the Son to the Father, is the absolute type for the whole relation of man to God. "What the Son is absolutely, those who believe on him are to become through his mediation. In the same relation in which the Son stands to the Father believers also stand not only to the Son, but through his mediation to the Father also. The ruling prin- ciple of the relation is love actively manifesting itself by unreserved devotion, and by following the Divine will. The highest absolute principle of this love is the love of the Father to the Son, and of God to the world. Love is thus the dominant conception from which the Johannine mode of view sets out ; and this is the point at which the Johannine doctrine diverges from the Pauline. Lofty as is the apostle Paul's conception of the love of God, yet it results from his view of the law, that love always has righteousness stand- ing over against it. Man cannot get away from the law without satisfaction being rendered to the claim which the law is entitled to put forward against him, without his debt being cancelled, his ransom paid. From the standpoint of the Gospel of John we see that, on the one hand, the law has come to be at such a distance from the present field of vision, that its claims may as it were be regarded as antiquated — there is no occasion for trying to arrive at a definite understanding with the law. On the other hand, the view taken of the whole person of Jesus does not admit of any one feature of his work or personality being insisted on so much more than the rest, as that the whole work of redemption should centre in his death. That death is redemptive only to the same extent as the whole manifestation of Jesus is redemptive. What the fact of the death is with Paul the simple personality of Jesus is here — the person of Jesus in its absolute significance. To gain a correct idea of the relation of the Johannine standpoint to that of Paul, we must consider that all those antitheses, through which Paulinism was obliged to fight its way, were to the author of the Johannine Gospel a part of a far distant past. Faith and works are merged in love, their higher unity. Jewish particularism, with all the 180 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. antitheses connected with it, disappears in that general antithesis which forms the background of the Johannine view of the world — the antithesis of the two principles, light and darkness, which exercise a determining influence on the moral as well as the religious world. At this stage the development of the Christian principle has reached its definite goal within the sphere which we are at present considering. Christianity is established as a universal principle of salvation ; all those antitheses which threatened to detain it within the narrow limits of Jewish particularism are merged in the universalism of Christianity. This has come about at two different points, at each of which a series of phenomena has run its course, each independent of the other. The one point is to be found in the Church of Eome ; the other in the Gospel of John. At both these points the Christian consciousness is working out its freer development, and in both it has the same goal before it, the realisation of the idea of the Catholic Church. In the Gospel of John this process of development presents itself to us on its ideal, in the Church of Eome on its practical side. In the former the development of the Christian consciousness already bears the char- acter of a Christian theology : in the latter the great question is to realise the practical idea of the Church. On the one side the movement proceeds from a definite point : we stand upon the firm ground of historical reality ; there are definite antitheses which it is sought to reconcile : on the other side the whole mode of thought floats in the sphere of a transcendental idealism. We do not even know where the Gospel of John came into existence. It is true that it is connected in many ways with the Church of Asia Minor and with the controversies which during the course of the second century made that Church the centre of the ecclesiastical move- ment ; yet both as a whole and in many of its individual features it exhibits such a decidedly Alexandrian stamp, and so close an affinity to the later Alexandrian theology, that we cannot avoid the conclusion that it represents the Alexandrian tendency, and that in whatever part of Christendom it may have come into existence, LATEB EBIONITISM. 181 we have to seek the root out of which it grew chiefly in this direction. In spite of its ideal and theological character it does not lose sight of the practical task involved in the idea of the Church, as when it speaks of the one fold and the one shepherd. It agrees with the Eoman Church in its broad anti-Judaistic tendency ; its most direct point of contact with that Church, how- ever, lies in the common opposition of the Church and of the Gospel to the Judaism of the Quartodecimans of Asia Minor. The endea- vour after unity had already been manifested in the Church of Eome in the brotherly agreement effected between the two apostles Peter and Paul ; and the same spirit imposed it on that Church as a necessary task to work out its views of Catholic unity against this relic of the old tenacious adhesion to Judaism. There must no longer be any such declared Judaists as the Quartodecimans still were ; and thus another element, which originally formed a link of connection between Christianitj'- and Judaism, but in regard to which Christianity desired no longer to be associated with Judaism, was now ehminated from the Christian Church. Thus it was declared that whoever should cling with the old tenacity to any one of the Jewish elements from which the Christian consciousness in the course of its development had gradually disengaged itself, placed himself thereby outside of the pale of the Catholic Church at least, if not of Christianity. This is the idea which now, from the end of the second century onwards, came to be connected with the term Ebionites. Ebionites at this part of Church history are those Jewish Christians who at this later period, even after a Catholic Church had come into existence, exhibited all those char- acteristics which had originally found their own place within the Christian community, and had even been regarded as an essential part of Christianity, but which the Catholic Church at a later time no longer sanctioned.^ The Ebionites, when we find them as a sect disowned by the Catholic Church, are just what the Jewish Christians were originally, as distinguished from the Pauline Christians. Irenaeus, ^ Of. Lehrbuoh der Dogmengesoli., 2d ed., p. 64. 182 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. who is the first to speak of the Ebionites as a sect not belonging to the Catholic Church,^ and Epiphanius, who gives a description of such remainders of the party as still survived at his time,^ specify the same features as were originally charac- teristic of Jewish Christians generally. The account given of them by Irenaeus they worship Jerusalem as if it were the house of God, is a very pointed indication of their view of the absolute importance of Judaism. The Ebionites of Epiphanius held firmly to circumcision ; they went so far as to regard it as the seal and characteristic mark not only of the patriarchs and of the just men who lived according to the law, but of the followers of Christ, who (they said) was himself circumcised.' By their hatred toward the apostle Paul and their express rejection of his Epistles, the Ebionites were afterwards distinguished from the more tolerantly disposed Nazarites, of whom at least this is not stated. The accounts we have of the Ebionitic Passover imply that they observed the Jewish festival in the same manner as the Quartodecimans. Epiphanius asserts that the Ebionites did not arise till after the destruction of Jerusalem. This statement, however, is completely unhistorical, and is a mere inference from the assumption that nothing afterwards deemed heretical could have been an original part of orthodox Christianity. The Ebionites did not become a sect till later ; even Justin does not regard them as a sect. But an examination of their principles, doctrines, and usages, while it shows us in many points the harsh sectarianism of their attitude, points at the same time to a very close identity and connection with Jewish Christianity. So much is this the case that it cannot be deemed an unjustifiable use of the name to say that Jewish Christianity in general was a kind of Ebionitism. In 'Adv. Haer. i. 26. ^Haer. xxx. 1, sq. 'Against Ritschl, who {op. cit., 2d ed. p. 172) regards the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs as a product of Nazaraism, Hilgenfeld maintains {Zeitschrift fur wisaensoh. Theol. 1858, p. 287, sq.) that the Nazarites and Ebionites are not so much two separate sects of Jewish Christianity as rather different modifications of the old hostility against Paulinism as it softened down to a more tolerant attitude towards Grentile Christianity. LATER EBIONITISM. 183 the ordinary and narrower sense of the name, however, it denotes that form of primitive Christianity which by no other action than its own came to be detached from the community of the Catholic Church, because its adherents were unable to keep pace with the development of the Christian consciousness in its advance beyond Jewish Christianity. PAUT THIRD. CHEISTIANITY AS AN IDEAL PRINCIPLE OF THE WOELD ; AND AS A REAL PHENOMENON EXISTING UNDER HISTORICAL CONDITIONS ; OR, GNOSTICISM AND MONTANISM, AND THEIR ANTITHESIS, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. I.— GNOSTICISM AND MONTANISM. I. GNOSTICISM. "With the name and the notion of " Gnosticism " (the reason for coupling it with Montanism in the title cannot be explained tUl afterwards) we enter upon a totally different field of the history of the early Church from that which we have hitherto been discussing. The question is no longer whether Christianity is a particular or a universal principle of salvation, or as to the conditions on which the Christian salvation is to be obtained. The practical interest is no longer merely that of breaking through and putting aside the barriers that impede the free and more universal development of Christianity. The circle of vision is completely changed. God and the world, spirit and matter, absolute and finite, the origin, development, and end of the world : these are the conceptions and antitheses into the sphere of which we are now transferred. In a word, Christianity is now to be apprehended not as a principle of salvation, but as a principle of the world. The phenomena with which we have now to deal have their own point of com- mencement, form a circle by themselves, and have a character of their own. So much is this the case, that in fact it is merely GNOSTICISM. 185 the name of Christianity that connects them with the rest of the phenomena which form the history of the early Church. Yet on the other hand they are not without weighty significance for the history of the development of the Catholic Church. It is involved first of all in the very idea of the Catholic Church that she should seek to rise above everything particular, and merge it in the uni- versality of the Christian principle ; but on the other hand it is a not less essential part of her office to maintain and hold fast the positive elements of Christianity. In fact, what constitutes her a Catholic Church is that she stands in the middle to harmonise aU tendencies together, and rejects the one extreme as much as the other. Had not the idea that developed itself out of Christianity, the idea of the Catholic Church, overcome the particularism of Judaism, Christianity itself would have become a mere sect of Judaism. But on the other side, on the side where it came in contact with heathenism, it was threatened by a danger no less serious, viz., that ideas would come to operate upon the Christian doctrines, under the influence of which they would fade away into vague and general abstractions, so that the Christian consciousness spreading out in limitless expansion would entirely lose its specific historical character. Now this was the tendency of Gnosticism, and the general account which we have to give of Gnosticism in view of this tendency is, that it regarded Christianity not in the first instance as a principle of salvation, but as the principle that determines the whole development of the world. Thus the interests out of which it arose were those of speculation and philosophy rather than religion; and it points back to philosophy as the highest outcome of the human spirit in the Gentile world. This suffices for a general indication of what Gnosticism is. But when we attempt to give a more particular account of the nature and development of the conception, we find that, even after all the discussion that has taken place on the subject, especially of recent years, this is by no means an easy or simple task. It is still an unaccomplished task, to seize, amidst so much that is indefinite, vague, merely circumlocutory, and only partly true, those points 186 CHUBCH SISTOBY OF FIBST THREE CENTURIES. that furnish a clear conception of the thing itself. The most usual course is to conceive Gnosticism as being in the first instance theo- logical speculation. This is Gieseler's^ account of it. He finds the philosophical basis which serves to e^lain it partly in the old problem of the origin of evil, and partly in the development of philosophical thought with reference to God. In working out the idea of the Supreme Deity, he says, philosophy found it more and more difficult to regard him as the creator of the world, and became more and more inclined to derive the imperfect good in the world from inferior beings, and the evil from an evil principle. These ideas found support in the Christian view of Christianity, Judaism, and Paganism, as the perfect, the imperfect, and the evil. Neander^ starts from the aristocratic spirit of the ancient world, from the distinction drawn between those who know and those who believe, and from the eclectic character of Gnosticism, and goes on to say that, " as soon as Christianity entered into man's intellectual life, it could not fail that a need should be felt to attain to a clear consciousness as to the connection of the truths given by revelation with the previous intellectual possessions of mankind, and also as to the inner connection of Christian truth as an organic whole. Where such a need, instead of being satisfied, was forcibly sup- pressed, there the one-sided tendency of Gnosticism found its justification." But this is obscure, and E"eander's favourite cate- gory of reaction is here inapplicable. We look for the solution of the riddle therefore in what follows — "The speculative element in the Gnostic systems is not the product of a reason divorced from history, and resolved to draw everything from its own depths. The void into which a merely negative philosophy invariably sinks had set the human spirit, which ever craves for reality, to seek for a more positive doctrine. In the Gnostic systems we can discover elements of Platonic philosophy, Jewish theology, ancient Oriental theosophy, blended together ; but they by no means admit of being explained by the mere mixture and combination of these elements. There is a peculiar living principle which animates most of these 1 K. G. i 1, p. 179, sq., 4. N. 2 Church Hist. vol. ii. p. 1. GNOSTICISM. 187 combinations. The time in which they appeared stamped them with a peculiar character. In any age there are certain tendencies and ideas which exert a wonderful influence upon everything con- temporary with them. Such, in the present case, was the dualistic principle whose influence harmonised with, and, as it were, reflected the prevailing temper of the age. The underlying tone in many of the more earnest spirits of this time was a consciousness of the power of evil ; and Christianity operated in a peculiar way upon this feeling." According to this, the origin and nature of Gnosti- cism are to be explained by the influence of the dualistic principle. Now, unquestionably dualism is an essential feature of the charac- ter of the Gnostic systems. But it cannot suffice to explain the nature of Gnosticism ; for the influence of this principle is not seen till it becomes apparent in Gnosticism itself. Neander's most pertinent contribution to the understanding of Gnosticism comes to this : " Gnosticism sought to make the doctrine of religion de- pendent on a speculative solution of all those questions which speculation had been vainly labouring to solve. In this way it was to lay for doctrine a firm foundation, and to provide for the correct understanding of it ; so that this was to be the way in which men were to arrive at an understanding of Christianity, and attain to a true conviction, independent of anything external. In a word, then. Gnosticism was a philosophy of religion ; but in what sense was it this?^ The name of Gnosticism — Gnosis — does not belong exclusively to the group of phenomena with whose historical explanation we are here concerned. Gnosis is a general idea ; it is only as defined in one particular manner that it signifies Christian Gnosticism in 1 Cf. on the notion of Gnosticism my Inaugural Dissertation de Gnosticorum christianismo ideaU, Tub. 1827 ; and my work die Christliohe Gnosis oder die chriatliohe Religionsphilosophie in ihrer gescMchtlichen Entwicklung, Tiib. 1835. Also my Essays : Kritiscbe Studien uber den Begriff der Gnosis, Theol. Stud. u. Krit. 1837, iii. p. 511, sq. TJeber den Begriff der christKohen Eeligionsphilosophie ihren Ursprung und ihre ersten Formen j Zeitschr. fur speculative Tbeol., edited by Lie. Bruno Bauer, ii. 2, Berlin, 1837, p. 354, sq. Also my Lebrb. d. cbrist- lichen Dogmengeschichte, 2d ed., Tlib. 1858, p. 69, sq. ; and "Die Tubinger Sebule," p. 50, sq. 188 CHUBCH HISTOBY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. a special sense. Gnosis is higher knowledge, knowledge that has a clear perception of the foundations on which it rests, and the manner in which its structure has been built up ; a knowledge that is completely that which, as knowledge, it is called to be. In this sense it forms the natural antithesis to Pistis, Faith : if it is desired to denote knowledge in its specific difference from faith, no word will mark the distinction more significantly than Gnosis. But we find that, even in this general sense, the knowledge termed Gnosis is a religious knowledge rather than any other ; for it is not specu- lative knowledge in general, but only such as is concerned with religion. Thus the apostle Paul uses the word tyvwaii to charac- terise that view of the eating of meat offered to idols, which claimed acceptance as more liberal than any other, as more enlightened, more strictly in accord with the essence of the matter in question. In 1 Cor. xii. 8 he speaks of a Xo'70? yvdxreox: which, moreover, he distinguishes from the Xoyo'; ao(f>la(;. The distinction must lie in the greater depth of thought put for- ward in the former style of address. It is especially noteworthy for our purpose that we find the word yvaat^, in its more particular sense, used of such religious knowledge as rests on allegorical inter- pretation of the Scriptures.^ Gnosis and allegory are essentially allied conceptions; and this affords us a very marked indication of the path which will really lead us to the origin of Gnosticism ; for we shall find that allegory plays an important part in most of its systems, especially in those which exhibit its original form. It is well known that allegory is the soul of the Alexandrian re- ligious philosophy. Nothing else, indeed, can enable us to under- stand the rise of the latter; so closely is allegory interwoven with its very nature. Allegory is in general the mediator between philosophy and the religion which rests upon positive tradition. Wherever it is seen on a large scale, we notice that philosophical views have arisen side by side with, and independently of, the existing religion; and that the need has arisen to bring the ideas and doctrines of philosophy into harmony with the contents of the religious belief. 1 Cf. die ohristliche Gnosis, p. 85, sq. GNOSTICISM, THE ORIGIN OF. 189 In such circumstances allegory appears in the character of media- tor. It hrings about the desired conformity by simply interpret- ing the belief in the sense of the philosophy. Eeligious ideas and narratives are thus clothed with a figurative sense which is entirely different from their literal meaning. It was thus that allegory arose before the Christian time among the Greeks. The desire was felt first by Plato, and afterwards still more strongly by the Stoics, to turn the myths of the popular religion to account on behalf of their philosophical ideas, and so to bridge over the gulf between the philosophical and the popular mind ; and with this view they struck out the path of allegory, of allegorical interpretation of the myths. It is well known what extensive use the Stoics made of allegory when they wished to trace their own ideas of the philo- sophy of nature in the gods of the popular belief and the narratives concerning them.^ But in Alexandria this mode of interpretation assumed still greater importance. Here it had to solve the weighty problem how the new ideas that had forced their way into the mind and consciousness of the Jew, were to be reconciled with his belief in the authority of his sacred religious books. Allegory alone made it possible to him, on the one hand, to admire the philosophy of the Greeks, and in particular of Plato, and to make its ideas his own ; and, on the other, to reverence the Scriptures of the Old Testament as the one source of divinely revealed truth. The sacred books needed but to be explained allegorically, and then all that was wished for, even the boldest speculative ideas of the Greek mind, could be found in the books themselves. How widely this method was practised ia Alexandria may be judged from the writings of Philo, in which we see the most extensive use made of allegorical interpretation, and find the contents of the Old Testament blended intimately with everything that the systems of Greek philosophy could offer. But it would be quite erroneous to think that it was nothing but caprice and the unchecked play of fancy that called forth this allegorical explanation of the Scrip- tures, which came to exercise such influence. For the Alexandrian 1 Zeller, Philosophie der Grieelien, iii. p. 123, sq. 190 CBURCH mSTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. Jew at the stage of spiritual development which he had now reached, with his consciousness divided between his ancestral Hebraism and modern Hellenism, this allegorising was a neces- sary form of consciousness ; and so little did he dream that the artificial link by which he bound together such diverse elements was a thing he had himself created, that aU the truth which he accepted in the systems of Greek philosophy seemed to him to be nothing but an emanation from the Old Testament revelation. Now the Gnostic systems also, for the most part, make very free use of the allegorical method of interpretation ; and this is enough to apprise us that we must regard them under the same aspect as the Alexandrian religious philosophy. As far as we are acquainted with the writings of the Gnostics we see them to have been full of allegorical interpretations, not indeed referring, as with Philo, to the books of the Old Testament (for their attitude towards the Old Testament was entirely different from his) ; but to those of the New, which were for the Gnostics what the books of the Old Testament were for Philo. In order to give their own ideas a Christian stamp, they applied the allegorical method, as much as possible, to the persons and events of the Gospel history, and especially to the numbers that occur in it. Thus for the Valentinians the number thirty in. the New Testa- ment, especially in the life of Jesus, was made to signify the number of their Aeons ; the lost wandering sheep was for them their Achamoth ; and even utterances of Jesus which contain a perfectly simple religious truth, received from them a sense referring to the doctrines of their system. The lately discovered Philosophoumena of the Pseudo-Origen,^ who undertook the task of refuting all the heresies, show us even more clearly than before what an extensive use the Gnostics made of allegory. They applied it not merely to the books of the Old and New Testaments, but even to the products of Greek literature, — for instance, to the Homeric poems. Their whole mode of view was entirely allego- ^ 'SlpLyevovi <^tXoa"0(/)ov^cva, rj Kara iratrwv alpecreatv eXey^os, E codice Parisino nunc primum edidit Emmanuel Miller. Oxonii, 1851. GNOSTICISM— ALLEGORY. 191 rical. The whole field of ancient mythology, astronomy, and physics was laid under contribution to support their views. They thought that the ideas that were the highest objects of their thought and knowledge were to be found expressed everywhere.-' The allegorical mode of thought may be described as being simply the means by which a matter composed of various elements receives a form not unsuitable for itself — a form which makes it easily approachable from a side with which it would naturally have least in common. In trying to understand Gnosticism, then, we have first to ask what is the inner nature of that matter for which allegory provides no more than the outward form of expression. In this respect too. Gnosticism stands in a relation of the closest af&nity to the Alexandrian religious philosophy, and must be pro- nounced to be essentially a mere continuation and development of the latter. Both derived their principal contents from Greek philo- sophy. The system of Philo may be called a speculative system of religion ; and the character of the Gnostic systems is closely similar. Such was indeed the light in which the early doctors of the Church regarded Gnosticism. They declared it to be a different thing from Christianity, to be a purely worldly wisdom, and (for instance Tertullian) reproached philosophy with being the author ^ Cf. the Pliilos. V. 8. p. 106. Tovroit Km rols toiovtols eTro'/icj/oi oi dav/xacnm- TOTOi TvaxTTCKo'l, €(f)€vpeTai Kev^s Te-)(yT)S ypafxiJ.aTtKrjst Tov eavToyv 7rpocl)r]Tr]v''Op,Tjpov ravTa Trporpalvovra dpprjTas io^diova-i Kal tovs d/ivriTovs ras ayias ypaas els ToiavTas cvvolas crvvdyovres ewfipiCovcrr iv. 46, p. 81. "Xva 8e (ra(j)ea-Tepa rols evTvyydvovcn ra pT]6r]a6p^eva (^Javrj, boKfl Koi rd Ta 'Apdra 7r€(f}povTi(rp€va nept rrjs Kara tu>v ovpavicav aaTpau Sta^eVccoj i^eiirelp, (os rives els rd vno twv Tpa<^mv elprifieva direiKovi^ovTes avTa d^\T}yopov(ri, p^erd (leg. aTrarap orTrkavav) tov vovv ratv Trpo(re)^6vTa>v neipwfievoi, widavois Xoyoif Trpocrdyovres avTovs npbs a fiovKovrai, ^evov Bavua evdeiKvvp.evoi a>ff Karrjo'TepLO-pevaiV Twv vn avrav \eyopevaiV : at v. 20, p. 143, it is said of the Sethiani : enTi be 6 Jkdyor avTwv crvyKelpevos €k v Kol Tvpos erepa elprjp.iva>v prjpdToiv, d e'is tov dtSiov \6yov perdyovTes SirjyovVTm, p. 144. ''EffTt Se avTois 7} irdcra bidacTKaXla tov Xd-yov vnd T(ov nakaiuiv 6eo\6yaiV, Mova-alov Kal AiVou, koi tov tos reXeras Koi Ta pva-Trjpui KUTaSel^avTos 'Op(pea>s. Of the Gnostic sect of the Peratai it is said v. 13, p. 127, that they e7n\j/^€va-dpevoi, ra> Trjs oKrjBelas ovopari i>s XptOToC Xd-yov KaTrjyyeiXav alavav (TTd(nv koi dnoa-Taa-ias dyaOav &vvdp.eci>v els koko, etc. The whole of the fancies of astrologers about the stars are interpreted by them in their own sense, and from this it may be seen that their 'K6yoi tS>v d(TTpo\6ya>v op.o'koyovpevas elaiv oi Xpia-rov, 192 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. of the heresies.-' Nor did they derive Gnosticism merely from philosophy in general ; they sought also to prove in detail from what philosophical systems the Gnostics had borrowed the main ideas and principles of their own. Irenaeus and TertuUian opened up this line of argument, but it was the author of the Philosophoumena who gave the most thoroughgoing demonstration of it. This is the design of his whole work. The refutation of the Gnostic heresies which the author proposes to give, consists merely in showing that one Gnostic writer followed one Greek philosopher, and another another ; e.g. Simon Magus followed Heraclitus the Obscure, Valentinus Pythagoras and Plato, Basilides Aristotle, Marcion Empedocles. With a view to as accurate as possible a demonstration of this agree- ment, the author of the Philosophoumena sets forth the doctrines of the Greek philosophers in order from Thales downwards. His demonstration is not very convincing, since he deals chiefly with detached points of agreement and with external analogies ; but on the whole, he lays before us enough to confirm the general view, that the basis of Gnosticism was the philosophical thought of antiquity : that this was transplanted by Gnosticism into Christi- anity, with which it was then blended into a system consisting of various elements, but resting on one and the same conception of the universe. In its form and contents Christian Gnosticism is the ^ T>e praesor. haer. c. 7. Hae sunt doctrinae homiuum et daemoniorum, prurien- tibus auribiis natae de ingenio sapientiae secularis, quam Dominus stultitiam vocans stulta mnndi in eonfusionem etiam pliilosopli ae ipsius elegit. Ea est epim materia sapientiae secularis, temeraria interpres divinae naturae et dispositionis. Ipsae denique haereses a philosophia subornantur. Inde aeones et formae nescio quae infinitae, et trinitas hominis apud Valentinum ; Platonicus fuerat : inde Maroionis Dens melior a tranquillitate ; a Stoicis venerat ; et uti anima interior dioatur, ab Epicureis observatur ; et ut carnis restitutio negetur, de una omnium pliUosophorum schola sumitur ; et ubi materia cum Deo aequatur Zenonis dis- ciplina est, et ubi aliquid de igneo Deo allegatur, Heraclitus intervenit. Eadem materia apud haereticos et philosophos volutatur, iidem retractatus implioantur : unde malum et quare, et unde homo et quomodo ? et quod proxime Valentinus proposuit, unde Dens ? scilicet de enthymeai et ectromate. Miserum Aris- totelem ! qui iUis dialecticam instituit, artificem struendi et destruendi, versi pellem in sententiis, coactam in conjecturis, duram in argumentis, operariam contentionum, molestam etiam sibi ipsi, omnia retractantem, ne quid omnino tractaverit. GNOSTICISM— 8PIEIT AND MATTER. 193 expansion and development of Alexandrian religious philosophy ; which was itself an offshoot of Greek philosophy. But if we are to gain a more accurate notion of what Gnosticism was, we must analyse its main ingredients, and ask with regard to each of its characteristic conceptions whether it belongs to pagan or to Christian thought. The fundamental character of Gnosticism in all its forms is duahstic. It is its sharply-defined, aU-pervading dualism that, more than anything else, marks it directly for an offspring of paganism. Pagan antiquity never got past the antithesis of spirit and matter, and was unable to conceive a world produced by the free creative activity of a purely personal will. In the same way in Gnosticism the two principles, spirit and matter, form the great and general antithesis, within the bounds of which the systems move with aU that they contain. Now these two principles cannot merely confront each other in an abstract antithesis. Accordingly the main substance of the systems is the process of world-develop- ment which is broiight about by the action of the principles upon each other. The world is constituted by, and is the sum-total of the relative and restricted antitheses which proceed from the limitation of the absolute antithesis. The fixed path which every- thing is to pursue in the world is determined on this side or on that according as the shifting balance dips on the one side or the other of the universal antithesis. The activity which initiates this process comes either from the one side or the other. If from matter, matter in its self-originated activity is the principle of evil, and the process of the world-development therefore takes the form of a continuous antagonism, in which two hostile powers act and react on one another. For matter, as the kingdom of dark- ness, has a natural instinct of enmity to the principle of light. But if the first impulse of the world-development is on the side of the spiritual principle, then this impulse also must be of a spiritual kind. The moving principle is then the process of the spirit with itself : the natural tendency of spirit is to differentiate itself from itself, and in the differentiation of the several momenta 194 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST TRRFE CENTURIES which are posited by the thinking activity, to become self-conscious spirit — spirit reflected into itself. From this highest height in the purely spiritual process, the world- development goes forward to the sphere of physical and material life. Matter is itself but the limit of the spiritual being, spirit become objective and external to itself. The conception of matter is thus a very negative one ; but the dualistic mode of thought does not fail to maintain here also the absolute antithesis of its two principles ; the principle of matter is posited in the very impulse of the spirit to go forth from itself and objectivate itself; the principle of matter lies in the tendency from above downwards of the spirit materialising itself, a tendency which admits of no iilterior explanation. Again, it is an equally essential attribute of the spiritual principle, that spirit frees itself again from the dominion that matter has obtained over it, and rises absolutely victorious over every limitation and obscuration that matter can make it suffer. Thus the whole course of the world-development ends only with the return of spirit into itself as pure spirit. Yet the absolute antithesis of the two principles is not at an end even here. The same process of world- development may at once begin afresh, and again follow the same course. The principle of matter can never be so completely removed, the opposing principles can never be so abstractly conceived, that the possibility or necessity should cease to exist for spirit to be drawn again, in an endless series of worlds, into the same process of world-development. Matter cannot raise itself to spirit, but spirit can always externalise itself into matter, and sink down into matter ; and accordingly it is by the emanations and projections (irpo/SoXal) of the spirit that the infinite abyss between spirit and matter is filled up and the transition from spirit to matter provided for as far as may be. Thus in most of the Gnostic systems an important position is occupied by the Aeons, as the forms of the spirit objectivatin^ itself. In fact it is this conception, that of the Aeons, more than anything else, that identifies these systems with the ancient mode of thought. The Aeons are but the personified ideas, the arche- types of the finite world : in them we are presented with that antithesis of the ideal and the real, or of the upper and the lower GNOSTICISM— THE DEMIUBGU8. 195 world, which also enters into the very substance of the Gnostic systems. A further leading Gnostic conception is the Demiurgus. The two highest principles being spirit and matter, and the true con- ception of a creation of the world being thus excluded, it follows in the Gnostic systems, and is a characteristic feature of them, that they separate the creator of the world from the supreme God, and give him a position subordinate to the latter. He is therefore rather the artificer than the creator of the world. But where did the Gnostics get their notion of a Demiurgus? From the fact that he is identified with the God of Judaism, we might be led to think that he simply came from Judaism into their systems, and that the notion was one which belonged only to the standpoint of the Jewish religion. But Platonism also had its Demiurgus, who held the same position as the Demiurgus of Gnosticism.^ On the one hand indeed the Platonic Demiurgus stands above the deal OeSiv, the gods of the mythical nature-religion, as the one God and the father of works, which have been made by him, and wUl not be destroyed as long as he so wills it. But, on the other hand, there is a higher principle above him. The Platonic God can only accomplish his creative work by looking to that which ever remains the same with itself, the ideas, and by taking them for his arche- types, and he must be said to be dependent on the ideas. Now since the Demiurgus holds with Plato the same subordinate position as with the Gnostics, the conception must be fundamentally the same in each case. The Platonic Demiurgus is a mythical form. With Plato the mythical contains an element of truth, in so much as mythus is a necessary form for the setting forth of the abstract philosophical idea ; and so the Demiurgus is a mythical personi- fication of the creative power of the ideas. This personification is the form by which alone the mythical view is adjusted to the philosophical consciousness. In the Platonic Demiurgus mythical polytheism passes into a kind of monotheism, the highest truth of which is simply this, that the place of the indeterminate Many is taken by the simple One. This unity on the one hand stands to 1 See my Essay in the Stud. u. Krit., referred to, p. 187. 196 CHURCH HISTORY OP FIRST THREE CENTURIES. express the absolute idea, but the mythical element still asserts itself in the assumption that the creator of the world is a personal being free to act, and of the same nature as the gods of the popular mythical belief. We must regard the G-nostic Demiurgus in the same light. When it is said that Gnosticism derived the substance of its thought from Greek philosophy, this is only one side of the matter ; the other is that the form in which it sets forth that thought is a reflection of the mythical mode of view of the Greek popular religion. Not only Greek philosophy, but Greek mythology as well, is an essential ingredient of Gnosticism. All the beings that compose the world of Aeons, and present the idea of the abso- lute in its various relations, are mythical forms. The only distinc- tion between them and the Demiurgus is that the latter stands at a lower stage, and therefore appears in a more concrete mythical form. He reflects and represents the popular mythical conscious- ness of God. The immediate reason why the Gnostics identified the Demiurgus with the God of Judaism was, that the God of the Old Testament is described for the most part as the Creator and Lord of the world ; but the identification serves to indicate to us the view the Gnostics took of the Old Testament religion. They assigned it to a stage of development at which the religious con- sciousness had not yet risen above an idea so full of sensuous elements as that of the Demiurgus. The Demiurgus proves more than anything else that the contents of Gnosticism were religion rather than philosophy. The distinction between religion and philosophy is, that in religion the philosophical idea, originally abstract, is presented in a more concrete and material form. Now Gnosticism measures the rank which is due to such ideas in proportion to their sensuousness, and reduces them to a lower rank according as they are more material in their character. It thus places its own thinking consciousness above the sphere occupied by the mythico-religious way of thinking, and so is neither purely philosophy, nor purely religion, but both together. The relation in which it places its two elements, philosophy and religion, towards each other, is such that the only way in which we can describe its general character is to call it a religious philosophy. GNOSTICISM-^CHRIST. 197 The Gnostic Demiurgus exemplifies the principle that the relation of religion to philosophy varies according as the two are conceived as more or less identical in form and in substance. When, as we see in Platonism, the Demiurgus is closely united with the absolute idea of God, the mythical personality appears as a neces- sary form of presentation, inseparably bound up with the matter presented. When, on the other hand, as in the Gnostic systems, the Demiurgus is placed far beneath the absolute God, and sharply distinguished from him, this is a distinct indication that philo- sophical reflection feels herself to be superior to the concreteness and materiality of the religious mode of presentation, and able to discard it. Gnosticism fixed the relation of all these notions, standpoints, and antitheses to each other, by laying down not merely two, but three principles, and by regarding the psychical, which stands between the spiritual and the material, as the peculiar field of the Demiurgus. These three principles are the elements of all natural and spiritual being : in particular, they divide men into three essentially different classes. If a union of the two principles, spirit and matter, is possible at all, it can only be effected by the mediation of such a form as the psychical coming in between them. The psychical is thus, no doubt, a third principle ; but since there are ultimately only two principles, and the true substance of the psychical is the spiritual which it contains, it follows from the constitution of the psychical that it is at last dissolved into the spiritual. It is the finite, the transitory : the whole world of the Demiurgus must come to an end again at last. The distinction between the spiritual and the psychical, into which the distinc- tion between philosophy and religion may also be analysed, rests ultimately therefore on the broad fact that there are different aspects from which our contemplation may set out, so that a matter identical in itself may yet come to appear in various forms. What the Demiurgus is on the one side of the Gnostic systems, in their direction downwards, Christ is on their other side, in the direction upwards. There being a descent, there must be an ascent as well, and we recognise the Christian character of these systems 198 CHUBGH BISTORT OF FIBST THREE CENTURIES. not only in the fact that they assign this definite place to Christ, but also in the great emphasis with which this side is insisted on. The turning-point of the system as it moves through its various momenta is found in Christ. All that serves in any way to adjust the relations of one part with another, to maintain the connection of the whole, to reunite what has been, severed, to bring back what has wandered, to open up the road from the lower to the upper world, to bring everything to the point where the con- summation and completion of the whole world's course is arrived at — all this is connected with the names Christ and Jesus, and with the conceptions allied to them. In them is contained the goal towards which the whole world-development is pressing. What was originally only a redemption in a moral and religious sense, becomes in the Gnostic systems the restitution and fulfil- ment of the whole world-order. Even in the world of Aeons Christ restores the broken harmony, and acts as a maintaining, stablishing, uniting principle ; and in the lower world, Jesus who was born of Mary, the Soter in this peculiar sense, has the similar task of Biopdcaait; or eTravop6a)aLs ava> ev ry ayevv7]T(0 dvvap,ei, the a-ras Karoi ev rfi porj tS>v vhaTtav ev eiKovi yevvr)6e\Sf the (rrrja-opevos avco^ napa ttjv paKapiav anepavTov 8vvap.iv iav e^eiKOVKrQfi (when he has objectified himself in a real image, and thus externalised himself, he returns back into the unity of the principle). 2 In the Philos., vi. 19, it is said of Simon that he ov ftovov to Mcbo-ccbs (ca/co- rexv^o'as els o e^ovXero p-eBripprivevoreVy dWa Kai ra tojv TTOLrjTav. In this feature also Simon fitly represents the character of Gnosticism, its way of bringing every- thing into its service by means of allegorical interpretation. Cf. Die christliche Gnosis, p. 305, sq. In the following passage of the PhUos., vi. 18, p. 175, the two figures, Simon and Helena (whose beauty was the occasion of the Trojan war, all the powers of the world wishing to share her eViVoia), are made to furnish a very characteristic expression of the tendency of Gnosticism to decompose everything positive, and dissolve into general ideas and views : Ttjv 'EXevrjv \vTpaia-dpevos {2ipaiv) ovTcas Tols dvSpaynoiS o'coTTjpiav Trdpea^e Sta rrjS Idias iniyvaxreais. KaKois 202 CHURCH HISTOBY OF FIB8T THREE CENTURIES. not derived from a special founder, but only stand for the general notion of Gnosticism. Such a name is that of the Ophites or Naassenes. The Gnostics are called Ophites, brethren of the Serpent, not after the serpent with which the fathers compared Gnosticism, meaning to indicate the dangerous poison of its doctrine, and to suggest that it was the hydra, which as soon as it lost one head at once put forth another ; but because the serpent was the accepted symbol of their lofty knowledge. The serpent first appears at the Fall as the intelligent being which by its dialectic weaves good and evil into each other in such a way that the process of the world's history, worked out as it is from the antagonism of the two principles, at once begins. The first priests and supporters of the dogma were, according to the author of the Philosophoumena,the so-called Naassenes — a name derived from the Hebrew name of the serpent. They afterwards called themselves Gnostics, because they asserted that they alone knew the things that are deepest. From this root the one heresy divided into various branches ; for though these heretics all taught a like doctrine, their dogmas were various. According to Irenaeus and Epiphanius, their system was worked out through several successive stages, and much resembled the Valentinian.^ In the Philosophou- mena their doctrine appears simpler. They defined the primal being, as Simon was said to have done, as both male and female, but called it man and the son of man, or Adamas (Adam), and distinguished in it the three principles ; the spiritual, the psychical, and the material. The Gnostic perfection was said to begin with the know- ledge of man, and to end with the knowledge of God.^ Jesus was yap hiOLKOvvTcav Tav dyyeXcov tov KotrfjiOVf dia t6 (piKap^slv aiiToiis, els €7vav6p3aKTt,v eXTjXvBeifai avTov €<^r) ^i€Tajj.op<^ovp-evov Kcu €^op.oLovp.evov rats ap^ais Koi rats e^ovaiats KOL Tols dyyiXois 0}£ KOi avOpainov (Tias yvacris avdpajrov, 6cov 8e yvSxns dTTTjpTto'pevT] TdXeiaa-is. THE PEBATES. 203 the counterpart of the primal man. All that the primal man united in himself, the spiritual, the psychical, and the material, descended at once, they affirmed, upon the one man, Jesus the son of Mary. Similar to these are the Perates, of whom hitherto little has been known. It is only the author of the Philosophoumena who has contributed to the history of these heretics a clear account of the doctrine of this sect.^ They assumed three principles : the first is the unbegotten good, the second the self-begotten good, the third the begotten. Everything is triply divided, and Christ sums up in himself all tripartitions. From the two upper worlds, the unbegotten and the seH-begotten, the seeds of all possible powers descended into this world in which we are. Prom the unbegotten realm, from above, Christ came, to save by his descent all that is triply divided. All that has fallen to the lower from the upper sphere will return through him. The third world is doomed to destruction, but the two upper worlds are imperishable. Euphrates the Peratic, and Gelbes the Carystian, are named as the founders of the Peratic heresy ; but the name seems rather to point to the assertion of the Peratics, that since they alone knew the necessary law of that which has come into existence, and the way by which man entered into the world, none but themselves were able to over- come decay.^ They placed the principle of decay in water. This, they said, is the death that fell upon the Egyptians in the Eed Sea. Now, all that are without knowledge are Egyptians : there- fore we should leave Egypt, i.e. the body. Eegarding the body as an Egypt in little, they required that men should pass through the Eed Sea, i.e. the water of decay, which is Cronos, and betake them- selves to the wilderness ; that is, attain to that sphere beyond the temporal world, where all the gods of perdition and the God of salvation meet together. The gods of perdition are the stars of the mutable world, which subject to necessity all that rises into being. 1 Philos., V. 12, p. 123, sq. The Perates were already known from Theodoret, Haer. par. i. 17. But Theodoret in his Heresiology only nsed the summary given in the tenth book of the Philosophoumena. This was shown byVolkmar, Hipi)olytus und die romischen Zeitgenossen, 1855, p. 22, sq. ; so that all that we know in detail of the doctrine of the Perates is derived from the above-cited passage of the Philos ophonmen a. 2 Philos., V. 16, p. 131. bi(\6iiv Kai Tvepacrai rfjv < 204 CHUBGR HISTORY OP FIRST THREE CENTURIES Moses called them the biting serpents of the desert, which killed those who believed that they had left the Eed Sea behind them. To those who were bitten in the desert he showed the true, the perfect serpent, and whoever believed in it was not bitten in the wilderness. No one can save those who go out of the land of Egypt, i.e. this body, and the world, but only the perfect serpent. He who puts his trust in it is not destroyed by the serpents of the desert, i.e. by the gods of the temporal world. The significance which the serpent has in several passages of the Old Testament, as where it is the sign of salvation in the wilderness, or the wonder- working rod of Moses in Egypt, Exod. iv. 17, and above all, in the history of the Eall,^ placed it so high in the eyes of the Gnostics, that they beheld in it one of their highest principles. The serpent was the same as the Son was. Between the Father on the one side, and matter on the other, is the Son, the Logos, the serpent, ever moving, now towards the motionless Father, and again towards matter which has motion. Now it turns to the Father, and takes up his powers into itself; now it turns with these powers to matter, and the formless matter receives upon itself the impress of the ideas of the Son, of which the Son has received the impress from the Father. And as the serpent mediates between the Father and matter, in order to bring the powers of the upper world down into the lower, so the serpent or the Son is the sole saving principle which enables these powers to return.^ It is thus, in a word, the process of world-development, windingits way dialectically through the antitheses. The substance of these doctrines, ever concerned with the same problems — unity, duality, trinity of principles, their antitheses, and reconciliation, the descent from the upper world into the lower and the return from the lower into the upper — is so general, that they may all very well have been in existence long before specific Christian Gnosticism arose, and have received their Christian ' Philos., p. 133. 6 KadoXiKos otpis ovtos 'ia-riv 6 a-o(p6s Tfjs Euas Xdyos. It is called Catholic as the universal world-symbol ; a usage somewhat resembling that in Exc. ex. scr. Theod. par. 47, where the Sijfuovpybs KadoXiKos is the Demiurgua in the higher, the universal sense, in contrast to the special Demiurgi. 2 Philos., p. 135, sq. VALENTINUS. 205 colouring and modification only afterwards, when they expanded under the allegorical and syncretistic mode of view. This is what we have before us in the doctrines said to be those of the Simonians, the Ophites, the Gnostici, the Perates, the Sethians (this name belongs to this series of sects) ; and especially in such a description of them as that of the Philosophoumena. Here we have Gnosticism in all its fluidity and disconnectedness, attaching itself to whatever it can reach, ever seeking, amid the cheq^uered medley of ancient myths and symbols, a new expression for its general fundamental view. The Gnosticism of more developed structure, of firmer consistence, and which does not shrink from the widest application of its prin- ciples, that Gnosticism in which the Christian element is an essential part of the organic system, and cannot be separated from it, meets us first in those systems which are known to us by the names of their authors. The period on which we now enter is the most important in the history of Gnosticism. It begins in the first part of the second century. The chief names which it contains are those of the three famous heresiarchs, Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion, whose appearance is placed by all the most approved testimonies in the time of Trajan and Hadrian.^ Basilides is said to have lived at Alexandria about the year 125 ; Valentinus to have gone from Alexandria to Eome about the year 140. About the same time Marcion came to Eome from Sinope in Pontus : the period during which he flourished at Eome is placed in the years 140-50.^ Even these outward facts, that Alexandria was the native country of ^ Hegesippus in Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. iii. 32. Olem. of Alex. : Strom, vii. 17. ^ As to the chronological statements respecting Marcion and his appearance at Eome, cf. Volkmar, die Zeit Justin's des Martyrers, in the Theol. Jahrb. 1855, p. 270, sq. : " All the older Fathers, when they speak definitely of the date of Marcion, are perfectly clear that he appeared first in the reign of Antoninus Pius, and at the earliest in the year 135." The Libellus adv. omnes Haereses, undoubtedly not by Tertullian, says, cap. 6, iipon the alleged cause of Maroion's leaving his country, Pontus, and going to Rome : Post hunc (Cerdonem) discipulus ipsius emersit Marcion quidam nomine, Ponticus genere, episoopi tilius, propter stuprum cujusdam virginis ab ecolesiae communicatione abjectus. It now seems to me, comp. Die Christliche Gnosis, p. 296, that the simplest way of explaining this is to suppose, that the " stuprum virginis " was originally nothing but a figurative way of speaking of his heresy, by which he did violence to the Church, the napSevos KaBapa Koi aSidcpdopos, according to the expression of Hegesippus, Euseb. iii 32. 206 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. several Gnostics, and that two such great heads of sects as Valen- tinus and Marcion both travelled to Eome, are very noteworthy for the history of Gnosticism. The profoundest of these systems is also more accurately known to us than any another. It is that which bears the name of Valentinus ; though it would perhaps be more fitly termed the Valentinian system, since it is impossible to determine how much of it is to be ascribed to the master, and how much to his disciples. The idea which governs the whole system is that of mapping out the world of Aeons according to its numbers and categories. The total num- ber of the Aeons is thirty ; but they are divided into several leading numbers, an ogdoad, a decad, a dodecad. Two Aeons, however, are always connected together, and form an Aeon-pair — for the idea of syzygy is here also one of the fundamental conceptions on which the system is based. Only in the case of the highest Being the followers of Valentinus seem to have given various answers to the question, whether he should be conceived as associated with a female Aeon. Some wished to conceive the Father as simply alone ; others thought it impossible that anything should have proceeded from a male alone, and therefore assigned to the Father of the all, in order that he might become a Father, silence (Siyn) as his (Tv^vyoi. This silence, however, is only an expression for the abstract notion of his absolute unity or of his being alone. But as he was averse to solitude, and was all love, and love is not love if there is not an object of love as well, the Father felt in himself the desire to beget and produce what was most beautiful and perfect of all that he had within him. Alone then as he was, he begot Nous and Aletheia, the duad which is the mother of aU the Aeons within the pleroma. Nous and Aletheia themselves gave birth to Loo-os and Zoe, and from these two sprang Anthropos and Ecclesia. In order that the perfect Father might be glorified by a perfect num- ber. Nous and Aletheia produced ten Aeons ; but Logos and Zoe could only produce the imperfect number of twelve Aeons. In whatever way the Valentinians conceived the relation of this decad and dodecad, the principal series of their Aeons is certainly formed by the six primal Aeons, Nous and Aletheia, Logos and Zoe, VALENTINUS. 207 Anthropos and Ecclesia. The further development of the system turns mainly upon the well-known myth relating to Sophia. Sophia is the twelfth of the dodecad, the youngest of the twenty-eight Aeons, and as the weakest and the last member of the whole series, is a female Aeon. But if she was separated by a wide interval from the primal principle, she was proportionately conscious of her great remoteness ; and this produced in her a longing to overleap all the intervening members, and unite herself immediately with the primal being. She therefore sprang back into the depth of the Father, wishing to produce alone and by herself, like the Father, something not less than what he produced. She knew not that only the unbegotten, as the principle of the whole, as the root, the depth, the abyss, is competent to beget alone. Only in the unbegotten does all exist together : in the begotten the female produces the substance, but the male forms the substance which the female produces. So what Sophia produced was only an e/cTpco/xa, as the Valentinians termed it. Within the pleroma there was ignorance in Sophia, formlessness in her offspring : confusion arose in the pleroma; the whole world of Aeons was in danger of becoming formless and defective, and of finally falling a prey to destruction. All the Aeons fled to the Father, and besought him to comfort Sophia, who was plunged in grief for her offspring. It is easy to see that the myth aims at explaining the procession of the finite from the absolute. The finite can only derive its origin from the absolute, and yet the finite is inconsistent with the idea of the absolute. N"ow though, by means of the ideas of syzygy and of begetting, the finite is imported into the absolute itself ab initio, stiR in the Aeon series, in which Aeons are begotten by Aeons, the distinction thus introduced is considered to be one that admits of being reduced again to unity. But at last, if the finite as such is to come into existence, a breach with the absolute must ensue which can no longer be adjusted. Thus in the absolute itself there is a breach, a rent, a division, by which the absoluteness of the absolute is made doubtful. The task now arises, on the one hand, to maintain the notion of the absolute pure and unimpaired, in spite of this breach, and on the other to 208 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. disengage and eliminate tlie finite from it. Here is the point where the specific Christian idea of restitution enters to play its part in the system. The Father, pitying the tears of Sophia, and regarding the prayers of the Aeons, commanded a fresh projection ; and the number of thirty Aeons was fulfilled, when Nous and Aletheia produced Christ and the Holy Ghost, in order that the eKTpwfia might be formed and separated, and Sophia be calmed and comforted. Christ separated the formless eKTpajxa from the rest of the Aeons, that the perfect Aeons might not be disturbed by the sight of his formlessness. And that it might cease alto- gether to be visible to them, the Father caused another Aeon to come into existence, viz., Stauros. He was to be the boundary- mark of the pleroma, to hold together in himself the thirty Aeons, and to be a visible representation of the greatness and perfection of the Father. He is called Horos, because he is the boundary between the ifKripwfia and the v(7T€'p7]/j,a which lies without ; Partaker (jMero^eiK;), because he has part in the va-repTjfia ; and Stauros, because he stands firm and unchangeable, so that no part of the vareprjfia can so much as come into the neighbourhood of the Aeons who are within the pleroma. External to Horos or Stauros was the so-called Ogdoad, Sophia, who dwelt outside the pleroma. Christ, as soon as he had formed her, sprang with the Holy Ghost back into the pleroma to Nous and Aletheia, and peace and unity reigned among the Aeons. Thus harmony was restored within the pleroma. But outside the pleroma the same process continued. There Sophia, separated from him who had formed her but had then forsaken her, lay in great fear. Full of longing, she directed her prayer to him in her sufferings, and Christ and the other Aeons all had pity upon her. In the place of Christ comes now Jesus or the Saviour, who is called the com- mon fruit of all the Aeons of the pleroma. Christ and the other Aeons sent him outside the pleroma as the av^vyo'; of Sophia who was without, to free her from the pains she suffered in her loncin^ after Christ. He freed her by divesting her of the various affec- tions of which this longing consisted, and out of them he made the Psychical, the kingdom of the Deminrgus. The psychical sub- VALENTINUS. 209 stance was conceived as fiery. Tiiey also called it The Place, the Hebdomad, the Ancient of Days. The Demiurgus also is of a fiery nature, and the words of Moses, Deut. ix. 3, are applicable to him, " The Lord thy God is a consuming fire." The essence of the Demiurgus is composed of all the elements that distinguish the psychical from the spiritual. He is destitute of intelligent con- sciousness. Sophia, hovering over him in the Ogdoad, works everything in him, while he knows not what he does, and thinks that he himself of his own power effects the creation of the world ; as when he says, " I am God, and beside me is no other." Deut. xxxii. 39. The Demiurgus is the creator of souls ; he has given them bodies made from material substance, which is diabolic. The inner man, the psychical, dwells in the material body ; and the soul is now alone, now in the company of demons, now in that of the Xdyoi. The Xojoi, falling from above, from the common fruit of the pleroma and Sophia, are scattered like germs over this world. The Jesus who is united with Sophia outside the pleroma, and is really the second Christ after the first, is distinguished by the Valenti- nians from a third Christ, the Jesus born of Mary. As the first Christ restored order to the pleroma, and the second to the Ogdoad of Sophia, so the third is to do the same in the present world. This can only be brought to pass, if Christ, who proceeds not only from the Demiurgus, but also from Sophia, reveals that which was concealed even from the Demiurgus. The Demiurgus had been in- formed by Sophia that he was not the one God, but that there was a higher above him ; the great secret of the Father and the Aeons had not remained unknown to him. But he had kept it hidden, and imparted it to none. Thus the revelation of the mystery does not occur within the sphere of the Demiurgus ; but when it was time to take away the veil that lay upon the con- sciousness of psychical man, and to bring all these mysteries to light, Jesus was born of Mary. Placed in this connection, what can Christianity consist in, but in the communication of that knowledge which the Demiurgus possessed indeed, but only abstractly and for himself, so that it should become a part of the common consciousness of mankind ? Through Christianity then 210 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. does man first learn that the Demiurgus is not the highest God, that above him stand the world of Aeons, the pleroma, and the eternal Father ; only with Christianity accordingly does the consciousness of the absolute awaken. Now this knowledge is nothing else than the advance from the psychical to the spiritual. The reason why the Demiurgus knows nothing of the higher order of the world above him is that he stands at the stage of the psychical, and the psychical cannot comprehend the spiritual. The discovery through Christ of that which is hidden from the Demiurgus, is the progress from the period of the psychical principle to that of the spiritual. A new and higher consciousness dawns upon humanity : humanity becomes aware of a higher world-order, lying beyond the order of the earthly, grows conscious of that which exists before all change, of the absolute, and its relation to the finite. But it was the spiritual itself that first became the psychical. We have therefore to distinguish two opposite sides of the world-development. On the one side, the spiritual goes down into the psychical ; on the other, the psychical rises into the spiritual. The psychical is only a stage of transition for the spiritual; the spiritual divests itself of its own nature and becomes psychical, in order to return from the psychical back into itself. The spiritual {irvevfiaTUKoi) principle is the spirit as dis- tinguished from matter ; and the series of steps by which the spiritual becomes psychical, and the psychical becomes spiritual, is the process conducted by spirit with itself. Spirit, or God, as essential spirit, goes forth from itself, and in this self- revelation of God the world arises, which, while on the one hand distinct from God, is also on the other essentially one with him. But in whatever way we regard this immanent relation of God and the world, whether as a self-revelation of God or as a world-develop- ment, it is a purely spiritual process, arising out of nothing but the essence of spirit. In the Aeons which it sends forth out of itself, spirit produces out of itself and places over against itself its own essence. But since the essence of pure spirit is nothing else than thought and knowledge, the process of its self-revelation can only consist in its becoming conscious of its own essence : the VALENTINUS. 211 Aeons of the pleroma are the highest conceptions of spiritual existence and life, the general forms of thought, in which what spirit is essentially, it is for the consciousness determinately and concretely. But with the self-knowledge of spirit, with its self- consciousness as it distinguishes itself from itself, is given not only a principle of differentiation, but also, since God and the world are essentially one, of the materialisation of spirit. For the con- ceptions which spirit uses in order to reach this consciousness are separate and apart from the absolute principle ; and the wider this separation, the more is the spiritual consciousness darkened : spirit divests itself of its own nature ; it is no longer clear and trans- parent to itself ; the spiritual sinks down to the psychical, the psychical thickens into the material, and the material is connected at its further extremity with the notion of the demonic and diabolical.'' But as the psychical belongs in its essence to the ^The most important point of tlie whole system is the transition from the spiritual to the'psychieal, represented in the sufferings of Sophia. Here we have before us the extremest pain and distress of spirit struggling with itself, despairing of itself, when on the point of being compelled to strip itself of its own nature and to become something different from what it is. On this point compare the following passage in the Philosophoumena, p. 191 : — 'Eiroir)crev ovv its tijXikoCtos ata>v koX ttovtos tov ■n\rjpi>iiaTos cKyovos (Jesus or the Soter), fVoT^i/m ra jra^ij an' avrrjs, K.a\ cTroirjcrfv aira virocrTiiTas ov(rias koI tov fiiv (t>o^ov ^vxiKr/v inoirjo-ev iiTi6vjj.iav, ttjv he XvTrrjv vXiKTjv, TrjV Be anopiav Saifiovaiv, ttju 6e cVtOTpoc^^j', koX Scjjcij' Ka\ iKeTfiav 686v Koi lieravoiav Koi hivajxiv iJavxcktjs outri'as, ^Tiy (taXciTai Se^ia (cf. Christl. Gnosis, 134), 6 brjiitovpyos, ano tov (jjofiov TOVTidTiv, o Xeyci, ia, published by Petermann, Berlin, 1851, fromaOoptic MS.? Sophia's sufferings and fteTavoia form the chief subject of the first part. Jesus descending again after his ascension, for no other object than to impart to his disciples the whole truth from first to last, plain and undisguised, relates the history of the fall of Sophia. "When TIIo-tis 2od)ia was in the 1 3th of the Aeons, the place of all her sisters, the doparot who are themselves the 24 Trpo^oXai of the great doparos, then it came to pass at the com- 212 CHITRCE HISTORY OF FIRST TERES CENTURIES. spiritual, and germs of spiritual life are left everywhere, the spiritual must again pierce through the material obscuration of the spiritual consciousness which takes place at the stage of psychical life : it must throw off the veil that is laid upon it in the world of the Demiurgus. The whole world-development is the continuation of the same spiritual process. There must therefore be a turning-point, at which spirit returns from its self-divestment to itself, and becomes once more clearly conscious of its own essential nature. Such is the Gnostic conception of the Christian revelation. Those who know, in the Gnostic sense, that is to say the spiritual, who as such have also the truly Christian conscious- ness, mark a new epoch in the general spiritual life, and are the highest stage of the self-revelation of God, and of the world- development. This period of the course of the world begins with the appearance of Christ, and ends at last when through Christ and Sophia, all that is spiritual is received back into the pleroma. Christ in his activity is seen as the principle that re-establishes, that maintains unity with the absolute. He is thus seen at every mand of the first mystery that she looked up, and saw the light of the KaTaTreracrfia of the dr/a-avpos of light. She longed to go there, but was not able ; and instead of performing the mystery of the 13th Aeon, she directed her hymns to the place on high. For this all the archons of the 12 Aeons hated her ; because she ceased from her mysteries, and wished to be above them. The great rpiSuvafioc avBdhrfs hated her most of all ; he who is the third Tpihivajios in the 13th Aeon. He sent forth from himself a great power with a lion's face ; and from his vkr) a multitude of 7rpo/3oXai vXiKai, which he sent to the lower parts, into chaos, to lie in wait for niVris 2o0i'a and take away her strength. When Sophia saw in the depth the light-power that had come from hydabt}!, thinking that this was the light she had seen on high, she descended, out of desire for this light, into chaos, and was there put to sore pain by the 7rpo/3oXai vKiKa\ of AvBaSrjs. In her distress she called for help on the light which she had seen at first. She had trusted it from the beginning, and in her unfailing confidence in the power of this light — whence she has the name of Ulcrns 2o0ia — she addressed to it her lieravoia. She bewails her distress and pain in 12 fierdvoiai, and prays for the forgiveness of her sins. The 12 jierdvoim correspond to the 12 Aeons, in respect of whom she has erred : and the 12th is followed by a. 13th, for the 13th Aeon, the TOTTos hiKaioa-vvrji, is the place whence she descended. With the 13th ficTavoM, her time is fulfilled, the series of her Gki^us is accomplished : Jesus is sent by the first mystery to help her, and leads her back on high from chaos. Cf. Theol. Jahrb. 1854, p., 1 sq. BASILIDES. 213 stage of the world-development, and in the highest regions of the world of Aeons, in which everything at last comes to rest, and which is arranged from the first with a view to this one great result of the whole. Thus, in the Gnostic view of the world, Christ has quite the significance of an absolute world principle.-^ The Valentinian system affords us a clearer view than any other into the specific character of Gnosticism, its deeper spiritual import, and the inner connection of its view of the world. ISTor had any other so large a number of adherents. The school had many ramifications, and the system was elabor- ated and developed in various ways by the more eminent disciples and successors of Valentinus, as Secundus, Ptolemaeus, Heracleon, Marcus.^ Among the Gnostics contemporary and connected with Valen- tinus and his disciples, we may mention the two Syrians, Bardes- anes and Saturninus ; but the most important and the most inde- pendent were Basilides of Egypt and his son Isidorus. Our previous knowledge of his system has been much enlarged and modified by the new source of information discovered in the PhUosophoumena ;^ and we shall therefore do weU to give a brief statement of its main features. 1 In this statement I have been guided chiefly by the new sources of informa- tion contained in the Philos. vi. 29, sq., p. 184, sq. The principal points of the system there appear very distinctly : what is wanting may be easily supplied from the more detailed statement, drawn from other sources, which however agree with this one in all essential points, given in my Cbristliohe Gnosis, p. 124, sq. 2 Colarbasus, whose name has generally been placed along with that of Marcus, must in future be struck o\it of the series of Gnostics. Volkmar is inoontestably right in the result of his dissertation in the Zeitschrift filr Hist. Theol., 1855, p. 603, sq., viz., that "The Gnosticism of Colarbasus may be reduced to the Valen- tinian Gnosticism of Kol-Arbas, the highest tetrad of the thirty Aeons, as elabor- ated by the followers of Marcus, who appealed to an immediate revelation of this tetrad, or of the mother of secrets, Sige, in the same tetrad." The only remain- ing question would be, whether, under the word Kol, we should not understand rather i^ip, "the voice," i.e. sound in contrast to silence, than •o, "all the four, aE four together.'' '■> vii. 1 9, p. 230, sq. Compare : Jacobi, Basilidis phUosophi gnostici sententias, etc., Berlin, 1852 ; Bunsen, Hippolytus und seine Zeit, Leipzig, 1852. i. 65 ; 214 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. The Gnostics, unable to devise terms sufficient to express the idea of the absolute, find themselves obliged to determine it nega- tively, as that which is exalted above all expression and conception. Thus Basilides places simple nothing at the summit of his system, and thus speaks of God, not as the Being, but as the not-being. There was simply nothing, — not matter, not substance, not what is without substance, not simple, not compound, not man, not angel, not God, simply nothing of all things that can be perceived or imagined. Still, the not-being God made a not-being world out of the not-being : yet every positive attribute is denied of this making, this act of the divine wiU.^ Basilides was of opinion that as, gene- rally, the expressions which we use do not really correspond to the things they signify, this must much more be the case in speaking of the absolute ; there every positive and negative statement can be but a sign of what we wish to say. We can see clearly that Basilides' great difficulty was to get a beginning. God is and is not, and so the world is and is not ; one cannot tell how it came into being ; it simply is. In order to get rid of every idea of an emanation or projection from God,^ Basilides conceived the world, as in the Mosaic book of Genesis, as brought into existence simply and only by the word of him who spoke : though sometimes he did not hesitate to speak of the world as a divine tt/jo^SoXtj. Thus the standpoint of Basilides differs from that of Valentinus, inas- much as what is principally kept in view in his system is rather the return to God than the going forth from God. A prominent con- Uhlhorii, das Basilidianisclie System mit besonderer Eiloksiclit auf die Angaben des Hippolytus, Gbtt. 1855. Hilgenfeld, Das System des Gnostikera Basilides, Theol. Jahrb. 1856, p. 86, sq. Cf. Die judiscbe Apokalyptik 1857, p. 287, sq. My essay : Das System des Gnostikers Basilides und die neuesten Auffassungen desselben, Theol. Jahrb. 1856, p. 121, sq. 1 Philos. p. 231 : 'Ai/o^tos, avaic6r]Ta>s, d/SouXmj, anpoaipiras, diradas, di-fTrt- BviifiTtos, Koajiov i}6(\r]a-e noifi<7ai. To Sc rjdeKrja-e Xe'-yu, (pija-X, crijjuacrias X"/""! a.6eXrjTa>s KaX dvoi]Ta)s Koi dvaLo-Bfirais. 2 Philoa. p. 232 : (jjeiyei yap itaw /cm fic'Soifcc ras Kara Trpo^oXijn twv yeyovoTosv ova-ias 6 Baa-iKfi&rjs. He compared tie process of emanation to the act of a spider spinning its threads out of itself. He took as his beginning the absolute notion of the not-being, thus opposing the idea of emanation, which assumes the entire reality of the being. BASILIDES. 215 ception of his system is the separation of the powers and elements. Since that alone can be separated which was formerly mingled and connected, Basilides assumed that those elements which after- wards came in the course of development to be separated, and to take up more and more independent positions, were originally mixed, or existed in each other or side by side. And thus the v 6ebs, has developed into a notion of something concrete in the (nripfia OVK ov. The relation of God and the world is viewed as the immanent transition from the abstract to the concrete, from the ideality of that which is only con- ceived to the reality of the actual. The moving principle is the tendency to set forth out of unity the antitheses which, while in unity, are still indifferent, and cause them to confront one another in their pure opposition. This is done when the abstract antithesis of being and not-being becomes the concrete antithesis of spiritual and material. 216 GHURGE HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. When this embryo of the world has been once evolved from God as the principle of the world, and not till then, the world-develop- ment enters on its determinate course. The divine germs con- tained in the primal world are called by BasHides the sonship (viOTij';)} This again is distinguished into three separate con- stituent parts as soon as the first projection of the o-Trep/xa has taken place. The finest part at once returns to the not-being with a swiftness which Basilides characterises by the poetic expres- sion axrel ir-repov rje vor)ixa.'^ Every nature in fact strives, one in one way, another in another, to reach the not-being, attracted by its exceeding beauty. The denser part strives to follow the finer, but remains in the awep/xa ; yet it also clothes itself with wings, after the manner of the soul in Plato. The principle that gives the wings is the Holy Spirit : the relation in which it stands to this part of the vloTr)<; is described by saying that the two are as mutually serviceable as the wing and the bird, neither of which can soar upward without the help of the other. The Spirit rises, indeed, and comes near to that finest part of the uiott;? ; but it cannot, from its nature, endure the region of the not-being God and of the i/toV?;?, the purest region, exalted above every name. It therefore remains behind ; but, as a vessel once filled with sweet- smelling ointment keeps the perfume even when empty, so the Holy Spirit has, as it were, a perfume of the vIottj^, and this per- fume descending from the Holy Spirit penetrates to the formless under-world. After the first and second soaring of the vIottj';, the Holy Spirit remains in the midst between the world and that which is above the world.^ After these two parts of the being have been separated by a firmament, the great Archon, the head 1 The exXoyr) Koa-jiov in Clemens Alex. Cf. Die Christliche Gnosis, p. 223, sq. The expression vlorr;!, denoting the spiritual, might seem to refer to the higher grade in which the Son stands in this development from below upwards. So the son of the Archon is more inteUigeut than the Archon himself. But the expres- sion is to be taken in the sense of the phrase uioi deov (Rom. viii. 14, sq. ), Philos. p. 238. 2 Homer. Od. vii. 36. 3 Hence the TTvevjxa jxidopiov. From the same mediating function (« ifpyerctw) the Spirit is described in Clemens of Alexandria as ivviVjia SiaKovovuevov. BASILIDES. 217 of the world, tears himself away from the airlpfia Koafiiicbv (and the iravaTvepfjiia tov atopov), and knowing not that above him there is a wiser, mightier, and better than he, he thinks himself the lord, the sovereign, and the wise architect of the world, and begins to make all the things the world contains. First, not liking to be alone, in imitation of the plan which the not-being God sketched when he laid the foundation of the world in the iravairep- fiia, he begot, from the matter of the world which he had ready before him, a son who was far wiser and better than himself. Surprised by his beauty, he set him on his right hand. By his help he made the ethereal world, the kingdom of the great Archon, called by Basilides the Ogdoad. After the completion of this ethereal world, which extended down to the moon, another Archon arose out of the ■n-avairep/xla, who also is greater than aU that is under him except the i/toV?;?, which still remains behind. His place is the Hebdomad, and he too has a son who is more under- standing and wiser than himself. From these worlds is now dis- tinguished the region which, as the basis of the whole world- development, Basilides called the acopo^ and ■n-ava-jrepfiia. It has no governor, arranger, or Demiurgus of its own; but the thought placed in it by the not-being at the creation suffices for it. In it remains the third vtoVjy?, which has also to be revealed, and to be brought up to the region where, beyond the Spirit, are the two first parts of the utor??? and he who is not-being. This is the creature, groaning and waiting for the manifestation of the children of God ; and we, says Basilides, are these children, we are the spiritual still remaining behind here. When we, the children of God, for whose sake the creature groaned, were to be revealed, the Gospel came into the world. It did not come by the descent of the blessed vloTrji; of the inconceivable, blessed, not-being God ; but, as naphtha kindles a fire at a great distance, so did the son of the great Archon receive the thoughts of the vtoViy? by the mediation of the Spirit. The Son learnt that he was not the God of the whole, but that there was over him the Ineffable, the not-being. He went into himself, was affrighted at the ignorance he had been in up to this 218 GHUBCE HISTOBY OF FIRST TEBEF GENTUBIES. time, and how his son sitting beside him — who is now called Christ — instructed him who the not -being is, what the vIotijv is, what the Holy Spirit, how the universe has been disposed and arranged, and whither it is to return. Basilides also applied to the fear which seized the Archon the words apxv cro^ta? (po^o^ Kvpiov (Prov. i. 5) ; and to the penitence with which he confessed the sin of his self-exaltation, the passage Ps. xxxii. 5. The same instruction was imparted also to the whole Ogdoad, and from the Ogdoad the Gospel then came to the Hebdomad. The son of the great Archon caused the light which he had received from above, from the vlorri'i, to rise on the son of the Archon of the Hebdomad. Thus enlightened, the son announced the Gospel to the Archon of the Hebdomad ; and the impression it produced on him was not different from that produced on the Archon of the Ogdoad. After all these regions with their countless apx^^i, Zvvd^ei<;, and e^ovaiai and the 365 heavens, whose great Archon is Abrasax, had received the enlightenment of the Gospel, the light had to descend also to the a.fiop(f)M in the nethermost world, in which we are ; and the hitherto unknown mystery had to be revealed to that vIott]^ which, like an e/cTpco/^a, was left in the afiop(j)ia. Thus the light, which had come from the vio'tt?? through the Spirit to the Ogdoad and thence to the Hebdomad, descended to Mary, and her son Jesus was enlightened by it. The power of the highest which over- shadowed Mary is the power of the xplcri';, the separation. The world must continue till all the vl6T7jv (ru'yKe;;(U/ieV CTTcpfxaTi t5>v oKav iv dpXTJt ^^OKaTaaTa/ievav 6e eV Kaipols ISiois. 220 CHURCS HI8T0BY OF FIBST TEEEE CENTURIES. spiritual natures are essentially one, even in that present state in which they are hidden and obscured by the psychical and the material. It is this consciousness of that which essentially is, and is supramundane, that forms the true essence of Christianity. And so accordingly BasUides defines it.-^ Although that which comes to its accomplishment in Christianity has first been imdergoing preparation in the earlier stages through which the process of world- development moves, still it does not attain its fuU reality, till the absorption of spirit into itself has reached its deepest depth. As Valentinus distinguished three different Christs, so in the system of BasiUdes Jesus cannot appear till after the two sons of the ruler of the Ogdoad and the ruler of the Hebdomad. These three are essentially one; in all the three we have the same principle, which mediates between the several spiritual beings and the primal principle, maintains and restores their connection with it, and recalls them to unity. Both with Valentinus and with Basilides we find the Holy Spirit placed along with Christ, and subordinate to him in the same capacity. The Sophia of Valen- tinus coincides with the Christ and the Holy Spirit of Basilides ; Sophia herself is not found in the doctrine of the latter, since the more concrete idea of syzygy is altogether absent from his system. The Gospel only declares universally that which, though it existed before, existed as a mystery. Before the Gospel, in proportion as any given time was more remote, the deeper was the concealment of this mystery.^ What was at first shrouded in thick darkness, and then, though declared, was yet, as it were, but a glimmering light, Philoa. p. 243. 'Evayytkiov fVrt Kar' avroiis fj tS>v iwepKoa-fiiav yvSxris. Only when one knows what is above the world, can one know also what the world itself is. 2 In this sense Basilides said, p. 238, that the Ogdoad was apprjTos, the Hebdomad prjrov, and that the Archon of the Hebdomad said to Moses : " I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the name of the God I did not make known to them " (Ex. vi. 3), i.e. the name of the apprjros 6e6s, the Archon of the Ogdoad. In the period from Adam to Moses, the proper period of the ruler of the Ogdoad navra rjv (pvXaaa-o p-eva dwoa o-iooTrn. The two rulers mark two periods of the world. BASILIDES. 221 and was only to break through in the creature which was waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, — this in Christianity- becomes the broad and full daylight of clear and transparent spiritual consciousness. And it is just at this time that God caused a great ignorance to come over the whole world, in order that nothing might strive to overstep the bounds of its nature. The assertion of this ignorance gives us much help towards character- ising the standpoint of the system. The ignorance denotes that progress in the march of the world's history, by virtue of which each period is deemed the highest, and regarded as absolute, only so long as spirit in its development has not gone forward to a higher stage. In contrast to a higher stage, the stage preceding appears so subordinate and at so low a level, that all its glory is veiled as by the darkness of ignorance. The two Archons especially are overtaken by this ignorance ; but such is the fate also of all that was great and important in its time, and, like the minds of those rulers, believed itself to be the power that governed the world. It is of necessity given over to the darkness of uncon- sciousness, when the progressing spirit of the world passes beyond it. Therefore, according to Basilides, everything has its deter- minate limits, its determinate time. Knowledge is ever changing into its contrary. As the process of history is carried further and further, spirit, ever retiring into itself, receives back into itself the forms which it had sent out as of apparently permanent impor- tance. The forms dissolve, and there remains at last, as all that is really before the consciousness, only the abstract notion, the natural law which is immanent in the subsisting order of the world.^ Here the realism and the idealism of the Gnostic view of the world so interpenetrate one another, that the process exhibited in it is rather the phenomenological process of the spirit than the real one of the world. It is not the real principles of the world's origin in themselves, that are the highest absolute point whence all proceeds, and on which aU depends. It is these principles only because 1 The present order of the world, Basilides says, has no governor, such as the Archons were : apKcX 6 Xoyitr^As iKcivos, ov 6 ovk iiv, on fTTOiej', eXoyiffro. 222 CHURCH HISTORY OF FIRST THREE CENTURIES. they are the object about which the consciousness of spirit, knowing and thinking, moves, gaining, as it employs itself with these neces- sary postulates of its own procedure, a clear perception of itself, and being thus enabled to comprehend the antitheses of the subsisting order of the world in all their width. And this is exactly what the genuine Gnostic conception of airoKaToia-Taai'i amounts to. The main point is, not that something which is not yet, becomes realised in the world of objective existence ; but that something which already exists in essence becomes firmly established. That which already has being essentially is to be made to be for consciousness as well, and to be recognised in the consciousness of knowing subjects as that which it already is in essence.^ The more completely the objective being of things becomes a subjectively known being, and the stricter and closer, therefore, the unity of being and consciousness, so much the more fully is the goal of the world's development attained. It appears plainly from this, that the highest subject with which the Gnostic systems concern themselves, is ever ultimately knowledge and in- tuition. Gnosis in its peculiar absolute significance. This is what gives the system of BasHides, in the form in which it is now known to us, its distinguished position in the history of Gnosticism. It affords us a deeper insight than any other system into the inner nature of Gnosticism, and the intellectual process carried on in Gnostic speculation.^ ^ The aTTOKaraiTTains is the third of the sucoeesive connected stages after the crvyxvats and (jiv\oKpivj]cns, PhUos. p. 244. The Gnostic addresses himself to his highest task when he determines that the all-important question he has to seek to answer is ris ianv 6 oix i>v, ris t] vioT-qs, ri to ayiov jrceC/xa, tIs ij rav oKoiv Karao'KevT], ttov Tavra d'noKaTaaTadrjo-erai,, Philos. p. 239. This result is attained when the Ta)v o\v o-vyKexvfievav els Ta oixeia. All that is comes to stand iu its due and proper place, when that which is various in itself is known and contem- plated without confusion in its variety of principles. In this indeed aU knowledge and intuition consist. "Ayraia as above defined is an essential step of the ajroKOTd- (TTa(ns which is thus accomphshed. 2 Hilgenfeld (in loc. cit.) affirms that the statement of the system of Basilides given in the Philosophoumena is neither fairly consistent with that given by the MARCION. 223 We have said that the fundamental character of Gnosticism is its dualistic view of the world. This statement seems at first to receive but slight confirmation from our inquiry into the two systems, which we have described at some length as the two chief representatives of the Gnostic mode of thought. They cannot indeed entirely conceal the dualistic basis on which they are founded; yet this element is not prominent in them, and can scarcely be regarded as their principal distinguishing feature. We should thus be led to say that the peculiar nature of Gnosticism was not fully developed before the appearance of the system of Marcion, which, on account of its more strictly dualistic form, we must distinguish from those hitherto set forth, as marking a new stage of Gnostic thought. Still the distinction is merely relative ; for none of the systems, however various their modifications, ever get past the antithesis of spirit and matter. But with regard to this antithesis itself, strict as it seems to be, we nevertheless are able to gather from our inquiries up to this point the very character- istic fact, that the two principles do not form a pure antithesis. The one principle always contains something derived from the other. If spirit is unable to resist its longing to materialise itself, it contains already the principle of matter. And if matter is moved by the impulse to come into contact with spirit, then it has in itself a spiritual element. The two are related as two forces authorities Htherto known to us, nor derived from original knowledge. For disproof of tliia position, compare my Abhandlung quoted above, p. 150, sq. Wliat HUgenfeld has further laid down in the Anhang zur jiid. Apokal. p. 287, contains nothing reaUy new. It is clear enough that we are equally unable to determine precisely, in the system of Basilides and in that of Valentinus, how much is due to the founder and how much to the further elaboration of disciples. But, with regard to this question, in a general history of Gnosticism, the form which contains most distinctly the characteristic features of the system is our surest guide. And this form of the Basilidian teaching is undoubtedly to be found in the statement given in the Philosophoumena. The doctrine of Basilides seems to have assumed various modifications ; his name is connected with Manichaeism (Das Manich. Rel. Syst. p. 84) and PrisciUianism (Gieseler, Eccl. Hist. i. 2, p. 98). It is likely enough that the a-iyxv