It cannot be true, as many have asserted, that the Christian world had no criterion of orthodoxy before the third century. The Fatherhood of the one God and the Lordship of Christ were universal axioms, though contention might arise when different parties undertook to render these axioms more persuasive to themselves or to outsiders. So far as we know there was never a congregation without some notion of a scripture: most groups claimed the authority of at least one of the apostles, and Marcion was perhaps the only teacher who rejected the Old Testament in toto. The letters of Ignatius do not indicate, as Bauer supposed (1972), that some desired a church without any bishop, though it would seem that not everyone held so high a view of the bishop’s office. Irenaeus feels obliged to defend the fourfold canon of the Gospels, but he implies that this was the norm in churches governed, like his own, by a strong episcopate; wherever we find evidence of such an institution at the end of the second century, we also find, as Irenaeus himself predicts, a common rule of faith (Iren., AH 3.2-3).
In the third century, while it was the bishops who maintained this rule of faith, it was the task of laymen or dissentient clerics to expound it, to confirm it from the scriptures, and to elaborate it with ratiocination. Tertullian of Carthage was the first and most belligerent of Latin theologians. He is often called a schismatic, but to him the true schismatics were the ‘‘psychics’’ who were not quickened by the ‘‘new prophecy’’ of the Phrygian Montanus. Even when he began to shun his lukewarm co-religionists, he did not attempt to form a rival clergy; he had no cause to do so, for he could preach new fasts, forbid remarriage even after widowhood, and refuse forgiveness to sinners whom the episcopate absolved without being thought to lay a new foundation for Christian belief. In his Apology of 197, he ridicules the manmade gods of Rome and pleads that Christians are innocent of any act that would warrant persecution. From Moses, whom he proves to be more ancient than any pagan source, he demonstrates the unity of God; Christ he represents, in the manner of the Greek apologists, as a supervenient being, the latent reason of the Father taking shape as concrete speech for the creation and redemption of humanity (Apol. 21). He upholds the same view with the vigor of the new prophecy in his strident work Against Praxeas (c.207), where he also coins the word trinitas and bequeaths at least a lexical norm to western Christianity by distinguishing the one substance of the Godhead from the three persons who are Father, Son, and Spirit. Praxeas was one of a numerous party of ‘‘monarchians’’ who maintained that the three were merely different phases of one being; Tertullian’s case for the Trinitarian view proceeds with a confident inconsistency - sometimes tending to tritheism, sometimes threatening to reduce the Son and Spirit to epiphenomena of the Father - which suggests that he saw himself as the mouthpiece of an established dogma. Even his premise that God, like every actual being, must be a corpus or body, does not seem to have been derived from the Stoics, for he implies that this is not a body of matter (Adv. Prax. 8). On the other hand, he draws openly and freely on the Stoics in his lengthy treatise On the Soul, with the aim of proving that the soul, being as material as the body, is not naturally immortal and disposed to transmigration as the Platonists affirmed. Tertul-lian was a Montanist when he wrote this catholic masterpiece, as he was when he completed his five books Against Marcion, arguing, with greater skill than any previous writer, for the salvation of the body, the authority of the Old Testament, and the integrity of Luke.
Tertullian therefore cultivates philosophy in fields that he believes to have been left fallow by the apostles. His Greek-speaking contemporary Hippolytus maintained in his Refutation of all Heresies that every pagan system was both false in itself and fatal to the orthodoxy of Christian adherents. In Alexandria the eminent theologians were at once less contumacious to the episcopate and more generous to Greek culture. Clement, head of the Catechetical School, set out to demonstrate, in the eight books of his Stromateis or Miscellanies, that the best thoughts of the Greeks concurred with the biblical revelation, and conversely that philosophy was a serviceable discipline for those who wished to graduate from simple faith to the wisdom of the true Gnostic. Those who condemn his ‘‘intellectualism’’ fail to see that, just as philosophy for its zealots was not merely a school of reason but a way of life, so gnosis in Clement signifies the perfection of obedience and not merely a refinement of theology. Nor, though he admired Plato more than any of his rivals, does he deserve to be called a Platonist: he never accepts a doctrine on the authority of Plato, seldom borrows Plato’s vocabulary except when quoting him, and attributes his discoveries not to native shrewdness or direct inspiration, but to a holiday in Egypt where he stumbled across the Book of Jeremiah. Philosophy may help us to elucidate the truth, but it is God who has revealed it through the Logos. It is true that Clement says little of a historical Incarnation, of a bodily resurrection, or of anything else that cannot be harmonized with pagan doctrines; but that is because the object of the Stromateis is to illustrate this harmony, and if we had more of his Hypotyposeis, or Outlines of Theology, we might find the peculiar tenets of Christianity discussed with less reserve. He was not always deferential to the philosophers, for even when he contends in his Protrepticus that they too despised the atrocities of popular religion, he implies that, not being Christians, they lacked the courage to die for their beliefs.
Nor should we be too eager to make a Platonist of Origen, who is said to have succeeded Clement as president of the Catechetical School. His reputation as commentator and preacher flourished after he decamped to Palestinian Caesarea and was illegally ordained as a presbyter. He was persecuted, however, by the jealous Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria, and suspected by some contemporaries of heresy; in 553 the Fifth Oecumenical Council denounced 15 propositions widely associated with his name. Of these the one that has come to define Origenism states that souls exist before embodiment, and descend by their own inertia into the bodies of angels, human beings, or devils after tiring of the contemplation of God. The evidence of his own works, however, suggests that he entertained at most the first half of this thesis, which by itself is neither Platonic nor heretical; he certainly did not accept the transmigration of souls, and he maintained that the body, suitably attenuated and purified, participates in the sanctification of the inner man (C. Cels. 5.18-23 etc.). His purpose, as he states in the introduction to his treatise On First Principles, is to uphold the rule of faith, speculating only where the apostles left a matter undetermined, and he admonishes a pupil that the function of Greek learning - whether in grammar, rhetoric, history, or philosophy - is to elucidate the obscurities of scripture (Ph. 13). With these auxiliaries we may arrive at a consistent and intelligible paraphrase of the letter, but the sacred book must be its own interpreter in the quest for the higher or mystical intention. This is present and mandatory even where the literal construction is untenable, since every word is a manifestation of Christ the Word of God (Ph. 4). Most passages have a threefold signification by analogy with the threefold division of the human person into body, soul, and spirit (De princ. 4.2.4); 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is the source of this trichotomy, which a Platonist could only have elicited with difficulty from the Axiochus. In any case the Platonists had only begun to flirt with allegory, and neither they nor the Stoics (who are invidiously associated with Origen by Porphyry at Euseb. Eccl. Hist. 6.19) had yet shown such assiduity in the exposition of a classic text. His only predecessor in this marriage of exegesis with philosophy was Philo of Alexandria, in this respect not so much a Middle Platonist as a Jew.
In Alexandria, as elsewhere, it was necessary to urge against the monarchians that such titles as Wisdom, Word, and Power did not imply that the Son was less substantial than the Father. On the contrary, says Origen, since God cannot change, the distinctions that we express by the formula ‘‘three hypostases’’ must be eternal; and if Christ is the Wisdom of God there was no time when he was not, or there would have been a time when God was without his wisdom. This reasoning entails that the three hypostases are coeternal, not that they are equal: commenting on John 1:1, where the Father is styled ho theos (God) and the Logos merely theos (god), Origen calls the Father autotheos, as the one who is by nature what the Son and the Spirit are by derivation (In Joh. 2.2). With Proverbs 8:22 in mind, he can even say that the Son is the one true creature of the Father, whereas everything in the world is not so much created as made by the Son himself (Justinian, Letter to Mennas). He has, however, no term (other than theos) to express the common essence of the three hypostases, and he seems at times to imply that they are united not in essence but in will (C. Cels. 8.12).
An extreme proponent of the monarchian doctrine, Paul of Antioch (more commonly known as Paul of Samosata), was condemned by a council of his fellow bishops in 268. An extreme proponent of the three hypostases, the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, went so far as to say that the Son was created out of nothing, and perhaps (though this is not certain) that he was quite unlike the Father. In 325 the Christian Emperor Constantine, having recently become master of the east, convened a council of about 200 bishops at Nicaea in Asia Minor to adjudicate a number of controversies, including the one provoked by Arius. The bishops agreed to designate what the Father and Son had in common by the adjective homoousios. This was not the last word but the first of many, for there was no accord on the meaning of the term. The Alexandrian bishops Alexander and Athanasius took it to mean that the two were identical in nature, while Eusebius of Caesarea, the great historian and apologist, insisted that it betokened only a similarity of attributes (Socr., Hist. Eccl. 1.6-8). Some objected that it was unscriptural, or had hitherto been used only to say that two material things were of the same stuff; others, like Marcellus of Ancyra, may have inferred that, since hypostasis and ousia were almost synonyms in ordinary usage, there was only one hypostasis in the Godhead. Small wonder then that in 341 a council held in Antioch drafted four new creeds without the word homoousios, and that 40 years of internecine wrangling intervened before the Second Oecumenical Council in 381 was able to proclaim in the name of Christendom that the Son (though not the Spirit) was consubstantial with the Father, light from light and God from God.
World History
