Lawrence Thomas Cole

“ Thus from any one fact of beauty, harmony, etc., the human mind may rise to the notion of a common quality in all objects of beauty, etc.: "from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others; from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until, from thought to thought, we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the perfect, absolute, Divine Beauty." ”

“ And this estimate of the function of philosophy with respect to theological truth, which the Fathers worked out on the [Pg 56] basis of the concrete example of the course of Greek thought, though with a view to a much wider application, has its justification in the very nature and conditions of thought itself. For philosophy is essentially a process—its very life depends on its being in motion, in process of change and development. Each system is evolved out of its predecessors, and contains within itself the germs of its successors—it is the link which connects the past with the future. ”

“ In their struggle for existence, threatened on every side by official persecution and popular fury, they had no opportunity for speculation on fundamentals—they pleaded merely to be allowed to live the life to which they were pledged. With the Eastern training, which most of them had had, so foreign to the ideals of Greek philosophy, and so tenacious of the idea of God, and with the person of Christ so near to them as to blind their eyes to the possibility of any other standard of truth than His words, they naturally afford us no material for the question under discussion. ”

“ As this highest Idea stands over all ideas as the cause of all being and knowing, so over all gods, alike hard to find and to describe, stands the one, eternal, invisible god, the Framer and Father of all things. ”

“ In no period of the history of thought were men more commonly led into abstractions by being dazzled by the brilliancy and novelty of the latest idea than in the pioneer age represented by Greek philosophy, when men had not yet attained to a clear perspective, and the foot-hills often hid the lofty mountain peak. ”

“ To them the argument, such as we frequently find, from the Old Testament types and prophecies, or from the superior beauty and morality of the Christian doctrine and life, taking for granted the existence of God, was what the case required. And when, as is very frequently the case, they address the popular idolaters, it is a negative argument to show the unworthiness of idol-worship, and the superiority of their own doctrine, of which they naturally make use, and not a theistic argument which would have no significance to those who were already "too religious." ”

“ In fact, they seem to grant to Greek philosophy all that its adherents would claim for it, namely, that, by means of the arguments adduced by its different schools, the Greeks had attained to the opinion that there was something behind the phenomena of nature, but this might as well be a transcendent force or a pantheistic world-soul as an immanent God. With the Apostle on Mars' Hill they would say that the best theology of the Greeks simply put them in a position "that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him." ”

“ A vague, fanciful first cause of physical phenomena, a general idea, abstracted out of all content, so as to leave no meaning for the human mind—whatever the imagination might make of it—a mechanical, magnetic force, to which all motion might conveniently be referred; a deified principle of order—and these held in conjunction with the popular polytheism, and impregnated with the national pantheistic conceptions—was all that Greek philosophy could offer to the higher religious aspirations of the educated man. ”

“ Thus early, however, as in modern times, Christian theology, in contrast with the attempts of rational theology, began to emphasize the interdependence of these different forms of the theistic argument, and the cumulative character of their evidence. [Pg 60] Each one of itself could bring no conviction, nor even high degree of probability, and furthermore, even if all its claims be admitted, would lead to a result far short of theism—a mere indefinite first cause, an Architect of the universe, etc. ”

“ Men were asked to judge of Christianity by its fruits, and to receive the faith which it professed, not because of its rational demonstration, but because of the authority of Him who promulgated it. The persons to whom the arguments were addressed, too, explain much of the silence of the Fathers. To the Jew or religious Gentile it would be superfluous to address elaborate arguments to prove the existence of God, and it was to these classes that many of the works under discussion were addressed. ”

“ Changed conditions demand a different statement of the truth to satisfy them, and furnish the data upon which such a statement is based. Philosophy, like science, "does not really accumulate, but is entirely transformed by each fresh hypothesis. It is only the data that accumulate; and when we say that a new hypothesis is 'truer' than that which preceded it, we mean merely that it enables us to co-ordinate a larger number of these data." ”

“ The absolute failure of the Greeks to arrive at any certainty of God's existence by demonstration, the introduction of the Christian doctrine of God, before which the deductions of Greek philosophy seem empty and unsatisfactory, even to many who cannot accept [Pg 54] that doctrine as truth, and the substitution of faith in a Person for purely rational proof, render it impossible, so long as that faith continues, that any one should think it worth while to devote more than a passing notice to any such argument, unless for the purposes of an argumentum ad hominem. ”

“ The Maker of the universe alone; the great Artist and Father has formed us, such a living image as man is. But your Olympian Jove, the image of an image, greatly out of harmony with truth, is the senseless work of Attic hands." [Pg 42] This, it will be readily seen, is more an attempt to show the insufficiency of idolatry to account for man's nature, than a deliberate attempt at theistic proof.
The other examples of the use of this form of the argument for the existence of God are found in Lactantius, "the Christian Cicero." ”

“ Plato's Ideas, as we have seen, determine the method by which he arrives at his abstract divinity, namely, by the "Idealogical" form of argument based upon a process of generalization. Aristotle, struck by the phenomena of motion in the universe, lays most stress on the course of reasoning which would lead back to the Prime Mover. The Epicureans, subordinating their theology to their ethical theory, and unwilling to allow their deity to interfere with the world or with men's affairs, developed and placed their dependence on the argument from common consent. ”

“ But the chief source from which the Fathers drew that certainty which they could not find in the demonstrations of philosophy was in the teaching of the Word, Jesus Christ. God, indeed, as we have seen, is not an object of science, "but the Son is wisdom and knowledge and truth, and all else that has affinity thereto. He is also susceptible of demonstration and of description." ”

“ The philosophy of the Greeks during the first century of our era presents a great contrast to that of the age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. No longer do we find men engaged in the processes of positive, constructive thought, but we have presented to our view an age of retrospection, of literary criticism, and, to a great extent, of intellectual exhaustion. ”

“ Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, the "Orientalizing Hellenes," and the "Hellenizing Orientals," all by their restless, nervous, frequently erratic and aimless activity, bear witness to the fact that the mind of man has had revealed to it its own limitations, and is well on the way towards despair of ever arriving at truth. The Greek mind no longer exhibits that elasticity and spontaneity and enthusiasm in the search for truth, or that confidence in its results, which characterized the representatives of the best period of the thought of the race. ”

“ The thought of Greece before the time of Socrates, from the very nature of its problem, and the material at its disposal, yields us but little that can, without doing violence to the facts, be construed as bearing on the theistic argument. The search of these early philosophers was, indeed, for an ἀρχή, but their interest in the inquiry, as a perusal of the extant fragments of their writings will prove, was pre-eminently cosmological. ”

“ The fall of the old world, which was at once political, religious and philosophical, was characterized by a universal atomism. Politically, the individual, as an atom, found himself alone, without a country, hardly with a home. Religiously, the individual, as an atom, has lost his God ”

“ The subject of the "demonstration" of the existence of God is spoken of at some length in several places by St. Clement of Alexandria, and with his position most of the Fathers agree in the main. He regards the subject largely from an Aristotelian point of view. All knowledge is derived from Sensation and Understanding. "Intellectual apprehension is first in the order of nature; but in our case, and in relation to ourselves, Sensation is first, and of Sensation and Understanding the essence of knowledge is formed, and evidence is common to Understanding and Sensation." ”

“ Christian doctrine represents to them the stable, absolute truth, so far as it was revealed by the Incarnate Word, the eternal verities in their completeness and unity, so far as man is able to comprehend them. Philosophy represents the phase or aspect of the truth which the conditions of thought at the time demands and emphasizes, which will co-ordinate the data at present in the foreground of consciousness. ”

“ But we should expect that to men, upon whom a close perusal and study of the Old Testament Scriptures had impressed the idea of God as the Creator, Law-Giver and Governor of the universe, the Cosmological argument would appeal strongly. Moreover, the strong Stoic influence which is seen in their works, particularly in their treatment of questions of morals, and in their ethical terminology, would naturally, one would think, pre-dispose them to regard with favor this argument, so in vogue among the philosophers of the Porch. ”

“ Thus they conceive of the facts of Christian Theology as the goal towards which philosophy is (often unconsciously) striving, but at which it can never arrive without the "leap of faith." Once this leap is taken, however, these theological verities become the major factors in the data to be co-ordinated, and philosophy and theology come into that union and harmony which, in the eyes of the Christian philosophers, is their normal relation. ”

“ In Alexandria and the East there was no incentive for the Christians to try to prove the existence of God, for the philosophy of that portion of the world was essentially religious in its character, and based its speculation on the existence of God as a fundamental postulate of revelation and of reason as well. ”

“ In the representations of early Christian thought, however, we find great differences in the emphasis laid upon the speculative side of the theistic problem. Christian philosophy is no exception to the rule that the thought of the race develops through the needs, temperaments and tendencies with which it comes into contact, and unfolds itself naturally in response to internal or external stimuli—the doubts, intellectual needs and growing consciousness and experience of the believer, and the cavils, objections and attacks of his opponent. ”

“ The absolute Idea is not only the first principle of the universe, but also its final purpose, and thus we have indicated in various places a teleological argument. Traces of other forms of the theistic argument have been detected in Plato's writings, but none of them are at all explicitly developed, and one cannot but feel that some writers on the subject have claimed altogether too much for Plato's theology. ”

“ The Fathers think that in the Christian doctrine of God they find all the true elements contributed by previous thought, and besides these an infinite depth of truth unthought of by the Greeks, all unified and harmonized in a way that makes it a sharp contrast to the fragmentary and abstract character of the Hellenic theology. ”

“ In the post-Aristotelian schools we have an entire change of the point of view, and instead of a philosophy of nature, such as occupied the attention of the pre-Socratic thinkers, or a philosophy of mind, such as Socrates, Plato, and to a large extent, Aristotle attempted to construct, we find the interest of men in speculative questions centered in a philosophy of life, of morals. ”

“ Frequently the patristic writers have occasion to emphasize the inability of man to attain by any of his natural powers to religious truth, and to point to the impotent longings and aspirations of Greek philosophy as an example of this. St. Clement of Alexandria, for example, asserts that "the chiefs of philosophy only guessed at" religious truth, [45] and [Pg 33] lays down the general principle that "God, then, being not a subject for demonstration, cannot be the object of science." ”

“ The Stoics, on the other hand, with their strong conviction of providence working in the world, were rather inclined to deny the validity of this argument from common consent, and rested their belief in the gods, as Cicero makes his Stoic do in De Natura Deorum, [23] on the evidence of design and purpose in the universe, but by this process succeeded only in proving to their own satisfaction that the world is divine—a fatalistic pantheism which roused the ire of the Epicurean and Sceptic alike, and which even Cicero seemed hardly to be able to accept. ”