unthought, nor unperceived, nor man, nor angel, nor god, nor absolutely any of the things that are named or perceived or thought, .... God who was not (our v Oeós), without thought, without perception, without will, without purpose, without passion, without desire, willed to make a world. In saying 'willed,' I use the word only because some word is necessary, but I mean without volition, without thought, and without perception; and in saying 'world,' I do not mean the extended and divisible world which afterwards came into being, with its capacity of division, but the seed of the world." This was said more briefly, but probably with the same meaning, by Marcus: There is no conception and no essence of God.2

These exalted ideas of His transcendence, which had especially thriven on Alexandrian soil, were further elaborated at the end of the second century by the Christian philosophers of the Alexandrian schools, who inherited the wealth at once of regenerated Platonism, of Gnosticism, and of theosophic Judaism. Clement anticipated Plotinus in conceiving of God as being "beyond the One and higher than the Monad itself," which was the highest abstraction of current philosophy. There is no name that can properly be named of Him: "neither the One, nor the Good, nor Mind, nor Absolute Being, nor Father, nor Creator, nor Lord." No science can attain

1 ap. Hippol. 7. 21, p. 358.

2 åvevvóŋtos kaì ávovσtos, ibid. 6. 42, p. 302; cf. 12 ff., pp. 424 ff., for Monoïmus, and also Ptolemæus, ad Floram, 7.

3 Pædag. 1. 8.

Möller, Kosmologie, p. 26, cf. 124, 129, 130.

unto Him; "for all science depends on antecedent principles; but there is nothing antecedent to the Unbegotten." Origen expressly protests against the conceptions of God which regarded Him as supra-cosmic rather than transcendent,2 and as having a material substance though not a human form. His own conception is that of a nature which is absolutely simple and intelligent, or which transcends both intelligence and existence. Being absolutely simple, He has no more or less, no before or after, and consequently has no need of either space or time. Being absolutely intelligent, His only attribute is to know and to be known. But only "like knows like." He is to be apprehended through the intelligence which is made in His image: the human mind is capable of knowing the Divine by virtue of its participation in it. But in the strict sense of the word He is beyond our knowledge our knowledge is like the vision of a spark as compared with the splendour of the sun.4

(2) Revelation or Mediation of the Transcendent.--But as in Greek philosophy, so also in Christian theology, the doctrine whether of a supra-cosmic or of a transcendent God necessitated the further question, How could He pass into the sphere of the phenomenal? The rougher sort of objectors ridiculed a God who was "solitary and destitute" in his unapproachable uniqueness: 5 the more serious heathen philosophers asked, If like knows like, how can your God know the world? and

1 Strom. 5. 12.

3 De princ. 1. 1. 2, 5, 7.

2 c. Cels. 6. 19 sqq.

4 Ibid. 1. 1, passim; cf. 4. 1. 36.

5

e.g. Min. Felix, c. 10; cf. Keim, Celsus, 158.

the mass of Christian philosophers, both within and without the associated communities, felt this question, or one of the questions that are cognate to it, to be the cardinal point of their theology.2

The tentative answers were innumerable. One early group of them maintained the existence of a capacity in the Supreme Being to manifest Himself in different forms. The conception had some elements of Stoical and some of popular Greek theology, in both of which anthropomorphism had been possible. It came to an especial prominence in the earlier stages of the Christological controversies, as an explanation of the nature of Jesus Christ. It lay beneath what is known as Modal Monarchianism, the theory that Christ was a temporary mode of the existence of the one God. It was simply His will to exist in one mode rather than in another.4

"One and the same God," said Noetus, "is the Creator and Father of all things, and, because it was His good pleasure, He

1 The older sort, who clung to tradition pure and simple, were dubious of the introduction of dialectic methods into Christianity: see Eus. v. 28; cf. v. 13. "Expavescunt ad oikovoμíav," Tert. adv. Prax. 3. Cf. Weingarten, p. 25.

2 Pantænus, when asked by outside philosophers, "How can God know the world, if like knows like?" replied (Routh, Rel. Sac. i. p. 379): μήτε αἰσθητῶς τὰ αἰσθητὰ μήτε νόερως τὰ νοητὰ· οὐ γὰρ εἶναι δυνατὸν τὸν ὑπὲρ τὰ ὄντα κατὰ τὰ ὄντα τῶν ὄντων λαμβάνεσθαι, ἀλλ' ὡς ἴδια θελήματα γινώσκειν αὐτὸν τὰ ὄντα φαμέν . . . for if he made all things by His will, no one can deny that He knows His own will, and hence knows what His will has made. Cf. Julius Africanus (Routh, ii. 239), λέγεται γὰρ ὁμωνύμως ὁ θεὸς πᾶσι τοῖς ἐξ αὐτοῦ, ἐπειδὴ ἐν πᾶσιν ἐστίν. 3 γίνομαι ὃ θέλω καὶ εἰμὶ ὃ ἐιμί, as used by the Naassenes, ap. Hipp.

5. 7.

...

Cf. Harnack, art. in Encycl. Brit. "Sabellius."

S

appeared to righteous men of old. For when He is not seen He is invisible, and when He is seen He is visible: He is uncontained when He wills not to be contained, and contained when He is contained. . . . . When the Father had not been born, He was rightly styled Father: when it was His good pleasure to undergo birth, He became on being born His own son, not another's."1

....

But the dominant conception was in a line with that of both Greek philosophy and Greek religion. From the Supreme God came forth, or in Him existed, special forms and modifications by which He both made the world and revealed Himself to it.

(i.) The speculations as to the nature of these forms varied partly with the large underlying variations in the conception of God as supra-cosmic or as transcendental, and partly with the greater or less development of the tendency to give a concrete shape to abstract ideas. They varied also according as the forms were viewed in relation to the universe, as its types and formative forces; or in relation to the Supreme Being and His rational creatures, as manifestations of the one and means of knowledge to the other. The variations are found to exist, not only between one school of philosophers and another, but also in the same school. For example, Tertullian distinguishes between two schools of Valentinians, that of Valentinus himself and that of his great, though independent, follower Ptolemy. The former regarded the Eons as simply modes of God's existence, abiding within His essence: the latter, in common with the great

1 Hipp. 9. 10; Schmid, Dogmeng. 47, n.

2 Tert. c. Valent. 4; cf. dio.0éreis of Ptol. ap. Iren. 1. 12. 1.

majority of the school, looked upon them as "personal substances" which had come forth from God and remained outside Him. And again, most philosophers of the same school made a genealogy of Eons, and furnished their opponents thereby with one of their chief handles for ridicule: but Colorbasus regarded the production of the Eons as a single momentary act.1 Sometimes, however, the expressions, which came from different sources, were blended.

Almost all these conceptions of the means by which God communicated Himself to the world were relative to the conception of Him as Mind. It is as inherent a necessity for thought to reveal itself as it is for light to shine. Following the tendency of current psychology to regard the different manifestations of mind as relative to different elements in mind itself, some schools of philosophers gave a separate personality to each supposed element in the mind of God. There came forth thought and reflexion, voice and name, reasoning and intention: 2 or from the original Will and Thought came forth Mind and Truth (Reality) as visible forms and images of the invisible qualities (diabéσewv) of the Father.3

(ii.) But side by side with this tendency to individualize and hypostatize the separate elements or modes of the Divine Mind, there was a tendency to regard the mind of God as a unity existing either as a distinct element in His essence or objective to Him. On one theory, mind is the only-begotten of God. He alone

1 ap. Iren. 1. 12. 3.

2 Hipp. 6. 12.

3 Ptolemy ap. Iren. 1. 12. 1; cf. Hipp. c. Noet. 10, moλùs v.

4 ap. Iren. 1. 2. 1, 5 (Valentinians).