Himself who gives the orders. By a different conception of the genesis of the world, and one that is of singular interest in view of the similar conceptions which we shall find in some Gnostic schools, God is the Father of the world: 2 and the metaphor of Fatherhood is expanded into that of a marriage: God is conceived as the Father, His Wisdom as the Mother: "and she, receiving the seed of God, with fruitful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His visible son, only and wellbeloved."3

We have now the main elements of the current conceptions out of which the philosophers of early Christianity constructed new fabrics.

Christianity had no need to borrow from Greek philosophy either the idea of the unity of God, or the belief that He made the world. Its ultimate basis was the belief in one God. It rode in upon the wave of the reaction against polytheism. The Scriptures to which it appealed began with the sublime declaration, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It accepted that declaration as being both final and complete. It saw therein the picture of a single supreme Artificer: and it elaborated the picture by the aid of anthropomorphic conceptions: "By His almighty power He fixed firm the heavens, and by His incomprehensible

1 De profug. 19 (i. 561).

2 ὁ τῶν ὅλων πατήρ, de migrat. Abrah. 9 (i. 443); ὁ θεὸς τὰ πάντα yevvýoas, de somn. 1. 13 (i. 632), and elsewhere.

De ebriet. 8 (i. 361).

wisdom He set them in order: He separated the earth from the water that encompassed it . . . . and last of all He formed man with His sacred and spotless hands, the impress of His own image."1

The belief that the one God was the Creator of heaven and earth came, though not without a struggle, to be a foremost and permanent element in the Christian creed. The various forms of ditheism which grew up with it and around it, finding their roots in its unsolved problems and their nutriment in the very love of God which it fostered, gradually withered away. But in proportion as the belief spread widely over the Greek world, the simple Semitic cosmogony became insufficient. The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain?

These questions of the mode of creation and of the relation of God to the material world, and the underlying

1 1 Clem. Rom. 33. 3, 4: but it is a noteworthy instance of the contrast between this simple early belief and the developed theology which had grown up in less than a century later, that Irenæus, lib. 4, præf. c. 4, explains the 'hands' to mean the Son and Spirit: "homo... per manus ejus plasmatus est, hoc est per Filium et Spiritum quibus et dixit Faciamus hominem."

question which any answer to them must at the same time solve, fill a large place in the history of the first three centuries. The compromise which ultimately resulted has formed the basis of Christian theology to the present day.

The first answers were necessarily tentative. Thinkers of all schools, within the original communities and outside them, introduced conceptions which were afterwards discarded. One group of philosophers, treating the facts of Christianity as symbols, like the tableaux of the mysteries, framed cosmogonies which were symbolical also, and fantastic in proportion as they were symbolical. Another group of philosophers, dealing rather with the ideal than with the actual, framed cosmogonies in which abstract ideas were invested with substance and personality. The philosophers of all schools were met, not only by the common sense of the Christian communities, but also by caricature. Their opponents, after the manner of controversialists, accentuated their weak points, and handed on to later times only those parts of the theories which were most exposed to attack, and which were also least intelligible except in relation to the whole system. But so far as the underlying conceptions can be disentangled from the details, they may be clearly seen to have drifted in the direction of the main drifts of Greek philosophy.

1. There was a large tendency to account for the world by the hypothesis of evolution. In some way it had come forth from God. The belief expressed itself in many forms. It was in all cases syncretist. The

same writers frequently made use of different metaphors; but all the metaphors assumed vast grades and distances between God in Himself and the sensible world. One metaphor was that of an outflow, as of a stream from its source.1 Other metaphors were taken from the phenomena of vegetable growth, the evolution of a plant from a seed, or the putting forth of leaves by a tree.2 The metaphors of other writers were taken from the phenomena of human generation: they were an elaboration of the conception of God as the Father of the world. They were sometimes pressed: there was not only a Father, but also a Mother of the world, Wisdom or Silence or some other abstraction. In one elaborate system it was held that, though God Himself was unwedded, all the powers that came forth from Him came forth in pairs, and all existing things were the offspring of their union. That which came forth was also conceived in

1 Derivatio: Iren. 1. 24. 3, of Basilides (or rather one of the schools of Basilidians).

2 This is probably the metaphor involved in the common word poßoλý, e.g. Hippol. 6. 38, of Epiphanes.

3 The conception of the double nature of God, male and female, is found as early as Xenocrates, Aetius ap. Stob. Ecl. 1. 2. 29 (Diels, p. 304); and commonly among the Stoics, e.g. in the verses of Valerius Soranus, which are quoted by Varro, and after him by S. Augustine, de civit. Dei, 7. 9:

Jupiter omnipotens regum rex ipse deusque

Progenitor genitrixque deum, deus unus et omnis.

So Philodemus, de piet. 16, ed. Gomp. p. 83 (Diels, p. 549), quotes Zevs äppηy, Zevs Oñλvs; and Eusebius, præp. Evang. 3. 9, p. 100b, quotes the Orphic verse:

Ζεὺς ἄρσην γένετο, Ζεὺς ἄμβροτος ἔπλετο νύμφη.

* The Valentinians in, e.g., Hippol. 6. 29; 10. 13: so of Simon Magus, εξ 6. 12, γεγονέναι δὲ τὰς ῥίζας φησὶ κατὰ συζυγίας ἀπὸ τοῦ πυρὸς

various ways. The common expression in one group of philosophers is won (aiwv), a term which is of uncertain origin in this application. In other groups of philosophers the expressions are relative to the metaphor of growth and development, and repeat the Stoical term seed. In the syncretism of Marcus the several expressions are gathered together, and made more intelligible by the use of the synonym logoi;1 the thoughts of God were conceived as active forces, embodying themselves in material forms. In the conception of one school of thinkers, the invisible forces of the world acted in the same way that the art of a craftsman acts upon his materials.2 In the conception of another school, the distinction between intellectual and material existence tended to vanish. The powers which flowed forth from God were at once intellectual and material, corresponding to the monistic conception of God Himself. They were subtler and more active forms of matter acting upon its grosser but plastic forms. In the conception of another school, God is the unbegotten seed of which the Tree of Being is the leaves and fruit, and the fruit again contains

1 Hippol. 6. 43 (of Marcus), rà dè óvóμata Tŵv σTOIXEíWV Tà Koivà καὶ ῥητὰ αἰῶνας καὶ λόγους καὶ ῥίζας καὶ σπέρματα καὶ πλη ρώματα καὶ καρποὺς ὠνόμασε.

* Hippol. 5. 19 (of the Sethiani), πᾶν ὅ τι νοήσει ἐπινοεῖς ἢ καὶ παραλείπεις μὴ νοηθέν, τοῦτο ἑκάστη τῶν ἀρχῶν πέφυκε γενέσθαι ὡς ἐν ἀνθρωπίνῃ ψυχῇ πᾶσα ἡτισοῦν διδασκομένη τέχνη.

3 Hippol. 8. 8 (of the Docetæ), eòv elvaι тòv πρŵтov oioveì σrépμa συκῆς μεγέθει μὲν ἐλάχιστον παντελῶς δυνάμει δὲ ἄπειρον : ibid. c. 9, τὸ δὲ πρῶτον σπέρμα ἐκεῖνο, ὅθεν γέγονεν ἡ συκῆ, ἐστὶν ἀγέννητον. Α similar metaphor was used by the Simonians, Hippol. 6. 9 sqq., but it is complicated with the metaphor of invisible and visible fire (heat and flame). It is adopted by Peter in the Clementines, Hom. 2. 4, where God is the ῥίζα, man the καρπός.