CLEMENT AND ORIGEN.* ONE sometimes wonders what the Rev. John
Bampton, who, some hundred and forty years ago, furnished the means for a perpetual polemic, which was "to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and confute all heretics and schismatics," would have thought of some of the structures raised upon his founda- tion. No more learned temperate, and reasonable discourses have been preached under the title of Barn pton Lectures than those which Dr. Bigg has given us in this volume. Still, it would be possible to describe them as being substantially an apology for two teachers, of whom one is a decanonised saint, and the other an anathematised heretic. This, perhaps, is to state the case too strongly. Though Clement VIII. banished his great namesake from the roll of the Roman martyrology, yet the Gallican Church, in this matter, at least, preserving its in- dependence of judgment, has never ceased to keep his festival. As to Origen, the anathema pronounced on him—if, indeed, it was pronounced—by the Council of Constantinople, will be counterbalanced in many minds by the admiration felt for him by some of the most illustrious doctors of the Church, by Athanasius and by Basil, by Gregory of Nazianzum and by Gregory of Nyasa. Jerome, indeed, condemned him (though in earlier days he had bestowed upon him emphatic, even exaggerated praise); but Jerome's condemnations may some- times, as in the case of Chrysostom, be treated with but little respect. There can be little doubt that the tendency of religious thought in these days, wherever it is free t3 move, will be to condone the errors, if errors they were, of the Alexandrian teachers, and to put a higher and yet higher value on their contributions to the true science of Christian life.
No inconsiderable part of the speculations of Clement and Origen may be dismissed altogether from consideration. They included in their inquiries, according to the habits of thought in which they had been bred, matters which are beyond human knowledge ; they attempted to solve problems which are in themselves insoluble. It is true that it was no idle passion for speculation that prompted them. They found these questions already subjects of discussion, and they attempted to find answers that would vindicate the Christian conception of the divine government. It seems, for instance, a quite profitless matter to inquire whether the human soul has pre-existed. But if it seems so to us, it had not that appearance for men of the time of Clement and Origen. "Time," as Dr. Bigg puts it, "has delivered a sufficient verdict" on the thesis. But, as he well goes on, "it was no mere arbitrary crotchet, but a serious and systematic attempt to explain and vindicate the distributive justice of God. Origen was the first to apply it in this way ; but the belief itself was one that had an imposing array of authority, both Pagan and Jewish, in its favour, and might even claim support from the well-known passage in St. John's account of the healing of the man who was born blind."
There is another part of the Alexandrian teaching which requires to be dealt with in another way. Its place in the his- torical succession of Christian doctrine must never be forgotten. The lives of Clement and Origen together occupy what may be roughly described as the second half of the second and the first half of the third centuries. The settlemeut of orthodox doc- trine that was to be made at Nicasa was still seventy years distant from the end of this period. The two great teachers had to deal with an imperfect theological apparatus and an unsettled terminology. To borrow a simile from commerce, they had to do business without the recognised medium of exchange. Clement, for instance, may be said to be unsound on the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Ghost. He certainly does not state it in the precise terms that we find in the formularies of after-times. But then, the term "Procession," which Christendom has agreed to accept as defining the relation • The Christian Platcmists of Alezanctria the Bampton L.ctures of 1886. By Charles Bigg, D.D. Oxford; The Clarendon Pre,. 1886.
of the Holy Spirit to the Godhead, had not then been invented. Dr. Bigg pats the case with admirable force :—
"Theology is the only ungrateful science. She crushes her builders with the very stones they helped to pile. Among the greatest of these builders were Clement and Origen. We must ask what they found to build with. We must throw ourselves back into the days when tradition was in the making, and beliefs, which afterwards seemed eternal truths, had as yet occurred to no man. We must compare them not with Anselm, or Augustine, or Basil, or Athanasius, but with Irenaens, or Tertallian, or Hippolytus, or Justin; and where these disagree we must allow that there was as yet no definite creed. If we compare the creed of the fourth century with that of the second, we cannot deny that there has been development. There has been no demonstrable change, if by change we mean shifting of ground or alteration of principle. Yet doctrine is not the same thing as sentiment, nor tech- Meal formularies as implicit belief. The Church of Origen is no more the Church of the Athanasian Creed, than the Parliament of Charles I. is the Parliament of Queen Victoria."
Another line of thought with which the names of the two teachers is inseparably connected, is the allegorical interpreta- tion of Scripture. It is in Origen, however, that this assumes a really important form :—
"He held that innumerable passages in both Testaments have no sense at all except as Allegories. Neither Clement nor Philo ex- pressly affirmed this, though the idea certainly larked within their minds. Bat Origen was not the man to disguise from himself or from others the exact nature of what he was doing. Many passages of Scripture, he says, are excluded from belief by physical impossi- bility. Such are those which speak of morning and evening before the creation of the Sun, the story of the Fall, and the carrying up of -our Lord into an exceeding high mountain by Satan in the Tempta- tion. Others again imply moral impossibilities. Such are those which speak of the child as punished for the sin of the parent, the law that on the Sabbath no Jew should take up a burden or move from his place, the precepts of the Saviour not to possess two coats, to pluck out the offending eye, to torn the right cheek to him that bias smitten the left. Yet another class are rejected by the enlightened conscience. Such are the adventures of Lot, the cruelties of the -Jewish ware, the execrations of the Psalms. All these antioomies of Scripture were forced upon him on one side by the Ebionite and Gnostic, on the other by the Greek philosopher, who was beginning to study the Bible in a spirit of not wholly unfriendly curiosity, and was violently repelled by these proofs, as he thought them, of Jewish barbarism. Origen felt the embarrassment most acutely, and his fearless logic saw but one way of escape. These passages he admitted, in their literal sense are not true. Why, then, urged the adversary, are they found in what you Christians call the Word of God ? To this he replied that, though in one sense untrue, they are in another the highest, the only valuable truth. They are permitted for an object. These impossibilities, trivialities, ineptitudes, are wires stretched across our path by the Holy Spirit, to warn us that we are not in the right way. We must not leap over them ; we must go beneath, piercing down to the smooth, broad road of the spiritual intelligence. They are the rough outer bask, which repels the ignorant and unfit reader, but stimulates the true child of God to increased exertion. The letter is the external garb, often sordid and torn, but the king's daughter is all-glorious within.' It is as if the sunlight streamed in through the crannies of a ruinous wall ; the wall is ruinous in order that the sunlight may stream in."
"This was Origen's attempt to deal with a serious difficulty which may be said still to confront the believer. Even in his -day, it had the disadvantage of being possible only to the inner circle of illuminated minds. To us, it may still suggest many beautiful and instructive thoughts ; but, as a whole, it is -obviously impossible. We must find our escape from this diffi- culty in a large interpretation of the
.vglesp_; xcci oro_orp_7.-to; ;
-of the writer to the Hebrews.
But of all the topics which Clement and Origen handled, their -eschatology is perhaps that which has now the most absorbing interest. We do not see that Dr. Bigg mentions that bold speculation to which Macaulay referred when he wrote of that ultimate restoration of the Evil One "which Origen confidently expected, and of which Tillotson did not despair." This, indeed, is a matter on which we may without loss profess ourselves agnostics. On that side of the question which concerns the destinies of man, Dr. Bigg sums up the matter thus :—
"Neither Clement nor Origen is properly speaking a Universalist. Nor is Universalism the logical result of their principles. For if the goodness of God drew them in one direction, the Freedom of the Will, their negative pole, drove them with equal force in the other. Neither denied the eternity of punishment. What is known as the Poenct Dainni—exclusion that is from the sight of God—they held would never cease. The soul that has sinned beyond a certain point can never again become what once it might have been. The 'wise fire' will consume its evil fuel; anguish, remorse, shame, distraction, all torment will end when 'the wood, the hay, the straw' are burnt up. The purified spirit will be brought home; it will no longer rebel; it will acquiesce in its lot; bat it may never be admitted within that holy circle where the pure in heart see face to face. Even this general cessation of the pain of sense' they hoped, but did not venture to affirm. Man tramples on God's goodness here • he may scorn and defy it for ever. And so long as he answers will slot' to the eternal Thou shalt,' so long must his agony endure
This question lies so near the roots of life, it is united by such tender fibres to our dearest hopes and fears, that it cannot be touched without a thrill. Hence it is seen through the mist of love and horror, and these two emotions intensify one another. The thought of the City of Destruction adds wings to the pilgrim's feet ; and while he rejoices with trembling over his own salvation, he cannot wish that the pur- suing fury should seem less vengeful to others. Hence there has been much diversity. Words have been employed in very different senses. Points, upon which high authorities have insisted as vital, are treated by other authorities not less high as subordinate and immaterial. Yet if we fix our attention upon the language of the wisest teachers, there is also considerable agreement. As to the instruments of the Divine Retribution, there is no longer any serious dispute. Nor per- haps will any one now deny, that the first object of chastisement is the amendment of the sinner, and that if in any case it appears to lead to a different issue, the cause is in the sinner himself To the Alexandrines every man that lives is a child of God, a possessor of the divine grace, inasmuch as he bears within him, in his reason and his conscience, the image of the Divine Word. It may be that he has cast down and broken the image, that he has wholly embritted himself. But unless he has sunk to this frightful depth by his own free will, unless he has ceased to be a man, the Alexandrines held that we may leave him with fearful hope to the judgment of God. The later theologians took a far more sombre view. They who are in the Church and they only are within the pale of the Divine Love. Upon the excommunicate, the unbaptised, the heathen, the door is shut. This is the real distinction between the two."
We have been content to describe rather than to review some part of the contents of Dr. Bigg's volume, while we have left other parts altogether untouched,—e.g., the first lecture, dealing with Philo and the Gnostics, and the seventh, which treats of "The Reformed Paganism," its Oriental and Greek antecedents, and its development in Trinitarian and Unitarian Platonism. Nor can we do more than refer to some interesting points of Christian life and practice of which the lectures make incidental notice, —the relation of the Eucharist and the Agape, and the yet imperfect development in Clement's days of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. We shall have fulfilled our object if we send the student of theology to Dr. Bigg's admirable volume.
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