• "IRRELIGIOUS SOLICITUDE FOR GOD."
CANON GORE, who appears to us nearly the only theologian of the Anglican Church who is at once in the largest sense profoundly learned, and also in the largest sense thoroughly original, quotes this remarkable phrase, "irreligious solicitude for God," from Hilary of Poitiers in his recent Dissertations* on points which his Bampton Lectures did not adequately cover. He quotes it as de- scribing thinkers who in Hilary's age shrank from accepting that which was part of the essence of divine revelation, because it seemed to do a sort of dishonour to God, even though God had not himself shrunk from manifesting his will in that sense. Apparently, it was a phrase which Hilary might have applied to his own disinclination to treat frankly the avowed and repeatedly asserted limitation of our Lord's own human intelligence for the very same reason. Pro- bably this remarkable phrase was one which Hilary's own critical self-consciousness had discerned as fitting many attitudes of his own thought, and no doubt this gave it its admirable applicability to a great many different phases of ecclesiastical history. But however this may be, it seems to us certain that no more discriminating and pungent quali- fication of the reluctance of theologians to let Revelation have its own way with us, when that way seems to our poor minds derogatory to the divine Being—though, as St. Paul so justly perceived, what the wise and learned think deroga- tory to God, is of the very essence of the Incarnation, is part and parcel of its intrinsic significance—was ever struck from the mint of theological genius. Just consider how it describes the reluctance of the Apostles themselves,— including the Prince of the Apostles,—to let their Master have his own way with them at the very origin of the Christian Revelation. St. Peter had hardly made the great confession on which our Lord said that he should build his Church, than he capped it, as it were, by his "irreligious solicitude" for his master. When Christ told him that he should be cruci- fied and mocked and put to death by the chief priests at Jerusalem, he burst out with the protest, "Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee," receiving the imme- diate rebuke, "Get thee behind me, Satan, thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men,"— the strongest rebuke which ever fell from those lips which, predicted St. Peter's own threefold denial with such singular tenderness. When the beloved disciple himself proposed to bring down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village which would not receive him, he was again virtually told that his "solicitude for God" was irreligious. He knew not, said Christ "what spirit he was of." "The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." And have not the persecutions of heresy from that time forth been all due,— whenever they have been due to any motive so little ignoble, —to the same "irreligious solicitude for God"? What is the story of the Inquisition itself but the story of "irreligious
• London: John Harm.
solicitude for God"? irreligious zeal to enforce the ccnfession of real or supposed dogmatic truth P The massacre of St. Bartholomew was worse in degree but not one bit worse in kind than the Protestant persecutions of Catholics under ELizabeth and the Scottish Covenant. The desire to bring down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village was the great type of all those subsequent persecutions which endeavoured to blast the resistance which it was found so difficult to subdue by means which were truly of divine origin.
But it is not merely in the history of physical cruelty and perverseness that we see the illustration of Hilary of Poitiers' pregnant phrase. Perhaps something like half the corruptions of the Church might be described under the same general heading. Canon Gore has shown us, in the book to which we have referred, how few of the great thinkers who elaborated the theology of the Incarnation, while insisting most strenuously in general words on the true humanity of the nature which Christ assumed, were willing to admit that the limitations of that nature extended to ignorance of that which no human knowledge could, in the circum- stances of his life and times, by any possibility have com- passed. Even Athanasius himself, after asserting and even contending for this ignorance, seems hardly able to maintain it, and in his "solicitude for God" almost topples over into that "irreligious solicitude" which he condemned. Origen is perhaps the writer who moat fully apprehended the danger of this over-solicitude for Christ's infinite knowledge. But Ambrose, Augustine, almost all the great fathers of the Church, whilst they denied in the strongest terms that our Lord's nature was not really human, tried to interpret his infancy, his youth, his ques- tions, his marvellings, his declaration that he knew not the hour when the Son of Man should come, his prayers that the cup might pass from him, his anguish, and his cry of desolation on the Cross, in some non-natural sense, which might have reconciled his language as a man with some sort of omniscience which could in no sense at all have been human, and if it could have been, would have separated his humanity from ours by a gulf which nothing could have bridged. Nothing can be more remarkable than the reluctance of the Church to believe in the genuineness of that humanity which it so eagerly and justly asserted. In words it is pro- claimed, but no sooner proclaimed than recalled. And our Lord's life is therefore transformed from a human reality into a sort of dramatic fiction, by the explanation that he only asked questions to elicit what he already knew, and that he only declared his ignorance of that of which he was not ignorant, because he was speaking in the name of his Church, which was really ignorant, and was intended to remain really ignorant, of the times and seasons of its visitation. This is surely frittering away the whole meaning of the Incarnation, and making it a matter of tragic appearance rather than the greatest and most solemn of all realities.
It is curious to observe that there have been, however, great changes in the sphere in which men have been most irreligiously solicitous for God, during the long history of the Church. In the earlier days, and especially in the Greek Church, the admission that anything analogous to human suffering could enter into the spirit of a divine passion, seems to have often been thought dishonouring to God; and the "irreligious solicitude" to admit any such element in even the human life of Christ is seen in the most curious emphasis in such writers as the Alexandrian Clement. Canon Gore tells us that Clement denied to Christ any such human emotion as joy, grief, or even huuger,—in direct contradiction to the simplest statements of the Gospels. And that was only part of that "irreligious solicitude for God," which laid such immense stress on the supposed divine attribute of absolute impassibility, that every declaration with which the Old Testament abounds of God's wrath, and his affliction in our afflictions, and his sympathy with us generally, had to be explained away. The great idea of many of the Greek Fathers was that to ascribe suffering of any kind to a divine being was derogatory to divinity. And the " solicitude " of the Gnostics, or those who inclined towards the Gnostics, was therefore to minimise, or rather to dispose altogether of, the reality of our Lord's sufferings. In the medimval and modern world there has been little or none of this reverence for the divine impassibility. Whatever may be held to be the abstract impassibility of the eternal mind, the medieval tendency was rather to magnify than to attenuate the sufferings of our Lord in his passion. Any one who knows the wonderful sermon of Dr. Newman's on the passion, knows how the medimval Church dilated on the infinitude of those sufferings till the mind almost reels beneath the awfulness of that great agony. And even in modern times the reverence for the very idea of vicarious suffering has been so profound that the disposition to shrink from the mere conception of divine suffering has almost disappeared, and we venture to think that the impassibility of God has sunk quite into the background, while the sublimity of our Lord's sufferings for man has been brought well into the foreground as of the very essence of the Christian Gospel., The "solicitude for God" is now all the other way from that of the Greeks, not to dwell on his impassibility, but on what seems to the present age the far greater grandeur of the passion. Fashions change in philosophy, but those who believe in the truth of Revelation must adapt their fashions to the direct teaching of the Almighty, and control their "irreligious solicitude for God."
Luther used to say, as we have often had occasion to remind our readers, "We tell our Lord God plainly that if he will have his Church he must keep it himself, for we cannot keep it, and if we could we should be the proudest asses under Heaven." And nothing has proved the truth of this saying more than the constant tendency of the Church to rebel against the humiliating teachings of revelation and her irre- sistible disposition to be more solicitous for the majesty of God than God himself has been. Unitarians have been so solicitous for it that they thought it degraded God to attribute to him a true Incarnation of any kind, and even Trinitarians, while eagerly clinging to that faith, have explained it away as elaborately as St. Augustine and St. Hilary. It is our "irreligious solicitude for God" which has produced many of the heresies as well as most of the crimes of the Christian Church from the age of the Gnostics to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
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