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| Chapter V
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Chapter
V.
That there is, then, a Word of God, and a Breath of God, the Greek,
with his “innate ideas”1953
| 1953 innate ideas (κοινῶν
ἐννοιῶν).
There is a Treatise of Gregory introducing Christianity to the Greeks
“from innate ideas.” This title has been, wrongly,
attributed by some to a later hand. | , and the Jew,
with his Scriptures, will perhaps not deny. But the dispensation as
regards the Word of God, whereby He became man, both parties would
perhaps equally reject, as being incredible and unfitting to be told of
God. By starting, therefore, from another point we will bring these
gainsayers to a belief in this fact. They believe that all things came
into being by thought and skill on the part of Him Who framed the
system of the universe; or else they hold views that do not conform to
this opinion. But should they not grant that reason and wisdom guided
the framing of the world, they will install unreason and unskilfulness
on the throne of the universe. But if this is an absurdity and impiety,
it is abundantly plain that they must allow that thought and skill rule
the world. Now in what has been previously said, the Word of God has
been shown not to be this actual utterance of speech, or the possession
of some science or art, but to be a power essentially and substantially
existing, willing all good, and being possessed of strength to execute
all its will; and, of a world that is good, this power appetitive and
creative of good is the cause. If, then, the subsistence of the whole
world has been made to depend on the power of the Word, as the train of
the argument has shown, an absolute necessity prevents us entertaining
the thought of there being any other cause of the organization of the
several parts of the world than the Word Himself, through whom all
things in it passed into being. If any one wants to call Him Word, or
Skill, or Power, or God, or anything else that is high and prized, we
will not quarrel with him. For whatever word or name be invented as
descriptive of the subject, one thing is intended by the expressions,
namely the eternal power of God which is creative of things that are,
the discoverer of things that are not, the sustaining cause of things
that are brought into being, the foreseeing cause of things yet to be.
This, then, whether it be God, or Word, or Skill, or Power, has been
shown by inference to be the Maker of the nature of man, not urged to
framing him by any necessity, but in the superabundance of love
operating the production of such a creature. For needful it was that
neither His light should be unseen, nor His glory without witness, nor
His goodness unenjoyed, nor that any other quality observed in the
Divine nature should in any case lie idle, with none to share it or
enjoy it. If, therefore, man comes to his birth upon these conditions,
namely to be a partaker of the good things in God, necessarily he is
framed of such a kind as to be adapted to the participation of such
good. For as the eye, by virtue of the bright ray which is by nature
wrapped up in it, is in fellowship with the light, and by its innate
capacity draws to itself that which is akin to it, so was it needful
that a certain affinity with the Divine should be mingled with the
nature of man, in order that by means of this correspondence it might
aim at that which was native to it. It is thus even with the nature of
the unreasoning creatures, whose lot is cast in water or in air; each of them has
an organization adapted to its kind of life, so that by a peculiar
formation of the body, to the one of them the air, to the other the
water, is its proper and congenial element. Thus, then, it was needful
for man, born for the enjoyment of Divine good, to have something in
his nature akin to that in which he is to participate. For this end he
has been furnished with life, with thought, with skill, and with all
the excellences that we attribute to God, in order that by each of them
he might have his desire set upon that which is not strange to him.
Since, then, one of the excellences connected with the Divine nature is
also eternal existence, it was altogether needful that the equipment of
our nature should not be without the further gift of this attribute,
but should have in itself the immortal, that by its inherent faculty it
might both recognize what is above it, and be possessed with a desire
for the divine and eternal life1954
| 1954 Cf.
Cato’s Speech in Addison’s Cato:—
It must be so; Plato, thou
reasonest well!—
Else whence this pleasing hope,
this fond desire
This longing after
immortality?
* * * * *
’Tis the divinity that
stirs within us;
’Tis heaven itself that
points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity
to man. | . In truth this
has been shown in the comprehensive utterance of one expression, in the
description of the cosmogony, where it is said that man was made
“in the image of God”1955
. For in this
likeness, implied in the word image, there is a summary of all things
that characterize Deity; and whatever else Moses relates, in a style
more in the way of history, of these matters, placing doctrines before
us in the form of a story, is connected with the same instruction. For
that Paradise of his, with its peculiar fruits, the eating of which did
not afford to them who tasted thereof satisfaction of the appetite, but
knowledge and eternity of life, is in entire agreement with what has
been previously considered with regard to man, in the view that our
nature at its beginnings was good, and in the midst of good. But,
perhaps, what has been said will be contradicted by one who looks only
to the present condition of things, and thinks to convict our statement
of untruthfulness, inasmuch as man is seen no longer under those
primeval circumstances, but under almost entirely opposite ones.
“Where is the divine resemblance in the soul? Where the
body’s freedom from suffering? Where the eternity of life? Man is
of brief existence, subject to passions, liable to decay, and ready
both in body and mind for every form of suffering.” By these and
the like assertions, and by directing the attack against human nature,
the opponent will think that he upsets the account that has been
offered respecting man. But to secure that our argument may not have to
be diverted from its course at any future stage, we will briefly
discuss these points. That the life of man is at present subject to
abnormal conditions is no proof that man was not created in the midst
of good. For since man is the work of God, Who through His goodness
brought this creature into being, no one could reasonably suspect that
he, of whose constitution goodness is the cause, was created by his
Maker in the midst of evil. But there is another reason for our present
circumstances being what they are, and for our being destitute of the
primitive surroundings: and yet again the starting-point of our answer
to this argument against us is not beyond and outside the assent of our
opponents. For He who made man for the participation of His own
peculiar good, and incorporated in him the instincts for all that was
excellent, in order that his desire might be carried forward by a
corresponding movement in each case to its like, would never have
deprived him of that most excellent and precious of all goods; I mean
the gift implied in being his own master, and having a free will. For
if necessity in any way was the master of the life of man, the
“image” would have been falsified in that particular part,
by being estranged owing to this unlikeness to its archetype. How can
that nature which is under a yoke and bondage to any kind of necessity
be called an image of a Master Being? Was it not, then, most right that
that which is in every detail made like the Divine should possess in
its nature a self-ruling and independent principle, such as to enable
the participation of good to be the reward of its virtue? Whence, then,
comes it, you will ask, that he who had been distinguished throughout
with most excellent endowments exchanged these good things for the
worse? The reason of this also is plain. No growth of evil had its
beginning in the Divine will. Vice would have been blameless were it
inscribed with the name of God as its maker and father. But the evil
is, in some way or other, engendered1956
from within,
springing up in the will at that moment when there is a retrocession of
the soul from the beautiful1957
| 1957 τὸ καλὸν. The Greek word for moral perfection, according to one view of
its derivation (καίειν),
refers to “brightness”; according to another (cf.
κεκαδμενος), to “finish” or perfection. | . For as sight is an activity of nature, and blindness a
deprivation of that natural operation, such is the kind of opposition
between virtue and vice. It is, in fact, not possible to form any other
notion of the origin of vice than as the absence of virtue. For as when
the light has been removed the darkness supervenes, but as long as it
is present there is no darkness, so, as long as the good is present in the
nature, vice is a thing that has no inherent existence; while the
departure of the better state becomes the origin of its opposite. Since
then, this is the peculiarity of the possession of a free will, that it
chooses as it likes the thing that pleases it, you will find that it is
not God Who is the author of the present evils, seeing that He has
ordered your nature so as to be its own master and free; but rather the
recklessness that makes choice of the worse in preference to the
better.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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