SECTION IV

antagonistic criticism in its subordinate principles and aspects

Considered as a history of the facts in which the Godhead was united with manhood, the Gospel must be regarded as a spiritual and intellectual height lying far above the principles, dispositions, and insight of Heathenism or natural religion. Wherever, then, natural religion is in any way active, or even opposes the agency of Christianity, its principles become the principles of an antagonistic criticism, and these principles appear in definite forms and expressions.

When Heathenism is regarded as the religion of nature in contrast to the religion of the Spirit, it is generally viewed chiefly on that side by which it would find the divine directly in nature, identify it with her and worship it in her. In this case, Heathenism is viewed in its piety, in its superstitious exaltation, in its deification of the creature. But in this manner it is not fully comprehended, and still less are its real roots appreciated. For this superstitious piety stands in polar interaction with a deep-lying impiety; and the monstrous superstition which it exhibits, is founded upon a monstrous unbelief. The self-chosen idol of the heathen only attains its magic splendour by more or less undeifying the world which is exterior to it. Its fame is surrounded and borne up by the sphere of the profane. And even when the heathen multiplies his gods, when his world seems in his eyes everywhere radiant with divine glory, he only attains to this multiplication and partition of the divine in nature by making general matter form the dark, unspiritual background which scatters all these lights, and in its gloomy power rises above and encloses them. In a word, Heathenism cannot get free from the eternity of matter: it wants the knowledge of a God who, in His eternal and spiritual light and power, is self-possessed, self-determined, and self-comprehended; who ordains, creates, and governs the world; whose eternal power and wisdom call it into existence, and before whose majesty it vanishes. Its divinity is limited and restrained by the dead matter of a world whose existence seems too real, too mighty, to allow its profane independence to be utterly surrendered in the beginning of the world, to the glory of the Father, in the midst of the world, to the glory of the Son, at the end of the world, to the glory of the Holy Ghost.

Even heathen consciousness cannot indeed mistake the superiority of the Godhead to the ever unspiritual, material world. It views this superiority, however, under various aspects, according to the various forms of its own life. First, the heathen looks upon the Godhead with the drowsiness of his own natural religious passivity; and in this case he beholds it everywhere appearing, and everywhere disappearing in the mighty process of the material life of nature. Matter is to him the absolute darkness into which it sinks and from which it again emerges in the many gods, or in the one idea of universal divinity. This is the pantheistic stand-point. But then a moral sorrow, and indignation against the power which matter seems to exercise over spirit, are excited within him: he cannot endure that the Divine should be thus carried down the dark stream of natural forces, and tries to make in his own mind a separation between light and darkness. To this, however, he can never attain without making the God of light supreme over all. This god seems to be the Almighty Creator of the world. But in his inmost nature that eternal darkness, which the heathen mind cannot separate from deity, already exists and prevails. Hence his creation is more passive than active, a pathological incident; and as his life is developed, the darkness which lay at its root becomes more and more prominent. Darker and still darker worlds and structures are its manifestation. This is the ancient emanation-doctrine of the contemplative Oriental. It views God as the bright Father of light, the world as His dark offspring. Modern Pantheism, on the contrary, makes the divine nature arise, by an entirely opposite form of emanation, from the dark foundation of the material universe, as the result of the moral effort of intellectual power. Here finally the Divinity appears Deity, the result of the saddest process of mature human consciousness, the bright offspring of a dark mother.¹ Pantheism, whether ancient or modern, fails to recognise that Holy Spirit which rules the world, and transforms it into the sanctuary of the eternal God.

In the emanation-doctrine of Pantheism is seen, however, a transition to that separation between the light of spiritual life, and the darkness of natural life, which Dualism completes. Dualism is the moral effort of the heathen to free his God from materialism. He excludes matter from his notion of God, and thus forms the conception of an immense and mighty struggle between material light and material darkness. He now calls the light Good, the good God. But he is obliged also to define evil as the evil God, because to him it is eternal matter of a dark kind, which the good God finds opposed to Himself, and which He can indeed restrain, but not annihilate. He can restrain it, because it is matter, and therefore weaker than spirit; He cannot annihilate it, because it is eternal and substantial. It is from this religious point of view that the heathen fails to recognise in God the Almighty Father.

He has, however, begun to recognise in the moral and powerful God, the Being who governs the material world, restrains what is evil therein, arranges what is formless, and, by continual decrees which penetrate to the material as laws, forms all into an orderly creation. In this perfected creation, God appears indeed in super-mundane, but not in intra-mundane glory, because He is viewed as only subduing by conflicts and victories, and restraining by iron laws, a world originally opposed to Him. Matter, in its subjection to law, is indeed no longer the darkness which overwhelms the Divinity, nor the evil which resists Him, but it is the rigidity which limits Him in the full manifestation of His glory in the world. Such a view of divinity is a mutilated Monotheism,—it is Deism, which cannot recognise the Son of God, or God in the glory of His Son.

Thus we have discovered three heathen principles subordinate to Christianity, which are capable of becoming the principles of a criticism antagonistic to the Gospel history. In the history of religion, there is, however, a continual interweaving of these different principles of Heathenism, especially of Pantheism and Dualism. These contrasts, like all contrasts of a morbid kind, formed in a spurious element common to both, run to unnatural extremes, and often reconcile their differences by overleaping each others’ boundaries, and by mutually intermingling. The various forms of the emanation-system form the border land, in which this mingling of Pantheism and Dualism takes place. The emanation-system is ever oscillating between the decision which calls what is natural, evil, and that which calls what is evil, natural.

Mutilated Monotheism, on the other hand, keeps itself more or less aloof, in form at least, from these two extremes, which are so closely allied with it by a common heathen basis, by recognising God as a spiritual power raised above the world, and ruling its darkness by imposing laws upon it. In its essence, however, it partakes of both extremes: it is pantheistic, because its universe possesses a life properly its own, separate from God, ever conformed to laws, and so far divine; but on the other hand, it is also dualistic, inasmuch as its rigid conformity to laws would force the eternal God to behold inactively, and in super-mundane quiescence, the mechanism of those laws of nature which He had Himself ordained.

From the commencement of Christianity to the present day, these two principles, viz., that of dualistic Pantheism, as well as that of pantheistic but still more dualistic Deism, have asserted themselves against the principles of Christianity; and the results have appeared in a long parallel series of productions on the part of antagonistic criticism.

It is, however, self-evident, that these principles can only appear in their unmitigated form outside the Christian Church. Wherever they have intruded within it, they must have been more or less christianized. They were broken by the power of Christianity, but were, even in their mutilated condition, tenacious of existence, in proportion as they had taken up some of the elements and powers of the Christian faith, and had strengthened each other by becoming mutually interwoven, and consolidated into compounds.

It was in the Græco-Romish Heathenism, or in Persian Dualism, that the purely extra-christian forms of pantheistic Dualism chiefly opposed Christianity. Its modified and semi-christian forms have been principally developed in Gnosticism, Manichæism, Spinozism, in the Bohemian theosophy, in the earlier system of Schelling, in the Hegelian philosophy, and in its critical offshoots. The wholly extra-christian phenomena of dualistic Pantheism have manifested their opposition to Christianity in Talmudism, in Mahometanism, and, in modern times, in Materialism. Its christianized forms have appeared, in the ancient Church, in Ebionitism and Monarchianism; in the modern, in Deism and Rationalism.

The criticism which the Gospel history experienced on the part of unmixed pantheistic-dualistic Heathenism, appears in the martyrdoms of the first centuries of the Church, and in the literary accusations and works by which this persecution was accompanied. The Church first experienced this antagonistic criticism on the part of the prevailing pantheistic Heathenism, in the persecutions which it underwent from the Roman power; and afterwards on the part of the prevailing dualistic views, in the martyrdoms encountered in the Persian kingdom.

The dualistic principle, however, was gradually introduced into the Christian Church, and was constrained to appear, within this sphere, under a maimed and modified form. It is under such a form that we behold it in the system of the Gnostics. The essentially distinctive mark of Gnosticism is overlooked, when its relation to the Church is lost sight of. It exhibits a series of systems, misconceiving the pure ideality of creation, and hence the Old Testament; and therefore incapable of believing in the manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh, and equally incapable of forming a society in separation from the Church; or in other words, of exhibiting a powerful embodiment of their ideas. It is the latter circumstance which makes these systems Gnosticism. The climax of Gnosticism is Manichæism, which under various disguises glides through the middle ages, and finds religious seriousness, in its morbid form of melancholy, the congenial soil in which its old and scattered seeds will always spring up. The system of Spinoza seems to present the greatest contrast to Manichæism, exhibiting, as it does, the entire dissolution of this morbid dualistic effort. But even in this case the existence of one extreme cannot but testify to that of the other. The acts of the Divine Being are, according to Spinoza’s views, utterly pathological; this Being, in His constant torpor, is resolved into His attributes, or into the incidents of life—a dark fatalism alone gives Him any existence. But the dualism in question reappears in its most decided form in the system of Jacob Böhm, and, by its means, pervades even to our own days, though under various and ever-increasing disguises and refinements, the more modern idealistic and philosophic view of the universe. It is seen in the obscure unfathomableness from which Böhm makes the being of God emerge, and comprehend Himself in the Son, as in His heart; so that in this self-comprehension He is first called God, ‘not, however, according to the first principium, but cruelty, wrath—the stern source to which evil bears witness, pain, trembling, burning.’² Its course is next traced in the earlier system of Schelling; evil being therein regarded as that higher power, inherent in the dark groundwork of nature, which comes forth in actual life; its necessity being asserted, and the contrast between nature and spirit, between darkness and light, viewed as the contrast between good and evil. According to Hegel also, the ideal is in a state of declension in nature; the absolute, the natural condition of man is evil, the creature has an unhappy existence. Finity, humanity, and abasement are said to be identical, and are considered alien to that which is simply God, and, as such, destroyed by the death of Christ. The exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God is regarded as an explication of the nature of God returning to Himself, of God as spirit. This spirit manifestly gets rid of individuality as something alien, because it can still only view it as a product of nature, which is said to be the self-alienation of the ideal. Even Hegel’s opinions concerning physiognomy, prove that he did not comprehend the importance of individuality. He views it as finity, limitation, deficiency; hence spirit must get rid of it to be reconciled with itself. But is it not the very opposite of deficiency, even that infinite definiteness of spirit, which is a condition of personality? This Manichæan shadow forms also that philosophical obscurity, that warped and dualistic principle, which is found in Strauss’s Life of Jesus, and by which the several conclusions of that work are explained. Here the dualistic separation between the ideal and reality is a chief premiss (see pp. 89 and 90). From this premiss arose that brilliant phrase which was one day to attain to world-wide celebrity, as a test of the absence of presentiment in religion, viz., that it was not the custom of the ideal to lavish its fulness upon an individual and to be niggardly towards all others. According to this saying, individuality is at best but a stronghold in which the ideal is confined, and whence it cannot come forth, till, like magic powder, it has burst its prison-walls. Hence it cannot be raised to the pure ideality of the spirit, nor pervaded by its fulness, because the boundary lines which circumscribe the individual, are still regarded as limitations of the spirit. This is the most refined attainment, the highest effort of dualism; hence its necessary complement must be Pantheism, which regards the universe as a foaming ocean, and beholds its God involved in its ceaseless tides.

The assertion that the rites of the ancient Hebrews were a worship of Moloch, has been maintained with ever increasing boldness.³ The truth is, that the Hebrews had to maintain a continual struggle, by means of the revelation and law of Jehovah, who as the eternal God stands opposed to the process-God, in order to free and purify themselves from heathen traditions of the worship of Moloch. Jehovah commanded Abraham to offer up Isaac; he was willing to make the sacrifice; but, in the decisive moment, he understood the command as if Moloch had said to him: Slay Isaac. Then Jehovah interposed, praised his obedience, corrected his error, and taught him the difference between the two acts, surrender and death,—bidding him slay the ram as a sign that he surrendered, i.e., sacrificed, his son. Abraham showed not only by the strength of mind with which he responded to the voice of God when commanding sacrifice, but by the clearness with which he understood the voice of God when explaining sacrifice, that he was the elect one, whom the Lord had need of for the founding of a theocracy, in which the life of man was to be continually sacrificed to Him, but in which no human being was to be slain through guilty priestcraft. Thus the Old Testament gained a victory over the worship of Moloch, in the case of Abraham, though it had still to resist and subdue the backsliding of the people into this false religion. And how can this backsliding astonish us, when we see that philosophy has not yet succeeded in entirely freeing itself from Chronos, when it still considers it the highest attainment of the religious spirit to regard individualities as sacrifices, which must fall before the process-God? This Pantheism cannot endure even the idea of the God-man, of the pure consecration of the divine-human consciousness merging itself in the eternity of God. If Christ be comprehended as eternal personality in God, it is manifest during time that God has ever been comprehended in Him as personality. If this God-man performs miracles, what is this but manifesting the entrance of higher and still higher circles and spiritual forms into the old world; exhibiting the government of God in the foundation and centre of the world, and thereby abolishing the assumption that the Divinity is ever lost and ever found again in the ever uniform course of things? The world then ceases to appear an endless stream; it discloses itself as the wondrous flower, in whose blossom may be discovered the eternity which brought it forth. The dynamic and organic relations of the world’s history, according to which Christ forms the deep centre, the outweighing counterpoise to the whole human race, and regulates the whole course of the universe as its stable centre, according to which He elevates glorified humanity, as His one Church, to the eternity of His spirit, are relations of a sublimity unattainable, by the view which makes the greatness of mankind to consist in its masses. It is also incapable of understanding Christ’s death upon the cross in its moral significance, as the reconciliation of the world, arising from the voluntary surrender of Christ to the justice of God, and can only regard it as an event naturally developed in the series of necessity. But the resurrection is the rock on which Pantheism suffers shipwreck. That spiritual and divine heroism, that sense of eternity, that inspiration of personality, which shows its consciousness of its eternal dignity by testifying to the certainty of the resurrection, lies far above its conceptions. Its spirit arises from rashness, and proceeds to rashness, over that Faust-like magic bridge of subjective life which it hastily constructs, and again destroys. That such a view of the world should seek, with all the energy of its nature, to destroy, by a critical attack, the actuality of the Gospel history, lies in its very nature. Christianity, however, finds this criticism criticised by the unspirituality of its principles. A philosophy not yet freed from the worship of Chronos, cannot sit in judgment upon the history which put an end to the sway of Zeus. But that this formerly vanquished view of the world has been able to attain a relative authority in bur days, must have been caused by the morbidity of the view of the world prevailing in the Church. If Christian theology and the Christian view of the world have misconceived the omnipresence of God in the world, and resolved God’s elevation above the world into a terrible and abstract absence from it, the rise of the opposite extreme is thereby sufficiently explained. When, further, the ideal, the general, was ever more and more lost in the single facts of the Gospel, and these were regarded as mere past and isolated facts, which faith was to preserve as historical dicta complete in themselves, it was a just retribution that Pantheistic criticism should, on its side, no longer acknowledge the actuality of the Gospel ideas. This criticism, however, has attacked not only false views, but the Gospel history itself, and has in this respect itself become the criticism of its own deficient and antiquated principles.

Mutilated dualistic Monotheism, under the form of the Jewish hierarchy, brought about the crucifixion of Christ, because it was perplexed by a Messiah, in whom the fulness of the Godhead was united with a real, a poor, and a homely human life. Talmudism subsequently carried on this criticism, and expressed itself by defamation of the Virgin⁴ by abhorrence of the ‘executed One,’ and by a deep hatred of the Gospel in general. Even Mohammedanism criticised Christianity, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, from the point of view of a deistical faith, assuming the abstract unity of God, His exclusive super-mundanism and super-humanism, and the self-contained absence of His being from the world.⁵

Deism also was forced to modify its expressions concerning the personality of Christ, and the Gospel history in general, as soon as it entered and took up a position within the Church of Christ. Ancient christianized Deism, as chiefly implanted in the Church by converted Pharisees, appeared under the form of Ebionitism, which denied the eternal glory and deity of Christ, opposed His miraculous conception, and looked upon Him as the actual son of Joseph, while it honoured Him as the last of the Old Testament prophets, the reformer of Israel, endowed with the largest measure of the Spirit for the execution of His work. Ebionitism in its Jewish narrowness gradually fell, like a withered branch, from the tree of the visible Church; but the Deism on which it was founded continued to agitate the ancient Church under forms more elevated and profound. It appeared in the whole series of Monarchians, who had this common feature, that they all denied the essential Trinity of the Godhead. They embraced, like Noëtus, the doctrine of Patripassianism; or, like Sabellius, the doctrine of a merely triple form of manifestation; or, like Arius, a new development of Polytheism,⁶ rather than plunge into the depths of the doctrine of the threefold glory of God. In other words, they could not free themselves from the deistic view of the abstract unity of God.

This Deism is also perceived in the system of Nestorius,⁷ so far as the latter misconceives the ideality of the human personality of Christ, prepared for throughout the whole history of the human race; while the opposite systems of Eutychianism and Monophysitism could not attain to the full recognition of the human reality and historical truth of this personality, and were consequently perplexed by Gnostic errors. Nestorian as well as Gnostic notions have in disguised forms been secretly amalgamated with Christian views, especially with such as regard the incarnation of Christ as merely a part of His humiliation, and consider it solely as a positive arrangement of God with a view to the redemption of mankind.⁸

This abstract Monotheism took a more philosophic and definite form in modern Deism, which is for this reason more definitely so called. The deist looks upon the universe as simply nature, as a work of God, separate from Himself, purely natural, and self-sustained. He considers that God, in His omnipotence, caused the existence of the world to depend upon that conformity to law which he imposed upon it; that He so strictly bound it to a rigid conformity to law, as Himself to seem constrained and limited by the constraint He had laid upon the universe. In this system, conformity to law usurps the place of God’s active government, and seems to be a second deity, separate from Him, and causing Him, while reposing in that absolute supra-mundanism which is the celestial counterpart of a monkish renunciation of the world, to leave it to the perpetual correctness of its own movements. As, however, conformity to law cannot really work as a second divinity, a divinity in the world, it rather becomes, in the religious consciousness of the deist, a shadow obscuring the living God, a partition separating from Him. This evil result cannot but follow from the fact, that the universe, even in its motions, is seen by him under a narrowed, an impoverished, a mutilated form. It is not the actual world, with its infinite variety, its continual progress from lower to higher grades of life, its refined and spiritual conformity to law, agreeably to which the ordinary appearances of the lower spheres of life are ever being broken through and laid aside, amidst miraculous phenomena, by the principles of the higher spheres of life, which furnishes him with the facts upon which his theory is formed. His view rests, on the contrary, upon a compendium of natural philosophy, which has elevated the elementary principles and definitions thereof to eternal statutes. It confounds these statutes of a dead compendium with the living laws of the world, the formula which designates the phenomena with the phenomena themselves, empiricism operating upon common every-day remembrance with the infinite objective reality. The deist is specially taken with the false assumption, that the development of the world exhibits a single æon, ever moving onwards amidst unvarying results, as upon an interminable railroad between an inconceivably distant commencement, and an as inconceivably distant termination. He does not form a conception of progress from æon to æon in an advancing series, resulting from the introduction of higher, deeper, and richer Vital principles, and least of all, of the appearance of that principle, in the midst of time, which eternalizes temporality and transforms the restless course of his unending line into the solemn movement of a circle returning upon itself. The shortsightedness, prejudice, and enmity with which Deism has, on its subordinate principles, criticised the facts of Gospel history, are well known.⁹ In modern Rationalism it has striven to ennoble itself, has taken a more Christian form, and has endeavoured to make better terms with the high reality of the Gospel history. But Rationalism, too, has radically failed, because the inconceivableness of the abstract monotonous unity of the Godhead, the necessity of the Trinity in Unity, the living light of the personality of God in its self-manifestation, have not yet risen upon it. Hence, in its interpretations of Scripture, and delineations of the life of Jesus, it has ever employed a criticism more or less betraying an Ebionite point of view.

So early as in the days of the Apostle John, the influence of these extraneous heathen principles was manifested in the critical opinions uttered against the heavenly reality of the divine-human life of Christ. The apostle proclaimed the deity of Christ, in opposition to incipient Ebionitism (1Jn 4:15); the truth of His humanity, in opposition to incipient Gnosticism (1Jn 4:2). But compounds, especially the system of Cerinthus, soon resulted from the elective affinity of these extremes. Such compounds are continually reappearing, and frequently reappeared.¹⁰⁾

In our own times, the Gnostic element, under the form of modern culture, has shown its old critical antagonism to the great ideal reality of the Gospel history in Strauss’s Life of Jesus; the Ebionite element, under that of modern scholarship, has expressed the same antagonism in the Life of Jesus by Paulus. The work of the former has, indeed, assimilated many elements belonging to the latter stand-point; indeed, the latest productions of antagonistic criticism can scarcely be reduced to any, not even to heathen principles.

An intelligent view of the principles of antagonistic criticism exhibits their connection with those dark powers of heathen natural life, which Christianity criticised, i.e., sentenced and conquered in the Gospel history. If they regain any influence within the Christian Church, notwithstanding their former overthrow in their original forms, this is a consequence of special compounds and relations in the sphere of spiritual life. A venerable and respectable Pharisaism will often obtain consideration in the presence of rank Antinomianism; while, again, the idealistic spiritual aspirations of Gnosticism will gain fresh favour when orthodoxy stiffens into mere lifeless precepts. The facts of the Gospel history had long been treated by the Church in a rigidly positive manner, and regarded rather as dead marvels than living miracles; their vital power, and innumerable vital relations, being misconceived,—their ideality, unappreciated. It was ordained that the stiff rigidity in which the living pictures depicted in the Gospel history were held by such a view, should be broken up by the electric shock of a partial and and Gnostic treatment.

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Notes

1. The common principle of every possible product, both of naked extra-christian Heathenism, and of broken and christianized Heathenism, is ungodliness, impiety: impersonal Atheism, with respect to the subjective view; Materialism, with respect to the objective appearance. Atheism trembles to admit that solution of the problem, the government of God in all reality; hence its product is materialism, the unspiritual substance. Materialism is the refuse of the world, heaped up before the door of indolent atheism. The measure of the one is the measure of the other. The heathen system, to be understood in its specifically heathen character, must be viewed on this side, viz., that of its impiety. If, on the contrary, it is viewed, as is usual, only in its piety, which, as a morbid and superstitious piety, corresponds with its impiety, it is difficult, fundamentally, to refute it. For example, it is not so easy, when contending with the fire-worshipper, to dispute the beauty and magic power of fire, as to show him how erroneous it is to regard water as a God-forsaken mass. The temple-worshipper feels, when within his fane, a divine awe; it is, so to speak, the asylum of his delusion; it is in its profane environs that the Erinnys of criticism must attack him. The pantheist feels himself happy in contemplating that divine afflatus which breathes through the universal; but he must be shown that he is unhappy in the presence of that great glory, the majesty of the eternal conscious Spirit, whose ever-powerful and conscious unity makes the universal, abstractedly considered, vanish into nothing, as the same Spirit had called it forth from nothing. It must be proved to him that his system, in wanting a definite God, the eternal spiritual consciousness of God, has too little of God; that it has not, as seems to have been sometimes thought, too much of God. The deist boasts of maintaining the unity of God. But if he is forced to acknowledge the absolute darkness which lies in the notion of an abstract unity of God, and also to confess the blackness of darkness proceeding from the rigid mechanism of an universe left by God to its own laws, he is on the road to recognise that the unity of the Eternal Spirit cannot be conceived of, in its vitality, without the form of Trinity.

2. Gnosticism has this peculiarity, that it can only form schools and not churches, because it knows only morbid ideals, which can never become flesh and blood; a transient summer of the divine, which can never become the sun of the personal Deity. Its chief characteristic is antagonism to the accomplished realization of divine government. Hence the Gnostic systems also must be simply viewed and arranged according to their polemic relations to the Old Testament doctrine of creation, to the real advent of Christ in the Old Testament, and to His incarnation in the New, and according to the development of these relations. Consequently, even Manichæism must be regarded as only a potentialized Gnostic system. With regard to Gnosticism in general, the thesis may be laid down, that there is no pantheism which is not completed by dualism, no dualism which is not completed by pantheism. The pantheist finds the existence of an evil being, first, in general finity; next, in human sensuousness; then in the sacred lines of Individuality, which distinguish man from man; and lastly, in the human feeling of dependence, i.e., in religion. Dualism is continually betraying its pantheism, by its inability to maintain the precise line of demarcation between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. Darkness comes forth in the kingdom of light, and the lost germ of light is again sought in the kingdom of darkness; this confusion is the sign of that pantheistic somnolency which overcomes the heroic efforts of dualism.

3. Every form of deism has the peculiarity of regarding the existence of the world as a trivial reality, as the great tout comme chez nous, which need not be surrendered to the all-ruling Godhead; while Gnosticism makes the actual world a terrible sacrifice, to be consumed upon the altar of the ideal, like sin itself; nature, a declension from the ideal; individuality, limitation; the features of the countenance, a caricature of the spirit, haunting the world; personality, the selfish Sunday child which will not accommodate itself to the perpetual process of the dialectic railroad; the historical Christ, the ideal niggardly of its abundance, the ideal in oppressive majesty; and, lastly, the Gospel history, the high land which opposes a granite-like resistance to that stream of idealistry, which is to wash down everything, and will not in its Vulcanic character surrender itself to the process which would convert it into one of the sedimentary deposits of mythology.

4. As the vampire is said to be nourished by the blood which he sucks from the living sleeper, so does dualism derive its triumphs from the blood of the Church herself, when she has fallen asleep over her riches. If, for instance, the ideality of the Gospel history had been always duly estimated, its reality could never have been so sadly misconceived; and if its reality had been more powerfully proclaimed, criticism could not have attempted to convert its ideality into scraps of wonderful New Testament grammar. Dr Paulus’ view of Gospel history is done away with by Dr Winer’s New Testament grammar. If the real grammar can do so much for the ideal theology, how much more must the real theology be able to do for it!

5. The warning of the Apostle Paul, Col 2:8, applies here: βλέπετε μή τις ὑμᾶς ἔσται ὁ συλαγωγῶν διὰ τῆς φιλοσοφίας καὶ κενῆς ἀπάτης κατὰ τὴν παράδοσιν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, κατὰ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, καὶ οὐ κατὰ Χριστόν. ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ κατοικεῖ πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα τῆς θεότητος σωματικῶς. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, (through the philosophy, namely, which, is formed) after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ (which does not look upon Christ, but upon elements, atoms, matter, as the principle of the world). For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (in the unity of the bodily appearance). For so would I translate and explain this passage.¹¹ Thus the apostle is contrasting, with all earnestness, the philosophy founded on the assumption that the elements are the principle of the universe, with the philosophy which recognises Christ as the principle of the universe, and that, not as if delivering a discourse, but speaking of it in its proper meaning, both in a Christian and speculative manner. This philosophy arose from human, i.e., heathen tradition, and did not overcome heathenism. It was, at first, rightly called philosophy, as being the sincere effort of the human mind to attain to knowledge; but now that it would maintain itself in opposition to the philosophy which is after Christ, it becomes vain deceit. And they who would impose it upon Christians spoil them, deprive them of the infinite riches laid up in Christ, and chiefly of the certainty that in Him the fulness of the Godhead, and the most decided individual corporeity, are become one. While Christian philosophy-which is not mere philosophy, because it goes beyond abstractions, and presses on from life to life-recognises Christ as the eternal principle of the universe, this miserable philosophy, which makes Christians poor, looks upon the elements as the principle of the universe. Here, then, we find the matter of the heathen view of the world resolving itself, before the eye of the philosopher, into atoms or elements. These float before his view like dark mouches volantes, which he cannot perceive to be caused and arranged by the ideality of the great and spiritual principle of the universe, and are seen, in consequence of a defect of spiritual vision, in mutual interaction with the so-called ‘dark seed’ of sinfulness, especially of moral spiritual bondage. The ascetic precepts of the teachers of error at Colosse (Col 2:16, &c.) showed that they were founded on Gnostic, consequently on dualistic principles. These precepts, too, are στοιχεῖá τοῦ κοσμοῦ (Col 2:20; Gal 4:3; Gal 4:9); and correspond with the theoretic assumption of world-forming στοιχεῖα. The profane sense, which looks on the world as profane, must be brought back by the strictness of the precept to a feeling for what is holy, that it may discover the principle of the holy, that principle which both theoretically and practically sanctifies the world. By this allusion, the apostle seems to have been led to designate even the Israelitish precepts as στοιχεῖα τοῦ κοσμοῦ.

1) [See the reference to Feuerbach in Part I. sec. i. p. 34.—ED.]

2) See Baur, die Christliche Gnosis, p. 560.

3) Daumer, der Feuer und Molochsdienst der alten Hebräer; Gillany, die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer, and others.

4) Compare Strauss, Leben Jesu, i. 227.

5) Compare Gerock, Christologie des Koran, p.74. The Koran assumes that, according to Christian teaching, Jesus, and Mary His mother, were placed as two Gods (Allahs) near to Allah (Sura, v. 125).

6) In church histories of Arianism, Arius indeed, as a believer in subordination, is represented as opposed to the Monarchians, but it is easy to perceive that subordination well agrees with monarchy, especially the subordination of Christ with the monarchy of God.

7) The Nestorian terms, συνάφεια and ἐνοίκησις, to define the manner of the union of the divine and human natures, express the immediate and merely external meeting and union of the two natures of Christ. Adoptianism also belongs to the same group.

8) If it were agreeable to Christian truth to look upon the incarnation of Christ as part of His humiliation, His exaltation must consequently be either represented as depriving Him of humanity, or as obscured by the continuance of His humanity. The passage, Phil. ii, 7, ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε, μορφὴν δούλου λαβὼν ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος, does not designate the incarnation of Christ abstractedly viewed, but the definite historical circumstance thereof, that He took upon Him the form of a servant, that He became like unto (sinful) man, as His humbling Himself.

9) English Deism, in its practical results, viz., critical attacks upon sacred history, was specially introduced by the sensualistic philosophy of Locke. Comp. Lechler, Gesch. des Lngl. Deismus, p. 154, &c.

10) Philo may be cited as an example. As an Israelite, he could not be a complete Gnostic; nor, as a Platonist, a complete Israelite. By his assumption of the eternity of matter, he stood below the Old Testament, while thinking to stand above it.

11) [Virtually the same interpretation is given by Tertullian (De Preserip. Heret. c, 33): ‘Apostolus, cum improbat elementis servientes, aliquem Hermogenem ostendit, qui materiam non natam introducens deo non nato eam comparat, et ita matrem elementorum deam faciens potest ei servire, quam deo comparat.’ Buta full consideration of this and all the other passages which bear upon the Gnostic heresy will be found in the Bampton Lectures for 1829.—ED.]