Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

hatred of evil is immeasurable."1 The Christian heart in Clement gained the victory over his metaphysical abstractions.

God is conceived as a Trinity. Clement not only uses the word, but again and again implies the doctrine, though it is not definitely formulated by him in a developed form. Referring to a passage in the 'Timæus' of Plato he says, "I understand nothing other than the Holy Trinity to be indicated." 2 "Our treasure in an earthen vessel is guarded by the power of God the Father, and the blood of God the Son, and the dew of the Holy Spirit." s At the close of the Pædagogus he prays "that all may praise with thanksgiving the alone Father and Son, the Son who is Tutor and Teacher, together, with the Holy Ghost also." Of the work of the Spirit in the Church and in the individual believer, as the inspirer of Holy Scripture, as the source of the higher life, Clement often speaks; but of the Spirit in Himself, and in relation to the Father and the Son, he says little. In the lost or unfinished treatises on Prophecy and the Soul he intended to discuss the question of the method in which the Holy Spirit was distributed and His nature. But though the doctrine of the Trinity is in the background of his thought, he nowhere, like his contemporary Tertullian, discusses the relation of the Persons in the Trinity to one another. Though in most cases the comparative absence of incidental allusions to a doctrine cannot be pressed, in the case of a writer so discursive as Clement it is a feature that cannot be treated as without significance; and the conclusion would seem to be that the question in itself was of little interest to him, and was only of importance on its speculative and practical 2 Str., v. 14 103; Tim., 41 A.

1 Prot., x. 104.

[blocks in formation]

4 Pæd., iii. 12 101. Cf. Ec. Pr., 13, 29.

side in its bearing on the fact and the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word.

What is of permanent value in this doctrine of God presented by Clement with the view of winning over to the Christian faith the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria ? It contains many noble elements. In representing the knowledge of God as the true life of man and the possibility of its attainment as the goal of all lofty aspiration, he lays down the basis that underlies all positive religious life. At the same time, he begets a sense of reverence within us by reminding us that, apart from the manifold revelations of the Word, the Father of the universe is an unknown God, and that even with His revelation we can but touch the hem of His garment. It gives a place to the manifestation of God in nature as well as in the universal consciousness of mankind. If in setting aside all possibility of a pantheistic conception of God, he ascribes to Him a transcendence which seems to remove Him absolutely from the range of our vision, and out of all relation to us, he at the same time represents Him as immanent, as eternally operative in His own world. Though some phrases in his writings may be interpreted as favouring a dualistic origin of the universe, the general direction of his thought is distinctly anti-dualistic; and it is possible to interpret such phrases in a way that is reconcilable with his otherwise emphatically reiterated teaching that the universe owes its existence and its continued existence to the One, Unbegotten, Almighty God. If partly under the influence of Plato, partly from a polemical interest in opposition to Gnosticism, he sometimes exaggerates the unrelatedness between the Creator and man, and seems to make the relation an external rather than an internal and moral relation, he establishes anew the natural relationship which he had seemed to disown by ascribing

to man a unique dignity among created things as alone. "made in His image," and therefore capable of apprehending Him. In some other aspects this theology is of a type that we are wont to consider as primarily modern, whereas the modern and loftier conception of the nature and purposes of God may be said to be but a return to an earlier position which the Church ignored, superseded, or abandoned. In making not the sovereignty of God but His goodness-and that a goodness that had always been at work-as the central principle of his thought, in leading us to think of the justice of One who is good rather than of the goodness of One who is just, and thus bringing the punishment of sin in immediate relation to the goodness rather than to the sovereignty of God, Clement is in harmony with a strong current of thought in our own time. It may be that he is not free from the imperfect grasp of the sin of man in relation to the holiness of God that is sometimes associated with that mode of thought; but what his theology loses thereby in stately symmetry it gains in warmth and life.

LECTURE IV.

THE PERSON AND WORK OF CHRIST.

"IN the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made.1 That which hath been made in Him was life; and the life was the light of men. . . . And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth." "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten God 2 who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." "Even as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee." "He is the image of the invisible God, the First-born of all creation; for in Him were all things created. . . . All things have been created through Him and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist." "No man knoweth the Son but the Father, and no one knoweth the Father save the Son, and He to whom the Son shall have revealed Him." "God having of old time spoken to the fathers in the prophets by diverse portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son, whom 1 So, like the Ante-Nicene fathers generally, Clement divides the sentence. 2 So Clement reads in John i. 18.

G

He appointed heir of all things, through Whom also He made the worlds: Who being the effulgence of His glory and the impress of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high." "That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life-and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us."1 The Christology of Clement is an endeavour to make explicit the conceptions that underlie these statements. A keen and restless spirit to whom the truth was no external possession, but a part of his very being, to whom the injunction, "Seek and ye shall find," came with special insistence, could not be satisfied without speculation on the meaning of the words and seeking to elaborate their contents. And that that elaboration should have been cast in the mould of his earlier teaching, and to that extent have been modified thereby, is merely what might have been expected. He was not called upon to discard the positions of his pre-Christian days, unless so far as they were inconsistent with the Christian standpoint. A change of attitude involved no breach of intellectual continuity. The only question is, Was the Christian teaching so modified in the process that it became inconsistent with the primary source or with a legitimate development of it? To seek to bring his thought into perfect conformity with the formulas of a later age, or to expect that he should have anticipated such formulas, would be an absurd anachronism. Keeping in view his liberal attitude towards the pre-Christian 1 John i. 1-4, 14, 18; xvii. 21. Col. i. 15, 16, 17. Luke x. 22. I John i. 1, 2.

Heb. i. 1-3.

« ÎnapoiContinuă »