THE NICENE THEOLOGY AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY."
Mn HALL is much impressed with the delusive impersonating feats of the religious fancy, and has written this little book (which, so far as its profound intellectual scepticism will allow, is written in a tone of Christian sentiment,) to persuade us that the distinct personalities which our faith discloses in the Being of God, are mere shadows of this impersonating energy in man. The book is too aphoristic, and if Mr. Hall will excuse us for applying to it a word which it eminently deserves but which he peculiarly dislikes, too dogmatic, to explain on what grounds these conclusions are arrived at. • The author contents himself with showing that fanciful personalities were invented by the spiritual needs of man in all the ages and nations of paganism, which were nothing more than human ideas allegorized or impersonated, and thinks it an apparently self-evident truth,
• The Lam of Impersonation as Applied to Abstract Ideds and Religious Dogmas. By E. W. Hall. Third Edition. With in appendix on the Dual Constitution of First Causation. London: Trubner.
which will be recognized as soon as stated, that the same tendency has transmuted " the religious truths and ideas of Christianity" into a " transcendental Christian mythology," due to the same mental necessity and the same process of reasoning as " the Pagan mythology of the East, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, and the other regions of the world." This is with Mr. Hall an assumption and an axiom,—an axiom so clear that he simply reiterates it in order to produce belief. However, there is no doubt that it has got some hold of the religious literature of the day, and the interest excited by a recent letter in our columns on comparative mythology which adopts less boldly and decisively something of the same method of thought, makes it an in- teresting subject for discussion how far the tendency in the human intellect to deceive itself by clothing abstract ideas and laws with the attributes of personality, has or has not any true application to the Catholic theology of the Incarnation and the co-eternal personalities in God. Mr. Hall asserts with the constant reiteration of personal conviction, but without any variety of either statement or argument, that " the Christian im- personations are fated to undergo the same process as the pagan. When apprehended in their internal significance by the reflective mind when elevated to the height of Abstract Ideas, the transi- tive form of the concrete—the impersonated—will have seen its day, and Christianity will have been evolved in Spirit and Truth." Nay, he asserts in evident good faith that Christ Himself adopted the impersonating language simply as a condescension to the wants of His time, and that He taught esoterically that the rude language of impersonation would pass away, and the true wor- shippers should "worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth," —where we cannot help asking whether " the Father" thus to be worshipped is one of these delusive impersonations still lingering even in our Lord's esoteric teaching, or whether—and Mr. Hall is exceedingly ambiguous on this point—personality,banished from all other "religious ideas," is to be permitted to linger in our language and thoughts concerning "first causation ?" Christ, says Mr. Hall, "in order to bring home to rude understandings the force of moral laws, was obliged to couch His precepts and doctrines in the language of one having a direct personal mission from God Himself. Nothing less than a sensible corporeal medium with articulate organs could evoke their latent Faith or satisfy their belief. With this aid alone were they able to realize the idea of God, His laws of conscience, and a future State of being. For their easier comprehension the spiritual and in- tellectual were brought down to Sense. Hence the present neces- sity for esoteric interpretation to restore' the ideas and doctrines of Christ and St. Paul to their essential abstract forms." And then, as illustrating, we suppose, the " essentially abstract form" of Christ's esoteric doctrine, Mr. Hall quotes our Lord's saying to an ignorant woman by the well of Samaria about worshipping "the Father" in Spirit and in Truth,—a quaint form of words, as we should have thought, for an esoteric inculcation of Ab- stract Ideas as the only permanent essence of religious imper- sonations.
Now, it appears to us that both the method of Comparative my- thology as applied by these writers, and the notion that Abstract Ideas and laws are the only permanent substance of religious truths, demand, if they mean anything, that all religious imper- sonation should be considered delusive,—the personal conception of the First Cause, no less than of the Eternal Son of God. Whether this is Mr. Hall's view or not we are not sure. We are sure that numbers of modern thinkers who regard the eternal personality of the Son as a pure mythological dream,—the product of our impersonating faculty—would eagerly maintain the personality of the divine First Cause. Perhaps Mr. Hall himself is of this opinion, for though his language is quite vague and inconsistent, he tells us on page 42, " Faith gives us psychical intuition of divine agency. Reason conviction of its unity [he does not say personality] through the idea of First Causation. There is there- fore no warrant in the world of Mind, of Faith, or of Matter, for more than one God. The Impersonation and Deification of our spiritual nature in Christ and the Holy Ghost sound like a remnant and reminiscence of Pagan polytheistic divinity." The truth is, however, that after running down the idea of per- sonality as a figment of our own anthropomorphic imagination as most of these writers do, it is exceedingly inconsistent to attribute it, as they usually do directly or indirectly, to the First Cause. We say " directly or indirectly," beef:luso even when the word is proscribed, the idea will be found to linger in a thousand forms,—in the first place, in ths,t of unity even,—for what can unity mean in a multitude eJf infinitely :t various phenomena spread over infinite space, if i be not unity
of purpose and thought, which imply both will and consciousness? There is no unity in stones, or water, or any inorganic life,—only a shadow of unity in the vegetable organisms, which are not really distinguishable from the earth that feeds them ; we do not get at a true unit anywhere till we get at some vestige of a mind, purpose, soul. In the next place, the admission that acts of faith and moral sentiment are appropriate towards God, of itself im- plies that He is capable of understanding and accepting them, which could be true only of a person. In short, in a thousand ways we shall find that the most caustic critics of the imperso- nating power of the human fancy, indirectly attribute perso- nality to the Creator, because they feel that the higher we rise in the scale of nature the less of mere vague inarticulate motions and tendencies, the more of personality, we find there ; in other words, the more unity of directing thought and will, the more of self-limitation, or self-sacrifice, the more of something super- natural connecting together the "Abstract Ideas" and " Laws " which would have no worth and no significance without wills and purposes, i. e., personalities. But if this be granted, the notion that we limit God by believing in His personality, and holding that He has revealed it to us, disappears at once; personality becomes the highest thing we can perceive in the universe, and to discharge it from the infinite Reason of the first Cause, is to loosen all the most divine as well as royal links in the supreme nature, and leave something which may be infinitely wider than man, but certainly is not above him. Personality does imply limitation,—self-limitation, at all events,—but to deny the power of self limitation is a far greater moral and spiritual limitation than to affirm it. Rob God of the power of self- saciifice for beings below Him, and by professing to glorify, you really, if not consciously dishonour Him.
And we believe it to be precisely the same false circle of ideas which is always endeavouring to explain away the deep theology of the gospels, and the faint anticipations of it in pre•Christian religions, as shadows of human fancy ;—to transform eternal reali- ties into "Abstract Ideas," and prove that the Ideas engendered the realities, instead of the realities the Ideas. Usually we recog- nize freely enough that our ideas are shadows, and but poor inadequate shadows of the facts outside us,—but on this subject the line of reasoning is always reversed ; men are always trying to show with Fichte and Mr. Hall how the human mind "evolves" God, instead of humbly trying to take the infinite God, so far as we can, into the human mind. The darkness boasts that it "imagined" the beautiful dream of Light, instead of admitting that the " Light shined in the Darkness and the Dark- ness comprehended it not." The tendency in the present day to revive the great Nicene controversy as to the divine personalities is remarkable, and, we believe, far healthier than the attempt to deal on lower ground with such questions as the future state and punishment of man. Unless we can find for ourselves the true theology we shall never get any data even for discussing the future state of man, which wholly depends on the nature, purposes, and will of God. And to us we confess it is matter of pure wonder that so many who take the first great step,—who accept with scarcely a hesitation the vast assumption of a living and infinite righteous will directing all things,—who never stumble at the awful difficulty of eternal self-existence,—who can root universal nature in what Tennyion calls the "Abysmal deeps of Personality," and ask no root deeper than that,—should yet think it, so often as they do, almost a childish infatuation to accept the teaching which seems to us to render that great fundamental truth at once credible and full of inexhaustible light,—we mean the teaching that more than one personality lies in the mysterious unity of God, that the reciprocity of life and love, of giving and receiving, of law and duty, of eternal righteousness in oppOsite attitudes, are all as eternal as that " First Causation " which would be otherwiseour sole connecting link with the ages of the infinite past. The effort to make out that "persona " as applied to the eternal Word did not mean what our word " person" means, will doubtless be successful,— though we conceive it certain that the Greek word used in the Nicene controversy (hypostasis), of which "persona" was the weak Latin equivalent, differed from our word person rather by meaning more than less. In the earlier part of the Nicene controversy the word afterwards used to express the distinct " personality " of Christ meant more than personality,—" sub- stance" as well as " personality,"—in short, the " underlying" essence of the mind and character. But in modern times no controversy can turn on mere metaphysical distinctions. It is on the divine definition which Christ gives us of his own eternal nature,—on his revelation that he lives, and lived before all worlds, the life of a 'filial and dependent freedom, that the only practical
theology can be founded. " I can of mine ownself do nothing," "the Son can do nothing of himself but what he .seeth the Father do, for what things soarer he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise ; for the Father loveth the Son and showed' him all things that himself doeth." " My judgment is just because I do not mine own will but the will of the Father who bath sent me." " Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world ;"—it is on sayings like these, not on metaphysical subtleties, that we found our faith as to His personality. But does not this reciprocity of love and life between Himself and the Father on which He founds all His prayers for His disciples (" As thou Father art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us"), demand this distinction of personalities, though not of divine essence? Is not the apparent depth of Greek subtlety in the Nicene definitions the mere evolution of intellectual assumptions involved in every word of Christ's own deepest, and simplest, and most spiritual teachings ? Would they not all become what Mr. Hall apparently thinks them, exceedingly gross and carnal forms of shadowy abstract ideas, if either our Lord had not had any eternal life with the Father at all, or had been as that Sabellian philosophy would have it which wishes to make the different "persons " only different " phases " or " aspects" of the same Will, only a human manifestation of the Father Himself? It seems to us that the philosophical presumption which takes for granted that man has " evolved " God, not God man, gets rid by that means not only of philosophical subtleties, but of the deepest springs of spiritual life. The belief in God, native twit is to the human mind, cannot be sustained without a supple- menting belief that God has worked and is working eternally to unveil Himself to His creatures, and that in the ages of the eternal past no less than during the Hs of finite beings, His mind has had the same essence, love, will, character, not mere "self-causation." It is because the theology of Christ enables us to retain and deepen our faith in God, by unveiling Him to us as the self-existent being who, before all time and before all finite existences, no less than now, was not only a first cause, but the perfect union of divine persons, involving the reciprocal life of will and thought and love and character,—not mere empty omnipotence and design, but essentially such as He has since revealed Himself to us,—that we accept it as greater than ourselves, instead of analyzing it away as the shadow of our own weak fancy. We believe that the more the Nicene theology, as it is called, or, to speak more truly, the theology of St. John and St. Paul, is pondered, the more clearly will it be seen that it is indis- solubly allied with all true Theism, that it alone satisfies the conditions on which we can believe profoundly in a personal God at all, that it alone can overcome the deep atheism which is in all our hearts and half our moods, that it alone can crowd for us the otherwise oppressive solitudes of eternity with a life and love homogeneous with that which once and once only found its full earthly manifestation in the incarnation of our Lord. We can never sufficiently wonder that those who have once adequately grasped the principle of a personal theism do not also accept the revealed eternal personality of the Son of God as the supplementary truth, which, had it not been revealed indeed, no one could have discovered—but once revealed, makes God an eternal reality, instead of a mere vision of intellectual grandeur and hope.
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