48. XLVI. Conclusion

XLVI. Conclusion

Starting from the human side, the highest generalisation which science can reach, working by the method of partial knowledge, (See Section XLII.) and rising step by step, is that there is an order in nature, i.e. that the Universe is a rational system, that true scientific knowledge is the comprehension of this system, and that the aim of life is to come into harmony with the order of nature. There is nothing in this which Paul, as we think, would not fully and gladly accept, so far as it goes; but he requires you to go much farther. (See Section XIX.) He insists on the personality that makes this order, and expresses itself through this order. (Acts 14:15f., 17:24 f.) To apprehend the personality which thus declares itself is beyond the range of scientific, i.e. (in Pauline phrase (1 Corinthians 13.)) partial or piecemeal knowledge. It belongs to what we may call in modern phrase direct intuition; we must see for ourselves and grasp through the power of Faith the ultimate truth that “God is — the real and personal God”.

There is, according to Paul, no inherent and final contrariety between this impersonal generalisation of science, and the personal axiom of direct and complete knowledge from which he starts, that “God is”. (See Section XIX.) The former is imperfect and incomplete, but it can naturally and simply be exalted into perfect and complete knowledge by coalescing with the direct perception of God, which is the heritage of man. God has not left Himself without witness, “in that he did good to [man]” (Acts 14:17.) and gave order to society and nature.” (Acts 17:25f.)

If we attempt to put this in modern terms, scientific knowledge is abstract; it is not real and concrete. It deals with artificial and arbitrary products, as, for example, to take a simple case, a mathematical investigation into some problem of the external world isolates certain of the conditions and studies the effects of these, without attempting to cope with the infinite complexity of the problem in nature. Hence the so-called “laws of nature” always break down in the progress of discovery; because in that progress we rise to the power of embracing in our calculations a larger, and ever larger number of the conditions in nature, and thus we gradually approximate towards the complexity of the world around us. These “laws” then are merely steps in the process of knowledge: they are not truth, but stages in the progress towards truth. The statements of scientific laws which were customary in the schools forty-five years ago, when the present writer was beginning to study at college, are long ago almost completely antiquated, i.e., they are now stated in a way so different and with such different implication that the old may be said to be abrogated by the new. The new seems almost to be different in kind from the old; but it is not really different in kind; it is reached by continuous growth and by uniform application of the same method of “piecemeal knowledge”.

It does not reach truth; and yet it is true, because it is a process towards truth. You have always the same apparent contradiction in every “Paulinistic” expression of thought. Try to think like Paul, and you always find yourself involved in the same double and contradictory pair of statements: “it is” and “it is not”: “I have attained” and “I have not attained”: “You are justified” and yet “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”. (See Sections XIV, XLVI.) The solution of the apparent contradiction, as we have already seen, lies in the idea of growth and evolution. A thing is what it is in process of growing to be: it has attained what it must attain to. The apparent contradiction actually disappears when the word “yet” is introduced into the negative proposition, “I have attained” is not really contradicted, but only completed, by saying “I have not yet attained,” (This has led to the insertion of the word “yet” in Philippians 3 (as is pointed out in another section).) which implies “I am in process of attaining, but have not yet completed the process”. The law of the process is the truth. In the development of the scientific statement of “laws of nature,” there is a movement towards spirit and away from matter. Science now is expressed in a far less material form, and in a form that is, so to say, more “ethereal” and in the line of progress towards the spiritual. It has not reached the spiritual in the perfect sense, but it is approximating towards it. It recognises far more emphatically and explicitly that “matter” is only the expression of our ignorance, that science is the process of analysing and resolving matter, and therefore that we cannot reach truth until we reach spirit. The ultimate spiritual expression is personal and God does not lie, or does not yet lie, within the domain of scientific statement. Yet the explicit recognition that scientific statement, being abstract, does not give us the concrete world of reality, is not so very far removed from the spiritual expression. The chasm that divides them is narrow; it can be bridged over; and the bridge is formed by the natural power which is inherent in every man of recognising the fundamental truth of the spirit, the truth that God is, that in God is the only reality, that anything else which seems to exist is mere illusion, mere pretence, or mere ignorance.

Moreover, at every step in the growth of this partial knowledge there must occur, as has been already stated, (Section XLII.) something akin to and not easily to be distinguished from the intuitive perception of the ultimate spiritual truth. Each step is consummated in a flash of revelation; there is added to the process of study and combination “that indescribable element which vitalises the whole into a new creation”. This element is the operation of the Divine element in man grasping the Divine unity and plan that rules in the world. (Ibid.)

Now we see more clearly than before the nature of progress, which is the intention of God, and the law of nature; but which has in fact not been so common or so wide-spread in the world as degeneration and degradation. (Ibid.) Progress is normal, and yet it has been rare and unusual. There is a condition of progress, both for the individual and for the nation: the condition is that it listens to the Divine voice.

Moral progress of the race is in a certain way analogous to the progress in knowledge which marks the career of the investigator in science. Each takes places, not in a continuous insensible progress, but in a series of steps separated by intervals almost of stagnation, which on the religious side especially easily and commonly tend to pass into degeneration. These steps depend mainly or almost entirely on the outstanding individuals who have a larger spark of the creative force in the sense in which it has just been defined. Every science grows infinitely more through the creative impulse communicated by the genius of individuals than through the slow accretion of details made by the labour of the many. Yet even in these small additions, where there is any real and vital growth, there is involved a spark of the creative fire and the sympathy with the ordered universe of nature. The moral progress of the race depends largely on a series of revelations to individuals, to whom has been granted the power of sympathetic insight into the will and nature and purpose of God. According as the race is influenced in a series of steps by such powerful individuals, is its moral progress. There is usually traceable an individual force behind every moral or religious movement, a rousing of the many through the one man. This is especially clear in the history of the Hebrew race. The Promise was fulfilled in the succession of the great prophets and seers, whose progressive revelation of truth was not merely the blessing of their own people, but the inheritance of the whole world: “In thy seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed”. This is progress, and every step in it involves the hearing of the voice of nature, i.e. of God. The fundamental and ultimate truth then, the first and the last, is that this process of growth is the real expression of the Divine life and the Divine power, both within man and outside of man; and man is, or is intended to be, moving towards God, moving from the situation of being separated from God towards the union, i.e. the re-union, with God. If there is to be motion, there must be a force to produce the motion. What, then, is the force that drives man along the way towards God, a difficult way, requiring (as Paul repeatedly declares) the utmost exertion of the whole nature of the individual? This force Paul calls Faith. We end, as we began, in Section VIL, with this force and prime motive power. Faith, This is the one thing needed, without which there can come about nothing else in man: it is the compelling force of life: without Faith there can be no life and no movement towards truth and God. It is “an intense and burning enthusiasm, inspired through overpowering belief in, and realisation of, the nature of Jesus — an enthusiasm which drives on the man in whose soul it reigns to live the life of Jesus”. It exists potentially in all men. It is the Divine element in man, recognising, longing for, and striving to attain to, the Divine nature around man. The following paragraphs were intended to come in Section XIX, before the second last paragraph; but owing to distance did not find a place in that Section: — The method used in Athens was too remote from the ordinary man’s way of thinking, too generalised and abstract. It could not conquer the world. The common man is not convinced by a statement of general principles; he must be won by the concrete picture of living reality. And so Paul says that, from the very beginning of his missionary career, he “placarded Jesus Christ before the eyes” of the Galatians. (Galatians 3. This refers to public and open declaration intended to be clear to the eyes of all.) He did not require to go to Athens to discover that the abstract method was ineffective. He knew this from the first, and he used the other method from the first right through to the end in his work. But where the audience was suited to be approached first of all by the other method, he used that other way.

Moreover, that other way gave him a beginning. He took the pagan idea of a God, where his audience was simple, or of Divine power and Divine nature, where his audience was more educated; and this he proceeded to raise to a higher level and to fill with a richer meaning. We do not know how he addressed the proconsul Sergius Paullus at Paphos; but I imagine that it was in a style similar to his Athenian address. This was the style suited to the hearer. Even to the pagan rustics of Lystra in the province Galatia, he found a starting-point in their simple conception of a God who gives good things. He did not begin by criticising their conception of God, and telling them that it was wrong and poor and barren. He took what was right in it — that God did good to them — and then he went on to “placard Jesus Christ before their eyes”.

What he did certainly find in Athens was that highly educated and philosophic hearers were more difficult to affect than a less sophisticated audience. A group of professors in a University, philosophic lecturers used to give displays of their own powers in moral discourse, was the hardest of all audiences to touch and to move. That is always the case. It lies in human nature that it should be so. Even Sergius Paullus, though he admired and wondered and “believed,” does not seem to have gone farther in the Christian course. (See Section LII.)

Professor Rendel Harris has greatly advanced our knowledge of and insight into this Athenian speech. (Expositor, October 1906, April 1907, October 1912.) He has shown that Paul took his text from the Greek poets to a much greater extent than was supposed. Epimenides had said, “In Thee we live and move and have our being”. Paul knew the passage where this line occurs, and quotes another line from the immediate context in the letter to Titus. This same Epimenides had taught the Athenians to cure a plague by erecting altars “to the deity” at every place where one of a flock of sheep that he had turned loose lay down. The inscription on the altar, which Paul quotes as the starting-point of his address, brought to his mind the Cretan Epimenides, and recalled that passage in his poem “Minos,” in which occurs the line describing the relation of man to God. The words of Epimenides are in Paul’s mind throughout the opening of his speech. He reminds his hearers of the doctrine taught by the famous Cretan prophet and philosopher, and of the equally beautiful and true thought which the philosophic poets Aratus and Cleanthes (Both were Stoics, and were revered by some of Paul’s opponents.) had enshrined in noble verse.

Such are the principles which he assumes to be accepted by his audience. They know the fundamental principles that God exists, and that we are His offspring, and live and move in Him; but yet they are in other respects ignorant of the nature of this God whose existence they accept. They begin with the right conception; and Paul’s purpose is to enlarge and complete their knowledge. In Luke’s brief summary of an address that was evidently rather long, the opening has been exposed to a mistranslation, which some few modern scholars favour. Luke uses a word of doubtful sense, deisidaimonia, which is capable of meaning both “superstition” and “religion”; but Luke calculated that the context would show the true significance; and the great majority of commentators in ancient and in modern time have rightly caught the intention. Some, on the contrary, argue that, since in most cases deisidaimonia means “superstition” and was despised as a bad characteristic, therefore Paul must have used it in the bad sense, and that he begins his address by accusing his philosophic hearers of “superstition” — the quality which they specially contemned. The whole purport of his address, however, is to praise their instinctive religious feeling, and to say that the very same deity whom with this right instinct they worship, though unknown, is the God whom he declares to them.

It is an untrustworthy line of argument to maintain that a word which, by its plain and evident form and by occasional use, is capable of a good sense, but which is far more frequently used in a disparaging and contemptuous sense, must necessarily bear this bad sense in any given passage. If the word is used by a good authority in any one place clearly in a good sense, it may be used in that good sense in another place: that is a canon of interpretation. Words have a wide range of meaning, and are not always used in one single narrow connotation. But, as the argument runs, Paul starts with this word, and its bad sense, being much more common, would naturally be caught by the audience who were unprepared by the context to catch the good significance. This, however, is an untrustworthy line of reasoning. In the first place, it ignores the effect of tone and gesture, which are so important in conveying the intention of the spoken word: the whole difference would lie in the orator’s tone. In the second place, it would be unsafe to assume that, because the context, which to the readers of a brief summary determines the good intention of the word, comes after it in the written report, therefore the much longer oration began with the same abrupt declaration. It may be regarded as almost certain that there was a more formal introduction, which along with tone and gesture, made it clear to the audience that the orator was beginning in the usual complimentary fashion and was commending their natural religious feeling. The fact that Paul uses two lines (I assume that Paul wrote to Titus. The double quotation is strong evidence of authorship.) out of the short passage, only four lines, preserved from the “Minos” of Epimenides, proves that he was familiar with the entire context, and that he quoted intentionally words which referred to the pagan deity Zeus and which were written to rebuke the false and debased view held about Zeus and his supposed death and Cretan tomb by the Cretans, “always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies”. At Athens therefore he was not merely using a tag familiar to the vulgar: it has been contended that he would never have quoted from Aratus, if he had known that Aratus was speaking of the false deity Zeus, and that therefore Paul had never read Aratus, but merely caught up a few words which had become current in uneducated society. He uses with deliberate intention words that speak of all mankind as the offspring of Zeus, “in whom we live and move”. These words express the truth. Zeus is God, an ignorant conception of God, but yet not devoid of truth; and this philosophic conception of Zeus may be elevated to become the true idea of the one living God. But image worship in every form is debased, and inseparably connected with moral degradation and innumerable abuses.

I regret to differ absolutely from Professor Deissmann on this point. I presume he did not know about Professor Rendel Harris’s discovery, for he would surely not maintain that Paul’s two quotations out of four lines of Epimenides are both merely “lines that lived in the mouth of the people”. This would be far too marvellous a coincidence; and Paul’s evident starting-point in an altar whose inscription recalled Epimenides is a clear proof that he knew the whole situation and circumstances of the poem and the history. He had read, and he could quote aptly from his reading.

We notice also, in passing, that Luke marks his report as being only a brief account of a speech, for he implies in 5:32 (Although 5:18 refers generally to the language which was characteristic of Paul at Athens, and not specially to the address before Areopagus, Luke gives this address because it was characteristic, and must therefore have intended that the noun should be understood as implied in the verb.) that the listeners caught the word “Anastasis” on Paul’s lips, misunderstood it, and mocked at it as the name of a strange deity. Now the word does not occur in Luke’s report, but only a cognate verb in inflected form. The actual noun must have been used in the address as it was spoken, so that hearers heard “Anastasis,” and thought it was a god; (The noun in 5:32 clearly refers back to the participle in 31, and implies that the listeners heard and mocked at the noun.) and Luke here leaves a proof that he is giving his own summary of a longer address. That the address was long may also be inferred from the wish of the audience that it should be cut short, though the wish was expressed politely in the form that “we will hear thee concerning this yet again”.