CHRIS TIAN A GNOSTICISM. 



79 



out God ? ' And I bow to the authority of Christ, who tells me, ' No 

 man hath seen God at any time ' ; ' God is a Spii'it ' ; ' Blessed are they 

 that have not seen and yet have believed.' And, in so holding, I am in 

 full accord with the Church. I say with her, ' We know Thee now by 

 faith ' ; ' The Father is incomprehensible {im-mensus) ' ; ' There is but 

 one God, eternal, incorporeal, indivisible, beyond reach of suffering, 

 infinite ' — in short, a profound and inscrutable Being. Nor do I find 

 that Catholic theology, for 1800 years, has ever swerved from a clear 

 and outspoken conf es^on of this agnosticism. So early as the second 

 century, we read in Justin Martyr, ' Can a man know God, as he knows 

 arithmetic or astronomy ? Assuredly not.' * Irenseus, in the same cen- 

 tury, repeatedly speaks of God as 'indefinable, incomprehensible, in- 

 visible.' f That bold thinker in the third century, Clement of Alexan- 

 dria, declares (with Mi*. Spencer) that the process of theology is, with 

 regard to its doctrine of God, negative and agnostic, always ' setting 

 forth what God is not, rather than what he is.' J All the great fathers 

 of the fourth century echo the same statement. St. Augustine is strong 

 on the point. John of Damascus, the greatest theologian of the East, 

 says bluntly, ' It is impossible for the lower nature to know the higher.' * 

 Indeed, it would be a mere waste of time to adduce any more of the 

 great Catholic theologians by name. They are all 'agnostics' to a 

 man. And M. Emile Burnouf is quite right when he says, 'Les doc- 

 teurs Chretiens sont unanimes k declarer que leur dieu est cache et in- 

 comprehensible, qu'il est plein de mysteres, qu'il est I'objet de la foi et 

 non pas de la raison.' " || 



Thus there is nothing new under the sun, not even in the high- 

 est flights of modern philosophy ; and no man, with all the fathers 

 of the Church at his back, need hesitate to say, " I am a Chris- 

 tian agnostic." Yet all who concur in this will, I am sure, warmly 

 welcome a powerful auxiliary like Mr. Herbert Spencer, if only he 

 remain true to the principles so lucidly set forth in the last num- 

 ber of this review (" Popular Science Monthly," January, 1884). For 

 although ho might not himself care to qualify his philosophy by the 

 adjective " Christian," fearing thereby to limit — as a philosopher is 

 bound not to do — his perfect freedom of speculation, still his guidance 

 is none the less valuable to those who are approaching the same sub- 

 ject from a different side. The Christian, indeed, is, of all men, the 

 most absolutely bound-over to be truthful. When, therefore, any great 

 leader of thought arises, whether in the higher or the lower depart- 

 ments of human inquiry, the liegeman of a " God of truth " must 

 needs feel such reverence as Dante expressed for Aristotle, " the great 



*"Trypho," sec. 3. f i^, 34, 6, etc. i^ "Strom.," v, 11. 



«"Defide,"i, 12. 



II "Science des Religions," p. 15. (Christian doctors are unanimous in declaring that 

 their God is hidden and incomprehensible, that he is full of mystery, that he is the ob- 

 ject of faith and not of reason.) 



