Note 678 — Chapter VI

Footnote 678:

(return)

In ecclesiastical antiquity all systematising was merely relative and limited, because the complex of sacred writings enjoyed a different authority from that which it possessed in the following period. Here the reference of a theologoumenon to a passage of Scripture was of itself sufficient, and the manifold and incongruous doctrines were felt as a unity in so far as they could all be verified from Holy Scriptures. Thus the fact that the Holy Scriptures were regarded as a series of divine oracles guaranteed, as it were, a transcendental unity of the doctrines, and, in certain circumstances, relieved the framer of the system of a great part of his task. Hitherto little justice has been done to this view of the history of dogma, though it is the only solution of a series of otherwise insoluble problems. We cannot for example understand the theology of Augustine, and necessarily create for ourselves the most difficult problems by our own fault, if we make no use of that theory. In Origen's dogmatic and that of subsequent Church Fathers—so far as we can speak of a dogmatic in their case—the unity lies partly in the canon of Holy Scripture and partly in the ultimate aim; but these two principles interfere with each other. As far as the Stromateis of Clement is concerned, Overbeek (l.c.) has furnished the explanation of its striking plan. Moreover, how would it have been conceivable that the riches of Holy Scripture, as presented to the philosophers who allegorised the books, could have been mastered, problems and all, at the first attempt.