undivine principle has no place, can neither have originated nor permitted evil substances; and since He alone can be the Creator of substances, evil ought not to be regarded as a substance. Thus Augustine's canon: Nulla natura malum, sed quod contra naturam, id erit malum. Just so the Greek Fathers teach: Τὸ σῶμα οὐχ ἁμαρτάνει, ἀλλὰ διὰ τοῦ σώματος ἡ ψυχή. Evil belongs essentially to the psychical side. Again, in opposition to all Fatalism, the imputability of evil is firmly held, this being based on human freedom, whereas in Manichæan, as in Gnostic Dualism, the existence of evil has its ground in an unhappy fate. It is the merit of the Greek Fathers, up to the beginning of the fifth century, to have rejected this physical conception of evil. To this category belong the Alexandrian Fathers: Clement, Origen, Athanasius, and the Antiochian Diodorus of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. But their positive doctrines of the nature and reality of evil are less satisfactory. In order to avoid the error which makes evil a substance, which would require the disruption of one aspect of man's nature, they treated it more as a defect, certainly as a nonentity which ought not to exist. But again, in order to avoid an unethical Fatalism, those Fathers go back to the natural capacity for virtue in such a way as to impinge upon the rights and the necessity of grace. As concerns the former, the negative idea of evil, the one class of more Hellenic spirit, like Clement, found evil in the want of true knowledge, depriving the will of power to control the desires, or generally in infirmity of will, which is inherent in a finite nature. Here the influence was powerfully felt of the notion shared by an Athanasius and Augustine, that reality in the strict sense properly belongs to God alone, while the creaturely world, which arose from nothing, hovers between being and non-being, and tends back to nothing. Infirmity, corruption, or mortality, the physical element (therefore physical evil) was thus specially viewed as that from which redemption by God is necessary. Evil for them is severance from the true divine life, so that death, from which redemption is necessary, has also for them in part spiritual significance, and the dominion of the devil," who has the power of death," refers to his power in temptation. But seeing that the Greek Fathers ascribe even to fallen man a moral power

and freedom, which although weakened remains essentially unchanged, scarcely anything is left but physical death and corruption, as that from which only divine intervention can redeem. This would imply a Manichæan remnant, if they did not again derive the necessity of death from sin. Theodore of Mopsuestia, who, like Origen, lays stress on the freedom of man, although not to such a degree as to derive man's present mortality from the personal guilt of individuals in a pre-existent state, attempts on the other hand to reconcile the need of divine redemption with freedom, by supposing that mortality was man's destiny from the beginning, and not merely on account of actual sin, because God foresaw that he would sin; this mortality or physical disorganization renders man weak and unfree, and is empirically the cause of his actual sinfulness. The vanquishing of death by the resurrection is redemption. But since even believers must die, such a limitation of the meaning of redemption would imply that redemption in Christ has not yet come, but is only promised. The following may be taken as the general doctrine in the fourth century: Man needs redemption, because the divine image is obscured in him, and he needs a higher knowledge and incitement of the will to good, as well as deliverance from Satan's dominion, especially from the curse of death—the punishment that has come down from Adam. On this view, Christ's example and doctrine, especially that of the resurrection, form the characteristic elements of Christianity. On the, whole, therefore, the rejection of Dualism in the Greek Church was purchased by inadmissible sacrifices. That evil might not be conceived as substance, it was stamped as mere defect. Further, and this took place in increasing measure, that capacity of moral imputation might not be infringed, a doctrine of freedom was set up, which left little room, as concerns sin and guilt, for the need of a divine act of redemption through Christ, and which was little in harmony with those doctrines of grace and the efficacy of the divine Spirit, which entered at the same time.

2. This was destined to be revealed in the conflict between

Pelagius and Augustine. In strict antithesis to a merely

1 The forgiveness of sins indeed always took an important place, chiefly in the rite of baptism, but not a central place governing also the life after baptism. DORNER.-CHRIST. DOCT. II. Y

physical idea of evil, Pelagius maintains the subjectively moral standpoint exclusively: Non naturæ delictum est, sed voluntatis; omne bonum ac malum non nobiscum nascitur, sed agitur. The act, the self-determination of the free will, is to him the sole source of that which is subject to moral estimate. On this account not only is all determining power of moral significance denied to the material and physical, but all inwardly determining divine influences (gratia interna) are excluded; there is merely an adjutorium Dei externum, consisting chiefly in Christ's teaching, example, and promise. Even mortality does not place man in a state needing redemption. It neither results in nor springs from sin; to the spirit it has not the force of pollution or punishment, but is an innate necessity of our externally limited nature. On the contrary, man has in himself power for a holy life, which pious heathen have proved. Man certainly has not this indestructible power of freedom for virtue from himself, but from the Creator. If we wish, we may refer it to grace, i.e. gratia creans, a view which no doubt involves the refining away of the distinction between nature and grace. But there is no further supernatural and internal grace in history, because it is superfluous. But as all good in man springs from his freedom, so too all evil in the world springs from the action of freedom in the individual. He makes evil example the means by which evil is diffused, but behind that he conceives freedom to be man's unchanging power over himself. To the doctrine of inherited sin he opposes the inherited blessing of freedom. Evil can never be a vitium naturæ, an inherited misfortune. This doctrine may appear strictly moral, because it strongly emphasizes personal responsibility and guilt, and satisfying in a religious aspect, so far as it absolutely transfers all causality of evil from God to individual men. But it assigns a foreign, 'deistic position to God in relation to sin. Under this aspect it is impious, and lacks, therefore, ethical depth. Self-sufficient centring in one's self, isolation from God is thereby sanctioned and invested with the appearance of ethical dignity. We can only agree with Pelagius by

1 Cf. the works of Jerome (ed. Vallars. xi.), where along with the Epist. ad Demetriadem are printed the books Expositionum in Epistolas Pauli, revised in the sense of the Church. Cf. Nitzsch, ut supra, p. 362.

finding the good, which we ought to possess, merely in single acts and outward works (as Pelagius lays great stress on monkish virtue so called), without reference to the totality of disposition, to the living unity of the person, who only acquires a holy character in that child-like communion with God, which, where God's law is unmutilated, must be accounted man's moral duty as well as the highest moral good.

With Augustine the Christian idea of evil begins its course; for by excluding Manichæism as well as Pelagianism—those fundamental anthropological heresies—he began to lay the foundation for Christian anthropology. It is true, he opposes Manichæism, as even Anselm and Aquinas did, by affirming that evil is a nonentity. To desire, he says, to know what evil is, would be to desire to see darkness and hear silence. But still to him evil is not simple non-being or potential being, but a less degree (Nichtmehrsein, privatio) of a being which ought to be, privative negation. And the origin of evil lies to him primarily neither in God, nor in matter or nature, but in freedom of will in the first man, by which means he endeavours to secure the moral imputation of evil. But, on the other hand, he is no less anxious to interpret the Christian consciousness of man's need of redemption in a more thorough manner than was possible to the Easterns, who were so fond of referring simply to the darkened mind and the mortality inherited from Adam, or than Pelagius did. His central feeling is expressed in the saying: Jacet ab Oriente ad Occidentem usque ingens ægrotus. De cælo venit Dominus, ut sanaret ægrotum. In keeping with his profounder religious sense, the main thing for him, in order to goodness in man, is not singleness of acts, but his entire habitual character. He regards evil not as mere limitation from without, but as contrariety to a pure beginning, vitium privatio justitiæ originalis, the obverse of which is amor inordinatus or concupiscentia. But whence then this universality of corruption, which is a necessitas naturalis in respect of every one newly born? The Greek Fathers, although teaching a transmission of the curse of death, stopped at the freedom of every individual with or without supposition of pre-existence, and either maintained innocence and purity in children, or along with mortality spoke only in general of an evil, natural

desire, or impurity, from which baptism delivers; or again they referred to the temptation of Satan, to which they do not attribute compulsion. The Westerns very early taught differently. One class say (so Tertullian first of all), Adam is fons generis et princeps, his soul is matrix omnium, who arise out of it like shoots (per traducem). But they cannot be other than homogeneous with Adam, who became corrupt by his apostasy; and the malum originale constituted by Adam's free act of sin extends by generation to posterity, producing death in them and making regeneration necessary for all. In a similar sense speak Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose. But with the corrupted nature, propagating itself from Adam, is transmitted also the culpa resting upon it. This theory of Tertullian of Adam's soul as matrix omnium, is that of Traducianism proper. Adam is therewith conceived as a single historic person, but one who stands at the head, and occupies a historic position unique in kind. The sinfulness of all, without their personal participation, is supposed to be absolutely grounded in Adam's free act, by the consequences of which they are affected as by a misfortune, which is also a punishment for the inherited culpa. But another theory, found in Irenæus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, is, that Adam is not merely an individual, but the universal man (ó κae' oλov ǎveρwπоs), and we were really embraced in him, so that we sinned in him. This would be a species of Pre-existentianism in more religious form connecting with Adam. According to the first theory, the entire genus, developing itself from the first pair, suffers through the single historic person-Adam; according to the second, all the members of the genus are considered not as passive, but as active, but active in Adam. Both theories are found maintained in Augustine. On one side he speaks of a propagatio, by which the sin of Adam first passed over to posterity. On this view, therefore, they are not conceived as present and co-operating in Adam. Also when he says: In Adam totum genus humanum radicaliter institutum est;1 or: 2 ipsum esse totum genus humanum, so to speak as a germ, this may be understood in a Traducian sense. But, on the other side, he does not quite give himself up to

1 De Genesi ad literam, 1. vi. § 14, ed. Ven. vol. iii. 267.

2 In Johannis Ev. Tract. x. 11, vol. iv. 494.