‘History is bunk.’ The question of the continuity of past events was important for the first Christians. Yet for some, like the Gnostics, it was trivial; for others, like Marcion, it was bad, not merely bunk but bad bunk. For the Gnostics, the most it could provide was a reflection of the divine reality, for nothing really happened outside God. For Marcion, the past told of another God, and whatever it said was wrong. Yet Justin, and those who came after him, loved the story of the past, they loved talking about it, and making sense of it. They were, indeed, too keen about it for most of their readers today. Justin fills page after page with too many references to the Old Testament, with the way in which it makes sense of Jesus and Jesus makes sense of it.

With the apologists, this interest in history begins, like everything else, as a response to a challenge, a rebuttal of an objection. What right had Christians to make such extraordinary claims for their knowledge of God? If they had the truth, did they think that nothing true had ever been said before? They used the Jewish scriptures, but they did not keep the Law of the God who had spoken in them. Marcion and the Gnostics were at least consistent: they did not pretend that the most high God or the divine Pleroma had anything to do with the Old Testament.

The four writers, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement, come from four major cities and centres of Christianity: Rome, Lyons, Carthage and Alexandria.

Justin

In the second century, Rome continued to enjoy prosperity. While literature lost some of its power, building and sculpture went on vigorously. Trajan's forum, the baths of Caracalla, the palace of Septimius Severus on the Palatine, the Pantheon and Hadrian's mausoleum remain as evidence of great activity. The period of the Antonines was, said Gibbon, the greatest period of Rome. Wars were few and there was prosperity on many sides. Yet disquieting signs may be found, and a recent picture of the period speaks of it as an age of anxiety : men knew that the best was past and the unknown future had little to lure them on. There is truth in both these opinions, for it was the best of times and the worst of times; the general position of the empire was sound but there was intellectual insecurity.

Christians were to be found in small groups, which met in houses and recognised the oversight of a college of presbyters, and before long the presidency of one bishop. Heretics like Marcion and Valentinus met a strong opposition at Rome, for there the movement towards right belief was strongest. There was tension between Rome and the East on the date of Easter, and attempts at reconciliation were not successful.

After Socrates, Greek philosophy could never turn its back on questions about man and the life he should live. Man became the centre of the cosmos, ethics became fundamental and introspective reflection like that of Marcus Aurelius emerged. Philosophers and Gnostics asked: ‘Where did man come from and how did he come?’ Christian thinkers had to ask about man for other reasons too. They saw a new humanity in Christ, a universal brotherhood, which broke across every barrier of race and class. The goal of history was the liberty of the children of God, a liberty shown in Christ and given to his followers. If man were central to the total purpose of things, as the Stoics also insisted he was, what was he? Further, if man's salvation were the goal of Christian preaching and of more esoteric religious propaganda, why did man need to be saved? Again, Christians claimed as evidence for the truth of their God, the moral transformation of men of all shapes and sizes; this confident but perilous claim kept man in the centre of the argument. Finally, there was only one ground on which all the critics of Christianity could be met: polytheist, philosopher, Jew, Gnostic, Marcionite, with internal divergences in most camps, had nothing but their humanity in common. When the apologists spoke as men to men, they were dealing with the only common question.

Man, according to one definition that Clement found, was a rational, mortal, earthy, walking, laughing animal.

Problems

The problems of one ineffable transcendent God group themselves around the idea of a first cause. The persistence of this idea, with all its difficulties, has been sometimes seen as a ground for its acceptance. In the second century, a strong monistic tendency was not peculiar to Christians; but they were able to make good use of it. In recent discussion, logical objections to the first cause are tempered by an appreciation of the question as a religious problem. Everything has a point of ultimate dependence, as Augustine found at Ostia: ‘if one could hear them, all these things are saying, “We did not make ourselves, but he who made us is he who abides to eternity”’ [Conf. 9.10].

Man and his freedom showed the link between God and man and the need for God to change human life, while keeping it human. The term ‘deification’ was important because it pointed to the gift of immortality as something that could not be taken for granted. Freedom was seen to be more important than free will because it was concerned with a fullness of life that, unlike self-fulfilment, found its centre in the cross of Jesus.

The world and history go together, for the world belongs to a God of hope, who opens the future and gives meaning to history; he is the suffering God, known supremely in the cross of his Son and the death of the martyrs.

Alternative methods in the history of ideas in the patristic period

Our five different questions and methods spring from a scheme that is based on three main types, with subdivisions in the third. The first method is polemical: ‘Does it make sense?’ ‘Is it true?’; and regards past writers as contributors to unchanging problems: ‘by noticing the strong and weak points of each theory we can discover the direction in which further progress may be made’. The systematic theologian commonly approaches the early centuries with similar direct questions:

There is an attractive freshness about this approach; for more than a thousand years the fathers had been cited in short authoritative passages. Theology had so often been built upon catenae that could not be questioned because they were so close in time to the sources of Christianity. For example, questions of Church order and Roman primacy were argued with extracts from Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian and others. Ascetical theology followed a similar pattern. Just as the biblicist cited his proof-texts from the Bible, so the patristic scholar found his proof-texts in the fathers.

Whatever hesitation there was in speaking of God, there was no hesitation in speaking of man and his relation to God; nor is there hesitation in speaking about the world. This is God's world: he made it, he orders it and he governs it. The first way into his mystery is through his transforming power in men's lives; the second way is through the world he has made. Each of the four writers takes creation seriously. Justin has an earthy optimism: God made the world out of matter for man's sake. But Justin is a city man who writes for city men – he tells us little about his world, except that he finds God in it through the cosmic cross. Irenaeus is different; he has an eye for colour and movement and a curiosity for shapes and structure. Creation is earthy, but it is beautiful too. Tertullian stands out as the staunchest defender of creation and the toughest opponent of Marcion. His heart is in the fight, for God's world fires his curiosity and interest. All creatures great and small, especially the small and complicated, tell him about God. God, he wants to argue, wouldn't be God without the world. The government of the world is no abstract activity, for God drops thunderbolts, causes earthquakes and readily smites whoever deserves to be smitten.

The present movement of Western civilisation away from Christianity has directed attention to earlier days when Christians were a small part of a Roman world of pluralistic beliefs; they came before, we come after, Christendom. Claims for relevance, however, are always competitive and need to be argued. What drives twentieth-century Western man back to the second and third centuries? Initially there is little more than a vague feeling that Christendom was a mistake, that ecumenical councils in the fourth and fifth centuries achieved less than they claimed, that the classical dogmatic formulations are too ambiguous to be helpful. Clearly this response is not enough. Christendom was not an unqualified mistake and its assessment is the task of a lifetime and not of an impulse. The best ecumenical councils may well be those that seem to achieve little; ambiguity of creeds and councils invites further analysis before resignation.

The importance of the second century and the apologists is best seen in the emergence of Christian argument; but Christians have argued about so many strange things that the area of argument is important. The claim of the enthusiast for early Christian thought is that the problems that Christians faced in a pluralistic world, then, have a close relation to those that they face now: the problems were more general and more philosophical (Is there one God? Can man speak of him? Is man free? Why is there evil in God's world?) than the dogmatic issues of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Each group of problems has shown two marked characteristics. In the first place there has been the untidiness of infinity, for there has never been a point at which the questions could be rounded off and completed. There was always a sense of being on the edge of the desert, or the shore of the sea. (The chief reason for stopping was that the topic was inexhaustible; enough had been seen to learn that the end would never be in sight.) The God above was shrouded in mystery or revealed in brightness too fierce for man to bear. Man, as God's image yet sinful, as free yet captive, was a rational, laughing animal who found life through the practice of death. The world, God's good cosmos, was shot through with suffering and evil. History had reached its end in Christ, but still went on in eerie confusion; another end remained but when, why or how could not be set down.

In the second place, there has been one conclusion and that a short one, to each investigation. The unknown God is known through his Word. Man is logikos and he learns his true nature only in the perfect man and complete Logos. The world is made and governed by the divine Word. History is long but it is summed up in the Word. The brutal brevity and simplicity of the gospel was unattractive to most people: only a slave mind could accept such a reduction of so many issues.

One God was the fixed point of early Christian thought. His oneness meant that he could not be caused, described or seen. Negative attributes have an abstract ring when they are not heard properly; correctly understood, they point to the first commandment: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’. ‘The Lord our God is one Lord and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy mind.’ The discovery of this God through the crucified Christ led Justin and others to think vigorously and to live and die faithfully. The framework was eschatological; thinking, living and dying went together: ‘If we are punished for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ we hope to be saved; for this shall be our salvation and confidence before the more terrible judgement seat of our Lord and Saviour who shall judge the whole world.’ ‘Do what you will for we are Christians and offer no sacrifice to idols.’ The meaning of the unity of God was found in the difference it made to the lives of those who accepted it.

When unity is taken seriously, it is inexpressible and transcendent. We cannot say what the One is; we can only say what it is not. Plato's Parmenides is logically, if not historically, relevant: ‘If there is a One, of course the One will not be many.’

The earliest Christian writers were also the most creative; but the established ways of viewing their work have largely obscured its meaning. Two things make rediscovery possible: on the one hand there is the recent interest in second-century issues like language about God and the problem of evil, and on the other hand there is the mass of historical work done by the late Jean Daniélou and others over the last twenty-five years. As his translator claims, the relevance of the contents of Daniélou's Gospel message and Hellenistic culture is not obvious. Another step is needed, to elucidate the problems that puzzled the second-century writers and puzzle us.

Apart from Cardinal Daniélou, others have helped considerably. In Cambridge, Professors G. W. H. Lampe, C. F. D. Moule and E. G. Rupp have helped with clarity and understanding. R. P. Claude Mondésert in Lyons and Professor Ernst Käsemann in Tübingen have placed me frequently in their debt. In Rome, R. P. Antonio Orbe has allowed me to benefit from his unrivalled knowledge of Irenaeus. Closer to home, Professor John Passmore and Dr Behan McCullagh have lent guidance on the crucial issue of method. The intelligent enthusiasm of my students here has been a major factor. Dr A. Lenox-Conyngham read proofs and, with Dr David Rankin, checked references, while Mr Edwin Brown prepared the index of citations. The staff of Cambridge University Press have guided the book through the press with unfailing skill and patience.

The Man, the Time, and the Place

The details of Heraclitus' life are almost completely unknown. Reliable information is limited to the fact that he was a native of Ephesus, on the coast of Asia Minor north of Miletus, and that his father's name was Bloson. His approximate date is fixed by a synchronism with the reign of Darius, 521 to 487 B.C.; his traditional ‘acme’ in the 69th Olympiad, 504–501 B.C., is probably nothing more than a simplified version of the same synchronism. The rough accuracy of this date, on the threshold of the fifth century, is guaranteed by fragment XVIII (D. 40), where Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecataeus are cited as older contemporaries or figures of the recent past. All three men seem to have died between 510 and 480 B.C. The book dates itself, then, in or near this period. The same approximate date could be inferred from the presence or absence of various philosophical influences: there are clear debts to the sixth-century Milesians, to Pythagoras and Xenophanes, but none to Parmenides or to any thinker of the fifth century.

The ‘life’ of Heraclitus by Diogenes Laertius is a tissue of Hellenistic anecdotes, most of them obviously fabricated on the basis of statements in the preserved fragments. (The unusually disgusting reports of his final illness and death reveal a malicious pleasure in mocking a figure whom the Stoics venerated as the source of their own philosophy.) Suggestive, if not entirely credible, are the stories which describe Heraclitus as refusing to engage in politics or to legislate for Ephesus, in sharp contrast with the public activities of most early philosophers.