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120 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. it did not exclude the realities of Christ's gospel. Through the storm of his life, Athanasius stood on the rock of the reality of the salvation which Christ brought mankind.^ Nevertheless, the formulation of Christianity in dogma was Hellenic and metaphysical, and a depar- ture alike from the Hebraic spirit of the Old Testa- ment and from the nature of Jesus' teachings. If we follow the gradual revelation in the Old Testament of Jehovah as a great personality with a definite charac- ter, and if we then pass to the synoptic gospels, and see how Jesus sets forth, phase by phase, the relation- ship of God to man, the loving ways of God the Fa- ther, and finally, if we observe in the fourth gospel how in modes deeply analogous to his way in the sy- noptics, Jesus sets forth teachings which pass man's understanding, yet are real to the mind and give to the heart's realities a further range, then we shall find throughout a common trait, the absence of definition and formulation — the absence of any formulation of what, when formulated, the human mind cannot grasp and realize.^ 1 Athanasius, in his Discourses against the Avians and other writings (see, e.g.,De Incarnatione Verbi Dei) , founds his Christol- ogy on his Soteriology ; i.e. on the principle that Christ must have been God to effect a real reconciliation between men and God — to be a Redeemer. See also Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, II (2d Ed.), p. 167, etc. 2 It would be interesting to point out how the formulation of belief, when pushed beyond the range of man's inner experience and external observation, becomes unreal, and in becoming unreal tends to evoke formalism complemented by superstition. Chris- tianity has been affected by two apparently opposite kinds of super- stition, which nevertheless present analogies, and are not unrelated