Just as the Exodus provided the historical root of the Judaic hope in the future Day of the Lord, so too did Christ’s resurrection and reunion with God provide the foundation for the Christian hope in mankind’s future resurrection and reunion with God. And just as the Jewish Bible, with its revelation of God’s law and promises in counterpoint with the history of his people, had sustained the Jews through the centuries and permeated their lives with its principles and its hopes, so now the sustaining basis for the new religion and its traditions became the Christian Bible, with a “New Testament” joined to the “Old” (the Jewish Bible). The Church was the new Israel. Christ was the new covenant. Thus it was that the character of the new age ushered in with Christianity was stamped with the altogether un-Hellenic character of the small nation of Israel.
Of all the characteristics of the new religion, Christianity’s claims to universality and historical fulfillment were pivotal, and those claims derived from Judaism. The Judaeo-Christian God was not one tribal or polis deity among many, but was the one true supreme God—the Maker of the universe, the Lord of history, the omnipotent and omniscient King of Kings whose unequaled reality and power justly commanded the allegiance of all nations and all mankind. In the history of the people of Israel, that God had entered decisively into the world, spoken his Word through the prophets, and called forth humanity to its divine destiny: what would be born of Israel would have world-historic significance. To the quickly growing numbers of Christians who now proclaimed their message far and wide in the Roman Empire, what was born of Israel was Christianity.
Classical Elements and the Platonic Inheritance
Considering the singular nature of its essential doctrine and message, Christianity spread at an astonishing rate from its tiny Galilean nucleus eventually to encompass the Western world. Within a generation after Jesus’s death, his followers had forged a religious and intellectual synthesis within the framework of their new faith that not only inspired many to undertake the often dangerous mission of extending that faith into the surrounding pagan environment, but also was capable of addressing, and eventually fulfilling, the religious and philosophical aspirations of a sophisticated urbanized world empire. Yet Christianity’s self-conception as a world religion was profoundly facilitated by its relation to the larger Hellenistic world. While Christianity’s claim to religious universality originated in Judaism, both its effective universality—its success in propagation—and its philosophical universality owed much to the Greco-Roman milieu of its birth. Ancient Christians did not consider it accidental that the Incarnation occurred at the historical moment of conjunction between the Jewish religion, Greek philosophy, and the Roman Empire.
Significantly, it was not the Galilean Jews who had been closest to Jesus, but Paul, the Roman citizen of Greek cultural background, who effectively turned Christianity toward its universal mission. Although virtually all of the earliest Christians were Jewish, only a relatively small fraction of Jews eventually became Christian. In the long run, the new religion appealed much more broadly and successfully to the larger Hellenistic world.3 The Jews had long awaited a messiah, but had expected either a political monarch, like their ancient king David, who would assert Israel’s sovereignty in the world, or a manifestly spiritual prince—the “Son of man”—who would arrive from the heavens in angelic glory at the dramatic end of time. They did not expect the apolitical, unmilitant, manifestly human, suffering and dying Jesus. Moreover, although the Jews understood their special relation to God would have important consequences for all mankind, the Judaic religion was by character intensely nationalistic and separatist, almost wholly centered on the people of Israel—a spirit that continued in those early Christian Jews in Jerusalem who opposed the full inclusion of non-Jews into the community of faith until all of Israel was awakened. While the Jerusalem Christians, under the leadership of James and Peter, continued for some time to require the observance of traditional Jewish rules against common eating, thus circumscribing the new religion into the Judaic framework, Paul asserted, amidst much opposition, that the new Christian freedom and hope for salvation was already universally present, for Gentiles without the Judaic Law as well as Jews within it. All of mankind needed, and could embrace, the divine Savior. In that first fundamental doctrinal controversy within the early Church, it was Paul’s universalism that prevailed over Judaic exclusivism, with large repercussions for the classical world.
For the reluctance on the part of most Jews to embrace the Christian revelation, and the success of Paul’s reaction—bringing Christianity to the Gentiles—combined with political events to shift the new religion’s center of gravity from Palestine to the larger Hellenistic world. After Jesus’s death, the messianic political revolutionary movements led by the Zealot party continued among the Jews against the Romans, reaching a critical peak a generation later in a widespread Palestinian revolt. In the ensuing war, Roman troops crushed the rebellion, captured Jerusalem, and destroyed the Jewish Temple (70 A.D.). The Christian community in Jerusalem and Palestine was thereby dispersed, and the closest link of the Christian religion to Judaism—maintained and symbolized by the Jerusalem Christians—was severed. Christianity thereafter was more a Hellenistic than a Palestinian phenomenon.
It must also be noted that, compared with Judaism, Greco-Roman culture was in many respects more consistently nonsectarian and universal in both its practice and its vision. The Roman Empire and its laws transcended all nationalities and previous political boundaries, granting citizenship and rights to conquered peoples as well as to Romans. The cosmopolitan Hellenistic age, with its great urban centers and trade and travel, joined together the civilized world as never before. The Stoic ideal of the brotherhood of mankind and the Cosmopolis, or World City, affirmed that all human beings are free and equal children of God. The universal Logos of Greek philosophy transcended all apparent oppositions and imperfections—the divine Reason ruling all humanity and the cosmos yet immanent in human reason and potentially available to every individual of whatever nation or people. But above all, a universal Christian religion of world proportions was made feasible by the prior existence of the Alexandrian and Roman empires, without which the lands and peoples surrounding the Mediterranean would still have been divided into an enormous multiplicity of separate ethnic cultures with widely diverging linguistic, political, and cosmological predispositions. Despite the understandable antagonism felt by many early Christians toward their Roman rulers, it was precisely the Pax Romana that afforded the freedom of movement and communication that was indispensable to the propagation of the Christian faith. From Paul, at the start of Christianity, to Augustine, its most influential protagonist at the end of the classical era, the character and aspirations of the new religion were decisively molded by its Greco-Roman context.
These considerations apply not only to the practical side of Christianity’s dissemination but also to the elaborated Christian world view as it came to rule the Western mind. Although the Christian outlook may be imagined as an entirely independent and monolithic structure of belief, we may more accurately distinguish not only opposing tendencies within the whole, but also a historical continuity with the metaphysical and religious conceptions of the classical world. It is true that, with the rise of Christianity, the pluralism and syncretism of Hellenistic culture, with its various intermingling philosophical schools and polytheistic religions, were replaced by an exclusive monotheism derived from the Judaic tradition. It is also true that Christian theology established the biblical revelation as absolute truth and demanded strict conformity to Church doctrine from any philosophical speculations. Within these limits, however, the Christian world view was fundamentally informed by its classical predecessors. Not only did there exist crucial parallels between the tenets and rituals of Christianity and those of the pagan mystery religions, but in addition, as time passed, even the most erudite elements of Hellenic philosophy were absorbed by, and had their influence on, the Christian faith. C
ertainly Christianity began and triumphed in the Roman Empire not as a philosophy but as a religion—eastern and Judaic in character, emphatically communal, salvational, emotional, mystical, depending on revelatory statements of faith and belief, and almost fully independent of Hellenic rationalism. Yet Christianity soon found Greek philosophy to be not just an alien pagan intellectual system with which it was forced to contend, but, in the view of many early Christian theologians, a divinely prearranged matrix for the rational explication of the Christian faith.
The essence of Paul’s theology lay in his belief that Jesus was not an ordinary human being but was the Christ, the eternal Son of God, who incarnated as the man Jesus to save mankind and bring history to its glorious denouement. In Paul’s vision, God’s wisdom ruled all of history in a hidden manner, but had at last become manifest in Christ, who reconciled the world with the divine. All things had been made in Christ, who was the very principle of divine wisdom. Christ was the archetype of all creation, which was patterned after him, converged in him, and found its triumphant meaning in his incarnation and resurrection. Christianity thus came to understand the entire movement of human history, including all of its various religious and philosophical strivings, as an unfolding of the divine plan that was fulfilled in the coming of Christ.
The correspondences between this conception of Christ and that of the Greek Logos did not go unnoticed by Hellenistic Christians. The remarkable Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, an older contemporary of Jesus and Paul, had already broached a Judaic-Greek synthesis pivoted on the term “Logos.”4 But it was with the opening words of the Gospel according to John, “In the beginning was the Logos,” that Christianity’s relationship to Hellenic philosophy was potently initiated. Soon afterward, an extraordinary convergence of Greek thought and Christian theology was in progress that would leave both transformed.
Faced with the fact that there already existed in the greater Mediterranean culture a sophisticated philosophical tradition from the Greeks, the educated class of early Christians rapidly saw the need for integrating that tradition with their religious faith. Such an integration was pursued both for their own satisfaction and to assist the Greco-Roman culture in understanding the Christian mystery. Yet this was considered no marriage of convenience, for the spiritually resonant Platonic philosophy not only harmonized with, it also elaborated and intellectually enhanced, the Christian conceptions derived from the revelations of the New Testament. Fundamental Platonic principles now found corroboration and new meaning in the Christian context: the existence of a transcendent reality of eternal perfection, the sovereignty of divine wisdom in the cosmos, the primacy of the spiritual over the material, the Socratic focus on the “tending of the soul,” the soul’s immortality and high moral imperatives, its experience of divine justice after death, the importance of scrupulous self-examination, the admonition to control the passions and appetites in the service of the good and true, the ethical principle that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one, the belief in death as a transition to more abundant life, the existence of a prior condition of divine knowledge now obscured in man’s limited natural state, the notion of participation in the divine archetype, the progressive assimilation to God as the goal of human aspiration. Despite its having entirely distinct origins from the Judaeo-Christian religion, for many ancient Christian intellectuals the Platonic tradition was itself an authentic expression of divine wisdom, capable of bringing articulate metaphysical insight to some of the deepest of Christian mysteries. Thus as Christian culture matured during its first several centuries, its religious thought developed into a systematic theology, and although that theology was Judaeo-Christian in substance, its metaphysical structure was largely Platonic. Such a fusion was advanced by the major theologians of the early Church—first by Justin Martyr, then more fully by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and finally, most consequentially, by Augustine.
In turn, Christianity was regarded as the true consummation of philosophy, with the gospel as the great meeting ground of Hellenism and Judaism. The Christian proclamation that the Logos, the world Reason itself, had actually taken human form in the historical person of Jesus Christ compelled widespread interest in the Hellenistic cultural world. In their understanding of Christ as the incarnate Logos, early Christian theologians synthesized the Greek philosophical doctrine of the intelligible divine rationality of the world with the Judaic religious doctrine of the creative Word of God, which manifested a personal God’s providential will and gave to human history its salvational meaning. In Christ, the Logos became man: the historical and the timeless, the absolute and the personal, the human and the divine became one. Through his redemptive act, Christ mediated the soul’s access to the transcendent reality and thus satisfied the philosopher’s ultimate quest. In terms strongly reminiscent of Platonism with its transcendent Ideas, Christian theologians taught that to discover Christ was to discover the truth of the cosmos and the truth of one’s own being in one unitary illumination.
The Neoplatonic philosophical structure, developing simultaneously alongside early Christian theology in Alexandria, seemed to offer an especially fitting metaphysical language within which could be better comprehended the Judaeo-Christian vision. In Neoplatonism, the ineffable transcendent Godhead, the One, had brought forth its manifest image—the divine Nous or universal Reason—and the World Soul. In Christianity, the transcendent Father had brought forth his manifest image—the Son or Logos—and the Holy Spirit. But Christianity now brought dynamic historicity into the Hellenic conception by asserting that the Logos, the eternal truth which had been present from the creation of the world, had now been sent forth into world history in human form to bring that creation, by means of the Spirit, back to its divine essence. In Christ, heaven and earth were reunited, the One and the many reconciled. What had been the philosopher’s private spiritual ascent was now, through the Incarnation of the Logos, the historical destiny of the entire creation. The Word would awaken all mankind. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit would occur the world’s return to the One. That supreme Light, the true source of reality shining forth outside Plato’s cave of shadows, was now recognized as the light of Christ. As Clement of Alexandria announced, “By the Logos, the whole world is now become Athens and Greece.”
It is indicative of this intimacy between Platonism and Christianity that Plotinus and Origen, the central thinkers, respectively, of the last school of pagan philosophy and the first school of Christian philosophy, shared the same teacher in Alexandria, Ammonius Saccas (a mysterious figure about whom virtually nothing is known). Plotinus’s philosophy, in turn, was pivotal in Augustine’s gradual conversion to Christianity. Augustine saw Plotinus as one in whom “Plato lived again,” and regarded Plato’s thought itself as “the most pure and bright in all philosophy,” so profound as to be in almost perfect concordance with the Christian faith. Thus Augustine held that the Platonic Forms existed within the creative mind of God and that the ground of reality lay beyond the world of the senses, available only through a radical inward-turning of the soul. No less Platonic, although thoroughly Christian, was Augustine’s paradigmatic statement that “the true philosopher is the lover of God.” And it was Augustine’s formulation of Christian Platonism that was to permeate virtually all of medieval Christian thought in the West. So enthusiastic was the Christian integration of the Greek spirit that Socrates and Plato were frequently regarded as divinely inspired pre-Christian saints, early communicators of the divine Logos already present in pagan times—“Christians before Christ,” as Justin Martyr claimed. In ancient Christian icons, Socrates and Plato were portrayed among the redeemed whom Christ led forth from the underworld after his storming of Hades. In itself classical culture may have been finite and perishable, but from this view it was being reborn through Christianity, endowed with new life and new meaning. Thus Clement declared that philosophy had prepared the Greeks for Christ, just as the Law had prepared the
Jews.
Yet however profound this metaphysical affinity with Platonic thought, the essential thrust of Christianity derived from its Judaic foundation. In contrast to the Greeks’ atemporal balancing of many archetypal beings with different qualities and areas of dominance, Judaic monotheism bestowed to Christianity a particularly forceful sense of the divine as a single supreme personal being with a specific historical plan of salvation for mankind. God acted in and through history with definite intent and direction. In comparison with the Greeks, Judaism condensed and intensified the sense of the holy or sacred, regarding it as emanating from a single omnipotent Deity who was both Creator and Redeemer. Although monotheism certainly existed in various Platonic conceptions of God—the universal Mind, the Demiurge, the highest Form of the Good, and especially the Neoplatonic supreme One—the God of Moses was by his own declaration unequivocally unique in his divinity, and was more personal in his relationship to humanity and more freely active in human history than was the transcendent Platonic absolute. Although the Judaic tradition of exile and return bore a striking resemblance to the Neoplatonic doctrine of the cosmos’s outgoing and return to the One, the former possessed a communally witnessed historical concreteness and ritually consecrated emotional passion that were not characteristic of the latter’s more interior, intellectual, and individualized approach.
While the Hellenic sense of history was generally cyclical, the Judaic was decisively linear and progressive, the gradual fulfillment in time of God’s plan for man.5 While Hellenic religious thought tended toward the abstract and analytic, Judaism’s mode was more concrete, dynamic, and apodictic. And where the Greek conception of God leaned toward the idea of a supreme ruling intelligence, the Judaic conception emphasized that of a supreme ruling will. For the essence of the Judaic faith rested on a burning expectation that God would actively renew his sovereignty over the world in a dramatic transfiguration of human history, and by Jesus’s time this expectation centered on the appearance of a personal messiah. Christianity integrated the two traditions by proclaiming, in effect, that the true and highest divine reality—God the Father and Creator, the Platonic eternal transcendent—had fully penetrated the imperfect and finite world of nature and human history through the flesh-and-blood incarnation of his Son Jesus Christ, the Logos, whose life and death had commenced a liberating reunion of the two previously separate realms—transcendent and mundane, divine and human—and thus a rebirth of the cosmos through man. The world Creator and Logos had broken anew into history with fresh creative power, inaugurating a universal reconciliation. In the transition from Greek philosophy to Christian theology, the transcendent was made immanent, the eternal was made historical, and human history itself was now spiritually significant: “And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Passion of the Western Mind Page 14