Christian Philosophy in the Early Church

Anthony Meredith SJ

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780567213174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Written by a master of the subject with a long teaching experience, this book is a concise and accessible overview of the response of early Christian thought to classical philosophy and its integration into Christian theology.

1

Introduction

The Christian religion was born in and into first century Palestine. When exactly it began is not altogether clear. Was it at the moment of the Incarnation, or was it on the cross with the piercing of the side of Christ as recorded in the fourth gospel (19.34), or was it with the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles in the upper room as recorded in the opening chapters of the Acts of the Apostles? For the purposes of the ensuing study it hardly matters which particular moment is accepted. All were historical moments. They all occurred in Roman occupied Palestine between the beginning of our era and about the year 30 AD.

Jesus Christ was a Jew, and so too were his family and closest followers. The first followers and hearers of Jesus were not drawn from the intellectual and social elite of their day, but rather from artisans, tax collectors and the more disreputable members of society. Yet out of such seemingly unpromising and insignificant beginnings, a seed was planted by his teaching, his cross and resurrection, which was destined to spread its shade over the entire known world. What had begun life as an essentially Jewish movement founded on the preaching, life, death and resurrection of the Messiah from Nazareth became, by an astonishing and even now quite mysterious process and with quite amazing speed, a religion that was accepted not only by Jews and proselytes but also by pagans, Goths, Franks and eventually by the New World.

No one has so far offered an adequate historical explanation of the reasons for this astonishing success story. The appeal of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit at its beginning on the first Whit Sunday is no doubt the ultimate secret, but such a reason is not enough to satisfy the historian. All we can do is to trace its path, mapped out by the hurrying footsteps of the divine apostle Saint Paul, among others, who was above all responsible for the transformation of an essentially Jewish movement into a more universal faith. But this transformation was not only spatial; it also affected its self understanding. As we shall see, it would be overly facile to speak of a violent break with the Jewish roots of the church.

This is partly because the roots were never purely Jewish in the sense of what was later understood as Rabbinic Judaism. The Palestine into which Jesus was born in the first century AD was not ‘uncontaminated’ by alien wisdom. Part of Jesus’ own mission took place in the Greek speaking Decapolis region.¹ Further to that, Greek interest in Jesus is strongly suggested by the Greeks who ‘wanted to see Jesus’.² It is unlikely that the subsequent discussion was conducted in Hebrew or Aramaic.

This means that within Palestinian Jewry, the attempt had already started to relate to a wider audience well before Christianity stepped into the shoes of Judaism. The use, therefore, made by later Christian writers of ideas and language drawn from the culture of the day, was simply an extension both of the initial dynamism of the gospel and an attempt to render real the final words of Jesus as they appear in Saint Matthew’s gospel to ‘go and teach all nations’.³ The conversion and subsequent mission of Saint Paul⁴ reminds us that Paul was designated ‘Apostle of the Gentiles’ ‘to carry my name before Gentiles and Kings’ from an early date. The need for an interpretative tool with which to recommend the good news was evident from the very beginning of the enterprise. Language is the vehicle through which the gospel was transmitted, and if it was to be understood, it was not enough simply to repeat the exact words and language of the Master. It stood in need of both translation and at a later date also of interpretation if it was to be intelligible and appealing to all.

Facing the problem

At the outset, therefore, we are faced with certain problems of definition, without attending to which the ensuing discussion will be in danger of drifting into obscurity. Unfortunately however, the terms requiring definition are not at all easy to define, as we shall see. To begin with we need to ask ourselves the question ‘what is the essence of Christianity?’ Has Christianity got a definable essence at all? Is it at all possible to arrive at a definition of Christianity agreed on by all, with which to contrast various attempts to structure the gospel message with the aid of philosophy? Was the gospel’s concern with orthopraxy, that is, doing the right thing, or was it orthodoxy, that is, the importance of truth in religion, as subsequently articulated and insisted on by the Church through the creeds?

Again, does the word ‘Christianity’ itself mean quite the same in the first and the fourth centuries? How fair was Edwin Hatch to mark a distinction⁵ between the moral stress of the Sermon on the Mount and the combination of both history and metaphysical ideas embedded in the creeds of Nicaea (in 325 AD) and Constantinople (in 381 CE). Shortly before Hatch’s essay appeared, Matthew Arnold had taken an even bolder step and endeavoured to reduce all factual elements in the gospel to moral ideas. Arnold writes: ‘the true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion’.⁶

In the same way, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Adolf von Harnack proposed a celebrated definition of Christianity as ‘the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of the human soul’.⁷ He regarded metaphysics, which in his view began to infiltrate into Christianity from the middle of the second century together with a priestly and monastic system, as alien growths on the soil of the gospel. Although his views have not met with uncritical acceptance, his words have proved a beacon for those who have explored the subject of the supposed hellenization of the gospel ever since.

But was his definition as satisfactory as it has certainly proved challenging? Was Holl, another German theologian, fair to insist against von Harnack that the sinfulness of man and his need of grace was at the heart of the gospel? The search for a definition of the essence of Christianity is by and large a Protestant preoccupation and has obvious advantages as it enables one to discover what is and what is not essential to faith. Richard Field, an Anglican dean of Gloucester in the early years of the seventeenth century, argued for a distinction between primary and secondary articles of faith.⁸ But is such a distinction justified? A more general and less precise approach that concentrates on the double command to love God and our neighbour is preferable, leaving the working out to development in both areas.

One important factor that serves to unite Jews and Christians is that for all of them, the knowledge of the Supreme Being was mediated primarily above all in sacred books. Revelation comes primarily through a historical revelation and therefore in history. The exodus from Egyptian captivity for the Jews, and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were all historical and at the same time defining moments, carefully recorded in sacred texts.

For the Greeks by contrast, even before the advent of the pre-Socratics, the gods were thought of as expressions of physical and moral truths, not as historical figures: Zeus was the sky god and Hera goddess of the air. The appeal then and later was rather to nature and the moral law – the starry heavens above and the moral law within. The poems of Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey, though to some extent regarded as the bible of the Greeks, were not perceived to be accurate accounts of the behaviour of the gods. Plato in his Republic thought their influence sufficiently pernicious in their account of the behaviour of the gods that he wished to forbid them to be recited in his ideal state.

It is true of course that certain passages in the psalms, for example the opening of Psalm 19, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’, reflect a more positive attitude to natural theology than a sharp dichotomy might suggest. Nevertheless Exodus,⁹ Deuteronomy,¹⁰ the Psalms and Isaiah¹¹ portray God as the personal creator and lord of the universe. For the Christian the supreme revelation of God is to be found in Jesus of Nazareth. To the idea of the divine supremacy, so prominent in the Old Testament, the New Testament adds the revelation of God as love.¹²

The question immediately arises as to the possibility of harmonizing these two accounts of the ultimate reality, the natural and the revealed, and the different routes that lead to them. Can reason and revelation be brought into harmony with each other, linking nature, morality and history? To this important question Christians have from the outset proposed very different replies. Some of these will be discussed in Chapter 2. One of the most celebrated answers is that offered by Blaise Paschal. In a moment of revelation on 23 November in the year of grace 1654, he begins his Pensées with the celebrated words: ‘“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob” not of philosophers and scholars’.¹³ At a later date, Professor Kneale in the course of a lecture insisted that the idea of a personal absolute was, at least for him, a contradiction in terms.¹⁴

Again how could a being that is beyond the reach of both change and moral variability be also compassionate and incarnate? Perhaps more importantly, does the thought of what is fitting for God to be and do stand in judgement upon the data of biblical revelation? Gregory of Nyssa insists that the Christian concept of God must include the four basic ideas of justice, wisdom, goodness and power.¹⁵ Does one have to choose between rationalism and some form, biblical or ecclesial, of fundamentalism? Is the philosophic idea always in danger of ousting the biblical idea? Writers from Plato onwards have argued that the highest human ideals o...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Saint Paul, the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists of the second century
• 3 The Alexandrian School
• 4 The influence of philosophy on the language and thought of the councils
• 5 Saint Augustine
• 6 Epilogue
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index