V

Apologetics and the Beginnings of Christian Philosophy

1. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGY

What born fools were all who lived in ignorance of God! From the good things before their eyes they could not learn to know him who is, and failed to recognize the artificer though they observed his handiwork! Fire, wind, swift air, the circle of the starry signs, rushing water, or the great lights in heaven that rule the world—those they accounted gods. If it was through delight in the beauty of these things that people supposed them gods, they ought to have understood how much better is the Lord and master of them all; for it was by the prime author of all beauty they were created. If it was through astonishment at their power and influence, people should have learnt from these how much more powerful is he who made them. For the greatness and beauty of created things give us a corresponding idea of their creator.

                                                                                             Wisdom of Solomon 13:1-5.

What can be known about God is perfectly plain to them since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity–however invisible–have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made. That is why such people are without excuse: they knew God and yet refused to honor him as God or to thank him; instead, they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened. The more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew, until they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for a worthless imitation, for the image of mortal man, of birds, of quadrupeds and reptiles. . . since they refused to see it was rational to acknowledge God, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behavior.

                                                                                                          St. Paul, Romans 1:18-23, 28.

             The first steps toward a Christian philosophical tradition were taken when educated Christians, in the face of persecution, began to defend their faith in pamphlets and letters. This apologetic literature operated, at first, on rather a low level of argumentation and philosophical sophistication, abysmally low compared to the work of the best professional Pagan philosophers of the time, but since part of its professed point was to appeal to educated Pagans who did not share Christian presuppositions, it did undertake rational justification for portions, at least, of the Christian world view, and it was natural for it to draw on stock arguments from the Pagan philosophical tradition for this justification. Although the impossibility of a faithful Christian entertaining alternative world views hampered the introduction of philosophy at a more sophisticated level, a number of other factors were nonetheless encouraging.

             For one thing, as Christianity moved into the mainstream it became important to Christian intellectuals to be capable of answering philosophical criticisms of their world view. This was in part because of simple pride. However sure they are of their beliefs, educated people dislike admitting that they cannot give good reasons for them, or answer objections to them. Certain of the Christian beliefs cried out for a metaphysical defense, in particular, the belief in a God transcending the natural world, and the complex, and implausible, developing ideas about Jesus, who was supposedly both fully God and fully man, and one member of a Triune God. Hence, a new brand of metaphysical reflection became the natural centerpiece in the rational defense of the Christian world view.

             For another thing, the opinion was abroad right from the beginning that reason could not discover and justify the truth about God and salvation, that by faith and revelation alone could we come to knowledge of God. It was natural, then, for Christians to develop some form of skeptical epistemology, supporting the claims of faith against reason. For a time after Christianity had claimed philosophy as the spoils of its ideological victory, skepticism was rejected by most Christian thinkers as a violation of common sense, and as a road block in the way of its newly acquired resource for establishing the faith, especially in its metaphysical dimensions. But the victories of skepticism among the Scholastics of the fourteenth century, though they mark the beginning of the decline of Christian rationalist metaphysics, as has been pointed out in the Thomistic tradition, seem also to mark the re-emergence of what, for a Christian, is a natural line of thought. We find a struggle among Christian thinkers right from the beginning over the place of philosophy in the faith. Some, at first, generally followers of Plato, were to argue that many basic Christian truths could be proved, and that Greek philosophy represents a valuable preparation for the Good News of revealed truths that are beyond reason. Others held that philosophy had nothing to do with Christianity, no matter whether we mean by philosophy the various existing philosophical schools and institutions in the Ancient world, or a search for truth relying on the rational techniques of the philosophers. Reason, they held, was incompetent to discover the truth about God and salvation, and faith was in any case a necessary virtue for salvation, and could not be maintained simultaneously with a searching philosophical stance towards life.

             There was no doubt much confusion in the minds of Christians about the legitimate claims of faith against reason. Faith, that is, trust in Jesus Christ, was necessary for salvation, of course, and this meant reliance on Jesus rather than one’s own resources. Now if we trusted Jesus because we had figured out that it is the best thing to do, and perhaps even developed an objective proof that it was the best thing to do, this would seem to cast doubt on our faith, first of all, because we are relying on our own reason to guide us, and should be relying on Christ, and in the second place, because this sort of faith seems too cold and calculating. We are tempted to think that faith in people based on long acquaintance and objective evidence of their reliability is somehow less noble and pure than faith without any such reasons behind it. Certainly we value the latter sort of faith when others have it in us, and we also value the faith of others when it cannot easily be destroyed by occasional bad behavior on our own part. So perhaps, if we are not cynics, we come to value this sort of faith in general, finding it noble because it involves a certain potential for self-sacrifice, and finding it pure because it perhaps betrays a certain naïveté characteristic more of children and those dependent on others than it is of fully functioning adults.

             But does it follow from any of this that knowledge of God and salvation is best obtained through faith? Perhaps, if it happens that there is no other way to know about such things—but there are two difficulties here. The first is that God, if perfectly good and all-powerful, would surely be in a position to convince even the skeptical of the saving truths. One response to this seems to have been that he has in fact made the truth perfectly plain, as we shall see. Another response would be to argue that only the faithful deserve to be saved, and so there is no reason for God to make the truth plain to those who demand proofs and reasons. The second difficulty is that certain fundamental truths would surely have to be made rational before the possibility of faith in Jesus Christ emerges. For instance, one would have to have reason to believe that there is a God, and know the career of Jesus Christ. The more clear-sighted of Christian thinkers would see all this, and argue that reason has a definite, if limited, role to play in enabling faith, and consequently salvation, even if it has to be abandoned after a certain point for reliance on God’s word if we are to know all that can be known and needs to be known about these matters. As Augustine remarks, in this matter of faith, at least the question who is to be trusted must be left to reason.

             Christian apologetics grew, in the first instance, out of Jewish apologetics, including such works as Philo’s Hypothetica and Josephus’s work Against Apion, written in reply to an anti-Jewish writer. Commonplace Jewish arguments about the absurdity of Pagan practices became standard fare in Christian writings. The earliest apologetic passages are found in the speech of Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17:22-31, and Paul’s condemnation of Paganism at Romans 1:18-32, and in both passages Paul draws on Jewish themes.

             The passage in Acts is addressed, it seems, to intelligent Pagans who may be critical of their own religion, and it tries not to be too inflammatory. Paul first praises the Athenians for the scrupulous way in which they dedicate an altar even to an unknown god, and suggests that they in fact worship a God they do not know, the creator, in whom we “live and move and have our being” (an expression suggested by a line from the poet Epimenides), who does not dwell in any shrine made by human hands, nor have any appearance that a man could represent in a cult statue. He then suggests that God will not put up any longer with our worshiping cult statues, but calls on us for repentance, and begins to exposit the Christian revelation, and Christ’s resurrection as proof of it. Paul seem to have thought that the more educated people in his audience would be attracted by his criticism of popular beliefs, and, indeed, they might well have taken him for a philosopher, at least in the beginning of his talk, and given him the polite attention thought due a philosopher.

             The passage in Romans is not an appeal to Pagans, but an attack on them for the benefit of a Christian audience, and in it Paul displays considerably less delicacy. He makes no attempt here to find an ally in Pagan philosophy. Rather, he views philosophy as nothing more than a bankrupt attempt at a rational defense of Paganism. Indeed, Paul seems unhappy with anything resembling complex reasoning. Philosophical reason carries the odor of the sophistry of the Pagan professors who control higher education. Paul insists that the truth about God (that he is creator of the world, and presumably that he resembles no creature) is perfectly obvious, and only a contumacious obstinacy, rooted in pride, can explain how Pagans got it wrong. As a result of their deliberate stupidity, God has abandoned them to their sexual passions, homosexuality, and other vices. But despite his hostility to Pagan philosophy, Paul does insist that Christian beliefs are reasonable, and Pagan beliefs unreasonable, and when he says that the more they call themselves philosophers the more corrupted their reasoning is, he certainly does not mean that they were true philosophers. If a true philosopher followed reason, he would no doubt see the truth of Christianity, or at least so a Christian with an interest in philosophy might conclude.

             Jewish apologetic was not to be the only source for Christian apology. The Pagan philosophers themselves provided much useful material, especially to the later, Latin apologists. Varro’s critique of Roman religion forms the basis for Tertullian’s early To the Nations, the first draft of the far more brilliant Apology. Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods provides the basis for Minucius Felix’s Octavius, and for Lactantius’s work. Arnobius depended on Neo-Platonic sources. Those who drew on such sources might well fall into the notion that philosophy, which is set against Pagan religion, could after all be made Christian. The opposite view was fostered by the appeals of Gnostics to philosophy (though the philosophers attacked Gnosticism, as a matter of fact). So Hippolytus’s Refutation of all Heresies is rooted in the notion, commonplace at the time of its composition, that the various schools of philosophy are the source of the various heresies.

             As a form of literature, the Christian apology is something of a literary conceit. An apology is generally explicitly addressed to an official, or a Pagan whose conversion is envisioned, and its ostensive purpose is to convince the Pagans at least to tolerate Christianity. But it is unlikely that the apologies were read much by Pagans, or intended to be. They are in fact addressed to educated converts or prospective converts, to shore up their faith, and to Christians in general, to convince them of the injustice of the persecutions. It is for this reason that Christian apologetic generally attacks Pagan religious practices and beliefs, and often attacks philosophers and other literary figures in the Pagan canon, in a way that could only alienate a Pagan audience. Even the most skillful and conciliatory apologies, those of Aristides and Athenagoras, for instance, fall into this practice. However, some of the apologies might well have been submitted as petitions to Roman officials, and it seems likely that Celsus’s book against the Christians is in part a response to such petitions.

             Moreover, if the apologies were all genuinely addressed to the Pagans, they would have to be considered failures. Not one addresses convincingly the real objection to Christianity, that is, the withdrawal of Christians from the life of the larger society to which they belonged. Christians rejected ordinary pleasures, whether we speak of sex or the games and civic festivals, and essential practices such as the initiation of the young into adulthood, the common rituals of marriage, and so on, as sinful, because they all involved at least nominal offerings or petitions to the Pagan gods, and Christians refused to honor even the forms of Pagan communal ritual. More in particular, they refused to go along with the program of Hellenization and Romanization, largely through religious institutions, that the government depended on to unite the Empire. From the Christian standpoint, of course, this is more than justifiable, for the Pagan gods are demons who wish to lead the souls of men into damnation, and the worship of demons, even in the smallest things, is a sure way to that goal. But for an apologist addressing Pagans to give that reason, as most did, is to suggest what was surely true, given events, that Christians would obliterate other religious practices themselves if they could. And indeed, suspicion that this was the case, that Christians posed a real danger to the tolerant religious pluralism aimed at by the Romans, was one of the chief motives behind the persecutions. Again, the tale is told in the most skillful and conciliatory of the apologies. Even Athenagoras leaves an aftertaste of anti-communal and anti-Hellenic attitudes, and asks that the Christians be left alone to follow their own peculiar communal life in separation from the rest of humankind. A political liberal might well claim that Athenagoras’s request should be granted, that even the unpleasantly intolerant should be conceded religious freedom, but a conservative could argue that such principles betray a Liberal death wish, for it nurtures within its bosom the very forces that would, and in this case, did, destroy the Liberal program. In any case, rubbing their noses in Christian intolerance was not the best way to convince the Romans to be tolerant to Christians.

             The same general strategy, based closely on St. Paul in Romans, quoted at the head of this section, is employed in all the apologies written in the second century. The apologies seem to fall into two groups, those which, following Romans, are openly hostile to philosophy, and those which, following Acts, take philosophy as an ally, a preparation for the Gospel, and appeal to the intellectually sophisticated Pagan for support both of central elements of the Christian view of things, and of the Christian condemnation of Pagan practices. They usually employ the argument from design to show the existence of a single transcendent God who made and rules the world. Then they condemn Pagan worship as a misguided devotion to mere natural objects, condemning all the philosophers but Plato (and sometimes Plato too) for their failure to recognize the transcendent God and His providence in the world. The more philosophically inclined make a good deal of Plato’s Timaeus, seen as parallel to Genesis, to support their case. They argue that sacrifice should be replaced, for a believer in such a transcendent God, by morality and justice, and suggest that Christians are peculiarly ethical, due to their belief in an afterlife and God’s judgment. They may point out that Christians pray for the Emperor even if they do not sacrifice to him. In their epistemology they lean toward the view that inspiration, revelation through the Holy Spirit, is the only reliable source of knowledge about the origins of the world, God, and the like, insisting that an eye-witness, not argument from theory, is the only trustworthy road to the truth in such matters. Of course, they attack the reliability of the poetic inspiration of Pagan mythographers by the Muses. They generally conclude that the Pagan gods are in fact demons who have seduced human beings to their worship. But let us turn to the individual apologies to see how they work out this Pauline strategy.

2. QUADRATUS, THE LETTER TO DIOGNETUS, MARCIANUS ARISTIDES

Before his advent, who among mankind had any notion at all of what God is? Or do you accept the vapid and ludicrous suggestions of your own pretentious philosophers? – some of whom assure us that God is Fire (thus giving the name of God to what they will surely come to one day themselves!), some that he is Water, and others one of the other various elements of his creation. If any of these ideas were admissible, there would be no reason why anything else in the world could not be declared to be God. Assertions of that sort are no more than the hocus-pocus, the ‘hey, presto!’ of professional illusionists, for no man living has ever seen Him or known Him; it is He Himself who has given us the revelation of Himself. But He has only revealed Himself to faith, by which alone are we permitted to know God.

                                                                                             Letter to Diognetus 8.

             The earliest Christian apology we know of was that of one Quadratus, directed to the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned 117–138. The sense of the one citation we have from it is that the healing works of Christ had lasted so well that some he had cured were still alive (and so more than a hundred years old!). No doubt the intent is that the healing works of Pagan gods often did not last, that the victim’s symptoms quickly returned. This would be a clear sign that the apparent recovery was merely psychosomatic, of course.

             Another early apology, the Letter to Diognetus (written around 125), is probably typical for the time in its approach to philosophy. It takes a skeptical approach, insisting that no one knew what God was until God revealed Himself to us. Philosophers, in particular, thought God, absurdly, to be fire or water or some such thing. It might be asked why God revealed Himself to us so late. The author answers that we needed to learn first that we could not enter the Kingdom (by practicing virtue in accord with the Law), or know God, by our own power (that is, through reason). Until we learn that, we will not accept Christ’s ransom for our sins, or God’s self-revelation. The pride of intellect typical of a philosopher must be chastened before He can reveal Himself to us. It takes faith to accept God’s revelation. This explanation of Christ’s late appearance in the world is new, and in the second century it is found elsewhere only in Irenaeus. Later apologists like to argue that the Pagans have the more recent cult, since Christianity goes back to Moses, who lived long before the Greeks’ arrival on the scene.

             Christians, the author tells us, live in the world like resident aliens in a city. They obey the laws, but do not participate in the public life of the world. Nonetheless they love all men, and are like the soul in the body—they are diffused throughout the world without being part of it, and they hold the world together, loving the world as the soul loves the flesh, while the world wars against them as the flesh wars against the soul. Finally, they are immortal, like the soul, and are only passing through on their way to a nobler place. Thus Christians should be tolerated, despite their withdrawal from civic life, just as resident aliens are tolerated, since they are harmless, and perhaps do some good. To a Pagan, of course, this “apology” would look rather arrogant.

             Another apology, much more friendly to philosophy, was directed to the Emperor Antoninus (138-147), by Marcianus Aristides, who describes himself as “a philosopher of the Athenians.” The piece opens with a brief argument for God’s existence, which, following St. Paul in Romans, makes no reference to Scripture, but relies on reason alone. One must be “amazed at the arrangement of the world,” so that we are entitled to say that “the world, and all that is therein, are moved by another,” presumably because there is nothing within the world that could account for its motion, or for its order. But the mover and ruler must be more powerful than what is moved and ruled by it. The author perhaps thinks, in addition, that only a mind or soul could be an unmoved mover, and so he identifies the mover of the world as the “God of all, who made the world for the sake of man.” Thus he argues to a god transcending nature, and goes on to say that this God is perfect, incomprehensible, eternal and without beginning or end, immutable, Wisdom and wholly mind, and contains all. The argument is organically connected with what follows, for Aristides next argues that the barbarians have all held that parts of creation are gods, even though it is clear that they are imperfect, destructible, and lacking in power and wisdom, so that their views must be wrong. The Greeks invent gods wholesale rather than misidentifying parts of creation, but their error is plain from the imperfections and crimes they attribute to their made-up deities, and Aristides suggests that such stories as the Greeks tell corrupt their morals. The argument draws on Plato in his Republic and other Greek philosophers critical of the Olympian religion, as well as Jewish apologetic, when it criticizes the worship of natural things, or worse yet, idols, which are destructible, and so cannot be God. Aristides’s handling of the Jews is very brief, and it is hard to see how he could develop much of an argument against them, given that they profess exactly the sort of transcendent God he assumes, but he does criticize their observances (the execution of the ritual demands of the Law) as suitable expressions of reverence toward angels rather than such a God. Christians, on the other hand, worship God through their excellent moral behavior and love for their fellow man, which is appropriate to God, who stands in no need of sacrifices or praise, but deserves love and demands morality.

3. JUSTIN MARTYR

If we then in particular respects even teach something similar to the doctrines of the philosophers honored among you, though in many cases in a divine or more sublime way; and we alone do it in such a way that the matter is proved...

                                                                                             Justin Martyr, First Apology 20.

Our doctrines are more sublime than any human teaching, because the Christ who appeared for our sakes was the whole fullness of reason.

                                                                                             Justin Martyr, Second Apology 10.

             In Justin Martyr we encounter the first Christian writer with some claim to be a philosopher. Justin was born Flavius Justinus of Greek parents about 100 C.E., in Palestine, and then lived afterwards for some time in Ephesus, and finally moved to Rome where he ran a school, presenting himself as a philosopher, in philosopher’s garb. He converted to Christianity some time before 132, and died in 164—accused of being a Christian by the Cynic philosopher Crescens, by Justin’s account a spiteful rival with whom he had debated in the past, he confessed his faith, refused to sacrifice to the Emperor, and was executed. Justin’s surviving works are his First Apology (about 152), Second Apology (about 155), and the Dialogue with Trypho (about 161).

             The First Apology deliberately echoes Plato’s Apology of Socrates. The Christians are accused of the same crime that Socrates was, atheism, and are, like Socrates, guilty only of rejecting Gods that are in fact demons who have seduced men from reason. Moreover, like Socrates, Christians would rather die than compromise their principles. Justin asserts that the Romans can kill them, but cannot do them any real harm, just as Socrates had asserted the Athenians had no power to harm a good man, even if they could execute him. If Christians reject the deities of the Romans, it is because, like Socrates, they worship a high, ethical god. The Christians form a school of philosophers, and should be tolerated as such.

             In the Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew, Justin has his protagonist explain (one assumes more or less autobiographically) how he had sought wisdom among the philosophers, going to a Stoic, to a Peripatetic, to a Pythagorean, and finally to a Platonist, but always failing to find what he wanted. He followed the usual conception of philosophy at the time as a way of personal salvation, agreeing with Trypho that “philosophers turn every discourse on God,” and “questions continually arise among them about his unity and providence,” so that “it is truly the duty of a philosopher to investigate the deity.” Thus, he claims that religion and philosophy have the same ultimate aim, to find God. The Stoic, it seems, did not believe there was a God, the Peripatetic demanded a fee, thus proving that he was not truly teaching salvation but in it for the money, and the Pythagorean insisted that he learn mathematics and music first, and presumably Justin thought the saving truth would be available even to the unlearned. After he became a Platonist, he reports,

the perception of immaterial things quite overpowered me, and the contemplation of ideas furnished my mind with wings, so that in a little while I supposed that I had become wise, and such was my stupidity, I expected forthwith to look upon God, for this is the end of Plato’s philosophy.

After he was a Platonist for a little while, Justin says, he met an old man who convinced him that his philosophical notions were absurd, compared to the solid sense of the scriptures, and so he became a Christian. Thus we see how philosophy prepares the way for the Gospel, by showing people the correct aim, and helping them find out enough about God so that they can recognize the truth of Christianity when they encounter it, but we also see how philosophy fails to achieve the aim itself.

             Indeed, Christians are philosophers, and philosophers, up to a point, at least, Christians. Christians live as philosophers do, in accord with reason (logos), for Christ is Reason. Justin is not influenced in this doctrine by the Gospel of John or Philo, and it is not clear if he is familiar with either source. Our apologist does not hold that Christ is the logos, Reason, because he is a cosmogonic figure, John’s Word spoken by God, through which God creates the world, or Philo’s rational conception of the world, mediating God’s creation. As a Platonist, he does hold that Reason mediated the creation just as these authors said, and was begotten before creation, through an act of will in the way that we utter a word within our souls, which remains united to them, through an act of will. But Justin makes Christ Reason not because Christ participated in creation, but because, as a Platonist, he thinks Reason is divine, and Christ is, by definition, as it were, the divine as it occurs in human beings, and the source of God’s revelation. Since Christ is Reason, whatever philosophers have rightly said comes from Christ, since it comes from reason, and so Christians can claim it as their own. Rational thought is a gift from God, designed to lead us to Him. In particular, it is through our rational faculties that we choose to do what is right, and so pleasing to God, and thereby become worthy of immortality and fellowship with God. (Christ is also said to be the Truth in John, of course, but since Justin did not know this Gospel, he does not argue, as Clement of Alexandria did later, that inasmuch as reason leads men to the truth Christ, that is, God Himself, leads men to God.)

             Still, having praised philosophy thus, Justin insists that reason is not, in a world overcome by sin, the best road to God. Revelation is superior to philosophy because it is accessible to all, whereas only a few, in our present state, can fight their way to the truth through reason. Moreover, philosophers only share partially in the logos, whereas Christians, even the least intellectual, partake wholly of it. Christians behave rationally when they follow the authority of Christ, that is, they do the reasonable thing, even if they do not use their own reason to determine that it is reasonable. The immorality of the philosophers indicates that they can behave unreasonably (do the unreasonable thing) while depending on their reason, and, given the weakness of our reason, we might behave most reasonably (do reasonable things most reliably) by depending on God’s Word instead. The inadequate share of philosophy in the logos is indicated in the way in which philosophers contradict themselves, and, indeed, the Pagans would not have figured out the truth at all if they had not taken their views from the Old Testament. Our reason fails us, though, not because it is intrinsically weak, but because human beings have become subject to demons through sin (as Paul would have it in Romans), for the Pagan gods are simply demons. Thus it is that reason must become incarnate if we are to harken to it, and it must reside, as it were, outside us, and make demands as of authority on our belief. The old man convinced Justin to become a Christian, in the end, because Justin had lost faith in the power of his reason to achieve knowledge of God, and he saw, suddenly, a clear account why reason should have failed. Christianity, with its unique belief in the influence of demons on a mind made their prey through its fall into sin, appealed powerfully to the dissatisfied intellectual vainly seeking a saving belief through reason. Whether he sought to believe, as Paul did, in his own fundamental goodness, despite the evidence of his sin and weakness, or, as Justin did, in the possibility of knowing God, despite his evident personal failure to do it, the discovery at once of an explanation for failure and a method of success might relieve a strain grown intolerable, and in the joy of the release, lead to the experience of conversion to a new faith.

             It might nonetheless be asked, even by the intellectual on the threshold of conversion, why we should believe that Christianity contains God’s revelation of Himself. Justin’s reply relies on the prophecies of Christ’s life and crucifixion in the Old Testament. The prophecies cannot be magic, which is done with the aid of demons, since one must know God’s will to prophesy, and Christ’s coming would have been concealed from the demons. Only the prophecies certify the miracles performed by Christ and his Disciples as acts of God, rather than magic. The demons, it seems, attempted to imitate the events prophesied in the Old Testament to create doubt that it was the coming of Christ that was prophesied, but they could not understand the prophecies of the crucifixion, so there are no imitations of that event to muddy the waters. In connection with these points, Justin argues that human beings must have free will to be morally responsible, as they are, for their actions, but God can nonetheless foresee their actions, though not in such a way as would necessitate them.

             Concerning the superiority of Christian revelation to Platonic reason, the old man in the Dialogue with Trypho argues that we cannot see God unless we are “clothed with the holy ghost,” that is, not through our own efforts, but only through God’s self-revelation, and after the expulsion of demonic influence through God’s power. (The reference is no doubt to baptism, in which one renounces Satan, and welcomes the aid of the Spirit in expelling the demons, and after which one no longer traffics with demons in the omnipresent rituals of Pagan religion.) Justin responds that we see God, according to Plato, through reason, which is divine and immortal, not through our own, mortal and inadequate efforts, and that we see God especially when reason is separated from the body, but do not remember seeing God when reason is joined to the body later. The old man replies first that animals’ bodies are like ours, and so we should be no better than they are at seeing God, but Justin objects that we differ from animals not in our bodies but in our possession of reason, so that the similarity of bodies is not relevant to this issue. The old man makes a better point, though, or so Justin thinks, when he argues that one gains no advantage from the sight of God if one is then reborn and cannot remember it in this life, no more than suffering as an animal is a disadvantage to him who has done wrong when the animal cannot even remember the evil deed or view its life as inferior to that of a human being. In the end, this is an attack on the Platonic notion of an impersonal survival after death as pure reason. A satisfactory salvation from death has to extend to the human being in the body, with his memories and passions, not merely to his rational part. But it also rejects the Platonic notion that it is through Reason that we see God, asserting instead that we see God only through the action of the Spirit, which, of course, is God Himself. He rejects this view despite the fact that he is willing to view Reason as Christ the Logos in us.

             Plato taught rightly that God transcends matter, time and space, that He is immutable and impassible, and cannot be named. Moreover, he was right about the soul’s special kinship to God, and in his insistence that human beings are responsible for their actions, and will suffer judgment in the world to come. But the soul does not experience repeated incarnations, nor does it possess a natural immortality, despite its kinship to God. Its immortality depends on God’s will. Justin thought that Plato had learned from Moses (that is, the Pentateuch), and praises him for this. It was this and Christ, that is, reason, in him, that gained him freedom enough from the influence of the demons so that he could get this much right. Justin praises Socrates for perceiving the corruption of Pagan religion, and treats him as a precursor of Christian martyrs. He was hounded to death at the instigation of the demons that Pagans worship, and which he opposed.

             Justin takes the goal of philosophy to be the vision of God, not merely knowledge about God, but direct acquaintance and reconciliation with Him, and given this aim Justin’s disappointment with philosophy in general, and with Platonism in particular, which seems to promise the attainment of this goal, is not unreasonable. He would presumably hold it is obvious from his creation that God exists. His philosophical task, then, is to argue that the acceptance of the Christian revelation is sufficient to produce acquaintance and reconciliation with God. The validation of Christian Scripture through the prophecies is his chief strategy for accomplishing this. It is natural to assume that God would want to communicate with us, to tell us how to proceed in His world, so the issue is this—which of the purported revelations of God that are current is the genuine one. Such arguments as Justin makes surely would help us decide that. But Justin also depends on the natural human reliance on tradition, claiming that Christian doctrine is more ancient than all the Pagan writings (since the Prophets are more ancient), and asking us to accept it not because it resembles philosophy, but simply because it is true. The reliance on tradition here is rooted in the notion (apparent in Romans) that the truth is clear, and has always been known, and that rational argumentation is only a seductive, but endlessly complex and unreliable way either for people favoring nonsensical but “progressive” views to avoid the obvious, or for misguided defenders of common sense to provide uncertain “proofs” for what is clear in itself. And so Justin tells us that where Christian views agree with philosophy they will often be presented in a more sublime way by the Christians, and it is Christianity, not philosophy, that has the proof. Justin is after truth, but he sees no difficulty in the task. All this thought is unnecessary and ineffective—we should simply accept the answer from God.

4. TATIAN, ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS

The soul, men of Greece, is not in itself immortal but mortal; yet it also has the power to escape death. For if it is ignorant of the truth it dies and is dissolved with the body, but rises later at the end of the world along with the body, to suffer death by immortal punishment; on the other hand it does not die, even if it is dissolved for a time, if it has obtained knowledge of God. In itself it is dark and there is no light in it, and so the saying goes ‘The dark does not comprehend the light.’ For the soul does not itself preserve the spirit, but was preserved by it... if it gains union with the divine spirit it is not unaided, but mounts to the realms above where the spirit leads it; for the spirit’s home is above, but the soul’s birth is below. So the spirit became originally the soul’s companion, but gave it up when the soul was unwilling to follow it. The soul kept a spark, as it were, of the spirit’s power, yet because of its separation it could no longer see things that are perfect, and so in its search for God went astray and fashioned a multitude of gods, following the demons and their hostile devices.

                                                                                             Tatian, Address to the Greeks 13

             Tatian (about 120 - after 170) wrote an apology, the Address to the Greeks, sometime before 172. A Syrian, he was said by Irenaeus to have studied under Justin Martyr. Late in life he became a Valentinian, and founded a rigorist sect, Encratism, that regarded even marriage as fornication.

             Tatian’s attitude to the philosophical tradition is quite hostile, and if Justin’s apologies are modeled on Socrates’s apology, Tatian’s smacks strongly of the Cynic diatribe. He claimed that the Greeks stole all their ideas from the Barbarians, including many from the Old Testament (which he argues at length is much older than any Greek book) and then turned them into absurd allegories, and that the lives of all the philosophers except Socrates were immoral and base. Christianity provides a readily intelligible picture of the world, and one made available even to the poor and uneducated, unlike the incomprehensible complexities of philosophy, which can only be learned by those who can afford a good deal of leisure. Tatian appeals throughout to the hostility felt by many non-Greeks toward the Hellenistic culture their rulers and their own upper classes tried to impose upon them. Christianity, of course, is reasonable, and a man of wisdom, whose mind is not clouded by sin and the work of demons, will accept the religion. This is not, as it turns out, due to the natural ability of a person to know, but rather to the presence of the Spirit in those who are free of sin. It is through the Spirit that we recognize the word of God. Tatian, of course, nowhere equates the Spirit with rationality, and even if he speaks speak of the Logos, Christ, as one with the Father, and the ‘firstborn’ of the Father, which is in God’s essence, he also refuses Justin’s line that Christ is to be identified with the philosopher’s Reason. In all probability he would be scandalized by any such suggestion, and rejects the notion that philosophy is a preparation for the Gospel, or that reason is divine. He also rejects quite explicitly the Platonic notion that matter existed prior to God’s creation, insisting that matter was created by God.

             But Tatian follows Justin in denying the natural immortality of the soul. Immortality is a divine trait, like reason, and must come from some participation in the divine, and so Tatian identifies the Spirit as the source of the soul’s immortality, and that wherein its likeness to God resides. The soul must follow the Spirit if it is to escape death, though death is figurative for Tatian, that is, the sinner will suffer forever in Hell. Since the Fall, the Spirit dwells in a human being only after conversion to the faith, for it fled from human beings when the demons gained dominion. Without the Spirit human beings differ from animals only in the power of speech, for animals too have souls, or so Tatian tells us. But Tatian also says it is by the right use of free will, something we are all capable of, and something in which we differ from the beasts, that we can regain the Spirit. This free will is present in the sinful because the soul “kept a spark, as it were, of the Spirit’s power” even when the Spirit had left it.

             The doctrine of the Spirit here smacks of a Gnostic approach, at least to later tastes, and Tatian’s general picture of salvation certainly fits the Gnostic picture. To be saved, one must come to be “taught of God,” and freed from the demons by the knowledge thus gained, one will regain the lost portion of the divine spirit, and so become immortal, living out an eternal life in a better world than this. Nonetheless, the Address suggests that its author is orthodox on othe