| #### 2. THE FIRST APOLOGISTS |

| #### #### What was there in the religion of the Catholic Church to interest the Pagans of this century so desperately interested in religion? Had it any "message" for the enquirer who sought security of mind and peace of soul, and sought in vain from mystery cults and magic? from first one, and then another, of the day's moral philosophies? Celsus, the most informed perhaps of all its early opponents, was to sneer at Christianity as a religion that began with fishermen and publicans. Had it then nothing to offer to the educated, to the intellectuals? Was it no more than an association of mutual benevolence, a friendly society with its ritual and passwords, a kindly sentimental morality? The answer to these questions was the writings of Christianity's first publicists, the so-called Apologists. #### The name Apologist is conventionally restricted to a small group of some fifteen writers. Half of them -- Quadratus, Miltiades Melito for example -- are little more than names to us, for their works, all but a few fragments, have perished. In other cases whole treatises remain from which we can discover the common aim which inspired this great literary effort, study its methods, and form some estimate of its importance in the development of Catholic theological thought and of the technical language in which it has come to be expressed. This second more important group includes the Greeks Aristides, Athenagoras, Hermias and St. Theophilus of Antioch, the Syrian Tatian, the Latins Minucius Felix and Tertullian, and St. Justin Martyr. In date their work ranges from the Apology to [the Emperor] Antoninus Pius of Aristides (between 138- 161) and Hermias' A Laugh at the Heathen Philosophers of perhaps seventy years later. Tertullian, the greatest writer of them all, was something more than an apologist and will be discussed elsewhere. A more representative figure is St. Justin Martyr, and the school, with its merits and its weaknesses, is perhaps best described in him. #### A double object inspires the writings of the Apologists. They hope to clear their religion of the calumnious charges which the Pagan world takes as proved against it, and so to persuade the emperors to a policy of toleration. They hope, also, to make clear to the associates and friends of their own pre-Christian life the beauty and truth of their new belief. They are converts from Paganism, converts from the Philosophical sects, who have not ceased to philosophise with their baptism but, realising now that their new faith is the goal of all thought, they burn with the desire to communicate this good news to those by whose side they sat in the lecture rooms of Rome and Athens, or those to whom they themselves once taught the consolations of Stoicism and the divine Plato. With St. Paul (Philipp. iv, 8) they made their own whatever is true, whatever is just, the virtuous and praiseworthy, wherever they found it. They carefully sought out whatever of truth or goodness there was in Pagan thought and inspiration and, made the most of it, that it might serve as a bridge for the heathens to pass from the philosophies to Christ. Christianity was the unknown good, and to it unconsciously all men of goodwill tended. The Apologists hoped then to dispose the pagan mind for Christianity. They did not set out to instruct the Pagan in the full detail of Christian belief -- and the Apologists' limited objective must be continually borne in mind when their writings are used as evidence of early Christian belief. From the nature of the Apologists' case, they prefer to elaborate those points where Christian teaching confirms Philosophy, to discuss natural virtues and those truths about God which are discoverable by the natural reason. All the stock topics of the day find treatment in their writings -- the unity of God, the unicity of God, the soul’s immortality, the future life as a sanction of morality. These are the substance of their apologetic appeal. #### St. Justin was born in Palestine round about the year 100. He was not only a philosopher by education and taste, but by profession too! earning his living by teaching philosophy. In his search for truth he passed from one school to another and was Stoic, Aristotelian, Neo-Pythagorean, Neo-Platonist by turn. Finally, when thirty-eight years of age, he was converted to Christianity at Ephesus, and passing to Rome opened there a school where he taught Christianity as a philosophy. At Rome he flourished for nearly thirty years, until the malice of a rival, worsted in debate, set the persecuting laws in motion against him and, under the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, thrown to the beasts, he died a martyr in 165 His surviving works are his two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. St. Justin's reasoned presentation of Christianity has for its starting point the principle that Christianity is itself a philosophy. More striking than its differences from other philosophies are the many points it has in common with them. Those differences, too, are not so much real oppositions as shades of meaning. The Faith does no more than teach with greater security what Plato and the Stoics teach. Faith teaches with divine authority, and Faith can prove with reason what it teaches. The origin of this likeness between Philosophy and Christianity is, for St. Justin, twofold. First of all, the philosophers originally learned these truths from the Old Testament -- an idea popular, before St. Justin, with the philosophising Jews of Alexandria. Then -- by a theory of St. Justin's own invention, destined to make a name for itself -- the philosophers had profited from the activity of the Divine Logos. The Logos, whose incarnation in Jesus Christ was the beginning of Christianity, had, from the beginning, made Himself known to the Pagans as well as to the Jews. To the Jews He had spoken by the prophets and the writers of the sacred books, to the Pagans through the philosophers. This revelation through the philosophers was indeed less complete than that made to the Jews. None the less it was sufficient to make possible the philosophers' discovery of the truths of natural religion. This seed of the Logos (Logos Spermatikos) planted in every man's mind from the beginning, was the true source of philosophical truth. Between Philosophy then and Christianity there could not be any real and final opposition. All who have lived according to that light are Christians, Socrates and Heraclitus as truly as Abraham. Christianity is the fulfilment of Philosophy, Jesus Christ of Socrates ! The revelation through the Logos Spermatikos was incomplete, and from its incompleteness errors were bound to follow. Hence the mistakes of even the best of philosophers. But now, the Logos has appeared incarnate, the fullness of revelation is come by which the errors of the past may be corrected. The philosopher who is logical embraces Christianity. #### The argument against the sufficiency of the philosophies of the day, thus roughly summarised, is but one side of the Apologist's work. He criticises the pagan religions, their insufficiency, their puerility, their immorality. He defends the Christians from the vile calumnies which, to the man in the street, justified the persecutions. He addresses himself also to the Jews, responsible, in the eyes of St. Justin, for many of the calumnies whose refutation occupies his time. The accord of their own prophetic writings with subsequent history and the present event, proves the Church to be the divine fulfilment of the religion of Abraham and Moses. The true Israel of to-day is the Church of Christ. #### It is not easy to say how much this first learned appeal for a hearing achieved. The calumnies continued, as did the persecution. Nor have we any data by which to judge of the fruit of the Apologies among the Pagan elite. They remain, however, a valuable evidence of the first contact of Christianity with the thought of the contemporary Pagan world; and, in addition, they are of absorbing interest as the first attempts of members of the Church to clothe its traditional beliefs in philosophical language. With the Apologists Catholic Theology is born -- the development of the content of Revelation by human reasoning under the guidance of that authoritative teaching which, from the beginning, has been one of the new religion's most striking features. With these fir t beginnings of speculation on the data of Revelation there begins no less surely the trouble bred in the Church by the thinker who claims for his thought, for his own carefully worked-out explanation of the revealed tradition, a superiority over the tradition itself. Here, too, is the real origin of those discussions which fill the fourth and fifth centuries, and which can never be really understood if these primitive theologians are neglected. Inevitably the Apologist's trained mind was drawn to the exploration of the meaning of the great mysteries of the Christian tradition. The urge of his own piety, the passion to explain all, to know all that is knowable, made it impossible for him not to attempt the task of describing these mysteries philosophically. #### So it was with the mystery we know as that of the Trinity. God was one. Jesus Christ was God because the Logos incarnate. And yet Jesus Christ was not God the Father. Again there was the absorbing question of the relation of the Father and the Logos before the incarnation, and the question of the eternal generation of the Logos. These difficulties did not challenge in vain. The Apologists boldly showed the way to eighteen centuries of Christian thinkers. Like pioneers of every type they had to devise instruments and machinery as they went along. The road was unplotted, the obstacles unknown and, when known, for long not fully understood; the rough tools were sometimes a hindrance as well as a help. They use, for example, the concepts and language of the philosophical schools to which they at one time adhered, and thence ensues a host of new difficulties for the student of their teaching. The modern scholar picks his way easily through the difficulties of such high speculation, equipped with a tested technical language which they lacked. Of that language they were the founders. In their stumblings and gropings it was born. Inevitably there is, at times, in their speculation an uneasiness, a confusion and an obscurity which leave room for contrary interpretations of their meaning. Little wonder, then, that the efforts of these first private theologians bred a certain uneasiness on the part of the Authority whose mission it was to preserve at all costs the traditional faith, and for whom, by comparison with that high duty, the need to explain philosophically that faith's coherence was of secondary importance. #### St. Justin, faithful to the tradition, explains that there is only one God and that in God there are to be distinguished the Father, the Logos or Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father is God as the source of divinity and is therefore the Creator who formed all things from nothing. Nevertheless, following St. John (i. 3), creation was, by the Father's will, through the Logos, and so too, through the Logos, has God chosen to reveal himself to man (St. John i. 18) and to redeem him. Creation, revelation and redemption are the work of the one only God. The Logos is truly God; not a creature, not an angel. "God of God Begotten" says Theophilus of Antioch. The Logos exists before all creation, is not himself made nor created, but begotten and therefore truly Son of God. The Logos then is really distinct from the Father. For all the distinction's reality, it does not imply any division of the indivisible divinity, any separation of Logos from the Father. The next two questions to suggest themselves were that of the moment of the generation of the Logos, and, deriving from this, the question of the difference in the relation of Father to Logos before and after the creation. The current philosophical theories of the day once more came to the thinker's aid. These notions the Apologists adapted to explain the Christian mystery of the Trinity. #### Logos in Greek means the word as spoken, and it also means the conceived idea of which the spoken word is the manifestation. The Stoics had thence developed a theory of the Logos as immanent and as manifested. St. Justin put it to a Christian use. #### The Logos existing from all eternity, did not exist from all eternity in a real distinction from the Father. As a term really distinct He exists only from the moment of the generation, and that moment was the moment of God's willingness to create. Until that moment the Divine Logos is Logos Endiathetos -- the Logos Immanent in God. At that moment, in a manner of speaking, the Logos issues forth. Thenceforward He is Logos Prophorikos -- the Logos Manifested -- and really distinct. This is the theory which has been called (none too correctly) the theory of the temporal generation of the Logos. The Logos, moreover, since He is in function the minister of the Divine Will is "subordinate" to the Father -- a subordination however not of nature, for the Logos is equally God with the Father and God is one. This is subordinationism, but only in so far as it is an attempt to describe the role of the Logos in the Divine ordering of things. It neither necessitates, nor implies, any theory of the inferiority of the Logos to the Father in nature. #### Through the Logos manifested had come the Creation, and the partial revelation to the philosophers and to the Jews. Through the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ had come the fullness of revelation and the Church. It is from the Church that the disciple learns of His work and its fruits, how He died on our behalf to ransom us from the death which sin had merited. His death is the principal cause of our redemption, and, as Jesus Christ the Incarnate Logos restored what Adam the first of mankind had ruined, so Mary, consenting to be the mother of Him Who is mankind's salvation, repaired the ills that followed from Eve's disobedience. #### St. Justin is primarily a polemist. He has set himself to the restricted task of the defence and explanation of special points, and this to a restricted audience of Pagans. None the less he describes the Christian life, makes clear the ritual, as well as the doctrine, of Baptism; and he has left the most precious description of the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist, in primitive times, which we possess. ####  |