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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.
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