The questions of the extent to which early
Christian thought was influenced by Hellenism and whether that influence should
be met with disapproval or approbation have been debated by theologians for at
least a century and a half. In 1892
A. M. Fairbairn edited and
posthumously published a collection of lectures by Edwin Hatch titled The Influence of Greek Ideas and
Usages Upon the Christian Church. Since that time it has generally been accepted
that the thought of the early Christians was largely shaped by Hellenism.
Because of this historical trend in
scholarship, it is common for writers about church history to assert that
shortly after the time of the apostles, or even during the time of the
apostles, the essentially Hebraic, biblical framework of the gospel message was
replaced or greatly influenced by Hellenistic thought and philosophy. In the Spirit
of Early Christian Thought, Robert Louis Wilken argues that this is not the
correct way to view the early church. He asserts that, “The notion that…early
Christian thought represented a hellenization of Christianity has outlived it’s
usefulness,” and that, “a more apt expression would be the Christianization of
Hellenism.”
Wilken proposes that, instead of being dependent on Greco-Roman thought, early
Christian thinkers showed independence from the philosophical ideas of their
surrounding culture.
Wilken goes beyond a mere narrative of
events or catalogue of ideas in order to show what motivated the leaders of the
early church as they developed the intellectual and liturgical expressions of
the Christian faith. He argues that three particular marks of early Christian
thought show this independence of mind. Early Christians argued from Old
Testament history and the life of Christ, from the experience of the ritual of
Christian worship, and from the Scripture themselves. Of these, he says that he
was most impressed in his research by “the omnipresence of the Bible in early
Christian writings.”
Early Christian thinkers certainly interacted with their culture, but because
they were beginning from these three points, they were able to “acknowledge the
good and right qualities of Hellenic thinking,” while at the same time
“transform[ing] them so profoundly that in the end something quite new came
into being.” If
Wilken is correct in his assessment, then the history of early Christian
thought should be read not as a cautionary tale of biblical thinking being
subverted by pagan worldviews, but as a picture of how a pagan culture is
transformed by Christianity and as a model for Christians today in a culture
that is increasingly hostile to the faith.
Wilken arranges his book around these three
starting points, history, worship, and scripture, and shows how these affected
the thought of early Christians in five areas. He begins with foundational
beliefs, covering the knowledge of God, worship and the sacraments, and
scripture. He then focuses on specifically Christian teachings regarding the
Trinity, the work of Christ, and creation. Next, he discusses the lives of
believers both in their private faith and in their relationship to society. He
then writes about the development of unique Christian culture in the realm of
poetry and art. Finally, he addresses the moral and spiritual aspects of
Christian life, showing how a Christian view of morality acknowledged the best
ideas of Greek ethicists while framing morality in the context of Biblical
teachings on holiness.
Through all of these discussions, Wilken says that he intends to “show the
indispensability of love to Christian thinking.”
This review will examine the manner in which
Wilken makes his case regarding each of these five areas of Christian life and
belief. Next, the benefits of the transformation of Hellenistic culture by
Christianity will be examined. Finally some potential pitfalls of this process
of transformation will be highlighted.
Wilken’s Case
Foundations
Wilken says that a good place to begin the
story of early Christian thought is with the questions posed by outsiders.
Far from believing that Christians were accepting and adapting to Greco-Roman
thought, “Christians, it was thought, jettisoned the wisdom of the past.”
Breaking with the Platonic idea that the soul is eternal in itself, Christians
believed that the soul was a creation of God, and the continued life of the
soul is a gift of God.
God is known not through arguments or through internal illumination but through
His self revelation in history and by trusting those who have recorded and
testify to that revelation.
This way of knowing God stands in stark
contrast to the typical philosophical approach to knowing God. In the
philosophical world “all knowledge of God came through the activity of the mind
purged of impressions received by the senses.”
Origen highlights this difference in his work Against Celsus where he
argues that the knowledge of God must being with God’s descent to human beings
in history. In this way, the gospel is a self validating proof.
Wilken argues that in all of this, Christians did not fully abandon the
philosophical tradition, but gave it a different starting point, God’s
revelation. “Now one reasoned from Christ to other things, not from other
things to Christ.”
Far from demolishing reason, this starting point “gave men and women new
confidence in reason.”
Wilken follows this up with a discussion of
worship. Though it made use of philosophy, the starting point for Christian
thought was the Word of God and the
worship of God. “Christian thinkers always began with specific biblical texts,”
and, “what they believed is anchored in regular, indeed habitual, participation
in the church’s worship.”
Wilken shows that the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being a Greek
philosophical way of talking about God, is rooted in the prayers of the early
church to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Wilken also discusses the way that the celebration of Baptism and the Eucharist
shaped Christian views about sacraments and the liturgical year. Preaching as
part of worship, likewise, was rooted in the Bible. Combining the two emphases,
Sacrament and Word, Wilken states, “…in the early church the words of the Bible
were the linguistic skeleton for the exposition of ideas,” and, “The liturgy
provided a kind of grammar of Christian speech, a key to how the words of the
Bible are to be used.”
In regard to the text of the Bible as a foundation for early Christian thought,
Wilken focuses on Clement of Alexandria. Clement is often used as an example by
scholars of an early Christian thinker who was completely influenced by Greek
thought. Wilken acknowledges that Clement presented the Bible in ways that
sounded more like the prose his readers were accustomed to, and frequently made
use of the Greek philosophers and rhetors. However, “[a] rough calculation
indicates that on average there are seven or eight biblical citations on every
page of his writings. There are more than fifteen hundred references to the Old
Testament and close to three thousand to the New Testament.”
In other words, thought Clement adapted his writings to his Greco-Roman
audience, he remained rooted in the Bible as the primary source of his thought.
Wilken goes on to show how Clement shifted ideas of likeness and telos
from Greek philosophy to a more biblical foundation by relating them to
creation in Genesis. Deliverance from sin, not developing good habits is the
first step toward achieving the chief end of human life.
Teachings
In the next section of the book, Wilken
focuses on three particular areas of Christian teaching and how they developed:
the Trinity, the Work of Christ, and Creation. He begins his discussion of the
Trinity with the Resurrection of Jesus. The thinker Wilken chooses to follow in
this chapter is Hilary of Poitiers who wrote the first great western work on
the Trinity. For Hilary, the doctrine of the Trinity begins to arise from the
fact that early Christians “were observant Jews who every morning recited the
Sh’ma,” the declaration that God is one.
However, after Christ’s Resurrection, Thomas, a faithful Jew, addressed Jesus
as “My Lord and my God,” the same terms that appear in the Sh’ma.
Hilary argues that because of the Resurrection we know Jesus to be God, but we
also know God to be one. This creates the necessity for the doctrine of the
Trinity. Wilken further shows how the person of Divine Wisdom seen in Old
Testament writings came to be equated with Christ
and how the tripartite prayer of early Christians led to the recognition of the
Holy Spirit as God as well.
Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of a scholastic tendency
influenced by Greek thought, but from the history of the church, the words of
scripture, and the worship of Christians.
Subsequent to the development of the doctrine
of the Trinity, early Christians had to come to grips with how Jesus could be
both God and man. This led to the major Christological controversies, and
heresies such as Docetism and Ebionism. Rather than focus on these
controversies, however, Wilken chooses to follow Cyril of Alexandria as he wrestles
with the identity of Christ, and he shows how Cyril was motivated, not by Greek
thought, but by an attempt to understand Christ’s drawing back in the Garden of
Gethsemane. Specifically it was the equation of Christ’s glory with His
suffering that perplexed Cyril.
If Christ’s glory lay in suffering then His death on the cross, more than
simply the abstract fact of God taking on human flesh, was at the heart of His
purpose and our redemption. Likewise, if Christ did not take on all that it
meant to be human, then humans are not redeemed by His substitutionary death.
Maximus the Confessor recognized this as why it is essential to argue that
Jesus had a human as well as divine will. “’If it is only as God that he wills
these things,’ then his flesh is ‘lifeless and irrational.’”
Again, these issues are raised by the text of Scripture itself rather than by
outside philosophical concerns.
Finally, Wilken shows how, by beginning with
Creation in Genesis, early Christians rejected large portions of Greek thought
on the world and mankind. Augustine was emphatic about the fact that the Bible
portrays creation as good.
This stands in stark contrast to Platonism and to neo-Platonic philosophies and
religions such as Manichaeism which we explicitly or implicitly dualistic.
Basil of Caesarea likewise found insight in Genesis, especially in the fact
that special creation shows “’artistic
reason,’ not a matter of ‘arbitrary power’ or chance.”
This idea that creation is purposeful flies in the face of Epicureanism which
rejects the idea of telos and Stoicism which believes in an impersonal
fate. Finally, Wilken shows how Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, takes up the
interpretation of Genesis and develops it further. Gregory challenged the
common Greek perception that man is a microcosm, a small scale model of the
universe itself, so necessary to Plato’s ideal of the Republic. Rather,
in viewing man as being made in the image of God, Gregory concluded that man’s
mind resembles God’s superior nature and that man has a freedom and liberty
that makes him above the rest of creation.
Again, these are examples Wilken portrays of Christian thought, rooted in
Scripture, transforming Greek culture and ideas.
Believers
In the following section of the book, Wilken
expounds on an idea he raised earlier. Christianity, far from subverting
reason, rescued reason and gave it new life. By insisting that knowledge of God
begin with faith in the facts of revelation, Christians established that
different kinds of knowledge require different sorts of demonstration.
Historical claims are not subject to scientific demonstration; nor are they
subject to mathematical proof. They constitute a different sort of claim that
can be argued for with evidence, but which, in the end, requires faith or trust
to be believed. Augustine originally rejected the word “knowledge” for this
kind of belief, preferring to distinguish the two kinds of knowledge. However,
later in his life, he recognized that in common usage the word “know” has a
range of meaning that includes historical belief.
In doing this, Augustine shifted the question from “What should I believe?” to
“Whom should I believe?”
This gets at the root of the Christian idea of “faith” from the word “peitho”
meaning “I am persuaded.” Faith, then, forms a foundation from which to reason
by appealing to the trustworthy testimony of those who have gone before and
witnessed the original historical events of the Christian faith.
Next, Wilken turns his attention to the
relationship of Christianity to culture. The major theologian here is, of
course, Augustine, and the work Wilken focuses on is City of God. Unlike
Plato’s Republic, which presents the philosopher’s ideal city, one in
which all parts are in perfect balance, just like the perfectly balanced soul
of a just man, Augustine does not present an ideal city. Augustine’s city “is
not an ideal but an actual city, a living community to which one belongs.”
Augustine posits the City of Man, the political reality in which Christians
find themselves, but also the City of God a city that exists among the people
of God whose aim is “perfectly ordered and harmonious fellowship in the
enjoyment of God.”
Again, Wilken emphasizes the way Augustine digresses from the culture around
him and looks to Scripture and Christian life as the models for his thought,
while still showing a vast knowledge and familiarity with the culture and
thought of the pagan world.
Christian Culture and Life
In the final sections of the book, Wilken
focuses on culture and daily life. He shows how early Christian poetry
developed, from the simple and elegant hymns of the New Testament to the
non-liturgical poetry of Prudentius. Prudentius wed “metrical virtuosity
and…verbal allusions to Virgil and Ovid and Horace”
to Christian virtues and “the glorious deeds of
Christ.”
This stands as another example of a Christian who was not simply transformed by
Greco-Roman thought, but who took Greco-Roman forms and transformed them for
the glorification of Christ. An account follows of the rise of Christian art,
especially in the form of icons. Wilken shows that the defenders of icons
against the iconoclasts argued, not from completely pagan arguments, although
there are some such examples, but largely from the incarnation of Christ. A
rejection of icons was seen by many as a rejection of the idea that God became
a visible man in the incarnation.
Wilken concludes his book with a look at the
way Christian thought transformed pagan views of moral and spiritual life. He
most specifically shows how the Greek idea of telos in morality, the
happiness acquired by the practice of virtue is transformed by the idea of
Christian repentance and the ultimate telos of fellowship with God.
Because of this, habitual practice in the four cardinal virtues is not enough for
Christian morality. Spiritual virtues such as the fruit of the Spirit from
Galatians 5 and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love were added.
Virtue was seen not “simply a matter of spiritual athleticism…Christian life is
Trinitarian, oriented toward God the supreme good, formed by the life of
Christ, and moved toward the good by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”
Likewise early Christian thought removed from the life of virtue the idea of
emotional detachment, and made love and wrath part of virtue.
Evaluation
Overall in this book, Wilken does an
excellent job of proving his point that early Christians were part of their
Greco-Roman culture but that they did not use that culture as a starting point
for thought. Rather the history of the faith, the regular rituals of Christian
worship, and the words of Scripture formed the foundation of their thought.
This allowed Christians to embrace whatever was acceptable and true in their
culture while rejecting the errors of pagan thought.
Wilken does not specifically address the
potential pitfalls of this approach to cultural engagement. In his book, the
potential dangers are most clearly seen in the chapters on the person of Christ
and icons. With regard to the person of Christ, the treatment of the incarnation
as a philosophical abstraction was in danger of obscuring the real historical
Jesus of Nazareth until the discussion was re-centered firmly on the gospel
accounts. In the case of icons, many of the iconodules created straw man
arguments of their opponents and used justifications of the use of icons that
had been used by philosophers as well to defend using statues of the gods whom
they claimed to be transcendent. In this case, though Wilken has sympathy with
the iconodules, it appears that the iconoclasts were the party more rooted in
biblical thought, and they lost out in the historical arena.
As a whole, The Spirit of Early Christian
Thought proffers a persuasive reading of early Christian thought as
transformative rather than transformed, and in the process holds up a model of
cultural engagement for Christians today while demonstrating the potential
dangers inherent in such an approach.
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