How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (7 page)

In these highly Hellenized social settings it was inevitable that Greek philosophy would influence religious perspectives. As Chadwick put it: “As early as Philo, we see that the current intellectual coin of the more literate classes of society is this blend of Stoic ethics with Platonic metaphysics and some Aristotelian logic. Like the form of Greek spoken in the hellenistic world … Philo simply takes it for granted.”
¹¹
Thus, the most revered and influential Jewish leader and writer of the era, Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–AD 50), attempted to interpret the law “through the mirror of Greek philosophy,”
¹²
and he described God in ways that Plato would have found familiar: “the perfectly pure unsullied Mind of the universe, transcending virtue, transcending knowledge, transcending good itself and the beautiful itself.”
¹³
According to scholar Erwin R. Goodenough, Philo “read Plato in terms of Moses, and Moses in terms of Plato, to the point he was convinced that each said essentially the same things.”
¹⁴

But Philo was wrong. Although it is true that the Jewish conception of God is consistent with some aspects of the supreme God proposed by Plato, Aristotle, and the other Greek philosophers, the Jewish God is different in important ways. Like Plato and Aristotle’s God,
Yahweh
is believed to be perfect, eternal, and immutable. But he is no remote ideal. He is the loving Creator who is intensely conscious of humankind. He sees and hears; he communicates; he
intervenes
. And it was the fully developed Jewish conception of God, not the remote and inert God of the Greeks or even the God of Philo, that shaped Christian theology and underlay the rise of the West.

Early Christianity and Greek Philosophy

From the start, the early Christian fathers were familiar with Greek philosophy—Paul correctly quoted the Stoic Greek poet Aratus (ca. 315–240 BC) in his impromptu sermon to local philosophers on Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17:28). In fact, some early and influential Christian theologians had been trained as philosophers before they converted to Christianity. And as their conversions testified, the many points of agreement between the philosophers and Christian theology were widely
acknowledged. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215), who probably was born in Athens and who studied with several philosophical masters before converting, wrote:

Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness … being a kind of preparatory training.… Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring “the Hellenic mind,” as the law, the Hebrews, “to Christ.” Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.
¹⁵

Perhaps no early church father held Greek philosophy in higher regard than did Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165). Justin was born into a Greek-speaking pagan family in Samaria, was formally trained in philosophy, and continued to wear his philosopher’s cloak even after his conversion to Christianity in about 130. Eventually he opened a school in Rome where two future church fathers, Irenaeus and Tatian, may have been his students. Justin was given the surname “Martyr” for having been flogged and beheaded during an outbreak of anti-Christian persecution during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Justin held that “the gospel and the best elements in Plato and the Stoics are almost identical ways of apprehending the same truth.”
¹⁶
One reason for this close correspondence, according to Justin, was that the Greeks depended immensely on Moses—a view ratified by Philo as well as by Neoplatonist contemporaries of Justin, including Plotinus, who asked, “What is Plato, but Moses in Attic Greek?”
¹⁷
In this sense, Justin identified the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers as “Christians before Christ.”
¹⁸
Of course, he and other early Christian thinkers were wrong about the early Greeks having learned from Moses, as Saint Augustine wryly admitted in his
City of God.
¹⁹
But that doesn’t alter the fact of extensive similarities between Christianity and Platonism.

Justin gave a second reason for the great similarity between Christian theology and Greek philosophy: both rested on the divine gift of reason, which, he said, “has sown the seeds of truth in all men as beings created in God’s image.”
²⁰
And since God’s greatest gift to humanity was the power to reason, Christian revelation must be entirely compatible with “the highest Reason.”
²¹
Consequently, Justin viewed Jesus as
a philosopher as well as the son of God, as the personification of “right reason.”
²²

To Justin, then, Plato was correct when he conceived of God as outside the universe, timeless, and immutable, and when he said that humans possessed free will. But Justin, Clement, and other early Christian writers also pointed out many shortcomings in Greek philosophy. For example, they denied Greek claims that God was remote and impersonal, that souls took up life in a new body, and that lesser gods existed. And where Greek philosophy and Christianity disagreed, according to Justin, the latter was authoritative, for philosophy was merely human, whereas Christianity was divine—revelation was the ultimate basis of truth.

One problem early Christian writers identified was that none of the numerous divinities in the Greek pantheon was adequate to serve as a conscious creator of a lawful universe, not even Zeus. Like humans, the Greek gods were subject to the inexorable workings of the natural cycles of all things. Some Greek scholars, including Aristotle, did posit a god of infinite scope having charge of the universe, but they conceived of this god as essentially an impersonal essence, much like the Chinese Tao. Such a god lent a certain spiritual aura to a cyclical universe and its ideal, abstract properties, but being an essence, “God”
did
nothing and never had.

Even when Plato posited a demiurge—an inferior god who served as creator of the world, the supreme God being too remote and spiritual for such an enterprise—this creator paled in contrast with an omnipotent God who made the universe out of nothing.
²³
Moreover, for Plato the universe had been created in accord not with firm operating principles but with ideals. These primarily consisted of ideal shapes. Thus the universe must be a sphere because that is the symmetrical and perfect shape, and heavenly bodies must rotate in a circle because that is the motion that is most perfect.
²⁴
As a priori assumptions, Platonic idealism long impeded discovery: many centuries later, Copernicus’s unshakable belief in ideal shapes prevented him from entertaining the thought that planetary orbits might be elliptical, not circular.

A second problem in Greek philosophy, according to early Christian writers, related to the Greek conception of the universe as not only eternal and uncreated but also locked into endless cycles of progress and decay. In
On the Heavens
, Aristotle noted that “the same ideas recur to
men not once or twice but over and over again,” and in his
Politics
he pointed out that everything has “been invented several times over in the course of ages, or rather times without number.” Since he was living in a Golden Age, he concluded, the levels of technology of his time were at the maximum attainable level, precluding further progress. As for inventions, so too for individuals—the same persons would be born again and again as the blind cycles of the universe rolled along. According to Chrysippus in his now-lost
On the Cosmos
, the Stoics taught that the “difference between former and actual existences of the same people will be only extrinsic and accidental; such differences do not produce another man as contrasted with his counterpart from a previous world-age.”
²⁵
As for the universe itself, Parmenides held that all perceptions of change are illusions, for the universe is in a static state of perfection, “uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end.”
²⁶
Other influential Greeks, such as the Ionians, taught that although the universe is infinite and eternal, it also is subject to endless cycles of succession. Although Plato saw things a bit differently, he too firmly believed in cycles, that eternal laws caused each Golden Age to be followed by chaos and collapse.

Finally, the early Christians saw that the Greeks insisted on turning the cosmos, and inanimate objects more generally, into
living things
. Plato taught that the demiurge had created the cosmos as “a single visible living creature.” Hence the world had a soul, and although “solitary,” it was “able by reason of its excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend but sufficient to itself.”
²⁷
The problem with transforming inanimate objects into living creatures capable of aims, emotions, and desires was that it short-circuited the search for physical theories. The causes of the motion of objects, for example, were ascribed to
motives
, not to natural forces. According to Aristotle, celestial bodies moved in circles because of their affection for this action, and objects fell to the ground “because of their innate love for the centre of the world.”
²⁸

For these reasons, the early Christian fathers did not fully embrace Greek philosophy. They were content to demonstrate where it supported Christian doctrines and, where there was disagreement, to show how much more rational and satisfying were the Christian views.
²⁹
Thus the primary effect of Greek philosophy on Christianity had far less to do with doctrines per se than with the commitment of even the earliest Christian theologians to reason and logic.
³⁰

The Rational Creator of the Cosmos

Justin Martyr was not alone in stressing the authority of reason.
³¹
That has been the most fundamental assumption of influential Christian theologians from earliest times. From the very start the church fathers were forced to reason out the implications of Jesus’s teachings, which Jesus did not leave as written scripture. The precedent for a theology of deduction and inference began with Paul: “For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect.”
³²

As Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 225) put it, “Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing which he has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.”
³³
This was echoed in
The Recognitions
, which tradition attributed to Clement of Rome: “Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.”
³⁴

Hence the immensely influential Saint Augustine (354–430) merely expressed the prevailing wisdom when he held that reason was indispensable to faith: “Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.” Augustine added that although it was necessary “for faith to precede reason in certain matters of great moment that cannot yet be grasped, surely the very small portion of reason that persuades us of this must precede faith.”
³⁵

Augustine devoted all of book 8 in his
City of God
to explicating and assessing the bonds between Greek philosophy and Christianity, placing the primary emphasis on reason as a basis of truth. He noted that Plato “perfected philosophy” by using reason to prove the existence of God and to deduce many of his aspects from the many observations of order in the universe—such as the predictable movements of the heavenly bodies, the succession of the seasons, and the rise and fall of the tides.
³⁶

But Augustine recognized something else inherent in Plato’s commitment to reason: Socrates had surpassed his predecessors, Plato had advanced knowledge beyond Socrates, and Christianity was far advanced beyond all the Greeks—clearly philosophy was
progressive.
Indeed,
some Greek philosophers were inclined to think that history was itself a progressive phenomenon.
³⁷
Augustine shared that view, stressing that the general trajectory of history is progressive as knowledge accumulates and technology improves. Scholars have identified this belief as
the idea of progress
.

By this I do not mean that human progress is
inevitable
, as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) may have believed, but merely that, at least in the West, there has been a progressive trend, especially in the sphere of technology, and in the widespread agreement that things can be and ought to be made better. Because humans lead their lives “under the spell of ideas,”
³⁸
the idea of progress has marked the path to modernity.

Faith in Progress

A remarkable amount of nonsense has been taught about the idea of progress. The prolific Cambridge professor J. B. Bury’s 1920 book
The Idea of Progress
dominated opinion for several generations with the message that belief in progress is a recent development, having originated during the eighteenth-century era sometimes called the Enlightenment. This claim is as mistaken as the notion that science developed despite the barriers religion erected. The truth is that science arose only because the doctrine of the rational creator of a rational universe made scientific inquiry plausible. Similarly, the idea of progress was inherent in Jewish conceptions of history and was central to Christian thought from very early days.