Hellenism and Christianity in the First Centuries of Our Era (1)

Christianity is not opposed to Greek philosophy as one doctrine to another doctrine. The natural and spontaneous form of Christianity is not didactic and written teaching. In the Christian communities of the apostolic age, composed of artisans and ordinary people, the concerns of fraternity and mutual assistance dominate in the expectation of a near consummation of things. Nothing but circumstantial writings, epistles, accounts of the history of Jesus, acts of the apostles, to strengthen and propagate the faith in the kingdom of heaven; no coherent and reasoned doctrinal exposition.

Greek philosophy arrived, around the time of our era, in the image of a universe completely penetrated by reason, devoid of mystery, whose schema is constantly repeated by philosophical writings as well as in more popular forms (the treatise On the World, Seneca’s Natural Questions, etc.); vanished, in such a universe, the problem of future destiny either by the Epicurean idea of ​​”immortal death” which in no way concerns the living, or by the Stoic acceptance of death as of all the events that weave the universal destiny; vanished the myths of the gods, reduced either to the proportion of a historical narrative by Euhemerus who wants to find there the history of deceased kings, or to a physical symbolism by the Stoics. The whole practical attitude of the philosopher is commanded by rationalism; in his consolations, in his advice, in his direction of conscience, it is always the same refrain: what reason to complain, to fear, to be troubled in a world where every event happens in its place and at its time?

At the time when the philosopher was preaching rationalism in Rome, Jesus was teaching in Galilee to uneducated people, ignorant of Greek sciences and their conception of the world, more apt to grasp parables and images than the reasonings of a tight dialectic; in this teaching, the world, nature and society do not intervene as realities penetrated by reason and docilely yielding to the understanding of the philosopher, but as inexhaustible reservoirs of images full of spiritual meaning, the lily of the field, the prodigal son, the housewife in search of her lost drachma, and so many others whose freshness and popular character contrast with the expected flowers and the precious elegance of the diatribes. He too learns how happiness is to be attained; but it is not by a sort of heroism of the will which makes one consider all external events as indifferent; poverty, sorrows, injuries, injustices, persecutions, these are real evils, but evils which, thanks to God’s predilection for the humble and the disinherited, open to us the kingdom of heaven. Suffering and waiting, a sort of joy in suffering, which comes from the expectation of happiness, how different a state, in the disciple of Christ, from that serenity of the wise man who, at each moment, sees his entire destiny fulfilled! Now, concerning this teaching of Christ, which is clearly opposed to Hellenism by the total absence of theoretical and reasoned views on the universe and on God, the historian of philosophy must pose a problem which is, moreover, only one aspect of a more general problem concerning the history of civilization: what is the exact importance, in the history of philosophical speculations, of the fact that Western civilization, from Constantine onwards, became a Christian civilization? We know the whole range of answers that have been given to this question: it is null, say some, and this can be said with two different intentions, either to save the purity of evangelical Christianity which contains nothing but the duty of love and charity and salvation through Christ, or to guarantee the independence and autonomy of rational thought; In the first intention, it is shown (such was the point of view of the first Protestant historians of philosophy) (1) that the Christian dogmatics which was added to the Gospel and to Saint Paul during the first five centuries, notably the speculations on the nature of the Word and on the Trinity, was only a dangerous addition of Greek speculation to the primitive tradition. In the second intention, it is shown that the effective progress of the human mind from a rational point of view is linked without suture to the Greek sciences, without Christianity intervening in the march which led from Greek mathematics to infinitesimal calculus or from Ptolemy to Copernicus: a sort of autonomous development of reason which Christianity was sometimes able to hinder, but which it never helped: such is the point of view of the theorists of progress in the second half of the 18th century.

(1) Cf. Introduction

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu