DID ST. PAUL QUOTE ARISTOTLE?
Throughout the writings of St. Paul, his exactly cultivated mind is scarcely less visible than his divinely inspired soul. Notwithstanding his magnificent rebukes of human learning and philosophy, and his sublime exaltation of the foolishness of God above the wisdom of men, the Apostle of the Gentiles was no mean master of Gentile learning. His three well-known quotations from Greek poets furnish direct evidence of his acquaintance with Greek literature. He proclaimed the fatherhood of God to the Athenians in the words of his countryman the poet Aratus (Acts, xvii. 28.). He warns the Corinthians by a moral common-place borrowed from the dramatist Menander (1 Cor. xv. 33.). He brings an hexameter verse of a Cretan poet as a testimony to the bad character of the Cretan people (Titus, i. 12.). I do not positively assert that I have discovered a fourth quotation; I would merely inquire whether the appearance in a Pauline epistle of a sentence which occurs in a treatise of Aristotle, is to be regarded as a quotation, or as an accidental and most singular identity of expression. In the Politics (lib. III. cap. 8.), Aristotle, in speaking of very powerful members of a community, says, "κατα δε των τοιουτων ουκ εστι νομος" ("but against such there is no law"). In the Epistle to the Galatians (v. 23.), Paul, after enumerating the fruits of the Spirit, adds, "against such there is no law" ("κατα των τοιουτων ουκ εστι νομος"). The very same words which the philosopher uses to express the exceptional character of certain over-powerful citizens, the apostle borrows, or, at least, employs, to signify the transcendent nature of divine graces. According to Aristotle, mighty individuals are above legal restraint, against such the general laws of a state do not avail: according to Paul, the fruits of the Spirit are too glorious and divine for legal restraint; they dwell in a region far above the regulation of the moral law.
While there is no possibility of demonstrating that this identity of expression is a quotation, there is nothing to forbid the idea of this sentence being a loan from the philosopher to the apostle. Paul was as likely to be at home in the great philosophers, as in the second and third-rate poets of Greece. The circumstance of Aratus being of his own birth-place, Tarsus, might specially commend the Phænomena to his perusal; but the great luminary of Grecian science was much more likely to fall within his perusal than an obscure versifier of Crete; and if he thought it not unseemly to quote frown a comic writer, he surely would not disdain to borrow a sentence from the mighty master of Stagira. The very different employment which he and Aristotle find for the same words makes nothing against the probability of quotation. The sentence is remarkable, not in form, but in meaning. There is nothing in the mere expression peculiarly to commend it to the memory, or give it proverbial currency. I cannot say that it is a quotation; I cannot say that it is not.
I am not aware that this quotation or identity of expression has been pointed out before. Wetstein, who above all editors of the Greek Testament abounds in illustrations and parallel passages from the classics, takes no notice of this identical one. It is surely worth the noting; and should anything occur to any of your correspondents either to confirm or demolish the idea of quotation, I would gladly be delivered out of my doubt. I should not think less reverently of St. Paul in believing him indebted to Aristotle; I should rather rejoice in being assured that one of the greatest spiritual benefactors of mankind was acquainted with one of its chief intellectual benefactors.
THOMAS H. GILL.