[Footnote 855: ][ (return) ] Acts, xi. 26.
The spread of the Greek language was one of the most important services which the cities of Antioch and Alexandria rendered to Christianity. The Greek tongue is intimately connected with the whole system of Christian doctrine.
This language, which, in symmetry of structure, in flexibility and compass of expression, in exactness and precision, in grace and elegance, exceeds every other language, became the language of theology. Next in importance to the inspiration which communicates the superhuman thought, must be the gradual development of the language in which the thought can clothe itself. That development by which the Greek language became the adequate vehicle of Divine thought, the perfect medium of the mature revelation of truth contained in the Christian Scriptures, must be regarded as the subject of a Divine providence. Christianity waited for that development, and it awaited Christianity. "The Greek tongue became to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew. The mother-tongue of Ignatius at Antioch was that in which Philo composed his treatises at Alexandria, and which Cicero spoke at Athens. It is difficult to state in a few words the important relation which Alexandria, more especially, was destined to bear to the whole Christian Church." In that city, the Old Testament was translated into Greek; there the writings of Plato were diligently studied; there Philo, the Platonizing Jew, had sought to blend into one system the teachings of the Old Testament theology and the dialectic speculations of Plato. Numenius learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of Plotinus is the development of Philo's intuitions. A theological language by this means was developed, rich in the phrases of various schools, and suited to convey the spiritual revelation of Christian ideas to all the world. "It was not an accident that the New Testament was written in Greek, the language which can best express the highest thoughts and worthiest feelings of the intellect and heart, and which is adapted to be the instrument of education for all nations; nor was it an accident that the composition of these books and the promulgation of the Gospels were delayed till the instruction of our Lord, and the writings of his Apostles could be expressed in the dialect [of Athens and] of Alexandria." [856]] This must be ascribed to the foreordination of Him who, in the history of nations and of civilizations, "worketh all things according to the counsel of his own will."
[Footnote 856: ][ (return) ] Conybeare and Howson, "Life and Epistles of St. Paul," vol. i. p. 10.
Now it is the doctrine of the best philologists that language is a growth. Gradually, and by combined efforts of successive generations, it has been brought to the perfection which we so much admire in the idioms of the Bible, the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and the prose compositions of Demosthenes, Cicero, Johnson, and Macaulay. The material or root-element of language may have been the product of mental instinct, or perhaps the immediate gift of God by revelation; but the formal element must have been the creation of thought, and the result of rational combination. Language is really the incarnation of thought; consequently the growth of a language, its affluence, comprehension, and fullness must depend on the vigor and activity of thought, and the acquisition of general ideas. Language is thus the best index of intellectual progress, the best standard of the intellectual attainment of an age or nation. The language of barbaric tribes is exceedingly simple and meagre; the paucity of general terms clearly indicating the absence of all attempts at classification and all speculative thought. Whilst the language of educated peoples is characterized by great fullness and affluence of terms, especially such as are expressive of general notions and abstract ideas. All grammar, all philology, all scientific nomenclature are thus, in fact, psychological deposits, which register the progressive advancement of human thought and knowledge in the world of mind, as the geological strata bear testimony to the progressive development of the material world. "Language," says Trench, "is fossil poetry, fossil history," and, we will add, fossil philosophy. Many a single word is a concentrated poem. The record of great social and national revolutions is embalmed in a single term. [857] And the history of an age of philosophic thought is sometimes condensed and deposited in one imperishable word. [858]
[Footnote 857: ][ (return) ] See Trench "On the Study of Words," p. 20, where the word "frank" is given as an illustration.
[Footnote 858: ][ (return) ] For example, the κόσµος of the Pythagoreans, the εὶδη of the Platonists, and the ἀταραξία of the Stoics.
If, then, language is the creation of thought, the sensible vesture with which it clothes itself, and becomes, as it were, incarnate--if the perfection and efficiency of language depends on the maturity and clearness of thought, we conclude that the wonderful adequacy and fitness of the Greek language to be the vehicle of the Divine thought, the medium of the most perfect revelation of God to men, can only be explained on the assumption that the ages of philosophic thought which, in Greece, preceded the advent of Christianity, were under the immediate supervision of a providence, and, in some degree, illuminated by the Spirit of God.
Greek philosophy must therefore have fulfilled a propædeutic office for Christianity. "As it had been intrusted to the Hebrews to preserve and transmit the heaven-derived element of the Monotheistic religion, so it was ordained that, among the Greeks, all seeds of human culture should unfold themselves in beautiful harmony, and then Christianity, taking up the opposition between the divine and human, was to unite both in one, and show how it was necessary that both should co-operate to prepare for the appearance of itself and the unfolding of what it contains." [859] During the period of Greek philosophy which preceded the coming of Christ, human reason, unfolding itself from beneath, had aspired after that knowledge of divine things which is from above. It had felt within itself the deep-seated consciousness of God--the sporadic revelation of Him "who is not far from any one of us"--the immanent thought of that Being "in whom we live and move and are," and it had striven by analysis and definition to attain a more distinct and logical apprehension. The heart of man had been stirred with "the feeling after God"--the longing for a clearer sense of the divine, and had struggled to attain, by abstraction or by ecstasy, a more immediate communion with God. Man had been conscious of an imperative obligation to conform to the will of the great Supreme, and he sought to interpret more clearly the utterances of conscience as to what duty was. He had felt the sense of sin and guilt, and had endeavored to appease his conscience by expiatory offerings, and to deliver himself from the power of sin by intellectual culture and moral discipline. And surely no one, at all familiar with the history of that interesting epoch in the development of humanity, will have the hardihood to assert that no steps were taken in the right direction, and no progress made towards the distant goal of human desire and hope. The language, the philosophy, the ideals of moral beauty and excellence, the noble lives and nobler utterances of the men who stand forth in history as the representatives of Greek civilization, all attest that their noble aspiration and effort did not end in ignominious failure and utter defeat. It is true they fell greatly beneath the realization of even their own moral ideals, and they became painfully conscious of their moral weakness, as men do even in Christian times. They learned that, neither by intellectual abstraction, nor by ecstasy of feeling, could they lift themselves to a living, conscious fellowship with God. The sense of guilt was unrelieved by expiations, penances, and prayers. And whilst some cultivated a proud indifference, a Stoical apathy, and others sank down to Epicurean ease and pleasure, there was a noble few who longed and hoped with increasing ardor for a living Redeemer, a personal Mediator, who should "stand between God and man and lay his hand on both." Christ became in some dim consciousness "the Desire of Nations," and the Moral Law became even to the Greek as well as the Jew "a school-master to lead them to Him."
[Footnote 859: ][ (return) ] Neander's "Church History," vol. i. p. 4.