It is therefore the more remarkable that within a century and a half after Christianity and philosophy first came into close contact, the ideas and methods of philosophy had flowed in such mass into Christianity, and filled so large a place in it, as to have made it no less a philosophy than a religion.
The question which arises, and which should properly be discussed before the influences of particular ideas are traced in particular doctrines, is, how this result is to be accounted for as a whole. The answer must explain both how Christianity and philosophy came into contact, and how when in contact the one exercised upon the other the influence of a moulding force.
The explanation is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the apparent and superficial antagonism, between certain leading ideas of current philosophy and the leading ideas of Christianity there was a special and real kinship. Christianity gave to the problems of philosophy a new solution which was cognate to the old, and to its doubts the certainty of a revelation. The kinship of ideas is admitted, and explanations of it are offered by both Christian writers and their opponents. “We teach the same as the Greeks,” says Justin Martyr,[212] “though we alone are hated for what we teach.” “Some of our number,” says Tertullian,[213] “who are versed in ancient literature, have composed books by means of which it may be clearly seen that we have embraced nothing new or monstrous, nothing in which we have not the support of common and public literature.” Elsewhere[214] the same writer founds an argument for the toleration of Christianity on the fact that its opponents maintained it to be but a kind of philosophy, teaching the very same doctrines as the philosophers—innocence, justice, endurance, soberness, and chastity: he claims on that ground the same liberty for Christians which was enjoyed by philosophers.
The general recognition of this kinship of ideas is even more conclusively shown by the fact that explanations of it were offered on both the one side and the other.
(a) It was argued by some Christian apologists that the best doctrines of philosophy were due to the inworking in the world of the same Divine Word who had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. “The teachings of Plato,” says Justin Martyr,[215] “are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar.... For all the writers (of antiquity) were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted Word.” It was argued by others that philosophers had borrowed or “stolen” their doctrines from the Scriptures. “From the divine preachings of the prophets,” says Minucius Felix,[216] “they imitated the shadow of half-truths.” “What poet or sophist,” says Tertullian,[217] “has not drunk at the fountain of the prophets? From thence it is, therefore, that philosophers have quenched the thirst of their minds, so that it is the very things which they have of ours which bring us into comparison with them.” “They have borrowed from our books,” says Clement of Alexandria,[218] “the chief doctrines they hold, both on faith and knowledge and science, on hope and love, on repentance and temperance and the fear of God:” and he goes in detail through many doctrines, speculative as well as ethical, either to show that they were borrowed from revelation, or to uphold the truer thesis that philosophy was no less the schoolmaster of the Greeks than the Law was of the Jews to bring them to Christ.
(b) It was argued, on the other hand, by the opponents of Christianity that it was a mere mimicry of philosophy or a blurred copy of it. “They weave a web of misunderstandings of the old doctrine,” says Celsus,[219] “and sound them forth with a loud trumpet before men, like hierophants booming round those who are being initiated in mysteries.” Christianity was but a misunderstood Platonism. Whatever in it was true had been better expressed before.[220] Even the striking and distinctive saying of the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” was but a coarser and more homely way of saying what had been extremely well said by Plato’s Socrates.[221]
It was through this kinship of ideas that Christianity was readily absorbed by some of the higher natures in the Greek world. The two classes of ideas probably came into contact in philosophical Judaism. For it is clear on the one hand that the Jews of the dispersion had a literature, and on the other hand that that literature was clothing itself in Greek forms and attracting the attention of the Greek world. Some of that literature was philosophical. In the Sibylline verses, the poem of Phocylides, and the letters of Heraclitus, there is a blending of theology and ethics: in some of the writings which are ascribed to Philo, but which in reality bridge the interval between Philo and the Christian Fathers, there is a blending of theology and metaphysics. None of them are “very far from the kingdom of God.” The hypothesis that they paved the way for Christian philosophy is confirmed by the fact that in the first articulate expressions of that philosophy precisely those elements are dominant which were dominant in Jewish philosophy. Two such elements may specially be mentioned: (1) the allegorical method of interpretation which was common to both Jews and Greeks, and by means of which both the Gnostics who were without, and the Alexandrians who were within, the pale of the associated communities, were able to find their philosophy in the Old Testament as well as in the New; (2) the cosmological speculations, which occupied only a small space in the thoughts of earlier Greek thinkers, but which were already widening to a larger circle on the surface of Greek philosophy, and which became so prominent in the first Christian philosophies as to have thrust aside almost all other elements in the current representations of them.