The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church

by Edwin Hatch

2. In the second place, it is necessary to take account of our own personal prepossessions. Most of us come to the study of the subject already knowing something about it. It is a comparatively easy task for a lecturer to present, and for a hearer to realize, an accurate picture of, for example, the religion of Mexico or of Peru, because the mind of the student when he begins the study is a comparatively blank sheet. But most of us bring to the study of Christian history a number of conclusions already formed. We tend to beg the question before we examine it.

We have before us, on the one hand, the ideas and usages of early Christianity; on the other hand, the ideas and usages of imperial Greece.

We bring to the former the thoughts, the associations, the sacred memories, the happy dreams, which have been rising up round us, one by one, since our childhood. Even if there be some among us who in the maturity of their years have broken away from their earlier moorings, these associations still tend to remain. They are not confined to those of us who not only consciously retain them, but also hold their basis to be true. They linger unconsciously in the minds of those who seem most resolutely to have abandoned them.

We bring to the latter, most of us, a similar wealth of associations which have come to us through our education. The ideas with which we have to deal are mostly expressed in terms which are common to the early centuries of Christianity, and to the Greek literature of five centuries before. The terms are the same, but their meaning is different. Those of us who have studied Greek literature tend to attach to them the connotation which they had at Athens when Greek literature was in its most perfect flower. We ignore the long interval of time, and the new connotation which, by an inevitable law of language, had in the course of centuries clustered round the old nucleus of meaning. The terms have in some cases come down by direct transmission into our own language. They have in such cases gathered to themselves wholly new meanings, which, until we consciously hold them up to the light, seem to us to form part of the original meaning, and are with difficulty disentangled.

We bring to both the Christian and the Greek world the inductions respecting them which have been already made by ourselves and by others. We have in those inductions so many moulds, so to speak, into which we press the plastic statements of early writers. We assume the primitiveness of distinctions which for the most part represent only the provisional conclusions of earlier generations of scholars, and stages in our own historical education; and we arrange facts in the categories which we find ready to hand, as Jewish or Gentile, orthodox or heretical, Catholic or Gnostic, while the question of the reality of such distinctions and such categories is one of the main points which our inquiries have to solve.

3. In the third place, it is necessary to take account of the under-currents, not only of our own age, but of the past ages with which we have to deal. Every age has such under-currents, and every age tends to be unconscious of them. We ourselves have succeeded to a splendid heritage. Behind us are the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits of mind, which have been in process of formation since the first beginning of our race. They are inwrought, for the most part, into the texture of our nature. We cannot transcend them. To them the mass of our thoughts are relative, and by them the thoughts of other generations tend to be judged. The importance of recognizing them as an element in our judgments of other generations increases in proportion as those generations recede from our own. In dealing with a country or a period not very remote, we may not go far wrong in assuming that its inheritance of ideas is cognate to our own. But in dealing with a remote country, or a remote period of time, it becomes of extreme importance to allow for the difference, so to speak, of mental longitude. The men of earlier days had other mental scenery round them. Fewer streams of thought had converged upon them. Consequently, many ideas which were in entire harmony with the mental fabric of their time, are unintelligible when referred to the standard of our own; nor can we understand them until we have been at the pains to find out the underlying ideas to which they were actually relative.

I will briefly illustrate this point by two instances:

(a) We tend to take with us, as we travel into bygone times, the dualistic hypothesis—which to most of us is no hypothesis, but an axiomatic truth—of the existence of an unbridged chasm between body and soul, matter and spirit. The relation in our minds of the idea of matter to the idea of spirit is such, that though we readily conceive matter to act upon matter, and spirit upon spirit, we find it difficult or impossible to conceive a direct action either of matter upon spirit or of spirit upon matter. When, therefore, in studying, for example, the ancient rites of baptism, we find expressions which seem to attribute a virtue to the material element, we measure such expressions by a modern standard, and regard them as containing only an analogy or a symbol. They belong, in reality, to another phase of thought than our own. They are an outflow of the earlier conception of matter and spirit as varying forms of a single substance.[6] “Whatever acts, is body,” it was said. Mind is the subtlest form of body, but it is body nevertheless. The conception of a direct action of the one upon the other presented no difficulty. It was imagined, for instance, that demons might be the direct causes of diseases, because the extreme tenuity of their substance enabled them to enter, and to exercise a malignant influence upon, the bodies of men. So water, when exorcized from all the evil influences which might reside in it, actually cleansed the soul.[7] The conception of the process as symbolical came with the growth of later ideas of the relation of matter to spirit. It is, so to speak, a rationalizing explanation of a conception which the world was tending to outgrow.

(b) We take with us in our travels into the past the underlying conception of religion as a personal bond between God and the individual soul. We cannot believe that there is any virtue in an act of worship in which the conscience has no place. We can understand, however much we may deplore, such persecutions as those of the sixteenth century, because they ultimately rest upon the same conception: men were so profoundly convinced of the truth of their own personal beliefs as to deem it of supreme importance that other men should hold those beliefs also. But we find it difficult to understand why, in the second century of our era, a great emperor who was also a great philosopher should have deliberately persecuted Christianity. The difficulty arises from our overlooking the entirely different aspect under which religion presented itself to a Roman mind. It was a matter which lay, not between the soul and God, but between the individual and the State. Conscience had no place in it. Worship was an ancestral usage which the State sanctioned and enforced. It was one of the ordinary duties of life.[8] The neglect of it, and still more the disavowal of it, was a crime. An emperor might pity the offender for his obstinacy, but he must necessarily either compel him to obey or punish him for disobedience.