CHAPTER III
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC APPREHENSION OF FACT
The Latin West afforded the milieu in which the thoughts and sentiments of the antique and partly Christian world were held in Latin forms and preserved from obliteration during the fifth and succeeding centuries, until taken up by the currents of mingled decrepitude and callowness which marked the coming of the mediaeval time. Latin Christianity survived, and made its way across those stormy centuries, to its mediaeval harbourage. The antique also was carried over, either in the ship of Latin Christianity, or in tenders freighted by certain Latin Christians who dealt in secular learning, though not in “unbroken packages.” Those unbroken packages, to wit, the Latin classics, and after many centuries the Greek, also floated over. But in the early mediaeval times, men preferred the pagan matter rehashed, as in the Etymologies of Isidore.
The great ship of Christian doctrine not only bore bits of the pagan antique stowed here and there, but itself was built with many a plank of antique timber, and there was antique adulteration in its Christian freight; or, in other words, the theology of the Church Fathers was partly made of Greek philosophy, and was put together in modes of Greek philosophic reasoning. The Fathers lived in the Roman Empire, or in what was left of it in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Many of them were born of pagan parents, and all received the common education in grammar, rhetoric, and literature, which were pagan and permeated with pagan philosophy. For philosophy did not then stand apart from life and education; but had become a source of principles of conduct and “daily thoughts for daily needs.” Many of the Fathers in their pagan, or at least unsanctified youth, had deeply studied it.
Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the Latin Fathers, who were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Nevertheless, in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek; while the Latins reset in Latin, and sometimes juristic, phrase what their eastern brethren had evolved.[34]
Obviously, for our purpose, which is to appreciate the spiritual endowment of the Middle Ages, it is essential to have cognizance of patristic thought. And in order to understand the mental processes of the Fathers, their attitude toward knowledge and their perception of fact, one must consider their intellectual environment; which was, of course, made up of the store of knowledge and philosophic interests prevailing in the Roman Empire. So we have to gauge the intellectual interests of the pagan world, first in the earlier times when thinkers were bringing together knowledge and philosophic concepts, and then in the later period when its accumulated and somewhat altered thought made the actual environment of the Church.
What race had ever a more genial appreciation of the facts of nature and of mortal life, than the Greeks? The older Greek philosophies had sprung from open and unprejudiced observation of the visible world. They were physical inquiries. With Socrates philosophy turned, as it were, from fact to truth, to a consideration of the validity of human understanding. Thereupon the Greek mind became entranced with its own creations. Man was the measure of all things, for the Sophists. More irrefragably and pregnantly, man became the measure of all things for Socrates and Plato. The aphorism might be discarded; but its transcendental import was established in an imaginative dialectic whose correspondence to the divinest splendours of the human mind warranted its truth. With Platonists—and the world was always to be filled with them—perceptions of physical facts and the data of human life and history, were henceforth to constitute the outer actuality of a creation within the mind. Every observed fact is an apparent tangibility; but its reality consists in its unison with the ultimate realities of rational conception. The apprehension of the fact must be made to conform to these. For this reason every fact has a secondary, nay, primary, because spiritual, meaning. Its true interpretation lies in that significance which accords with the mind’s consistent system of conceptions, which present the fact as it must be thought, and therefore as it is; it is the fact brought into right relationship with spiritual and ethical verity. Of course, methods of apprehending terrestrial and celestial phenomena as illustrations of ideally conceived principles, were unlikely to foster habits of close observation. The apparent facts of sense would probably be imaginatively treated if not transformed in the process of their apprehension. Nor, with respect to human story, would such methods draw fixed lines between the narration of what men are pleased to call the actual occurrence, and the shaping of a tale to meet the exigencies of argument or illustration.