Extracts from:

A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins.


With Christianity now seeming to be a flesh-hating religion infused with Platonic philosophy, the transformation from its Jewish roots was complete. You would have to go a long way to find a Jewish Christian, and even God had become Greek. In 300, Spanish churches, in a breathtaking reversal of the story of Peter and Cornelius, agreed to expel anyone who ate with Jews.
Church and empire, meanwhile, seemed not only on friendlier terms but to be converging. Just as Christianity had been incorporating Platonic ideas, Roman religion was becoming almost monotheistic – not denying worship to the gods and emperors, but focussing more on one supreme deity, the unconquered Sun. Philosophy likewise: the Alexandrian Plotinus launched an influential new version of Platonism, built around the idea of 'the One', incomprehensible, transcendent, the source of all being. The popularity of Neoplatonism made Christianity seem more, mainstream than ever, while also providing another attractive source of ideas for Christian thinkers. (p 42, 43).


Clement and Origen

Alexandria in Egypt was the intellectual capital of the Roman world. Schools of every major philosophy taught there, drawing on its incomparable library of 70,000 scrolls. The philosophical Alexandrians had little interest in Christianity – for all Justin's efforts – apart from the Gnostic variety, which thrived. Alexandrian Christians therefore were a defensive enclave, holding tightly to inherited doctrines rather than engaging with contemporary culture.

The mission of Clement, head of the Christian school in Alexandria for pre-baptismal training, was to demonstrate that Christianity was not just for an uneducated underclass but could hold its own with the philosophers and gnostics. Writing in the popular philosophical style, sprinkling his books with quotations from an impressive array of pagan writers, he argued that Christianity was the culmination of all that was good in Greek thought, especially Plato's. `Philosophy may even have been given to the Greeks directly by God,' he suggested. 'It was a schoolteacher to bring Greek culture to Christ, as the Law was for the Hebrews.'

The problem was that the Law of Moses did not have a great deal in common with Platonism, with its transcendent, emotionless, abstract God and immortal human souls. So to reconcile them, Clement took Christian allegorising of the Bible further than ever. Arguing that full knowledge is hidden symbolically in its odder passages, to protect those not mature enough to accept or understand it, Clement was able to decode the scriptures to reveal the truths that his Platonist mind knew must be in there somewhere.

He was similarly friendly to the Gnostics. While he successfully argued against them, he loved their idea that salvation and knowledge of God are the same thing. For him, Christianity was about being gradually made like God and becoming one with him through knowledge, so advanced Christians are in fact the `true Gnostics'.

Being a pastoral teacher, Clement also wrote a guide to Christian behaviour throughout the day, covering everything from sex being only for procreation to talking with your mouth full. Concerning sex (and other earthly pleasures), Clement was actually the most liberal Christian writer of his age – probably of the whole coming millennium in fact, but the idea that the Christian life was fundamentally about denying physical desire was becoming generally accepted.

His pupil and successor, Origen, was a case in point. He had few possessions, and got by on the minimum food, drink and sleep. For the sake of his spiritual life, he is said to have castrated himself. In the anti-Christian campaign of 202, Clement fled Alexandria, while Origen, aged seventeen, was so desperate to join his father in being tortured and beheaded that he only stayed because his mother hid his clothes. Just a year later, he took over the school.

A brilliant thinker, Origen has been called the most prolific writer ever, though most of his work is lost. He developed Clement's allegorical Bible-reading into a three-tiered system: every text has its plain meaning (which is sometimes erroneous or immoral), then works as a moral parable, then most importantly encodes mystical symbolism. He wrote many vast biblical commentaries unpacking these meanings, the most celebrated being Song of Songs: he found in its shockingly erotic verse a wealth of meditation on the union between Christ and the church.

This allowed him to import the God of Plato, `ever unmoved and untroubled in his own summit of bliss', more successfully into the Bible than ever. It told him that souls existed before birth, and that they are saved by mystical experience of God in Christ. He apparently reinterpreted the resurrection of the dead as reincarnation in new universes, a repeated process of sin and suffering until the soul is purified. This means that no one is eternally damned: God's punishment purifies us, so that all humans and even demons may ultimately become one with God.

Origen also put a lot of thought into the Trinity. If the three are one God, then what is the difference between them? What makes them three? Origen's answer is that some are more God than others. Only the Father is God in his own right, so the Son and Spirit receive their divinity from him: great, greater, greatest; a three-storey hierarchy. Where he really broke new ground is in rejecting the assumption that the Father gave birth to the Son at some point in time. God (Platonism says) is timeless, so the Son is fathered timelessly, `eternally begotten of the Father', as the Nicene creed agreed a century later.

Origen was a formidably original thinker, by no means orthodox in the common sense – or in the religious sense, according to the sixth-century church, which burnt his writings as heretical. He kicked up controversy in his own time too, the redemption of the devil especially raising eyebrows. He clashed with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, who seemed to find having a theological celebrity in his church somewhat trying, and of whom Origen was probably rather critical. On a teaching visit to Caesarea in 230, Origen was ordained as an elder so that he could preach. This snub was the last straw, and together with the rest of Egypt's bishops, Demetrius excommunicated him as a heretic and a eunuch, though his attempt to have him condemned at Rome failed, and he retained his huge following. Origen spent the rest of his life in Caesarea, until, clothed or otherwise, he finally achieved his martyrdom. (p 36-38).



Augustine

He continued to study philosophy and science, growing disillusioned over ten years by the failure of Manichee gurus to answer his questions. Moving on to Neoplatonism, he went to the great city of Milan to teach public speaking.
(p 58)

Meanwhile, he attended Ambrose's celebrated sermons, hoping to learn rhetoric. Instead, he learned Christianity. He learned to read the Bible for its more acceptable, undercover, Neoplatonic truths… (p 59)

Thomas Aquinas

The next character is our story is, unlikely as it seems, Aristotle. While his tutor, Plato, had had more influence over the church than most Christians, Aristotle's work was largely lost when Europe fell apart after the collapse of Rome and persecuted pagan philosophers took refuge in Islamic lands. But now that Christians were constantly mingling with Muslims, for the first time they came across silk, sugar and Aristotle, whom the Muslims had kept in circulation. He was a bit of a shock.

For Plato, the spiritual realm is infinitely more real than the physical, matter but a shadow of the eternal. So we understand life and God by reason, by contemplating eternal truths. Aristotle, in contrast, accepted the physical realm as real. So matter matters, and we understand by observing with our senses. Truth comes not through divine revelation, then, but human
1 investigation. Aristotle studied physics, biology and cosmology. His research established that there must be a God to have set the universe in motion, but he had little room for the God personally encountered in Christian Platonism. He also concluded that souls are mortal and the universe immortal, the opposite of Plato. It was a serious challenge to traditional Christianity. The Pope and Paris University banned Aristotle. The man who brought him in from the cold was Thomas Aquinas. (p 119)

A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins (p 34)

Second-century writers are known as the apologists, being remembered for their defense of the faith rather than as its early architects. Different apologists took very different attitudes to the beliefs of their opponents, however.

Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr was a professional thinker who had worked his way through several current Greek philosophies, before being converted to Christianity by the Jewish scriptures. He believed that Jesus was the culmination of all philosophies, God's Word of truth (in which every philosophy has an imperfect share) come in the flesh. Those, like Socrates, 'who live according to reason, are Christians, even though they are considered atheists'. He tried to persuade readers that they did not have to abandon the wisdom of the Greeks to become Christians. Ironically, he earned his surname thanks to the anti-Christian policies of his fellow philosopher, the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Tertullian,

Tertullian, on the other hand, despised Greek philosophy as pagan lies.

Philosophy came from humans, Christianity from God.

Those who tried to learn from both merely corrupted Christianity. 'Wretched Aristotle!... What does Athens have in common with Jerusalem?'


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