Pardon me as I meader from one unfinished discussion to another. I know I have loose ends lying around that I need to tie up eventually.
Today is the start of a new series, and this will be a lengthy discussion too. The intersection of philosophy and Christianity is one of my little passions.
To kick this off, western civilization has essentially been built on three gigantic pillars:
- Greek culture from roughly 800 BCE (starting with Homer) and ending when the empire fell around 31 BCE.
- Judaism and its two more powerful stepchildren (Islam and Christianity).
- Science and related disciplines.
I included science on this list because it really does belong there, but it is important to recognize that it is a newcomer. While science certainly was important all the way back to ancient Greece, it did not become a powerful force in culture until just a few centuries ago with the arrival of modernism. For that reason, I want to put it aside for a while and focus on the other older two pillars.
It is really hard to put in words just how vast the influence of ancient Greece has been on the arc of humanity over the past 2,500 years. No other similar civilization over a similar time period has even come close to achieving what the Greeks achieved in fields such as mathematics, geometry, philosophy, theater, literature, music, science, and medicine.
Yes, the Greeks had some strange ideas. But it is jaw-dropping just how much they discovered that still is considered useful today. For example, Democritus somehow came up with the concept of atoms in the 5th century BCE. During the same time, Pythagoras used ratios to discover the modern western musical scale and the famous geometry formula that bears his name.
And without the use of the sophisticated tools we have today, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within just a few miles. Forget about the myth that all the world believed the earth to be flat until Galileo. The Greeks knew better than that 2,000 years before Galileo.
Indeed we could talk about Greek accomplishments for a long, long time.
The greatest contribution of the Greeks was in the realm of how to think, a discipline we call philosophy. But don’t get the idea that the Greeks were unified on philosophy. Greek philosophers cycled through an immense variety of ideas that have been debated ever since. Eventually, the culmination of Greek philosophy occurred between 300-500 BCE with Plato/Socrates and Aristotle, but those men did not agree among themselves as much as you would think either.
If you are like me, you probably know something of those three names from your high school or college education, but may need a refresher. It is important to understand a bit about these men if you want to follow where I am going, so let me give a bit of background.
First, you might wonder why I lump Plato and Socrates together. The simple reason is that it is virtually impossible to separate their teaching. Socrates was an older friend/mentor to Plato. He wrote nothing on his own, and in fact, almost everything we know of him was recorded by Plato. Supposedly, Socrates had long conversations (dialogues) with other influential philosophers and pupils, and Plato recorded them word for word at some point later on in what we now know as the Socratic dialogues.
In reality, of course, it is not possible to remember any conversation word for word even a week later, and that is doubly true for these kinds of complex and technical conversations. For that reason, it is sort of taken for granted that Plato was at least sometimes using these Socratic dialogues as a literary device to speak for himself. In fact, I rather doubt that some of those dialogues ever really happened at all. And while Plato probably initially largely agreed with Socrates, as he aged, his views diverged more and more.
Socrates was an interesting guy. He lived a fairly humble life, was generally respected in the community, and usually hung out with a small circle of pupils and philosophers. Over time, the leaders of Athens began to see him as a threat, and eventually, he was executed by hemlock. Plato presents him as a gentle soul, patient to a fault, humble, and unflinchingly moral. By the way, Socrates was also excruciatingly funny. To this day, you can read some of these dialogues and laugh hysterically. (I recommend Euthydemus in particular if you want to laugh.)
Plato and Socrates generally believed in a god of some sort and strove to live up to that god’s idealistic standards. To them, this present world is a poor mirage of a better world, an ideal world, and a more real world. Plato and Socrates largely focused on improving the inner person, a priori knowledge (knowledge of universals existing outside experience), and a somewhat mystical, supernatural world of ideals (which are often referred to as “forms” in Platonic philosophy).
Aristotle lived after Plato, and in many respects, saw the world quite differently. When you think of iron-clad logical/rational thinking (the kind of thinking that advances science and medicine), you probably have in mind many of the methods and tools that Aristotle gave us. Aristotle was not focused on some idealistic world; he was rather squarely focused on the world in which we live. He was more empirical in his epistemology, meaning that he valued the knowledge that comes from real experience.
While Aristotle was influential in science and medicine, he actually wrote extensively on ethics and morality. His writing on ethics for example is arguably more extensive and systemized than the ethics of the Bible. He also believed in a god; specifically, he believed that the world in which we live is full of things that are clearly designed, and a designed world requires a designer. To this day, Christian apologists regularly use Aristotle’s thinking in this area (often called the teleological argument) in debates with atheists.
A main point that I want you to take away from this discussion so far is that Plato/Socrates and Aristotle essentially staked out a battleground for philosophical debate that has never ended. Today’s debates such as rationalism vs empiricism, materialism vs idealism, and nominalism vs realism trace back to Plato and Aristotle. The tenets of virtually every philosopher since then can be traced back to one or the other. Their shadows are just immense.
And, as we shall see, this battleground over the same issues has existed within Christianity as well.
Now, let’s talk briefly about the origin of Christianity.
Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, which was a culture and religion that existed during the same period as ancient Greece. It is actually very easy to view the Old Testament Judaism of the Bible as a parallel culture to Greece, especially if you have spent time reading Greek literature. For example, the animal sacrifices you find in Leviticus are eerily similar to those Homer detailed in the Illiad.
The same is true for the wars and the recorded deeds of warriors. II Samuel 23, for example, contains an interesting discussion of warriors that is very reminiscent of Homer. There is, without doubt, a difference in style. Whoever he actually was, Homer was a master of style and far more talented than the OT authors. His writing was more dramatic and colorful, but the general content is quite similar in many ways.
In general, while Greeks were busy setting a stage for Western civilization to flourish, early Jewish culture contributed little in the arena of art, literature, science, and other such disciplines. It was a much smaller culture and population that in its best days controlled an empire a tiny fraction of the size of the Greeks.
However, the Jewish contribution would be in the area of religion, and it is hard to overstate just how significant that contribution would be. Judaism may have been small-time compared to the Greeks, but Jewish religion has had a remarkable run and has been extremely influential all the way through modern history. More significantly, it was the precursor of Christianity and Islam, two powerful forces that would eventually overshadow it and dominate western history every since.
I think we have now done enough setup to actually start talking about the intersections of Christianity and Greek philosophy.
To give you an idea of the ground we need to cover, I could start by saying that there are secularists who see Jesus as a copycat of Socrates, used by Greek-influenced Jews as a way to export Jewish culture to the world. In fact, there are many similarities between the two men. Both had a relatively humble station in life and both lived a modest life, surrounded by a small group of disciples. Neither wrote their wisdom down and what we know about their lives is limited to what their disciples recorded of them. Both used the dialectic method as a teaching tool. Both got into trouble with powerful politicians and both were unjustly executed. Both had the power to escape execution but willingly chose to submit to death. Both had an enormous influence that only grew exponentially after their time on earth.
I do not put much stock in this copycat claim because of a general lack of proof. Similarities do not prove much of anything, and furthermore, the general similarities shared by Socrates and Jesus probably were shared by many other religious leaders of that time. The Buddha for example lived a similar life.
But as we shall see, the Socrates/Jesus similarity is only the beginning of a broader question. It is worth examining what Greek philosophy made its way into what would become Christian theology and even into the Bible itself. Those are questions for next time.