 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Father Figures. Introduction to Ancient Christian Philosophy. As a historian of philosophy, it's somewhat embarrassing for me to admit this, but I'm pretty bad with dates. I don't meet the dried fruits or romantic encounters, though to be honest neither of those was ever my forte either. I mean when things happened, when famous people were born, and for that matter, birthdays and anniversaries. So I'm always grateful when a historical figure has a really memorable birth or death date. The best example has to be Al-Ghazali, the great Muslim philosopher and theologian, who did people like me the favor of dying in the year 1111. You might say he should get no credit for this noble service, since this is the date of the Christian calendar, but in the Muslim calendar he passed away in the almost equally memorable year 505. What a professional. Of course, if we do stick with the Christian calendar, no one has a more memorable year of birth than Jesus of Nazareth himself, namely zero. That's about as round a number as you can ask for. As for the precise day of birth, even I can remember that Christ was born on Christmas. Sadly, scholars reckon that the historical Jesus was probably not in fact born on Christmas in 0 AD, but in the last few years BC, which last time I checked was supposed to stand for before Christ. Nor was the year 0 AD a sudden turning point in the history of philosophy. Some of the developments we've already examined spanned the first centuries BC and AD, such as the emergence of middle Platonism and the rebirth of Aristotelianism. The Roman Stoics come along beginning in the following decades. Seneca, for example, lived in the first half of the first century AD. The birth of Jesus and of a faith which accepted him as a messiah had no immediate impact on the history of philosophy, but in due course it would have an impact exceeded by no other single historical event. This impact already began in the ancient world, so much so that I'm going to be devoting more than a dozen episodes to ancient Christian thought. You may be surprised to hear this. When we think of Christianity in relation to philosophy we are likely first to think of medieval philosophy in Europe, and then perhaps modern-day philosophy of religion. Antique Christian philosophy does offer one household name, Augustine. He was exceptional in his genius and his influence, but far from the only philosophically sophisticated Christian author. Even a casual study of Christianity in this period will acquaint you with great theologians like Tertullian, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. The earliest Christian thinkers are collectively referred to as church fathers. Most of them were educated in the ancient rhetorical curriculum I described back in episode 84. This is clear from every page of their writing. It's just as clear that they were steeped in the Hellenic philosophical tradition. They knew their Plato, their Aristotelian logic, and the teachings of the Stoics. Some who lived in later antiquity even knew their Proclus. Those who wrote in Latin also responded to authors like Lucretius and especially Cicero, a major influence on Augustine. There isn't really any room for doubt, then, that the Christian fathers made extensive use of philosophical ideas, but I suspect some listeners may be skeptical as to whether they made any contributions to philosophy. Did they have ideas of their own, ideas of philosophical and not just religious and historical interest? Starting with this episode, I hope to convince you that they did. Let's first look briefly at the historical context. By the end of antiquity, Christianity will be consumed by refined and complex theological debates. But the very earliest Christians would have been nonplussed, if not stunned, to learn of the disputes that lay ahead. In the first century AD, we do not yet find bishops gathering in cities to dispute the technicalities of the Trinity or Platonic and Stoic doctrine being used to refute heretics. Some scholars have claimed to detect echoes of the philosophical tradition in the Bible itself, even in the teachings of Jesus, who since antiquity has been compared to Socrates. Ancient Christians preferred to detect an influence in the other direction. Unlike me, they were very good with dates and pointed out that Moses came long before the Hellenic philosophers. Thus, he could be recognized as an influence on their thought. Still, early Christian groups were not philosophical schools, like the Neoplatonic enclaves of Athens and Alexandria. Nor were they committed to the passionate defense of dogma. Rather, they were communities who lived in expectation of an imminent final reckoning with God, and lived in hope, thanks to the mediation offered in the person of Jesus Christ. These communities were bound together by the practices of sharing bread and wine in the Eucharist, baptism, and group prayer. One doesn't get the sense that they were engaged in intense scrutiny of sacred texts. Indeed, which books were to be included in the New Testament would remain a disputed issue up until the fourth century. Though the New Faith was not yet associated with Greek philosophy, it was associated with the Greek language. Of course, the books of the New Testament are in Greek, not Hebrew, and the religion was spread around the empire by Greek-speaking missionaries, like St. Paul. Even in Rome, many early Christians were Greek speakers. This helps to explain why philosophy was later able to penetrate into Christianity, and vice versa. Much ink has been spilled over the question of Christianity's Hellenic nature, and its contrast to the Jewish culture out of which this New Faith grew. It has been a controversial issue since antiquity, given that the boundary between Judaism and Christianity was at first rather blurry. One key point of differentiation was that Christians did not demand circumcision. It has been suggested that for them, baptism occupied the role played by this ritual in Judaism. Christian writers of antiquity instead speak of circumcision as a metaphor, symbolizing, for instance, the way the faithful should renounce the things of the body. Before long, Christian theologians began to accuse their opponents of Judaizing. If the line between Jew and Christian was blurry, the divide between Christian and pagan was clear to see. Christians were distinguished by their ethical beliefs, especially their praise of chastity. pagans had traditionally admired moderation and self-control, but without renouncing such basic human functions as sexuality. Along with the Jews, the Christians were also distinguished by their refusal to accept the traditional pantheon of Greco-Roman gods. We've seen that the traditional pantheon was rather porous and flexible, able to accommodate divinities from Egypt and other cultures. So the Judeo-Christian insistence on a single, true god struck pagans as not just wrongheaded, but bizarre and needlessly provocative. They duly accused Christians of being atheists. This sounds rather strange to our ears, but the great church father, Justin Martyr, admitted that he and his co-religionists were indeed atheists as far as the gods of Rome were concerned. Justin's name is a clue to another major feature of ancient Christian life. His honorific title, Martyr, refers to his death at the hands of the Romans in 165 AD. The reigning emperor? The philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Marcus' fabled Stoic restraint didn't extend to putting up with Christians, and he was far from unique among emperors in this respect. Some were more tolerant towards Christians than others, but for two centuries the new faith faced the constant threat of persecution, even if actual persecution was more occasional and sporadic than we tend to believe. Often, Christian writers seemed almost to revel in the danger of their precarious position. The church father Ignatius promised he would be glad to serve as wheat to be ground up by the teeth of wild animals yielding flour for the bread of Christ. Origen, the greatest of the early Greek fathers, wrote a letter to a friend urging him to greet his probable impending martyrdom with eagerness rather than reluctance. You can see why he wrote a letter, they don't make greeting cards for occasions like this. Some felt it necessary to caution their fellow Christians against deliberately inviting martyrdom. There's a fine line between dying in the name of faith and using faith as an excuse for suicide. The Romans had what they considered to be good reason for the persecutions. When not throwing the Christians to the lions, they threw various accusations at the Christians. They called the Christians cannibals, because their ritual involved claiming to eat the body of Christ, and they at least pretended to think that the Christians' gatherings concluded with sexual orgies. But the already mentioned charge of atheism was the key complaint. The survival of the empire was believed to depend on the favor of the gods, and here were people who not only refused to sacrifice at the temples, but who rejected the gods' very existence. As antiquity wore on, the emperors themselves were credited with being gods. Christians of course denied this also, which was reason enough for the persecutions. These persecutions would end only once the emperors themselves became Christians, the first to do was of course Constantine. Which brings us to another date worth remembering, 306 AD, the year that Constantine became emperor in the west of the empire. In 305 the emperor Diocletian had relinquished power after a reign that saw particularly enthusiastic persecution of Christians. Famously, Constantine consolidated his rule over the empire at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 312 AD, since you ask. Just as famously, he supposedly had a vision before the battle which encouraged him to support the Christians. Whether this vision actually occurred, what he might have seen, what, if any, role it played in his benevolence towards Christianity and when exactly he himself converted, are all matters debated by historians. We historians of philosophy can leave these issues aside though, and simply note that after Constantine the empire would be ruled by Christians, with the notable exception of Julian the Apostate, whom we covered a few episodes back. This made it possible for Christianity to thrive, to grow from an oppressed community to a major institutional force within the empire. Free of persecution by pagans, the Christians wasted little time in turning upon one another, as they engaged in doctrinal disputes with increasing fervor. As we'll be seeing, already in the 2nd century AD, figures like Justin were using their rhetorical and philosophical skills to uphold what they took to be orthodoxy and to refute what they took to be heresy. But the institutionalization of Christianity provided a new context and new impetus for such disputes. Already within the reign of Constantine, doctrinal clashes were causing headaches for the emperor. He was the first, but far from the last, secular ruler to attempt a peaceful resolution of the heated theological debates. In due course, disagreements over such issues as the Trinity and the Incarnation would lead to street violence, would inspire insurrection against emperors of the East, and would provoke the leading intellectuals of the empire to write massive works of mutual refutation. This brings us back to philosophy. As I've said, there is plenty of evidence that the Church Fathers were influenced by the Hellenic philosophical tradition. Here, one need look no further than Augustine, who before his conversion took a large step towards Christianity thanks to his reading of what he calls the Books of the Platonists, by which he probably means Latin versions of Plotinus and Porphyry. They showed him how he could understand God to be an immaterial cause, something he had previously found hard to accept. Of course, Augustine was an exceptional man, but in this respect not all that exceptional. Clement of Alexandria and Origen, two great Church Fathers who wrote in Greek, were steeped in Hellenic culture generally, and Hellenic philosophy in particular. This is not to say that all Christian thinkers embraced philosophy in a warm embrace. All three of the theologians I've just mentioned criticize the pagan philosophers in various ways. Other theologians like the Latin Church Father Tertullian were actively hostile, as they exalted the Gospel over the works of Plato and Aristotle. Despite this, Christian writings should be seen as being part of the ancient philosophical tradition. To be honest, this is not a widely shared view. Rarely would you find papers on the Church Fathers in ancient philosophy periodicals, and they are not usually taught in university philosophy courses. Instead, the study of the Fathers, often called Patristics, usually falls within the purview of theology or religious studies departments. Christian Augustine, who, for my money, is one of the greatest philosophers who has ever lived, receives attention from historians of philosophy mostly in connection with the study of medieval thought, despite having died already in 430 AD. My impression, however, is that scholars of ancient philosophy are already getting increasingly interested in the Church Fathers, attracted by the sophistication of these texts and the opportunity for finding new topics to investigate. Let me give you a few reasons why they would be right to do so. Firstly, there is the attitude of the ancient Christians themselves. Admittedly, some, like Tertullian, did complain bitterly about pagan philosophy and even identify it as a source of heresy within Christianity. But others sought to appropriate the word philosophy for the new religion. Justin speaks of Christianity as the true philosophy, Clement of philosophy as a stepping stone towards the truth of the Gospels. We've already seen how it served this purpose in Augustine's case. And in fact, it would be surprising if the Fathers had not attempted to appropriate philosophy for their own purposes. The Fathers were well-educated and wrote for a well-educated audience. They wanted to show this audience that their faith was equal, or rather superior, to intellectually refined pagan systems like Stoicism and Platonism. Their pagan opponents understood the danger of allowing Christianity to draw on classical education. This is why the pagan Emperor Julian banned Christians from teaching rhetoric. As for the Christians, they were not slow to point out that philosophy means the love of wisdom, and depends on reason, in Greek logos. If Jesus was quite literally the incarnation of divine wisdom and logos, what could be more philosophical than Christianity? There is more to this point than mere wordplay. The Christians recognized that philosophers had always been pursuing truth, and sometimes praised them for this. But the philosophers were doomed to fail, at least in part, since perfect truth is given to man only in the Bible and in the person of Christ. Divine revelation, then, finally offered what philosophers had been trying to achieve with the power of human reason alone. Does this mean though that our theologians were not philosophers after all? They swore allegiance precisely to revelation as a source of truth, and not to rational argument. But consider Origen's On Principles, perhaps the greatest work of Christian philosophy in antiquity outside the works of Augustine. At the very beginning, he lists several doctrinal points that are not up for serious debate because they are established beyond doubt by Scripture. These include the existence and oneness of God, the begetting of the Son by the Father, the incarnation of the Son in Christ, and so on. But Origen immediately goes on to emphasize how much still remains open for debate. What is the nature of the soul, and how does it relate to the body? What exactly does it mean to say that the Father begets the Son? What if anything existed before God created the world? These are just a few of the questions Origen goes on to investigate. In doing so, he usually proceeds by giving philosophical arguments which are only afterward shown to be consonant with the Scriptures. Often, it must be said, the supposed demonstration of agreement between his conclusions and scriptural authority is the least convincing part of Origen's presentation. It's natural that the Church Fathers should have proceeded in this way. The Scriptures were, apart from the odd textual dispute, common ground between them and their theological opponents. Certainly, theologians did not hesitate to hurl Biblical proof texts at one another, but those texts were already well known to the other side, who could reply by quoting their own favorite passages. So it was common in such debates to appeal to the neutral ground of rational argument, sometimes including explicit use of logic and other tools of Hellenic philosophy. Philosophy was thus a weapon that could be used to combat heresy, to defeat rival theological theories, and, as in Origen, an instrument that could solve difficulties not settled unambiguously by Scripture. As a result of all this, we can indeed find innovative philosophical ideas in ancient Christian texts, ideas that should be of interest even to the most confirmed atheist. I will mention three. First, there is the issue of causation. The most hotly debated theological issue of late antiquity was the interrelation of the Trinitarian persons. All agreed that the Father begets the Son. But how to understand this divine relation of begetting? Presumably, it should have something in common with the case where a human father begets a human son. This calls for a careful analysis of the causal relationship between human fathers and human sons, and an equally careful consideration of how the divine case might differ from the human case. Nor would even that be enough. After all, the Christians believe that God causes the world to exist, but they are at pains to deny that God relates to the created world the way that the Father relates to the So, any satisfactory position on the Trinity needed to compare and contrast three causal relations—between God and world, between divine father and divine son, and between human father and human son. It's no wonder that Church Fathers offer some of the most sophisticated discussions of causation to be found in antiquity. This leads us to a second issue, the special kind of causation involved in freely chosen action. We have seen that ancient philosophers, including Stoics and Platonists, thought carefully about the sense in which human actions are free. Christian authors responded to these discussions, above all to the notion of an autonomous will or power of choice, such as we find it in the Stoic Epictetus. But they take this notion much further, exploring the conditions under which a will may be said to be free. They also discuss how moral responsibility attaches to the will. Again, the context of this discussion is usually a theological debate. For instance, Augustine's teaching on the will is developed partially in order to show that humans cannot merit salvation without divine grace. But the Christian's ideas about freedom and the will lived on even once those debates had faded into history. Today, even non-Christians find themselves with powerful intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility that resonate more with Augustine than with, say, Aristotle or Plato. Thirdly, ancient Christians were fascinated by language, by both its power and its limitations. The need to interpret Scripture forced them to reflect on the way that language both conveys and conceals meaning. Sometimes implicitly, and often explicitly, they set forth new ideas about what we would call hermeneutics, the interpretation of texts. This topic had been explored by pagan philosophers and by grammarians and rhetoricians who were commenting on Homer and other classical authors. But Christians recognized with new force the possibility that a given text may be subject to an indefinite range of interpretations. This was perhaps especially true of the divine, revealed text of Scripture, but the interpretive theories developed by Augustine and others are applicable to language more generally. Ancient Christians also worried about how language could describe God, including passages in Scripture that describe him in terms that clearly could not be taken in their literal or surface meaning. As we'll see, this issue leads the mysterious thinker known as the Pseudo-Dionysius to an unprecedented investigation of the limitations of language. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of areas where church fathers say things of novel philosophical interest. One could easily add more examples, such as the nature of the soul or the metaphysical relation of parts to wholes, another issue that arose in the Trinitarian debate. Also central to their writings was the problem of whether God's knowledge of the future leads to determinism, a version of a problem we first saw in Aristotle's logic. Philosophically, then, we have good reason to spend a few episodes in the company of the ancient Christians. Historically, their importance is even more obvious. One cannot understand medieval philosophy without first looking at ancient Christianity. That goes not just for the medieval age in Europe, but also the Byzantine tradition and even philosophy in the Islamic world. So I hope you'll make a date to join me next time as I begin to look in more detail at the Greek church fathers here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.