Sound thinking
Philosophy and loving the Logos
by Ken Myers
“Although [in this book] I deal with ideas and arguments, I am convinced that the study of early Christian thought has been too preoccupied with ideas. The intellectual effort of the early church was at the service of a much loftier goal than giving conceptual form to Christian belief. Its mission was to win the hearts and minds of men and women and to change their lives. Christian thinkers appealed to a much deeper level of human experience than had the religious institutions of society or the doctrines of the philosophers. In this endeavor the Bible was a central factor. It narrated a history that reached back into antiquity even to the beginning of the world, it was filled with stories of unforgettable men and women (not all admirable) who were actual historical persons rather than mythical figures, and it poured forth a thesaurus of words that created a new religious vocabulary and a cornucopia of scenes and images that stirred literary and artistic imagination as well as theological thought. God, the self, human community, the beginning and ending of things became interwoven with biblical history, biblical language, and biblical imagery.
“The church gave men and women a new love, Jesus Christ, a person who inspired their actions and held their affections. This was a love unlike others. For it was not only that Jesus was a wise teacher, or a compassionate human being who reached out to the sick and needy or even that he patiently suffered abuse and calumny and died a cruel death, but that after his death God had raised him from the dead to a new life. He who once was dead now lives. The Resurrection of Jesus is the central fact of Christian devotion and the ground of all Christian thinking. The Resurrection was not a solitary occurrence, a prodigious miracle, but an event within the framework of Jewish history, and it brought into being a new community, the church. Christianity enters history not only as a message but also as a communal life, a society or city, whose inner discipline and practices, rituals and creeds, and institutions and traditions were the setting for Christian thinking. . . .
“In the Roman world the closest analogy to the moral philosopher was the physician, one who, in the words of Cicero, practiced ‘a medical art for the soul.’ Ethics was centered on the moral agent, and the virtuous life was learned in a one-to-one relation with a tutor. Seneca wrote letters to Lucilius to guide his formation in virtue, and in a sermon (or moral lecture) on wealth, Clement of Alexandria exhorted his hearers to seek out a man of God as director and entrust themselves to him as to one who ‘sees to your cure.’ To be sure, in early Christian literature there are treatises (or sections of treatises) that deal with such moral issues as lying, sexuality, marriage, and public amusements, and here and there one will find discussions of topics such as suicide, war, abortion, and homosexual acts. But the vast bulk of writings on ethics, whether Christian or pagan, has as its theme the formation of individual lives.
“In a little work written in appreciation of Origen his disciple, Gregory the Wonderworker left an engaging account of what it meant to have Origen as teacher. Gregory says he had come to Palestine, where Origen was living, to have ‘fellowship with this man.’ He was attracted by Origen’s great learning and fame as an interpreter of Scripture, but his essay accents Origen’s spiritual and moral qualities. From the time Gregory came to study with him Origen urged him to ‘adopt a philosophical life.’ He said that ‘only those who practice a life genuinely befitting reasonable creatures and seek to live virtuously, who seek to know first who they are, and to strive for those things that are truly good and to shun those which are truly evil . . . are lovers of philosophy.’
“The term for philosophy in the early centuries of the Roman Empire was life, bios in Greek, a word that is best translated in English as ‘way of life.’ Philosophy was not simply a way of thinking about life; it was a way of instilling attitudes and training people to live a certain way. Musonius Rufus, a second-century philosopher, said the task of philosophy is ‘to find out by discussion what is fitting and proper and then to carry it out in action.’ When Justin Martyr embraced the Christian philosophy instead of the philosophy of Plato and Pythagoras, he said he had found a life that was ‘sure and fulfilling.’ Clement of Alexandria, who wrote the first treatise on Christian ethics, entitled The Tutor, said that its purpose was to ‘heal the passions’: ‘The role of the tutor is to improve the soul, not to educate nor give information but to train someone in the virtuous life.’ In another treatise Clement set forth the theological and philosophical grounds for the Christian life, yet his goal always remained the same, to form the soul in virtue.
“In an original and insightful book entitled Seelenfuehrung (Directing the Soul), Paul Rabbow, a German scholar, made the imaginative suggestion that the best place to learn the techniques used by Roman moral philosophers (and Christians like Clement) to train their disciples in virtue was found in the exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Society of Jesus. Rabbow observed that the ancient texts embodied a system of ‘spiritual direction’ in the form of moral exercises, cultivation of good habits, self-examination, meditation on edifying sayings, contemplation of noble examples, all under the watchful eye of a master. The philosopher Galen said that twice a day he pondered sayings attributed to Pythagoras, reading them over and reciting them aloud. His aim was not to understand certain metaphysical or moral truths but to practice self-control, for example, in matters of food, desire, drink, and the emotions. Philosophy demanded that its adherents engage in an ‘inner battle between the old and the new life.’ In short, the moral life required conversion of the affections as well as of one’s behavior.”
— from Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 2003)
