Classicism and Christianity: An Irrepressible Conflict?

In the Late Roman Empire, when classical civilization had fallen into decadence and decay, Christianity proved a dynamic and creative force. Amid the deterioration of political authority, the stagnation of economic life, and the decline of learning, a new civilization was emerging.

I.

As confidence in reason and the expectation of finding happiness in this world eroded during the last centuries of the Roman Empire, a new attitude and outlook began to emerge. Evident in the popularity of mystery religions, this new vision evolved within the context of a declining classicism and an intensifying otherworldliness. One response to the decline of the classical world, Christianity offered the spiritually disillusioned a reason to go on living. Christianity put forward the hope in personal immortality, in the attainment of everlasting life. The rise and triumph of Christianity marked a break—in important respects it was a radical break—with classical antiquity, for there were fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the classical and the Christian concepts of God, the individual, and the purpose and meaning of life.

Christianity succeeded both because of its organization and its message. To retain the devotion of the faithful, to win new converts, and to protect itself from rivals, Christianity early developed an organization that in time grew into a church. To the lonely, the alienated, and the disillusioned in search of community, a church that referred to its members as “sisters” and “brothers” had a powerful appeal. The rise and triumph of Christianity was also related to the corresponding decline in the thought and culture of the Greco-Roman world. The emergence of Christianity marked a shift from reason to emotion, from philosophy to revelation. Offering solutions to the miseries of life and the fear of death, Christianity demonstrated a greater capacity than reason to offer comfort and hope.

The deterioration of the classical world view had led to the advent of mystery religions, the popularity of astrology, the widespread practice of magic, and the quest for a mystical union with the divine. The retreat from reason and the embrace of the supernatural helped to prepare for the acceptance of Christianity. In the culturally stagnating and spiritually troubled Roman world, Christianity gave new meaning to life. For all of its power, the Roman Empire was vast, impersonal, and remote. Many persons found it difficult to give their allegiance to such a distant political entity. The Christian message of a divine savior and a loving father inspired men and women who felt no attachment to the empire, who took no solace in philosophy, and who, as a consequence, endured a profound sense of isolation and loneliness. Christianity offered people what the Roman Empire and classical philosophy could not: an intimate personal relationship with God; membership in a community of the faithful who cared about one another; the promise of eternal life.

Emphasizing the rational intellect and admiring independence and self-reliance, classical philosophy did not provide for people’s changing emotional needs. Christianity addressed itself to that omission. The enslaved, the impoverished, the downtrodden, and the oppressed were especially attracted to the teachings, personality, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to his doctrine of love for all, and his sincere concern for a suffering humanity. People found spiritual and emotional sustenance in a religion which taught that a person need not be wealthy, educated, or talented to be worthy of love. To people overcome by hardship, burdened by misfortune, or terrified of death, Christianity held out the promise of a better, more purposeful, life in this world and salvation in the next. Once they entered the kingdom of heaven, God himself would welcome and comfort them.

Classical philosophy offered little compassion for those in distress. In glorifying acts of heroism, classical thinkers had expressed contempt for individual life, including one’s own. Christian doctrine reversed the relations between life and the world. The cardinal principle of Christianity was that Jesus had endured earthly torment because of his love for humanity—a love that regarded each individual life as invaluable and sacred. Christianity thus gave to ordinary men and women what the aristocratic values of Roman civilization and classical philosophy did not: a source of inner strength, a sense of dignity, a feeling of hope, and a promise of immortality. This world will pass away Christianity taught. Human beings will live forever.

II.

To the first Christians, Jesus was a prophet come to explain the ways of God to man and to herald the beginning of a new age. To St. Paul, Jesus was the Christ, “the anointed one,” the Son of God, the redeemer destined to save the world. He had become a man and allowed himself to suffer and die so that he could atone for the sins of humanity. He rose from the dead to offer eternal life to all who had faith in him.

Belief in a dying god was common among the mystery religions of the eastern Mediterranean. All of these religions in one way or another promised salvation from a painful and oppressive earthly existence. Like these religions, Christianity initiated converts into the mysteries of the faith, served a sacramental meal (the Eucharist), and in time developed a priesthood. But the differences between Christianity and the various mystery religions were more important than the similarities. Unlike the gods of the mystery religions, who were mythical, Jesus was a historical figure. Early adherents to Christianity could identify with Jesus as a person, which enhanced the appeal of the faith. In addition, in the legends of most of the mystery religions, evil beings or powers had killed the deities, who had died against their will. According to Christian scripture, Jesus was a god who, from deep feelings of compassion and love, chose to become a man so that he could share the burdens of humanity and die so that others might live. He sought to lead a bewildered humanity away from sin and death and toward eternal life.

The mystery cults also did not require adherents to undergo a moral and spiritual transformation. Converts to Christianity, by contrast, felt a profound obligation to change themselves and their lives. In the words of St. Paul, Christians had to make themselves “worthy of the God who calls you.” (Thessalonians 2:12) Christians had to obey the command of Jesus to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Finally, in keeping with the Jewish faith from which their religion derived, Christians accepted the existence of only one god. The adherents of the mystery religions often believed in multiple gods, or at least recognized the divinity of gods associated with other cults. For Christians, there was and could be only God the Father, who had created the universe and all that was in it, and his only begotten son, Jesus, who had died to atone for the sins of a fallen world.

Yet, Jesus insisted that he did not intend to start a new religion and to lead the Jews away from Judaism. “‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets,’ he said; ‘I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.’” (Matthew 5:17) Nevertheless, although Jesus did not deny or negate the Law, some of his interpretations of it offended Jewish leaders. For Jesus was distressed about the practice of Judaism in his time. He feared that rabbis had an exaggerated concern with ritual and the subtleties of the law to the neglect of God’s mercy and love. The focus of Judaism, he complained, had deviated from ethical and moral considerations to an emphasis on obedience to a set of rules that regulated the smallest details of daily life.

Rooted in the moral outlook of the Old Testament prophets, the ethical teachings of Jesus are a logical extension of the Hebrew Scriptures, a product of the religious environment of which Jesus was a part. For Jesus thought of himself as a Jew, and was conscious of the Jewish nature of his message. His teachings are thus situated unequivocally in the context of Jewish theology. During the first century B.C., four social, political, and religious parties existed among the Jews of Palestine: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. Composed of the Jewish elite—the landed gentry and the hereditary priests–the Sadducees were religiously conservative, insisting on a strict interpretation of Mosaic Law and a strict observation of the temple ceremonies. More theologically liberal, the Pharisees allowed discussion and varying interpretations of the law. Unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees also believed in life after death, a concept barely mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. Belief in immortality, a late addition to Jewish religious thought that the Jews probably adopted from Zoroastrianism in Persia, had gained wider currency by the first century A.D. As a result, the Pharisees enjoyed the support of a growing number of Palestinian Jews.

The Essenes took the belief in life after death further than the Pharisees had done. The Essenes not only believed in the immortality of the soul but also in the resurrection of the body, which would take place, they argued, when the kingdom of God was established on earth. The Zealots were more of a political party than a religious assembly, although their political opposition to Rome had religious implications. The Zealots were fervent Jewish nationalists who demanded that the Jews neither pay taxes to Rome nor acknowledge the authority of the Roman emperor. They resisted Roman government in every way possible, culminating in the Jewish revolt of 66-70 A.D.

In addition to a belief in the afterlife, another idea that had gained currency among the Jews was the anticipation of a Messiah, a redeemer whom God had chosen to liberate Israel from foreign rule. The idea of a Messiah had both religious and political significance, merging comfortably with the Zealots’ demand for political independence from Rome. Jewish thinkers and prophets predicted that the Messiah would free the Jewish people. The exiles would then return to Israel, and the Jews would be forever blessed with peace, prosperity, and unity in a homeland of their own. Jesus undertook his ministry in the context of these Jewish religious desires and nationalist expectations. His earliest followers expressed the dissatisfaction of the lower classes with the power that the aristocratic Sadducees exercised over Jewish religious, social, and political life. But his adherents were also attracted to the emphasis on immortality, the belief in the resurrection of the body, the need for repentance, and the yearning for a Messiah who would free the Jewish homeland from Roman authority and establish the kingdom of God on earth.

For Jesus, the coming of the kingdom was imminent; the process, in fact, had already begun. God would soon establish a new order in which he would reign over the world with justice tempered by mercy. The present moment was critical. Jesus taught that it was a time of repentance and preparation, because the thoughts, words, and deeds of every person would determine whether he or she could enter the kingdom. Jesus insisted that people had to change their lives and themselves. They had to eliminate greed, lust, arrogance, and selfishness, to purify their hearts and show their love for God and their fellow human beings. “So whatever you wish that men would do to you,” Jesus declared, “do to them; for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)

Jewish leaders countered that the detailed regulations that governed eating, washing, family relations, business transactions, observations of the Sabbath, and the like were essential to the faith. They constituted God’s commandments to his chosen people intended to sanctify even the most ordinary aspects of life. To Jesus such a rigid application of the law distorted its meaning. Rules dealt only with an individual’s behavior; they did not engage a person’s inner being and produce a moral and spiritual transformation. The best way to realize the true meaning of the Law, Jesus argued, was to show love for other human beings. To love one another was the first and greatest commandment that God had given to humanity. According to the Gospels, Jesus taught that the spirit of the law was more important than the letter.Rather than slavish adherence to a set of rules, a simple loving heart was the essence of Judaism. He thus urged individuals to experience a moral and spiritual transformation—a rebirth–not by following the law but through a direct encounter with God and his divine love.

By preaching love for others and compassion for the suffering and the downtrodden, by stressing an intimate relationship with God, Jesus associated himself more with the Hebrew prophetic tradition than with Jewish law. He was less concerned with the rituals, rules, and prohibitions that identified the Jews as a distinct people and that perpetuated their religious, cultural, and national traditions. Given this perspective, it was almost inevitable that the guardians of Jewish religion, culture, and national identity would come to regard Jesus as a threat. To Jewish leaders, Jesus was a subversive. They accused him of associating with social outcasts, prostitutes, imperial tax collectors, and other n’er- do-wells and sinners. He thereby undermined respect for Jewish law. Worse, he proclaimed spiritual and religious truths in his own name and on his own authority, asserting that he, above all others, had a special rapport with God that permitted him to forgive sins and perform miracles. In essence, Jewish leaders alleged that Jesus disparaged the authority of Mosaic Law, which in their minds was an unforgiveable blasphemy.

The Romans who governed Palestine had little interest in Jewish religious disputes. But they did fear that Jesus was a political agitator, a charismatic figure who could ignite Jewish messianic expectations into an uprising against Rome. The Romans may even have viewed Jesus as a Zealot, especially since a number of his early followers were Zealots. Jewish leaders might also have wanted Jesus out of the way because, like the Romans, they feared he would initiate a bloody but futile revolt against Rome that was sure to have terrible repercussions for the Jewish community in Palestine. As a result, some Jewish leaders conspired to turn Jesus over to the Roman authorities. Taken into custody, he was questioned, tortured, and finally sentenced to death. The Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, condemned Jesus to be crucified, which was the customary punishment for anyone found guilty of treason against Rome.

At the time of Jesus’ death in 29 A.D., Christianity was not a separate religion. It was, rather, a small and insignificant Jewish sect with dim prospects for survival. The conviction of the followers of Jesus that he had risen from the dead established Christianity as a religion. The resurrection enabled people to regard Jesus as more than merely an ethical figure, a wise rabbi, or a holy prophet. It made possible the image of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, the savior of the world who had come to earth to show people the way to heaven. For the first Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus assumed a greater importance than his life.

III.

The Apostles and other Disciples of Christ who preached the gospel and tried to win converts addressed themselves to Jews. But before Christianity could realize the universal implications of Jesus’ teachings and become a world religion, as distinct from a Jewish sect, it had to extricate itself from Judaism—from Jewish theology, ritual, politics, culture, and history. This achievement was the work of a Jew named Saul, who became known to the world as St. Paul.

Born in the Greek city of Tarsus in southeastern Asia Minor, Saul was part of the Jewish Diaspora, the dispersion of millions of Jews who lived outside of Palestine. Although the Jews of the Diaspora retained their faith, they also fell under the influence of Greek culture and thought. Saul knew Greek, but his writings suggest that he had no more than a superficial familiarity with Greek literature, philosophy, and science. Educated in the liberal teachings of the Pharisees, Saul had traveled to Jerusalem to study under the guidance of Rabban Gamaliel, a renowned Pharisee teacher. In Jerusalem, Saul persecuted the followers of Christ until he experienced a spiritual transformation and converted to Christianity, becoming its most zealous and important advocate.

St. Paul taught that without Jesus human beings were helpless and lived without hope. They could not on their own overcome their sinful natures, which condemned them to eternal damnation. In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (7:24-25) All who wished to be saved had to accept Jesus as their Lord, an act accomplished formally through the purifying ritual of baptism, which literally washed away original sin, and enter into a personal union with him. To reach the Gentiles with his message, Paul had gradually to disentangle Christianity from Judaism. He reassured the Gentiles that they were not bound by the hundreds of rituals, rules, and prohibitions that composed Mosaic Law. Nor were the Jewish followers of Jesus. The life and teachings of Jesus, Paul insisted, had rendered Mosaic Law obsolete. For Paul, the Laws of Moses were no longer the avenue to God. The love for, and faith in, Jesus had replaced them.

To Paul, the Christian community was the culmination and fulfillment of Judaism. Christianity revealed that the Messiah in the person of Jesus had shown the way to spiritual transformation of this world and eternal life in the next. The Jews regarded their faith as a national religion bound up with the history and culture of the Jewish people. Paul, on the contrary, saw Christianity not as a national but as a universal religion—a faith that was true in all places, at all times, and for all peoples. Jesus had fulfilled not only the messianic hopes of the Jews, but also, and more important, the longing of all peoples for eternal life. In teaching that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus had rendered superfluous Mosaic Law, Paul, whatever his intentions, severed the Jewish roots of Christianity and transformed it from a Jewish sect into a new religion. Paul, not Jesus, founded Christianity.

Christianity synthesized the philosophical and religious traditions of the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans. By assimilating Hebrew monotheism and morality, Christian theology accommodated Hebrew scripture, the Old Testament. The ability to combine Judaic monotheism with Greek rationalism further explains the appeal of Christianity. But almost from the outset an internal struggle developed between fundamentalists who sought to eliminate the influence of what they considered a pagan philosophy and those who recognized the value of Greek thought. To fundamentalist Christians, classical philosophy did not derive from divine revelation. The product of the human mind, philosophy was irrelevant and even menacing to the faith. Christianity alone possessed truth as God revealed it. Fundamentalists objected that studying classical literature and philosophy would contaminate and weaken Christianity and promote heresy. There could be no compromise or rapprochement between classical philosophy and Christian revelation. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked the early Christian theologian Tertullian. “With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our faith that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.”[i]

Despite such admonitions, some church fathers defended the study of the classics. If properly taught, they asserted, the classics could aid in moral development and understanding through an exploration of the Good and a discussion of what constituted a virtuous life. A few went so far as to maintain that Greek philosophy contained the glimmer of divine revelation, a pre-Christian insight into divine wisdom that proved the truth of scripture. As a practical matter, knowledge of classical literature and thought enabled Christians to explain their beliefs intelligibly and to argue doctrine logically in ways that were more capable of answering and even persuading skeptics and critics.

The knowledge of Greek philosophy did, in fact, enable Christian thinkers to transform Christianity from a simple ethical creed into a complex theological system. For Christians, God was the author of the universe and the source of its order as well as the moral principles that governed human conduct. Jesus was the divine Logos, that is divine reason in human form. Christian thinkers thereby assimilated Plato’s distinction between the material world of the senses and the transcendent world of the Forms, which provided them with a more familiar way to talk about heaven. The universal Forms, which Plato asserted were the source of knowledge and morality, for Christians came to exist in the mind of God.

In addition, Christian ethics rested on the Stoic ideals of moderation and restraint. But Christian thinkers reformulated the Stoic conviction that all people are equal because they all share in universal reason. According to Christian thought, people are equal because they are brothers and sisters in Christ. Like the Roman Empire, Christians saw their church as universal, the fulfillment of the Stoic vision of a polity that embraced the entire world.

IV.

That classical philosophy had a strong presence in church doctrine was of immense importance. It meant that rationality, the crowning achievement of classical civilization, was not completely lost to revelation. But the continuing importance of philosophy did not indicate the triumph of classicism over Christianity. The opposite, in fact, took place. Classical thought, in time, sacrificed its independence to the needs of Christian revelation. Reason came to serve faith, wherein Christian truth ultimately resided. Tertullian made clear that it was precisely because faith in Jesus defied all human understanding and logic that he believed. “And the Son of God died,” he wrote. “It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible.” [ii]

Born in the North African province of Numidia and educated in Carthage, where he studied the Latin classics, Augustine of Hippo was by far the most important Christian theologian of the early church. Struggling to find meaning in a world overwhelmed by uncertainty, chaos, and evil, Augustine initially turned to Manichaeism, an eastern philosophy the principal doctrine of which was the struggle between the forces of light and goodness and the forces of darkness and evil. But Manichaeism failed Augustine, leaving him intellectually unsatisfied and spiritually restless. Inspired by the sermons of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, Augustine abandoned Manichaeism and converted to Christianity. He devoted the rest of his life to explaining the teachings of Christ. After being ordained a priest, he was appointed the bishop of Hippo in 395, when he was forty-one years old.

Augustine was fifty-six when, in 410. the Visigoths sacked Rome. The destruction of Rome sent people throughout the Empire into a panic. Non-Christians blamed Christians for the tragedy, alleging that Christians had predicted, and subsequently had brought about, the end of the world. By refusing to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods, Christians had turned them against Rome. Christians had also left the Empire vulnerable to its enemies by refusing to serve in the imperial army. Even Christians expressed alarm at the destruction of Rome. “Where was God?” they asked. “Why had he not spared them? Why did the righteous suffer along with the wicked? Where was the kingdom of God on earth that had been prophesied in Scripture?” Augustine’s City of God was a response to the crisis of the Roman Empire. He maintained that the worldly city, the City of Man, should not be the primary concern of the Christian faithful. Men, he declared, could not realize the ideal state on earth. It existed only in heaven. The misfortunes of Rome, however terrible, should not produce undue distress, for Christianity belonged to the realm of the spirit and could not be identified with any earthly kingdom.

The architect of the Christian world view that was to succeed a dying classicism and a collapsing Roman state, Augustine did not find the meaning of history in the mission of Rome to bring civility, order, and peace to the world. The fall of Rome did not diminish Christianity because true Christians were citizens of the heavenly city, the City of God, which barbarians could never assail or plunder. Compared to the City of God, the decline of Rome was insignificant. Augustine’s perspective offered comfort to Christians who were in anguish about the misfortunes that Rome had endured. What mattered in history was not the coming to be or passing away of empires, but the operation of God’s will on earth and the spiritual destiny of mankind.

At the same time, Augustine conceded that human beings still had to live in the world. Christians could not ignore or reject the City of Man, but Augustine insisted that to the extent it was possible they must reshape it according to the teachings of Christianity. The city that one day must arise from the ashes of Rome, Augustine concluded, should rest on Christian principles and be inspired by the spirit of Christ, organized to shield human beings from their own sinful natures. To restrain people, Augustine was willing to allow that the state must occasionally employ repressive measures and harsh punishments, if only to prevent men and women from destroying each other. But Augustine cautioned that even if guided by Christian doctrine, the earthly city would never know tranquility. People should labor under no illusion that the City of Man could ever be transformed into the City of God, for it was inhabited by wretched sinners. In every place and at every moment, human beings displayed a:

love for all those things that prove so vain and . . . breed so many heartaches, troubles, griefs, and fears; such insane joys in discord, strife, and war; such wrath and plots of enemies, . . . such fraud and theft and robbery; such perfidy. . . homicide and murder, cruelty and savagery, lawlessness and lust; all the shameless passions of the impure—fornication and adultery . . . and countless other uncleanness too nasty to be mentioned; the sins against religion—sacrilege and heresy. . . the iniquities against our neighbors—calumnies and cheating, lies and false witness, violence to persons and property. . . and the innumerable other miseries and maladies that fill the world, yet escape attention.[iii]

Nevertheless, God, in his infinite mercy, still cared for the imperfect creatures whom he had endowed with life. By becoming a man, God in the person of Jesus suffered and died to free human beings from the bondage of original sin.

Yet, Augustine never believed that by his sacrificial death and glorious resurrection, Jesus had brought salvation to the majority of human beings. Most remained condemned to spend eternity in hell. Those from whom God had withheld the gift of faith could do nothing to overcome their sinful natures or alter their destiny. Moral and spiritual regeneration did not arise from human effort or will. Only God could bestow grace, and he alone determine whom he would save and whom he would damn. The comparatively small number possessed of grace constituted the citizens of the City of God. These men and women only sojourned on earth, awaiting their promised deliverance.

The permanent residents of the City of Man, by contrast, were destined for eternal punishment. Augustine imagined an everlasting conflict between the two cities and their inhabitants. The City of Man represented sin, corruption, and death. The City of God stood for righteous, truth, and life. Although Augustine’s insistence that only a small number of persons would be saved ran counter to the early Christian belief that Jesus had offered salvation to all, his distinction between the higher realm of perfection and the lower world of corruption was among the pillars of Christian thought during the Middle Ages.

To those who believed that people had the intelligence and the goodwill to remake the earthly city into a just and holy community, Augustine offered a reminder of the apparently unlimited human capacity for error, sin, and evil. Nor did he think that new social and political arrangements, however original and ingenious, could alter human nature, which was inherently flawed. Augustine cautioned the optimists that progress was always uncertain if not illusory, that success was fleeting, that people were selfish, fickle, weak, prone to iniquity, and that misery was an inescapable part of the human condition.

V.

St. Augustine repudiated the distinguishing characteristic of classical humanism: the independence of reason. Against the classical insistence on the primacy of reason, Augustine proposed the supremacy of faith. Secular knowledge on its own had little value or purpose. In his view, human beings could attain neither understanding nor wisdom through the application of reason alone. The starting point for understanding and wisdom was belief in God and acceptance of the divine will. Reason must always and ever be guided by faith. Moreover, by itself reason could not establish moral and ethical standards. These religion alone could formulate and God alone could reveal. Without faith, humanity was lost. Philosophy was invalid unless it first accepted the existence of God and the authority of revelation. For Christians, truth did not reside in theory or logic. God was the exclusive source of truth, which, without divine guidance, the feeble mind of man could never hope to comprehend. Reason unsupported by faith, Augustine concluded, did not and could not serve as a proper guide to life. “The happiness of man can come not from himself but only from God,” he proclaimed. “To live according to oneself is a sin.” [iv] With Augustine, the human-centered outlook of the Classical Age gave way to the God-centered world view that dominated the Christian Middle Ages. Fulfillment of, and obedience to, the will of God, and not the development of the human personality or human talent, became the purpose of life.

Although classical culture and civilization continued to disintegrate in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Classicism and Christianity remain the two principal sources of the Western tradition. Classical thinkers believed that human worth derived from the capacity of individuals to reason and to shape their characters and their lives according to some rational standard of morality and justice. Christianity also places great emphasis on the individual. According to Christian doctrine, every life is sacred and God loves every person. He wants all persons to behave righteously and thus to enter the kingdom of heaven. So great was his love that he sent Jesus, his only begotten son, to die so that humanity might be saved. Without God, Christians believed, people are just as Augustine described them: “foul, crooked, sordid, and vicious.” With God, human nature can experience a miraculous transformation and become good, loving, and free of sin.

Despite the centrality of the individual to both classicism and Christianity, the two traditions represent fundamentally different, even antithetical, world views. The triumph of Christianity signaled the end of the age of reason and the beginning of the age of faith. Christianity altered the meaning and purpose of life. Christians no longer sought to achieve excellence in this world but to attain salvation in the next. Worldly accomplishments, the full and creative development of human capacities, amounted to nothing if individuals did not have faith—that is, if they did not accept the existence of God and the truth of divine revelation. The Christian ideal of the saintly individual who rejected the world to live an isolated, contemplative, and prayerful life of service to God was alien to the classical spirit, which valued the engaged, active, and responsible citizen. Equally foreign to the classical outlook was the need to escape human nature, which Christianity taught was tainted by original sin, the consequence of Adam’s and Eve’s defiance.

In classical thought, history had no ultimate end and no ultimate meaning. Alternate periods of happiness and misery recurred in the lives of individuals and nations. While in prison awaiting execution, Boethius, who helped to sustain the classical tradition into the early Middle Ages, reflected that there was no “certainty in the affairs of mankind, when you know that often one swift hour can utterly destroy a man.” [v]According to the Christian world view, by contrast, history had both a cosmic and a deeply personal significance. It was the drama of humanity, the struggle to overcome original sin in order to gain eternal lire and happiness in heaven. History began with the fall of Adam and Eve. It would end when Christ returned to earth to eradicate evil and to enshrine peace, harmony, and love, an act that marked the end of history in the culmination of the will of God.

Classicism acknowledged no higher authority than reason. Classical thinkers believed that all persons had within themselves the ability to understand life and the world. Christianity taught that without God, knowledge was inconsequential, erroneous, and finally, meaningless. Classical thinkers insisted that ethical and moral standards rested on the laws of nature, which reason could discern and appreciate. Through reason, individuals could discover the values and virtues by which they ought to order their lives and regulate their conduct. Alone in his dungeon, Boethius turned for consolation not to the teachings of Christ but to classical philosophy. He derived solace from the philosophical tradition that extended from Socrates to the Stoics—a tradition which confirmed that “if then you are master of yourself, you will be in possession of that which you will never wish to lose, and which Fortune will never be able to take from you.” No tyrant, however powerful or unjust, could “ever disturb the peculiar restfulness which is the property of a mind that hangs together upon the firm basis of reason.”[vi] Reason enabled people to govern themselves and to control their destructive passions. Reason exposed evil and confirmed goodness.

Christian thinkers, on the contrary, maintained that ethical and moral standards originated with God. Without submission to the will and the commandments of God, human beings were lost. However compelling and powerful, reason alone could not enlighten or alter sinful human nature. Only by turning again and again to God for guidance, mercy, forgiveness, love, and hope could sinful human beings find the resilience to subdue the evil that dwelled within. Most Christian thinkers did not seek to eradicate the classical tradition. They recognized its worth and its power. Instead, they sought to incorporate Greek and Roman philosophy into the framework of Christian theology. That task, though, was easier said than done. Christianity had inherited the Hebraic vision of God as Lawgiver and Judge. God makes life both intelligible and meaningful. Although the Greeks also had a conception of God, to them God was an abstraction. The Greek vision of God was incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian God of judgment and compassion. In classical, especially Greek, thought, God was the principle of order, the first cause, the unmoved mover. Unlike the Hebrew-Christian God, the classical god was distant, impersonal, unfeeling, and removed from human affairs. The Greeks approached God through the mind. The Christians approached God through the heart. The Greeks neither loved nor worshipped God, and he remained indifferent to the world of men.

As a consequence of these incompatible conceptions of God, the classical and Christian worlds also charted different paths to happiness and meaning. To classical thinkers, the political community was the avenue to justice and purpose. Following the influence of St. Augustine, Christians denied the importance of worldly accomplishments and identified with the belief in eternal life beyond the temporal world. Only in heaven could the ideal commonwealth exist. Entrance into the Kingdom of God was, or rather became, the sole purpose of life. For the next thousand years this distinction between heaven and earth defined Western thought and culture.

In the Late Roman Empire, when classical civilization had fallen into decadence and decay, Christianity proved a dynamic and creative force. Amid the deterioration of political authority, the stagnation of economic life, and the decline of learning, a new civilization was emerging. Possessed both of institutional strength and spiritual vitality, Christianity survived the fall of Rome. In the centuries to come, it served as the essential agent of civilization in the Western world.

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[i] Tertullian, “On Prescription Against Heretics,” in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (New York, 1918), Vol. 3, 246.

[ii] Tertullian, “On the Flesh of Christ,” in Ibid., 525.

[iii] St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. by Gerald G. Walsh, et al. (Garden City, NY, 1958), 519.

[iv] Ibid., 300.

[v] Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy, trans. by W.V. Cooper (New York, 1943), 26.

[vi] Ibid., 29, 34.

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