Christianity
The Patristic Age 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 27 May 2008
The Foundation of the Christian Myth
The Patristic Age, the period following the Apostolic Age of the Church, was the age of the Church Fathers. The honest Christian has to face up to the fact that these Church Fathers had no consistent or coherent doctrine. By the fifth century, the Christian theologian, Cyril of Alexandria, had a complete theology, but, in the second century, the Apostolic Fathers lacked a mature and sophisticated outlook. The Holy Ghost took its time in formulating doctrine, giving every impression to the unbiased observer that men were inventing and refining it as they went along, just as they would if had no spiritual assistance but made it up on the hoof.
In the second century, a wide variety of opinions existed, even on matters central to Christian belief, such as atonement. Men who were later called heretics were considered orthodox and even respectable, like Origen. The Church Fathers had inherited from believers in the Apostolic Age an outline history of the Christian saviour, suitably modified to avoid offending Romans, and this outline was all they had. The theological consequences of the basic story had not come with it, and needed to be elucidated, and so it was, but in a piecemeal and gradual fashion, in different regions of Christendom, and without uniformity or coherent prioritizing, but according to questions from the flock that occurred spontaneously.
In the west of the empire, the Latin speaking bishops were averse to philosophy, and contented themselves with enlarging on the basic faith of the sheep, and trying to defend it against sophisticated classical beliefs and Christian heresies, as they saw them. In the east, where there was more continuity with the earliest followers of Christ, and a more philosophical train of thought, the bishops saw two degrees of Christianity and Christians, only the lower of which simply comprised faith and nothing more. The higher level was one of “gnosis”, and attempt to go beyond faith to a more complete understanding of God and salvation. The simple believer was the “hearer”, and the ones with a greater understanding were “perfect ones”. Plainly, this division reflected the division of the Essenes into village Essenes and the holy monks who remained celibate and tried to be perfect like God and His angels as the Jewish scriptures demanded.
Christianity had its own peculiar history in its bowdlerized version of the ministry of Jesus, set down in writing between the years of about 70 AD to 120 AD, half a century to a century after the events they record, but it was growing in a large and sophisticated state, the Roman Empire, a complicated network of different cultures which could not avoid influencing its evolution, despite the unreasonable beliefs of fundamentalists. The rapid expansion of Rome into its neighbouring Mediterranean countries created a soil fertile with religious, liturgical and philosophical ideas. Some of them some Christians abhorred and reacted against, while others, some accepted and gladly adopted.
According to the Christianity that has come to us, its womb was Judaism, a religion set up by the Persians for people who had co-operated with them rather than resisting them, the nations whose gods were not considered by Persians as daevas, devils. The gods and religions of people who resisted the Persians were destroyed, and loyal colonists from elsewhere in the empire were put in charge of them in the traditional manner of ANE imperialism. Their remit was to impose the acceptable religion of non-Persian subjects of Persia. Loyal nations were treated to an influx of Persian scholars to help them restore their religion, which the Persians claimed had been destorted by previous wicked kings or conquerors. Either way, a religion acceptable to the Persian administration was imposed, albeit sometimes under the pretence of restoring an ancient tradition.
In Judah it seems that initially the Persians did little. The country was tiny and impoverished, and seems not to have resisted Persian rule, so the Am ha Aretz of Judah were allowed to continue as before, with just token colonization by some external administrators. But, in the middle of the fifth century BC, the Judahites seem to have rebelled, either joining the rebellious Egyptians or, soon after, the rebellion of Megabyxos (or Megabazes Greek, Persian Bagabukhsha) against Artaxerxes. The outcome was that a body of colonists were sent into Judah to set up a temple for the Juddin, peaceful non-Persian people, and to raise taxes from them more effectively. Jerusalem was set up as a Vatican City for non-Persians within the empire as a spiritual and financial center of their religion.
The God of the Jews was chosen as Yehouah, a popular local deity in Canaan and the ANE, but he was imposed as an ethical god moulded on Ahuramazda, the Persian High God, not the storm and fertility God he had been to Caananites and Syrians. Judaism was therefore a fairly new religion, but one which successive rulers of Judah, Persians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Hasmonaeans and Herodians continued to refine and alter. This the Persians began as a mythical corrective history based on the Assyrian annals they had captured, and the Ptolemies and others changed and built on it. Thus Judaism began as more than the religion of the tiny state, Yehud. It was the religion of a class of subject people under the Persians, and widespread within the Persian empire.
Over 300 years later, at the time of the birth of Christianity, many Jews of Persia were now in Europe, the western satrapies of what once was Persia having been taken over by Rome. So the Jews were not simply a dispersion of people from a tiny state, but began as a diaspora across Persia, and, when Rome annexed Asia, Syria and Egypt, millions of Jews became an ethnos of the Roman empire.
It was in this large volume of dispersed Jews that Christianity initially spread. Until the revolt of Bar Kosiba, in the second century, Christianity predominantly comprised Jews. Christian thinking was mainly Jewish thinking, and the scriptures mentioned in Christian writing of the time meant the Jewish scriptures, albeit in their Greek form, the Septuagint.
Hellenization
Despite this Jewish dominance, Hellenization was strong, even from the outset, and in the second century began to exercise a greater and greater influence. Even in Judaism, aspects or “hypostases” of God were increasingly personified, as they had been in the Persian religion. Wisdom or Sophia is an example, and the Holy Ghost was the direct equivalent of the Persian Holiest Spirit, Ahuramazda in his central aspect, and quite probably identified with Mithras (Mica). Persian yazatas became Jewish and Christian angels, allowing the archangel Michael to become the face of God visible to humanity just as Mithras was, it seems, of Ahuramazda. Mithras (Mica) is Michael (Mica)!
Paul used these ideas to explain Christ, and how the hypostasis of the logos applied to him. So, Wisdom, Glory (Shekinah), Word (Logos) and Spirit were all hypostases of God within Judaism that, in due course, allowed the Christians to justify the Trinity as different manifestations of a single God. The archangels seem to have been the same, there being six or seven of them, as there was in Zoroastrianism, depending on whether the Holy Ghost or Angel of the Lord was included—God’s reason in angelic form—or excluded. This angel was identified with the angel Michael.
Michael was effectively God in a more accessible form, just as Mithras seems to have been an accessible form of Ahuramazda. Otherwise, angels seem to have been considered independent, and so, somehow could get up to mischief and become the devil and his demons, a separate creation in the original Zoroastrianism. Thus, Michael could seem to be an independent angel who interceded for Jews before God, and as such easily adapted into being Christ and the Trinity. Michael was God, he was an independent angel or spirit, and he became Jesus Christ when the attribute of instituting the Final Judgement was transferred to Christ as his parousia.
The focus of Hellenistic Judaism is thought to have been Alexandria in Egypt, though it is a mistake to imagine it was a single species. There were many Jews in the other great African and Asian cities too, and each took a slant conditioned by the local culture. Even so, Hellenistic Judaism as a looser type of Judaism “proved a highly sympathetic channel for introducing Hellenistic culture to the early Church”, according to Canon J N D Kelly (Early Christian Doctrines, 1977). What he means was it was an excellent channel for the Essenistic Judaism of Jesus and the Jerusalem Church to be led into the gentile Roman empire.
Philo of Alexandria
Philo was an important contemporary (30 BC to 45 AD) Hellenized Jew of Alexandria whose ideas we have in detail. He was head of the Jewish delegation to the emperor Gaius in 40 AD. Following a trend established by the Egyptian dynasty of Greek kings, the Ptolemies, he claimed everything Greek had been anticipated by the Jews, or rather the God of the Jews in the Pentateuch, where God had used inspired men to write down His will. How was it possible to get Greek philosophy from the Jewish Torah? By interpreting the Torah as allegory!
It is a method of proving anything from anything else—the moon is made of green cheese, or you can get sunbeams from cucumbers! It has long been used to get supposedly hidden meanings from mythical stories. Stoics used it to find Stoicism in Homer and Hesiod, and the Jew, Aristobulus, used it to find philosophy in the Torah. Philo liked it and used it enthusiastically himself. The literal meaning of a text was metaphorically the body, and the hidden meaning was its metaphorical soul, an apt analogy as no one has yet been able to find the soul of anything.
Philo saw God as utterly transcendent, leaving Him with the problem of how He could affect the world. He solved it by inventing intermediate powers between God and the material world. The logos was one such power. So God could not directly influence the world because He utterly transcended it, but by a blatant mental conjuring trick, God created the logos whereby He could create the material level. This God is not omnipotent but has to use tricks and devices to achieve His aims. Neither Philo nor most Christians notice. Canon Kelly writes that “Philo’s teaching about the logos is ambiguous, even inconsistent”.
The logos was an ancient Greek speculation taken from Persian arta, but was polished by the Stoics at this time. For them logos remained order and truth, as it was for the Persians (arta, asha), but became cosmic reason and a cosmic blueprint, the rational principle of reality which gave it shape, natural laws and meaning. Humans could comprehend reality because of the logos in them. From such notions, logos, to Philo, was the senior intermediary of God, the most like Him, and the first to emanate from Him, His “first begotten son”! (De Agric 57).
Logos then acted as God’s agent in creating the world, and in permitting humanity to comprehend God. In modern evolutionary terms, this latter is analogous with the accumulated experience early forms of life acquire from their environment which allow them to understand the world in which they live. The logos, Philo tells us, is the Angel of the Lord, which appeared to the Patriarchs. In other respects, the Angel of the Lord seems identifiable as Michael, so the logos is Michael, who is like God.
The bible had it that God created the world by His word (logos), and similarly, by His word revealed Himself to His prophets. No modern believer, Jew or Christian, will doubt that the bible precedes the Greek philosophers, but it does not. Heraclitus wrote about logos a century before the bible began to be written by the Persian colonials, and even longer before the Ptolemies cast Genesis in more or less the shape it is now in. Philo had logos playing the role that others had Wisdom playing. It acted as the source of Plato’s forms. By the logos, God, who was Himself transcendent and unable to touch matter, projected His thoughts into it to make the tangible universe.
Syncretism in Rome
The loss of the Republic, civil war, and the institution of the empire had left Romans feeling insecure, and dissatisfied with their tranditional religions. In the last two centuries BC, several eastern religions had been imported into Rome, and had enjoyed a deal of popularity. Cybele, Serapis, Isis and Mithras had their own adherents, while the traditional Greek and Roman beliefs faded. Emperor worship was treated as a symbol of patriotic loyalty, like the US flag, and the portrait of the British Queen rather than a serious religion. With these competing beliefs came also eclecticism, called, in religion, syncretism, whereby beliefs and rituals are picked and chosen, and religions adapted to the demands of their customers, like modern Christian cults in the US:
The various cults fused with and borrowed from each other indiscriminately.Canon Kelly
One characteristic of the mystery religions, in which new members were inititiated by secret rituals, was a sacred meal, and before partaking of it, the initiates had to spend periods in abstention and purification. Moreover, monotheism was getting increasingly accepted even by the lower orders. The Greek philosophers had mainly not believed in the gods of Homer and Hesiod, except as illustrative of various aspects of a supreme God. Thus Plato found the supreme God in The One, the utmost Good in his world of forms. Therafter, people increasingly saw the polytheistic gods as attributes of one supreme God, or aspects of a unique power, not necessarily conscious, in the cosmos.
Aristides praised individual gods in his speeches, but he regarded them as emanations of a universal father, some knew as Pantheos. When Aurelian, in 274 AD, made Sol Invictus the state God of Rome, it was as a universal God, as a Pantheos. More intelligent and educated people preferred a philosophical approach rather than any type of ritualized religion. The Greek philosophers offered explanations of the world and of the principles that ran it.
At the beginning of Christianity, Stoicism was popular among educated people. Stoics rejected any sort of parallel world that could not be sensed, but accepted that matter was subject to an order (logos) which arranged it. This logos was airy, and so was pneumatic or spiritual, using the words in their proper sense, but was not spiritual in the modern sense of being immaterial. It was material itself, merely being energetic rarefied matter, a type of fire, like the Persian asha which annealed and shaped matter, and, at the End of Time, would consume it. To the Stoics, everything was material, even the spiritual!
Logos was also akin to mind, Nature, Providence and even God, though not of the tinkerman kind. Human people could be sure that this Providence had made, and would maintain, the world to their advantage—reminding us of the way evolution tailors organisms to the environment they live in—but it did not interefere in what was ordained by changing its own laws. The Stoics were “stoical” in just the sense we still use the word—they accepted fate as it came to them, gritting their teeth when necessary, and hoping for a change in the future.
Everything that existed was profane matter including the sacred fire or logos. Everything therefore had logos within it, a divine spark, a notion that the Gnostics took up. These sparks of the universal logos were like seeds which gave rise to everything different, and so they were called “seminal logoi”, and this is just what the human soul was. Compared with the body, it was immortal, but nevertheless died in the general conflagration at the End of Time. The soul, the emanation of the divine “logos” in man, consisted of different parts controlled by a ruling element which was reason.
Syncretism was common in these philosophical world views, just as in ritual religions, so that Stoicism and Platonism ran together in the first centuries of the modern era. Neo-Platonism was partly Stoicism and vice-versa, and both influenced Christianity. Even so, the schools never merged, but retained their own independence, both inclining towards a variety of monotheism, Platonism absorbing Aristotelianism in some of its offshoots, and leaning towards religion in others by equating Plato’s Good with Aristotle’s Supreme Mind, Forms or Ideals being the thoughts of the resulting God.
The critic of Christianity, Celsus, whom Origen sought to refute at a time when Celsus was unable to reply—he was dead—was in a school of middle Platonism founded by Albinus in the second century. Immiscible phases of being had their own god. The prime God was unmoved and purely spiritual—now in its modern usage—so unable to relate with anything material, but a World Intellect represented a desire for the spiritual God, and allowed Him to influence material being, albeit indirectly. However, the world also had its own spiritual phase, the World Soul, which the prime God did control directly.
In Contra Celsum 4:52, 54, Origen says Celsus denied that God could have created the material body, or anything mortal. Only the soul belonged to God. For God to appear incarnated on earth, Christians were postulating an impossibility, unless God ceased being purely spiritual. Any such change, if it could happen, must be a change for the worse (Contra Celsum 4:14)
Essentially neo and middle Platonists thought God was necessarily entirely transcendental or spiritual, and therefore only glimsible by humanity briefly and incompletely through the intellect. Today we might doubt that something infinite in extent could compress itself into the finite figure of a man, and albeit with his different concepts, that was Celsus’s view.
It was Plotinus (205-270 AD), an Egyptian Greek, who founded neo-Platonism as it was met by the Church Fathers. Plotinus was a monist, a believer that “all was one”, but differentiated into phases, grades or emanations of being, arranged as a taxonomy. The levels of being all condensed, or emanated depending on your analogy, from “The One”, the highest level or hypostasis of being, and everyting was motivated to return to it. In scientific terms, it has some parallels with potential energy—everything seeks to minimise its potential energy. The One can yield condensates (or emanations), yet it remains itself unchanged, just as the energy of a system is conserved though it appears in different forms. Plotinus identified it with The Good, not because it had Goodness as a mere quality, but that it was Goodness.
Then, like the middle Platonism of Albinus, came a second hypostasis—Thought, Intellect or Mind—and then came the third phase, Soul. Mind was a phase constituted of Forms (ideals) which were intermediate between reality and the absolute perfection of The Good. Mind was the source of the variety in the world, and is equivalent to Plato’s Demiurge or Creator. Soul itself has a higher phase and a lower one, the higher linking Mind to the material world which is the lower, Nature or Physis, the World Soul.
People’s individual souls emanate from the World Soul as a higher and a lower phase, the higher being their mind and the lower their body. The body is material, quite out of touch with the phase of Ideals, and so is dark, The Good being pure illumination. What is dark is evil. Nevertheless, Nature, Matter is still a phase of The One, and that is purely Good, so even what is evil cannot be without merit. It is subject to the hypostases that are above and beyond it, being put in order by a higher soul, and so, unpleasant as it might seem, it is the best of all worlds!
Every level has an urge to return to the original state in The One. The human soul finds this urge in love, the Eros of Plato’s Symposium, and through it can begin to climb the intervening levels back to identity with The One. To do so there are three requirements:
- To eschew the body by foregoing its pleasures in a catharsis, and reducing its demands via the senses
- Adopting mental challenges instead of physical ones, learning all one can of science and philosophy
- A mystical union with The One by means of “ecstasy”, the loss of one’s sense of the individual, od subject and object, of separation from all else that exists. It is the kinunity of Adelphiasophists.
