Christianity and the Classics

Extract

‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ cries Tertullian of Carthage when the Christian Church was barely two centuries old, ‘what harmony is there between Plato's Academy and the Church?’ Then, with all the mastery of eloquence that he had learned in the school of classical rhetoric, he denounces non-Christian literature as pernicious—‘We have no need of curiosity going beyond Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry beyond the Gospel.’

The question might still be crudely asked to-day—Why teach pagan literature in Christian countries and Christian schools? Some may answer that the problem and the conflict are past; none of the greater Christian churches opposes classical education now; on the contrary the clergy mostly encourage it, while it is the scientists that object. But Christianity and the classics meet each other with different facets in different epochs. Sometimes these facets seem less adjustable than those before them. And some of the defences made for pre-Christian literature by Christians, and some of the uses they recommend for it, deserve attention still.

What follows here is mainly an historical survey, and necessarily a very sketchy one. It must begin long before our Lord's time, at the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. By that time Palestine and Egypt, the two great centres of Judaism, had come under Greek rule. After Alexander's death both these regions were taken over by Ptolemy. He and his namesake successors were enlightened and tolerant monarchs. Under their rule Hellenism gained ground among the Jews both at Jerusalem and at Alexandria.