The logic of religion

III. Christian Conceptions of Belief: Early Church Fathers, Augustine

   CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS OF BELIEF Early Church Fathers, Augustine With the advent of Christianity, Western thought underwent a dramatic shift. At the beginning of the Christian era there prevailed in Hellenistic philosophy the image of a universe imbued with reason and consequently shorn of mystery. The universe was regarded as intelligible, its design discernible by science and philosophy . With the teachings of Christ and the Apostles the cosmos of the Greeks took on new meaning. Although Christianity was not introduced as a body of knowledge in opposition to Greek and Roman philosophy—that is, as one doctrine against another doctrine—its alternative character soon became apparent. In contrast to the thought of the Academy and the Lyceum, the natural, spontaneous form of Christianity was not written or didactic instruction. The Christian communities were initially made up of artisans, fishermen, and people of small means. While in Rome Stoic philosophers were lecturing to a relatively sophisticated audience and conducting a disinterested inquiry into nature; in Galilee Jesus was instructing uneducated people who knew nothing at all about Greek science or the Graeco-Roman conception of the world. The untutored people of Galilee could grasp parables and images more readily than the in-  tricacies of dialectical argumentation. In the teaching of Christ and in that of the apostles, the world, nature, and society are presented not as objects of science but as inexhaustible reservoirs of images replete with spiritual significance—e.g., “the lily of the valley ,” “the prodigal son,” “the lost sheep,” and many others whose freshness and popular appeal contrast sharply with the conventional rhetoric and the studied eloquence of the Roman world. Christ teaches people how to attain happiness but not through the development of a Stoic will that treats all external events with indifference. Poverty, sorrow, wrongs, injustices, and persecutions are true evils but evils which, thanks to Christ’s redemptive act, will be righted in the kingdom to come. Typical Christian teaching , such as joy in the midst of suffering in the expectation of eternal happiness, is quite different from the serenity of the Stoic who at each moment sees that moment in its entirety including its role in the fulfillment of his destiny. From its beginnings in Galilee, Christianity spread rapidly from Jerusalem and Judea in the first century, particularly to the north and west, into Syria, Asia Minor, and to Rome. Beginning as a Jewish sect, appealing largely to Hellenized Jews, it first broadened its reach into the Gentile world largely through the efforts of the Apostle Paul. As it made fast its roots and grew, Christianity attracted converts from a wide social and intellectual spectrum. St. Paul is representative of highly educated Hellenized Judaism. One finds within his writings ample evidence of his familiarity with Greek philosophical thought, and he in part addressed hearers of like education. Later when Christianity began to arouse the suspicion and hostility not merely of the Jews and political authorities but also of the pagan intellectuals, theoretical attacks on philosophical grounds had to be met with philosophical as well as theological arguments. Consequently among the writings of the Church Fathers and early                             apologists we find a pronounced philosophical element, largely Platonic but including elements of their limited knowledge of Aristotle and considerable knowledge of the Stoics. The teachings of Christ by implication introduce the problem of faith and reason. The originality of Christianity is seen from two distinct but perhaps complementary viewpoints. Some scholars call attention to the fact that Greek philosophy is essentially an objective representation of things and provides an image of the universe as an object for the contemplating mind. Aristotle taught that in knowing, the knowing subject becomes identical to its object . And in Stoicism, the moral subject has no freedom except in complete adhesion to its object. Without denying this, Christianity presents the specter of truly autonomous subjects, independent of the universe, who completely have a life of feeling and love that cannot always be translated into objective representation. In short, independent of the speculations of the Greeks concerning the cosmos , Christianity calls attention to the subjective, namely to the inner self, to the heart, to feeling, and to conscience. The Greek world, in a manner of speaking, is a world without history. Its eternal order is not affected by time since it is either forever identical to itself or forever returning to the same point...