Doctrine and Philosophy in Early Christianity: Arius, Athanasius, Augustine (review)

Christopher Stead. Doctrine and Philosophy in Early Christianity: Arius, Athanasius, Augustine. Variorum Collected Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Pp. xviii + 294. $105.95.

This volume collects twenty-one of Christopher Stead's papers, all except two previously published. In the tradition of the Variorum Collected Studies series, the reprinted essays are individually labeled with a Roman numeral and reproduced with the original pagination. For those who can afford to purchase it, the book will relegate well-worn photocopies to the recycling bin. For all who read it, the book provides an intellectually rich and rigorous journey through fourth- and fifth-century Christian thought from Stead's distinctly philosophical perspective.

Despite its character as collected papers, the book exhibits a certain coherence thanks to a focus on a few central doctrines—God, Christ, and the cosmos—and a consistent point of view on philosophy and the development of Christian orthodoxy. In his delightful introduction, Stead proposes a rather simple structure for the book: "I start with the beginnings of Christian doctrine, and thereafter follow a chronological order" (ix). This description is true enough, but I found a subtler plan to the arrangement of the essays. The book is framed by the large question of the relationship between Greek philosophy and the biblical tradition, especially as this relationship affects Christian talk about God.

The first essay considers the question of "Greek Influence on Christian Thought" in general, and the second turns to Christian appropriation of philosophical concepts of God and their possible tension with the biblical picture of divine freedom and creativity of action. Likewise, the final two essays consider the doctrine of God in terms of how philosophical concepts render problematic certain attributes of the biblical God, especially his possession of a name and his providential care for creatures.

In these four framing papers, Stead articulates a set of principles that inform the analyses in the seventeen intervening chapters. Christian talk about God must acknowledge both God's mysterious otherness (some questions about the divine nature "should not be answerable," even "enormously important" ones [XX, 320]) and his providential engagement ("it is God's will to bridge the gap that separates infinite from finite being . . . God is love" [11, 18]). On the doctrine of God, as on other questions, the "evolution of orthodoxy" should be "a continuing process, in which established positions need tobe clarified,andsome false steps retracted, in the faith that a better grounded and better articulated consensus of belief may be attained" (XXI, 255). Such an effort requires listening to a variety of voices from the past: "[E]ven the Arians, if given their due, might have something to teach us" (XXI, 268).

As for orthodoxy's appropriation of ancient philosophy, it remains a live question whether a Christian theology expressed in Greek concepts is still serviceable for a Church faced with the challenge of further expansion, e.g., in Africa and Latin America. What can be said with assurance is that such questions could not even be raised, let alone considered, without the arts of accurate statement and rational debate which the Church absorbed from its Greek-speaking adherents" (1, 185). Thus, Christians received from ancient philosophy essentially two things: concepts and modes of argument. While the concepts are expendable in service to the Gospel, philosophy's practice of accurate statements and rational debate is essential to the continuing evolution of orthodoxy.

The remaining seventeen essays display these humane principles in action. As the subtitle suggests, Arius, Athanasius, and Augustine are the major players, featured in all but two of papers III through XIX. Stead subjects the arguments of these thinkers to rigorous analysis marked by the generosity of spirit and devotion to accuracy and rationality that the framing essays suggest.

For my part, I believe that the early Christians appropriated from non-Christian philosophy, in addition to the concepts and arts of speaking and debate that Stead mentions, the conviction...