The Greek Mind

Why start with Greece?

Read the opening of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word." The Greek term translated "Word" is Logos. To a Greek reader it meant much more than a spoken word. It meant the reason or rational order behind the universe. The author of John was taking a word that philosophers had used for centuries and saying, in effect, "That rational principle you have been looking for became a human being."

That one example shows why historians like Diarmaid MacCulloch begin the story of Christianity in ancient Greece. Christianity was born among Jews. But within a generation it was speaking Greek, reading Greek, and thinking in categories that Greek philosophers had invented. Many later Christian arguments make little sense without that background. Is God one or three? How can Jesus be both divine and human? What is a soul?

From many gods to one reality

The earliest Greek religion was a world of many gods: Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena and the rest. We know them mainly from the poems of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey. These gods were powerful, but they were not especially good. They quarreled, cheated and played favorites among humans. People offered them sacrifices to win their help or avoid their anger.

From around 600 BC, some Greeks began asking different questions. Living in busy trading cities on the coast of what is now Turkey, thinkers such as Thales asked what everything is really made of. Is there one basic stuff, or one basic principle, beneath all the change we see? These early philosophers ("lovers of wisdom") did not necessarily reject the gods. But they started looking for a single, rational explanation of the world. Some began to speak of a single divine principle, more perfect and more unified than the squabbling gods of the myths.

This was an important shift. Long before Christianity, many educated Greeks had come to think that the true divine must be one, unchanging, and good. When Christian missionaries later preached one God, those educated hearers already had a framework for the idea.

Socrates, Plato and the invisible world

In the city of Athens in the 400s BC, Socrates questioned everyone he met about justice, courage and goodness. He wrote nothing himself. In 399 BC the city put him to death for "corrupting the youth" and disrespecting the gods. His calm acceptance of an unjust death made him a hero to later thinkers. Some early Christian writers even saw him as a kind of forerunner of Christ.

His student Plato became perhaps the most influential philosopher in Western history. Plato taught that the world we see and touch is not the deepest reality. Behind it lies a realm of perfect, unchanging "Forms" or ideas: perfect Justice, perfect Beauty, and above all the Good. Our world is like shadows on a cave wall, a dim copy of the real thing. The human soul, Plato believed, belongs to that higher world. It existed before the body and will outlive it. The goal of life is to turn the soul away from the distractions of the body toward the eternal Good.

It is hard to overstate how much this shaped Christian thought. Later Christian thinkers, from Origen to Augustine of Hippo, found in Plato a language for describing God as perfect, eternal and beyond the physical world. Plato's picture of the soul as immortal also passed into Christian thinking. Yet it was always in tension with the Jewish and Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. Plato hoped to escape the body. The Bible promised to redeem it. That tension runs through the whole of Christian history.

Aristotle: the great organizer

Plato's student Aristotle (384–322 BC) had a more down-to-earth mind. He wanted to classify everything: plants, animals, governments, arguments, kinds of cause. He wrote on logic, physics, ethics, politics and poetry. He described God as the "Unmoved Mover," the first cause that sets everything else in motion without itself being moved.

Aristotle's influence on Christianity came later than Plato's. For centuries much of his work was lost to Western Europe, though it was preserved by Syriac Christians and Muslim scholars. When it returned to the West in the 1100s and 1200s, it set off an intellectual earthquake. Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle to build a vast system of Christian theology. Even the later Catholic language about the bread and wine of the Eucharist, "Transubstantiation," uses Aristotle's terms of "substance" and "accidents."

Stoics and Epicureans

After Aristotle, two other schools became popular. Both were more about how to live than about abstract theory.

• Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BC, taught that the universe is ordered by a divine reason (the logos again). A wise person accepts whatever happens with calm self-control. Stoics also taught that all human beings share in this reason and so form one great human family. That idea echoes in the Christian vision of a church open to all nations.
• Epicureans taught that the gods, if they existed, did not care about humans. The goal of life was a quiet, modest pleasure and freedom from fear, including fear of death.

When the apostle Paul preached in Athens, the book of Acts says he debated with Epicureans and Stoics in the marketplace (Acts 17). His speech even quotes a Greek poet: "in him we live and move and have our being." From its earliest days, Christianity was in conversation with Greek philosophy.

Greek ideas Christianity inherited

Alexander and the Greek-speaking world

Philosophy alone would not have shaped Christianity so deeply if Greek had stayed a local language. It did not. In 334 BC a young Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, crossed into Asia. Within about ten years he had conquered the Persian Empire, Egypt, and lands as far east as India. He died at 32, and his generals split the empire between them. But they kept spreading Greek culture: cities, theaters, gymnasiums, schools and above all the Greek language.

Historians call the period that followed the Hellenistic age, from Hellas, the Greek word for Greece. A simple form of Greek called Koine ("common") became the language of trade, government and learning from Sicily to Syria. A merchant from Antioch could do business in Alexandria or Corinth. A letter written in Greek could be read across the whole eastern Mediterranean. Three centuries later, that is exactly what Paul's letters did.

Jews who spoke Greek

Alexander's new city of Alexandria in Egypt became the greatest center of learning in the ancient world, with a famous library. It also had a huge Jewish community. Many of its members no longer understood Hebrew well. So, starting around 250 BC, Jewish scholars translated their Scriptures into Greek. According to legend the work was done by seventy-two translators, which is why it is called the Septuagint ("the Seventy").

The Septuagint mattered enormously. It was the Bible most early Christians read. When New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they usually quote this Greek version. It also brought Jewish ideas into contact with Greek ideas. The Alexandrian Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC – c. AD 50) tried to show that the law of Moses and the philosophy of Plato taught the same deep truths. He read the Bible allegorically, finding hidden spiritual meanings beneath the stories. Christian teachers in Alexandria, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, would later do the same.

Gifts and tensions

Greek culture gave Christianity a common language, a body of philosophical ideas, and habits of careful argument. Without them, the church could never have written its great creeds. The Council of Nicaea in 325 used a Greek philosophical word, Homoousios ("of the same substance"), to describe the relationship between God the Father and the Son.

But some Christians worried that philosophy was a Trojan horse. The North African writer Tertullian famously asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem, meaning what philosophy had to do with faith. The debate he began has never really ended. When is reason faith's ally, and when does it bend the gospel into something else?