From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

Is there anyone out there really interested in this book? Perhaps not. Even so, there comes a moment when an idea that is going to change the world takes off. This is the moment not when it originates, but when it achieves critical mass and from which its momentum becomes just about inevitable. How does an idea shared between a few believers become a mass movement? Sometimes it is against all reasonable expectation.

If a local handyman announced that he was starting up a new sect a few streets away from where you lived, what odds would you give on its becoming the official religion of the world, announced as such by the then Global Government, with other temples and churches being shut? Long odds, I would guess, and these would lengthen once you had heard of the neighbourhood prophet's death at the hands of a hostile mob.

Somehow Christianity achieved this. Whether or not you believe that one reason for its success was that God intended it as part of His Plan for humanity, the mechanisms by which it succeeded are intriguing.

Compare it with Judaism. In the first century AD, Jews made up around 8 or 9 per cent of the Roman Empire's population - a percentage greater than in Europe before 1939. But it did not go on to sweep the world.

Nor did persecution eradicate the new cult. Other beliefs withered in the blast of official disapproval. When the mysteries of Dionysus were suppressed as improper, in 186 BC, that was their end. Later on, the Church was to destroy its rivals, pagan rites being finally banned in 451 AD.

Professor Stead's book examines the influence of Greek philosophy on early Christianity and shows one key way in which the new cult found a response among the Gentiles once it had begun to separate from its Jewish origins. The Acts of the Apostles describes how St.Paul met Epicureans and Stoics at Athens and made converts. This was an important step. The educated, hellenised - the words were practically synonymous - citizens of the Roman Empire were able to recognize familiar concepts in the new cult. Christians were able to incorporate philosophical ideas into their belief system. The new sect had arrived in a belief environment which would assist it to survive and expand:

The conventional state religion was often little more than a formality; the so-called 'mystery cults' offered comfort and reassurance, but provided no explanations and made few demands; the worshipper could enter one, two or several such fellowships as he wished. The Jews had largely detached themselves from the main stream of ancient culture. It was the philosophers who both called for commitment and presented a way of life based on a rational view of the world and man's place within it.[Page number?]

The book shows how much the philosophy of Plato reflected the direction of the emerging new cult. Plato's works presented a world view where a divine ideal, the "forms" operated at a heavenly remove from the imperfection of the human world; Christians also sharply separated heaven and earth. Similarly, they could respond to the sharp division of body and soul, with the latter being responsible for intellectual and moral life. A dialogue like the Phædo, where Socrates defends his belief in the immortality of the soul, appealed greatly.

Professor Stead chooses the objects of his analytical focus with telling economy. He takes Philo of Alexandria, as an example of the merging of formerly disparate philosophies which occurred in the first century BC.

Philo was a Greek-speaking Jew who took the Torah as accurate in truth and detail, but interpreted it through the ideas of Plato, the Stoics and Aristotle. Moses is treated as a Platonic philosopher; the forms are the concepts of creation - hoi logoi spermatikoi - in the mind of God. Philo's God does not act directly on the world but through powers among which is God's Reason or Logos. This figure in turn originates in the demiurge, who - rather than the supreme God - made the world,according to the myth of creation in Plato's Timæus. The Logos is referred to as God's son, and together with Wisdom - sophia - God's consort, makes up a prototype of the Christian Trinity.

With the accounts of the various accounts of the Logos in Platonic and Stoic philosophy you can see just how many resonances an educated reader would have found in the words which start St.John's Gospel: "In the Beginning was the Word..." - En arche en ho Logos. Which Word? The Son of the new Christian God? The organising cosmic principle of the Stoics? The Reason of Philo's Platonic/Jewish God?

The book has a rational division into three parts. It gives a brief overview of Greek philosophy; examines the use of philosophy in Christian thought and finishes by looking at Saint Augustine.

Along the way, the investigation becomes complex, particularly of the bitter wrangling over the nature of Christ. The analyses of key defining words - phusis; hypostasis; prosopon; ousia - becomes bewildering as each word has superfine shades of meaning which pointed the way to heresy or orthodoxy for those who used them in the fourth century.

The detailing of the theological battleground clearly grips Professor Stead but on occasion your reviewer, flagging slightly, found himself rather more curious about the deceits by which the "devoted but devious" Cyril of Alexandria outplayed the "sincere but inexperienced" Nestorius of Constantinople at the Council of Ephesus in 431.[Page number?]

The final section of the book is devoted to Augustine, who was perhaps the greatest of all the early Christian thinkers. Professor Stead suggests that the account Augustine himself gives of his conversion in The Confessions - the saint finally rejecting worldly ambitions and committing to spiritual life - is a later gloss on events. He suggests that for Augustine, philosophy and religion were not widely divorced from each other; that the Platonism in which Augustine was steeped directed him to Christianity.

Augustine moved to a grim view of free-will and sin: he believed only a small group of pre-selected believers would be saved and that God fixed the circumstances through which a man might be saved. Here Professor Stead's own beliefs show through. It is a relief to read "I myself believe that the predestinarian system is wholly incompatible with a doctrine of God's love and mercy." [Page number?] Amen to that.

One is still left with awe at the formidable talent of Augustine in adapting philosophical ideas to the service of his faith. He can, for example, draw on the Stoics' idea of a propatheia, an involuntary response (like a sudden surge of desire), and claim that God arranges for these to strike men randomly, controlling the sequence of events but not - Augustine insisted - dictating whether the response is sinful or not! Somehow he believed that, although God knew all future events, and indeed through the allocation of grace ordained the ability to achieve salvation, man did possess a free will.

To Christopher Stead, the debates he presents so clearly have an importance beyond the academic. His belief informs his knowledge, and gives the lucidity of his exposition an added dimension. At the close of the second section of the book, when the analysis of the Christological debate between the rival camps of Alexandria and Antioch has reached an almost baroque impenetrability, the smoke suddenly clears and we see Professor Stead's colours. We know the debate we have managed to follow - if we have - matters passionately to him. The rhythms of his language are balanced, and lucid, drawing together analysis and faith.

If we think it right, we can believe with the Fathers that the divine Wisdom foresaw that this man would always act out his appointed part, acquiring liberty to choose, but choosing right without constraint, in an exercise of freedom which knows no sin.

In this way we might hope to reach a synthesis of Alexandrian and Antiochene insights; the Logos takes the initiative, and retains it; yet human obedience is also manifested to be our example and inspiration.[Page number?]

The formidable bibliography is a reminder, although none is needed, of the depth of learning behind this book. The index is clear. The list of subjects is intelligently restricted to those analysis of which constitutes the core of the book.

Christianity, like many other once assertive belief systems, appears to be in retreat Yet its images, stories, symbols, language and habits of thought still permeate our society. Whether for the student of philosophy, theology, or history, this book stands as a clear and compelling introduction to one of the key influences on Christianity at the critical moment when it made its transition from back-street cult to international religion.

And, I suppose, there is much here in the way of guidance by example for those libertarians who want their own back-street cult to take over the whole wide world.

Michael Barry

---