The Way that seems Right
In every age there are things which seem so right to men that they are called ‘self evident truths’. For example, in past ages most ‘Christians’ have been convinced that all men had immortal souls, that God was a Trinity, that He was immaterial, that men’s souls were destined for heaven. No proof could be found in God’s Word for any of these assertions. They were believed, not because they were logical or proveable, but because they seemed right.
The doctrines mentioned did not arise after the advent of Christianity, but existed before in pagan philosophy, particularly among that group of Greek philosophers called ‘Platonists’, who derived most of their philosophy from Plato.
These ‘Platonic’ doctrines found their way into Christian teaching because they seemed right to the vast majority of people in the Roman world, and when in the time of Constantine masses of ordinary Romans became Christians in order to follow the Imperial fashion, they simply could not think that ideas which had always seemed so right were no longer true.
A useful parallel exists in our own day. Most people have come to accept the theory of evolution as a self-evident truth. It seems right, therefore it is right, and anyone who cannot accept it is counted a fool, and ridiculed. Christians know that a straight reading of the Genesis Creation record gives the lie direct to evolution; nevertheless, most Christians find it so hard to reject this theory, that they try to allegorise the record in Genesis, or twist it in some other way which will permit them to accept both evolution and (after a fashion) Scripture.
In the same way, pagans who were convinced of the truth of certain Platonic teachings about god and man called themselves Christians, but bent their minds to adjusting Scripture doctrine to fit these pre-conceived ideas. They read the word ‘soul’ in Scripture as the divine essence in man spoken of by Plato;they saw God as a distant abstraction, like Plato’s god. Thus even when reading Scripture their minds were so prejudiced that they read Plato into the very text of God’s Word.
In the Roman Empire in the time of Constantine the uneducated masses who became Christian had little interest in the philosophical approach to religion.
In the past their religion had consisted almost entirely of appeasing a mass of good and bad deities or demons, and expecting favours of some kind in return. Their transition to Christianity was an easy one. They had little interest in the more abstruse doctrines such as the nature of the Trinity; they found in the shrines of martyrs and saints a simple alternative to the little specialized deities they had always worshipped; and so instead of offering food and drink to Felicity, or to any of the other gods and goddesses who offered specialized help, they took their food and drink to the tombs of martyrs etc.,or the shrines of apostles, and prayed for good luck.
The intellectual pagan transferred his beliefs in a different way.
Images, shrines and other visible tokens were cynically despised; instead, the philosophic pagan transferred his cherished theories about god and man into the Christian dogma. This is the matter with which we are concerned, for it was at this level that the Christian doctrines became corrupted. As far as the common level is concerned, we shall not mention this again. Anyone interested in this question will find Mr. Alexander Hislop a mine of information.
Greek Ideas on the Nature of God and Man
There were certain views which practically all these ancient philosophers had in common, which seemed to all to be ‘self-evident truth’. Some of these views are probably older than Plato; but most are part of his teaching.
First, there was the nature of the universe. (The reader may have to make a conscious effort to see things as these early Greeks did, for they are foreign, and even ridiculous, to us.) Imagine yourself as being totally without any scientific knowledge you might possess on this subject, and ask yourself how you would explain the movements of the stars and planets in the sky above. To the Greeks, nothing could move without a cause, and there could be two possible explanations only for the movement of the stars. Either some divine force was moving them, or they had divine life of their own. They were either, that is, gods in their own right, or were parts of a great composite god. As far as I know, every pagan religion without exception believed in the divinity of the stars.
Secondly, every pagan believed that the stars had an influence on men. This idea is much earlier than the Greeks; but they adopted it ( again, I think, without exception) into their religious and philosophic systems. It seems to have been accepted as a belief which hardly needed proof to them. Everyone knew it as a self-evident truth – the only point under dispute was the degree to which men were controlled.
The third generally received ‘truth’ was that anything which existed in time and space was perishable, and subject to change; on the other hand, anything immortal was thought to be essentially immaterial and ‘immutable, i.e. not subject to any change whatsoever. This belief may be thought of as the most basic ‘feeling’ or idea in Greek philosophy; it was held so strongly thatanyone who suggested this was not so became subject to ridicule (as was Paul when he preached the resurrection of the dead). This stronglyheldbelief is at the root of almost all the corruption of the Christian gospel by paganism – it lay, for example, at the root of the Trinitarian disputes, particularly as regards the pre-existence of Christ; and the scorn and anger directed against Arius was due to the fact that most Church leaders had been so influenced by Platonism that they could not imagine an immortal being like Christ as not having existed from eternity. They believed that if Christ had had any kind of beginning, he would have been in some way ‘mutable’, and had ‘come to exist’ instead of always ‘being’; and his very immortality contradicted that to then. (All Arius had suggested was that at some remote time in the past, ‘there was when he was not’.) ‘Being’,(i.e. immortal existence) applied to all divine things; becoming,(i.e. changing one’s purpose, character, in time only to material, mutable things.
It will be as well’ to expand this point about immortal and material things, as it plays so important a part in the corrupting of Christianity. Again, a certain effort of mind will be required in order to understand ideas not commonly believed by us. The Greeks frequently thought in abstractions, and believed that everything which existed had an ‘essence’, ‘form’ or ‘quality’ apart from its material construction. They accepted that men, existing in time and space, were material creatures. However, thought was believed to be separate from the physiological nature,, and to be immaterial. Because it was immaterial, it was immortal. (It goes without saying that they had no conception of physiology as we understand it.) Not only man, but any material thing had an essence or nature which was greater than the matter from which it was made. A wooden cube might exist in space and time, and was therefore material and mutable. However, the conception of ‘cubeness’, the abstract quality or nature of the cube, was an immaterial concept; and because it was immaterial, it was therefore immortal, not only existing for ever, but having already existed eternally. Therefore Plato postulated that everything had a ‘form’ which was immortal, and on which pattern all created things had been made. You can see here how the Greeks saw the pre-existence of all things as essential to their whole logic. The souls of men (their thought, character, etc.) were made of previously existing immortal ‘stuff’; these descended from heaven and became housed in bodies; eventually, when the body dissolved, the soul returned to heaven, to begin the whole process again.
This is where the influence of the stars comes in. The ‘soul’ of the stars, the divine essence which made them live and move, was the stuff from which the human soul was made. Therefore the stars had a individual. Each soul belonged to a particular star; and when a child was conceived or born, immortal parts of the star were housed in the new body. Thereafter, the soul of the individual had a particular kinship with the stars, which throughout his life had an affinity with, and a direct influence on, their ‘child’ A person’s true destiny could only be fulfilled, and a proper life lived before the divinities, if the submitted himself to the guidance of the stars. If he did not do so, he was nevertheless dragged to his ultimate end by them but suffered in the process.
The Platonic System
I would like to finish this account of Greek philosophical ideas on god and man by setting out the whole Platonic cosmogony; in the next article I hope to deal with the later Neo-Platonic adjustments to this scheme, and to show how these ideas influenced the early Christian Church before the time of Constantine.
To begin with, Plato postulated a single, supreme god, who appears a shadowy being, almost an abstraction, both immortal and immutable; that is, not dwelling in either time or space. This god had none of the vivid, personal characteristics of the God of Israel, since to show anger, joy, or any other emotion would have made him mutable, and therefore not immortal. This god could not change his status in any way, and could not ‘become’ anything different from what he always had been, and so could not beget a real son, and so become a father, or anything else which he had not been from eternity. Indeed, the Greeks thought that to have ‘become’ anything would have degraded him.
Out of chaotic material already in existence, but which had originally been created out of nothing, this god made the world. He made it in two parts, a body and a soul. The body was all the material part of the world and the sky, and. the soul was its immaterial ‘life’. This soul pervaded the whole body, but chiefly existed in the heavens. As such it was divided into two strips, each crossing the other at an angle, and each strip joining its own end at the top. The resulting diagram would look rather like some people’s drawings of Ezekiel’s wheels, and was meant to portray the movements of the stars and planets. The two circles moved in different directions, called ‘Same’ and ‘Different’, these two representing the different kinds of movements of heavenly bodies in the sky.
In this ‘world soul’ of the heavens, god placed his created ‘children’, the stars, and gave these the job of making man. Man was made by using some of the material part of the world as a body, and part of the ‘world soul’ as a soul. Thus man had a kinship with the stars, and ‘same’ and ‘different’ made up part of his soul, accounting for different mental and moral characteristics. When the ‘same’ and the ‘different’ were in perfect balance, the soul of man was wholly good.
However, when the soul of man was put into its human body, the defects intrinsic in matter threw it off balance, and caused all kinds of disorders. This happened in the case of every newborn child, who did not understand how he should behave, because his material body upset his immortal soul; he was expected therefore to get his soul to circle in an orderly way, as the stars circled in the sky above. This was achieved by learning philosophy, and by opening the heart to the influence of the stars above. Then, when his body died, he returned to his star, eventually to be sent back to earth to inhabit a new body. Men who did not learn to order their souls, or to submit to god’s will by allowing the influence of the stars to improve their better part, returned next time as a woman, or as an animal.
Man was therefore divided into three physical parts, head, heart and belly. The soul also had three parts, the greatest being reason, located in the head, while emotion belonged to the heart, and appetite to the belly. God also had three parts, man being a copy of god’s nature; but the development of this threefold system belongs to the next article, and the Neo-Platonists. The reader will realise that we are on the way to dealing with the development of the Trinity in Christian teaching.
The Kingdom of God has been a cornerstone of the gospel from the earliest church