I feel like I’ve been reading Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture for a year now. It’s taken me longer to finish that book than it’s taken me to finish other summer reading books in years past. I’m glad to be moving on to Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft and I hope to finish that much more quickly, especially because teacher training starts in less than a month.
I highly recommend the Pelikan, though. The book is actually a compilation of his Gifford lectures, and so the book benefits from a series of chapters each marinated equally in his thesis that natural theology formed an important part of early Christian theology. There is a tradition in American Protestantism to discount the value of natural theology, and while it’s clear that the natural theologians of the 17th and 18th centuries were approaching different questions than the classical Greeks busied themselves with, for a number of folks “natural theology” is a dirty word. After reading Pelikan I think instead that we deprive our theology if we exclude theological beliefs based solely on rational inquiries into the subject. Natural theology of some kind is necessary for Christian theology insofar as it identifies a particular theology as Christian.
The book can be repetitive at times, since Pelikan wanted to make his arguments clear to his hearers, not his readers. But lectures can often be more compelling that literature, and I think this book benefits from that a little bit.
Enough said. On to Bloch.
Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture is a wonderful introduction to the Cappadocian Fathers who produced a number of important theological works during the fourth century. In his exploration of the theology of Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their sister Macrina, he traces the influence of Greek philosophy and culture on their theological arguments, most of which were grounded in both reason and revelation.
The key word for these thinkers is apophasis, which emphasizes that God’s essential qualities are beyond the power of language to provide accurate description. For them, God, the wholly Transcendent, was far above any thought a human being might have. Similarly, thoughts were far beyond the ability even of the thinker to communicate. Such restrictions were employed to curb the excesses of arrogant theologians who sought to describe God’s nature in detail. The Cappadocians preferred instead to say what God was not. Not bound by time, not confined to space, not moved by passions, not comprehensible. It’s evident that this method sneaks into theological discussions through the back door. By saying what God was not, the Cappadocians were making several serious claims about what God was.
Apophatic theology not only worked inside the church to stifle heresies of various kinds, but also worked against the pagan proponents of classical culture. By taking the alpha-privative (the term for the series of prefixes that are found in our words like “anti-” and “a-”) and making it work for Christian apologetics, the Cappadocians were able to prevent a potentially excessive influence of Greek thought, especially thinking that would undermine liturgical and sacramental practice. This fact alone seems to call the broad notion that Christianity was over-hellenized by Plato- and Aristotle-loving thinkers into question. In Pelikan’s portrayal of them, the Cappadocians adopt very few classical ideas without finding Biblical precedents, especially precedents in the Old Testament.
As they appropriated Greek philosophy for Christian ends, the Cappadocians were participating in a broad fourth century shift from classical dominance in the Roman empire to Christian dominance in a converted empire. Christianity had triumphed over classical culture, but Pelikan records a second victory as theologians triumph over heretics and impure doctrine. The Cappadocians made Greek thought work for them in this forum as well. Heresy was concurrent with false philosophy, and the Gregories and Basil railed against a number of heretics, including Eunomius.
I found it quite relevant that one of the chief critiques against Eunomius, coming from these alleged hyper-hellenists, was that Eunomius was exclusively interested in pure doctrine, and not in the practice of the liturgy and sacraments. The method of apophasis served them well against him, as his interest in discerning the nature of God appeared to the Cappadocians as the pretentious effort of a fool. Fast-forwarding from then to the present, I wonder how many are arguing that a lack of dedication to sacraments and liturgy effectively calls into question the accuracy of a doctrine, or its supporters. I don’t mean the kind of pietistic argument that someone’s arguments depend solely on their character. But for a religion that demands transformation, I wonder how many today in the evangelical world are dedicated even to the idea of the transformation, and the ways through which it has been historically confessed to come.
