Scriptorium Daily
Paganism and pagan philosophy never recovered from Paul’s message. When Paul begins his sermon by saying that he perceives that the men of Athens are very religious he is placing a wedge between the popular religion of Delphi and the religion of the persons on Mars Hill. Paul decries the idols in the city of Athens. Since Luke intentionally points out that Stoics and Epicureans are present, and Paul will quote a Stoic poet Aratus, the reader can be sure Paul knows that the Stoics are not idol worshipers. In fact, Luke is at pains to show Paul’s erudition as he also has the Apostle quote Epimenides, a sage of the sixth century. So at the very start of the speech, the compromise with Delphi is exposed and used by Paul to make a point. No Epicurean or Stoic believes in idols, but over their shoulders looms the great temple of Athena and all around them is a city given over to the worship of objects made of matter.
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If there is a God, then no temple can hold Him. He also creates all things and provides a basis of unity for all men who are His children. Paul is establishing points of agreement between his gospel and some of the philosophies of the Greco-Roman world. There is nothing in this sermon thus far that would have offended or even educated a good neo-Platonist or Stoic. Paul’s statement that the God is “creator” might have been controversial if it were understood as Paul meant it, but both Plato and the Stoic philosophers demonstrate that they would use language of “creation” even if they did not believe in a literal first moment in time or creation out of nothing.
Paul’s discussion that men are called to seek God with the hope of finding Him has Socratic echoes. Paul recognizes that there is a quest for the Divine and does not believe that this quest can be ended by any human effort. Instead this knowledge will come as a product of divine revelation an idea that Plato seemingly allows for in construction of the liver in Timaeus. Four centuries of interaction with philosophy had now proven beyond a doubt to the Greco-Romans on Mars Hill, man is not only political, not only desires to know, but he is also religious. Man wishes to know God. Paul has not found God, but God has found Him.
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The philosophical integrity of the Athenians saved some of them from missing Paul’s message. Paul argued well and many wanted to hear more of his message. In this sense, they were the pagan equivalents of the Berean Jews who sought out the truth of Paul’s message in the Sacred. The main group well positioned to hear Paul would have been the neo-Platonists. These thinkers could allow for the personal survival of a human soul for all eternity. (Phaedo) They had access to creationist language in Timaeus. They had a notion of a final judgment in the Republic’s myth of Er. The unity of humankind was not foreign to them.
What did they lack? They had not concept of the God becoming man and then providing a way for man to become like God. The idea of the Incarnation linked to theosis (man becoming like God) was exciting. That the divine Creator should “appoint a man” to judge the world at the Day of Doom and by doing so raise this man to divinity was beyond novel. In many ways, the Christology that lies behind this part of Paul’s remarks, uniting the Divine logos with man forever is the answer to the dilemma of Plato’s Cave. It is no shock that at least some of the persons on Mars Hill came to faith quickly. In the conversion of Dionysus the Areopagite, we see the model of the Christian Greco-Roman world to come.
We began this tour in the church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantine’s city. There the happy marriage of Athens and Jerusalem came to a great culmination (though not the final one!) in a work of profound philosophy expressed in stone. That Byzantine Empire has fallen to other masters, but other churches in other nations can carry on its work. We can create little expressions of Holy Wisdom all over the world thanks to that small Jewish man from Tarsus, Paul, and his day on Mars Hill. (more)
