Ideals Christian & Hellenic

The Gospel as a philosophical way of life

While watching a roundup of footage from the Paris Olympics—one beautiful, strong, healthy body after another—a reader pinged me about something I’d said in episode 3. ‘Could you say a bit more about how the Fathers’ attitude toward the body differs radically from the classical ideal of the body, and how that overlaps with how we tend to view the body today? I mean, what you said was clear, but it’s really fascinating.’

Glad to hear what I said was clear. Less glad to expand upon it. It’ll require me to untie a few knots, since I grossly oversimplified what is in fact a profoundly complicated subject.

Here’s a transcript of the passage:

The Hellenic ideal, the ideal of ancient Athens and Rome, was quite close to our own ideal. Healthy body, healthy mind. If you’ve seen Greek sculptures, if you know anything about the life of the Greek gymnasium—where, in the nude, men would wrestle and work out and perfect their bodies, perfecting their beauty and their strength and their health, while debating and fine-tuning their use of reason and their powers of rhetoric—that was the Hellenic ideal.

Into that ideal Christianity came like a grenade, saying, no, the way you use your mind is vain sophistry leading you nowhere, and the way you use your body is equally vain and certainly not able to rescue you from your inevitable fate of death and decay. Instead, the Christians said, pursue true virtue—the Way of the Cross, crucifying your flesh, weakening your body—so that, your mind united with God, your whole being will be transfigured; and after death, your flesh itself will be transformed into spirit.

I must confess, ‘the Hellenic ideal’ is doing a lot of heavy-lifting there. As if there was a single Hellenic ideal!

The idea we have in our heads of ancient Greece and Rome, if it’s accurate at all, is limited and partial, as partial as would be someone’s idea of our own time if they knew nothing about it beyond, say, Davos Man and the elite sliver of the world that he inhabits. Most people back then were neither Greek nor Hellenised, and only a tiny minority were brought up cultivating the arts and sciences which entitled a person to live freely. Just like today, there was a kind of establishment ethos or ideology that no bog-standard member of the elite scrutinised too intelligently; just like today, that ideology was barely coherent, a grab-bag of intellectual moods and postures, a bit of scepticism, a bit of superstition, a bit of moralism, a bit of savagery. Vibes, really.

But that wasn’t the whole story, not at all. There were intellectually and morally serious Greeks and Romans who were quite happy to point out the shortcomings of the prevailing ethos and to suggest alternative possibilities. Philosophers, they were called. Pythagoreans, Platonists, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Cynics, Stoics, Therapeutae, and yes, Jews too, all of whom pursued a spiritual way of life, indeed an ascetic way of life.

Diogenes the Cynic

Or rather, ascetic ways of life, since their philosophies were so varied and diverse, and the degree of dedication with which their followers pursued them spanned the full spectrum of enthusiasm, from total zeal to dilettantish hobbyism. Philosophy bled over into the world of the elite, of course it did, just as its equivalents do today; but really, the true philosophers were regarded as quite weird, and therefore had as much in common with those oddballs calling themselves Christian as they had with those Abercrombie & Fitch models in the gymnasium. 

And whatever might be meant by ‘the Hellenic ideal’, it is certainly not the case that Christianity affirms its diametric opposite. For starters, the Christian tradition is also multifarious. There was no single cast-iron interpretation of what was first called ‘The Way’. I don’t want to put too strong a point on that, as patristic teaching is undoubtedly founded on an original deposit of faith and practice, rooted in the Jewish tradition, which can be traced back to Jesus himself. Only doctrinaire sceptics would outright deny the reasonableness of that assertion. But it’s equally true that the first Christian centuries were seething with disputation, controversy, and conflict—and not only between adherents of the so-called Great Church on one side, and on the other, those mavericks and schismatics who were labelled heretics. Mutual hostility was often most hot-tempered between factions within the Great Church itself, especially during the three centuries following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity—from which the majority of texts featured on Life Sentences will be drawn.

More importantly, however, Christianity cannot be the opposite of Hellenism because, in the long run, it is itself not only the most successful expression of Hellenism, but also the most authentic. Which is to say, Christianity absorbed and synthesised pretty much everything worthwhile about the Hellenic tradition—and you can throw in the even more ancient Egyptian tradition for good measure, the Hellenised form of which Christianity also absorbed—meaning that whatever those traditions contained of true spiritual worth, the Fathers incorporated into their teaching and passed down to us.

But even putting it that way isn’t quite right. It makes it sound as if the Church emerged from outside Hellenism and then, later on, had bits of Hellenism grafted onto it. When in fact, by the time Christ was being ferried back and forth across the Sea of Galilee, calling people to repentance, the whole region had been under Hellenic cultural domination for 350 years. That’s a long time! Archaeology has now firmly established that, despite the relentless efforts of Bible illustrators and Hollywood filmmakers, when we imagine the Roman province of Judaea at the time of Christ, especially the Galilee, we should have ancient Greece in mind more than, oh I don’t know, ‘the Middle East’. More Corinthian columns and paved roads, fewer hovels and dirt tracks.

That Hellenism in some form or another was already regarded by the first generation of Christians as playing an integral role in what they believed to be the Gospel Truth, the Gospel of St John plainly expresses. 

Now among those coming up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. They approached Philip who was from Bethsaida of Galilee, and they said to him, ‘Sir, we want to see Jesus.’ Philip went and told Andrew, and then Andrew and Philip told Jesus. Jesus responded by saying to them, ‘The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ - John 12:20-23

What is St John saying? That the covenant which the One God made with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai reached its consummation in Christ, by whose sacrificial death on the Cross access to God’s glory is now accessible to absolutely everyone; and the signal that the time had come for Christ to ascend the Cross is when Greeks arrive to be numbered among his followers. The Fathers interpreted this to mean that God’s universal invitation to salvation was actualised precisely via the Hellenisation of the Gospel. So no, Christianity is not the opposite of ‘the Hellenic ideal’.

Admittedly, I was talking about the ideal of healthy body, healthy mind, which patristic ascetic teaching certainly pushed against (as did some philosophical schools, certainly the Cynics, but also to some extent the Stoics). The vital, this-worldly, life-affirming quality of classical civilisation—which, for example, Nietzsche valued so highly and which he hated Christianity for undermining—is the polar opposite of what the Fathers taught. And therefore isn’t it interesting that, in the passage I quoted above from St John’s Gospel, Christ continues by saying:

Truly, truly I tell you that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it will bear much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it; those who hate their life in this world will keep it forever. - John 12:24-25

There you have it, straight from the Master’s mouth.

So, yes, the Hellenic tradition was as broad a church as, well, the Church. Perhaps you’re wondering, if that’s so, if the patristic tradition and Christianity more generally are as diverse as I say they are, then why am I always referring to ‘the Fathers’ as if they spoke with a single voice, laying down a single tradition?

The short answer is, because it’s easier.

A slightly longer one is what I wrote above, that despite their differences of interpretation, the Fathers did draw on an original deposit of faith, a real revelation that was passed down to them from the Apostles and their successors; a real tradition, whose transmission occurred and occurs in time, naturally, but whose true source was and is supernatural and eternal, initiating those who genuinely receive it into what I can only describe as unity of spirit.

This is of course not something I can prove to you. I myself only know it through faith and by having received a meagre portion of that same spirit—who is, in fact, the Holy Spirit. Talking about faith intelligently can feel extremely awkward for that reason.

The truth that faith reveals is spiritual truth, not at all material, and therefore isn’t at all like anything else one can know. For that reason, the sort of knowing that it involves is not at all like any other kind of knowing. It’s a cliche, but talking about the truth that faith reveals is like talking about a sunset, very hard to capture in words. Not only that, more often than not it’s like talking about a sunset to someone who’s spent his whole life underground and so cannot even conceive what the thing you’re talking about could possibly be. (I was going to write, ‘to a blind man’, but that would be inaccurate. A blind man can’t see a sunset; someone who’s only lived underground simply hasn’t seen one, nor the horizon, sunlight, and sky that come together to form one.)

Yes, without profound inspiration, the Gospel truth is hard to capture in words. That’s why, in Life Sentences, we’re attending so closely to the inspired words of the Fathers.