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The Path of Reason

Early Christian intellectual life, according to Wilken, was dramatically different from Greek thought in that it reasoned not to God, but from God. Greek critics of Christian thought believed that the proper path of knowledge consisted in the ascent of the mind to eternal, transcendent realities. Knowledge of God, in this view, “came through the activity of the mind purged of impressions received by the senses” (8). Thus only the aesthetes, the spiritual elites capable of such pilgrimage, could make the journey to God. Hence the path commended by Celsus: “If you shut your eyes to the world of sense and look up with the mind, if you turn away from the flesh and raise the eyes of the soul, only then will you see God.” His contemporary Alcinous suggested a similar course, again the mind ascending to the non-corporeal. “First one contemplates the beauty found in bodies, after this one passes on to the beauty of the soul, then to the beauty in customs and laws, then to the vast ocean of beauty; after this one conceives of the Good itself . . . which appears as light and shines on the soul as it makes its ascent. Then one comes to the idea of God because of his preeminence in honor.” (Celsus, True Doctrine; and Alcinous, Didaskalikos both quoted in Wilken, 9.)

Christian thinkers, however, offered a radical inversion of this path to God, one that ought to hearten any committed empiricist (or road-weary sinner). Origen and others emphasized the descent of God to humankind, his subjection to our scrutiny, his coming to our terms, rather than our spiritual ascent to him. Origen asked the critics to “consider whether the Holy Scripture shows more compassion for human kind when it presents the divine Word (logos), who was in the beginning with God . . . as becoming flesh in order to reach everyone” (Against Celsus, quoted in Wilken, 12).

Wilken says that “in the debate between Christian thinkers and their critics the central issue was where in the search for God reason is to begin. Christians argued that Christ had brought something new; the life he lived, though fully human, was unlike that of anyone who had lived earlier. . . . After the coming of Christ, human reason had to attend to what was new in history, the person of Jesus Christ” (14-15, italics mine). Christian thinkers, according to Wilken, were criticized for their attention to sensible things, to the world of flesh and blood. “For the Greeks, God was the conclusion of an argument, the end of a search for an ultimate explanation, an inference from the structure of the universe to a first cause. For Christian thinkers, however, God was the starting point, and Christ the icon that displays the face of God. . . . Now one reasoned from Christ to other things, not from other things to Christ. In him was to be found the reason, the logos, the logic, if you will, that inheres in all things” (15).

Arguably, then, Christians stimulated a kind of reason that began with history and a serious consideration of events in space and time. And yet Christian thinkers denied that just anyone could come to see Christ as the key to knowledge and wisdom. Rather, such an understanding derived from the revelation itself, what the biblical writers called grace. And so Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, wrote in the second center that “The Lord taught us that no one is able to know God unless taught by God. God cannot be known without the help of God” (Against Heresies, quoted in Wilken, 19).

 

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