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By Root 1427 0

Obviously, I do not want to capitulate to that conclusion for even an instant; I believe that however predominant this narrative has been in Western Christian history for seventeen hundred years, there have always been minority reports—among the desert fathers and mothers, the Celts, the Franciscans, the Anabaptists, the Catholic and Protestant mystics, not to mention the other main wing of the faith known as Eastern Orthodoxy. These persistent voices encourage us that the future of the Christian tradition can be different from—and better than—its Western, Greco-Romanized past. Mindful of all these provisos, we can use the term profitably. For a helpful popular overview of the concept, see the first few chapters of Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor, 1996).

2. In emphasizing the reframing of the biblical narrative by Greek philosophy in this chapter, I feel I have underemphasized the role of Roman power. The two are profoundly related. Plato, for example, didn’t believe in the Olympian gods of Greek religion, but he felt that certain beliefs were necessary for social stability—namely, belief in a Supreme Being and in the threat of eternal punishment for wrongdoing in the afterlife. Plato considered these beliefs so important to the social order that he recommended (Laws, bk. 10) people be punished by the state with five years of banishment for the first offense and death for the second. Roman imperial powers, preoccupied with regime continuation, would obviously share Plato’s affection for politically useful beliefs—beliefs that unify and pacify, we might say. It’s interesting in this light, and probably not accidental, that these become the very preoccupations of the version of Christianity that the Roman Empire sanctioned in the fourth century. By the fifth century the church and state together routinely imposed banishment and the death penalty for misbelief, exactly as Plato had recommended centuries before. See Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), p. 219.

3. Although I’m highly critical of the unintended consequences of the embrace of the Greco-Roman narrative by early Christian theologians, I must acknowledge the absolute brilliance of their move. By retelling their story in the terms of Greek philosophy, they integrated Plato and Aristotle into their own larger whole—something Greek philosophers hadn’t been able to do on their own. As a result, they “saved” Aristotle and gave him an honored role as philosopher of time, and they “saved” Plato and gave him the honored place as philosopher of eternity. Their instinct—to save and embrace the great philosophers rather than condemn and exclude them—was, I judge, a Christlike one. The way it was done, however, created a lasting Greco-Roman syncretism under the guise of orthodoxy, and as a result the “frontward” story line of the Bible in which Jesus emerged was largely lost. (This story is complicated by the fact that Aristotle’s works were lost to the West for several centuries, due to the plundering and burning of libraries by invading tribes from the north. Aristotle’s works had, however, been preserved by Muslim scholars to the south, who later shared them with Christian scholars. In the absence of Aristotle’s influence, Western Christianity had become increasingly Neoplatonic. Thomas Aquinas helped reintroduce Aristotle to the Christian world, thus restoring a more dynamic tension in Christian intellectual life.)

4. If this play on words helps you (it may not), for Platonists (in the tradition of Plotinus) the material (composed of matter) is immaterial (unimportant, insubstantial), and the nonmaterial (not composed of matter) is material (substantial, important).

5. Again, Aristotle’s thought was deliciously more complex than this simplification, but this simplification accurately reflects the general impression commonly and popularly associated with his thought.

6. This imaginary conversation has been immortalized in Rafael’s iconic painting of 1510/1511, The School of Athens. For more on the painting,