A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [20]
This Greek philosophical mind-set affected the Roman mind in at least three profound and history-changing ways. First, the Greco-Roman mind was habitually dualistic, in the sense that an enlightened or philosophic mind would always see the world divided in two, the profane physical world of matter, stuff, and change on the low side and the sacred metaphysical world of ideals, ideas, spirit, and changelessness on the high side. The categories of dualism might change (morphing into capitalist versus communist, left versus right, or conservative versus liberal, for example), but the dualistic outlook itself remains consistent.
Second, this argument infused the Greco-Roman world with a peculiar energy and confidence—so strong we might even call it superiority or supremacy. Through their Aristotelian resources, the Greco-Roman culture attended carefully to the physical world and achieved amazing feats of engineering: cities, temples, road systems, fleets, aqueducts, and other advancements in which they could take great pride. Through their Platonic resources, the Greco-Romans pioneered what we might call the life of the mind. Their intellectual achievements armed them with an astonishing confidence that their enlightened or “philosophic” human minds could uniquely grasp the absolute, transcendent, universal truth. As a result, the Greco-Roman mind became highly certain of its own superiority. “Others have their messy ‘barbarian’ viewpoints and superstitions,” the Greco-Roman mind might muse, “but we have the clean and clear perspective, the absolute, objective ‘philosophic’ truth.”7 “They depend on their brute physical senses for knowledge,” they might add, “but we depend on pure reason.”
Third, this philosophical dualism and intellectual superiority fused in a corresponding social dualism and superiority. The Greco-Roman mind epitomized an “us” versus “them,” in-group versus out-group society, in which “we” are civilized and superior and the rest of the world is barbarian and inferior. To the Greco-Roman mind, the story of the Roman Empire represents the real plotline of history, and every other culture has value only in what it contributes to Greco-Romanism.8 To illustrate, imagine that each culture conceives of its own historical time line, creating a messy tangle like this:9
But then imagine that we render all of the wavy lines invisible and insignificant by focusing only on one time line: our six-lined Greco-Roman version, in bold. At that moment, we have effectively marginalized all other cultures to the level of an annoying sideshow standing in the way of the only past, present, and future that really matter, namely, our own.10
It’s hard to overestimate the power of this social dualism. (It’s also hard for those of us who inherited it to even see it or imagine seeing without it.) The Greco-Roman dream was to create a high society of philosophical enlightenment and material prosperity, characterized by stasis and order, the Pax Romana (or Roman peace) being a social approximation of an ideal society in a Platonic sense.11 In contrast, the barbarian nations were bumbling along on the lower level, their lives tragically excluded from the noble plane of Greco-Roman civilization. Even within the empire, it was only Roman citizens who really counted: the dualism between free citizens and slaves mirrored the dualism between Roman and barbarian.
The Jews, by the way, were barbarians in this scenario, as were the Christians until they managed to construct an identity first as a “third race” (a concept articulated by early theologians like Aristides, Tertullian, and others) and later as holders of the “true philosophy” to which the Greeks had always aspired (especially in the writings of Clement).12 The Jews themselves also had a binary social outlook, dividing the world between the circumcised Jewish “us” and the uncircumcised gentile “them,” but their outlook was rarely imperial. Yes, they believed they were called by God to bless all nations and be respected by all nations, but they seldom if ever