Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 16

Struggle of Christianity to Keep its Own Meaning.

The conflict between Christianity and the world was not confined to persecution by the state. More dangerous for the Church than open persecution was its contact with the ideas and beliefs of surrounding Hellenism. Here it encountered a threat that the faith would be distorted from within, and the second century was marked by intense struggle as Christians strove to preserve the purity and integrity of their doctrine.

St. Paul had already called preaching about Christ “unto the Greeks foolishness” (I Cor. 1:23). It was extremely difficult for a man raised in an atmosphere of Hellenism to understand and really accept Christianity. Inevitably the philosophers of Athens, meeting on the Areopagus to listen to St. Paul, interrupted him when he spoke of the resurrection of the dead. His words about the incarnation of God, death on the Cross, and resurrection of the body could not be received without a revolution in their habits of thought. Greek philosophy taught that in the body we see a prison of the immortal soul, and in the world the Hellene saw only an eternal return, an eternal cycle from which he sought salvation in the motionless world of ideas.
Does not the secret of the harmony of Greek art lie in its effort to find and express only the ideal form of the world concealed behind its passing, changeable surface? Not real life, surely, full as it often is of tragic contradictions. The sense of history, its irreversibility, the unrepeating nature of time, and within this time the uniqueness and unrepeated quality of each event and each person, were all profoundly alien to Hellenic psychology.
The history of early Christianity, therefore, is a history not of rapprochement between Athens and Jerusalem, but rather of a struggle through which there took place a gradual “churching” of Hellenism which was to fertilize Christian thought forever after.

The Church had first to protect itself from all attempts to reconcile Christianity too easily with the spirit of the times and reinterpret it smoothly in Hellenistic patterns. If the Church had remained only in Jewish molds it would not have conquered the world; but if it had simply adapted these molds to those of Hellenistic thought, the world would have conquered Christianity. Gnosticism, the first enemy with which it came into conflict, was in fact inspired by the idea of reinterpretation and reconciliation.

Gnosticism is the name usually given to a mixture of Greek philosophy and Eastern mysticism, a strange religious and philosophical fusion, which emerged from close contacts between the Greco-Roman world and the East. The movement reached its peak just at the time when Christianity was beginning to spread. Typical outgrowths of a transitional, religiously excited age, Gnostic tendencies reflected genuine spiritual needs as well as a superficial attraction to the “wisdom of the East” and a morbid interest in mysterious symbols and ceremonies. As in theosophy, Gnosticism combined a “scientific” approach to religious problems with mystical fantasies and all sorts of secrets. Men were promised initiation into the ultimate mysteries of existence, but an emphasis on rites and consecrations tended to substitute religious sensuality for genuine religion.

As in our own time, men were groping for a syncretic religion, in which elements of truth from all doctrines, philosophies, and religions might, as it were, be one. It was this effort to combine and reinterpret all religions in its own way that rendered Gnosticism a danger to the Church. It was far from hostile to Christianity — on the contrary, tried to include it within its own fold. Christianity had also come from the East, the homeland of all secret wisdom; it was connected with Judaism, which had a distinctive vogue in the Hellenistic world and also had its mysteries, concealed from the eyes of the crowd. As the Church was taking its very first steps, we see beside it and sometimes even within it seeds of Christian Gnosticism, attempts to interpret the Gospels, avoiding what seemed unacceptable or incomprehensible in them — primarily, of course, the very reality of the Incarnation of God and the humanity of Christ. We sense uneasiness even in St. Paul: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col. 2:8).

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-1-beginning.asp?pg=16