Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/33

Rh general use of it throughout so large a part of the Roman dominion. There is no such thing as a "dead language" for people who read and speak intelligently; and certainly in early Christian times, although the splendour of the classic period had passed, the language in which Plato wrote, degenerate as it now was, came into the Church "trailing clouds of glory." For better or for worse, Greek ideas invaded the Church under the cloak of the Greek language. With the more scholarly writers this was allowed consciously.

Even St. Paul shows traces of the Hellenic influence, especially in his doctrine of the flesh, which was not found in purely Jewish or earlier Christian teaching, and in the language with which he describes the exalted Christ, which reads like an echo of Philo, as well as in his evident allusions to the Hellenistic Book of Wisdom. This tendency is much more apparent in the Epistle to the Hebrews. There are traces of it in the so-called "Epistle of Barnabas." Most of the earlier Christian writers known as the Apostolic Fathers wrote simply and practically with little reference to the world outside. But the Greek influence blossomed out in the Apologists, men who made it their business to bring the gospel into contact with the thought of their age. Aristides appeared in Athens wearing the conventional philosopher's cloak; Justin Martyr came to Christianity through Platonism. and he made the first serious attempt to reconcile Philosophy to the Gospel, by combining St. John's Logos with the Logos of Philo and the Stoics. In Clement of Alexandria we have classic literary scholarship, and in his successor Origen Platonic philosophy, brought over bodily into the exposition of Christian truth. Henceforth the elaboration of doctrine in the Church becomes a process of applying Greek thought to the elucidation of the data supplied by the facts of the gospel history and the truths of Scripture and experience. Even the dialectical methods of the