Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/47

 AND GREEK CULTURE 33

out by sin and error. He is the Educator of the human race, the true Orpheus who brings all that is savage into submission with a song that song which in the beginning of time created the harmony of the spheres. Reason is His Image and acting in accordance with reason is the ethic and the aesthetic of Christian life. The first to seek to harmonize the ancient powers of the intellect and the new powers of the soul inside a Catholic Church which opened its arms wide to all things divine and human, were Clement of Alexandria and Origen his great disciple.

Both of them were speculative Easterners. It is true that they all but brought the Gospel into subservience to Greek philosophy, but the movement they fostered which the Roman West halted at the right time bequeathed to the whole Church something of great and enduring value. What Paul and John had begun now reached an initial state of perfection. The intellect was summoned to explore the greatest secret of history; science flung itself upon the cosmos of faith. Antique confidence in the strength and dignity of 'reason united itself with the new self-assertion of the soul, and in a time when man despaired of man cleared the path which led to a human- ism in the name of Christ, who was God become Man. Christen- dom surmounted the danger of becoming merely a religion of the slaves and the "lower classes." A faith in the providential guidance of all mankind and its spiritual life, a belief in the unity and con- cordance of histoty, preserved the antique world for the present and the future by reason also of God's word present in it. A cargo of philosophy alone the Church could not have borne. The religion which it was to teach the world was both deed and teaching, not teaching only. Some adopted it because it reasoned in the manner of Plato; others came because they were tired of Plato and wished to exchange speculation for salvation, and Eros for charity. Was not culture declining throughout the Empire because it had become com- mon property and no longer quenched the ultimate thirst? Many a pious person looked upon the ancient thinkers as gossips and sophists who in the empore on the Nile were given honours due those who taught Christ. The Church faced the peril of either sacrificing re- ligion to culture or of sacrificing culture to religion. That was the second conflict of powers that demanded a solution.

34