It was Christianity, as Origen’s life demonstrates, that gave rise to new branches of learning, it was it that also revitalised some of the old ones, and especially the key discipline of philosophy. The application of traditional categories and methods to the material of Christian theology refreshed and redirected them. The process put an end to recycling age-old materials, to trivial novelty, seeking and hair-splitting. Philosophy was once more centred on big themes, urgent questions, matters that were worth being tortured or killed for. And the philosopher’s life was no longer a niche for the careerist. Typically it meant laborious teaching without lucrative fees, pastoral responsibility for the welfare of others and engagement in a life of discipline and prayer. Philosophy was turned to the issues of salvation. Ironically, it was the Christians, at first the apparent enemies of Greekness, who made the philosopher’s life more like Plato’s view of what it ought to be. Once more, it had become a liberating search for truth. It would not be hard to point to other instances of scholarship arising out of mission. We could look eastwards from the Roman Empire where the battle for the Greek intellectual heritage was won, and observe Syriac-speaking Christians spreading the gospel through Mesopotamia and Iran and across central Asia, until in 635 AD (much the same time as the king of Northumbria in northern England was hearing it), it came to the emperor of China. That long missionary trail is also a trail of libraries. Wherever the Christians went, they took books, and the encounter with new cultures, as the Chinese evidence makes it clear, caused them to translate books and to write new ones. The Chinese emperor of the day was himself a scholar, who spent half of each day in study. His first concern was to see what books the Christians had brought with them, and to get them translated, and to review them himself. It was on this basis that Christianity was allowed to spread in his empire. The surviving documents show these Christians trying to present Christ in Chinese categories, exploring how the Buddhist terminology might be used to portray Christ, beginning a dialogue with Buddhist monks. Whether or not, as some have argued, their work had a permanent effect within Buddhism itself, promoting the hope of a merciful saviour that developed in China (so different from the original teaching of the Buddha), it is clear that they entered on an intellectual project as daring as that of the apostle Paul, Justin and Origen.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 19:20:24 +0000
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