Greeks

• understood evolutionary character of human progress

74:8.5Away from the in­flu­ences of Dala­ma­tia and Eden, man­kind tended to­ward the be­lief in the grad­ual as­cent of the hu­man race. The fact of evo­lu­tion is not a mod­ern dis­cov­ery; the an­cients un­der­stood the slow and evo­lu­tion­ary char­ac­ter of hu­man prog­ress. The early Greeks had clear ideas of this de­spite their prox­im­ity to Mes­o­po­ta­mia. Al­though the var­i­ous races of earth be­came sadly mixed up in their no­tions of evo­lu­tion, nev­er­the­less, many of the prim­i­tive tribes be­lieved and taught that they were the de­scen­dants of var­i­ous an­i­mals. Prim­i­tive peo­ples made a prac­tice of se­lect­ing for their “totems” the an­i­mals of their sup­posed an­ces­try. Cer­tain North Amer­i­can In­dian tribes be­lieved they orig­i­nated from beavers and coy­otes. Cer­tain African tribes teach that they are de­scended from the hyena, a Malay tribe from the lemur, a New Guinea group from the par­rot.

• individual Greeks › Sato, leader of Adamsonite settlers

80:7.3Al­most two thou­sand years af­ter the set­tle­ment of Crete a group of the tall de­scen­dants of Adam­son made their way over the north­ern is­lands to Greece, com­ing al­most di­rectly from their high­land home north of Mes­o­po­ta­mia. These pro­gen­i­tors of the Greeks were led west­ward by Sato, a di­rect de­scen­dant of Adam­son and Ratta.

80:7.4The group which fi­nally set­tled in Greece con­sisted of three hun­dred and sev­enty-five of the se­lected and su­pe­rior peo­ple com­pris­ing the end of the sec­ond civ­i­liza­tion of the Ad­am­son­ites. These later sons of Adam­son car­ried the then most valu­able strains of the emerg­ing white races. They were of a high in­tel­lec­tual or­der and, phys­i­cally re­garded, the most beau­ti­ful of men since the days of the first Eden.

• great teachers, artists, traders, and colonizers

80:7.12When Egypt fol­lowed Mes­o­po­ta­mia in cul­tural de­cline, many of the more able and ad­vanced fam­i­lies fled to Crete, thus greatly aug­ment­ing this al­ready ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion. And when the ar­rival of in­fe­rior groups from Egypt later threat­ened the civ­i­liza­tion of Crete, the more cul­tured fam­i­lies moved on west to Greece.

80:7.13The Greeks were not only great teach­ers and artists, they were also the world’s great­est traders and col­o­niz­ers. Be­fore suc­cumb­ing to the flood of in­fe­ri­or­ity which even­tu­ally en­gulfed their art and com­merce, they suc­ceeded in plant­ing so many out­posts of cul­ture to the west that a great many of the ad­vances in early Greek civ­i­liza­tion per­sisted in the later peo­ples of south­ern Eu­rope, and many of the mixed de­scen­dants of these Ad­am­son­ites be­came in­cor­po­rated in the tribes of the ad­ja­cent main­lands.

• favored monogamous marriage

83:6.3The Chaldean tribes rec­og­nized the right of a wife to im­pose a pre­mar­i­tal pledge upon her spouse not to take a sec­ond wife or con­cu­bine; both the Greeks and the Ro­mans fa­vored monog­a­mous mar­riage. An­ces­tor wor­ship has al­ways fos­tered mo­nog­amy, as has the Chris­tian er­ror of re­gard­ing mar­riage as a sacra­ment. Even the el­e­va­tion of the stan­dard of liv­ing has con­sis­tently mil­i­tated against plu­ral wives. By the time of Mi­chael’s ad­vent on Uran­tia prac­ti­cally all of the civ­i­lized world had at­tained the level of the­o­ret­i­cal mo­nog­amy. But this pas­sive mo­nog­amy did not mean that man­kind had be­come ha­bit­u­ated to the prac­tice of real pair mar­riage.

• treated women better than most

84:5.6The early Chi­nese and the Greeks treated women bet­ter than did most sur­round­ing peo­ples. But the He­brews were ex­ceed­ingly dis­trust­ful of them. In the Oc­ci­dent woman has had a dif­fi­cult climb un­der the Pauline doc­trines which be­came at­tached to Chris­tian­ity, al­though Chris­tian­ity did ad­vance the mores by im­pos­ing more strin­gent sex obli­ga­tions upon man. Woman’s es­tate is lit­tle short of hope­less un­der the pe­cu­liar degra­da­tion which at­taches to her in Mo­hammedanism, and she fares even worse un­der the teach­ings of sev­eral other Ori­en­tal re­li­gions.

• recognized disease results from natural causes

90:3.95. Nat­u­ral cau­sa­tion. Man­kind has been very slow to learn the ma­te­rial se­crets of the in­ter­re­la­tion­ship of cause and ef­fect in the phys­i­cal do­mains of en­ergy, mat­ter, and life. The an­cient Greeks, hav­ing pre­served the tra­di­tions of Adam­son’s teach­ings, were among the first to rec­og­nize that all dis­ease is the re­sult of nat­u­ral causes. Slowly and cer­tainly the un­fold­ing of a sci­en­tific era is de­stroy­ing man’s age-old the­o­ries of sick­ness and death. Fever was one of the first hu­man ail­ments to be re­moved from the cat­e­gory of super­nat­u­ral dis­or­ders, and pro­gres­sively the era of sci­ence has bro­ken the fet­ters of ig­no­rance which so long im­pris­oned the hu­man mind. An un­der­stand­ing of old age and con­ta­gion is grad­u­ally oblit­er­at­ing man’s fear of ghosts, spir­its, and gods as the per­sonal per­pe­tra­tors of hu­man mis­ery and mor­tal suf­fer­ing.

• recognized disease results from natural causes

90:4.9The Greeks were the first to evolve truly ra­tio­nal meth­ods of treat­ing the sick. Both the Greeks and the Egyp­tians re­ceived their med­i­cal knowl­edge from the Eu­phrates val­ley. Oil and wine was a very early med­i­cine for treat­ing wounds; cas­tor oil and opium were used by the Sume­ri­ans. Many of these an­cient and ef­fec­tive se­cret reme­dies lost their power when they be­came known; se­crecy has al­ways been es­sen­tial to the suc­cess­ful prac­tice of fraud and su­per­sti­tion. Only facts and truth court the full light of com­pre­hen­sion and re­joice in the il­lu­mi­na­tion and en­light­en­ment of sci­en­tific re­search.

• individual Greeks › Plato

92:5.124. The sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ. Many men arose to pro­claim truth in this, one of the great­est cen­turies of re­li­gious awak­en­ing ever wit­nessed on Uran­tia. Among these should be re­corded Gau­tama, Con­fu­cius, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, and the Jain­ist teach­ers. The teach­ings of Gau­tama have be­come wide­spread in Asia, and he is revered as the Bud­dha by mil­lions. Con­fu­cius was to Chi­nese moral­ity what Plato was to Greek phi­los­o­phy, and while there were re­li­gious reper­cus­sions to the teach­ings of both, strictly speak­ing, nei­ther was a re­li­gious teacher; Lao-tse en­vi­sioned more of God in Tao than did Con­fu­cius in hu­man­ity or Plato in ide­al­ism. Zoroaster, while much af­fected by the preva­lent con­cept of dual spiritism, the good and the bad, at the same time def­i­nitely ex­alted the idea of one eter­nal De­ity and of the ul­ti­mate vic­tory of light over dark­ness.

• individual Greeks › Anaxagoras
• individual Greeks › Aristotle
• individual Greeks › Plato

98:2.6Xeno­phanes taught one God, but his de­ity con­cept was too pan­the­is­tic to be a per­sonal Fa­ther to mor­tal man. Anaxago­ras was a mech­a­nist ex­cept that he did rec­og­nize a First Cause, an Ini­tial Mind. Socrates and his suc­ces­sors, Plato and Aris­to­tle, taught that virtue is knowl­edge; good­ness, health of the soul; that it is bet­ter to suf­fer in­jus­tice than to be guilty of it, that it is wrong to re­turn evil for evil, and that the gods are wise and good. Their car­di­nal virtues were: wis­dom, cour­age, tem­per­ance, and jus­tice.

• not much interested in philosophy of self-realization, abstract Deity
• plunged into intellectual stagnation, moral depravity, and spiritual poverty

98:2.10But the av­er­age men of these times could not grasp, nor were they much in­ter­ested in, the Greek phi­los­o­phy of self-re­al­iza­tion and an ab­stract De­ity; they rather craved promises of sal­va­tion, cou­pled with a per­sonal God who could hear their prayers. They ex­iled the philoso­phers, per­se­cuted the rem­nants of the Salem cult, both doc­trines hav­ing be­come much blended, and made ready for that ter­ri­ble or­gias­tic plunge into the fol­lies of the mys­tery cults which were then over­spread­ing the Med­i­ter­ra­nean lands. The Eleusinian mys­ter­ies grew up within the Olympian pan­theon, a Greek ver­sion of the wor­ship of fer­til­ity; Diony­sus na­ture wor­ship flour­ished; the best of the cults was the Or­phic broth­er­hood, whose moral preach­ments and promises of sal­va­tion made a great ap­peal to many.

98:2.11All Greece be­came in­volved in these new meth­ods of at­tain­ing sal­va­tion, these emo­tional and fiery cer­e­mo­ni­als. No na­tion ever at­tained such heights of artis­tic phi­los­o­phy in so short a time; none ever cre­ated such an ad­vanced sys­tem of ethics prac­ti­cally with­out De­ity and en­tirely de­void of the prom­ise of hu­man sal­va­tion; no na­tion ever plunged so quickly, deeply, and vi­o­lently into such depths of in­tel­lec­tual stag­na­tion, moral de­prav­ity, and spir­i­tual pov­erty as these same Greek peo­ples when they flung them­selves into the mad whirl of the mys­tery cults.

• individual Greeks › Aristotle

121:6.3Though the Hel­le­nized Jew­ish be­liefs were very lit­tle in­flu­enced by the teach­ings of the Epi­cure­ans, they were very ma­te­ri­ally af­fected by the phi­los­o­phy of Plato and the self-ab­ne­ga­tion doc­trines of the Sto­ics. The great in­road of Sto­icism is ex­em­pli­fied by the Fourth Book of the Mac­cabees; the pen­e­tra­tion of both Pla­tonic phi­los­o­phy and Stoic doc­trines is ex­hib­ited in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon. The Hel­le­nized Jews brought to the He­brew scrip­tures such an al­le­gor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that they found no dif­fi­culty in con­form­ing He­brew the­ol­ogy with their revered Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. But this all led to dis­as­trous con­fu­sion un­til these prob­lems were taken in hand by Philo of Alexan­dria, who pro­ceeded to har­mo­nize and sys­tem­ize Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy into a com­pact and fairly con­sis­tent sys­tem of re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. And it was this later teach­ing of com­bined Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy that pre­vailed in Pales­tine when Je­sus lived and taught, and which Paul uti­lized as the foun­da­tion on which to build his more ad­vanced and en­light­en­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.

• individual Greeks › physician in Rome

132:4.5He talked with a Ro­man sen­a­tor on pol­i­tics and states­man­ship, and this one con­tact with Je­sus made such an im­pres­sion on this leg­is­la­tor that he spent the rest of his life vainly try­ing to in­duce his col­leagues to change the course of the rul­ing pol­icy from the idea of the gov­ern­ment sup­port­ing and feed­ing the peo­ple to that of the peo­ple sup­port­ing the gov­ern­ment. Je­sus spent one evening with a wealthy slave­holder, talked about man as a son of God, and the next day this man, Claudius, gave free­dom to one hun­dred and sev­en­teen slaves. He vis­ited at din­ner with a Greek physi­cian, telling him that his pa­tients had minds and souls as well as bod­ies, and thus led this able doc­tor to at­tempt a more far-reach­ing min­istry to his fel­low men. He talked with all sorts of peo­ple in ev­ery walk of life. The only place in Rome he did not visit was the pub­lic baths. He re­fused to ac­com­pany his friends to the baths be­cause of the sex promis­cu­ity which there pre­vailed.

• individual Greeks › contractor in Corinth

133:4.6To the Greek con­trac­tor and builder he said: “My friend, as you build the ma­te­rial struc­tures of men, grow a spir­i­tual char­ac­ter in the simil­i­tude of the di­vine spirit within your soul. Do not let your achieve­ment as a tem­po­ral builder out­run your at­tain­ment as a spir­i­tual son of the king­dom of heaven. While you build the man­sions of time for an­other, ne­glect not to se­cure your ti­tle to the man­sions of eter­nity for your­self. Ever re­mem­ber, there is a city whose foun­da­tions are righ­teous­ness and truth, and whose builder and maker is God.”

• individual Greeks › mistress of inn in Corinth

133:4.8To the mis­tress of the Greek inn he said: “Min­is­ter your hos­pi­tal­ity as one who en­ter­tains the chil­dren of the Most High. El­e­vate the drudgery of your daily toil to the high lev­els of a fine art through the in­creas­ing re­al­iza­tion that you min­is­ter to God in the per­sons whom he in­dwells by his spirit which has de­scended to live within the hearts of men, thereby seek­ing to trans­form their minds and lead their souls to the knowl­edge of the Par­a­dise Fa­ther of all these be­stowed gifts of the di­vine spirit.”

133:5.1They shortly ar­rived at the olden cen­ter of Greek sci­ence and learn­ing, and Ga­nid was thrilled with the thought of be­ing in Athens, of be­ing in Greece, the cul­tural cen­ter of the one­time Alexan­drian em­pire, which had ex­tended its bor­ders even to his own land of In­dia. There was lit­tle busi­ness to trans­act; so Gonod spent most of his time with Je­sus and Ga­nid, vis­it­ing the many points of in­ter­est and lis­ten­ing to the in­ter­est­ing dis­cus­sions of the lad and his ver­sa­tile teacher.

133:5.2A great uni­ver­sity still thrived in Athens, and the trio made fre­quent vis­its to its halls of learn­ing. Je­sus and Ga­nid had thor­oughly dis­cussed the teach­ings of Plato when they at­tended the lec­tures in the mu­seum at Alexan­dria. They all en­joyed the art of Greece, ex­am­ples of which were still to be found here and there about the city.

133:5.3Both the fa­ther and the son greatly en­joyed the dis­cus­sion on sci­ence which Je­sus had at their inn one evening with a Greek philoso­pher. Af­ter this pedant had talked for al­most three hours, and when he had fin­ished his dis­course, Je­sus, in terms of mod­ern thought, said:

133:5.4Sci­en­tists may some day mea­sure the en­ergy, or force man­i­fes­ta­tions, of grav­i­ta­tion, light, and elec­tric­ity, but these same sci­en­tists can never (sci­en­tif­i­cally) tell you what these uni­verse phe­nom­ena are. Sci­ence deals with phys­i­cal-en­ergy ac­tiv­i­ties; re­li­gion deals with eter­nal val­ues. True phi­los­o­phy grows out of the wis­dom which does its best to cor­re­late these quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive ob­ser­va­tions. There al­ways ex­ists the dan­ger that the purely phys­i­cal sci­en­tist may be­come af­flicted with math­e­mat­i­cal pride and sta­tis­ti­cal ego­tism, not to men­tion spir­i­tual blind­ness.

133:5.5Logic is valid in the ma­te­rial world, and math­e­mat­ics is re­li­able when lim­ited in its ap­pli­ca­tion to phys­i­cal things; but nei­ther is to be re­garded as wholly de­pend­able or in­fal­li­ble when ap­plied to life prob­lems. Life em­braces phe­nom­ena which are not wholly ma­te­rial. Arith­metic says that, if one man could shear a sheep in ten min­utes, ten men could shear it in one minute. That is sound math­e­mat­ics, but it is not true, for the ten men could not so do it; they would get in one an­other’s way so badly that the work would be greatly de­layed.

133:5.6Math­e­mat­ics as­serts that, if one per­son stands for a cer­tain unit of in­tel­lec­tual and moral value, ten per­sons would stand for ten times this value. But in deal­ing with hu­man per­son­al­ity it would be nearer the truth to say that such a per­son­al­ity as­so­ci­a­tion is a sum equal to the square of the num­ber of per­son­al­i­ties con­cerned in the equa­tion rather than the sim­ple arith­meti­cal sum. A so­cial group of hu­man be­ings in co-or­di­nated work­ing har­mony stands for a force far greater than the sim­ple sum of its parts.

133:5.7Quan­tity may be iden­ti­fied as a fact, thus be­com­ing a sci­en­tific uni­for­mity. Qual­ity, be­ing a mat­ter of mind in­ter­pre­ta­tion, rep­re­sents an es­ti­mate of val­ues, and must, there­fore, re­main an ex­pe­ri­ence of the in­di­vid­ual. When both sci­ence and re­li­gion be­come less dog­matic and more tol­er­ant of crit­i­cism, phi­los­o­phy will then be­gin to achieve unity in the in­tel­li­gent com­pre­hen­sion of the uni­verse.

133:5.8There is unity in the cos­mic uni­verse if you could only dis­cern its work­ings in ac­tu­al­ity. The real uni­verse is friendly to ev­ery child of the eter­nal God. The real prob­lem is: How can the fi­nite mind of man achieve a log­i­cal, true, and cor­re­spond­ing unity of thought? This uni­verse-know­ing state of mind can be had only by con­ceiv­ing that the quan­ti­ta­tive fact and the qual­i­ta­tive value have a com­mon cau­sa­tion in the Par­a­dise Fa­ther. Such a con­cep­tion of re­al­ity yields a broader in­sight into the pur­pose­ful unity of uni­verse phe­nom­ena; it even re­veals a spir­i­tual goal of pro­gres­sive per­son­al­ity achieve­ment. And this is a con­cept of unity which can sense the un­chang­ing back­ground of a liv­ing uni­verse of con­tin­u­ally chang­ing im­per­sonal re­la­tions and evolv­ing per­sonal re­la­tion­ships.

133:5.9Mat­ter and spirit and the state in­ter­ven­ing be­tween them are three in­ter­re­lated and in­teras­so­ci­ated lev­els of the true unity of the real uni­verse. Re­gard­less of how di­ver­gent the uni­verse phe­nom­ena of fact and value may ap­pear to be, they are, af­ter all, uni­fied in the Su­preme.

133:5.10Re­al­ity of ma­te­rial ex­is­tence at­taches to un­rec­og­nized en­ergy as well as to vis­i­ble mat­ter. When the en­er­gies of the uni­verse are so slowed down that they ac­quire the req­ui­site de­gree of mo­tion, then, un­der fa­vor­able con­di­tions, these same en­er­gies be­come mass. And for­get not, the mind which can alone per­ceive the pres­ence of ap­par­ent re­al­i­ties is it­self also real. And the fun­da­men­tal cause of this uni­verse of en­ergy-mass, mind, and spirit, is eter­nal—it ex­ists and con­sists in the na­ture and re­ac­tions of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and his ab­so­lute co-or­di­nates.

133:5.11They were all more than as­tounded at the words of Je­sus, and when the Greek took leave of them, he said: “At last my eyes have be­held a Jew who thinks some­thing be­sides racial su­pe­ri­or­ity and talks some­thing be­sides re­li­gion.” And they re­tired for the night.

133:5.12The so­journ in Athens was pleas­ant and prof­itable, but it was not par­tic­u­larly fruit­ful in its hu­man con­tacts. Too many of the Athe­ni­ans of that day were ei­ther in­tel­lec­tu­ally proud of their rep­u­ta­tion of an­other day or men­tally stupid and ig­no­rant, be­ing the off­spring of the in­fe­rior slaves of those ear­lier pe­ri­ods when there was glory in Greece and wis­dom in the minds of its peo­ple. Even then, there were still many keen minds to be found among the cit­i­zens of Athens.

• individual Greeks › philosopher in Ramah

146:3.1At Ramah Je­sus had the mem­o­rable dis­cus­sion with the aged Greek philoso­pher who taught that sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy were suf­fi­cient to sat­isfy the needs of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence. Je­sus lis­tened with pa­tience and sym­pa­thy to this Greek teacher, al­low­ing the truth of many things he said but point­ing out that, when he was through, he had failed in his dis­cus­sion of hu­man ex­is­tence to ex­plain “whence, why, and whither,” and added: “Where you leave off, we be­gin. Re­li­gion is a rev­e­la­tion to man’s soul deal­ing with spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties which the mind alone could never dis­cover or fully fathom. In­tel­lec­tual striv­ings may re­veal the facts of life, but the gospel of the king­dom un­folds the truths of be­ing. You have dis­cussed the ma­te­rial shad­ows of truth; will you now lis­ten while I tell you about the eter­nal and spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties which cast these tran­sient time shad­ows of the ma­te­rial facts of mor­tal ex­is­tence?” For more than an hour Je­sus taught this Greek the sav­ing truths of the gospel of the king­dom. The old philoso­pher was sus­cep­ti­ble to the Mas­ter’s mode of ap­proach, and be­ing sin­cerely hon­est of heart, he quickly be­lieved this gospel of sal­va­tion.

146:3.2The apos­tles were a bit dis­con­certed by the open man­ner of Je­sus’ as­sent to many of the Greek’s propo­si­tions, but Je­sus af­ter­ward pri­vately said to them: “My chil­dren, mar­vel not that I was tol­er­ant of the Greek’s phi­los­o­phy. True and gen­uine in­ward cer­tainty does not in the least fear out­ward anal­y­sis, nor does truth re­sent hon­est crit­i­cism. You should never for­get that in­tol­er­ance is the mask cov­er­ing up the en­ter­tain­ment of se­cret doubts as to the true­ness of one’s be­lief. No man is at any time dis­turbed by his neigh­bor’s at­ti­tude when he has per­fect con­fi­dence in the truth of that which he whole­heart­edly be­lieves. Cour­age is the con­fi­dence of thor­ough­go­ing hon­esty about those things which one pro­fesses to be­lieve. Sin­cere men are un­afraid of the crit­i­cal ex­am­i­na­tion of their true con­vic­tions and no­ble ide­als.”

• individual Greeks › philosopher in Ramah

148:8.2The Greek philoso­pher who had been won for the king­dom on the pre­vi­ous tour of Gal­i­lee re­turned with cer­tain wealthy Jews of Alexan­dria, and once more they in­vited Je­sus to come to their city for the pur­pose of es­tab­lish­ing a joint school of phi­los­o­phy and re­li­gion as well as an in­fir­mary for the sick. But Je­sus cour­te­ously de­clined the in­vi­ta­tion.

• contrasted with Jews and Romans

191:5.3“Peace be upon you. For a full week have I tar­ried that I might ap­pear again when you were all pres­ent to hear once more the com­mis­sion to go into all the world and preach this gospel of the king­dom. Again I tell you: As the Fa­ther sent me into the world, so send I you. As I have re­vealed the Fa­ther, so shall you re­veal the di­vine love, not merely with words, but in your daily liv­ing. I send you forth, not to love the souls of men, but rather to love men. You are not merely to pro­claim the joys of heaven but also to ex­hibit in your daily ex­pe­ri­ence these spirit re­al­i­ties of the di­vine life since you al­ready have eter­nal life, as the gift of God, through faith. When you have faith, when power from on high, the Spirit of Truth, has come upon you, you will not hide your light here be­hind closed doors; you will make known the love and the mercy of God to all man­kind. Through fear you now flee from the facts of a dis­agree­able ex­pe­ri­ence, but when you shall have been bap­tized with the Spirit of Truth, you will bravely and joy­ously go forth to meet the new ex­pe­ri­ences of pro­claim­ing the good news of eter­nal life in the king­dom of God. You may tarry here and in Gal­i­lee for a short sea­son while you re­cover from the shock of the tran­si­tion from the false se­cu­rity of the au­thor­ity of tra­di­tion­al­ism to the new or­der of the au­thor­ity of facts, truth, and faith in the su­preme re­al­i­ties of liv­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. Your mis­sion to the world is founded on the fact that I lived a God-re­veal­ing life among you; on the truth that you and all other men are the sons of God; and it shall con­sist in the life which you will live among men—the ac­tual and liv­ing ex­pe­ri­ence of lov­ing men and serv­ing them, even as I have loved and served you. Let faith re­veal your light to the world; let the rev­e­la­tion of truth open the eyes blinded by tra­di­tion; let your lov­ing ser­vice ef­fec­tu­ally de­stroy the prej­u­dice en­gen­dered by ig­no­rance. By so draw­ing close to your fel­low men in un­der­stand­ing sym­pa­thy and with un­selfish de­vo­tion, you will lead them into a sav­ing knowl­edge of the Fa­ther’s love. The Jews have ex­tolled good­ness; the Greeks have ex­alted beauty; the Hin­dus preach de­vo­tion; the far­away as­cetics teach rev­er­ence; the Ro­mans de­mand loy­alty; but I re­quire of my dis­ci­ples life, even a life of lov­ing ser­vice for your broth­ers in the flesh.”

195:0.1The re­sults of Pe­ter’s preach­ing on the day of Pen­te­cost were such as to de­cide the fu­ture poli­cies, and to de­ter­mine the plans, of the ma­jor­ity of the apos­tles in their ef­forts to pro­claim the gospel of the king­dom. Pe­ter was the real founder of the Chris­tian church; Paul car­ried the Chris­tian mes­sage to the gen­tiles, and the Greek be­liev­ers car­ried it to the whole Ro­man Em­pire.

195:0.2Al­though the tra­di­tion-bound and priest-rid­den He­brews, as a peo­ple, re­fused to ac­cept ei­ther Je­sus’ gospel of the fa­ther­hood of God and the broth­er­hood of man or Pe­ter’s and Paul’s procla­ma­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion and as­cen­sion of Christ (sub­se­quent Chris­tian­ity), the rest of the Ro­man Em­pire was found to be re­cep­tive to the evolv­ing Chris­tian teach­ings. West­ern civ­i­liza­tion was at this time in­tel­lec­tual, war weary, and thor­oughly skep­ti­cal of all ex­ist­ing re­li­gions and uni­verse philoso­phies. The peo­ples of the West­ern world, the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of Greek cul­ture, had a revered tra­di­tion of a great past. They could con­tem­plate the in­her­i­tance of great ac­com­plish­ments in phi­los­o­phy, art, lit­er­a­ture, and po­lit­i­cal prog­ress. But with all these achieve­ments they had no soul-sat­is­fy­ing re­li­gion. Their spir­i­tual long­ings re­mained un­sat­is­fied.

195:0.3Upon such a stage of hu­man so­ci­ety the teach­ings of Je­sus, em­braced in the Chris­tian mes­sage, were sud­denly thrust. A new or­der of liv­ing was thus pre­sented to the hun­gry hearts of these West­ern peo­ples. This sit­u­a­tion meant im­me­di­ate con­flict be­tween the older re­li­gious prac­tices and the new Chris­tian­ized ver­sion of Je­sus’ mes­sage to the world. Such a con­flict must re­sult in ei­ther de­cided vic­tory for the new or for the old or in some de­gree of com­pro­mise. His­tory shows that the strug­gle ended in com­pro­mise. Chris­tian­ity pre­sumed to em­brace too much for any one peo­ple to as­sim­i­late in one or two gen­er­a­tions. It was not a sim­ple spir­i­tual ap­peal, such as Je­sus had pre­sented to the souls of men; it early struck a de­cided at­ti­tude on re­li­gious rit­u­als, ed­u­ca­tion, magic, med­i­cine, art, lit­er­a­ture, law, gov­ern­ment, morals, sex reg­u­la­tion, polygamy, and, in lim­ited de­gree, even slav­ery. Chris­tian­ity came not merely as a new re­li­gion—some­thing all the Ro­man Em­pire and all the Ori­ent were wait­ing for—but as a new or­der of hu­man so­ci­ety. And as such a pre­ten­sion it quickly pre­cip­i­tated the so­cial-moral clash of the ages. The ide­als of Je­sus, as they were rein­ter­preted by Greek phi­los­o­phy and so­cial­ized in Chris­tian­ity, now boldly chal­lenged the tra­di­tions of the hu­man race em­bod­ied in the ethics, moral­ity, and re­li­gions of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.

195:0.4At first, Chris­tian­ity won as con­verts only the lower so­cial and eco­nomic strata. But by the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond cen­tury the very best of Greco-Ro­man cul­ture was in­creas­ingly turn­ing to this new or­der of Chris­tian be­lief, this new con­cept of the pur­pose of liv­ing and the goal of ex­is­tence.

195:0.5How did this new mes­sage of Jew­ish ori­gin, which had al­most failed in the land of its birth, so quickly and ef­fec­tively cap­ture the very best minds of the Ro­man Em­pire? The tri­umph of Chris­tian­ity over the philo­sophic re­li­gions and the mys­tery cults was due to:

195:0.61. Or­ga­ni­za­tion. Paul was a great or­ga­nizer and his suc­ces­sors kept up the pace he set.

195:0.72. Chris­tian­ity was thor­oughly Hel­le­nized. It em­braced the best in Greek phi­los­o­phy as well as the cream of He­brew the­ol­ogy.

195:0.83. But best of all, it con­tained a new and great ideal, the echo of the life be­stowal of Je­sus and the re­flec­tion of his mes­sage of sal­va­tion for all man­kind.

195:0.94. The Chris­tian lead­ers were will­ing to make such com­pro­mises with Mith­ra­ism that the bet­ter half of its ad­her­ents were won over to the An­ti­och cult.

195:0.105. Like­wise did the next and later gen­er­a­tions of Chris­tian lead­ers make such fur­ther com­pro­mises with pa­gan­ism that even the Ro­man em­peror Con­stan­tine was won to the new re­li­gion.

195:0.11But the Chris­tians made a shrewd bar­gain with the pa­gans in that they adopted the rit­u­al­is­tic pageantry of the pa­gan while com­pelling the pa­gan to ac­cept the Hel­le­nized ver­sion of Pauline Chris­tian­ity. They made a bet­ter bar­gain with the pa­gans than they did with the Mith­raic cult, but even in that ear­lier com­pro­mise they came off more than con­querors in that they suc­ceeded in elim­i­nat­ing the gross im­moral­i­ties and also nu­mer­ous other rep­re­hen­si­ble prac­tices of the Per­sian mys­tery.

195:0.12Wisely or un­wisely, these early lead­ers of Chris­tian­ity de­lib­er­ately com­pro­mised the ide­als of Je­sus in an ef­fort to save and fur­ther many of his ideas. And they were em­i­nently suc­cess­ful. But mis­take not! these com­pro­mised ide­als of the Mas­ter are still la­tent in his gospel, and they will even­tu­ally as­sert their full power upon the world.

195:0.13By this pa­gani­za­tion of Chris­tian­ity the old or­der won many mi­nor vic­to­ries of a rit­u­al­is­tic na­ture, but the Chris­tians gained the as­cen­dancy in that:

195:0.141. A new and enor­mously higher note in hu­man morals was struck.

195:0.152. A new and greatly en­larged con­cept of God was given to the world.

195:0.163. The hope of im­mor­tal­ity be­came a part of the as­sur­ance of a rec­og­nized re­li­gion.

195:0.174. Je­sus of Naz­a­reth was given to man’s hun­gry soul.

195:0.18Many of the great truths taught by Je­sus were al­most lost in these early com­pro­mises, but they yet slum­ber in this re­li­gion of pa­ganized Chris­tian­ity, which was in turn the Pauline ver­sion of the life and teach­ings of the Son of Man. And Chris­tian­ity, even be­fore it was pa­ganized, was first thor­oughly Hel­le­nized. Chris­tian­ity owes much, very much, to the Greeks. It was a Greek, from Egypt, who so bravely stood up at Nicaea and so fear­lessly chal­lenged this as­sem­bly that it dared not so ob­scure the con­cept of the na­ture of Je­sus that the real truth of his be­stowal might have been in dan­ger of be­ing lost to the world. This Greek’s name was Athana­sius, and but for the elo­quence and the logic of this be­liever, the per­sua­sions of Ar­ius would have tri­umphed.

195:1.1The Hel­l­eniza­tion of Chris­tian­ity started in earnest on that event­ful day when the Apos­tle Paul stood be­fore the coun­cil of the Are­opa­gus in Athens and told the Athe­ni­ans about “the Un­known God.” There, un­der the shadow of the Acrop­o­lis, this Ro­man cit­i­zen pro­claimed to these Greeks his ver­sion of the new re­li­gion which had taken ori­gin in the Jew­ish land of Gal­i­lee. And there was some­thing strangely alike in Greek phi­los­o­phy and many of the teach­ings of Je­sus. They had a com­mon goal—both aimed at the emer­gence of the in­di­vid­ual. The Greek, at so­cial and po­lit­i­cal emer­gence; Je­sus, at moral and spir­i­tual emer­gence. The Greek taught in­tel­lec­tual lib­er­al­ism lead­ing to po­lit­i­cal free­dom; Je­sus taught spir­i­tual lib­er­al­ism lead­ing to re­li­gious lib­erty. These two ideas put to­gether con­sti­tuted a new and mighty char­ter for hu­man free­dom; they pre­saged man’s so­cial, po­lit­i­cal, and spir­i­tual lib­erty.

195:1.2Chris­tian­ity came into ex­is­tence and tri­umphed over all con­tend­ing re­li­gions pri­mar­ily be­cause of two things:

• willing to borrow good ideas

195:1.31. The Greek mind was will­ing to bor­row new and good ideas even from the Jews.

195:1.42. Paul and his suc­ces­sors were will­ing but shrewd and saga­cious com­pro­mis­ers; they were keen the­o­logic traders.

195:1.5At the time Paul stood up in Athens preach­ing “Christ and Him Cru­ci­fied,” the Greeks were spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry; they were in­quir­ing, in­ter­ested, and ac­tu­ally look­ing for spir­i­tual truth. Never for­get that at first the Ro­mans fought Chris­tian­ity, while the Greeks em­braced it, and that it was the Greeks who lit­er­ally forced the Ro­mans sub­se­quently to ac­cept this new re­li­gion, as then mod­i­fied, as a part of Greek cul­ture.

195:1.6The Greek revered beauty, the Jew ho­li­ness, but both peo­ples loved truth. For cen­turies the Greek had se­ri­ously thought and earnestly de­bated about all hu­man prob­lems—so­cial, eco­nomic, po­lit­i­cal, and philo­sophic—ex­cept re­li­gion. Few Greeks had paid much at­ten­tion to re­li­gion; they did not take even their own re­li­gion very se­ri­ously. For cen­turies the Jews had ne­glected these other fields of thought while they de­voted their minds to re­li­gion. They took their re­li­gion very se­ri­ously, too se­ri­ously. As il­lu­mi­nated by the con­tent of Je­sus’ mes­sage, the united prod­uct of the cen­turies of the thought of these two peo­ples now be­came the driv­ing power of a new or­der of hu­man so­ci­ety and, to a cer­tain ex­tent, of a new or­der of hu­man re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice.

195:1.7The in­flu­ence of Greek cul­ture had al­ready pen­e­trated the lands of the west­ern Med­i­ter­ra­nean when Alexan­der spread Hel­lenis­tic civ­i­liza­tion over the near-East­ern world. The Greeks did very well with their re­li­gion and their pol­i­tics as long as they lived in small city-states, but when the Mace­do­nian king dared to ex­pand Greece into an em­pire, stretch­ing from the Adri­atic to the In­dus, trou­ble be­gan. The art and phi­los­o­phy of Greece were fully equal to the task of im­pe­rial ex­pan­sion, but not so with Greek po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tion or re­li­gion. Af­ter the city-states of Greece had ex­panded into em­pire, their rather parochial gods seemed a lit­tle queer. The Greeks were re­ally search­ing for one God, a greater and bet­ter God, when the Chris­tian­ized ver­sion of the older Jew­ish re­li­gion came to them.

195:1.8The Hel­lenis­tic Em­pire, as such, could not en­dure. Its cul­tural sway con­tin­ued on, but it en­dured only af­ter se­cur­ing from the West the Ro­man po­lit­i­cal ge­nius for em­pire ad­min­is­tra­tion and af­ter ob­tain­ing from the East a re­li­gion whose one God pos­sessed em­pire dig­nity.

195:1.9In the first cen­tury af­ter Christ, Hel­lenis­tic cul­ture had al­ready at­tained its high­est lev­els; its ret­ro­gres­sion had be­gun; learn­ing was ad­vanc­ing but ge­nius was de­clin­ing. It was at this very time that the ideas and ide­als of Je­sus, which were par­tially em­bod­ied in Chris­tian­ity, be­came a part of the sal­vage of Greek cul­ture and learn­ing.

195:1.10Alexan­der had charged on the East with the cul­tural gift of the civ­i­liza­tion of Greece; Paul as­saulted the West with the Chris­tian ver­sion of the gospel of Je­sus. And wher­ever the Greek cul­ture pre­vailed through­out the West, there Hel­le­nized Chris­tian­ity took root.

195:1.11The East­ern ver­sion of the mes­sage of Je­sus, not­with­stand­ing that it re­mained more true to his teach­ings, con­tin­ued to fol­low the un­com­pro­mis­ing at­ti­tude of Ab­ner. It never pro­gressed as did the Hel­le­nized ver­sion and was even­tu­ally lost in the Is­lamic move­ment.

• backbone of early Christian church

195:3.6The early plan of Chris­tian wor­ship was largely taken over from the Jew­ish syn­a­gogue, mod­i­fied by the Mith­raic rit­ual; later on, much pa­gan pageantry was added. The back­bone of the early Chris­tian church con­sisted of Chris­tian­ized Greek pros­e­lytes to Ju­daism.