This chapter mainly deals with pagan (Hellenic, in the East) belief and philosophy and its influence on Christian writers.
Ultimately, the battle for the public faith of the empire was lost to Christianity, but Hellenism did not suddenly disappear. Its dialogue with a new upper class intelligentsia of Christians had a deep influence on the direction of Christianity.
(East and West took somewhat different paths. In the West the withdrawal of the Roman Empire and the lack of other intellectual structures left writers such as Ambrose and Augustine as the almost unchallenged heirs of Plotinus and they provide the link between Greek philosophy and the Middle Ages. In the East, somewhat paradoxically, although Constantine thoroughly Christianised the apparatus of state, paganism lived on for longer. A fifth century bishop could happily “speak in myths” in church, but “think as a philosopher” in private. Pagan country-gentlemen survived until the tenth century in Eastern Turkey.)
The Hellenes described by Brown can also be referred to as the Neo-Platonists and Brown focusses especially on Plotinus (c.204-270). The Neo-Platonists used ancient methods in an evolving tradition to look at:
- Body and Soul: The linking of visible and invisible, or the joining of an inexpressible inner world and meaningful articulation in the outside world.
- Man and Universe: A meaningful universe and a great chain than linked, mingled and interwove a relationship between man and the One God.
It was, in short, possible, through rational contemplation to seize the intimate connection between every level of the visible world and its source in the One God.
This was a decidedly different to the Gnostics for whom there was no connection between the universe and a Good God, between a man’s inside and his outside, between his body and his soul.
It was also different to the earlier Christian ascetics. These had focussed all of their attention on the One God, to the exclusion of the world around them. Brown talks of a lost sense of intimacy with the world and how the glare of crude monotheism […] drained away the rainbow.
In the fourth century the ideas of those such as Plotinus were seen as the crowning achievement and the sole hope of all civilised thinkers in the Roman Empire. His legacy to Christianity was to breathe colour back into a world that had threatened […] to grow pale in the harsh light of the […] simple worship of a half-known high-God.
These ideas make their way into the art of the period. Eyes flash at us, revealing an inner life hidden in a charged cloud of flesh. Equally the gold and icons of a Byzantine church where the onlooker at ground level is linked by an unbroken chain of saints, angels, and archangels to the God, almost invisible in the highest vault.
(Paradoxically, the intimate and intangible presence of the unseen also gave pagans solace when their temples were later destroyed – the soul lived on, after all.)
Moritasgus 