De Lacy O'Leary

“ To begin with there are no degrees in eternity: but, most serious error of all, this idea made God liable to variation, at one period of eternity he had been alone, and then he had become a father: philosophy taught that the First Cause, the True God, is liable to no change, if he is Father now, he must have been so from all eternity: we must understand the Son as the Logos for ever eternally issuing forth from the Father as source. ”

“ It is self-existent, eternal, and perfect, and comprehends within itself the "spirit world," the objects of abstract reason, the whole of the reality which lies behind the world of phenomena; the things perceived are only the shadows of these real ones. ”

“ In fact philosophy ruthlessly pressed home was the danger of which the Church was most afraid, feeling in some dim realm of sub-consciousness that the deposit of faith did not quite fall into line with science, or at least with the science then in fashion; and the Church's real enemies were the enthusiasts who were confident that doctrine and philosophy were both absolutely true. ”

“ If we regard the main test of educational efficiency as being in its research product and not simply the promulgation of material already attained, then Nestorianism was not an educational success: and it seems that this should be the supreme test, for knowledge is progressive, and so the smallest contribution towards further progress must be of more real value than the most efficient teaching of results already achieved. Yet it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Nestorianism in preparing an oriental version of Hellenistic culture in the pre-Muslim world. ”

“ The doctrine of an Absolute Reality as the necessary cause of all that is variable, something like the fulcrum which Archimedes needed to move the world, was one to which all philosophy, and especially the Plantonic school, was tending. But, as causation to some extent implies change, this First Cause could not be regarded as directly creating the world, but only as the eternal source of an eternally proceeding emanation by means of which the power of the First Cause is projected so as to produce the universe and all it contains. ”

“ In such an unnatural atmosphere no doubt, it is possible for a religion or a philosophy to live perfectly pure and uncorrupt, but it is certainly not an ideal life: in real life there are bound to be introduced many unworthy elements and some which can only be described as actually corrupt. ”

“ It was impossible for churchmen, educated in this atmosphere, to do otherwise than accept these principles, just as it is impossible for us to admit that the body of a saint can be in two places at once, our whole education training us to assume certain limitations of time and space, although a devout Muslim of Morocco can believe it and honours two shrines as each containing the body of the same saint who, he believes, in his life time had power of over-passing the limitations of space. ”

“ The great importance of the Syriac speaking Christian communities was as the medium whereby Hellenistic philosophy and science was transmitted to the Arabic world. There was no independent development in its Syriac atmosphere, and even the choice of material had already been made by the Hellenists before it passed into Syriac hands. It was now definitely established that the basis of the "humanities" was the Aristotelian logic, and that this as well as all other studies in the work of Aristotle was to be interpreted according to the neo-Platonic commentators. ”

“ It was not, as now, an academic study sought only by a group of specialists, but a living influence which guided men in their ideas about the universe in which they lived and dominated all theology, law, and social ideas. ”

“ It was generally admitted that man has a psyche or animal soul which he shares with the rest of the sentient creatures, and in addition to this a spirit or rational soul which, under the influence of the neo-Platonists or of Alexander of Aphrodisias, was regarded as an emanation from the creative spirit, the Logos or "Agent Intellect," a belief which Christian theologians supported by the statement in Genesis that God breathed into man the breath of life and so man became a living soul. ”

“ Laying great stress on the completeness of the humanity of Christ so that body, soul, and spirit were necessarily connected in the human frame, the view was so expressed as to describe the Virgin Mary as the mother of the human Christ, body, soul, and spirit alone, which implied, or seemed to imply, that at birth Christ was man only and afterwards became God by the Logos entering into the human body, a conclusion possibly not intended by those who expressed their views but pressed by their opponents. ”

“ The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Plantonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind. ”

“ But this position violates the primary canon of history which postulates that all life is continuous, the life of the social community as well as the physical life of an organic body: and life must be a perpetual series of causes and results, so that each event can only be explained by the cause which went before, and can only be fully understood in the light of the result which follows after. ”

“ First stands the question of the stage of development reached by Hellenism, and we may test this by its intellectual life as represented by science and philosophy, at the time when the oriental offshoot shows a definite line of separation. English education, largely dominated by the principles learned at the renascence, is inclined to treat philosophy as coming to an end with Aristotle and beginning again with Descartes after a long blank during which there lived and worked some degenerate descendants of the ancients who hardly need serious consideration. ”

“ As many races and states were associated together in the Greek Empire which, though apparently separated into several kingdoms, yet had an intellectual coherence and a common civilization, and this was still more definitely the case when the closer federation of the Roman Empire followed, philosophy was forced more and more in the direction of speculative theology: it assumed those ethical and doctrinal functions which we generally associate with religion, the contemporary local cults concerning themselves only with ritual duties. ”

“ All Gnostic theories bear witness to the belief that there is a First Cause, absolutely real, perfect, eternal, and far removed above this world of time and space, and that some emanation or emanations must have intervened to connect the resultant world, such as we know it, with this sublime Cause: and such belief indicates in crude form a general conviction which was getting hold of all current thought in the early centuries of the Christian era. ”

“ Gradually however this attitude changed and we begin to find men like Justin Martyr who had received a philosophical education and yet found it quite possible to co-ordinate contemporary science and Christian doctrine. In Rome, in Africa, and in Greece the Christians were a despised minority, chiefly drawn from the unlettered class, and ostentatiously ignored by the writers of the day. Like the Jew of the Ghetto they were forced to live an isolated life and thrown back upon their internal resources. ”

“ At once the warning prediction of the Nestorians was justified: the teaching of a "fusion" between the Logos and the rational soul in Christ entirely undermined his humanity. Another controversy ensued and in this, as in the former one, neither side suggested any doubt as to the psychology or metaphysics borrowed from the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophies, that was throughout assumed as certain, the problem was to make Christian doctrine fit in with it. ”

“ For many centuries it pervaded the atmosphere in which Western Asia was educated and in which it lived. Men became Christians, for a time the new religious interest filled their minds, but later on it was inevitable that philosophy should re-assert its power, and then Christian doctrine had to be re-cast to conform to it: the descendants of these people became Muslims and then again, after an interval, religion had to conform itself to current philosophy. ”

“ What we call the "middle ages" had an important place in the evolution of our own cultural condition, and owed much to the transmitted culture which came round from ancient Hellenism through Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew media. ”

“ The old pagan religions showed many local varieties, and from these a world-wide religion could only be evolved by some speculative doctrines which reconciled their divergences. Never has a religion of any extension been formed from local cults otherwise than by the ministry of some kind of speculative theology: sometimes the fusion of cults has spontaneously produced such a theology, as was the case in the Nile valley and in Mesopotamia in early times, and when the theology was produced it brought its solvent power to bear rapidly and effectively on other surrounding cults. ”

“ Neo-Platonism was the system just coming to the fore-front when the Christians of Alexandria began to be in contact with philosophy. The first prominent Alexandrian Christian who endeavoured to reconcile philosophy and Christian theology was Clement of Alexandria who, like Justin Martyr, was a Platonist of the older type. Clement's Stromateis is a very striking work which shows the general body of Christian doctrine adapted to the theories of Platonic philosophy. ”

“ The active intellect is not a part of the soul but is a power which enters it from outside and arouses the material intellect to activity; it is not only different in source from the material soul, but different in character in that it is eternal and so always has been and always will be, its rational power existing quite apart from the soul in which the thinking takes place ”

“ The new outlook, broader in its horizon, perhaps shallower in other respects, impelled men to take what was an imperialist attitude instead of a local or national one. Precisely similar changes were forced upon the Jewish religion. Hellenistic Judaism, at the beginning of the Christian era, is concerned with the human species and the race of Israel is considered chiefly as a means of bringing illumination to mankind at large. ”

“ The first point is to understand what is to be implied in the term "soul." Plato was really a dualist in that he regards the soul as a separate entity which animates the body and compares it to a rider directing and controlling the horse he rides. But Aristotle makes a more careful analysis of psychological phenomena. In the treatise de anima he says "there is no need to enquire whether soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the imprint are one ”

“ All these, embracing life in its widest application, are classed together as soul, but the last, the intellect, nous, or rational soul, is peculiar to man alone. It does not depend on the senses, directly or indirectly, and so, whilst the other three faculties necessarily cease to function when the bodily organs of sense cease, it does not necessarily follow that this rational soul will cease as it is apparently independent of the organ sense. ”

“ From Plato onwards philosophy had been very largely concerned with theories which more or less directly concerned the structure of society: it was perceived that a very large part of man's life, duties, and general welfare, was intimately concerned with his relations to the community in which he lived. ”

“ Yet Plotinus does not allow the numeral "one" to be applied to God as numerals are understandable and refer to the plane of existence in which we have our being, so that "one" as a mere number is not attributed to God, but rather singularity in the sense of an exclusion of all comparison or of any other than himself. As Absolute God implies a compelling necessity so that all which proceeds from him is not enforced but is necessarily so in the sense that nothing else is possible ”

“ Besides philosophy and theology we find a considerable interest in medicine and the two sciences of chemistry and astronomy which were treated as allied to it, for astronomy, regarded from the astrological point of view, was supposed to be closely associated with the conditions of life and death, of health and disease. Medical studies were especially attached to the school of Alexandria. ”

“ But soon after the time of Aristotle the general conditions of the social order were seen to be undergoing a profound modification: great empires with highly organised administrations replaced the self-governing city states of the older period, and social life had to adjust itself to the new conditions. ”

“ These writers belonged to an Arabic speaking community, but very few of them were actually Arabs.
After the later Hellenistic development Greek culture spread outward into the oriental fringe of people who used Syriac, Coptic, Aramaic, or Persian as their vernacular speech, and in these alien surroundings it took a somewhat narrower development and even what we may describe as a provincial tone. There is no question of race in this. Culture is not inherited as a part of the physiological heritage transmitted from parent to child ”