Neapolis and the Philosophic Quest

Justin was born early in the second century at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria — the city the Romans had built beside ancient Shechem, the modern Nablus — of Greek-speaking pagan parents, and grew up a Gentile among the ruins of the patriarchs’ country. Driven by a longing for the knowledge of God, he gave himself to philosophy, passing in turn through the schools of the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans, and the Platonists, and finding in each something that failed him. This file traces that origin and that quest, the road that led him to the seashore.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Samaritan by Birth, a Greek by Culture

Justin opens his First Apology by naming himself and his home with a Roman precision that doubles as a biography in miniature: “Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine of Syria” (First Apology 1; ANF 1). Flavia Neapolis — “the new city of Flavius,” founded by the emperor Vespasian around A.D. 72 next to the old town of Shechem — is the modern Nablus, in the hill country of Samaria (Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 5–6). The names of his father and grandfather are Latin and Greek; nothing in them, and nothing in Justin’s own writing, suggests Jewish or Samaritan ancestry. He describes himself plainly as having grown up outside the covenant: he was, by his own account, uncircumcised and a Gentile, one of those “from the nations” (Dialogue with Trypho 28, 41; ANF 1). The land of his birth was saturated with sacred history — Jacob’s well lay at the foot of the mountain, and Justin would later argue from the Samaritan and Jewish Scriptures with the ease of a local — but he came to that history as an outsider, a pagan child of a Roman colony.

The date of his birth is not given in any source and must be estimated backward from his career and martyrdom. He was active as a teacher and writer in the 150s and 160s and was executed under Marcus Aurelius around 165; a birth around the year 100 is the usual scholarly estimate, allowing him to be a mature man at the height of his apologetic work [Disputed: most modern scholars (Barnard, Justin Martyr, p. 5; Minns & Parvis, Apologies, p. 32) give c. 100; the Orthodox synaxarion tradition, followed by the OCA, places his birth c. 114 (Martyr Justin the Philosopher, OCA, June 1) — neither rests on a primary statement of Justin’s age]. What is certain is that he belonged to the first generation of Christians who came to the faith neither as Jews nor as the children of Christians, but as educated pagans seeking, through the schools of the Greeks, an answer to the oldest of questions.

The World of the Second-Century Schools

To follow Justin’s quest it helps to picture the world of the philosophical schools in the second century, the period of the so-called Second Sophistic, when philosophy flourished as both a serious vocation and a public spectacle. A young man of means and ambition seeking wisdom would attach himself to a teacher of one of the established schools — Stoic, Peripatetic, Platonist, Pythagorean, Epicurean, Cynic — each with its own doctrines, its own discipline of life, and its own succession of masters reaching back to a founder. The schools were not merely places of instruction but communities and ways of life, and to “become a philosopher” was to enter such a community and adopt its regimen. They competed for pupils, disputed in public, and were marked out in the street by the philosopher’s cloak. This is the world Justin entered, moving from teacher to teacher in search of the one who could give him what he sought; and it is the world whose dress and idiom he would keep after his conversion, presenting Christianity as a school and a way of life that could stand among — and above — the rest (see Philosophy as the True Faith). His tour of the schools is thus not an eccentric biography but a typical itinerary of a serious seeker in his age, given a singular ending.

The Longing for the Knowledge of God

That question, for Justin, was the knowledge of God. In the autobiographical prologue to the Dialogue with Trypho he presents philosophy not as an academic discipline but as the soul’s road to the divine: “Philosophy is, in fact, the greatest possession, and most honourable before God, to whom it leads us and alone commends us; and these are truly holy men who have bestowed attention on philosophy” (Dialogue with Trypho 2; ANF 1). The tragedy of philosophy, as he saw it, was that it had splintered into rival schools, each claiming the name and none possessing the whole; and so the young Justin set out to test them one by one (Dialogue 2). The narrative that follows is stylized — it owes something to the conventional “conversion to philosophy” story of the ancient schools — but it is also our only window onto his formation, and it is told with a particularity that rings true (Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 6–9).

The Procession of the Schools

Justin’s tour of the schools is a catalogue of disappointments, each different in kind (Dialogue with Trypho 2; ANF 1).

He went first to a Stoic, and stayed for a while, but the man taught him nothing about God and indeed thought such knowledge unnecessary — a fatal defect in a teacher Justin had sought out precisely for the knowledge of God.
He went next to a Peripatetic, a follower of Aristotle, “a sharp man” who, after a few days, pressed Justin to settle the fee — proof, in Justin’s eyes, that the man was no philosopher at all, for a true lover of wisdom does not put a price on it.
He turned then to a celebrated Pythagorean, who received him with a demand: before he could ascend to the contemplation of “the beautiful and the good,” Justin must first have mastered music, astronomy, and geometry, the disciplines that “abstract the soul from sensible things.” Justin had not, and was turned away at the threshold.

Each failure is instructive. The Stoic offered ethics without God; the Peripatetic, technique without love; the Pythagorean, a curriculum without an entrance. Justin records them without bitterness, as a man recording the stages of a genuine search (Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition, ch. 1).

Platonism and Its Promise

Then he came to a Platonist, newly arrived in his city and of high reputation, and here at last the quest seemed to find its end. “The perception of immaterial things quite overpowered me,” Justin writes, “and the contemplation of ideas furnished my mind with wings, so that in a little while I supposed that I had become wise; and such was my stupidity, I expected forthwith to look upon God, for this is the end of Plato’s philosophy” (Dialogue with Trypho 2; ANF 1). This is the heart of his attraction to Platonism: it promised the vision of God as the natural terminus of the philosophic ascent. The Stoic had said God could not be known; Plato said the soul could rise to behold him. For a man whose whole quest was the knowledge of God, this was the closest thing to home he had found, and he gave himself to it wholly.

It is essential to read what comes next against this Platonist high point, because Justin never repudiated the longing Platonism had awakened in him; he came to believe only that Platonism could not, by itself, satisfy it. The contemplation of the eternal Forms had given his soul wings; it had not given him God. That deficiency, and its remedy, are the subject of the seaside encounter that follows (see The Conversion).

The philosophic quest, then, is not in Justin a youthful error to be repented but a providential preparation. He had gone looking for the knowledge of God along every road the Greeks could offer, and the very thoroughness of the search — the very seriousness with which he took the Platonist promise of the vision of God — is what made him ready, when the old man spoke, to recognize that the prophets had been speaking of the same God all along, and had known him better (see The Logos Spermatikos, where Justin’s mature theology accounts for the truth he had genuinely found among the philosophers).

The Convention and the Sincerity of the Quest

It is worth pausing on the literary character of this narrative, because it bears on how much we may trust it. The “intellectual autobiography” — the account of a young man’s disappointed tour of the schools, ending in a conversion to true philosophy — was a recognized literary form in antiquity; Galen, Lucian, and others wrote variants of it, and the seeker who tries each sect in turn and finds each wanting is something of a stock figure. Some scholars have therefore wondered whether Justin’s account is more a literary set-piece than a memoir, a stylized way of presenting his thought rather than a record of his life (Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 6–9; Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, pp. 10–11). The caution is fair, and this collection does not treat the catalogue of schools as a precise itinerary. But two things weigh on the side of substantial sincerity. First, the particular grievances Justin records — the Stoic who would not discuss God, the Peripatetic who demanded his fee, the Pythagorean who turned him away for want of mathematics — are concrete, slightly comic, and not the obvious choices of a man merely filling out a literary form; they have the texture of remembered irritation. Second, and more importantly, the whole of Justin’s later thought makes sense only if he had genuinely loved philosophy and genuinely found it wanting: his retained cloak, his school, his claim that Christianity is the true philosophy, and his doctrine of the seminal Word all presuppose a man who came to Christ through philosophy and never ceased to honor what was true in it (see Philosophy as the True Faith). The form may be conventional; the quest behind it was real.

Samaria and the Scriptures

One further feature of Justin’s origin shaped his work. Although a Gentile by birth, he grew up in Samaria, a land whose population kept its own version of the Mosaic books and whose landscape was thick with the memory of the patriarchs and prophets. Whether or not this proximity gave the young Justin any early acquaintance with the Hebrew Scriptures, the mature apologist handled the Greek Old Testament with a fluency and a hunger that mark him out among the second-century writers: the Dialogue with Trypho quotes and argues from the prophets at enormous length, and the First Apology‘s proof from prophecy ranges across the whole sweep of the Septuagint (see The Defense to Antoninus). When the old man on the seashore directed him to “certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers… called prophets” (Dialogue with Trypho 7; ANF 1), he was pointing the Samaritan-born Gentile toward books that his homeland had, in its own way, never forgotten. The convert from Platonism became, in the end, one of the early Church’s most tireless readers of the Hebrew Scriptures — a trajectory that began in the hill country of Samaria and ran through the seaside conversation that turned him from Plato to the prophets (see The Conversion).

References

Justin, First Apology 1. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 1–2, 28, 41. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and trans. Thomas B. Falls, rev. Thomas P. Halton, ed. Michael Slusser, St. Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003.
Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Chadwick, Henry. Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
Minns, Denis, and Paul Parvis. Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Martyr Justin the Philosopher and those with him at Rome. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, June 1. (Used for the synaxarion birth-date tradition; the chronology is cross-checked against the scholarly Lives.)