The Conversion

At the height of his Platonism, walking in solitude by the sea, Justin met an old man — venerable, gentle, and persistent — who in a long conversation dismantled his confidence that the philosopher’s soul could ascend unaided to the vision of God, and pointed him instead to the Hebrew prophets, who had not reasoned their way to God but had been filled with his Spirit and had foretold Christ. Justin’s heart was kindled; he found in the prophets and in Christ “the only sure and worthy philosophy,” and he became a Christian. This file treats that turning, as Justin himself narrates it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Old Man on the Seashore

Justin sets the scene with care. Wishing to be undisturbed in contemplation, he had withdrawn to a solitary place near the sea, and there an old man, “by no means contemptible in appearance, exhibiting meek and venerable manners,” followed him at a little distance and fell into conversation (Dialogue with Trypho 3; ANF 1). The encounter is the hinge of Justin’s life, and he gives it the better part of six chapters of the Dialogue (3–8), staged as a genuine philosophical exchange in which the old man — never named, and of unknown identity — leads Justin step by step out of his Platonism by Platonism’s own methods (Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 9–13). Whether the old man was a real person or a literary device standing for the whole prophetic and Christian tradition, the scene is Justin’s chosen image of how he came to the faith, and it is the earliest such conversion narrative we possess from a Christian intellectual (Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, pp. 10–11).

The Soul Cannot See God Unaided

The conversation turns first on the very thing that had drawn Justin to Plato: the claim that the philosopher’s soul, purified and turned from the body, can rise to behold God. The old man presses him on what kind of thing the soul is, whether it is itself divine and immortal by nature, whether it sees God by its own power — and at each point shows that the Platonic confidence outruns what can actually be established (Dialogue with Trypho 3–6; ANF 1). The soul lives not because life is its own essence but because God wills it to live; it does not possess the vision of God as a natural endowment but receives it as a gift, where God grants it. The whole edifice of the unaided ascent begins to crack — not by an appeal to revelation against reason, but by reason pressed harder than Justin had pressed it.

This is a crucial feature of Justin’s conversion as he tells it: he was not argued out of philosophy but argued through it, brought to the point where philosophy itself confessed that the knowledge of God it sought could not be had by the soul’s own striving. The Platonist had promised the vision of God as the end of his philosophy (see Neapolis and the Philosophic Quest); the old man showed that the end could not be reached by the road Plato had drawn.

The Prophets, Who Saw and Foretold

Having emptied Justin’s hands, the old man fills them. There were, he says, long before these philosophers, “certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers, both righteous and beloved by God, who spoke by the Divine Spirit, and foretold events which would take place, and which are now taking place. They are called prophets” (Dialogue with Trypho 7; ANF 1). These men did not reason their way to God; they were filled with his Spirit, saw the truth, and proclaimed it, “neither influenced by a desire for glory, but speaking those things alone which they saw and which they heard, being filled with the Holy Spirit.” Their writings remain, the old man says, and whoever reads them with faith may profit greatly concerning the beginnings and the end of things “and such matters as the philosopher ought to know.” And above all they “both glorified the Creator, the God and Father of all things, and proclaimed His Son, the Christ” (Dialogue 7; ANF 1).

The proof the old man offers is not a syllogism but a manner of testimony: the prophets had foretold what was now coming to pass, and their words carried the authority of men who had seen. The decisive criterion is fulfilled prophecy — the very argument Justin would later make the spine of his First Apology (see The Defense to Antoninus). And then the old man departed, exhorting Justin above all to pray that the gates of light might be opened to him, “for these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and His Christ have imparted wisdom” (Dialogue 7; ANF 1).

The Criterion of Fulfilled Prophecy

It is worth marking precisely how the old man persuades Justin, because the method became the spine of Justin’s own apologetic. He does not ask Justin to abandon reason for blind faith, nor does he offer a chain of metaphysical argument; he offers a criterion — the prophets foretold what is now coming to pass, and the fulfillment of their words in events is the evidence of their truth (Dialogue with Trypho 7; ANF 1). The prophets are credible because they spoke beforehand of things that have happened, and above all because they “glorified the Creator… and proclaimed His Son, the Christ,” whose coming and works fulfill what they said. This is the argument from prophecy, and Justin would make it the central proof of both the First Apology (where it fills the long central section) and the Dialogue (where it occupies the bulk of the work) (see The Defense to Antoninus and The Debate with Trypho). That the method by which he was himself converted became the method by which he sought to convert others is no accident: Justin believed that the fulfillment of prophecy was the rational ground on which faith in Christ could rest, the bridge by which a philosopher could cross from the seeking of reason to the certainty of revelation.

“The Only Sure and Worthy Philosophy”

What followed Justin records as a fire: “But straightway a flame was kindled in my soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in my mind, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable. Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher” (Dialogue with Trypho 8; ANF 1). The phrasing is exact and deliberate: Justin does not say he ceased to be a philosopher and became a Christian, but that he found this philosophy — the faith of the prophets and the friends of Christ — to be “alone safe and profitable,” and so became a philosopher in the truest sense. The conversion is not an abandonment of the quest but its fulfillment.

Justin says nothing in the Dialogue about a baptism or a date, and the seaside narrative is silent on the mechanics of his entry into the Church; we know him to have been a baptized Christian from his writings, where he speaks of baptism as something he and his readers have undergone (First Apology 61; see The Earliest Liturgical Witness). He elsewhere names a further motive that drew him toward Christianity even before his full conviction: watching Christians go fearlessly to their deaths, he concluded that men who could die so could not be the vice-ridden criminals they were accused of being (Second Apology 12; ANF 1). The witness of the martyrs, that is, was part of the apologetic that converted the future apologist — a fact that gives a particular weight to his own death (see The Trial Before Rusticus).

From this conversion flows everything else in Justin: the retained philosopher’s cloak, the school at Rome, the apologies, the Logos theology, and the argument from prophecy. He had gone looking for the knowledge of God among the Greeks and found that the Hebrew prophets had possessed it; the rest of his life was the working out of how both things could be true (see The Logos Spermatikos).

A Conversion of Reason, Not Against It

The most important thing about Justin’s conversion, for his later thought and for the Church’s reception of him, is the manner of it. He was not converted by a vision, a voice from heaven, or a sudden ecstasy that bypassed his mind; he was converted by an argument — pressed, step by step, through the very Platonism he had embraced, to the point where reason itself confessed its insufficiency and pointed beyond itself to the prophets. The faith he came to was not the abandonment of his rational quest but its answer. This is why Justin could never regard Christianity as the enemy of philosophy or as a refuge for those who had given up on the mind. He had come to Christ as a philosopher, by the road of reason honestly followed, and he held that this was the road the truth always takes: that reason rightly pursued does not lead away from the gospel but toward it. The conversion narrative of the Dialogue is thus the seed of his whole apologetic — the conviction that the faith can be argued, that it answers the deepest questions of philosophy, and that the same Logos who gives reason to all also gives himself in Christ (see Philosophy as the True Faith).

The Identity of the Old Man

The Church has sometimes wondered who the old man was. The text never names him, and Justin gives no clue to his identity beyond his venerable bearing and his command of the Scriptures and the philosophical questions. Some readers have taken him for a real Christian teacher whom Justin met; others have seen in him a literary figure standing for the whole prophetic and apostolic tradition, the voice of the Church meeting the philosopher; a few of the Fathers, struck by the scene’s resemblance to the meeting of a soul with its guide, read him almost as an angelic or providential figure (Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 9–13). The text does not allow a decision, and this collection does not force one. What matters is the function the old man serves in Justin’s own telling: he is the one who turns Justin from the philosophers to the prophets, from the unaided ascent to the gift of God, from Plato to Christ — the human instrument, real or representative, of a conversion Justin attributes finally to the grace that opens “the gates of light” (Dialogue with Trypho 7; ANF 1).

References

Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 3–8. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and trans. Thomas B. Falls, rev. Halton, ed. Slusser. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003.
Justin, First Apology 61; Second Apology 12. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
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.