Philosophy as the True Faith

Justin’s most original move was to present Christianity not as a rival to philosophy but as its fulfillment — “the true philosophy,” the wisdom the schools had been groping toward. He kept the philosopher’s cloak (the tribōn) after his conversion and went on teaching, claiming the name and the dress of the philosopher for the Christian, and arguing that whatever had been rightly said by anyone, anywhere, belonged by right to the Christians, because it came from the one Logos. This file treats that vocation and its theological ground.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Cloak Retained

The outward sign of Justin’s vocation was the philosopher’s cloak, the coarse mantle (tribōn or pallium) by which a professional philosopher was known on sight in the Greco-Roman city, as a clergyman’s collar is known today. Justin kept it after his conversion and continued to wear it as a Christian — a deliberate and provocative claim that the Christian teacher was the true philosopher. The Dialogue with Trypho opens with exactly this recognition: Trypho approaches Justin in the colonnade because of the cloak, having been told by his Socratic teacher to engage anyone who wore the philosopher’s dress (Dialogue with Trypho 1; ANF 1). Eusebius, a century and a half later, twice remarks that Justin preached the gospel “in the garb of a philosopher” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.11; trans. NPNF II/1). The cloak is not a costume detail; it is Justin’s thesis worn on the body. He did not believe that becoming a Christian had made him cease to be a philosopher. It had made him, at last, a true one.

Philosophy as a Way of Life

To understand why Justin could call Christianity “the true philosophy” without strain, it helps to remember what philosophy meant in his world. For the ancient schools, philosophy was not primarily an academic discipline or a body of theories but a way of life — a disciplined manner of living ordered toward wisdom, virtue, and the right relation to the divine. To “do philosophy” was to belong to a school, to follow a master, to practice a set of exercises and a moral regimen, and to order one’s whole life toward a vision of the good. Seen this way, Justin’s claim is far less strange than it sounds to modern ears: Christianity, with its definite teaching about God and the soul, its rigorous moral discipline, its community of disciples under the teaching of Christ, and its orientation of the whole life toward God, is a philosophy in precisely this ancient sense — and, Justin holds, the only one that delivers what all the schools promised and none could give, the true knowledge of God and the transformation of life. The cloak and the school are not borrowed trappings, then, but the natural form of a faith that genuinely was, in the terms of its age, a philosophy — a total way of life ordered toward the divine (Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, pp. 9–11; Barnard, Justin Martyr, ch. 7).

“The True Philosophy”

Behind the cloak lies a claim about what Christianity is. For Justin, the various Greek schools were so many partial graspings after a wisdom that Christ possessed whole. Philosophy at its best was a real seeking after God; its tragedy was its fragmentation and its incompleteness; and the gospel was the wisdom it had been seeking. This is why Justin can describe his own conversion not as a departure from philosophy but as the discovery of “this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable” (Dialogue with Trypho 8; ANF 1), and why he can address the emperor — himself a student of philosophy — as one philosopher to another, appealing to reason and to the love of truth as common ground (First Apology 2–3; ANF 1).

The framing is not a rhetorical convenience but a theological conviction, and it cuts both ways. On the one hand it dignifies the Greek inheritance: the Christian need not despise Socrates or Plato, for what was true in them was true. On the other hand it relativizes that inheritance utterly: the philosophers had only fragments, and possessed even those imperfectly, whereas the Christian possesses the whole in Christ. Justin holds both edges at once, and the holding-together is the substance of his thought (Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, pp. 9–22; Barnard, Justin Martyr, ch. 7).

“Whatever Has Been Rightly Said Belongs to Us”

The boldest statement of the claim comes in the Second Apology. Of Socrates, Heraclitus, and the others who “lived with the Logos,” Justin will say more in his Logos theology (see The Logos Spermatikos); but the principle that governs his whole reading of pagan wisdom he states plainly: “Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians” (Second Apology 13; ANF 1). The reason is that the same Logos who became flesh in Christ had already, before his incarnation, sown seeds of truth in the minds of all rational beings; whoever spoke truly, in whatever age or nation, spoke by a participation in that Word. The truth in Plato and the truth in Moses have one and the same source, and that source is Christ. The Christian therefore does not borrow from the philosophers; he reclaims what was always Christ’s.

This is at once the most generous and the most assertive thing Justin says about Greek philosophy. It allows him to read the whole of pagan learning as anonymous Christianity-in-advance, and at the same time to insist that the fullness was never available there — that the philosophers, possessing only a “seed” of the Logos, fell into contradiction and error in just those places where they outran what the seed had given them (Second Apology 10, 13; ANF 1). The doctrine is examined in full in Section 07; here it is enough to see that Justin’s vocation as a Christian philosopher rests on it. To wear the cloak and call Christianity the true philosophy is to claim, on the strength of the Logos doctrine, that the gospel is the wisdom of which philosophy was the foreshadowing.

Philosophy and the Cross

There is a temptation to read Justin’s “true philosophy” as a smoothing-over of the offense of the gospel — as if he had made Christianity respectable to the educated by dressing it in Greek robes and quietly setting aside the scandal of a crucified God. The texts do not bear this out. Justin keeps the cross at the center and knows it to be a stumbling-block: he devotes long stretches of both the First Apology and the Dialogue to the prophecies of the crucifixion, arguing that the very thing the Greeks found most absurd — a Savior who suffered and died on a tree — was foretold and is the heart of the matter (First Apology 35, 50–53; Dialogue with Trypho 89–96; ANF 1). He insists that Christians worship “the crucified one” and are not ashamed of it, and he answers directly the charge that it is madness to give a crucified man a place second only to the unchanging God (First Apology 13; ANF 1). The “true philosophy,” for Justin, is not a sanding-down of the gospel to fit the Academy but the claim that the crucified and risen Word is the wisdom the Academy was groping toward — a wisdom that judges and completes philosophy rather than being absorbed by it. The cloak is worn, but the cross is preached.

A Disputed Inheritance

Justin’s program was not without cost, and the Church’s later reception of it has been mixed. The same move that let him baptize Greek philosophy also opened him to the charge of Hellenizing the faith — of letting Platonic categories color his account of God and the Logos. That charge, and the long debate over how far Justin’s “true philosophy” is faithful to the gospel and how far it bends the gospel toward the Academy, belongs to the history of his reception (see The First Christian Philosopher and Modern Scholarship). What is not in dispute is the originality and the courage of the program itself. Before Justin no Christian had so deliberately claimed the philosopher’s name; after him the claim became part of the Church’s self-understanding, running through Clement and Origen of Alexandria to the Cappadocians and beyond. The conviction that faith does not abolish reason but perfects it — that the gospel is not the enemy of the mind’s true seeking but its answer — is in large part Justin’s bequest.

See Also

• The Conversion — how Justin came to call the faith his philosophy
• The School at Rome — where he taught the true philosophy
• The Logos Spermatikos — the doctrine that grounds “whatever is true belongs to us”
• The First Christian Philosopher — the reception of his program
• The Church Fathers — Justin’s place among the Fathers who followed him

References

• Justin, First Apology 2–3. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
• Justin, Second Apology 10, 13. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
• Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 1, 8. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; trans. Falls, rev. Halton, ed. Slusser.
• Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.11. Trans. NPNF II/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.