With just one look at this guy’s noggin, it quickly becomes clear that he is, without a doubt, smarter than me.
Could I beat him up? Probably. But at the end of the day, no matter how many times I could physically dominate him and leave him helplessly stuffed into a locker, the hard truth is that he’s far more brilliant than I am. And that counts for a whole lot more.
His name is Saint Justin Martyr, and he lived from 100 to 165 AD. (One guess as to how he died.) Living, learning, and teaching in the early second century meant that his life overlapped with people who knew and learned from the Apostles. Justin, however, came from a good pagan family and learned from the likes of Plato, Pythagoras, and Socrates.
Instead of leaving stoicism, platonism, and the rest of classical Greek philosophy behind at his conversion to Christianity, Saint Justin believed that Christ illuminated the pagan philosophy. And not in a cheap, youth-group way, either. He wasn’t just a Christian who understood philosophy really well. Otherwise he’d be just like any pretentious coffee shop theologian today.
Saint Justin used Christianity to speak to and through pagan philosophy in such a way that reworked the Christian definition of truth.
Logos
Jesus’s identity as the eternal Word of God was central to Justin’s apologetics. Christianity has pretty much always connected Logos terminology with Jesus thanks to the writings of John.
Logos can be translated way too many ways if you ask me. But in classical, pre-christian philosophy (namely Stoicism), Logos refers to universal reason or wisdom. Stoicism sought to lay aside the emotions that detract from man’s ability to clearly reason. If you mention “universal reason” or “transcendent wisdom” to even the staunchest of stoics, you’ll likely see their emotionless facade crack apart before a torrent of rapturous hoots and hollers.
So for Justin to take John’s Logos Christology and project it back to what he knew about Stoicism, he was doing such a polished evangelistic gainer that it would have brought tears of glee to Saint Paul’s eyes. (See Acts 17.) Justin taught that the revelation of truth, whether in Christ (the ultimate truth/ Logos) or any other form, was the revelation of capital-T Truth — the Word of God. Moses, Socrates, Plato, the stoics, and anyone else who revealed truth, were unwittingly working on behalf of Christ — the word becoming flesh.
As Hans Urs von Balthasar paraphrases Justin,
“Everything that is good and beautiful belongs to us.”
Along the same lines as Justin, von Balthasar says,
“The ancient worldview — whether it is understood more in the sense of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, or Plotinus and Proclus — is permeated by the divine and contains within an image of God… Because the biblical Sophia (wisdom [Jesus]) inherited all things in the Incarnation, it satisfied the pagan search for wisdom (philosophy), and it therefore appropriated for itself the intelligible unity and rationality of this search.”
Truth is truth wherever it is found. And Christ is the fullest revelation of God — and therefore the culmination of truth.
Beauty
Truth and Logos, however, lack the philosophical and evangelistic zing they bore in the 2nd century. Accordingly, von Balthasar instead placed beauty at the center of his apologetics.
Everybody, religious or not, can recognize beauty when they see it. Whether it is in a mountain vista, a woman across the bar, or something deeper like a selfless act, we all have an inborn register for beauty. When we see it, we are drawn to it.
Experiencing beauty raises questions about the nature of being. When someone looks up at the stars, the beauty of the night sky leads to questions of purpose, origin, and meaning. When a man is enraptured by a woman, he can’t help but think about the changes he would gladly make to his present life that would come with grafting her into it. The beauty points beyond itself.
That transcendent sense of beauty is proof we live in a world that glows and radiates with the energy that comes just from being — we can’t help but be moved by our world. Hans Urs von Balthasar says that God appealed to this part of us through the incarnation. God could have pulled us up by the ears and said, “now listen here, you punks,” but he instead appeals to our sense of beauty.
In his crucifixion and death, the ugliest corners of the human existence, Jesus personifies the trinity as totally self-emptying love. The image of the Word becoming flesh is macabre and gruesome, but it’s the most clear act of love that could be given. Somehow in its outward ugliness, it eclipses and completes everything that shimmers.
Whether it be truth, beauty, or goodness, God has a monopoly on it. And whether we want to give due credit or not, it all points back beyond itself to the triune God. We live in a world that hums with meaning and radiates purpose. And as followers of Christ, the fullest revelation of the God who created it all, “everything that is good and beautiful belongs to us.”
For more on St. Justin Martyr
For more on Hans Urs von Balthasar
