Задачи христианской апологии

The position of the Christian Church in the pagan world and the charges brought against it and its members determine the tasks of its defense. To accusations of atheism and impiety, of disrespect for the gods and contempt for the gods of the state religion, of indignation against the authority of the law, of insulting the emperor and the people, of infanticide and the eating of human flesh (Tiestes suppers), of debauchery and Oedipal incest, apologists could only respond with energetic denial and appeal to facts. Those who, renouncing all earthly honors, pray for its well-being and the salvation of the emperors cannot be enemies of the empire; whose trustworthiness is absolute and who, striving to form virtuous people, thereby provide the state with the best citizens. Accusations of secret crimes were rejected with just indignation, in addition, pointing to the internal transformation, known even to pagans, that the Christian faith produces in those who accepted it, and in general to the holy life of Christians. The mystery in which they clothe their lives is a matter of necessity: while they are being persecuted, self-preservation forces them to hide their religion. They are not atheists, but they worship God, who is spirit and does not live in churches made by human hands. They are not guilty of insulting the shrine, since they refuse to make sacrifices to those who are not gods, and to make sacrifices to a mortal is blasphemous madness. Magic is forbidden to them, their sacred books contain no enchantment or sorcery; demons were cast out not by any illegal means, but by the name of Jesus Christ. Christians are forbidden even impure thoughts, and there can be no talk of incest. They do not eat human flesh - they are prohibited from all bloodshed, even that which is usually tolerated in pagan society, such as infanticide and gladiatorial competitions. The “kiss of peace” is a pure and holy greeting, and all Christians call each other “sisters” and “brothers” as children of one God, and not due to unnatural connections. If the disasters befalling mankind were the judgment of heaven, then they were the judgment of those who reject the true God and worship devils. The world is outdated and its strength is exhausted, and Christians are no more responsible for the difficult times it is going through than for the dilapidation and decline of the world. Here we moved on to the ground of positive evidence in favor of the internal justification of faith. Along with evidence from life, they referred to the victorious power of Christianity, revealed by persecution, and to the power of miracles that continues to operate in the Church. {However, in an age when everyone believed in magic, the last argument was not particularly applicable, and therefore miracles were not appealed to very often. More} they insisted on the inner spirit and strength of Christian teaching. Whoever reads the Gospel receives a power that is higher than him; the words that Christians believe are full of spirit, power and grace. On the other hand, they are an expression of reason and can count on the agreement of all reasonable people with them: it is natural for every person to recognize adultery, debauchery and murder as evil; everyone's mind is drawn to righteousness. Moses, the prophets and Christ taught nothing less than what is beautiful and just by nature. Therefore, Christian morality does not need any arguments; it is innate in a rational person and by its actions in him it proves its divine power. As for Christian dogma - the doctrine of one God, Christ, Judgment, the end of the world, in this regard, the Old Testament prophecies serve as decisive proof of the truth and divinity of Christianity: they contain everything that a philosopher needs to know about the beginning and end of everything, and meet the condition that even Plato set for truth - that it must come from God. What the prophets said about Christ, His life and teaching, about piety, about rewards and punishments, has been fulfilled and continues to be fulfilled in every detail. But God alone can predict the distant future and act in such a way that the present is foreshadowed in the past. True prophecies cannot be spoken without Divine enlightenment and cannot be fulfilled without Divine help. Religion, therefore, which has been so abundantly foretold and typified from the most ancient times, must be Divine. The apologists very persistently and carefully carried out this proof on the basis of prophecies. Thus, for them the New Testament was grounded in the Old: what the New Testament teaches, what it demands, what it promises, is true, for in the distant past it was predicted by inspired men. In carrying out the details of this argument, apologists have sometimes gone extremely far. The Old Testament was made very flexible in order to explain it everywhere, as a preview and premonition of the Gospel, and sometimes they used non-canonical writing. The Old Testament, with its prophecies and types, also served as a means of deflecting the reproach about the newness of the Christian religion: the foundation of the Christian religion is ancient; before the prophets, those pagans who refer to the deep antiquity of their religion and generally consider antiquity to be the criterion of true religion must remain silent; the prophets are more ancient than all the pagan sages, the sacred books surpass in antiquity the very first principles of Greek history and Greek philosophy. In general, the reproach that the religion betrayed by the fathers and sanctified by them was abandoned for the sake of a new one was considered weak by the apologists, since in the question of religion the decisive factor is not origin, but truth: it is a matter of personal conviction, and violent measures cannot be applied against it: religio cogi non potest [religion cannot be a forced matter (Lactant., Divin. instit. V, 20)]. You need to obey God more than people. Thus, apologists insist on the right of freedom of conscience, the right to follow the known truth, and Christianity is the absolute truth. Not limiting themselves to defense, the apologists transferred the struggle to their opponents’ own field, proving with particular force the meaninglessness and immorality of paganism, which they spoke about on the basis of close acquaintance with it. They argued that polytheism is an unnatural and unreasonable phenomenon, a deviation of the human spirit from the true God, that pagan gods are nothing more than wooden, stone, gold and silver images made by human hands, or all kinds of animals, or at best beings endowed with human passions and vices. What is the history of these gods as told in pagan mythology! Apparently, there are no crimes that, in their highest manifestation, are not attributed to deities. Mythology, if we take literally what it tells about the gods, was a school of immorality. Apologists have made ample use of this material; but they went further and sought where polytheism and idolatry came from in the world. They found its moral reason in the tricks of demons. The demon, in order to corrupt a person, turn him away from God and force him to serve himself, forced him to recognize him as God: he inhabits statues, subjugates sorcerers to his power, trembles in the entrails of sacrificial animals, controls the flight of birds, etc. Hence, if apologists agree with philosophers in rejecting such gods and with poets in ridiculing them, then they cannot, however, admit that making a sacrifice to them is an act that has no meaning and is innocent: to worship that which is nothing is a profanation of worship, but to worship these deities is worse, because it is the worship of demons; in any case, it is a betrayal of the true God and His Christ. In connection with criticism of mythology, apologists portrayed in very sharp terms the shortcomings of the moral and social life of the pagans: all kinds of crimes, cruelty, debauchery, bloody victims of the circus, etc., emphasizing that the pagans attribute all sorts of abominations to Christians only because they themselves are immoral and capable of serious crimes. All these speeches were intended to prove that it is completely inconsistent for people with such faith and morality to raise persecutions against Christians for supposed superstitions and moral impurity, and that it is unfair for those whose participation in shameless and cruel rites has never been denied to punish others for worship of God, the purity of which has never been denied. Consequently, even if Christians were guilty of something, their opponents would not have the moral right to condemn them. Criticism of pagan cult and morals is the classic theme of all apologies. Pagan philosophy and pagan culture have found a contradictory assessment among apologists, oscillating between an exaggerated judgment of its importance and a dismissive attitude towards it. And this attitude is quite understandable: if Christianity is an absolute religion, then paganism is a delusion; but on the other hand, paganism contains truths that find their completion in Christianity. Thus, Christianity stands in exclusive opposition to all religions, and yet is also their conclusion. All apologists agree on one point: that human research is deceptive and insufficient, that the obvious errors of religious and philosophical thought in paganism provide eloquent proof of the need of the human spirit for higher enlightenment, that it is necessary for philosophers to turn to the prophets. They emphasized the uncertainty, contradictions and errors in the systems of philosophy in order to show that pagan civilization testifies to the fall of paganism from truth to error, from the true essence to the shadow. As a result, the consciousness of the absolute opposition of Christianity to paganism was very strong. All religions of mankind, even Judaism, were placed on one side, and only Christianity was given a place on the other side. But at the same time, apologists saw in paganism those sides that could be favorably assessed. Their desire was not to widen and strengthen the gap between Christianity and paganism, but to find common ground between them in order to make it easier for pagans to convert to Christianity. Therefore, in paganism they looked for elements of truth, premonitions of Christianity, similarities between the teachings of the sages and the teachings of Christianity, prototypes and prophecies about it in paganism. Some of the apologists argued that it is impossible not to recognize similarities or even identities between Christianity and the teachings of the best philosophical schools. The differences that separate them are merely shades rather than opposites. Faith affirms what Plato, Menander, and the Stoics confessed; only she affirms with greater completeness and Divine authority, and is not content with asserting, but also proving. This agreement of some provisions of philosophical theories with Christian teaching was explained in two ways. Firstly, the grains of truth contained in pagan philosophy were traced back to the writings of the prophets as the final foundation and source from which philosophers also drew: Plato was either a student of Moses or copied from him. Secondly, they developed the theory of the Divine Word, the Logos, Who recently appeared in the form of a man, [but] always acted and continuously revealed Himself in the world. Among the Jews, He manifested Himself in the Epiphanies, spoke through the prophets and taught in the sacred books. But the seeds of the Logos were also scattered in paganism, because the light of natural reason is a ray of the Divine Logos. In the pagan world, the Logos acted in sages, poets, and legislators. This explains the allusions to Christian truth in pagan philosophical and poetic works, as well as in pagan legislation. Even the great and virtuous men among the pagans owe their best to the Logos. All this, so to speak, is part of Christianity in paganism. But although this image of the Logos allowed philosophers to discover important truths, they could not proclaim them with confidence. Philosophers sometimes, even often, made mistakes, either because they only partially possessed the Logos, or because the demon, the enemy of people, leads them to errors. With the incarnation of the Word, complete light appeared, and now there should be no place for incomplete philosophy, half-truth, which can never enlighten the people and make them moral. Therefore, one must accept Christianity. The fight against paganism pushed some apologists (Tatian, Hermias) to excessive humiliation and even unfair censure of pagan philosophy and the entire pagan civilization, but this was the exception. In general, in apologetics of the 2nd century. there is a tone of sympathy for the best sides of paganism. For Christians, the internal need for apologetic explanations about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism was clearly understood. If the Old Testament bearer of the idea of ​​salvation refused to recognize the divinely established order to see and understand that his mission ended with the advent of the new Kingdom, then Christianity was faced with the task of proving the Divinity of its mission against this people, to prove that in reality the turn of the Divine economy from Jewish particularism to universalism, already foretold by the prophets, had come, and at the same time the Old Testament was abolished by the New. This apologetic proof was also necessary for other reasons. For the spread of Christianity among the “languages” it was a considerable obstacle that the Jewish people, among whom Christianity received its beginning and with which it was closely connected, for the most part turned out to be hostile to Christianity. True, together with Ap. Paul (Acts. 28:25–28) from this one could derive proof that God’s salvation was sent to the pagans; but this did not eliminate the individual objections of the Jews: In addition, the latter, as you know, did not stop at any means to damage the new teaching and suppress it. It was necessary to fight against the lies and slander of the Jews before the pagan people and government, not so much for their own protection, but because if such false judgments about the teaching and life of Christians were not refuted by Christians, it would be difficult to expect the conversion of the pagans. Finally, the pagan Church itself felt the need to give an account of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The method of defense was indicated in the New Testament writings: if it wanted to be principled and justified, then it had to rely on the books of the Old Testament and in them find an indication of the New, in which the entire system of Divine foretelling and foreshadowing in the Israeli people was completed and found its undeniably exact fulfillment in the Church of Christ. The focus of these prophecies and types, and at the same time the apologetic reasoning with the Jews based on them, was the Face of Jesus Christ and His messianic character; at the same time, it is firmly established that with the actual coming of the promised Messiah, the New Testament, the new Kingdom of Israel was opened and the Old Testament ended. Apologies of Christianity against Judaism are significantly inferior in number to apologies against paganism; from the 2nd century Only two such apologies are known: Ariston’s “Debate of Jason and Papis” and Justin’s “Conversation with Tryphon.” Thus, the apologists set their task: to oppose Christianity as the only true religion, Christians as the true people of God, the true Israel, to the world of errors. The pure and true teaching of Christ reigns here. Its content is faith in the supreme God, in the new law that Christ brought as reward and punishment beyond the grave. But first of all, Christ taught people true morality, which is found in the life of Christians. Apologists proudly point to the life of Christians, in which purity and chastity, truth, honesty, love for neighbors and love for enemies reign. Sins and crimes are like fierce storms that roil the sea of ​​life, and the Churches are like islands on which one can find refuge. Despite the confusion of pagan views, there is one truth here. Therefore, pagans incorrectly think that Christianity has brought harm to the world. On the contrary, Christianity preserves peace. The sea of ​​the world would have dried up long ago if it had not been nourished by the influx of fresh water of the law and the prophets. One can even say that in general the world continues to exist only for the sake of Christians and through their prayers. Finally, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that Christianity is the best support for the state, since the idea of ​​eternal torment leads much better to the fulfillment of the law than the idea of ​​temporary punishments. They go even further when they assert that the flourishing of the Roman state under Augustine should be connected with the emergence of Christianity, and that only bad emperors persecuted Christianity (Melito in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. IV, 26.7 sqq.). The basis of such arguments is the great self-awareness of Christianity, destined to be the salt and light of the world and to carry out a world-historical salvific mission: Christians possess truth and morality, they are a people of true philosophers and therefore are the heart, the essence of world history.