XII. The Contact with Greek Thought At this point (That suffering is learning was the lesson on which Aeschylus insists, e.g. Agamemnon, 170.) we begin to come in contact with Greek influence and Greek expression in Paul’s conception of religion. Yet it would be a profound blunder to lay too much stress on this, or to infer from such a passage as Romans 8:20 ff, that Paul regarded evil as undeveloped good, and as a necessary stage in the upward progress of man towards God. Gloss it over as you may, wrap it up in such form of words as you please, the Greek idea of sin or error is always involved in that opinion, which is radically opposed to the Hebraic and Pauline idea. To the Greek (Aeschylus has a deeper and truer conception of sin than any other Greek of the Classical period: to him sin is typically the issue ofὕβρις, the arrogant trampling on the right order of nature.) what he might call sin (ἁμαρτία) was only a failure to hit the true aim, an overplus or a falling-short which keeps him from hitting the right mean: it was a mistake ultimately intellectual, a stage in the process towards true knowledge and wisdom and Sophia. However some Greek thinkers might attempt to introduce into their idea of “error” or “sin” an element of volition, they could not get free from this thoroughly Greek way of contemplating the problem of evil except by de-Hellenising their thought (as some were trying to do, though imperfectly and in theory); but of this, owing to the loss of most of their writings, we are imperfectly informed. To the Hebrew Paul, on the contrary, sin is not merely an error of the intellect: it is a deterioration and degradation of the will, progressive and illimitable, ending in death, as “righteousness” leads towards life. To the Greeks sin was a failure; to Paul it was a crime. The Greek blamed the Gods, or Fortune, or Necessity, or Ate, or some such superhuman conception, for his error. Paul laid the fault on man himself. To the Greeks, error was an episode, happily and usually only temporary, in the natural life, a failure to balance accurately the various powers of nature which unite to form the man’s being, producing as a consequence the temporary ascendancy of one among these powers. In the estimate of Paul sin was a deliberate declination from nature, carrying man away from the Divine life, weakening his will and leading him inevitably onward in progressive deterioration, out of which the only hope of salvation lay in a reinvigoration of the power of Faith, so that the sinner might be strengthened in will towards salvation. To take a rough illustration, the career of a drunkard exhibits in a simple form the Pauline conception of sin; the first indulgence weakens the moral power, which continuously deteriorates with fresh indulgence, so that there is no limit to the depths of infamy and degradation yawning to engulf the sufferer; no cure is of any value, no drug has any real influence, unless the will of the drunkard can be strengthened; and (so far as experience shows) no salvation is possible for him except through reawakening his faith in the goodness and kindness of God. In this simple case the contrast between the Greek and the Pauline view is clear. To the Greek the drunkard is a worshipper of the divine power Akrateia. To Paul he is a slave of the devil, turning his back on God and good and on faith in the goodness of God. To recreate Faith in the criminal is the only way of Salvation: no other force or power is of any avail.
Thus Faith is the force which makes a man capable of hearing the Divine will. The perfect belief that God does enter into communication with man and the strained eager longing to be so favoured are both necessary. Faith is not merely an intellectual belief: it is a moral and an emotional force. At every stage and in every act of the higher life, Faith is the one supreme requirement. Without it nothing can be achieved. With it everything becomes possible.
Although our examples and quotations must necessarily be taken from Paul’s writings, and therefore belong to his Christian period, yet I cannot doubt that, when he was persecuting the Church, or still earlier, when he chose the Divine life and came to Jerusalem, he was eagerly bent on hearing and obeying the Divine voice. As he said to the High Priest and the Council, “I have lived before God in all good conscience unto this day”; and undoubtedly he included in this claim his early pre-Christian life. He had from infancy believed in the Promise, and was ready always to stake his life on the assurance that the Promise must be fulfilled and the Messiah must come. It was through a new revelation, made possible because of his unhesitating Faith in the Promise, that he learned that the Messiah had already come; and the conviction that his mind and life must be remade was the necessary result of this revelation. As yet we have found no Greek element in Paul’s thought except the way in which he explains the suffering and the apparent evil in the world. This is not necessarily or exclusively Greek; but, as we shall see, it is expressed by Paul in a form that is characteristic of Hellenic philosophy.
