Dualism and Work: The Greek Contribution
It is common for Christians to think about life being divided between the sacred and the secular. Prayer, Bible reading, witnessing and teaching at church are sacred while working, school, (unless it is a Bible Collage) raising children, eating, sleeping, traveling and everything else we do is secular. Similarly, working for the church as a pastor, missionary or youth worker is sacred, while working as an accountant, lawyer or longshoreman is secular. Our body is corrupt and a source of temptation while our soul is redeemed and bound for heaven. Contemplating and worshiping God is sacred but contemplating mathematics, philosophy or how best to do a job is secular.
This dualism has relegated many Christians to think of their lives as being mainly secular. Instead of our life on earth being a foretaste of what God has for us, it is seen as a mundane stop on the way to heaven. This dualistic outlook is foreign to Jesus, Hebrew thought and the early church. The church, however, came into contact with the surrounding culture and has at times adopted aspects of that culture.
Jesus was born into a Hebrew culture which was surrounded by the greater culture of the Roman Empire. Greece had been the prominent power in the Mediterranean region prior to the Roman conquests. At their zenith the Greek language and Greek philosophy had spread through the region and this culture was largely adopted by the Roman Empire. Plato and Aristotle had helped established Greek philosophy approximately 400 years prior to the birth of Christ and their thought was still influential in the Greek speaking world. Philosophy itself was still widely practiced by the Greeks as can be seen in Luke’s description of Paul’s encounters with philosophers in Athens.
There were significant clashes between Hebrew thought and Greek thought. Jesus and the disciples were steeped in Hebrew culture but as the faith moved outside of Palestine the church came into contact with Greek culture. In Lycaonia (Acts 11) Paul and Barnabas are confused with Greek gods. Paul also debated Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Athens.
Some of the major clashes were due to Hebrew and Christian doctrine on their being one God as opposed to Greek polytheism. The Greeks, however, also thought in dualistic terms. The body and soul were separate and even in conflict with one another. The body restricted the soul and deceived it. Greek society was stratified into exalted professions like philosophers and lessor vocations like entrepreneurs that were acting more like beasts of the field than like human beings. The Greek philosophers ascribed to a severe asceticism that some in the church found attractive and some of these ideas became ingrained into western thought.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek thought became less prominent in Western European thinking to the extent that the ancient Greek philosophers where mainly forgotten. This changed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as Western Europe came back into contact with the ancient texts through their travels to the Middle East during the Crusades. The rediscovered texts had a significant influence on Aquinas, the monastic movement and the thinking of many church scholars.
Plato’s Phaedo
One of the rediscovered texts which explores Greek dualism is Plato’s “Phaedo”. This dialogue recounts Phaedo’s conversation with Echecrates regarding the day of Socrates execution. Socrates had been tried in Athens on charges of corruption of the youth of the city and impiety to the Athenian gods. Having been found guilty on both accounts he was sentenced to death to be carried out by drinking poisonous Hemlock.
When the day of execution comes, a good number of Socrates’ friends, including Phaedo, are allowed to spend the better part of the day with Socrates before he was executed at the end of the day. The friends expect to spend the day mourning and comforting Socrates as he faces death. To their surprise they find Socrates in an excellent mood awaiting his death with anticipation and cheerfulness. Socrates finds himself having to console his friends rather than his friends consoling him. The result is that Socrates and his friends spend the day discussing philosophy including the reasons why his death is a good thing.
Socrates and the group quickly agree that death is the separation of the soul from the body. They then discuss the role of the body in a philosopher’s life.
There are two ways that the body keeps the soul from attaining true wisdom. First of all, bodily senses like sight and hearing can only perceive a distorted and changing world. Socrates believed that the soul gained knowledge of unchanging and perfect wisdom in its pre-birth existence. Accordingly, we recognize a horse because we have an idea of horseness. The horse idea does not change and is not corrupted by nature. In nature, however, horses have defects. They may have scars or deformities or their coat may be ragged. After a period of time, horses die and then their body disintegrates and eventually disappears. We can therefore catalogue a horse as a horse because of the comparison to the soul’s pre-existent notion of a horse but the horse our senses perceive falls short of this idealized horse recognized by the soul. In Socrates’ words “This thing which I can see has a tendency to be like something else, but it falls short and cannot be really like it, only a poor imitation” (Phaedo 74 e).
Similarly, the soul contemplates an idealized beauty and recognizes earthly beauty because of this contemplation. The beauty the body senses, however, constantly changes and eventually fades. There are also often defects in the beautiful object we are observing. Therefore, if we want to contemplate pure beauty, we must contemplate it with our mind and soul and not with our senses.
Our senses never see a perfect circle. There are always flaws in what we are seeing. The only true circle is one our soul knows and can be described mathematically but no natural object will be a perfect circle. No orbit will be a circle without flaws. The senses will then never experience a circle but will only see flawed copies of a circle and if the senses are relied on to tell the soul what a circle is, the soul will receive flawed data.
Our bodily senses are also known to distort reality. When we look at the heavens, we are looking through air. The air distorts what we see and changes it so that we do not experience the sun or stars the way they are but the way they are perceived to be while looking at them through the air. This is similar to the distortion a fish would experience if it was looking at the world above the water but through the water. Knowledge that comes through the senses therefore cannot be trusted.
Therefore, if the soul relies on the body to contemplate ‘reality’ it is “compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance” (Phaedo 82 e).
The Greek philosophers’ idea of pure knowledge, pure reality and pure wisdom was composed of ideas that were unchangeable, immortal and everlasting (Phaedo 79 d). If something was always changing, it could not be known. It would be beautiful one day and ugly the next. If there were imperfections, the observer would have to qualify their observation and point out how the object was like something but with imperfections. Therefore, the true philosopher, who wanted pure wisdom without qualification, would use his mind and soul to contemplate the idea rather than the physical objects he was surrounded by.
This outlook on life resulted in the life of contemplation and thought being of greater importance than the physical world we occupy. Ideas were more important than things. Thinking was more important than work. Contemplating God was more important than serving God. Philosophy was more important than physics.
The second way the body keeps the soul from true wisdom is through interruptions and distractions that cause impediments to the philosopher’s striving for knowledge. The body needs constant maintenance and attention. It needs to eat, sleep and exercise. It is prone to disease, pain and fatigue. In addition, it tempts us with “loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense…” (Phaedo 66 c). The body craves pleasure and even enjoys doing nothing. The body doesn’t like hard work or study and will willingly distract itself from more gainful pursuits. All these things take or waste time and interfere with the philosopher’s search for wisdom.
Many of us have experienced the distractions that Plato is alluding to here. A paper or thesis is being written. The ideas are coming and we can barely type fast enough to get them all down. Our level of concentration is at the ideal level for being very productive and if it is not put on paper right now the thought will be gone forever. And then our body tells us we’ve done well today and it is okay to stop. Or the body is hungry and something to eat has to be prepared. A friend might call, or a child starts crying and our work stops. We then get back to the task and find that our concentration is gone, our motivation has waned and we’re now ready to go to sleep. Those who are unusually disciplined learn to ignore any distraction when they’re in the middle of these sorts of tasks. If their spouse comes home from work and wants to be greeted and talk about the day, they at least insist on finishing the paragraph so the thought is not lost. Family and friends learn to put up with these lack of social graces. If they don’t the disruption of family harmony further disrupts lives and makes the pursuit of wisdom that much harder. The distractions of the body are very frequent and demanding and are an impediment to serious study.
The Ascetic Life
But, while Socrates is condemned to die that night and will be free of his body, his friends must go on living. How are they to maximise their pursuit of wisdom with all these distractions? Socrates’ answer is for them to continue closest to knowledge by adopting an ascetic life. Prior to their death they will “avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until god himself gives us deliverance” (Phaedo 67 a).
As a result, Socrates’ philosopher adopts a severe asceticism. Since the body distorts true wisdom and interferes with the soul’s contemplation and search for wisdom through distraction, Socrates attempts to isolate the body from the soul in any way possible. Thus, Socrates contends that a serious philosopher does not “concern himself with the so-called pleasures connected with food and drink…” (Phado 64 d). Similarly, he does not seek out sexual pleasure. He despises “smart clothes and shoes and other bodily ornaments….” The serious philosopher spends his time in contemplation and is severe with his body and other worldly distractions so that he can concentrate on wisdom which is the most important goal there is. He concentrates his attention on his soul and frees himself from attention to his body as much as possible.
Life after Death
Asceticism alone, however, will not eliminate the body’s influence on the soul. The body still gets hungry at the most inconvenient times. Lust can be suppressed for a time, but it has a way of creeping back into our minds and building up over time and distracting the soul from contemplation. Head aches, sleepiness, sickness, being cold or hot, experiencing pain or pleasure are all inconveniences of the body that take the soul away from its desire or ability to acquire wisdom. At best asceticism can postpone the body’s influence or dull its impact. To be truly free, Socrates believed that the philosopher’s soul must be separated from his body. But this only happens at death, where the body dies and the soul survives. After death the body is slowly corrupted and returns to its elemental ingredients. At death, however, the soul is free from the body’s influence and can pursue wisdom and pure knowledge without interference. Therefore, in life after death, the philosopher can attain his deepest desire and at last be free from his body (Phaedo 66 d, e).
But how does the soul prepare for the afterlife? If one has not spent his life seeking wisdom, the soul will come to the next life unprepared to participate in that life. Since the soul is immortal, “it demands our care not only for that part of time which we call life, but for all time. And indeed it would seem now that it will be extremely dangerous to neglect it” (Phaedo 107 c). If death ended everything, the wicked would escape their wickedness and not suffer the consequences. As it is, “since the soul is clearly immortal, it can have no escape or security from evil except by becoming as good and wise as it possibly can. For it takes nothing with it to the next world except its education and training, and these, we are told, are of supreme importance in helping or harming the newly dead at the very beginning of his journey there” (Phaedo 107 d).
Socrates’ asceticism, therefore, is crucial to the soul attaining a good result in the afterlife. If one is successful in keeping oneself uncontaminated by the body, they will “probably reach the company of others (in the afterlife) like ourselves and gain direct knowledge of all that is pure and uncontaminated…” and presumably the truth. As for the non ascetic, “one who is not pure himself, to attain to the realm of purity would no doubt be a breach of universal justice” (Phaedo 67 b).
According to Socrates, a life of study uninterrupted by the distractions and distortions caused by the body will lead to a good life after death. Socrates is confident that he has attained a sufficient level of philosophical sophistication so that by the end of the day he will find himself amongst good men and supremely good divine masters (Phaedo 63 c). As long as one has purified “themselves by philosophy…” they will “live thereafter altogether without bodies, and reach habitations even more beautiful…” (Phaedo 114 c).
Not everyone, however, has the ability or the inclination to attain to this ideal next life. Asceticism is hard and the life devoted to pleasure is enticing. He could also say that not everyone thinks philosophically. As he observes the common man he sees few lovers of wisdom, many seeking pleasure and some seeking honour and martial victory. Socrates anticipates that very few of us will attain his dream of a life of contemplation after we have died.
But what happens to the rest? Socrates is convinced that only philosophy can purify the soul. For those who give in to bodily pleasures and desires, life after death is not so pleasant. These souls have become accustomed to being linked with the body so that these habits and pleasures have become ingrained in their very nature through “constant association and long practice” (Phaedo 81 c). The soul is then weighted down and dragged back into the visible world. The result is a ghost-like existence hovering around tombs. They wander in the afterlife craving for a body of some kind until finally “they are imprisoned once more in a body” (Phaedo 81 e).
What kind of a body they finally acquire is determined by how they lived when they were alive. If they were lawless and violent, they would be reincarnated as wolves or hawks. If they were merely selfish and gluttonous, they would come back as donkeys or other perverse animals. The happiest of the non- philosophers, however, would be those who through self discipline have made a habit of integrity and become good citizens without the aid of philosophy. These souls would come back as disciplined social animals such as bees and ants. If they are extraordinary in their goodness they may even come back into the human race and become good decent citizens again (Phaedo 82 a, b, c).
Stratification of Society
Plato stratifies society in Phaedo mainly in his discussion of the afterlife. The stratification is done in moral terms with the philosopher being of the highest morality, followed by the good citizen and leaving the glutton and selfish close to the bottom of moral society but still above the wicked lawless and violent person. The stratification shows itself as each strata is rewarded in life after death.
Plato, however, stratifies society in life before death as well. This is seen in his dialogues in The Republic. His main categories of people are: the philosopher, the politicians who are grouped with warriors, and workers and merchants. The philosopher is the one who seeks truth, knowledge and wisdom. Of all the categories, the philosopher is the one who will seek after money the least. The politician and warriors, on the other hand, are seeking for honour and to make a name for themselves in the community. The workers and merchants are those who are seeking after money.
Plato is not satisfied to just name the groups he sees. He also wants to rank them. He starts to rank them by comparing the pleasures each group experiences. The money maker follows his appetites. His money gives him access to “food, drink, sex, and other things which follow from these” (Republic 580 e). The profit lovers settle for the baser pleasures “with their heads bent to the ground like cattle…. To get their fill of such things they kick and butt each other… and kill each other” (Republic 586 a, b). As such they are on the level with animals and live a debased life that is barely human.
Clearly Plato has a very low view of the life of an entrepreneur. His analysis is very limited and only contemplates the baser pleasures. In fairness, being a success brings a certain satisfaction to the business person. If he has enough, money that could just become the score card in how well his business is doing and it gives him the ability to acquire new businesses and or tools to compete even better. Money also brings security and often power. The entrepreneur can also be in the business in order to make his customers lives better. We should be thankful for those who have given us better phones, cars, planes and more abundant food. If they became rich in the process, the resulting inequality can be justified in that we paid them because it made our lives better.
While Plato’s description of the entrepreneur in unduly harsh and is not robust enough to fully describe the entrepreneur or even the common laborer, it is still true that most entrepreneurs concentrate on their business and many laborers work only for the money and can easily forego what Plato would consider greater pleasures. The entrepreneur also runs additional risks that the philosopher does not. Wealth is not certain. It can be gained rapidly, but it can also be lost rapidly. Wealth can be destroyed by war, depressions, pandemics, disasters or just bad luck. Moths and rust corrupt what our wealth provides. Worst of all, when the entrepreneur dies, all that he lived for is left behind. The philosopher, on the other hand, lives for wisdom and true knowledge. Once attained, these stay with him and follow him to the after life.
The lover of honour thinks “the pleasure of making money to be vulgar, and the pleasure of learning to be smoke and nonsense…” (Republic 281 d). Honour, however, is to be sought after. A general wants victory that will make his name great throughout history and his land. The politician wants to govern well so that the people will look up to him, give him a great name and remember him for all of history. Plato points out, however, that his “love of honours makes him envious, his love of victory makes him violent, his irritability make him angry, and he pursues the satisfaction of honours, victory, and anger without reasoning or intelligence” (Republic 586 c).
In addition to these problems with honour, honour can be fleeting. A general can be honoured the day of a victory but then lose that honour through a defeat or an accusation. How many great politicians and warriors have been lost to history and completely forgotten. Worse, as we see in our day, statesmen who were honoured centuries ago have had their good deeds scorned and actions and attitudes that were ‘OK’ in their day cause them to be reviled since those attitudes are not acceptable today. Some are rejected since they promoted programs that were subsequently badly run and had bad results. John A McDonald, Egerton Ryerson and Christopher Columbus are just a few of today’s examples of this weakness with the pursuit of honour.
Plato’s main argument, however, is that the philosopher, since his childhood, has had a taste of the pleasures of the profit seeker and the honour seeker. He is therefore able to compare these pleasures to the intellectual pleasures of seeking truth and wisdom through philosophy. This is something the profit seeker and the honour seeker cannot do since they have never sought to live the life of the philosopher and have never experienced the intellectual pleasures that the philosopher has come to enjoy. Therefore, the philosopher is in the best position to judge which pleasures are most rewarding. Having tasted the pleasures of the entrepreneur and the pleasures of those seeking honour, Plato asserts that the greatest pleasures and rewards go to the philosopher as he seeks true knowledge and wisdom.
But how can intellectual pleasures top the pleasures of sex, good food and drink? It is hard work for someone to master a subject. Sometimes it is very boring to read the required material. It can also be very hard to wrestle through opposing positions. Writing can also be hard and you have to be careful in your presentation or find your ideas destroyed by those who oppose you. It can be very embarrassing if you fail or say something that obviously won’t stand up to criticism.
Yet there is a great deal of pleasure when you reach a milestone and you know that it is good. Your mind becomes alive as you contemplate your new knowledge and see the connections it makes to other areas of your life and intellect. Your first computer program compiles and runs. You’ve struggled through a difficult calculus problem but you’ve successfully solved it. The book or thesis is finally done and it is good. These are accomplishments that give someone a great deal of pleasure and unlike the bodily pleasures, these intellectual pleasures will often last a lifetime. After a week you’ve forgotten the steak you had last Friday but you never forget successfully defending a thesis.
Plato’s conclusion, therefore, is that the philosophical life is the greatest goal to be attained. He believes, however, that few will attain it. A greater number will attain the life of honour through public service or military prowess but they will still be a fairly small minority and will not have attained the highest level one can reach. The profit lover will be in the majority but he will mainly be seeking the pleasures of the beast and will live a life unworthy of a human being.
The Church and the Gnostics
These Greek ideas influenced the church as the church encountered the surrounding culture. The Gnostics were the earliest group to influence the church this way. There were different groups of Gnostics and they did not always agree philosophically. They were, however, all influenced by Greek philosophy and eastern religions. They all emphasized the intellectual life and the attainment of knowledge was their ultimate goal. Like Plato, they did not think the body, or even the physical world, was very important and would either resort to asceticism or would take the position that since the body was not important it didn’t matter what you did with your body. Since matter was not intellectual and could take away from the intellectual life, they believed a good god could not have created the world. This creation was done by a lesser god who brought evil into the world and scattered the essence of god into physical beings.
Gnostics who were attracted to the church believed that Christ could not be truly man with a body since matter was evil. These ideas crept into and influenced many in the early church. Paul and John had to instruct the church that Jesus had come in the flesh and to deny the incarnation was to ascribe to heresy (I John 4:2).
Gnostics, who like Greek philosophers turned to asceticism, influenced some Christians to adopt their extreme ascetism. In the second century, Galen, a physician, noted that Christians “sometimes act in the same way as genuine philosophers do.”[1] Galen is referring to the Christian’s contempt of death and their self control in sexual relations. Christians in the early church era practiced an extreme asceticism which was also beginning to take shape in the first century church (Col 2:23).
The Medieval Church
With the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek philosophy lost much of its influence in the Western European church. This influence was revived as European Christians came into close contact with Islamic scholarship during the Crusades. Islamic scholars had preserved Greek texts which impacted Aquinas, much of the monastic movement and much of Western European thought. Whereas the Greeks emphasized contemplation of philosophy, the medieval church asserted that the highest good was the contemplation of God. Doing good works that benefited your fellow man actually took away from the time you could spend contemplating God. Therefore, they saw the life of work and charity as being a distraction from the highest Christian ideal of contemplation. While this was not true of all monastic orders, it was true of many. Many monastic orders only survived because layman came and provided for all the physical needs of the order. The monks were doing the important work of contemplating God, while the laity were doing the mundane work of merely living.
The assertion that contemplating God was the highest task of the Christian even influenced marital relationships. An affair with passion was sin, but it was not as bad as a passionate relationship with your wife. This was because a passionate affair with your wife was longer lasting and would interfere with your ability and time needed to contemplate and worship God.[2]
Greek Philosophy and Early Christian Theology: Plato and Paul
The Body
Perhaps we can understand Greek philosophy better if we contrast it with early Christian Theology. We have seen how Socrates longed to be rid of his body since his body was giving him false data and distracting him from philosophy. He longs for a disembodied existence. Plato does not elaborate on how this existence would work. How would communication be done? How would we even know that another entity was even in our presence? What would our ‘presence’ even mean?
Christians do need to believe that a Spirit can exist apart from a physical presence. We believe that God is a Spirit unconstrained by a physical existence. Similarly, Paul contemplates being absent from the body but to be present with Christ (II Cor 5:8). We’re not told anything about this type of existence. When heavenly spirits communicate with us they take on bodily forms. Thus Peter, James and John saw Moses and Elijah prior to their resurrection and they appeared to be physical. God, the Father, who is also present, ‘appears’ in a cloud and speaks but he is not seen.
The similarities to Plato’s theology stop there. In Christianity God, in Christ, takes on a physical body. He is released from this body in death for a portion of 3 days. But then his spirit is reunited with his body which is changed but still physical. Forty days later he ascends into heaven with this same body. This could lead to the conclusion that his body was not discarded as he came to heaven and that he is still connected to a body. Paul asserts that Christ’s resurrection is a foretaste of what is to happen to all believers (I Cor 15:20).
Paul’s attitude to the resurrection is diametrically opposed to Socrates’ view. Socrates would be horrified to contemplate a God who took on a body. In addition, once Socrates’ spirit was free, he didn’t ever want it to be reunited with any body. Paul, on the other hand, contemplates our earthly body being destroyed. This is a burden because he does not want to be bodyless. But he anticipates that God is going to reclothe him with a heavenly, but still physical, body that will replace his mortal body. This new life is in the new heavenly dwelling (i.e. body) that God has prepared. All this is something that Paul longs for and believes that God has fashioned us for this very purpose (II Cor 5:1-5).
Asceticism
Asceticism has always had an aura of spirituality. The discipline and hard work asceticism takes shows that the person is taking their spirituality very seriously. Socrates practiced asceticism so that he could suppress his body and concentrate on attaining knowledge and wisdom which would lead him to his version of salvation. Asceticism was also a temptation for early Christians. We see this in Paul’s letter to the Colossians at the end of chapter two. The Christians in this chapter were troubled by man-made decrees not to handle, taste or touch. A century later the church adopted an even severer asceticism that caught the attention of those outside the church. For the second and third centuries Christian asceticism consisted of acts of works to gain salvation and to ensure that they did not fall back into sin and become apostate. The doctrine of grace seems to have been forgotten until Augustine is converted in 383 AD. Unfortunately, successful asceticism can often lead to pride or false humility. Paul points out that these regulations “have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence” (Col 2:23).
Salvation and the Next Life
Socrates needed to overcome the distractions in life and concentrate diligently on wisdom and knowledge so that he could attain a heaven after death whereby he could spend all eternity philosophising with wise gods and great philosophers who had gone before him. While he may not consider himself on an equal plane with the gods, he is not, however, encountering the gods with a sense of awe or humility. He realises that very few will make it to this ideal circumstance but he is confident he will. He acknowledges that some humans have been too wicked to enjoy life after death. It would even be unjust for them to just cease to exist and not face justice for their wrong doings. They are therefore, reincarnated into wolves and other undesirable animals and thus suffer for their misdeeds. You do not get the impression, however, that this makes up a large portion of humanity. Most of humanity is taken up with seeking money and the pleasures it can buy. This portion of humanity operates on the level of the beast. They too are reincarnated, but acquire a better animal for their spirit to be joined with. A good soldier or political leader may even come back as a human. Heaven, however, is for the few and is taken up with discovering wisdom and true knowledge. Salvation is also acquired by attaining knowledge and proving oneself worthy of a philosophical life. Clearly not everyone is capable of attaining that level even if they were inclined to try.
In contrast, in Christian soteriology, one can only reach salvation by acknowledging that they are not worthy of it and have committed sins that disqualify them from attaining it. While there are some wise, some wealthy, and some distinguished to whom salvation has been granted, the majority of Christians are not from that human strata. Instead, they come from the slaves, the poor and the ordinary people who go about their normal lives, working for a living and looking out for their fellow men. It is the humble and the sinner who plead for mercy that are saved. Our bodies are not a distraction and while thinking is important, in and of itself, it does not lead to salvation. The body can either distract from, or contribute to worship which is a high calling and privilege of the Christian. Pride, a sin of the soul, is a greater hinderance to worship than the body. Our issue is not lack of knowledge but a propensity to sin, to do the wrong thing and to assert our independence from God. While some of our sins originate in desires of the body, the more serious sins come from our pride and desire to not submit to God. These are more sins arising from the soul rather than from the body. Socrates thinks he has attained salvation on his own merits. The Christian knows that this is not possible. Socrates believes that the body distorts reality. The Christian believes that sin distorts our view of reality and is the real impediment to knowing God. Socrates believes only a few are capable of salvation. The Christian believes salvation is available to anyone who repents.
Work
Socrates’ disdain for work, workers and entrepreneurs is well documented. Work itself is on the level of the beasts. The entrepreneur and worker have their heads down in the trough with beasts of burden. There is little reward for the worker in the next life and he will be demoted in the reincarnational rewards of the next life.
In contrast, Paul considers himself a slave of Christ. In his Christian ministry he takes the lowest social status in the Roman world but describes it as a high calling. He is entitled to be paid by those he teaches, but he provides for his own needs, as well as the needs of his entourage. He does this by manual labouring at making tents. He does this as an example and encouragement to the church to provide for their families and not to be idle. Paul is deeply concerned that someone who is idle will find time for contemplating the temptations that come their way and will create issues for the church and for the person herself. And the church will have to deal with the resulting sin.
Similarly, those who in their pre-Christian life provided for themselves through theft are now instructed to give up this ‘trade’ and work with their hands in an honest trade so that they have something to give to the poor. Paul instructs slaves to do their work “as if you were serving the Lord, not people…” (Eph 6:7-8). Verse eight states that the work done will be a good thing and that they will be rewarded for the good they do. The “good” in this case is directly tied to work. Paul gives these instructions to slaves who would see the least personal benefit from their work but he also indicates that these same rewards are available to those who are free. Therefore, whether slave or free when a Christian works, he is working for the Lord and will be rewarded for the good work he does.
Conclusion
There were Christian scholars who wanted to Christianize Aristotle and Socrates. Western Europe had much to relearn from the ancient Greeks. They also, however, needed to evaluate Greek thought in the light of scripture. The church acquired an unbiblical view of work and a stratification of society and occupations that could not measure up to a Biblical standard. If a Christian is going to stratify society, “the first will be last and the last will be first.” All work that benefits society is good and Christians, so employed, are working for God and will be rewarded for work that is well done. The Greeks stratified society the way humans tend to stratify society. God, however, has a different view of who is worthy and he does not show favouritism.
Copies of this article for research purposes may be made but the article may not be published. Copyright, Dale Ross Barkman, 2022.
Bibliography
Bruce, F.F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Nashville, Tennessee F.F. Bruce Copyright International, Inc., 2000.
Bruce, F.F. The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from its First Beginnings to Eight Century England. Nashville, Tennessee, F.F. Bruce Copyright International, Inc., 2017.
Graves, Dan, “Gnosticism-AD 1-300”, Christianity.com, https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1-300/gnosticism-11629621.html
Hardy, Lee. The Fabric of This World, Inquiries Into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work. Grand Rapids Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990.
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Lorenz, Hendrik, "Ancient Theories of Soul", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/ancient-soul
Moore, Edward, “Gnosticism”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fieser, James (ed.), Dowden, Bradley (ed.), https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/
Plato. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974.
Plato. “Phaedo,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version NIV Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved world wide.
References
[1] Bruce, F.F. The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from its First Beginnings to Eight Century England (Nashville, Tennessee, F.F. Bruce Copyright International, Inc., 2017), Chap XIX, first paragraph.
[2] See C.S. Lewis, “Courtly Love,” The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, Chapter 1. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977.
