Tuesday of Holy Week
Considering that there were large Graeco-Roman towns, such as Sephoris, in the territory where Jesus walked and taught, the Greeks and things Greek receive very little attention in the Gospels. Admittedly, Jesus says repeatedly that his message is for the Jews and not the Gentiles but that does not explain the absence of any account of any contact between the two cultures such as that described in Acts 17. Even here, in John 12, the poor Greeks receive an extremely cursory mention. Nonetheless, we often under-play the influence of Greek philosophy on the emergence of Christian thought. Not altogether ironically, and perhaps because it was the last of the four Gospels, the Greek influence is most discernible in John from the opening distinction between the Logos and the flesh which developed, with neo Platonic boosters, into the dualism of body and soul, the greatest and most persistent Christian heresy of all time.
At first sight, there seems to be a dislocation in the text between the gradated approach from the Greeks to Jesus and his response but the text suggests that, as in many 20th Century films and books, Jesus cuts to the chase without preamble; this is no time, he seems to imply, for a discussion of abstract philosophical concepts with religious tourists; the death and the glory are too near, too real, too big, to be set aside in favour of theory; this death and this glory are, in the context of Judaism, promised and practical.
It would not, for a minute, be right to foreswear philosophical deliberations in matters of theological discernment - we need all the tools we can get to overcome the category distinction between God and man, the Creator and the created - but one of the major problems with theology has been its disjunction from exegesis. There are exceptions, such as the Wisdom literature in the Old Testament, the discourses of Jesus in John 5-7 and 13-17 and the Book of Revelation but, by and large the Bible is a library of narrative and practicality with all the necessary ambiguity, even discord, of tone and message. Philosophy is a helpful tool but Christianity is not a philosophical thesis, it is a Biblical out-working.
The difference I want to emphasise is that between philosophy as a tool for probing and philosophy as a life manual. Before Western academia split into specialisms, what we now think of as literary criticism was philosophical speculation and we need that no less now than then because the written word demands sceptical attention; we also need this kind of tool to undertake sorting, or taxonomical processes, to decide what kind of things we can group together into classes and what separates those classes; and, thirdly, tools can help us to put processes into a logical order - we cannot do this until we have done that - not least so that we understanding the syntactical meaning of a proposition before we draw conclusions about what it means.
Which is to say that in spite of my doubts about Saint Anselm's understanding of the Cross, his understanding of the relationship between scholarship and belief, the former being the servant to the latter, is impeccable; but there is a contrary trap which is that we start with our belief and never let anything cause us to stop and think. For all its virtues, the Bible is not an ideal manual for Christian living; there's too much of it and we have to involve ourselves in justifying which bits we observe and which bits we reject for which we need philosophical method; as recipients of God given intellect we are not entitled to lazy - and certainly not aggressive - assertion.
Had Jesus summoned these anonymous Greeks to hear his discourse on death and glory they would not have been mystified by the content - Homer (Homer) is full of glorious death - but they certainly would not have classified this as philosophy but, rather, as myth. We, in hindsight, can classify Jesus' rejoinder discourse as the real thing, neither myth nor philosophy, the culmination of the story of how God out of time was conjoined with God in history.