The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian churchHatch, Edwin
Philosophy
The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church
Hatch, Edwin
Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Philosophy -- History; Philosophy, Ancient; Theology, Doctrinal
should be reflected upon speech. For the love of speech had become to
a large proportion of Greeks a second nature. They were a nation of
talkers. They were almost the slaves of cultivated expression. Though the
public life out of which orators had grown had passed away with political
freedom, it had left behind it a habit which in the second century of
our era was blossoming into a new spring. Like children playing at
“make-believe,” when real speeches in real assemblies became impossible,
the Greeks revived the old practice of public speaking by addressing
fictitious assemblies and arguing in fictitious courts. In the absence
of the distractions of either keen political struggles at home or wars
abroad, these tendencies had spread themselves over the large surface of
general Greek society. A kind of literary instinct had come to exist. The
mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance
with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated
speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education.
Two points have to be considered in regard to that education before it
can be regarded as a cause in relation to the main subject which we are
examining: we must look first at its forms, and secondly at its mass.
It is not enough that it should have corresponded in kind to certain
effects; it must be shown to have been adequate in amount to account for
them.
I. The education was almost as complex as our own. If we except only the
inductive physical sciences, it covered the same field. It was, indeed,
not so much analogous to our own as the cause of it. Our own comes by
direct tradition from it. It set a fashion which until recently has
uniformly prevailed over the whole civilized world. We study literature
rather than nature because the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans
and the Roman provincials resolved to educate their sons, they employed
Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths.
The two main elements were those which have been already indicated,
Grammar and Rhetoric.[9]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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