Review - The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken

Letting first millennium Christians speak for themselves

There is a vast swath of time between the first century AD and the sixteenth century that don't get a great deal of attention, especially where Christian history is concerned.  Documentation and other evidence is scarcer and the writers who have the qualifications to handle the period well are rare, relative to other historical fields.  Perhaps this is why I've found books about this era in history to be consistently rewarding.  In the case of this volume, Robert Louis Wilken draws our attention to the first centuries of Christian history and the thinkers that followed those who are documented in the New Testament. Simply by absorbing and paying attention to the currents, influences and sources that predominate among the early Christian writers he produced a beautifully written book that I expect to return to later with pleasure.

This book is 20 years old at this point, so it is not brand new. Wilken wrote an earlier work The Christians as the Romans Saw Them which focused on pagan reactions to Christianity, a revealing study in its own right. Here he focuses closely on the thinking and writing of Christians themselves. He emphasizes that most of the writers from this era were church leaders which meant they spent a large amount of their time ministering to church congregations and conducting worship. They delivered sermons, and performed the ceremonies of baptism and the Eucharist. Hence their writings and concerns sprang from those things.

They of course had to defend their faith against Jewish and pagan critics and that presents the starting point in Chapter 1.  Chapter 2 looks at the aforementioned daily practice of prayer and worship these men engaged in. Chapter 3 moves on to the Scriptures, which can be neglected as an important source of thought, but profoundly influence and direct the thought and argument of the early Christian leaders. Some leaders were more well versed in Greek philosophy than others, but in all cases Scripture predominates.

Chapter 4 deals with the Trinity in Christian thought, not so much in terms of the language of creeds but how it shaped thinking from the earliest days. Prior to the debates of how to actually articulate and formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in creeds, Trinitarian thinking was present in Christian teaching prior to Tertullian's coining of the word “Trinity”.

Chapter 5 shifts to grimmer history, telling the story of Maximus the confessor and his articulation of the doctrine of two wills, asserting that Jesus had both a distinct human and a divine will. This belief was out of favour with the powerful of his day who preferred a doctrine of a single will (a doctrine that perhaps sacrifices belief in Christ's humanity to emphasize his divinity). Maximus had his right hand cut off and his tongue ripped out for his trouble. Ultimately his argument would carry the day, as the best way to articulate a truly human and truly divine Jesus acting on earth.

Chapter 6 shifts perhaps surprisingly to tell the story of how the Genesis story of creation was interpreted and handled in the early church. A doctrine of first things, and where we come from and what our purpose all ultimately goes back to look at “in the beginning.” Chapter 7 looks at how human reason was viewed, showing that the intellectual life of early church leaders was exceedingly strong, and the idea that reason perished with Christianity's rise is untethered from reality. Chapter 8 discusses St Augustine's magnum opus, The City of God , its purpose, how it fits with his time and examines its achievement. Chapter 9 shifts to poetry focusing on the first great Christian poet, Prudentius, discussing his artistic achievement in establishing what was a truly Christian art form. Chapter 10 looks at icons and iconoclasm – how icons became an accepted and expected part of worship within Orthodoxy. To this non-icon using Mennonite the reasoning here seemed the feeblest. The notion that because God made Christ incarnate in the flesh it is legitimate for humans to reincarnate him in painted icons wanders towards blasphemous thinking in my view. It was interesting to have the arguments sampled and presented though, and the question of how far ought we to go in catering to the visual remains strongly relevant.

Chapter 11 looks at the writing of biographies (and hagiographies) of saints that emerged and what their purpose was. Chapter 12 wraps things up telling the story of Christian views of love, especially looking at the various Greek words for love that were used and how the concepts were integrated and reconciled.

Overall this is a profound beautifully written book on early Christian thought, and not territory that is over travelled or over understood.