Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Christianity and Divine Unity
A friend I've been emailing made the observation that Protestants sometimes accuse Catholics of pagan practices, what with all the saints and statues and veneration of Mary and all the incense and vestments. Nothing new about this viewpoint. My observation, after thinking about Unity: The Divine is One, is that from a strict monotheist viewpoint Christianity, all branches of it, is pagan. I've been browsing Catholic blogs, and rarely is God mentioned. It's always Jesus and Mary and anything else. AND, that's OK in my eyes. It's our Greco-Roman cultural inheritance. We're pagans who somehow adopted the god of the Jews; we went halfway to monotheism but we just couldn't abandon all of our old ways, so we mixed it up with JC and the trinity. It's OK. It's another way to view God.
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There is an irony in this. The earliest Greek philosophers, thales, anaximander, and so on, were all engaged in seeking unifying principles. Water or Air or Fire, change etc.. There was a big difference between what these thinkers believed and what was popularly believed by their (pagan) culture, and while it may be fair to say that Christianity retains some pagan concepts, it's also well-documented that the Greek philosophers, both pre- and post-socratic had a big influence on the development of Christian orthodoxy. The Trinity concept is at least possibly a consequence of this-the best way they could find to reconcile Greek philosophy's preoccupation with seeking unifying principles and the emotional need for believing in the divinity of Christ.
You make a good point, Quixote. It's an interesting point here: Greek philosophers were seeking a unifying principle in philosophy, and Judaism found a unifying principle in the idea of one god. So here I am, wanting both, in a way. You're right that the Greeks couldn't make the leap to a clear monotheism. Once again, the philosophy of the elites and the practices of the average person don't coincide.
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