Athens at the time of Paul was a city that in many ways lived in the past. It had ceased to have much economic importance. The school of Alexandria surpassed it in many ways. Still, however, the great Parthenon towered over the center of the city on the great rock of the Acropolis covered with the wonderful friezes that now are the prizes of world-class museums.
If it dazzles the eye still with its beauty in its nearly ruined state, imagine how it must have appeared to Paul when it was still in one piece. Though looted many times, pagan benefactors who honored the classical period had also filled Athens with temples, theaters, and art work to honor the intellectual gifts of Greece to Rome. The marketplace was still there and if it was less busy than before one could still remember that here Socrates had begun philosophy. The type of Athenian porches (stoa) that had given their name to the Stoic school could still be enjoyed to beat the heat.
The Academy still carried on its mission, even if it had little to do with the actual teachings of Plato, a short walk away and on the walk one could remember the teachings of Aristotle. In between the great Acropolis and the marketplace stood a small hill which the ancient Athenians called the Areopagus. It had served from deepest antiquity as an Athenian court. On the hill of the Areopagus, the archons, the members of the court, met and even under the democracy they retained some power especially over murder and sacrilege cases. By the time of Paul, it was a favorite meeting place for intellectuals where the judgments were more over ideas than men. So Saint Paul would have walked through the marketplace where philosophy was born to the hill where religious judgments had traditionally been made in the shadow of the greatest temple of the religion of Homer and of Delphi. Athens was still symbolically one the great centers of ancient paganism and as a symbol had no equal for it contained great icons of both pagan religion and pagan philosophy. The Areopagus, Mar’s Hill to the Romans, stood right in the center of the life of Athens.
Like Socrates, who was also accused of worshipping strange gods, Paul is brought to the Areopagus. Some question whether the site of Paul’s sermon would have been the literal hill of the ancient Areopagus as opposed to a meeting of the council of Areopagus , though the hill is marked as the site by the modern Greeks with a plaque containing Paul’s message. In any case, case Luke uses the literary symbolism well. The physically unimpressive Paul was to stand before the Athenians as a symbol of the new and greater philosophy.
Paul’s message is deceptively simple. Rhetorically, he uses the same technique that worked so well in his debates with the Jews. Paul will divide his audience winning the majority by implicitly attacking unpopular but still numerous minority opinions. In the case of the Jews, Paul divided the Pharisees from the Sadducees by appealing to his common doctrinal beliefs with the Pharisees. Here he will split the neo-Platonists and the Stoics from the Epicureans by appealing to his common ground with the neo-Platonists and the Stoics against the Epicureans. He was spectacularly successful.
Paganism and pagan philosophy never recovered from Paul’s message. When Paul begins his sermon by saying that he perceives that the men of Athens are very religious he is placing a wedge between the popular religion of Delphi and the religion of the persons on Mars Hill. Paul decries the idols in the city of Athens. Since Luke intentionally points out that Stoics and Epicureans are present, and Paul will quote a Stoic poet Aratus, the reader can be sure Paul knows that the Stoics are not idol worshipers. In fact, Luke is at pains to show Paul’s erudition as he also has the Apostle quote Epimenides, a sage of the sixth century. So at the very start of the speech, the compromise with Delphi is exposed and used by Paul to make a point. No Epicurean or Stoic believes in idols, but over their shoulders looms the great temple of Athena and all around them is a city given over to the worship of objects made of matter.
Philosophy has allowed the city to continue full of idols. The common people are permitted to continue in their gross ignorance to the benefit of the establishment. Through fear and through hope for gain, philosophy has allowed herself to become co-opted by evil. Christianity as presented by Saint Paul does not need this compromise. The great thinkers and the common church goers will have the same beliefs. There will not be a God of the philosophers that is distinct and hidden, in fear, from the person who kneels at the Christian alter.
Paul then mentions that he has “found” an alter with an inscription to an “unknown god.” In all probability Paul has seen one of many alters to unknown gods and has made the perfectly logical move that an alter to unknown gods is also an alter to an unknown god! The unknown gods in Greek thought are those that are propitiated in order not to accidentally miss a local or obscure divinity and so bring down divine wrath. It is not so much a god that anyone is looking for but one about which the locals might be ignorant. This is a point that Paul makes when he says that what they once worshipped in ignorance, he will now proclaim to them openly. This openness of proclamation is also an attack on the Gnostics who hide their gospel from public view.
Paul then points out that the true God cannot live in any temple made by humans and that no human could ever serve him. This was an obvious philosophical truth. If there is a God, then no temple can hold Him. He also creates all things and provides a basis of unity for all men who are His children. Paul is establishing points of agreement between his gospel and some of the philosophies of the Greco-Roman world. There is nothing in this sermon thus far that would have offended or even educated a good neo-Platonist or Stoic. Paul’s statement that the God is “creator” might have been controversial if it were understood as Paul meant it, but both Plato and the Stoic philosophers demonstrate that they would use language of “creation” even if they did not believe in a literal first moment in time or creation out of nothing.
Paul’s discussion that men are called to seek God with the hope of finding Him has Socratic echoes. Paul recognizes that there is a quest for the Divine and does not believe that this quest can be ended by any human effort. Instead this knowledge will come as a product of divine revelation an idea that Plato seemingly allows for in construction of the liver in Timaeus. Four centuries of interaction with philosophy had now proven beyond a doubt to the Greco-Romans on Mars Hill, man is not only political, not only desires to know, but he is also religious. Man wishes to know God. Paul has not found God, but God has found Him.
At this point, Paul has utterly separated himself from the Epicurean philosophers. They cannot accept his religiosity. He will increase that gap by quoting from the Stoic sage Aratus who says that in the god, “we live and move and have our being.” Any neo-Platonist present also can accept what is being said since, as we have seen, neo-Platonism has been deeply influenced by Stoicism.
Paul’s call for a day of judgment also can be understood as being compatible with Stoic teaching. The Stoic cycle that ends in fire could easily be perceived as a day of doom for this present existence. However, Paul then presents the offense of the gospel to the persons on Mars Hill. He states that a man will judge the world and that this man can be known to be divine by the fact that God has raised him from the dead.
At this point the Epicureans can have nothing but mockery for Paul, but the Stoics also are also unable to move forward. Their atomist view of the soul makes any idea of the personal survival of any individual after death difficult though until the conflagration perhaps the good souls may survive for a time. From the return to the Divine Fire no man or soul can survive. As a result, Paul’s placing the man Jesus as the judge at the day of doom is incompatible with Stoic doctrine. They cannot accept Paul’s teaching.
The philosophical integrity of the Athenians saved some of them from missing Paul’s message. Paul argued well and many wanted to hear more of his message. In this sense, they were the pagan equivalents of the Berean Jews who sought out the truth of Paul’s message in the Sacred. The main group well positioned to hear Paul would have been the neo-Platonists. These thinkers could allow for the personal survival of a human soul for all eternity. (Phaedo) They had access to creationist language in Timaeus. They had a notion of a final judgment in the Republic’s myth of Er. The unity of humankind was not foreign to them.
What did they lack? They had not concept of the God becoming man and then providing a way for man to become like God. The idea of the Incarnation linked to theosis (man becoming like God) was exciting. That the divine Creator should “appoint a man” to judge the world at the Day of Doom and by doing so raise this man to divinity was beyond novel. In many ways, the Christology that lies behind this part of Paul’s remarks, uniting the Divine logos with man forever is the answer to the dilemma of Plato’s Cave. It is no shock that at least some of the persons on Mars Hill came to faith quickly. In the conversion of Dionysus the Areopagite, we see the model of the Christian Greco-Roman world to come.
Persecutions lasted for three hundred years, but the faith continued to spread. It was particularly successful in attracting tough minded and rhetorically skillful defenders. Christianity was bubbling with ideas, some heretical, and some not. It had the intellectual and moral energy that paganism and philosophy had lost. As a result, it began to attract the first rate intellects of the day. More and more frequently, Christian bishops would make spectacular advances in theology appropriating the philosophical language and techniques of the pagans to their own ends. These dazzling intellectual structures, the formulation of the two natures of Christ and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, would become the basis for Western and Eastern Christian thought.
In the face of this accomplishment, Constantine the Great become convinced that only Christianity could preserve his Empire. Though inconsistent in his practice of the faith, after all there were no Christian emperors to serve as role models, he established a Christian foundation for an Eastern Roman Empire that would preserve learning, philosophy, and faith for one thousand years, eventually passing these riches on to the Islamic Empire and the West.