Christianity has long spread the Gospel by presenting Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophets, the fulfillment of Platonic philosophy, the fulfillment of that element of truth that can be found in other religions (see this earlier post on that point). However, Christianity has long rejected any change to the basic Gospel message; it thus separates itself from paganism and from heresy, and also from the pluralism of our present age.
Pope/St. Gregory the Great illustrates this well in an incident used by Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Ratzinger) in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (Ignatius Press, 2004), in a portion of the book not previously published as an essay. The incident involved the evangelization of England by St. Augustine of Canterbury, whose feast day is later this week on May 27.
In 596, Pope/St. Gregory, who had been a monk, sent the monk Augustine (now known as St. Augustine of Canterbury) to evangelize the English. England had fallen into the Dark Ages around the end of the life of St. Patrick of Ireland, and had nearly lost contact with Rome for about 100 years. Gregory the Great had made Augustine Archbishop of the English and had sent him to renew the distant church. Augustine reported miracles in England, which Gregory then concluded were given to help people's unbelief and to manifest holiness. Augustine’s mission was successful, and the English Church was firmly established by 601.
The success of the mission, and its methods, are recorded in the letters of St. Gregory the Great, in the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England. Pope Benedict XVI referenced two such letters in one of the essays published in Truth and Tolerance. (I am taking the quoted letters from that book, and thus use the same translation of Pope/St. Gregory as was used there by Ignatius Press. The second of those letters can be read in context online at Christian Classics Ethereal Library, as printed in the Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede here).
In his first of two letters discussed by Benedict XVI, Pope/St.Gregory wrote to the English King Ethelbert:
"Therefore, my most illustrious son, carefully preserve the grace you have received from God….Inflame your noble zeal….Suppress the worship of idols; destroy their temples and altars. Uplift the virtues of your subjects by outstanding behavior and morality."
(Truth and Tolerance, pg. 228-229, quoting Pope/St. Gregory the Great, Ep. XI, 37.)
One month later, Gregory sent a different message to a group of missionaries who had just departed for England, and to someone named Mellitus:
"But when, with the grace of almighty God, you reach our most reverend brother, Bishop Augustine, then tell him that I have been reflecting at length about one matter concerning the Englishmen. That is, one should by no means destroy the temples of this people’s idols: rather, simply destroy the idols to be found within them….When the people see that we are not destroying their temples, then they will nonetheless abandon their errors and will that much more joyfully turn to the knowledge and the worship of the true God in their accustomed places."
(Truth and Tolerance, pg. 229, quoting Pope/St. Gregory the Great, Ep. XI, 56.)
Cardinal Ratzinger thus wrote:
"This shows what we call continuity in worship. The holy place remains holy, and the intentions and petitions of prayer, and the worship of the divine, which formerly took place, are taken up and transformed, given a new significance. . . . [The pagan gods] have been overthrown: the question of truth has itself deprived them of divinity and brought about their downfall. Yet at the same time their truth has emerged that they were a reflection of divinity, a presentment of figures in which their hidden significance was purified and fulfilled."
(Truth and Tolerance, pg. 229) The pagan gods, although false, are seen as "steps in the search for the true God and for his reflection in creation" and thus they "may become messengers of the one God." The two letters can be viewed in the context of two "phases in the Christian relationship with 'pagan' religions" also discussed in that section of the book. Cardinal Ratzinger saw the first letter as indicative of a phase of
enlightenment, in which Christianity is placed on the side of
philosophy and enlightenment, against divided truth. In the second phase, "the connection with the religions and the limits of enlightenment emerge." That section of the book concludes with the observation that, in I John 4:8 ("God is love"), truth and love are identical. "This sentence -- if the whole of its demand is understood -- is the surest guarantee of tolerance, of an association with truth, whose only weapon is itself and, thereby, love."
Perhaps, in applying what Pope Benedict XVI then said of what was done in the sixth century to our present understanding of tolerance, in seeing truth and love as identical, we too work to find the right point of connection between truth and love in any given situation. It seems to me that what Pope/St. Gregory initially would have done (the first letter) may have reflected the way the Church had dealt with Arians. However, what he did after further thought (the second letter) reflected the way the earlier Church had dealt with pagans. What seemed at first essential to proclaim the enlightenment of truth, after one month's consideration, could be compromised -- not in that the truth was less important than it had been one month earlier but rather in that the situation in which the truth was to be proclaimed was better understood. St. Augustine's proclamation of the Gospel included both a proclamation of the truth and an understanding of the existing situation as a step in the search for God, and the work of love and truth as one involved both.
In Truth and Tolerance, Cardinal Ratzinger explained that the evangelistic transformation shown in Pope/St. Gregory's second letter can be seen all over Rome, offering the Church of St. Mary Sopra Minerva as an example.
Without suggesting that I might have some additional, equivalent point to make, here are a few more examples of the same thing. This manner of evangelism is seen as early as St. Paul's sermon at the Areopagus, where he presented the God of the Bible as the "unknown god" in the thinking of the people to whom he was preaching (Acts 17:22-23). St. Clement of Alexandria followed the same pattern in the second century. For evangelistic purposes, St. Clement had gained extensive knowledge about the writings of poets and philosophers. W.H.C. Frend, in The Rise of Christianity, wrote of Clement that “he realized from what he read that his missionary task would be hopeless unless he was able to interpret Christian truth in terms which educated inquirers could accept.” He saw Plato and Aristotle as preparing the Greek people for the true message of the Gospel, just as the Old Testament had prepared the Hebrews. (Frend, pg. 370). St. Clement justified his use of philosophy and literature by the example of St. Paul, explaining that he too would become all things to all men that he might by any means save some (Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition, pg. 35).
This understanding that Pope/St. Gregory the Great and St. Augustine of Canterbury showed to the culture of the sixth century English people should not be confused with treating their religious views as equal in truth in a pluralistic sense. Therein lies the first phase, the emphasis on enlightenment and truth, without wavering from love. Historians now commonly agree that early Christians were severely persecuted because they rejected Roman pluralism and were evangelistic. Cardinal Ratzinger discussed this in connection with the writing of St. Augustine of Hippo (Truth and Tolerance, pp. 165-170). Christianity “was not one religion among others but represented the victory of perception and knowledge over the world of religions.” (Id., at 170.) J. Patout Burns, Jr. recently made this point in Cyprian the Bishop, Routledge, 2002, about third century Carthage: “One of the imperial objectives seems to have been the elimination of the divisions of religious exclusivism.” (Burns, pg. 1). G.W. Clarke made a similar point concerning the persecutions of Carthage in his Introduction to The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage, Vol. I, pg. 24.
The challenge of our own era is to recognize that need to affirm both truth and love, both the truth of Christianity and a recognition of the value of other people's beliefs as steps on the way toward God, in application to the ever changing secular culture around. It is also essential to recognize that some of the disagreements between Christians over how to respond to one situation or another arise, in fact, from seeing different phases of evangelism in the same conflicted situation. One person sees a situation as Gregory did in his first letter, and the other sees the same situation as Gregory did in his second letter, and yet both views may be properly considered in seeking the will of God in both truth and love in a complicated and changing culture. Where Pope/St. Gregory saw the same situation from both perspectives, one month apart, we should not be too surprised if the same difference of perspective exists between two Christians viewing the same situation at the same time now.
The ultimate objective now, as then, must be to find that point where God's will lies, expressing the unity of truth and love in proclaiming the Gospel message now.
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