Justin the Philosopher

Origins at Flavia Neapolis

Justin was born about the year 100 at Flavia Neapolis in the province of Syria Palaestina — the Roman colony planted by Vespasian beside the ancient Samaritan city of Shechem, at the foot of Mount Gerizim, the place of Jacob's well (the modern Nablus). He names himself in the opening of the First Apology as "Justin, son of Priscus, son of Bacchius, of Flavia Neapolis in Syria Palaestina." The names are telling: a Latin father, a Greek grandfather, a colonial family of settlers rather than of native Samaritans. He tells Trypho plainly that he was uncircumcised and reared without the Law, and his knowledge of Hebrew was slight; the synaxaria, following him, call his parents pagan Greeks. He grew up, then, a Gentile of the Hellenistic east, in a town where the Samaritan religion, the Jewish diaspora, and the whole apparatus of Graeco-Roman cult stood side by side — an upbringing that left him permanently interested in how the God of Israel and the reasonings of the Greeks could be one truth.

The search through the philosophies

The Dialogue with Trypho opens with the most famous intellectual autobiography of the second century, and everything later told of Justin's conversion depends on it. Seeking God, he went first to a Stoic, who had nothing to teach him about the divine nature and thought the question unnecessary. He went next to a Peripatetic, who began by settling his fee, and whom Justin left in disgust as no philosopher at all. A Pythagorean of reputation refused to admit him until he should first have mastered music, astronomy and geometry, as the disciplines that detach the soul from the senses; Justin, having no such training and no time to acquire it, went away discouraged. At last he attached himself to the Platonists, and there for a time he rested: the contemplation of the incorporeal, the doctrine of the Ideas, the ascent of the mind toward the Good, seemed to him the very wings of the soul. He expected "straightway to look upon God."

The old man by the sea

Withdrawing to a quiet place near the sea to think undisturbed, Justin was followed and accosted by an aged man, grave and gentle, whose name the Dialogue never gives and who is usually taken for a Christian of Syria or Palestine. Their conversation is the hinge of his life. The old man drew him out on the Platonic doctrine of the soul — that it is by nature immortal, kindred to God, and able of itself to see Him — and then dismantled it: if the soul lives, it lives not by its own nature but because God wills it to live; if it sees God, it does so not by kinship but by gift. Philosophy at its best had defined the search and could not satisfy it.

Then he told Justin of others: that long before all those reckoned philosophers there had been men more ancient, blessed and righteous and beloved of God, who spoke by the Holy Spirit and foretold things now come to pass — the prophets. They did not argue, for they were witnesses to the truth beyond argument; they glorified the Maker of all and proclaimed His Christ. "Pray," the old man said, "that the gates of light may be opened to thee, for these things are not to be seen or understood by any unless God and His Christ grant understanding." Then he departed, and Justin never saw him again. A fire, he says, was kindled in his soul; a love seized him for the prophets and for those who are the friends of Christ; and as he turned their words over he found this alone to be the philosophy that is safe and profitable. He was baptised — the Slavic tradition places it in his thirtieth year, about 133–137 — and thereafter, still wearing the philosopher's cloak, he professed Christianity itself as the true philosophy, the only one that both proves its case and saves.

Teacher at Ephesus and Rome

Justin travelled and taught. The Dialogue is set at Ephesus in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba war (132–135), where he met a learned and courteous Jew, Trypho, a refugee of that war, and disputed with him for two days in the colonnade of a gymnasium. Later he came to Rome in the reign of Antoninus Pius (138–161) and there opened a school of Christian philosophy; he taught, the Acts of his martyrdom say, in lodgings above the baths of Myrtinus (or Martinus), and received all who would come. Tatian the Syrian was his most famous pupil — and, after his master's death, the founder of a rigorist sect of his own.

Justin's method is what makes him a father of theology and not merely a defender of the Church. He held that the Word (Logos) who was made flesh in Christ is the same Word by whom all men reason, and that a seed of the Word (logos spermatikos) is sown in every mind; therefore whatever any man has rightly said belongs to Christians, and Socrates, Heraclitus and the best of the Greeks lived, in their measure, by Christ. The philosophers had fragments; the Church has the whole. It is a generous doctrine, and it has been the charter of every Christian engagement with pagan learning since.

The Apologies and the Dialogue

Three works of Justin survive, transmitted — a fact worth pausing over — in one single imperfect Greek manuscript, Parisinus graecus 450, copied in 1364:

• The First Apology, addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius, his sons, and the Roman Senate, and generally dated about 153–155. Justin asks not favour but justice: that Christians be tried for crimes proved, not condemned for the name; he answers the standing charges of atheism, incest and cannibalism; he argues from the prophets that Jesus is the Christ; and — chapters 61 and 65–67 — he describes, for the benefit of a pagan emperor, exactly what Christians do when they meet. This is the earliest full account of Christian worship anywhere (see below).
• The Second Apology, a shorter piece to the Roman Senate, provoked by a particular scandal of justice: a woman's conversion, her husband's denunciation of her teacher Ptolemaeus, and the execution of Ptolemaeus and of a bystander, Lucius, who protested the sentence, by the prefect Urbicus. Justin's point is that Christians are killed for nothing but the name, and that the demons stand behind the whole business.
• The Dialogue with Trypho, his longest work, written after the Apologies and before 161: that the Law was given for a time and to one people; that the new and everlasting covenant in Christ is for all; that the Scriptures of Israel testify to Him; and — with a courtesy rare in the genre — that the Jews are addressed as brethren whom he desires to persuade, not as enemies.

Eusebius knew and lists a number of further works now lost: Against Marcion, a Refutation of All Heresies, On the Resurrection, an address To the Greeks, On the Sovereignty of God, a treatise called The Psalmist, and one On the Soul. Several late writings circulated under his name in the manuscripts and are not his.

The earliest witness to the Eucharist and to Sunday

The value of Justin to the Church is not exhausted by his arguments. Because he set out to explain Christian practice to outsiders, he recorded in the First Apology what insiders had no reason to write down, and his account is the earliest detailed description of the Church's worship that exists — earlier than any liturgical text, and a full century before the Syrian orders.

He describes baptism (ch. 61): instruction, fasting and prayer, with the congregation praying and fasting alongside; then the washing in water "in the name of the Father and Lord of all, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit," which he calls illumination, because the mind of the one baptised is enlightened. The newly baptised is then led to the assembly, where the brethren pray with him for the first time and he receives the gifts.

He describes the Eucharist (chs. 65–66): the common prayers; the kiss of peace; bread and a cup of wine mixed with water brought to "the president of the brethren"; the long prayer of thanksgiving over them, to which the whole people answers Amen (he explains the Hebrew word for his Greek readers); the distribution by the deacons, who also carry the gifts to those absent. And then the sentence for which every later theology of the sacrament has had to account: this food is called among Christians Eucharist, and it is received "not as common bread and common drink"; as the Word was made flesh for our salvation, so the food over which the thanksgiving has been made is the flesh and blood of that same incarnate Jesus. He adds that none may share in it but the baptised who believe the Church's teaching and live according to Christ's commandments.

And he describes the Sunday assembly (ch. 67), the earliest such description we have: on the day called Sunday all who live in town or country gather in one place; the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read as long as time allows; the president then instructs and exhorts; all stand and pray; the bread, wine and water are brought and the Eucharist is celebrated; the deacons carry portions to the absent; and those who are able and willing give what they wish, the collection being kept by the president for orphans and widows, the sick, prisoners, strangers, and all in need. Sunday is kept, he explains, because it is the first day, on which God made light out of darkness, and because it is the day on which Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead. For the Orthodox reader this is the second century's own testimony to the Divine Liturgy: Scripture, homily, intercession, offering, anaphora, communion, and the care of the poor, in that order, on the Lord's Day.

The dispute with Crescens and the martyrdom

At Rome Justin disputed publicly with a Cynic philosopher named Crescens (the Slavic lives call him Crescentius), and worsted him. In the Second Apology Justin says outright that he expects to be "plotted against and put in the stocks" by Crescens, a man who loves not wisdom but the applause of the crowd and who denounces Christians as atheists without having troubled to learn what they teach. Tatian, who was there, states flatly that Crescens contrived his master's death. Whatever the immediate mechanism, the accusation came; and under Marcus Aurelius, about the year 165, Justin was brought with a group of his hearers before the prefect of the city, Q. Junius Rusticus (in office c. 162–168).

The record of that trial survives — the Acts of Justin and his Companions, in three Greek recensions, and one of the small handful of genuinely early martyr-acts that read like court minutes rather than legend. Rusticus asks Justin what doctrines he professes; Justin answers that he has tried to make himself acquainted with every system and has rested at last in the true teaching of the Christians, however that may displease those who hold error. Asked where the Christians meet, he replies that God is not confined to a place, that Christians are scattered, and that he himself lodges above the bath of Myrtinus, where he has taught all who came to him. Asked whether he is a Christian, he says: "Yes, I am a Christian." Six companions are questioned in turn and each confesses. Rusticus presses Justin on whether he supposes that after being scourged and beheaded he will ascend into heaven and receive a reward; Justin answers that he does not merely suppose but is persuaded of it, and that to all who so live the favour of God abides until the ending of the world. When at last the prefect commands them to sacrifice to the gods, the martyrs answer together: "Do what you will, for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols." Sentence is pronounced in the dry formula of Roman law — that those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to obey the emperor's edict be scourged and led away to be beheaded according to the laws. So they were, glorifying God; and the faithful took up their bodies secretly and laid them in a fitting place.

Veneration and later cultus

Justin's fame in the East rests on his writings as much as on his passion: he is the Philosopher among the martyrs, cited by Irenaeus, quarried by Eusebius, and named with honour in the councils of the Church as an ancient witness to the faith of the second century. The Byzantine synaxaria keep him on June 1 with the companions who suffered with him. In the West his feast stood on April 14 from 1882 until 1969, when it was moved to June 1 to agree with the Eastern date. He is invoked as a patron of philosophers, and by extension of Christian apologetics — the discipline he may fairly be said to have founded.