Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 53:209 (Jan 1896)
Article: Greek Elements In Modern Religious Thought
Author: Edwin Stutely Carr

BSac 53:209 (Jan 1896) p. 117

Greek Elements In Modern Religious Thought

Edwin Stutely Carr

“Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll lectured at the Columbia Theater yesterday afternoon to an audience practically filling the theater. The title of the lecture was ‘Which Way?’ There are two ways, Mr. Ingersoll said. One way for living was the generally accepted way of Christians known as God’s way; the other was Mr. Ingersoll’s, which was rather different. To so live in this world as to merit life in heaven was the way Mr. Ingersoll pointed out to be vain, because he was not at all certain that such a place or condition as heaven existed, and he had no intention or desire to go there. The Ingersoll way was to live for this life alone and to make this earth heaven.”—Record (Chicago), January 7, 1895.

Colonel Ingersoll is perhaps not aware of it, but this last statement expresses the central idea of the Greek tendency of modern thought.

Greek philosophy, as influential in our modern life, is represented mainly by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In these men we find the sunny-hearted Greek nature,—”never sick or sorry,” on terms of glad and familiar intimacy with itself and the physical universe,—girding itself for the task of expressing the universe in terms of reason, intellect. Socrates’ primary interest was moral, but his maxim “Know thyself” expresses his strongly intellectual bent, confirmed by his identification of virtue and knowledge. Plato, in his noble speculations, remains true in general to his master, Socrates, laying great stress on immortality,—an essential element in his system. With Aristotle, who gave the movement its final and permanently influential form, the intellectual interest is supreme. The heart is lost out of the universe. God is intel-

BSac 53:209 (Jan 1896) p. 118

lect, “thought of thought,” but with no concern for men; there is no prayer, no immortality, except for the race or species. The Aristotelian heaven is that of George Eliot in the little poem which has been so much admired: —

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence:
…So to live is heaven.”

And so Colonel Ingersoll is at one with Aristotle in advising to live for this world alone, and to make this earth heaven.

This Greek intellectualism usually finds expression in some form of the Logos doctrine. The Logos as a philosophical principle first appears with Heraclitus. Logos in Greek meant primarily a word, proposition, and secondarily the faculty of the mind which is manifested in speech,—reason. Heraclitus indicates the principle of...