Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 56:221 (Jan 1899)
Article: The Philosophical Disintegration Of Islam
Author: Henry Woodward Hulbert

BSac 56:221 (Jan 1899) p. 44

The Philosophical Disintegration Of Islam1

Rev. Henry Woodward Hulbert

Taken together, the first five centuries of the Christian church present a splendid spectacle of the power of the new faith to win its way against all obstacles. External to the Christian organization, Judaism, the Græco-Roman pagan systems, the Stoic, Cynic, and Epicurean philosophies, the revived mystery cults, Neo-Pythagoreanism, Neo-Platonism, and a final syncretism of all the pagan elements, went down in succession before the all-conquering faith in the Crucified One—Judaism alone remaining to-day to tell the story of disaster.

Within the church waged a still fiercer contest. In the guise of Christian heresies, the Jewish and Pagan elements

BSac 56:221 (Jan 1899) p. 45

crept into the early church. Ebionitism, Gnosticism, Sabellianism, Manichæsm, Arianism, Pelagianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, each in turn, and at times several in combination, stormed at the citadel of faith—all in vain as far as affecting any organic lodgment or even holding any outstanding tower or battlement.

We may justly account these continued victories without and within as proof of the fundamental basis in truth of that faith. Doubtless these hostile forces were useful in the disciplinary work which we cannot but think was necessary in the progress to be made. By them, every joint in the Christian armor was tested, every weapon in which the church was trusting was put to trial, and in the great creeds of the ecumenical councils the fundamentals of faith were formulated for all ages.

It is now our purpose to contrast at some length the first five centuries of Islam with these first five triumphant centuries of Christianity.

It was a sad day for Christendom when the Imperial church in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries undertook to extirpate paganism within the Empire by persecution. It is true that Neo-Platonism in its later development was taking on a quasi-trinitarian cast, and that some prominent Christians were yielding to the vague pantheistic ideas of Emanation taught by the philosophers; but, could the weakened and vanishing remains of the pagan cults, especially pagan philosophy (mainly in the form of Neo-Platonism), have remained within the bounds of Christendom, there can be little doubt but that they would have died out as effectually as did the great heresies. The safest place in which to keep wrong opinions is in the full blaze of the best intellectual and spiritual life of an age.

Hence, when the church of the Byzantine Empire forcibly drove the scattered remains of paganism across its borders, and into sections esse...