The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman ... - Historia Antigua

1. INTRODUCTION 9
and teaching of Jesus, and is omitted from other gospels. Then, a
little later, Greek philosophy was added. The teachings of Jesus
himself are difficult to put into a single philosophical system; but
God's purpose in sending him, the existence of the pagan deities,
the position of Christianity in the state, and such topics were
discussed, by the attackers and the defenders of Christianity, on
a philosophical basis. St. Augustine himself, in his autobiography,
actually says it was Cicero's introduction to philosophy, Hortensius,
that turned his own mind towards religion, to Christianity. 1
Through his works, and the works of many other fathers of the
church, classical philosophy was kept alive, converted to the
service of Christianity, and transmitted to modern times. 15
Even more important than the transmission of classical philosophy
was the survival, through the church, of Roman law and
Roman political sense. Even after the Roman empire dissolved
and barbarian kingdoms succeeded it, the western church retained
Roman law for its own use. This is clearly laid down in an early
Germanic law of the sixth century, and although the principle
developed, it did not change. 16 The canon law of the church grew
out of the great civilizing achievement of Roman jurisprudence;
and it carried on, even through the Dark Ages, not only the methods
and principles of Roman law, but the fundamental conception that
law is a lasting-embodiment of right, to be altered only with great
care, and always higher than any individual or group. This is a
conception more effective in western Europe and the Americas and
the English-speaking world than anywhere else on the planet, and
we owe it to Rome.
Roman political sense, chiefly as handed on to the church but
also as revived in monarchs like Charlemagne, saved western
Europe from degenerating into a Balkan disorder. Although Rome
was not the city in which Christianity originated or first grew
powerful, although a scholarly Roman at the end of the first
century A.D. knew practically nothing about Christianity and met
it only in the Near East, 17 we feel instinctively that it would be
destroying an important value to transfer the seat of the Roman
Catholic church from Rome to Jerusalem. And, although Catholicism
is more firmly established in South America than in Europe,
it would be still more improper to shift the centre of the church to
Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. It was St. Paul who first felt this:
for, as Spengler points out, 18 he did not go to the oriental cities of