Today is the feast of Saint Justin the Martyr, a Christian philosopher from the second century of the common era[1], who was put to death, together with his students, at the very beginning of the Christian era, around the year 165 CE.
Few of his writings have survived, but the work we do have demonstrates the
broad influence Justin had in shaping our understanding of Jesus as the second
person of the trinity, the rabbi from Galilea as the Son of God…an incarnation
of the divine logos, whom Christians call the Word.
Following Saint Paul, Justin established the philosophical underpinnings of the theological narrative that Jesus of Nazareth, otherwise known as Joshua bin Joseph (likely…Jesu in his native dialect of Aramaic), was the embodied manifestation of God’s rational aspect, the principle of divine reason alive in the world.
In his philosophy Justin follows the Hebrew philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who was a contemporary of Jesus, establishing in Christian doctrine, the notion that all—people carry a seed of the Word within them; according to Justine and Philo, Jesus and Paul, this is what it means to be created in the divine image, it is to share at the ontological level in the being of the divine. This is the doctrine of the Logos Spermatikos and it stands in stark distinction to the much more pessimistic theology of Saint Augustine of Hippo developed three hundred and fifty years later, at the beginning of the Church’s imperial era.[2]
Justin suggests that when the divine source of all being, breathed life into Adam, God imparted to his creature, the essence of God’s own self, like a seed of the divine, planting within Adam and the descendants of Adam (humanity writ large) a yearning for the truth and the ability to become transformed by our encounter with the truth, through the agency of the divine logos. Justin remarks that it is this gift of from God, of God’s own self is what makes humankind into the creature that Aristotle referred to as “the rational animal,” unlike every other species of animal on Earth…and the paramount expression of God’s creative will.
Among the other significant theological doctrines that Saint Justine pursued was that of the unitary nature of the godhead, and the indivisibility of the divine being, which is to say that where God exists…God exists fully, and that human beings, who bear a seed of the Word within themselves, must then also bear the fullness of God within themselves, because the whole exists within the part, just as the part exists within the whole, and while distinct (according to the mystery of God) they are inseverable.
Justin taught that by Adam’s sin our connection to the divine was circumscribed, marginalized and corrupted, occluding our otherwise innate experience of grace, and causing the seed within us to go dormant, like grain buried in a dry field. He held that the reality of sin in our lives, in our hearts and minds, functions as a barrier cutting us off from our inherent potential, and the ability to live our lives in the fullness of God’s promise. The existential dilemma of sin, according to Justine, undermines our capacity to understand the truth, perceive beauty and do good, it interferes with our desire for justice and our capacity for mercy...both; it does not obviate our connection to the divine, but rather causes the connection to enter into a stage of latency. He believed that water of baptism does for the divine-but-dormant seed with us, what ordinary water does for ordinary seed, it actuates the potential within the germ causing it to root and blossom; in the same way that baptism confers grace and causes the real presence of God, to germinates within us.
[1] Born:
c. AD 90 – 100, Flavia Neapolis, Judaea, Roman Empire. Died: c. AD 165, Rome,
Italia, Roman Empire
[2] Augustine
devised the doctrine of original sin, arguing that humanity does not share in
the being of God (individually or corporately) because we are created ex
nihilo, out of nothing…a complete reversal of Justine, which harmed the
church in significant ways, and still does today.