[249] 3. THE SPEECH BEFORE THE COUNCIL OF AREOPAGUS. (XVII 22) AND PAUL STOOD IN THE MIDST OF THE COUNCIL AND SAID, "YE MEN OF ATHENS, IN ALL RESPECTS I OBSERVE THAT YOU ARE MORE than others RESPECTFUL OF WHAT IS DIVINE. (23) FOR AS I WAS GOING THROUGH your city AND SURVEYING THE MONUMENTS OF YOUR WORSHIP, I FOUND ALSO AN ALTAR WITH THE INSCRIPTION TO UNKNOWN GOD. THAT divine nature, THEN, WHICH YOU WORSHIP, NOT KNOWING what it is, I AM SETTING FORTH TO YOU. (24) THE GOD THAT MADE THE WORLD AND ALL THINGS THEREIN, HE, LORD AS HE IS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, DWELLETH NOT IN SHRINES MADE WITH HANDS, (25) AND IS NOT SERVED BY HUMAN HANDS AS THOUGH HE NEEDED ANYTHING, SINCE HE HIMSELF GIVETH TO ALL LIFE AND BREATH AND ALL THINGS. (26) AND HE MADE OF ONE nature EVERY RACE OF MEN TO DWELL ON ALL THE FACE OF THE EARTH; AND FIXED DEFINED TIMES AND BOUNDS OF THEIR HABITATION, (27) THAT THEY SHOULD SEEK THE GOD, IF HAPLY THEY MIGHT FEEL AFTER HIM AND FIND HIM, BEING AS INDEED HE IS NOT FAR FROM EACH ONE OF US. (28) FOR IN HIM WE LIVE AND MOVE AND ARE, AS CERTAIN ALSO [250] OF YOUR POETS HAVE SAID, FOR WE ARE ALSO HIS OFFSPRING. (29) BEING THEN THE OFFSPRING OF GOD, WE OUGHT NOT TO THINK THAT THE DIVINE NATURE IS LIKE UNTO GOLD OR SILVER OR STONE, GRAVEN BY ART AND DEVICE OF MAN. (30) NOW THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE GOD OVERLOOKED, BUT AT PRESENT HE CHARGETH ALL MEN EVERYWHERE TO REPENT, (31) INASMUCH AS HE HATH SET A DAY ON WHICH, IN the person of THE MAN WHOM HE HATH ORDAINED, HE WILL JUDGE THE WORLD IN RIGHTEOUSNESS; AND HE HATH GIVEN ALL A GUARANTEE BY RAISING HIM FROM THE DEATH."(32) AND WHEN THEY HEARD OF "RAISING FROM THE DEAD,"SOME MOCKED, AND OTHERS SAID, "WE WILL HEAR THEE CONCERNING THIS YET AGAIN". (33) THUS PAUL WENT OUT FROM THE MIDST OF THEM. (34) BUT CERTAIN MEN CLAVE UNTO HIM AND BELIEVED; AMONG WHOM ALSO WAS DIONYSIUS, A MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL, AND A WOMAN NAMED DAMARIS, AND OTHERS WITH THEM. (XVIII 1) AND THEREAFTER HE LEFT ATHENS, AND WENT TO CORINTH.

The influence of Paul's Athenian surroundings may be traced in the "philosophy of history"which he sketches briefly in his address. In the Socratic position the virtue of"knowing"was too exclusively dwelt on, and in some of the earlier Platonic dialogues the view is maintained that virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance; and Greek philosophy was never clear about the relation of will and permanent character to "knowing". The Greek philosophers could hardly admit, and could never properly understand, that a man may know without carrying his knowledge into action, that he may refuse to know when [251] knowledge is within his grasp, and that the refusal exercises a permanent deteriorating influence on his character. Now Paul, in his estimate of the relation of the pre-Christian world to God, adopts a different position in the Athenian speech from that on which he afterwards took his stand in his letter to the Romans, I 19-32. In the latter place he recognises (to quote Lightfoot's brief analysis) that the pagan world "might have seen God through His works. They refused to see Him. They disputed, and they blinded their hearts. Therefore they were delivered over to impurity. They not only did those things; but they took delight in those who did them."Here we have a full recognition of that fundamental fact in human nature and life, which Aeschylus expressed in his greatest drama 1 a conception of his own differing from the common Greek view:"the impious act breeds more, like to its own kind: it is the nature of crime to beget new crime, and along with it the depraved audacious will that settles, like an irresistible spirit of ill, on the house". But to the Athenians Paul says, "the times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked"; and those times are alluded to as a period, when men were doing their best to find and to worship "God Unknown". We must not, of course, demand that the entire theology of Paul should be compressed into this single address; but yet there is a notable omission of an element that was unfamiliar and probably repugnant to his audience, and an [252] equally notable insistence on an element that was familiar to them. The Stoic ring in 23 f. is marked (pp. 147, 150).

One woman was converted at Athens; and it is not said that she was of good birth, as Was stated at Berea and Thessalonica and Pisidian Antioch. The difference is true to life. It was impossible in Athenian society for a woman of respectable position and family to have any opportunity of hearing Paul; and the name Damaris (probably a vulgarism for damalis, heifer) suggests a foreign woman, perhaps one of the class of educated Hetairai, who might very well be in his audience.

It would appear that Paul was disappointed and perhaps disillusioned by his experience in Athens. He felt that he had gone at least as far as was right in the way of presenting his doctrine in a form suited to the current philosophy; and the result had been little more than naught. When he went on from Athens to Corinth, he no longer spoke in the philosophic style. In replying afterwards to the unfavourable comparison between his preaching and the more philosophical style of Apollos, he told the Corinthians that, when he came among them, he "determined not to know anything save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified"(I Cor. I 12); and nowhere throughout his writings is he so hard on the wise, the philosophers, and the dialecticians, as when he defends the way in which he had presented Christianity at Corinth. Apparently the greater concentration of purpose and simplicity of method in his preaching at Corinth is referred to by Luke, when he says, XVIII 5, that when Silas and Timothy rejoined him there, they found him wholly possessed by and engrossed in the word. This strong expression, so unlike anything else in Acts, must, on our [253] hypothesis, be taken to indicate some specially marked character in the Corinthian preaching.

FOOTNOTES:

1 Agamemnon 730 f., a passage where the text is very uncertain and is terribly maltreated by many editors: Paley turns it into an elaborate genealogical tree, while Wecklein conjectures away the depravation of the will, which is the key to the philosophic position of Aeschvlus.