My interesting correspondence about the relationship between Christianity and paganism continues.

Here are my friend’s latest comments:

Thanks for these leads. I have downloaded the Markos book. It appears to take a different line from the Macmullen book I cite. There seem to be two lines or ‘hermeneutics’ on this, like Vatican II – a hermeneutics of rupture (Christianity as a revolutionary break with the pagan world – as Hart argues, with Tertullian?) and a hermeneutics of continuity (with foreshadowing, the gradual “discovery of God” through divine accommodation outside the Judeo-Christian narrative, as Stark argues in his book of that title). Interesting.

And here’s my response:

On the one hand, the early Church was at pains to distance itself and differentiate itself from the pagans; on the other hand early Christians, such as St. Augustine, embraced and adopted the ideas of the neo-Platonists. The former was inevitable as the Church endeavoured to evangelize the very pagan culture in which it found itself; the latter was the necessary fruit of the Church’s fidelity to both faith and reason. Christianity was a revolutionary break with the pagan world, but it was equally a revolutionary break with the Jewish world: the Incarnation was the fulfillment and consummation of both paganism and Judaism. Just as Christ did not come to abolish the Old Law of the Jews but to fulfill it; so he doesn’t abolish the philosophical quest for truth but to reveal it in its fullness. St. Augustine and Boethius owed a great deal to the pagan philosophers; the bard of Beowulf owed a great deal to the classical epics; St. Thomas Aquinas was a disciple of Christ but also a follower of Aristotle; Dante was a disciple of Christ (and Aquinas) but was also a follower of Virgil. In this sense, I feel that the hermeneutics of rupture does violence to the reality that Christ reveals, whereas the hermeneutic of continuity is closer to an understanding of the fulfillment that Christ brings. The analogy is not one of rupture but of baptism. Christ makes all things new but does not do violence to anything good and noble in that which is old, whether it be in the Old Law or the Old Myths.