What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

An excerpt from Professor David Bradshaw’s Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ix–x. 

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? That is a question that no student of western culture can avoid. Tertullian, who first posed it, did so in the course of accusing philosophy of engendering heresy. The implication behind his question was that Athens and Jerusalem are two different worlds, and therefore categories deriving from Greek thought should have no place within the Christian faith. Yet even Tertullian found it impossible in practice to maintain such a strict division. The Church as a whole tended instead to follow the lead of the Greek apologists, who had drawn freely on Greek philosophy in interpreting the Christian message. Ultimately the many forms of Christian thought that vied for pre-eminence throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and into the early modern era, almost invariably owed much to both of Tertullian’s opposing worlds. The result is that Athens and Jerusalem have been deeply and inextricably intertwined in the formation of western culture.

This fusion gives to Tertullian’s question a different and more alarming meaning. Viewed in light of the intervening history, the question is not simply whether Christian theology should make use of Greek philosophy; it is whether the two great sources of our civilization are compatible. To hold that they are not is necessarily to put into question, not only at least one of them (and perhaps both), but also the civilization that grew out of their union. Whatever one’s own views on this question, it is all too clear that our culture as a whole has given it a negative answer. No conflict is more familiar, or recurs in more varied forms, than that between the apostles of reason and enlightenment and those of moral authority and revealed truth. In the ongoing culture wars, and the alleged conflict of science and religion, it is as if Athens and Jerusalem were at war before our eyes. The very existence of these conflicts reflects a pervasive sense that reason and revelation are at odds. Some of us respond to this situation gladly, welcoming the chance to choose decisively one or the other. Others face it with more ambivalence, and even with a sense that something precious has been lost. Whether one chooses gladly or reluctantly, however, the inescapable fact is that our culture demands that we choose.

It was not always so. The history of western philosophy is, among other things, the long story of the attempt to bring Athens and Jerusalem into harmony. If today our culture operates under the working assumption that they are not in harmony, then the reason must lie ultimately in the shipwreck of those endeavours. That is where the historian of philosophy, and especially of philosophy in its relation to Christian thought, faces an important and even an urgent task. When and how did this shipwreck occur? Was it inevitable? Was there perhaps a wrong turn taken along the way—one that, had it been taken differently, might have led to a different result? And, if so, is that possibility still open to us? Or has history now effectively foreclosed all reconsideration, so that the divorce of Athens and Jerusalem is a fact to which we can respond in different ways, but which cannot itself be placed into question? […] It is surely important that, viewed from a historical standpoint, the shipwreck of faith and reason was strictly a western phenomenon. In the Christian East there occurred no such result.