St. Justin Martyr

He had gone out alone to a quiet place to think, as Platonists liked to do, when the old man appeared and followed him at a little distance, then drew level and spoke. He was gentle and meek, and he wanted to know what Justin was seeking in philosophy. The young man answered grandly: philosophy leads the soul to God. The old man pressed him — what, then, was God? — and let Justin lay out the Platonist picture of a being beyond bodies and change, glimpsed by the trained and purified mind. Patiently he pulled at the threads. Had Justin's soul ever actually seen this God? It had not. Then how could a faculty that had never perceived God be trusted to know him by its own power? The eye of the mind the philosophers boasted of was not enough.

There had lived, the old man went on, long before any of these philosophers, certain men both righteous and beloved of God, who spoke by the Divine Spirit and foretold things that were now coming to pass. They were called prophets. They had not argued; they had seen, and announced what they saw, fearing no one and seeking no glory. Their writings were still to be had — and a man who read them would be helped far more than by all the reasoning in the schools. Then the old man urged him above all to pray that the gates of light be opened to him, for these things could not be seen or understood unless God and his Christ gave a man to understand them. And he left. Justin stood on the empty shore with a fire newly lit in him, and from that hour he counted this alone to be philosophy, safe and profitable.

Before the shore there had been the long search, and Justin remembered every door he had knocked on. He had gone first to a Stoic, and stayed a good while, and come away having learned nothing whatever about God — the man neither knew himself nor thought the knowledge necessary. He went next to a Peripatetic, a sharp fellow pleased with his own cleverness, who after only a day or two pressed Justin to fix the fee for his lessons, so that the friendship would have a price. A teacher who opened the conversation with money, Justin judged, was no philosopher, and he left.

He had heard great things of a certain Pythagorean and went to him full of hope, only to be told he could learn nothing of wisdom until he had first studied music and astronomy and geometry, to wean his soul from the senses and fit it for the higher things. Justin had no appetite for years of preliminaries and no skill in those arts, and he turned away disappointed. Then a Platonist newly arrived in the city took him in, and here at last the search seemed to find its rest. The contemplation of pure ideas gave wings to his thought; he believed he had grown wise, and in his folly, he later admitted, he expected at any moment to gaze upon God face to face. That was the height from which the old man on the shore took him gently down — and pointed him to the thing none of the four had ever held.

The argument on the shore lit the fire; the martyrs had already laid the kindling. Long before he believed, Justin had stood in the crowds that watched Christians die, and what he saw there would not leave him. He had heard the whispered charges — that these people were atheists who scorned the gods, that they met in secret for cannibal feasts and unspeakable rites — and he had half believed them, as everyone did. But the accused did not behave like the guilty. Brought to the sword and the fire, given every chance to save themselves with a pinch of incense and a word, they refused, and went to their deaths without flinching.

It worked on him like a splinter. A man sunk in evil and in love with pleasure, he reasoned, clings to life and dreads death above all things; he does not meet it calmly for the sake of a principle. Yet here were men and women, untaught many of them, doing exactly that. Either they were mad, or they knew something worth more than living. He could not make the slander fit the courage. The contradiction gnawed at him through all his years in the schools, so that by the time the stranger spoke to him of the prophets, half the work was already done. Reason had shown him the door; the blood of the martyrs had already half opened it.

When Justin came up out of the baptismal water he did not change his clothes. The short rough mantle of the wandering philosopher stayed on his shoulders, and he wore it for the rest of his life. To the Romans the cloak was a uniform; it announced a man who had given himself to the search for wisdom and claimed to have found some. Justin meant exactly that. He had not abandoned philosophy in becoming a Christian — he was sure he had become, for the first time, a real philosopher, because he had at last laid hold of the truth all the others were chasing.

It shaped everything he did afterward. He did not present the faith as a retreat from the mind into mere belief, but as the goal of the mind's whole journey, the true and only safe philosophy. Plato and the Stoics had not been simply wrong; they had caught real glimpses, fragments of a light whose source they never saw. He would write that whatever had been nobly said by anyone at all belonged by right to the Christians, who alone knew the Word from whom every such saying came. So the convert kept the costume of his old life and filled it with new meaning, and walked the streets of Ephesus and Rome a philosopher still — only now he taught the one philosophy that could be died for.

At Ephesus, walking under the colonnade, Justin in his philosopher's cloak caught the eye of a cultivated Jew named Trypho, a refugee from the recent war, who greeted him and remarked that the gown marked him as a lover of wisdom and that they ought to talk. They did — for two whole days, with a knot of Trypho's friends listening and putting in their own objections. It was courteous and stubborn by turns, and Justin later set the whole thing down as a dialogue.

He told Trypho the story of his own wanderings through the schools and the meeting on the shore, then turned to the Scriptures they both honored and tried to show what he now saw in them. The old Law, he argued, had been given for a season and was meant to give way to a new covenant for all peoples. The Christ the prophets foretold was no mere man but had been with the Father before the ages — the same who appeared to Abraham and Moses, who made man and was himself made man and crucified. He leaned hard on Isaiah's Behold, a virgin shall conceive. Trypho granted, from the prophets, that the Messiah must by now have come, but insisted he had not yet shown himself to the world; the two never closed that last gap. When night ended the talk, Trypho thanked him warmly and wished him a safe voyage, for Justin was bound for the sea — and the conversation went out into the world as one of the earliest debates between the Church and the synagogue that we still possess.

Rome drew him as it drew everyone, and there Justin set up the thing he had become: a Christian school of philosophy. He took lodging above the baths of a man named Timothy, on the Viminal hill, and there he taught. Anyone who wished could climb the stairs and hear him — pagans curious about this new wisdom, Jews, seekers of every kind — and there too the Christians of the quarter gathered to pray and to break bread. Among the students who came was a brilliant, prickly Syrian named Tatian, who would carry on and later distort what he learned.

Justin made no secret of the address, and it would be used against him. Years later, at his trial, the prefect would demand to know where he assembled his followers, and Justin would answer plainly that he lodged above the baths of Timothy and that anyone who wished had come to him to be taught the truth. He had not hidden, because he did not think the faith was a thing to be hidden — it was, to his mind, the most reasonable doctrine in the world, and reasonable things are argued in the open. The little room over the bathhouse was schoolroom and chapel and, in the end, the evidence at a capital trial.

The boldest thing Justin ever did was to write to the men who could kill him and tell them they were wrong. His Apologies were addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius, to his sons, and to the Roman Senate, and their argument was disarmingly simple: judge us by our deeds, not by a name and a rumor. Christians were dying, he said, merely for being called Christians, without any crime ever being proved — and that was not law but mob feeling dressed as law. The charge of atheism he turned on its head: yes, they refused the demons the empire called gods, but they worshipped the one true God in spirit and truth. The charge of treason he answered by pointing out that men who believed God saw every hidden thought made the most honest subjects an emperor could have.

Then he did something no one had done in writing before: he described the worship itself, to show there was nothing monstrous in it. He told how converts were washed in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Spirit; how the community gathered on the day of the sun to hear the memoirs of the apostles and the prophets, to pray, and to share bread and a cup of wine and water over which thanks had been given — no ordinary food, but the flesh and blood of the Jesus who was made flesh. His plain report is the oldest description of the Mass that survives. And he wove through it all his great idea: that the Word, the Logos, had sown seeds of truth in every mind, so that whoever had ever spoken rightly — Socrates above all — had spoken by a share in the Word who was now fully revealed in Christ.

It came as he had foreseen it would. A Cynic philosopher named Crescens, whom Justin had worsted and exposed in public debate, nursed the grudge into a denunciation, and around the year 165 Justin was seized with six others and brought before the prefect of the city, Quintus Junius Rusticus — himself a Stoic, and a teacher of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Rusticus questioned each of them, then turned to the business at hand and ordered them to obey the gods and sacrifice. Justin refused; no one of sound mind, he said, forsakes the truth for falsehood. The prefect sharpened the threat: obey, or be tortured without mercy.

That is our desire — to be tortured for our Lord Jesus Christ, and so to be saved.

The others answered with him, each in turn declaring himself a Christian and refusing the idols. Rusticus asked Justin whether he supposed that if they beheaded him he would go up into heaven; Justin said he did not suppose it, he knew it. There was no more to be done. The prefect pronounced the sentence the law prescribed for those who would not sacrifice to the gods and obey the emperor: they were to be scourged and led away to die. Glorifying God, the seven were taken to the place of execution, beaten, and beheaded. When it was over, some Christians came secretly, took up the bodies, and laid them in a fitting place.