Note (return) — Chapter IV

Athenagoras. The petition on behalf of Christians, which Athenagoras, "the Christian philosopher of Athens," presented, to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, nowhere expressly designates Christianity as a philosophy, and still less does it style the Christians philosophers.371 But, at the very beginning of his writing Athenagoras also claims for the Christian doctrines the toleration granted by the state to all philosophic tenets.372 In support of his claim he argues that the state punishes nothing but practical atheism,373 and that the "atheism" of the Christians is a doctrine about God such as had been propounded by the most distinguished philosophers—Pythagoreans, Platonists, Peripatetics, and Stoics—who, moreover, were permitted to write whatsoever they pleased on the subject of the "Deity."374 The Apologist concedes even more: "If philosophers did not also acknowledge the existence of one God, if they did not also conceive the gods in question to be partly demons, partly matter, partly of human birth, then certainly we would be justly expelled as aliens."375 He therefore takes up the standpoint that the state is justified in refusing to tolerate people with completely new doctrines. When we add that he everywhere assumes that the wisdom and piety of the emperors are sufficient to test and approve376 the truth of the Christian teaching, that he merely represents this faith itself as the reasonable doctrine,377 and that, with the exception of the resurrection of the body, he leaves all the positive and objectionable tenets of Christianity out of account,378 there is ground for thinking that this Apologist differs essentially from Justin in his conception of the relation of Christianity to secular philosophy.