Justin Martyr is a saint of the Catholic Church (Feast Day, April 14th).
Our College has discovered in the holy person of St. Justin Martyr the
inspiration for the renewal of classical education and Christian culture.
St. Justin was born in the early part of the second century into a pagan family in the Near-Eastern Graeco-Roman city of Flavia Neapolis (Nablus). As a young man he manifested a thirst for philosophy and subsequently traveled to the great city of Ephesus, where he appears to have discovered the truth of Christianity and entered the Catholic Church. While there, it is believed, he received instruction in the Johannine discipline of logos theology. St. Justin was well acquainted with the various schools of antiquity. Ephesus was also the site of his famous debate with Trypho who, upon meeting Justin in the colonnade of the gymnasium, appropriately exclaimed: "Hail, O Philosopher . . . Is not the whole endeavor of the philosophers aimed at God, and are not their enquiries always concerned with the role of the universe and with providence? Is not the task of philosophy to examine the problem of the Divine?"
Afterwards Justin established himself in Rome, the center and head of the classical world - Caput Mundi, where he set up something of a catechetical school in his own home, and formulated the first great expositions and apologies of the Catholic Faith for a non-Catholic audience. It was his lively and intelligent defense of the Faith that led to his martyrdom. He is, furthermore, the great source of one of the earliest and clearest descriptions of the shape of the sacred liturgy, in which he gives momentous testimony to a change in the eucharistic elements that underlies the Mass sacrifice.
Since
the fracturing of Western Christianity, some have found in Justin a suspect
alliance between philosophy and faith. Such an alliance, however, can
only be a source of joy to the Catholic thinker and educator who sees
in that alliance an affirmation of the fundamental harmony of religion
and intellectual culture, and of the goodness of nature and natural reason,
even if wounded and in need of the salvific perfection of grace. Justin
indeed may be hailed as the first Christian philosopher who discovered
in the teachings of Christ through the Catholic Church the fulfillment
of classical culture and intellectual longing - the "true philosophy"
as it were. As Justin remarked, "[Certain] errors were not only condemned
among the Greeks by the Logos through Socrates, but among the barbarians,
by the Logos Himself, who took form and became man and was called Jesus
Christ."
Classical philosophy and education sought the Logos of the universe.
Catholic Christianity announced the revelation of the Logos in the Word
made flesh. St. Paul, who himself embodied the three cultures that form
the basis of Western Civilization - Hebrew, Greek, Roman, understood the
divine plan behind the interplay of those cultures and their ultimate
unification in Christianity. He saw, for example, that whereas God worked
a supernatural revelation among the Israelites, among the Greeks He worked
a natural revelation through reason and philosophy. And the Romans, in
their practical aptitude, were held to have established the ways and means
by which the message and banner of Christ could go forth, eventually conquering
the conquerors so as to give, besides an administrative unity, a spiritual
unity to the empire. Similarly, for St. Justin, the cultural rise of philosophy
was "a very great possession and very precious in the eyes of God."
Philosophy was "the knowledge of the real, perception of the true"
and had as its end the vision of God. Thus out of the seminal thought
of St. Justin Martyr grew the original grand synthesis of secular and
sacred learning, from Clement of Alexandria to St. Thomas Aquinas, which
is the foundation of Catholic civilization and the path to the being and
mind of God.
