3. Hellenistic Influences

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Ancient Greece was very influential to the surrounding countries. Its language and philosophies permeated cultures, even after the Greeks lost their rule after the Roman Conquest, their influences lingered behind.

A special portion of history, from the 4th century BCE till the 31 BCE of the Roman conquest, often referred to as the Hellenistic world (Bagnall, 2008), was especially influential to Judeo-Christian beliefs. Besides the obvious use of the Greek language that was used to write the New Testament,  historians have also noted how the world of the New Testament have been influenced more subtly by this intermixing of cultures. Subsequently, future generations of Christians tried to make sense of Judeo-Christian beliefs within the broader framework of Greek and Roman culture. Resulting in a some interpretations that would affect humans’ relationship with the environment, the 2 most controversial being: Dualism and Gnosticism.

Dualism
Dualistic way of thinking caused people to categorize the world into polar opposites, for example, pure vs soiled, mind vs body, culture vs nature, superior vs dominated (Cairns, 1996). With such a manner of categorization, it created an unnecessary division between humans and nature: Separating nature from humans’ concept of self-identity.

White emphasizes that this distinction between man and nature has been further emphasized through a dualistic reinterpretation of the creation story (White, 1967) Therefore, “good” was associated with humans, and not with nature. While nature was associated with bad, evil and mysterious things.

Gnosticism
A sect within the early church took the teachings of dualism and combined it with Plato’s philosophy about the spiritual world who are referred to as the Gnostics. The Gnostics not only advocated the dualistic view of physical and spiritual, but they also viewed the physical as an inferior and evil corollary of the spiritual world, while the spiritual world contained the good that people should aspire toward (Ehrman, 2005).

Actual scroll containing Gnostic writings found in the Nag Hammadi “library”

Evidence of the Gnostics on Christianity can be found in the Nag Hammadi library which contains writings from Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. Amongst some of their teachings are about realizing the “divine spark” within, which was usually achieved through ascetic practices, and renunciation of the material world as evil (Ehrman, 2005).

These teachings had repercussions in the psyche of Christianity, by encouraging the dichotomizing of physical and spiritual, and thus in advocating spiritual as good implicitly conveyed that physical was bad. These negativistic attitudes toward the physical world translated toward neglect and uncaring attitudes toward the environment.

Although these ideas were condemned in the second and third century by Augustine and Irenaeus, these ideas remained within the Christian belief system implicitly influencing subsequent ideas and behaviours such as the Puritan movement in the 1800s.

 

 

References:
Ehrman, B. D. (2005). Lost Christianities: The battles for scripture and the faiths we never knew. Oxford University Press, USA
Bagnall, R. S., & Derow, P. (Eds.). (2008). The Hellenistic Period: historical sources in translation. John Wiley & Sons
Green, K., 1994. “Freud, Wollstonecraft and Ecofeminism”, Environmental Ethics, 16: 117–34.
Cairns, E. E. (1996). Christianity through the centuries: a history of the Christian church. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub.