Hellenism and Christianity

Abstract

WITH the exception of two essays on “Bacchylides” and on “The Greek Anthology,” all the essays in this volume deal with some aspect or other of the relationship of Christianity to the world, ancient or modern. Touching the ancient world, there are two essays on the earliest contacts of Christianity and Paganism, and two especially delightful ones on St. Augustine. The essays on the modern world all revolve around the conflict between our “rationalistic” civilisation and religious experience as focussed by the life and teaching of Christ. The author's limpid style makes it a pure pleasure to read his arguments, and his complete candour should secure for them respectful consideration even from those who stand intellectually aloof from theology. A good example of his method, on a non-controversial topic, is the short essay on “Dirt,” in which he works out in a most interesting way the polarity of our feelings towards objects, like our bodies and sex, which we treat as at once sacred and unclean. Of miracles he holds that their possibility cannot be scientifically disproved, but at the same time he regards them as altogether “peripheral” in Christian belief, and he finds the evidence both for the Virgin Birth and for the Bodily Resurrection of Christ too uncertain to build the edifice of faith upon them. Hellenism and Christianity. By Edwyn Bevan. Pp. 275. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1921.) 12s. 6d. net.