TRUTH (300BC)
“Theory or Torah?”
In some respect the age of Alexander the Great was similar to ours. Greek city-states had been absorbed into an enormous empire. The community had turned into a melting pot of cultures. People could no longer oversee society. Just like in our time of globalization, they turned away from politics and focused their attention on nature and their own psyche.
People thought about the question: “what is truth?” Jews understood this question as, what does God want me to do? What is justice? Jewish truth is relational – a matter of the heart, of ideals and concrete choices. Very different from the Greeks, who understood the question as: what in essence is a human being? What is matter? Their truth is rational – a matter of the mind, of ideas and abstract knowledge. Both traditions have profoundly affected our society. In this section we first follow the Greek line of thought.
For the first time in history Greek philosophers began to perceive reality as a question. Till then the traditional view prevailed: this is just how the world is and nothing else. But now the Greeks are starting to raise questions: why is this so? And they also believed that everybody could find the answer, if only one tried hard to investigate the matter.
Of course, major disagreements arose as well as all kinds of philosophical schools. These topics were being debated at the Areopagus in Athens. What is more essential: the eternal or the temporal? The spiritual or the material? The purpose or cause of things? And how to find the answer: by thinking or by observing?
Plato emphasized thinking, the eternal, spiritual. He combined religion and rationality, in particular theology, mathematics and logic. With his theory of the eternal soul, he strongly influenced the Christian theologies of St Paul, St Augustine and other Church fathers. Democritus – best known for his theory of atoms – and other ‘sceptics’ considered observing the temporal, tangible things most relevant. They strongly influenced later scientists.
So, in our time both religious people (via the church) and atheists (via science) are indebted to the ancient Greeks, whose ideas about reality still live on in our views.