The Feast of Saint Justin the Martyr, Christian Philosopher

Today is the feast of Saint Justin the Martyr, a Christian philosopher of the second century who was put to death, together with his students, at the very beginning of the Christian era, around the year 165 CE.

Few of his writings have survived, but the work we do have demonstrates the broad influence Saint Justin had in shaping our understanding of Jesus as the second person of the trinity, the Son of God, an incarnation of the divine logos.

Justin established the theology that Jesus of Nazareth, Joshua bin Joseph, was the embodied manifestation of God’s rational aspect, the principle of divine reason alive in the world.

His work established the notion that all people carry a seed of the Word within them, insofar as all people are created in the divine image and thereby share in the being of God. This doctrine is referred to as the Logos Spermatikos and it stands in stark distinction to the much more pessimistic theology of Saint Augustine of Hippo developed three hundred and fifty years later, at the beginning of the Church’s imperial era.[1]

Justin’s theology suggests that when God breathed life into Adam, God imparted to his creature God’s own self…like a seed of the divine, God planted within Adam, and the descendants of Adam (humanity writ large), a yearning for the truth and the ability to become transformed by the truth, through the agency of the divine logos as we encounter it in ourselves and see it reflected in our fellow human beings, thus making humankind into the creatures that Aristotle referred to as “the rational animal.”

Justin also taught that the divine is indivisible, that wherever God is present God is present fully, in person and in attribute.

In other words: he taught that human beings, who bear a seed of the word within themselves, must therefore bear the fullness of God within themselves.

Justin held to the nation that by Adam’s sin our connection to the divine within us became corrupted, occluding our experience of grace, causing the seed within us to become dormant, like grain buried in a dry field. He taught that that the reality of sin functions as an existential barrier within us that cuts us off from our inherent potential and the ability to live our lives in the fullness of God’s promise. Suggesting that sin, to the extent that we are engaged in it (and all of us are) undermines our capacity to understand the truth, perceive beauty and do good, sin interferes with our desire for justice and our capacity for mercy; though it does not obviate our connection to the divine, Justin taught that it is due to sin the connection enters a stage of latency for which baptism was the cure, nourishing and enlivening the dormant seed with us, as ordinary water is to the ordinary seed, baptism confers grace and activates our potential. Baptism confers grace, facilitating the germination of the seed, which opens us to the real presence of God that has always been within us.

[1] Augustine devised the doctrine of original sin, arguing that humanity does not share in the being of God (individually or corporately) because we are created ex nihilo, out of nothing.