Foundations

Meet a saint who is the perfect bridge for this week: a man who loved Greek philosophy and then found that all his searching pointed to Christ. Justin (c. AD 100-165) was born in Samaria of pagan parents and spent his youth studying the great philosophical schools, Stoic, Pythagorean, Platonic, hungry for truth. He found glimpses of it everywhere, but no certainty. Then an old man on a seashore told him about the Hebrew prophets and the Christ they foretold, and Justin's whole search came to rest. 'I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable,' he wrote. But Justin did not throw away his learning; he baptized it. He argued that wherever pagans like Socrates had glimpsed truth, they had glimpsed the Logos, the Word, who is Christ himself. He wrote his First Apology to the Roman emperor, defending Christians against slander and explaining the faith with calm reason. In the end he was beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to the gods, earning the name 'Martyr.' He models the virtue of wisdom: the love of truth that follows reason all the way to God. His feast is June 1.

At the start of the 5th century BC, the small, quarreling Greek city-states faced the largest empire on earth: Persia. When the Persian king Darius demanded submission, Athens refused. In 490 BC, against the odds, Athenian hoplites crushed a Persian landing at Marathon, a runner is said to have raced 26 miles to bring the news, giving us the modern race. A decade later Darius's son Xerxes returned with an enormous army and navy. At the pass of Thermopylae (480 BC), King Leonidas and 300 Spartans (with allies) held the line to the death, the courage we studied as fortitude. Though the Persians burned Athens, the Greeks lured the Persian fleet into the narrow strait of Salamis and shattered it, and the next year defeated the army at Plataea. Free Greece had defied the greatest empire in the world. The confidence and prestige Athens gained launched its Golden Age (c. 460-430 BC): under Pericles it built the Parthenon, perfected its democracy, and produced the first great historians (Herodotus, Thucydides), playwrights, and philosophers. But success bred rivalry. Athens and its empire clashed with Sparta in the long, exhausting Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), which Athens ultimately lost, ending its dominance, though not its ideas.

While the Greeks debated the good life, Jesus came proclaiming something greater: the Kingdom of God. YOUCAT (Q86-Q91) teaches that the central theme of Jesus' preaching was that God's reign was breaking into the world in his own Person. He announced it not mainly in arguments but in deeds: healing the sick, forgiving sins, casting out demons, eating with sinners and tax collectors, and teaching in parables, simple stories that hide and reveal the mystery of the Kingdom to those willing to listen. The Kingdom is not a place on a map or a political state like Athens or Persia; it is God's saving rule that begins in human hearts and will be completed at the end of time. Jesus shows that this Kingdom belongs especially to the poor, the humble, and the childlike. He called twelve apostles to be its foundation and gave the new law of love, summed up in the Beatitudes and the command to love God and neighbor. The Greeks built a polis by human reason; Christ builds a Kingdom by grace, and invites everyone in. (See CCC 541-546.)

Add today's vocabulary (hoplite, Golden Age, Kingdom of God) to your glossary. Write one sentence contrasting the kingdom Persia wanted to build with the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed.