The Feast of Saint Justin the Martyr, Christian Philosopher

Today is the feast of Saint Justin the Martyr, a Christian philosopher from 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 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 of suggests that when God breathed life into Adam, God imparted to his creature God’s own self, like a seed of the divine, planting within Adam and the descendants of Adam (humanity writ large) a yearning for the truth and the ability to become transformed in our encounter with the truth, through the agency of the divine logos, making humankind into the creatures that Aristotle referred to as “the rational animal,” unlike every other species of animal on Earth.

 Justin taught that the divine is indivisible.

 In other words: he taught that where God exists, God exists fully, and 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 nations 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 go dormant, like grain buried in a dry field. The reality of sin functions as an existential barrier cutting us off from our inherent potential and the ability to live our lives in the fullness of God’s promise. Sin undermines our capacity to understand the truth, perceive beauty and do good, it interferes with our desire for justice and capacity for mercy. Sin does not obviate our connection to the divine, rather, it enters a stage of latency.

 Justin taught that the water of baptism is to the divine dormant seed with us, lying dormant, what ordinary water is to ordinary seed, it actuates our potential. Baptism confers grace, and the real presence of God, which had always been there, germinates within us.

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[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.