NOTES for Act 17:21

According to Luc's words, the Athenians of the evangelic era were in many like our contemporaries. It is in particular about this relation in the philosophy and generally about the question about truth, which was appropriate for them. Athens has long been known for its philosophic school: it is enough to remember the names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. And although the history of the Greek philosophic idea begins not at all in Athens, it is particularly Athens that became the symbol of the antique philosophy. And however, already in the time of Socrates and Plato in the Greek philosophy began these processes, which in the end brought it to substance degeneration.

No, of course, the Academy of Athens continued to exist, it was only liquidated by Justinian in VI s AD by a special decree, wishing to do a service to the Church (the service indeed turned out a clumsiness, but it is already another history). But here is, the philosophy itself changed fundamentally. It is just to say that five hundred years before Paul, at the time of Socrates, he, Socrates, was the only one of his kind seeker of the truth. Already then, arrived the sophists in the city, ready for a similar payment (usually not little) to teach all the interested "wisdom", which in their interpretation was usually reduced to the verbal balancing, the skills which helped the one who possesses this art "to prove" anything. Seekers of truth like Socrates, in those days, and in all the others were little.

But if the antiquity knew all the same Socrates, and Plato, later they stopped generally looking at the philosophy as the search of truth, it became an ordinary profession, and in the time of Paul the philosophers were already either interested in the questions about good and evil or the meaning of life, as Socrates, but in the exercises of the intellectual balancing, making philosophy an original intellectual sport, and the philosophers - participants of the competitions in the construction of the metaphysical systems and the verbal duels, the purpose of which was on one hand the protection, and on another - the denial of certain theses mostly having few relations to the spiritual life and to life in general.

The spectators, coming to look at such competitions, attended the philosophic discussions about as well as their less educated and more unrefined contemporaries went to the circus to look at the fight of the gladiators. It is not surprising that in such a public, where nobody thought either of God, or the Kingdom, or even the truth, Paul had practically no grateful listeners. The question about the truth can be seriously given only by the One, for whom the search for the truth is a matter of life or death. And among the amateurs of the philosophic discussions in Athens, as we see, these people were very little.