Andrew Blaski: Christ Our First Principle: The Dynamics of Persuasion in Early Christian Apologetic Discourse

Aristotle, like Plato before him, recognized that “all teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge” (An. Post.1.1). That is, human beings appear to possess knowledge that they never intentionally sought, or that was never formally demonstrated for them. Contrary to Plato, however, Aristotle rejected anamnesisas a suitable explanation, constructing instead a robust account of “first principles” (propositions or assumptions that serve as the “first basis from which a thing is known,” but which themselves cannot be proven or deduced). In this paper, I will demonstrate that early Christian apologists made extensive use of this core philosophical concept (implicitly and explicitly) in their own methods of religious argumentation. That is, contrary to certain streams of modern Christian thought, they tended not to seek to demonstrate that Christ is true, as though he could be proven by some more foundational standard, but rather that Christ is theTruth (Jn. 14:6): the ultimate First Principle, or non-provable basis for all reality. By looking at a handful of key apologetic arguments in Minucius Felix (Octavius), Justin Martyr (First Apology), and Tertullian (Apology), we will see that the central task of the early Christian apologist was not primarily to “demonstrate,” but rather to point out with clarity the explanatoryrelationship between observable reality and the truths of Christianity. In short, they sought to reveal that the very nature of things reflects Christ, from the structure of the cosmos, to the wisdom of the ancients, to the fruitful and well-ordered lives of the saints.