Justin the Philosopher and the problem of Human Historicity
According to Justin the Philosopher, who lived on the border of two ages, Hellenistic and early Christian ideologies, “every man should philosophize”. This necessity is due to the fusion of thought and world in man, which forms a ‘fact’ (in a historical, philosophical, or grammatical sense) that we can and must witness. The sequence of facts builds the philosophy as man’s history, consisting of ‘a priory’s perfects’ which are transformed into the aorist. History, which goes back to a single source- the Logos, like philosophy, unfolds in a man and forms around him. The life and language of the philosopher is interrelated. In the texts of Justin the prefigurations of the Old Testament (brazen serpent of Moses, for instance) are correlated with philosophical symbols (the creation of anima mundi in ‘Timaeus’ is seen as a prefiguration of the Cross). Justin cites prefigurations as philosophical evidences or proofs. This can be described as the a-grammatical perfect - that is the past, which defines the future as already happened. This nonlinearity is born from the interaction of two principles (Hellenic and Christian) and means the recoding of the inner form of language, words, and metaphors. Justin interpreted the concept of the “sown Logos” ( logos spermatikos ) in a special way, as the cause of cognition that obliges a man bearing the seeds of Logos to seek the truth and to tell about it.