Annotation LI

”Go, and tell John: The blind see,” etc. — Matthew 11:5

Whether before Christ's coming faith in Christ was necessary for salvation.

Chrysostom, homily 37 on Matthew, disputing on these [words], seems to opine that for the Gentiles and Jews living well before Christ’s coming, no faith in Christ, no knowledge of Christ, was necessary for salvation. For there he relates such things: “Men who died before Christ’s coming could then be saved even without having confessed him. For the worship of Christ, who had not yet come, was not required of them; but that — the worship of idols being spurned — they should know the one only God, the Founder of all. ‘For the Lord,’ he says, ‘thy God is one Lord.’¹ Therefore the Maccabees are [objects] of admiration, who chose to die rather than betray the Law. We greatly admire also those boys, and several others among the Jews, who lived well and most excellently, and preserved this measure of knowledge inviolate — of whom nothing further was required; for then, as we said, it sufficed to know the one only God. But now it is not so; rather, the knowledge of Christ is necessary for salvation.” And below: “But [as to the fact] that those who died before Christ, and therefore did not know him — if they withdrew from the worship of idols and adored God alone, [and] if besides [they behaved well toward] men… [if besides they behaved well toward men and] passed their life honorably, they will attain eternal goods and beatitude. Hear what Paul says: “Glory, and honor, and peace to everyone who works good — to the Jew first, and to the Gentile.” Again, in the first sermon on Lazarus, he indicates that the just who preceded the time of the evangelical preaching had no faith in a future resurrection, writing thus of the beggar Lazarus: “Lazarus could not so much as philosophize about the resurrection, but believed that the affairs of this life were ended with the end of this life; for he was of the number of those who preceded the grace of the Gospel,” etc. Thus far Chrysostom — whose opinion certain very ancient writers had professed many years before him. Of whom Justin Martyr, in the book of Questions posed by the gentiles, question eight, says: “Those who lived according to reason are Christians, even if they were thought not to have known God — such as, among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus, and others like [them],” etc. And Clement of Alexandria, in the fifth and sixth book of the Stromata, says that those who lived before Christ and lived honorably were made just, either by the law or by philosophy, but that they lacked only faith in Christ; wherefore in hell they awaited the coming of Christ and the apostles, and by their preaching there were converted, so that they believed in Christ, and thus at length were saved.

Against this assertion the other theologians seem to protest — before others, Augustine, who in the 157th letter, to Bishop Optatus, writes thus: “Let that faith be preserved [sound] in us, by which we believe that no one of men — whether of greater age, or of however tender and recent an age — is freed from the contagion of the ancient death and from the obligation of the sin which he contracted by [his] first birth, except through the one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus; by the most salutary faith in whom — the same [being] man and God — even those just [ones] were made saved, who believed, before he came in the flesh, that he would come in the flesh. For the faith is the same, both ours and theirs; since they believed that would be, which we believe has been done.” And below: “Accordingly, since all the just — whether before Christ’s incarnation or after — have neither lived nor live except by faith in Christ’s incarnation, in whom is the fullness of grace: assuredly that which is written, that there is no other name under heaven in which we must be saved, avails for saving the human race from that time [onward] from which the human race was corrupted in Adam.” This [says] Augustine.

I should believe that Chrysostom, in his words, wished to allude to that knowledge and faith which the Scholastics call explicit — that is, an open and distinct knowledge of the singular mysteries of Christ — which not all the just before the Savior’s coming attained. For it sufficed for the simpler and lesser Jews to have [only] the knowledge of the human redemption, wrapped up under the veils and coverings of the sacrifices and ceremonies. But for the Gentiles — if any attained salvation without knowledge of the Mediator — it was enough to have the same faith enclosed within a belief in the one God: that is, to believe that God was the Savior of the human race, according to an order hidden in his admirable providence, and

revealed by a special privilege [to some of their own seers and Sibyls]. See below, the passage bearing on this, Annotation 151.