Myrtle Stevens lived in an apartment in the Beach directly facing Lake Ontario. I had a rather nondescript but hugely loyal dog at the time, named Pat. He would accompany me down the winding ravine that led almost directly from our home down to Queen Street East and the water. Pat chased squirrels as I intoned Greek declensions and conjugated Greek verbs to myself while hiking through the woods. On the other afternoons I had a part-time job as a delivery boy for Betty’s Fish and Chip Shop on Kingston Road. In the winter I was told to keep the newspaper-wrapped food orders inside my parka to prevent them being a cold, congealed mess on arrival. The system worked, but it meant that one’s hair, clothes and everything else reeked of deep-fried grease. The good thing about it was that as I pedalled the bicycle through sun, sleet and snow, I repeated the Greek vocabulary and grammar to myself until I had them down thoroughly. This meant I had little or no remaining Greek homework to do at night.
The following year, Ms Stevens introduced me to Homer’s Odyssey. I had always loved adventure stories, especially those involving travel, the kind of tale told so well by my favourite childhood author, Richard Haliburton. His mysterious and never-solved disappearance in the Sea of China on board a junk in 1939 had captured my boyhood imagination in a major way. Accordingly, to stumble, however slowly—looking up nearly every word at first in a lexicon—in the wake of Odysseus and his companions was a dream come true. The two of us, an elderly spinster and a teenager, sat together over the ancient text and shared a rare sense of harmonious delight. I counted myself fortunate indeed in such a mentor. And Pat was always there afterwards, waiting patiently for me outside. We trudged home happily in the gathering winter darkness up to Kingston Road and home. I little thought then that I would one day be the minister of a growing church situated right on Kingston Road, about ten miles farther east along that same highway.
By grade thirteen, the final year at Malvern, Ms Stevens had me convinced that I had a reasonable shot at winning a scholarship to university if I worked really hard. She said the good news was that the number of students in the whole of Ontario taking their finals in Greek was small—so, more opportunity to win. The bad news, of course, was that these students were amongst the top scholars in their respective schools. The competition would be keen and close.
The results back then were published in the Toronto daily papers. It was early July 1947, and I was up on the roof of a cottage on Lake Simcoe helping my summer boss shingle a roof when a young lad I knew from a nearby farm came up the lane on his bicycle. He had a newspaper in his hand. He blurted out: “You got nine firsts and a second. And you got a scholarship too!” I nearly fell down the ladder in my rush to take a look. There it was in black and white: the James Harris Scholarship in Latin and Greek. I let out a whoop of joy because this meant my complete tuition would be paid for all four years of Classics at the University of Toronto, with a little money for books besides. It wasn’t the leading prize; that was won by a student from Riverdale. But for me it was an answered prayer.
There was one piece of wisdom Ms Stevens gave me in addition to tutoring me in Greek. Right at the start she said that if I was serious about my studies, I should find something practical to do as a hobby. Working with your hands, she said, complements working with your brain. “You can do woodworking, manual labour or whatever, but you’ll find it keeps you balanced and fit.” I took her advice and spent an hour or so after school most days at Malvern in the shop making lamps, birdhouses, bowls (on a lathe) and other household items. In the summers before I started going north as a teacher I did a variety of jobs, from selling fresh fish off a horse-drawn wagon to cottagers at Lake Simcoe to haying, hoeing and cleaning stables on a farm near our cottage. Playing sports of various kinds was another great release from purely intellectual pursuits. I even continued to play rugger while in my first parish as a minister, from 1956 to 1958 at the University of Toronto. By that point I had already played as a forward on the Varsity first-string squad during my two years studying theology at Wycliffe, from 1954 to 1956.
The four years I spent studying Classics at University College in the University of Toronto were a mind-expanding, privileged experience that laid the foundation for everything that followed. The course involved reading in the original Latin and Greek most of the great authors of antiquity, from Cicero, Pliny and Virgil, Horace and Catullus, to Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus and Plato, to name only a very few. I could scarcely believe my good fortune, or “blessings” as my mother would have said. There were archaeological studies of art and architecture from the classical and Hellenistic eras in special lecture rooms at the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition there was an English course each year and also one in Oriental or Near Eastern Studies to put our core interests in their wider context in the ancient world.
The terms of my scholarship required that my marks be a “first” each successive year, and I was able through hard work (and prayer!) to maintain that and win additional, smaller awards as well. But the really important thing is that a whole new universe of ideas and of insights into the humanitas of our species was gradually opening up for me. It was an incredible inner voyage of discovery.
Two of the encounters that were to be powerful influences on my later thinking about religion in general and my own faith in particular were with Platonism and Stoicism. Plato, to use a colloquialism, blew me away. The myth of the cave, for example, has stayed with me all down the years. There has never been a better depiction of the way we humans often persist in ignorance or half-truths and then resist in anger when someone—a guru, a teacher or even a saviour figure—comes and seeks to lead us to the light of a greater reality.
The soaring heights of Plato’s spirituality, especially with regard to the Form of the Good, or God, took me completely by surprise. Here was a writer almost five centuries before the Christian era whose thoughts and even at times his express words echoed in the writings of Saint Paul and in the Gospels. It’s not that Paul or the Gospel authors quote the great philosopher, but his ideas and occasionally his actual illustrations foreshadow and influence the New Testament and indeed all subsequent literature in the Mediterranean world and far beyond. All the top theologians of the Church’s most formative period were inspired by Plato and by Neoplatonism, most notably of course Saint Augustine. Socrates, Plato’s hero and the key voice for all his major works, was widely recognized by these same Christian thinkers as in every way a Christian before Christianity. Meeting him in the pages of Plato in the original Greek text is something one can never forget. What I didn’t know then but was to learn later in my research for The Pagan Christ was that Plato himself had spent considerable time in Egypt, where he was instructed by the priests in the spiritual lore of that ancient treasure house of wisdom. In the writings of the classical authors, Egypt is described as “the temple of the world.”
Meeting Zeno and the Stoics was another life-changing moment of illumination for someone who had been raised in the east end of Toronto by Irish immigrants. Zeno of Citium (335–263 BCE), the founder of Stoicism—the name comes from the stoa or porch where he walked as he taught in Athens—set out a philosophy that directly embraced the world or, better still, the entire cosmos. He instructed his followers to think of themselves as citizens of the whole cosmos. He was thus the first truly cosmopolitan man.
It was profoundly liberating to read how he taught that the divine Logos, the rational principle according to which the cosmos was brought into being—and also of course the same term used in the opening of John’s Gospel and translated as “the Word”—was actually inherent in the mind and heart of every human being. Zeno called this divine spark of rationality the logos spermatikos, the “seed” word sown in everyone. Immediately you are led to think of the passage from John just cited: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . That was the true light which lighteth every human being coming into the world.” Based upon that kind of foundation, the Pagan, Zeno, taught a universal brotherhood of man and a total commitment to fulfilling one’s duty and destiny. Reading the works of later thinkers and writers such as Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, you quickly realize that they too were “Christians,” without the cross.
By this time I was reading some of the New Testament itself in the original Greek, and in doing so I one day came across the famous