quinta-feira, 20 de dezembro de 2007

Filosofia Patrística


Patristic philosophy


Early Christian writers used terminology and ideas drawn from Graeco-Roman philosophical literature in their theological writings, and some early Christians also engaged in more formal philosophical reflection. The term ‘patristic philosophy’ covers all of these activities by the ‘fathers’ (patres) of the Church. The literature of nascent Christianity thus contains many concepts drawn from Graeco-Roman philosophy, and this early use of classical ideas by prominent Christians provided an authoritative sanction for subsequent philosophical discussion and elaboration.

Early Christians were drawn to philosophy for many reasons. Philosophy held a pre-eminent place in the culture of the late Hellenistic and Roman world. Its schools provided training in logical rigour, systematic accounts of the cosmos and directions on how to lead a good and happy life. While philosophical movements of the period, such as Neoplatonism or Stoicism, varied widely in their doctrines, most presented accounts of reality that included some representation of the divine. These rationally articulated accounts established the theological and ethical discourse of Graeco-Roman culture. As such, philosophy had a natural appeal to Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian thinkers. It provided a ready language in which to refine ideas about the God of the ancient Hebrew scriptures, and to elaborate the trinitarian God of Christianity. It also helped to bring conceptual coherence to the ideas found in the scriptures of both religions. Finally, it provided the common intellectual discourse that those communities required in order to present their central tenets to the majority culture of the Roman empire.

To a considerable extent, the notion of ‘philosophy’ suggested to the ancients a way of life as much as an intellectual discipline. This too drew Christians to the teachings of the philosophers. While there were doctrines and prescriptions of behaviour specific to the major schools, philosophers in general tended to advocate an ethically reflective and usually rather ascetic life, one which conjoined intellectual with moral discipline. This ethical austerity was prized by early Christians as an allied phenomenon within Graeco-Roman culture to which they could appeal in debates about the character of their new movement. The tacit validation that philosophy offered to the Christian movement was thus multifaceted, and, while it was sometimes thought to be associated with unacceptable aspects of pagan religious culture, philosophy provided some educated Christians with a subtle social warrant for their new life and beliefs.

It should be noted that ancient Christianity was itself a complex movement. Like Graeco-Roman philosophy, Christianity included a broad spectrum of beliefs and practices. Thus those early Christians who developed their beliefs with reference to philosophy endorsed a wide range of metaphysical and ethical doctrines, ranging from materialism to extreme transcendentalism, from asceticism to spiritual libertinism. Yet, while diversity is evident, it is also true that the Christian movement came to develop a rough set of central beliefs and some early forms of community organization associated with those beliefs. This incipient ‘orthodoxy’ came to value some sorts of philosophy, especially Platonism, which seemed best suited to its theological agenda. This tacit alliance with Platonism was fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, and it was never a reciprocal relationship. Nonetheless, in the second and third centuries a type of Christian philosophical theology emerged which owed much to the Platonic school and became increasingly dominant among orthodox Christian authors. It was this trajectory that defined the character of patristic philosophy.

Early Christian thought had its origins in Hellenistic Judaism, and its initial character was defined by the dominant patterns of that tradition. This early phase extended through the first half of the second century ad, as Christianity began to define its distinctive themes associated with the nature and historical mission of Jesus Christ. Throughout the second century, Christianity became increasingly a movement made up of gentile converts; some of these new members had educations that had included philosophy and a few were even trained as philosophers. Thus Christian thought began to show increased contact with the Graeco-Roman philosophical schools, a trend no doubt reinforced by the critical need for Christians – as a proscribed religious minority – to defend their theology, ritual practices and ethics in the face of cultural and legal hostility.

This so-called ‘age of the apologists’ lasted throughout the second and third centuries, until Christianity began to enjoy toleration early in the fourth century. However, it would be a mistake to consider Christian philosophical thought in that period as primarily directed towards the surrounding pagan society. In many respects philosophy, as the intellectual discourse of Graeco-Roman culture, offered gentile Christians a means to clarify, articulate and assimilate the tenets of their new faith. This process of intellectual appropriation appears to have been of considerable personal importance to many Graeco-Roman converts. Christian philosophical theology helped them to recover ideas familiar from their school training and to find unfamiliar concepts defended with the rigour much prized within Graeco-Roman culture.

After Christianity became a licit religion in the fourth century, philosophical activity among Christians expanded. The task of theological self-articulation became increasingly significant as Christianity grew in the fourth and fifth centuries towards majority status within the Empire, with imperial support. In this later period the range and sophistication of Christian thought increased significantly, due in part to the influence of pagan Neoplatonism, a movement that included a number of the finest philosophers active since the classical period of Plato and Aristotle. Later patristic philosophy had a defining influence upon medieval Christian thought through such figures as Augustine and Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, establishing both the conceptual foundations and the authoritative warrant for the scholasticism of the Latin West and Greek East.

 



1 Influences


Judaism in the time of Jesus of Nazareth was the heir of centuries of reflection on the unique existence of God, some of which was partly conditioned by Greek philosophical speculation. The book of Proverbs in the Old Testament emphasizes the one God who is the source of all wisdom and who produced the world (Proverbs 3: 19; 8: 22–31). Here wisdom begins to appear in a hypostatized role, as a quasi-independent power which serves to instantiate and express the hidden purposes of God (Proverbs 8: 1–31). Wisdom is the first product of God, and as such is a mediator between God and humanity. In the Wisdom of Solomon, an intertestamental work written between 100 bc and ad 50, wisdom (sophia) is presented as a distinct power that orders the cosmos and reveals the moral structure that conforms to that divine production. Wisdom is praised for her power and exalted as the source of prophecy and human sanctity. These texts indicate a characteristic aspect of Hellenistic Jewish theology: exaltation of a single, universal God in cosmological and ethical terms combined with discussion of a secondary principle that serves as an instrument of divine production and moral revelation.

Philo of Alexandria, the pre-eminent Jewish philosopher of the period, was preoccupied with the articulation of biblical theology in terms of Greek philosophy. His treatises, written in Greek, had a defining influence on early Christian philosophy, both in method and content. The works of Philo present philosophical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, which he read in a Greek translation (the Septuagint), using strategies of allegorical exegesis. His philosophical sources are characteristic of the Hellenistic period, a mixture of Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean and Platonic conceptions in which the transcendentalism of the Pythagoreans and Platonists was predominant (see Platonism, Early and Middle; Peripatetics; Pythagoreanism; Stoicism). For Philo, the patriarchs, especially Moses, were philosophers; it was to Moses that God revealed the transcendent archetypes upon which creation was based. These paradigms – understood as Platonic forms – constituted both the inherent patterns of order within the cosmos and the transcendent powers which generated it. Collectively, they were described as the Logos or divine Word, the ‘place’ of the forms. Philo used numerous ways to express this notion of an intermediate level of reality; sometimes the Logos seems to be only an aspect of God, in his role of relating to his products, but at other times the Logos seems to be a secondary entity that emerges from God and is used as an instrument to structure the cosmos. Other names or figures are also used, such as Wisdom (as we have seen), Goodness or Sovereignty; each represents an independent aspect of the divine nature. These ‘principles’ or ‘powers’, however understood ontologically, function to mediate between the primordial aspect of God and the cosmos that emerged from him.

One aspect of Philo’s portrayal of God bears particular mention: his unwillingness at times to attribute descriptive terms to God, particularly those that suggest direct divine interaction with the cosmos. Here Philo seems not only to be building upon traditional Hebraic reluctance to employ a proper name for God, but also to be drawing upon Pythagorean and Platonic theology, which proscribed ascribing predicates to the ‘One’ or the ‘Good’. Powers such as Logos or Sophia appear as the pre-eminent representations of the hidden and unsearchable divine nature, the self-revelation of God in metaphysical terms. But He Who Is, the God of Exodus, remained hidden in his august transcendence. This model of philosophical theology, with its interplay between a largely ineffable God and intermediate divine representations, would have a major effect on subsequent Christian thought, suggesting a philosophical approach to reflecting on the nature of Christ (see God, concepts of).

The use of philosophical discourse in Hellenistic Jewish thought was part of a natural strategy of cultural association, drawing Judaism into discussion with ideas that were well-established within its host society. But it represents as well an internal development away from more archaic anthropomorphic conceptions of God, a development common to the Mediterranean religions of the age. Philo’s use of Graeco-Roman philosophy is an important instance of this anti-anthropomorphism. God is a remote divine being who, if he can be described at all, can be approximated by metaphysical terms such as ‘One’, ‘Good’ or ‘Monad’. It was God’s Logos or Sophia that acted as a demiurge to craft the cosmos and now controls the world according to God’s good purposes.

 



2 Beginnings of Christian thought


Some of this thinking seems to have influenced the earliest Christian writers of the New Testament, especially Paul and John. Although there is no firm consensus among scholars on the precise details of this relation, some patterns are evident. In Romans 1: 19–21, creation is understood to be an act of divine revelation, universal in its scope. The one God must, for Paul, be more than the guardian of an individual people, but also the source and judge of all humanity (Romans 3). The one God directs all things providentially for the good. This idea of a single God whose universal revelation is creation can also be found in speeches attributed to Paul in Acts (14 and 17).

It is in explaining the nature of Jesus Christ that the letters attributed to Paul clearly evince aspects of Hellenistic Jewish wisdom theology. Colossians 1: 15–23 presents a pre-existent cosmic power who is the image of the invisible God and the entity first born from God. This being is the creative power, by whom all things came into being, whether earthly or heavenly. The cosmic Christ is thus ontologically central: ‘all things were created by him, and for him, and he is before all things, and by him all things consist’ (Colossians 1: 16–17). In Paul’s theology it is this power that manifested itself in Jesus of Nazareth, who died on the cross in order to reconcile a fallen world to himself and thus to God. The exact import of such Pauline passages is difficult to assess, since their conceptual background can only be approximately recovered. The same is true of the splendid prologue to the Gospel of St John. Similar prepositional language is used there to indicate the causal and ontological significance of a unique entity. The Word or Logos was with God in the beginning and serves as the power through which all things were made. As such, the Logos is the principle of life and light, and a power manifested historically in the human person of Jesus of Nazareth. This iteration of a cosmic mediator in Pauline and Johannine texts became the basis of subsequent Christian ontology, although these interpretations would differ significantly.

In the early second century, we find evidence of a developing consensus among Christian authors about God’s metaphysical properties. Ignatius, the early second-century bishop of Antioch, writes about Christ as a timeless, invisible, intangible, and impassible being who shed these characteristics in order to become human (Epistle to Polycarp 3: 2). In the mid-century Apology of Aristides, God is presented in philosophical terms as the unmoved mover, the ruler of the universe and an eternal being without beginning or end. As such, he is understood to be ungenerated, immutable, free from need or defect, immobile and exempt from partition or division. These metaphysical epithets were commonplace among pagan philosophers of the period, and their adoption by early Christian apologists suggests a common theological discourse to which the new movement was making explicit appeal (see God, concepts of).

The effort to articulate a first principle which was transcendent of the cosmos led many Graeco-Roman thinkers, particularly Pythagoreans and Platonists, to reject the ascription of many characteristics, such as mutability or mobility, to the deity. This ‘negative theology’ came sometimes to regard all predication to be inadequate, so that even notions such as perfection or immateriality seemed too restrictive (see Negative theology). This tendency – mediated through Jewish thought – is also to be found in second-century Christian thinkers, especially some loosely classed as ‘gnostics’, who believed that they possessed a special, higher knowledge (gnosis) of the ineffable God beyond the divinity revealed in the sacred scriptures (see Gnosticism). An example is Basilides, a gnostic teacher of the mid-second century, who adopted a line of thinking whose roots go back at least as far as Plato’s Academy. He held that the first principle could not be described by analogy with anything within the cosmos, but was best thought of as ‘without being’. This completely transcendent power cannot be understood from the perspective of the universe; indeed, even calling it ‘ineffable’ is suspect. Similar views are common among other second- and third-century gnostic Christian authors. Their theology usually contrasted a hidden first principle, to whom special access is required, with lesser but misguided divine powers, whose presence is more easily attested.

However, this transcendentalism was not the whole story in early Christian thought. Some Christians were influenced by more materialistic Roman philosophical schools, and their thinking was sharply opposed to the strongly transcendentalist tendencies of the gnostics. Perhaps the best example is Tertullian, a Roman jurist who converted to Christianity and campaigned vigorously for an understanding of the scriptures which was corporealistic, along the lines of Stoicism and Roman medical theory. For Tertullian, God was a spirit sui generis, a being understood in an attenuated materialist way, as a force which was invisible but nonetheless part of the cosmos. Similarly, the human soul was a corporeal entity, transmitted in the act of conception and immortal only through divine intervention. Such thinking was constructed in opposition to the developing transcendentalism of the early Christian Platonists, and it underscores the fact that the scriptural record could well have been read through a very different philosophical prism. But, as it happened, Tertullian’s materialistic theology became a dead end, as the affinity of Platonism and Christianity was successfully argued by Christian philosophers in the second century.

 



3 Early Christian Platonism


By the latter half of the second century ad, Christianity had become largely a gentile movement, with a complex political and cultural relationship to the Roman Empire. Philosophical reflection was an important component in the developing self-articulation of the movement. A good example is the second-century Apology of Athenagoras of Athens, who wrote eloquently to the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius in defence of Christianity, arguing that in rejecting the pagan gods Christians were not atheists, but believers in a single first principle. This cultural polemic is supported by his philosophical treatise On the Resurrection of the Dead. Here he addresses the composite nature of the human person, and argues that the unity of body and soul must be restored after death through resurrection of the body if human beings are to fulfil the eternal destiny intended by their divine creator. These arguments have an Aristotelian flavour, indicating a sophisticated and flexible use of philosophical sources. Similarly the three books entitled Ad Autolycum by Theophilos of Antioch, written about ad 181, contain arguments cast in philosophical terms. Written by a Christian convert to a pagan friend, these treatises argue for the uncreated nature of God, who is immutable but creates through his Logos. This Word exists both within God and also as the external expression of God through which he expressed himself in the act of creation.

The most important of these early apologists was Justin Martyr, who was executed circa ad 165. Justin was trained as a philosopher, having tried the Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean and Platonic schools before converting to Christianity. His extant writings include two Apologies and a Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Justin spent time as an itinerant Christian philosopher and even wore the philosopher’s cloak (pallium) before settling in Rome, where he founded a school. Justin’s approach to Graeco-Roman philosophical and religious culture was complex. In his view, the ancient Greek thinkers had access to the Old Testament and learned from it. Moreover, the divine Logos, the Wisdom of God, was the rational foundation of both the universe and the human soul, so that a natural knowledge of God was accessible to pagan philosophers. For Justin, all who think and act according to reason do so by participating in the Logos. Abraham and Socrates were Christians in anticipation of Christ, the incarnate Logos. Justin thus used philosophy to present a broad defence of Christianity, one that not only employed specific arguments in defence of scriptural conceptions, but also discovered a wide-ranging historical scheme to conjoin both the Hebraic and Hellenic cultures within Christianity.

The central locus of Christian philosophical activity in the second century was Alexandria, a major cultural centre of the Empire. There we find a Christian school, a succession of Christian teachers and pupils whose activities seem to parallel that of pagan philosophers. Clement of Alexandria is the first of the Alexandrian Christian teachers about whom much is known, although he himself refers to several earlier figures, especially Pantaenus, a former Stoic. Clement was probably a convert; he was born in mid-century and died around ad 215.

His principal work, the Stromateis (Miscellanies), is a compendium of ethical and theological observations on a wide range of topics. Clement’s goal seems to have been the presentation of a broadly educated, cultured form of Christianity. Its adepts would be Christian gnostics; unlike others who claimed that name, they would be both members of the developing orthodox movement and truly enlightened thinkers. Their life was described by Clement in ethical terms drawn from Stoic, Platonic and Aristotelian literature, characterized by an effort to approximate the stability and impassibility of God’s own being. Pagan philosophy was significant in Clement’s view since it represented a parallel phenomenon, the result of the illumination of the Greeks by the divine Logos. This notion of the natural knowledge of God allowed Christians like Clement to treat philosophy as an anticipation of Christianity, a path to a common fund of knowledge completed by the revelations found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

In reading scripture, Clement owed much to Philo’s allegorical method of exegesis. Through the latter, Clement was able to discover the gnostic, or deeper, meaning of texts whose origins and character seemed remote from cultured Graeco-Roman sensibilities. This more advanced reading, grounded in philosophy, separated the simple believer from the mature or gnostic Christian, whose wisdom was enriched by this joint foundation in natural and revealed truth. Clement’s capacious model of Christian wisdom, with its compatibilist understanding of the Graeco-Roman and Hebraic traditions, helped to establish an enduring Christian approach to philosophy and, more generally, to the classical heritage.

Clement’s Logos theology had another feature which followed Philo’s thought, namely his emphasis on the unknowability of God. This ‘negative’ theology was, as we have seen, an important theological strategy in the period. The concept of a primordial but uncharacterizable godhead revealed through a lower power or aspect was widely accepted by Pythagoreans, Platonists and many heterodox Christian gnostics. But Clement, like Philo before him, put this negative theology to a positive use. The ultimate God was understood as beyond finite description, having no conceptually adequate predicates; but God was not thereby cut off from the world, nor was the cosmos at the mercy of ignorant or malevolent intermediate powers. For Clement, this hidden God, alluded to by the philosophers, was made manifest in his Word, the Logos, the transcendent power which produced the world and then became present in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is this fine balance between the hidden and the apparent that characterizes Clement’s theology, setting his views into sharp contrast both with heterodox gnosticism and with more affirmative or literalist approaches to theology within early Christianity. This difference, between apophatic theology (the theology of apophasis or denial) and kataphatic theology (that of kataphasis or assertion) thus came to the surface within orthodox Christianity through the catechetical school at Alexandria.

 



4 Origen


The greatest theologian in the era before Christianity’s legitimation in the fourth century was Origen of Alexandria, a product of the Alexandrian Christian school. Origen was born into a Christian family about ad 185; his father was martyred, a fate which Origen himself also suffered, dying subsequent to torture in the Decian persecution around ad 254–5. An intense reader of scripture from his youth, Origen studied both in Christian schools and in the pagan philosophical school of Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Plotinus. Origen’s many writings encompass apologetics (for example, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus)), biblical commentary and systematic treatises (De principiis (On First Principles)). Much has been lost, although the substantial works that remain give ample evidence of vast scriptural erudition combined with a bold command of contemporary Platonic thought. Origen may fairly be said to be the most innovative Christian thinker of the pre-Nicene era, the most brilliant and important Christian intellectual before Augustine.

Unlike Clement, Origen generally avoided negative theology, perhaps because of its popularity among the heterodox gnostic thinkers whom he opposed. His theology focused upon the self-diffusion of God, a single divinity that produced a finite and intelligible image. This image – the Word – is the collective world of the Platonic intelligibles and the foundation of the lower, created cosmos. The Word is eternally generated by the Father, so that God is eternally productive of his perfect image. As such, the Logos appears to hold an intermediate status in the structure of reality, the link between God and the cosmos. Matter was also attributed by Origen to God, who was thus the only foundation of reality.

Origen also made human freedom central. Souls were seen as rational beings created with free choice. On Origen’s Platonic exegesis of Genesis, souls that turned away from God descended to lower levels of reality. Freedom of choice produced psychic precipitation, the falling of rational souls into their present corporeal state. This primordial loss of perfection resulted in a cosmic system of distinct worlds. Each degree of reality was attuned to the level of the soul’s descent. Souls only slightly separated from God could continue to engage in everlasting contemplation; Origen identified these with the stars. Others were entombed in human bodies and are subject to death. The demons are souls who chose the most extreme removal from God. Thus the cosmos was the direct manifestation of a fundamentally moral phenomenon; reality is the expression of the ethical disposition of its inhabitants. No other Christian philosopher in the patristic period linked moral freedom so directly with ontology.

Since evil is, in this theory, the direct result of the soul’s choice, the natural evils of our world and mortality itself are epiphenomena of moral evil (see Evil, problem of). Death is thus punitive, and suffering educative. The cosmos is a vast penal colony designed for the rehabilitation of souls. Origen seems moreover to have held that all souls would eventually be successfully reformed. This universalism presents cosmic history as a providential process which will eventuate in a restoration of perfection, ‘that God may be all in all’. Whether this reformation of souls precludes for Origen an additional, subsequent misuse of freedom is unclear. One corollary of Origen’s universalism, that the devil would be saved, was not lost on his contemporaries; it contributed to the controversy which surrounded Origen’s thought throughout late antiquity.

 



5 Later patristic philosophy: Gregory of Nyssa, Marius Victorinus, Ambrose


In ad 313, the imperial Edict of Milan initiated a new era of religious legitimacy for Christianity; shortly thereafter, the great ecumenical Council of Nicaea (ad 324–5) began the process of defining orthodoxy with imperial support. Christian philosophy was influenced by both events. No longer was there a need for political polemics in defence of the faith, although the effort to present Christianity to educated pagans continued unabated. Now, internal efforts to define and explain the doctrines of orthodoxy came to the fore.

These developments are particularly evident in the works of three Cappadocian bishops, Gregory Nazianzen (circa ad 330–90), Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa (circa ad 330–90). Of these, the most philosophically acute was Gregory of Nyssa, whose theology is much influenced by Origen and by post-Plotinian Platonism (see Neoplatonism). Unlike Origen, Gregory did not ground his thought exclusively on a model of free will and psychic precipitation. Rather, divine creation is the dominant image and the soul but a creature conditioned by God’s providential intention. That eternal plan involved materiality and the body. Thus the fall constituted a desecration of human nature, but it did not generate the mingling of soul with body. The misery of human life can be overcome only by restoration of our original state through God’s intervention, through Christ. Philosophy can guide the soul to recognition of its condition, but the soul can be saved only by God’s activity. Philosophy alone can never be sufficient for salvation.

Gregory’s thought put a renewed emphasis on the conceptual transcendence of God, so that the divine Father was presented along Plotinian lines as being beyond all predicative descriptions. In Gregory’s case, this view was based upon a sharp recognition of divine infinity. The created soul has, as its future course, the eternal process of the contemplation of God’s infinitude; unification of the human soul with the one God can never be wholly consummated.

Gregory of Nyssa and the other Cappadocians are evidence of a great emergence of Christian Platonism in the Greek world of the late fourth century. This same post-Nicene flowering of philosophical theology also occurred in the western portions of the Empire. Here the influence of the Greek philosophical schools was somewhat less direct, in part because of linguistic difficulties, but it was still felt. Marius Victorinus was a Roman rhetorician much influenced by the works of the Plotinian school; he translated some of these into Latin and wrote treatises with a pronounced Neoplatonic influence in defence of Nicene orthodoxy. For Victorinus, Platonism seemed a conceptual resource and philosophical ally of Christian orthodoxy. This is also true to an extent of Ambrose, the great fourth-century bishop of Milan, who was concerned not only with re-drafting Christian theology in a Platonic idiom accessible to cultured pagans, but also with presenting Christian asceticism and theology as a successful rival to Platonic philosophy. His strategy had internal resonance within Christianity as well, allowing orthodoxy to assert its superiority to Arianism, Manicheism and other forms of Christianity (see Manicheism). His greatest success was the conversion (from Manicheism) of the North African rhetorician Augustine, whom he baptized in ad 387. It was the preaching of Ambrose, together with his treatises, that led Augustine to study ‘the books of the Platonists’ which Marius Victorinus had translated. This proved a spiritually volatile mixture, sending Augustine into an orthodox Christian trajectory and a life of asceticism.

 



6 Later patristic philosophy: Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius


Like Gregory of Nyssa and Ambrose, Augustine was determined to construct a coherent Christian theology which could stand as a compelling alternative to the still active and prestigious pagan tradition. It is well to remember that Julian the Apostate, the recidivist emperor who sought to restore a paganism through the revitalization of polytheistic cult and Neoplatonic theology, ruled during Augustine’s youth (ad 361–3). Augustine’s thought might well be considered as a fresh response to the same set of desiderata as had moved Gregory and Ambrose: problems internal to Christianity and external ideas which were hostile to orthodoxy. Perhaps because he read little Greek and had an informal philosophical education, Augustine’s thought is less a Christianized Platonism than it is a systematic development of Christian theology, using Platonic epistemology and metaphysics. Often Augustine seems intent on answering classical philosophical questions in novel, Christian ways.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Confessiones (Confessions), where Augustine carefully asserts his own personal success at Plotinian contemplation in the vision at Ostia, only to conclude that pagan philosophy, while providing the soul with epistemic access to God, was inadequate as a means of assuring continuing salvific association with God. Augustine presents this theme as an autobiographical refutation both of Manichean materialism, now confounded by the soul’s transcendental vision through contemplation, and Platonism, found wanting in its prideful over-estimation of the soul’s natural proximity to the eternal and the divine. These opponents are the background to the brilliantly original account of memory and time in Books X and XI of the Confessiones, where the phenomenology of the fallen, embodied, and temporally constrained soul is explored. This account of the human soul constructing a lapsarian self and so constituting time as the medium of its collective anxiety and loss had a decided impact on the development of the introspective consciousness of the West and on the framing of a philosophical account of Genesis.

Throughout the vast corpus of his later writings, Augustine frequently makes use of philosophical notions, usually in contexts whose primary focus is theological. In the De civitate Dei (City of God), however, he returns to the question of the value of philosophy, especially Platonism. In this sustained argument, he makes plain his admiration for the intellectual utility of philosophy, while rejecting the philosophers’ pretence to salvific efficacy and excoriating their continuing acceptance of polytheistic cult. It is interesting to note that Augustine views Platonism as a natural approximation to Christianity, achieved through reason but without the benefit of revelation. Yet the Platonists were, in the end, spiritually incoherent, accepting a first principle, the Good or One, while countenancing polytheistic worship.

While Augustine was in many respects a sui generis thinker with a penchant for original reflection on philosophical topics, there were other Christian thinkers in late antiquity whose works were more clearly bound by philosophical conventions. Boethius is an outstanding example. An active member of the Roman senatorial circle during the Ostrogothic period in Italy, Boethius undertook the revival of technical philosophy at a time of its marked decline in the western provinces. He translated and commented on some of Aristotle’s logical works, and wrote a series of five theological treatises on the Christological debates of his time. Most important for medieval and renaissance readers, he completed the De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), a protreptical work on the value of the philosophic life, while a political prisoner before his execution. In most respects, Boethius was a conventional Christian Platonist, although the Christian element can be found only in his theological works (see Platonism, medieval). His efforts to articulate and defend the congruity of divine foreknowledge and human freedom were critical to later medieval scholasticism, as were his commentaries on Aristotle. His pupil Cassiodorus continued aspects of the encyclopedic legacy of Boethius, concentrating his efforts on articulating the seven traditional liberal arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy). He also wrote a treatise on the soul, arguing that it is transcendent of materiality, but distinct from God in its capacity for evil. As is the case with his teacher Boethius, Cassiodorus is significant primarily for his role in transmitting classical philosophy to the medieval age (see Encyclopedists).

At about the same time (early sixth century) in the Greek East there surfaced a collection of treatises under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite (St Paul’s Athenian convert in Acts 17). The identity of the actual author has been the subject of extended speculation and remains undetermined, although the works came to be accepted as genuine in both the Byzantine East and later in the Carolingian West (see Pseudo-Dionysius). These treatises represent the high-water mark of compatibilism between Christianity and late Platonism. They centre on the absolute predicative transcendence of God. The soul must grasp the total darkness of divinity as well as the vast manifestation of its hidden nature in the cosmos that emerged from it. The whole of reality is a theophany, an expression of the One who cannot be known per se. The levels of reality that are manifest to us constitute grades of being, each part of a pattern of divine self-presentation and return. The concept of God, while undefinable, is not privative or nugatory but can be partially understood as characterizing the source of reality.

This theology represents a Christian redaction of the pagan Platonism of the fifth century. While assuredly Christian in its theological terminology, its basic ontology is intelligible only when read against the metaphysics of the pagan Neoplatonists. This was one possible line for Christian intellectual development. However, there were others who resisted such assimilation. Chief among them was John Philoponus, who was active in the Greek East during the first half of the sixth century. Philoponus was sharply opposed to pagan Neoplatonism, especially that of Proclus. He criticized Aristotelian and Neoplatonic claims about the eternity of the cosmos, and favoured a model of temporal creation. Even if the world were beginningless, it must be seen as a contingent system that depended for its existence upon a transcendent source. In his view, the eternalism of the pagan cosmologists occluded this central metaphysical point (see Eternity of the world, medieval views of). Moreover, the commitment of many pagan Platonists to a theory of necessary cosmic emanation from the One further confused the issue. In consequence, Philoponus attempted to clarify the fundamental ontological dependence of a contingent cosmos upon its divine creator. He is a representative of a vigorous Christian philosophical movement in late antiquity which sought to sharpen the lines of conceptual demarcation between Christianity and pagan Platonism, while using common methods of philosophical argumentation to achieve that end.

The closing of the pagan Platonic academy in Athens was ordered by the Emperor Justinian in 529. Subsequently philosophy continued in a variety of Christian philosophical schools, each committed to different, rival theologies, including monophysites, Chalcedonians and Nestorians. It was on this foundation that later Byzantine Christian philosophy and early Islamic philosophy were able to develop, transmitting the thought of both the classical and the patristic traditions into the medieval period.

 


 

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