Lyceum & Book Club - Lecture Notes for Interaction Btwn Christian & Hellenistic Philosophies

(from wiki)

Christianity and Hellenistic philosophies experienced complex interactions during the first to the fourth centuries.

As Christianity spread throughout the Hellenic world, an increasing number of church leaders were educated in Greek philosophy. The dominant philosophical traditions of the Greco-Roman world then were Stoicism, Platonism, Epicureanism, and, to a lesser extent, the skeptic traditions of Pyrrhonism and Academic Skepticism. Stoicism and, particularly, Platonism were readily incorporated into Christian ethics and Christian theology.

Christian engagement with Hellenistic philosophy is reported in the New Testament in Acts 17:18 describing the Apostle Paul's discussions with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.

Christian assimilation of Hellenistic philosophy was anticipated by Philo and other Greek-speaking Alexandrian Jews. Philo's blend of Judaism, Platonism, and Stoicism strongly influenced Christian Alexandrian writers such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, as well as, in the Latin world, Ambrose of Milan.

The Church historian Eusebius suggested in his Praeparatio Evangelica that Greek philosophy, although in his view derivative, was concordant with Hebrew notions. Augustine of Hippo, who ultimately systematized Christian philosophy, wrote in the 4th and early 5th century,

“But when I read those books of the Platonists I was taught by them to seek incorporeal truth, so I saw your 'invisible things, understood by the things that are made' “(Confessions 7. 20).

The Neoplatonists were quite justified in regarding themselves as the spiritual heirs of Pythagoras; and, in their hands, philosophy ceased to exist as such, and became theology. And this tendency was at work all along; hardly a single Greek philosopher was wholly uninfluenced by it.

It was not until the fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian theology with Christianity that the concepts of strict omnipotence, omniscience, or benevolence became commonplace. The Platonic Theory of Forms had an enormous influence on Hellenic Christian views of God. In those philosophies, Forms were the ideals of every object in the physical world, and objects in the physical world were merely shadows of those perfect forms. Platonic philosophers were able to theorize about the forms by looking at objects in the material world, and imagining what the "Perfect" tree, or "Perfect" man would be. The Aristotelian view of God grew from these Platonic roots, arguing that God was the Infinite, or the Unmoved mover.

Hellenic Christians and their medieval successors then applied this Form-based philosophy to the Christian God. Philosophers took all the things that they considered good, Power, Love, Knowledge and Size, and posited that God was "infinite" in all these respects. They then concluded that God was omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. Since God was perfect, any change would make him less than perfect, so they asserted that God was unchanging, or immutable.

Anselm of Canterbury, a priest, monk, and philosopher defined God as the "Being than which no greater can be conceived." Almost 200 years later, Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, article 3, wrote succinctly: "By 'God', however, we mean some infinite good".

With the establishment of the formal church, the development of creeds and formal theology, this view of God as Omni-Everything became nearly universal in the Christian World.