The Medieval Use of the Greek Philosophers
There has always been that class of “theologians,” Étienne Gilson tells us, “according to whom Revelation had been given to men as a substitute for all other knowledge, including science, ethics and metaphysics … Reduced to its essentials, their position is very simple; since God has spoken to us, it is no longer necessary for us to think.”1 Now this is an extreme way to put things, but it does mark a basic tendency that has as its parallel an aversion to finding wisdom from among the pagans.
It is generally recognized that the earliest apologists planted the roots of “logos Christology” in their Greek philosophical background.2 By a more philosophical reading of texts like John 1:1, 14, 1 Corinthians 1:24, and Colossians 2:3, in Christ, “Reason became man.”3 The thornier question has been whether or not this was a good thing.
The prevailing thesis for over a century has been that it was not. It was Adolph von Harnack who articulated what became a popular notion for generations of conservative Evangelicals—largely unaware of its liberal origins—namely, that Christian theology as a whole was distorted by Greek philosophical categories during this early period. At the very least, Gordon Clark wrote, such emphasis “was not capable of avoiding confusion.”4 The criticism often begs the question as to whether this inheritance had to do with method or content.
G. L. Prestige remarked,
“There is nothing particularly Hellenic, still less pagan, about rational method, except that the Greeks had the providential privilege of its discovery and development. In itself, it is part of the equipment with which human nature has been endowed by God who made mankind.”5
Platonism and the Patristics
Opinions about the reception of Plato are determined in large part by how one views that philosophy and its compatibility with Christian theology in the first place. If one does not know what Plato (or his successors) meant by concepts such as being, participation, forms, immortality, and the like, then it is unsurprising that one will fail to recognize whether these notions have been wholesale rejected, uncritically embraced, or else critically appropriated, often by other terminology. Jordan Cooper fairly summarizes that,
“The majority of Christian writers acknowledged both continuity and discontinuity between Christian thought and that of Plato, rejecting both a pure antagonism between the two as perceived by Tertullian, and a near total adoption of Greek thought forms as held by Clement.”6
We are given additional help when the fathers themselves chronicled their own journey in and out of Platonism, as when Justin Martyr spoke of his hope that contemplating the immaterial would result in the beholding of God.7
Tertullian excelled the other fathers in his antipathy toward the philosophers, and yet he had no difficulty affirming both common notions and various conclusions about God drawn from them. For example, he did not hesitate to reference Plato’s forms as a way to apply Paul’s language in Romans 1:20:
“The objects which are touched by the mind are of a higher nature, since they are spiritual, than those which are grasped by the senses. Since these are corporeal, any superiority they may display lies only in the objects—e.g., as lofty ones contrasted with humble—not in the faculties of the intellect over against the senses. For how can the intellect be considered sovereign above the senses, when it is these which educate it for the discovery of various truths? It is a fact that these truths are learned by means of parable forms; in other words, invisible things are discovered by the help of visible ones, even as the apostle says in his epistle.”8
In his Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa presupposes quite a bit of common ground between Plato and the biblical authors. To cite two examples: first, his definition of truth and falsehood is entirely a function of apprehending being and non-being;9 and second, to speak of human virtue is to speak of participation in eternal attributes.10 Pelikan identifies in Gregory a capacity to rebuke an idea arrived at “unphilosophically,” yet elsewhere caution that “nature was ‘not trustworthy for instruction.’”11
Augustine’s appropriation of Plato was of a critical kind.12 His Confessions evidence a precursor to this balance, as he offers a repetition of truths he found “there” (in the Platonists)13 that were similar to Scripture, yet that next step of the same thing he found “nowhere” among them.14 Thomas Aquinas himself would recognize this balance in writing that, “whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with faith, he adopted it; and those things which he found contrary to faith he amended.”15
This is also not to speak of some early appendage of his thought that faded away. On the contrary, it remained a unifying concept throughout his life. Against the notion of “baptized Platonism,” Kenney speaks of “adaptive novelty,” an appropriation that “was nuanced and complex and on-going.”16 Certainly notions like recollection, which Plato rooted in a preexistence life, were discarded by Augustine soon after conversion. However those elements which most profoundly highlighted the superiority of eternal, immaterial things remained central. “It is evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists,”17 since they “have seen that whatever is changeable is not the most high God.”18
The Islamic Invasion of Aristotle
When we move forward into the scholastic era, Arvin Vos is clarifying in asking: “Was [Aquinas] basically an Aristotelian who also wanted to make room for the truths of revelation, or was he a Christian concerned to explain this truth in the most adequate way possible - which for him meant utilizing Aristotle?”19
The “adequacy” of this Christian handling of Aristotle must also be understood as a matter of apologetics with respect to Islam. Thomas J. White puts it in this way,
“The debate was greatly affected by the influential interpretations and commentaries of the Aristotelian corpus effectuated by Avicenna and Averroes which presented diverse points of compatibility or incongruity with the confession of the Catholic faith.”20
In short, silence to Aristotle would have meant intellectual retreat.21 It was not that Christianity was to be modified to the Philosopher, but rather the burden was to show that Christianity could handle Aristotelian categories and questions better than could Islam.
Neither was Thomas simply baptizing Aristotle into Christian service.22 As Henry Koren pointed out, “St. Thomas widened the scope of Aristotelian metaphysics by adding to it many other elements, especially from Neoplatonic philosophy.”23
Aristotle’s philosophy implied three claims that Aquinas could not accept as a Christian. These three are the eternity of the universe, the immortality of the soul, and the omniscience and providence of God. One resolution was to write a book On the Eternity of the World in 1270. The question for him was not whether the Scripture was to be affirmed. Of course it was. Neither was the question whether the universe could have existed always and apart from divine causality. The sole question was whether or not reason per se could demonstrate that the universe must have a beginning.
Understanding the exact question is one gateway into how Thomas (and classical theology in general) resisted the idea that something could be true in theology while false in philosophy, or vice-versa.24 Here, for instance, it is not the case that Thomas was asking his readers to accept either Aristotle or Scripture. Rather, the reader was being challenged to rightly classify this article as belonging to faith and thus the authority of Scripture, instead of belonging to rational demonstration.
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1. Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 5, 6.
2. cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 83-87; 95-101.
3. Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 2005), 15.
4. Gordon Clark, Thales to Dewey: A History of Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1980), 214.
5. G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1936), xiii.
6. Jordan Cooper, Prolegomena (Just & Sinner, 2020), 121.
7. John Peter Kenney, Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5.
8. Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 18 (ANF 3:199).
9. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 60.
10. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 31.
11. Jeroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 26.
12. cf. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 88-100; Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction, 9-10, 17-31; Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine; Warfield, “Augustine’s Doctrine of Knowledge and Authority,” The Princeton Theological Review, Volume V, Number 3 (July 1907) 353-397.
13. Kenney suggests Neoplatonism is a “modern neologism” whose usefulness has come and gone. Better to simply see this era as featuring a development in Platonism proper: in “None Come Closer to Us Than These:’ Augustine and the Platonists”, Religions 2016, Vol. 7, (11), 115.
14. Augustine, Confessions, 7.9.14.
15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Pt. I. Q.84. Art.5
16. Kenney, Contemplation and Classical Christianity, 11.
17. Augustine, City of God, VIII.5.
18. Augustine, City of God, VIII.6.
19. Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, & Contemporary Protestant Thought: A Critique of Protestant Views on the Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 132.
20. Thomas Joseph White, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2016), 69.
21. cf. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, II. Pt. 2, 144.
22. cf. Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
23. Henry J. Koren, An Introduction to the Science of Metaphysics (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1955), 13.
24. cf. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 40; Maurer, Medieval Philosophy, 100.
