Philosophy and Revelation

The clash between classical philosophy and the central ideas of Judaism and Christianity began before the 6th c. In the 1st c. B.C., Philo of Alexandria had proposed an allegoric reading of the Bible and articulated a philosophy in which the notion of creation and that of providence were interpreted in light of Neoplatonic and Pythagorean ideas. Since the 2nd c., it is Christianity that confronts the ancient philosophies in the works of the apologists (2nd-3rd c.: Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lattantius, and Origen), the Fathers of the Greek church (4th c.: Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nanzienzen, and John Chrysostomus), and the Fathers of the Latin church (4th c.: Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; and 6th c.: Gregory the Great). The results of this clash are very diverse, but taken together there is a tendency to privilege, among philosophic sources, Platonism and above all Neoplatonism, sometimes alongside key elements from the Stoic tradition. The work of the Greek Fathers had no further developments in the Byzantine Middle Ages, whereas, in the West, John Scotus Eriugena continued several of their most important ideas. Among the Latin Fathers, Augustine of Hippo was instead the basis of early medieval philosophy in the West, and, sometimes in agreement with and others against Aristotle, he remained at the center of theological discussion even into the Scholastic period. Augustine’s thought, constructed against a Neoplatonic background, is not however a monolithic system, since it was composed in response to various exigencies, from the interior reflection of his first years to the conscious attempt to construct an ecclesiastic point of view in the last phase of his life; thus, to say an author is Augustinian or in the Augustinian tradition can mean many different things, not all of them necessarily conceptually homogeneous.