Chapter 28 - Introduction: Greek Christian Platonism

Summary

A Christian Platonist may be either a Platonist who requires to substantiate his speculations by a faith which transcends them, or a Christian who thinks of his faith, and desires to expound it, in terms intelligible to Platonists. St Augustine is the outstanding example of the former type, with whom could perhaps be associated from among the Greeks the ps.-Dionysius and Johannes Philoponus if we knew more about their origins. But the thinkers who built up the Greek Christian Platonist tradition and kept it within the bounds of orthodoxy mostly belonged to the latter: the Alexandrians, the Cappadocians, possibly the ps.-Dionysius, certainly St Maximus Confessor. And it was by following in the footsteps of these, but particularly of St Gregory of Nyssa, the ps.-Dionysius and Maximus, that Johannes Scottus Eriugena introduced this form of Christian philosophy to the West.

Three attitudes towards pagan learning were possible for the Christian: uncompromising acceptance, which led to heretical Gnosticism; uncompromising rejection, as shown by the early apologists and ascetics, favoured by the School of Antioch, and surviving into the Iconoclastic movement and into some forms of modern protestantism; and controlled acceptance, the attitude of the Alexandrians and of the writers discussed in this Part, which produced the Christian philosophy, or Christianism. This attitude acknowledges that the current philosophical systems contained elements of truth, a fact taken for granted by the Alexandrians and openly asserted, with particular reference to Platonism, by the Cappadocians, while rejecting what is evidently falsified by the Christian Revelation.