From Aristotle to Augustine
Aristotle’s philosophy led him to a belief in a “god” who has been compared to the sovereign of the British nation: a “do-nothing king who reigns, but doesn’t rule.” He concluded that his god was the ultimate form of eternal matter (Remember, form and matter were both in the nature of all things to Aristotle.), and that he caused all other things to be and to do what they were and did. His god came to be known as the “unmoved mover.” He governed the universe by way of a kind of magnetic attractive force.
As false as Aristotle’s concept of god seems to Christians, it is a concept that people have come to take for granted in many systems of thought since Aristotle’s day. And even today, men and women tend to see God as an aloof, uninvolved supreme Being who doesn’t actively care for the creatures in His universe, but simply governs us by way of impersonal, mechanistic natural laws. How different this is from the testimony of the Bible, which reveals Yahweh as a God of loving providence who leaves nothing to chance, but causes all things to work out according to His eternal, divine decree.
Just as the impasse between the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides led to a period of skepticism that was answered by Socrates and Plato, so the disagreement between the philosophy of Plato and that of Aristotle led to a new skeptical age in the thinking of ancient Greece. A skepticism that continued into the first century with the advent of Christianity and the writing of the New Testament. Two competing schools of thought arose out of this period that are mentioned in the book of Acts: the Stoics and the Epicureans.
Both of these movements showed little interest in metaphysics (the study and consideration of what lies beyond the physical realm). The Stoics concentrated on moral philosophy, the question of what is involved in living a virtuous life. Their ultimate answer to this was to achieve what they called “imperturbability”--the ability to accept one’s fate as determined by a fatalistic universe. A peace of mind and soul that refused to be rattled or disturbed by any of the forces that are beyond one’s control. Their ultimate hero was Socrates, who accepted his fate by willingly drinking the hemlock when he was condemned to death.
The Epicureans didn’t accept the fatalistic materialism of the Stoics; rather, they saw philosophy as a path to human freedom from religious bondage. Epicurean philosophy sought more of a hedonistic goal: the enjoyment of pleasure and the rejection of pain. Not that they were crass “party animals” who engaged in orgies and the like. They realized that unbridled pleasure-seeking can lead to ultimate misery and pain. So they sought to balance pleasures of the body and the mind with the practice of moderation. Rather than “going for the gusto” and maximum pleasure, they sought a more refined path: optimum pleasure. For them, this was the good life.
These Greek ways of thinking were eventually challenged and replaced with the worldview of Christianity. The teachings of Jesus’ apostles swept over the Roman world in an amazingly short time span. By the third century A.D. Christianity was the dominant thinking of the empire. However, an Egyptian-born thinker named Plotinus came along during that century and sought to create an alternative to Christianity by reviving and improving on the philosophy of Plato. This Neoplatonism viewed God as “the One,” an ultimately unknowable Being out of which all things flow like the rays of the sun. To Plotinus, the farther from the One something had radiated, the more material it became. Again, the material world was seen as lower, less significant, detached from God, who was so high and lofty one could really know or say nothing about Him.
It was into this age of competing philosophies that God raised up possibly the greatest philosopher/theologian of all time--certainly the greatest during the first millenium since the Apostle Paul. His name was Augustine, and he lived from A.D. 354 to 430. After going through several distinct periods of philosophical change, young Augustine became a Christian. Ten years later, he was a bishop in the church and was writing brilliant works of biblical thought that have had powerful influence in the church and the world that continue to this day.
It is important to know that many of the early battles and disputes the church of Christ fought in the early centuries of its existence were won because of the depth of study in the Scriptures themselves, as well as the familiarity with the philosophies of the day by those who studied them. Augustine was well-prepared by God’s providence to become a champion and doctor of grace. And because of Augustine’s writings, future champions of the faith such as Martin Luther, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards would be stirred with passion for the same doctrines of grace.
Part 3 of this series:
http://markaikins.blogspot.com/2014/03/philosophy-and-christian-truth-part-3.html
Part 2 of this series:
http://markaikins.blogspot.com/2014/02/philosophy-and-christian-truth-part-2.html
Part 1 of this series:
http://markaikins.blogspot.com/2014/01/early-greek-ideas-and-christian.html
No comments:
Post a Comment