THEOLOGY, INFLUENCE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY ON

The influence of Greek philosophy on Christian the ology has been complex and varied, decisive in shaping its mental cast. The Christian faith came to men in the gospel kerygma of salvation in Christ, a message proclaimed in the popular and concrete manner proper to the Semitic genius. Theology being the reflex and systematic expression of faith that seek understanding, Christian reflection on the history of man's salvation needed a philosophy. It so happened that it was the syncretic Middle Platonism and the Neoplatonism prevalent in the Hellenic world in the centuries that prepared and saw the birth and youth of Christianity that provided theologians with the phraseology and ideas for reflection on their faith. Christian theology might have looked different had it been born and had it grown up in another ideological and cultural, say a Hindu, milieu. Without entering into the historical details of the Greek influence, and at the inevitable risk of oversimplifying the historical facts, this article will outline its main positive and negative sides at the two historic junctures: (1) of the Biblical message and Hellenic philosophy in the early Christian centuries; (2) of Augustinianism and Aristotelianism in medieval scholasticism. In conclusion the article will briefly indicate the renewed influence of Greek philosophy in the contemporary renewal of theology.

Biblical Message and Hellenic Philosophy. The Christian message entered the Hellenic world as a great novelty. Not only was it proclaimed in the cast of the Hebrew mind, which is spontaneous and synthetic rather than reflex and analytic, bent on experience of the concrete rather than on abstraction and systematization; but the way in which it presented itself, viz, as a "history" of salvation rather than as a philosophy, jarred with the Greek mind, for which historical and concrete facts offered little interest—the Greeks had a science of history and of its cyclical returns, but no theology of history. Besides, the Biblical history of salvation carried a metaphysics in sharp contrast with the Hellenic vision of God, of man and the world.

Middle Platonism. The Middle Platonic world vision, predominantly Platonic with an alloy of Aristotelian and Stoic elements, presented one aspect appealing to the Christian mind: the opposition between the spiritual and the sensible, as of permanent values and fleeting things. But it saw God, the supreme spiritual reality, as the necessary cause of the cosmos either through emanation or through the work of a demiurge (world architect), often against the background of a dualistic pattern that placed an uncreated or eternal matter, the evil principle, in opposition to God. Man himself was to the Greek mind a duality of spirit and matter, a fallen soul imprisoned in a body, awaiting or striving for liberation from the body and return to God. (see platonism.)

Into this ideological setting the Christian message of salvation entered: a God who out of love freely created the world and man and who after man's fall into sin promised and worked out his salvation; a Savior who came in the fullness of time and by His Passion, death and Resurrection redeemed God's people from sin and death, and now leads it to the ultimate fulfillment of history in a new world. Creationism, presupposed by salvation history, in which creation is the first act, eliminated from the concept of God all monistic idea of necessary creation. God is the supreme spirit, infinite, incomprehensible, immutable, almighty, in the sense of a transcendent free Creator, not fashioning the cosmos from an eternal, uncreated matter but making all things, men included, out of nothing at the beginning of time. Christened and purified from all monistic connections, the Hellenic idea of one God as infinite spirit served Christian theology to correct, if correction was needed, Biblical anthropo morphism.

Thus the idea of creation, unknown to the Greek, latent or implicit in the Bible, made explicit in early Christian teaching (note the opposition in the Nicene Creed between "begotten" and "made"—Henry), may well be the cardinal innovation of Christian Greek theology. It vindicates the goodness of matter created by God and thereby sets dualism aside; it makes for the possibility of the otherwise unthinkable mystery of the incarna tion—the Word could not assume what is evil. The idea of man himself becomes different both from the Biblical image of a living body and from the Greek concept of a soul imprisoned in the body: matter and spirit are seen as complementary principles of being. Resurrection becomes not just the revivifying of a once-living body but the reunion of man's natural components.

Neoplatonism. With its insistence on the One inaccessible Spirit—necessary cause of all degrees of being, matter not excluded—and on the return to the One as salvation of man's spirit, the neoplatonism of plotinus (3d century) made an even stronger appeal to Christian theologians, e.g., Saint Augustine, because of its thorough "spiritual" character and its firm and orderly structure. It needed christening by eliminating necessity from creation and removing the intermediary hypostases in the process of the descent of the multiple from the One. Its influence did not substantially modify Christian theology.

Selection. "Orthodox Christian thought," thus, "had chosen from Greek philosophy the elements that seemed to it to be serviceable, and it had rejected the metaphysical theses that to it seemed incompatible with its own principles and particular needs" (Tresmontant, Les Idées maîtresses 15). Their praeparatio evangelica (Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen) was thus purified and completed.

Negative Side. In consequence of the Greek failure to integrate into its metaphysics time and history, there was also a negative side to the Greek influence on Christian theology. Greek thought, beguiled by the cyclic theory with its idea of history as the inexorable unfolding of a series of events, failed to perceive in time any real value or purpose. Early Greek theology, then, located the Redemption mainly in the fact of the Incarnation of the Word, while yet holding in faith the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ (see the creeds of the Nicaean and Constantinopolitan Councils). Influenced by the Greek ἀπάθεια, the early Fathers gave too little importance to the sufferings of Christ. For all that, in contrast with Hellenic philosophy, the Biblical metaphysics of time and history as an irreversible flow of unique, decisive, salvific events forced upon their theology a sense of the personal and existential.

Technical Concepts. This existential approach is apparent in the historic service that Christianized Greek philosophy rendered to the early councils by providing them with technical concepts needed to express the metaphysics of the two great mysteries of salvation history: Christ and the Trinity. The Biblical message spoke of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—one God working out mankind's Redemption through the Son made man. It did not say in so many words that the Trinity is one God in three Persons or three Persons in one divine essence or nature; nor did it say that Jesus the Savior is a Divine Person in two natures, divine and human. Theologians, drawing from Greek philosophy the technical terms of nature, essence, and person, and adapting their meaning to the Christianized vision of God, the world and man, built up the reflexive expression of the Trinitarian and Christological mysteries. They often did so, in reaction to defective and unorthodox expressions, after long and harrowing discussions. Here Athanasius, the two Gregorys, and Basil played a decisive role. Thus one has the theology of the Son, or the word [ logos (λόγος)], and of the Spirit, consubstantial (ὁμοούσιος, originally a Gnostic term—Henry; see consubstantiality; ho moousios) with the Father, three hypostases ([symbol omitted]ποστάσεις; see subsistence) or πρόσωπα in one divine nature (φύσις), or essence (ούσία). One also has the unilinear pattern of the Trinitarian processions: from the Father, unborn principle, the Son proceeds by way of generation (γέννησις), and from the Father through the Son proceeds the Spirit (ἐκπορεύεται). Through the Incarnation the Son is consubstantial with men in their specific human nature, as He is consubstantial with the Father and the Spirit as God in the one divine nature, and with this difference: Christ is not a human person. Mary is theotokos (θεοτόκος), not merely χριστοτόκος, because Christ is one Divine Person.

The Greek councils did not go beyond the narrative of their creeds in the expression of the soteriological content of the Christian message. Its theological formulation comes mainly from Saint Augustine, who drew it from Scripture; it is not of Greek origin. Augustine insisted on the Fall and man's Redemption in Christ. Yet in metaphysics and theology he was a Platonist. He bequeathed to Christian theology a synthesis of Neoplatonism and reflex soteriology that, under the name of augustinian ism, dominated Western thought for centuries.

Augustinianism and Aristotelianism. Meeting to blend in different proportions in the various schools of scholasticism, particularly in thomism, Augustinianism and aristotelianism each represented one trend of the Greek influence in theology. Augustine believed in the truth of a number of Neoplatonic ideas, and thanks to him the characteristic doctrines included in the "Platonism of the Fathers" passed on to early scholasticism: the opposition of two worlds, one intelligible and one sensible; God, Father of the universe and incomprehensible in His simplicity; the spirituality of the soul; a slighting of matter and the corporeal; a systematic view of the world with God as source and end; and, within this framework, all beings ordered according to the hierarchic degrees of being and simplicity. Yet, not its Platonism but its soteriology was the chief influence of Augustinianism on theology. Nor was Platonism here the chief Greek influence.

Wiith the arrival in the West of Aristotle's philosophy (in Latin translations from the Greek or the Arabic) and its adoption by scholasticism, another Greek influence on theology was added, mainly on that of the Latin West. The East, except for Saint John Damascene, "the scholastic" and Aristotelian of the East, remained in the Platonic current.

Aristotelianism's chief significance in theology was methodological, not merely for its use of Aristotle's logic and categories, but more especially for its acceptance of his rational vision of the world. This led, in Saint Thomas, to a definite distinction between faith and reason, natural and supernatural. A prerequisite to that acceptance was a Christianizing of Aristotle's metaphysics, of the two basic ideas: of God, the immobile mover of all things, only their moulder and not their creator; and of matter uncreated and eternal. The Christianizing was done by means of the great Christian corrective: creation out of nothing. Thus Christianized, Aristotle's metaphysics, built on the pairing of act and potency, or matter and form, as principles of being, covers the whole range of reality, from the pure act of God through the various degrees of beings composed of act and potency to the lowest degree of reality, that of pure potency, or prime matter. It gave a structured explanatory system of the entire order of nature, and it did so, in Saint Thomas's doctrine, without on any point contradicting the data of faith.

Even in the field of faith Aristotelian philosophy had a role to play. On the assumption that grace follows the pattern of nature, it applied the principles of reason to supernatural realities. Hence the attempt of Saint Thomas to extend hylomorphism, the metaphysics of act and potency, of the four causes (efficient and final, material and formal) to the field of supernature and grace: the mystery of God, of the Incarnation, of the life of grace, and of the sacramental economy of salvation. Scholasticism is "theology under the regime of metaphysics" (Congar), actually, of Christianized Aristotelian metaphysics. Such phrases express the deep-going influence of Greek philosophy in its Aristotelian form on Catholic theology.

Theologians Augustinian in orientation reacted against this intrusion of "the Philosopher" into theology, although they themselves had already accepted to varying extents his method and principles. Reason, they said, and they meant Aristotelian metaphysics, is competent in earthly things; it is not suitable for things spiritual and eternal—here only revelation is a safe guide. They found exaggerated Saint Thomas's trust in human reason with regard to the world of grace.

In fact, as subsequent developments and deviations were to prove, there is inherent in scholastic theology a danger of undue rationalization or conceptual systematization out of touch with reality. The Aristotelian theory of abstractive knowledge, which denies to human reason intellectual knowledge of the individual and the concrete, exposes a theology cast in its mould to the danger of drifting away from the specific object of Christian theology, viz, the gospel message about the history of salvation. Nor is the objection unfounded that the scholastic mind, following too closely Aristotelian principles, may lack a sense for the historical. But thanks, no doubt, to the persistent hold of the Augustinian tradition, soteriology and the soteriological meaning of Christ's Passion, death, and Resurrection always remained part and parcel of scholastic theology.

Renewed Greek Influence in Contemporary Theology. The reaction against scholasticism in contemporary theology—some have spoken of a "crisis of Thomism"—provoked by and in turn fostering the renewal of Biblical and historical theology, may to all appearances tend to weaken the Greek influence as embodied and living in scholastic theology. But the present-day return to the sources, particularly to the Greek Fathers, includes a renewed Greek influence. Greek patristic theology differs in method a great deal from the scholastic; it is more pastoral and less academic, more spiritual and less speculative. Its revival may lead to an existential rather than essential, a more real rather than speculative approach to the history of salvation. This is one of the beneficent results of the patristic revival.

With regard to Catholic dialogue with non-Catholics or non-Christians, the awareness of the influence exercised by Greek philosophy in the shaping of Catholic theology should warn one of the possibility of expressing the gospel message of salvation in a theology built up under the influence of a different philosophy. Present-day theology is one way of expressing reflexively and systematically the riches of Christ. Under the influence of Chinese, Hindu, or African thought, future centuries may bring another.

See Also: dogmatic theology, articles on; greek philosophy; greek philosophy (religious aspects); stoicism; theology, history of; dialectic in theology; theological terminology

Bibliography: r. arnou, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. a. vacant et al., 15 v. (Paris 1903–50) 12.2:2258–2392. y. m. j. congar, ibid. 15.1:341–502. p. henry, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner, 10v. (2d, new ed. Freiburg 1957–65) 5:215–22. a. h. armstrong and r. a. markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy (New York 1964). t. boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, tr. j. l. moreau (Philadelphia 1960). j. daniÉlou, Message évangélique et culture hellénistique aux II ^e et III ^e siècles (Tournai 1961). g. l. prestige, God in Patristic Thought (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; (London 1935; repr. 1959). 1935; repr. 1959). h. tardif, "L'Unité du composé humain," in L'Homme au regard de la foi, ed. p. barrau et al. (Paris 1959) 45–95. c. tresmontant, A Study of Hebrew Thought, tr. m. f. gibson (New York 1960); Les Idées maîtresses de la métaphysique chrétienne (Paris 1962).

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