Greek philosophy has had a profound influence on Christianity since its early days. Many key Christian doctrines and ideas find precedents in Greek philosophical schools of thought that were active during the first centuries of the church. In this 9000 word article, we will provide an overview of some of the main ways Greek philosophy impacted the development of Christian theology and practice.
Platonism
One of the most significant examples of Greek philosophical influence on Christianity is found in Platonism. Plato was a hugely important Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th-4th century BC. His metaphysical and epistemological ideas deeply shaped the landscape of Hellenistic philosophy during the early Christian period. As Christianity emerged and began to articulate its doctrines more systematically, Platonic concepts provided helpful frameworks for explaining central Christian beliefs.
A key example is the Platonic concept of separate realms of ideal forms and imperfect physical manifestations. This metaphysical dualism resonated with early Christian thinkers like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. They saw it as a useful way to explain the distinction between the perfect heavenly realm inhabited by God and the corrupted physical world. The material world was merely an inferior imitation of divine ideals. This Platonic perspective contributed to a deprecation of bodily existence and exaltation of the spiritual over the material that exerted significant influence on early Christian asceticism.
Plato also asserted the immortality of the human soul. This claim aligned well with Christian doctrines of eternal life and the afterlife. Platonic notions of the soul’s pre-existence and reincarnation were rejected, but the basic concept of a non-physical human essence that transcends bodily death was influential on Christianity. This philosophy fed into a negative view of physicality and helped shape ideas about the soul’s ascent into heaven after death.
Additionally, Platonism contributed metaphors and frameworks that proved useful for early Christian thinkers seeking to articulate orthodox Christology. Platonic concepts like Logos (divine reason) helped explain how Christ could be pre-existent and yet become incarnate on earth. Platonic idealism thus provided philosophical foundations for the doctrine of the incarnation that were appropriated and Christianized by theologians like Justin Martyr.
Aristotelianism
Another major branch of Greek philosophical thought that exerted significant impact on the development of Christian doctrine was Aristotelianism. Aristotle was Plato’s most famous student and an immensely influential philosopher in his own right. His works shaped thinking across spheres like metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and natural sciences. Christian engagement with Aristotelian ideas can be traced back as early as the late second century AD.
In contrast to Platonic dualism, Aristotle maintained a more holistic perspective that did not sharply divide physical and spiritual realms. He also placed strong emphasis on sense perception and experience as sources of knowledge, rather than just relying on pure rationalistic reflection. During the medieval period, Aristotle’s writings on logic, ethics, and natural philosophy were tremendously influential across the European intellectual landscape and came to exert substantial impact on scholastic Christian thought.
Key Christian thinkers like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas selectively appropriated ideas from Aristotle, aiming to reconcile them with scriptural revelation. Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology shaped scholasticism and Thomism, one of the foremost traditions of medieval Catholic thought. Concepts like Aristotle’s four causes were incorporated into arguments for God’s existence and the rationality of Christian belief.
Aristotle’s virtue ethics shaped scholastic understandings of concepts like habit, vice, and human flourishing. His stress on empirical observation of nature drove extensive scholastic exploration of topics ranging from motion, causality, and logic to biology and astronomy. Scholastic appropriation of Aristotelian thought provided the intellectual architecture for the stunning theological and philosophical output of figures like Aquinas that went on to massively shape the trajectory of medieval and Catholic Christian thought down to the modern day.
Stoicism
Stoicism was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. It became influential across the Greco-Roman world and left recognizable traces on early Christian thought as well. Stoicism taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment. One needed to achieve a kind of dispassionate rational tranquility by living according to Nature. This involved conforming oneself to Fate or Divine Providence rather than succumbing to passions.
These Stoic ethical principles resonated with some strands of ancient Christian thought, feeding into ideas about apatheia (freedom from passions) and the necessity of subordinating oneself to God’s will. The Stoic concept of the logos (the rational ordering principle of the universe) also paralleled some early Christian uses of Logos theology to describe Christ’s cosmic significance. Christian authors like Tertullian explicitly engaged with and responded to Stoic philosophers like Seneca.
Stoic notions of natural law, reason, and fatalism influenced early Christian perspectives on morality, providence, and living in accordance with God’s will. Stoic ideas filtered into Christianity through varied channels including Jewish Hellenistic philosophers like Philo of Alexandria. They contributed to ethical perspectives in early Christian communities that focused on themes like self-control, reason’s domination of passions, and acceptance of adversity as part of God’s plan.
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism was a school of thought originating with Plotinus in the 3rd century AD that creatively reworked and developed Plato’s philosophy into a comprehensive worldview. It had significant influence on Christian theology in late antiquity. Plotinus taught that all of reality emanates from a transcendent One beyond being. He proposed that the rational human soul has within it a divine spark which enables it to rise up again through contemplation to eventual unification with the One.
For Neoplatonists, the spiritual realm is fundamentally good and the material world is far inferior. Salvation is achievable through freeing oneself from the shackles of bodily existence and worldly distractions in order to access the divine within. These Neoplatonic concepts permeated the writings of numerous Christian authors in the patristic era, from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa to Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and John Scottus Eriugena.
They contributed to notions like beatific vision of God, stages of spiritual ascent, mystical illumination, and the soul’s homeward journey back to unity with divine reality. Neoplatonism provided vocabulary and conceptual frameworks for articulating central aspects of patristic Christian mysticism and contemplative spirituality centered on the direct experiential knowledge of God. Its influence shaped Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant mysticism down to the modern day.
Patristic Thought
The Greek philosophical currents we’ve surveyed above permeated the terrain that formative Christian intellectuals – known as the Greek and Latin Church Fathers – inhabited as they articulated Christian doctrine during the first centuries of the church’s existence. Scholars describe Christianity’s early development as marked by a process of Hellenization as it spread across a late antique world suffused by Greek philosophy.
Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo were all substantially shaped by Greek philosophy in their education and intellectual outlook. They built bridges between biblical revelation and Greek reason. For patristic authors, Christianity fulfilled and perfected the partial glimpses of truth found in Greek philosophy.
Patristic theology engaged deeply with Neoplatonism and other philosophical frameworks to systematize Christian doctrines like the Trinity, Christology, human nature, sin, and salvation. However, sustained tensions existed between Antiochian and Alexandrian theological strands over how far to integrate Greek philosophy into theology, with writers like Tertullian rejecting its influence due to incompatibilities with biblical truth.
Nevertheless, the bridge-building project that appropriated elements of Greek philosophical thought to articulate and defend central Christian doctrines was mightily influential on the shape of early church history. It contributed to Christianity’s rapid spread across the Hellenized Greco-Roman world and ensured the new faith’s deep and lasting imprint by the Greek intellectual tradition.
Impact on Medieval Thought
The trajectory of Greek philosophical influence on Christianity continued through the medieval period in the West. Access to Aristotle’s writings and Muslim philosophical outputs like Avicenna and Averroes spurred extensive scholastic development of theology in dialogue with Aristotelianism. Thomas Aquinas exemplifies the attempt to rationally systematize theology on an Aristotelian foundation.
Questions about how to relate faith and reason run through medieval Christian thought. Anselm of Canterbury famously articulated an ontological argument for God’s existence and emphasized the harmony of faith and reason. The idealist strain of Platonism exerted influence on major Christian theologians like Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, shaping views on the soul, the afterlife, and mysticism.
During the medieval and early modern periods, sustained debates unfolded over issues like universals, causality, the soul, and ethical frameworks between Thomist, Scotist, and nominalist philosophical schools of thought impacting theology. Medieval Christian thought cannot be properly understood without grasping how it developed in dialogue with themes and texts from Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. This philosophy helped shape its theological systems and engines of its intellectual output.
Byzantine Theological Traditions
Within the eastern Christian context of Byzantium, extensive interaction also unfolded between Greek philosophy and Orthodox theology that left major imprints. Byzantine philosophy consistently displayed Platonist and Neoplatonist influences in how it approached metaphysical questions. The Cappadocian Fathers’ Trinitarian formulations drew on Middle Platonic philosophical concepts. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite synthesized Neoplatonism with Christian mysticism in hugely influential writings.
Byzantine philosophers like John Philoponus engaged in cosmology and debates about the intellect’s relationship to the body. Eastern Christian thinkers like Maximus the Confessor incorporated Neoplatonic ideas into meditations on the divine logoi and the Incarnation. Byzantine Hesychast mysticism culminating in Gregory Palamas articulated notions of theosis and divine energies that were shaped by Neoplatonism and Stoicism.
Throughout Byzantine Christian thought, a strong mysticism and negative theology strand existed that accorded with Neoplatonic emphases on transcending rational knowledge to reach mystical experience of the unitary divine source of all reality. This Neoplatonized theology contributed to significant differences between eastern and western medieval Christian thought and played a major role across the Byzantine theological tradition.
Critiques & Decline
Despite its pronounced influence in the early and medieval church, Greek philosophy’s imprint on Christian thought was not without controversy. Tertullian exemplified early voices who opposed the syncretism of biblical faith and Greek reason. Later Byzantine theologians like Gregory Palamas argued against perceived excesses of Greek rationalizing tendencies in theology.
In the Protestant Reformation, figures like Luther and Calvin voiced concern over Aristotelian scholasticism’s negative impact on theology and piety. Post-Reformation voices from Baruch Spinoza to Søren Kierkegaard argued for Christianity’s radical distinction from Greek philosophical modes of thought. The modern turn toward history and biblical criticism also diminished philosophy’s formerly dominant role in theology.
In the 20th century, perspectives like Paul Tillich’s existentialist approach sought to articulate Christian message in ways purged of Greek metaphysics. Renewed 20th century interest in patristic and medieval texts fueled ongoing debates about Greek philosophy’s lasting impact on Christian thought, whether positively or negatively. While its all-pervasive influence has declined, exploring Christianity’s fruitful dialogue with Greek thought remains key for understanding major contours of its intellectual history.
Historical Legacy
In reviewing the manifold ways Greek and Hellenistic philosophy helped shape the trajectory of Christian theology, we can identify a number of central facets of its historical legacy down to today:
– Provided metaphysical frameworks and vocabulary for articulating central doctrines like the Incarnation, the Trinity, Christ’s divinity and humanity, and the soul
– Contributed to a dualistic cosmology that sharply demarcated the physical and spiritual realms
– Fed into a negative view of materiality and bodily existence
– Fostered an intellectualism and esteem for rational systematization of theology
– Shaped philosophical psychology through concepts like mind, intellect, soul, passions, virtues
– Advanced theories of ethics and human purpose rooted in reason’s rule over passion
– Yielded contemplative mysticism focused on experiences of divine union
– Demonstrated the the resonance between Christian revelation and Greek reason
For good or ill, these multifaceted impacts suffused Christian thought across the patristic, medieval, and early modern periods. Understanding this legacy furnishes indispensable insight into the intellectual history of Christianity.
Conclusion
In this broad historical survey, we have explored philosophy’s profound shaping influence upon the Christian theological tradition as it developed within a Hellenized intellectual milieu. Core Christian doctrines were articulated in conversation with the metaphysical concepts of Platonism. Ethical frameworks relied upon the virtues and human purpose delineated by Aristotelian and Stoic thought. Neoplatonism contributed the vocabulary and frameworks for mysticism.
Major patristic, medieval, and Byzantine authors and texts cannot be interpreted accurately without grasping their rootedness within the wider discourses of Hellenistic philosophy. As differences endured between more mystically inclined East and more reason-driven West, Christianity’s alliance with Greek philosophy fostered its theological creativity, spiritualdepth, and intellectual sophistication, leaving an indelible imprint across two millennia of Christian thought.