Medieval Europe · c. 2nd – 8th c. CE
Patristic & Augustinian philosophy
Christian faith can be understood with the tools of Greek philosophy, above all Platonism: God is the eternal Good, and evil is a lack of good.
How can revealed faith and pagan reason be reconciled?
As Christianity spread through an educated Roman world, its teachers had to defend it against pagan critics and settle disputes about God, Christ and evil. The philosophical language at hand was Greek, especially the Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry.
If God is wholly good and created everything, evil cannot be a substance in its own right; it must be a privation, a good thing turned away from its source by a free will. Truth, unchanging and shared by all minds, points beyond the mind to God, who illuminates it.
- Evil is the privation of good, not a thing in itself.
- Faith comes first, and understanding follows from it.
- God sees all of time at once, in an eternal present.
Augustine shaped Latin theology, the medieval idea of the self and later debates on grace and will; Boethius handed Aristotle’s logic to the Latin Middle Ages.
Thinkers
354–430Augustine of HippoNorth African bishop who fused Christianity with Platonismc. 477–524 or 526BoethiusRoman statesman who translated Aristotle’s logic into LatinKey texts
Where it came from
Borrowed fromNeoplatonismAugustine read “the books of the Platonists”, likely Plotinus and Porphyry in Latin, and took from them God as immaterial Good and evil as mere privation.Borrowed from
AristotelianismBoethius translated and commented on Aristotle’s logical works, which for six centuries were nearly all of Aristotle the Latin West knew.
What it led to
Carried on byScholasticismAnselm took Augustine’s method of “faith seeking understanding” and turned it into rigorous argument.Carried on by
HermeneuticsAugustine’s On Christian Doctrine set out rules for interpreting scripture that later hermeneutics generalised.
On the record
Patristic philosophy is drawn as ending around 750, with John of Damascus.
This is a convention, and a reasonable one: John of Damascus (c. 660–c. 750) is usually counted the last of the Greek Church Fathers. Historians draw the line between late antiquity and medieval philosophy in several places (c. 500, c. 800, or with Augustine himself), so the boundary should be read as a hinge rather than an ending.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Medieval Philosophy”