Guthrie : Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

Page 28

The lifetime of Cicero saw also a revival of the Pythagorean philosophy by certain spirits who were impressed by the religious needs of the age and attracted by a mystical conception of the relation between god and man, but wished to give this a more philosophical basis than was offered by the emotional cults of Isis or Cybele. It is, however, by no means free from the superstitious credulity of its time. It is the existence of this Graeco-Roman school that accounts for much of the difficulty of reconstructing the Pythagoreanism of the time of Plato and earlier. Most of our information about Pythagoreanism comes from writers of the later period, and what they say about the earlier phase is contaminated with post- Aristotelian ideas. Whole books were freely written and promulgated in the name of well-known early Pythagorean thinkers.

Perhaps the chief importance of the Neopythagoreans is that they helped to pave the way for Plotinus in the third century A.D. and the whole of the great and influential movement of Neoplatonism. The Neoplatonists Porphyry and lamblichus both wrote lives of Pythagoras, and there was a close affinity between the two schools, as was only natural and inevitable, considering how deeply the successors of Pythagoras affected the mind of Plato himself.

We have now crossed the line between the pre-Christian and the Christian eras. In its primitive form, the teaching of Jesus and his handful of Hebrew followers may seem to have had little to do with the impressive and continuous unfolding of Greek philosophy. But after the conquests of Alexander, this continuing development was accompanied by ever widening opportunities for impact on other peoples. Greek and Semite had already met in Zeno and later Stoic philosophers. The first men to set down the new Gospel in writing did so not in their own vernacular but in the language of Plato and Aristotle as it had now adapted itself to its function as the lingua franca of the greatly enlarged Hellenic world. The task of converting the Gentiles brought the need to meet them on their own ground, as we see Saint Paul already doing in his famous speech to the Athenians, in which he commends the Christian belief that all men are sons of God by quoting a line of the Stoic poet Aratus. Later on, there is a continuous interaction between Christian and pagan thought. The Christian attitude varies in individual writers between extreme hostility and considerable sympathy, from the 'What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?' of Tertullian to the idea of Greek philosophy as a praeparatio evangelica, the idea that, as Clement of Alexandria put it, philosophy had prepared the Greeks for Christ, as the Law prepared the Jews. With the birth of the highly spiritual religious philosophy of Neoplatonism, the interaction became even more marked. Whether for hostile and apologetic purposes or not, understanding and some degree of assimilation of the views of the opposite camp became indispensable. Thus even with the growth of Christianity to be the recognized religion of the civilized world, the continuity is not broken nor the influence of the Greek tradition at an end. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics continue to exert their power over [the Byzantine Fathers, and] the scholastics of the Middle Ages. We have our Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century, our Catholic Thomists and our Protestant Platonists today.

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W.K.C. Guthrie
A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

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W.K.C. Guthrie A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy

Learned Freeware

W.K.C. Guthrie
A Synopsis of Greek Philosophy