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Since the early stages of civilization philosophy has been closely connected with religion. This fact is strikingly apparent in Indian philosophy, which, not only at its beginning but throughout its development, was intimately bound up with the doctrine of the sacred books. The Greeks, at least during the most important periods of their history, were much less subject to the influences of pagan religions; in fact, they combined with extreme scrupulosity in what concerned ceremonial usage a wide liberty in regard to dogma. Greek thought soon took its independent flight Socrates ridicules the gods in whom the common people believed; Plato does not banish religious ideas from his philosophy; but Aristotle keeps them entirely apart, his God is the Actus purus, with a meaning exclusively philosophic, the prime mover of the universal mechanism. The Stoics point out that all things obey an irresistible fatality and that the wise man fears no gods. And if Epicurus teaches cosmic determinism and denies all finality, it is only to conclude that man can lay aside all fear of divine intervention in mundane affairs.
The question takes a new aspect when the influences of the Oriental and Jewish religions are brought to bear on Greek philosophy by neo-Pythagorism, the Jewish theology (end of the first century), and, above all, neo-Platonism (third century B.C.). A yearning for religion was stirring in the world, and philosophy became enamoured of every religious doctrine Plotinus (third century after Christ), who must always remain the most perfect type of the neo-Platonic mentality, makes philosophy identical with religion, assigning as its highest aim the union of the soul with God by mystical ways.
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It has often been remarked that Christianity, with its monotheistic dogma and its serene, purifying morality, came in the fulness of time and appeased the inward unrest with which souls were afflicted at the end of the Roman world. Though Christ did not make Himself the head of a philosophical school, the religion which He founded supplies solutions for a group of problems which philosophy solves by other methods (e.g. the immortality of the soul). The first Christian philosophers, the Fathers of the Church, were imbued with Greek ideas and took over from the circumambient neo-Platonism the commingling of philosophy and religion. With them philosophy is incidental and secondary, employed only to meet polemic needs, and to support dogma; their philosophy is religious. In this Clement of Alexandria and Origen are one with St. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The early Middle Ages continued the same traditions, and the first philosophers may be said to have received neo-Platonic influences through the channel of the Fathers. John Scotus Eriugena (ninth century), the most remarkable mind of this first period, writes that "true religion is true philosophy and, conversely, true philosophy is true religion" (De div. praed., I, I). But as the era advances a process of dissociation sets in, to end in the complete separation between the two sciences of Scholastic theology or the study of dogma, based fundamentally on Holy Scripture, and Scholastic philosophy, based on purely rational investigation. This differentiation was not completed until the middle of the thirteenth century.
Editor: Haselhurst
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1. Catholic Encyclopedia: Philosophy, 1911
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