Is Christian philosophy original thought or Greek ideas in new clothes?
Early Christians disagreed sharply about reason. Origen and Augustine saw faith and science in harmony; Tertullian saw a clash. Out of that argument grew a tradition spanning more than a thousand years, from third-century defenders of the faith to Thomas Aquinas, whose synthesis the Catholic Church still holds up as a model.
Christian philosophy set out to reconcile reason, science and faith, starting from natural explanation and drawing on revelation where needed. It began in earnest around the third century with the Patristic writers, whose first task was defending the new religion. As Christianity spread through the Hellenised Roman Empire, they borrowed tools from surrounding schools to explain their own claims about Christ. Many scholars regard Origen as the first to offer Christian metaphysics as a full rival to Platonism, and Justin Martyr had already rooted his thought in Greek philosophy.
The scholar Tiago Adão Lara sorts the tradition into three eras: the Patristic period from the second to the seventh centuries, Scholasticism from the ninth to the thirteenth, and a pre-modern phase in the fourteenth and fifteenth. Scholasticism absorbed Jewish and Islamic philosophy as well as Greek sources, and thinkers like Aquinas aimed to build a complete structure of knowledge fusing Aristotle's logic and metaphysics with revelation. From the sixteenth century onward, increasingly independent secular science and philosophy grew up alongside it.
A working rule separates the disciplines: if any premise of an argument comes from revelation, the argument belongs to theology; otherwise it is philosophy. Catholic teaching, formally declared at the First Vatican Council, holds that natural reason alone can reach some truths, including God's existence. Philosophy is traditionally called the handmaid of theology, autonomous in method yet useful for clarifying doctrine. Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris championed Aquinas, and John Paul II's 1998 Fides et ratio pictured faith and reason as two wings lifting the mind toward truth.
Critics doubt there is anything distinctively Christian here, arguing the concepts were all worked out by the Greeks. Others object that philosophy is critical while religion rests on dogma, and that the medieval Church controlled all values. Étienne Gilson and Philotheus Boehner reply that Greek culture survives in Christian thought in a genuinely transformed shape, not as mere repetition.
Source: Christian philosophy
