Philosophic Classics From Plato to Derrida

The first issue, the nature of Christ, was resolved at the Council of Nicea, con-
vened and presided over by the first Christian emperor, Constantine, in A.D. 325.
The Council determined that the Son was exactly the same substance, “consub-
stantial”homoousios, and not just “of like substance”homoiousios, with God
the Father. (The single Greek letter “iota,” meant a great deal more than “one iota
of difference” to the early church.) By the middle of the first millenium, the
“Nicene Creed” was confessed by virtually all Christendom as the orthodox
answer to the nature-of-Christ question. The Nicene Creed is still authoritative in
Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches.
Even though the Christological question was answered at Nicea, the question
of the right relation between faith and reason continued to be argued throughout
the medieval period. The early Christians had a simple faith in Jesus as Messiah
(if they were Jewish Christians) and as Lord (if they were Gentile Christians), and
they believed Jesus had lived, taught, died, and risen for them and all others. But
almost immediately, that simple faith encountered sophisticated Hellenistic
thought throughout the Roman Empire. How much should Christian faith concede
to the competence of philosophic reason? What was the relation between sacred
writings (i.e., the Bible) and secular writings (e.g., philosophy)? In Acts 17, the
Apostle Paul, the early Christian convert, used reason and quoted pagan poets to
help him preach the gospel to Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Athens. Yet
later, in Colossians 2:8, he warned, “See to it that no one takes you captive
through philosophy and empty deceit....”Some early Church Fathers, such as
Justin Martyr, used philosophy to help interpret Christian faith. Other Church
Fathers, such as Tertullian, argued that reason could be inimical to faith: “What
has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” he asked.
Some in the early church even claimed to have special esoteric knowledge not
available to the rabble either in the sacred Scriptures or secular reason. They were
known as “Gnostics,” from the Greek word for knowledge gnosis. These
Gnostics emphasized the Platonic belief in the soul as good and the body as evil,
and they sought to free the soul from the body by extreme ascetic practices. Some
of the Gnostics taught that Jesus was not reallya physical person (since the body
is evil) and that the Old Testament God, Yahweh, who had created bodies and
matter, was really the devil. Manicheaism, which rivaled Christianity in the third
and fourth centuries, and for a time claimed Augustine as one of its believers, was
based on Gnostic thought.
For the most part, the early medieval philosophers sought to resolve these
theological issues within the broad framework of Platonic thought. Augustine (as
either the last classical thinker or the first medieval one), Boethius, Anselm, and
Hildegard of Bingen all used Neoplatonic concepts. In the early Middle Ages,
most of Aristotle’s writings were not available in the West. But in the East,
Islamic philosophers, such as Ibn-Sina and Ibn Rushd (or Averroës), and Jewish
thinkers, such as Moses Maimonides, read and commented on a wide range of
Aristotelian works. These works, along with the Muslim and Jewish commen-
taries on them, were reintroduced to Western Europe in the late–Middle Ages and
became the basis for the monumental work of Thomas Aquinas.
While Thomas lived during a period of relative calm and well-being, the cen-
turies following his death were filled with tumult and upheaval. As a part of the
often vicious conflict between church and state, Philip IV of France captured Pope
Boniface VIII in 1303 and soon thereafter moved the papal court to Avignon,

INTRODUCTION 269