Latin Patristic Platonism

The claim

The Platonists were right that true reality is immaterial, unchanging and known by turning inward — and wrong that anyone can reach it unaided.

What it held

The Latin fathers found in Platonism a philosophy that already held most of what they wanted: that the sensible world is derivative, that the soul is not the body, that the highest reality is beyond change. Augustine says plainly that he found nearly everything in the Platonists except the Incarnation.

What they added was a doctrine of the will and a doctrine of grace, and both are genuinely new. The Platonic soul ascends by understanding; the Augustinian soul is divided against itself and cannot ascend by wanting to. That produces an interiority the Greeks had not written — the Confessions is the first sustained self-examination in European literature, and it is a philosophical work.

Boethius, at the far end, is the last man in the Latin West who could read Greek philosophy fluently and the first who knew he had to translate it or lose it. He got through part of Aristotle's logic before being executed, and that fragment was the whole of the West's Aristotle for six hundred years.

How it argued

Reading scripture through Platonic categories and Platonic texts through scripture, with an increasing tendency to argue rather than assert as the tradition matures.

What it was arguing against

Manichaean dualism, which Augustine had held for nine years; Pelagius on whether the will can choose good unaided; and the pagan philosophical schools, argued with respectfully and at length.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether grace overrides freedom, which Augustine and Pelagius never settled and which reopens in every century since. How much of Plato can be taken without taking the transmigration of souls.

Common misconceptions

That the fathers were hostile to philosophy. Augustine's most Platonic works are the ones he never retracted, and Boethius' Consolation, written awaiting execution, contains no Christian doctrine at all.

How it began

Latin Christianity arrived at philosophy late and through translation, which is why the crucial figures are men who could read both languages at a moment when almost nobody else could.

What became of it

Closed by circumstance. Boethius was executed in 524 and the Greek philosophical libraries of the West were effectively gone within a century.

Lasting influence

It is the foundation of everything Latin Christendom did in philosophy for the next thousand years. Boethius' logical translations and his Consolation were school texts throughout the Middle Ages.

Why it still matters

The problem it opened — how far a will can be free if it is also formed by what it loves — is untouched by anything since.

Put another way

A man translating a library while the building is coming down.

Where to start

Confessions Book XI, on time. It is the most philosophical thing in the book and it stands alone.

The surprising bit

Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison by a Christian statesman awaiting torture and death, never mentions Christ. Philosophy arrives as a woman in a torn dress and does all the consoling.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Neoplatonism

Influenced

Augustinianism, Early Scholasticism

The verdict

Two centuries in which a religion acquired a philosophical vocabulary it has not since put down.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy