Augustine Stoicism and Platonism

Augustine Stoicism and Platonism

Thesis

It is examined that the significant but mostly neglected topic of the elaborate mutual leverages between Platonism and Stoicism in the Hellenistic time span, the Imperial Age, and after. Although this interrelationship is often termed ?eclecticism,? the authors of Platonic Stoicism disclose that the position is much more complicated. Far from being eclectics, most Stoics and Platonists attentively appropriated material and integrated it into their own philosophical system.

Argument

The influence of Stoicism on the subsequent history of philosophical and religious thought is hard to evaluate directly. The tradition of theories of natural law in ethics seems to stem directly from Stoicism. Christian theologians were certainly receptive to some of the elements of Stoicism. There exists an inauthentic correspondence between St Paul and Seneca included in the Apocrypha. This forgery is a very ancient one, since it was referred to in both Jerome.

Augustine, alas, chose to follow the Stoics rather than the Platonists (his usual allies among the philosophers) on the question of animals' membership in the moral community (City of God 1.20). Medieval and Renaissance philosophers were acquainted with Stoicism chiefly through the writings of Seneca and Cicero. The influence of Stoicism on Medieval thought has been considered by Verbeke (1983) and Colish (1985). Its renaissance in the sixteenth century is discussed by Zanta (1914) and Cooper (2004). There are several new studies of the influence of Stoic philosophy including Osler and Strange and Zubek.

When Augustine was about twenty (4.16.28), he read Aristotle's Categories, a basic text of logical analysis which was available in Latin translation. He found it very clear, but he says it was a further obstacle to his thought about God, whom he imagined in Aristotelian categories as a subject with attributes, not as greatness itself or beauty itself. He was not, evidently, aware of the Platonist debate on whether the Categories was concerned only with human systems of classification, or whether it was applicable to all levels of being. He also read more of Cicero's philosophical works. Some of them advocated strict agnosticism: As Augustine put it 3ëtheir opinion was that everything must be doubted, and they declared that nothing of the truth can be understood by a human being'. But, he says, he had not yet understood what they meant, and what this means is that he had read Cicero on the state of philosophical debate 400 years earlier, but had not yet encountered the argument that their apparent scepticism camouflaged an esoteric teaching of the truth which had been expounded by Plato.

Intellectual knowledge is not the result of the acquisitive operation of the intellect, but a participation or grant from God. It is in this participation that Augustine's innatism with regard to ideas consists. It follows from this that the intellect, considered in itself, is incapable of acquiring knowledge of intelligible beings, but is made capable of such knowledge through illumination.By this claim they were prepared to stand or fall. In the years that followed these movements, the European way of ...