[Footnote 867: ][ (return) ] See Smith's "Bible Dictionary," article "Philosophy;" Pressensé, "Religions before Christ," p. II; Butler's "Lectures on Ancient Philosophy," vol. ii. pp. 28-40.
In attempting to account for this partial harmony between Philosophy and Revelation, we find the Patristic writers adopting different theories. They are generally agreed in maintaining some original connection, but they differ as to its immediate source. Some of them maintained that the ancient philosophers derived their purest light from the fountain of Divine Revelation. The doctrines of the Old Testament Scriptures were traditionally diffused throughout the West before the rise of philosophic speculation. If the theistic conceptions of Plato are superior to those of Homer it is accounted for by his (hypothetical) tour of inquiry among the Hebrew nation, as well as his Egyptian investigations. Others maintained that the similarity of views on the character of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destination of humanity which is found in the writings of Plato and the teachings of the Bible is the consequence of immediate inspiration. Origen, Jerome, Eusebius, Clement, do not hesitate to affirm that Christ himself revealed his own high prerogatives to the gifted Grecian. From this hypothesis, however, the facts of the case compel them to make some abatements. In the mid-current of this divine revelation are found many acknowledged errors, which it is impossible to ascribe to the celestial illuminator. Plato, then, was partially inspired, and clouded the heavenly beam with the remaining grossnesses of the natural sense. [868] Whilst a third, and more reasonable, hypothesis was maintained by others. They regarded man as "the offspring and image of the Deity," and maintained there must be a correlation of the human and divine reason, and, consequently, of all discovered truth to God. Therefore they expected to find some traces of connection and correspondence between Divine and human thought, and some kindred ideas in Philosophy and Revelation. "Ideas," says St. Augustine, "are the primordial forms, as it were, the immutable reason of things; they are not created, they are eternal, and always the same: they are contained in the Divine intelligence and without being subject to birth and death, they are types according to which is formed every thing that is born and dies." The copies of these archetypes are seen in nature, and are participated in by the reason of man; and there may therefore be some community of idea between man and God, and some relation between Philosophy and Christianity.
[Footnote 868: ][ (return) ] Butler's "Lectures on Ancient Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 41.
The various attempts which have been made to trace the elevated theism and morality of Socrates and Plato to Jewish sources have signally failed. Justin Martyr and Tertullian claim that the ancient philosophers "borrowed from the Jewish prophets." Pythagoras and Plato are supposed to have travelled in the East in quest of knowledge. [869] The latter is imagined to have had access to an existing Greek version of the Old Testament in Egypt, and a strange oversight in chronology brings him into personal intercourse with the prophet Jeremiah. A sober and enlightened criticism is compelled to pronounce all these statements as mere exaggerations of later times. [870] They are obviously mere suppositions by which over-zealous Christians sought to maintain the supremacy and authority of Scripture. The travels of Pythagoras are altogether mythical, the mere invention of Alexandrian writers, who believed that all wisdom flowed from the East. [871] That Plato visited Egypt at all, rests on the single authority of Strabo, who lived at least four centuries after Plato; there is no trace in his own works of Egyptian research. His pretended travels in Phœnicia, where he gained from the Jews a knowledge of the true God, are more unreliable still. Plato lived in the fourth century before Christ (born B.C. 430), and there is no good evidence of the existence of a Greek version of the Old Testament before that of "the Seventy" (Septuagint), made by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus, B.C. 270. Jeremiah, the prophet of Israel, lived two centuries before Plato; consequently any personal intercourse between the two was simply impossible. Greek philosophy was unquestionably a development of Reason alone. [872]
[Footnote 869: ][ (return) ] Mr. Watson adopts this hypothesis to account for the theistic opinions of the ancient philosophers of Greece. See "Institutes of Theology," vol. i. pp. 26-34.
[Footnote 870: ][ (return) ] Ritter's "History of Ancient Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 147.
[Footnote 871: ][ (return) ] Max Muller, "Science of Language," p. 94.
[Footnote 872: ][ (return) ] See on this subject, Ritter's "History of Ancient Philosophy," vol. i. pp. 147, 148; Encyclopædia Britannica, article "Plato," vol. xvii. p. 787; Smith's "Bible Dictionary," article "Philosophy;" and Thompson's "Laws of Thought," p. 326.
Some of the ablest Christian scholars and divines of modern times, as Cudworth, Neander, Trench, Pressensé, Merivale, Schaff, after the most careful and conscientious investigation, have come to this conclusion, that Greek philosophy fulfilled a preparatory mission for Christianity. The general conclusions they reached are forcibly presented in the words of Pressensé: