Unfortunately, Augustine's whole referential framework was in his attempt to distance himself from his former false gnosto-philosophy of Manicheanism, so his attempts were still essentially extant within that paradigm, rather than within a *scriptural* one.
But he still does have faith in the truth of the doctrine the Gospel *does* contain, and those truths can in effect serve as axioms for philosophical inquiry
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You say he’s a platonist and elsewhere imply he fell afoul of Paul’s strictures on pagan vanity
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But he wasn’t a platonist. Augustine’s philosophy is bizarre. His answers to a number of phil. questions are simply unique (well, him and Tertullian)
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It IS bizarre, but I don't think we can really deny that he was heavily influenced by platonic thought, even as he sought to differentiate Christianity from Platonism in areas such as creation, nature of the soul, etc.
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Just to be clear - are you saying some of Augustine’s epistemology, cosmology, sociological ideas in Civ. Dei come from Plato, etc? or that the soteriology and christology people call “Augustinian” is in fact just Platonism?
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I took you to be saying the latter - sort of a non sequitur otherwise Btw it’s not super-easy to say which way some of these lines of causation run.
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For example, Origen was the disciple of a Platonist, and also had some heretical views, and it’s pretty clear the heresies are just creative Platonic interpretations of Gospel
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But then for many later writers with similar views... were they influenced by Plato? neoplatonists? Or by Origen and the Alexandrian school of theology he founded?
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Typically when secular historians take the reductive “Athens and Jerusalem” approach and claim the Christian tradition is a creative fusion of Paul’s ideas with Greek philosophy, they’re talking about the Alexandrine approach - Clement and Origen, free will, etc
End of conversation
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