Philosophy
Greek philosophy and philosophers, and the relation of faith to reason.
Passages that substantially address this topic, in date order.
Press Enter to listen from here. Left and right arrows move by word.
- To Diognetus 8.2Anonymous · ca. 150–200 (disputed) · The philosophers' ideas of God are empty.
- To Diognetus 8.3Anonymous · ca. 150–200 (disputed) · By that logic anything created could be called God.
- To Diognetus 8.4Anonymous · ca. 150–200 (disputed) · Such ideas are the deceit of charlatans.
- First Apology 2Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · Justin asks the rulers, who claim to be philosophers, to judge by reason, not rumor; they can kill Christians but not harm them.
- First Apology 5Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · The pagan gods are evil demons, exposed by Socrates among the Greeks and by the Word made man, Jesus Christ, among the barbarians.
- First Apology 20Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · Christian teachings resemble Plato, the Stoics, and the poets; why then are Christians alone hated?
- First Apology 44Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · God gave humans free choice; the philosophers borrowed from Moses, so there are “seeds of truth” among all.
- First Apology 46Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · All people share in the Word; those who lived by the Word before Christ, like Socrates and Abraham, were in a sense Christians.
- First Apology 59Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · Plato's teaching that God made the world from formless matter was taken from Genesis 1.
- First Apology 60Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · Plato's “world soul set crosswise” and his threefold order came from Moses' bronze serpent and Genesis; even the unlettered among Christians know these things.
- Second Apology 6Justin Martyr · ca. 150–160 · God delays the final judgment for the sake of the Christians; humans and angels act by free choice, not by fate, as the Stoics wrongly teach.
- Second Apology 8Justin Martyr · ca. 150–160 · Justin expects to be killed, perhaps through the Cynic Crescens, whom he has shown in debate to know nothing of Christian teaching.
- Second Apology 10Justin Martyr · ca. 150–160 · Philosophers knew parts of the truth through the Word; Christ is the whole Word, for whom even the uneducated die, as no one died for Socrates.
- Second Apology 13Justin Martyr · ca. 150–160 · Justin strives to be a Christian; whatever truth any philosopher spoke belongs to Christians, since the philosophers had only seeds of the Word, while Christians have the Word himself.
- On the Resurrection 6Justin Martyr · 2nd century (disputed) · By the principles of Plato, the Stoics and Epicurus alike, nothing perishes into nothing, so God can remake the body from its indestructible elements.
- Dialogue with Trypho 1.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin, dressed as a philosopher, is greeted one morning by Trypho and his friends.
- Dialogue with Trypho 1.2Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Trypho explains that he was taught to seek conversation with philosophers.
- Dialogue with Trypho 1.3Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Trypho introduces himself as a Jew who fled the recent war in Judea; he says philosophy inquires about God.
- Dialogue with Trypho 1.5Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Such views, Justin says, lead to moral license: the Stoics' endless cycles and the Platonists' untouchable immortal soul.
- Dialogue with Trypho 1.6Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Trypho asks Justin about his own philosophy.
- Dialogue with Trypho 2.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin begins: philosophy is one and leads to God, yet it has split into many schools.
- Dialogue with Trypho 2.2Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The schools arose because disciples followed famous teachers instead of seeking the truth.
- Dialogue with Trypho 2.3Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin tried a Stoic, who knew nothing of God, and a Peripatetic, who wanted a fee.
- Dialogue with Trypho 2.4Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · A Pythagorean required him first to study music, astronomy, and geometry.
- Dialogue with Trypho 2.6Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Among the Platonists Justin made rapid progress and hoped soon to see God.
- Dialogue with Trypho 3.3Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin defends philosophy as the highest work.
- Dialogue with Trypho 3.4Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin defines philosophy as knowledge of being and truth.
- Dialogue with Trypho 8.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin never saw the old man again, but a fire was kindled in him, and he found in the prophets and Christ the only sure philosophy.
- Oration to the Greeks 2Tatian · ca. 165–172 · Tatian mocks the lives and doctrines of famous philosophers, especially Aristotle and his pupil Alexander.
- Oration to the Greeks 3Tatian · ca. 165–172 · Heraclitus, Zeno, Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, and Crates are mocked for arrogance and contradictory doctrines.
- Oration to the Greeks 19Tatian · ca. 165–172 · The philosophers' contempt for death is a pose; the Cynic Crescens plotted against Justin and Tatian. Oracles serve human greed; God alone should be followed.
- Oration to the Greeks 25Tatian · ca. 165–172 · The Cynics' claim to self-sufficiency is hollow and the schools contradict each other; Christians hold one consistent teaching, and the charge of cannibalism fits the Greek myths, not them.
- Oration to the Greeks 26Tatian · ca. 165–172 · Greek learning is borrowed, divided into warring schools, and fussy about Attic style; Christians have left it to follow the word of God.
- Oration to the Greeks 27Tatian · ca. 165–172 · Christians are condemned for their name without examination, while pagan atheists and skeptics are read freely; the philosophers' speculations are idle.
- To Autolycus 2.4Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · The philosophers disagree about God; Plato's uncreated matter would make it equal to God, but God's power is shown in creating out of nothing.
- To Autolycus 2.12Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · No one can fully explain the six days of creation; the philosophers' imitations mix truth with error; the seventh day, the sabbath, is known to all peoples though they do not know why.
- To Autolycus 3.2Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · The poets, historians, and philosophers gained nothing true from their works; even Orpheus is said to have renounced his many gods.
- To Autolycus 3.6Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · Plato's community of wives and the incest and sodomy taught (so Theophilus says) by Epicurus and the Stoics show that the charges of immorality belong to the philosophers.
- To Autolycus 3.7Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · The philosophers contradict themselves about the gods and providence; some comic poets affirm providence and reward; readers must judge critically.
- A Plea for the Christians 2Athenagoras · ca. 176–180 · Christians ask not to be punished for their name but to be tried on real charges, as philosophers are.
- A Plea for the Christians 6Athenagoras · ca. 176–180 · Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics all in effect teach one God; the Christian God is the one who made all things by his Word and holds them together by his Spirit.
- A Plea for the Christians 11Athenagoras · ca. 176–180 · Christian teaching is shown by its fruit: even uneducated Christians love their enemies, do not retaliate, and love their neighbors, as the philosophers do not.
- A Plea for the Christians 19Athenagoras · ca. 176–180 · Gods that came into being must perish; neither water nor matter can be the origin of all things, for the Maker must precede what is made.
- A Plea for the Christians 22Athenagoras · ca. 176–180 · Allegorical explanations of the gods as elements or seasons fail: elements and seasons change, while God is unchangeable; the elements need their Maker as a ship needs its pilot.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 5.66Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Other philosophers made gods of the infinite, the stars, or the world-soul; the Stoics put God in all matter, Aristotle limited providence, and Epicurus denied it.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 6.67Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Clement rejects the philosophers' theories of chance and of divine elements and planets as old wives' tales.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 6.68Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Seeking God, not his works, Clement turns to Plato, who admits God is hard to find and beyond words; the Word, the sun of the soul, alone reveals him.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 6.70Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Plato's sayings about God and justice were learned from the Hebrews, as the Sibyl describes them: people who worship only the immortal God.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 6.71Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Antisthenes and Xenophon, pupils of Socrates, glimpsed that God is invisible and unlike anything; Xenophon learned it from the Sibyl.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 6.72Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Cleanthes the Stoic and the Pythagoreans describe God as the one good and the mind and father of all.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 11.112Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Since the Word has come from heaven, there is no need of Greek schools; Christ's disciples have the wisdom the philosophers only hinted at, and in Christ all divisions are overcome.
- Exhortation to the Greeks 11.113Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Godliness is the one exhortation for all of life; the Word enlightens the soul's eyes, and through him we find the Father and become fellow heirs.
- Against Heresies 2.14.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The Gnostics have stitched their system together from the philosophers: Thales, Homer, Anaximander and Anaxagoras.
- Against Heresies 2.14.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The Gnostics' void and images come from Democritus, Epicurus and Plato.
- Against Heresies 2.14.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Creation from pre-existing matter and the rule of necessity over God come from Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Plato and the Stoics.
- Against Heresies 2.14.5Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The Saviour 'made from all the Aeons' copies Hesiod's Pandora; their indifference to conduct comes from the Cynics, their subtlety from Aristotle.
- Against Heresies 2.14.6Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Their number-mysticism, and Marcus's Tetrad, come from the Pythagoreans.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 1Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · The author proposes to compare the teachers of Greek religion with those of the Christians, to free the Greeks from ancestral error.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 3Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · The early Greek philosophers disagree about the first principle of things: water, the infinite, air, fire, or like parts.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 5Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato and Aristotle contradict each other about where God dwells, and Aristotle appeals to Homer, who also supports Thales against him.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 7Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato contradicts himself, and the philosophers disagree endlessly about the soul, because they relied on human cleverness.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 12Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · The Greek philosophers are recent, while Moses' writings are older than Greek letters; the Seventy translated them into Greek with miraculous agreement.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 22Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato, fearing the Areopagus, borrowed Moses' "He Who Is" as "that which always is", and called God the craftsman, not the maker, of the gods.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 25Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato blamed Homer for changeable gods yet made his own craftsman changeable; he learned God's eternity from Moses' "He Who Is" and called Moses' law "the ancient word".
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 26Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato attributes true knowledge to "men dear to God", meaning the prophets, and from them learned of judgment after death.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 30Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato misread Genesis to posit ideas of earth, heaven, and man; Homer echoes Genesis in calling the dead body "earth".
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 32Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato's virtue given "by divine allotment" is the Holy Spirit of the prophets under another name.
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks 36Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Socrates confessed he knew nothing, yet his successors claim knowledge of heaven; the Greeks should flee their eloquence and read the prophets.
- Miscellanies 1.1.15Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The Stromata will hint rather than state, refute the heresies, and prepare the ground for the higher knowledge of the tradition; it will use the best of philosophy, becoming Greek to the Greeks, as Paul did.
- Miscellanies 1.1.17Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Like the cook and the shepherd, readers use Greek learning for different ends; Clement uses the Greeks' own writings to water their soil so that it may receive the spiritual seed.
- Miscellanies 1.1.18Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The Stromata hide the truth among philosophical doctrines like a kernel in its shell; against those who think philosophy useless or evil, Clement will show that it too is a work of providence.
- Miscellanies 1.2.19Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Even if philosophy were useless, showing it so is useful; one must understand the Greeks to refute them; and wide learning commends the truth to hearers and catechumens.
- Miscellanies 1.2.20Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Philosophy is not a corrupter of life but a clear image of truth, a divine gift to the Greeks; comparing doctrines strengthens faith and leads to knowledge, and the Stromata hide its seeds in learning.
- Miscellanies 1.5.28Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Before Christ, philosophy was given to the Greeks for righteousness, as the law was to the Hebrews: a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ; now it is a useful preparation for faith.
- Miscellanies 1.5.29Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · There is one way of truth fed by many streams; Scripture speaks of many ways of wisdom; the harlot of Proverbs is foolish pleasure, not Greek learning; worldly studies should be used but not dwelt in, as some neglect their mistress philosophy for her maidservants.
- Miscellanies 1.5.30Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · As general studies serve philosophy, philosophy serves wisdom, the knowledge of things divine and human; Abraham first took Hagar, worldly learning, and afterward Sarah, true wisdom, bore Isaac.
- Miscellanies 1.5.32Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Abraham's words to Sarah show that worldly learning is a handmaid to true knowledge; philosophy is an inquiry into truth, and Christ is the truth; preliminary training sharpens the mind for rest in him.
- Miscellanies 1.7.37Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Greek learning and philosophy came from God indirectly, like rain falling everywhere; by philosophy Clement means not any one school but the selection of whatever each has said well about righteousness and piety.
- Miscellanies 1.8.39Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Sophistry creates false opinions that seem true; Plato and Aristotle condemned it; rhetoric aims at persuasion, eristic at victory, sophistry at astonishment, and none at truth.
- Miscellanies 1.9.43Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Some want bare faith without learning, like expecting grapes without tending the vine; but Christ, the vine, must be cultivated; the educated believer gathers what is useful from every study to defend the faith.
- Miscellanies 1.9.44Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The experienced Christian, like a touchstone, can tell true philosophy from sophistry and truth from heresy; distinguishing ambiguous words is useful, as Christ did against the devil in the temptation.
- Miscellanies 1.11.50Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Worldly wisdom is folly with God, and boasting belongs only in knowing the Lord; when Paul warns against “philosophy and empty deceit,” he means not all philosophy but the Epicurean, which denies providence.
- Miscellanies 1.11.51Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Paul also opposes the Stoics' material god and hair-splitting logic; true inquiry, like an athletic contest, needs daring and wisdom, and Christ's “seek and you will find” leads to real finding.
- Miscellanies 1.11.52Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · True philosophy, following the divine tradition, upholds providence and the Creator, and teaches likeness to God; the philosophy Paul condemns deifies the elements and denies providence.
- Miscellanies 1.13.57Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Truth is one, but the philosophical schools, like the Bacchants tearing Pentheus, each hold a fragment and claim it is the whole; whoever reassembles the fragments into the one Word will see the whole truth.
- Miscellanies 1.14.62Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Greek philosophy descends in three successions, Italian, Ionian, and Eleatic; Pythagoras and Thales were probably of barbarian origin, and Thales learned from Egyptian priests.
- Miscellanies 1.15.66Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Most early Greek sages were barbarians or learned from barbarians: Pythagoras from Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Magi; Plato admits he learned from barbarians and visited Egypt.
- Miscellanies 1.15.71Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Numa, taught by Moses, forbade images of God; philosophy flourished first among barbarian peoples, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Druids, Magi, and Indian sages, including the followers of Boutta (the Buddha), before reaching the Greeks.
- Miscellanies 1.16.80Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Some say Greek philosophy grasps truth by chance, others that it comes from the devil or lesser powers; Clement holds that, though it cannot grasp the whole truth, it prepares the way for Christ's teaching.
- Miscellanies 1.17.87Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Philosophy holds a little stolen fire, a trace of wisdom: the Greek philosophers took portions of truth from the Hebrew prophets, distorting some and discovering some; the prophets, by contrast, received from Christ's fullness.
- Miscellanies 1.18.88Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Paul's “wise man” and “debater of this age” are the Greek philosophers; the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks, but Christ's coming made believers wise; those who refused chose unbelief.
- Miscellanies 1.19.94Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · However the Greeks came by some truths, whether by chance, nature, or reflection, all comes from the one God; they saw God dimly as in a mirror, as we do now, but face to face comes after death.
- Miscellanies 1.20.97Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Philosophy is a joint cause helping toward the truth, like one of many men hauling a ship; truth is one, with partial truths in each field, but the sovereign, unassailable truth is found through the Son.
- Miscellanies 1.20.98Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · As one coin has many names, virtue and truth appear in many forms; Greek truth differs from Christian truth in greatness, proof, and divine power, since Christians are taught by the Son of God.
- Miscellanies 1.20.99Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Philosophy is a preliminary training and joint cause, not a necessary condition: most believers received the word of God by faith without it; it justified the Greeks partially, and it helps with clarity and defense against heresies.
- Miscellanies 1.20.100Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Christ's teaching is complete in itself; philosophy adds no power to it but serves as a hedge against sophistry and as dessert to the bread of faith; the Greeks who took from the barbarians as their own are thieves who hold partial truths.
- Miscellanies 1.28.176Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Moses' philosophy has four parts: history, law, priestly ritual, and theology; true dialectic, as Plato says, aims to speak and act in a way pleasing to God.
- Miscellanies 2.5.22Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Christ, whose Father is God, is the truly noble; Plato too calls the wise man rich, free, beautiful, and king, agreeing with Scripture that riches lie in the soul and freedom comes from the truth.
- Miscellanies 2.21.127Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Clement begins a survey of philosophers' views of the goal of life: Epicurus and the Cyrenaics make it pleasure, others freedom from disturbance.
- Miscellanies 2.21.128Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Continuing the survey: the Cyrenaics make virtue serve pleasure; the Aristotelians make the goal life according to virtue but require the three kinds of goods, so the poor, the sick, and slaves cannot be happy.
- Miscellanies 2.21.129Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The survey continues with the Stoics (Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Antipater, Archedemus, Panaetius, Posidonius), Ariston, Herillus, the Academics, and Peripatetics such as Lycon and Critolaus.
- Miscellanies 2.21.130Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Clement lists the goals proposed by the natural philosophers: contemplation (Anaxagoras), cheerfulness (Democritus), self-sufficiency, and others; the Cyrenaics reject Epicurus's definition of pleasure as absence of pain.
- Miscellanies 5.14.96Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Plato's goal of becoming like God matches the saying that the seeker will find and reign and rest; Thales' sayings about God echo Scripture, and Moses' “choose life” teaches that only the good is to be chosen and that the end of life is to love God.
- Miscellanies 5.14.98Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Plato's myth of the golden, silver, and bronze citizens can be read of the elect who long for knowledge, or of Jews, Greeks, and Christians; his portrait of the true philosopher in the Theaetetus pictures the Christian life.
- Miscellanies 5.14.133Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Pythagorean, Orphic, and comic writers speak of one first principle and one Father of all; Plato's philosophy is the turning of the soul toward the Good; and every nation has a natural preconception of the one Maker.
- Miscellanies 6.4.38Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The Indian gymnosophists also had a philosophy, shown in their shrewd answers to Alexander's ten questions.
- Miscellanies 6.7.54Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · True philosophy is not a school's teaching; wisdom is firm, unchangeable knowledge of things divine and human, taught by the Lord, eternal and perfect, whereas philosophy is partial and passing.
- Miscellanies 6.7.55Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · For Christians philosophy is love of the wisdom that is the knowledge of the Son of God; Greek philosophy is the best of the schools, much of it borrowed and only partly true.
- Miscellanies 6.8.62Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Paul does not condemn philosophy but warns those who have reached knowledge not to go back to it, for it is only elementary training; and understanding itself is God's gift.
- Miscellanies 6.8.67Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Philosophy was given by God to the Greeks as a kind of covenant preparing for Christ, but, as in the church, the enemy sowed weeds in it, such as Epicurus' godlessness.
- Miscellanies 6.17.159Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · It is absurd to credit the devil with philosophy, since it makes people virtuous and vice cannot produce virtue; philosophy came from God, as the law did for the Jews, until Christ's coming brought the universal call to one people.
- Miscellanies 6.18.162Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The knower gives his time to the most important things and takes Greek philosophy like dessert in his leisure; those lost in sophistry miss what matters; true knowledge grasps causes, and even to reject philosophy one must first philosophize.
- Miscellanies 7.2.11Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The same Lord gave the law to the Hebrews and philosophy to the Greeks, both leading to faith in Christ; a Greek who goes straight to faith without philosophy takes a shortcut to salvation.
- Miscellanies 8.3.7Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Since proof cannot go back forever, all demonstration rests on first principles that are believed without proof, that is, on faith, and on what is plainly evident to sense and thought.
- Miscellanies 8.4.10Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Before answering whether the unborn is an animal, one must ask what the questioner means by “animal,” since Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics define it differently.
- Miscellanies 8.5.15Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Against the skeptics: a universal suspension of judgment refutes itself, since the claim that nothing is certain must either be true, and so something is certain, or false.
- Miscellanies 8.5.16Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The skeptic who says truth cannot be known contradicts himself; a school of thought is defined as adherence to a coherent set of doctrines, and even dogmatists suspend judgment on some questions.
- Miscellanies 8.7.22Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The skeptics say that suspension of judgment arises from the instability of human opinion and from the conflict among things, which fill life with disputes and libraries with contradictory books.
- Miscellanies 8.9.26Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Philosophers dispute whether causes produce bodies or incorporeal effects; Clement holds that causes produce incorporeal predicates such as “being cut,” which also solves the sophism that a house passes through your mouth when you say “house.”
- Miscellanies 8.9.28Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · There are four kinds of cause (maker, matter, form, end); a thing's readiness to be affected is a cooperating condition, not the cause, and sustaining causes act at once while some initiating causes take time.
- Miscellanies 8.9.30Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Two things can be causes to each other of some effect without causing each other, as the stones of an arch hold each other up; so the law of “eye for eye” is not a cause of wrong but brings justice to one and correction to the other.
- Octavius 5.4Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Caecilius is indignant that uneducated Christians claim certainty about matters philosophers still debate.
- Octavius 8.2Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Even famous atheist philosophers never gained real authority.
- Octavius 13.1Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Caecilius commends Socrates' refusal to speculate about the heavens.
- Octavius 13.2Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Socrates was wisest because he knew he knew nothing.
- Octavius 19.3Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · The philosophers, in substance, agree with the Christian idea of God as mind and spirit.
- Octavius 19.4Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Thales held that God is the mind that formed everything from water.
- Octavius 19.10Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · The Stoics, despite differences, agree on one providence and explain the gods as natural elements.
- Octavius 19.14Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Plato calls God the maker and father of the world, hard to find and impossible to declare publicly.
- Octavius 20.1Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · The philosophers taught one God under many names, as if they were Christians.
- Octavius 34.2Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · The Stoics too teach that the world will end in fire.
- Octavius 38.5Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Christians reject the sceptical philosophers praised by Caecilius, whose lives contradict their words.
- Apology 19Tertullian · ca. 197 · The Scriptures are older than all pagan literature and religion, since Moses lived long before Danaus, the Trojan war, and Homer.
- Apology 46Tertullian · ca. 197 · Christianity is not merely a philosophy: philosophers attack the gods unpunished, but their lives contradict their teaching, while Christians know God and live chastely and faithfully.
- Apology 47Tertullian · ca. 197 · The philosophers and poets drew on the older Scriptures and distorted them, as heretics have since distorted the Christian rule of truth; their judgment, Pyriphlegethon, and Elysium are copies of Christian teaching.
- To the Nations 1.4Tertullian · 197 · Christians are hated for their name, like Socrates for truth, even when their lives visibly improve, and their true marks are wisdom, self-restraint, chastity, compassion, truth, and freedom.
- To the Nations 2.1Tertullian · 197 · Tertullian takes up Varro's three kinds of theology, natural, mythical, and national, and argues that none of them can yield a true god, since true divinity must be certain, pure, and common to all.
- To the Nations 2.2Tertullian · 197 · Philosophers, lacking the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom, disagree endlessly about the gods, borrowing scraps of Scripture and distorting them.
- To the Nations 2.4Tertullian · 197 · The Greek word for god does not come from “running,” as some claim, but was borrowed from the name of the true God, who is unseen and distinct from matter; the philosophers' speculations about the heavens are futile.
- The Testimony of the Soul 1Tertullian · ca. 197–198 · Rather than appeal to pagan literature, which its readers do not trust, Tertullian calls the simple, untaught human soul itself as a witness to Christian truth.
- Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 1Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Hermias opens his satire by setting the philosophers' conflicting definitions of the soul against Paul's word that the world's wisdom is foolishness with God.
- Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 2Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Hermias mocks the philosophers who turn his soul into every creature and toss him from Anaxagoras to Parmenides, Anaximenes, Empedocles, Protagoras, Thales, Anaximander, Archelaus, Plato and Aristotle.
- Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 6Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Hermias continues his mockery with Pherecydes, Leucippus, Democritus, Heraclitus, Epicurus, Cleanthes and the Academic sceptics, who declare that nothing can be known.
- Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 8Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Hermias mocks the Pythagorean geometry of the elements.
- Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 9Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Hermias imagines himself measuring the ether, the sea and the earth with Pythagoras's cubit.
- Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 10Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Epicurus's infinite worlds drive Hermias into endless measuring; he concludes that the philosophers' inquiry is endless and useless.
- Prescription against Heretics 7Tertullian · ca. 203 · Heresies draw their questions and doctrines from philosophy; Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem, and after Christ and the gospel no further inquiry is needed.
- Against Marcion 1.13Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The Marcionites scorn the world as unworthy of God, yet even pagan philosophers found it so splendid that they made its elements into gods, and the smallest flower or shell refutes them.
- Against Marcion 1.25Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · A god of goodness alone, free of all feeling, is the idle god of Epicurus; yet by willing to save mankind Marcion's god already shows desire, care, and rivalry, and so must have the other emotions Marcion denies him.
- Against Marcion 5.19Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · In Colossians the gospel's spread through the world, Christ as image and firstborn of creation, the reconciliation of all things, the warning against philosophy, and the law as a shadow of Christ all point to the Creator, and Marcion's doctrines come from the philosophers.
- On the Soul 1Tertullian · ca. 210 · Socrates' calm talk of the soul's immortality before his death was studied composure, not knowledge of truth; knowledge of the soul must be learned from God, its author.
- On the Soul 2Tertullian · ca. 210 · Philosophers sometimes stumbled on the truth, but they distort it with their own arguments; the Christian must separate truth from their reasoning and learn about the soul from God's writings.
- On the Soul 3Tertullian · ca. 210 · Because philosophers are the forerunners of heretics, Christians must counter their confused theories of the soul with the Lord's teaching; the soul's origin from God's breath has already been settled.
- On the Soul 5Tertullian · ca. 210 · Many philosophers, especially the Stoics Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, argued that the soul is a body.
- On the Soul 6Tertullian · ca. 210 · The Platonist arguments that the soul is bodiless fail: the soul moves and is moved, is perceived like other things, and is fed by food, as the physician Soranus shows.
- On the Soul 12Tertullian · ca. 210 · The mind is not a separate substance but a faculty of the soul, against Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and the Valentinians.
- On the Soul 15Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul has a ruling part, and Scripture places it in the heart, as many philosophers and physicians also held.
- On the Soul 17Tertullian · ca. 210 · Against the Academics, the senses are reliable, since apparent errors have natural causes; to doubt them would make even the witness to Christ's real body untrustworthy.
- On the Soul 18Tertullian · ca. 210 · Plato and the Gnostics wrongly separate intellect from sense; both are powers of the one soul, and the intellect depends on the senses for its knowledge.
- On the Soul 23Tertullian · ca. 210 · Heretics claim that souls came down from heaven, drawing on Plato's teaching that souls pre-existed and that learning is recollection; refuting Plato refutes them.
- On the Soul 24Tertullian · ca. 210 · Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection fails: a godlike soul could not forget, natural knowledge is never lost, and time or the body cannot explain forgetting.
- On the Soul 28Tertullian · ca. 210 · The doctrine that souls pass back and forth between the living and the dead rests on Pythagoras, who faked his own death and return from the underworld.
- On the Soul 29Tertullian · ca. 210 · Plato's argument from contraries fails: the dead come from the living, but the living do not therefore come from the dead.
- On the Soul 31Tertullian · ca. 210 · Transmigration makes no sense: souls would return one to one and at the same age, and Pythagoras' supposed former lives were utterly unlike his own.
- On the Soul 32Tertullian · ca. 210 · The human soul cannot pass into animals, whose natures, sizes, and ways of life are contrary to it; Scripture likens men to beasts only in character, not substance.
- On First Principles 2.1.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The variety of the world requires bodies; matter, which takes on qualities, was made by God and is not unbegotten or coeternal with him, as some philosophers held.
- On First Principles 3.3.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The wisdom of this world is the ordinary arts and sciences; the wisdom of the rulers of this world is the secret lore of nations, inspired by the spiritual princes set over them, who plotted against Christ.
- Fragments on Genesis, column 89Origen · ca. 220-254 · Logic is needed to read Scripture: those who missed that “world” is homonymous misread 1 John 5:19 and blasphemed the Creator.
- PG 12:1053Origen · ca. 220-254 · Origen sets out philosophical definitions of “end” (from Aristotle and the Stoics, via Herophilus) and of “God,” as background to the psalm titles.
- PG 12:1223 (Ps 16–17 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · The end of LXX Psalm 16 (Ps 17:14–15): philosophers’ fine doctrines come from God’s hidden things; the enemies’ portion is in this life; the saint will be satisfied by the sight of God’s glory; the beginning of LXX Psalm 17 (Ps 18): the Lord is the very strength and firmness of the saints.
- Refutation of All Heresies, table of contents of Book 1, item 2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Book 1 sets out the views of the natural, moral, and dialectical philosophers.
- Refutation of All Heresies, table of contents of Book 1, item 3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · A list of the natural philosophers treated in Book 1.
- Refutation of All Heresies, table of contents of Book 1, item 4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Socrates and Plato are listed as the moral philosophers; Plato combined all three branches.
- Refutation of All Heresies, table of contents of Book 1, item 5Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle and the Stoics are listed as dialecticians.
- Refutation of All Heresies, table of contents of Book 1, item 6Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The list ends with Epicurus, Pyrrho, the Brahmins, the Druids, and Hesiod.
- Refutation of All Heresies, Book 1, preface 8Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus will first set out Greek philosophy, to show that the heresies come from it rather than from Scripture.
- Refutation of All Heresies, Book 1, preface 9Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Each heresy will then be matched with the philosopher from whom its founder borrowed.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.1.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Thales taught that water is the origin and end of all things.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.2.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pythagoras founded the Italian school after fleeing Samos for Italy.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.3.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Empedocles taught that strife and love are the principles of all things and that all will return to fire.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.4.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Heraclitus wept over human ignorance, claiming that he alone knew all things.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.6.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Anaximander, Thales' pupil, taught that all worlds come from the boundless.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.7.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Anaximenes taught that boundless air is the source of all things, even the gods.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.8.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Anaxagoras taught that mind ordered a mixture of boundless material principles.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.9.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Archelaus followed Anaxagoras, making the separation of hot and cold the source of motion.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.11.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Parmenides held that the universe is one, eternal, and spherical, yet named fire and earth as principles.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.12.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Leucippus taught that worlds form from bodies colliding in the void by an undefined necessity.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.13.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Democritus taught that atoms move in the void and that there are countless worlds.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.14.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Xenophanes taught that God is one, eternal, spherical, and perceives with all his being.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.15.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Ecphantus taught that indivisible bodies are moved by divine mind and that the earth rotates.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.18.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Socrates, who valued "Know yourself," left no writings; Plato was his ablest pupil.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.19.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Plato named God, matter, and the pattern as the principles of the universe.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.20.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle made philosophy systematic, distinguishing substance and nine kinds of accident.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.21.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Stoics made God, the purest body, the principle of all, with providence pervading everything.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.22.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Epicurus made atoms and void the principles of all things.
- Refutation of All Heresies 1.23.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pyrrho founded the skeptical school, which argued both sides and affirmed nothing.
- Refutation of All Heresies 4.43.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The philosophers disagreed about God, identifying him with one or another element.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.9.6Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The hidden and manifest parts of fire correspond to Aristotle's potency and act or Plato's intelligible and sensible.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.11.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Simon calls the fire perfect and intelligent, so that everything in it thinks and acts, and cites Empedocles on like knowing like.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.21.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus says that Valentinus built on Pythagoras and Plato, and first recalls their teaching.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.21.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pythagoras and Plato took their teaching from Egypt; Valentinus borrowed it from them, renamed it, and made a Greek heresy foreign to Christ.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.22.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Plato's Timaeus traces its account of the world to Egyptian wisdom brought to the Greeks by Solon.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.23.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pythagoras made the unbegotten monad the father and the begotten dyad the mother of all numbers.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.23.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Zaratas, Pythagoras's teacher, called one the father and two the mother; from them come the numbers up to ten.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.23.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · For Pythagoras ten is the perfect number, bodies arise from point, line, and surface, and the tetraktys (1+2+3+4=10) generates the perfect number.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.24.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pythagoras distinguished an intelligible world from the monad and a sensible world from the tetraktys and the number ten.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.24.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · We know the intelligible world by reason and the sensible world by the five senses.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.25.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The world is held together by a numerical and musical bond, and Strife and Love will never cease.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.26.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Plato, a disciple of Pythagoras, called philosophy the separation of soul from body; Pythagorean riddles call the passions Furies.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.27.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus recalls Pythagoras's symbolic sayings, because the heretics imitate that manner of speech.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.27.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · “Tie up the bedding-bundle” means to be ready to die at any moment.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.28.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Pythagoreans make the sun the craftsman of the world, set in it like a soul in a body.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.37.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus quotes Plato's riddle to Dionysius about the king of all and the second and third things.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.37.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Plato's letter continues: the soul's restless inquiry about these things is the source of evils.
- Refutation of All Heresies 6.52.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus judges Marcus's system to be astrology and Pythagorean arithmetic, not godly knowledge.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.14.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus will first summarize Aristotle so that readers can see Basilides' doctrines are borrowed from him.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.15.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle divides substance into genus, species, and the individual, which cannot be further divided.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.16.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle's example: “animal” in general, which is no particular animal, gives the particular animals their being.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.17.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus argues that on Aristotle's account the things that exist come from something that is none of them, and he defers the question of who laid down this origin.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.18.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · When a member of the species “human” is picked out by a name such as Socrates, it is an individual substance.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.18.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · “Said of a subject” means a common term like “animal,” which is truly said of many different species.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.18.6Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus concludes that on Aristotle's terms primary substance is made up of things that do not exist on their own, and so comes from what is not.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.19.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The outer heaven is a fifth substance beyond the elements, and Aristotle's philosophy is divided to match his division of the world.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.19.4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle's writings follow this division: the Physics for things below the moon, the Metaphysics for things above it, and a treatise on the fifth substance as his theology.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.19.5Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle's doctrine of the soul is unclear: his definition is easy to state but hard to understand.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.19.7Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle defines God as thought thinking itself, which Hippolytus calls inconceivable, and holds the world to be eternal.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.24.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus says the Archon and his son are Aristotle's body and soul under new names.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.24.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · As Aristotle's soul governs the body, so Basilides' son governs the Archon.
- Refutation of All Heresies 7.29.4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Empedocles names six elements: earth and water, fire and air, and the shaping powers Strife and Love, and he calls the four roots by gods' names.
- Refutation of All Heresies 10.6.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · After four books on the Greeks and five on the heresies, Hippolytus summarizes: Greek philosophy is natural, ethical, and dialectical.
- Refutation of All Heresies 10.6.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Natural philosophers derived everything from one principle (with or without quality: fire, air, water, earth) or from many.
- Refutation of All Heresies 10.6.4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Stoics derived everything from qualityless matter; others from fire (Hippasus, Heraclitus), air, water (Thales), or earth (Xenophanes).
- Refutation of All Heresies 10.7.5Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Empedocles has four material and two active principles; Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Epicurus derived all from infinitely many.
- Refutation of All Heresies 10.7.6Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Anaxagoras posited like particles, Democritus and Epicurus atoms, Heraclides and Asclepiades loose masses, and Plato God, matter, and pattern.
- Commentary on John 2.30Origen · ca. 230–248 · The third group follows the Greek philosophical schools, which share partly in the Word.
- Commentary on John 2.112Origen · ca. 230–248 · The Stoics taught “paradoxes,” such as that only the wise man is priest and free.
- Commentary on John 2.113Origen · ca. 230–248 · Origen declines to discuss the Stoic paradoxes in detail here.
- On Prayer 27.8Origen · ca. 233–234 · Origen reviews two philosophical views of “being”: the Platonist view that being belongs properly to incorporeal things, and the Stoic view that it is the qualityless matter underlying bodies.
- Address of Thanksgiving 6Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Origen won Gregory to philosophy by argument and by kindness; like Jonathan's soul knit to David's, Gregory's soul is bound to Origen.
- Address of Thanksgiving 7Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Like a farmer clearing a field, Origen first trained Gregory's mind in logic, teaching him to test arguments and not to assent rashly.
- Address of Thanksgiving 9Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Origen taught the moral virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, and courage, by self-examination and by his own example, not by mere definitions.
- Address of Thanksgiving 10Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Gregory disclaims flattery and any intent to praise Origen by disparaging other philosophers.
- Address of Thanksgiving 11Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Origen led Gregory to live the virtues: justice as attending to one's own soul, prudence as self-knowledge, temperance as preserving it, courage as perseverance.
- Address of Thanksgiving 13Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Origen had his students read all the ancient philosophers and poets except the atheists, so that no single school would capture their minds.
- Address of Thanksgiving 14Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Philosophers cling to the first school they meet as to a marsh, forest, or labyrinth; Origen guided his students through all schools, keeping what was true.
- Homilies on Exodus 4.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Moses is the law, the ten plagues the ten commandments, and the rod the cross of Christ; the first six plagues correct the errors of philosophers, poets, dialecticians, Cynics, idol-worshippers, and the vices of malice, pride, and anger.
- Homilies on Exodus 4.9Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · As Moses first met Pharaoh at the water, so in disputation one should first refute the pagan philosophers before going further, and should not be fooled when the devil feigns defeat and asks us not to go far.
- Homilies on Joshua 7.7Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Achan’s “tongue of gold” is the eloquence of pagan philosophy and poetry, which heretics such as Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion brought into the church; the “pure” bracelets are works without God, as a merely human Christ would be.
- Homilies on Joshua 18.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Caleb asks for the mountain of fortified cities, figures of the doctrines of philosophers and heretics that the wise teacher overthrows, and receives Hebron with the tombs of the patriarchs and their wives.
- Homilies on Judges 4.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Ehud ("praise") killing Eglon king of Moab figures the church's teacher destroying with the sword of the word the doctrine that pleasure is the highest good.
- Homilies on Judges 5.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Jael ("ascent") is the Gentile church, which kills the vices with the wood of the cross and then shares the victory with Israel, who will be saved at the end.
- Homilies on Numbers 1.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Only the strength of Israel, taught by God through Scripture, counts before God, and Israel was counted only after it had been tested, fought, and received the law.
- Homilies on Jeremiah 8.9Origen · ca. 240 · God refutes worldly wisdom not with his full wisdom but with a little of his “foolishness,” the humble Gospel; Christ took on weakness and folly to lead us up to God's true wisdom and power.
- To Theopompus on the Impassibility and Passibility of God, section 30Gregory Thaumaturgus · if authentic, ca. 240-275 · A self-absorbed God would be more loveless than the philosophers, who labor to heal those sick in soul; as Diogenes said, physicians go to the sick, not the healthy.
- To Theopompus on the Impassibility and Passibility of God, section 31Gregory Thaumaturgus · if authentic, ca. 240-275 · If human philosophy hastens to heal sick souls, God, the teacher of all philosophy, must go willingly to those struck down by sufferings; love of money is the soul's sickness, and envy has no place in God.
- Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.75Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Solomon's three books correspond to the three branches of philosophy, moral, natural and inspective (contemplative), which the Greeks borrowed from him; logic runs through all three.
- Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.76Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Proverbs teaches moral philosophy, Ecclesiastes natural philosophy and the Song contemplative philosophy, while the opening of Proverbs also shows Solomon's concern for logic.
- Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.78Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The Song comes last for the purified soul; the three disciplines are prefigured in Abraham (moral, obedience), Isaac (natural, digging wells) and Jacob (contemplative, the ladder).
- Commentary on the Song of Songs 2.141Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The 'veiled' are the philosophical schools whose truth is covered; verse 8 is Solomon's earlier and better form of the maxim 'Know yourself': the soul must recognize its beauty as God's image or be sent to pasture kids.
- Against Celsus 1.9Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus mocks Christians for believing without reasons; Origen replies that Christianity also examines its beliefs deeply, but simple faith is the best way to help the many who cannot study philosophy.
- Against Celsus 1.13Origen · ca. 248 · Paul did not call all wisdom evil but only "the wisdom of this world"; reasoned faith is better than simple faith, but God saves through the "foolishness" of preaching Christ crucified.
- Against Celsus 1.64Origen · ca. 248 · Philosophy too reformed a few wicked men like Phaedo and Polemon, but Christ has transformed multitudes, as Paul's words to Titus describe.
- Against Celsus 2.12Origen · ca. 248 · Betrayal by a follower proves nothing against a teacher: Aristotle turned on Plato and Chrysippus on Cleanthes, yet no one blames their teachers.
- Against Celsus 3.47Origen · ca. 248 · Paul's criticism of the “wisdom of the world” targets materialist doctrines, not wisdom itself; he even admits that Greek sages knew God from the created world.
- Against Celsus 3.54Origen · ca. 248 · Christians seek to heal the souls even of the foolish, as Wisdom invites them in Proverbs, just as philosophers like Pythagoras and Zeno taught slaves.
- Against Celsus 3.58Origen · ca. 248 · Christians speak freely before good fathers and teachers; they turn youths away only from immoral teachers, and they build on a good philosophical education to lead students to the deeper wisdom of the prophets and apostles.
- Against Celsus 3.66Origen · ca. 248 · Both philosophy and Scripture record people who were completely changed, like Heracles, Odysseus, Socrates, and Musonius, so Celsus is wrong that habitual sinners cannot change.
- Against Celsus 3.67Origen · ca. 248 · Philosophy itself refutes Celsus: Phaedo, once forced into a brothel, became Plato's narrator of Socrates' death, and the drunken Polemo became head of Xenocrates' school.
- Against Celsus 3.72Origen · ca. 248 · True wisdom, defined as knowledge of divine and human things or as the radiance of God's glory, never leads people away from Christ; only sophistry falsely called wisdom does.
- Against Celsus 3.74Origen · ca. 248 · Every philosopher, like Christians, seeks to win “fools” in the sense of the morally bad, as a doctor seeks the sick; but Christians especially seek sharp minds able to grasp the hidden meanings of Scripture.
- Against Celsus 3.75Origen · ca. 248 · The only “physicians” Christians turn people from are philosophers with harmful doctrines, such as Epicureans, Peripatetics, Stoics, and believers in transmigration; Christians never despise knowledge and point pupils to God and Jesus, not to themselves.
- Against Celsus 4.39Origen · ca. 248 · Origen sets the story of paradise and the serpent beside Plato's myth of Eros born of Poros and Penia in the garden of Zeus, arguing that both must be read for their hidden meaning, and suggests Plato may have learned from Jewish teaching in Egypt.
- Against Celsus 4.54Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus borrows from Plato's Timaeus the claim that God made only souls and lesser gods made bodies, but he gives no argument, whereas the Stoics and reason point to one God who made all things for a purpose.
- Against Celsus 4.68Origen · ca. 248 · Origen notes that the Stoics extend the doctrine of endlessly repeating world-cycles even to the gods, and mocks their attempt to say each cycle has only 'indistinguishable' copies.
- Against Celsus 4.89Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus should have proved bird-divination before claiming birds know God better than people; on his view birds outrank Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, and he should take them as his teachers.
- Against Celsus 5.7Origen · ca. 248 · Neither Jews nor Christians call heaven God, and Celsus's principle that the parts of a divine whole must be divine would make even flies and worms gods, which no Greek would admit.
- Against Celsus 5.20Origen · ca. 248 · The Stoic doctrine of endlessly repeated world-cycles, in which Socrates is born, tried, and condemned again and again, is far more absurd than the Christian resurrection, yet Celsus does not mock it.
- Against Celsus 5.35Origen · ca. 248 · If philosophers may rightly abandon superstitious ancestral taboos, so may Christians; to keep them anyway would make a philosopher as ridiculous as an Egyptian who fears to eat an onion.
- Against Celsus 6.2Origen · ca. 248 · Plain Scripture has helped far more people than Plato's polished prose, because God gives power to those who preach, as Paul and the Psalms say.
- Against Celsus 6.3Origen · ca. 248 · Plato rightly said that the highest good cannot be put into words but dawns on the soul like a spark, yet, as Paul says in Romans, those who know the truth about God without worshipping him rightly are without excuse.
- Against Celsus 6.4Origen · ca. 248 · The philosophers who wrote nobly about the highest good still worshipped idols, so God chose the simple, while Moses and the prophets taught that God is seen by the pure in heart.
- Against Celsus 6.7Origen · ca. 248 · Moses and the prophets could not have borrowed from Plato, who lived later, and Scripture itself commends searching inquiry and argument.
- Against Celsus 6.8Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus praises Plato for not telling marvels or demanding faith in a Son of God, but Origen points to the marvellous legends told of Plato, Pythagoras, and Socrates, and to Plato's own mention of a Father of the world's ruler.
- Against Celsus 6.12Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus claims Paul's contrast between worldly and divine wisdom was borrowed from Heraclitus and Plato; Origen notes that Plato himself distinguished true wisdom from merely human wisdom.
- Against Celsus 6.19Origen · ca. 248 · Christians did not borrow the idea of a realm above the heavens from Plato; David, Paul, and the prophets spoke of it first, and Plato may even have learned it from the Hebrews.
- Against Celsus 6.71Origen · ca. 248 · When Christians call God “spirit” they do not mean, like the Stoics, a bodily breath pervading the world; God, the Word, and even the rational soul are incorporeal and imperishable.
- Against Celsus 7.28Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus claims Christians borrowed their hope of a better land from Homer's Elysian plain and Plato's pure earth, but Origen answers that Moses, older than all Greek writing, promised a good land that is not earthly Judaea.
- Against Celsus 7.37Origen · ca. 248 · Origen argues that Celsus's imagined Christian speaker is inconsistent: simple believers would not talk like Stoics, and educated Christians know from Paul that God's invisible things are understood through creation.
- Against Celsus 7.41Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus points Christians to unnamed inspired poets and philosophers; Origen asks how Orpheus, Homer, or the philosophers are better guides than Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, who teaches both the learned and the simple.
- Against Celsus 7.42Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus quotes Plato's Timaeus that the maker of the universe is hard to find and impossible to declare to all; Origen answers that the Word became flesh to reach everyone, and that God can only be found with God's own help.
- Against Celsus 7.43Origen · ca. 248 · Plato does not say God is nameless, only hard to declare to many; Christians say God is seen by the pure in heart and through Christ, the image of the invisible God, not by bodily sight.
- Against Celsus 7.44Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus thinks God is known by the philosophers' methods; the Word says God is known by revelation and grace, and God chose the simple over proud philosophers who still worship images, while the humblest Christian rises in prayer above the world.
- Against Celsus 7.45Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus sets out Plato's teaching on being and becoming and on the Good as the sun of the intelligible world, and tells Christians, whom he calls lame in soul, to be silent if they cannot follow it.
- Against Celsus 7.54Origen · ca. 248 · Origen replies that Heracles' deeds were disgraceful, Orpheus told worse myths than Homer, and Anaxarchus and Epictetus, however brave, cannot be compared with Jesus, whose words still convert people.
- Against Celsus 7.59Origen · ca. 248 · A true doctrine is not discredited because Greeks also said it; as a wholesome food prepared for the many does more good than a delicacy for the few, so plain teaching for all is better than refined teaching for a few.
- Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 35Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Figuratively, the battles and reports of battles are the conflicts of heresies and philosophies that the advanced Christian must hear and discern without alarm before the Word's glorious coming into the soul.
- Commentary on Romans 1.15Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · God's righteousness is revealed in that no one is excluded from salvation; 'from faith to faith' is from the Law to the Gospel; God's wrath is revealed against those, like the philosophers, who know the truth but hold it in unrighteousness.
- Commentary on Romans 1.17Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · The philosophers, who study creation, could know God's eternal power and divinity from it; by seeking forms in God they lost God's image in themselves and fell into idolatry.
- Commentary on Romans 3.1Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · Origen explains that Paul's seemingly disordered argument serves to set Jews and Gentiles in their places; God is not unjust in punishing, because justice is known from its contrary and wrath falls on those who have made room for injustice; and God's truth 'abounds' when it refutes the false doctrines of philosophers.
- 17Anonymous · 250 (the text may be later) · Pionius silences the rhetor Rufinus by appeal to Socrates.
- Res. 1.62Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Scripture, Plato and the physicians all call this visible flesh 'body', so Paul's statements about the body refer to it, and the narrator promises to show that Paul consistently teaches the resurrection of the flesh.
- Res. 2.30Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The speaker rejects the atomists and those who hold that the elements change into one another, arguing that God, who holds all things together, can give each body its own form again.
- Against the Nations 2.6Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Pagan learning in grammar, rhetoric, and logic does not qualify anyone to judge ultimate truth, for human wisdom is foolishness with God.
- Against the Nations 2.7Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Philosophers cannot know even basic facts about human nature, sleep, perception, or the mind, let alone divine things.
- Against the Nations 2.9Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Philosophers too accept their doctrines on the authority of earlier teachers, not on sight.
- Against the Nations 2.10Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Philosophers too rest on belief, and their constant disagreements show that nothing certain is known by them.
- Against the Nations 2.11Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Pagans believe philosophers who worked no miracles; Christians believe Christ, whose mighty works justify faith in him.
- Against the Nations 2.13Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Platonists mock Christian teaching on God, resurrection, and the soul's salvation, though Plato taught similar things.
- Against the Nations 2.19Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Human arts are useful inventions, not proof of divinity, and people's unequal learning and conflicting opinions refute the Platonic doctrine that learning is recollection.
- Against the Nations 2.30Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If souls are immortal and incorruptible, punishments cannot touch them and virtue is pointless; if they simply perish, as Epicurus held, virtue is equally without reward.
- Against the Nations 2.31Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The middle, uncertain nature of souls explains both the value of philosophy and the philosophers' disagreement about whether the soul is mortal or immortal.
- Against the Nations 2.33Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Unlike philosophers who trust in their own divinity to rise to the stars, Christians trust God alone for life beyond death.
- Against the Nations 2.36Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Plato himself taught that the gods are immortal only by God's will; so God can make souls immortal, and Arnobius adds that souls were not begotten by the supreme God but by a lesser being of his court.
- Against the Nations 2.56Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Christians leave aside questions beyond their knowledge, seeing that philosophers argue plausibly for contradictory views on the world and the gods.
- Against the Nations 2.57Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Philosophers argue equally persuasively for opposite views of the soul, which shows that such questions cannot be settled by human reason.
- Against the Nations 3.36Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The pagans' own allegorizing philosophers abolish the gods more thoroughly than Christians do, so any divine anger should fall on them.
- Church History 2.4.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Philo excelled in Jewish learning and in Greek philosophy, especially Platonic and Pythagorean.
- Church History 5.28.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · They neglect Scripture for Euclid, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Galen.
- Church History 6.18.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · He taught gifted students the full course of philosophy, winning fame even among pagans.
- Church History 6.19.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Porphyry: Origen studied with the philosopher Ammonius but chose the opposite way of life.
- Church History 6.19.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Origen: because heretics and philosophers came to him, he studied their teachings.
- Church History 6.19.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · He followed the example of Pantaenus and Heraclas, who had also studied philosophy.
- Homilies 1.3Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Clement studies with the philosophers but finds only debate, not certainty about the soul's immortality.
- Homilies 1.10Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Philosophers mock Barnabas with a question about the gnat and the elephant, but he keeps to his message and offers eyewitnesses instead of syllogisms.
- Homilies 1.11Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Clement rebukes the laughing philosophers, arguing that God foresaw their unworthiness and now sends simple heralds of his will.
- Homilies 1.12Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Clement continues God's imagined reply and rebukes the philosophers for barking down a messenger who meant them good.
- Homilies 2.7Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Peter argues that philosophers who sought truth by their own conjectures were deceived.
- Homilies 2.8Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Peter says that people left to themselves take what pleases them for truth, as the Greek philosophers did with their consistent but false systems.
- Homilies 5.18Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · The letter appeals to philosophers, from Socrates to Chrysippus, as practitioners or defenders of free sexual unions.
- Recognitions 1.8Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Mocked by philosophers with a question about gnats and elephants, Barnabas refuses to argue and appeals to eyewitnesses.
- Recognitions 1.9Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Clement rebukes the crowd for mocking Barnabas's plain message and warns them of God's judgment.
- Recognitions 8.7Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Niceta says he can state the old man's case himself, having studied Epicureanism while his brothers studied Pyrrhonism and Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and the old man adds that he holds birth-fate besides.
- Recognitions 8.15Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Niceta surveys the Greek philosophers' theories of first principles and argues that whatever the elements, a God who combined them is required.
- Recognitions 8.20Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · What is called nature is really God the maker, as Plato's Timaeus testifies; the ordered heavens, like a painted domed house, proclaim a wise maker.
- Recognitions 8.61Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · The philosophers' subtle words lead nowhere, while the true Prophet's simple knowledge, proved by fulfilled prophecy, gives certainty.
- Recognitions 10.5Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Faustinianus presents the Greek view that nothing is good or evil by nature—not murder, adultery, or theft—and Plato's teaching that friends should hold all things, even wives, in common.
- Recognitions 10.48Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · The philosophers' ethics differ from Christian teaching because they lack a God who judges secret deeds, they still honor demons as gods, and they wrongly deny that God is angry with the wicked.
- Divine Institutes 1.1.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers deserved to know the truth because they longed for it above everything.
- Divine Institutes 1.1.4Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Some philosophers gave up property and pleasure to follow virtue alone.
- Divine Institutes 1.1.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers failed, because God's truth cannot be reached by human ability alone.
- Divine Institutes 1.1.17Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Lactantius sets the philosophers aside because they offer nothing certain.
- Divine Institutes 1.1.18Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers contradict one another and themselves, and so leave seekers confused.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.16Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Thales held that God is the mind who formed all things from water.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.17Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Pythagoras defined God as a soul pervading all nature and giving life.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.18Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Anaxagoras called God infinite mind; Antisthenes said there is one natural God behind the popular gods.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.19Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cleanthes and Anaximenes called the aether God, as Virgil also did.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.20Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Chrysippus and Zeno described God as divine reason, necessity, or law.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.21Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Whatever the philosophers call it, they agree on one providence, which Christians call God.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.22Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Aristotle, despite inconsistencies, testifies that one Mind rules the world.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.23Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Plato openly taught that one God made the world.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.24Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero, following Plato, calls God supreme and argues that he rules all nature.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.25Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · In his Consolation Cicero defines God as a free mind separate from everything mortal.
- Divine Institutes 1.5.26Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Seneca often praised the supreme God, the ruler of the world on whom all the lesser gods depend.
- Divine Institutes 1.12.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Stoics reinterpreted Saturn's myth as natural philosophy, as Cicero reports.
- Divine Institutes 1.12.9Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Stoics made Saturn a symbol of time, Kronos as chronos.
- Divine Institutes 1.12.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Stoic allegory of Saturn as time is absurd.
- Divine Institutes 1.17.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Stoics interpreted the gods as natural forces, and Cicero followed them.
- Divine Institutes 1.17.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero says natural philosophy produced fictitious gods and old wives' superstitions.
- Divine Institutes 2.3.12Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The wise attacked false religions but could not introduce the true one.
- Divine Institutes 2.3.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Rejecting all religion was a worse error than holding a false one.
- Divine Institutes 2.3.15Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers were wise to reject false religion but foolish to deny any true one.
- Divine Institutes 2.3.19Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Lactantius asks of the philosophers only what reason could achieve.
- Divine Institutes 2.3.23Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Human wisdom recognizes falsehood; knowing truth requires God's teaching.
- Divine Institutes 2.3.24Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers could say what is not but not what is, as Cicero admitted.
- Divine Institutes 2.5.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Even Stoic philosophers held the heavenly bodies to be gods.
- Divine Institutes 2.5.28Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · If its parts are not gods, the world is not a god, as the inconsistent Stoics claim.
- Divine Institutes 2.19.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Next comes the harder struggle against the philosophers.
- Divine Institutes 2.19.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Lactantius will show the philosophers that truth has been found, but not by human wit.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Truth will shine by its own light; the philosophers' learning does not give them knowledge of the truth.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers' desire for truth was good, but they did not know what truth was or how to seek it.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.8Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Trying to cure error, the philosophers fell into it; the plan of the work now leads to refuting philosophy.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Scripture says the philosophers' thoughts are foolish; this must now be shown by argument.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers' eloquence is not to be feared.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.14Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers spoke well but not truly, since they had not learned truth from God.
- Divine Institutes 3.1.15Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers often confess their own ignorance.
- Divine Institutes 3.2.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · After refuting false religion in Books 1–2, Book 3 will show philosophy to be empty and false.
- Divine Institutes 3.2.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, is by its very name not yet wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.2.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Pythagoras invented the name 'philosopher' because he knew that human pursuit cannot reach wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.2.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy is not wisdom, and its seeking is not right, because it never finds wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.2.8Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · After so many ages of searching without success, it is clear philosophy contains no wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.3.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Socrates and the Academics rightly denied such knowledge.
- Divine Institutes 3.4.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Combining Socrates and Zeno, philosophy is wholly abolished, and indeed all philosophers overthrow it.
- Divine Institutes 3.4.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy is split into many contradictory sects.
- Divine Institutes 3.4.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Every sect is condemned as false by other philosophers.
- Divine Institutes 3.4.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy destroys itself.
- Divine Institutes 3.4.11Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Arcesilas founded a new philosophy of not philosophizing by arming himself with all the others' criticisms.
- Divine Institutes 3.4.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Whichever side wins, philosophy perishes, being at war with itself.
- Divine Institutes 3.5.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Arcesilas rightly refuted others but lost the name of philosopher by teaching that nothing is known.
- Divine Institutes 3.6.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Academics denied all knowledge because some things are obscure.
- Divine Institutes 3.6.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Arcesilas, opposing Zeno, claimed on Socrates' authority that nothing can be known.
- Divine Institutes 3.6.20Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Both natural philosophy and scepticism fail, so philosophy is extinguished.
- Divine Institutes 3.9.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · He will show that the philosophers never grasped man's highest good.
- Divine Institutes 3.13.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Only ethics remains of philosophy, as Socrates saw.
- Divine Institutes 3.13.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Since they erred in ethics too, all philosophy is false and empty.
- Divine Institutes 3.14.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero too praised philosophy extravagantly.
- Divine Institutes 3.14.15Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero himself confessed that philosophers are blind and dull.
- Divine Institutes 3.14.19Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · By Cicero's own judgment philosophy is folly.
- Divine Institutes 3.15.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Seneca defined philosophy as the rule of right living.
- Divine Institutes 3.15.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · If philosophy made men good, only philosophers would be good.
- Divine Institutes 3.15.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Many unlearned people are good, few philosophers are; so they do not teach virtue.
- Divine Institutes 3.15.21Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy does not teach virtue; any goodness in philosophers comes from nature.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero admits philosophy offers more amusement than usefulness.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers dispute for amusement and are mere talkers.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy is to be discarded: one must be wise, not endlessly seek wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.9Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · In Cicero's Hortensius, the critic of philosophy is shown to be philosophizing.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Christians reject human philosophy but defend divine wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.12Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy's known beginning shows it is not wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.16.17Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Greeks invented philosophy to find a hidden truth and mistook it for wisdom.
- Divine Institutes 3.17.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · He turns from philosophy to the philosophers.
- Divine Institutes 3.20.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Yet the philosophers win fame for it.
- Divine Institutes 3.20.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · They can neither find nor defend anything.
- Divine Institutes 3.25.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero held that philosophy is only for the learned.
- Divine Institutes 3.25.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy belongs only to those with a beard and cloak.
- Divine Institutes 3.25.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The uneducated cannot understand Epicurus's physics.
- Divine Institutes 3.26.12Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy hides vices but does not remove them.
- Divine Institutes 3.28.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers claim wisdom yet admit they have none.
- Divine Institutes 3.28.11Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · When baffled, philosophers cry out that they are blind.
- Divine Institutes 3.28.12Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Anaxagoras and Empedocles lamented human ignorance.
- Divine Institutes 3.28.19Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Their views were inconsistent and contradictory.
- Divine Institutes 3.30.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · He has shown the philosophers' errors, though not exhaustively.
- Divine Institutes 3.30.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · He refuted philosophy lest people turn to it after leaving false religion.
- Divine Institutes 4.1.9Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Seven Sages were called wise for first inquiring into nature.
- Divine Institutes 4.1.12Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Even with much learning afterward, Greece never grasped truth.
- Divine Institutes 4.1.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers rejected the title 'wise' and so condemned both the sages and themselves.
- Divine Institutes 4.2.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The philosophers sought wisdom in the wrong place.
- Divine Institutes 4.3.4Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Separated, philosophy and pagan religion are both false.
- Divine Institutes 4.3.8Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · A philosopher-priest does not unite philosophy and religion.
- Divine Institutes 4.9.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Zeno the Stoic spoke of the Logos as the world's craftsman.
- Divine Institutes 5.13.15Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers praise such constancy only in words.
- Divine Institutes 5.14.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Carneades lectured on justice at Rome.
- Divine Institutes 5.14.4Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The next day he argued against justice.
- Divine Institutes 5.14.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Plato knew of one God but not true religion.
- Divine Institutes 5.17.4Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Plato and Aristotle lacked divine knowledge.
- Divine Institutes 5.17.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophy without heavenly foundation persuaded no one.
- Divine Institutes 5.17.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers could show no living examples of justice.
- Divine Institutes 5.17.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · No one lived as the philosophers taught.
- Divine Institutes 5.17.9Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Carneades used the paradox to support Academic skepticism.
- Divine Institutes 5.20.14Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers who deny the gods are tolerated.
- Divine Institutes 5.20.15Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Epicurean teaching is heard freely while Christians are punished.
- Divine Institutes 6.2.15Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero valued moral precepts above oratory.
- Divine Institutes 6.6.26Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Cicero admitted no one was truly wise.
- Divine Institutes 6.7.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Even philosophers are led down steep paths.
- Divine Institutes 6.8.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers seek the way on earth, where it is not.
- Divine Institutes 6.9.13Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Without God, philosophers are blind, deaf, and dumb.
- Divine Institutes 6.14.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · He turns to the Stoic view of the passions.
- Divine Institutes 6.14.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Stoics would remove the four passions.
- Divine Institutes 6.15.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The Peripatetics say the passions are natural and should be moderated.
- Divine Institutes 6.15.17Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Stoics end where Peripatetics begin.
- Divine Institutes 7.2.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Without God's teaching philosophers stuck in the mud.
- Divine Institutes 7.3.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Stoics divide nature into active and passive parts.
- Divine Institutes 7.3.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Stoics confuse God with the world.
- Divine Institutes 7.7.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Every school saw part of the truth.
- On the Anger of God 1.4Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · Philosophers tried to reach truth by guesswork, but the human mind, shut in the body, cannot; knowledge belongs to God.
- On the Anger of God 4.1Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · Epicurus denied God both anger and kindness, seeing that one implies the other.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.7.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Diodorus never mentions God; Eusebius turns to Plutarch's Miscellanies to show the philosophers' conflicting views on first principles.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Thales held that water is the first principle of all things.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Anaximander held that the infinite is the cause of all, that the world and heavenly bodies arose from it, and that man came from other creatures.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Anaximenes made air the first principle and explained the world by its condensation and rarefaction.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Xenophanes denied coming into being, distrusted the senses, and held that no god rules over another.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Parmenides held that being is eternal, one, and unmoved, and that coming into being is mere opinion.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Zeno of Elea only raised difficulties.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Democritus held the universe infinite, unmade, and governed by necessity.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Epicurus denied the gods' activity, held that everything is body, and made pleasure the highest good.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristippus made pleasure the good and confined inquiry to practical ethics.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Empedocles held four elements moved by Love and Strife and explained the heavens and the soul's seat in the blood.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Metrodorus held the universe eternal, infinite, and unmoved, and explained the sun and stars by condensation and rarefaction.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Diogenes of Apollonia made air the element and held that there are infinite worlds.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius concludes that the natural philosophers named no creator and ascribed the universe to chance motion.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The philosophers contradict each other, and Socrates, according to Xenophon, called them fools.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.15Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Xenophon: Socrates avoided speculation about nature and called those who pursued it foolish.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates compared the natural philosophers, with their contradictory views, to madmen.
- Preparation for the Gospel 1.8.19Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Since even Socrates rejected the natural philosophers, Christians rightly reject them; Eusebius returns to Diodorus on the earliest religion.
- Preparation for the Gospel 2.6.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Later philosophers reinterpreted the myths physically, unable either to reject or to accept them.
- Preparation for the Gospel 2.6.21Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The ancients knew only the myths; Eusebius now turns to the philosophers' natural theology.
- Preparation for the Gospel 2.6.22Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The philosophers contradict one another: some allegorize at will, others reject the myths, yet outwardly accept them for fear of the laws.
- Preparation for the Gospel 2.6.23Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato sometimes rejects the myths outright and sometimes, out of deference to the laws, requires belief in them.
- Preparation for the Gospel 2.7.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · In the Republic Plato calls the myths of Ouranus and Cronus great lies, not to be told to the young.
- Preparation for the Gospel, Book 3, preface 3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius will draw on the most famous philosophers.
- Preparation for the Gospel, Book 3, preface 4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plutarch's allegories are inconsistent: Hera is now marriage, now the earth, now the same as Leto.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.1.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plutarch says the ancient natural philosophy was hidden in myths and in the symbolic actions of the rites.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.2.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius concludes that Plutarch's secret natural philosophy contains nothing divine.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.2.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The allegories lead not to spiritual powers but down to matter and human passions.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.6.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Greek philosophy promises much but deifies only fire and the material parts of the world.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.6.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius turns to the Neoplatonists, especially Porphyry, who combine Platonic ideas with the old myths.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.13.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Greek allegories are likewise easily refuted.
- Preparation for the Gospel 3.13.25Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Only Christ taught all people the true worship of the one God, while the philosophers, as Paul says, became fools.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.1.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius introduces Book 10: the Greeks not only knew of the Hebrews but imitated their teaching.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.4.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The best Greek philosophers found no truths not already held by the Hebrews.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.4.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Where Greek philosophers reached the truth, they shared Hebrew teaching.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.4.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Pythagoras, first of the philosophers, was by some accounts a barbarian.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.4.20Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato studied in Egypt and acknowledges his debt to the barbarians.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.14.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Thales was the first Greek natural philosopher.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.14.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Anaxagoras first taught that Mind ordered the universe.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.14.15Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The successions of philosophers; Zeno of Elea died under torture rather than betray his comrades.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.14.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · All Greek philosophy, Plato’s above all, is much later than Moses and the prophets.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.14.18Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s agreement with the Hebrews must be weighed against his late date.
- Preparation for the Gospel 10.14.19Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius will next show Greek sages imitating Hebrew doctrines.
- Preparation for the Gospel, Book 11, preface 3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Book 11 will show Plato’s agreement with the Hebrews.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.1.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s threefold division of philosophy is found earlier among the Hebrews.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.1.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius introduces Atticus the Platonist.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.2.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Atticus: the three parts of philosophy, ethics and physics.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.2.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato first united the scattered parts of philosophy.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.2.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Earlier thinkers each pursued only one part of philosophy.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.2.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato perfected every part of philosophy.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.3.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles: before Plato, philosophers were partial or obscure.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.3.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates raised every question but died before completing them.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.3.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato divided knowledge into physics, ethics, and logic.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.3.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato divided philosophy into three.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.3.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Hebrews had the same threefold philosophy long before Plato.
- Preparation for the Gospel 11.10.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Numenius: “What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic?”
- Preparation for the Gospel 12.29.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Scripture praises the solitary life of the wise; Plato describes the true philosopher.
- Preparation for the Gospel 12.29.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s Theaetetus: the true philosopher ignores civic affairs.
- Preparation for the Gospel 12.29.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The philosopher’s mind roams the universe while his body stays in the city.
- Preparation for the Gospel 12.29.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · In public life the philosopher seems ridiculous.
- Preparation for the Gospel 12.29.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The free philosopher versus the servile man of affairs.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.2.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The schools mocked and refuted one another.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.4.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s successors in the Academy: Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.4.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s successors at once corrupted his teaching, and strife never ceased.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.5.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Numenius: Plato’s first successors kept much of his teaching but already diverged.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.5.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Numenius: the Epicureans never departed from their master, and their school is free of faction.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.5.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Numenius: the Stoics have been divided from the beginning.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.6.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Academics could be attacked only by showing they were not Platonic.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.7.15Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Carneades founded the Third Academy, distinguishing the inapprehensible from the unclear.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.8.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Carneades allowed probable impressions so that life could be lived.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.12.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · A letter ascribed to Xenophon says Socrates taught only human goods, and hints at Plato’s Sicilian ventures.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.13.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius introduces Plutarch’s collection of the philosophers’ opinions (the Placita).
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.14.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Heraclitus and Hippasus made fire the principle and end of all things.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.14.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Democritus and Epicurus: the principles are indivisible atoms moving in the infinite void.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.14.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Empedocles: four elements, with Love and Strife as moving powers.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.14.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Anaxagoras was the first Greek to make mind the cause of all things.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.16.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plutarch: Anaxagoras and Plato both made God the orderer of matter.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.16.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plutarch summarizes the views of Thales, Anaximander, Democritus, and Pythagoras about God.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.17.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles: the Eleatics and Megarians rejected the senses and held that being is one and unmoved.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.17.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles: reason is most divine, but sense is also a kind of knowledge.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.17.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles: right philosophy uses both the senses and reason.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.18.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Pyrrho: things are indifferent and undecidable, so we must hold no opinions.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.18.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The skeptics contradict themselves in teaching and refuting.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.18.31Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristippus of Cyrene, founder of the Cyrenaics, implied that pleasure is the end.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.18.32Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The younger Aristippus defined the end as pleasure and taught three states of feeling.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.19.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles: the Cyrenaics said only feelings are known, not their causes.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.20.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Protagoras: man is the measure of all things.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.20.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles, following Plato, refutes Protagoras: why not a pig as the measure?
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.21.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristocles: Epicureans make pleasure and pain the criterion of choice.
- Preparation for the Gospel 14.22.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato (Philebus): Socrates asks whether pleasure or mind is more akin to truth, measure, and beauty.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.2.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius turns to Aristotle’s doctrines.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.3.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Against Moses and Plato, Aristotle held that happiness requires bodily and external goods.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.4.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Atticus: Aristotle is the most opposed of all philosophers to Plato.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.4.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle denies that virtue alone suffices for happiness.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.7.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Atticus: Aristotle added a fifth element to make himself appear original.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.13.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Atticus: Aristotle mocked Plato’s Ideas, the summit of his philosophy.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.13.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Atticus: the Ideas are God’s thoughts, the patterns of creation, and knowing them is man’s end.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.13.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Antisthenes, Socrates’ pupil, scorned pleasure.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.13.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The succession from Antisthenes through Diogenes and Crates to Zeno.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.13.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Stoic succession after Zeno; Eusebius introduces their doctrines.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.14.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Stoics: periodic conflagration, the seminal fire, and fate as the law of all.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.15.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Stoic God, governing the world-city, cares for men.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.17.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Numenius: only the incorporeal is stable being and holds bodies together.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.18.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Arius Didymus: the oldest Stoics held that all things periodically dissolve into ethereal fire.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.19.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Stoic Great Year: nature absorbs all into itself and is restored.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.32.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The philosophers’ contradictions justify Christians in suspending judgment on such questions.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.45.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates and Plato: the ideas are God’s thoughts, separate from matter.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.45.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle: forms are not separate from matter.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.45.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Stoics: ideas are our concepts.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.61.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Pythagoras: life in the heart, reason in the head.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.61.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius: Christians rightly leave these useless questions and hold to piety toward the Creator.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.61.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates as a witness against the natural philosophers.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates did not speculate about the cosmos.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates questioned the motives of the natural philosophers.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The philosophers' disagreements show these matters are beyond human discovery.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The natural philosophers contradict one another as madmen do.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Knowledge of nature gives no power over it.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates discussed only human and moral questions.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristippus and Ariston: philosophy should be ethics alone.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Seeing the whole cosmos would not make us better.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Natural knowledge does not bring virtue or happiness.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates: only human things concern us.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Socrates left natural philosophy for moral inquiry.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Natural philosophy is also impious.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The natural philosophers disagree about everything.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Timon of Phlius mocks the philosophers' wrangling.
- Preparation for the Gospel 15.62.15Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Timon on Strife among the philosophers.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 25.2Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Next he turns to the false wisdom of the philosophers.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 25.3Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Human wisdom can be overcome by heavenly truth.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 25.4Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Philosophy, as love or pursuit of wisdom, is not wisdom itself.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 25.5Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · It is not even a real pursuit, since it never attains wisdom.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 26.1Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Socrates denied knowledge and Zeno opinion, undermining philosophy.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 26.6Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · With knowledge and opinion both removed, philosophy has no root.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 27.1Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Philosophy's sects condemn one another and so destroy it.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 27.2Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · The Academics attacked all schools, asserting only that nothing can be known.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 27.3Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · By professing ignorance the Academics lost even the name of philosophers.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 27.4Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Philosophy destroys itself.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 30.6Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · So all philosophy proves empty and useless.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 34.7Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Aristippus founded a school that justified vice by making pleasure the highest good.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 35.2Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Philosophers cannot teach justice or virtue, as they admit their ignorance.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 35.3Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Anaxagoras and Empedocles admitted the limits of knowledge.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 35.5Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Since human wisdom fails, we follow the divine wisdom God has revealed.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 36.4Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Pagan religion lacks wisdom and philosophy lacks religion, so both are false.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 37.4Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Plato spoke of a first and second god, perhaps following Hermes.
- Epitome of the Divine Institutes 54.1Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Philosophers spoke of two ways of life, but only in terms of this life.
- Demonstration of the Gospel 3.3.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Porphyry teaches that the supreme God is worshiped by silence, pure thought, and a passionless life, not material offerings.
- Demonstration of the Gospel, Book 5, preface 16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · If the gods taught truly, Greek philosophers would not have sought wisdom abroad or split into rival schools.
- Oration to the Assembly of the Saints 9.1Constantine the Great · ca. 325 (dated variously 317–325) · Philosophers, overreaching in speculation, lose the truth and contradict one another.
- Oration to the Assembly of the Saints 9.2Constantine the Great · ca. 325 (dated variously 317–325) · Philosophy bred strife: Socrates was executed for his sophistry, and Pythagoras passed off as his own revelation what he had learned from the prophets in Egypt.
- Oration to the Assembly of the Saints 9.3Constantine the Great · ca. 325 (dated variously 317–325) · Plato rightly taught a God beyond being and a second God who derives his existence from the first and serves his commands in creation.
- On the Incarnation 2.1Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · Athanasius begins with rival accounts of creation, first the Epicurean view that all things arose by chance without providence.
- On the Incarnation 2.3Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · Athanasius states Plato's view that God made the world from pre-existing uncreated matter.
- On the Witch of Endor 29Eustathius of Antioch · ca. 324–337 · Eustathius argues that if Plato rejected even Homer's and Hesiod's tales as false myths, the possessed woman's “belly-myth” must be false, as the very name implies.
- Theophany 2.19Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.20Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.21Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.24Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.30Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.41Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.47Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.49Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.50Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Theophany 2.51Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
- Tricennial Oration (In Praise of Constantine) 4.2Eusebius of Caesarea · 335–336 · The Word of God is the source of all human reason, virtue and kingship; he made humans in God's image and came among them to call all to the heavenly kingdom.
- Tricennial Oration (In Praise of Constantine) 11.17Eusebius of Caesarea · 335–336 · Philosophers have called the Word nature, world-soul or fate; others wrongly identified him with the supreme God himself bound up in matter.
- Against Marcellus 1.4.24Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 336–337 · Marcellus says Origen began writing too soon and was misled by philosophy.
- Against Marcellus 1.4.26Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 336–337 · Eusebius replies that Origen's opening words, even if found in Plato, lead straight to Christ the truth.
- On Ecclesiastical Theology 2.13.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 337–339 · Eusebius distinguishes the senses of logos: reason, speech and writing.
- Life of Constantine 2.71.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 337–339 · Philosophers stay united despite minor differences; so much more should Christians.
- On the Decrees of Nicaea 28Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 350–356 · The Arians borrowed the non-scriptural term “unoriginate” from the Greek philosophers to reintroduce their condemned claims about the Son.
- Life of Antony 72Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · Two pagan philosophers came to test the unlettered Antony, who told them that if they thought him wise they should imitate him and become Christians.
- Life of Antony 73Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · To philosophers who mocked his lack of learning, Antony replied that the mind, which invented letters, needs no letters if it is sound.
- Life of Antony 77Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · Antony made the philosophers admit that faith working in the soul comes before and surpasses proof by argument.
- On the Trinity 1.3Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · The moral philosophers gave sound but ordinary precepts; Hilary longed instead to know God himself, the giver of life.
- On the Trinity 1.13Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · Colossians 2 warns against philosophy and teaches that in Christ, fully God, believers are buried and raised in baptism and freed from the curse.
- On the Trinity 2.12Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · Neither Greek philosophy nor Jewish learning can explain the Son's generation, and confessing his miracles is not enough, since heretics confess them too.
- On the Trinity 12.20Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · Following Col 2:8 and 2 Cor 10:4–5, believers must not only avoid but refute philosophical sophistries, since faith needs instruction to stand firm.
- On the Generation of the Divine Word 10Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus explains how matter and quality are one, how soul differs from matter by understanding itself, and why mixed things belong to the things that are not truly not.
- Homilies on the Psalms 32.7Basil of Caesarea · ca. 360-378 · On Ps 33:11–12 Basil contrasts the scattered philosophies of the nations with the abiding counsel of God, reads the two “generations” as the two covenants, and calls blessed the chosen people gathered from the nations, before the remnant of Israel.
- Letter 71Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 360–390 · Gregory urges Philagrius to bear his illness like the Stoics, Anaxarchus, Epictetus and Socrates, and like Job, making weakness the material of virtue.
- Tractates on the Psalms 61.3Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Pagan philosophy, denying the incarnation and future judgment, pushes over man, already a leaning wall, into vice.
- Tractates on the Psalms 63.9Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The arguments of philosophers fail before the faith: God is creator and governor, the soul is from God's breath and survives death, the body will rise, and God judges human life.
- Tractates on the Psalms 67.21Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The cross, folly to others, is God’s wisdom; Christ alone, the firstborn from the dead, has the “issues of death,” going out from death and raising our nature to glory.
- Oration 4.44Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory mocks the Greek philosophers for their ideal cities, their atheism, Epicureanism, and fatalism, and their lack of any judgment after death.
- Oration 25.1Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory opens his praise of the philosopher Hero, a Christian in Cynic dress and a confessor, inviting him to the altar to be crowned before God and the Church.
- Oration 25.4Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory tells how Hero chose Christian philosophy, preferred a life among people to solitude, and kept the Cynic dress while rejecting Cynic godlessness and the empty speculations of the schools.
- Oration 26.10Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory compares the true philosopher to a mythical plant that thrives by being cut, showing how he turns every circumstance (birth, age, beauty, health, wealth, or their opposites) into virtue.
- Oration 26.13Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory says the philosopher, like God and the angels, cannot be mastered, and answers his opponents’ threats: he cares nothing for homeland, health, throne, or presidency, which is the source of the Church’s strife.
- Oration 43.12Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Basil was first educated in life and learning by his father, then at Caesarea, where he excelled as orator, philosopher and Christian, treating letters as a servant of the Christian philosophy of withdrawal to God.
- Oration 43.23Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Basil mastered rhetoric, grammar, philosophy and dialectic, took from the mathematical sciences only what was useful, learned medicine through his own illness, and excelled above all in character.
- Tractates 1.1.5Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno challenges the disputer to show real powers of faith instead of probing the divine nature by argument, citing Sirach, Romans and 1 Timothy against curiosity.
- Tractates 1.3.2Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno shows from Paul and Jeremiah that the world's wisdom is folly, and describes worldly wisdom, strength and riches as the foundations of vice.
- Tractates 1.7.1Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno begins a sermon on Psalm 131 by rebuking the Greek philosophers, whose curious arguments about God have passed into the church.
- Against Eunomius 1.9Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil traces Eunomius's argument about privation to Aristotle's Categories and shows that 'unbegotten' belongs with 'incorruptible,' 'invisible,' and 'immortal,' so that his reasoning would prove too much.
- Hexaemeron 1.2Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The first words of Genesis name God as the maker, against Greek theories that ascribe the world to elements or atoms and chance.
- Hexaemeron 1.3Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · Circular motion does not prove the world eternal: what began in time will end in time, and the philosophers who made the heaven eternal or divine became fools.
- Hexaemeron 1.4Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · Astronomers who chart the heavens precisely failed to recognize God as Creator and Judge, and mock the doctrine of the world's end.
- Hexaemeron 1.10Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · Basil reports the philosophers' argument that the earth rests at the center of the universe, and refers the wonder to God's wisdom.
- Hexaemeron 1.11Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The philosophers contradict one another about the substance of heaven; believers should leave the question and glorify the Creator from the beauty of his works.
- Hexaemeron 3.3Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The firmament is a second heaven distinct from the first; the philosophers who deny more than one heaven, or teach the music of the spheres, refute themselves.
- Hexaemeron 3.7Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The firmament separates fine from coarse moisture; abundant water is needed because heat, even the sun's, constantly consumes it, as the philosophers' own arguments admit.
- Hexaemeron 3.8Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The firmament is called heaven by likeness; rain and snow come from the waters above it; the simple words of Scripture surpass the philosophers' contradictory theories.
- Hexaemeron 8.2Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The soul of beasts is earthy and perishes with the body, against the doctrine of transmigration; Basil returns to the birds, created from the waters because flight is a kind of swimming.
- Homilies 12.6Basil of Caesarea · ca. 363-378 · Instruction also means choosing useful learning over geometry, astrology, poetry, rhetoric and sophistry; Basil then turns to “words of prudence” and the puzzle of the “prudent” serpent.
- Commentary on Colossians 2:1–3Ambrosiaster · ca. 366–384 · All wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ, so the Colossians need no worldly learning or other powers; Paul, present in spirit like Elisha, warns them against subtle reasoners.
- Commentary on Colossians 2:8–9Ambrosiaster · ca. 366–384 · Paul warns against philosophy that reduces God's power to natural reasoning and worships the elements and stars; all fulness of divinity is in Christ, so no other is to be worshipped.
- Question 114, section 18Ambrosiaster · ca. 370–384 · Pagans call the Son of God and the resurrection irrational, yet their own philosophers never settled anything by argument alone.
- Letter 49.13Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome defends his polemical style by the distinction between writing as an exercise and writing as teaching, citing philosophers, apologists, and Paul himself.
- Letter 52.3Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets Abishag as the wisdom that grows in old age, supporting this from Proverbs, from long-lived sages and poets, and from the meaning of her name.
- Letter 60.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome recalls the consolations of philosophers and the fortitude of Greek and Roman fathers who lost their sons.
- Letter 70.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome lists Greek Christian writers, from Quadratus to the Cappadocians, who drew on philosophy in their works.
- Letter 96.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus condemns Origen for following philosophy rather than Scripture and argues from the Gospels and Paul that Christ's kingdom is everlasting.
- Letter 132.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine notes that even if the virtues are inseparable, it does not follow, as the Stoics held, that all sins are equal.
- Letter 132.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine sets out the philosophical argument that the four cardinal virtues are inseparable.
- Letter 132.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine describes the Stoic view that a person progressing toward wisdom has no wisdom until he is perfect, like a drowning man who is either under water or out.
- Letter 133.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome tells Ctesiphon that the new claim that a man can be free of sin and passion comes from the Stoic and Pythagorean philosophers and is refuted by Paul and common experience.
- On the Holy Spirit 3.5Basil of Caesarea · ca. 374–375 · The heretics borrowed a philosophers' classification of causes, in which each kind of cause has its own preposition, and applied it to God.
- On the Holy Spirit 17.41Basil of Caesarea · ca. 374–375 · If "subnumeration" means dividing a common class into its members, it would make Father, Son, and Spirit of one essence, the opposite of what the opponents intend.
- Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 4.2.8Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Greek philosophy and its schools arose in this period.
- Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 5.1.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The Stoics call God the mind of the visible universe.
- Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 6.1.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Plato shares Stoic errors but differs on matter.
- Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 7.1.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Pythagoras teaches one God but also reincarnation.
- On Virgins 2.5Ambrose · ca. 377 · The Christian virgin and soldier surpass the famous friends Damon and Pythias; the tyrant who admired those friends mocked his own helpless gods, whereas the true God punished and pardoned Jeroboam.
- On the Christian Faith 1.5Ambrose · ca. 378–380 · Ambrose lists the Arian claims about the Son (unlike the Father, begun in time, created, not good, not true Son, not almighty, not one with the Father) and warns against their reliance on dialectic.
- On the Christian Faith 1.13Ambrose · ca. 378–380 · Ambrose answers “how was the Son begotten?” with the image of radiance from light, reads the furnace, Mamre, the Transfiguration, and the burning bush as revelations of the eternal Son, and contrasts simple faith with philosophical disputation.
- On Noah 92Ambrose · ca. 378-384 · Against the varied opinions of philosophers on the soul, Moses teaches that the rational soul comes from God's breath, while blood is the soul of the flesh, the seat of life and pleasure.
- On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 49Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory argues that if desire and anger are intellectual they would be separate souls; Macrina replies that the question is old, and that Christians must take Scripture, not pagan philosophy such as Plato’s chariot image, as their rule.
- On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 51Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina sets aside Plato and Aristotle and dialectical proofs, taking Scripture as her rule: since the soul is God’s likeness, nothing foreign to God, such as anger or desire, belongs to its essence; and the definition of man as rational does not include them.
- On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 107Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina promises that the body will be rewoven finer and more beautiful; Gregory asks for reasoned support for the resurrection; Macrina reviews pagan views of transmigration, accepting only what agrees with the resurrection, that the soul is again joined to a body made of the world’s elements.
- Theological Oration 1 (Or. 27), Against the Eunomians 9Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · Gregory mocks the self-made theologians and sends their love of argument to pagan philosophy and to open questions where error is harmless.
- Theological Oration 2 (Or. 28), On the Doctrine of God 28Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · The air, winds, snow, rain, and thunder surpass the natural philosophers’ explanations and call for faith beyond reason.
- On the Life of Moses 329Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · The ark in which the infant Moses is saved signifies education; the princess who adopts him is pagan philosophy, which may be used for a time provided one is not cut off from the Church’s milk; the fight with the Egyptian is the fight of godliness against error.
- On the Life of Moses 337Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · Pagan philosophy may be a spouse to the life of virtue once its errors (transmigration, a material God, eternal matter, fate) are “circumcised”; Aaron’s coming to meet Moses figures the guardian angel given to each person, who is opposed by an evil demon.
- On the Duties of the Clergy 1.10Ambrose · ca. 386–390 · The seemly is taught first in Scripture, and David, earlier than the philosophers, teaches measure in speech, learned like any skill by practice.
- On the Duties of the Clergy 1.13Ambrose · ca. 386–390 · Ambrose refutes the Epicurean and Aristotelian denial that God cares for the world he made.
- On the Duties of the Clergy 1.26Ambrose · ca. 386–390 · Against the philosophers’ idolatry and idle speculation, Moses shows true wisdom, which seeks God the judge and must issue in deeds.
- On the Duties of the Clergy 1.28Ambrose · ca. 386–390 · Christian justice rejects the philosophers’ permission to retaliate and their view of private property, teaching mutual help from Scripture, while avarice and ambition destroy justice.
- On the Duties of the Clergy 2.2Ambrose · ca. 386–390 · Against the philosophers’ varied views of happiness, Scripture places eternal life in the knowledge of God and in good works, as David taught long before them.
- On the Duties of the Clergy 3.5Ambrose · ca. 386–390 · Against Plato’s fable of Gyges’ ring, true examples show the just man avoiding sin even when he could escape detection: David sparing Saul and John the Baptist refusing to keep silent.
- Exposition of Psalm 118 2.5.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Pythagoras’ five years of silence imitated the prophet’s counsel of silence, for David came earlier.
- Exposition of Psalm 118 2.13.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Moses’ “attend to yourself” is older than the Delphic “know yourself.”
- Exposition of Psalm 118 18.3.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Philosophers borrowed from Scripture the idea that punishment corrects and death ends sin.
- Exposition of Psalm 118 18.4.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Ambrose claims Plato learned this idea in Egypt from Moses and the prophets.
- Exposition of Psalm 118 22.9.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Worldly prudence and philosophy seek gain and cosmology but ignore God.
- Exposition of Psalm 118 22.10.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Become a fool to the world; have nothing to do with philosophy that leads faith astray.
- Exposition of Psalm 118 22.10.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · The Arians, following Aristotle’s dialectic rather than Paul, fell into error about Christ’s generation.
- On the Happy Life 2Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Augustine distinguishes three kinds of people who come to philosophy: those who reach it early and easily, those who wander far and are brought back by misfortune, and those who remember their homeland but delay until adversity drives them home.
- On the Happy Life 4Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Augustine tells Theodorus how Cicero's Hortensius first fired him with love of philosophy, how he passed through the Manichees and the Academics, and how in Milan, through Ambrose, Plotinus, and an illness, he came to the harbor of philosophy.
- On the Happy Life 10Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Monica says that only one who wants and has good things is happy, which Augustine praises as the very heart of philosophy and confirms from Cicero's Hortensius.
- On the Happy Life 14Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Augustine argues that the Academics, who seek truth but never find it, do not have what they want and so are neither happy nor wise; most agree, while Licentius reserves judgment for Alypius.
- On the Happy Life 15Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Licentius tries to defend the Academics by appeal to the absent Alypius, but Augustine presses him on each premise and Licentius contradicts himself.
- Against the Academics 1.3Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine urges Romanianus to awaken, telling how a chest ailment drove him from rhetoric to philosophy, which freed him from the superstition into which he had led his friend.
- Against the Academics 1.7Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Licentius cites Carneades and Cicero, who held that nothing can be perceived and the wise man only searches diligently for truth, to argue that the search alone can make one happy.
- Against the Academics 1.23Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Licentius defines wisdom as both the knowledge, which belongs to God, and the diligent search, which belongs to man, of the things pertaining to the happy life, and argues that the seeker is wise and happy now and blessed hereafter.
- Against the Academics 1.24Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine reviews the course of the debate, praising both young men and noting that the Academics' stronghold lies in their definition of error.
- Against the Academics 2.1Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine, addressing Romanianus again, explains why the Academics' arguments seem invincible and prays for him to the power and wisdom of God, the Son of God.
- Against the Academics 2.5Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine tells how certain books of the Platonists set him on fire for philosophy and how he then turned back to the religion of his childhood and read the apostle Paul through.
- Against the Academics 2.11Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine sets out the Academics' position that nothing can be known, built on Zeno's Stoic definition of what can be perceived, and their conclusion that the wise man assents to nothing.
- Against the Academics 2.12Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine explains how the Academics answered the charge of inactivity by appealing to the probable or truthlike as a guide to action.
- Against the Academics 2.14Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Alypius explains that the New Academy of Arcesilas arose against the Stoic Zeno, not against the Old Academy, whose suspicion of rash assent it developed into the refusal to assent to anything.
- Against the Academics 2.24Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Alypius warns against a dispute about words, and Augustine replies that the Academics chose their terms deliberately, perhaps to hide their real opinion from the unworthy, and that he will argue against those who think them enemies of truth.
- Against the Academics 3.5Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that the wise man differs from the philosopher by possessing the discipline of wisdom, which implies knowledge of the truth, and seizes on Alypius's admission that it seems to the wise man that he knows wisdom.
- Against the Academics 3.9Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine presses Alypius for a direct answer, and Alypius concedes that a wise man such as reason describes would seem to him to know wisdom.
- Against the Academics 3.10Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that either the wise man knows wisdom, which refutes the Academics, or the question becomes whether anyone can be wise, which is a question no longer about the Academics.
- Against the Academics 3.12Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine claims that the Academics are reduced to disputing only about assent, and that both sides agree that one should assent to the truth if it is found.
- Against the Academics 3.15Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine begins a continuous speech with Cicero's witty argument that the Academic, ranked second by every other school, must be first.
- Against the Academics 3.16Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine retells Cicero's comic scene in which Stoics and Epicureans each rank the doubting Academic second, and says he will not dispute this glory.
- Against the Academics 3.17Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine turns Cicero's jest against the Academics: one who doubts can also claim second place, but one who denies that the wise man knows even wisdom is defeated either in glory or in argument.
- Against the Academics 3.21Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that Zeno's definition is either true, and so known, or false, in which case something can be perceived after all; either way something is known.
- Against the Academics 3.22Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine imagines Carneades retreating to the claim that only philosophical questions are unknowable, and replies that Zeno's definition, fixed at the entrance of philosophy, defeats him, comparing him to Cacus overcome by Hercules.
- Against the Academics 3.23Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine replies to the argument from the philosophers' disagreements that even in physics he knows true disjunctions, such as that there is either one world or more than one.
- Against the Academics 3.25Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that disjunctions and mathematical truths such as three times three is nine hold whether one is awake, asleep, or mad, and that the senses are not to blame for dreams and madness.
- Against the Academics 3.26Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that the senses report truly how things appear, that one knows how things appear to oneself, and that in any case some philosophers place knowledge in the intellect rather than the senses.
- Against the Academics 3.29Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine lists the truths he has learned from dialectic, including logical forms and rules for dealing with verbal disputes and fallacies.
- Against the Academics 3.30Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine answers Alypius's claim that the Academic wins even in defeat, arguing that once it is probable that the wise man knows wisdom, there is no reason for him to withhold assent from it.
- Against the Academics 3.31Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine imagines a quarrel between the wise man and wisdom to show the absurdity of a wise man who withholds assent from wisdom, which he finds in himself, and quotes Cicero's Hortensius.
- Against the Academics 3.34Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine tells the story of two travelers, one credulous who reaches his goal by trusting a shepherd, and one cautious who follows a probable but false direction and gets lost, to show that the Academics' probable does not keep one from error.
- Against the Academics 3.35Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that the Academic doctrine would excuse a young man who commits adultery because it seemed probable to him, making error and even sin impossible to blame.
- Against the Academics 3.36Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine argues that the Academic doctrine would excuse every crime and that the Academics surely saw this, though even Cicero could not refute one who says 'I know that it seems so to me.'
- Against the Academics 3.37Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine begins his account of the Academics' hidden purpose with Plato's doctrine of two worlds, the intelligible world of truth and the sensible world that is only truthlike.
- Against the Academics 3.38Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine conjectures that Arcesilas, faced with Zeno's materialism, hid the Platonic doctrine like buried gold and set himself to unteach false opinions, which gave rise to the New Academy.
- Against the Academics 3.41Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine traces the Academy through Philo, Antiochus, and Cicero to Plotinus, in whom Plato's thought shone out again.
- Against the Academics 3.42Augustine of Hippo · 386 (autumn) · Augustine holds that one true philosophy, harmonizing Plato and Aristotle and concerned with the intelligible world, has emerged, but that souls could return to it only because God lowered the authority of the divine intellect to a human body.
- Letter 1.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine tells Hermogenianus that he imitated rather than refuted the Academics, whose concealment of truth suited their age but now discourages the search for truth.
- Letter 3.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine asks whether happiness lies in knowing natural philosophy and reflects on infinite divisibility and the contrast between intelligible and sensible number.
- Letter 101.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Only what accords with truth is truly liberal; poets, orators and philosophers who did not know God are not, though honest history has some nearness to freedom.
- Letter 102.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Christ appeared when and where he foreknew there would be believers; in earlier ages he foresaw that people would not have believed even his miracles.
- Letter 104.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Stoic hardness condemns the mercy Nectarius asks for; Cicero praised Caesar's mercy, and Christians practise mercy with truth, which sometimes means restraint.
- Letter 118.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine argues that the highest good cannot be in the body, since the mind is better than the body, and notes the Epicureans who placed it there.
- Letter 118.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine argues that the mind is not its own highest good, since it is changeable and made wise by the unchangeable Wisdom, which is God; the Stoics erred in placing the good in the mind.
- Letter 118.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine explains that the Platonists, who placed the highest good in the enjoyment of God, opposed both the Epicureans and the Stoics while concealing their own doctrine.
- Letter 118.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine explains that the Platonists lacked the example of Christ's humility and so could not lead the crowds to belief in the invisible God.
- Letter 118.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine shows that in logic too the Platonists' teaching that truth is grasped by the intellect alone would not be heard against schools that trusted the senses.
- Letter 118.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine observes that the old philosophical sects have fallen silent and that the Platonists, with a few changes, should submit to Christ, the incarnate Word.
- Letter 118.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine shows that one who knows that God is present everywhere whole, like truth, and that the Word is begotten in a unique way, need not trouble about Anaximenes' view that air is God.
- Letter 118.24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine accepts Anaxagoras's “Mind” as a name for divine Wisdom and answers Cicero's objections, which treat the infinite as if it were a body.
- Letter 118.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine examines Cicero's objection that Anaxagoras's Mind must be either a living being with a body or beyond understanding.
- Letter 118.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine deplores Democritus's teaching that the gods are images flowing from bodies, and asks from what body the image of truth could come.
- Letter 118.28Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine describes the atomist theories of Democritus and Epicurus about the gods and the images by which things are thought of.
- Letter 118.29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine refutes the atomist theory of images by showing that vast images could not touch a small mind or small eyes as wholes.
- Letter 118.31Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine argues that chance collisions of atoms could not produce ordered forms and that the atomists' own theory of images undermines the existence of atoms.
- Letter 118.33Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine recounts how the Platonists of Plotinus's school either fell into magic or became Christians, so that authority and reason are now found in Christ and his church.
- Letter 120.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine distinguishes true reason from the false reasoning of the Arians and Macedonians, and notes that philosophers who accepted Christ crucified found the fishermen ahead of them.
- Letter 135.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Volusian writes to Augustine describing a gathering of friends where rhetoric, poetry, and the philosophical schools were discussed.
- Letter 149.24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · In context, Paul warns the Colossians against false 'wisdom' from pagan philosophy and Jewish observances, pointing them to Christ, in whom all treasures of wisdom are hidden.
- Letter 149.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine traces Colossians 2:5–10: Paul warns against philosophy and the 'elements of the world,' since Christ, in whom the Godhead dwells bodily, is head of every principality and power.
- Letter 155.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The philosophers lacked true piety because they sought to make themselves happy by their own virtue, and so absurdly allowed the wise man to kill himself to escape suffering.
- Letter 155.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Cicero's Tusculans show the contradiction of philosophers who call the wise man always happy yet advise him to kill himself under extreme suffering; the remedy is to pray to God.
- Letter 184.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine describes the plan and progress of the City of God (ten books done, the fourteenth in hand), which will answer their questions.
- Letter 234.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The pagan Longinianus replies with elaborate compliments, appealing to Socratic, Orphic and Hermetic precepts, and calls Augustine a uniquely good man.
- Letter 234.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Longinianus says the way to God is a life of virtue with the help of the gods and purification by the ancient rites and abstinence.
- On Order 1.10Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Licentius rejoices that he is no longer an Academic and senses something divine, and Augustine, quoting Vergil, prays that God, who is truth itself rather than the oracular Apollo, will lead them.
- On Order 1.31Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · When Monica asks whether women appear in such discussions, Augustine defends her presence, noting that learned books include humble philosophers and that women philosophized among the ancients.
- On Order 1.32Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine explains to Monica that philosophy is the love of wisdom, that Scripture condemns only the philosophy of this world, as Christ's kingdom is not of this world, and that her freedom from fear of death makes him glad to be her pupil.
- On Order 2.7Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Licentius argues that the wise man, gazing on God, needs no memory, which belongs to the servant part of the soul; Augustine objects that teaching requires memory, and the question is deferred.
- On Order 2.30Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine defines reason as the movement of the mind able to distinguish and connect what is learned, and notes that few can use it to understand God or the soul.
- On Order 2.31Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine reflects on the definition of man as a rational mortal animal and distinguishes the rational, what uses reason, from the reasonable, what is made or said by reason.
- On Order 2.44Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine says that one who reduces the disciplines to one simple truth may seek divine things, but one ignorant of basic metaphysical notions will err greatly even about his own soul, let alone God, who is better known by not knowing.
- On Order 2.47Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine says that one must know dialectic and number, or at least what the one is, before inquiring into these questions; philosophy then studies the soul and God, leading to knowledge of the two worlds and of the Father of all, known only by knowing how he is not known.
- Soliloquies 1.4Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason uses the geometer's line and sphere to show that very different things can be known with equal certainty, and asks whether Augustine would be content to know God in that way.
- Soliloquies 1.12Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine admits that he wants his friends and his own life only for the sake of finding wisdom, and that he fears bodily pain because it hinders the search, citing Cornelius Celsus on the supreme good and evil.
- Soliloquies 1.15Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason begins to show that truth outlasts all true things that perish, so that truth must dwell in what is immortal, and urges Augustine to entrust himself wholly to God.
- Soliloquies 2.5Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason shows that defining the true as what appears to a knower leads to absurd conclusions, while defining it as what is leaves nothing false, and Augustine is left without an answer.
- Soliloquies 2.6Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · After Augustine prays for light, Reason shows from sight, hearing and the other senses that what we call false is always something that resembles the true.
- Soliloquies 2.11Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason argues that grammar and every discipline are true because they are disciplines, formed by the definitions and divisions of the art of disputation, so that truth is true through itself.
- Soliloquies 2.15Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason restates the proof that truth cannot perish, then shows that something is called false only when it imitates the true, as a false statement imitates true ones or lead imitates silver.
- Homilies on Matthew 1.4John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · The Gospels' harmony on essentials is proved by their reception throughout the world, in contrast with the contradictory philosophers and Plato's and Zeno's ideal states, which Chrysostom calls demonic inventions against nature.
- Homilies on Matthew 1.5John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · Christian teaching is loftier and simpler than the philosophers' (virginity, the double love command), and its commonwealth is heavenly; Chrysostom then lists the questions raised by Matthew's genealogy and urges his hearers to attend as eagerly as they do at the theater.
- Homilies on Matthew 33.4John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · The pagan philosophers and generals are nothing beside the twelve fishermen, who conquered the world and the demons by suffering and changed their enemies; in the mission some things are Christ’s gift and some the apostles’ own virtue.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 1.1Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Ambrose opens by setting out the philosophers' theories of the first principles of the world, Plato's three and Aristotle's.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 1.3Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · The philosophers disagree about how many worlds there are and whether the world is eternal.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 1.5Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Moses' opening words answer the philosophers: God is the maker of matter itself, and he made the world at once.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 1.7Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Moses spoke by God's Spirit, not by philosophy, and rejected the atomists' world of chance.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 1.23Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Ambrose reports the philosophers' debate over whether heaven is made of the four elements or of a fifth, ethereal substance.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 2.3Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · The works of creation must be judged by the rule of Scripture and the power of Christ, not by philosophy.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 2.5Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Against philosophers who deny that God could make more than one heaven, Scripture says God does whatever he wills.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 2.6Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Scripture speaks of several heavens; the philosophers borrowed this and invented the music of the spheres.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 2.7Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Ambrose refutes the music of the spheres: if it existed, we would hear it as we hear thunder.
- Hexameron (Exameron) 6.23Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · A dog tracking a hare reasons like a philosopher's syllogism, and dogs are loyal unto death and even expose murderers.
- Explanation of Twelve Psalms 35.1.2Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Philosophers followed this order, but David long preceded Plato.
- Explanation of Twelve Psalms 36.28.2Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The "riches of sinners" may be the philosophers' wealth of words.
- Explanation of Twelve Psalms 36.28.3Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Simple priests, poor in words, win more than eloquent philosophers.
- Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.10.2Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The other nations stand for philosophical sophistry, worldly servility, avarice, trust in riches and the physician who cannot heal himself.
- On the Immortality of the Soul 3Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Augustine argues that the mind can move bodies in time without itself being changed, since its intention, memory, and expectation hold together what passes, and that even if it undergoes some change, change is not the same as perishing.
- On the Immortality of the Soul 4Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Since the unchangeable principles of the arts exist inseparably in the mind and cannot be lost, transferred, or begotten by it, but are found within it, the human mind is immortal.
- On the Immortality of the Soul 5Augustine of Hippo · 387 · The changes the soul undergoes, through the body or its own affections, are like changes of color or shape in wax: they do not destroy the subject, and so do not threaten the soul in which unchangeable reason resides.
- On the Immortality of the Soul 6Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Defining reason as the mind's gaze, its contemplation, or the truth contemplated, Augustine argues that the mind joined to reason cannot be separated from it by any power, and that reason, which supremely is, gives the mind being, so that it cannot perish.
- On Free Choice of the Will 2.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–395 · Beginning the proof that God exists, Augustine establishes that Evodius exists, lives, and understands, and ranks the bodily senses, the inner sense that presides over them, and reason, which judges them all and knows itself.
- On Free Choice of the Will 2.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–395 · The bodily sense, which lives, is better than the bodies it perceives, and the inner sense is better than the bodily sense because it governs and judges it.
- On Free Choice of the Will 2.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–395 · Wisdom is the truth in which the highest good is discerned and held; all want happiness and so want wisdom, and, like sunlight in which many things are seen, one wisdom may be common to all the wise.
- On the Catholic Way of Life and the Manichaean Way of Life 1.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–389 · Temperance also despises popular glory and curious, prideful study of the physical world; the New Testament forbids love of the world, and Ecclesiastes declares all such things vanity, to be used, not loved.
- On True Religion 1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · Augustine begins by observing that the pagan philosophers held conflicting views in their schools while sharing the same temples and rites with the people.
- On True Religion 2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · Augustine interprets Socrates' oaths by dogs and stones as a rebuke of idolatry, but notes that neither he nor Plato turned the people from their idols.
- On True Religion 3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · Augustine argues that what Plato could only hope a divine man might achieve, persuading the peoples to seek the unseen truth, has been accomplished through Christ and the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world.
- On True Religion 4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · Augustine urges the Platonists to acknowledge Christ, through whom the peoples have been persuaded of what their masters could not teach them, and suggests that Plato and his followers would become Christians if they lived now.
- On True Religion 39Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · Augustine urges the reader to return into himself and transcend even his reasoning soul toward the truth, arguing that anyone who doubts is certain of something true and so cannot doubt that truth exists.
- Sermon 68.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The “wise and prudent” are the philosophers who studied creation but mistook parts of it for God and did not find the Creator.
- Sermon 68.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Some pagan philosophers did come to know the Creator through creation, as Paul acknowledged at Athens.
- Sermon 68.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · To glorify God is to give him thanks; the philosophers grew vain through pride, like smoke that rises and vanishes.
- Sermon 68.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · God hid himself from the proud philosophers and revealed himself to the humble; Peter the fisherman holds what Plato lost.
- Sermon 141.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Some philosophers saw God, the unchanging truth, through creation but did not find the way to him; Paul says they hold the truth in unrighteousness.
- Sermon 141.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · God manifested himself to the philosophers through creation, which answers all who question it, “God made us”; but they did not glorify him, and in their pride became fools.
- Sermon 141.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The philosophers’ folly was idolatry: knowing God from his works, they worshiped images made by craftsmen, which, if they had hearts, would worship their makers.
- Sermon 150.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Providence brought only Epicureans and Stoics to debate with Paul because, man being body and soul, those who seek happiness in man must place it either in bodily pleasure, as the Epicureans did, or in virtue of mind, as the Stoics did.
- Sermon 150.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Paul could not place happiness in the body, as the Epicureans did, who held the soul mortal; he grieved over Christians who lived like Epicureans, saying “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
- Sermon 150.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Stoics placed happiness in virtue, but trusted in themselves; the Christian says that happiness is God’s gift, and virtue itself flows from Christ, the rock struck by the rod of the cross, so that we say, “I will love you, O Lord, my strength.”
- Sermon 150.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The happy life means truth without deception and life without death or pain, which alone deserves the name of life; the philosophers missed the way to it, but Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, has come to us.
- Sermon 156.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Augustine contrasts the Epicureans, who lived by the flesh, and the Stoics, who lived by their own soul's virtue, with Paul at Athens, who lived according to God and placed happiness in hope in the Lord.
- Sermon 160.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Knowing Christ crucified is to hold a wrapped treasure of all wisdom; proud philosophers despise the humble wrapping and miss what eye has not seen, ear not heard, nor heart conceived.
- Sermon 177.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Pagan philosophers also condemned avarice, but only Christ's school adds “flee these things and pursue righteousness, faith, love”; Christians, adopted sons, should use goods like an inn on a journey, not an estate.
- Sermon 240.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Platonist philosophers taught the soul's immortality but also its endless return into bodies; God has made such wisdom foolish, and believers in the Mediator will receive their bodies back for glory.
- Sermon 241.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The philosophers came to know the Creator from his works, as Romans 1 teaches, and so are without excuse for not glorifying him.
- Sermon 241.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Having known God, the philosophers did not glorify him and fell into idolatry, even of animals, sinking as low as they had risen high.
- Sermon 241.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Augustine mocks the Platonist notion that purified souls in the stars forget their past miseries and yet desire to return to bodies.
- Sermon 241.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Even Virgil's Aeneas recoiled from the doctrine of souls returning to bodies; such souls would be happy only by error, whereas the Truth gives true freedom.
- Sermon 241.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · If souls return from heavenly happiness to bodily misery, the philosophers' hope makes present misery hopeful and future happiness hopeless; and love of bodies would be a stain in purified souls.
- Sermon 241.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Against Porphyry's maxim that all body is to be fled, Augustine points to the philosophers' own teaching that the world is an eternal living being with a soul forever joined to its body.
- Sermon 241.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Plato's Timaeus has God promise the star-gods that they will never leave their bodies, which refutes the Platonists' claim that all body must be fled.
- Sermon 242.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ, Word, soul, and body in one person, ascended with the flesh taken from earth; even Plato makes God keep created gods from dissolving by his will, so God can do what is otherwise impossible.
- On Faith and the Creed 24Augustine of Hippo · 393 · The risen flesh will become a heavenly body; since even the philosophers grant that every body can change into every other, God can transform it in an instant.
- Against Jovinianus 1.4Jerome · 393 · Jerome compares Jovinian's teaching to the serpent's in paradise, announces his plan, and states that Jovinian, by making all merits equal, wrongs both virginity and marriage.
- Against Jovinianus 1.47Jerome · 393 · Jerome quotes at length Theophrastus's lost book On Marriage, arguing that a wise man should not marry.
- Against Jovinianus 1.48Jerome · 393 · Jerome adds examples from pagan history and literature of the troubles of marriage, and the views of Epicurus and Chrysippus.
- Against Jovinianus 2.6Jerome · 393 · Jerome answers the argument from the uses of animals: many creatures serve medicine or the needs of laborers, but the Christian seeking perfection may abstain from meat and wine.
- Against Jovinianus 2.9Jerome · 393 · Jerome cites philosophers who withdrew from luxury to pursue wisdom, and concludes that no one can live in pleasures without being held by them.
- Against Jovinianus 2.11Jerome · 393 · Jerome cites physicians and philosophers (Hippocrates, Galen, Diogenes, Epicurus) for the health and freedom of a simple diet.
- Against Jovinianus 2.14Jerome · 393 · Jerome cites Jewish, Persian, Indian, Greek, and Cynic examples of abstinence, especially Antisthenes and Diogenes.
- On Christian Doctrine 2.28Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · History, though learned outside the Church, helps in understanding Scripture, as with Christ's age and Ambrose's argument that Plato borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures rather than Christ from Plato.
- On Christian Doctrine 2.31Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Logic is very useful for Scripture if one avoids sophistry; valid inference can be learned outside the Church, but the truth of propositions is found in Scripture.
- On Christian Doctrine 2.40Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · What is true in pagan philosophy, especially Platonism, should be taken for Christian use, as Israel took the Egyptians' gold, as Cyprian, Lactantius, and others did.
- Confessions 3.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · At nineteen Augustine read Cicero's Hortensius, which turned him from vain ambition to a burning love of wisdom and began his return to God.
- Confessions 3.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · The Hortensius set Augustine on fire with love of wisdom, but it could not fully captivate him because it lacked the name of Christ, which he had learned from his mother.
- Confessions 7.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Augustine read books of the Platonists which taught, in other words, what John's prologue says of the eternal Word, but not that the Word came to his own and made believers children of God.
- Confessions 8.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Simplicianus tells Augustine how the famous pagan rhetor Victorinus became a Christian.
- On the Trinity 4.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine criticizes philosophers who think they can purify themselves by their own power because they have glimpsed unchangeable truth: they see the homeland from afar but in pride refuse the wood of the cross that carries the humble there.
- On the Trinity 4.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine argues that philosophers who know God's eternal reasons are not therefore authorities on the resurrection or the course of history, since they learn natural and historical facts from experience and cannot foresee the future as prophets do.
- On the Trinity 4.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine distinguishes kinds of foreknowledge: conjecture from experience, demons' perception of what is already on its way, revelation through angels, and direct prophetic vision by the Holy Spirit; the philosophers, though they knew something of God, were not given knowledge of the ages and the resurrection, which was revealed to the prophets.
- On the Trinity 10.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Thinking itself a body, the mind has been identified by philosophers with blood, brain, heart, atoms, air, fire, or the body's tempering; but it is present to itself and need not seek itself as though absent.
- On the Trinity 12.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine rejects Plato's doctrine of recollection and Pythagorean transmigration, explains learning by divine illumination, and proposes to seek a trinity in the knowledge of temporal things.
- On the Trinity 13.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · In this life faith is needed, for only in the life to come will the good live as they will; the philosophers' boast of living as they will is pitiable, and happiness requires immortality.
- On the Trinity 13.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · What the Word made flesh did in time belongs to knowledge, his eternal being to wisdom; Christ is both our knowledge and our wisdom, which the philosophers missed by refusing the Mediator.
- On the Trinity 14.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · The image of the Trinity will be perfected by the sight of God after the judgment, which is eternal life; Cicero's praise of contemplative philosophy falls short without faith in the Mediator.
- On the Trinity 15.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Against the Academic skeptics, Augustine argues that much is truly known, above all that one lives, and also much learned through the senses and the testimony of others; from such knowledge the true inner word is born.
- The Harmony of the Gospels 1.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · The pagans believe what the disciples of Pythagoras and Socrates wrote about masters who wrote nothing; they should likewise believe Christ's disciples.
- The Harmony of the Gospels 1.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · The Romans refused the God of Israel because, as Socrates said each god should be worshiped as he commands, his worship excluded all others.
- The Harmony of the Gospels 1.35Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Later Platonists reinterpreted Saturn as 'full mind' and Jupiter as the world-soul; Augustine leaves the world-soul an open question, since wisdom comes only from God's wisdom.
- The Harmony of the Gospels 1.45Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Even if the God of Israel is only the ruler of the elements, as one philosopher said, he outranks all the gods of parts and should be worshiped alone.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 0Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Addressing the presbyter Paul, the author proposes to show from Aristotle's Physics that the Greeks reasoned about God and creation by conjecture, while the prophets, taught by God, agree that the one unoriginated God made all things by his will.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 1Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Aristotle's claim that there is always an underlying thing from which what comes to be comes is turned into a series of questions against the eternity of matter.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 2Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Aristotle's account of the underlying thing as one in number but two in form is turned against him: if matter has no being as a “this” of its own, it cannot be an eternal principle.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 3Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · On the number of the principles of natural things (Physics 1.7): if form makes matter formed by its presence, matter without form cannot be ungenerated.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 4Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The author quotes Aristotle on the early philosophers who denied all coming to be, as proof that the Greeks reasoned by conjecture rather than demonstration.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 5Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The author quotes Aristotle's claim that things come to be from not-being only accidentally and argues that this abolishes generation as much as the early philosophers did, that matter cannot be ungenerated, and that his principles should be four, not three.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 6Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's distinction of matter and privation (Physics 1.9): matter that never is in itself cannot be an ungenerated principle beside God.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 7Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's matter as a joint cause and “mother” of what comes to be: matter that is ungenerated and imperishable would rival God.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 11Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The author quotes Aristotle's claim that mind and nature are prior causes to chance, even of the heaven, and charges him with contradicting his own claim elsewhere that the heaven is ungenerated.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 16Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's unmoved first mover, the author argues that a principle that is not natural cannot move naturally, and that a natural principle that has a principle of motion is not a principle. The author concludes that among eternal things nothing is first, so Aristotle's unmoved mover cannot be the first principle.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 31Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's doubts about the existence of time, the author argues that time, which came to be, has a beginning, is composed of actual and potential parts that exist, and must include the now as a part.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 41Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's argument that time, and so motion, has no beginning, since there is no time without a now (Physics 8.1).
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 42Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's rejection of “it always is or comes to be so” as a sufficient principle (Physics 8.1).
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 44Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against the primacy of locomotion (Physics 8.7): if circular motion is first and eternal, it cannot also be said to have a before and after.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 49Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Using Aristotle's saying that God and nature do nothing in vain, the author argues that the heavenly bodies are made by God and so cannot be ungenerated and eternal.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 50Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle's distinction between the form apart from matter and the form in matter (On the Heaven 1.9).
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 52Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against “each thing that has a work is for the sake of the work” and God's activity as eternal motion (On the Heaven 2.3).
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 53Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The author quotes Aristotle on why the heaven's circular motion requires a body at rest in the middle. The author completes Aristotle's argument that a resting earth implies fire, the intermediate elements, generation, and further circular bodies, and objects that the heaven, said to move by its element, actually moves by its spherical shape, and that a weightless body should rest rather than move. The author argues that the heaven's spherical motion is not natural to its element, that a world whose parts depend on one another is the work of providence and so generated, and that Aristotle's chain of necessities (eternal motion, a fifth body, a resting earth, the elements, generation) proves the dependence of all these things.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 54Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Against Aristotle on the two directions of motion on the circle (On the Heaven 2.5).
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 55Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · On what the stars are made of and how they move (On the Heaven 2.7): the author argues that this too implies their generation.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 56Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · If the stars rest fixed in their circles, they are there either in vain or by force, which Aristotle denies of eternal things; and stars called gods would be gods dragged along by gods.
- Refutation of Certain Aristotelian Doctrines 60Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The author argues that stars made of the same element and shape as the heaven yet kept at rest have their nature in vain or contrary to nature, and that their shaping by nature's providence shows they are not ungenerated.
- Christian Questions to the Greeks 6.5Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Matter, not being an essence, could not be worked by nature or art; and Aristotle's fifth element cannot be heated by motion without being one of the four ordinary elements.
- Christian Questions to the Greeks 6.7Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The sun's constant heat despite unequal motion refutes Aristotle's view that it is hot only by its motion.
- Christian Questions to the Greeks 6.8Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Aristotle contradicts himself in denying that matter is an essence while making it receptive of contraries, and in deriving things from a matter that lacks being.
- Christian Questions to the Greeks 6.9Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Aristotle's matter must either be being or be incapable of producing anything.
- Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine states his rule: what is demonstrated about nature is not contrary to Scripture, what contradicts the faith is false, and the reader should seek first the author’s own meaning, then a meaning consistent with the context and with sound faith.
- Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Men become like beasts by their conduct in this life; the philosophers' argument from likeness of character cannot support transmigration, which they probably meant figuratively.
- Apology against Rufinus 1.18Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome quotes Origen's lost Stromata 6, which follows Plato in allowing a useful lie as a medicine, to support his charge that Origenists tolerate lying.
- Apology against Rufinus 3.39Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome answers Rufinus's demand for the books of Pythagoras: he had spoken of Pythagorean doctrines, known through Cicero and others, and he cites the Golden Verses and Pythagorean maxims.
- Apology against Rufinus 3.40Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome traces the doctrine of transmigration and of learning as recollection from Pythagoras through Plato to Origen's On First Principles, and explains that he spoke of reading doctrines, not books.
- Tractates on the Gospel of John 2.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Some philosophers glimpsed through creation that all things were made through the Word, but in pride despised the humility of the cross, the only 'wood' by which the sea of this world can be crossed.
- Tractates on the Gospel of John 45.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Philosophers who promised happiness apart from Christ climbed in another way, like thieves.
- Tractates on the Gospel of John 60.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Against the Stoics, Augustine affirms that Christians rightly feel fear, sorrow, desire and joy for just causes.
- Tractates on the Gospel of John 60.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Christ's trouble was not joy, as some philosophers would say, but sorrow, as at Gethsemane, as the betrayer was about to go out.
- City of God 2.7Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that philosophy is human discovery, not divine precept, and that pagans imitate the immoral deeds of their gods, as in Terence's young man who cites Jupiter's example.
- City of God 2.14Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that Plato, who banished poets from his ideal city, was better than the gods who demanded plays, and that the Romans' own laws condemned their gods.
- City of God 4.10Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine exposes the contradictions in the physical allegories that assign gods to the elements, from Jupiter and Juno to the confusions of Vesta and Venus.
- City of God 6.1Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine turns from those who worship the gods for this life to those who worship them for the life after death, and argues that gods too petty even for earthly goods cannot give eternal life.
- City of God 6.5Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine sets out Varro's three theologies — mythical for the theater, natural for philosophers, civil for the city — and argues that the civil cannot be separated from the fabulous.
- City of God 8.1Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine turns to natural theology and chooses the Platonists, who acknowledge one God above all souls, as the philosophers most worth debating.
- City of God 8.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine sketches the Italian school of Pythagoras and the Ionian succession from Thales to Archelaus, the teacher of Socrates.
- City of God 8.3Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine describes how Socrates turned philosophy to ethics, and how his followers, such as Aristippus and Antisthenes, disagreed about the supreme good.
- City of God 8.4Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine praises Plato for uniting the active and contemplative parts of philosophy in a threefold division, and suggests that in God are found the cause of being, the light of knowing, and the rule of living.
- City of God 8.5Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine asks all the theologies and all the materialist philosophers to yield to the Platonists, and argues that since the mind is not a body, neither is God, its creator.
- City of God 8.6Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine explains how the Platonists rose above bodies and changeable souls to the unchangeable, simple God from whom all form comes, as Paul says in Romans 1.
- City of God 8.7Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine prefers the Platonists' logic to that of the Epicureans and Stoics, who founded knowledge on the senses, because the Platonists held that God is the light of the mind.
- City of God 8.8Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine sets the Platonists above other moralists because they placed happiness not in body or mind but in the enjoyment of God, the supreme good.
- City of God 8.9Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine prefers any philosophers, of whatever school or nation, who hold God to be the source of being, knowledge, and happiness.
- City of God 8.10Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine explains that a Christian, warned by Paul against worldly philosophy yet told that some knew God from creation, rightly prefers the Platonists for what they grasped of the one God.
- City of God 8.11Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine corrects his earlier view that Plato met Jeremiah, but suggests Plato may have learned of the Scriptures through an interpreter, citing likenesses to Genesis 1 and to God's name 'I am who am.'
- City of God 8.12Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine explains why he debates the Platonists — Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Apuleius — and notes that they all nevertheless offered sacrifice to many gods.
- City of God 8.13Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that since Plato held all gods to be good and banished the poets, the beings who demand obscene plays and punished Titus Latinius cannot be good gods.
- City of God 8.14Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine reports the Platonist scheme of gods, demons, and men, and uses Apuleius' On the God of Socrates to argue that demons, not gods, demand obscene rites.
- City of God 9.1Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine recalls that Book 8 showed demons who love vice cannot reconcile good men to the good gods.
- City of God 9.4Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that Stoics and Platonists differ in words rather than substance about the passions, citing Aulus Gellius' story of the Stoic who turned pale in a storm at sea.
- City of God 9.5Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine teaches that Christian discipline asks not whether one feels anger, sadness, or fear but why, praises mercy as a virtue against the Stoics, and explains that God's 'anger' describes his punishment, not a passion.
- City of God 9.17Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues, citing Plotinus' 'flight to the fatherland' by likeness to God, that we need a mediator who is mortal with us yet just and divine — Christ, uncontaminated by the flesh he took.
- City of God 10.1Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine opens Book 10 by asking whether the blessed immortals wish worship and sacrifice for themselves or only for God, and defines the worship owed to God alone (latreia).
- City of God 10.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine notes that Plotinus, like the Gospel of John, teaches that souls and blessed beings are happy only by the light of God, not their own.
- City of God 10.23Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine notes that Porphyry, citing an oracle, held that only the “principles” purify, and compares his Father, paternal Mind, and intermediate principle with the Christian Trinity.
- City of God 10.28Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that Porphyry, who held that only the paternal Mind purifies, rejected Christ, the Wisdom of God, out of pride at the incarnation and the cross.
- City of God 10.31Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine refutes the Platonist argument that the soul must be coeternal with God, since even Porphyry admits a happiness of the soul that begins in time and never ends.
- City of God 11.25Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The philosophers' division into physics, logic, and ethics mirrors our dependence on God for being, wisdom, and happiness; Augustine distinguishes enjoying from using.
- City of God 11.26Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The human mind bears an image of the Trinity in being, knowing, and loving, of which it is certain even against the skeptics: if I am deceived, I am.
- City of God 12.14Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine rejects the philosophers' doctrine of eternal recurrence, which denies the soul true happiness and misreads Ecclesiastes, since Christ died once and the saints will be with the Lord forever.
- City of God 12.27Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The Platonist view that lesser gods made our bodies as prisons for punishment is self-contradictory, since Plato also calls the world with its mortal creatures most good, and God's mind contains the forms of all.
- City of God 13.16Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The Platonists mock the Christian view that the soul's separation from the body is a punishment, yet Plato himself has the supreme god promise the lesser gods that they will never lose their bodies.
- City of God 13.17Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Platonists who hold the world-soul and the star-gods happy in eternal bodies cannot consistently deny that God can make human bodies immortal; only corruptible bodies, the result of sin, burden the soul.
- City of God 13.19Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Had the first humans not sinned, they would never have died; the Platonists, who give their gods everlasting bodies and even let the wise return to bodies, cannot reasonably scorn Christian faith in the resurrection of incorruptible bodies.
- City of God 14.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · In Scripture “flesh” often means the whole man, so living according to the flesh includes vices of the mind, such as idolatry, enmity, and heresy, as well as bodily pleasures; Stoics as well as Epicureans live according to the flesh.
- City of God 14.8Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine examines the Stoic doctrine of three good feelings in the sage and no sadness, showing that Scripture and classical authors use will, gladness, and even sadness in both good and bad senses, as with godly sorrow.
- City of God 14.9Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Citizens of God's city rightly fear, desire, grieve, and rejoice out of charity, as Paul and Christ himself did; Stoic apatheia belongs not to this life but, as freedom from fear and grief, to the life to come, where love and joy remain.
- City of God 14.20Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The Cynics' teaching that marital intercourse may be done in public was defeated by natural shame; the shame of lust shows the penalty of the first disobedience, borne in the very organs of generation and removed only by grace.
- City of God 18.37Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that the Hebrew prophets, and above all Moses, are older than every Greek philosopher and even than the wisdom of Egypt.
- City of God 18.41Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine contrasts the endless disagreements of the philosophers, all tolerated by the earthly city, “Babylon,” with the concord of the canonical Scriptures, through which God himself taught Israel.
- City of God 19.1Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine sets out Varro's scheme by which philosophical views of the supreme good could be multiplied to 288 possible sects, and explains Varro's removal of the distinctions that do not concern the end of good.
- City of God 19.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine explains how Varro strips away the distinctions of social life, certainty, Cynic dress, and kind of life, and reduces the question of the supreme good to three possible views about virtue and the primary goods of nature.
- City of God 19.3Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine reports Varro's argument, following Antiochus of Ascalon, that man is soul and body together, so that the supreme good consists of virtue and the goods of both, in a social life that mixes leisure and action.
- City of God 19.18Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine rejects the universal doubt of the New Academy, affirming the certainty of reason, the senses, and the canonical Scriptures, while allowing reasonable doubt about matters none of these establishes.
- City of God 22.11Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine answers the Platonist argument from the natural order and weights of the elements, showing from birds, the soul's union with the body, Varro's story of the Vestal's sieve, and fire on earth that God can make risen bodies fit to dwell in heaven.
- City of God 22.12Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine sets out the pagans' mocking questions about the resurrection of the flesh: aborted fetuses, infants, stature, hair and nails, fatness, dissolved bodies, deformities, and flesh eaten by others.
- City of God 22.26Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Against Porphyry's demand that the blessed soul flee all bodies, Augustine cites Plato's Timaeus, where the supreme God promises the created gods an impossible immortality in their bodies, so God can likewise raise incorruptible flesh.
- City of God 22.27Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · If Plato's view that souls return to bodies were combined with Porphyry's that purified souls never return to evils, both would reach the Christian faith in the eternal, evil-free resurrection body.
- City of God 22.28Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine notes Plato's myth of a man returned to life, Labeo's tale of two revived men, and Varro's report of a rebirth of the same body and soul after 440 years, and argues that combining these pagan views yields the Christian resurrection.
- Enchiridion (Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love) 20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 421–423 · Augustine leaves open whether harmless mistakes are sins and rejects the Academics' suspension of all assent, since faith requires assent and much, like the fact that we live, is certain.
- Retractations 1.1Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Reviewing Against the Academics, Augustine regrets his frequent talk of fortune, some loose expressions about the senses, the mind, and the soul's return to heaven, and his excessive praise of the Platonists.
- Retractations 1.3Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Reviewing On Order, Augustine regrets his talk of fortune, his overvaluing of the liberal arts, his own endorsement of Plato's two worlds, and his praise of Pythagoras.
- The Conferences 5.21John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · An elder puzzled philosophers with a riddle about a creditor who can never be paid off, meaning the belly, and they recognized him as a true moral philosopher.
- The Conferences 13.5John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Chaeremon replies that the pagan philosophers had only a partial chastity, restraining outward acts but not inner desire, as sayings of Socrates and Diogenes show; true chastity, the circumcision of the spirit, is God’s gift.
- Letter to Valerian, paragraph 24Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 432 · Valerian should exchange the philosophers' precepts for Christian teaching, since the philosophers, not knowing God, have only a shadow of virtue, and some, like the school of Aristippus, place happiness in bodily pleasure.
- Tome to the Armenians 3Proclus of Constantinople · ca. 435-437 · Greeks and Christians define virtue differently; the Greeks, groping in darkness, see only visible things.
- Tome to the Armenians 4Proclus of Constantinople · ca. 435-437 · The Greek philosophers' four cardinal virtues stay earthbound and confine virtue to visible things.
- Part 1, chapter 33Quodvultdeus of Carthage · ca. 445-450 · Moses, hidden three months, set in the river, raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, and slayer of the Egyptian, figures Christ: worldly learning humbled in baptism serves the Church, and Christ frees souls from demons.