Essay - See Below Augustine and Aquinas: the Influence of Platonic and...

See Below Augustine and Aquinas: The Influence of Platonic and Aristotelian Thought

According to St. Augustine, one ***** the greatest sins of his early life was his love ***** classical, pagan philosophy. ***** traces his early sinfulness not simply ***** his crimes of fornication and stealing pears as a young boy, but also to his belief in the superiority of Latin ***** rhe*****rical works over the Christian words ***** the Bible. However, he did acknowledge ***** pagan neo-Platonists who had influenced his thought. In fact, in ***** Confessions, Augustine writes that it w***** studying the neo-Platonists that enabled him to break away from the erroneous, heretical teachings of ***** erroneous, heretical teachings ***** the Manicheans. It was ***** ***** "that first made ***** possible for him ***** conceive the possibility of a non-physic*****l substance" that still ***** value and an existence in the created world before him. Neo-Platonic philosophy which stressed the ideal world of the 'forms' as *****tuitively sensed or felt by ***** soul provided him an outlet from the common-sense materialism, in the tradition of pure Aristotelian materialists. For August*****e, the Platonic idea that there is a better, higher ***** of forms than the one in which we currently d*****ll, ***** which ***** resembles ***** world, provided him with an explanation about how ***** world could be created by a good God, yet still possess evil within it—he*****ven was a more perfect reflection of life on e*****rth, but still had a corresp*****dence to it.

Augustine's overall emphas***** on deductive reasoning can also be traced to the Greeks, as can his ***** that grace is always 'there,' it must merely be recognized. T***** recalls one ***** Plato's Socratic dialogues, where Plato demonstrates that an ignorant slave can ***** taught a geometric proof through deduction—true knowledge is always residing in the human mind, waiting to be drawn out, because of *****ity's rational capacity. Similarly, grace is always there to be drawn *****, in Augustine's Christian understanding ***** salvation.

It is true ***** Augustine's stress upon inner sense "bears some affinities to Ar*****totle's common sense" for it "makes us aware that the disparate information converging upon us ***** our vario***** senses comes from a common external source" and "makes us aware when one of our multiple ***** in ***** functioning efficiently. Augustine's discussion of the senses thus reflects some belief in ***** value of inductive or experiential learning. But for Augustine, the senses are more apt to lead an individual *****tray into temptation. Thus while he does allow for ***** Aristoteli***** influence of the value ***** sensory experience so he does not fall back into a Manichean divide between good and evil, heaven and earth—***** is some 'good' to be learned w*****h the *****—*****'s mistrust of his old sinning life and the world of the senses makes ***** fundamentally ***** ra*****r than Aris*****telian in nature.

In contrast, Aquinas whole-heartedly embraced the Aristotelian approach to the *****. True, some philosophers have since *****ed the "prominence in Thomas of such Platonic notions as