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The Impact of Christianity Response

During the Hellenistic age and the peak of the Roman empire, divisions of Greek philosophy were being founded. Neo-Platonism was one of these divisions or schools of philosophy. An Alexandrian philosopher by the name of Plotinus founded this school in Rome and based it's teachings on Platos' metaphysics. Plotinus believed, as Plato did, that two worlds existed, one beyond our scope of understanding and one in which we perceive daily. Plotinus believed that the indescribable, indefinable world was God. Unlike the Christian concept of God, Plotinus' version only allowed for the realization of god through a merging of the soul and god, which he called the "vision".

Christianity began as a Jewish sect and eventually formed into a completely different religion. For the first couple of centuries Christians were persecuted for their beliefs due to the unpopularity of Christianity. It wasn't until the Romans recognized religious tolerance that Christianity became popular along with the help of various Christian followers and philosophers. One of those philosophers that contributed greatly to the rise of Christianity was a student of rhetoric named St. Augustine. Augustine grew up in Algeria, studied rhetoric in Carthage and eventually moved on to Rome to teach rhetoric. Here he became a Christian at thirty-three and used his rhetorical abilities to tear down heretical viewpoints. Augustine used his knowledge of Plato and Plotinus' teachings to better understand the fundamental Christian principles that the scriptures entailed. Augustine accepted the Old Testament view on creation, that God created the earth from nothing. Unfortunately, this posed a conflict of interest with Plato and Plotinus' views and many other Greek philosophers. The theory that God created the world from nothing(ex nihilo) was easily conquered by Augustine. Augustine established that God transcends time and that it is a subjective mind experience, that before we were created, time did not exist.

About seven centuries before the time of Augustine a form of philosophy was born called Skepticism. Skeptics held the belief that nothing can really be known or nothing can be known without first suspending judgment on the matter. Two of the most popular groups out of the skepticism realm were the Academics and the Pyrrhonists. Skeptics believed that to know of something outside of the mind is impossible, to be aware of it is but a fraction of what our senses allow us to interpret. St. Augustine set out to debunk the theory of skepticism with three principles. The first of these principles was known as the principle of non-contradiction which states that something cannot be said to have certain properties and simultaneously possess the opposite of those properties. Second Augustine maintained the idea