Surveys philosophy from the neo-Platonists to St. Anselm, showing how Greek philosophy took the form in which it was known to its cultural inheritors and how ...

One of the most interesting recent attempts to interpret the peculiarities of Plotinus's philosophy is that of Bréhier in his ‘La Philosophie de Plotin’. His thesis, contained in the last four chapters of the work, is that Plotinus, instead of being simply the continuator of the Greek rationalist tradition, is the founder of modern European Idealism, or, perhaps more accurately, Pantheism. ‘Avec Plotin nous saisissons done le premier chatnon d'une tradition religieuse qui n'est pas moins puissante au fond en Occident (...) que la tradition chretienne …’. He is the spiritual ancestor of Spinoza and Hegel. It is interesting in passing to compare this view with that of Dean Inge, for whom Plotinus is the spiritual begetter of S. Thomas Aquinas. The divergences of modern interpreters of the Plotinian metaphysic are often both amusing and suggestive. (shrink)

The Bhagavad-Gītā is the most important text in the smrti literature of India, as distinct from the śruti literature which is traditionally regarded as ultimately authoritative. The Bhagavad-Gītā has been assigned a date ranging from the fifth century B.C. to the second century B.C. The Indian religious tradition places the Gītā at the end of the third age of the present cycle of the universe and the beginning of the fourth, namely the Kali Yuga to which we belong.

Christianity stands out among the three great Abrahamic religions in its willingness to make extremely precise dogmatic statements about God. The Christians who make these statements have generally regarded them as universally and absolutely true, since they are divinely revealed, or divinely guaranteed interpretations of revealed texts. Of course from the beginning there has not been universal agreement (to put it mildly) among Christians about what statements should be so regarded and how they should be worded: and the seriousness with (...) which this need for dogmatic precision has been taken is shown by the way in which the inevitable disputes did not only involve theologians but the general body of Christians, and have led to divisions of churches, long continuing and flourishing mutual hatreds, and an overwhelming amount of theoretical and, where opportunity offered (i.e. where a Church party could get a secular power on its side), practical intolerance. Two areas of Church history which seem to me to provide particularly clear evidence of the incompatible verbal precisions demanded in dogmatic statements and the serious consequences of these demands are the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries and the Filioque dispute between East and West (though there is plenty of choice, and others may have other preferences). In both of these, theologians with a real and deep sense of the mystery of God often seem to an outside observer, in spite of their passionate assertions that this is not at all what they are doing and the rhetorical reverence of their language, to be arguing as if the God-Man or the Trinity were small finite objects which they had pinned down firmly in their theological laboratories and were examining under the microscope. (shrink)

Cassirer’s Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge, of which the present work is a translation, was first published in 1932; it therefore necessarily takes no account of the mass of work on the English Catholic humanists of the Renaissance, beginning with Chambers’s Thomas More, and on 17th-century English religious thought, which has appeared in the last 20 years. This may partly account for the rather old-fashioned impression which the book produces. Cassirer still understood More, Colet, and (...) Erasmus after the manner of Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers, a book which he frequently quotes. But the misunderstanding which, so it seems to the present reviewer, makes the picture given by the book as a whole a distorted one, goes rather deeper. The eminent neo-Kantian author appears to think that authentic Christian orthodoxy is Augustinianism, and Augustinianism interpreted in the manner of Jansenius or Calvin. Hence the philosophy of St. Thomas, to which he gives some fine and understanding pages, appears to him as a heroic but unsuccessful attempt to establish a Christian humanism on an Aristotelian basis which had little lasting effect ; he is led to represent such great and profoundly Catholic figures of the Renaissance as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and St. Thomas More as fundamentally unorthodox; in dealing with his main subject, the Cambridge Platonists, he presents ideas which any Catholic brought up in an enlightened Thomist tradition will naturally recognize as a normal part of his own religious and philosophical inheritance as if they were in the deepest disaccord with the teachings of orthodox Christianity; and he greatly exaggerates the opposition between the Cambridge Platonists and their Puritan contemporaries. (shrink)