Scholasticism is partly based on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and which philosophers can be called a kind of analog for the eastern branch of Christianity?
I recently interviewed a Doctor of Philosophy from the Ukrainian Catholic University. We talked about abortion, and we couldn't help but touch on the attitude to sex: how much according to the teachings of the CC, sex is possible for pleasure, and not just for the sake of procreation (the Orthodox Holy fathers believed that only for the sake of procreation). And my interlocutor just claimed that this attitude to the flesh was adopted by the Orthodox from the ancient Greek philosophers. This fragment was not included in the published text, but I was not too lazy to translate it from Ukrainian specifically for you:�
“They (the Orthodox Holy Fathers – D. K.) borrowed such views on sexuality from pre-Christian systems, which met with the fact that a person very often cannot cope with his body. The Apostle Paul describes this struggle between the physical and the spiritual very well in his Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7: the body fights against the spirit, and the spirit fights against the body. But if authentic Christianity explains this as a consequence of original sin, then these philosophical systems tried to find an explanation somewhere, for example, in the fact that the body is material, and matter is evil. It is chaotic, it is disordered, and the passions are taken from matter, which is chaotic. And the body is material, and bears the imprint of this chaos. this is the Platonic whole system, this is Plato, the neo-Platonists. Or in stoicism, the stoic had to live exclusively according to reason, and passions do not allow you to live according to reason, and you have to fight them, and the strongest of passions is sexuality. And so, according to the Stoics, sexuality is an evil that must be combated in order to be fully self-possessed. And the Greek Orthodox fathers got it out of stoicism and Platonism, and it has nothing to do with Christianity. The Catholic Church also had these influences, but rather from Protestantism and from Victorian Anglicanism…”
I think that the influence of philosophers on Christianity (both Eastern and Western) is not limited to the attitude to sex. It is unlikely that a Jewish sect could have given out to the world all the dogma that was formulated for it by the Greek-Roman heads… It is not for nothing that the Orthodox themselves have been trying for thousands of years to somehow attract ancient Greek philosophers to their ranks: “Christ is the firstborn of God, His Logos, in which all people participate: this is what we have learned and what we bear witness to… All those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even if they were considered atheists – as, for example, among the Greeks Socrates, Heraclitus and others like them… “(St. Justin, 2nd century). And Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Socrates and Pythagoras and others are painted on temple frescoes among the saints. (For a selection of frescoes with philosophers from Mount Athos, as well as the philosophizing of the priest, who tries to prove on their basis that the church is a friend, and not an enemy of ancient culture, see here: http://azbyka.ru/forum/xfa-blog-entry/ob-afone-jazychniki-na-freskax.1363/ )
I recently interviewed a Doctor of Philosophy from the Ukrainian Catholic University. We talked about abortion, and we couldn't help but touch on the attitude to sex: how much according to the teachings of the CC, sex is possible for pleasure, and not just for the sake of procreation (the Orthodox Holy fathers believed that only for the sake of procreation). And my interlocutor just claimed that this attitude to the flesh was adopted by the Orthodox from the ancient Greek philosophers. This fragment was not included in the published text, but I was not too lazy to translate it from Ukrainian specifically for you:�
“They (the Orthodox Holy Fathers – D. K.) borrowed such views on sexuality from pre-Christian systems, which met with the fact that a person very often cannot cope with his body. The Apostle Paul describes this struggle between the physical and the spiritual very well in his Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7: the body fights against the spirit, and the spirit fights against the body. But if authentic Christianity explains this as a consequence of original sin, then these philosophical systems tried to find an explanation somewhere, for example, in the fact that the body is material, and matter is evil. It is chaotic, it is disordered, and the passions are taken from matter, which is chaotic. And the body is material, and bears the imprint of this chaos. this is the Platonic whole system, this is Plato, the neo-Platonists. Or in stoicism, the stoic had to live exclusively according to reason, and passions do not allow you to live according to reason, and you have to fight them, and the strongest of passions is sexuality. And so, according to the Stoics, sexuality is an evil that must be combated in order to be fully self-possessed. And the Greek Orthodox fathers got it out of stoicism and Platonism, and it has nothing to do with Christianity. The Catholic Church also had these influences, but rather from Protestantism and from Victorian Anglicanism…”
I think that the influence of philosophers on Christianity (both Eastern and Western) is not limited to the attitude to sex. It is unlikely that a Jewish sect could have given out to the world all the dogma that was formulated for it by the Greek-Roman heads… It is not for nothing that the Orthodox themselves have been trying for thousands of years to somehow attract ancient Greek philosophers to their ranks: “Christ is the firstborn of God, His Logos, in which all people participate: this is what we have learned and what we bear witness to… All those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even if they were considered atheists – as, for example, among the Greeks Socrates, Heraclitus and others like them… “(St. Justin, 2nd century). And Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Socrates and Pythagoras and others are painted on temple frescoes among the saints. (For a selection of frescoes with philosophers from Mount Athos, as well as the philosophizing of the priest, who tries to prove on their basis that the church is a friend, and not an enemy of ancient culture, see here: http://azbyka.ru/forum/xfa-blog-entry/ob-afone-jazychniki-na-freskax.1363/ )