principles of conduct and "daily thoughts for daily needs." Many of the Fathers in their pagan, or at least unsanctified youth, had deeply studied it.
Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the Latin Fathers, who were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Nevertheless, in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek; while the Latins reset in Latin, and sometimes juristic, phrase what their eastern brethren had evolved.[1]
Obviously, for our purpose, which is to appreciate the spiritual endowment of the Middle Ages, it is essential to have cognizance of patristic thought. And in order to understand the mental processes of the Fathers, their attitude toward knowledge and their perception of fact, one must consider their intellectual environment; which was, of course, made up of the store of knowledge and philosophic interests prevailing in the Roman Empire. So we have to gauge the intellectual interests of the pagan world, first in the earlier times when thinkers were bringing together knowledge and philosophic concepts, and then in the later period when its accumulated and somewhat altered thought made the actual environment of the Church.
What race had ever a more genial appreciation of the facts of nature and of mortal life, than the Greeks? The older Greek philosophies had sprung from open and unprejudiced observation of the visible world. They were physical inquiries. With Socrates philosophy turned, as it were, from
- ↑ A prime illustration is afforded by the Latin juristic word persona used in the Creed. The Latins had to render the three ὑποστάσεις of the Greeks; and "three somethings," tria quaedam, was too loose, as Augustine says (De Trinitate, vii. 7-12). The true and literal translation of ὑπόστασις would have been substantia; but that word had been taken to render οὐσια. So the legal word persona was employed in spite of its recognized unfitness. Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage, etc., p. 116 sqq.
