6 Responses to “What was the main difference in beliefs of most Greek citizens and the early Greek philosophers?”

1. Dan Says:
   May 22nd, 2010 at 12:59 am

   Most Greek citizens had devotions to any of the Olympian gods. They would attempt to explain various phenomena with a given god to represent a phenomenon. Zeus was the god of thunder, Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, Athena the warrior goddess of wisdom, Ares the god of war, etc…

   But few of them would stop to think more deeply about the real direction of life, the ultimate driver, the difference between good and evil, and the ideal of Heaven.

   Through the questioning of Socrates, the dialogues written by Plato, and the subsequent philosophical developments by Aristotle, some attempts were made to better define virtue and the universe. These were so well done that they were used later by Christian saints such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to explain the virtues, and Heaven and the salvation of humanity by Christ.

   Among the ideas developed by Plato and Aristotle was the concept of a heavenly perfection and order. Everything we see is in a system of “spheres”, if you will, where the sphere we live in is turned by a higher sphere, and that higher sphere is turned by an even higher sphere, and so on. Eventually there is one supreme sphere that turns all the rest of them in a coherent system of order. This was a preliminary concept of what the one God of the universe really is, although Plato and Aristotle left it there.

   St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas then picked up from that point, to carefully expand the understanding of God. They realized that God is so infinite, that you can”t explain God by saying what God is, but rather what God is NOT. God is not unjust, or immoral, or weak, or finite, etc…

   Aristotle also tried to define a heavenly ideal. If you take any square on earth, or triangle, they are all imitations of an absolutely perfect square or triangle in heaven. The ones on earth, as near perfect as they can seem, are imperfect in some way. Only their model in heaven is perfect. So therefore none of the squares or triangles on earth could ever be found in heaven, since the ones on earth are not perfect, but all the ones in heaven are perfect.

   This concept differed from the gods of Greek mythology, since those stories tell of gods who acted in self-interest much of the time and were bickering among each other, and many times disloyal, such as Zeus often being disloyal to his wife Hera. Even in the Iliad (the story of the Trojan War), gods took sides against each other, making the right and wrong of the story very murky.

   But using Aristotle”s concept of heaven, St. Augustine then went on to develop that analogy of the perfect shapes in heaven – in the Christian view. We as humans on earth are an inferior imitation of a model who is in Heaven (Christ). Therefore we could never really enter heaven on our own accord, since Heaven is only for perfection. So we need a helper who makes us perfect so we can enter. The only possible helper has to be Himself perfect, and that of course can only be Christ who is our Savior.

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