Faith verses Philosophy in the middle ages

In a quest to learn about the world, philosophers put forward different theories. From the early Greeks to Aristotle, either faith in supernatural things or substances such as water, air, and fire dominated the intellectual minds. The search continued and reached the times of great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, who conquered the intellectual pursuit of philosophy. The achievements in physics, ethics, morality, science, and philosophy stagnated with the birth of Christianity and Judaism. Asceticism and altruism took hold over reason and logic. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were influential philosophers who integrated Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies with the Christian faith and helped preserve the treasures of reason, logic, and empiricism in the religious world of the Middle Ages.  

In medieval times, all thinkers from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim were preoccupied with the attempt to synthesize philosophy with religion. The Neo-Platonism philosophy of Plotinus made an effort. The revival of Aristotelian metaphysics occurred with the great works of the Muslim Arabic thinkers who helped gain wider acceptance of Aristotle’s ideas into theology.

Plato’s ideas were adopted in subsequent cultures. The Roman Empire conquered and absorbed Greek culture. Romans preserved the Greeks’ extraordinary accomplishments in arts, philosophy, and politics. After 500 years of Plato’s death, Plotinus was born. He revived Plato’s ideas and propagated an intellectual movement known as Neo-Platonism. Plotinus adhered to the concepts of duality proposed by Plato. The soul is a spiritual substance; it can exist independently of the body and is superior to the body. The physical body is imperfect, and the soul has been caged in the vessel as the body. Plotinus had profoundly influenced Saint Augustine and Western consciousness.

One of the significant achievements of Augustine was his integration of Plato’s philosophical concepts with the tenets of Christianity. The goal of Middle Ages philosophy was to fit the rational truths of philosophy into the dogmatic truths of Christianity. This will serve two purposes: first, it makes Christianity a powerful faith, and second, it will serve the power of the Church.  Augustine propagated that Platonism and Christianity were natural partners. He adopted Plato’s concepts of two worlds. One is an intelligible realm where truth dwells, and the sensible world is the world of the senses. He inculcated Plato’s metaphysics into Christian beliefs. Plato’s eternal realm of the forms became the transcendent God in Christian beliefs. Plato’s vision of immortal souls striving for the eternal realm through intellectual enlightenment became transformed by Augustine into immortal souls striving to achieve union with God through faith and reason. Plato’s metaphysics thus gave philosophical justification for Christian beliefs. The immortal souls find eternality when they unite with the transcendent realm that is God in Christianity and intellectual enlightenment for Plato.

In parallel, another development occurred. Nine hundred years after Saint Augustine’s influential views on Western thought, St. Thomas Aquinas appeared on the scene. He was a priest, philosopher, and theologian. Unlike Augustine, Thomas Aquinas gravitated toward Aristotle’s metaphysical philosophy and used it as an intellectual structure for Christianity’s ideas of the self and reality. Like Aristotle, Aquinas rejected Plato’s concept of dualism.

Aristotle’s metaphysics is categorized into two things: Matter and Form. Matter and Form make up the universe and the essence of things. Matter and Form combine to create a substance that is everything we see in the universe. For example, a carpenter takes a wood (which itself embodies both Matter and Form) and gives it a form using the design in his mind. Aristotle believes that form and matter are inseparable and cannot exist independently of one another. In the case of human beings, the soul and body cannot be separated into distinct existences. Therefore, Aristotle’s metaphysics emphasized Form; Form and Matter only exist with one another.

Thomas Aquinas personified Aristotle’s metaphysics. He believes that life begins out of the union of matter and form. With time, Matter and Form gained consciousness of self. Like a mixture of milk and water, any entity has Matter and Form that cannot be separated into discrete entities. Plato and Augustine’s dualism believes that the soul and body are distinct objects, and the soul is a superior thing kept in the cage of the body. The soul is the life of every living organism, and it is the soul that distinguishes living things from non-living things.  

To cap it all, the Western world came out of the Dark Ages when philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Augustine incorporated the metaphysics of Aristotle and Plato into the dogmatic Christian theology. The Muslim Golden Age also contributed to the revival of Aristotle and Plato’s philosophy. Plato's and Aristotle’s metaphysics are different in essence, and Thomas Aquinas and Augustine tried to amalgamate them with Christian faith. Aristotle and Plato’s knowledge helped the Greeks to become a great civilization of their time. Similarly, it gave wisdom to the Roman Empire to rule over the world. The Muslim golden age was supplemented again by the ideas of Aristotle and Plato. Finally, the enlightenment in the West would not have been possible if the West had not revived Aristotle and Plato's ideas.