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Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz
An ambitious history of how medieval writers came to terms with paganism
From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the "Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia, and, later, America and China.
Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers―philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci―tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue.
A sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the classical and the modern world.
From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the "Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia, and, later, America and China.
Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers―philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci―tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue.
A sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the classical and the modern world.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published March 22, 2015
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June 7, 2025
Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz Kindle Edition by John Marenbon
According to John Marenbon, the problem of paganism is that some pagans were moral, intellectual, and cultural heroes to Christian intellectuals. People like Socrates and Aristotle provided a moral and intellectual foundation for Christians. Seneca modeled a lifestyle that Christians admired. Even Emperor Trajan was turned into an exemplar of Christian charity by a story that Pope Gregory had obtained Trajan’s release from Hell through prayers after learning that Trajan had interrupted a military expedition in order to see that a widow whose son was killed was paid compensation by his murderer.
Pagans could be virtuous, but was pagan virtue sufficient for Christian salvation?
The question arose from the Pauline emphasis on salvation by faith. Works mattered, but so did faith in the sense of some adherence to Christian claims about the One God of the Jews and Christians. Marenbon observes:
Paul influenced not only views about pagans’ virtue and wisdom, but also the discussion about their salvation. Indeed, it was he—and the way he would be read by Augustine—who made it a problem. Christian doctrine might well have developed in such a way that the salvation of just pagans, at least in the period before Christ, was a matter of course, had it not been for Paul’s emphasis on justification by faith in Christ, and on the gratuitousness of God’s choice of whom to save. As reconstructed by scholars today, Paul’s concern was to lessen the importance of the Jewish Law as part of his efforts to convert non-Jews. But his repeated statements that we can be justified only by faith in Christ made it seem difficult or impossible to explain how anyone who did not believe in Christ—such as a virtuous pagan, even a monotheistic one—could be saved.5 And the rhetoric of Romans ix, which proclaims God’s freedom, as creator, to show mercy to one person, and harden the heart of another, to cast away a human as a potter might a vessel of clay, seemed to explain how such seeming injustice befits the divinity.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 20-21). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Christian scripture taught that some propositional knowledge was necessary, albeit a surprisingly low level of propositional. Hebrews 11:6 states: ‘But without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God, must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him’. The “Pauline Bare Minimum” stipulated that the necessary saving faith entailed a belief in God as the rewarder of deeds.
Marenbon is interested in the way that Christian thinkers during the “Long Middle Ages” (200 AD to 1700 AD) attempted to reconcile God’s love and justice with the apparent exclusion of good pagans and those who had never had the opportunity to hear the gospel for salvation. For some Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, there was no problem; Augustine reasoned that pagans could not be saved without a divine mediator, which meant they could only be saved by recognizing and accepting Christ as their mediator. This acceptance required an explicit faith in the incarnate Christ.[1]
Marenbon is a leading scholar on the subject of medieval philosophy. For example, he wrote the “Very Short Introduction” to Medieval Philosophy and has several books about the subject, including “Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction.” He knows the subject. Accordingly, this book is encyclopedic with respect to its treatment of virtually every writer – well-known or obscure – who had an opinion on the fate of pagans. The book starts with the Bible and ends with Leibniz.
What do Christians do about virtuous pagans?
Augustine also questioned pagan virtue. For him, pagan virtue was tied into pagan culture, which was intertwined with war and human suffering. The chief vice of paganism was pride, which deformed all pagan efforts at virtue. Only acts directed ultimately to the highest good – God – could qualify as truly virtuous; pagan virtue was not virtuous because it did not find its end in God.
Other philosophers were more accommodating toward pagan philosophy. Boethius, for example, presented Lady Philosophy as a figure who could lead, to some extent, toward the truth. Boethius did not harbor hostility towards secular philosophy and did not define it as a realm mired in vice.
Subsequent philosophers, such as Abelard, found pagan philosophy to be genuine, virtuous, and consistent with Christianity. These philosophers were viewed as knowing or anticipating Christian doctrine. The source of this knowledge may have come from revelations given to the Jews. It was a common belief among Christian writers that Old Testament prophets were aware of God’s triunity. Marenbon explains:
Abelard consistently holds that most ancient philosophers believed in the existence of one God.4 He considers that they taught the truth, as recognized by Christians, about the immortality of the soul, heavenly reward and punishment and God’s ordering of the universe (TChr II.26–42); and also that a number of ancient philosophers wrote, in a veiled fashion, about the Trinity, or at least about one or more of its persons, and he sets out his evidence for this judgement in the first book of each version of the Theologia.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (p. 74). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
There were other avenues to revelation of Christ:
Some of the Church Fathers discussed the Hermetic writings. Lactantius treated him respectfully, but in the City of God (VIII.23–24, 26; cf. XVIII.39) Augustine attacks him for idolatry. Abelard ignores, however, Augustine’s critical views, but uses material from Lactantius quoted in the City of God and in a treatise wrongly attributed to Augustine to present Trismegistus as a venerable ancient philosopher who wrote about the Son of God.5 Hermes is just the first in a whole series of ancient philosophers presented by Abelard: Pythagoras and Seneca, who talk about the Holy Spirit, and outstandingly Plato and his followers, such as Macrobius, who discussed all three person of the Trinity. Abelard also names a few non-philosophers among the ancient pagans who spoke or wrote of the Trinity: the Cumaean Sibyl, widely thought in the Middle Ages to have prophesied the coming of Christ,6 and the poet Virgil,7 who in his fourth eclogue refers to her and talks of the birth of a child who will bring a new age; Nebuchadnezzar (because he sees, in addition to the three men he had cast into the fire, a fourth ‘who looks like the son of God’);8 and the Brahmans (Bragmanni), known from the tradition of Alexander literature.9 There is also Job, whom Abelard often considers along with the ancient philosophers, since the Bible makes is clear he was not a Jew, although he was generally accepted as being among the Old Testament saints.10
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 75-76). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
The people who accepted these beliefs on these grounds would have qualified as having Christian faith.
Other intellectuals developed alternative theories by which virtuous pagans might attain the necessary Christian faith. One theory involved “implicit faith.” This developed out of reflections on the required “bare minimum of faith” aka “the Pauline Minimum”:
With regard to the knowledge of God and Christ under natural law, William of Champeaux based himself on Paul’s statement (Hebrews xi, 6): ‘But without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God, must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him’. This statement provides a rather low threshold for what is to count as faith: belief in God as a repayer of good and evil. Relying on this Pauline minimum, William declared, ‘It should be said that those who were saved before the coming of Christ believed that there is a just and pious judge who would repay the good with good things and the evil with bad things. There were also some who believed that someone would come from God who would redeem the people, but they did not know how he would do so. And there were a very few to whom the manner of the Redemption was known’.32 It is wrong to describe this as a theory of implicit faith (though one would be developed from it). In William’s view, the Pauline minimum is enough, both under natural law and the Old Law, to allow a person to be saved.33
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 65-66). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
The theory of “implicit faith” involved “taking something on trust” or trusting in someone who had the relevant propositional knowledge. Marenbon explains:
Aquinas answers by saying that, in the case of scientific knowledge we can draw the conclusions from the principles without being taught, and so we can be said to have implicit knowledge of the conclusions in the principles; yet even here we also have implicit knowledge in someone else who knows, in so far as we do in fact need the help of a teacher. But ‘it is not the same with regard to knowledge (scientia) as to faith, because there are no principles naturally within us from which the articles of faith derive. Rather, faith in us is determined entirely by teaching, and so we must have implicit faith in the cognition of ‹some other› human being’.46
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (p. 171). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Trust in the church or in the Jewish scriptures might suffice.
Alternatively, accepting one premise might implicitly mean that explicit Christian premises were accepted. Marenbon notes:
Few other theologians go into so much detail as Aquinas, but the standard theory of implicit faith he proposes continues to be widely followed. It is put forward, for example, by Richard of Middleton in the next generation, and Duns Scotus and Durandus of St Pourçain at the turn of the fourteenth century.47 But there are some changes: although Durandus’s solution follows Aquinas’s quite closely, and he does clearly think of implicit faith as a matter of the minores taking on trust what the maiores believe, his explanation of what is meant by ‘implicit’ is given in terms of the particular being implicit in the universal, without any reference to the faith of others.48 This slide in meaning is even more apparent in the way the very widely-read biblical commentator, Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349) puts a view which, otherwise, is like Aquinas’s. Those who believe in God as a rewarder must in consequence, he argues, believe in divine providence, and the way in which in fact God provided for the providence of humans was the Incarnation.49
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 171-172). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Implicit faith was the “main medieval theory for how, in principle, a good pagan can be saved.” It was particularly useful to explain how Jews who had died prior to Christ could be saved.
“Special inspiration” was another theory. The idea behind special revelation was that God would never permit a virtuous pagan to depart this life without faith. The theory posits that every person will have a moment of revelation in their life, perhaps at the moment of their death, where they will be presented with a choice to accept Christ or not. The biblical warrant for this theory was the example of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, whose acts of charity resulted in an angelic visit, followed by Peter's arrival to baptize Cornelius. Albert the Great and Aquinas were sympathetic to the special inspiration theory, but unsure about it and not willing to place much weight on it.”
What we see from Marenbon’s survey is that generosity toward the possibility of pagan salvation was highest during the supposedly bigoted Middle Ages:
With one exception, the most generous of the thirteenth-century theologians towards the ancient philosophers was Aquinas.71 He sets his views out in greatest detail in his Sentences commentary, and repeats the main lines of them in the rather later Questions on Truth.72 Like Abelard before him and Robert Holcot and Thomas Bradwardine in the following century, he believes that prophetic knowledge of Christ was to some extent available to non-Jews, as the example of the Sibyls show (and he also cites a Roman miracle in which Christ’s coming is prophesied). But he accepts that there were some to whom no special revelation was made, and he puts forward a way in which they were able to be saved by implicit faith. On the one hand, they did not sin by failing to follow the Old Law, which, unlike the New Law, applied only to the Jews. On the other hand, as he puts it in the Questions on Truth, the philosophers should not, despite their worldly wisdom, be thought of as instructors in the divine faith, and so they can be considered among the lesser ones, for whom implicit faith is enough. But in whom was their faith implicit? He answers in the Sentences commentary that it was implicit ‘in the cognition of God’ (in Questions on Truth ‘divine providence’) or ‘of those who were taught by God—whoever they might be, indeterminately (just as the greater ones among the Jews so far as those things which had not yet been revealed to them were concerned), so long as they did not pertinaciously hold themselves against the preaching of the faith’.73 It was enough, then, for pagan philosophers who believed in God, as they did, to accept as their own belief whatever God himself knew about the truth, or it was sufficient for them to say that they accepted as their own the belief of whoever it might be who knew more of God’s ways than they did.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 177-178). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
In contrast, subsequent philosophers became less generous under the influence of theologies that emphasized faith alone. My sense was that the more a theology emphasized virtuous living, the more willing its adherents were to find “loopholes” to include pagans among the saved. In contrast, the more that a theology emphasized faith – and particularly a faith defined by particular propositional statements – the less willing the thinker was to look for loopholes.
However, it is a mixed bag throughout Christian history; one which defeats a tidy explanation, as Marenbon acknowledges:
THE INTRODUCTION PROMISED THAT THIS BOOK WOULD REACH NO FIRST-order general conclusions about the Problem of Paganism. Unlike an enquiry in the natural sciences, it has, and should have, no results. But it is worth mentioning two striking negative points that it has, silently, established. The Middle Ages in Western Europe are frequently associated with narrowness and religious bigotry, and the Renaissance and seventeenth century with the beginnings of the Enlightenment. It would be natural, therefore, to expect that attitudes to pagans would progress from medieval severity, according to which pagans lacked knowledge and virtue and were heading for eternal punishment, to Early Modern toleration, in which pagan goodness, wisdom and salvation were widely accepted. But there was no such progression. No sixteenth- or seventeenth-century writer pleaded the pagan case more fervently than Abelard in the twelfth century. No early medieval ascetic (nor even Augustine himself) so willingly accepted the wickedness of pagans as many seventeenth-century Protestants and Jansenists. Was the movement then in the reverse direction, with a hardening of attitudes to pagans, like that towards groups such as Jews, homosexuals and lepers in the later Middle Ages?1 This view is equally contradicted by the (very different) ideas of, for instance, Pomponazzi, Las Casas, Suárez and Leibniz. The full gamut of reactions was available to thinkers throughout the period, because the Problem of Paganism did not admit of any solution which allowed them (with rare exceptions) to retain all their doctrinal commitments. Similarly, it might be expected that the European discovery of America, and the new contacts with India, and then Japan and China, would transform thought about paganism. But there was no transformation, just a gradual change without a shift in fundamental principles.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (p. 304). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
What do Christians do about Pagan learning?
Another problem with paganism involved how pagan philosophy should be integrated into Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas advocated a “path of unity” on the grounds that true philosophical reasoning was consistent with truth, which could not be inconsistent with Christian revelation. Where there was a conflict between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation, Aquinas would seek to “dissolve” the problem by distinguishing it, or, ultimately, rejecting Aristotle as wrong. [2]
Another option was promoted by the “selective rejectionists” who held that reason had to be based on faith. Pagan philosophy was necessarily inadequate because of its non-Christian foundations. Rather than “solving” the problem of the eternity of the world in a logical demonstration, philosophers like Bonaventure deemed that the conclusion that the world had a beginning could be proven by reason.[3]
The third option was “limited relativism,” which affirmed pagan philosophy as descriptive of the real world while claiming that Christian revelation was true as a proposition of faith. Limited Relativism was the position staked out by Siger of Brabant in arguing in the 1260s in favor of Averroes’ position that all humans carried out their diverse and individual acts of reasoning through a shared active-and-potential intellect. Aquinas argued against Siger and Averroes in contending in favor of the position that each individual had a unique active-and-potential intellect. Marenbon explains:
[The rest of the review is here - https://petersbradley.substack.com/p/... ]
According to John Marenbon, the problem of paganism is that some pagans were moral, intellectual, and cultural heroes to Christian intellectuals. People like Socrates and Aristotle provided a moral and intellectual foundation for Christians. Seneca modeled a lifestyle that Christians admired. Even Emperor Trajan was turned into an exemplar of Christian charity by a story that Pope Gregory had obtained Trajan’s release from Hell through prayers after learning that Trajan had interrupted a military expedition in order to see that a widow whose son was killed was paid compensation by his murderer.
Pagans could be virtuous, but was pagan virtue sufficient for Christian salvation?
The question arose from the Pauline emphasis on salvation by faith. Works mattered, but so did faith in the sense of some adherence to Christian claims about the One God of the Jews and Christians. Marenbon observes:
Paul influenced not only views about pagans’ virtue and wisdom, but also the discussion about their salvation. Indeed, it was he—and the way he would be read by Augustine—who made it a problem. Christian doctrine might well have developed in such a way that the salvation of just pagans, at least in the period before Christ, was a matter of course, had it not been for Paul’s emphasis on justification by faith in Christ, and on the gratuitousness of God’s choice of whom to save. As reconstructed by scholars today, Paul’s concern was to lessen the importance of the Jewish Law as part of his efforts to convert non-Jews. But his repeated statements that we can be justified only by faith in Christ made it seem difficult or impossible to explain how anyone who did not believe in Christ—such as a virtuous pagan, even a monotheistic one—could be saved.5 And the rhetoric of Romans ix, which proclaims God’s freedom, as creator, to show mercy to one person, and harden the heart of another, to cast away a human as a potter might a vessel of clay, seemed to explain how such seeming injustice befits the divinity.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 20-21). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Christian scripture taught that some propositional knowledge was necessary, albeit a surprisingly low level of propositional. Hebrews 11:6 states: ‘But without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God, must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him’. The “Pauline Bare Minimum” stipulated that the necessary saving faith entailed a belief in God as the rewarder of deeds.
Marenbon is interested in the way that Christian thinkers during the “Long Middle Ages” (200 AD to 1700 AD) attempted to reconcile God’s love and justice with the apparent exclusion of good pagans and those who had never had the opportunity to hear the gospel for salvation. For some Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, there was no problem; Augustine reasoned that pagans could not be saved without a divine mediator, which meant they could only be saved by recognizing and accepting Christ as their mediator. This acceptance required an explicit faith in the incarnate Christ.[1]
Marenbon is a leading scholar on the subject of medieval philosophy. For example, he wrote the “Very Short Introduction” to Medieval Philosophy and has several books about the subject, including “Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction.” He knows the subject. Accordingly, this book is encyclopedic with respect to its treatment of virtually every writer – well-known or obscure – who had an opinion on the fate of pagans. The book starts with the Bible and ends with Leibniz.
What do Christians do about virtuous pagans?
Augustine also questioned pagan virtue. For him, pagan virtue was tied into pagan culture, which was intertwined with war and human suffering. The chief vice of paganism was pride, which deformed all pagan efforts at virtue. Only acts directed ultimately to the highest good – God – could qualify as truly virtuous; pagan virtue was not virtuous because it did not find its end in God.
Other philosophers were more accommodating toward pagan philosophy. Boethius, for example, presented Lady Philosophy as a figure who could lead, to some extent, toward the truth. Boethius did not harbor hostility towards secular philosophy and did not define it as a realm mired in vice.
Subsequent philosophers, such as Abelard, found pagan philosophy to be genuine, virtuous, and consistent with Christianity. These philosophers were viewed as knowing or anticipating Christian doctrine. The source of this knowledge may have come from revelations given to the Jews. It was a common belief among Christian writers that Old Testament prophets were aware of God’s triunity. Marenbon explains:
Abelard consistently holds that most ancient philosophers believed in the existence of one God.4 He considers that they taught the truth, as recognized by Christians, about the immortality of the soul, heavenly reward and punishment and God’s ordering of the universe (TChr II.26–42); and also that a number of ancient philosophers wrote, in a veiled fashion, about the Trinity, or at least about one or more of its persons, and he sets out his evidence for this judgement in the first book of each version of the Theologia.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (p. 74). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
There were other avenues to revelation of Christ:
Some of the Church Fathers discussed the Hermetic writings. Lactantius treated him respectfully, but in the City of God (VIII.23–24, 26; cf. XVIII.39) Augustine attacks him for idolatry. Abelard ignores, however, Augustine’s critical views, but uses material from Lactantius quoted in the City of God and in a treatise wrongly attributed to Augustine to present Trismegistus as a venerable ancient philosopher who wrote about the Son of God.5 Hermes is just the first in a whole series of ancient philosophers presented by Abelard: Pythagoras and Seneca, who talk about the Holy Spirit, and outstandingly Plato and his followers, such as Macrobius, who discussed all three person of the Trinity. Abelard also names a few non-philosophers among the ancient pagans who spoke or wrote of the Trinity: the Cumaean Sibyl, widely thought in the Middle Ages to have prophesied the coming of Christ,6 and the poet Virgil,7 who in his fourth eclogue refers to her and talks of the birth of a child who will bring a new age; Nebuchadnezzar (because he sees, in addition to the three men he had cast into the fire, a fourth ‘who looks like the son of God’);8 and the Brahmans (Bragmanni), known from the tradition of Alexander literature.9 There is also Job, whom Abelard often considers along with the ancient philosophers, since the Bible makes is clear he was not a Jew, although he was generally accepted as being among the Old Testament saints.10
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 75-76). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
The people who accepted these beliefs on these grounds would have qualified as having Christian faith.
Other intellectuals developed alternative theories by which virtuous pagans might attain the necessary Christian faith. One theory involved “implicit faith.” This developed out of reflections on the required “bare minimum of faith” aka “the Pauline Minimum”:
With regard to the knowledge of God and Christ under natural law, William of Champeaux based himself on Paul’s statement (Hebrews xi, 6): ‘But without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God, must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him’. This statement provides a rather low threshold for what is to count as faith: belief in God as a repayer of good and evil. Relying on this Pauline minimum, William declared, ‘It should be said that those who were saved before the coming of Christ believed that there is a just and pious judge who would repay the good with good things and the evil with bad things. There were also some who believed that someone would come from God who would redeem the people, but they did not know how he would do so. And there were a very few to whom the manner of the Redemption was known’.32 It is wrong to describe this as a theory of implicit faith (though one would be developed from it). In William’s view, the Pauline minimum is enough, both under natural law and the Old Law, to allow a person to be saved.33
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 65-66). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
The theory of “implicit faith” involved “taking something on trust” or trusting in someone who had the relevant propositional knowledge. Marenbon explains:
Aquinas answers by saying that, in the case of scientific knowledge we can draw the conclusions from the principles without being taught, and so we can be said to have implicit knowledge of the conclusions in the principles; yet even here we also have implicit knowledge in someone else who knows, in so far as we do in fact need the help of a teacher. But ‘it is not the same with regard to knowledge (scientia) as to faith, because there are no principles naturally within us from which the articles of faith derive. Rather, faith in us is determined entirely by teaching, and so we must have implicit faith in the cognition of ‹some other› human being’.46
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (p. 171). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Trust in the church or in the Jewish scriptures might suffice.
Alternatively, accepting one premise might implicitly mean that explicit Christian premises were accepted. Marenbon notes:
Few other theologians go into so much detail as Aquinas, but the standard theory of implicit faith he proposes continues to be widely followed. It is put forward, for example, by Richard of Middleton in the next generation, and Duns Scotus and Durandus of St Pourçain at the turn of the fourteenth century.47 But there are some changes: although Durandus’s solution follows Aquinas’s quite closely, and he does clearly think of implicit faith as a matter of the minores taking on trust what the maiores believe, his explanation of what is meant by ‘implicit’ is given in terms of the particular being implicit in the universal, without any reference to the faith of others.48 This slide in meaning is even more apparent in the way the very widely-read biblical commentator, Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349) puts a view which, otherwise, is like Aquinas’s. Those who believe in God as a rewarder must in consequence, he argues, believe in divine providence, and the way in which in fact God provided for the providence of humans was the Incarnation.49
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 171-172). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Implicit faith was the “main medieval theory for how, in principle, a good pagan can be saved.” It was particularly useful to explain how Jews who had died prior to Christ could be saved.
“Special inspiration” was another theory. The idea behind special revelation was that God would never permit a virtuous pagan to depart this life without faith. The theory posits that every person will have a moment of revelation in their life, perhaps at the moment of their death, where they will be presented with a choice to accept Christ or not. The biblical warrant for this theory was the example of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, whose acts of charity resulted in an angelic visit, followed by Peter's arrival to baptize Cornelius. Albert the Great and Aquinas were sympathetic to the special inspiration theory, but unsure about it and not willing to place much weight on it.”
What we see from Marenbon’s survey is that generosity toward the possibility of pagan salvation was highest during the supposedly bigoted Middle Ages:
With one exception, the most generous of the thirteenth-century theologians towards the ancient philosophers was Aquinas.71 He sets his views out in greatest detail in his Sentences commentary, and repeats the main lines of them in the rather later Questions on Truth.72 Like Abelard before him and Robert Holcot and Thomas Bradwardine in the following century, he believes that prophetic knowledge of Christ was to some extent available to non-Jews, as the example of the Sibyls show (and he also cites a Roman miracle in which Christ’s coming is prophesied). But he accepts that there were some to whom no special revelation was made, and he puts forward a way in which they were able to be saved by implicit faith. On the one hand, they did not sin by failing to follow the Old Law, which, unlike the New Law, applied only to the Jews. On the other hand, as he puts it in the Questions on Truth, the philosophers should not, despite their worldly wisdom, be thought of as instructors in the divine faith, and so they can be considered among the lesser ones, for whom implicit faith is enough. But in whom was their faith implicit? He answers in the Sentences commentary that it was implicit ‘in the cognition of God’ (in Questions on Truth ‘divine providence’) or ‘of those who were taught by God—whoever they might be, indeterminately (just as the greater ones among the Jews so far as those things which had not yet been revealed to them were concerned), so long as they did not pertinaciously hold themselves against the preaching of the faith’.73 It was enough, then, for pagan philosophers who believed in God, as they did, to accept as their own belief whatever God himself knew about the truth, or it was sufficient for them to say that they accepted as their own the belief of whoever it might be who knew more of God’s ways than they did.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (pp. 177-178). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
In contrast, subsequent philosophers became less generous under the influence of theologies that emphasized faith alone. My sense was that the more a theology emphasized virtuous living, the more willing its adherents were to find “loopholes” to include pagans among the saved. In contrast, the more that a theology emphasized faith – and particularly a faith defined by particular propositional statements – the less willing the thinker was to look for loopholes.
However, it is a mixed bag throughout Christian history; one which defeats a tidy explanation, as Marenbon acknowledges:
THE INTRODUCTION PROMISED THAT THIS BOOK WOULD REACH NO FIRST-order general conclusions about the Problem of Paganism. Unlike an enquiry in the natural sciences, it has, and should have, no results. But it is worth mentioning two striking negative points that it has, silently, established. The Middle Ages in Western Europe are frequently associated with narrowness and religious bigotry, and the Renaissance and seventeenth century with the beginnings of the Enlightenment. It would be natural, therefore, to expect that attitudes to pagans would progress from medieval severity, according to which pagans lacked knowledge and virtue and were heading for eternal punishment, to Early Modern toleration, in which pagan goodness, wisdom and salvation were widely accepted. But there was no such progression. No sixteenth- or seventeenth-century writer pleaded the pagan case more fervently than Abelard in the twelfth century. No early medieval ascetic (nor even Augustine himself) so willingly accepted the wickedness of pagans as many seventeenth-century Protestants and Jansenists. Was the movement then in the reverse direction, with a hardening of attitudes to pagans, like that towards groups such as Jews, homosexuals and lepers in the later Middle Ages?1 This view is equally contradicted by the (very different) ideas of, for instance, Pomponazzi, Las Casas, Suárez and Leibniz. The full gamut of reactions was available to thinkers throughout the period, because the Problem of Paganism did not admit of any solution which allowed them (with rare exceptions) to retain all their doctrinal commitments. Similarly, it might be expected that the European discovery of America, and the new contacts with India, and then Japan and China, would transform thought about paganism. But there was no transformation, just a gradual change without a shift in fundamental principles.
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (p. 304). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
What do Christians do about Pagan learning?
Another problem with paganism involved how pagan philosophy should be integrated into Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas advocated a “path of unity” on the grounds that true philosophical reasoning was consistent with truth, which could not be inconsistent with Christian revelation. Where there was a conflict between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation, Aquinas would seek to “dissolve” the problem by distinguishing it, or, ultimately, rejecting Aristotle as wrong. [2]
Another option was promoted by the “selective rejectionists” who held that reason had to be based on faith. Pagan philosophy was necessarily inadequate because of its non-Christian foundations. Rather than “solving” the problem of the eternity of the world in a logical demonstration, philosophers like Bonaventure deemed that the conclusion that the world had a beginning could be proven by reason.[3]
The third option was “limited relativism,” which affirmed pagan philosophy as descriptive of the real world while claiming that Christian revelation was true as a proposition of faith. Limited Relativism was the position staked out by Siger of Brabant in arguing in the 1260s in favor of Averroes’ position that all humans carried out their diverse and individual acts of reasoning through a shared active-and-potential intellect. Aquinas argued against Siger and Averroes in contending in favor of the position that each individual had a unique active-and-potential intellect. Marenbon explains:
[The rest of the review is here - https://petersbradley.substack.com/p/... ]
July 4, 2017
Immensely learned, apparently exhaustive treatment of the problem that exasperated Christian thinkers: could a virtuos person who is not a Christian be saved? What if this person lived before Christ? Or after Christ but having no opportunity to learn of Christianity? A spectrum of views is outlined, with ludicrous acrobatics to save Socrates, Aristotle or Trajan from eternal damnation.
What a useless exercise of the intellect!
What a useless exercise of the intellect!
November 28, 2019
This book is absolute garbage. The Bible isn't a moral compass because it promotes Jesus Christ eating dead animals and it also promotes slavery and war, not to mention that it was used by Nazis to kill millions of Jews. Instead, read this non-biased book which contains no assumptions or subliminal promotion of evil in order to truly educate yourself about religion and doing good: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Phi...
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