Philosophical theology

Though theology without some form of religion to prompt it would be an odd phenomenon, it is by no means the same thing as religion. Theology, or at least philosophical theology, is a rational enterprise or at any rate an attempt to rationalize the irrational. Rationalist forms of reflection concerning the gods, or the divine, are part of Greek philosophy from its very beginning. On the one hand, the primary principle or principles were often said to be divine or provided with divine attributes, while on the other traditional views of the gods were criticized and other proposals formulated. But the first philosopher to elevate theology (at least in principle) to the status of a part of philosophy was Aristotle, who at Metaph. E 1.1026a19 affirms that there are ‘three theoretical disciplines: mathematics, physics, theology’. Before Aristotle, Plato had argued that those who write about the gods should follow certain ‘models’ (Rep. 379a6). According to this prescription, a god is good and so not the cause of evil but only of what is good, and he does not change but always remains the same. The sharp contrast with the gods of traditional Greek religion, who assume different shapes at will and may not only favour human beings but also deceive and harm them, is very deliberate.

Divinities which conform to this ideal play a decisive part in Plato's and Aristotle's cosmologies. According to Plato's Timaeus we live in the best of all possible worlds because it has been constructed by a Divine Craftsman and his help-mates.

Why so much has been lost

We know a good deal about Hellenistic philosophy, but by no means as much as we would like to know. The reason is that with very few exceptions no works written by the Hellenistic philosophers themselves survive. The situation is therefore quite different from that in which we find ourselves with regard to the great classical philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato's complete works have been preserved. Much of Aristotle's vast output has perished, but the philosophically more important part of his writings is still available. The reason for the preservation of these Platonic and Aristotelian corpora is that these works continued to be taught and studied in the philosophical schools. Treatises of Aristotle were taught by the late Neoplatonists as a preparation for the study of a set of dialogues by Plato, and those of his works which were not part of the curricula have mostly perished. The professional teachers of philosophy themselves were required to have perfect knowledge of practically everything these great masters had written.

But by the end of the third century AD the schools (in the sense both of institutions and schools of thought) which had been founded in the early Hellenistic period had died out. The works of Epicurus and his immediate followers, or of the great early Stoics for example, were no longer taught, though a preliminary instruction in the views of the main schools could still be part of a decent pagan education in the fourth and to a much lesser extent in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

DOXOGRAPHI GRAECI

Because the works of the early Greek philosophers have been lost, our knowledge of their content is entirely dependent either on sparse verbatim quotations (though less sparse than for instance those relating to the early Stoics) or on various forms of reportage in all sorts of ancient authors. It has thus become customary to begin books of this kind with a critical review of our sources of information.

What is at stake is the reliability of these sources. The ideal of an objective history of philosophy is a nineteenth-century invention. In antiquity history of philosophy was part of systematic philosophy, serving a variety of purposes. The ideas of earlier philosophers were used and interpreted in many ways, and, more often than not, served merely as springboards. This holds not only for the attitude of major thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle but also for the far humbler works consisting of collections of doctrines, with or without some biographical detail, that circulated on a fairly extensive scale. Such works were used, it would seem, in the context of a primary education in philosophy and also as quarries to be exploited whenever someone writing about a philosophical issue felt he should set off his own view against those of others, to improve upon an already existing view or to replace it with another.