Thomas Aquinas and the Christianization of Neoplatonism
Few questions have exercised historians of philosophy and theology more persistently than the question of how Christianity came to appropriate, transform, and ultimately baptize elements of Greek philosophy. From the earliest centuries of the Church, Christian thinkers found themselves confronted by intellectual traditions that had been developed long before the emergence of Christianity. Among these traditions, none proved more influential than Platonism and its later development, Neoplatonism. The encounter between Christian faith and Neoplatonic philosophy produced one of the most fertile intellectual syntheses in the history of Western civilization, shaping doctrines of God, creation, knowledge, the soul, grace, and salvation. At the center of this long and complex dialogue stands Thomas Aquinas, whose achievement may be understood as one of the most sophisticated attempts to preserve the metaphysical insights of the Neoplatonic tradition while reconfiguring them according to the demands of Christian revelation.
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