A lucid presentation of the first and most influential attempts to weave together philosophical thought on God, reason and happiness.

This insightful book brings profound new insights to the Trinitarian doctrines of “orthodox” Christianity. With clear and precise documentation, the book shows how these doctrines migrated into early Christianity from Greek philosophy. The various aspects of Trinitarian belief are isolated, linked to their Greek sources, and carefully analyzed to show they differ radically from biblical teaching. The Writings of early Church Fathers, portrayed in their historical context, show that during the second century, theological concepts taught in Platonism were adopted as Christianity struggled to end Roman persecution. Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a famous Stoic philosopher, was putting Christians to death because their belief did not conform to the Hellenized religion of the day. The book shows that the early church fathers sought to save their people’s lives by redefining the Christian God in Greek terms. Their efforts brought metaphysics to Christianity and ushered in concepts like the Trinity. After presenting the historical setting in which these philosophical errors were embraced as Christian doctrine, the book compares orthodox Christian theology today, called “classical theism,” to biblical teachings. The book identifies how Greek philosophy has influenced major attributes of God taught in classical theism. The book constitutes a major challenge to those who accept the tenants of classical theism but do not know the many aspects of their doctrine that are based on Greek philosophy.

Concepts of God presented by Greek philosophers were significantly different from the image of the divine of popular religion and indicate a fairly sophisticated theological reflection from the very inception of Greek philosophy. This book presents a comprehensive history of theological thought of Greek philosophers from the Presocratics to the early Hellenistic period. Concentrating on views concerning the attributes of God and their impact on eschatological and ethical thought, Drozdek explains that theology was of paramount importance for all Greek philosophers even in the absence of purely theological or religious language.

In this classic work, the eminent Catholic philosopher Étienne Gilson deals with one of the most important and perplexing metaphysical problems: the relation between our notion of God and demonstrations of his existence. Gilson examines Greek, Christian, and modern philosophy as well as the thinking that has grown out of our age of science in this fundamental analysis of the problem of God. "[I] commend to another generation of seekers and students this deeply earnest and yet wistfully gentle little essay on the most important (and often, at least nowadays, the most neglected) of all metaphysical--and existential--questions. . . . The historical sweep is breathtaking, the one-liners arresting, and the style, both intellectual and literary, altogether engaging." --Jaroslav Pelikan, from the foreword "We have come to expect from the pen of M. Gilson not only an accurate exposition of the thought of the great philosophers, ancient and modern, but what is of much more importance and of greater interest, a keen and sympathetic insight into the reasons for that thought. The present volume does not fail to fulfill our expectations. It should be read by every Christian thinker." --Ralph O. Dates, America

Provides a comprehensive account of the socio-political role Aristotle attributes to traditional religion, despite rejecting its content.

The new and revolutionizing ideas which the early Greek thinkers developed about the nature of the universe had a direct impact upon their conception of what they called, in a new sense, 'God' or 'the Divine.' The history of the philosophical theology of the Greeks is thus the history of their rational approach to the nature of reality itself in its successive phases. The late Professor Jaeger's classic book traces this development from the first intimations in Hesiod of the theology that was to come, through the heroic age of Greek cosmological thought, down to the time of the Sophists of the fifth century B.C.