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The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers
The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers Author:Edward Caird Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE THIRD. THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO. In the last lecture I suggested that Plato is the first systematic theologian, the first philosopher who distinctly... more » grasped the idea that lies at the root of all religion, and used it as the key to all the other problems of philosophy. Or, if this statement require some qualification, we may at least say that he is the philosopher to whom all our theology may be traced back, and to whom it owes most. Emerson once said that Plato's Dialogues were the Bible of educated men; and if by this he meant that from them the reflective consciousness has drawn its greatest nutriment and support, it is not too much to say of the writings of one who is the fountain- head of idealistic, we might even say of ideal, views of life. Plato has done more than any other writer to fill both poetry and philosophy with the spirit of religion, to break the yoke of custom and tradition " heavy as frost and deep almost as life," whichcramps the development of man's mind, to liberate him from the prejudices of the natural understanding, and to open up to him an ideal world in which he can find refuge from the narrowness and inadequacy of life. In the Terrestrial Paradise, on the summit of the Purgatorial mount, Dante is made to drink of the waters of Lethe to wash away from his memory all his earthly cares and sins, and then of the waters of Eunoe to refresh and strengthen his spirit for the vision of the heavens. Plato's writings may be said to be Lethe and Eunoe in one, at once the liberation of thought from that which is limited and temporary, and its initiation into a new ideal way of conceiving the world. To put it more directly, Plato is the source of two great streams of theological thought which have flowed through all the subsequent literature of religion...« less