Platonisers in the early ages of the church: to his own generation, however, there was something new, striking, even alarming, in the manner in which he stated it.[1] He seemed to efface the distinction between faith and unfaith, and to treat Christian doctrine almost as a species of philosophy. Yet, even had he done so, he would only have been formulating a proposition which after all was part of the tacit, unacknowledged creed of students of philosophy. Among them the dignity of Plato the Theologian[2] was certainly not allowed to suffer by comparison with the Bible. It was not merely that he furnished (by whatever crooked process of evolution) the materials for the accredited system of metaphysics: the accident that the middle ages as yet knew him only through the Timaeus,[3] made him also specially the authority in cosmology and theosophy. The trinity that was discovered there took the place for speculative purposes of the Trinity of the Christian church. The Father and the Son became the ideal unities of Power and Wisdom, and there was a strong temptation to identify the Holy Ghost with the universal Soul. Abailard indeed never went this length, although he was charged with the identification at the council of Sens: for himself, he consistently distinguished the Third Person as Goodness or Love. But he liked to illustrate the prime doctrine by every possible analogy and was specially fond
- ↑ [See saint Bernard's caustic remark, Ubi dum multum sudat quomodo Platonem faciat Christianum, se probat ethnicum: Tract. contra error. Abaelardi iv., Opp. 1. 650 A.]
- ↑ According to the distinction of Cassiodorus: Through the work of Boëthius 'Pythagoras musicus, Ptolemaeus astronomus leguntur Itali; Nicomachus arithmeticus, geometricus Euclides audiuntur Ausonii [ed. Ausoniis]; Plato theologus, Aristoteles logicus, Quirinali voce disceptant, &c.: Variorum i. epist. 45, Opp. 1. 20 a, ed. Garet.
- ↑ A Latin version of the Phaedo and Meno was made, according to a manuscript of Corpus Christi college, Oxford, ccxliii. 14 & 16. (Coxe, Catal. Codd. mss. Coll. Oxon. 2. 101), by Euericus Aristippus, – no doubt the Henricus Aristippus mentioned by Hugo Falcandus, De tyrann. Sicul., Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. 7. 281 C, – for Maio, great admiral of Sicily, and Hugh, archbishop of Palermo. This connexion gives a date of about 1160. There is however no symptom of the translation being used until the thirteenth century. Cf. Schaarschmidt 115 sq. [On the literary work of Euericus Aristippus see Valentin Rose, in Hermes 1. 373-389; 1866.]
