Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/140

 122 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. formulation lay largely in progressive disclaimer and condemnation of opinions pronounced erroneous, it was also a creative process resulting in the establish- ment of original propositions. Besides eclectically modified Stoicism, the Greek system chiefly used in this formulation was Neo-platonism, the dominant pagan philosophy in the fourth century. Dogma grew y" from Hellenic reasoning upon gospel data, and was it- self in turn to form the subject of further processes of reasoning based on Greek philosophy. After its first and creative Christian career, Greek philosophy, from the ninth century onward, runs its second Christian course in scholasticism. With the schoolmen, philos- ophy was not to be entirely uncreative ; yet was chiefly to consist in a systematizing of dogma and a new endeavor to place it upon a basis of reason and knowl- V edge. The Greek system employed was Aristotelian- ism, a philosophy in its nature more systematizing and less creative than Platonism. During the first Christian career of Greek philoso- phy the classic sources were open to the Christian world, which, however, made chief use of those closest to Christianity in spirit and in time. For the second Christian career of Greek philosophy the sources had to be gradually redisclosed. Boethius' Aristotelian translations^ represent the knowledge of Greek philos- ophy in the West in the seventh and eighth centuries. In the ninth, the first great schoolman, John Scotus Erigena, translated the works of Dionysius the Are- opagite, and in the centuries following the tenth there gradually came a larger knowledge of Aristotle, till 1 See ante^ Chap. IV.