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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books History of Western Philosophy 3.3 the Patristic Period: Establishment of the Christian Church and Dogma The Patristic Period was, at least in things of the spirit, an age of richness and promise extending from the time of Christ to the death of Augustine in 430 or, interpreted most widely, until the Council of Trullo in 692. Concern is with the development of dogma in this period. Early theology. The Acts of St. Paul. The Gnostics.

The Apologists the Logos doctrine [logos, reason, the first cause, in God]; free will and original sin. The period, which results from the fusion of early Christian religion with Hellenistic philosophy, is much richer in theology than in philosophy. St. Augustine [353-430] the greatest representative of the age, the only figure who fully deserves the title: philosopher, has no immediate philosophic descendents, and comes into his own much later in an age clearly medieval.

Earliest Christian communities varied greatly in type but can be classified as [a] Gentile, and as [b] a type still oriented largely to Jewish religion. Very early, there emerged from these two sources: Hellenistic Christianity, exemplified by St. Paul, in whose writing two significant natures: [^1] exaltation of Christ, [^2] interpretation of his person in then dominant Hellenistic conceptscontains only the germ of the later doctrine of Trinity, and union of human and divine natures in Christ.

The doctrine of the Trinity on which the whole theology of Western Christianity is ultimately based, was not given definite form until the Council of Niacea in 325, and was established as a secure and accepted basis of the new Church until the Trinitarian disputes in controversy between Arians and Athanasius' followers were settled by the Council of Constantinople, 381, and further disputes on the relation between the human and divine in Christ were ended in the West at least by the Council of Chacedon, 451.

Prior to these developments there was considerable controversy employing Hellenistic philosophical terminology largely Platonic. Council of Niacea 325 turned away from Neoplatonism, and devised a formula for the Christian conception of Jesus Christ: the son of God and at the same time truly God incarnate.

The Nicene definition established the meaning of faith which Christians were to hold and its defenders had recourse less to philosophical or theological speculation than to the Scripture as they understood it.