If the Fathers condemned Greek philosophy, why is it central to Christian thought?
A viewer named Levi asks why modern Christians make the tradition of Athens central to the faith if pagan Greek philosophy was condemned by the Fathers and at Second Constantinople under Justinian.
Answer
When you deal with Greek philosophy, you can treat it either on an individual basis, looking at what Epicurus or Hippocrates or any of the two or three dozen individual philosophers said, or you can treat it as general topics of epistemology and metaphysics, bypassing the individuals. That is why philosophy classes start with Plato and Aristotle: they crystallize two of the most basic categories. In Raphael's School of Athens, Plato points upward, representing universals, the all-encompassing, and Aristotle holds his hand out horizontally, representing particulars, because everything in life is a combination of universals and particulars, and no one has ever figured out the exact balance between them, which is why philosophy keeps battling between Aristotelian particulars and Platonic universals. So when we as Catholics do philosophy, we usually use the general categories rather than endorsing any individual pagan promoter of a particular philosophy. On the one hand the philosophies are all dead ends, but on the other hand there are aspects of them, like universals and particulars, that even theology cannot get rid of, because we use that very principle when we exegete Scripture, going back and forth between the particular details of the languages and the universal perspective of God's sovereignty. The ultimate universal-and-particular is the Trinity itself: one and three.