Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism by JAROSLAV PELIKAN - February 1995

Yale University Press, February 1995. Paper Back. New. The fourth century was the crucible in which classical Greek culture and science and Christian orthodoxy confronted one another to form the basis of normative Christian belief thereafter in eastern Christendom. The four great Cappadocians - Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, their sister and teacher Macrina, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus - were the crucial minds behind the development of the orthodox Christian synthesis that emerged from this encounter, comparable in influence to that of Augustine in the West. Their selective appropriation of the Greek philosophical tradition to questions of religious experience, free will and immortality, the nature of the universe and of the good life, is a model of how to ''think Christianly'' about traditions and ways of thinking that are not explicitly Christian. Based on the Gifford lectures delivered by Pelikan in the early 1990s. 416 pp.