key contributors to Christianity's impact on philosophy
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Hi Angela!
There's a lot to this. A line is hard to draw between Theology and Philosophy, so that's a whole other debate if the people you list will be a part of that. But if I had to post my top 5, it would probably be:
1) Aristotle. Yes...not even a Christian. But a lot of Christian Theology was described in terms of Aristotle's worldview. Most of Aquinas can only be understood if you know at least the basics of Aristotle's philosophy.
2) St. Augustine His work in "The Confessions" is fantastic!
3) Tertullian Not horribly well known (as opposed to Aquinas and Augustine), but he pretty much laid the foundation for understanding the Trinity. Can we really count him out of this list?
4) Thomas Aquinas. His Summa of Theology is one of the greatest (in terms of importance) documents in Christian Theology.
5) CS Lewis. I have to have a modern person in here. People might not agree with a lot of his writings and see basic flaws in logic in them, but CS Lewis has done a lot to bring some complex Christian ideas into very easy to read material. He tackled the problem of "what is evil?" extremely well for me with his book "The Screwtape Letters."
Those are my personal top 5. There are countless others we can pick too.
Matt
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