Publishing House Metropolitan of Oltenia, Craiova, 2021
Philosophy represents human knowledge, as a perpetual search for wisdom, which becomes after the incarnation of the divine Logos, divine and human wisdom.
Ancient philosophy had to answer the highest question of the human mind: how we think in identity and special at the same time One and Multiple, Being and existence. This made a clear distinction between matter (world, creation) and ontological reality (Being).
From the very beginning, from the pre-Socratic period, ancient philosophy dealt with the relationship between being and becoming, Parmenides giving priority to being, while Heraclitus gave priority to becoming. Even if it had obvious pantheistic expressions, as a natural result of the essence of the One, – speaking of either ontological pantheism or genetic pantheism, ancient philosophy remains a propaedeutic or an announcement of the Christian way of life and an authentic evangelical preparatio. She knows through the pre-Socratic and especially Socratic glimpses (the founding philosophical thought – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) a culmination of thought and speculation, then there is a decline towards skepticism and nihilism, along with Hellenistic philosophy, to return to a impressive noetic height (but still incomplete) through neo-Platonism, with intuitive reverberations related to Christian Revelation.
This explains why the Holy Fathers of the Church rightly called Christian theology, as our philosophy or true philosophy, and assimilated the fundamental fragmentary intuitions of ancient philosophy, while transfiguring the pre-Christian pagan philosophical content.