Every theology enthusiast – I would never use the term dork – has, at some point, identified himself with one of two factions: the Thomistic Aristotelians or the Augustinian Platonists. Granted, the whole debate is kind of dumb. Reading Aquinas’s commentary on Boethius, one realizes pretty quickly that the Angelic Doctor himself is as much an Augustinian as the more “Platonic” theologians like Bonaventure. Still, there are worse things to argue about over scotch and pipes. Most of my friends back home are alumni of Thomas Aquinas College, so I’m usually the lone Augustinian. But that’s fine. If Pope Benedict is for us, who can be against us? Of course, Tertullian wouldn’t be amused. The man widely credited as the founder of Western theology had no use for pre-Christian thinkers. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” he famously sneered. Yet this contempt for classical philosophy has gained little traction except among some radical Calvinists. Most Christians (and all Catholics) have followed Augustine, who taught that “truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature.” This appreciation for the genius of antiquity compelled the traditional Scholastic – Aquinas among them – to debate the Averroists over the meaning of Aristotle. This, in turn, led to the development of philosophy as the discipline we know and practice today. No serious thinker anywhere in the world is untouched by Aquinas’s influence, directly or indirectly. That’s why modern historians are wrong to draw such a strict line between the supposedly ignorant and superstitious Medieval Ages and the worldly, learned Europe of the Renaissance. It was Machiavelli, the archetypal Renaissance thinker, who scorned philosophy. “For there is such a distance from how one lives to how one ought to live,” he wrote in The Prince, “that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns what will ruin him rather than what will save him.” Meanwhile, Erasmus warned his own Christian prince that, “unless you are a philosopher, you cannot be a prince – only a tyrant.” Erasmus and his friend, the great martyr Thomas More, are often called “Christian humanists”; Augustine and Aquinas would have recognized them simply as “Catholics”. But why do we only think of ourselves as Aristotelians and Platonists? There’s a whole panoply of classical philosophies that Christians may draw from. And the most neglected are undoubtedly those that ask what it means to live a good and worthy life. For instance, Stoicism – the belief that true happiness is achieved by transcending both pleasure and pain – is enjoying a renaissance of its own. Rear Admiral James Stockdale, best known as Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 presidential election, credited this the Stoics for seeing him through seven years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. In his extraordinary book Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior, Stockdale argues that Stoicism and Christianity are compatible: