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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

I'd be wary of misinterpreting endearment as honorific.

Morally, he couldn't exalt a Pagan. He only brought himself to say that they essentially "weren't all bad", and beautifully illustrated. He was right, of course, about them—but ultimately he looked down upon them from a moral and ethical standpoint.

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Aquinas acknowledged heavy philosophical debts to Maimonides and Averroes while critiquing them in particulars. And as for the theology, I don't see how you get "looked down on" from: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10. To say that Aquinas "looked down on" pagans seems like an almost maximally uncharitable summary of the man's actual views. Where are you seeing this?

The Medieval church's philosophy was called Neoplatonism, after Plato, a 'pagan'. IIRC, they would have loved to have Aristotle's works too, and they were finally discovered in the time of Aquinas.

Common cosmological and philosophical threads run through all religions, but some tenets of Neoplatonism and related Hermetic mystical foundations made their way into Catholicism through two means: early Christian cults and sects before an organized central church ruled on all tenets, and later through Augustine and Aquinas saying "these guys aren't so bad, they figured out why we know there's a god at all and now we can prove it".

Neoplatonism well predates the church. It's beautiful, though.

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