Hezo Kittie

Everything in Life is Still Related

Okay so I'm obviously not the first person to see commonalities between great thinkers. Firstly, Emerson actually was Christian, as he went to Harvard Divinity School to become a minister. However, he resigned from being a minister because of his radical views.

"Emerson discounted Biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God. His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. For this, he was denounced as an atheist, and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply, leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another thirty years, but by the mid-1880s his position had become standard Unitarian doctrine."

And Emerson was indirectly influenced by Kant.

"Emerson was strongly influenced by his early reading of the French essayist Montaigne. From those compositions he took the conversational, subjective style and the loss of belief in a personal God. He never read Kant's works, but, instead, relied on Coleridge's interpretation of the German Transcriptal Idealist. This led to Emerson's non-traditional ideas of soul and God."

Also, the link between Aristotle's works and Christianity was a major movement in the Middle Ages.

"Scholasticism was the dominant form of theology and philosophy in the Latin West in the Middle Ages, particularly in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. It was both a method and a system which aimed to reconcile the Christian theology of the Church Fathers with the Greek philosophy of Aristotle and his commentators.

"The main figures of scholasticism were Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure and, above all, Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica is an ambitious synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine."

Crazy.