Abstract

For followers of religions which take solid cultural form of coherent doctrinal
systems, the fact that other comparable religious systems exist may pose
a difficult theoretical and existential problem that needs to be addressed at
a number of levels, including the one of human existential experience. This is
the problem that was faced by the original followers of the Christian religion
in relation to the Greek spiritual culture, and ancient Greek philosophy in
particular, at the time when it boldly explored spiritual areas closely connected
to Christianity. The problem became particularly significant in the second
century CE. It was tackled by early Christian thinkers that were educated in
Greek philosophy themselves and used its ideas to solve the above-mentioned
problem.