The fourth influence: After he had left the Manichaean group, he fell intoskepticism, as always happens if you are disappointed about a system of truth in which you believe, suppressing other elements of truth which are in you but which you do not admit; then if you cannot keep them down any more., you fall into a skeptical doubt about every possibility of truth.
In his period skepticism was a very widely spread mood. Even in the later Academy, i, e., the Platonic school, skepticism about knowledge was present in terms of what is called probabilism: only probable statements are possible; no certainty is possible.
This, in the Platonic school, was how the end of the Middle Ages looked.
All his older philosophical writings deal with the problem of certainty, He wanted to overcome the skeptical philosophy; he wanted certainty. This is another element in his thinking. It is very important, again, because it presupposed the negative end of the Greek development. The Greek heroic attempt to build a world on the basis of philosophical reason came to an end in terms of a catastrophe which we usually call skepticism. This was the end of the Greek thinking. The end of the Greek development to create a new world of thinking in terms of reason was skepticism.
The heroic attempt of the Greek philosophers (after the archaic traditions had fallen down) to create a new world in terms of a doctrine of essences (Plato, the Stoics), came to an end in terms of skepticism. On this basis the emphasis on revelation must be understood. The negative end of the development of Greek philosophy, namely skepticism, is the negative presupposition for the way in which Christianity received the idea of revelation. Skepticism is very often the negative basis for a doctrine of revelation. Those people who emphasize revelation in the most absurd supernaturalistic terms are those who enjoy being skeptical about everything.
