In a world like that of mediaeval Christian Europe, where everyone was a religious believer, how was the moral standing of non-Christians to be approached? Could people who did not share the faith everyone acknowledged as true nonetheless be virtuous?
Mediaeval Christians were educated in a culture derived from antiquity. They learned to admire the heroes of ancient Rome and Greece, and their great poets and philosophers. Lucretia, Regulus, Cato, Virgil and Aristotle, for example, seemed obviously to have been virtuous people. But Christian doctrine appeared to go against this conclusion: all people are affected by Original Sin, in such a way that they cannot act well consistently, and so be virtuous, without divine assistance. The route to this divine assistance was through faith – precisely what these pagans lacked. Moreover, if such pagans were genuinely virtuous, then it would be unjust for God to damn them, and yet there seemed to be biblical warrant that no one without faith is saved. This, in outline, is the problem that pagans posed to Mediaeval Christian thinkers.
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