Cicero’s Summum Bonum and the Greatest Commandment

Philosophy, ideally, brings our rational inquiry to a proper level of cultivation that allows us to accept the revelation in the Gospels. Praeparatio evangelica is a doctrine of the early Church, which maintains that God, prior to the fullness of revelation in His Son, already cultivated the soil, as it were, for the Incarnation, by developing a philosophical culture that would be open to the revelation of Jesus Christ.[1]

45 years before the birth of Christ, Cicero, a Roman orator, statesman, a...