What if Christianity and Islam Co-Existed with Classical Philosophy Communities, like Epicureans and Stoics?

This is the most recent installment in the alternate history series. The last was The Mongols Were Good For Europe.


Shrine to Zao Jun the kitchen god.
From Penang Today Community on Facebook
If you've been to a Chinese restaurant, you've seen a shrine to the kitchen god, often with some fruit or a little tray of incense offering. Maybe in other quarters, you've seen others like Kwan Yin or Guan Yu. Wait - China is polytheist? I thought they were...Buddhist? And/or Confucian, and/or Taoist? Very confusing for Westerners! Same in Japan: Shinto and Buddhism exist side by side. To be sure, there are sometimes tensions, and they've waxed and waned in terms of their political influence over the centuries, but the traditions are all there, influencing each other and incorporated into the cultural character.

This does not occur in Europe and the Middle East. Sure, there have inevitably been a couple bleedings-over - Western Chistians have renamed Yule logs in their house in December, and the Aztec celebration of Mictlantecutli snuck in by moving to All Saints Day - but those are a few trappings, lacking their own communities. This is strange, because Europe had its own philsophical communities like Confucius, in fact more of them - Epicureans and Platonists and Pythagoreans and Stoics. These weren't just people discussing ideas; there were actual intentional communities of people organized around the philosophies, or at least they had regular events. This is very unlike how we think of philosophy in the West now. (Imagine an existentialist commune. Sounds like a Monty Python sketch.)

Granted, these classical influences did not fully disappear in Christianity and Islam - Christian theologians over the centuries have tended to be interested in Plato and Stoicism, and there were post-classical works explicitly trying to reconcile ancient philosophies with their (to them obviously correct) religion - eg Averroes and Albertus Magnus. But these philosophies died as living traditions and communities by the late classical period, else there would be no "revival" movements today. You can probably mark the end of this era as AD 529, when Justinian shut down the Neoplatonist Academy in Athens. As a rule, the post-classical Abrahamic religions - and their political agents like Justinian - were zealously intolerant of other philosophies. In contrast, while China has had its purges over the centuries, but somehow these traditions continue. This remains the case even today, under a new dynasty that has brought back philosophical purges - but still celebrates Confucianism and tolerates Buddhism. How would Euope differ if these communities had survived, or at least the explicit traditions? Or what if they survived, incorporated into Christianity as orders, like Franciscans and Dominicans?


Above: head from a statue of Epicurus at the Epicurean colony of Virginia. A document written by one of the scions of the colony offered as the highest aim, the pursuit of happiness, rather than virtue. (Really, a reproduction of a Roman sculpture,
at the Met in New York.)

So what would the world look like with a Europe and Middle East that were still Christian and Muslim, but had classical philosophical communities as well? Existing alongside the religions, or as orders within them (Sunni, Shi'a, and Platonist Islam?) What would a Stoic or Epicurean colony in the New World look like?