So, on another forum, I've a got a VII Catholic asserting that saying Muslims worship the same God or the Church does not deny the truth in all of the religions can be supported by Paul's witness in Athens when he quotes Greek poets/writers in a positive light. In other words, Paul evangelized by bringing up that these Greek pagans had some truth (even if they didn't know it).
This is a distortion on that person's part because the sermon that St. Paul delivered unto the Athenians was not principally based on what the Greek poets had written but preached the sacred Gospel with an exposition of those primal truths of reason that illuminated the classical poets and philosophers (who had earnestly striven for wisdom and the observance of the natural law) as a preamble.
He later on preaches the absolute necessity of penitence on account of their idolatry, so that the Poets and Philosophers alone could not keep the heathen from degrading themselves unto the idolatry that resulted from the spiritual blindness for which the transgression of natural law was both a logical consequence and a just punishment: "And the times truly of this ignorance whereas God despised, now He denounceth unto men that all everywhere do penance" (Act. cap. xvii. 30). He then preached upon the General Judgment Doomsday and the Resurrection of all flesh.
Rev. Fr. Cornelius à Lapide says in his Commentary upon the Acts of the Apostles that St. Paul cited the poet Aratus (
supra cap. xvii. 28). Traditionally, the verse "For of his kind also we are" ("
ipsius enim et genus sumus" in the Sacred Vulgate) was understood as the rational principle that man was created by God as His masterpiece, and that the human soul had a kinship with its Creator in its rational and intellective faculties. Here reason, disciplined by self-abnegation and moderated by moral probity, in the heathen world coincided with what was divinely revealed unto the ancient Hebrews: "Let us make man to our image and likeness" (Gen. cap. i. 26). The celestial origin of the soul was taught not only by Aratus, but by Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Ovid, &c.
Rev. Fr. Cornelius à Lapide wrote (
supra cap. xvii. 23) that the altar dedicated to the "unknown God" by the Athenians was made, according to some authors, by the Athenians at witnessing the marvels that occurred at the Death of Our Lord, and that this unknown God must be identified with God suffering in the flesh, with Christ Crucified. Other authors, says the same Jesuit exegete, wrote that the Athenians had learned of the future Incarnation of Christ from the Sybils and the Hebrews, and unto Him did they erect this altar, as to an "unknown God" who is to be understood as the Incarnate Word whom the Athenians whose advent the Athenians had not understood until the preaching of the Apostles.
Finally, Rev. Fr. Cornelius à Lapide plainly states that St. Paul makes known to the Athenians the infelicity of the ancient heathens and the unsurpassed felicity of the new economy established by Our Lord and Redeemer, for the which thing we are ever to be grateful to God: for we have been born in this refulgent epoch of the Gospel wherein eternal beatitude is more easily obtainable than it was for the heathen before the preaching of the Gospel, who had to labor without the aid of Divine Revelations and without Sacramental grace; Socrates can glory in his wisdom but we may glory all the more for having been born in the era of Christ and within the bosom of Holy Mother Church (
supra cap. xvii. 30).
So, I do not understand how this sermon of St. Paul can be used to justify the novelty of religious syncretism that we see enshrined in so many professedly Catholic churches and schools.