While reading, Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, I realized I’ve been guilty of a major oversight in my discussions of ‘hellenistic metaphysics’. Cassirer doesn’t speak much of Christianity or the Church in that book, but he does speak of swings between various forms of Hellenistic metaphysics. And there are indeed different beasts in that menagerie. Using Christianity as a reference:
- The Hellenistic thinkers in the Apostolic era and for two centuries following were generally followers of Plato and Aristotle, Zeno, Pythagoras, Epicurus, and other thinkers who lived before Jesus Christ. While those Greeks (all were largely Greek by culture but not all were ethnically Greek) were wrong about the nature of being — some more than others, they were pretty much all rational and clearheaded at least in the formulation of their questions.
- Two centuries after Christ, Plotinus completed the development of a bastard offspring of Platonism which was called Neoplatonism. Soon enough, intellectual life was a picnic for those who prefer a deeply confused view of being so they can select from a cafeteria of inconsistent entrees. It was also a meal eaten in desperation by Christians trying to protect their faith in God the Creator in light of an incoherent understanding of Creation.
None of the Hellenistic systems of philosophical thought are adequate for grounding Christian belief in Creation nor for providing the best possible language for speaking of God. Still, the followers of Plato and Aristotle and the other earlier Greeks hold to rational thought which allows at least the possibility of seeing the primary Christian revelations in their blazing glory without obscuring those truths with inconsistent speculations. A careful reading of Being and Some Philosophers by Etienne Gilson would be well worth the time for anyone seriously concerned about these issues.
Somewhere, Etienne Gilson said he could imagine St. Thomas Aquinas throwing up his hands in frustration as he tried to make sense of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. And a great cry came forth, “What does all this have to do with Christianity?” In fact, Aquinas’ respect for the data of our senses and his strong tendency to use common sense to order that data would have rendered Neoplatonism repugnant to him, however much he felt forced to put angels and demons into his system of thought as decorative elements.
Plotinus (circa 250) and his followers had introduced great confusion into their concept of being and beings and that confusion was appealing to some Christian Fathers, some of whom should have known better. The sorts of confusion which allow wishful thinking and the avoidance of discipline and hard-work have remained popular. For the more abstract-minded out there, the first error of Plotinus was to derive the nature of being from first principles and not from what can be seen in what lay around him. Plato also was somewhat committed to this error but was also commited to the principle he gave to the astronomers/astrologers of his day: Save the phenomena. To give a flavor of Plato’s situation by way of an unfair characterization: He was committed to both wishful thinking and disciplined observation of physical reality. Plotinus wasn’t much worried about the real world or its phenomena.
The Neoplatonic errors in being led Plotinus to the belief that an impersonal and impassive God — having nothing to do with the God of Jesus Christ — couldn’t even know that this imperfect world existed. Mediators, such as angels and demons or a demiurge weren’t just an option. At least one god-like creature was necessary for any communication between God and His Creation. At least one such god-like creature was necessary for any other creature to exist.
Clearly this was a philosophy not conducive to Christianity and, so it was, that members of a contrary race — even St. Augustine of Hippo — chose to build their Christian theologies upon such unpromisingly swampland. To be sure, as intelligent readers have noticed (see Jacques Barzun’s discussion of Augustine’s thought in From Dawn to Decadence), Augustine moved from a paganistic and Neoplatonic philosophy in his youth towards a shockingly blunt physicalism in his later years and later works such as the later chapters of The City of God where he ponders the fate of our nail-clippings when we’re resurrected in the body and also jokes about those who can control their bodily functions so well as to make music with their farts.
But the early Augustine influenced later Christians greatly with his Neoplatonic errors, errors to which many are attracted in any case. Christian thought was soon turned away from efforts to understand the world created as an act of love by God and turned towards grotesque imagry of hierarchies of angels ascending to a God sitting majestically on a throne in Heaven. The Neoplatonic Christians did believe in the Biblical revelations and this business of the throne in Heaven was about the best they could do to see the God of Jesus Christ as the creator of a Neoplatonic world, but they’d signed a deal with the devil, so to speak, and we’re now paying what’s due.
In any case, though considered a major thinker, Plotinus and even his ‘sort-of’ follower St. Augustine in his earlier years, seemed to share the belief of occultists and magicians that mediating beings (angels and demons) somehow create breaks in logical laws and cause-and-effect relationships. This gives a philosopher or theologian or ordinary believer an immense amount of freedom to exercise his imagination in an undisciplined manner. This unleashing of human thought about being from the empirical world has continued to be a blessing for those who are befuddled enough to draw part of their worldview from modern science and part from ancient superstitions about gods, our angels and demons, who were seen as movers of planets and agents of disease. Now their major task is to take the responsibility for our failure to pass on Christian beliefs or even civilized moral behavior to our children. They also serve well to insulate us from responsibility for our nation’s criminal wars or for injustices in general.
It’s not that creatures such as angels and demons are inherently impossible. It is true that they don’t make sense to us as creatures of this universe unless they make sense in terms of what we know and believe about this universe, this phase of God’s Creation. And no one has made sense of them in such a way. If anyone wishes to tell us how angels fit into a universe in which creaturely substance is so well-described by Einstein and Heisenberg, they’re free to do so. And Einstein’s universe isn’t porous to creatures from other realms. This points to another reason to have a clear Christian philosophy: God Himself seems impossible in this universe if He’s seen as having substantial being or at least He’d be excluded from this universe. I’ll talk about this in later entries.
Let me put it bluntly:
We Christians have, quite literally, no coherent and rational way to talk about our most important beliefs.
We sound like lunatics both when we speak of our belief in a resurrection of the body and when we babble on about angels and Satan and even when we speak of God the Creator of this universe. Why do we sound like lunatics? Because 99% of our lives are spent talking the talk and walking the walk of a modern empirical viewpoint in which known creatures, including human beings, communicate by means of energy transfers mediated by particles. I happen to believe that modern empirical knowledge is the best way to understand this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, but the immediate problem isn’t even ultimate truths so much as incoherence, sheer irrationality.
Let me put the issue into slogans:
- You can’t have both Satan and MRI’s.
- You can’t have both St. Michael and the National Hurricane Center.
- You can’t have the entire complex of angels and demons and also a rational understanding of modern history.
- You can’t have the God of Jesus Christ and also Neoplatonic wish-thinking.
There are certainly signs that many are beginning to see that modern-day Christians preach an irrational way of thought. As I noted above, we’re paying the price for the deal our ancestors made with the devil, a deal we’re struggling desperately to maintain. I see signs that many believers are unsettled and uncertain in their beliefs because they can see the validity of the criticisms of Christianity as it is preached and taught and written about in the modern world. Sure, the ordinary citizen doesn’t understand these matters explicitly but that’s never mattered. It’s certainly doubtful that many believers or scholars or artists understood the Augustinian undperpinnings of their culture in the Middle Ages but post-Roman European culture was founded upon Augustinian foundations.
The ordinary believer knows something is wrong but he can’t say what other than to wonder aloud why his children and grandchildren aren’t sitting next to him in the pew. What’s far more disturbing for now is that very few priests and ministers show any explicit awareness of what’s gone wrong. Many of those clergymen are floundering about, aware that something has gone wrong but they can only vaguely blame Satan or a corrupt media for their sins of omission and our sins as well. Those well-intentioned men do much and accomplish many things but fail utterly at the only important thing: nurturing the faith of the children and bringing to Christ those who left Christianity or were never baptized. Look out into the emptying pews. That’s one of the signs that Christian faithful, clergymen and laymen alike, can’t convince their children or friends that the God of Jesus Christ is the Creator of Einstein’s universe.
Undoubtedly, most priests and ministers have a strong respect for modern empirical knowledge and at least some doubts about some speculations in the Christian traditions, but they go on babbling about Adam and Eve and original sin as if it were a revealed truth. Each time they do that, some bright 13 year-old who visits the National Geographic website each week will sneer to himself, “Right, two apes ate an apple and put me on the road to Hell and the only way I can save myself is to listen to this guy talk about a wise and loving God.” That’s a more explicit rejection than will usually occur. The more typical cases will be like my own situation. After being given membership in the Congregationalist church in which I was raised, I would have stopped going to church because there really didn’t seem much point to it. I continued as a companion to my grandmother out of respect for her but stopped attending church for 15 years after I left for college.
Human beings have never gone to church or synagogue or temple just to sing to some Ethereal Fluff in the sky. They go when they have a reason to fear or love a God or gods who play a role in their world. In other words, they want a God or gods which give evidence of being real, a God or gods which are more than decorations for their inner-lives. Human beings want divinity with some oomph to it.
I hate having to write in such negative terms because the real point is that God is the Creator of the world in which we live, a world open to empirical investigation. If it’s a world bereft of the foo-foo stuff of paganism or sloppy wish-thought philosophy? Doesn’t matter. In fact, it seems a better world for being what it is instead of being Neoplatonic.
The real work, and the fun work, is the hard study and thought which will allow Christian thinkers to make sense of the world on its own terms. If talented, hard-working young thinkers can be turned to this work, then Christians might even start playing a role in forming the cultures in which we live. We might be able to walk out of the intellectual ghettos in which far too many devout Christians live. We might be able to speak in terms that make sense given what we now know about this universe, this phase of God’s Creation. We might even give our children and our neighbors reason to wonder if the God of Jesus Christ might be the Creator of all those stars and gas clouds, rattlesnakes and rabbits.