Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@
Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Selected Essays
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Selected Essays
Volume I
Studies in Patristics
A N D R EW L O U T H
Edited by
L EW I S AY R E S A N D J O H N B E H R
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932504
ISBN 978–0–19–288281–3
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882813.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
For my offspring
Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
xi
1
1. The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
7
2. The Use of the Term ἴδιος in Alexandrian Theology from
Alexander to Cyril
21
3. Ignatios or Eusebios: Two Models of Patristic Ecclesiology
26
4. On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity: St Basil the Great
between the Desert and the City
39
5. St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor:
The Shaping of Tradition
52
6. St Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology
63
7. ‘From Beginning to Beginning’: Continuous Spiritual Progress
in Gregory of Nyssa
76
8. St Makrina: The Fourth Cappadocian?
83
9. Evagrios: The ‘Noetic’ Language of Prayer
97
10. Evagrios on Anger
108
11. Augustine on Language
115
12. St Augustine’s Interpretation of the Transfiguration of Christ
123
13. Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers
130
14. Heart in Pilgrimage: St Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms
145
15. Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism in Denys the
Areopagite
155
16. ‘Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things’:
Dionysios the Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible
162
17. The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor
171
18. The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World: Maximus
to Palamas
182
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
x
Contents
19. Dionysios the Areopagite: The Unknown God and the Liturgy
197
20. St Maximus the Confessor between East and West
211
21. From the Doctrine of Christ to Person of Christ: St Maximos
the Confessor on the Transfiguration of Christ
225
22. Eucharist and Church According to St Maximos the Confessor
237
23. The Views of St Maximos the Confessor on the Institutional Church
250
24. Virtue Ethics: St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas Compared
257
25. St Maximos’ Doctrine of the Logoi of Creation
271
26. Mystagogy in Saint Maximus
279
27. The Lord’s Prayer as Mystagogy from Origen to Maximos
292
28. St Maximos’ Distinction between λόγος and τρόπος and the
Ontology of the Person
305
29. Pronoia in the Life and Thought of St Maximos the Confessor
312
30. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, in St Maximos the Confessor
321
31. The Doctrine of the Image of God in St Maximos the Confessor
329
32. The Holy Spirit in the Theology of St John Damascene
343
33. John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between
Humanity and God
350
34. The Doctrine of the Eucharist in the Iconoclast Controversy
359
35. Photios as a Theologian
366
36. Knowing the Unknowable God: Hesychasm and the Kabbalah
382
37. Aquinas and Orthodoxy
396
Details of Original Publication
Index
409
413
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Abbreviations
Abbreviations used in the essays collected here have been retained from their original
publication style; where they are not explained (for instance, some journal or series titles),
they may be found in The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical and
Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander et al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999).
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Introduction
I
Looking at the essays and lectures collected in these volumes, I am struck by the
fact that I seem to have been a late developer: in each volume there are only three
essays published before 1990, by which time I was in my late 40s—­one well before,
in 1978, ‘The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers’, the rest
in the 1980s. So I suppose I was, indeed, a late developer and wonder why.
Perhaps not as late as this might suggest, for my first two books came in rapid
succession after 1980: Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (1981), and
Discerning the Mystery (1983). That first book, amazingly well reviewed, rather
led to my being classified (still) as someone whose principal interest is in ‘mysticism’ (in some ways disowned, or contextualized, in the second edition of 2006
with its afterword). On reflection, it seems to me that my interest in the ‘mystical
tradition’ had other roots, for I was not so much interested in ‘mysticism’ as in a
form of religion independent of institutions or dogmas (what has come to be
called ‘spirituality’), nor in mysticism as, in a tradition revived by William James
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, concerned about ‘peak experiences’,
rather my interest was to do with the way in which theology is rooted in prayer,
both personal and liturgical.
Discerning the Mystery adumbrated, as I see it now, an approach to theology for
which the practice of prayer, and what such practice presupposed, was
indispensable—­indispensable, not in the sense that theology demanded prayer,
and therefore faith, so that the answers had smuggled themselves in before being
asked, but indispensable in that prayer expresses an openness to the transcendent, and therefore calls in question any idea that the nature of things could be
encompassed by human conceptuality, ruling out the notion of a closed universe.
There has remained lodged in my memory—­largely unconscious, though surfacing from time to time—­some lines of thought discussed by Thomas Vargish in
his book, Newman: The Contemplation of Mind (1970). Discussing Newman’s
‘illative sense’, Vargish spoke of it as ‘that “subtle and elastic logic of thought” . . . elastic and delicate enough to take account of the variousness of reality, the uniqueness of each thing experienced’ (p. 68), and a sense of faith, not so much as
delivering ‘truths’, as requiring freedom, in which theology ‘makes progress by
being “alive to its own fundamental uncertainties” ’ (p. 87, quoting William
Froude). It was a freedom I had sensed in the Fathers’ use of Scripture, as
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
2
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
discussed in the earliest essay included in these books—­a freedom from both the
prescriptive nature of Catholic theology and the anxiety of Protestants for a single
determinative meaning to be found in Scripture.
I suppose I was beginning to move towards the Orthodoxy of the Eastern
Church (as a friend of mine, the late Geoffrey Wainwright, perceptively pointed
out to me after reading Discerning the Mystery). Another—­quite different—­aspect
of these early books is contained in the subtitle of the first of them: ‘From Plato to
Denys’. For there had never been any question for me but that that book would
begin with Plato—­an interpretation of Plato much indebted to A.-J. Festugière’s
seminal work, Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon (3rd edition, 1967).
Plato has remained important to me—­probably returned to more often than to
any Christian writer—­possibly because of my early enthusiasm for mathematics
(and G. H. Hardy’s conviction that pure mathematics is concerned with realities,
not ideas humanly constructed).
It might seem that, in finding my intellectual feet, as it were, reception into the
Orthodox Church, by (then) Bishop Kallistos Ware, soon followed. That was at
the end of 1989, the year in which my third book, Denys the Areopagite, was published—­in response to a request from Brian Davies, OP, for his series, Outstanding
Christian Thinkers. I had responded to Brian Davies’ suggestion with alacrity,
because a year or two before that I had read St John Damascene’s On the Orthodox
Faith, which had fascinated me, in a largely uninformed way, and it already
seemed to me that two profound influences on the Damascene were Dionysios
the Areopagite and St Maximos the Confessor. Furthermore, my mind was then
full of Dionysios, anyway, for I had spent a fallow year in Bodley, reading everything I could find about that mysterious thinker. The sense that, ultimately, I was
going to write something on the Damascene led me, a few years later, to agree to
the request of Carol Harrison, the editor of the Early Christian Fathers, to prod­
uce a volume for the series: I chose Maximos the Confessor. Those three books
were conceived in sequence—­but not as a trilogy, for they are very different, the
first on Dionysios—­Denys, as I called him then—­simply an introduction, the second on Maximos an even shorter introduction accompanied by translations of a
brief selection of his works, mostly drawn from his theological, as opposed to his
spiritual, works (an opposition unsatisfactory especially in the case of Maximos),
and the third a lengthy study of the surviving works of a monk, writing, most
likely, in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during the construction of the edifices there celebrating the triumph of Islam.
So I found myself exploring, in a way I had probably not anticipated, what still
seem to me the three writers who, together by inheriting and interpreting the
Greek patristic tradition, fashioned the lineaments of Byzantine Orthodoxy (and,
indeed, its best, and most enduring elements). Plato, and especially the developments of Platonism in late antiquity, remained a preoccupation of mine, and
I became more deeply convinced of the coinherence of Platonism and Christianity.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Introduction
3
The books speak for themselves, and many of the articles in this collection fill out
aspects of this Byzantine synthesis of theology and philosophy, prayer and asceticism, and liturgy and song.
II
Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual development,
though this is hampered by the oddities (as it certainly must now seem) of my
formation as a theologian. I never studied for a PhD (or DPhil), so have no
Doktorvater. I did, however, while studying for the Anglican priesthood in
Edinburgh, enrol for the MTh at the Faculty of Divinity in the university there
under Professor Tom (T. F.) Torrance; the subject of my dissertation for that
degree was the doctrine of the knowability of God in Karl Barth’s theology, the
most important sections of which were on the place of natural theology in his
Church Dogmatics and doctrine of analogy. The chief influence on me during
undergraduate years in Cambridge (plus one, preparing for Part III) was without
doubt Donald MacKinnon, the Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity, under whose
guidance I took two courses in the section on Philosophy of Religion of Part III of
the Theological Tripos. Despite this, I could never make much of the style of phil­
oso­
phy of religion that I mostly encountered in Cambridge (I don’t think
MacKinnon made much sense of it either) and rather made my own way by careful textual study of the texts—­Descartes to Kant—­that we were expected to read;
but it was from MacKinnon’s extraordinary Socratic style of engaging with his
students that I learnt to think (or rather—­though that is perhaps the same thing—­
discovered that I could think). Another don at Cambridge, with whom I had a
few supervisions in patristics, was Maurice Wiles, from whom I learnt a great deal
even though largely by way of disagreeing with him—­a disagreement that con­
tinued when we were both in Oxford from 1970: him as Regius Professor of
Divinity, and me as a lecturer in theology in the University and Fellow and
Chaplain of Worcester College. That appointment, though probably due to my
philosophical training with MacKinnon (a new joint degree in Philosophy and
Theology had just been introduced), did not specify what area of theology I was
to pursue, so I decided to make myself a patristics scholar, a decision I have never
regretted. Also, while in Oxford, I came to know Henry Chadwick, who moved
from the Regius Chair of Divinity to being Dean of Christ Church in 1970, whom
I held in awe, though I never got to know him very well (though well enough in
the eyes of others to be asked to write his obituary for the Independent). I also
came to know, in the end very well, academically as a colleague rather than as a
student, and more importantly as my spiritual father, the recently departed
Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), the Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies
during my time in Oxford (and before and after): my debt to him is incalculable.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
4
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
There are many others to whom I am indebted, not least the two editors of
this volume.
Others who affected my intellectual formation I mainly (or entirely) knew
through their books; in the later 1970s (as I remember it), I often devoted the
long vacation to reading some massive work that I wanted to come to terms with.
One year it was Hans-­Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, which I read in
conjunction with the English translation as a crutch for my (then) feeble German.
Another year it was A.-J. Festugière’s monumental four-­
volume work, La
Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, the title of which tells you more about its origins
(in the notes he made in the course of translating and annotating, with A. D. Nock,
the Budé edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, published 1945–54), than its contents (a series of soundings in the religious and philosophical thought of late
antiquity). Another year it was Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse Médiévale (4 vols,
1959–64), another work that starts from a particular problem and casts light
much more widely. Hans Urs von Balthasar, to whose writings I was introduced
by Donald MacKinnon, came later, but I read with excitement Herrlichkeit (for
which I translated some parts of sections II and III, as part of team led by John
Riches), and then Theodramatik, and eventually much of Theologik.
My encounter with Orthodox thinkers came later, and they seemed to fill out
and deepen insights that I had originally discovered in Western writers, such as
those already mentioned. It was mostly through reading their works, though
I came to know personally several members of the Orthodox Church, of course,
Fr Kallistos (as he then was), Nicolas Zernov, living in retirement in Oxford when
I arrived in 1970, and later Father (now St) Sophrony of Essex. One Orthodox
thinker whom I read early on was the French convert, Olivier Clément, the dis­
ciple of Vladimir Lossky, who has also been a constant presence. Bulgakov
became increasingly important to me (I encountered him first in the French
translations by Constantin Andronikof), later Florensky (for whom I am indebted
to Boris Jakim’s translations, though I have struggled myself with his Russian, as
well as the Russian of others). I have learnt a great deal about Florensky from
Avril Pyman, the author of an acclaimed biography, published in 2010, already by
then a great friend. She is an expert on the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature and
helped me to see Florensky, and indeed others, such as Vladimir Solov´ev, in the
broader cultural context of the Silver Age.
In a not dissimilar way, my encounter with modern Greek theology, not least
Christos Yannaras, was consequent on a fairly wide reading in Greek literature—­
especially the amazing poets of the twentieth century, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis,
Elytis—­through whom I came to read Philip Sherrard, who translated and interpreted them (but whom, alas, I never met), before I came across his theological
writings. The great man of letters, Zisimos Lorentzatos, I also encountered
through my reading in Greek literature and had some sense of his theological
insights before ever engaging with Yannaras, with whose writings I have tried to
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Introduction
5
keep up over the years (in recent years much aided by Norman Russell’s excellent
translations). Through Lorentzatos I discovered Alexandros Papadiamandis,
which opened up for me layers and layers of the Greek experience of Orthodoxy
(a few of whose short stories I was later encouraged to translate). Something of
this engagement with Orthodoxy—­mostly the fruit of my becoming Orthodox,
which seemed to me a fulfilment of my intellectual and spiritual development,
not a rejection of the West (although such anti-­Westernism has been a Leitmotiv
of too much Orthodox theology since the beginning of the second Christian millennium)—is to be found in two later works of mine: Introducing Eastern
Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to
the Present (2015), which were the result of four years spent as Visiting Professor
at the Amsterdam Centre of Eastern Orthodox Theology in the Vrije Universiteit,
now the St Irenaeus Institute of Orthodox Theology at the University of Radboud,
Nijmegen.
Another stage of my academic career that I have somewhat passed over is my
ten years at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1985 to 1995. During
this period Goldsmiths went through a major change from being an Institute with
Recognized Teachers to becoming a School of the University of London. From
being head of a small department of Religious Studies I eventually become head—­
for five years—­of a new department of Historical and Cultural Studies, made up
of the old departments of History, Art History, and Religious Studies, in which I
taught early medieval and Byzantine history, often along with my colleague, Paul
Fouracre, a fine Merovingian and Carolingian historian. I learnt, mostly from
him, a lot about the ways of the historian’s mind—­very different were the ways of
the theologian’s mind—­which affected my own way of thinking about history
(and indeed theology). Some of the fruits of that are to be found in my volume,
Greek East and Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071 (2007), in the series, The
Church in History, originally conceived and planned by John Meyendorff.
Have I learnt anything over these years? I hope so, though I am not at all sure
what. My writings are mostly studies of others; my aim has been to elucidate their
thought and their concerns. It looks like, I daresay, theology as a branch of intellectual history, but one thing I have learnt is that ideas do not—­as so many essays
in intellectual history seem to imagine—­float in some kind of noetic ether; ideas
are thought by people, who live at a particular time and in a particular place.
Their ideas are part of the way in which they have sought to make sense of the
world in which they lived, and theological ideas are no exception: they, too, are
the products of human minds seeking to make sense of the place of the Gospel
and the Church in a world created by God and governed by his providence, in
however mysterious a way. It was with deliberation (inspired by another who
greatly influenced me, Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun who spent her final years
near Whitby in Yorkshire) that I called my book on modern Orthodox theology,
Modern Orthodox Thinkers.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
6
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
I cannot end this Introduction without thanking the editors, my friends and
colleagues, Lewis Ayres and John Behr, for undertaking to bring this collection of
essays of mine to publication. Although the work of publication is theirs, what is
to be found in these volumes is, for better or worse, mine, and I would like to
dedicate the volumes to my offspring: Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac.
Andrew Louth
Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford, 2022
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
The Necessity of Platonism for
Christian Theology
It is a great privilege to be asked to give the Crouse Memorial Lecture for 2021, a
privilege exceptionally great as I realize that it was the tenth anniversary of
Fr Robert’s death only a couple of days ago; I hope that I shall be able to do him just­
ice. But that is a tall order: he was a fine and meticulous scholar, given in his own
works to an ascetic brevity. My impression of him (I hardly knew Fr Crouse per­
sonally; I met him on a few occasions, the last time, I think, after giving a paper to
a seminar organized by Professor Wayne Hankey in King’s College, Halifax) is
that a great deal of his achievement as a scholar and teacher was as a mentor,
encouraging and directing those who were his students. There is something
intangible about such an achievement, but its intangibility in no way diminishes
its depth and importance. He was also, in a unique way, a representative of a trad­
ition of refined spirituality that drew on a deep knowledge of the Western Latin
tradition—­Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Honorius Augustodunensis, Aquinas,
but also, perhaps especially, Dante. Fr Crouse belonged to a profoundly Catholic
Anglican tradition, which for all its distinctiveness was welcome in a wider
Catholic world—­towards the end of his life he was, on several occasions, Visiting
Professor of Patrology at the Augustinianum in Rome. I have the feeling that I am
digging myself into a hole: for I am an ex-­Anglican priest, now an Orthodox arch­
priest, who has concentrated a lifetime’s scholarship mainly on the Greek patristic
tradition. Nevertheless, I have been asked to give this lecture in Fr Crouse’s
­honour, and am delighted to do so, as I held him, and hold him, in the very high­
est regard.
There is one area of scholarship in which our interests overlap, though Fr
Crouse is a brightly shining star in this field, something to which I cannot myself
aspire, that is Neoplatonism, understood not just as a scholarly specialism, but as
a powerful intellectual presence in traditional Christian theology. It therefore
seemed to me appropriate to take as my title for this lecture: ‘The Necessity of
Platonism for Christian Theology’. I think Fr Crouse would have warmed to such
a subject, though I am sure that he would have approached it from a very different
perspective than mine, and he now beholds the truth of these matters, without
any veil.
Choosing a topic is one thing; writing a lecture about it another (and it has to be a
written lecture, when in other contexts I might have talked from notes, because I am
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
8
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
not with you in the chapel of King’s College, Halifax, but looking at a screen,
which prescinds from the personal dimension of addressing people present in
front of me). As I thought about it, it dawned on me that the format I was consid­
ering was very traditional indeed: for what you are going to hear is something
very much after the model of the medieval question or quaestio. That is: I shall
start by considering objections to my proposition that Platonism is in some sense
necessary for Christian theology; these objections will form the first part of the
lecture. Then moving to the Sed Contra, I shall develop my thesis about the neces­
sity of Platonism for Christian theology. However, in this first part, I shall not
simply register the objections, as, for example, St Thomas Aquinas did in what
often seems to be a kind of ‘intellectual striptease’, leaving him, as it were, naked
in the face of the powerful objections he has raised to his thesis: no, I shall dispose
of them, as I raise them, and indeed use them as an introduction to what I want to
say, by making clear what it is that I do not want to say.
So, first of all, I do not mean that you have to be a Platonist in order to be a
Christian, though I do think that you have to be open to some Platonist intuitions
in order to think as a Christian. But Christianity is not an intellectual pursuit as
such; it is a way of life, and a way of life characterized fundamentally by love, a
love inspired by God’s love for us manifest on the Cross of Christ. To be a
Christian is to respond to Christ’s love on the Cross and enter more deeply into
that love in our lives. We do not need to think about it in an intellectual way;
indeed, one might say that one only needs to think about it in order to clear away
half-­baked and misleading ways of thinking about what Christ and the Cross
mean. The heart of the matter of being Christian is to take up our Cross and fol­
low Christ: some—­many? most?—won’t need to think about this, they will just
get on with it.
But when we do start to think? Some could readily take my title as indicating
that I am going to advance and defend some form of Christian Platonism. I don’t
want to do that at all, and I think it would be helpful to explain why. Christian
Platonism is often thought of as a way of using Platonism as a kind of intellectual
launchpad for Christian theology. Used in this sense, it might be contrasted with,
say, Christian Aristotelianism, or to move closer to the present (though Plato and
Aristotle are always with us), Christian existentialism. To oppose, or contrast,
Plato and Aristotle has been a frequent theme in the intellectual history of the
West; Renaissance ‘Platonism’ saw itself in opposition to the ‘Aristotelianism’ of
Scholasticism; the growing influence of the newly discovered Aristotle in the thir­
teenth century was sometimes opposed in the name of Platonism (though more
commonly in the name of theology); however, I do not need here in King’s
College, if only virtually, to remind you that the greatest of the Schoolmen
claimed for Aristotle, namely St Thomas Aquinas, never lost his profound
Platonic roots. Coleridge, as is well known, saw a fundamental contrast between
Platonists and Aristotelians: in his Table Talk, he put it thus:
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
9
Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that
any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born
Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of men,
beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.1
But what the contrast entailed has varied from age to age: we can trace it back into
late antiquity, though it keeps on changing its valency, but making the contrast
has the effect of promoting the notion of ‘Christian Platonism’. There is no doubt
that among the Fathers Plato could be held in high regard: St Athanasios, in his
De Incarnatione, refers to Plato as ὁ μέγας παρ᾽ Ἕλλησι (‘great among the Greeks’:
inc. 2. 3), though in the context of attributing to him the false doctrine of creation
from pre-­existent matter; and in Anastasios of Sinai’s Questions and Responses, we
find this story:
There is handed down an ancient tradition, that a certain learned man used
often to curse Plato the philosopher. Plato appeared to him in his sleep and said
to him, ‘Man, stop cursing me, for you only harm yourself. For that I have been a
sinful man, I do not deny; but when Christ came down into Hades, truly no one
believed in him before me.’2
Plato, then, had a certain respect among the Fathers, at least in late antiquity. By
the end of the first Christian millennium regard for Plato was more conflicted;
among the anathemas added to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy after the condemna­
tion of John Italos in 1082, anathema was pronounced ‘on those who pursue
Hellenic learning [which certainly included Plato] and are formed by it not sim­
ply as an educational discipline, but follow their empty opinions, and believe
them to be true . . .’.3 Aristotle himself had less appeal to the Fathers. In a famous
phrase, often cited by others, St Gregory the Theologian recommended that
Christians should present their theology ἁλιευτικῶς, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἀριστοτελικῶς—‘in
the manner of the fishermen/apostles, not in the manner of Aristotle’: a quip that
was capped by St John Damascene when writing against John Philoponos he
commented that Philoponos’ problems, both Trinitarian and Christological,
would not have arisen had he not introduced ‘St Aristotle’ as the ‘thirteenth
apostle’.4 In both these cases, it seems that ‘Aristotle’ meant his logical works,
1 See S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk and Omniana (Oxford University Press, 1917), 118 (entry for 2nd
July 1830). It is contrast to which Coleridge returned: see, e.g., one of his marginalia in his copy of
Hooker, to be found in S. T. Coleridge, A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson (Princeton
University Press, 2003), 186–7. See, also, D. Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English
Romantic Thought (John Murray, 1974).
2 Anastasius of Sinai, Quaestiones 61. 2; CCSG 59, ed. M. Richard and J. A. Munitiz (2006), 111–12.
3 Anathema 7 against Italos, in J. Gouillard, ‘Le Synodikon d’Orthodoxie. Édition et commentaire’,
Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967), 1–270, at 59.
4 John Damascene, Contra Jacobitas 10. 13 (ed. B. Kotter, PTS 22 [1981], 113).
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
10
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
which had, in fact, already been incorporated into a fundamentally Platonic
context.5
But ‘Christian Platonism’? That seems to me a category mistake. In late (and
classical) antiquity Platonists were those thinkers who appealed to the authority
of Plato and his writings; Aristotelians to the Aristotelian corpus. In contrast to
them, Christians appealed to the Christian Scriptures, the Old and the New
Testaments. The idea of Christian Platonism, which is very widespread, sees these
positions—­Christianity, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism—­as collections of
doctrines. Recent scholarship has retrieved a much more adequate understanding
of what was meant by philosophy in late antiquity by insisting that such philoso­
phies were not just a matter of doctrines (though they involved doctrines, and the
philosophers argued over them amongst themselves), but are primarily to be
seen, to use part of the title of a book containing English translations of articles by
the most prominent scholar espousing this view, namely Pierre Hadot, ‘as a way
of life’.6 In this sense, certainly, Christianity could be regarded—­and indeed some­
times presented itself as—­a philosophical school, but to speak of ‘Christian
Platonism’ muddies the waters. This has been evident especially since Mark
Edwards published his book with the provocative title, Origen against Plato, in
which Origen is presented, not as a ‘Christian Platonist’, but as an explicit critic of
Plato.7 The different philosophical schools in late antiquity could, and did, over­
lap in the doctrines they espoused, but what distinguished them was also quite
clear: it was where they found their authority for the doctrines they maintained—­
the dialogues of Plato? the writings of Aristotle? the Christian Scriptures? In late
antiquity, in reaction against the Christian (and Jewish) appeal to their ancient
Scriptures, we find philosophical schools of a generally ‘Platonic’ colour appeal­
ing to the authority of supposed ancient oracles, such as the Chaldaean Oracles or
the treatises ascribed to Thrice-­Greatest Hermes, Hermes Trismegistos—­oracles
that were claimed to be the ultimate source of the doctrines of Plato, who was
believed in late antiquity to have been a disciple of Hermes Trismegistos.8 Plato’s
envisaging Socrates as having learnt the true doctrine of love from Diotima,
priestess of Mantinea, in the Symposium had hardly discouraged the growth of
such a notion.
The notion of ‘Christian Platonism’ confuses the issue, suggesting that
Christianity is, as it were, adjectival to Platonism, whereas the reverse was the
case for all of those claimed as ‘Christian Platonists’: they supported their
5 On the use of Aristotle in Christian theology up to Boethius and John Philoponos, prescinding
from the phenomenon of textbooks of logic that drew on Aristotle and his interpreters in the seventh
and eighth centuries, see now Mark Edwards, Aristotle and Early Christian Thought (Routledge, 2019).
6 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. A. I. Davidson (Blackwell, 1995).
7 See M. J. Edwards, Origen against Plato (Ashgate, 2002).
8 For the notion of Egypt as the source of wisdom in late antiquity, see Garth Fowden, The Egyptian
Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
11
doctrines by appeal to the Scriptures, so at best they could be regarded as ‘Platonic
Christians’. The only thinker of late antiquity that I can think of who might rea­
sonably be regarded as a ‘Christian Platonist’ was Synesios of Cyrene, a Platonist/
Neoplatonist who became a Christian, indeed a Christian bishop, but made it
clear in a letter to his brother that truth was something that he had learned from
Plato, while what he was to preach as a Christian bishop were no more to him
than popular ‘myths’.9 But Synesios is pretty well a unique case: an attractive one,
and not without some influence (his hymns, much in the same vein as the
Neoplatonic Proklos’ hymns, are preserved in some monastic liturgical MSS, and
so must have been used liturgically, unlike the verse of his younger contemporary,
St Gregory the Theologian!).10
So, I am not making a case for Christian Platonism. What might seem a more
fruitful line could be to note the overlap in doctrines between Christian theology
and Platonism. There is genuine and important overlap in the doctrines Platonists
and Christians embraced: both believed in the existence of the divine (God or
gods); in divine providence or πρόνοια, that is, that the gods care for the universe;
and that humans are responsible for their deeds, and will be rewarded, or pun­
ished, in an afterlife. In other words, both Platonist and Christian maintained a
belief in a moral universe, which required that divine providence held sway but
did not override human freewill (though to talk of ‘freewill’ is to use later
Christian terminology; earlier, philosophers—­both pagan and Christian—­spoke
rather of human αὐτεξουσία, responsibility). Other philosophical schools had dif­
ferent doctrines, believing that the cosmos is either the result of chance (as
Aristotelians were held to believe, at least in the sublunary realms; in the celestial
realm the movement of the stars and planets was predictable) or governed by an
ineluctable fate (as the Stoics were held to maintain). Christian thinkers drew on
an established body of arguments that had been developed by earlier thinkers,
mostly Platonists. But there were Platonic doctrines that Christians rejected: for
example, Platonists believed that the soul was immortal, that is, it had existed
from eternity and would continue to exist to eternity; for Christians the soul had
only an immortal future. Christians believed in the resurrection of the body, a
doctrine incomprehensible to most non-­Christian philosophers, as the Apostle
Paul had discovered at Athens (see Acts 17). Nevertheless, Christians responded
warmly to the idea that, in virtue of possessing a soul, there was a certain affinity
between the human and the divine, something expressed in a distinctively
Christian way by their doctrine of the human created in the image of God—­an
idea expressed beautifully in the troparion or apolytikion for a saint not called to
martyrdom:
9 Synesios of Cyrene, Ep. 105.
10 See C. Lacombrade in his edition of Synesios’ hymns: Synésios de Cyrène, tome 1: Hymnes, ed.
and tr. C. Lacombrade (‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1978), 30.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
12
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
In you was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for you
took up the Cross and followed Christ, and by your deeds you have taught us to
despise the flesh, for it passes away, but to care for the soul, which is a thing
immortal. And therefore your spirit rejoices with the Angels.
For it is important to grasp that even when Platonists and Christians agreed on
one doctrine or another, they did so for different reasons: Christians because it
was entailed by the Scriptures; Platonists because it was part of the body of doc­
trines upheld by Socrates and his disciple, Plato. In some ways, Platonists contem­
porary with Christians in the first Christian centuries shared something with
these Christians that they could hardly be said to share with the founders of their
school, Socrates and Plato: and that was a heightened religious sense. As R. E. Witt
memorably put it many years ago, late antiquity ‘was attracted not so much by
Plato the ethical teacher or political reformer, as by Plato the hierophant, Plato
who (according to an old legend) had been conceived of Apollo and born of the
virgin Perictione’.11 Nevertheless, this overlap or assimilation of Platonism and
Christian theology in the patristic period is not what I have in mind in speaking
of the necessity of Platonism for Christian theology.
Now, I suppose, I begin my Sed Contra. I want to do this by thinking, in a very
sketchy way, about what it is that is distinctive about the way philosophical ideas
are approached in Plato’s dialogues. I am aware that I am venturing into a thicket
of controversy, with which I am only imperfectly acquainted, but we cannot talk
about Platonism without talking about Plato and his dialogues! Nevertheless, in
embarking on this, I am not making any claims to have done much more than try
to make some sense of what is going on in the dialogues, drawing on any help that
seemed to be at hand. There are, it seems to me, two areas of thought—­apparently
quite distinct from each other—­where the ‘Socratic method’ is strikingly effective:
mathematics and ethics (perhaps it is because my earliest training was as a math­
ematician that this has always struck me, and anyway, there was said to be
inscribed over the entrance to the Academy: Ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω). In
both cases, Socrates seems to move from the realm of empirical reality to some
kind of ideal world. In the case of geometry—­let us confine ourselves to this case,
as indeed Socrates seems to do—­instead of thinking of points, lines, and shapes,
as we actually see them—­imperfect, with points occupying an irregular space,
lines neither exactly straight nor curved without irregularity, and triangles and
circles similarly imperfect, however ‘good’ they are, we are encouraged to think,
as Euclid does, of perfect shapes that conform perfectly to how they are defined.
And why? Because this perfection, though never manifest as such, is easier to
think with. If we had to take account of all the imperfections in empirical reality,
11 R. E. Witt, Albinus and the History of Middle Platonism (Hakkert, 1971; originally publish by
Cambridge University Press in 1937), 123.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
13
we would simply make everything far too complicated to understand. We under­
stand the relationships between points, lines, and shapes as they are ideally, and
recognize that in reality all we can expect to encounter are approximations to
these ideal realities. Furthermore, we have little hesitation about identifying the
real with the ideal, the actual with the imperfect. What Socrates is much more
concerned with, however, are forms of human excellence, ἀρεταί, ‘virtues’ we usu­
ally call them, but the Greek word has a much stronger connotation of excellence,
even though Socrates is generally concerned with moral forms of excellence:
goodness, justice, truth, and the like. In the ‘Socratic’ dialogues (often regarded as
early), Socrates quizzes his interlocutors about what these virtues or excellences
are: definitions are offered, and then tested against examples of such virtuous/
excellent behaviour, and often found wanting. several of these dialogues seem to
reach no conclusion at all. That is, however, misleading in one fundamental way,
for it is taken for granted that we can recognize what is good or just or honest,
even if we cannot formulate a definition. In other words, we know the ideal form
of the excellence in question, even as we also know that we have never encoun­
tered the perfect form of the excellence, and maybe never could. Both mathemat­
ics and ethics reveal a similar state of affairs: knowledge of something ideal that is
never encountered in actuality—­an ideal that is recognized as the reality, of geo­
metrical form or moral excellence, that we know, even if we cannot perfectly for­
mulate it.
I think all this might be clearer if I cite someone else’s account of it, that some­
one else being, perhaps to your surprise, the nineteenth-­century thinker, Walter
Pater, whose lectures on Plato and Platonism were first published in 1893. Pater
begins his exposition of what he called Plato’s theory of ideas (though he is at
pains to insist that Plato himself does not erect it into a ‘theory’—something that
Christopher Rowe also affirms, when he says that
It is Plato’s interpreters who have turned “forms” (“ideas”), eidē or ideai, into a
technical term. Plato has no technical terms, unless in the shape of a collection
of terms—­and even then he is quite capable of talking about the things the terms
refer to without using the terms themselves. Variation is one of the signature
features of Platonic style . . . .12)
Pater’s exposition begins: ‘Platonism is not a formal theory or body of theories,
but a tendency, a group of tendencies—­a tendency to think or feel, and to speak,
about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato’s dialogues as reflect­
ing the peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion’.13 He goes on to
show how an appeal to the general does not detract from our attention to the
12 C. Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 275, n. 4.
13 W. Pater, Plato and Platonism (Macmillan, 1901), 150.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
14
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
particular, but rather enables us to notice what is particular about the particular,
for it is only as we compare one particular with another of the same kind, that we
notice the particularity of the particular. Later on in this chapter, Pater puts it
like this:
By its juxtaposition and co-­ordination with what is ever more and more not it,
by the contrast of its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper
and perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by
the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent world, concentrated
upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-­hand now, and as if in a sin­
gle moment of vision, all that, which only a long experience, moving patiently
from part to part, could exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of
nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one’s hand.14
What seems to me important about this procedure of understanding is that it
is not a procedure in which, as it were, by applying a certain method, we pass
from ignorance to knowledge, it is rather a process by which the knowledge we
already have—­knowledge both of the world around us and of forms of human
excellence—­is clarified and deepened. The process is one of clarification in the
light of experience, rather than appeal to some empirical observation that adds,
in some way, to our knowledge, understood as a collection of information. This
growing understanding is however a matter of ‘long experience’, an experience
that is itself central to a ‘way of life’.
Plato considers this advance in knowing through long experience explicitly in
his account of the soul’s pursuit of beauty through love in his Symposium. Here we
have an account of the ascent of the soul to the ultimate conceived of as the beau­
tiful, an ascent in which the soul’s love, or ἔρως, is gradually purified as the soul
passes from loving one beautiful body to seeing that what constitutes the beauty
of one is common to all, and then passing to love for the immaterial beauty of the
soul; then passing to what makes the soul beautiful, namely its capacity for under­
standing and knowledge; and then, finding itself drawn to the ‘great ocean of the
beautiful’, there is suddenly/immediately—­
ἐξαίφνης—­
revealed ‘a wondrous
vision, beautiful in its nature’ (Symp. 210DE). In the soul’s ascent to the beautiful
through love, the passage is, at each stage, a passage from what is acknowledged
as beautiful to the source of that beauty, so that in this passage there is both puri­
fication of the soul’s love and a purification, simplification, of the beauty that
draws it. The soul’s ἔρως remains a longing, but as it passes beyond the beloved
one to beauty in itself, possession for oneself is transcended, for all share in the
one beauty. The beauty sought is also transformed from bodily charm to
14 Pater, Plato, 158.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
15
something ‘that is eternal in being, neither coming into being nor perishing,
­neither waxing nor waning, not partly beautiful and partly ugly’, nor relative to the
beholder, but αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ μεθ᾽αὑτοῦ μονοειδὲς ἀεὶ ὄν—‘itself eternally being of
one form according to itself with itself ’ (Symp. 211B). This final revelation of
ul­tim­ate beauty is ἐξαίφνης, conveying a sense of something both immediate, that
is, unmediated, and also something not attained by an effort on our part, but sud­
denly, unexpectedly (though not without anticipation) revealed, as beauty dis­
closes itself. This seems to me to express a principle that is present in every stage,
or aspect, of knowing: what we come to know is, in one sense, already known
through a kind of affinity, and yet is not attained, but acknowledged.
I think this intuition, for such I think it is, could be expressed something like
this. Plato had an abiding sense of human existence opening out on to the tran­
scend­ent, to which he tried to give some shape in his theory of forms or ideas, but
this transcendent realm is itself transcended—­by the Form of the Good or the
Beautiful, ‘beyond being’: ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. This means that any meaning we
find in the world in which we live is, in some sense, received from (even given by)
something (not yet someone, for Plato) beyond understanding. This transcendent
reality, bestowing meaning, is glimpsed beyond the Good and the Beautiful. For
Plato himself this was something untheorizable: it remained an intuition, though
it almost imperceptibly tips over into a religious, even theological, intuition. I am
reminded of a quotation from C. C. J. Webb my revered mentor Professor Donald
MacKinnon used to growl forth in his lectures in Cambridge half a century ago:
‘We could not allow the name of God to a being on whose privacy an Actæon
could intrude, or whose secrets a Prometheus could snatch from him without his
assent’.15 Plotinos, as we shall see, takes a step beyond Plato, but does not take
away the sense of transcendence as beyond meaning, yet the source of meaning.
In this Plotinos finds a sense of something that would make possible the continu­
ing fruitfulness of meditation on Plato in the Christian tradition, that, indeed,
lent the Christian vision the intellectual coherence it needed to articulate its own
vision of reality, a vision opened up by Revelation, though because it was the
reve­la­tion of God, ‘ineffable, incomprehensible’, it was revelation that remained a
mystery, unknown and unknowable.
What I have just expressed is something that I have only found the means to
articulate through recently rereading Hans Urs von Balthasar in order to write a
chapter commissioned for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Hans Urs von
Balthasar on the influence on the great Swiss theologian of Plato and the Platonic
tradition. In the long section on Plato in ‘The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity’16
Balthasar presents Plato as the supreme witness to philosophy in antiquity, while
15 C. C. J. Webb, Problems in the Relations of God and Man (James Nisbet & Co., Ltd, 1911), 25–6.
16 H. U. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity
(T. & T. Clark, 1989), 166–215.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
16
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
at the same time recognizing inherent limitations. ‘ “Sternly shaking himself free”
from poetry and myth, as from an “old passion” ’,17 Plato devotes himself to the
quest for truth, discovered by reason. But this quest is for him a religious quest,
seeking true divinity that transcends the ‘gods’ of the myths: he ‘occupies himself
with “becoming like God, so far as this is possible, by becoming righteous and
holy with wisdom” ’.18 This is, however, a quest that, though pursued by reason,
cannot be represented solely by transparently rational procedures. The slave in
the Meno is shown already to be aware of truths which he has not been taught and
of which he is unaware, and this because learning is for Plato a matter of recalling
what the soul has already experienced: the myth of metempsychosis, of the rebirth
of the immortal soul in this life and this body, is evoked to explain something that
reason can reveal but not explain. Other attempts to explore what is involved in
the rational pursuit of truth, for instance in the Symposium or the Phaedrus,
invoke themes of inspiration, the longing of eros, understood as a daimon, neither
god nor human, immortal nor mortal—­themes that seem to transcend, or under­
mine, reason. ‘ “Myth”, for Plato, is to be found, and belongs, where the lines
drawn by philosophical reflection stretch beyond its grasp’.19 And in telling these
myths, Plato demonstrates a literary power to evoke and persuade in a way very
different from the demonstration of truth by rational argument. ‘Which brings us
to the alarming question’—Balthasar comments—‘where Plato is going to lead the
transcendence of knowledge’.20
Balthasar continues with a long meditation on how Plato leads us beyond
knowledge, or into the transcendence of knowledge. It is a classic piece of
Balthasar, learned, allusive, tracing the sequence of Plato’s thought in a way both
suggestive and tantalizing. The first staging-­post for Balthasar is the emergence in
Plato’s thought of ‘the transcendental movement of knowledge as knowledge, of
philosophy as the “great daimon” of the “in between” ’. Heraclitus’ system of pure
becoming is rejected, and Plato seems to be following Parmenides in the pursuit
of pure being, an ascent that ‘only becomes more demanding, since now it must
take becoming with it up into being, the half into the whole. This whole is the
soundest, κάλλιστον, the most honourable, τιμιώτατον; inspiration, erôs, myth
can point to nothing higher . . .’.21 This leads into Balthasar’s final section on
Plato, entitled ‘The Breadth of the Kalon’. Passing through inadequate ways of
understanding the beautiful, which is part of the kalon, itself bound up with the
good, agathon, Balthasar finds the ‘key-­word’ in the Timaeus: ‘All that is good is
beautiful, but there is nothing beautiful without inner measure’.22 This notion of
measure, balance, harmony, Balthasar traces throughout the Platonic corpus—­in
17 Balthasar, Glory, 172; citing Rep. X. 607E.
18 Balthasar, Glory, 172; citing Theaet. 176B.
19 Balthasar, Glory, 195.
20 Balthasar, Glory, 197.
21 Balthasar, Glory, 200; citing Phileb. 30B, Tim. 30A.
22 Tim. 87C, cited at Balthasar, Glory, 204.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
17
the balance of the virtues in the soul, parallel to the defining qualities of the
classes within the kallipolis (guardians, warriers, merchants, and labourers): an
arrangement ‘according to nature’ (κατὰ φύσιν), ‘both in man, who is a miniature
state, and in the state, which is man writ large’.23 The Timaeus provides a further
analogy: the cosmos, the word itself denoting adornment, which is both an image
of what the demiurge beholds in the realm of ideas—­or rather more than that,
‘not only an image (εἰκών) of an archetype but rather a quasi-­sacramental repre­
sentation of the gods (ἄγαλμα τῶν ἀϊδίων θεῶν)’,24 which itself, as soul and body,
images the human. Balthasar sums up this sequence of thought thus:
This rounds off an aesthetic ethic immanent in the world, in which the divine as
well as the human appears in a final identity as a harmony of balance; the last
glimmer of a revelation from above—­some features of which in the middle
period were left to the (transcendent) Sun of the Good—­fades, or rather passes
over into the macrocosmic harmony which is accessible to philosophical enquiry.
Now is born that philosophical aesthetic of the grand style, to which even
Plotinus will be able to make no significant alteration and which will lay down
the pattern for all Western forms of humanism: of Antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and right into modern times. An aesthetic which seeks to draw out the glory of
God which breaks in upon the human scene in the direction of a human, of what
for the moment is the same, cosmic ‘sublime’. And all the time there will be dis­
cernible powerful counter-­currents—­classical as well as Christian.25
But for Balthasar it is Plotinos who sees what the final implications of Plato’s in­tu­
ition really amount to:
Plotinus stands in awe and wonder before the glory of the cosmos
—here Balthasar reaches for his touchstone for understanding Platonism, in this
case, that of Plotinos—
[the cosmos] is manifestly a vast ensouled organism, in which individual souls,
rational and irrational, have their share . . . Throughout this glorious world radi­
ates the presence of an eternal and intelligent spirit in which noêsis and noêma,
the act of thought and the object of thought, are one (Aristotle’s god, νόησις
νοήσεως); and in the ultimate ground of this spirit there is an unutterable gen­
era­tive mystery at work which in all the splendour of the cosmos simultaneously
reveals and hides itself, present everywhere yet unapproachable . . . All intellec­
tual activity in heaven and earth circles around this unattainable generative
mystery, all longing love (ἔρως) struggles upwards towards it, all the beauty of
23 Balthasar, Glory, 207.
24 Balthasar, Glory, 211; citing Tim. 51C, 37C.
25 Balthasar, Glory, 213.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
18
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
the world is only a sign coming from it and pointing to it so that as he contem­
plates and seeks to understand the things of the world the philosopher is com­
pelled at a deeper level to run away, to let go, to turn again (ἐπιστροφή) to the
uniqueness of absolute unity.26
On the one hand, the irrefragable wonder of the world around us, and on the
other, stemming from this, a sense of being touched by knowledge in which won­
der seems to dissolve any sense of distance between the known and the knower.
Wonder before the cosmos does not, as a first step, highlight a contrast with our
everyday experience—­as with the Gnostics to whom he was radically opposed
(who may include Christians)—but reveals a hidden sense of oneness:
For Plotinus, in contrast, the vision of the starry heavens directly reveals the
certainty of the world’s divinity, and an ‘awed reticence’ (εὐλάβεια) fills the soul:
it is ‘the manifest and glorious image’ of an ‘unimaginable wisdom’, a ‘wondrous
intellectual power’ reveals itself in this vision; how can the stars be anything but
‘divinity manifest’? Why should we rob this world, springing forth from God’s
spirit, of its maker and seek to confine him to a meagre ‘beyond’?27
Balthasar goes on to expound familiar aspects of Plotinos’ thought: the stress on
individuality, wholly positive, defined from above, where it is found in the realm
of the ideas, not from below, by material difference. Since the soul derives from
above, the individual soul cannot be evil, there is always something in it that
remains ‘above’. The ‘descent’ of the soul is not simply negative, just as emanation
from the One is ambivalent, both some kind of decline into multiplicity, but still
bearing something of its blessed origin; Plotinos speaks of procession as τόλμα,
risk—­but also daring, temerity. An entailment of this is that ‘the One is not sep­ar­
ated from anything: because God is the absolutely transcendent, therefore he can
be the absolutely immanent in all things. Thus does Plotinus reject not only the
utter “beyondness” of Aristotle’s God, reposing in himself, but also the Platonic
χωρισμός [separation] . . .’.28 Intellection, νόησις, itself reflects the inexpressible
unity of the One, as the realm of one–­many, ἕν–­πολλά: ‘all this is one, nous, noêsis,
noêton’ (Enn. V. 3. 5). Its activity is without effort or noise: ‘Silently, and without
being moved, intellect has shaped all things’ (Enn. III. 2. 2).29 ‘This’, Balthasar
continues ‘leaves nothing except the One in its moment of eternal self-­identity to
define what intellect stretches out towards: God is nothing other than the ‘inner
depth’ of things, the centre of that circle whose periphery they constitute . . .’30
Balthasar goes on to comment (touching base, as it were, again) that
26 Balthasar, Glory, 282.
27 Balthasar, Glory, 283.
28 Balthasar, Glory, 290.
29 Both cited in Balthasar, Glory, 299.
30 Balthasar, 299–300.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
19
The real Plotinus could never rest content with speculation in the modern sense.
Throughout his life he was to stand speechless before the miracle of being that
transcends all reason. That there is something, that what is is a world of such
immense wonder, this is for him the clearest possible revelation of the source
lying behind all things, the groundlessly self-­giving Good.31
It is this perception, conviction, that lies behind Plotinos’ deepened understand­
ing of the meaning of beauty. For Plato (in Balthasar’s exposition) what finally
defined beauty is measure, even symmetry. For Plotinos (although he endorses
such a sense of beauty in his earlier works, for example, the very first Ennead,
chronologically speaking, Enn. I. 6), beauty is rather bound up with intellect’s
perceiving ‘beyond its own being something marvellous, a θαῦμα, something sub­
limely worthy of veneration, σεμνόν, something at whose “blinding light” we can
as little stare at as we can at the sun’s brightness’.32 Beauty is perceived as some­
thing lent by a higher realm (in the intellectual realm, the One; in the realm of
soul, from the intellect), but Balthasar emphasizes more than some other inter­
preters that this sense of something ‘lent’ inspires awe, wonder, veneration. One
must not, either, forget the mutual entailment of transcendence and immanence,
which dispels any ‘distancing’ from the ‘beyond’. Both these points become
explicit when Balthasar affirms:
The fascinosum, which is the radiance sent forth by beauty at every level of
Intellect, Soul and nature, signifies beauty itself, yet also signifies that there is in
beauty something beyond it. The structure of the Beautiful inscribes itself within
the formal structure of a doctrine of God. The ‘in’ here is not voided of force by
the ‘beyond’; there is no reduction to ‘pure appearance’. But the radiance of
manifestation presupposes the One, from whose centre all the rays emanate and
become manifest.33
Balthasar concludes his chapter by making the following comment:
Plotinus draws together the various strands of the Greek heritage in his vision of
being as Beauty, because it is the revelation of the divine. Beauty is thus charac­
terized by an inner differentiation between radiance and form, light and har­
mony. It is in the fact that his formal ontology and aesthetics leaves the way open
to pure philosophy and self-­
conscious theology that Plotinus represents a
moment of kairos; it is in this that both the risks and fruitfulness of his thought
for future ages lie.34
31 Balthasar, Glory, 302 (my italics).
32 Balthasar, Glory, 303.
33 Balthasar, Glory, 307.
34 Balthasar, Glory, 313.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
20
Selected Essays, VOLUME I
For Balthasar, Plotinos is clearly the apogee of Platonism, surpassing even the one
he regarded as his master. Transcendence, which for both is only fully sensed in
the Beautiful, is less, as with Plato, the subject of meditations, than a sense of
wonder before the transcendent: a raw wonder, not to be thematized or theorized,
but a speechlessness before the miracle of being—­and its source. This tran­scend­
ent is absolute, and therefore absolutely immanent, experienced as presence, as
immediate (ἐξαίφνης), palpable but intangible, felt but never understood.
It is this intuition of Plato’s—­an intuition that penetrated to the very being of
Plotinos—­that I want to claim is necessary for Christian theology, necessary in the
sense that without it the Christian thinker will find it impossible to articulate the
centrality of Christ, the centrality of the Cross, for Christian theology. It is this
sense of speechlessness before the miracle of being, and its source, that ensures
both acknowledgment of the reality of God, transcendent and immanent—­
transcendent because immanent, and immanent because transcendent—­and a
sense of the wonder of creation. Both of these are necessary if the mystery of
Christ is not to be either sucked up into the transcendent mystery of God or
drawn down into the mystery of created being. Plato’s—­Plotinos’—intuition
remained for them something unfulfilled and unfulfilling. The sense behind this
intuition that meaning is always received, through being given, cannot be ul­tim­
ate­ly sustained if there is no Giver, no God who bestows meaning, for the sover­
eign reality that must be recognized in the supreme Giver, the Giver of being
itself, cannot rest on the acknowledgment of the creature. This is the mystery of
grace, which cannot itself demand or require what can only be freely given.
I leave you with a paradox: that Christian theology stands in need of an in­tu­
ition of the radical givenness of meaning, an intuition that formed the heart of
Plato’s metaphysics, an intuition that might even be said to have rendered speech­
less before the mystery of being his greatest interpreter, Plotinos, but which for
both Plato and Plotinos could not but remain unfulfilled.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.