Christianity East and West:
Some Philosophical Differences
David Bradshaw
University of Kentucky
Tonight I wish to sketch for you three different ways in which Christians have attempted to
think philosophically about God. I have in mind not simply three different arguments or sets of
beliefs about God, but three different styles of reasoning. Each has its own presuppositions, aims,
and method. The first two were typical of western Europe during the Middle Ages. They survive
today especially among Roman Catholics and others who highly value the Christian intellectual
tradition. Their influence is not limited to those circles, however, for they helped form a certain
conception of what a rational approach to the Christian faith should look like, and that conception is
still the dominant one today among both Christians and nonbelievers.
The third flourished
primarily in the Byzantine Empire, and survives today among the Eastern Orthodox. It is the one
that I especially wish to commend to you—partly because I am Orthodox, and partly because I think
it is a way that the West today especially needs to recover.
All three are rooted in Plato. Christians in the ancient world, noticing how often Plato
seems to anticipate the teachings of Christianity, suspected that he must have read the writings of
Moses. A popular saying ran, "What is Plato but Moses Atticizing?"--that is, Moses speaking Attic
Greek. Well, Plato did not read Moses. What he did was hit upon certain ideas that Christians
throughout the ages have found helpful as they seek to understand their faith. In our own times,
some have accused Plato of being a distorting influence on Christian thought; they have claimed
that Christianity was taken captive by Greek philosophy, and needs to free itself by looking in other
directions. I disagree. Whatever view one takes on this matter, however, it is important to begin by
understanding what Plato's influence actually was. I hope that what I say tonight will shed some
light in that direction.
Plato is most famous for his theory of Forms. This theory begins from the following simple
observation: not all of the concepts through which we understand and evaluate the world around us
are to be found "within" that world. As an example of one that can be found within the world, take
1
the concept of green. If you were asked to explain what green is, you could readily point to a green
object and say that you mean that color. Assuming that the object really is green (and not, say,
greenish-blue) you would probably not need to say any more. You would not need to explain in
what respect the object is green, or say that it is green in relation to one thing but not in relation to
another, or green to one observer but not to another. If it is green at all, then it has the property of
greenness in an unambiguous way.
Now take the concept "one." Here is a quarter. Is it one? Yes. But it is also more than
one, for it has two sides and an edge, and numerous etchings, and billions upon billions of
molecules. It is one in some respects and not one in others. The same could be said for virtually
any physical object. (I have to say "virtually" because we might quibble over subatomic particles
and electromagnetic fields. Since these are not direct objects of experience they are not relevant to
the point I am making.) Any object experienced through the senses will be both one and not one,
depending on what respect or specification of it you have in mind.
Another such example is "large." Is this finger large? Well, it is large in relation to one
finger, and not large in relation to the other. If asked simply whether it is large, all you could say is
that it both is and is not.
Another example is sameness. Here are two quarters. Are they the same? Well, yes, in that
they are two quarters--two things of the same type. But no, in that they are two quarters. Sameness
is not a property that they simply have or do not have. They both have it and do not have it,
depending on what respect is at issue.
Now here is Plato's question. If all the things we encounter in experience both are and are
not one, and are and are not large, and are and are not the same, how do we get the concepts of
"one" and "large" and "the same"? They are not like the concept of green; they are not simply
given, as it were, as part of our experience. They seem to be something that we bring to experience.
In fact, we have to have them already even to be able to say that sensible objects fall short of them
in various ways. Clearly we cannot get them from the things we use them to judge--from quarters,
fingers, and the like.
I have found in talking to students that a simple answer often comes to mind. We get them
from our parents! Our parents taught us to speak, and the vocabulary they taught us included words
like "one" and "large." This answer will not do. Our parents had to get them from somewhere.
2
Plato's question is not about how we individually acquired these words, but about how the concepts
the words represent entered the common stock of human thinking.
If you have a philosophical bent of mind, or know very much about the history of
philosophy, you will probably be able to think of several possible answers. First let us consider
Plato's own answer. He held that prior to our existence on earth we had direct experience of what
he called the Forms. The most important feature of the Forms is that each one simply is what it is
without qualification.
The Form of Largeness, for example, simply is large--not large in
comparison to one thing and small in comparison to another. By this he did not mean that it is
some sort of ethereal giant. It is not one large thing among others. It is, rather, Largeness itself; any
other thing is large only in a derivative sense, by imitating what the Form of Large is in its own
proper nature. I realize that these claims raise many questions. For the moment I will leave them
unanswered, for my interest lies not in Plato's theory per se, but in its influence on Christian
philosophy.
Now I will leap ahead about eight hundred years to the first great Christian philosopher.
This was, of course, St. Augustine. St. Augustine agreed with Plato that concepts like "one" and
“large” need special explanation. Being a Christian, however, he could not accept that prior to our
lives on earth our souls exist in the heavens and have there a direct perception of the Forms. So he
found a different answer. As a Christian, he knew that Jesus Christ had claimed to be Truth
incarnate. He also knew that, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus--that is, the Word of God, the
second person of the Trinity--is "the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the
world" (1:9). Could there be an answer to Plato's question in the Scriptural teaching that the Word
of God is Light and Truth? Augustine thought so. He reasoned that we would not have access even
to simple concepts like "one" were it not for a continual illumination of our minds by the second
person of the Trinity, whom in this context he usually referred to as the divine Wisdom. This
illumination is not a special gift given to some; it is a precondition for the normal operation of the
mind. Without it, any thought involving even elementary concepts like "one"--any thought that
goes beyond the fleeting contents of sense experience--would be impossible.
Augustine did not stop there. Jesus claims not simply to be the Truth, but to be "the Way,
the Truth, and the Life." That means that the presence of divine Wisdom to the mind is not just a
precondition for normal understanding;
it is a precondition for moral understanding, for
3
recognition of the true Way in whom we find life eternal. This moral illumination operates at
several levels. One is that it enables us to recognize qualities such as beauty, justice, wisdom, and
goodness. Plato had noted that these have the same "is and is not" character as "one" and "large";
they therefore require the same kind of special explanation. A second level at which moral
illumination operates is that it gives us knowledge of eternal moral truths. Nowadays, of course, we
tend to be skeptical that there are eternal moral truths. I confess that Augustine’s example seems to
me like a pretty good one: "a life that cannot be swayed by any adversity from its fixed and upright
resolve is better than one that is easily weakened and overthrown by transitory misfortunes."1 Since
a truth of this sort cannot simply be inferred from sense experience, we must know it by the
operation of divine Wisdom. Finally, at a third level, divine Wisdom "stamps" us with a notion of
happiness or beatitude. All of our acts are aimed at achieving a condition that we have never fully
experienced and probably never will experience within our present lives. Augustine thought that
this was another indication of how God is present at the very heart of our moral reasoning.
Now the odd thing about the illumination of the mind by divine Wisdom is that, though we
all have it, we do not recognize it for what it is. God is present to us in every thought we think and
every action we make; but we are not present to Him. You might say that we have "forgotten"
Him, if by this you mean, not that we have lost a knowledge we once had, but that we fail to be
aware of something immediately present. It is the same kind of forgetting as when we say, "I forgot
myself." Augustine in his great work, On the Trinity, explores at length the connection between
"memory" (in this special sense), knowledge of self, and knowledge of God. He finds within the
soul two images of the Trinity. One consists of the mind, its knowledge of itself, and its love of
itself.2 These three are a single substance, for if the mind knows itself perfectly and loves itself
perfectly, then the content of those two acts is nothing other than the mind itself. The knowledge
and love are not present in the mind as accidents in a subject; they are constitutive activities, which
by their presence make manifest what the mind already is. The second image consists of the mind's
memory of God (using "memory" in the special sense I have explained), its knowledge of God, and
its love of God.3 Here again are three conditions or activities, each different, yet the same in
substance. Indeed, the first trinity in the soul is rooted and grounded in the second. Any mind that
truly knows itself also knows God, who is the condition of its understanding; any mind that truly
loves itself also loves God, who is its ultimate end. Properly speaking, we should not speak of self4
knowledge or self-love at all, for within and behind the self there is always God.
I hope this will be enough to give you a sense of what the Augustinian way of doing
philosophy is like. It is introspective, meditative, and psychologically acute. Augustine never
doubts the reality of God; what he doubts is whether he knows God, and, consequently, whether he
knows himself. He seeks to find God by finding himself and to find himself by finding God.
Many, many thinkers in the western tradition—St. Anselm, St. Bonaventure, Calvin, Descartes,
John Henry Newman, and C.S. Lewis, to name just a few—have drunk deeply at this Augustinian
well.
The second way of doing philosophy will be easier to explain because it resonates more
readily with our scientific and technological age. We are accustomed to the notion that by studying
effects one can infer their hidden causes. Scientists do this all the time, as when doctors examine
symptoms and infer that a given germ is present, or physicists study the tracks in a bubble chamber
and infer the properties of subatomic particles. The first to use such reasoning in connection with
God was Plato in Book X of the Laws. That is where Plato gives his response to the atheists of his
day. He argues that, of all the various types of motion or change, the one that must have been
present before all others is that which moves itself. He identifies such "self-moving motion" with
soul, and ultimately with the gods who animate and move the cosmos. The details of this argument
are less important for us than its historical influence. It was the prototype for a much more famous
argument developed by Plato's student, Aristotle. Aristotle also begins from the fact of motion or
change. Unlike Plato, he argues that the ultimate explanation of motion must be a single being
which is itself unmoved. He further argues that this first, unmoved Mover must be eternal,
unchanging, and free of potency, in the sense that it can neither be acted upon nor has capacities to
act that it does not at all times fully realize. The being thus described--the Unmoved Mover--is
Aristotle's version of God.
The argument from motion, whether in Plato's version or Aristotle's, has the following
form: we start from certain effects in the world, such as motion; we reason that the cause of these
effects must have certain properties; then, based on those properties, we conclude that the cause
may be identified with God. Once this fundamental pattern is established, similar arguments based
on other types of effect can readily be invented. I will mention two. One is the teleological
argument, or argument from design. St. Paul seems to endorse this argument when he says that "the
5
invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the
things that are made" (Romans 1:20). The other way of reasoning from created effects back to God
is based on the difference between necessary and contingent being. If you are interested in the
details I must ask you to consult Aquinas. Suffice to say that the logical structure of the argument is
similar to that of Aristotle's version of the argument from motion.
All of these arguments found occasional use among the Church Fathers. No one brought
them together and molded them into a single coherent way of thinking about God, however, until
St. Thomas Aquinas. The arguments I have mentioned constitute four out of Aquinas's Five Ways
of demonstrating the existence of God. (Four because Aquinas split the argument from motion into
two, an argument from motion and an argument from efficient causality.) Although there is much
one might say about Aquinas, I will make only two points.
First, Aquinas does not think of reasoning from effects to causes as simply one way among
many in which we can come to know about God. In Aquinas's view, it is the only way available
apart from divine revelation.4 Indeed, since our knowledge of revelation always depends on the
testimony of others, in a sense it is the only way, period. A more direct knowledge is available only
in the afterlife, when the blessed will enjoy the "beatific vision," a direct vision of the divine
essence. Although Aquinas does not reject the Augustinian theory of divine illumination, he
reinterprets it in a way that removes the possibility of knowing God as an immediate presence
within the human mind. For Aquinas, the divine light is that by which things are known, but never
that which is known.5 All our knowledge of God is based on public, objective phenomena
available through the senses.
This may seem like a rather negative result. The second point is more positive. Aquinas
takes the Aristotelian idea of God as a being free from any potency and gives it a new and
distinctively Christian meaning. He does so by applying Aristotle's distinction between actuality
and potentiality in a way never envisioned by Aristotle himself: namely, by thinking of the essence
of something as a kind of potentiality of which the corresponding actuality is the thing's real
existence. Aquinas indicates such real existence by the verb esse, "to be." A thing's esse is its act
of being, that by which it is actually real rather than a mere object of the intellect. Aristotle had
held that a thing's matter and form are related as potency to act. Aquinas goes a step further and
asserts the same relationship between a thing's essence and its esse.
6
What does this have to do with God? Well, if in God there is no potentiality, then God's
essence cannot be a distinct constituent of His being which is then given full reality by His esse.
God's essence and esse must be one and the same. Indeed, just as God not only has wisdom but is
Wisdom, so He is esse itself. This is what Aquinas takes to be the meaning of Exodus 3:14, where
God reveals Himself from the burning bush as qui est, "He Who Is."6 The existence of creatures is
nothing but their participation in the single act of being which is God.
This means that Aquinas is able to explicate the nearness of God to creatures in a way quite
different from that of Augustine. Augustine found God within the depths of the soul. Aquinas
finds Him within the metaphysical structure of created being. Looking at the very nature of what it
is to exist, Aquinas finds God. From a Scriptural standpoint, one might say that he takes statements
such as Colossians 1:16 ("by him [Christ] all things consist") and Hebrews 1:3 (which speaks of
Christ "upholding all things by the word of his power") and makes them the central inspiration for
his philosophy.
I have now described two ways in which Christians have attempted to think about God. One
looks inward, to the soul; one looks outward, to the created world. It may seem that there is little
left to say. Once we have looked both inward and outward, what is left?
In reply I will start from Scripture rather than from Plato. In Colossians 1:28-29, St. Paul
speaks of Christ, "whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom;
that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: whereunto I also labour, striving according
to his working, which worketh in me mightily." The Greek translated "striving according to his
working, which worketh in me mightily" is agonizomenos kata tēn energeian autou tēn
energoumenēn en emoi en dunamei. Literally, it speaks of Paul striving according to the energeia
of Christ that is "energizing" (acting or becoming actual) in him in power. What does this mean?
Energeia is a word invented by Aristotle. At the time of St. Paul, it generally meant the
characteristic activity or operation of something. In speaking of God, it was also used to refer to
special miracles or visitations of divine power.7 What is striking in the passage from Paul is that he
speaks of the divine energeia being active within him. One might think--if one did not know Paul-that he is referring to a kind of divine possession, to God simply taking him over and using him to
fulfill the divine will. But that is clearly not what he means. If we know anything about Paul, it is
that he remained a unique and powerful personality throughout his career. The divine energeia
7
does not submerge or override whatever it is that makes Paul who he is. In fact, in the passage
quoted it seems that the divine energeia at work in Paul is also Paul's own energeia. After all, it is
Paul, not God, who is said to be "striving."
So I take it that Paul is describing a kind of coalescence between his own activity and that of
God. This has come about because of his submission to God's will, and especially his care and
service on behalf of his fellow believers. Now I suggest that of all the things you know, you know
nothing so well as your own activity. You know it because you perform it; it is your life, not in the
sense of something you passively experience, but in the sense of that which you actively work out
with whatever care and toil you can muster. In light of that, please consider the following question.
What if your activity were also that of someone else? What if it were that of God—as appears to
be the case here with St. Paul? What would follow? It would follow that you would know God.
Not in His essence, of course; you would not be able to define what God is. But you would know
Him in His activity, through what He does, because what He does and what you do would be one
and the same. You would be able to say with Paul, "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live;
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
This is a third way in which there can be knowledge of God. It is not inward and
meditative; nor is it outward and scientific, based on inference from effects to their cause. It is a
way of knowing God by personally participating in the divine life. Precisely this sort of knowledge
was the central preoccupation of the Greek Church Fathers. They spoke of it using the word that I
have singled out in the passage from Colossians: energeia. For the Greek Fathers the goal of the
Christian life is to "participate in the divine energeiai." It is not possible here to trace out all the
ramifications of this view. I will mention two which seem to me of particular philosophical
interest, and which present a clear contrast to both Augustine and Aquinas.
The first is at the level of philosophical theology. I mentioned earlier, in discussing
Aquinas, that for Aquinas God is His own esse. In fact Aquinas holds a similar view about all the
divine attributes: God is His own power, His own goodness, His own wisdom, and so forth, for no
distinctions can be drawn within the divine being. Each attribute of God is identical to the divine
essence itself. This is the "doctrine of divine simplicity." It plays an important role in Aquinas's
systematic theology, as may be seen from the fact that the third question of the Summa, that
immediately after the Five Ways, is devoted to explicating it. Augustine also holds this doctrine,
8
though in a less sophisticated form.
The Greek Fathers had a different view of what it means for God to be simple. Consider the
following passage from St. Basil the Great.
We say that we know the greatness of God, His power, His wisdom, His goodness,
His providence over us, and the justness of His judgment; but not His very essence
(ousia) . . . . God, he [an opponent of Basil] says, is simple, and whatever attribute
of Him you have reckoned as knowable is of His essence. The absurdities involved
in this sophism are innumerable. When all these high attributes have been
enumerated, are they all names of His essence? Is there the same mutual force in
His awfulness and loving-kindness, His justice and creative power, His providence
and foreknowledge, His bestowal of rewards and punishments? . . . . The operations
(energeiai) are various, and the essence simple, but we say that we know our God
from His operations, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His
operations come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach.8
Whereas Augustine and Aquinas identify God's essence with His attributes, St. Basil distinguishes
them sharply. For St. Basil the attributes belong among the energeiai, which can be known because
they "come down to us." The divine essence remains strictly beyond our reach. This is not to say
that Basil does not believe that God is simple. He thinks that the essence of God is simple, but that
this simple essence manifests itself through a real plurality of energeiai.
This difference between the eastern and western approaches to divine simplicity has an
important bearing on what I said earlier about knowing God by participating in the divine life.
There are at least two preconditions for our being able to share in the divine energeiai in the way
described by St. Paul. One is that the energeiai must be distinct from the divine essence—for
otherwise, in participating in them, one would take on the essential attributes of God Himself. The
other is that the energeiai must somehow be available to us, or “come down to us,” as St. Basil puts
it. Both of these preconditions are satisfied by the way St. Basil describes the relationship between
the single, unknowable divine essence and the multitude of divine energeiai. It is far from clear
than anything similar can be said on the view of simplicity taken in the West. Augustine and
Aquinas could not hold that the purpose of human life is to participate in the divine energeiai
because their philosophical theology has no room for the divine energeiai as something distinct
from the divine essence. The doctrine of divine simplicity prevents it.9
The second point I wish to make is about how the Greek Fathers view nature. In order to
9
understand this one must understand the concept of "ascetic struggle." I am sure you are all familiar
with the commandment of St. Paul to "make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof"
(Rom. 13:14). You are probably also aware that the flesh is not the body. St. Paul opposes flesh,
not to mind, but to spirit, and especially to the spirit of God.10 Perhaps the simplest way to
understand the flesh is that it is self-love. It is our innate tendency to seek our own comfort and
security rather than acting, feeling, and thinking in a way that is permeated with the love of God. It
manifests itself through the whole range of sins and passions: hatred, anger, gluttony, lust, sloth,
and all the others.
Now the Fathers were well aware that the flesh is not the body. However, they thought that
the surest way to conquer the flesh is, in fact, by disciplining the body. The reason is that the flesh
manifests itself at the most elemental level as love for one's own body. To meet it on its home turf,
so to speak, one must confront the body and its power of domination. This does not mean
neglecting the body. It means habitually denying one's bodily urges and replacing them with urges
of the spirit. The desire for food must be met by fasting; the desire to let the mind coast--to do
what we do today when we plop down in front of the T.V.--must be met by prayer and study of
Scripture; the desire for sleep must be met by vigils; the desire for material security must be met
by almsgiving; the desire for distraction and idle chatter must be met by silence and solitude. And
all of this must be done regularly enough so that the new, spiritual urges come to be habitual—so
that you actually want to pray more than you want to plop down in front of the T.V.
This is very difficult. It is especially difficult to do alone. That is why practices such as
regular hours of communal prayer and regular periods of required fasting were so important in the
early Church. Difficult though it may be, ascetic struggle is necessary if one's most basic habits and
inclinations are to be reoriented away from love of self and toward love of God. Jesus said that
"from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the
violent take it by force" (Matt. 11:12). This is a cryptic saying, but for the Church Fathers its
meaning is clear: it refers to the violence one must do to the flesh and the passions.
There is a close connection between ascetic struggle and the goal of participating in the
divine energeiai. Fasting, prayer, almsgiving, soaking the mind in Scripture, guarding the thoughts,
simply being with God in silence—all of these are good in themselves. They are forms of
obedience to the divine commandments, and already, to that extent, a way of participating in the
10
divine life. But they are also the particular form of obedience that has the greatest power to
transform the soul. One might say that they are the way of sharing in the divine energeiai that
penetrates most deeply into one’s very being. They have the power to make one who pursues them
consistently the “new creature” spoken of by St. Paul—already a participant, in this present life, of
the glory of the age to come.
What does all this have to do with the Greek Fathers’ view of nature? Let me explain by
citing the interpretation of the early life of Moses given by St. Maximus the Confessor, a prominent
Byzantine theologian of the seventh century. Maximus presents Moses as a model of one who
overcomes the passions through ascetic struggle.11 In Maximus’s allegorical reading of the story,
Pharaoh is the devil; Pharaoh's daughter, to whom Moses was subject for a time, is the senses; the
Egyptian whom Moses kills with "noble zeal" is the "Egyptian-like way of thinking that belongs to
the flesh." When Moses leaves Egypt to become a shepherd in the wilderness, the sheep he guides
are "the trains of thought that still consent to the earth and seek enjoyment from it." These he
governs and directs with careful labor, leading them "through the desert which is a condition
deprived of passions and material things and pleasures, to the mountain of the knowledge of God."
Finally, at the end of his labors, Moses encounters the burning bush. In the interpretation of the
bush we find a clue as to how Maximus understands the natural world.
[Moses] became worthy of beholding and hearing with his mind the ineffable,
supernatural, and divine fire that is present, as in the bush, in the being of everything
that exists, I mean God the Word, who in the last times shone forth from the Bush of
the Holy Virgin and spoke to us in the flesh.
God the Word--the Logos--is present "in the being of everything that exists." In the latter days, as
we know, this Word took flesh of the Virgin Mary. The same Word is present in the natural world,
but to perceive it, to hear its message, requires ascetic struggle and the resulting freedom from the
passions. The fire is there to be seen, but only those with purified vision are able to see it.
Maximus makes a similar point in his discussion of the Transfiguration.12 According to
Maximus it was not, properly speaking, Christ who was transfigured when he was seen in glory; it
was the disciples, who were momentarily enabled to see him as he truly is. "They passed over from
flesh to spirit before they had put aside this fleshly life, by the change in their powers of sense that
11
the Spirit worked in them, lifting the veils of the passions from the intellectual activity that was in
them." Again it is the passions that must be overcome before true vision can occur--though in this
case "the veils of the passions" are removed momentarily by a miraculous intervention of the Spirit.
Of the many layers of meaning in the vision itself, the one that concerns us here relates to the
garments of Christ. Maximus finds in these a symbol "of creation itself, which a base presumption
regards in a limited way as delivered to the deceiving senses alone, but which can be understood,
through the wise variety of the various forms that it contains, on the analogy of a garment, to be the
worthy power of the generative Word who wears it." The physical creation is the garment of the
Word, from which the Word itself shines forth to those who are able to see.
I hope it will be clear from these two passages that the Greek Fathers' view of nature is very
different from our own. We tend to think of nature as an autonomous system that can be
understood largely in its own terms. It may need grace to complete or fulfill it, as Aquinas taught;
nonetheless, as the very notion of "completion" shows, the starting point is nature. That is why
Aquinas begins the Summa by discussing at length what can be known of God based on natural
reason.13 I think it is fair to say--though I will not argue the point here--that this view of nature was
a precondition for the rise of modern science. Historically its roots go back to the sharp dichotomy
between nature and grace drawn by Augustine during the Pelagian controversy.
The view of Maximus is different. He does not think of nature as an autonomous system; it
is more like a bush burning with divine fire, or a garment worn by God and shining with uncreated
light. Another metaphor Maximus offers makes his view clearer. He says that physical things are
to God as printed words are to their meanings.14 To study the physical world as an autonomous
system would make as much sense as scrutinizing the marks on a piece of paper as if they were
mere physical objects. The marks are not there to be studied in their own right, but to be read
through, as it were, so as to discern the meaning behind them. If they seem to make no sense, then
the solution is not to scrutinize them more and more closely; it is to learn the language in which
they are written. The way one "learns the language," however, is not by intellectual effort. It is by
purifying oneself from the passions through ascetic struggle and obedience to the divine
commandments.
I said at the beginning that all three of the ways I would discuss are rooted in Plato. The
idea that physical reality shines forth with the transcendent is one of Plato’s recurrent themes. For
12
Plato every sensible object is an image of the Forms. He, too, holds that one must learn to look
through the sensible world to the transcendent reality that is its source. It is true that for Plato this is
largely accomplished through philosophical reasoning, or dialectic. But Plato also emphasizes selfdenial, the acquisition of the virtues, and the conquest of the passions. In the Ladder of Love
passage in the Symposium, for example, it is only by caring for the beloved—seeking “to bring forth
beauty in the beautiful”—that one is enabled to ascend to the vision of Beauty itself.
The Eastern Fathers sometimes adopt an idiom that is strikingly reminiscent of Plato. They
speak, not only of discerning the single Logos within the created world, but also of discerning the
individual logos of each creature.
The individual logoi are the “meanings” of things, their
significance within the mind of God. They are also the eternal exemplars in accordance with which
things are created. They thus play a role similar to that of the Forms in the philosophy of Plato.
The difference is that, for the Fathers, each individual logos is part of an ordered discourse. The
many logoi are the single divine Logos passed through the prism of God’s creative act and broken
into innumerable separate beams. Their collective meaning is simply the Logos Himself as He is
manifested in creation. As St. Maximus puts it, “the one Logos is many logoi, and the many logoi
are one Logos.”15 The logoi are thus personal in a way that the Forms are not. They are God’s
declaration of who He is and His call to all creatures to return to Him.
I hasten to add that the vision of God in the natural world is not the highest kind of vision.
Besides the vision of Christ's garments, there is also the vision of his face. In beholding his face the
disciples beheld God Himself in the flesh through the uncreated light that surrounds Him. Maximus
and the other Fathers who discuss this subject hold that the vision of the uncreated light is the
highest and purest form of participation in the divine energeiai. In beholding God in this way one
also beholds the logoi, the "meanings," of created things, for all of creation may be seen in the
Creator. Interestingly enough, this is precisely what Aquinas says about the vision of God enjoyed
by the blessed in heaven.16 But whereas Aquinas holds that such a vision cannot be enjoyed in this
present life, the Fathers insist that it can. It is the natural culmination of a life of ascetic struggle,
obedience to the divine commandments, and participating in the divine activity. This does not
mean that it necessarily follows from such practices, but only that God is more likely to grant it,
freely and gratuitously, to those who have in this way been purified from the passions.
I like to think that Aquinas himself is the finest witness to the fact that the Fathers were
13
right on this point and Aquinas was wrong. There is a story that, near the end of his life, Aquinas
had a vision while celebrating Mass that he would not reveal to anyone. We only know that from
that point he refused to write another word. When he was urged to do so, he replied: "I can write
no more. I have seen things that make all my writings like straw." I would be the last to say that
Aquinas's writings are straw. They are full of wisdom, as are those of Augustine. But they pale
beside the actual life of knowing God, which the Fathers articulate, and which God offers to all of
us.
14
1. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, tr. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 51.
2. De Trinitate IX.4.
3. D.T. XIV.12
4. Summa Theologiae I, Q. 12, art. 12 & 13.
5. S.T. I, Q. 84, art. 5 & 7.
6. S.T. I, Q. 3, art. 4; Q. 13, art. 11.
7. For other Biblical references to the divine energeia, see II Macc. 3:29, III Macc. 4:21, 5:12, 5:28,
Wisdom 7:26, Eph. 1:19, 3:7, Phil. 3:21, and Col. 2:12; also occurrences of the verb energein, of which I
Cor. 12:6, 11 and Phil. 2:13 are the most relevant.
8. Basil, Epistle 234; tr. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), Second
Series, vol. 8, 274. For the Greek see the Loeb edition of Basil's letters.
9. I also believe that, taken strictly as a proposition of philosophical theology, the position of St. Basil is
more sensible than that of Augustine and Aquinas, for it allows both God and creatures to exercise free
choice without thereby implying that there is contingency within the divine essence. I have elaborated this
argument in "The Dilemma of Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom" (unpublished).
10. See especially Romans 7-8, I Corinthians 2-3, and Galatians 5.
11.
11. For the following see Maximus, Ambiguum 10 (PG 91 1148A-D); tr. Andrew Louth, Maximus the
Confessor (Routledge, 1996), 121.
12. Ambiguum 10 (PG 91 1127D-1128C); tr. Louth, 108-109.
13. See especially S.T. I, Q. 2, art. 2 ad 1.
14. Ambiguum 10 (PG 91 1129A); tr. Louth, 110.
15. Ambiguum 7 (PG 91 1081BC).
16. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.59.
15