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Charlie,Mary,Sarah,andIsaac
Editors Preface and Acknowledgments
Andrew Louth has been a central figure in the world of Anglophone Patristic studies for the past four decades, and a key theological figure within Orthodoxy (especially Orthodoxy in the diaspora) for three. Andrew is also a thinker known far beyond the world of those devoted to the study of early and Byzantine Christianity, and far beyond the circle of those confessionally Orthodox. His works have been a major source for all those—across many Christian traditions— interested in the work of ressourcement, of turning again to the resources of classical Christianity (especially as it is developed in the Greek world between Plato and John Damascene). His monographs cover a considerable range, from his early and much appreciated two volumes The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition and DiscerningtheMysteryto his translations and commentaries, and on to his magisterial surveys John Damascene: Tradition and DevelopmentinByzantineTheologyand GreekEastandLatinWest: The Church AD 681–1071. Andrew’s range and depth of knowledge are rendered all the clearer in his reconceptualizing and editing of the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2022).
But alongside these volumes Andrew has always also been a significant essayist; many of his most significant contributions to scholarship and to theology are scattered throughout journals and edited collections, some of which are rather difficult to access. These contributions, often delivered initially as lectures at institutions and to conferences and symposia around the world testify to his range and erudition, as well as to his willingness to contribute to the life of the theological community. The same virtues are, of course, seen in his long contribution as co-editor of the Oxford series “Oxford Early
Christian Studies,” and “Oxford Early Christian Texts.” The present two volumes attempt to reveal something of that range and erudition by presenting seventy-four of his essays, in a selection made by Andrew himself. One notable principle of selection here is that Andrew has not included any of the many pieces he has produced for “handbooks” over many years.
Dividing the essays between the two volumes has presented something of a challenge because Andrew’s work on Patristic theology is also intrinsic to his work as a theologian—the division is not one between history and theology. But neither is it one simply between the theology of the Fathers over against work in modern theology or on modern theologians. Such a divisions would contradict Andrew’s very conception of the manner in which engagement with the Fathers is the enduring heart of theological work, however much it also must reflect on the streams of thought that are ours today. The division between the volumes is thus intentionally fluid. Those essays that are most directly focused on exploring the thought and world of figures in the early Christian world (and in a few cases exploring the links between that world and the world of Byzantine Christianity) appear in the first volume. In the second volume many of the essays consider broader theological topics, some focus on Byzantine and modern theological writers (especially some of the great figures of the twentieth-century Orthodox diaspora), while yet others consider the legacy of early Christian theology. The essays in this second volume are offered in chronological order, allowing the reader to gain a sense of how Andrew’s thought has developed. As these essays were written at a variety of points over the past half-century a number of them use styles of expression that reflect the periods in which they were written. We have therefore left the wording of the essays as they were published.
Alongside the editors, a team of Andrew’s former students and friends helped to prepare these essays for publication, especially the arduous task of checking pre-published electronic versions against the final published forms, and turning PDFs into text. We would like
to thank Dr Krastu Banev, Dr Evaggelos Bartzis, Fr Demetrios Bathrellos, Fr Doru Costache, Prof Brandon Gallaher, Fr Antonios Kaldas, Dr Samuel Kaldas, Fr Justin Mihoc, Dr Wagdy Samir, Dr Christopher Sprecher, Dr Gregory Tucker, and Dr Jonathan Zecher.
We also wish to express our gratitude to the Publishers, Journals, and others who have granted permission for the essays collected in these volumes to be reprinted.
Lewis Ayres and John Behr
October2022
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology
The Use of the Term ἴδιοςin Alexandrian Theology from Alexander to Cyril
Ignatios or Eusebios: Two Models of Patristic Ecclesiology
On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity: St Basil the Great between the Desert and the City
St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor: The Shaping of Tradition
St Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology
‘From Beginning to Beginning’: Continuous Spiritual Progress in Gregory of Nyssa
St Makrina: The Fourth Cappadocian?
Evagrios: The ‘Noetic’ Language of Prayer
Evagrios on Anger
Augustine on Language
St Augustine’s Interpretation of the Transfiguration of Christ
Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers
Heart in Pilgrimage: St Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms
Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism in Denys the Areopagite
‘Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things’: Dionysios the Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible
The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor
The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World: Maximus to Palamas
Dionysios the Areopagite: The Unknown God and the Liturgy
St Maximus the Confessor between East and West
From the Doctrine of Christ to Person of Christ: St Maximos the Confessor on the Transfiguration of Christ
Eucharist and Church According to St Maximos the Confessor
The Views of St Maximos the Confessor on the Institutional Church
Virtue Ethics: St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas Compared
St Maximos’ Doctrine of the Logoiof Creation
Mystagogy in Saint Maximus
The Lord’s Prayer as Mystagogy from Origen to Maximos
St Maximos’ Distinction between λόγοςand τρόποςand the Ontology of the Person
Pronoiain the Life and Thought of St Maximos the Confessor
Sophia, the Wisdom of God, in St Maximos the Confessor
The Doctrine of the Image of God in St Maximos the Confessor
The Holy Spirit in the Theology of St John Damascene
John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between Humanity and God
The Doctrine of the Eucharist in the Iconoclast Controversy
Photios as a Theologian
Knowing the Unknowable God: Hesychasm and the Kabbalah
37. Aquinas and Orthodoxy
DetailsofOriginalPublication
Index
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).
Introduction
ILooking 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.
DiscerningtheMysteryadumbrated, 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 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 viecontemplative selonPlaton(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 EarlyChristianFathers, to produce 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. 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 ChurchDogmaticsand 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 philosophy 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 continued 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. 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 ExégèseMédiévale(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 disciple 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 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, GreekEastandLatinWest: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 OrthodoxThinkers.
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.
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 justice. 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 personally; 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 tradition 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 archpriest, 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 highest 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 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 considering 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 necessity 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 notwant 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 follow 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 thirteenth 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:
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 ὁμέγαςπαρ᾽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 QuestionsandResponses, 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 condemnation of John Italos in 1082, anathema was pronounced ‘on those who pursue Hellenic learning [which certainly included Plato] and are formed by it not simply 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
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, 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 philosophies 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 sometimes 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, OrigenagainstPlato, 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, overlap 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 appealing 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 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 reasonably 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 punished, 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 different 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:
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 doctrines upheld by Socrates and his disciple, Plato. In some ways, Platonists contemporary 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 mathematician that this has always struck me, and anyway, there was said to be inscribed over the entrance to the Academy: Ἀγεωμέτρητοςμηδεὶςεἰσίτω). 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, we would simply make everything far too complicated to understand. We understand 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
usually 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 encountered the perfect form of the excellence, and maybe never could. Both mathematics 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 geometrical form or moral excellence, that we know, even if we cannot perfectly formulate it.
I think all this might be clearer if I cite someone else’s account of it, that someone 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 reflecting 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 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 shorthand now, and as if in a single 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 beautiful, 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 understanding and knowledge; and then, finding itself drawn to the ‘great ocean of the beautiful’, there is
