PLATO AND THEOLOGY BY ANDREW DAVISON

[Music] our topic is the influence of the philosopher Plato on Christian thought or what Christian theologians have made of Plato's ideas the man himself lived in Athens in ancient Greece he was born in 428 BC and died in 348 BC the stature of Plato widely speaking can hardly be in doubt the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the entire history of Western philosophy could be characterized as a series of footnotes on Plato and many have claimed that he is the first philosopher in the sense that we use the word today philosophy goes back to Plato Plato's thought might be considered important for all sorts of reasons here are two ethics for instance and politics and the nature of knowledge or epistemology but it is perhaps his theory of the forms that lies at the heart of the Christian interest in his work Plato proposed that behind the world that we can see with all its characteristics and its objects was a transcendent realm of what he called the forms which were the truest of all realities so when we encountered justice in the world for instance he thought that that was a certain sort of copy or shining forth of eternal justice or the form of justice similarly beauty in the world was a glimpse of the form of beauty or goodness of the form of the good he went further and said that even material objects like a tree is some instantiation of the true and ideal tree or even that when carpenters make a bed they are somehow perhaps unwittingly consulting the true form of the bed which lies somewhere in this realm of the truest beings what's important about this for theology is the sense of a transcendent reference to the world that somehow the world comes from somewhere that it embodies something that it shows something forth that it has a meaning it has truth which comes to it from beyond now plato's theory of the forms presented many challenges to Christian theologians and we'll come back to that later but this idea of a transcendent origin and reference for the world was what lies at the heart of why they valued his thought so much this was often expressed in terms of a word participation taken from very platonic vocabulary this was the idea that everything exists as a sort of gift from God a sort of donation that the existence of anything for instance is some sharing from God of God's perfect existence or we might consider that tree that everything about it its strengths its beauty its life are all in a way a sharing from God of these perfections in God's own life so thinking about it from God's the world we can think about it as a sharing or a donation thinking about it from the side of the creature as it were we can talk about it in terms of participation that the tree's life and beauty and strength and it's very being our participation in God and those qualities in God well the great theorists of this in the Christian tradition is Augustine of Hippo and he particularly liked a verse which we find towards the beginning of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians where he asks them what do you have that you did not receive and Augustine saw this as a question that could be pressed very very far back that we could ask about anything in the world it's very existence in all of its qualities what do you have that you did not receive now the challenge here is to hold in tension two different truths that the Christian faith wants to uphold on the one hand that God is the apse origin and that everything about everything comes from God or comes the question of evil they're in a little a little while but at the same time we want to say that we're not pantheists and that there is some distinction between the world and God and in formulating an account of how participation works like this that's the challenge to say that everything about everything comes from God and yet at the same time to make this absolute distinction between God and his creatures to talk about some of the content of Plato's thought that might have been significant for later thinkers Christians among others but there's also the question of how he wrote which was consistently in the dialog form that's to say that his writings don't look like essays they look like play scripts often the figure of Socrates is prominent and he finds himself in some sort of social gathering and various other characters ask him questions and he asks questions in return we sometimes call this the Socratic method of getting to the truth through asking and answering questions so Plato writes in this dialogue format to and fro and with questions and this was to Peru proved important from time to time in later writing I might think of some of the earlier dialogues of Augustine for instance just after his conversion or some Alred of rivo wrote his book on spiritual friendship in this form now we would be wrong to say here that in either of those cases there was necessarily a direct influence of Plato but we can say that Plato was the great instigator of the dialogue form of this to and fro and that this was taken up perhaps in rather a diffuse form and without necessarily a direct influence time and time again in later writing so there's the way in which Plato looks on the page and that's certainly important but there's another principle at work here which in some ways is even more important for Christian practice and spirituality and that's the idea that the truth is thought best when it's sourced together Plato gives us in this dialogue form and in the details of his own life and in the life of Socrates his great teacher this sense that we seek the truth best together in the form of a friendship in fact he would say that the characteristic of the highest form of friendship was this communal search together after and he presents us with really a very compelling image where truth and beauty and goodness and being are all into woven so we might say that there's almost something of the love story to this search for the truth there's a sort of there's an element of desire to it because the truth is good and good is beautiful and this draws us on we might think of paradoxically one of the few documents that's come down to us with plato's name on it that isn't a dialogue the so-called seventh letter we can be pretty certain that most of the other letters are not by him and the authorship of the seventh letter is slightly in question but it's certainly very typically photonic in its themes and there he talks about the search for truth as an act of friendship and a common project after long partnership in common life devoted to this very thing that's seeking together does truth flash upon the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter it's a common very much religious spiritual search for the truth by common conversations and by a sort of purification of the life and if we were to search subsequent literature we would probably find nowhere where that spirit is more perfectly exemplified than a passage in Augustine's Confessions way talks about a conversation he had with his mother Monica sitting near a window in a house in the port town of Ostia near Rome there he says they have a conversation and as their thoughts mount with this to and fro eventually they're accorded by God a vision of eternity there's no reason to suppose that Augustine had that passage of a Gus of Plato in his mind when he wrote of that vision but there's something very deeply photonic about the sense of a common search after truth through a process of dialogue and discussion place nism has a history we might speak of the first phase as being the life and thought of Plato himself and then as that's taken up by his immediate successors but then we reach what's often called middle platonism which stretches from the 1st century BC into the 3rd century AD and this is important for our purposes because it's Platonism in this form that forms something of the philosophical background of early Christian thought and mission middle Platonism is represented by figures such as Plutarch and Romania's it was in fact rather a loose connection of thoughts and philosophical approaches certainly very much inspired by Plato but beginning to take in aspects of new Pythagorean thought and of Aristotle it's defined by its reaction to other things that were happening in philosophy at the time particularly a sort of skepticism and growing sense of atheism so in this end in this sense it had aspects that were in keeping with a Christian attitude towards the world it respected the idea of Revelation for instance it was very enthusiastic about this idea of a transcendent origin and reference for the world and the importance of spiritual practices certainly we would X we wouldn't expect to find developed Christian doctrines there and we don't find them but rather as a Christian today might in the face of atheism think that he or she and members of another religion were at least on the same page we could perhaps say the same for middle placed nism and Christians in respect of that more skeptical philosophy that was around at the time the earliest Christian responses to this sort of platonic philosophy run the whole gamut of reactions on the one hand we find something of agitation we find some of the earliest fathers saying that they recognize so many similarities between their outlook and that of Plato that Christians risk being accused of having copied what they're saying from Plato and as I say they often put that with something of agitation on the other hand there was also a great deal of respect we might single out in particular two aspects of Platonism that went down rather well and one was a sense that the world was God's creation that is not unproblematic in place nism and we'll get to where the problems might lie later on well they did encounter in one of the dialogues called the Timaeus the idea of the Demiurge it may be a lesser sort of God but is at least presented as a sort of creator and they also these early Christians liked the idea in place nism of the utter transcendence of God they liked the sense that one was talking here not about some pagan anthropomorphic God but as of the God who lay behind all things and was difficult to speak about or couldn't couldn't be easily domesticated within any human scheme there was a particular passage in the Timaeus for that reason for both of these reasons that drew particular respect now to discover the maker and father of the universe were a task indeed and having discovered him to declare him and two others were a thing impossible we also come across claims of copying that's another way of reacting to this danger that they might be seen to be saying too much the same thing so the claim is not at all uncommon that Plato must have copied from Moses in fact among the fathers you get quite a discussion of how it could have been the Plato knew Moses the idea perhaps that's when the Jews were in exile Plato had come across the writings of Moses so we spoken a little bit about middle Platonism as part of the philosophical background of those very early Christian writers the next stage of Platonism and one that has been incredibly important for later Christian thought is often called neo place nism sometimes the beginning of this movement is put down to rather an elusive figure called ammonius Sakas in the 3rd century AD who didn't leave any writings or one of his followers platanus who left quite an extensive collection of writings although in rather a jumbled state a definitive feature of Neoplatonism is rather an elaborate and metaphysical scheme with a divine source at its most inaccessible at the top perhaps called the one and from the one a veritable cascade of the mediating figures stretching all the way down through various spiritual figures through to the material universe and at the very bottom of this cascade matter which is where we could say or where they would say that being or goodness gave out so this idea of an elaborate scheme of cascading descent is an important aspect of Neoplatonism we could also single out the importance of Eastern religious sources tis rather a cosmopolitan time in the world's history and ammonia circus was said to be a porter at the docks in Alexandria and from there he picked up and synthesized the religious perspectives and stories of a great many traditions especially stretching out to the east and we know that platanus that other great important early neoplatonist was also interested in a variety of religious traditions and all of this gets synthesized within the Neoplatonic scheme to get a sense of the importance of Neoplatonism for christian writers we might consider Augustine of Hippo who has left us an accounts of his life and his intellectual thoughts in his book the confessions and here the writings of neoplatonism were important to him in helping him to move beyond a certain sort of Gnosticism the heresy of Gnosticism which saw the world as intrinsically evil the creation of a lesser or evil God which he encountered a particular form called Manichaean ISM and it was he said from the neo-platonists that he learned a certain perspective on evil which has been important for later Christian thinking it's the idea of evil as privation as lack or loss so those Manicheans were in danger of seeing good and evil as equal and opposite forces they were duelists they saw good and evil as equally substantial and locked in an eternal battle but from the neo-platonists Augustine learned the idea that the true reality is good and that evil is a sort of failure of falling away from the good it has a shadowy character or nature it's not to say that we don't come across evil things or bad people it's just that the nature of that evil is to be seen as a failure of living up to being what they're supposed to be or could be we could cast it in participatory terms evil is a failure of a things participation in its divine source so that's very important for the history of the conversion of this key Western father that Neoplatonic sources helped him to move beyond manichaean ISM factor goes a bit further he said that from the neo-platonists he might have learned that in the beginning was the word the word was God but then crucially he says but they could never have guessed and I could never have learned from them that the word became flesh and dwelt among us so here he's quoting from the beginning of John's Gospel the prologue forgot John's Gospel and saying that some of that was in some shadowy way present or open to the neo-platonists and other aspects of it a man in particular the Incarnation they would never have grasped or dreamt of Neoplatonism had a really important influence on Augustine and recently Philip Carey has written quite persuasively of the idea that Augustine's great concern which was with divine grace has a certain debt to Neoplatonic sources he says he draws his account of grace from two principal places of course from the epistles of some Paul and then he approaches it through various ideas which he's picked up from Neoplatonism and Kerry argues that it was some of this Neoplatonic frame of reference or way of thinking that helped Augustine to be such an eloquent expander of this central Christian idea that the grace of God characterizes who God is and characterizes God's offer of salvation to all people so we've had some sense there of how Neoplatonism helped Augustine to move beyond dualism and the suggestion that it may have played a part in his understanding and formula H formulation of accounts of grace he also says that neoplatonism helped him move beyond the idea which we might find rather peculiar of thinking of God in material terms and I suppose that's that point about transcendence that Neoplatonic ways of thinking of helped Christians to think about God as transcending the world we even have it recorded that Augustine had some words of the tynus on his lips as his final words before he died which is maybe rather surprising for this great doctor of the church to be citing a pagan philosopher as his final words it's not that everything about near placed ism went down well with Agustin or anyone else in his book the City of God he takes on a different strand of Neoplatonism from the one we've been talking about so far and his discussion of something called fear G so we might think of Neoplatonism as falling into two basic camps we've got the Thainess and some of his followers who present us with a spiritual quest that's basically one of escape of escape from the world to the one to the divine source but then there are some other near placed nests a little bit later Proc lesson young bleakest particularly important you had rather a different vision it's not what they would completely have turned against that idea of escape but they also had a downward rather than up with an ascending vision by which they would call upon divine powers call upon the gods to descend into the world for the sake of purification and the sake of aid and this is called fear G it's a sort of conjuring of the gods now a custom wasn't very keen on this as well might expect it looks rather magical looks like the worship of false gods but we might detect in here something of a worry that this Theo G looks just a little bit too much like Christian practice it might look just a little bit too much like Christian liturgy and the Eucharist for him to be entirely comfortable so it may be that part of Augustine's very vehement attack attack on Theo G is actually born out of something of a sense of kinship as often that which were closest to that elicits our greatest hostility we might see this in a reverse direction a couple of centuries earlier with the middle Platonist figure Celsus his writings have not survived in any form other than origins refutation of them but here we have a neoplatonist laying vehemently into Christian thought and practice and again we might sense that he's particularly perturbed by Christianity because he recognizes certain similarities of approach and of perspective and it's that which is nearest his perspective that he feels most threatened by if we move on a little bit further we encounter an intriguing figure pseudo-dionysius now he's called pseudo-dionysius the areopagite because his writings pass him off as being that Dionysius who meets the Apostle Paul on the Mars Hill or areopagus in Rome as is recounted in the book of Acts is rather an important passage from a philosophical perspective because it's where Paul quotes pagan philosophers are saying in God we live and move and have our being and indeed we are his offspring it's one of the most philosophical parts of the New Testament and so this corpus of writings which was attributed to that Dionysius were written probably in Syria some few centuries later but they had his name attached and once it was worked out that this author is not in fact that same Dionysius of biblical times he picks up the Edition pseudo so he's pseudo-dionysius the areopagite he drew particularly from that second tradition of Neoplatonism that i discussed and particularly from practice and Dionysius presents us with one of the heaviest attributions or heaviest appropriations of the Neoplatonic tradition within Christianity many writers will think that he's taken a good thing a little bit too far his influence was to be particularly profound in Christian spirituality and from this Neoplatonic tradition Dionysius the Areopagite took this idea of god's hiddenness or the unspeakable 'ti or unknowability of god it's a tradition that's often called a per fattest ism and it stresses what we can't know about God God's hiddenness in the darkness and he gets this from that sense of supreme transcendence that we find within Neoplatonic sources but of course it's very much in you with many biblical passages and we might think of a line from the prophet Isaiah where he says to God truly you are a God who hides himself so there was something of a natural Alliance to be made between these ideas of transcendence and unknowability which were to be found in neoplatonism passages from the bible such as that and they found their synthesis among other places in pseudo-dionysius the areopagite and he was to be particularly influential as I say on later traditions of spirituality we might think of a late 14th century English mystical texts called the Cloud of Unknowing very popular in its day and of enduring popularity in the present day and often as he's expounding this idea of God's unknowability or of some sort of paradoxical approach to God through unknowing he quotes this figure whom he gives the homely English name of Dennis - and this is Dionysius the Areopagite and his near place mizzen so we've had various sensors there of what it was in Neoplatonism that christian writers found so attractive imagine other aspects of which they were quite critical I mentioned that the early church writers were enthusiastic about what they found of creation in the writings of Plato and his followers and it's true that the idea of creation as its found in Christianity and Judaism is extremely alien to the ancient world but Plato's account of creation is still a long way from the biblical one on all sorts of levels for one thing he thought that there was eternally pre-existent matter and his creator or the Demiurge is rather a lowly figure in his hierarchy and the truth and shape of things comes from these forms these eternal forms the ideal forms of the things that we find in the world and the Demiurge has to consult them as his pattern they are in that way more excellent than him and impose those shapes and forms upon this pre-existing matter so in many ways they're a vision of creation that is at odds with the Christian one Neoplatonism in some ways got a little bit further since it sees all that exists as emanating from this transcendent figure often called the weong but here again there are some problems for Christian theology for one thing this emanation seems to be necessary that's to say it would be simply of the very nature of this plenitude earnest origin of all things to overflow where's Christian theologians wanted to say that creation was God's choice and in putting this emphasis in that way on God's will to say that all of creation is a gift because if creation just emanates or flows from God unless then it doesn't have that sort of gratuitous character to it which is what Christian theologians have want to uphold neoplatonism would also see as I've mentioned before that matter is at the very end of this cascade of being from the one so being we might say Cascades and eventually like some flow of lava eventually solidifies the heat goes out of it and that would be matter and materiality this makes matter and materiality somewhat evil or incomprehensible within the Platonic scheme and again this is rather in contrast to the Christian vision where materiality is seen to be part of God's good creation so we have the idea of necessity or creation as a gift free gift we have the idea of the goodness of materiality within the Christian vision in contrast to the idea of materiality being where the goodness of this sort of eruption eventually dies out and the third thing would be that the Neoplatonic scheme found it difficult or impossible to think that this most divine principle at the heart of the scheme would be interested or perhaps even aware of the world that's why we have this very complicated scheme of mediating figures and principles the one however is blissfully unaware of the world and contemplates only itself and in distinction to that Christian theologians wanted to say the God was both intimately aware and intimately involved in creation so whilst they found aspects of the near photonics scheme they could work with Christian theologians were also perfectly willing to be critical where they thought he departed from biblical vision [Music] this interactive multimedia tightline explores the relationship between theology and modernity beginning with the enlightenment and moving through the centuries up to the present day key philosophical works and intellectual milestones are featured at the top and theologies and theologians below behind many of these featured works are richly Illustrated videos by specialists on those seminal thinkers from Humes Heidegger from Darwin to Derrida and much in between not only are individuals explored in this timeline but also philosophical movements and theological traditions this project is also available on iPad style tablets so this timeline has the potential to develop into a chronological video encyclopedia of faith and thought [Music] you [Music]

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Published: Fri Feb 28 2014