The dualism exist exactly at the distinction between Form and Matter. Now I find it difficult to believe that as well read as you are you feign any knowledge of Platonic dualisms. Stanfords Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes:
In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4-84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato's dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics. One problem with Plato's dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.
It is here that the Gnosticism rears its ugly head and we hear notions of trying to escape the body so we might become one with the Form. Even in orthodox Christianity a theology of negation in which only by negating particularity could one come to a knowledge of God and hence a whole period of time in which ascetitism became the mode of existence for many in the Church.
For Plato escaping the world of particularity was to achieve the ideal world of the Forms. Knowledge was not possible in the world of becoming only can man have knowledge by participating in the world of eternal truths, abstract reasoning, only conceptual knowledge of the ideal world was participation in the divine. Thus this ideal world of abstract concepts is set apart as something that both God and man can participate together in.
Christianity teaches something wholly other than an abstract ideal world in which God and man participate. Christianity teaches that God is a se, that is, God is not correlative or dependent upon anything besides his own being. God is self-sufficient and is the only being who is self-sufficient. Everything else that is must, by virtue of God's aseity, be dependent upon and derived from that unique being and be an altogether different kind of being. Unfortunately Romanism holds to a synthesis of Platonism and Christianity via Aquinas' Analogia Entis. In this schema he makes God correlative to creation or creation as an emanation of the Godhead through the great chain of being thus reducing God's aseity. But God's aseity is clearly self-contained in his ontological trinitarian being not needing any complementation or fulfillment for he has absolute unity and absolute particularity within himself.
That being the case what can be said of the creature? First we must dump any notion of a general being and any of idea of man participating in the being of God. As Christians then we must acknowledge a two level ontology that comes to expression in the Creator/creature distinction. Having thus disposed with any notion of a univocal metaphysics we come to realize the uniqueness of God's being and that everything else exists derivatively and dependently based upon God's fiat creation and that which was not but called into existence before any extraneous knowledge of him existed. Creation then was the first step in extra divine knowledge.
The question becomes how can man have any knowledge of God when such a great distinction exists between the Creator and the creature? Simply, that God condescended himself to make himself known by way of the imago dei in which he reveals something of himself by way of nature, through mans conscience and his providential ordering of history.
In summary we could say that created reality is not being but meaning. It is dependent and refers to God and created things are only the bearers of meaning and in no way self-sufficient. In this we no longer need to have being and meaning as two different things. Ontology and Epistemolgy are united. Here then we avoid the notion that only meaning refers to God but being only refers to itself. The two layer level of ontology is the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God.
This is nonsense.. Its possible that know that.. Maybe a diversion?..
The link for the Stanford article is here.
In reply, I again aver what I mentioned earlier at post 215 and 211: context, context, context.
The discussion at Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not Spiritual. It is philosophy. One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters. That doesn't mean his contributions were worthless or not according to God's will.
Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:11-14
For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.
And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. – I Corinthians 2:1-5
But Plato's thoughts do not substitute for the words of God. The words of God are spirit and life, the words of men are neither spirit nor life:
To God be the glory!
Well of course it does one_conscience! But don’t blame Plato for never having heard of Jesus Christ, since he lived ~400 years before the coming of our Lord. Plato had no awareness of God as Personality. Until the Incarnation of Christ, God as Person was not made fully manifest to mankind. Instead, Plato was aware of God as the Beyond of the Kosmos, the Source of its life (being) and order. He sensed Him as “Mind,” as the divine Nous. And thus he reasoned that, since man also possesses nous, divine–human conversation is possible. (Many Christians would testify to this.) And because the world is divinely ordered by Nous, it is discoverable by means of human nous. (That presumption lies at the very root of modern science.)
It’s as if Plato is to be blamed for repudiating Christ — which he never got an opportunity to do since our Lord did not come until four centuries after his death.
I have noticed a decided antipathy to the great classical thinkers among many Reformed Church sects/confessions; and by extension, antipathy for the scholastic philosophical tradition of the Roman Church, as if it had claimed for itself a “new, improved revelation” to be super-added to the Holy Scriptures (it does not make that claim and never has). Your characterization of Thomas Aquinas as somehow arguing that God is co-extensive with His creation appears utterly false to me. You realize, of course, that this would be a prescription for pantheism. Saint and Doctor Thomas, Trinitarian to his roots in spirit and intellect, would never make such an egregious mistake.
Thomas — as all the great doctors of the Church, e.g., Augustine and Anselm — is on bended knee to the “aseity” of God, His a se, complete, total, eternal self-subsistence and self-completeness, needing nothing to be eternally perfect. He is Creator and sustainer of all that there is, the tetragrammatical god YHWH, “I Am That Am,” the Father of Being, “beyond” the world of created things, and inaccessible to human reason; He is the Logos of creation, the Son of God Who is the Word of God, for whom and by whom were all things made, the Alpha and the Omega; He is the Spirit of God with us, bringing us into relation with the Son and, by His sacrifice, restoring us to our Father.
As for Plato’s position on the matter,
In the Republic, the beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence (pareinai) it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful (kallion) and higher in rank (hyperechontos) of dignity and power than the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge…. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, “the god” becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of is existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the Helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference. — Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works Vol. 12.It seems where you see a dualism — e.g., the division of man into body and soul, and the dualism of form and matter — I see a complementarity. A complementarity is a situation where one has two seemingly mutually exclusive entities, both of which are necessary to the total description of the system which they together comprise. The fact is that, although we can conceptually separate body and soul in order to study them, a living man cannot be separated into the entities body and soul and still live. He exists in spatiotemporal reality only while they are conjoined. Here I take you to task for the same error you charged me with in my earlier discussion of the Great Hierarchy of Being, that I was focusing on the four partners as if they were separable — which they are not. To see them as separable is to miss the point that it is their mutually dynamic relations that constitute spacetime reality as human beings experience it.
As my dearest sister in Christ Alamo-Girl puts it, what is needed for understanding here is “context, context, context.”
In closing, I’d only like to suggest that “the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God” had been anticipated by Plato.
Thank you ever so much, one_conscience, for your excellent, thought-provoking essay/post!