On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation

November 30, 2004 | Jean F. Drew

[betty boop]

When you don't want to answer a question, though, you really don't need to supply me with wordy justifications.

Point of order, Machette: I mentioned in my first reply that I disliked taking questions such as yours, and did in fact decline to answer it directly. You continue to question me. Pace.

[Matchett-PI]

betty boop: "I mentioned in my first reply that I disliked taking questions such as yours, and did in fact decline to answer it directly. You continue to question me"

LOL

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1291601/posts?page=133#133

[Agrarian]

From the article: "It [a statement by St. Justin Martyr] is the first time in Christian theology that we find so concise an explanation of the difference that separates Christian revelation from human speculation.”

Your question: "The first time? Is this true, or just limited by their (non)access to our writings?"

I haven't had time to read the entire article, and I'm afraid that my contributions to this will be pretty simplistic compared to the more elevated fare.

I think that it is pretty common to conceive of "theology" as what writers in the Church taught, wrote, or thought after the time of the writing of the Scriptures. (Whereas we as Orthodox would look at theology as a seamless robe that is part and parcel in the life of the Church from the founding of the Church outside the gates of the garden of Eden up until this present day. Christian theology didn't start with the post apostolic era, or even with the apostolic era.. Regardless of that, St. Justin is a very early writer, so by these lights, it wouldn't surprise me that any number of things might "appear first" there."

That, of course, does not mean that it is a new idea. As the author of the article states, St. Justin "insisted that human wisdom was impossible without the testimony of the Prophets." I think that it is always important to remember that the early Christian apologists made no claims to be able, in their disputes with pagans, to "prove" the truth of Christianity via logic. Their task was to prove that the Christian faith was reasonable. That it was reasonable, and not complete and utter foolishness to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed by the prophets, and now known in Trinity and revealed on earth in the person of the God-man Jesus Christ.

What makes this bit of revelation vs. human speculation new is that with the advent of Christ, the faith of the Church is now free to and must come into direct contact and interaction with pagan philosophy. It certainly pops up in the New Testament where the framework of the apologetics directed towards both pagan and Jew were encapsulated in St. Paul's statement that the Cross was foolishness to the former and a stumbling block to the latter.

Faith itself, for the apologists, could only come through divine revelation -- in Scripture, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the continuing living presence of the Holy Spirit in the church. Their job was to remove intellectual and religious barriers to faith in Christ. They partly did that by showing the reasonableness of the faith itself, and partly by showing the unreasonableness and outright foolishness of pagan beliefs and teachings.

Looking at the article, the quotation cited from St. Justin is "We cannot know God as we know music, arithmetic, or astronomy." The author goes on to state that St. Justin is saying that "it is necessary for us to know God not with an abstract knowledge but as we know any person with whom we have relations."

It is interesting that the author elsewhere discusses the experience of the Prophet Moses with the burning bush. The Hebrew is usually translated as "I am that I am." The Greek phrase that contains -- 'o On -- (which is on every single icon of Christ, identifying him explicitly as Jehovah who revealed himself to man and interacted with man in the Old Testament) literally means "he who is." This is even more personal than "I am," which can have a bit of an abstract flavor to it.

Perhaps an interesting place to look for where these things could have been discussed would be in the Alexandrian Jewish writings -- Philo, etc... Surely they wrestled with the issue of the relationship of philosophical speculation and divine revelation. I suspect that because entrance into the religious community that worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was so difficult and relatively rare prior to the time of Christ, and because there was no directive to convert people prior to the Christian era, such apologetics wouldn't have been engaged in much, if at all. Anyway, those are my thoughts off the top of my head.

Thanks for the ping to the interesting article, which I will later read in more depth (although I probably won't understand the philosophical parts...)

[Baraonda]

"A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them." - Suzanne K. Langer

[Matchett-PI]

"Faith itself, for the apologists, could only come through divine revelation -- in Scripture, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the continuing living presence of the Holy Spirit in the church. Their job was to remove intellectual and religious barriers to faith in Christ. They partly did that by showing the reasonableness of the faith itself, and partly by showing the unreasonableness and outright foolishness of pagan beliefs and teachings."

And in spite of the best efforts of those apologists who tirelessly defend the faith, pagan beliefs are daily being promoted (wittingly or unwittingly) by professing Christians.

For instance, one of the pagan beliefs about the soul is back in popular fashion again today in some religious circles.

Pre-existentianism is the term used for the idea that the souls of people exist in heaven long before their bodies are conceived in the wombs of their mothers, and that God then brings the soul to earth to be joined with the baby's body as he or she grows in the womb.

But this view is not held by either Roman Catholic or Protestant theologians and is dangerously akin to ideas of reincarnation found in Eastern religions.

There is no support for this view in Scripture. Before we were conceived in the wombs of our mothers we simply did not exist, in spite of what pagans would like to believe.

[betty boop]

...the early Christian apologists made no claims to be able, in their disputes with pagans, to "prove" the truth of Christianity via logic. Their task was to prove that the Christian faith was reasonable. That it was reasonable, and not complete and utter foolishness to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed by the prophets, and now known in Trinity and revealed on earth in the person of the God-man Jesus Christ.... What makes this bit of revelation vs. human speculation new is that with the advent of Christ, the faith of the Church is now free to and must come into direct contact and interaction with pagan philosophy. It certainly pops up in the New Testament where the framework of the apologetics directed towards both pagan and Jew were encapsulated in St. Paul's statement that the Cross was foolishness to the former and a stumbling block to the latter.

Oh, what a glorious and heart-wrenching essay, Agrarian (e.g., esp. re: St. Paul's statement). Thank you oh, so very much for this post!

[Agrarian]

Yes, and this shows that the job of apologetics is never done, and that each generation must deal (without passion) with the things it faces.

There is a great passage, in St. Athanasius somewhere, I think, that my wife really likes. He basically says that no matter how tired we get of doing it, and how ridiculous the things are that we are having to refute, we have to go through the drudgery of doing so, because there will always be someone foolish enough to believe them if they are allowed to pass unrefuted.

The trick, of course, nowadays is to accomplish this without seeming too harsh or shrill -- in our society that makes for an instant "ear-closing event..."

Of course, the pre-existence of souls is nothing new as a Christian heresy. No less an intellect than Origen -- who was incredibly brilliant, very pious, and whose process of "doing theology" underlies much of patristic thought -- fell prey to entertaining the possibility of this idea. He was condemned (posthumously) by the Church for it.

Pre-existence of souls is taught by the Mormons, incidentally, but has, as you say, absolutely no place in Christian teaching and has been condemned by the Church specifically. As to re-incarnation -- that is yet another step further away...

[StJacques]

Ok, I'm back now, I wanted to get this done earlier but we just had our congressional runoff election here in Louisiana Saturday and for at least a couple of days I was quite busy. I see we've had quite a bit of discussion on mathematics but I still want to comment on some questions raised in the original post and to elucidate further comments I made in my post #84.

On Science, Plato, and the Early Church

I want to focus attention on the intellectual ferment that existed in the Hellenistic world as Christianity grew in influence and its impact upon the form of intellectual, and by implication purely scientific, debate in western philosophy afterwards. I want to emphasize two important aspects of this ferment; the ever-present epistemological question "what is the source of knowledge?" and the real-world nature of intellectual debate as it may exist at any time, when contrasting the "speculative" versus the "experimental," by which I mean that speculation forces the quest for knowledge internally or inwardly and the experimental projects that focus outwardly into the material world. And I raise these two aspects because I believe that the major philosophical debates that were resolved as Christian doctrine coalesced into a unified, coherent, and dominant body of thought in the work of Augustine put in place a belief system that defined the context of the emergence of scientific thought in the modern era, even though the rules of science as we now know them were outside that belief system.

When we usually view the Graeco-Roman or Hellenistic philosophical tradition, the principal emphasis we make is the definition of the distinct world-views inherent in the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and especially in terms of their differing epistemological systems. Plato held that knowledge, of whatever kind, reflected an ideal formal reality which humanity could only represent in some imperfect fashion, since the "world of forms" was of a higher order of reality than the plane of human existence. Aristotle in contrast developed the empirical tradition that knowledge comes from experience. And beyond this restricted emphasis on the Platonic-Aristotelian conflict most who study the philosophy of the ancient world only very briefly touch upon all the rest, except for an examination of the rise of Christian thought. This focus should not be regarded as unexpected, since we study history to explain the present and it is only natural that we would want to trace the origins of modern thought when we examine the intellectual ideas of the past. But the Platonic-Aristotelian conflict was only the central focus of intellectual debate among the ancient Greeks for a very short time and by the dawn of the Christian era it had become subsumed within a larger and more splintered philosophical struggle that, aside from the rise of Christianity itself, is either mentioned in the briefest manner or overlooked altogether when studied as history.

At the dawn of the Christian era we can see a broad and diverse philosophical debate underway in the Hellenistic world. The Romans, by this time the dominant power in the region, had thoroughly absorbed Greek rationalist philosophy to the point where we can treat the varied philosophical movements as simulataneously occurring within a unified culture. And the lines of the Platonic-Aristotelian epistemological conflict that draws our attention when we look at the history of scientific thought is essentially external to the divisions we can identify between these groups, because their focus was primarily upon Ethics and Metaphysics or, to place this within the context of the "real-world nature" of intellectual debate I introduced earlier, Hellenistic philosophical debate was of a speculative nature and only concerned itself with the physical world as a means of acquiring knowledge that either could inform ethical conduct or place metaphysical questions in sharper focus.. The Epicureans, who were the true materialists of this period and the one group who could have moved scientific inquiry forward but did not, developed a hedonistic ethical philosophy built around pleasure and pain, used the atomic theory of Democritus to explain the physical world and relied upon Aristotle's empiricism as necessary to understanding the physical sensations that revealed that which is good. The Stoics concentrated on the development of an individually-centered code of moral and ethical conduct but they adopted Aristotle's empirical reasoning and had their own primitive version of what we later recognize as Locke's Tabula Rasa model for explaining the growth of knowledge, but they held knowledge of the external world to be secondary to knowledge of one's self. And the NeoPlatonists, who continued the Platonic tradition in metaphysical reasoning, seem to have borrowed from almost every other school of thought, though they generally doubted the value of empirical reasoning. And we can add other traditions of Greek rationalist thought that we may not necessarily define as "schools," such as Cynicism and Skepticism, that nonetheless informed many of problems in rational discourse. But the sum total of all of this is that the development of early Christian thought began within a rational debate that treated the natural sciences as a secondary pursuit.

This is the environment of Hellenistic rational thought into which Augustine finds himself immersed at the end of the fourth century as he continued in the tradition of St. Paul and attempted to reconcile the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans with that of a still fluid body of Christian thought, that had its own divisive internal controvesies. Chief among these were the competing "heresies," as we now call them, that addressed the central problem of the Trinity. Constantine's convening of th Council of Nicea in 325 attempted to put these conflicts to rest, but the mere official stamp of church doctrine did not silence debate effectively. In addition to the official church version of the Trinity emobodied in the Nicean Creed two major alternatives still held sway among many Christians, the Arian heresy, which held that Christ was was not divine and was quite popular, and the Sabellian heresy, which argued that the three distinctions within the Trinity were three modes of being of the one God rather than coexisting separately and eternally. You can add to that many minor heresies such as Donatism, which argued that personal piety trumped church authority, and Pelagianism, which held that original sin did not taint the rest of humanity after Adam and that men could earn salvation by their free will alone. Augustine's daunting task was that he had to make Christian doctrine understandable and acceptable as rational philosophy and authoritative in seeking to resolve doctrinal disputes within Christianity. What is truly remarkable, one is almost tempted to say "miraculous" were it not for the overtones the word creates in the present context, is that he succeeded.

In the City of God Augustine proposed a Dualist philosophy that was part cosmology and part philosophy of history that separated the earthly from the divine and, in the process, gave himself what we might describe as "two playing fields" upon which to address matters of theological doctrine and earthly philosophy. According to Augustine there were two "histories" that ran simultaneously; the divine history, Civitate Dei, and human history, Civitate Homo, whose paths only crossed at a few points. The limited intersection of the two had an important epistemological meaning as addressed by rationalist philosophy, because Augustine postulated a third potential source of knowledge outside of formal ideas and experience, namely; that Revelation was a source of knowledge made known to man in holy scripture, and that one could best approach truth through a meaningful search for knowledge within scripture. But Augustine also worked hard to limit man's ability to call upon Revelation in a willfull search for knowledge. While Augustine saw the entirety of scripture as the "revealed word of God," which meant that he had to recognize numerous instances of the divine history intersecting with human existence, especially in the Old Testament, he also argued that the Old Testament prophecies had been fulfilled and that there was one remaining event of the divine history yet to be written [in human terms], that of the Last Judgement. In a larger sense Augustine saw three great events in human history when the intersection of the divine and human history became clear; the Fall from Grace of Adam and Eve, the Incarnation of Christ, and the Last Judgement. The first two had already occured and the third was impending, though no one could know for certain when it might arrive, we could just say that we live in Anno Domini, the "year of our lord." Yes, it is Augustine who is responsible for the very way we see time. And with the "sacred history" all but complete humanity should concern itself with secular matters, especially as they related to building morally-upright societies.

Augustine's confrontation with rational philosophy was equally important to the general acceptance of his intellectual worthiness within his own day and as a guideline to Christian attitudes thereafter. He recognized Christianity as a belief system in the tradition of Plato, and in doing so rejected both the empiricism and materialism of the Epicureans and the simple empiricism of the Stoics, but in his ideational philosophy he made a key revision to Plato's Theory of Reflection with his ownTheory of Illumination, in which Augustine held that since formal reality was divine, which was his Christian perspective on Platonic theory, that knowledge of things originated in the divine being. Illumination has been confused with Revelation by many Christian theologians who followed Augustine, but the two were quite different. Revelation was knowledge of truth gained through scripture, Illumination was knowledge of truth gained through ideas and incorporated Logic, which Augustine knew very well from his long service as a Rhetor (one who teaches Logic and Rhetoric) as well as observation. But clearly Illumination was not a concept that encouraged investigation of the natural sciences, even though Augustine was quite interested in them earlier in his life. These were the terms of what may be called the "Augustinian Settlement." The sacred and secular were distinct and humanity was encouraged to dwell upon the secular life, but more in terms of Morals and Ethics than an examination of the physical world. The Augustinian emphasis, which went without any significant challenge until Thomas Aquinas over eight hundred years later, was upon a fixed body of knowledge from Revelation and a growing amount of human knowledge from Illumination, and the speculative controversies of the late Roman world, which had been ongoing since the rise of classical Greek philosophy some seven hundred years earlier, subsided. And inquiry into the natural sciences came to almost a complete end.

The Development of Modern Rationalism, Natural Law Philosophy, and Scientific Method

We can now roll the clock forward a little over twelve hundred years to the mid-seventeenth century to next important debate, the outcome of which framed the context within which we viewed its predecessor. Many of us understand that modern scientific thought began with the explosion of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment that followed Issac Newton's development of his Natural Law Philosophy, which was complete in that it had a clear epistemology, which is that knowledge is gained from experience; it had a fully-developed method of acquiring knowledge, which was inductive reasoning embodied in his scientific method; and, perhaps most importantly, it answered a pressing need of its time, which was that it gave everyone a means to apply rational thought to the development of technology which, coming on the heels of the reawakened interest in independent thinking that the Renaissance provided, was already proceeding to reshape the material lives of Europeans with advances on all fronts of human endeavor. Newton's triumph was so complete that it forced almost every other discipline of intellectual thought to adjust to determine what were the "natural laws" that applied to its particular area of interest. Enlightenment thinkers began to ask what were the laws of mathematics, physics, biology, botany, chemistry, social interaction, and even politics. No form of intellectual endeavor was left untouched. And the result of all of this was that it left empirically-validated "scientific thought" enthroned as the true antidote to superstitious and mystical reasoning to the point where most in the western world have come to equate empirical scientific reasoning with rationalism itself, which is a mistake. But nonetheless, science and rationalist thought are largely synonomous in the popular consciousness just the same.

The key period that bears remembering in my opinion, is the previous thirty to forty years that preceded Newton's publication of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, and perhaps continuing a short time thereafter, before the full effects of the Newtonian revolution had took root. During that period European thought already had begun to move towards a more fully-developed definition of "Rationalism," and not everyone took the same approach or operated under the same assumptions as did Newton and those who followed in his wake. This is something that is recognized in college level "History of Modern Philosophy" courses that usually begin with the "Rationalist - Empiricist" debate of the seventeenth century that primarily pitted the ideas of the French mathematician-logician René Descartes against those of the English intellectual John Locke. In this more useful distinction the "Rationalists," who include Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz; begin the attempt to restart modern philosophy and to focus its attention on reason itself. Their approach was speculative, Descartes even began his systematic reasoning by doubting his own existence. They proposed a hierarchy of knowledge that placed intuition at the top, which put them squarely within the tradition of Plato's formalistic philosophy, they relied upon a deductive method of reasoning that gave precedence to Logic and Mathematics, and they did not ignore observation of real-world phenomena but believed that the essence of observation was of little value until it was enhanced by logic through "demonstration," which placed it at the bottom rung of their epistimelogical ladder. The Rationalists also did not rule out metaphysical inquiry as a legitimate intellectual pursuit in fact, for Spinoza at least, it may have been at the core of his thought. Descartes spent a good deal of time working out logical proofs for the existence of God, Spinoza argued forcefully that God and Nature were one, and Leibniz's Monadology attempted to provide a mathematical justification that God was "the necessary being which constitutes the explanation of contingent being, why the universe is this way rather than any other." But the overall approach of the "Rationalists" was largely rejected in favor of the "Empiricist" alternative when the Newtonian revolution moved scientific thought, inductive reasoning, and materialistic philosophy into the forefront of intellectual pursuit. I submit that the principal reason why this happened is that the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment was an "experimental age" in which Europeans were looking for answers that would help them reshape the material world around them and what Newton, scientific method, Empiricism, and the Aristotelian epistemological tradition had to offer much more directly suited their needs than the specualtive philosophy of the Cartesian Rationalists. But that does not deny that the "Rationalists" were still, ultimately, "rational."

A Final Thought on Rationalism and the "Purpose of Science"

As we sit and ponder the meaning of all of this for science and we ask ourselves to what purpose science can be put, we must remember that this is not a "scientific" question, but rather an ethical one and asking it requires that we think about Ethics in new ways, not science. As we discuss the "purpose of science" we must be careful that we do not surrender to science that which science never purported to take from us in the first place -- our souls. Rendering science a service to humanity is a question of Ethics, and a very important one at that, and it permits us to rationally discuss and speculate upon the need for religious meaning in our lives.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your excellent essay post, StJacques! It was quite an engaging tour of the history of philosophy, in particular with reference to science.

All I can add is for any Lurker interested in reading more about a personal testimony of one of the earliest Church Fathers: Justin Marytr's (100-165 A.D.) dialogue with Trypho.

In this excerpt, Martyr describes his own path in studying philosophy: (I took the liberty of making paragraph breaks for easier reading) -

Justin Martyr

CHAP. II.--JUSTIN DESCRIBES HIS STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY.

"I will tell you," said I, "what seems to me; for philosophy is, in fact, the greatest possession, and most honourable before God,(1) to whom it leads us and alone commends us; and these are truly holy men who have bestowed attention on philosophy. What philosophy is, however, and the reason why it has been sent down to men, have escaped the observation of most; for there would be neither Platonists, nor Stoics, nor Peripatetics, nor Theoretics,(2) nor Pythagoreans, this knowledge being one.(3)

I wish to tell you why it has become many-headed. It has happened that those who first handled it [i.e., philosophy], and who were therefore esteemed illustrious men, were succeeded by those who made no investigations concerning truth, but only admired the perseverance and self-discipline of the former, as well as the novelty of the doctrines; and each thought that to be true which he learned from his teacher: then, moreover, those latter persons handed down to their successors such things, and others similar to them; and this system was called by the name of him who was styled the father of the doctrine.

Being at first desirous of personally conversing with one of these men, I surrendered myself to a certain Stoic; and having spent a considerable time with him, when I had not acquired any further knowledge of God (for he did not know himself, and said such instruction was unnecessary), I left him and betook myself to another, who was called a Peripatetic, and as he fancied, shrewd. And this man, after having entertained me for the first few days, requested me to settle the fee, in order that our intercourse might not be unprofitable. Him, too, for this reason I abandoned, believing him to be no philosopher at all.

But when my soul was eagerly desirous to hear the peculiar and choice philosophy, I came to a Pythagorean, very celebrated--a man who thought much of his own wisdom. And then, when I had an interview with him, willing to become his hearer and disciple, he said, 'What then? Are you acquainted with music, astronomy, and geometry? Do you expect to perceive any of those things which conduce to a happy life, if you have not been first informed on those points which wean the soul from sensible objects, and render it fitted for objects which appertain to the mind, so that it can contemplate that which is honourable in its essence and that which is good in its essence?' Having commended many of these branches of learning, and telling me that they were necessary, he dismissed me when I confessed to him my ignorance.

Accordingly I took it rather impatiently, as was to be expected when I failed in my hope, the more so because I deemed the man had some knowledge; but reflecting again on the space of time during which I would have to linger over those branches of learning, I was not able to endure longer procrastination.

In my helpless condition it occurred to me to have a meeting with the Platonists, for their fame was great. I thereupon spent as much of my time as possible with one who had lately settled in our city,(4)--a sagacious man, holding a high position among the Platonists,--and I progressed, and made the greatest improvements daily. And the perception of immaterial things quite overpowered me, and the contemplation of ideas furnished my mind with wings,(5) so that in a little while I supposed that I had become wise; and such was my stupidity, I expected forthwith to look upon God, for this is the end of Plato's philosophy.

(some really great chapters omitted here in the interest of bandwidth…)

VI.--THESE THINGS WERE UNKNOWN PLATO AND OTHER PHILOSOPHERS.

"'It makes no matter to me,' said he, 'whether Plato or Pythagoras, or, in short, any other man held such opinions. For the truth is so; and you would perceive it from this. The soul assuredly is or has life. If, then, it is life, it would cause something else, and not itself, to live, even as motion would move something else than itself. Now, that the soul lives, no one would deny. But if it lives, it lives not as being life, but as the partaker of life; but that which partakes of anything, is different from that of which it does partake. Now the soul partakes of life, since God wills it to live. Thus, then, it will not even partake [of life] when God does not will it to live. For to live is not its attribute, as it is God's; but as a man does not live always, and the soul is not for ever conjoined with the body, since, whenever this harmony must be broken up, the soul leaves the body, and the man exists no longer; even so, whenever the soul must cease to exist, the spirit of life is removed from it, and there is no more soul, but it goes back to the place from whence it was taken.'

CHAP. VII.--THE KNOWLEDGE OF TRUTH TO BE SOUGHT FROM THE PROPHETS ALONE.

"'Should any one, then, employ a teacher?' I say, 'or whence may any one be helped, if not even in them there is truth?'

"'There existed, long before this time, certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers, both righteous and beloved by God, who spoke by the Divine Spirit, and foretold events which would take place, and which are now taking place. They are called prophets. These alone both saw and announced the truth to men, neither reverencing nor fearing any man, not influenced by a desire for glory, but speaking those things alone which they saw and which they heard, being filled with the Holy Spirit. Their writings are still extant, and he who has read them is very much helped in his knowledge of the beginning and end of things, and of those matters which the philosopher ought to know, provided he has believed them.

For they did not use demonstration in their treatises, seeing that they were witnesses to the truth above all demonstration, and worthy of belief; and those events which have happened, and those which are happening, compel you to assent to the utterances made by them, although, indeed, they were entitled to credit on account of the miracles which they performed, since they both glorified the Creator, the God and Father of all things, and proclaimed His Son, the Christ [sent] by Him: which, indeed, the false prophets, who are filled with the lying unclean spirit, neither have done nor do, but venture to work certain wonderful deeds for the purpose of astonishing men, and glorify the spirits and demons of error.

But pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to you; for these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and His Christ have imparted wisdom.'

CHAP. VIII.--JUSTIN BY HIS COLLOQUY IS KINDLED WITH LOVE TO CHRIST.

"When he had spoken these and many other things, which there is no time for mentioning at present, he went away, bidding me attend to them; and I have not seen him since. But straightway a flame was kindled in my soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in my mind, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable. Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher. Moreover, I would wish that all, making a resolution similar to my own, do not keep themselves away from the words of the Saviour. For they possess a terrible power in themselves, and are sufficient to inspire those who turn aside from the path of rectitude with awe; while the sweetest rest is afforded those who make a diligent practice of them. If, then, you have any concern for yourself, and if you are eagerly looking for salvation, and if you believe in God, you may--since you are not indifferent to the matter.(1)--become acquainted with the Christ of God, and, after being initiated,(2) live a happy life."

[GOPJ]

This seems like an unsustainable leap in logic:

But Plato’s great insight is that all things in the state of becoming — that is, all existing things — are whatever they are because they are participations in Being. That is to say, “we perceive the trace of being in all that exists,” writes Smith, “and that is why we say, with reference to any particular thing, that it is.” Existence, in other words, is contingent on Being.

But we wonder: In what way is this possible? And if existents participate in being, what is that Being in which they participate?

[StJacques]

Thanks for the reply Alamo-Girl. I am familiar with Justin.

Since some of the ideas present in Justin's dialog, and I speak especially of Platonic thought being an underpinning for Christian theology and the "words of the Prophets" being truth, equivalent to "Revelation as Knowledge" in Augustine, I would like to mention something I thought about including in what I wrote on Augustine, but omitted for space, which is that in many respects Augustine represents a synthesis of many ideas of Christian belief present in the Graeco-Roman world but not yet pulled together in a coherent and cohesive body of thought. But if I introduce synthesis, then I can go on and on without end. Lord knows I put up enough to chew on in what I did write.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for the encouragement! Your essay was great and I'm sure we'd all love to hear more on your "take" on Augustine and synthesis.

This entire thread is a treasure for me. It is bookmarked because sometimes a point made here or there on a truly great thread has bearing for a future discussion as well.

[GOPJ]

I read my granddaughter the story of Plato taking to his student about his father not letting him race the chariots. The father let the slave race the chariots - a clear indication to the kid that the father favored the slave. She learned, she laughed and I laughed. Plato's eternal. Yep, he's real.

There was probably no such person as Plato.

Dream on, kiddo.

[KingNo155]

BUMP

[StJacques]

"This seems like an unsustainable leap in logic:

But Plato’s great insight is that all things in the state of becoming — that is, all existing things — are whatever they are because they are participations in Being. That is to say, “we perceive the trace of being in all that exists,” writes Smith, “and that is why we say, with reference to any particular thing, that it is.” Existence, in other words, is contingent on Being.

But we wonder: In what way is this possible? And if existents participate in being, what is that Being in which they participate?"

---

Actually, the logic in this case is that one can infer qualities of some things (existents) from the nature of all thing[s] (being), which is logically valid. The reverse would be to try to infer the nature of all thing[s] from some things, which is logically invalid.

In Logic you learn within the so-called "Square of Opposition" that a statement "All S are P" is a "superaltern" to the "subaltern" statement "Some S are P" and the Rule of Subalternation is that the superaltern implies the subaltern, while the subaltern does not imply the superaltern.

Ahem!

[StJacques]

". . . This entire thread is a treasure for me. . . ."

Yes; thank you for the thread betty. It's a shame I was so busy over the past few days because I would have loved to jumped in within the middle part of a few of those discussions, especially those concerning mathematics. But I'm enjoying reading it just the same.

[Matchett-PI]

"Of course, the pre-existence of souls is nothing new as a Christian heresy. No less an intellect than Origen -- who was incredibly brilliant, very pious, and whose process of "doing theology" underlies much of patristic thought -- fell prey to entertaining the possibility of this idea. He was condemned (posthumously) by the Church for it."

From the very beginning, man has been tempted to believe he is like God [Genesis 3:4-5]. Every lie that has ever been, or will be perpetuated in the Christian religion, stems from the desire of arrogant man to be a god.

"There is a great passage, in St. Athanasius somewhere, I think, that my wife really likes. He basically says that no matter how tired we get of doing it, and how ridiculous the things are that we are having to refute, we have to go through the drudgery of doing so, because there will always be someone foolish enough to believe them if they are allowed to pass unrefuted."

Is this the one you're talking about?:

".. I have written a short account of the sufferings which ourselves and the Church have undergone, refuting, according to my ability, the accursed heresy of the Arian madmen, and proving how entirely it is alien from the Truth. And ..what pains the writing of these things has cost me, in order that you may understand thereby how truly the blessed Apostle has said, ‘O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God' and may kindly bear with a weak man such as I am by nature.

For the more I desired to write, and endeavoured to force myself to understand the Divinity of the Word, so much the more did the knowledge thereof withdraw itself from me; and in proportion as I thought that I apprehended it, in so much I perceived myself to fail of doing so. Moreover also I was unable to express in writing even what I seemed to myself to understand; and that which I wrote was unequal to the imperfect shadow of the truth which existed in my conception.

.... For although a perfect apprehension of the truth is at present far removed from us by reason of the infirmity of the flesh, yet it is possible, as the Preacher [Solomon] himself has said, to perceive the madness of the impious, and having found it, to say that it is ‘more bitter than death.

Wherefore for this reason, as perceiving this and able to find it out, I have written, knowing that to the faithful the detection of impiety is a sufficient information wherein piety consists.

For although it be impossible to comprehend what God is, yet it is possible to say what He is not.

And we know that He is not as man; and that it is not lawful to conceive of any originated nature as existing in Him. .....

Accordingly I have written as well as I was able; and you, dearly beloved, receive these communications not as containing a perfect exposition of the Godhead of the Word, but as being merely a refutation of the impiety of the enemies of Christ, and as containing and affording to those who desire it, suggestions for arriving at a pious and sound faith in Christ. And if in anything they are defective (and I think they are defective in all respects), pardon it with a pure conscience, and only receive favourably the boldness of my good intentions in support of godliness.

For an utter condemnation of the heresy of the Arians .... that the heresy is hated of God, however it may have men for its patrons..... Amen.’ ~ Athanasius (Letter LII-written 358-360) HERE

[Alamo-Girl]

It's a shame I was so busy over the past few days because I would have loved to jumped in within the middle part of a few of those discussions, especially those concerning mathematics.

Seems to me the love of mathematics runs so deeply that, if you were to ping some of the posters to your comments, they'd want come back to the discussion.

[Matchett-PI]

"All I can add is for any Lurker interested in reading more about a personal testimony of one of the earliest Church Fathers: Justin Marytr's (100-165 A.D.) dialogue with Trypho."

A link from my personal archives: Justin Martyr / Typhro a Jew

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the link - however, it says the page cannot be displayed. I'll try later.