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

On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation
By Jean F. Drew

God, purposing to make the universe most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible beings, created one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order.

Thus does Plato (d. 347 B.C.) succinctly describe how all that exists is ultimately a single, living organism. At Timaeus20, he goes on to say:

“There exists: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination … second, that which bears the same name as the form and resembles it … and third, space which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be.”

And thus we find a description of the universe in which Being and Existence (Becoming) — the one God and the multiplicity of things — are bound together as a single living reality whose extension is mediated by Space (which for us moderns implies Time).

Our aim in this essay is to define these ideas and their relationships, and trace their historical development from the ancient world to the present. Taking a page from the late Eric Voegelin (1901–1985, philosopher of history specializing in the evolution of symbolization), we will follow a history-of-ideas approach to these issues. Along the way we will find that not only philosophy and cosmology, but also theology and even modern science can illuminate these seminal conceptions of Platonic thought. We must begin at the beginning, that is, with God — who is absolute Being in Plato’s speculation, of whom the cosmos itself is but the image (eikon) or reflection.

When Plato speaks of God (or when Aristotle does for that matter, as in e.g., Nicomachean Ethics), he is not referring to the Olympian gods, to Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the rest of the gang of “immortals.” For the Olympians are like man in that they are creatures of a creating God. Not only that, but they are a second generation of gods, the first having reigned in the antediluvian Age of Chronos; which is to say that the Olympians’ rule or law is not everlasting, but contingent. Thus they are not self-subsistent, but dependent (contingent) on a principle outside of themselves. We might say that the central difference between Plato’s God and the Olympians consists in the fact that the latter are “intracosmic” gods, and the former is “extracosmic,” that is, transcending all categories and conditions of space-time reality. In contrast, the intracosmic gods are subject to change, to contingency; and so, though they may truly be said to exist in some fashion, cannot be said to possess true Being. (More on these distinctions in a minute.)

It is clear that for Plato, God is the “Beyond” of the universe, or in other words, utterly transcendent, perfectly self-subsistent Being, the “uncaused cause” of all the multiplicity of existents in the universe. In yet other words we can say that, for Plato, the cosmos is a theophany, a manifestation or “presence” of the divine Idea — in Christian parlance, the Logos if I might draw that association — in the natural world.

As Wolfgang Smith notes, “Christian teaching is based upon the doctrine of the Logos, the Word of God, a term which in itself clearly suggests the idea of theophany. Moreover, what is implicit in the famous Prologue of St. John [“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1–5)] is openly affirmed by St. Paul when he declares that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world have been clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20) … The indisputable fact is that at its deepest level Christianity perceives the cosmos as a self-revelation of God.” [Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 1984]

Being and Existence (Becoming)
Being is a concept so difficult that it comes close to eluding our grasp altogether. It is utterly beyond space and time; imperishable; entirely self-subsistent, needing nothing from outside itself in order to be complete; essential; immutable; and eternally perduring. Contrast this with the concept of existence, regarding which Plato asks “how can that which is never in the same state be anything?” And this is the clue to the profound difference between being and existence: The existing things of this world are mutable and transient.

We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. [Timaeus, 3:28]

“… they come upon the scene, we know not from whence; they grow, change, and decay; and at last they disappear, to be seen no more. The physical cosmos itself, we are told, is a case in point: it, too, has made its appearance, perhaps some twenty billion years ago, and will eventually cease to exist [i.e., finally succumbing, we are told, to thermodynamic entropy or “heat death”]. What is more, even now, at this very moment, all things are passing away. ‘Dead is the man of yesterday,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘for he dies into the man of today: and the man of today is dying into the man of tomorrow.’ Indeed, ‘to be in time’ is a sure symptom of mortality. It is indicative, not of being, but of becoming, of ceaseless flux.”

All the multiplicity of existents in the universe are in a state of becoming and passing away. 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?

In Exodus 3:14 Moses has experienced a theophany: While tending his flock on Mount Horeb, suddenly he hears the voice of God issuing from a burning bush: God is speaking to him! Reverentially, Moses inquires of God what is His name (meaning: what is His nature or character).

And God said unto Moses, I AM WHO AM: and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

God has told Moses: that He is Being (“I AM”). And the strong implication is that there is no “other” being: “I alone AM.” For “I” is plainly singular in form.

Smith draws the crucial point, “God alone IS. But how are we to understand this? ‘It seems to me,’ writes St. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘that at the time the great Moses was instructed in the theophany he came to know that none of those things which are apprehended by sense perception and contemplated by the understanding really subsist, but that the transcendent essence and cause of the universe, on which everything depends, alone subsists.’ But why? Does not the world exist? Are there not myriads of stars and galaxies and particles of dust, each existing in its own right? And yet we are told that the transcendent essence alone subsists. ‘For even if the understanding looks upon any other existing things,’ the great theologian goes on to say, ‘reason observes in absolutely none of them the self-sufficiency by which they could exist without participating in true Being. On the other hand, that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change whether to better or to worse (for it is far removed from the inferior and has no superior), standing in need of nothing else, alone desirable, participated in by all but not lessened by their participation — this is truly real Being.’”

Smith continues: “In the words of St. Gregory, ‘that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change … is truly real being.’ As concerns ‘existing things,’ on the other hand, the teaching implies that these entities are always changing, always in a state of flux, so that their very existence is in a way a process of becoming, in which however nothing is actually produced. This has been said time and again, beginning with Heraclitus and the Buddhist philosophers. And there can be little doubt that it is true: even modern physics, as we can see, points to the same conclusion. Only there is another side to the coin which is not always recognized. Existent things — the very flux itself — presuppose what Gregory and the Platonists have termed ‘a participation in Being.’ The point is that relative or contingent existences cannot stand alone. They have not an independent existence, a being of their own. ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being,’ says St. Paul….”

I beheld these others beneath Thee, and saw that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not. An existence they have, because they are from Thee; and yet no existence, because they are not what Thou art. For only that really is, that remains unchangeably.

Space
Space is the third essential term of the Platonic cosmology: It is the matrix in which living things and all other existents participate in Being. Plato’s creation myth — the Myth of the Demiurge in Timaeus — elucidates the Platonic conception of Space.

For Plato, the God of the Beyond is so “beyond” that, when it came time for creating the Cosmos, he didn’t even do it himself. He sent an agent: the Demiurge, a mythical being endued by God to be in divine likeness of God’s own perfect love, truth, beauty, justice, and goodness. The embodiment of divine perfections, the Demiurge wishes to create creatures just as good and beautiful as himself, according to the standard of the divine Idea — a direct analog, it seems to me, of the Logos theory of the ancient Church. Indeed, Eric Voegelin sees in the Demiurge the symbol of Incarnation [Order and History Vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle, 1957]:

“The Demiurge is the symbol of Incarnation, understood not as the result of the process but as the process itself, as the permanent tension in reality between the taxis of form or idea and the ataxia of formlessness.”

Similarly to the Christian account, the Demiurge in a certain way creates ex nihilo — that is, out of Nothing. At first glance, Plato is seen specifying, not a pre-existing “material” but a universal field of pure possibility called Chora, “Space.” Perhaps we may find in this concept a strong analogy to Isaac Newton’s concept of Absolute Space (see below).

Chora seems to indicate the idea of an eternal, universal field of pure stochastic potentiality that needs to become “activated” in order to bring actual beings into existence. In itself, it is No-thing, i.e., “nothing.” This “activation” the Demiurge may not effect by fiat: He does not, for instance, “command” to “Let there be Light!” The main tool at his disposal is Peitho, “persuasion.”

And if Chora is not so persuaded, it will remain in a state of “nothingness.” It will remain unformed, in the condition of ataxia. Of itself it is “Nothing”; by itself, it can do nothing. It cannot generate anything out of itself, not even matter in primaeval form.

And thus Plato introduces the figure of the Demiurge into his creation myth, symbolizing form or idea — the principle of (formative) taxia that draws (formless) ataxia into existence. We moderns might be tempted to describe the Demiurge as constituting an “information set” together with an “energy source,” who “persuades” the pure stochastic potentiality of formless, absolute, empty space into actualized form, and thus existence. From the cosmic standpoint, he makes unity out of multiplicity, in harmony and geometrical proportion:

“The best bond is the one that effects the closest unity between itself and the terms it is combining; and this is best done by a continued geometrical proportion.” [Timaeus, 4]

Thus the Demiurge is a kind of “divine geometer,” producing the forms (or mathematical ideas) that Chora can be persuaded to conform to, and thus come into existence.

But the Demiurge does more than just get things started: As bearer of the divine Idea — as pure love and beauty and goodness and truth — he continues always persuading Chora to generate creatures as like himself as possible (i.e., reflecting his own divine qualities at whatever generic stage), throughout all eternity. Thus creation is a continuous process in space-time. Moreover, it is the source and driver of evolution as a universal natural process.

Through the ongoing activity of the Demiurge, men and the world are constantly being informed and renewed by the divine Idea; and thus a unified cosmic whole, a “One Cosmos,” a universal order comes into being at the intersection of time and timelessness, of immanent and transcendent reality, in the medium of Space (and Time).

Compare the Platonic creation myth with the philosophy of Dionysius the [Pseudo-]Areopagite, said to be the Greek converted by St. Paul in Acts, 17:34. For Dionyius, the “names of God” — the divine qualities — are goodness, being, life, wisdom, power, and justice. Joseph Stiglmayr writes [Cath. Encycl. at the entry for Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite], that for Dionysius, God is

“… the One Being (to hen), transcending all quality and predication, all affirmation and negation, and all intellectual conception, [Who] by the very force of His love and goodness gives to beings outside Himself their countless gradations, unites them in the closest bonds (proodos), keeps each by His care and direction in its appointed sphere, and draws them again in an ascending order to Himself (epistrophe) … all created things [proceed] from God by the exuberance of being in the Godhead (to hyperpleres), its outpouring and overflowing … and as a flashing forth from the sun of the Deity. Exactly according to their physical nature created things absorb more or less the radiated light, which, however, grows weaker the farther it descends. As the mighty root sends forth a multitude of plants which it sustains and controls, so created things owe their origin and conservation to the All-Ruling Deity…. Patterned upon the original of Divine love, righteousness, and peace, is the harmony that pervades the universe…. All things tend to God, and in Him are merged and completed, just as the circle returns into itself, as the radii are joined at the centre, or as the numbers are contained in unity.”

The Platonic resonances seem unmistakeable in these lines. It appears that both Platonic speculation and the Logos doctrine of the ancient Church as articulated by Dionysius are in agreement that Creator must be “beyond” Creation in order to resonate with it — which resonance is what makes the universe to be alive — i.e., a living universe.

C. A. Dubrey points out [Cath. Encycl. at the entry “Teleology”], that the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas makes it clear that, “Intrinsic finality [we are to think of this as a blend or merger of efficient and final causes in the Aristotelian sense] consists in the fact that every being has within itself a natural tendency whereby its activity is directed towards the perfection of its own nature…. St. Thomas does not hesitate to speak of ‘natural appetite,’ ‘natural inclination,’ and even ‘intention of nature,’ [we moderns might be tempted to add ‘instinct’ to this list] to mean that every being has within itself a directive principle of activity. Accordingly, God does not direct creatures to their ends from outside, but through their own nature…. The Divine plan of creation is carried out by the various beings themselves acting in conformity with their nature.

When, however, this finality is called immanent, this expression must not be understood in a pantheistic sense, as if the intelligence which the world manifests were to be identified with the world itself, but in the sense that the immediate principle of finality is immanent in every being…. Thus the unconscious finality in the world leads to the conclusion that there must be an intelligent cause of the world.” [Emphasis added.]

Aquinas’ insight, and also Plato’s, evokes a reconsideration of Isaac Newton’s concept of Absolute Space. Possibly this may be understood in the following terms. First, Absolute Space is “empty” space. Second, it is not a property of God, but an effect of His Presence; i.e., we advert to theophany again. The question then arises, in what “where” or “when” does this theophany take place? Perhaps Newton’s answer would be: In the beginning, and continuously thereafter. Second, it has been suggested that Newton intends us to understand Absolute Space as the sensorium Dei: “God constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence” [ existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium consitutit: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3d ed., 1726]. Wolfhart Pannenberg writes,

“Now there are a number of good reasons — suggested by both philosophical and scientific thought — to consider time and space as inseparable. Einstein’s field concept comprises space, time, and energy. It takes the form of a geometrical description, and this seems to amount to a spatialization of time. The totality of space, time, and energy or force are all properties of a cosmic field.

“Long before our own age a theological interpretation of this subject matter had been proposed, and it was Isaac Newton who offered this proposal. It too referred everything to space or, more precisely, to the correlation of force as in the case of a force like gravitation acting at a distance. Newton’s well-known conception of space as sensory of God (sensorium Dei) did not intend to ascribe to God an organ of sense perception, the like of which God does not need, according to Newton, because of divine omnipresence. Rather, Newton took space as the medium of God’s creative presence at the finite place of his creatures in creating them.” [Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993]

Thus the infinite takes priority over every finite experience, including intellectual experience — a position decisively argued by Descartes, as Pannenberg avers, “in his thesis that the idea of God is a prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of any other idea, even that of the ego itself.”

The Influence of Platonic Speculation on the Early History of the Church
D. Edmund Joaquin, an insightful and gracious Christian friend, writes, “We understand that the universe is created and sustained by the Word [the Logos], and not only that, but by the Word sounding. God sustains the universe consciously and actively. He has not gone away and left us. In fact, He reveals Himself to us, and His final revelation is in the person of Christ [the Logos]. Christ is not an abstract aspect of God, like wisdom. He is God. He is God incarnating in the world that He himself has made.”

Joaquin further observes that “[the Gospel of] John is written to the Greeks and put into words that they could understand.” It seems there’s a mystery buried in here somewhere. Consider: Socrates was the teacher of Plato, who was the teacher of Aristotle, who was the teacher of Alexander — and Alexander spread Greek culture throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Add to this the fact that the great evangelist, St. Paul, had some difficulty converting the Jews to the Christian faith; but he converted the Greeks in droves. Not only St. John, but also St. Paul speaks in terms the Greek mind could readily grasp, as when he says God is He “in Whom we live and move and have our being.” These historical connections do not appear to be accidental, coincidental, nor incidental to the spread of the early Christian Church.

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Greeks strongly responded to Christianity for its moral beauty as well as its truth. A case in point is St. Justin Martyr. He was a man of Greek culture, born in Palestinian Syria about the year 100 A.D, who converted to the faith around 130 A.D. Justin became one of Christianity’s earliest and most powerful apologists, and ended up condemned by the Roman authority for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, for which offense he was summarily executed by the Imperium, along with several other of his “refusnik” co-religionists. The official record of their martyrdom is extant:

“The Prefect Rusticus says: Approach and sacrifice, all of you, to the gods. Justin says: No one in his right mind gives up piety for impiety. The Prefect Rusticus says: If you do not obey, you will be tortured without mercy. Justin replies: That is our desire, to be tortured for Our Lord Jesus, and so to be saved, for that will give us salvation and firm confidence at the more terrible universal tribunal of Our Lord and Saviour. And all the martyrs said: Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols. The Prefect Rusticus read the sentence: Those who do not wish to sacrifice to the gods and to obey the emperor will be scourged and beheaded according to the laws. The holy martyrs glorifying God betook themselves to the customary place, where they were beheaded and consummated their martyrdom confessing their Saviour.”

Jules Lebreton writes (at the entry for St. Justin Martyr in Cath. Encycl.) “Justin tries to trace a real bond between philosophy and Christianity: according to him, both one and the other have a part in the Logos, partially disseminated among men and wholly manifest in Jesus Christ.”

Yet for all their apparent similarities and resemblances in many respects, there is a profound difference between Platonic insight and the Christian one: and this pertains to the relations between God and man.

Both Plato and Justin proclaim the transcendent God. Yet for Plato, God is so “beyond” as to be almost impossible of human grasp. Yet Plato felt the “divine pulls” in his own nature. These Plato thought could be accounted for and articulated by an act of pure unaided intellect, that is by nous, in a state of intense contemplation.

Contrast this position with Justin Martyr’s, who insisted that human wisdom was impossible without the testimony of the Prophets (whom God himself had informed and instructed) and the action of the Holy Spirit. For Plato, man’s relations with God consist of operations of the mind. For Justin, they are operations of the heart, of the Spirit. For Justin, God is not a mental abstraction: He is real Personality with whom one can have direct personal relations, in the Spirit.

A later writer, John Scotus Eriugina (ninth century) elaborates the Justinian position, in the process noting that there is a “downward tendency” of the soul towards the conditions of animal existence, and that this has only one remedy: Divine grace, the free gift of the Holy Spirit. “By means of this heavenly gift,” writes William Turner [at the entry for Scotus in the Catholic Encyclopedia], “man is enabled to rise superior to the needs of the sensuous body, to place the demands of reason above those of bodily appetite, and from reason to ascend through contemplation to ideas, and thence by intuition to God Himself.”

The pull of animal nature is an idea we also find in Plato, and also the countervailing pull from the divine Beyond. Man lives in the metaxy, in the “in-between reality” constituted by the two. Man’s task is to resolve this tension, and establish the proper balance that expresses the highest and best development of his human nature. But man must do this entirely by himself by means of nous or reason. There is no spiritual help “extra” to the human psyche available to facilitate this process.

“…admits that the soul can naturally comprehend what God is, just as it understands that virtue is beautiful … but he denies that the soul without the assistance of the Holy Ghost [Spirit] can see God or contemplate him directly through ecstasy, as the Platonic philosophers contended. And yet this knowledge of God is necessary for us: ‘We cannot know God as we know music, arithmetic, or astronomy’; it is necessary for us to know God not with an abstract knowledge but as we know any person with whom we have relations. The problem which it seems impossible to solve is settled by revelation; God has spoken directly to the Prophets, who in their turn have made Him known to us…. It is the first time in Christian theology that we find so concise an explanation of the difference that separates Christian revelation from human speculation.” [Emphasis added]

Natural Law, Contingency, and the Scientific Method
The Platonic model encourages us to recognize that the universe is zoon empsychon ennoun, a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence. The myth of the Demiurge describes the world process as a type of incarnation, a dynamic relation of absolute being and contingent becoming evolving in space and time in a manner expressing a perduring taxia–ataxia relation. The Cosmos itself — the totality of all existing things — like its constituents, for example man and even the stars, is an eikon of being-in-becoming, a reflection or image of the divine Idea. Time itself is but a “moving image of eternity.” The life of the cosmos is wholly dependent, contingent on the Idea from which it manifests.

It is a lawful, orderly universe, yet one in which new occurrences are always arising. These new events are coming from, as it were, a “sea of contingency” analogous to Plato’s conception of Space, that is Chora — the infinite field of unformed, pure potentiality.

The immediately foregoing ideas, of course, are not scientific ones strictly speaking. Still, there are elements here that perhaps science would do well to consider, in order to maintain the integrity of its own method. For one thing, it seems science itself, in its disclosure of the regularities of nature, seems to have an in-built tendency to overlook contingency. We may define an event as contingent if a description of it is neither self-evident nor necessary, “if it could have happened differently,” as Ted Peters puts it in his Preface to Pannenberg’s Towards a Theology of Nature.

C. A. Dubray writes [“Teleology,” Cath. Encycl.], “The fact that the world is governed by laws, far from giving any support to the mechanistic conception, is rather opposed to it. A law is not a cause, but the expression of the constant manner in which causes produce their effects.” In other words, natural laws are expressions of observable regularities that occur in the world of existent phenomena in ordinary space-time reality. Thus, the laws themselves have no force as “causes”: they are descriptions.

Yet the focus on regularity inevitably masks the particularity and contingency of unique events. As Ted Peters notes, it is here that “we run into a problem of focus in the scientific community, because virtually all the theoretical attention is given to the regularity of nature’s laws, while the contingency of natural events slips into the nearly invisible background.” Peters continues:

“What researchers concentrate on are the uniformities that can be expressed in timeless equations. A dictionary of equations describing these uniformities allegedly constitutes scientific knowledge…. A closer examination, however, reveals that the applicability of these equations to concrete cases of natural processes requires certain initial and marginal conditions, conditions that in every case are contingent. Only when contingent conditions permit can we expect a natural law to operate as expected.”

To the extent that the scientific method of inquiry is premised on an “If/Then” logical construction — which seems ever to be the case — the method itself is an exercise in contingency, yet nonetheless one in which “Determinacy gets thematized, whereas contingency gets ignored.” Arguably this is a serious bias having epistemological implications; for e.g., “if the laws of classical dynamics are in principle temporally reversible, the actual course of natural events from which those laws have been abstracted is not. The reality of nature is first and foremost a historical reality.”

Pannenberg suggests a corrective for this “bias,” acknowledging: “That modern science so easily lends itself to abuse cannot be prevented in principle. It is one of the risks involved in the abstract study of regularities that either are inherent in nature itself or can be imposed on natural processes [e.g., as in ideological, technical, or engineering solutions]. This risk cannot be met on the level of scientific description itself but must be met first on the level of philosophical reflection on the work of science. It is on this level that the abstract form of scientific description must be considered with special attention to what it is “abstracted from” and what is methodically disregarded in the abstract formulas of science.”

And so contingent conditions — i.e, initial and boundary conditions — must be restored to their proper place in our deliberations, for they “are required for any formula of natural law to be applied. They are contingent at least in that they cannot be derived from the particular formula of law under consideration.… The mathematical formula of a natural law may be valid without regard to time. The physical regularity that is described by such a formula is not independent of time and temporal sequence. But it is only that physical regularity which makes the mathematical formula a law of nature. This suggests that the laws of nature are not eternal or atemporal because the fields of their application, the regularities of natural processes, originate in the course of time. Thus it also becomes understandable that new patterns of regularity emerging in the sequence of time constitute a field of application for a new set of natural laws….”

We may recognize that the total process of natural events presents itself to observation as a mesh of contingency and regularities. It is the task of science to pursue thematically the aspect of regularity. But, asks Pannenberg, can science “ever succeed in bringing into view the entirety of nature as determined in all details by a number of laws that are in any case not infinitely complex? This would mean at the same time that a stage of research is conceivable from which nothing more could be discovered. Many natural scientists have had this nightmare because of the successes of their own research. Fortunately it probably is not a truthful dream.”

For, says Pannenberg, “laws always uncover what is necessary superimposed on what is contingent. Given the undeniable contingency of occurrences in natural events, can we recognize in their special character as occurrences … [that] regularity as their own element in such a way that the presence of regularity can be thought together with the contingency of occurrences, not only under abstraction from the contingency of occurrences?” [Emphasis added]

Which is why Pannenberg advocates an opening up of new viewpoints in scientific research, “not because physical hypotheses or insights can be derived from them but because they open up and enlarge the intellectual space on which the formation of physical hypotheses depends…. In physics also, horizons of questioning have to be opened up first of all in order that hypotheses that arise in them can be examined by experiment and classified theoretically.”

Perhaps we need a greater appreciation of the “fitness” of the scientific method to engage the truly great questions of life, which ever seem to involve the relations of law and contingency. Leibniz propounds two great questions of perennial interest to the human mind: (1) Why are things the way they are and not some other way? (2) Why does anything exist at all?

Such questions, scientists will readily tell you, are beyond the purview of the scientific method. But does that mean such questions have no force or meaning such that they should not be asked at all?

Perhaps the incapability of the scientific method to answer such questions owes to the fact that all the great physical laws are acknowledged to be time-reversible; but we know that existence in space and time is not a time-reversible process. As Pannenberg states, it is a historical process. We might even say it is an evolutionary process.

Which suggests an analogy that might enlighten these questions, sharpen their meanings, and suggest additional questions: an analogy to direct human experience. Pannenberg writes of human beings, who do seem to live in a “time-irreversible,” that is “historical” process:

“Human beings never live only in the now. Rather, they experience their present as heirs of the past and as its active change. They anticipate the future in fear, hope, and planning; and in the light of such anticipation of the future they return to their present and the heritage of their past. The fact that we know of historical continuity is at least also conditioned by this peculiarity of human experience with time. If there is a new event, then it modifies the context of our consciousness of time which is already found present. It throws light back on earlier occurrences which have become a part of our experience already. In the same way, ideas that occur to us throw light on our previous expectations and plans in justifying, fulfilling, modifying, or disappointing and thwarting them. Thus the contingent event always enters already into a context of experience or tradition…. The future, beginning in the present happenings, is thus the origin of the perspective in which the past occurrences are put by every new experience.”

Worldviews and Paradigm Shifts
It is perhaps a truism that we tend to find what we’re looking for by screening out any and all potential elements which do not fit the pattern of our expectation. Arguably, the scientific method may be said inherently to suffer exposure to potential danger from this side, as suggested in the above remarks. Indeed, Schröedinger’s theory of wavefunction seems to predict this. Consider these remarks from Stephen M. Barr [Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 2003]:

“In quantum theory, as traditionally formulated, there are ‘systems’ and ‘observers.’ Or rather, in any particular case, there is the system and the observer. The observer makes measurements of the system. As long as the system is undisturbed by external influences (that is, as long as it is ‘isolated’), its wavefunction — which is to say its probability amplitudes — will evolve in time by the Schröedinger equation…. However, when a measurement is made of the system the observer must obtain a definite outcome. Suddenly, the probability for the outcome that is actually obtained is no longer what the mathematics said it was just before the measurement, but jumps to 100 percent. And the probabilities for all the alternative outcomes, the ones that did not occur, fall to 0 percent.”

Thus we might say that the “reality” we humans experience ever involves “a moving goal-post.” And as the mover of this goal-post, the human agent is most indispensably involved in this process.

Faced with such “indeterminacy” regarding the foundations of experience, it is not surprising that people usually have recourse to mediating worldviews, or organized frames of ideational reality that constitute the conceptual space in which active experience is engaged and accordingly analyzed and interpreted. Certainly Plato has offered such a model. And so has Nobel laureate Jacques Monod [in Chance and Necessity, 1971]:

“Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution. The central concept of biology … is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one compatible with observed and tested fact. All forms of life are the product of chance….”

Needless to say, these two models are polar opposite conceptualizations. Yet having received each on “good authority,” which do we choose?

Such are not idle considerations; for as James Hannam points out [“The Development of Scientific and Religious Ideas,” 2003], “grand theories … often suffer death by detail where it is found that up close the situation is too complicated for the theory to handle…. [Yet] in the end, after it has changed the course of the river of enquiry, the theory can end up as a mortlake cut off from the general flow….”

Hannam cites historian Thomas Kuhn, who documents an historical process he terms “paradigm shift,” describing a situation in which the findings of authoritative science move “out of science and into practically every other field of human endeavor.” Once a given, albeit partial or even defective theory becomes “dominant,” writes Hannam, “far from being thrown out, a falsified theory is enhanced to deal with new information until such time as it finally collapses under the weight of anomalous results. Then, after a chaotic period, a new theory emerges that can deal with the anomalies and normal service resumes…. A paradigm refers to but one field, say classical mechanics or health policy whereas the ideology/worldview is the general background that underpins all the paradigms.”

The worldview (or ideology, if you prefer), for better or worse, implicitly shapes the background knowledge of thinking agents to which new experiences constantly are being conformed. Hannam says that worldview “is often so deeply embedded in the psyche that it is very rarely considered explicitly except by specialists,” but that nonetheless, “the worldview is seen as [a] self-confirming fact of life and hence it is not strictly rational…. The existence of a dominant worldview does not mean that a particular individual is unable to think outside the box but rather that his ideas are unlikely to fall on fertile ground. Unless new ideas can be stated in a language that makes them comprehensible to his peers, his intention in writing will not be met.”

Which is the not-too-subtle way to put the fact that every man has a worldview, without exception, whether articulate or inarticulate; and that somehow, for the “intention of writing to be met” — that is, for accurate and meaningful (i.e., successful) communication of ideas to take place — some deeper, common ground of shared truth must first be accessed, for the purpose of providing a more capacious intellectual space in which the human pursuit of knowledge and wisdom might unfold or evolve from its present point of attainment.

But where today in our modern world is such a common ground or field to be found? Hannam proposes the examination of the history of ideas as a possibly useful method in the search for common ground. He writes,

“To examine the history of ideas the only fair way to proceed would seem to place before ourselves the evidence and authority that the historical agents had before them and assume they acted rationally on that basis. Otherwise, there is no hope of ever tracing intellectual development because ‘cause and effect’ assumes some sort of logical causality that is impossible with non-rational agents. The best that could be hoped for would be a catalog of mental positions, with no way to say how one led to another except by being pushed by blind exterior forces. This might be precisely what determinists are advocating but they would have to give up any hope of finding causes and restrict themselves to explanations.”

Perhaps we moderns would do well to reconsider the common assumption that people living before our own time were somehow inferior in knowledge, experience, and observational powers as compared with our own status as enlightened individuals. Arguably, the ancient world produced some of the most powerful thinkers in the history of mankind, formulating ideas that were, in the words of Hannam, “the fruits of unfettered metaphysical speculation that inevitably hits on the right answer occasionally.”

Democritus, for example, proposed a theory predicting the atom as the ultimate constituent of matter, more than two-thousand years before the technical means existed to isolate atoms experimentally or, as Hannam notes, any “useful applications for them” could be found. Then it was discovered that the atom itself is an ordered constellation of even finer parts. There seems to be an historical progression of ideas here, the new building up on a framework originally laid up in the past, modifying it, improving on it in light of new insights and technical capabilities.

Hannam gives another example of more recent vintage: “Copernicus needed Nicole Oresme’s solution as to why we do not feel the movement of the Earth even though in Oresme’s time it was just a curiosity as no one thought the Earth actually was moving … each new idea, once accepted, shifts the boundaries of the worldview and makes it possible for further new ideas to be accepted into the pale.”

We can extend the examples even further. Reimann constructed a geometry, apparently because his mind could grasp the logic and beauty it revealed for its own sake. But at the time, it had no apparent “external referent” in the field of nature. It was a beautiful and glorious abstraction — until Einstein came along, and picked it up “off the shelf” as it were, to become the very language of relativity theory.

Thus it might be said that the evolution or “progress” of science depends on successive enlargements of the conceptual space it requires to do its work. In other words, science inherently is a participation in the historicity of the world.

Whatever our personal worldview, perhaps it would be well to recall that science is an historical process. Perhaps this understanding could open up additional, needed conceptual space that science itself requires in order to advance.

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...)

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.

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."

"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

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