One of the best books deconstructing modernity has to be Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times”, in it Tyson calls for a return to premodern ways of thought, he lays out four specific aspects of a more ancient, Platonic Christianity :
“Firstly, Christian Platonism is an entirely integrative outlook, yet it is not a reductive or closed (conceptually complete) outlook. That is, this stance assumes that there is one overarching ever-active Cause of reason and existence in the cosmos (God), and hence all true meanings are coherent with each other and there are no discrete zones of different types of truths/meanings that have no connection. Even so, while God knows and sustains the whole, we only ever know parts and know partially.”
…..our knowledge of truth—of any sort and to any degree—is a function of the grace of divine revelation and is always “located” within an ontological and epistemic relation to God. Thus knowledge is inherently religious and we can gain a more integrative and truer perspective on reality through a deeper repose in the ever-revealing Word of God. Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.”
“Secondly, Christian Platonism does not think the modern idea of “pure nature” makes any sense at all. In an Augustinian fashion, all creation is understood as perpetually upheld by the Creator such that the very intelligibility and existence of any being is a manifestation of divinely gifted form made actual in embodiment.
“Thirdly, Christian Platonism maintains that moral, aesthetic, and spiritual qualitative meanings are real, and are more primary than material quantitative facts. This does not make the material and the quantitative unreal, but what is apparent to the senses is not understood as intelligible or actual in anything other than a derived relationship to the spiritual realities on which all material manifestations are dependent. Further, the reality of transcendent meaning is not fully comprehensible to us, but as we ourselves (and all creation) are dependent on spiritual meanings and realities for our very being we have an innate participatory knowledge of truth to the partial extent that we are both capable of and open to such knowledge.”
“Ontological participation is the idea that concrete particular beings, such as the book in your hand or Socrates, are not self-contained entities, but rather participate in qualitative powers of being that transcend their spatiotemporal specificity. Indeed the Platonist understanding of the nature of temporal beings maintains that no immediate and tangible physical appearance can be equated with that which really (that is, eternally) is. Here a clear distinction between appearance and Reality is in play, and this distinction operates on a couple of levels. To Plato, the intelligible essence of any being is real, and the spatiotemporal expression of that being in physical actuality is partial and derivative. Such incomplete derivation is what constitutes the very fabric of the order of reality revealed to us by our senses. Because of this derivative relationship, there is always more to any being than what meets the eye.
“Reality are appearance not independent of each other, but appearance is dependent on Reality for its intelligibility and for the mystery of its spatiotemporally expressed actuality, and that Reality cannot itself be accounted for by any appearance.
In Christian Platonist thinking, God in his hiddenness is always present as the eternal and intelligible grounds of his temporal creation. God is the ontological Source out of which all beings gain their intelligible essence (their form) and their particular existence (for beings like us, matter in space and time is the medium of our existence). Thus the Real is not immediately visible and is always more ontologically primary than the apparent.
That is, Christian faith historically saw the priority of the spiritual over the material as a relation between that which is primary and that which is derivative. So an ontological perspective (and Western metaphysics used to be entirely defined by this perspective, which is why Western metaphysics itself has been so determinedly dissolved and re-defined in recent centuries) holds that what you can’t simply see is more real than what you can.
“Christian belief explicitly holds that God totally transcends his created order of beings, and also gifts beings with a degree of real autonomy from himself—but it does mean that all of reality is fundamentally dependent on God for its ongoing existence and its essential and intelligible nature.
So ontological participation means that at the level of what I most fundamentally really am, I do not define and self generate the most basic reality of my being myself; I, as God’s creature called into being by him, ontologically participate in God. So, as Augustine put it, God is closer to me than I am to myself.”
Excerpt From: Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times”
“Christian belief explicitly holds that God totally transcends his created order of beings, and also gifts beings with a degree of real autonomy from himself—but it does mean that all of reality is fundamentally dependent on God for its ongoing existence and its essential and intelligible nature.
So ontological participation means that at the level of what I most fundamentally really am, I do not define and self generate the most basic reality of my being myself; I, as God’s creature called into being by him, ontologically participate in God. So, as Augustine put it, God is closer to me than I am to myself.”
Excerpt From: Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times”
I am very curious after reading this. What would you say to someone like Nietzche or Heidegger (who followed him) when they say that Christianity relies on the chasm created by Plato and the sophists? Apparently the Greeks before Plato conceived of "Being" as all encompassing, rather than as two separate realms with one deriving from the other. Are we really just bad Platonists? I suspect there is an answer to this charge, or at least a justification for why the Christian view is better than the Nietzchean view. I hope I have accurately stated the charge against us, and I look forward to hat you have to say on this (for my own peace of mind).
ReplyDeleteWell, it’s complicated, for Parmenides real being was the eternal and unchanging, our transitory would was not real. For Heraclitus only the ever changing world is real. Plato had levels of being, our transitory world is in between, an alienated deformation of real eternal being.
ReplyDeleteOne can say Aristotle has something like tan “all encompassing being” but he wasn’t terribly influential until centuries later introduced through Islamic scholars, and then after Dun Scotus in the 1300’s with the notion of the so-called univocity of being. This means that the word “being” has only one meaning. One either has being or one does not. There are no degrees of being.
Scotus then preserves God’s otherness through the introduction of the idea of God as an infinite being. God exists just like anything else - only “bigger”, infinitely so, at the “top” of a hierarchy of being. Christian thought stands outside the opposition that is presumed within either a metaphysics of imminent becoming or a platonic “transcendent” being.
There is an ontological difference between God and creation, the two exist in different ways, so we speak of God’s “being” not as univocal, or the same, as creations “being”, but not entirely different, or equivocal, but analogous. With a trinitarian ontology, God is not at the “top” but “outside” being all together, in a transcendence that can therefore be IN imminence, a “true” transcendence, not Scotus’s really big infinite being, but God, for Christians exists in a different way from the way everything else exists, he exists in a way analogous to the way other things exist, not “somewhere else”, but God donates being directly, being truly transcendent He is utterly imminent, closer to us than we are to ourselves, God’s being, since it’s different, is not therefore in opposition to contingent reality, so Being is *IN* becoming.
This is our contingent being not as a tragic alienation from a perfect Platonic One, but being as a gift, being AS communion with God ! Creation as theophany - a manifestation of God. God not as a “being” within the cosmos, or some principle or proposition.
Thus the eternal is revealed in the historical, Only Christian trinitarianism has broken the bipolar metaphysical vicious circle of dialectical thought (choosing sides between univocal and equivocal metaphysics, the Ideal Plotonic One/Order vs brute being as difference and chaos, Apollo or Dionysus, Parmenides’ absolute identism, Being, or Heraclitus’ absolute becoming.
The Christian God is at once infinitely more transcendent of and, in consequence, infinitely nearer to (within the very being of) finite reality than was the inaccessible God of antique metaphysics, the supreme being set apart on being's summit, the fixed hook from which the cosmos dangled. So, rather than the contingent, changing of our creation occluding “being”, or being alienated for the Platonic One - God’s transcendence is revealed IN our ever changing, contingent historical reality. Christ marries the transcendent to the contingent, the historical to the eternal, heaven to earth etc
We believe in a God who is the utterly transcendent and the absolutely immediate actuality of any being's ing's existence, thus we can affirm the immediacy of Creations goodness as Nietzsche, and the Pagan’s, and affirm a Christian transcendence within this creation, without like the gnostics fleeing this world to “another platonic heaven” - for Orthodoxy, and Christianity upon until the 1700’s, “heaven” was the new creation *IN* this creation, “heaven” coming down to Earth to fill it up, here is NT Wright on that :
https://time.com/5743505/new-testament-heaven/
And on how to *see* God within Creation, I’ve written here
: https://disfiguredpraise.blogspot.com/2020/02/on-seeing-divine-world-hidden-inside.html
The other question I have then is this: Heidegger believed that Parmenides and Heraclitus were actually in agreement and there has been an artificial division introduced between them. I understand this is not the normative view, but he seems to make a decent case. With both of them we are working with fragments. Is there any resource that has refuted Heidegger's view that you know of? Sorry, I know I'm getting deep in the weeds here. It could quite easily be that Heidegger is simply wrong; since my last comment, I've read his section on "logos" in early and late Greek philosophy. I couldn't believe how simplistic he was in trying to show that Christianity didn't understand the ancient Greek idea of logos as "gathering-in/gatheredness." He tries to show that St. John's prologue describe Christ only as the Word, as something audible/discursive, yet only a few verses later St. John says that all things subsist in Him. That would seem to occupy both the old and new Greek definitions of logos. All that to say, I'm just trying to understand what I'm reading a bit better and you seem to be someone who would have some insight. Thanks for the generous response.
ReplyDeleteHeideggers translations and interpretations of Greek philosophy are notoriously idiosyncratic, and he didn't know Aqinas nor the Analogy of being (that "being" could refer to different ways of existing, God doesn't exist like creation, but his being is analogous), no, H studied Scotus, which is where many think the problems of modernity began.
DeletePreviously, it was evident this contingent world must be derivative and dependent upon a higher reality, to be unintelligible. The ancients had faith that reason is prior, but, unable to prove this, the moderns discarded this relation of thought to being, and with it all justified reasoning and thought itself.
Scotus flattened all "being" into one univocal concept of being that included every reality, and just made God an infinite being, and therefore unknowable because undefinable....
What moderns call thinking is only a deformed parody of real thought.
Nevertheless it is true the metaxologically modified “Eleatic” trajectory of “high ontology” that Plato draws on from Parmenides is often wrongly contrasted with the “Ionian” trajectory of Heraclitus, who celebrates the flux and contingency of our experiences within existence.
This contrast is invalid because it ignores the fact the Heraclitus was a great, possibly the original, Greek thinker of Logos (the Greek word for divine, cosmos-ordering reason).
The energetic motion of fire, which burns up its material grounds, is placed in wonderful dialogue with a cosmic Logos in Heraclitus.
Heraclitus teasingly implies a relationship between transcendently grounded meaning in the cosmos and the flux and motion of observable phenomena, but it is Plato who draws this relationship out in understanding phenomena’s relation to being via thinking of experience as “neither fully is, nor fully is not” (metaxu).