That said, the five negations we explored in the last post didn't provide a positive view. We haven't specified any of the Neoplatonic vision that the church fathers found so hospitable. Plus, I've flipped between describing "Platonic" and "Neoplatonic" in this series in ways that might be confusing. In the first post I stated that Christianity was influenced by Neoplatonism. If so, what is Neoplatonism in contrast to a generic Platonism?
You don't want a long history lesson, but here's a quick gloss.
Platonism evolved over time. Obviously, it began with Plato and his immediate followers in the 4th–3rd centuries BC. "Middle Platonism" followed in the 1st century BC to the late 2nd century AD with thinkers such as Plutarch. And then, in a third wave, Neoplatonism emerged with thinkers like Plotinus in the 3rd century AD. When I've referred to the whole of this history, like in the last post, I've said "Platonism." But in this post I want to unpack the specific beliefs of Neoplatonism, the final developments of the Platonic tradition. And as you can see from the dates, the Neoplatonic philosophers were contemporaries with the church fathers, which is why this particular part of the Platonic tradition proved to be the one so influential in early Christian thought. These ideas were being cross-pollinated as pagan metaphysics was incorporated into Christianity.
Is "incorporated" too strong a word? Augustine didn't think so. Here's what Augustine said in On Christian Doctrine about how Christians should plunder the riches of Neoplatonic philosophy:
If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use. Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use.
So, yes, Christians incorporated pagan metaphysics as both "true" and "well accommodated" to the Christian faith. To be sure, Biblical faith rejected certain Neoplatonic beliefs. But much was, as Augustine says, "converted to our use." In this post I want to describe what, exactly, was carried over from Neoplatonism into Christianity.
First, Neoplatonism's vision of God--called the One and the Absolute--emphasized God's radical transcendence from the created, material world. Obviously, this vision of transcendence highlighted the borderline between creature and Creator so vigorously policed in Jewish monotheism. But the Neoplatonic influence would push this idea further. Given the absolute ontological difference between God and the world, the One was unknowable and beyond human comprehension. This gave birth the the apophatic stream of Christian thought, from Pseudo-Dionysius to Aquinas.
Another influence was Neoplatonism's vision of emanationism. This was an idea that Christians changed and converted to their use. Simplifying greatly and ignoring differences among various philosophers, according to Neoplatonism creation was an "emanation" from God, the "radiance" of God's being. Creation "poured forth" and "cascaded out" from God. Like light emanating from the sun.
There were two issues, however, with emanationism. The first was the Christian commitment to creation ex nihilo, that God created the world from nothing. The theological interest here is to preserve creation as a free and spontaneous gift, that God didn't have to create the world. Emanationism could make creation seem necessary rather than gratuitous. If the Sun exists it shines, right? That's what the Sun does. Necessarily so. But that necessity jeopardizes viewing creation as a gift.
The other concern with emanationism, light from Light, is that it could blur the ontological contrast between God's Being and created being. There is a pantheistic worry here.
For these reasons, Christian thought modified Neoplatonic emanationism, to both preserve creation ex nihilo and police the ontological contrast between Creator/creature. But the part of emanationism that Christian thought carried forward was the belief in creation's continuous ontological dependence upon God. Theologians from Augustine to Aquinas have pointed out how if God stopped attending to creation we would cease to exist.
The influence of Neoplatonism on this point, a baptized emanationism, is important to keep in mind. There are a lot of people who think that creation ex nihilo implies Deism. Or that Deism is implied if we adopt Big Bang cosmology. But this is a confusion. No matter what science says about the origin of the universe, we exist because being is continuously gifted to us. This vision of an ongoing and persistent ontological dependence upon God is a Neoplatonic ripple on the waters of Christian thought. And once we lost this imagination we defaulted to the mechanistic and Deistic vision of the God/world relation. Creation is imagined has happening via Newtonian cause and effect rather than through the ontological participation espoused by the church fathers. This contrast goes to the heart of this series and sits at the root of modern Christian disenchantment. Modern Christians unthinkingly assume that creation is a machine.
A third influence of Neoplatonism was its soteriological vision of a "return" back to the One. In the Neoplatonic vision we emanate "out" from the One and then "return," via ascent, back to the One. This "return" to God becomes the soteriological vision of theosis and divinization within Christianity. Again, this metaphysical vision of salvation is something that gets lost in modernity, especially in Protestantism were salvation has become juridicial rather than participatory.
This summary of the Neoplatonic influence upon Christianity isn't exhaustive. But for the purposes of this series I wanted to highlight some of the positive content of Neoplatonic thought so that you can trace some of its impact upon Christian belief. Transcendence. Apophaticism. Continuous ontological dependence. Theosis. Losing the metaphysical worldview that helped give birth to and sustained these theological fruits was going to have consequences. Which is precisely why some theologians have argued that a metaphysical recovery is urgently needed in order to stabilize and sustain Christian faith in the modern world.
