Visiting Julian
This was the church were Julian lived as an anchoress. Anchorism was a distinctive practice of medieval Christianity, where the anchorite, generally a woman, would have a cell built that was attached to an external wall of a church. A window made in the wall, called a "squint" or "hagioscope," allowed the anchoress to see the altar and participate in the Mass. The anchoress would be ritually enclosed in her cell to spend the rest of her days.
We believe that Julian wrote her short account of her "showings"--called the Short Text--shortly after her illness in 1373 and prior to her enclosure. After her enclosure, Julian returned to her showings and expanded upon them, reflecting upon their deeper meanings. This produced what is called the Long Text, which we know as Revelations on the Divine Love.
Julian wrote in Middle English, so her work comes to us in various translations, some more literal and others more interpretive. Here's the Middle English text of the hazelnut vision from Chapter 5:
Also in this, he shewed me a littile thinge the quantitye of a heselle nutte, lygande in the palme of my hand, and, to my understandinge, that it was as round as any balle. I lokede theropon and thowte: "Whate maye this be?" And I was answerde generaly thus: "It is alle that is made." I merveylede howe it might laste, for methought it might falle sodaynlye to nought for litille. And I was answerde in my understandinge: "It lastes and ever shalle, for God loves it. And so hath alle thinge the beinge thorowe the love of God."
The Quantity of a Hazelnut
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding and thought: "What may this be?" And it was answered generally thus: "It is all that is made."
I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it. And so have all things their being by the love of God."
Reflections on Faith and Politics: Part 3, The Threat of Worldview Defense
Religion, obviously, was and remains, a huge player in these hero systems. Religion has functioned as a repository of our deepest values and as an engine of meaning-making. To return to Part 1, this is what makes religion vulnerable to idolatry. I inherit religious beliefs from my culture, stepping into a meaning-making hero system. But that hero system has been used over time to justify human projects. God, for example, prizes my race or country over others. Consequently, it takes a great deal of effort to extract oneself from this inherited idolatry. And as Jesus said, only a few find their way out.
And yet, politics has slowly taken over the role of hero system among American Christians. Politics has become the primary arena of heroic moral performance, how I make my life "matter." Christianity has suffered political capture. Politics has become the repository of our values and the focus of our concerns.
Simply put, politics has become existentially freighted. Instead of a pragmatic pursuit of the common good, politics is where I discover, pursue, and perform my identity.
Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to our hero systems. In Ernest Becker’s book Escape from Evil, his sequel to The Denial of Death, he describes how our hero systems become a source of social conflict. People who espouse values different from our own threaten the validity of our hero project, calling into question the metrics of our meaning. This unsettles us and makes us anxious. And in the face of that anxiety we lash out at those people who hold different values and beliefs. Psychologists call this hostility worldview defense.
With politics now becoming our dominant hero system, the place where we strive for ultimate purpose and meaning, it is increasingly vulnerable to worldview defense, growing more tribal and hateful. This is the dark feedback loop we're witnessing all around us. The more politics matters the more violent it becomes.
So, what's our response supposed to be? If we reject politics as our hero system and re-embrace our faith, wouldn't Christianity become vulnerable to worldview defense? Aren't we just jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? Replacing one hero system for another, each just as susceptible to worldview defense?
The answer, to echo Part 1 again, is yes, religion is no sure protection from worldview defense. Idolatry is the default condition. But there is a sliver of hope. Jesus described it as a narrow road. And a few do find it.
What's the hope of pulling our hero system out of politics to find it again in Christianity? The answer is: Jesus. If you're pursuing meaning from within Christianity there is a chance you'll bump into Jesus. Not the fake, idolatrous Jesus. The Jesus who legitimizes your politics. The real Jesus. The Jesus who loved his enemies. That Jesus has a chance to interrupt your idolatry.
Plus, as I mentioned in the last post, there are the virtues of the Christian tradition. It's true that religions are vulnerable to worldview defense, but religions have virtue traditions that political parties do not. The only thing partisan politics valorizes is aggression. Political partisans do not call their people to peace-making, kindness, generosity, mercy, humility, and love. But if your hero system is pursued within Christianity you will be called to such virtues. Even fake Christians bump into the Sermon on the Mount from time to time. And that encounter can tamp down some of worst excesses of worldview defense. At least a little bit.
My point here is that Christianity has moral resources that partisan politics lack. Consequently, while worldview defense is a chronic temptation you have a better chance of dealing with it from within Christianity than from without.
Psalm 123
Show us favor, Lord, show us favor,
for we’ve had more than enough contempt.
We’ve had more than enough
scorn from the arrogant
and contempt from the proud.
Hearts do. They crack. We are rejected, hurt, betrayed, and wounded. We can suffer abuse. We carry the scars. As I learned at an early age, falling in love is a risky and dangerous thing. The concerns here aren’t just romantic. Our families of origin are hazardous as well. The love we experience within our homes can be absent, inadequate, manipulative, or abusive. Family can mess us up in ways not easily fixed.
For my part, I’ve been lucky in love. But not everyone is. The problem with social mattering isn’t just that love is scarce, that loneliness has become an epidemic. Love itself can be the problem. The most important people in our lives can let us down, betray and hurt us. In light of this, our mattering has to dwell somewhere beyond our saddest and most tragic love stories.
Reflections on Faith and Politics: Part 2, We've Lost Track of Virtue
For example, on the Christian right “being a Christian” means holding certain political views—pro-gun ownership, pro-life, pro-capitalism, pro-capital punishment, against entitlements, and against affirmative action. On the Christian left “being a Christian” also means holding certain political views—pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-socialism, against capital punishment, supportive of entitlements, and more favorable toward affirmative action.
To be sure, it's not so neat and tidy, but you get the point. The Christian "political witness" means espousing and pursuing specific policies. Being a Christian means taking a particular stance on a specific issue. And to be sure, I hold opinions about which policies I feel are closer to the witness of Jesus.
Still, it’s worth noting how little Scripture has to say about many of our modern policy debates. The reason is obvious: we’re separated from the biblical authors by two millennia. Jesus and Paul would surely lament gun violence, but it’s hard to squeeze a Second Amendment opinion out of either. And what about capitalism versus socialism? Both care deeply about justice and the poor, but perhaps they’d be less concerned with a nation’s chosen system than with whether people are treated fairly and the vulnerable are cared for.
As we know, providing Biblical warrant for specific policy stances can be tenuous, thin, and sketchy. What about affirmative action? Capital punishment? Vaccine mandates? Immigration policy? And yet, so much effort is devoted toward precisely this task, on both the right and the left. Consequently, Scripture is torn in two as Christians on the right and left engage in political and ideological combat.
In the midst of all this conflict, however, Scripture is clear in its call to virtue. This is what makes the moral witness of Scripture so universal and timeless. No matter when or where we're living, no matter the nation state or economic system, Christian character remains a constant. And I wonder, as I said at the top, if this is what's gone wrong with Christian political engagement. By focusing so much on policy issues we've lost track of virtue. Christians are now defined by how they vote rather than by the fruit of the Spirit. We're no longer identified as being or focused upon becoming loving, joyful, peace-filled, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. Rather, we've been pulled into debating issues about which the Bible has little to say and might not even care about.
What if we were to refocus upon virtue? Might that have a salutary effect upon our politics? Might it lower the temperature on our debates? Allow us to see each other as beloved siblings in the family of God rather than dehumanized enemies?
Perhaps this has been the devil's greatest trick. Christians have exchanged virtue for a vote.
Reflections on Faith and Politics: Part 1, Between Nihilism and Idolatry
In this post I want to talk about how God always gets pulled into idolatrous projects, and will be perennially pulled into idolatrous projects. But also how attempts to remove God from public life creates its own toxic and dysfunctional outcomes. In short, God always sits between nihilism and idolatry.
The case about idolatry is easily made. Humans are religious and worshipping creatures. As James K. A. Smith puts it, we are Homo liturgicus. Paul Tillich describes how we live with a horizon of "ultimate concern." These ultimate concerns imbue life with sacred fulness, purpose, and meaning. We pursue life within an existential arena of heroic moral action.
The trouble is that humans are also sinful and broken. Consequently, the religious and sacred is co-opted to provide divine justification for the protection and pursuit of my interests. God baptizes my way of life. God legitimizes a world that privileges and serves my needs and agendas. This happens at all different scales. At the individual level I use God to justify or rationalize selfish choices. At the group level God stands with Us over against Them. This is how God becomes pulled into racial, political, and nationalistic ideologies.
What I'm describing isn't new. We all know that this happens. My point here is simply to say this always happens and will always happen. In fact, I'd suggest that this the default situation. I know that is a very harsh and cynical thing to say, but I don't know how an honest reading of Scripture leads to any other conclusion. Read 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. Idolatry was the default. Read the gospels. Jesus declared the temple in Jerusalem to be desolate. Again, idolatry was the default. Read Revelation. Idolatry is the default. I think Jesus is clear on this point: "Narrow is the way that leads to life, and few find it."
Few find it. Idolatry is the default.
If that's true, then it stands to reason that most of the "Christianity" we observe in America is false worship. "Christianity" is used, just like every religion gets uses, as divine legitimization for individual, political, and nationalistic interests. Consequently, there is nothing strange or shocking when we see Christianity being pulled into ideological movements. This is precisely what the Bible expects will happen. Again, on the pages of Scripture idolatry is the default. That holds for us. Much of the Christianity we observe in the culture will be counterfeit. Something that is true of all religions in all cultures throughout history. Our time and place is no different.
Given this situation, how religion comes to sacralize material, political, ideological, and nationalistic self-interests, many are tempted to jettison the sacred altogether. God is just too dangerous. Transcendence is a cancer. The divine is poisonous. The safer course would seem to be to reject any role for religion in public life. God needs to be amputated from "God and Country." We need a wholly secular politics based upon liberal, humanistic, and Enlightenment ideals.
The problem with this is that nihilism has its own toxic and dysfunctional impacts upon society. If you evacuate human life of sacred, ultimate, and transcendent significances what remains behind is a existential wasteland. Life is evacuated of heroic meaning and we are left unmoored, rudderless, and set adrift.
On this point, Fredrik deBoer has recently argued that political violence is increasingly being produced by nihilism. Violence becomes a way to construct meaning. Here is a bit from deBoer's much commented upon piece:
This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available. The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This is part of why so many of them engage in acts of abstruse symbolism and wrap their politically-incoherent violence in layers of iconography; they are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion. The tail wags the dog; acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.
The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 9, The Lost World
I've hinted at this insight in a few of these posts, but I want to conclude by bringing it fully into view.
It recently struck me, while reflecting upon the Protestant mind, that the Protestant worldview is a metaphysical vacuum, at least overtly. To be sure, Protestantism espouses a Biblical faith, but it lacks any supporting metaphysical assumptions or cosmological worldview. Rather, most Protestants implicitly default to the metaphysics of modernity--subject/object dualism, the fact/value split, the absence of teleology--which work to undermine Biblical faith. Christianity struggles in the metaphysical soil of modernity.
In addition, a sola scriptura tradition bereft of a metaphysical or cosmological worldview is left with words on a page without a means to make sense of those words.
Let me illustrate.
Consider Genesis 1.1: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." These are words on the page, and Protestants believe these words. And yet, what do these words mean? A lot of Protestants default to the metaphysical assumptions of modernity. Genesis 1.1 means that, a long time ago, God created the cosmos like a watchmaker makes and winds up a watch. A deistic and mechanistic imagination sits behind this view of Genesis 1.1. God is the Watchmaker. God is the Intelligent Designer. We imagine that the natural order now exists autonomously and independently of God. Lost is the patristic understanding that creation is constant and ongoing. Gone is the recognition of our continuous ontological dependence. We have lost track of how this particular moment of existence--right here and right now--is an astonishing ontological gift.
And this isn't just a problem with our understanding of creation. It goes to how we envision God's relation to the world generally. Does God stand "at a distance"? Do we imagine that when God acts in our world that His act is an external intervention into the natural order? Is a miracle a "suspension" or "violation" of the "laws of physics," an act of ontological violence? When we imagine God at work in the world is He tinkering as one cause among many?
Here's another example. John 3.16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." These are words on the page, and Protestant believe these words. But again, what do these words mean?
As I've described in this series, without a participatory metaphysics, our visions of "perishing" and "eternal life" default to forensic, penal, and juridical understandings. "Eternal life" means means being forgiven. Which is true, but the patristic vision of sanctification, divinization, and theosis has gone missing.
Another example, Hebrews 11.6: "For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists." Again, words on a page. Words we believe. But when you believe that "God exists" what are you imagining? God as an object? Is the analogy of being operative? Do you think that science could "disprove" God's existence?
I hope these examples illustrate my point. When you look behind the curtain of the Biblical text, what metaphysical imagination is at work in the background? How are words like "creation," "existence," and "salvation" being unpacked? As words on a page, creation, existence, and salvation can mean many different things. And some of these understandings aren't very good. They can be thin and impoverished. They can be antagonistic to faith. They can be wrong.
The point, I hope you can see, is that there is a metaphysics of faith. Christianity espoused a participatory metaphysics for over a thousand years. Protestantism has lost touch with this tradition and legacy. The worldview of the patristic tradition has become a lost world.
And in jettisoning the participatory metaphysics of the patristic tradition, Protestantism has defaulted to the metaphysics of modernity. Again, there is a metaphysics of faith. This is unavoidable. There is always more at work than reading words off the Biblical page. Protestants, by and large, are unaware of this, but probe their beliefs and assumptions about creation, existence, and salvation and you'll quickly bump into an imagination driven by modern metaphysical assumptions. This is a metaphysics of faith that leads to juridical understandings of salvation and to the disenchantment of the world.
That glitch in the background.
The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 8, The Loss of Final Causes
Again, the purpose of these historical narrations is to bring the metaphysical assumptions of modernity into view so that we can clearly see the metaphysical loss we have undergone and what needs to be done by way of recovery.
I've written a lot about the origin of fact/value split. We're going to revisit that history again, but I'm going to bring in some additional material we've not covered before. We begin with Aristotle's theory of causes.
In his Physics, Aristotle describes four different causes that give us knowledge of the world. This vision of Aristotelian science was replaced by modern science during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries.
So, what were Aristotle's four causes? They were:
1. The Material Cause: What something is made of.
2. The Formal Cause: The essence of something and the blueprint, shape, or pattern that flows from and expresses that nature or identity
3. The Efficient Cause: What causes something to to come into existence.
4. The Final Cause: The purpose and goal for which something exists.
I expect that you don't want a lecture on Aristotelian science, but we need to know enough to describe how Aristotle's vision of causality was changed during the Scientific Revolution.
As you look at Aristotle's list, two of the causes will seem quite plain and obvious to you--material and efficient causes. To know what something is made of and what caused it to come into existence is the very stuff of science. Material causality is what we mean by reductionism, breaking something down into smaller and smaller constituent parts. For example, the human person can be reduced from organs to tissues to cells to molecules to atoms to elementary particles. And each level of material reduction is its own branch of science, from biology to chemistry to physics.
Beyond material causality, we also understand efficient causality. Causes have effects and effects have causes. Scientific investigation involves teasing out this chain of cause and effect. Where material causality creates reductionism, efficient causality creates determinism. And our mechanistic imagination of the natural world, as described in the last post, flows from a combination of the two. Reductionism + Determinism = Mechanism.
Summarizing, modern science was created by focusing exclusively upon two of Aristotle's four causes. Science only investigates material and efficient causality. Formal and final causality were left behind.
Why was formal and final causality lost, and what was suffered with that loss?
Getting your head around formal causality can be tricky. I’m not exactly sure I have it completely down. But the basic idea, as best as I can put it, is that if you know the identity or essence of a thing, you’ll know the form it has or will take. For example, if you know that an acorn is the seed of an oak you know what form that acorn will take as it grows. The acorn's essence determines its form. The point for our purposes is that modern science abandoned the Aristotelian belief that natural things possess an inner essence or identity (“treeness” or “oakness”).
Final causality was also abandoned. This is the part of the story I’ve told before, how the loss of final causality (teleology) created the fact/value split. Specifically, if you know what something is for you can determine if something is good. But with a rejection of final causality, values were severed from facts. Normative judgments were no longer tethered to empirical observations.
Also, by restricting itself to material and efficient causality science turned toward the past, reasoning backwards in time from effects to prior causes. This broke with how Aristotelian science faced the future in its examination of the ends to which all things were moving. And while this gave modern science great power in answering our How? and What? questions, we lost our ability to answer existential Why? questions.
In short, in rejecting final causality modern science created both moral relativism and existential nihilism.
Now, this conversation has been about Aristotle. Where does the Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics we've been discussing fit in?
Again, formal causality concerns the essence of things, their form and pattern. In Neoplatonic thought, these essences and forms of things are intelligible patterns that emanate from the One and reside in the Divine Intellect. These forms serve as the archetypes of things, and the visible world reflects them as imperfect images. In Christian Neoplatonic thought, the essences and forms of created things are ideas within the Divine Logos who provides the blueprint and rational order of creation. Simply put, created things are ideas in God's Mind and these ideas give created things their identity.
Concerning final causality, recall how Neoplatonic and Christian Neoplatonic thought described a return to the One. Human persons are moving toward their purpose and goal, which is God. Divine participation is our telos. Theosis is our end.
Stepping back, we can see the impact of the loss of formal and final causality. We have lost the view that created things reflect and participate in the mind (Logos) or wisdom (Sophia) of God. We also have lost the view that our existence is purposive, that we have a meaningful future ahead of us. And while all this discussion about Aristotle might seem abstract and philosophical, this discussion helps us hone in on modern metaphysical assumptions that fragilize faith and promote disenchantment. Specifically, an exclusive focus upon material and efficient causality evacuates the world of sacred intelligibility, divine connection, and cosmic destiny. Given this, a recovery of a participatory metaphysics would involve two things.
First, we need to perceive created existence as reflective of and participating in the Logos. This is the vision of John 1 and Colossians 1. Through the Logos "all things were created" and in the Logos all things "hold together." From the Russian sophiological tradition, we perceive Divine Wisdom flowing through and sustaining the world.
Second, we need to recover a teleological perspective. We aren't a cosmic accident at the end of a long chain of random causal events and facing a blank future. Rather, we are future-oriented creatures. Our existence is purposive. We are moving toward our End. We are on the journey Home.
Psalm 122
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
“May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls
and security within your towers.”
For the sake of my relatives and friends
I will say, “Peace be within you.”
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
I will seek your good.
“May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls
and security within your towers.”
Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. (Zechariah 7:10)
The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 7, The Ontological Bifurcation of Modernity
To some, this might seem to be an irrelevant history lesson. But recounting this story is important for both diagnostic and prescriptive purposes. As I've described, we tend not to notice the implicit metaphysics of modernity. It's simply the air we breath. So if we can describe exactly what the Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition was replaced with we'd be in a better position to both notice our metaphysical assumptions, making the implicit explicit, and be more surgical in pushing back upon the default assumptions that create such inhospitable soil for the flourishing of the Christian faith.
So, let's tell a bit of this story. How did we come to lose the participatory metaphysics in which Biblical faith grew and thrived?
In this post, we'll focus upon the impact of RenƩ Descartes and what has been called "Cartesian Dualism."
Recall, according to the participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition, existence was participation in Being. This participation implied a metaphysical link between creature and Creator. To be sure, as I've pointed out, in order to preserve the analogia entis this link can only be understood analogically, but there existed an ongoing and vital connection between God and the world. This meant that the spiritual and the material realm were bound together in a whole. Since all being was connected to and flowed forth from God, there existed a unity of being.
Descartes severed this connection by positing an ontological bifurcation. Specifically, he asserted that there were two distinct substances in the cosmos, what he called res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). In separating these dual substances, Descartes made a distinction between the mental and the physical, which would go on to sever the connection between the material and the spiritual. This bifurcation would create a host of downstream problems, the most famous being what is called "the mind/body problem." How does the mind, as an immaterial and spiritual substance, interact with the physical brain? Descartes' failed answer to that question is now pejoratively called "the ghost in the machine." Having cut off the mental from the physical, Descartes couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Importantly for our story, material existence lost contact with spiritual existence. Instead of ontological participation, an ongoing metaphysical connection with spiritual reality, we had two separate substances that couldn't be fit together. And we still don't know how link the mental and the physical. There are, in fact, very good arguments (called "the hard problem of consciousness") that the connection can never be resolved. If so, it seems reasonable to assume that Cartesian Dualism is deeply wrong about the nature of reality and has led the modern world down a metaphysical cul-de-sac.
Crucially, Cartesian Dualism severed our ontological connection with God. The effect of this severing is the disenchantment of the material world. I share some of this story in The Shape of Joy. Metaphysically speaking, we live in our heads, as an isolated subjective consciousness, surrounded by inert material objects. Our interior world is the domain of meaning and values, and the exterior world is the domain of facts. More, as modernity has progressed the interior world of meaning and value has come to be viewed as illusory and fictional. The invisible mental stuff described by Descartes, in being invisible, isn't real. To say that something is "only in your mind" means that it doesn't really exist. The only thing that is real is the exterior world of facts. And because of this, science has increasingly became the sole arbiter of truth.
Relatedly, upon the separation of the material world from mind, the cosmos came to be understood to function like a machine. Creation had been viewed as a theophany, as an ongoing act of divine communication. God's Mind spoke to our minds, Logos to logos. Now the world is viewed as silent and mute. Prior to modernity, our relation to God was constant and ongoing. God was present. Today we view God as absent and interventionist, a Deistic "tinkerer" with the cosmos.
This description of mine has been told before. This story is not new. But as I mentioned above, it's important to understand how we lost a participatory metaphysics and what it was replaced with. Most modern people assume Cartesian Dualism, that there two kinds of things in the world, minds and objects, and that these things are ontologically separate. Further, they assume that if anything in the mind can't be verified by science then what is in the mind is imaginary and fictitious. Only objects are real. Only facts are true. The world is inert and is devoid of mind, best viewed as a large machine that runs independently of any sustaining or guiding intelligence. Existence is taken for granted and is no longer viewed a gift. Theophany has been replaced with an existential void.
The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 6, A Juridical Faith
In this post, let me turn to another effect of our metaphysical loss, how Protestantism became a juridical faith.
Again, due to the participatory metaphysics that held sway for the first millennium of the church, salvation was understood as theosis and divine union. This vision of mystical return emphasized sanctification, purification, and divinization. In modern Protestantism, these are foreign notions as salvation is primarily understood in juridical terms. Biblically speaking, there was a soteriological pivot away from sanctification toward justification. And with that pivot a loss of the contemplative, mystical, and monastic traditions. This evacuated Protestantism of any robust vision of spiritual formation, a loss many evangelicals have tried to remedy, from Richard Foster and Dallas Willard a generation ago, to John Mark Comer today. Still, as I've described before, in many sectors of evangelicalism this retrieval faces both resistance and indifference. Many evangelicals find conversations about contemplative prayer or spiritual disciplines to be exotic and "too Catholic."
The reasons for this soteriological shift, from theosis toward a juridical vision of justification, are many. But one of the most important ones is what we've been talking about, the loss of a metaphysical vision of participation. Again, the Neoplatonic vision of "return" to the One influenced the patristic vision of theosis and divinization. The mystical and contemplative tradition of Christianity worked within this metaphysical paradigm. Spiritual practices, contemplation, ascesis, monastic discipline, and sacramental rites purified the soul and brought it into union with God, the soul becoming more and more Godlike. The famous three stages of this spiritual journey--the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way--concisely summarize the entire tradition. Purgation, illumination, union. A very Neoplatonic vision.
Protestantism lost touch with this soteriology, largely because it lost the metaphysical framework that animated it. And again, to keep repeating the point, so much of this is and was happening off the pages of Scripture. As any skeptical evangelical will point out to you, there's not a lot of Biblical warrant for much of what we find in the contemplative and monastic traditions. Lent isn't in the Bible. Nor is living in the desert like a hermit. Which is precisely why so many evangelicals are skeptical of these traditions. The monastic and contemplative practices made sense primarily because of the participatory vision of salvation at work in the background. The justification for these practices and rituals, which allowed you to walk the purgative, illuminative, unitive path, was primarily metaphysical and not Biblical. Thus, when you lose those metaphysical assumptions--salvation as participation--you struggle to justify spiritual disciplines and contemplative practices wholly on Biblical grounds.
To be sure, there many evangelicals who love and embrace this recovery of the contemplative and monastic traditions. But this evangelical appropriation can be thin, pietistic, and performative. And much of this is due to a lingering metaphysical impoverishment, trying to adopt practices that only make sense within a certain metaphysical framework. The practices get adopted--we learn to walk a labyrinth, say breath prayers, and celebrate Advent--but the adoption is superficial. It's all fun and interesting, freshens things up a bit, but the underlying soteriological metaphysics haven't been changed. Simply put, any recovery of the contemplative and monastic traditions cannot simply be a recovery of "practices" and "disciplines." The recovery has to be metaphysical as well. You need to recover an entire worldview and not just a new prayer technique.
So, back to how the Protestant soteriological vision became juridical.
By juridical I mean the soteriological shift from theosis to penal substitutionary atonement. When you lose a participatory metaphysics what happens to your vision of salvation? Well, you lose a robust vision of sanctification. You begin to emphasize justification. To be clear, those substitutionary images of atonement are in Scripture. Critics of penal substitutionary atonement, and I find this a bit of a head-scratcher, routinely fail to appreciate how mercy, grace, pardon, and forgiveness are integral to the gospel. The issue is one of emphasis. Due to their metaphysical assumptions and the Neoplatonic influences, the church fathers emphasized salvation as sanctification and divine union. Lose those assumptions and you begin to emphasize justification over sanctification. And that's what happened with Protestantism, a soteriological turn from theosis toward a juridical vision of salvation.
Another reason for this development, I think, is that you really don't need much of a metaphysics to espouse a juridical vision of salvation. All you need, by way of metaphysics, is the belief in God. Here's all the metaphysics you need:
1. God exists.
2. God forgives you.
I'm being a wee bit facetious here, but not much. A juridical faith is perfectly suited for the thinned out metaphysics of modernity. Which might work okay for a bare bones soteriology, just enough to create an altar call sermon, but it evacuates the metaphysical imagination of Protestantism. Where, for example, is the celestial hierarchy assumed by Pseudo-Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas? Where has the sacramental ontology gone? Where is the analogy of being?
As we know, due to its metaphysical impoverishment, this juridical vision of faith is thin and fragile. Which is precisely why you see the Richard Fosters, Dallas Willards, and John Mark Comers trying to recover the spiritual practices and disciplines of the tradition. And I wholly agree. May their tribe increase.
But without a deeper metaphysical recovery I fear this is lipstick on a pig.
The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 5, Losing the Analogy
I've argued that the Neoplatonic influence on Biblical faith has been generative. In the last few posts I've pointed to some of those theological fruits. Let me unpack one of those fruits and the impact of its loss on modern faith.
The issue is God's transcendence. To be sure, Jewish monotheism policed the ontological boundary between creature and Creator. But in its encounter with Neoplatonic metaphysics, Christian reflection upon God's transcendence was mystically explored and theologically deepened.
One of the fruits of these reflections was the articulation of what is called "the analogy of being," the analogia entis. This something I've talked about a lot over the last few years, but a quick recap.
Simply put, God exists differently than how we exist. We can assert that God exists but we should never imagine that God exists like objects in the universe exist. The reason, again, has to do with a participatory metaphysics. God, as Existence Itself, imparts existence. Consequently, however God "exists" isn't the same as how we creatures exist. Thus, we can only speak of God's "existence" analogically. There is something similar to how God exists and we exist, but there is also a radical dissimilarity as well. Given God's transcendence, whenever we speak of God's existence we must use "the analogy of being," how God exists but exists differently.
Now, why should any of this metaphysical speculation matter? Recall how, at the start of this series, I described how "Scripture alone" folks are going to think all this Neoplatonic mumbo jumbo is unnecessarily philosophical and extra-biblical. In this view, the first four posts in this series were a massive waste of time.
And yet, skepticism and unbelief are on the rise. People are nonverting from their churches. Parents are struggling to impart the faith to their children. Why? What's going on? The words of the Bible haven't changed. People still know how to read. But quoting the Bible over and over isn't moving the needle. So what's changed?
What's changed are those background assumptions, many of them metaphysical. The analogy of being, for example. Most of my college students imagine God as an object that exists in the universe. A big, powerful object, but an object nonetheless. As moderns, my students don't assume a participatory metaphysics. Their default imagination is that the universe is full of objects governed by the laws of physics. They are not thinking of God's existence analogically, but literally. God exists exactly like a chair exists. Thus, many of these students are persuaded by the argument that, since science cannot "find" God in the universe, then science has proven that God doesn't exist. Or they become convinced that belief in God is committed to "God of the gaps" arguments. Or that faith can be breezily relegated to "I have no need of that hypothesis" irrelevancy.
Notice in all this how unbelief is being driven by metaphysical assumptions and not biblical illiteracy. To go back to the metaphor from my first post, the glitch is happening off the page of Scripture, in the background code. The default metaphysical assumptions of modernity, assumptions my students don't even recognize they've adopted, are destabilizing their faith.
All that to say, to all those "Bible alone" Protestants out there, if you ignore the metaphysical loss we've undergone in modernity you'll fail to appreciate how the Bible is being read in very different soil from where it first was planted and flourished. You'll be thumping your Bible harder and harder to lesser and lesser effect.
And listen, to "Bible alone" readers, I sympathize. I know you're sad in having to talk about things like "the analogy of being." I'm aware that the words analogia entis are not found on the pages of Scripture. But if you're raising your kids to believe that God exists like a chair--and I know you are because I teach your children--well, you're going to reap what you sow.
The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 4, The Neoplatonism of Thomas Aquinas
So, a simple contrast was taught: Augustine was Platonic and Aquinas was Aristotelian.
Sadly, this contrast is overly reductionistic and wrong.
First, as I described in Part 2, while Aristotle rejected Plato's theory of the Forms he still operated within a Platonic framework. Aristotle's philosophy was antimaterialist, antimechanistic, antinominalist, antirelativist, and antiskeptical. Consequently, pitting Plato against Aristotle in the thought of Augustine and Aquinas misses the metaphysical continuity between them.
More importantly, Thomas inherited the Neoplatonic framework of the church fathers, Augustine among them. Thomas quotes Augustine more than any other authority outside of Scripture. So while Thomas engages with Aristotle he doesn't jettison his theological inheritance wholesale. Rather, Thomas effects an integration of the Neoplatonism of the patristic tradition with Aristotelian philosophy. Basically, Aquinas is very Platonic, just as Aristotle was.
Where do we see Neoplatonism in Thomas Aquinas?
I'm no Aquinas scholar, but let me highlight a few examples.
First, due to the reputation of medieval scholasticism, crude presentations of Aquinas' five "proofs" for God's existence, and the analytical style of the Summa Theologica, people assume that Aquinas was a logic-chopping rationalist. But Thomas was a mystic and an important figure within the apophatic stream of Christian theology.
You see the impact of Neoplatonic apophaticism in how Thomas treats human knowledge of God in the Summa. For example, Thomas writes:
God cannot be seen in His essence by a mere human being...the Divine essence cannot be known through the nature of material things...Hence it is impossible for the soul of man in this life to see the essence of God.
And further:
Our natural knowledge begins from sense. Hence our natural knowledge can go as far as it can be led by sensible things. But our mind cannot be led by sense so far as to see the essence of God...But because [sensible things] are His effects and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God whether He exists...This is Thomas' famous distinction between God's essence and God's existence. The essence of God, what God "is," is unknowable. God's Being is shrouded in apophatic mystery. God's existence, by contrast, can be known though the effects of God, like creation, which sets up Thomas' famous proofs. Importantly, Thomas is clear in his proofs that they only point to God's existence and not God's essence. No one knows what God "is." Thomas preserves and carries forward the apophatic tradition.
God is in all things...[T]he thing moved and the mover must be joined together...God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being...Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it.
We must consider not only the emanation of a particular being from a particular agent, but also the emanation of all being from the universal cause, which is God; and this emanation we designate by the name of creation.After our having been created, Thomas goes to describe how human happiness involves our return to God: "Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence." In the beginning stages of this journey, as described above, the soul comes to understand that God exists. But that knowledge is not enough. The soul longs to look upon God directly, not just upon God's effects. Knowing that God "exists" is thin soup. Consequently, the soul's erotic longing for God pushes on until happiness is achieved though divine union. Thomas describing the journey of the soul all the way home:
If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than that He is; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man’s happiness consists...
[T[he wonderful source of all visible and invisible order and harmony supernaturally pours out in splendid revelations to the superior being the full and initial brilliance of his astounding light, and successive beings in their turn receive their share of the divine beam, through the mediation of their superiors...Hence, on each level, predecessor hands on to successor whatever of the divine light he has received and this, in providential proportion, is spread out to every being.Of course God himself is really the source of illumination for those who are illuminated, for he is truly and really Light itself. He is the Cause of being and of seeing. But, in imitation of God, it has been established that each being is somehow superior to the one to whom he passes on the divine light...