In the last post I described how, prior to the Enlightenment, Christianity assumed a Platonic metaphysics. And how, in modernity, we've lost these assumptions. I suggested that many of Christianity's contemporary ailments have been caused by this metaphysical loss. A loss that is hard to see because it operates in the background. Consequently, these issues are hard to talk about as the conversation appears unnecessarily abstract and philosophical and doesn't seem to have much to do with the Bible.
So, here's a metaphor. Imagine soil and a plant. The soil represents metaphysical and cosmological assumptions. A worldview. The plant represents Biblical faith. As I described in the last post, Biblical faith was planted in Platonic soil. And as pope Benedict argued, this was a providential potting. The plant grew large and healthy. Then, during the Enlightenment, the plant was uprooted and replanted in a different pot with different soil. This different metaphysical soil lacked the nutrients that had helped the plant thrive and grow. And so, the plant begins to wither and die.
Using this metaphor, let's return to the point I made in the last post. A conversation about metaphysics might seem off-topic and unnecessarily academic. But if you're looking at a repotted plant that is dying it seems reasonable to take a look at the soil.
I hope the soil metaphor helps a bit. If so, let's turn our attention to the soil Platonism provided for Biblical faith. What nutritive conditions for the growth Biblical faith were within this worldview?
Last year, I shared the work of Lloyd Gerson on the history of Platonism. A review of his work will be helpful in describing what I mean by "the Platonic soil" in which Christianity grew. Gerson's work will be particularly useful in showing how we, in the modern era, hold very different metaphysical assumptions.
As I shared last year, Gerson describes what he calls Ur-Platonism.
By Ur-Platonism Gerson means a tradition of thought larger than Plato’s particular philosophy. Plato’s philosophy, in this view, is just a particular expression of a broader metaphysical worldview. For example, Gerson argues that Aristotle can rightly be described as a Platonist. To be sure, Aristotle rejected his teacher’s theory of the Forms, but taken as a whole his philosophy still operates within a Platonic paradigm. We’ll see something similar when we turn to Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is often described as Aristotelian, but recent scholars have come to see him as deeply Neoplatonic. And if it’s true that both Plato and Aristotle fall under the broader umbrella of Ur-Platonism, that’s exactly what we should expect. To pit Plato against Aristotle is to miss what they held in common, and it’s their shared metaphysical assumptions that concern us here.
What, then, are the elements of Platonism? Below is Gerson's list I shared last year, with selected quotations from a chapter of his entitled "Was Plato a Platonist?":
- Antimaterialism: "the view that it is false that the only things that exist are bodies and their properties"
- Antimechanism: "the view that the only sort of explanations available in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order"
- Antinominalism: "the view that it is false that the only things that exist are individuals, each uniquely situated in space and time"
- Antirelativism: "the denial that...'man is the measure of all things.'"
- Antiskepticism: "the view that knowledge is possible"
Let's work again through this list.
First, the Platonic worldview is antimaterialist. Platonism assumes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical.
Platonism is also
antimechanistic. As Gerson writes, "Antimechanism is the view that the only sort of explanations available in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order." More: "One way to understand antimechanism is as the denial of one version of what we have come to call 'the causal closure principle,' that is, the principle that physical or material causes are necessary and sufficient for all events in the physical world." Platonism rejects the view that the cosmos runs like machine, mechanically and deterministically.
Next, Platonism is antinominalist. This really gets into the participatory metaphysics I described in the last post. Let me recap.
Nominalism was the philosophical view that came to deny universal properties and principles, the contention that only individual objects exist. For example, "redness" isn't a universal property or reality that exists independently from the collection of things that are red. "Redness" is just a name (hence the label "nominalism") for a feature (the color red) a collection of objects share.
On the surface this seems like no big deal. But the denial of universal properties has huge metaphysical implications. First, a nominalist approach to reality denies transcendentals such as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. This isn't to say that nominalists don't have a version of the true, the beautiful, and the good. In the nominalist account of, say, the beautiful, the word/name "beautiful" is simply a word/name that describes a collection of objects we'd label "beautiful." In this nominalist account "beauty" is subjective, a word to describe our subjective judgments about what we consider beautiful. The antinominalist Platonic account of Beauty, by contrast, argues that the Beautiful exists independently of objects and our subjective judgments. Beauty is not subjective. Beauty is the Real. The same goes for the True and the Good. If so, something is called true, beautiful, or good because they participate in, are connected to, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are imparted to objects through a metaphysical connection.
Beyond the transcendentals, there is also the question being and existence. According to nominalism, a word like "existence" is just a name for a class of individual objects. That is to say, we can gather a group of objects--a dog, a chair, an apple--and say that these things "exist." Just like a group of objects can be named "red." But according to the church fathers, given their Platonic assumptions, "existence" wasn't just a name. To be was to participate in Being. To exist was to be in relation to Existence. In short, nominalism flattens our imagination when it comes to existence. Our understanding of existence becomes literalistic. "Existence" comes to mean "physical object" rather than mystical participation in God.
Moving on, Platonism is also antirelativist. The particular issue here is moral relativism, the view that "goodness" is a subjective opinion. According to Platonism, however, "goodness is a property of being." Platonism asserts what is called moral realism, the view that the good exists independently of human judgments.
Finally, Platonism is antiskeptical. According to Platonism, the world possesses an inherent rationality. Both Greek philosophy and Christian theology call this the Logos. More, the human mind must, in its own right, image the Logos, be capable of mirroring the rationality it encounters in creation. Platonism argues that there is here a "fit" between mind and Reality. Because of this correspondence, Platonism contends that "knowledge is possible."
Stepping back, we can appreciate how Platonism provided good soil for Biblical faith. The soil of Platonism was antimaterialist, antimechanistic, antinominalist, antirelativist, and antiskeptical. This was a nutritive environment in which faith could grow and thrive.
By contrast, since the Enlightenment we've been trying to grow faith in metaphysical soil that is materialistic, mechanistic, nominalist, relativist, and skeptical. Consequently, when we see the plant of Biblical faith struggling to grow in this different soil it shouldn't be all that surprising.
