The Metaphysics of Faith: Part 4, The Neoplatonism of Thomas Aquinas

When I was taught about Thomas Aquinas in college the story about him went something like this. Early Christian thought was Platonic. Augustine is an example. Then, in the 12th and 13th centuries, the writings of Aristotle were discovered by the Latin West. There were some worries about these newly discovered texts, but Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian faith and thereby established medieval scholasticism. 

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.  

Another place where you see Thomas carry forward Neoplatonic ideas is in his use of participatory metaphysics to describe God's creation and sustaining of the world. As Thomas puts it in the Summa, "that which has existence but is not existence, is a being by participation." That is to say, since "nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence" things that exist are not existence itself. Existence must be given or imparted. We exist only "by participation" with something already in existence. And since this applies to everything in the world, Thomas draws the conclusion: "Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation." And this participation, as we've seen, describes our continuous ontological dependence upon God. As Thomas describes:

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 also see the Neoplatonic legacy at work in Thomas' arguments for divine simplicity. In Neoplatonic thought, the One was an Absolute Unity with no internal divisions. The impact of this idea influenced the doctrine of divine simplicity, where the attributes of God are treated as identical. As Thomas describes the relation of God to divine predicates: "He must be His own Godhead, His own Life, and whatever else is thus predicated of Him." For example, in God Being and Goodness are an identity. As Thomas says, in God "Goodness and being are really the same." 

Further, we see Neoplatonic influences in how Thomas describes beings coming from God and returning to God. First, Thomas deploys Neoplatonic emanation, with the Christian ex nihilo twist, to describe the act of creation:

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...

Notice how the soteriological framework here isn't juridical, like we see in Protestantism. Salvation is the story of our journey Home, being finally united with the Source of our being. Salvation and complete happiness comes though divine union. 

Lastly, before concluding, let me also mention that Thomas talks a lot about angels in the Summa. This is another example of Neoplatonic influence. 

In its vision of creation-via-emanation, Neoplatonism posited hierarchical gradations. Metaphorically, the light was stronger the closer to the Sun (the One, the Absolute) and got weaker the further away. Beings closer to the Sun mediated the divine light to those further away, in a cascading sort of way. This idea was carried forward, but also altered and "baptized," by the Christian tradition. For example, Pseudo-Dionysius described what he called "the Celestial Hierarchy." Existing between God and humanity are orders of angelic beings who mediate God's grace from the higher to the lower. As Pseudo-Dionysius describes it:

[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...

This is a very Neoplatonic idea, successive beings passing on the divine light down through a celestial hierarchy. I expect most modern Christians would find this vision very strange and foreign. Personally, I find some significant tensions between Pseudo-Dionysius and the contention in the book of Hebrews that angelic mediation has been set aside in Jesus (see Hebrews 1-2). 

Regardless, one can see the Neoplatonic influence upon Thomas in how much attention he pays to angelic mediation in the Summa. For example, Thomas recognizes an angelic hierarchy and spends significant time describing how "inferior" and "superior" angels interact with each other in God's providential governance of the world. As Thomas describes, "One angel enlightens another" and this influence goes from superior to inferior: "the intellectual power of an inferior angel is strengthened by the superior angel turning to him." More: "Hence a superior angel knows more about the types of the Divine works than an inferior angel, and concerning these the former enlightens the latter." All this in Thomas, the Celestial Hierarchy, is very Neoplatonic. 

To conclude.

The point in digging into the Neoplatonism of Thomas Aquinas is to make this point. As I pointed out at the top, it's common to view the patristic tradition as Platonic and medieval scholasticism as Aristotelian. But such a contrast misses the deep Neoplatonism of Thomas. To be sure, the discovery of Aristotle would begin to shatter the Neoplatonic consensus that persisted from the fathers to Thomas. The Renaissance would soon arrive, followed by the Enlightenment. Each would do their work in dislodging Neoplatonic metaphysics from Christian thought. The plant of Biblical faith would be repotted in the soil of modernity. 

But our focus on Thomas has clarified this for us: Neoplatonism wasn't just an early patristic phenomenon. The Platonic influence persisted for over 1,000 years, from Origen to Aquinas. 

And then, quite rapidly, it all evaporated.