Constantine’s sword-The Church and the Jews. By James Carrol.
(P 208,209)
THE PREVIOUS EASTER, in 387,1 this same Ambrose had taken a thirty-three-year-old man naked into a pool of water, and three times, pushing by the shoulders, he had forced the man under, saying, "I baptize you, Augustine." After Constantine, the conversion of Augustine (354—430) may be the most momentous in the history of the Church. He was born seventeen years after Constantine died. He was a bishop in Hippo, a small city in North Africa, but it is as a writer that he is remembered. He wrote nearly a hundred books, by his count, and thousands of letters and sermons, most of which survive. Garry Wills describes his method: "Augustine dictated to relays of stenographers, often late into the night . . . He employed teams of copyists.
His sermons, several a week, were taken down by his own or others' shorthand writers. In some seasons, he preached daily. His letters were sent off in many copies. He paced about as he dictated, a reflection of the mental restlessness and energy conveyed in the very rhythm of his prose"' His greatest work, to which we will turn, may be The City of God, a meditation on the relationship of the Church and the empire, of politics and virtue, of history and hope. But his most compelling work is surely The Confessions,' the Western world's first great autobiography.
This book, with its realistic exploration of human psychology and its affirmation that subjective experience is of ultimate value, stamped the mind of Europe. Its search for God in an act of memory makes each person a center of Christian revelation. That idea is the birthplace of modern individualism, for good and for ill.
Augustine's solid grounding in the classical intellectual tradition prepared him for the task of applying categories of Platonic thought to Christian theology.
To take only one example of the importance of his ideas, he marshalled the definitive argument against the Donatists, held that saintly virtue was a prerequisite for full membership in the Church.
Augustine's position was rooted in Plato's distinction between the ideal and the real and Augustine knew that the ideal would not be realized until God brought about the fulfillment of Creation at the end of time.
Therefore, he held, the human condition was by definition flawed. Gospel was addressed to human beings, not to angels. Because Augustine carried the day against the Donatists, Christians could come together before God, confessing sin, and knowing that the Church itself, too, remained imperfect. The Church would not be a sect of the saved but community open to all. Augustine is commonly credited as the father c Western Christian theology, but he is, perhaps more basically, the father of the inclusive Western Church we know, in both its Catholic and Protestant manifestations.
(P 578,579)
But recall further that the Dark Age itself was, in part at least, an unintended consequence of powerful but ambiguous developments occurring Christian theology, an intellectual equivalent of the Church's political accommodation of the imperium in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion.
The theological formulations that jelled between the council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381) had reflected an accommodation with Greek thought, and so had the work of the great Augustine (354-430).
In this period, the metaphors that early Christians used describe their experience of and faith in Jesus of Nazareth were reinvented in the categories of Hellenistic metaphysics.
Obviously, the movement from religious expression which began, essentially, as poetry, which prizes ambiguity and allusiveness, to religious philosophy, which values precision above implication, represents a decisive shift.
When the Church fathers found the mysteries of revelation to be illuminated by their understanding of Plato's dichotomy between form and matter — between the world, that is, of ideal perfection and the inherently awed material world of everyday experience — a new idea of the cosmos raced the Christian vision.
Less a construct of Plato than of his syncretist interpreters of late antiquity, especially Plotinus (c. 205-270), Neo-Platonism posited a dualism that would become Christianized as between grace and sin.
This was one culture's form of the perennial human temptation binary thinking, as evidenced among Gnostics of various kinds in the ancient world. The Neo-Platonic divide between soul and body would have its later equivalents in the post-Descartes alienation between the self and the world, and even in the postmodern deconstruction of the bond between the self and the self's expression.
Now God was understood to be the True, the One, the Holy; the material world — enigmatic, chaotic, profane — could only be ontologically unrelated to such a God.
Creation was merely the Creator's shadow. For a people with roots in the biblical view of reality, this was a massive mutation, for the God of Israel, while very much a transcendent God, was the Lord of human history who had chosen to be intimately involved in that history.
Among Christians, a new idea of the person took hold too, one equally foreign to the biblical idea, with a split between the body and the soul, which in nature could not be reconciled.
This split posed large problem for theologians who sought to define exactly how Jesus could he both God and man, and disagreements over the formulas constructed to answer the question — "begotten, not made," "hypostatic union," " filoque - became violent, leading to the first great condemnations of heresy.
But perhaps the most damaging consequence of this new dualism was the devaluation of the physical world that seemed logically to flow from a Neo-Platonic suspicion of "matter."
This led not only, say, to the distrust of sexual pleasure — original sin defined as the sex act — which has been a mark of Christianity ever since, but to the idea that human beings, mired in the material world, were inherently unable to arrive at a state of happiness — in religious language, salvation — that was natural to the realm of the ideal.
The body, that is, condemned the soul to live in permanent exile from the realm for which it was made. It is only when such Hellenistic categories shape Christian theology that the idea of the immortality of the soul becomes the content of religious hope — a notion that has nothing in common with biblical hope, which is based on personal wholeness, not dichotomy; on God's promise, not the soul's indestructibility.
But in the scheme of Christian Neo-Platonism, even the soul's intrinsic immortality was no hope, because its pollution by the body left it doomed.
The gulf between body and soul was itself a pale shadow of the infinitely larger gulf between God and the human person.
For the purposes of this book, it cannot be emphasized enough that one effect of this thoroughgoing Hellenization of the meaning of Jesus, whatever positive results it had as an intellectual construction, was the final obliteration of the Jewish character of that meaning.
With the Christian adoption of Greek intellectual categories, the parting of the ways became turnpikes set in concrete.
From now on, most ominously, since there was nothing intrinsically Jewish about Jesus, there would be nothing to prevent Christians from defining themselves in opposition to Jews.
Despite the intellectual monuments created by Church fathers from Tertullian to Augustine, a collapse of intellectual pursuit and scientific inquiry was an ultimate consequence of the Christian adoption of a dualistic worldview, since there was no reason to take the experience of the senses seriously.
On the contrary, the senses became the enemy, and where once the sexual body was celebrated as the very image of God — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." “the sexual body now became an "occasion of sin” to he subdued.
Among Christians, the Greek idea of soul became entirely removed from the biblical idea of spirit, which, since it literally means "breath," is intrinsically physical.
Indeed, now the body, even with its breath, was defined as the source of all evil. Christian piety became penitential — the self-flagellation of body hatred became the highest form of devotion — and even work of the mind, like reading.
Friday, 13 July 2007
The Development of Platonism & Neo-Platonism within Christendom
The Development of Platonism & NeoPlatonism within Christendom.
Does the Trinity have its Origin in the above?
Many thanks - for this external contribution.
This paper traces the development of the neo-Platonist trinitarian system from Greek philosophy into the post-Christian synthesis. It shows the origin of the Cappadocian system using both ancient philosophy and modern Catholic theology in admission of the origin of the doctrine.
The Development of the Neo-Platonist Model
The concept of God as three hypostases of the superior entity is developed from Greek thought. It has nothing to do with the Bible. Plato developed the concept of forms in his works. Plato uses the philosopher Parmenides as his model. Parmenides was the first of the Greek Monists. He was not Monotheist. The concepts were further developed by those who followed Plato. Plotinus developed a relatively simple metaphysical scheme:
providing for just three hypostases - One, Intellect, and Soul - [this scheme] seems to have suffered elaboration already at the hands of his senior pupil Amelius (who had a special weakness for triads), but from the perspective of the Athenian School it is Iamblichus (c. 245-325) who began the major system of scholastic elaboration which is the mark of later Neoplatonism (Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, General Introduction, p. xv, Morrow and Dillon, Princeton University Press, 1987).
Thus the Trinity is prefigured as the One, the Wisdom or Intellect and the Soul becoming the One as Father, Word equated with Wisdom and the Spirit as functional Soul. This Spirit as functional Soul is held to be capable of individuation yet remains complete as an entity separate to and equal with the other two hypostases.
Proclus developed the concept of an Unparticipated Divine Soul. Dillon says of this:
Once again the psychic realm must have its proper monad (or henad), Unparticipated Divine Soul, which itself participates in Nous and presides transcendently over its own realm. In the Elements of Theology, when Proclus comes to discuss Soul (props. 184-211), we find no mention of such an entity, only of souls in the plural, but it is plainly presupposed, and is in fact mentioned earlier, in prop. 164. There we learn that the Unparticipated Soul 'presides primarily over the cosmos' [prootoos huper tou kosmou esti], but does so transcendently and so is distinct from the immanent World Soul, as well as from individual souls.
Proclus holds that all monads (unities or single units, henads in Platonic philosophy) in and above the cosmos, intelligible and intellectual are attached to their own monads and ordered with respect to one another, with the One as the leader of secondary monads.
Similarly, the One is the source and basis of the triad. Proclus holds:
Parmenides abides in the transcendent One, Zeno projects the many as the One, and Socrates turns back even these many to the Parmenidean One, since the first member in the every triad is an analogue of rest, the second of procession and the third of reversion, and the reversion rounds out a kind of circular path connecting the end with the beginning .
The concepts of the three begin to emerge but the first step is necessarily that of the dyad (a unit of two parts) but the dyad is a copy of the Unity. Thus the second is inferior to the One of Parmenides which is termed by Zeno himself as logos or discourse. The One is greater than plurality and the paradigm superior to the copy.
Thus the logos concept of Greek philosophy is attributed to the One rather than the second. This is contrary to the Bible but the origin of the concept is thus evident. The important concept of the Greeks was to show, as Proclus did by improving on Zeno's arguments, that plurality devoid of unity is impossible. Thus the Godhead was logically required to be a unified plurality but the early Greeks had no concept of Agape.
Agape is a transliteration of the Hebrew term ’ahabah from the Song of Songs in the Septuagint. Thus the concept of the love of God by dispensation is limited among the early Greeks. The consequent sharing of godliness they thus regarded, where accidentally acquired, as divine theft having no real concept of a plan of salvation as was present in the Hebrew.
The theory of Ideas existed as early as the Pythagoreans and was taken up by Plato in the Sophist (248a). Socrates posits the existence of the itself by itself which is taken to be the unmixed simplicity and purity of the Ideas.
The Hebrew combines this concept as being present with God (Prov. 8:22). Wisdom was created by God as the beginning of His way, the first of His acts of old. This led the rabbis to assume that the law was the wisdom referred to as it established order instead of chaos.
The Ideas were distinguished from attributes predicated of particular things. Thus, for the Greeks, the logos as expression of ideas was taken to be appropriated to the prime cause rather than an attribute of the cause.
Hence the logic of the denial of a subordinate logos. From this also came the concept that God is pure thought. It is worth noting that from Acts 7:29 logos is merely an utterance or saying. See also logoi of God translating dabar Yahovah or oracle(s) of God in the LXX and New Testament.
Plato gave Orpheus to say (In Tim. I, 312.26 ff., and 324.14 ff., cf. Proclus ibid., p. 168).
...that all things came to be in Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes, because, although the causes of all things in the cosmos appeared primarily and in a unified form in him (sc. Phanes), they appear secondarily and in a distinct form in the Demiurge. The sun, the moon, the heaven itself, the elements, and Eros the unifier - all came into being as a unity 'mixed together in the belly of Zeus' (Orph. fr. 167b.7 Kern).
The Demiurgic forms gave rise to the order and arrangement of sensible things (ibid.). All things stemming from the Father thus gave rise to animism, where the nature of the deity was immanent in all matter.
The Greeks, from Parmenides, turned the concept to Monism, making the One immanent. But Proclus shows that these concepts, particularly the Ideas which stemmed from the Will of the Father, have their origin in the Chaldean Oracles (fr. 37 Des Places).
The Intellect of the Father whirred, conceiving with his unwearying will
Ideas of every form; and they leapt out in flight from this single source
For this was the Father's counsel and achievement.
But they were divided by the fire of intelligence
and distributed among other intelligent beings. For their lord had placed
Before this multiform cosmos an eternal intelligible model; And the cosmos strove modestly to follow its traces,
And appeared in the form it has and graced with all sorts of Ideas.
Of these there was one source, but as they burst forth innumerable others were broken off and scattered
Through the bodies of the cosmos, swarming like bees
About the mighty hollows of the world,
And whirling about in various directions -
These intelligent Ideas, issued from the paternal source,
Laying hold on the mighty bloom of fire.
At the prime moment of unsleeping time
This primary and self sufficient source of the Father
Has spouted forth these primally-generative Ideas.
Proclus comments thus:
In these words the gods have clearly revealed where the Ideas have their foundation, in what god their single source is contained, how their plurality proceeds from this source, and how the cosmos is constituted in accordance with them; and also that they are moving agents in all the cosmic systems, all intelligent in essence and exceedingly diverse in their properties (op. cit., p. 169).
The concept of the Father as creator which is the biblical model is clearly understood in the Chaldean systems and in the original Greek texts. The application of the functions of God, however, become misapplied by them. However, the ancient concepts of the Father as supreme God was understood by all nations. It was the neo-Platonists who perverted it.
The Introduction to Book III of Proclus' Commentary holds that the summary (831.25 ff.) shows Proclus to specify:
three basic attributes of Forms - Goodness, Essentiality, Eternity, deriving respectively from the One (the First Cause), the One Being and Aeon. All paradigmatic Forms derive their being from these three (p. 155).
The requirement thus emerges of the three attributes of Goodness, Essentiality and Eternity being predicated to the Triune system. The Greeks thus had to assert that Christ was co-eternal with God in spite of the fact that the Bible clearly says he is not and that only God is immortal (1Tim. 6:16). The aspect of Christ as the Angel of YHVH also was required to be of the primary three, in view of the perceived requirements of the adequacy of the reconciliation of men to God through Christ.
The Greeks were themselves limited by their concepts of love to the primary relationships of filial and erotic love, hence they could not understand the biblical paradigms.
The concept of omniscience being applied to Christ, contrary to Scripture (e.g. Rev. 1:1), follows from the requirements of the attributes especially Essentiality. Proclus develops the argument from Book IV.1047, op. cit., p. 406.
In dealing with knowledge as single or multiple, Proclus shows that it must be single therefore the neo-Platonists had to assert omniscience to Christ to ensure the other attributes of the divine nature. Such assertion was, of itself, biblically absurd.
If, however, we are to state the single principle of knowledge, we must fix upon the One, which generates Intellect and all the knowledge both within it and what is seen on the secondary levels of being. For this, transcending the Many as it does, is the first principle of knowledge for them, and is not the same as them, as is Sameness in the intelligible realm.
This is co-ordinate with its Otherness and inferior to Being. The One, on the other hand, is beyond intellectual Being and grants coherence to it, and for this reason the One is God and so is Intellect, but not by reason of Sameness nor Being.
And in general Intellect is not god qua Intellect; for even the particular intellect is an intellect but is not a god. Also it is the proper role of Intellect to contemplate and intelligise and judge true being; but of God to unify, to generate, to exercise providence and suchlike. By virtue of that aspect of itself which is not intellect, the Intellect is God; and by virtue of that aspect of itself which is not God, the god in it is Intellect.
The divine Intellect, as a whole, is an intellectual essence along with its own summit and its proper unity, knowing itself in so far as it is intellectual, but being 'intoxicated on nectar,' as has been said, and generating the whole of cognition, in so far as it is the 'flower' of the Intellect and a supra-essential henad.
So once again, in seeking the first principle of knowledge, we have ascended to the One.
Similarly, the first principle was held to be the One (ibid.) and Socrates (Phaedrus 245d) says the first principle is ungenerated.
Here, Trinitarianism becomes confused because it holds Christ to be a generation of the Father. The newer Process Theologians hold the transcendent unity of the Godhead where there was an essential ungenerate co-eternal oneness which regards individuation as illusory. It is properly Monism and not Monotheism, hence it is properly a form of liberation theology akin to Buddhism and Hinduism rather than Christianity.
Logically it is popular with Mysticism. Indeed the recent developments of Trinitarianism seek to make God immanent as pure thought, present in matter, e.g. stone, wood, glass etc. This is not only not Christian it is not even transcendental Monotheism. It is Monism.
The logical requirements of the Greek philosophical form of reasoning have to assert equal divinity with Christ in order to predicate unconditional ascent to the One. This objective of ascent to God by individual determination rather than by God's allocation is the underlying motive of Cappadocian Trinitarianism.
The conclusion is verified from an examination of the history.
C M LaCugna (God For Us, Harper, San Francisco, 1973) states that the Cappadocians, despite the fact that they infrequently used the terms oikonomia and theologia, had considerably altered the concepts and their meaning became firmly set.
Theology is the science of 'God in Godself'; the economy is the sphere of God's condescension to flesh. The doctrine of the Trinity is Theology strictly speaking. In later Greek Patristic theology, usage will remain generally the same. The biblical concept of oikonomia [economy] as the gradual unfolding of the hidden mystery of God in the plan of salvation, is gradually constricted to mean the human nature of Christ, or the Incarnation.
Theologia, not a biblical concept at all, acquires in Athanasius and the Cappadocians the meaning of God's inner being beyond the historical manifestation of the Word incarnate.
Theologia in this sense now specifies the hypostases in God, but not the manner of their self revelation ad extra. If Christian theology had let go the insistence on God's impassibility and affirmed that God suffers in Christ, it could have kept together, against Arianism, the essential unity and identity between the being of God and the being of Christ (p. 43).
We are thus now at the illogical position which the process of Greek philosophy had led the theologians. They had to develop theology apart from soteriology (see ibid.). In other words, they considered theology apart from and without reference to the plan of salvation, which was fatal for Christianity.
The theologians cut theology adrift from the Bible and, hence, it achieved even greater levels of incoherence.
More particularly, the requirement for God to have suffered in Christ is not a biblical requirement; it is a requirement of Greek philosophy, which places improper limitations upon the adequacy of a subordinate sacrifice. The early Christian Church writers were all subordinationist. None of the early theologians ever claimed that Christ was God in the sense that God the Father was God. This was a late invention of Greek philosophy imported into Christianity.
LaCugna says that:
The Cappadocians were highly competent speculative theologians. They brilliantly synthesized elements of Neo-Platonism and Stoicism, biblical revelation, and pastoral concerns to argue against both Arius and Eunomius. Their central concern remained soteriological.
They saw as their task to clarify how God's relationship to us in Christ and the Spirit in the economy of Incarnation and deification reveals the essential unity and equality of Father, Son, and Spirit. In the process Basil and the Gregorys produced a sophisticated ‘metaphysics of the economy of salvation’.
Unfortunately that was not, in fact, the aim of Basil and the two Gregorys as Gregg had demonstrated from the texts in his Consolation Philosophy etc., Philadelphia Patristic Foundation Ltd, 1975.
Basil was attempting to separate from the world altogether in the one escape (Basil EP., 2 tr.
Defarrari, I, 11, Gregg, p. 224).
The passions were to be removed from the soul. The soul must be perfected for separation from the flesh. God Himself becomes visible to those who have seen the Son, His image.
Illuminated by the Spirit, souls become themselves spiritual [psuchai pneumatikai] and are initiated into life in which the future is known, mysteries come clear, and all the benefits of heavenly citizenship are enjoyed. The climax, Basil writes is:
...joy without end, abiding in God, being made like to God [he pros Theon homoioosis], and highest of all, being made God [Theon genesthai]
(Basil 9.23. trans from NPNF, V, 16) Gregg adds (fn3) Much of the thought of Basil's Spir. 9 was taken from Plotinus, as P Henry demonstrated in his Les etats de texte de Plotin (Brussels; n.p., 1938, p. 160). Jaeger argues that the ideas were borrowed from Basil by Gregory of Nyssa in his De Institutio Christiano, in Two Rediscovered works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: E J Brill, 1954, pp. 100-103).
LaCugna noted that the Cappadocians oriented theology in a direction which further contributed to the separation of economy and theology. This trajectory led to the:
via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius and, finally, to the theology of Gregory of Palamas (Chapter 6).
In the Latin West, in the period immediately following Nicaea, theologians such as Hilary of Poitiers and, perhaps to an extreme degree, Marcellus of Ancyra, retained the connection between the divine hypostases and the economy of salvation. Augustine inaugurated an entirely new approach. His starting point was no longer the monarchy of the Father but the divine substance shared equally by the three persons. Instead of inquiring into the nature of theologia as it is revealed in the Incarnation of Christ and deification by the Spirit, Augustine would inquire into the traces of the Trinity to be found in the soul of each human being.
Augustine's pursuit of a 'psychological' analogy for the intratrinitarian relations would mean that trinitarian doctrine thereafter would be concerned with the relations 'internal' to the godhead, disjoined from what we know of God through Christ in the Spirit (LaCugna, p. 44).
The Medieval Latin theology followed Augustine and the separation of theology from economy or soteriology. The entire structure became embroiled in neo-Platonism and Mysticism. The important notations of LaCugna are that from Augustine the Monarchy of the Father was no longer paramount. The Trinity assumed co-equality.
This was the second step following on from the false assertion of co-eternality. The correct premise was the concept of the manifestation of the Godhead in each individual, namely the operation of the Father by means of the Holy Spirit which emanated from Him through Jesus Christ.
This direction through Jesus Christ enabled Christ to monitor and direct the individual in accordance with the will of God who lived in each of the elect. Christ was not the origin of the Holy Spirit. He was its intermediary monitor. He acted for God as he had always acted for and in accordance with the will of God. But he was not the God.
The Trinitarians lost sight of this fact, if indeed they ever really understood the matter. As LaCugna says the:
Theology of the triune God appeared to be added on to consideration of the one God (p. 44).
This affected fundamentally the way Christians prayed. That is, they no longer prayed to the Father alone in the name of the Son as the Bible directs (from Mat. 6:6,9; Lk. 11:12) worshipping the Father (Jn. 4:23), but to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Further, the scholastics developed a metaphysics of theology itself. But the entire edifice was built in disregard to, or manipulation of, the Bible.
That is why Trinitarians never address all Bible texts on a subject and mistranslate and misquote other key texts ignoring the ones they cannot alter. But their system is based on Mysticism and Platonism. LaCugna states that:
The Cappadocians (and also Augustine) went considerably beyond the scriptural understanding of economy by locating God's relationship to the Son (and the Spirit) at the 'intradivine' level (p. 54).
The One God existed as ousia in three distinct hypostases. We have seen (in the paper) that the Platonic term ousia and the Stoic term hypostases mean essentially the same thing.
The theology of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus:
was formulated largely in response to the theology of Eunomius. Eunomius was also a Cappadocian, and for a brief time, bishop of Cyzicus. He was a neo-Arian, a rationalist who like Aetius believed in the radical subordination of Son to Father (heterousios).
For Eunomius, as for Arius, God is a unique and simple essence. But Eunomius drew further consequences for this essentially Arian premise. According to Eunomius, God is supremely arelational, God cannot communicate the divine nature, God cannot beget anything from the divine essence. Since the Son is begotten or generated (gennetos) by an energy, the Son cannot be of the same substance as the Father.
Thus there is no sense, not even a derivative sense, in which the divinity of the Son could be maintained.
Second, Arius had believed that while God is incomprehensible, the divine Son makes the incomprehensible God comprehensible. Eunomius believed human reason is capable of apprehending the very essence of God. His name for God is Agennesia: Ungenerateness, or Unbegottenness (LaCugna, p. 56).
Here we come to the issue. The Cappadocians repeatedly asserted that God can never be fully comprehended by human reason or language. Gregory of Nazianzus in his Theological Orations (hence the title Theologian) held that purity of heart and the leisure of contemplation are preconditions for the knowledge of God. Even this personal interaction does not enable the knowledge of God's ousia.
Only God's works and acts (energeiai) can be known, that which constitutes the hinder parts of God exposed to Moses between the gaps in the cliff in Exodus 33:23.Thus, Christ showed by this example that only an (as yet) imperfect knowledge of the Godhead was available to him.
LaCugna states:
The Cappadocian response to Arianism* and Eunomianism must be understood against the backdrop to mystical theology. The threads of the mystical theology of the Cappadocians are found already in their predecessors and in Middle Platonism.
The centrality of mysticism in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa, combined with his intellectual acumen, produced a powerful refutation of the Eunomian position that God is knowable, and the Arian position that the Son is created (genetos). Both Gregorys worked out a theology of divine relations in the process.
But they were emphatic that even if we are able to explain what divine paternity means, words like begotten and unbegotten, generate and ungenerate, do not express the substance (ousia) of God but the characteristics of the divine hypostases, of how God is toward us.
The title 'Father', for example, does not give any information on the nature or qualities of divine fatherhood but indicates God's relation to the Son (LaCugna, p. 57).
* Arianism is applied generally to encompass subordinationists who all believed that Christ was a creation of the Father. This included Irenaeus, Polycarp, Paul, the apostles and even Christ himself.
Thus, early theologians are often termed Arians or early Arians even though they wrote centuries before Arius was born. It helps Trinitarians assert a spurious relativity to their position. The correct term is Subordinationist Unitarianism – or simply Unitarianism.
Trinitarians do not see or understand the universal relationship of the Sons of God to the Father.
The important aspect, which emerges from the above summary by LaCugna, is that we are able to see the non-biblical premises from which the Cappadocians attempt to reason.
For example, Christ clearly states that God is knowable. Christ knows and is known by the elect as he knows the Father and the Father knows him (Jn. 10:14). This knowledge was given to Christ by the Father as he was given power to lay down his life (Jn. 10:18).
The Son of God came and gave understanding to the elect to know him who is true and the elect are in him who is true and in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1Jn. 5:20). Thus the true God is He who is true and the Son is Jesus Christ.
The Son is not the true God, he is the Son through whom the elect are to know God. Thus the elect know God, where they did not formerly know God (Gal. 4:8), but came to know Him through the Father's willing self-revelation in the Son.
For what is known of God is manifested by God (Rom. 1:19 see Marshall's Interlinear), namely His invisible nature, His eternal power and deity (Rom. 1:20). It is a source of shame to the elect that some do not have a knowledge of God (1Cor. 15:34).
The knowledge is hence conditional and relative. It is revealed through the Spirit, which searches everything, even the depths of God (1Cor. 2:10).
The Cappadocians are thus wrong.
Further, their insistence that the Son is ungenerate or unbegotten, is not only contrary to Scripture but also contrary to logic and that is why they had to resort to Mysticism – because the logic of subordinationism, whether or not it is incorrectly labelled Arianism, is compelling.
Christ is an image or eikõn of the God, the first begotten (prõtotokos) of all creation (see Marshall's Interlinear Col. 1:15). Hence, Christ is the beginning of the creation of God (Rev. 3:14).
Christ said this to the Laodicean Church because it is in that Church that the apostasy became evident as it does in the last days with the man of lawlessness. It is the Gentiles who do not know God (1Thes. 4:5) and who reap God's vengeance (2Thes. 1:8) as the Cappadocians so amply demonstrate from their mystical cosmology.
You cannot be punished for not knowing God if that knowledge is unobtainable. God would be an unjust judge and thus unrighteous and hence not God.
The second point of error of the Cappadocians was that the divine paternity was not confined to Jesus Christ as we see from Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. Satan was also a Son of God before his rebellion typified by Genesis 6:4 and Jude 6. We are all to become Sons of God (Jn. 1:12; Rom. 8:14; 1Jn. 3:1,2) and hence co-heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17; Gal. 3:29; Titus 3:7; Heb. 1:14; 6:17; 11:9; Jas. 2:5; 1Pet. 3:7).
Because we are Sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts (Gal. 4:6). Thus the Spirit is extended through the Son to the Sons of God in Christ.
Paul's writings are subordinationist but confusing to Gentiles unfamiliar with the allocation of name by authority. For example, in Titus 1:3 he refers to God as the saviour of us. In Titus 1:4, he distinguishes from God the Father and Christ and refers to Christ as the saviour of us.
Thus, Trinitarians assert that the function of God as saviour is here asserted as the aspect known as Son. This is incorrect. The authority of the Son is derived from the Father as we have seen in John 10:18. The adequacy of the sacrifice was determined by the Father, as it was to reconcile man to the Father that it was required to be made. God determines the adequacy of the sacrifice as it was to Him that the debt was owed.
There is no question that Paul makes clear distinction between God and Christ. Paul is an absolute and incontestable subordinationist. No apostle was a Trinitarian – not because they did not need to develop the theory but because it is blasphemy.
Those who profess to know God must demonstrate their knowledge by their deeds (Titus 1:16). Thus the law is kept from a knowledge of and love of God. The law must be kept because sin is the transgression of the law (1Jn. 3:4) and, if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin (Heb. 10:26). Those sins are carried to judgment as a profanation of the blood of the covenant by which we are sanctified (Heb. 10:29).
The elect understand that Christ is a subordinate God. Further, that they will be co-heirs with Christ as subordinate theoi or elohim. They do not think that they can be equal to the God.
2Thessalonians 1:5-8 This is the evidence of the righteous judgement of God, that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering - since indeed God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
The punishment is meted out upon those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of Christ. There is no doubt that Paul distinguishes God from Christ in this text from 2Thessalonians 1:12: 2Thessalonians 1:12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus.
More particularly, the apostasy (apostasia) must come first before the coming of Christ when the Man of Sin or Lawlessness is revealed taking his seat in the shrine or the naos of God (2Thes. 2:4), the holy of holies of which we are.
Thus the Man of Sin is found amongst us as one of the elect. He sits in the naos of ton Theon, the Eloah or Elohim, placing himself above everything being called God declaring himself to be the God. Thus he is not one of the elect as subordinate theoi or elohim. He declares himself in equality to God as Basil sought to do by the introduction of trinitarian Mysticism.
The next development of Trinitarianism was by Augustine where the linear representation of the Cappadocians from Father to Son to the Holy Spirit was altered to an interrelationship which came to be represented as a triangle with each of the entities equally placed. His work De Trinitate is the most sustained treatment of his theology.
Written over the period 399-419 it was fundamentally influenced and probably altered by his reading of Gregory of Nazianzus' Theological Orations around 413 (LaCugna, p. 82, noting also Chevalier). Augustine sought to explain that:
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit constitute a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality (LaCugna, p. 82, quoting De Trinitate 1.4.7 PL 42,824).
Augustine's schema sought to return to God whom the soul images through contemplation (LaCugna, p. 83). Thus, he also was concerned with mystical contemplation.
The understanding of all the apologists of the second century, not to mention the first century, Church thought that the Son and Spirit had appeared in the Old Testament theophanies – for example, that the Son alone appeared to the Patriarchs (Novatian Treatise on the Trinity quoted also by LaCugna, p. 83.
The modern position is that all three as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appeared at Sinai because, in fact, God is pure thought and is expressed through the Son as logos. This misapprehends the nature of the Holy Spirit and the way in which it acts in the Son and, in fact, confers Godhood on the Son.
LaCugna argues that Arians interpreted the texts differently arguing that, if the Son appeared without the Father, this must indicate a difference in their natures (p. 83). We will assume that she is referring generically to Unitarians as the term Arian limits the nature of the inquiry.
The arguments of early theologians were quite clear and specific. Christ was a creation of the Father, in fact the primary act of the creation and hence its beginning. This is the position of the Bible. It was the Athanasians and the later Cappadocians who altered the structure contrary to the Bible.
Consequently, that is why the Cappadocian apologists in churches with a Bible foundation are caught up in this absurd position of denying the literal intent of the Bible.
The Process Theologians and neo-Buddhists in Christianity are attempting to assert a monist structure where the Godhead is an immanent non-divisive blob.
Thus is Christendom!
(Many thanks to my friends for this contribution)
letusreason
Does the Trinity have its Origin in the above?
Many thanks - for this external contribution.
This paper traces the development of the neo-Platonist trinitarian system from Greek philosophy into the post-Christian synthesis. It shows the origin of the Cappadocian system using both ancient philosophy and modern Catholic theology in admission of the origin of the doctrine.
The Development of the Neo-Platonist Model
The concept of God as three hypostases of the superior entity is developed from Greek thought. It has nothing to do with the Bible. Plato developed the concept of forms in his works. Plato uses the philosopher Parmenides as his model. Parmenides was the first of the Greek Monists. He was not Monotheist. The concepts were further developed by those who followed Plato. Plotinus developed a relatively simple metaphysical scheme:
providing for just three hypostases - One, Intellect, and Soul - [this scheme] seems to have suffered elaboration already at the hands of his senior pupil Amelius (who had a special weakness for triads), but from the perspective of the Athenian School it is Iamblichus (c. 245-325) who began the major system of scholastic elaboration which is the mark of later Neoplatonism (Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, General Introduction, p. xv, Morrow and Dillon, Princeton University Press, 1987).
Thus the Trinity is prefigured as the One, the Wisdom or Intellect and the Soul becoming the One as Father, Word equated with Wisdom and the Spirit as functional Soul. This Spirit as functional Soul is held to be capable of individuation yet remains complete as an entity separate to and equal with the other two hypostases.
Proclus developed the concept of an Unparticipated Divine Soul. Dillon says of this:
Once again the psychic realm must have its proper monad (or henad), Unparticipated Divine Soul, which itself participates in Nous and presides transcendently over its own realm. In the Elements of Theology, when Proclus comes to discuss Soul (props. 184-211), we find no mention of such an entity, only of souls in the plural, but it is plainly presupposed, and is in fact mentioned earlier, in prop. 164. There we learn that the Unparticipated Soul 'presides primarily over the cosmos' [prootoos huper tou kosmou esti], but does so transcendently and so is distinct from the immanent World Soul, as well as from individual souls.
Proclus holds that all monads (unities or single units, henads in Platonic philosophy) in and above the cosmos, intelligible and intellectual are attached to their own monads and ordered with respect to one another, with the One as the leader of secondary monads.
Similarly, the One is the source and basis of the triad. Proclus holds:
Parmenides abides in the transcendent One, Zeno projects the many as the One, and Socrates turns back even these many to the Parmenidean One, since the first member in the every triad is an analogue of rest, the second of procession and the third of reversion, and the reversion rounds out a kind of circular path connecting the end with the beginning .
The concepts of the three begin to emerge but the first step is necessarily that of the dyad (a unit of two parts) but the dyad is a copy of the Unity. Thus the second is inferior to the One of Parmenides which is termed by Zeno himself as logos or discourse. The One is greater than plurality and the paradigm superior to the copy.
Thus the logos concept of Greek philosophy is attributed to the One rather than the second. This is contrary to the Bible but the origin of the concept is thus evident. The important concept of the Greeks was to show, as Proclus did by improving on Zeno's arguments, that plurality devoid of unity is impossible. Thus the Godhead was logically required to be a unified plurality but the early Greeks had no concept of Agape.
Agape is a transliteration of the Hebrew term ’ahabah from the Song of Songs in the Septuagint. Thus the concept of the love of God by dispensation is limited among the early Greeks. The consequent sharing of godliness they thus regarded, where accidentally acquired, as divine theft having no real concept of a plan of salvation as was present in the Hebrew.
The theory of Ideas existed as early as the Pythagoreans and was taken up by Plato in the Sophist (248a). Socrates posits the existence of the itself by itself which is taken to be the unmixed simplicity and purity of the Ideas.
The Hebrew combines this concept as being present with God (Prov. 8:22). Wisdom was created by God as the beginning of His way, the first of His acts of old. This led the rabbis to assume that the law was the wisdom referred to as it established order instead of chaos.
The Ideas were distinguished from attributes predicated of particular things. Thus, for the Greeks, the logos as expression of ideas was taken to be appropriated to the prime cause rather than an attribute of the cause.
Hence the logic of the denial of a subordinate logos. From this also came the concept that God is pure thought. It is worth noting that from Acts 7:29 logos is merely an utterance or saying. See also logoi of God translating dabar Yahovah or oracle(s) of God in the LXX and New Testament.
Plato gave Orpheus to say (In Tim. I, 312.26 ff., and 324.14 ff., cf. Proclus ibid., p. 168).
...that all things came to be in Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes, because, although the causes of all things in the cosmos appeared primarily and in a unified form in him (sc. Phanes), they appear secondarily and in a distinct form in the Demiurge. The sun, the moon, the heaven itself, the elements, and Eros the unifier - all came into being as a unity 'mixed together in the belly of Zeus' (Orph. fr. 167b.7 Kern).
The Demiurgic forms gave rise to the order and arrangement of sensible things (ibid.). All things stemming from the Father thus gave rise to animism, where the nature of the deity was immanent in all matter.
The Greeks, from Parmenides, turned the concept to Monism, making the One immanent. But Proclus shows that these concepts, particularly the Ideas which stemmed from the Will of the Father, have their origin in the Chaldean Oracles (fr. 37 Des Places).
The Intellect of the Father whirred, conceiving with his unwearying will
Ideas of every form; and they leapt out in flight from this single source
For this was the Father's counsel and achievement.
But they were divided by the fire of intelligence
and distributed among other intelligent beings. For their lord had placed
Before this multiform cosmos an eternal intelligible model; And the cosmos strove modestly to follow its traces,
And appeared in the form it has and graced with all sorts of Ideas.
Of these there was one source, but as they burst forth innumerable others were broken off and scattered
Through the bodies of the cosmos, swarming like bees
About the mighty hollows of the world,
And whirling about in various directions -
These intelligent Ideas, issued from the paternal source,
Laying hold on the mighty bloom of fire.
At the prime moment of unsleeping time
This primary and self sufficient source of the Father
Has spouted forth these primally-generative Ideas.
Proclus comments thus:
In these words the gods have clearly revealed where the Ideas have their foundation, in what god their single source is contained, how their plurality proceeds from this source, and how the cosmos is constituted in accordance with them; and also that they are moving agents in all the cosmic systems, all intelligent in essence and exceedingly diverse in their properties (op. cit., p. 169).
The concept of the Father as creator which is the biblical model is clearly understood in the Chaldean systems and in the original Greek texts. The application of the functions of God, however, become misapplied by them. However, the ancient concepts of the Father as supreme God was understood by all nations. It was the neo-Platonists who perverted it.
The Introduction to Book III of Proclus' Commentary holds that the summary (831.25 ff.) shows Proclus to specify:
three basic attributes of Forms - Goodness, Essentiality, Eternity, deriving respectively from the One (the First Cause), the One Being and Aeon. All paradigmatic Forms derive their being from these three (p. 155).
The requirement thus emerges of the three attributes of Goodness, Essentiality and Eternity being predicated to the Triune system. The Greeks thus had to assert that Christ was co-eternal with God in spite of the fact that the Bible clearly says he is not and that only God is immortal (1Tim. 6:16). The aspect of Christ as the Angel of YHVH also was required to be of the primary three, in view of the perceived requirements of the adequacy of the reconciliation of men to God through Christ.
The Greeks were themselves limited by their concepts of love to the primary relationships of filial and erotic love, hence they could not understand the biblical paradigms.
The concept of omniscience being applied to Christ, contrary to Scripture (e.g. Rev. 1:1), follows from the requirements of the attributes especially Essentiality. Proclus develops the argument from Book IV.1047, op. cit., p. 406.
In dealing with knowledge as single or multiple, Proclus shows that it must be single therefore the neo-Platonists had to assert omniscience to Christ to ensure the other attributes of the divine nature. Such assertion was, of itself, biblically absurd.
If, however, we are to state the single principle of knowledge, we must fix upon the One, which generates Intellect and all the knowledge both within it and what is seen on the secondary levels of being. For this, transcending the Many as it does, is the first principle of knowledge for them, and is not the same as them, as is Sameness in the intelligible realm.
This is co-ordinate with its Otherness and inferior to Being. The One, on the other hand, is beyond intellectual Being and grants coherence to it, and for this reason the One is God and so is Intellect, but not by reason of Sameness nor Being.
And in general Intellect is not god qua Intellect; for even the particular intellect is an intellect but is not a god. Also it is the proper role of Intellect to contemplate and intelligise and judge true being; but of God to unify, to generate, to exercise providence and suchlike. By virtue of that aspect of itself which is not intellect, the Intellect is God; and by virtue of that aspect of itself which is not God, the god in it is Intellect.
The divine Intellect, as a whole, is an intellectual essence along with its own summit and its proper unity, knowing itself in so far as it is intellectual, but being 'intoxicated on nectar,' as has been said, and generating the whole of cognition, in so far as it is the 'flower' of the Intellect and a supra-essential henad.
So once again, in seeking the first principle of knowledge, we have ascended to the One.
Similarly, the first principle was held to be the One (ibid.) and Socrates (Phaedrus 245d) says the first principle is ungenerated.
Here, Trinitarianism becomes confused because it holds Christ to be a generation of the Father. The newer Process Theologians hold the transcendent unity of the Godhead where there was an essential ungenerate co-eternal oneness which regards individuation as illusory. It is properly Monism and not Monotheism, hence it is properly a form of liberation theology akin to Buddhism and Hinduism rather than Christianity.
Logically it is popular with Mysticism. Indeed the recent developments of Trinitarianism seek to make God immanent as pure thought, present in matter, e.g. stone, wood, glass etc. This is not only not Christian it is not even transcendental Monotheism. It is Monism.
The logical requirements of the Greek philosophical form of reasoning have to assert equal divinity with Christ in order to predicate unconditional ascent to the One. This objective of ascent to God by individual determination rather than by God's allocation is the underlying motive of Cappadocian Trinitarianism.
The conclusion is verified from an examination of the history.
C M LaCugna (God For Us, Harper, San Francisco, 1973) states that the Cappadocians, despite the fact that they infrequently used the terms oikonomia and theologia, had considerably altered the concepts and their meaning became firmly set.
Theology is the science of 'God in Godself'; the economy is the sphere of God's condescension to flesh. The doctrine of the Trinity is Theology strictly speaking. In later Greek Patristic theology, usage will remain generally the same. The biblical concept of oikonomia [economy] as the gradual unfolding of the hidden mystery of God in the plan of salvation, is gradually constricted to mean the human nature of Christ, or the Incarnation.
Theologia, not a biblical concept at all, acquires in Athanasius and the Cappadocians the meaning of God's inner being beyond the historical manifestation of the Word incarnate.
Theologia in this sense now specifies the hypostases in God, but not the manner of their self revelation ad extra. If Christian theology had let go the insistence on God's impassibility and affirmed that God suffers in Christ, it could have kept together, against Arianism, the essential unity and identity between the being of God and the being of Christ (p. 43).
We are thus now at the illogical position which the process of Greek philosophy had led the theologians. They had to develop theology apart from soteriology (see ibid.). In other words, they considered theology apart from and without reference to the plan of salvation, which was fatal for Christianity.
The theologians cut theology adrift from the Bible and, hence, it achieved even greater levels of incoherence.
More particularly, the requirement for God to have suffered in Christ is not a biblical requirement; it is a requirement of Greek philosophy, which places improper limitations upon the adequacy of a subordinate sacrifice. The early Christian Church writers were all subordinationist. None of the early theologians ever claimed that Christ was God in the sense that God the Father was God. This was a late invention of Greek philosophy imported into Christianity.
LaCugna says that:
The Cappadocians were highly competent speculative theologians. They brilliantly synthesized elements of Neo-Platonism and Stoicism, biblical revelation, and pastoral concerns to argue against both Arius and Eunomius. Their central concern remained soteriological.
They saw as their task to clarify how God's relationship to us in Christ and the Spirit in the economy of Incarnation and deification reveals the essential unity and equality of Father, Son, and Spirit. In the process Basil and the Gregorys produced a sophisticated ‘metaphysics of the economy of salvation’.
Unfortunately that was not, in fact, the aim of Basil and the two Gregorys as Gregg had demonstrated from the texts in his Consolation Philosophy etc., Philadelphia Patristic Foundation Ltd, 1975.
Basil was attempting to separate from the world altogether in the one escape (Basil EP., 2 tr.
Defarrari, I, 11, Gregg, p. 224).
The passions were to be removed from the soul. The soul must be perfected for separation from the flesh. God Himself becomes visible to those who have seen the Son, His image.
Illuminated by the Spirit, souls become themselves spiritual [psuchai pneumatikai] and are initiated into life in which the future is known, mysteries come clear, and all the benefits of heavenly citizenship are enjoyed. The climax, Basil writes is:
...joy without end, abiding in God, being made like to God [he pros Theon homoioosis], and highest of all, being made God [Theon genesthai]
(Basil 9.23. trans from NPNF, V, 16) Gregg adds (fn3) Much of the thought of Basil's Spir. 9 was taken from Plotinus, as P Henry demonstrated in his Les etats de texte de Plotin (Brussels; n.p., 1938, p. 160). Jaeger argues that the ideas were borrowed from Basil by Gregory of Nyssa in his De Institutio Christiano, in Two Rediscovered works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: E J Brill, 1954, pp. 100-103).
LaCugna noted that the Cappadocians oriented theology in a direction which further contributed to the separation of economy and theology. This trajectory led to the:
via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius and, finally, to the theology of Gregory of Palamas (Chapter 6).
In the Latin West, in the period immediately following Nicaea, theologians such as Hilary of Poitiers and, perhaps to an extreme degree, Marcellus of Ancyra, retained the connection between the divine hypostases and the economy of salvation. Augustine inaugurated an entirely new approach. His starting point was no longer the monarchy of the Father but the divine substance shared equally by the three persons. Instead of inquiring into the nature of theologia as it is revealed in the Incarnation of Christ and deification by the Spirit, Augustine would inquire into the traces of the Trinity to be found in the soul of each human being.
Augustine's pursuit of a 'psychological' analogy for the intratrinitarian relations would mean that trinitarian doctrine thereafter would be concerned with the relations 'internal' to the godhead, disjoined from what we know of God through Christ in the Spirit (LaCugna, p. 44).
The Medieval Latin theology followed Augustine and the separation of theology from economy or soteriology. The entire structure became embroiled in neo-Platonism and Mysticism. The important notations of LaCugna are that from Augustine the Monarchy of the Father was no longer paramount. The Trinity assumed co-equality.
This was the second step following on from the false assertion of co-eternality. The correct premise was the concept of the manifestation of the Godhead in each individual, namely the operation of the Father by means of the Holy Spirit which emanated from Him through Jesus Christ.
This direction through Jesus Christ enabled Christ to monitor and direct the individual in accordance with the will of God who lived in each of the elect. Christ was not the origin of the Holy Spirit. He was its intermediary monitor. He acted for God as he had always acted for and in accordance with the will of God. But he was not the God.
The Trinitarians lost sight of this fact, if indeed they ever really understood the matter. As LaCugna says the:
Theology of the triune God appeared to be added on to consideration of the one God (p. 44).
This affected fundamentally the way Christians prayed. That is, they no longer prayed to the Father alone in the name of the Son as the Bible directs (from Mat. 6:6,9; Lk. 11:12) worshipping the Father (Jn. 4:23), but to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Further, the scholastics developed a metaphysics of theology itself. But the entire edifice was built in disregard to, or manipulation of, the Bible.
That is why Trinitarians never address all Bible texts on a subject and mistranslate and misquote other key texts ignoring the ones they cannot alter. But their system is based on Mysticism and Platonism. LaCugna states that:
The Cappadocians (and also Augustine) went considerably beyond the scriptural understanding of economy by locating God's relationship to the Son (and the Spirit) at the 'intradivine' level (p. 54).
The One God existed as ousia in three distinct hypostases. We have seen (in the paper) that the Platonic term ousia and the Stoic term hypostases mean essentially the same thing.
The theology of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus:
was formulated largely in response to the theology of Eunomius. Eunomius was also a Cappadocian, and for a brief time, bishop of Cyzicus. He was a neo-Arian, a rationalist who like Aetius believed in the radical subordination of Son to Father (heterousios).
For Eunomius, as for Arius, God is a unique and simple essence. But Eunomius drew further consequences for this essentially Arian premise. According to Eunomius, God is supremely arelational, God cannot communicate the divine nature, God cannot beget anything from the divine essence. Since the Son is begotten or generated (gennetos) by an energy, the Son cannot be of the same substance as the Father.
Thus there is no sense, not even a derivative sense, in which the divinity of the Son could be maintained.
Second, Arius had believed that while God is incomprehensible, the divine Son makes the incomprehensible God comprehensible. Eunomius believed human reason is capable of apprehending the very essence of God. His name for God is Agennesia: Ungenerateness, or Unbegottenness (LaCugna, p. 56).
Here we come to the issue. The Cappadocians repeatedly asserted that God can never be fully comprehended by human reason or language. Gregory of Nazianzus in his Theological Orations (hence the title Theologian) held that purity of heart and the leisure of contemplation are preconditions for the knowledge of God. Even this personal interaction does not enable the knowledge of God's ousia.
Only God's works and acts (energeiai) can be known, that which constitutes the hinder parts of God exposed to Moses between the gaps in the cliff in Exodus 33:23.Thus, Christ showed by this example that only an (as yet) imperfect knowledge of the Godhead was available to him.
LaCugna states:
The Cappadocian response to Arianism* and Eunomianism must be understood against the backdrop to mystical theology. The threads of the mystical theology of the Cappadocians are found already in their predecessors and in Middle Platonism.
The centrality of mysticism in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa, combined with his intellectual acumen, produced a powerful refutation of the Eunomian position that God is knowable, and the Arian position that the Son is created (genetos). Both Gregorys worked out a theology of divine relations in the process.
But they were emphatic that even if we are able to explain what divine paternity means, words like begotten and unbegotten, generate and ungenerate, do not express the substance (ousia) of God but the characteristics of the divine hypostases, of how God is toward us.
The title 'Father', for example, does not give any information on the nature or qualities of divine fatherhood but indicates God's relation to the Son (LaCugna, p. 57).
* Arianism is applied generally to encompass subordinationists who all believed that Christ was a creation of the Father. This included Irenaeus, Polycarp, Paul, the apostles and even Christ himself.
Thus, early theologians are often termed Arians or early Arians even though they wrote centuries before Arius was born. It helps Trinitarians assert a spurious relativity to their position. The correct term is Subordinationist Unitarianism – or simply Unitarianism.
Trinitarians do not see or understand the universal relationship of the Sons of God to the Father.
The important aspect, which emerges from the above summary by LaCugna, is that we are able to see the non-biblical premises from which the Cappadocians attempt to reason.
For example, Christ clearly states that God is knowable. Christ knows and is known by the elect as he knows the Father and the Father knows him (Jn. 10:14). This knowledge was given to Christ by the Father as he was given power to lay down his life (Jn. 10:18).
The Son of God came and gave understanding to the elect to know him who is true and the elect are in him who is true and in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1Jn. 5:20). Thus the true God is He who is true and the Son is Jesus Christ.
The Son is not the true God, he is the Son through whom the elect are to know God. Thus the elect know God, where they did not formerly know God (Gal. 4:8), but came to know Him through the Father's willing self-revelation in the Son.
For what is known of God is manifested by God (Rom. 1:19 see Marshall's Interlinear), namely His invisible nature, His eternal power and deity (Rom. 1:20). It is a source of shame to the elect that some do not have a knowledge of God (1Cor. 15:34).
The knowledge is hence conditional and relative. It is revealed through the Spirit, which searches everything, even the depths of God (1Cor. 2:10).
The Cappadocians are thus wrong.
Further, their insistence that the Son is ungenerate or unbegotten, is not only contrary to Scripture but also contrary to logic and that is why they had to resort to Mysticism – because the logic of subordinationism, whether or not it is incorrectly labelled Arianism, is compelling.
Christ is an image or eikõn of the God, the first begotten (prõtotokos) of all creation (see Marshall's Interlinear Col. 1:15). Hence, Christ is the beginning of the creation of God (Rev. 3:14).
Christ said this to the Laodicean Church because it is in that Church that the apostasy became evident as it does in the last days with the man of lawlessness. It is the Gentiles who do not know God (1Thes. 4:5) and who reap God's vengeance (2Thes. 1:8) as the Cappadocians so amply demonstrate from their mystical cosmology.
You cannot be punished for not knowing God if that knowledge is unobtainable. God would be an unjust judge and thus unrighteous and hence not God.
The second point of error of the Cappadocians was that the divine paternity was not confined to Jesus Christ as we see from Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. Satan was also a Son of God before his rebellion typified by Genesis 6:4 and Jude 6. We are all to become Sons of God (Jn. 1:12; Rom. 8:14; 1Jn. 3:1,2) and hence co-heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17; Gal. 3:29; Titus 3:7; Heb. 1:14; 6:17; 11:9; Jas. 2:5; 1Pet. 3:7).
Because we are Sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts (Gal. 4:6). Thus the Spirit is extended through the Son to the Sons of God in Christ.
Paul's writings are subordinationist but confusing to Gentiles unfamiliar with the allocation of name by authority. For example, in Titus 1:3 he refers to God as the saviour of us. In Titus 1:4, he distinguishes from God the Father and Christ and refers to Christ as the saviour of us.
Thus, Trinitarians assert that the function of God as saviour is here asserted as the aspect known as Son. This is incorrect. The authority of the Son is derived from the Father as we have seen in John 10:18. The adequacy of the sacrifice was determined by the Father, as it was to reconcile man to the Father that it was required to be made. God determines the adequacy of the sacrifice as it was to Him that the debt was owed.
There is no question that Paul makes clear distinction between God and Christ. Paul is an absolute and incontestable subordinationist. No apostle was a Trinitarian – not because they did not need to develop the theory but because it is blasphemy.
Those who profess to know God must demonstrate their knowledge by their deeds (Titus 1:16). Thus the law is kept from a knowledge of and love of God. The law must be kept because sin is the transgression of the law (1Jn. 3:4) and, if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin (Heb. 10:26). Those sins are carried to judgment as a profanation of the blood of the covenant by which we are sanctified (Heb. 10:29).
The elect understand that Christ is a subordinate God. Further, that they will be co-heirs with Christ as subordinate theoi or elohim. They do not think that they can be equal to the God.
2Thessalonians 1:5-8 This is the evidence of the righteous judgement of God, that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering - since indeed God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
The punishment is meted out upon those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of Christ. There is no doubt that Paul distinguishes God from Christ in this text from 2Thessalonians 1:12: 2Thessalonians 1:12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus.
More particularly, the apostasy (apostasia) must come first before the coming of Christ when the Man of Sin or Lawlessness is revealed taking his seat in the shrine or the naos of God (2Thes. 2:4), the holy of holies of which we are.
Thus the Man of Sin is found amongst us as one of the elect. He sits in the naos of ton Theon, the Eloah or Elohim, placing himself above everything being called God declaring himself to be the God. Thus he is not one of the elect as subordinate theoi or elohim. He declares himself in equality to God as Basil sought to do by the introduction of trinitarian Mysticism.
The next development of Trinitarianism was by Augustine where the linear representation of the Cappadocians from Father to Son to the Holy Spirit was altered to an interrelationship which came to be represented as a triangle with each of the entities equally placed. His work De Trinitate is the most sustained treatment of his theology.
Written over the period 399-419 it was fundamentally influenced and probably altered by his reading of Gregory of Nazianzus' Theological Orations around 413 (LaCugna, p. 82, noting also Chevalier). Augustine sought to explain that:
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit constitute a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality (LaCugna, p. 82, quoting De Trinitate 1.4.7 PL 42,824).
Augustine's schema sought to return to God whom the soul images through contemplation (LaCugna, p. 83). Thus, he also was concerned with mystical contemplation.
The understanding of all the apologists of the second century, not to mention the first century, Church thought that the Son and Spirit had appeared in the Old Testament theophanies – for example, that the Son alone appeared to the Patriarchs (Novatian Treatise on the Trinity quoted also by LaCugna, p. 83.
The modern position is that all three as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appeared at Sinai because, in fact, God is pure thought and is expressed through the Son as logos. This misapprehends the nature of the Holy Spirit and the way in which it acts in the Son and, in fact, confers Godhood on the Son.
LaCugna argues that Arians interpreted the texts differently arguing that, if the Son appeared without the Father, this must indicate a difference in their natures (p. 83). We will assume that she is referring generically to Unitarians as the term Arian limits the nature of the inquiry.
The arguments of early theologians were quite clear and specific. Christ was a creation of the Father, in fact the primary act of the creation and hence its beginning. This is the position of the Bible. It was the Athanasians and the later Cappadocians who altered the structure contrary to the Bible.
Consequently, that is why the Cappadocian apologists in churches with a Bible foundation are caught up in this absurd position of denying the literal intent of the Bible.
The Process Theologians and neo-Buddhists in Christianity are attempting to assert a monist structure where the Godhead is an immanent non-divisive blob.
Thus is Christendom!
(Many thanks to my friends for this contribution)
letusreason
Monday, 9 July 2007
Is the Doctrine of the Trinity true, or was it ingrafted into Christianity by the Apologists and Church Fathers from Platonism and Neo-Platonism?
I'm sure most people would agree, that if something is true, then it has always been true! If the Trinity is true, then it has always been true, and it should not take nearly 400 hundred years for it to "become" true! The Trinitarian debates over the centuries show in themselves that such a doctrine has not been true, otherwise there would have been no need of debates...
Modern scholars and historians have positively proved the link between Greek speculative metaphysics/philosophy and and the doctrine (Dogma) of the Trinity!
The paper below presents such proof of such a link. (part of the paper has been on the bbc board).
This paper traces the development of the neo-Platonist trinitarian system from Greek philosophy into the post-Christian synthesis. It shows the origin of the Cappadocian system using both ancient philosophy and modern Catholic theology in admission of the origin of the doctrine.
The Development of the Neo-Platonist Model
The concept of God as three hypostases of the superior entity is developed from Greek thought. It has nothing to do with the Bible. Plato developed the concept of forms in his works. Plato uses the philosopher Parmenides as his model. Parmenides was the first of the Greek Monists. He was not Monotheist. The concepts were further developed by those who followed Plato. Plotinus developed a relatively simple metaphysical scheme:
providing for just three hypostases - One, Intellect, and Soul - [this scheme] seems to have suffered elaboration already at the hands of his senior pupil Amelius (who had a special weakness for triads), but from the perspective of the Athenian School it is Iamblichus (c. 245-325) who began the major system of scholastic elaboration which is the mark of later Neoplatonism (Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, General Introduction, p. xv, Morrow and Dillon, Princeton University Press, 1987).
Thus the Trinity is prefigured as the One, the Wisdom or Intellect and the Soul becoming the One as Father, Word equated with Wisdom and the Spirit as functional Soul. This Spirit as functional Soul is held to be capable of individuation yet remains complete as an entity separate to and equal with the other two hypostases.
Proclus developed the concept of an Unparticipated Divine Soul. Dillon says of this:
Once again the psychic realm must have its proper monad (or henad), Unparticipated Divine Soul, which itself participates in Nous and presides transcendently over its own realm. In the Elements of Theology, when Proclus comes to discuss Soul (props. 184-211), we find no mention of such an entity, only of souls in the plural, but it is plainly presupposed, and is in fact mentioned earlier, in prop. 164. There we learn that the Unparticipated Soul 'presides primarily over the cosmos' [prootoos huper tou kosmou esti], but does so transcendently and so is distinct from the immanent World Soul, as well as from individual souls.
Proclus holds that all monads (unities or single units, henads in Platonic philosophy) in and above the cosmos, intelligible and intellectual are attached to their own monads and ordered with respect to one another, with the One as the leader of secondary monads.
Similarly, the One is the source and basis of the triad. Proclus holds:
Parmenides abides in the transcendent One, Zeno projects the many as the One, and Socrates turns back even these many to the Parmenidean One, since the first member in the every triad is an analogue of rest, the second of procession and the third of reversion, and the reversion rounds out a kind of circular path connecting the end with the beginning .
The concepts of the three begin to emerge but the first step is necessarily that of the dyad (a unit of two parts) but the dyad is a copy of the Unity. Thus the second is inferior to the One of Parmenides which is termed by Zeno himself as logos or discourse. The One is greater than plurality and the paradigm superior to the copy.
Thus the logos concept of Greek philosophy is attributed to the One rather than the second. This is contrary to the Bible but the origin of the concept is thus evident. The important concept of the Greeks was to show, as Proclus did by improving on Zeno's arguments, that plurality devoid of unity is impossible. Thus the Godhead was logically required to be a unified plurality but the early Greeks had no concept of Agape.
Agape is a transliteration of the Hebrew term ’ahabah from the Song of Songs in the Septuagint. Thus the concept of the love of God by dispensation is limited among the early Greeks. The consequent sharing of godliness they thus regarded, where accidentally acquired, as divine theft having no real concept of a plan of salvation as was present in the Hebrew.
The theory of Ideas existed as early as the Pythagoreans and was taken up by Plato in the Sophist (248a). Socrates posits the existence of the itself by itself which is taken to be the unmixed simplicity and purity of the Ideas.
The Hebrew combines this concept as being present with God (Prov. 8:22). Wisdom was created by God as the beginning of His way, the first of His acts of old. This led the rabbis to assume that the law was the wisdom referred to as it established order instead of chaos.
The Ideas were distinguished from attributes predicated of particular things. Thus, for the Greeks, the logos as expression of ideas was taken to be appropriated to the prime cause rather than an attribute of the cause.
Hence the logic of the denial of a subordinate logos. From this also came the concept that God is pure thought. It is worth noting that from Acts 7:29 logos is merely an utterance or saying. See also logoi of God translating dabar Yahovah or oracle(s) of God in the LXX and New Testament.
Plato gave Orpheus to say (In Tim. I, 312.26 ff., and 324.14 ff., cf. Proclus ibid., p. 168).
...that all things came to be in Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes, because, although the causes of all things in the cosmos appeared primarily and in a unified form in him (sc. Phanes), they appear secondarily and in a distinct form in the Demiurge. The sun, the moon, the heaven itself, the elements, and Eros the unifier - all came into being as a unity 'mixed together in the belly of Zeus' (Orph. fr. 167b.7 Kern).
The Demiurgic forms gave rise to the order and arrangement of sensible things (ibid.). All things stemming from the Father thus gave rise to animism, where the nature of the deity was immanent in all matter.
The Greeks, from Parmenides, turned the concept to Monism, making the One immanent. But Proclus shows that these concepts, particularly the Ideas which stemmed from the Will of the Father, have their origin in the Chaldean Oracles (fr. 37 Des Places).
The Intellect of the Father whirred, conceiving with his unwearying will
Ideas of every form; and they leapt out in flight from this single source
For this was the Father's counsel and achievement.
But they were divided by the fire of intelligence
and distributed among other intelligent beings. For their lord had placed
Before this multiform cosmos an eternal intelligible model; And the cosmos strove modestly to follow its traces,
And appeared in the form it has and graced with all sorts of Ideas.
Of these there was one source, but as they burst forth innumerable others were broken off and scattered
Through the bodies of the cosmos, swarming like bees
About the mighty hollows of the world,
And whirling about in various directions -
These intelligent Ideas, issued from the paternal source,
Laying hold on the mighty bloom of fire.
At the prime moment of unsleeping time
This primary and self sufficient source of the Father
Has spouted forth these primally-generative Ideas.
Proclus comments thus:
In these words the gods have clearly revealed where the Ideas have their foundation, in what god their single source is contained, how their plurality proceeds from this source, and how the cosmos is constituted in accordance with them; and also that they are moving agents in all the cosmic systems, all intelligent in essence and exceedingly diverse in their properties (op. cit., p. 169).
The concept of the Father as creator which is the biblical model is clearly understood in the Chaldean systems and in the original Greek texts. The application of the functions of God, however, become misapplied by them. However, the ancient concepts of the Father as supreme God was understood by all nations. It was the neo-Platonists who perverted it.
The Introduction to Book III of Proclus' Commentary holds that the summary (831.25 ff.) shows Proclus to specify:
three basic attributes of Forms - Goodness, Essentiality, Eternity, deriving respectively from the One (the First Cause), the One Being and Aeon. All paradigmatic Forms derive their being from these three (p. 155).
The requirement thus emerges of the three attributes of Goodness, Essentiality and Eternity being predicated to the Triune system. The Greeks thus had to assert that Christ was co-eternal with God in spite of the fact that the Bible clearly says he is not and that only God is immortal (1Tim. 6:16). The aspect of Christ as the Angel of YHVH also was required to be of the primary three, in view of the perceived requirements of the adequacy of the reconciliation of men to God through Christ.
The Greeks were themselves limited by their concepts of love to the primary relationships of filial and erotic love, hence they could not understand the biblical paradigms.
The concept of omniscience being applied to Christ, contrary to Scripture (e.g. Rev. 1:1), follows from the requirements of the attributes especially Essentiality. Proclus develops the argument from Book IV.1047, op. cit., p. 406.
In dealing with knowledge as single or multiple, Proclus shows that it must be single therefore the neo-Platonists had to assert omniscience to Christ to ensure the other attributes of the divine nature. Such assertion was, of itself, biblically absurd.
If, however, we are to state the single principle of knowledge, we must fix upon the One, which generates Intellect and all the knowledge both within it and what is seen on the secondary levels of being. For this, transcending the Many as it does, is the first principle of knowledge for them, and is not the same as them, as is Sameness in the intelligible realm.
This is co-ordinate with its Otherness and inferior to Being. The One, on the other hand, is beyond intellectual Being and grants coherence to it, and for this reason the One is God and so is Intellect, but not by reason of Sameness nor Being.
And in general Intellect is not god qua Intellect; for even the particular intellect is an intellect but is not a god. Also it is the proper role of Intellect to contemplate and intelligise and judge true being; but of God to unify, to generate, to exercise providence and suchlike. By virtue of that aspect of itself which is not intellect, the Intellect is God; and by virtue of that aspect of itself which is not God, the god in it is Intellect.
The divine Intellect, as a whole, is an intellectual essence along with its own summit and its proper unity, knowing itself in so far as it is intellectual, but being 'intoxicated on nectar,' as has been said, and generating the whole of cognition, in so far as it is the 'flower' of the Intellect and a supra-essential henad.
So once again, in seeking the first principle of knowledge, we have ascended to the One.
Similarly, the first principle was held to be the One (ibid.) and Socrates (Phaedrus 245d) says the first principle is ungenerated.
Here, Trinitarianism becomes confused because it holds Christ to be a generation of the Father. The newer Process Theologians hold the transcendent unity of the Godhead where there was an essential ungenerate co-eternal oneness which regards individuation as illusory. It is properly Monism and not Monotheism, hence it is properly a form of liberation theology akin to Buddhism and Hinduism rather than Christianity.
Logically it is popular with Mysticism. Indeed the recent developments of Trinitarianism seek to make God immanent as pure thought, present in matter, e.g. stone, wood, glass etc. This is not only not Christian it is not even transcendental Monotheism. It is Monism.
The logical requirements of the Greek philosophical form of reasoning have to assert equal divinity with Christ in order to predicate unconditional ascent to the One. This objective of ascent to God by individual determination rather than by God's allocation is the underlying motive of Cappadocian Trinitarianism.
The conclusion is verified from an examination of the history.
C M LaCugna (God For Us, Harper, San Francisco, 1973) states that the Cappadocians, despite the fact that they infrequently used the terms oikonomia and theologia, had considerably altered the concepts and their meaning became firmly set.
Theology is the science of 'God in Godself'; the economy is the sphere of God's condescension to flesh. The doctrine of the Trinity is Theology strictly speaking. In later Greek Patristic theology, usage will remain generally the same. The biblical concept of oikonomia [economy] as the gradual unfolding of the hidden mystery of God in the plan of salvation, is gradually constricted to mean the human nature of Christ, or the Incarnation.
Theologia, not a biblical concept at all, acquires in Athanasius and the Cappadocians the meaning of God's inner being beyond the historical manifestation of the Word incarnate.
Theologia in this sense now specifies the hypostases in God, but not the manner of their self revelation ad extra. If Christian theology had let go the insistence on God's impassibility and affirmed that God suffers in Christ, it could have kept together, against Arianism, the essential unity and identity between the being of God and the being of Christ (p. 43).
We are thus now at the illogical position which the process of Greek philosophy had led the theologians. They had to develop theology apart from soteriology.
In other words, they considered theology apart from and without reference to the plan of salvation, which was fatal for Christianity.
The theologians cut theology adrift from the Bible and, hence, it achieved even greater levels of incoherence.
More particularly, the requirement for God to have suffered in Christ is not a biblical requirement; it is a requirement of Greek philosophy, which places improper limitations upon the adequacy of a subordinate sacrifice.
The early Christian Church writers were all subordinationist. None of the early theologians ever claimed that Christ was God in the sense that God the Father was God. This was a late invention of Greek philosophy imported into Christianity.
LaCugna says that:
The Cappadocians were highly competent speculative theologians. They brilliantly synthesized elements of Neo-Platonism and Stoicism, biblical revelation, and pastoral concerns to argue against both Arius and Eunomius. Their central concern remained soteriological.
They saw as their task to clarify how God's relationship to us in Christ and the Spirit in the economy of Incarnation and deification reveals the essential unity and equality of Father, Son, and Spirit. In the process Basil and the Gregorys produced a sophisticated ‘metaphysics of the economy of salvation’.
Unfortunately that was not, in fact, the aim of Basil and the two Gregorys as Gregg had demonstrated from the texts in his Consolation Philosophy etc., Philadelphia Patristic Foundation Ltd, 1975.
Basil was attempting to separate from the world altogether in the one escape (Basil EP., 2 tr.
Defarrari, I, 11, Gregg, p. 224).
The passions were to be removed from the soul. The soul must be perfected for separation from the flesh. God Himself becomes visible to those who have seen the Son, His image.
Illuminated by the Spirit, souls become themselves spiritual [psuchai pneumatikai] and are initiated into life in which the future is known, mysteries come clear, and all the benefits of heavenly citizenship are enjoyed. The climax, Basil writes is:
...joy without end, abiding in God, being made like to God [he pros Theon homoioosis], and highest of all, being made God [Theon genesthai]
(Basil 9.23. trans from NPNF, V, 16) Gregg adds (fn3) Much of the thought of Basil's Spir. 9 was taken from Plotinus, as P Henry demonstrated in his Les etats de texte de Plotin (Brussels; n.p., 1938, p. 160). Jaeger argues that the ideas were borrowed from Basil by Gregory of Nyssa in his De Institutio Christiano, in Two Rediscovered works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: E J Brill, 1954, pp. 100-103).
LaCugna noted that the Cappadocians oriented theology in a direction which further contributed to the separation of economy and theology. This trajectory led to the:
via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius and, finally, to the theology of Gregory of Palamas (Chapter 6).
In the Latin West, in the period immediately following Nicaea, theologians such as Hilary of Poitiers and, perhaps to an extreme degree, Marcellus of Ancyra, retained the connection between the divine hypostases and the economy of salvation. Augustine inaugurated an entirely new approach. His starting point was no longer the monarchy of the Father but the divine substance shared equally by the three persons. Instead of inquiring into the nature of theologia as it is revealed in the Incarnation of Christ and deification by the Spirit, Augustine would inquire into the traces of the Trinity to be found in the soul of each human being.
Augustine's pursuit of a 'psychological' analogy for the intratrinitarian relations would mean that trinitarian doctrine thereafter would be concerned with the relations 'internal' to the godhead, disjoined from what we know of God through Christ in the Spirit (LaCugna, p. 44).
The Medieval Latin theology followed Augustine and the separation of theology from economy or soteriology. The entire structure became embroiled in neo-Platonism and Mysticism. The important notations of LaCugna are that from Augustine the Monarchy of the Father was no longer paramount. The Trinity assumed co-equality.
This was the second step following on from the false assertion of co-eternality. The correct premise was the concept of the manifestation of the Godhead in each individual, namely the operation of the Father by means of the Holy Spirit which emanated from Him through Jesus Christ.
This direction through Jesus Christ enabled Christ to monitor and direct the individual in accordance with the will of God who lived in each of the elect. Christ was not the origin of the Holy Spirit. He was its intermediary monitor. He acted for God as he had always acted for and in accordance with the will of God. But he was not the God.
The Trinitarians lost sight of this fact, if indeed they ever really understood the matter. As LaCugna says the:
Theology of the triune God appeared to be added on to consideration of the one God (p. 44).
This affected fundamentally the way Christians prayed. That is, they no longer prayed to the Father alone in the name of the Son as the Bible directs (from Mat. 6:6,9; Lk. 11:12) worshipping the Father (Jn. 4:23), but to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Further, the scholastics developed a metaphysics of theology itself. But the entire edifice was built in disregard to, or manipulation of, the Bible.
That is why Trinitarians never address all Bible texts on a subject and mistranslate and misquote other key texts ignoring the ones they cannot alter. But their system is based on Mysticism and Platonism.
LaCugna states that:
The Cappadocians (and also Augustine) went considerably beyond the scriptural understanding of economy by locating God's relationship to the Son (and the Spirit) at the 'intradivine' level (p. 54).
The One God existed as ousia in three distinct hypostases. We have seen (in the paper) that the Platonic term ousia and the Stoic term hypostases mean essentially the same thing.
The theology of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus:
was formulated largely in response to the theology of Eunomius. Eunomius was also a Cappadocian, and for a brief time, bishop of Cyzicus. He was a neo-Arian, a rationalist who like Aetius believed in the radical subordination of Son to Father (heterousios).
For Eunomius, as for Arius, God is a unique and simple essence. But Eunomius drew further consequences for this essentially Arian premise. According to Eunomius, God is supremely arelational, God cannot communicate the divine nature, God cannot beget anything from the divine essence. Since the Son is begotten or generated (gennetos) by an energy, the Son cannot be of the same substance as the Father.
Thus there is no sense, not even a derivative sense, in which the divinity of the Son could be maintained.
Second, Arius had believed that while God is incomprehensible, the divine Son makes the incomprehensible God comprehensible. Eunomius believed human reason is capable of apprehending the very essence of God. His name for God is Agennesia: Ungenerateness, or Unbegottenness (LaCugna, p. 56).
Here we come to the issue.
The Cappadocians repeatedly asserted that God can never be fully comprehended by human reason or language. Gregory of Nazianzus in his Theological Orations (hence the title Theologian) held that purity of heart and the leisure of contemplation are preconditions for the knowledge of God. Even this personal interaction does not enable the knowledge of God's ousia.
Only God's works and acts (energeiai) can be known, that which constitutes the hinder parts of God exposed to Moses between the gaps in the cliff in Exodus 33:23.Thus, Christ showed by this example that only an (as yet) imperfect knowledge of the Godhead was available to him.
LaCugna states:
The Cappadocian response to Arianism* and Eunomianism must be understood against the backdrop to mystical theology. The threads of the mystical theology of the Cappadocians are found already in their predecessors and in Middle Platonism.
The centrality of mysticism in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa, combined with his intellectual acumen, produced a powerful refutation of the Eunomian position that God is knowable, and the Arian position that the Son is created (genetos). Both Gregorys worked out a theology of divine relations in the process.
But they were emphatic that even if we are able to explain what divine paternity means, words like begotten and unbegotten, generate and ungenerate, do not express the substance (ousia) of God but the characteristics of the divine hypostases, of how God is toward us.
The title 'Father', for example, does not give any information on the nature or qualities of divine fatherhood but indicates God's relation to the Son (LaCugna, p. 57).
* Arianism is applied generally to encompass subordinationists who all believed that Christ was a creation of the Father. This included Irenaeus, Polycarp, Paul, the apostles and even Christ himself.
Thus, early theologians are often termed Arians or early Arians even though they wrote centuries before Arius was born. It helps Trinitarians assert a spurious relativity to their position. The correct term is Subordinationist Unitarianism – or simply Unitarianism.
Trinitarians do not see or understand the universal relationship of the Sons of God to the Father.
The important aspect, which emerges from the above summary by LaCugna, is that we are able to see the non-biblical premises from which the Cappadocians attempt to reason.
For example, Christ clearly states that God is knowable. Christ knows and is known by the elect as he knows the Father and the Father knows him (Jn. 10:14). This knowledge was given to Christ by the Father as he was given power to lay down his life (Jn. 10:18).
The Son of God came and gave understanding to the elect to know him who is true and the elect are in him who is true and in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1Jn. 5:20). Thus the true God is He who is true and the Son is Jesus Christ.
The Son is not the true God, he is the Son through whom the elect are to know God. Thus the elect know God, where they did not formerly know God (Gal. 4:8), but came to know Him through the Father's willing self-revelation in the Son.
For what is known of God is manifested by God (Rom. 1:19 see Marshall's Interlinear), namely His invisible nature, His eternal power and deity (Rom. 1:20). It is a source of shame to the elect that some do not have a knowledge of God (1Cor. 15:34).
The knowledge is hence conditional and relative. It is revealed through the Spirit, which searches everything, even the depths of God (1Cor. 2:10).
The Cappadocians are thus wrong.
Further, their insistence that the Son is ungenerate or unbegotten, is not only contrary to Scripture but also contrary to logic and that is why they had to resort to Mysticism – because the logic of subordinationism, whether or not it is incorrectly labelled Arianism, is compelling.
Christ is an image or eikõn of the God, the first begotten (prõtotokos) of all creation (see Marshall's Interlinear Col. 1:15). Hence, Christ is the beginning of the creation of God (Rev. 3:14).
Christ said this to the Laodicean Church because it is in that Church that the apostasy became evident as it does in the last days with the man of lawlessness.
It is those who do not know God (1Thes. 4:5) and who reap God's vengeance (2Thes. 1:8) as the Cappadocians so amply demonstrate from their mystical cosmology.
You cannot be punished for not knowing God if that knowledge is unobtainable. God would be an unjust judge and thus unrighteous and hence not God.
The second point of error of the Cappadocians was that the divine paternity was not confined to Jesus Christ as we see from Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. Satan was also a Son of God before his rebellion typified by Genesis 6:4 and Jude 6. We are all to become Sons of God (Jn. 1:12; Rom. 8:14; 1Jn. 3:1,2).
Because we are Sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts (Gal. 4:6). Thus the Spirit is extended through the Son to the Sons of God in Christ.
Paul's writings are subordinationist but confusing to Gentiles unfamiliar with the allocation of name by authority. For example, in Titus 1:3 he refers to God as the saviour of us. In Titus 1:4, he distinguishes from God the Father and Christ and refers to Christ as the saviour of us.
Thus, Trinitarians assert that the function of God as saviour is here asserted as the aspect known as Son. This is incorrect. The authority of the Son is derived from the Father as we have seen in John 10:18. The adequacy of the sacrifice was determined by the Father, as it was to reconcile man to the Father that it was required to be made. God determines the adequacy of the sacrifice as it was to Him that the debt was owed.
There is no question that Paul makes clear distinction between God and Christ. Paul is an absolute and incontestable subordinationist. No apostle was a Trinitarian – not because they did not need to develop the theory but because it is blasphemy.
Those who profess to know God must demonstrate their knowledge by their deeds (Titus 1:16). Thus the law is kept from a knowledge of and love of God. The law must be kept because sin is the transgression of the law (1Jn. 3:4) and, if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin (Heb. 10:26). Those sins are carried to judgment as a profanation of the blood of the covenant by which we are sanctified (Heb. 10:29).
2Thessalonians 1:5-8 This is the evidence of the righteous judgement of God, that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering - since indeed God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
The punishment is meted out upon those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of Christ. There is no doubt that Paul distinguishes God from Christ in this text from 2Thessalonians 1:12: 2Thessalonians 1:12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus.
More particularly, the apostasy (apostasia) must come first before the coming of Christ when the Man of Sin or Lawlessness is revealed taking his seat in the shrine or the naos of God (2Thes. 2:4).
The next development of Trinitarianism was by Augustine where the linear representation of the Cappadocians from Father to Son to the Holy Spirit was altered to an interrelationship which came to be represented as a triangle with each of the entities equally placed. His work De Trinitate is the most sustained treatment of his theology.
Written over the period 399-419 it was fundamentally influenced and probably altered by his reading of Gregory of Nazianzus' Theological Orations around 413 (LaCugna, p. 82, noting also Chevalier). Augustine sought to explain that:
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit constitute a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality (LaCugna, p. 82, quoting De Trinitate 1.4.7 PL 42,824).
Augustine's schema sought to return to God whom the soul images through contemplation (LaCugna, p. 83). Thus, he also was concerned with mystical contemplation.
The understanding of all the apologists of the second century, not to mention the first century, Church thought that the Son and Spirit had appeared in the Old Testament theophanies – for example, that the Son alone appeared to the Patriarchs (Novatian Treatise on the Trinity quoted also by LaCugna, p. 83.
The modern position is that all three as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appeared at Sinai because, in fact, God is pure thought and is expressed through the Son as logos. This misapprehends the nature of the Holy Spirit and the way in which it acts in the Son and, in fact, confers Godhood on the Son.
LaCugna argues that Arians interpreted the texts differently arguing that, if the Son appeared without the Father, this must indicate a difference in their natures (p. 83). We will assume that she is referring generically to Unitarians as the term Arian limits the nature of the inquiry.
The arguments of early theologians were quite clear and specific. Christ was a creation of the Father, in fact the primary act of the creation and hence its beginning. This is the position of the Bible. It was the Athanasians and the later Cappadocians who altered the structure contrary to the Bible.
Consequently, that is why the Cappadocian apologists in churches with a Bible foundation are caught up in this absurd position of denying the literal intent of the Bible.
The Process Theologians and neo-Buddhists in Christianity are attempting to assert a monist structure where the Godhead is an immanent non-divisive blob.
Thus is Christendom!
(Many thanks to my friends for their contributions).
letusreason
I'm sure most people would agree, that if something is true, then it has always been true! If the Trinity is true, then it has always been true, and it should not take nearly 400 hundred years for it to "become" true! The Trinitarian debates over the centuries show in themselves that such a doctrine has not been true, otherwise there would have been no need of debates...
Modern scholars and historians have positively proved the link between Greek speculative metaphysics/philosophy and and the doctrine (Dogma) of the Trinity!
The paper below presents such proof of such a link. (part of the paper has been on the bbc board).
This paper traces the development of the neo-Platonist trinitarian system from Greek philosophy into the post-Christian synthesis. It shows the origin of the Cappadocian system using both ancient philosophy and modern Catholic theology in admission of the origin of the doctrine.
The Development of the Neo-Platonist Model
The concept of God as three hypostases of the superior entity is developed from Greek thought. It has nothing to do with the Bible. Plato developed the concept of forms in his works. Plato uses the philosopher Parmenides as his model. Parmenides was the first of the Greek Monists. He was not Monotheist. The concepts were further developed by those who followed Plato. Plotinus developed a relatively simple metaphysical scheme:
providing for just three hypostases - One, Intellect, and Soul - [this scheme] seems to have suffered elaboration already at the hands of his senior pupil Amelius (who had a special weakness for triads), but from the perspective of the Athenian School it is Iamblichus (c. 245-325) who began the major system of scholastic elaboration which is the mark of later Neoplatonism (Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, General Introduction, p. xv, Morrow and Dillon, Princeton University Press, 1987).
Thus the Trinity is prefigured as the One, the Wisdom or Intellect and the Soul becoming the One as Father, Word equated with Wisdom and the Spirit as functional Soul. This Spirit as functional Soul is held to be capable of individuation yet remains complete as an entity separate to and equal with the other two hypostases.
Proclus developed the concept of an Unparticipated Divine Soul. Dillon says of this:
Once again the psychic realm must have its proper monad (or henad), Unparticipated Divine Soul, which itself participates in Nous and presides transcendently over its own realm. In the Elements of Theology, when Proclus comes to discuss Soul (props. 184-211), we find no mention of such an entity, only of souls in the plural, but it is plainly presupposed, and is in fact mentioned earlier, in prop. 164. There we learn that the Unparticipated Soul 'presides primarily over the cosmos' [prootoos huper tou kosmou esti], but does so transcendently and so is distinct from the immanent World Soul, as well as from individual souls.
Proclus holds that all monads (unities or single units, henads in Platonic philosophy) in and above the cosmos, intelligible and intellectual are attached to their own monads and ordered with respect to one another, with the One as the leader of secondary monads.
Similarly, the One is the source and basis of the triad. Proclus holds:
Parmenides abides in the transcendent One, Zeno projects the many as the One, and Socrates turns back even these many to the Parmenidean One, since the first member in the every triad is an analogue of rest, the second of procession and the third of reversion, and the reversion rounds out a kind of circular path connecting the end with the beginning .
The concepts of the three begin to emerge but the first step is necessarily that of the dyad (a unit of two parts) but the dyad is a copy of the Unity. Thus the second is inferior to the One of Parmenides which is termed by Zeno himself as logos or discourse. The One is greater than plurality and the paradigm superior to the copy.
Thus the logos concept of Greek philosophy is attributed to the One rather than the second. This is contrary to the Bible but the origin of the concept is thus evident. The important concept of the Greeks was to show, as Proclus did by improving on Zeno's arguments, that plurality devoid of unity is impossible. Thus the Godhead was logically required to be a unified plurality but the early Greeks had no concept of Agape.
Agape is a transliteration of the Hebrew term ’ahabah from the Song of Songs in the Septuagint. Thus the concept of the love of God by dispensation is limited among the early Greeks. The consequent sharing of godliness they thus regarded, where accidentally acquired, as divine theft having no real concept of a plan of salvation as was present in the Hebrew.
The theory of Ideas existed as early as the Pythagoreans and was taken up by Plato in the Sophist (248a). Socrates posits the existence of the itself by itself which is taken to be the unmixed simplicity and purity of the Ideas.
The Hebrew combines this concept as being present with God (Prov. 8:22). Wisdom was created by God as the beginning of His way, the first of His acts of old. This led the rabbis to assume that the law was the wisdom referred to as it established order instead of chaos.
The Ideas were distinguished from attributes predicated of particular things. Thus, for the Greeks, the logos as expression of ideas was taken to be appropriated to the prime cause rather than an attribute of the cause.
Hence the logic of the denial of a subordinate logos. From this also came the concept that God is pure thought. It is worth noting that from Acts 7:29 logos is merely an utterance or saying. See also logoi of God translating dabar Yahovah or oracle(s) of God in the LXX and New Testament.
Plato gave Orpheus to say (In Tim. I, 312.26 ff., and 324.14 ff., cf. Proclus ibid., p. 168).
...that all things came to be in Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes, because, although the causes of all things in the cosmos appeared primarily and in a unified form in him (sc. Phanes), they appear secondarily and in a distinct form in the Demiurge. The sun, the moon, the heaven itself, the elements, and Eros the unifier - all came into being as a unity 'mixed together in the belly of Zeus' (Orph. fr. 167b.7 Kern).
The Demiurgic forms gave rise to the order and arrangement of sensible things (ibid.). All things stemming from the Father thus gave rise to animism, where the nature of the deity was immanent in all matter.
The Greeks, from Parmenides, turned the concept to Monism, making the One immanent. But Proclus shows that these concepts, particularly the Ideas which stemmed from the Will of the Father, have their origin in the Chaldean Oracles (fr. 37 Des Places).
The Intellect of the Father whirred, conceiving with his unwearying will
Ideas of every form; and they leapt out in flight from this single source
For this was the Father's counsel and achievement.
But they were divided by the fire of intelligence
and distributed among other intelligent beings. For their lord had placed
Before this multiform cosmos an eternal intelligible model; And the cosmos strove modestly to follow its traces,
And appeared in the form it has and graced with all sorts of Ideas.
Of these there was one source, but as they burst forth innumerable others were broken off and scattered
Through the bodies of the cosmos, swarming like bees
About the mighty hollows of the world,
And whirling about in various directions -
These intelligent Ideas, issued from the paternal source,
Laying hold on the mighty bloom of fire.
At the prime moment of unsleeping time
This primary and self sufficient source of the Father
Has spouted forth these primally-generative Ideas.
Proclus comments thus:
In these words the gods have clearly revealed where the Ideas have their foundation, in what god their single source is contained, how their plurality proceeds from this source, and how the cosmos is constituted in accordance with them; and also that they are moving agents in all the cosmic systems, all intelligent in essence and exceedingly diverse in their properties (op. cit., p. 169).
The concept of the Father as creator which is the biblical model is clearly understood in the Chaldean systems and in the original Greek texts. The application of the functions of God, however, become misapplied by them. However, the ancient concepts of the Father as supreme God was understood by all nations. It was the neo-Platonists who perverted it.
The Introduction to Book III of Proclus' Commentary holds that the summary (831.25 ff.) shows Proclus to specify:
three basic attributes of Forms - Goodness, Essentiality, Eternity, deriving respectively from the One (the First Cause), the One Being and Aeon. All paradigmatic Forms derive their being from these three (p. 155).
The requirement thus emerges of the three attributes of Goodness, Essentiality and Eternity being predicated to the Triune system. The Greeks thus had to assert that Christ was co-eternal with God in spite of the fact that the Bible clearly says he is not and that only God is immortal (1Tim. 6:16). The aspect of Christ as the Angel of YHVH also was required to be of the primary three, in view of the perceived requirements of the adequacy of the reconciliation of men to God through Christ.
The Greeks were themselves limited by their concepts of love to the primary relationships of filial and erotic love, hence they could not understand the biblical paradigms.
The concept of omniscience being applied to Christ, contrary to Scripture (e.g. Rev. 1:1), follows from the requirements of the attributes especially Essentiality. Proclus develops the argument from Book IV.1047, op. cit., p. 406.
In dealing with knowledge as single or multiple, Proclus shows that it must be single therefore the neo-Platonists had to assert omniscience to Christ to ensure the other attributes of the divine nature. Such assertion was, of itself, biblically absurd.
If, however, we are to state the single principle of knowledge, we must fix upon the One, which generates Intellect and all the knowledge both within it and what is seen on the secondary levels of being. For this, transcending the Many as it does, is the first principle of knowledge for them, and is not the same as them, as is Sameness in the intelligible realm.
This is co-ordinate with its Otherness and inferior to Being. The One, on the other hand, is beyond intellectual Being and grants coherence to it, and for this reason the One is God and so is Intellect, but not by reason of Sameness nor Being.
And in general Intellect is not god qua Intellect; for even the particular intellect is an intellect but is not a god. Also it is the proper role of Intellect to contemplate and intelligise and judge true being; but of God to unify, to generate, to exercise providence and suchlike. By virtue of that aspect of itself which is not intellect, the Intellect is God; and by virtue of that aspect of itself which is not God, the god in it is Intellect.
The divine Intellect, as a whole, is an intellectual essence along with its own summit and its proper unity, knowing itself in so far as it is intellectual, but being 'intoxicated on nectar,' as has been said, and generating the whole of cognition, in so far as it is the 'flower' of the Intellect and a supra-essential henad.
So once again, in seeking the first principle of knowledge, we have ascended to the One.
Similarly, the first principle was held to be the One (ibid.) and Socrates (Phaedrus 245d) says the first principle is ungenerated.
Here, Trinitarianism becomes confused because it holds Christ to be a generation of the Father. The newer Process Theologians hold the transcendent unity of the Godhead where there was an essential ungenerate co-eternal oneness which regards individuation as illusory. It is properly Monism and not Monotheism, hence it is properly a form of liberation theology akin to Buddhism and Hinduism rather than Christianity.
Logically it is popular with Mysticism. Indeed the recent developments of Trinitarianism seek to make God immanent as pure thought, present in matter, e.g. stone, wood, glass etc. This is not only not Christian it is not even transcendental Monotheism. It is Monism.
The logical requirements of the Greek philosophical form of reasoning have to assert equal divinity with Christ in order to predicate unconditional ascent to the One. This objective of ascent to God by individual determination rather than by God's allocation is the underlying motive of Cappadocian Trinitarianism.
The conclusion is verified from an examination of the history.
C M LaCugna (God For Us, Harper, San Francisco, 1973) states that the Cappadocians, despite the fact that they infrequently used the terms oikonomia and theologia, had considerably altered the concepts and their meaning became firmly set.
Theology is the science of 'God in Godself'; the economy is the sphere of God's condescension to flesh. The doctrine of the Trinity is Theology strictly speaking. In later Greek Patristic theology, usage will remain generally the same. The biblical concept of oikonomia [economy] as the gradual unfolding of the hidden mystery of God in the plan of salvation, is gradually constricted to mean the human nature of Christ, or the Incarnation.
Theologia, not a biblical concept at all, acquires in Athanasius and the Cappadocians the meaning of God's inner being beyond the historical manifestation of the Word incarnate.
Theologia in this sense now specifies the hypostases in God, but not the manner of their self revelation ad extra. If Christian theology had let go the insistence on God's impassibility and affirmed that God suffers in Christ, it could have kept together, against Arianism, the essential unity and identity between the being of God and the being of Christ (p. 43).
We are thus now at the illogical position which the process of Greek philosophy had led the theologians. They had to develop theology apart from soteriology.
In other words, they considered theology apart from and without reference to the plan of salvation, which was fatal for Christianity.
The theologians cut theology adrift from the Bible and, hence, it achieved even greater levels of incoherence.
More particularly, the requirement for God to have suffered in Christ is not a biblical requirement; it is a requirement of Greek philosophy, which places improper limitations upon the adequacy of a subordinate sacrifice.
The early Christian Church writers were all subordinationist. None of the early theologians ever claimed that Christ was God in the sense that God the Father was God. This was a late invention of Greek philosophy imported into Christianity.
LaCugna says that:
The Cappadocians were highly competent speculative theologians. They brilliantly synthesized elements of Neo-Platonism and Stoicism, biblical revelation, and pastoral concerns to argue against both Arius and Eunomius. Their central concern remained soteriological.
They saw as their task to clarify how God's relationship to us in Christ and the Spirit in the economy of Incarnation and deification reveals the essential unity and equality of Father, Son, and Spirit. In the process Basil and the Gregorys produced a sophisticated ‘metaphysics of the economy of salvation’.
Unfortunately that was not, in fact, the aim of Basil and the two Gregorys as Gregg had demonstrated from the texts in his Consolation Philosophy etc., Philadelphia Patristic Foundation Ltd, 1975.
Basil was attempting to separate from the world altogether in the one escape (Basil EP., 2 tr.
Defarrari, I, 11, Gregg, p. 224).
The passions were to be removed from the soul. The soul must be perfected for separation from the flesh. God Himself becomes visible to those who have seen the Son, His image.
Illuminated by the Spirit, souls become themselves spiritual [psuchai pneumatikai] and are initiated into life in which the future is known, mysteries come clear, and all the benefits of heavenly citizenship are enjoyed. The climax, Basil writes is:
...joy without end, abiding in God, being made like to God [he pros Theon homoioosis], and highest of all, being made God [Theon genesthai]
(Basil 9.23. trans from NPNF, V, 16) Gregg adds (fn3) Much of the thought of Basil's Spir. 9 was taken from Plotinus, as P Henry demonstrated in his Les etats de texte de Plotin (Brussels; n.p., 1938, p. 160). Jaeger argues that the ideas were borrowed from Basil by Gregory of Nyssa in his De Institutio Christiano, in Two Rediscovered works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: E J Brill, 1954, pp. 100-103).
LaCugna noted that the Cappadocians oriented theology in a direction which further contributed to the separation of economy and theology. This trajectory led to the:
via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius and, finally, to the theology of Gregory of Palamas (Chapter 6).
In the Latin West, in the period immediately following Nicaea, theologians such as Hilary of Poitiers and, perhaps to an extreme degree, Marcellus of Ancyra, retained the connection between the divine hypostases and the economy of salvation. Augustine inaugurated an entirely new approach. His starting point was no longer the monarchy of the Father but the divine substance shared equally by the three persons. Instead of inquiring into the nature of theologia as it is revealed in the Incarnation of Christ and deification by the Spirit, Augustine would inquire into the traces of the Trinity to be found in the soul of each human being.
Augustine's pursuit of a 'psychological' analogy for the intratrinitarian relations would mean that trinitarian doctrine thereafter would be concerned with the relations 'internal' to the godhead, disjoined from what we know of God through Christ in the Spirit (LaCugna, p. 44).
The Medieval Latin theology followed Augustine and the separation of theology from economy or soteriology. The entire structure became embroiled in neo-Platonism and Mysticism. The important notations of LaCugna are that from Augustine the Monarchy of the Father was no longer paramount. The Trinity assumed co-equality.
This was the second step following on from the false assertion of co-eternality. The correct premise was the concept of the manifestation of the Godhead in each individual, namely the operation of the Father by means of the Holy Spirit which emanated from Him through Jesus Christ.
This direction through Jesus Christ enabled Christ to monitor and direct the individual in accordance with the will of God who lived in each of the elect. Christ was not the origin of the Holy Spirit. He was its intermediary monitor. He acted for God as he had always acted for and in accordance with the will of God. But he was not the God.
The Trinitarians lost sight of this fact, if indeed they ever really understood the matter. As LaCugna says the:
Theology of the triune God appeared to be added on to consideration of the one God (p. 44).
This affected fundamentally the way Christians prayed. That is, they no longer prayed to the Father alone in the name of the Son as the Bible directs (from Mat. 6:6,9; Lk. 11:12) worshipping the Father (Jn. 4:23), but to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Further, the scholastics developed a metaphysics of theology itself. But the entire edifice was built in disregard to, or manipulation of, the Bible.
That is why Trinitarians never address all Bible texts on a subject and mistranslate and misquote other key texts ignoring the ones they cannot alter. But their system is based on Mysticism and Platonism.
LaCugna states that:
The Cappadocians (and also Augustine) went considerably beyond the scriptural understanding of economy by locating God's relationship to the Son (and the Spirit) at the 'intradivine' level (p. 54).
The One God existed as ousia in three distinct hypostases. We have seen (in the paper) that the Platonic term ousia and the Stoic term hypostases mean essentially the same thing.
The theology of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus:
was formulated largely in response to the theology of Eunomius. Eunomius was also a Cappadocian, and for a brief time, bishop of Cyzicus. He was a neo-Arian, a rationalist who like Aetius believed in the radical subordination of Son to Father (heterousios).
For Eunomius, as for Arius, God is a unique and simple essence. But Eunomius drew further consequences for this essentially Arian premise. According to Eunomius, God is supremely arelational, God cannot communicate the divine nature, God cannot beget anything from the divine essence. Since the Son is begotten or generated (gennetos) by an energy, the Son cannot be of the same substance as the Father.
Thus there is no sense, not even a derivative sense, in which the divinity of the Son could be maintained.
Second, Arius had believed that while God is incomprehensible, the divine Son makes the incomprehensible God comprehensible. Eunomius believed human reason is capable of apprehending the very essence of God. His name for God is Agennesia: Ungenerateness, or Unbegottenness (LaCugna, p. 56).
Here we come to the issue.
The Cappadocians repeatedly asserted that God can never be fully comprehended by human reason or language. Gregory of Nazianzus in his Theological Orations (hence the title Theologian) held that purity of heart and the leisure of contemplation are preconditions for the knowledge of God. Even this personal interaction does not enable the knowledge of God's ousia.
Only God's works and acts (energeiai) can be known, that which constitutes the hinder parts of God exposed to Moses between the gaps in the cliff in Exodus 33:23.Thus, Christ showed by this example that only an (as yet) imperfect knowledge of the Godhead was available to him.
LaCugna states:
The Cappadocian response to Arianism* and Eunomianism must be understood against the backdrop to mystical theology. The threads of the mystical theology of the Cappadocians are found already in their predecessors and in Middle Platonism.
The centrality of mysticism in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa, combined with his intellectual acumen, produced a powerful refutation of the Eunomian position that God is knowable, and the Arian position that the Son is created (genetos). Both Gregorys worked out a theology of divine relations in the process.
But they were emphatic that even if we are able to explain what divine paternity means, words like begotten and unbegotten, generate and ungenerate, do not express the substance (ousia) of God but the characteristics of the divine hypostases, of how God is toward us.
The title 'Father', for example, does not give any information on the nature or qualities of divine fatherhood but indicates God's relation to the Son (LaCugna, p. 57).
* Arianism is applied generally to encompass subordinationists who all believed that Christ was a creation of the Father. This included Irenaeus, Polycarp, Paul, the apostles and even Christ himself.
Thus, early theologians are often termed Arians or early Arians even though they wrote centuries before Arius was born. It helps Trinitarians assert a spurious relativity to their position. The correct term is Subordinationist Unitarianism – or simply Unitarianism.
Trinitarians do not see or understand the universal relationship of the Sons of God to the Father.
The important aspect, which emerges from the above summary by LaCugna, is that we are able to see the non-biblical premises from which the Cappadocians attempt to reason.
For example, Christ clearly states that God is knowable. Christ knows and is known by the elect as he knows the Father and the Father knows him (Jn. 10:14). This knowledge was given to Christ by the Father as he was given power to lay down his life (Jn. 10:18).
The Son of God came and gave understanding to the elect to know him who is true and the elect are in him who is true and in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1Jn. 5:20). Thus the true God is He who is true and the Son is Jesus Christ.
The Son is not the true God, he is the Son through whom the elect are to know God. Thus the elect know God, where they did not formerly know God (Gal. 4:8), but came to know Him through the Father's willing self-revelation in the Son.
For what is known of God is manifested by God (Rom. 1:19 see Marshall's Interlinear), namely His invisible nature, His eternal power and deity (Rom. 1:20). It is a source of shame to the elect that some do not have a knowledge of God (1Cor. 15:34).
The knowledge is hence conditional and relative. It is revealed through the Spirit, which searches everything, even the depths of God (1Cor. 2:10).
The Cappadocians are thus wrong.
Further, their insistence that the Son is ungenerate or unbegotten, is not only contrary to Scripture but also contrary to logic and that is why they had to resort to Mysticism – because the logic of subordinationism, whether or not it is incorrectly labelled Arianism, is compelling.
Christ is an image or eikõn of the God, the first begotten (prõtotokos) of all creation (see Marshall's Interlinear Col. 1:15). Hence, Christ is the beginning of the creation of God (Rev. 3:14).
Christ said this to the Laodicean Church because it is in that Church that the apostasy became evident as it does in the last days with the man of lawlessness.
It is those who do not know God (1Thes. 4:5) and who reap God's vengeance (2Thes. 1:8) as the Cappadocians so amply demonstrate from their mystical cosmology.
You cannot be punished for not knowing God if that knowledge is unobtainable. God would be an unjust judge and thus unrighteous and hence not God.
The second point of error of the Cappadocians was that the divine paternity was not confined to Jesus Christ as we see from Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. Satan was also a Son of God before his rebellion typified by Genesis 6:4 and Jude 6. We are all to become Sons of God (Jn. 1:12; Rom. 8:14; 1Jn. 3:1,2).
Because we are Sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts (Gal. 4:6). Thus the Spirit is extended through the Son to the Sons of God in Christ.
Paul's writings are subordinationist but confusing to Gentiles unfamiliar with the allocation of name by authority. For example, in Titus 1:3 he refers to God as the saviour of us. In Titus 1:4, he distinguishes from God the Father and Christ and refers to Christ as the saviour of us.
Thus, Trinitarians assert that the function of God as saviour is here asserted as the aspect known as Son. This is incorrect. The authority of the Son is derived from the Father as we have seen in John 10:18. The adequacy of the sacrifice was determined by the Father, as it was to reconcile man to the Father that it was required to be made. God determines the adequacy of the sacrifice as it was to Him that the debt was owed.
There is no question that Paul makes clear distinction between God and Christ. Paul is an absolute and incontestable subordinationist. No apostle was a Trinitarian – not because they did not need to develop the theory but because it is blasphemy.
Those who profess to know God must demonstrate their knowledge by their deeds (Titus 1:16). Thus the law is kept from a knowledge of and love of God. The law must be kept because sin is the transgression of the law (1Jn. 3:4) and, if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin (Heb. 10:26). Those sins are carried to judgment as a profanation of the blood of the covenant by which we are sanctified (Heb. 10:29).
2Thessalonians 1:5-8 This is the evidence of the righteous judgement of God, that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering - since indeed God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
The punishment is meted out upon those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of Christ. There is no doubt that Paul distinguishes God from Christ in this text from 2Thessalonians 1:12: 2Thessalonians 1:12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus.
More particularly, the apostasy (apostasia) must come first before the coming of Christ when the Man of Sin or Lawlessness is revealed taking his seat in the shrine or the naos of God (2Thes. 2:4).
The next development of Trinitarianism was by Augustine where the linear representation of the Cappadocians from Father to Son to the Holy Spirit was altered to an interrelationship which came to be represented as a triangle with each of the entities equally placed. His work De Trinitate is the most sustained treatment of his theology.
Written over the period 399-419 it was fundamentally influenced and probably altered by his reading of Gregory of Nazianzus' Theological Orations around 413 (LaCugna, p. 82, noting also Chevalier). Augustine sought to explain that:
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit constitute a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality (LaCugna, p. 82, quoting De Trinitate 1.4.7 PL 42,824).
Augustine's schema sought to return to God whom the soul images through contemplation (LaCugna, p. 83). Thus, he also was concerned with mystical contemplation.
The understanding of all the apologists of the second century, not to mention the first century, Church thought that the Son and Spirit had appeared in the Old Testament theophanies – for example, that the Son alone appeared to the Patriarchs (Novatian Treatise on the Trinity quoted also by LaCugna, p. 83.
The modern position is that all three as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appeared at Sinai because, in fact, God is pure thought and is expressed through the Son as logos. This misapprehends the nature of the Holy Spirit and the way in which it acts in the Son and, in fact, confers Godhood on the Son.
LaCugna argues that Arians interpreted the texts differently arguing that, if the Son appeared without the Father, this must indicate a difference in their natures (p. 83). We will assume that she is referring generically to Unitarians as the term Arian limits the nature of the inquiry.
The arguments of early theologians were quite clear and specific. Christ was a creation of the Father, in fact the primary act of the creation and hence its beginning. This is the position of the Bible. It was the Athanasians and the later Cappadocians who altered the structure contrary to the Bible.
Consequently, that is why the Cappadocian apologists in churches with a Bible foundation are caught up in this absurd position of denying the literal intent of the Bible.
The Process Theologians and neo-Buddhists in Christianity are attempting to assert a monist structure where the Godhead is an immanent non-divisive blob.
Thus is Christendom!
(Many thanks to my friends for their contributions).
letusreason
Extracts from:
A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins.
With Christianity now seeming to be a flesh-hating religion infused with Platonic philosophy, the transformation from its Jewish roots was complete. You would have to go a long way to find a Jewish Christian, and even God had become Greek. In 300, Spanish churches, in a breathtaking reversal of the story of Peter and Cornelius, agreed to expel anyone who ate with Jews.
Church and empire, meanwhile, seemed not only on friendlier terms but to be converging. Just as Christianity had been incorporating Platonic ideas, Roman religion was becoming almost monotheistic – not denying worship to the gods and emperors, but focussing more on one supreme deity, the unconquered Sun. Philosophy likewise: the Alexandrian Plotinus launched an influential new version of Platonism, built around the idea of 'the One', incomprehensible, transcendent, the source of all being. The popularity of Neoplatonism made Christianity seem more, mainstream than ever, while also providing another attractive source of ideas for Christian thinkers. (p 42, 43).
Clement and Origen
Alexandria in Egypt was the intellectual capital of the Roman world. Schools of every major philosophy taught there, drawing on its incomparable library of 70,000 scrolls. The philosophical Alexandrians had little interest in Christianity – for all Justin's efforts – apart from the Gnostic variety, which thrived. Alexandrian Christians therefore were a defensive enclave, holding tightly to inherited doctrines rather than engaging with contemporary culture.
The mission of Clement, head of the Christian school in Alexandria for pre-baptismal training, was to demonstrate that Christianity was not just for an uneducated underclass but could hold its own with the philosophers and gnostics. Writing in the popular philosophical style, sprinkling his books with quotations from an impressive array of pagan writers, he argued that Christianity was the culmination of all that was good in Greek thought, especially Plato's. `Philosophy may even have been given to the Greeks directly by God,' he suggested. 'It was a schoolteacher to bring Greek culture to Christ, as the Law was for the Hebrews.'
The problem was that the Law of Moses did not have a great deal in common with Platonism, with its transcendent, emotionless, abstract God and immortal human souls. So to reconcile them, Clement took Christian allegorising of the Bible further than ever. Arguing that full knowledge is hidden symbolically in its odder passages, to protect those not mature enough to accept or understand it, Clement was able to decode the scriptures to reveal the truths that his Platonist mind knew must be in there somewhere.
He was similarly friendly to the Gnostics. While he successfully argued against them, he loved their idea that salvation and knowledge of God are the same thing. For him, Christianity was about being gradually made like God and becoming one with him through knowledge, so advanced Christians are in fact the `true Gnostics'.
Being a pastoral teacher, Clement also wrote a guide to Christian behaviour throughout the day, covering everything from sex being only for procreation to talking with your mouth full. Concerning sex (and other earthly pleasures), Clement was actually the most liberal Christian writer of his age – probably of the whole coming millennium in fact, but the idea that the Christian life was fundamentally about denying physical desire was becoming generally accepted.
His pupil and successor, Origen, was a case in point. He had few possessions, and got by on the minimum food, drink and sleep. For the sake of his spiritual life, he is said to have castrated himself. In the anti-Christian campaign of 202, Clement fled Alexandria, while Origen, aged seventeen, was so desperate to join his father in being tortured and beheaded that he only stayed because his mother hid his clothes. Just a year later, he took over the school.
A brilliant thinker, Origen has been called the most prolific writer ever, though most of his work is lost. He developed Clement's allegorical Bible-reading into a three-tiered system: every text has its plain meaning (which is sometimes erroneous or immoral), then works as a moral parable, then most importantly encodes mystical symbolism. He wrote many vast biblical commentaries unpacking these meanings, the most celebrated being Song of Songs: he found in its shockingly erotic verse a wealth of meditation on the union between Christ and the church.
This allowed him to import the God of Plato, `ever unmoved and untroubled in his own summit of bliss', more successfully into the Bible than ever. It told him that souls existed before birth, and that they are saved by mystical experience of God in Christ. He apparently reinterpreted the resurrection of the dead as reincarnation in new universes, a repeated process of sin and suffering until the soul is purified. This means that no one is eternally damned: God's punishment purifies us, so that all humans and even demons may ultimately become one with God.
Origen also put a lot of thought into the Trinity. If the three are one God, then what is the difference between them? What makes them three? Origen's answer is that some are more God than others. Only the Father is God in his own right, so the Son and Spirit receive their divinity from him: great, greater, greatest; a three-storey hierarchy. Where he really broke new ground is in rejecting the assumption that the Father gave birth to the Son at some point in time. God (Platonism says) is timeless, so the Son is fathered timelessly, `eternally begotten of the Father', as the Nicene creed agreed a century later.
Origen was a formidably original thinker, by no means orthodox in the common sense – or in the religious sense, according to the sixth-century church, which burnt his writings as heretical. He kicked up controversy in his own time too, the redemption of the devil especially raising eyebrows. He clashed with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, who seemed to find having a theological celebrity in his church somewhat trying, and of whom Origen was probably rather critical. On a teaching visit to Caesarea in 230, Origen was ordained as an elder so that he could preach. This snub was the last straw, and together with the rest of Egypt's bishops, Demetrius excommunicated him as a heretic and a eunuch, though his attempt to have him condemned at Rome failed, and he retained his huge following. Origen spent the rest of his life in Caesarea, until, clothed or otherwise, he finally achieved his martyrdom. (p 36-38).
Augustine
He continued to study philosophy and science, growing disillusioned over ten years by the failure of Manichee gurus to answer his questions. Moving on to Neoplatonism, he went to the great city of Milan to teach public speaking.
(p 58)
Meanwhile, he attended Ambrose's celebrated sermons, hoping to learn rhetoric. Instead, he learned Christianity. He learned to read the Bible for its more acceptable, undercover, Neoplatonic truths… (p 59)
Thomas Aquinas
The next character is our story is, unlikely as it seems, Aristotle. While his tutor, Plato, had had more influence over the church than most Christians, Aristotle's work was largely lost when Europe fell apart after the collapse of Rome and persecuted pagan philosophers took refuge in Islamic lands. But now that Christians were constantly mingling with Muslims, for the first time they came across silk, sugar and Aristotle, whom the Muslims had kept in circulation. He was a bit of a shock.
For Plato, the spiritual realm is infinitely more real than the physical, matter but a shadow of the eternal. So we understand life and God by reason, by contemplating eternal truths. Aristotle, in contrast, accepted the physical realm as real. So matter matters, and we understand by observing with our senses. Truth comes not through divine revelation, then, but human
1 investigation. Aristotle studied physics, biology and cosmology. His research established that there must be a God to have set the universe in motion, but he had little room for the God personally encountered in Christian Platonism. He also concluded that souls are mortal and the universe immortal, the opposite of Plato. It was a serious challenge to traditional Christianity. The Pope and Paris University banned Aristotle. The man who brought him in from the cold was Thomas Aquinas. (p 119)
A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins (p 34)
Second-century writers are known as the apologists, being remembered for their defense of the faith rather than as its early architects. Different apologists took very different attitudes to the beliefs of their opponents, however.
Justin Martyr
Justin Martyr was a professional thinker who had worked his way through several current Greek philosophies, before being converted to Christianity by the Jewish scriptures. He believed that Jesus was the culmination of all philosophies, God's Word of truth (in which every philosophy has an imperfect share) come in the flesh. Those, like Socrates, 'who live according to reason, are Christians, even though they are considered atheists'. He tried to persuade readers that they did not have to abandon the wisdom of the Greeks to become Christians. Ironically, he earned his surname thanks to the anti-Christian policies of his fellow philosopher, the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Tertullian,
Tertullian, on the other hand, despised Greek philosophy as pagan lies.
Philosophy came from humans, Christianity from God.
Those who tried to learn from both merely corrupted Christianity. 'Wretched Aristotle!... What does Athens have in common with Jerusalem?'
letusreason
A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins.
With Christianity now seeming to be a flesh-hating religion infused with Platonic philosophy, the transformation from its Jewish roots was complete. You would have to go a long way to find a Jewish Christian, and even God had become Greek. In 300, Spanish churches, in a breathtaking reversal of the story of Peter and Cornelius, agreed to expel anyone who ate with Jews.
Church and empire, meanwhile, seemed not only on friendlier terms but to be converging. Just as Christianity had been incorporating Platonic ideas, Roman religion was becoming almost monotheistic – not denying worship to the gods and emperors, but focussing more on one supreme deity, the unconquered Sun. Philosophy likewise: the Alexandrian Plotinus launched an influential new version of Platonism, built around the idea of 'the One', incomprehensible, transcendent, the source of all being. The popularity of Neoplatonism made Christianity seem more, mainstream than ever, while also providing another attractive source of ideas for Christian thinkers. (p 42, 43).
Clement and Origen
Alexandria in Egypt was the intellectual capital of the Roman world. Schools of every major philosophy taught there, drawing on its incomparable library of 70,000 scrolls. The philosophical Alexandrians had little interest in Christianity – for all Justin's efforts – apart from the Gnostic variety, which thrived. Alexandrian Christians therefore were a defensive enclave, holding tightly to inherited doctrines rather than engaging with contemporary culture.
The mission of Clement, head of the Christian school in Alexandria for pre-baptismal training, was to demonstrate that Christianity was not just for an uneducated underclass but could hold its own with the philosophers and gnostics. Writing in the popular philosophical style, sprinkling his books with quotations from an impressive array of pagan writers, he argued that Christianity was the culmination of all that was good in Greek thought, especially Plato's. `Philosophy may even have been given to the Greeks directly by God,' he suggested. 'It was a schoolteacher to bring Greek culture to Christ, as the Law was for the Hebrews.'
The problem was that the Law of Moses did not have a great deal in common with Platonism, with its transcendent, emotionless, abstract God and immortal human souls. So to reconcile them, Clement took Christian allegorising of the Bible further than ever. Arguing that full knowledge is hidden symbolically in its odder passages, to protect those not mature enough to accept or understand it, Clement was able to decode the scriptures to reveal the truths that his Platonist mind knew must be in there somewhere.
He was similarly friendly to the Gnostics. While he successfully argued against them, he loved their idea that salvation and knowledge of God are the same thing. For him, Christianity was about being gradually made like God and becoming one with him through knowledge, so advanced Christians are in fact the `true Gnostics'.
Being a pastoral teacher, Clement also wrote a guide to Christian behaviour throughout the day, covering everything from sex being only for procreation to talking with your mouth full. Concerning sex (and other earthly pleasures), Clement was actually the most liberal Christian writer of his age – probably of the whole coming millennium in fact, but the idea that the Christian life was fundamentally about denying physical desire was becoming generally accepted.
His pupil and successor, Origen, was a case in point. He had few possessions, and got by on the minimum food, drink and sleep. For the sake of his spiritual life, he is said to have castrated himself. In the anti-Christian campaign of 202, Clement fled Alexandria, while Origen, aged seventeen, was so desperate to join his father in being tortured and beheaded that he only stayed because his mother hid his clothes. Just a year later, he took over the school.
A brilliant thinker, Origen has been called the most prolific writer ever, though most of his work is lost. He developed Clement's allegorical Bible-reading into a three-tiered system: every text has its plain meaning (which is sometimes erroneous or immoral), then works as a moral parable, then most importantly encodes mystical symbolism. He wrote many vast biblical commentaries unpacking these meanings, the most celebrated being Song of Songs: he found in its shockingly erotic verse a wealth of meditation on the union between Christ and the church.
This allowed him to import the God of Plato, `ever unmoved and untroubled in his own summit of bliss', more successfully into the Bible than ever. It told him that souls existed before birth, and that they are saved by mystical experience of God in Christ. He apparently reinterpreted the resurrection of the dead as reincarnation in new universes, a repeated process of sin and suffering until the soul is purified. This means that no one is eternally damned: God's punishment purifies us, so that all humans and even demons may ultimately become one with God.
Origen also put a lot of thought into the Trinity. If the three are one God, then what is the difference between them? What makes them three? Origen's answer is that some are more God than others. Only the Father is God in his own right, so the Son and Spirit receive their divinity from him: great, greater, greatest; a three-storey hierarchy. Where he really broke new ground is in rejecting the assumption that the Father gave birth to the Son at some point in time. God (Platonism says) is timeless, so the Son is fathered timelessly, `eternally begotten of the Father', as the Nicene creed agreed a century later.
Origen was a formidably original thinker, by no means orthodox in the common sense – or in the religious sense, according to the sixth-century church, which burnt his writings as heretical. He kicked up controversy in his own time too, the redemption of the devil especially raising eyebrows. He clashed with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, who seemed to find having a theological celebrity in his church somewhat trying, and of whom Origen was probably rather critical. On a teaching visit to Caesarea in 230, Origen was ordained as an elder so that he could preach. This snub was the last straw, and together with the rest of Egypt's bishops, Demetrius excommunicated him as a heretic and a eunuch, though his attempt to have him condemned at Rome failed, and he retained his huge following. Origen spent the rest of his life in Caesarea, until, clothed or otherwise, he finally achieved his martyrdom. (p 36-38).
Augustine
He continued to study philosophy and science, growing disillusioned over ten years by the failure of Manichee gurus to answer his questions. Moving on to Neoplatonism, he went to the great city of Milan to teach public speaking.
(p 58)
Meanwhile, he attended Ambrose's celebrated sermons, hoping to learn rhetoric. Instead, he learned Christianity. He learned to read the Bible for its more acceptable, undercover, Neoplatonic truths… (p 59)
Thomas Aquinas
The next character is our story is, unlikely as it seems, Aristotle. While his tutor, Plato, had had more influence over the church than most Christians, Aristotle's work was largely lost when Europe fell apart after the collapse of Rome and persecuted pagan philosophers took refuge in Islamic lands. But now that Christians were constantly mingling with Muslims, for the first time they came across silk, sugar and Aristotle, whom the Muslims had kept in circulation. He was a bit of a shock.
For Plato, the spiritual realm is infinitely more real than the physical, matter but a shadow of the eternal. So we understand life and God by reason, by contemplating eternal truths. Aristotle, in contrast, accepted the physical realm as real. So matter matters, and we understand by observing with our senses. Truth comes not through divine revelation, then, but human
1 investigation. Aristotle studied physics, biology and cosmology. His research established that there must be a God to have set the universe in motion, but he had little room for the God personally encountered in Christian Platonism. He also concluded that souls are mortal and the universe immortal, the opposite of Plato. It was a serious challenge to traditional Christianity. The Pope and Paris University banned Aristotle. The man who brought him in from the cold was Thomas Aquinas. (p 119)
A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins (p 34)
Second-century writers are known as the apologists, being remembered for their defense of the faith rather than as its early architects. Different apologists took very different attitudes to the beliefs of their opponents, however.
Justin Martyr
Justin Martyr was a professional thinker who had worked his way through several current Greek philosophies, before being converted to Christianity by the Jewish scriptures. He believed that Jesus was the culmination of all philosophies, God's Word of truth (in which every philosophy has an imperfect share) come in the flesh. Those, like Socrates, 'who live according to reason, are Christians, even though they are considered atheists'. He tried to persuade readers that they did not have to abandon the wisdom of the Greeks to become Christians. Ironically, he earned his surname thanks to the anti-Christian policies of his fellow philosopher, the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Tertullian,
Tertullian, on the other hand, despised Greek philosophy as pagan lies.
Philosophy came from humans, Christianity from God.
Those who tried to learn from both merely corrupted Christianity. 'Wretched Aristotle!... What does Athens have in common with Jerusalem?'
letusreason
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