This, then, is the correct distinction between wisdom and science: that to wisdom pertains the intellectual apprehension of eternal things, but to science the reasonable cognition of temporal things; and so it is not difficult to decide which is to be preferred to which or placed above the other.
St. Augustine
Haec est tota metaphysica nostra: de emanatione, de exempleritate, de consummatione, scilicet illuminiari per radios spirituales et reduci ad summum. Et sic eris verus metaphysiucs.
St. Bonaventure
The topic of Sophiology has gained wide popularity in contemporary Christian discourse and numerous publications have been consecrated to it in the last decade alone. Often these works try to approach Sophiology from a newly felt need for the “Divine Feminine” and its reintroduction into the overly “patriarchal” monotheism of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which, as it is argued, has hitherto neglected this “Maternal Face of God”.[1]
Now, we do not doubt that such an approach possesses, at least in principle, a certain validity (that is, as long as Sophiology doesn’t become a pretext for antinomian abuses like gender ideology or “feminist theology”): Sophia is “das Ewig-Weibliche” after all, and the polarity of male and female principles – which (like all things in heaven and earth) necessarily possesses an archetypical prefiguration in the Godhead itself (viz., in the two dimensions of “Infinity” and “Absoluteness” intrinsic to It) – are simply a fact of experience that no one will reasonably deny.
We ourselves have dwelt on these and similar issues at some length in previous essays; however, at present we want to approach the question of the Divine Sophia from a less “theosophical” and more strictly metaphysical – that is to say, Platonic – angle, by posing it in the context of the age old “problem of universals” and, by extension, the problem of knowledge as such.[2]
The meeting of nascent Christianity and Platonism was undoubtedly providential, yet it was also the source of many a controversy, particularly as it pertains to the notion of the Logos, which is of course central to all Christian theology. In Platonizing Jews like Philo (and other Middle Platonists) this “Divine Mind” had taken on the role of mediating power between God and the world, as well as that of the locus of the ideas (or forms), the “topos noêtos” which already Plato had spoken about (Rep. 508C).
These and similar ideas that were current in the philosophical melting pot of late antiquity possessed of course also a natural affinity with the Christian vision of the cosmos, however it is also obvious that such “Platonizing” always carried an inherent danger of introducing a subordinationism into the Trinity, as was arguably the case with Origen who was heavily influenced by the Platonic doctrines. The tendencies to reduce the Logos to a lower principle – or to a mere creature even – ultimately culminated in the Arian crisis which shook the Church to its very foundations and which could only be averted by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, viz., the heroic efforts of St. Athanasius and other holy confessors of the Faith.[3]
However, even if Arianism had been more or less vanquished by the end of the 4th century (only to rear its ugly head from time to time until these latter days), its shadow loomed large over all subsequent Christian thought. Now, “there must be heresies”, as the Apostle tells us (1. Cor. 11:19), and it is without question that Arianism also served as an impetus to sharpen the true doctrine of the Trinity and the Logos in a manner that is both in harmony with metaphysical principles and the teachings handed down by the Apostles.
In general one could say that in order to “baptize” Platonism into orthodoxy, the “world of ideas” was more and more transferred into God Himself (viz., into the consubstantial Logos) and the often baroque emanationist cosmologies of neo-Platonic scholasticism, with its countless daimons, gods, and henads, were leveled to safeguard the unique position of Christ as the “only Mediator between God and men” (1. Tim. 2:5).
Of course, as is so often the case, these developments were manifold and complex, however for the purpose of brevity we venture to say that there are grosso modo two approaches to Platonism which can be discerned within the Christian tradition, namely the Augustino-Thomistic exemplarism of the West and the “logoiism” of the East, which goes back to Dionysius the Areopagite, but was most prominently developed by St. Maximus Confessor.
The doctrine of the logoi, as it has become more or less accepted in the Eastern Church (especially through its adaption by Palamas within the framework of the Essence/Energy distinction), has received many varying interpretations throughout the ages and its precise meaning is still debated among scholars even today. Obviously it cannot be here our task to give a holistic exposition of this doctrine or to discuss in how far the later Palamite interpretation is really true to the spirit of St. Maximus[4]; instead we will content ourselves with only giving a very brief outline and refer the reader to Eric Perl’s Methexis, which gives, according to our estimation, the best reading of this doctrine out of all the numerous studies that have appeared in recent times.
For Maximus the logoi are uncreated and eternal; they are not in any way to be conceived as “substantial realities” in the vein of Platonic ousiai or the countless Procline intermediaries that fill up the ontological space between God and the cosmos, but rather as theia thelémata: volitions or “intentional acts” of God, His “condescensions” (synkatabasei) or “self-impartations” (each of which is unique for each individual manifestation). As Perl puts it, “a logos is no more than the presence of the participated in the participant”, “the differentiated presence of God in creature”, i.e. “its own way of possessing the divine perfections” (cf. ibid. V); it is the mode by which the Logos is present to its finite manifestations, as the Being and innermost Self of all things, the universal Cause of their procession (proôdos), reversion (epistrophé) and subsistence (moné).
It follows that for St. Maximus there are no self-subsisting “universals” in the strict Platonic sense. Surely, there is such a thing as an ontological hierarchy following the strict taxonomy of the Arbor Porphyricus (genus, species, individual etc.), however these hierarchies only exist as a function of the universal procession and reversion of all things to the One, the unifying relations that draw the multiplicity of particulars into oneness, the highest “universal” being of course the Logos itself, i.e. “the Wisdom and Prudence of the Father, Jesus Christ, who both holds together the universals of being by the power of wisdom, and contains their fulfilling parts by the prudence of thought, as by nature the Creator and Provider of all things, and who draws into one those which are separated, putting an end to war among beings and binding all things together in peaceful love and indivisible accord, as the divine Apostle says” (Ambigua, XLI).
This same Logos “is manifested and multiplied benevolently in all things” (agathoprepôs deiknúmenón te kai plethunómenos) and it is to Him that all returns; and in this deifying assumption (which sub specie aeternitatis coincides with the creative procession itself) He “embraces and enhypostatizes all things in Himself” (panta perilabôn kai enhypostêsas heatôn), an embrace which is nothing else than the universal Incarnation of God that constitutes the very telos of creation as such.
There is thus an ontological reciprocity between particulars and universals (just like the whole “Christocentric cosmology” of the Confessor is inherently defined by such reciprocal relations between participans and participatum, even to the level of the One and the many itself): The particulars are unified and – since ens et unum convertuntur – in a sense even existentiated by the universal, but the universal is itself only an effect of the reverting particular and in this sense dependent on it.[5] Instead of a strictly “top-down” emanation, what we see is rather “a moving tension between universal-being (kathólou) and particular-being (kat’ ekaston)”, a perpetual diastolé and systolé between both poles “in which, in untroubled companionship, both motion and peace, both ‘drunken bacchic revelry’ and ‘transparent clarity and rest’ – the one as movement toward individual, non-identical being, the other as its ‘immediate dissolution’ in unity – blend into each other” (cf. von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, IV.2).
The Dionysio-Maximian vision possesses an undoubtable beauty in simplicity. All is ultimately reducible to the One and its “most beautiful Names”, which are not “nouns” but “verbs”, that is to say, relations rather than substances. Thus, the static ontologism (or “logolatry”) of late Platonic thought is transformed into an “energism” of divines Names, a dynamism of the Word in whom and through whom all things are perpetually flung out of nothingness and toward whom they perpetually convert. Every apparition is theophany, so much so that Erigena will later even use the term divina apparitio indiscriminately both in an ontological sense (viz., in reference to created beings) as well as in an epistemological sense (in reference to the knowledge of said beings). All knowledge is knowledge of God, disclosing Himself to us under a certain “name” in all created things, yet He in Himself, as the ultimate Ground and Principle of all theophanic “showing forth” (ostensio), is the ever-unknowable, forever concealed and revealed by the inexhaustible treasure of His most beautiful processions, even (according to Eastern tradition) in the life to come. It is clear, then, that in such a paradigm there cannot really be an epistemology as an autonomous discipline, for all knowing is already theologia in the most literal sense, a communication of the theia logia, theia logoi, manifested to the mind of the creature; God speaking in and through all things to the inner-most soul.
This illuminative presence of the first Cause “in abdito mentis”, disclosing itself through its effects, has a close affinity to St. Augustine, for whom all knowledge proceeds ultimately from the Logos, “the light which lighteth every man”. Nevertheless, it is also in Augustine that a clear departure from the East can be noted.
Since the ideas of St. Maximus will concern us again when dealing with their “Latin translation” in the thought of his student Erigena, let us for now turn to the dominant vision of the West.
Immediately one key difference between the Dionysio-Maximian and the Augustinian approach to Platonism becomes obvious. In Dionysius the Logos and the whole Trinity as such is (perhaps as a response to Arianism in all its forms) categorically located on the level of the One, Plotinus’ first hypostasis, which (quite unwarrantedly) has not seldom put the Areopagite under suspicion of Sabelianism by his detractors. Where the Plotinian Noûs appears it is transformed into the angelic world, “the choir of blessed intelligences which dance around (perichorein) the Original Light of the Thearchic Sun” (cf. Coel. Hier. III), but the Trinitarian Persons themselves are firmly placed in the divine darkness beyond knowing and unknowing.
The West on the other hand (starting with the “psychological Trinitarianism” of Augustine whose influence can still be discerned even in the likes of Hegel) has engaged more deeply with the inner dynamism of Plotinian emanation in which the Noûs is essentially the product of an eternal, self-reflexive movement of the One upon itself. Thus the Divine Logos is conceived of as the self-knowledge of the Father, His “Wisdom” or “Intellect”. This Knowledge however does not immediately – and as if driven by an inner necessity – move towards an “apostasis” ad extra but rather proceeds circularly and remains eternally within. And so we see that Augustine actually follow his great teacher Origen quite closely in identifying the Word with the Noûs of Plotinus, while taking however greater care to assure its co-eternality and equality with the first Hypostasis: Although it is true that “Wisdom is manifold”, as Holy Scripture surely testifies (Wis. 7:22), because it contains the potential multiplicity of Platonic eide, it is itself one, being all that it contains.
For neither are there many wisdoms, but one, in which are untold and infinite treasures of things intellectual, wherein are all invisible and unchangeable reasons of things visible and changeable which were created by it. For God made nothing unwittingly; not even a human workman can be said to do so. But if He knew all that He made, He made only those things which He had known. Whence flows a very striking but true conclusion, that this world could not be known to us unless it existed, but could not have existed unless it had been known to God (Civ. Dei XI.10.3).
Here we see already the basic outline of all later Western exemplarism: the ideas are one in the one knowledge of God and, since in divinis knowing and being are identical (suum esse est suum intelligere), it follows that the ideas are ultimately non-different from the Divine Essence itself (an identification that the East, at least in its later theology, usually avoids); they are simply so many forms under which God knows His own Essence as imitable, as Aquinas should later put it.
The ideas are certain original and principal forms of things, i.e. reasons, fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine Intelligence. And though they themselves neither come into being nor pass away, nevertheless, everything which can come into being and pass away and everything which does come into being and pass away is said to be formed in accord with these ideas … It is by participation in these that whatever is exists in whatever manner it does exist. (Augustine, De div. quaes. XLVI).
However, in Augustine, the exact relation of unity and multiplicity is left ambiguous; in the Plotinian scheme the absolute Oneness of the first hypostasis and the minimal complexity of Noûs and noeta that characterized the second are neatly distinguished. However, as we’ve already pointed out, the Christian adaption of this scheme is not without problems, and while Augustine did certainly succeed in “correcting” Origen in some of these issues, his exemplarism is not developed systematically enough as to resolve all of them – which is the task that his many commentators should set themselves to.
Among the most noteworthy of these commentators is certainly St. Thomas Aquinas, who provided perhaps the most influential interpretation of exemplarism in the West. For St. Thomas “the ideas are understood as the forms of things, existing apart from the things themselves” (S.Th. I.15.1) and it is according to the “likeness” (ad similitudinem) of these forms existing in the Divine Mind that the world was created, a process for which Thomas often uses the analogy of the “idea of a house” existing in the mind of the architect and the actual house formed in material reality (cf. I.15.2, 44.3.1). While they thus act as exemplary causes ante rem, “existing apart from the things themselves”, they are clearly distinguished from the “essences” in re as well as the universals existing in our mind post rem. Consequently, there can be no talk of any Platonic “hypostatizing” or subordinationism: the ideas are simply one in the divine Knowing in which God knows Himself by Himself and in Himself all things; a knowledge which, by virtue of its infinite perfection, further embraces all the possible ways in which His Essence is imitable and particable by the creatures and thus does not preclude all virtual distinction per se.
Inasmuch as He knows His own Essence perfectly, He knows it according to every mode in which it can be known. Now it can be known not only as it is in itself, but as it can be participated in by creatures according to some degree of likeness. But every creature has its own proper species, according to which it participates in some degree in likeness to the Divine Essence. So far, therefore, as God knows His Essence as capable of such imitation by any creature, He knows it as the particular type and idea of that creature; and in like manner as regards other creatures. So it is clear that God understands many particular types of things and these are the many ideas (S.Th. I.15.2).
But while the transcendence of the Logos is certainly safeguarded in this view, it seems as if we run here into an epistemological – or more precisely gnoseological – impasse; for if the eide are exiled from the (ontological) kosmos noêtos to the inscrutable depths of the Divine Essence, what is it that we actually know in things? And is not this the very question that Plato wants to answer through his idealism? Let us recall, for Plato the ideas are “that which is most true in all things” (Phd. 65E), what is “completely knowable” (Rep. 477A) and indeed “that what is known” (to noumenon) and what can be known, “because the truth of beings is always in the soul” (Meno 86B).
Now, of course Thomas too affirms that “all things are known by participation in the eternal types (in rationibus aeternis) … for the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types” (S.Th. I.84.5), but he also vehemently defends the view that that what is known by us are not actually these types (which are only seen by the blessed “who see God, and all things in Him”) but rather an “abstraction” or a “likeness” thereof (I.85.1.3, 85.3.4 etc.). Like the Platonic Sun of the Good, they are the light which renders objects visible, while remaining in themselves eternally unseen.
Yet, for Plato, what the Good renders visible with its superessential light is precisely the intelligibles. The ideas – “the really real reality (ousia ontos ousa) which is apprehended by the intellect alone” (Phd. 247C) – are not hidden within the Summum Bonum but rather shown forth by it and called into being by Him who is epekeina tês ousias. It is this conception which was likewise so fruitfully picked up by St. Augustine and his vision of God as the “Sun of minds”: “the intelligible Light, from whom and through whom and in whom all things intelligibly shine” (Solil. I.1.3).
For Augustine, the “Light which lighteth every man” is still the illuminating God-Truth, which “radiates into our minds” (qua mens nostra quodammodo irradiator) and inform our understanding “without intermediary” (nulla natura interposita praesidet). When Thomas talks about this lumen intellectuale, however, “the intellectual light which is within us”, he is usually referring to the agent intellect, which – while “a certain participating likeness of the uncreated Light” (quaedam participata similitudo luminis increati) – is not that Light itself but rather an innate faculty of the individual soul. To “know in the eternal reasons” for Aquinas means simply this: To know by means of the agent intellect, participating in that Light in which the reasons were created. What is known by us – or rather, that by which we know – are not ideas but “intelligible species” (species intelligibiles), that is to say the “quiddities” of things insofar as they’re abstracted from the sensible and impressed on the tabula rasa of the (passive) intellect, “obiectum intellectus nostri est quidditas rei materialis, quam a phantasmatibus abstrahit” (I.85.8). These quiddities (or essences), subsisting in the “concreated” form/matter composite, are not principles of existence (“ut Plato existimavit”) but merely principles of knowledge (I.85.3.4), meaning that they possess a “real existence” as a universal concept (viz., species)[6] in our mind (and – ut Aristoteles exstimavit – as the substantial form present in the thing itself) but not as an independent ontological reality.[7]
Thus, despite his “illuminist” imagery, Aquinas’ epistemology departs quite substantially from that of St. Augustine. For Augustine our cognition is not merely participation in the light of the (Aristotelian) intellectus agens through which we can rationally ascend to the “spiritual things of God” but a true inner knowledge of these invisibilia, an immediate “seeing”, i.e. theôria – “Intuemur inviolabilem veritatem”. Illumined by the intelligible light of the magister interior, “the soul discerns – not with physical eyes, but with its own highest part in which lies its excellence, i.e., with its intelligence – those reasons whose vision brings to it full blessedness” (Div. Quaes. XLVI). Indeed, “by a certain inner and intelligible countenance”, the oculus mentis beholds the “realties themselves” (ipsis rebus), the “self-same being”, which is “as present to the gaze of the mind as the visible and tangible things are present to the senses of the body” (cf. De div. quaes. IX; De magistro, XII, De Trin. XII.14-15).
Yet it would also be too rash to simply label Thomas as the definitive gravedigger of illuminism per se (that questionable honor goes to later thinkers, particularly Scotus). While the agent intellect is the light in which we see, it too is derivata a superiori intellectu, and this superior intellect existing separately from the created order (and “which Plato compared to the Sun”) “is, according to the teaching of our Faith, God Himself … wherefore the human soul (ultimately) derives its intellectual light from Him, according to the Psalm (4:7): ‘The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us’” (S.Th. 79.4). Thus, even though “the agent intellect is the immediate and proximate principle by which things which are potentially intelligible become actually intelligible, the first Principle by which all things become intelligible is the uncreated Light itself” (De Ver. XVIII.1). And this Light of primal Truth shines into all finite minds “like the face of a man is reflected in many mirrors” (sicut ab una facie hominis resultant plures similitudines in speculo).
The material sun sheds its light outside us; but the intelligible Sun, which is God, shines within us. Hence the natural light bestowed upon the soul is God’s illumination, whereby we are enlightened to see what pertains to natural knowledge … Therefore the human mind, however perfect, cannot, by reasoning, know any truth without the divine Light; and this pertains to the aid of grace (S.Th. II-I.109.1).
Rather than simply dispensing with the Augustinian view, Thomas merely aims to update it in light of the new philosophy and to elucidate some of its unresolved problems that had begun to be perceived more and more clearly in the advent of the Aristotelian critique. By firmly distinguishing the principium essendi (i.e. the uncreated exemplars) from the principium cognoscendi (i.e. the created quiddities), Aquinas definitively establishes that the knowledge of intelligible realities in no way intrude on the Essence itself (as the locus idearum).[8] Of course Augustine himself was far off from the ontologist position that all our knowledge is a de facto knowledge of God ipse. Even though, in his writings, he often switches from the one to the other with hardly any transition, the saintly Doctor knew very well to distinguish the natural knowledge “in the eternal reasons” from the mystical vision “of the reasons” themselves.[9]
Nevertheless, it seems hard to deny that, for Augustine, what is seen in the mystical raptus is indeed God Himself[10] (at least insofar as He is identical to His ideas) and even though he distinguishes both modes of congition, we do not to fear to betray his thought when we say that they merely represent certain gradations, different intensities of participation in the same uncreated Light that shines within us. The knowledge that the wicked has of justice is purely exterior and abstract, whereas the just man, who has its form impressed on his soul knows it “intime”; finally, those who are pure of heart might even ascend to a contemplation of the Solis justitiae itself and, “in the blinding vision of a moment”, intuit what the blessed in Heaven enjoy in its final perfection (“pervenit ad id quod est in ictu trepidantis aspectus”). Yet, the same primal Justice is contemplated by all of them, albeit in different degrees, for “God lets His Sun shine over the just and wicked alike” (Matt. 5:45) and being human, possessing intellect, means by definition to share in His illuminating presence, “credendum est mentis intellectualis conditam ita esse naturam, ut rebus intelligibilibus naturali ordine”. Indeed, “nothing is as close to God as the soul”, which, as a spiritual substance, mediates between the intelligibles and the body; and as the soul confers its form on the body, so it is itself directly informed by the divine ideas, that is to say, by God Himself, the “Soul of the soul”, vita vitae meae.[11]
In Thomas this immediate presence is substantially weakened; certainly, for him too, God is still “intime in omnibus”, but this intimacy is primarily ontological, not directly illuminative, and it is usually construed more generally, as the inherence of a cause in its effect, rather than – as for example in the Franciscan interpretation – as an on-going special action. This tendency is further cemented by the introduction of the intellectus agens as a kind intermediary between the Lux inaccessibilis of God and the knowing soul (active in regards to the soul and passive insofar as it receives its light from God), a step that was deemed necessary to safeguard the relative autonomy of the created intellect (especially contra the Aristotelian heretics that saw the active intellect as a separate substance). As Gilson, echoing Aquinas, likewise observes: “If the light which shines in us is divine, all our knowledge must be strictly supernatural.”[12] Against this supernaturalism, which threatens to confuse the created and uncreated order, Thomas’ more naturalistic approach to epistemology managed to clearly disentangle the two, while yet making the former fundamentally dependent on the latter.
But even though Aquinas tried his best to stay faithful to the great Western Doctor, the notion of the agent intellect presents an element that is certainly alien to the more Platonic inspiration of Augustine and which carries wide-ranging implication, starting with the very basics. For Aquinas, all knowledge begins from sensation, principium nostrae cognitionis est a sensu, and without the outer phantasms acting as an instrument for the intellect, there is strictly speaking no possible knowledge whatsoever. Augustine assesses the senses way more negatively; rather than being the “principle of cognition” and thus essential to all human knowing, they are “a hindrance to understanding” and a “source of error” (De Trin. XI.1, Solil. II.4.5, 6.12), “an impediment in the soul’s ascent to that higher Light, which does not disclose itself to one burdened with desire for sensible things” (Solil. II.45.24). Whereas for Thomas “nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu”, for Augustine all sensibles are seen “in the unchangeable Truth which is above our minds” (Conf. VII.17) and in which “the intellectual soul contemplates the intelligibles and brings forth its judgments according to the light received from there (De Gen. ad lit. VIII.47).
External things can only be known in the measure in which they participate in truth, and this we can find out only if we compare them to Truth. But in order to do so, we must first know what is truth; otherwise we could not recognize other things as true (De Trin. XI, n. 14).
A complete reversal has taken place. If for Thomas our only way of attaining to the knowledge of intelligible realities is by abstracting them from phenomena, for Augustine (as for Plato) the sensible realm, submitted to perpetual change and becoming as it is, cannot even be a proper object of knowledge at all! Omne creatum habet aliquid simile falso, but truth pertains purely to the intelligible order (“verum est id quod est”).
Whereas for Augustine the soul is active, exercising its causal agency on the outside world as the higher on the lower, for Thomas intelligere est quoddam pati, not operating on the outer world but in potency to it. Of course the scholastic principle that the lower cannot directly act on the higher (superior comprehendendi vis amplectitur inferiorem, inferior vero ad superiorem nullo modo consurgit) is not flat out denied (cf. S.Th. I.84.1.2), but the logic of abstraction does proceeds in a bottom-up manner, emphasizing a continuity between all animic faculties, according to the “Dionysian rule” that the highest grade of a lower order touches upon the lowest grade of a higher one (semper fines priorum coniungens principiis secundorum). Thus, the body, as the lowest rung on the ladder of the cognitive process is not only conductive to knowledge but indeed necessary. What knows is the soul, i.e., the form/matter composite, not the intellect, and thus what the soul knows is composites, i.e., individual substances.
Of course, for Augustine too the senses have a role to play, albeit only accidentally: “the outer world arouses the mind and excites ideas”, yet “what teaches is the inner truth” which “diffuses itself throughout the soul as a light most pure and most intelligible” (Conf. XI); and thus all that the outer “signs” (signa) and phantasm can do is to “cause us to enter into ourselves”, where, “in the hidden recesses of the mind, the truth is found before we first thought it, and an inner word is begotten such as belongs to no tongue” (De Trin. XV.21) – Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi!, “do not desire to go outside of you, but retire into yourself, for truth dwells in the inner man” (De vera relig. XXXIX), such is the imperative of the Augustinian gnoseology.[13]
It follows that Augustine can even speak of a true anamnesis: “nec aliud quidquam esse id quod dicitur discere, quam reminisci et recordari” (De Animae Quant. XX.34). Yet this recollection through which the soul “grasps the intelligible things” (Ep. VII) is not the recalling of the past – much less of a past live, as the Platonic myth would have it – but a “remembrance of the presence”, a vertical ascension to the nunc aeternitatis which is the very substance of God, “Aeternitas, ipsa Dei substantia est”.[14]
Thus, “it not because man once knew and has forgotten” that he finds the truth of beings always in the soul, nor should we think that God simply deposited all ideas in the soul a priori, according to a kind of nativistic innatism (“creavit Deus, et abiit”); but rather, “he has in himself the light of the eternal reasons whereby he sees the unchangeable realities” (De Trin. X), that is to say, that at its highest point, the spirit of man contemplates the intelligible light in an ongoing participation in which “knower and known are one”. (Nevertheless, though the ideas are always present to the soul, they are distinct from it, pertaining in themselves to a strictly supra-individual order; yet they are seen by each on the infinite horizon of uncreated Truth in which all partake.[15])
Now, it is true that Thomas at times likewise employs a language of pre-existent knowledge, especially when it comes to first principles (praeexistunt in nobis quaedam scientierum semina), however, the notion of a scientia innata like that of Augustine (or Bonaventure for that matter) is something his more empiricist outlook cannot accommodate. “All that God knows actually, man knows potentially” (nulla res est quam intellectus divinus non cognoscat actu, et intellectus humanus in potentia), yet the possible intellect in itself is merely potential to form, “like a clean tablet on which nothing is written, as the Philosopher says” (cf. De anima III.4), not “plena formis” as the Platonist would have it (De causis, prop. 10).
But the Thomistic “synthesis” has even more far-ranging implications still, for the divorce of existential and epistemic principles also implicitly breaks with another quintessential Platonic truth, namely that the degrees of knowledge correspond to the degrees of being.[16] In this light, it is certainly not without significance that “the pope of neo-Thomism”, Jacques Maritain, wound up as one of the fiercest opponents of René Guénon who championed the perennial doctrine of “the multiple states of the Being”[17] in recent times.
It might even be argued that this scission at least contributed the abandonment of the traditional (Platonic) tripartite anthropology towards a more Aristotelian dichotomism as we find it in Thomas.[18] Already Thomas’s great teacher, Albert the Great, had decisively broken with the Platonic psychology that had dominated the West from the times of Augustine by locating the integral personality not in the soul alone but in the form/matter composite. Instead of using the body as a mere “instrument”, the soul now became its “entelechy” and was even made, in a sense, dependent on it for its own perfection. Of course it will have to be admitted that the Thomistic view is more conscious of the unity of the subject, that is to say, that there is a continuity of senses (corporal), imagination (psychic), the rational and intellectual faculty, whereas in Augustinianism there often prevails a crude substance dualism. Yet, one cannot help but feel that the anthropological reform of the 13th century through Aristotelianism and its immanentization of the intellect also marks a decline, a horizontalization. No longer does man find himself stretched out between heaven and earth, with sense-perception as his messenger and intellect as his king (Plotinus V.3.3). No longer does he stand in all three worlds “sharing being with the minerals, life with the plants, and understanding with the angels”, as St. Gregory the Great says. Rather, he remains fixed in his assigned position as the lowest of the intelligible lights and noblest of the material substances, confined to the concentrated point of his own existence with nowhere to go (a horizontalization that is in fact a necessary consequence of the adaption of Aristotelian essentialism). Chained to prison of the body, the intellect no longer provides door to transcendence through which one can escape the limitation of the corporeal world, no longer soars freely between the heavenly things (ratio superior) and the things of this world (ratio inferior).
Whatever the merits or deficiencies of the Platonic and Aristotelian view, it is undeniable that the Thomistic compromise, according to which the ideas are no longer the very forms, the true being (ousia) of things[19] but merely intentional “similitudes” in the Divine Knowing, was crowned with an incredible success, exercising a huge influence on all subsequent Christian thought; and it is not hard to see why. It present itself as the via media, navigating between the extremes of Ockham’s nominalism and the “radical” or “extreme realism” of Plato, while at the same time offering convenient solutions to many of the long-standing quaestiones disputatae that had perennially occupied the masters of the schools. As such this position, which has to become known as “moderate realism” (a very convenient terminology indeed, for as we all know moderation is the mother of all virtues and who in the world would want to be a “extremist”?), quickly went on to become the generally accepted solution to the “Platonic question” in high scholasticism, not only among the Aristotelians like Thomas but also among more thoroughly Platonic Augustinians like St. Bonaventure[20], who, despite all, tried to defend the old doctrine of illuminism in one last heroic effort.
Nevertheless, it is quite arguable that this “deontologization” of the ideas pathed the way for nominalism which eradicated even the last semblance of realism – and with it Christian metaphysics as such – all together. What is more, the “gnoseological impasse” which resulted from the shift away from the Augustino-Platonic paradigm toward the more Aristotelian epistemology that was initiated by the high scholastics and finalized by their early modern commentators gradually closed the door to a true “sacred intellectuality”, a “gnosis truly so called”.
“Yet, the intellectual intuition (of ideas) is simply a reality”, as Borella rightly points out[21], and while we are certainly inclined to agree with him when he states that “si l’armature ‘exoterique’ du Thomisme est Aristotélicienne, sa dimension intérieur est implcitement Platonicienne”, and that an “esoteric” reading of Thomas is thus definitively possible, we nevertheless feel at least justified in briefly exploring another path, “the road less traveled by” that has hitherto often been neglected.
Indeed, there seems to be a dilemma in the baptism of Platonism which has proven difficult to traverse: By effectively doing away with the kosmos noêtos, one either relegates the ideas to the realm of absolute transcendence (i.e. the Divine Essence), thus rendering them inherently unknowable[22], or, inversely, pulls down the Logos to the level of ontology as the “highest being” (onto-logos), the pinnacle of the ontological hierarchy occupied by the noetic world, “that which fully is” (to pantelos on), as Plato says. Since neither of these paths seem fully satisfactory, we want to briefly investigate a “third way”, and we think that it is the notion of Sophia that could provide a key here.
As we’ve already mentioned elsewhere, there are certain “seeds” for such a Sophiology even in the Fathers, especially in St. Augustine in Himself who distinguishes between the Sapientia increata (i.e. the Divine Logos) and the Sapientia creata, which is “a pure and most harmonious mind” (mens pura, concordissime una) as well as “the highest of all creatures” (creatura creaturarum maxima), thus approaching her to the ontos on of Plato.
Traces of such a “radically realist” vision of the Divine Wisdom are indeed legion within the Western tradition. A more explicit Platonism has always existed at the “fringes” of Christian thought, not only among later Renaissance thinkers under the influence of Neoplatonism and the Hermetica, but also among early medieval thinkers like William of Champeaux, Otto of Tournai, and arguably even St. Anselm.[23] Even after the formal canonization of moderate realism its triumph was not complete. As such there were also among later scholastics some who wanted to uphold the old Augustinian vision or at least a more explicit realism. These “dissidents” include illustrious names such as Henry of Ghent, the “Subtle Doctor” Blessed Duns Scotus, and – a figure whose name is often missing in such genealogies – Meister Eckhart …
[To be continued…]
[1] Cf. Cselényi, The Maternal Face of God: Explorations in Catholic Sophiology; other Sophiological studies in the same vein include Schipflinger, Sophia-Maria and Martin, The Submerged Reality.
[2] A Sophiological interpretation of Platonism already suggests itself from the fact that Christian Platonists ever since Dionysius have often replaced the neo-Platonic triad Being-Life-Intellect with the (more Biblical) series of Being, Life, and Wisdom.
[3] We should, however, not make the error of equating Platonism and Arianism as such, which is often done among modern polemicists. As Radde-Gallwitz points out in his article on The One and the Trinity (cf. Hampton/Kennedy, Christian Platonism, I.3), neither was Arius simply a Platonist, nor was the anti-Arianism of the Fathers at the same time an anti-Platonism; a contrario, “generally the pro-Nicenes identified greater continuity between their own doctrine and that of their Platonist sources than between their opponents and the Platonists”. Augustine speaks almost always approvingly of Platonism (cf. Conf. VII, Civ. Dei, X etc.), as does Cyril of Alexandria who claims that the Platonic doctrine of the three hypostases (as it is laid out by Plotinus) largely “agrees with the views of the Christians” (Contra Jul. VIII.26). In fact we would even go so far as to say, that one cannot be an orthodox Trinitarian without being also – at least to some extent – a Platonist.
[4] Gersh for example categorically rejects such a Palamite reading of Maximus as anachronistic: “Lossky censures Eriugena for failing to grasp the ontological distinction between essence and energies taught by Ps.-Dionysius and Maximus (Mystical Theology, p. 96), but in fact the reason why Eriugena failed to find the distinction in these writers was because it was never there in the first place being entirely a creation of fourteenth century Byzantine Theology” (From Iamblichus to Eriugena, IV.2.3.B.Γ). Others like Ivánka (cf. Plato Christianus, IX) come to the conclusion that, while they are certainly prefigurations of a distinction between “divine activities” (or energeiai) and ousia in the Fathers, the Palamite notion that such a distinction should be valid beyond the limits of our finite understanding and possess some ultimate metaphysical reality is “expressis verbis refuted” by them (cf. for example Maximus’ Theological Centuries, III-IV where any objective application of the categories dynamis and energeia to God is rejected).
[5] Rightly understood, this also means that if, say, a plague were to wipe out every last dog from the face of the earth, the universal form of “dogness” would likewise cease its ontological reality, which, for a Platonist of strict observance, might obviously be hard to accept. Maximus arguably inverts the logic of Platonism by giving priority not to the universal but to the particular logos of a being and in doing so elegantly circumvents many of the criticism that have been historically levied against Platonic realism (whether rightly or wrongly is not here the place to discuss) as well as doing justice to the Christian imperative of a divine knowledge of individuals. There can be, in the Maximian paradigm, no talk of any “unnecessary doubling”, according to which God first creates the archetype and then – as if by a separate act – creates its sensible “copy”, but rather there reigns the strictest unity between all planes of existence. Although form is ontologically prior, it is not a separate creature but merely coextensive with the manifested being (as its “semantic dimension”, we might say), just like in man spirit, soul, and body are not three distinct creations but simply dimensions of the same unity we call the “person”. Thus, what we have previously said about the person, namely that it is quintessentially a relational vertical axis, could also be transposes to the universals: The “intelligible world” (while absolutely real) is not a se but merely exists as a function of the relationship established between God and creation via His divine Names.
[6] Nota bene that there is a distinction to be made between “species” and “concept”, the former being the direct likeness of the object (or rather, its form) which is impressed into the wax tablet of the intellect “immediately”, and the latter the likeness of said form which we conceive in ourselves through reflection, i.e., the first conscious objects of our knowledge properly speaking. We thus see that Thomas, despite his emphasis on abstraction, is in no way a representationalist but adheres to a strict realism. The proper object of the intellect are essences, “quidditas autem rei est proprium objectum intellectu”, making it the “sense of being” much in the same way as ears are for hearing and eye for sight: “unde sicut sensus sensibilium propriorum semper est verus, ita et intellectus in cognoscendo quod quid est” (De Ver. I.12). Thus our knowledge is primarily a knowledge of things and only secondarily of concepts, and when Thomas speaks of the species in terms of “similitudes” (similitudo formae) this should not be taken as a mere image or copy of the form but rather a prolongation of it, i.e., not as a different entity but the same exact substance under a different mode (cf. Gilson, Thomism, II.7). “The intellect becomes what is knows”, as the Philosopher says (anima est quodammodo omnia) and thus, in the act of knowing, there is real coincidence between knower and known, an adaequatio rei et intellectus: “the intelligible in act is the intellect in act” (In de anima, II.2), or as Aristotle himself put it: “that which thinks and that which is thought are the same” (De anima, III.4).
[7] In sum we see that Aquinas roughly adapts, via Avicenna, the doctrine of the threefold existence of universal as defined by the Alexandrian Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle (the original inventors of “conceptual realism”), namely as “prior to particulars” (pro tôn pollôn), i.e., as exemplars in the mind of God, as “within the particulars” (en tois pollois), i.e., as Aristotelian “material form”, and as “posterior to the particulars” (epi tois pollois) or “applied to the particulars and conceptual” (epi tois pollois kai ennoematiká), i.e., as abstracted universals in the human intellect. Such a neat distinction between exemplar, essence, and species is still foreign to Augustine who uses all three terms synonymously: “Quas rationes, ut dictum est, sive ideas sive formas sive species sive rationes licet vocare, et mulits conceditur appelare quod libet, sed paucissimis videre quod verum est”.
[8] Cf. De Veritate, XVIII.1: “The Divine Essence is compared to intelligible things as the substance of the sun is to visible bodies. However, it is not necessary for one who sees some color to see the substance of the sun, but only the light of the sun, in so far as it illumines color. Similarly, it is not necessary for one who knows some intelligible thing to see the Divine Essence, but only to perceive intelligible light, which originally derives from God, in so far as by it something is made actually intelligible”.
[9] As already Plotinus remarked: “We can be in accord with it [the Intellect] in two ways: either by having its writings written in us like laws, or by being in a way filled up with it” (V.3.4). In a similar manner, for Augustine, the action of the divine ideas on the mind, while being direct and therefore intuitive, is, in our usual cognition, merely regulative and does not involve actual content, hence why he also calls them “regulae”.
[10] It could be argues that problems arise here because of Augustine’s onto-theology that largely identifies God with the “id quod est”, immutable, self-identical, and intelligible Being (ousia) that carries all the characteristics of the Platonic kosmos noêtos or Plotinus’ second hypostasis (so much so in fact, that Augustine even speculated that Plato must’ve know the famous passage of Ex. 1:4; cf. Civ. Dei, VIII.11). Neither is there (as in the Dionysian tradition), a firm distinction between the hyperessential Godhead and the “being” (to on) which is its first procession, nor does Augustine establish (like Aquinas) a clear relation analogy between the divine esse and the creaturely entia. In this transitory ontology, which is no longer fully Platonic and not yet Thomistic, it becomes increasingly hard to accurately differentiate between the mystical theôria of ideas and the visio beatifica of God as such (hence why other early Christians, most notably the Cappadocians, as well as later theologians like Thomas, saw fit to dispense with all such notions theôria in the first place).
[11] Thus also St. Gregory the Great (In Ez. I.1): “Anima in corpore vita est carnis, Deus vero vita est animarum”.
[12] Cf. The Philosophy of St. Augustine, I.V.4: “To have truth, which is divine by essence, dwell in a soul which is also divine involved no problem for Plotinus, but to explain how truth, which is divine, can become the truth of a creature was a difficulty Augustine could not escape … In fact, it was impossible to escape this difficulty except by forsaking Plotinus in favour of Aristotle. To St. Thomas Aquinas goes the credit for this stroke of genius”. Gilson goes on to liken St. Augustine’s doctrine of illumination to “one of the pagan temples in which his contemporaries were sometimes content to set up a Christian altar”, yet we might ask in how far the naturalism of Aristotle is in any way more “Christian” than the Platonic account of knowledge which Augustine had found so “consonant with the Gospel” (consonans Evangelio), especially with the illuminism of the Johannine prologue (cf. Conf. VII.9, Civ. Dei, X.2). It seems to us that, if anything, the opposite is the case and that the “scientific spirit” of Aristotle presents an element that is fundamentally alien, not only to Christianity, but to the religious perspective as such, which, by definition, aligns itself way more closely with the “supernaturalism” of the Platonists.
[13] We might note that, even though Thomas at times tries to interpret the Augustinian dictum that “truth should not be looked for from the senses of the body” in light of his Aristotelian epistemology (cf. S.Th. I.84.6), the notion that phantasms are not essentially but only accidentally necessary for our understanding, “as things so to speak inciting and preparing the possible intellect
to accomplish its receptive function”, is rejected by him as a Platonic error (Contra Gen. II.76).
[14] In fact, in the passages in which Augustine seems to argue against Platonic recollection (cf. De Trin. XII.15, Retr. IV.4, VIII.2), it is not anamnêsis per se but the preexistence of the soul that he argues against. For Augustine the intelligible truths which “we see in that book of light called Truth” are not deposited in the soul as a result of transmigration but “by an impression, as the form of the ring is transformed to the wax without leaving the ring. This impression is made by the Divine Light illuminating the soul” (De Trin. XIV.21). Thus, Augustine, through his commitment to Christian truth, finds back to an authentic Platonism.
[15] Cf. De lib. arb. II.12.33: “There is one Sun and one Light for all to see, and if two persons can see the same thing, it is simply because that thing is distinct from them both. In the intelligible order also, the truths seen by different minds at one and the same time are distinct from those minds”.
[16] We can observe echoes of this teaching In Thomas’ treatment of the angels, according to which their place in the hierarchy of being depends on the perfection of their contemplation. (It is thus no wonder that this aspect of his thought, which is often glossed over by certain neo-Thomists, seems to have most interested Guenon.) Yet of course in Aquinas there remains a clear qualitative gap between the knowledge of the angels (which do, in fact, know per species innata) and that of man. Thus, there can likewise not be an intellectual ascent as we still find it in the scholastic gnosis of earlier, more Platonic schools like the Victorines, nor an ascend along Jacob’s ladder to what Guénon would call the “angelic states” .
[17] In an ironic twist of history Guénon’s book Les Etats multiples de l'être (1932) appeared in the very same year as Maritain’s magnum opus on Les Degres du Savoir. (Cf. also Chenique’s essay A propos des États multiple de l’être et des Degrés du savoir.)
[18] On the question of a tripartite anthropology in St. Thomas cf. also Borella, Love and Truth, IX.3.3.
[19] In fact, for Thomas the particular form/matter composite is, by virtue of the fact that it actually exists (habet esse), more eminently real that the universal form.
[20] E.g. De Scientia Christi, q. II: “God knows things through their eternal reasons (rationes aeternae) … But these eternal intelligibilities are not the true essences and quiddities of things, since they are not other than the Creator, whereas creature and Creator necessarily have different essences. And therefore it is necessary that they be exemplary forms and hence similitudines representativae of things themselves. Consequently these are intelligibilities whereby things that are are made known (rationes cognoscendi), because knowledge, precisely as knowledge, signifies assimilation and expression between knower and known. And therefore we must assert, as the holy doctors say and reason shows, that God knows things through their similitudes.”
[21] We refer the reader in this context to his article Sur l’Intellect chez Saint Thomas D’Aquin (cf. L’Intelligence et la Foi, Appendix) where this issue is more broadly discussed.
[22] The opposite problem – yet with the same causes – is found in the illuminism of Augustine, who (contrary to the Cappadocians) wants to hold on to a Platonic theôria “in rationibus aeternis” while also transposing the topos noêtos into God Himself, thus arguably verging on turning every epistemic act into a true “visio beatifica”, a quasi-mystical rapture that becomes dependent on the “measure of love” of the knower (cf. De div. Quae. XLVI). Here the Plotinian henôsis with the One (first hypostasis) and the simple intellection of ideas (second hypostasis) risk becoming muddled by reason of merging both principles into one and while Augustine of course nominally keeps both firmly distinct from another, it is not always precisely clear where the one ends and the other begins. Since, for Augustine, every act of knowledge whatsoever is already a certain “natural grace”, a common participation in the Logos – “the light which lighteth every man” –, we might possibly say that the “supernatural grace” of the noetic rapture, the “theôria” in the proper sense, does in fact merely constitute a higher degree or “intensity” of participation in that selfsame Light (which is of course quite a “gnostic” position indeed!).
[23] Cf. the chapter on William of Champeaux and the Indefferentists in Turner’s History of Philosophy. As for Anselm, the extent of his realism debated since the topic is never treated explicitly in any of his text and has to be as it were inferred from between the lines (Turner for example sees him rather as the father of moderate realism); however there is certainly a case to be made for a more pronounced Platonism on his part.