Christian Platonism

      

Creation is a gift – a sharing of God to us of his Being (goodness, beauty). Giving us part of God’s divine life, allowing us to participate in it. The analogy – or metaphor? – of ‘participation’ helps me to think about this gift of Creation (as it has helped many others throughout history including to some extent St. Paul and some of the early church fathers). Indeed, there is much Platonic imagery in the New Testament: most of all, perhaps, in the Book of John. Such images, of course, are a great leap of imagination into an unknown land. Kant and that whole tradition are right: these matters exceed the limits of human understanding. God, like Plato’s Idea (or archetype) of “the absolute Good” is beyond the world, and thus beyond your conceptual grasp. Whoever fails to understand the absolute difference between creature/Creation and Creator, the origin and source of the creature, is outside of Christian thought (which goes beyond Plato here).

           In addition to our finitude, of course, sin also darkens the intellect, which tends to become a slave to ego-centered constructions of desire. Yet if that were the whole story, then our intellect would be impotent when it came to understanding the meaning of our existence, or, which is the same thing, being as a whole (as a limited whole under the aspect of eternity). Through the fact that we share in existence and indeed in “God’s image”, we are not altogether cut off from our origin; some trace of the original goodness of Creation remains in us – otherwise, we all would be lost. Assuming our intellects – ultimately through grace – can achieve partial independence from the shadowy, constructed world as seen through the prism of alienated ego, it can become aware of its own existence, and understand the significance of the experience of beauty, goodness, hope, faith, and love. It can understand its connection with God.

        But – and this is the problem – we can apprehend all these wonders only from a dimension lower, from the perspective of finite, mortal, limited, material, sensory being. Perhaps as a mother cat, lacking the self-consciousness that some human beings possess, can only ‘love’ her kittens in an attenuated sense – still it has a connection to the individualizing, self-conscious love a human mother can experience for her baby. Or perhaps as our eyes can only see a limited portion of what is there is light, but what light we can perceive is a real aspect of light itself, which is beyond our sight. As when Plato, confronted reality from a higher dimension leaking through into our minds, resorted to myth when concepts failed, thus we resort to metaphors. However, metaphors based on a real analogy: the light waves our eyes can translate into color is not just ‘in our head’ but is a reality that we have only partial access to. The goodness, the beauty, or love we experience is a pale reflection of the full reality of the divine, but it is part of God’s self-giving we may partake in. All we have to do is free our intellect from our self-constructed prisons – for which we must cooperate with grace – and we know this in some form.

             The crucial point in Christian Platonism is this: we are in origin “good, very good.”  In contrast to Luther and most of Protestantism, we are not by nature wretched sinners, completely worthless, living in this wretched vale of tears, who can only be loved and kept in being by an unfathomable God for some inscrutable reason. Rather, God draws us away from the sin of self-enclosure back to our original goodness (love-ableness) through the love of Christ, through whom all was created. There is something in our being – which God gives us – that is “good, very good”, love-able, which “sin” darkens.

      Obviously, we can’t get out of the world and compare these two pictures with the thing itself. Both pictures reflect states of soul, forms of experience, projected by analogy onto a higher dimension of reality. Like barely sprouting seeds that cannot see the full blossom but only speculate on it from what has come out of the seed so far. But intellect is not completely helpless. Even in the face of our absolute inability to attain “knowledge” in theological matters, we can make judgements on what makes sense. Given that the world was created by God, “very good” it was created – a matter of faith and an axiom for Christians – and given God’s essential goodness (conceptual), Christian Platonism has helped me and others make sense of things in a way that Luther or Calvin cannot. Indeed, a Christianity interpreted in a way hostile to Platonism kept me away from it until I realized that one could be a Christian without accepted the traditional protestant view. Ultimately, we choose based on criteria like ‘I would not choose to be born into a universe like the one imagined by Calvin.’