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Chapter 4
The Concept of God in Late Antiquity — the Clash of Gods
St Athanasius was archbishop of Alexandria from 328 to 373. The whole fourth century was a time of severe crisis in the church. Under Alexander, Athanasius predecessor on the throne of Alexandria, a priest of Alexandria, Arius, put forward theological opinions that let loose a major controversy over the concept of God. Athanasius is remembered for his defence of Orthodoxy against Arian heresy. An early work by Athanasius is the Against the Greeks — On the Incarnation. This work is not connected with the Arian controversy, but rather expresses Athanasius’ theological vision in a more philosophical way.[1]
In On the Incarnation (§2) Athanasius makes some critical remarks on pagan cosmology. First he criticises the Epicureans, who, according to Athanasius, teach that the cosmos was generated of itself and by chance. They further deny Providence. This is, however, for Athanasius, contrary to the obvious facts of experience: the orderliness of the world tells against such a doctrine. We shall return to the concept of Providence in a later chapter.
Athanasius next move is directed against Plato’s Timaeus. Plato is called ‘the great among the Greeks’, but even so his cosmological doctrine is wrong, according to Athanasius. Plato claims that the cosmos is made from ‘pre-existent and uncreated matter’. God would not have been able to make the world unless matter already existed, ‘just as a carpenter must have wood first in order to be able to fashion it’. But how could God be Maker and Demiurge if His ability to make came from something else, viz. matter? In that case, God would be merely a craftsman and not the creator (technites monon kai ou ktistes) of beings. For Athanasius this implies that the Platonists impute weakness to God. He depends on matter, and is therefore weak, since He cannot make anything without the existence of matter.
Still there is one common point between Athanasius and Plato, something which marks them both off from Aristotle, viz. what they say about divine goodness as the motif of creation.[2] Athanasius says the reason for the creation of the cosmos is God’s goodness. The Good has no envy (phthonos), and God, consequently, envies nothing it’s being. Therefore He generously created all things. This message is almost identical with what Plato says in the Timaeus, also denying envy (phthonos) of God. Even if this idea is rooted in Christianity as well, it is not improbable Athanasius’ knowledge of Plato stems from acquaintance with the Timaeus, first or second hand.
The issue between Platonism and Christianity over the concept of God involves several aspects. First there is a problem inherent in the non-Christian conception of divinity as such. This problem originates in Neoplatonism after Plotinus (205-269/70), and concerns the Neoplatonist dogma of harmony between the giants of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle: is God the efficient or the final cause of the world? This topic does not only concern how the theology of Plato and Aristotle should be fitted together, it also concerns how the concept of God as related to the cosmos fits into the theological hierarchy of Neoplatonism itself. As we shall see, there is a further difference between Neoplatonism and Christianity at exactly this point. In the Neoplatonist system the divine Maker proper is in a sense not the highest divinity, which it definitely is in Christianity. Secondly, why does God need a pre-existent stuff to make the world? Thirdly, God made just one cosmos, but does this mean that He couldn’t make more than one?
(i) As we have seen above, there are important differences between the divinities of Plato and Aristotle, at least the way we have interpreted them, and this is in accordance with how modern scholarship interprets them. Plato’s God is a Creator and the efficient cause of the world. Aristotle’s God is the final cause of cosmic movement, and therefore the condition on which the world depends. Plotinus, on the other hand, identifies the Platonic Demiurge with the divine Intellect.[3] The result is, however, something rather different from Plato’s divine figure in the Timaeus. The God of the Timaeus seems to create because this is something he will do quite directly. The causal scheme of Plotinus is much more complex, and the Intellect or the Mind as Demiurge is not occupied with any directly willed communication of goodness to created otherness, even if this communication is the effect of processes within the divine being itself. — We shall see this much more clearly when we turn to Plotinus’ concept of causality in the next chapter.
In the present context, there are especially two thinkers we should take notice of, viz. Proclus (c. 411-485) and Ammonius (c. 435/45-517/26). Proclus was head of the Neoplatonist school of Athens, and Ammonius was his student. Ammonius later became the head of the Alexandrian Neoplatonist school. Proclus obviously thought that Aristotle, in accordance with his own principles, should have noticed that God should be understood as a creator.[4] In his commentary on the Timaeus Proclus argues along the following lines:[5] a finite body cannot possess an infinite power. If the finite body shall move for all eternity, it has to receive an infinite power to do so, not all at once, but successively. It receives this power by desiring it, like Aristotle said in the Metaphysics 12. Even so, the cause of the infinite power does not work only as a final cause. In effect it becomes the productive cause of the being of the moving body in question. This is an implication that Proclus thinks Aristotle should have noticed. — Could this be made a bit clearer? I think the argument should be understood as follows: if we accept the idea that the finite body receives power to move from moment to moment throughout eternity, the divine cause immediately turns into something more than an object of desire, it becomes a giver of power, i.e. a productive cause of power in the finite body. Since this condition of incessant motion is the reason why the finite body exists as a cosmic entity, God is the productive cause of it’s being as well.
Ammonius, the student of Proclus, is more positive towards Aristotle, and, according to Simplicius (sixth century), he wrote a whole book in order to demonstrate that Aristotle’s God is the productive cause of the being of the cosmos.[6]
Plotinus conceived of a demiurgic intellect, a doctrine brought further in different shapes by other representatives of the school. As the term indicates, in the concept of this demiurgic intellect Plotinus tries to fit together both Platonic and Aristotelian concerns, but what emerges is a quite new entity that works in accordance with a causal scheme conceived by Plotinus. This is a God that is more remote from the world than Plato’s Demiurge, even if a bit closer to it than Aristotle’s divine Intellect. On the one hand, the Intellect contemplates itself like the Aristotelian self-thinking thought. On the other hand, while thinking itself, the Intellect thinks the paradigm of the lower cosmos, and becomes, by the aid of Plotinus’ sophisticated doctrine of causation, the efficient and final cause of what is below it in the scale of being. According to Christian measures Plotinus’ doctrine is at least two steps in the wrong direction. First, the Christians definitely teach that the Creator not only dwelt within His own thoughts, but rather that the making of the world was directly willed by Him. Secondly, in Christianity the making of the world is not delegated to a lower divinity like the Plotinian Intellect, but is the concern of the highest divinity itself. However, in the end Christian thinkers and pagan thinkers have to face some of the same basic problems when the topic of creation turns up. We shall return to this.
There is one more thing to be commented on under this first point, even if I have never seen any Christian writer turning this into a critique of Neoplatonism. As just mentioned, according to Plotinus, the making of the world depends on the second hypostasis in his hierarchic scale of beings, the Intellect, while in Christianity the world is made by God himself. It is quite interesting that Plotinian Neoplatonism as well as Christianity have a triadic view of divinity. In Plotinus scheme, we have the One, the Intellect, and the Soul as three primary hypostases in a descending scale of reality. These are the triad or trinity of Neoplatonism. In Christianity we have the one God, conceived as a triad or trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The two conceptions are, however, quite different when it comes to details. The three hypostases of the Christian God cannot be arranged in a descending scale of reality, they are definitely on the same ontological level. Even if the Father is understood as the arche or source of divine being, the other two hypostases are of the same essence, power, activity, and eternity as Him. There is no ontological subordination of hypostases in the Christian God. Even if this is the case, we may here see something that is similar and something that is different between the two systems. Plotinus’ Intellect is the medium of creation, i.e. the one by whom lower reality is made. — We shall see in the next chapter that the Soul also plays a role in this. — In the Christian scheme, the Son of God the Father, that is the divine Logos or Word, is the medium of creation. It is by Him the world is made. The difference is, of course, what we noted above viz. that the making of the world is a concern of the divinity itself, i.e. of the whole Trinity.
Our next question is why God needs a pre-existent stuff in order to create the world. Here we have to be aware that there is a difference between Plato’s God and Plotinus’ divine hypostases. We may say that Plato’s God need the pre-cosmic stuff, while in Plotinus’ system matter occurs as the lowest end of emanation from the One. In Plotinus, therefore, matter itself seems to be the result of the creative activity. As we saw above, St Athanasius accuses the Platonists of imputing weakness to God if God is in need of pre-existent matter. Whatever the difference between Plato and Plotinus, there seems to be a tension in Platonist thinking. The Platonic God is, on the one hand, not omnipotent, but, on the other hand, he possesses an infinite power of keeping things going once they are created. It is not easy to figure out the exact difference between the Neoplatonist and Christian concepts of Godhead, but the Platonist God is mainly a cosmic principle, the beginning and end of movement or activity, while the Christian God is more that this. The Christian God turns Himself into the principle of the cosmos, but is radically transcendent in a way Platonic deities are not. This is a subtle difference, since the One of Plotinus is beyond the grasp of human minds almost to the same degree as the Christian God is. Both divinities are unconceivable in their essence. Even so, the Platonist and Neoplatonist divinities are somehow ontologically tied to the cosmic arrangements to a greater degree than is the Christian God. I postpone any further treatment of this topic, but we shall have to return to this in connection with doctrines of creation in later chapters.
The third point that needs some comments now concerns the question of the number of worlds. According to the arguments of Plato and, as we have seen, Aristotle, there is only one cosmos, and there cannot be more than one. This doctrine is in agreement with Plotinian thought as well. They argue this against atomist theory according to which there may exist an infinite number of worlds. What do the Christians think of this? It should definitely be in accordance with basic Christian concerns that there in fact is only one world. There are Christian doctrines that presuppose the existence of just one world-system. On the other hand, here there occur ideas that once more shed some light on the nature of the Christian God as compared with Platonist deities. St Basil the Great, the brother of St Gregory of Nyssa, wrote a series of homilies that are know under the title On the six days of creation, the In hexaemeron. I quote:
In fact, as the potter, although he has formed innumerable vessels by the same art, has exhausted neither his art nor his power, so also the Creator of the universe, possessing creative power not commensurable with one world, but infinitely greater, by the weight of His will alone brought the mighty creations of the visible world into existence.[7]
It is quite interesting to note that while God in fact made just one world, He could, if He wanted, have made an indefinite number of worlds. There are several implications of this, I am sure, but we shall only note that in Christian thought, the conception of God has certain elements that make this divinity into something quite distinctive: God is radically transcendent. In His own being He is just Himself. The world exists, not because there is any eternally given ontological bond between God and the cosmos, but simply because God willed the world to exist. One might imagine a distant future, when the old Platonist-Aristotelian cosmology gradually lost its grip on the minds, and the world was investigated from new angles, that such a conception of the nature of God could contribute to open up scientific possibilities of a radically new kind.
Obviously, the reaction of Athanasius witnesses to what we may call a clash of gods. Here there are two different conceptions of divinity that are opposed. On the one hand, we have the powerful, but not omnipotent God of Plato. On the other hand, we have the all-powerful God of Athanasius and the Christians that not only fashions an already existent material substrate into cosmic being and order. He rather makes even matter itself. Athanasius’ reason for making this polemic against the Platonic conception probably originates from contemporary concerns. There are, I suggest, still Platonists that would teach this kind of theology.
[1] Anatolios (2004), 39.
[2] Timaeus 29e and De incarnatione §3.
[3] Cf. Ennead 2.3.18; 5.9.3.
[4] The Philosophy of the Commentators, 164.
[5] The Philosophy of the Commentators, 169-70
[6] The Philosophy of the Commentators, 165-7.
[7] In hex. 1,2.