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April 27 - May 21, 2023
In his search for an ordered intelligible guide to existence, Plotinus had managed to fuse Aristotle’s regard for the material world as the work yard of form with Plato’s Demiurge as the procreative fountainhead of all truth. Yes, Plotinus says, we are born in a cave. But it’s not hard to find our way out. There’s a trail provided for us, because the links in the Chain of Being not only go down, like the steps of a ziggurat, they also lead up. The downward flow of divine perfection is matched by an equal upward striving of all things back toward their original source.
The human soul, which bears the largest share of that spiritual radiance that fills all material creation, feels that upward tug the most. We don’t have to be dragged forcibly out of the cave to see the light, either, as Socrates seemed to suggest in the Republic. Instead we are gently pulled out by our own innate attraction to perfection: because that perfection is our own true self.
This would be Plotinus’s great message to his own age and to the future. All of us, whether we know it or not, want to be one with perfection—or as later Neoplatonists will say, to be one with God. No one wants to live in the cave. We all want to see the light; and once we discover th...
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Increasingly, Plotinus realized that no dialectical process, no matter how rigorous, was going to lead to the big breakthrough he wanted: to see the truth for itself and grasp the last mysteries of existence.
Plato had written about the inadequacy of mere words to express reality—one reason he often turned to myth and allegory.28 The Pythagorean alternative had been to turn to the eternal truths of number and mathematics. But to Plotinus mathematical reasoning, too, seemed a series of clumsy symbols or signs, just as language did, compared with the raw truth of spirit and the One. The trail out of the cave suddenly seemed a dead end. Plotinus decided there was only one way out: a leap of mystical illumination. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, Plotinus experienced this mystical union at
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In the end, Plotinus’s system is less of a philosophy than a religion.30 At its core is a mystical, even ecstatic, union with God, the final leap in which we transcend all the limitations of matter, time, and space and become one with the One. The closest metaphor Plotinus could find to capture its delight was of a dance with eternity: On looking on [the One] we find our goal and our resting-place, and around Him we dance the true dance, God-inspired, no longer discordant.… In this dance, the soul beholds the wellspring of Life, and wellspring of Intellect, the source of Being, [the] cause of
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For Plotinus, the task of the wise man is the same as it was for Socrates. It is to prepare the soul for the final revelation of truth. But no one has to wait to die to achieve it. Wisdom can be found here and now, through mystical union with the One that takes us “from this world’s ways and things” to a higher reality.
With Plotinus we have come to the last loosening of the ties of loyalty between the empire and its best and brightest. “The wise man,” Plotinus said, “will attach no importance to the loss of his country.”32 True happiness (eudaimonia) requires a flight from all worldly connections toward a higher end, the final union of the soul with God.
Plotinus had finally found the cure for the hole in the soul of his world-weary countrymen. The price was any commitment to, or belief in, the value of the Roman Empire or any other kind of politics. Don’t worry about those things, Plotinus said. Stay on the steep ascent to the One, and keep the soul focused on its ultimate goal. On his deathbed his last words were, “Strive to lead back the God within you to the Divine in the universe.”33
There was only one problem. Plotinus’s solution worked fine for those with the money and leisure to retire to a Roman villa to contemplate the eternal verities. What about everyone else? Strangely...
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A man “should take each moment and hold it tenderly in his hands,” Origen later wrote, in order “to examine what other possible meaning it may hold, what other purpose or end.”
Plato’s insight that symbols and allegories can sometimes lead men to the highest truths more powerfully than reason—including
The Church’s job was to train our inner voice to answer to our faith, not as an alternative to our reason, but as its highest expression. It is that conviction that will give the Christian the courage to speak truth to power, whether we are speaking of Origen or Martin Luther King.
The ancient Greco-Roman ideal that human government exists to serve human ends
Augustine had discovered that simply knowing right from wrong was not enough. What’s needed is a deeper emotional commitment to rightness and truth.
Most people know the quotation from the Confessions “O God, make me good, but not yet!” But few realize the tension and despair underlying that famous bon mot.
Like Aristotle, Augustine believed that the quality of life we lead depends on the choices we make. The tragedy is that left to our own devices—and contrary to Aristotle—most of those choices will be wrong.
There can be no true morality without faith and no faith without ...
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According to Augustine, all societies built around earthly ends, the needs and desires of human beings, are doomed to destruction—including
“Understanding is the reward of faith,” Saint Augustine says. “I believe, in order that I may understand” will be the catchphrase of the early Middle Ages.
Through doubting we question, and through questioning we perceive the truth. —Peter Abelard
To Boethius, Augustine’s “Christian liberty” grated against more ancient ideals of liberty. For one thing, it seemed to strip men of the power of free will.
If we are going to be happy, we have to be free to act in the world, even if that means we make mistakes.
If we are going to deal with a complex and dangerous world, he believed, we had better be prepared. That means above all reading Aristotle.
Those rules, Aristotle pointed out, rest on certain self-evident laws, such as the law of identity (whatever else it is, A is always A), the law of contradiction (A cannot be both B and not B), and the law of “excluded middle.”a But in the end, all inferences that are true have to come in two forms.
They are either deductive, meaning that given one or more true premises, the conclusion we draw is necessary; or they are inductive, meaning that given one or more facts—such as the things we know through observation—the conclusion we draw is reasonable. The classic deductive inference (actually taken from Aristotle’s Categories) is “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.” Usually a good deductive inference goes from greater generalities to lesser ones: “All dogs are mammals; all Lab retrievers are dogs; therefore all Lab retrievers are mammals.” By contrast,
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Inductive logic offers a source of new knowledge, based on empirical observation. Aristotle recognized the value of induction; his own sciences were founded on it.13 Still, his real focus was always the logic of deduction. How can we be sure that what we say about the world and the thin...
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Aristotle called these true deductive inferences syllogisms. All syllogisms follow the same basic structure as the “Socrates is mortal” example. Each contains two premises or assumptions (called major and minor) and the inescapable conclusion we have to draw from them.
Aristotle showed that every valid syllogism fit one of four basic patterns, although his followers in the Middle Ages claimed to discover more than four. Far more important, Aristotle showed (or seemed to show) that by linking one valid syllogism to another regarding a single subject, such as biology or ethics or even the nature of God, one could build a conceptual chain of reasoning that would inevitably lead, link by link, from one set of necessary truths to another, all the way to the highest truths of all.
Not everything that makes deductive sense may be true.b
The idea of the “liberal arts” (so called because it was the education fit for liberi, or free men, as opposed to slaves) was a late Roman invention.c16
It was Anselm who coined the most famous phrase of the Middle Ages: “I believe [in God] in order to understand.”
The problem with Aristotle’s logic is that once it gets started, it is very hard to stop. It can become a kind of compulsion as it moves from examining one set of conventional beliefs and assumptions after another, overturning everything in sight. Logic is, to borrow William Blake’s phrase, self-delighting. The experience can be so exhilarating that we fail to notice where we are headed.
In the end, Abelard concluded, “no one can believe something which he has not first understood.”
“Careful and frequent questioning is the basic key to wisdom.”
“By doubting we come to question, and by questioning we perceive the truth.”
Anselm said I must believe so that I can understand. Abelard now reversed the formula: I must understand so that I can believe.
Faith without reason was merely supposition, an opinion or guesstimate (aestimatio).
Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know.
The seven were grammar, rhetoric, and logic; astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic.
Real faith is a matter of an unqualified emotional commitment, what Saint Augustine called love, or caritas: a fierce spiritual force that binds man to God and (as proved by the sacrifice of the Crucifixion) vice versa. “Faith avails not,” Bernard wrote, “unless it is actuated by love.” Love for Bernard was the gift of the Holy Spirit. It was the heartfelt token of salvation.10
All the same, it was Saint Bernard who put the image of the Virgin Mary, the nurturing Mother of God, at the center of the Catholic faith and who made the loving human heart the key to exploring religious truth—even the key to discovering God.13 Even more than Augustine, he is the first great religious psychologist—therapist, almost. Bernard’s goal was to lay bare the deepest recesses of the soul and bring man to a spiritual simplicity and humility. Looking forward, his theology prefigures the teachings of the most tenderhearted of medieval saints, Saint Francis of Assisi. Looking backward,
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For Saint Bernard, self-love is the root of all evil, and the Achilles’ heel of the Aristotelian mind. Not only does it block us from grasping the true nature of love, and hence of God. It also prevents us from realizing the relative unimportance of human reason.14
Without faith, Bernard affirmed, intellectual inquiry is doomed to run off the track. Worldly wisdom, he liked to point out, teaches only vanity.15 By contrast, by making God the center of our lives instead of ourselves, we are spiritually transformed. Through love of God, “he who by his former life and conscience was doomed as a true son of perdition to the eternal flames,” he wrote, “draws new life and hope beyond all expectation.” He is “rescued from a most deep and dark pit of horrible ignorance, and plunged into a pleasant region bright with eternal light.”
Later, this spiritual transformation will be called being born again. It is in fact a Christian variant on Plato’s Myth of the Cave. “Once I was blind,” as the hymn says, “but now I see.”
Bernard wanted to draw people out of the cave and into the light of God, not by imposing new rules and regulations (although Bernard had no problem with those), but by appealing to human beings’ most basic feelings.
One way was through sermons. Saint Bernard transformed the art of sermons and elevated their importance in the medieval Church by introducing a rich evocative Latin style that appealed to listeners’ senses and touched their hearts. For those without Latin, Bernard saw the importance of using religious imagery like the cross, and figures like the Virgin Mary, as a way to speak directly to the emotional needs of the listener, even the simplest and least educated. The cross was the only decoration he allowed in his monasteries, as the symbol of God’s willing sacrifice of His only son to save
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In the words of Abbot Suger’s friend the mystic Hugh of Saint Victor, “All human learning can serve the student of theology.”
The evidence of the senses further corroborates the fact that the earth is round. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? In eclipses the outline is always curved; and since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical.…
The text was in Arabic, but the author was a Greek.2 The man’s name, Gerard noted, was Aristotle.
