Jerusalem
WHEN JESUS DIED on the cross, when he rose from the dead, when he ascended into heaven, there was no Christian religion. There is good reason indeed to think that, until the last minute, Jesus did not know that he was going to die, and that the moment of realization and acceptance—“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46)—is the key to the whole drama. The work of making a religion from the life and teaching of Jesus fell to his followers, initially, Peter and Paul, and then over the next few centuries to the so-called church fathers, culminating with the greatest of them all, Saint Augustine of Hippo.
Confessions of a Neoplatonist
Augustine (354–430), whose influence on Western Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) cannot be overemphasized, was born in a Roman province in North Africa of a Christian mother (Monica) and a pagan father. Raised a Christian, he dropped out, acquired a mistress with whom he lived for thirteen years and by whom he had a son who died in adolescence, went to Italy as a professor of rhetoric, fell among the Manicheans (who believed in two gods, one good and one evil), sloughed off his first mistress and had another for two years, and then, finally back in Africa, particularly at the urging of his very persistent mother, became again a Christian and was baptized by Saint Ambrose (ca. 340–397), bishop of Milan, in 386. In succession, Augustine became a (celibate) priest and then bishop of Hippo (in 395), and spent the rest of his life writing frenetically against a variety of Christian heretics. His Greek was bad, so he read the Bible and philosophy only in Latin, original or in translation. He knew of the works of the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, but probably only read parts of the Timaeus and Meno, and got his knowledge of the rest from commentaries. The greatest influence, for all that he criticizes them, were the Neoplatonists, particularly Plotinus (204–270). Let us start there, with the Greek input to Augustine’s thinking.
About ten years after returning to Christianity, Augustine wrote his autobiography, the Confessions, perhaps the greatest spiritual story of personal growth of Western culture. His God is emphatically the God of Plato, the God of The Republic, where the Form of the Good is a necessarily existing eternal force or entity, outside time and space, truly good and beautiful, the font of all other beings, from which everything stems and to which everything relates as the cause of existence. Unlike the Good that as Demiurge simply designs, the Christian God is the Creator from nothing. In all other respects, Augustine’s deity is taken from the heart of the Platonic philosophy and then Christianized. Necessary: “For God’s will is not a creature but is prior to the created order, since nothing would be created unless the Creator’s will preceded it. Therefore God’s will belongs to his very substance.”1 Outside space: “no physical entity existed before heaven and earth.”2 Outside time: “Your ‘years’ neither come nor go. Our years come and go so that all may come in succession. All your ‘years’ exist in simultaneity, because they do not change; those going away are not thrust out by those coming in … Your Today is eternity.”3
One particularly innovative doctrine in Christianity is the Trinity. This is the teaching “that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit [Ghost] intimate a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality; and therefore that they are not three Gods, but one God.”4 Plato in the Timaeus was ahead of things here, with the Demiurge doing the designing, the Forms being that which guided the Demiurge, and the world soul being that which gave life and meaning to the physical reality. Before Augustine, the fourth-century Christian, Calcidius, had already helpfully made the connections. The Demiurge, the Creator, is God the Father. The Good that gives rise to the Forms from which the Creator works and models the world is God the Son. And, neatly, the world spirit that pervades all physical reality is God the Holy Ghost. Plotinus (who never mentioned Christianity) was likewise helpful in explicating and unpacking the Form of the Good. He spoke of three aspects—“hypostases”—of this Form: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. The One is “a nobler principle than anything we know as Being; fuller and greater; above reason, mind and feeling; conferring these powers, not to be confounded with them.”5 Absolutely crucial is the way that it is a unity, something entire and simple in itself, and giving integration to everything else. From it, all other things “emanate” (in the sense of being existence-dependent). Next comes the Intellect. This is bound up with the realm of the other Platonic Forms. As we know, they all are given their being by the Good, and it is these that the rational part of the soul can apprehend. As with Plato in The Republic, we get the analogy of the sun and its warmth and rays. “The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first should have its offspring, carrying onward much of its quality, in other words that there be something in its likeness as the sun’s rays tell of the sun.”6 And so third we come to the Soul. Basically, this is the world soul of the Timaeus. We have the Intellectual Principle setting the norms through the Forms. We have matter. And we have the Soul in some sense giving shape and meaning and motion to matter, in the light of the Forms.
In a Christianized form, these pagan ideas resonate through Augustine’s writings. Not just the One, the Good, the eternal being from which all else emanates but also in the metaphors that are used to describe the other parts of the threefold nature of ultimate being. In his greatest work, The City of God, Augustine explicitly links Plato, via Plotinus, to the Trinity. Jesus is the Intellect, with the analogy of the sun and light. “This is in harmony with the Gospel, where we read: ‘There was a man sent from God whose name was John; the same came for a witness to bear witness of that Light, that through Him all might believe. He was not the Light, but that He might bear witness of the Light. That was the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”7 And then there is the Soul. “Expounding Plato, Plotinus asserts, often and strongly, that not even the soul which the Platonists believe to be the soul of the world derives its blessedness from any other source than does our own soul: that is, from the light which is different from it, which created it, and by whose intelligible illumination the soul is intelligibly enlightened.”8
What of purpose? What of value? What of the argument from design? Augustine’s Christianity would not have been overly helpful here. There was King David’s contribution, the opening of Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.” Saint Paul also rushed briefly over the idea: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). Generally, however, in both Old and New Testaments, God’s existence is a given, not something needing proof. The very idea that God might not exist is an un-spoken-of nonstarter. Even the fool who “hath said in his heart there is no God” almost certainly was not declaring for atheism but for gods other than the God of the Jews, Yahweh.9
Augustine would have found more support in his Roman heritage. Noted already is the enthusiasm of the Stoics. Thanks to Cicero, we have seen that they gave a kind of protoversion of the argument as made famous at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Archdeacon William Paley, where the world of organisms is analogically linked to a functioning watch. But above all, it was the Platonic influence that was all-important here, as Augustine plunged headfirst into the teleological argument. The world shows signs of purpose at work. The only way we can explain this is through a good, creative, designing god or God. In the Confessions: “I was wholly certain that your invisible nature ‘since the foundation of the world is understood from the things which are made, that is your eternal power and divinity’ (Rom. 1:20).”10 And then repeated in the City of God: “Even leaving aside the voices of the prophets, the world itself, by the perfect order of its changes and motions, by the great beauty of all things visible, claims by a kind of silent testimony of its own both that it has been created, and also that it could not have been made other than by a God ineffable and invisible in greatness, and ineffable and invisible in beauty.”11 We have a world of great value, created on purpose by a loving God.
History
From early in the Confessions: “Hear me God. (Ps. 54: 2). Alas for the sins of humanity! (Isa. 1:4) Man it is who says this, and you have pity on him, because you made him, and did not make sin in him. Who reminds me of the sin of my infancy? for ‘none is pure from sin before you, not even an infant of one day upon the earth’ (Job 14: 4–5)” (8–9). An infant of one day a sinner? “I was on the way to the underworld, bearing all the evils I had committed against you, against myself, and against others—sins both numerous and serious, in addition to the chain of original sin, by which ‘in Adam we die’ (1 Cor. 15:22)” (82). “The chain of original sin”? What is this? Why am I condemned? Why is the infant condemned? “You had not yet forgiven me in Christ for any of them, nor had he by his cross delivered me from the hostile disposition towards you which I had contracted by my sins” (82). Whatever else we might say, this is not the world of Plato and Aristotle.
Augustine drew heavily on Greek philosophy. But this comes in an altogether new framework. With Christianity, we have entered a world alien to and unknown by the Greeks. It is true that Augustine, thanks to his philosophy, strove for continuity, even as he changed Christianity to a nigh unrecognizable extent. Perhaps “created” is a better word than “changed.” It is undeniable that we have another world that is going to give us a whole new take on purpose and on ends, a whole new take on values. This is a world that is in some very deep sense historical and that posed new thinking and challenges, indeed, to such a degree that, as Augustine changed what had been before, it in turn gave rise to a world picture that is foreign to anything remotely imagined by those early church fathers, including Augustine himself.
Start with history. When you first encounter Aristotle’s philosophical writings, probably the thing that strikes you most forcibly is the staggering breadth of interest that he shows. He seems to write on just about everything—logic, mechanics, cosmology, optics, meteorology, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics, rhetoric—you name it. Except history. He is no proto-Hegelian, giving us a story of world spirits through the ages and stuff like that. And it is easy to see why neither he nor Plato could really be philosophers of history. Their philosophical systems did not admit of such systems. They both saw the world as eternal. While Plato had the idea of the Demiurge, it may have been a principle of ordering, and even if it was not, it was working on stuff that had always been and always would be. The same for Aristotle. There were, of course, Greek histories, not to mention epic poems, but the background context is that such change is within limits and there are things before and things after. At most you get cycles. Plato’s Republic spends the first half of the book building up the society, but at the end he talks of it decaying and collapsing—presumably to start all over again. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is eternal, indifferent to human beings, who generation after generation spend their lives trying to emulate it. With ends as far as individual humans are concerned, but not with ends over history. You are never going to become an Unmoved Mover.
The atomists are not into history in any meaningful sense, that is, history showing a pattern and perhaps a sense of purpose. Lucretius has a long discussion about the beginnings of civilization, but it all seems to be a matter of chance, not always for the good. Take religion. It stems from false impressions and misreadings, for instance, that there must be gods that drive the heavenly bodies. And what a disaster that all was. The New Atheists could not say it better.
O humankind unhappy!—when it ascribed
Unto divinities such awesome deeds,
And coupled thereto rigours of fierce wrath!
What groans did men on that sad day beget
Even for themselves, and O what wounds for us,
What tears for our children’s children! Nor, O man,
Is thy true piety in this: with head
Under the veil, still to be seen to turn
Fronting a stone, and ever to approach
Unto all altars; nor so prone on earth
Forward to fall, to spread upturned palms
Before the shrines of gods, nor yet to dew
Altars with profuse blood of four-foot beasts.12
Things happen, sometimes good things, like the coming and use of fire or the smelting of metals, and sometimes bad things, like religion. But it is all a matter of blind law.
Christianity is completely different. Thanks to the Jews, we have a clear start to things. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Then after putting the universe in order and filling it up, God brought the story to a climax by creating Homo sapiens. “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 1:27). As is well known, things rather went downhill from here. Placed in paradise, Adam and Eve were given but one prohibition: namely, not to eat fruit from the tree of good and evil. This, thanks to the seducing wiles of the serpent, they promptly did, and, equally, God promptly kicked them out of paradise, made them work for a living, and condemned them to eventual physical death. However, God took pity on humankind and so sent Jesus, his son—an essence (hypostasis) of himself—to be our savior. This was effected by death on the cross, which made possible our eternal salvation, escape from the life of sin, and reunion with God. Augustine is quite detailed on this, thinking it a kind of perpetual peace with the Almighty. He is also quite detailed on the fate of those who are not saved. There are going to be the ongoing torments of hellfire.
The disobedience of Adam and Eve—Augustine sees Adam as the real culprit—brings sin into the world, and this is something somehow passed down through the generations. It seems that the transmission of this dark aspect to our nature—“original sin”—is somehow bound up with the act of sexual intercourse. No doubt a reflection of his guilt over his misspent youth, Augustine sees even sex within marriage as in some sense a cause for shame. We have to do it: “Nevertheless, when that act is actually being performed, not even the children who have already been born from it are permitted to witness it. This right action desires recognition by the light of the mind, but it nonetheless shuns the light of the eye. Why is this, if not, because something which is by nature decent is performed in such a way as to be accompanied by shame, by way of punishment?”13 Note that Christ escapes original sin because he was virgin born. For the rest of us, even newborn infants, we are tainted and bound to fall into moral error. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross leads to the extension of mercy to some of us sinners. Let us give thanks for that, even though, unfortunately, it cannot be extended to the majority: “if all were to be brought across from darkness into light, the truth of retribution would have appeared in no one. But many more are left under the punishment than are redeemed from it, so that what was due to all may in this way be shown.”14
Christian Purpose
Augustine is firmly committed to the traditional restricted number of years for the time span between the creation of the world and the coming of Jesus. He is significantly more hesitant about the time span from the death of Jesus to the coming Day of Judgment, but the overall impression is that it is going to be in the order of a thousand years. The important point is that with Christianity, unlike the Greek philosophies, we have a definite, temporally limited story, one with a beginning, a middle, and a predicted end. One that makes humankind the central players. One where the Creator God plays a definite and ongoing role. Which means that we have a whole new picture of direction, of ends, of purposes. We have a new picture of purpose or purposes for God, and we have a new picture of purpose or purposes for humans.
What, first, of God? What did he value? He did not have to create the world and its denizens up to and including humankind. Although, ultimately, Augustine would have insisted that we are not necessarily to know all of God’s purposes, the main reasons are clear for all to see. God wanted creatures whom he could love—we are in an important sense God’s children—and in turn, he wanted creatures who could love, worship, and obey him, who would give thanks for the gift of life and the opportunity to live it properly. As a Platonist, Augustine always insisted that evil is not a positive thing in its own right. The Forms come from the Good, so there could never be a Form of Evil. Plato even denied you could have Forms of hair and mud and dirt.15 Evil must be a deficit, a lack of goodness. Hence, that we did not obey God is not God’s fault. “Alas for the sins of humanity (Isa. 1:4). Man it is who says this, and you have pity on him, because you made him and did not make sin in him.”16 It was God’s goodness that, like a parent, he picked up after us when we had made a mess.
What, second, of our purpose? In a sense, it is pretty straightforward. Drawing a distinction between the City of God (the realm of obedience to and fellowship with God) and the City of Man (the everyday realm in which humans spend their lives), it is attaining the former that is our goal, the end purpose to our lives and actions. “The New Testament clearly reveals what is veiled in the Old; that the one true God is to be worshiped not for the sake of those earthly and temporal goods which divine providence grants to good and evil man alike; but for the sake of eternal life and everlasting rewards, and the fellowship of the supernal City itself.”17
Augustine fills in the details, in ways that have proven incredibly influential in the history of Christianity. We are all sinners, and there is nothing we can do to merit salvation. As we have seen, God being a just God is perfectly within his rights in turning from us and condemning us to eternal hell flames. But in his mercy, God is going to redeem some of us. Although how much is up to God. “He simply does not bestow his justifying mercy on some sinners … He decides who are not to be offered mercy by a standard of equity which is most secret and far removed from human powers of understanding.”18 What are we supposed to do now in order to gain such redemption or at least to get into the game and have a chance? Protestants, notably Luther and Calvin, turned to Saint Paul for guidance. No doubt reflecting the fact that he had done absolutely nothing to merit his own salvation, Paul dismissed good works and put everything on belief, on commitment, on faith. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). None of us are up to the moral mark. “Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:27–28). Justification by faith alone. Sola fide.
Augustine knew full well that this could not be the whole story. He was keenly aware of the preaching of Jesus. The Day of Judgment is coming, when Jesus will separate the sheep on his right hand from the goats on his left. Did you feed the hungry? Did you give drink to the thirsty? Did you welcome strangers? Did you clothe the naked? Did you visit the sick? Did you give solace to those in prison? If you did this, caring about others, then heaven awaits. “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40). A sentiment backed by other biblical passages. “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?” Continuing, “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:14–17). Faith is important, but it is not all-important. Good works count too.
Now, if the wicked man were to be saved by fire on account of his faith only, and if this is the way the statement of the blessed Paul should be understood—“But he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire”—then faith without works would be sufficient to salvation. But then what the apostle James said would be false. And also false would be another statement of the same Paul himself: “Do not err,” he says; “neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the unmanly, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the Kingdom of God.”19
This is the point. If good works do not follow faith, then faith is not enough and probably not genuine. “Paul and James do not contradict each other: good works follow justification.” Note that this does not mean that good works are payment for entry into the City of God. Nor are they just a mark that you have genuine faith. In some sense, the faith confers merit on them and God will take note. Talking of Abraham’s faith in God being so great that he was ready to sacrifice Isaac on God’s command: “If Abraham had done it without right faith it would have profited him nothing, however noble the work was. On the other hand, if Abraham had been so complacent in his faith that, on hearing God’s command to offer his son as a sacrificial victim, he had said to himself, ‘No, I won’t. But I believe that God will set me free, even if I ignore his orders,’ his faith would have been a dead faith because it did not issue in right action, and it would have remained a barren, dried-up root that never produced fruit.”20
Free Will?
Yet, can we reconcile the acts of humans with the sovereignty of God? In order for your acts to have any merit, for them to have genuine purpose, you must in some sense do these of your own free will. However, God knows exactly what is going to happen in the future, whether you will do the acts or not. You are “predestined” to do what you do. Is this not incompatible with free will? Augustine (as did those who followed him, notably, Calvin) denies this vehemently. “You would not necessarily compel a man to sin by foreknowing his sin. Your foreknowledge would not be the cause of his sin, though undoubtedly he would sin; otherwise you would not foreknow that this would happen. Therefore these two are not contradictory, your foreknowledge and someone else’s free act. So too God compels no one to sin, though He foresees those who will sin by their own will.”21
Augustine agrees that if (say) the stars were controlling our fate, then we would have no free will, and hence there would be no reason for praise or blame, no cause for eternal salvation or eternal damnation. This is not the usual case. Take an analogy. Suppose you have two students, Mary and Norman, about to take a mathematics examination. The better will receive a scholarship, the worse nothing. In the first scenario, Mary is hypnotized the night before and fed the right answers. Nothing happens to Norm. Mary does much better on the exam, winning the scholarship. The teacher knew this would happen but, although Mary gets the award, she deserves no credit. Nor does Norm merit scorn. This is analogous to fate determining our actions. Now, in the second scenario, nothing happens to either of the examinees the night before. However, Mary is much brighter than Norm and does much better on the exam, winning the scholarship. Again, the teacher knew this would be the case, but his foreknowledge was in no sense biasing the outcome, and so Mary is deserving of reward in a way that Norm is not.
This is how Augustine regards free will and predestination. God knows what is going to happen, but what does happen comes from within the human and hence merits praise or scorn. Note that Norm is not fed bad information or given a defective intelligence. He gets nothing. Analogously, in the good works case, the sinner is not fed a bad will but rather is inadequate—he or she is not fed everything to make a successful will. Of course, you could say that God determines the moral equivalent of Mary’s 140 IQ and Norm’s 90 IQ. So, in the end, God is not entirely off the hook. This does seem to be Augustine’s position, at least with respect to angels, and this presumably applies to humans also. On the one hand, “we must believe that the holy angels were never without a good will: that is, the love of God.” On the other hand, “the angels who, though created good, have nonetheless become evil, became so by their own will.” How come? “The fallen angels, therefore, either received less of the grace of the divine love than those who remained steadfast in the same love; or, if both good and bad angels were created equal, then, while the latter fell by their evil will, the former were more amply aided by God.”22
In the end, it is all God’s business and God’s decision. “‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so has it come to pass: blessed be the name of the Lord.’ As a good servant, Job held the will of his Lord to be a great treasure in itself, through attendance on which his spirit would grow rich.”23 This is what Christian commitment is all about. “For faith is only faith when it waits in hope for what is not yet seen in substance.”24
Aristotle Again
Augustine’s legacy has lasted down to the present and still has bite. In the last decade, at one of the leading liberal arts colleges in America—Calvin College in Michigan—a member of the Department of Religion lost his job for doubting the total truth of Augustine’s account of original sin.25 For us now, the all-important point is the extent to which Augustine’s world picture was thoroughly end-directed and totally value-laden. God acted throughout with purpose, in the way he made the world and in his plans for the world and its inhabitants after he had finished this work, most particularly, in the way in which he was prepared to intervene when his children went astray. Jesus did not die on the cross for nothing. He died that we might get eternal salvation. His purpose was our well-being. Our actions, our purposes, must be framed in the light of that. Nothing else matters.
This is not to say that time stood still. Augustine’s was the most important word. It was not the final word. With the birth and rise of Islam—the Koran (or Quran) was delivered to Muhammad in the first half of the seventh century (609–632)—the intellectual and spiritual heart of the Western world moved to the Middle East and then to the countries that increasingly came under the rule of the Muslims. Until AD 1000 or a little later, religion, science, and philosophy became the province of the Arab world, until slowly it started to seep back into Europe and the Christian lands. There is much discussion about the reasons for the decline in Europe. The popular eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ claim that it was all the fault of Christianity, with the emphasis on faith and not on reason and evidence, is too simplistic on its own but probably is not entirely false. However, the legacy of the Greeks, particularly of Aristotle, did start to make inroads, often at first in Latin from an Arab translation and only slowly from the original Greek, as long-neglected manuscripts were discovered in libraries and as language abilities started to gain momentum. Gerard of Cremona (1114–87) went to Toledo, learned Arabic, and set up a veritable factory of translation. Included were Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens (De Caelo), Meteorology, and On Generation and Corruption. Other works followed soon thereafter.26
Things did not always go smoothly. There were theological worries about Aristotle. The Platonic world soul is ultimately something imposed from without and remaining ontologically separate. Aristotle’s metaphysics rather implied a spirit actually in matter itself. This was felt to run uncomfortably close to pantheism. But, overall, the Aristotelian world system and metaphysical approach was too powerful to be resisted, and, indeed, there were good reasons why Christians might find it very congenial. Think of the cosmology with the earth at the center, in a state of constant turmoil, as opposed to the heavens perfect and forever cycling changelessly and perfectly. Wasn’t this exactly what our religion taught us, with the home of the Christian drama at the center, in a state of constant turmoil, as opposed to the heavens perfect and forever cycling changelessly and perfectly? Moreover, this could be fitted seamlessly with Christian natural theology (meaning knowledge of God through reason and evidence), as was shown in great detail with much sophistication by the greatest Catholic thinker of them all, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). As a good Christian, he thought that faith—revealed theology, meaning knowledge of God through divine intuition or authority—must always reign supreme and, if need be, trump reason. But this could be turned to advantage. Aquinas admitted, for instance, that as an Aristotelian he had nothing philosophically against an eternal universe. It was just that as a Christian, revelation told him otherwise. There was a beginning, and God is Creator God. Likewise with the soul. As an Aristotelian, Aquinas was drawn to monism, thinking that there are not (as Plato and, following him, Augustine assumed) separate substances, body and mind, but rather one entity, the bodily person whose soul is its form. Unfortunately, to a Christian this seemed to imply that when the body dies so also does the soul. Not so, said Aquinas. In some sense, the thinking part of the soul survives—after all, the Unmoved Mover has no physical body. “Therefore, the intellectual principle, which we call the mind or the intellect, has an operation in which the body does not share. Now only that which subsists in itself can have an operation in itself.… We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.”27 In any case, the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body reunites matter and form, body and soul.
Aquinas’s five proofs of the existence of God are well known. Four are variants on the causal or cosmological argument, a version of which can be found in Augustine. “Of all visible things, the world is the greatest; of all invisible things, the greatest is God. But we see that the world exists, whereas we believe that God exists.”28 Note that this argument, which may have come from Plotinus, does not necessarily prove God as Creator. It is more God as sustainer. The world is a contingent thing. Why, therefore, does it exist? Because a necessary being stands behind it, sustaining it. The relationship is less one of efficient cause and more one, perhaps, of formal cause. This is certainly the way that things come across in Aquinas, as can be seen from his first proof, which centers in on motion. “It is certain and in accord with experience, that things on earth undergo change. Now, everything that is moved is moved by something; nothing, indeed, is changed, except it is changed to something which it is in potentiality. Moreover, anything moves in accordance with something actually existing; change itself, is nothing else than to bring forth something from potentiality into actuality.”29 Aquinas now argues for an Unmoved Mover, but notice that this cannot be an (Aristotelian) efficient cause because this would trap you into an unacceptable infinite regress, something Aquinas thought a contradiction in terms. “But this process cannot go on to infinity because there would not be any first mover, nor, because of this fact, anything else in motion, as the succeeding things would not move except because of what is moved by the first mover, just as a stick is not moved except through what is moved from the hand. Therefore it is necessary to go back to some first mover, which is itself moved by nothing—and this all men know as God.”30 This is not identical to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover; it is Creator, and it is keenly aware of our existence. In the context of the proof, it is not far from Aristotle’s notion. It is at least a formal cause, if not a full-fledged final cause.
One finds the same style of thinking in Aquinas’s treatment of the argument from design. At one level, if you like, he is bound (in the terms of this book) to be a Platonist, because he sees God standing behind everything. But the foreground is entirely Aristotelian.
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.31
Note that Augustine (in the Platonic tradition) and Aquinas (in the Aristotelian tradition) both include the inanimate world as well as the animate world in their argumentation. They would have thought it odd to do otherwise, for their God was the Creator God of the whole universe—a universe of purpose.
An Aristotelian World Picture
Things did not stand still. Through what is known as the “High” Middle Ages (1200–1450), the Aristotelian world picture was accepted, refined, moved forward. Sometimes such care had to be taken to stay onside with Christianity that one suspects the underlying philosophy was what is known as “instrumentalism,” where theories are just taken as computing devices to yield predictions, as opposed to “realism,” where theories are taken to denote what is really true out there in the world. For instance, Aristotelian cosmology demands that the heavens rotate around the earth once a day—light, dark, light, dark. Nicolas Oresme (ca. 1320–82) pointed out it would make things a lot easier to assume that the earth rotates once a day and that accounts for that portion of the heavenly motions. He took care to show, anticipating an argument of which Galileo was to make much three centuries later, that this did not mean that bodies dropped from on high would land farther back because the earth had moved forward. As we see on board ships when objects are dropped, it is all a matter of relative motion. Nevertheless, Oresme—whether from conviction or tactically—stepped back sharply from a realist interpretation of his hypothesis, quoting Psalm 92: “For God hath established the world, which shall not be moved.” And that, apparently, was the end of that argument.
In other cases, however, advances were made that seem not to have been theologically objectionable, that made good sense within the system, and persisted, perhaps, even weathering the Scientific Revolution, if emerging in transformed ways on the other side. The “impetus” theory of Jean Buridan (1295–1358) is a case in point. On the Aristotelian system, physical objects have their natural places—earth, water, air, fire. If you let go of a stone, it falls in order to reach its proper place. The smoke from a fire rises, for the same reasons. Why then, if you throw a javelin, does it not immediately fall to the ground? You have passed on something akin to what today we would call “momentum.” “It is because of this impetus that a stone moves on after the thrower has ceased moving it. But because of the resistance of the air (and also because of the gravity of the stone) which strives to move it in the opposite direction to the motion caused by the impetus, the latter will weaken all the time. Therefore the motion of the stone will be gradually slower, and finally the impetus is so diminished or destroyed that the gravity of the stone prevails and moves the stone towards its natural place.”32 This isn’t exactly the modern notion of momentum, but it is certainly a legitimate forerunner.
Hints of what is to come: discoveries and ideas that were to destroy not just Aristotelian physics but Aristotelian metaphysics also. We are in a world filled with purpose—everything, rocks, plants and animals, humans, the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars. Aristotelian final causes explain all. The Christian God stands behind the world, but it is the “Philosopher’s” theory that explains it. Not for much longer.