mardi 5 décembre 2023
samedi 7 octobre 2023
HERMAN DOOYEWEERD: SPARKLING CRYSTAL OF THE TEMPORAL WORLD
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| Law-Spheres (ie Aspects) are temporal refractions of the fullness of Time and of the fullness of Meaning. |
HERMAN DOOYEWEERD:
SPARKLING CRYSTAL OF THE TEMPORAL WORLD
It is the very nature of theoretical thought itself, in distinction from the prescientific mode of thinking, that forces the transcendental basic problem upon the critical attitude of thought. The basic problem of philosophy in its above formulation is not an arbitrary construction of mine. On the contrary, it is imposed on us by the nature of the theoretical attitude of thought itself. For wherein lies the distinction between this attitude, which is inherent in all scientific activity as such, and the pretheoretical or non-scientific attitude? Without question, this distinction lies in its character of placing itself in opposition to, or taking distance from, its field of investigation. But what does this mean?
Theoretical thought, insofar as it is placed opposite its fields of inquiry as its logical correlates, is undoubtedly logical in character. In this theoretical function it moves within the logical aspect of reality, an aspect which we can provisionally define as that of analytical distinction (or distinctness). There are, however, numerous other aspects of reality. These include the aspects of quantity (number), space, motion, organic life, and feeling; also the historical aspect, the lingual aspect, the aspect of social interaction, and the economic, aesthetic, jural, ethical, and faith aspects. None of these remaining aspects is intrinsically logical (analytical) in character.
Now, the theoretical attitude of thought demands above all that these aspects be logically separated or held apart in logical analysis or dissection. When temporal reality is theoretically pried asunder in this way into the diversity of its aspects, the non-logical aspects are necessarily placed in opposition to the logical aspect. As the German language succinctly expresses this, they enter into a Gegenstand relation to the logical aspect of thought. In the theoretical attitude, therefore, the logical function of thought is set in opposition to the non-logical aspects, which form its fields of investigation. […]
In the pre-theoretical, non-scientific attitude of thought, the attitude of so-called naive experience, the situation is entirely different. In naive experience, too, we are clearly aware of the distinct aspects of reality. We perceive a quantity or number of branches and leaves on a tree. We notice its spatial shapes and its movements. We observe that it lives. We see its sensible qualities, such as its colors and its sensible shape. We know of the logical features that distinguish it from other things. We also are conscious of its cultural properties, its name, its value in social life, its economic and aesthetic qualities, and so on.
Yet the logical function of our thought here does not adopt a theoretical distance in opposition to the non-logical aspects. It does not pry reality asunder, but rather takes its stand completely within reality. The non-logical aspects are not experienced explicitly here, that is, as discrete functions that stand opposed to the logical aspect of thought. On the contrary, our experience of them is implicit, for they are encountered together, in an indissoluble coherence with the logical thought aspect, as inherent factors of individual totalities (concrete things, concrete events, concrete people, concrete acts, concrete societal relationships in state, church, business, school, family, etc.).
There can be no doubt that naive experience alone perceives reality in the structure in which it presents itself. Its attitude of thought remains completely immersed in that reality. The theoretical dissection that reality undergoes in the Gegenstand relation does not really pry it asunder. Reality itself remains intact and integral. The logical aspect remains embedded in the unbreakable coherence of the aspects, as one of the many facets displayed by the sparkling crystal of the temporal world. It is only within our theoretical consciousness that we perform the artful trick which may be compared to the slicing apart of a whole fruit into distinct pieces.
Thus, the theoretical Gegenstand relation does not show us reality as it is; it rather presents it as it has been artificially dissected or pried asunder. For this reason, it can only have existence within the non-dissected structure of temporal reality. This means that the theoretical Gegenstand relation is not primary, but only secondary. It is the product of a theoretical analysis, in which something essential is abstracted from the structure of reality as this is given in naive experience. In other words, it is produced by theoretical abstraction.
(Extract from REFORMATION AND SCHOLASTICISM IN PHILOSOPHY – VOLUME II pp 97-98) [Free PDF download of this book available HERE]
Moreover…
DOOYEWEERD: THE FALL AND COMMON GRACE
Whoever holds that the original creational ordinances are unrecognisable for fallen humankind because they were supposedly fundamentally altered by the advent of sin, essentially ends up denying the true significance of God’s common grace which maintains these ordinances. Sin did not change the creational decrees but the direction of the human heart, which turned away from its Creator. Undoubtedly, this radical fall impacts the way in which humankind discloses the powers that God enclosed in creation. The fall affects natural phenomena, which humankind can no longer control. It impacts itself in theoretical thought led by an idolatrous ground-motive. It appears in the subjective way in which humankind gives form to the principles established by God in his creation as norms for human action. The fall made special institutions necessary, such as the state and the church in its institutional form. But even these special institutions of general and special grace are based upon the ordinances that God established in his creation order. Neither the structures of the various aspects of reality, nor the structures that determine the nature of concrete creatures, nor the principles which serve as norms for human action, were altered by the fall. A denial of this leads to the unscriptural conclusion that the fall is as broad as creation; i.e., that the fall destroyed the very nature of creation. This would mean that sin plays a self-determining, autonomous role over against God, the creator of all. Whoever maintains such a position denies the absolute sovereignty of God and grants Satan a power equal to that of the Origin of all things. (Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture, pp 59, 60)
samedi 16 septembre 2023
Herman Dooyeweerd: Critique of Logos Theory 7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
The Reformed thinkers Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck, contrary to their starting point, indeed logicized God’s order for the creation. What brought them to this was the “ideal-realistic” twist that they gave to the Kantian critique of knowledge. Taking a stand against Kant’s notion that all law-governed relations are subjective and transcendental-logical in origin and nature, they enlisted the services of the traditional scholastic theory of the logos in order to escape Kant’s subjectivism.
In so doing, however, they failed to attack Kant’s critique at its root. They made no change in Kant’s view that all law-governed relations without exception are logical. Instead, they located the origin of these relations not in the human, but in the divine Logos, the divine Reason with its unity of “logical thought” and “word” that had already been spoken of by Philo.
Thus they viewed the relationships in knowing things not as subjectively logical, but as objectively logical; and they thought that this logical nature was what allowed them to be grasped by our logical thought. For these thinkers maintained that in the process of gaining theoretical knowledge, as Aristotle had taught, a union takes place between the subjective logical function of thought and the objective logical ontic forms of knowable things.
To some extent one can appreciate this attempt to evade Kantian subjectivistic epistemology by appealing to a rational divine plan of creation. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to notice that this entire logicistic view of the divine creation ordinances conflicts flagrantly with Kuyper’s religious understanding of God’s law, in which he put his finger on the very heart of the Reformed position. This religious understanding, which is worked out particularly in Kuyper’s Stone Lectures on Calvinism, accepted Augustine’s and Calvin’s starting point in the absolute sovereignty of God’s will as Creator. God stands above the laws He has imposed on His creation. Nevertheless, these laws are not a product of arbitrary despotism; for they are in complete harmony with God’s holy nature.
It was precisely Kuyper, in fact, who took the first step toward making this religious understanding of the law fruitful for Christian philosophical thought. In the second Stone Lecture, which deals with “Calvinism and Religion,” Kuyper’s confession of God’s sovereignty as Creator is immediately worked out in his theory of the distinct spheres of laws or ordinances:
“Everything that has been created” [Kuyper writes] “was, in its creation, furnished by God with an unchangeable law of its existence. And because God has fully ordained such laws and ordinances for all life, therefore the Calvinist demands that all life be consecrated to His service, in strict obedience. A religion confined to the closet, the cell, or the church, therefore, Calvin abhors.” (second Stone Lecture: “Calvinism and Religion”).
These words of Kuyper completely rule out the metaphysical theory of the logos. They express an understanding of God’s law for His creation that is purely religious and Scriptural. Note how Kuyper developed this thought further:
“What now does the Calvinist mean by his faith in the ordinances of God? Nothing less than the conviction firmly rooted in man’s heart [Dooyeweerd inserts: nota bene, not in his “reason.”] that all life has first been in the thoughts of God, before it came to be realized in Creation. Hence all created life necessarily bears in itself a law for its existence, instituted by God Himself. There is no life outside us in Nature, without such divine ordinances, – ordinances which are called the laws of Nature – a term which we are willing to accept, provided we understand thereby, not laws originating from Nature, but laws imposed upon Nature. So, there are ordinances of God for the firmament above, and ordinances for the earth below, by means of which this world is maintained, and, as the Psalmist says, These ordinances are the servants of God. Consequently there are ordinances of God for our bodies, for the blood that courses through our arteries and veins, and for our lungs as the organs of respiration. Similarly there are ordinances of God for logic, to regulate our thoughts; ordinances of God for our imagination, in the domain of aesthetics; and thus also, strict ordinances of God for the whole of human life in the domain of morals.” Kuyper, Stone Lectures).
No doubt, this is not yet a truly philosophical and scientific conception of the law-spheres that govern temporal reality. Nevertheless, in its popular form, it is a religiously rooted guideline for philosophical inquiry that contains a great, profound thought: the unity of the divine law lies above logic, in the central religious relation to God’s sovereignty as Creator. Within temporal reality this central religious unity of the law is refracted into a great multiformity of law-spheres, each of which retains its own nature and within which the logical sphere is merely one among many. There is no warrant, therefore, for reducing the other spheres of ordinances to the logical sphere. Kuyper himself elaborated on this latter thought with great acuity in his Stone Lecture on “Calvinism and Art,” where we find the following remarkable passage:
“Intellectual art is no art, and the effort put forth by Hegel to draw art out from thoughts, militated against the very nature of art. Our intellectual, ethical, religious [ie pistic] and aesthetic life each commands a sphere of its own. These spheres run parallel and do not allow the derivation of one from the other. It is the central emotion, the central impulse, and the central animation, in the mystical root of our being, which seeks to reveal itself in the outer world in these four branches. . . . If, however, it be asked how there can arise a unity of conception embracing these four domains, it constantly appears that in the finite this unity is found only at that point where it springs from the fountain of the Infinite. There is no unity in your thinking save by a well-ordered philosophical system, and there is no system of philosophy which does not ascend to the issues of the Infinite. In the same way there is no unity in your moral existence save by the union of your inner existence with the moral world-order, and there is no moral world-order conceivable but for the impression of an Infinite power that has ordained order in this moral world. Thus also no unity in the revelation of art is conceivable, except by the art-inspiration of an Eternal Beautiful, which flows to us from the fountain of the Infinite and elevates us to the Infinite.” (Kuyper, Stone Lecture on “Calvinism and Art,”)
What is most striking in this quotation from Kuyper is his profound emphasis on the religious unity of God’s law, both in its Origin and in its central fullness of meaning. Kuyper’s understanding of the law here corresponds perfectly to his Scriptural conception of the heart as the religious concentration point of all the temporal functions of human existence. And from this follows, as a matter of course, the idea of sphere-sovereignty, that is, the notion that the law-spheres that Kuyper expressly mentions are mutually irreducible by their very nature.
The metaphysical logos theory, which ultimately reduces all laws to logical relations that originate in the divine Logos, thus has been cut off at its religious root. There also is no room in Kuyper’s view for the theory that there are greater or lesser degrees of reality, depending on proximity to or distance from the ideas. Woltjer, in particular, had elaborated on this Neoplatonic twist in the logos theory at length in his Ideëel en Reëel. Kuyper’s understanding of the law, however, which he unfolded in his Stone Lectures as a direct fruit of the basic Scriptural, religious position of Calvinism, was diametrically opposed to any such theory.
What Kuyper implicitly discovered here is the true point of contact between religion and philosophy, and in this he performed a lasting service for Reformed philosophy. For there can be no doubt that the view of the law that I have set forth briefly above by itself entails a radical transformation of philosophy’s whole outlook upon the structure of reality.
It is true that Kuyper did not carry this view through consistently in his scientific works. Alongside this purely Scriptural line of thought, he also adhered to traditional scholastic thought patterns. This, however, in no way proves that both viewpoints have an equal right to exist in an intrinsically Reformed philosophy. It only shows that Kuyper lacked the opportunity to carry through his basic Reformed conception in the internal course of scientific inquiry. Kuyper himself, in fact, described this on many occasions as a great shortcoming that held forth a huge task for the next generation.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 83-86)
The above book is available HERE
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Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
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Herman Dooyeweerd: Critique of Logos Theory 6. Hellenistic antipathy towards the Christian philosophy of accommodation.
6. Hellenistic antipathy towards the Christian philosophy of accommodation.
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
One must never forget that the logos theory of Greek philosophical theology was basically rooted in the rational principle of form, and that its highest standard for cosmic order was a rational standard. It is well known that Hellenistic philosophy, in taking its stand against the Christian religion, was repelled by this religion precisely because it dethroned the rational form principle. It could not tolerate Christianity’s teaching that the cosmos has to be viewed from the perspective of an infinitely more profound principle, a principle that assigns even to thought a proper, limited place within the created order.
Greek philosophy intuitively perceived the depth of this radical antithesis between itself and the Christian religion. It did not grasp this new Christian principle, but rather regarded it, in contrast to its own rational principle of form, as a barbaric reversion to the darkness of the matter principle. The apostle Paul gave a trenchant description of its attitude when he wrote that the gospel is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23).
It was not without reason that Christian thinkers attempted to accommodate the Greek theories of the logos and the ideas and the Greek view of human nature to the divine Word-revelation. Their primary goal was to win the Greeks over to the Truth of the Christian religion and to counter the accusation that this religion was irrational. Their effort was flawed, however. When Greek philosophy was pressed into the service of Christian doctrine, the way to a deep understanding of the central significance of the Christian religion for philosophical thought was cut off. Plotinus rightly pointed out to the “Christian” Gnostics that they had taken all their real philosophical goods from Greek philosophy, but that they had put this philosophy in barbaric disarray by combining it in a bizarre way with their presumed higher knowledge. They imagined that in doing this they stood far above Plato and the other giants of Greek thought, when in reality they stood far below them in philosophical depth.
This accusation, to be sure, could not be maintained against Christian thinkers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Nevertheless, authentic Hellenistic philosophy realized intuitively that these great church fathers, for all their erudition and knowledge of Greek thought, were trying to use this thought for a goal to which it could not lend itself. The Hellenists perceived that the church fathers had no right to speak of a “philosophia christiana” so long as they did nothing more than adapt alien philosophical notions to Christian dogma. The judgment of Porphyry, a pupil of Plotinus, concerning Origen is revealing in this regard. Porphyry wrote the following about Origen:
(Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae VI,19): “But Origen, having been educated as a Greek in Greek literature, went over to the barbarian recklessness. And carrying over the learning, which he had obtained, he hawked it about, in his life conducting himself as a Christian and contrary to the laws, but in his opinions of material things and of the Deity being like a Greek, and mingling Grecian teachings with foreign fables. For he was continually studying Plato . . . .”) (History of the Church V.19.7-8. Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Series 2, Volume 1, pp. 265-266).
It was because of a false dilemma that the church fathers accepted the philosophical content of the Greek theory of the logos. As Augustine reasoned, following Gregory of Nyssa, if God, through the Logos, did not create the world in accordance with rational ideas, we then would have to conclude that He performed His work of creation in an “irrational” manner (Retractationes I, 3, 2. Written close to his death this work contains Augustine's mature view; cf. vol. 60 in Fathers of the Church, CUA Press, 1999). Augustine already knew from Plotinus’ theology, however, that the contrast between rational and irrational cannot be applied to the Origin of all things, since God’s nature is above reason.
Plotinus did not carry this thought through in his logos theory, simply because for him the logos was not the divine unity itself, but only a product of the first divine radiation. Augustine, by contrast, professed the Scriptural doctrine that the three Persons of the Godhead share the same nature. How, then, could he have accepted a theory of logos and ideas that even Plotinus did not venture to apply to his divine One?
In Augustine’s thought, the theory of the logos patently came into conflict with the Christian Scriptural ground-motive of creation, fall, and redemption. He maintained the absolute sovereignty of God’s creative will, and the logos theory simply was not designed with this Scriptural doctrine of creation in view. To the contrary, it fit hand in glove with the rational form principle of the Platonic realistic theory of ideas. […] In contrast to this Greek view, the Scriptural doctrine of creation underscores the truth that thought is not the origin of the divine creation order, but is rather subject and subordinate to that order. Nowhere in Scripture do we find the predicate “divine” attached to logical, as opposed to pre-logical, matters. God’s order for the creation is only disclosed to human thinking when man begins to bow in faith before God’s majesty, submitting his thought to God’s law instead of trying to logicize that law in accordance with Greek logos theory.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 80-83)
The above book is available HERE
——————————————————————————
Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
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Herman Dooyeweerd: Critique of Logos Theory 5) Accommodation of Trinity and Creation doctrines post Nicea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD). Augustine, Eriugena.
5) Accommodation of Trinity and Creation doctrines post Nicea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD). Augustine, Eriugena.
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
At the Ecumenical Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, the Christian church formulated the doctrine of the divine Trinity as a complete oneness of nature (or being) between the three Persons of the Godhead. Following this, thinkers trod further down the road of accommodation between the logos theory and this trinitarian dogma, which earlier had been worked out in a Scriptural sense by Irenaeus and Athanasius.
Among the Greek church fathers schooled in Origen’s theology, Gregory of Nyssa (335-ca.395 AD) in particular elaborated on the logos theory at length in this new accommodated form. He combined the Jewish conception of the unity of the divine nature with the Neoplatonic conception of the deity’s three hypostases, and he interpreted the ideas in the divine Logos, which he too understood as the second Person of the divine nature, as “thoughts of God.” Eusebius of Caesarea, meanwhile, the famous church historian who was strongly influenced by Platonism, had taken a stand against the Neoplatonic theory of the emanation of the logos from the divine One, a notion that had been erroneously ascribed to Plato.
The theory of the logos first received its definitive, “orthodox” form in the thought of Aurelius Augustinus (354-430 AD), the grand master of the Latin church fathers. Under the influence of Marius Victorinus, who did not convert to Christianity until 355 AD in his old age, and who himself formulated an elaborate logos theory, Augustine made the philosophical-theological speculation of Plotinus, in particular, into an object of accommodation.
He began, however, by upholding the oneness of nature or being of the three Persons of the Godhead against Plotinus’ notion of three divine hypostases whose perfection of being is successively diminished, and by defending the Scriptural doctrine of the incarnation of the Word against the Gnostic theory that Christ’s earthly body was a mere semblance. This latter theory was inseparably tied to the religious dualism between mind or spirit and matter, which both the Gnostics and Origen carried to an extreme. Matter, in the sense of the Greek matter motive, thus was completely deprived of divinity.
Further, Augustine, whose understanding of the ground-motive of the Christian religion was basically pure, forcefully defended creation as an act of God’s sovereign will against the Plotinian theory of radiation. Despite this defense, however, someone like John Scotus Erigena [recte Eriugena = “Irish-born”] (ca. 801-877 AD) clearly reverted to this theory in the ninth century under the influence of Origen. It carried him to dangerous pantheistic consequences, just as did his logos speculation, in which the Logos functioned as the principle by which multiplicity was traced back to the divine unity.
On the other hand, Augustine did adopt the Plotinian theory of degrees of reality, although he restricted it to the created cosmos. He also adopted the Stoic theory of germinal forms (the logos spermatikos) in the material world, albeit in a semi-Plotinian accommodation to the Scriptural motive of creation. Most seriously, he adopted both the theory of the logos as the seat of the divine creative ideas and the whole theory of the objective actualization of these ideas in the material world. All these speculative philosophical doctrines were inseparably tied to the ground-motive of form and matter, whose religious nature was intrinsically pagan. Nevertheless, this was realized neither by Augustine and the scholastics who followed him, nor by Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer, who followed Augustine in their logos theory.
We can grant that the accommodation of these pagan conceptions to the Scriptural doctrines of the Trinity and of creation changed their original meaning to a certain extent. It is equally true, however, that because of this process of accommodation the Christian ground-motive could no longer make itself felt in philosophical and theological thought in an unadulterated way.
78-80
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 78-80)
The above book is available HERE
——————————————————————————
Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
——————————————————————————
vendredi 15 septembre 2023
Herman Dooyeweerd: Critique of Logos Theory 4. Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
4. Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
Christian thought was devastated during its first few centuries by these logos speculations. At first, Philo’s idea of the logos was followed almost literally. Circa A.D. 150 it was the central idea of religious philosophical thought, and the Apologists simply identified it in its Jewish-Hellenistic form with the “Word” (Logos] of the Gospel of John. Thus they regarded the Logos as a being that was actually neither God nor cosmos, but was rather the bridge or mediator between spirit and matter. Tertullian (160-222), a lawyer in Carthage, elaborated on this theology at length in a materialistic, Stoic manner.
According to Berkhof, the main features of the Apologists’ theology can be summarized as follows:
“For the purpose of creation God called into existence a personal being, the Logos, through whom He has made all things. The human person, though a participant in the Logos, was misled by demons and thus ensnared in ignorance, polytheism, and immorality. In order to set humankind right again the Logos himself appeared in human form. Thus Christ unmasked the deception of the demons, proclaimed the true doctrine of God and the world and of the coming judgment, and showed the way to a God-pleasing manner of life. This manner of life is practiced in the church; and there are also ‘seeds of the Logos’ outside of it (especially in Plato), but there people remained trapped in error. The human being has a free will and can, with the help of Christ’s teaching and example, free himself from the grip of the demons. In Christ, therefore, there has appeared a mere demigod, who is not a Redeemer in the Scriptural sense but only an example and teacher.” (Hendrikus Berkhof, De Geschiedenis der Kerk, Nijkerk, 1967, pp. 52 ff)
Thus, the acceptance of the Jewish-Hellenistic logos theory initially led to a radical undermining of the ground-motive of the divine Word-revelation, that of creation, fall into sin, and redemption through Jesus Christ. Under the influence of the dualistic ground-motive of form and matter, the Christian religion was converted into a moral system with a Christian veneer.
Things did not improve in the theological-philosophical systems of Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215) and of the great Greek church father Origen (185-254), who only added philosophical depth to the logos theory of the Apologists. According to Clement the world is animated by the Logos as the vehicle of all rational-moral forces, who illuminated the souls from the beginning. The Logos instructed the Jews through Moses and the prophets, and among the Greeks he raised up wise men and offered philosophy as a teacher of righteousness. Only in Jesus Christ, however, was this Logos fully revealed.
Clement’s Logos is the archetype of the created world, the sum total of the ideas, the mediator between God and world (in the sense of Philo) and the rational law of the cosmos. Within the divine triad, the Holy Spirit occupies the third position after the Father and the Logos.
Clement then connected this Logos doctrine with a ranking, borrowed from pseudo-Christian Gnosticism, between pistis (faith) and gnōsis (knowledge). The faith of the simple was contrasted with the Christian knowledge of the Gnostic, which ranks much higher and is able to penetrate to the hidden meaning of the Word-revelation through allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Philosophy is indispensable for arriving at this gnōsis. Pistis too is a necessary condition for Christian gnōsis, but it is only through gnōsis that one can freely and fully surrender himself to God.
Only the works of the Christian Gnostic are perfectly good, because they correspond to the Logos, the divine reason. This ideal of the wise Christian person came dangerously close to that of the Stoic sage, for it was carried all the way to the demand of apatheia, of freeing oneself of all feelings and emotions. Clement in fact wrote a book called The Pedagogue, in which his exposition of the rules for Christian living often literally followed the discourses of the cynically inclined Stoic Musonius Rufus. An obvious connection became manifest here between the logos theory and the Greek religious idea of theoria, which I will discuss later. The Gnostic, who shares in the Logos, already on earth becomes a “God walking in the flesh.” (Stromateis VII, 16; Stählin edition 3, 71). He raises himself above the temporal world and, in the eternal theoria he beholds and grasps God – not just in isolated ecstatic moments, as Philo and later the Neoplatonists taught, but in lasting communion.
Origen was the first to incorporate the Jewish-Hellenistic logos theory, in combination with Neoplatonic elements, in a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine, which in his hands was turned into a theological-philosophical system of grand dimensions. Like Clement, he regarded Christian doctrine merely as the perfection and completion of what the Logos had already disclosed in Greek philosophy. Origen thus saw pagan wisdom as a preparation for Christianity, even though his judgment of it still remained rather reserved.
In complete conformity with the philosophical theology of both Philo and the later Neoplatonists, Origen taught that God, in the truest sense of the word, is the absolute unity, exalted above both nous (the thinking mind) and being (Contra Celsum VII, 38). This God in the highest sense of the word is the Father, the origin and goal of all created things. The Son or Logos has been generated from eternity from God the Father as an emanation of the divine light. The Son does have a commonness of being with the Father, but this homoousion is merely relative in nature and implies nothing more than Plotinus’ commonness of being between the divine unity and the nous.
Origen’s Logos is an archetype that proceeds from the Father, but it is of lesser divinity. It is a second God (deúteros theós) of lower rank, who has the same relationship to the Father that the Christian has to him. In relation to the cosmos this Logos is the original type, the image of the invisible God (Contra Celsum VI, 64. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4, p. 603). By him all things are created, and they are made in his image alone, not in the image of the Father. As the first-born of the Father the Logos is the principle of all rationality. Seen from the point of view of the creation he is God, but seen from God’s point of view he is a creature (Contra Celsum III, 34. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4, p. 478; “Intermediate between the nature of the uncreated and all created things.”).
As the divine unity unfolds into a multiplicity, the Logos is the first member and the Holy Spirit is the second. This Spirit is even less divine than the logos, and it stands the closest to the created cosmos.
The Holy Spirit thus begins the series of lower spiritual beings, which along with their divine nature also have a free will of their own. Already at this point human souls, as spiritual beings, have the freedom to choose between good and evil. Those who have not chosen the good, God has cast away in punishment for their guilt and encased them in material bodies.
At the end of all things, however, all creatures will be brought back into unity with God (cf. Origen’s main systematic theological work De principiis III, 6, 1 ff). Then will come the destruction of sin, which for Origen, as for the later Neoplatonists, was merely a privation of being; but then also the material bodies will revert to non-being. [Origen believed in a future resurrection of a spiritual body, which resembles “the splendour of the celestial bodies” but, nevertheless, is a body, not mere spirit (De principiis II, 2, 2)].
Origen’s logos theory, too, led to a radical undermining of the ground-motive of the Christian religion. The creation was understood in Neoplatonic fashion as an emanation of the divine light. The radical meaning of the fall into sin was denied. The Logos, in its manifestation in Christ Jesus, is not the Redeemer in the true sense but only a moral example. Finally, the Scriptural doctrine of the divine Trinity was undermined by the Hellenistic speculation about the Father as the absolute One.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 74-78)
The above book is available HERE
——————————————————————————
Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
——————————————————————————
jeudi 14 septembre 2023
Herman Dooyeweerd: Critique of Logos Theory 3) Plotinus.
3. The logos theory of Plotinus.
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
Philo’s logos theory exerted tremendous influence on the Apologists and on the church fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Besides this, the logos theory of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonic philosophy, became extremely important for Christian philosophical thought based on the accommodation standpoint. The reason was that Augustine derived his philosophical conception of the creation order from it.
Plotinus of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 205-270) was a student of Ammonius Saccas, a son of Christian parents who later reverted to pagan Greek religion and tried to achieve a philosophical synthesis between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He developed a logos theory which arose from the same kind of speculative philosophical reflections as that of Philo, but which nevertheless differed from the latter fundamentally. [Plotinus pursues the line of the step-wise descent from the One, in connection with the view that every emanation represents a weaker image of the preceding level of being.]
Plotinus agreed with Philo in his notion that the deity is absolutely transcendent to the principle of matter. For him as well, the deity is totally exalted above the active nous or reason, since the latter always contains a duality between thought and the object of thought. God is not irrational but supra-rational, just as He has no formed being, but a supra- (supreme) being that is the origin of every form of being.
Aristotle’s idea of God held that He is the absolute, actualized, perfect Reason, whose thinking has only itself as its object (the noēsis noēseōs, “thought thinking itself”). In Plotinus’ view, however, this idea still did not do justice to God’s transcendence. Like Philo, he assumed that human thought concepts can only be applied to the deity in a negative sense; they can only indicate what God is not. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and their followers were to follow him in this, although in working out his theory of the analogy of being, which I will discuss later, Thomas still also granted a positive significance to the metaphysical determination of God’s attributes.
For Plotinus, the only positive determinations of God’s nature are His unity and His goodness. God is exalted above all being, thinking, and doing. All forms of being (ideas) spring from the fullness of His being, but God Himself is not confined within a particular form of being. Plotinus then attempted, unsuccessfully however, to derive even the principle of matter from the absolute divine unity as Origin. Thus he tried to surmount the polar dualism in the Greek religious ground-motive, an effort that Philo had not made. To accomplish this, Plotinus devised his theory of emanation or procession.
Plotinus asked himself, how did multiplicity spring from the divine unity? This could not have happened through an act of creation or a decree willed by God, for God, according to Plotinus, is exalted above all doing and all activity. He is absolutely unmoved and remains in eternal, silent rest. It also could not have happened through emanation, as pantheism maintains, since by emanation the divine being would be diminished. Only through “radiation”(uitstraling) could all things issue from God’s fullness of being, while He Himself remains eternally the same, just as the sun produces the brilliance that surrounds it without itself losing any of its light. And this radiation takes place not through an act of God’s will, but through a necessity of His being.
The fullness of God’s being must radiate outward, merely because of His goodness. According to Plotinus this radiation occurs in three stages, each earlier stage calling into being the next one.That which originates from God diminishes in perfection of being in each of the three stages. Thus there are degrees of reality, determined by their greater or lesser distance from God and from the world of ideas. Plotinus maintains the dualism of the form-matter motive in his system by drawing, in Platonic fashion, a sharp distinction between the supra-sensible realm, which is entirely ruled by the form principle, and sensible reality, in which the form and matter principles are bound together.
The supra-sensible realm is altogether divine in character. Radiating from the divine One, which is the first and absolute hypostasis, are two lower divine hypostases. The first of these is the divine mind or Logos, which is “the greatest in perfection of being subsequent to the Supreme Perfection.” This Logos is the first reflection or mirror image of the divine unity. Its nature is to contemplate the divine unity. In the intellect or logos there is thus already a fundamental duality of subject and object, of the activity of thinking and that which is thought.
In the Logos are contained the divine ideas, the ideal ontic forms (forms of being) of everything that is actualized in the sensory world. Plotinus conceived of these ideas as substances and as active mental forces, which secure the operation of the logos or nous upon the levels of reality below it. They are inseparably tied to the logos, since their being is identical with their being thought; yet, they are not purely subjective divine thoughts as the middle Platonic school taught, but have a real existence. Furthermore, the ideas are not mere universal forms (universalia) – for instance, forms of the animal, the human being, the plant – but contain in themselves a fullness of individuality. Thus there is an idea of the individual man Socrates, of the man Plato, etc. They also have in them a synthesis between form and matter, since how else could sensible things be images of them? (Enn. II, 4, 4). This “matter,” however, is ideal in nature.
The third hypostasis, finally, is the soul, which is the reflection of the divine intellect or logos. It is the direct fruit of the intellect, and it receives its form from the world of ideas emanating from the logos or nous. It hovers about the divine intellect as its inseparable reflection, its light, its image inseparably attached to it; on the upper level united with it, filled from it, enjoying it, participant in its nature, intellective with it, but on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or, rather, generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath (Eneads V,1.7).
The soul, therefore, is the lowest level in the divine, supra-sensible realm; and simultaneously it is the bridge to the sensible realm, which it in turn creates. Plotinus thus gives it an intermediary role, and he accordingly splits it into a higher, simple and rational part called the nous, and a lower part called the phusis, which is turned toward the sensible matter of the body. This lower part of the soul is divisible insofar as the material body cannot incorporate the psychical forces undivided. Nevertheless, the soul as a whole remains an indivisible substance.
There is a real multiplicity of substantial souls. The highest among them is the divine world-soul, which gives form to the entire sensible cosmos and pervades and animates it. The individual souls, however, are not parts of this world soul, but independent radiations from the mental ideas in the logos. All functions of the soul, including memory, sense perception, and even the vegetative function that forms the material body, are supra-sensible and rational in nature. They belong to the substance of the soul, are in fact identical with this substance, and are independent of and separable from the body.
The divine realm extends from the One through the soul. The world-soul contains the logoi, which correspond to the ideas of the logos and are the agents by which the intrinsically indeterminate matter is formed into the things of the sense world. Plotinus borrowed this latter notion from Stoic philosophy and its theory of the logoi spermatikoi, “germinal forms,” which supposedly exert a formative influence upon indeterminate matter from within the world soul. As we shall see later, however, he transformed this Stoic idea in a fundamental way.
Finally, matter itself is the product of the soul through radiation.The soul is a light that at the furthest limit of its radiation turns into its opposite, darkness (Enn. IV, 3.9), and this darkness is unformed matter. In this sense Plotinus calls matter the “depth” (bathos) or“abyss” of every sensible thing.
Whereas the logos is light, matter is darkness. It is non-being (mē on) and an absolute privation of ontic form. As the absence of form it is the principle of evil, but as receptivity for form it is simultaneously an intermediate state between good and evil.
One can plainly see that the polar dualism of the Greek theme of form and matter has reasserted itself in Plotinus’ whole view of reality. He merely camouflaged it by means of his theory of radiation or procession, but it easily broke through this disguise in the polar opposition between light and darkness.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 70-74)
The above book is available HERE
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Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
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