Part 12

In the preceding discussion I have used the word God freely, but it may fairly be asked how far such use is justified, and furthermore whether Plato was a pantheist or a polytheist. It is indeed somewhat difficult to answer these questions, for in many passages he speaks of the gods in the plural after the common manner, and in the Timaeus he especially provides for a multitude of gods secondary to the Absolute; in many other places he speaks of the Divine (τὸ θεῖον) or simply God (θεός). Sometimes he seems to conceive of God as a living personality; again God is apparently only the impersonal idea of the Good. Yet in spite of the fact that his expressions range from polytheism almost to monotheism, considering the sum total of his thought, we are justified in speaking of his idea of God. At the same time we must always understand that his thought admitted many gods, subordinate to the Absolute and included in it.

But whatever the form of expression which he uses, Plato conceives of God as the giver of good alone. For him there is no deception or deceit in the divine; the chastening of man by God is always for the purpose of making man better, never to satisfy any punitive desire. The notion of “the envy of the gods,” which is so prominent in Aeschylus, Herodotus, and other writers of the fifth century, to Plato is abhorrent and inconceivable. Furthermore he makes the Divine, the idea of the Good, the measure of truth, not man, as Protagoras would have had him. His world therefore has a divine warrant of its validity; it is ordered by the mind of the good and just God, and not by the will of a debased divinity or by mere chance. Previous thinkers had made Justice the highest attribute of divinity; to this Plato added Goodness as the chief characteristic of God.

But in this discussion of Plato’s religious philosophy we have left one important subject untouched—the problem of evil. This was a question which a mind so acute and inquisitive as Plato’s could not finally avoid. Of the presence of evil in the world he was fully aware, and indeed he maintained that evils must always exist, for there must remain something antagonistic to the good; and since evils cannot exist in heaven the earth is their abode, from which man must try to escape.[208] On the source of evil, however, he touches only in the Statesman and the Timaeus;[209] in both the question is intimately connected with his theories of creation, which he sets forth in myth. But leaving aside the Platonic imagery, I will simply remind you that earlier in this lecture we saw that Plato conceived the world we know as dual—the phenomenal world known through the senses and the world of ideas apprehended by reason. Now the ideas alone have Being; but the phenomenal world is always in a state of Becoming, that is, of coming into being and of ceasing to be; it is both temporal and imperfect. Obviously there must be some principle, parallel in a way to the perfect and eternal ideas, such that it can receive them, and by its participation in them bring the imperfect sensible world into transitory existence. This principle is to Plato the material element. Now since he ascribes to the ideas alone real existence, that is, Being, the material principle must be Not-being. It is the negative substratum of all sensible phenomena, itself invisible, without form or characteristic, or in Plato’s words “the receptacle, and in a manner, the nurse of all generation” for, although itself formless, it is capable of taking on all the forms which the ideas may impose upon it. Plato himself could not avoid the difficulties which such a material substratum raises, and at times he is forced to speak as if it were something real in itself, having an existence beside the ideas. But his true notion seems to be that matter is mere negation, like the Aristotelian στέρησις, something which cannot be grasped by the intellect, as can the ideas, or perceived by the senses, as can the phenomenal world; it is identical with space. Of course when Plato talks about this negative principle, he inevitably speaks as if we could know something about it.[210]

The Absolute in Plato’s thought had not only life and intelligence but also creative activities; and the acts of creation consisted in imposing on the formless material principle the ideas which the Absolute comprehends in itself, or, as perhaps he would have preferred to say, in making the material principle partake of the appropriate idea. In the Cratylus he illustrates the relation of matter to the idea by the way in which the artisan makes a shuttle out of wood, always forming his material with reference to the true or ideal shuttle.[211] We may illustrate further by examples modelled on Plato’s own. Think for a moment of the potter and his clay. The clay is formless matter which the potter takes and places on the wheel, and there imposes upon the clay the idea of the pot which is in his own mind; so the pot acquires a real existence in so far as it partakes of or embodies the idea which exists in the potter’s mind. Or we may think of the sculptor and the shapeless block of marble. By imposing his idea upon the marble, by making the shapeless block embody his idea, the sculptor brings the statue into being. These illustrations, both Plato’s and my own, are of course misleading, for the wood, clay, and marble from which the several objects are made are far from being the negative substance which Plato would have us believe his material principle to be. But they may serve to suggest the way in which he conceived the varied world about us to come into its temporary existence.

Now to Plato’s mind the Absolute and the ideas are perfect; yet we know that the phenomenal world is imperfect, and imperfection is evil; therefore, he says, evil must be found in the negative substratum, since as we have already seen, this was regarded by Plato as in every way the opposite of the perfect ideas. This imperfection, inherent in the material principle, is the “necessity” of which he speaks in the Theaetetus as causing evils—the opposite of the good.[212] Evil, therefore, is eternal, but, as we have earlier learned, the individual may escape, if he will take the deliverance which philosophy offers him.

As I have said, the course of creation is explained through myth in the Timaeus and the Statesman.[213] In the former God is represented as creating first the gods of heaven which are the fixed stars and planets, from whom sprang the gods of popular mythology. The Creator had already conceived of creatures of the air, sea, and land; but these he did not himself create, for then they would have been on equality with the gods; he rather commissioned the gods to create man and the lower animals, while he furnished the divine part, the soul. Man’s soul therefore is of the same nature as the universal soul, but his body is material, made of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, and it is imperfect, being subject to the passions. In the Statesman Plato sets forth his theory of the development of man from an earlier stage to the present: the significant thing for us at the moment is his explanation of man’s falling away from virtue as due to the admixture of matter in him, that this fall was “inherent in the primal nature which was full of disorder.”

This, then, will at least suggest Plato’s view as to the origin of evil in the world. His language is that of myth, and it seems evident that he did not formulate his explanation perfectly even in his own mind. We shall best regard it as one of his guesses at truth. It is, of course, easy to find weaknesses in his thought on this question and to show that the explanation which he suggests is not satisfactory. But we shall do better to remember the difficulty of the problem and to recognize the value of his attempt to reach its solution.

The greatest service, however, which Plato did was to establish by means of his doctrine of ideas a rational relation between the invisible world of reason and the visible world of the senses; and by pointing out that the rational part of man’s soul is of the same substance as the ideas and therefore of the same substance as the Absolute, to give an intellectual basis to the doctrine of a natural striving on the part of man after the supreme Good. Hardly second to this was his service in the field of ethics, where he showed that man’s spiritual advance depends upon the constant curbing of the passions and the body. The greatness of his genius is shown by the fact that throughout antiquity the highest religious thought of paganism had its source in his work and was only a development of it. Before we have finished these lectures we shall gain some hints of his profound influence on Christianity.

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Platonic philosophy by attributing to the ideas an existence apart from things, and conversely by denying all existence to anything but the ideas, had removed all reality to the supernatural world. It was inevitable that this view should be promptly attacked. The challenge came from Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle.

Aristotle, born at Stagira in Thrace about 384 B.C., by inheritance and early training had a strong bent toward natural science, since he was descended from a line of physicians who, according to Galen, taught anatomy by dissection. For twenty years he was the pupil and assistant of Plato in the Academy. After the death of his master he went to the court of Hermias, a prince of Mysia, and in 343 he was appointed tutor to the son of King Philip of Macedon, Alexander, then thirteen years of age. About 335 he opened a school in the Lyceum at Athens, where he taught for some thirteen years. Then, being accused of impiety after Alexander’s death, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, as he said, that the Athenians might not sin a second time against philosophy; there he died about 322.

Into Aristotle’s encyclopedic knowledge and enormous scientific activities we may not now go; and indeed we need not dwell at very great length upon him, for his influence in religion was less potent than Plato’s through antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages. The chief cause of the elder philosopher’s greater influence is to be found in the fact that Plato’s thought centered on man, his morality, and his relation to God, while Aristotle was concerned primarily with the universe of which man was to him only a part; to Plato virtue was inseparably connected with religion, and was therefore something to be sought with fervent spirit as well as with cool reason; to Aristotle virtue was rather an intellectual matter, an even balance of the soul, that natural perfection of the whole organism on which the well-being and happiness of man depended—a state which was to be attained by right calculation, choice, and habit. So it came to pass that although Aristotle’s works on logic were continuously studied in one form or another, his great sway in many realms of human thought, including theology, began in the thirteenth century, when, learning first from Arabic scholars, later aided and stimulated by the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the western intellectual world eagerly studied his works anew. Then Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon raised him to the supreme position in philosophy and theology, so that he became for that age indeed “the master of those who know.”

Let us now consider some parts of his philosophy. He criticized Plato’s doctrine that ideas have an existence apart from things, and not unjustly charged that Plato had taken the universals, which we arrive at by abstraction, and had elevated these general concepts into eternal and immortal elements, claiming for them that they were anterior to the things of sense and alone had real existence. In his own philosophy he took a position fundamentally opposed to that of Plato, for he insisted that “ideas,” “forms” and the phenomenal world could not exist apart, for if they did, then we should be obliged to postulate a third world beyond them; that is to say, that if the idea of man, for example, had a substantial existence apart from individual men, then there would have to be an idea antecedent to both the idea of man and the individual men, the model of both, and this idea would be a “third man.” He further pointed out that men know the ideas only in the concrete objects, never apart from those objects of which they are the ideas, that the essence can never be separated from that of which it is the essence, since then both thing and essence would cease to exist. So he charged Plato with using meaningless poetic metaphors when he said that ideas, forms, existed apart from things. Reality to Aristotle was always in the individual object, itself an indissoluble union of matter and form. Of course he recognized that the human mind could abstract these two elements each from the other and could think of the matter and the form as separate, but he would not allow that these abstractions had substantial reality in the sense that they could ever exist by themselves.[214]

Since then to him the Platonic ideas were nothing apart from the individual objects, Aristotle could find no principle of movement or change in them; so he claimed that the doctrine of ideas was sterile and came to naught. In his own system he enumerated four principles or causes, which he insisted, however, are only known to us from individual things: the material cause (τὸ ἐξ oὗ γίνεταί τι, ἡ ὓλη), the formal cause (τὸ εἶδος, ἡ μορφή), the efficient cause (τὸ ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχή), and the final cause (τὸ oὗ ἕνεκα, τὸ τέλος). To make his meaning clear let us use in part his own illustrations: the material cause of the statue is the bronze of which it is made, just as in the example of the pot which we used a little while ago, the clay was its material cause; the formal cause is the idea of the statue, or of the pot, or of the octave in music, which the artist has in mind; the artist himself is the efficient cause; and the object of the action, the completed pot, statue, or whatever it may be, is the final cause.[215] That is to say the statue exists potentially in the bronze, the pot potentially in the clay, the octave potentially in the musical sounds, but these things can be called in actual existence only by the operation of the other three causes; and the same thing holds true in animate nature. It is possible therefore to state the matter generally and to say that in every case the individual is produced by the operation of the formal, efficient, and final causes on the material cause, bringing to actuality the potentiality in matter. Of course we may regard the formal, efficient, and final causes as different aspects of the same formal cause—a thing which Aristotle himself does in more than one passage,[216] so that in the last analysis he regards matter and form as the two causes or principles of things. These two are to him correlatives, each completing the other, although he gives greater importance to the formal than to the material cause. These two causes, he says, attract each other; and their union brings about movement, which is always the evolution of something from something else.

From these considerations I trust that it is evident that Aristotle regarded every object of nature, whether animate or inanimate, as the product of causation; behind each individual he found another individual, and he saw that each object was the result of conscious causal activity. So, looking on the world with scientific eyes, he found therein continuous movement dependent on a chain of causes, and he pointed out that such a chain requires a first cause which must be the source of all activity. This first cause was to him Mind, pure Thought, God, conscious, eternal, and good. But his First Cause was at the same time the Final Cause, for the supreme Mind conceives the end toward which all creative activity is tending, that is, it acts with intelligence so that the world is the creation of intelligence and is directed toward wise ends.[217] The order of the universe bears witness to the Mind which set it in order, and which keeps it in motion, all for intelligent ends; for to use Aristotle’s own expression, “God and Nature do nothing without a purpose.”[218] Thus Aristotle introduced into theology cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God.

But when Aristotle defines God as pure Thought, the supreme Idea or Form, with no admixture of matter, it might seem that he had contradicted himself. It will be remembered, however, that in his system matter and form do not stand quite on an equality—matter is somewhat subordinate to form. He regarded matter as the point of departure for something higher—the clay being antecedent and lower than the pot, the bronze than the statue—for the higher product always results from the operation of the formal cause on the material. Of course in our illustrations the bronze and the clay are not absolute matter, but only matter with reference to the higher products evolved from them—the pot and the statue. Indeed Aristotle did not suppose that there was such a thing as absolute matter existing by itself, but he rather thought of his material cause as matter not yet formed, the germ from which the actual object was to be developed by the operation of the formal cause. Now he saw in the universe an ascending scale of existence, just as today we recognize such a scale in the animal world, each stage being more perfect than that below it; he pointed out that with reference to the lower, each higher stage was ideal, but material with reference to that which was still higher. So in every stage the idea, the form, preceded and conditioned the material element, and in a sense we may correctly say that Aristotle gradually refined away his material element in the ascending scale. At the summit Aristotle placed the perfect and supreme Idea, God, the eternal antecedent of all activity, the prime mover of the universe. So in the end he identified God and Form. Strictly speaking in his system God could not be a resultant of form and matter, for then God would not be the ultimate being, but some cause would lie behind him; and he would not be perfection, since some potentiality, the characteristic of matter, would still reside in him. As a matter of fact Aristotle in a number of passages identifies his ultimate material and form (ἡ ἐσχάτη ὔλη καὶ ἡ μορφὴ ταὐτό);[219] not that he would have granted that there was a material element in the Supreme Being; but in the light of what we have just said we can understand how he might have held that the ultimate material and God were identical.[220]

It readily follows from Aristotle’s concept of God as the prime mover, the source of all activity in the world, that God can be but one. Monotheism is the logical result of the Aristotelian reasoning. Moreover it was inevitable that Aristotle should make God transcendent, that is, that he should place him above all objects of the natural world, since if the First Cause is pure thought unmixed with matter, he cannot be immanent in material things. The immateriality which Plato gave to his ideas, his pupil transferred to God.

Midway between the natural and the supernatural worlds Aristotle placed man, whom he regarded as bound to the world of nature by his body and the lower elements of his mind, but connected with God through his reason, for he held that the human mind possessed attributes of the divine intelligence. Aristotle’s psychology was based on his belief that there was a purpose in all nature, and on his view that in the individual were always united form and material. With reference to animate beings he showed that they had their formative principle within them, which brought to actuality the material which had the potentiality of life, and which determined the purpose for which the individual creature existed. This formative principle was then for him the soul of the animate being, whether plant, lower animal, or man; it was the internal principle which determined the processes of nutrition, growth, and decay common to all animate creatures, and no less the functions peculiar to the lower and the higher animals throughout the scale of life. The soul of a plant, then, he defined as the assimilative principle (τὸ θρεπτικόν) But creatures of the next, higher stage, the so-called lower animals, he saw had senses, desires, and self-movement; to their souls therefore he assigned the additional elements of sensation (τὸ αἰσθητικόν), appetite (tὸ ὀrektikόn), and motion (τὸ κινητικόν). Finally, he said, the human soul had mind (νοῦς) in addition to the elements possessed by the lower animals and plants, for man has the power of thought and reflection. Therefore man is the highest creature, the most perfect organism in the natural order.

But the human mind, as Aristotle pointed out, has two activities: it concerns itself with knowing and with reasoning; it is passive, receptive, in that it receives ideas from without, and creative in that it can reflect on its own ideas and so create new ideas which are in no sense dependent on material objects—are, as we say, abstract ideas. To this creative part of man’s soul, to his reason alone, did Aristotle grant eternal existence and immortality. All other activities of the soul—knowing, moving, seeking, feeling, and assimilating—he held to be bound to the body and hence to perish with it; but the reasoning element he maintained was in no way dependent on the material world, was always active, and therefore it alone was immortal and eternal.[221] Yet after establishing the immortality of the reasoning element Aristotle failed to define the fate of the immortal human reason after death; of joys or pains beyond the grave he gave no description.