Medieval neo-Platonic monism
7 January, 2009
I wrote a paper last semester called “Detriment and Responsibility: The Culpability of Christianity for the World’s Ecological Crisis and the Way Forward.” It was for my course on Philosophy of Religion, on the topic of Religion and Ecology. Specifically, I was responding to the seminal 1967 paper by historian Lynn White: The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis. White’s thesis is, in brief, that Christianity is responsible for the environmental (his word is “ecologic”) crisis facing the world today, because Christianity inherently seperates humanity from nature. I argued against this view. Due to page limitations, there were two section which were more excurses than integral parts of my argument, so I thought I would share those two exerpts. This is the first.
It would be a mistake to assert that the dualism which White argues is the very source of the problem is present in all Western Christian thought. In fact, attempting to reconcile Christian theology with the revered categories of ancient Greek philosophy, the greatest minds of the Western Middle Ages posited a decidedly monistic relation of God to creation.[1] Drawing principally upon the categories of neo-Platonic metaphysics, and thus also on the assumptions of Plato’s monistic naturalism, such figures as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Nicholas of Cusa posited an ontology in which creation is spun out of the very stuff of God.[2]
Augustine soliloquizes to God in the Confessions: “[t]herefore, Thou spakest, and they [heaven, earth, the air, and the waters] were made, and in Thy Word[3] Thou madest them.”[4] To Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “[a]ll things derive in hierarchical order from the Supre-Divine Godhead.”[5] Thus all of creation descends from the highest and most exalted height of God to the lowest material things, but never vitiating in substance. Thomas Aquinas, though attempting to operate within an Aristotelian framework, was Platonic in his interpretations. Thomas rationalizes cause as the First Cause, and thus the solution to the problem of causality that without an external cause the causal chain of creation would necessarily ad infinitum.[6] For Nicolas of Cusa, God contained within Himself all the “multiplicity of creation.”[7] Thus God both contains and transcends His creation.[8] This consubstantiality of God and creation is the very dialectical opposite of the dualism of God and creation that White argues was promulgated by medieval Christianity, even more so than a “nature as sacred” belief system, which is assumed to be the system of belief that White feels Christianity supplanted.[9]
[1] John H. Gay, “Four Medieval Views of Creation,” Harvard Theological Review LVI (1963) 272.
[2] Ibid.
[3] The Word of God, second person of the Trinity
[4] Robert Maynard Hutchins ed., Edward Bouverie Pusey, trans., Great Books of the Western World: Augustine: The Confessions (Toronto: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 90.
[5] Gay, “Views,” 255.
[6] Gay, “Views,” 259-262.
[7] Gay, “Views,” 267.
[8] The similarity to modern panen-theism should not be overlooked.
[9] For under a “nature as sacred” belief system, the natural world can represent the divine, be home to the divine, and parts of it may even be themselves divine, but is Platonic monism then all creation, from humanity to the natural world to the stuff of the stars themselves, is made up ultimately of the very substance of the divine, and there is no material division between God and creation.
