The fundamental characteristic of Plato's philosophy is its sharp dualism between the two worlds, the world of sense and the world of the Ideas. This dualism rests on rational grounds. This may be clearly seen by means of the line of truth, Plato's famous twice-divided line. Truth is represented by a diagram of a vertical line that is divided into four parts. The vertical line is the line of truth and it is first divided into two divisions representing the basic divisions of truth into opinion (doxa) and knowledge (episteme). The lower division representing opinion (doxa) is further divided into two segments; the lower segment representing unsupported imagination and the upper segment representing perceptual belief, that is, partially warranted belief based the senses. The upper division of the line of truth representing knowledge (episteme) is also divided into two segments; the lower segment representing hypotheses, that is, semi-abstract ideas that are supported by logic and mathematics, and the upper segment representing universal abstract ideas based on reasoning about first principles. The mathematical entities in the lower segment show the influence of the Pythagoreans. The line of truth presents Plato's view that the universal and abstract has more reality than particular and concrete things. The dialectic method is the movement up from the perceptual world to ultimate reality, the world of Ideas. This upward movement is a movement toward the theoretical. The corresponding downward movement is the application of the theoretical. This is art in a general sense of controlled and purposive making and doing. The fine arts is a special case of the arts.
Plato's treatment of beauty in the Symposium is parallel to this treatment of the twice-divided line of truth. The direction of the movement, empowered by eros, is from beautiful appearances and particular things to the beauty in more abstract enities such as laws and constitutions; this increasing abstraction leads finally to an intuition of beauty itself, eternal and unchanging, the Absolute Beauty. In Plato's treatment of the good in the Republic and elsewhere - such as the dialogue Philebus - there is a similar upward movement with respect to the good. In the place of imagination we have pleasure, and at higher levels, leading to the highest and final one, we have ideas of moderate satisfaction of desire, intellectual pleasures, measure, proportion, completeness, and seasonableness. Over these may be discerned that Absolute Good which Plato describes as "the author of all things beautiful and right" and the "source of reason and truth in the intellectual world." If the One in the Parmenides is combined with these, it is probably correct to say that Plato held that the Absolutes of Truth, Beauty, and the Good are identical in the One. These are the archetypes of the particulars of the world of sense. In a certain sense these universals "participate" in the things of the world of sense, or, more accurately, things "participate" in the universal Ideas; the universal Ideas do nothing. Plato held that the human mind is able to "participate" in these forms. He expressed this by his doctrine of recollection (anamnesis) which he propounded, mythically, that the human soul had known these forms before birth, but by the shock of birth they are driven from our memory. In a vague sort of manner we know everything, and experience enbles us to recall this knowledge accurately. Some have interpreted Plato as here teaching the "innateness of ideas" and the transmigration of souls, metempsychosis, but this is reading of these later doctrines into Plato's doctrine. Plato does not explicitly teach either of them. Plato held that when man glimpses the universals in things, he is seized by the heavenly eros, the longing for the pure world of the Ideas. Eros is the upward tendency of the human soul for this ideal world; it is the love for the Good and the Beautiful. When Plato gives a clear definition of eros, he says that it is an intermediate state between having and not having. Obviously eros is desire, a longing, a striving. But man only desires what he does not have, and that of which he feels he needs. He can strive for that which feels is valuable. Hence love, as Plato sees it, has two main characteristics; the awareness of a need and the effort to satisfy that need. Thus eros is acquisitive love; it seeks to acquire that which it does not have, and to possess it. Now eros - love is directed toward an object that is regarded as valuable. Love and value belong together; the one implies the other. Acquisitive love is motivated by the value of its object. But eros is not completely described as acquisitive love. For there is a kind of acquisitive love that drags the soul downward and only puts the soul in bondage to the world of senses; and that is sensual love. The Heavenly Eros by contrast is a love that is directed upward; it is soul's longing and striving toward the heavenly world, the world of Ideas. The Heavenly Eros is not simply desire; it is desire for the Good and the Beautiful.
Aristotle
Aristotle expands Plato's views of the good, giving it cosmic
significance. This he does by converting Plato's sharp metaphysical
dualism between the world of sense and the world of the Ideas
into a dualism of form and matter in every object of knowledge.
Instead of two worlds Aristotle has one world; and every body
in that world is composed of form and matter; they are formed
matter. For example, the soul of man is the form of his body.
In a sense, form and matter are relative terms. What is in one
sense formed matter at one level (for example, a block of marble)
is in another sense matter for higher level (for the statue, a
higher formed matter). Aristotle viewed the world as an hierarchy
where the lower levels are matter for higher levels and the higher
levels are form for the lower levels. At the bottom of this hierarchy
is pure matter ("prime matter") and at the top is Pure
Form. By interpreting matter as potenitality and form as actuality,
Aristotle explained change as the change of matter into form,
the matter as potential at a lower level is actualize by form
at a higher level, and so forth. The process of nature is viewed
by Aristotle as a successive assent from matter to form, from
imperfect to the more perfect form of being, from potentiality
to actuality. Aristotle distinguished three kinds of change;
"locomotion" or change of position,
"alteration" or change of quality, and
"growth or diminition" of change of quantity,
He found that there are four types of cause of change:
efficient, formal, material, and final.
Efficient cause is the manner in which one body acts another
and produces locomotion.
Formal cause provides the form for the change and
material cause provides the matter for the change.
Final cause is purpose or goal of the change
and the last stage of its developement.
Pure Form is the ultimate final cause of all motion;
it sets the whole process in motion and is the goal of all motion.
It itself is unmoved, but moves all things.
But how is it possible that which is completely unmoved
causes motion? Aristotle answers, "it moves by being loved"
[kinei hos eromenon]. Aristotle interpreted eros as the
ultimate principle of all change. It sets things in motion in
the same way that the beloved object moves the lover by desire
that it awakens. Through eros, the desire for the object,
the influence of Pure Form is exerted on all things and awakens
in matter (potentiality) the change into form (actuality). Thus
Aristotle turns Plato's eros into a cosmic force.
According to Aristotle the good is that which all things aim. For man the good is that which is desired for itself, and that for which everything else is done. According to Aristotle happiness is this good. Aristotle held that man's highest good (summum bonum) is happiness (eudaimonia). Now happiness is not passive state but an activity in accordance with virtue. There are two kinds of virtue: intellectual and moral. The highest intellectual virtue is wisdom. Moral virtues are many, and may be defined as the mean between excess and defect. Courage, for example, stands in between rashness and cowardice, temperance between insensibility and gluttony, and justice between deficiency of allowing one's rights to be trampled on and the excess of trampling over the rights of others. Following the mean in all things leads to a life of maximum happiness. Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics,
"Virtue must have the quality of aiming at the intermediate.... Hence it is no easy task to be good. For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for everyone but for him who knows; so, too, any one can get angry - that is easy - or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble."He interpreted man's happiness or well-being rationalistic; that is, since it is man's ability to reason that separates man from the other animals, then the search for man's happiness must include the development of his reason. Aristotle held that the complete development of anything is its highest good. Development involves the transformation of potentialities into actualities and the realization of its capacities. Since man is a rational animal and his reason is his highest part, then man's goal is the development of his reason. Those capacities he shares with other animals (that is, eating and reproducing) should be also realized, since he is also an animal. But he is also a rational animal. Thus it follows that those capacities which man does not share with the other animals - those capacities that set him off from other animals - should be fulfilled in such a way that they will have priority and control over the development of man's animal capacities. Thus moral virtue involves rational control of the desires. Thus he stressed the importance both of the intellectual and moral virtues, the former relating to reason and latter to the rational control of the sensitive and appetitive life. For Aristotle man's soul has a rational as well as an irrational part. The rational part is the seat of the intellect, and may be divided into an active and passive part. The active intellect which makes all things is immortal and will survive the body. The passive intellect, which becomes all things, is the seat of individuality and does not survive the body at death. The irrational part of man's soul is the seat of the appetites and desire. While one part of man's rational soul has no relation to desire, the other part can exercise control on desire. This occurs through the development of habits, and leads to a moral will. Development of man's rational soul leads to the intellectual virtues of wisdom and insight. The development of speculative wisdom (sophia), combining intuitive reason and rigorous knowledge of first causes and principles, is best exemplified by the discipline of Metaphysics. The development of practical wisdom (phronesis) is development of the virtues life by the finding the mean between extremes.
Epicureanism
Epicureanism is the school of philosophy founded in Athens by
Epicurus in 306 B.C. The school, stressing empiricism, atomic
theory, and hedonism, was influencial in Greece and Rome from
the time of Epicurus until the 4th century A.D. Epicurus was a
Greek philosopher who was born in Samos in 341 B.C. and died in
270 B.C. He was influenced by Democritus who held the atomic theory
of matter and hedonism, that is, pleasure is the good to be sought
and pain is the evil that is to be avoided. Epicurus held that
the goal of life is happiness and happiness is ataraxia, the state
of pleasure to be enjoyed in tranquility, free from mental or
phyiscal pain. He held that prudence is the guide to happiness
and the foundation of the virtues. Epicureanism with its doctrine
that reality was composed of an infinity of atoms in void and
that pleasure is the criterion of good and evil was outside the
mainstream of Greek philosophy and it gradually lost its influence.
Stoicism
Stoicism is that Graeco-Roman school of philosophy that was founded
by Zeno of Citium in 108 B.C. and developed great influence in
the Roman Empire where at one time it became the dominant philosophy.
Stoicism was a closely knit system of logic, metaphysics and ethics
that won many adherents with its lofty, somewhat impersonal, moral
ideal of overcoming the world by mastering oneself, living a life
in accordance with nature (that is, the rational principle within
man), and the botherhood of man.
The Stoics reacted vigorously against the Platonic dualism of the world of the Ideas apprehended by the mind and the world apprehended by the senses. Whatever exists, they argued, must be body, that which occupies space; the universe as a whole is material made up of bodies. They stressed the corporeal nature of things and held that bodies were composed of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Following the Heracliteans, they held that fire was the basic element, the stuff of all things. This fire is God, and the source from which the crasser elements, which make up the corporeal world, come forth from. The world is the body of God, and God is to the world, what the soul is to the body; God is the soul of the world. The Stoics drew a distinction within reality between active (to poioun) and passive (to paschon) principles. There is crude unformed matter, without character or quality, that is passive and there is active reason (logos) which acts upon it to form and organize it. They envisaged this active reason as spirit (pneuma) or fiery vapor; it was from this all-pervading fire that the cruder, passive matter emerged, and in the end it would be reabsorbed in a final conflagration. God is this Active Principle which contains within itself the active forms of all things that are to be; these forms being the logoi spematikoi (Rational Seeds). These "seeds" are the active forms, through the activity of which individual things come into being as the world developes. Thus Stoicism was a monism teaching that the Logos or God is the finer matter immanent in the material universe; it is a pantheistic materialism. Reason or God is totally immanent in the world; it permeates and controls every thing and every event. This lead to the strong Stoic belief in providence (pronoia), which is interpreted as fate (heimarmene). Logic as well as physics, they believed, supported this position. They argued that every proposition, for example, "Scipio will capture Numantia", is either true or false. If it is true, the event must happen, and if it is false, it cannot happen. Thus every event is determined. This position was also supported by the belief in the cyclic character of the natural order, in which each cycle is identical to all the others. This determinism is an ordering of all things according to the universal reason or logos which is in control, apparently by reason of a pneuma [spirit] that animates and controls matter. The soul of man is a portion of, or an emanation from, this all-prevading divine fire which is the Logos. It is the spirit, or warm breath pervading the body and giving it form, character, and organization. The soul is the logos in man, and the Stoics made an important distinction between the "immanent logos" (logos endiathetos), which is his reason considered merely as present in him, and the "expressed logos" (logos prophorikos), which is his reason made known by the means of the faculty of speech and self-expression.
The Stoic conception of an universal reason (logos) ordering of the physical universe led to the idea of an universal law for ordering, not only the physical universe, but human communities and the individual. An early Roman philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) introduced the idea of natural law, possibly suggested by Aristotle. Cicero pictured men living in harmonious universe controlled by a rational deity. The decisions of this being, built into the universe, constitute a natural law which stands above the positive laws of human societies, and giving them a norm or measure. Later Roman lawyers made the distinction between the jus gentium or law of the nations and jus naturale or natural law, the law which should order all nations. The determinism of the Stoics provided the most explicit support for this idea of natural law and the distinction between the jus gentium and jus naturale.
Later Stoicism preached by such men as Seneca (c.4 B.C.- A.D. 65), Epictetus (c. A.D. 55-138), and Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) was a definite and distinct system of thought, but it put the emphasis on conduct and ethics. There is a clear movement away from the traditional materialism. Seneca, for example, so stresses the divine perfection and goodness that he comes close to the conception of God as transcendent being. Marcus Aurelius also divides human nature into three parts: body, animal soul (psyche), and intelligence (nous); and expicitly states that the last of these, the ruling part in man, is not derived, as the other two parts are, from the four elements which constitutes matter (fire, air, water, earth). It is an offshot (apospasma) from God, a spiritual substance of higher origin than matter.
The Stoics defined virtue as the end or perfection of a thing. Man becomes virtuous through knowledge, which enables him to live in harmony with nature and thereby achieve a profound sense of happiness (eudaimonia) and freedom from emotion (apathia) which will insulate him the vissitudes of life. In connection with their determinism, they taught resignation or apathia, as the important virtue, and to view this as a reflection of the ultimate reason of things. The Stoic temper differs radically from the Epicurean, giving rise to the English connotations of those adjectives. This may be seen from some of the detailed advice for everyday living. For example, the Stoic wise man will take part in politics (in fact, Stoicism both directly and indirectly contributed to Roman law); he will marry and raise a family; he will not groan under torture, and in general he will suppress emotion as irrational, neither showing pity nor as a magistrate relaxing the penalties fixed by law; and, since one falsehood is just as false as any other, it follows that all sins are equally great, and all men who are not perfectly wise are arrant knaves. However, if life grows too burdensome, he may commit suicide.
Tertullian
In his apologetic writings Tertullian (c. A.D. 155-c. 222) opposed
the blending of Greek philosophy and Christianity ("What
has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy,
the Christian with the heretic?"). He held that reason
and revelation are contradictory ("I believe because
it is absurd."), and vigorously attacked the Greek philosophy,
as well as Gnosticism in particular, and paganism generally. In
this Tertullian differs from the strategy of most Christian Apologists
who emphasized, in greater or lesser degree, a harmony between
Greek philosophy and the Christian faith. On Tertullian's view,
that the Son of God died is to be believed because it is a contradictory,
and that he rose from the dead has certitude because it is impossible.
This opposition to Greek philosophy may come from his opposition
to its idealism. Tertullian clearly saw that there is a fundamental
difference between Greek idealism and Christianity. The fundamental
characteristic of Greek idealism is its dualism of mind and matter
and to regard man as in essence a rational being who is in bondage
to matter. Salvation then means spiritualisation, that is, the
deliverance of the rational part of man from its captivity in
matter and sense. Against this idea of salvation and this whole
conception of God, man and the world, Tertullian, in the name
of Christianity, objected. In his doctrine of the relation of
the body and soul, and of God and the world, he adopts a Stoic
materialism where both God and the soul are view as spiritual
matter. "Everything which exists is a bodily existence
sui generic. Nothing lacks bodily existence
but that which is non-existence"; "for who will
deny that God is a body, although 'God is a Spirit'? For Spirit
has a bodily substance of its own kind, in its own form".
Tertullian seems here to be maintaining a materialistic doctrine
and holding that God is really a material being, just as the Stoics
considered God to be material. Some, however, have suggested that
by "body" Tertullian often meant simply substance
and that when he attributes materiality to God, he is really simply
attributing substantiality to God. On this explanation, when Tertullian
says that God is a corpus sui generis, that
God is coprus and yet spiritus,
he actually means that God is a spiritual substance; his language
would be at fault, while his thought would be acceptable. One
is certainly not entitled to exclude this explanation as impossible,
but it is true that Tertullian, speaking of the human soul, says
that it must be a bodily substance since it can suffer. In his
Apology he gives as a reason
for the resurrection of the body of the wicked that "the
soul is not capable of suffering without the solid substance,
that is, the flesh". It is probably best to say that,
while Tertullian's language often implies materialism of a rather
crass sort, his meaning may not have been that which his language
would often imply. When he teaches that the soul of the infant
is derived from the father's seed like a kind of sprout, he would
seem to be teaching a clearly materialistic doctrine but this
"traducianism" was adopted partly for a theological
reason, to explain the transmission of original sin, and some
later writers who are inclined to this same view, did so for the
same theological reason, without apparently realizing the materialistic
implications of the doctrine. Tertuallian's materialism provided
a reasonable explanation for this "traducianism".
Of all of early Christian writers, the background of the ideas of Tertullian was Stoic, and he regarded the divine spirit as a highly rarified species of matter. In his defense of the Trinity, he uses a crudely materialistic language and says that "the Father is the whole substance, while the Son is derivation from and portion of the whole." The context makes it clear that "portion" (portio) is not be taken literally as implying any division or severance. When he sums the subject up, Tertullian dismisses the idea that the three Persons can be three in "status" (that is, fundamental quality), substance or power; as regards these the Godhead is indivisibly one, and the threeness applies only to the "grade" (gradus = Greek taxsis), or "aspect" (forma), or "manifestation" (species) in which the Persons are presented. Under the influence of Stoicism Tertullian held to the conception of the human soul as material. Though simple and more subtle, he regards soul as a body intimately united with and occupying the same space as the physical body to which it belongs. Here Tertullian is rejecting the Greek idealistic division of human nature into mind and body. He held firmly to the Old Testament view that God had created the whole man, body and soul; and because of the Fall, the whole man is lost; and to the primitive Christian teaching is that Christ came to save not merely a part of man, but the whole man; and in the resurrection the whole man will eternally live with God. The soul and body are so intimately united that it is impossible to speak of the soul without a body. Hence, when he speculates about the soul's origin, he can reject the current theories of pre-existence (see Origen). He had equally little use for the view that it was created by God at birth when the body came into existence (creationism). In contrast he held to a thoroughgoing "traducianist" view, that each human soul is derived along with the body with which it is united from the parent; the whole man, soul as well as body, is produced by one generative act, and the parental germ is not merely a portion of the father's body, but is charged with a definite soul-stuff. Thus all souls, along with the germ of the body, were contained in Adam, since they must all be ultimately detached portions of original soul breathed into him by God. Every soul, as Tertullian expressed it, is, as it were, a twig cut from the parent-stem of Adam and planted out as an independent tree.
Tertullian not only attacked the Greek idealism as it expressed itself in Gnosticism, but the Christian heresy of Marcion. Both Gnosticism and Marcion had rejected and attacked the Old Testament. Gnosticism rejected the Old Testament doctrine that God is the Creator of heaven and earth. Gnosticism held that the Highest God has nothing to do with the world of sense. This world of sense is produced by a lower being, the Demiurge. This being is imperfect and the best proof of this is the world that he has created; material, uncouth, impure. It is this demigod who is worship by the Jews as their God, and the Law is the expression of his will. He threatens with a curse all who transgress his will, but he is instead himself "the accursed God." This is the title that the Gnostic sect, the Ophites, applied to the Creator of the world, the God of the Jews. The Serpent which seduced men to fall from the Creator, did man a kindness; he taught them to know the distinction between good and evil and unmasked for them the real character of the Creator-God. Therefore the Ophites named their sect after the Serpent (ophis). Marcion, on the other hand, rejected the Old Testament because the God of the Old Testament is not the God revealed by Christ. The Old Testament belongs to the Jewish God, and the Christians have now no use for it; the "legal" relation to God was antiquated through Christ. Marcion held that something absolutely new and undreamed had entered the world through Christ without warning it comes as an astounding revelation from above. In sublime language Marcion describe the miracle of Divine love.
"O miracle above all miracles, rapture, might, and wonder, so that we can say nothing at all about the Gospel, nor think anything about it, nor compare it with anything!"This idea of the absolutely newness of Christianity Marcion connects with his basic idea of the difference between the God who created man, and the God who in Christ effected man's salvation. This world we live in bears clear testimony to the weakness and imperfection of its Maker; it is crude and impure. Marcion, like the Gnostics, has nothing but contempt for it. But Marcion goes beyond the Gnostics; what is true of the world in general applies equally to man; he too, body and soul, is a work of the Creator-God, and their weakness and infirmity are convincing evidence of their Maker's inferiority. In addition this Creator is also a God of Law, who holds men prisoner under his commandments and ordinances. It is against this background that the great and amazing miracle takes place. The Highest God is seized with sympathy for the misery of men, and descends Himself in Christ to bring them deliverance. In compassionate love He wills to save what another, not Him, had created. In abounding mercy He adopts the children of another. Being the Stronger, He vanquishes the Creator-God, despoils him, and lead his oppressed children to a new and better home. Marcion sees the relation of the Old Testament to the New, not as of co-ordination, but one of conflict. It is not a question of two different stages, as held by the early church, in which the earlier is included in the later, and the later is the fulfillment of the earlier, but their relationship is purely antithetical. Marcion carried this distinction into the New Testment; he recognized as genuine Christian writings only ten Pauline letters and the Gospel according to Luke, after purging these of supposed Judaising additions. Marcion found in these writings, and above all in Paul's attack on "the Law" the basis for his interpretation of Christianity. The God of the Old and the God of the New confront each other, the "righteous God" (ho dikaios theos) against the "good God" (ho agathos theos), the God of Law against the God of Love. Since "no man can serve two masters", we must refuse faith and obedience to the Creator, the God of Law, and give ourselves wholly to the "good God." The age of Law is past, and age of the Gospel has come with the rule of love. Away, then, with the Old Testament! And away with its inferior ethical principle: "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth!" Only the principle of love is true. In his opposition of the Old Testament, Marcion could make common cause with the Gnostics, and his arguments against the Creator and the God of the Jews are largely those which Gnosticism used. It is not surprising that the Early Church Fathers regarded him as a Gnostic pure and simple. More recent study of them has shown that this view of Marcion is not true. Tertullian was mistaken in lumping Marcion with the Gnostics and treating him as a Gnostic.
But Marcion's views of the God of the Old Testament needed to be opposed. But in opposing Marcion, Tertullian goes to the other extreme in complete acceptance of "the Law" and the interpretation of Christianity as the New Law. Both Testaments stand for Tertullian on the same level, seemingly unaware that the New Testament has something new, over and above the Old, to say about the Way of Salvation. He defends the Old Testament by defending it as a "Legal" relation to God and the "Legal" Way of Salvation. Marcion had asserted that Highest God acts soley on the principle of love and goodness, and that the Creator-God is solely a God of retributive justice. Tertullian replies that there is no God but the Creator, and that He is both good and just. But when there is a tension between the love and justice, God would always take the side of justice. Against Marcion Tertullian writes, "Eye for eye does our God require; but your God does an even greater injury, when he prevents an act of retaliation. For what man would not repeat a blow, if he were not struck in return?" Tertullian is oblivious that this is a criticism, not only of Marcion, but of Jesus, who says: "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, resist not him that is evil" (Matt. 5:38).
Tertullian is quite unable to conceive of fellowship with God except on the basis of justice. The only motive, in his opinion, that can surely bind man to God is fear of punishment and the hope of reward. If God is pure love and shows His goodness even to the undeserving, then there is no incentive to do good. The righteous has no advantage over the sinner. Tertullian can attach no meaning to an immediate rejection of sin, which needs no mediate, egocentric motivation, but arises directly out of the experience of God's grace. But this does not mean that Tertullian has no place for love; for Tertullian love and goodness are the primary attributes of God. Out of love God created the world; and love must always be our first word in speaking of God as He is in Himself. Owing to the Fall, He has been forced to bring another side of His nature to the fore, that is, His judging and retributive justice. but His goodness never ceases, for He defers the restoration of man and the annihilation of the devil. Originally man succumbed to the devil because the devil managed to get man's free will on his side; but now God in His goodness leaves time and space for a continued struggle, to give man opportunity in a fresh contest to defeat the enemy by the use of that same freedom of the will, which was the means of his undoing before. Thus God shows His love in giving man an opportunity, through a victory of his own, "worthily to recover his salvation." Even God's retaliatory justice is an expression of His love. Punishment serves the ends of goodness, for it deters man from evil; and that is best for him. Would not all take the evil way if they had nothing to fear? But however much Tertullian may talk in this way of the goodness of God, it is law and retributive justice that has the last word.
Tertullian's view unites this legalistic interpretation of the Old Testament with Roman moralism and jurisprudence. The result is a theology of merit whose influence on later Christianity is calamitous. The idea of retributive justice is central to his interpretation of Christianity. Nothing, he says, can more become God, as the good and righteous judge, than to elect and reprobate men according to their deserts. God simply cannot disregard man's merit; He cannot condemn those who have not deserved it, nor refrain from rebrobating those who have sinned. The Law is the proper Way of salvation. As a condition of salvation, God requires man to have fulfilled His will as revealed in the Law; He requires man to give Him complete "satisfaction" (satisfacere deo). By doing what is well pleasing to God, man has in the strictest sense of the word to merit his salvation; and the best means to this is an ascetic life. By good works man can make God his debtor. The highest degree of merit attaches to highest conceivable achievement, martyrdom. To the martyr who following His Lord takes up his cross, the following words apply: "The whole key to Paradise is thine own blood." Christianity thus has been transformed into a religion of law. But even though Tertullian's outlook has affected the Western interpretation of Christianity to a high degree, he has been excluded from the Church, owing to his attachment to Montanism, and his influence has been limited.
Neoplatonism
Between Plato and Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, there
was a period about 500 hundred years. During this time Platonism
(called Middle Platonism to distinguish it from Plato's philosophy
and Neoplatonism) developed Plato's philosophy giving it a strong
religious coloring. Emphasis was placed on understanding the divine
world and practically on finding the way to attain the greatest
possible likeness to God. Theologically it brought together the
supreme Mind that Aristotle postulated and Plato's Good, and equated
them. Thus Middle Platonism was more theistic than its forerunner.
At the top of the hierarchy of being it placed the unique Divine
Mind; they retained Plato's conception of a transcendent world
of Ideas or Forms, but interpreted them as God's thoughts. The
system of one of these Middle Platonist, Albinus (2nd century
A.D.), was more complex. He distinguished the First Mind or God,
Who is unmoved (like Aristotle's unmoved mover), from the Second
Mind or World-Intellect, through which the First Mind operates
and which is set in motion by desire of Him, and from the World-Soul.
Another Middle Platonist, Celsus, the critic of Christianity,
whom the Christian philosopher, Origen (c. A.D.185-254), attempted
to answer, argued that God cannot have created the body, or indeed
anything mortal, and only Soul can have come from God directly;
and the idea of His coming down to become a man must be rejected
as involving a change in Him, and a change necessarily for the
worse. In general the Middle Platonists were ready to allow the
existence of intermediary divinities and this view was to be expected
given the position they assigned to the supreme God. While including
God in the hierarchy of being, they nevertheless regarded Him
as utterly transcendent, only to be known in occasional flashes
of divine illumination.
In Neoplatonism this tendency to make God transcendent was pushed as far as it could go. Neoplatonism was a fully developed system, Platonic in its origin, but incorporating Aristotelian, Stoic and Oriental elements. Its founder and one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world is the Greek-speaking Egyptian, Plotinus (A.D. 205-270). His philosophy, called Neoplatonism, was basically a monism, in contrast to Plato's dualism of two worlds: the world of Ideas and the world of the senses. Plotinus conceived of reality as a vast hierarchical structure with grades or levels descending from what is beyond being to that which is below being. His highest reality, or "hypostasis", is God, which he designated as the One. The One is beyond being, and even beyond Mind (with which the Middle Platonists equated God). The One is the source from which being derives, the goal to which it ever strives to return. Plotinus describes analogically the process by which being comes from the One as emanation, just as the radiation of light comes from the sun. This emanation leaves the One unchanged and undiminished, just as the sun suffers no loss by it radiation. The One is ineffably simple and cannot be the subject of any attributes; it can be called good, but not in the sense that it possesses goodness as a quality, but that It is goodness. Immediately below the One in the hierarchy comes the second hypothesis, Mind or Thought; and below and issuing from it comes the third hypothesis, Soul. Mind comprises the world of the Ideas or Forms which the Soul contemplates in its effort to return to the One; thus multiplicity is introduced into the universe. The Soul is the causal principle, being identified with Plato's Demiurge. The Soul is divided into two: the higher Soul, which is akin to Mind and transcends the material order, and the lower soul or Nature (phusis), which is the soul of the world of sense. All individual souls are emanations from the World-Soul, and like it they have a higher element which is related to Mind, and a lower element which is directly connected with the body. Matter in itself, unilluminated by form, is darkness or non-being, and as such is evil.
Three features of Neoplatonism must be stressed. First, though Matter is evil, the visible universe reflects the intelligible order, and as such is good and should be accepted as the best possible worlds. The material world as we know it is good; it has been made and ordered by the higher soul and is held together by Nature. Second, Neoplatonism contains one element that is is quite foreign to the original Platonism and Aristotelianism; that is, the descending movement in the universe, the idea of emanation; whatever exists is an "overflow" of the One. Plato's emphasis was on the ascent of the soul to the world of the Ideas; how it happened that a Divine soul ever came down to earth and became imprisoned in a human body is a question of secondary interest to Plato, and at most it receives only mythological treatment. But for Plotinus, as for the Alexandrians generally, this question is of primary importance, maybe because of Judaism's and Christianity's doctrine of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth. In the Alexandrians view the ascent presupposes the descent and is conditioned by it; for the stages of the cosmological process (the Descent) must be reproduced, though in reverse order, by the human soul on its return to the One (the Ascent). For Plotinus the whole world process is summed up in this double conception of the out-going of all things from the One, the Divine, and the return of all things to the One. This leads to the third feature; pervading all of reality at its different levels, is the ardent desire for union with what is higher, and ultimately with the One itself. The whole universe bears the marks of Eros, the lower reaching up after the higher and striving to become like it. This striving manifests itself from sphere to sphere, "in the stars as a striving after the likeness of God; in the sun as a striving after the likeness of the stars; in nature, with its everlasting growth and decay, as a striving to become like the sun." So the human soul, fired by the heavenly Eros of which Plato spoke in his Symmposium, is compelled to undertake this ascent. There are three stages in this ascent. The first stage is one of purification; the soul must free itself from the body and its beguilements of sense-perception. At the second stage the soul rises to the level of Mind and concerns itself with philosophy and science, retaining its self-consciousness. In the final stage the soul obtains mystical union with the One; this stage is mediated by ecstasy, in which the beholder becomes one with that which he beholds; and when this occurs the awareness of the distinction between subject and object is lost. Only then shall the soul have reached the goal, when the copy has returned and has been taken up into the Original. Then the soul has found rest, for it has found the ultimate object of its longing and desire. In the present life the state of ecstasy is rarely attained, if ever, and is bound to be short-lived. Plotinus, as we are informed by his biographer Porphyry, was himself granted this experience four times only in five years.