Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small

Recently, Pope Benedict XVI caused a bit of a stir in his address at the University of Regensburg (Sept. 12, 2006). I’ll address the true thrust of his speech and not those remarks which were taken out of context. Specifically, I intend to work in line with his stated intention:

“The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application.”

Along those lines, I will argue for an enlargement of Hellenistic metaphysics as the title of this entry states. I believe that this enlargement is possible because of empirical knowledge, knowledge which points to the reality which shapes the human mind and may shape the human being into a truer image of God. My belief in this regard is shaped by modern scientific knowledge as well as the plausible forms of speculative knowledge based on the rapid progress in physics, mathematics, geology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience over the past few centuries. We also have learned more than some people would appreciate from the human events which have occurred since the days of the ancient Greek thinkers. Even in literature, we now see greater possibilities for the movement of the human mind and spirit than the Greeks could have realized.

All of this knowledge can be pulled into a surprisingly coherent Christian worldview if we have faith that God truly is all-powerful, that the physical universe is the way He intended it to be and not the result of some primordial fall from a state of grace. With this faith, we can begin to understand the universe, which becomes the world when seen as morally ordered, as a place of linear development and not the static or cyclical cosmos which was part and parcel of Hellenistic metaphysics. This is not to deny reason nor even to deny the truths given us by the ancient Greek thinkers. It is to say that Hellenistic metaphysics is too small for the God of Jesus Christ, a Creator who has shown through modern empirical knowledge that He is not limited to the systems of mathematics and logic which gave birth to the thoughts of Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle. He is not even limited to the systems of mathematics and logic which gave birth to the thoughts of Cantor and Einstein and Planck, Heisenberg and Schrodinger and Dirac, Godel and Turing and Chaitin.

Hellenistic metaphysics is too small for modern empirical knowledge and for modern speculative knowledge such as the theories which make partial sense of our physical universe and those which have expanded our ideas of what number is and what mathematics is. And those physical and mathematical theories are entangled in surprising ways, though I only note that so the reader doesn’t think there is an ultimate division between speculative, or theoretical, knowledge and empirical knowledge. I addressed the issue of human knowledge in my first published book, “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, and went more deeply into the subject in a draft I just finished, “Four Sorts of Knowledge: Revealed Knowledge, Speculative Knowledge, Scientific Empirical Knowledge, Practical Empirical Knowledge”. Ultimately, the only two sorts of knowledge are: knowledge of God and knowledge of Creation. Even that split might be somewhat artificial from God’s viewpoint but it’s a necessary division in knowledge from a creaturely viewpoint. But the four-fold division in knowledge is forced by our ignorance and by the frailties of the human intellect.

The Greeks gave us much we should appreciate and much that underlies even the most radical forms of modern speculative knowledge, that is, the more rational forms of modern speculative knowledge and those which are empirically supported. I’ll not try to differentiate between speculations formed by rebellion against what is and speculations formed by efforts to move with the grain of the universe, though I will say that some thinkers, notably Nietzsche and Foucault are examples of thinkers whose books give interesting mixtures of both false insights and profound insights. Some other famous radical thinkers of recent centuries appear to worth reading only as examples of human pathologies.

Let me turn to an area where powerful forms of reasoning have clearly led to an expansion well beyond Greek thought. Modern mathematics has not proven that Euclidean geometry was wrong but it has proven that it is not the only possible geometry. There is plenty of evidence that our universe, at the large-scale, does not have a physical structure fully describable in Euclidean terms though the true structure is not yet known. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that the questions about the geometry of this universe have been so complicated and complexified that it seems unlikely that we can even settle on a single geometry for all of physical reality. Any broad and realistic view of physical reality now involves multiple forms of geometry to describe that one reality. Roger Penrose’s book “The Road to Reality” is a good example of such a view — that book is a tangled maze of geometries and various mathematical systems which must be employed to describe that one reality. Greek metaphysics, and all the non-Thomistic metaphysical systems I know of, assumed that physical reality must be describable by one speculative system of thought employing one mathematical model, or at least a single family of models. Now it seems that reality is unified but no one human system of thought can cover even the purely physical aspects of that reality.

Concrete reality does not seem to be the sort of entity which is being built the way a child builds a bridge with an erector set or even the more complex way an engineer builds a bridge in a busy city. Concrete reality is rational and well-ordered but it’s rationality seems to be more complex than the thoughts that can be credited to the Greeks, though they are the fathers of the later thinkers who have expanded the range of human thought. It has mathematical aspects but those aspects are far beyond anything the Greeks could have recognized as mathematics, though Euclid can be seen as the father of Cantor and Cauchy, Gauss and Kolmogorov.

In the same way, Plato and Aristotle can be seen as the fathers of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. It was Aquinas in particular who gave us the foundations of a truer Christian metaphysics which seems to be immensely greater in scope than anything the Greeks could have imagined. St. Thomas Aquinas expanded the possibilities of metaphysics more than he probably expected by noting that metaphysics uses the specific sciences and by endorsing Aristotle’s claim that the human mind is shaped by its physical environments, though even Aquinas didn’t suspect there was also a shaping of the human mind, in a species sense, over an immense amount of time. It’s interesting that it was the simple Christian faith and the empirical leanings of Aquinas which were responsible for his most important insights, though he used the disciplined forms of reasoning he inherited from the Greeks by way of Christian Neoplatonists.

The differences between Greek metaphysics and modern metaphysics bear some similarity to the differences between Greek mathematics and modern mathematics. By this I mean that the enlargement of scope creates a variety of seeming contradictions that mask our Greek heritage to those who prefer reductionistic or surface views. There was a seeming contradiction between Euclidean geometry and others discovered in the late 1700s and early 1800s but that was caused by Euclid’s fifth axiom which he knew to be doubtful: parallel lines never meet and never diverge. In fact, consistent geometries can be developed using other assumptions about the relationships between lines that are ‘parallel’.

In a roughly similar way, Greek metaphysics assumes that any existing entity has to have some underlying substance at least analogically similar to creaturely substance, the stuff of this universe. This is because substance is considered primary, the real point of those seemingly silly proposals that all stuff is made from water or air or fire or earth or perhaps some combination of those four. In the Greek view, and this is natural without revelation, substance is necessary and has a property we call ‘existence’. At least some of the ancient Greek thinkers were troubled by the results of their own unconscious assumption that substance is primary in that way — the contradictions between Plato’s dialog “The Timaeus” and his non-religious, metaphysical dialogs is the clearest signs of the fears mostly suppressed by the Greeks. That assumption of the primacy of substance was unconscious just because they had no reason to believe there were any alternatives to that assumption. All that they knew was made of substance or was the result of relationships between entities made of substance. Modern sciences, especially physics, have given us serious reason to raise relationships to the primary status. Substance is necessary for creatures to exist but some sort of relationship, primary God’s love, brings about some act-of-existence which precedes that substance.

Let’s be fair to the Greeks. The Hebrews received the revelation that God is ‘I-am’ at about 1000BC or so and we Christians had that revelation from the start. We even had the revelation who was the incarnate Son of God as well as the revelation that “God is love”. We were even told that God loved us before the world existed. And yet neither we nor the Jews ever asked if maybe relationships could be primary and substantial being might be brought into existence by relational acts. At that, substance seems to be necessary for us to have the limited independence from God that allows us the freedom to become His companions.

We knew the world was brought into existence by God’s love and yet we speak as if substance is primary. As if God Himself must be made of stuff, divine stuff to be sure but still stuff. As a consequence of our faith in the primacy of substance, we believed that many aspects and relationships required a different stuff than flesh and blood, dirt and water. Mind-stuff and soul-stuff were purer and more ethereal substances, but they were substances. God was divine stuff and our thoughts were mind-stuff.

No. With less reason than the Greeks, we literalized relationships, including those which appear as ‘mind-like’ or ‘soul-like’ aspects. God is made of stuff. He looks like a dignified but gentle old man who sits on a throne. His Son sits at His side while a Divine Dove hovers over their heads. The three of them looked down upon countless numbers of human souls or minds entrapped in stuff not good enough for that soul-stuff or mind-stuff.

The Greeks can be said to have discovered disciplined speculative reason and also disciplined ways to investigate reality. They also built a prison for themselves — and for us. Plato likely suspected that. In “The Timaeus”, he claims only the God, the Father and Creator of all is truly immortal. Seeing God as necessary being, Plato was on his way to thinking about God in non-substantial terms. After all, it’s hard — at least for me — to think of any substance as having necessary existence, as being inherently immortal. Seeing God as a Creator who made all else from nothing, he had a hint of God as His own Act-of-being, as the cause of all existing things by way of acts-of-being. But Plato seems to have put aside his religious instincts expressed so powerfully in that dialog to return to his life as a mainstream Greek metaphysician.

In any case, the Greeks deserve great praise for laying the foundations for disciplined human thought. Plato deserves a special round of applause for seeing what can only be seen by way of revelation from God — so I believe. That means I believe that Plato was a special friend of the God he didn’t really know. At the same time we acknowledge our debt to the Greeks and their successors, many Christian or Jewish, we need to break out of the prison of substantialism or essentialism (as most philosophers would call it) and see the importance of relationships, especially of God’s primary relationships to us which I call acts-of-being.