I’m taking up a series of entries after several months…
Hold on for a wild trip.
I’ll speak mostly about some pagan ideas which have affected Christian thought, sometimes being adopted for valid reasons at the time. After all, the pagans knew many truths and gave them to us. It takes time, contemplation, and exploration of empirical reality to decide which of the pagan teachings are correct and which are in error. But some pagan teachings are unavoidable without the self-revelations of God we find in the Person of the incarnate Son of God. Unfortunately, some of those teachings are falsely viewed as part of Christian revelation.
1. The great pagan thinkers, and most pagan forms of religion, have some sort of intuition that man is destined for life beyond the grave. Given the limitations of their ideas of time and eternity, substance and existence, Cosmos and God, they could only see that happening if man is inherently immortal, that is, if man has an immortal soul.
To a certain extent, this idea of the soul is the result of historical accidents. A pagan knowing of modern science and mathematics might have a different idea of the nature of man and of the nature of time vs. eternity.
To a Christian, the situation is not simple and there is not a a priori truth about life after death. Christians are certainly not bound to give up the idea of life after death if we discover we are ‘only’ physical creatures in this life. We were promised bodily resurrection by the Son of God. Jesus Christ seems to have left it to us to come to some better or worse understanding of how it is that an apish creature could live for time without end on the other side of the grave.
2. The pagans — and many Christians — have an idea of an all-powerful God who is strangely constrained to act in ways well-defined by certain human ways of thought. The funny thing is that those ways of thought, coming from great thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, were derived partially from an understanding of mathematics which is quite limited by modern standards. Among other anomalies: Christian theologians have a very inadequate understanding of infinity compared to modern mathematicians. The eternity and the infinity of the mainstream Christian God are awfully small compared to the possibilities raised by modern transfinite set theory.
These problems, and some similar ones involving the nature of physical matter and also space, were also historical accidents to some extent. I don’t know what a Plato would make of modern science, assuming he didn’t become a Christian or a Jew.
3. A pagan would say that God needs substance for existence. Sometimes, He is seen as being made of the same substance as the Cosmos but usually He is made of some divine substance that is little different from the stuff of the human soul.
I see no way out of this trap without the possibility of a God who is truly all-powerful, not just working with being but actually creating all being but His own. But that becomes possible only if His Being is radically different from the sort of being we can directly imagine from the things of Creation.
A God who can take up into Himself, by way of His Son, the nature of a creature, is not a God who is made of a substance which is opposed to the stuff of His Creation. He is not a God made of anything directly analogical to the stuff of His Creation.
I think this to be a real sticking point for pagans and for Christians who try to adopt pagan ideas of substance. In theory, Christians were allowed to escape this trap because of the God’s self-revelations in the incarnation of His Son. I’ll discuss this more in next posting, but the real advantage of Christianity is the difficulty of believing that God could take on a creaturely nature. This should have broken the Christian thinkers free of the habit of thinking of God in terms of substance.
4. In general, pagans have no reason whatsoever to truly separate God and Creation. The one seeming counter-example, Plato’s dialogue “The Timaeus”, resulted in a God who is so much different from His Creation that no direct interaction is possible. His God, Father and Creator of all, was not even truly aware of the Cosmos which was created by a intermediary god, the Demiurge.
Let me summarize by re-phrasing and merging the above comments. If you have two radically different substances, such as the thing-like stuff of Creation and the divine stuff of God, it’s not really easy to understand how those substances could interact. In a similar fashion, it’s hard to understand how living beings of incompatible substances can even be aware of the existence of each other. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine a being of divine substance somehow ‘inhabiting’ a human body and it’s pretty much impossible to understand how physical substance and soul-substance can come together to form one being.
If God is made of divine stuff that is radically different from the stuff of this universe, how can He interact with it while remaining invisible in Himself? Maybe we can imagine such a God creating this universe and casting it off to make its own way, but how can we imagine such a God in constant interaction with this universe? True, we can imagine a God of divine stuff as sitting on a throne in Heaven. He is a white-bearded elderly man looking benignly down upon a Creation which interests Him but lies outside of Him in such a way that He must send angels to carry His messages or to execute His will. In fact, we can even imagine that the Creation of such a God could be stolen from Him by rebellious angels.
Christians have a way out of this problem. St. Thomas Aquinas laid out the path over seven hundred years ago. That path was said to be lost after the death of John of St. Thomas who lived a generation or so after his master. And then it was re-discovered a little more than a century ago. It was Etienne Gilson who reconstructed the history of this lost solution to a deep problem. In doing so, He set out clearly the problems with substance-based views of being, including those of pagan theologies and most Christian theologies.