Column 03/11/2023: The Trinitarian Controversy as the Culmination of Ancient Platonism

The Trinitarian Controversy as the Culmination of Ancient Platonism

Recently, while engaged in scholarly work, I suddenly had a moment of revelation where I felt, for the first time, that I understood ancient Platonism and how Christian Trinitarianism both arose out of and resolved the conflicts within it. It was frankly an incredible high, which has since faded into the common light of day, but I am now attempting to relive it by trying in labored fashion to express what I saw then.

What follows is best understood as "pseudo-scholarship": arising out of my academic research, but written quickly in a slapdash fashion without references, to sum up my own reflections on many, many hours of reading and research on these topics.

So: here goes.

What is Platonism?

The more reading I've done in ancient philosophy, the more merely perplexed I have become at the version of "Platonism" that is taught to Americans in schools and universities, and that indeed was taught to me. In this myth, as we might call it in a nod to the dialogues, Plato was a man solely notable for deciding that, for some strange reason, every object of our experience was a distant shadow of a perfect, idealized "form" existing somewhere in the sky, in a beautiful land where the ideal cow cavorts happily with the ideal fingernail, the ideal triangle, and the ideal jurisprudential reasoning. At this point, students of whatever age nod gravely, and then spend the rest of their life sharing Platonic pick-up joke memes.

There is nothing corresponding to this description in ancient philosophy, let alone ancient Platonism, let alone Plato himself. Indeed, it rather badly mangles two central theses of ancient philosophy, (1) that perfection is necessarily tied to unity, not to indefinite plurality, and (2) that most objects of our experience are tied up with such plurality and with change and corruption and so not compatible with ideality or perfection as such. The question of "the forms"--what precisely Plato meant by them, what they correspond to, how they exist--is a complex one, but it is nearly always wrongly contextualized by modern thinkers. Modern philosophy and thought, put simply, is obsessed with the problem of identity, sameness, difference, and definition: and so modern people tend to interpret Plato primarily or solely in terms of this question. "The forms" becomes one more option (a very simplistic option) in a long list of ways to account for these problems.

Ancient philosophy was not, for the most part, interested in these questions. Rather, "the forms" in whatever form form (I am proud of this sentence) one part of a larger picture meant to account for and answer the chief questions with which ancient philosophers were preoccupied. While it may appear somewhat presumptuous to put nearly a thousand years of philosophy into a one-sentence nutshell, I believe these preoccupations may fairly be summarized by the question of how to reconcile the multiple, divided, conflictual, material world of our experience with the concept and reality of being. The Parmenidean challenge--that necessarily changeless, timeless, unified being is by definition contradictory to the changing, temporal, divided world of experience--defines ancient philosophy as much as or more than the Cartesian challenge--that the existence and understanding of the exterior world and other people is dependent on and potentially contradictory to the scattered, interior experiences of the individual mind--defines modern philosophy. 

The forms, where they are present at all in Plato, are present as one part of a larger discourse on how the world of our experience may be generated from changeless, eternal being, or, put alternately, how consideration of the world of our experience can lead to consideration of changeless, eternal being. Whatever forms at various point in his dialogues Plato may have postulated, in practice the main forms discussed in ancient philosophy are the mathematical and metaphysical forms: precisely because they serve as key linchpins in this exitus/reditus process. As Plato explains in the Timaeus and elsewhere, the entire world of material experience can be generated or derived using only a few base mathematical and geometrical forms; and as he explains in the Symposium and Republic, transcendental forms like the good or the beautiful can lead in only a few steps from individual objects of experience to the summit of being itself.  

Modern philosophers are often perplexed by the degree to which explicit discussion of the forms other than the mathematical and transcendental seems to disappear from Middle and Neo-Platonist discourse. Yet this is perfectly logical when considered in relation to the preoccupations of ancient philosophy--especially when coupled with the Aristotelean polemical challenge to more extreme versions of the forms doctrine and explication of substance or ousia as an alternate route by which to connect the entities of experience, and especially living beings, to being itself.

This is a somewhat unnecessarily long proem for my actual point: which is that while Plato set the terms and the goals and many of the methods for achieving this essential task of ancient philosophy, he left many ambiguities and unresolved questions behind him that would define the next thousand years of philosophical conflict and debate. 

The Platonic Questions

In many ways, it would be truer to call all ancient philosophy Platonism than to treat it as one school among many. While there was a real divide in antiquity between schools and thinkers who aimed at comprehensive fidelity to the texts of Plato and schools and thinkers who felt more free to take liberties with said texts and introduce their own sources and authorities, Plato's texts were the more or less fixed poles around which ancient philosophical reasoning and debate took place. 

These texts, though, are extremely ambiguous, centering around speculative constructions, debates, and "myths," and also on the face of it do not agree among themselves on many important questions. Organized philosophy, then, very quickly went through a series of schisms, dividing into a dizzying variety of groupings, sects, or (in the original sense of the term) "heresies." 

These debates can be summed up through ambiguities in the Platonic corpus, as well as through the questions brought up by the basic dichotomy of (1) world of experience and (2) changeless being and the movement from one to the other. 

Here is an attempt to sum up some of those questions:

(1) How is the summit of being, which we may simplify by calling (in Jewish/Christian language) God, most essentially defined?

Lurking in the background of ancient philosophy is the base Parmenidean concept of being, defined by total absence of change, time, and multiplicity. Even this base definition, though, possesses a significant, basic ambiguity: namely, whether being is fundamentally defined by its negative disjunct or contradiction with the world of experience, or rather by some positive concept or content, such as fullness, completeness, etc. This may seem a rather academic distinction, but it has significant effects when one tries to (as Parmenides did not) reconcile the existence of being with the actual existence (in at least some minimal sense) of the world of experience.

While "heretical" from the point of view of the Platonic academy, one answer to this basic question was the Stoic treatment of God as a sort of material substance or body, existing in an eternal, cyclical succession of states. This allows God to be in a fundamental way timeless, changeless, and unified while eliminating the disjunct between God and the world of experience by incorporating it "into" God as a series of trivial, non-substantial, temporary changes in shape, density, etc. While outwardly opposed in many ways, this was essentially also the move made by Epicureanism, which postulated an infinity of atoms and void and made all objects of experience the illusory result of accidental changes in position within this one, changeless entity.

Another "heretical" alternative was the later Gnostic treatment of the highest God as a totally empty, contentless, undetermined will. In a sense, this embraces the totally negative side of the Parmenidean description of being, eliminating all positive affirmations that might connect God to the world of experience, while making the world of experience the culmination of a long, conflictual mythic-cum-genealogical account of divine births, miscarriages, and failures at self-realization.

Mainstream Platonism (into which Aristoteleanism was largely incorporated) embraced neither of these extremes, instead defining God's relationship with the cosmos by way of some concept of transcendence, higher versus lower, better versus worse, complete versus incomplete, without destroying either term or assimilating one to the other. This, though, retained the challenge of Parmenides to a much greater degree than alternate systems.

(2) How does God give rise to the world of our experience?

Plato gives at various points in his corpus accounts connecting the world of experience with a higher, unifying principle, by way of "participation" in transcendental forms, by way of the generation and combination of mathematical forms, by way of the "enlightening" of the noetic cosmos by the "Sun" of the Form of the Good, or once, in the Timaeus, by way of a narrative account of the creation and fashioning of the cosmos by an active, rational "craftsman" or Demiurge. 

These accounts, however, all involve some kind of "adding onto" the basic concept of Parmenidean being, in a way that introduces at least the possibility of disjunct or contradiction. They also are somewhat ambiguous and in tension with each other. The sun gives off radiance "automatically," so to speak, without any particular willful or intellective activity; the Demiurge practices creation as a craft, actively deciding on the particular details of his cosmos while accounting for the limitations of his material; mathematical forms are combined and derived deductively and intellectually and therefore in some mind or minds; Beauty itself is participated in and desired by objects of experience, but without it being clear whether it was given to them or how they have come to participate in it.

(3) Can activity, creativity, and/or intellective thought be ascribed to God directly, or does it have to be ascribed to a lesser entity or entities?

As already referenced, the Platonic corpus features a large number of spiritual entities which are treated, at least in the context of the particular dialogue, as ultimate, and therefore make good candidates in later thinking for the summit of being. In the Republic, there is the Form of the Good and hence Sun enlightening the spiritual, intellectual "noetic" cosmos. In the Symposium, there is the Form of the Beautiful, changeless, eternal, and complete, and participated in by beautiful objects of our experience. In the Timaeus, there is the Demiurge, the generous, intellectually active craftsman of the cosmos, and/or his model, a "living being," and/or a supply of "material" on which the craftsman works. In the Philebus, there is a cosmic "nous" or intellect that is the cause of the world of experience. These are postulates or metaphors rather than straightforwardly defined concepts, and any number of them can be combined and/or eliminated altogether depending on the underlying assumptions of the interpreter. 

It is these texts, in particular, that led to the major divergence within the Platonic tradition, between those thinkers that tended to combine the various entities into one intellectual, active creator-God, and those that tended to separate them out into divergent, hierarchically-arranged beings.

(These were not precisely separate schools so much as tendencies present to varying degrees within various thinkers. Plutarch, to take only one example at random, tended to conflate the Demiurge with the Form of the Good and so treat God as an active, intellective craftsman, but at the same time made of the "material" of the Timaeus a kind of passive, evil deity not deriving from God but existing eternally and limiting his generous activity). 

The basis for this divergence, though, was the questions posed above, about the essential nature of the deity and its connection with the cosmos. On the one hand, thinkers who, in keeping with some of the obvious Platonic texts, sought to identify the summit of being with the fullness of intellective activity, creativity, and craftsmanship, found it difficult to explicate these qualities without seeming to compromise the complete being-in-itself of God. For God to be essentially an intellect, he needed something to think about, whether that was, as most Platonists would have it, the eternal Forms generated by his own mind, or, as Aristotle would have it, merely and solely his own self. For God to be essentially creative and a craftsman, as the Timaeus would have it, he needed both a model and some material to act on; and this naturally led to the positing, in contradiction to the plain text of the Timaeus, of an eternal cosmos co-existing with the deity, or, at the very least, an eternal material substance on which God would eternally act or (as Plutarch would have it) eternally be in conflict with and dominate. In one way or other, these systems tended to incorporate God within the cosmos or to raise the cosmos to the level of God--in a manner far from comfortable to advocates of changeless, complete Parminidean being.

For the other party, this was simply unacceptable. A God defined by opposition to the world of experience in its totality could not be called a craftsman or engage in activity or be directly participated in by objects of experience or even reason actively so as to generate, hold, and make use of mathematical forms, or, put simply, exist in the same or even an analogous sense to the beings of our experience. He must be above or beyond being, beyond intellect, beyond activity, at best (as Plotinus would have it) the sun automatically radiating and so making possible intellectual activity in beings below him. 

Hence, the connection between such a deity and the cosmos must consist not of a relatively straightforward process of deduction or craftsmanship, but rather of the unknowable generation or emanation of those lesser entities actually responsible for these processes. Rather than the question being how being in its fullness might lead to being in lesser degrees, or unity might lead to multiplicity, or a generous, creative craftsman might create a particular work of craft, the essential question of philosophy becomes how something beyond being might lead to being, how something beyond reason might lead to reason, how something beyond unity might lead to oneness, or, in short, how the sun might give rise to a craftsman.

Hence, in different ways and to different degrees, the elaborate mythological turn of Gnosticism, and hence the increasingly complex hierarchical-cosmic and ritual turns of Neo-Platonism. 

Jewish Platonism and the Logos

Ancient philosophers were generally impressed by the degree of convergence between the Jewish tradition and Platonic philosophy--a convergence leading to many theories about Plato possibly having derived his thought, at least in part, from Moses. As the result both of this apparent convergence and the general permeation of Judaism by Hellenistic culture and thought, Jews began relatively early to incorporate Platonic and philosophical thinking into their interpretations of their religion, while at least some philosophers incorporated Mosaic metaphors or interpretations into their philosophy. 

Jewish Platonism, though, from the beginning tended by its very nature to one side of the divergence discussed above. The God of the Torah is first and foremost an active, intellective craftsman and creator-deity, a virtual twin to the Demiurge of the Timaeus. He is also, in Exodus as interpreted by later thinkers, identified with being itself. Finally, he is not merely a creator-deity, but a cultic deity, the direct recipient of and responder to prayers and sacrifices. 

This latter was by far the biggest divergence between the two traditions. While Plato may be easily read as treating God as an active craftsman and nous, like virtually all pagan philosophers he found it impossible to countenance the participation of the highest deity in the world of cult and cultic ritual, and hence, in the Symposium, introduced the intermediary class of daimones as the go-betweens between the actual intellectual gods and the material, sacrificial world of cult. While the cultic world of the Torah is a highly rationalized, simplified one, far from the polytheistic chaos of Greek religion, this nevertheless was probably the largest factor preventing a complete unity between Jewish thought and ancient philosophy--at least until the ritual turn and exoticizing trends of late Neo-Platonism.

However, while Jewish thought tended by its inmost nature to treat the summit of being as an existing, generous, creative craftsman and cultic deity, it was not immune from the tensions of Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. On the one hand, later Judaism tended increasingly to emphasize the daimon-like presence of intermediary angels, involving them directly in cultic and ritual tasks and active involvement with the cosmos, even to the point of ascribing such essential roles as the delivering of the Torah to them. Most important for the confluence of Platonism and Judaism, however, was the figure of Divine Wisdom or Logos as it emerged in Jewish wisdom literature and was later interpreted by Jewish Platonists.

The figure clearly precedes any contact with Platonism as such. It rather derives principally from the Near Eastern genre of proverbial literature about wisdom, particularly in the sense of the highly active, practical prudence necessary to make decisions about life, rulership, and happiness. In producing their own versions of this literature, Jewish sages naturally related it to their cultic deity and so emphasized God's nature as an active, intellective being involved in fashioning the cosmos and ruling it in a manner capable of being obeyed, looked to, and imitated by human rulers and sages.

At the same time, however, Jewish sages did not merely describe God as wise, but increasingly delineated a distinct figure of feminine, personified Divine Wisdom. This was likely in large part under the influence of the popular traditions of Israel, which had long, like many cultic traditions of the Near East, made use of the figure of a female divine consort for their masculine warrior/ruler deity--a practice widely and harshly condemned by the central literary, priestly, and prophetic traditions that make up the bulk of the Old Testament. 

By portraying Divine Wisdom as a feminine divine consort, however, Jewish sages incorporated this heterodox tradition in a more rationalizing, "orthodox" way. God would remain the singular, monotheistic monarch-creator deity, but now he would create and fashion "in" and "through" and out of love and desire for his Wisdom, while Israel's cultic activity could be portrayed in terms of the presence and activity of Wisdom on earth and the interplay between her and God. Finally, and perhaps most cogently, the portrayal of Divine Wisdom as a feminine divine consort allowed the sages themselves to make use of pre-existing themes and poetic narratives of the human sage's desire for and pursuit and possession of Wisdom-as-woman, narratives not easy, at least rhetorically and poetically, to reconcile with the legislator-warrior God of the Torah. 

The figure of Wisdom, then, was emphatically not originally a Platonic active-intellective intermediary for a distant God beyond such things. It did, however, feature almost as many basic ambiguities of interpretation as the Platonic tradition. Was Divine Wisdom distinct in fact from God, or merely a poetic way of referring to the creative aspects of God? Was she fundamentally "lower" than God, an inferior product made use of in the creation of the cosmos, or was she in fact his intrinsic, divine Wisdom itself? Was she in any sense another deity like the divine consorts she was modeled after? 

Later expositions of Wisdom, such as those of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, naturally came to incorporate Platonic concepts and vocabulary--most basically by way of the base Socratic meaning of "philosophy" as the love of and pursuit of Wisdom, another remarkable point of convergence between the Platonic and Jewish traditions--without necessarily resolving these basic ambiguities. In the Wisdom of Solomon, she is described, in highly Greek vocabulary, as a "vapor of the power of God, and a certain pure emanation of his glory"--thus implying both distinction and some continuity, a la Stoicism, in substance. 

In Philo of Alexandria, this process was taken even further with the more clearly active, intermediary figure of the Logos, a Greek translation and masculinization of the figure of Wisdom. Like Platonic Demiurgic figures, the Logos for Philo was not merely a means or inspiration for God's creative and ruling activity, but the direct, active divine creator and ruler himself. Still, within the more emphatic monotheizing traditions of Judaism, Philo was not able to produce as clear and direct a divide between his summit of being and his active, demiurgic creator as pagan Platonists. While the Logos could undertake the creative and directive aspects of divine activity, these aspects could not be simply subtracted from the purview of the God of Israel without doing utter violence to the whole tradition. Thus, while the Philonic Logos is fairly clearly distinguished from God and in relation to him, he also embodies essential features of the God of Israel. 

Depending on how precisely one interprets him, then, the Logos can be seen merely as the creative, directive, rational aspects of God himself--or their contingent, external manifestation, in contradistinction to God-in-himself. Philo thus attempts to rationalistically interpret and reconcile both Platonism and the Torah at the very real risk of introducing a schism within the Jewish tradition between the cultic God of Israel and the true God-in-himself. 

Whatever precisely Philo and his followers meant by this (and I do not pretend to know), this concept of Logos-Wisdom meant that by the time of the New Testament, the essential Platonic questions discussed above had been to a large extent incorporated into the Jewish tradition.

The Trinitarian Controversy

Here, I deliberately elide the question of how, precisely, the New Testament texts engage with this tradition. By the time of the 4th century, however, the figure of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God had been clearly and totally identified with the Hellenistic-Jewish figure of Wisdom-Logos, and a divine Trinity long since incorporated into liturgy and sacrament. The 4th century Trinitarian controversy, then, was primarily and decisively a debate over interpretation, an attempt to define clearly and for all time the nature and meaning of deity, its relation to the cosmos, and its unity and/or multiplicity.

Within Platonic, Jewish, and Christian tradition alike, a relative distinction had been accepted between, on the one hand, divine being in its Parminidean sense, in opposition to time, change, and multiplicity, and divine intellection, creativity, and activity. For some within these traditions, this relative opposition could be reconciled sufficiently as aspects of one divine entity; to others, this relative opposition was better separated into multiple distinct entities. This opposition could go to different degrees of fundamentalism.

What the Arian controversy did for ancient philosophy was to produce a much sharper and more immediate and irreconcilable divergence, thanks both to the developing sophistication of Neo-Platonic philosophy and Christian theology and to Christian social and ecclesiastical and ritual structures, which necessitated a far greater degree of clarity and definition by thinkers of all stripes. 

On the one hand, "Arianism" in its various manifestations attempted to canonize and nuance the concept of a fundamental divide between God as the summit of being-in-itself and creative, intellective activity. In Eusebius of Caesarea, the Son of God is explicitly the Platonic Demiurge as interpreted by Plotinus and others--the active, intellective, creative craftsman and ruler of the cosmos. The Father, meanwhile, is the God-in-himself entirely outside of the cosmos and beyond both being and activity, taking no part in the creation or ruling of the world and thus preserving in their purity the antimonies of Parminidean being. The generation of the former by the latter is thus "incomprehensible," preceding from no intellectual principle other than an arbitrary, non-intellectualist concept of will. In its foremost exponents, this system was breathtaking in its comprehensiveness, incorporating the entirety of Platonism and the entirety of the Jewish and Christian traditions in one nuanced presentation of ultimate deity-in-itself somehow, unimaginably, giving rise to an active creator deity who in turn gives rise to the world of experience.

To meet this compelling resolution of the ambiguities of the Christian and Platonic traditions, the proponents of Trinitarianism were forced to attempt to resolve the ambiguities themselves, along highly different lines. 

Taken to its extremes, there were, in a sense, only two basic resolutions to the problem of reconciling divine being with creativity and activity. The one was exemplified by Plotinus and the "Arians": that is, by clearly separating out the two as contradictory antimonies and providing a mysterious account of how a thing might arise from its opposite. The other was eventually taken, in its emphatic form, by the Christian Trinitarians: to make of divine creativity and activity not a marginal but an essential aspect of God, incorporating it fully within the separated Parminidean realm of being-in-itself.

Put simply, Christian Trinitarianism resolved the questions of Platonism by asserting (1) that God in himself was not merely negative but possessed definite, positive content defined not merely in opposition to multiplicity, change, and generation, but by specific modes of transcendence and prefiguring of these qualities. In other words, Trinitarianism resolves the Parminidean challenge by clearly specifying the ways in which being-in-itself is separate from the world of experience while also transcendently incorporating and therefore being capable of giving rise to that world. 

In particular, Trinitarianism specifies in response to (2) that God-in-himself is eternally and necessarily the summit of creative, intellective, active being, who has thus necessarily already achieved an eternal, totally successful creative act by fully and rationally reproducing the fullness of being-in-itself as a Trinity of divine persons; or in other words, that God-in-himself transcendentally embodies the complete creative act divided in the Timaeus between divine model, demiurgic craftsman, material, and cosmos. Thus God has no need of either an eternal cosmos or an eternal material to fulfill his creative nature, and his production of the cosmos can be understood as a reasonable, but inherently non-necessary and contingent outgrowth of that nature. 

Finally, per (3), there is no necessity and no reason to posit separate, lesser beings to act or reason or craft or participate in cultic relationships on behalf of God. Since God is the fullness of creativity, activity, and communicativeness, created beings can participate in that fullness as intermediaries in a lesser sense, but never take his place. At the same time, such relationships can be in a sense incorporated within God-in-himself. The Son may be understood as Logos-Wisdom since he is the eternal completed act of divine reasoning, while Logos-Wisdom can be treated through social relationships like Son or feminine consort since he is in fact the archetype and fulfillment of generosity, generativity, desire, and the interpersonal and social as such.

In resolving these Platonic questions along certain lines, Christian Trinitarianism also achieved a reconciliation of sorts between the Jewish traditions of the Torah and Platonism, by affirming the being-in-itself of Platonism and ancient philosophy as at the very heart of Mosaic revelation while making of the active, creative, cultic, ruler-warrior God of Israel a reasonable outgrowth and unfolding of God-in-himself's own inner being--and in fact pushing these characteristics even farther by affirming God's Incarnation as a human Messiah immediately and fully communicating divine life and love to human beings. "God is love" is today treated as a truism, but is in fact a masterful summation of the revolutionary aspects of Christian Trinitarianism, making an achieved generous, communicative, creative, interpersonal act the definition of the separated, Parminedean God-in-himself.

This culmination took many decades and centuries to work out in its entirety, and is arguably still being worked out--and it came into existence only through conflict with the rival comprehensive systems of "Arianism" and pagan Neo-Platonism. 

Still, with its decisive victory over its rivals, made possible and secured by the novel and very non-philosophical social and ecclesiastical and political institutions of the Church, philosophy entered a decisively new phase. The effects of this revolution are still very much with us today.