On A Theological Preference for Materialism: A Response
“…each of these points of view has its good reason and its own value in the order to which it applies… what matters therefore is to know how to put each aspect into its proper hierarchical place, and not to try to carry it over into a domain in which it would no longer have any valid significance.”
Rene Guenon [1]
My friend Cantus, who is a philosophical materialist, and whom I have responded to before, wrote, in my opinion, an insightful post on the theological justification for his materialism. Cantus is a Christian, an Anglo-Catholic to be precise, and this, as he notes, seems, to many people to contradict his materialism. He takes Christian Platonism as a direct competitor to his philosophy, viewing it as a non-materialist philosophy, and the default philosophy for most of Christianity throughout history. Indeed, he uses Platonism as a prime representative for the non-materialist understandings of Christian theology, and he is justified in the sense that another popular school of theology, possibly by now more popular than the prevalent Platonism of the past, based on Aristotelianism, can be viewed as a modified Platonism. Note that his post is not comprehensive, nor does it have formal arguments for materialism, and this is intentional. He is simply giving something of an outline of his views, rather than a wholesale system of argumentation in favour of it.
Now, I agree with Cantus that materialism, broadly construed, and against popular opinion, is not inherently atheistic. What I don’t agree with is his understanding of Platonism as anti-materialist in substance, even if some construals of it may be seemingly anti-materialist in form. I don’t agree with the opposition he places between Platonism and biblical revelation, which is technically materialist, but not in the way Cantus thinks. One reason for this is because Cantus mistakes “physical” for “material”. We will see why and how shortly, as I respond to his various points.
I
CREATION
The Old Testament Creation Story
Cantus begins by outlining what he sees as the incompatibility of Platonism (as he sees it) and the cosmogenesis described in Scripture.
In relation to Man’s creation, he quotes the following scripture:
And the Lord God formed man [adham] from the dust of the ground, [adhamah] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. — Genesis 2.7
Cantus then goes to make the point that although Platonists translates “being” as “soul”, that is not what the verse is saying, and that scripture often uses that term “being” to refer to the “person”, who is identified with his body. He also disagrees with the Aristotelian understanding of the “breath of life” being the “form of man” being impressed into inert matter, partly due to the fact that the scripture predates the Aristotelian understanding, and that he doesn’t think, in his words, that “any exegete can rightly extrapolate a metaphysics from a phrase the purpose of which is to provide lucid imagery to accompany the thrust of the verse”. He seemingly makes his case irrefutable by quoting this verse:
In the sweet of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. — Genesis 3:19
Adding that:
In this verse God identifies Adam with dust and states that death just is the disintegration of the body. What else could “till thou return unto the ground” and “unto dost shalt thou return” possibly mean? It should also be noted what is not asserted in this verse. Adam is not told that he is a soul and his soul is going to be destroyed upon death or sent to some nasty place. Instead, we find the materialist claim I started with. Adam is told that he just is the dust his body was made out of. Substitute “Adam’s body” for “Adam” and you don’t lose anything in your ontology!
Now, Cantus is right on the main that scripture, in many places anyway, does not speak of a strictly disembodied human identity. Where he misses it however, is that he believes that Platonists and Aristotelians are by a necessity relating to their metaphysics, unable to glean that metaphysics from the text. Why can they, contra Cantus, glean their metaphysics from the text? Because the text is not meant to be understood plainly. As Matthieu Pageau states:
When interpreting reality, each of these worldviews raises its own types of questions. For example, when looking at a plant from a material perspective, one might ask the following questions: “What is this plant made of?” and, “How does it work?” However, when looking at the same plant from a spiritual perspective, one might ask the following questions: “What is the meaning of this plant?” and, “What higher truth does it embody?” Not surprisingly, these questions have little or nothing in common, which demonstrates the distinct nature of these worldviews. [2]
Please note that Pageau uses “material” in the modern sense of “physical”, not the ancient sense, which I will get to later. Cantus gets something of this when he says that “It is clearly a flowery image meant to portray the fact that God is causally responsible for Adam’s life”, but he doesn’t get it well enough. The words chosen to describe Adam’s creation are specifically chosen for a reason beyond “flowery language”. The ancients, especially in things like writing religious texts, were known for employing symbolic, metaphorical, and poetic language in order to put into an exceedingly dense form what would be otherwise impossible or impractical to put in conventional wording. Each word chosen is deliberate, and their understanding of the words is necessarily esoteric. It is esoteric truths like these that were presumably passed on to Plato and Aristotle [3], who put them in a more “conventional” form, although of course the truths they learned were probably not from the authors of Jewish scripture. However, even barring a direct line of passage of traditions between Jewish Scripture writers and the Greek philosophers, the entire ancient world still shared one united “worldview” that undergirded their own personal explications of metaphysics. For example, concerning the “heaven and earth” of biblical cosmology, and for us, the “earth” Adam is made of, Matthieu Pageau says:
“In the Bible, raw ‘earth’ refers to matter without meaning, and pure ‘heaven’ refers to spiritual meaning without corporeal existence. As strange as this duality may seem to modern sensibilities, this way of framing reality is self-evident from the spiritual perspective because it directly addresses the following questions: “What does it mean?” and, “What spiritual truth does it embody?” So, it is not surprising that the basic polarity of this cosmology is meaning and matter.”
Note that “corporeal” here means “physical” in the modern day usage of the word, which is the way Cantus would use it. If you don’t already get it, this duality of “matter” and “meaning” corresponds directly to the Aristotelian duality between “matter” and “form”, because one of the senses of the word “form” is the “meaning” of a being, this “meaning” also captures one of the senses of the word “logos”, of which “form” is simply the Aristotelian sub-classification of. In relation to man, Pageau says:
In the story of the Garden of Eden, humanity is described as a microcosm of creation. Thus, Adam is created by joining a body from the earth and a breath from heaven. …the soul and body of Adam may simply be interpreted as instances of heaven and earth at the level of human experience. Accordingly, the word “spirit” simultaneously refers to the wind of heaven and the breath of living creatures. These are one and the same in biblical cosmology. [2]
This duality as conceived here is subtle, and can be confused as applicable to only our “level”, but as Algis Uždavinys says:
“If matter can be regarded as “evil” (in no positive sense), this is because it is absolutely non-existent and formless. Nevertheless, it is necessary for the completion of the universe. The existence of Form compels the existence of Matter, since every form requires a substrate in which it is lodged. Therefore just as sensible matter is filled by the immanent presence of Soul, so intelligible Matter is illuminated by the One, taking light from outside itself, and thus providing the matrix in which a higher level of reality may be immanently present. Just as light is weakened through its dispersion in the air, so is form weakened when dispersed into matter.”
In other words, if “pure matter” is simply “non-existence”, or “nothingness”, the true meaning of “evil”, then all created things are “made of matter”, including the forms (the intellects, angels and gods, made of what Uždavinys calls “intelligible matter”), because all created things are “limited”. There is a “domain”, whether of “place” or “duration”, where they are “something”, and many other “domains” where they are “nothing”. There is a point where all created things exclude one another, and where their presence would be “absurd”, the word “absurd” being another way of describing “nothingness”, which is without “logic” of any kind and therefore does not exist. This is the difference between the subtle ancient “materialism” of the philosophers and the modern “physicalism” -- which equates the physical, which concerns only a domain of the material, with all of materiality -- and this is what Cantus (and those who oppose him in the other side of his erected dichotomy) confuses. This “materialism” confesses to a hierarchy of being endemic to many traditional religions, a hierarchy of progressively “finer bodies” until we reach God, who can be considered both supremely embodied in all created beings, or, more correctly, bodiless in himself. This is the source of the “relative reality” or “relative unreality” of created beings. The less limited a being (or person) is, the more “real” they are, God being the most real by being unlimited. To quote David Bentley Hart, and put the quotes Cantus uses of him in perspective:
…none of these beings was typically considered to be incorporeal in the full sense, at least in the way we would use that word today. The common belief of most educated persons of the time was that, if any reality was bodiless in the absolute sense, it could be only God or the highest divine principle. Everything else, even spirits, had some kind of body, because all of them were irreducibly local realities. The bodies of spirits may have been at once both more invincible and more mercurial than those with an animal constitution, but they were also, if in a peculiarly exalted sense, still physical. Many thought them to be composed from, say, the aether or the “quintessence” above, the “spiritual” substance that constitutes the celestial regions beyond the moon. Many also identified that substance with the πνεῦμα—the “wind” or “breath”—that stirs all things, a universal quickening force subtler even than the air it moves. It was generally believed, moreover, that many of these ethereal or spiritual beings were not only embodied, but visible. The stars overhead were thought to be divine or angelic intelligences (as we see reflected in James 1:17 and 2 Peter 2:10-11). And it was a conviction common to a good many pagans and Jews alike that the ultimate destiny of great or especially righteous souls was to be elevated into the heavens to shine as stars (as we see in Daniel 12:3 and Wisdom 3:7, and as may be hinted at in 1 Corinthians 15:30-41). [4]
The “dust” or “earth” of scripture is the “nothingness” man, and all beings are brought from, and this “creation of man”, and also his fall, can be thought of as happening on several different levels at once and also in succession. The “earth” he is created from being nothingness, the body “formed” from it could refer to the heavenly form of man, while the “breath” would be the “light of the One”, “light” being a universal symbol of “spirit”, alongside “breath”. It could also be the common sense “physical” body of man given the “form of man” or his “soul”, which is a “lesser light” or “lesser spirit”. The take away here is that there is not just “one body”, but many, interpenetrating and informing one another, the “higher body” being apparently “incorporeal” in relation to the “lower”, although the “higher body” itself is a form of embodiment, the “celestial body” of Paul as David Bentley Hart has elaborated on [4]. This “relativity of beings” is my answer to Cantus’ construal of the Platonist view of creation. “Intrinsic worth” is not worth “independent” of God, who alone is independent and intrinsically worthy. Creation is good because God is good, and the only “goodness” creation has is the goodness God gives it. Even as he quotes Ecclesiastes, Cantus misses a central point of the entire book, which is that “All is Vanity”, all do have an illusory existence. “Heaven and earth will pass away” are Christ’s words. Christ also says “none is good, but God”. There are two related and mutually implicative points of view here: All are "evil" or "not real" when contrasted with him, and all are "good" or "real" in whatever capacity they are united to Him and manifest Him. This is also why Cantus' understanding that "The Platonist claim is that embodiment and materiality as such are the cause of corruption and decay" is both true and false. True in that, in the deepest sense, all have "fallen" short by the mere fact of being created, all are "like the wind" because they are not God; But his statement is also false because there are levels of "fallen", if fallen just means "created". The otherness of creation that is its fallenness is not necessarily a bad thing, as the forms are "other than God", and therefore "celestially embodied", and yet no proper moral evil or suffering exists in their world. "Evil" in its proper metaphysical sense, is morally ambivalent, and as such is a condition for creaturely existence. It only becomes moral evil and the "hard" or "violent" separation of one from the other on our level, the level of "terrestrial flesh", which St. Paul says we must be delivered from. It is our current embodiment and psycho-physical materiality that is most properly "fallen" and decaying in the common Christian sense of the word, which is also the Platonist sense. We need deliverance into "celestial embodiment", into the "Nous" of Plotinus and the Christian Hesychast Tradition. I submit that if “Schopenhauer’s Will is blind and irrational”, then there is no number of “friendlier qualities” you can add that would make it the God of Plato or Classical Theism, because if any being is blind in any form, it is creaturely being, and if any being is irrational in any capacity, it does not exist in that capacity. The goodness of creatures is relative, and just like bodies, in relation to God in his fullness, we do not exist; or from another angle, all that exists are the various “sides” or “expressions” and “bodies” of the “Lord of Breaths” [5]. In this, we see that God is the one who truly “sees” and it is “creatures” who “see through a glass darkly”. This is why God can call creation “good”. Our redemption is the realization of this, where we “regain” our “original self”, “Christ in you”, which brings us to Cantus’ second point.
II
PASSION
Cantus contrasts here death as conceived by a Platonist and death as conceived by a materialist, with Scripture on the materialist side. For the Platonist, according to Cantus, death leads to the intermediate stage, which for the redeemed is the “beatific vision” or something analogous. There is also an apparent conflict between the original Platonist idea of liberation from the body and Christian Resurrection. But Scripture does not (directly) speak of a beatific vision. Death is usually portrayed in Scripture as a form of “sleep”, which agrees with a materialist reading, but Cantus misses that Scripture talks about “liberation from the flesh” and that “terrestrial flesh” cannot be redeemed, for “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom”.
Now, Cantus is correct that there is no disembodied “beatific vision” directly referenced in scripture, but he doesn’t seem to clinch why he is correct. This is all bound up in the very linear form of his materialism and his understanding of scriptural and ancient materialism. Like I said before, scripture condenses so much meaning into a particular form of language, and although this form changes, there is an underlying logic to them all, and this logic reveals the many senses scripture should be read.
There is ultimately no conflict between death as “sleep”, and death as an “awakening” to beatific vision. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin, as I have explained before. “Death” the enemy is precisely that which “blinds the children of this age”, namely, an illusion. “He who believes in me shall live, though he dies” is followed by “He who believes in me shall never die” in the very next sentence in John 11 where Lazarus is said to “sleep” in death. “Death” is not just one thing, it is many. It is “sleep” in that heaven is a kind of “dream” compared to our current state, but it is awakening in that in the hierarchy of being, all of creation is, in Schuon’s words, a dreamlike dimension of God [6], which is a “death” in as much as it is separated from him, and requires awakening to divinity or “Theosis”. We die every day, we are reborn every day. We also inch towards another form of death, one which takes us away from this form of embodiment to another, and which leads to a “resurrection” into a more “subtle” body. This cycle continues until we are supposed to reach beyond embodiment, into God himself. This is Theosis, and it results in the ultimate “resurrection”, where, as Christ says, “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”. Meaning, you shall realize “Christ in you, the hope of Glory” and “become like him”, because, “God will be all in all”. As one “realises God”, one realises his cosmic incarnation, and the body they discarded in search of him is given back, redeemed, the “psycho-physical body” revealed as only the shadow that it is in light of the “Celestial body” [4], a shadow that is assumed into the light that spawned it:
"Likewise, I believe," John Scotus goes on to say, "will the corporeal substance go over into the soul, not to perish, but that, having been elevated to a more excellent condition, it shall be preserved. So too one must suppose that the soul, having been received into the intellect, becomes more beautiful and more similar to God. In the same way I think of the entry into God not perhaps of all, but certainly of rational substances-in whom they shall reach their goal, and in whom they shall all become one." [7]
This body, considered correctly, is precisely the “intellectified soul” that is liberated from our fallen existence [3]. Absolute death does not exist, except as a phantom, a phantom to be dispelled by resurrection, a “resurrection” where the various “bodies” that acted as graves become perfect theophanies, and they become theophanies precisely because they are united with God as best they possibly can without dissolving into divinity, unlike our fallen bodies over here. This is not against Platonism, it is indeed its end, because to be liberated from the flesh is, like St. Paul himself said, to abolish the “terrestrial body” and gain the “celestial body”.
This is the attraction of Platonism, and this is why it is so prevalent. It accords with Christian revelation. For Platonists, like David Bentley Hart and Jordan Daniel Wood, as indeed for Vedantists like Coomaraswamy, and even for Plotinus [5], all creation is “Incarnation” [8], and the incarnation of Christ was an intense manifestation of this deepest truth of all creation, obscured by the fall and hidden by the phantom of absolute death. The role of the Philosopher is to “incarnate” the forms as well as they can, to “go up there” and “bring it down here”, in order to carry us all “up there”, just as the point of the incarnation can be summarised as “God became man that man might become God”. “That art Thou” is an eastern way of putting it, as is “Know Thyself” of the Greeks, for thy “self” is Christ, the Logos, the Atman, “Lord of Breaths”, who is in every heart and animates every personality, every single stone, rock, star and atom. Viewed in their particularity, we are indeed different, but viewed metaphysically, in the highest sense of the word, we are all different manifestations of the same Cosmic incarnation called the “Cosmos”, the “Visible God” [9], the Cosmic Christ [10], and the “all in all”.
[1] Guenon, R. (2004). The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (4th ed.). Sophia Perennis.
[2] Pageau, M. (2018). The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis: A Commentary (1st ed.). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
[3] Uzdavinys, A., & Bregman, J. (2009). The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (The Perennial Philosophy) (A. Uzdavinys (ed.)). World Wisdom.
[4] Hart, D. B. (2018). The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients. Church Life Journal. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/
[5] Coomaraswamy, A. K. (1944). On the One and Only Transmigrant. Journal Of The American Oriental Society, 3, 28.
[6] Schuon, F., & Cutsinger, J. S. (2017). The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity. In World Wisdom. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfss2f.13
[7] Smith, W. (2009). Wisdom Of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition.
[8] Wood, J. D. (2017). Creation Is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity Of The Logoi In Maximus Confessor. 7177. https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12382
[9] Martin, D. B. (1999). The Corinthian Body. Yale University Press.
[10] Cutsinger, J. S. (2002). The Mystery of the Two Natures © 2002. 2(1998).