Meditation: “Symbolic” Classical Theism and its Importance for the Coherence of Christianity.
“…the language of Sophia is above all symbolism in all its forms”
Frithjof Schuon
The ideas of “classical theism”, a belief in God with the “classical” attributes (simplicity, timelessness, etc) are often described as too “abstract” and called “unbiblical” and “going against the grain of the text”. God is apparently not “relatable” in this “system”. He isn’t “personal” enough. The effect of this is that more (so called) “biblically” minded Christians become “Neo-classical theists” or perhaps “open theists”, both of which deny many or all of these classical attributes and for the latter, includes God’s “knowledge” of the future. I want to say here that I don’t find critiques of CT in this manner very cogent. Not that I don’t respect their reasons (to be “biblical” is important), but I don’t buy into what they see as “biblical” or “abstract” or “impersonal” or even “contrary to revelation”. So as not to imply that I’m tribalist here, it is not that I like all construals of classical theism (hence called CT). I’m not a genius, but I do see that when some construals are critiqued by Neo-classical theists and atheists, I support their critique because they are right in a sense. But I also oppose them because as someone who also subscribes to CT, I still see the substance of it, and that substance is almost never addressed, or understood. I hope this gets clearer as I explain what I mean by “Symbolic Classical Theism” through the lens of Schuonian Neoplatonism.
Symbolism, as such, is a system of representation, or perhaps we could call it the very essence of representation. One thing symbolizes another when it represents that other in a particular “space”. Words, for example, are a symbols. Whether written or spoken, they represent something else not immediately present. What joins that which represents to the represented? The answer, I am proposing (and I am not the first), is the very soul of true philosophy, the “love of wisdom” and her garment of symbols.
The deepest claim of Classical Theism is very simple: Reality is One. This “oneness” is not numerical, nor is it mere unicity. It is unitive. The claim is pretty much irrefutable. If reality isn’t Unity, if it isn’t One, then there is a prior “higher” reality that makes this broken reality intelligible. Why? Because there is no other way to even think about a broken reality without the “background” of “One” that makes the brokenness intelligible in a “contrast”. Reality as such is pretty much ineffable. It simply is. It couldn’t have “not been”, because both “to exist” and “to not exist” presuppose the absolute necessity of the “state” of “Being” in which something contingent must participate or not. This dichotomy can only apply to existent things, and not to “Reality” or “Being” as such. To oppose this is to break logic to pieces, including your logic. And Yes, for the Classical Theist, Reality = God. And such a description is not subject to any questions of whether or not a “supreme being” may exist. If you are thinking in such a way to refute this, you simply did not grasp my argument. One may call it disingenuous, but they’d be wrong, considering this is how the classical arguments, particularly that from composition, works. The only “atheism” that makes sense here is very similar to that of the Buddhist: God is “no-thing”, God is the emptiness that is also fullness. That which contains everything without being contained or determined by it.
Connecting this to symbolism, one can then see what is the ultimate “link” between symbols and what they symbolize, and that is reality itself. The first and primordial symbolism that grounds all others is the fact of existence. The thing symbolizing and the thing being symbolized both exist, and are a “symbol” of the ineffable reality that simply is “isness”. Here, we can find the ultimate meaning behind the scripture “the heavens declare the glory of God”.
So far so good, now how do you go from “Reality is One” to timelessness, impassibility, etc.? Let me make do with what I think the most important (you can derive all else from this): Simplicity. If reality is Unity, what are the characteristics of unity? Keep in mind that I said “unity” not a “unified being”. Unified beings exist, they may even be necessary and be “indestructible”, but they aren’t “Being as such”. They aren’t “God”. Following from before, multiplicity presupposes a prior “background” of unity to be intelligible, why? Because we instinctively consider things as “wholes” before “parts”. Even when we divide things, the “parts” are considered as “smaller wholes”, they are “one”. Here, the whole contains the parts without being reducible to said parts. “Treeness” implies and therefore “contains” “woodness”, and trees are made of wood, but “Treeness” is not “woodness” nor is this “containment” a composition like the way physical trees exist. Similarly, “Being” or “Beingness” implies “beings”, but “beings”, even when “added up” (say, the whole Universe or Multiverse) are not “Being” as such. And Being is such that there is nothing outside of it, otherwise that would be a “being” not participating in “Beingness”, and hence a contradiction. Hence, “Being” is not made of “parts”, and is “simple”. This is not to say that there are not relatively “simple” beings, “treeness” as such is not made of parts, it is one of those “indestructible beings”, a possibility in the realm of possibilia, which, unknown to Joe Schmid, who wrote this, is actually the platonic realm of forms in more contemporary language. But it is still composite in that “treeness” is not “Beingness” as such, and is hence “limited”. Its essence is not fully identical to “Beingness”, the “All Possibility”, or “Possibility as such” that makes possibilities in the realm of possibilia exist. Considering it cannot exist without “Beingness” as such, which it is not, this means it is a “composite” (real distinctions imply compositeness), although not to manifested trees. Meanwhile “Beingness” is identical with every “being”, incuding “treeness”. In short “Being is unity as such”, to be is to be “united”, to participate in unity i.e. Being, to be “unity” in a particular limited form.
Coming back from that lengthy detour, we should consider the implications and importance of this link between CT and Symbolism. The first is simple, namely that CT elucidates the hidden background of all rationality and hence all reality, especially that of symbolism, which is indispensable for human understanding. All our knowledge and even attempts to know stem from the assumption that “Reality is”, and CT, in its various expressions, articulate the implications of this fundamental truth. All existent things presuppose this truth, and as such are “symbols” of it, in that they stand “in place of” it and “speak of” it. Whatever exists, whether it is events, decisions, forms, prayer, whatever, manifests some aspect of that ineffable reality. How these existents relate to each other in light of this over-arching fact of reality is best articulated in the “chain of being”.
We can introduce here the concept of “causation”, which, in CT, at least in the medieval and ancient past, simply means that which makes something else “intelligible” or “knowable”. From this, we can see that “Being” is the primary “cause” of all things because it is only in virtue of it that all things exist and are knowable, and my implication, that which is absolutely impossible is unintelligible and unknowable e.g. a square-circle is a “misconception”, NOT a conception. It is a “privation” of “conception” as there are no ways you can “conceive” it that is not really a joined square and circle. It is not a “shape” in the same way its constituent shapes are, unless by “square-circle” one means the composite in question. Another implication is that “existence” takes on a very wide meaning. The “mind” exists, so does its contents. “Abstract objects” exist, etc. The existence of objects is then synonymous with “manifestation”, and presupposes the distinction between subject and object (to whom is something manifesting?), one of the primary dualities of nature. What everything does not do is exist “physically”, and here we understand that there are states and “grades” of existence, and all of them are never “as real” as Being itself, the source of all intelligibility.
These existents all relate to each other causally, and in different senses of the word “causal”. For example, Aristotle’s four types of causation (copied from here):
The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue.
The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.
There are also “essential causes”: the causes of the “being as such and such an entity” of an entity, e.g. the “archetypal” possibility of humanity as such (the form of man) is the essential cause of my existence as a human. There are also “causal chains”, such as those of “per se” and “per accidens”. In short, per se causation is basically essential causation, per accidens is simply per se causation as it appears in time. The latter claim can be justified thus:
The essence of a being (like treeness), fully represented by its form (Form of tree), contains all the possibilities of its manifestation in the sensible. But, because of the limitations of manifestation, these possibilities can only “sensibly” manifest as change in a particular limited instantiation. Scale this up to the whole cosmos and you get the motivation for Plato’s “Time is the movement of eternity” and the true meaning of “per accidens” causation. The interaction between all physical things is the manifestation of both the possibilities inherent in the “minimally complex” unity of the forms and the possibilities inherent in their unity as “world of forms”.
It is this “per se” causation that can be used to show the chain of being. If reality is “all possibility”, or “Possibility as such”, or “Being”, the most primordial things it can “spawn”, or the most primordial “symbols” to veil itself with are simply the “pure” possibilities of being. Whether that of “humanity”, “treeness” (and one can have disagreements on what can be a true archetypal possibility or not), these are what make everything else apart from reality as such possible. These are the “forms”. Just as there is simply Possibility, which is synonymous with Being, so are there possibilities, synonymous with beings, the highest of which are the “archetypal” possibilities that undergird all others. I cannot go into the various ways we can classify possibility in this manner, there are whole book chapters on that, but the point is they are intelligible and therefore “real”. They are intelligible only in light of possibility as such, as that is the only thing more primordial than they, and they are intelligible through their manifestations (You know of the form of man through men). This “realm of possibilia” is the Nous, or “Intellect”, the realm of forms. The interval between that realm and our “physicality” is called “Soul”. The chain of being (in Plotinus’ formulation at least) is then:
Unity (“to hen” or “The One”)
Nous (world of forms)
Soul
Matter
When I say “matter” here, I don’t mean atoms, but “prime matter”, pure indeterminacy, symbolized by “waters” (I hope you are beginning to see how CT connects to Genesis 1 and similar myths in other places). One could say that our world of physicality is a “mixture” of soul and matter, or that physicality is “coagulated soul”, but that is an explanation for another post. For now we could say the symbolism goes thus:
Unity (“to hen” or “The One”) – Beyond the Sky or firmament
Nous (world of forms) – Sun, Moon, stars, firmament
Soul - Air
Physical universe - Land
Prime Matter - Water
This is just a primer, since symbolism repeats itself in fractal like ways (there’s one such example in the symbolism above, if you can find it), but the point is that this “chain of being”, represented in mythical ways, is in many religions, most notably in the dichotomy of “heaven” and “earth” and their interactions. This is why the majority of church fathers in Christianity, for example, saw no irreparable rift between scripture, even the historical literature, and their classical theism. For them, all manifestation is symbolism (this is the logic of icons). They may have disagreed on particulars, but this is the thread connecting them all. The “literal” is also the “symbolic”. You get the story right (literal meaning) in order to know the essential meaning (symbolism, expressed in the typological, analogical, and anagogical), whether or not they “happened” in the sense of a modern journalistic account of history. This is the Tradition, the believed rationale of the text and its authors. The symbolic shapes the literal, and not the other way round. But to get to the symbolic, you must get the literal right, and this does not involve “solo scriptura” without the history of interpretation found in every religious tradition (Christians have the church fathers themselves, religious Jews have the Talmud, etc.). This is the link between “Natural philosophy” and “revelation” that is really two ends of a seamless garment that was never meant to be torn in two. This is so much so that there is no practical difference between the two. The philosophies Christians in antiquity appropriated for themselves was itself a theology explaining what its proponents considered to be revelation in the form of myth (in this case, Greek myth). The difference between Christian and “pagan” Greek philosophy is not “Revelation” and “Reason”, but two different forms of revelation, with one overall “perennial” framework in their common “reasonable” Platonic approach that undergird both their agreements and disagreements. I cannot get into the particulars concerning the nature of Nous, Soul, and Matter, that is beyond this post. I should say, however, that to say God is a “mind” is probably a mistake, and God knows how much ink has been spilled defending this in the name of Classical theism. This position is as a result of my continual delving into “pagan” Platonism and how various people have explained God through it. That is another topic. But the crux of the matter is that this symbolism and the “classical theist” philosophy that undergirds it is very much important for Christianity, and, in my opinion, all religions. Without it, you lose sight of Being and fight for beings. Rather than see Being through beings, rather than see the “form of God” in scripture as that Nous that reveals the One in its various celestial “bodies” of “anima”, we fight over the “bare letter” and actually forget the Spirit. In scripture, God is angry, God changes his mind, and he has a body. For the Christian, the Incarnation says why this is so: God becomes man that man might become God. If God, as man, can change his mind, why cannot a human, or “superhuman” portrayal of God do so? Considering what God is, simply reality itself, what better way to communicate him than with symbols that manifest him, in whatever limitative way? Reality is that which unites everything, including the human, and hence human portrayals of reality do say something about Reality. This symbolism isn’t mere literary symbolism, but real “embodiment” (whatever the form of body, whether conceptual, “celestial” like in the Old Testament theophanies, or even through statues, or as in the New Testament, the fleshly body of Christ), through various “gods” or “angels” who are, in actuality, the rationality of a human collectivity given form. Considering from before that wholes precedes parts, why do you think that peoples have believed their nation “founded by gods”? and that their unity as a people precedes and holds together the collective and multiple individuals? If you do get the answer to this question, you will see why “ideologies” can be called “angels” or “demons” or “principalities”, because as rationales, they are “causes”, and “rule” their “effects”, and we do treat them this way when we try to “exorcise” these things from people through “propaganda”. We can only “see” God this way, you can only know the essence through the form in the light of their “intelligible unity”. You can only know the Father through the Son in light of the uniting Spirit; and I hope you can see, like Gregory of Nyssa in “the life of Moses”, the divine and forever embodied Word calling you up to the divine cloud of the hidden formless essence of the Father shrouded in Spirit at the top of the Sinai that is the chain of being. Amen, and Happy New Year.