The debate between Eunomius, the Arian (Anomoian) bishop of Cyzicus (+ ca 395) and Gregory, the Orthodox bishop of Nyssa ( ca 330-395) has a great deal of contemporary relevance. On the one hand, the question of Christ's full divinity, which Eunomius rejected and Gregory acknowledged, is still the central point in much contemporary Christological debate. On the other hand, the intellectual projects of Eunomius and Gregory raise basic methodological issues to be faced in contemporary attempts to indigenize Christianity and to make it relevant to Secular or "outside" philosophy. Both points will become clearer in the body of this paper.
Two basic interpretative points need to be clarified from the outset -- the meaning of the term 'philosophia' in hellenistic and Christian thought, and the basic assumption of the 'technologia' of sophistical rhetoric used by both Gregory and Eunomius.
'Phi1osophia', literally, befriending wisdom, meant something quite different to the ancients from what it means in the context of the modern university. Philosophy was no intellectual pursuit, but the search of love (eros) for wisdom or the higher good. It meant primarily a way of life in which one renounces lesser loves like wealth, power and glory, and disciplines oneself to seek that which is unqualifiedly good and true. This is usually done in the communion of a small group of disciples led by a teacher of a guru who has already advanced enough in this disciplined way of life to be able to lead other along shoe some path.
The intellectual discussion is ancillary to the way of life in true philosophy. That discussion can help in shedding wrong ideas, but can never lead to discovery of ultimate truth. This latter come only through the disciplined life. How difficult is is for the professor as well as student in the modern university, to realize what the black ‘academic’ gown which scholars (as well as lawyers and priests) wear today, signified in its original context! It is still called the 'academic' gown because it was the uniform worn by student and teacher alike in Plato's academy. It was actually a shroud worn by the corpse on its way to the burial ground. It stood for renunciation of the pleasures and gratifications of the body -- a sort of acceptance of the death of the body ahead of time. It meant good-bye to the feverish quest for money and power, for popularity and fame, for comfort and affluence, for tenure and promotion, £or‘reviewers' acclaim and best-seller markets, for the pleasures of middle class living.
To this kind of philosophy as renunciation of worldly pleasures, stands in stark contrast the sophistic technology of rhetorical discourse, which had developed enormously in the fourth century. Technology today means the systematic treatment of techne or the art of making things - the logia (discourse) about techne (art or way of doing something). But in ancient Hellenism, the technologos was the technos of the logos, the artisan or using words, the expert in rhetoric, the one who knows about prosody and metre, about sophistic arguments and debating techniques, about persuasion and perhaps, demagogy. The technologos pretended to be wide, or showed himself as wise (sophos). Pythagoras did not want to be called sophos, but probably coined the name philosophos as an alternative, regarding God alone as truly wise, and the philosopher as a friend of God.
The concept oi philosophy as love of the higher good came to be very much corrupted in post-Pythagorean Pagan development until 4th century Christians made philosophia once again synonymous with the ascetic life, particularly monastic life.
Eunomius was more of a sophist and a rhetorician than a philosophos in the Pythagorean sense. Gregory on the other hand was one who sought philosophy in the later Christian sense, as an ascetic way of life.2 But he has shown also prowess and talent in using technologia or rhetoric and sophistry in the less honorable sense, to win a point in debate.
The debate between Gregory of Nyssa and Eunomius takes place within a milieu where the Platonic Pythagorean tradition of serious life-oriented philosophy co-existed with the more exhibitionistic tradition of sophistic rhetoric. Both Gregory and Eunomius used all the tricks of rhetoric in their debate. At the point of using rhetorical tricks Gregory was not much nobler than Eunomius. In the pursuit of philosophia however Eunomius and Gregory followed two different paths, with two different starting points and two different methods as we shall make clear in the conclusion.
Our judgment today in the Eunomius-Gregory debate cannot be on the basis of whose arguments are more logically water-tight or more fallacious. Christians especially will have to choose today between the different starting points, the different objectives, and the different methods that the two debaters used.
The Nature Of The Platonic Tradition
Precisely because Platonism had a higher notion of the task of philosophy, it becomes difficult for the modern university, a daughter of the European Enlightenment, to come to real terms with Platonic phi1osophy. Mistaking philosophy to be the effort to articulate knowledge precisely and clearly, the European academy, today a universal institution, mis-understands Platonism as "idealism", "world of ideas", and so on.
In Plato's academy two names were highly revered - those of Pythagoras and Socrates. Socrates was more vividly remembered, since Plato and many of his interlocutors had personally known Socrates before his dying. Pythagoras lived more distantly in the past. He left so little of his writing to posterity, whereas all of Socrates' teaching was remembered at first hand by the great master Plato himself. And yet Pythagoras and Socrates had both contributed enormously to the development of Platonic tradition. And both were regarded as basically religious teachers, teachers of a way of life and worship, not as mere professors of logic and rhetoric.
It is this religious aspect of the Platonic tradition that modern university studies of Plato most ignores or marginalizes. Take the great western thinker Bertrand Russell as an example. Russell in fact thought Plato to be more like himself - a non-religious academic philosopher. He blames Porphyry, the Syrian disciple and biographer of plotinus, for making Platonism religious. In fact Lord Russell, a late rationalist, has little use for Plotinus himself, and blames him for misunderstanding Plato, in taking Plato's "theory of ideas, the mystical doctrines of the Phaedo and Book V1 of the Republic, and the discussion of love in the Symposium"3 as making up the whole of Plato. Lord Russell takes a distinctly greater interest in Plato's political ideas, in his definitions of particular virtues, and his discussion of the pleasures of mathematics. Using outmoded and anachronistic categories, Russell accuses Porphyry of being more Pythagorean than Platonic, and as more 'Supernaturalist' than Plotinus. Russell's Summary of Plotinus shows clearly how difficult it is for a post-enlightenment European rationalist, or for a modern philosopher trained in that tradition to come to terms with the religious element in Plato and Plotinus.
Plato's Socrates As A Religious Genius
According to A.E. Taylor, Plato wrote his symposium "plainly to call our attention to a marked feature in the character of Socrates. He is at heart a mystic and there is something other-worldly about him.4 Aristodemus tells us the story o£ Socrates going into "standing raptore“ for a whole day and a night.5
But that is possibly another misunderstanding to regard Socrates’ ‘mystical’ rapture as the source of his wisdom and discernment, and therefore to seek that rapture as a means of knowing the ultimate.
No, for Plato's Socrates, what matters is not the rapture, but the teaching and discipline into which one is initiated and in which one grows. Socrates’ Guru was Diotima, the Priestess of Mantea. Diotima's speech in the symposion, reported by Socrates, according to Taylor, is unique in pre-Plotinian Greek literature.6 Taylor sees Diotima's description of love or eros ascending to the highest good as bearing close resemblance to St. John of the Cross' description of the journey of the soul. W. Hamilton, in his introduction to the Penguin English translation of the Symposium, says about the Diotima speech:
"Diotima describes it in terms borrowed from the mysteries, partly no doubt, because it is a gradual progress comparable to the stages of an initiation, and partly because the final vision is a religious rather than an intellectual experience, and like the culminating revelation of mystery religion, is not to be described or communicated".7
Here is another of the problems of modern university studies, which seem to assume that something never could have existed or happened which has not been written about. Literature is a very unreliable guide to the past, as every archaeologist knows. Neither Plato's Socrates nor Plotinus would speak or write extensively about the secret teaching about religious discipline and mystical experience. The error of the modern academic student is to make literary silence a testimony for the nonexistence of such religious discipline and experience.
And yet, Plato tells us enough to give us a glimpse of that discipline and teaching of Diotima of Mantinea, which can be taken to be the centre of Plato's own teaching in the Academy.
Love is the secret — love as eros, as desire and craving for fulfillment. It can be directed to any of three levels: pleasure, money, power, physical prowess at the lowest level, above that the second level, where love is directed to knowledge and wisdom; and at the third and highest level, love of the supremely, totally and absolutely good. As the soul ascends the ladder of the mysteries of love, at the end of her ascent, there is revealed to love (not to knowledge):
"a beauty whose nature is marvellous indeed, the final goal, O Socrates, of all her previous efforts. This beauty is first of all eternal, it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes: next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful in one time and ugly at another another, not beautiful in this relation and ugly in that ... She will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change". 8
Diotima, says Plato, advised Socrates to stay all one's life in this region of the "contemplation of all beauty. This contemplation, however, by no means is a purely intellectual one. Ardent and passionate, it entails a secret discipline of training the eros to desire the absolute good. Plato's Socrates makes mention of this secret discipline only in one tantalising sentence:
“I declare that it is the duty of every man to honour love, and I honour and practice the mysteries of love in an especial degree myself, and recommend the same to other“ 9
Socrates learned these "practices of the mysteries love" from Diotima the priestess, whose religious offices and sacrifices, according to Socrates (and Plato), postponed the plague from hitting Athens for ten years.10
Socrates was no intellectual, no rhetorician or academic, like Lycon his accuser or Gorgias or Hippies, or Evenus the Parian, or like a modern university professor. Socrates was of course a great questioner, an exposer of contradictions, a ridiculer of facetious arguments, a logician of the first waters when he wanted to be. But the secret of this life was his “practice of the mysteries of love", and the muse or divinity upon whom he depended for guidance, as he told the Athenians in his famous Apologia:
"You have heard me speak at some times and in some places of a divine element or daemon which comes to me (moi theion ai kai daimonion gignetai). For me this began from my childhood. It is a voice which comes to me, always turning me away from what I am going to do, but never telling me what to do".
'Mysticism‘ in Greece did not start with Plotinus, nor is it an oriental element. Socrates‘ capacity to perceive truth, to expose contradictions and to ridicule sham and pretension, came from an "inner life” of the “mysteries of love", of worship, of
what came to be called in our hopelessly academic language ”theurgic mysticism of the later neo-platonists".
Socrates was a poet of the good, a "Poietes of arete," a procreator or creator of the good. And for Plato, this is central -- not the doctrines about hyle and idea. Plato's ideal ascribed to Socrates, is to bring forth, or to beget the good, to nurture and train the good; that is the true desire of all souls.
Our misunderstanding of both Plato and Socrates comes from our academic malformation. The manifest technique which Plato and Socrates used was dialogue and dialectical or Socratic questioning. But we see today how despicably poor mere logical analysis can be in promoting virtue, compared to the Socratic analysis. The difference between the two is that logical analysis presupposes and demands only linguistic consistency as the quality of truth, whereas in the Socratic analysis, there is a prior perception of truth which comes from the "practice of the mysteries of Love" and not merely from the requirements of logic.
It is this practice of the mysteries of love by participation (methexis or metousia) in the ariste psuche of God that both Plato and Socrates advocated. It is the vision of truth, of which one is usually always largely silent, that informs the philosophy of Plato and Socrates, not logic, nor pure thinking. That vision is always born of a discipline of worship, and one speaks little about it, and writes less.
When Plato draws attention to the "standing rapture" of Socrates for a whole day and night, he is pointed to the true secret of all genuine wisdom -- the participation, beyond all discursive rationality, in the absolute good.
Not all that Plato taught is in his extant of extinct writings. The Academy inherited this unwritten teaching (agrapha dogmata) 12 of Plato, and embodied it, not just in its class-room exposition, but in the disciplined practice of the mysteries of love in the Academy. The Good was more at the heart of the Academy than the True in an intellectual sense. In fact for them the Good alone was absolutely true. The disciplined pursuit of the Good, rather than satisfactory intellectual explanations of reality as it is constituted the central thrust of the Academy, in the days of Plato as in the days of his successors.
Of course the discourse in the Academy debated fine points of logic whether the geometrical point was a fiction of the geometers or the starting point of a line, the beginning of a flow rather than a minimum of static volume. These discourses were necessary for the shaping of the mind to perceive reality. The central concern, however, was what Plato put in the mouth of Socrates‘ and his priestess-guru, Diotima, not the discussions about forms or ideas. To know the truth is to choose the good. And to choose the good is to pursue the good through a disciplined life.
Even when academicians succumbed to the temptation of giving priority to intellectual knowledge over the quality of being, the Academy never completely separated the True firom the Good and the Adorable. The main concern of the Academy was to grow wings for the soul. "The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace: but when fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away“.13
I thinks the point is clear. The secular intellectual Plato and Socrates which the modern university studies have invented is pure fiction. The Platonic tradition was through and through religious, and the Academy of Plato was a basically religious movement. It is this religious Plato the Jew (ca 20 s.c to ca 50 A.D) and the Christian Fathers beginning with Clement and Origen (ca 185 A.D to ca 254).
The Platonic Tradition, much of which has left no literary remains, flourished in the time of Eunomius and Gregory, and provided the common intellectual milieu for their debate. It was a living tradition, in which there was no consciousness of any clear distinction either between Platonic and Pythagorean, or between Platonic and Neo-Platonic. It was a rich tradition, in which Christians and Bagans shared much. It was a continuous tradition - a diadoche or succession of teachers maintaining the Platonic tradition and developing it, just as Christian Bishops and Fathers maintained and developed the Christian Apostolic Tradition.
NeoPlatonic Theurgy
"Neo-platonism," another invention of the modern university, was in basic continuity with the Pythagorean - Platonic tradition inherited by the Academy. Modern interpretations of Neo-Platonism read Plotinus as if this disciple of Ammonius Saccas, was a nonreligious philosopher, and as Russell claimed, that it was Porphyry who introduced the religious element into Neo-Platonism.
The Enneads of Plotinus, we should not forget, were transcriptions by Porphyry of discourse given without any logical continuity or structure. Plotinus was not a Greek, in the strict sense, but an Egyptian. Those who regard Alexandria as a Greek city with a Greek culture, do not take into account the filow of Egyptian, Syrian and other Asian cultures into it. The Museum of Alexandria absorbed life and thought from as far away as India, beginning at least as early as the first century. The Scribe who took down the notes of the Egyptian Plotinus' lectures was a Syrian, whose original Syriac name was Malohus or Malko (king) of which the name Porphyry (purple-clad) is a Greek adaptation.
Porphyry was perhaps an ex-Christian 14 and certainly an anti-christian, the author of fifteen hooks against the Christians. A native of Tyre, he met Plotinus in 262 A.D., and during the eight years preceding the latter's death in 270 A.D., took down notes from lectures and interviews. It is only through Porphyry‘s Syrian mind that we have access to the Egyptian mind of Plotinus. And unless our own minds develop something in common with the Egyptian and Syrian minds, we are likely to misunderstand Plotinus as Russell did, and therefiore to misunderstand Eunomius.
For example, Porphyry's Peri Tes Ek Logion Philosophias was an exposition of the Greek oracles which so influenced all writers and thinkers of this period. Augustine 15 calls the
book Theologia Philosophias and quotes from it, mixing admiration and criticism. But he cites also Porphyry's comment on the Appollonian oracle about Christ, that the Jews have a better understanding of God than the Christians have. The Oracles are clearly an anti-Christian, but probably pro-Jewish, pagan work. The pagan gods and goddesses, Apollo and Hecate, condemn Orthodox Christians as deluded, while Hacate at least praises Christ himself as a noble soul.
One has to see Porphyry's perspective as essentially akin to much modern liberal Christianity, in which the dogmas about Christ's divinity and pre-existence are regarded at best as delusions or superstitions - i.e., absurd beliefs which have survived into a rational age. There is no difficulty in thinking that the Arian bishop of Cyzicus was of the same school. Eunomius was an academic philosopher-theologian, who accepted the "theurgic mysticism" of the pagan philosophers of his time as the standard of truth, and tried to fit his Christian belief into that framework-- a framework equally acceptable to Jews as to cultivated pagans.
For Porphyry as for Plotinus, life is a sort of preparation for death and for the life beyond death. Philosophy for them also means the practice of virtue rather than the quest for knowledge as such. For both Plotinus and Porphyry, truth and the good are one; doctrine leads to practice; discipline leads to true illumination. Prophyry's early work on the oracles seems a full systematisation of Pythagorean teaching and practice.
In the Enneads the theurgic practices of Plotinus are not made explicit. So modern western scholarship finds him more attractive, and regards him as a pure philosopher, without the taint of religion. But the theurgy that Porphyry writes about is but an embellishment of the sacrificial-cultic practices of the Platonic Tradition, which Plotinus himself practiced.
What Porphyry seems to have done in his later works like "On the Images of God " (Peri Agalmaton) 16 is to make the worship part of the Platonic Tradition more explicit and more philosophically justified. Peri Agalmaton was probably written before Porphyry became a disciple of Plotinus. Here the idea of God has become more refined, the disdain for Pythagorean ‘magical' rites more explicit, a greater confidence evident in the power of reason.
Porphyry seems to have moved from neo-Pythagoreanism to Neoplatonism, after he had left Christianity (if ever he was a Christian). Ammonius Saccas probably influenced him in his younger days, but it was after a bout of Neo-Pythagoreanism that Porphyry came back to Plotinian new-platonism.
Plotinus was the teacher of the aristocracy. His main pupils were professionals like the medical doctors Eustochius and Paulinus, bankers like Serapion, senators like Orontius, Sabinillus and Rogatian.17 The teaching of Plotinus was never intended for the masses. Its attraction was for the upper and middle classes, among whom the religiously inclined had only disdain for Christianity. Before Plotinus came on the scene, the upper and middle classes oscillated between various forms of Platonism and Pythagoreanism or Gnosticism adopted for their needs. During the second century, what we today call “Middle Platonism", but which in fact was an always religiously oriented re-interpretation of Pythagoras and Plato, had already become prevalent among the aristocracy. Plutarch and Gaius, Albinus and Apuleus, as well as Atticus, taught a Plato who was able to satisfy the religious needs of the cultured. Plato for these people became the theoretician of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, a legislator for the true and refined religious life.
Plutarch (died Ca 120 A.D.) above all had lifted up the Concept of the one, to hen, as the ultimate reality, as distinct from the multiple or polla. To hen was to on. It is this Plutarchian reconciliation of hen and on that Plotinus picked up and made central to his teaching. 18
But the concept of the One who is transcendent and beyond all multiple reality was a common concept in the first and second century Mediterranean culture among the philosophically inclined. One sees it in any Platonist, including Philo of Alexandria. This One is so transcendent, that the world of the many can have contact with it only through an intermediary like Philos Logos or Plotinus' Nous. The intellectual transcendence of God, which the Jewish and Christian Fathers called the “incomprehensibility of God“, was also common coin among the Pagan intellectuals. To get to the one, one has to shed the dragging weight of matter and the multiple. When finally the contact is made, it is not the reasoning mind that sees: it is a new eye opened in the heart; a sudden opening of the soul's eye, as if waking from a dream,19 that sees the light.
But it was Plutarch again who put the nous above the psyche. Since the One is pure intelligible, the psyche or soul has to rise above both body and soul, to the nous which is far superior to the soul. For Plutarch if the body is the earth, while the soul is related to it like the moon to the earth, only the nous is bright and superior, like the Sun.20
Albinus, a disciple of Gaius whom Plotinus read, along with Apuleius, a fellow-disciple of Gaius, had paved the way for Plotinus' final integration with the neo-Platonist Trinity of the three hypostases — the One, the nous, and the psuche. Albinus' three hypostases were:
(a) the first God, who is the first Good, the huperouranios Theos, the primary Intellect
(b) the second Intellect, the ouranios nous, the world soul, the Platonic kosmos noetos
(c) The Soul of the psuche which creates the multiple.2l
This is not to say that Plotinus simply systematized Gaius, Albinus, and Apuleius. we mean to suggest that the idea of a trinity of three hypostases was already current in the literature which Plotinus read and to which Eunomius had access. The Platonic Trinity was the most respectable doctrine in the 4th century Mediterranean, and Eunomius rather uncritically accepted it, and accommodated it to his Anomoian faith.
Our main point, however, is to draw attention to the basically religious orientation of Middle Platonism as well as of Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. All Platonic philosophy was an attempt to counter-act the pressures of the carnal, material body, a lusis kai periagoge psuches apo somatos, a separation of the soul from the body, for homoiosis Theoi kata to dunaton, for a resemblance or configuration to God according to capacity. This is so in Plutarch and Apulebius as in the less religious Albinus.
We often forget that Numenius,22 Plotinus, and Porphyry were all disciples of both Plato and Pythagoras. The two basic options available outside Christianity and Judaism for second or third century seekers were platonized Pythagoreanism and Gnosticism.
Peripateticism of the Aristotelian school and Stoicism in their various versions, as well as Epicureanism had lost their organisational strength. Aristotle and the Stoics deeply influenced Plotinus as well as Eunomius. But Neo-Pythagoreanism and Gnosticism were clearly demarcated doctrines of specially organized groups, with their own cults and religious practices.
Neo-Platonism is basically anti-Gnostic and pro-Pythagorean. Pythagoras was more akin to Plato than the wild speculations of Gnosticism. Plotinus, Porphyry tells us, wrote a treatise, Against the Gnostics. 23 This seems to have been directed against Christian Gnostics, who were organised in some sort of "house-churches", and thrived on many books of "revelation." "Plotinus frequently attacked their position at his conferences", Porphyry tells us.
Every attack on Gnosticism by these Platonists was a support, not so much for Orthodox Christianity, as for other pagan groups whose religion was an amalgam oi Plato, Pythagoras and the mystery cults.
Plotinus, it would seem, set the principles of Pythagoras and of Plato in a clearer light than anyone before him", 24 says Lenginus (213 - 273 A.D.), friend and contemporary of both Plotinus and Porphyry himself repeats than Plotinus followed Plato and Pythagoras.
Porphyry also tells us that Plotinus, by following the ways of meditation and discipline, became "God-like and lifting him self often, ... to the first and all-transcendent God" and God appeared to him. The supreme end of Plotinus‘ life was to become one with the One, and according to Porphyry "four times, during the period I passed with him, he attained this end, by no mere natural fitness, but by the ineffable Act".25
Plotinus was a “theurgist", one who sought and served the transcendent God, and was often protected from error by God. For him also philosophy was religion, and religion was philosophy.
It is this neo-Pythagorean, neo-Platonist, theurgic, religious philosophy of the Platonic Tradition that Porphyry and Iamblichus set forth more clearly, and which was the secret religion and faith of Eunomius, the Arian bishop of Cyzicua. The goal of Middle Platonist philosophy was the direct vision of God and the configuration (Homoiosis) to God that would result. Justin Martyr tells us that he took to the study of Plato for that purpose. so did Clement of Alexandria and Origen possibly, as well as the later fathers of the Church. And why not, perhaps Eunomius too?
whatever Plotinus taught, we know mainly through Porphyry's neo-Pythagorean arrangement of that material into six groups (enneads) of 9 chapters each. The numbers six and nine have to be traced to neo-Pythagoreanism than to Plotinus himself. But neither Plotinus nor Porphyry or Iamblichus was free from neo-Pythagorean influence. This influence can be seen in later writers like Proclus and the Pseudo-Areopagite, with his nine choirs of angels in the Celestial Hierarchy. In the development of the Tradition (Platonic Tradition) religion and philosophy were always unseparable.
The main difference between the pagans in the Platonic Tradition and the Christians sharing the Platonic Tradition were three:
Pagans in the Platonic Tradition. |
Orthodox Christians (Nicean) in the Platonic Tradition |
|
| 1 | The transcendent One is totally One, beyond all duality or multiplicity; there are three initial hypostases, the One, the Nous and the Psuche, but the One does not admit any plurality; the Nous, however is Being, i.e. One-and-many as Plato's Parmenides said. | The transcendent One is both One and three. This Triune One is beyond all multiplicity can provide no analogy for understanding the three in one. There is no room for number of quantity in the Three-in-One, which is infinite. There is not multiple, because and-many, as Plato's Parmenidea three is one |
| 2 | The One engenders the Nous by emanation, as the operation (energeia) of the One. The Nous engenders the Psuche by its operation (emanation). And the Psuche engenders the world of multiplicity by its operation. The three are different in status, rank and Operations. | The Three-in-One creates the world of multiplicity by a process (creation) quite different from the eternal generation of the Second Hypostasis from the First. The Third Hypostasis is not generated by the Second, but proceeds from the First. And the Three-in-One by their joint operation, the world of multiplicity nothing. And time begins creation, not before it. The Three together create all things, and there is no difference in status or rank between them. the one ousia of the three has one operation. |
| 3 | In a human person, the reality is the sould, which is immortal, and of the same genus as the three initial hypostases (One, Nous and world-soul). The Body is a drag and the human soul has to be freed from it, to be alienated from it and to rise towards the One, by disciplined effort. The Soul is freed and it is in its nature to make this effort and to rise toward, the one, by turning inward ignoring the world of things, towards the Centre of one being, and through that centre to the Centre of all centres to be merged and become one with that Centre, beyond Being. This is done through a secret discipline of worship and ascetic practices of which one speaks or writes very little. | In a human person, body and soul are both real, both created together by the Triune God, in God's image. This image is reflected in the body and the soul. When the soul separates itself from evil, and is surrendered to its creator, it is able to bring the body under control and to use it for creativity of the good. This separation from evil and surrender to God is a synergistic act, where the soul, in its freedom is helped by God. The soul is bound, in prison, and has to gain liberation as well as the rising towards God and the free creativity of the good are synergistic acts in which the human being and God act together. The rising in the good is infinite. There is no Term or Final End, but an eternal rising in joy towards the Three-in-One, in the infinite Three-in-One. |
Christians affirmed the unity of the Transcendent One just as strongly as the Arians and the Neo-Pythagorean Noe-Platonists. Both Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa strongly affirm the principle "Not Three Gods". Nazianzen's fifth theological oration and Nyssa's fifth theological oration and Nyssa's sermon on "Not Three Gods" leave us in no doubt on this.
The Formation of Eunomius
But Eunomius does not belong to this world of Nicene, Orthodoxy. He belongs intellectually to the Pagan Platonist world, with its theurgy, but Christian by profession, and trying to reconcile the two, in an anhomoian context.
Plotinus said nothing of any cultic discipline -- at least nothing explicit. He is silent, even in Porphyry's-Version, about any mystical experience or religious rite. The ascent to the One is described in metaphors - rising, responding to voices from on nigh. becoming present to the Supreme One, moving from the external to the internal, seeing the light, going beyond oneself, polishing the statue, cutting away everything, return to one's origins, return to one's fatherland.
Elevation, introversion, return and vision leading to union - there is for this obviously as method, a technique, a training (Ennead I speaks of a Proficient, a trainee for the Final End) this training is not to add something, but to take something away, something that hinders the ascent of the soul. Ennead I:6:6 speaks about purification through moral discipline, courage and every virtue. In this sixth tractate of the First Ennead, Plotinus speaks about approaching the Holy Celebrations of the Mysteries (I:6:7).
In Plotinus' school, feasts were kept e.g., Plato's feast (vita Plotinii 15): papers were read, debates were held (git.Plot 18). None of the accounts however mention any religious rites. This is, however, no reason to think that Plotinus was an academic. He was certainly an ascetic, one who fasted and brought his body under subjection, in order to be free from its demand. But of third discipline, the Enneads tell us little.
Porphyry wrote a Life of Pythagoras and a work on Abstaining from meat. There is little doubt that Porphyry the Syrian practised some Pythagorean disciplines of fasting and abstentions. If Porphyry also took part in mystery cults, he would naturally refrain from disclosing them in his writings, because such secrecy required by the mystery cults, Porphyry died at the beginning of the 4th century. Eunomius may have known him through his writings only.
Iamblichus who died around 330 was also personally unknown to Eunomius, who went to Alexandria around 3350 A.D. to study under Aetius. Aetius who was from Antioch on the other hand, probably knew Iamblichus, who was just as much Pythagorean as Plotinian, and wrote an Introduction to the Doctrines of Pythagoras. In fact Iamblichus considered himself a Pythagorean. Aedesius who established the school in Syria was also a Pythagorean and a disciple of Iamblichus.
Both Porphyry and Iamblichus belonged to the theurgic Plotinus Platonic Tradition, to which Proclus gave fuller expression in the second half of the 5th century. Philosophy is a hierophant of the universe - Proclus stated and has to express this in worship. This concept is conceivably or Christian origin but has its roots also in the Pythagorean and Socratic traditions which ante-date Plato and Christianity. According to the Christians also,the Eucharist was a sacrifice on behalf or the whole of humanity and the whole of creation, as the texts of some Christian liturgies remind us.
The Theurgy of the Platonic Tradition has often been interpreted as the result of an impact of the Oriental religions. But it is just as legitimate to conceive it partly as the influence of a successful Christian practice of the Eucharist which the pagans imitated. Any pagan could see that the Eucharist was the source of cohesion and strength for the Christians. The pagans, out of a background of the mystery religions and Pythagorean practices, developed forms of worship which we now call "theurgy". Even Julian the Apostate, in re-opening pagan temples, had in mind the formation of a pagan theurgy which would function like the Christian eucharistic liturgy.
Theurgy was the technique accessible to the common people, especially for Egyptians and Syrians, to raise their souls towards the One. Iamblichus it was, perhaps more than others, who worked out the role of symbols and symbolic actions in raising the soul towards the One. For Plotinus, the three first hypostases could also be named Ouranos (Bachus), Chronos (Saturn) and Zeus (Jupiter). He saw no conflict between his system made for the aristocrats and the people's religion properly interpreted. But all "things" had to be dialectically used for mounting upward. It was in this tradition, as also in the Aristotelian or Peripatetic tradition that Eunomius had been trained.
Theurgy stayed theoretically in this framework of using things as symbols for ascending towards the One. In practice however the demonic powers were sought after and acquired. Eunomius was less of a symbolist than his contemporary neo-Platonists, but he too practised some form of theurgy, possibly one transformed by Christian practice. 26 Eunomius accepted Christ as monogenes, but not as homoousion with the father. Christ was begotten or gennetos, unbegotten. Neither was Christ a man like other man, because he was produced. by the unique energeia of the One, which generated nothing but the Son, who is therefore also unique. Eunomius, as bishop (Anomoian) of cyzicus, must have often presided over the Christian Eucharistic liturgy. Whether he also saw the Christian Eucharist within the model of pagan theurgy we have no way of determining. There need be no doubt that the Anomoian group led by Eunomius was seeking to work out a compromised Christianity that they hoped would be acceptable to pagans and jews alike.
Aetius, Eunomius and the Trinity
Platonic or pagan theurgy, refurbished by replacing the dialectic reason of Plato with the non-contradiction logic of Aristotle, within Christian forms and names explains Aetius, and to a large extent Eunomius.
Aetius was a coelesyrian, who studied Aristotle‘s logic under a peripatetician in Alexandria, and also studied Arian theology in Antioch. For him the Aristotelian syllogism alone gave a firm grasp of truth.
Aetius wandered between Alexandria and Antioch, became exposed also to Platonic theurgy, but concentrated, under George of Cappadocia, on Arius and Aristotle. Eunomius is his disciple, less Aristotelian, more sophist, but deeply immersed in the Platonic theurgy. Eunomius learned from Aetius what the latter put down in his work: Theology or the Art of Sophistication. And he uses the technologia (i.e., technique of using discourse)fully in agreement with the principles of the Second Sophistique.
The passage cited by Gregory of Nyssa in Contra Eunomium I:l5l 27 is a clear exposition of the Trinitarian lore of the Platonic Theurgy that we have bee speaking about: "Here is a summery of our whole teaching: "From the highest and supreme-most Being, and from this, through it, after,it, but before all else, a second Being. And a third, but in no way to be put on the same level as the two others, but subordinated to the One as its cause (aitia) and to the second as its birth-giving operation(energeia)'.
This is clearly the Trinity of the three initial hypostases of Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. The three Beings or Ousiai, have each its own operation (energeia) which follows (Parepomenon) it, the names coming into being with the operation, according to Eunomius.
Eunomius insists, with the clarity of Aristotle's logic of non-contradiction, that each ouaia has its separate energeia, and the energeiae of the three are different from each other: the hypostases, each of which is single and identical only with itself, give birth to different energeiai or operations. The erga or result of these operations we can study, and from these operations we can understand the ousia which produced them. From erga to energeia to ousia we can rise to the being of God, according to Eunomius. Nyssa pricks a hole in Eunomius' logic at the outset. If the names of the three Beings come into being along with their energeiai as Eunomius insists, why doesn't he mention these names, namely Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Why does Eunomius suppress these names and use circumlocutions like "anotate kai kuriotate ousia" instead of Father, and more complicated phrases for the son and the Holy Spirit?
Nyssa regards Eunomius as a crypto-pagan, determined to undermine the faith of the church from within 28 More explicitly, Nyssa accuses Eunomius of advocating the Jewish doctrine of God (Ioudaikos dogma: 304), attributing Godhead only to the Father.
Nyssa's argument about being and existence can easily escape us. For him ousia. i.e.. being or is-ness, does not permit degrees. "By what sophia (wisdom or sophistry) does he distinguish between more and less in being?" (To mallon te kai hetton tes ousias). There cannot be more being and less being, because being is a simple predicate. This is particularly so for the Divine being for Gregory. There is no quantity of more or less in the infinite being.
Neither is there sub-ordination or super-ordination in the divine nature. Subjection or sub-ordination is only for the creation. If the Son is subject to the Father in Christian faith, it is only the Son as part of creation, not as Creator.
Nyssa's radical refutation of Eunomius does not come from any logical demonstration, though he exposes the logical untenability of many of Eunomius' arguments. The dispute is not between two philosophers and cannot be settled by the arbitration of a third philosopher. The controversy is between two group convictions -- that of the Church and that of the Anomoeans.
"so then the whole fight and word-battle between the Church people (ekklesiastokoi) and the Anomoians (anomoiai), is about whether the Son and the Holy Spirit are created natures as they say or whether they are uncreated (aktistos phuseis) nature as the Church has believed" 29
Clearly both sides are unable to demonstrate logically the createdness or the uncreatedness. Eunomius affirms that there are three initial hypostases or beings, following the neo-Pythagorean neoPlatonist theurgic school to which he really and secretly belongs, while serving as Arian bishop of Cyzicus. Gregory of Nyssa affirms that there is only one uncreated Being:
"The Church's teaching is not to divide the faith among many beings (plethos ousion), but in three personae (prosopois) and hypostases(hypostasesi), never different in being is-ness (einai), while our opponents posit variety and difference among the beings" 30
Simplicity and infinitude - (aploun kai apeiron) - that is the divine nature. And if all the first three hypostases are simple and infinite, then one simple and infinite cannot be greater or lesser than another (45:32lD). Eunomius obviously regarded the three initial hypostases as simple, but whether he regarded the second and the third as infinite is doubtful. In fact even the simplicity is less perfect as one comes down the scale of Eunomius' three initial hypostases. The Father seems to be more perfectly simple than the son and the Holy Spirit in whom there seems to be some admixture of compoundness. Nyssa's final clinching of the argument comes from a direct statement of the faith of the Church, which we summarize thus:
"Being can be ultimately divided into intelligible and sensible (to noeton kai to aistheton); the intelligible world can be divided again into uncreate and created (aktistos kai ktiste). Larger and smaller exist only in the sensible part of the created world, i.e., where there is size and extension. Even in the intelligible part of creation, greater and less would have to be measured by other than size or extension.
"The source-spring of all Good (pantos aqathou pege) the beginning (arche), the treasure-house (choregia), is seen as in the Uncreated Nature. The whole created order is inclined (neneuken) towards this, and subsists by sharing in the First Good of the Supreme Nature in contact with it and participating in it by necessity in proportion to the varying (some more, some less) measure of freedom of will each had (kata to autexovsion tes proaireseos metalambanonton). It is the share of this freedom of the will and consequent participation of less and more in the First Good, that becomes the measure of greater and lesser in the created intelligible world. Created intelligible nature stands on the frontier (methorios) between good and evil, capable of either. Degree is then decided by greater removal from evil and further advance in the Good.
"But these distinctions have no place in the Uncreate Intelligible Nature. It does not come to the good by acquisition. Nor participates in it by measure. It is itself the fullness of good and the source of good. Any distinction within the Uncreate is not in terms of more and less — not of quantity o£ good. but only by virtue of the uniqueness of the Three Persons. The three persons are all uncreated, infinite, fullness of good in each". 31
That is a summary of Gregory's teaching based on The Church's faith. Nyssa then goes on to refute Eunomous' argument that the Father is 'prior' or ‘senior’ to the Son, being more ancient and therefore worthy of greater honour. This of course was the key argument of all Arians that there was a then when the Son was not: that the Father had first to exist before the Son could be begotten; therefore that there was a time-interval (diastema) between the Father and the Son.
Nyasa's argument is clear. First, the universal statement that time belongs to the created order and that there is no time-interval in the Uncreate 32 (45:357 Bff). Second, attributing time-interval within the Creator introduces a logical anomaly. If the Son began at a particular point in time, and if the Father existed for a fixed (finite) period of time before that, the finite age of the son plus the finite period of the Father's existence before that would give the finite age of the Father, since the sum of two finite numbers has to be finite. This would make the Infinite God finite, which is absurd 33 (45:360 Aff)
Conclusion
The debate between Gregory of Nyssa and Eunomius, part of which is reflected in contra Eunomium 1, cannot be understood as between a Nicene Platonist and an Aristotelian Gnostic, Gregory of Nyssa of course speaks out of Nicene Orthodoxy, and uses the technologia of the Second Sophistique, just as much as his opponent. But Nyssa has learned all he can from the Platonic Tradition of searching for unity with the One through worship, Nyssa has, however, sifted the prevailing system of pagan philosophy through a religious-dogmatic sieve - the faith in the Triune God and in the historical Incarnation of the 5econd Person of the Trinity. For Gregory, the faith of the Church was the standard by which all out-side knowledge was to be tested and sifted, though in that testing and sifting, or rather after that testing and sifting, the technology of outside logic could be used to the hilt. It is not that logic that yields the truth. But once the truth is firmly grasped on the basis of faith, logic can be fully used to refute error.
Eunomius on the other hand, is no Aristotelian Gnostic. Most likely he agreed with Plotinus and the neo-Platonists as well as with neo-Pythagoreans, in being anti-Gnostic. No doubt Eunomius has much more confidence in the non-contradiction logic of the Aristotelian syllogism than in the dialectical Socratic logic of Plato. Eunomius‘ basic effort, however, is to bring the faith of the Church in line with prevailing outside philosophy. He probably hoped, like many today who advocate indigenisation or secularisation of the faith, thereby to win pagans and Jews for the Christian faith. The Cappadocians were the main obstacle in the way. Hence the fury of his personal attack on Basil, which according to Gregory, caused Basil's death. Gregory perhaps because of this belief of his that Basil died because of Eunomius' attack, has also been unsparing in his personal attacks on Eunomius.
History has given the verdict in favour of the Cappadocians. But the basic problem is still with us. Do we, like Eunomius, seek to bring the faith to fit the categories of outside knowledge, or can we use the insights of the faith to question some of the assumptions of prevailing outside philosophy. The judgment we have to give today as Christians is a choice between the two projects. Eunomius was prepared to accept the Platonic Tradition
as the normative structure within which to accommodate Christianity. Eunomius could do this only by abandoning the two main planks of the Nicene Platform - namely a consubstantial and non-multiple Trinity on the one hand, and a perfectly divine-human Christ on the other with the resurrection of the body. The same temptation faces many Christians today to abandon illogical and unscientific concepts like Trinity, incarnation and bodily resurrection. It was also the temptation of those who in modern times, tried to
interpret the gospel in terms of one modern school of western philosophy, be it Existentialism, Phenomendogy, Linguistic Analysis or structuralism. History has shown us that Eunmion style projects are fore-doomed to failure and disappearance.
The other style of project, which Gregory of Nyssa undertook in the Fourth Century, has again to be undertaken in our time. Gregory has made a synthesis of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan faith with many elements in the Platonic tradition, thereby making Christian teaching, despite all the logical inconsistencies, the foundation for Byzantine civilisation. Today, for our generation of Christians who have come through modern science and modern philosophy, the task is to reinterpret Christianity in a new global context. Remaining faithful to the Trinitarian-Incarnational foundation, we have again to re-examine the assumptions behind modern thought, question the assumptions which are incompatible with the Trinitarian-Incarnational faith of the Church, and reformulate the faith as Gregory did in his time, not as Eunomius sought to do.
Notes
2. Clement of Alexandria (2nd cart) spoke of the ascetical practice
of philosophy (philosophian askein, stromatis I) and John chrysostom
(4th century) spoke about the zeal for the philosophy of the monks
(ten tonflmonachon philoaophian zelosai, Homily_55 in Math.p 356)
3. Betrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster,
New York 1945, p. 287 ff
4. A.E. Taylor, Plato, The Man and His work, University Paperbacks,
Methuen, London, 1926/1960. p.211.
5. Symposium 174 ff
6. A.E.Taylor, Plato p. 225
7. Plato, The 5 sium- Eng. Tr. W. Hamilton, The Penguin Classics,
Harmondsworth, §85I7I959 p. 24-
Plato, The symposium, E.T. cited pp 93 - 94.
9. ibid . p. 95
10. ibid p. 79
11. Plato: Apologia Sokratous, 31.6. Eng. TR. present author's .
12. Aristotle frequently refers to these agragha dogmata of the Academy.
13. Phaedrus: E.T. Irvin Edman, (ed) The works of Plato, Modern Library, New York, 1928, p. 287.
14. Socrates, Hist. Eccl.
15. Augustune, The city of God Bk XIX. ch. xxm.
16. we have a few fragments of Peri ggglggtgn in Eusebius
Praegaratio Evangelica BK.III. ch. vii,ix,xi,xii, xm
l7. Porphyry, Vita Plofiinii x 7 .
l8. Plutarch: De El apud Delphos: xx
19. Philo de brahamor 15
20. Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride : L XXVII
21- see R. Arndw, Platonisme in pict- Qheol gath vol.l2 p 2272 ff
22- Our access to Numenius is basically through fragments conserved
by Prochus or Eusebius.
Vita Plotinii: 16, E.T. Stephen Mackenna, Plotinus, The Enneads, 4th Edn. London, 1969, Q. Ll.
24. Cited by Porphyry, vita Plotinii: 20, 2.1-. 92 pp.14-15.
25. ibid = 23
26. See Contra Eunomium 1:54 (GNO 1:80 PG 452265) speaks of Eunomius' ten te aporreton ekeinen mustaqggian kai hoia para
27- GNO 1: 151 if (PP 71 ff) . PG 452297 Aff
28. GNO I: 158 ff PG 458300
29. GNO I: 217 ff. PG 458317 A
30. GNO It 229 PG 45:32O D.
31. GNO I. 270 ff. PG 45:333 BHD - summery by present writer.