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What’s the Matter with Matter?
2.1 Platonic Spiritualism
By Dr. Thaddeus Williams
This is part 2 of A Twoist Model for Helping Your Utopian Neighbors
A second area where we have taken on the colors of a Oneist culture is with the doctrine of “platonic spiritualism.” We find ourselves not only in a Pelagian captivity but also in a Platonic captivity. Dennis Johnson has accurately captured a biblical insight in his point that, “There is nothing the matter with matter.” Plato, by contrast, believed that everything was the matter with matter. For the Athenian philosopher, the material world is not the ex nihilo creation of a good Creator who calls it ‘good,’ but the devious work of an evil power called the Demiurge. According to Plato’s cosmology, this Demiurge took the beautiful, timeless, perfect “forms,” and shackled them in the prison of matter. Thus, we must escape the cave of creation, where we mistake the shadows on material existence for reality, and make the arduous ascent into the abstract realm of pure spirit, the higher plane of unshackled spirit-forms. The material world only retains value insofar as it can “transports us with the recollection of true beauty [i.e., the beauty of the spirit-forms]… then careless of the world below… a kind of ecstasy overtakes us and the soul is renewed.”
On this point, Platonism and Hinduism are virtually indistinguishable. As Albert Schweitzer observed:
The real belief of the Brahmins is that man does not attain to union by means of any achievement of his natural power of gaining knowledge, but solely by quitting the world of the senses in a state of ecstasy and thus learning the reality of pure being.[1]
The Hindu’s goal is “quitting the world of the senses,” leading to Yogananda’s claim that, “I don’t take life seriously; it’s all a dream.” Plotinus the third century Roman philosopher and father of Neo-Platonism, likewise urges “to separate yourself from your body and very earnestly to put aside the system of sense with its desires and impulses and every such futility.”[2]
2.2 The Platonic Captivity of the Church
The Christian church through history has long flirted with this Platonic spirituality, at times exchanging a full-fledged biblical view of creation for Plato’s view that material existence (rather than sin) is our biggest problem. Justin Martyr in the second century retained much of his earlier Platonism after his conversion, esteeming Plato as a Christian before Christ.[3] Platonism was part of the philosophical zeitgeist of third century Alexandria, where Clement and others came to equate sinful with the material. In the next three centuries Plato’s ideal of becoming “careless of the world below” (i.e., the Hindu quest to “quit the world of the senses” and Plotinus’ goal of “putting aside the body”) became enshrined in Gnostic and ascetic movements that spread through the church world.
Just like a modern day Hindu sadhu (holy man) the church came to hail the spiritual heroism of men like Simeon Stylites the Elder who spent thirty-seven years living on a pillar in the Syrian desert, or Alypius who stood atop a pillar for fifty-three years before his legs gave out and he laid another fourteen years until his death. Gradually such narcissistic attempts to reach union with God became the mark of Christian spirituality, rather than a life of love expressed in the material world. Yet it is only if Plato rather than Christ is Lord that an isolated quest for spiritual ecstasy can be considered more “spiritual” than giving cold water to the thirsty, warm clothes to the naked, a soft bed to the stranger, and solid food to the hungry (Matt. 25:34-36).[4]
The impact such Platonic spirituality can still be seen in much of the contemporary church world. We craft events and services with the goal of ushering people into a spiritual high, devoid of content. We draw distinctions between spiritual vocations and mere secular jobs. We fail to see environmental care as part and parcel of a robust biblical worldview. We also stray from a biblical to a Platonic view, abandoning Jerusalem for Athens, by creating an artificial split between the scientific and the sacred. Science is often viewed by Christians with either indifference or antagonism, as if the study of nature is either irrelevant or an enemy to faith.[5]
2.3 The Biblical Antithesis to Platonic Spirituality
When we turn to the Bible, we see that the influx of Platonic ideas into the church is nothing new. The church in first century Colossi was impacted by an emphasis on the spiritual realm over and against the physical realm. We can detect the biblical antithesis to such Platonic spirituality in Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Paul argues that Jesus created and sustains the physical cosmos. In the past tense, Jesus constructed the entire material realm from nothing and for His glory: “All things were created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:16b). In the present tense, He also sustains and upholds all things together: “In Him all things hold together” (1:17b). Every swirling galaxy and swerving quantum particle is sustained by the sovereignty of Jesus. The Creator-Sustainer Christ of Paul’s theology is a far cry from the Demiurge of Plato’s cosmology.
Paul goes on to argue that the Creator-Sustainer Christ became flesh and reconciled us “in His body of flesh” (1:22), personally and painfully entering into the material nexus of His own Creation. “For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (2:9). The incarnation is, among other things, God’s confirmation of the Genesis 1 benediction (Latin: bene = good, diction = word) that He spoke when He created matter. Paul also stresses the reality of the bodily resurrection (2:12), a decisive refutation of Plato’s devaluation of material existence. Jesus’ death, in Paul’s theology, was not liberation from the cave as His true spirit-self entered the world of the forms. Rather, Christ rose bodily from the dead, “the firstborn from the dead” (1:18b), reorienting history toward God’s final eschatological utopia, the eternal good place that will be irreversibly and eternally physical.
The remaining chapters of Paul’s letter to the Colossians follow logically from the anti-Platonic polemic of his opening chapters. Paul discourages the spirituality of “asceticism and severity to the body,” (2:23) with its anti-matter regulations, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch” (2:21). He diagnoses our problem not as our material bodies, but as “the old self,” which is Paul’s shorthand for that self-obsessed bundle of internal impulses that propel us into “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness, anger wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk, lying, etc. (3:5, 8-9). True spirituality, therefore, is not achieved by body-defying feats of the ascetic,[6] which in Paul’s estimation “are of no value stopping the indulgence of the flesh,”[7] but when, by the Holy Spirit’s power (rather than self-power) we “put the death“ of “the old man” and “put on… compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience… and above all love” (3:12-14). Paul then presents a vision of true spirituality that happens not on the pillar of the isolated ascetic, but in the family relationships in the home (3:18-21), and the employee relationships in the workplace (3:22-4:1).
In other words, our cosmology determines how we define spirituality. If it all begins with a malevolent demiurge, then spirituality becomes the ascetic’s ecstatic escape from the material prison he created. If it all begins with a good Creator, however, then spiritually happens where we relationally engage others in everyday life in God’s good world. In this non-Platonic spirituality, the extraordinary and the supernatural do not banish the ordinary and the natural to the shadows, but bathe the ordinary and the natural in a spiritual glow. All of life becomes sacred, our manufactured curtain of division between the spiritual and the non-spiritual is torn, and we behold the comprehensive Lordship of Christ over every “square inch in the whole domain of human existence.”[8]
As the church in the 21st century takes a mass exodus from our Platonic captivity, entering into the spiritual territory of Christ’s Lordship everyday life to which Paul invites the Colossians, must can join Irish poet Evangeline Paterson when she says:
I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.
The spiritually infiltrates the mundane as we affirm with Martin Luther that, “The widow can sweep her floor to the glory of God” or with Johann Sebastian Bach that, “The aim and final end of all music is to bring glory to God,” or the Charter of the Royal Society’s call to “Direct your scientific studies to the glory of God and the benefit of the human race,” or with Paul that “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). A Christian spirituality that can eat breakfast, drink coffee, sweep floors, play music, study nature, change diapers, offer cold water, etc. for the glory of God is far more helpful to our utopian neighbors than escapist pursuits of spiritual ecstasy. Let us live the biblical antithesis in all of life.
[1] Albert Schweitzer.
[2] The Essence of Plotinus, tr. Mackenna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), V, iii, 161.
[3] Justin Martyr, First Apology, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 178, 193.
[4] The exchange of biblical spirituality for Platonic spirituality is not without consequences. The Platonizing of Christianity through the Middle Ages shoulders some responsibility for the pendulum swing in Western culture to the reductive materialism of the modern world. In the analysis of the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn).
In other words, a church of Plato’s spiritualism leads to a culture of Democritus’ atomism. An overemphasis on the spiritual swings the pendulum to an overemphasis on the material and humans are reduced from pure spirit or pure matter.
[5] In my years of interacting with scientifically-minded people who claim to have “deconverted” from Christianity to atheism, I have found that time and time again, they were really turning from Plato dressed up in Jesus clothes. Their former churches did not embrace nature as something created and called ‘good’ by God. Their churches did not affirm along with Robert Boyle that, “Science is a religious task, the disclosure of the admirable workmanship which God displayed in the universe.” When Christians devalue the material world, neglecting our sacred role to steward and study creation, we throw many thinking people into a completely unnecessary dilemma between either keeping their faith intact or allowing their God-infused natural curiosity to develop.
[6] In his first letter to Timothy, Paul even equates material world devaluing practices with “the teaching of demons,” which implicitly deny that “everything created by God is good” (See 1 Tim. 4:1-5).
[7] The “flesh” (Greek: sarx) in Pauline thought is often used synonymously with “the old self,” not in reference our physical bodies, but to the core drive to be autonomous from God, to do things our way by our power for our glory. As A.C. Thiselton argue, “[By sarx Paul expresses] the self-centered, self-justifying standards of secular man… This is not the flesh of the anti-Epicurean polemic, but man himself, in so far as he gives himself up to his own aims in opposition to God’s” (“Flesh” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol. 1, 675, 676).
[8] In the words of Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”