How The Aristotelian Mind-set Impacts Christian Liberal Theology

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, theologians, scientists, and philosophers rebel against classical theology by championing an Aristotelian this-worldly mind-set. They openly challenge the Platonist perception of God as a spiritually perfect being who reigns over-and-above an inferior material world.

Renaissance thinkers like Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton undertake to shift theology from God’s immutable being per se to the exploration and development of God’s creation. Immanuel Kant summarizes the principle of Aristotelian worldliness and its role in the Enlightenment when he asserts:  “Have courage to use your reason.” 

Have courage to use your reason

In the nineteenth century, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) emphasizes the God/human relationship with his perspective that the Christian God desires people to subjectively apprehend and experience him. Kierkegaard faults the Church’s otherworldliness for constraining believers with bonds of passivity and joylessness.

Other theologians of the nineteenth century deepen the Aristotelian “hands on” ethos by rallying people toward social action for the improvement of humanity. They encourage people to face, feel, and solve the practical problems of this world.  

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) lay the foundations for liberal theology, so-called for its human-centered concerns and doctrinal pragmatism. In their view, Jesus came not to challenge the world, to pronounce judgment upon sin, or even to be a savior, but to embrace culture and improve the human condition. For these theologians, the kingdom of God concerns the realization that God calls each person to accept and love one another in the here and now of this earthly life.

As classical theism is rejected, so, too, is the authority of Scripture. Liberal theologians lay aside orthodox doctrines considered unreasonable, such as the virgin birth, the miracles Jesus performed, or the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments. Christ is more morally inspiring than divine. He becomes the ultimate model of love and justice.

In the next generation, theologians like Paul Tillich (1886-1965) continue to find value in the Aristotelian mind-set. Tillich seeks to correlate the Biblical message with the needs of contemporary society by redefining God as the ground of Being. He argues that God is found in the form of ultimate concern embedded in the depth of people’s personalities and life-situations.

God as Ground of Being

In addition to the liberal protest, there are other challenges to the Platonist mind-set of classical theism. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) develop a characteristically Aristotelian fascination with God’s this-worldly immanence as the actualizing force, or entelechy, that pushes all creation toward the fulfillment of its purposes. 

In their view, God is not static and fixed, but always in flux, moving forward, co-creating history with humanity. Christ is not so much a historical person as an evolutionary cosmic process. This intuitive and pragmatic approach to Christian thought is known as process theology.  

The inherent difficulty, of course, is that God is so completely identified with the immanent Becoming of this world that the transcendent Being of the Trinity dissolves into the fabric of creation.

Late twentieth-century formulations with an Aristotelian thrust are found in the black theology of African-American James Cone, the liberation theology of Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, and the feminist theology of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza.

Each of these individuals share frustration, even resentment, toward what they consider the rigid mind-set of a traditional theology that is caught up in abstractions to the point that it is oblivious to racial, social, and gender injustices. Theology is not simply the rational study of the Being of God, Cone asserts, but the study of God’s liberating transformation of the world. In the view of Cone and other liberation theologians, the oppressed will “risk all for earthly freedom, a freedom made possible in the resurrection of Christ.”

Liberal progressive theologians have vigorously critiqued what they consider the centuries old white male patristic dominance of Christianity. They consider it an influence that too often sides with the status quo of the ruling class and thereby crucifies Christ anew by persecuting minorities, the poor, and women. 

Christ is seen as struggling for justice alongside the victimized and marginalized against all forms of social oppression, which can even include the Church herself. In a decisive break with a centuries-old conservative praxis, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) opened the doors to the influence of the Aristotelian mind-set, including the involvement by Catholic laity and clergy in radical social politics.

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How Plato Influences Christianity

One can recognize the influence of Plato’s absolute idealism in the fourth and fifth centuries of the early church, when Greek metaphysical concepts are employed to shore up and defend orthodoxy against heretical trends, particularly Arianism, which denies the co-equal identity of Christ with the Father.

Indeed, Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a prime contributor to early church doctrine, had been well schooled in Neo-Platonism before his conversion. While Augustine quotes the Bible extensively, he tends to interpret it within the neo-Platonic framework. In Teaching Christianity, for example, Augustine writes, “If those philosophers happen to have said anything that is true and agreeable to our faith, the Platonists above all…we should even claim back for our own use what they have said.” 

Augustine of Hippo

The influence of such a perspective is revealed in the same work when Augustine writes, “God does not enjoy us, but makes use of us…For he is the one who supremely and primordially is, being absolutely unchanging.” And in discussing Jesus’ commandment to love God and others as one’s self, Augustine writes, “There is no need of a commandment that we should love ourselves…The end of the commandment is love of God and neighbor.” 

Here is depersonalization, both of God's nature and his relationship to human beings. This philosophy reflects more mechanistic than personalistic and covenantal categories. And this trend continues today when the Christian view of God takes on a distinctly Platonist tone by insisting that God is impassible, indifferent to feeling, invulnerable to suffering, and apart from humanity.

Much of the metaphysical speculation concerning God throughout the Middle Ages, including the writings of Anselm (1033-1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), demonstrates a similar preoccupation with the study of God’s Being per se, rather than reflecting the biblical narrative in which humanity is redeemed for communion with the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Anselm

 

Thomas Aquinas

Christ’s divinity is clearly affirmed, but his humanity is neglected. His existence as the representative human being who by his death and resurrection transposes ordinary people into sons and daughters of the living God is passed over. 

The Platonist mind-set gives rise to a theology from above, absolutely concerned with God but revealing little interest in persons, apart from pointing out how far short they fall from God’s ideal Being. This, then, is classical theology: a perspective that values God’s eternal intradivine life (termed the “immanent Trinity”), yet is permeated by a remoteness that separates God from his creation. This perspective shares the dualism inherent in Plato’s philosophy and is found in both Western and Eastern Orthodox traditions.

Compass theory suggests that whenever the Platonist mind-set consciously or unconsciously dominates Christian precepts, God is viewed as mechanistic, impersonal, and fatalistic. As a consequence, permanence of belief and thought overshadows the process of growth and change. 

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Plato, Aristotle, and Compass Psychotheology

It is commonly accepted that the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, made essential contributions to the foundations of Western civilization. Less recognized is how the diametrically opposed ideologies of Platonism and Aristotelianism influenced the formative centuries of Christian thought, creating theological fault-lines whose tensions reverberate to the present day.

For the purposes of compass theory, the original philosophical positions held by Plato and Aristotle assume importance for psychotheological reasons. Their philosophies, we propose, are foundational to the development of two opposing mind-sets that profoundly impact Christianity and the Western world. Here is a summary of each position.

Plato’s Transcendent Realm of “Eternal Being” 

Plato

Both a brilliant philosopher and mathematician, Plato (428-348 BC) favors the use of abstract reason in theorizing about the nature of God and humanity. It is interesting to note that Plato draws many of his examples to support such propositions from the field of mathematics, an area of study that reflects upon perfect but lifeless entities.

Beyond this spatiotemporal world, Plato hypothesizes, there exists a noncorporeal and perfect world, one of eternal being, that is nonphysical, nonspatial, and nontemporal. This is Plato’s world of Ideal Forms. A world that is in stark contrast to the imperfect shadow of this physical world in which human beings live.

Here is Plato on the subject:

This, then, which gives to the objects of knowledge their truth and to him who knows them his power of knowing, is the Form or essential nature of Goodness...And so with the objects of knowledge: these derive from the Good not only their power of being known, but their very being and reality.

At a practical level, Plato implies that the world ordinary people experience as being real—the world of changing, growing, living things—is not real at all. It is but an illusory and inferior representation of the eternal and changeless realm of Ideal Forms.

The highest and most noble aspect of the self is the mind, with its ability to contemplate abstract ideals and apply them to the disciplined life of human reason. The lowest and most ignoble aspects of the self are the emotions and bodily senses, because of their inherent “irrational” qualities.           

Since reason possesses greater stability and most accurately corresponds to the noncorporeal world of ideal being, it therefore follows that abstract thinking is superior to emotion, sensation, and intuition.

Such reliance upon reason is applied to natural theology as well. Plato attributes intelligence to God and a reasoned order to the universe. Like the Christian God, Plato’s deity is good. Indeed, God is termed the Form of the Good, positioned at the summit of the pyramid of knowledge, the perfect expression of eternal being.

But the Form of the Good is an impersonal creator, and while the created universe is ordered and ordained for a purposive human destiny, this is a mechanistic rather than personalistic universe.

“The emphasis (is) most decidedly placed by Plato on the sphere of perfect Being, of true Reality,” notes philosopher of history Frederick Copleston: “On Being, rather than on Becoming.”

Such mental preoccupation with absolute ideals, based on the otherworldly perfection of God’s eternal being, defines the essence of Plato’s mind-set.

The sense world of human experience is entirely separate from the world of Ideal Forms. This separation results in dualism: an unbridgeable chasm between eternal Being and spatiotemporal Becoming—in theological terms, between the transcendence and immanence of God.

Aristotle’s Immanent World of Change and “Becoming”

 

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 BC) investigates this present world for the purpose of organizing data and discovering the principles of change that govern the world of sense perception. In his fascination for earthly creation, Aristotle shows considerable gifts for practical, empirical, and intuitive investigation. He favors biology as the model science, developing a curriculum for the study of imperfect but living organisms.

For Aristotle there is no dualistic separation of eternal Being from spatiotemporal Becoming, as Plato would have it. There is only one world, the world of actual things that are moving dynamically toward fulfillment. Although he accepts the concept of Plato’s eternal forms, Aristotle sees such forms as embedded in the concrete particulars of this world, as inner forces of growth and change. These forms are self-actualizing trends of the spatiotemporal world, a concept that he terms “entelechy.” 

God is seen as pure and complete actuality. There is no sense of god as a person who cares about or provides for humanity. Instead, God is a metaphysical necessity, the force behind entelechy that drives all things toward fulfillment in the here and now world of becoming.

In clear contrast to his mentor, Plato, “Aristotle was possessed by the concept of Becoming,” Copleston notes. Aristotle’s interest in this-worldly concreteness characterizes the subsequent mind-set of Aristotelianism, derived from Aristotle’s search to describe and understand the sensible world, a passion absent in the philosophy of Plato.

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