Eric Voegelin (7)

Transcendence vs. Christianity

Here is a passage of Voegelin's (from chapter 9 of Plato and Aristotle), comparing Aristotelian "empiricism" unfavourably with Plato's refusal to fall prey to the illusion that the Absolute can be found in the material world:

Curious as it may sound . . . , Plato is the better empiricist; Aristotle, who wants to find form in reality at all cost, can find it only at the price of losing such parts of reality as do not fit the pattern of his evolving form. The [theory of the] polis is a premature generalization from insufficient materials.

Plato is satisfied with transcendent Ideas that are imperfectly manifested on the inferior material plane; this paradoxically makes him a better student of the material world.

It strikes me that while this observation may well be accurate as far as the history of empirical science is concerned, it reflects rather badly on Plato from the point of view of later Christian philosophy. At the core of Christian thought is the idea that the world is created by an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God, and therefore in some sense perfect, or as perfect as is possible without logical contradictions. Admittedly, this idea is obscured by the notion of the Fall of man through the abuse of free will. Nevertheless, God created man in the knowledge that this abuse would take place as a consequence, and so even the Fall must ultimately be part of the perfect Divine plan. The world ultimately is an unmarred reflection of the Divine; appearances to the contrary only indicate our own limited consciousness. Plato, on the contrary, saw no reason to believe ours to be "the best of all possible worlds"—or so I gather from Voegelin. Perfection had to be reserved for the transcendent.

This pantheistic idea of a hidden perfection in the world is itself rather dangerous. Voegelin does not talk about this idea (as far as I know); his focus, rather, is the problematic nature of the "gnostic" belief in the coming manifest perfection of the world. Naive pantheism, the refusal to acknowledge the existence of evil, is a distinct heresy which has also become prominent in the last couple of centuries. (The danger of a premature pantheism, notwithstanding the truth of pantheism in an ultimate sense, was a theme of the early-20th-century "Sufi universalist", Hazrat Inayat Khan.)

Eric Voegelin (6)