by Michael Ward
In place of Dante’s Virgil, Lewis’s guide to this strangely beautiful and disturbingly un-homely place is none other than George MacDonald, whose novel, Phantastes, we are told had been the unlikely beginning of Lewis’s own conversion. When Lewis attempts to express his appreciation of MacDonald’s writing his attempts at praise are abruptly, if kindly, dismissed. Now that he has seen the reality, the fiction which brought him there is unimportant—and, of course, since what we are reading is itself a
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fiction, we can draw the parallel conclusion. Just as the letters that make up the words disappear as we get into a narrative, so the narrative—and the aesthetic delight we may take in it—disappears as it, in turn, points beyond itself. Elsewhere Lewis has a term for this: “transposition”13—the process by which the richer system is represented by the poorer, just as the inhabitants of E. A. Abbott’s Flatland cannot conceive of a sphere except in terms of a circle (which unnervingly, for them, who can only inhabit two dimensions, varies arbitrarily in size).
In “The Weight of Glory,” a sermon given in Oxford in 1942, Lewis is quite explicit about this transposition:
If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree
fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what
will truly satisfy.
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country,
which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I
am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the
inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts
so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like
Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also
which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate
conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow
awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves. . . . We cannot tell it
because it is a desire for something that has never actually ap-
peared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experi-
ence is constantly suggesting it. . . . Our commonest expedient
is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his
own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to
those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing
itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would
turn out itself to be a remembering. The books or the music in
which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to
them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the
memory of our own past—are good images of what we really
desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they
are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we
13. Lewis, “Transposition.”
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have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from
a country we have never yet visited.14
I apologise for the length of that quotation, but you can see why. There are those who will respond to this description; and there are those who will hate it—either because they have never shared it, or because they have. T. S. Eliot was not alone in despising Lewis’s theology. But like it or hate it, this is not merely why Lewis in the end accepted Christianity, but also why he became a literary critic. It didn’t begin in that order, but then, as in The Great Divorce, knowing where you have arrived is necessary to understanding the past.
14. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 200.
part five
Oxford Addresses
16
God and the Platonic Host
William Lane Craig 1
Central to classical theism is the conception of God as the sole ultimate reality, the Creator of all things apart from Himself. This doctrine receives its most significant challenge from Platonism, the view that there are uncreated abstract objects, such as numbers, sets, propositions, and so forth. According to Platonism there is a host of objects, indeed, infinities of infinities of beings, which are just as eternal, necessary, and uncreated as God. So God is not the sole ultimate reality.
I should perhaps clarify that I speak here,2 not of what is been called
“lightweight” Platonism, but of a “heavyweight” Platonism.3 Lightweight Platonism treats abstract objects merely as the semantic referents of certain singular terms like proper names and definite descriptions. In lightweight Platonism abstract objects are individuals merely in the sense that Wednesdays and the hole in your shirt are individuals, namely, as referents of the 1. Dr. William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, California, and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University, Texas.
He is the author of numerous books, including Reasonable Faith (Crossway, 2008) and
God, Time and Eternity (Kluwer Academic, 2001). He maintains a web presence at www.reasonablefaith.org.
2. Dr. Craig’s lecture was given to a meeting of the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society (19th November 2013). A video of the address is available online: https://youtu.
be/cVoXs4qQIl8.
3. I am speaking of contemporary Platonism, not classical Platonism. Contemporary Platonism differs vastly from classical Platonism in various respects, principally in taking abstract objects to be causally unrelated to the concrete world. Neither do contemporary Platonists consider abstract objects to be more real than concrete objects.
Nor do they think that concrete objects participate in some way in abstract entities, as Plato thought physical objects participate in ideal objects.
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terms “Wednesday” and “the hole in your shirt,” but not in a sense which would require God to create such things in order for us to speak meaningfully of their existence. I am talking about “heavyweight” Platonism, according to which abstract objects exist just as robustly as the fundamental particles that make up the physical world. Such a Platonism saddles us with a metaphysical pluralism according to which God is not the sole ultimate reality. Rather there are infinite realms of beings that exist independently of God. How is this challenge best met?
Theological Prolegomena
It is not to be met, I believe, by theological compromise; for the biblical witness to God’s sole ultimacy is both abundant and clear. Undoubtedly one of the most important biblical texts, both theologically and historically, in this regard is the third verse of the prologue of the Gospel of John. Speaking of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Logos or Word (1:14), John4 writes:
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being” (1:1–3).
“All things” (ÈŠÅ̸) connotes all things taken severally, not simply the Whole. Of course, God is implicitly exempted from inclusion in “all things,”
since He has already been said to have been (öÅ) in the beginning (ëÅÒÉÏĉ) (v. 1). God and the Logos are not the subject of becoming or coming into being, but of being simpliciter. They simply were in the beginning. Everything other than God and the divine Logos “came into being” (뺚żÌÇ) through the Logos. The verb is the aorist form of γίνομαι, whose primary meaning is “to become” or “to originate.” Verse 3 thus carries the weighty metaphysical impl
ication that there are no eternal entities apart from God. Rather, 4. I use the name of the received author of the fourth Gospel without commitment to its actual authorship or to the evangelist’s authorship of the prologue. Many Johannine commentators think that the prologue contains an independent poem or hymn, perhaps stemming from the Johannine community, which has been adopted by the evangelist and supplemented with his explanatory glosses. There is unanimity that vv. 1–5 (with possible exception of v. 2), 10–11, and 14 belong to the original poem or hymn; vv. 6–9 are clearly the evangelist’s gloss. Our interest is solely in what vv. 1–3 of the prologue mean.
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everything that exists, with the exception of God Himself, is the product of temporal becoming.5
The verb γίνομαι also has the sense of “to be created” or “to be made.”
This meaning emerges in v. 3 through the denomination of the agent (»Àн
¸ĤÌÇı) responsible for things’ coming into being. The preposition »ţ¸ +
genitive indicates the agency by means of which a result is produced. The Logos, then, is said to be the one who has created all things and brought them into being. A second, equally significant metaphysical implication of v. 3 thus emerges: only God is self-existent; everything else exists through another , namely, through the divine Logos. God is thus the ground of being of everything else.
John 1:3 is thus fraught with metaphysical significance, for taken prima facie it tells us that God alone exists eternally and a se. It entails that there are no objects of any sort, abstract or concrete, which are co-eternal with God and uncreated by God via the Logos.
Partisans of uncreated abstract objects, if they are to be biblical, must therefore maintain that the domain of John’s quantifiers is restricted in some way, quantifying, for example, only over concrete objects. The issue is a subtle one, easily misunderstood.6 The question is not: did John have in mind abstract objects when he wrote ÈŠÅ̸»À¸ĤÌÇı뺚żÌÇ? Probably not.
But neither did he have in mind quarks, galaxies, and black holes; yet he would take such things and countless other things, were he informed about them, to lie within the domain of his quantifiers. The question is not what John thought lay in the domain of his quantifiers. The question, rather, is: did John intend the domain of his quantifiers to be unrestricted, once God is exempted? It is very likely that he did. For not only is God’s unique status as the only eternal, uncreated being typical for Judaism, but John himself 5. This implication reinforces the point which we have elsewhere made that the biblical concept of creation is an inherently temporal notion (Copan and Craig, Creation out of Nothing, chaps. 1–4). N.B. that to say that everything other than God has a temporal beginning is not to say that there is a temporal beginning of all things col-lectively. Theoretically, the sequence of past events could be enumerated by the negative numbers, beginning with the present event as 0, so that while everything that exists has individually a moment of its creation at some time in the finite past, nevertheless the series of creative events regresses infinitely. The evangelist precludes this theoretical possibility by his expression “in the beginning,” when only God and the divine Logos exist. Still the point remains that while for every thing that has come into being, there is a time in the past at which it began, nevertheless that does not imply that there is a time in the past at which everything began.
6. See the persistent misunderstanding of the question by my collaborators in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, ed.
Paul Gould, with articles, responses, and counter-responses by K. Yandell, R. Davis, P.
Gould, G. Welty, Wm. L. Craig, S. Shalkowski, and G. Oppy (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
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identifies the Logos alone as existing with God (and being God) in the beginning. Creation of everything else through the Logos then follows. The salient point here is that the unrestrictedness of the domain of the quantifiers is rooted, not in the type of objects thought to be in the domain, but in one’s doctrine of God as the only uncreated being .
But was John, in fact, ignorant of the relation between abstract objects and divine creation when he wrote vv. 1–3, as we have assumed? It is, in fact, far from clear that the author of John’s prologue was innocent concerning abstract objects and their relation to the Logos. For the doctrine of the divine, creative Logos was widespread in Middle Platonism,7 and the similarities between John’s Logos doctrine and that of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo (20 B.C–A.D 50) are numerous and striking.8 Of particular interest is the role of the Logos as the instrumental cause of creation.
The use of δια + genitive to express instrumental creation is not derived from Wisdom literature but is a earmark of Middle Platonism; indeed, so much so that scholars of this movement are wont to speak of its “prepositional metaphysics,” whereby various prepositional phrases are employed to express causal categories:9
Phrase:
ÌġĨÎЏÇī
ÌġëÆÇī
Ìġ»ÀЏÇī
Ìġ»ÀЏĞ
Category:
Ìġ¸ċÌÀÇÅ
÷ĩþ
Ìġëɺ¸¼ėÇÅ
÷¸ĊÌţ¸
Efficient
Material
Instrumen-
Final cause
cause
cause
tal cause
Entity:
God the
Four
Logos of
God’s
Creator
elements
God
goodness
Philo identifies the four Aristotelian causes by these prepositional phrases, stating that the phrase “through which” represents creation by the Logos.10
7. For references see Stirling, ‘‘Day One.” The Logos appears already in the work of Antiochus of Ascalon and Eudores, two of the earliest Middle Platonists.
8. Cf. Leonhardt-Balzer, “Der Logos und die Schöpfung,” 318.
9. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the “Timaeus” of Plato, 140–43; Stirling, “Day One.’
10. On the Cherubim [ De cherubim] 125–27. References to the Logos as the instrumental cause of creation are prevalent in Philo. Runia provides the following list: On the Creation of the World [ De opificio mundi]; Allegorical Interpretation [ Legum allegoriae]
3.9; On the Cherubim 28; On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain [ De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini]
8; On the Unchangeableness of God [ Quod Deus sit immutabilis] 57; On the Confusion of Tongues [ De confusione liguarum] 62; On the Migration of Abraham [ De migrationi Abrahami] 6; On Flight and Finding [ De fuga et inventione] 12; 95; On Dreams 2.45; The Special Laws [ De specialibus legibus] 1.81.
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The similarities between Philo and John’s doctrines of the Logos are so numerous and close that most Johannine scholars, while not willing to affirm John’s direct dependence on Philo, do recognize that the author of the prologue of John’s Gospel shares with Philo a common intellectual tradition of Platonizing interpretation of Genesis chapter 1.
Now John does not tarry to reflect on the role of the divine Logos causally prior to creation. But this pre-creation role features prominently in Philo’s Logos doctrine. According to Philo scholar David Runia, a cor-nerstone of Middle Platonism was the bifurcation of the intelligible and sensible realms.11 To draw the distinction in this way is, however, somewhat misleading.12 The fundamental distinction here, as originally found in Plato, is between the realm of static being (ÌţÌġěÅÒ¼ţ) and the realm of temporal becoming (ÌţÌġºÀºÅŦļÅÇÅÄòÅÒ¼ţ). The former realm is to be grasped by the intellect, whereas the latter is perceived by the senses. The realm of becoming was comprised primarily of physical objects, while the static realm of being was comprised of what we would today call
abstract objects. For Middle Platonists, as for Plato, the intelligible world (ÁŦÊÄÇËÅǾÌŦË) served as a model for the creation of the sensible world. But for a Jewish monothe-ist like Philo, the realm of Ideas does not exist independently of God but as the contents of His mind. The intelligible world may be thought of as either the causal product of the divine mind or simply as the divine mind itself actively engaged in thought. Especially noteworthy is Philo’s insistence that the world of Ideas cannot exist anywhere but in the divine Logos. Just as the ideal architectural plan of a city exists only in the mind of the architect, Philo explains, so the ideal world exists solely in the mind of God. On Philo’s doctrine, then, there is no realm of independently existing abstract objects. According to Runia, while not part of the created realm, “the ÁŦÊÄÇË
ÅǾÌŦË, though eternal and unchanging, must be considered dependent for its existence on God.”13
11. Runia, Plato and the “Timaeus,” 68. The locus classicus of the distinction was Plato’s Timaeus 27d5–28a4, which is in turn cited by Apuleius De Platone et eius dog-mate 193; Nichomachus Introductio arithmetica 1.2.1; Numenius fr. 7; Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho 3.5; Sextus Empiricus Adversus mathematicos 7.142.
12. None of Runia’s texts draws the distinction at issue as fundamentally intelligible vs. sensible; rather it is being vs. becoming. The problem with the former characterization of the distinction is that it seems to leave no place of immaterial concreta like intelligences, angels, or souls. Given that the intelligible realm exists in the mind of God, such beings cannot be classed as part of the intelligible realm. They must be part of the sensible realm, which is thus more accurately described as the realm of concrete objects subject to becoming.
