Natural Theology in the Patristic

Period
Wayne Hankey
Chapter Three
of
The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology
Edited Russell Re Manning
Oxford University Press 2012

The centrality of natural theology in this period and its inescapable formation of
what succeeds are indicated by the multiple forms it takes throughout its extent
in Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian philosophies, religious practices, and
theologies. Commonly, the term, as used to refer to an apologetic or instrument
presupposed by or leading to revealed religion and theology, makes no
distinction between the forms of philosophy. Moreover, when those listed as
“philosophers” in our histories touch on theological or religious matter, they are
usually treated as if what they wrote was all “natural”, in the sense of coming
from inherent human capacity, as opposed to what is inspired or gracious.
Packing the natural theology of what we are calling “the Patristic Period” into
such crudely undifferentiated lumps moulded by later binary schematizing
destroys what it most distinctively accomplished. It not only produced the new
language of metaphysics and the supernatural, 1 but also thought through how
nature and what is beyond it interpenetrated one another.
The Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers and theologians of the
period, themselves frequently bridging the natural / supernatural divide in their
“divine” miracle working or at least consecrated persons, took what was
diversely established within Classical Antiquity to build hierarchically connected
levels and kinds within wholes. Physical and metaphysical, fate and providence,
sensible and supersensible, the immanent and the transcendent, being and non-
being—both excessive and deficient in respect to being—, the rational and what
was below and above it, the natural and the supernatural, what was in human
power and what was a gift from without, profane and holy, what theory could
reach and what required practical cooperation with the divine, what was open to
all and what required initiation, were all distinguished, sometimes opposed, and
always related. In leading humans to the gods and even beyond, after instilling

1 De Lubac 1946:323–428; Brisson 1999; Harrington 2004:121–123.

communal, religious and moral virtues, philosophers, often consecrated at least
by their lineage as successors handing on sacred traditions, shepherded their
disciples not only up the long difficult ladder of philosophy’s hierarchy, but also
to what before, accompanying, and beyond this required worldly practice and its
frustration, myth, mystery, prayer, magic, inspiration, prophesy, madness,
hymn, symbol, theurgy, sacrament, the breaking in of the divine, the violation of
the self, and, finally, yielding and silence. Evidently, in these situations,
“natural” as well as “theology” became polyvalent.
I shall not manage to set out and explain all this extravagant diversity,
especially because understanding one term requires thinking its pairs. To get
some sense of these diverse significations, and recollecting that the study of
nature in antiquity may serve as spiritual exercise, the striking use of physics as
theological foundation for Epicurean and Stoic ways of life, and how Plato’s
Timaeus as philosophical genesis reaches across religious differences to dominate
the Patristic Period, we may begin with the Stoic Middle Platonism of Philo
Judaeus and Josephus. With Philo, uniting Plato’s and Moses’ genesis, and thus
connecting God, the cosmos, and the human in the opposite way to the one taken
by Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura, we encounter most of the forms natural
theology took in the period. We discover not only that there is no operation of
pure nature abstracted from the divine activity but also that physics leads to
theology and that nature, the human, and community depend on gifts given
beyond them from above.

PHILO: NATURAL THEOLOGY AS

PHYSIOLOGIA
Philo, when commenting on a text from Numbers which makes every day a feast,
writes that the Law “accommodates itself to the blameless life of righteous men
who follow nature” (Spec. II.42).2 After noting the practice of civil and moral
virtue by these righteous Greeks and Barbarians in training for wisdom, he
makes them “the best contemplators of nature and everything found in her.” So,
while their bodies are below, their souls take wing and they know the ethereal
powers, “as befits true cosmopolitans.” (Spec. II.42) The cosmos is the city of
these acute physiologues; their associates are the wise in the universal
commonwealth ruled by virtue. They themselves keep above passions and do
not buckle under the blows of fate.

2 Generally translations are my own, though those cited are carefully considered.
 Physics does not only lead to Stoic apatheia, it opens the human to
prophecy. According to Philo in another context, connection to the natural
elements made the authors of the Septuagint open to revelation; they became not
translators but “hierophants and prophets.” After prayer, to which God assented
so that the human race might be led to a better life by using the “philosophical
and truly beautiful ordinances” of the Jewish Law, secluded on the island of
Pharos with “nothing except the elements of nature: earth, water, air, heaven, the
genesis of which was to be the first theme of their sacred revelation—for the
production of the cosmos is the principle of the laws—like men inspired, they
prophesied…”. In consequence, without conferring with one another “they
found words corresponding to the things.” In arriving at the very realities which
had been revealed through Moses, and expressing them in Greek, their minds
went along with the purest of spirits, his (Mos. II.36-40). The Mosaic Law,
understood in union with nature and as both philosophical and revealed, is now
available to teach all humankind.
For Josephus, who depended upon and shared the mentality, Jewish
history is written by starting with Genesis as normative physiologia: “first we
must study the nature of God and, then, having contemplated his works with the
eye of reason, we can go on to imitate in our own deeds, so far as possible, the
work of God, the best of all models, and endeavour to follow it.” For Josephus,
all things told in his history are “in accord with the harmony in the nature of the
whole” (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities I.4). God always acts so as to maintain the
cosmic order eternally founded in his very nature. Philo not only shows God
doing this but also explains how the divine, human, cosmic interconnection is
known and maintained.
Philo was “the first thinker to associate the goodness of Plato’s demiurge
with the Judaeo-Christian conception of God the creator.”3 God is the all good
and desires to share that goodness as much as possible. He is continually creative
(Leg. I.18) in an activity with two stages; the first, his image eternally formed in
his mind, is ex nihilo. The physical world, made according to the incorporeal
model, has presuppositions. Philo explains how the cosmos is both created and
eternal in language which reminds us of Aristotle, De Anima III.5: “in all existing
things there must be an active cause, and a passive subject; the active cause is the
intellect of the universe, thoroughly unadulterated and thoroughly unmixed,
superior to virtue and superior to science, superior even to abstract good or
abstract beauty; while the passive subject is something inanimate and incapable
of motion by any intrinsic power of its own, but having been set in motion, and

3 Runia 1986:135.
fashioned, and endowed with life by the intellect, became transformed into that
most perfect work, this cosmos” (Opif. 8-9).
The account of the education and offices of Moses, the mediator between
God and the cosmos, depends on differentiating between what is innate and
belongs to philosophical labour, on the one hand, and what is from without and
above, on the other. By the union of both, he acquires the capacities of the
philosopher-king, legislator, high priest, and prophet who establishes the cosmic
priesthood of Israel. While he receives a complete education, including symbolic
philosophy, from all kinds of masters employed from Egypt, the adjacent
countries, and Greece, his innate genius meant that he was recollecting rather
than learning and was improving upon what his teachers gave (Mos. I.18-24).
This grounding of his human labours in the nature given to him indicates the
principle at work in Philo’s treatment of the unique bridge between the divine
and the human, one with both sides. While Philo is careful to differentiate the
offices Moses holds and the diverse capacities by which he exercises each, the
foundation of them all is both a moment in his history and activities and is also
its underlying source, namely, his union with the Divine Logos in the mystical
darkness. There is a reciprocity by which in return for his labours, virtues, and
giving up all personal possessions, he receives from God. The gift, however, is
out of all proportion to the human work and power. Moses, as the friend of God
and his heir, is given as recompense the wealth of the whole earth, sea, and
rivers, and of all the other elements and their combinations “therefore, every one
of the elements obeyed him as its master, changing the power which it had by
nature and submitting to his command” (Mos. 155-156). Moses is, of course, a
citizen of the cosmos, but far more he has the names of God: “For he also was
called the god and king of the whole nation, and he is said to have entered into
the darkness where God was, into the unseen, invisible, incorporeal, archetypal
essence of all beings. There he beheld things invisible to mortal nature.” He
becomes the middle between the divine and the human to be imitated by us
(Mos. 157-159). When he is about to die, the Father changes Moses from “a
double being, composed of soul and body, so that his whole nature is that of a
monad without elements, thus transforming him wholly and entirely into a most
sun-like mind” (Mos. II.288).4
This reciprocity is extended to all. Grace and nature are two sides of the
same—a principle which will be common also to pagans and Christians in the
period, despite some tendencies associated with an aspect of Augustine’s
thought. While Philo tells us that the creature should be conscious of his own

4 My understanding of Moses in Philo owes much to Parker 2010.

“nothingness” when approaching his Maker,5 God is “one who loves to give”, his
gifts are boundless and without end (Her. 31). He is the “saviour” of those who
cry to him. Philosophy has never been anything else except the desire to see the
Existent, his image the Logos, and, after these, his perfect work, the cosmos truly
according to our diverse capacities. Moses is given to lead the way (Confus. 92-
97). Although many forces push us down, none are powerful against the soul
suspended from God, who, with a greater strength, draws it to himself (Abr. 59).
The human is the image of God, and the human mind stands to the rest in
the way that God stands to the cosmos as a whole. They are connected in mutual
support through the priesthood. Having presented the dress of the High Priest as
visible representation of the cosmos, Philo explains that this is, first, so that by
constantly contemplating “the image of the all”, the life of the High Priest will be
worthy of the nature of the whole. Second, the cosmos will become his co-
ministrant in his sacred rites: “It is very right and fit that he who is consecrated
to the service of the Father of the cosmos should bring the Father’s son, the all, to
the service of the creator and begetter” (Spec. I.95-96). Finally, in contrast to the
priests of other nations, the High Priest of the Jews offers his prayers and
sacrifices “not only on behalf of the whole human race, but also for the parts of
nature: earth, water, air, fire; for he looks upon the cosmos (as indeed it really is)
as his country” (Spec. I.97).
Philo’s influence was not primarily within his own religious community,
where, after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, although Hellenic
Judaism persisted, there was a turn against the kind of identification with Greco-
Roman culture of which his corpus was the acme. Nonetheless, Philo shares the
common theology out of which the Wisdom of Solomon, and great parts of the
New Testament—most notably the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Pauline corpus,
and the Gospels of Luke and John emerge.6 This will facilitate his gigantic
influence among the Christian Fathers, underestimated because substantially
unacknowledged by them. Clement of Alexandria, and the Catechetical School
there, continued Philo’s unification of philosophy and scriptural revelation in his
home city, and Clement’s works contain massive reiterations of both content and
methods. In Alexandria, Origen also came into the heritage and made a hugely
important contribution to its dissemination when he carried the Philonic corpus
to Palestine when he moved. There, among other uses, his Life of Moses came to
underlie the ideology of the Byzantine Empire through Bishop Eusebius of
Caesarea’s modelling of Constantine on it, and beyond the Christian Empire,
even into the understanding of the philosopher-king, legislator, prophet and

5 Language echoed by Iamblichus, De Mysteriis I.15, 47, 17; cf. Feichtinger 2003:136.
6 Siegert 2009.
religious leader in an Islamic philosopher like al-Farabi.7 However, no one has
traced what we owe to him outside the Fathers with the barest adequacy; not
only the Islamic but also the pagan philosophical reception are neglected. Philo’s
natural theology certainly massively provided content and method for the
philosophical interpretation of Christian scripture generally and of Genesis and
Moses especially, which we may indicate by mentioning the works entitled
Hexamaeron of bishops Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan,
and the multiple interpretations of Genesis by Augustine; there are also the De
Vita Moysis and De Hominis Opificio of Gregory, to mark the most obvious.8 John
Scottus Eriugena translated Gregory’s On the Creation of Humankind and
(probably) Basil’s Hexamaeron into Latin. Their content passed into his
Periphyseon.
The ways Philo and his philosophical sources are taken up illumine how
physics, cosmogony, theology, metaphysics, “true gnosticism”, and the vision of
those initiated into the mysteries are connected in our period. Thus, for example,
Clement in his Stromata, when passing to “the physiologia truly gnostic”, speaks
of those initiated into the mysteries, moving from the lesser to the greater as
distinguished in the Gorgias.9 For him, physiologia is a gnosis conformed to the
canon of truth, or better, the contemplation belonging to highest degree of
initiation into the mysteries (epopteia) which reposes on the discussion of
cosmogony. From this we are elevated to theology. Appropriately, he says, after
philosophical physiologia, he will go on to consider the prophetic Genesis
(Clement Stromata IV.3.2-3).
Basil of Caesarea took up the anagogy in Plato’s Symposium which both
differentiated and linked the contemplation of physical and intelligible beauties.
Above sensible eros, Diotima had spoken of the highest mysteries of revelation
and contemplation (Symposium 210A). For Basil, someone who for a long time
had been among the physiologues but desired to follow the command to seek
God’s face would go beyond this level of reality to place himself closer to God.
The seeker would then be turned to the truly beautiful and desirable, reserved
for the pure in heart, and, passing from physiologia to the greater beauty beyond
nature (meta physin), would join those initiated into the supreme contemplation.10
Determined pagans in this period also made metaphysical contemplation into
spiritual exercise. Proclus organised the Academy as a kind of monastery. Its
programme of study initiated its members step by step into contemplation

7 O’Meara 2003 gives important parts of the history but without tracing Philo’s role in it.
8 Runia 2009; Pelikan 1995 and 1997.
9 Clement Stromata IV.3.1; cf. Plato Gorgias 497C and Philo Sacrif. 62.

10 Basil Commentaire sur Isaïe V.162; cf. Brisson 1999: 38–40.

within a context of prayer. The philosophy of Plato was “mystagogy”, an
“initiation into the holy mysteries themselves...installed, for eternity, in the home
of the gods on High.”11 His own Elements of Theology may be considered
“metaphysics as spiritual exercise.”12 In this view of philosophy, Plato becomes a
theologian, his dialogues sacred scripture to be interpreted appropriately. This
helps explain the greater antipathy towards Platonism by the Christian
authorities and why it was increasingly passed on by Neoplatonists through
commentary on Aristotle’s comparatively more secular writings.

BOETHIUS: THE CONSOLATIONS OF

NATURAL THEOLOGY
Two heirs of Proclus, Boethius and his contemporary Dionysius the Areopagite,
exhibited none of the polemical antipathy to philosophy which marks
Augustine’s deeply ambiguous relation to what enabled his return to his
Christian beginnings. When writing out the philosophical concord in Late
Antiquity which consoled his imprisonment awaiting execution by torture, the
Christian Boethius not only repeated many times and in various ways and
metres the contemplation of nature which Philo promised would be efficacious
against the blows of fate, but also had Lady Philosophy imitate the Timaeus by
praying.13 At the exact centre of the Consolation, in a beautiful poem fashioned
from elements of the Platonic genesis, Philosophy prays to the “creator of heaven
and earth”. The concord by which the Consolation purges, illumines, and converts
the prisoner to meet the gaze of God with hope bridges the pagan Christian
divide. The Consolation makes no explicit reference to anything distinctively
Christian, although allusions are plentiful for those who seek, and there is very
little or nothing taught by Lady Philosophy which stands against Christian
doctrine—the reference of the Timaeus to an existence of the world before time is
interpreted so that the interminable life of the world does not share God’s simple
eternity of motionless infinite possession (Cons. V.vi). The prayer converts the
prisoner towards that simplicity by turning him from reason which divides what
is one (Cons. III.ix). He moves to the perspective of the One in which the mind is
led through intellectual deduction from unity to goodness to God, so as to
explain why “every happy man is a god” (Cons. III.x).

11 Saffrey 1984:182 quoting Proclus Theo. Plat. I.1; cf. Saffrey 1997.
12 O’Meara 2000: 279–290.
13 Plato Timaeus 27B-C; Boethius Cons. III.ix; cf. I.v, V.ii
 Many features of the natural theology of our period appear in the
Consolation: the study of nature as spiritual exercise; a conciliating synthesis of
philosophies; Lady Philosophy’s preference for a Platonism which has
assimilated Aristotle, together with her use of the cathartic spiritual exercises and
techniques for self-care of the Sceptics, Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics, while their
philosophies are rejected as partial or false; philosophy’s use and need of
religious acts, myth, hymn, poetry, rhetoric; allegorical interpretation of myth;
arguments for the necessity and possibility of prayer; her medicinal and salvific
work; the identity of philosophy and religion; the differentiation of higher and
lower forms of apprehension; her anagogy of the fallen soul, so that, ultimately,
divine and human intuition meet; the subordination of fate to providence. The
last helps us to understand how nature and grace interpenetrate in this period.
Plato taught that the divine goodness involved a universal and particular
providential care: “The gods perceive, see, and hear everything” (Plato, Leges
901D) and these gods “are more, not less, careful for small things than for great”
(900D). For Philo, Moses, in agreement with Plato, taught “that God exerts his
providence for the benefit of the cosmos” (Philo, Opif. 172). Defending the
Platonic doctrine requires dealing with the flat out denial essential to Epicurean
enlightened religion, and the Peripatetic limitation which denies that providence
is for the sake of individuals and intervenes for or against them.14 Plotinus
undertakes this defence, by using Alexander of Aphrodisias’ refutation of the
Stoic determinism which would make prayer pointless and by employing the
Middle Platonic distinction between higher providence and lower fate, which we
saw in Philo. He writes: “One thing results from all, and there is one providence;
but it is fate beginning from the lower level; the upper is providence alone” (Enn.
III.3.5). Iamblichus, for whom the gods contain and employ the material for the
sake of human souls altogether descended into it, has a sense for the integrity of
nature, how it is connected, and how it serves justice. Because, following
Plotinus, physical movements depend upon immaterial intellectual activities,
and secondary causes on primary ones, the “divine” Iamblichus writes to a
correspondent: “Fate is enmeshed with providence and exists by virtue of the
existence of providence”.15 Systematising, the “divine” Proclus, successor of
Plato, divides and connects for the sake of anagogy. In the distinction within the
order, fate is on the side of movement, multiplicity, and the corporeal, but
“providence precedes fate, and everything that comes about according to fate
comes about far more according to providence. … [M]any things escape fate, but
nothing providence” (On Providence §3). Fate connects things, but providence

14 Alexander of Aphrodisias 1983: XXX-XXXI.

15 Iamblichus 2009: To Macedonius, On Fate, Fr. 4, p. 23.
directs them to the good. “Providence is per se god, whereas fate is something
divine, but not god” (On Providence §14).
Boethius brings all of this into Philosophy’s Consolation, so that fate and
providence become two different perspectives on the same plan: “When this plan
is thought of in terms of the purity of God’s own understanding, it is called
providence. When this same plan is thought of in terms of the manifold different
movements which are the life of individual things, it is called fate by the
ancients” (Cons. IV.vi). Perspective is creative, as Eriugena will demonstrate most
thoroughly, but Boethius anticipates some of his principles. Reiterating a theme
we encountered in Philo, he works out how, by changing their perspective, by
turning from sense and imagination to reason, and from reason to intellect and
intuition, humans free themselves from the chains of fate and come under God’s
beneficent providence. We become what we know and love; ultimately this will
carry us out of ourselves.
For Plotinus, union with the First is a breaking in or a bringing to birth
where there is a “sudden reception of a light” compelling the soul “to believe”
that “it is from Him, it is Him.” With this arrival of the “true end of the soul,” it
“contemplates the light by which it sees,” but it is no longer operating by a
power over which it has control. Augustine shared with Plotinus the experience
that, when united with the First, the soul moves beyond thinking about itself and
discovered that the attempt to grasp its goal results in fall. 16 Thus the soul passes
here beyond philosophy into the realm of grace. Despite systematic differences,
Proclus has an analogous view of that to which the providence of the gods leads
and how it comes. Real freedom for humans requires their help because they
possess the virtue we desire. Slavery to them is our greatest freedom, “by serving
those who have power over all, we become similar to them, so that we govern
the whole world” (On Providence §24). Knowledge beyond intellect, divine
madness, involves arousing “what is called the ‘one of the soul’…and to connect
it with the One itself.” Then the soul loves to be quiet and becomes speechless in
internal silence. The acme of liberation is “the life of the gods and that of the
souls who dance above fate and follow providence” (On Providence §§31-34).
These representations of the conclusion beyond philosophy of
philosophy’s itinerarium are well beyond anything found in the sober Boethius,
but they bring us back to his contemporary who claimed to inherit the fruit of St
Paul’s blinding encounter with a heavenly light “beyond the brightness of the
sun” (Acts 26.13). Dionysius interpreted this through what descended to him
from Philo on Moses in the divine darkness, Plotinus, Proclus and Damascius.
The Mystical Theology prays for union with the good beyond thought and being

16 Plotinus Enn. V.3.17, VI.9.7; VI.9.11; Augustine Conf. 7.16.22 & 9.10.24-25; Trin. 15.25.
for which Plato’s analogy was the sun,17 a brilliantly shining darkness and a
trumpeting silence, where soul and mind are left behind.
Dionysius, concluding beyond negation and affirmation a journey begun
with a sensuous affirmative symbolic theology, shows that the Neoplatonism
which became the natural theology of the Fathers, and their successors Christian
and Islamic, surpasses matter / spirit, body / soul, sense / reason, evil / good
dualisms by way of the ineffable First. He, joined in the Latin West by Boethius,
is the main source of a Christianised rendition of Proclus’ doctrine of the non-
being of evil, the one most representative of Neoplatonism, which became the
authoritative common teaching of the scholastics. Dionysius reproduces great
parts of Proclus On the Subsistence of Evil in On the Divine Names so literally that it
is used to restore the lost Greek text of Proclus’ treatise.
Plotinus had been clear that defending the Platonic doctrine of providence
required dealing with evil and injustice, but his theodicy made matter evil and
its cause.18 Proclus’ De malorum subsistentia is directed not only against the
Plotinian treatment of the nature of evil and its cause, but also against everything
which would give evil substantiality. For Proclus, matter is directly caused by
the Good. It is not evil, and, as the means of the complete explication of the
Good, is, at least indirectly, good. In consequence, the Good can have no contrary
and evil no single cause. Proclus, and Dionysius in his wake, warn us against
giving evil strength by magnifying its reality. Evil comes from particular
weaknesses, is parasitic on good, and can only get such power as it has from
goodness.19 In the Consolation, evil is “nothing” (Cons. III.xii). Doing evil makes
humans powerless and drags them down towards non-being. “The divine nature
is such that to it even evils are good, since by a suitable use of them God draws
out as a result some good” (Cons. IV.vi).
Before leaving the sixth century, a little must be said about a Hellenic
concordantist and a Christian who began in that tradition but moved against it
for the sake of defending the positions which separated his faith from the
philosophical consensus.

17 Plato Republic 509B-C.

18 Plotinus Enn. III.2.2 and Enn. I.8.
19 Proclus On the Existence of Evils §§7-9, §§30-38, §§47-54; Dionysius On the Divine Names Chapter

4.
 THEOLOGICAL CONCORD AND DISSENT:
SIMPLICIUS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF
DIALECTICAL THEOLOGY
Bringing Plato and Aristotle into concord long predates Boethius. From the
beginning of the Platonic school fundamental Aristotelian ideas like activity and
potentiality were adopted by Platonists and his criticism of the existence of the
forms outside thinking was accepted. We have witnessed the result in Philo.
Exchange between Peripatetics and Platonists intensified in our period, and,
beyond this, despite reciprocal criticisms and rivalries, the harmony of the two
philosophies was asserted and demonstrating it became a Neoplatonic project.
Tracing the history of this concordism is outside our purpose and is complicated
by the inevitable endeavour of the later enthusiasts to push back the harmony as
early as Pythagoras. Nonetheless, a word about motives and results is necessary.
Porphyry is clearly engaged in philosophical harmonization, but, with
Iamblichus and those in his wake, the project widens to embrace reconciling
revelations, including religious practices and myths, to one another and to
philosophy, which is regarded as having revelation at its origins. Thus, for
example, Iamblichus writes as if he were an Egyptian priest defending the
ancient mysteries and Hierocles of Alexandria turns Homer into a Platonist.
Iamblichus fixes the curriculum of the Platonic schools, giving the sciences of
Aristotle an essential, if secondary, place. With Proclus, following Iamblichus,
philosophy itself is explicitly only a preparation. It is given a role comparable to
that of purifications, rites of ablution and expiation in the Mysteries, so that
“philosophy constitutes a preliminary purification and a preparation for self-
knowledge and the immediate contemplation of our own essence” (Proclus, On
the First Alcibiades proem). The motive of the concord is twofold. One aim is to
draw all spiritual activities together into a hierarchical and differentiated leading
of the soul upward to the gods, thus showing that nothing escapes their mastery.
The other is to give authority to the Hellenic tradition as both inclusive and
consistent—it is not a morass of contradictory squabbling sects. The primary
technique beyond distinguishing, classifying, and hierarchical ordering was that
used by Philo, allegorizing, but now this includes texts of philosophy, certainly
Plato’s. One influential result, both with the Islamic philosophers and Latin
mediaevals, was the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle on creation.
 The harmonisers want to draw together the Timaeus, and its Demiurge,
with Aristotle’s Physics, and his Unmoved Mover. To do this they need to
reconcile Aristotle’s eternal universe with that in the Timaeus, which is generated
and corruptible, though perpetual because it is held in being by the divine will.
The diverse positions of his Platonic and Peripatetic predecessors are treated by
Simplicius. The following is an example of the result:

[T]he truly marvellous Aristotle brings his instruction about the principles
of nature to culmination in theology, which is above nature, and proves
that the entire corporeal structure of nature is dependent on the
incorporeal intellective goodness that is above nature and unrelated – here
too following Plato. But it was from the very existence of the body of the
world that Plato discovered the intellective god who is the creator of the
world. … Aristotle too proceeds from motion and change and from the
subsistence of bodies, which is finite and has extension, to the unmoved,
unchangeable, unintermittent cause.20

A little further, when he is showing how both Plato and Aristotle make god the
efficient and final cause of creation, Simplicius reveals a source, a determined
conciliator and pupil of Proclus. He writes of his teacher, who also taught his
adversary, the Monophysite Christian John Philoponus, that: “Ammonius has
written an entire book which provides many proofs of the fact that Aristotle
considers god to be also the efficient cause of the entire world, and I have here
taken over some points sufficiently for my present purposes.”21
Simplicius explains how a commentator on Aristotle ought to work. When
there are apparent disagreements between Plato and Aristotle, the good exegete
“must…not convict the philosophers of discordance by looking only at the letter
of what [Aristotle] says against Plato; but he must look towards the spirit, and
track down the harmony which reigns between them on the majority of points”.22
Commenting on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, where Aristotle and his Peripatetic
followers are unrelenting in their criticism of Plato, Simplicius complains
repeatedly about literalism which does not understand that Plato speaks
metaphorically in the manner of theologians. The gods speak through him, his
words in the Timaeus: “are those of the Creator of all these things, whose
thoughts and deeds Plato revealed as a prophet”.23

20 Simplicius 2001:1359,5-1359,10.
21 Simplicius 2001:1363,8-1363,12.
22 Simplicius 2003:7,30-32)

23 Simplicius 2006: 106,5-6)

 Although Boethius was determined both to hand on the translated works
of Plato and Aristotle to a barbarian age and to present them as harmonious, his
caution about interpreting the Timaeus on the eternity of the world hinted that
some Christians might have problems with the Neoplatonic conciliation on
creation. This is confirmed in Simplicius on the De Caelo which is full of mean-
spirited polemic against John Philoponus because of his dissent. Whatever the
outcome of their disputes at the time, Simplicius’ attacks helped Philoponus by
preserving his arguments, thus the reconstruction of his Against Aristotle on the
Eternity of the World draws all except one of its Greek fragments from
Simplicius.24 Philoponus also wrote against Proclus on the same question.
However, what is most interesting to us is that Philoponus, who must represent
here many others, not only opposed the philosophic consensus on particular
matters but began the unravelling of the project as a whole. This makes him, as
Moses Maimonides discerned, a leader in a new relation of philosophy to
religion, that of dialectical theology. Maimonides, who denounced these
“Mutakallimūn” and the “kalam”, sees the dialectical theologians rising first
from among Greeks who had adopted Christianity, and then within Islam and
Judaism, as unconcerned for philosophical truth in itself and wanting to use
philosophical arguments as persuasions to predetermined dogmatic positions.25
Whether or not this is fair to Philoponus whose arguments were entirely
philosophical, what Maimonides condemns was not at all the mode of the
Carolingian figure who stands at the end of Patristic natural theology, John the
Scot, Irish born.

ERIUGENA: PHYSICS AS THE COMPLETE

THEOLOGY
Having arrived at Boethius and his sixth-century contemporaries, we have the
elements which will enable us to conclude our consideration of theology as
physics with its acme, the Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena. Because, by
gathering all within a single system, Eriugena does in Latin what Origen had
undertaken six centuries earlier in Alexandria with his On First Principles, the
first Christian theological system, and because Eriugena’s is a physiologia,
predating the methods and divisions of the medieval scholastics, and because

24 Philoponus 1987.
25 Maimonides 1963:I,71.
Eriugena derives his philosophy almost entirely from the Christian Fathers, he
provides a terminus.
Eriugena “reinvented the greater part of the theses of Neoplatonism”26, by
his time largely forgotten in the Latin West. His authentic repossession and
radical reworking of pagan Platonism illuminates how it served as natural
theology. By discovering his Neoplatonic principles mostly in Christian
theological writings, Eriugena showed the overwhelming degree to which
Patristic Christian theologians had assimilated them. Noting a few outstanding
features of his work displays something of what that philosophical theology gave
to Christian (and, indeed, to Islamic and Jewish) philosophy and theology.
Moreover, his is another concordism with a new dimension exhibiting a further
use of philosophy by theologians.
After Boethius, Eriugena was the first to unite the Greek and Latin
Platonisms of late Antiquity; this enabled his reconciliation of Latin and Greek
Christian theologies. His beginnings are with the Latin Fathers—pre-eminently
Augustine, crucially Boethius, and importantly Ambrose. In Periphyseon they are
contained within a single system with the Greek Fathers of whom he made
translations, beginning with the Dionysian corpus. Eriugena’s reconciliation of
East and West was accomplished by extending the primarily Plotinian and
Porphyrian Platonism of the Latin Fathers in the direction of notions from
Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius transmitted by the Greeks. As
generally when the earlier Platonism of Augustine met the later, most
authoritatively conveyed by Dionysius, the later determined systematic
structure. It was to it that Eriugena also owed his conceptions both of nature and
the supernatural.
Eriugena gave his masterwork a Greek title, Peri physeōn, Concerning
Nature; it is a physiologia (Peri. IV PL441C), a term he found in Gregory of Nyssa
(De hom. opif. I). Physics includes all, because, as Plato had taught, genesis
embraces “what is and what is not” (Peri. I PL441A) and the divine superessential
nothingness of the Neoplatonists, the infinite fullness beyond all things which
are and are not, is the principle of his completely inclusive theology. In his
system, nature is completely divided logically, and returns to itself according to
the same logic: “first, into that which creates and is not created, second into that
which is created and creates, third into that which is created and does not create,
fourth, that which neither creates nor is created” (Peri. I PL441D). These divisions
produce four subjects: 1) God as creator, 2) the primary causes, 3) what is subject
to generation in place and time, i.e. the labours of the hexamaeron, including the
human—the work of the sixth day—and its Fall. It, as the terminus of the

26 Trouillard 1983, 331.

procession, becomes the point of departure for the return into 4) God as end, the
final object of investigation. This fundamental Neoplatonic movement he
discerned in Dionysius: monē (remaining), proodos (going-out), epistrophē (return);
it enabled a mutual assimilation to one another of philosophical and Biblical
structures.
In the pagan Neoplatonists, soul mediates between supersensible and the
sensible. Christians tend to give this role to the human. Eriugena found the
human as the immediate connection of God and the all in Augustine and
radicalised it. Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, he came to understand human
nature in such a way, that, more than being “that in which all things could be
found”, it became “that in which all things are created”. 27 The medium through
which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness
is the human, because, uniquely among beings, it possesses all the forms of
knowing and ignorance, including sensation and because the human mind
shares the divine nothingness and self-ignorance. There are no absolute objects,
because everything is through the diverse human perceptions. As with the
Middle and Neo Platonists, the Platonic forms have become not only thoughts,
but types of apprehension in various kinds of subject; as Plotinus puts it, “all
things come from contemplations and are contemplations” (Enn. III.8.7). Like
Neoplatonic systems generally, Periphyseon is an interplay of diverse
subjectivities.
The notion of a divine self-creation takes up and transmutes another
feature of Neoplatonism essential to understanding how nature and grace are
related in this period, namely the complementarity of extreme transcendence and
immanence. Because the First is beyond thought and being, is nothing, and
comes into being only in what derives from it, the First is immanent in the finite
without compromise either to its own transcendence or to the existence of beings.
Plotinus teaches this (e.g. Enn. V.1.7), but it is developed more radically by
successors like Iamblichus and Proclus. It enables the incarnational and
sacramental aspects of Iamblichan thought where the gods include the material
and cooperate in its use so as to draw to themselves humans immersed in
genesis—features inherited by Dionysius. Jean Trouillard exposits what
characterised Proclus’ universe: “it is traversed by a series of vertical lines, which
like rays diverge from the same universal center and refer back to it the
furthermost and the most diverse appearances. These chains tend to absorb the
hierarchical ordering of the levels and to link them all directly to the One….Thus,
a stone is itself able to participate in the divine power to purify.”28

27 Zier 1992, 80; cf. Eriugena Peri. II PL531AB, III PL733B, Peri. IV PL807A V PL893BC.
28 Trouillard 1965:23–25
 Eriugena’s first work was commissioned to solve a local theological
controversy, originating in a literal reading of Augustine so that he taught
double predestination—the doctrine that God wills both the damnation of the
reprobate and the salvation of the elect, with the consequent destruction of
human free will. In the event, his On Divine Predestination increased the
theological troubles and made him part of them, nonetheless, it displays
important features of natural theology.
Following Boethius, Eriugena attempted to maintain divine predestination
and grace together with human freedom. Through Boethius, his solution is
located at the end of a line of Platonic treatises and commentaries which start
from a principle stated by Porphyry that everything is accommodated to the
substance of each knower.29 In order to save both human freedom and divine
providence, Iamblichus, Ammonius, Proclus, and Boethius distinguished
between the mode of the knower and the mode of the thing known. Eriugena, by
emphasising the difference between the eternal mode of the divine being and the
temporal mode of the human, concludes that the problem in our reasoning arises
when “foreknowledge and predestination are transferred to God by likening him
to temporal things” (Praed.. XI.7 PL393B). When we make this transferral, we
place God’s operations within the process of time where they must predetermine
our acts in such a way as to make them unfree.
Eriugena rejected double predestination on the strictly philosophical
ground that it is inconsistent with the goodness and unity of God. His simplicity
is such that predestination and God are one: “the one eternal predestination of
God is God”.30 Eriugena insisted that the means by which he had arrived at this
flinty solution were essential to theology, asserting that correctly interpreting
Scripture requires the liberal arts—for him the rhetorical trivium and the
mathematical quadrivium. The theological errors on predestination had grown
out of “an ignorance of the liberal arts” and “of the Greek writings in which the
interpretation of predestination generates no fog of ambiguity” (Praed. XVIII.1
PL430C-D). His determination to interpret Augustine through the Greek Fathers
reminds us that their thought never fell into the kind of opposition of nature and
grace which emerged out of Augustine’s controversy with Pelagius and had the
consequences for the understanding of predestination of which Eriugena was
unhappily conscious.
Eriugena also serves to remind us of a theme as old as the apologists of
the Apostolic age, Christianity as philosophy, because his conclusion brought his
readers back to his first chapter and its assertion that, “true philosophy is true

29 Porphyry 1975:10.
30 Eriugena Praed. E.3 PL438C; compare Proclus 2007: §14.
religion and, conversely, true religion is true philosophy. This formula
reproduced, but also intensified, Augustine, whom he had just quoted,31 so that
philosophy and theology form a dialectical unity. The mutual transformation of
philosophical ideas and religious images which Eriugena would accomplish in
Periphyseon was only suggested here, but he was on his way to a “coinherence of
recta ratio and biblical auctoritas that forestalls real conflict between the two and
therefore denies any meaningful distinction between philosophy and theology.”32
However, Eriugena is concerned about more here than a hermeneutical
procedure; the practice of the liberal arts brings immortality. Eriugena comments
that Martianus, one of his few pagan sources, “openly teaches that the study of
wisdom makes the soul immortal…all the arts which the rational soul employs
are naturally present in all men whether [or not] they make good use of
them…and, for this reason, every human soul is made immortal by the study of
wisdom which is innate in itself”.33
This understanding of the study of wisdom, or philosophy, when taken
with the interplay between it and religion asserted in On Divine Predestination,
renders comprehensible his notorious comment: “No one enters heaven unless
through philosophy, the seed of splendours”.34 The gloss concerns “a certain
woman who speaks of Philosophy”. She has the virtues and the arts at her
disposition and brings to mind the Consolation of Boethius, which inspired the
solution in On Divine Predestination. 35 In the Consolation, Lady Philosophy opens
the door of heaven in virtue of her capacity to be earthy, human, and heavenly,
and even to pierce through the heavens.
Gone with Boethius, Dionysius and Eriugena is the confrontation between
Christian and pagan philosophy. For Eriugena, philosophy is neither pagan, as
opposed to Christian, nor mundane, as opposed to theology. Dialectic, mystical
interpretation, and the itinerarium towards union with God, all belong to its
work which is to give us the mind of Christ, for “the perfect human is Christ”
(Peri. IV PL543B).

NATURE AND GRACE

I am placing the discussion of nature and grace in Augustine at the end in the
hope that the foregoing will provide context. If we reify nature and grace,

31 Eriugena Praed. I.1 PL358A; Augustine De vera religione V.8.

32 McGinn 1996: 65.
33 Eriugena 1939:17.12; cf. 171.10.

34 Eriugena 1939:57.15.

35 Crouse 2004: 108–9.

separating them ontologically in a medieval scholastic or modern way, Platonic
philosophy becomes a preliminary natural theology through which and from
which Augustine passed to a Christian life governed by grace. However, in fact,
he lived and thought within the patterns we have considered and they prevent
such a separation. The Platonism to which he comes, and within which he lives
his Christianity, will not allow nature to set itself up against what comes from
above and within as the substance and power of its existence. When an attempt
is made to establish it independently in this way, Augustine produces the
assertions of the nullity of nature and the totality of grace which characterise his
anti-Pelagian writings. Plotinus, were he forced to speak in such a framework,
would produce something analogous, as his equation of the fall of the human
soul and our desire for independence shows. Moreover, he would agree with
Augustine that, although this is not our natural, in the sense of proper, position,
humans are born into a fallen state. 36
Natural theology takes many forms in Augustine. We have already noted
that, in his Genesis commentaries, he followed Philo, the Greek Fathers, and
Ambrose in hexamaeral physiologia. Indeed, surpassing them, in the Confessions,
he places the autobiographical account of his Christian return to his Beginning
(Books I-IX) within an allegorical interpretation of Genesis (Books XII-XIII). His
fall and redemption belong within the cosmic becoming, both are a “running
back to you the One” (Conf. 12.28.38). In the same work he repeatedly ascends to
the metaphysical by way of the physical, most notably when he depicts the
natural world as testifying that it was not the object of his love and that God
made it (Conf. 10.6.9).
The Confessions is overall a search for love and Augustine recounts there
how he first learned to love God properly. Because, as also later in the crucial
conversion to Platonism at the centre of the work, he is taught this love by a
pagan, it might seem to belong to natural theology. However, what happens is
not theoretical abstraction. Augustine tells us that in reading Cicero’s Hortensius,
an exhortation to philosophy, his feelings were changed. It changed his
experience, religious practice, values, and desires in respect to God himself: “It
altered my prayers, and created in me different purposes and desires.” Inflamed
by philosophy, Augustine repented his vain hopes; in their place, he writes: “I
lusted for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour of the heart.”
Now his conversion begins, and he represents it, in language Neoplatonists use,
as the return to the divine source: “I began to rise up to return to you” (Conf.

36Compare Augustine De Natura et Gratia: chapters 3, 33, 69, 75; Conf. 6.16.16 and Plotinus, Enn.
V.1.1.
3.4.7-8). This philosophical love of God remained religiously determinative for
Augustine.
The method of his treatise On the Trinity seems to require natural theology
in a standard form. It unites philosophical arguments with what comes from the
authority of Scripture and the church to arrive at an understanding of faith.
However, as when philosophy taught him the true love of God, it is never
discarded. The De Trinitate is a metaphysical spiritual exercise, a step-by-step
deepening of the understanding that we are essentially rational, what this means,
what it makes possible, and what it requires. When Augustine finally reaches the
consideration of the inner and superior reason and the image of the Trinity
which belongs to it, he makes his principle explicit. The image of the Trinity has
been impaired by sin but not lost: “Behold! the mind ... remembers itself,
understands itself, and loves itself; if we perceive this, we perceive a Trinity, not
yet God indeed, but now finally an image of God” (Trin. 14.11). If the essential
incorporeal rationality of the human soul could be denied, nothing in the whole
itinerarium to beatitude in the contemplation of God would work and the ascent
itself would have no purpose. On this account, Augustine returns, in the final
book of the De Trinitate (15.21), to the philosophical refutation of the Sceptics, a
project to which he had devoted himself when preparing for baptism, because
now he needs a mirror in which to see the divine Trinity. This is natural theology
which will not go away.
Augustine’s greatest telling of how Neoplatonism brought him back to
God is the fulcrum point of the Confessions. Books again, this time Platonic ones,
admonished him now to return into himself. They were the means of God’s own
guidance. What he saw on that interior journey, described in Plotinus’ language,
finally gave him the positive conception of incorporeal substance which he
required to move beyond Scepticism to Christianity. He encountered immutable
light. That is to say, unchanging and unchangeable knowing was both the means
and the content of the vision he describes. The identity of knowing and being
gave true knowledge of the incorporeal, eternal, and immutable God, and,
consequently, of himself, as immortal, incorporeal, but mutable soul. He
discovers that the divine life is a triad in one substance: “Eternal truth and true
love and beloved eternity”. All else is created by God and is therefore good. The
Platonic hierarchy of being enables solving the problem of evil in what we
recognise as Proclean, rather than in a Manichean or Plotinian, way—it is a
consequence of choosing the lesser good against the higher. Augustine also
learns that, through His Word, God provides grace sustaining us and drawing us
to himself.37

37 Augustine Conf. 7.8.12-7.15.21.

 Of course, Augustine also finds differences between Platonism and
Christian teaching. However, of the many things he learned from the Platonist
books and will retain, one came to define Augustinian reason and certainly
determined something essential in his inter personal experience of Christ,
namely, the doctrine of illumination. It is pure Platonism but, when, in Book X,
he obeys the Delphic “Gnothi seauton”, the idea that he knows and judges
through contact with the immutable light above and within enables him to ask:
“Truth, when did you ever fail to walk with me, teaching me what to avoid and
what to seek after..?” (Conf. 10.40.65) Is such a theology only natural?

****
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