What is "the Good?"

Questions from a correspondent

A friend and correspondent sent me an interesting question recently. My reply ended up rather longer than intended, and I thought that some readers here may be interested. It’s not polished, but I think that’s one of the advantages of this medium: I know I can write to you without a pack of Twitter jackals descending to rend my flesh if I so much as stumble. So, caveat in mind, here was my friend’s question:

…I was musing while walking about whether “the heavens,” suggestively in the plural in Scripture in both the Hebrew (ha mayim) and the Greek (hoi ouranoi), might approximate the Good in Plato’s world of forms (did he ever link the Good with the Divine?), and so the Kingdom of Heaven would be the messianic community participating (to a more or less imperfect extent) in that transcendent, Trinitarian really-real.

I also wondered whether the Resurrection Body, because it is free of the distorting, inhibiting power of sin, could be seen as the fullest possible participation (for human creatures) in the form of Life.

So, for what it is worth, this is my rough-and-ready answer. Do correct me if I’ve got anything wrong!

Christian Platonists are unanimous in identifying the Good, which Plato describes in the Republic as “beyond being,” with God Himself. For Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius, the Good is the highest name of God, above even Being, whereas Augustine and Aquinas, on the basis of God’s self-revelation make Being itself the highest Name (subject in Aquinas to the important disclaimer that created being is only analogous to the Being of God). In either case, God is both the Good and source of being who Himself transcends being; God is the Good to which all things tend, the true object of all desire; and being in itself is good. All of the above-mentioned fathers concur that evil is a lack of goodness and therefore a lack of being; were this not so, God would be the origin of evil, which is impossible. Importantly, this means that anything which exists is, to some extent, good because it participates in being; there can be no such thing as ungraced or “pure” nature (as de Lubac would conclude from his patristic studies). This leads Origen to say that even the Devil will be saved…

For Plato himself, things are more ambivalent: the above is really a Neoplatonic schema, although the term “Neoplatonist” is one given to them by modernity, and they saw themselves as faithful exegetes of the Platonic tradition - which, to them, included Aristotle. Plato’s Parmenides focusses on the One as the highest form, which is beyond number and distinction, utterly simple and thus beyond being; in the Republic he identifies the beyond-being as the Good and compares it to the Sun, which gives both light (sight, knowledge) and life (warmth, being, growth); but in the Timaeus, while maintaining the teaching of the One and the Good as originating principle of all things, he introduces a “Demiurge” as a lesser creator deity who works from the blueprint of the Forms which naturally emanate from the One/Good. The Neoplatonists syncretised the One/Good and the Demiurge with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, essentially mythologising the Demiurge and making the One/Good the creative source of all things.

Plotinus devotes a long treatise to articulating this in terms of divine will, saying that the One/Good does indeed have will, but that this is entirely contiguous with its nature, so that in God’s utter simplicity, no distinction can be made between his essence as Good and his will - contra the later nominalists like Ockham, God cannot reverse the commandments and will evil (e.g. "Thou shalt murder"), not because He is impeded by any higher law (in which case He would not be God), but because it is incompatible with His nature. Plotinus even calls God “Father,” which was also an earlier Platonic usage. Further, he says that the hypostases proceeding directly from the One/Good are the Nous (mind) and Psyche (soul), which respectively give order and life to the cosmos. No wonder, then, that Ambrose and Augustine seized on his work with such enthusiasm. Some Christian Platonists took on the schema wholesale and applied it to the Trinity: Christ is the Nous, the mind of God in which all the Forms exist, the ordering Word and Wisdom of God (who is given demiurgic “craftsman” function in Wis 7/8, Proverbs and Sirach); the Psyche is the Spirit, the life-giving breath of God. Where the pagan Platonists drew a line between the One/Good and the subsequent two “hypostases,” the Christians moved the line down, to make the three hypostases one.

The Forms on this schema are the imaginings of God contemplated from His mind, i.e. the Divine Word and Wisdom, into existence. The heavens, then, are not the Good, but they are an “unfolding” of the mind of the Good, and participate in it to a higher degree than does the material realm in which we live. It is a realm of spiritual intelligences - angels, saints, etc. - who are (as all things are) “processions” or “energies” radiating from the Good (i.e. God). And indeed, the host of angels and cloud of witnesses mediate our vision of the Good, which in its essence is invisible (for no man may see God and live). But all things, from the celestial realm through the terrestrial to hell, participate in the unfolding of the Trinitarian life, insofar as they have any part in being, life, desire and reason. On the Platonic schema, all things come from the Good (procession, proodos), and desire to return to the Good (reversion/return, epistrophe), while the Good remains transcendent and impassible (remaining, mene) – for the Good, substitute the Trinity, and you have Christian Platonist doctrine in a nutshell. The Resurrection body is absolutely the “fullest possible participation” for us not just in the form of Life (which is our subordinate category of the Form of Being), but even in the form of the Good itself: and this is where Christian theology considerably nuances Platonism, in much of which there is a decidedly antithetical position towards the physical body. Plotinus is aware of this criticism, but still tends to express salvation (henosis, unification with the Good) as dependent on escaping from the body into the realm of pure soul. Life is a breakout from Plato’s cave. But for Christian theologians, that cave becomes a temple, and itself shows the route out to those who will open their eyes.

According to Gregory of Nyssa, the resurrected body is the restoration of the marred image of God in humans to the likeness of God, according to capacity; the clothing Adam made of dead skin becomes the wedding garment, the rock of our hearts is pierced with the wood of the Cross as with Moses’s staff at Meribah, and we partake of the living water which flows from the side of Christ. Gregory compares our souls to a mirror (also an image found in Wisdom): at the Resurrection, all the tarnish of sin is removed, so that we reflect God's face perfectly, like a gold coin bearing His image (q.v. the widow's mite, the lost coin, the coin not belonging to Caesar, the hidden treasure in the field, the Magi’s gift). But we only ever see that image as it were in the mirror, “in a glass” - that is our “capacity.” We never finish our movement towards the Good, but keep following for eternity (for God’s Word always calls, “follow me”): our thirst for the stream is never slated, and we grow constantly towards divine infinitude. Where pagan Platonic henosis was a return to the stasis of the One, theosis for Gregory is an endless movement towards God; Dionysius develops this into joining the saints and angels in the Trinity’s perpetual dance-like, spiralling inner movement. What we are now is in Pauline terms the fleshly seed of that spiritual body, which, as Dionysius wrote and Aquinas developed, God’s grace does not destroy, but perfects.

Is there anything you would like me to write about? I’m happy to engage in Q&A via Substack if so when time permits. Do just reply to this email.