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When somebody asks Jordan Peterson whether he believes in God, he usually answers with a question: “What do you mean by ‘god’?” It drives interviewers crazy. It’s also a fair question.
We moderns tend to assume everybody means the same thing when they say “God.” Two thousand years of Christian culture will do that. But put a Christian, a Platonist, and a Stoic at the same table over a round of beers, and it becomes clear pretty fast that they’re describing three very different realities.
This matters because Orthodox Christians hear a certain charge a lot: our theology is just Plato with incense. The Fathers were Greeks, the argument goes, so the Trinity and all that talk about God’s “unknowable essence” must be baptized Neoplatonism.
Let’s test that. We’ll look at what the philosophers actually believed, where the Fathers borrowed their words, and where they drew a hard line.
Plato’s Other World
For Plato, the things we see are shadows of eternal Forms—perfect, abstract ideas that exist beyond this world. J. N. D. Kelly describes Plato’s theory of knowledge as centered on “a transcendent, non-sensible world of Forms or Ideas which are apprehended by the intellect alone.” Those Forms are necessary, eternal, and uncreated. They were always there.
The Fathers said no. Fr. John Meyendorff notes that early Christians rejected Plato’s eternal world of Ideas because there could be nothing “which would limit the absolute freedom of the creative act.” God made everything, freely, out of nothing, and the world he made has a weight of its own. It’s far more than a “shadow of eternal realities.”
Vladimir Lossky puts it bluntly: “Creation ex nihilo [out of nothing] is a dogma of the faith…. There is nothing remotely similar in other religions or metaphysics.” The New Testament agrees: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:3).
That changes everything for us. Meyendorff says the “difference and distinction between Him and His creation” becomes the ground for “the very ideas of providence, love, and communion.”
A God who made the world out of nothing can love it on purpose.
Plotinus and the Leaking Fountain
Plotinus, the third-century founder of Neoplatonism, took Plato further. At the top of his system sits the One—absolutely simple, with no division or plurality, beyond all categories. Everything else flows downhill from the One, like water spilling over the lip of a fountain, getting dimmer and thinner the farther it goes.
Lossky’s verdict: “The God of the Christians is more transcendent than that of the philosophers.” In Plotinus, the One “is in a certain manner in continuity with the Intellect, and finally with the world. The universe appears as a manifestation, as degradation of the Absolute.”
Degradation. In that system, the world is what we get when divinity runs low. The Christian God creates, and he stays God while he does it. The Fathers insisted that “the visible world and its history” could be, as Meyendorff writes, “worthy of salvation and redemption.”
Christian writers did pick up some of Plotinus’s vocabulary, but critically. Lossky warns that “despite all the outward resemblances (due primarily to a common vocabulary),” the two visions part ways.
The Stoics Go to the Gym
The Stoics went the other direction. Kelly explains that they “reacted vigorously against the Platonic differentiation of a transcendent, intelligible world” from the world of the senses. “Whatever exists, they argued, must be body.” The universe was material through and through, and God was a kind of fiery reason running through it.
The Stoics are having a moment, by the way. Podcasters love them. So do CrossFit coaches. (I say this with affection, as a guy who spends a lot of time in a CrossFit-style gym.) There’s real wisdom in Marcus Aurelius about self-control. But the Fathers couldn’t follow the Stoics into a universe where God and matter are made of the same stuff.
Here’s the beauty of it. Plato pulls God away from matter. The Stoics collapse God into matter. The Incarnation settles the argument neither side could settle: the transcendent God takes flesh and remains God.
Wisdom at Work
So what did the Fathers put in place of Plato’s world of Ideas? Wisdom.
Proverbs pictures Wisdom beside God at creation, “like a master workman” (Prov. 8:30). Lossky explains that Wisdom “is an instrument of creation, not a world beyond it.” He writes that “God in order to create, thinks creation, and this thought gives its reality to the being of things.” Lossky calls it “Wisdom at work”—God’s will and word, where the inner principles, or logoi, of all things are rooted.
St. Paul gives that Wisdom a name: “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). “For by him all things were created” (Col. 1:16).
Borrowing Without Buying
Were the Fathers influenced by Greek philosophy? Of course. Many of them had the best classical education money could buy. St. Basil the Great even wrote an essay for young Christians on how to profit from pagan literature.
They used philosophy the way Saint Paul used it on the Areopagus. He quoted a Greek poet to an Athenian crowd—“In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28)—and then preached the Resurrection, which got him mocked by half the audience (Acts 17:32). Borrow the vocabulary; keep the gospel.
Lossky says St. Dionysius took “the apophasis of the Platonists” and transformed it “into an expression of the absolute transcendence of the divine essence.” Same tool, new job. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos puts it more strongly than I would: “All of the Holy Fathers criticize the philosophy of their time and reject it.” Rejected or repurposed, the point stands.
For the Fathers, theology was never a seminar topic.
Metropolitan Hierotheos again: “In patristic tradition, the theologians are those who see God.”
Evagrius said it in a line every catechumen should tape to the fridge: “If you are a theologian you truly pray. And if you truly pray you are a theologian.”
Which brings us back to Jordan Peterson’s question. What do we mean by “God”? We mean the One who made everything out of nothing, loved it on purpose, and then did the one thing no philosopher saw coming. He became part of it.
Next in this series: how the Trinity and the Incarnation turn unknowing into knowing.
Sources
Evagrius Ponticus. On Prayer 61. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1, translated and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 2003.
Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Edited by John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976.
Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Translated by Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
Vlachos, Hierotheos. The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1993.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.