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| ISBN-13: | 9780802864499 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2010 |
| Pages: | 298 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Calvin's Ladder
A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and AscensionBy Julie Canlis
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2010 Julie CanlisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6449-9
Chapter One
Ladders of Ascent: A Brief History
Thee, God I come from, to thee go, All day long I like fountain flow From thy hand out, swayed about Mote-like in thy mighty glow.
* * *
When it comes to Calvin's concept of participation, we find ourselves with the unsurprising task of pulling apart inheritance and innovation. As much as Calvin improved on some of the excesses of medieval scholasticism, he was its rightful child and heir. The discussion in this chapter falls into three parts: (1) Greek patterns of ascent; (2) Christian appropriation of these patterns; and (3) Calvin's distinctive appropriation and transformation of this pattern, using Aquinas in particular as a foil. A brief look at the history of ascent will begin to tease out the consonance and innovations between Calvin and the developments of patristic and medieval theology. It is when we understand the uniqueness of Calvin's doctrine of ascent that we will be poised to understand his doctrine of participation and how it differed from the vision of Plato, Plotinus, and even Aquinas. And it is this basic vision that, I will argue, is not far from Irenaeus.
Greek Itineraries: Plato's Ladder and Plotinus's Golden Circle
When early Christians attempted to understand themselves, their relationship to God, and their future, they used the tools at their disposal: words and concepts forged in the fiery minds of Greek philosophers. The Hellenistic typology of ascent was not repugnant to early Christian theologians, whose Lord had ascended into the heavens to be the "firstborn" of many brothers. Not only had rising Jewish apocalypticism paved the way for this emphasis on ascent; it was also the history of their Lord and Savior. The apostle Paul, too, spoke rapturously of being "caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know — God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2). The soul's descent from paradise and accompanying salvation and progressive ascent to Christ was a way to mark the contours of the grand scheme of things: the drama of sin, salvation, and return. And yet, for a doctrine of ascent to be authentically Christian, these theologians had to wrestle with two problematic aspects of Hellenistic ascent: its underlying escapism and its ontological monism. I will begin with a description of Hellenistic cosmologies in order to lay a general framework for Christian appropriations of ascent, noting that these descriptions are only to provide general schematic accuracy sufficient to our purpose.
Plato
Plato (fourth century BCE) dominated the world of classical Greece, stamping on it his hypothesis of the soul's natural divinity and introducing the image of the ladder. Having fallen into our corrupt world of flesh, changeability, and history, the soul desires to return to its eternal homeland. "Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, ... so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty." This strong line of demarcation between our world of appearances, marked by instability and becoming, and the world of "Ideas" or "Forms" (in Parmenides), marked by permanence and being, is pervasive throughout Plato and has had inestimable influence on the Christian tradition. Ascent, then, factors as the path for the exiled soul out from materiality and is accomplished by a threefold ascent of purification (askesis), illumination, and contemplative union (theoria). Socrates' famous illustration of the chariot in Phaedrus describes not only the ascent of the soul but also the previous descent into materiality. Likening the soul to winged horses (human and divine parts) guided by a charioteer, Socrates describes the fateful plunge of the chariot to earth, imprisoning the soul in a physical body. "And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings!" (246D). Vice, ignorance, and a love of opinion over truth imprison the soul on earth for ten thousand years. However, the philosopher can break the cycle by a frankly intellectual solution: nourishing his broken wings on "the plain of truth" (248B) through contemplation and restraining the lower elements in order to ascend once again. Here ascent and participation are clearly bedfellows, in that the soul participates naturally in divinity and, as such, is enabled to ascend to its original home. But perhaps even more forceful is Plato's disjunction between the heavenly and the material. The soul, exiled, is no more of this world than are the Ideas.
Plotinus
Neo-Platonism, with Plotinus (third century CE) at the helm, synthesized 600 years of Platonic speculation and bequeathed to Christian philosophers even more sophisticated conceptual tools. For Plotinus, ascent functioned as the "return" from a prior departure of all reality from the One (to hen). Unlike Plato's dichotomy between being and becoming, Plotinus did not structure his great ordering principle around a dualistic distinction between a unitive source and the fragmented reality subordinate to it. Instead, he spoke of the procession of being from the One, of like from like, in a descending hierarchy in which lower stages flow from the higher ones through emanation. This achieved systematic status in Proclus, who developed it into a nonhistorical principle of logic. He wrote of the "communion" (koinonia) of all things as they exist in perpetual procession from and return to their source — a process that "must be accomplished through likeness." Under Proclus's consistent treatment, procession and return became the nonsequential, interlocking movements of all causes and effects that constitute reality.
Plotinus, however, was not really a systematician, so he oscillated between procession-return as a timeless theory of reality and as a description of the soul. We will find that Augustine will follow Plotinus's individualization of the theory, while Aquinas will broaden it out into a comprehensive principle to sum up all theology (and the processions within God himself). In Plotinus, the ontological levels (three hypostases) that separate the soul from the One do not mediate between them as a buffer but rather are levels to which the soul is ontically assimilated as it participates to a greater and greater degree in the One. "Procession" and "return" become the organizing movements around which life is understood and redirected. Plotinus claimed to have several mystical experiences with the One throughout his lifetime, such as the autobiographical passage in Ennead 4.8.1:
Often have I woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself, going out from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identity with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down....
It is Plotinus's univocal view of reality that allows for his gradual ascent and ontic assimilation to the divine. The world is not in opposition to the divine, but rather has descended from the One and is capable of return. For Plotinus, this "return" is first a movement inward — gnothi seauton — and only then a movement upward (a double movement that becomes central to both Augustine and Bonaventure). The soul, finding itself on the lowest plane of being, leads "a life which takes no delight in the things of this world" and through contemplation begins to experience "liberation from the things of this world...." As it is purified, the soul is ontically assimilated at each enlightened higher level. "He was one himself, with no distinction in himself either in relation to himself or to other things." This is Plotinian ascent — "escape in solitude to the solitary" — in which the soul's highest good is for the philosophically elite, and is an individual matter.
Christian theology leaned heavily on these concepts, and it was not without temptation and crucifixion that it gradually (and not entirely) transformed them. Plato and Plotinus, whose influence is inestimable, represent the twin pitfalls of Hellenistic ascent for Christian theologians, even as they provided the necessary nomenclature. Of the first, the Platonic temptation, Bernard McGinn says:
Contemplation is only one of the historically and culturally conditioned forms in which Christian mysticism has come to birth, but it is one of the most ubiquitous and enduring.
Plato's sharp disjunction between the realm of appearances and the realm of Ideas threatened to taint a typology of ascent with material suspicion, even for those who believed in a Creator. His upward itinerary, depicted by a three-staged ladder, "would shape the basic psychological structure of the following centuries." Similarly, its privileging of the rational soul had the potential to stunt anthropology and, with it, sanctification.
Of the second, the Plotinian temptation, McGinn says:
The ... master paradigm of exitus and reditus, the flowing out of all things from the First Principle and their eventual return to it, had been incorporated into Christian mysticism as early as the time of Origin. This central motif also appeared in the thought of Dionysius and through him influenced mystics in both Eastern and Western Christianity. ... The "flowing forth" of all things from God was employed by earlier mystics primarily to express the ontological foundation for their major concern, that is, the exploration of the soul's ascent to God.
The legacy of Plotinian ascent is a participatory view of reality. Plotinus transposes the Platonic descent, or "fall," of the soul to embodiment into a procession of all creatures from the One. Plotinian ascent is marked less by escape than by corresponding return. Yet the univocal nature of such a scheme once again is challenged by Christianity's belief in a Creator who is radically other than his creatures. The Christian insistence on a mediator is undermined by a Plotinian ascending typology that suggests progressive, unmediated participation in divinity. In the Christian narrative, the human drama is less a matter of "like returning to like" than an act of salvation, of grace bringing unlike to participate in unlike.
All of these aspects of Hellenistic ascent continued to challenge Christian theology, even as Christian theology used descent/ascent and procession/return as a frame around which to make itself intelligible. Was this, then, the "Hellenizing of Christianity," or, in Eastern Orthodox eyes, the auspicious "Christianizing of Hellenism"? There will always be theologians who deem ascent to be at cross-purposes with a theology based on the descent of God to us; similarly, there will be those who see participation exclusively as a Greek philosophical phenomenon, having no place in the New Testament. But there are others who take it seriously precisely because it has been the chosen (and presumably sanctified) language of the church. Andrew Louth well notes, "And yet man is made in the image of God, and so these movements of ascent and descent cross one another and remain — as a fact of experience — in unresolved tension." While our description of Hellenistic ascent suggests at once an escape from the world and the univocal nature of being, neither of these pitfalls need accompany an authentically Christian use of such typology (as we shall see with Calvin). Ascent has proved an invaluable category for theologians who are articulating the process of sanctification, the final "return" of all things to communion with their Creator, and participation in the One who has ascended.
Christian Journeys: Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas
I now turn to a discussion of theologians who have expressed Christian theology within a typology of ascent and/or return. We will focus on Augustine and Aquinas, two who have unquestionably left their mark on the Western (and especially late medieval) theology that Calvin inherited. Origen is interesting for our purposes as the first to arrange his theology along this formal structure and as a brief example of a theologian unable to transform such typology.
Origen
Origen's (third century) ascent-mysticism comes to us as a mixed bag. Perhaps the greatest exegete in the history of the church, Origen is regarded by von Balthasar as the master of the theologia ascendens in that he transposed his entire cosmology, soteriology, and mysteriology into a formal structure ("attitude," von Balthasar says) of ascent.
In this everything is actually graded upwards, everything directed to the ascensiones in corde, everything turned upward from the concealing lowliness to the radiant light of Tabor.... [It] is this Origen who entered without reserve, as it were, into the broadest ranges of the thinking of the Church. Not only did all the Alexandrians after him, not only did Pamphilius, Gregory the Wonder-Worker, Didymus, Eusebius and the Cappadocians, Jerome, Hilary, Ambrose and, through all these, Augustine accept his model of the ascensiones in corde, but also, mediated through these dominant figures, the little thinkers, the preachers, the people.
Origen's cosmology is played out amidst the drama of fallen intellects who, in committing the first sin, "fell" into embodiment (De principiis 2.9). (Origen was the first to coin the word "fall" for original sin, because he regarded it as a literal fall from the higher spirit world to our lower world of materiality.) Having fallen, these intellects follow a threefold Platonicstyle pedagogy to return to God: purification, illumination, and contemplative union. Given this cosmic tutorial, Origen's soteriology follows suit and styles the person of Christ as the cosmic educator of these misplaced souls. (The Spirit is, not surprisingly, the Spirit of Wisdom.) In this scheme, the physicality of the Savior can be read as more or less a stage for the soul to pass by as it ascends to less and less mediated knowledge of the eternal Logos — for how could God's limitation be his ultimate expression? In comparison to his near-contemporary Irenaeus, we see in this Alexandrian (and many after him) a subtle shift in accent away from the salvation of the flesh to the pedagogy of the soul.
McGinn argues that Origen's ascent "departs from Platonism both in its Christocentrism and in its biblical foundation," especially in that Origen's mystical ascent is not a Plotinian ascent in "solitude to the solitary" but is located in the mystical body of Christ, the church. Furthermore, Origen rigorously distanced himself from the Platonic substructure of the soul's innate divinity. Nevertheless, Douglas Farrow rightly wonders whether Origen's scheme conjures up images of the Christian life as a reform school. He further argues: "By now it will be obvious that Origen is the real source of the idea of the general ascent of man, and of the doctrine of progress in a collective sense." While this is too harsh and too general to be of much help, there is truth in Farrow's charge that Origen solidified and baptized a general Platonic template. The embodied ascension of Christ has been replaced by the ascension of the soul to higher consciousness. Origen's speculation on the soul's descent led to a unique myth of descent,a fusion of Genesis 3 and the falling chariot of Phaedrus. His transposition of ascent into the soul's ascent away from the material (and even away from the humanity of Christ) bequeathed an instability to Christian reflection on ascent, for von Balthasar does not exaggerate when he says that Origen "has become invisibly all-present in Christian theology."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Calvin's Ladder by Julie Canlis Copyright © 2010 by Julie Canlis. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Participation and Christianity 5
Participation as a Valid Reformed Category? 13
Participation and Irenaeus 17
Calvin and Irenaeus 21
1 Ladders of Ascent: A Brief History 25
Greek Itineraries: Plato's Ladder and Plotinus's Golden Circle 26
Christian Journeys: Origen, Augustine, Aquinas 31
Calvin's Paradigm of Ascent 42
2 Creation: The Ground and Grammar of Ascent 53
Eternal Mediation of the Word 55
The Mediator and the Garden 74
3 Christ: The Ascending One 89
The Bidirectional Itinerary of God 91
The Descent of Jesus: His Earthly Humanity 98
The Ascent of Jesus: His Continuing Humanity 112
4 The Spirit: The Eucharistic Ascent 123
Discipleship 124
Adoption 130
The Eucharistic Ascent 159
5 The Ascending Vision of Irenaeus 173
The Ascending Economy of Adam 178
The Ascending Economy of Christ 192
The Ascending Economy of the Spirit 210
6 Reforming Ascent: Irenaeus, Calvin, and Christian Spirituality 229
Backward and Forward with Descent and Ascent 229
Recapitulating Ascent in Calvin 233
Participation and Its Challenges 243
Ascent, Calvin, and Contemporary Spirituality 245
Bibliography 253
Index of names 273
Index of subjects 278
Calvin's works 283