To Infinity and Beyond: Dionysius on Being and Evil

It took most of my freshman year to understand Plato’s ideas of Being and Becoming. It was a shock to me when Pseudo Dionysius took it a step further. As soon as I started reading him I messaged an upper class man to try to understand what was going on. She helped me complete my understanding of Plato and helped me see further up into Dionysius’s thoughts.

In the opening pages of Pseudo Dionysius’s The Divine Names, he writes about God as beyond Being itself.

We must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed. Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being.

Plato like Play-Doh: Being and Becoming

Being and Becoming. What do these terms even mean for Plato? This was probably one of the most difficult ideas to wrap my mind around freshman year. I heard professors talking about it all the time, but I never could figure out what it meant. After thinking about it for a semester, I was finally able to figure it out.

Plato explains his system of existence in Timaeus. He breaks existence down into three categories: Being, becoming, and space.

Aristotelian Virtue

What is virtue? How does one practice it? Does virtue measure actions or a person?

One of the primary authorities in Torrey on virtue is Aristotle who examines virtue in Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle, a student of Plato, thought differently about virtues than Plato. Where Plato believed in forms of virtue, Aristotle believed in moderation.

Virtue

Aristotle describes  virtue as “a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency” (II.9). This is a sort of moderation or temperance, where one aims at the middle to achieve the goal. Aristotle applies to all virtues such as courage, generosity, and magnanimity. If courage is the median, then a deficiency of it is called cowardliness and an excess of it is rashness (Book III). For generosity, the deficiency is stinginess and the excess is wastefulness (Book IV). For magnanimity (essentially the virtue of knowing your place in society in relation to honor, or greatness of soul) the deficiency is smallness of soul while the excess is vanity.

Magnanimity is

The Call to Love

The two authors we spend the most time discussing in Torrey are Plato and Augustine, and rightly so as both have deeply affected Western thought. Much of the development of theology, East and West, has come out of Augustine. I’ve already stressed the importance of Plato in an earlier post, which I’ll be referencing throughout this one.

Loving God

During my freshmen and sophomore years I wrote two papers on “The Call to Love” which took Plato and connected him to Christ’s command to love. While I am a better writer now, I believe the ideas in it have been the most important and fundamental to my spiritual growth as well as how I interact with the world around me. My thought forms around Plato’s tripartite soul and Christ’s command to love him and love others.

My theory originates from Mark 12:30.

Plato like Play-Doh: The Tripartite Soul, The Cave, and The Forms

No blog on the Torrey curriculum would be complete without a look at Plato. While I don’t claim to be an expert (except maybe in puns), I have been taught and trained to both understand and explain Plato. It is possible, however, to read Plato and miss what is happening in the big picture. We read Plato in our first semester and I’m sure I missed most of it. This series of posts will serve as a guide to some of the basic elements of Plato. I believe these ideas are important for everyone to understand, even if they don’t agree with them, for they appear throughout much of Western thought. Having clear definitions of these terms and ideas will hopefully help you read and understand Plato and other books better.

One thing I must say is that this is not a post to replace reading Plato. Reading the primary text is the most important thing for

Justin’s Apology for Plato

One of the purposes of this blog is to find the redemptive portions of texts that aren’t about God or Christianity. What are the universal truths that we can find in works like Machiavelli’s The Prince or things that can speak into our lives as Christians such as Homer’s gods in the Iliad?  The idea of redeeming other works is not new. One early Christian apologist, Justin Martyr, did this with Plato. Justin Martyr believed that Plato went to heaven because he knew God, the logos. While I cannot argue myself for Plato’s salvation, I will show how Justin, in his First and Second Apologies, can extend salvation to Plato. Justin has personal investment in his project as he is a philosopher himself who studied Plato’s works and seeks to show Christianity as the true religion and philosophy. He was martyred under Marcus Aurelius, another Torrey author.

The Logos

Justin believes that Socrates (and Plato) had received revelation from the Logos. The Logos in Greek philosophy was the idea of knowledge or discourse. In the Bible and Christian thought, it is