The Friar and the Cipher Read Online Free PDF Page B

called the First Mover or Prime Mover. In the Aristotelian system, God (as the Christians later conceived Him) was reduced to whosoever had pushed the boulder downhill.
    Although Aristotle's cold-logic empiricism was almost immediately adopted as the only way to do science—Galen, Ptolemy, and all the other great Greek and Roman scientists were Aristotelians—it occurred to some that Plato's concept of Ideals would be much better suited to mysteries of the infinite and the eternal. The duality of the knowable and unknowable (which would later take shape in Christianity as the conflict between reason and faith) allowed Christian, Jewish, and eventually Islamic theologians to allow for man's inability to perceive the essence of God. Aristotle, on the other hand, both literally and figuratively, lacked soul.
     
    BY THE SECOND CENTURY A.D., Christianity had already been established as a dominant religion across much of Europe, Asia Minor, and northern Africa. Still, many Christians did not have a firm idea of the fundamental tenets of their religion. Even the concept of God itself seemed to have any number of different references in the Bible. Was God the Father in heaven, Christ himself, or some other, more ethereal overriding presence? There was also the question of what made Christianity different from other monotheistic religions. The words of the apostles provided direction but not logic, leaving its followers willing but uneasy. Christians needed their own thinkers to give the religion a philosophical base, but in their absence, they cast around among non-Christians to try and provide some answers.
    Eventually an Egyptian named Plotinus, after studying ten years with an unemployed dockworker and lapsed Christian named Ammonius Sacchus, asked the question “How could such a flawed corporeal universe spring from the perfection of God?” This was the same question with which many Christians had been wrestling. To answer it, Plotinus extended Plato's duality, added God (sort of), and incorporated both into a movement that came to be called Neoplatonism.
    God, Plotinus postulated, tap-dancing around the lack of a specific deity in Plato's work, was merely the Ideal, the unknowable, eternal One, The Good, from which all earthly things emanated, in the predicted imperfect form. From The One came The Intelligence, a kind of all-encompassing reality that in turn engendered The Soul. The Soul, unlike the first two layers, was active, and created all the lesser, individual souls that made up the earth.
    To Neoplatonists, God was not an active being who created the universe in a voluntary act but rather merely a contemplative deity. As one moved down the ladder, reality became increasingly material, active, and imperfect. Nonetheless, each individual soul, flawed or besotted though it might be, was still part of The Soul, and therefore The Intelligence, and, ultimately, The One. All the different layers aside, Plotinus succeeded in transforming the concept of Plato's Ideal into a specific deity, which was exactly what Christians had been looking for.
    Although his notion of a passive, contemplative God was branded with the epithet “pantheism,” as were all theological constructs that either stated explicitly or implied that knowledge of God was present equally in all beings (a term the
Catholic Encyclopedia
today dismisses as “simply atheism”), Plotinus's concept of the existence of different forms was used by the Nicaean Council in 325 AD to create the Trinity, thereby reconciling the inconsistent definitions of God in the scriptures.
    But Plotinus, Neoplatonism, and Plato gained their most significant partisan about fifty years later, when Christianity produced perhaps its greatest theorist ever, St. Augustine of Hippo. Through Augustine, who unlike Plotinus possessed impeccable credentials as a Christian, duality was fully incorporated into scriptural theory.
    Augustine was one of a number of great figures in Christian