PHIL-THEO Joint Seminar: Ancients and Moderns on God and the World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Plato's cosmology in his Timaeus was the definitive Greek account in Antiquity about human beings' place in the universe and their relation to a Maker God. The Stoics, as in the second book of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, took over many ideas from Plato to posit that God is maximally responsible for the order of nature and that there exists a very close kinship between human and divine reason. Already in the second century BC Plato's cosmology was read alongside the creation account of Genesis, and this pairing deeply influenced the Jewish-Greek author Philo of Alexandria, in his On the Making of the World, as well as the Gospel of John and the 4thc. Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, in his On the Six Days of Creation. Turning to the medieval and Renaissance periods, we will continue our investigation of philosophers and theologians who are concerned to understand the nature of the relationship between God and the world. To this end we will read selections from John Scotus Eriugena's Periphyseon. We will also listen to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who attempted to represent music of the spheres. With Copernicus and Galileo, however, the general understanding of our place in a divine cosmos dramatically changed, and philosophers, more unsure of our place within it, sought more subjective foundations, most famously, with Descartes's cogito. In short, what used to be obvious to the ancients, the medievals, and even the Renaissance philosophers—that we belonged to a divine cosmos and economy—was no longer. And it took more than a century for philosophers to find some way "back to nature." Among the most notable of them was the young German Romantic philosopher, F.W.J. von Schelling (1775-1854), who, in his Ideas toward a Philosophy of Nature and later, his Bruno, set out to correct what he considered the one-sidedness of Descartes's view. Turning, finally, to the modern period we will read two works, one by C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image on ancient and medieval cosmology, and another by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who sought to overcome the dialectic between ancient-cosmological and modern-anthropological starting points with a phenomenology of love.