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By Root 1516 0

“the Fall,” or eternal conscious torment in hell, a suspicion began to grow in me about where the six-lined narrative might possibly have come from. I was able to articulate it a few months later in a conversation with a friend, as I recounted my little exercise in setting up the backward and frontward lines of sight to see Jesus: “What we call the biblical story line isn’t the shape of the story of Adam, Abraham, and their Jewish descendants. It’s the shape of the Greek philosophical narrative that Plato taught! That’s the descent into Plato’s cave of illusion and the ascent into philosophical enlightenment.” Some time after that, in a conversation with another friend, I realized it was also the social and political narrative of the Roman Empire, and so I began calling it the Greco-Roman narrative.1

What we call Western civilization is the project that grew from a marriage between the Greek philosophical tradition and the Roman political, economic, and military empire.2 Greek philosophy was energized by a seminal argument between Plato and Aristotle.3 Plato was a complex genius from the fourth–fifth century BCE whose work can be read in widely differing ways, but the interpretation of Plato by Plotinus (another complex genius, of the third century CE, known as a father of Neoplatonism) eventually became dominant in the Greco-Roman tradition.

According to Plotinus, Plato taught that ultimate reality was nonmaterial, eternal, and unchanging. The material, temporal, and changing objects of this world, in this view, are a shadow, an illusion, like an image projected on a screen or a shadow cast on the wall of a dark cave. The realities that projected the images or cast the shadows were abstractions, conceptions, ideals. (Plato called them “forms,” but that term often confuses contemporary readers. “Conceptual models,” “archetypes,” or “essences” may serve as rough correlates, if not as synonyms.) So, behind the frail world of material chairs is a sturdy ideal called “chairness,” and behind fragile skin-and-bone women and men are robust immaterial realities called “maleness” and “femaleness,” “personhood,” “soul,” and so on. Ultimate reality, then, is nonmaterial, and material things are shadows or manifestations of the Nonmaterial and Unchanging Real.4

Plato’s student Aristotle tried looking at the world from the opposite perspective, as students often do.5 “No,” Aristotle might say, “what is real is the changing material world of furniture for sitting, and ‘chair’ is just an unchanging word or name we put on those objects. What is real is that flesh-and-blood man Joe over there and that smiling woman Sue over there and millions more like them. ‘Humanity,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ are just words or names—mere puffs of air—concepts or constructs we impose on those specific, constantly changing physical beings.” So reality is a collection of material things, and as such it is inherently changeable. Joe gets old, Sue gets pregnant, the chair gets broken, the dog gets sick and then better and then dies.

So you can see why Platovia-Plotinus’s followers would say, “Ultimate reality is nonmaterial Being,” and Aristotle’s followers would say, “We beg to differ. Ultimate reality is material Becoming,” to which Plato’s followers would respond, “We believe it is changeless, and change is an illusion,” to which Aristotle’s followers would reply, “Wrong again. It is constantly changing, and changelessness is simply an idea or mental construction, not a reality.” Plato would point upward and say, “Can’t you see? It is the higher transcendent ideal that is real. All this stuff down here is mere illusion or appearance.” Then Aristotle would point to the earth and say, “Can’t you see? There is no chairness around us, nor is there maleness or femaleness or dogness. But we are surrounded by chairs, men, women, and dogs. These things are reality. Your higher transcendent ideals are less real than the material things that surround us.”6 This argument animated the Greeks and later the Romans, who assimilated and adopted Greek culture, creating the