by Matthew Gaetano

The mysterious figure, (Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite, presented himself as the convert of Paul after the Apostle’s sermon in Athens (Acts 17), where Paul taught, “in him we live and move and have our being.” In fact, Dionysius lived around the turn of the sixth century, and his writings reveal a deep engagement with the works of Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Proclus, and others. Of course, Dionysius also drew substantially on the Church Fathers, particularly the Cappadocians, and his engagement with the Pauline corpus was quite rich. To support a broadly Christian Platonic vision of things, he drew upon passages like Romans 11:36: “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” In the beginning of his Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius says:

Inspired by the Father, each procession of the Light spreads itself generously toward us, and in its power to unify, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the oneness and deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in. For, as the sacred Word says, “from him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). Let us, then, call upon Jesus, the Light of the Father, the “true light enlightening every man coming into the world” (John 1:9), “through whom we have obtained access” to the Father (Rom. 5:2), the light which is the source of all light. (145)

All things come from the Father through the Son and all that returns to the Father does so through Christ, who has given us access to the light of the Father, the source of all light.

In Divine Names, Dionysius invokes Romans 11:36 again:

To put the matter briefly, all being drives from, exists in, and is returned toward the Beautiful and the Good. Whatever there is, whatever comes to be, is there and has being on account of the Beautiful and the Good. All things look to it. All things are moved by it. All things are preserved by it. … In short, every source, all preservation and ending, everything in fact, derives from the Beautiful and the Good. Even what is not still there exists transcendentally in the Beautiful and the Good. Here is the source of all which transcends every source, here is an ending which transcends completion. “For from Him and through Him and in Him and to Him are all things” says holy scripture. And so it is that all things must desire, must yearn for, must love the Beautiful and the Good. (79)

Dionysius thus links the Platonic vision of things coming from and returning to the Good (exitus-reditus) with the Pauline language in the Epistle to the Romans.

Centuries later, A. Eschenauer, reported on his visit to the great German philosopher, Friedrich Schelling (d. 1854), many years after the important turn to divine revelation in Schelling’s late philosophy:

I went straight to the heart of the matter and tried to put my interlocutor [Schelling] on his own terrain by saying that public opinion was very interested in his project of creating a new philosophy. I asked him to tell me what to think of it. His regard, which had been calm until this moment, became animated and shone with a more lively clarity. He replied with perfect good nature, and with his own desire to give me satisfaction, that he had indeed been working for many long years on a work whose goal was to present the harmony between revelation and philosophy and thereby to give the key to the later … Encouraged by this overture and desirous of more exact information, I asked the venerable old man, “What will be the principle, what will be the dominant note of this harmony?” Thereupon — I can still see it now — Schelling got up, went to his library, took down an old copy of the New Testament in Greek and came back to me holding out the sacred volume. Then he opened it at Romans 11:36 and read himself, “For of Him, and by Him, and in Him, are all things.” (The philosopher spoke even of this passage as indicating the Trinity.) “That,” he said simply, “is the fundament and the last word of my philosophy. Holy Scripture gives them to us.”

Dionysius and Schelling and many thinkers in between (here and here) saw a passage like this one as key to the Pauline corpus and perhaps to Christian wisdom as a whole. The mysterious depths of God’s wisdom and knowledge means that His judgments and ways are unsearchable and inscrutable (Rom. 11:33), but there is, at the same time, a clear expression that all that exists is from, through, and in him.

I wondered how theologians who (arguably) approached Paul differently from the ancient Dionysius or the modern Schelling may have handled this passage.

In John Calvin’s commentary on Romans 11:36, he says the following:

[Paul] shows, that it is very far from being the case, that we can glory in any good thing of our own against God, since we have been created by him from nothing, and now exist through him. He hence infers, that our being should be employed for his glory: for how unreasonable would it be for creatures, whom he has formed and whom he sustains, to live for any other purpose than for making his glory known? It has not escaped my notice, that the phrase, εἰς αὐτὸν, to him, is sometimes taken for ἐν αὐτῷ, in or by him, but improperly: and as its proper meaning is more suitable to the present subject, it is better to retain it, than to adopt that which is improper. The import of what is said is, — That the whole order of nature would be strangely subverted, were not God, who is the beginning of all things, the end also.

In Calvin’s account, because God is the origin, God should also be the end. Human beings, who are not only created but also sustained by God, should make His glory known. This explanation of why it is fitting to give all glory to God is not simply a matter for the individual human being and his or her creator; Calvin sees that this passage relates our glorying in God the Creator and Sustainer to “the whole order of nature.”

Charles Hodge (d. 1878), a major Reformed theologian in nineteenth-century Princeton, saw this verse as, in a way, “the appropriate conclusion of the doctrinal portion of this wonderful epistle.” While “creatures are as nothing … in comparison with God,” it remains the case that all things exist “by him”; “through his power, wisdom and goodness,” Hodge says, “all things are directed and governed; and to him as their last end all things tend.” He uses this passage to teach that human beings should not boast in themselves, that God is the source of all good, and that human beings stand in need of divine grace. As Hodge says, “The reason why man can lay God under no obligation”–an issue raised by the challenges of Romans 9-11–“is that God is himself all and in all; the source, the means and the end.” Indeed, for him, this verse shows “how adorable the wisdom of God manifested in the plan and conduct of the work of redemption” really is (460-461). Romans 11:36 has an important role in Hodge’s account of the epistle as a whole, even if he appears to emphasize the order of salvation more than the order of creation.

These questions about God’s relationship to his creation in Scripture, the Fathers, the scholastics, the Reformers, and modern theologians are significant. Francis Oakley, a historian whom I admire a great deal, writes the following in his helpful book, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas:

Given [the developing character of Neoplatonic patterns of thought and its emerging notion of God], it is not too hard to understand how St. Augustine, following the trail blazed in Alexandria by Philo Judaeus in the first century of the Christian era and later broadened by the Greek church fathers, was able, in a triumphant achievement of philosophico-theological bridge-building and in a fashion that proved to be definitive for Western Christian philosophy, to engineer a further and quite stunning conflation. It was nothing other, in effect, than the conflation of the Neoplatonic God–the God of the philosophers, as it were, in its final, most complex, and most developed form–with the biblical God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the personal God of power and might who not only transcends the universe but also created it. … Clearly, an extraordinary accommodation. That duly acknowledged, I must now insist that what it reflected was a victory for delicate philosophical and theological diplomacy rather than the achievement of any truly stable synthesis. (46-47)

Oakley sees this vision of the “personal and transcendent biblical God of power and might” and a radically contingent universe as not only as a point of tension with, but also as a kind of stumbling block to, a real encounter with the “Greek intuition of the divine as … innerworldly and of the universe as necessary and eternal.” He suggests that the “voluntaristic” tendencies of later medieval and early-modern theology and natural philosophy, tendencies which emphasized God’s freedom to do anything that is not a contradiction and perhaps even to create the very laws of logic and mathematics, are a kind of victory for a genuinely biblical vision of God.

Of course, Dionysius would disagree. Further reflection on the biblical and Patristic sources of a view of the universe as rational and intelligible, as manifesting divine wisdom and goodness–as we arguably see in Romans 11:36–might help to soften these edges in Oakley’s account. If the great theologians from Augustine and Dionysius to Calvin and perhaps Hodge saw these “cosmic” elements in the Pauline corpus, it may be that the view of a free God of power and might and the vision of a God of Logos through whom and in whom are all things are both present in Scripture. This idea of God doesn’t merely come from the Greeks, and the struggle to reconcile those elements of God’s way of revealing himself to mankind did not emerge with Augustine.