by Joshua Shaw

In another post we will look at the critical methods of these men (as well as others – Schlatter, Hodge, Bavinck, Lightfoot, etc.) in a more direct way; for now we consider it from the perspective of the last post – the relationship of man to Creation, the relationship of this world to the next, of the bodily to the ghostly. It is in this light (not with a view to the method per se) that their fundamental, in fact, diametrical opposition to the currents of their time stands out. 

Resuming the themes of the last post, Westcott writes,[i]

The dependence of Creation upon man both in his fall and in his restoration, the vital unity of the whole visible order. … It could not be otherwise; for the sympathy of Nature with man is written on the first page of the Bible and on the last. In the spiritual history of Genesis the earth is said to have been cursed for man’s sake. In the spiritual vision of the Apocalypse new heavens and a new earth are prepared for redeemed humanity.

Westcott, Christus Consummator, 135.

And here we must see with clarity that Christian Platonism does not necessarily mean, as so often heard in off-hand remarks, enmity with or disregard for the body and the bodily, the earth and the earthly.[ii] The materialist’s reduction of nature to meaningless bouncing atoms and man to that is countered everywhere by the resounding asseveration that, whereas Man is never less what he is in virtue of his bodily being, he is always – or at least ought to be – more. But not just man; all of reality.

The difference between the ‘shadow’ and the ‘image’ is well illustrated by the difference between a ‘type’ and a ‘sacrament,’ in which the characteristic differences of the Old and New Covenants are gathered up. The one witnesses to grace and truth beyond and outside itself: the other is the pledge and the means through which grace and truth are brought home to us. … Things visible and sensible are the shadows: things unseen and spiritual are the substance. The whole world is made for us a shadow of some unimaginable glory.

Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 304.

Not the meanness of the material, but the splendor of the spiritual constitutes the outlook of the Christian Platonist. [iii] Fenton John Anthony Hort put it similarly,

All Christian life is sacramental. Not alone in our highest act of communion are we partaking of heavenly powers through earthly signs and vehicles.

Yet he also pointed to the way out of the materialist’s quagmire:

This neglected faith may be revived through increased sympathy with the earth derived from fuller knowledge, the fearless love of all things.

Hort, The Way, The Truth, The Life, 213.

So, while the the Cambridge Trio was known for “beginning by reading the New Testament like any other book”[iv], yet they could say, “The unseen and the eternal is for all of us who confess Christ come, Christ coming in flesh, the ruling thought of life” (Westcott, Christus Consummator, 57).

All of this makes clear that, on principle, Westcott and Hort could not for a moment diminish the divine and the spiritual in the Biblical text (this is also borne out by their practice). In this way they remained, in the only sense here considered, “conservative” Christian theologians. They remind us therefore that, though good in itself,

The new renaissance is not less perilous than the old,

Westcott, Lessons from Work, 47 [v]

And,

There is a life below the surface which the surface veils at once and reveals; and this life it is, which materialism in every shape tends to conceal.

Westcott, Lessons from Work, 83.

This “new Renaissance” is recognized by them as bearing two faces: even as a Protestant may well look with favor on the old Renaissance for its not insignificant part in the revival of a knowledge of the ancient Christian sources in their original context, yet the pride that comes with discovery, the arrogance which clings so easily to knowledge, are besetting sins of both the Renaissance and Reformation, though their names would have us distinguish them sharply.[vi] In both the temptation is the same: either the old is reduced to the terms of the new, or trumped by the advance of the new, instead of growing up into the new, or being refined (as through fire) and so revealing the truer reality beneath.[vii]

Yet Westcott and Hort refused to give up the good of the new Renaissance any more than that of the old, and so they supported a historically rooted reading of the Biblical text for the exact same reasons as they supported the modern sciences  – namely, that the “highest does not stand without the lowest.”[viii]

When we have realised with vital distinctness how God spoke in and through the past, we shall be prepared to recognise and to interpret His message for to-day.

Wescott, Lessons from Work, 180.

The historical meaning of a text is not chaff to be sloughed off, but is the bodily seed to be “sown in corruption, raised in incorruption,” even as we shall rise again, glorified, at the last day. And so Westcott can with all sincerity say,

The retrospect of fifty years of Biblical criticism is, I repeat, more than reassuring.

Lessons from Work, 182.

For all this historical research and appreciation of its temporal, material aspect, Scripture is never spent, and its life is not only deep down things, but high things which become in their turn standards for the low things. Historical study was only the prequel, the beginning, itself not properly understood except from the viewpoint of the summit:  “[it is] in the knowledge of the highest that the nature of all knowledge is best to be understood.”[ix] In the end is our beginning.[x]

We have that to make known which is not of the world, but above it: that which cannot be measured or tested by limited standards: that which justifies itself simply by shining.

Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord, 88.

The question is simply

whether we are fruitlessly mourning over a loss which is, in fact, the condition of a blessing, or waiting trustfully for the transfigurement of the dead

The Revelation of the Risen Lord, 27

And so we end where the post began:  

Christianity shrinks from no test while it transcends all. If therefore doubts come we must not dally with them or put them by, but bring them into a definite form, and question them. And in God’s good time they will, as of old, prove an occasion for fuller, unanticipated knowledge.[xi]

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[i] The same sentiment can be found in Hort: “Whether we were moulded out of the dust of the earth immediately or through an ascending series of lower beings, the world of nature can no longer be an alien world. On the strength of the knowledge already securely won, setting aside all disputed and disputable problems, we must henceforth as men feel a true kinship to the earth and to all that lives upon it” (The Truth, 81).

[ii] Of course for certain important thinkers this has been the case, but only seldom for the great Christian Platonists (Origen, Augustine, Traherne, Westcott and Lewis). All of them had great respect for what we now call the Aristotelian elements of the tradition, but which they simply viewed as a common element in Plato and Aristotle – as in their respective theories of knowledge (epistemology).  For instance, “The principles of knowledge concerning intelligible things (τὰ νοητά) and of opinion concerning perceptible things are thought (νοήσις) and perception, respectively. Perception is an experience (πάθος) of the soul through the body which principally conveys the meaning (δύναμις) of that which was experienced. But whenever an impression (τύπος) is engendered in the soul through the sensory faculties in accordance with the perception (which impression is the perception), then – lest it be effaced over the passage of much time – endures and is kept whole, and the health (σωτηρία) of this impression is called memory. And opinion is an interweaving of memory and impression” (Alcinous, Introduction to Platonic Doctrines). Now of course the Theaetetus takes first place here (and the Republic is not far away), yet anyone can see real resemblance to Aristotle’s doctrines of knowledge from De Anima and elsewhere. As an important link in Plato between the two kinds of knowledge, “opinion” and “thought”, memory is often overlooked. It is worth remembering that memory, which is the “health” (σωτηρία) of perceptive knowledge (opinion), is also, perhaps in the same way and at the same time, the means for achieving the highest kinds of knowledge, symbolized by the remembering the previous life of the soul when it saw God and the forms. But all this (though taken literally by many Platonists of the religious sort) may have been meant as a true metaphor for the mysterious process of learning and knowing. While Alcinous is known in the scholarship as a kind of mediator between Aristotle and Plato, yet the problem for the early Christians of the middle-Platonist sort was not knowledge or the way to acquire it, but instead the sufficiency of virtue (interpreted by Christians as friendship with God, viz., the Gospel) for blessedness. They saw Aristotle as breaking down this foundation of religion, namely, that God and his goodness is sufficient for the soul (likewise in the Aristotle’s popularized doctrine of a limited providence). The 14th book of Eusebius’s Praeparation for the Gospel is instructive on precisely those points which irked the early church regarding Aristotle: and it wasn’t his epistemological framework. They also didn’t see fundamental disagreement about the superiority of spiritual goods (of the soul) over physical ones (of the body) – the main problem was the sufficiency of the soul’s health for happiness.

[iii] One thing I dislike about the term is the unsavory sound of “Platonistic” or “Platonizing” or “Platonic Christian,” which, while sounding worse, conveys semantically the truth of the matter. He is not a Platonist who is colored by Christianity, but rather a Christian who does not leave behind the good in Platonism.

[iv] This statement, taken out of context of his thought as a whole from a number of places (the preface to his commentary on First John and Hebrews), has lead to much consternation.

[v] Westcott saw this as having entered the faith by subtle methods, methods which ring familiar to us 150 years later: “It is impossible to open many popular books of devotion, or to read many modern hymns, without feeling that materialism has invaded faith no less than science, and that enervating sentimentalism [note the connection!] is corrupting the fresh springs of manly and simple service” (The Revelation, 27).

[vi] The humbler sense of reforming (as opposed to rebirth), which suggests continuity, while in many respects apt, can also be misleading. The same sense of danger is expressed by Hort: “the air is thick with bastard traditions which carry us captive unawares while we seem to ourselves to be exercising our freedom and our instinct for truth” (The Truth, 91).

[vii] Of course many scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation both succeeded in establishing a healthier and more organic relationship to the immediate past and present – the point here is that the danger is never utterly escaped.

[viii] So CSL often quoted the Imitatio of Thomas a Kempis.

[ix] The Truth, 60. This is echoed in Westcott’s claim in his preface to Hort’s fragment on I Peter that for him, despite his unbelievable devotion to detail in text criticism and historical philology, the main concern was always theological and always personal.

[x] For Hort Christ was the Way because he was the Truth, such that movement and steadfastness were united in his person: “Standing fast in the unchanging Truth and an endless progress in taking knowledge of it shall be indissolubly united” (59). One thinks here almost involuntarily of Augustine’s apud te… omnium inrationalium et temporalium sempiternae vivunt rationes (I.6.9) or stant causae.

[xi] The Revelation of the Risen Lord (105) is a series of lectures on the separate recorded epiphanies of Christ after his resurrection: a series of lectures rife with long and careful study. In the lecture on the revelation to St. Thomas, he says likewise, “We do grievous wrong to spiritual sensibility when we seek to hasten the momentous crises of faith” (98).

I was unable to find the reference, but in one of the many lengthy footnotes in his Introduction to the Study of the Gospels Westcott wonders whether the pursuit of the purely historical Jesus is not a kind of idolatry, becoming a slave again to the “foundational principles of the world.” This is just one more example of many which sets his work in diametrical opposition – both in starting point and final aim – to the Tübingen school of Bauer.