To Be Real is to Appear

Continuing my study into the intelligibility of the cosmos within Louis Dupre’s Passage to Modernity.  In his words:

If there is one belief Greek thinkers shared, it must be the conviction that both the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form.  Basically this means that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way.  By envisioning the real as such as harmonious appearance, the Greek view displays a uniquely aesthetic quality, expressed as much in architecture and sculpture as in philosophy.  That appearance, however, derives not from our subjective perception of the real; it is the form itself that shines forth. (18)

A couple thoughts as I work through all this.  Firstly, is the fact that the essence of the real is to appear a direct reflection of the fact that it is the nature of God to create?  The notion of logos which, according to the Greeks, was the “ideal quality of the kosmos that renders its rule intrinsically intelligible” (23).  Logos is the quality of the real that invokes it to reveal itself by virtue of its reality.  Thus, human art was as capable of apprehending the truth as philosophy was because the real was something fundamentally revealed in the cosmos.  However, for the Greeks, the real did not depend upon a transcendent deity for its existence as it does with Christian theology.  As Dupre notes:

In sum, for the Greeks, the principle of form contains the definitive justification of the real.  The decisive question was not why something existed, but how could it exist meaningfully, that is, in orderly form.  Real being begins with intelligible form, with a multiplicity rendered harmonious through unity.  In this respect the fundamental question of Greek metaphysics differed from the Christian one.  Having deprived the form of its intrinsic necessity, the Christian doctrine of creation evoked a further question: Why does form exist?  Even if the Greeks had raised that question, their gods would not have provided the answer.  The gods’ own being had to be justified by the form principle. (22)

In other words, for the Greeks, reality was self-justifying because it exists and the essence of the real (form) by nature was to appear.  By locating the logos within the kosmos, the Greeks absolved themselves from having to consider the “why” of what exists.  But Christian theology, of course, does not locate the logos within reality, but located reality in, from, by, for, through, and to the logos which is Christ.  And by locating the logos within the Godhead, it becomes characteristic of God’s nature to create the universe according to an intelligible and orderly form.  The existence of the real is justified by God’s creativity which is due to the divinity of the Logos.  But there is more to this.  Since the Greeks conceived of the logos as being the quality of the kosmos which yielded its intelligibility, the forms that were displayed therefrom were as ultimate a manifestation of the logos as possible.  However, as Logos is not merely a quality but rather a Person, the second member of the Trinity, while it is true that Creation is yielded from his divine nature, it is the nature of the Logos himself as a Person to make himself intelligible and the all-encompassing revelation of the real is not completed until the manifestation of the Person of the Logos.  The Incarnation, therefore, is the means by which “all things consist” by Jesus Christ as stated by St. Paul in Colossians and represents the Christian revolution in metaphysics.

Postscript

Part of my goal in these posts is to receive all manner of correction and fine-tuning.  So I ask my readers who are more versed in philosophy and theology to offer their thoughts and opinions for the betterment of my study.  Thanks!

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