Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy

Dylan M. Burns, Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 9789004432970.

Trevor Jordan Davis, Kilgore College, tdavis@kilgore.edu.

Providence is a concept that remains central to a variety of faiths across the world and as a topic of scholarly inquiry by historians of religion and the history of ideas. The notion that there is a god, or gods, who care for and at times intervene in the world for the good of human beings is an ancient concept, but one that has been typically treated by scholars of religion within the narrow confines of their particular disciplines and rarely in reference to the history of philosophy. In Did God Care?, Dylan M. Burns traces the historical development of the concept of providence (pronoia) in antiquity by examining providence within a broad spectrum of ancient Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian sources. Such an expansive approach to ancient sources enables Burns to provide an important contribution to the study of providence in academic literature. By disposing of many of the artificial barriers imposed by (modern) scholarship, Burns enables these texts to be subject to comparative analysis with a critical eye towards the interplay between “philosophical” and “theological” contributions to the intellectual discourse surrounding divine providence in antiquity. Burns quite rightly notes that “it is widely recognized that the boundary between theology and philosophy is utterly porous in Roman antiquity” (p. 9), an insight that underlies his treatment of both the classical philosophical texts of ancient Greece and Rome alongside religious works by Jewish and Christian authors.

To accomplish this (by no means easy) feat, Burns divides his material into three interdependent sections: providence, dualism, and will. While each section is defined by a distinct sub-topic, the arrangement within each section is generally chronological. This decision is laudable because it enables Burns to chart the complex interplay of ideas across time without leaving the reader befuddled by confusing chronological jumps. This division also allows for an organic division in terms of primary sources, with the first section (Providence) dominated by Platonic and Stoic conceptions of providence and the second and third parts (Dualism, Will) offering equal treatment to pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic sources. This overarching structure provides a strong foundation for Burns’s inquiry and elevates the presentation of his argument as each chapter unfolds.

The first section (consisting of the first two chapters of the book) is principally devoted to tracing the problem of providence in antiquity: how, when, and why a notion of providence developed within the context of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. The notion of providence may be ancient but it was hardly intuitive as a component of ancient Greek religious belief. Burns notes that, in the eighth century BCE, the Iliad would (somewhat infamously) depict the Olympian deities obsessing over the Trojan War while at the same time showing little concern for how their actions caused pain and suffering among the human characters. As Burns notes, ancient Greek epic did not develop a “systematic” treatment of providence (p. 19) while the earliest Greek philosophers (the Presocratics) left no room for caring and active gods in their atomistic vision of the universe. Burns traces the earliest form of providence in classical philosophy in the works of Plato in the fourth century BCE, who, in postulating a critical view of the Olympian pantheon, effectively supplanted them by speculating on the existence of a creative demiurge (God) and intermediary daimones who assisted in the administration of the cosmos. Burns persuasively argues that the Platonic view would provide the essential foundation for subsequent philosophical discourse on providence in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Plato’s formulation of providence in the Timaeus as a reflection of the demiurge’s ultimate concern with the good of the universe, rather than the individual: “Plato was the first of the Greeks to frame the question of God’s relationship to the world in terms of wholes and parts—the ‘big picture’ versus the small dramas, however tragic they may be” (pp. 24–25).

This Platonic account of providence, Burns notes, raised natural points of contention: if God and the daimones are fundamentally good, how could the existence of evil be explained? Just as pressingly, is providence the direct result of God or merely the activity of lesser gods or daimones acting in God’s stead? To what extent is God involved, if at all, in the lives of human beings? In answering these questions, Burns’s treatment of Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean solutions to these problems are illuminating, not least because of how thoroughly he engages with the relevant texts and scholarship. Burns demonstrates his mastery of both the primary sources and scholarly literature in addressing the perspectives of each of these philosophical schools. A strong example of this comes in Chapter 2, “Which God Cares for You and Me?,” in which Burns dispenses with the common stereotype that Platonic and Stoic philosophers believed in a “more remote and abstract God” versus the more “personal” God of Judaism and Christianity (p. 55). A closer reading of these sources, Burns convincingly argues, shows that both the Stoics and Platonists considered God no less personally than Jewish or Christian philosophers did. Stoics held that the workings of a pantheistic deity were revealed through nature (thus necessitating the acceptance of fate) and Platonists saw the works of personalized daimones acting on God’s behalf, and thus acting as intermediaries between the human and the divine.

By including the contributions of Abrahamic monotheism in antiquity to this discourse on divine providence, Burns highlights perhaps the single most significant contribution of Jewish and Christian philosophers, which lies not in the “personalization” of divine forces but rather who they attributed credit for providence. For Jewish writers like Philo and Josephus, or the anonymous author of Sirach, providence was explicitly identified with the God of Abraham, who intervened on behalf of virtuous individuals and for his people; for Christians, such as Justin the Philosopher/Justin Martyr, it was no less than “the Father of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah,” who administered the cosmos. For both Jews and Christians, the secondary daimones of Platonism were demoted from divine administrators to either angelic messengers on God’s behalf or demonic entities guilty of ensnaring mankind in idolatry (pp. 97–100, explored in greater detail in Chapter 3). A further significant development that Burns ably traces is the degree to which Jewish and Christian understandings of providence introduced a dualistic model for understanding the cause of good and evil, with God as the source of good and evil (as seen in Christian authors such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria) necessarily stemming from both a material cause (human evil, or sinfulness) but also the metaphysical or spiritual evil of demonic forces that stood in opposition to God. Burns furthermore offers a fascinating treatment of Gnostic responses to these same dilemmas, which typically borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus and Jewish and Christian sources to present a radically dualistic universe in which the good God is locked in conflict with the evil demiurge and lesser archons (effectively evil daimones), essentially rejecting matter and its first causes as utterly degenerate in contrast to the realm of pure spirit that pre-existed the cosmos.

In grappling with these ideas, Burns offers fascinating insights into how Christian writers in late antiquity had to navigate a complex web of philosophical concepts (inherited from Middle Platonism and Stoicism) that, combined with Jewish and Christian sources, drove further philosophical speculation: if God had foreknowledge of future events, to what extent could prayer feasibly “move” God to intervene in particular cases if the outcome was already known to God? Were human beings predominantly responsible for evil (echoing Stoic answers to the problem of evil) or were demonic entities responsible for introducing evil into the world? And—perhaps of greatest philosophical import—to what extent did human beings possess free will relative to an omniscient and omnipotent God? In investigating answers to these questions, Burns takes pains to demonstrate that Jewish and Christian writers made no less valuable contributions to philosophy as their pagan counterparts and were no less sophisticated or rational in their efforts to formulate compelling answers to these philosophical problems. Indeed, perhaps one of the most illuminating aspects of Burns’s scholarship is how deftly he weaves together philosophical disputes between pagan, Gnostic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers in late antiquity. Far from validating the old canard that Christian writers simply stole classical philosophy, Burns demonstrates that there was constant engagement across religious and philosophical lines in the ancient world, with Jewish and Christian writers making their own original contributions to philosophy. Indeed, just as Christians could draw from pagan thought, pagan philosophers could be driven to adopt elements of Christian philosophy, particularly in regards to the conception of the divine attributes of God: “At the beginning of the third century, it was distinctively characteristic of Jewish and Christian philosophers, as well as the Stoa, to ascribe omniscience and foreknowledge to God; by the end of the century, Platonists had come to do the same” (p. 307). Such changes become especially visible in the Neoplatonic writings of Plotinus in the late third century, as Plotinus both rebutted and adapted elements of Christian thought, often with the consequence of rejecting classical Middle Platonist views (such as the importance of the daimones in favor of a directly omniscient, omnipotent, and active deity) in his own thought.

Did God Care? is a legitimate landmark in the history of ideas and Burns deserves ample praise for his deft handling of a wide variety of complex primary sources and historiographical strands. His usage of a comparative methodological approach to ancient sources helps illuminate the metatextual relationships between different philosophical schools of thought. This is especially welcome in his treatment of Jewish and early Christian philosophy and their relation to both pagan and Gnostic writers in antiquity. This monograph should be considered essential reading for both scholars of ancient philosophy (whether from the classical period or late antiquity) and religious historians operating within the same period. Burns’s work is a compelling example of how a work of interdisciplinary scholarship can open new and exciting avenues for historians seeking to make inroads in fields that may often seem exhausted or parochial.

Table of Contents

Introduction (1–16)
Part 1: Providence
1. The Pronoia Problem(s) (17–53)
2. Which God Cares for You and Me? (54–102)
Part 2: Dualism
3. The Other Gods (103–52)
4. Did God Care for Creation? (153–90)
Part 3: Will
5. Did God Know All Along? (191–222)
6. What We Choose Now (223–69)
7. How God Cares (270–310)
Conclusions (311–20)

Discussion

1. First, thank you for your time and your willingness to discuss your work. I was struck in reading the introduction to Did God Care? by your observation that modern scholarship tends to “cloister Greek ‘philosophical’ sources and Christian ‘theological’ or ‘religious’ ones away from one another” (p. 5). What are your thoughts on how and why this division emerged in modern scholarship? How can scholars work to better bridge this gap going forward in studies of ancient philosophy and religion?

Thanks for your interest in the book! The roots of the divide between the study of ancient Christian and “pagan” philosophical sources are very old and arguably go back to antiquity itself. Already in the third century CE we see an emerging cleft among Hellenic (“pagan”) and Christian philosophers. Pierre Hadot argues that it became formalized in the Middle Ages. In scholastic curricula we see Greek logic, physics, and metaphysics taught as “philosophy” while other aspects of the Greek philosophical tradition (religious matters, spiritual exercises) are set aside in favor of “theology.” Our modern philosophy and theology/religion departments largely replicate this divide. A way to overcome it is to engage in interdisciplinary work, which is genuinely risky. Reading outside the specific discipline in which you have trained to work as a professional scholar can be daunting. Networking outside of that discipline—e.g., splitting your time among conferences in multiple fields rather than hyperspecializing—is often not rewarded. But genuine interdisciplinary research can achieve terrific, groundbreaking results.

2. In Chapter 7, you note that it is possible that by the third and fourth centuries CE, Stoic and Platonist philosophers had been forced to re-evaluate their views on providence as a result of their encounters with Christian texts; in short, Christian writers “moved the goalposts” for all philosophers dealing with the question of providence in late antiquity (p. 309). Would you be willing to elaborate on how and why Platonist and Stoic philosophers in late antiquity may have felt it necessary to reconsider their understanding of providence as a result of engagement with Christian and Gnostic texts?

Historians of ancient philosophy generally agree that in late antiquity, we see greater emphasis on providence, and especially divine omniscience, in ways that sometimes resemble earlier Christian views on these subjects. This is something worth trying to explain. “Influence” may be too strong a word, but we know that early Christians were doing philosophy and that they were often in conversation with Hellenic philosophers. Maybe the terms of those conversations shifted over time, in the direction of biblically inclined thinkers.

3. I was deeply impressed by the diversity of primary sources that you consulted in crafting this book, particularly the inclusion of obscure Gnostic texts alongside Jewish and Christian works. Do you see other topics in the history of philosophy (i.e., aside from providence) in antiquity that would likewise benefit from integrating these more obscure sources into a wider conversation with more “conventional” or “philosophical” texts from the Roman world?

Yes: logic, physics, and metaphysics! One of the things I learned from doing this book is that there are so many other topics in ancient philosophy that one could explore in similar fashion. Ancient physics alone offers a lot of opportunities: Christian, Gnostic, and Manichaean sources have a lot of interesting views on matter, mixture, and the elements that are worth explicating in light of all of the terrific work that historians of philosophy have conducted on these topics in recent decades. One could go on. So we live in exciting times.