As could happen only once in the history of Western thought, a teacher and his student set the course for a whole discipline until the present day. In nearly 2,500 years the answers have changed remarkably, but even more remarkable is the fact that the questions have not changed at all. Plato was the first thinker we know of who attempted to synthesize the thought of his predecessors, and his grand synthesis is still an object of discussion today.

Plato took the competing systems that came before him and produced a new answer. Whereas those who followed Heraclitus saw the only true reality as the constancy of change, the disciples of Parmenides held that change was an illusion, that only the permanent has substance. How could these two views be brought together?

Plato's answer is the first, and among the greatest, attempts at a grand synthesis, a bringing together of all of human thought and expression into one more or less coherent world view. In this world, Plato said, Heraclitus was indeed right. Change was real and characterized everything in this life. But, Plato cautioned, there is another world, more real than this one. And in the world of ideas, or forms, there is no change. All ideas are permanent, so Parmenides too is correct.

This becomes what is referred to as a dualistic system: there are two realities, not just one monistic whole. Both the present world of change, of coming into being and ceasing to be, and the eternal world of unchanging ideas, of pure concepts, of essence without material embodiment, are real. There is a world of matter and a world of spirit. Whether this dualism is real or not is one of the great arguments in intellectual history. Christianity is dualistic. Eastern philosophies tend to be monistic.

Along with this dualism came an emphasis on the eternal as the important. Dean Inge states that it is through Plato "that the conception of an unseen eternal world, of which the visible world is but a pale copy, gains a permanent foothold in the West. . . . The call, once heard, has never long been forgotten in Europe."{5}

In Plato's conception of reality, there are forms beyond this world: "that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have to term the idea of the good."6

If Plato brings to the Western world the idea of a world beyond this world, and good as its highest ideal, then Aristotle returns us to the consideration of things firmly planted in this world. A student of Plato's for nearly twenty years, Aristotle none-the-less initiated the other great school of classical philosophy that is still much in evidence today. Bertrand Russell's critical assessment was, "Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine; in logic this is still true today."{7}

In place of Plato's emphasis on forms, Aristotle focused on the causes of material objects. Aristotle distinguished four causes: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. These explain what something is made of, what it is patterned after, who made it, and for what purpose.

It is to Aristotle that we owe the subject divisions that we still use today even in conversation. Aristotle either invented or described

the subjects of logic, metaphysics, politics, ethics, rhetoric, psychology, physics, biology, meteorology. He gave us our distinctions between theoretical and practical, intellectual and moral, potential and actual; our classification of forms of government into constitutional and tyrannical, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy; the central terms of logic such as syllogism, universals, substance. Aristotle is the source also of the moral vocabulary of Europe, so incomparably rich in refined distinctions-between motive and intention, behavior and character, between the generous and the magnanimous man, the courageous and the reckless man, the wit and the buffoon, the friend and the lover.{8}

But while he provided categories for the forms of the unseen world of Plato, he was not at all interested in a world above this one, but sought instead to ground his system in "this fixity within human life, not beyond." His interest in language and logic came from his passion to comprehend the diversity of this life, rather than look, as Plato had, for a unity beyond this life. That is why, in Raphael's picture, the hand of Plato points up and Aristotle, in quiet dissent, points out into the world.

How do these two great thinkers find their way into the church? Through two of the greatest theologians in Christian history, Augustine and Aquinas.

For the first few hundred years the church was consolidating the faith, through the completion of the New Testament, the first church councils, and the growth of the church among the Gentiles. Church art quite quickly picked up characteristics of the Syrian culture around it, and many contemporary cultural expressions came into the church from the experiences of those who built the first small churches. But as Christianity became the religion of the Empire under Constantine, a revolution was on the way.

1. St. Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey

   No large church buildings were built until after the Edict of Milan, in 312. St. Sophia is one of the first great churches built in the East. Built from A.D. 532 to 537 it is vast on any scale. We think of Gothic cathedrals as immense, but they are dwarfed by St. Sophia. The highest Gothic cathedral was Beauvais, but, at 157 feet, it collapsed. St. Sophia rises 183 feet to the top of its dome. It is higher than the Roman Pantheon in Rome. Gothic naves were never broader than about 50 feet. St. Sophia is 100 feet. The main area of the building is 220' by 107' through the full length. It is a building to inspire awe and reverence in anyone who enters. Whoever you are, you know you have walked into a building designed to magnify Someone greater than yourself. You look up and up, and if you are disposed to worship at all, this building will humble you before the mighty God.

   It was a Christian church for its first 916 years. Then, after the Turkish conquest of 1453, it became a Moslem mosque. The four slim minarets were added to it and the Christian mosaics were plastered over at that time.

   The idea of the building seems to be to shrink the individual into insignificance and to draw his or her thoughts upward to where reality is. The building seems to cry out: Don't be caught up in this petty world, but look up to the heavens and God. The early Christian basilicas were the successors to the secular architecture of Rome, rather than to the ancient temples (where the worshipers did not enter and so the buildings could be small). Greeks beautified the exteriors, Romans the interiors (e.g., the Baths of Caracalla). Byzantine basilicas were designed along the lines of the Greek cross.

2. Christ (Mosaic in St. Sophia, 12th century) While this is late Byzantine art, little had changed in more than 500 years. Christ, blessing the faithful, is portrayed as a symbolic figure. There was no model for this figure, He is the universal image of the Christ. Byzantine art had gold backgrounds to signify heaven, to set the figures off from the everyday world. And the figures themselves are types, not people drawn from life. By looking at the clothing or the pose, one knew who was pictured, even if the figures were not labeled. Byzantine art focused on the universal types, not portraying the characteristics of a particular person. The mosaics were the essence, not a mere earthly image of the saints. This is surely a result of the Neo-Platonic influences that had replaced the old Roman style which was quite realistic and literalistic.

3. St. Etienne Cathedral

   St. Etienne of Bourges was started in 1195, finished about 1266, and consecrated in 1324. Aldous Huxley called it "the grandest, the most strangely and fabulously beautiful building in Europe."{12} "Seen from its gardens, all burly in its muscular shoulders of sustaining flying buttresses, impresses mainly by its posture of strength. There is nothing of the delicacy and grace that mark the outer ribbings of other Gothic cathedrals."{13} Calvin would later study at a university built here.

   While in the interior, the eye is carried upward by the very structure, and the grandeur leads one to meditation on the glories of heaven rather than earth. The cathedral was the earliest movie theater, with the darkness serving to focus one's attention on the stained glass windows, which retold the stories of the Bible, and of the faithful who were now in heaven with Christ. "By the lightness of its mass, the pyramidal composition of values, the skillful gradation of its upward lines, the cathedral of Bourges is perhaps, of all cathedrals, the one which conveys the most moving impression of Gothic art."{14}

4. The Annunciation (illumination from the Swabian Gospel manuscript, c. 1150) The symbolic has taken over reality: there are only stylized representations, not real people. Byzantine art came to be seen as something to be read, as one would read a theological text. Each symbol has its assigned meaning, but that meaning no longer has any contact with what it once pictured in the natural world. People do not have emotions; they are not grounded in real space. Art remained in essentially this mode from A.D. 300 to 1200, a monument to an essentially static view of life and the universe.