Christian Platonism Research Articles

Mary Astell’s theory of spiritual friendship

ABSTRACTMary Astell’s theory of friendship has been interpreted either as a version of Aristotelian virtue friendship, or as aligned with a Christian and Platonist tradition. In this paper, I argue that Astell’s theory of friendship is determinedly anti-Aristotelian; it is a theory of spiritual friendship offered as an alternative to Aristotelian virtue friendship. By grounding her conception of friendship in a Christian–Platonist metaphysics, I show that Astell rejects the Aristotelian criteria of reciprocity and partiality as essential features of the friendship bond and that she develops a theory of friendship that is neither reciprocal nor partial. Further, I argue that Astell’s theory of friendship advances her feminist aims by providing a justification for female–female spiritual bonds in contradistinction to female–male marriage bonds. Astell argues that the female–female bond of spiritual friendship is sanctioned by God, and is, therefore, a divinely authorized alternative to the male–female bond of marriage. Through her theory of spiritual friendship, Astell marks out a central place for female–female bonds and provides women with a justification for resisting marriage.

The Creature Makes Itself: Aquinas, the De-idealization of the Eternal Ideas, and the Fate of the Individual

The Christian Platonic tradition affirmed that human flourishing involves conjunction with the realm of eternal divine ideas. The account developed by Thomas Aquinas in effect denied this, rendering ideas contingent, unknowable and impossible as direct objects of attainment. Although no longer ideals for human aspiration, a role within spiritual or ethical striving might still be envisioned for such de-idealized ideas. Through discussions of Meister Eckhart, Kierkegaard and Manfred Frank, the essay outlines such a role: one’s idea in God operates to ontologically ground personal existence, deploying the human agent as an irreducible individual entity engaged in a hermeneutical labor of self-creation.

Origen and the Platonic Tradition

This study situates Origen of Alexandria within the Platonic tradition, presenting Origenas a Christian philosopher who taught and studied philosophy, of which theology was part and parcel. More specifically, Origen can be described as a Christian Platonist. He criticized “false philosophies” as well as “heresies,” but not the philosophy of Plato. Against the background of recent scholarly debates, the thorny issue of the possible identity between Origen the Christian Platonist and Origen the Neoplatonist is partially addressed (although it requires a much more extensive discussion); it is also discussed in the light of Origen’s formation at Ammonius’s school and the reception of his works and ideas in “pagan” Platonism. As a consequence, and against scholarly perspectives that tend to see Christianity as anti-Platonism, the final section of this paper asks the question of what is imperial and late antique Platonism and, on the basis of rich evidence ,suggests that this was not only “pagan” institutional Platonism.

Patrides, Plotinus and the Cambridge Platonists

ABSTRACTDiscussion of the Cambridge Platonists, by Constantinos Patrides and others, is often vitiated by the mistaken contrasts drawn between those philosophers and late antique Platonists such as Plotinus. I draw attention especially to Patrides’s errors, and argue in particular that Plotinus and his immediate followers were as concerned about this world and our immediate duties to our neighbours as the Cambridge Platonists. Even the doctrine of deification is one shared by all Platonists, though it is also here that genuine differences between pre-Christian and Christian exegesis can be found. All, it can be said, hope and expect to join ‘the dance of immortal love’, but Christian Platonists had a deeper sense of God’s ‘humility’ in His Word’s material and temporal manifestation. Not Olympian Zeus but the Crucified Christ was their preferred image of divine involvement, and their better guide to heaven.

Synesius of Cyrene and the American “Synesii”

This article explores the Hellenic/Christian synthesis of bishop Synesius and its later influence, especially on nineteenth-century America. Synesius accepted a bishopric despite Neoplatonic reservations concerning Christian doctrine: the uncreated soul pre-exists; the uncreated cosmos is eternal; and the “resurrection” an ineffable mystery, beyond the vulgar. Whether or not born a Christian, his study under Hypatia brought about a conversion to “pagan” Neoplatonism. His attempted synthesis of Hellenism and Christianity was unique, unlike that of any other late antique Christian Platonist. Later, Renaissance thinkers scanned a new religious horizon reviving Hellenic Neoplatonism, Hermetic thought, Pythagoreanism, etc., included in a “primordial revelation,” contemporaneous with the Mosaic revelation and thereby in harmony with Christianity. In Romantic-era England, Thomas Taylor revived Hellenic Neoplatonism as the “true” religion, in the spirit of the anti-Christian theurgic Neoplatonist Roman emperor, Julian. Taylor had a significant influence on the American “Synesii,” Transcendentalists and Neoplatonists, e.g., on Bronson Alcott’s Platonic/Pythagorean lifestyle. Reading Taylor’s translations, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the “Trismegisti” whose Neoplatonic religion predated and superseded “parvenu” Christianity. Later Transcendentalists continued the work of Taylor, sympathizing with late antique “pagan” Neoplatonism, but, in the spirit of Synesius, synthesizing it with Christianity and with other religions. They sought a non-sectarian, universal “cosmic theism,” notably through Thomas M. Johnson’s journal, The Platonist, which included translations of Synesius and other Neoplatonists. One of its contributors, Alexander Wilder, also influenced Theosophy on its Neoplatonic side. More recent Anglophone “Synesii” include Hilary Armstrong, who was a major presence in Neoplatonic scholarship, both in the uk and North America. He argued for a return to Hellenic inclusive monotheism, in which a Christian Platonist, like himself, could also venerate Hindu or Isis’ holy images as being true reflections of the divine.

Christianity’s Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, Its Theoretical and Theological Appeal

The development of medieval Christian thought reveals from its inception in foundational authors like Augustine and Boethius an inherent engagement with Neoplatonism. To their influence that of Pseudo-Dionysius was soon added, as the first speculative medieval author, the Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena (810–877ce), used all three seminal authors in his magisterial demonstration of the workings of procession and return. Rather than a stable ongoing trajectory, however, the development of medieval Christian (Neo)Platonism saw moments of flourishing alternate with moments of philosophical stagnation. The revival of theTimaeusand Platonic cosmogony in the twelfth century marks the achievement of the so-called Chartrian authors, even as theTimaeusnever acquired the authority of the biblical book of Genesis. Despite the dominance of scholastic and Aristotelian discourse in the thirteenth century, (Neo)Platonism continued to play an enduring role. The Franciscan Bonaventure follows the Victorine tradition in combining Augustinian and Dionysian themes, but Platonic influence underlies the pattern of procession and return — reflective of the Christian arc of creation and salvation — that frames the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Echoing the interrelation of macro- and microcosmos, the major themes of medieval Christian Platonic thought are, on the one hand, cosmos and creation and, on the other, soul and self. The Dominican friar Meister Eckhart and the beguine Marguerite Porete, finally, both Platonically inspired late-medieval Christian authors keen on accomplishing the return, whether the aim is to bring out its deep, abyss-like “ground” (Eckhart) or to give up reason altogether and surrender to the free state of “living without a why” (Marguerite), reveal the intellectual audacity involved in upending traditional theological modes of discourse.

The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel

Contents: Introduction: the art, science, and technology of medieval travel, Robert Bork and Andrea Kann Part I Medieval Vehicles and Logistics: Carolingian military operations: an introduction to technological perspectives, Bernard S. Bachrach Everything is a compromise: Mediterranean ship design, 13th to 16th centuries, John E. Dotson From carriage to coach: what happened?, Julian Munby Caister castle, Norfolk, and the transport of brick and other building materials in the Middle Ages, David H. Kennett. Part II Medieval Travel and the Arts: Pilgrims and portals in late medieval Siena, Michelle Duran-McLure The strange lands of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Anne McClanan Spiritual pilgrimage in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg, Annette Lermack. Part III Medieval Maps and their Uses: Mapping the macrocosm: Christian Platonist thought behind medieval maps and plans, Nigel Hiscock Informal catechesis and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, Dan Terkla The Gough Map: Britain's oldest road map, or a statement of empire?, Nick Millea Petrarch's journey between 2 maps, Evelyn Edson. Part IV Medieval Navigational Instruments: Medieval tools of navigation: an overview, Richard A. Paselk Astrolabes and medieval travel, Sara Schechner. Index.

The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture in the Greek and Latin Middle Ages

Is the display of number and geometry in medieval religious architecture evidence of intended symbolism? This book offers a new perspective in the retrieval of meaning from architecture in the Greek East and the Latin West, and challenges the view that geometry was merely an outcome of practical procedures by masons. Instead, it attributes intellectual meaning to it as understood by Christian Platonist thought and provides compelling evidence that the symbolism was often intended. In so doing, the book serves as a companion volume to The Wise Master Builder by the same author, which found the same system implicit in plans of cathedrals and abbeys. The present book explains how the architectural symbolism proposed could have been understood at the time, as supported by medieval texts and its context, since it is context that can confer specific meaning. The introduction locates the study in its critical context and summarizes Christian Platonism as it determined the meaning of number and geometry. The investigation opens with the recurrent symbolism of the dome and the cube as heaven and earth in the Byzantine world and moves to the duality of the temple and the body in the East and West as reflections of Plato's universal macrocosm and human microcosm. The study then examines each of the figures of Platonic geometry in the architecture of the West against the background of their mathematics and metaphysics, before proceeding to their synthesis with the circle, as seen in circular and polygonal structures, the divisions of circles in Christian art, and their display in window tracery, culminating in the rose window. In view of the multivalency of the symbolism, the investigation establishes systematic occurrences of it, which strongly suggest patterns of thought underlying systems of design. The book concludes with a series of test cases, which show the after-life of the same symbolism as it overlapped with the Renaissance.

Christian Platonism and the Debate about Afterlife

In the sixth and seventh centuries the belief in an active afterlife and its corollaries, the cult of the saints and the care of the dead, came under attack by a group of people who claimed that the souls could not function without their bodies. Some defenders of the traditional point of view sought to rebut this argument through recourse to the Platonic concept of the self-moved soul, which is not in need of the body. However, the fit between Platonism and traditional notions of the afterlife was not as complete as might first be thought. This article focuses on two Christian thinkers, John of Scythopolis and Maximus the Confessor, who were deeply influenced by Platonic ideas. In his Scholia on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius John states clearly that after death the souls of ordinary human beings are inactive whereas the souls of the spiritual elite have entered the realm of eternal realities, which is entirely separate from this world. The case of Maximus is more complex. One of his letters is a spirited defence of the posthumous activity of the soul. However, in his spiritual writings he outlines a conceptual framework that shows a marked resemblance to the position of John of Scythopolis.

Simpliciores,Eruditi, and the Noetic Form of God: Pre-Nicene Christology Revisited

Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen have shown that anthropomorphism, one of the most popular and equally biblical tenets of ancient Christianity, was spread out not only among thesimpliciores(the simple) of the early ecclesia but also among itseruditi(its educated members), particularly suchdocti(learned) in Stoicism like Tertullian. Following previous researchers, Griffin and Paulsen have also argued that Christian Platonizing authors, starting with Origen in the East and Marius Victorinus in the West, developed a sturdy campaign of promoting the doctrine of an incorporeal God. At a time when the clergy itself was largely conceiving God as a corporeal entity, the Christian Platonists were heavily employing the rhetoric of erudition in order to uphold an anti-anthropomorphist agenda. Other scholars have noticed that Origen of Alexandria was the first (or among the first) to relate the anthropomorphist position to the uneducated members of the Christian community, thesimpliciores. Later on, Cassian, Socrates, Sozomen, and Palladius will communicate the events of the Origenist debate by means of the same distinction betweensimplicioresanderuditi. As Elizabeth A. Clark observes:According to several fifth-century Christian writers—Socrates, Sozomen, and Palladius, all of whom sided with the alleged Origenists—the simple desert Monks were outraged by Theophilus of Alexandria's Festal Letter of 399 that championed God's incorporeality, a position in accord with that of Alexandria's most important theologian, Origen.Griffin and Paulsen equally find several Augustinian pages in which the bishop of Hippo asserts that the “Church'seducated men(docti)” cannot embrace anthropomorphism, and he prefers to portray the less educated Christians as “whimpering babies,” “children,” or possessing a “childishness of mind.”

Ethos and Logos: A Second-Century Debate Between “Pagan” and Christian Philosophers

This essay analyses the most significant sources—some overlooked so far—on the debate on ethos and logos that was lively between “pagan” and Christian philosophers in the second century ce. Epictetus’s attribution of a behaviour based on ethos to the Christians should not be regarded as utterly negative, but should rather be connected with his teacher Musonius’s high appreciation of ethos, even over logos. Marcus Aurelius’s and Celsus’s negative attitude toward Christianity as an obstinate, irrational habit can be explained by the possible influence of Montanism, while the Syriac apology to Marcus ascribed to Melito reacts to anti-Christian accusations of irrationality by attaching logos to the Christians and a behaviour based on a bad ethos to “paganism”—the same as was done by Clement of Alexandria, one of the Christian intellectuals most committed to demonstrating the rationality of Christian belief. Literary problems related to the apology are tackled, and parallels are pointed out with both Justin and Bardaisan, two other Christian Platonists who attempted to construe Christianity as philosophy. Galen’s judgment about the Christians shows interesting parallels with, and differences from, that of Epictetus. For both intellectuals an engagement with Christian doctrines of creation is argued for (this is usually admitted in the case of Galen, but not in that of Epictetus). Another second-century anti-Christian accusation of the lack of logos is the charge of onolatry. Lucian’s attitude toward the Christians is showed to be less simplistic than generally believed: he allowed for the ascription of logos and a certain intellectual development to Christianity and its founder. But for Christians to claim that the Logos was on their side, they had to develop a theology of the Logos, which identified Jesus Christ with God’s Logos. This operation, anticipated by Philo and Hellenistic Judaism, started from the Prologue of John and was continued by Justin, most Valentinians, Clement, and especially Origen, and then by the Patristic philosophy which depended on Origen. Thanks to Origen, who was deeply respected by “pagan” philosophers too, Christianity could no longer be charged with being a religion for irrational people.

Divine properties, parts, and parity

Christian Platonism and Divine Simplicity remain the most commonly discussed views with respect to the way in which Christians ought to conceive of God’s nature and properties. In this essay, I suggest that we ought to consider seriously two versions of a quite different view, namely, what I call ‘the Nominalized Composite God View.’ Both versions of the Nominalized Composite God View share two features: (1) they treat God as metaphysically composite, in opposition to Divine Simplicity, and (2) they deny that God has God’s properties in virtue of instantiating abstractly existing universals, in opposition to Christian Platonism.

Daemonic Trickery, Platonic Mimicry: Traces of Christian Daemonological Discourse in Porphyry’s De Abstinentia

Porphyry of Tyre’s discussion of daemons and animal sacrifice in De Abstinentia strays from traditional Platonic formulations of daemonic involvement in the Graeco-Roman cult. As a result, scholars have struggled to identify the intellectual pedigree for Porphyry’s daemonology. By contrast, I propose that Porphyry draws upon Christian Platonic daemonologies, best represented in the writings of Origen of Alexandria. To substantiate this hypothesis, I first outline the dissonance between Porphyry’s daemonology and his Hellenic predecessors, before outlining the several daemonological tenets he shares with Christian writers. Second, I note the extensive conceptual commonalities between Origen and Porphyry’s respective daemonologies, Finally, I reexamine Porphyry’s attribution of his daemonology to “certain Platonists,” a claim which, when read in light of Porphyry’s Vita Plotini, places Origen squarely within the intellectual circles from which Porphyry was drawing his daemonological discourse.

The Stoic Doctrine of Oikeiosis and its Transformation in Christian Platonism

I investigate how, through which channels, and with what adaptations the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis was received and transformed by the two main Patristic philosophers, Origen of Alexandria and Gregory Nyssen. I also endeavour to assess how much Gregory’s oikeiosis theory owes to Origen - a great deal, I suspect. In sum, it is Origen who Christianised the doctrine, but Gregory seems to have identified apokatastasis as the Godhead’s oikeiosis or reappropriation of all beings, which belong to it. I contend that these Christian Platonists and other early Christian sources can help to clarify the Stoic oikeiosis doctrine itself, which poses substantial problems and which they received. They even present the technical vocabulary of oikeiosis, which in Hierocles’ non-technical circles passage is absent (and this has raised concerns). Therefore, it is useful to consider their texts when assessing the oikeiosis doctrine at least in Stoicism.

Методологія теологічного мислення у творах св. Максима Сповідника

The author proves the inadequacy of previous studies of Maximus the Confessor’s theological system. These studies paid little attention to the originality of transformation of Cappadocian Fathers’ teaching by this thinker. The paper demonstrates that Maximus turned out to be ahead of his time in his ontological reinterpretation of the previous patristic tradition. A revolutionary version of Christian Platonism created by Maximus the Confessor, requires new stu-dies, especially in comparison with the ancient philosophers.

Harmony between Arkhē and Telos in Patristic Platonism and the Imagery of Astronomical Harmony Applied to Apokatastasis

Abstract This study investigates the idea of harmony as a protological and eschatological principle in three outstanding Patristic philosophers, well steeped in the Platonic tradition: Origen, Gregory Nyssen, and Evagrius. All of them attached an extraordinary importance to harmony, homonoia, and unity in the arkhē and, even more, in the telos. This ideal is opposed to the disagreement/dispersion of rational creatures’ acts of volition after their fall and before the eventual apokatastasis. These Christian Platonists are among the strongest supporters of the final universal restoration. Their reflection on the unity-multiplicity dialectic, which parallels that between harmony and disorder/discord/dissonance, is informed by the Platonic tradition. In Gregory, the idea of harmony assumes musical connotations, especially in relation to the telos. In this connection, I examine the relationship between their notion of harmony in the arkhē and telos and Plotinus’ concept of harmony. Plotinus was well known to Gregory, the author of a Christianized version of Plato’s Phaedo in which apokatastasis is prominent. Origen, whose readings included many Middle-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean texts, in Alexandria attended the classes of the “proto-Neoplatonist” Ammonius, who was also Plotinus’ teacher. A wide-ranging methodical investigation of the relation between Origen’s and Plotinus’ philosophical thoughts is still a notable desideratum. Finally, I concentrate on the concept of harmony in astronomy as a metaphor for intellectual harmony and apokatastasis in Patristic Platonism, especially in Evagrius’ Kephalaia Gnōstika. The noun apokatastasis was used in an astronomical sense, and employed in Stoicism for the conclusion of a cosmic cycle. Evagrius, who loved astronomical metaphors, focussed a kephalaion on a wordplay—which escaped Guillaumont and all other scholars—concerning the astronomical meaning of apokatastasis, thus embedding his theory of the eventual restoration in an allegorical framework that rests on a notion of astronomical harmony. A strong case is made in this connection that Evagrius was elaborating on Plato’s pivotal link between cosmological (astronomical) and intellectual harmony, and was aware that the Stoic theory of cosmological apokatastasis drew on Plato.

Murrin, Lewis, Greenblatt, and the Aristotelian Self-Swerve

Know that I am Massinassa, king of the Maesuli, and since I believe that this land will fall to my lot, I should be loth to sack and burn it. So, as God is my witness, any harm which befalls you now will be through no fault but your own.--Gian Giorgio Trissino, Sophonisba (1) Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch--and it was just not there anymore--it had burned to the nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange..... You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part oil nous ne serons jamais separes; Ohio?--Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (2) The success and influence of Stephen Greenblatt's work-from Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which inaugurated the New Historicism, to his ode to the Epicurean Lucretius in the recent best-seller The Swerve-may be attributed to any number of things: the intelligence and writing talent of the author; a Yale education that gave the author a solid grounding in Renaissance texts; the application of insights from other fields, particularly anthropology, psychology, and sociology; a Marxist perspective sharpened by studying with Raymond Williams; the helpless experience of living through the Viet Nam era as a graduate student; chatty sessions at Berkeley with Foucault and De Certeau; and possibly an inordinate hatred of Harold Bloom's understanding of literature as a phenomenon isolated not only from cultural issues, but the self. For if Bloom's agon turns literature into some sort of analgesic that makes the pain of the world and the self disappear for some precious moments, Greenblatt's ego works as a sort of Salvation Army outreach program that regards literature as an education in the ills of society without quite admitting its own regimentation. One may wonder just whose libido was more repressed in 1980, that of the fictional Guyon, whose violent destruction of the Bower of Bliss (Greenblatt argues) reflected the colonial violence and dangerous desires of the English in Ireland, or the author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, whose enormous range of interests included a stint, while he was at Cambridge, with the English, all-male boarding school cut-ups who became Monty Python's Flying Circus. In this paper I will argue that however brilliant Greenblatt's work-and I think I am second to none in the fan club-he overlooks or simply has no sympathy for Platonism. I don't think he could have written Hamlet in Purgatory otherwise, but for the most part I will confine myself first to his chapter Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning and then more briefly to The Swerve. I will first argue that Christian Platonism created the allegorical mode in which Spenser wrote, allowing a different perspective of the self than the one Greenblatt describes. I will then suggest that those Christian thinkers who rejected Lucretius and Epicureanism did so for philosophical reasons deeply grounded in Plato's thought. There are, as Whitehead said, two sets of footnotes in the history of philosophy, but both are productive and unable to cancel the other. In what I will openly admit is a paean to my great teacher at the University of Chicago who is retiring this year, I would like to argue that of three books published in 1980--Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashion, Fredrick Jameson's Political Unconscious, and Michael Murrin's The Allegorical Epic--that it is the third, far less well-known book--and its theoretical prelude, The Veil of Allegory--that can best help us understand what Guyon was doing when he burned the banquet houses of the Bower of Bliss. For Greenblatt seems not to recognize the extent to which Spenser is separated from Guyon, because he does not take into account the dichotomy between events as they transpire on the ground, as today's political writers like to say, and events that are mere, imperfect, fleeting glimpses of an unknowable ideal. …

Philosophy and Sexual Politics in Mary Astell and Samuel Richardson

The intellectual relationship between Mary Astell, the High Tory Christian Platonist philosopher, and Samuel Richardson, the middle-class epistolary novelist, provides a striking example of the int...

‘Looking Down on Creation’: Reconceptualising Incarnation with Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray

Merleau-Ponty's focus on embodiment enacts a Nietzschean critique of the Christian Platonism in Descartes' mind/body split, and subtly challenges the transcendence/immanence, divine/human distinction. Given Irigaray's deconstruction of the transcendence/immanence distinction in her creation of the sensible transcendental, recent feminist adoptions and adaptations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach to bodily being-in-the-world, despite their lack of discussion of the theological, may have contributions to make to a feminist theology. Indeed, the attentiveness to lived experience in contemporary feminist phenomenology can offer a counter discourse to the continuing privilege accorded the abstract, the transcendent, and the rational in contemporary philosophy and theology.

Newman and Christian Platonism in Britain

With the beatification of John Henry Newman by the Roman Catholic Church (in September 2010), it may be timely to recall a strand of Newman’s Anglican inheritance that is sometimes overlooked. Within philosophical theology, the habit of reading Newman pretty exclusively against the background of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume has notably eclipsed the possibility that there are other apt historical figures for shedding light on his thought. Consider the following example (from the mid-1830s) in Newman’s sermon “The Invisible World”: “Green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we would not take up the part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God himself; but they are not His fulness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His Image.” Against a post-Lockean landscape, such language can easily sound merely romantic, an escape from a religious discourse becalmed in a little pool of “evidences” and arguments over logical warrants. The alternative I explore here (pursuing a fertile observation made by Louis Dupre) uncovers the insights gained from reading Newman in conversation with some crucial opponents of Hobbesian and Lockean thought—and how this line of reading Newman helps explain in newly clarifying ways the importance of his contributions. In particular, this essay considers the implications of Newman’s Christian Platonism for his understanding of the natural world and his corresponding anxieties