Henry Chadwick's inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Oxford sketched out, economically and elegantly, some aspects of the problem confronting every historian of early Christian thought, the problem of how to discern and define the self-perception of the first Christian communities: how, with reference to what, did they define themselves? Chadwick portrays a tension between two models of authoritative self-identification, the ‘circle’ and the ‘ellipse’ – the unified institution with a definable centre providing a norm or touchstone for right belief, and the network of communities linked by their common origins in Jerusalem and the events transacted there at the navel of the earth. In some sense, the narrative of Paul's career as set out in the Acts of the Apostles dramatizes this tension: the movement is necessarily and inevitably away from Jerusalem, itself originally the centre of a ‘circle’, the church of the circumcision (pp. 4–5), towards the administrative heart of the Roman civilized world (pp. 12–16); but Rome cannot replace Jerusalem or assert a unilateral sovereignty over the churches that stem from the events in Jerusalem. In spite of all temptations (and efforts), Rome never comes to be taken for granted as the sole standard of the church's self-definition; the circle model never quite triumphs (p. 12). In one way or another, the idea of the church as a family united in virtue of its ancestry rather than of its present organizational structure persists.

The great majority of theological students in the English-speaking world can only read English. If such a one were to determine to investigate the critical development concerning Christian doctrine which took place in the fourth century of the Christian era, he would find himself very badly served. Recent books covering the whole story of the last stages of the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity are scarce, but they exist, and they are not in English. Much the best is Manlio Simonetti's La Crisi Ariana nel Quarto Secolo. There is also E. Boularand's L'Hérésie d'Arius et la foi de Nicée, which has some good points but generally is not satisfactory, if only because when Arius propounded his views they were not then formally heretical. In English the last full-scale book written on the whole Arian controversy was that of H. M. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, published in 1882. Twenty-seven years later he published the short Arian Controversy but in a note prefixed to it he says that this work is ‘largely, though not entirely, an abridgement’ of the earlier book. That book was a fine one in its day, but it is now almost completely out of date. The only other works that could be said to be comprehensive in approaching the subject are G. L. Prestige's God in Patristic Thought and J. N. D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines.

Over twenty years ago, when ‘soundings’ were beginning to be taken and doubts raised about the future of theology, Root diagnosed as the most serious problem facing the Christian faith the existence of a secularized imagination for which theology is no longer alive. The problem of the imagination as part of a crisis in the cognitive aspect of theology continues to preoccupy theologians almost two generations later. It is also commonly asserted that we are entering an historical age in which the visual will be paramount as the means of exposition of the truth and the verbal, with its great faith in logic, will no longer be accorded the premium which it has had for so long, particularly in European thinking. But in the early church it was possible to think theologically without cutting oneself off from other ranges of thought and imagination which in our day no longer have contact with theology; and in a volume of essays dedicated to Professor Chadwick it is a matter of happiness to begin with the recognition that there is indeed a way out of the modern impasse because it already exists in the tradition.

In 842 when the church proclaimed the Triumph of Orthodoxy it was talking about art as the visual interpretation of dogma. The ancient church considered that nourishment was to be found for theology and doctrine in the world depicted by artists, which sometimes rejects the conventional ways of theology and religion as they exist in the literary expression.

For some two hundred years following its mid-eighteenth-century discovery by Mingarelli in a manuscript lacking title page and the opening chapters, the De Trinitate was regarded as the chief surviving work of Didymus the Blind (313–98), the last really distinguished leader of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Mingarelli based his ascription in part on the numerous and striking verbal parallels between this work and Didymus' De Spiritu Sancto, which survives only in Jerome's Latin translation. The last generation, however, has seen a remarkable shift in scholarly opinion on the matter: the discovery of the Toura papyri in 1941 and the ascription to Didymus of a series of extensive biblical commentaries contained in them has led in turn to comparisons of these works with the De Trinitate which seemed to support the conclusion that Didymus could not also have been the author of the latter. If correct, this conclusion not only requires a radical revision of the entire picture of Didymus and his theological teaching developed before the discovery of the Toura papyri; it also leaves the De Trinitate – a major work by any standards – floating in the void of anonymity. In recent years, study of Didymus has concentrated on the Toura commentaries; the De Trinitate has received relatively scant attention, though it is arguably more theologically substantial and significant than the commentaries, whether or not Didymus is the author.

Categories: preliminary rationale

It was suggested in §0 that the metaphysical theory of the Categories could be seen as a miniature or cut-down study model relative to the theory of the Metaphysics; but although the Categories is indeed limited in apparatus, that is not to say that there is anything modest about its scope, which is nothing less than to offer a logical/semantical analysis or ‘philosophical grammar’ for the entirety of predicative being – that is, for every state of affairs in the world that ordinary language (the immediate object language of the theory is of course Greek of the mid fourth century, but we may for our purposes pass rather freely between that medium and our own) casts into the form

X is γ

for any subject X, and any predicate γ. The purported analysis regards this immense field of situations as falling into eight distinguishable types, exemplified by the following instances (the selection here is arbitrary, but the arrangement deliberate), so that it claims to analyze the being of

1. (1) Socrates' being man′ or animal, and of

2. (2) Socrates' being brave or grammatical, or Coriscus' being ghastly pale or precisely 52.39 kilograms in weight, and of

3. (3) Socrates' being virtuous or knowledgeable, or Coriscus' being some-how-colored or a bantamweight, and of

4. (4) (a) man's being (a) mammal, (an) animal, and of

5. (5) (a) man's, (an) animal's, being brave, grammatical, ghastly pale, precisely 52.39 kilograms in weight, and of

6. (6) (a) man's, (an) animal's, being virtuous, knowledgeable, somehow-colored, a bantamweight, and of

7. (7) bravery's being (a) virtue, grammar's being (a) knowledge, ghastly pallor's being (a) color, and of

8. […]

My aim in what follows is to explain and to motivate a theory of essence, existence and individuation that I think is to be found in the later and more advanced of the extant writings of Aristotle. The view to be explored has several features that are noteworthy from a scientific as well as a philosophical standpoint: it centers especially, though not exclusively, on a concept of what an individual material object is – a concept that has both intrinsic interest and (if some suggestions I shall advance as to its provenance and motivation are accepted) a historical significance that has not always been accurately appreciated.

The subject has of course had a great many discussants over the millennia, and so inevitably there is overlap at most points here with what others have had to say. Yet anyone familiar with the richness, elusiveness and originality of Aristotle's thought in this area will readily agree that present understanding of it remains imperfect and that new points and perspectives regarding it are still to be gained; the topic is limitless. Such novelties of content as I shall recommend will emerge in their due order. But there are also some unconventional and very likely exceptionable aspects to my method in this study which should be identified at once.

One is a variation on the usual approach to a historical philosopher – that of working from his text to his meaning. For my interpretive practice here is in places frankly reconstructive in character, synthetic rather than analytic; where it seems needed, or even merely helpful, I do not stick at approaching the text by convergence, rather than by trying to extract doctrine from it in the conventional way.

This book began when I resolved to take a sabbatical leave in 1971–2. My proposed research consisted of three limited projects, as I thought: one on Aristotle's biology and metaphysics, one on Leibniz's monadology, and one on Frege's philosophy of language. Because I had written previously on the second and third of these topics, I decided (with a logic that seemed persuasive at the time but now escapes me) to work first on the Aristotle.

That was in the summer of 1971. I am writing these final words in the summer of 1986. Leibniz and Frege are still in my file drawer.

There have to be many reasons why a project should prove so intractable, besides the incapacities of its author, and there is little ground to expect the author to be aware of all of them. The main reason that I myself know about is the size and complexity of the subject, which I adequately realized only gradually. I have felt like a builder who contracted to construct a modest country church from a plan supplied by the vestry, but who finds that as each phase of the construction is supposedly completed, the plan has mysteriously become that of a larger and more elaborate building, and eventually that of a huge and pretentious cathedral – one which he would never have agreed to build at the start, but which he must now try to finish in view of the efforts already invested. (That is a personal and subjective simile; a different constructional image better suited to the subject-matter is pursued in §0.)

Methodological reorientation

We have noted (§4) that in the Categories, the substantial individuals are (as it was put) “methodologically opaque”, so prodigiously “atomic” as to display no internal structure. And we saw (also in §4) that the treatment of both the synchronic and the diachronic unity or “oneness” of substantial individuals is unusually terse and obscure: synchronically, the explanation of the “this”-hood of substance quickly gets into deep trouble (pp. 30–33). And diachronically, the requirement that a substantial individual have a permanent essential nature which it cannot “migrate” out of while remaining the same and numerically one, is at most insinuated there by some not very luminous outgivings about “definition”, rather than made unmistakably explicit (pp. 34–38). Subsequent to that, some few main features of substantial individuals according to the Metaphysics concept have been sketched out, in a rather schematic way; but we have not yet tried to see very deeply into their internal structure, to conceptualize with any vividness what “substantial being” comes to. To get further, we must try to do this.

However, the best way to do this is not, I believe, to try to wring an intuitive understanding directly out of Aristotle's own positive outgivings on the topic, particularly those coming down to us as the peri tēs ousias, “On Substance”, i.e., Metaphysics ZHΘI. That is an abstruse and imperspicuous work, as is well-known in itself and well-attested-to by the notably uneven successes of the interpretive tradition, and this tends to discourage such a frontal approach; but besides, for an intuitive understanding there is a better way in, one that can for now circumvent some of the perplexities of the metaphysical writings, and that may later enable us, as it were, to come up beneath them under our own power.

Three lessons from the biology

Now we are in a position to bring this inquiry home to the metaphysics: extracting the relevant points of intuition and theory developed in connection with biological objects as Aristotelean substances, in order to illuminate what he calls (Meta. Zeta 1) the central and most vexatious metaphysical question: What is substance? Let us first take stock of the more significant new aspects that have been introduced into our aristotelische Weltauffassung since we took leave of the Categories.

The size and depth of the world

First, the little world of the Categories is seen from the biological perspective to be embedded in, to be a spatially discontinuous fraction of, a much wider and deeper universe: the total sublunary universe of Empedoclean matter. This universe is wider, in having a great deal more in it than just the (“primary”, sensu Cat.) individual substances and their cross- and intra-categorial paraphernalia: there is matter in many other states than as worked up into substances – such as the many piles (molar “earth”), jugfuls (“water”), breezes, conflagrations, etc. ad lib. And this universe is deeper: for the “primary” substances of the Cats., which in that work, as has been noticed already (§4), are atomic, opaque, and inscrutable, are now seen to be endowed with internal structure: as the semi-stable “knots” that are open to the detailed analysis that goes in terms of Matter and Form.

Hupokeitai DIKHŌS: the two-stage domain

The three very broad points of perspective reviewed in §17: (i) the size and depth of the world, (ii) the vertical, organizational moment in differentia and genus, and (iii) the connection of form and unity, are by no means exhaustive of the metaphysical morals derivable from the biology; but they are already sufficient to give the outlines of the kind of universe that Aristotelean metaphysics puts up to correspond to (or in contemporary terms, to serve as a “model” for) the distinction that was floated in §8 between “constitutive” and “characterizing” things-predicated.

It is a universe (“model”) of two levels or stages.

Metaphysical framework: outline of the static picture

The upper stage is that of the individual substances and their accidental attachments, inherents or “coincidences” (sumbebēkota); it is in most respects – though not completely – identical with the entire universe of the Categories. Based as it is on a domain of well-distinguished substantial individuals, to which attach or “coincide” (or in which inhere) the various qualities and so on, it also bears some slight affinity, to that extent at least, to the sorts of structures that can be thought of as models for present-day formal languages analyzed in terms of standard first-order quantification theory that were mentioned briefly in §8, although the comparison is highly extrinsic, most anachronistic, and made at all only to point the contrast that follows.

The lower stage is that of the shaping-up of the individual substances through form out of matter, and accordingly it is matter rather than discrete individual “thisses” that is cast in the logical-semantical role of subject of predication.

Two criteria for the substantial

Proceeding from the “philosophical grammar” (as it was once or twice styled in the foregoing) of the Categories, to the full theory of substance that is attempted in the Metaphysics, is like travelling from the complex surface of a solid into its multiply-complex interior. In fact, the problem of complexity is one that can very easily get out of hand with this theory, for the object or “solid” in question is highly multidimensional; and this makes for difficulties of both organization and tactics, to which very likely no solution is ideal. Also, the full picture requires of us moderns some rather considerable mind-bending if we are to take it all in. The best course, it seems, is to proceed in stages, by degrees; for while bending one's mind is highly salutary for the philosophical soul, I would not wish to break any minds, or blow them. It has been indicated in §0 that particular emphasis is going to be placed on Aristotle's biological writings as a source of concrete metaphysical intuitions, and we shall move in that direction shortly. But it will both help us in focusing on the right issues, and also work in the spirit of proceeding-by-degrees, first to indicate roughly and provisionally some main features of the Metaphysics concept of the sort of thing a substance is, and from the outset to separate some questions that it is very important to separate. The first of these tasks is for the present section; the second is undertaken in §7.

It was also let fall in §0 that my interpretive approach would be, in places, “reconstructive”, “approaching the text by convergence”.

In the previous chapters we have considered various aspects of Plotinus’ account of sense-perception. There are two topics that seem to me to stand out in this account in the sense that we have been led to them in many different contexts: Plotinus’ direct realism and his soul-body dualism. In this final chapter I summarize and expand our main conclusions concerning these two central topics. As regards the former, the survey given here is also meant to show how the main conclusions from previous chapters can be interpreted as elements in a single, relatively coherent view.

Judgement, affection and the objects of perception

We have seen that Plotinus’ doctrine is that the objects of perception are external objects and their qualities. It remains to be seen whether and, if so, how Plotinus reconciles this with his doctrine about the mediacy of sensory affections in perception. The problem can be stated as follows: perceptions are described as judgements; the judgements belong to the soul and they are to be sharply distinguished from sensory affections that belong to the animated body; the affections function as mediators between the soul and the external objects because the soul cannot directly assimilate sensibles; but if the affections are thus in between the external qualities and that which perceives, it may seem that the affections and not the external objects or qualities are what is immediately apprehended. Or how would Plotinus respond to such a charge?

First, let us recall what we noted in Chapter iv, that Plotinus holds that the affections are necessary in order to account for how we apprehend things in space.