Aristotle believed that many (not, of course, all) natural events and facts need to be explained by reference to natural goals. He understands by a goal (hou heneka) whether natural or not, something good (from some point of view) that something else causes or makes possible, where this other thing exists or happens (at least in part) because of that good. So in holding that some natural events and facts have to be explained by reference to natural goals, he is holding that some things exist or happen in the course of nature because of some good that they do or make possible. Thus he holds that living things have many of the organic and other parts that they have because of the good it does them, so that these parts exist, and are formed, for the sake of the animal or plant itself whose good they subserve. To explain why they have them, and why as they are being formed they come to have them, one must refer to the whole animal or plant who needs them as the goal for which they exist. Aristotle gives or suggests, at one place or another, several arguments in favour of this thesis. Some of these press the analogy between artistic activity, which is admittedly goal-directed, and natural processes, thus extending explanation by appeal to goals from human action to non-human, even non-animal nature.

G. E. L. Owen's papers tend not only to transform their professed subject matter, but also to spread illumination into quite distant regions. The present distant region is no exception, as the footnotes will reveal.

Plotinus distinguished at least two kinds of thinking. There is dianoia, which is often called discursive thinking, and which is the activity of the soul (psuchē). And then there is the different activity of the intellect (nous), which is often called non-discursive thinking. It is commonly held that non-discursive thinking does not involve entertaining propositions. That is, it does not involve thinking that something is the case. Instead, one contemplates concepts in isolation from each other, and does not string them together in the way they are strung together in ‘that’-clauses. It is further supposed that Plato and Aristotle anticipated Plotinus in postulating this non-propositional thinking.

I have three aims in this chapter, The main one is to deny that non-propositional thinking is to be found in any of these three thinkers at the points where it has most commonly been detected. In order to show this for the case of Plotinus, I shall have to explain some of Aristotle's ideas about thinking and how Plotinus transformed them. He certainly did believe that there is a mystical state in which we have contact with something much simpler than any proposition. But I shall maintain that he regards this mystical experience as above the level of thinking, while thinking in its highest form he treats as propositional.

For me, G. E. L. Owen's ‘Plato on Not-Being’ radically improved the prospects for a confident overall view of its topic. Hitherto, passage after passage had generated reasonable disagreement over Plato's intentions, and the disputes were not subject to control by a satisfying picture of his large-scale strategy; so that the general impression, as one read the Sophist, was one of diffuseness and unclarity of purpose. By focusing discussion on the distinction between otherness and contrariety (257B1–C4), Owen showed how, at a stroke, a mass of confusing exegetical alternatives could be swept away, and the dialogue's treatment of not-being revealed as a sustained and tightly organised assault on a single error. In what follows, I take Owen's focusing of the issue for granted, and I accept many of his detailed conclusions. Where I diverge from Owen – in particular over the nature of the difficulty about falsehood that Plato tackles in the Sophist (§§5 and 6 below) –it is mainly to press further in the direction he indicated, in the interest of a conviction that the focus can and should be made even sharper.

2. By 256E5–6 the Eleatic Stranger (ES) can say ‘In the case of each of the forms, then, what is is multiple and what is not is indefinite in number.’ Yet it is only at 258B6–7 that Theaetetus is allowed to announce the availability, at last, of the application for ‘what is not’ that was needed in order to flush the sophist from his refuge.

Meaning and signification

Professor Owen has taught us to attend to Aristotle's, no less than to Plato's, views on the relation between language and reality. Some of his work is the distinguished result of his attention to these views. In ‘Logic and Metaphysics’ and ‘Aristotle on the Snares of Ontology’ he has argued that Aristotle's views on the proper way to inquire into Being are influenced by his views on the irreducibly different senses of ‘being’. In ‘Tithenai ta Phainomena’ he has shown how Aristotle's questions ‘What is time?’, ‘What is place?’, ‘Does anyone ever act incontinently?’ and so on are approached by methods and arguments different from those of empirical science: ‘By such arguments the Physics ranks itself not with physics in our sense of the word, but with philosophy. Its data are for the most part the materials not of natural history but of dialectic, and its problems are accordingly not questions of empirical fact but conceptual puzzles.’

This account of Aristotle's results reflects a clear and influential picture of his questions and his aims. Aristotle asks the Socratic ‘What is it?’ question to find out what a word means, to give an analysis of the concept associated with the word; he wants to set out the meaning that competent speakers implicitly grasp but cannot always state in clear, paradox-free terms. Sometimes he denies that there is just one answer to the Socratic question, because the word is homonymous; and then he means that it has more than one sense.

‘History is bunk.’ The question of the continuity of past events was important for the first Christians. Yet for some, like the Gnostics, it was trivial; for others, like Marcion, it was bad, not merely bunk but bad bunk. For the Gnostics, the most it could provide was a reflection of the divine reality, for nothing really happened outside God. For Marcion, the past told of another God, and whatever it said was wrong. Yet Justin, and those who came after him, loved the story of the past, they loved talking about it, and making sense of it. They were, indeed, too keen about it for most of their readers today. Justin fills page after page with too many references to the Old Testament, with the way in which it makes sense of Jesus and Jesus makes sense of it.

With the apologists, this interest in history begins, like everything else, as a response to a challenge, a rebuttal of an objection. What right had Christians to make such extraordinary claims for their knowledge of God? If they had the truth, did they think that nothing true had ever been said before? They used the Jewish scriptures, but they did not keep the Law of the God who had spoken in them. Marcion and the Gnostics were at least consistent: they did not pretend that the most high God or the divine Pleroma had anything to do with the Old Testament.

The four writers, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement, come from four major cities and centres of Christianity: Rome, Lyons, Carthage and Alexandria.

Justin

In the second century, Rome continued to enjoy prosperity. While literature lost some of its power, building and sculpture went on vigorously. Trajan's forum, the baths of Caracalla, the palace of Septimius Severus on the Palatine, the Pantheon and Hadrian's mausoleum remain as evidence of great activity. The period of the Antonines was, said Gibbon, the greatest period of Rome. Wars were few and there was prosperity on many sides. Yet disquieting signs may be found, and a recent picture of the period speaks of it as an age of anxiety : men knew that the best was past and the unknown future had little to lure them on. There is truth in both these opinions, for it was the best of times and the worst of times; the general position of the empire was sound but there was intellectual insecurity.

Christians were to be found in small groups, which met in houses and recognised the oversight of a college of presbyters, and before long the presidency of one bishop. Heretics like Marcion and Valentinus met a strong opposition at Rome, for there the movement towards right belief was strongest. There was tension between Rome and the East on the date of Easter, and attempts at reconciliation were not successful.

After Socrates, Greek philosophy could never turn its back on questions about man and the life he should live. Man became the centre of the cosmos, ethics became fundamental and introspective reflection like that of Marcus Aurelius emerged. Philosophers and Gnostics asked: ‘Where did man come from and how did he come?’ Christian thinkers had to ask about man for other reasons too. They saw a new humanity in Christ, a universal brotherhood, which broke across every barrier of race and class. The goal of history was the liberty of the children of God, a liberty shown in Christ and given to his followers. If man were central to the total purpose of things, as the Stoics also insisted he was, what was he? Further, if man's salvation were the goal of Christian preaching and of more esoteric religious propaganda, why did man need to be saved? Again, Christians claimed as evidence for the truth of their God, the moral transformation of men of all shapes and sizes; this confident but perilous claim kept man in the centre of the argument. Finally, there was only one ground on which all the critics of Christianity could be met: polytheist, philosopher, Jew, Gnostic, Marcionite, with internal divergences in most camps, had nothing but their humanity in common. When the apologists spoke as men to men, they were dealing with the only common question.

Man, according to one definition that Clement found, was a rational, mortal, earthy, walking, laughing animal.

Problems

The problems of one ineffable transcendent God group themselves around the idea of a first cause. The persistence of this idea, with all its difficulties, has been sometimes seen as a ground for its acceptance. In the second century, a strong monistic tendency was not peculiar to Christians; but they were able to make good use of it. In recent discussion, logical objections to the first cause are tempered by an appreciation of the question as a religious problem. Everything has a point of ultimate dependence, as Augustine found at Ostia: ‘if one could hear them, all these things are saying, “We did not make ourselves, but he who made us is he who abides to eternity”’ [Conf. 9.10].

Man and his freedom showed the link between God and man and the need for God to change human life, while keeping it human. The term ‘deification’ was important because it pointed to the gift of immortality as something that could not be taken for granted. Freedom was seen to be more important than free will because it was concerned with a fullness of life that, unlike self-fulfilment, found its centre in the cross of Jesus.

The world and history go together, for the world belongs to a God of hope, who opens the future and gives meaning to history; he is the suffering God, known supremely in the cross of his Son and the death of the martyrs.

Alternative methods in the history of ideas in the patristic period

Our five different questions and methods spring from a scheme that is based on three main types, with subdivisions in the third. The first method is polemical: ‘Does it make sense?’ ‘Is it true?’; and regards past writers as contributors to unchanging problems: ‘by noticing the strong and weak points of each theory we can discover the direction in which further progress may be made’. The systematic theologian commonly approaches the early centuries with similar direct questions:

There is an attractive freshness about this approach; for more than a thousand years the fathers had been cited in short authoritative passages. Theology had so often been built upon catenae that could not be questioned because they were so close in time to the sources of Christianity. For example, questions of Church order and Roman primacy were argued with extracts from Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian and others. Ascetical theology followed a similar pattern. Just as the biblicist cited his proof-texts from the Bible, so the patristic scholar found his proof-texts in the fathers.

Whatever hesitation there was in speaking of God, there was no hesitation in speaking of man and his relation to God; nor is there hesitation in speaking about the world. This is God's world: he made it, he orders it and he governs it. The first way into his mystery is through his transforming power in men's lives; the second way is through the world he has made. Each of the four writers takes creation seriously. Justin has an earthy optimism: God made the world out of matter for man's sake. But Justin is a city man who writes for city men – he tells us little about his world, except that he finds God in it through the cosmic cross. Irenaeus is different; he has an eye for colour and movement and a curiosity for shapes and structure. Creation is earthy, but it is beautiful too. Tertullian stands out as the staunchest defender of creation and the toughest opponent of Marcion. His heart is in the fight, for God's world fires his curiosity and interest. All creatures great and small, especially the small and complicated, tell him about God. God, he wants to argue, wouldn't be God without the world. The government of the world is no abstract activity, for God drops thunderbolts, causes earthquakes and readily smites whoever deserves to be smitten.

The present movement of Western civilisation away from Christianity has directed attention to earlier days when Christians were a small part of a Roman world of pluralistic beliefs; they came before, we come after, Christendom. Claims for relevance, however, are always competitive and need to be argued. What drives twentieth-century Western man back to the second and third centuries? Initially there is little more than a vague feeling that Christendom was a mistake, that ecumenical councils in the fourth and fifth centuries achieved less than they claimed, that the classical dogmatic formulations are too ambiguous to be helpful. Clearly this response is not enough. Christendom was not an unqualified mistake and its assessment is the task of a lifetime and not of an impulse. The best ecumenical councils may well be those that seem to achieve little; ambiguity of creeds and councils invites further analysis before resignation.

The importance of the second century and the apologists is best seen in the emergence of Christian argument; but Christians have argued about so many strange things that the area of argument is important. The claim of the enthusiast for early Christian thought is that the problems that Christians faced in a pluralistic world, then, have a close relation to those that they face now: the problems were more general and more philosophical (Is there one God? Can man speak of him? Is man free? Why is there evil in God's world?) than the dogmatic issues of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Each group of problems has shown two marked characteristics. In the first place there has been the untidiness of infinity, for there has never been a point at which the questions could be rounded off and completed. There was always a sense of being on the edge of the desert, or the shore of the sea. (The chief reason for stopping was that the topic was inexhaustible; enough had been seen to learn that the end would never be in sight.) The God above was shrouded in mystery or revealed in brightness too fierce for man to bear. Man, as God's image yet sinful, as free yet captive, was a rational, laughing animal who found life through the practice of death. The world, God's good cosmos, was shot through with suffering and evil. History had reached its end in Christ, but still went on in eerie confusion; another end remained but when, why or how could not be set down.

In the second place, there has been one conclusion and that a short one, to each investigation. The unknown God is known through his Word. Man is logikos and he learns his true nature only in the perfect man and complete Logos. The world is made and governed by the divine Word. History is long but it is summed up in the Word. The brutal brevity and simplicity of the gospel was unattractive to most people: only a slave mind could accept such a reduction of so many issues.