As of this date, there are probably fewer than 200 Protestants in the world who know the facts that follow. I will greatly condense an exceedingly complex story that took me many years to uncover and led me on a long, demanding trek from Sophia to Rome to the stacks of the UCLA library.
Let's begin here: Stained glass windows, steeples, and high vaulted church ceilings got into our lives through Plato, not Christ. Plato wrote again and again about light and space and color as they relate to man's upward spiritual striving toward the "unknowable" Divine essence, the "other than," the "touch with the sublime," the "moment of awe."
Plato insisted that man must go through a number of ascensions and plateaus to meet the divine essence. It takes a lifetime, he warned, and very few will achieve it. Only the gifted will succeed, and that through much suffering. The Catholics adopted the Platonic "Stages of Ascent." They can be found in virtually all their writings on the subject of knowing God.
Plato's brilliant nonsense was enthusiastically picked up, massaged, endorsed, and passed on down by generations of heavy-duty Christian thinkers like Origen, and Augustine. They gradually fine-tuned Plato's thoughts into a formidable worldview called religious Neo-Platonic Dualism.
Now, we could have survived this empty philosophizing pretty easily except for one thing: a nameless, one-man disaster team from Syria, a truly warped monk of about A.D. 500 who called himself...
Pseudo-Dionysius, as he is called today, was a prolific author-and a total fraud. He claimed that his writings were those of the original Dionysius, a real disciple who actually did live in first century Greece and was led to Christ by St. Paul (Acts 17:34). (Pseudo-Dionysius also claimed that Timothy had sat at his own feet. Pretty good for a monk writing in A.D. 500 about events in A.D. 50!) This rascal was enamored of Neo-Platonic philosophy, which was in vogue then. When people read his writings, they really thought they were listening to a profound Christian who was a personal friend and student of Paul. So they thought Paul was a Neo-Platonic philosopher-theologian, too!
It was nearly a thousand years before this hoax was finally rejected. By then the damage was done, and it was irreversible. This man's ideas are warp and woof of Christian thought, and will remain so until the Lord returns. Why? Because his brand of philosophy was picked up and integrated into our intellectual heritage by every Christian thinker for a whole millennium - including, alas, a fellow named...
Suger (soo-ZHAY) was the head of France's national church in St. Denis (de-NEE) from 1122 to 1151. (Denis is the patron saint of France.) Now back before 825, there had been this fable that Dionysius of Syria (500) was the Dionysius of A.D. 50. Unfortunately for all of us, there had been a Christian missionary killed in France in 250 named Denis. The village of St. Denis grew up on that spot. In 825, someone at the church in St. Denis made the astonishing claim that the Dionysius of A.D. 50, the Denis of 250, and the Dionysius of 500 were all the Same guy! Which guy? The convert of Paul, of course. And everyone believed the story! The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius now became just about the most important documents in Christian history, and in the process this fable made Paul a follower of Plato. Read it and weep!
Suger jumped on this legend, and in 1140 created the world's first Gothic cathedral-and the Christian theology of architecture. He deliberately emphasized light, space, color, man's littleness, God's greatness and His "other-than unknowableness." Suger proved this was Christian-and St. Paul's view-by quoting Dionysius!! (He had to overcome the objections of Bernard of Clairvaux, the famous ascetic who was his boss-and who didn't want to build it at all.)
Church architecture as philosophy and theology has been with us ever since. Stained glass windows (light), high ceilings, vaults and arches (awe, wonder, the littleness of man, the greatness of God) all combined to produce a spiritual experience by physical means. Walk into any cathedral, and you will understand. (You'll also whisper no matter how hard you try not to.) The touch of the sublime, the sense of awe! All of this is of body and soul, no part of it is of the spirit. Even worse, Pseudo-Dionysius' fantasies were lionized by the most important Christian thinker since Paul...
Imagine a mind great enough to integrate Augustine with the other early Christian writings; harmonize Plato, Aristotle, and the Neo-Platonists; then combine them all into one massive system of thought ... called New Testament theology! This is exactly what Thomas Aquinas did in his Summa Theologica before he died in 1274. Thomistic thought is so brilliant that it is still the official doctrine of the Catholic church seven centuries later.
You're not Catholic? No matter. Attend virtually any Protestant seminary in the world, you will still be taught from books that follow his format and from lesson plans that mimic his line of thought. And when you go out to preach, you will preach Christ and Aquinas (which includes huge doses of Pseudo-Dionysius because Aquinas quoted that wretch over 100 times in his Summa.) It's a package deal. It's not even a salad you can pick over with a fork, but a systematic stew.
If you read Western man's best thoughts about God, you also get Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Antisthenes, Zeno of Citium, Panaetius, Sation, Seneca, Epictetus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Philo, the stoics, Plotinus, Clement, Numenius, Origen, Augustine, Speusippus, Arcesilaus, Carneades, the skepticism of the Academies, Saccas, Tertullian, Aquinas, and - lucky you - a little bit of St. Paul.
After Constantine, the understanding of our faith quickly fell into the hands of big-time intellectual speculators. And no one noticed that the church was losing spiritual depth in quantities exactly equal to its gains in profound philosophy. The intellectual leadership of Christianity soon became the property of some very brainy gentlemen who spoke and theorized somewhere out above the upper stratosphere of the outer ectoplasm - at the expense of ordinary working blokes like you and me, who would gladly settle for a few good thoughts on how to get through the week.
