Thinking of God
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we do – we can identify this thing as a chair or a dog)? We can do so because thingspossible for us to know these things In that exist, and the eternal, immutable The Republic, Plato’s Socrates distinguishes between changing, mutable as the kind of things they are (which forms of those things. How is it
the thing appears to us as an instance of its form; the eternal form is the condition of the intelligibility of a thing. The form makes it possible to say, “this is a chair.” The form is the light in which the mind’s eye conceives what the physical eyes perceive as the kind of thing it is. The eternal world of
forms inhabits and also grounds the changing world of appearances.(“participation” or “imitation”) between appearance and reality, the form of the good is the highest form and the “ultimate object of knowledge”: “the Since forms imply a standard of goodness as perfect correspondence
end of all endeavour, the object on which every heart is set.”on to give an account of the good, Socrates says, “I’m afraid it’s beyond me, and if I try I shall only make a fool of myself and be laughed at.”the form of the good, as first principle, cannot be defined, although we use^23 When called (^24) Indeed,
it in making judgments of value and worth. Accordingly, Socrates fashions similes and analogies to show what the good might be like. He begins with the simile of the sun. Just as the experience of seeing something requires not only eyes endowed with the power to see and something to be seen, but also
a “third element,” the light of the sun, so the experience of understanding something requires a mind endowed with intelligence, something to be understood, and a third thing – the form of the good.classical reference point for metaphysical theology and its metaphorical (^25) Here we have the
cluster of God as Platonic).history. In Consider Augustine, one of the most important theologians in Christian (^26) Augustine wants to know God and the soul, and reason (Soliloquieslight of the world., the basic form of thinking is Platonic (or neo-logos)
addresses him as the interface between the two. In knowledge something transcends us, so the goal of knowledge is somehow already present at the start; it needs to be brought into clarity. There is, he admits, no necessity in sensory experience, so he negates that form of experience in terms of pro-
viding knowledge of how God and the soul necessarily are. Only through intellectual knowledge can one know how things necessarily have to be; we know the flux only in light of eternal realities, which are in the mind of God. Human thinking has an intrinsic obligation to the highest standards – truth
and goodness – and so the human thinker stands in the presence of God as he or she reflects these standards in thinking and doing.of God as light began to shift its emphasis from the pervasive sense of the By the time of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, the metaphor