Pepe Le Pew And The Epiphany

Can you tolerate just one more visit to Plato’s world of forms and substance?

Even though today is Epiphany?

It’s really important. To understand the world in which the New Testament writers lived, a little knowledge about Plato and his teachings is flat out necessary.

(In our contemporary world, a thing to note is that Pepe Le Pew was created on today’s date, in 1945. Mr. Le Pew was envisioned to be an amorous but confused skunk that fell in love with cats. When this “form” became “substance,” it created layers of unwelcome questions from curious children. This has been happening ever since. Some ideas should never see the actual light of day. They should remain pure forms.)

Believe it or not, in the first century Plato’s ideas were the topic of everyday conversation. Two centuries later, the Bishop of Constantinople complained in a letter to a friend that one could not go to the public bath or buy a carrot at the market without being accosted with questions about philosophy and theology. Most of those questions were Plato’s fault, directly or indirectly.

The good bishop would have enjoyed being a pastor in our times. If I get accosted at the market; it’s almost never about theology or philosophy!

I am much more likely to get in a conversation about some figure like Pepe Le Pew, as to whether or not he is or is not an appropriate cartoon for healthy Christian children to watch. Personally, I think Le Pew stinks, and am willing to take a stand on that.

Anyway, back to Plato and how his ideas influenced Christian theology. Who knows when the days will return like those that troubled the bishop of 3rd century Constantinople? We will need to be prepared.

Imagine God preparing to create the universe. First, according to those influenced by Plato, God made “molds” or “forms.” Because these ‘forms” were made of spiritual “stuff,” and came from the being of God, the forms were eternal and perfect.

Now imagine God making material substance, stuff we can see and taste. (I personally don’t know anyone who can taste a form.)

Finally, imagine God taking His various mixtures of “earth-stuff,” all the carbon, water, silicon, and whatever else seemed good to Him to make, and pouring this stuff into His invisible and perfect “forms.”

If you can imagine that process, you have started to understand Plato.

However, as you can imagine, when “substance” gets poured into the forms, the result is never as perfect as the forms themselves were before becoming matter. A building’s lines aren’t as straight as the blueprint designed them to be because the materials used to build buildings are always a bit faulty, a bit “de-formed.”

I don’t know if Pepe le Pew turned out exactly as Chuck Jones planned. I doubt it. The artists and engineers, the sound guys and the program directors all had to tweak the idea as it moved through production and I’m sure the original idea shifted a bit before it became a cartoon character for kids to watch on Saturday mornings.

The visible parts of the universe are not in as good shape as the invisible parts. (Except for the Devil and his friends but that’s another story.) Here in the material universe, things diverge in small and big ways from the divine plan. This difference in quality between “spiritual” things and “material” things, are due to the imperfections of substance. That’s Plato’s idea, anyway.

This way of looking at things is behind many expressions and arguments in the New Testament, as we will see.

Once again, material things – things that exist in our visible universe -- are imperfect. They do not adequately represent the eternal and invisible forms that give them definition, shape and identity.

Plato coined several terms that we use every day to express his view of reality.

For example, he created the word “deformed.” When something is deformed, it has lost some of its form. When things are deformed, they should be “reformed,” that is, “returned to the original form.”Sometimes, we can change the form of a thing, in which case it will be “transformed,” or “made into an entirely new thing.” If something is “formal,” then we are observing the form much more closely than we do under normal circumstances. All meetings have a form but a “formal” meeting tolerates much less deviation from that from than when the meeting is more relaxed.

We could go on and on about this, but you get the idea – if you are still reading!

In Plato’s opinion, all visible and material things are imperfect copies of the perfect and eternal forms, up in the real world (what the New Testament calls “the heavenlies.”)

Some Platonists, or people who study Plato, believed that this inferred that material things are necessarily further from God than the eternal and perfect forms. That is not a New Testament idea, but one that crops up repeatedly in Christian history.

So even though the New Testament writers used Platonic terms, they did not agree with him in some very important ways.

Nonetheless, the idea that things in this world are only imperfect copies of the eternal, and perfect things, is used several times in the New Testament, particularly in St. John’s gospel and the book of Hebrews.

The New Testament twist on Plato is that material things as they are today, after the fall of Adam and Eve, are indeed imperfect representations of what God originally intended. However, material things, before the fall, were “perfect,” at least perfect in the sense that material things were exactly what God created them to be.

Since the fall, material things are not as they were created to be. Material things have indeed become imperfect, or to use a platonic word, “deformed.”

That is why God called the Wise Men from far away by the light of a star, which we celebrate on Epiphany. It announced that light would now be shared with the gentiles – the non Jews – about God and faith. The nations would now be given the law of God and the good news that Jesus Christ has come to save us from our sins.

Now, one question remains: why doesn’t Pepe get it when Penelope the Cat tells him that she doesn’t want him around? Why does he keep thinking that she wants him but just can’t bring herself to admit it?

Perhaps it’s because he cannot recognize his own stink and has no grasp of his real condition.

If only Chuck Jones could talk to Pepe about the original design and how to bring life and love into conformity with that design.

Of course, he would have to pay attention.

Becky Scott, The American Revolution and The Renewing of Our Minds

In the last blog, I tried to interest you in Plato. If I succeeded, I will be nominated teacher of the year. Or, we could give that award to Becky Scott, since today is her birthday.

I could also talk about how that near this date in 1784, the American Revolution officially ended and the founding fathers signed the treaty of Paris. (In happened on January 14th, to be exact.)

Perhaps we should forget about Plato and all the rest of this stuff and just return to our Bible readings!

However, reading the first stories of the Old and New Testaments requires us to stop and think. Sometimes as much as talking about Plato.

(Understanding what was gained by the American Revolution also requires a thoughtful reading of -- and reflecting on -- the nation’s founding documents. We used to do that in an ancient course called “civics,” which taught us how to be citizens. So, healthy citizenship and Christian discipleship each require mature and thoughtful engagement with a text. Who would have thought?)

Anyway, why were the Bible stories written in a way that although entertaining at surface levels, requires such intense thought to get the main points?

Why do the characters in the Bible stories say what they say?

Why are things mentioned in those stories that seemingly lack any connection to the plot?

You can be sure that there are no “throw away” passages or meaningless insertion into the stories. Every word counts; every symbol speaks; every reference to another part of scripture is there for a purpose. So what’s the deal with the complicated structures of the Bible?

Well, reading God’s word is a form of meditation. Prayerful reading focuses our thoughts and emotions and leads us into what we might call “spiritual” consciousness. That’s when we begin to see the connections and begin to submit our intellect to the molding influence of the Holy Spirit.

Many influential Christian thinkers have taught that we learn to stretch toward God by contemplating what lies behind and beyond the things God has made and the things He has said. To use Plato’s language, we learn to look through the substance of a thing in order to perceive that which makes the thing what it is – its form.

(If you didn’t get that, go back and read the last blog on Plato and Jell-O.)

To make this simple: we should practice looking at and through the world, the Bible, and our experiences. We should continually meditate about what these things mean. Our everyday lives, the life of our society, and in the life of the world to come depend upon eternal truth, goodness and beauty that shines through the World in unexpected places.

Many great men and women of God have claimed to have been transformed by their contemplation of God’s Word.

One of my favorite people in history is a medieval monk named Thomas Aquinas. While not all Christians agree with his theology, he is an example of how human intellect humbles itself before the majesty of God. He did this without sacrificing his intellectual integrity. Aquinas believed that once we give our allegiance to the Word of God, we can apply our intellect and emotions in the life-long work of filling our being with the presence of God. We can learn to see all of life, not just the “religious” part of life, through God-touched eyes.

Aquinas especially wanted to understand and explain the old Greek philosophers (Aristotle and Plato) in the light of Holy Scripture. As he did this, he came up with some pretty amazing thoughts about how contemplating God can transform the human heart.

Most of us are not as smart as Thomas Aquinas or Plato, of course. But we don’t have to be. The simplest believer opens himself to the wisdom of God every time he reads the words of scriptures.

Plato said that there is a form behind and beyond “things.” The form is eternal. It exists in another time and another place. A thing’s substance looks as it does and acts as it does because of the form that gives it shape and definition.

The Bible is a concrete, material thing: a book. However, this book expresses God’s eternal nature. If we read it with a worshipful heart and a fully engaged intellect, the Bible will pull us into God. This can only occur if we read with reverence, focused attention and remain intellectually engaged. Our reading has to become a form of prayer – conversation with God.

If we do these things, the Word will penetrate our intelligence, disciple our minds, and stretch our capacity to think.

The Bible claims that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The renewal of our minds is made possible by the entrance of the Word into our minds.

Our human substance becomes deeply affected by the way we take into ourselves the Form that is above all human form, when we, as the New Testament puts it:

Let this mind be in us that was also in Christ Jesus. The American founding fathers were scholars who were well acquainted with everything I have said here. They envisioned a citizenry that would master the great ideas that formed our republic, come to solid opinions about how to apply these ideas to the nation’s on-going political life, and thus become capable of governing themselves: the first such nation in history.

They didn’t envisioned that we would not take the time to read the founding documents, be unconcerned with what those documents say and would prefer politicians who speak in sound bites, wear nice haircuts and who never challenge us to think. Perhaps they would not have fought a revolution had they realized that we would hate civics so much.

The writers of the Bible also believed that we would want to meditate upon the Word that God had inspired them to write. They believed that we would read until we learned how to live, how to think, and how to find God. They thought that forming a God-consciousness that transforms one’s life would be worth the effort of reading, meditating, praying and acting out the Word of God.

Jello, Plato, and Theology

In my last blog, I wrote a lot about food.

For some reason, it made me think about Jell-O.

(The way some of you celebrated New Years, you might need Jell-O!)

I understand that one might not conclude an elegant romantic meal with Jell-O (outside of West Virginia anyway), but indulge me. Jell-O will help me explain something important.

The old Greek philosopher, Plato, had a very considerable influence upon the writers of the New Testament, the church fathers, and many great Christian thinkers since. Sometimes early Christian thinkers have agreed with Plato and sometimes they haven’t. Whether they have or not, most of them borrowed words and concepts from him. They needed those concepts to communicate with their Greek-speaking audience. For this reason, we need to have some idea of of what Plato taught before we proceed.

So please bear with me for a couple of pages as I plunge us into some of Plato’s heavy thoughts.

Come on, you’re up to it!

Let’s begin with Jell-O. (Jell-O is not that heavy, you see.)

Plato said that everything in the universe is made of two things – form and substance. Now before you give the words “form” and “substance” the meaning you normally assign them, let me explain how Plato used these words.

By “substance,” Plato meant the stuff you can hold in your hand and do tests on and so forth, the elementary stuff of our material world. You know, stuff!

By the word “form,” he meant something like a blueprint. He believed that “forms,” or the blueprints of everything that exists in our material world, came first. Substance was added later.

Forms were made of some sort of spiritual stuff that is now invisible to us. We can talk about forms, but that requires a special kind of thinking and talking.

Think of Plato’s “substance” as Jell-O.

Now think of “form” as a mold into which you can pour the not-yet-solid Jell-O.

Congratulations, you just started understanding Plato! The only difference is that Plato thought “forms” were eternal and were, therefore, the most important part of creation. He also believed that the “substance,” (the “Jell-O”) was a much lower level of creation than the mold we choose to pour the Jell-O into.

(Of course, Plato never tried to eat Jell-O molds. At least one would hope not!)

However, Plato’s idea makes spiritual sense. Any plan that God makes exists on a much higher level than any human plan.

For example, when I decided to write this blog, I first made an outline. Then I began thinking about stories, illustrations and so forth I could pour into my outline.

God did something similar when he created the world. However, God’s “outline,” Plato would say, was itself a living thing. It came from God, for God’s sake! In fact, the blueprint for the universe, the form of all forms, was a part of God.

A bit further along in this book, we will see how St. John’s gospel used this very pattern of thought to introduce Jesus to the Greeks. He called Jesus the “logos,” the form of all forms, who in Christ become flesh and dwelt among us.

As we read through the Bible, we will be challenged by the thought patterns of ancient people. We will have to think about how God chose particular cultures, languages and ears of history to craft his Word into the form we now call the Bible.

A few years ago, I visited the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem. It commemorates the place where the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Just a few feet away, there is an old monk’s cell, where St. Jerome worked for years to translate the Bible into Latin, so we Westerners could read the scriptures.

I remember the awe of standing between these two memorials, one that helps us remember how the Word became a body; the other that helps us remember how the Word became a book.

As Plato might have put it: the perfect form leapt into the world, taking upon itself corruptible substance so we could see and touch the Word of life.

What he did not know was that the corruptible substance would itself be transformed, so that mortal might put on immortality and corruptible might put on incorruptibility.

Christ became a mortal body that we might become an eternal body. The Word became a book so that its power might transform us into God’s eternal companions.

There are some things that even Plato didn’t know.

Also, he never knew that there is always room for Jell-O.

This is a New Year and a new decade. It’s wonderful to think about how God had a plan for our lives before He even created the universe. Our spiritual journey is about discovering that plan and then living accordingly. Furthermore, the plan is not a dead description of God’s hopes but a living entity that flows from God’s own being; sort of like D.N.A. When children are conceived, the “plan” for their physical being is contained in a set of “drawings” that come from the Mom and Dad.

The plan for all creation – God’s D.N.A -- is Himself a living entity, a “form” in Plato’s language. That “form of forms,” the Logos, Blueprint, Word, once took on substance so we could see Him and hear Him.

Sometimes, God’s plan for our lives takes on flesh too and becomes a living thing. However, we have to cooperate with God for this to happen.

Like a woman long ago that prayed, “Let it be done unto me according to Thy will.”

Its not a bad prayer to pray on this first day of the year.