Jay Dyer: Roman Catholicism, Islam & Greek Philosophical Presuppositions

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]All right, so if you came for an exciting, engaging lecture, you got ripped off.

[00:00:05]It's going to be super dry, super philosophical, but I'll try to make it as interesting and engaging as I can.

[00:00:12]So, we've heard a lot about simplicity.

[00:00:14]We've heard a lot about Neoplatonism.

[00:00:16]We've heard about merging with the one.

[00:00:19]Emanations, immanentism.

[00:00:22]So, let's talk about why this matters.

[00:00:24]Why did the church fathers get into this?

[00:00:27]And basically, what I'm going to do is go through a long talk about philosophy gibberish to show the inadequacy and stupidity of philosophy. So, you're going to see in 1 1/2 hours, hopefully, uh the stupidity of this system. And we're going to link it to not just Aristotle, not just the important positions that we see in the figure of Eunomius, who is a key early uh church heretic, who was a kind of radical Arian. We're also going to see it in the Greeks, the Hellenic dialectics that we're going to look at.

[00:00:59]We're going to notice it in Islam in terms of the classical Sunni tradition, which is what we've been inter- interacting with. So, uh unfortunately, Islam is kind of Protestantism, where you have a whole bunch of schools and sects, but you can kind of get, you know, some general ideas. So, we're going to take kind of the position that we had with Sheikh Abdur Rashid as the exemplary. Then we're going to look at the Roman Catholic minus system. I'll make a few comments if I can about Protestantism as well to tie it all in.

[00:01:29]So, Aristotle and other philosophers give us this uh idea of potency and act.

[00:01:35]I'll I'll try to find these as best I can for those who are not sort of into philosophy. I'm not an Aristotle scholar. Father Deacon is.

[00:01:41]>> Hi, guys. I'm an Aristotle scholar.

[00:01:48]>> So, not everything necessarily that I say about Aristotle will be will be perfect, but we're going to try to capture this as best we can.

[00:01:54]So, um so, basically, what Aristotle wants to do is give us a philosophical description of metaphysics that's coherent and explains actual substances and things in the world, external reality, etc. He has a conception of God that he will call the first actual actualizer, the first mover, uh the the perpetual actualizer, the eternal actualizer. And what he actualizes is something other than itself at all times.

[00:02:22]One of the key things that he does give us is useful for theology, though, is the distinction between essence and energy. So, that's actually an Aristotelian distinction. And yes, uh the the Neoplatonic influence on the church fathers is at times even countered by Aristotle.

[00:02:37]Um excuse me, excuse me. The the the Neoplatonic doctrines are countered by the church fathers.

[00:02:42]And they use sometimes Aristotelian distinction. So, we're going to see Saint Basil actually uses some of these ideas to rebut the Neoplatonic assumptions of, you know, who's going to be our key kind of model heretic that will be present in all these guys, right? So, even though this is going to be kind of the Greek assumption, this is going to be kind of the Islamic rebuttal. You're going to notice the pattern of Eunomius in each of these. And you're going to see the distinction between those and our system, particularly in the Cappadocians, particularly in uh letters of Saint Basil and the the key distinctions that Saint Basil makes.

[00:03:20]So, one of the distinctions that we want to talk about is is not just potency and act, which is the movement from a state of potentia, right? It's what something could be, to what it is or is actualized as, right? So, for example, in this analogy, uh I might have the skill to beatbox, but I don't if if I don't act if I don't actually beatbox, I haven't actualized beatboxing.

[00:03:45]But I possess, right, this potentia, this power.

[00:03:50]And so, Basil's going to make key use of this notion of the distinction between dynamis, right? Or the potential or the the the ability to do something as opposed to actually doing it. And so God can possess both of those things. He can possess the dynamis, power, and in fact many powers that he does not necessarily have to actualize. Now, why is that a problem for uh these systems? Because if that's the case, this is not the case. And this is going to be definitive for all of these positions.

[00:04:24]Uh even even though this doesn't necessarily use the phrase pure act, which we'll get to in a minute, actus purus, this system still borrows heavily from that, especially in the Middle Ages when Islam comes into uh you know, popularity into its It has an early stage, I should mention, which is very um simplistic, uh and it's it's very anti-philosophical. Then they move into their Kalam stage, they they do reasoning philosophy.

[00:04:51]And when they move into that stage, the ironic thing is that they're going to borrow directly from all of this, but they're going to say, "Oh, we got that from Allah, by the way." Right? So they they didn't get it from the Greeks, who had it before them. They got it from Allah. Yeah, sure. Right? Just like the biblical texts come before them and contradict their texts, but it comes perfectly from Allah.

[00:05:12]So when Basil talks about the distinction between these things, between energy or which we're saying is the same thing basically here as activity in our theology. When he talks about the distinction between something being in potentia or to have a power that you don't necessarily actualize, this comes into focus with the doctrine of creation.

[00:05:31]Cuz what you're going to notice is that these systems are not going to be able to give an account for our unique doctrine of creation ex nihilo. In fact, pure act will make that impossible. I'm sure people have heard us talking about this, but we're going to get into how that is the case.

[00:05:45]So uh in terms of expressing a capacity, right? Energeia is the expression of the capacity or this dunamis, this faculty or this potentia that one possesses, that the agent possesses. And so, by doing this action, we move from a state of potency to act.

[00:06:06]Now, for Aristotle, the first mover, the unactualized actualizer, cannot have this kind of stuff going on.

[00:06:13]And there's reasons for that. And the reason primarily is that he has presuppositions. You may have heard this word, presupposition. We're going to repeat these presuppositions.

[00:06:22]And this comes from what's called the perfections, or should we say a table of opposites from Pythagoras.

[00:06:29]So, Aristotle borrows this table of opposites.

[00:06:32]And you'll notice that he's got this assumption that the good corresponds to number one being, so he means the highest supreme ultimate being in his mind, an unmoved mover, which is self-referencing thought, thought thinking itself in a kind of never-ending circle.

[00:06:47]Unity is better or perfect or more perfect, right, than multiplicity, being over non-being.

[00:06:54]Rest, this is key because rest, immobility, stasis, is going to be fundamental to origin, it's going to be fundamental to the Neoplatonic idea.

[00:07:06]And a lot of these Hellenic dialectics are going to underlie these systems as well.

[00:07:10]So, remember, these are in not just distinction to these.

[00:07:14]These are in opposition. They're opposites, okay?

[00:07:18]Being in this system is opposite non-being. Unity in this system is opposite multiplicity. Rest in this system is opposite motion.

[00:07:27]>> [clears throat] >> And so, for this, this means that God must possess, the first cause must essentially be these things in contrast, in distinction, in dialectical contrast [clears throat] with these things.

[00:07:39]These things are a diminished ontological status, that do not possess the highest degree of ontology, perfection, unity, simplicity that these things possess. This is fundamental to not just Aristotle, but you're going to notice that through most of the the Hellenic mindset, you could say generally speaking.

[00:07:59]The philosophers as we have here. And you're going to notice so many heretics have the same problem. This dialectical opposition is going to be running through all of these heretics. And it's not just these things that have dialectical opposition between this.

[00:08:11]Because this in a sense can be said to be opposite of that, right? So in a lot of these systems, this distinction entails opposition, opposites, dialectic.

[00:08:21]>> [clears throat] >> So dialectic, right, refers to opposition between two things.

[00:08:26]We don't do that. Why do we not do that?

[00:08:28]Well, because our God is not in a definitional sense pure act.

[00:08:34]Yes, some church fathers will say we can speak the speak of God in a manner of speaking as pure act. Maximus at the beginning of the general chapter says in the first five pages, we can speak of God as pure act only in contrast to creatures, only in contrast to things that come to be in time.

[00:08:52]Why is that? Because the things that come to be in time are acted upon.

[00:08:58]God acts upon the things in time. And the things in time, yes, they do possess the feature of potency to act. They do possess change. They do possess these uh uh and they're not purely in stasis, right?

[00:09:14]And again, this mindset, remember, it believes that things that are in stasis are better.

[00:09:20]Now, the amazing thing about this is that we know that the Greeks are smart people.

[00:09:24]We know that they have amazing, tremendous insights, right? Even even the the Neoplatonists.

[00:09:31]Even crazy guys like Stoics, like they they have insights that the church fathers used.

[00:09:36]But one thing that they don't do is question certain presuppositions like Like why is this perfect? Why is it that more perfect than that thing?

[00:09:48]It's just sort of assumed.

[00:09:50]There's not any arbitrary thing that we look at the world and we just know, oh okay, well, we know that unity is better than multiplicity.

[00:09:59]I mean, many philosophers have come along and say, "No, actually multiplicity is better than unity. In fact, maybe we should all just be anarchists. Maybe we should wreck this whole system and destroy any notion of unity.

[00:10:10]Maybe motion is better than rest or stasis.

[00:10:13]There's no a priori reason to know or assume or think that one is automatically ontologically superior, higher, better, right?

[00:10:23]And you can begin to see that since these things characterize the created world, creation begins to be negated. Creation is seen in a an increasingly negative attitude, diminished attitude.

[00:10:38]Creation is something that we need to escape from, especially in Platonism.

[00:10:42]I'm speaking of Plato particularly, Plato.

[00:10:44]Uh now, Aristotle is a little better in that he does have um a pretty positive view of this world, of the polis, of life, virtues, and so on, what we need to do in this life, the body, right? He's not as negative as what we see in people like Plato.

[00:10:59]But what we're going to notice is that this or basal and for the capital missions.

[00:11:06]This is fundamental to the Trinity.

[00:11:09]And it's fundamental not because it's a philosophical reasoning. It is philosophical, but it's philosophical reasoning that's fundamental to the Trinity because revelation contains these ideas.

[00:11:21]In other words, we know that God could have created a bunch of different worlds. He could have created any logically possible possible world.

[00:11:30]We don't believe he created every logically possible world, right?

[00:11:35]And so there is in some sense a kind of potentia that God has because he possesses free will. And if he possesses free will, then he has that potentia if he did not actualize every possible world, then he's not pure act because this means there's no unrealized potentia in God.

[00:11:54]So you cannot have this as a definitional sense of who God is in his inner being.

[00:11:59]That's precisely what happens kind of here and then definitely.

[00:12:04]Let's do that again.

[00:12:07]So pure act is fine in St. John of Damascus and in St. Maximus as a way to describe God only in relation to creation.

[00:12:15]When we get to the inner life of God, theology proper, God ad intra, Maximus says, this is dumb.

[00:12:24]Dumb. You can't say this about God in his inner life because [clears throat] it becomes a reductionist move.

[00:12:32]And that reductionist move is what we're going to look at now and this is from Eunomius, an important thing called identity.

[00:12:44]Identity thesis is basically the idea that when we name God, when we speak about what these names mean, what they say about what they're thinking about, what they're predicating, what they're referring to, in God, it's all identical.

[00:12:58]Okay?

[00:12:59]So we know that Eunomius has this position.

[00:13:04]Read your Roman Catholic definition, for example.

[00:13:07]>> [clears throat and cough] >> Ludwig Ott says in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, it's a classic, right?

[00:13:13]This is section three, the difference between the attributes and essence of God.

[00:13:18]The divine attributes are both identical with the divine essence as well as amongst themselves and that is de fidei.

[00:13:25]Okay? So that in Roman Catholic theology, de fide means dogma. Can't question that. It's not up for dispute.

[00:13:30]It's dogmatic.

[00:13:32]The reason for this, Aquinas says, lies in the simplicity of God.

[00:13:36]Acceptance of any real distinctions would lead to an acceptance of composition in God.

[00:13:42]So, the assumption of identity thesis here promoted by them dogmatically By the way, it's also in the Fourth Lateran Council. It's It's Peter Lombard's teaching, which the Fourth Lateran Council accepts, reduces person to nature. So, for for Lombard, he is what he is in his essence, and that is identical to the phrase that Eunomius uses. Eunomius says the exact same thing that Peter Lombard says, ironically.

[00:14:11]Uh so, that's the Roman Catholic doctrine, and we see that God has to be this. Why?

[00:14:17]Because anything that is potency to act, according to this system, this corresponds to matter to form.

[00:14:29]Okay.

[00:14:33]So, potency is to act as matter is to form, right? So, when matter is informed, it has form, and that's like the move or similar to the move of potentia to actualitas.

[00:14:45]This cannot be in God, as you see, right?

[00:14:48]Why is that? Well, let's let's let's listen to what the Dumb Ox says.

[00:14:56]So, I question one That's Aquinas, for those who don't know.

[00:15:03]Summa, uh one volume one section question three.

[00:15:09]Is God composed?

[00:15:11]I absolutely answer It's absolutely true that God is not a body and cannot and this can be shown in several ways. First, because no body is in motion unless it's put in motion.

[00:15:22]Secondly, I'm going to move down.

[00:15:24]Uh well, it's just because the unmoved mover has not moved.

[00:15:27]Secondly, because the first being must of necessity be in act.

[00:15:33]And in no way in any potentia.

[00:15:40]For although any single thing that passes from potentia to actuality, the potentiality is prior in time to the actuality. Nevertheless, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to potentiality. Because God is the first pure act, which provides composite reality that's the created world of matter and form, potentia and act. So, it's just it's just obvious, dude, right? God has to be this because this is better than that.

[00:16:07]Now, one thing that's great about I'll just say briefly about non-being, that uh Father Stanley talks about uh one of bits of This is the first volume of Orthodox Dogmatics, is that you want to use this project This is not the opposite for us.

[00:16:23]God has no opposite.

[00:16:25]God is not in any dialectical opposition to anything, to any metaphysical principle, idea, whatever.

[00:16:31]This is This is not inherently bad. It's not inherently evil. And it's not in opposition to being.

[00:16:38]Because if we thought if we thought that, right, then we're back in this dialectical thinking, that God has to have the opposite of himself in order to be who he is. Why is that a problem? Well, Aristotle Aristotle insistently took this doctrine and applied it the way it's supposed to be understood. He's actually more consistent than these people or these people.

[00:17:01]Because this doctrine means that if there's no potentia in God, there's no possibility that God could have done one thing over another thing.

[00:17:11]In other words, freely to create or not to create or to create this world or other worlds or multiple logically possible worlds?

[00:17:19]By the way, I'm sure you've all heard my joke about how we easily disprove open faultism.

[00:17:25]Is it logically possible that God could be create a world without the Pope and Aquinas? Yes.

[00:17:32]Then we don't need the Pope and Aquinas.

[00:17:36]There's no logical necessity to assume that.

[00:17:38]So, uh in terms of the created order, this leads to a necessary eternal creation. Why? Because you need the idea of potentia, you need the the ability for God to do or will different things.

[00:17:54]So, then he's not constrained to always be an eternal act, right?

[00:17:59]Now, when we get over here, we'll notice that there's going to be the problematic doctrine of the divine ideas of this system, which our system actually makes sense of, because we talk about the logoi.

[00:18:10]The logoi are not in the divine essence.

[00:18:15]But, for this >> [clears throat] >> to be the case, for God to be self-referencing, perpetual, circular thought thinking itself, notice that this is uh an idealized, almost an image of the Greek mind, right? It's like God is essentially what every Greek philosopher thought himself to be, right? Like, I'm the most intellectual guy, reasoning is clearly a higher faculty than the body.

[00:18:44]So, God must be like just reasoning.

[00:18:47]And what does God think about?

[00:18:49]It's awesome.

[00:18:51]He's like, so narcissistic.

[00:18:55]But, now seriously, the the Aristotelian God is a total self-referencing narcissist. He literally talks about it being self-referencing. Now, what about this self-referencing is is uh particularly useful for us here, is that this Unitarian conception of God is very similar to the Eunomian doctrine Eunomius, the early church heretic who took his divine simplicity very seriously such that he believed that the doctrine of ingeneracy or God being ungenerated, not generated, was literally who God is in his essence and literally who the Father is. The Father is ingenerate and is the divine essence.

[00:19:36]This is strict identity thesis. Right?

[00:19:40]So, just stop back for a moment and think about the Roman Catholic apologetic, how confused and how like all over the place they are when they counter on this point.

[00:19:50]They have missed the fundamental argument of the Cappadocians, Basil especially.

[00:19:58]Basil's whole point is to utilize Eunomius' potentia, right? It's referenced in Bradshaw's paper at the end, the divine concept of divine energies at the end.

[00:20:10]To refute identity thesis.

[00:20:13]So, if Basil is not teaching essence energy distinction, then he's not refuting Eunomianism. I mean, this is so obvious, right? And one thing that I'm going to get to at the end which you you're going to be probably surprised.

[00:20:27]Guess what? All of this gibberish is based on given autonomous reasoning, natural theology, and does not require any repentance, any purification of notions of these concepts through asceticism, [clears throat] through divine revelation.

[00:20:45]But guess what Basil says. Basil says, "No, none of this is going to work. The words aren't going to work. The divine names aren't going to work. We can't divinely name God unless we've undergone repentance, unless we purify a lot of these words and the predicates that we're using here, the names of earthly conceptions.

[00:21:06]And by that he doesn't mean they turn to the opposite themselves.

[00:21:09]He just simply means they become the correct doctrine of analogia, which is going to be not analogia entis, but analogia energy energeia for us, basically.

[00:21:26]That's going to be very different from the Thomistic system.

[00:21:30]So, >> [clears throat] >> one one one funny point that I noticed re- re-reflecting on these things was So, when we think about this and this, right? God possesses no form.

[00:21:52]God possesses no form because form applies to matter and form that was changeable, that which is in the created order.

[00:22:01]How is God the storehouse of the forms?

[00:22:09]But he possesses no form.

[00:22:10]But he's the storehouse of all the forms.

[00:22:12]But he's absolutely simple and everything that we say about him is identity thesis.

[00:22:20]Do you see what I'm saying? I mean, is this obvious yet, right? So, here's the Thomistic conception, there's the Tu conception. This is an aerosol, too, by the way, right?

[00:22:28]What do we mean by this? We heard the divine mind mentioned, okay?

[00:22:34]What does Aquinas say about the divine mind and the divine knowledge? So, this is God.

[00:22:42]The divine mind, the divine knowledge, right? These are just different ways of describing that thing right there.

[00:22:49]Okay? They're just words that do have a kind of descriptive like virtual distinction.

[00:22:56]But they're just ways to describe supposedly this thing.

[00:23:01]But this thing is not in space and time.

[00:23:04]It's outside of space and time. So, how do we know these words match up to this?

[00:23:08]Oh, well, you see, there's this created wall here. There's this this wall of time and space. And this thing has all these different causal things that it does, supposedly. Which actually, if that's the case, this doesn't have different cause.

[00:23:24]Right? It doesn't cause different It doesn't do different things, if that's the case. Okay?

[00:23:28]So, this divine mind is absolutely simple identity thesis thing here, generic theism from natural theology.

[00:23:35]The way we know this thing is that it does these different things to the created world.

[00:23:41]And the created world is in the here we are, right? We're perceiving these created effects.

[00:23:47]These created effects come into our mind, and then our mind has different notions.

[00:23:54]Our minds are chocolate chip cookies.

[00:23:57]Our minds have different notions of what that is, based on these different created effects. But I guess what? This is going to be a problem.

[00:24:04]Because these created effects and the created objects of the sensible world, this world, these are based on forms, I need the divine ideas.

[00:24:18]Guess where the divine ideas are?

[00:24:25]Okay.

[00:24:26]Those are different things.

[00:24:30]We said this.

[00:24:34]So, we don't actually know that there's different things in the divine essence.

[00:24:37]It also doesn't make any sense to say that there's different things in the divine essence.

[00:24:42]And the Roman Catholic and Thomistic response to this is simply to say, "Well, yeah, but like all of these different things are kind of arranged in a hierarchy, and so they're like supremely simple up at the top, and then they kind of like filter down and like a a a uh uh the uh uh uh into multiplicity, right? And I kind of think of it platonically, right? But again, that's begging the question because you told me that all I know about this thing is the creative effects on this side of this wall here between God and creatures.

[00:25:17]And let's notice something about this.

[00:25:20]If these things are opposites, being is opposite non-being, unity is opposite opposite of multiplicity, rest is opposite motion, uh is is that similar to that at all?

[00:25:36]No, it's not.

[00:25:38]And I'm going to go back to the latter in a second, but I'm going to run the terms of the from the Thomistic system. Wait a minute.

[00:25:45]So, Thomas wants us to have the idea of a perfectly simple essence or substance that's equivalent to pure act, it's equivalent to Aristotle's unmoved mover, first actualizer.

[00:25:58]So, he's one.

[00:26:01]He's timeless.

[00:26:03]He's unmoved. He's unchanging. He's simple.

[00:26:10]Those things are opposite these things.

[00:26:13]One is opposite many. Time is opposite eternity.

[00:26:18]Moved is opposite unmoved. Change and motion are opposite unchanging. Composed of matter and form is opposite of simplicity.

[00:26:25]If these things are opposite this thing, what is the analogia? The analogy?

[00:26:35]Because this says that that essence is like creatures how?

[00:26:50]Divine ideas, forms, the exemplars in the divine essence.

[00:26:55]Aquinas is very clear about that.

[00:26:57]These exemplars or forms become the patterns, the basis for all of the created things.

[00:27:04]The created things are multiple, they're moved, they're changing, etc. Now, so do you see the problem here?

[00:27:11]Wait a minute.

[00:27:14]The forms or ideas that are the patterns of creatures are based on the essence.

[00:27:19]But God's essence isn't like any creature. Duh, right? Is that not all Do you see what I'm getting at?

[00:27:26]There's no similarity between the thing that is absolute being, absolute unity, absolute rest, absolute eternality, absolutely unmoved, unchanging, and simple.

[00:27:37]Aquinas says, "No, there is a similarity based on likeness of being caused."

[00:27:43]Okay, but God isn't caused.

[00:27:46]So, he's the unmoved mover, the unactualized actualizer. [clears throat] So, there's no similarity. This whole position is based on an analogy of this being. What is the analogy of being?

[00:28:01]Okay.

[00:28:02]The created effects that we're seeing, that we're perceiving, causal chains, that is going to be a problem here.

[00:28:14]That we will address later.

[00:28:16]It's called occasionalism.

[00:28:18]This is tied to atomism.

[00:28:21]That, by the way, they didn't get from the Greeks, they got from Allah.

[00:28:25]Yeah, [snorts] right.

[00:28:27]So, so we have this divine mind, supposedly.

[00:28:33]What's a mind? It's an analogy to this.

[00:28:37]But do you see that the the more that we say the names of this thing, the giant cookie, this God, the unmoved cookie, we're not saying anything.

[00:28:49]And this is precisely why St. Gregory Palamas, as we'll see, says, "If you call God pure act himself, you're an atheist. This leads to atheism."

[00:28:59]And it also leads to not knowing that the created order is created.

[00:29:05]How can it be a created order when this needs something to actualize?

[00:29:13]There's no such thing as pure act if he's not acting to actualize something.

[00:29:17]Now, he's not actualizing himself because he's unmoved.

[00:29:20]So, what is the unmoved mover, the first actualizer, instead of the unactualized actualizer?

[00:29:26]What is he moving?

[00:29:28]Well, Aristotle says he's eternal and his self-referencing thoughts.

[00:29:33]Aristotle thought he's self-referencing thinking himself and his own ideas of the created things, and that eternally, cuz he never stopped, he was always thinking. That eternally birthed the world.

[00:29:48]So, Aristotle is more consistent than these people or these people because he understands from his own philosophy that the unmoved mover must have something to move.

[00:29:59]And to have something to move is something other than himself. He possesses no distinctions. Distinctions are features of the external world, the created world.