From Classical Metaphysics to Christian Theology

Abstract

This essay investigates the symbolic formation of the figure of God in Christianity, highlighting the structural continuity with classical Greek metaphysics. Rejecting essentialist or theological explanations, it argues that Plato and Aristotle do not anticipate Christian theology, but rather establish ontological functions — order, intelligibility, orientation — which are subsequently re-inscribed under a new figuration. The Platonic Demiurge and the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover are not theological gods, but conceptual operators that make the world legible and thought orientable. Christian theology reuses these functions, attributing language, will, and agency to them. Throughout the text, it is shown how the figure of the Christian God results from the synthesis between philosophical principles, mythical narratives, and religious symbolic devices. The goal is not to trace a linear genealogy, but to highlight how the divine function shifts between distinct symbolic regimes, maintaining a fundamental operative coherence: ensuring that the world is cosmos, not chaos.

Introduction

Understanding the figure of God in Christianity requires tracing back to the philosophical structures that allowed for its symbolic inscription. It is not an isolated invention nor a rupture with ancient thought, but a mutation: functions already active in classical metaphysics are reorganized under a new symbolic regime, the theological one. Plato and Aristotle do not offer religious attributes, but establish schemes of order, orientation, and intelligibility that will later be converted into narrative.

Christianity is born not in opposition to Greek philosophy, but as its reorganization. Structures that operated implicitly in philosophy — ordering chaos, guaranteeing cohesion, founding intelligibility — are re-inscribed as functions of an absolute subject. The difference is not in the content, but in the regime of inscription: the impersonal operator becomes a speaking character; the abstract structure, an instance endowed with will and word. The goal of this essay is not to trace doctrinal genealogies, but to recognize the continuity of certain operations: establishing order in becoming, making the world comprehensible, fixing a figure of meaning.

Plato and Aristotle are not merely historical antecedents, but founders of these operations, which Christianity will condense as attributes of God. The Demiurge organizes matter by reference to an eternal model; the Unmoved Mover orients the cosmos through the perfection of pure act. Neither of them is “God” in the theological sense, but both are conceptual operators that will be re-inscribed in a new symbolic field.

I. Plato: the Demiurge and the Good

Plato's philosophy arises from the experience of the instability of the sensible: a multiple, corruptible world, exposed to incessant becoming. The sensible, incapable of ensuring permanence or truth, demands a plane that does not dissolve in change. Hence the separation between the sensible and the intelligible — not as two substantial worlds, but as a symbolic gesture of inscription: the intelligible guarantees that the sensible can be interpreted. The Demiurge of the Timaeus appears in this context, not as a creator ex nihilo, but as an operator who contemplates the eternal model and reorganizes formless matter. The Demiurge inscribes proportion and measure in the chôra, an unstable receptacle saturated with possibilities. He does not create matter, but reconfigures it according to a rationality compatible with it. Its function is twofold: reading the intelligible as a relational matrix and inscribing it in the sensible as proportion and harmony. The cosmos results from this operative compatibility between the indeterminacy of matter and the measure of the model.

The demiurgic gesture is thus a response to an excess of possibilities, not a teleological imposition. Goodness is the principle of this operation. Plato affirms that the Demiurge acts out of goodness, but this is neither moral nor affective: it is an ontological principle of organization, that which stabilizes and orders. The Good, in this sense, is the condition for deciphering reality. This structure will later be re-inscribed in Christian theology as good creation: God creates because he is good. In Plato, however, goodness is not personal will, but the condition of order. The demiurgic gesture articulates operations that Christianity will recognize as divine: separating, naming, stabilizing.

In the Timaeus, each element is configured by mathematical proportions; the cosmos is a figure of rationality, not of arbitrariness. This rationality fulfills the function of making the world comprehensible, a function that theology will convert into the creative word, the expression of divine intelligence. The symbolic regime changes: where Plato speaks of proportion, theology will speak of the word; where there is an eternal model, there will be creative will.

Even more decisive is the figure of the Good, in Book VI of the Republic. The Good is the supreme principle, prior to the Ideas, the condition of their intelligibility. Just like the Sun in the visible world, it allows one to see, understand, and orient oneself. Without it, there is neither truth nor knowledge. Christian theology will transpose this figure to God as the source of light, truth, and being. The language changes, from philosophical analogy to dogmatic formulation, but the function is the same: ensuring coherence and orienting thought. The Platonic Good is not a subject; it does not intervene. It is a pure operative condition.

II. Aristotle: the Unmoved Mover

Aristotle takes up the Platonic matrix, but removes the demiurge as an agent. In place of the hand that imposes form, he establishes the Unmoved Mover: an instance that does not manufacture the world, but makes it intelligible as an end. As pure act, it does not intervene, but offers a reference of perfection. Movement does not result from external causality: it is structured by relation to an ultimate term that confers direction and cohesion.

In Book XII of the Metaphysics, the Unmoved Mover is “thought thinking itself”: self-sufficient reality, pure actuality without becoming. By thinking itself, it becomes the exemplary form for every entity to achieve its entelechy. The cosmos is not born from creatio ex nihilo, but from a finalistic ordering: not divine hands, but orientation towards the best possible.

The intelligibility of the Aristotelian universe thus depends on final causality. Each being finds identity because it tends towards the actualization of what it can be; the Mover guarantees coherence not through action, but through contemplative excellence. Chaos does not prevail because everything is oriented towards its own proper end. This architecture prepares the theological re-inscription. By excluding demiurgic agency, Aristotle fixes an absolute principle which, without intervening, is the condition of order.

Christianity will inherit this matrix and reorganize it into a new symbolic regime: the formal presence converts into a character who speaks and legislates through the word. The difference is clear: where Aristotle describes a contemplative reference, theology presents a subject endowed with will and language. In Plato, the goodness of the Demiurge was the principle of ordering; in Aristotle, this goodness is transposed to the perfection of the pure act. God, here, is absolute thought: independent of the world, but indispensable to its intelligibility.

III. Biblical Re-inscription of the Function

Genesis opens with the foundational gesture of separation and naming: “let there be light,” and there was light. The world is no longer just a cosmos intelligible by proportions, but creation enunciated by the word. In this transposition, philosophy gives way to religion. The Demiurge contemplated eternal models, the Mover attracted through perfection; the biblical God intervenes and legislates. His word is a performative gesture: to say is to create, to order is to institute. The coherence of the world no longer rests on mathematical proportion or ontological finality, but on the word-law that founds cosmos and community.

This displacement is also affective. The goodness of the Demiurge and the attraction of the Mover condense into divine love: contemplative desire transforms into love that chooses, seals covenants, and demands fidelity. But this love is an asymmetrical bond, capable of welcoming and subjugating. Hence the constitutive contradictions of the biblical text: the same God who presents himself as the source of love is also a severe legislator, who punishes and legitimizes wars. Love and violence coexist as attributes of the same subject. Religion thus becomes a political instrument. The biblical God does not only guarantee the order of the cosmos: he regulates behavior, institutes laws, and organizes collective destinies.

IV. The Christian Synthesis

It is the New Testament that will take this re-inscription to the extreme, condensing philosophical and religious functions into a single figure. The prologue of the Gospel of John opens with a formula that resonates with both philosophy and myth: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). Creation is no longer just separation and naming: it is the eternal Word, Logos, the absolute principle. In Revelation, the glorified Christ affirms: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (22:13). Here we explicitly find the duality that was already hinted at in the Unmoved Mover: efficient cause and final cause, beginning and end of all things. Christianity unites, in a single voice, what Plato and Aristotle had kept in distinct figures.

The structural convergence is, therefore, evident. Plato provides goodness as the ordering principle; Aristotle provides the cause without cause, efficient and final; the Old Testament provides the narrating and legislating subject. Christianity condenses these three dimensions into a single figure: a God who creates out of goodness, who attracts through love, who legislates through the word. What was an abstract structure becomes an absolute subject. What was a philosophical principle converts into religious narrative. What was the intelligibility of the cosmos transforms into the politics of humanity.

Conclusion

Christianity, as it crystallizes in the history of the West, cannot be understood as a pure revelation, detached from the operations of classical thought. What is presented in it as absolute novelty — a single God, creator, legislator, beginning and end of all things — is, in fact, the result of a symbolic condensation in which previously formulated philosophical functions are re-inscribed in narrative and religious form. The thesis imposed here is clear: there is a philosophical paternity of the Christian figure of God. Christianity does not invent the divine structure ex nihilo; it inherits, adapts, and reconfigures the principles that Plato and Aristotle had already inscribed on the horizon of metaphysics, adding to them the narrative voice of the Hebrew tradition and the affective density of faith.

Christianity, thus, is less rupture than synthesis. It is philosophy turned religion, it is metaphysics made narrative, it is abstraction converted into institution. The Christian God is the Demiurge who gained a voice, the Unmoved Mover who became love, the philosophical goodness that became law and salvation.

“The Christian God was not born only of revelation: he was born of philosophy. He is the beginning and the end, the cause and the destiny, the love and the law — the religious condensation of the oldest philosophical necessity: that the world be legible.”

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