The Search for the Intelligible Good

THE SEARCH FOR THE INTELLIGIBLE GOOD K ISTOTLE'S definition of the good as that which all things desire is acceptable in any of the historic philosophies except the materialistic. Men of good will and philosophic vision have always been able to attain to the concept of the Immanent or the Transcendent Good. However, it is only in Judaeo-Christian thought that there has been any development of the concept of the Immanent and Transcendent Good, the God Who loves all things 1 as well as the Good whom all things love. Eastern theologies, whether indigenous or transplanted to the West, find the immanent good of natural existence a perpetual stumbling-block in the rise to the Transcendent One. On the other hand, Western theology, when separated from Messianic thought, either before or after Christ, never succeeds in making a systematic identification of the Immanent and the Transcendent Good. When Heraclitus discovered the Everlasting Logos, he found it only as a principle immanent in the flux. And the sovereignty held by the Platonic ideas over the realm of bei~g is ordained to the perpetual renewal of the temporal order. Even the One of the Parmenides is still involved in the Heraclitian flux at the end of the dialogue in spite of all the Pythagorea:n and Eleatic rationalism which has gone before. Aristotle, alone of all non-Messianic thinkers, succeeded in achieving a statement of true transcendence and a statement of true immanence. But by restricting the contemplation of God to the Mind of God, Aristotle also fails to identify the Transcendent and the Immanent Good. The universe of Aristotle is moved by God to the Good. It is not moved for and in God, as it is to .St. Paul. To Aristotle, n:o less than to Plato, the forms found in nature are to be perpetually renewed. Once 1 The Book of Wisdom, 11, 25. 492 THE SEARCH FOR THE INTELLIGIBLE GOOD 493 away from the First Mover, they have a completely autonomous life of their own. The Platonic insistence that the truly real is the ideal sets the historical pattern of Western idealism by becoming the scepticism of the Middle and New Academies. Meanwhile, under the influence of Theophrastus, Peripateticism devoted itself to the exploration of the natural sciences. The search for the Good was continued in the Alexandrine age only by the Stoics. Moreover the Stoic emphasis on the doctrine of Providence gave to their concept of God a realism in theology which only the Hebrews had asserted previously. To the Stoics evil is not the inevitable result of natural imperfection, as in Plato and Aristotle . The concept of evil is rather the product of human ignorance . This doctrine is, of course, an extension to the physical world of the Socratic doctrine of moral evil. And it amounts to the broadening of a basic error rather than a basic truth. The denial of intrinsic imperfection is, of course, the weak point in the Stoic dialectic. But the important point for the history of the search for the Good is the unyielding Stoic insistence that all reality is reducible to a Divine Purpose. Neither the early nor the later Stoics were ever able to support their statements of the Providence of God by any arguments except ad hominem. They did, of course, revive the Socratic argument from Design. But to the inescapable question: why is the Design so obviously imperfect from the human point of view, the Stoics could say only that it is the human point of view which is imperfect. That is good rhetoric but it does not answer the objection. The Stoics maintained the doctrine of Providence against their opponents. But they did not establish it. After two centuries of controversy with Epicureans, Peripatetics , and ~ceptics, the Stoic position was synthesized with Pythagorean mysticism by the Stoic Posidonius. The resulting Neo-Pythagoreanism attained a considerable influence until it was finally absorbed hy the Neo.,Platonic school. But the union of Stoicism and mysticism was made at the expense of the basic Stoic orientation toward nature as good in itself. And 5 494 JAMES F; KELEHER Epictetus revived an historically pure Stoicism by insisting...