Supernatural asa Western Category [BENSON SALER 1 In “Ojibwa Ontology, Belavivr, aud World View," Professor Hallowell writes that the appellation “supernatural persons,” if applied to characters in the myths of the northern Ojibwa, “is completely misleading, if for no other reason than the fact that the concept of ‘supernatural’ presupposes a concept of the ‘natural.’ ‘The latter is not present in Ojibwa thought” (1960:28). He adds that “It is unfortunate that the natural-supernatural dichotomy has ‘been so persistently invoked by many anthropologists in describing the outlook of peoples in cultures other than our own” (1960:28). Like many another anthropologist in recent years, Hallowell [Rowson SALER it anociate profesor and chalmin of the Department of Anthropotogy at Brandes Univeriy. He his caried out fc work among Quiche in Guatemala and Guajiro tn Colombia and: Venczel T wish to acknowledge my ineblednes to Dr Alexander Altmann, W: tiam’A.Johmon, nd Douglas). Swart for thee ital comments a catty draft of this paper ast abo rate to Dr. Owsel Temkin fort Simulating ‘scuson of the developcst of nodons about magic and Iodine as they seat to ie about “nature” andthe natural Another stent of the Ojiiwa had made + somewhat similar point thai “to ell these beings supernatoral tightly misntrprets the. Tans tonception” Gennes 1185:20"as quoted by Livi Straus, 1965 [155230 jenna. howeter, went on 10 aut that thee beings "are t pase of the ‘strode of three no thas ma bias ee Sn cra respect.32 © Erios ‘wars us that “a thoroughgoing ‘objective’ approach to the study of cultures cannot be achieved solely by projecting upon those cultures categorical abstractions derived from Western thought. For, in a broad sense, the latter are a reflection of our cultural sub- jectivity” (1960:21). But Hallowell does not go so far as some of the more extreme proponents of this viewpoint. That is, as his use of the word “solely” would seem to suggest, he does not call for the rigid suppression or suspension of our categories. It is appro- priate that he does not, for it is difficult to imagine how we might apprehend the natives’ representations in any way that is thoroughly independent of our own. Rather, with his characteristic judicious- ness, Hallowell advises us to adopt “a perspective which includes ‘an analysis of the outlook of the people themselves as a comple- jentary procedure” (1960:21)—complementary, that is, to the unavoidable employment of our own categorical abstractions in recognizing problems and in groping for understandings. Ethnoscientists have sensitized us to the high probability of dis torting the natives’ perspectives should we simplistically impose our categories on them. That point has been so cogently and force- fully argued that I need not belabor it here. I do, however, want to focus attention on a related danger—a subtle danger that may well be severely pernicious in its own right insofar as the ethno- graphic enterprise is concerned, If, as Hallowell and others sup- pose, we do make some significant use of our own categories in the discovery of native categories and in the refinement of our under- standings, it behooves us to reflect on the semantics and pragmatics of our own categories. Various anthropologists have justly decried the use of Western folk categories as if they were well-explored analytical constructs, In point of fact, we may sometimes entertain rather foggy notions of what those categories supposedly mean in four own society. In such cases the casual application of our cate- gory labels to various of the collective representations of other peoples becomes doubly problematical and, in the final analysis (should there be a final analysis), it is likely to prove only speci- ously convenient. Such, I submit, may be the case for “superna- tural” in the exploration of non-Western world views. Hallowell (1960:28) quotes Arthur ©. Lovejoy (1935:12) to the point that the word nature “is probably the most equivocal in the vocabulary of the European peoples,” and he notes but does notSUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY #93, elaborate on the statement (save for two references) that “the natural-supernatural antithesis has had its own complex history in Western thought.” In this paper I take up certain highlights in the development of ideas about the supernatural in Western civili- zation. I do so in the conviction that investigations of this sort can yield three sorts of benefits over and above the intellectual pleasure that they afford, First, a clarification of the different meanings that are likely to attach to our own folk categories will better enable us to decide whether or not we might defensibly and usefully employ any of those senses in our professional deliberations. With regard to super. natural, for example, there are two distinct questions that come to mind: whether or not to utilize the term in describing discrete non-Western world views and whether or not to make use of the term in formulating general definitions of religion. Second, a deeper appreciation of our Western categories, gained through the exercise of exploring them, ought to sharpen our sen- sitivities and sensibilities in exploring other peoples’ categories, Third, tracing the developmental histories of various Western categories affords us a rare opportunity to study in great time depth diverse processes attendant on the formulation and modifi- cation of world views. When we attempt to investigate such pro- ‘cesses among nonliterate populations we usually lack much in the way ofa rich and deep longitudinal perspective. Fortunately, how- ever, twenty-five hundred years of Western thought are available to us, thanks in no small measure to generations of humanist scholars who have dedicated themselves to preserving and clarify- ing it. Within the Western tradition we can trace, often with con. siderable confidence, how people challenged, modified, or rejected each other's constructs and models in light of their differential apperceptions of a multiplicity of problems over a vast span of time. 1 ‘The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first definition of supernatural “That is above nature; belonging to a higher realm or system than that of nature; transcending the powers or the ordi- nary course of nature.” In questionnaires that I administered to three populations of undergraduate students at Brandeis Univer-34 © ETHOS sity, some of the definitions of supernatural given by the respon- dents approximated fairly closely to that definition. Others, how- fever, diverged, sometimes in the direction of emphasizing that things supernatural are not directly amenable to sensory percep- tion or human control and understanding, ‘These definitional pro- pensities, moreover, were often locked into vague or seemingly contradictory statements, But while the definitions given varied widely in content and in relative sophistication, those student re- spondents who were asked to sort objects as either “supernatural” ‘or “not supernatural” exhibited considerable convergence in the sorting task. Thus, for example, most agreed that “Dracula” is “supernatural” whereas Frankenstein's monster is not; in justifying the latter sorting, respondents variously stated that the monster ade,” that Baron Frankenstein was a “scientist” ap- plying his “science,” and so forth? “Most social scientists who employ the term “supernatural” in the sources that I have examined do not state precisely what it is that they mean by it. While there seems to be, in elect, a wide ‘consensus as to the actual sortings that are to be made in including things under the rubric supernatural, definitions, with certain notable exceptions, are usually skimpy if, indeed, they are given at all. Broadly speaking, however, I discern two major applications of the term in the social science literature. ‘The first is a very general usage: supernatural is employed as a broad cover term for a variety of postulated entities, forces, ot “beings” that are usually denominated “spiritual” or “superhu- man” and whose effects surpass those possible of achievement by ‘ordinary human capabilities (see, for example, Spiro 19673). ‘The sccond major application does not really contrast with the first; rather, it explicates and refines it, though by so doing it em- bodies or tends to suggest certain antimetaphysical biases that the more general application does not endorse in any deliberate or immediate fashion, Durkheim (1965 [1912)) provides us with an example, He maintains, as does EvansPritchard (1937:80-81) and Hallowell (1960:28), that supernatural presupposes or entails some concept of the “natural.” “In order to say that certain things are supernatural,” Durkheim writes, “it is necessary to have the senti- ‘ment that a natural order of things exists, that is to say, that the 42. The Golem of Prague seemed to impress the respondents a6 bit more problematia, though mos concluded that it is "nuperatural”SUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY "35 phenomena of the universe are bound together by necessary rela- tions, called laws" (1965:41). But he elaborates on this theme to a greater extent, and with greater severity, than does either Hallowell or EvansPritchard. By “supernatural,” says Durkheim, “is understood all sorts of things which surpass the limits of our knowledge; the supernatural is the world of the mysterious, of the unknowable, of the un- understandable” (1965:39). But this sense of mystery “is not of primitive origin” (1965:43). The forces in which the primitive believes, though different from those of modern science, are for him “no more unintelligible than are gravitation and electricity for the physicist of today” (1965:40). Even though those forces are frequently thought of “under the form of spiritual beings or con- scious wills" this in itself is no proof that they are irrational, for “The reason has no repugnance a priori to admitting that the socalled inanimate bodies should be directed by intelligences” (1965:40). For the primitive, as Durkheim conceives him, the uni- verse is not really terribly complex, let alone mysterious, “It is science and not religion which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand” (1965:42), and it is onr re- cently acquired appreciation of “the immutability and the inflexi bility of the order of things” (1965:41) that disposes us to con- template posited exceptions as being marvelous and mysterious. Indeed, “In order to arrive at the idea of the supernatural,” events s0 labeled must be conceived of as being “impossible”—“that is to say, irreconcilable with an order which, rightly or wrongly, appears to us to be implied in the nature of things” (1965:43).8 This idea 4. While both Hallowell and Evans-Pritchard conceive of the supernatural as‘being opposed to the natural and ay being inexplicable by reerence to fatural lay neither of them, insofar as Tam aware, expliily endorsed the “tense of the Impossible” recommended by Durkheim (1865-8) and accept to an extent by Lévy-Brust (1998:), Evane-Pritchardexpresed,himelt tse words: “We have a notion of an ordered world conforming to whet We cal natural laws, but some people in oor sclety believe that mysterious things cin happen which cannot be accounted for by reference to natural laws and which therefore are held to transcend theta, and. we ‘all thexe Happenings supernatural. To us supernatural means very much the she a abnormal or extraordinary” (1987:%0). But “abnormal” and “extraordinary 4 T understand those words, are not quite the same thing as “impossible Nor docs a failure to account for something by refeenee to naar ce ‘ecesaily mean that that something fe "tresonllable” with natural le Levy-Drubl maintains that “alchough primltves =. tan clealy dilesen- tite things that appear supernatural from those thai occur tt he ordaty furs of nature, they rarely imagine them ax separate, for in them. he sense of the impomile is leking” (1096: The supernatural, in his view,36 * ErHos of a necessary order, Durkheim avers, has been constructed by the positive sciences, The contrary idea, the idea of the supernatural “as we understand it,” is dependent on it and thus of very recent origin: “even the greatest thinkers of classical antiquity never suc ceeded in becoming fully conscious of it” (1965:41). It would there- fore be inappropriate to base a universal definition of religion on beliefs in “supernatural” entities or forces. Moreover, once we admit that “the phenomena of the universe are bound together by necessary relations, called laws,” whatever is contrary to them must ipso facto appear to be irrational, for those laws express “the man- ner in which things are logically related” (1965:41).. ‘Now in Durkheim's statements about “the idea of the super- natural, as we understand it,” the phrase “as we understand it” is quite important. Some may be inclined to dismiss his stipulated understanding because it strikes them as suggesting a brassy pos tivism, To do so, however, would be as biographically unjust as it is argumentatively unreasonable: Durkheim avoided describing himself as a positivist, and he distinguished his general intellectual position from “the positivist metaphysics” of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer (Lukes 1972:72-73). Of real relevance to the {question of whether or not we ought to adopt Durkheim’s under- standing is the matter of intellectual history. ‘The term “supernatural” and cognate words in various Euro- pean languages were employed long before the rise of the modern natural sciences. Durkheim insists that “the idea of the super- natural” in his sense “dates only from today” because it depends on the “idea of universal determinism,” and that idea is “a conquest of the positive sciences” (1965:41). What, then, about other, older ‘meanings that attach to supernatural? Do they not deserve some hearing? One also wonders if Durkheim might not have overstated the ‘case somewhat in asserting the contemporaneity of ideas about “natural laws,” “universal determinism,” and the sense of the “impossible.” Modern scientific thought does of course differ con- TW manifesed in primitive mentation by attention to “wneen pow prompted by emotional dispositions, He argues that soperaatara i li Fstey an “ective category.” hat fs that ie primary sigaifeance must be Understood as eing Inrgely emotional and evoeaive. While primitive man tay not confuse the worlds of the natural and the supernatural “in their fceenc,” he tells us, "eaten happens that he docs not diferntate between thea" ms)SUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY "37 siderably from that of Greek philosophy or of High Scholasticism, It has—more or less—jettisoned notions of primal substances, es- sential essences, and first causes, emancipating itself to a notable extent from obvious dependence on metaphysical speculation Nevertheless, there are broad continuities in thought that span millenia: a conviction that the exercise of human reason can dis- cover order in the manifold phenomena of nature, and the ancillary conviction that that order can be described and in some sense ac- counted for by the framing of general propositions or lawlike statements. In pursuit of their inquiries into the order of nature, some of the premoderns approximated in varying degrees to conceptions of natural law, determinism, and even “impossibility” of the sort espoused by Durkheim's scientific contemporaries—they came close enough, at any rate, to make room for the supernatural by speculative contrast, though their reasoned systems did not always implicate it. Aristotle, after all, viewed the universe as operating in a rational and intelligible manner, according to necessity but not transcendental design, The Stoics were celebrated for their interest in natural laws— and castigated, eventually, by various Christian writers for their materialist theology. Saint ‘Thomas Aquinas, who played a major role in developing a technical theology of the supernatural, was hardly adverse to conceiving of the operation of natural laws, and, like Durkheim, he insisted on an indissoluble association between such laws and rationality. And when it comes to conceiving of “impossible” events (Durkheim 1965:43), who can match Tertullian in the shock value of parados ‘The Son of God was crucified; it is not shameful because it ought to ‘cause shame. And the Son of God died; it is believable because it can't be grasped. And having been entombed, he arose; itis certain because it is impossible (De Carne Christi V, 4). Any concept of the supernatural would seem to require or pre- 4. This is rather less the ease inthe social and prychologialsclences than Inthe “phyical” (rom the Grech) or "natural" (fom the Tatin scence. Sch words ah "mind, "subject elt! ‘peson "the individual to sy nothing of "value," John Dewey (10442) reminds us “are more than tinged in thet furrent usage (which alfees wily-silly philosophical formulation) with Signtcations they absorbed ftom belief of an extanatral characters There is almost no word employed in psychological or societal analyse and dese. on that does not tell thi Fnfence38 = ErHos suppose some concept of the natural. The reverse, however, is not true. Various of “the greatest thinkers of classical antiquity” ar- rived at rather sophisticated ideas about nature and the natural order without requiring some contrastive category of a transcen- dental or wholly separated supernatural order. For some the most interesting opposition was conceptualized as a contrast between nature and art. And, or so I shall argue, even Christian thinkers through the fifth century did not really develop theologically sig: nificant usages of supernatural. This generalization admits of some exceptions, to be sure. The most notable is probably Saint Cyril of Alexandria (4. 444), He employed the Greek expression hupér phuisin in his theology of grace when postulating man’s elevation ‘above nature’ through Christ (Kenny 1967:812). Generally speak- 1g however, for the Church Fathers, as for many Jews of that and earlier times, the most arresting and crucial of oppositions was between creator and creature, Nevertheless, a naturalsupernatural opposition took root and flourished in the soil of Christianity. When we examine statements about the Order of Grace offered by certain mediaeval schoolmen we encounter it in blossom. The sowing of the seeds from which it sprang, however, occurred long before that, mm ‘The sixth century 8.c. School of Miletus is generally credited ‘with beginning critical philosophy in Western civilization. Those Tonian Grecks developed critical attitudes toward received doc- trines and myths, and among them it was apparently not unusual for students to propound theories that explicitly diverged from those of their masters. As Karl Popper (1972:348) admiringly puts it, “doubt and criticism . .. become . .. part of the tradition of the school,” and in the course of critical discussions “observation is called in as a witness.” ‘The Milesian philosophers are of interest to us not only because of their critical attitude, but also because they engaged in syste- matic speculation about phiisis, a term that is often glossed into English as ‘nature’ (the Greek Fathers of the Church employed that term; churchmen writing in Latin substituted the Latin word ‘natura for it). The Milesians came to be known as phtsikoi, ‘physi cists, or phusidlogoi, ‘students’ or ‘theorists’ of phiisis, ‘The term phtisis is polysemic, and its various meanings andSUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY "39 career in Greek thought are difficult to deal with briefly. In Sand- bach’s concise summation, the word literally means ‘growth’, “then “the way a thing grows’, and by extension ‘the way a thing acts and behaves’. By a further extension it came to mean ‘the force that ‘causes a thing to act and behave as it does’ (1975:31). Jaeger (1947:20) points out that it denotes the act of phinai, “the process of growth and emergence,” but that it also includes the source of origin of things—"that from which they have grown, and from which their growth is constantly renewed—in other words, the reality underlying the things of our experience.” ‘The luminaries of the Milesian School were Thales, Anaxi- mander, and Anaximenes, In a more-or-less conventional view of them (see, for example, Collingwood 1945), they purportedly sup- posed that the multiplicity of different objects encountered in experience derived from the existence or action of some original ‘substance’ or ‘ground principle’ (Jaeger 1947). Our knowledge of the Milesians, however, is scanty indeed. The major source on them is Theophrastus, one of Aristotle's students, and the small corpus of fragments attributed to them is in lange measure dubi- ous. Stokes declares that “Practically any statement concerning Milesian linguistic usage is based on nothing but conjecture” (1971:64), so that we can neither accept nor reject with certainty the ofevoiced claim that the Milesians were principally concerned with how the many things of heaven and earth arose from one thing, the one becoming many. In any event, virtually nowhere in the conventional picture of the Milesians do we find any suggestion of clear transcendence, of a creator being outside of nature (see, however, Collingwood 1945:82). Quite the contrary, in fact, seems to be the case. In Guthrie's pointed historical characterization, “no European” before the Milesians “had set out to satisfy his curiosity about the world in the faith that its apparent chaos concealed a permanent and in- telligible order, and that the natural order could be accounted for by universal causes operating within nature itself and discoverable by human reason,” and that in attempting so to account for the natural order the Milesians “consciously rejected the mythical and religious tradition of their ancestors, in particular its belief in the agency of anthropomorphic gods” (19675441). Greck naturalism took account of ta énta, ‘the things that are’, and it sought to make them comprehensible, While it is true that40. * Eros the philosophers called in “observation . . . asa witness.” they dis. agreed among themselves as to the relative weighting of sensate experience and reason. Parmenides of Elea thrust the latter into sharp relief, claiming that reality is unitary and unchanging, that itcan be apprehended only by thought, and that the sensible world, deceives us. ‘The Eleatic preference for reason over the testimony of the senses later reached perhaps its most elevated development in some of the writings of Plato. In various of his works the intelligible is powerfully distinguished from the sensible and we are confronted by the famous theory of forms. The theory of forms is popularly taken to be the core of “Platonism.” It is, indeed, with regard to the ontology of forms (as expressed, eg, in the Phaedo) that we encounter Platonic transcendence. A plate made by a potter is an imperfect circle; our senses deceive us if we suppose that it is per- fectly round. But a perfect circle does exist: it exists as a concept in a superior world of concepts that can be apprehended only by reason. The ideal forms of that world are eternal and immutable. They are, if you will, more real than their transitory, mutable approximations in the world of sensate experience. Platonic trans- cendence exalts the perfect over the imperfect, the changeless over the changing, and it celebrates the superiority of ratiocination over dependence on sensation. It does not, however, coincide with “su- pernatural,” either in that term's common contemporary accepta- tions or in the meaning assigned to it by Durkheim. (Nor does the artisan-god of the Timaeus appear to be supernatural in any signi- ficant metaphysical sense.) We do not find some clearly recognizable sense of our “super natural” in Aristotle any more than in Plato, and this despite Aristotle’ talk about the necessity of a“ in nature. Avis. toile (A. 822 1c.) gives several somewhat different definitions of nature, but for our purposes it will sufice to cite this passage in his writings: nature in the primary and strict sense is the essence of things which hhave in themselves, as such, a source of movement; for the matter is called the nature because it is qualified to receive this, and processes of becoming and growing are called nature because they are move- ‘ments proceeding from this. And nature in this sense is the source of the movement of natural objects, being present in them somehow, either potentially or in complete reality. (Metaphysics, Delta 10158)SUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY #41 We read in the Physics (257b), however, that “it is impossible that that which moves itself should in its entirety move itself.” Aristotle's theory of nature, as Woodbridge (1965:55) notes, is largely a theory of motion. In accounting for the movements of natural things, Aristotle proposed that there is an ultimate cause of motion, a Prime Mover separate from the world of nature, an Unmoved Mover which is immaterial, eternal, and immutable, and which we may call God (theds). The Aristotelian Prime Mover, however, does not act by free will. It is, as Maimonides pointed out, an “intellectual principle” in a theory of causality (Wolfson 1941:152), a final cause in an order of endless necessity. The world is uncreated and eternal, and God is not its designer. God, how ever, is the ultimate source of regularity and purposive action in nature because imperfect nature strives to imitate God’s perfection, Aristotle's order of nature is ultimately an order of teleological striving that admits of a transcendental causal principle but not of supernatural design and determination. ‘We do not encounter the supernatural among the greatest of the Greek philosophers, nor do we find it among their chief rivals, the poets. The poets, who tried to convey truth through metaphor and to invoke it by touching the emotions, in effect sang of two analytic cally distinguishable sorts of gods. ‘One sort of god is an anthropomorphic being. He (or she) is filled with purpose and very often passion, We meet such gods in Hesiod, where we find that they themselves are created, engen- dered, or generated, We meet them also in Homer, where it be- ‘comes clear that the gods are part of nature, not outside of it. They differ from men in being deathless—this is the hallmark of the divine—and in having greater powers, But they, too, are subject to their moira, their lot or portion, their destiny. The other sort of god is an abstract principle, a depersonalized verity that is a “god’” because it endures far longer than does an individual person, ‘The poets’ gods, in short, are by no means “supernatural,” and the Greek term theds does not have quite the same meanings as Judaeo-Christian-Islamic words for God: ‘The question, as Wilamowitz acutely observed in Der Glaube der Heltenen, is never really, what will we say of gods (or, by extension, spiritual realities), but what will we say is a god: how widely will we choose to extend the concept Theos, which is essentially a predicate,42, © erHos not a subject, to any number of phenomena which we find important and meaningful? So that when Euripides writes (Helen 560), “Recog- nizing friends is also a god,” we have to conclude that everything else in the “supernatural” apparatus of classical civilization in a sense means that which is eternal, uncontrollable by human plan ‘or will, and possibly, therefore, somehow sacred, but in no way superior to, antithetical to, or a substitute for, human ideals, aspirations, or goals (Douglas J. Stewart, personal communication), ‘The classical Greeks, philosopher and poet alike, sometimes made use of the adjective huperphués. It is tempting to gloss it ‘super- natural'—it could conceivably be used to mean that. In classical usage, however, it meant (depending on context) ‘overgrown’, ‘tangled’, ‘enormous’, ‘monstrous’, ‘outlandish’, and so forth— even, in some contexts, ‘superior’. It has the primary sense of ‘growing above ground’. We find it used, for example, in Demo- ss somewhat “"Tylorian” theory of the origin of religion. In the tradition passed on to us by Sextus Empiricus (Diels 1960:178, Sext. adv. math. IX 19, Democ. B, 166), Democritus envisaged the images that people see in their dreams and identify as apparitions of the gods as “megdla te kal huperphué kai diisphtharta mén’ ‘Targe and exceeding human stature and hard to destroy’. Exceed: ing human stature, but not “supernatural,” “as we understand it. ‘The Latin expression, supra naturam excedens, was employed rather like the Greek huperphues, and it seems doubtful that the Romans arrived at an explicit formulation of the supernatural. ‘They were interested, to be sure, in the uncanny, but we have litle reason to suppose that they drew a sharp boundary between a natural realm and a preternatural-that-issupernatural realm, Like the Greeks, the Romans seemed to regard the gods as products of a natural order rather than its creators, and hence the participation of the gods in that order was not supernatural. v When we tum to early Christianity, the intellectual currents flow more swiftly toward the supernatural. We find in early Chris- tianity a vigorous emphasis on a transcendental creator, an empha- sis that derives in the main from Jewish sources! 5 At diferent times and in diferent places individuals, with oF without followings, have advocated the immanence of God in the world rather than the deity: transcendent separation from it, Such persone have appearedSUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY = 43, In Hebrew thought, Raven (1953:26) observes, “God's relation- ship to the world was represented as external and transcendental.” God creates the world and all that it contains in successive acts, in 4 sequence of verbal fiats (let there be light’, ‘let there be an ex- ppanse in the midst of the water’, etc.), each of which is descriptively preceded in the Book of Genesis by the formula “vayomer elohim,” “And God said’. The Hebrew “Logos,” Jaeger (1947:16-17) writes, “isa substantialization of an intellectual property or power of God the creator, who is stationed outside the world,” and it contrasts sharply with the Greek idea of gods who “are stationed inside the world . . . and are generated by the mighty power of Eros, who likewise belongs within the world as an all-engendering primitive force. The early Fathers of the Church accepted the Jewish view of a transcendental creator apart from nature, and they accepted the idea of revelation as a source of knowledge about him. But while it might be argued that supernatural could be posited for them as a covert category or “cryptotype,” they apparently did not employ it as an overt concept. Kenny (1967:812) tells us that no word that might be glossed ‘supernatural’ is to be found in the New Testax ment, the patristic writings of the early centuries, or the ancient Titurgical texts. The fundamental opposition celebrated by the Church Fathers was not between the supernatural and the natural, but rather, it seems to me, between the creator and his creation. Indeed, the major in-house debate over the nature of Christ im- mediately referred to those latter opposites. Given an uncomprom. ising monism, it was argued that if Christ were of the same ‘being’ or ‘substance’ as the Father, he would pertain to the domain of the creator, whereas if he were of a similar ‘being’ or ‘substance’ he would merely be a creature, a creation, regardless of how otherwise exalted and powerful he might be, ‘The domain of creation included not only human beings and other objects that we would describe as “natural,” but also entities that we should probably term “spiritual”: angels, for example, and demons. God (in whatever number of Persons) is clearly separate from all that he created. One of the interesting things about this portioning of objects to categories is its lack of iso- ‘among eeiebranis in Judaism, Chrsianity, and sam, and womeume the intimacy or equation between Gad and nature that they depleted. Induced others to Tabel them "pantheists”44." ernos morphy with our contemporary assignment of objects. We, of course, would put angels and demons in the same box as God, and label it “supernatural,” while putting human beings, elephants, and whatnot into a different box, labeled “natural.” The early Church Fathers did not divide up things in that way, however, Decause our natural-supernatural distinction was not salient for them. The creator-creation opposition was what held their atten- tion. When, then, one of our foremost contemporary authorities on the development of Christian thought describes that patristic opposition under the rubric of “The Supernatural Order” (Peli- kan 1971:182-141), he may well be engaging in a projection of categorical abstractions of the sort that Hallowell (1960:21) char- acterized as “a reflection of our cultural subjectivity.”* “The relationship between creator and creation contained in the pivotal patristic opposition was carried to something of an extreme by Saint Augustine (d. 430). He held that all of creation ‘existed at the will of God. The ‘natural’ is epiphenomenal to God's pleasure and is dependent on it for its continuance. Indeed, all of nature represents God's intervention and abiding interest, and nature itself is in this sense miraculous (City of God, X, 12). This formulation effectively rules out a stable naturalsupernatural dichotomy. “The eventual development of a clear concept of the superna. tural in Christian theology was promoted both by dialogues with, heretics and by the influence of Neoplatonie philosophy. In the early centuries of its history, Christian dogma was chal- Tenged by an assemblage of doctrines collectively referred to as “Gnosticism.” In a broad sense Christianity was itself a species of cought salvation through ‘knowledge’ (gnosis) gained by revelation, In a narrow sense (the sense used here), however, Gnosticism consisted of teachings, sometimes promul- gated by persons who styled themselves Christians, that were un- acceptable to mainstream Christianity. Many of the Gnostics taught that the spiritual was inherently good whereas the physical-material ‘was inherently evil, and that men of knowledge might liberate 6. In a somewhat anslogou case—Hoa's (1010 (1027) gloss of evo vakiud erm ay respectively, supernatural and “profane’, and his descrip ton of what belongs under cach ‘subric-Wemer Colin has obser that ‘natural and “spermato” are nat kept distinct in ou tener of the words, and --. Hous would probably have done beter to Bind diferent Ege Tish words Co amslave these’ Kwaklatlexpresions” (106425.SUPERNATURAL AS A WESTERN CATEGORY ™ 45, their souls from the corruption of the material world. Salvation for the Gnostics was a freeing of the spiritual from whatever pre- vented it from attaining true spiritual coherence. Patristic Christianity also recognized a distinction between mat- ter and spirit (matter, indeed, was created by spirit), and it pic- tured a chasm between good and evil. It did not, however, endorse the Gnostic notion that the physical-material aspects of the universe are evil in themselves (Van Groningen 1967:30). Further, the Church Fathers strenuously rejected Gnostic notions to the effect that the deity of the Old Testament is a demiurge inescapably as- sociated with the evils of the world and distinct from the true crea- tor who is a remote and essentially unknowable God. But in com- ating Gnostic dualisms, Christian thinkers elaborated a dualism that they did endorse, a distinction between matter and spirit that they shared to a significant extent with the Gnostics. And while they did not regard the world as evil in itself, as evil in essence, they clearly regarded things spiritual as ultimately more desirable than things material. These points of view, I think, paved the way for the eventual advancement and acceptance of a theology of the supernatural. In defending Christianity against sits theological adversaries, Christian spokesmen not only defended dogma but created it. Many of the writings of the Church Fathers are, in fact, attacks on their Jewish, Gnostic, Manichacan, and other intellectual opponents, land the doctrines that they espouse were shaped dialectically. ‘There was, indeed, much overlap in the competing world views, and it would doubtless prove fascinating to inquire into the exis. tential conditions that might have encouraged apocalyptic Chris- tians and many of their adversaries to entertain similar attitudes and understandings. In particular, we should like to understand better the apparent development of a certain disenchantment with the world and a search for completion on the spiritual plane, a search often spurred by faith and by Neoplatonic speculation, Neoplatonism is our label for certain philosophical elaborations ‘on Platonic themes. The Neoplatonic tradition, so-alled, is gen- erally held to have begun with Plotinus (d. 270 a. and to have suffered a mortal blow (though its ghost lingers on) in 529, when Justinian ordered the closing of the academy in Athens. The \Neoplatonists conceived of a ‘god’ or principle so transcending the universe that it cannot be described in the predicates of ordinary