Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)

2010 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kaiser, Christopher Barina: "Isten bölcsességének jelei" Comenius Panorthosia c. művében: egy bibliai téma a modern tudomány alapjaiban

Augustine uses Plato to get the attention of his educated Christian readers, but he uses a biblical text to make his point authoritative. Was he justified in making this association between Plato and the Bible?

The synthesis of biblical and Platonic ideas was a commonplace in early Jewish and Christian thought—it was hardly a new idea with Augustine. In fact, the Wisdom of Solomon had already incorporated popular ideas from Plato’s Dialogues. Compare the following passage from Plato’s Timaeus 53a:

At first, the elements were all without reason and measure.... Such being their nature, God now fashioned them by form and number.

The reference to measure and number is the same in both Plato and the Wisdom of Solomon. So Augustine was right to associate the two. However, Plato said nothing about the weight of the elements—perhaps because the weightiness of matter was irrational for Plato and therefore quite unlike the more abstract categories of measure and number.

The idea of weight as a category of divine creation came from several Old Testament examples that antedate both Plato and the Wisdom of Solomon. Here are two examples:

Isa. 40:12-13 “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of the hand and... enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”

Job 28:25-6 “God gave to the wind its weight, and meted out the waters by measure.”

So the terms “measure” and “weight” came from the Hebrew Bible and the terms “measure” and “number” came from Plato with an obvious overlap. Augustine was well within his intellectual rights to synthesize the biblical and Platonic ideas and to cite Wisdom 11:20 as a prooftext.

As a result of the attention Augustine drew to it, Wisdom 11:20 became one of the biblical texts most often cited in discussions of the natural world. It was quoted by nearly all natural philosophers from Augustine to Adelard of Bath, Agrippa of Nettesheim, John Dee, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Tymme, Francis Bacon, and Descartes to name just a few. In this respect, Comenius was not original. He was simply acting as the transmitter of a biblical topos or commonplace and creating a pansophic synthesis.

The Tradition from Gregory to Comenius

But what about the points that Comenius made that we found also reflected in the writings of physicists like Einstein and Davies? One was the idea that mathematical characteristics like weight, number and measure were imprinted on both creation and the human mind—this was extremely important because it implied that the mathematical nature of creation should be visible to anyone with the proper training to see it. This idea is not found in either Wisdom 11 or in Augustine’s interpretation of it.

"Marks of God Wisdom"

SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK 27