When Thought Lost Its Wings: The Mystical Age of Early Ch...

The Quality of Early Christian Consciousness

The image of "thought with wings" captures something specific about the intellectual and spiritual quality of the early Christian centuries. Thinking in this period was not yet the dry, analytical, self-contained faculty that modern education trains. It was warmer, more image-permeated, more directly connected to what the Greeks called the divine Logos: the ordering reason of the cosmos through which all things were made and through which the human mind, in its highest exercise, participated in something greater than itself.

The great thinkers of early Christianity did not experience themselves as constructing theories about a God who was distant and unknowable. They experienced themselves as thinking within a living spiritual reality that thought through them when they opened themselves to it sufficiently. Origen of Alexandria, describing the method of scripture interpretation he practiced, spoke of moving through the literal meaning to the "soul" of a text and then to its spirit: a progression from information to meaning to direct spiritual perception. This is not a metaphor in Origen; it describes a real experiential trajectory he believed was accessible to any Christian who undertook the necessary inner preparation.

What gave this thinking its wings was its connection to the Platonic vision of a cosmos organized by living spiritual archetypes, now interpreted through the lens of the Logos who had become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The world was not a mechanical system but a living expression of the divine Logos, and every genuine thought participated in that expression. This gave thinking an inherent spiritual dimension that the purely conceptual thinking of later centuries would lose.

Logos Theology: Christ as the Cosmic Word

The Prologue of the Gospel of John opens with one of the most philosophically charged sentences in all of ancient literature: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and the life was the light of humanity."

The Greek word Logos carries meanings in ancient philosophy that no single English word captures: word, reason, principle, logic, account, discourse. In Stoic philosophy, the Logos was the rational principle immanent in the cosmos, the divine reason that structured all things from within. In Platonic philosophy, the Logos was related to the Demiurge, the divine craftsman who shaped the material world according to the eternal Ideas. In Jewish philosophy, particularly in Philo of Alexandria (a contemporary of Jesus), the Logos was the intermediary between the transcendent God and the created world, the first-born Son and the high priest of creation.

When the author of the Gospel of John identified this cosmic Logos with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the theological implications were immediate and enormous. If Jesus was the Logos through whom all things were made, then his incarnation was not merely a historical visit of a divine figure to a small corner of the Roman Empire; it was a cosmic event, the moment when the ordering principle of all reality took human form and lived a human life. This is the claim that early Christian theology labored to understand and articulate, and the labor produced some of the most remarkable thinking of the ancient world.

Justin Martyr (100-165 CE), one of the first Christian philosophers, argued that the philosophers of Greece had participated in the Logos through their reason, and that whatever was true in Plato, Socrates, or the Stoics came from the same Logos who had now been fully revealed in Christ. "Those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even though they were counted as atheists." This was not a claim that all philosophies are equivalent to Christianity; it was a claim about the unity of truth and the identification of the Christ with the universal principle of rational order.

Neoplatonism and the Christian Mystical Vision

Neoplatonism, the philosophical tradition developed by Plotinus (205-270 CE) in Rome and elaborated by Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, provided early Christian mystical theology with its most powerful intellectual framework. It is impossible to understand the greatest Christian mystical thinkers without understanding Neoplatonism.

Plotinus described reality as a hierarchical emanation from the absolute One, which is beyond all being and all description. From the One emanates Nous (Divine Mind or Intellect), the realm of eternal archetypes and the Platonic Ideas. From Nous emanates Soul (Psyche), the level of temporal existence and the life of the individual soul in matter. The material world is the lowest level of this hierarchy, the point at which the emanation from the One has become most diffuse and least unified.

The human soul, in Plotinus's vision, belongs at the level of Soul but has become absorbed in the material world, forgetting its origin. The philosophical life is the path of return: a progressive withdrawal from attachment to the sensory world through purification and contemplation, ascending through the levels of Soul and Nous toward union with the One. This union is not a dissolution of the individual into an undifferentiated whole; it is a paradoxical experience in which the individual recognizes its identity with the source of all individuality.

Early Christian theologians, particularly in the Alexandrian tradition and later in Pseudo-Dionysius, found this framework both deeply compatible with and in need of transformation by Christian revelation. The One of Plotinus was recognizable as God; the Nous was recognizable as the Logos; the emanation was recognizable as creation. What Neoplatonism lacked, from a Christian perspective, was the central event: the descent of the highest into the lowest, the Logos becoming flesh, which inverted the direction of the spiritual journey from ascent-only to a path that passed through the depths of material existence and out the other side.

The Alexandrian School

The Catechetical School of Alexandria, founded in the late 2nd century, was the first great institution of Christian theological education. Operating in the city that housed the ancient world's greatest library and its most cosmopolitan intellectual culture, the Alexandrian theologians worked with the full resources of Greek philosophy, Hellenistic Jewish thought, and the emerging Christian tradition.

Clement of Alexandria (150-215 CE), the school's second known director, argued that Greek philosophy was to the Greeks what the Law was to the Jews: a preparation for the Gospel, a schoolmaster leading toward Christ. His "Stromata" (Miscellanies), a deliberately unsystematic collection of philosophical and theological reflection, represents one of the most wide-ranging integrations of Greek wisdom with Christian thought in the ancient world. Clement's Christian "gnostic" (his term) was not a heretic but a philosopher who had attained genuine spiritual wisdom, going beyond mere faith to direct knowledge.

Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE) was perhaps the greatest theological intellect of the early church. His systematic theology, "On First Principles," was the first complete attempt to give a philosophically rigorous account of Christian doctrine. His commentaries on scripture, of which many survive, demonstrate the allegorical method at its most sophisticated: every text yields historical, moral, and spiritual meanings, and the spiritual meaning, accessible only to those who have undertaken inner preparation, reveals the living Logos speaking directly through the symbolic medium of the written word.

Origen's most characteristic and controversial conviction was the universality of salvation (apokatastasis): the belief that all rational beings, including demons and even the devil, would ultimately be restored to their original divine unity. This conviction, condemned posthumously as heresy, reflects the depth of his Neoplatonic commitment to the fundamental unity of all rational nature in the Logos.

Pseudo-Dionysius and the Apophatic Way

The writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (a figure mentioned in Acts 17:34 as a convert of Paul), now known to have been composed around the late 5th or early 6th century CE, exercised an influence on Western Christian mystical theology second only to the scriptures themselves. The works, four treatises and ten letters, represent the most systematic expression of apophatic (negative) theology in the Christian tradition.

Pseudo-Dionysius's most important contribution was the articulation of a complete hierarchical cosmos: the Celestial Hierarchy, organizing the angelic beings into nine orders (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels), and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, mapping the structure of the Church onto the celestial structure. These hierarchies were not merely organizational charts; they were the vehicles through which the divine light descended into matter and through which the human being ascended back toward the divine source.

The apophatic theology, most concentrated in "The Mystical Theology," describes the highest approach to God as a progressive negation: beyond being, beyond unity, beyond goodness, beyond all possible predicates, the divine darkness that is also the supreme light is approached only by the one who has left behind all knowledge, all sensation, and all being. "We must leave behind every divine light, every voice and every word from heaven... we must be unitively raised up to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is." This is the literary equivalent of the darkest phase of contemplative experience, the dissolution of all concepts in direct confrontation with what is beyond all concepts.

Theosis: The Divinization of the Human Being

One of the most distinctive and, to modern Western Christianity, unfamiliar concepts of early Christian theology is theosis: the teaching that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is the genuine divinization of the human being. Not merely moral improvement, not merely closeness to God, not merely salvation from hell, but actual sharing in the divine nature, the becoming-divine of the human person.

Athanasius of Alexandria's famous formulation, "God became human so that humanity might become divine," expresses the inner logic of the Incarnation as early theology understood it: the descent of the highest into the lowest was precisely the opening of a path for the lowest to ascend into the highest. What God by nature is, the human being can become by grace.

Theosis is distinct from pantheism. It does not claim that human beings are identical with God or that they will be absorbed into an undifferentiated divine whole. The person undergoing theosis becomes more themselves, not less: the divine qualities of love, freedom, wisdom, and beauty are not foreign impositions but the fulfilment of human nature. The image of God in which humanity was created (imago Dei, in the Latin tradition) is progressively restored and perfected in theosis.

This concept was central to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and has remained so. In the Western Catholic tradition it was somewhat displaced by the juridical framework of salvation (sin, judgment, redemption) that became dominant after Augustine. The mystical theology of figures like Eckhart and John of the Cross preserved it in the Western tradition, as did the Renaissance Neoplatonists who drew directly on the Greek sources.

Steiner's Map of Consciousness Evolution

Rudolf Steiner developed a detailed account of the evolution of human consciousness across historical epochs, which he described in works including "Occult Science," "The Riddles of Philosophy," and many lecture cycles. While this account cannot be verified by conventional historical methods, it provides a framework that illuminates the distinctive quality of early Christian spiritual awareness in a way that more conventional historical accounts do not.

Steiner described the Greco-Roman cultural epoch (approximately 747 BCE to 1413 CE) as the age of the development of the intellectual soul or mind soul: the gradual emergence of individual, self-reflective thinking out of the group-soul consciousness of earlier periods. In the earlier phases of this epoch, thinking was still largely carried by what he called the sentient soul: warm, picture-permeated, emotionally resonant, and organically connected to the spiritual world. Greek philosophical thinking, particularly in its Platonic and Neoplatonic forms, represents this stage in its highest expression: thinking that was genuinely abstract and logical while still suffused with the warmth of living cosmic wisdom.

The early Christian centuries, in Steiner's account, represent the beginning of the transition from the intellectual soul to the consciousness soul, a stage not fully realized until the 15th century. The consciousness soul brings full individual, self-contained, analytical thinking: powerful, rigorous, and free, but cut off from the living spiritual currents that had nourished earlier thinking. The mystical awareness of the early Christian era preserves, in its late form, something of the older quality: thought that has not yet completely lost its wings.

When the Wings Were Lost

The transition from the mystical quality of early Christian thought to the scholastic thought of the high medieval period was not abrupt. It was a gradual shift across several centuries, driven by changes in the broader quality of human consciousness and by specific historical events.

The closing of the Neoplatonic schools in Athens by Justinian in 529 CE removed the institutional context in which the living philosophical tradition that had sustained Christian mystical theology could be publicly practised. The scholars dispersed, some to Persia where they preserved elements of the tradition in a new context. The monastic movement, which had been growing since the 3rd century, became the primary institutional vehicle for contemplative practice in the Western church, but monasticism also represented an increasing withdrawal of the contemplative life from the public sphere of intellectual culture.

The shift from Platonic to Aristotelian frameworks in theology, completed by the Aristotelian synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, brought extraordinary logical rigor to Christian thought but at the cost of the directly intuitive, cosmically participatory quality of the Platonic tradition. Aristotle's God is an unmoved mover, thinking of itself, utterly removed from the world. The God of Neoplatonic mysticism is the overflowing source whose love drives the cosmos into existence. These are different Gods, and they call forth different kinds of religious life.

What was lost was not the tradition but its living quality: the sense of thinking as direct participation in the cosmic Logos, of theological inquiry as a form of spiritual vision, of the cosmos as a hierarchical living whole descending from and ascending toward the divine source. These elements persist in the mystical stream, but as a minority voice within institutional Christianity rather than as its animating center.

The Mystical Thread Continues

The mystical thread has never been fully cut. From John Scottus Eriugena in the 9th century through Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics in the 14th century, through Jakob Boehme in the 17th century and the Romantic philosophers in the 19th, through Rudolf Steiner and the contemplative revival of the 20th century, the Logos theology and the participatory, cosmically-oriented quality of early Christian thinking has continued to find expression.

Contemporary access to this tradition is greater than at any previous point in history. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, Clement, Plotinus, and the other key figures are available in translation, and modern scholarship has clarified both their meaning and their historical context. The Mind and Life Institute's research on contemplative experience provides scientific validation for some of the key claims about direct spiritual perception. Steiner's extensive writings on the evolution of consciousness and the Christ event offer the most systematic modern attempt to integrate the early Christian mystical tradition into a comprehensive account of the cosmos and of human spiritual development.

The "wings of thought" are not gone; they are waiting to be rediscovered by anyone willing to do the inner work that the early Christian mystics understood as the preparation for genuine spiritual perception. That work involves not only intellectual study but the cultivation of the qualities of soul that the tradition has always identified as prerequisites: the willingness to question, the practice of inner silence, the discipline of directed spiritual attention, and the openness to encounter realities that exceed all prior conceptual frameworks.