By Joseph R. Wood
Saint Paul was concerned about the Galatians. In his letter, he laments:
“Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and destitute elemental forces, whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear I may have labored over you in vain!” (Gal 4:8–11)
The distinction that Paul emphasizes is between not knowing God, knowing him, and then being known by him. This last point demands special attention. But first, some preliminary points.
The expression “those who by nature are not gods” catches the attention of anyone who has read Aristotle carefully. The Philosopher, as Saint Thomas calls him, uses the phrase “by nature” repeatedly to describe man, who is rational by nature, and social or political by nature. We use reason to know and seek the common good.
By the very order of the human being, by his nature, we have certain characteristics that we do not choose for ourselves.
Aristotle also teaches that certain human communities exist by nature: families and households, villages that group households, and cities or political communities. Each one has its own good that it is called to realize according to its own nature.
I leave it to the biblical scholars to determine whether Saint Paul uses the expression “by nature” in the same sense as Aristotle. But the meaning must be close, since Paul employs it to distinguish between beings with different orders of existence, or what we might call different essences.
And I leave it to the theologians to explain who those “weak and poor elemental forces of the world” are that are not gods. They are not divine; they are elemental or base; spirits (bodiless?) compared to needy beggars, but with the power to enslave man. And apparently, with the power to enslave him again, perhaps by clinging to the cycle of celebrations of the Old Covenant, even after having come to know God through faith.
(The latter was told to me by artificial intelligence. Paul may have been concerned about a relapse into Jewish practices among the Galatians. But I do not think that explanation exhausts the meaning of “elemental spirits.” To me, they sound more like idols like the Golden Calf that the Jews made when Moses was absent, or the remnants of Greek, Roman, or Celtic deities still present in the region of Anatolia.)
If Paul had wanted to speak only of a slavery to the Old Covenant, he would surely have alluded directly to works of the law without faith. I hope the theologians can do better than the AI.
In the Garden of Eden, in Genesis, Adam and Eve are known by God, and they know him. They speak with him and receive direct instructions.
But after disobeying the one rule God gave them, they immediately hide and try not to be known by him. Our Original Sin, then, leads us not to want to be known by God.
This pattern repeats throughout the Old Testament: the people choose to know and be known by God, then rejects him, and finally returns to him and to his law.
A comparable story appears in Plato’s dialogue Statesman. The character guiding the conversation about the true ruler presents a myth in which the universe has gone through two ages.
In the first, a god or demiurge governs the events of the universe, while it revolves in a certain direction. Lesser gods are appointed to guide men and provide for them. In this age, men have food in abundance without effort. Since the gods provide everything, they need no constitutions or politics.
It is a scene reminiscent of Eden, though, as one of my sharp seminarians aptly noted, in Plato’s myth, man has no responsibility over Creation, unlike the paradise before the fall.
At a certain point, the second age arrives: the gods withdraw from their governance, the universe violently reverses its course, and men must take charge of their own affairs. At first they remember how the gods governed, but soon that fades, and their condition deteriorates.
You can guess in which phase of the universe Plato places us. Even so, even when this disordered age began, the gods left “necessary seeds”: knowledge of agriculture and the arts necessary for survival.
Plato’s providential god knows us and knows what we need, even if he sometimes withdraws. If the men of the previous age knew they were known by the gods, it is not clear. In the disordered age, alien to Christ, there are priests who try to intercede, but their seriousness is doubtful.
Aristotle’s supreme god, the unmoved mover, is in perfect rest, a rest that all other things desire or seek in their motion and change. The attraction toward that perfect rest is what Aristotle calls love.
But that unmoved mover does not love man in a personal way. His perfection is such that the only activity appropriate for him is to contemplate himself.
Thus, Saint Paul identifies in Galatians a fundamental truth that all men seek to understand: the problem of knowing God and being known by him.
The solution—and here, again, I defer to theology—may lie in the first chapter of Saint John: Christ gave us the power to become children of God. Children are known first by their father, and then they know him.
Paul states that the new Gospel he had delivered to the Galatians restored them as beings capable—or willing—to be known by God.
To be truly human, we must be known by God and know him.
About the author:
Joseph Wood is an assistant professor in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is a pilgrim philosopher and an easily accessible hermit.