Raphael and the Philosophers

Francis Schaeffer referred to Raphael's painting "The School of Athens" in the detail of the gestures of Plato and Aristotle. Detail below.

 The Split Between Nature and Grace

 Schaeffer highlights the separation between the "universal" (represented by Plato pointing up) and the "particular" (represented by Aristotle pointing down). This split represents a failure to keep God as the creator of both, leading to an increasing separation between humanity and the Divine.

A friend put it to me that this was possibly not the references being made, rather, Plato is pointing up to "the good" and Aristotle is gesturing to the world as it is, founded on the "unmoved mover".

Together they are depicting a world in its base reality as impersonal, One that makes of personhood and thus man a final nullity.

The rest of philosophy seeks to deal with this nullity...culminating in Nagel's "The View from Nowhere" p. 225:

One of the difficulties is that the appropriate form of a subjective attitude toward my own future is expectation, but in this case there is nothing to expect.  How can I expect nothing as such? It seems that the best I can do is to expect its complement, a finite but indeterminate amount of something—or a determinate amount, if I am under definite sentence of death. Now a good deal could be said about the consequences of the finiteness of my future, but that is relatively banal and something most of us automatically allow for, particularly after reaching the age of forty. I am concerned with the adequate recognition of my eventual annihilation itself. There will be a last day, a last hour, a last minute of
consciousness, and that will be it. Off the edge.

But the view of life and its base ontology from the Creation in Genesis 1, re-pictured by Paul in Romans 8:18ff: is Love, and the 'mission' of the Creator is to bring us into that realm of his Love through Christ.

 

This makes life and love meaningful because its reality is basic, unlike Plato and Aristotle in their bleak finally impersonal static base reality which admits no love, no passion and no fellowship.

 

On the other hand: