Neoplatonism and Theology 2

"What is Neoplatonism?"

1. “Neoplatonism” is a fairly new word. It emerged in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries as a way to disengage Plato from the platonic tradition. In Naomi Fisher’s Schelling’s Mystical Platonism (1792-1802), she recounts how the first use of the term was in Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, written between 1742 and 1744; it slowly became a term used by paritsans of the enlightenment to deride the metaphysical excesses of the interpretive tradition around Plato’s writings. The idea was that these “platonists” were not heirs to Plato, but rather imitators of the derivative Plotinus, the first “Neoplatonist.”

2. The Enlightenment Plato was very different than the speculative-mystical Plato of medieval and early modern tradition. The Medieval and Early Modern Plato understood the whole cosmos as a totality, an outflowing of reality from the one cause, ordered hierarchically in manifestation of the One’s beauty, goodness, and truth; the Plato of the Enlightenment was an epistemic and ontological dualist, making much more moderate claims. The Plato of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period was an esoteric Plato, possibly the first magician, definitely the first saint, who communicated oral traditions about the one and the dyad; the Enlightenment Plato was an exoteric Plato, whose communication was solely through the dialogues, ordered by means of textual criticism according to his theoretical development: early, middle, and late. The Medieval and Early Modern Plato was the father of both theological and pagan speculative traditions; the Enlightenment Plato was a republican, committed to freedom of thought, etc. You can start to see the pattern here. Like Jesus himself, Plato, under the scrutiny of modern historical work, underwent a transformation during modernity. He was reduced by a quest for the “Historical Plato” and the textually verifiable Plato.

3. Separating Plato from “Neoplatonism” meant that modern scholars could look at Plato with fresh eyes, without bothering with the long and contradictory commentary tradition that accompanies Plato’s writings. Since the latter half of the 20^th century, this severing of Plato from Platonism has come under increasing scrutiny, most of all from the so-called Tubingen School of Plato studies.

4. The Tubingen Paradigm was defended by scholars in Germany and Italy who sought to interpret Plato once again according to this older tradition. They challenged the supremacy since Schleiermacher of the modern, isolated Plato, arguing for a maximalist view of Plato’s thought based on esoteric or unwritten dogmas. But how could one go about reconstructing unwritten dogmas, if they’re unwritten? At this point proponents of the Tubingen paradigm look to antique and late antique testimonies about Plato’s thought, written by Plato’s disciples or adversaries. From these Testemonia, they then build a coherent system of Platonic doctrine. This is then described as the more authentic reading of Plato, instead of the one modern scholars derived from Plato’s dialogues.

5. There is, of course, a problem here. And it’s the same problem that one runs into when one reads Tzamalikos’s two volume work on Anaxagoras and Origen. The issue is one of verifiability and the criteria to establish what can be verified. For example, in his work, Tzamalikos bullies the reader into discounting Aristotle’s description of Anaxagoras and then attempts to bully him further into revising his view of the entire development of classical philosophy. But more often than not, Tzamalikos’ facts aren’t as convincing as he seems to think that they are. One must have faith that the antique thinkers that give an account of Plato’s thought (returning to our discussion) are giving trustworthy accounts—and this can only be decided on an author-by-author basis, with opinions among specialists varying widely. Methodologically, I think it is beyond a doubt that the Tubingen account is fruitful for understanding how pre and early modern thinkers thought about Plato—but there is still work to be done for establishing the persuasiveness of a methodological bias towards the earlier tradition, instead of the modern one, as if it allows one to access the “truer” Plato.

6. In my previous post, we talked a little about how neoplatonic theology has been signaled out as a dualistic, world-denying philosophy akin to Gnosticism. And if one looks at how modern critical scholars reconstructed Plato’s doctrines from his “middle” dialogues, it would be hard to argue with that representation of Plato’s thought. What the Tubingen approach allows us to do, though, is to say that that picture of Plato is a historically-conditioned one, and, for most of the history of the platonic tradition, not the normative picture of Plato used by those who have understood themselves to be platonists (or Christians/Pagans who read and remark and use Platonic theology/philosophy). This wider perspective has the potential to nuance historical judgments about theologians we have identified as “platonists”, such as Origen, Nyssa, Augustine, etc.—instead of simply dismissing them all away as radical dualists, we can see how they embody a different type of Platonism, one characterized by mystical monism and an emanatory cosmology.

7. There are of course different types of Platonism. Those that we call “Neoplatonists” today—Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and Iamblicus being the major thinkers of the movement—have a tremendous amount of difference between them. After Plotinus, Neoplatonism divided into two different approaches to speculation, the contemplative and the theurgic. Porphyry represents the impulse of the former; Proclus and Iamblichus the latter. For these theurgists, as Gregory Shaw shows us, Platonism was an eclectic tradition, which incorporated into itself scriptures like the Chaldean Oracles and other elements of Greek popular and esoteric religion. Proclus and Iamblichus had a different view of embodiment than Plotinus and Porphyry did, as well; for Iamblichus, the soul was actually fully descended into the body (not simply its mirror image!) and so was the subject that performed the theurgic rituals, circumambulating the temple just as the gods/planets circumambulate the cosmos. Iamblichus taught that there were grades of being, organizing the cosmos into a hierarchy of philanthropy, where higher beings, such as heroes and gods, could help lower beings, such as humans and philosophers. Proclus, too, understood reality according to this totalizing picture: reality was itself a going out and a return, or an exodus-reditus; this model captured the minds of Medieval theologians through the Christian Syrian Proclean writings, especially the Dionysian Corpus and the Liber de Causis.

8. The same can be said for Christian Neoplatonists. Augustine himself quotes Plotinus word for word in certain of his works, especially his Confessions. But his reception of Plotinus is qualified by his own work as a Christian Bishop in North Africa and his encounter with eastern monasticism and Origenian exegesis. As a celebrant, Augustine is formed through a theurgic encounter with God that actually enacts contemplation in his body; as a Bishop, he is given responsibility to make sure his doctrine conforms with Christian tradition and the words of Scripture (in their spiritual-literal meaning). Plotinus’ emanatory theory is recast in Augustine to describe the exegetical ascent into God, the rectification of the will and the healing of one’s nature after the incurvature and devastation of the primordial fall. Through the church’s spiritual exercises, and not through Plotinian contemplation, Augustine understands the healing of our natures to take place. He further cuts out the intermediary beings that populate the neoplatonic cosmos, leaving only daemons between us and the divine.

9. Another Christian Neoplatonist is Gregory of Nyssa. One of the conversations that has been happening about Gregory’s writings is the question of the extent to what particularly philosophical system he is indebted to. For example, scholars traditionally have expressed Gregory’s debt to Plato and Plotinus, to the overall exclusion of any other philosophical influences. But J. Warren Smith, for example, in his Passion and Paradise, has shown pretty incontestably that Gregory made a decent use of Aristotle’s De Anima in forming his particular psychology of the passions. Michele Rene Barnes, too, has demonstrated other philosophical influences on Gregory’s conception of dunamis or power. Stoic and Aristotelian influences on Gregory’s thought should not be surprising, though, in my opinion. These ideal types or schools of philosophy began to merge in late antiquity; more and more, Neoplatonists became eclecticists who did not see large differences between Plato and Aristotle, or Aristotle and Seneca. Rather, Neoplatonism asserted itself as a philosophia perrenis, in a sense: the culmination of the antique heritage in a mono-philosophical/religious challenge to the growing threat of Christianity.

10. That being said, there are similarities among the Christians, too. St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa both have deeply compatible visions of the Christian life, which is a life of deification by entrance into the ecclesial community and living her exegetical form of life. These theologians operated with a strong bifurcation or dichotomy between the “word” and the “world.” The point of monasticism was for the word to envelop and transform your world, so that one could enter into an ecology of divinity, a unified cosmos around the cruciform body of Christ. This was a neoplatonic realignment of all reality with the first principle, a grand return of all things back into the One, in the mode of Odysseus finally making it back to Ithaca. And because both theologians ascribed infinity to the absolute one, the entrance into that one had to be an endless ascent, an ascent so infinite itself that it must be rest.

11. As I noted before, the Middle Ages continued this tradition of Neoplatonism, all the way into the early modern period. There are of course key figures along the way. Pseudo-Dionysus, for example, was a deeply important Christian bridge between the Middle Ages and classical Procleanism. The Franscican mystics, such as Bonaventure, the Victorines, and Gerson, were deeply implicated in Proclus as communicated by Pseudo-Dionysus. The Dominican Mystics, including Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, too, were deeply influenced by Procleanism, with the added emphasis of Arabic Aristotelian manuscripts that made teleology incredibly important to this tradition. Meister Eckhart’s followers, such as the Beguines and the Rhineland Mystics (Tauler, Suso, the Theologia Germanica) all brought out the implications that this Procleanism had for the Church and World. In some sense, these two traditions, the Dominican and the Franciscan, were at odds with the each other, though they were both within the general Christian Neoplatonism camp. Luther, to anticipate some of what will be said in a later post, encountered both of these traditions, always seeming to favor the Franciscan mysticism as closer to what he read in Augustine.

12. John Scottus Eriugena is important to single out here, as well. Eriugena was not only a skilled philosopher, he was also a translator. And among the theologians he translated into Latin, some for the first time, were Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Pseudo-Dionysus. Eriugena’s neoplatonism was of a highly speculative quality, thinking through the implications of the one-beyond-being of apophatic theology. He also had significant influence on Bonaventure, the Victorines, Eckhart, and Cusanus.

13. Denys Turner, in his Eros and Allegory, has made the argument that the structure of monasticism was organized around the speculative Neoplatonism of the eastern fathers. That is, the path of purgation, enlightenment, and union that one finds in the monasteries, perhaps especially in the song of songs commentary tradition, the high point of which is Bernard of Clairvaux, is based around the metaphysics of Epectasy and ascent one finds in Origen, the Cappadocians, Evagrius of Pontus, John Cassian, and St. Augustine. So then, even when there wasn’t explicit reflection happening on neoplatonic themes, the structure of medieval life in the monasteries was ordered according to that philosophy’s principles, indelibly marking it on countless Western psyches…

14. Reformers and humanists both benefitted from this medieval heritage of Neoplatonism. Much of the Reformation and Humanist critiques of the institutional church relied on neoplatonic spirituality; one can see, for example, in the convergences between medieval spirituality that happened in Luther and his critique of indulgences or Caspar Schwenckfeld and his critique of transubstantiation (and Lutheran consubstantiation); Calvin and Melanchthon’s preference for language about the spiritual presence of Christ in Communion; the widespread Reformation emphasis on faith; the widespread emphasis on textuality and exegetical life. All of these things are not original but are transformations of emphases already present in the Middle Ages, as heritage from patristic and pagan Neoplatonism.

15. Humanists, it’s often thought, were “secularists waiting to happen”—but really, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Most humanists were neoplatonists: from Pico and Ficino to Reuchlin, Colet, and Erasmus. The reclaiming of the classical inheritance and rebirth of culture meant a return to the pagan and Christian neoplatonic tradition, which of course included emphases from stoic rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian. The emphasis particularly on rhetoric was in line with a neoplatonic way of thinking about reality, namely the emanation of the Logos from the first principle, and the seminal nature of the logikoi as the metaphysical principles which reconciled Plato and Aristotle’s divergence on the location and number of forms. Rhetoric worked because of what rhetoricians assumed about the nature of reality; this is apparent from the textbook by Quintilian, which set up the Rhetor to basically be a Philosopher King or Sage or even Magician. The emphasis on rhetoric and language in general among the humanists—on classical languages by Erasmus, on the ursprache Hebrew by Reuchlin—proves the persuasiveness of the medieval vision, even among its detractors: the foundation of the cosmos was logos; all things moved by the speaking of the divine word.