“Defining Christian Neoplatonisms: Preliminary Considerations”
A Communication to the Atlantic Classical Association Annual Meeting at Dalhousie
University, Friday, 23 October 2015.
Does Christian Neoplatonism, or Neoplatonisms, exist as a movement in distinction
from Neoplatonisms generally? Beginning a book on a subject, Christian
Neoplatonism, to which no monograph has been devoted, I am faced with the task of
answering this question and defining what I distinguish. My task of marking the
specific difference of Christian Neoplatonism, I have made more difficult because I
judge that the foundations of the Christian Platonisms which become systematic in the
Neoplatonic ways stand on the interpretation of Scripture by Philo Judaeus. This
beginning will require me to identify characteristics shared with Philo's Platonized
Judaism and to note where differences arise. In this preliminary attempt at definition
what is shared between pagan, Jewish, and Christian Neoplatonists will be indicated, as
well as points on which differences arise. My hope is that participants in the discussion
will aid my evolving work.
Both yes and no answers to my initial question seem necessary. No, there is not a
Christian Neoplatonism which exists apart from and independent of the non-Christian
forms. However, I judge that we can identify several characteristics more or less general
to Christian Neoplatonisms.
The first and second are consequences of its Trinitarian first principle, the third of its
monotheism, the fourth of the mutually implicated doctrines of the human as Image of
God and the Incarnation, the fifth of its eschatology, the sixth of its subordination of
history to metaphysics, the seventh of the Christian / Gnostic myth of primal fall within
the highest angelic powers.
1.
Christianity’s Trinitarian equality of the divine hypostases prevents an
exclusive transcendence of the One above thought and being. So, many Christian
Neoplatonisms, especially those in the Latin and Augustinian tradition, resemble
Middle Platonist systems, and speak of God in terms of esse (e.g. Augustine and
Aquinas) or ousia (e.g. Eriugena). The East is more apophatic and as its influence,
and as Proclus’ arguments, make themselves more felt among the Latins by way
Eriugena’s and other translations of Dionysius and the Greeks, of the Liber de causis,
and of Proclus’ own writings, the Ground from which the Trinity springs is more
sought and Augustine is more assimilated to the containing structure (e.g. Aquinas,
Bonaventure, and, above all, Meister Eckhart).
2.
Second, for Augustine and his successors divine and the human trinities
mirror one another by way of the reflexive interrelation of being, knowing, and
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loving. This has a physical form as measure, number and weight, so Augustine can
write: “My love is my weight, carrying me.”1 There is thus a new understanding
both of the human and of cosmic structure.
3.
Christian monotheism has the effect of reducing the independence of the
subsistences in the spiritual world; gods become angels and divine hypostases
become attributes (e.g. the corpus of Dionysius the Areopagite).
4.
Fourth, in virtue of understanding the human as imago dei and of the
divine Incarnation, the human replaces soul as the horizon where the divine and the
material worlds meet. In this incarnational humanism or anthropocentrism the
human fall becomes the reason for the material creation and its return or
resurrection determines its final character (e.g. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus
the Confessor, and Eriugena). Augustine and his successors do not assimilate
creation and fall but do draw together the divine, the cosmic and the human
conversions in autobiography; the Confessions is as important for the development
and centrality of Western psychological introspection as is his De Trinitate.
We use humanism to characterise the Renaissance, but once we focus on “Christian”
Neoplatonisms, a correction, undertaken here, is required. The Christian
Neoplatonisms are pre-dominantly, and I judge dangerously, anthropocentric, one
might say, incarnational, from the beginning (on which see Origen at the beginning
and Charles Williams in the 20th century). Incarnation and Atonement determine the
fundamental logic of divinity (e.g. Augustine, Eriugena, Anselm, Aquinas, Meister
Eckhart, Dame Julian of Norwich, Cusa, Bérulle, Hegel, Michel Henry). Alan
Garner’s Boneland combines Augustinian introspection, the unity of self, history,
cosmology, exitus and reditus, eschatology, the mutuality of myth and science—in
an entirely up to date form—with an immanent trinity. As compelling in its
unification of all these as Bonaventure’s The Minds’ Road into God, it reveals the
inescapability of Augustine for Western Christians and their secular progeny.
5.
Fifth, the fundamental Neoplatonic structure of reality as Remaining
(mone), Going out (proodos), Returning (epistrophe) for everything beneath the First
(and imported into it in virtue of its Trinitarian form, most notably and influentially
by Augustine) undergoes a mutual assimilation with eschatology. Ontological Exitus
and Reditus is united with the Genesis movement from “Let there be light” to the
Sabbath rest, and these to the whole Biblical circling from Genesis to John’s
Apocalypse (e.g. paradigmatically, Origen’s De Principiis, Augustine’s Confessions,
Eriugena’s Periphyseon, Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis
in Deum). Generally, though not universally, these assimilations will involve a
1
Confessions, 13.8.10.
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Platonic beginning of time with creation and a temporal end, and (though less
usually) an end of time.
6.
The sixth characteristic belongs with the assimilation of ontology,
incarnation and eschatology. The consequent subordination of history to the
paradigms which eternally belong to the divine life itself require that the Saviour
and his work fall within these. While orthodox Christian Neoplatonisms will insist
on the historical existence of Jesus Christ and his deeds and words, for them the
patterns he enacts are known, present, and effective outside that historical
particularity. His salvific work either includes or complements the other ways or
both. This is inclusive, not exclusive, soteriology: Jesus is the way, the truth and the
life, and no one comes to the Father except by him (John 14.6).
As with most else, the principle here is seen already in Philo. His mediator, Moses,
makes the paradigms in the Logos known and effective. Moses is a prophet because
of his union with these forms, and, as with Christ, although he is said to learn, but
the knowledge and power of both mediators come from the presupposed union with
the Logos. Mystical union is both an experienced moment and the presupposition of
Moses’ functions and deeds as Philosopher-King, Legislator, Priest and Prophet.
Linear time and historical particularity cannot be taken as absolute when their limit
and foundation is the present eternal. Beginning with Clement and Origen of
Alexandria, Christian and arriving at 20th century Christian Neoplatonic theologians,
philosophers, and artists like Austin Farrer, Charles Williams, Alan Garner, John
Tavener, T.S Eliot, Michel Henry, Jean Trouillard, Stanislas Breton and Henry
Duméry have justified and understood the salvific mediation of Christ through the
paradigms it enacts and manifests and through the other revelations it thereby
presupposes.
7.
The seventh may characterize Christian in distinction from pagan
Neoplatonisms; it has to do with the misplaced criticism of Neoplatonism as
dualistic. In fact, the subordination of both the intellectual and the sensible realms to
the One or what is above it prevents dualism being fundamental for any
Neoplatonist. There are the oppositions of thought to sense and soul to body but
these are sublated when the formlessness of the One finds its mirror in the
formlessness of matter and the First is the cause of subsistence at every level. Proclus
is determined that matter is not the cause of evil, indeed it has no substantial reality
or cause but rather belongs to weaknesses and is parasitic on the good. His
treatment of matter and evil dominates Christian Neoplatonisms having been
transmitted authoritatively by Dionysius the Areopagite. However, in this area the
pseudo Apostolic teacher makes an important alteration, he must allow for evil
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among the spiritual beings above the human in order to allow for Satan, and the fall
of the exalted Lucifer.
The more thoroughly Neoplatonic a Christian is, the less dualistic, thus Origen’s
doctrine of apokatastasis universal return or redemption; for him even the Devil will
be redeemed. Origen’s apokatastasis was condemned again and again by those who
thought, as Origen did not, that the Scriptural “aeon” must be eternal, but
persistently reiterated on philosophical ones, so that at present the emptiness of Hell
is a doctrine of the Roman Magisterium. The pagan Neoplatonists, freer from the
influence of the pessimistic side of Hellenistic religions, were less affected by the
Gnostic good – evil dualisms and were more effective than their Christian
counterparts and successors at combating them. The war between the heavenly and
diabolical hosts haunts Platonic Christianity to this day, we need only mention
Michael the Archangel, Milton and Charles Williams’ novels like War in Heaven to
remind ourselves of it.
My beginner’s guide to Christian Neoplatonisms will consider its origins together with
the motivations those origins indicate and the characteristics they give it. The scope is
vast. Besides the Greek and Latin Neoplatonisms of the Patristic Church, there are those
of Byzantium, and the Latin Middle Ages, early, high and late. After we consider the
march of Proclus along the Rhine and the outburst of mysticism, Renaissance beauty
and determined conciliation present their charms. Both the Reform, with Calvin and
Richard Hooker, and the Counter-reform, most originally with the Cardinal de Bérulle
and Malebranche must have a place. Among early moderns, Leibniz, the Cambridge
Platonists and Bishop Berkeley precede the great break out with the German Idealists
and their followers among the Russians. The 20th century is grand one for Christian
Neoplatonism, in philosophy, theology and music, especially but by no means
exclusively, in French, in poetry, drama and literature among the English and Irish.
Heidegger is an important provocateur, even if he may not himself be counted among
Neoplatonists. At the last, there are the important phenomena of secularised
Neoplatonism for former Christians and of Christian Neoplatonists, who insist,
incredibly, that Neoplatonism is the name of the rationalist humanism they are fighting!
October 23, 2015
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