NEOPLATONISM

NEOPLATONISM. The dominant philosophy (q.v.) in late antiquity by the opening of the 4th c., Neoplatonism is associated with the Enneads of one of the giants of ancient thought, Plotinus (q.v.), an Egyptian Greek-speaker (d. 270). He effected a fusion of the two dominant philosophies extant in the 3rd c. Stoicism advocated a vision of the universe as a single living thing. Platonism stressed the divide between the realm of the eternal ideas and the phenomenal universe, though it acknowledged a dependence of the latter upon the former. Plotinus brought the first’s organic metaphor together with the second’s primacy of the spiritual. The result was a singularly powerful and markedly religious vision of the human being and the cosmos-at once intimately linked and themselves manifestations of the single divine reality underlying both. Still, both the human composite and the physical world are viewed as far removed from the One and the Good.

The hierarchy of being in Plotinus-from the One to Mind to Soul to Body-becomes more pronounced in his successors Porphyry (d. 303), Iamblichus (d. 330), Proclus (d. 482), and Damascius (d. ca. 535). The result is both an expansion in the detail of the earlier thinker’s emanations, and in the last three philosophers a defense of traditional, pagan religion as mediating between the higher planes of being and human existence in the realm of matter. This is particularly clear in Iamblichus’s and Proclus’s defense of theurgy, literally “divine actions.” At its best, the latter emphasizes a dependency on prayer and on the grace of the gods, which later Christian writers, such as Dionysius the Areopagite (q.v.), will find congenial. At its worst, it becomes appallingly reminiscent of “new age” theosophy, down to ectoplasm, mediums, and even “crystals.” No Christian writer found this aspect appealing.

Neoplatonism in general was simply the philosophy of the Church Fathers (q.v.) of the 4th c. and afterward. It was at once the intellectual air they breathed, and their adversary. The story of Greek-and hence, Orthodox-theology throughout the Byzantine era (qq.v.) is similar to Jacob’s wrestling with the Lord; but this wrestling was with a philosophical tradition in an effort to make of it an instrument of the revelation in Christ.