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Plato and Mysticism | Part Two

In the previous thread we looked at two very ancient religious systems of Zoroastrianism and Judaism in the form of Kabballah that best show the influence on Plato’s thought. Plato was a substance dualist and so his metaphysics reveal themselves as consisting of two worlds, one is the visible and physical world that we occupy and the other is an intelligible realm of forms and ideas that exist outside of human perception and that we obtain knowledge of the unknowable through recollection upon discovery. This means that truth is always proportional. This dualist view also implies that we must have existed in some form prior to existing in this world and so the concept of the soul is permitted by Plato’s metaphysics. Other-worldly beings are also permitted with this ontology, from grand designer type beings that are so high up in the conceptive cycle that they are ‘uncreated’ and ‘formless’, but they have the ability to emanate their form into other beings that represent aspects of reality. These range from over all concepts of what is Good in the cosmos, to what is Just, all the way into our emotions as human beings and the various shapes and sizes of particulars in material reality that all correspond to ‘universal types’.

We shall continue with our historical review of Platonism and Mysticism by looking at the end of the Classical period of Ancient Greece. I have left out Egyptian religion for now, but what I will say on that matter is Egypt is not a monolithic term, there have been many Egypts. Egypt, during times of consdierable significance to our study, was under Persian influence for a very long time, as well as Greek influence too. Therefore, talk of ‘origins’ is misleading.

Take Aristobolus of Pineus for example:

The term ” Gnosticism ” is derived from the Greek, Gnosis, knowledge a word specially employed from the first dawn of religious inquiry to designate the science of things divine. Thus Pythagoras, according to Diogenes Laeitius, called the transcendental portion of his philosophy, ” the knowledge of things that are.” And in later times Gnosis was the name given to what Porphyry calls the Antique or Oriental philosophy, to distinguish it from the Grecian systems. But the term was first used (as Matter on good grounds conjectures) in its ultimate sense of supernal and celestial knowledge, by the Jewish philosophers belonging to the celebrated school of that nation, flourishing at Alexandria. These teachers, following the example of a noted Rabbi, Aristobulus, surnamed the Peripatician, endeavoured to make out that all the wisdom of the Greeks was derived immediately from the Hebrew Scripture ; and by means of their well-known mode of allegorical interpretation, which enabled them to elicit any sense desired out of any given passage of the Old Testament, they sought, and often succeeded, in establishing their theory. In this way they showed that Plato, during his sojourn in Egypt, had been their own scholar ; and still further to support these pretensions, the indefatigable Aristobulus produced a string of poems in the names of Linus, Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod all strongly impregnated with the spirit of Judaism.

That being said, we will now look at the effect Alexander the Great had on ideas and religions, then at the revival of Platonism in the form of Plotinus and what we refer to as Neo-Platonism and finally the spread of these ideas from the East to the West during the Translation Movement, from The House of Wisdom in Baghdad and then on to the first Renaissance in Western Europe.

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great

Only 8 years or so after Plato passed away in 348 BC, a Macedonian prince was born who would transform Greek-Persian relations forever. Alexander the Great was famously tutored by Aristotle, who was one of Plato’s students. Aristotle disagreed with Plato in regards to the forms, arguing that they implied infinite regression (that each cause requires another cause to justify itinto infinity) and that all physical particulars were compounds of form and matter. Aristotle was a substance pluralist or to be more technical, he advocated hylomorphic theory which conceives being (ousia) as a compound of matter and form.

Apart from the disagreement about forms, Aristotle and Plato were on the same page regarding politics. Though perhaps best known for his scientific treatises, Aristotle also published his Ethics and Politics, and his influence in these areas also reached Alexander. Aristotle asserted this influence particularly with regard to the so-called barbarians–a term that was used to characterize essentially all non-Greeks. Alexander himself was already passionately anti-Persian; and Aristotle provided him with the intellectual justifications for his fated and inherited mission. Aristotle believed that slavery was a natural institution, and that barbarians were by nature meant to be slaves. He therefore encouraged Alexander to be a leader to Greeks and a despot to barbarians, treating the former as friends and the latter as beasts.

On this point, Plato in the Republic speaks of The Noble Lie, a grand lie that even those who are in power will forget it is a lie, as will be repeated many times over many generations. These lies re-enforce the power of the state and keep everyone in their place. For example, we might say that those who are in power emanate from the universal form of Gold, whilelesser types of people, such as slaves, will emanate from the form of mud, or horse shit, the point being that the state is put across as a natural law beyond anyone else’s control.

Alexander spent three years studying with the great philosopher. In the meantime, his father was mobilizing troops to pay a visit to noncompliant allies in Perinthus and Byzantium. In 340 B.C., Philip II summoned his sixteen-year-old son, Alexander, to return and serve as Regent of Macedonia and Master of the Royal Seal in Philip’s absence. Thus Alexander would retire from the Academy and begin the lessons of real-life responsibilities.

Alexander commited patricide and proceeded to invade Persia, defeating the empire totally. Alexander was not only a great warrio, he was also a great politician and used syncretism to bind religious beliefs across the empire with Greek versions of myths and deities. Alexander eventually died and left no known successor, leaving his generals to battle it out. It is believed he was assassinated by his own people.

The Ptolemy’s would rule over Egypt and maintain the famous Library of Alexander, which we mentioned earlier in regards to Aristobolus of Pineas. The invasion of Persia by Alexander the Great would bring and end to Classical Greece and bring forth the Hellenic World.

I would like to pause to explain what all of this means. Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek cultures were now inseperable, mixing up with each other. The Alexandrian Empire gradually transformed into the Byzantine Empire/Eastern Roman Empire. Cicero, a Roman philosopher, translated the texts from The Timaeus by Plato, which told of the story of Atlantis – this deserves an entire thread all on its own as the topic is vast and so I will leave that out of this thread for now – but we will now look at two philosophers from Iranian and Roman backgrounds to see once again how the Ancient religion Zoroastrianism and Platonism always seem to find each other throughout history.

Mani and Plotinus

Mani 216–274 CE and Plotinus 204/5 – 270 whose effects were felt acutely in the intellectual life of the late antique Mediterranean world (and, in some cases, beyond). Working with similarly Platonic tools, they all built up their own frameworks for interpreting the world and its relation to the divine.

In the nearly six centuries from Plato’s time to Plotinus’, there had been an uninterrupted tradition of interpreting Plato which had begun with Aristotle and with the immediate successors of Plato’s academy and continued on through a period of Platonism which is now referred to as Middle Platonism. The term “Neoplatonism” implies that Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato was so distinct from those of his predecessors that it should be thought to introduce a new period in the history of Platonism. To Plotinus, reality emanated from The One and was consdered a philosophy which asserts that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. This makes it a form of Idealistic Monism.

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process which takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian gnostic and religious movements. Manichaeism introduced an important element – evil – for the first time these metaphysics no longer constituted lesser or greater forms with say, dualistic notions of benevolence and malevolence, but the substance of evil itself.

These two philosophies would combine to form the basic components of what we know today as Gnosticism and from Constantine the Great 272-337 CE to Justinian 482 CE, the ‘Gnostics’ would be persecuted. Although it had a label, Gnosticism was not a comprehensive package of doctrines, but rather, simply a mystical, Orphean-inspired approach to Christianity. As such, not all Gnostics were actually “heretical” or teaching things that other Christians didn’t.

The division among the Christians grew, until Emperor Constantine, in 325, called a general Council, in order to heal the rifts. He had invited some Gnostics to attend, however, they did not take the Council seriously. If any did attend, we don’t know about it. Thus, with no Gnostics present, the Council immediately, with little debate, denounced it as heresy.

This is only a very brief overview, but it is important to acknowledge this ‘going-underground’ of the Gnostics and also their contagious effects on many religions and mystic cults such as Mithraism and the Templars – something that deserves a thread all on its own.

Not long after this, St.Augustine of Hippo revised the conception of the soul in a very Platonist and Zoroastrian fashion. According to Augustine, the human soul is a simple substance, that is to say, it is inextended ; it does not occupy space like material objects, so that different parts of the soul correspond to different parts of space; but it is present in the body which it animates.

St.Augustine

 Augustine himself comes to spend nine years as a hearer among the Manicheans, and while there are no extant writings from this period of his life, the Manicheans are clearly the target of many of the writings he would compose after his conversion to the more orthodox, if Neoplatonizing, Christianity he encountered under Bishop Ambrose of Milan. The Manicheans proposed a powerful, if somewhat mythical and philosophically awkward explanation of the problem of evil: there is a perpetual struggle between co-eternal principles of Light and Darkness (good and evil, respectively), and our souls are particles of Light which have become trapped in the Darkness of the physical world. By means of sufficient insight and a sufficiently ascetic life, however, one could eventually, over the course of several lives, come to liberate the Light within from the surrounding Darkness, thus rejoining the larger Light of which the soul is but a fragmented and isolated part.

The Prophet Mani

As Augustine recounts it in the Confessions and elsewhere, he became disenchanted with the inability of the Manichean elect to provide sufficiently detailed and rigorous explanations of their cosmology. As a result, he began to drift away from the sect during his sojourn in Rome, flirting for awhile with academic skepticism [Confessions V.xiv.25] before finally coming upon the Platonizing influence of Ambrose and the “books of the Platonists”. When Augustine eventually comes to write about the Manicheans, there are three features upon which he will focus: their implicit materialism (a widespread feature of Hellenistic thought, the Neoplatonists being a notable exception); their substantive dualism whereby Darkness, and hence, evil, is granted a co-eternal, substantial existence opposed to the Light; and their identification of the human soul as a fragmented particle of the Light. According to Augustine, this latter identification not only serves to render the human soul divine, thereby obliterating the crucial distinction between creator and creature, but it also raises doubts about the extent to which the individual human soul can be held responsible for morally bad actions, responsibility instead being attributed to the body in which the soul (itself quasi material) is trapped. Although Augustine is vehement and at times merciless in his repudiation of the Manicheans, questions can still be asked about the influence the Manichean world-view continued to exert upon his understanding and presentation of Neoplatonic and Christian themes.

St. Augustine

With respect to Augustine’s desire to find a viable alternative to the awkward and intractable moral dualism of the Manicheans, there can be little question that his embracing of Neoplatonism is a positive development. Not only does it allow him to account for evil without substantializing it, but it also provides him with a unified account of the moral drama that constitutes the human condition. Even so, this metaphysical architectonic is prone to tensions of its own, some of which lend themselves to a kind of moral dualism not altogether unlike that of the Manicheans.

For Augustine, the individual human being is a body-soul composite, but in keeping with his Neoplatonism, there is an asymmetry between soul and body.

We will now very briefly cover the transmission of Platonism through the translation movement.

The House of Wisdom was a major intellectual center during the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom was founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786–809) and culminated in prominence under his son al-Ma’mun (reigned 813–833) who is credited with its formal institution. Al-Ma’mun is also credited with bringing many well-known scholars to share information, ideas, and culture in the House of Wisdom. Based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries, beside Muslim scholars, people of Jewish or Christian background were allowed to study here. Besides translating books into Arabic and preserving them, scholars associated with the House of Wisdom also made many remarkable original contributions to diverse fields.

The Translation Movement was a movement started in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad which translated many Greek classics into Arabic.

Islamic Spain in the 12th Century Renaissance bought with it the translations of many Ancient Greek texts and by the 14th or 15th Century, Moses De Leon had composed (or redacted) the Zohar, which is considered the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah, which as we have already seen in the previous thread, was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism and Platonism.

This will conlude the historical study of the transmission and possibilities for transmission of these ancient ideas and how they have affected Christian and Medieval thought.

We will return to the main philosophical theme of Plato from the next thread, his Theory of Naming and then I will see where we will go from there.

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