ADOPTING AND ADAPTING RELIGION WITHOUT PHILOSOPHY
The philosophy of the Platonists may intend partially or entirely to replace the traditional ritual practices of the Greeks, but, in the Neoplatonists especially, it also reinterprets them so that the philosopher can continue to practise them.
This reinterpretation constitutes a move beyond Plato, who has Socrates say in the Republic that he will leave the legislation of ritual practices to the oracle at Delphi (427b). The Neoplatonists’ increasing involvement with ritual practices culminates in lamblichus’ reinterpretation of traditional Greek practices in On the Mysteries and Dionysius the Areopagite’s reinterpretation of Christian practices in On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Neither of them is at liberty explicitly to reinvent the practices of their tradition. lamblichus claims in On the Mysteries that we should follow those (that is, the Egyptians) who first established the laws concerning ritual practice. Dionysius, too, lays down the rule that we should neither think nor speak anything about the divine beyond what is given in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Such claims (in contrast to Socrates above) seem to deny any role for the human power of discursive rationality in the development of ritual practices. Rationality serves only as an interpreter of a source that is outside rationality, and so, seemingly, the traditional texts of the Jews and Christians exercise an absolute authority even within the Neoplatonic philosophy of Dionysius.Plotinus, the first of what are now known as the Neoplatonists, is perhaps the least interested in linking the philosophy of his school with traditional ritual practices. When his student Amelius invites him to the festival of the new moon, Plotinus gives his famous answer that “the gods ought to come to me, not I go to them”. And yet Plotinus does go so far as to establish occasionally an analogy to one text, place or ritual, and because of its capacity to leap over borders, to all the misfits who did not quite fit into any determinate system.
The effect of religious Platonism was therefore to pave the way for entirely new forms of cosmopolitanism, capable of subverting established forms of both cosmos and polis but never of losing entirely its dynamic appeal to individual human beings.SUGGESTED READING
Corrigan, K., J. D. Turner & P. Wakefield 2012. Religion and Philosophy in the Platonic and Neoplatonic Traditions: From Antiquity to the Early Medieval Period. Sankt Augustin.
Gerson, L. (ed.) 2010. The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, 2 vols. Cambridge.
Golitzin, A. 1994. Et Introibo ad altare Dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita. Thessaloniki.
Hare, J. 1985. Plato’s Euthyphro (Bryn Mawr Commentaries). Indianapolis, IN.
Menn, S. 1992. “Aristotle and Plato on God as Nous and as the Good”. Review of Metaphysics 45(3): 543-73.
Shaw, G. 1995. Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. Philadelphia, PA.
Watts, E. J. 2006. City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. Berkeley, CA.
ornaments. This love of detail also comes across in the narrative traditions as in the following example from the heroic epic Tain Bo Cuailnge from the Ulster Cycle:
He set on his head his war-like crested helmet, finely decorated with forty precious carbuncles and inlaid with red enamel and crystal and carbuncle and gleaming stones from the East. He took in his right hand his furious spear, stout and fierce. In his left hand he took his battle-sword with its gold grip and its hilt of red-gold. On the curve of his back he took his handsome huge shield with the great red-gold knob in the middle and another fifty knobs around it, each big enough to hide a prize boar.
(Kinsella [1969] 2002: 193; in O’Rahilly 1961 [Irish edn]: 97-8)
This attention to all the fine accoutrements of a great warrior produces a both bombastic and fantastic narrative style that seems eminently suited to the often boastful, temperamental and unbearably vain figures that these stories concern. Much emphasis is placed on looks, clothing and weaponry which are often described down to the minutest details, which means that the driving force of the plot itself at times fades into the background while the narrator is busy conveying to the reader exactly what the hero carries in his left hand.
Perhaps it is not unfair to compare this material situation - crude housing and personal beauty - with the intellectual situation of favouring the intangible oral medium over the more tangible written one. It means that knowledge about religion, belief, ritual, custom and all sorts of native lore was preserved in oral memory rather than being committed to writing, and this naturally complicates our access to that knowledge. Such intellectual bias is an important aspect of the Celtic mind-set and is probably connected in some way or other to the cult of the head, which is an equally characteristic feature of Celtic tradition.