RETHINKING THE RELATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
How is one to think of the relation between philosophy and religion in the Platonic tradition? The phrase ‘‘religious Platonism” may seem to be an oxymoron, if one defines Platonism, after Nietzsche, as primarily a philosophical or intellectual enterprise, fixated on “reason” and practised by a rationalist elite; or if one defines religion, by contrast, as a set of common beliefs and practices, involving prayers, rituals and accepted procedures, either more or less irrational or possessing their own peculiar traditional roots shared by a specific group of people.
Platonism, more broadly conceived, however, resists modern categories, for it is an “in-between” phenomenon that cuts across modern disciplinary and dichotomous notions such as “religion” and “philosophy” as well as across ancient traditionalist representations of divinity (such as the Greek gods), of city- state or nationhood. Religion is a term derived from Latin with no exact Greek equivalent and for this reason one might claim that there is no notion of religion as such in Greek antiquity. Even for Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian “Platonist” of the fifth-sixth centuries CE, the approximate terms for our notion of religion, namely threskeia (worship), theologia (theology), hierourgia (holy work), leitourgia (liturgy), theourgia (theurgy), agathourgia, involve a “theology” of lived experience that does not separate philosophy, practice, prayer and community. Equally, neither Plato in the fourth century BCE nor Dionysius in the sixth century CE divides life up into its various domains (social, political, philosophical, etc.) and then adds “religion” as another category. For the Greeks, the “religious” pervades all other categories from the beginning. Pierre Hadot has emphasized that much of ancient philosophical thought must be understood as forms of ascetic practice and preparation, spiritual exercises, and not academic philosophy with departmental status as we know it today (Hadot [1987] 1995).We want to suggest that philosophy of the whole period (particularly that of Plato) is a radical form of rethinking the diverse modes of its own past, a form that recasts the masks of drama, for instance, and the prayers and rituals of religious practice into a transformative participatory dialectic no longer in honour of Dionysus (alone) or of the entire Greek pantheon, for that matter, but conversation) to what is really important, that is, not external signs of rank but internal, moral worth and openness to a reality that saturates and sustains the whole of nature. This at least is the gist of Socrates’ defence at his trial. A story preserved in Porphyry’s De abstinentia [On Abstinence], and possibly from Theophrastus, tells us that the person Apollo loved most was not, according to the oracle, the wealthiest Magnesian always in the temple, but a totally unknown Clearchos of Methydrion in Arcadia who “worshipped the gods not by sacrificing cattle or cutting up victims, but by offering what he had available” (2.16). Porphyry is arguing against animal sacrifice, of course, but he is profoundly rooted in this Socratic tradition in a new religious way, and what Socrates has “available” is a peculiar capacity for critical distance, that is, not to accept the comfortable self-identities of accepted practices, but to call conventional religion and everything else into question. In Plato’s Euthyphro, for instance, the claims of justice and ordinary morality are more basic to human life than different representations of divinity. When Socrates asks: “Is the holy holy because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it is holy?” he suggests, however aporematically, the necessity of a higher standard for authentic religious thinking than the preferred viewpoints of rival deities (Euthyphro lOd). So the search for “forms” or “standards” is interwoven with a religious critique of conventional religious meanings from the outset, although this critique will have the result that traditional religious practices can be retained in the life of the polis (in the Laws).