The Platonic tradition from Aristotle to Pseudo-Dionysius

The very positing of such a principle signifies several important things that help to give us a significantly different way of looking at the Platonic tradition. We shall take these points up in the following order: first, philosophy as a form of practical experience in a new key; and secondly, the problem of address or prayer.

First, it is sometimes argued that in later Christian “Platonists” such as Gregory of Nyssa there is a new refusal to subordinate virtue to knowledge; instead virtue (which is adespoton, “without a master”), the sacraments and the practical life represent an equally, perhaps even superior path to God (Meredith 1995: 61). So- called Christian Platonism differs completely from its pagan sisters. However, it inhabits the same space, and ideas in that space are radically transgressive. They do not stop at predetermined boundaries. The idea that virtue is without a master occurs first in Republic 9. For both Plato and Gregory of Nyssa, the horizon of the Good means surely that both knowledge and virtue are mutually pervasive forms of philosophy which necessarily involve a strong experiential element. A famous fragment of Aristotle’s lost De Philosophia asserts that in the mysteries the initiate needs “not to learn something but to experience and to be disposed in a certain way” (ou mathein ti dein alia pathein kai diatethenal) (Fragment 15 Rose). Pseudo-Dionysius, much later still, interweaves in a thoroughly Platonic manner different cognitive and experiential perspectives in a quest that is simultaneously practical and contemplative: sometimes one learns from others, “from the sacred writers”; sometimes one learns from what one’s own “perspicacious and laborious research of scriptures” has uncovered; or sometimes from “whatever was made known through that more mysterious inspiration, not only learning but also experiencing the divine things” (ou monon mathon alia kai pathon ta theia·, On the Divine Names 648b).

Secondly, there is the problem of address or prayer. Since the practice of philosophy is not entirely in our power, some open-ended orientation to the Good appears to be necessary. As the Stranger argues in the Laws, while “prayer... is a dangerous instrument in the hands of the person without intelligence”, because he asks for stupid things or for “everything to conform to his own will”, for the good person who wishes to become “dear to god” (philos theoi), it is the “noblest and truest of all things” “to sacrifice and to be in association with the gods always (prosomilein aei) by prayers, offerings and every kind of tendance (the rape ia)” (Laws 3.687d-688d; 4.716c-e). Such a view seems to suggest a two­way dialectic of love (here philia) reminiscent of the Symposium s intermediate Eros-daimon in Diotima-Socrates’ speech, through whom all intercourse (homilid) between gods and human beings takes place (202e-203a).

This does not necessarily turn philosophy into religion or religion into philosophy, for they can be different perspectives and yet occupy the same space, but it certainly raises the question of what such homilia and dialektos could be. Do the gods actually hear human prayers, for instance, or is this simply absurd?

For Aristotle, the benefits of prayer are what have been handed down in “the form of a myth” or “with a view to the persuasion of the many and with a view to its legal and beneficial use” (Metaphysics 12.8.1074a38-bl4). This may be a cynical way of saying that such views keep ordinary people in line or alternatively it may be more like Plato’s view that prayer involving proper rational requests (e.g.

Now thinking in itself is of that which is best in itself... and intellect thinks itself by participation in the object of thought; for it becomes intelligible by touching and thinking so that intellect and object of thought are the same; for what is receptive of the intelligible object and substance is intellect, and it acts in having them, so that activity rather than receptivity is what intellect seems to have as divine, and contemplation is the sweetest and best.

(Metaphysics 1072bl8—24)

Plotinus and Porphyry (and Iamblichus, for whom there is no space here for comparison) confront the same problem but give different answers. In a famous thought-experiment in the opening lines of 5.8.9 (On intellectual beauty), Plotinus urges the reader to avoid Gnostic-like censure of the visible cosmos and to practise a deeper understanding of it as follows:

This cosmos, then, let us take in our discursive thought (dianoia), with each of its parts remaining what it is without confusion, gathering all of them together into one as far as we can, so that when any one part appears first, species or individual.

Porphyry has a similar, if more austere view. Whatever sacrifice, address and prayer may be, they do not involve the butchering of animals or human speech: “it is not sacrifices that honour the god, nor a multitude of offerings that enhance him, but thought full of god and well-established that joins us to god; for like must necessarily go to like” (To Marcella 19; Clark 2000). Instead, “we shall worship [the god who rules over all] in pure silence and with pure thoughts... We must, then, be joined with and made like him, and must offer our own uplifting (anagoge) as a holy sacrifice to the god for it is both our hymn and our security. This sacrifice is fulfilled in passionlessness of the soul and contemplation of the god” (On Abstinence 2.34; Clark 2000).

To sum up, we have argued that religion and philosophy cannot be conceived in isolation from each other, as they have come to be in the modern world. We have also emphasized to this point the implicit adaptation or transformation of traditional religious practices that characterize part of what we have called religious Platonism. Let us turn now to the interpretation of traditional ritual practices in the Platonisms of late antiquity.