I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
--"Jerusalem" by William Blake
I want to bring into focus certain key themes that emerge in the early common era that became central for shaping the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary of Latin Christendom. I want to focus, first, on how Christian Neoplatonism came to provide the metaphysical imaginary throughout the Mediterranean world, and then to focus particularly on developments in the European West until the late medieval period. And then we'll look at how retrieval of its essential elements lost after that point might provide a matrix for a postmodern/postsecular metaphysical imaginary.
Christianity started as a Jewish sect among several other Jewish sects, but the cosmopolitan pluralism that we discussed in Part 9 created a cultural infrastructure for its rapid spread. So while its historical roots were deeply embedded in Judaism, it quickly become a universalist religion, riding on the back, so to say, of Hellenistic cosmopoltanism and Roman roads. The New Testament was written in Greek; new Christians read the Septuagint, the Hebrew scriptures that were written in Greek.
So while the Greek influence is strong, there is obviously a lot going on in nascent Christianity that has little or nothing to do with Neoplatonism. And when push comes to shove, I'm not interested in tracing the systematic thinking of Christian intellectual elites that owes so much to Greek thought as I want to deepen understanding how these early Christians' experience of the Living Real was shaped by their imagination of it. To do so requires understanding the Greek influence as playing an almost equal role with Jewish influence.
Understanding the interrelationship between reality and our imagination of it is critical for the larger argument that I'm trying to make about the evolution and malleability of our metaphysical imaginaries. We tend to think that we live in reality, and of course we do, but our experience of it is filtered by our imagination of it, and that imagination of it is provisional, to say the least. What is real and what we experience of it are not the same thing. Some people are more deeply open to and aware of aspects of the real than others are, and one of the premises of the argument I've been making so far is that the ancient philosophical schools developed spiritual praxes that opened up transcendent dimensions of reality to their experience, and these experiences were foundational for their thought. If you don't understand the nature of the experience, you can't understand what they were thinking.
We no longer find it possible to take these experiences of transcendent reality seriously because, even though people often still have these experiences (qq.v, James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Taylor, Waking from Sleep), our metaphysical imaginary has changed in the last five hundred years in ways that have delegitimated them. They are reduced to subjective psychological/aesthetic experiences rather than thought of as disclosive of the Real. So underlying my argument is the assumption that this inability to take an ontology that comprises a spiritual or transcendent dimension is a mistake, and that this mistake has profound consequences of which we are mostly oblivious.
This experience of transcendence is central to the Axial Revolution and its assertion of ontonormativity, our sense that the immanent world isn't but ought to be ruled by the law of a higher order. Humans have become aware of this higher law through the intuitions, visionary experiences, and revelations of philosophers and prophets in different civilizations--whether the Law given to Moses, the Tao by Lao Tse, or the transcendental realm of the One, the Good, and the Beautiful as in Socrates and Platonism. There are two basic responses to this revelation--either (1) give up on the sin-dominated, delusion-saturated, immanent world and find a way to get out of it and into the transcendent world, or (2) Reform/transform the immanent world so that it aligns with the transcendent world--'thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'.
The Theocracy of ancient Israel set itself apart from the pre-Axial societies that surrounded it, and in doing so exemplified the second; the Greek philosophical schools exemplified the first. [See Note 1] In the age of empire after Alexander and then Rome, Aristotelian or Stoic republican virtue was still exercised by the few elites who were in politics--e.g., Cato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca--but this was not an option open to most attracted to philosophy, who instead undertook more apolitical philosophical pursuits.
Virtue as practiced in the more prominent Greek schools became mostly about theoria--the purification and alignment of one's individual mind with the transcendent One through ascetical spiritual and contemplative practice. There's not much room for political engagement when the whole goal is to get out of the body and up into the transcendent world where the One is to be contemplated. So the idea of an eschatological-historical political fulfillment is more Jewish than Greek, and it becomes symbolized in Christian imagination as the New Jerusalem, which is to be the fulfillment of history when the Law of Heaven and the Law on Earth become one as pictured in the Book of Revelations.
Now whether the mythopoeisis of the New Jerusalem means that history gradually evolves toward toward it or whether it's a dramatic intervention to come crashing down from the heavens at the end of time has been much debated. If you lean in the hopeful, progressive direction, you believe that humans are co-responsible with the Divine for making the New Jerusalem a reality in history. If you lean in the more pessimistic direction, you believe in the marrow of your bones that humans can do nothing to change history. History is a jail from which humans must be liberated either in the Buddhistic sense of being released from the chain of incarnations, or in the Christian sense of returning home after death from exile in a fallen world. The New Jerusalem is not something we co-create with the Divine, but something that the Divine gives the just, risen from the dead, in the eschaton.
Most secular people operate oblivious of how their imaginations are shaped by theological presuppositions, but these are two archetypes regarding the telos of history have a profound influence in organizing our political and metaphysical imaginaries, whether we are religious or not. And I think it's fair to say that if you incline to the first interpretation, your politics tends to be hopeful, progressive, and reform-oriented, and if the latter, oriented toward conservative stability and good order.
The first is more flexible and desirous of change, the second more rigid and resistant to change--except maybe to change things back to the way they were before things get out of joint. I'm with Blake, and like him I see this as a local project; it starts small here and there, in England or in America; in South Africa or in India. What is universalist in such a project is discovered only in the depths of particularity.
This conservative idea of political change shaped the medieval order. That order derived from an integration of Jewish monarchical theocracy with Greek metaphysics. The politcal-social realm on earth receives its form as it reflects the cosmic metaphysical hierarchy in the Great Chain of Being, which, of course, derives from Neoplatonism. As above, so below. As the transcendent world is changeless and eternal, so should the immanent world be stable and ordered. Revolution does not mean the creation of something new, but rather a "turning back" to the way things were before they became deformed by the lawlessness of tyrants or political elites whose debauched lives went against the natural cosmic order, as in Macbeth. [See Note 2]
I am conscious how removed these themes are from our ordinary experience of the world we live in today. And I feel compelled whenever I can to try to show their relevance. These ideas were not abstract two thousand years ago but in fact organized the imaginaries of the societies in which they arose--and deep down, even if only latently, they continue to organize our contemporary imaginaries. In the premodern West, the social imaginary and the cosmic imaginary were interdependent, and both were shaped by the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis. When the cosmic imaginary started to break down after Galileo, so did the stability of the hierarchical social imaginary, and with it the moral imaginary that was deeply linked to it.
One of the essential flaws that fragilized both the premodern cosmic and social imaginaries was their commitment to an order understood as a static hierarchy. The investment in such an order made it rather resistant to adapting to the torrent of new information and social change that flooded Western Europe in the post Renaissance/Reformation period. That the premodern hierarchical imaginary was not flexible enough to adapt does not mean that the fundamental intuitions that supported it were wrong, but that the custodians of the old hierarchical order lacked the imagination and flexibility of spirit to adapt. They were too invested in the superstructure rather than trusting in the Living Real that had given it its shape. The Erasmian spirit loses to the reactionary spirit in the Church, and science goes one way and faith the other. This was a tragedy, but perhaps one that could not have been avoided.
One interesting consequence was that a secular version of slumbering Jewish eschatological orientation toward the future gradually awakened and oriented those leaning toward a progressive understanding of history to see in science the method for achieving the New Jerusalem. In other words, Greek rationality coopts Jewish eschatology in the hopes of creating a reason-based utopian future that has nothing to do with God, who, if he exists at all, is a remote, uncaring clockmaker God who set up a cosmic machine for humans to reverse engineer, if they have the wit to do it. Progress comes to equate only with material progress, not spiritual or moral progress. And so here we are.
In the premodern imaginary, the only kind of progress that mattered was spiritual and moral. I'm interested in thinking through to a way of reconnecting the moral imaginary with the cosmic imaginary in a postmodern, Christian-Neoplatonic key. But in order to do so, the static hierarchical imaginary has to give way to an imaginary that is dynamic and historical. And so obviously, when I use the word "cosmic" I don't mean by it only the visible world, but a multi-dimensional cosmos where these various dimensions impinge on one another.
We're at a point where ancient religious ideas are converging with developments in computer science and modern physics--at least in its "weird science" precincts. It suffuses our imagination in science fiction from The Matrix, Lost, The Anomaly, The City and the City, Upload to just name a few that are top of mind. We don't take these works of fiction literally, but they work as metaphors for something that we deep down sense to be true: that the world given to us by the senses is not the only world that there is, maybe not even the most important one.
If we are intelligent enough to create virtual worlds, it becomes easier to imagine that other intelligences likely created our world. Once you've allowed yourself to make the shift regarding "other dimensions" from 'probably not' to 'probably so', then you move to the next step, which is to ask what can we know about these other dimensions that has any real plausibility? How do we know about them? Who can we trust among those who profess to have answers for these questions? What criteria are there to evaluate the validity of this 'knowledge'? As the asking of these questions acquires increasing legitimacy in intellectual circles, we move more deeply into a post-secular age.
So this is my way of segueing to how Christian thinking about what the deepest human aspirations should be about, which couldn't be clearer or more plainly stated in the Christian scriptures and in the thinking of the most important early Church Fathers--to become transformed by Divine Love. The point cannot be more emphatically asserted: Nothing is more important for the human project than to be transformed by Love. History, however imagined, is first a moral project--not a moralistic one. And so therefore, knowledge--the only knowledge that really counts--correlates with spiritual transformation, and the primary agent in this transformation is Divine Love. That was true then, and it's true now.
And so the only people you can trust about what they have to say about 'other dimensions' are people who have been in some degree transformed by Love. Are there "other dimensions" that have nothing to do with Love. Undoubtedly. Does this tell us something about the nature of evil and delusion? Probably so. And so for that reason, the only way you can be sure about anything is the degree that you feel the power of Love in it. And so therefore it follows that you cannot truly know anything really worth knowing if you are not Good, and you are Good to the degree that you have been transformed by Love. All other moral prescriptions, rules, imperatives, practices are subordinate to that one. If they are not in some essential sense enacted in the service of Love, they are at best useless and probably harmful.
So the cognitive/epistemological project on the vertical axis is linked to the moral/spiritual project. The reason that Western developed societies are reeling in ontological dizziness currently is because they gave up on this moral spiritual project because it was difficult, and because there were more easily obtained benefits by pursuing a cognitive/epistemological project that operated solely on the horizontal material Logos axis. There is currently no cognitive/epistemological project on the vertical Mythos axis that has broad cultural acceptance. The big question is how to remedy this. I am not claiming that to do so solves all our problems, but it at least provides a framework for a solution that is currently unavailable to us.
Christians inherited the idea of the dynamic, central animating power of Love from both the Greeks and the Jews, integrated it, and popularized it, that is, made it more broadly available. It saw itself as the bringer of good news regarding this subversively deep truth to the whole world. Not just for a particular people--the Jews--and not just for Greek philosophical elites, but to all people of good will. And many people of good will were already receptive to it because it fit with what they already suspected was true. That Christians often let this mission become coopted by other agendas that are utterly alien to it, and often in spectacular fashion, is not at issue. I want to focus on where it has succeeded, not in where it has failed. What matters is what was most deeply true in this new cultural movement.
No religious tradition can sustain itself if there is no experiential underground water table, so to say, that from time to time erupts into the above-ground world in springs that renew life in the waking world. This underground stream is the spiritual dimension that sustains any living culture by virtue of its connection to the Living Real. And a culture is healthy to the degree and to the extent that its people are refreshed by it. Now this idea of interior depths in the soul, which we'll see developed in Augustine, contrasts with the earlier imagination of mysticism which owes more to the Greeks, which emphasizes something in the heights, as something that one has to leave the body to encounter. This is true in Plotinian mysticism [See Note 3], and we see it even in Philo, for whom ecstasy is central to his experience of encounter with the Divine--
...but escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophetic inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it.
I have no doubt that this was a real experience, and as I laid out in Part 10, the aspiration to have such ecstatic experiences of transcendence comes from the Axial Revolution's focus on a transcendent dimension that is more real than reality as we experience it in the immanent, sublunar, embodied world. And so it makes sense that a longing to leave this world to experience that other world would be a focus of spiritual practice.
But this is a rare experience. According to his biographer, even a mystical prodigy like Plotinus had such an experience only four times, and with varying degrees of intensity and duration. And in reading about the sages who oriented their whole lives toward such experiences, you might wonder whether this is any way to live. Isn't this too world-denying, too negating of the body? Too individualistic? An example, perhaps, of what David Brooks calls the higher selfishness? It can be, although apparently it was not true of Plotinus. [See Note 3] But this tendency to see the body and its impurities as the chief impediment to the highest faculty of the mind--nous--attaining to the enjoyment of the contemplation of the One is very Greek. The Jewish m.o., even when influenced by the Greeks, is more down to earth. And so in Christianity there is this metaxic, creative tension between Greek otherworldliness and Jewish earthiness. Problems ensue when the tension snaps, or when one crowds out the other.
And so in the period of post-Axial development in the early centuries of the the common era, the dominant element in this tension is Greek--the orientation of spiritual practice is on a vertical axis, with the primary focus on what is above--with the individual spiritual aspirant reaching out from below to that which is above. As we'll see there is an ecclesiology that shapes Christian thinking that counterbalances spiritual elitism, but still the goal is the transformation of what is below by the power of that which is above. And spiritual fulfillment is something imagined as having begun below but only completed above after death. The idea of eschatological historical fulfillment recedes into latency.
Nevertheless, the Jewish idea of a God who cares, who initiates a reaching out from above to us humans below, valorizes a dynamic of descent not seen with the Greeks. We see it, though, in Philo and in the Song of Songs the One God reaching out in Love downward toward his people Israel, as the bridegroom to his bride.
And so it is by this logic of outreaching Divine Love that Christianity sees itself as an extension of Judaism. This Divine reaching out from above to humans below attains a fulfillment in the incarnation of the One God in a human being. That this was perceived as blasphemy by many Jews is understandable, and that it is implausible for most people now who inhabit a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary goes without saying. I am not here to persuade the skeptical, but instead to show how powerful this idea was, and why it was so broadly accepted within the Hellenic/Roman world--and beyond.
I've used the following Iain McGilchrist quote before, but I think it warrants re-reading from time to time because it distills what is central to the Christian mythos and why it was so compelling then and why it still is for so many now:
The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.(The Master and the Emissary, Kindle Locations 11566)
This points to why this new religion was so appealing when people first encountered it. It was compatible with foundational ideas already in the Hellenistic imaginary, and yet there was a central distinguishing idea here that derived from Judaism that refutes Greek ideas about the impersonal indifference of the godhead and asserts instead that the One God cares because he is Love, that he suffers compassionately with us, that our choices and our actions matter, particularly as we choose to love or refuse to. How astonishing this idea is, and that, especially for us now who have become incapable of astonishment, it sounds too good to be true is also understandable. But there are an awful lot of very smart, deeply wise people who hearkened to this good news, and this Genealogy series seeks to better understand why it was so compellingly believable for them.
And so going forward I want to organize our consideration of the thinkers and developments within Christian Neoplatonism around several key themes:
Imago Dei/Divinization: What is our deepest identity and destiny as human beings, and how do we find our way to its fullest realization? What practices promote the development of our deepest human identity as created in the image and likeness of God?
Visio Dei/Apophaticism: To what degree is God knowable or unknowable? To what degree is his presence in our lives cognizable? Where is such a presence visible?
Agapic and Erotic (understood correctly) Love: What is the real thing? What is its counterfeit? How can we tell the difference? How do we become transformed by it and so more capable of communion with other people, with the natural world, with the spiritual world.
Wisdom/Knowledge: What does it mean to truly know? How do we deepen our knowing? How do we distinguish truth from illusion? What is the role of tradition, exegesis, hermeneutic theory? How does a Neoplatonic metaphysics support a participatory epistemology?
Cosmic/Moral/Social Imaginaries: How is our moral development linked to our ideas about the Cosmos? Does our cosmic/moral imaginary play a role in shaping our political/social imaginary? What does that say about our current political and social imaginary? Is it possible within the framework of knowledge provided by science to frame a different cosmic imaginary that, so to say, could be extrapolated from our moral imaginary?
The Meaning of History: Is the goal to escape history or to transform it? Is this even a legitimate topic?
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Note 1: Nobody with any sense can take seriously Plato's political thought experiment in The Republic as a blueprint for politics in the real world. It's clear that civic virtue was critical for Aristotle, but that had more to do with the idea that human flourishing required political engagement without there being any idea about what the ideal polis ought to look like. Aristotelian republican virtue as an ideal recedes during the late Roman Empire and early medieval period and emerges again in the Italian city states in the late middle ages.
Note 2: I think that this goes a long way to explain the power of the archetype that energizes Qanon. People attracted to Qanon are not wrong to sense that the world is disordered, and so it's understandable that an atavistic sense of medieval order and disorder would incline them to blame corrupt elites and to believe that their elimination would restore cosmic and social order. But is it so atavistic? Does this not explain the disorder and the remedy for it as we all imagine it in Putin's corrupt, kleptocratic Russia? How ironic then, that Qanon is inclined to side with Putin. It can only make sense if you are committed to the idea that Western media is part of the whole corrupt Western elite system, so it must be wrong about Putin. And therefore Putin must be right no matter how overwhelming the evidence to the contrary.
Note 3: I'll probably have more to say about Plotinus in the context of the the cosmology developed by Dionysos the Areopagite. I want to go to Augustine first. He was influenced by Plotinus, and I will discuss Plotinus in passing as an influence on Augustine, but the most interesting thing about Plotinus from a history-of-ideas perspective and for the story I'm telling was his integration of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers, and then how in turn Plotinus's thought was Christianized. He would probably be a far more important figure in Western thought in his own stead if he had not been absorbed into what became Christian Neoplatonism after Augustine and Dionysos.
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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series. Regarding future installments in this series, they will come when I get to it, which depends on how much time and energy I have for it. The goal going forward will be to understand the historical development, i.e., the historical-cultural impact of Christian Neoplatonism on North Atlantic and Mediterranean societies through to the Renaissance, how it went underground after the Reformation, and how it worked as an underground, inspiring force in the arts and philosophy through the modern period. (3/30/22)]