The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of Victory demonstrates. For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict. That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks. But, as Freeman admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree. What Freeman takes to be the contrast between Greek and Christian thought might better be seen, according to some scholars, as the contrast between, on the one hand, the flexibility of a way of thinking which can be found in the rich tradition of the early Christian fathers as well as in the paganism with which it co-existed (where the hemispheres, too, co-operated), and, on the other, a culture marked by a concern with legalistic abstractions, with ‘correctness’, and the dogmatic certainties of the left hemisphere, whether Greek or Christian, which inexorably replaced them.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7951-7962).
To better understand the context in which Christian Neoplatonism arose, you need to have a feel for how crazy was the proliferation of all kinds of religions and mystery cults during the 650 years between Alexander and Constantine within the Greek and Roman world. That's more or less a stretch of time from where we are now in the 2000s back to the mid 1300s. A lot can happen during that amount of time, and a lot did. But the big story was the exportation of Greek civilization to the East and South, and the importation of Egyptian, Persian, and Indian mythologies, philosophies, and religions to the West.
Right dab in the middle of that stretch is when Christianity arose, and I would argue that the practice and thinking of the wisest Christian fathers was the product of their sifting and integrating what was most fruitful and healthful from all that cross fertilization from so many Axial sources. More recent attempts, mostly by Protestant scholars, to sift out from all that what was genuinely Christian from what was imported from paganism (that's biblical--good; that's pagan--bad) has always struck me as fussily narrow. Other attempts to portray the free-wheeling Gnostic heretical sects as the underdog fighting against the Orthodox "man" also miss the point.
What's particularly interesting about what became the Catholic or Apostolic tradition was the way it sifted through all that, kept what was helpful, and tossed what wasn't. Sure the Catholic Church in later times, with its inquisitions and indexes, is viewed for good reason through contemporary eyes as being overly rigid about correct doctrine. But the Church in the first three centuries was more truly catholic in its openness to anything that enriched their experience and understanding of their new faith. It's a fascinating, fertile moment in the development of Western civilization, and it needs to be understood better than it is.
To be a philosopher in the ancient world meant not primarily to be someone involved in some theoretical enterprise, but rather to adopt a way of life, a habitus, that involved disciplines designed to transform one's soul. It's interesting from a history-of-ideas perspective to know what was taught in the various schools, but more important is to understand the way of life to which one committed when joining a school. Some of these schools became models for monastic life for Christians later. There were numerous Greek Schools that spun off from Socratism--Cynicism, Stoicism, Cyrenaic Hedonism, Megaran Monism, and later Pyrrhonistic Skepticism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, eclectic Middle Platonism, and then Neopythagoreanism. All this went through its own sifting process culminating in Plotinian Neoplatonism in the mid 200s CE, which integrated Plato, Aristotle, and Neopythagoreanism. It was in the 200s CE that the Christian integrative project was taken to a new level in the remarkable figures, Clement and Origen.
Middle Platonism (90 BCE-mid 200s CE) influenced the Jewish Alexandrine thinker Philo (d. 50 CE) and provided a matrix for the proliferation of Jewish Gnostic sects throughout the Roman Empire. Throw into the mix the Manichaeans, Orphics, Mithraists, and dozens of smaller mystery religions and cults. It was a crazy hodgepodge of utter wackiness mixed in with sober, morally serious thinkers like Cicero, Plutarch, Cato the Younger, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others. But as now 'anything goes', so then 'anything went'--so long as you weren't seen as politically subversive.
Of these the most significant influences on Christian thinking and practice were Gnosticism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism. Gnosticism, because of its Jewish provenance had a significant impact on early Christianity, most notably in Paul's epistles, the Gospel of John, and the Gospel of Thomas. The last isn't canonical, but there's little in it that I can see that makes it heretically Gnostic.
Ah, that word "heretic". Let's take a moment to clarify the meaning of this radioactive word:
We tend to think of all the controversies surrounding who's a heretic or not through the lens of modern pluralistic tolerance for difference. We celebrate the heretic as the free thinker, the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer, the creative crazy whom stuffy conventional thinkers fail to understand. It's important to understand that as with any cross-section of humanity, there always have been and will be anal Christians, but the really soul-crushing rigidity in the Church and its obsession with suppressing heretics didn't set in until after Constantine when the Roman Empire became the official sponsor of the Christian Church. The Christians' counter-cultural identity dissolves as the Church now becomes part of the establishment. More and more serious Christians leave society for wilderness monastic communities.
Fundamentalism and rigid Dogmatism are for Christianity--or for any religion--a disease that infects those who don't know better, and too often the people who rise into positions of power are among the diseased, or they just don't care one way or another about 'truth'--they only care about maintaining the social order and the prerogatives that they enjoy at the top of it. The Renaissance popes come to mind, as do figures like the defrocked Cardinal McCarrick or Jim and Tammy Bakker, just to name a few of the most egregious in recent memory. This kind of self-serving corruption is endemic in any human organization, religious or secular.
The Iron Law of Oligarchy is only rarely suspended in the life of human communities. That this is true should not prejudice us against the truly wise and inspired thinkers who were the real singers in this dynamic historically evolving opera. Too much attention is paid to the house managers, the lawyers, and the accountants, the people who have a role to play in keeping the house lights on. But too often they think they are more important than the singers. People come to be inspired by the music, not to be told moralistic platitudes or to check the books or hear learned disquisitions on Canon Law. My goal in this Genealogy series is to celebrate the singers.
But it's important to distinguish the compulsion for order and conformity from the need to discern what's better and worse. It's important to understand that many of the early inspired singers saw in "pagan" Greek philosophy and other spiritual movements a song with which they could harmonize. They saw in them a parallel revelation and ways of thinking and ways of life that they could learn from and adapt to their own belief and praxis. They were right to do so. And it's important to understand that as much as these early Christians took from pagan thought, they sifted through it to adapt what fit and to reject what didn't in the light of what they found transformative and liberating in the Christian song. (See an outline of these criteria below.) And it's important to at least entertain the possibility that maybe they were mostly right--and when they were wrong it was an honest, correctable mistake.
I don't know whether later in this series I'm going to get into a more detailed examination of Gnosticism--there are many Gnosticisms--but I will say for now that there are two principal things that made parts of Gnosticism incompatible with the great Christian tradition that took shape in these centuries. First, its rejection of the body and the inherent goodness of creation; second, its obsession with knowing magical formulae as essential for salvation. To see the body and the material world as evil or at least as limitations to be transcended flows from Platonism, and this matter/spirit dualism was problematic for early Christian thinkers who wanted to adapt Plato and Neoplatonism to enrich Christian experience. But the whole point of Gnosticism was to escape Prison Earth, which is ruled by a Cruel demonic overlord that some Gnostics identified with, Yaweh, the God of the Jews. This is one of the ancient sources for anti-Semitism--the idea that the Jews don't worship the true God, but a Gnostic demon. Can we all agree that such an idea is worthy to be tossed out as 'heretical'?
This more pernicious aspect of Gnosticism is somewhat reflected in the Gospel of John, which has a tendency to blame the Jews for everything. But while I can recognize why John's Gospel might be difficult for Jews to read, it does not cross the line into Gnostic 'heresy'. So when you read "the Jews" in John's Gospel, you need to understand it as a reference to a religious power establishment that worked hand in hand with the Romans to kill the best and wisest man in Jerusalem. Plato blamed democracy for killing the best and wisest man in Athens. You can understand why either might have an axe to grind with their respective poltical-cultural establishments. What was historically contingent for these writers cannot be extrapolated into some general principle, as alas, too many have done with evil effect.
The Gnostics in the ancient world were known for their arrogance, their insistence that they knew better because they had the secret knowledge and formulas essential for salvation. A good example that illustrates how this persists even today appeared in the news last week. Some reactionary Catholics have their shorts all in a knot because a priest in Arizona when baptizing people throughout his career said "We baptize you..." instead of the prescribed "I baptize you...." If you accept the premise that the incorrect use of one word is consequential, then all kinds of chaos follows, which the article details. To obsess about exact wording like this is a characteristic of Gnosticism. It should be pointed out that most of the people in this priest's parish don't see this as a big deal and see their priest, now retired, as a beloved, warm, menschy guy.
But there were (and are) all kinds of Gnosticisms, and while some of it is contrary to the originary genius of Christianity, much of it was and is consonant with it. Again we see this in John, Paul, and Thomas. Those centuries before Constantine were an important time for wise Christian thinkers to sift out what was harmful or nonsense from what was fruitful. And so before talking about what the most important of these early Christian thinkers contributed to the development of Christian Neoplatonism, I want to lay out what I see as key criteria that the early fathers used to guide them in their sifting project. I am excerpting what follows from my summary of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age which covers the key criteria or what he calls "axes of significance":
Taylor argues that during the Patristic period, Christian thinkers wanted to use Greek ideas to help them to articulate their understanding of the significance of the Christian revelation. There were elements in Greek thinking, particularly from Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism that were helpful, and there were other elements that were distortive. Much of the arguing during this period focused on how much one gains or gives up in using Greek ideas to establish a Christian ontology and moral order. Taylor argues that the struggle was argued out on six axes of significance where Christian ideas using the Greek philosophical framework made significant alterations that were to have a significant shaping effect on the imaginaries of medieval Christendom:
- The significance of the body. While Greek spirit/body dualism persisted in some Christian thought, the more significant dualism for Christians was the one articulated by Augustine's "two loves" (love of self vs. love of God), based on the Jewish dualism of the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh. It is not the body that presents a problem qua body. The problem rather is to determine what is worthy of our love, or to put it another way, what is worthy of our 'ultimate concern' and what obstructs or distracts us from loving that which is truly worthy. That is a function of the predisposition of the heart. The life in the body is validated for Christians by its havng been hallowed by the Incarnation and the resurrection. The body has been redeemed in a way impossible to embrace within the pure Greek scheme. The goal is not to escape from the body but to transform it, to sanctify it.
- The significance of history. The Incarnation gives history and the events that happen in it a significance not found in Greek thought. In addition, the Greek idea of eternity--the beginninglessness and endlessness of time--is replaced by the Jewish/Christian idea of creation and the idea of history's eschatological culmination at the end of time. History has a plot: it is a story of falling away and return. For Christians the turning point in the plot is the Incarnation, and the end point is the eschatological gathering of all time together in the communion of the saints. The lives of the saints are the lives that depict the story of return--of alienation and reconciliation. The Prodigal Son is the archetype.
- The significance of the individual person. Individuation was not particularly important for Greek thought. But for Christians the significance of history enhances the importance of the individual whose eternal destiny is worked out in time. This sense of the individual is not important in the Plotinian Neoplatonist ontology, for instance, for which the goal is rather Eastern in the sense of the individual overcoming the illusion of individuation and melting back into the cosmic pleroma. And while for Aristotle the physical body was important, the individual had particularity only insofar as it is secured by matter. No body, no individuation. The eternal desinty of the individuated immortal soul is a Christian preoccupation. There's a lot of murkiness about the status of the individual in Aristotle's post-death existence, but the ultimate destiny of the human person is to be bodily transformed as Christ's body was transformed in the resurrection. Individuation and the Body are linked in this very important sense.
- The significance of contingency. Stoic fatalism and Plotinian necessity requires that things are exactly as they should be because they could not be any other way because God could not have created any other world. The human task for classical Stoics and Neoplatonists is simply amor fati. The idea of changing anything for the better or that there there could be such a thing as human progress is futile and delusional. This idea is challenged by Christian ideas of freedom and grace--although Plotinian necessity is still echoed in Augustine's and later Calvin's bizarrely un-Christian doctrine of double predestination. The more authentically Christian position is that there is no total plan, God created a more interesting universe than that. Here's Taylor view:
...the Christian eschaton is made up of paths, of stories. And these are shaped by contingencies. That the stories end well is sometimes seen as their having been rigorously scripted from the beginning. This is often what people call Providence, following the Stoics. God plans sins, so that he can script in some mercy.
But a rather different model is suggested by the Bible. God's Providence is his ability to respond to whatever the universe and human agency throw up. God is like a skilled tennis player, who can always return the serve. We can see this mode, for instance, in the famous phrase of the Preface of [the] Easter Vigil:"O felix culpa" (happy fault), applied to Adam's sin; happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. . . .
[The Good Samaritan story] takes us beyond any established relation into the domain of accident or contingency: my neighbour is someone I come across, bleeding in the road. It was sheer accident that I came along at just that time; but this accident can be the occasion for rebuilding a skein of human relations animated by agape. The Samaritan's action is part of God's response to the skewed serve the robbers have lobbed into history. (SA p. 275)
- The significance of the emotions. Life in the body is good, and it is humanity's eternal destiny to be embodied, so the challenge is not to suppress the emotions, but to transform them. Emotion and desire are affirmed, and Stoic apatheia is rejected. The idea of a compassionate, suffering God was an impossible idea for Greek thought, and a stumbling block for anyone whose thought was deeply embedded in the Greek imaginary. And unlike Buddhism, desire qua desire is not the problem so much as on what the human heart focuses its desire and its longing, on what it loves--see number 1 above.
- The significance of God as ‘person’ capable of ‘communion’. The Cappadocian formulation of the Trinity is of three persons in communion. God’s intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us through making us partakers of the communion which God already lives, and so that we become what we were created to be, fully individuated persons in the image and likeness of Him who created us. It was, in this sense, an intervention meant to make possible our “deification” (theosis). Salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion with one another.
This understanding of communion as the telos of history is the central idea, the hermeneutic key, without which it is impossible to understand the animating spirit of the Christian revelation. If you want basic criteria to judge whether someone who claims to be Christian is truly animated by the spirit of the gospels, you can do so by evaluating to what degree he wants to include rather than exclude, to embrace rather than shun, to give the benefit of the doubt rather than to judge, to forgive rather than condemn, to converse with the enemy rather than to attack him, to obsess about rules rather than the quality of relationship. Yes, Christians are admonished to be wise as serpents and guileless as doves. This is a warning to be not foolish or naive, but while the dove and the serpent need to be talking to one another, the dove sets the agenda. Too much church history, especially the kind that has been motivated by concerns about institutional preservation, alas, has come from the serpent setting the agenda, and for this reason its spectacular failures and its loss of spiritual authority in the broader culture.
These six themes will be central to the story I want to tell regarding the rise and fall of Christian Neoplatonism in the West, and also as to whether something like it is possible to provide a mythos dimension in a post-secular society.
But another theme central to the Neoplatonic tradition that I want explore in this series is its participatory epistemology. The important thing that Western civilization had through its Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary were assumptions that allowed for a knowledge born of wonder and of a need to deepen one's understanding of the world as an act of love. This idea of knowledge as eros was central to the pagan Neoplatonists and to the Christians who learned from them while inspired by the agapic ideals of the gospels.
We'll talk about how this way of knowing was lost during the late-medieval period and how its loss laid the groundwork for the rupture between science and religion in the modern period. I see that rupture as one that can be healed, and must be healed eventually if a metaphysical imaginary that includes a wisdom or vertical dimension is to be restored some time in the future.
If an epistemology that is based on participatory knowledge becomes the new norm in philosophy and cognitive science, as I think it will, it changes the game. Heidegger and Scheler got the ball rolling, Buber and Merleau-Ponty were important figures in the last century that should have been paid more attention to than all the stuff that came out the squabble between Structuralists and Post-Structuralists. Owen Barfield is also important here in a way that is too much overlooked. We see more recently Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke picking up the baton, relating these thinkers to neuroscience and cognitive science in ways that are pregnant with possibilities for some future integration of Logos and Mythos.
That's where I eventually want to wind up in this series, and we'll see if I have the energy and perseverance to get there. Even so, it might take a while.
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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.