Platonism

Concept

1. The world of thought, the maxims and teachings, the myths, and the concepts of the Greek philosopher Plato and his school are among the most influential traditions of European thought. ‘Platonism’ rested not only on an astonishing ancient continuity of doctrine—the Platonic Academy lasted a good nine hundred years, until 529 CE—it also influenced, just as did → Aristotelianism, the philosophical formation of theory until well into modern times. From the viewpoint of religious history, Platonism was effective in a twofold manner. Over the course of time, in late antiquity and in the Renaissance, it was transformed into an esoteric theology and → intellectual religion, and has been appealed to by religious movements down to the present (→ Esotericism). Of equal importance with this ‘religious Platonism’ is the influence exercised by the Platonic store of thought on the religious theologies of late- and post-ancient religions, especially on those that had directly received the ancient Greek philosophy by way of Hellenism, and thus on the Christian and Islamic cultural area. In addition, in modernity, thinkers of Asian religions, such as Sri Aurobindo, have adopted Plato.

Point of Departure: Plato

2. Three works of the philosopher Plato (d. c. 347 BCE), who came from the Athenian aristocracy and was a pupil of the famous Socrates, are central for his reception in the area of religion: the Symposium (in Gk., sympósion, ‘banquet’), the outline of the state in the Politeia (and the Theatetus), and the cosmological and utopian speculations of the Timaeus.

(1) The Symposium is a dialogue on the essence of Eros, which leads to the narrowed concept of “Platonic love” by way of its reception in the Renaissance.

(2) The Republic deals with the question of the ideal state, which culminates in the totalitarian vision of a ‘guardian state,’ and is adopted in later utopian states (→ Atlantis; Utopia). Important for its religious reception, besides the Platonic teaching on the soul, is the doctrine of Ideas, illustrated in the Allegory of the Cave:1 the things of the world are only copies or images of eternal, immaterial ‘ideas’ (in Gk., idéai or eídê), which present the essentially real. Human beings perceive only the copies—the images, as if they sat in a cave, with their backs to the exit—i.e. the shadows of things, projected on the wall of the cave by light from outside. Only by philosophical striving (érôs, love, in the broadest sense) can the immaterial exemplars of things be perceived, step-by-step, up the series of rungs of reality.

(3) The dialogue Timaeus contains a cosmogony that was received by nearly all representatives of religious Platonism. The thought that a demiurge (Gk. for ‘sculptor,’ ‘artisan’) has created the world as an—imperfect—image of the sphere of the Ideas is ancient and influential. The Gnostics, especially, saw in it the instance of utter wickedness, master of evil matter (→ Gnosticism). As ‘mediator’ between the incorporeal world of the Ideas and visible things, the Demiurge will have created the ‘world soul’ in particular. By way of the Neoplatonists, and, above all, through the Gnosis, the cosmogony of the Timaeus became a solid component of Christian and Islamic Platonism, especially in the case of ‘heretical’ currents of these religions.

Middle- and Neoplatonism

3. In late antiquity, under the influence of gnosis and of Christian and Jewish theology, as well as by way of an appeal to the early Greek Orphic and mystery theology, Platonism became a syncretistic new system of belief, and stronger than before. Philosophers Plotinus (205–270) and Porphyry (c. 234–305) introduced meditative techniques, such as ‘concentration ecstasy,’ in order to unite with the supreme principle of their philosophical theory; thereby they stand at the inauguration of European → mysticism (→ Gnosticism; Hermetism/Hermeticism). With Porphyry, asceticism played an important role. Within the Syrian school under Iamblichus (c. 250–330) magic and practices like ‘god-constraints’ (theurgíai) found entry. Iamblichus also developed a sophisticated pantheon.

The first and most important representative of ‘Neoplatonism,’ Plotinus, taught a hierarchy of being, from the immaterial ‘utterly one’ (in Gk., to hen), to the ‘spirit’ (nous), to souls, and further steps down to the world of the bodily, the material. The lower steps and principles of being had come into existence through an ‘effluence’ or ‘emanation’ (in Lat., emanatio) or ‘precipitation’ (in Gk., hypóstasis; the image is that of a saturated release) from each higher level—without loss of substance, however. This thought was taken up by Christian gnosis and is a key component of Islamic gnosis and modern receptions of gnosticism.

The Christian Church Fathers, as well, represented strongly Platonic conceptualizations: → Augustine, for example, who read Plato with the eyes of the Neoplatonists, applied the Platonic doctrine of the Ideas for his descriptions of the attributes of God, and placed God as the Summum Bonum (Lat., ‘Supreme Good’), likewise parallel to the idea of the Good that Plato had placed in the highest position. Nevertheless, Augustine remained faithful to the Christian conception of a personal God.

Middle Ages and Renaissance

3. In Augustine's tradition, the Christian Middle Ages are marked by the Platonic concept of transcendence. Thus, Platonic elements are found, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with Anselm of Canterbury, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and → Meister Eckhart (medieval Platonism). In the confrontation with Islam, Aristotle's logic, beginning in the twelfth century, was developed into a methodology, in order to systematize this originally Platonic theology (→ Aristotelianism).

The rediscovery of Plato and the Neoplatonists, however, finally occurs only in the → Renaissance. By 1463, Florentine bishop Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) translated into Latin the entire work of Plato as then known. His commentary on the Symposium sketches an ethics of (friendly) attraction and coins the concept of ‘Platonic love.’ Ficino's Theologia Platonica sketches a teaching on the soul in terms of Christian Platonism and takes up Platonic motifs such as the direction of the affects by the rational faculty; Christian notions (immortality of the soul) enrich the same motifs. At the newly founded (1459) Platonic Academy in Florence (which was, however, not a full-blown ‘Academy’), Plato was celebrated and venerated like a Christian saint. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) took up especially the thoughts on the philosophy of nature of the Timaeus, as well as that of the Neoplatonists; both elements were further developed by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), by whose example the conflict between scholastic theology of an Aristotelian stamp and the mainly Platonically-oriented Renaissance philosophy is also evinced. Renaissance art likewise took up Platonism creatively.

Islamic Platonism

4. After Aristotle, who is called in Arabic simply al-Faylasūf (‘the Philosopher’), Plato is the most important philosophical authority of the non-Arab tradition. To be sure, Islamic Platonism, as well, at first relies on mostly Hellenistic paraphrases of and commentaries on Plato, as well as on numerous non-canonical writings (apocrypha) that are no longer extant today in the Greek original. In the cultural centers of the Near East, beginning with the time of the Abbasids, schools of translators and philosophers formed, as whose best known representatives can be reckoned, for example translator al-Kindī (d. c. 870), and later, philosopher al-Farābī (d. 950). Al-Farābī can be counted the first important Islamic Platonist, who undertook the attempt to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism. Neoplatonic intellectual material penetrated Islamic philosophy especially through its reception of Aristotle (the Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle, for instance those of Porphyry, played an important role here). A well-known representative for this is Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037); but Plato himself—received mainly through the glasses of Neoplatonism—became significant for numerous schools of philosophy, for example that of the Ihwan as-Safa (“Brothers of Integrity”) in the Baghdad of the tenth century, and for the Islamic gnosis (Suhrawardi). The religion of the Druses, which developed at the end of the tenth century out of a Shia heresy, and whose followers live predominantly in Lebanon, England, and the United States, transports strongly Neoplatonic gnostic thought: here the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being has its parallels with the organizational levels in the hierarchy of religious authority (including God). The famous Ismailite grouping known as the Assassins, arising in the eleventh century (the leader of a succeeding organization is the Aga Khan) was strongly inspired by Neoplatonic and gnostic elements. As in the Christian reception, by representatives of the occult sciences promptly adopted Plato (→ Hermetism/Hermeticism). In → mysticism, as well, Platonism finds entry through the Neoplatonic chain of tradition, for example with Spanish mystic Ibn al-‘Arabī (1165–1240). The question of the insān al-kāmil (Ar., ‘perfect human being’) engaged other Muslim ‘humanists’ beginning in the tenth century.

Modernity: Criticism of Religion

5. In the modern age, (Evangelical) Christian theology once more adopts explicitly Platonic motifs. The ‘Cambridge Platonism’ of the seventeenth century, to which, among others, Henry More (1614–1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) belong, originally regarded itself as a counter-movement to the materialism of Thomas Hobbes and to the dogmatism of Puritanical Calvinism. With Shaftesbury, it takes on characteristics of an art religion or aestheticism—as it already had done in the Renaissance—and its effects are still felt in A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947). Common to all of these Christian forms of Platonism, however, is the fact that Plato is understood less as a philosopher than as a proto-Christian, whose doctrine of the Ideas, together with the notion of the Good in the highest position, anticipates Christian monotheism. Friedrich → Nietzsche has this theological ‘Christianization’ of Plato in mind when he calls Christianity, in the framework of his criticism of religion, “Platonism for the people”:2 the actual philosophical thoughts of Plato have entirely eluded Christian theologians in their eagerness to find a pre-Christian monotheism, and the doctrine the Ideas is ‘vulgarly’ understood as a teaching on transcendence.

Platonism in the Twentieth Century

6. In the twentieth century, Platonism is indeed received unusually broadly; but the margins become blurred. In the nineteenth century, Plato's reception on the part of Søren Kierkegaard went behind Plato to Socrates, who was interpreted dualistically, so that the monists around Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald received Neoplatonic notions. Strongly influenced by monistic Neoplatonism as well is Rudolf Steiner's (1861–1925) Anthroposophy (→ Theosophical/Anthroposophical Society). Steiner's point of departure is that human beings of today are alienated from themselves, because they no longer perceive themselves holistically (→ Wholeness/Holism).3 The human being has not only a physical, but also an ethereal and astral body, which latter exists beyond birth and death, and through an understanding of which the human being can become one with the cosmos. A Neoplatonically inspired step from the physical (material) through the ethereal (of fine matter) to the astral (immaterial) → body, that of the ‘Idea,’ and from there to unification with the one universe is striking. The Platonic influence becomes clearest in Steiner's doctrine of the ‘eurhythmy’: the human being responds to the rhythm of the blood, becoming an instrument, creating an outward copy of the ‘original image’ (of an Idea, then) through the ‘expressive gesture,’ and thereby bringing to expression the relationship of the human being to the world. Steiner understands art, with a reference to Goethe, as a kind of knowledge. This concept is unthinkable without the Platonic doctrine of the Ideas and the Allegory of the Cave, but it composes the ‘Ideas’ (‘original images’) once more in a oneness of the cosmos, the latter being available to experience in ‘supra-sensory knowledge’ of the true self, which is a part of this oneness. The concept accordingly takes its place among the monistic designs inspired by Neoplatonism.