In Our Time - Neoplatonism

Episode Date: April 19, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Neoplatonism, the school of thought founded in the 3rd century AD by the philosopher Plotinus. Born in Egypt, Plotinus was brought up in the Platonic tradition, studying and reinterpreting the works of the Greek thinker Plato. After he moved to Rome Plotinus became the most influential member of a group of thinkers dedicated to Platonic scholarship. The Neoplatonists - a term only coined in the nineteenth century - brought a new religious sensibility to bear on Plato's thought. They outlined a complex cosmology which linked the human with the divine, headed by a mysterious power which they called the One. Neoplatonism shaped early Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious scholarship, and remained a dominant force in European thought until the Renaissance. With:Angie HobbsAssociate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of WarwickPeter AdamsonProfessor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College LondonAnne SheppardProfessor of Ancient Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, of all the great thinkers of the ancient world, few have been as influential as Plato, born in the 5th century BC, the founder of the Academy in Athens. According to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead,

quote, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. One of the most extensive and important of these footnotes is a school of thought known as known as Neoplatonism, which emerged in Rome in the 3rd century AD. Its central figure was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, who with his followers developed the scholarship of Plato into a subtle and mystical system of thought.

Neoplatanism was the dominant philosophical tradition in Europe for centuries and was an important influence on the theology of Judaism, as well as on early Christianity and Islam. With me to discuss neoplatanism are Angie Hobbes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

at King's College London, and Anne Shepard, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. Angie Hobbes, before we get into Neoplatonism, briefly tell us what Plato's importance was to that. To Neoplatonism? Yeah, well, what Plato set out to do that they took up and took on? Okay, so Plato has a system in which he makes a division between the sensible material world

and what he, in terms of sort of an otherworldly realm of forms, of perfect, ideal, eternal, nonsensible principles. And those are the things that are true. truly real and everything in this world is simply representing it or imitating it. And the idea is that somehow we have to try to get as close to the forms as we can and particularly the form of the good. So it's that dualism is one of their first starting points. So he would object to the idea of us calling this world the real world?

Yes, this world is not really real. No, it's a mere image. And what did the That's a very accurate succinct, brilliant beginning We'll leave it at that And move on to Neoplaton and shift gear seven centuries And what did the Neo-Platon this as it were

What did they principally take from that? I think we need to have a quick look at what's happened in between Because Plato dies In 347 BC And Plotinus starts to write When he's in the middle of the Sort of about 260 AD

So we've got we've got a long gap. So I think we need to very quickly look that when Plato dies, the academy passes into the hands of his nephew Spusippus. And initially, it gives us a fairly orthodox account of Platonism. However, fairly shortly, the successes to Plato's academy take the academy into a very skeptical direction and give us a very, and give us Plato as a skeptic.

And by the time we get to Carnadis, who's head of the academy in about 155 BC, we've really got a skeptical philosophy. Then in about 90 BC we've got Antiochus comes along and says, no, no, no, let's get back to the real Plato. This isn't Plato. And he takes over in a movement that we now are rather unhelpfully called middle Platonism. However, Antiochus and his followers really turned Plato into a stoic. So Plato's being used in all these different ways.

He also appears in the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. He appears in the theology of the Christians, Clement of Alexandria and Oregon. He finds his way into the magical ritual texts of the Chaldean oracles and the hermetic corpus that I'm sure we'll come back to. So Plato is being appropriated all around in ways that wouldn't necessarily have delighted Plato. And then we get Plotinus. Now, Plotinus, he sees himself. as getting back to the sort of the true essence of Plato,

not necessarily the surface of what Plato says in the dialogues, but what Plotinus believes is hidden within, which needs unveiling through hermeneutical studies. It's really important to emphasize that Plotinus and the other Neoplatanists did not see themselves as Neoplatonists. They saw themselves as Platonists. They didn't want to be original.

They didn't particularly value originality. They didn't even think, Plato was being original. They thought Plato was accessing some even more ancient wisdom that he'd got from Egypt and Persia and Babylon and even from India. So they see themselves as sort of uncovering, unveiling the true hidden meanings within the Platonic text,

which they take in these really interesting metaphysical and psychological directions. Peter Adamson, the central hand you's mentioned the philosopher Plotinus. Can you tell us something about it before we go into what he believed in? Sure. Well, actually, we know more about Plotinus than we do about most ancient philosophers, and that's mostly thanks to...

Rather a relief, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Because we have this text, a biography of him, which was written by his student Porphyry. Porfrey also edited the works of the Titus in the collection that we call the Eniads, which we might come back to. And Porfrey tells us, among other things, when he was born and died, which is always useful. so he was born in 205 AD, died in 270.

And he hailed from Egypt. That might seem surprising. So why do we have this Greek philosopher from Egypt? But this is the Roman Empire, right? So Egypt belongs to the empire, but has a very strong Hellenic culture. So he was a native speaker of Greek. He was educated in Alexandria, studied with a man named Ammonius Sacas, about whom we don't know very much. He then went on a military expedition.

to the east under the emperor Gordian, and Porfrey gives as an explanation for this the fact that Plotinus was interested in learning the wisdom of the East and in particular Indian ideas, so philosophy from India. There's been some attempts to see whether we can actually detect influence from Indian philosophy on Plotinus, which hasn't really turned up very much, but Porphyry says it, so it's there. After that, he went to Rome, where he opened a kind of public. philosophical school, and this is where Porphyry studied with him. He had students and auditors from across the Roman aristocracy, was supposedly even admired by a later emperor, and in general, was a kind of public sage and professional Platonist in Rome. Can we talk, can you give us some,

and he's given us a huge background of racing through seven centuries of Plato, and, and, and, and, and, We've got something of Plotinus now, but can you just, again, generalize and give listeners an idea of the philosophical influences, apart from Plato, that would have been playing on him? Yeah, well, Porphyry actually talks a bit about that in the life of Plotinus, and he says, for example, that the metaphysical ideas of Aristotle are all contained within the Enneeds of Plotinus. We can also see a lot of stoic influences on platinus, but the most obvious direct influence on Platonists would be from these so-called middle Platonists, who obviously didn't call themselves middle Platonists any more than the Neoplatanists called themselves neoplatanus. In particular, there was a philosopher of the second century AD named Numenius, and Numenius is a little bit obscure.

We mostly know about him through just fragments and reports of things that he said, but Plotinus is contemporaries, some of the ones who didn't like him, accused him of plagiarizing his ideas from Numenius. What would these ideas be? Well, the main idea that he would have gotten from Numenius would be a version of a theory which is quite common in Middle Platonism, which sees the entire cosmos as a hierarchical system. And this goes back to something as you mentioned,

which is that they saw Plato as picking up an earlier, more ancient wisdom, which they ascribed particularly to Pythagoras. So if you're in a Pythagorean frame of mind, then you want to relate everything in the world to numbers, right? And in particular, you might have the idea that the numbers are all generated out of the first number, which is the number one. Although sometimes they say that one's not a number, but unity gives rise to multiplicity. That's the basic idea. And the middle platinus and then platinus give this a metaphysical spin by arguing that everything that there is come. from a first principle, which is a principle of complete unity,

and then you get ever-decreasing versions of this kind of unity at lower levels, and the lowest level is here where we are in the material world. We seem to be talking about, and this is very ordinary observation here, we've seen to be talking about a great merging of the real cultural influence of Plato and Aristotle stuff written down and to be read, and earlier philosophers writing in Greek, but in the Roman Empire by this time, and going further east, Persia, India. There seems to be a great swirl going on there.

Yeah, I think that's right. And in fact, we can think of neoplatonism as a kind of sifting of everything that's happened up until that point coming together in the works of Plotinus. One effect of that is that the elements of earlier Greek philosophy that Platinus didn't particularly like,

for example, Epicureanism and skepticism, which Angie has mentioned, basically vanish because of neoplatonism. Another effect is even in the text that we're able to read because, of course, back then we're dealing with handwritten text, right? So because Neoplatonists were the ones who for centuries were deciding which text would be copied and studied in classrooms, they preserve the works of Aristotle and Plato, but not, for example, the works of early Stoics, which is why they're lost.

Anne Shepard, can we just push further into Platinus and philosophy? I think we've got a very good background of the Plato, the drive from Plato and very good context now, Platinus. Now, can we begin to talk about his own philosophy? Right. I mean, it very much follows on, I think, from what Angie and the picture of being saying.

I hope it does, otherwise it got the structure on. Right. Okay. I mean, in a sense to pick up with where Angie started about the Plato's picture of, you have the intelligible world of platonic forms, which is thought of as being more real

than the physical world. world. I think what's going on with Plotinus and his successes is a huge expansion of that and a great deal of interest in what they call the intelligible world, if you like, the world of platonic forms. So discussion of lots of questions to do with that, how do forms relate to each other, how can we relate to them, but also arranging, thinking of the universe as being a hierarchy as being a series of metaphysical levels, so that the one that Peter mentioned, this sort of fundamental unity that gives rise to everything

is thought of as being above and beyond the intellectual world of forms, and then in between the intellectual world and the world of everyday experience that we all live in, they put another level which they call soul, which is kind of responsible for, both the human soul and they thought the whole world had a soul so it's responsible for that

it's also somehow responsible for bringing the physical world into being so it's a kind of elaboration if you like of what goes back to Plato can I just come in there because this is totally crucial for the rest of the programme

this notion of the one and it's it's not in our empirical tradition tradition and so, but it is absolutely crucial that. Can you just try to tell listeners, how do they arrive at the idea of the one? Is this a direct live from Plato and coming back from Pythag, beyond him, a Pythagrish, beyond him, some unknown Indian thinkers and Persian thinkers? What is the one? And why do they arrive at it in the way they, how do they arrive at it in the way they do with so much certainty about its unreality? Okay. I mean, there's several

possible ways of answering that question. I think... We've got time. Right? Okay. I think the main way I would answer it, the main way they would answer it, because as Andrew said, they thought they were expanding Plato, is actually to go back to Plato. And it might help that one of the main texts, Plato talks about the difference between forms and particulars, the physical world, is the Republic.

And it talks a very well-known text. One of the ideas it turns up there, but not elsewhere in Plato, is that as well as all the other forms, forms of things like justice, beauty, perfect circle, all those kinds of things, there is a form of the good, which is somehow responsible for all the others,

and it's very famous passage in the Republic, the sun, the line in the cave, and the beginning of that, the form of the good is compared to the sun in the physical world, and it's somehow responsible for everything, brings it all into being. But let's just hold on for a second, sorry.

Yes. But these unreal forms are actually the progenitors of the reality that we live that's the idea, yes. Yes, yes. Indeed, I mean, it's not just that there are things that we can understand with our minds. They're thought of as being, again, even in Plato, they're thought of as somehow causing the world that we live and to come into being. And that notion is stronger in neoplatonism. Okay, so in the Republic, you've got the form of the good, which is a kind of super form, if you like, which is responsible for all the others.

That's one of the sources of the neoplatonic notion of the one, because there's a one. as well as it's having this kind of mathematical role that Peter talked about, it is also thought of as being the ultimate source of value in the world and being the ultimate good as well. And then

they're putting that together with a much less well-known dialogue of Plato the Permanides, where there is a very strange discussion of the one as the ultimate reality. So in terms of Plato, that's where it's coming from. perhaps there are also influences which are very hard to pin down from Eastern thought, Indian thought and so on, as we mentioned.

Plotinus also, according to Porphyry, four times in his life, had a mystical experience of some kind of union with the one. And I think some people would say that that's where the idea is coming from. from that it's coming from a way of interpreting whatever this experience, which is like, if you like, a mystical experience of union with God, something like that, interpreting that. It's very hard to know, in fact, it's impossible, I think, to know whether the experience came first or the reading of Plato in a particular way that gave rise to this particular philosophical system came first. And of course, if people have, if people have, people interpret

mystical and religious experiences in terms of their beliefs and their philosophical system so it's a kind of chicken and egg thing in a way. Yes, it isn't, but it is that the seed of it, if we can stay with the chickens and eggs.

Angie, can we just take it even further and take it to her notice? Now, for we're in it, basically, we're talking to a lot of British empiricists and the world is one of them. And so is the evidence for this someone in an intense

state of mysticism, we understand, or an intense state of ecstasy. Out of this does the idea come, or is the idea able to be arrived at through something approaching or itself reason? Okay, so yes, so for Plotinus, the goal of human life is to assimilate yourself with the one, this ecstatic union with the one. And it is a mystical experience, as Anne was saying. However, it is really important to stress that for Plotinus, not necessarily for all later Neoplatonists, but for Plotinus, the way to achieve this ecstatic union is absolutely not by popping the ancient equivalent of a pill and dancing around a field at dawn. It is through

a program of rigorous philosophy and moral self-discipline. What's the philosophy? Well, we've been talking about these different levels, starting from the one emanating to intellect, which contains the platonic forms, which is also the level of Aristotle's unmoved mover. And then from that, we've emanated to the level of soul, which though itself, it's outside space and time, soul can only apprehend things separately and in order.

So soul creates as productive of space and time. I want to come to soul in a little while. I want to stick to the water because it's difficult enough. But this is important to answer your question, because we've looked at these metaphysical levels. What we need to emphasise now is that these metaphysical levels are also mental states. It's really, really important at the same time as being metaphysical levels.

They are psychological states. So the way to achieve union with the one is to turn away from the sensible world and to look within. Now, as we'll see, later Neoplatonists use various rituals. practices to help people on the way, but Plotinus doesn't have any of that. He wants this very careful program of philosophy. At the level of soul, we have discursive, rational, critical thinking within space and time. Then at the level of intellect, you move to outside space and time to contemplation. So you move up through these psychological states. And then hopefully you have this union,

mystical but not irrational, not for Plotinus. So we're talking about a sort of celestial hierarchy, Peter Adamson. Can we, can you, Angie's given us the outline of that. Can you take that further? And just tell us what, how Hinoces fits into this, the state of Hinoesis. Right. Well, actually, I think although we've done this in a very natural way, which is to start at the top of the system, Plotinus almost always starts at the bottom. And he'll ask you to consider, for example, the difference between an army and a single soldier. And he'll say, well, look, the army kind of exists. It's a real thing, but the soldier exists in a fuller,

more proper sense than the army. He might also ask you to reflect on the way that the unity of an artwork or a natural thing somehow gives it its beauty and its goodness. And he'll try to get you. So unity is really important. And as Anne said, unity is linked to goodness. It's also linked to beauty is linked to truth. And he thinks that he can get you to buy into that. What does he mean by unity? Are we back to the idea of war? So the idea will differ depending on which level you're at, right?

So at the level of the one, unity means complete and utter lack of multiplicity of any kind. And that's really, in a sense, all we can say about it. That's why it can only be grasped through this sort of mystical nothingness. At one point, he considers the question, how should we grasp the one? and he says, take away everything, and then the treatise ends, right? So there's not much you can say, right? It's like the consignance ladder, right? The rest is silence, exactly.

But that's only the ultimate outcome of an ever-increasing intensity of unity as you go up the system. So he wants to say that, for example, souls have a higher degree of unity than bodies, just like soldiers have a higher degree of unity than armies, right? Because souls are immaterial, thus their parts can't be, divided. That's a better kind of unity, a higher kind of unity than a body would have. But he also thinks that intellect has a higher degree of unity than soul, because it thinks about everything at once, all the forms, whereas souls have to do this discursive thing of going through one idea after another. Why do they have to do that? How does the system say that things have to do things?

Well, I think Plotinus is often presented as if he's just kind of got this doctrine that he's laying out for you, but that's not in any way true to the way that he writes. He always argues, like I say, from the bottom up and appeals to your intuition. So he thinks that you're supposed to just find it intuitive when you reflect upon your own mental life, that you do think in this way, right? You do think using language. You think about one thing and then you think about something else. But on the other hand, he thinks that there must be something that's anchoring your thought and making the thought knowledge rather than just kind of random belief. And that will be the platonic forms. And so he postulates the universal intellect as a kind of seat for these forms. How, and Shepard, how does

do, do, does he persuade other people that these things exist in their unreality? How does it, what's a persuasion? You who say people say saying, this thing is made of wood because I can knock on it and it's made for, but how does he, is it just by saying, I feel this, I see this. And I see this. And I, I am a person you respect and so and so forth, therefore come along with me. Is it that sort of thing? No, I think it's by a great deal of the kind of talk that Peter was just talking about, by getting people, there's quite a lot of kind of argument from analogy, if you like, like the thing about the soldier in the army, getting people to think about, as philosophers do,

getting people to think about their conceptual assumptions, and trying to get them to understand, as he would think of it, to realise that they're making certain assumptions. I mean, his surviving work, the Eniads, are all relate to teaching in his school. So there is a sense in which he's, if you like, preaching to the converted. I mean, according to Porphyry, didn't write anything down to quite late in his life, to leave he was in his 50s. And one of the difficulties about studying him is,

that the Eniads all, every treatise presupposes the system. So you could say, if you wanted to be very critical, you could say, well, look, he's just talking to a bunch of people who are accepting all this. But it's a bit more complicated than that. I mean, he was, I think, teaching by studying and discussing the texts of Plato and indeed Aristotle

with his pupils. So a lot of the treatise, a lot of the Eniads start from a particular problem. The Eniads being his collective work. The name is collected work. That's right. And so there are 54 individual treatises. And a lot of them start from discussing sometimes a problem in the text of Plato, you know, let's say inconsistencies in what Plato says about the soul in different places, something like that.

Or, if you like, philosophical problems, like there's one on the origin of evils, any ad one eight. The question is, where does evil come from? which is a perennial problem because, and again, and that I think brings out what I'm saying. He's assuming that the world is good. Now, you might not assume that.

You might think that the world's absolutely horrible. He's talking to a bunch of people assume the world is good. If you assume the world is good, then you've got a problem because where does evil come from? So he's starting with philosophical problems, and he is wanting to engage in dialectical discussion, philosophical reasoning, get people to think about the basis of their concepts and the way they think about things

but at the same time there's a kind of underlying assumption that if you reflect then you will be led to the conclusion that you know that Platonism is the right philosophical system to accept and there's something of a sort of salvation philosophy

about this isn't that? There's something almost of the preacher as well as the philosopher is that right? Oh completely I mean as soon as we're into AD we have all these different philosophical because Christianity is on the go down. Exactly Christianity is on the scene. Christianity is a huge sort of challenge. Now, Plotinus himself doesn't mention... Will Patinus know about Jesus Christ, for instance?

Well, we don't know. He doesn't mention Christianity. Porfrey certainly does. We're going to find out Porphyry writes a treatise called against the Christians and really goes for it. But, yeah, there's no question that the Neoplatonists are very aware they need to make a very good case for Neoplatanism as a salvation doctrine. because it's not just Christianity that's around. We've mentioned the Chaldean oracles. We've mentioned the Hermetic Corpus. Salvation cults and systems of belief

are hugely popular at this time. There have been all sorts of sociological speculations about why this might be so, and people have linked, they've called this the age of anxiety in the early VASAD. That might be. When does that end? Well, exactly.

But, you know, you've certainly got people who under the imperialian, the Roman imperial system don't have a big political voice. So not necessarily turning to political forms in the way they were in 5th century, Athens, to air their grievances. So there may be something in that. So we don't know what Plotinus thought about Christianity.

We do know what Porphyry and his successors do. But we do know that Plotinus wants to sell Neoplatonism. This is going to save you. You will be saying, There's a you will be saved element. But you will be saved through... But for what? I mean, what do you get?

Do you get eternal life or what happens when you're saved? You assimilate to... Well, you certainly assimilate to the eternity of the one. There's a debate about whether yourself continues as a self in the assimilation to the one. After you're dead, you mean? Or whether it's... No, in the ecstatic moment of you. Oh, right.

And there's an interesting debate about that. What's really important is that Plotinist, not think you need wealth or status for this salvation. He doesn't think you need the grace of God either. I mean, people like the Gnostics were saying, you know, only the elect few are going to be saved, and it's all predestined, and you may be lucky or you may not. For Plotinus, in principle,

salvation is open to anybody who is prepared to go through the rigorous philosophical, discursive reasoning and contemplation and the moral self-discipline. It's a tough road. Peter Adamson, and while you're there, Can you tell us about what Plotanis had to say about ethics? Yeah, well, of course, that relates to what Andrew is talking about. What I wanted to say is just that what you get is not necessarily eternal life because you're stuck with that.

Your soul can't be destroyed. You will definitely live forever and you always have lived. Souls don't come into existence and then stop existing. What is this soul like? Have you any idea of what it's like? So in a way that's what you get. What you get is a discovery of what your true self is. And Plotinus' ethics is offering you a chance to stop confusing yourself with a body.

and instead identify yourself with an immaterial agent of thought. Actually, Porphyry begins his life of Plotinus with a story about Plotinus, where one of his students wanted to have a portrait of him made, and Plotinus said, why would you want to make an image of my body? Because my body is only an image of my true self. So they got a painter to come along to the classes and memorize how Platinus looked and painted him anyway,

thwarting the philosophical point. But that was how Plotinus looked at his body. And so his ethics is mostly about turning away from the body, turning away from things that tie you to the body, like physical pleasure in particular, and engaging in the kind of philosophical reasoning, which will both allow you to discover your true self and in a sense is your true self because your true self is just a thinking soul. So you've just popped onto the table, the idea that the soul goes on for a. and everybody's got one. And so if you've got one, whether you follow this rigorous philosophical course or not, why should you say

I'm going to follow this rigorous philosophical course? I think because Flotinus assumes that it's better not to be deluded. So if someone came along and says, well, I think if it's there anyway, what's the delusion? Well, I think if someone came along and said, well, I'm quite happy

mistaking myself for a body because it gives me so much pleasure, he would say something like, what's wrong with you. I mean, it's hard to, I think it would be hard for him to argue with that position. I think rather what he would do is assume that people are interested in knowing what they really are. And also, I think he would assume that if he wanted to give you an argument, he might say something like this. If you're debased here in the body, then you'll ultimately be doomed to a life which is pulled in many directions, right? Because your pursuit of pleasure will pull you.

you this way and that. And what I'm offering you, again, is a more unified life, a life where everything about your life fits together because it's subordinated to reason and it actually makes sense. And Paul Frey wrote a biography of Plotinus and developed his ideas, but then we come to this, Anne Shepard, we come to this philosopher Iamblicus sometime like that. Did he develop Platonist? He's into the Neoplatonists, who are called Neoplatonists, I believe, only in the 90th century, but it's very useful for this program. Right. Well, I mean, the label Neuplatinus gets applied to Plotinus

and his successors, really to contrast Plotinus with the so-called middle platonists, as we mentioned at the beginning, who came earlier. Yes, I think Iamblicus develops Plotinus' philosophy in a number of ways. I mean, there's three ways, really, that come to mind.

One is that he makes the metaphysical system that we've been talking about with these different levels about the one and the intellect and soul and the natural world. He makes all that a whole lot more complicated and you might say why isn't it complicated enough? I think the answer to that is really because he's responding to some if you like quite technical philosophical problems within the system about how the different levels relate to each other and things like that. So that's one of the different levels.

difference. There's also another kind of difference we perhaps haven't got time to say very much about, which is that we talked about the fact that Plotian's success were teaching through text, teaching Plato and Aristotle, and you get the gradual development of continuous commentary on Plato and Aristotle, and Iamblicus has some very important ideas about how you should go about commenting on the text of Plato,

and he thinks that each Platonic dialogue just has one overall aim, and then you interpret everything else in accordance with that aim. Thirdly. And then the third thing, which relates more to what we've been talking about, is that Angie mentioned that Plotinus doesn't go in for popping

pills or rituals or whatever to achieve heinosis, to achieve a mystical experience. Iamblicus is more prepared to consider that. With Iambulicus, a kind of religious magic called Theogy starts to become much more important. Can I switch back to Angie on that? Can we talk about Theogy and put it in contrast

of what's been happening with Plotinus? Yes. So the question is about whether you need sort of external symbolic ritual practices to help you on your way. We've mentioned things like the Chaldean oracles which arose in the I think the second century AD which in some ways are a kind of handbook to Theodia, handbook to the kinds of ritual, even magical.

Almost magical kind of practices to sort of try and, well, in the Chaldean oracles, they're interested in trying to get gods to inhabit statues or human beings or so on. Theergy means God working. That's what it literally means. It's actually kind of how do you kind of work on the God? How do you get the God to work for you? Plotinus isn't having any of it. Porphyry after Plotinus has some...

He gives some space to theology. He says that philosophy is better, but philosophy is pretty difficult for most people. So as a first step, we might use some theological practices, some sort of ritual practices, but then let the philosophy take over, let the hard work take over. Now, Iamblicus, as Anne was saying, he actually ends up, as I interpret him,

thinking that theology is more important than philosophy. There's obviously, I can see Anne looking very... There's different views about that. see different views, but anyway, he certainly allows more space for it. And he also kind of says that philosophy can't get to union with the one because the one is beyond conceptual thought. This goes right back to that idea that Anne was talking about in Republic. I think it's Republic 509, where the form of the good is said to be beyond being and beyond truth.

So if you're dealing with something beyond conceptual thoughts, says Yamblick's How is philosophy going to help you get there? You need some practices, which really do kind of shade over into magic and depend on a kind of world view, which does appear to be quite magical. And so we get these links between Neoplatonism and the Chaldean oracles and the hermetic corpus and various other bodies have thought around this time, which have this notion that, this world in some way it can kind of reflect

and be an image of the divine powers that sort of can somehow be brought in to inhabit this world but through these external rights and there was a big debate we know there was a debate between Porphyry and Eamblicus on Eamblicus's views Peter Adamson

can we if you want to add to that that's fine And if not, can we move on to the final philosopher around this with Proclos. Do you want to have had to what Angenian and I'm saying? No, we better move on since we've got to five minutes. Right, where you go. Well, Proclus is the most important late Neo-Platonist, so to speak. So we're moving ahead another century now.

He is in Athens, and he is really the full flower of the movement within neoplatonism that was begun by Yamblicus. So he certainly would have been a believer in things like Theergy. In fact, his house has apparently been discovered the ruins of his house, and one of the things that was discovered in this, the remains of his house, was a sacrifice, an animal sacrifice of a pig, whereas Porphyry, for example, argued that we should never kill and eat animals, which was not only a kind of ethical gesture on his part, but also a move against this kind of traditional Greek ritual. Proclos integrates pagan religious belief into his philosophy in a way that's really almost unprecedented. I mean, it is taking on what we find in Eamblicus and also in Proclus' master Sirianus. And the way that he does this is by making this hierarchy that we were talking about more complicated. So instead of saying, for example, as Plotinus did, there's the intellect.

He says that there's an intelligible world, which is full of many levels. levels of gods of different types. And by making the hierarchy more populated, as it were, he gives you space to identify various levels of the Neoplatonic system with various pagan deities. So there might be, you know, Zeus, Oranos, Kronos, Hera, right? So many, many gods and also demigods and heroes to be accommodated within the system. And he enables you to do that. One of the more important things I think at the moment for us and Shepard is that Neoplatanism began to be important

to religious scholars because of its backing for, explanation for monotheism, the one, the monotheistic deity, and being taken on not by religious scholars, but by religions, much further on, there's Al-Farabi with Islam and then there's monodies, but the Christians are

although, poor free, hates the Christians, vicious sects, and they are, they are, so can you talk about the influence that this was having on religious movements at the time. You played it as well. Right. Quick one in five minutes.

I think one thing to say, actually, is that Platonism's already influencing Christianity before Plotinus. Going back to much earlier in the program when Angie was talking briefly about middle platonists, she mentioned that people like Clement of Alexandria and Origen the Christian father were influenced by the Platonism of their time.

And then that carries on. You have, as it were, a whole series of Christian thinkers who are educated in Greek philosophy and her influenced by it. I mean, one of the most important of it is St. Augustine, who may have been more familiar with the work of Porphyry than Plotinus, but was very much influenced by it. Augustine was in fact a neoplatonist before he was Christian or before he reconverted.

It's not quite clear. But in his confessions, he gives an account of his life where he has a series of conversions. And, well, first of all, he was a manichy, and the manichies were jewelists, and they thought there was a very sharp opposition between good and evil. And then he became a neoplatonist,

and part of that is that, as I was saying earlier, you think the whole world is actually fundamentally good. And then he became a Christian. And he was very influenced, I think, in his way in which he formulated his Christian outlook by his knowledge of neo-platonism. And that turns up in various ways. Sorry, see to run through the scholars of other religions for the next almost thousand years

and then tip over into the Renaissance with Ficino. Oh, yes, with Bessarion, Vichino, Pico, absolutely. We know Fichino is a very famous Platonist, translates Plato. But he's less known that Ficino also translates Plotinus. And of course, we're still in an age which is not distinguishing Plato from what we now call the Neoplatonists using a term which was really invented by 19th century scholars building on a distinction that Leibniz made in the 17th century.

So until Leibniz, there's really no distinction. So when Ficino calls himself a Platonist, but in many respects he's a neoplatonist, if you read his wonderful commentary on the symposium, in the Latin title, it's called a commentary on Plato's symposium. In its Italian translation, it's just called Deiomore. And if you read it, there's only about six passages of the symposium that are actually addressed as all sorts of stuff on love, including a lot of neoplatonist stuff. So absolutely central to his ethic and his sort of theory of art.

And then through Ficino and Pico we move on, it really influences a renaissance artist like Spencer. Then there's a whole kind of tradition moving. on through Coleridge and Blake. Blake's, I've only found this out recently. There's a painting by Blake called, I think it's the Sea of Time and Space, which is based on a commentary of porphyry on the cave of the Nymphs and the Odyssey.

So we have this wonderfully rich literary as well as philosophical tradition. Peter Adamson, briefly, do you think it's still active in philosophical thought today? Yeah, in fact, I think that when you stop someone on the street and say, tell me about Plato, probably what you'll get is a very basic version of what the Neoplatonist thought

about Plato. Well, that was brief. Thank you very much to Anne Shepherd, Angie Hobbes and Peter Adamson. Next week, we'll be talking about the Battle of Bosworth Field. 1485, enter the Tudors, and they've never left us. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast,

why not try others such as the forum, the discussion program about global ideas. To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.