What we are trying to do in this volume is to provide a wide-ranging and fairly detailed survey of the philosophy of the period when thought in the Mediterranean lands, and later in Europe north of the Alps, took forms which deeply influenced our literature, art, social behaviour and institutions at least down to the seventeenth century and, to some extent and in some quarters, to the present day. We set out to show how Greek philosophy reached its latest, and perhaps most influential, phase, that which modern historians of ancient philosophy call Neoplatonism; and how this was taken over and adapted in various ways to suit their own purposes by Jews, Christians and Moslems. Whatever the relationship of this late Platonism to the real thought of Plato may have been (here Merlan has some interesting suggestions in the first chapter of his section), it is certain that it is this, rather than the Platonism of the dialogues as understood by modern scholars, which we encounter whenever there is a question of Platonic influence on art, literature, theology or philosophy before the nineteenth century, and sometimes even later. It, and its various theological transformations, therefore seem worth studying, and in recent years they have been vigorously studied. There is a great deal going on, in particular, in the fields of Neoplatonic and patristic studies: so much, in fact, that inevitably agood deal in this volume will be out of date by the time it is published. But it still seems worth while attempting a comprehensive survey, because much of the scholarly material is rather inaccessible except to specialists in the various fields, and also because the study of this period, lying as it does across the frontiers of so many disciplines, has suffered rather more than most from academic compartmentalization.

Plotinus begins a new period in the history of Greek philosophy, but his achievement cannot be described as either a revival or a revolution. As Part 1 has shown, Platonism in the second and early third centuries A.D. was very much alive, and by no means merely stereotyped and superficial: and the thought of Plotinus in many ways continues along lines laid down by his predecessors. But he was an original philosophical genius, the only philosopher in the history of later Greek thought who can be ranked with Plato and Aristotle, and was impelled by a personal mystical experience of a kind and quality unique in Greek philosophical religion. So the result of his critical rethinking of the long and complex tradition which he inherited was a really original philosophy with far greater coherence and vitality than Middle Platonism, and one which had a wide and deep influence on later European thought.

We have only one reliable source of information about the life of Plotinus. It is the Life of his master which Porphyry, his disciple and editor, wrote in the year 301, more than thirty years after he had parted from Plotinus, and prefixed to his edition, the Enneads. This is generally recognized as a work of quite unusual quality, with no parallel among ancient philosophical or literary biographies, and giving a great deal of authentic information. It tells us, however, very little about the early life of Plotinus for the simple reason that Plotinus himself told his disciples next to nothing.

John of Scythopolis

No attempt is here made to intervene in the apparently interminable debate as to who the ps.-Dionysius was and when he lived, though this must have been later than the Cappadocians, some of whose notions he developed, and before 528, the latest possible date for the first historical reference to his writings. Obviously he had both Christian and Platonist sympathies, though it is difficult to assess their relative weight. It is probably safe to say that he was a Christian philosopher who presented his beliefs in terms of the contemporary Neoplatonism both because it had a strong appeal for him and because these beliefs could best be defended by turning the arguments of what he considered the most satisfactory of the rival philosophies against itself.

In this, his position was not unlike that of St Gregory of Nyssa: but the Neoplatonism of Gregory was that of Plotinus while the Neoplatonism of the ps.-Dionysius was that of Proclus. The trend from the one to the other was a deviation in the direction contrary to Christianism, and the ambiguities of the ps.-Dionysius are the symptoms of a tension between Christianism and Platonism that was nearing breaking point. This was felt at once. No sooner had the Corpus Dionysianum been made public than commentators leapt to the task of defending not only its genuineness, but also its orthodoxy. In the first half of the sixth century commentaries were written by John and George of Scythopolis, by St Maximus in the seventh, by Germanus I, Patriarch of Constantinople in the eighth, and by other anonymous commentators who belong to these three centuries.

The last Roman and the medieval tradition of logical studies

When we try to draw a borderline between antiquity and Middle Ages, in order to define the point where the history of medieval philosophy begins, the work of Boethius comes immediately to our mind. The last Roman and the first schoolman, the two titles with which he is normally introduced, express in their combination clearly his position between the two periods. His link with the Middle Ages is obviously very strong. Translations of two treatises from Aristotle's Organon, his introductions for the beginners and his commentaries and monographs for the advanced student of logic, have deeply influenced the course of medieval thought. In this development the gradual absorption of the Boethian legacy remained an important aspect up to and including the rise of early Scholasticism in the twelfth century. Through all the centuries of the Middle Ages De consolatione philosophiae, the Roman senator's final account with life, was a standard book, stimulating discussions among scholars, and a source of spiritual strength in critical situations. Hundreds of manuscripts, originating from the eighth to the fifteenth century, prove the importance of the Boethian corpus of writings in the libraries of Western and Central Europe.

But the history of his influence in the medieval world shows clearly that the Roman interpreter of Aristotle was not himself a part of it, but rather an intellectual force radiating from a distance. In life and thought Boethius still belonged to Christian antiquity. There is no doubt that he and his contemporaries felt the possibility of the end approaching and certainly such foreboding had a stimulating influence on their studies and literary activities.

The philosophers who are the subject of this Part make a sufficiently identifiable group. On the scale of this history all are adherents of Plotinus' version of Platonism although in some cases this may have to be argued and certainly the system was developed in directions which would not all have been approved by Plotinus. The survey runs from Porphyry, who was born in about the year when Plotinus started studying at Alexandria, to the last professors in Alexandria and Greece who were not concerned primarily to apply philosophy to Christian theology—that is from the middle of the third century a.d. to about the end of the sixth.

It is as well to have signposts even if they turn out, as signposts sometimes do, to need a little correcting. A century and a half from Plotinus' death (270) to the middle of Constantine's reign will be dominated by the figures of Porphyry and the Syrian Iamblichus (died 326). Pupils of Iamblichus continued to teach in Syria; but there is almost no trace of their contribution to philosophy; they probably made none. We therefore move to Athens where his influence was also very strong. The School at Athens had a continuous history from Plato, but we know nothing of its philosophy for some time before the great century of Athenian Neoplatonism. This begins with a man called Plutarch towards the end of the fourth century but consists substantially of the trio Syrianus, Proclus and Damascius; in fact their teaching seems sufficiently static for it to be examined only as it appears in Proclus, at least four of whose major works have survived.

It is now time to attempt a fairly systematic and detailed description of the universe in which, according to Plotinus, we find ourselves when we are wakened, recalled to our true self, and liberated into a genuine universality of experience by the kind of moral and intellectual self- discipline sketched in the last chapter. The thought of his Middle-Platonist and Neopythagorean predecessors, described in Part 1, formed the basis of the metaphysical speculations of Plotinus, but he worked over the pre-existing material available to him with such critical penetration and careful attention to his own mental experience that the resulting system was in many ways original, and far more coherent and attractive than anything to be found in Middle Platonism. This originality is particularly obvious in the account which Plotinus gives of the first principle transcending being from which all reality springs, the One or Good. There had already appeared in his predecessors, in a variety of more or less confused forms, the idea that the supreme principle of reality was beyond all determination or description. But Plotinus was the first to work out a coherent doctrine of the One or Good clearly distinguished from and transcending its first product, the divine Intellect (Νους) which is also real being in the Platonic sense, i.e. the World of Forms. In elaborating this doctrine it seems that, as so often happened, he was helped to clarify his mind by a critical consideration of Peripatetic thought about the simplicity of the divine intellect.

We must begin an account of Augustine's views on human history with a distinction between ‘sacred history’ (Heilsgeschichte) and secular history. He does not often use such phrases, but the distinction is implicit in all his utterances. Sacred history is the history of God's revelatory action among men, contained in the books of the Old and New Testaments. It concerns the redemption of the human race wrought in the work of Jesus Christ, and the preparation for this in the history of the chosen race, Israel. In these actions God has revealed his purpose in history; and the Scriptures are their record, the authoritative and certain source for Christian belief. The Scriptures, however, are not a mere formless historical record; the narrative they contain is shaped by the interpretative action of their authors, and would, indeed, be meaningless without this. Being inspired by the Holy Spirit, the significance with which the authors endow the events recorded is itself of divine origin. The scriptural history is therefore sacred in the double sense of containing a narrative of divine action and of telling the narrative in terms of divine providence, endowing its events with a significance within God's plan. Apart from the sacred history contained in the Scriptures, men have no revelation of God's plan, no indication of the significance of historical events in terms of God's purposes. Christians are in the same position as secular historians, except in regard to scriptural history.

Perhaps as good a starting-point as any for a consideration of the rich, complex and difficult thought of Plotinus is to see what he himself thought that he was really trying to do, what the aim was which he constantly pursued in all his thinking, teaching and writing. As he summed it up himself on his deathbed (whichever version of his last words we accept), it was to bring back the divine in man to the divine in the All. This is an ambiguous enough statement, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways, beginning with the crudest Stoic pantheism. But if we come to understand as precisely as possible what Plotinus meant by it, we shall be well on the way to understanding his philosophy as a whole. Man for Plotinus is in some sense divine, and the object of the philosophic life is to understand this divinity and restore its proper relationship (never, as we shall see, completely lost) with the divine All and, in that All, to come to union with its transcendent source, the One or Good. We must, of course, in studying Plotinus, beware from the beginning of the confusion that can so easily arise if we neglect the wide and vague meaning of theos and theios in Greek and understand his statements about divinity in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which, in its normal way of speaking, reserves ‘God’ and ‘Divine’ for the transcendent creative cause of all things, and only uses them of created beings rarely, and generally with carefully expressed qualifications (e.g. ‘divine by participation’).

Introduction

Like the Cappadocians, the ps.-Dionysius claims that he is not an innovator but a communicator of the Tradition, which he presents as Christian, but which in fact comes from Christian and pagan sources. Of the former the only authorities he names are the Scriptures (including some apocryphal works), but he is clearly indebted to the Cappadocians and perhaps directly to the Alexandrians; the pagan sources are disguised either as part of the ‘unwritten tradition’ or under the name of his master ‘Hierotheos’, possibly a fiction invented to confer upon them the authority of one whom he represents as being an associate of the Apostles.

The pagan element, apart from the Platonism which he inherited from his Christian sources, shows unmistakable affinity with the later Neoplatonism of which the most famous exponent was Proclus, and the most distinctive feature the importance attached to theurgy, a special branch of praxis which, under the increasing weight of religious influence upon the schools of philosophy, tended to exclude the other branches in the same way as theology, a special branch of theôria, had already, for similar reasons, become dominant in that field.

Theurgy, like all praxis, was the utilization of sensible objects, but concerned itself not with their matter but with the inherent power which they were supposed to derive from the sympatheia which binds the whole universe together, the sensibles to the intelligibles and the intelligibles to the gods, and the control of which was therefore an automatic means of invoking divine and demonic assistance for practical ends.

Augustine's views concerning the nature of man and of his place in the universe inevitably underwent profound transformations during his intellectual journey from Manichaean, through Neoplatonic, to Christian teaching. The three outlooks differ profoundly in their estimate of man. In Manichaean doctrine, man is a being torn in two, or two beings, just as the world itself is divided or thought of as two worlds, a world of darkness and a world of light. According to its cosmogonic myth, these are created by different creators, ruled by their own rulers, and are perpetually at war. Man is an episode in the inter-cosmic warfare: he is the product of an emission from the kingdom of light into that of darkness. The myth pictures him as the emissary of light devoured by the darkness, kept imprisoned by it and prevented from returning to his home. Man is object, stage and agent of this cosmic struggle. The cosmic forces are mobilized to prevent or to assist his return to his spiritual home; he is himself a composite of the two worlds which are at war within as well as around him; and he has some power to co-operate with the forces of darkness or to resist. In this last capacity man is not quite a passive spectator of the conflict: he is called to resist the entanglement with evil, to repudiate the body, its main agency. Rejection of and liberation from the body are therefore a vital part of the Manichaean doctrine of salvation: they belong to a realm essentially evil, and are foreign to man's inmost nature, serving as the prison of his real self.

Introduction

The Christian Platonism of the Greeks, shaped by the Alexandrians, the Cappadocians, the ps.-Dionysius and St Maximus the Confessor from material that continued to the end to be drawn from the pagan schools, had grown apart from that of the Latin West, which, except for Alexandrian influence reaching it through Boethius, was largely unaffected by any pagan thought later than Porphyry. But the defeat of iconoclasm in the East at the Second Council of Nicaea caused a flow of iconoclastic refugees to the West, bringing their books with them. The works of the ps.-Dionysius became available even if they were not read. In 758 Pope Paul I sent a copy to Pepin the Short, and Hadrian I may later have sent another to Abbot Fulrad of S. Denis. But there is no evidence of any use being made of these books. It was the gift of a third codex from the Emperor Michael the Stammerer presented to Louis the Debonair at Compiègne in September 827 that initiated the study of the ps.-Dionysius in the West and led to the transplantation of Greek Christian Platonism into Europe.

After an abortive translation by Hilduin, the abbot of S. Denis where the codex was deposited, a new version was requisitioned in or about 860 by Charles the Bald from Johannes Scottus, an Irishman who some time in the first half of the century had been driven from his country by the depredations of the Danes, and who like so many of his compatriots had brought with him the reputation for a knowledge of Greek exceeding what could be found on the European continent at that time.

Proclus and his predecessors

With the death of Iamblichus it is to Athens that serious philosophical history must move. The Athenians learnt much from him, and the work of a younger contemporary of his, Theodorus of Asine, is probably to be seen as only reinforcing the lesson. Plutarch of Athens undergoes the same influence, and in the hands of his pupils Syrianus and even Proclus the main themes of Neoplatonism do little else than become more systematized and more canonical. Plato, Iamblichus, Syrianus: that was the road to knowledge according to the last holder of the chair.

When Proclus came to Athens, Plutarch held the chair but was too old to lecture (he died in 431 or 432). Later writers speak of him as though he were the first of the Neoplatonists of Athens. Much of the psychology which Proclus learnt from him privately is taken for granted by Simplicius and the Alexandrians. But its essential character was simply what Iamblichus had emphasized: Aristotle and Plato were not at loggerheads, the De anima represented sound psychology, the Timaeus and Parmenides the theology which would complete it. In a number of details, too, when he was not just repeating Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plutarch followed Iamblichus or a common source. But the philosophically important fact is that he at least theoretically conceded that psychology as the study of a soul in a body can be pursued independently of metaphysics.

Augustine likes to distinguish different grades in the range of knowledge of which the human mind is capable. We have already noted one distinction, that between belief and understanding. Understanding, Augustine seems to suggest, is the distinctive work of human reason: it is the result of its application and pursuit. When he is concerned to contrast understanding with belief, Augustine normally speaks of intellectus, intelligere, intelligentia; when he discusses the result in the mind of the work of reasoning, he speaks of scientia. Thus one of his definitions of scientia in effect almost identifies it with intellectus: in the course of a lengthy discussion of the distinctive character of human knowledge (scientia) he likens the relationship between reason and knowledge to that between looking and seeing: knowledge is the success of the enterprise of reason. Its chief characteristic is rational cogency; something is known when it is fully clear and transparent to the mind, and is, so to speak, seen by it.

Before we examine the various mental processes involved in different kinds of knowledge, we must note a distinction which Augustine introduces within scientia: he defines wisdom (sapientia) as knowledge of a special kind. He calls it a ‘contemplative knowledge’, and describes it as being concerned with eternal objects, whereas the remainder of scientia, to which he now confines the term in a narrower sense, is concerned with temporal things. Knowledge and wisdom differ only in virtue of the difference in the objects concerned, and Augustine allows that their distinction is not radical: the words may indeed be used interchangeably.

Clement was born probably of pagan parents about the middle of the second century and died probably before 215. He sat at the feet of a succession of Christian teachers, of whom the last was the Alexandrian Pantaenus, a Stoic philosopher converted to Christianity (according to the report of Eusebius). In the Alexandrian church of the second century a cleavage had arisen between the simple believers, whose fear of Gnosticism had made them the more tenacious of unreflecting ‘orthodoxy’ (the term itself is beginning to become current at this time), and the educated Christians among whom tendencies towards Gnosticism were powerful if only because the most intelligent Christians at Alexandria had been Gnostics. Pantaenus was distinguished, according to Clement, by the fact that he intelligently expounded Scripture in a way that did not depart from the apostolic doctrine. It appears that this was a little unusual. Clement understands his task as a continuation of this demonstration that authentic Christianity is not obscurantism and that there is a proper place within the Church for a positive appreciation of the human values of Greek literature and philosophy. Clement's argument is therefore directed simultaneously against the Gnostics, against the obscurantists in the Church, and against cultured despisers of the faith who were representing it as hostile to civilization and culture generally. He builds on Justin's thesis that while polytheism is to be rejected absolutely, the values in the best Greek literature and philosophy find not merely toleration but their actual fulfilment in Christianity. This thesis he combines with a Philonic view of the relation of reason and revelation.

Christian philosophy does not strictly begin with the New Testament,but even at this early stage it is easy to discern statements and propositions that implicitly and indirectly point towards certain metaphysical positions. The origins of Christian philosophy are therefore more than a matter of discovering passing echoes of Greek ideas within the New Testament writings, for example the Platonic and Philonic overtones of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The prologue of St John's Gospel, with its identification of the Logos as the light lightening every man with the Logos made flesh in Christ, initially provokes the expectation of an indirect apologia to the Greek world; but the remainder of the Gospel is more concerned with other questions that are oddly nearer to Kierkegaard than to Plato, who cannot be said to be more than a remote influence in the background of the evangelist's thought. In St Paul there are some occasional Platonizing hints, especially in the discussion with the Corinthians about immortality in II Cor. iii–v. The indictment of pagan cult as a worship of the creature in place of the Creator in Romans i is qualified by a recognition that ‘that which may be known of God’ may be grasped by the natural reason through the contemplation of the world. In Romans ii St Paul freely draws on Stoic notions of conscience and natural law, and writes nobly of self-sufficiency and natural goodness in Philippians iv. But it is a common mistake to see early Christian ethics as a mere assimilation of current Stoic ideals and to take Tertullian's Seneca saepe noster as a simple account of the phenomena.