Origen was born about 184–5 at Alexandria, probably of Christian parents (Porphyry and Eusebius contradict one another on this point). When he was nearly seventeen his father was martyred in the persecution of Severus in 202/3, and the event left a deep mark on Origen's mind. He always writes with an impassioned sense of belonging to a church called to fearless martyrdom and resistance to all compromise with the world which ever threatens it at least as much by the infiltration of merely nominal belief as by external attack and persecution. With this attitude there goes a strongly world-denying strain of personal detachment and ascetic self-discipline, symbolized in the story, told by Eusebius from hearsay and possibly true, that in the zeal of youth Origen took literally Matt. xix. 12 and castrated himself. He lived on the minimum of food and sleep, and took seriously the gospel counsel of poverty.

For a time he studied Greek philosophy in the lecture room of Ammonius Saccas, with whom Plotinus was later to study for eleven years. Ammonius is a mysterious figure. All we know of him probably comes directly or indirectly from Porphyry who describes in his life of Plotinus how Ammonius' esoteric teaching fired Plotinus with a (typically Neopythagorean) desire to investigate the antique wisdom of Persian and Indian sages. But it is a forlorn and foolish undertaking to attempt a reconstruction of Ammonius' metaphysical doctrines by looking for synoptic elements common to Origen and Plotinus. It is impossible to determine what, if anything, Origen really drew from Ammonius. What is certain is that Origen possessed an exhaustive comprehension of the debates of the Greek schools and that to his contemporaries he stood out as an intellectual prodigy.

Antiochus and other Platonists of the first century B.C.

Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, and Crates were the successive heads of the Academy. It seems that the successor of Crates, Arcesilaus (fourth/third century), completely changed its character, teaching a kind of non-dogmatic, Socratic, in some sense of the word, sceptical Platonism. This sceptical phase (it continued under Carneades and Philo of Larissa, first century B.C.) seems to have exercised very little influence on later Platonists. A return to dogmatism, from which Platonists from then on never deviated, was initiated by Philo's successor, Antiochus of Ascalon (b. c. 130-120, d. c. 68 B.C.), one of Cicero's teachers. Convinced that the Stoic philosophy was essentially derived from the Old Academy, that Aristotle, in at least one phase of his activity, was a Platonist, and that the Peripatos (which, according to him, originated only after the death of Speusippus), though it modified particularly Plato's ethics, was essentially identical with the Academy, Antiochus incorporated many of their teachings in his own system; and this eclecticism, according to many scholars, paved the way for the Neoplatonic one. But it does not seem that he had any use for the Platonic Two-opposite-principles doctrine. In other words, his return to the Academy did not mean that he returned to all of its teachings.

Where did he stand on the theory of ideas? Speusippus, in some way Xenocrates, and Aristotle had at a certain moment of their careers abandoned it. But Antiochus blames Aristotle for having ‘weakened’ it, and indeed seems to have adopted it. But he did so with considerable modifications. First of all, as he denied any radical difference between intelligence and the senses (despite 30—1 with its assertion that only mens is rerum index, because only mens can perceive ideas; see Lucullus 30: mens ipsa sensus), obviously ideas could not retain their paramount importance3 nor their transcendent status despite the fact that their knowledge was still considered the prerogative of intelligence.

The history of Christian philosophy begins not with a Christian but with a Jew, Philo of Alexandria, elder contemporary of St Paul. He was born probably about 25 B.C. and was dead by a.d. 50. Unyielding in meticulous observance of the Mosaic law as the infallibly revealed will of God not only for the chosen people but also for Gentile proselytes (for whose edification some of his writing is directed), Philo is also fully hellenized, presenting a very Greek face to the world. Hebrew he knew imperfectly if at all. His Bible is the Greek Old Testament, in which the Pentateuch towers in authority above the rest; and his belief that the Septuagint translation was divinely inspired relieved him of any need or responsibility to refer to the original text.

Judaism had come into violent conflict with ‘Hellenism’ at the time of the Maccabean struggle which saved Israel from the destruction of its distinctiveness. Monotheistic Jews could never accept a syncretism which identified Yahweh with Zeus. Yet neither could they turn their back on Hellenism and devote themselves to their private pieties in a mood of nationalistic particularism. For Judaism was a missionary religion, and the ancient prophetic vision of Israel's call to be a light to lighten the Gentiles precluded isolationism, even if this had been a practical possibility, which it was not. The Jews were dispersed through the Mediterranean world. Their language and culture became Greek through and through, and well-to-do Jewish parents (like Philo's) provided their sons with a liberal education under Greek tutors.

Introduction

Born in Constantinople c. 580, Maximus was thirty when Stephen of Byzantium became director of studies at the Imperial Academy and taught, among other things, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle; but whether he was educated there or at the Patriarchal Academy, he would have found already established the curriculum which Stephen inherited; for since the time of Leontius an Aristotelian renaissance had been underway, and the two philosophies were taught side by side. Leontius himself shows the effects of this programme, and they are to be seen again in Maximus.

Maximus, however, was closer in temperament to the Cappadocians and the ps.-Dionysius, and his achievement was to present doctrines that were basically theirs in terms of the Aristotelian logic which was more congenial to the intellectual temper of the time, and which, by rationalizing without rejecting their mysticism, rendered it less susceptible to misinterpretation. The universe of Maximus is that of the ps.-Dionysius with a place found in it for the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa. The rigid formularies of the one are quickened by the historicism and dynamism of the other, a synthesis made possible by the critical examination to which the philosophers who preceded them had subjected the Aristotelian theories of time and eternity, motion and rest.

It is still a triadic universe, but the triad upon which it is constructed is no longer defined in the Plotinian and Procline terms of monê—proodos—epistrophê, but as Being, Power, and Act (ουσια—δυναμις—ενεργεια). This terminology may be described as Porphyrian, since Porphyry is the first known to have referred to this triad, but Maximus is the first to explain it fully.

General

The significance of some doctrines of Posidonius and of Seneca for the development of Neoplatonism has been indicated. But these doctrines concern only details, and the problem remains to what extent Stoicism at large contributed to Neoplatonism.

The Stoic system can be interpreted in two ways. We see in it either a ‘mundanization’ and a materialization of the divine, or, on the contrary, a divinization and spiritualization of matter. Nothing exhibits this ambiguity better than the relation between determinism (heimarmenê) and providence (pronoia) in the Stoic system. Strict determinism seems to leave no place for providence in any genuine sense of the word. But the Stoa tried to identify the two. The same ambiguity is exhibited in one of the central concepts of the Stoa, the spermatic ratio (pattern). The adjective has materialistic connotations, the noun spiritualistic ones. The strict immanentism of the Stoa can be taken to assert either the divine character of the cosmos or the strictly mundane character of the divine.

Like all monistic and deterministic systems which at the same time profess some kind of prescriptive ethics, Stoicism must try to find some place for freedom of the will (mostly, the formula will be accepted that we are free, because we can do whatever we want, but determined, because we must want what we want), some meaningful discrimination between good and evil, some possibility of distinguishing between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Whether any of this can be done is doubtful..

St Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79)

The Cappadocians inherited the Alexandrian Gnosis through Origen, though each departed from the position of their master, St Basil most of all. He was more interested in the moral and pastoral than in the philosophical implications of the Faith, distrusted allegory, and clung to the literal interpretation of Scripture, to which the pagan learning was to supply rational corroboration as required rather than combine with it to form a synthesis. Therefore, as was to be the case with the Aristotelian Christians, he made greater use of the physics of the pagans than of their metaphysics, and in his Homilies on the Hexaëmeron, intended as a scientific defence of the Mosaic account of creation, he drew chiefly on the current cosmology, meteorology, botany, astronomy and natural history.

As a consequence, the Christian theory of creation assumed certain pagan features, of which the most important were the implied identification of the Platonic Demiurge with Yahweh, the Aristotelian division of the universe into the supralunar and sublunar spheres, and the notion of a universal harmony (συμπαθεια): ‘Although the totality of the universe is composed of dissimilar parts, he binds it together by an indissoluble law of friendship into one communion and harmony, so that even the parts that from the positions they occupy seem most distant from one another are yet shown to be united by the universal sumpatheia.’

Nature is the work of God, who created her in time, or rather created time in the process of creating her. Matter is a part of creation, for if it were uncreated God would have been dependent upon it for bringing his plan to fruition; and if matter were independent of God there would not be that reciprocity between agent and patient which is everywhere apparent.

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’).