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.

Introduction

Neoplatonism is a term usually designating Plato's philosophy as reinterpreted by Plotinus and post-Plotinian Platonists. The term is slightly misleading, in that to some it may suggest a more radical difference between the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus than is warranted, in that it tends to obscure the debt of Plotinus to Platonists before him, particularly the Old Academy and the Platonism of the period between the first century B.C. and his time (today often designated as pre-Neoplatonism or Middle Platonism), and finally in that it suggests that all post-Plotinian Platonism bears the stamp of Plotinus' philosophy, whereas in many cases his influence on other Platonists was only limited.

However, in what follows we shall, in the main, limit ourselves to indicating those Platonic and post-Platonic philosophic doctrines which were probably of major importance for Plotinus, and the knowledge of which helps us to place his philosophy in historic perspective. No attempt will be made to ascertain the primary sources of these doctrines or to reconstruct systems of which only fragments have survived, nor do we plan to compete with an apparatus fontium. We shall simply present those major philosophic doctrines which we, in explicit form, still possess and which Plotinus knew, or in all likelihood knew. The framework of our presentation is provided by four passages in Porphyry's Vita Plotini. In the first, Porphyry says that Plotinus' writings contain Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines, and that all of Aristotle's Metaphysics is present there in condensed form.