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ABSTRACT
Discussion of the Cambridge Platonists, by Constantinos Patrides and others, is often vitiated by the mistaken contrasts drawn between those philosophers and late antique Platonists such as Plotinus. I draw attention especially to Patrides’s errors, and argue in particular that Plotinus and his immediate followers were as concerned about this world and our immediate duties to our neighbours as the Cambridge Platonists. Even the doctrine of deification is one shared by all Platonists, though it is also here that genuine differences between pre-Christian and Christian exegesis can be found. All, it can be said, hope and expect to join ‘the dance of immortal love’, but Christian Platonists had a deeper sense of God’s ‘humility’ in His Word’s material and temporal manifestation. Not Olympian Zeus but the Crucified Christ was their preferred image of divine involvement, and their better guide to heaven.
Acknowledgements
This article was originally composed for a Cambridge Workshop on the Cambridge Platonists in 2013. I have profited from the comments especially of David Leech and Douglas Hedley.
Notes
1 In a more recent collection some similar suggestions are made to contrast Christian Platonism with Plato’s own intellectual elitism and Plotinus's ‘disdain for the body’ (Taliaferro and Teply, Cambridge Platonist Spirituality, 6–7). These suggestions are also suspect, but the collection as a whole is less tainted by such misreadings.
2 After Hunter, ‘The Seventeenth Century Doctrine’, 209–10, citing Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 43–4.
3 See also VI.1 [10]27, 20, where a more active Matter than usual, capable of becoming everything, is ‘like the dancer who in his dance makes himself everything’. All passages from Plotinus, unless otherwise identified, are drawn from Armstrong, Enneads of Plotinus, with acknowledgements to Harvard University Press.
4 Compare Seneca Epistles 108.23 on the distinction between philosophy and philology.
5 For a better informed account of some genuine differences see Dockrill, ‘Heritage of Patristic Platonism’.
6 Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists (33n) was right to say that trying to equate the Christian Trinity with the ‘Platonical Triad’ of One, Nous and Soul ‘is bound to lead to heresy or at least to subordinationism’, but wrong to suggest that Cudworth’s reason was therefore ‘eclipsed’ when he sought a Plotinian analogue for the Trinity: the three hypostases are not where we should be looking for the comparison. There are other issues at stake than I can address here: Western Christianity has seemed to imply – as perhaps Plotinus does – that there is a unitary, as it were ‘impersonal’, substance behind or above the threefold Trinity, while the Eastern fiercely identifies the Father as the single personal source of both Word and Spirit (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 219–22).
7 That is, the material or phenomenal world we experience had a beginning – but the world as it is conceived in the Divine Intellect does not: that is just as much an eternally real somewhat as the pagans thought, even before it is, as it were, released on its own recognizance so as to make its own way, our own way, back home. But that is another story.
8 See also Cicero Orator II.8–9; Dio Chrysostom, ‘Man’s First Conception of God’ (at Olympia, in 97 AD): Discourses, vol. 2, 57 (12.51).
9 See Pépin, ‘Héracles et son reflet’; Sheppard, Studies on the 5th and 6th, 135.
10 A belief in ‘reincarnation’, as Williams, The Unexpected Way (80–3) has pointed out (and converted away from Buddhism to Catholic Christianity when he realized it), makes our present self of less significance than the animating ‘soul’ that has been or may yet be ‘a boy and a girl, and a bush and a bird, and a dumb fish in the sea’ (after Empedocles B117DK). But this too is too large an issue to attempt here.
11 See Lucian ‘Hermotimus': Lucian, Selected Dialogues, 96:
There have been a lot of philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Antisthenes, your own school founders, Chrysippus and Zeno, and all the others. So, what persuaded you [Hermotimus] to ignore the others and to decide to choose the creed you did to guide your studies? Did Pythian Apollo treat you like Chaerephon, and send you to the Stoics as the best of all? His practice is to direct different people to different philosophies, as he knows each individual’s requirements'.
12 See, for example, Benedict XVI (2009):
the objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide; the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are identical. In the end it is “one” reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091126_fisichella-telescopio_en.html (accessed 4 May 2016)
13 Athanasius Orations against the Arians 3.64.
14 See Ralph Cudworth, ‘Sermon preached before the Houses of Parliament’ (1647): CP, 106. Patrides comments on the trope presenting ‘our blessed Saviour as the true Hercules’. See also Waith, The Herculean Hero.
15 Prodicus of Ceos on the Choice of Heracles (between Vice and Virtue): Xenophon Memorabilia 2.1.21–34.
16 See also VI.4 [22].15, 23–40, where Plotinus compares our situation with that of an assembly besieged by a disorderly populace, and needing some ‘speech from a sensible man’ to calm them down. John Smith offers a similar account of the wicked as being thoroughly divided against themselves: CP, 172–3.
17 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 59:
it was strangely reassuring and calming to sit on my stone. Somehow it would free me of all my doubts. Whenever I thought that I was the stone, the conflict ceased. ‘The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years,’ I would think, ‘while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.’ I was but the sum of my emotions, and the other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.
18 Compare Francis Quarles (Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists, 9–10): ‘the best way to see day-light is to put out thy Candle’.