Neoplatonic Theurgists as Aesthetic Naturalists

Neoplatonic Theurgists as Aesthetic Naturalists Marilynn Lawrence Fourth Congress of Ecstatic Naturalism, Drew University, April 11-12, 2014 A trumpet sound Rang through the air, and shook the Olympian height; Then terror seized the monarch of the dead, And springing from his throne he cried aloud With fearful voice, lest the earth, rent asunder By Neptune's mighty arm, forthwith reveal To moral and immortal eyes those halls So drear and dank, which e'en the gods abhor. Homer, Iliad XX.61-65, tr. H.L. Havell1 I. Introduction: Metaphysical Caution In his latest book, Nature’s Sublime, Robert Corrington writes: “Plotinus gives us a roadmap that is striking in its beauty in its own right and which services to enrich and deepen aesthetic naturalism’s understanding of the depth-rhythms of beauty and the sublime” (164).2 In personal correspondences Corrington has also expressed an affinity with aspects of Plotinian thought, particularly through comparison of the traitless One to Nature Naturing. Plotinus' view on beauty--as something built into the structure of the cosmos--certainly resonates with Nature’s aesthetic core; and his revision of Plato's aesthetic theory paves the way for his successors for whom aesthetics is a significant component of the spiritual exercises that support their philosophies. And Plotinus' emanation theory, where Nous and Soul flow from the fountain of the One, has some resonance with the ontological difference of Nature Naturing and Nature Natured. However, there are both significant and superficial differences that limit a full-fledged metaphysical and psychological affinity. To cut to the chase, neither Plotinus nor Platonists before and after him practice ontological parity. In fact, ecstatic naturalism, like all naturalisms, is in some respects an inversion of Platonism, particularly concerning a principle of transcendence and the concept of Nature. Plotinus is noteworthy among the Late Antiquity Platonists for his placement of nature at the bottom of the ontological hierarchy as an image of nous and soul, not even worthy of designation as an hypostasis or level of reality at all. And the status of matter (hulê), closely associated with Nature, doesn't fare any better, having been deemed evil and completely devoid of the Good in Ennead 2.4 (though his precise position about matter and nature is still debated among scholars). With this stance he remains true to Plato’s divided line, where the physical and visible is less real than the immaterial and invisible. Plotinus draws his line rather sharply, while, as we'll see shortly, later Platonists beginning with Iamblichus bend it toward their own values and experiences of a religious life closely tied to the philosophical. Neoplatonic metaphysics is top down and hierarchical, from unity to multiplicity, from the transcendent reality to sublunary Nature. It can be envisioned as a pyramid or cone of unidirectional emanations. Corrington's ordinal metaphysics spins the cone horizontally so that the encompassing source is the bottom circle whose emanations radiate from the outer rim to the center and encapsulates all of the phenomena of nature natured, including human beings. Perhaps this should not be envisioned as a perfect circle, but as a wavy, pulsating circumference from which manifest not emanations, but spirits and traces of god-ing. Another substantial caveat about integrating Plotinus and the philosophy of other Neoplatonists into aesthetic naturalism is the issue of panentheism, particularly given Corrington’s leaning toward pantheism and away from panentheism and panpsychism.3 While Hartshorne and Reese identify Plato as an "ancient or quasi-panentheist," John W. Cooper argues that he is not so, on the basis of the world-soul of the Timaeus being a generated god rather than an eternal and uncreated one (Cooper, 37).4 Neoplatonism, on the other hand, he calls "the genuine fountainhead of classical panentheism" (Cooper, 39) for the One, which is beyond being for Plotinus "is both infinite and utterly transcendent, yet it includes or contains everything that emanates from it." (Cooper, 39). While Neoplatonism has been traditionally associated with pantheism (and is still listed as such in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica) I think Cooper's arguments in this regard are justified. [Though it could be noted that Cooper pegs Hegel as a panentheist though Corrington whispers of his pantheism]. This leaves an aporia given Corrington admitted affliation with Neoplatonism and specifically Plotinus ("My passage," 139), but I'm not concerned about this issue here (not yet). Despite the obvious cautions about using a philosophy so well-integrated in the history of Western transcendental metaphysics for the new enterprise of aesthetic naturalism, Neoplatonism remains a rich tradition full of intellectual and spiritual treasure. That it was not just a phase of intellectual history but has perennial value is attested to by its role as the dominant philosophy and rival of Christian theology for several centuries after Plotinus, only to be revived in the Renaissance, and again in 17th century Cambridge, and again through its influence on Hegel, Schelling, and German and British romanticism (not to mention Russia-Solovyov’s sophiology), and again in late 19th/early 20th century theosophy and process philosophy. I feel the relationship between Neoplatonism and aesthetic naturalism is worth a closer look. While the metaphysical issues deserve more attention, particularly given individual differences among the Neoplatonists, my purpose here is rather to focus on psychology, the study of the soul. The Platonists who followed Plotinus are not closer to aesthetic naturalism for being any less panentheistic or transcendent-oriented than Plotinus. They did, however, integrate methods and practices into their views about the soul's interaction with the divine as well as the sublime that produce a nascent notion of the unconscious and a richer psychology that may be of use within an aesthetic naturalist framework. II. Know Thyself Iamblichus established the curriculum for studying philosophy for the generations of Platonists following Plotinus. A philosophy student first read Aristotle for logic, rhetoric and knowledge of natural phenomena. Plato is then introduced through twelve dialogues, the first being Alcibiades I, for the central question that must be grasped before going further in philosophy was "What does it mean to Know Thyself?" Several extant commentaries on this and other dialogues in the canon, those by Iamblichus, Proclus, and Olympiodorus in particular, shed light on what the self means to Neoplatonists, and what it means in relation to the soul. The Platonists were also concerned with how the individual soul relates to the world soul (of the Timaeus), and how soul relates to the body, the intellect, and a divine source. A key phrase in the Alcibiades dialogue, auto to auto (129b, 130d) raised the question for the Neoplatonists, what is the self in itself, or what is the true self? While Plato identifies the self with the soul here, as opposed to the body or compound of body and soul, some of his later readers make a further distinction, namely that the true self is the rational part of the soul, and this part shares in the divine and wisdom. Many of Plato's followers took his tripartite soul, introduced in the Republic, Phraedus, and Timaeus, quite literally and continued to describe the soul in terms of three parts or divisions: the rational, spirited, and desirous (related to logos, thumos, and epithumia).5 Iamblichus takes a unique position against the traditional division of the soul into three parts, which is of interest when assessing his view of the self in relation to the world. For Iamblichus, the soul of humans (which is different in kind from other entities such as daimons, angel, heroes and gods) is a mean between the metaphysical extremes of body and intellect (nous), but it also has a double essence, or rather, there are two souls per human being that interchange when in different states. Furthermore, when the soul descends from its noetic place, it descends wholly, not leaving a rational part behind as the true self. This is a radical shift from Plotinus' view, for the soul is fully immersed in the natural world. In his commentary on Aristotle's De anima, Iamblichus sees himself as a truer interpreter of Plato when he writes: Plotinus removes from the soul the irrational powers: those of perception, imagination, memory, and discursive reasoning. He includes only pure reason (katharon logismon) in the pure essence of the soul, on the grounds that it has a power bound up with the very nature of the soul's essence. Plato assumes that the powers belong both to souls themselves and to the living beings, distinguishing each in accordance with each life." (13, trs. Finamore and Dillon trans, p 39).6 Whether it is through the training the lower parts of the soul by its ruling rational function, or integrating the irrational powers with the rational, a soul rumbling with self-conflicting emotions and appetites was a useful concept, particularly when combating Socrates-influenced Stoic intellectualism. A common understanding of the Stoics is that they attempted eradication of emotions and desires in one's perception of reality and decision-making activities. Neoplatonists of all stripes, however, find these irrational functions a necessary part of being human, neither to be willed out of existence nor favored, but harmonized and used appropriately. In this regard, Iamblichus places the whole self, if but for a lifetime, within the natural world; and while still holding the second soul's home in the intellect, Plotinus's first hypostasis from the One, he doesn't fully abject nature and sensible matter, but works with it. The self's experience is fully in this world and temporal, so, for Iamblichus, we cannot simply turn our gaze upward in Plotinian contemplation to find wholeness and union with our source. Plotinus' personal experience of the divine, described by Porphyry as instantaneous moments of mystical union, was purely intellectual and tied to rejection of the body. But for Iamblichus and other Neoplatonic theurgists such as Proclus, we're implanted in a natural world and must work with natural objects and surroundings, with our sensations and with symbolic artifacts to aid the soul's ascent. Ancient Neoplatonists, or any ancient philosophers for that matter, did not have the same concept of the self that we have post-psychoanalytic theory. But similarities of the human experience shine through their writings. The personal unconscious is present as that part of the self that is not directing thoughts and actions through prohairesis---deliberate decision or choice. Discussion of the struggle itself, between our desires and appetites and what we think is the right thing to choose, noted by Plato in his tripartite division (or metaphor), and by Aristotle who outlines the types of akrasia (weakness of will) in his Nichomachean Ethics, is evidence enough that ancients recognized other forces are at work in the self. Contra Plotinus, for Iamblichus, because intellect is not always humming along in the background whether we recognize it at work or not, there are components of the embodied self and the divine which seem outside this self, the ego self, that must be called upon. In De mysteriis, Iamblichus writes: For it is not pure thought that unites theurgists to the gods. Indeed, what then would hinder those who are theoretical philosophers from enjoying a theurgic union (henôsin) with the gods? But the situation is not so; it is the accomplishment of acts not to be divulged and beyond all conception, and the power of the unutterable symbols (sumbolôn aphthegktôn), understood solely by the gods, which establishes theurgic union. Hence, we do not bring about these things by intellection alone; for thus their efficacy would be intellectual and dependent upon us. But neither assumption is true. For even when we are not engaged in intellection, the symbols (sunthêmata) themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate work, and the ineffable powers of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognises the proper images of itself, not through being aroused by our thought. (DM 96.13-97.7, Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell trans.)7 Iamblichus' description of the sunthêmata points to an unconscious deeper than the personal unconscious. Whether we read the relation between the divine and the unconscious self beyond ego through Neoplatonism, Jungian psychology, or the selving process of Aesthetic Naturalism, the phenomenal experience of such remains a persistent human experience. The ties between the unconscious and the divine pervade the later Platonists' writings, particularly as they interpret Plato on divine madness, as we'll get to momentarily. Kevin Corrigan writes the following about the Delphic inscription gnothi sauton and Heraclitus's fragment 101, "I sought out myself": "Heraclitus' cryptic fragments suggest that to know oneself according to the logos is to go beyond a boundary into a shared and ultimately divine landscape." (Corrigan, 61)8 The quest to Know Thyself is tied with a desire to journey home, which means collecting and redirecting the entropic energy that would somatically and somnolently hold us. Iamblichus scholar Greg Shaw describes our immersion in "even the densest aspects of matter" for the theurgist as "potential medicines for a soul diseased by its body, and the cure for a somatic fixation in this theurgic homeopathy was the tail of the (daimonic) dog which bound it." (Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 47).9 The same energy, impulse or attraction that is responsible for "leading souls into bodies through daimonic urges, could be rerouted and transformed by theurgic rites." (Shaw, 46). Here I ask, what is this energy that is at once the way up and the way down, but the Will to Life? Of this force, in Nature's Sublime, Corrington says, "the Will to Life is the great unconscious of nature that pours itself into the human collective unconscious and its archetype, and via that route into the personal unconscious and its feeling-toned complexes." (Corrington, 67). The Platonists for the most part abjected nature, matter and the body, but as Corrington notes the process of abjection, when not hindered by rigidity, can provide energy for selving process to emerge and move forward (Corrington, 68). Such is the case for the theurgists, I maintain. We saw in the quote by Iamblichus the importance of symbols and symbolism in the activity of theurgy. It was through theurgy that ancient semiotics advanced, and these advances by Iamblichus and Proclus are where I see the strongest link to aesthetic naturalism. III. Ancient Semiotics In Nature's Sublime, Corrington writes, "It is tempting and a form of narcissism, to see signs as purely personal subjective products that only exist within human subjects who create them to render the complexity of experience more manageable." (Corrington, 72). Signs are in fact extra-personal. This view has ancient precedence when we consider the meaning of signs and symbols in Late Antiquity. Ancient Greek semiotics is rooted in both divinatory and medical practices. The term sêmêion primarily meant a sign such as an omen or oracle's response to an inquiry (Manetti, 4-5).10 Signs later get divide by Aristotle between those pertaining to language and non-verbal signs or symptoms, but there is also an earlier division between natural and conventional signs, and this division is a central question in Plato’s Cratylus, where the natural signs of language (such as the names of the gods) is not just extra-personal but extra-human as the mediatory language between gods and humans. While the various schools after Plato (the Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Latin rhetoricians) created their own semiotic theories, under Iamblichus' revival of Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonists took up the divinatory meaning of signs and symbols and combined it with the literary discussion of the symbol and symbolism found in allegory and myth. In Iamblichus, but more so in Proclus, this becomes a critical interpretive method linked to theurgic practice. Iamblichus held Pythagoras in esteem equal to Plato, and even may be classified as a Neopythagorean in certain regards. In Birth of the Symbol Peter Struck notes that "the Pythagorean 'symbol' acquires capacities similar to the symbol of the mystery religions and takes on an increasingly performative power. Its function outgrows the boundaries of semiotics and encroaches on the territory normally reserved for the priest and magician." (Struck, 194)11 A symbol in this context could be a word, name, image, natural object or artifact that provided a secret revelation to an initiate when decoded. The symbola or sunthêmata, for the theurgists, acquired the power not just to say things, but to do things. (Struck, 204). Let’s return to the quote by Iamblichus: "The symbols (sunthêmata) themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate work, and the ineffable powers of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognises the proper images of itself, not through being aroused by our thought." (DM 96.1397.7). Proclus inherits this understanding of symbol, but adds the idea that there are multiple chains of being, qualitative rays or emanations from the source, that convey the essence or trait of particular divinities or spirits, and touch beings at different levels including the material. Through the principle of sumpatheia, such a chain may reach from the One, to Apollo, to the noetic Sun, to the visible Sun and the element gold. At this point, theurgy may sound like nothing other than magic, but Iamblichus and later theurgists were adamant about differentiating theurgy (also called ‘’the hieratic arts’--technoi heiratikoi) from the practice of magic (goêteia) on the basis that magic is ego-enhancing and not a path for moving the ego-self out of the way to make room for the divine. Magicians attempted to draw down the gods and daemons, often through coersion and binding spells, in order to serve one’s desires and grant externals such as physical health, wealth, sexual love, or a good marriage for one’s offspring. The theurgist in contrast, may perform similar symbolic rituals that draw on the binding power of sumpatheia, either the material version of the Stoics or immaterial of Plotinus,12 but with the aim of letting go and letting silence fill the soul. This is a clearing, one likened to the higher stage of the selving process of integrating oneself with the Otherlike potencies of nature naturing. The symbol was an aid from without that helped prepare the soul for this clearing. In contrast to Plotinus' reaching up with the intellect to the One, Iamblichus believed the powers of the One must reach down, and the human soul must make preparatory actions to receive it (Struck, 211). In Nature's Sublime, Corrington expresses that in contemporary philosophy, our subjective sign-making is privileged over the extra-personal sign, which is considered an illusion, and “the manipulative dimension of semiosis is privileged over the assimilative." (Corrington, 72). In other word, there is a stress on humanistic world-making and the arbitrary relativism or nominalism of signs, rather than the self's reception of signs as an undergoing of the force or energy of nature naturing. What is unique in the theurgic understanding of symbols is that they don't, as Stuck has observed, "awaken some power of the human mind or soul. They derive their power from an indwelling presence of the higher orders within them." (Struck, 222). Of relevance here is that for Iamblichus the symbol both originates from nature and is imitative of nature's forces. In De mysteriis, he draws upon the Egyptian mystery cults who "imitate the natural powers of the universe and the demiurgic powers of the gods, and themselves make appear certain images of mystic and hidden and invisible thoughts through symbols, just as also the power of nature stamped out, in a certain way, the invisible principles in visible forms by means of symbols." (DM., 7.1.4-9). On words as symbols, Iamblichus and Proclus render the practice in ancient religious cults of naming divine names, compatible with Plato's Cratylus, where words that pertain to the gods have an inherent natural power that corresponds with the gods they represent. I'll again note that for these theurgists the world is not permeated by intellect understood as logos or rationality, but something beyond discursive reason, something which is conceived in modern times as the unconscious which has a logic of its own. And the Iamblichean soul is the link between theurgic understanding of symbols and Jungian psychology, particularly in relationship to the archetypes of the collective unconscious. This has not be widely discussed in Neoplatonic scholarship, though there is the notable exception of work by Bruce MacLennan, who sees theurgic rituals as methods for communicating with the collective unconscious and integrating the self into the wider cosmological picture.13 MacLennan also links theurgy, Jungian psychology, and evolutionary neuroethology, while eschewing the reductive materialism of most evolutionary approaches. He seeks to ground the experience of archetypal Forms or Ideas in human genetics, while the archetypes themselves are not static essences, but evolve just as genomes morph over time. Without going into further detail here, this line of inquiry may be fruitful for further research using aesthetic or ecstatic naturalism as the structural frame for relating these systems. Iamblichus redirected Neoplatonic thought toward a view of nature and the naturenatured visible world as a starting point for the soul's journey, or the attempt to find the lost object. But Proclus takes the representational aspect of the divine (the icon and the image) to another level, and finds spiritual aids in the representational arts (especially images of the gods); in interpretation of the symbolic in divinely inspired literature; and even in music. An ancient theory of the sublime will significantly figure into Proclus' version of theurgy. IV. Theurgy, the Aesthetic, and the Sublime As a sensitive reader of Plato, Proclus believed that those who think Plato rejected the poets, particularly Homer, and poetry wholesale misunderstand him and the intentions of his myths. Proclus makes a distinction between paideutic myth---an eiconic representation, an image or icon, intended to help train souls---and entheastic myth, which is symbolic of reality and requires deeper probing by someone whose soul is in a fit state in order to receive the inspired meaning (James A. Coulter, 49).14 The poets' power to encode levels of reality, ones that both affect and confound the soul, requires a type of ancient psychoanalysis found in Proclus' method of reading Plato and Homer. While Iamblichus opened up sensible representation as a vital aid not to be relegated to Plato’s shadowland, Proclus not only defends Homer’s representations but argues that Plato took over Homer's doctrines concerning nature or phusis which are cloaked in symbol (Coulter, 111). From his teacher, Syrianus, Proclus would have learned how the four types of madness in the Phaedrus are connected with different levels of what I'll call 'theurgic psychotherapy'. Madness in this context is considered to be divine inspiration (enthusiasmos) that affects different functions of the soul. Poetic madness harmonizes the conflicting parts of the soul (passions, spirit and reason); initiatory madness activates the intellective part, and perfects the soul's discursive function; prophetic madness moves in the intellective part and allows the soul to transcend itself and revert back to its true self. The highest type, erotic madness, connects the unified self to the gods and the realm of intelligible beauty (Radek Chlup, 175).15 These types of madness are incited and directed through what Radek Chlup categorized as ‘external’ theurgic activity such as music, dance, poetry, and artistic production, and ‘internal’ theurgy such as contemplation and reception of divine inspiration (Chlup, 169193). For Proclus, reading and interpreting is a sacramental act (Struck, 247). He believed this stairway of madness is most effectively brought about through the highest of four types of poetry, the symbolic, which “arises from a divine madness that is higher than reason.” (Struck, 242). In his understanding of the Ion, Proclus links the divine Muses, the poets, the rhapsodes, and the audience with the bonds of sumpatheia (Struck, 249), an experiential chain or conduit of the divine energy; or, we might add, a community of interpreters. How can Homer’s base depictions of gods-gone-wild be a path to union with the One? Proclus’s arguments that these mythological obscenities "possess a paradoxical affinity with transcendence" (Struck, 245) touch upon his theory of the sublime. The opening quote from the Iliad is an example of a passage from the Battle of the Gods called sublime by rhetorician Longinus in Peri Hupsous or On the Sublime. Longinus remarks that representing the gods in quarrel is downright impious and indecent, that is, he says, “unless…it is to be taken allegorically.” Proclus’ of course, does take the demonic representation of the gods allegorically, and more specifically as symbolic of the wild forces of natural/divine processes. The topic of a symbolic myth (rather than eikonic myth), as well as it’s poetic representation, is sublime, for it works on both gods and the soul. It attracts the attention of the gods who send a token or sunthema of their special nature, which affects the soul with erotic madness, a desire for the meaning beneath the surface---or as an aesthetic naturalist might say, of the unconscious of nature. As Corrington wrote in Nature’s Sublime, “A given spirit announces itself through a kind of breath or semiotic wind that opens up a small clearing next to a sign and its object” (Corrington, 127). Such was the aim of ancient theurgy. Proclus, like Kristeva, privileges poetry as the art for the return of the lost object (Corrington, 182), but the practice of theurgy incorporated visual art (typical as representations of the gods), music for inducing the mood of reception of the divine, dance, and sacred forms of language other than poetry, such as the uttering of divine names. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Iamblichus or Proclus naturalists, but these Platonists were working with our embodiment and situatedness while embracing the representative arts as the method for retrieving the lost object, or one’s true and integrated self. I end with this question: does the aesthetic naturalist theurgist play the role of artist or saint, or somewhere in between? Notes Quoted in Havell’s translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime. An alternative translation by Samuel Butler: All the roots of many-fountained Ida were shaken... And seized with fear in the world below was Aidoneus, lord of the shades, and in fear leapt he from his throne and cried aloud, lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and immortalsthe dread and dank abode, wherefor the very gods have loathing. 2 R. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 2013. 3 R. Corrington, “My passage from panentheism to pantheism American Journal of Theology & Philosophy; May 2002; 23, 2, 129-153. 4 J. W. Cooper, Panentheism, 2006. 5 Some Platonics group together the thumetic and epithumetic parts as the irrational part in contrast to the rational part. 6 Iamblichus, Commentary on De anima, 13, trans. J. Finamore and J. Dillon, 2002. 7 Iamblichus, De mysteriis 96.13-97.7, trans. Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell, 2003. 8 K. Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 2004. 9 G. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, 1995. 10 G. Manetti, “Ancient Semiotics”, in Routledge Companion to Semiotics, ed. Paul Cobley 2009, 3-28. 11 P. T. Struck, Birth of the Symbol, Princeton University Press, 2004. 12 See Gary Gurtler, “Sympathy: Stoic Materialism and the Platonic Soul, in Neoplatonism and Nature, ed. M. Wagner, 2001, 241-276. 13 B. MacLennan, "Evolution, Jung and Theurgy: There Role in Modern Platonism," in History of Platonism: Plato Redivivus, eds Berchman, Finamore, 2005. 14 James A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm: Theories of Interpretation of the Later Neoplatonists, Brill, 1976. 15 Radek Chlup, Proclus: An Introduction, 2012. 1