The Nature of Transcendence: The Ascetic Ideal -- 2

8 December 2022

The Nature of Transcendence: The Ascetic Ideal -- 2

A Platonist friend of mine recently sent me a link to an article by Sergi Grau called The Body Among Neoplatonists and Christians at the End of the Fourth Century: Synesius of Cyrene’s and Eunapius of Sardis’ Perspective, published this year.  I found the article very well written and focused on several disagreements between the rising Christianity and the Platonist tradition.  Grau writes, “The three objections [to Christianity] by Porphyry in his treatise Against the Christians . . . are well known: (a) the universe is eternal, uncreated and indestructible, (b) souls cannot be created at birth, and (c) resurrection of the body is impossible.”  I want to focus on the third disagreement, (c).

1.  I think this disagreement emerges out of different understandings of the nature of transcendence.  Briefly, I would put it that for Platonism transcendence is impersonal, while for Christianity transcendence is personal.

2.  When I say that in Platonism transcendence is impersonal, I mean that The One has no human characteristics and the journey to The One involves the gradual shedding of individual personality.

3.  When I say that for Christianity transcendence is personal, I mean that the resurrection of the body implies, and is explicitly stated, as the survival of an individual personality in a physical, though not necessarily material in the sense that we mean material, form.

4.  Asceticism in Platonism is the gradual alignment of the individual with the impersonal One.

5.  Asceticism in this early period of Christianity is the cleansing of the soul of sins so that the practitioner can be worthy of bodily resurrection.

6.  Though the two ascetic traditions have a lot of overlaps, the purpose of the ascetic practices differ.  And this difference was felt acutely by some of those who had previously been steeped in the Platonic tradition and then subsequently converted to Christianity.  A good example of this is Synesius of Cyrene who was a disciple of Hypatia of Alexandria, a dedicated Platonist. [As an aside, Synesius died a few years before Hypatia and therefore did not have to confront Hypatia’s gruesome death.]  Grau quotes from one of Synesius’s letters, “It is difficult, if not quite impossible, that convictions should be shaken, which have entered the soul through knowledge to the point of demonstration.  Now you know that philosophy rejects many of those convictions which are cherished by the common people.  For my own part, I can never persuade myself that the soul is of more recent origin than the body.  Never would I admit that the world and the parts which make it must perish.  This resurrection, which is an object of common belief, is nothing for me but a sacred and mysterious allegory . . . “

7.  Asceticism in Platonism isn’t instrumental, or rather it isn’t solely instrumental.  Asceticism is understood to be the means for returning to The One by becoming, as far as it is possible for an embodied individual, of the nature of The One.  This is possible because there resides within each human individual an inner light which is the presence of eternity.  If the soul is distracted by bodily concerns, by worldly concerns, the soul will not notice the presence of the light.  But if the soul turns to the light, to this eternal presence, then the ascent to The One has begun.  The soul’s turning to the light happens when we turn away from the sensory distractions of the material world, allowing us to see the ultimate otherness of the light within.