Return to Wisdom

18 December 2023

Return to Wisdom

I’ve been thinking a lot about the shift in the Platonic tradition that took place in the late classical period from philosophy to theology, from wisdom to theurgy.  This shift was common to the two main spiritual traditions of that period; Christianity and Paganism.  I mean that Platonists in both Christianity and Paganism reinterpreted the Platonic tradition and its focus and they did so in the same way.  This is masked by the fact that Pagans and Christians were at odds and so the underlying unity of their approach at that time is not immediately apparent.

1.  The idea that historical periods have a certain spirit, or focus, or that a particular time embodies certain unexamined understandings or premises, has been presented by a number of philosophers.  I think that this shift from philosophy to theology in the history of Platonism is a good example of this.  During the formative period of Platonism, and for centuries after, the idea of wisdom had a lot of attraction.  Philosophy grew up and emerged as a discipline in a society where wisdom was admired.  This could be ‘practical wisdom,’ which is to say broad knowledge of a specific topic, or it could be truly philosophical wisdom, which means wisdom regarding the transcendental.  It could even manifest as a distorted, or fake, wisdom as in the Sophists.  But in a way the Sophists are a further example of how wisdom was valued even if the presentation was just a mask of wisdom.

2.  But these broadly shared views eventually fade.  Wisdom as the primary focus of a well lived life slowly dimmed.  In its place theology emerged and faith took the place of wisdom.  This was expressed at the time of this transition as an opposition between Athens and Jerusalem. 

3.  I’m not opposed to faith, so my purpose here is not to critique faith.  But I tend to view faith as trust in something that as yet one does not have any experience of.  On a mundane level, for example, if I want to study some topic I know nothing about I have to trust that I am capable of such study and that trust comes before any experience of the topic or interaction with it.  If I don’t have this kind of trust, I simply won’t bother to take the first steps in learning; but the trust precedes those first steps.

4.  In contemporary culture there has been a shift away from faith as the dominant, unquestioned, paradigm, to ideology.  We live in an ideological era.  In an ideological context there is no mystery or transcendence and faith is equated with ignorance; the lack of the transcendental in ideological systems is not thought of as a lack, rather it is understood to be a virtue, a sign of progress.  The rejection of the transcendental is the way modernity undermines the previous era of faith because faith in the previous era meant faith in the transcendental.

Ideologies also have the characteristic of being thoroughly encompassing; that is to say that everything is interpreted through a few key ideas of the ideology.  Any criticism of the ideology is considered evidence that actually supports the ideological view.  For example, materialist ideologies regard advocacy for the transcendental as arising out of economic and political factors and are expressions of domination.

5.  Looked at in this way, Platonism as a wisdom tradition, because it is a wisdom tradition, has been out of touch, or out of sync, with the dominant society ever since there was the shift from philosophy to theology, from wisdom to theurgy.  Platonism didn’t disappear, but it was drained of sufficiency, becoming instead a means of support for theology.  In contemporary ideological systems, Platonism was further drained of sufficiency, though certain of its ideas were still found useful in fields like mathematics.

6.  I see the contemporary Platonist task as that of a Return to Wisdom.  This refers to the wisdom found in the Dialogues of Plato and the Enneads of Plotinus.  It is a return to transcendent wisdom.  At the same time, this is a recognition of the sufficiency of Platonism as a spiritual path, that Platonism does not require theology to be complete or theurgy (Christian or Pagan) to be practiced.  It is a return to the specific practices and virtues of Platonism as given in dialogues such as Phaedo and works such as Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals.  It is unhyphenated Platonism.