Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 39

3 March 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 39

1.  I’m enjoying the new book on Plotinus, Perspectives on Plotinus: The Collected Essays of John Dillon.  They seem to be written with great clarity and dedication.  Some of the essays are technical and require a background in Late Classical Platonism to access.  But many of them are written at what I think of as a college level.  

I previously mentioned that I was looking forward to Dillon’s essay on grace in Plotinus, “A Kind of Warmth.”  I’m happy to report that it surpassed my expectations.  It is the best essay on grace in Late Classical Platonism that I have come across.  There are other essays on this topic that I have read that I enjoyed and learned from; but these others were written by committed Christian authors and Dillon brings a non-Christian perspective to the topic.  For me grace is a significant topic because I view grace as essential to understanding the nature of the One.  Dillon points out in the first paragraph of the essay that for most people it is difficult to think of grace as part of a metaphysical system where the ultimate, The One, is non-personal.  But I don’t think that grace is necessarily connected to metaphysical personalism.  In any case, I think this essay will be a catalyst for a reconsideration of the role that grace plays in Platonism.

2.  It is revealing how strongly ascetic the life of a guardian, as depicted in The Republic is supposed to be.  At the end of Book III this is emphasized:

“Consider, then, whether or not they (the guardians) should live in some such way as this, if they’re to be the kind of men we described.  First, none of them should possess any private property beyond what is wholly necessary.  Second, none of them should have a house or storeroom that isn’t open for all to enter at will.  Third, whatever sustenance moderate and courageous warrior-athletes require in order to have neither shortfall nor surplus in a given year they’ll receive by taxation on the other citizens as a salary for their guardianship.  Fourth, they’ll have common messes and live together like soldiers in a camp.  We’ll tell them that they always have gold and silver of a divine sort in their souls as a gift from the gods and so have no further need of human gold. Indeed, we’ll tell them that it’s impious for them to defile this divine possession by any admixture of such gold, because many impious deeds have been done that involve the currency used by ordinary people, while their one is pure.  Hence, for them alone among the city’s population, it is unlawful to touch or handle gold or silver.  They mustn’t be under the same roof as it, wear it as jewelry, or drink from gold or silver goblets.  In this way they’d save both themselves and the city.  But if they acquire private land, houses, and currency themselves, they’ll be household managers and farmers instead of guardians – hostile masters of the other citizens instead of their allies.  They’ll spend their whole lives hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, more afraid of internal than of external enemies, and they’ll hasten both themselves and the whole city to almost immediate ruin.  For all these reasons, let’s say that the guardians must be provided with housing and the rest in this way, and establish this as a law.”

2.1  Overall, this is a description of a life that resembles a life vowed to poverty.  Minimal possessions, no ownership of private property, and no interaction with wealth symbolized by gold and silver.  

2.2  The rejection of gold and silver is complete; the guardians are not even to be in the same room.  Plato seems to be very aware of how corrosive wealth is, meaning how wealth turns one’s attention away from spiritual life and eventually spirituality completely fades from sight.

2.3  On one level this is a description of how the higher, sometimes called ‘rational’, soul should function.  The higher soul, which supervises the appetitive soul and the emotional soul, has to be strict in order to serve its functions of maintaining balance between the parts of the tripartite soul.  

2.4  On a social level, I think a passage like this is descriptive of the ideal philosopher whose rational soul has guided him for a long time.

(Plato, The Republic, Book III, translated by G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997, page 1052, 416d-417b, ISBN: 9780872203495)

3.  I think there are two arguments supporting vegetarianism within a Platonic context.  The first is the one put forth by Porphyry in his treatise on abstaining from eating or sacrificing animal flesh.  Porphyry’s view, which is stated early in the treatise, is that a vegetarian diet is necessary for a philosopher in particular because such a diet is supportive of the practice of contemplation.  From this perspective, vegetarianism is a tool for walking the Platonic path that resembles reading Plato’s Dialogues, or studying mathematics, or understanding the nature of emanation.

The second argument is that killing animals either for food or for the purposes of ritual sacrifice, as in theurgy, is deliberately harming living beings and doing so unnecessarily; that is to say there is no good reason to slaughter animals.  This argument focuses on the harm done to the animals that are slaughtered for food or for ritual purposes.  This is the argument that Plutarch seems to favor (because Plutarch’s essays on vegetarianism survive in only a partial state it’s not possible to state this definitively.)

The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive; both, I think, are valid and you will find aspects of the second argument in Porphyry and the first argument in Plutarch.  

A third presentation of vegetarianism in the Platonic tradition isn’t exactly an argument, but it is worth mentioning.  I am thinking of ancient biographies of Plato that depict Plato being vegetarian from birth and suggesting that Plato’s parents were vegetarian.  I see this as a symbolic sign of what one might call the ‘holiness’ of Plato.  It indicates that vegetarianism was a longstanding practice of philosophers in the Ancient Classical World.

4.  I live in the desert.  Summer in the desert here can be very hot, up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or 49 degrees Celsius.  A glass of cool water is very refreshing on days like that, even though I have air conditioning.  Reading Plato’s dialogues resembles that experience; reading the dialogues is refreshing because their source is the refreshing spring of eternity.

5.  One of the differences between the contemplative branch of Platonism (Plotinus, Porphyry) and the theurgic branch (Iamblichus, Proclus) is their method of presentation.  In the contemplative branch there is a lot of use of techniques like allegory, metaphor, symbol, and so forth.  The reader finds these in Plato and Plotinus, but most richly in Plato.

In the theurgic branch there is a tendency toward greater rigour as is found in Proclus.  This rigour is based on Euclid’s Elements which Proclus wrote a commentary on.  The Elements of Theology by Proclus attempts to use this kind of method to present his understanding of Platonic cosmology and metaphysics.

I favor the approach found in Plato because I think it uses all the capacities of the human mind and appeals to a wide range of types of mental comprehension.  I think this reflects the ability of Plato to use numerous structures in his dialectic, including allegory, simile, symbol, myth, syllogistic, and so forth.  In Plato the reality of the teaching exists before the method of presentation.  In Proclus the method preempts the teaching.  Or you could say that in contemplative Platonism the reality gives birth to method(s) whereas in theurgy the method preempts the teaching.