Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 44

28 April 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 44

1.  I’ve been thinking, more like pondering, about the division in Platonism between those who regard the soul as ‘fully descended’ and those who do not regard the soul as fully descended.  ‘Descended’ in this context means ‘descended into the material realm from higher realities; either the noetic or the ineffable transcendental of the Good and the One.  This division emerged in the late Classical Period; it was one part of various disputes between Porphyry and Iamblichus.  The dispute has left a lasting impression on the Platonist tradition.  There are those who regard the soul as always resident in the transcendental, exemplified by Plotinus, and there are those who regard the soul as separated from the transcendental, exemplified by Proclus (see the last section of the Elements of Theology).

1.1  I think my recent focus on this unresolved split within Platonism was stimulated at this time by my reading Theurgy and the Soul by Gregory Shaw; Shaw takes the view of Iamblichus and critiques Plotinus on this issue.  To be fair, Shaw’s criticism of Plotinus is nuanced in the sense that he points out where Iamblichus likely misunderstood Plotinus. Even so, I think overall that Shaw misrepresents Plotinus, but that’s to be expected from someone like myself who is so dedicated to Plotinus as a guide and an embodiment of transcendent wisdom. 

1.2  As I was thinking about this it came to me that the idea of the partial descent of the soul is not an unusual, or eccentric, view within a Platonic context.  I think partial descent is something we have all experienced.  For example, think of attending a lecture that is introducing a complex topic (perhaps in a classroom context, perhaps online, perhaps in person at a venue).  You are interested in the topic but there are parts of the lecture that you don’t understand, while there are other parts that immediately make sense.  This is a very common experience when, for example, learning a new language or beginning a branch of mathematics, and so forth.  What I want to suggest is that this is an example of a ‘partial descent’ of the topic into one’s mind.  When we have this experience, we know that our understanding is partial and that there is more to learn.  In a similar way, the partial descent of the soul into matter leaves the soul with only a partial understanding of its own place in the cosmos; more needs to be studied and understood and this is accomplished through renunciation, study, and contemplation.

1.3  There are other examples of partial descent in our experience of the world.  When the light of the moon appears in a pond, that is the partial descent of the light of the moon into the pond.  In a similar way, the soul can be thought of as analogically the partial descent of the light of the One into the pond of individuated material existence.

1.3.1  Another example, among many that can be chosen, is the material tree as an instantiation of, or emanation from, the form of treeness.  Each tree is descended from treeness but the material tree is only a partial representation of treeness.  All trees are like that; they have a limited reality here, and a transcendent reality there where treeness resides.

1.4  The partial descent of the soul also resembles the descent of higher, abstract, realities into materiality.  The descent of the One, in the sense of Unity, is partial in the material world.  The unity of a material being happens because of material beings’ participation in the One, in Unity itself.  But the unity of material beings is only a partial unity; if it were a full unity, a full descent of the One into material embodiment, then material beings would be the One itself.  The partial unity, or Oneness, of material beings is on display as becoming and begoning.  The One, and Noetic realities, do not participate in becoming and begoning, but material beings do and that is why the Oneness of material beings is only a partial Oneness.

1.5  It is my feeling that the idea of the full descent of the soul came into Platonism from Christianity.  What I am getting at is that the Christian view of fallen humanity is that because of the fall humans need an intermediary to connect with God because human beings are too sinful to make such a connection on their own.  The intermediary for Christians is Jesus who is considered to be fully human and fully Divine, fully God.  Because of this complex nature Jesus can save human beings from their fallen condition.

In a similar way, those Late Classical Platonists who argued for the full descent of the soul also argued for intermediaries, plural, consisting of the Gods of the Greek pantheon.  Through carefully constructed ritual the practitioner could contact one, or more, of these intermediaries who had the ability to lift the separated and fully descended human soul to noetic, and possibly higher, realms.

I understand that usually those who study the history of Platonism view Platonism and Paganism in the Late Classical period as deeply in opposition to Christianity; but I tend to see them as in significant ways engaged in the same project which in this case is based on the idea of the human soul as fully separated from the transcendental.

1.6  Returning to the context of Platonism and its internal disputes, I think that there has been a tendency to look at this dispute within Platonism in a way that is too analytical; in addition, there is a tendency to use language that is too technical when discussing this issue (too technical in the sense that the language used obscures rather than clarifies).  If, instead, we look at this issue through the procedures of analogy and metaphor, particular to our own experience, then the assertion that the soul is not fully descended into the material realm makes intuitive, and logical sense (logical in a Platonic sense) with a clear experiential basis.

2.  The history of Platonism gives me the impression of a very malleable tradition.  I say that because it seems that Platonism finds it easy to adapt to changing environments so that Platonism does not resist, or does not resist very much, putting on the robes of various other traditions such as Greek Paganism, Skepticism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mathematics, and so forth.  Some traditions are highly resistant to this kind of display; Jainism is one example. 

I think this is because Platonism regards the material domain as inherently unstable and in constant flux.  Looked at in this way I think it makes sense that one would accept the kind of changes and adaptations that Platonism has gone through.  The focus of Platonism is on the transcendental which is, from one perspective, ultimate otherness.  This ultimate otherness is not to be found here in the material domain; it is there in the transcendental.  From this perspective it is not a matter of first importance what robes the tradition wears.

3.  There is a social movement which is called ‘Minimalism’.  When I say ‘movement’ I don’t mean that Minimalism is very organized or that someone can attain an official certificate of Minimalism.  But there are people who act as what I would call guides to a minimalist life.

The movement is strongly devoted to simplifying one’s life by having as few things as possible, cutting back on extraneous things, or things one no longer actually needs.  Some Minimalists have very few possessions indeed.  Others are more moderate in their minimalism.

The Minimalist movement has a strong aesthetic component to it which some emphasize more than others.  I have noticed that there seems to be a Japanese aesthetic influence, which makes sense; and some of those offering Minimalist insights are Japanese.

But there is also a philosophical component.  And at times it seems some minimalists are almost taking a vow of poverty.  I haven’t run across any explicitly religious content from Minimalists; but there is a kind of sense that many minimalists are turning away from the material world having seen through its false promises.  This is often motivated by wanting to have time to do what is important in the life of a minimalist instead of their life being consumed by and wasted on the accumulation of things. 

I take all of this as a positive sign.  It indicates to me a kind of inchoate spiritual yearning.  Perhaps something profound will emerge from this.

4.  Brief is the life of a mountain.

5.  “. . . and the first requirement for a happy life is to do yourself no injury nor allow any to be done to you by others.  Of course, the first half of the requirement presents no great problem; the difficulty lies in becoming strong enough to be immune to injury – and the one and only thing that brings such immunity is complete virtue.  The same applies to a state: if it adopts the ways of virtue, it can live in peace; but if it is wicked, war and civil war will plague it.”

(Plato, Laws, translated by Travor J. Saunders, Plato: The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1997, page 1491, 829a, ISBN: 9780872203495)

“Now those who live happily must first avoid doing injustice to others and suffering injustice themselves at the hands of others.  Of these two, the former is not very difficult, but what is very difficult is acquiring the power that prevents being done injustice – this cannot be completely achieved unless one becomes completely good.  This very same thing applies to a city: if it becomes good it lives a life of peace, but it lives a life of external and internal war if it is evil.”

(Plato, Laws, translated by Thomas L. Pangle, The Laws of Plato, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980, page 219, 829a, ISBN: 0226671100)

5.1  It’s interesting to see that Plato in this passage makes an explicit case for the city and the individual as being kind of mutual analogies for each other (in the passage immediately preceding the one quoted, Plato also asserts this).  I think this suggests that the Laws, as is true of most of Plato’s dialogues, is written at multiple levels simultaneously and that the Laws is at one level a guide for how to live a good life.

It's not easy to see this in the long passages where the Laws discusses setting up various bureaus and committees in great detail; at least I find it difficult to see how this applies to my life as an individual.  But that is probably due to my own limited understanding.

5.2  It is helpful to see how Plato’s teaching on non-harming, or non-injury, makes an appearance here in his last dialogue.  Non-injury, injustice, and non-harming often have the same valence in the dialogues.

5.3  Plato seems to be suggesting that it is possible for a city, which in Plato’s day would mean a city-state which is close to what we mean by a country, can live in peace.  At other times in the Laws Plato expresses frustration that there has to be discussion about laws for acts that the three characters in the dialogue find abhorrent or disgusting; but (and you can almost hear the sigh) they have to do so because human beings have tendencies in those directions and they must be dealt with.  My conclusion is that Plato likely leans to the view that a City living in peace (both internally and externally) is probably a utopian fantasy.

 

 

Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 43

21 April 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 43

1.  One way of looking at Platonism is that Platonism consists of both things to be cultivated and things to be restrained, diminished, or eliminated.  The Platonist practitioner cultivates the Virtues such as Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance.  The Platonist practitioner also cultivates a relationship with the classics of Platonism such as the Dialogues and the Enneads; reading them, studying them, discussing them, and deepening his understanding of them.  And thirdly, the Platonist practitioner cultivates contemplation which at first is difficult but over time becomes more and more a part of the practice of Platonism.

In contrast, Platonism also has a system of ethical restraints such as non-harming and vegetarianism and sexual restraint including chastity and recommending a minimalist life, which is to say a life with minimal possessions.  This system of restraints strongly resembles the Precepts and Vows of Dharmic traditions; this resemblance is a primary reason why I think Platonism more closely resembles a Dharma, such as Buddhism, Jainism, or Hinduism, than it does what is currently thought of as philosophy in the West.  I hope to have more to say about this in a future post.

This weaving of cultivation and restraint in a Platonist practitioner’s life creates a sense of balance.  There is ethical asceticism and there is the acquisition and growth of wisdom.  There is letting go and acquiring.  

2.  One of the things about the Dialogues that I think is worth pondering is that Plato doesn’t have the perspective of progress.  Instead, Plato sees things from the perspective of that which is unchanging such as noetic realities.  I noticed this in particular while reading the Laws.  The setup for the dialogue is that the three participants in the dialogue are considering writing a new set of laws, a constitution, for a new colony in Crete.  But the three of them strive for instantiating previous examples from various societies to bring this about; this is not striving for something new, rather it is an effort to replicate aspects of the past.  In addition, it is not based on the idea of a ‘revolution’ which is something very widespread in modernity.  It is so widespread that the idea of ‘revolution’ is used to describe many non-political events such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or a ‘revolution in the arts’ and so forth.   But for Plato it is the past that sets examples to be admired and followed, rather than a speculative future utopia.  This is why, when discussing the arts such as poetry and music, Plato argues for artistic traditions that have lasted thousands of years as what humanity should follow rather than contemporary innovations which Plato views as a decline.

3.  In the Jain tradition Precepts and Vows are interpreted differently depending on the status of those taking, or committing themselves to, the Precepts.  The main distinction is between monastics and laypeople.  Monastics are expected to adhere to the Precepts in a much more extensive and strict manner than laypeople.  For example, the Precept of having few possessions, Aparigraha, for monastics means having only a few items of clothing and a begging bowl and perhaps a whisk to brush away insects from your path (and in some sects it means less than that).  For lay people the restrictions on possessions is much less onerous.  Manuals that focus on these Precepts are devoted to making these distinctions in practice clear; both monastics and lay people take the same initial set of five vows, but how those vows are applied differs.  (A good reference for this approach to ethical restraints or Precepts or Vows is Jaina Yoga by R. Williams.  As far as I know it is only published in India but I have been able to get it from Amazon.)

I wonder if a similar approach to the ethical restraints of Platonism would be helpful?  In a sense you can find this inclination in some of Plato’s dialogues when Plato talks about Guardians living a highly renunciate life, much more so than the average citizen.  Following this kind of suggestion, and using the Jain manuals as a kind of prototype, I think it would be possible to construct a similar approach to the teachings of ethical restraint found in Platonism.  It might be possible to use a lay/monk distinction (I know of a small number of people who think of themselves as Platonist Monks).  

One of the advantages to this is that it provides a sense of participation in the practices of the tradition for people who are not necessarily in a position to manifest a full instantiation of these restraints in their life at this time, or during this lifetime.  For example, a lay person will likely have to have a home and, if the layperson has children, many other things.  On the other hand, living a life with as few possessions as possible is something that a layperson can participate in and many have done so.  This way of interpreting the teachings of ethical restraint also provides people with a sense of the ultimate direction that their practice leads to and how they can be fully instantiated; this is the purpose of people like Platonist Monks who practice Platonist ethical restraint to a much greater degree than most ‘lay’ Platonists.

4.  “Naturalism cannot countenance eternity, especially the thought that that which is eternal can have an explanatory role for the temporal.”

(Lloyd P. Gerson, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2020, page 97, ISBN: 9781501747250)

4.1  I always enjoy reading Lloyd Gerson’s analyses.  He has such an articulate and clear style, even when he deals with subtle topics.  To be honest, I don’t always follow what he is saying because he is writing, I think, primarily for an academic audience and I’m not an academic.  But enough comes through to make the effort worthwhile like the one sentence jewel I quoted above.

4.2  By ‘naturalism’ Gerson means a philosophical view that regards the only valid explanations for things are ‘mechanistic’ and material.  In Platonism material things have a non-material origin; the forms (and beyond the forms, the Good and the One).  Gerson notes that naturalism was present in ancient Greece primarily among the atomists.  Naturalism is not new, but in the past it was a minority view whereas today naturalism dominates.  However, the situation today is more complicated in that some naturalists are ‘conflicted’ about whether naturalism can explain things like consciousness, thinking, intention, and moral experience (see page 25 of the same book as quoted above).  Still, naturalism has a strong hold on many people’s minds.

4.3  A reality that naturalism seems unable to grasp is eternity; that is because eternity is not a reality accessible to the senses though it can be inferred through abstract analysis that does not seem to contain any contradictions.  Hence the tendency to refuse to ‘countenance’ eternity.

4.4  Platonism distinguishes between the everlasting and the eternal.  The everlasting could be perceived, at least partially.  I am thinking of cyclic processes.  It can also be thought about through the operations of mathematics.

But those are everlasting because of their relationship to the eternal, they are not eternity as it is in itself.  The everlasting participates in eternity in the way that the unity of things participates in the One.  But just as the unity of things is not the Unity of the One as such, so also the everlastingness of some things and processes is not Eternity as such.

Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 42

14 April 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 42

1.  “. . . virtue and great wealth are quite incompatible . . . “

(Plato, Laws, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Laws is translated by Trevor J. Saunders, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997, page 1423, 742e, ISBN: 9780872203495)

Plato has a consistently hostile attitude towards the accumulation of wealth, or ‘great wealth’.  Plato thinks that cultivating virtue is difficult in such a circumstance as a life of great wealth.  This is a common theme in many spiritual traditions.  Buddhist monastics live a life of voluntary poverty and few possessions.  Jesus famously said that a person cannot follow God and money.  

There are some spiritual traditions that do not have this attitude, so it’s not a universal that is found in all spiritual traditions.  But it is found in many of them and it is worthwhile pondering why this is so. 

My personal observation has been that money is an enormous temptation that can seduce people into abandoning their principles, or virtues, so that its pursuit often leads to deception and harming others, even many others.  For this reason I think it is best for the Platonist practitioner to live a life of at least modest means.

2.  One of the interesting things about asceticism, something that is unexpected, at least it was by me, is how happy its practitioners often are.  I first ran into this when reading the Therigatha and Theragatha from the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.  In particular the Theirgatha, which are poems of the earliest Buddhist Nuns (Theri) are often expressions of how happy they are to now live a life of renunciation when comparing it with the life they previously lived.  

We tend to think of such a life as grim and unfulfilling because we view such a life through a materialistic lens.

I think this is true of asceticism in general, and true of Platonist asceticism specifically.  The traces of Platonist asceticism are difficult to find and consist mostly of stories about such practitioners.  There are not a lot of such stories.  Still, they may be enough to demonstrate the great joy that an ascetic life brings to its practitioners.

3.  “But no race, Greek or foreign, seafaring or landsmen, nomadic or urban, can bring itself to dispense with establishing some kind of symbols for the honour they pay their gods.”

(Maximus of Tyre, Oration 2: Images of the Gods, translated by M. B. Trapp, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, page 23, ISBN: 0198149891)

I think Maximus brings this up because it is a perennial problem for those spiritual traditions that point to an ineffable ultimate.  An ineffable ultimate is one that cannot be seen, heard, cannot be touched, and is beyond sensory experience or mental fabrication.  But this is difficult for human beings to understand, or to rest in, or to be satisfied with.  The result of this difficulty is for human beings to create symbols of various types as stand-ins for the ultimate.  These stand-ins are perceivable by one or more of the senses and thus more accessible.  It is not surprising, therefore, that it is often the case that people think of the symbolic reality as the end of their journey to the divine.  

A paragraph later Maximus writes:

“For God, Father and Creator of all that exists, is greater than the Sun and the heavens, mightier than time and eternity and the whole flux of Nature; legislators cannot name him, tongues cannot speak of him, and eyes cannot see him.  Unable to grasp his essence we seek the support of sounds and names and creatures, and shapes of gold and ivory and silver, and plants and rivers and peaks and streams; though desiring to understand him, we are forced by our own weakness to name merely terrestrial beauties after his divine nature.”

(As above, page 23)

4.  “If most men live and die without knowing what true happiness is, the reason is not that they do not desire it – at heart they never desire anything else – but that they look for it in the wrong place.  They confuse it with the round of pleasures, with health and long life, with worldly wealth, or with that irresponsible power which, by lifting its possessor above all law enables him always to ‘do as he likes.’”

(A. E. Taylor, Platonism and its Influence, Edicions Enoanda, Barcelona, 2018, page 48, ISBN: 9781977012975)

A. E. Taylor (1869-1945) was a British Idealist philosopher at a time when British Idealism was a pervasive movement in that country.  Platonism and its Influence was published in 1924.  He was a Christian Platonist but his Christianity seems to have been strongly shaped by the Church of England which has a different perspective than Catholic Platonism.  I first encountered A. E. Taylor as a young undergraduate where my professor recommended Taylor’s short work on Metaphysics.  I found it to be a masterpiece of conciseness and insight; I’ve reread it several times.

The quote elaborates on the idea that everyone is searching for the Good (the transcendental) but they cannot find it because they think of this in terms of a search for material happiness.  I think the source for this view are remarks in the Dialogues where Plato states that no one intentionally does evil, that people do evil things because they are ignorant of the true nature of the cosmos and therefore think that what they are doing will make them happy.

I often heard this kind of teaching when I was studying Buddhism.  The idea is that all living creatures are seeking peace, happiness, equanimity, and so forth, but because they do not know the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path they are unable to attain these goals.

I wonder if these kinds of teachings are true.  As I have grown older I have become more pessimistic about humanity.  I’m not sure that it is the case that everyone is seeking true happiness and transcendent peace.  In a sense this is an unanswerable question because our experience with others is very limited in number.  And my change of view doesn’t seem to have impinged on my practice; that is to say that my growing pessimism regarding humanity has not diminished my own commitments to study, practice, and contemplation.  My feeling is that the soul of many people is so deeply buried in negative habits and tendencies that it is unlikely that many souls will ever see the light outside the cave, or will join with that light.  In other words, I think we tend to underestimate the obstacles to spiritual growth and the tenacity of a materially focused life.  Again, though this is pessimistic, it does not deflect my own ongoing practice; in some ways I think it strengthens it.  Either way, Platonism offers the possibility of spiritual growth and realization.  And that is what really matters.

5.  One of the intriguing things about the contemporary Catholic Platonist, Peter Kreeft, is that he sometimes interprets Thomas Aquinas in Platonist terms.  This is unusual; at least it is unusual in the reading on Christian Platonism I have done.  It seems to be the case that Aquinas is thought of as an Aristotelian.  Of course there is an intimate relationship between Plato and Aristotle, and maybe Kreeft is relying on that historical connection. 

“The most recent and most radical philosophy called Deconstructionism centers on the denial that even words are signs, and reduces them to things that are either the causes or effects of power.  The Platonic tradition, exemplified by Aquinas’s hermeneutic, is the total opposite of this because it says that even things are words and signs as well as being things . . . A symbol is a kind of analogy in words, of course, but for Aquinas analogies are not just in words and language or just in thought and concept, but they are first of all in being.  Reality itself is analogical.”

(Kreeft, Peter, The Platonic Tradition, St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Indiana, 2018, page 63, ISBN: 9781587316500)

I don’t know enough about Aquinas to comment on Kreeft’s emphasis on the Platonic tradition in this context.  But it’s intriguing to me that Kreeft feels very comfortable with the idea that Platonism plays a significant part in the thought of Aquinas.

Regarding the idea that the things of this world are inherently analogical (I would probably say metaphorical), I think this is beautifully stated.  I think this is affirmed in the Dialogues by the use of analogy, and other structures of comparison, as modes of reasoning.  The quoted passage highlights one of the failings of contemporary philosophy, particularly in the analytic tradition and traditions derived from the analytic tradition.  And that is that the analytic tradition does not seem to understand how words work, that words are not numbers, and that words are, as Kreeft implies, inherently analogical.

I think we can understand what Kreeft is saying by noting how in Platonism certain experiences are symbols, or analogies, of transcendental realities.  The experience of beauty is such an experience.  So is the experience of numbers.  So is the experience of justice,  And so is the experience of equanimity and peace.  All of the manifestations in the material world that exhibit these realities, no matter how dimly, act as messengers from the divine, letting us know that in comparison to the dim and distorted experience of these realities here, these realities are only analogies, or emanations, or instantiations, of the the pure presence of these realities there.

Our soul responds to these realities because our soul is also such a reality.  Our soul is at the same time a symbol, and an analogy, of the divine, and the actual presence of the divine in our life and lives.  The soul is inherently present in the One, the transcendental, and the individual because of its everywhere and everything nature.  If we follow that which resonates with the soul we will walk the way to the Good and the One with patient assurance.

Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 41

7 April 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 41

1.  I was reading some of the essays by John Dillon from his new book Perspectives on Plotinus and at the same time rereading from the Orations of Maximus of Tyre.  I was reading them now and then and going back and forth between them.  I came away with a pleasing feeling of continuity; that is to say I feel a sense of common purpose between Dillon and Maximus as well as a common approach in their essays.  They both have great respect for the Platonic tradition.  They both ground what they are saying in the Platonic heritage, including older texts.  They both write in a focused, essay, style; I mean that each of their writings is focused on a particular topic of Platonism which the authors then unpack, showing how the topic of the essay relates to other topics in Platonism and/or Platonism as a whole.

2.  A friend of mine disagreed with my assertion in “Brief Notes on Various Topics 40.3” that presenting Platonism to college students needs to be done in a manner that can connect with them by presenting Platonism in a way that does not clash with the assumptions of modernity; at least not too much.  This means that starting with the topics of transcendence, or asceticism, is unlikely to make sense to young people in our culture at this time because of its materialism, nihilism, and reductionism.  

My friend pointed out that Platonism is not a tradition that is for most people.  Rather, Platonism is for the few.  My friend was suggesting that crafting a presentation of Platonism to appeal to undergraduate college students (perhaps in an Introduction to Philosophy class) implicitly means that I want Platonism to be a popular ‘Dharma’ or a ‘universal’ Dharma.  I think this is a fair point.  We in the West are used to thinking of religions and spiritual traditions as having the goal of universal appeal and, potentially, universal adherence.  This is true of Christianity.  But it is also true of a religion like Buddhism which has always had a strong push to convert others to its tradition(s).  

But not all spiritual traditions, or religions, think of their mission in the world as including converting large numbers of people to their tradition.  A good example are what I might call ‘spiritual arts’.  I am thinking of things like tea ceremony, tarot, I Ching, body-centered practices like Chi Gong, various meditation traditions and contemplative traditions, traditions like Jainism, and so forth.

Platonism more closely resembles these kinds of practices. There are differences, for sure; for example, Platonism seems to be more heavily invested in reading, studying, and interacting at multiple levels with most of these traditions and practices.  But then again, there are differences between any two of these non-universalistic traditions. 

In a number of Dialogues Plato presents the requirements for being a philosopher.  In Phaedo those requirements are ascetic.  This is also true in other dialogues.  In addition, in The Republic Plato mentions things like having a good memory, being a quick learner, and living what we today might call a ‘minimalist’ life.  Such a description presents a calling that is for a limited number of people.

2.1  When thinking about this a bit more, it came to me that the idea that a particular engagement in human affairs is not normally considered to have universal appeal.  For example, if someone is a gardener that person does not normally think of gardening as something that everyone should do.  Or someone who practices calligraphy as a hobby does not normally think of calligraphy as something that everyone should practice.  But when it comes to spirituality it seems to be the case that people think of spiritual traditions as for everyone, or accessible to everyone, and that if the spiritual tradition or practice is not universal in this way that it is somehow a failure when compared to traditions that do have a universalist approach.  I think that happens in Buddhism, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, because of certain ideals of compassion which are interpreted as being fulfilled when all people align with the Buddhist understanding of compassion; I’m thinking, for example, of the Bodhisattva Vows.  I think this happens in Christianity and Islam because of their supersessionist tendencies.  But, again, Platonism is not like that and is content to appeal to a limited number.

3.  In the Timaeus Plato writes, “. . . the motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe.  These, surely, are the ones which each of us should follow.  We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth, by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and so bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition.  And when this conformity is complete, we shall have achieved our goal: that most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods, both now and forevermore.”

(Plato, Timaeus, translated by Donald J. Zeyl, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1997, page 1289, 90c-d, ISBN: 9780872203495)

3.1  This helps the reader understand why astronomy is an important study in Platonism; because studying the revolutions of the universe connects us with the divine, linking the universe to the divine within us.  

3.2  One of the revolutions included would be the revolution of the sun, or the solar cycle.  This links astronomy to the contemplation what I call ‘waiting for the sun’.  I’ve posted about this before, but here in Timaeus is the explanation of the significance of this contemplation.  

4.  Most people use the word ‘theurgy’ as a synonym for magic.  I recently looked up the word ‘theurgy’ in an online dictionary and ‘magic’ was the first meaning listed.  I take a narrower, more specialized, view of theurgy.  In a Platonic context, based on Iamblichus’s influential On the Mysteries, theurgy is a sacrificial system that argues for the efficacy of blood sacrifice; that is to say the slaying of living animals as an essential part of theurgic ritual practice.  It’s not that all theurgic rituals require blood sacrifice; rather it is that theurgy is the foundation which permits animal sacrifice when it accords with the theurgic view.  I think that incorporating this perspective on ritual sacrifice into Platonism from Iamblichus onward, was a setback for Platonism that should be rejected.  The antidote is to be found in Porphyry’s Abstinence which argues against the slaying of animals either for ritual purposes or for slaying them for food.  A second antidote is to be found in the Platonic teachings on non-harming.

5.  On an everyday level Platonism is a gift that slowly transforms one’s life for the better.  At one level, the Platonist practitioner becomes more aware of what it means to live a virtuous life and why someone should strive to live a life of virtue.  On another level, what happens is that the Platonist practitioner begins to perceive material objects as symbols, or instantiations, of divine, or higher, realities.  This ability adds additional dimensions of experience to our ordinary life.  And these additional dimensions are invitations to transcendence and to that which is eternal.

6.  There is a passage in The Laws where the Athenian Stranger refers to an Egyptian artistic tradition which has lasted for 10,000 years; unchanged for all that time.  This was a style of painting which had strict rules for the procedures of painting bodily forms.  Clinias responds that this is “Fantastic!”, which I think in this context means something like ‘unbelievable’.  (As an aside, there are contemporary traditions of painting that strictly control the manner in which bodily forms are presented; I am thinking at the moment of Tibetan Thangka painting with which the West has become somewhat familiar in the last 50 years or so.  This tradition has rules governing the placement of bodies and other elements and these rules go back many centuries.)   The passage continues with a discussion of an Egyptian tradition that does roughly the same thing with music.  The Athenian Stranger clearly approves of this and wants to see this kind of tradition planted in the Greek world.  

It is difficult to conceive of an artistic or musical tradition that has lasted 10,000 years.  Many traditions in the arts in our culture today (music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and so forth) don’t last 100 years; some don’t last 6 months.  Think of what it would mean to sing a song that was 10,000 years old.  Think of what it would mean to live in a culture where that would be celebrated.  It would be a very different world.  (This discussion is found in The Laws at 656d-657c)

Later in The Laws the Athenian Stranger says, “The music we ought to cultivate is the kind that bears a resemblance to its model, beauty.”  (668b)