5 January 2026
Brief Notes on Various
Topics -- 79
1. Happy New Year Everyone!
Wishing you a prosperous and contemplative 2026!
2. Grace, Again
I think one reason why some contemporary Platonists dislike the idea of grace, and in some cases reject the idea that grace is a significant aspect of Platonism, is that in the West grace is thought of as a kind of personal gift. What I mean is that if the source of grace is God then the way grace is configured in the West implies that the God who grants grace is a person who has a personal relationship with the one receiving the grace. This kind of understanding of grace is consistent with monotheism so it doesn’t cause any friction in a monotheistic context.
But in other philosophical and spiritual contexts it does cause friction and in these other contexts grace is understood differently; grace is still a gift, but it is not a gift given to us as individual persons.
In a Pure Land Buddhist context, I once heard impersonal grace explained as follows: Suppose a man is very hungry. This man recently lost his job and is alienated from his family. He moved to the city just a few months before and doesn’t really know anyone. He is sitting on a bench at a bus stop when he notices that someone forgot to take a bag of food with them onto the bus. The bag is sitting against the bench. The man waits for several hours but no one shows up. The man decides to take the bag of food with him and this tides him over for the better part of a week.
The story was offered as a metaphor for grace. The hungry man didn’t deserve the food and therefore what happened was not an exchange of goods. But reality, or causation, unfolded in such a way as to prevent the man from going hungry.
Switching back to a Platonist perspective, the presence of the Good and the One is a gift that people can receive and the gift nourishes the return to the One. But it isn’t because we deserve the gift of this presence, and it isn’t because the One decides that I, as an individual will receive this gift of presence. Rather it is that reality is structured that way; and by reality I mean the structure of metaphysical reality. The gift of grace is a consequence of the everywhere nature of the Good and the One. The gift of grace is a consequence of the everywhen nature of the Transcendental. The gift of grace is a consequence of the everything nature of the Presence of Eternity.
The man sitting on the bench at the bus stop might not have noticed the bag of food. Or he might have decided not to take it even after waiting hours for someone to claim it. The working of grace is not mechanical, it does not follow material sequences of causation. But without grace I don’t think the spiritual ascent would be possible.
3. Modern Stoicism
For about 15 to 20 years there has been a popular interest in Stoicism. Before I retired, about three years ago, I worked at a spiritual bookstore and I can remember when books on Stoicism started becoming popular. They became so popular that I created a subsection within the philosophy shelf just for Stoicism. And the books sold well. It appears to me that books on Stoicism are still selling well.
I have observed that there is some pushback about these books on Stoicism on the grounds that they are very selective about the teachings of Stoicism that they bring forth and talk about. This criticism comes almost entirely from academics, particularly those who have a specialty in the Classical Period or Roman Philosophy. I have read and listened to a number of these critiques and I have noticed that many of them note that popular Stoicism rarely mentions Stoic Cosmology, to pick one example. Almost all popular Stoicism today is focused on ethics and/or self-help.
The point critics make about popular Stoicism not teaching about cosmology is, I think, misguided. For example, contemporary Aristotelians drop Aristotle’s cosmology, I mean his material cosmology, because the cosmos that science has uncovered has displaced it. The same could be said for Stoicism. I suspect that the focus modern Stoics have on ethics is there because in our society there is little offered in terms of ethical guidance; nihilism is rampant and a completely subjective, hyperindividualistic approach to ethics dominates. Stoic ethical teachings offer people a different perspective on ethics, one that is practical, one that people can actually access and use. (As an aside, I should mention that some academics, like Pierre Hadot, had a very positive view of the ethics of Stoicism and I suspect this group is not critical of popular Stoicism.)
I wonder if Platonists today can learn from the success of popular Stoicism? If contemporary Platonists used popular Stoicism as a model it would generate, for example, books on the ethical teachings of Platonism as opposed to an emphasis on metaphysical cosmology. This would be a way of introducing Platonism to people by emphasizing the way of life aspects of Platonism.
A few posts back I suggested that the first step in living a Platonist life was to become a vegetarian. A second step might be to simplify one’s life, that is to say to reduce possessions to essentials. These kinds of teachings do have a metaphysical foundation in the Platonist tradition, but they also can function as a mode of access to Platonism that is not overly intellectual or overly analytical.
4. Afterlife Histories
There is an interesting process whereby the negative reputation of someone gets transformed after they have passed away; and this transformation almost always happens in a shift towards a positive assessment. This has been observed by historians and sociologists for a long time. An historical figure might have been enormously destructive and received a lot of condemnation during their lifetime; yet, as time passes, the assessment changes and people start thinking of them as, to pick one example, a ‘great military leader’ and the specifics of the negative assessment fade from social awareness; the negative assessment becomes something that only dedicated historians, and a few people who might be interested in the topic for random reasons, even know about. An example of this is Alexander the Great; but there are many others. If you are attentive you can watch this process happen in real time to figures of political and military importance who die during one’s lifetime.
Part of it, I think, is a kind of general feeling that ‘one should not speak ill of the dead.’ And this sentiment aligns with the tendency for us to reconfigure the past in general in a more positive direction than may be warranted. This seems to be a feature of most people’s minds, with the exception of dedicated pessimists.
I was thinking about this because late in 2025 I saw two posts on Youtube that were overviews of the life of Julian the Apostate. In both cases the presenters lauded Julian as a hero who risked everything to bring back the position of Paganism in the Roman world. Neither of the presentations mention the huge amounts of animals Julian sacrificed during his brief reign. Well, I take that back; one of them said that under Julian the Pagan altars once again ‘ran red with blood.’ He said this as if it was a good thing. And it was just a passing comment.
One of the presentations was by a Pagan Platonist, or Neo-Pagan Platonist, or perhaps a Neo-Pagan Neo-Platonist. It makes sense that a Neo-Pagan would have a positive feeling about Julian, especially if he has a strong anti-Christian bias.
Still, I find it troubling that the zealous, I would say fanatic, devotion to animal sacrifice, which was a signature feature of Julian’s Paganism, goes unmentioned. Consider, for example, that many countries have laws against animal cruelty; and this applies to the nations in which these presenters live. This indicates that as a society we think of animals as lying within our ethical concerns. It’s true that laws against animal cruelty are rarely enforced, but in principle the existence of such laws indicates a general ethical concern regarding how animals are treated. But this kind of concern was absent from both presentations on Julian; not that this is unusual. Books I’ve read about Julian don’t bring it up either.
From a Platonist perspective, any animal sacrifice, let alone the elaborate and relentless sacrifices of Julian, means you have not come to terms with Platonist ethics or, I would argue, the ethics of the community in which the presenters reside. I say this about Platonism because the foundation of Platonist ethics is non-harming and the application of that foundation is found first in ways of life that include animals in the embrace of non-harming.
5. Breaking Free
The material world is a kind of trap because the material world is a region of suffering and sorrow. Platonism offers us a way of breaking free from the trap of material existence; that is the purpose and the meaning of Platonic Teachings, the Platonic Way, the Platonic Dharma.
6. Solitude in Platonism
The pursuit of solitude, or understanding solitude as a spiritual practice, is not prominent in Classical Platonist literature like the Dialogues and the Enneads. But there is a kind of reference to solitude in what I might call the ‘penumbra’ of Platonism. For example, Plotinus famously refers to the ultimate ascent to the ineffable One as a journey of the ‘alone to the alone.’ In addition, Plato mentions in several Dialogues how the Philosopher will be seen as marginal to the society in which the Philosopher dwells because the Philosopher is focused on the immaterial transcendental while almost all people are focused on the material world. This implies a kind of solitude; it might not be actual solitude in the sense of a hermitage, but these representations of the Philosopher indicate a psychic and social distance, even a separation from most people.
I’m not aware of the topic of solitude being discussed within a Platonist context. For example, I don’t find it in the Handbook by Alicnous and I don’t recall solitude being a topic in the Orations of Maximus.
But there are hints, now and then, of Platonists who have given up material possessions and live a life that is withdrawn from material concerns. I find these examples inspiring and uplifting. Perhaps it is time for contemporary Platonists to incorporate an explicit commitment to solitude as part of the ascent to the transcendental.
7. Does the Soul Have Parts?
I was reading what Alicnous has to say about the soul in his Handbook (discussion of the soul is found on pages 31-34 and consists of three sections; 23, 24, and 25, in Dillon’s translation). Section 24 is titled ‘The Soul and Its Parts’. It is a very clear presentation of the idea that the soul has parts (an affective part, a part that reasons, and so forth). And it is consistent with writings on the soul found in Classical Platonist literature both before Alcinous and after him.
Nevertheless, I lean towards viewing the soul as partless, as having no parts. First because the soul is immaterial and I don’t see how it is possible for that which is immaterial to have parts. On what basis would the parts be distinguished?
Second, I think of the soul as the presence of the One (and the Good) in the ephemeral individual. The One is the source of unity in material things; the One is why a thing is a thing and not nothing. But it seems to me that unity implies a partless reality. Without a partless immaterial reality individual material things could not even emerge in the material world.
Third, I think of functions like reason as a part of mind rather than soul. My interpretation is that the main function of mind is differentiation and reason is a tool of differentiation. I think of mind as the presence of the noetic in the material individual because it is in nous where differentiation first appears.
In other words, the soul does not reason, nor is soul irrational. Because the soul is prior to differentiation it is neither rational nor irrational.
Fourth, I think of the affective aspect of the individual to have its origin in the body (and the mind’s relationship to the affective body is to either work to actualize affective desires or to curb them through the cultivation of virtues and other types of purification). I understand ‘affective’ to mean primarily emotions and desires. Emotions and desires appear regularly in a manner that is cyclic; the material world is the world of cyclic existence and for this reason the affective aspect originates in the body rather than the soul.
I realize that viewing the soul as a partless unity is different from the standard presentation of the soul as having higher and lower parts and functions. Nevertheless, these are my current thoughts on the nature of the soul which I offer for your consideration.
