Read the first part of this article here.

Neo-Platonism and its legacy

Plotinus, not a Christian, is regarded as the founding father of Neo-Platonism, and influenced Saint Augustin’s thought, maybe even after the latter’s conversion to Christianity. Like Plato, his philosophy was based on a hierarchy of being: Ultimate or Supreme Reality, which he called “the One”; Mind, which is contingent on “the One”, but part of Ultimate Reality; the World Soul, in turn less ultimate than Mind, is also part of Ultimate Reality; Matter, far removed from “the One”, so far removed in fact that it could be regarded as evil. Effectively, Plotinus identified the One as equivalent to Plato’s concept of “the Good”. For Plotinus the One is the foundation of all reality. Guided as he was by reason alone, he held that nothing affirmative could be said about the One. It could only be defined in terms of what it was not. In that sense his teaching about Ultimate Reality could be likened to that of non-dualistic Hindu philosophy. When asked for a definition of Brahman, the Hindu mystic Shankara replied Neti, neti (not this, not this). It could be argued that this is as far as unaided reason can take us in trying to define the nature of Ultimate Reality. We can intuit the need for some metaphysical reality behind everything that exists, but how far can reason alone take us in determining the nature of this reality?

For Plotinus, the One is the source of Mind but, in order to be consistent with its non-dualistic nature, it cannot engage with anything lower than itself in the hierarchy. Plotinus overcomes this apparent contradiction by invoking what he refers to as circumradiation, like the “brilliant light encircling the sun and ceaselessly generated from that unchanging substance”. In other words, creation occurs by an overflowing or emanation of creative energy, like the radiation emanating, necessarily, from the sun. But like the sun’s relationship with what emanates from it, the One is indifferent to what results from its energy. The One has no interest in entering into a relationship of any kind with human beings. But we can, and should, reach out towards the One. This reflection on the part of Plotinus is the basis of the mystical traditions that are associated with him, and indeed it influenced much of the mysticism of Medieval Europe. His view was that union with the One was the ultimate goal and reward of all our striving. The human soul is akin in substance to the One, so by striving towards union with the One the human soul is returning to its true Self. This is reminiscent of the Hindu identification of the Brahman (Ultimate Reality) with the Atman (the human soul). This mystical impulse characteristic of both Hinduism and Neo-Platonism is understandable, from a pragmatic perspective, even if there is no rational justification for it. Ultimate Reality, as defined by Plato and Aristotle, is never conceived of in terms of personhood. It is a lifeless rational principle, or at best an indifferent source of the energy that produced everything that exists. From a personal point of view, this conception of Ultimate Reality is very unsatisfactory. It will leave the individual adherent of this philosophy with a thirst for a deeper connection. Hence Plotinus’s mystical approach to union with the One.

During the course of the following millennium, and beyond, Neoplatonism coexisted with orthodox (and heterodox) Christian theology, and undoubtedly influenced both. Plotinus’ conception of “the One” probably lay at the root of the Arian heresy, according to which God was One and not divisible into three Persons. For a while it seemed that Arianism could have ended up becoming the predominant paradigm within Christendom.  But it is worth asking what difference it would have made, and whether and in what forms Plotinus’s Neoplatonic conception of the undefinable, impersonal, “One”, with Christ as, at the most, “an emanation” from the One, has found its way into the Church’s theology and practice, even in the present day. In order for God to have always been fully personal, as the Bible teaches that he is, there needs to be an eternal community of persons within which personhood can express itself. Christians believe that God is love, and always has been, which necessarily implies giving and receiving between persons within the Godhead. Plotinus’s One cannot love, because if everything is contained in the One, then there can be no “other” besides itself to love.

In Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, “the One”, or “absolute Being”, was a placeholder for God, and a very far cry from the God who revealed himself in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, and uniquely in the incarnation. And philosophy has since then, and indeed since Plato himself, represented God, or ultimate reality, in similar or derived terms. The need for a metaphysical principle or entity, something to which ultimacy can be attributed, has been retained. But the living, creating, self-giving, choosing and acting God to whom all are subject and who is subject to none, has been replaced by a series of surrogate placeholders. This entity might misleadingly be referred to as “God”, but the “god” in question is stripped of personhood, agency, the capacity to do anything but, at the most, simply “to be”. For Neoplatonists this placeholder was “the One”. Baruch Spinoza later conceived of God as identical to the universe itself. God is everything that is, and everything is God. The natural world itself became the placeholder for God, and he made no distinction between good and evil. God is everything, irrespective of its moral character. For Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his philosophical descendants, the placeholder for God was “The Absolute Spirit”, to which he curiously attributed purpose and agency. The so-called Enlightenment made Reason the placeholder for God. Despite the rationalists’ denial of metaphysics, rationalists attributed a metaphysical quality to Reason itself. Reason became the Ultimate Reality in the light of which, and only in the light of which, all reality can be explained. Although many rationalists professed a belief in God, they essentially emptied the concept of God of anything that made belief in God meaningful. At the beginning of the 19^th century Friedrich Schleiermacher, basically singing from Spinoza’s hymn-sheet, so to speak, posited the idea of a religion without a god at all. “Belief in God is not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe.”1 After the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of species, whose concluding sentence begins with the words “There is grandeur in this view of life”, Natural Selection gradually came to be invested with the same explanatory power that had hitherto been attributed to the action of a self-existing, non-contingent personal Creator. For the so-called New Atheists and their followers, Natural Selection remains the Phenomenon in the light of which every other phenomenon can already, or will eventually be explained.

In view of the process of the de-deification of God that had already been underway for centuries, Schleiermacher’s statement that even religion can dispense with belief in God need not come as a surprise. Nor is it all that surprising, therefore, that such a “non-conception” of God should have found its way into theological faculties during the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It goes without saying that this “non-god”, whether or not the term “god” be applied to it, has established itself in popular culture. In the words of Lloyd Geering in his article Theology after Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God 1963 ², “Theology became a ‘do-it-yourself’ exercise in which everybody could participate, drawing upon their own inner experience”. Since the demise of all the overarching explanations and meta-narratives associated with Modernity, and the spread of Postmodern deconstruction through virtually every academic discipline, and throughout popular culture, it is now up to every individual to decide what they attribute ultimacy to. What is more, no one has any right to call into question what they choose to place at the top of their hierarchy of meaning and value. It could be an art form, a type of music, an ethnic or other kind of group identity, a relationship or a football team, etc.

Roger Marshall, English language and literature teacher in Barcelona, Spain.

Notes

1. Friedrich Schleiermacher On Religion (Quoted by Lloyd Geering in his essay Theology after Bishop Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’ 1963. Article for the Journal for the study of Religion Vol. 31 2018)

2. Lloyd Geering Theology after Bishop Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’ 1963. Article for the Journal for the study of Religion Vol. 31 2018