What follows is part of the introductory lecture for a course, entitled Plato and Platonism Through the Ages, which I have taught at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies
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Plato and Platonism is a course I have long wanted, and long plotted, to teach here at the School, though in effect, I’ve been doing so in every class I’ve ever presided over since the first, lo those many years ago. There is nothing in the history of Western philosophy, theology, and literature that does not bear the imprint of Plato’s influence, so that the history of Western thought and letters is, in essence, the history of Platonism.
To begin with what is so obvious that historians of philosophy have often missed it, Aristotle–the first scholarch to head the Academy in Athens after Plato’s death—was (what else?) a Platonist. In the period following Aristotle and the conquest of the ancient world by Alexander the Great, the afflatus of Plato is everywhere evident in the mystery religions that were practised throughout the Hellenistic and later Roman worlds. The Roman political and moral philosopher Cicero, along with the poets Virgil and Ovid, were heavily indebted to Plato. The great turn-of-the-era philosopher and father of biblical allegory, Philo of Alexandria, was a Jewish Platonist. For the first two centuries A.D., Platonism and Stoicism were the two dominant schools of philosophy in the antique world, attracting to themselves such adherents as Plutarch, Galen, Sextus Empiricus, Dio Chrysostom, and the Middle Platonist epitomists and orators Albinus, Maximus of Tyre, and Apuleius.
The age of Neoplatonism stretched from the beginning of the third century A.D. to the end of the Roman Empire, whose leading intellectual lights were Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus in the East, and Servius, Chalcidius, Macrobius, and Julian the Apostate in the Latin West. At the same time Platonism spawned a bizarre progeny of esoteric mythologies, theosophies, occult wisdom, theurgy, magic, and mystic cults, from the Esssenes, to Hermeticism (the wisdom of Hermes Tresmigistus), to Gnosticism (pagan and Christian), the Sibylline Oracles, the Chaldaean Oracles, the Orphic Hymns, the Hebrew Cabbala, and so on.
Most important of all, perhaps, the Greek doctors and fathers of the Church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzus, and the Latins from Minucius Felix and Lactantius all the way down to Augustine in the West, regarded Plato as the greatest of the Greek philosophers, and were convinced that he was inspired by the same divine Spirit as authored the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Scarcely less than Moses, Plato was the Prophet who bequeathed to Christians their fundamental conceptions of God, the world, the soul, and its salvation, doctrines that were allegorically read into the Old and New Testaments from the Early Christian period to the Renaissance, whether concordant with the original biblical ontology, theology, and soteriology, or not.
In the early and high Middle Ages, the most influential classical texts—besides the dialogues of Plato themselves–were Virgil’s Aeneid–read as a Platonic allegory of the journey of the soul through the temptations of this world and its return to its original homeland in the Other–, and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (overtly Platonic in both form and content), along with a commentary upon it by the late-antique pagan polymath Macrobius, whose Platonizing attitudes and doctrines had been so thoroughly assimilated into Christian theology by that time that the entirely spurious legend of his baptism was universally credited. Conversely, Boethius’ early sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy (probably the single most influential text of the Christian Middle Ages), having been written by a Christian beyond any doubt, makes no reference to Christ or the Bible, while it is replete with allusions to the divine Plato, Plato’s work and thought, and represents a kind of handbook of the Platonic moral and spiritual themes and doctrines that constituted the universal religion of the late-antique world.
Around the same time as Boethius (c. 500), writing in Greek, came the works of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius—his Celestial Hierarchy, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, and Divine Names,–a Christian author steeped in the Neoplatonic corpus and tradition, and the great font of medieval mysticism, angelology, and negative theology. The writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius were translated into Latin by the eighth-century Christian Neoplatonist philosopher John the Scot, and universally read and commented upon throughout the Middle Ages, inspiring every important Christian mystic throughout the centuries, including Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Thomas a Kempis’s Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous Imitation of Christ, Nicholas of Cusa, Theresa of Avila, all the way down to the twentieth century’s Simone Weil.
Two of the most important “renaissances” in the history of the West were Platonist revivals—not that Platonism ever lapsed into dormancy. The great twelfth-century renaissance centred at the cathedral school of Chartres fecundated a great outpouring of Neoplatonic speculation, mysticism, and mythic poetry by such luminaries as Bernardus Silvestris, John of Salisbury, Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, Hugh and Alan of St. Victor, Alan of Lille, and William of Conches. At the same time, just north of Paris, the church of St. Denis (the prototype of the new Gothic style) had been designed by its architect, the Abbot Suger, as a manifestation in stone and light of Platonic mysteries, as Suger had learned them from the Pseudo-Dionysius, Macrobius, and Plato’s Timaeus.
In the next two centuries (the age of Scholasticism), Plato’s sun was temporarily eclipsed by Aristotle’s moon; but leaving aside the fact that Aristotle himself was a Platonist, even amid the arid classifications and logical hair-splitting that he bequeathed to Christian philosophy, the spiritual method and via contemplativa of Plato continued to be extolled by the likes of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas.
The strenuous backlash against the soul-less methodology of Christian Aristotelianism began to achieve momentum as early as the fourteenth century. It is already incipient in the works of the Florentines Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and reaches critical mass in the same city, where Cosimo de Medici attracted to his court a number of Byzantine scholars and antiquarians fleeing the advance of the Moslem Turks, who were then on the verge of conquering Constantinople.
These scholars salvaged and brought with them a precious cargo in the form of the ancient manuscripts that had been housed in the great libraries of Byzantium, and had therefore been inaccessible to the courts, scriptoria, and universities of medieval Europe. Along with the manuscripts, the Byzantine refugees bestowed upon their grateful hosts a knowledge of the Greek language, which had grown stale and rusty in the Latin West, teaching it to the eager Florentine intellectuals who would, once re-acquainted with the recovered wisdom of the ancients, inspire the greatest of the Western renaissances.
Amongst the Latin texts reintroduced into the West and made available for study by these Byzantine scholars, the most important were the philosophical writings of Cicero, whose seminal Platonic dialogue, The Dream of Scipio, has already been mentioned; and amongst the Greek, the dialogues of Plato, along with the works of his Neoplatonic successors Plotinus, Prophyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus.
Indeed in Florence, Cosimo, and later Lorenzo the Magnificent, founded and presided over a school of philosophy that they conceived as a glorious revival of the original Platonic Academy at Athens. To it they attracted the leading lights of the age, the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the poet-humanists Landino, Aretino, and Bembo, and the most eminent artists and architects of the day, including Alberti.
Between the two of them, Ficino and Pico alone translated into Latin, and commented upon, every Platonic dialogue, every one of the works of the pagan Neoplatonists, much of the Hermetic corpus, the Sibylline and Chaldaean Oracles, the Orphic Hymns, the Cabbala, and the mystic quaternion of the Pseudo-Dionysius.
Of course, the Platonic afflatus of the Florentine Renaissance was the plinth upon which was erected the edifice of modern European thought throughout Italy, the West, and the North, down to the nineteenth century. Poliziano, Castiglione, Giordano Bruno, Michelangelo, Montaigne, du Bellay, Ronsard, Nicolas of Cusa, Erasmus, Reuchlin, Agrippa von Nettescheim, Paracelsus, Durer, Kepler, Kant, Spinoza, Goethe, Jung, Thomas More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Burton, Milton, Newton, Berkeley, and Wordsworth, are just a few of the writers and thinkers–to name them off the top of my head–upon whom Plato’s dispositive influence is beyond question.
But I mustn’t go on with this roll call any further.