Christian Platonism

Since this substack or blog (or whatever you call it now) is called ‘The Lutheran Neoplatonist,’ it’s important, I think, to explain a little bit of what I mean by that. In my PhD thesis, called Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God, I propose that liturgical theology, in order to provide a coherent account of liturgical participation (as well as Christian life and Christian practices in general), should embrace a theurgic approach, where human acts are consummated by the divine.¹ In this post, I will not go into detail about what ‘theurgy’ (Gk. theourgía) is, as that is easily available in my thesis. Rather, I want to explore some other aspects of a Christian Platonic outlook, engaging Paul Tyson’s book Returning to Reality.²

Tyson, pointing particularly to the work of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien,³ makes the point that in Christian Platonism, we seek to focus on that which transcends our everyday experience and phenomena, leading to a life through Christ, in the Spirit (cf. Romans 8; Colossians 3:1-17). This, however, does not mean that we ignore the world. In Platonism, particularly theurgic Neoplatonism, we reach the transcendent realities through temporal things. For Iamblichus, the central actor in this tradition, this means that the world is ‘populated’ with symbols and tokens, which are used in theurgic rituals:

What ritual, after all, and what cult celebrated according to hieratic laws, is there which is accomplished by the utilisation of passion, or which produces some satisfaction of passions? Was not this cult established by law at the beginning intellectually, according to the ordinances of the gods? It imitates the order of the gods, both the intelligible and that in the heavens. It possesses eternal measures of what truly exists and wondrous tokens, such as have been sent down hither by the creator and father of all, by means of which unutterable truths are expressed through secret symbols, beings beyond form brought under the control of form, things superior to all image reproduced through images, and all things brought to completion through one single divine cause, which itself so far transcends passions that reason is not even capable of grasping it.⁴

The created world, then, has certain things in it that function as symbols through which we can contemplate the transcendent. Tyson notes that for Lewis, who in many ways was a Platonist, “the world of immediate experience is not “seen through” and then discarded, but rather that world as we experience it is the necessary medium through which we hear the music of heaven.”⁵ Created reality is, in other words, in all its physicality, sacramental and mediatory. It does not point to itself but neither does it point away from itself. Rather, created, physical reality, the visible world, is that along or through which we can see transcendent realities, as Lewis notes in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed.”⁶ Elsewhere, explaining his Christian Platonic outlook, he makes a distinction between a symbolic or sacramental worldview, where everything points to, and participates in, that which transcends it, and a more ‘allegorical’ view, where things may point to other things, but only arbitrarily and exclusively:

It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms. What is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun. Evil and misery were deep and dark from the first. Pain is black in Homer, and goodness is a middle point for Alfred no less than for Aristotle. To ask how these married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question is how they ever came apart. […] This fundamental equivalence between the immaterial and the material may be used by the mind in two ways, and we need here be concerned with only one of them. On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia to express them. [. . .] This is allegory. . . . But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I could call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in turn is the copy of an invisible world, of something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism. It is, in fine, ‘the philosophy of Hermes that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabrick’. The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given—his own passions—to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. […] Symbolism comes to us from Greece. It makes its first effective appearance in European thought with the dialogues of Plato. The Sun is the copy of the Good. Time is the moving image of eternity. All visible things exist just in so far as they succeed in imitating the Forms.⁷

The centre of a Platonist Christian attitude to the visible world, then, is not one of rejection. No, it embraces the visible world, as revelatory, as symbolic, and as participating in that of which it is a symbol. But also understands that it is inferior to the invisible realities it points to. As I argue more in my PhD thesis, in the fifth chapter, we do not, and cannot, have a ‘direct’ contact with God, because He is no just one being amongst others but subsistent Being itself, which we cannot grasp directly.⁸ Therefore, we can only relate to God in a mediated manner, through the world, which points us to its creator (Job 12:7-8; Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:20), and most particularly through the means of grace given us through Christ, as we read in Confessio Augustana. The confession notes that the priestly ministry, centring on “teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments,” was founded so that we might receive the faith which justifies: “For through the Word and the sacraments as through instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear the gospel.”⁹ Through the word and the sacraments, through visible, sensible, things, we are granted salvation and union with the divine. This prioritises the invisible but not by rejecting the visible. Rather, the visible is that through which we reach that which is invisible and eternal. And that is the heart of a Christian Platonism.

1. Besides my thesis, I recommend reading a few books and articles: Crystal Addey, Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); R. M. van den Berg, Proclus’ Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, 2nd ed. with foreword by John Milbank and Aaron Riches (Kettering: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014); Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Peter T. Struck, “Pagan and Christian Theurgies: Iamblichus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Religion and Magic in Late Antiquity” (Ancient World 32:2, 2001), 25-38; Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in Late Antiquity: The Invention of a Ritual Tradition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity, with foreword by John F. Finamore (Kettering: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014); Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonist Tradition: Despoiling the Hellenes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). The book by Charles Stang is an excellent account of Pseudo-Dionysius’s theology, and Neoplatonic philosophy, and it is open access!

2. Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for our Times (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2015). Also see Alexander J. B. Hampton and John Peter Kenney, eds., Christian Platonism: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). If you have access to Cambridge Core, you can find this book there.

3. Tyson, Returning to Reality, 23-40.

4. Iamblichus, De mysteriis, Greek and English, intro. and trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), I, 21 (pp.78-81), cf. I, 1-2; III, 31; VI, 7; IX, 4.

5. Tyson, Returning to Reality, 25.

6. C. S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, reprint ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 230-236.

7. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Kindle ed. (Tingle Books, 2021), 50-52.

8. See Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 43-53.

9. For English, see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds., Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000). For Latin and German, see Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed., Irene Dingel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). I use the English translation of the Latin, if not otherwise noted.