Of all fetishes which have misled humanity, perhaps none is responsible
for more error than that of originality. As if anything could be new
that was true, or true that was new! The only possible lines along
which novelty or progress can lie are our reports, combinations, and
expressions. Some people think they have done for a poet if they have
shown that he made use of suitable materials in the construction of
his poem! So Shakespeare has been shown to have used whole scenes from
earlier writers. So Virgil, by Macrobius, has been shown to have laid
under contribution every writer then known to be worth ransacking.
Dante has also been shown to have re-edited contemporary apocalypses.
So Homer, even, has been shown to re-tell stories gathered from many
sources. The result is that people generally consider Shakespeare,
Virgil, or Homer great in spite of their borrowings, when, on the
contrary, the statement should be that they were great because of their
rootage in the best of their period. In other words, they are great not
because of their own personality (which in many cases has dropped out
of the ken of history), but because they more faithfully, completely,
and harmoniously represent their periods than other now forgotten
writers. Therein alone lay their cosmic value, and their assurance of
immortality. They are the voices of their ages, and we are interested
in the significance of their age, not in them personally.
It is from this standpoint that we must approach Plato. Of his
personality what details are known are of no soteriologic significance;
and the reason why the world has not been able to get away from him,
and probably never will, is that he sums up prior Greek philosophy in
as coherent a form as is possible without doing too great Procrustean
violence to the elements in question. This means that Plato did not
fuse them all into one absolutely, rigid, coherent, consistent system,
in which case his utility would have been very much curtailed. The very
form of his writings, the dialogue, left each element in the natural
living condition to survive on its merits, not as an authoritative
oracle, or Platonic pronunciamento, or creed.
For details, the reader is referred to Zeller's fuller account of
these pre-Platonic elements.[471] But we may summarize as follows:
the physical elements to which the Hylicists had in turn attributed
finality Plato united into Pythagorean matter, which remained as
an element of Dualism. The world of nature became the becoming of
Heraclitus. Above that he placed the Being of Parmenides, in which the
concepts of Socrates found place as ideas. These he identified with
the numbers and harmonies of Pythagoras, and united them in an Eleatic
unity of many, as an intelligible world, or reason, which he owed to
Anaxagoras. The chief idea, that of the Good, was Megaro-Socratic. His
cosmology was that of Timaeus. His psychology was based on Anaxagoras,
as mind; on Pythagoras, as immortal. His ethics are Socratic, his
politics are Pythagorean. Who therefore would flout Plato, has all
earlier Greek philosophy to combat; and whoever recognizes the
achievements of the Hellenic mind will find something to praise in
Plato. When, therefore, we are studying Platonism, we are only studying
a blending of the rays of Greece, and we are chiefly interested in
Greece as one of the latest, clearest, and most kindred expressions of
human thought.
If however we should seek some one special Platonic element, it
would be that genuineness of reflection, that sincerity of thought,
that makes of his dialogues no cut and dried literary figments, but
soul-tragedies, with living, breathing, interest and emotion. Plato
thus practised his doctrine of the double self,[472] the higher and
the lower selves, of which the higher might be described as "superior
to oneself." In his later period, that of the Laws, he applied this
double psychology to cosmology, thereby producing doubleness in
the world-Soul: besides the good one, appears the evil one, which
introduces even into heaven things that are not good.
It was only a step from this to the logical deduction of Xenocrates
that these things in heaven were "spirits" or "guardians," both good
and evil, assisting in the administration of human affairs.[473] Such
is the result of doubleness introduced into anthropology; introduced
into cosmology, it establishes Pythagorean indefinite duality as the
principle opposing the unity of goodness.
The next step was taken by Plutarch. The evil demons, had, in Stoic
phraseology, been called "physical;" and so, in regard to matter,
they came to stand in the relation of soul to body. Original matter,
therefore, became two-fold; matter itself, and its moving principle,
"the soul of matter." This was identified with the worse World-soul
by a development, or historical event, which was the ordering of the
cosmos, or, creation.
This then was the state of affairs at the advent of Numenius.
Although his chief interest lay in practical comparative religion, he
tried, philosophically, to return to a mythical "original" Platonism
or Pythagoreanism. What Plato did for earlier Greek speculation,
Numenius did for post-Platonic development. He harked back to
the latter Platonic stage, which taught the evil world-Soul. He
included the achievements of Plutarch, the "soul of matter," and the
trine division of a separate principle, such as Providence. To the
achievement of Xenocrates he was drawn by two powerful interests, the
Egyptian, Hermetic, Serapistic, in connection with the evil demons;
and the Pythagorean, in connection with the Indefinite-duality. Thus
Numenius's History of the Platonic Succession is not a delusion;
Numenius really did sum up the positive Platonic progress, not
omitting even Maximus of Tyre's philosophical hierarchic explanation
of the emanative or participative streaming forth of the Divine. But
Numenius was not merely a philosopher: of this gathering of Platonic
achievements he made a religion. In this he was also following the
footsteps of Pythagoras, who limited his doctrines to a group of
students. But Numenius did not merely copy Pythagoras. Numenius
modernized him, connecting up the Platonic doctrinal aggregate with
the mystery-rites current in his own day. Nor did Numenius shirk any
unpleasant responsibilities of a restorer of Platonism: he continued
the traditional Academico-Stoical feud. Strange to say, the last great
Stoic philosopher, Posidonius (A.D. 135-151) hailed from Numenius's
home-town, Apamea, so that this Stoic feud may have been forced on
Numenius from home personalities or conditions. It would seem that in
Numenius and Posidonius we have a re-enactment of the tragedy of Greek
philosophy on a Syrian theatre, where dogmatic Stoicism died, and
Platonism admitted Oriental ideas.
Apamea, however, had not yet ended its role in the development of
thought. Numenius's pupil, Amelius, had gathered, copied, and learned
by heart his master's works. It was in Apamea that he adopted as son
Hostilianius-Hesychius. After a twenty-four years' sojourn in Rome he
returned to Apamea, and was dwelling there still at the time of the
death of Plotinos, with whom he had spent that quarter of a century.
Here then we have a historical basis for a connection between Numenius
and Plotinos, which we have elsewhere endeavored to demonstrate from
inner grounds.
It was however by Amelius that philosophy is drawn into the maelstrom
of the world-city. Plotinos, in his early periods a Numenian
Platonist, will later go over to Stoicism, and conduct a polemic
with the Gnostics, the Alexandrian heirs of Platonic dualism,
under the influence of the Stoic Porphyry. However, Plotinos will
not publicly abandon Platonism; he will fuse the two streams of
thought, and interpret in Stoic terms the fundamentals of Platonism,
producing something which, when translated into Latin, he will leave
as inheritance to all the ages. Not in vain, therefore, did Amelius
transport the torch of philosophy to the Capital.
* * * * *
Let us in a few words dispose of the general outlines of the fate of
the Platonic movement.
Plotinos was no religious leader; he was before everything else a
philosopher, even if he centred his efforts on the practical aspects
of the ecstatic union with God. Indeed, Porphyry relates to us the
incident in which this matter was objectively exemplified. At the
New Moon, Amelius invited him to join in a visit to the mystery
celebrations. Plotinos refused, saying that "they would have to come to
him, not he go over to them." This then is the chief difference between
Numenius and Plotinos, and the result would be a recrudescence of pure
philosophic contentions, as those of Plotinos against the Gnostics.
As to the general significance of Plotinos, we must here resume what we
have elsewhere detailed: that with the change of editors, from Amelius
to Porphyry, Plotinos changed from Numenian or Pythagorean dualism
to Stoic monism, in which the philosophic feud was no longer with the
Stoics, but with the Alexandrian descendants of Numenian dualism, the
Gnostics. Even though Plotinos showed practical religious aspects in
his studying and experiencing the ecstasy, there is no record of any of
his pupils being encouraged to do so, and therefore Plotinos remains
chiefly a philosopher.
The successors of Plotinos could not remain on this purely philosophic
standpoint. Instead of practising the ecstasy, they followed the
Gnostics in theorizing about practical religious reality in their
cosmology and theology, which took on, more or less, the shape of
magic, not inconsiderably aided by Stoic allegoric interpretations of
myths, as in Porphyry's "Cave of the Nymphs."
What Plato did for early Greek philosophy, what Numenius did for
post-Platonic thought, that Proclus Diadochus, the "Successor," did
for Plotinos and his followers. For the first time since Numenius we
find again a comparative method. By this time religion and philosophy
have fused in magic, and so, instead of a comparative religion, we have
a comparative philosophy. Proclus was the first genuine commentator,
quoting authorities on all sides. He was sufficient of a philosopher
to grasp Neoplatonism as a school of thought; and far from paying
any attention to Ammonius, as recent philosophy has done, as source
of Neoplatonism, he traces the movement as far as Plutarch, calling
him the "father of us all," inasmuch as he introduced the conception
of "hypostasis." Evidently, Proclus looked upon this as the centre
of Neoplatonic development, and therefore we shall be justified in a
closer study of this conception; and we may even say that its historic
destiny was a continuation of the main stream of creative Greek
philosophy; or, if you prefer, of Platonism, or Noumenianism, or even
Plotinian thought.
Did Greek philosophy die with Proclus? The political changes of the
time forced alteration of dialect and position; but the accumulations
of mental achievements could not perish. This again we owe to Proclus.
Besides being the first great commentator he precipitated his most
valuable achievements in logical form, in analytic arrangement, in
the form of crystal-clear propositions, theorems, demonstrations, and
corollaries. Such a highly abstract form was inevitable, inasmuch as
Numenius had turned away from Aristotelian observation of nature. Just
like the Hebrew thinkers, who finally became commentators and abstract
theorizers, nothing else was left for a philosophy without connection
with experiment, when whittled down by the keenest intellects of the
times.
This abstract method, still familiarly used by geometry, reappeared
among the School-men, notably in Thomas Aquinas. Later it persisted
with Spinoza and Descartes. However, rising experimentalism has
gradually terminated it, its last form appearing in Kant and Hegel.
Kant's "Ding in sich," reached after abstracting all qualities, is only
a re-statement of Numenius and Plotinos's "subject," or, definition of
matter; and Hegel's dialectic, beginning with Being and Not-being, more
definitely proclaimed by Plotinos, goes as far back as the Eleatics
and Heraclitus, not to mention Plato. However, Kant and Hegel are the
great masters of modern thought; and although at one time the rising
tide of materialism and cruder forms of evolution threatened to obscure
it, Karl Pearson's "Grammar of Science," generous as it is in invective
against Kant and Hegel, in modern terms clinches Berkeley's and Kant's
demonstration of the reality of the super-sensual, thus vindicating
Plotinos, and, before him, Numenius.
It must not be supposed that in thus tracing the springs of our modern
thought we necessarily approve of all the thought of Plotinos, Numenius
or Plato. On the contrary, they were far more likely to have committed
logical errors than we are, because they were hypnotized by the glamor
of the terms they used, which to us are mere laboratory tools. The
best way to prove this will be to appraise at its logical value for us
Plotinos's discussion of Matter, elsewhere studied in its value for us.