It would be wrong, however, to end on this scholastic point, though the issue of the world’s eternity was actually highly fraught and became the basis of a heated dispute between philosophers and Christians at the very end of Late antiquity. In fact, it looks like the last members of the Platonist school in Alexandria had to compromise with Christian authorities on just these cosmological questions in order to stay in business. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that for philosophers of the imperial period, philosophy was conceived as a sacred rite: learning, teaching, belonging in the transmission of wisdom - all of this is part of a larger conception of philosophic activity, one that has its place, ultimately, in the cosmic scheme.
No doubt the philosopher who best illustrates this merging ofscripture and exegesis is Philo Judaeus, the first century Alexandrian philosopher and statesman who undertook a vast (48 works survive; the majority are in Greek, but a significant group only survives in Armenian) defense of Jewish religion in the form of a sprawling commentary on the Five Books of Moses. Philo belonged to the elite of Alexandrian Jewish society. His brother was one of the wealthiest men in Alexandria; supposedly the grandson of Herod the Great had to borrow money from him. His nephew became the Prefect of Alexandria, and we know that it was the very prominent social status of Philo that allowed him to form part of the embassy to Gaius Caesar in 38, an event we learn about from Philo’s own Embassy to Gaius. Philo wrote this political essay in the aftermath of a pogrom that resulted in the massacre of countless Jews living in Alexandria.
For our purposes, it is important to approach Philo with the realization that he believes that Moses literally composed the entire Pentateuch, the first five books of the Jewish Scripture. According to Philo, Moses, like Philo himself, received a thoroughly ‘‘Greek’’ education in both science and philosophy in Egypt at the court of Pharaoh. This education in the Greek curriculum was possible because it was Pythagoras, who as we saw founded Platonic philosophy, that brought the Hellenic tradition to Egypt during his travels. Thus the two traditions, Jewish and Hellenic, are really branches of the same primordial stream of wisdom.
His On the Creation of the World, actually a commentary on Genesis, follows the Antiochean interpretation of the Timaeus (recall that Antiochus was that notorious synthesizer of Platonic and Stoic tenets whom we first met in the Academica of Cicero), according to which two constituent principles, an active or divine cause, and a passive or material substrate, are completely fused and present in each other throughout the whole of nature (Cic. Ac. 1.24, with Sedley 2002: 48-50). Compare these excerpts from Philo’s On the Creation and Cicero’s summary of Antiochean physics:
When it came to nature... they spoke in such a way as to divide it into two things, so that one was active, the other at this one’s disposal, as it were, and acted upon by it in some way. In the active one they held that there was a power, in the one which was acted upon just a kind of matter. (Ac. 1.24.1-5, tr. Sedley)
But Moses, who had early reached the very summits of philosophy and who had learnt from the Oracles of God the most numerous and important of the principles of nature, was well aware that it is indispensable that in all existing things there must be an active cause, and a passive subject; and that the active cause is the intellect...(Op. 8.1-5, tr. Younge)
Philo takes the Stoic and already odd interpretation of the Timaeus, which posits a pantheist or immanentist account of deity vis-a-vis the world, and inserts it into a Judeo/Middle Platonist retelling of the Creator’s tale. Here the Forms supply a blueprint for the creative aspect of God, our divine architect, who uses the blueprint to provide a model for the temporal world. Now Plato’s Forms have become the thoughts of the divinity; a feature that is absent from Plato’s text. Nevertheless, in Philo’s account the craftsman, or logos, is really just a power of the highest God. For
Philo, God brings the intelligible order, the blueprint, into being on day one of creation. Hence although it is intelligible and in strictly Platonic terms should be an aspect of eternal being, in fact Philo finds that Moses understands that the blueprint, i. e. the Forms, actually occupies a space in genesis, the world of becoming. This example shows us that Philo uses Platonic conceptions in order to penetrate beneath the surface of the Mosaic text and uncover a theological doctrine that suggests that God is at once the creator of the universe but also utterly transcends any created nature. Moreover, God’s activity as Creator is only one aspect of the deity, one of the seven powers, as Philo calls them, that communicate but do not exhaust the divine substance (Runia 2002: 304-6). In turn, Philo’s apophatic and positive theologies that center on his appropriation of the Stoic logos via the transformations of Middle Platonism also form a foundation for his emphasis on the contemplative knowledge of God, which forms the destiny of every human soul.
The example of Philo reminds us that the Platonisms of the imperial era are not just an exegetical metaphysics that attempt to reify the hypotheses of Plato’s Parmenides or to spin theologies out of the Timaeus. There is also a dynamic aspect of the philosophy that can be expressed in terms of what A. C. Lloyd has called the spiritual circuit (Lloyd 1990). Procession, remaining, and reversion are the three moments of this cosmic respiration or universal pulse that constantly sends forth beings from the One into a state of manifestation, and at the very same time, unifies all things back into the One. This manifestation is just the life of the soul, as it undertakes the journey of awakening to its source in the One, and also its cosmic mission of returning the multiplicity back into the source. Porphyry ends the Life of Plotinus with the dying words of the sage: ‘‘Strive to bring the One in yourself back to the One.’’
Iamblichus formally introduced a language to convey some of the aspects of this spiritual life; the name he gave to it was theurgy, which he discussed in his work On the Mysteries of the Egyptians. The book opens with lamblichus adopting the persona of an Egyptian prophet who will attempt to answer Porphyry’s objections concerning the ritual efficacy of certain symbols for the purpose of uniting the individual soul with the gods. Knowledge or intellection does not deliver the soul from the constraints of embodiment. To complete its cosmic task, the soul must win over the whole chain of being that links our ordinary world with the ultimate principles of reality. ‘‘Thinking does not connect theurgists with divine beings, for what would prevent those who philosophize theoretically from having theurgic union with the gods? Rather... it is the power of ineffable symbols comprehended by the gods alone, that establishes theurgical union’’ (Iamb. Myst. 96).
For other philosophers of the imperial era, the most sacred rite was to engage with the text of Plato, since the Plato of this period was no longer just an Athenian philosopher but a vessel of divine knowledge. So, for example, Proclus: ‘‘I beg all the gods and all the goddesses to. . . open up the doors of my soul and allow it to receive the divinely inspired doctrine of Plato’’ (in Prm. 1.617.1). How far we have wandered in this prayer, from the skeptical Academy that burst on the scene in Cicero’s Rome. Here we find the Platonists doing theology and no longer truly philosophy. At the same time, perhaps it is in the words of this Greek philosopher from Lycia, who lived at a time when Rome had at last repudiated its traditional gods, that philosophy in the Roman Empire was able to preserve an element that echoed the Roman Empire’s inclusion of every nation’s gods.
World History
