European culture and the Christian religion from which it is inseparable are constituted in, and founded upon, a double inheritance: the Law of the Old Covenant and the wisdom of Greek thought. In modernity this double inheritance has tended to be tidily parsed, as if the former concerned the substance of cultic practice and salvation, concrete and “material,” while the latter concerned the pure disembodied act of reason and of philosophical wisdom. And so the Hebrew basis of Christian culture and religion is thought of as meaty and incarnational, while the Hellenistic contribution is colored by a superficial (and false) sense that Hellenism, and especially Platonic thought, rests on an unequivocal body-soul, matter-spirit dualism.
This division is highly distortive. The sapiential literature of the Hebrew Bible itself proves that no such tidy division exists, since herein the Scriptures themselves already bears traces of the Hellenistic culture and thought that would later permeate Christianity.
And if on the one hand we are seeing that Christianity inherited a certain “Hellenism” already within its Scriptures, on the other hand we are discovering more and more that, inasmuch as the philosophy of the Greeks was itself fully “religious”—concerned above all not with “philosophizing” in a modern sense, but rather with the culti-vation of spiritual practices that would realize the communion of the soul with the gods through concrete practices—the liturgical practice of Christianity, too, inherits significantly from the cultic practices of Greek philosophy. In this regard the recovery of the thought and influence of the Syrian Neoplatonist Iamblichus (c.245–c.325) may prove, in time, to stand at the very heart of a new self-understanding of Western culture and religion—one less domi-v
nated by the old mischaracterization and now freshly aware of the integrity of the double inheritance; and in particular how Christian liturgy, the sacramental practice of the Church and the metaphysics of the Incarnation owe a perhaps significant debt to the pagan Platonic tradition. The seminal work of Gregory Shaw stands at the crossroads of this new realization.
is a profound introduction and account of Iamblichian theurgy, “a ‘work of the gods’ capable of transforming man to a divine status” (5). Theurgy, as Shaw shows us, originated with the second-century Platonists, who used the term to explain the divinizing power of the rites of the Chaldean Oracles, some of which were thought to have been transmitted by the soul of Plato himself. In the performance of these rites, Iamblichus understood the goal of philosophy to be accomplished, namely, union with the divine. And thus, as Shaw outlines, Iamblichus sets out the definitive Platonic apology and rationale for theurgy, which after him became integral to the Neoplatonic tradition from the pagan Proclus to the Christian Denys the pseudo-Areopagite. These theurgic rites, as far as we can tell, approximate something of the “sacramental,” in that “matter” ( hyle) is used within a cultic rite to effect divine union. As Iamblichus puts it in De Mysteriis, in a passage outlined by Shaw,
Since it was necessary that earthly things not be deprived of participation in the divine, the earth received a certain divine portion capable of receiving the Gods. The theurgic art, therefore, recognizing this principle in general, and having discovered the proper receptacles, in particular, as being appropriate to each one of the Gods, often brings together stones, herbs, animals, aromatics, and other sacred, perfect, and deiform objects of a similar kind. Then, from all these it produces a perfect and pure receptacle. ( DM 233, 7–16)
Through the exercise of the rite, hyle—the technical term for “matter” coined by Aristotle—is made a receptacle of divine energy.
What may perhaps startle the modern reader is the fact that all of this was proposed and executed by Iamblichus as a retrieval of the cosmic vision of Plato’s Timaeus, which Iamblichus understood as vi
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threatened by the dualistic and quasi-gnostic impulses of Plotinian Neoplatonism.
With acumen and mystical love of his theme, Shaw expounds the contours of the theurgic vision and how, through cultic rites, Iamblichian Neoplatonism realized that “the highest good was not realized by escaping from materiality but by embracing matter and multiplicity in a demiurgic way” (26). In this way, he illustrates how Iamblichus realized an integral relation between rituals of cultic worship and the intellectual discipline of philosophical paideia.
Key in this regard is the function of Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, which here works a process of the soul’s reawakening though contact with the sensible world, coupled with a ritualistic extension of the cosmology of the Timaeus. All of this, outlined in detail by Shaw, decisively shatters the old modern idea of “Platonic philosophy” as disembodied and merely mental, a contemplating soul essentially divestible from religious, spiritual, and cultic practices.
For Iamblichus, as Shaw masterfully shows, philosophy finds its apex not in a disembodied “reason” but in a cultic participation in the divine works, known as theurgy. Indeed for Iamblichus, the power of theurgic rites, and not the philosophical theory, became the key to realize a philosophical vocation of union with the divine.
In this regard, Iamblichus’s non-dualistic sense of the interrelation of the material and the divine, along with his emphasis of rite and
“liturgy,” found a remarkable common cause with orthodox Christianity (as opposed to its Manichean and Gnostic variants).
As Shaw shows, for Iamblichus—in contradistinction to the dualistic and gnostic deprecation of matter which marred so much non-Christian thought of the era—incarnate being is precisely the vehicle of salvation through theurgy, rooted in a very careful and precise understanding of embodiment as depicted in the *Timaeus * of Plato, where the individual soul is called to imitate the activity of the Demiurge. This imitation lies at the heart of the rites of theurgy.
All of this is based on Iamblichus’s modification of Plotinus, for whom the individual soul is not fully descended and so in no need of divinizing ascent to the realm of the gods. For Iamblichus, on the contrary, the soul is fully descended, fully incarnate, and so has no unmediated access to the divine. There is no escape from media-vii
tion, from the “sacramental,” and from images; indeed it is only via these material facts that the soul receives (as by a quasi-“Grace”) the theurgy of the gods, the divine action that transforms the soul into godlikeness. All of this is remarkably akin to the sacramental and liturgical practice of Christianity, which finally understands the ascent of the human soul to God, not so much as a mere ascent of the soul, but rather as a paradoxical ascent of the soul rooted in the Incarnate descent of God from heaven relived and participated in Christian liturgy, which insofar as it is a “work-of-the-people” is finally and most truly a grace imbued by the power and action of the Holy Spirit.
The cultic presupposition of Iamblichian Neoplatonism is based on a radical and tensively paradoxical doctrine of participation. The doctrine was received by his chief intellectual heir, Proclus (412–485) who, in the form of the Liber de Causis, exercised an unparalleled influence on the metaphysical vision of the mediaeval schoolmen, and crucially on Thomas Aquinas. But undoubtedly the strongest current of Iamblichian Neoplatonism entered already through the mysterious sixth-century Syrian-Christian author of the Corpus Dionysiacum, who in order to express the Christian view of the cosmos—the ratio of the monastic life and the emoting of the Christian liturgy—drew profoundly on Proclus. All three presume and expound Platonic methexis as a radical “sharing out” of the divine life in which, paradoxically, divine simplicity and divine self-parti-tion converge and invert, entailing a mysterious and ontological kenosis at the heart of being. Finally this paradox can only be understood through the logic of gift: that being is perfected in giving, such that to give oneself away is to receive oneself most perfectly.
This suggests that there is an aspect of inversion and of super-transcendence in excess of every discrete hierarchy of being. And this forms, as it were, the basis of the logic of the theurgic re-conception of the One and, in a different way, in the Christian recapitulation of God realized in Incarnation and in the proclamation of the Crucified Lord. In the case of Iamblichus and Proclus it is clear that when they speak of the absolute One as “imparticipable,” this means that the One cannot be parceled out—not only on account of its inaccessibility but also on account of its unequalizably intimate viii
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relation to everything that proceeds from it.1 The point is that the
“participated” for these thinkers refers to elements within a hierarchy that have something that is already always specific to share, and that they can only impart in diminishing degrees. But at the very summit of the hierarchy stands something that does so by virtue of the fact that it *exceeds * all hierarchy. What is absolute and first is really only so in terms of “aristocratic height” because it is greatest in terms of “democratic scope,” as the very first proposition of Proclus’s *Elements of Theology * makes clear.2 The One is supremely intimate with everything because nothing exists except by virtue of some sort of unity. Indeed, after the energy of emanation has run out, at the bottom of the material scale the power of unity still remains, which is why for Proclus matter retains in the very pit of being a certain simplicity characteristic of its trans-existential summit.3 All of this is brought into clearest relief in terms of intellect.
For from a strictly hierarchical point of view, intellect is more than life, which is in turn more than being—but the greater reach of being and then life in terms of scope is taken by Proclus to reverse the normal hierarchical succession. In this way the “non-participability” of the One is in fact something like a hyberbolic degree of self-sharing, such that unity gives everything into being, yet without dividing itself. Somehow it gives itself absolutely and without stint, yet because it really does give, it is not identical with its diversity of gifts, which can only be gifts because they remain other than the giver. Hence each reality is only real because it has fully received unity, yet its unity is after all but particular and incomplete: as a particular limited mode of coherence it only “shares” in the One. It must be for this reason that Proclus with seeming inconsistency does after all speak of “participation in the One,” even though he often deems the One to be imparticipable.4
The same paradox is revealed in both Iamblichus and Proclus at every level of the scale of being before that of matter—unity, intel-1. Proclus, Elements of Theology, 53, 57.
-
Ibid., 1, and cf. 21.
-
Ibid., 59.
-
Ibid., 3, 5, 21.
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lectuality, psychic existence—which always consists within itself in a triad of remaining, outgoing, and reversion. This triad can also be constituted as imparticipable, participated, and participating. However, it is clear that the “imparticipable” element at the top of the triad itself shares in the next level above it and transmits this upper level economically within its own level via the outgoing to the lower elements within its own triadic series, which “rebound” upwards.
More evidently than Plotinus, the theurgic Neoplatonists assume that such procession involves also participation, and therefore one must conclude that by “imparticipable” they mean that which cannot be communicated within the very act of communication as the very condition for the possibility of communication.5 Moreover, the fact that “imparticipability” recurs at every lower level of the ontological series (or hierarchy) shows that this paradox can be inverted: what is communicated down the series is supremely that which cannot be communicated, since the “imparticipable” element always takes the lead at each stage. It is perhaps for this reason that Proclus says that the descending scale of internally triadic levels can also be considered (beginning at any point upon this scale) as two different series of “complete” imparticipables and “dependent” participations.6 In strict parallel, what descends is the complete and so indeclinable, as it were, *alongside * the declinable.
This paradoxical model of methexis, characteristic of theurgic Neoplatonism, can be described as “participation all the way up”—
or “radical participation,” since it does not allow that there is any literal “reserve” in excess of communication, precisely because it is this very reserve that is “impossibly” communicated. This model of participation, of metaphysical vision, was adopted and Christianized because, finally, it expressed metaphysically the most basic truth of Christianity: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses 5. On the divergent inheritances of Proclus and Plotinus in Christian theology, cf. John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 208–11. A double genealogy is here intimate: first lineage deriving from Plotinus through Avicenna, then to Scotus, Descartes and finally Kant; while another derives from Proclus to Thomas Aquinas, a minority theurgic tradition, which is taken up by Nicholas Cusa and later Vico.
- Proclus, Elements of Theology, 64.
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his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:38); “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24); “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19). The law of existence, from a Christian point of view, is based in the dynamic of radical love, of gift of being that is the only perfection of being. Or as the Second Vatican Council put it, “man . . . cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”7
The basic convertibility of Christianity and the Iamblichian paradox of participation is twofold. First, Christianity as a monotheism insisted on the absolute simplicity of God: a simplicity incompatible with different “aspects” or “ontological regions” within the Godhead. Secondly, in terms of the doctrine that “God is Love,”
especially as spelled out in Trinitarian terms, Christianity saw
“sharing” not only as an attribute of God’s very essence (even if it also held for monotheistic reasons that this essence is radically incommunicable) but that this is the condition of the possibility of both creatio ex nihilo and of Incarnation. Such an affirmation was a crucial aspect of the Christian view that God was eminently “personal” in nature. Christianity was therefore committed to both gift and paradox as fundamental dimensions of its theology. To para-doxa—an incomprehensibly original excess of glory, which is to say also, an incomprehensibly original excess of gift.8
If the current of Iamblichian participation flows into Christianity through the Liber de Causis and the Corpus Dionysiacum, the extremity of paradox the Iamblichian doctrine represents finds already equivalences prior to composition of the *Corpus * and thus long before the mediaeval reception of the Liber. In Augustine already, in whom we find a firm opposition to what he saw as the magical, demon-invoking character of pagan theurgics, there is nevertheless a certain equivalent of the theurgic moment in the 7. Gaudium et spes, 24.
- This is true conceptually and probably also etymologically. Whatever may be claimed by some, nothing really forbids us from supposing that all Indo-European
“do” and “da” roots are originally concerned at once with gift and outgoing manifestation or intentional action—as in “I do.”
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*Confessiones. * 9 * * It is the singing of a psalm that “shows” (in a Witt-gensteinian sense) the answer to the conundrum of time. For Augustine quite clearly, the liturgical action is only possible because God himself has descended into time at the Incarnation in order to counteract its fallen tendency to “dispersal”; and this stipulation later becomes the key difference between the Iamblichian and Dionysian “theurgies.”10 Nevertheless the resonance here is remarkable. Finally, the entire book concludes with a joining of the self with the cosmos to sing a cosmic hymn of praise.
It has often been argued that Augustine’s later critique of both empire and pagan magic in the City of God implies a complete rejection of this earlier Pythagorean approach to the political,11 and moreover that this underpins a tout court rejection of every quasi
“theurgic” integration of *theoria * and politics that would regard political life on earth as training for the divine life, or any earthly city as a reflection of an archetypal heavenly one. The truth is more complex. And it is a fact, moreover, that Augustine, drawing out Biblical themes, makes participation in “Jerusalem, our mother who is above” an important theme of his oeuvre up until the end.
The “City of God,” for Augustine, is an eternal and eschatological as well as temporary reality. In the latter respect it is *not * the mere aggregate of the truly saved, but a literal earthly polity that combines elevated theory and popular practice as crucially conjoined elements for the way of ascent.12
Most importantly of all, one can construe Augustine’s reworked account of deification in terms of a greater stress upon free divine 9. It is not impossible that Augustine knew something of Iamblichus’s works: see Dominic J. O’Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: OUP, 2003) *, * 151. And see also Jason Parnell’s important The Theurgic Turn *in Christian Thought: Iamblichus, Origen, Augustine and the Eucharist *(Ann Arbor MI: ProQuest, 2010), which shows that besides Augustine, Origen too evidences equivalents to theurgy.
-
Cf. Andrew Louth, “Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986), 432–38.
-
Augustine, *De Ordine * II, xiv.39-xvi.44; noted by O’Meara in Platonopolis, 152–53.
-
See John Milbank, *Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason *(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 382–442.
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descending grace as parallel to the greater emphasis upon divine descent within later Neoplatonism. This parallel seems counter-intuitive only in the light of a narrow understanding of divine pre-destination in Augustine’s final anti-Pelagian writings—an excess that the Western Church mostly retreated from. But so long as divine grace remains linked to synergy of divine and human will and to sacramental mediation (as it is in the bulk of Augustine’s writings), one can see how the critique of “Pelagian ascent” in the case of inner-Christian debates is truly comparable to the critique of “Plotinian ascent” in the case of Neoplatonic discussions. This is perhaps most clearly stated by Augustine in the Psalmos vox totius Christi theme; here Christ with us, as the incarnate body of God, alone performs the true and atoning liturgy in such a way that this action is wholly complete in him alone and yet even so completed by us.13
The basic metaphysical convertibility between Christianity and theurgic Neoplatonism lies in the way the paradox of participation entails for both a non-contrastive and non-dualist construal of the relation of divinity and even hyle, the lowest form of creation: matter and images can therefore truly communicate the transcendent, the world is therefore truly “sacramental.” For Christianity, of course, the basis of this is the Incarnation through which “matter
. . . becomes by its participation in Christ’s mystery the medium through which salvation is accomplished.”14
In the eighth century, facing contrastive and dualist iconoclasm of both the growing fact of Islam and iconoclast Christians within the Church, John of Damascus was moved to defend the Christian veneration of the “icon” (which included cloth, metal, ivory, wood, manuscript illustrations, frescoes, mosaics and statues) in terms highly reminiscent of Iamblichus:
I do not venerate matter ( hyle), I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease 13. See Augustine, Enarr in Psalmos, 60: 1–3, 61:4, 85: 4–5.
- Christoph Schönborn OP, God’s Human Face: The Christ-Icon, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 196.
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from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked. . . . [For] if the body of God has become God unchangeably through the hypostatic union, what gives anointing remains, and what was by nature flesh animated with a rational and intellectual soul is formed, it is not uncreated. Therefore I reverence the rest of matter and hold in respect that through which my salvation came, because it is filled with divine energy and grace.15
For John matter has been transformed by the Incarnation, the descent of the divine into the lowest order of creation, in order to draw the soul of the lost human being back to God. A concrete trace of Iamblichus in Christian theology lies, perhaps, most strongly here, in this realization of John: matter is pregnant with power to communicate what is most radically beyond matter.
In this defense of the icon it is possible that John relied directly on Iamblichus, who had also defended the intrinsic worthiness of matter ( hyle), which for him even in its cosmological “lowliness” is nevertheless a work and expression of the paternal source.16 And this means that matter is capable, through images and image-making, of becoming a true icon of the divine.17 In John as in Iamblichus, the conviction of matter’s worthiness to image the divine origin means that matter itself is receptive of the divine,18 and can therefore be a vehicle of communication of divine energy.19 Through rites and prayers, the divine power of matter to be receptive to the divine 15. John of Damascus, *De imaginibus, Oratio * I.16 (PG 94.1245 A–B).
- Cf. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, VIII.3. That the Damascene read Iamblichus seems likely. He was brought up outside the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire in Damascus, where his father held the high hereditary public office of chief financial officer for the caliph of Syria. The civil status of John’s family and the command of Greek verse and prose he evidences in his own oeuvre leads Andrew Louth to conclude that John clearly “benefited from a classical education (the enkyklios paideia)”
(Louth, St. John of Damascene, 6, cf. 19). The Enkyklios Paideia of the Middle Eastern seventh century context was one in which Hellenistic learning flourished. John is indeed well versed in Plato and Aristotle, and his writing evidences familiarity with Neoplatonic themes. All this seems to support the suggestion that he knew Iamblichus; that he deliberately and echoed Iamblichus would, however, require more scholarly substantiation than we are providing.
-
Cf. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, III.28.
-
Ibid., V.23.
-
Ibid., V.12.
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Neoplatonic Theurgy and Christian Incarnation energy is unlocked, making it thereby a vehicle of the soul’s receptivity to the divine energy.20 In this way the logic of Neoplatonic theurgy involves a kenosis of mind, a recollection that plunges downwards into matter, into the simplicity and non-reflexivity of material being. In a sense, then, better than abstract thought, material images reflect the divine simplicity and non-reflexivity of the original One at a highest pitch. In any event, for John the most profound theurgical anamnesis involves recapturing what Iamblichus calls the “pure and divine form of matter,”21 what Denys calls,
“Using matter, one may be lifted up to the immaterial archetypes.”22
But whereas for Iamblichus the pure divine form is beyond form and matter, for the Damascene and the Areopagite the pure divine form is Jesus Christ.23
If the structural parallels between Christianity and theurgic Neoplatonism extended beyond the bounds of the direct influence of the latter upon the former, this is because, at their heart, they discern the common paradox that is the heart of being, whom Christians profess in Jesus Christ, the Paradox Incarnate. All the specific impulses within Christianity supporting the double and co-belong-ing ideas of “descent all the way down” and “participation all the way up” are clearly Biblical, yet one should not atavistically seek to deny the extent to which pagan attention to its own oracles could lead it to go in a convergent direction. In the case of Iamblichus one sees above all the idea (highly consonant with Christianity) that 20. See Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, III.30 and V.15. And see John of Damascus, De *imaginibus, Oratio * I.36 (PG 94.1264A–D). Cf. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, 57.
-
Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, V.23.
-
Denys the Areopagite, Coelesti hierarchia, 2 (PG 3.144C). Cf. Andrew Louth,
“St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy” in Ysabel de Andia (ed.), Denys l’aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en occident: Actes de colloque international, Paris, 21–24 septembre 1994 (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 329–40.
- Andrew Louth has shown that Denys’s notion of theurgy is essentially a Christocentric theology of Incarnation, see Louth, “Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism in Denys the Areopagite,” The Journal of Theological Studies 37
(1986), 432–38. Further, on the importance of the Dionysian absorption of Neoplatonic theurgy, see Ysabel de Andia, Henosis L’Union à Dieu chez Denys l’Aréopagite (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
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while prayer is not about changing the minds of the gods, neither is it mere self-therapy. Instead it is the theoretical and practical endeavor to arrive at a kind of “attunement” with the divine that will truly allow the divine influence to flow into reality. No doubt our “attuning” is also ultimately the work of the gods, but that issue of causality lies at another ontological level. On the finite level there is a genuine synergy. When it comes to the issue of how far the divine side of causal influence belongs to the divine essence itself, it is clear that increasingly Iamblichus ascribes to the notion of a single “divine world” comprised of the One, the Good, gods, daemons and heroes, over against the non-divine world.24
The drive towards “monotheism” in Iamblichus’s writings lies here and *not * in a tendency to posit a “one beyond the one” as a counter-movement to the general efflorescence of divine beings that was part of his deliberate defense of pagan polytheism. Indeed, as with Iamblichus’s later successor Damascius of Athens, the positing of ever-yet greater absolutes was not an attempt to define an area absolutely reserved from all communication, but rather an attempt to indicate an “Ineffable” that could comprise both the one and the many, both absolute reserve and generous outflowing.25 Certainly in one respect this all-encompassing “One” is thereby all the more replete and withheld, yet only to the degree that no act of self-dona-tion lies outside its sway. No doubt the arising *aporiae * here (how to avoid both pantheism and acosmism) anticipates, on one level, the Trinitarian elaboration of classical Christian orthodoxy, which is a resolution through a heightened intensity of paradox, fully articulating the idea that God is in himself an ecstasy beyond himself, which includes an ecstatic reach towards the “external” beyond of Creation. All the same, pagan theurgic philosophy increasingly approached the question of participation in terms of paradox and mediation, which accomplished a remarkable synthesis of common religious piety open to all, and not merely the philosophically ini-24. See Iamblichus, *On the Mysteries, * I. 9–15.
- See Damascius, *De Principiis, * R. 76–77, 83; John Milbank, “The Mystery of Reason,” 68–117, esp. for Damascius see 85–91. It is relevant to the argument of this essay that Damascius sees “participation” as more ineffable than “procession.”
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Neoplatonic Theurgy and Christian Incarnation tiate. Achieving this synthesis, as Shaw shows to brilliant effect in Theurgy and the Soul, was the prestige of Iamblichus. That theurgic Neoplatonism aimed to do nothing other than return to the non-dualist essence of authentic Platonism through cultic ritual suggests that one current of Platonic thought was always running rather near to the ritual anamnesis at the heart the Christian Mass. And herein may lie the most lasting contribution of the Iamblichian theurgical vision: “the Church, with its ecclesiastical embodiment of the divine hierarchy, its initiations, and its belief in salvation through sacramental acts, may have fulfilled the theurgical program of Iamblichus in a manner that was never concretely realized by Platonists” (271).
John Milbank and Aaron Riches
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