When as a philosophy undergraduate, I found myself reading Plato for the first time, I noted a troublesome disconnect between the Plato that I was reading, and possibly fitfully understanding, and the confident nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators that accompanied this reading.
My Plato was the practitioner of therapeutic wisdom who aimed to convert your being through the devices of dialogue, storytelling, and myth-making accompanied by unambiguous references to embodied spiritual practices (gymnastics, corybantic dance, and so forth). The Plato of the commentators was a rational philosopher and a committed 'dualist' separating an 'ideal' realm of the good from the messy binding world of 'matter' from which we were presumed to want to escape in a fleeing ascent.
You could see where this dualist, binary Plato had come from for he (or better still Socrates) often creates separate images of contrasting worlds to elaborate his points but reading on you were meant to realize, I think, how this reconfigured back into a reimagined singular world: the present that we inhabit. The clues were everywhere so, for example, Plato created an image of the world of the forms - the ideal universal instantiations of any particular thing ultimately overseen by the Form of the Good - but as soon as you picture this as 'being elsewhere' in an unchanging eternal realm someplace else than here, Plato (or Socrates) tells you that the ideas are alive, they are fully present, unchanging at one level yet processing. Reality is nothing if not paradoxical to speech. You see the perfect instantiation when you see the world aright, not when you leave it!
This feeling of displacement was rectified when I read a remarkable book on Plato (and the Perennial Philosophy) called The Third City: Philosophy at War with Positivism by the Croatian philosopher, Borna Bebek, a book that qualifies for that curious title of an under-read masterpiece. Finally, someone who got it - and in a way far more sophisticated than I - and crucially who had come to it from the perspective of a seeker who recognized in Socrates a spiritual magician.
I was reminded of all this when reading this week another remarkable book (that you hope does not meet the fate of Bebek's) Gregory Shaw's 'Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichius'.
Here too is a desire to rescue a philosopher from scholarly misreadings as both a 'dualist' seeking to unlock the soul from bondage to matter and yet not really a philosopher because a practitioner of theurgy (and, thus, to the eye of our physicalist dominant narrative a misguided practitioner of superstition). Worse this late Platonist is despoiling the tradition of rational inquiry bequeathed us by Socrates/Plato who, though we disregard many of their conclusions, honor their methods (or, at least, those we can recognize - since no dancing is allowed to modern philosophers).
What follows is an erudite, highly accessible, and engaging account of what Iamblichus was truly interested in and why it matters. To do this, Shaw chooses a comparative method sitting Late neo-Platonism alongside a similar, resonant tradition that of Indian tantra and then contrasting these with their 'competitors': Other Neo-Platonists like Plotinus and Porphyry and emergent Christianity on the one hand and with Vedanta on the other.
The cleavage between the two sets of traditions, put simply, is whether redemption is through the world, a true embodying, or from the world - a flight of the alone to the Alone to quote Plotinus.
In Iamblichus/Tantra, the One, the divine, has deliberately, consciously become the Many, has alienated itself in the particular, so that it might be known, and in conscious acts of weaving be re-realized as One present to and within the Many, and not simply in the human soul but in every particular form of matter - animal, plant, stone - and the very forces of our alienation have the potential to be the energies of delight.
In the neo-Platonism of Plotinus and in Vedanta, matter is either the most remote, disintegrated form of the One or 'Maya' fundamentally illusory - and the purpose of the soul is to realize its fundamental difference from any material entanglement - which is dissolved as illusion.
Ironically, from the perspective of Iamblichus or Tantra, the alternative path is, in fact, seen as the one of 'dualism' - the soul detaches itself from the world, is a counterpoint to the world, the One identified with is not the One that embraces the Many but divorces it!
This set of differences is explored in fascinating and enriching detail in the text - and in many ways both Iamblichus and Tantra emerge as traditions that are fully incarnate, so what of Christianity, Iamblichus' chief rival, and one that would come to be the dominant Western tradition, eliminating its rival by force? Is not Christianity the religion of incarnation par excellence? To which Iamblichus' answer would be an unequivocal no! The fatal mistake of Christianity in his eyes was to imagine that the incarnation was singular - in one particular person - and though that event is meant to restore the possibilities of raising all humans to a new 'deified' status in theosis, the cleavage remains, the divine presence in the world is held by a human, 'rented' out to other humans (on certain conditions) and denied in its fullness to the world as a whole of which we are an interwoven, inseparable part. To Iamblichus, this was simply the definition not of cosmic theurgy or magic but of simple sorcery, a terrible demeaning inflation in the divine's proper ordering!
As well as the scholarly exposition of both Iamblichus' and Tantric thought, there is a recognition, that brings us full circle, of the importance of experience in understanding the spiritually therapeutic nature of both traditions. Both prioritize practice and its resultant experiences, over rational thought which is simply a handmaiden for clarity and discernment. This places us on a collision course with the physicalist presumptions of the academy where such practices would simply be imagined as delusory (or in less polite terms mad) but this Shaw argues intelligently simply stands in the way of us understanding what either Iamblichus or Tantric practitioner is about; and, tempts us into simply either ignoring or sympathetically misinterpreting them.
So we are back to Plato - who was his better interpreter - Plotinus or Iamblichus? Probably better both than their twentieth-century peers but for me, it would be Iamblichus because he sees better Plato in the round, is less inclined to elide those things that so often disappear in later readings, and miss the fundamentally transformative invitation of the dialogues to a spiritual life that embraces the whole of the created order, right now.
On a final note, this book is a model of scholarship for its ability to illuminate complex patterns of thinking and practice that both advance the debate and yet remain fully accessible to an 'amateur' reader like me (whose acquaintance with Late Neo-Platonism (excepting Plotinus) and Tantra was nodding at best!
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