Abolitionists adopted higher law to oppose the settled law which explicitly recognized chattel slavery in America. Emerson sometimes spoke on higher law but it was not his most comfortable position. Emerson was a Neoplatonist, and it is the gradualism of Neoplatonism that he embraced against the immediatism implied in higher law. But even before Emerson’s 1856 conversion to abolition, starting in 1854 Emerson began moving his self-reliance into Northern-reliance. He was working his way philosophically toward a political activism that he would, finally, enthusiastically embrace. Emerson borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus the word and idea of living “amphibiously,” and that is what he learned to do.

The Cambridge Platonists’ anti-Calvinism was undergirded by a Platonic epistemology of participation – an epistemology on which the faculty of reason allowed the soul to participate in, and thereby come to know, the nature of God. This epistemology, drawn largely from Plotinus, enabled them to defend and articulate their reasons for rejecting the arbitrary, voluntarist picture of God propagated by their Calvinist contemporaries, and defend their own, rival conception of God as unswervingly committed to communicating his overflowing goodness to all his creatures. The central component of this Platonic epistemology is a high view of human reason as a direct participation in the divine nature, where beauty, goodness and truth are inseparably united. This chapter introduces the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by highlighting the ways in which they make conformity to God, both through purity of mind and virtuous action, a precondition for knowledge of God, resulting in a distinctive combination of Plotinian epistemology and Puritan spirituality.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

This chapter focuses on Neoplatonist engagements with the issue of life worth living as represented in the philosophy of Plotinus. The Platonic metaphysics and ethics regards the highest form of life as the life of pure intellection, and the materiality of the body in strongly negative terms as the limiting and potentially corrupting influence on the soul. Therefore, the question about the conditions of a life worth living emerges specifically as a question about the worth of embodied life. Is it worthwhile for the immortal soul to descend into bodies, and to remain there until the bond between body and soul dissolves naturally? Plotinus’s attempts to answer this questions are best viewed in terms of a negotiation between the anti-corporealist stance, according to which disembodied existence is always better for the soul, and an acknowledgment that the embodied condition is good for the soul, insofar as it enables the realisation of some of its capacities.

The Romans adaptation of Greek philosophy was illustrated by the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics held that humanity is determined by the fates of nature, while the Epicureans believed that happiness came from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Plato was revived by Plotinus and dominated Roman philosophy during the early years of Christianity. Both the missionary zeal of early Christians and the tranquility of Roman administration rapidly spread Christianity. The teachings of Jesus were bolstered by defenders, who gave Christianity form and content. St. Augustine successfully reinterpreted Platonic thought within Christian theology, and the consequent influence on psychology continued well beyond. With the fall of the Western empire, intellectual life came to a virtual halt, and only the monastic movement preserved remnants of Greek and Roman civilization. The papacy assumed a leading role in spiritual direction and civil administration. The power shift to the East saw the Byzantine Empire assume a distinctive Greek character. The rise of Islam threatened the survival of Christianity in the Middle East and in North Africa. But, at the same time, much of the Greek heritage of scholarship was preserved and extended in the great academic centers of medieval Islam.

This chapter surveys different aspects of the theme of love (erōs) in Plotinus’ philosophy. Starting with what Plotinus finds significant in the human experience of love, we consider Plotinus’ nuanced evaluation of various types of earthly love (including sexuality), moving then to love as a desire of the beautiful expressing the very nature of soul in its relation to its origin in a divine transcendent Intellect, itself constituted in a relation of love to the ultimate first principle, the One/Good. Plotinus’ claim that the One is love/self-love is examined and two aspects of love, as expressing deficiency and as a generosity manifesting fulfilment, are discussed in relation to the One and as found in Intellect and in soul.

Platonic and Plotinian conceptions of beauty played a role in Ficino’s understanding of beauty in De amore and subsequently in Leone Ebreo’s (Judah Abravanel’s) understanding of beauty in Dialoghi d’amore. Plato’s Symposium is an inspiration to both but does not determine the structure of either author. This essay contrasts Ficino’s presentation of seven friends’ viewpoints on love and Leone’s dialogue between Philo and Sophia, who together create PhiloSophy. While Ficino’s letters to Cavalcanti, to whom he dedicates the work, provide further documentation of Ficino’s intent to experience a higher form of love, Leone’s view of Aristophanes’ androgyne as based on a pre-Talmudic Hebraic concept of Adam as a hermaphrodite indicates his subordination of the Symposium to the Hebraic tradition.

The essay shows the influence of Plotinus’ idea of love of intellect alone for the heavenly Venus and the influence of the Middle Stoics and Middle Academics on Ficino’s belief that there are generative seeds of virtue and knowledge in the human soul. Alberti’s concept of concinnitas and measure are at the root of Ficino’s notions of harmony of sounds and harmony of sights. Leone, like Ficino, values the senses of hearing and sight and disparages the senses of taste, smell and touch.

Both authors correlate beauty and virtue. Ficino is a major source for the Renaissance tendency to view the picture of a beautiful woman as a picture of a virtuous woman. Sophia and Philo both grasp the relationship between beauty and virtue and that the highest goal is a love relationship with the Divine Creator; nevertheless, Philo resorts to lecherous longing for Sophia despite recognizing that coppulazione is the moment of a human’s intellectual vision of God.

This essay offers an account of Thomas Aquinas’s very complex understanding of love (amor) and related concepts, such as delight (delectatio) and divinely infused charity. It acknowledges the many Platonic influences on Aquinas’s thought in these regards, influences that come to him especially through Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius – both of whom he occasionally criticizes, however, for adhering too closely to Platonic doctrines. Aquinas is intent upon tying all human love in some sense to nature, acknowledging that this entails that in many regards human love is necessitated. To the extent, however, that the rational appetite (the will) is involved, love is not necessitated. The divinely infused virtue of charity brings in further complications, for it is a love that is not natural but comes to a person from above: it is supernatural. And yet it too, according to Aquinas, is not wholly necessitating but affects man in a way that leaves his will free.

Ancient Greek philosophy has often been dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary environmental thought or part of the problem in environmental terms because of its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism; Plato is often seen as emblematic of this philosophical stance. Following the research of Timothy Mahoney, this chapter calls into question this characterisation of Plato’s philosophy. Additionally, it examines the environmental perspectives of several philosophers within the later Platonic tradition, whose philosophy was closely connected with ancient Mediterranean religions and has been largely marginalised and excluded from the canon of western philosophy. This chapter argues that there is an important strand in ancient philosophy which is participatory, relational and ecocentric, depicting the philosopher as rooted in place and landscape, and necessitating the philosopher’s recognition of the interconnectedness and sacredness of the natural world and the kinship and ensouled nature of all beings and natural entities. As such, this chapter suggests that ecocentric environmental perspectives can be discerned within Platonism (especially within late antique theurgy) and that, consequently, this strand of ancient philosophy has a great deal to offer to environmental ethics and contemporary environmental thinking on nature and the natural world.

Chapter 4 treats Augustine’s dialogue with the Platonists in books VIII–X of The City of God on philosophic or natural theology. Augustine emphasizes the excessive, false humility he considers Apuleius to have promoted, and the philosophic pride that may have prompted Porphyry’s harsh critique of Christianity, even as he lauds their achievements together with those of Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus.

Plato’s philosophical writings have over the centuries evoked widely differing styles of response. Platonist metaphysical systems have been created, as by his first successors in the Academy, down to Plotinus and later Neoplatonists and beyond; while the questioning spirit they evince was what fuelled the scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades in the Hellenistic period, and what most impressed James Mill and George Grote, the nineteenth-century British ‘Philosophical Radicals’. Both types of response agreed, however, in rejecting what the dialogues call ‘opinion’, the metaphysicians because it lacks the security and clarity of true knowledge, the sceptics and radicals because it leaves prevailing norms unquestioned. They all took from Plato the precept: Think for yourself, whatever opinion or the prevailing norms may be. And from the beginning they disagreed among themselves too, with Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and his successor as head of the Academy, already rejecting the dialogues’ theory of transcendent Forms. Where the theory was embraced, it was developed further than its originator ever did himself or perhaps could have done. Plato wrote for eternity, to open minds and encourage independent thought in any reader, whatever their historical circumstances.

This chapter investigates the apparent conflict in Plato presenting two apparently rather different things – fulfilling human nature and godlikeness – as the human telos. Fan argues that these two accounts are in fact compatible, if we understand the fulfilment of human nature as making the divine part in us flourish. If virtue is understood as a disposition to cope with evils that exist in the human condition but not in the divine life, it is hard to see how becoming virtuous fits with becoming godlike. In the Theaetetus, however, Plato understands becoming virtuous as a flight from the world. This has traditionally been understood as engaging in theory as opposed to praxis. However, such an understanding raises the problem that in the Theaetetus and in the Republic, justice, and thus being concerned with treating other people appropriately, is presented as a central virtue which speaks against understanding the flight idea merely in theoretical terms. Fan argues that instead of identifying the idea of fleeing from the world with withdrawing from practical affairs, we should understand it as a kind of self-transformation, in such a way that we are no longer rooted in the natural world, but in divine, transcendent reality.

The present chapter aims to show the connection between the ethical views of early Neoplatonist philosophers (Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus) and their metaphysical doctrines concerning the hierarchy of being. In the first section, it is argued that Plotinus focuses on virtues within the framework of a discussion about how the embodied soul can revert to the intelligible god (Enn. 1.2(19)). According to Plotinus the intelligible god has no virtues: there are paradigms of virtues in the Intellect, but these are not the virtues themselves. This is consistent with Plotinus’ view that different levels in the hierarchy of being are heterogeneous and do not share the same properties. Plotinus’ approach makes the status of political virtues problematic. Sections two and three focus on Porphyry and Iamblichus respectively. Their arrangements of the levels of virtues are connected to their accounts of the hierarchy of being, which are different both from that of Plotinus and from each other. Porphyry’s account in Sent. 32 is based on the idea that the cause pre-contains what depends on it (hence Porphyry’s emphasis on paradigmatic virtues). Iamblichus’ account seems to rely on his view that different levels in the hierarchy are connected via analogy.

In this chapter, I show how the contemplative ethics of Neoplatonism repurposes classical and Hellenistic ethics, advancing a new distinction between practical and theoretical wisdom. The classical and Hellenistic contrast between the bios praktikos and its attendant virtue phronesis, and the bios theoretikos together with its attendant virtue sophia, informs a half millennium or more of ethical thinking. In the discourse surrounding the competing value of these ethical registers, the practical life and the contemplative life, both ancient philosophers and their modern exegetes approach the theoretical life with trepidation, as if a certain amount of apology is owed for the practical limits of contemplative ethics. But such anxiety as to how the life of theoria can be valorised from the point of view of ordinary virtue is out of place when it comes to understanding the ethics of Plotinus and of Porphyry, at least in the Enneads and in the Sententiae. There is an important place for the practical life, if by practical we understand the development of the capacity for contemplation. As such, the practical side of this ethics is a form of mind training ,or even an ethics of concentration. Its complement, wisdom, theoretical virtue, or sophia, consists in insight, or knowledge of the nature of the real, together with realisation of the true self of the practitioner.

In the early treatise Ennead V.9, Plotinus discusses whether the arts are there in the intelligible realm, and concludes that they are at least partly. The chapter’s first part discusses a number of questions that arise. What is exactly the principle of division for which arts or which parts of an art are in the intelligible realm? What is the status of the arts in the intelligible world? Are there Platonic Forms of the arts? In a later treatise, V.8., Plotinus argues that rather than imitating sensible objects, some artists concerned with producing beautiful sensible objects imitate the intelligible paradigm of beauty. Emilsson discusses this claim, which seems a clear deviation from the account of mimetic art in Plato’s Republic. In the latter half of the chapter, Emilsson addresses Plotinus’ demythologisation of Plato’s Timaeus. Plotinus replaces the Demiurge of the Timaeus with the universal intellect and the World-Soul, which do not deliberate. However, Plotinus does not reject entirely any craftsman model, for he appeals to performance arts, which do not involve deliberation, in explaining how natural processes flow from higher principles. Emilsson then discusses what sort of conception of the arts lies behind this view.

Chapter 8 presents angelification in the Christian apocalypse Zostrianos. Zostrianos is the mysterious reputed author of the longest tractate in the Nag Hammadi library (NHC VIII,8.1). The first known reception of this text was by Christians, one-time friends of Plotinus who tried to fit into his philosophical circle at Rome. Zostrianos ascends into four extra-cosmic dimensions in which he experiences successively higher forms of angelification. The text of Zostrianos is designed to lead its readers into contemplative ascent prefaced by a life of purifying virtues. These virtues completely cut one off from the structures of civic society in an effort to generate an angelic subjectivity on earth.