Commentary XX

A Philosophical Checkpoint, and the Difference between Pagan and Christian Platonism

From Radek Chlup’s “Proclus: An Introduction”, p. 121

I have been unable to write anything lengthy the past few weeks, but that does not mean I do not have thoughts fighting through my mind. This is just me free writing on what’s been on my mind lately on two things: my philosophy, and Christianity.

Philosophy

Unsurprisingly, I remain broadly Platonist. My chief point of reference remains Proclus, as interpreted by Butler, although I on occasion would like to branch into more indepth reading of other Platonists. Butler himself has this fascinating quote that remains at the back of my mind whenever I think of the religious implications of this position:

“The philosopher must hold to the universality specific to philosophy, for it is to philosophy, rather than to theology, that polytheism in the absolutely unrestricted sense appears, inasmuch as there is no universal pantheon, any more than there is a pantheon peculiar to philosophy: these two facts entail one another. The philosopher’s universality, inasmuch as it consists in a radical openness to the peculiarity of individual Gods, expresses the nature of henadic totality, which is grounded, not in the wholeness of a pantheon, in which each God plays their part, but in the immediate presence of each God to all things.”[1]

The moment I first read this, I immediately knew that even if I was to remain a Christian (I was at the time), I would need to be a very unconventional one; because even the most progressive Christians I read would not participate in “non-monotheist” practices, even if they respected it and saw it as divine. I, on the other hand, see it as necessary to not be so restricted. It might not be necessary to be initiated (I have mixed feelings about that), but offering incense to this or that deity should, from that moment on, be something I should be prepared to do; and I say more about Christianity and this issue of divine multiplicity further in this post.

I have not been very successful with this practice, mostly because I have not had much opportunity, and also just because of a failure of nerve; but as I left institutional Christianity and began with Mariolatry, incorporating other Spirits in it, it’s become less of an issue. I have had a lot more success with respect to philosophical pluralism, however. Apart from my nominal acceptance of the validity of many philosophical ontologies as valid enough on their own terms, only failing insofar as it is not pure henology, my classes this past semester introduced me to authors like Sylvia Wynter, Fanon, and Cesaire. These three in particular, and Wynter especially, have shed light on how my philosophical vocation can also be so very African, (more importantly) anti-colonial, and how their visions have so dovetailed with my own intuitions on the political value of the metaphysics I want to develop.

Christianity

My current stance on Christianity is that it needs to die. This is wishful thinking, nevertheless it is my stance. It needs to die to be reintegrated into the world it seems to have marred. That would constitute its resurrection. I am thinking about this from the perspective of the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa over the past half century at least. Some think of this as good, but (to be more particular) I think the average Nigerian Christian suffers from a kind of cultural schizophrenia. I see it in myself, and I see it in others. It is possible to expand this diagnosis to beyond Nigeria, actually. There’s a lot I need to learn about Christianity in Africa, but this part, so far, remains constant. Ngong in his book “Senghor’s Eucharist” (that I need more people to read) says that:

“Senghor bemoans the fact that Christianity has taken root in Africa and its diaspora but the universal communion that it envisions and ritually invokes through the Eucharist has not. This refusal of communion may be understood as the Western Christian refusal to eat with non-Western Christians, as manifested in imperialistic acts of domination, such as slavery, colonialism, and colonialism’s afterlives. This refusal to eat together is clearly manifested in how global power dynamics, adumbrated through colonialism and imperialism, have been constructed around race rather than the Eucharist, around the will to power and domination rather than fraternity and solidarity. Like the perversion of the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11, the well-off of the world have arrogated communion among themselves, pushing to the curb expendable, surplus people in the process. Imperialistic domination has converted the Eucharist into the eating of the other, the other of the non-Western world. Because of this, the Eucharist has become a kind of witchcraft that has to be rescued or redeemed so that it may serve its real purpose—the communion that heals the world.

…

The act of eating together is communion, while the act of eating others is witchcraft. I argue that the Eucharist, for Senghor, was enacted as witchcraft rather than communion. His goal was to make it communion once again.”[2] (emphasis mine)

The whole introduction of the book was piercing to me, and put words to feelings I had trouble articulating. On my end, the communion Christians seek (or at least should seek) lies in the very Gods most of them spurn, at least if I were to be true to my Proclean priors. What this stance of mine is not, however, is a condemnation of Jesus himself, given that I consider Him a God and he is still a part of my devotions. I just think integration into a polytheist field is the way to go. Contrary to what some may think, this does not devalue Him, it is the highest estimation of Him possible. It fulfills his very ideal of communion, and all the virtues that Paul called the “fruits of the Spirit”.

To speak more on the metaphysical side, I will repeat a modified version of something I have said elsewhere on what I think Christian metaphysics in general fails in, and it is pretty much the above point about communion and Gods in another form. To wit:

I think the difference is as Perl put it; Proclus gives each form and Intellectual principle its distinct hypostasis, as directly participating different Gods qua unity while in a chain of indirect participation in being; Classical Christian metaphysics telescopes all of that into YHWH. Perl thinks the distinction does not really matter when it comes to the question of creation, but I disagree, and so does Plotinus, as what Perl describes is exactly Plotinus’ critique of the Gnostics’ notion of divinity. Although Pseudo-Dionysius appropriates some of the form of Proclus’ system, he does not take its most important content: The Henads. The absence of the Henads from the Liber De Causis had intense consequences for Islamic philosophies that adopted its ontology, such that there is no longer any category of things that are “self-sufficient in its existence or in its activity” (Prop. 9). Even the eternal hypostases, for the Islamic Neoplatonists. require existence given to them by the Allah. I wager the same is true for Pseudo-Dionysius. This leads to individuation problems, such that individuation too is telescoped to the act of YHWH in order to prevent a crude peripatetic dualism. But this entails that the principles the Angeloi instantiate do not have their eminence in the Angeloi, but in the God that gives them existence. The Angeloi of “Sameness and Difference” would then not be the eminence, the fullness of Sameness and Difference, but its first and highest participant, only preparing the way for participation of others. Where for Proclus, the Intellectual Monad of Sameness and Difference directly participates a particular ineffable God (as a participable “one”) for its existence (meaning the intellect subsists in and as the God), all while receiving essence from prior hypostases, the Angeloi in which Sameness and Difference subsists is not itself uncreated, not beyond Being. Logic operates, but it is not independent, it cannot transgress his ontology, or at least it is not allowed to. This is why this logic is also an Ecclesial logic for Pseudo-Dionysus, there is not supposed to be any sort of salvation apart from the church, no alternative formulations of ontology that are independent, or diversity within the structure such that any of the peculiar logoi or Angeloi of principles can be the centre of true devotion as an independent creator or God.

The result is that even the orders of non-embodied Angels of Pseudo-Dionysius are radically contingent in a way the hypostases are not for the Pagan Neoplatonists. Another key point of the different hypostases in Proclus is to secure their independence from each other (so they can relate) as well as to secure the independence of philosophy from theology; or the independence of Being’s intelligibility from divine ineffability which is beyond it, so that the latter can ground the former without reducing them to each other. The distinction between ontology and henology is the thin line running through all these other distinctions, such that, although The One or the generic God does have all these things as its “cause”, this transcendence as a cause must be expressed as enabling their separate existence as different effects, such that these effects are, in their different prime monads, the most eminent phase of the character they express, instead of The One or the God being the eminence of these things itself, which would compromise its transcendence. Being is truly Being, Life is truly Life, Intellect is truly Intellect; they are present “in each other”, yet distinct in their hyparxis/existence. They are not different names for The One.

Within the Hellenic theology Proclus articulates, it is the case that because of their self-subsistence, any of these Gods are directly worshipable as the unity of all things, because they are; their self-subsistence is also a unity of all things according to their specific providence, specific not in scope (a God’s providence reaches all things) but in activity. This what “ascending” to the One means. The Gods are not just mediators (although they can be), they are the end itself, each is the terminus of the ascent. The “stratification” of Principles in Proclus is always upendable, precisely because of this independence, and this “upending” is expressed in the fact that considering an independent principle involves seeing it the All according to its activity, and seeing its unity as unoriginate in anything prior or subsequent to its activity on that ontological strata, even as these other activities are present in its own. This is what I think Christian Neoplatonism lacks, just as it is what Plotinus sees Gnosticism as lacking. The focus on a possible nominally true identity in the chain of being elements obscures the fact that one is an ascent into more universal principles with an attendant paradigmatic multiplicity it explains (the One, for instance, explains the Gods primarily, and the latter is not dissolved in this ascent), while the other is an ascent to the subtraction of this paradigmatic multiplicity. “The One” for the Christian Platonists does not explain the Gods anymore, at best it absorbs them as aspects, attributes, contingent angeloi, or “divine names.” The difference could not be starker.

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[1] Edward P. Butler, “Universality and Locality in Platonic Polytheism,” Walking the Worlds 1, no. 2 (2015): 106-118. p. 118

[2] David Tonghou Ngong, Senghor’s Eucharist: Negritude and African Political Theology (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2023). p. 3, 5.