Louth, Andrew. “Platonism in the Middle English Mystics.” Baldwin, A, and S Hutton. Eds. Platonism and the English Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

CHAPTER 6

PLATONISM IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH MYSTICS

Andrew Louth

THE CHRISTIAN PLATONIC TRADITION

…Platonism and Christianity had so much in common…

…respect accorded to Platonism by many of their pagan contemporaries, …Christian theologians soon came to look at Platonism for arguments with which to defend Christianity

…doctrine of the Pre-existence of Souls;…Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo…distinguish Christian theology from developments in Platonic philosophy, notably in Neoplatonism, that explained the origination of everything for the One by means of a (mathematically inspired) theory of emanations

Difficult to put one’s finger on unambiguously Platonic elements in Christianity…Christian monotheism …not derived from Platonism…often expressed…everything derives from an indivisible unity.

Christian mystical tradition on one Platonic doctrine, viz. That of the two worlds

DOCTRINE OF THE TWO WORLDS

…fundamental to Platonism…that this world…perceive through the senses…opinions, is not the real world. This world is a world of change, decay, and …death…unreality. The real world is changeless, incorruptible…for Plato, the realm of the Forms…one is material, the other spiritual…senses…kosmos aisthetos…spiritual…kosmos noetos. We…belong to both…soul (strictly: an intellect, nous)…

For Plato the whole point of philosophy is to secure our passage to the spiritual world: philosophy is ‘practising death’, melete thanatou (Phaedo 81a),

…the spiritual world, as the place of eternal changeless, incorruptible life, is the object of our deepest longing: our love (eros) for truth, for beauty, is only fulfilled when we free ourselves from the shadows of this world and gain entrance to the spiritual world,…Diotima’s speech…Symposium (201e-212b)

…Plotinus’ writings are full of eloquent expression of the soul’s nostalgia

Christians lapped this up…aliens (peregrini) in this world: ‘here we have no abiding city’ (Hebrews 13.14)

…they thought of heaven and earth: the two worlds conjoined when human voices mingled song in the celebration of the Eucharist. Platonism provided them with terminology with which to articulate such belief. It was not wholly satisfactory: in particular, Platonic language and concepts tended to elide the notion of two successive ages of Christian belief (this one and the age to come)

‘futurist’ to ‘realized’ eschatology

…used by the English mystics of the fourteenth century…three ways of interpreting…inner and an outer world;…world of angels and the world of human beings;…world perceived by the spiritual senses in contrast to the world of the physical senses.

INNER AND OUTER WORLDS

Plotinus…one of his favourite metaphors for the relationship between the One and all other reality: that of a circle with the One as the centre and the rest of reality as the circumference.

The idea that man, or more precisely the human soul, is created in the image of God makes the human mind the fulcrum on which the doctrine of the two worlds turns...

…a world on its own reflecting in itself divinity.

Greek nous…is memoria...

Augustine… idea that an image of a Trinitarian God must be itself trinitarian and analyses man’s inner reality into memoria, intelligentia, and voluntas (or amor)…this way of understanding the soul established itself in the West

The Cloud of Unknowing, 63-7, ed. Phyllis Hodgson

John the Saracen’s revision of Eriugena’s translation, undertaken int he second half of the twelfth century at the behest of his friend John of Salisbury, that finally introduced Denys to the West

…Augustine…into Christian theology some of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus…Porphyry...

Denys…Neoplatonism, but the rathr different Neoplatonism [associated] with Proclus [(d. 485)]

Proclus’…apophatic and kataphatic theology (…of negation and …of affirmation)…privileging of the former...

…apophatic theology in Moses’ ascent into a cloud of impenetrable darkness on Mount Sinai in order to receive the Law from God…goes back to Philo…Denys had taken over from St. Gregory of Nyssa)...

…the closer the mind came to God the less it could make out:…reduced to a wondering silence…in the darkness it is aware of nothing

…author of the Cloud of Unknowing…translated…John the Saracen’s Latin …[Dionysius’] Mystical theology into English

Dionysian strand is introduced into a fundamentally Augustinian…psychology

…memory, understanding and will…

…Bernard is fond of setting up an opposition between truth and love (veritas-caritas), knowledge and feeling (cognitio-affectus), to the detriment of the former. It is love and feeling that touches man most deeply, it is at that level that man comes close to God.

…author of the Cloud is wholly of Bernard’s mind: ‘By love may he be getyn & holden; bot bi thought neither...

Apophatic theology…Cloud, shutting down the ‘principal worching might, the whiche is clepid a knowable might’ and relying wholly on ‘another principal worching might, the which is clepid a louyng might…two mights, to the first, the which is a knowyng might, God, that is the maker of hem, is euermore incomprehensible; & to the secound, the which is the louyng myght, in ilch one diuersly he is all comprehensible the fulle…’

…God is known ‘with affeccyon abouen minde’

SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL SENSES

…development of the Christian mystical - or Christian Platonic - tradition, though it is not without parallels in Platonism and Neoplatonism; for instance, in the way in which Plotinus tries to describe union with the One by calling it ‘pressing toward touch’

...ascent of the soul described in the Symposium, or in Phaedrus, is realised in Christian terms in interpretation of the Song of Songs.

Origen says, ‘that soul only is perfect who has her sense of smell so pure and per4ged that she can catch the fragrance of the spikenard and myrrh and cypress that proceed from the Word of God, and can inhale the grace of the divine odour’.

Interpreting Song of Songs…in the East,…St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the West, Bernard

Among the English…Richard Rolle

The Cloud seem to point in a different direction from the chapters that precede and follow: here the fracture between the physical and the spiritual is clearly ascribed to the Fall, rather than (more platonico) regarded as being intrinsic...

CONCLUSION

…English mystics are to be regarded as heirs of the tradition of Christian Platonism...