Christian Platonism is a catch-all phrase. It recognizes that Plato and his successors, including the whole of ancient pagan thought, formed part of the complex background to the emergence of a new religion. Both pagans and Christians were mutually transformed by their prolonged encounter on many issues, but especially on the questions of creation, desire, and return. The chapter begins with Judaeo-Christian influence upon major features of the Platonic tradition and then articulates a hidden conversation that lies behind Christian thinking about the Trinity, the structure of reality, and the creation of the human being.

RETHINKING THE RELATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

How is one to think of the relation between philosophy and religion in the Platonic tradition? The phrase “religious Platonism” may seem to be an oxymoron, if one defines Platonism, after Nietzsche, as primarily a philosophical or intellectual enterprise, fixated on “reason” and practised by a rationalist elite; or if one defines religion, by contrast, as a set of common beliefs and practices, involving prayers, rituals and accepted procedures, either more or less irrational or possessing their own peculiar traditional roots shared by a specific group of people. Platonism, more broadly conceived, however, resists modern categories, for it is an “in-between” phenomenon that cuts across modern disciplinary and dichotomous notions such as “religion” and “philosophy” as well as across ancient traditionalist representations of divinity (such as the Greek gods), of city-state or nation-hood. Religion is a term derived from Latin with no exact Greek equivalent and for this reason one might claim that there is no notion of religion as such in Greek antiquity. Even for Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian “Platonist” of the fifth-sixth centuries CE, the approximate terms for our notion of religion, namely threskeia (worship), theologia (theology), hierourgia (holy work), leitourgia (liturgy), theourgia (theurgy), agathourgia, involve a “theology” of lived experience that does not separate philosophy, practice, prayer and community. Equally, neither Plato in the fourth century BCE nor Dionysius in the sixth century CE divides life up into its various domains (social, political, philosophical, etc.)

For many centuries the four major works and ten letters that form the Corpus Dionysiacum were thought to be by St Denys the Areopagite, a member of the Athenian Areopagus converted by St Paul (Acts 17:34), just as their author represents them to be. Doubts about the authorship were raised as early as 532 by a Synod in Constantinople after a pro-monophysite group had claimed support for their views in the corpus, and later still by Peter Abelard (1121), Lorenzo Valla (1457) and John Grocyn (1501), but they were first widely published by Erasmus in 1504. Hardly anyone doubted a generally Platonic background to the corpus, although some, like Luther, thought it “pernicious”: Dionysius “Platonizes more than he Christianizes” (1888: 562). The Neoplatonic character of parts of the corpus was definitively demonstrated in 1895 by Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr (independently): Denys' presentation of evil as a parhypostasis, or by-product of reality without genuine existence on its own account, was dependent on Proclus' De malorum subsistentia. In fact, the corpus employs language and quotations from Hellenic authors stretching back through Proclus, Iamblichus and Plotinus to Aristotle, Plato and Parmenides.

INTRODUCTION: FORGERY AND ORIGINALITY

Dionysius, or Pseudo-Dionysius, as he has come to be called, was an unknown person who wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century ce and who transposed in a thoroughly original way the whole of Pagan Neoplatonism from Plotinus to Proclus into a distinctively new Christian context. Since he represented himself as St. Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian member of the judicial council, the Areopagus, who was converted instantly by St. Paul, his work, strictly speaking, might be regarded as a successful “forgery,” providing him with impeccable Christian credentials that conveniently antedated Plotinus by over 200 years. Dionysius' fictitious identity was first seriously called into question by Lorenzo Valla in 1457 and John Grocyn in 1501, a critical viewpoint later accepted and publicized by Erasmus from 1504 onward. But only in modern times has it become generally accepted that instead of being the disciple of St. Paul, Dionysius must have lived in the time of Proclus, and was perhaps of Syrian origin, someone who knew enough of Platonism and the Christian tradition to transform them both. So he has come to be known as Pseudo-Dionysius, that is, a kind of counterfeit representation or forgery of a supposed original.

“Forgery,” however, is a modern notion, from the Anglo-French verb forger, “to falsify or counterfeit” (and more distant still from the Latin fabricari), whose usage is first attested in 1574.

An explicit distinction between essence and existence is first attributed to the Arabic philosophers Al Farabi (c. 870-950) and Avicenna (c. 980-1037). The nature or essence of any finite being can be conceived separately from its existence that appears to be a perfection “superadded” or accidental to its nature. Pierre Hadot has traced the roots of this distinction even further back to Boethius, and later Neoplatonism, and in the latter case to two principal sources: (1) the distinction between absolute being and determinate being (respectively being-infinitive, to einai, and being-participle, to on) found in the anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides (ascribed to Porphyry) and in Marius Victorinus. And (2) the late Neoplatonic distinction (of Proclus, Damascius and Victorinus) between pre-existence (huparxis) and substance (ousia), that is, between pure being in its simplicity prior to all things and substance as the determinate subject taken together with all its accidents. I shall argue here that the roots of this distinction are also to be found in Plotinus.