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Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of lamblichus (review)
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 35, Number 2, April 1997
- pp. 296-297
- 10.1353/hph.1997.0040
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
~96 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL ~997 to derive lessons from both sides of a Platonic argument; there must surely be some debt, general or specific, to Gellius' study of this work under Taurus, and it confirms an interpretative strategy of second-century Platonism. One does not want 1o.2 2 in the testimonia, but it should be discussed in relation to 7.14.9, where one issue is again how far Gellius gives his own reading of Plato's text. HAROLD TARRANT University of Newcastle, NSW Gregory Shaw. Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism oflamblichus. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 268. Cloth, $45.oo. Once upon a time, aware that in antiquity no one called himself a Neoplatonist, many scholars had difficulty in separating Neoplatonism from Platonism. Distinguished thinkers, like Marsilio Ficino and the Cambridge Platonists, had assumed that there is little need to separate Platonists from Neoplatonists doctrinally. Contemporary critics, of course, are familiar with the notion that Neoplatonism is the variety of Platonism developed by Plotinus in the third century A.D. and handed on as Platonism to his successors. But there often still remains an inability properly to interpret the ancient distinction between those "Neoplatonists" who followed what was sometimes dubbed a "philosophical" path (Plotinus and Porphyry), and the followers and successors of Iamblichus who were said to be more "theological." The usual approach is to think of the Iamblicheans as retaining certain "philosophical" features from Plotinus while more generally exhibiting a decadent if not "Oriental" falling away into magic and superstition. In recent years the Iamblicheans have been getting a better press and their texts have been examined with less prejudice and more care. Iamblichus himself has been confirmed as the seminal figure of post-Plotinian Neoplatonism, and thanks to the work of Lloyd, Dillon, Trouillard, Saffrey and others his emphasis on theurgy has been gradually recognized as a theistic response to serious philosophical (and "theological") difficulties in "traditional" Neoplatonism. A number of people, including the present reviewer, have seen these difficulties primarily as a crisis in Neoplatonic ethics. Iamblichus rejected the Plotinian thesis that a part of the soul remains "undescended" and in contact with the intelligible world. Our reading of this was that he did so primarily because Plotinus' view seemed to diminish the seriousness of the problem of human evildoing and moral weakness: there is always, says Plotinus, a pure core within us, and by revealing that core we can display ourselves as divine once more: a theistic version of modern liberalism's claims about human perfectability. The backdrop to Shaw's vigorous if necessarily difficult study of Iamblichus is the decline of the "old ways" of pagan religion, and an indirect effect of Iamblichus' work was the attempt by others to "rescue" the sacred tradition of Platonism (including "Pythagoreanism") from an intellectual 61ite, and use it as the intellectual framework within which the old gods and popular beliefs of both "Hellenes" and "barbarians" could be explained and retained. But Shaw thinks of the intentions of Iamblichus aooK Rv.WEWS 297 himself as strictly theological--as primarily an attempt to restore a spiritual tradition-and he has thus appropriately analyzed Iamblichus' restatement of the problem of the "undescended soul" in more detail, in more of its ramifications, and to more effect than has hitherto been achieved. His book considerably advances our understanding of later Neoplatonism at the most fundamental level, though his view of Plotinus' original intent in postulating the undescended soul may be incomplete: he thinks (65) that Plotinus was trying to solve the problem of the suffering and "experience" (sic) of evil by the soul. It is likely, however, that Plotinus was as much concerned with the soul's doing of evil as with its suffering it. Shaw's reading of the role of Iamblichus is set out in his introduction (5): "It was the issue of the soul's place in the sensible cosmos that divided Iamblichus and all subsequent theurgical Platonists from the nontheurgicai Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry." His thesis, as it develops, is twofold: first, that theurgy is no magical manipulation of the gods by men, but a...