Polytheistic Platonism – collected essays

Description

The Platonic tradition is one of the most fertile and enduring currents of thought in our shared history, amply repaying whatever thoughtful attention is given to it. But the tendency of recent centuries to remove Platonic philosophy from its (polytheistic) devotional and ritual roots has limited those rewards both in terms of intellectual insights and especially in terms of embracing Platonism as a living practice.

Edward Butler’s writings seek not only to restore the balance which flourished in the ancient world between theory and practice but also to build upon it: it is, after all, the very nature of a tradition to re-express its timeless principles in ways appropriate to each passing age. In nature, growth is from the tip: the collection of essays in this book offers the reader a profound glimpse of that philosophic growth so clearly rooted in the tradition of Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus and many others. What we clearly see here is the startling truth that all these sages were polytheists not from some accident of history, but because polytheism is the natural soil in which the flower of philosophy germinates, grows and blossoms.

Contents:

Polytheism and Individuality in the Henadic Manifold  ** The Gods and Being in Proclus ** The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus ** The Second Intelligible Triad and the Intelligible-Intellective Gods ** The Third Intelligible Triad and the Intellective Gods ** The Henadic Structure of Providence in Proclus ** Plato’s Gods and the Way of Ideas ** Animal and Paradigm in Plato ** Time and the Heroes ** Plotinian Henadology ** Toward a New Conception of Platonic Henology ** The Henadic Origin of Procession in Damascius ** Damascian Negativity ** Polytheism and Ecology ** Polytheism as Methodology in the Study of Religions ** Phenomenology of Disorder: Matter and Alterity in Platonism