Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [320]
The Pagan Revival and Theurgy
THE “SCIENCE” OF theurgy came into its own in the pagan revival of the mid-fourth century. After Constantine’s vision of the cross at the battle for the Milvian Bridge, the process by which Christianity replaced the public, civic religion of the Empire continued apace-that is, until the short reign of Julian (later called “Julian the Apostate”), which began in 361 CE. Although many public sacrifices had already been abandoned in the progressive Christianization of the Empire, Julian the Apostate tried to restore them. He also turned to Iamblichus, the head of the Platonic academy, to help find an intellectual basis for paganism, which was refurbished to compete with, and hence, to parallel Christian practice.77
Iamblichus described theurgy in Platonic, intellectual terms, evidently also providing a number of religious rituals that paralleled those of the Christian church. This newly revitalized paganism, based as much on its rival Christianity as anything else, became a religion of personal piety and of salvation. With the foothold that Christianity had already made, it could hardly promise less. Under Julian’s tutelage, pagan philosophy developed into a religion like Christianity. In the center of the new religion was a new ritual component, never before part of philosophical discourse. This ritual was called “theurgy.”
In his essay, On the Mysteries, Iamblichus defends theurgy against Porphyry’s more strictly philosophical skepticism. In the Phaedo (66b-c), Plato had outlined an immortal soul in such a way as to suggest that the body and the soul’s moral journey through life affects its future rebirths or bliss in Elysium. But how anything corporeal could affect the soul is not completely clear in Plato’s writing, and the question remained unsolved throughout antiquity, though many philosophers offered their own solutions. (In fact, lack of solution to this vexing problem remains today as one very significant reason not to accept the Cartesian formulation of the mind-body problem.)78
To see the importance of this topic for the religious life of the pagan philosophers, one has to return at least briefly to the most important ancient interpreter of Plato in Christian times, Plotinus. Plotinus interpreted the world of ideas of Plato in an even more determinedly intellectualist way than Plato had because Plotinus had read the works of Aristotle and the later Stoics. He also knew the terminology of kosmos noetos, the intelligible world, which is first witnessed in Philo and which referred to the logos, hence to the divine mind as an external force in the universe. Plotinus tried to bridge the gap between the body and soul from the other side-with human intellectual activities and meditations leading the way upward. Because intellect can turn inward and contemplate itself, he valorized the experience of self-consciousness in a way that was not discussed before.
Plotinus believed that the way to ascend was through self-conscious meditation and even suggested that nondiscursive thinking or an altered state of consciousness (ASC) was the way to overcome our materiality.79 Plotinus was especially attuned to the feeling of living and experiencing in our mind. In the Enneads 5.8.9.1-3, Plotinus presents us with a thought-experiment by asking the reader to visualize a sphere. This, in turn, becomes the creative visualization to understand how “The One” can be formed of “the Many.” What the experiment was for is not as important as the process of internal visualization to resolve issues.
In her recent book, Sara Rappe shows that this move begins what can only be called