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Plotinus, like most ancient philosophers from Socrates on, was a religious and moral teacher as well as a professional philosopher engaged in the critical interpretation of a long and complicated school tradition. He was an acute critic and arguer, with an exceptional degree of intellectual honesty for his, or any, period; philosophy for him was not only a matter of abstract speculation but also a way of life in which, through an exacting intellectual and moral self-discipline and purification, those who are capable of the ascent can return to the source from which they came. His written works explain how from the eternal creative act--at once spontaneous and necessary--of that transcendent source, the One, or Good, proceeds the world of living reality, constituted by repeated double movements of outgoing and return in contemplation; and this account, showing the way for the human self--which can experience and be active on every level of being--to return to the One, is at the same time an exhortation to follow that way. (See emanationism.)
Plotinus always insisted that the One, or Good, is beyond the reach of thought or language; what he said about this supreme principle was intended only to point the mind along the way to it, not to describe or define it. But though no adequate concept or definition of the Good is possible, it was, nonetheless, for Plotinus a positive reality of superabundant excellence. Plotinus often spoke of it in extremely negative language, but his object in doing so was to stress the inadequacy of all of man's ways of thinking and speaking to express this supreme reality or to clarify the implications of the claim that the Good is absolutely one and undetermined, the source of all defined and limited realities.
The original creative or expressive act of the One is the first great derived reality, nous (which can be only rather inadequately translated as "Intellect" or "Spirit"); from this again comes Soul, which forms, orders, and maintains in being the material universe. It must be remembered that, to Plotinus, the whole process of generation is timeless; Nous and Soul are eternal, while time is the life of Soul as active in the physical world, and there never was a time when the material universe did not exist. The "levels of being," then, though distinct, are not separate but are all intimately present everywhere and in everyone. To ascend from Soul through Intellect to the One is not to travel in space but to awake to a new kind of awareness.
Intellect for Plotinus is at one and the same time thinker, thought, and object of thought; it is a mind that is perfectly one with its object. As object, it is the world of Forms, or Ideas, the totality of real being in the Platonic sense. These Forms, being one with Intellect and therefore with each other, are not merely objects but are living, thinking subjects, each not only itself but, in its contemplation, the whole. They are the archetypes and causes of the necessarily imperfect realities on lower levels, souls and the patterns or structures that make bodies what they are. Men at their highest are intellects, or souls perfectly conformed to Intellect; they become aware of their intellectual nature when, passing not only beyond sense perception but beyond the discursive reasoning characteristic of the life of Soul, they immediately grasp eternal realities.
Soul for Plotinus is very much what it was for Plato, the intermediary between the worlds of Intellect and Sense and the representative of the former in the latter. It is produced by Intellect, as Intellect is by the One, by a double movement of outgoing and return in contemplation, but the relationship between the two is more intimate and the frontier less clearly defined. For Plotinus, as for Plato, the characteristic of the life of the Soul is movement, which is the cause of all other movements. The life of the Soul in this movement is time, and on it all physical movement depends. Soul both forms and rules the material universe from above; and in its lower, immanent phase, which Plotinus often calls nature, it acts as an indwelling principle of life and growth and produces the lowest forms, those of bodies. Below these lies the darkness of matter, the final absence of being, the absolute limit at which the expansion of the universe--from the One through diminishing degrees of reality and increasing degrees of multiplicity--comes to an end. Because of its utter negativity, such matter is for Plotinus the principle of evil; and although he does not really believe it to be an independent principle forming, with the Good, a dualism, his language about it often has a strongly dualistic flavour. (See good and evil.)
He was not, however, really dualistic in his attitude toward the material universe. He strongly maintained its goodness and beauty as the best possible work of Soul. It is a living organic whole, and its wholeness is the best possible (though very imperfect) reflection on the space-time level of the living unity in diversity of the world of Forms in Intellect. It is held together in every part by a universal sympathy and harmony. In this harmony external evil and suffering take their place as necessary elements in the great pattern, the great dance of the universe. Evil and suffering can affect men's lower selves but can only exceptionally, in the thoroughly depraved, touch their true, higher selves and so cannot interfere with the real well-being of the philosopher.
As souls within bodies, men can exist on any level of the soul's experience and activity. (The descent of souls into bodies is for Plotinus--who had some difficulty in reconciling Plato's various statements on this point--both a fall and a necessary compliance with universal law.) Man can ascend through his own intellect to the level of universal Soul, become that whole that he already is potentially, and, in Soul, attain to Intellect itself; or he can isolate himself on the lower level, shutting himself up in the experiences, desires, and concerns of his lower nature. Philosophical conversion--the beginning of the ascent to the One--consists precisely in turning away, by a tremendous intellectual and moral effort, from the life of the body, dominating and rising above its desires, and "waking to another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use." This, Plotinus insisted, is possible while one is still in an earthly body and without neglecting the duties of one's embodied state. But the body and bodily life weight a man down and hamper him in his ascent. Plotinus' language when speaking of the body and the senses in this context is strongly dualistic and otherworldly. Platonists in general think much more dualistically about their own bodies than about the material universe as a whole. The physical world is seen positively as a noble image of the intelligible; the individual, earthly, animal body, on the contrary, tends to be regarded negatively as a hindrance to the intellectual and spiritual life. (See mind-body dualism.)
When a man's philosophical conversion is complete and he has become Intellect, he can rise to that mystical union in which the One manifests his continual presence, carried on the surging current of the impulse of return to the source (in its strongest and final flow), the pure love of Intellect for the Good from which it immediately springs. There is no consciousness of duality in that union; the individual is not aware of himself; but neither is he destroyed or dissolved into the One--because even in the union he is still Intellect, though Intellect "out of itself," transcending its normal nature and activity. This mystical union for Plotinus was the focus of much of his effort and, for those of similar inclination, the source of the continuing power of his teaching. Philosophy for him was religion, the effort to actualize in oneself the great impulse of return to the Good, which constitutes reality on all its levels; and religion for him was philosophy. There was no room in his thought and practice for special revelation, grace, and repentance in the Christian sense, and little for external rites or ceremonies. For him the combination of moral purification and intellectual enlightenment, which only Platonic philosophy as he understood it could give, was the only way to union with the Good.
Iamblichus (c. AD 250-c. 330) seems to have been the originator of the type of Neoplatonism that came to dominate the Platonic schools in the 5th and 6th centuries AD. This kind of Neoplatonism sharpened and multiplied the distinctions between the levels of being. The basic position underlying its elaborations is one of extreme philosophical Realism: it is assumed that the structure of reality corresponds so exactly to the way in which the mind works that there is a separate real entity corresponding to every distinction that it can make. In the fully developed late Neoplatonic system the first principle of reality, the ultimate One, was removed to an altogether ineffable transcendence, mitigated by two factors: the presence of the expressions or manifestations of its unifying power, the "henads"--identified with the gods of paganism--at every level of reality; and the possibility of return to absolute unification through the henad with which one is linked. Below the One a vast structure of triads, or trinities, reached down to the physical world; this was constructed by combining Plotinus' vertical succession of the levels of Being, Intellect, and Soul (much complicated by internal subdivision and the interposition at every stage of mediating hypostases, or underlying orders of nonmaterial reality) with another horizontal triadic structure, giving a timeless dynamic rhythm of outgoing and return, such as that already encountered in Porphyry. (See transcendentalism.)
Nearly all of Iamblichus' works have been lost, and his thought must be recovered from other sources. At present the main authority for this type of Platonism, and also for some of the later Neoplatonists, is Proclus (AD 410-485). Proclus appears to have codified later Platonism, but it is often impossible to tell which parts of his thought are original and which derive from his teachers Plutarch and Syrianus on the one hand and Porphyry and Iamblichus, from whom he quotes copiously but not always identifiably, and other earlier Platonists on the other hand. A carefully argued summary of the basic metaphysics of this kind of Neoplatonism may be found in Proclus' Elements of Theology, which exhibits the causal relationships of the several hierarchies that constituted his intelligible universe.
This later Neoplatonism aspired to be not only a complete and coherent metaphysical system but also a complete pagan theology, which is perhaps best seen in Proclus' Platonic Theology. The maintenance and defense of the old religion in a world more and more intolerantly dominated by its triumphant rival, Christianity, was one of the main concerns of the Platonists after Plotinus. By the study and sometimes forced exegesis of Aristotle and then Plato, culminating in the Timaeus and Parmenides, of which they offered a variety of highly metaphysical interpretations totally unacceptable to Plato scholars, they believed it possible to arrive at a complete understanding of divine truth. This truth they held to be cryptically revealed by the gods themselves through the so-called theologians--the inspired authors of the Orphic poems and of the Chaldean Oracles, published in the second half of the 2nd century AD. Porphyry first gave some guarded and qualified recognition to them, but they were inspired scripture to Iamblichus, who wrote a work of at least 28 books on the subject, and his successors. Their view of the human soul was a humbler one than that of Plotinus. It was for them a spiritual being of lower rank, which had descended altogether into the material world, while for Plotinus a part remained above; they could not therefore aspire, like Plotinus, through philosophy alone, to that return to and unification with the divine that remained for them the goal of human life. Help from the gods was needed, and they believed that the gods in their love for men had provided it, giving to all things the power of return in prayer and implanting even in inanimate material things--herbs and stones and the like--sympathies and communications with the divine, which made possible the secret rites of theurgy, through which the divine gave the needed spiritual help by material means. Theurgy, though its procedures were generally those of late Greek magic, was thus not thought of merely as magic; in fact a higher and more intellectual theurgy was also practiced. The degree of attention paid to external rites varied considerably from philosopher to philosopher; there seem to have been men even in the last generation of pagan Neoplatonists who had little use for or interest in such things and followed a mystical way much like that of Plotinus.
The different schools of late Neoplatonism seem to have differed less from each other than has sometimes been supposed. The school of Pergamum, founded by Aedesius, a pupil of Iamblichus, made perhaps the least contribution to the philosophical development of Neoplatonism, but it was not entirely given over to theurgy. Its greatest convert was the emperor Julian, called by Christians the "Apostate"; in that capacity he achieved great notoriety, but philosophically he is of no importance. By the end of the 4th century AD the Platonic Academy at Athens had been reestablished and had become an institute for Neoplatonic teaching and research following the tradition of Iamblichus. It was particularly fervent and open in its paganism and attracted Christian hostility. Though maintaining itself for a surprisingly long time against this hostility, it eventually yielded to it and was probably closed by Justinian in AD 529. In the interim, however, it had produced the greatest and most influential systematic expositor of later Neoplatonism, Proclus (see above). The head of the school at the time of its closing, Damascius, was also a notable philosopher. Another centre of Neoplatonism flourished at Gaza during the 5th and early 6th centuries; it was already Christian in its inspiration, though some of its members studied with the pagan Ammonius (see below). The school of Alexandria in the 5th and 6th centuries does not seem to have differed very much from that of Athens, either in its fundamental philosophical outlook or in the main outline of its doctrines. In fact there was much interchange between the two. The Athenian Syrianus taught the Alexandrian Hermias, whose son Ammonius was taught by Proclus. Ammonius (died c. 520) was the most influential of the Alexandrian Platonists. His expositions of Aristotle were published mainly in the commentaries of the Christian heretic John Philoponus (late 5th to mid-6th century). Simplicius, the other great Aristotelian commentator, worked at Athens but, like Damascius, had studied with Ammonius. The Alexandrian concentration on Aristotle, which produced a vast body of learned but Neoplatonically coloured commentary on his treatises, has often been attributed to Christian pressure and attempts to compromise with the church; it may equally well have been due to the quality and extent of Proclus' published work on Plato. Though Philoponus' later philosophical work contains important Christian modifications, an openly pagan (and very inferior) philosopher, Olympiodorus, was still teaching at Alexandria well into the second half of the 6th century. Finally, in the 7th century, under Heraclius, after philosophical teaching had passed peacefully into Christian hands, the last known Alexandrian philosopher, the Christian Stephanus, was called to teach in the University of Constantinople.
The first Christian to use Greek philosophy in the service of the Christian faith was Justin Martyr (martyred c. 165), whose passionate rejection of Greek polytheism, combined with an open and positive acceptance of the essentials of Platonic religious philosophy and an unshakable confidence in its harmony with Christian teaching, was to remain characteristic of the Christian Platonist tradition. This was carried on in the Greek-speaking world by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215), a persuasive Christian humanist, and by the greatest of the Alexandrian Christian teachers, Origen (c. 185-254). Although Origen was consciously more hostile to and critical of Platonic philosophy than either Justin or Clement, he was, nonetheless, more deeply affected by it. He produced a synthesis of Christianity and late Middle Platonism of remarkable originality and power, which is the first great Christian philosophical theology. In spite of subsequent condemnations of some of his alleged views, his influence on Christian thought was strong and lasting. The Greek philosophical theology that developed during the Trinitarian controversies over the relationships among the persons of the Godhead, which were settled at the ecumenical councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), owed a great deal to Origen on both sides, orthodox and heretical. Its most important representatives on the orthodox side were the three Christian Platonist theologians of Cappadocia, Basil of Caesarea (c. 329-379), Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-c. 389), and Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c. 394). Of these three, Gregory of Nyssa was the most powerful and original thinker (as well as the closest to Origen). He was the first great theologian of mystical experience, at once Platonic and profoundly Christian, and he exerted a strong influence on later Greek Christian thought. (See Trinity.)
At
some time between the period of the Cappadocian Fathers and the early years
of the 6th century, a new turn was given to Christian Platonism by the
remarkable writer who chose to publish his works under the name of St.
Paul's convert at Athens, Dionysius the Areopagite. The kind of Platonism
that the Pseudo-Dionysius
employed for his theological purposes was the 5th-century Neoplatonism
that is best represented by Proclus (see above The
later Neoplatonists). Almost everything about this mysterious author
is vigorously disputed by scholars. But there can be no doubt about the
influence that his system of the hierarchic universe exerted upon later
Christian thought; his vision of man's ascent through it--carried up by
divine love, to pass beyond all hierarchy and all knowledge into the darkness
of the mystical union with God--had its impact both in the East, where
one of the greatest of Greek Christian Platonist thinkers, Maximus
the Confessor (c. 580-662), was deeply influenced by the Dionysian
writings and commented extensively upon them, and in the West, where they
became known and were translated into Latin in the 9th century. In the
Latin West there was more than one kind of Christian Platonism. An impressive
and extremely difficult philosophical theology, employing ideas approximating
Porphyry's version of Neoplatonism to explain and defend the orthodox doctrine
of the Trinity, was produced in the second half of the 4th century by the
rhetorician and grammarian Marius Victorinus.
A strong and simple Platonic theism and morality, which had a great influence
in the Middle Ages, was nobly expressed in the final work of the last great
philosopher-statesman of the ancient world, Boethius (c. 470-524).
This was the Consolation
of Philosophy, written in prison while its author was under sentence
of death. Boethius was also influential in the medieval West through his
translations of Aristotle's logical works, especially the Categories
together with Porphyry's Isagoge ("Introduction"), on which he in
turn produced two commentaries. But the Christian Platonism that had the
widest, deepest, and most lasting influence in the West was that of St.
Augustine of
Hippo (354-430).(See Boethius,
Anicius Manlius
In his anthropology Augustine was firmly Platonist, insisting on the soul's superiority to and independence of the body. For him, as for Plotinus and Porphyry, it was axiomatic that body could not act on soul, for soul was superior in the hierarchy of reality, and the inferior cannot act on the superior. This affected both his ethical doctrine and his epistemology. On the other hand, he differed from the philosophers who influenced him in his insistence that not only man but higher spiritual beings as well are mutable and peccable, liable to sin and fall, and in his consequent stress on the necessity of divine grace. His crucial doctrine that man's destiny is determined by the right direction of love, though profoundly original, was a development rather than a contradiction of Platonism. His very original theology of history and his view of human society, however, owed little to Plotinus and Porphyry, whose interests lay elsewhere.
In his epistemology Augustine was Neoplatonic, especially in the subjectivity of his doctrine of illumination--in its insistence that in spite of the fact that God is exterior to man, men's minds are aware of him because of his direct action on them (expressed in terms of the shining of his light on the mind, or sometimes of teaching) and not as the result of reasoning from sense experience. For a Platonist, as has been said, body cannot act upon soul. Sense experience, therefore, though genuinely informative on its own level, cannot be a basis for metaphysical or religious thinking. This must be the result of the presence in the soul of higher realities and their action upon it. In Plotinus the illumination of the soul by Intellect and the One was the permanent cause of man's ability to know eternal reality; and Augustine was at this point very close to Plotinus, though for him there was a much sharper distinction between Creator and creature, and the personal relationship between God and the soul was much more strongly stressed. (See nous.)
In his theology, insofar as Augustine's thought about God was Platonic, he conformed fairly closely to the general pattern of Christian Platonism; it was Middle Platonic rather than Neoplatonic in that God could not be the One beyond Intellect and Being but was the supreme reality in whose creative mind were the Platonic Forms, the eternal patterns or regulative principles of all creation. Perhaps the most distinctive influence of Plotinian Neoplatonism on Augustine's thinking about God was in his Trinitarian theology. He started with the unity of God and continually insisted upon it, unlike Greek Christian thinkers, who started with the Three Persons perfectly united; and because he thought that something like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was to be found in Plotinus and Porphyry, he tended to regard it as a philosophical doctrine and tried to make philosophical sense of it to a greater extent than the Greek Fathers did. His last and most important and influential attempt to do so was in his treatise On the Trinity, with its discovery of analogies to the divine mystery in the self-directed, internal activities of the soul.
In the 4th century the Christian exegete Calcidius (Chalcidius) prepared a commentary on Plato's Timaeus, which exerted an important influence on the medieval interpretation of the Timaeus. A Christian Platonic theism of the type of which Boethius is the finest example thus arose; based on a reading of the Timaeus with Christian eyes, it continued to have a strong influence in the Middle Ages, especially in the earlier period. This kind of theism, issuing in a strongly positive view of God's creation and a nobly austere but humane view of man's duty and destiny, was particularly apparent in the Christian humanism of the School of Chartres (12th century).
The widest, deepest, and most persistent Christian Platonist influence in the Latin West was that of Augustine (see above Augustinian Platonism). Augustinianism in a variety of forms--often stiffened, exaggerated, or distorted--persisted throughout the Middle Ages and survived the "recovery of Aristotle" (see below). In the later Middle Ages Augustine's influence was particularly strong in the Franciscan school, though not confined to it. But the greatest and most influential of medieval thinkers deeply influenced by Augustine was Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34-1109), the originator (probably on the basis of suggestions in Augustine) of the still much discussed "ontological argument" for the existence of God (see religion, philosophy of) and a philosopher whose humility, openness, and readiness to consider objections had a genuinely Socratic quality. (See ontological argument.)
One of the boldest and most original thinkers of medieval Europe was John Scotus Erigena (810-c. 877), who introduced to the West the Greek Christian Platonist tradition (see above Patristic Platonism), as it had been developed by Gregory of Nyssa, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. His views were much disapproved of by the Western church; and his great philosophical work, the Periphyseon (usually known as De divisione naturae [On the Division of Nature]), was not much read and ceased to be copied after his condemnation in 1210. But a considerable part of the text circulated in the form of anonymous glosses to the Latin translations of the Pseudo-Dionysius (of which the first adequate translation was by Erigena himself); and in this way his thought influenced both the tradition of Western mysticism, which derived from the Pseudo-Dionysius, and 13th-century Scholasticism, for which St. Paul's supposed disciple was still a major authority.
There is no more superficial and misleading generalization in the history of philosophy than that which sharply opposes "Christian Platonism" and "Christian Aristotelianism." To be sure, the recovery of the authentic thought of Aristotle through Latin translations of his works in the 12th and 13th centuries was indeed a major event in the history of philosophy. But Platonism and Aristotelianism have never been tidily separated in the history of European thought. There was already a strong Aristotelian element in Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. Byzantine theologians (in the East) from the 6th century AD onward were as Aristotelian as anybody in western Europe in the 13th century. Thirteenth-century "Aristotelian" Scholastics, though much preoccupied with the new translations of Aristotle and their philosophical and theological implications, were still deeply influenced by Augustine, Boethius, and the Pseudo-Dionysius (with glosses derived from Erigena). And the Islamic philosophy, to be mentioned below, with which they had to grapple, was as much Neoplatonist as it was Aristotelian. Further, they also were influenced by Latin translations of two pseudo-Aristotelian works in Arabic, based on Neoplatonic sources (see the section immediately below) as well as by those of some of the shorter works of Proclus (see above The later Neoplatonists). It has been said that "Aquinas is closer to Plotinus than to the real Aristotle," and there is some truth in this judgment.
In spite of its deep influence on Greek Christian thinkers, Platonism was regarded with profound suspicion by the Byzantine Orthodox Church. The suspicion reflected its association in the Byzantine ecclesiastical mind with the militant paganism of the Athenian Neoplatonists (see above The later Neoplatonists). Nonetheless, it survived in the Byzantine world--generally underground but with an overt revival in the 11th century, in which the most notable figures were the broadly erudite Michael Psellus, who did much to enhance the prestige of philosophy, and his rival, the syncretistic Aristotelian commentator John Italus. In the following century Eustratius, metropolitan of Nicaea, and Michael of Ephesus continued the tradition of writing Neoplatonic commentary on Aristotle, plugging some of the gaps left by the Alexandrian commentators. In the 15th century the last known Byzantine philosopher, George Gemistus Plethon, a passionate pagan Platonist in the manner of Proclus, traveled to Italy (1438-39) and persuaded Cosimo de' Medici to sponsor a Platonic Academy at Florence, of which the greatest figures to emerge were its founder, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), who translated all of Plato and Plotinus into Latin, the first complete version of either in a Western language, and the humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), author of the influential Oration on the Dignity of Man. Ficino's Platonic Theology: On the Immortality of Souls contains not only Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy but also elements drawn from medieval Aristotelianism, Cicero, Augustine, and Italian humanist writers. In spite of the paganism of Plethon, the Platonism of the Florentine Academy was a Christian one of a humane and liberal kind. This was probably at least partly due to the influence in Italy of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), who worked out his own very original version of Christian Platonism, influenced by the Pseudo-Dionysius, Erigena, and the German mystical tradition (as in Meister Eckehart).
The influence of the Platonism of the Florentine Academy was quite extensive; it may be seen not only in the writings of later Italian philosophers but also in the iconography of Italian Renaissance painting and in 16th-century French literature and was particularly marked in England. Perhaps the most impressive development of this post-Renaissance movement lay in the works of the Cambridge Platonists (late 17th century). Since their time a tradition of liberal Christian Platonism has persisted in England. Moreover, there have been other notable traditions of Platonically influenced Christian thought in Europe. One that deserves to be better known is that of the outstanding French philosopher of "action" Maurice Blondel (1861-1949), who found a prominent place in his system for the formation of ideas--interpreted as an important species of action that faithfully reflects the eternal order of reality. Blondel's philosophy has had a widespread influence, mainly among Catholic philosophers dissatisfied with Neoscholasticism. Another French philosopher much influenced by Platonism, in its Plotinian form, was Henri Bergson (1859-1941), whose thought attracted much attention during and just after his lifetime but has been largely neglected since.
The rediscovery of Proclus by the great German Idealist G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) had an important influence on his thought and so on the whole history of 19th-century Idealist philosophy. His contemporary F.W.J. von Schelling (1775-1854) was also strongly influenced by Neoplatonism, in his case that of Plotinus. Idealism, however, should not be interpreted as revived Neoplatonism, nor Neoplatonism as an anticipation of Idealism. But the historical influence of Neoplatonism on Idealist thought is indisputable. There was a strong reaction against Hegel's influence in some quarters, and this reaction led to a corresponding depreciation of Neoplatonism though the tradition of Idealism continued in the work of F.H. Bradley and John Ellis McTaggart in England and Josiah Royce in the United States. But 20th-century continental European philosophers and scholars were, until the 1960s, readier than English-speaking ones to take a serious interest in Neoplatonism. The latter, with some notable exceptions, maintained a hostile attitude toward that philosophy which they wrongly regarded not only as "decadent" but also as "mystical," and thus outside the true tradition of Greek philosophy. (See Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, idealism, Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von.)
The influence of the sort of Christian Platonism mentioned above on English literature, and especially on English poetry, has been wide and deep. But there has also been a strongly anti-Christian Neoplatonic influence, that of Thomas Taylor "the Platonist" (1758-1835), who published translations of Plato, Aristotle, and a large number of Neoplatonic works in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Taylor was as militant in his pagan Platonism as was Gemistus Plethon. His ideas had a strong influence on the English Romantics. In the poetry of William Blake, who eventually succeeded in reconciling Taylor's paganism with his own very original version of Christianity, much of the symbolism is Neoplatonic. The Platonism of the English Romantic poets Coleridge and Shelley also derives from Taylor, although both were able to read the original texts. Taylor also deeply influenced Emerson and his circle in America. Later, in the early 20th century, the influence of Taylor's writings was again apparent in the Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats, who in his later poems made use of Stephen MacKenna's then new translation of Plotinus.
The foremost process philosopher (an adherent of a view emphasizing the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), perhaps because of his original and abiding concern with mathematical philosophy, was interested in Plato (though not, apparently, in the Neoplatonists); and his reading of the Timaeus in particular contributed something to the metaphysical system of his last period and especially to his concept of a God who does not timelessly transcend process but is in some way involved in it. Whitehead is an excellent example of a Platonically influenced thinker whose development of Plato's own thought proceeded along lines completely opposed to Neoplatonism.
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