In Letters to the Sage, vol. 2, a
regular recurrent topic in Alexander Wilder’s letters to T.M. Johnson is his pioneering
work on translating Iamblichus’ On the Mysteries, which he spent several
decades working on. Both Blavatsky and Olcott were supportive of this work,
although he ultimately opted for another publisher when the work was assembled
in book form, but it was serialized in The Theosophist magazine, beginning with the July, 1881 issue). The theosophy movement still continued to support the work, with
Wizards Bookshelf offering a reprint of the Thomas Taylor translation in the
1980s.
Posterity has shown that these early
theosophical efforts of reviving obscure neoplatonic works were important,
considering the major rediscovery of the importance of Iamblichus in the
history of western ideas. In the English language, it was the 1973 publication
of John Dillon’s The Fragments of Iamblichus that brought to light the major
influence of Iamblichus in determining the course of western philosophy for the
medieval and early modern period. The fact that he is one of the most
influential western thinkers of all time had been largely occluded due mainly
to the loss of much of his writings and the rise of modern materialism. Since
then, there has been a serious revival of interest in his work, a recent sample
is Iamblichus and the Foundations of
Late Platonism, Brill, 2012. https://brill.com/view/title/21497
.
Since
he lived in Apamea in southeastern Turkey, it is not surprising that of all the
Platonists in late antiquity it was Iamblichus who looked to the East most creatively
and sought to harmonize its wisdom traditions with those of archaic and classical
Greece. Like its aptly-named sister-city Zeugma, to which it was connected by a
bridge over the Euphrates, Apamea was the home of that elusive second century
CE Pythagorean-Platonist Numenius and as well as the refuge of Amelius (ca. 270
CE), a key disciple of Plotinus, and later of Iamblichus (born in Syria), who
settled there in his mature years after long postings in Egypt and Italy. As a
crossroads for caravans running East and West Apamea was a fitting base of
operations for these Platonists who mixed Plato and Pythagorean oral traditions
with the Oriental wisdom of the Brahmins, Magi, Egyptians, and Chaldaeans.
What is certain is that in the
first half of the twentieth century Iamblichus’ immersion in Hermetic and
Chaldaean wisdom and magic provoked antipathy from many classical scholars and
ancient philosophers. These two masterly editions and commentaries make an
essential contribution to the revaluation of Iamblichus’ thought which has been
underway for a generation.
They join the editions of his major
writings by Des Places and of the fragments of his commentaries on Plato and
Aristotle by Dillon and Larsen and these fundamental studies of his thought:
Carlos Steel, The Changing Self: A Study on the Soul in Later Neoplatonism:
Iamblichus, Damascius and Priscianus (1978); John Finamore, Iamblichus
and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul (1985); Garth Fowden, The Egyptian
Hermes (1986); Dominic O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and
Philosophy in Late Antiquity (1989); Beate Nasemann, Theurgie und
Philosophie in Iamblichus de mysteriis (1991); Greg Shaw, Theurgy and
the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (1995); Emma Clarke, Iamblichus
De Mysteriis: A Manifesto of the Miraculous (2001); and important
articles by H.D. Saffrey, P. Athanassiadi, John Finamore, John Dillon and
others.
With the changes in intellectual
fashions marked by the explosion of scholarship on late antiquity in the past
fifty years, including Neoplatonism, it is useful to recognize to what extent
twentieth-century attitudes towards Iamblichus, especially among
English-language scholars, are rooted in the seminal work of E.R. Dodds, who
both perpetuated some of the extreme rationalist biases of earlier European scholarship
against the religious dimension of his thought but who also recognized the
Syrian’s philosophical genius. The religious and philosophical aspects of
Iamblichus’ thought, which certainly would not have been recognized by its
author as separate or distinct, sit uncomfortably side by side in Dodds’
interpretive perspective.
In his great 1933 edition of
Proclus’ Elements of Theology he observed that ‘the historical
importance of Iamblichus has hardly been sufficiently recognized’ because his
primary metaphysical writings have been lost and his views have had to be
reconstructed from fragments and from what Dodds called ‘the
semi-philosophical’ De Mysteriis (1933, xix). Dodds’s schizophrenic
image of Iamblichus comes into focus in the very next sentence: ‘Mystagogue and
thaumaturgist though he was, and in intellectual quality immeasurably inferior
to a Posidonius or a Plotinus, his contribution to the final shaping of Neoplatonism
is scarely less than theirs’ (xix). How could an inferior intellect determine
the character of Neoplatonism, a tradition for which Dodds had great respect?
And, more disturbingly, how could a magician or mystagogue be a creative
‘philosophical’ thinker?
Dodds’s grand vision of late
antique thought in decline is motivated in part by his sense of the gradual
defeat of Hellenic rationalism by Oriental irrationalism, a war whose earlier
battles in archaic and classical Greece were charted, with a good deal of
Freudian cartography, in that classic of mid-century scholarship The Greeks
and the Irrational (1951).
Even as Iamblichus scholarship has
become more comprehensive and self-critical, it has continued to be shaped
consciously and unconsciously by Dodds’s pathbreaking work, sometimes
confirming his inspired judgments and sometimes replicating his biases in
milder form.
In 1910 Praechter dubbed him the
‘Neoplatonic Chrysippus’, the second founder of the Neoplatonic school (114, cited
by Dodds), which is appropriate for someone who was both synthesizer and
innovator.
Iamblichus systematized the
Platonism he inherited both methodologically and philosophically. In the first
respect he articulated an educational curriculum, which may have begun with the
Pythagorean curriculum before proceeding to the study of Aristotelian and then Platonic
texts (DA 6-7).
Iamblichus’ major surviving work in
religious thought is the De Mysteriis, an abbreviation of the title
coined by Ficino in the fifteenth century: De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum,
Chaldaeorum, Assyriorum. As Athanassiadi has argued (1995, 246) this title
may be less extravagant than it is usually thought to be if Iamblichus’
knowledge of Hermetic doctrine and Egyptian religion generally is given its
due. The actual title is ‘The Master Abamôn’s Response to Porphyry’s Letter to
Anebo, and the solutions to the difficulties contained in it’.
The DM’s combination of
oriential wisdom with Platonic philosophy alarmed earlier scholars like Dodds,
but the suspicions remain alive in Armstrong 1987, 184, who refers to ‘the more
spiritual, Plotinian, side of the tradition” and in Wallis, who contrasts
Plotinian rationalism with Iamblichus’ superstition (1972, 100). However, other
scholars assert that Iamblichus’ thought is more attractive precisely because
it recognizes the limits of Plotinus’ putative rationalism, as in Shaw’s
distinction between the theurgical Platonism of Iamblichus and his descendants
and the non-theurgical Platonism of Porphyry and Plotinus (1995, 5).
Thus, differences among scholars
tend now to turn more on how similar or not the complementary relationship
between theurgy and philosophy in Iamblichus makes his thought in comparison to
earlier Neoplatonists. In other words, disputes about theurgy are more
fine-grained—and truer to the texts—than they were in Dodds’s milieu. A softer
version of these judgments appears in FD’s edition of DA: ‘With
Iamblichus and his advocacy of theurgy as a necessary complement to theology, Platonism
also becomes more explicitly a religion. Before his time, the mystery imagery
so popular with Platonist philosophers (going back to Plato himself), was, so
far as can be seen just that—imagery’ (3). They maintain that theurgy is ‘is
really only magic with a philosophical underpinning…Partly this was a response
to a Christian emphasis on the miracle-working holy man’ (7).
