Un-Knowing the Unknowable God:

Apprehension of the Transcendent in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism

A prospectus for a graduate seminar in Ancient Philosophy

In the first 2 centuries CE, academic Platonists and Platonizing Gnostics posited an increasingly transcendental first principle or supreme “One” above what had formerly been considered the ultimate stratum of reality, whether that realty was conceived in terms of intelligible Forms, an Aristotelian self-thinking Nous, or a Pythagorean duality of Monad and Dyad. This progressive transcendentalization of the first principle, which split the essentially two–level metaphysics of Plato into three distinct strata, required increasingly sophisticated strategies of mediation both to explain the original process of ontogenesis–– i.e. how Being itself came into existence–– and also, more importantly, to provide a means of establishing some connection with the ever–more elusive transcendent principle. This tendency was particularly evident in the traditions of religio–philosophical speculation for which some kind of mystical or ritual ‘ascent’ towards the supreme principle was of central importance, and reached its apparent florescence with Plotinus and the contemporaneous Platonizing Sethian Gnostics whose treatises were known to have been read in his school.

This course will examine the entire history of the notion of the First Principle “beyond Being” from its presumed origin in certain enigmatic passages in Plato (especially the Good “beyond Being in seniority and overwhelming power” at Republic 509b9–10 and the “absolutely One” that cannot truly “be” of the first hypothesis of the Parmenides, 137c–142a), through the extant fragmentary evidence for the thought of Early Academicians such as Plato’s successor Speusippus and one branch of Middle Platonism, including Neopythagoreans such as Eudorus of Alexandria and Moderatus of Gades, and onward into the major Gnostic thinkers of the 2^nd century, including Basilides, the Valentinians, and the Platonizing Sethian Gnostics who were presumably the immediate precursors of Plotinus (evident in both Patristic heresiologies and in Coptic translations found at Nag Hammadi). Then we will examine in great detail Plotinus’ notion of the One “above” the second hypostasis (i.e. above both Being and Intellect) and attempt to situate this idea within its intellectual–historical context, comparing and contrasting it with the thought of Middle Platonists such as Numenius, the roughly contemporaneous Anonymous Turin Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, and Porphyry’s Sententiae. We will also cover the progressive formalization of transcendence in the later Neoplatonists–– Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius–– who posited a series of increasingly transcendent “Ones” above that of Plotinus.

Themes to be discussed include (i) the various complex derivational mechanisms by which the 2^nd stratum of reality–– and multiplicity itself–– was understood to emerge from the first principle; (ii) the relation of these derivational strategies to the problem of evil in late antique philosophy and Gnosticism; (iii) the development of sophisticated apophatic or negative–theological discourse about the transcendent principle; (iv) the nature of metaphorical language in the philosophy of transcendence; (v) the various methods for apprehending the absolutely unknowable first principle “above” Intellect itself as suggested by Neoplatonists and Gnostics: aphairêsis, “un–knowing” or “learned ignorance,” visionary mysticism, and transcendental epistemology; and finally (vi) recent debates in the history of philosophy concerning the relative chronology of Plotinus, the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides, and the Platonizing Sethian tractates from Nag Hammadi: a question which ultimately bears on the definition and significance of Neoplatonism itself.

While this course will be accessible to advanced philosophy or Classics undergraduates, it is primarily intended for graduate students working in later Greek and medieval philosophy or in the history of religions in late antiquity. Knowledge of Greek, Coptic, or Latin would be helpful but is not required.