by Andrew Kuiper

Stephen R. L. Clark. Cities and Thrones and Powers: Towards a Plotinian Politics. Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2022. 328 pp., $22.95.

Stephen R. L. Clark. How the Worlds Became: Philosophy & the Oldest Stories. Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2023. 340 pp., $19.95.

There has never been a time when Plato’s dialogues lacked readers interested in politics. While the medieval Christian readers of the Timaeus (or rather what they had of it) inevitably considered Plato in light of cosmic providential governance of nature, they also kept Cicero’s platonically infused political philosophy close at hand. Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the entirety of the Platonic dialogues into Latin during the Renaissance gave Western readers unprecedented access to Plato’s thought. With respect to Platonic politics, it was momentous that the Statesman, Republic, and Laws were able to be read and commented on in full. More recently, an emphasis on the political dimension of Plato has characterized the scholars who are indebted to the work of Leo Strauss. However, what has garnered less attention (almost nothing!) are the political dimensions of late antique Platonists (often, and somewhat polemically, called Neoplatonists).

For this reviewer, the term Neoplatonist is used without prejudice, and simply refers to the flowering of Platonic thought under the auspices of Plotinus (3rd century AD). Plotinus and those after him (Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, Damascius) are often scapegoated as the illegitimate systematizers of the Platonic dialogues. Almost simultaneously with the charge of overt rationalism, the Neoplatonists are also accused of harboring unphilosophical concern for mysticism and religion. But this is to work with a predefined notion of philosophy as not genuinely concerned with theology and religious experience—a position difficult to extract from the Platonic dialogues themselves. By my estimation, there is nothing in the Neoplatonists that could not be seen as a plausible extension of Plato’s own concerns. Even more, if Plato is concerned with politics (an assumption with which this reader agrees), then we ought to expect later Platonists to be concerned with it as well. It is within the horizon of these assumptions that Stephen R. L. Clark, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool, has written his lovely volume Cities and Thrones and Powers: Towards a Plotinian Politics.

Many readers will be startled by the vast scope of Clark’s treatment. Before writing on any topic that would be considered “political” in the narrow sense, he investigates Plotinus’ account of life, the really real, unity and diversity, the entanglement of the human and non-human (a particularly significant subject throughout Clark’s work), soul, mind, and the cosmos—in short, a dazzling rundown of every major metaphysical subject dealt with in the Plotinian system. Peppered throughout are references to contemporary philosophy of science, systematic theology, anthropology, science fiction, and even fantasy. All of this breadth, however, is disciplined and ordered toward the argument of each chapter. Clark practically breathes the Platonic corpus and Neoplatonic commentary tradition, and none of these outside sources are used as a substitute for investigating the texts. The citations from Numenius, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius are a particularly valuable feature of this book as they provide insightful commentary on Platonic questions that are difficult to access outside of expensive scholarly volumes.

Clark uses his own intellectually omnivorous approach in the opening chapters as a way of preparing the reader. Specifically, he is preparing the reader for the argument that, even beyond the soul, the polis and the entire cosmos form an analogy. The Platonic justification for this Plotinian emphasis can easily be found in the Timaeus and the Laws. Clark constantly compares (though never fully identifies) this Plotinian polis with the Kallipolis of the Republic, Magnesia of the Laws, the Virtuous City of Al-Farabi, and the general sense of microcosm and macrocosm informing medieval political society funded by Calcidius and Boethius. Clark successfully contextualizes Plotinus within larger and sometimes very different Neoplatonic currents in Christian and Muslim societies. All of this is prosecuted with a constructive emphasis and never devolves into the antiquarian.

If any criticism could be made, it is that the book is so valuable and interesting, so worth rereading, that the narrower questions of modern political theory tend to get overwhelmed. Perhaps that should challenge us to reconsider what is “political”. Still, this reader experienced a slight disappointment that there were not more straightforward assessments of how Plotinus might make an entry into modern discussions of political theory. Something like Dominic O’Meara’s Platonopolis is probably a necessary companion piece for that task.

This is not to suggest that Clark ignores the more narrow sense of the political. Platonopolis is in fact the name given for the philosopher’s city that Plotinus and the Emperor Gallienus are rumored to have planned (though never attempted). It is while imagining what a Platonic ideal city could look like completely outside of the era of independent Greek city-states that Clark gives his most interesting political insights. He often makes use of passages from the Emperor Julian who was, as far as we know, the only seriously practicing pagan Neoplatonist to become an emperor. A philosophical city in the age of the Roman empire would necessarily be transformed by that model of the empire and the figure of the emperor. It would have to inhabit a world at once more formally unified and more practically cosmopolitan. As Clark says:

It is possible–though this is to go far beyond any contemporary evidence–that Platonopolis was to be more than a simple well-organized polis. Perhaps Gallienus at least may have dreamed that it would be a genuine metropolis, at once a new home for a truly ‘godly’ emperor, and the center from which imperial power would radiate. … Somehow the sprawling empire must have a focal point, and that point must itself be worth our admiration. The city itself must also have a focal point–a place where the merely earthly reveals the heavenly. (155)

Obviously, something of this model informed the fourth-century Christian historian and bishop, Eusebius, and the imperial political theology he developed, which remained a contested and multifarious issue in Christian history. For those of us with less of a taste for empire and emperors (myself included), the vision of a simultaneously diverse and unified cosmopolitan political body still remains attractive, though the answer to what could possibly form the concrete center of such a politics remains enigmatic.

In How the Worlds Became: Philosophy and the Oldest Stories, Clark also makes use of what he calls a “Plotinian heuristic”. And while the topic has ostensibly shifted from politics to myth, there is a significant amount of overlap between the two books — even duplicated passages! These are not oversights but rather invitations to read the two books in light of each other. Why does Clark feel the need to repeat certain arguments and passages in both books? How the Worlds Became is most immediately a defense of Stoic and Neoplatonic theological allegoresis of Homer and Hesiod. Instead of being, as Luc Brisson posits, a rearguard action by embarrassed philosophers intent on saving the myths, Clark posits that these modes of reading are faithful to the actual intention and practice of the myth-makers. If, in the words of Plotinus, cosmic processes and eternal realities cannot be adequately expressed in language, we are necessarily bound by mythic narratives and imagery which will necessarily verge on the absurd or even grotesque. Clark is a brilliant scholar of late antique Mediterranean religion and philosophy, but he does not artificially limit himself to Greco-Roman paganism. He incorporates generous amounts of ancient near eastern myth as well as a profound grasp of Jewish and Christian exegetical practices. In the midst of his readings of Ptah, Isis, and Osiris as well as Hittite and Babylonian creation myths, he reminds his readers (and particularly his fellow Christians) that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. How myths should be read has been directly related to the question of how sacred scripture should be read at least as early as Philo and the polemics between Origen and Celsus. Clark cites St. Maximus the Confessor who, when criticized at his trial for not reading the words of Scripture as simply as possible, replied as follows: “If one may not delve into the sayings of Scripture and the Fathers with a speculative mind, the whole Bible falls apart, Old and New Testament alike” (12).

A short review cannot do justice to the total scope of Clark’s reflections on myth, so I will choose to focus on one theme that also appears prominently in Cities and Thrones and Powers. Throughout his life and work, Clark has defended animal rights and practiced vegetarianism from a Christian Platonic perspective. In this volume, these projects are charmingly wedded to a reading of folk and fairy tales as holding deep moral truths and not simply as anthropomorphic projections. The notion that “once upon a time non-human animals could all talk–or else we humans could all listen. Once upon a time there was no definite boundary between the many sorts of beings” (227) appears in Amerindian and ancient Near Eastern myth (including the book of Genesis) as well as the tale of the Golden Age in Plato’s Statesman. And of course, modern evolutionary theory has had the salutary effect of reminding us of our genetic solidarity with all of creation: “In brief, our present conviction that ‘we human beings’ are of a radically other kind than other living things is incompatible with our own preferred theories of evolutionary change, and the smug conceit with which too many commentators address ‘anthropomorphic fantasies’ as suitable only for ‘children’ has no clear intellectual basis” (229). While others might use this argument as a way of devaluing human life or the soul, Clark’s Christian Platonism leads him to elevate the dignity of all things and see our human selfhood as intimately mixed with the biomes and organisms that surround us. There is no neat division of outside and inside. Armed with the Plotinian dictum from Enneads III.8 that everything in the cosmos aspires toward theoria, Clark makes a compelling case for what I call an enchanted posthumanism.

Even more interesting to me is Clark’s engagement with the Christian and pre-Christian discourse about theriomorphic and anthropomorphic depictions of the gods. Some ancient writers perceived an inherent moral advantage in the Greek depictions of the divine as having human shape. Theriomorphic depictions of the divine, as common among the Egyptians, supposedly encourages more bestial behavior and more materialistic conceptions of theology. This trope can be seen from Plutarch to Virgil to Hegel. From the collection Values in a Time of Upheaval, we see that even Joseph Ratzinger sees in Daniel 7 a new political theology emerging which seeks the dynamic and anthropological kingdom of the Son of Man as a clear progression away from the bestial and gluttonous theriomorphic kingdoms. Clark is not so quick to see the admiration for the form or characteristics of animals as necessarily “bestial”. Instead, he suspects a kind of narrow ethical humanism has buttressed its own poverty with an act of arbitrary exclusion:

Humanism, in order to safeguard the interests of other human tribes, requires us to turn from the nonhuman. It is not difficult to see why, on the other hand, many animals have struck us as divine, and why rulers have often sought to seize their mystique for themselves, choosing lion or eagle or horse or wild boar as their emblems (231).

To this I would add (and Clark would certainly affirm) that animal emblems are positively deployed in Christian visual culture. The evangelical emblems are primarily animals, the very same animals that were used in ancient near eastern depictions of the divine pantheon. The gentle but staggering strength of the bull for St. Luke. The ferocity of the keen-sighted eagle for St. John. The imposing visage and lithe muscles of the lion for St. Mark. And also, one among many, the human image for St. Matthew. Even here, the human form is complicated by adding wings. These four figures are of course themselves taken from the book of Ezekiel where they are the likeness of the divine chariot-throne, the merkavah. Clearly, biblical apocalyptic does not demand an anthropological reduction: quite the opposite, it revels in riotous explosions and interminglings of the human and the animal. Christ himself, the One fully united to human nature, continues to be symbolically named and biblically presented as both the Lion of Judah and the decidedly freakish multi-horned Lamb of God who was slain before the foundation of the world.