Nature and the Platonic Tradition

According to Origen (c. 185-253), a Christian Platonist of the early church, creation is a location of paideia — the place in which the fallen soul, through education and development, can return to their original immaterial existence through the Logos. By inscribing the material world with the function of paideia, Origen betrays a moral, rather than scientific, interest in the examination of nature. I will draw on Origen’s structure of relation between the natural world and human person, and the Platonic principles that undergird it, to elucidate the function of paideia in view of the soul’s journey of return into God. I will conclude on a contemporary ecological note to suggest that Origen offers a non-exploitative and anthropocentric image of the relationship between the human person and the cosmos, making him an ideal candidate for a theological and theoretical consideration of contemporary ecological reform. 

Understanding Thomas Aquinas’ Neoplatonic theology of ‘participation’ as μέθεξις is key to interpreting his broader theological system––especially the relationship between the doctrines of God and creation. In this paper, I first retrieve classical Aristotelian (κοινωνία/Koinonia) and Neoplatonic (μέθεξις/Methexis) articulations of the doctrine of participation. I then show that Thomas affirms a unique version of the Neoplatonic notion of participation via an exposition of his commentaries on the Liber de causis and Dionysius’ De divinis nominibus. Once a clear genealogical and textual foundation is laid, I perform an analysis of the ontological structure of Thomas’ rendering of participation. This involves a discussion of items such as divine simplicity, actus purus, creation, and his famous essence/esse distinction. From this, I perform a critical analysis of the relationship between Thomas’ doctrines of actus purus and participation, suggesting that a contradiction may be derived from concepts of infinity. I call this the “Argument from Infinity.”

This paper explores the reinterpretation of classical philosophical figures, such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato himself, by Neoplatonic philosophers during Late Antiquity, with a focus on the Neoplatonists Iamblichus and Proclus. It examines how they reimagined these wisdom figures from ancient Hellenic tradition as semi-divine beings, also drawing on the *Chaldean Oracles*. The study highlights a shift from the traditional portrayal of philosophers as mere rational thinkers to special souls endowed with the ability to save humanity through philosophical discourse. Their unique mode of participation in the divine allows them to ascend the divine hierarchy to establish themselves at the ontic level of angels. To support this thesis, the speech will explore theological concepts such as "establishment" and "revelation," challenging conventional views on the metaphysics of participation in Neoplatonism and arguing that Neoplatonists viewed true philosophers as theurgists, capable of uniquely participating in the divine realm.

It’s widely assumed that whatever interest Plato has in nature is entirely subordinate to his manifest interest in transcendence or “becoming like God.” This paper aims to show that in the Republic, Symposium, andTimaeus, Plato is equally interested in transforming our understanding of nature itself, and that he does this by transforming our understanding of transcendence itself. In these dialogues, Plato suggests that we “become like God” only when we understand both ourselves and nature in general as pointing beyond and (often) striving to go beyond merely materialistic or mechanical ways of functioning, toward rational self-government. Transcendence, as we see in the Romantic poets and Hegel and Whitehead, is nature’s self-transcendence. And people who see this kind of transcendence everywhere, as Plato and these writers do, aren’t likely to despoil nature as we currently do.