Ritual and Reason

Today's crisis of culture has happened before

The way of life of an entire civilization is threatened by an upstart. The new creed started on the radical fringes of society, but over the span of two centuries, it has won the loyalty of lawyers, statesmen and educators. Conservative intellectuals have tried to resist its weed-like growth. They have poured contempt on its tenets, mocked its lack of rigor. But this was not enough to stem the tide. The generation of conservative thinkers after them realizes that however sound their predecessors’ thinking, it will avail nothing without a vehicle to popularize it and to convey it to the masses. To prevent annihilation by the new creed, they will have to revive what their elders scorned. They turn back to the old religion.

This story is familiar, but not new. The civilization in question is that of pagan antiquity, the conservative intellectuals are those we now call Neoplatonists, and the upstart creed is Christianity. One reason the Christian threat was so effective is that, for over a century, the pagan philosophers’ own cynicism had hastened the decline of their ancestral religion. Back in the second century, Plutarch had seen philosophy as complementary to the lively cultus of Hellenistic paganism. But by the middle of the third, his successors were cultured despisers, who regarded religion as at best a regrettable concession to hoi polloi.

The Ascetic

Plotinus (205-270) was instrumental in this respect. He taught by word and example a strenuously ascetic form of Platonism with an individualistic slant. The true philosopher, he taught, could escape the prison of the body and the world, and so ascend to spiritual union with God, the One. This was something that anyone with suitable intellectual faculties could achieve, entirely by their own merits. It was a universal system, unrelated to any local religious cult. On David Goodhart’s polarity of “somewheres” versus “anywheres,” Plotinus was very much an “anywhere” man. According to his biographer and chief disciple Porphyry (c.234-305), Plotinus refused to discuss his parentage or nation, proclaiming his true homeland as the realm of the Forms and his true father as God alone. His kingdom was not of this world. But unlike the Nazarene before him, whose claims to universality were grounded firmly in the specificity of his Jewish tribe and nation, for Plotinus, bonds of blood and soil were social chains from which the superior soul should strive to be liberated. By the time he died in 270, he was renowned as a spiritual master who had several times actually managed to achieve this liberation from the flesh and union with the One. Plotinus’ muscular philosophy of ascetic “flight from the alone to the alone” offered a fitting spirituality for the ambitious classes of an empire striving for political unity. His counsel was widely sought among the wealthy Roman elite.

The shadow side of Plotinus’ success, though, became apparent even among his immediate disciples. His spirituality offered great rewards for the few, but little if anything for the many. In the old, local cults, any son of the parish might be designated priest, fulfilling ritual duties without special training or spiritual experience. Now, it seemed, only the great philosophers could be true priests, for the only true temples were those interior ones accessible to their prodigious minds. In this regard, Porphyry echoed his master’s view. He graciously condescended to indulge his wife’s participation in the local sacrifices, but when pressed, considered such religiosity unnecessary, or worse – and this may be the fruit of Christian influence – he deemed the local rites efforts to appease unsavory and inferior daemons. So, Porphyry recognized the widening gap between civic cult and the philosophical ideal, but he thought it not worth the effort of bridging. As long as the philosophical elite could continue their spiritual and intellectual pursuits unhindered, it mattered little what the plebs offered at their village altars.

The Priest

It was Porphyry’s contemporary, Iamblichus (c. 240-325), also part of Plotinus’ circle, who saw that the threat to Greek religion implied, more seriously, a threat to Greek culture as a whole. Iamblichus understood that the universal Platonic philosophy proclaimed by Plotinus could not be excised from its local, culturally specific instantiations in popular religion without the risk of killing both. It was in the myriad stories of local deities that the singular truth of philosophy was conserved in particular forms. In the ritual outworking of those stories, the Platonic pursuit of union with God was made accessible not just to the few, but to the many, and indeed to the whole cosmos, according to the spiritual capacity of each being. The village temple was a local repository of universal memory, indeed a local expression of the universal soul. And this was true, averred Iamblichus, whether it was a temple to a Greek divinity, one of his own native Syrian gods, or one of the Egyptian pantheon which he came to adopt. These divinities were not to be rejected, as Porphyry had suggested, as malevolent daemons: rather, Iamblichus countered, time had proven the local gods the most effective means of warding against such malicious spirits. The old religion protected the people and inspired virtue, not vice, in them, channeling the power of the One through localized instantiations. Far from being an obstacle to philosophy, local religion was necessary for its preservation and propagation, and for that of the rich cultural inheritance of Greece.

Iamblichus’ mission to reconcile philosophy and pagan religion ultimately failed. For while pagan philosophy had been busy digging up its own religious roots, a wild mustard bush had spread prodigiously over the topsoil of the Empire. Christianity was popular among the masses, but even in Plotinus’ day held increasing influence in the elite schools of pagan philosophy, too. His frequent invective against those he calls “gnostics” indicates this much. At the end of the third century, Emperor Diocletian launched a final wave of persecutions against the new religion, which strengthened the pagan philosophers’ hands, but not for long. Oppression also served then, as it has through the centuries, to consolidate Christian resistance, and the numbers of the faithful grew. So, by 312, when the emperor St Constantine converted and the next year proclaimed the toleration of Christianity in the Edict of Milan, the writing was on the wall for the pagan philosophers. By the middle of the fourth century, the best way for them to survive was to move away from the religious brand of Platonism espoused by Iamblichus and again to separate philosophy clearly from religion, teaching only what would not rouse the ire of the Christian authorities.

The Emperor

Pagan philosophers enjoyed a brief reprieve in 361-363 under Emperor Julian the Philosopher, known better to posterity by his Christian moniker, “the Apostate.” He enthusiastically revived Iamblichus’ project. Offering firm intellectual grounds for the restoration of pagan religion for the masses, Iamblichus’ religious Platonism had the potential to replace Christian thought as the official theology of the Empire. Having learnt from his forefathers’ examples that violent persecution of Christians watered the seedbeds of martyrdom, Julian tried instead to cut them off from the intellectual life of the Empire. Think of today’s “cancellations,” as he deposed Christian teachers of philosophy from their academic posts. What he could not do, however, was prevent the churches from feeding and clothing the pagan poor. Nor could Julian’s desire to decentralize and dissipate power along the boundaries of local deities’ patronage, essentially a reversion to pagan parochialism, halt the Constantinian momentum towards political unity to which Christian monotheism had lent its formidable mass. After Julian’s death in 363, the remainder of the fourth century saw Christian reprisals against pagan philosophers, including the execution of Julian’s mentor Maximus, a disciple of Iamblichus.

The Successor

By the turn of the fifth century, pagan devotion was largely forbidden in public and retreated to the private sphere. Persecution of pagan philosophers progressed, climaxing in 415 with the mob execution of Hypatia in Alexandria under the alleged approval of the city’s bishop, Cyril. Nonetheless, the teaching of pagan philosophy was tolerated there to the degree that it did not conflict openly with Christian theology. So, sixteen years later, a prodigious nineteen-year-old would travel there to study Aristotle, whose works were deemed theologically neutral enough not to attract the suspicion of the Church. This young man was Proclus (412-485). Though born in Constantinople and educated at first in Alexandria, his name would come to be suffixed with that of Athens, protectorate of the eponymous goddess of wisdom and home of Plato’s Academy. Restored by Marcus Aurelius in the 170s following the sacking of the city by Rome in 86, the Academy continued to flourish. There, Proclus was guided from his Aristotelian rudiments to the higher mysteries of Plato. His master was Syrianus, the head of the Academy, who bore the title Successor or Diadochus of the great father of philosophy. Proclus progressed so quickly that when in 437 Syrianus died, he took his place, serving as Diadochus for almost half a century. Never marrying, he devoted himself to teaching, writing – and to religion. On the foundations laid by Iamblichus, Proclus built a complex and subtle philosophical edifice, sharing the conviction that the various local cults of the world were divine revelations of a single truth, so that, in words recorded by his biographer Marinus, the philosopher ought to be “the common priest of the entire world.” Under Proclus’ leadership, the Academy became as much a religious house as a school of the intellect. Unlike the school in the more Christian-dominated Alexandria, pagans under his tutelage in Athens not only survived, but thrived. It was decades after his death that, in 531, the Academy was closed for good on the orders of the Christian Emperor Justinian.

The Fathers

This story of Platonic philosophy’s bifurcation between rationalism and ritualism is salutary to modern Christians, with analogues repeating through the history of the Church. At the broadest level, the more rationalistic, Western Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry had greater influence on the Western Church, typified particularly by St Augustine. The ritualistic, Eastern Platonism of Iamblichus and Proclus were more influential in the Eastern Church, via the anonymous monk who identified himself with St Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian philosopher won to Christ by St Paul in Acts 17.

St Augustine had little time for what he knew of Eastern Platonism. Cicero’s Hortensius and other Platonici libri which he tells us he studied in the Confessions were products of the Western school. In book 10 of the City of God, Augustine amplifies Porphyry’s objections and condemns the ritualistic practices promoted by Iamblichus as necromancy and discourse with demons. The particular target of his ire was theurgy. This literally means “divine work,” and constituted a sort of ritual magic by which certain tokens of a god were used to invoke that divinity’s powers. For example, in a fragment of an otherwise lost work, De sacrificio et magia, Proclus cites the movement of heliotrope flowers, the luster of the sunstone, the cockcrow at dawn and the mane of the lion as symbols of the sun-god which are immanent in the cosmos. These could be ritually used to channel the power of Helios. Under the more Plotinian, Western kind of Platonism, the material world was something from which the adept should strive to escape by an inward turn to the soul, a motif which reappears in Augustine’s spirituality. But under Eastern Platonism, the entire cosmos offers multifarious revelations of God. The universe is replete with divine images which, however dim and blurred, participate in the energies of the gods whose likeness they bear. Through proper ritual use of these symbols, humans too can participate in the divine energies. Despite Porphyry and St Augustine’s objections, however, to participate did not mean to control. Iamblichus himself countered Porphyry’s complaints directly in a letter still extant, insisting that theurgy in no wise implied that mortals can manipulate the gods, but rather, the symbols inherent in nature are vehicles by which the gods’ wills are accomplished through human hands.

St Dionysius certainly did not share St Augustine’s hostility towards theurgy. He made it the intellectual basis for his sacramental and liturgical theology. Borrowing directly from Proclus, in some instances, almost verbatim, he articulates a vision of the cosmos as a theophany, the revelation not of gods but of the One, true and Triune God. To describe this theophanic cosmos, he coined the term “hierarchy,” by which he means not the power structure that serves as a bogeyman to modern progressives, but in the literal sense of the term, a “sacred order.” Everything flows from God, whose Oneness and Threeness demonstrates that He is beyond even the distinction of unity and multiplicity. God is utterly transcendent, yet simultaneously immanent, and so patent of participation through such effective symbols as water, oil, bread, and wine, as revealed by the Divine Word Incarnate and in Scripture. The elements of baptism, anointing and Eucharist are each compounds of God’s work and man’s. On the one hand, they are the product of the seasons moved by the celestial spheres, which is to say, God’s work; yet also of the human work of harvesting, pressing, mixing, and baking. The sacraments therefore express a synergy between the Creator and the created. In this, they are a microcosm of true reality, the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man. As the Logos which gives form to all creation, He reveals Himself in everything that exists.

Dionysius drew on Proclus’ Eastern Platonism to clarify that precisely because God is Incarnate, He is known not despite, but through the things of this world, and that the vehicle for knowing Him is the communal practice of religious ritual. Like Proclus, he does not limit this commonality, or Communion, to the human mind alone. All things symbolize God according to their capacity and so speak a non-verbal language of adoration, a cosmic hymn to God redolent of Psalm 19 and the Benedicite sung by the Three Children. As Proclus put it in the De Sacrificio, “all things pray according to their own station, and sing hymns” through “vertical chains” of reality. Whereas those “chains” for Proclus meant the various strata of pagan heroes, daemons and demigods linking the lower world to the One, for St Dionysius and his successors they are the saints and angels, headed by the Blessed Theotokos, who lift up the prayers of the Church and cosmos to Christ. This hierarchical vision in no way compromises the unique mediation of Christ, for it is always Him working through the saints and angels, and indeed throughout the entire created order. Christ alone intercedes to the Father, yet all beings may participate in His intercession according to their capacity. There is no mistaking Proclus’ influence here, but this is not just the fanciful elaboration of pagan Hellenism over some pristine and simple substrate of Hebraic thought. One can find analogous angelology in Second Temple Jewish literature, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees, and in non-canonical Christian writings of the Apostolic age. What Dionysius does with Eastern Platonic theurgic philosophy is to amplify the full cosmic significance of the liturgy of the Church. The Church is the Body of Christ through which all things may be all in Him, with Him as Head governing the whole.

St Dionysius’ theurgic Platonism continued to influence the Eastern Church through the likes of St Maximus the Confessor, St John of Damascus, and St Gregory Palamas, but he was also far from inconsequential in the West. Mediated by translation into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena, Dionysius went on to influence such fathers as St Bonaventure, the Victorines and, most famously, St Thomas Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor took the Areopagite’s sub-apostolic identity as read and cited him as an authority higher even than St Augustine. Eastern Platonism also stole covertly into the mediaeval West via the Arabic recension of the so-called Liber de causis, long mistakenly attributed to Aristotle, but in fact a paraphrase of Proclus’ Elements of Theology. It is evident too in the hierarchical strata portrayed in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The Reformers

But later, the West would be riven by disputes between rationalists and ritualists over much the same territory as that delineated centuries before among the Platonists. By Luther’s time, Dionysius’ authenticity was in doubt. When the great Reformer dismissed the pseudo-Areopagite, “whoever he was,” as plus Platonizans quam Christianizans, what irked him was not only his apparent appropriation of apostolic authority, but the ritualistic, sacramental application of Platonism. Luther was not anti-sacramental; nonetheless, for him, the inward turn of conscience trumped communal ritual obligation, and the theology of the Cross took precedence over the theology of God’s glory revealed in the cosmos. Calvin’s hyper-Augustinianism bears further marks of his master’s more Plotinian inward turn, particularly in his receptionist interpretation of the sacraments. For the Calvinist, the sacraments are not objective vehicles of divine grace, but their efficacy depends on the recipient’s inward state of faith. And while the “book of nature” bears its artist creator’s fingerprints, it can hardly be described as sacramental. Hence the devotional media of art, music or incense are therefore ephemera at best, and at worst idolatrous distractions from the pure, inward worship of a contrite heart. While the churches of the Reformation have always harbored a diversity of opinions towards ritual, an underlying hermeneutic of suspicion against beauty is undeniable.

The Moderns

Nonetheless, the pendulum between Eastern Platonic religious ritualism and disdainful Western rationalism did not stop swinging at the Reformation. It has carried on right to the present. It swung from the rationalist Reformers to the ritualist Caroline divines, from the Puritan Commonwealth to the monarchist and sacramentalist 1662 Prayer Book, from high-and-dry Anglican verbosity to Methodist weekly communion, and from Cartesian and Kantian interiority to the Romantic, Arts and Crafts and Oxford Movements which reacted against the moralistic deism and the utilitarian, technocratic spirit of their age. It swung from the scientific occultism of the elite Blavatksyite salons, through the Great War, to the climax of inter-war Anglo-Catholicism which offered the requiem masses so needed by the people to commend their sons’ souls to God. From this swing emerged the conscious medieval aestheticism of the Inklings.

Nor, however, did the pendulum stop there. The 1960s marked a decisive swing away from the ritual of organized religion. The liturgical reforms which followed the Second Vatican Council were a part of this swing, betraying a certain lack of faith by the Roman Catholic Church in her ancient rites which Protestant churches would soon mimic. Instead, within the whole Western Church there was a boom in interior and experiential forms of spirituality, including the charismatic movement. Outside arose a new fascination with East Asian religions and paganism. All of these subjective spiritualities eased the way towards mass apostasy and atheism, embraced even by certain Christian theologians of the day. Liberal deism, historical-critical Biblical scholarship, liberation theology and its particularist offshoots have also played their part, subjecting the veracity of divine revelation in the Church to external, rational criteria, respectively psychology, empiricism, Marxism, and postmodern theory. Hence, liberal churches today offer the same thing as secular modernity: individual self-fulfillment via liberation not through, but from the hierarchies of Church, nature, nation, and family. If there is any divinity at all, it is only to be found within the self, not mediated through the other. The saints are no more than exemplars, the angels an unnecessary hypothesis. The sacraments can be received in the heart by online livestream. The created order is barely relevant to salvation. Revelation is direct, or not at all. There is now only me and my God, and like Plotinus, I must fly to him alone.

But there are signs of another swing today. Like the ancient philosophers, Christianity has been busy rationalizing itself into obscurity. And now, as in the days of Iamblichus, the old religion faces the threat of an upstart. A cuckoo nests in the Church, academy, business world and political establishment. However, the ancient pagans’ enemy was easier to identify. Ours is more nebulous, driven by a shadowy coalition of agents with uncertain motives. The progressive new religion of race and gender critical theory which has swept through Western society plays all too conveniently into the cynical machinations of Communist China, Russia, and political Islam, none of which have shown particular interest in the preservation of Western culture and liberties: hence the swing. Though one might hesitate to put Richard Dawkins into the same camp as Plotinus, it is surely noteworthy that the old guard of cultured despisers of religion are beginning to admit that even if it is not true, it may be needed to save the culture they enjoy. They are threatened with the same cancellations that once befell their opponents. In the post-Dawkins generation, Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson are among those who, like Porphyry, concede psychological and historical value to their historic religion, but do not think it necessary to adhere to it themselves, instead taking its stories as motifs for the creative pursuit of ultimately individual spiritual growth. But there are also those of the younger generation yet who, like Iamblichus, see the necessity not only of the mythos, but of religious practice and adherence. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Paul Kingsnorth are exemplars of these protégés, a former atheist and pagan respectively, who have now reverted fully to the old religion in its most ritualistic and sacramental of forms, Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Among Protestants, too, there are those such as the Anglican Hans Boersma who follow the Dionysian path, calling for a reappraisal of classical metaphysics and its concomitant sacramental worldview. Peter Leithart and Phillip Cary call for a renewal of the sacramental life from their respective Reformed and Lutheran perspectives. Across the Christian spectrum, the gap between ritual and reason is closing again.

Beyond Atheism

Is the story of the pagan philosophers repeating itself with new actors in our lifetime? Iamblichus, Julian the Apostate and Proclus’ efforts to revive the old religion were too little, too late. It may not yet be so for us. But we should be clear about what is necessary. Attempts at preserving an entire culture at the purely intellectual level, by elites pursuing wisdom in elevated enclaves, did not work for the ancient pagan philosophers, for the high-minded Reformers or the Enlightenment rationalists. The intellectual trickle-down they desired has watered the canopy but failed to soak into the soil. A universal religion of reason practiced in the temples of the mind is not earthy enough for us creatures of blood and dust. The growing numbers of younger people turning to traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy are a sign of our need for altar, sacrifice, and sacrament, for this is how God reveals Himself in the cosmos and calls us into Communion with Him. But in Iamblichus’ day, it was the loss of the local cultus that accelerated the collapse of Greek paganism. Now that Christians are beginning to reclaim lost ground on the battlefield of universal reason, we need to turn more attention towards the local, to the mediation of the universal through the cult of our national and regional saints, rites, and customs. We need to rediscover the supernatural in the natural, the Logos in the cosmos, certainly – but also God in ordinary, the universal in the particular, in each man and woman, parish and nation, story, sacrifice and song.