Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art (SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions)

This book is an invaluable resource for understanding Neoplatonism’s role in Western culture. One can only hope that the resurgence of the ideas expressed in this book will lead to another renaissance.

To appreciate the importance – and the boldness – of this book, one must understand how materialism conquered the Western mind in a process we call “modernity.” By the current century, the materialist dogma had been subsumed by postmodernism, which holds that everything whatsoever is a “social construct” or a product of the “social discourse.” Postmodernism, then, categorically denies the existence of nature, of any enduring reality that transcends “society.”Turn from this intellectual history to Plato’s image of the prisoners in the cave. The cave is the social world, a realm of darkness and delusion (i.e., opinion), whereas the outside of the cave, where the sun shines directly, is nature (i.e., truth). Postmodern thinkers deny that there is a world outside the cave, the realm of nature or truth. In the absence of truth, there is only empty opinion, only the darkness of the cave, only the tyranny of arbitrary social authority – the nightmares of Orwell and Kafka and many other 20th-century writers. And the only sensible goal in this ugly, gray world is the accumulation of social power. This, in fact, is the avowed aim of the postmodern ideology that dominates our universities, namely, to gain control over the social discourse in order to “change the truth” and thus the structure of reality itself.But trying to control the social discourse in order to implement a political program is incompatible with the purposes of scholarship. Not surprisingly, then, these materialist and postmodern academics have succeeded in almost completely falsifying the history of Western thought in the service of remaking the social discourse in their own image. As Arthur Versluis admirably demonstrates throughout the book, the categories we’ve been operating with, particularly “philosophy” and “mysticism,” are distorted artifacts of this very same discourse, which obscures their own origins.Historically, within the Platonic tradition, what we call “philosophy” and “mysticism” were complementary. Versluis does what virtually no scholar of Platonism has done in our era: he tries to accurately reconstruct Platonism as it was understood by ancient Platonists. Leo Strauss, he concedes, appreciated the esoteric character of Platonic writings, but Strauss reduced their content to philosophy and political science. Versluis goes further beyond the veil to what I’ll call the gnostic core of Platonism. The object of the Platonic path, contrary to pretty much everything you’ll learn in a Western university, is the attainment of a type of knowledge that is not merely intellectual but also intuitive, and that is direct rather than abstract. Versluis uses Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist, to make this abundantly clear: philosophy is a preparation of the mental faculties for a “contemplative” (i.e., mystical) leap into a higher form of knowledge (gnosis), which transcends what we think of as rational thought but which is hardly “irrational” in the modern sense of the word.Something of the content of this gnosis is indicated through basic features of Platonic metaphysics (the Forms, for example) and doctrines like anamnesis (that all knowing is remembering), which are found again and again in the thought of Western mystics from Dionysius the Areopagite to Meister Eckhart to contemporary mystics, not to mention the Gnostics and Hermeticists and others in or on the fringes of this tradition, which Verluis simply and appropriately names “Platonic mysticism.”For obvious reasons, Platonic mysticism has been the archenemy of modern materialists and postmodernists, who in the course of their openly declared ideological war have at length succeeded in obscuring what it is. One way they do this, Versluis shows, is by bluntly ignoring conscious experience and thus mystic experience (which means direct experience of divine or transcendent reality). They deny its possibility ex cathedra, that is, merely on the basis of their presumed authority, as Versluis has the courage to point out. This kind of glib dismissal of the possibility of universal or transcendent modes of consciousness, or of Platonic thought as “fallacious,” is really just a sign of the cultural power of the postmodern left. Nonetheless, Platonic mysticism, in myriad forms, keeps rising from the ashes…perhaps because nature exists after all! And perhaps there is some hope for the humanities, if books like this can get published by an academic press.

For many years, I have been interested in mysticism, philosophy of religion, Platonism, and Buddhism. Thus, I was excited to find this 2017 book by Arthur Versluis, "Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art", which explores these matters and more. Versluis is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies, Michigan State University. He has written extensively about mysticism, but this book was my first exposure to his work.Plato's works are fundamental to western thought and are susceptible to many interpretations. Although other scholars read Plato differently, Versluis legitimately reads Plato through the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and his successors. An important goal of Versluis' book is to show that Platonic mysticism as elaborated in Plato, Plotinus, Dionysus the Aeropagite, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and others is fundamental to western thought and to the development of Christian mysticism. With increasing knowledge of Buddhism and other Eastern religions, western mysticism in the 20th century came to include Buddhist teachings which in many but not all respects were consistent with the Neoplatonic tradition.Versluis argues that Platonic mysticism deserves to be understood and practiced in its own right. He is critical of the modern academy for largely marginalizing Platonism, Plotinus, and mysticism and failing to view them as a way to understanding, seeing them instead through psychology, particular cultures, and history. Versluis describes mysticism and Platonism as "the nature and development of man's spiritual consciousness" (quoting Evelyn Underhill). Vesluis explains that Platonic mysticism constitutes"the reflective awareness of our own transcendent nature, or to put it another way of the nature of transcendent reality from which, in this tradition, it is said we are indivisible. As such, mysticism has offshoots and subsets that can better be understood with reference to it, but mysticism essentially is contemplative ascent and illumination, whatever cultural context it exists within. (p, 8)In a passionately-written, erudite work, Versluis offers a history and a defense of Platonic mysticism. He begins with a chapter tracing its development through Plato, Plotinus, and Dionysius the Areopagite through the great medieval Christian mystics, He traces the thread through more modern mystics, including the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and contemporaries such as Willigis Jager. There is much to learn and to absorb in his discussion.Versluis discusses studies of mysticism beginning with William James' famous book "The Varieties of Religious Experience" and argues that scholarly work gradually detached mysticism from its universal, philosophical roots, as developed in Plotinus, and began to view it through largely in psychological terms. He discusses further the increasing dismissal of mystical thought and experience in the academy with the continued rise of a scientific, materialistic outlook. In a pivotal chapter titled "The Externalist Fallacy" Versluis argues that mystical thought and experience deserve to be studied in their own terms and that contemporary analysis has no legitimate reason for dismissing mystical thought and cutting it off.In the three final chapters of the book, Versluis offers many insights into the nature of Platonic mysticism. In "On Literature and Mysticism" he explores how mystical insight, which is beyond language, may be explored and suggested through language in the works of Plato and Plotinus, and in various writers and poets, such as William Blake and Rilke. He discusses well and at length the late work of the literary critic Northrup Frye who once said: "for a long time I've been preoccupied by the theme of the reality of the spiritual world, including its substantial reality." (Versluis at 96).In a chapter titled "Transcendence", Versluis explains further the nature of Platonic Mysticism and of Buddhist mysticism and argues that science, historicism, or analytic studies have shown no reason to reject them as a guide to the fundamental nature of reality. In "Contemplative Art, Contemplative Science" Vesluis shows how art, similarly to literature may point to transcendence in the work, for example, of the Hudson River School of American Painting. He urges serious and renewed attention to given to Platonic mysticism, both through the arts and through what he sees as studies of contemplative experience, or contemplative science.I share many of Versluis' passions and thoughts, which in my case come from an early interest in Plato and a more recent but still lengthy interest in Buddhism and in Meister Eckhart together with an interest in Jewish mysticism and philosophy. I learned a great deal from him. His book addresses the criticism of mysticism through science and psychology, but it does not discuss other broad issues that need to be addressed, including the nature of individuation and the problem of evil. Versluis properly points out the inconsistency between the approach of Platonic mysticism and the confessional, creedal approach of Western theistic religions, an inconsistency which probably cannot be bridged. Still he has kind things to say about most religious and their search. Although he does not discuss it at length, I was disappointed with Vesluis' brief comments about Judaism which seem to me unduly dismissive and stereotyped. He writes that the inconsistency between theistic religions and Platonic mysticism is particularly acute "in a tradition of worshipping a tribal god that emphasizes one's own people as the elect or chosen and others as lesser or lost". (p. 60-61) I found these strictures unfair on their face to Judaism and found as well that they ignored the long tradition of Jewish mysticism, including Jewish mysticism influenced by Neoplatonism. Thus, even though I learned much from the book and share a great deal with it, I felt the strong need to disengage myself from this work.Robin Friedman

This is an important work that enlarges our perceptions of Plato. Confined to philosophy for most of his historical life, we now see him in a different light - as a thinker with a profound knowledge of the mystical impulse, one of the mainstays of Western thought. I heartily recommend this publication by one of America's truly independent voices.