Talk:Neoplatonism

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Philo, and the "reaction" reading, in the Hellenism section

I think this section is a bit too quick on Philo. He gets two sentences, between Numenius and the Apologists, as one "forerunner" among others, and the whole paragraph rests on the old Britannica (Harnack, 1911). But at the very moment Harnack was writing, other scholars had a quite different picture, and the article does not say a word about it.

Two things are missing, in my opinion.

The Philo → Plotinus filiation. For a whole generation of scholars around 1900, Philo was not a parallel case but a source. Herriot, in his thesis on Philo (1898), presented the Jewish school of Alexandria as a real philosophical school, not a curiosity. Guyot (two Sorbonne theses, 1906) went further: the infinite One of Plotinus, an infinity that is a perfection and not a defect, is something classical Greek philosophy simply does not have (for the Greeks the apeiron is on the side of the bad), and Guyot traces it to Philo, with a list of textual reminiscences of Philo in the Enneads. Drummond's Philo Judaeus (1888) and Bréhier's book on Philo (1908) discuss the same question from different angles. One may disagree with these authors, but they are exactly contemporary with the source the section already uses, and the debate they opened is still going on.

Neoplatonism as an answer to Christianity. Elsee, Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianity (Cambridge, 1908), who uses Herriot for the Philo part, argues that the school of Plotinus is not only a synthesis of older Greek thought but also, in part, the response of cultivated paganism to the rise of the Church: same city, same generation as Origen, same teacher perhaps (Ammonius), and then Porphyry's Against the Christians, Iamblichus' theurgy, the Academy of Athens up to 529: a rival road to salvation.

What is interesting is that the two readings meet on one point: the pagan side does not simply refuse the newcomer, it includes him, at a lower rank. Christ is a pious sage, the Christians are a confused sect — this is the Porphyry quotation the article already gives (with a "citation needed" that Elsee could easily fill: the oracles are in Augustine, City of God XIX, 23, and Eusebius, Dem. ev. III, 6-7). Hierarchy absorbs the rival. That is, I think, a much more precise way to describe the relation than "mirrored elements".

So, concretely, I would propose to add after "...moral and religious knowledge":

Whether Philo was only a parallel to Neoplatonism or one of its sources was much discussed around 1900: Herriot (1898) and Guyot (1906) argued for a direct filiation, in particular for the idea of a positive infinity of the first principle, which has no clear precedent in earlier Greek philosophy.

and after "...also mirrored elements of Neoplatonism":

Some scholars have read Neoplatonism itself as a pagan answer to Christianity: for Elsee (1908) the school of Plotinus, born in the same Alexandrian milieu as Origen, offered a rival philosophical path to salvation, one which tended to include Christ within its own hierarchy of the divine rather than to reject him, as Porphyry's oracles quoted by Augustine and Eusebius show.

Sources (all public domain, online):

Drummond, James. 1888. Philo Judaeus, or the Jewish-Alexandrian Philosophy. London: Williams & Norgate. Bigg, Charles. 1895. Neoplatonism. London: SPCK. Herriot, Édouard. 1898. Philon le Juif. Essai sur l'école juive d'Alexandrie. Paris: Hachette. Guyot, Henri. 1906. L'Infinité divine depuis Philon le Juif jusqu'à Plotin, and Les Réminiscences de Philon le Juif chez Plotin. Paris: Alcan. Elsee, Charles. 1908. Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianity. Cambridge: CUP. Bréhier, Émile. 1908. Les Idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon d'Alexandrie. Paris: Picard. Samuel Barbouki (talk) 16:31, 26 September 2026 (UTC)