2012

Lankila, Tuomo

The subject of this study is the defense of polytheistic piety in the Neoplatonist school of Athens. The dissertation consists of five articles together with a concluding and complementary essay. Proclus Art of Referring with a Scale of Epithets shows that philosophizing in the form of sophisticated commentary also produced an art of referring to predecessors using a set of honorific epithets in order to convey an impression of a well-defined order of ranks and degree of orthodoxy from the perspective of the Athenian School. In the "Hypermoetic Cognition and the Scope of Theurgy in Proclus" it is pointed out that Proclean hypernoetic faculties of the soul are also to be found in his highly original discussion of matter and the receptacle of Plato's Timaeus and that Proclus explicitly rejects the identification of hypemoetic cognition as a form of theurgy. "Henadology in the two Theologies of Proclus" shows that the theory of the classes of the gods in the Platonic Theology is not only an extended version of the henadology in the Elements of Theology but brings forth some theoretical modifications of which some are so substantial that one must describe them as major rectifications of the theory. In the "Aphrodite in Proclus Theology is shown that for Proclus Aphrodite is the most one-like and purest life at the hypercosmic level, the Uranic summit in Aphrodite being "the flower of life". The theory of the divine. series enables Proclus to defend Aphrodite in all the forms of her traditional cult "The Corpus Areopagiticum as a Crypto-Pagan Project considers the post-Proclean philosophers' strategies for adapting to the changed historical circumstances which required developing new and radical ways to protect the School's spiritual inheritance. The complementary essay in its chapters conceming henadology argues that Proclus achieved success, due to his conception of the divine series, in forging a reasonable accord between philosophical monism and polytheistic theology. The primal structural principle in Proclus is the concept of the serialized set. Use of it permeates all his metaphysics. Later Neoplatonism is reluctant to separate itself from traditional piety but tries to establish a balance where religious life is philosophically based and conceptually convincing and at the same time compatible with the modes of traditional piety and mythology. Henology and henadology are crucial elements of the Neoplatonic tradition, defining it apart from ontotheology and monotheism. Analyzing the rise of Christianity and the resistance carried out by more or less isolated pagan pockets in 5th and 6th century Byzantine society, this thesis underlines a tremendous novelty in the formation of the universal obligatory state religion. The significance of the birth of the confessional state cannot be overestimated. One dimension connected to this process was the shift of the value of sexuality from the sacred sphere to that of sin, even to the position of the main sin, the most feared enemy of organized religion hereafter. Among late. antique asceticism there was an erotophobic attitude pleading for the total destruction and abolition of this enemy, which was personified in Aphrodite. During the epoch when the idealization of virginity, sexual renunciation, and mortifying the lusts of the flesh with extreme forms of stringent asceticism were rapidly gaining a hegemonic position in ideology, Proclus defense of Aphrodite situates him among the camp of those with a sober acceptance of the irresistible drifts of embodied life. But because later Neoplatonism shared so many of the positions with its adversaries, especially in the idealization of virginity subsumed to the male archetype of divinity, it was not able to recuperate in full the inheritance of the Greek erotic tradition or consistently vindicate the primordial concept of goddess.