Iamblichus in Luther's Philosophy: A Platonic Puzzle
For decades, both admirers and detractors have held up Martin Luther as the great enemy of “Christian philosophy.” By challenging the scholastic formulations of his time—so the argument runs—Luther wrenched apart the medieval unity of faith and reason, sending Western civilization spinning down the road to secular modernity. In Luther’s own oft-quoted words: “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.”
Fortunately, recent years have witnessed a welcome corrective to this narrative, emphasizing Luther’s own philosophical training and the particular conception of Christian righteousness against which Luther was reacting so vehemently. Though not a systematic philosopher—or theologian—Luther certainly did not reject his received intellectual tradition root-and-branch. As yet, however, the philosophical theses of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation—some of Luther’s most striking meditations on metaphysical questions—have received little scholarly attention on this front.
This omission is unfortunate, since a close look at the disputation reveals a far more sophisticated engagement with classical philosophy than Luther is often claimed to have undertaken. Merely consider the following passage, in which Luther contrasts the Platonic philosophical inheritance to Aristotle’s:
That Plato’s philosophy is better than Aristotle’s philosophy is plain from the fact that Plato always strives for divine and immortal things, separate and eternal things, insensible and intelligible things. . . . [T]hat Plato’s ideas are separate [from matter] is plain from blessed Augustine, Iamblichus, and all the Platonic disputants. And so it is clear that Aristotle’s philosophy crawls in the dregs of corporal and sensible things, while Plato is occupied with separate and spiritual things. (WA 59:424.8–14, 425.1–4, 425.6–9)
At first read, Luther’s claims may simply seem to reflect a widespread medieval-Christian inclination toward Plato over Aristotle. Aristotle, after all, had been received with suspicion by many Christian authorities, once new translations of his work filtered into Europe from the Islamic East. But there seems to be more to the story.
Midway through the passage, Luther invokes Iamblichus in support of a favorable reading of Platonism. Augustine and Plato are familiar names, even today. But Iamblichus—though reasonably well known to scholars of antiquity—has been almost completely forgotten today. Nor does Iamblichus loom particularly large in medieval Christian scholasticism as a whole, at least in terms of explicit references or citations.
What can Luther be talking about here? Why invoke this particularly obscure figure at all?
Intriguingly, Iamblichus was one of the figures in the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition most concerned to reconcile the reality of divine activity in the world with the goodness of created matter—a key concern of Luther’s own theology. Might Iamblichus’s philosophy represent an underexamined point of cross-pollination between Luther’s work and the classical intellectual tradition?
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From early on, Christian theological reflection on Plato’s work has often centered on the Timaeus, a lengthy and somewhat enigmatic metaphysical dialogue in which Plato outlines an intricate account of the world’s creation.[i] The Christian appropriation of the Timaeus likely stems from the dialogue’s ostensible affirmations that the cosmos of experience originated as the handiwork of a transcendent and personal creator—one that could not be identified (as in much pagan thought) with the immanent creation as such—and that the finite cosmos as such is not itself eternal.[ii]
But on its face, the creation story outlined in the Timaeus is markedly different from the more comprehensive metaphysical picture that Plato details in the early pages of the Republic. Forgoing talk of shaping and crafting, the Republic instead sketches out a distinctive metaphysics of participation: all things “below” are what they are because they participate in the ideal and eternal Forms, which in turn are given their “being” (such as it is) by the light of the absolute Good as such.[iii] The quest of philosophy, on the Republic’s account, is to ascend towards the Good and towards contemplation of the divine Forms themselves.[iv]
With this bigger picture in mind, the theological limitations of the Timaeus come into view. The “artificer” deity who forms the material world is still, in some sense, part of the “metaphysical furniture” of the cosmos; in shaping the creation, the artificer “looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern” and crafts a creation that “relate[s] to the lasting and permanent and intelligible.”[v] The deity about whom the Timaeus speaks, in short, is not a creator in an absolute sense; he is a craftsman who works upon a preexistent material “given,” and his work proceeds by reference to the eternal verities (“patterns”) that are the Forms. Given the core Christian claim that “all things” indeed come from God, such a reduced account of the divine is unacceptable: for God to be truly God, He must be God of the Forms also, not merely of their material exemplars.
Accordingly, a key motif of the Platonic intellectual tradition, including in its Christianized expressions, has been its ongoing attempt to reconcile the principles of the eternal rational order—traditionally identified with the intellect—to the mutable and transient world of matter that is encountered by the senses. In Christian terms, what does it mean to speak of Christ as Logos, the divine Reason of the world? Romans 1 implies the existence of a universal rational order that structures and governs the cosmos, an order that is apparent to all persons by nature (Rom 1:18–20), but what relationship does that order have to both the will of God and the world of experience?
The intellectual movements described pejoratively today as “Gnosticism” were, in large part, attempts to reckon with this question. Confronted with the banality and instability—and, indeed, evil and darkness—of the world of sensory experience, the Gnostics posited a metaphysical dualism that entailed an axiological dualism: the domain of the “spirit” was good, and the domain of the “body” was evil.[vi] The Good and the eternal Forms were the answers to the longings of human beings, while the material order was hopelessly corrupt and inferior.
Gnostic theology, in short, drove a wedge between the cosmology of the Timaeus and that of the Republic—a disjunction that maps well onto the Marcionite distinction between the theology of the Old Testament and that of the New. On the gnostic account, the ineffable One or the Good was properly identified with God the Father.[vii] By contrast, the “demiurge” responsible for the physical construction of the material world was identified with the Yahweh of the Jewish tradition, and characterized as a malevolent independent entity responsible for human suffering and the imprisonment of human souls in crude matter.[viii] For the Gnostics, the kind of artificer figure gestured toward by the Timaeus was no god worthy of worship at all.
Christian texts—such as the epistle of 1 John, the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, and many others—famously offered responses to these Gnostic ideas. But so too did other, non-Christian Platonists. The Neoplatonism of Plotinus, for instance, depicted reality as a grand, integrated ontological continuum, a progressive unfolding of transcendent divine unity into the multiplicity of the sensory world. On this view, the common matter of everyday experience is but the manifestation of higher divine realities in which it participates.
Crucially, over against those who would demand a sharp distinction between the spiritual and the material, Plotinus’s emanationist cosmology allows for the essential goodness—even semi-divinity—of creation to be affirmed. Indeed, Plotinus took pains to argue that the material world, despite its distance from the One, was not strictly evil.[ix] And the overarching conceptual framework of ontological emanation from the One paved the way for Augustine of Hippo to elaborate his famous definition of evil as essentially privatio boni, the absence of Being/the Good—not as some separate substance or power, as in the gnostic metaphysical schemes.[x]
Yet the development of Neoplatonic emanationism did not decisively resolve the problem that the Gnostics had intuited. If the domain of the spiritual and intellective is that which is more divine, and the material order is correspondingly less divine, the task of spirituality must be understood as primarily a function of the intellect. Plotinus termed this process the “refuge of a solitary in the solitary”—the journey from the isolation of the individual consciousness “upward” to the silent, impassible One.[xi] What good can be said, then, of the material world? Placing the landscape of sensory experience at the furthest remove from the divine inevitably leads to a turning-away from the physical order, once the search for final enlightenment begins in earnest.
This is the point at which much Lutheran criticism of the Platonic intellectual legacy—and of traditional philosophy more broadly—originates. An “unbaptized” Neoplatonism undoubtedly places the spiritual onus on the individual to pursue a private voyage toward divinization, to struggle upwards under one’s own power in the quest toward ever-greater union with the One. Hence Luther complains of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite—a well-known Christian Platonist—that “in his Theology, which is rightly called Mystical, of which certain very ignorant theologians make so much, he is downright dangerous, for he is more of a Platonist than a Christian.”[xii]
Luther does have something of a point. Echoing Plotinus, the Mystical Theology treats as the highest form of Christian spirituality a state in which “one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing” and in which one pursues “the denial of all beings.”[xiii] This absolutizing apophaticism is, at the very least, difficult to square with a sacramental theology in which one genuinely encounters God under the forms of material elements, and it is not immediately metaphysically obvious how, on the Mystical Theology’s account, the Incarnation itself is to be conceived.
But should Luther’s words be taken as an indictment of Platonic categories across the board? The question becomes particularly vexing in light of the fact that, in the disputation, Luther finds himself positively invoking Plato’s “spiritual-ness” over against an (allegedly) more carnal Aristotelianism. Is it possible to square this circle?
Enter Iamblichus—who diverges from Plotinus in important ways, and who, I would suggest, may help explain Luther’s guarded appreciation of the Platonic tradition in the Heidelberg Disputation.
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From early on, Iamblichus was concerned to reconcile Plato’s early insights in the Timaeus to later developments in Neoplatonism. And from Iamblichus’s perspective, the trends of his time were not encouraging: as Gregory Shaw writes, “Iamblichus believed that the world described by Plato in the Timaeus was being torn apart by a new kind of Platonism that denied the sanctity of the world and elevated the human mind beyond its natural limits.”[xiv] In other words: Neoplatonism under Plotinus’s shadow had become too dualistic.
The chief point of controversy between the Iamblichan and Plotinian versions of Neoplatonism may sound, to modern ears, both arcane and farfetched: whether the human soul is “fully descended” into the human body.[xv] Nevertheless, the issue has tremendous theological implications, implicating both the fundamental nature of human identity and the attitude that human beings ought to have toward the cosmos. On a Plotinian anthropology in which the human soul is not “fully descended,” the human person is situated as a kind of astral wayfarer, thrown by birth into a forbidding landscape of fragmented materiality that is ultimately irrelevant to the ultimate destiny of the soul (union with the One).
Iamblichus sharply rejected this posture of indifference toward the world. If, Iamblichus contended, the soul is not fully embodied and properly resident in the material cosmos, what is the theological significance of the created order at all? “If, as Plotinus believed, . . . [the soul] does not, in fact, truly become embodied, then the manifestation of the divine as kosmos would have little or no role in the soul’s paideia [education].”[xvi] Surely, the fact that there is a creation at all ought to impact one’s attitude toward the divine.
A right acknowledgment of creation as divine manifestation was, therefore, at the heart of Iamblichus’s foremost intellectual emphasis: the importance of “theurgy” as a means of encounter with the divine. By “theurgy,” Iamblichus meant the set of traditional rites and cultic practices for the worship of the classical pantheon, which Neoplatonists working in the Plotinian tradition had conventionally eschewed on the grounds that such rites were inferior carnal substitutes for philosophical contemplation and study. Yet for Iamblichus, “theology was merely logos, a “discourse about the gods,” and however exalted, it remained a human activity, as did philosophy. Theurgy, on the other hand, was a theion ergon, a ‘work of the gods’ capable of transforming man to a divine status.”[xvii] The “liturgical” practices of formal ritual worship, Iamblichus held, constituted genuine encounters with the divine, despite the fact that material elements were used as instruments of spiritual mediation. Building on this foundation, Iamblichus’s most famous work, De mysteriis (On the Mysteries), is something of a theological-philosophical manifesto outlining the logic of theurgy over against its cultured despisers within the Plotinian tradition.
Iamblichus’s emphases in De mysteriis foreshadow Lutheran sacramentology in intriguing, if imprecise and suggestive, ways. To wit, Iamblichus insists that ritual works are works of the gods, not of their priests, and do not derive their efficacy from the intent of the celebrant. So too, religion is practiced “objectively”: matter is the medium to which the divine commits itself and through which it discloses itself. This is how Iamblichus can respond to a “Plotinian” devaluation of the material order, without lapsing into a rejection of transcendence.
From early on, Iamblichus takes great pains to make clear that his emphasis on traditional religious rites—such as divination—must not in any way be construed as a form of divine manipulation. “Nothing, then, of any such qualities in us, such as are humans contributes in any way towards the accomplishment of divine transactions.”[xviii] In theurgy, divine power “is neither drawn down nor turned toward us, but, being transcendent, it guides and gives itself to its participants; and is neither altered in itself nor made less, nor is it subservient to its participants, but, on the contrary, it makes use of all that is subservient to it.”[xix] The motive-spring of theurgic effectiveness is always the divine, not the human; theurgy, then, is always an act in which the divine gives itself to human beings.
In outlining this view, Iamblichus considers and rejects the argument (which resembles one pressed by the Donatist heretics) that the presence of an unfit participant affects the character of theurgic rites. And in the same passage, Iamblichus additionally goes on to make an even more startling claim: that the validity of a theurgic rite is completely independent of the intentions of the participants:
I have labored this point at some length for this reason: that you not believe that all authority over activity in the theurgic rites depends on us, or suppose that their genuine performance is assured by the true condition of our acts of thinking, or that they are made false by our deception.[xx]
Iamblichus’s argument here, when viewed in the context of Christian sacramental theology across traditions, is distinctive. Iamblichus’s view is very different from a traditional Roman Catholic understanding of the sacraments, which “teaches very unequivocally that for the valid conferring of the sacraments, the minister must have the intention of doing at least what the Church does” and rejects the view that “the interior dissent of the minister from the mind of the Church would not invalidate the sacrament.”[xxi] So too, an “Iamblichan sacramentology” also diverges from Reformed and other views of the sacraments that would posit a modified form of divine presence in sacramental rites. For Iamblichus, the divine is not merely “spiritually present” in theurgy, but really present: the divine power always “guides and gives itself to its participants” and is not “altered in itself.”[xxii]
At bottom, Iamblichus’s understanding of theurgic practice has distinct similarities to the sacramental theology of Luther’s Large Catechism, which stresses the divine character of both baptism and communion against those who would either claim responsibility for them or contend that unworthy reception invalidates these rites.
Baptism, however, is not our work, but God’s. . . . [T]here is no work done here by us, but a treasure, which God gives us and faith grasps. It is like the benefit of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross, which is not a work, but a treasure included in the Word. It is offered to us and received by faith. (LC IV, ¶¶ 31, 37)
[T]he Sacrament has not been invented nor introduced by any man. Without anyone’s counsel and deliberation it has been instituted by Christ. . . . Nothing is withdrawn or taken from it, even though we use and administer it unworthily. (LC V, ¶¶ 5–6)
Building on this “monergistic” emphasis, Iamblichus likewise emphasizes that religious practice should not become a matter of individual withdrawal into mystic contemplation. Such contemplation necessarily leaves the Plotinian philosopher hopelessly mired in theological subjectivity: one only encounters the divine in the act of intellectual grasping, rather than in the objective reality of being grasped by the divine. For the practitioner of traditional theurgy, on the other hand, “even when we are not engaged in intellection, the symbols themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate work, and the ineffable power of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognises the proper images of itself, not through being aroused by our thought.”[xxiii] Just as before, here it is the objective fact of divine self-commitment that guarantees ritual efficacy.
Classical Lutheran theology, broadly speaking, aligns with Iamblichus on the importance of retaining longstanding forms of religious practice over against a purely contemplative mysticism that would eschew rites altogether. From early on, the Lutheran tradition was keen to retain the worship forms and rhythms handed down from the early fathers of the church. The Defense of the Augsburg Confession “judge[d] it to be right that traditions be maintained” insofar as “they did not obscure the glory and office of Christ,” in order “that the people might know at what time they should assemble; that, for the sake of example all things in the churches might be done in order and becomingly; [and] lastly, that the common people might receive a sort of training.” (Ap XV, ¶ 18) Within such traditions—especially Holy Communion—God Himself reveals himself in, with, and under the material elements of water, bread, and wine. None of this can be reduced to a “private” domain of interiority.
Put another way, the Iamblichan conviction that theurgic benefit is utterly independent of human manipulation is echoed in the Lutheran guarantee of sacramental objectivity, which roots the sacraments’ efficacy in divine promise rather than in any priest or officiant’s intentions. In Lutheran sacramental theology, the “divine symbols” of the rite would be understood as the conjunction of Word and matter: the baptismal rite spoken over the initiate over whom water pours, or the words of institution pronounced above the bread and wine.
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It is impossible to say with certainty that Iamblichan categories and concepts directly influenced Luther in the later development and articulation of his own sacramental theology. But it is clear from the Heidelberg Disputation that Luther was at least aware of Iamblichus, and confident enough to cite him positively—as a supporter of a Platonism worth commending over against a more “immanent” Aristotelianism.” The points of contact are striking enough to justify speculating that Luther may have been more than passingly familiar with Iamblichus’s work. Indeed, viewing Iamblichus as a point of connection between Luther and the prior classical tradition may help dissolve the seeming tension between Luther’s positive use of Plato in the disputation alongside his rejection of excessive Platonic dualism.[xxiv]
In any case, Lutherans today tempted to embrace Tertullian’s famous maxim—“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—ought, at the very least, to recognize that “Athens” never did speak with one voice.
[i] Edward Mathews, “What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review (1999), https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1999/1999.01.10/.
[ii] Plato, “Creation,” trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Primary Readings in Philosophy for Understanding Theology, eds. Diogenes Allen and Eric O. Springsted (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 17–21.
[iii] Plato, “The Sun, the Line, and the Cave,” trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Primary Readings in Philosophy for Understanding Theology, eds. Diogenes Allen and Eric O. Springsted (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 11–13.
[iv] Plato, “The Sun, the Line, and the Cave,” 13–15.
[v] Plato, “Creation,” 17.
[vi] Joe E. Morris, Revival of the Gnostic Heresy: Fundamentalism (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 94.
[vii] David Bentley Hart, “The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics After Nicaea,” in The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 143.
[viii] John Arendzen, “Marcionites,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09645c.htm.
[ix] Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), 29.
[x] Frederick H. Russell, “‘Only Something Good Can Be Evil’: The Genesis of Augustine’s Secular Ambivalence,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 701.
[xi] Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.11.
[xii] Martin Luther, “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” trans. A.T.W. Steinhäuser, in Martin Luther, Three Treatises (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990 [1959]), 240–41.
[xiii] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology 1001a, 1025b.
[xiv] Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 4.
[xv] Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 11.
[xvi] Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 11.
[xvii] Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 5.
[xviii] Iamblichus, De mysteriis, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), II.11.
[xix] Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.17.
[xx] Iamblichus, De mysteriis II.11.
[xxi] J. Delany, “Intention,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton
Company, 1910), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08069b.htm.
[xxii] Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.17.
[xxiii] Iamblichus, De mysteriis II.11.
[xxiv] Jordan Cooper, Prolegomena: A Defense of the Scholastic Method (Ithaca, NY: Just and Sinner Publications, 2020), 183.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow with the Davenant Institute, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.