Platonism and the Irrational

By today’s standards, belief in astrology is widely considered to be irrational for being engaged in faulty reasoning; and it was categorized as irrational by E.R Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational. Dodd’s speculated that the widespread belief in astrology in the Hellenistic era and Late Antiquity was a flight from existential freedom: “better the rigid determinism of astrological Fate than that terrifying burden of daily responsibility” (p 246).

In this presentation, I will provide an analysis of Philo of Alexandria’s reformulation of two of Plato’s comments on divination through dreams (Rep 9.571c-572c, Tim 70d-72c). In the Republic, Plato explains that indulging in the passions and stimulating the irrational part of the soul hinders one’s ability to have prophetic dreams. Plato’s explanation thus makes divination a function of the rational part of the soul and emphasizes an ethical component.

Christian Platonists generally rejected both magic and theurgy, which they associated with “pagan” religion, and tended to emphasize the preeminence of the Logos in every respect, including psychology. This preeminence in their case had the additional rationale that in their view the Logos is Christ; the rational faculty of the soul is rational insofar as it participates in Christ-Logos (the very category of participation, μέθεξις, which they abundantly deployed, was obviously Platonic).

In an article entitled “The Renaissance of the Occult,” the great classicist E. R. Dodds wrote: “When the history of the early years of the twentieth century comes to be written … there will almost certainly be found in it a chapter devoted to the Renaissance of Occultism. It will be a very long chapter.”[1] Dodds himself played a central role in this renaissance.

The most remarkable aspect of the Platonic tradition is its insistence upon harmonizing the rational (logicon) and irrational (alogon) aspects of the soul’s ascent, as summarized most explicitly in Sinesius’ Dio (1136) where he maintains with Aristotle (Rose, fr. 15) that there are two ways to become fit (epitedeios) for the vision of the inner light: one through initiation in the mysteries and becoming a bacchant, the other – through the methodical exercise of reason.