The History of Religious Imagination

in Christian Platonism
 Also available from Bloomsbury

Debating Christian Religious Epistemology, edited by John M. DePoe and Tyler

Dalton McNabb
Four Views on the Axiology of Theism, edited by Kirk Lougheed
Free Will and God's Universal Causality, by W. Matthews Grant
Living Forms of the Imagination, by Douglas Hedley
Sacrifice Imagined, by Douglas Hedley
The Iconic Imagination, by Douglas Hedley
 The History of Religious
Imagination in Christian Platonism

Exploring the Philosophy of Douglas Hedley

Edited by
Christian Hengstermann
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 Contents

List of contributors vii

Preface ix

Part I Cambridge Platonism past and present

1 The ‘devout contemplation and sublime fancy’ of the Cambridge

Platonists and their legacy Douglas Hedley 3
2 The chariot, the temple and the city: The imaginative idealism of
Douglas Hedley Christian Hengstermann 17
Response by Douglas Hedley 55

Part II Spiritual sensation in ancient and early modern Christian Platonism

3 Θεία αἴσθησις: Origen’s epistemological concept of spiritual

sensation Alfons Fürst 73
Response by Douglas Hedley 87
4 Cogitatione attingere: Divine sensation in René Descartes and the
Cambridge Platonists Christian Hengstermann 94
Response by Douglas Hedley 118
5 Aids to reflection and imagining God: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
concept of the imagination Friedrich A. Uehlein 127
Response by Douglas Hedley 139

Part III The religious imagination in contemporary philosophy of religion

6 God in the world and ourselves in God: Panentheistic speculation

in the early Karl Rahner Klaus E. Müller 145
Response by Douglas Hedley 160
7 René Girard and Douglas Hedley on violence, sacrifice and
imagination Per Bjørnar Grande 163
Response by Douglas Hedley 171
8 Perceptions of God: Reflections on William P. Alston’s theory of
religious experience Margit Wasmaier-Sailer 173
Response by Douglas Hedley 183
vi Contents

9 From Cambridge to Calcutta: The presence of Indian thought in

Douglas Hedley’s Christian Platonism Daniel Soars 186
Response by Douglas Hedley 203
10 Imagination and religion: Some Shakespearian reflections Douglas Hedley 210

Index of names 229

 Contributors

Alfons Fürst is Professor of Early Christian Studies and Christian Archaeology and
Director of the Origen Research Centre at the University of Münster. His primary
research interests are Origen, the Alexandrian tradition and the reception of Origenian
freedom metaphysics from late antiquity to modern theology and philosophy. Among
his most recent publications are several German translations of Origen’s works, the
monograph Origenes: Grieche und Christ in römischer Zeit (2017) and an edited essay
collection entitled Origen’s Philosophy of Freedom in Early Modern Times: Debates
about Free Will and Apokatastasis in 17th-Century England and Europe (2019).

Per Bjørnar Grande is Professor at the Department of Pedagogy, Religion and Social
Studies at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen. In his
research, he focuses mainly on René Girard, the notion of sacrifice and the religious
dimension of literature on which he has published a great number of articles. Among
his recent publications is a monograph entitled Mimesis and Desire: An Analysis of the
Religious Nature of Mimesis and Desire in the Work of René Girard (2009).

Douglas Hedley is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University

and Fellow of Clare College as well as Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Study
of Platonism. His research interests focus on contemporary religious philosophy as
well as the Neoplatonist and Romantic traditions and Cambridge Platonism. Hedley
has published on the history of religious philosophy from antiquity to the present day
and the theory of imagination and its role in religious epistemology and ontology.
His most recent books are The Iconic Imagination (2016) and Revisioning Cambridge
Platonism: Sources and Legacy (2019), an essay collection co-edited with David Leech.

Christian Hengstermann is an associate lecturer at the Classics Department of

Wuppertal University and Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism.
His research mainly focuses on Origen and the Cambridge Platonists and their
relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy and systematic theology. His most
recent books are Origenes und der Ursprung der Freiheitsmetaphysik (2016) and an
edited collection entitled ‘That Miracle of the Christian World’: Origenism and Christian
Platonism in Henry More (2020).

Klaus E. Müller is Professor of the Philosophical Foundations of Theology and

Religious Philosophy at the University of Münster. His chief research interests include
panentheist theories of God and panpsychist cosmologies as well as the history of
religious philosophy, especially Thomas Aquinas, Baruch de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant
and German Idealism. Among his major monographs are a three-volume exposition
viii Contributors

of the philosophy of religion entitled Glauben – Fragen – Denken (2006–10) and In der
Endlosschleife von Vernunft und Glaube: Einmal mehr Athen versus Jerusalem (2012).

Daniel Soars teaches in the Divinity department at Eton College and is on the editorial
board of the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. He holds a PhD from the University of
Cambridge with a dissertation entitled ‘Beyond the Dualism of Creature and Creator:
A Hindu-Christian Theological Inquiry into the Distinctive Relation between the
World and God’ (2020). His principal research focus is philosophical theology done
from a comparative perspective.

Friedrich A. Uehlein is Professor Emeritus at the University of Freiburg. His principal

research interests are Anthony A. Shaftesbury and Samuel T. Coleridge as well as
aesthetics, literature, theories of self-consciousness and the philosophy of religion.
Uehlein is the author of two monographs on Shaftesbury and Coleridge entitled
Kosmos und Subjektivität. Lord Shaftesburys Philosophical Regimen (1976) and Die
Manifestation des Selbstbewußtseins im konkreten Ich Bin: Endliches und Unendliches
Ich im Denken S. T. Coleridges (1982).

Margit Wasmaier-Sailer is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of

Lucerne. Her main research interests are contemporary religious philosophy, notably
William Alston, the current human rights discussion and Kantian and post-Idealistic
philosophy. Her most recent publications include the monograph Das Verhältnis
von Moral und Religion bei Johann Michael Sailer und Immanuel Kant: Zum Profil
philosophischer Theologie und theologischer Ethik in der säkularen Welt (2018) and
an essay collection co-edited with Matthias Hoesch entitled Die Begründung der
Menschenrechte: Kontroversen im Spannungsfeld von positivem Recht, Naturrecht und
Vernunftrecht (2017).
 Preface

Douglas Hedley’s trilogy on the religious imagination is a major work of contemporary

philosophy of religion. It propounds a new epistemology of the Divine and a
sacramental ontology of a reality suffused by God’s ubiquitous creative and salvific
work in nature and culture. It also constitutes a revival of the rational theology of
the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and
John Smith, whom the author acknowledged as the greatest of his precursors in his
inaugural lecture as Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at
the University of Cambridge on 7 May 2018. It is under Professor Hedley’s leadership
that the Cambridge Platonists’ major writings have been newly edited and translated
on the AHRC-funded project Cambridge Platonism at the Origins of the Enlightenment,
which ended in the online publication of a major Sourcebook in November 2019.
The chapters collected in this volume are intended to provide an introduction to
both Hedley’s own thought and the tradition of divine sensation which it seeks to revive
and refine. Written by colleagues, friends and pupils, the chapters mostly go back to
talks presented at a conference on the trilogy of the Iconic Imagination held at the
University of Münster from 1 to 2 April 2016. However, they also reflect Hedley’s more
recent research in the AHRC project and as Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and
director of the Cambridge Centre of the Study of Platonism. The additional chapters
by Per Bjørnar Grande and Daniel Soars are intended to do justice to René Girard’s
seminal influence upon Hedley’s trilogy and its ecumenical scope and importance to
interreligious dialogue. Moreover, an exposition of Hedley’s philosophy of religion
written by Christian Hengstermann has been added alongside a transcription of the
author’s inaugural lecture.
It is my great pleasure to express my gratitude to the authors for preparing their
chapters for print and to the Bloomsbury editors Colleen Coalter and Becky Holland,
and Dhanuja Ravi, the project manager, for their untiring guidance and unfailing
support. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. My
greatest gratitude is to Professor Hedley himself for a decade of great Platonic dialogue
and friendship.
Christian Hengstermann
x
 Part I

Cambridge Platonism past and

present
2 
 1

The ‘devout contemplation and sublime fancy’

of the Cambridge Platonists and their legacy
Douglas Hedley

Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while considering the
education of Boethius, wrote that he attempted to reconcile the ‘strong and subtle sense
of Aristotle with the devout contemplation and sublime fancy of Plato’.1 Most modern
commentators seek in the dialogues Plato the dialectician. Yet Plato is also, and perhaps
more importantly, a consummate fashioner of philosophical images and scenes in
which he invokes a vision of the supreme reality as absolute and fecund goodness.
Gibbon is being ironic, of course. Yet in his irony there is much truth about the
contemplative power and elevated imagination of the Athenian, and I will endeavour
to expand on the reception of that ‘devout contemplation and sublime fancy’ in the
thought of the Cambridge Platonists.
When in 1996 I arrived in Cambridge to give a lecture for my interview in the
philosophy of religion, I nervously presented my interest in the Cambridge Platonists.
At the end of my presentation, the then Norris-Hulse professor sniffed, and remarked,
somewhat disconcertingly, ‘Yes, but we in Cambridge are embarrassed about the
Cambridge Platonists.’ It is very satisfying to reflect that now we have a team in
Cambridge and Bristol to research and edit this remarkable group of writers. Even
then, these thinkers appealed to me as a paradigm of philosophical activity, a vibrant
combination of hermeneutic and speculative interests, open to the great issues of the
age while fully cognizant of the rich history of the subject. The Cambridge Platonists
are the most important Platonic school between the Renaissance and the Romantic
period, and yet never properly edited, though much studied. They exerted an influence
upon Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Reid, Hume, Coleridge and the
German Idealists.2
Many of the ideas, arguments and problems of the Cambridge Platonists are
currently the focus of attention in philosophy and theology – especially the issues of
atheism and religion, nature and the ecological question, tolerance and politics, and
the foundation of ethics.3 Even though they were drawing on a Platonic perspective –
many of the problems they are addressing only emerged with the New Science or
with other aspects of modern society, such as tolerance and authority, equality and
hierarchy.
4 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

As an undergraduate in Oxford, I was introduced to the canon of the British

Empiricists, reading Locke, Berkeley and Hume. All of those philosophers were
influenced by Cudworth, who was rarely mentioned by my tutors. In a sense, Cudworth,
Berkeley and Coleridge represent another strand of British thought and one which is
critical of Empiricism and appeals generally to Platonism as an alternative.4 One might
claim that this Platonism is a system, but nevertheless an open and flexible structure
of thought. And ‘Neoplatonism’ is used as a term that denotes not so much one school
of philosophy, but rather an intellectual paradigm and a way of life, disseminating its
influence in myriad forms of thought and culture. It is said, for example, that Hegel is
the founder of the Philosophy of Religion. Hegel opened his 1821 Inaugural Lecture
on the Philosophy of Religion delivered at the University of Berlin with these words:
‘The object of these lectures is the Philosophy of Religion, which in general has the
same purpose as the earlier type of metaphysical science which was called theologia
naturalis.’5 Unbeknownst to many, it is actually Ralph Cudworth who for the first time
coined the word ‘Philosophy of Religion’, and wrote the first treatise that can be called
a Philosophy of Religion. George Berkeley, himself openly indebted to ‘the learned
Dr Cudworth’, in his Siris (1744) writes:

Proclus, in his Commentary on the Theology of Plato observes there are two sorts
of philosophers. The one placed Body first in the order of beings, and made the
faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things
are corporeal; that Body most really or principally exists, and that all other things
in a secondary sense, and by virtue of that.
Others, making all corporeal things to be dependent upon Soul or Mind, think
this to exist in the first place and primary sense, and the being of bodies to be
altogether derived from and presuppose that of the Mind.6

There are thus for Berkeley two sorts of philosophers. The first placed body first in
the order of reality and mind emerges from it. Others, those with whom Berkeley
identifies, make corporeal things to be the product of soul or mind. The Cambridge
Platonists belong to an Idealistic tradition in Berkeley’s sense of ‘those who make all
corporeal things to be dependent upon Soul or Mind’. They belong, in an important
sense, to the tradition that derives from Plato, Plotinus, Origen, Eriugena, Eckhart,
Cusa and Ficino. They are Idealists in that they claim the dependency or derivation
of the material realm upon or from the spiritual. Hence, their metaphysics attempts
to explain the ‘lower’ (nature) in terms of that which is higher (spirit), whereas the
naturalist explains the higher in terms of the lower, the spiritual realm in purely natural
terms.
The Idealists follow the ‘interior’ path. The absolute, or God, is not to be inferred
from the facts or the very contingency of the cosmos, but is intuited or apprehended in
consciousness or the structure of the spirit. The distinction between the spiritual and
material is such that the transcendence of the Divine is not conceived in materialistic
terms as remoteness. The refusal to envisage divine transcendence as ‘out and up there’
and the absolute as the apex of a cosmic pyramid has sometimes been mistakenly
interpreted as pantheism when in fact it is the opposite. The enigmatic image of God
 
The ‘Devout Contemplation and Sublime Fancy’ 5

as a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere is the attempt to

dispel materialistic or anthropomorphic conceptions of the first principle:

A Circle whose circumference no where

Is circumscrib’d, whose Centre’s each where set,
But the low Cusp’s a figure circular,
Whose compasse is ybound, but centre’s every where.7

And for Ralph Cudworth, in his Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality,
we find the more prosaic explanation:

Wherefore although some novelists make a contracted idea of God consisting

of nothing else but will and power, yet his nature is better expressed by some in
this mystical or enigmatical representation of an infinite circle, whose inmost
centre is simple goodness, the radii or rays and expanded area (plat) thereof all
comprehending and immutable wisdom, the exterior periphery or interminate
circumference, omnipotent will or activity by which every thing without God is
brought forth into existence.8

John Henry Muirhead, pupil of T. H. Green in Balliol, viewed Cudworth and More as
the forefathers of British Idealism. According to Muirhead, the following are the main
metaphysical points of the Cambridge Platonists:

(1) Their view of the divine principle in the world as the action not of an arbitrary
Will acting on it from without but of an immanent will to good whether conceived
of as Beauty, Justice, or Truth; (2) The view of nature which they pressed against
the mechanical systems both of other times and of their own; (3) The theory of
mind as an active participant in the process of knowledge.9

This is almost a paraphrase of Cudworth’s words:

First, for making a Perfect Incorporeal intellect to be the Head of all; and Secondly,
for resolving that Nature, as an Instrument of this Intellect, does not merely act
according to the Necessity of Material Motions but for Ends and Purposes, though
unknown to it self; Thirdly, for maintaining the Naturality of Morality; and Lastly,
for asserting the τὸ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν, Autexousie, or Liberty from Necessity.10

Recently, Dimitri Levitin has questioned the existence of the ‘Cambridge Platonists’.
I am not quite sure which part of the ‘Cambridge Platonists’ might be objectionable.
Most of them were here! And their enthusiasm for Platonism is hard to question. Yet
the central claim has been gathering support and is widely and respectfully cited by
historians. One should consider his claims in more detail. He writes:

One did not have to be a ‘Cambridge Platonist’, or in any way connected to the
supposed group, to be interested in ancient thought. As is shown throughout this
6 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

book, there was no such thing as a ‘Cambridge Platonist’ attitude to the history
of philosophy. For a start, apart from Henry More, they were not ‘professional
philosophers’, but – like most senior university fellow – theologians and philologists
who used philosophy when it suited them. Second, both their coherence and
importance are predicated on the same nineteenth-century whig story that sought
to trace a ‘rationalist’ lineage for ‘liberal’ Anglicanism. The idea that they represent
an anachronistic remnant of ‘Renaissance humanism’ in an otherwise ‘modern’
world is based on the old assumptions about ‘ancients and moderns’ and about
traditions of Platonic ‘syncretism’ we met earlier.11

Ralph Cudworth emerges not as an anachronistic ‘Platonist’ but as a cutting-

edge European philologist. Most importantly, a huge number of scholars, natural
philosophers and divines were acutely interested in ancient wisdom without having
anything to do with the Cambridge group. Levitin’s brief is that of a historian rather
than a philosopher or theologian and one might excuse a lack of familiarity with
some of the salient principles at stake. The mocking tone of Levitin, however, is
frankly absurd. The authors known as the ‘Cambridge Platonists’ were indeed mostly
Cambridge figures, and closely knit through friendship and elective affinity; and
their adherence to Plato and his school is in marked opposition to the Aristotle of
the schools. Unless one is utterly sceptical about tags like ‘The Renaissance Platonists’
or ‘The German Idealists’, both of which are more questionable as groups than ‘The
Cambridge Platonists’, it is quite reasonable to use the term helpfully. The existence of
figures such as Henry Hallywell (1640–1703) and his teacher George Rust (1628–70),
who shared very close beliefs about the soul, enthusiasm and atheism, reveals a wider
group of students who paraphrase, develop and repeat the arguments of More and
Cudworth.12 The existence of a school is evinced by contemporary critique in the form
of Herbert Thorndike, Joseph Beaumont and especially Samuel Parker’s A Free and
Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophy in 1666. And contrary to Levitin’s jejune
proposition that Cudworth was in reality a theologian and philologist, Cudworth is,
in fact, the nearest thing to a professional philosopher in England until T. H. Green
in the nineteenth century. In response to Levitin’s last point about Cudworth being a
philologist rather than a philosopher, we find Cudworth himself asserting:

We were necessitated by the Matter it self, to run out into Philology and Antiquity;
as also in the other Parts of the Book, we do often give an Account of the Doctrine
of the Ancients: which however some Over-severe Philosophers, may look upon
Fastidiously, or Undervalue and Depreciate; yet, as we conceived it often Necessary,
so possibly may the Variety thereof not be Ungratefull to others; and this Mixture
of Philology, throughout the Whole, Sweeten and Allay the Severity of Philosophy
to them: The main thing which the Book pretends to, in the mean time, being the
Philosophy of Religion.13

It is quite evident from this passage that Cudworth himself views his activity as
primarily philosophical, that is, the philosophy of religion. And, later on, Cudworth
defines philosophy as
 
The ‘Devout Contemplation and Sublime Fancy’ 7

not a Matter of Faith, but Reason, Men ought not to affect (as I conceive) to
derive its Pedigree from Revelation, and by that very pretence seek to impose it
Tyrannically upon the minds of Men, which God hath here purposely left Free to
the use of their own Faculties, that so finding out Truth by them, they might enjoy
that Pleasure and Satisfaction, which arises from thence.14

Cudworth is adducing a theological argument for philosophical autonomy. If we have

been endowed with reason by God, then it is legitimate to use it freely. It is quite evident
that he sees his own work as proceeding upon this rational basis. Hence the critique of
‘latitude’ from High Churchman, such as Joseph Beaumont, who was concerned that
Cudworth failed to defend the authority of the church.
The philosophical endeavour of Cudworth’s magnum opus is clear in the
frontispiece of the first edition of 1678. There we find a copperplate engraving by
Robert White (1645–1703), after a design by the portrait-painter Jan Baptist Gaspers.
Called The Six Greek Philosophers, the engraving depicts, in two camps, the ‘Theists’,
on the right (from the book’s perspective), and the ‘Atheists’, on the left: the ‘Theists’,
over whom we find the word ‘Victory’ in a laurel wreath, are Aristotle, Pythagoras
and Socrates. The ‘Atheists’, who have the word ‘Confusion’ over their heads in a
broken wreath, are Strato of Lampsacus, Epicurus and Anaximander. Spinoza is the
new Strato, and Hobbes the new Anaximander. Under the engraving, we find the
Greek words of Plato from book 10 of his dialogue on Laws, which forms a sort
of treatise against atheism: ‘Well now, how can one argue for the existence of gods
without getting angry? You see, one inevitably gets irritable and annoyed with these
people who have put us to the trouble, and continue to put us to the trouble, of
composing these explanations.’15 Book 10 of the Laws is perhaps the foundational
text of Western natural theology.
Coleridge is perhaps the most significant inheritor of the Cambridge Platonists
in the Romantic period. When challenged about his obligations from Schelling,
Coleridge replied that he and Schelling shared many similar sources in Platonism and
Boehme. However disingenuous Coleridge’s response to those legitimate accusations
of plagiarism may have been, his claim that the Cambridge Platonists were forerunners
of Kant and the post-Kantians was shared by other British philosopher such as Dugald
Stewart (in 1815) and later by James Mackintosh (in 1872), two of the most significant
early interpreters of Kant in Great Britain.16 Coleridge writes:

The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they believed
themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson, Henry
More, John Smith, and some others. What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition
into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge, an examination
of the scales, weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be
weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental aesthetic, logic, and
noetic.17

Coleridge’s criticism of the Cambridge Platonists in this passage amounts to the claim
that they did not attain the heights of Kant’s transcendental logic!
8 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Coleridge’s pupil F. D. Maurice, Knightbridge professor of Casuistry, Moral Theology

and Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, following in the footsteps of his
mentor, wrote memorably of his seventeenth-century predecessors:

There were English divines in their time who aimed at this reconciliation
in a different spirit – by a different method. Cudworth, More, Whichcote,
Worthington, John Smith – those men who have been sometimes called Platonists
and sometimes Latitudinarians, who are eulogized by Burnet, whose influence was
chiefly exercised in Cambridge, and was felt most there – were not memorable as
preachers, and never sought popular reputation of any kind.18

Coleridge and Maurice were Platonists themselves, and part of a living tradition
of Platonic thought. As such, they keenly recognized a kinship, albeit not an
uncritical bond, with their intellectual ancestors.19 Hence the historian John Hunt
in his Religious Thought in England speaks of the Cambridge Platonists as the ‘chief
Rationalists of the age’ and as critics of Hobbes, Platonists trying to establish ‘religion
and morality not on anything transient or arbitrary, but on principles immutable
and eternal’.20 Contrary to Levitin, Hunt is not proposing some dubious reification
but providing an accurate description of the school, and a classification that draws
upon the insights of earlier illustrious writers like Coleridge and Maurice, as well as
the reflections of seventeenth-century contemporaries such as Richard Baxter and
Gilbert Burnet. Far from being an artificial construction, ‘Cambridge Platonists’ is a
term that denotes a living tradition of thought, and one without which I could not
have embarked upon my trilogy.

1 Platonism as a systematic metaphysic and a way of life

The Platonism of the Cambridge Platonists is systematic and yet emphatically a
philosophy of life and experience. For Cudworth and More, Plato’s philosophy is a
system and Plotinus is the greatest of all interpreters of Plato. The Good in Plato as both
the sovereign principle of philosophy and beyond Being meant that both ethics and
epistemology required a theological foundation. And this meant addressing questions
that could not emerge in Plato’s age, or that of Plotinus or Ficino. The Cambridge
Platonists did just that. They belonged to a post–Galilean-Cartesian universe and they
were equipped and ready to make the case for the philosophical truth of Platonism in
the age of the New Science.
This stress upon Platonism as a system is linking, in a seemingly paradoxical fashion,
with the insistence upon the affective dimension of philosophy. This has its roots
in Plato’s Symposium, but its most striking philosophical expression is in Plotinus’s
Enneads. Our thinkers can be called philosophical contemplatives, and I mean exactly
this temper of mind in Plotinus that veers between a strongly contemplative rationalism
and an emphasis upon that which resists conceptual analysis: will, life, experience, God.
Some make the mistake of seeing ‘Platonism’ as purely contemplative or rationalist and
then argue that the Cambridge Platonists are thus not properly speaking Platonists. In
 
The ‘Devout Contemplation and Sublime Fancy’ 9

a sense the ‘Platonism’ of the Cambridge Platonists lies precisely in the tension between
‘reflection’ and ‘experience’. The appeal to ‘experience’ is characteristic of the Platonic
approach in the philosophy of religion.
I have said something about Cudworth’s frontispiece. Let me now say something
about his title page, on which we find a quote from Origen’s Against Celsus:
Γυμνάσιον [. . .] τῆς ψυχῆς Ἡ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΙΝΗ ΣΟΦΙΑ, ΤΕΛΟΣ ΔΕ Ἡ ΘΕΙΑ.21 The
Cambridge Platonists were great admirers of Origen, ‘that Miracle of the Christian
world’.22 This is in part because they associate the Christian and the pagan Origen
as a pupil of Ammonius Saccas and schoolmate of Plotinus. Origen is thus integral
for the ‘Platonism’ of the Cambridge Platonists.23 The Cambridge Platonists are
not simply fideists, but they use Origen as the paradigm of the rational theologian
rather than Thomas Aquinas or other Schoolmen. Christian theology needs a proper
metaphysical structure especially against the modern philosophical criticisms of
religious beliefs. This may not be surprising to anyone aware of the significance of
Scholasticism in seventeenth-century Europe. Although the Cambridge Platonists
are using Scholastic ideas, arguments and themes, their paradigm is not Scholastic,
but Patristic, and Alexandrian in particular. This in part explains the particularly
strong Platonic strand in their thought. Plotinus, not Aristotle, becomes the ‘definite
article’ philosopher.
The Cambridge Platonists were wary of the powerful justifications of atheism
in their own culture. The erosion of teleology or even the very idea of spirit as
substance in Hobbes and Spinoza was to these thinkers an index of a new form of
atheism. Cudworth and More assert the need for a Christian metaphysics in which
the irrational bases of Materialism and Determinism are exposed and confuted. For
Henry More, it is essential ‘to cut the sinews of the Spinozan and the Hobbesian
cause’.24 And in order to do this, Cudworth deems necessary to construct a
metaphysical system by ‘joyning Metaphysicks or Theology, together with Physiology,
to make up one entire System of Philosophy’.25 Philosophy, however, is not just a
system, but also a way of life:

Were I indeed to define divinity, I should rather call it a divine life, than a divine
science; it being something rather to be understood by a spiritual sensation,
than by any verbal description, as all things of sense and life are best known by
sentient and vital faculties. γνῶσις ἑκάστων δι’ ὁμοιότητος γίνεται, as the Greek
Philosopher hath well observed: every thing is best known by that which bears a
just resemblance and analogy with it. (Plotinus, Enneads I 8,1)26

For John Smith:

The true Metaphysical and Contemplative man . . . endeavours the nearest union
with the Divine Essence that may be, κέντρον κέντρῳ συνάψας, as Plotinus speaks;
knitting his owne centre, if he have any, unto the centre of the Divine Being. . . .
This life is nothing else but God’s own breath within him, and an Infant-Christ (if
I may use the expression) formed in his Soul, who is in a sense . . . the shining forth
of the Father’s glory.27
10 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

This ‘Metaphysical and Contemplative man’ is an image of Plotinus, the ‘divine

philosopher’:

Plotinus aimed at such a kind of Rapturous and Ecstatick Union with the Τὸ ἕν and
Τἀγαθόν, the First of the Three Highest Gods, (called The One and The Good) as by
himself is described towards the latter end of this Last Book [Ennead VI 9], where
he calls it ἐπαφὴν, and παρουσίαν ἐπιστήμης κρείττονα, and τὸ ἑαυτῶν κέντρον
τῷ οἷον πάντων κέντρῳ . . . συνάπτειν, a kind of Tactual Union, and a certain
Presence better than Knowledge, and the joyning of our own Centre, as it were, with
the Centre of the Universe.28

One of the inheritors of the Cambridge Platonists in the twentieth century was A. E.
Taylor. Taylor was a product of Oxford Idealism (he dedicated his first book to F. H.
Bradley) but felt committed to a Neoplatonic variant of theism, in which the conversion
of the soul to the Divine source is the pith and kernel of genuine philosophical inquiry.
Following in this living tradition, A. E. Taylor writes:

The first step towards the ‘conversion’ of the soul from the world to God, as we learn
from the Platonic Socrates, is that knowledge of self which is also the knowledge
of our own ignorance of true good. How do we pass from the discovery that we
are in this miserable and shameful ignorance of the one thing it is incumbent on
us to know to apprehension of the scale of true good? How do we get even so
far beyond our initial complete ignorance as to be able to say that a good soul
is immeasurably better than a good body, and a good body than abundance of
possessions? We know how the Augustinian doctrine, which is Christian as well as
Platonic, answers the question. It does so by its conception, traceable back to the
New Testament, that God Himself is the lumen intellectus, a view which has been,
in substance, that of all the classical British moral philosophers from Cudworth to
Green, and seems, in fact, to be, in principle, the only solution of the difficulty.29

The claim is in striking contrast to the interpretations of some of Taylor’s brilliant

contemporaries such as Cornford and Julius Stenzel. Stenzel, for example, regarded the
theory of ideas in Plato as a means that Plato employs to describe the ideal functioning
of the polis, and he holds to a view of Plato giving up the theory of forms. Taylor is also
quite unlike Cornford in attributing a view to Plato that connects unproblematically, if
not without certain modifications, with the views of later Platonists such as Augustine
and Cudworth.30

2 Contemplating nature, imagination

and the sense of the sublime
J. N. Findlay once observed: ‘The basic strength of Platonism lies in its appeal to our
imagination, our understanding and our sense of values.’31 The beautiful, the true
 
The ‘Devout Contemplation and Sublime Fancy’ 11

and the good is at the very mainspring of the Platonic vision in European culture
and thought. The link between the axiomatic and the ontological is forged in Plato’s
Timaeus, where the demiurge creates the physical cosmos out of generosity, and the
imaginative coupling between beauty, truth and goodness finds expression in Dante
or Schiller. The Cartesian or Newtonian universe seemed much less habitable for the
radical conjunction of fact and value expressed in the myth of the demiurge of Timaeus.
Yet it is precisely this awareness of goodness pervading the cosmos that informs the
philosophy of Cudworth. In a passage that is redolent of Rudolf Otto’s account of the
Holy and the Romantic sublime, Cudworth writes:

And Nature itself plainly intimates to us, that there is some such absolutely
perfect Being, which though not inconceivable, yet is incomprehensible to our
finite understandings, by certain passions, which it hath implanted in us, that
otherwise would want an object to display themselves upon; namely those of
devout veneration, adoration, and admiration, together with a kind of ecstasy and
pleasing horror.

This ‘pleasing horror’ evokes the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of Otto, that sense
of the holy:

Which in the silent language of Nature, seems to speak thus much to us, that there
is some object in the world, so much bigger and vaster than our mind and thoughts,
that it is the very same to them, that the ocean is to narrow vessels; so that when
they have taken into themselves as much as they can thereof by contemplation,
and filled up all their capacity, there is still an immensity of it left without, which
cannot enter in for want of room to receive it, and therefore must be apprehended
after some other strange and mysterious manner, viz. by their being as it were
plunged into it, and swallowed up or lost in it.32

Coleridge, in his The Eolian Harp (1795), expresses the same feeling:

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all.33

This ‘animated nature’, ‘Plastic and vast’, is a barely veiled reference to Cudworth’s plastic
nature. What is the relation between spirit and matter? How one goes about answering
such a question depends to a very significant degree upon how one imagines nature
itself. Thus, from at least the late eighteenth century, the rapid and radical success of
the early modern scientific world view appeared to offer an unambiguous answer:
there was no relationship between spirit (or the mental) and matter; the mental was
either regarded as an epiphenomenon of matter or taken to be explanatorily inert.
Of course, this apparent answer has always had its critics. However, contemporary
12 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

discussions about the relation of ‘mind and cosmos’ alongside other seemingly
intractable difficulties with the problem of consciousness have generated renewed
arguments against a narrowly materialistic world view.
René Descartes’s philosophy is commonly considered the point of departure for the
exorcism of spirit from nature. His strict separation of spirit and matter constituted
a methodological revolution with far-reaching ramifications. Descartes interpreted
nature as an interaction of mechanical – which is to say, ‘spirit-less’ – forces. However,
a number of brilliant contemporaries of Descartes already argued against his account.
Most notably, the Cambridge Platonists insisted that the material and mechanistic
world view with its spiritless account of nature left crucial questions unanswered.
Drawing especially upon Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophies, they attempted to
articulate an account of the ongoing presence of spirit in nature despite emerging
Cartesian concerns. Hence, the criticism of a merely mechanistic conceptualization
of nature begins with the Cambridge Platonists. Henry More (1614–87), for instance,
engaged Descartes’s philosophy in a variety of formats, from his comprehensive study
Antidote to Atheism to his own personal correspondence with Descartes himself. Ralph
Cudworth (1617–88) was More’s ally in this, especially in his monumental The True
Intellectual System of the Universe, in which Cudworth develops the notion of ‘plastic
nature’, the idea that nature implies a spiritual but form-giving principle. Although
often overlooked today, Cudworth and More’s work exerted an enormous influence on
thinkers in England and America, but also in both France and Germany.

3 Conclusion
The starting point of the ‘philosophy of religion’ is not Christian theology but ‘religion’. It
is the experience of the sacred in human life, together with the sad array of desecration,
the sublime and the presence of evil witnessed by the varieties of religious experience in
human culture, for example, from the earliest cave paintings to abstract expressionism,
from the Vedas to Dostoevsky, from Pythagoras to Gandhi. The Barthian critique
of ‘religion’, together with post-structuralist attacks on ‘essentialism’, has generated a
misplaced hostility to the idea of ‘religion’. My own research in Hindu tradition, inspired
by Julius Lipner in the faculty, was in the way of those latitudinarians of the seventeenth
century who were eager to explore the rites and beliefs of the great cultures, whether
that of ancient Babylonia, Egypt, the philosophy of the ‘Turks’ or the mystical Jewish
cabbala. The philosophy of religion of the Cambridge Platonists was more open to non-
Christian religion than most proponents in the field in the twentieth century, with notable
exceptions such as John Hick and Brian Hebblethwaite. The frequent appeals I have heard
within these walls to a deus ex machina in the fideist tradition of Pascal, Kierkegaard
and Barth and their Anglo-American epigones have to be rejected, if only because it
blocks the exploration of religions outside of Christianity. The philosophy of religion is
a philosophical activity, not a subsection of Christian apologetics. It may be legitimately
used as Christian apologetic, and I have done that myself, but that is not its proper brief.
The bedrock of the strand of Platonic philosophy of religion as a living tradition is a
theory of the absolute as the first principle or arche and unconditioned principle, which
 
The ‘Devout Contemplation and Sublime Fancy’ 13

is intelligibility in itself and which furnishes intelligibility for all subordinate beings,
and which the Christian Platonists of Alexandria identified with the great I AM of
Exod. 3.14. Such an absolute is precisely the kind of limit of explanation that the analytic
tradition of philosophy has dismissed or critiqued as straying beyond the bounds of
logic and experience. The forgetting of this tradition of ancient Platonic speculation
led to the Babylonian captivity of Heidegger’s critique of the onto-theological in
postmodern theology and phenomenology. Talk of ‘theology overcoming metaphysics’,
so fashionable when I arrived in the faculty, would have been frankly unfathomable to
the ‘Platonick’ divines of this university’s greatest era.
Some of the most ancient questions of philosophy remain the stuff of contemporary
disputes: How can the mere clutter of phenomena form a harmonious whole? Or does
the apparently random concatenation of cause and effect reflect a catena or chain of
being? How does the indiscerpible unity of inner experience mirror the unity of a
lawlike universe? Do developments in the study of the brain or neurophysiology raise
new questions about human freedom, or do the egregious horrors of the English civil
war or the tumult and brutality across the world in the last century reignite questions of
good and evil? What are the metaphysical implications of postulating or denying values
as transcendent verities? These metaphysical obsessions of the Cambridge Platonists
remain urgent and pressing questions, and not least because the contemporary legacy
of the two powerful models of Hobbes and Spinoza is evident, whether in the form of
a neo-Spinozism in which any contingency disappears, or the radical contingency of
the purblind Watchmaker of materialistic neo-Darwinian metaphysics. If anything,
the sinews of the Hobbesian and Spinozan cause have become all the more powerful
in the contemporary period through the post-Darwinian theory of random mutation
and natural selection on the one hand and also the deterministic component found
in mechanical models of the DNA structure and function on the other. This has been
reinforced by widespread and corrosive nominalism, derived more immediately from a
heady cocktail of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, presenting issues of class, race or gender
as the final arbiter in questions of intellectual inquiry and the life of the university in
particular.
Moving from the principle of the foundational and transcultural sense of the
sacred, the insufficiency of piecemeal mechanical explanations, and the capacity of
the mind to be an organon of transcendence, all of which I found in S. T. Coleridge
and the Cambridge Platonists, I wrote the trilogy on the imagination by a desire to
reject any crass dichotomy between rational judgement and imagination, linked to
the belief in the capacity of finite images and symbols to unveil the infinite and the
eternal. However, even if the religious imagination is endowed with a central role in the
philosophy of religion, the logical and moral critic of religious images is equally part of
the task of the philosophy of religion.
The religious imagination requires metaphysics in two respects. One positive: our
metaphysical reflections can be inspired and shaped by images and symbols – Plato’s
cave being perhaps one of our most striking. Yet the rational critique of such images
is equally necessary. It is chastening to recall in our self-esteem culture, and especially
when giving lectures to a tender-minded generation, that false beliefs can be highly
inspiring and true beliefs can be profoundly dispiriting. The cool appraisal of consoling
14 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

phantasies has been a part of philosophy since Xenophanes. If the cosmos is a heap of
ultimately meaningless disjecta membra, then Nietzsche is right that Platonic–Idealistic
metaphysics is the timid refusal to endorse the death of God.
While it was a scholar of literature who coined the phrase ‘the anxiety of
influence’,34 no one could have more reason for such Oedipal anxiety than students of
Plato. Yet Platonism as a live philosophical option has been infinitely fertile in fusing
together the legitimate desire for the explanation of value and intelligibility while
resisting rationalism of the narrow kind. Long may the endeavour to climb out of
the cave and up the divided line continue; long may we contemplate the Good that
ultimately overcomes evil and consecrates the finite and the defective; and long may
we continue to revere the finite and transitory as a precious icon of the great I AM
that alone truly is.

Notes
1 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (London:
Everyman, 1993), vol. IV, 159.
2 See Douglas Hedley and David Leech (eds), Revisioning the Cambridge Platonists:
Sources and Legacy (Dort: Springer, 2019).
3 Charles Taliaferro, Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4 Victor Nuovo, John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 159. I had the good fortune of being taught by Michael Ayers,
perhaps the pre-eminent scholar of Locke in recent decades.
5 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 1: Introduction and the Concept of
Religion, edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson and
J. M. Stuart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford and New York: Oxfors
University Press, 2007), 3.
6 Berkeley, Siris, § 263.
7 Henry More, A Platonick Song of the Soul. For the full poem, see A Platonick Song of
the Soul, edited with an Introductory Study by Alexander Jacob (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 407.
8 Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality With A
Treatise of Freewill, edited by Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 27.
9 John Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: George
Allen & Unwin LTD; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 35.
10 The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Printed for Richard Royston,
1678), 65.
11 Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge et al.:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 16.
12 See the work of Marilyn Lewis, ‘Pastoral Platonism in the Writings of Henry Hallywell
(1641–1703)’, The Seventeenth Century 28 (2013): 441–63. See also her ‘“Christ’s
College and the Latitude-Men” Revisited: A Seminary of Heretics?’, accepted for
publication in History of Universities 33 (2020) 17–68.
13 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, ‘The Preface’.
 
The ‘Devout Contemplation and Sublime Fancy’ 15

14 Ibid., 22–3.
15 Plato, Laws, X, 887c7–d2: φέρε δή, πῶς ἄν τις μὴ θυμῷ λέγοι περὶ θεῶν ὡς εἰσίν;
ἀνάγκη γὰρ δὴ χαλεπῶς φέρειν καὶ μισεῖν ἐκείνους οἳ τούτων ἡμῖν αἴτιοι τῶν λόγων
γεγένηνται καὶ γίγνονται.
16 For a more recent argument to this effect, see Ben L. Mijuskovic, The Achilles of
Rationalist Arguments (Springer: The Hague, 1974).
17 The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, collected and edited by Henry N.
Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1838), 415–16.
18 Frederick D. Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, vol. 2: Fourteenth Century
to the French Revolution with A Glimpse into the Nineteenth Century (London:
Macmillan and co., 1862), 346.
19 Cf. David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought
(London: Murray, 1974).
20 John Hunt, Religious Thought in England: From the Reformation to the End of Last
Century, vol. 1 (London: Strahan and co., 1870), 410.
21 Contra Celsum 6,13: ‘Human wisdom is a means of education for the soul, divine
wisdom being the ultimate end’ (Origen, Contra Celsum, translated with an
introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University
Press, 1953), 326).
22 Henry More, The Preface General, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings
(London, 1662), xxii.
23 On the question of Origen in early modern Cambridge, see Christian Hengstermann,
‘Pre-existence and Universal Salvation – The Origenian Renaissance in Early Modern
Cambridge’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (2017): 971–89, as well as
the essay collection by Marialuisa Baldi (ed.), ‘Mind Senior to the World’: Stoicismo e
origenismo nella filosofia platonica del Seicento inglese (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1996),
and the more recent ones by Alfons Fürst and Christian Hengstermann (eds),
Die Cambridge Origenists. George Rusts Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen
and the Chief of His Opinions (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2013), and Origenes
Cantabrigiensis. Ralph Cudworth, Predigt vor dem Unterhaus und andere Schriften
(Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2018).
24 Alexander Jacob, Henry More’s Refutation of Spinoza (Hildesheim, Zurich and New
York: Olms, 1991), 101.
25 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 175.
26 John Smith, Select Discourses, 4th edn, corrected and revised by Henry G. Williams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1859), 1. For John Smith, see Derek
Michaud, Reason Turned into Sense: John Smith on Spiritual Sensation (Leuven:
Peeters, 2017).
27 Ibid., 21.
28 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 549.
29 Alfred E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist: Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University
of St. Andrews 1926–1928. Series 1: The Theological Implications of Morality (London:
MacMillan and co., 1930), 238. One might note that the Cambridge Norris-Hulse
Professor of Divinity (1960–76) Donald MacKinnon (1913–94) was assistant lecturer
in moral philosophy in Edinburgh in 1936–7, and he always referred to this post as
‘Assistant to A. E. Taylor’. MacKinnon was less committed to any straightforward
Neoplatonism than A. E. Taylor, whose obligations to Cudworth are evident.
Nevertheless, Mackinnon shared Taylor’s high estimate of Plato and Kant. Mackinnon
was a shaping influence in turn upon figures like Iris Murdoch and Rowan Williams.
16 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

30 I am thinking in particular of their different views of the Timaeus. See Francis

M. Cornford, Plato‘s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato, translated with a running
commentary (London: Routledge, 1937). Alfred E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato‘s
Timaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928).
31 John N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute: Metaphysical Papers and Lectures (London:
George Allen & Unwin LTD; New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 252.
32 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 640.
33 Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, ll, 44–8. Coleridge, Poetry and Prose, edited by
Alfred A. Knopf (New York and Toronto: Pocket Books, 1997), 120.
34 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford et al.: Oxford
University Press, 1973).
 2

The chariot, the temple and the city

The imaginative idealism of Douglas Hedley
Christian Hengstermann

1 Introduction: Idealism reimagined: Symbolic

knowledge and the sacrament of the world
Hedley’s trilogy of works1 sets out to provide a first comprehensive philosophical
defence of the religious imagination as our primary epistemic power of experiencing
and knowing a God ubiquitously present in all of nature and culture. To this end, the
author draws upon the idealist tradition of the Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth,
Henry More and John Smith and the English Romantics Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
William Wordsworth from whom he borrows the conceptual categories for his own
draft of a contemporary epistemology and ontology of the Divine. The epistemology
of the imagination as a source of symbolic knowledge about God and the ontology of
reality as an image of his creative and salvific action provide a via media between the
speculative systems of classical idealism and the misguided accounts of man and the
world in modern-day naturalism and scepticism.
The chief foil to Hedley’s idealism of the imagination delineated and defended in
the trilogy is contemporary materialism in its various guises which, the author argues,
inevitably falls short of human nature conceived of primarily as a restless striving for
the true, the good and the beautiful. Conscious subjectivity, as is evidenced, above
all, in the experience of aesthetic beauty, scientific truth and moral goodness, is a
stubborn fact, as is its constitutive relationship with its transcendent divine principle
revered in occidental and oriental religions. Consciousness, whether human or divine,
has so far defied and continues to defy every attempt at reductionistic materialist and
psychological naturalization:

If finite subjectivity were readily explicable, the argument that God is merely the
projection of the human agent upon a cosmic landscape might be feasible. But
subjectivity, notwithstanding the valiant efforts of eliminative materialism and
identity theorists, is far from readily intelligible. Some distinguished philosophers
like Nagel think that any progress is very far off; others like McGinn think it a
18 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

forlorn hope. If human consciousness is a genuine mystery, the theistic hypothesis

of attempting to ground it in the Divine mind seems no less attractive than the
agnostic materialism of McGinn or the appeal to the brute givenness of mind in a
philosopher like Chalmers.2

Beauty, truth and goodness cannot be consistently explained in a naturalistic

paradigm of metaphysics, as all three require as the condition of their very possibility
man’s defining ability to be both in and beyond the world at the same time. Since the
subjective experience of an objective world, by its very nature, involves an effort of
the imagination on the part of a subject endowed both with self-consciousness and
free will, there can be no account of either man or the world without appeal to this
distinctly human power: ‘It is a paradox of empiricism’, Hedley states at the beginning
of his three-volume system of imaginative idealism, ‘that it cannot deal with experience
because our experience is essentially imaginative.’3
In response to the prevalent materialism of the modern age which he combats,
Hedley, therefore, chooses to view man chiefly as a being of imagery and symbolism
that cannot but reach beyond the present world in the three distinct operations of its
power of reason in its irreducible experience of the beautiful, the true and the good. The
image is the sole means whereby a conscious subject, transcending brute facts, comes to
perceive and know the truth of reality in research, whether scientific or philosophical,
and, at the same time, feel the appeal of its beauty and obey the imperatives of its
goodness. The world encountered by man as a being of the iconic imagination is not
one of desiccated naturalism, but one suffused by God’s creative and salvific presence.
Hence, man, by his very essence, possesses an experiential awareness of God in his
imaginative participation in a theophanic cosmos. His capacity for transcendence
is, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s felicitous expression, the ‘Sheckinah in the heart’, in
which man, in the symbolic modes of his theophanic imagination, experiences ‘the
transcendence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal’.4

2 Transcendental epistemology: The theophanic

imagination and the realm of the symbolic
Like the earlier great Platonist anthropologies of Plato’s own Alcibiades maior and
Plotinus’s Ennead I 1: The Animate and the Man, to which it is indebted throughout, the
transcendental analysis of Hedley’s imaginative idealism follows the Delphic imperative
of the γνωθὶ σαυτόν.5 At its centre is man’s imagination which reveals him to be a being
both in and beyond his environment at the same time: ‘The imagination is the basis
of the distinctive amphibious capacity of human beings to be both part of a natural
environment and to transcend that same environment: we are organisms instinctively
adapting to the world and interpreting it as reflective agents with memories and
projections.’6 It is through its own amphibious nature as active and passive, creative
and receptive, as well as cognitive and affective that the imagination, the chief power
of human subjectivity, also mediates between divine infinity and human finiteness, as
it comes to see God in the mirror of humankind’s rich symbolism.
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 19

At its most fundamental level, the imagination is identical with human subjectivity
conceived of as ‘the transcendental unity of apperception’ in the Kantian vein.7 Every
single act of knowing and acting requires as the condition of its very possibility ‘a
unified field of perception’, in which a subject, distinguishing itself from it and,
thereby, constituting itself in its defining activity of the cognitive process, perceives
and understands the word as a whole and in its parts. In the tradition of the Greeks’
metaphysics of light, or lux intelligibilis, in which sight is revered as the highest of
our senses, the imagination is likened to sensual vision. As an intellectual analogue,
its transcendental unity is not one of sequentiality or temporal becoming, but one of
simultaneity or eternal being:

Within a field of vision the objects are given ‘at once’ rather than determined
by a succession of times. Because of this, vision enables detachment. Through
vision we encounter a simultaneous image and thus are capable of exploring the
freedom of the contrast between Being and Becoming. The image of the world at a
distance generated by the human imagination is a world that is subject to control.
Consciousness can therefore function as an ‘inner eye’. For humans, the mind does
not depend upon the environment. One can think of dreams. The relationship
between this inner world and the outer perceived environment constitutes the
distinctively human.8

Accordingly, the ‘distinctively human’ power of the imagination, viewed as the condition
of the possibility of all human reasoning, whether theoretical, practical or aesthetical,
is defined as an ‘amphibious capacity’. It is situated ‘on the boundary between sensation
and thought’, sharing its passive receptivity with the former and its creative activity
with the latter. Thus, while passive and receptive in its reliance upon the phenomenon
presented to it in the world around it, the imagination proves both active and creative
in the theoretical order which it imposes upon it. It thereby mediates between the
objective and universal on the one hand and the subjective and individual on the other:
‘The human imagination possesses a mediating power, or liminal quality. It provides a
refuge of irreducible individuality and a part of subjective consciousness and yet draws
upon the shapes and forms of physical objects.’9 As a mediating power, the imagination
is characterized by a creative tension informing all of human cognition and action
in which its transcendental universal power, paradoxically, brings about a person’s
irreducible individuality: ‘The imagination is uniquely characterized by a tension
between the inner and the outer, thought and sense; this tension is unavoidable, and
imagination hovers between the manifestation of the inner through the outer and yet
the inscrutable private part of consciousness that creatively represents experiences,
states of affairs in the theatre of consciousness, remains unmediated.’10
In the living history of the concept in British philosophy, Hedley’s imagination,
therefore, steers a middle path between the infelicitous extremes of Thomas Hobbes’s
entirely passive and George Berkeley’s wholly active power of the same name. Neither
is the imagination merely fading sensation, an evanescent remnant of an earlier sensual
impression outside a subject’s conscious control, nor is it to be identified with the
latter’s pure sovereign volition by which it evokes images without any prior contact with
20 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

reality.11 Instead, Hedley opts for the ‘remarkably sane middle way’ of S. T. Coleridge,12
as put forth in the daring system programme of Anglo-Saxon Idealism of chapters XII–
XIV of his Biographia Literaria.13 Thus, the author agrees with Hobbes in holding that
the imagination is dependent upon prior sense data with which it is furnished by its
environment, while concurring with Berkeley in stressing its irreducible transcendental
activity in conferring upon them a distinct shape in perception and intellection. The
imagination possesses what Coleridge, with a neologism of his own coinage, calls an
‘esemplastic’ power, that is, the power ‘by a sort of fusion to force many into one’.14 To the
passive and active dimensions of the imagination in Hobbes and Berkeley correspond
the primary and secondary imagination as a ‘shaping and modifying power’ and fancy
as ‘an aggregative and associative power’15 in Coleridge’s middle way. In the Romantic
philosopher’s celebrated definition, the imagination, in its primary form, is no less than
‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.16 It
‘repeats’ or participates in the divine creatio ex nihilo by turning the many of the empirical
phenomenon into the one of a living form of its own making. Its activity is defined as
a ‘creative nisus towards unity’17 by which the soul, endowing the many with a unitary
shape, produces an entirely novel entity. It is the chief error of empiricist concepts of
the imagination that they disregard this creative dimension of the human imagination
entirely: ‘Imagination is more than the mere constitution of items of memory into a
new set of relations: it is a fusing power that produces a new unity.’18 The ‘secondary
imagination’, different from the primary one not in kind, but ‘in degree’ only, either
destroys pre-existing unity in order to bring about new forms of intelligible order ‘or
where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and
to unify’,19 thus revealing its defining creativity in both its destructive and constructive
work. The third function of the imagination, that is, ‘fancy’, corresponds to memory
and instrumental reasoning by which the soul imposes mechanical order upon present
and past sense impressions received and remembered without endowing them with
any original form of its own. While lacking the ‘esemplastic’ work characteristic of the
primary and secondary functions of the first power of the human mind, it nevertheless
fulfils a vital function of human subjectivity which is key to man’s being as an agent
both shaping and shaped by his environment in theoretical and practical reasoning: ‘As
such the term “fancy” is not meant pejoratively; fancy is not bad as such, and can have
a perfectly respectable and indeed necessary function. It is hard to see how we could
negotiate and adapt to the world without the capacity to use memory in this way.’20 The
‘creative nisus towards unity’, as the defining work of the imagination in human cognition
and action, is displayed in the striving for a unified understanding of the soul’s prima
facie chaotic manifold environment. It is in Shakespeare’s celebrated account of the ‘poet’s
eye’, the canonical text of Romantic aesthetics and epistemology, that the coincidentia
oppositorum wrought by the imagination as the principle of unity in plurality finds a
succinct expression. ‘Heaven and earth’, in Hedley’s reading, symbolize the highest and
lowest strata of reality to which man, by virtue of his imagination’s sublime capacity for
divine creativity, gives ‘shapes’ and ‘names’:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 21

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.12–17)21

The work of art, on the principles of Hedley’s Romantic Platonism, is a paradigmatic

case of the imagination as a paradoxical unity of epistemic activity and passivity
working upon a ‘many’ and turning it into a ‘one’ as an object of vision and thought.
While drawing on a range of pre-existing materials upon which the poet imposes his
own unitary artistic vision, the resultant product is entirely new and as such defies any
attempt at reduction to the single parts of which it is made up: ‘The creation of a work
of art as a world sui generis cannot be intelligibly reduced to simple mechanisms of
addition and comparison.’22
Not only is the reality perceived and understood a product of the imagination, but
the self as the active source of its intelligible unity is its ‘work of art’ as well. While it
is the pinnacle of man’s cognition, sharing in the highest prerogative of God’s own
primordial creativity, the imagination is also, in a way, the lowest of his manifold
powers. As ‘the prime agent of all human perception’,23 including those that are
subconscious or involuntary, the imagination, for all its divine sublimity, reaches down
to the very depths of the soul’s lowest vegetative function, thereby again evidencing its
distinguishing unitive power in linking the divine and animal parts of man. Quoting
the two chief Romantic authorities of his own imaginative idealism, Hedley extols the
imagination as the principle of man in the entirety of his amphibious existence:

Yet it is also ‘essentially vital’, the primordial and organic ‘living Power and prime
Agent of all human Perception’. It is a point where human self-consciousness
merges with its subconscious roots in the vegetative soul, such that Coleridge can
both exclaim ‘How much of man lies below his consciousness!’ and exalt the point
where the human soul can enjoy communion with the Divine, as Wordsworth
claims in The Prelude:
To hold communion with the invisible world
Such minds are truly from the Deity.24

Man, as an imaginative being of an amphibious nature, is characterized by the tension

between the conscious and voluntary and the unconscious and involuntary which are
joined in each single act of his defining epistemic power. Dreams are cases in point of the
latter part of human nature, its natural ‘Plastick Power’, shaping the former. Conversely,
the poet relies on the sudden inspiration from the unfathomable depths of his psyche to
create a work of art in imaginative effort: ‘In every work of art’, Hedley quotes Coleridge
with approval, ‘is a reconcilement of the external with the internal; the conscious is
so impressed on the unconscious as to appear in it.’25 Again, the work of art illustrates
the imagination’s ‘creative nisus towards unity’ in turning the plethora of contradictory
aspects constituting an individual human existence, whether subconscious, affective or
cognitive and volitional, into a person of recognizable identity over time.
22 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

In the terms of the Cambridge Platonists, to whom the Romantic philosopher is

indebted throughout, Coleridge’s primary imagination corresponds to Henry More’s
‘active sagacity in the soul’,26 John Smith’s ‘“true Efflux” of divine sagacity’27 and, most
importantly, Ralph Cudworth’s ‘hegemonikon or the ruling principle of the soul’.28
The imaginative power of man is the hegemonikon in the theory of personal identity
propounded by Cudworth, the greatest philosopher of the early modern Cambridge
Enlightenment which Hedley seeks to revive and refine in his own system of imaginative
idealism. In contradistinction to the bundle theory of consciousness, as espoused by
David Hume and his many contemporary heirs like Simon Blackburn, Hedley follows
Cudworth in positing a unitary centre of rational personality and agency by which
man, driven by the a priori of God’s disinterested goodness, imposes order upon his
many cogitations, volitions and passions. Neither can the ‘hegemonikon’, a term which
the Cambridge Platonist himself borrows from ‘the great Alexandrian Divine Origen’,29
be defined as the final appetite, as in Hobbes’s materialistic and hedonistic paradigm of
agency, nor as a distinct faculty of the soul, as in John Bramhall’s alternative scholastic
conception. Instead, it is identical with the agent as an imagined unitary whole as she
contemplates her soul and character prior to a decision regarding a possible future
course of action. Being wrought by the imagination, the hegemonic unity of the subject
in reflection and action is itself deeply imaginative in nature. Human persons, like
the greatest of Shakespeare’s characters, are ‘free artists of themselves’,30 as they seek
to confer unity and coherence both upon the tensions of the conflicting parts of their
psyche within and the disparate events of their life without. The intense struggles of
Augustine’s soul narrated to God in the Confessions, the archetypal autobiography of
Western literature, testify to the conflict between the ideal of imaginative unity and
the reality of the Pauline ‘divided self ’, which structures the powerful autobiographical
account of the Latin Church Father’s conversion.31 There is a close correspondence
between the degree of narrative unity and coherence achieved by a person’s
imaginative effort and the amount of happiness experienced in their life. The stronger
the personality, the stronger the ability to cope with personal setbacks and contingent
blows of fate: ‘Human happiness must have more continuity and depth. It must be
linked to the homogenous functioning of different elements with an overarching
element. The stronger the personality, the easier its capacity to endure pain, suffering
and misfortune.’32 However, neither the ‘depth and continuity’ of human personality
nor the ‘overarching element’ of the autobiographical narrative by which it is brought
about can be sought in the realm of finite becoming, but in that of infinite being which
is both the principle and ideal informing the process of autobiographical storytelling.
Again, it is the creator of the genre of Western autobiography who expresses the
intimate link between the finite and infinite ‘I am’ in the narrative in an existential
reading of God’s name in Exod. 3.14: ‘His Commentary on Psalm 38 dwells upon the
soul’s ascent to God: “For myself, in my weakness I am so nearly non-existent that God
has eluded my memory, God who said, I AM WHO I AM (Ex. 3:14).”’33
Both in its knowledge of the world and the self, the imagination is a source of a
sui generis knowledge about the ‘infinite I am’ of which it is a ‘repetition’ in every
single finite act of cognition. Man’s relationship with the ‘infinite I AM’ of Coleridge’s
definition is a paradoxical one of nearness and elusiveness. Neither is the God who, on
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 23

the Neoplatonic principles of Hedley’s imaginative idealism, is both Plato’s ἐπέκεινα

τῆς οὐσίας and Augustine’s interior intimo meo34 beyond any experience whatsoever
nor can the contemplation of the Divine be modelled on sense perception. Unlike sense
perception, the credibility and certainty of the divine imagination can be grounded
neither in the immediacy by which its alleged analogue is defined nor in the doxastic
practice of a religious community of which it is part.35 Instead, the imaginative grasp
of the Deity is an overall experience of the whole of being as such in which man comes
to feel the infinite ground of all finite subjective and objective reality. Hedley adopts
both William James’s definition of religious experience as ‘a man’s total reaction upon
life’,36 whether good and life-affirming or bad and pessimistic, as well as its fourfold
description as ‘ineffable’, ‘noetic’, ‘transient’ and ‘passive’.37 Thus, while it transcends
all discursive language of which its ineffable intuition is the necessary condition,
the experience of the primary imagination nevertheless adds to man’s knowledge as
a reality far greater than himself acts upon him at moments of visionary insight. It
applies both to the vision of the self and the world. Thus, it informs the Neoplatonists’
introspection into the infinite depths of the soul imagined as a ‘shining sphere’ stripped
of all of its attributes and thereby gradually revealing the irreducible reality of the
transcendent One’s creative ubiquity.38 At the same time, it is also the principle of the
Romantics’ deeply imaginative vision of nature at large as ‘a sacrament of the creative
divine mind’.39 As an intuitive grasp of the infinite prior to every finite act of human
intellection and volition, the imagination is, by its very nature, anagogic and dynamic.
It strives for the infinite fullness intuited in its aesthetical, theoretical and practical
contemplation. Quoting a memorable passage from the French novelist Marcel
Proust’s Jean Santeuil, Hedley views the specifically human power of imaginative
transcendence over all temporal and spatial bounds as a yearning ‘to feed on the
eternal’ or as the capability of ‘wrenching ourselves free from the slavery of the now,
letting ourselves be flooded with the feeling of life everlasting’,40 as the soul struggles
to assimilate itself to the fullness of divine being. Again, its closeness to the archetypal
infinite ‘I am’, which it seeks to ‘repeat’ in its acts of narrative self-fashioning, is key
to the happiness of the finite ‘I am’. The less it manages to embrace the infinite ‘I am’
or the universal ‘field’ or ‘wave of consciousness’ of which it is part in nature and
knowledge alike, the more depressed is its overall ‘mood’. Conversely, the more the
image comes to embrace its infinite archetype, the greater is its overall enjoyment of
life in its entirety.41
As the ‘consciousness of the world as a whole’, the primary imagination, therefore,
is as much affective as cognitive in character. The mood stirred in the experience of the
whole of mind and nature is one of inevitably religious awe, ‘a sense of weal or woe’,42
as the finite human ‘I am’ cannot but encounter the infinite ‘I am’ of metaphysics and
religion:

It is the participation and imaginative engagement with the whole that generates
the specifically religious aspect. This image of the world as a whole is closely linked
to our emotional reactions, a sense of weal or woe. The mind can turn around
upon itself. Man is self-consciously in the world and thus aware of the world as an
arena of free agency: religion and metaphysics are unavoidable.43
24 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

It is identical with the irreducible sacred intuited in man’s most primordial of experiences,
the mysterium fascinans et tremendum in Rudolf Otto’s celebrated expression.44 The
feeling of wonder evoked by its experience in the world and the self alike is one
that both exalts and humbles a rational agent, as she contemplates a sublime reality
superior to herself. While intimately linked to human rationality whose transcendental
ground it is, its primordial ‘hidden depth’ defies a clear conceptual definition, rather
harrowing man with fear and wonder.45 In the German original of Otto’s classic of the
philosophy of religion, the author’s newly coined numinose Gemütsgestimmtheit upon
which Hedley comments in great detail hearkens back to the great tradition of the
German mysticism of Meister Eckhart and his pupils. It is meant to express the holistic
dimension of the finite human soul’s infinite divine ground:

Gemüt is almost impossible to translate: in the German Mystical tradition (with

which Otto was deeply familiar) it was the personal-affective core of the human
agent. Rather than convey just feeling, ‘Gemüt’ is the whole thinking-feeling self,
even if it later came to be narrowed down to feeling in opposition to thinking.
‘Gestimmtheit’ is cognate with ‘Stimmung’ or mood or attunement. We might
translate/paraphrase ‘numinose Gemütsgestimmtheit’ as the ‘affective attunement
by the experience of the numinous’.46

The finite soul’s imaginative grasp of the infinite God for whose fullness it strives in
every act of theoretical and practical reasoning is thoroughly symbolic in character. Its
pre-discursive vision of the infinite or existential ‘attunement’ to it is one of symbols
pointing to an all-embracing natural and intellectual reality: ‘Much of this attunement
is pre-theoretical. Symbols ignite emotional energies and powers which are not entirely
comprehended. Put in another way, the mind is not a tabula rasa: it must be attuned
and open to truth before it can properly form true beliefs.’47 The experience of divine
infinity is always mediated through imagery and symbolism, which, as a ‘medium
between the Literal and the Metaphorical’,48 both reveals and conceals the divine reality
at once immanent and transcendent to it. Hedley subscribes to Coleridge’s theory
of the symbol as ‘the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal’, also
following the Romantic poet philosopher in viewing the relationship between eternity
and time along the conceptual lines of Platonic participation: ‘It always partakes of
the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself
as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.’49 As such, a symbol, on
Coleridge’s Platonic theory, is ‘tautegorical’, that is, whereas an allegory, by definition,
means something different from what it says prima facie, illustrating something
abstract by means of a more graphic narrative, a tautegorical symbol is identical with
the meaning it expresses. While an allegory, therefore, can (and indeed is meant to)
be translated into conceptual language, symbolic meaning resists any such attempt at
translation. Instead, symbols are, in Hans Blumenberg’s parlance, ‘absolute metaphors’,
whose irreducible meaning transcends the conceptual.50 The inexhaustible semantic
fullness of a symbol, which sets it further apart from allegory, may itself be viewed as
indicative of its close relationship to the Divine of which it is a mirror: ‘The symbol is
endlessly fertile and suggestive, whereas the meaning of allegory is rapidly exhausted.’51
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 25

Like the power of the imagination itself, a symbol is both objective and subjective, as
the imagination furnishes the finite individual with insight into the infinity of reality,
thereby once again revealing its crucial role in a religious epistemology conceived
throughout as ‘a middle way between a debilitating scepticism and an idolatrous
and credulous superstition’.52 As the means of participating in the divine ‘I am’ as the
condition of the possibility of its every thought and action, it is, hence, the chief mode
of human subjectivity: ‘Human self-consciousness is a “participation in reality”. This
means a subjectivity that is constitutive of human existence and an encounter with
objective reality. The ensuing vision is not a fanciful construction but an imaginative
response to a transcendent mystery.’53 The transcendental insight into the infinite
absolute expressed in the symbol is one of intuitive immediacy, as the soul grasps its
meaning prior to any discursive reasoning of which the symbolic imagination, on the
principles of Hedley’s imaginative idealism, is itself the transcendental prerequisite: ‘It
is reasonable to appreciate the grasping of ideas as intuitive (although most analytic
philosophers deny this). If one views the grasping of ideas as intuitive, then the
symbol provides a medium of intuitive vision.’54 Hence, while the subsequent rational
discourse about the matter symbolized is one of the exchange of arguments in time,
it throughout relies on an initial vision provided by the timeless symbolism of the
imagination. Consequently, contrary to a prevalent paradigm of interpretation, the
wealth of symbols that is mythology, whether pagan, Jewish or Christian, cannot
possibly be naturalized or translated into the terminology of science without severe
loss in meaning. Man’s knowledge, on the contrary, is informed by the original myths
of his most primordial epistemic power, the imagination: ‘The myth does not proceed
from the material fact, but shapes how the psyche experiences the biological, historical
or material facts. It is not history that determines the mythology of a people, but the
mythology which determines the history.’55 Hence, all sciences and all humanities
are narratives themselves, structured throughout by the mythology of the creative
imagination: ‘Philosophy, history and science are themselves narratives in a strong
sense – knowledge is invention (or imagination) rather than discovery.’56 Since the
imagination, moreover, is the ‘the prime agent of all human perception’, encompassing
in itself all the soul’s powers as their unifying hegemonic principle, its myths give
form and shape not only to the highest of the attainments of human ingenuity but
also to the depths of the human psyche. Hence, Hedley follows C. G. Jung in positing
imaginative ‘archetypes’ that inform the deepest layers of the soul’s inner life. The
unconscious archetype is not part of the dark id of Freudian psychoanalysis, which
Jung, drawing upon the rich Romantic legacy from Creuzer to Schelling, subjects to
astute criticism, but a person’s innermost temple in which she shares communion with
the divine principle of her very being: ‘Rather than a crude primitive and infantile
legacy which should be overcome, this is the holy place or sanctum of the soul, part of
the Promethean fire.’57
The reality of the beautiful, the true and the good has assumed a plethora of
visible forms and shapes in the course of the history of art, whether secular or sacred.
Likened to concepts as diverse as Plato’s and Plotinus’s ‘ideas’ in the divine intellect, G.
Vico’s ‘imaginative universals’ and C. G. Jung’s ‘archetypes’, which shape and inform
our every experience,58 it is, above all, in three deeply ecumenical symbols or poetical-
26 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

philosophical universals common to humankind’s many cultures and religions that

man’s defining power has found its expression, namely the chariot, the temple and the
city of God.

3 The three ecumenical symbols: The ancient

theology of the iconic imagination

3.1 Imagery of human triumph: The chariot and the soul’s ascent
The first of the three perennial symbols of the religious imagination, the chariot of
the soul soaring to the heights of divine contemplation and action, expresses the
transcendence of the soul in its striving for scientific truth, moral goodness and the
beauty of nature and art. It provides the core of an anthropology of man as a being of
imaginative transcendence as well as a rational theology of a God who is identical with
the idea of the beautiful, the true and the good beyond and within a cosmos created in
his image and likeness.
In Indian, Hebrew and Greek thought, that is, in the Upanishads, in Parmenides’s
On Nature and, above all, Plato’s Phaedrus, respectively, as well as in the Old and
New Testament revelations of the prophets Ezekiel and John of Patmos, the chariot
symbolizes the human condition in its yearning for a Divine that is both near and
elusive.59 As a paean of praise of perennial power extolling the ‘madness of the Muses’,60
by which man may advance beyond the confines of the visible temporal world, the
symbol of the chariot illustrates the Platonic ‘conviction that there is a surplus of
ultimate meaning that transcends any attempt to express it: the Good is “beyond
being”. There is an experiential if not definitional knowledge.’61 Its core message is both
theological and anthropological, revolving around beauty, truth and goodness as the
three objects of the ‘experiential knowledge’ of the intuitive or imaginative kind in
which the soul encounters the Divine in its ascent to the highest realms of reality.
Its theology is that of a God who, as the epitome of beauty, truth and goodness, calls
on the soul to worship him in art, science and morality in a cosmos created in his
own image and likeness. His being is a source of the highest of intuitive insights into
the whole of reality. Like mathematical truths which it is called upon to contemplate
in preparation for the highest ontological realms of the principles and ideas, the
beautiful, the true and the good are such that the soul cannot possibly refrain from
giving assent to them when intuiting them. Theirs, therefore, is a sui generis normative
quality which, seen by the ‘eye of understanding’, is the transcendental prerequisite of
all subsequent aesthetic, scientific and ethical discourse.62 The myth’s notion of man
is that of a restless dynamic as the charioteer or intellect, moved by the beauty of the
transient visible world, seeks to steer his vehicle with its obedient horse or courage and
the recalcitrant one of desire towards the realm of divine eternity. Human identity is
not static, but constantly forged in the approximation to the divine archetype. While
‘ratiocentric’ in its ideal of the intellect’s control over the unruly passions, the soul of
the archetypal Phaedrean imagination is also one characterized by the ‘responsiveness
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 27

to the rhythms of the whole self ’, which the charioteer is at pains to guide towards the
heavens alongside its obedient volitional part.63
Of the three objects of experiential knowledge by which the finite I am, obeying
God’s bidding and realizing its vocation, ascends to the latter’s infinite subjectivity,
the experience of beauty is the first to instil in it the yearning for the Phaedrean Deity.
Not surprisingly, the beauty of nature has always been one of the chief sources of
religious poetry of which Plato’s Phaedrus is itself a key example: ‘One of the great
expressions of Plato’s religious imagination is the Phaedrus. Beauty can awaken
the soul to its true destiny because of its intense experiential power.’64 The heavenly
ideas which the soul seeks to contemplate are the unitary archetypes of the earthly
phenomena to which each ectypal image points. As is testified by nature poetry from
the Psalms to the Romantics, the beauty of nature is such that it can inspire in the soul
‘a transcendental mood which grasps the unity which precedes and transcends the
conceptual structures of the world of the primary imagination’.65 Nature has always had
the power of inducing contemplative awe. It is celebrated in the biblical Psalms which,
Coleridge averred, ‘afford a most complete answer to those who state the Jehovah of the
Jews, as a personal and national God and the Jews, as differing from the Greeks only
in calling the minor Gods Cherubim and Seraphim and confining the word God to
their Jupiter’.66 Both the Hebrew and the English poets reveal ‘a sense of the immanent
presence of God in the cosmos, the theophanic dimension’.67 Nor is it by accident that
the great New Testament seer John, like the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, is granted
his vision of a new Jerusalem on ‘a great high mountain’.68 Nature itself is God’s own
dwelling-place, his icon, by which the human imagination perceives his ubiquitous
creative and salvific presence. In cosmic anamnesis, nature itself calls upon man to
return to God, its creator. The aesthetic mood stirred by the contemplation of the
beauty of nature is not a mere subjective mood alone, but a perception of the original
truth of creation as an image of its creator’s consummate mind. Reminding man of his
divine vocation, beauty, Hedley avers, is neither extraneous to nor merely supervenient
upon reality, but, on the contrary, one of its irreducible characteristics. As the first
mode of our experience, the beautiful in fact discloses to us ‘the ultimate facts of the
universe perceived in their intrinsic value’.69
In the symbolistic ontology and epistemology of the trilogy, the Phaedrean striving
is revealed to be at work in science itself. Only by providing an overall system of
which each single piece of information is an essential part do the plethora of facts
collected in empirical observation and research become intelligible scientific truth.
Far from bearing out the claims of contemporary materialistic metaphysics, modern
science itself is, therefore, shown to testify to the necessary truth of the ancient
theology of Plato’s dialogue. A crude empiricism like eliminative materialism finds
itself in a hopeless quandary in the face of the indispensable imaginative dimension
of our experience of reality as such. Hedley’s anti-materialist argument is that of the
ancient academy’s time-honoured σώζειν τὰ φαινόμενα, which serves as a yardstick of
philosophical systems old and new: ‘Strictly the paradox is that of empiricism – that
it cannot do justice to experiences, imagination being required in order to “save the
appearances”.’70 Among ‘the appearances’ which, paradoxically enough, materialism,
for all its scientific pretensions, fails to ‘save’ is that of truth itself which defies an
28 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

explanation in terms of cerebral processes alone, however complex.71 On Leibniz’s

definition of the identity of indiscernibles, brain processes and scientific thought
should equally share a spatial locality and the predicates of truth and falsity, which
clearly they do not. Rather, modern science itself is an extraordinary attainment of
the creative imagination, relying as it does throughout upon entities that, on closer
inspection, prove to be mental rather than physical in character. Hedley’s argument
relies on mathematics as the cornerstone of modern physics:

But if we have reasons for positing mathematic entities, why should the mental
not be admitted into the furniture of the universe? After all, the matter that the
common-sense, no-nonsense materialist invokes looks increasingly puzzling (and
immaterial!) once science gets to the level of electrons, quarks and gluons and the
solid objects of the world evaporate into the paradoxical behaviour of quantum
components.72

Likewise, the powerful imagery in which pioneering scientists like Albert Einstein,
August Kekulé and Dmitri Mendeléev expressed their momentous theories73 points
to a ‘powerful link between imaginability and intelligibility’74 which belies any clear
opposition between the creative imagination and the scientific intellect. This intimate
connection has far-reaching ontological implications. It points to a fundamental
isomorphy between the intellectual and the real which we cannot but imagine to be in
fundamental agreement with one another. It seems rather counter-intuitive to assume
that a mind such as man’s with its singular ability to gain a systematic understanding
of the cosmos and its laws should emerge from a dysteleological process of natural
selection either wholly indifferent or even hostile to it: ‘It is difficult for us to imagine
a world which radically rebuffs our attempts to find order and meaning in it.’75 Instead,
the remarkable fact of the world’s intelligibility, as mirrored in man’s iconic intellect,
points to a divine agreement between mind and matter:

But it is much harder to accept that an interest in abstract truth emerges through
the bleak and harsh sieve of natural selection. Is it not far-fetched to connect the
concern with theoretical knowledge characteristic of human science with the kind
of adaptive modification evinced in the giraffe’s neck? The astonishing capacity of
human beings to imagine hidden structures of being, to observe laws and patterns
in observable phenomena, suggests that the world is providentially susceptible to
systematic intellectual inventions of the finite mind.76

In response to the twin spectres of materialism and nominalism, which he rejects

as undermining the concept of scientific truth, Hedley, therefore, defends a robust
realism in the vein of Plato’s doctrine of the first principles of the one and the many and
the intelligible realm of the ideas mediating between them and the visible world.77 Its
starting point is the experience of manifold patterns of identity and regularity amidst
the diversity and difference of the world around us of which we seek to provide true
descriptions in contemporary science. While of Plato’s five ‘greatest kinds’ difference
appears to be the first category of observable being in its prima facie bewildering variety,
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 29

all scientific research must assume the identity of the laws it postulates. Starting with a
universe as an entity that is, by definition, one, rather than many, scientific explanation,
in other words, requires a unity static and identical to itself and exempt from all motion
and change whatsoever: ‘Science operates with fundamental constants that remain
identical throughout time and space (for example, the atomic mass of oxygen). We
presuppose uniformity in order to explain the universe, a fact that is puzzling when
we assume that the cosmos is a radical plurality.’78 As well as embracing the two first
Platonic principles, the one and the many, and the five ‘greatest kinds’ of being, identity
and difference, rest and motion, Hedley also subscribes to the doctrine of ideas. A
scientific epistemology of ‘universal predication’, viewed as the transcendental sine
qua non of all empirical research, is best viewed as being rooted in an ontology of
immutable intelligible concepts. Plato’s ideas, however, must not be misunderstood as
either universals or objects. They are not reified abstractions in a distinct ontological
realm. Instead, Hedley, for one thing, follows the Middle Platonic interpretation of
Plato’s doctrine subsequently adopted by Philo the Jew and the early Alexandrian
Church Fathers in placing the ideas in the mind of God. In a middle position between
whole-scale dogmatism and universal scepticism, Hedley, thus, distinguishes between
an objective divine truth always aspired to, yet never fully reached, in universal
scientific predication and our imperfect striving for it: ‘With his framework we can
combine both realism and scepticism. With regard to the Divine mind, it is clear that
we do not have ready access to its “contents”! With regard to universals in the physical
world, we can adjudicate the relevant scientific considerations.’79 An example of the
consummate divine intellect’s thoughts approximated by the natural sciences is the
biological concept of a species. Humanity itself, despite controversies regarding its
demarcation, say, from higher apes, is an example of a scientific abstraction which we
tend to regard as an objective fact, rather than a mere name of subjective agreement
among representatives of one discipline of modern science: ‘It is part of the warp and
woof of Platonic metaphysics’, concludes Hedley, ‘to envisage the physical cosmos as
exhibiting patterns which are exemplified in individuals. Such patterns are repeatable
and form the basis of laws, and thus predictions. These law-like regularities are so
deeply entrenched that it is implausible to view them in the nominalist mode as
conventions.’80 To the approximation in subjective knowledge, significantly, corresponds
that in objective being. The said biological concept describes a law-guided development
as the evolution of a species which, for all its apparent dysteleology consequent upon
the Darwinian principle of natural selection, must, on the underlying convictions
of Hedley’s Platonism, be viewed as both flowing from and aspiring to its respective
divine archetypal idea.81 The whole of the cosmos, therefore, is an image of its divine
archetype to which its lawlike patterns, as established in scientific research, bear
testimony: ‘The physical cosmos is the mirror of the Divine: a theophany. This world is
a luminous array of images reflecting (although often enigmatically) the perfect being
of the Divine.’82 Moreover, while the multiplicity of the ideas of the divine intellect
is the ground of manifold scientific laws governing the processes of life and nature,
their essential simplicity provides the principle of the cosmos as a single lawlike
entity whose truth can be described with an ever-higher degree of objective truth in
the plethora of the natural sciences and humanities: ‘It is simplicity – the One in the
30 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

many – that forms the precondition of any form of explanation. How can a world
that is merely a receptacle of numerically separate and unrelated individuals be an
object of scientific inquiry?’83 Indeed, it is this scientific quest for the one identical law
in the many different phenomena both in an individual scientific discipline and in a
universal theory of everything that has borne testimony to humankind’s Phaedrean
striving since its very dawn in prehistoric time. ‘Elegance’ and ‘simplicity’ required of
a modern theory testify to the intimate link between the beautiful and the true in the
scientific imagination of the Homo sapiens sapiens: ‘It is through the employment of
theories of elegance and simplicity that the turbid, eerie and menacing environment
of our hunter-gather ancestors became the intelligible and predictable domain of
modern science.’84 The ‘elegance’ and ‘simplicity’ sought for in scientific hypotheses
mirrors God as the living archetype of the cosmos, his image, whose truth and beauty
are modes whereby he converses with man.
Not only does materialism rule out scientific truth, reducing it, implausibly, to mere
brain processes in the subject and accidental patterns in the world around it, but it also
undermines both goodness and moral and political duty: ‘The normative quality of
beliefs about goodness, truth or beauty’, Hedley criticizes the prevalent paradigm, ‘is
very puzzling from a naturalistic perspective. There is a significant asymmetry between
the prediction of natural objects and reasoning about persons. How can science describe
the process by which one judges an act reasonable or polite? Yet society clearly depends
upon the existence of binding norms of behaviour.’85 To the Phaedrean ascent in beauty
and truth, therefore, corresponds that in the good. The archetypal myth of the chariot
of the soul can be seen to inform an ethical idealism whose categorical imperative, as is
shown with regard to Plato’s late antique, early modern and Enlightenment successors
Plotinus, Ralph Cudworth and Immanuel Kant, is the gradual realization of the soul’s
higher part in the ever-growing participation in divine goodness. Not only is the
unmeasurable width opened up by the imagination the sine qua non of freedom which
cannot be conceived of in terms of stimulus and response alone, but also proof of the
human person’s divine vocation:

The creativity and freedom that is definitive for human life points to the ultimate
question, which is why is there something rather than nothing: God’s own self-
diffusive, creative love. Imagination, I argue, is the index of humanity made in
the image of God. Better to think human consciousness as inherently creative
processing of the environment. Imagination is the mind’s freedom from stimulus;
this freedom is linked to a vocation for a soul, and the calling of the soul is linked
to its image.86

In contradistinction to empiricist ethical theories, notably utilitarianism and neo-

Aristotelian communitarism, which Hedley subjects to thorough philosophical
criticism,87 the ethical paradigm of the Phaedrean chariot revolves around a rational
‘true self ’88 beyond the restraints of physical causality, including those of biology
and economy. Ever since Socrates’s celebrated account of his second sea voyage in
the Phaedo, in which Plato’s teacher, on the eve of his execution, insists upon his
rational insight into the good and the intelligible, rather than his biological make-up
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 31

as the cause of his philosophical martyrdom,89 moral agency has withstood every
attempt at naturalization with particular tenacity. While there is no denying man’s
evolutionary origin in the animal kingdom, any naturalistic account of human
virtue and vice in terms of his animal characteristics must inevitably fail to express
any moral and judicial notion such as ‘murder’. The idea, for instance, that, as has
been claimed, ‘murder comes naturally to chimpanzees’90 is exposed as an ‘instance
of egregious anthropomorphism’.91 For one thing, there is no correspondence in
chimpanzee behaviour to the defining characteristics of the concept of that felony such
as the perpetrator’s malice and lower motives. For another, the analogy is generally ill-
defined in terms of evolutionary biology. Instead, man, as Hedley argues in a strictly
metaphysical, rather than functionalist secular or positivistic Christological reading
of the biblical creation of humankind ‘in the divine image’ (Gn. 1.26), is a rational
agent capable of moral action beyond the fetters of natural necessity. His supernatural
agency is linked to his capability of practical reasoning about means and ends,
expressed in discursive language: ‘Removed from the normal causal nexus involving
all other animals, human beings are language users, free agents and able to contemplate
ultimate ends as well as proximate means. We have a traditional language in the West
for this – the “image of God”.’92 Following Hans Jonas, Hedley attributes to man ‘the
freedom of image-making’,93 which, defined as his unique ability to ‘represent entities
and events through the mind’s eye’94 at will, enables him to transcend the immediate
perception of his environment of which, paradoxically, he is and is not a part at the
same time and from whose laws, therefore, he is exempt in principle.95 By virtue of his
imagination, which is capable of factual as well as counterfactual ‘image-making’, man
is not slave to either his perceptions or his passions, but literally at liberty to invoke
images conducive to laudable actions. Man is, therefore, called upon to foster his
capacity for moral ‘image-making’, thereby gradually climbing the rungs of the ladder
of images of divine goodness, which Hedley views as the very core of archetypal human
freedom: ‘The believer legitimately starts with accessible images like the shepherd or
the teacher and gradually evolves towards more spiritual likeness of the transcendent
Godhead. What does freedom consist in? It is the seeing, interpreting, and pressing
into service of images.’96 His field of imaginative vision which is the condition of the
possibility of man’s libertarian action as a rational being is, therefore, not an indifferent
power beyond good and evil. On the contrary, it must be likened to or identified with
a stance of disinterested universal goodness, according to which we have both the duty
and the ability to transcend our petty egotistic and communitarian and tribal motives.
For one thing, the imagination is the obvious sine qua non of every altruistic action,
as it is imperative that we adopt a fellow human being’s stance in moral reasoning and
action. Hence, the imagination of Hedley’s Platonism, contrary to Descartes’s cogito,
is throughout conceived of as a deeply social faculty of the soul in which empathy is
grounded. For another, it is the imagination which provides man with the perspective
of universal and objective goodness so crucial to ethics. Translating the rich myth of
Plato’s Phaedrus into ethics, Hedley concurs with Kant and Plato in positing a timeless
intelligible subject to which the former’s categorical imperative and the latter’s ὁμοίσις
τῷ θεῷ bear testimony no less impressively than the tragic heroes created by the
philosopher poet Shakespeare:
32 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Kant and Plato present an essentially imaginative picture of human vocation.

Life is a drama in which each individual has a choice of rising or descending. The
ascent may not be as dramatic as the depiction in Plato’s Phaedrus or the descent as
grim as Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, yet I cannot see how any approach which does
not consider the imaginative dimension of human thought will be very useful in
ethics. We possess certain ideals and aspirations which are irreducible to instinct
and embedded in an organic history and culture.97

According to Hedley, Kant’s homo noumenon, whom the divine calling of the categorical
imperative elevates above nature, is an offspring of Plato’s charioteer and Plotinus’s
undescended ‘true self ’.98 Hedley’s is a strictly libertarian concept of freedom. By virtue
of the imaginative effort of moral reasoning, man is exempt from the constraints of
necessary physical laws. While recognizing their causal power, we generally dismiss
a naturalistic perspective of an agent’s upbringing and environment as necessitating
her course of actions of which we approve or disapprove in everyday moral praise and
blame. Instead, we cannot choose but adopt the Phaedrean perspective of the soul as
a moral agent who can transcend nature and nurture alike because she ought to. As
is clear from the Kantian point of departure of Hedley’s libertarianism, the notion of
free action is essentially that of moral action. The infinite ‘I am’ in which the finite ‘I
am’ participates in the practical reasoning of its theophanic imagination is not morally
indifferent, but it is the ‘highest good’ or ‘kingdom of ends’ gradually brought about by
the combined effort of all rational agents at every place and at every time. In its ethical
application, the Phaedrean doctrine of the soul originating in Plato’s and Plotinus’s
concept of the ὁμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ and culminating in Kant’s categorical imperative
requires a moral agent to disregard her own interests as well as those of her kin and
kind in a perspective of disinterested universality:

The defining component of the human moral agent lies in the capacity of being
more than the sum of instincts, needs and society – the capacity to act out of
reverence for the moral law and not merely in accordance with it. Hence Kant’s
concept of ‘heteronomy’ is not so much an absurdly rigoristic dismissal of
altruistic behaviour towards friends and family per se but the rejection of ethical
naturalism. Kant is attacking the restriction of ethical behaviour to those ‘nearest
and dearest’: a restriction which is implied in any theory of ethics (like Hume’s)
based on sympathy. Autonomy proper means the ability to treat others as ends in
themselves without external social pressures or instinctual propensity.99

Not only, therefore, does Kant’s categorical imperative of the absolute end of universal
respect for the humanity in our and every other person disclose to us the moral course
of action, but, more importantly, our Phaedrean being of transcendence.100 It is by
subordinating all of our many personal concerns and prudential considerations to the
one moral ideal of the highest good of the kingdom of ends that our finite selves come to
acquire a character of moral unity akin to the infinite fullness of archetypal goodness of
which they are imperfect images. Kantian ethics is, thus, revealed as another Phaedrean
narrative of the self in the ancient theology of man’s divine vocation: ‘TheZagent who
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 33

takes a merely prudential interest in his or her own affairs – health and fitness, savings,
pensions – is a long way from being a properly moral agent but is acting as if life is a
series of merely successive moments rather than a deeper unity.’101
However, while being a creature of Phaedrean transcendence and unity, man’s
experience of the world is one of overwhelming disunity and chaos which cannot but
prove a formidable intellectual as well as existential challenge to his iconic imagination.
If the whole of being originates in an infinite cause defined as supreme beauty, truth
and goodness, why do the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which
the human condition is inevitably subject appear to belie the soul’s noble origin and
destiny in the Divine? It is the second of the three tautegorical symbols, that is, that of
the Jerusalem Temple, which mediates between the heavenly ideal of the soul’s triumph
and ascent and the earthly reality of its tragic descent and fall.

3.2 Symbols of the tragic: The Jerusalem Temple, Christ’s death on

the Cross and the drama of fall and salvation
The temple, the leitmotif of the second volume entitled Sacrifice Imagined,102 is the
archetypal place where the profane, as is evidenced by the etymology of the eponymous
term (sacrum facere), is ‘made holy’ in sacrifice, thereby rendering visible the hope for
salvation in a fallen world:

The Jerusalem Temple is the symbolic meeting point of the terrestrial and the
spiritual, the material and the heavenly. It is a vision of heaven and image of
longing and hope in the midst of suffering and doubt and in a world that seems to
exhibit so much cruelty and discord. It is an image of that transcendent beauty that
Dostoevsky maintains will save the world.103

One of the three foremost imaginative universals, the religious notion of sacrifice
is crucial to man as the being of an amphibious imagination that enables him to
transcend egotistic subjective necessity in favour of the objective fullness of divine
freedom in self-sacrificial theoretical and practical reasoning. Both the symbol itself
and the transcendental structure of imaginative subjectivity that it stands for reveal
the world to be the stage for the whole of humanity’s tragic, yet eventually successful,
soul-making overseen and guided by a benign Deity.
Sacred buildings are visible embodiments of the invisible Divine in stone and
architecture meant to testify to ‘the goodness of existence’.104 Since the prehistoric
origins of humankind, temples have been works of craft and ingenuity that evidence the
distinctly human power of the imagination in its defining twofold role expressed by the
term itself. Both the English word and its Greek equivalent ποίησις denote necessary
drudgery and free creativity as the specific characteristics of the Homo sapiens sapiens.
It is the imaginative transformation of its hostile environment in life-sustaining
toil which heralds the advent of humankind as a sui generis species in the course
of evolution history: ‘The shift from the hunter-gatherer society to more advanced
civilization has been a poetic activity: a making or shaping of the environment.’105
34 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Growing more and more complex, humankind’s ‘poetic activity’ bears testimony to
its defining ‘creative nisus towards unity’ in forging more complex meaning: ‘The
transformation of nature into a habitable world, into towns, agriculture, commerce,
etc., is also the conferring of order and meaning. It is derived from a deep need to find
meaning and this is connected to the imagination.’106 Among the first products of the
newly born race’s poetic imagination is the sacred building of Gobekli Tepe excavated
in south-eastern Turkey. It is an awe-inspiring monument of our first forebears’ original
imaginative inklings of the Divine both around and beyond them: ‘One can imagine
hunter-gatherers driven by a primordial sense of the sacred, the mysterium tremendum
et fascinans, and thus seeking and constructing a place of worship. Six millennia older
than Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe is an imposing construction with theriomorphic
designs carved into the monumental pillars.’107 In the midst of the temple, its holy
of holies, dwells God himself whom the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, according to
R. Otto’s seminal interpretation, experiences as the sublime itself, being ‘humbled’ and
‘exalted’ at the same time. The purification of his lips stands for the gap between the
ordinary human and sublime divine realms of being: ‘The prophet is aware of his own
unworthiness in the Temple. The idea of purification of the lips of Isaiah is emphasized
by Otto in his use of the prophet’s encounter with God.’108
Countering modern misgivings about the allegedly archaic cruelty which it
supposedly extols, Hedley sets out to rehabilitate the much-maligned religious
concept of sacrifice. To this end, the author takes issue with the seminal accounts of
religious sacrifice by Walter Burkert and René Girard which trace this primordial rite
of the temple imagination back to the violence at the advent of human nature and
culture, respectively. Burkert’s is a naturalistic account of sacrificial killing which is
explained as a ritual re-enacting of the early human hunter-gatherers’ ambivalent
feelings involved in the hunt, that is, the original excitement and the subsequent guilt
over the animal’s blood spilt and its food consumed. The ritual, therefore, continues
closely to mirror the three stages of our first forebears’ experience of archaic hunting,
that is, ‘killing, sharing and penitence’.109 At the heart of Girard’s alternative account
of sacrifice, which is literary rather than biological and ethological in origin, are the
concepts of ‘mimetic desire’ and ‘mimetic double’ whereby human beings, inevitably
driven by violence, engage in acts of violence. Only by unleashing their aggression
upon a scapegoat victim, rather than upon one another, can the rivals preserve the
social bond that unites them in society. Drawing upon literature, both classical and
contemporary, Girard seeks to reveal the wanton violence against an innocent object
of man’s uncontrollable wrath as the thinly veiled core of the religious rite: ‘Religion is
a complex attempt to obscure the terrible truth of victimization at the root of human
culture, sacrificial ritual the inadequate attempt to resolve the problem of violence at
the root of all human relations, and myth is a language of concealment.’110 According
to Hedley, neither account does justice to the imaginative depths of the archetypal
tautegory of the temple symbol. Drawing upon the ‘On Sacrifices in General’ by the
infamous Roman Catholic counter-Enlightenment thinker Joseph de Maistre, Hedley
instead views substitution by which sinful humanity, in pagan, Jewish and Christian
ritual, is cleansed of its trespassings and ‘made holy’ according to the term’s etymology
as the defining characteristic of sacrifice.111 Key to the author’s own concept of sacrifice
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 35

imagined is the typological relationship between the pagan rites and the Old Testament
temple on the one hand and the New Testament Cross on the other. It is the latter, seen
‘in a mirror, darkly’ in the former, which discloses the whole meaning of religious
sacrifice. The New Testament antitype of the Son’s death on the Cross, as disclosed
in Philippians and Hebrews, can be seen neither as a re-enacting of the natural urges
of prehistoric humanity, as in Burkert, nor as a religious concealment of the mimetic
violence at the origins of society, as in Girard. Instead, it is a revelation of self-sacrificial
goodness as the principle and purpose of all reality. The Son who acts both as the priest
and the lamb is neither worthless prey nor a ritual scapegoat, but the embodiment of
the ideal of self-sacrificial love by which the cosmos is redeemed. Hence, sacrifice,
reimagined by Hedley in the original terms of Pauline theology, stands not for violence,
but ‘renunciation’ for the sake of the many:

The key to sacrifice is not the scapegoat but, rather, renunciation. The making holy
of sacrifice is expressed in the hymn of Philippians 2:7 and the kenotic theology
therein. Christ is, as Hebrews 9:14 puts it, both priest and victim. The point is
not that Christianity perceives reality for the first time from the perspective of
the victim, but that Christians have in Christ not merely a substitute (not I but
Christ in me) but also a pattern. This pattern of self-sacrificial love is neither
reciprocal altruism nor scapegoating. Not the scapegoat but renunciation is the
true sacrifice.112

‘Renunciation’ as the core meaning of the archetypal temple symbol informs all acts
of human reasoning, notably the aesthetic response to the infinity intuited by the
imagination, but also moral volition and action and all theoretical intellection, whether
scientific or metaphysical. To the beautiful expressed by the archetypal Phaedrean
experience corresponds the sublime both admired and dreaded in the temple
experience. In philosophical aesthetics, the experience of the sublime, as defined
by Pseudo-Longinus in Late Antiquity and Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in
the Enlightenment, is one in which the individual is humbled by a phenomenon of
extraordinary magnitude: ‘The sublime is traditionally an experience of boundless
grandeur and immensity of nature, at once conveying danger and inspiring awe or
worship: an experience with evidently religious implications.’113 The concept is applied
to man’s awe-inspiring capability of transcending the whole universe in his longing
for knowledge, an experience which Burke went on to describe in terms of ‘terror
and pain’ and which Kant traced back to our ‘humanity’ or intelligible self. While
inferior to infinite nature in his phenonemonal or corporeal reality which the latter
can undeniably annihilate in an instant, man is superior to it in his noumenal or
incorporeal ‘personality’ which provides the condition of the possibility of the infinite
perceived, even proving its better in holding on to its superior moral designs:

Thus humanity in our person remains unhumiliated, though the individual might
have to submit to this dominion. In this way nature is not judged to be sublime
in our aesthetical judgements in so far as it excites fear, but because it calls up
that power in us (which is not nature) of regarding as small the things of life
36 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

about which we are solicitous (goods, health, and life) and of regarding its might
(to which we are no doubt subjected in respect of these things) as nevertheless
without any dominion over us and our personality to which we must bow where
our highest fundamental propositions, and their assertion or abandonment, are
concerned.114

The awakening of the higher self effected by the experience of the sublime witnesses
to the deep elective affinity that links Kant with Plato. It is an imaginative ἀνάμνησις
by which man inevitably comes to grasp his higher causality as a supernatural rational
agent unbound by the shackles of his corporeal nature in him and around him: ‘The
sublime represents for Kant transcendence over those sensuous components that
constitute mankind as a causally determined part of nature.’115 The supernatural
self and the higher order of things in which it participates is also stirred in man’s
response to tragedy which likewise is defined by a peculiar ambivalence of pleasure
and revulsion. Not only does classical Attic tragedy abound in dramatic depictions
of sacrifices such as those of the eponymous heroes of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis
and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon,116 but its paradoxical appeal is bound to prove an
inexplicable conundrum on the principles of a sombre vitalism of the will like Arthur
Schopenhauer’s or a modern naturalism of man and world as a mere interaction of
matter particles along the lines of Richard Dawkins. Why should our insight into the
absurd grimness of a cosmos wholly indifferent or inimical to our concerns, whether it
is that of Schopenhauer’s Will and Representation117 or that of Dawkins’s Selfish Gene,118
be a source of aesthetic pleasure to us? Instead, the metaphysics of Greek tragedy119 is
that of an intelligible reality of elevating and humbling sublimity. The experience of
Greek tragedy is deeply religious in character, as its most celebrated protagonists such as
Antigone, Orestes and Oedipus are faced with the sublime power of ‘the unconditional
and normative nature of the ethical’.120 The duty to bury one’s own brother, which must
be obeyed even at the cost of one’s own life, is an objective reality, as is the guilt of
matricide and incest, even if perpetrated for justifiable moral reasons or in ignorance.
It is the aesthetics or the imagination of the sublime that can, therefore, also be seen
to inform theoretical and practical reason alike. In science, it is imperative that research
be carried out in a spirit of objectivity that requires the sacrifice of one’s own subjective
biases and interests for the greater good of the progress of knowledge. In ethics, the
temple, far from being a religious remnant of a bygone era of archaic violence designed
to appease an angry God, stands for the self-sacrifice of the lower empirical self for the
sake of the higher intelligible ‘humanity’ or ‘personality’ that is the chief end of Kant’s
categorical imperative. The higher vantage point at which the transient individual ‘I
am’ with all its many private concerns and interests is made to vanish for the sake of
the one moral ideal of the eternal and universal ‘I am’ or its true self is likened to the
Platonic notion of philosophy as a ‘practice of death’ (μελέτη θανάτου) wrought by
an agent’s moral imagination.121 Its analogue in both Christianity and Buddhism is
the injunction that ‘the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the
real life’.122 Despite the sacrifice required in giving up all private concerns, man’s true
life is not that of the body or the homo phaenomenon, but that of the immortal soul
or the eternal homo noumenon, as experienced in the vision of the sublime good in
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 37

Plato’s and Kant’s metaphysics of morals. Only by conforming to the objective value of
disinterested universality can the finite subject gain a personality in the strict ‘Platonic-
Kantian’ sense of the supernatural term. In the words of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph
Cudworth, who anticipates Kant’s notion of a rational agent’s autonomy in following
the ‘internal ought’, obedience to the timeless ‘true self ’ is ‘true freedom’: ‘Freedom is
defined by Cudworth axiologically. Ultimately, it is moral control of one’s self. We are
properly “a law unto ourselves”. The decisive fact about ethical obligation is its intrinsic
nature. To act ethically is to be true to ourselves and to be properly autonomous.’123 In
its commitment to infinite goodness, man’s ‘true self ’ ultimately is identical with the
divine ground of his soul or, in Cudworth’s Origenist critique of Plotinus, the humble
Christ in us:

Origen is preferable for Cudworth because in the term ‘hegemonikon’ he can insist
upon both what is right and wrong with the Plotinian view. Within Christianity
Christ is the true ‘self ’. One of Origen’s favourite biblical texts is John 1.26, about
the dwelling of Christ among the people. In a piece of exegesis as brilliant as
counterintuitive, Origen reads the ‘in the midst’ announced by John the Baptist
to mean in the interior man. For Origen, this is Christ as the hegemonikon of the
soul: the ruling principle.124

Hence, the ‘true self ’ conceived along the conceptual lines of the temple symbolism
which shaped both Cudworth’s and Kant’s reading of Plato’s ‘practice of death’ is one of
sincere humility.125 Again, the philosophic insight into the nature of the moral agent,
as expressed by the symbol of the temple, finds rich confirmation in poetry, notably
William Shakespeare’s view of man as ‘such stuff/As dreams are made on’ (The Tempest
4.1.156–157) or as ‘a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And
then is heard no more’ (Macbeth 5.5.24–25)126 and in Friedrich Schiller’s Kantian paean
to the soul taking upon itself the self-sacrifice of the noumenal ideal:

But free from the ravages of time,

................................
Would’st thou freely soar on her wings on high,
Throw off earthly dread,
Flee from narrow, stifling life
Into the realm of the ideal.127

The heavenly ‘realm of the ideal’ to which the earthly reality of the self is sacrificed
is deeply social in character, as the temple is also shown to underlie our social bonds
as an indispensable prerequisite. Thus, the temple cleansings represent a ‘longing for
expiation’, which must be viewed as ‘a deep and legitimate need’ as well as ‘a sign of
a sophisticated and refined moral sensibility’.128 Moreover, they express a specifically
human capacity irrevocably lost in reductive naturalism: ‘The concept of forgiveness
also shows the metaphysical inadequacy of naturalism in dealing with ethical questions
and the theological frontiers of ethics. Could animals forgive? The answer is clearly
no. The capacity to forgive presupposes a uniquely human (or Divine) responsibility
38 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

and rationality.’129 Likewise, G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit may be read as

a succession of stages of self-sacrifice by which man comes to acquire subjectivity by
surrendering (or renouncing) his individuality in universal virtue. Man has to give
up his own initial absoluteness both in recognizing others for the confirmation of his
own truth claims in interpersonal dialogue and to find self-expression in his work and
labour. It is, hence, the other, both personal and impersonal, that at once limits and
delimits human self-consciousness to which the self-sacrifice in recognizing it is key.
Hence, human subjectivity is, by its very nature, self-sacrificial: ‘Self-conscious spirit is
the continual sacrifice and restoration of identity through resistance and recognition.’130
As such, self-sacrificial intersubjectivity is at the core of all political community. The
temple is a moral as well as a social and political symbol. Not only does Hobbesian
egotism or its more refined Spinozist version of the conatus fall short of man’s self-
sacrificial humanity as his higher self, but both early modern philosophers, contrary
to their Cambridge Platonist critics Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, fail to provide
a satisfactory foundation for human community.131 According to Hedley’s imaginative
idealism, it is not a contract entered into for the purpose of mere self-preservation
and self-interest, but the capacity for imaginative self-sacrifice in the self-fashioning
of human subjectivity and in disinterested ethical and political reasoning that is key to
the flourishing of both state and society, which are both endowed with a providential
role in Hedley’s symbolistic political philosophy. Since the Son, in Christianity, is both
the priest and the victim, his self-sacrifice on the Cross spells the end of all violence
as the foundation of human society. Instead of the imperative of self-preservation as
the motor of the evolutionary survival of the fittest, it is sacrificial love which literally
sanctifies humankind amidst its struggle: ‘We are the products of an evolutionary
process in which strife and conflict plays a central role. Loss, suffering, and painful
toil constitute the stuff and substance of conscious human existence.’132 In Hedley’s
imaginative political philosophy, self-sacrifice, therefore, replaces alternative accounts
of political obligation such as enlightened self-interest and a contract for a future state’s
citizens’ mutual benefit: ‘If the Lamb has been slain from the foundation of the world,
one can infer that self-sacrifice is properly the foundation of society.’133
Hedley’s Christological view of history as salvation history is informed by this
archetypal image, that is, the Old Testament type of the temple and its New Testament
antitype, the Lamb crucified. Anthropologically, the narrative of the Cross enshrines
the depth of human nature which has always defied attempts at a definition in merely
biological or physical terms. It is, in Tillich’s terms, the ‘depth of sacrifice, of suffering,
and of the Cross’,134 which discloses the greatness of the human soul as it seeks to
embrace the Divine even at the nadirs of abject and tragic failure. Theologically, the
Cross is the unshakeable foundation of Hedley’s ontology of salvation. Christ, on the
principles of his idealism of the symbolic imagination, is the chief metaphor or ‘living
form’ of God. Being, according to the Nicene Creed, ‘of one substance with the Father’,
the Son reveals the most perfect being to be one of self-diffusive love, rather than stern
und unforgiving will and omnipotence: ‘If that doctrine and life is a mirror into the
Divine nature, which Christians wish to maintain with the homoousios, then perhaps
the teaching and life of the Galilean Rabbi reveals the Divine essence and not the
arbitrary will of a cosmic demiurge.’135 His Cross, interpreted by the four evangelists in
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 39

the imagery of the Jerusalem Temple, is a symbol of the Father’s works of creation and
salvation alike. As the apogee of the historical development of humankind’s archetypal
temple imagery, the Cross symbolizes God’s eternal nature as creative goodness that
calls into being a plethora of beings created in his own image and likeness:

For Christians, the sacrifice of the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Logos
made flesh, is a death in space and time. But as the death of the God-man, it is
the mirroring of that sacrifice which preceded the world, both logically and, as it
were, temporally. Salvation should not be understood in the crude forensic terms
of a propitiatory sacrifice made by man for God but rather vice versa: as part of an
eternal and continual self-abnegation or contraction of the Divine.136

It is in order for creative libertarian freedom to flourish in imaginative soul-making

that God, in a primordial act symbolized by his Son’s kenosis, chooses to ‘contract’,
creating nature and man as ‘co-workers’ even at the risk of their later apostasy and
the consequent arising of both evil and suffering: ‘If created beings make themselves,
there is a contraction or diminution of the original divine plenitude, but also the
surrender of absolute control. In the ushering of co-workers into the created order,
God countenances and embraces rebellion.’137 Moreover, it is not by violence or force,
but by sacrificial love that God overcomes the evil springing from man’s misguided
libertarian choice, not destroying it at once, but patiently transforming it in the course
of salvation history138 by sharing with him the tautegorical symbols of his salvific being
in transcendental and historical revelation: ‘“God makes creatures make themselves”.
That self-fashioning is through images and myths.’139 Chief among the symbolic means
whereby Christ brings about the restitution of all things is the New Testament antitype
of the Old Testament Jerusalem Temple, the Cross. In the symbolism of Hedley’s
imaginative idealism, it is, in the words of the poet Thomas Traherne, ‘the Jacob’s
ladder by which we ascend into the highest heavens’ or ‘a tree set on fire with invisible
flame, that illumineth all the world’.140 Hedley’s notion of redemption is one that seeks
to avoid the equally aporetic ‘alternatives of the forensic theory of penal substitution
in Calvin and the exemplarist theory of old-style liberalism’, which he rejects as
overly mythological and overly rationalist, respectively.141 Neither is Christ’s Cross a
ransom paid to the devil in a preposterous mythological transaction nor does man
save himself by imitating Christ’s example in a desiccated practical rationalism: ‘The
traditional substitutionary theory of atonement seems too crassly forensic, and mere
exemplification theory of the cross too insipid. But to attain the just balance between
the subjective and the objective dimensions of sacrifice is difficult.’142 The middle way
propounded in the trilogy hinges upon a twofold robustly realistic account of good
and evil, both of which are deemed realities in the strong Platonic sense of the word.143
Since the good is grounded in the archetypal divine mind of which the visible world is
an imperfect image, evil must, accordingly, be viewed as an offence perpetrated against
the very order of things. Egregious evil, by its very definition as ‘motiveless malignity’,
possesses a ‘surd quality’ that defies all attempts at rational explanation, whether it is
defined as akrasia in terms of classical Greek theory of action or explained on political
and economic grounds in more modern theories.144 Nor can the chasm between divine
40 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

goodness and human wickedness with the concomitant estrangement of humanity

from God145 be ever overcome by the effort of any single individual. However, as
an offence against the moral fabric of the world, sin as a trespassing of such cosmic
magnitude requires a forgiveness that must be understood neither as pardoning nor
as condoning.146 The temple sacrifice, therefore, satisfies a core longing of the religious
soul. It is the key idea expressed by the tautegorical symbol of the temple originating
in, yet significantly adding to, the transcendental notion of the self-sacrificial ‘practice
for death’. The vicarious suffering of the one may expiate the sin of the many: ‘We
can assume some mysterious principle of unity and transferability or substitution of
guilt among human beings, where the sufferings of the innocent atone for the deeds of
sinners. One might think of the role of the martyrs in the early Church, or the saints.’147
As an absolute symbol that is both archetypal and tautegorical in character, the Cross,
the supreme self-revelation of the divine nature, symbolizes the ultimate victory of the
good over ‘surd evil’ which the crucified Son, as is symbolized by the instrument of
his passion and his posture on it, recapitulates in himself so as to transform and heal
it. Whereas the rival accounts of the salvation wrought by Christ’s death on the Cross
in terms of a ransom paid to the devil or a punishment undergone for our sake are
metaphorical at best or anthropomorphic at worst, the Christological tautegory of the
Cross with its many layers of meaning is analogical in nature, providing genuine insight
into the absolute itself: ‘This is “Christus consummator”. Some other form of execution
– for example, beheading or hanging – would not have served this symbolic purpose.
What is unveiled in Christ is neither the arbitrary anthropomorphic deity of much
superstitious and subrational folk religion of all ages nor, significantly, the impersonal
God of Aristotle or Spinoza.’148 It is this divine love which enters a world marred by evil
and suffering to redeem it in the painful pedagogy of Aeschylus’s great πάθει μάθος,
which is the foundation of Hedley’s theodicy of the sacrificial imagination.
At its heart is what the author calls ‘MacKinnon’s paradox’. While undermining
naturalism in evidencing the existence of genuine value without which evil could
not be perceived as evil in the first place, evil also threatens to undermine the classic
theism of a benign creator:

Tragedy reveals an intimation of the depth and meaning in human life, albeit
meaning thwarted or truncated by evil, which is at odds with strict naturalism.
Yet this very same reality of evil frustrates any attempt to produce a metaphysical
theodicy which tries to articulate and explain the inscrutable. Let us call this
MacKinnon’s paradox. Evil thwarts both strict naturalism and classic theodicy.149

In response to the first horn of the dilemma, that is, the incompatibility of the reality
of evil with naturalist metaphysics, Hedley, following the Russian novelist Mikhail
Bulgakov,150 provides a formalized proof of God’s existence from the reality of evil
which, paradoxically, does not refute, but, on the contrary, both proves his existence and
discloses his essence as an agent in salvation history. In a first three-part epistemological
argument, the existence of evil, inexplicable on the principles of reductive naturalism
(1), is shown to presuppose a sense of goodness as its transcendental sine qua non (2).
In introspection, the objective fact of evil also indicts man as a moral agent chiefly
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 41

responsible for its occurrence (3). In a two-part theological conclusion, the very fact
of evil is revealed to prove a panentheistic God both transcendent to a world unlike
him in its evil (4) and immanent to it by displaying his love for humankind in a
process of the soul-making of responsible rational agents (5).151 In response to the
second horn, that is, the incompatibility of evil with classic theistic theodicy, Hedley
rejects the defences of divine goodness and justice along the lines of a theoretical and
practical rationalism like G. W. Leibniz’s and I. Kant’s, respectively. Instead, he opts
for the sombre, yet theologically sound, vision of the early modern Catholic counter-
Enlightenment thinker Joseph de Maistre, who avoids the twin aporiai of a theory of
an allegedly higher degree of harmony and order in the cosmos at large which offsets
the experience of futile suffering and a Christian practice of charity unconcerned
with suffering as a theological problem. Hedley’s theodicy of sacrificial suffering,
put forth in an emphatically Origenistic reading of the much-maligned Maistre, is
deeply Christological in character and hinges upon the tautegorical temple imagery.
It acknowledges evil in its pervasive and devastating reality. In his interpretation of
Maistre’s Soirées de Saint-Petersburg, which he reveals to be a key work of early modern
Origenism in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists’ historic rehabilitation of the
Alexandrian Platonist, the author embraces the Savoyard count’s grim vision of the
world as a gigantic altar upon which the whole of humankind is sacrificed and purged
in its return to the Deity: ‘The entire earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing
but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end,
without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the
extinction of evil, until the death of death.’152 In Maistre, the whole of divine and human
history is interpreted along the conceptual lines of the second of the three archetypes
of the iconic imagination, as man is called upon to share in Christ’s suffering. The
French theologian refuses to subscribe to the Augustinian Deus absconditus, whose
counsels spring from inscrutable omnipotence alone, but defends the Origenist God
of consummate goodness whose providential work is that of a benign, albeit strict,
education of humankind.153 On such a model, wanton violence and egregious suffering,
while retaining all of their horror which the Savoyard count invokes in such graphic
detail, are nevertheless rendered intelligible as part of God’s design of the salvation
of humankind by pedagogical and punitive means after the fall: ‘The cosmos is the
arena for the painful return to God through submission of the will on the model of
Christ’s suffering love. War and disease are part of the via purgativa to be endured by
a sinful humanity.’154 To this theological end, Maistre provides unsettling examples of
violence that, while deeply shocking in themselves, still witness to the divine order
in whose image the natural and social world, for all their shortcomings, were created
for God’s educative purposes. Thus, in his most celebrated example, the executioner,
despite his grim task of putting to death delinquents at the behest of the political
powers, represents the order of a judicial system even in the despicable spectacle
of an execution. Likewise, war, for all its horrors, can be seen to point to the divine
order, however obliquely, as soldiers obey certain rules such as the sparing of non-
combatants. Though faint, the traces of God’s benign providence are felt even at the
lowest tier of reality, that is, in the afflictions of fallen humankind, who can feel the
pull of divine gravity even amidst the greatest horrors of their immolation on the altar
42 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

of the earthly temple. The ontological backdrop of the Savoyard count’s apparently
bleak vision of reality is that of Origen’s Christian Platonism. It is a vision of a ‘scale of
being’ in which nothing can possibly fail to point back to its transcendent principle and
purpose, albeit ‘in a mirror, darkly’. Hence, sacrificial violence, as stated in shocking
diction by the Savoyard count, serves as a necessary reminder that humankind is in
sinful disunity both with itself and with God:

Sin is a state of dispersion, of being torn asunder like Isis or Pentheus. And the
violence of man’s fallen state reflects this dispersion. The visible world is a portion
of that transcendent spiritual domain from whence the former is derived. As
human beings our vocation is a harmonious communion with this intelligible
universe that is the mind of God.155

Again, disorder presupposes the a priori of an eternal intelligible order, without which,
on the principles of Hedley’s transcendental analysis of the sacrificial imagination, it
could not be perceived as chaotic and evil. In Maistre’s sacrificial cosmology of the
earth as an altar, on which Christ’s sacrifice is time and again re-enacted in the woes
of human history, everything is created for the sake of human intelligence. Each of
the ‘members’ of the dissevered Isis or Pentheus to which Maistre likens the pitiful
remnants of divine order reminds man of the ‘regions of light’ originally forfeited in
the fall and gradually recovered in the sacrificial πάθει μάθος of human history. Hence,
the dissevered members of the pagan types of the archetypal sacrifice of the Cross are
protreptic in character, as it were, incessantly calling upon man to follow the Delphic
γνωθὶ σαυτόν and rediscover his soul’s original pondus towards the Divine so as to
‘gravitate’ back towards Christ the lamb, the antitype of a great many historical and
mythological types, whether pagan or Jewish:

[Man] gravitates [. . .] toward the regions of light. No beaver, no swallow, no bee

wants to know more than its predecessors. All beings are calm in the place they
occupy. All are degraded, but they do not know it; man alone has a feeling of it, and
that feeling is at once the proof of his grandeur and of his misery, of his sublime
rights and of his incredible degradation.156

Maistre’s, therefore, is a ‘resolutely providentialist’ theodicy.157 The world’s chaos and

disorder invoked so powerfully in his descriptions of the human institution of ritualized
violence is part of God’s punitive pedagogy by which man’s yearning for communion
with the Divine is once again stirred. Man could not know divine goodness if it were
not for the tragic experienced on the world’s altar.
As well as proving, rather than disproving, the existence of the God of the sacrificial
imagination, the current state of chaotic disorder, on Maistre’s Origenst principles,
also serves as a powerful symbol of the fundamental Christian truth that salvation is
not wrought by the destruction of evil but by its transformation. Embracing Maistre’s
startling insight that ‘Evil is not a hindrance to Divine design and purpose but
makes it clear’, Hedley invokes the Cross as the key symbol of the divine and human
self-sacrifice: ‘Let us not forget that Christianity views evil as overcome through
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 43

transformation rather than separation. The cross is an image of the man-God suffering
and transforming evil and violence into peace and harmony. The key to evil is thus not
separation but, rather, absorption and change.’158 In Hedley’s imaginative soteriology,
the three primordial symbols of God’s imagination are shown to fuel Christ’s cosmic
striving for a transformation, rather than destruction of evil. Christ, according to the
threefold symbolism of the iconic imagination, is the chariot gradually elevating
the souls towards the heavenly city in the sacrifice offered in the world’s temple from the
beginning to the end of all things. The events of Christ’s earthly life during as well as
before and after his incarnation, that is, his heavenly Humanity which constitutes the
cosmic chariot in Henry More’s reading of Ezekiel,159 is made up of historical events
and archetypal images explaining one another so as to become genuine revelations of
the mystery of the infinite God. In his philosophy of revelation160 which provides a
middle position between a strongly metaphysical and merely poetical account of the
redemptive process, Hedley concurs with Austin Farrer’s quasi-Kantian insight that
‘the events without the images would be no revelation at all, and the images without
the events would remain shadows on the clouds’.161 Just as ‘concepts without percepts
are empty’ and ‘percepts without concepts are blind’, so do the history of Christ and the
living forms of the imagination collude to bring about the restitution of a world beset
by wanton evil with the latter in particular being seen in the light of the Son’s eternal
temple sacrifice.
It is the transformation of imperfection and evil in the union with the intelligible
realm, the ‘infinite I am’ as the first principle and final purpose of man’s imagination,
that is expressed in the last of the three symbols of Hedley's trilogy, that of the heavenly
city contemplated by John of Patmos in his sublime visions recorded in the final book
of the Holy Writ.

3.3 Emblems of universal salvation: St John’s visions of the

heavenly city and feast
The vision of the heavenly city promised to the faithful with great imaginative and
poetic vigour in the book of Revelation is not one of terror and fear, but one ‘of creation
restored through Christ’.162 In the final book of the Holy Writ, John of Patmos describes
a messianic feast held in the heavenly city as a symbol of universal salvation. It is the
promised end of the temple sacrifice or the painful process of divine punishment and
pedagogy for which the second symbol stands. As such, the feast is a deeply symbolic
vision of the restitution of all things in the shared vision of God as the beautiful, the
true and the good in which each rational agent attains to the universality and unity
intuited in the iconic imagination while also retaining her individuality.
Key to the symbolic meaning of the heavenly city in Hedley’s trilogy is the notion
of the feast at which the eventual consummation of a cosmos united in the imaginative
vision of the Divine is celebrated. Deeply influenced by the commentaries of Henry
More and Austin Farrer, Hedley’s Platonic reading of the final book of Scripture views
the apocalyptic feast as a symbol of the union of humankind. As a living form or
ideal of the iconic imagination, the one eschatological feast celebrated in the heavenly
44 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Jerusalem is anticipated in many types in human religion and art alike. In the ‘Church
as paradise provisionally regained’,163 the Eucharist is a sacramental anticipation of the
feast in the heavens, its apocalyptic antitype. In his interpretation of the sacrament
as a feast, Hedley throughout follows Ralph Cudworth, whose early 1642 works A
Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper and The Union of Christ
and the Church in a Shadow provide a compelling symbolic vision of the Eucharistic
communion of God and man. The author concurs with Cudworth’s critique of the
Roman Catholic interpretation and the notion of the sacrament as festive, rather than
sacrificial.164 Instead, the Eucharist is to be defined as a ‘feast upon the True Sacrifice’,
that is, Christ, thereby revealing the contemplative vision of the divine city as the end
of the afflictions of soul-making:

But now the True Christian Sacrifice being come, and offered up once for all, never
to be repeated; we have therefore no more Typical Sacrifices left among us but onely
the Feasts upon the True Sacrifice still Symbolically continued, and often repeated,
in reference to that ONE GREAT SACRIFICE, which is alwayes as present in Gods
sight and efficacious, as if it were but now offered up for us.165

While the existence of the many ‘Typical Sacrifices’ of old evidences God’s universal
providence by which he cares for all peoples of all times and all places by sharing with
them his vision of self-sacrificial love in the temple a priori, the Christological ‘once
for all’ expresses the uniqueness of the one historical antitype. This antitype is Christus
consummator and his Cross by which man, after the woes of soul-making, attains to
the weal of the eschatological feast: ‘Christ is a way of seeing the invisible world. He is
the great High Priest who opens the veil of the Temple and reveals the Divine essence.
As the blood-stained Logos, he opens the heavens.’166 The Eucharistic feast is, thus, a
‘Federall Rite between God and us’167 symbolizing and anticipating the eschatological
fullness of communion between God and humanity. Against the backdrop of the
Platonic ontology of an archetypal intelligible and an ectypal empirical realm, the
feast, hence, marks the final reditus of the world to its divine source after its sinful
exitus. By celebrating the Eucharistic feast amidst the evil and suffering of humankind’s
immolation on the altar of the present world, the Christian community provides public
testimony to the ultimate meaningfulness of all things: ‘The capacity for joy invoked
by the festival’, as will eventually be confirmed in the heavenly city of Jerusalem, ‘is
incompatible with a belief in the radical contingency or meaninglessness of the
cosmos.’168 Another symbolic expression of the life-affirming festivity, whether earthly
or heavenly, is the music played on that joyous occasion. As ‘the most immaterial and
spiritual of the arts’,169 it likewise is a symbol of the life-giving power of the Divine in
creation and salvation. In many ways, it finds its most sublime artistic expression in the
Renaissance painter Raphael’s The Ecstasy of St Cecilia, which depicts the titular patron
of church music gazing towards the opened heavens amidst several saints, including
John of Patmos, who is holding his visionary book of Revelation in his hands.170
Its ‘Platonic-Pythagorean dimension’, already noted by its most ardent Romantic
admirers, links the Renaissance painting to the ancient theology of salvation defined
as the soul’s existential participation in the beautiful, the true and the good as the first
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 45

cause and final end of all things. Manifold literary analogues to the New Testament
seer’s profound vision of the heavenly feast are provided by the metaphysical Bard in
whose early and late plays alike death and loss are transformed in life-affirming drama.
In Shakespeare’s early Romeo and Juliet, the eponymous ‘star-crossed lovers’ are united
in an imagined feast after the heroine’s apparent death:

Her beauty makes

This vault a feasting presence full of light.
5.3.85–86171

Likewise, Shakespeare’s visionary late masterpieces, his Romances, abound in lost

loved ones being restored to life in perplexing turns of dramatic events accompanied
by music. Thus, music helps to bring back to life Thaisa and Hermione in Pericles and
The Winter's Tale or allay the devastating storm in The Tempest.172
The transcendental meaning of the third of the three primordial symbols of the
iconic imagination is that of the consummation of all things in humankind’s eventual
union with the infinite ‘I am’ which Hedley elucidates in terms of the ‘Plotinian
vision of the Divine intellect as a “community of living intelligences”’.173 Not only
does man’s striving for the fullness of being and beauty find its consummation in the
communion expressed by the tautegorical symbol of the city, but his yearning for the
highest good of all creation is fulfilled as well, as human and divine freedom coincide
in unhampered understanding. Human imagination finds its fulfilment in the infinite
width of all rational agents joining in the vision of God’s glory: ‘The transformation
of self-consciousness through the aid of the indwelling Christ is a foretasting of the
dwelling in the heavenly city. The heavenly city is an empathic image of transcendence:
of that which is “beyond being”.’174 Both the biblical and Platonic visions are ones of
a ‘mutual indwelling’ in consummate community as free agency epitomized by the
chariot, through the struggles symbolized by the temple, finds its consummation in the
heavenly city, the chief emblem of universal love:

Free agents can recognize and avow this often-occluded unity through love. The
process of ‘union’ is through ‘free exchange’. The unexclusive life of the City, then, is
everywhere vicarious life, up to the level of each capacity. It is as much the instinct
of the gentleman as the climax of the saints. The ‘bear one another's burdens’ runs
through all. Unlike commercial exchange, the sharing in the celestial city does not
mean loss or diminishing of the goods.175

In the Church Father Origen’s Commentary on John, on which Hedley draws in his
Platonic exegesis of Revelation, the ‘living precious stones’ of which the heavenly
city is composed are identified with the rational beings after their purification in the
triumphs of the chariot and the afflictions of the temple and the Cross. The alleged
violence of the final book of Scripture is not a literal one of strife among agents,
either earthly or heavenly, but the spiritual one of humankind’s soul-making, as the
souls struggle to overcome the sins and vices of their fall. As is shown by the symbol
of the feast contemplated in the eschatological vision of the pagan and Christian
46 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Neoplatonists, the individual ‘I am’ of neither man nor nature is swallowed up into
the infinite ‘I am’ of God at any point. Contrary to Spinoza’s naturalist soteriology,
salvation, in Hedley’s imaginative idealism, is one in which individuality is preserved.
Quoting Plotinus with approval, he subscribes to the later Neoplatonic tenet of ‘the
existence of forms of individuals’, which evidences the abiding value of ‘personality’
and ‘individuality’ in Platonist soteriology.176 It is by its individuality that each of
the ‘living precious stones’ of which the heavenly city is made contributes to its
splendour.
The reality of the hoped-for restitution of all things is inferred along the
argumentative lines of Kant’s postulates. Like Kant’s threefold postulate of the soul’s
freedom, its immortality and the eventual correspondence between goodness and
happiness, Hedley’s hinges upon the chasm between the ideal of the beautiful, the true
and the good and the reality of human sin and suffering. Hedley concurs with David
Hume that God’s goodness cannot be inferred from the state of affairs in the visible
world. As in Baruch de Spinoza, whose onslaught on the classical theism of a moral
ens perfectissimum equals Hume’s in its argumentative vigour, the world around us
may well be seen as nothing but ‘blind nature . . . pouring forth from her lap, without
discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children’.177 However, while
Hume’s critique of religion is one of theoretical reason, arguing from natural evil for
a first cause beyond good and evil, Kant’s defence of theism is one of practical reason
revolving around the notion of the internal ought and its far-reaching implications:
‘Hume is inferring from the outward facts to God’s existence or absence. Kant is
arguing from the interior sense of goodness as revealed in consciousness by conscience
as distinct from prudence.’178 The Phaedrean nature of human existence, that is, man’s
knowledge of the categorical good and the consequent rational belief in his libertarian
freedom, reveals a painful gap between the ‘ought’ of practical reason and the dire ‘is’
of the world. It calls for a reconciliation between the ideal and the real at the end of all
things:

But if one does hold to the objectivity of the moral law and to the idea that it cannot
be frustrated, this drives one to the acceptance of an eschatological reconciliation
between the source of nature and the source of morality in a transcendent, good
God. Duty demands that we assume God’s existence as a practical postulate, if not
as a fact of speculative metaphysics.179

The postulate is spelled out in the Origenistic terms of the soul-making theodicy
of imaginative idealism. Thus, Hedley follows Origen and his early modern heirs,
the Cambridge Platonists and Joseph de Maistre, in subscribing to the postulate
of an eventual restitution of all things, rather than Augustine’s ‘logic of terror’
that informs the Latin Church Father’s sinister doctrine of the predestination of
an irrevocably forlorn massa damnata,180 quoting verbatim the most vocal of the
Alexandrian Platonist’s early defenders, George Rust. Not only is the earthly vale of
tears, according to Rust, an arena for humankind’s soul-making, but it also furnishes
the most perfect being itself with the ‘greater advantage to magnifie [sic] his love in
our Recovery’.181 It is by virtue of his own self-sacrificial love that the God of Hedley’s
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 47

panentheism eventually brings about a world in which each and every creature
participates in the fullness of divine beauty, truth and goodness. He is the archetype
of all unity in creation and salvation alike.

4 Imaginative panentheism: Ontology of the divine ‘all in all’

Hedley’s rational theology is shaped throughout by the patristic dogma of the ὁμοούσιος
and the notion of the Trinitarian God as both infinite reality and personality, as stated
with great speculative vigour by the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth182 and the
Romantic poet philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge,183 respectively. The God of the
iconic imagination is a panentheist Deity who is at once a consummate intellect of
paradoxical simplicity that transcends the world and the latter’s soul that is immanent
to it and animates its every part, however minute. Creating all things from the fullness
of his own being in the beginning, he is perfect goodness ungrudgingly sharing with
nature and man his own vision of the good, the true and the beautiful in the three
tautegorical symbols of the iconic imagination and, thereby, gradually guiding the
whole of creation towards its restitution in the end.
Of the four primary historical options of the philosophy of religion, that is, Platonism,
Spinozism, Deism and German Idealism, Hedley subscribes to the first paradigm, the
‘Neoplatonic-theistic view of a hierarchy of being’, which posits ‘a transcendent unity
as perfect being and perhaps personal insofar as this is compatible with the absolute
autonomy and self sufficiency of the Principle’.184 His, therefore, is the God or the ens
perfectissmum of the rationalist tradition of the ancient theology of Platonism.185 God’s
consummate perfection in the tradition of the Christian philosophia Trinitatis of which
Hedley’s own concept is part is that of a ‘relational unity’ of the two Neoplatonic concepts
of divine oneness,186 namely that of the One ‘beyond being’ and that of the All-Oneness
of Being and Intellect, which are identified with the Father and the Son, respectively.
United through the loving bond of the Holy Spirit, they are telescoped into the one
θεῖον of the ancient theology, whether philosophical or biblical.187 As the Father, God
is a first primordial unity infinite in its ineffable nature and comprehending in itself all
intellectual and natural reality as its ‘Origin, Principle or Cause’, while being ‘beyond it
in dignity and power’: ‘The One is all because everything is through or out of Him. But
the One is not “all” in a pantheistic sense; it is the Origin, Principle (ἀρχή) or Cause
of all. It is the all-encompassing condition of the many, of difference and division:
the ground of precisely all forms of being, but not subject to their conditions.’188 In
the Son, the most perfect being thinks itself as the sum total of the ideas of creation.
Whereas the ὁμοούσιος of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 is generally
viewed as a rejection of both Arianism and Platonism as related doctrines of the strict
subordination of an intellectual second principle to a transcendent first one, Hedley
follows Ralph Cudworth in hailing it instead as a distinctly Christian interpretation
of the Greek ‘metaphysics of intellect’189 in the vein of Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides.
In contradistinction to later apophatic Neoplatonism that denies divine subjectivity as
compromising the absolute’s perfect simplicity,190 the first principle of all things is, by
its very nature, intellect. Being ὁμοούσιος or ‘consubstantial’ with the Father, the λόγος
48 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

of the Gospel of John or the intellectual second unity of Neoplatonism is a ‘perfect

expression of its source’, that is, the first transcendent One, thereby revealing the first
principle of all things to be one that is both simplicity and multiplicity in the eternal
communion of the three persons of the Trinity:

The concepts which Augustine and Boethius used to defend the doctrine of the
Trinity: ‘unity’, ‘uniqueness’, ‘simplicity’, ‘difference’, ‘identity’, ‘substance’, ‘relation’,
and ‘spirit’ are, of course, all products of the Platonic-Aristotelian Geistesmetaphysik,
especially Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides. In a sense, the basic problem of ancient
Greek metaphysics was that of the relations of identity and difference and the nature
of the ἀρχή. Although many scholars have argued that the Nicaean definition
of the relation of the Father to the Son as ὁμοούσιος constituted a rejection of
pre-Nicaean Christian Platonism: The role of the doctrine of the Trinity within
natural theology is profoundly influenced by the tradition emanating from Plato’s
Parmenides; especially the relation of identity to difference. The principle and fount
of the Intellectual System is the transcendent ἀρχή which constitutes a relational
unity. The realm of ideas do not form an inferior intermediate realm between the
causal source of the universe and the physical world but are the divine mind.191

Hedley’s deeply patristic Geistmetaphysik is modelled on the Greeks’ speculation on a

first ‘principle’ of all things and on the five ‘greatest kinds’ of Plato’s Sophist, interpreted
against the backdrop of the dialectic of the one and the many in his Parmenides. The
distinctly Christian metaphysics of the One and the Intellect as a ‘relational unity’ of
two ‘consubstantial’ expressions of the one divine nature envisages a primordial first
mind conceived of as a paradoxical concidentia oppositorum. While inevitably many in
the totality of the ideas which constitute his very essence as an intellectual substance
defined as a relationship between the first two hypostases in a third, God is still the One
beyond all things. In the vein of the theological reading of Plato’s μέγιστα γένη in John
Scot Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa, to which Hedley subscribes in his imaginative
Trinitarian theism, the absolute is defined as a ‘paradoxical unity of intense life and
stillness or a paradoxical coincidence of motion and rest as the motus stabilis or status
mobilis’.192 As such, God is the ground of all determinateness of thought and being
whatsoever of which his own simplicity, conceived of as the transcendent fullness of
being, is the logical prerequisite.193 As well as being a perfect intellect, the ‘relational
unity’ of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit is also conceived of as personal.
To this end, Hedley adopts Coleridge’s definition of ‘the triune identity of God as
ipseity, altereity, and community’.194 It is by being the Father’s ‘altereity’ that the Son,
while being his consummate image and, hence, identical with him in the ‘community’
effected by the Holy Spirit, nevertheless introduces ‘difference’ into the θεῖον or the
divine nature,195 which is the sine qua non of personhood defined as an awareness
of ‘another self’.196 In opposition to Spinoza’s pantheism, in which the infinite all-
oneness as pure ‘ipseity’ lacks all otherness and, therefore, is of necessity impersonal,
the God of Hedley’s Christian Platonism is at once infinite being and infinite person,
distinguishing himself from another self in his Trinitarian nature which is defined as
identity and difference in one all-encompassing community. As such, the God of the
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 49

iconic imagination is ‘a wholly good and omnipotent personal transcendent agent’,197

endowed with freedom and volition. For one thing, he is absolute freedom in that his
own will is the sole cause of his being. Hedley’s is a rationalism of the first principle that
is throughout deeply indebted to Plotinus’s speculations on the Will and Freedom of the
One in his landmark treatise on personal theism and freedom metaphysics: ‘The One’,
he concurs with the greatest of the Neoplatonists, ‘is not the product of fate or chance
but free will. Plotinus is the first philosopher to identify thought and being with will.
The One of Plotinus is distinguished from all “difference”. He is what he is absolutely –
he is entirely self-constituted (αἴτιον ἑαυτοῦ).’198 For another, Hedley closely follows
Origen and the Cambridge Platonists in viewing God’s absolute freedom as one of
‘univocal goodness’.199 In response to Spinoza’s substance as the first principle beyond
good and evil and exempt from all allegedly anthropomorphist moral categories,200
Hedley insists upon goodness as the key characteristic of the divine nature. Restating
the unshakeable foundation of the Platonic metaphysics of his early modern Cambridge
precursors Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, Hedley rejects theological voluntarism
tout court. Rather than a deity of unrestricted will and omnipotence, as propounded
in several books of the Holy Writ, the church fathers and modern thought, the God
of the iconic imagination is ‘goodness itself, the culmination of being’.201 Hence, the
‘most perfect being’ is a ‘most moral being’ committed to the goodness that constitutes
its very essence. A benign agent, the Christian God, as a relational unity of oneness
and infinite intellection, cannot but choose to overflow and ungrudgingly share his
fullness with a creation distinct from him. Hedley’s is a concept of creation revolving
around the Neoplatonic notion of emanation or ‘undiminished giving’ of the divine
archetype. God, as the idea of the good or goodness itself, is diffusivum sui.202 To this
end, Hedley rejects the ‘contrast between the freely chosen gift of creation and the
necessary manifestation of an impersonal absolute’203 generally invoked in classical
theology to prove the alleged incompatibility of Christianity and Platonism, insisting
instead upon the identity of freedom and necessity in an absolute which is, by its very
nature, defined as creative goodness:

If God’s nature is love and it is God’s nature to communicate that love, this is a
form of necessity. It is a necessity grounded in the divine essence – it is intrinsic to
God. Insofar as it is not extrinsic to God, we can say that this manifestation of love
is an act of self-determination. It reflects God’s nature and not any arbitrary will.204

On the first principles of Hedley’s imaginative theism, to which the notion of the
beautiful is key throughout, the relationship of the creator to his creation is neither one of
inevitable necessity nor one of arbitrary freedom, but rather one of Hindu Lila or ‘cosmic
play’, which the author, in a blend of Western philosophy and Eastern mythology, posits
as yet another median category between two competing metaphysical options:

One may see this concept as attempting to bridge two extremes which also occur
in Western theology – extreme voluntarism and necessitarianism: is the world the
product of arbitrary and brute will or the mechanical and inexorable emanation
of the absolute? Neither alternative is theologically attractive. In the first, the
50 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Divine becomes wilful and anthropomorphic and in the second a sub-personal

or impersonal being. The notion of ‘play’ may be viewed as a median position
between these two options. God is not ‘constrained’ or needful in his activity but
neither is this work wanton or groundless.205

The whole of reality, proceeding as it does from the divine substance itself, cannot
but be spiritual in character itself. Its nature is described as a ‘particular density or
“thickening” of spirit’, body, in the language of Henry More’s bold early poetry, being
nothing ‘but this spirit, fixt, grosse by conspissation’.206 The relationship of spirit
and matter closely corresponds to the identity of symbol and meaning in Hedley’s
Romantic theory of imaginative tautegory. Being as being, whether material or mental,
is a symbolic revelation of the benign divine nature from which it springs. It is life
in its manifold variety which discloses the inner essence of all being as ‘spirit, fixt,
grosse by conspissation’ on which God continuously works as its creative form, sharing
with it his own beauty, truth and goodness in disinterested love in a process of soul-
making.207 In accordance with the aesthetic first principles of Hedley’s imaginative
theism, God’s action in the world is one of continuous theogonic ‘image-making’ by
which nature and man, from the Big Bang to the eventual restitution of all things, come
to participate in the imaginative self-communication of his own relational unity to an
ever-fuller degree. Its unfolding is that of the gradual acquisition of more complex
unities from the first emergence of the primitive life of one-celled organisms to the
advent of sentient beings capable of thought and action in the course of evolution:

The higher we move in the domain of living creatures, the more complex the
unity. The amoeba is close to an arithmetical unity, in that it is one cell possessing
one nucleus, and from sponges to more advanced metazoans (like flies or mice)
we encounter increased grades of bodily complexity. Observed advances in
genomic complexity and morphological diversity, however, have arisen through
the interaction of integrated individuals with their environments. [. . .] Consider
the increase in complexity but also in integrating identity in a fly, a mouse, and
a human being. In a human being there is the complex physical structure (body
plan) but also the volitional agent, the character over time, the conscious selfhood
of the agent, all contributing to personal identity. The first unity, the body plan,
is more readily understandable. But perhaps we should be thinking of unity as
unity by virtue of its unifying power. The paradigm would be the unification of the
heterogenous elements in human personality.208

The God of the iconic imagination, like the poet of the Bard’s ars poetica in the
Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘bodies himself forth’. He is, above all, the poet of the world,
who ‘as imagination’, on the author’s Shakespearean model of the titular epistemic
power of his trilogy, ‘bodies forth/The forms of things unknown’ (A Midsummer Night’s
Dream 5.1.14–15)209 in sacrificial self-communication: ‘The cosmos itself is the Divine
sacrifice: the metamorphosis of God’s identity in difference.’210 God is immanent to
his creation as its inner soul and form. The Son’s incarnation is the archetypal symbol
of the Father’s providence in which he saves each and every being, however vile
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 51

and insignificant, not acting upon it in occasional interventions from without, but
perfecting it as the principle of its higher life from within: ‘Incarnation corresponds
with creation and is its fulfilment – a God who acts but is not arbitrary, and whose
action is not intervention from without in a mechanical sense, but paradigmatically
within the created realm in an organic or plastic sense.’211 In the vein of the Christian
metaphysics of Ws. 11.21: ‘Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and
weight’, as pioneered, above all, by Augustine, Hedley views God as the principle
of the various kinds of identity of which the finite cosmos is composed: ‘God is the
creative and determining measure or mensura of all things. He is also numerus as the
mathematic harmony of the cosmos.’ As such, he is the first cause of the pondus or
‘teleological gravity’ of all things towards their one divine centre: ‘Finally, He is also the
source of the teleological “gravity” of the universe, as its highest good.’212
To the creator’s playful self-communication corresponds the creature’s own ‘creative
contemplation’ as the ‘ontological motor of being’,213 which finds its apogee in the
emergence of beings mirroring him in their own imaginative intellection and volition
and yielding to the ‘teleological “gravity”’ implanted in them: ‘God’, Hedley states the
key conviction of his imaginative idealism, as enshrined in the ancient theology of
humankind, ‘is a transcendent spiritual being and humanity can have communion with
him’.214 The relationship of God’s ‘infinite I AM’ to man’s ‘finite I am’ is that of a dynamic
‘realization of the image’215 in divine and human ‘double agency’ by which Hedley, again
drawing on the ‘greatest kinds’ of Plato’s Sophist, seeks to eschew the twin aporiai of
Spinozistic identity on the one hand and Gnostic difference on the other. For one thing,
the finite creature’s participation in its infinite creator who acts as the formal and final
cause of its imagination in its every thought and act is that of the image approximating
its archetype. Siding with the medieval Platonists Dietrich von Freiberg and Meister
Eckhart against Thomas Aquinas, whose primarily functionalist reading he rejects,
Hedley provides a densely metaphysical exegesis of the biblical theologumenon of man
being created in God’s ‘image and likeness’ (Gn. 1.26), highlighting the ontological
identity between the ectypal finite and the archetypal infinite I AM, rather than their
difference. Whereas a physical container is different from its contents, spiritual beings
such as God and the soul admit of no such difference.216 For another, Hedley, following
J. Caird and Austin Farrer, subscribes to the notion of ‘double agency’ in which the
finite image and the infinite archetype, by virtue of their shared intellectual nature,
act in complete unison whenever multiplicity is turned into complex unity, thereby
being endowed with the quality of the beautiful, the true and the good. Again, God
addresses man not as an exterior ‘thou’ from without, as in Martin Buber’s dialogical
philosophy or Karl Barth’s dialectical theology, but works upon him from within, that
is, in Spinozist parlance, as the inward principle ‘constituting the being of the human
mind’.217
Since, therefore, the infinite divine ‘I am’ is not ontologically different from the
finite human ‘I am’, God’s creative and salvific action is identical with man’s, as Hedley
elaborates in a speculative reading of Hamlet’s musings on divine providence: ‘There’s
a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’ (Hamlet 5.2.10–11),
which he interprets as a poetic outline of a theory of God’s occasionally elusive, yet
constant and ubiquitous, providentialist work in the course of nature and history.
52 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Just as the Bard has Fortinbras and Malcolm restore political order to the shattered
kingdoms at the end of the two greatest of his tragedies, God is at work wherever man
imposes unity upon chaotic multiplicity through his multifaceted imaginative effort,
whether in art, in action or in knowledge: ‘This is to say that mankind as self-conscious
is distinct from the animal kingdom, and that human self-consciousness represents the
eternal self-consciousness of God. Shakespeare’s Christian providentialist vision is also
evident in the suggestion of growth out of chaos. Fortinbras arrives at Elsinore, and
Malcolm at Dunsinane, to rebuild from the ruins.’218 Accordingly, God’s first visible
providentialist action coincides with the very first artefacts of human ingenuity in
prehistoric cave paintings which mark the beginnings of humankind as a species of
the religious imagination: ‘Humanity has created images of the sacred since prehistoric
times. These sublime images and imaginings of the transcendent become an instrument
of revelation: the real presence of the eternal in human history and culture.’219
Hedley imagines the first hominids to have been driven by the newly born species’
distinguishing power of the imagination of the infinite. The earliest works of human
art such as the paintings of Chauvet or the prehistoric Gobekli Tepi are impressive
evidence of religious aesthetics expressing the earliest human beings’ ‘inchoate sensus
divinitatis’ at the very dawn of humankind.220 In an audacious ‘neo-Schellingian
attempt to combine myth with revelation’,221 based on the deeply mythological
character of modernity itself,222 Hedley views the evolution of nature and culture alike
as the gradual self-communication of the Deity with the ancient theology of the West
and East documenting the ‘means by which human consciousness is transformed
by, includes and reveals the Divine mind . . . through the imagination’.223 It is by the
imaginative vision of the beautiful, the true and the good which God graciously shares
with his kin and offspring that all things, including humankind, will be saved in the
end. The historical theism of Hedley’s Iconic Imagination is not the deflationary one
of either Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise or Hume’s Natural History of Religion,
but the vision of world ages in Vico’s New Science and, above all, of the theogonic
history of the human mind in Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology in which the various
stages of Greek polytheism and Jewish and Christian monotheism trace God’s own
coming-to-be in the development of the prevalent theological narratives and symbols
of humankind. While Coleridge, subscribing to the Platonic variety of theism, rather
than its idealist offspring with its postulate of a historical becoming of the Divine,
parted ways with Schelling on the question of divine potentiality and change,224 Hedley
allows for passion in the sympathetic God of Christianity as the latter must witness his
grand imaginative vision succumb to disorder and evil time and again. While images
of God’s own struggle for nature’s and man’s salvation are many and manifold in the
pagan types of old, it is in St John and St Paul’s notion of the crucified Lord that the
process of soul-making is eventually viewed as part of the divine life itself: ‘Christianity
has a much higher estimate of sympathy than its Stoic or Platonic rivals. It accepts the
fact of suffering rather than pleading for detachment. In so doing, it conveys through
its Christology and Trinitarian theology an image of the Divine nature that, however
enigmatically, integrates sorrow, sympathy and love in the Godhead.’225 The world and
its woe and weal are not extraneous to God, but an essential part of his own being as
creative goodness ungrudgingly sharing its riches with nature and man created in its
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 53

own image and likeness. The Christian Platonist God’s vision of the world saved by
the beauty of his goodness and his truth is the grand narrative of the world of the
Phaedrean chariot, the Old Testament temple and the New Testament heavenly city
recounted in the trilogy of the religious imagination.

5 Metaphysics of the image: A new paradigm

of religious philosophy
Hedley’s imaginative idealism provides a powerful new paradigm of religious
philosophy as a middle way between scepticism and dogmatism, which are both
rejected as inimical to the cause of rational religion. It, thereby, gives a comprehensive
vision of God, man and nature viewed in terms of the three symbols of the rational
soul’s iconic imagination.
Representing a living tradition of Anglo-Saxon Platonism which originated in
seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonism and eighteenth-century Romanticism,
Hedley’s idealism rests on a compelling analysis of the imagination as the chief
power of human subjectivity. Not only does the imagination provide a general field
of intellectual vision modelled on the sense of that name, which is the sine qua non of
all reflection and action, but its ‘esemplastic’ power of ‘fusing into one’ the manifold
phenomena of self and world reveals it to be key to human subjectivity as such. It also
mediates between the finite and the infinite as the latter is shown to be the condition
of the possibility of the former. Hedley’s transcendental epistemology, thereby, lays
the foundation for a religious philosophy of the Divine intuited in the rich symbolism
of all products of the human imagination from the prehistoric origins of humankind
to present-day art and literature. The threefold symbolism of the chariot, the temple
and the city is meant to provide no less than an exhaustive account of the human
imagination and its relationship to the ubiquitous Divine. It reveals man to be a being
of Phaedrean striving in aesthetics, physics and metaphysics and ethics. Every act of his
imagination is shown to be driven by a longing for an objective truth both aesthetically
appealing to and ethically binding upon him. The painful chasm between the triumph
of the ideal and the tragic reality of apparently futile evil and suffering is at the core
of the religious philosophy of the temple sacrifice which amounts to a highly original
soul-making theodicy of self-sacrificial suffering. The heavenly city symbolizes the
hope for the fulfilment of man’s deep desire for reconciliation. Throughout, human
reasoning, based upon the imagination as its chief power, is shown to be informed by
all of the three tautegorical symbols.
It is on the basis of his comprehensive transcendental analysis of the original
symbolism of the human imagination that Hedley provides an ontology of the Divine.
His is a theism in which God is a transcendent agent of infinite goodness, wisdom
and power who is also immanent to each and every part of his creation as its soul.
He is the ens perfectissimum reimagined according to the irreducible transcendental
categories of the Phaedrean ascent, the tragic of the temple and the Cross and the hope
for reconciliation symbolized by the city. Hence, he is consummate being and unity
54 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

conceived of as a loving unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As such, he shares with a
cosmos created from his own fullness the riches of his being. His sacrifice on the Cross
brings about the reditus of his prodigal creation as his vision gradually comes to inform
the imagination both of man and the world at large. For all its profoundly ecumenical
latitude, the grand narrative of the world in its fall and restitution put forward in the
idealism of the iconic imagination is profoundly Christian in character.226
Hedley’s idealism of the imagination is one of the most audacious modern systems
of ancient Platonism and modern philosophy of religion whose powerful narrative of
God working upon the imagination of his creatures in the history of nature and culture
alike is another momentous ‘footnote to Plato’ as well as a new paradigm of religious
philosophy.
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 55

Response by Douglas Hedley

Christian Hengstermann has written a wide-ranging synthesis of my ‘Romantic Platonism’,
but one that draws upon the seventeenth-century and various contemporary discussions
over a number of years. My approach to philosophy is hermeneutical and deeply shaped
by theology. While I have immense respect for the achievements of analytic philosophy in
specific areas of philosophical logic such as reference, theory of knowledge and especially
philosophy of religion, the tendency of the school is often to foreshorten and obscure
the great tradition of the history of philosophy. We are self-understanding creatures, and
while that means drawing upon contemporary problems and challenges, we should not
ignore those great books which have shaped the very culture we inhabit.
Hengstermann also refers significantly to figures whose import for the project is
perhaps more surprising, such as Rudolf Otto or Friedrich Creuzer, and my deep debt
to my teacher Werner Beierwaltes. He is correct to see Coleridge as the guiding light of
the project. My initial study of Coleridge formed the basis for the systematic endeavour
of the trilogy. Yet he also notes the key themes that I wanted to address: imagination as a
part of human psychology and the need for stories, while recognizing the danger of the
Nietzschean prospect that we can weave the stories and create meaning in a universe
inherently without purpose. More than the so-called hard problem of consciousness,
it is the mystery of human self-consciousness that is the starting point of any serious
attempt to ‘save the appearances’, and imagination must play a role in that. Stories are
one of the primordial features of man’s awareness, and I claim that the power of the great
stories, as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien averred, lies in their power to summon reality.
Many religious stories concern sacrifice and violence: these are features of the world
that seem to thwart any facile theodicy or crudely anthropomorphic theology. These
are also themes that touch upon psychological, anthropological and literary themes.
Tragedy is a genre that relies upon the concept of sacrifice, and it is a topic that divides
the great confessions of Christianity and, indeed, the religions of the world. Suffering
and guilt are the bedrock of the great religions. Are these atavistic traits in contemporary
culture and an embarrassment for the despisers of religion? Or do they, as even atheists
such as Sartre or Heidegger admit, offer genuine insight into the human condition? The
third volume of my trilogy turns to the idea of the transcendence and immanence of the
image. That is one of the most perplexing areas of philosophical theology. If one stresses
transcendence too vigorously, only a ‘mysterious kind of atheism is left’, yet to yoke the
Divine too closely to the warp and woof of the cosmos would seem idolatrous or to
diminish the glory of the creator. Despite the generous appraisal of Hengstermann, I
remain unsure that I achieved the right balance in the trilogy.

Notes
1 The following introduction to Douglas Hedley’s idealism of the imagination is based
upon its systematic exposition provided in his trilogy of works: Living Forms of the
Imagination (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008); Sacrifice Imagined: Violence,
56 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Atonement, and the Sacred (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), and The
Iconic Imagination (New York et al.: Bloomsbury, 2016). His earlier monograph
Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), provides an in-depth account
of the eponymous Romantic philosopher’s synthesis of Platonism and idealism
which is one of the key sources of the author’s own im6aginative metaphysics. It
also sheds helpful light upon the author’s original use of the traditions of Greek
Neoplatonism, German Idealism and British Romanticism, which have shaped his
own systematic thought. Besides the four monographs mentioned, the author’s rich
work in historical and systematic religious philosophy has likewise been made use
of to provide as nuanced an account of his philosophy of religion as possible. Cf.
also my earlier German depiction of Hedley’s thought in my ‘Kritik der religiösen
Vorstellungskraft – Douglas Hedleys Trilogie zur “Imagination” als neues Paradigma
der Religionsphilosophie’, Theologische Rundschau 82 (2017): 174–84.
2 Sacrifice Imagined, 37.
3 Living Forms, 39.
4 Sacrifice Imagined, 48.
5 See the references to the Delphic injunction in Living Forms, 171, and the more
comprehensive accounts of its original meaning and subsequent legacy in European
idealism in Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 4–5, 109–16 and 169–80, and in
‘Forms of Reflection, Imagination, and the Love of Wisdom’, Metaphilosophy 43
(2012): 112–24, here 115–18.
6 Living Forms, 37.
7 Cf. the important reference to Kant’s concept of human subjectivity in Iconic
Imagination, 43.
8 Ibid., 43–4. While the distinction between ‘simultaneous unity’ and ‘sequential unity’
is derived from Hans Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology
of the Senses’, in The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (Evanston:
Northwestern, 2001), 135–56, that between being and eternity and becoming and
time is Platonic. The tertium quid of the analogy is twofold. It consists in the unity of
the act of perception and the timelessness of the single moment in contradistinction
to the passage of time.
9 Living Forms, 59.
10 Ibid.
11 See the concise comparison between these two historically influential notions of the
imagination in Living Forms, 49–50, notably the perceptive final remarks: ‘Hobbes
and Berkeley represent two extreme and unsatisfactory accounts of the imagination.
Hobbes seems to leave out the evident fact of its spontaneous and creative component.
Berkeley, in going to the other extreme, seems to neglect the sub- or semi-conscious
aspect of the imagination. The differences between Hobbes and Berkeley on the
nature of the imagination resolve into a difference between an excessively active and
excessively passive view of mental activity. One might speculate that the theological
concerns of both men contribute to the basic difference in their view of the mind.’
12 Living Forms, 57. Coleridge is a pivotal figure in Hedley’s theological narrative of
Greek, German and British idealism. His theory of the imagination is analysed in
great detail in the author’s ‘Platonism, Aesthetics and the Sublime at the Origins of
Modernity’, in Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early
Modern Philosophy, edited by id. and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 269–
82, and ‘S.T. Coleridge’s Contemplative Imagination’, in Coleridge and Contemplation,
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 57

edited by Peter Cheyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 221–36. Besides his
early monograph Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, which mainly explores the roots
of Coleridge’s Romantic philosophy of religion in ancient patristic and early modern
Cambridge Platonism as well as its close ties with the German and British idealist
tradition of his day, cf. also the author’s account of Coleridge’s seminal influence
upon Anglican theology and British philosophy alike in his important studies of
Austin Farrer in ‘Austin Farrer’s Shaping Spirit of the Imagination’, in The Human
Person in God’s World: Studies to Commemorate the Austin Farrer Centenary, edited
by id. and Brian Hebblethwaite (London: scm Press, 2006), 106–31, and ‘Imagination
Amended: From Coleridge to Collingwood’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives, edited by James
Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstone et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 210–23.
13 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, edited with an Introduction and Notes by
H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280–320.
14 Coleridge, Collected Notebooks, III, 329, Biographia, I, 85, quoted in ‘Platonism,
Aesthetics and the Sublime’ (see n. 12), 276. The term is derived from the Greek εἰς
ἓν πλάττειν.
15 Ibid., 306.
16 Ibid., quoted and discussed in Iconic Imagination, 76–7.
17 This is the apposite description used in Living Forms, 52, which is testimony to
Hedley’s debt to Platonism in its Romantic guise.
18 ‘Imagination Amended’ (see n. 12), 212.
19 Coleridge, Major Works (see n. 13), 313.
20 ‘Imagination Amended’ (see n. 12), 212.
21 See, for example, the interpretations of these key verses in Living Forms, 20; Sacrifice
Imagined, 55–6 and 105.
22 ‘Imagination Amended’ (see n. 12), 212.
23 Coleridge, Major Works (see n. 13), 313.
24 Living Forms, 50.
25 Biographia Literaria, II, 258, quoted ibid., 185.
26 More, Antidote Against Atheism I, 5, 2, quoted ibid. 48.
27 The concept cited ibid., 145, is borrowed from John Smith, Select Discourses
(Cambridge, 1660), 2.
28 Sacrifice Imagined, 113.
29 Ibid., 111. This sobriquet clearly witnesses to Hedley’s own great sympathies for the first
major Christian Platonist who, in many ways, may be viewed as a principal authority
of his Platonism. On the following brief account of Cudworth’s Origenist theory of
moral action, see Sacrifice Imagined, 113–19, as well as the more comprehensive
treatment of this subject in his ‘Cudworth on Freedom: Theology, Ethical Obligation
and the Limits of Mechanism’, in Die Cambridge Origenists. George Rusts Letter of
Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions, edited by Alfons Fürst
and Christian Hengstermann (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2013), 47–58.
30 A. C. Bradley’s Hegelian characterization of the heroes of the Bard’s four great
tragedies in his brilliant classic Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 2nd edn, 1932), 14–16,
may well be seen as a particularly apt précis of Hedley’s theory of narrative personal
identity. See the author’s characteristically circumspect caveat ibid., 200, which
reveals the author’s notion as yet another bold median position between Platonism
and Postmodernism: ‘Narrative presupposes personal identity and yet personal
identity is notoriously elusive. It has long been de rigueur in some literary circles
58 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

to suggest that narrative creates identity. But this is a very strong and somewhat
implausible claim. However, it is not entirely without merit.’
31 Cf. Living Forms, 199.
32 Ibid., 222. Cf. also Sacrifice Imagined, 121, where Hedley highlights the close link
between the coherent unity and the morality of a happy life. According to the
author, morality provides a degree of unity which is by definition unachievable in
hedonism: ‘Narrative is used not just in the psychological sense that people do in fact
understand themselves in the mode of story or narrative, but the normative sense
that narrative is important: a life unified in terms of overarching values is a better
life than one that is disoriented and incoherent: the ‘ne’er do well’ or the indolent
searching for distraction from boredom or anxiety or amusement.’
33 Living Forms, 203.
34 See, for example, ibid., 90 and 249, respectively.
35 Ibid., 79–113, Hedley rejects the twin errors of radical apophaticism and
kataphaticism in a critical close reading of two seminal books on the topic of his
trilogy, namely Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and William P. Alston, Perceiving
God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Both Turner’s ‘incommensurability
thesis’, which, following medieval mystics, views the experience of God as
transcending all categories, and Alston’s ‘perception of God’, which provides a
justification of religious beliefs on the grounds of an alleged analogy between divine
and sensual perception and the Wittgensteinian reliability of a lifeform like religion
and mysticism, fail to do justice to the dialectics of a Deity at once concealed and
revealed in his utter transcendence and all-pervading immanence. It is a key concern
of Hedley’s trilogy to establish the imagination as a power of an awareness of a
transcendent God’s paradoxical presence that is perceptive and conceptual as well as
cognitive and affective in nature.
36 Ibid., 108, where Hedley quotes William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience:
A Study in Human Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 62.
37 Ibid., 82. The reference is to James, ibid., 380–1.
38 See the summary of Plotinus’s proto-Cartesian thought experiment in Enn. V 8, 9,
1–2, ibid., 88.
39 Ibid., 80.
40 Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (London: Weidenfeld; Nicholson, 1955),
409–10, quoted and commented on in detail in Iconic Imagination, 61–2.
41 Again, the illuminating quantitative terminology is that of James, Religious
Experience (see n. 36), 231, which chimes well with the dialectics of infinite and finite
subjectivity in Coleridge’s notion of the primary imagination adopted by Hedley.
42 Iconic Imagination, 45.
43 Ibid., 45–6.
44 Hedley’s debt to Otto’s seminal masterpiece Das Heilige is profound. See, for example,
the references to it ibid., 106, and esp. the detailed discussions in Sacrifice Imagined,
26–9. Cf. the similar reflections on the ‘romantic mood’ stirred by the introspection
into the infinite horizon of all human subjectivity on the basis of the fictional and
non-fictional writings of the novelist metaphysician Charles Williams ibid., 125.
45 Hedley’s comment on the work’s subtitle in Sacrifice Imagined, 30, is revealing. As in
Otto himself, the relation of the imagination to reason, for all the emphasis placed
on the experiential dimension of man’s knowledge of the Divine, is key to Hedley’s
Romantic Platonism throughout: ‘The subtitle of Otto’s The Holy is An Inquiry into
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 59

the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational.
Otto was not part of the widespread vitalism of the period, largely emanating from
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and evident in his younger colleague Heidegger. Otto
stresses the significance of reason in religion. He means by the “rational” the idea of
the Divine as clearly grasped by the powers of understanding and within the domain
of customary and recognizable definitions.’ However, Otto asserts that ‘Beneath
this sphere of clarity and lucidity, we go on to maintain, there lies a hidden depth,
inaccessible to our conceptual thought which we in so far term “non-rational”.’
46 The careful philological analysis in Hedley’s ‘Affective Attunement and the Experience
of the Numinous: Reflections on Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige’, International Journal for the
Study of the Christian Church 17 (2017): 33–45, here 37, testifies to the overall significance
of the traditions of German metaphysics to his own idealism of the iconic imagination.
The elective affinity with Otto is due not least to the shared debt to Romanticism
demonstrated in great historical and philosophical detail in the article cited.
47 Living Forms, 113.
48 Iconic Imagination, 25.
49 Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual, 30, quoted in Iconic Imagination, 142. See also the
succinct line of reasoning for a participationist ontology as a corollary of the very
concept of a symbol ibid.: ‘The symbol presupposes the metaphysics of participation.
The symbol ‘partakes’ in the reality it conveys.’ Coleridge’s notion of the symbol is close
to Schelling’s which, in turn, was deeply influenced by the work of Friedrich Creuzer.
As the first German translator of Plotinus, Creuzer, though less well-known today, is a
pivotal figure in intellectual history linking Greek Neoplatonism and German Idealism.
See the intriguing accounts of Creuzer’s seminal role in German and European
intellectual history in Sacrifice Imagined, 41–4, and Iconic Imagination, 203–4.
50 Cf. Iconic Imagination, 13–14.
51 Living Forms, 135.
52 Iconic Imagination, 146.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 This is one of the most startling insights of the trilogy expressed in Living Forms,
123–4.
56 Ibid., 175.
57 Ibid., 129–30.
58 See the illuminating comment on all three of them in Sacrifice Imagined, 42,
which applies equally well to Hedley’s own concept of the threefold imaginary of
humankind: ‘One manner of conceiving these imaginative universals, or poetic
characters, is as poetic archetypes that lie somewhere between (both conceptually
and historically) Plato’s ideas and Jung’s archetypes.’
59 See the important sketches in Living Forms, 14–16 and 171, in which Hedley views
the doctrine of the soul’s ascent as the shared Platonic and biblical core idea of the
Phaedrean myth: ‘One need only think of the image of ascent in Diotima’s speech in
the Symposium or the paradigmatic image of ascent in the chariot of the Phaedrus.
Biblical exegesis of Jacob’s ladder, Moses on Mount Sinai and St Paul’s experience
of the ascent of the mind to God are further instances of this paradigm of ethics as
ascent.’ It is supplemented by the manifold Eastern sources in the more extensive
survey of the principal literary accounts of the seminal mythological narrative of the
soul in Iconic Imagination, 207–10.
60 Phaedr. 245a.
60 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

61 Living Forms, 15.

62 See the detailed interpretation of the Phaedrean myth in Living Forms, 19, in the light
of Plato’s doctrine of the first principles and ideas. Based upon a characteristically
thorough appreciation of its key terminology, it clearly reveals the myth as a key
source of the author’s transcendental epistemology of the imagination’s intuitive
grasp of divine infinity as a sine qua non of all finite knowledge and action: ‘The basis
for epistemological, ethical and aesthetic judgement, Plato avers, must reside in a
transcendent principle, perceived by what he refers to as the “eye of understanding”.
The idea (ἰδέα) has the primary sense of visible forms and appearances (cf. εἶδος), and
is linked to the verb (εἶδον, I saw). Both are cognate with both the Latin videre and the
German Wissen. Many other central epistemological terms in Plato possess this strong
visual component, e.g. δόξα and θεωρία. Thus Plato uses the symbol of the eye to
convey the power and immediacy of the soul’s apprehension of immaterial realities.’
63 Cf. Living Forms, 187, where Hedley, referring to and citing the interpretation of the
myth by John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in
Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 131, rereads the powerful image of the charioteer in the light of his holistic
notion of the self. It is in keeping with the hermeneutics of symbols proposed in the
trilogy that a myth of archetypal significance, thanks to its infinite semantic fullness,
should contain more meaning than might have been intended by its author in his
occasionally more austere rationalism.
64 Living Forms, 81. Cf. also the interpretations of the Platonic myth in the later
volumes, notably Iconic Imagination, 122.
65 Ibid., 81. The mood described is ‘transcendental’ in that ‘unity’ and ‘infinity’ are the
defining aspects of the primary imagination as the condition of the possibility of all
of the soul’s cognitive acts.
66 S. T. Coleridge to William Sotheby, Friday 10 September 1802, quoted ibid., 224.
67 Iconic Imagination, 224.
68 Ibid., 225.
69 Living Forms, 24.
70 Ibid., 39.
71 Cf. ibid., 63.
72 Ibid., 72.
73 Of the three images mentioned ibid., 67, Einstein’s of a ‘rider on a beam of light
carrying a mirror’, may be the most well-known one.
74 Ibid., 71.
75 Ibid.
76 ‘Reflection, Imagination, Love of Wisdom’ (see n. 5), 120, where the wording is
particularly precise. Thus, the act of ‘imagining hidden structures of being’ precedes
that of ‘observing’ them, which is generally taken to be the core of scientific research.
77 See the extraordinarily dense chapter 6 of Iconic Imagination, esp. 125–32 and
139–40, which contains the author’s theory of scientific knowledge in the language of
the Phaedrean symbol of the ascent.
78 ‘Foreword: The Legacy of the Parmenides’, in Plato’s Parmenides: Text, Translation
& Introductory Essay, translated by Arnold Hermann in collaboration with Sylvana
Chrysakopoulou (Las Vegas, Zurich and Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 2010), vii–
xviii, here vii.
79 Iconic Imagination, 131. In its claim to truth, Hedley’s theory of the science of
the iconic imagination of which man’s Phaedrean striving for true and objective
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 61

knowledge is an integral part is therefore very much in keeping with the general
notion of the soul’s titular power.
80 Ibid., 143.
81 While undoubtedly controversial, Hedley’s espousal of human evolution as necessary
ibid., 143 n. 70 is, therefore, a key corollary of the imaginative idealism of his trilogy,
which may be extended to all other living beings created by the divine intellect to
share in its own fullness.
82 Ibid., 139.
83 Ibid., 136.
84 Not surprisingly, it is aesthetic qualities that Hedley ibid. singles out as key
characteristics of science which shows its constitutive link to the transcendental
power of the imagination.
85 Living Forms, 63.
86 Ibid., 77.
87 See Living Forms, 144–51.
88 A key influence on Hedley’s notion of the soul’s eternal subjectivity in the divine
intellect is the exposition of the Neoplatonic philosophy of the true self by his
Munich teacher Werner Beierwaltes, Das wahre Selbst. Studien zu Plotins Begriff des
Geistes und des Einen (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001).
89 Phaed. 96a–102a.
90 Iconic Imagination, 33, quoting an online resource.
91 Ibid., 34.
92 Ibid., 39, where Hedley, significantly, cites Clement and Origen, the great Christian
Platonists of Alexandria, in support of his metaphysical–ethical reading of Gn. 1.26. It
is, above all, via the Cambridge Platonists or Cambridge Origenists that the latter is a
decisive source of the author’s imaginative metaphysics of freedom. The libertarian theory
of action delineated in the trilogy is one of the work’s major philosophical attainments.
93 Ibid., 32. See also ibid., 42, where Hedley expands on this concept on the basis of
Hans Jonas, ‘Image Making and the Freedom of Man’, in The Phenomenon of Life:
Towards a Philosophical Biology (Evanston: Northwestern, 2001), 157–75.
94 Ibid., 42.
95 In an audacious reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s celebrated doctrine of freedom,
Hedley, ibid., 69, follows Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2014), 188–9, in likening the existentialist ‘néant’ by which man is
enabled to transcend the necessity of the real and the present in limitless self-creation
to the Neoplatonic ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας or Eriugena’s God as nihil per excellentiam.
The comparison reveals a striking elective affinity as Hedley’s concept of the rational
soul as an imaginative being shares with Sartre’s notion of nothingness as the specific
difference of humanity the key idea of man’s practical transcendence as a prerequisite
of his libertarian freedom.
96 Ibid., 118.
97 Living Forms, 169.
98 The important comparison between Platonist and Kantian metaphysics ibid., 149,
reveals the author’s own answer to the Problem of Metaphysics raised in the chapter
to be that of an emphatically practical speculative system: ‘If we raise the general
question “What is metaphysics?” we may well turn back to Plato: Platonism is the
recognition of the world as images and Platonic philosophy is the ascent through
duty above nature and constitutes his freedom from the mechanism of nature.
Kant’s idea of the noumenal character beyond space and time has evident parallels
62 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

within the Platonist tradition, e.g. Plotinus’s doctrine of the “upper soul”.’ Cf. also the
comprehensive historical account of the synthesis of Platonism and Kantianism in
early modern British and German philosophy, which informs Hedley’s systematic
train of the thought in the trilogy on the religious imagination throughout, in his
Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 162–9.
99 Living Forms, 151.
100 See ibid., 153, where Hedley, in his Platonic rereading of the great Königsberg
philosopher, views the ontology of transcendence as the core of Kant’s Metaphysics of
Morals: ‘Ethics is not primarily a matter of action but of being.’
101 Ibid., 200.
102 Cf. my review of the second volume of Hedley’s trilogy in Theologische Revue 109
(2012): 1–2.
103 Sacrifice Imagined, 18.
104 Iconic Imagination, 230.
105 Living Forms, 55.
106 Ibid.
107 Iconic Imagination, 226. In Living Forms, 43–4, Hedley turns the evolutionary
uselessness of the building into a compelling anti-naturalist argument with the
chronological priority of sacred edifices pointing to the ontological priority of the
divine intellect vis-à-vis matter and nature.
108 Sacrifice Imagined, 28.
109 Ibid., 66.
110 Ibid., 85.
111 Cf. the comprehensive discussion of this text ibid., 81–3.
112 This passage ibid., 108, may be read as a succinct summary of Hedley’s conception
of the titular religious rite which is at the heart both of his transcendental analysis
of the sacrificial nature of human reason and his religious philosophy of Christus
consummator and the salvation of man and the cosmos.
113 Ibid., 28.
114 This key excerpt from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, A104–105/B 106
(Kant’s Critique of Judgement, translated by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 2017),
100–1), is cited at length and commented on in detail ibid., 32.
115 Ibid., 33.
116 While the former may be the classic example, the latter is convincingly shown to
qualify as a religious act of murder ibid., 92: ‘Agamemnon is killed in a bathtub
referred to in explicitly sacrificial terms as a λέβης, the sacrificial libation bowl. This
usage seems to be a hapax legomenon: the sacrificial allusions in Clytemnestra’s
murder of her husband could hardly be clearer.’
117 Cf. the highly illuminating critique of Schopenhauer’s Kantian concept of the
sublime, as applied to Greek tragedy ibid., 96–9.
118 Cf. ibid., 102.
119 Ibid., 91, the author is outspoken in pursuing a metaphysical and even theological
agenda in his interpretation of the greatest plays of classical antiquity: ‘We reject
theories of tragedy that revolve around the question of genre and attempt to consider
the metaphysical and theological implications of tragedy. Tragedy is a form of
praeparatio evangelii.’
120 Ibid., 102.
121 Living Forms, 157–61, Hedley links Socrates’s famous definition in Phaed. 81a with
the archetypal Greek philosopher’s apparent absent-mindedness before the titular
feast in Symp. 175a–b.
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 63

122 Ibid., 160, quoting James, Religious Experience (see n. 36), 165.
123 Sacrifice Imagined, 115, where Hedley endorses the interpretation of Cudworth’s
theory of action as a variety of Kantian ‘internalism’ propounded by Stephen
Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 109–48.
124 Ibid., 117–18.
125 Cf. also the link between the Platonic metaphysics of the image and the Christian ethics
of humility in Hedley’s interpretation of Cudworth’s notion of deification in terms of
Meister Eckhart’s mysticism in his ‘Image, Idol and Likeness: Ralph Cudworth’s Sermon
before the House of Commons 1647’, in Origenes Cantabrigiensis. Ralph Cudworth,
Predigt vor dem Unterhaus und andere Schriften, edited by Alfons Fürst and Christian
Hengstermann (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2018), 51–62, here 61: ‘Rather than an
“enthusiastic” aggrandizement of the self in the process, it is precisely “self-will” that is
the strong “Castle, that we all keep garrison’d against heaven in every one of our hearts,
which God continually layeth siege unto”. . . . In this, Cudworth is following Eckhart,
for whom “all things are accomplished in the truly humble person”.’
126 Living Forms, 160. In Sacrifice Imagined, 162–7, Hedley provides a detailed account
of his Platonic reading of Shakespeare’s plays, also relating the latter to Florentine
Renaissance aesthetics.
127 Ibid., quoting ‘Das Ideal und das Leben’, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by E. V. der
Hellen (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta, 1904), I, 192.
128 Sacrifice Imagined, 164.
129 Ibid., 167.
130 Ibid., 132.
131 Cf. Hedley’s trenchant critique of these two spiritual fathers of modern political
philosophy ibid., 114–20.
132 Ibid., 170.
133 Ibid., 171. It is, thus, on the basis of his transcendental image of the temple as self-
sacrifice that Hedley subjects contractualist reasoning at large to criticism.
134 Paul Tillich, Shaking the Foundations (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1969), 69, quoted
and discussed in Iconic Imagination, 117–18.
135 Iconic Imagination, 143. See also the vigorous defence of the Nicene Creed in Living
Forms, 220.
136 Living Forms, 223.
137 Ibid. Cf. also Sacrifice Imagined, 156, where Hedley acknowledges not only the
Cabbalistic source of the notion of divine self-contraction, but also its problematic
Nachleben in German Idealism: God ‘is sacrificing himself in the quasi-Cabbalistic
sense of a self-contradiction or limitation, for example in German Idealism where
God is the infinite who sacrifices himself for the finite and finite beings must sacrifice
themselves to reveal the infinite’.
138 In Sacrifice Imagined, 109 and 137, Hedley cites A. N. Whitehead’s famous distinction
which he hails as Plato’s original insight in his Adventures of Ideas (New York: Collier-
Macmillan, 1961), 25: ‘In this way, Plato is justified in his saying, The Creation of the
world – that is to say, the world of civilized order – is the victory of persuasion over
force.’
139 ‘Analogy or Dialectic? Reflections on the Philosophical Theology of Ingolf Dalferth’,
Hermeneutische Blätter 1 (2008): 95–105, here 102. The article quoted is a key document
of Hedley’s Christological symbolism which is at the heart of his rational theology.
140 Hedley quotes Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation (London: Dobell, 1908) I,
§60, 41, at the beginning of chapter 6 of Sacrifice Imagined, 161.
64 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

141 Living Forms, 222.

142 Sacrifice Imagined, 163.
143 Hedley’s account is not only anti-nominalistic but also anti-Spinozistic, as the
philosophy of an unethical first substance propounded by the Dutch rationalist is
seen as a decisive break in the Western recognition of the objective reality of moral
evil. See his ‘Introduction’, in The History of Evil in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries. 1700–1900, edited by id., Chad Meister and Charles Taliaferro (Oxon and
New York: Routledge, 2018), 1–4, here 1: ‘The God of Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, is
emphatically not a moral being. Spinoza was opposed to inherited Western morality
in his refusal to recognize evil.’
144 See the powerful description of evil in Living Forms, 217, along the conceptual
lines of a contemporary reformulation of the Christian Platonist paradox of evil as
incomprehensible, yet painfully real, privatio boni from which the above concepts
have been taken: ‘Yet by “explanation” I do not mean a quasi-scientific relation of
explanans and explanandum. Evil has by definition a surd quality. It is precisely the
unintelligible nature of evil as “motiveless malignity” and as hatred of goodness
that distinguishes it from deplorable selfishness, callousness or greed. Scarcity of
resources, conflicts of interests, and limits of sympathy can account for much human
malice and cruelty. But such empirical or psychological factors can barely explain the
more egregious horrors of human behaviour.’
145 See the rereading of the traditional notion of original sin in terms of a sense of
hopeless alienation from the Divine grounded in humankind’s structures of sin,
whether economic or political, in Sacrifice Imagined, 164: ‘Original Sin is the doctrine
that mankind is at least structurally if not inherently alienated from God.’
146 Cf. the important argument originally advanced by Origen and Anselm of
Canterbury ibid., 167.
147 Ibid., 171.
148 This précis of the author’s theology of the Cross in Sacrifice Imagined, 172, is a highly
revealing example of his symbolistic hermeneutics of imaginative rationality applied
to the key tenets of Christian faith. While grounded in the transcendental analysis
of the role of self-sacrifice in human morality, his Christology nevertheless does
justice to the historic importance of Christ incarnate. In so doing, Hedley manages
to formulate a notion of divine personhood which is neither a mere metaphor nor
a figment of the imagination, as in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, but an
analogical predicate of the absolute. Cf. also the strong plea for divine personhood in
the exegesis of Exod. 3.14 provided ibid., 36–8.
149 Living Forms, 147. The whole chapter is devoted to D. MacKinnon, The Problem of
Metaphysics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
150 Cf. Sacrifice Imagined, 138.
151 See the formal account of the argument ibid., 150.
152 In the principal chapter on Maistre’s soul-making theodicy, this key text from his St
Petersburg Dialogues Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence,
translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1993), 217, with the leitmotif of the second volume of the trilogy, that is, the
altar upon which humanity is sacrificed, is quoted twice, first in its original French
ibid., 155, then in an English translation ibid. 157. Cf. also the discussion of this text
ibid., 204.
153 See the important remarks on Maistre’s commitment to Origenism against the
backdrop of the prevalent Augustinianism of Reformation theology ibid., 144: ‘Thus
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 65

I suspect that the attraction of Origen resided in the latter’s resolute attachment to
the goodness of God. The espousal of a God of inscrutable will, the Augustine so
important for Luther and Calvin as well as Jansenism, is problematic for a thinker
like Maistre. Origen is the Church Father who is dedicated to freedom.’
154 Ibid., 153.
155 Ibid.
156 Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues (see n. 152), 43, quoted in its original French ibid.
and in an English translation ibid. 158.
157 Sacrifice Imagined, 145.
158 Ibid., 156.
159 Cf. ibid., 224–5, where Hedley quotes the early modern Cambridge Platonist’s
exegesis of the Divine Dialogues (London: James Flesher, 1668), 282, 284, 296–7
More’s deeply Origenist Christology of the pre-existent Christ whose soul and body
are shaped by the Son informs Hedley’s cosmic Christology.
160 In Living Forms, 225–42, Hedley delineates his concept of historical revelation in a
comprehensive defence of Austin Farrer’s account in his systematic Glass of Vision
(London: Dacre Press, 1948), and his exegesis of the book of Revelation in A Rebirth
of Images: The Making of St John’s Apocalypse (London: Dacre Press, 1949). In so
doing, Hedley fuses Farrer’s notion of ‘double agency’ with the latter’s concept of
revelation as an event imagined in terms of the veridic, rather than merely aesthetic
metaphors of the iconic imagination.
161 Farrer, Glass of vision (see n. 160), 43, quoted in Living Forms, 228.
162 Iconic Imagination, 218.
163 See the link between Hedley’s symbolistic epistemology and rational ecclesiology in
his first exposition of the third of the three primordial images in his reading of S. T.
Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, in ‘Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and
the Walled Gard of “Kubla Khan”’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 115–34,
here 121.
164 The discussion of one of the key sources of the author’s account of the second
and third ecumenical symbols in Living Forms, 231–2, is revealing in terms of his
hermeneutic of religious imagery. While agreeing with Cudworth that Christ’s
sacrifice is an important aspect of the infinite semantic richness of the sacramental
symbol, the denominational bone of contention is the question whether the sacrificial
or the festive character is to be stressed in the interpretation of the Eucharist,
whether in liturgy or in theology. Though Anglican in character, Hedley’s philosophy
of the sacrament is, hence, deeply ecumenical, as the semantic core of the infinity of
meaning expressed by the symbol allows for great liturgical and dogmatic latitude.
165 Ralph Cudworth, A Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper
(London, 1642), 15–16, quoted in Sacrifice Imagined, 206.
166 Sacrifice Imagined, 207.
167 Cudworth, True Notion (see n. 165), 54, quoted ibid., 207.
168 Living Forms, 230. It is not by chance that the imaginative theodicy of the middle
work of the trilogy, true to its Platonic structure of creation, redemption and
restitution ends in a comprehensive account of ‘joy’. See Sacrifice Imagined, 220–4.
169 Living Forms, 236.
170 It is not by accident that Raphael’s painting is on the front cover of the concluding
volume of the trilogy.
171 Quoted in Living Forms, 230.
66 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

172 Cf. Hedley’s penetrating interpretations of Shakespeare’s late dramatic work in Iconic
Imagination, 237–9, which, in many ways, provides the most compelling literary
evidence for his own religious vision of salvation.
173 Iconic Imagination, 245. Hedley’s use of Plotinus’s notion of the second hypostasis for
the sake of biblical exegesis is a particularly telling example of his Christian Platonist
synthesis of biblical and philosophical thought.
174 ‘Coleridge and “Kubla Khan”’ (see n. 163), 131.
175 Iconic Imagination, 247.
176 Cf. Living Forms, 92–3.
177 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in Dialogues and Natural
History of Religion, edited by John Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
113, quoted in Living Forms, 167.
178 Living Forms, 167.
179 Ibid.
180 As is clear from the graphic terminology, Hedley’s rejection of Augustinianism
is inspired by the German historian of philosophy Kurt Flasch’s formidable
philosophical onslaught on the Latin Church Father in his edition of the latter’s
first comprehensive treatise on divine omnipotence and election as transcending
our categories of good and evil: Logik des Schreckens. Augustinus von Hippo, De
diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum I 2, translated by Walter Schäfer, edited and
commented on by Kurt Flasch, 3rd edn (Mainz: Dieterich, 2012).
181 Sacrifice Imagined, 138–9. However, the quotation is not from the author’s celebrated
Letter of Resolution, published anonymously in London in 1661, which constitutes
the first sustained defence of Origenism as a Christian metaphysics, but from the
author’s sermon on God is Love, delivered in Cambridge three years earlier: The
Remains of that Reverend and Learned Prelate Dr George Rust (London, 1686), 1–20,
here 18.
182 See, above all, Hedley’s numerous seminal articles on Ralph Cudworth’s True
Intellectual System of the Universe, notably its comprehensive exposition of the
ancient theology of pagan and patristic Platonism which the author himself has
been instrumental in revealing to be the chief source of the early modern British and
European debates on the theology of the Trinity: ‘The Platonick Trinity: Philology
and Divinity in Cudworth’s Philosophy of Religion’, in Philologie und Erkenntnis.
Beiträge zu Begriff und Problem frühneuzeitlicher ‘Philologie’, edited by Ralph Häfner
(Tübingen: De Gruyter, 2001), 247–63; ‘Persons of Substance and the Cambridge
Connection: Some Roots and Ramifications of the Trinitarian Controversy in
Seventeenth-Century England’, in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians,
Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by
Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls (Leiden and Bosten: Brill, 2005), 225–40; ‘The
Cambridge Platonists and the “Miracle of the Christian World”’, in Autonomie und
Menschenwürde. Origenes in der Philosophie der Neuzeit, Alfons Fürst and Christian
Hengstermann (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2012), 185–97, esp. 192–6; ‘Gods and
Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and His Ancient Theology’, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 25 (2017): 932–53.
183 Cf. the magisterial account of the poet philosopher’s seminal role in his reception of
Cambridge Platonism and German Idealism after the historic Pantheism Controversy
in Enlightenment Germany in: Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 18–87, succinctly
summarized in ‘Coleridge as a Theologian’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, edited by Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 473–
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 67

92. Cf. also ‘Coleridge’s Creative Contemplation’, in Coleridge and Contemplation,

edited by Peter Cheyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 220–36.
184 See the concluding overview in Hedley’s concise analysis of Christian theology in his
early article ‘Pantheism, Trinitarian Theism and the Idea of Unity: Reflections on the
Christian Concept of God’, Religious Studies 32 (1996): 61–77, here 75–7. Deism, the
third doctrine, is dismissed out of hand as ‘spiritually a rather barren option’ (ibid., 76).
Hedley’s rational theology hinges upon his Platonic concept of the transcendence of
the One and the Intellect over the many of material reality, by which it is distinguished
from Spinoza’s pantheism, which is at once its closest relative and chief foil.
185 Hedley’s theology proper can, therefore, be seen as participating in and decisively
contributing to the ‘revival of Perfect Being Theology’ mentioned in Iconic
Imagination, 127. The author also uses the time-honoured divine name of early
modern rationalism without any further comment in ‘Forms of Reflection’ (see n. 5),
113.
186 See both the stress laid upon the theology of the One in Hedley’s ‘Legacy of the
Parmenides’ (see n. 78) and the key concept of ‘relational unity’ in his work on
the Cambridge Platonists in ‘Platonick Trinity’ (see n. 182), 259–61, and on S. T.
Coleridge in Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 63–4.
187 Hedley’s account of the patristic appropriation of the Platonist metaphysics of the
One and the Intellect throughout draws upon his teacher Werner Beierwaltes’s
magisterial exposition of the development of Christian Platonism and idealism
from Late Antiquity to the present day in his Platonismus und Idealismus, 2nd edn
(Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004).
188 ‘Coleridge and “Kubla Khan”’ (see n. 163), 127.
189 Hedley alludes to the classic of German historiography of philosophy by Hans
Joachim Krämer, Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte
des Platonismus zwischen Platon und Plotin, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner –
Publisher, 1967).
190 Hedley concurs with Cudworth in his rejection of this strand of Neoplatonism as ‘a
certain kind of Mysterious Atheism’ in ‘The Platonick Trinity’ (see n. 182), 257, and
Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 61.
191 This is the core of Hedley’s compelling interpretation of this decisive part of the
history of Christian dogma in ‘Platonick Trinity’ (see n. 182), 255.
192 Iconic Imagination, 219. Cf. also the detailed account of Nicholas of Cusa’s celebrated
doctrine of God as coincidentia oppositorum in ‘Coleridge and “Kubla Khan”’ (see n.
163), 122–3.
193 Cf. Hedley’s line of argument ibid., 136, where he quotes Plotinus’s characterization
of the One as πρὸ τοῦ τί. God is not a ‘thing’ in any way, but the principle of
‘thingness’ itself. He is the principle of determinateness which as such is itself beyond
determinate thought and being.
194 ‘Coleridge as a Theologian’ (see n. 183), 482.
195 See the succinct explanation of the Christological concept of ‘alterity’ in ‘Christian
Concept of God’ (see n. 184), 71, in which Hedley expressly links it to that of the
ὁμοούσιος: ‘The concept of “alterity” is meant to avoid the strong sense of difference
implied by the word “other”. The Son, the Word, is not other than the Father but, as
the councils said, consubstantial.’
196 See the definition of personhood and the theological aporia of a purely Spinozistic
notion of divine infinity in Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 70: ‘Personhood seems
intuitively to involve an awareness of otherness and the idealists were convinced
68 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

that a minimal requirement of being a person involves distinguishing oneself from

another self. Yet this conflicted with the all-oneness tenet of Spinozism. If God is all,
he cannot be a person in any remote sense because logically there can be nothing
which is “other” to the “all-oneness”.’
197 ‘Christian Concept of God’ (see n. 184), 62.
198 Enn. VI 8, quoted and interpreted in Living Forms, 93. The first treatise on divine
freedom, Plotinus’s enn. VI 8 is one of the most important Neoplatonic sources
of Hedley’s own rational theology. See the discussions of this treatise in Hedley’s
early works such as ‘Christian Concept of God’ (see n. 184), 70–1, Coleridge,
Philosophy and Religion, 82, and ‘Platonick Trinity’ (see n. 182), 257, and his more
recent remarks on this text in ‘Coleridge as a Theologian’ (see n. 183), 486–9, and
‘Contemplative Imagination’ (see n. 12), 228.
199 See Hedley’s explicit affirmation of univocal divine goodness in Sacrifice Imagined,
135, and, more recently, in his ‘Gods and Giants’ (see n. 182), 940.
200 Spinoza is usually mentioned alongside David Hume with the former’s Theological-
Political Treatise and the Appendix to Ethics I and the latter’s History of Religion
(1757) and Natural Dialogues providing the most trenchant and most formidable
critique of religion in the nascent modern age (cf., for example, Living Forms,
148, and Iconic Imagination, 202). On the anti-Spinozist foundations of Hedley’s
imaginative idealism, see his critical comments on the Dutch philosopher’s Treatise
and Ethics in Living Forms, 12–14.
201 In Iconic Imagination, 142, Hedley singles out the biblical account of God’s
arbitrary preference of Jacob over Esau, Augustine’s doctrine of predestination and
Kierkegaard’s admiration for Abraham obeying God in choosing to slaughter Isaac
for particular critique. See the more detailed critique of the Danish theologian’s
‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ in matters of religion in Living Forms, 154–5.
202 Cf. Sacrifice Imagined, 20.
203 Iconic Imagination, 140.
204 Ibid., 141.
205 Iconic Imagination, 196, where the author goes on to link the Indian theologumenon
to the sapiental tradition originating in the Old Testament Wisdom books and
culminating in Christ’s identification with the Logos in the Gospel of John.
206 Henry More, A Platonick Song of the Soul, edited with an Introductory Study
by Alexander Jacob (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated
University Press, 1988), 409, quoted in Living Forms, 133.
207 Cf. the deeply Platonic meditation on the sun as symbol of the Divine in Living
Forms, 135: ‘For example, the symbol of light conveys the productive bestowing of
illumination without exhaustion or depletion of the source, but also joy; awe; insight;
warmth; sustenance. There is a continuum between the nature and effects of the
symbol (e.g. the sun) and the object symbolized (God).’ Sunlight is a telling example
of the double agency of God and nature, as the sun participates in divine creativity,
bringing about and sustaining life on earth and disclosing to it its archetypal
principle for a certain period of its cosmic lifetime. Thus, it is a specific mode of the
divine substance within the ‘continuum between the nature and effects of the symbol
. . . and the object symbolized’.
208 The dense meditation on different forms of unity ibid., 91, may be seen as providing
a key to the cosmology and soteriology of the author’s imaginative idealism which is
particularly indebted to the first principle of Platonism, the One, as first enunciated
in its founder’s Parmenides.
 
The Chariot, the Temple and the City 69

209 Again, the image, on the principles of Hedley’s imaginative idealism, is not a mere
metaphor, but possesses a metaphysical fundamentum in re in that the finite ‘I am’,
in its imagination, is a ‘repetition’ of the archetypal infinite ‘I am’. Shakespeare’s
verse, applied to the divine nature, expresses an analogical truth about it. While the
‘unknown’ cannot refer to the fullness of God’s knowledge of the ideas, it may be
applied to the creative novelty introduced into the world by the countless myriads of
autonomous natural and spiritual agents.
210 Sacrifice Imagined, 59, where the author, following the general drift of Scriptural
theology, comes close to positing a bipolarity in God as process and reality: ‘Scripture
provides a vision of God not as pure actuality but relishing the goodness of human
beings. There has always been a drive away from the strict aseity of the Divine
towards a theogony in which God is involved in the life of the universe and in which
human beings play a role in the process of redemption.’
211 Living Forms, 238.
212 Hedley’s metaphysical reading of Ws. 11.21 in Iconic Imagination, 235, is heavily
influenced by the seminal article on the Christian Platonist Augustine by his
teacher Werner Beierwaltes: ‘Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11,21’, Revue
d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 15 (1969): 51–61. Cf. also the more extensive
explanation of the Neoplatonic doctrine in Living Forms, 78: ‘This is the Neoplatonic
tenet that when the soul is liberated from evil it ascends quite naturally to the Good:
omnia in deum tendunt et recurrunt. This metaphor of the natural place of the soul
in God or its gravitation towards the One is employed by Christian theologians of
Neoplatonic provenance such as Eriugena and Eckhart.’
213 Iconic Imagination, 243. In the grand tradition of the ancient theology of Origen
and Plotinus, the fathers of Christian and pagan Neoplatonism, and the Cambridge
Platonists and Romantics, their most important early modern heirs, Hedley posits
‘creative vision’ as the principle of all being as being. The key text, quoted at length
and commented on in great detail ibid., 243–4, is Plotinus’s philosophy of nature
in Ennead III 8. On the seminal role that this treatise, the first to be translated into
German by F. Creuzer, played at the early stages of nascent German Idealism, see
‘Creative Contemplation’ (see n. 183), 228–30. See also the excellent discussion
of ‘undiminished giving’ and ‘creative contemplation’ as the twin principles
of Neoplatonism in: Maria L. Gatti, ‘Plotinus: The Platonic Tradition and the
Foundation of Neoplatonism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, edited by
Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10–37.
214 Iconic Imagination, 35.
215 Cf., above all, the chapter of that title in Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen.
Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 73–113.
216 See the succinct précis of Eckhard’s reflections upon the relationship between
divine archetype and human image which throughout informs Hedley’s account
of the intimate link between human knowledge and action and divine creativity in
Iconic Imagination, 50: ‘The image points to that which is beyond itself: it has its
essence in its exemplar or archetype (Urbild). It is not the relation of accidents to a
substance. The specifically Neoplatonic dimension of this metaphysics of the image
is particularly clear in Latin Sermon XLIX. In this passage the image is presented
as having eight characteristics: it possesses likeness, and secondly is similar in its
“nature and species”. Thirdly, the perfect image is identical with its source. Fourthly,
the image emanates from its source. Fifthly, it excludes any otherness. The image and
70 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

its exemplar are not divided things or substances. It is characterized by reflection,

by a reditio completa (perfect return) of the image to its exemplar. Finally, the image
possesses the abundance of its source.’
217 Farrer, Glass of Vision (see n. 160), 7–8, quoted and discussed at length in Living
Forms, 236–8, quotes Spinoza, Eth. 2p13, to whom he attributes his conversion
from an exterior to an inward Deity. See also Farrer’s further critical explanation
of his early ‘Spinozism’ in hindsight: ‘Undoubtedly I misunderstood Spinoza, in
somewhat the same fashion as . . . St. Augustine misunderstood Plotinus, turning
him to Christian uses. Here, anyhow is what I took from Spinozism. I would no
longer attempt, with the psalmist, “to set God before my face”. I would see him as
the underlying cause of my thinking, especially of those thoughts in which I tried
to think of him.’ Cf. also the more detailed interpretation of Farrer’s theological
autobiography in ‘Shaping Spirit of the Imagination’ (see n. 12), 115–20.
218 Living Forms, 166. Not only does this passage from Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece
illuminate the principle of double agency, but also the limitations that libertarian
human action of necessity imposes upon God’s creative vision of the world.
219 Iconic Imagination, 57.
220 Cf. ibid., 37–8, where Hedley draws upon the respective excavations to bolster his
philosophical argument for the ‘precedence of religion over technology’, and the
more comprehensive discussion of prehistoric art ibid., 54–7.
221 Ibid., 200, where Hedley buttresses his apparently anachronistic philosophical agenda
on the basis of his philosophy of the imagination informing all of our thought and
language alike: ‘Moreover, if language is deeply and necessarily metaphorical, we
are always confronting the mythic.’ Indeed, if the transcendental analysis of the
imaginative idealism of the trilogy is apposite, we cannot but view our history as a
theogony in which our Phaedrean striving, despite all the sacrifices symbolized by
the temple, will eventually be fulfilled in the divine plenitude of the heavenly city.
222 See the analysis of the narratives of modernity in Living Forms, 1–37.
223 Iconic Imagination, 202.
224 The debate between Schelling and Coleridge on the relationship between divine
and human consciousness, recounted in Living Forms, 123–4, is one of considerable
systematic interest. Is the cosmic double agency by which nature and man come to
participate in a vision of the Divine thegonic in the strict sense of the word? Does
it add to the divine life itself, as it communicates itself to the cosmos in triumph
and tragedy alike? It is a question explicitly raised at various points in the trilogy.
Whereas Schelling views the ‘gradual disclosure of truth in myths’ of tautegorical
power as ‘part of a progressive unfolding of the Godhead’, Coleridge chooses to see
the divine truth as ‘essentially timeless’.
225 ‘Analogy or Dialectic?’ (see n. 139), 103.
226 Hedley himself is outspoken in emphasizing the Christological character of the
entirety of his narrative theologia naturalis, thereby providing a hermeneutical key to
the imaginative ontology of his trilogy on the very first page of its first volume, where
he invokes the Christological title of Christus victor: ‘This book is consciously written
in a tradition of Christian Platonism, but it emphasizes the eschatological-mythical
dimension of Platonism and the apocalyptic-Christus Victor gospel of Christian
faith. It is a fusion of narrative and natural theology’ (Living Forms, 1). In ‘Analogy or
Dialectic?’ (see n. 139), 102, Hedley provides an explanation of the latter epithet, the
Christus consummator, expressly linking it to the ‘eschatological-mythical dimension
of Platonism’.
 Part II

Spiritual sensation in ancient and

early modern Christian Platonism
72 
 3

Θεία αἴσθησις
Origen’s epistemological concept of spiritual sensation
Alfons Fürst

1 The concept of spiritual sensation as the

‘humble beginnings’ of imagination
In his books about religious imagination, Douglas Hedley investigates imagination as the
master way to express the inexpressible. Musing about various aspects of this approach
to the knowledge of the divine in his book The Iconic Imagination of 2016, he refers to
the ancient Platonic concept of spiritual sensation coined by Origen and Plotinus.1 In
the previous volume Living Forms of the Imagination of 2008, he stated that the ancient
philosophers had no concept of imagination, but this need not mean that the phenomenon
called imagination did not exist.2 I would like to propose – and if I do not misunderstand
him, this is suggested by Hedley himself in the volume of 2016 – that the concept of spiritual
sensation can be seen as an equivalent of the concept of imagination, one of its ‘humble
beginnings’ in Antiquity.3 Through ‘the eye of the soul’ or ‘of the mind’, as Origen and
Plotinus said,4 using a famous phrase of Plato,5 or through ‘the eye of the heart’, as Origen
said with a synonymous biblical term,6 finite rational beings can apprehend transcendent
forms and ideas.7 ‘Plato uses the symbol of the eye to convey the power and immediacy of
the soul’s apprehension of immaterial realities.’8 In the language of spiritual sensation as
coined by Origen and Plotinus, this is extended to all five corporeal senses: the eternal God
is apprehended via the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching.
When Hedley uses this tradition to explain ‘the living forms of the imagination’ and
‘iconic imagination’, he mostly refers to Plotinus. Origen is mentioned only scarcely,
but appropriately in the context of this topic. With regard to the concept of spiritual
sensation, we can rightly place Plotinus and Origen next to each other. What Hedley
points out about Plotinus and (Neo)Platonism regarding imagination and intellectual
perception and knowledge holds true for Origen as well. In support, he can quote
one of his own Platonic ancestors at Cambridge: the Cambridge Platonist John Smith
(1618–52) ‘knew the writings of Plotinus well although the language of the spiritual
sensation is taken from Origen’.9 Smith, who can therefore be deemed an Origenist
as well, was not wrong in combining Plotinus and Origen with regard to the topic
74 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

of spiritual sensation. Both ancient philosophers were Platonists who had the same
ideas about the indirect apprehension of the transcendent reality. They shared the
same principles of cognition based on the Platonic tenet of participation: the lower,
the sensible, the image, is derived from and participates in the higher, the intelligible,
the imagined archetype. It is thus not odd at all to put the great pagan Platonist
Plotinus besides the great Christian Platonist Origen, and the less so as Hedley’s books
are ‘consciously written in a tradition of Christian Platonism’.10 The emphasis in the
following contribution will thus be put on Origen.

2 A brief history of the research on spiritual sensation

As to the ancient founders of this tradition, Karl Rahner published a seminal article
about Origen in 1932,11 which is his very first academic publication,12 and two articles
in 1933 and 1934 about Bonaventure and the Middle Ages.13 Hans Urs von Balthasar
studied these works of Rahner with great care and devoted a long chapter to the
concept of spiritual sensation in his anthology of Origenian texts of 1938 entitled Spirit
and Fire.14 By these studies Rahner and von Balthasar set the stage for the subsequent
research on this topic up to present times. Both theologians, von Balthasar even more
than Rahner, draw a lot on this epistemological concept in their own theological
thought – but I am not going to deal with this aspect of Origen’s reception, although
it was very important for the development of Catholic theology during the twentieth
century.15 In Origen research, however, this topic was well known as a key element of
Origen’s spiritual theology, although it failed to attract much attention.16 Only some
aspects related to this idea have been treated in a few contributions.17 As to Plotinus,
in 1986 John Dillon published an article in which he discussed Rahner’s depiction of
Origen’s doctrine of spiritual senses and provided a brief outline of Plotinus’s concept
in Enneads VI 7.18 Dillon’s article, especially his interpretation of Origen, was critically
reviewed and convincingly confuted by Mark J. McInroy in 2012.19
Apart from this small number of scholarly studies of the concept of spiritual senses
in Origen (and in Plotinus), the topic as such has attracted wider attention only
recently in an essay collection edited by Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley in 2012.20
As to the development of this concept in later epochs, there are some monographs
on Byzantine and medieval authors like Simeon the New Theologian,21 William of
Auxerre,22 Bonaventure,23 and on the later Middle Ages,24 but, as noted by Gavrilyuk
and Coakley, much more is to be done with regard to other authors in the Syriac,
Byzantine and Western medieval tradition and some strands of thought in Early
Modern and Modern Times like the Cambridge Platonists, German Pietists, German
and English Romantics, French phenomenologists and present-day charismatics.25

3 The spiritual senses in Origen and in Scripture

In his pioneering French article of 1932, Karl Rahner takes into account nearly all the
passages in Origen’s works related to spiritual sensation, except the ones found later
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 75

in the Tura papyri in 1941 (especially the Dialogue with Heraclides and the treatise On
Passover).26 Origen alludes to this concept very often, and sometimes he gives a concise
description.
The first principal texts are to be found in the early systematic treatise On First
Principles, written in Alexandria during the late 220s.27 The Dialogue with Heraclides
discovered in Tura and thus unknown to Rahner and von Balthasar before its first
publication in 1949, which is of uncertain date but almost certainly belongs to the
Caesarean period of Origen’s life after 233, contains a detailed description of all the
five divine senses and extends the concept to the spiritual dimension of other parts of
the body like hands, feet, bones, heart, hairs and blood.28 In a passage in the Homilies
on Isaiah inspired by Jesus’s promise that ‘out of his belly shall flow rivers of living
water’ (Jn 7.38), which is not taken into account by Rahner, Origen explains that we
have eyes, ears and feet of the body as well as of the soul or the heart, respectively,
and poses the question ‘whether we might also have two bellies, a corporeal and a
spiritual one’.29 The most important biblical book in this respect is the Song of Songs,
so that in the Commentary as well as in the Homilies on the Song of Songs, which were
most probably written around 240 and 245, respectively, Origen dwells on the concept
of spiritual senses, when he explains the ‘savour of thy ointments’ in Song 1.3-4, and
refers to it time and again in his exegesis of the highly metaphorical text of the Song
of Songs.30 Eventually, we find this theory in two late works written between 245 and
249, namely in the Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, where Origen explains the
interconnection of the five ‘lamps of the senses’ (whose principle is Christ as wisdom)
as analogous to the interconnection of the virtues (whose content and principle is
Christ as well),31 and in two passages of the apology Against Celsus, where he gives a
succinct summary of the core of this idea based on the main biblical texts.32 Apart from
these major texts, Origen uses the idea of spiritual sensation as a whole or parts of it
throughout his œuvre in order to explain metaphorical and anthropomorphic notions
in Scripture and to describe a way how the finite human mind is able to perceive
infinite spiritual realities.33
For the five senses, Origen has recourse to passages in Scripture where the
particular bodily organs are mentioned or used in a metaphorical way: ‘the eyes of
your understanding’ in Eph. 1.18,34 the ‘ears to hear’ in Mt 11.15-16; 13.935 and the
‘unspeakable words heard’ by Paul, ‘whether in the body or out of the body’, in ‘the
third heaven’ in 2 Cor. 12.2-4,36 the taste according to the commandment in Ps. 33.9
LXX: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good’,37 which is the taste for the ‘living bread from
heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die’ but ‘live for ever’ in Jn 6.32-33 together
with 6.50-51,38 the smell of the ‘sweet savour of Christ’, ‘the savour of death’ and ‘the
savour of life’ in 2 Cor. 2.15-16,39 and the touch ‘of the Word of life, that our hands
have handled’ in 1 Jn 1.1.40 The most important text is Prov. 2.5, because in his reading
it provides a biblical umbrella term for his notion of the spiritual senses: καὶ αἴσθησιν
θεῖαν εὑρήσεις (sensum divinum invenies in Latin) – ‘thou shalt find a divine sense’.41
This is not the wording of the Septuagint: καὶ ἐπίγνωσιν θεοῦ εὑρήσεις – ‘thou shalt
come to the knowledge of God’, which is translated in the Vulgate as et scientiam Dei
invenies. Origen’s version is a peculiar one, maybe taken up from Clement of Alexandria
who provides the same wording.42 It need not seem that strange if one notices that in
76 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Clement as well as in Origen αἴσθησις is nearly synonymous with ἐπίγνωσις or γνῶσις

in the sense of ‘perception’.43

4 Spiritual sensation: Mystical psychology,

imagery and apologetics
What is ‘spiritual sensation’? The concept as such is commonly known in Origenian
studies, but it is not easy to explain what we should understand by it. Hedley poses the
main question: ‘Is the language of sensation merely metaphorical or does it refer to the
perception of spiritual realities? Are terms such as “seeing” and “hearing” employed
in a figurative manner to denote “understanding”, without placing any importance on
the sensation?’44 As we will see in the following, in Origen’s concept of spiritual senses
sensation does play a real role in the process of perceiving and understanding spiritual
realities. ‘The image becomes a vehicle of the experience of transcendence,’ Hedley
states (for Plotinus) with regard to imagination. ‘Where conceptual and discursive
thought fail, the image becomes an instrument of apprehension of the noetic realm.’45
This is the core idea of spiritual sensation as well. The senses have a mediatory power:
they embody the invisible into forms of corporeal relationship and thus connect
heaven and earth.
It is precisely this mediating function of the spiritual senses to which Karl Rahner
pointed in the opening statement of his article of 1932:

If religious, and especially mystical, experience seeks to express the inexpressible

despite all the obstacles that lie in the way, then inevitably it must go back to images
which come from the realm of sense knowledge. Mystics are happy, therefore,
to speak of sight, hearing and taste of a spiritual kind in order to describe their
experience of the realities of which they were conscious.46

As a contribution to the history of this idea, Rahner analyses the main aspects of Origen’s
concept of spiritual senses (Rahner himself speaks of a ‘doctrine’, but this is due to the
theological terminology common in those days, it does not match Origen’s undogmatic
and open-minded style of research). In lack of other evidence of this ‘doctrine’ before
Origen, ‘he must have drawn it from no other source than Scripture. Those passages in
particular come into question in which religious understanding is expressed in terms
which manifest the operations of sense powers.’47 Although these biblical passages
‘simply contain well chosen metaphors’,48 the Origenian concept based on them is not
metaphorical.49 Of course, when Origen explains notions in Scripture like, for instance,
seeing and hearing God, he intends to avoid any anthropomorphic understanding. He
interprets this metaphorical language as referring not to any material sense knowledge
of God, but to the idea of a sense faculty for the divine which is different from corporeal
sense perception. In this regard, Origen’s concept of a spiritual sense perception is
apologetical. Within his system of the ascent of the soul to perfection, however, Origen
uses the concept of spiritual senses ‘to give a clearer account to the psychology of
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 77

mystical experience’. Although it is still an open question whether Origen speaks of

a mystical experience different from general religious understanding and Platonic
enthusiasm, ‘it is evident, then, in Origen’, Rahner concludes, ‘that the spiritual senses
can be the organs of mystical knowledge’.50 In Origen’s concept of spiritual sensation,
the divine senses are far more than an imagery to explain anthropomorphic metaphors
in Scripture. They have a mediating function within the imagination of divine realities.
On the one hand, ‘divine sensation’ is linked to corporeal sense knowledge of material
things that are imagined in the language which is used to describe ‘divine sensation’,
and on the other hand it transcends corporeality because ‘divine sensation’ is not a
corporeal, but an incorporeal perception of immaterial, spiritual realities.
In his discussion of ‘the most useful article of Karl Rahner’, John Dillon, in 1986,
made a case for some development in Origen’s thought about the spiritual senses.51
He compares the early Origenian texts on this matter with the late ones and assumes
‘that, at the time he wrote the De principiis, Origen had not yet fully developed a theory
of “spiritual” senses’, while ‘in the Dialogue with Heraclides . . . we find the theory
developed noticeably’.52 In the Commentary on Matthew then ‘we find the theory fully
developed’,53 and in Contra Celsum ‘Origen propounds a remarkable theory of noetic
or spiritual analogues to the five senses’.54 Dillon argues for a purely metaphorical use
of the language of sensation in the early Origen, whereas the late Origen presents the
theory of spiritual sensation as a fully developed epistemological concept. As against
this interpretation of the evidence, Mark J. McInroy argued convincingly in 2012
‘that unexamined aspects of Origen’s early writings in fact demonstrate noteworthy
continuities between his early and late uses of sensory language’.55 Whereas Dillon
distinguishes a metaphorical use of the language of sensation in the early Origen from
an analogical use in his later works, McInroy shows that ‘Origen does not cleanly divide
his use of sensory language into “analogical” and “metaphorical” moments’.56 Instead,
his use of this language is multivalent, and even in his early works ‘Origen uses the
language of sensation in a manner that does not seem to be metaphorical’.57 McInroy
corroborates this view on the basis of a number of early texts prior to De principiis in
which the presence of God to the human senses, namely ‘to the eyes of the mind’, is
described in an unmetaphorical way. The perception of God is rather described in close
resemblance to corporeal perception.58 For instance, Origen speaks of ‘a bodiless voice
in the depth of the hearts of human beings which they, after recollecting themselves
and after entering their chamber and closing the door of their senses, and being wholly
outside the body, send up to him who alone can hear such a voice’.59 ‘Instead of an early,
metaphorical period that is followed by a late, analogical portion of Origen’s career,
then’, McInroy concludes his study, ‘we find in Origen’s works an intermingled use of
metaphor and analogy throughout his writings, both early and late.’60
The result of this small scholarly discussion is that Origen, as has been shown
by McInroy, from the outset did not use the language of spiritual sensation only
metaphorically. Both aspects, the metaphorical and the analogical ones, are connected
to each other. And it was not simply for exegetical-apologetical reasons that Origen
coined this concept, as Dillon insinuated from his restricted perspective that was
mainly based on Origen’s late debate with Celsus.61 He conceived of the idea of spiritual
senses rather as an epistemological theory in order ‘to express the inexpressible despite
78 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

all the obstacles that lie in the way’,62 as Rahner set the task which still remains to be
solved.

5 Corporeal and spiritual senses in theory and practice

As shown in Chapter 4, it was not simply reasons of exegetical or apologetical expedience
which gave rise to the concept of spiritual senses in Origen’s theology, but it was, from
the outset, an attempt to deal with a fundamental question of learning and knowing.
In the De principiis, this question is discussed within a reflection about how corporeal
bodies are able to perceive incorporeal things: ‘Whence comes it’, Origen asks, ‘that
the power of memory, the contemplation of invisible things, yes, and the perception of
incorporeal things reside in a body? How does a bodily nature investigate the teachings
of the arts and the meanings and reasons of things? And divine doctrines, which are
obviously incorporeal, how can it discern and understand them?’63 Origen’s inference
is that mind and soul cannot be corporeal because in this case they would not be able
to perceive incorporeal things. The underlying idea is the old Greek hermeneutical
principle of knowing ‘like by like’. There must thus be something like an incorporeal
perception in order to perceive intellectual things: ‘There are in us two kinds of senses,
the one being mortal, corruptible and human, and the other immortal and intellectual,
which here (i.e. in Prov. 2:5) he calls “divine”.’64 This is the core of Origen’s concept of
‘spiritual sensation’. It is neither a cheap trick to explain anthropomorphic language
in the Bible in a more or less allegorical way nor a tool to get rid of anthropomorphic
ideas. Instead, the concept of spiritual senses expresses the inextricable connection of
mind, soul and body when it comes to the perception of incorporeal things. In Origen’s
view, the metaphorical language used in Scripture is a sign and an expression of the
interconnection of mind and body in the process of perceiving and understanding
spiritual realities. It is on the basis of this insight that Origen reads the Bible and tries
to explain passages in which the language of sense perception is used to describe
intellectual realities.
A further argument for this view is provided at the end of the De principiis where
Origen finally points to the concept of spiritual senses. He again quotes Prov. 2.5, and
he admonishes the reader to take this theory into account when he reads the present
book: ‘It is with this sense that each of the rational questions which we have dealt
with above must be perceived; and with this sense that the words we speak must be
listened to and our writings pondered.’65 The concept of spiritual sensation is here
clearly presented as a hermeneutical rule which is of fundamental relevance not only
to exegesis but to theological or philosophical perception and knowledge in general. It
is a progress, or a passage, a visibilibus ad invisibilia:

A rational mind, by advancing from a knowledge of small to a knowledge of greater

things and from things visible to things invisible, may attain to an increasingly
perfect understanding. For it has been placed in a body, and of necessity advances
from sense-objects which are bodily, to sense-objects66 which are incorporeal
and intellectual. But in case it should appear mistaken to say as we have done
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 79

that intellectual things are objects of sense, we will quote as an illustration the
saying of Solomon: ‘Thou shalt find a divine sense’ (Prov. 2:5). By this he shows
that intellectual things are to be investigated not by bodily sense but by some other
which he calls divine.67

Again it becomes clear that for Origen the concept of spiritual sensation is not a tool to
explain the metaphorical language of Scripture, but a foundational principle in order to
explain how a mind placed in a body can perceive and understand incorporeal objects.
It may be noteworthy, by the way, that Origen here argues in the same way as in the
preface to the De principiis. At the end of the preface, he presents the hermeneutical
and methodological rule of how to deal with theological questions, namely to argue by
reason and by Scripture, and for this basic rule he quotes a biblical verse in a special
version, in this case the version of the Septuagint: ‘Enlighten yourselves with the light
of knowledge’ (Hos. 10.12). We find the same procedure at the end of the De principiis:
Origen emphasizes the concept of spiritual sensation as a hermeneutical rule of how
to deal with theological questions, that is, questions related to the incorporeal and
intellectual but nevertheless accessible to sense perception, and how to read books
about these questions. In order to support this idea by Scripture, he quotes Prov. 2.5
(with a special wording). As in the case of Hos. 10.12, this verse is not the initial reason
for formulating this concept, but functions as biblical confirmation of a concept coined
for philosophical reasons.
In his article about the divine sense in Origen of 2006, Robert Hauck also deals with
the question ‘whether his understanding of this [i.e. the divine sense] is metaphorical,
that is, whether this is a way to illustrate intellectual knowledge of the intelligible
world; or whether he thinks there are actually such faculties in the human soul’.68 In
order to answer this question, he places it in the context of ancient Platonic theories
of vision and cognition and offers quite interesting insights into how this sense works.
According to the Platonic understanding, the eye is a light-emitting organ and its vision
is enabled by the light of the sun. Vision occurs when the light from the eye meets the
light produced by an object for which the sunlight is the necessary ingredient: ‘when
the three rays meet, an impression is conveyed to the soul by the eye.’69 Origen draws
on this ancient scientific theory of sensation and knowledge and transfers it to the
spiritual senses.

For Origen, the mind, the perceptive faculty of the soul, operates like the eye by
emitting intellectual light that illuminates the soul and coalesces with the divine
light from above. [. . .] This coalescence, in which like is known by like, serves as
an explanation of the operation of the divine sense. [. . .] Mental vision operates as
a coalescence. In this case divine truth is the effluent which meets the intellectual
rays of the mind and produces knowledge.70

It is in this way that Origen in the De principiis describes how the divine sense works:

Each of the bodily senses is appropriately connected with a material substance

towards which the particular sense is directed. For instance, sight is connected with
80 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

colour, shape and size; hearing with the voice and sound; smelling with vapours
pleasant and unpleasant; taste with flavours; touch with things hot or cold, hard
or soft, rough or smooth. But it is clear to all that the sense of mind is far superior
to the senses above mentioned. Does it not then appear absurd that these inferior
senses should have substances connected with them, as objects towards which their
activities are directed, whereas this faculty, the sense of mind, which is superior to
them, should have no substance whatever connected with it, and that this faculty
of an intellectual nature should be a mere accident arising out of bodies? Those
who assert this are undoubtedly speaking in disparaging terms of that substance
which is the better part of their own nature; nay more, they do wrong even to God
himself in supposing that he can be understood through a bodily nature, since
according to them that which can be understood or perceived through a body is
itself a body; and they are unwilling to have it understood that there is a certain
affinity between the mind and God, of whom the mind is an intellectual image,
and that by reason of this fact the mind, especially if it is purified and separated
from bodily matter, is able to have some perception of the divine nature.71

Origen does not ‘simply extend Platonic metaphorical language about the eye of the
soul’, but ‘views the divine sense as a mental organ or a faculty in the soul that has a role
in the apprehension of intelligible truth’, and in the passage quoted he ‘provides insight
into his understanding of how it works’.72 ‘As the eye’s vision is enabled by the light
of the sun, the intellect’s knowledge of divine things is illuminated by the light of the
Son of God.’73 Origen thus thinks of the intellect as the perceptive faculty of the soul.
Hauck accepts that ‘the moral dimension certainly is present’, but in his view Origen’s
‘solution is intellectual’.74 His reasoning runs as follows: ‘For him the moral imperative
does not have to do with the health or wholeness of the physical eye, or even the moral
disposition in relation to generosity or simplicity, but rather the strength and capacity
of the intellectual eye.’ ‘When our mind is a lover of matter’, says Origen, ‘then the light
in us is darkness.’75 The enlightening flash of the mind consists of the establishment
of the rule of the intellect over the lower parts of the soul. ‘For, illumination from the
mind is like a gleaming flash, and the light in the body is like a lamp with gleaming
rays.’76,77 Contrary to this claim, I would argue that the strength and capacity of the
intellectual eye depends on the moral disposition, as will be seen in the following text,
and that the rule of the intellect over the lower parts of the soul is a moral rule. But
apart from this evaluation of the moral aspect, Hauck’s comments are highly revealing.
It should have become clear by now that Origen, right from the outset, that is, in the
De principiis and in other early writings, develops the concept of spiritual senses within
an epistemological framework. The Scriptural phrases cited may be metaphorical,
but their use by Origen is not. He states explicitly that ‘all parts of the sensual body
are to be found within the inner man’.78 It is not only a question of how to deal with
metaphorical language in Scripture. From Origen’s hermeneutical perspective, these
passages are verbal expressions about the constitution of the inner man, that is,
anthropological statements about the capacity of human beings to grasp the spiritual
reality within the framework of their bodily constitution. The perception of mind and
soul is not sensible, but nevertheless linked to sensation, as mind and soul are linked
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 81

to a body. Within this framework the corporeal organs fulfil a specific task during the
progress towards spiritual perception and, in the end, to perfection. They have a kind
of preparatory function: using the corporeal senses in the right way, that is, according
to the commandments of the Gospel, prepares the ‘lamps of the senses’, that is, the
spiritual faculty of sensation, to perceive incorporeal and intellectual objects. ‘The
ascent from objects perceptible by the senses to those perceptions called divine [. . .]
leads to the comprehension of spiritual realities.’79
This capacity is acquired and exercised by using the senses properly: the eyes should
not see injustice (with Is. 33.15), the ears should not hear idle talk, but the words of
Jesus.80 This is not at all metaphorical or symbolic, but real. As the physical faculties
are strengthened by constant practice, so are the spiritual senses.81 In real practice, the
senses get used to the spiritual realities enclosed in corporeal things. This can be called
the pedagogical aspect of the concept of spiritual senses: the use of spiritual sensation
can and is to be learned. The pedagogical aspect is expressed in the statement of Hebr.
5.14 that ‘the perfect by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good
and evil’ – a verse quoted by Origen as biblical evidence for the spiritual senses with
regard to the need of exercising them.82 ‘There is no other way to perfection than
training in the divine and intellectual senses.’83 Not everyone possesses these spiritual
faculties: ‘The utterance of God’, Origen writes in the late Contra Celsum, ‘which is
mentioned in Scripture is certainly not vibrated air, or a concussion of air, because it
is heard by a superior sense, more divine than physical hearing.’ Hence, ‘a man who
has superior hearing hears God, whereas a man who has become hard of hearing in
his soul does not perceive that God is speaking.’84 In an early text the Alexandrian
theologian states quite the same with respect to the eyes:

Just as with physical light which enables those with healthy eyes to see both the
light itself and other sensible objects, so too does God come with a certain power
to the mind of each one. As long as those to whom he comes are not all closed off
and their ability to see clearly not impeded by their passions, God makes himself
known and leads those illumined by him to a knowledge of other spiritual things.85

‘Only the perfect’, Rahner already stated, ‘are endowed with these spiritual faculties,
which they have brought to a higher level of operation through constant practice.’86
The dynamic aspect of progression and advancement to cultivate the proper emotional
disposition is also expressed in Prov. 2.5 because this verse is a promise: ‘Thou shalt
find a divine sense’ – if you do what this promise indicates and suggests, you will find
it.87
What is to be done then? The means of training the spiritual senses are the respective
corporeal senses. The process of learning might be conceived of as a kind of transition:
what the soul learns via training the corporeal senses – for example, to hear only the
words of Jesus with the corporeal ears – is transferred to the spiritual perception of Jesus,
and thus the spiritual sensation is exercised both physically and spiritually. Our bodily
behaviour affects our spiritual disposition directly. There is a tight link between the
corporeal and the spiritual senses that is far more than only a metaphorical or symbolic
relationship and also more than an analogy.88 On the contrary, the behaviour of the
82 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

corporeal senses can be regarded as a mirror of the status of the spiritual knowledge.
It is therefore not the case ‘that the spiritual senses become effective to the extent that
the bodily senses are deadened’, as Andrew Louth has described the relationship.89
This is only true if the bodily senses are seen as striving for nothing else but than
carnal desires. Taken in this sense, Origen indeed says that the corporeal senses must
be mortified, but he makes this aspect clear by calling these senses ‘carnal’.90 Within the
hermeneutics of spiritual perception, however, Origen argues that the bodily senses
can be tuned towards good actions like hearing the word of God. The spiritual senses
thus do not become effective when the bodily senses are deadened, but when the latter
are exercised in virtuous behaviour. To this end, the carnal desires of the corporeal
senses must be mortified, but not the bodily senses in general. Instead, by deadening
the carnal desires of the corporeal senses, the latter are released to evolve the spiritual
senses in the soul. For the same reason, the spiritual senses are not ‘different figurative
expressions for nous’, but rather ‘spiritual counterparts of the bodily senses’.91
Consequently, the spiritual senses are connected to each other because if one
corporeal sense is abused for bad things, this misbehaviour immediately affects and
damages spiritual perception as a whole.92 All senses, the corporeal as well as the
spiritual ones, are focused on Christ as the principle, content and aim of corporeal and
spiritual sensation. When used properly, that is, in a virtuous manner, the corporeal
senses are tuned towards the spiritual sensation of the virtues, for example, truthfulness
and righteousness, and the latter is directed towards Christ as sum and principle of all
virtues.93 In the treatise On Passover, Origen can therefore speak of ‘the five senses of
man’ without qualifying them as corporeal or spiritual because both are meant when he
says that ‘Christ has to come into each of them’.94 Two aspects of the concept of spiritual
sensation are combined in this short note: Christ is coming into the human senses – into
the spiritual as well as into the corporeal ones because if the corporeal senses are not
used according to the commandments of Christ, he cannot be present in the spiritual
dimension of man’s senses. And Christ has to come into each of the senses because if
he is not present in all senses, he cannot be present in any of them at all, or, as Origen
says metaphorically, ‘he cannot be sacrificed and consumed’.95 In an abbreviated way,
Origen can thus say that one should exercise one’s taste by eating the Lord, smell Christ’s
savour (with 2 Cor. 2.15 and Song 1.3), touch the ‘Word of life’ (according to 1 Jn 1.1).96
A passage like this sounds quite metaphorical, but within the underlying concept it is
an abbreviated description of the interconnection of corporeal and spiritual sensation.
Origen, using a neologism, calls this connection ‘a not sensible sense’.97 If the
spiritual senses are trained in the way described earlier, that is, by a proper use of the
corporeal senses, they will reach a ‘divine sense’ (θεία αἴσθησις), as he is used to saying
in his peculiar version of Prov. 2.5. A ‘divine sense’ is a sight that sees things superior to
corporeal beings like the cherubim or the seraphim. It hears sounds without objective
existence in the air, it tastes the living bread from heaven, it smells the sweet savour
of Christ and it touches the Word of life. The prophets, Origen says, found this divine
sense: they saw in a divine manner, heard in a divine manner, tasted and smelt in a
similar way, ‘so to speak, with a sense which was not sensible’.98 This ‘superior and
incorporeal sense’ ‘is different from that commonly so called by popular usage’.99 What
Origen means is to be found in the following sentence: ‘And they touched the Word
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 83

by faith.’100 The interconnection of corporeal and spiritual senses is again made clear in
the example of the healing of the leper (cf. Mt 8.3): ‘Jesus touched the leper spiritually
rather than sensibly, to heal him, as I think, in two ways, delivering him not only, as
the multitude take it, from sensible leprosy by sensible touch, but also from another
leprosy by his truly divine touch.’101 Both are meant here, the sensible touch as well as
the spiritual, and within the sensible touch and by means of it, the leper is touched
in a not sensible way. Through a bodily sense, therefore, he is led to a ‘not sensible
sensation’. By means of this oxymoron Origen tries to express the inexpressible – as
Karl Rahner posed the problem of spiritual perception.
The most compelling account of the spiritual senses as intertwined with the respective
bodily senses is to be found in the Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs.102
Origen interprets the sensuality of the biblical text as a medium to steer the mind from
the corporeal sense perception, which is used in a metaphorical sense in the text, to the
spiritual perception or, as he says in a Greek fragment, to the ‘pneumatic sense’ (αἴσθησις
πνευματική)103 and thus to attain the true reality. But the language of corporeal sensuality
is even more than a mere medium that can be left behind after having been used. Instead,
the corporeal senses are the place where human beings are able to get into contact with
intellectual and spiritual reality. Human beings can talk about spiritual sensation only
within the confines of their bodily constitution. Origen therefore connects the spiritual
senses not only to the mind but also to the soul104 because the soul is the link of the mind
to the body. Human corporeality thus plays an important role in the spiritual relationship
to God. Corporeal and spiritual senses are mutually interconnected.
Two examples of Origen’s exegesis of the Song of Songs may suffice to demonstrate
this connection. The Alexandrian exegete interprets the shared ‘bed’ of Bride and
Bridegroom in Song 1.16 as the human body.105 He combines this verse with Paul’s
statement in 1 Cor. 6.15 ‘that our bodies are the members of Christ’ and concludes
his explanation with the statement ‘that the soul who is able to look at him with
spiritual eyes has its body as bed in common with the Word because the divine power
extends to the grace of the body’.106 If the body is shaped according to ‘good works
and spiritual thoughts’,107 the soul will be able to see the Word in a spiritual sense,
and thus the body will be the place where the companionship of soul and Christ is
realized. In this sense Origen also explains the ‘windows’ in Song 2.9: ‘Each window
is one sense. The Bridegroom looks through this window. Another window is another
sense, and through it the Bridegroom looks worried. Since through which senses does
the Word of God not look?’108 The senses here are the corporeal as well as the spiritual
ones.109 They are both the medium of communication between God and the soul. In
the concept of spiritual sensation man as a whole, consisting of mind, soul and body,
is engaged in the perception of God which, therefore, is described by means of the
sensible notions of seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting and touching.

6 Plotinus on spiritual sensation

A brief look at Plotinus’s idea of spiritual sensation adds to a better understanding
of the specific profile of Origen’s reflections on this topic. His concept of spiritual
84 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

senses is not different from but close to Plotinus’s.110 According to Dillon,111 Plotinus in
Enneads VI 7 conceives of spiritual senses in the framework of ‘a general principle of
his, that the phenomena of this world are just pale reflections of what exists, in a more
real way, at a higher level’.112 As this principle works, for instance, for civic virtues and
cathartic virtues, time and eternity, or action and contemplation, ‘so here, sensibilia are
simply dim versions of higher, noetic “sensibilia”’.113 In this context, Plotinus discusses
a passage in Plato’s Timaeus where the ‘Young Gods, under the orders of the Demiurge,
are described as fabricating eyes for the soul in the body (and, by implication, other
organs of sense), to enable it to function successfully in the sensible world’.114 In order to
secure that ‘the nature of Man at the level of Form is to be complete’, ‘we must envisage
some form of sense-faculties in the soul before it leaves the intelligible realm’.115 As a
solution to this problem, Plotinus thought about an ‘analogue or paradigm of sense-
perception’ at the level of Nous,116 and as Dillon interprets him, he does not simply
propose ‘forms or paradigms of sensibilia’ but rather something like ‘noetic correlates
of sensibilia’.117 Since ‘the sense-world dimly mirror[s] the prior arrangements of
the noetic’, Plotinus concludes that ‘the man in Nous enjoy[s] a full set of faculties
answering to sense-faculties and that [he] contemplate[s] or apprehend[s] appropriate
objects’.118 Or in Plotinus’s own words:

What we have called the perceptibles of that realm enter into cognizance in a
way of their own, since they are incorporeal, while sense-perception here – so
distinguished as dealing with corporeal objects – is fainter than the perception
belonging to that higher world, but gains a specious clarity because its objects are
bodies; the man of this sphere has sense-perception because existing in a less true
degree and taking only enfeebled images of things There: perceptions here are dim
intellections, and intellections There are vivid perceptions.119

Dillon correctly states ‘that we have here, in Plotinus’ theory, a far greater degree of
“mirroring” of the noetic world by the sense-world than is traditional in Platonism.
Everything here is also There, in another, more exalted, mode.’120
In contrast to Origen – to come back to him – the spiritual senses in Plotinus’s
concept are strictly part of the noetic world. Origen, however, conceives of them as
belonging to the facilities of man even here on earth, not only in the intelligible world.
We find here another aspect of Origen’s reassessment of the goodness of the body.121
In his doctrine of man and of salvation history the body is not only the material
expression of punishment for earlier sins but also and even more the necessary form
in which man can learn and exercise a virtuous life. Origen’s concept of spiritual senses
can be seen as a main element of this anthropology. The fallen mind as soul in a body
stays connected to the noetic world to which the spiritual senses provide access if
they are trained by means of a proper usage of the corporeal senses in this world. In
Origen’s concept of the spiritual senses, there seems to exist an even closer connection
of the noetic and the sense-world than in Plotinus’s concept of mirroring. Whereas,
according to the Neoplatonic philosopher, sensible perception of corporeal objects in
this world is only a faint mirror of sense perception in the intelligible world, for the
Christian Platonist the perception provided by the spiritual senses here opens up the
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 85

way to the noetic world. This claim leads us back to conceive of spiritual sensation as
imaginative apprehension.

7 Spiritual sensation as imaginative apprehension

Douglas Hedley’s reflections about imagination might help to gain a better
understanding of the ‘strange’ theory of spiritual senses, as Dillon qualified it. This
concept expresses the unity of the material and spiritual worlds which is described by
Hedley in the following way with regard to ‘imagination’:

Imaginative apprehension of the Divine is pre-eminently the awareness of that

reality which is pressing and proximate for the soul and yet hard to grasp or
articulate in the categories appropriate for the physical domain. For human beings
the tension between the material and the spiritual, between inward and outward
worlds, is resolved in the imaginative vision of their underlying unity.122

Origen’s theory of spiritual senses can be regarded as another solution to this problem
which works along the same lines. Precisely because spiritual sensation is connected
to the sense perception of the bodily organs if the latter are tuned towards a behaviour
according to God’s commandments, the sensible and the ‘not sensible sense’ operate
together as a vehicle of the perception of the transcendent reality. It may be possible
to express this by means of the language of imagination, above all with regard to the
Song of Songs: this biblical book is an imaginative text in itself, and by explaining the
images of this text, Origen creates new images of sensation for man’s perception of and
relation to God.
The underlying unity of the material and the spiritual world can be seen in a
demanding passage in the preface of Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs where
Origen describes the effect of the physical beauty of the world in the following way:

The soul is moved by heavenly love and longing when, having clearly beheld the
beauty and the fairness of the Word of God, it falls deeply in love with his loveliness
and receives from the Word Himself a certain dart and wound of love. For this
Word is the image and splendour of the invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation,
in whom were all things created that are in heaven and on earth, seen and unseen
alike (cf. Col. 1:15–16). If, then, a man can so extend his thinking as to ponder and
consider the beauty and the grace of all the things that have been created in the
Word, the very charm of them will so smite him, the grandeur of their brightness
will so pierce him as with a chosen dart – as says the prophet (Is. 49:2) – that he
will suffer from the dart Himself a saving wound, and will be kindled with the
blessed fire of His love.123

The power of physical beauty, the visible beauty of the world, leads the lover (the Bride
of the Song) through the experience and presence of the Divine in the world to the
86 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

truth of spiritual, supersensible beauty. This passage in Origen’s commentary is clearly

a reflection of Plato’s statement in the Phaedrus, that aesthetic experience provides
compelling images of intelligible reality.124 Plato and Origen describe ‘intellectual love,
in which the knowledge of the intelligible is kindled by the sense of visual beauty’.125
Based on the experiential apprehension of the divine presence in the world, the soul
envisages the world as a sacrament of the transcendent God. The beautiful image of
the world leads us to imagine the beauty of its creator. Doing this is an act of creativity,
not only mimesis. In this activity the senses act as vehicles of awakening the soul to
an invisible and untouchable world. They provide a key not only to the relation of the
mind to the world but also to the relation of the mind to that which lies beyond this
world.
What Hedley writes about Neoplatonism holds true for Origen’s world view as well:

The material realm, for the Neoplatonist, is – though subject to decay – not alien to
the soul because it is produced by the non-deliberative intelligence of the World-
soul. The apparently inanimate exhibits intelligence. Our planet, and indeed the
entire physical universe, is a dynamic and harmonious unity that mirrors the unity
of the noetic cosmos. The realm of nature is not simply the sum of its parts. [. . .]
Nature is a harmonious unity because it is an image or expression of the divine
mind. It is weaker and less valuable than the Intellect, but nevertheless possesses
its own derivative goodness – which Plotinus defends vigorously against the
Gnostics.126

Because the noetic cosmos includes the whole of the sensible cosmos, the language
of touch can be used to describe it.127 This is precisely the point where the doctrine of
spiritual senses comes into play. The spiritual or intelligible world can thus be described
in terms of sense perception. By virtue of the oxymoron of ‘a not sensible sense’, Origen
tries to express the interaction of the intelligible with the sensible world. By means of
the activity of ‘a not sensible sense’, the whole soul is brought into activity – the whole
soul, that is, all its kinds of perception mediated by the corporeal senses. If the soul as
a whole, even in its faculties of corporeal senses, is concerned with nothing else than
this kind of spiritual perception, ‘everything which the rational mind, when purified
from all the dregs of its vices and utterly cleared from every cloud of wickedness, can
feel or understand or think will be all God, and the mind will no longer be conscious
of anything besides or other than God, but will think God and see God and hold God’,
and God will be ‘all in all’.128 The perfect soul contemplates God not only intellectually
but with all his senses of feeling, seeing and touching, that is, as a complete being of
mind and body.
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 87

Response by Douglas Hedley

Alfons Fürst has provided an illuminating account of spiritual sensation in Origen. Is the
language of spiritual sensation merely metaphorical? The reality of spiritual sensation
is neither crudely anthropomorphic nor radically apophatic. But the link between the
human imagination and spiritual/intellectual realities is grounded in the continuity
between the physical and intellectual cosmos, the reflection of the ‘yonder’ world in the
sensible realm. The awakening and recognition of this vision are properly creative and
not purely mimetic. I concur with Fürst that the concept of spiritual sensation could
be viewed as corresponding to the notion of imagination. Plato was a poet, and he uses
myths like his poetic rivals, for his own purposes. The great Platonists of late Antiquity
were aware of this dimension of Plato, and the interpretation of myths assumes great
significance for them. The key to Platonic metaphysics, the relationship between image
and archetype, provides the basis for the doctrine of spiritual sensation. Fürst’s contrast
and comparison of Plotinus and Origen are most instructive. Yet common to both
Christian and pagan Alexandrian Platonists is the acute sense of the presence of the
invisible world and the importance of the imaginative and metaphysical reconciliation
of the inner and outer worlds. Fürst’s analysis of Origen’s Song of Songs commentary is
particularly helpful in this regard, where the Alexandrian evokes and explains how the
love of the intelligible is kindled by sensible beauty.

Notes
1 Douglas Hedley, The Iconic Imagination (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016),
25–7.
2 Douglas Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York: T&T Clark,
2008), 16.
3 Ibid., 3.
4 For example, Origen, In Exodum homiliae 10,3; In Numeros homiliae 17,3; 20,3; In
Canticum commentaria II 9,12; In Isaiam homiliae 6,3.7; 7,3; In Hiezechielem homiliae
2,3; In Lucam homiliae 3,2; De oratione 9,2.
5 Plato, Politeia VII 533c–d; Sophistes 254a; Symposion 219a.
6 For example, Origen, De principiis I 1,9.
7 Cf. Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 2), 1 with respect to imagination: ‘Through the
“inner eye” of imagination, finite beings can apprehend eternal and immutable
Forms.’
8 Ibid., 19.
9 Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 1), 26.
10 Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 2), 1.
11 It was originally published in French: Karl Rahner, ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq
sens spirituels chez Origène’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 13 (1932): 113–45. This
article contains all of the many references given by the early Rahner to Origenian
and other (e.g. Philonian) sources as well as his explanations of textual questions
concerning the biblical verses used by Origen. A simplified and abriged German
version by Karl H. Neufeld was included in the edition of Rahner’s works: ‘Die
88 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

geistlichen Sinne nach Origenes’, in Karl Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, vol. XII:
Theologie aus Erfahrung des Geistes, edited by Karl H. Neufeld (Zurich, Einsiedeln
and Cologne: Benziger, 1975), 111–36. This German version was translated into
Italian as ‘I “sensi spirituali” secondo Origene’, in Karl Rahner, Nuovi saggi vol. VI:
Teologia dell’esperienza dello Spirito (Rome: Paoline, 1978), 133–63, and into English
as part of the English edition of Rahner’s Schriften: ‘The “Spiritual Senses” according
to Origen’, in Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. XVI, translated by David
Morland (New York: Darton, Longmann and Todd, 1979), 81–103.
12 For the historical circumstances and the spiritual-monastic background, see Andreas
R. Batlogg et al., Der Denkweg Karl Rahners. Quellen – Entwicklungen – Perspektiven
(Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2003 (22004)), 21–35.
13 Karl Rahner, ‘La doctrine des “sens spirituels” au Moyen-Âge, en particulier chez
saint Bonaventure’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 14 (1933): 263–99, and id., ‘Der
Begriff der Ecstasis bei Bonaventura’, Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik 9 (1934): 1–19.
Karl Neufeld combined these two articles and published them in German as ‘Die
Lehre von den “geistlichen Sinnen” im Mittelalter’, in Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie,
vol. XII (see n. 11), 137–72. This German article was then translated into English as
‘The Doctrine of the “Spiritual Senses” in the Middle Ages’, in Rahner, Theological
Investigations, vol. XVI (see n. 11), 104–34.
14 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origenes – Geist und Feuer. Ein Aufbau aus seinen Schriften
(Salzburg and Leipzig: Müller, 1938), 319–80. English translation: Origen – Spirit and
Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, translated by Robert J. Daly (Washington,
DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984) (2nd edn 2001), 218–57. Cf.
also the chapter on this topic in his Parole et mystère chez Origène (Paris: Édition
du Cerf, 1957), 65–71 (originally published in two articles in Recherches de Science
Religieuse 26 (1936): 513–62 and 27 (1937): 38–64), then used for his own theological
purposes in Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik, vol. I: Schau der Gestalt
(Einsiedeln: Johannes-Verlag, 1961), 352–410.
15 Werner Löser, Im Geiste des Origenes. Hans Urs von Balthasar als Interpret der
Theologie der Kirchenväter (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1976), 83–100; Stephen Fields,
‘Balthasar and Rahner on the Spiritual Senses’, Theological Studies 57 (1996): 224–41;
Agnell Rickenmann, ‘La dottrina di Origene sui sensi spirituali e la sua ricezione
in Hans Urs von Balthasar’, Rivista Teologica di Lugano 6 (2001): 155–68; Mark J.
McInroy, ‘Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving
God in Western Christianity, edited by Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley
(Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2012), 257–74.
16 It is not by chance that in the entry ‘sensi spirituali’ in the Italian dictionary of Origen
no other specific article after Rahner’s is noted: Paolo Bettiolo, ‘Sensi Spirituali’, in
Origene. Dizionario. La cultura, il pensiero, le opere, edited by Adele Monaci Castagno
(Rome: Città Nuova, 2000), 443–4.
17 Marguérite Harl, ‘La “bouche” et le “cœur” de l’Apôtre: Deux images bibliques du
“sens divin” de l’homme (“Proverbes” 2,5) chez Origène’, in Forma Futuri. Studi in
onore del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino (Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1975), 17–42; Enrico
Cattaneo, ‘La Dottrina dei “sensi spirituali” in Origene: Nuovi apporti’, Adamantius
11 (2005): 101–13; Robert J. Hauk, ‘“Like a Gleaming Flash”: Matthew 6:22–23, Luke
11:34–36 and the Divine Sense in Origen’, Anglican Theological Review 88 (2006):
557–73.
18 John M. Dillon, ‘Aisthêsis noêtê: A Doctrine of Spiritual Senses in Origen and in
Plotinus’, in Hellenica et Judaica. Hommage à Valentin Nikiprowetzky, edited by A.
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 89

Caquot, M. Hadas-Lebel and J. Riaud (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 1986), 443–55,
again in: John M. Dillon, The Golden Chain: Studies in the Development of Platonism
and Christianity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990), nr. XIX.
19 Mark J. McInroy, ‘Origen of Alexandria’, in Gavrilyuk and Coakley (eds), The
Spiritual Senses (see n. 15), 20–35.
20 Gavrilyuk and Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses (see n. 15).
21 Bernard Fraigneau-Julien, Les sens spirituels et la vision de Dieu selon Syméon le
Nouveau Théologien (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985) (on Origen: 29–43); Rosa Maria
Parrinello, ‘Da Origene a Simeone il Nuovo Teologo: La dottrina dei sensi spirituali’,
in Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition, edited by Lorenzo
Perrone (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 1123–30.
22 Boyd Taylor Coolman, Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the
Theology of William of Auxerre (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press, 2004).
23 Fabio Massimo Tedoldi, La dottrina dei cinque sensi spirituali in San Bonaventura
(Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1999) (on Origen: 27–32).
24 Gordon Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
25 Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, ‘Introduction’, in id., The Spiritual Senses (see n.
15), 1–19, here 19.
26 It is not the aim of the contribution of Cattaneo, ‘Dottrina dei “sensi spirituali”’ (see
n. 17), 102, to deal with this topic in depth, but only to contribute some new texts
which he quotes at length.
27 Origen, De principiis I 1,7.9; IV 4,9–10.
28 Dialogus cum Heracleide 15–24.
29 In Isaiam homiliae 7,3.
30 In Canticum commentaria prol. 2,9–14; I 4,10–26, II 9,12–14; In Canticum homiliae
1,2; 2,4.12. For Song 1.3, see also Dialogus cum Heracleide 18; De pascha 18; In
Matthaeum commentariorum series 64, Greek fragment in GCS Orig. 11, 150.
31 In Matthaeum commentariorum series 63–64 about Mt 25.1-12.
32 Contra Celsum I 48; VII 34. Cf. furthermore ibid. II 72; VII 39; VIII 19.
33 In Exodum homiliae 10,3.4; In Leviticum homiliae 3,7; In Psalmum 36 homiliae
1,4; Catena Palaestiniana in Psalmum 118,103; In Hiezechielem homiliae 11,1; In
Matthaeum commentaria XV 33; In Lucam fragmenta 186. 192 Rauer2; In Iohannem
commentaria X 40,279; XIII 9,51; 24,144; XX 43,405–408; De pascha 18.
34 Eph. 1.18: De principiis I 1,9. For these eyes, cf. also Ps. 18.9 LXX; 118.18 LXX:
Dialogus cum Heracleide 16–17. 20; Contra Celsum VII 34; In Canticum commentaria
I 4,25.
35 Mt 11.15-16; 13.9: Dialogus cum Heracleide 17 (here together with Is. 42.18 and
Ps. 57.4-6 LXX); De pascha 18; Contra Celsum VII 34; In Exodum homiliae 10,3;
In Leviticum homiliae 3,7; In Canticum commentaria I 4,25; In Lucam fragmenta
186 Rauer2.
36 2 Cor. 12.2-4: Contra Celsum I 48.
37 Ps. 33.9 LXX: Dialogus cum Heracleide 19; In Leviticum homiliae 3,7; Catena
Palaestiniana in Psalmum 118,103; In Canticum commentaria I 4,25; In Iohannem
commentaria XX 43,406.
38 Jn 6.32-33, 50-51: De principiis I 1,9; Contra Celsum I 48; In Canticum commentaria
I 4,12–15; II 9,12; In Lucam fragmenta 192 Rauer2; In Iohannem commentaria XX
43,406.
90 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

39 2 Cor. 2.15-16: Dialogus cum Heracleide 18; De pascha 18; In Matthaeum

commentariorum series 64, Greek fragment in GCS Orig. 11, 150; Contra Celsum I
48; In Leviticum homiliae 3,7; Catena Palaestiniana in Psalmum 118,103; In Canticum
commentaria I 4,25; In Lucam fragmenta 192 Rauer2.
40 1 Jn 1.1 (sometimes together with Jn 1.14): Dialogus cum Heracleide 20; De pascha
18; In Matthaeum commentariorum series 64, Greek fragment in GCS Orig. 11, 151;
Contra Celsum I 48; VII 34; In Leviticum homiliae 3,7; In Canticum commentaria
I 4,11–12.25; II 9,13; In Canticum fragmenta 3 Fürst and Strutwolf; In Lucam
fragmenta 192 Rauer2.
41 Prov. 2.5: De principiis I 1,9; IV 4,10; In Canticum commentaria I 4,16; In Matthaeum
commentariorum series 63; Contra Celsum I 48; VII 34; In Lucam fragmenta
186 Rauer2; In Iohannem commentaria XX 43,405; In Epistulam ad Romanos
commentaria VI 5 p. 210 Scherer.
42 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I 27,2.
43 See the explanations of the phrase θεία αἴσθησις in Prov. 2.5 by Harl, ‘Deux images
bibliques’ (see n. 17), 26–35.
44 Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 1), 26.
45 Ibid.
46 Rahner, ‘“Spiritual Senses” according to Origen’ (see n. 11), 81 (quotes from the
English version of 1979).
47 Ibid., 83.
48 Ibid.
49 The latter seems to be the opinion of Jean Daniélou, Origène (Paris: La Table Ronde,
1948), 300: ‘Il s’agit de métaphores indiquant des expériences spirituelles.’
50 Rahner, ‘“Spiritual Senses” according to Origen’ (see n. 11), 96–7.
51 Dillon, ‘Aisthêsis noêtê’ (see n. 18), 443–9 (the quote is ibid., 443 n. 1).
52 Ibid., 447.
53 Ibid., 448.
54 Ibid., 443.
55 McInroy, ‘Origen of Alexandria’ (see n. 19), 20.
56 Ibid., 24–5.
57 Ibid., 31 as a result of McInroy’s new assessment of the language of sensation in De
principiis I 1,9; IV 4,10 and Contra Celsum VII 34.
58 In Lamentationes fragmenta 116 Klostermann. Cf. In Iohannem commentaria I 9,55;
25,161.
59 Selecta in Psalmos 4,4. Translation H.U. von Balthasar (R. J. Daly).
60 McInroy, ‘Origen of Alexandria’ (see n. 19), 34–5.
61 Cf. Dillon, ‘Aisthêsis noêtê’ (see n. 18), 445, as a result of his interpretation of Contra
Celsum I 48: ‘It is plain that he [i.e. Origen] has here developed a systematic theory
of analogical, ‘spiritual’ senses for the intellect, or hegemonikon, apparently to solve
a series of problems of exegesis posed by anthropomorphic expressions about the
godhead and about spiritual life which abound in both the Old and New Testaments.’
This is also the opinion of Henri Crouzel, Origène et la ‘connaissance mystique’
(Brussels and Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961), 262, 505–7.
62 Rahner, ‘“Spiritual Senses” according to Origen’ (see n. 11), 81.
63 Origen, De principiis I 1,7. The translations here and in the following quotes from De
principiis: G. W. Butterworth. Origen then tries to give an answer to these questions
ibid., I 1,7–9, where I 1,8 is a digression (to a great extent repeated ibid., II 4,3).
64 Ibid., I 1,9.
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 91

65 Ibid., IV 4,10.
66 The translation of Butterworth here and in the following sentence is wrong: he
accepts the reading insensibilia instead of the correction sensibilia and speaks of
‘things beyond sense perception (insensibilia), which are incorporeal and intellectual’.
But this makes the following explanation senseless because Origen explains there
why it is appropriate to say ‘that intellectual things are of sense perception’, not
‘beyond sense perception’, as Butterworth translates, because this would need no
explanation. The wrong wording is kept and misinterpreted by Harl, ‘Deux images
bibliques’ (see n. 17), 33 n. 22.
67 De principiis IV 4,10. Translation Butterworth with the emendations of Dillon,
‘Aisthêsis noêtê’ (see n. 18), 447, who argues strongly for the correction of insensibilia
into sensibilia, as in the German edition and translation by Herwig Görgemanns
and Heinrich Karpp, Origenes. Vier Bücher von den Prinzipien (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3rd edn, 1992), 821.
68 Hauck, ‘Divine Sense in Origen’ (see n. 17), 573.
69 Ibid., 563, relying on Plato, Timaeus 45b. This passage is also referenced by Plotinus
in Enneads VI 7, where he puts forward his version of spiritual sensation.
70 Hauck, ‘Divine Sense in Origen’ (see n. 17), 569–70.
71 Origen, De principiis I 1,7. Translation Butterworth, who in a footnote to this text
explains correctly that Origen contends that like the corporeal senses mind ‘must
also have its appropriate “substance” to act on’, that is, ‘God, truth and the reasons of
things. Origen contradicts the view that mind is an epiphenomenon, or by-product of
matter.’
72 Hauck, ‘Divine Sense in Origen’ (see n. 17), 566.
73 Ibid., 571.
74 Ibid., 573.
75 Origen, In Matthaeum fragmenta 128.
76 In Lucam fragmenta 187 Rauer2.
77 Hauck, ‘Divine Sense in Origen’ (see n. 17), 572.
78 Origen, Dialogus cum Heracleide 22.
79 In Iohannem commentaria X 40,279.
80 In Matthaeum commentariorum series 64, Greek fragment in GCS Orig. 11, 150.
81 In Canticum commentaria I 4,17–19. Cf. Rahner, ‘“Spiritual Senses” according to
Origen’ (see n. 11), 87.
82 In Canticum commentaria I 4,13.16–20; II 9,12; In Hiezechielem homiliae 11,1; In
Matthaeum commentariorum series 66; In Lucam fragmenta 186 Rauer2; In Iohannem
commentaria XIII 24,144.
83 In Lucam fragmenta 186 Rauer2.
84 Contra Celsum II 72. Cf. ibid. VIII 19 about ‘those who are capable of hearing God’s
words with a divine power of hearing’. Translation H. Chadwick.
85 Selecta in Psalmos 4,7. Translation H.U. von Balthasar (R. J. Daly).
86 Rahner, ‘“Spiritual Senses” according to Origen’ (see n. 11), 84.
87 In Lucam fragmenta 186 Rauer2, Origen explicitly states that we find the divine
sensation in Proverbs in form of a promise.
88 The same link between the practical behaviour of any corporeal sense and its effect
on the faculty of spiritual sensation is expressed in a passage in Jerome’s Commentary
on Isaiah, which according to Cattaneo, ‘Dottrina dei “sensi spirituali”’ (see n. 17),
102–5, is taken from Origen’s lost commentary on this prophet: Jerome, In Esaiam
commentaria VII 16 (on Is. 19.18).
92 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

89 Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 68. Cf. also Daniélou, Origène (see n.
49), 301: ‘Ils [sc. les sens spirituels] sont liés à la mortification de la vie charnelle.
A mesure que l’homme extérieur dépérit, l’homme intérieur se fortifie. Enfin, ils
captivent l’âme et l’arrachent à elle-même.’
90 Origen, In Canticum commentaria I 4,16.
91 Louth, Christian Mystical Tradition (see n. 89), 68, claims the opposite.
92 Origen, In Matthaeum commentariorum series 63.
93 In Canticum commentaria I 6,14; III 6,4; In Iohannem commentaria VI 19,107; XXXII
11,127; In Matthaeum commentaria XII 14; XIV 7; In Matthaeum commentariorum
series 33; In epistulam ad Romanos commentaria IX 34; Contra Celsum I 57; III 81; V
39; VIII 17. See Christian Hengstermann, ‘Leben des Einen. Der Tugendbegriff des
Origenes’, in Ethische Normen des frühen Christentums. Gut – Leben – Leib – Tugend,
edited by F. W. Horn, U. Volp and R. Zimmermann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013),
433–53, here 440–51.
94 Origen, De pascha 18.
95 Ibid.
96 In Matthaeum commentariorum series 64, Greek fragment in GCS Orig. 11, 150–1.
97 Contra Celsum I 48; In Iohannem commentaria X 40,279.
98 Contra Celsum I 48.
99 Ibid. VII 34.
100 Contra Celsum I 48.
101 Ibid. Translation H. Chadwick. – The same holds true for the healing of the woman
having an issue of blood (cf. Lk. 8.43-48), although Origen does not connect his
explanation explicitly with the concept of spiritual senses: In Canticum commentaria
III 13,48.
102 For a recent interpretation of the relevant passages (noted above in n. 29), see Alfons
Fürst, ‘Liebe mit allen Sinnen – die Theorie der geistigen Sinne’, in Origenes, Die
Homilien und Fragmente zum Hohelied, translated and edited by Alfons Fürst and
Holger Strutwolf (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), 29–35. An older depiction
drawing on Rahner’s article is to be found in Louth, Christian Mystical Tradition (see
n. 89), 67–70.
103 Origen, In Canticum fragmenta 3 Fürst and Strutwolf.
104 Rahner, ‘“Spiritual Senses” according to Origen’ (see n. 11), 88–9.
105 Origen, In Canticum homiliae 2,4.
106 In Canticum commentaria III 2,5.8.
107 Ibid. III 2,6.
108 In Canticum homiliae 2,12.
109 This is stated explicitly In Canticum fragmenta 29 Fürst and Strutwolf.
110 Henri Crouzel, Origène et Plotin. Comparaisons doctrinales (Paris: Téqui, 1992),
371–3, understands Origen’s concept correctly as not simply metaphorical, but as an
epistemological concept of mystical perception and knowledge based on the Greek
principle of knowing ‘like by like’. However, as regards Plotinus, he only mentions
a few passages, mostly ones about the image of touch, like Plotinus, Enneads V
1(10),11.12; V 3(49),10.17, but does not describe any concept because, as he wrongly
assumes, ‘à la difference d’Origène Plotin ne bâtit sur cet usage métaphorique aucune
théorie’ (ibid., 371). Crouzel does not mention either Ennead VI 7 (Ennead V 5 is also
important) or the article by Dillon.
111 Dillon, ‘Aisthêsis noêtê’ (see n. 18), 449–53.
 
Θεία αἴσθησις 93

112 Ibid., 451.

113 Ibid.
114 Ibid., 449–50, paraphrasing Plato, Timaeus 45b.
115 Dillon, ‘Aisthêsis noêtê’ (see n. 18), 450.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid., 452.
118 Ibid., 453.
119 Plotinus, Enneads VI 7(38),7. Translation Dillon.
120 Dillon, ‘Aisthêsis noêtê’ (see n. 18), 453.
121 See the fine new article by Jonathan Bieler, ‘Origen on the Goodness of the Body’, in
Sacrality and Materiality: Locating Intersections, edited by Rebecca A. Gieselbrecht/
Ralph Kunz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 85–94. See also Alfons
Fürst, ‘Matter and Body in Origen’s Christian Platonism’, in Origeniana Duodecima:
Origen’s Legacy in the Holy Land – A Tale of Three Cities: Jerusalem, Caesarea and
Bethlehem, edited by B. Bitton-Ashkelony et al. (Leuven/Paris/Bristol CT: Peeters,
2019), 573–88.
122 Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 2), 37.
123 Origen, In Canticum commentaria prol. 2,17. Translation R. P. Lawson.
124 Cf. Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 2), 20 about Shakespeare and Plato’s Phaedrus.
125 Ibid., 22.
126 Ibid. We can add that Origen did quite the same against the Gnostics.
127 Ibid., 24.
128 Origen, De principiis III 6,3 with 1 Cor. 15.28. Translation Butterworth.
 4

Cogitatione attingere
Divine sensation in René Descartes
and the Cambridge Platonists
Christian Hengstermann

1 The sovereignty of the good: Platonism and Cartesianism

in seventeenth-century Civil War England
In his Sermon before the House of Commons of 1647, delivered at the height of the
devastating British civil wars, the young preacher Ralph Cudworth provides an
intensely topical philosophical reading of 1 Jn 2:3-4: ‘And hereby we do know that we
know him, if we keep his Commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth
not his Commandments, is a liar, and truth is not in him.’ At the heart of Cudworth’s
exegesis is a vision of divine love which he enjoins the members of parliament to
imitate by laying aside once and for all their petty disputes about matters of church
government and divine grace and election and instead embrace one another in the
spirit of Christian charity. Throughout his homily, Cudworth lambasts ill-guided
religious zeal as the source of the fierce civil strife afflicting British Christendom.
His stated political aim is nothing less than ‘a true Reformation’,1 which he declares
to be key to the survival of a Christian body politic time and again. A year before
the decapacitation of Charles I, Cudworth impresses upon the members of parliament
assembled at St Margaret’s Church a deeply ecumenical rational religion based upon
God’s own disinterested and universal love. Created in God’s own image, they are
to follow him in humbling themselves and making themselves instruments of his
transformative love.2
The Sermon before the House of Commons delivered by the young Plato
Cantabrigiensis in Civil War England is the foundational document of the ‘Cambridge
Enlightenment’, whose figureheads are a group of Anglican theologians generally
known as the ‘Cambridge Platonists’ or ‘Cambridge Origenists’.3 Drawing upon the
rich resources of the ancient theology of pagan and patristic Platonism, the Cambridge
Enlightenment thinkers sought to create a first Protestant rational religion centred
upon divine love and human freedom. Cudworth’s daring manifesto of the school’s
 
Cogitatione Attingere 95

irenic ecclesiastical and political latitudinarianism is an enquiry into the right method
of the ‘philosophy of religion’4 composed in the vein of the rationalist foundationalism
of René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and the Principles of Philosophy,
which Cudworth himself and his fellow Cambridge Platonists, notably his close friend
Henry More, were instrumental in introducing at Cambridge University. In the young
philosopher preacher’s reading, the Johannine verse expounded provides in a nutshell
the only ‘right way and methode of discovering our knowledge of Christ’5 and our own
salvation. In accordance with the overall irenic message which his homily brings home
to its listeners, Cudworth’s concept of religious knowledge views the soul’s purification
of its detrimental affects in general and its ‘self-will’ in particular as the sine qua non
of all scientific theology. Hence, the knowledge acquired by the only ‘right way and
method’ of religious philosophy cannot be one of the dead letter of theoretical dogma.
Instead, it is one informed by the spirit of the Father’s own love and life shared with
humankind in the incarnation of the Son in the pious soul:

Words and syllables which are but dead things, cannot possibly convey the living
notions of heavenly truths to us. The secret mysteries of a Divine Life, of a New
Nature, of Christ formed in our hearts; they cannot be written or spoken; language
and expressions cannot reach them; neither can they ever be truly understood,
except the soul it self be kindled from within and awakened into the life of them.6

Not only are the ‘secret mysteries of a divine life’, in which the soul gains insight
into God in a life of purity and charity alone, key to salvation, but they also serve
as the unshakeable foundation of the Cambridge Platonists’ comprehensive religious
epistemology. In the momentous seventeenth-century re-enactment of Plato’s ‘battle of
the Gods and Giants’, that is, the struggle between the idealists of the Cartesian camp
and materialists like Thomas Hobbes or Pierre Gassendi, the Cambridge Platonists
developed a first Anglo-Saxon idealism to which the notion of an autonomous subject
acquiring knowledge about God, the world and itself not from without, but from within
is fundamental.7 At the heart of their religious foundationalism is the goodness of a
transcendent God whom the soul, endowed with freedom in action and thought, knows
in pre-discursive intuitive awareness. As in Descartes’s celebrated epistemological
project, God’s goodness and veracity are shown to be the source of the soul’s trust
in its own epistemic powers and the world around it. The Cambridge Platonists’
epistemology of the Divine is one deeply steeped in the Cartesian imagination which
views the I of the Meditations as literally in ‘touch’ with divine infinity in every single
cognitive act.

2 Transcendent imagination: ‘Touching’

divine infinity in René Descartes
The ‘unshakeable new foundation’ of early modern science, laid by Descartes in his
Discourse and his Meditations, is that of simple ideas seen clearly and distinctly by the
96 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

unprejudiced mind’s eye.8 In his early Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes
describes the intellectual intuition of uncompounded truths of which all our later
complex science of the extended world of atoms is made up as the means whereby the
soul may attain indubitable knowledge. Contrary to its inferior powers of sense and
imagination, which cannot but lead it astray, reason, if properly applied, provides the
soul with truths which cannot be doubted:

By ‘intuition’ I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses or the deceptive
judgement of the imagination as it botches things together, but the conception of
a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room
for doubt about what we are understanding. Alternatively, and this comes to the
same thing, intuition is the indubitable conception of a clear and attentive mind
which proceeds solely from the light of reason. Because it is simpler, it is more
certain than deduction, though deduction, as we noted above, is not something a
man can perform wrongly. Thus everyone can mentally intuit that he exists, that he
is thinking, that a triangle is bounded by just three lines, and a sphere by a single
surface, and the like.9

Besides the attributes of thought and extension which define the two Cartesian
substances in their manifold modes, the meditating I, guided by Descartes’s rules for the
directions of its mind, also intuits God as one of its innate simple ideas. The objective
or representational reality of the ‘true idea’ of God is that of an infinite mind whose
manifold perfect modes, joined in consummate ‘unity, simplicity and inseparability’,10
admit of no potentiality whatsoever. ‘By the word “God”’, Descartes defines the soul’s
inborn idea, ‘I understand a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent,
all-knowing and all-powerful, and which created both myself and everything (if
anything else there be) that exists.’11 The innate idea of God can neither be a mere
negation of the soul’s finiteness, which is at odds with the positive infinity of his
objective reality, nor a merely potentially infinite augmentation of its own imperfect
attributes and modes, which cannot but fall short of his actual infinity. While Descartes
admits that as finite minds we can never aspire fully to comprehend God’s infinity, he
nevertheless insists that we can ‘touch it in thought’ (cogitatione attingere): God is ‘the
possessor of all the perfections which, while I cannot grasp them, I can, in some way,
touch in my thought’.12 Our intuitive insight into or immediate touch of God’s infinity
resembles our view of a vast ocean or a chiliagon. In the Replies to the First Objections,
raised by Caterus, Descartes expands upon his concept of spiritual sensation in a
memorable comparison rich in both visual and tactile metaphor:

For as regards infinity, even though we understand it to be positive to the highest

degree, we nevertheless understand it only in a certain negative fashion, i.e.,
insofar as we notice in it no limit whatsoever. We understand that which is infinite
positively, but not adequately, i.e., we do not understand everything about it that
can be understood. Nevertheless, we are said to see the sea when turning our
eyes to it, even though we cannot embrace it wholly in our sight or grasp its vast
immensity. Seeing it at a distance, thus perceiving it in its entirety at once, as it
 
Cogitatione Attingere 97

were, we see it only confusedly as when we imagine a chiliagon, embracing all

of its sides at once. . . . In a similar fashion, God, I concede with all theologians,
cannot be grasped by the human mind, nor can he be understood distinctly if we
seek to embrace him all at once and view him from afar. . . .. However, if we attempt
to focus upon his perfections one at a time, not grasping them, but rather being
grasped by them, and devote all the power of our mind to their contemplation,
we shall find more copious and more accessible matter for clear and distinct
knowledge in them than in any created thing.13

However, while there can be no adequate knowledge of the fullness of God’s objective
reality, our grasp of its idea surpasses those of finite things both in clearness and in
distinctness. Not only is the idea of God superior, but it is also prior to those of finite
things, including the cogito itself. ‘Moreover’, Descartes replies to another critic of his
Meditations, ‘it is false that the infinite is understood through the negation of a boundary
or limit; on the contrary all limitation implies a negation of the infinite.’14 Accordingly,
the cogito’s many imperfect modes, revealed in the first and second Meditations in the
thought experiment of universal metaphysical doubt, presuppose the prior notion of
infinite perfection proved only in the third: ‘For how could I understand’, the meditating
I asks, ‘that I doubted and desired – that is, lacked something – and that I was not wholly
perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to
recognize my own defects by comparison?’15 Each single mode of the defining attribute
of the thinking substance, therefore, he explains in his Conversation with Burman, is
nothing but ‘a defect and negation of the perfection of God’,16 which, unbeknownst to
the Cartesian I at the start of its meditations, turns out to be the necessary condition of
its thought throughout its meditative ascent from universal doubt to clear and distinct
knowledge about the triad of thinking, extended and divine substances. Hence, while
explicit knowledge of the cogito may indeed be first ‘for it’, the implicit knowledge
of God is earlier ‘in reality’ (in re ipsa).17 The discovery of God as the ground of all
thought reveals the protagonist of the Meditations as an amphibious creature between
the nothingness into which he may, unbeknownst to himself, vanish after each brief
moment of conscious introspection, and the fullness of divine infinity: ‘I realize that
I am, as it were, something intermediate between God and nothingness, or between
supreme being and non-being.’18 Hence, the soul’s striving for divine infinity, which
it intuits or ‘touches in thought’ in the intellection of the Meditations, finds its chief
expression not in intellection itself, but in volition. Of the many modes of cogitation in
which its defining attribute expresses itself, the will, even more than reason, proves that
the I is ‘the image and likeness of God’: ‘It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which
I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my
grasp; so much so that it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to
bear in some way the image and likeness of God.’19
The metaphorical or analogical touch of the Deity by which the mind, significantly,
apprehends the idea of God or nature both clearly and distinctly and partly and
imperfectly at the same time plays a crucial role in the meditating I’s struggle
against scepticism, restoring as it does by conceptual necessity its overall trust in a
comprehensive cosmic and epistemic framework. Famously, Descartes, in the first of
98 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

the two closely intertwined cosmological or causal arguments in the third Meditation,
appeals to a twofold causal principle which stipulates that nothing can come from
nothing and that a cause must have at least as much or more reality than its effect
in order to prove that God’s ‘formal’ or actual reality is the sole possible cause of his
‘objective’ or conceptual reality represented in man’s innate idea. So great is the reality
of the unique inborn notion of the original infinite substance inscribed in the derivative
finite substance that the former cannot possibly originate in the latter. The proofs of
God’s existence in the third and fifth Meditations mark a crucial step in the meditating
I’s endeavour to lay a new unshakeable foundation for scientific knowledge after its
decision to cast into doubt its every earlier belief. After the reliability of its senses and
even its once-indubitable mathematical knowledge have been shattered to the core
in the thought experiment of an omnipotent malicious demon by which its every
cognitive and volitional endeavour might be doomed from the onset, the I regains
its trust in its reasoning capacity. Both the cognitive powers which it possesses and
the world which it perceives originate in a trustworthy God whose perfect objective
reality it sees or ‘touches’ even before it comes to know its own manifold imperfect
modes. Divine infinity, Descartes expresses as the I’s ‘sure hope’ (spes certa) in the
final sixth Meditation, is either the immanent order of nature itself or its transcendent
creator: ‘Indeed, there is no doubt that everything that I am taught by nature contains
some truth. For if nature is considered in its general aspect, then I understand by
the term nothing other than God himself, or the ordered system of created things
established by God.’20 The theism of divine goodness which allows the I to trust both
its faculties of understanding and the world around it is, hence, essential to Descartes’s
foundationalism.
It is the divinely guaranteed coherence and trustworthiness of man’s thinking
and the world’s extended substances, perceived in intellectual vision and touch in
Cartesianism, that is fleshed out in the ethical epistemology of Cambridge Platonism.
Remedying a key shortcoming of the Cartesian synthesis, which lacks an ‘understanding
of inquiry that is anchored in broader moral precepts’,21 Ralph Cudworth, Henry More,
John Smith and George Rust, the most philosophically outstanding representatives of
the early modern Cambridge Enlightenment, conceive of the Cartesian cogitatione
attingere primarily in practical terms.

3 Boniform vision: Divine goodness and

the knowledge of the first principle
3.1 Divine sensation: Natural sagacity, the boniform
faculty and the superintellectual instinct
The Cambridge Platonists share with Descartes the commitment to the certainty of
self-consciousness as the unshakeable foundation of all philosophy.22 However, in
contradistinction to Cartesianism, the first principle of Cambridge Platonism is not
subjectivity per se, but rather accountable moral agency. In the school’s analogue to
 
Cogitatione Attingere 99

Descartes’s Discourse of Method,23 John Smith24 views the ‘good life’ as the true way or
method of Attaining divine knowledge. Practical virtue, to him, is ‘the prolepsis and
fundamental principle of divine science’.25 In support of his practical epistemology of
the Divine, Smith, as will Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
a century after him, invokes Plotinus’s metaphor of the ‘sunlight eye which alone is
able to gaze at the sun’.26 The author goes on to follow the latter’s Enneads as well
as John’s Gospel and David’s Psalms in positing not only an ‘intellectual touch’ but
several spiritual senses whereby the soul, overcoming its self-love in a long process
of active and contemplative self-perfection, gradually comes to grasp the Divine.
Whereas speculation in theoretical syllogistic reasoning, which Smith rejects as a
‘poor wan light’ and ‘thin, airy, knowledge’, is bound to remain altogether flat and
unprofitable, the intuition of the Divine is one that is conceived of as essentially
practical and existential.27 Only through purification and sanctification does the soul
acquire an intuitive knowledge of divine goodness that is exempt from any doubt
whatsoever. Quoting with approval the Alexandrian Church Father Origen with
whom he shares the primacy of practical and experiential participation in the divine
first principle vis-à-vis merely theoretical reasoning about it, Smith subscribes to an
ethical mode of knowing God. It is at once knowledge and the feeling of awe and
fear experienced in the sublime vision of the fullness of God’s goodness. Practical
knowledge about God, on the general Cartesian principles of Cambridge Platonist
epistemology, possesses not only absolute clearness and distinctness but also a higher
degree of evidence than mathematics. Like ethical insight, religious knowledge,
acquired by spiritual sensation, commands the soul’s immediate assent from which
the latter, as Smith puts it in the technical neo-stoic vocabulary of the school’s theory
of religious knowledge, cannot withhold its ‘acknowledgement’ or assent: ‘And these
are both available to prescribe out ways of virtue to men’s own souls, and to force
an acknowledgement of truth from those that oppose, when they are well-guided
by skilful hand.’28 Divine goodness is at once metaphysically ‘clear and perspicuous’
and ethically binding. As an epistemic power, the spiritual senses by which the
soul perceives divine goodness in intuitive immediacy appears to be both distinct
from and superior to reason, while also being its highest modus operandi aspired
to by the pious soul at the end of its ascent. In a fourfold scheme which traces the
Christian soul’s spiritual growth, the ‘true metaphysical and contemplative man’ first
overcomes sense and imagination in purification. He, then, identifies solely with his
soul and sheds off all of his corporeal passions altogether so as to participate in the
fullness of the divine life. In the subsequent union, ordinary discursive reason or
διάνοια, which proceeds by arguments and conclusions, gives way to spiritual vision
or νοῦς, which grasps its object without any conceptual mediation:

The priests of Mercury, as Plutarch tells us, in the eating of their holy things, were
wont to cry out γλυκὺ ἡ ἀλήθεια – ‘sweet is truth’. But how sweet and delicious that
truth is, which holy and heaven-born souls feed upon their mysterious converse
with the Deity, who can tell but they that taste it? When reason once is raised, by
the mighty force of the Divine Spirit, into a converse with God, it is turned into
sense: that which before was only faith well built upon sure principles, (for such
100 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

our science may be) now becomes vision. We shall then converse with God τῷ
νῷ, whereas before we conversed with Him only τῇ διανοίᾳ – with our discursive
faculty – as the Platonists were wont to distinguish.29

Spiritual sensation, hence, is paradoxical in nature. It shares the defining characteristics

of reason and sense. As supreme rationality, it proceeds from ‘sure principles’ or the
unshakeable practical foundation of theological ‘science’. However, as sensuality, it also
shares with taste and vision the unmediated presence of its object whose appeal is such
that the soul cannot help but savour and enjoy it on experiencing it at the end of a long
process of practical purification and sanctification. While being the pinnacle of active
discursive reasoning, spiritual sensation is also passive in nature as the soul is ‘raised’
by ‘the mighty force of the Divine Spirit’ which works upon it in Smith’s ideal of its
‘mysterious converse with the Deity’.
While Smith identifies the soul’s intuitive knowledge of God and the good
with Neoplatonic νόησις, both Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, the two chief
philosophical representatives of Cambridge Enlightenment epistemology, choose to
view it as a sui generis epistemic power called ‘boniform faculty’ or ‘natural sagacity’
and ‘superintellectual instinct’, respectively.30 Thus, More is wary of identifying the
‘pure eye’ by which the poor, as Jesus promises them in the beatitudes of the Sermon
on the Mount, will ‘see God’ (Mt. 5.8) with Plato’s and Plotinus’s concept of νοῦς tout
court. The Greek concept, he avers, fails to capture the aspect of the mind’s immediate
assent to the divine object presented to it. Instead, the vision promised is that of a
divine sense beyond reason:

But having regard to our Saviours Discourse in this place, it is plain he intends not
so much that which Philosophers call νοῦς, for the Homologous term to that of
the Eye, as what S. Paul stiles φρόνημα; which is not meer notion or perception, but
implies with it a savour and relish of what is perceived. Get thee behind me Satan
(said Christ to Peter) ὄτι οὐ φρονεῖς τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ, because thou savourest not
the things that be of God. And the Apostle expressly mentions τὸ φρόνημα τῆς
σαρκός, and τὸ φρόνημα τοῦ πνεῦματος.31

Man’s ‘Divine Sensations’, More elaborates in a letter to John Norris, ‘lye deeper than
imaginative Reason and Notion’,32 of which they are viewed as the necessary condition.
The ‘boniform faculty’ or ‘natural sagacity’ in which they originate is the power ‘to
distinguish not only what is simply and absolutely the best, but to relish it, and to
have pleasure in that alone’.33 It instils in man ‘a living sense of the Comeliness and
Pulchritude of Grace and Vertue’,34 which More and Cudworth concur in calling
‘intellectual love’ (amor intellectualis)35 or ‘Orphic-Pythagorean love’.36 The soul’s
love for God’s supreme goodness is twofold. It is directed towards him both as the
transcendent principle of all of reality and as its immanent form or soul. More draws
upon both the vocabulary of the ancient Platonic metaphysics of love and spiritual
sensation and that of the early modern Cartesian physics of the world as a ‘mass’ of
atoms engaged in motion to describe the soul’s vision in which it ‘relishes’ and takes
‘pleasure’ in a God both transcendent to and ubiquitously active in the world:
 
Cogitatione Attingere 101

Hence we are instructed how to set God before our eyes; to love him above all;
to adhere to him as the supremest Good; to consider him as the Perfection of all
Reason, of all Beauty, of all Love; how all was made by his Power, and that all is
upheld by his Providence. Hence also is the Soul taught how to affect and admire
the Creation, and all the parts of it; as they share in that Divine Perfection and
Beneficence, which is dispersed through the whole Mass: So that if any of these
parts appears defective or discomposed, the soul compassionates and brings help,
as it is able, to restore every thing to that state of felicity which God and nature
intended for it.37

In his early metaphysical poetry, More posits as the first principle of all cognition
‘all-spreaden love/To the vast Universe’ by which the soul, once it has overcome its
self-will, is made ‘half equall to All-Seeing Jove’. The insight into this first principle is
expressed in dense tactile metaphor, as the soul is said to experience all of reality in one
comprehensive spiritual touch: ‘Then all the works of God with close embrace / I dearly
hug in my enlarged arms.’38 Likewise, Cudworth follows the ‘Holy Scripture’, which
he commends for its general lack of ‘Metaphysical Pomp and Obscurity’, in viewing
‘Love or Charity’ as the ‘Source, Life and Soul of all Morality’, which, as such, cannot
itself be ‘Better than Reason and Knowledge’. Hence, it must be ‘vital and not notional’
in nature.39 The whole intuited in ‘vital’ sensation, rather than ‘notional’ reflection,
is that of God’s own infinity and eternity alike. Cudworth’s depiction of the soul’s
mystical union with God, for one, bears the imprint of the Cambridge Enlightenment’s
profound debt to Descartes. As well as describing knowledge of the Divine in tactile
metaphors along the lines of the Cartesian cogitatione contingere, Cudworth invokes
the notion of divine infinity as the object of the soul’s superintellectual intuition. For
another, however, the God touched is not infinity per se, but ‘boundless love’. Savouring
God’s ‘boundless sweetness’ in superintellectual vision, man transcends all spatial
and temporal boundaries whatsoever. Instead, ‘he enclasps the whole world within
his outstretched arms’ with his soul, in this process, becoming ‘as wide as the whole
universe, as big as yesterday, today and forever’:

No man is truly free, but he that hath his will enlarged to the extent of God’s own
will, by loving whatever God loves, and nothing else. Such a one does not fondly
hug this and that particular created good thing, and enslave himself to it; but he
loves everything that is lovely, beginning at God, and descending down to all his
creatures, according to the several degrees of perfection in them. He enjoys a
boundless liberty and boundless sweetness, according to his boundless love. He
enclasps the whole world within his outstretched arms; his soul is as wide as the
whole universe, as big as yesterday, today, and forever. (Heb 13.8)40

However, while the intuitive vision and ‘intellectual’ or ‘Orphic-Platonic love’ of divine
goodness is above reason, of which it is the principle, it is not contrary to it. The
assent given to it is ‘vital’ or above reason. It denotes the soul’s existential commitment
to absolute moral value. The insight into goodness itself, however, is ‘notional’ and
reasonable. Thus, More is careful to distinguish between the two defining aspects of
102 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

the soul’s foremost epistemic power: ‘Also that all Moral Good, properly so called, is
Intellectual and Divine.’ He then goes on to explain its contents in terms of the school’s
Platonist realism of the forms among which the moral ones, notably that of the good
identified with the divine first principle itself, take pride of place:

Intellectual, as the Truth and Essence of it is defined and comprehended by the

Intellect: and Divine, as the Savour and Complacency thereof, is most effectually
tasted through that high Faculty, by which we are lifted up and cleave unto God,
(that Almighty One, who is the most pure and absolute Good, and who never wills
any thing but what is transcendently the Best.)41

In contradistinction to the sectarian enthusiasm of the Interregnum era, Cambridge

Platonist mysticism is one of practical reason. In his critique of the irrational
enthusiasm of his day, More espouses the vision of a transformative practical vision of
God whom the soul imitates in its own love for all of his creation:

But I say that a free divine universalized spirit is worth all. How lovely, how
magnificent a state is the soul of man in, when the life of God inactuating her,
shoots her along with himself through Heaven and Earth, make her unite with,
and after a sort feel herself animate the whole world, as if she had become God and
all things? This the precious clothing and rich ornament of the mind, farre above
reason or any other experiment.42

The mystical vision of true rational religion revolves around a life of practical universal
love. It is expressed by More in the technical vocabulary of Plotinus and Dionysius
the Areopagite, those ‘mystical divines’ who, as he confides in his reader in what his
biographer Richard Ward terms the ‘Dr’s little narrative of himself ’,43 helped him
overcome his early adulthood ‘aporia’ of purely theoretical-theological dogma in
favour of the ‘euporia’ of practical purgation and illumination.44 The experience of God
in immediate touch and vision is not enthusiastic fancy, but practical insight into the
‘superessential causes’ of the soul’s virtues exercised in a moral life:

This is to become Deiform, to be thus suspended (not by imagination, but by

union of life, Κέντρον κέντρῳ συνάψαντα, joyning centres with God) and by a
sensible touch to be held up from the clotty dark Personality of this compacted
body. Here is love, here is freedome, here is justice and equity in the superessentiall
causes of them. He that is here, looks upon all things as one, and on himself, if he
can then mind himself, as a part of the whole. And so hath no self-interest, no
unjust malicious plot, no more then [sic] the hand hath against the foot, or the ear
against the eye. This is to be godded with God, and Christed with Christ, if you be
in love with such affected language.45

The boundlessness of God’s creative goodness in space and time, intuited and embraced
in the soul’s original vision, provides the ‘open Champain’ or the ‘Plain of Truth’
(πέδιον τῆς ἀληθείας) of Plato’s Phaedrus46 upon which the soul exercises its reasoning
 
Cogitatione Attingere 103

powers, both theoretical and practical. In theoretical speculation, the rational belief in
‘creation’ as a meaningful whole provides ‘the first Rise of successful Reason’, as it sets
out to understand all of reality as one comprehensive and coherent image of archetypal
divine perfection from which it proceeds and to which it returns. In the Cambridge
Platonists’ experiential rationalism, Plato’s archetypal ‘plain of truth’ is identified with
Christ who, grasped as the ‘spirit of Illumination’ or ‘Principle of the purest reason’ in
original boniform intuition, guides the soul towards a coherent vision of all reality
in discursive reasoning. He is ‘the Eternal λόγος, the all-comprehending Wisdom
and Reason of God, wherein he sees through the Natures and Ideas of all things, with
all their respects of Dependency and Independency, Congruity and Incongruity, or
whatever Habitude they have one to another, with one continued glance at once’.47 The
boniform faculty provides the soul with a first original intuition of the comprehensive
unity of all reality in God’s love. It goes on to serve as the ‘measure’48 or yardstick of all
subsequent cognition: ‘Therefore, I say, this most simple and Divine Sense and feeling
in the boniform faculty of the soul is that rule or boundary whereby reason is examined
and approves itself.’49 In practical reasoning, the boniform faculty is the source of the
first general imperative ‘to restore every thing to the state of Felicity, which God and
Nature intended for it’, thereby enabling it to share in the fullness of divine perfection
envisaged in the faculty’s original vision: ‘In short, it turns all its Faculties to make
good Men happy; and all its Care and Discipline is to make bad Men good.’50
As the ‘rule or boundary’ of theoretical and practical reason alike, the boniform
faculty is situated on the threshold between God and the soul. They act in unison
in theoretical intellection and moral action as the all-encompassing vision of divine
goodness and love informs human reasoning not from without, but from within. God,
as More expounds the etymology of his newly coined neologism of the ‘boniform
faculty’, is ‘the form of the good’ that ‘moves’ or ‘inactuates’ the soul. It is he himself who
becomes ‘the precious clothing and rich ornament of the mind’, that is, the formative
principle of all the latter’s agency in cognition and action alike. Still, although it is God
who moves the soul as its both formal and final cause, the latter’s boniform vision is
throughout qualified as ‘freedome’, since the soul acts in accordance with the formative
principle of its own essence. Paradoxically, its vision is at once active intellection and
passive perception as the soul, while engaged in the highest form of active reasoning,
finds its every cognitive act to be passively informed by the principle of God’s universal
goodness: ‘It is very true’, More concedes, ‘that we may as to this point (with Descartes)
allow that all intellection has so much of passion, as it is the perception of something
imprinted from without’. Despite that, however, the author is adamant that this does
not take away from the soul’s own activity in any way. On the contrary, it is the soul
itself which rouses itself to reasoning in contemplating and embracing the divine
principle of universal goodness in the autonomy of ‘intellectual love’: ‘However, as this
perception, which is made by intellection, is not from the body, but rather from the
soul exerting and exciting herself into such action, so neither is this love from the body,
but either from the soul itself or else from God above who calls and quickens the soul
to such a divine effort.’51 The intellectual love aroused by the boniform faculty is equally
divine and human with the one universal love and the many passions corresponding
to God himself and the soul, respectively. Drawing upon the key distinctions of his
104 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

rationalist metaphysics, More likens love to light and colour as one basic substance
differentiated in a range of modes or visual impressions and specific shades and hues.
Although the love for the good intuited and embraced in the original boniform vision
takes on many different modes in man, including ‘Hope, Fear, Joy, Anger, Sorrow’
or even ‘Hatred itself ’, all of them can be reduced to their first principle or ‘general
ground-work’, thereby revealing divine love and goodness as the very principle and
substance of the soul. This love is described in terms of the Phaedrean wings by which
the soul ascends to the heavens in pious enthusiasm:

That Love which I have defined to you, is one simple and uniform thing, like the
visible Light. And this is a perpetual well-liking of, or benign affection to the
Divine Beauty communicable to man; which is as one still sun-shine day; or (if you
will) as the Sun shining in silence and solitude, there being no Earth, or any opake
part of the World to reflect and variegate his Rays. Such is the mind of him that is
possest with this Divine Love, as it is freely and uncurb’dly working in it self. But
lighting upon several objects is after several manners modified and transfigured
into several shapes.52

There is, hence, but one single love informing the soul’s many passions. Its every
passion, however vile, reveals the soul to be the image of God by whom it finds itself
‘inactatued’ in the various degrees of its own freedom: ‘Thus we see Divine Love ceases
not by other Passions, but remains still the same, though in several postures: And that
it is the several operations of one simple Nature about one and the same Object, that is
the Image of God or Divine Accomplishments communicable to man.’53 Universal love
is the ‘divine life’ itself which becomes the soul’s own in a triad of virtues. Overcoming
the petty passions of its lower ‘middle’ and ‘animal lives’ in ‘purity’, it accepts God
or love itself as the source and principle of all its agency in ‘humility’.54 Once the
particularity of human passion has been overcome, the universality of divine love or
‘charity’ is bound to take its place instead, revealing the God of the soul’s boniform
vision as its ‘Primogeneal, or Original Fire’ fuelling its every act and motion:

Surely the purging of it from this foul dross and dregs, must needs wing it, free it,
universalize it, and make it as generally benign to all men, as the Sun is universally
courteous to all the World, in lending Light and Heat to all. For by how much the
Soul doth purge her self, by so much nearer she approaches to that Primogeneal,
or Original Fire, which is God himself, that lets his sun rise on the evil and good,
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Mt. 5.45)55

Not only, therefore, do ‘our minds’, once they are ‘inactuated’ and informed by his
goodness, ascend to God, ‘but descend also in very full and free streams of dearest
affection to our fellow creatures, rejoicing in their good as if it were our own and
compassionating their misery as if it were our selves did suffer and according our best
judgement and power ever endeavouring to promote the one and to remove the other’.56
The agency of universal love and charity is both divine and human as God gradually
becomes the form of the soul’s many cognitions, volitions and passions. Its jarring
 
Cogitatione Attingere 105

discord is thereby reduced to the one harmony of God’s own vision of the world at large
which he shares with the soul and all his creatures. Once he has adopted the triad of the
virtues of the ‘divine life’, man is, as it were, ‘laid fast hold on by the Spirit of God, who
guides this faithful and well-fitted Instrument, not according to the ignorant or vicious
modes of the World, but his motions keep time to that Musick which is truly Holy,
Seraphical and Divine, I mean, to the measures of sound reason and pure Intellect’.57
Cudworth agrees with More in identifying divine grace and human freedom. When
sharing in God’s own being in ‘enclasping the world in his outstretched arms’ and
being ‘as big as yesterday, today and tomorrow’ in his original superintellectual vision,
man is viewed by Cudworth at once as being ‘truly free’58 and having achieved a state of
‘Evangelicall liberty’59 or ‘true freedom’60 and as being subject to ‘necessity’. In his two
homilies and his many treatises on human agency,61 of which only one was published
a century after its author’s death, Cudworth, like More, draws upon the technical
vocabulary of early modern physics and ancient metaphysics in viewing God or divine
goodness as the ‘elater or spring’62 and ‘τὸ πρώτως κινοῦν’63 of the human soul. Like
More’s principle of universal divine love which is the moving power as well as the
general substance of the soul’s many individual passions, Cudworth’s ‘first mover’,
grasped by the soul’s superintellectual instinct in ‘μάντευμά τι, a certain vaticination,
presage, scent, and odour of one summum bonum’,64 is at once the principle and the sum
total of all the soul’s living powers. In a stunning comparison, Cudworth expounds the
vision of the divine life driving all of man’s thoughts and actions in the Cartesian terms
of the conservation of motion imparted to the atoms in the beginning:

Now this love and desire of good, as good in general, and of happiness, traversing
the soul continually, and actuating and provoking it continually, is not a mere
passion or horme; but a settled resolved principle, and the very source, and
fountain, and centre of life. It is necessary and nature in us which is immutable,
and always continues the same, in equal quantity. As Cartesius supposed the same
quantity of motion to be perpetually conserved in the universe, but not alike in
all the same bodies, but being transferred, and passing from one to other, and so,
more or less, here and there. So is there the same stock of love and desire of good
always alive, working in the soul by necessity of nature, and agitating it, though by
men’s will and choice, it may be diversely dispensed out, and placed upon different
objects, more and less.65

‘Will and choice’, however, do not denote a distinct faculty of the soul, but its ἡγεμονι
κόν66 or unified centre of agency by which the ‘the soul as comprehending itself, all its
concerns and interests, its abilities and capacities, and holding itself, as it were in its own
had, as it were redoubled upon itself ’,67 chooses to yield to or resist the pull of divine
goodness which suffuses and impels it in its original multiplicity of passion, thought
and will and its subsequent hegemonic unity of ‘intellectual volition’ and ‘volitional
intellection’ alike.68 Cudworth’s reductio arguments both for the human ἡγεμονικόν
or the ‘redoubled self ’ as the cause of moral action and the divine πρώτως κινοῦν or
the intuition of universal goodness as its first driving force are strictly analogous. The
twofold argument proves the necessary reality of the human and divine principles of
106 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

accountable agency as transcendental prerequisites of moral praise and blame and

judicial reward and punishment in politics and religion. Just as the ἡγεμονικόν, by
its will and choice, resolves upon a course of action, unifying all the aforementioned
aspects of the soul’s life recapitulated in itself in the process, so does the πρώτως κινοῦν
move the ἡγεμονικόν, endowing it with the unity of the superintellectual vision of God’s
all-encompassing goodness. God and soul again work in unison as the first mover is not
extraneous to, but the very principle and substance of the soul whose every cognition
and volition it shapes as its formal and final cause. ‘No’, Cudworth exclaims in the first
of his two homilies, ‘then, are we acted by God himself, and the whole divinity flows
in upon us; and when we cashiered this self-will of ours, which shackled and confined
our souls, our wills shall then become truly free, being widened and enlarged to the
extent of God’s own will’.69 In the second, he expressly defines God’s action upon human
cognition and action as ‘the soul’s acting from an inward spring and principle of its own
intellectual nature, not by a mere outward impulse, like a boat, that is tugged on by oars,
or driven by a strong blast of wind’.70 In one of his unpublished treatises on free will,
Cudworth follows the logic of the ‘realization of the image’71 in identifying the ἡγεμον
ικόν’s divine moving power with its ‘inward self ’, arguing ‘that to find God and return
to him by grace is nothing but to find ourselves and to return to that divine principle in
the bottom of our beings’.72 Since God is the soul’s archetypal principle or ‘true self ’,73 the
motion caused by his universal goodness is both theonomous and autonomous. In its
autonomy, it is up to the soul either to give its assent to or withhold it from God’s benign
moving power. Elaborating upon the nautical metaphor with its Cartesian pedigree,
Cudworth likens the soul’s autonomy to that of a sailor’s who, while inevitably being
pushed forward by the wind, may influence his ship’s direction:

I may compare the human soul to a ship under sail moving upon the waters and
necessarily carried along with the winds and tide in which the chief pilot himself
is carried as well as the other mariners, as being passive to its motion, and yet,
notwithstanding, he, sitting at the helm, has also some power of determining the
motion of that ship in which he is carried on, can direct its course to some port
rather than another.74

Hence, even though the soul’s motion is caused by God as first ‘spring and elater’,
it is not imposed upon it from without, but stirred in it from within, as the ectypal
hegemonic self is linked closely, if not indeed identified to its divine archetype.
Inevitably driven forward by divine love which is the principle and substance of his
passions, volitions and cognitions, it is up to man’s soul either to allow or to not allow
himself to be carried forward by the wind of divine goodness. Trespassing and sin,
paradoxically, but consistently, are called ‘the voluntary non-exercise of free-will’.75 The
soul itself is a ‘vital life and energy’, either engaging or failing to engage in the ‘Self-
exertive conation’76 imparted to it in the superintellectual vision of divine goodness
which it ‘touches’ and ‘enclasps’ in its first quasi-instinctual conatus:

To conclude therefore, Liberum Arbitrium is not Indifferency but Self-power, a

Power which the Soul as redoubled and Self-active hath of exerting a Vigorous
 
Cogitatione Attingere 107

Conatus towards the Higher Principle of Honesty and Reason, or of not exerting
the same, of Determining it Selfe towards the better or the worse, of exerting it
Selfe more ore lesse together with full Command over the Famulative Powers, the
Understanding as to Exercise and Object and the locomotive.77

It is the chief fulfilment of the human soul’s conatus as God’s image to participate in the
archetypal divine motion of disinterested self-communication which the Cambridge
Platonists view in terms of the Deity’s kenotic goodness.

3.2 Kenotic goodness: Images of living sacrifice

At the heart of Cambridge Platonism is the notion of God or kenotic goodness
ungrudgingly sharing with all of reality the fullness of his own being in creation and
salvation. Throughout the extant sermons of the Cambridge Platonists, the insight
into God and goodness, achieved in purification of self-love and the imitation of his
creative and salvific self-communication, possesses a sacrificial dimension.
More’s and Cudworth’s pupil George Rust shares with his two teachers the Neoplatonist
notion of creation and salvation as God’s disinterested self-communication. Drawing on
the Neoplatonic dialectic of one and many, he defines the perspective adopted in the soul’s
existential union with God as an utter annulment of all particularity and individuality
whatsoever in the undifferentiated universality of divine goodness. Like his two mentors,
Rust expounds man’s boniform or superintellectual vision of God in the predominantly
ethical terms of the school’s shared religious philosophy of the first principle as ens
moralissimum: ‘He looks not on himself as a partial and determinate being, but as a
part and member of the universe and accordingly serves not his own particular interest,
but the good and welfare of the whole.’78 The ethical point of view adopted by the pious
soul discloses to it a God whose goodness is that of kenotic self-sacrifice. Christ’s voluntary
death on the cross, the nadir of his voluntary descent praised in Paul’s celebrated hymn,
is a symbol of the kenosis of the first simple principle in creation. The Father, of his own
benign volition, ‘lays aside this State’ so as ‘to communicate his Goodness and to take up
his Creation into a participation of his own Happiness and Bliss’:

And though it seems becoming the Simplicity and Majesty of God, that he should
be alone within himself, retired into the inapproachable recesses of his own Being;
yet through the infinite desire of communicating and diffusing his own Love and
Goodness, he lays aside this State, and goes forth of himself, and by his tender care and
Providence is intimately present with the longest Projection of Being. No Man hateth
his own Flesh, (saith the Apostle) but rather cherisheth it; and we are (as I may speak)
flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone, and the whole Creation is but the Expansion
and Dilatation of Divine Simplicity and Perfection. And all Creatures do more properly
belong to God than Faculties or Actions to their Principles from whence they flow.
And God pronounces concerning the Works of his Hands, that they are very good.79

So close is God to the soul that the Father is even said to suffer in its moral shortcomings
and failures which do violence to his Son born and crucified in each human being’s
108 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

life. Thus, the young metaphysical poet More ponders on the sublimity of the drama
of a Divine apparently thwarted in Christ’s cruel crucifixion at the hands of sinful
humankind: ‘Is Gods own life of God himself forlorn? Or was he to continuall pain
of God yborn?’,80 More asks in daring verse, questioning the tenability of the orthodox
notion of divine impassibility:

For the life that is in him and should flow into us, is hindred in its vitall operation.
But if any man make it a light matter that God himself or the Word himself is not
hurt, let him consider that he that can find of his heart to destroy the deleble image
of God, would, if it lay in his power, destroy God himself, so that the crime is as
high and as much to be lamented.81

Cudworth, too, likens the triumphs of virtue and vice in the life of the Christian soul to
Christ’s birth in the manger and his death on the cross respectively. As infinite goodness
and love personified, the Father, he avers, cannot but commiserate with the afflictions
of the soul in whom his Son, in the virtuous extirpation of passion and self-love, is born
in another incarnation. To the comprehensive view of reality as the one coherent ‘plain
of truth’ in Cambridge Platonist epistemology, therefore, corresponds the categorical
imperative of disinterested self-communication in the school’s ethics of the Theateatan
‘assimilation to God’. Like all of reality, the soul originates in the primordial divine
self-sacrifice in which it emerges from the simple goodness of the Father as ‘flesh of his
flesh, and bone of his bone’.82 It is, hence, called upon to participate in God’s creative
and salvific self-giving, ungrudgingly passing on to its fellow creatures the riches of
his being that it has received itself. Like God who, as overflowing goodness, shares
with his creatures the fullness of his being, the soul is called upon not to keep its own,
but humble itself, giving to its fellow creatures the physical and intellectual gifts it has
received. Thus, Smith, using the school’s hylemorphist language of God as the boniform
first mover shaping all of human cognition and action, views the Christian life as one
continuous sacrifice in which God, as the ‘protoplastic virtue of our being’, gradually
consumes the soul in the latter’s voluntary self-sacrifice: ‘Thus we should endeavour to
preserve that heavenly fire of the divine love and goodness (which, issuing forth from
God, centres itself within us, and is the protoplastic virtue of our being) always alive
and burning in the temple of our souls, and to sacrifice ourselves back again to Him.’83
Of the Cambridge Platonists’ two principal treatises on sacrifice, the first, Cudworth’s
daring youthful first treatise on The True Notion of the Lord’s Supper,84 draws upon a
comprehensive survey of Jewish, Greek and Roman religious custom to establish the
ritual of feasting on sacrificed animals as the heart of the Christian Eucharist which
Roman Catholic theology erroneously interprets as a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice on
the cross. In his typological exegesis, both the pagan and the Jewish rites are shown
to be ‘types and shadows of the true Christian sacrifice’ anticipated in the prophetic
ancient theology of pre-Christian time:

Now having thus shewn, that both amongst the Jews under the law, and the Gentiles
in their Pagan worship (for Paganism is nothing but Judaism degenerate), it was
ever a solemn rite to join feasting with sacrifice, and to eat of those things which
 
Cogitatione Attingere 109

had been offered up; the very concinnity and harmony of the thing itself leads me
to conceive, that that Christian feast under the gospel, called the Lord’s supper, is
the very same thing, and bears the same notion, in respect of the true Christian
sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, that those did to the Jewish and Heathenish
sacrifices; and so is epulum sacrificiale, a sacrificial feast – I mean, a feast upon
sacrifice; or, epulum ex oblatis, a feast upon things offered up to God.85

To feast upon Christ’s body ‘is to be made partaker of his sacrifice offered up to God for
us’.86 In accordance with ancient custom, the festive sharing of food and drink is ‘a federal
rite between God and those that offered them’87 or ‘a symbol of love and friendship’88
meant to serve as visible confirmation of the ‘sacred covenant, and inviolable league
of friendship with him’.89 At the heart of Cudworth’s typology of religious sacrifice in
Judaism, paganism and Christianity is Christ. His sacrifice discloses to humankind the
goodness of a God who shares with them his archetypal fullness in the many images of
the types and shadows of sacrificial ritual in human religion.90
The second major treatise on the notion of sacrifice expounds the ‘federal rite’
between God and man in terms of the Cambridge school’s practical epistemology
of the superintellectual instinct and the boniform faculty. In his sermon on Heb.
13.16: ‘To do good and communicate forget not, for with such sacrifices God is well
pleased’, More views self-sacrifice as the first duty of the soul created in the image
of the moral first principle. Human self-sacrifice is shown to take the two forms
of a disinterested sharing of the material and spiritual goods received from God’s
fullness. Enjoining the Christian soul to vie with God in whom ‘there is neither
envy, want nor niggardness’91 and be ‘but one intire Sacrifice, whom that great
High Priest, Christ Jesus, offers to his Father’,92 More assumes the role of the creator
himself addressing his creature: ‘So surely God will reason with us in this matter
too, That which thou hast, I gave it thee; why therefore dost thou not imitate me,
and impart somewhat to thy Neighbour of that I gave thee? Freely you have received
(saith our Saviour) freely give.’93 On sacrificing to God its base passions, notably its
petty and pernicious self-will, in a ‘triumph . . . over the animal life’94 in purity, the
soul acknowledges in humility that it owes everything that it is and that it does to
God’s own primordial self-sacrifice alone. In accordance with the notion of divine
agency as God’s ‘universal spirit’ informing and acting upon the soul in the intuitive
immediacy of the vision and touch of the boniform faculty, the soul is, therefore,
called upon to allow God alone to perform his creative and salvific work by means of
its own ‘perfect exinanation’ in disinterested charity: ‘Which is a perfect exinanition
of our selves, that we may be filled with the sense of God, who worketh all in all,
and feelingly acknowledge what ever good is in us to be from him, and so be no
more elated for it, than if we had none of it, nor were conscious to our selves we had
any such thing.’95 As God’s image and likeness, the soul must follow the example
of its archetype and give freely, that is, in disinterested and cheerful generosity, to
its neighbours both material and spiritual things. It must give to its brethren, as
More details in his scriptural ethics of sacrifice, both ‘rem & consilium; A supply
of outward necessaries, or seasonable and friendly advice’.96 ‘Charity’ or ‘charitable
duties to [our] neighbour’97 are viewed as ‘the true Christian Sacrifice and Holy
110 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Worship of God’,98 in which Christian souls imitate the Son in selflessly coming to
the aid of their neighbours whom More expressly calls ‘those living Temples of God’:

But to be crucified with Christ, to suffer with him, to undergo the deadly dolorous
pangs of mortification, to sweat drops of Blood, and endure the unspeakable
agonies of dying to sin, this is a harder way: To give Alms and relieve the needy, to
furnish those living Temples of God, the poor Christians Souls with necessaries,
this way is more chargeable.99

Reviewing a host of relevant passages in the Old and New Testaments, More goes on
to refute the charge that moral duty ‘is not truly a Sacrifice; but Metaphorically, and
improperly so called’. On the principles of the Cambridge Platonist theology of the ens
moralissimum, a Christian soul’s disinterested morality is in reality the true archetype of
all sacrifice: ‘The service of the Old Law and its Ceremonies, are but Types and Shadows
of the Righteousness that is required of us Christians under the Gospel.’100 If God, as is
intuited by the soul in boniform vision, is kenotic goodness, then the triad of Christian
virtues, that is, the soul’s sincere ‘purity’ and ‘humility’ and its universal and disinterested
‘charity’, is the true sacrifice ‘seen in a mirror, darkly’, by the authors of the sacred writings
of the Greek and Hebrew ancient theology. The three primary Old Testament sacrifices,
that is, those of animals, of things and of drinks, can hence be shown to be types and
images of the univocal archetype of moral self-sacrifice. The animals slaughtered are
types of our brutish passions and bestial oblivion of which we need to purify ourselves
and our neighbours in the triad of the fundamental sacrificial virtues of purity, humility
and charity. Likewise, the sacrifice of drink, quite literally, is offered in beverages shared
with the thirsty. The four incenses which God asks Moses to burn on the altar in Exodus
symbolize the true sacrifice of the self in its virtuous return to its divine source, as More
paraphrases the exegesis of Philo the Jew: ‘Philo Judaeus will have these four ingredients
to be Emblemes of the four general Principles or Elements of which this World consists;
and the evaporation of this fume, to be that acceptable re-ascending of the Creature
to God in holy thankfulness, and evacuation of it self into the great ocean.’101 As well
as possessing a spiritual sense of smell by which it perceives and participates in divine
goodness and virtue as the source of all its own motion and love, the soul is obliged to
transform itself into odorous incense, thereby gradually becoming an ‘emblem’ or image
of God viewed as the loving archetype and source of all things. Its every charitable act,
therefore, is a finite expression of the infinite sacrificial love at the origin of all things
intelligible and sensible. As ‘Goodness it self and allembracing Love’, More avers, ‘God
alone’ is the ‘beginning and end’ of every good deed, even though the neighbour is its
recipient. Thus, the priest’s or agent’s consecration stipulated by the definition of sacrifice
occurs in the ‘outward mystical ceremony’ in which the visible act, whether it is practical
benevolence and charity or verbal counsel and consolation, discloses the invisible good
or its divine first principle and final purpose:

But now that this action of doing good, whither by hand or tongue, is not without
an outward mystical Ceremony, is hence plain: For whether it be the munificence
of our hands, they are but a resemblance of his munificence, that openeth his
 
Cogitatione Attingere 111

hands, and filleth with good every living thing: Or if of tongue, whereby we do
beget the holy life in others, or direct in doubt or danger, this is an emblem of the
eternal λόγος, the everlasting word, whereby all things were made, and are now
governed and directed.102

Lastly, recognizing that the goodness which he freely gives to others originates in and
is aimed at God alone, every Christian is ordained a ‘Lawful Minister’, as is required by
the Protestant notion of sacrifice.
The first intuitive insight into God as supreme kenotic goodness, gained in a life of
self-sacrificial love, provides the unshakeable foundation of the Cambridge Platonists’
epistemology of the iconic intellect which gradually gains fuller participation in the
fullness of the divine vision of all things in every cognitive act.

4 Iconic intellection: Idea and unity in discursive knowledge

The comprehensive and coherent vision of divine all-oneness intuited or touched by
the mind’s eye or its distinct power of spiritual sensation informs all of cognition. Every
finite cognition is viewed by the Cambridge Platonists as springing from the soul’s
original boniform or superintellectual vision of God’s sacrificial creative goodness.
As in Descartes’s Third Meditation, the trustworthiness of the finite mind’s clear
and distinct knowledge originates in the infinity of the all-encompassing archetypal
mind, ‘touched in thought’ or tasted and intuited prior to and in every individual
cognitive act. However, whereas in Cartesian theism God’s veracity as the sine qua
non of the soul’s trust in its own epistemic powers is inferred from his perfection,
deceit being ruled out as an imperfection incompatible with the innate idea of the
ens perfectissimum, Cambridge Platonism envisages divine goodness, grasped by the
boniform faculty as an indubitable analytic truth a priori, as the foundation of all claims
to objective truth. In his Discourse of Truth, George Rust, anticipating a key argument
of the later critique of Cartesianism, exposes what he perceives to be a vicious circle at
the heart of Descartes’s foundationalist project. If only insight into veracity as a divine
perfection can guarantee epistemic certainty, this insight is based upon a number of
conceptual inferences, including those that ‘Veracity is a perfection’ and ‘that there
be an intrinsecal relation betwixt Veracity and Perfection’.103 In response to the aporia
of Cartesian foundationalism, Rust instead follows 1 Jn 4.16: ‘God is Love’, which he
subjects to in-depth rationalist exegesis, elevating divine goodness into the rank of a
first principle ‘of whose Truth’, he explicitly takes issue with Cartesian epistemology,
‘I make no more doubt than I do of my own Existence, which the so much admired
Monsieur hath made the first Principle of his Philosophy.’104 God’s goodness, in turn,
is the transcendent source of the ‘clear intelligibility’105 of intellect as the sum total of
all truths. Descartes’s criterion of truth is transformed into an ontological sphere of its
own whose every part is defined as an object of clear and distinct knowledge. While
‘pure falsehood’, on the Cambridge Platonists’ privation theory of error and evil, is
‘pure nonentity’ which, Cudworth avers in his earliest work, ‘could not subsist alone by
itself ’,106 truth is equated to God’s own archetypal being. According to the Cambridge
112 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Platonist Trinitarianism of the ens perfectissimum as goodness, intellect and will or

omnipotence, the middle hypostasis possesses ‘clear intelligibility’ as its modus essendi
and modus cognoscendi. Proceeding from the first principle, the sum total of truth as
the second is superior to the third and, hence, exempt from any change wrought by any
arbitrary divine omnipotence:

I answer therefore, that the criterion of true knowledge is not to be looked for
any where abroad without our own minds, neither in the height above, nor in the
depth beneath, but only in our knowledge and conceptions themselves. For the
entity of all theoretical truth is nothing else but clear intelligibility, and whatever
is clearly conceived is an entity and a truth. But that which is false, divine power
itself cannot make it to be clearly and distinctly understood because falsehood is a
non-entity, and clear conception is an entity. And omnipotence itself cannot make
a non-entity to be entity.107

It is through its own autonomous discursive activity that the soul gains an ever-growing
participation in the one and coherent divine whole of reality of which it acquires a
first intuitive grasp by virtue of its boniform faculty or superintellectual instinct. In
their sharp critique of nascent contemporary empiricism, as put forth, above all, in
their philosophical archfoe Hobbes’s Elements of Philosophy and Leviathan, both More
and Cudworth go to great lengths to prove that human perception and intellection
must not be understood along the lines of the celebrated empiricist metaphor of a
tabula rasa gradually filled with external sense impressions beyond the subject’s
control. Instead, they argue, not even sensation can be understood as entirely passive.
It requires an ‘active vigour’ on the part of an incorporeal soul without which no
sense impression can be explained. Cudworth’s argument hinges upon the atomistic
cosmology of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy and the concomitant epistemological
distinction between primary and secondary qualities. If body, as has been established
beyond doubt by the atomism of the ancient theology and early modern cosmology
alike, in reality consists of nothing but the primary qualities of size, shape, place and
locomotion, its secondary qualities such as the ‘ideas of heat, light and colours and
other sensible things’, which Cudworth, endorsing the usage of Descartes’s Meditations,
views as ‘several modes of cogitation’, cannot be accounted for without ‘some inward
vital energy of the soul itself ’ giving rise to them:

Neither is this passion of the soul in sensation a mere naked passion or suffering,
because it is a cogitation or perception which hath something of active vigour
in it. For those ideas of heat, light, and colours, and other sensible things, being
not qualities really existing in the bodies without us, as the atomical philosophy
instructs us, and therefore not passively stamped or imprinted upon the soul from
without in the same manner that a signature is upon a piece of wax, must needs
arise partly from some inward vital energy of the soul itself, being phantasms of
the soul, or several modes of cogitation or perception in it. For which cause some
of the Platonists would not allow sensations to be passions in the soul, but only
active knowledges of the passions of the body.108
 
Cogitatione Attingere 113

However, despite the vital active contribution whereby a subject turns the senseless
locomotion of atoms into sensual impressions, sense is subject to physical stimuli from
without and physiological responses from within and as such predominantly passive.
While emerging from the ἡγεμονικόν as the source and principle of intentionality by
which a subject may choose to perceive any given object, the process of perception
itself occurs in accordance with ‘a necessary and fatal connection between certain
motions in some parts of the enlivened body and certain affections or sympathies in
the soul’109 beyond the latter’s voluntary conscious control. Conceptual reasoning, by
contrast, is pure ‘active vigour’. It brings to bear upon reality without its own categories
and concepts from within. Whereas in sense the rational mind bows to the ineluctable
laws governing the physico-biological interaction of the world’s void and atoms and
the body and its sense organs, in knowledge, the soul, as Cudworth sets out to prove
in his in-depth rebuttal of empiricist sensualism, ‘conquers’ the reality outside itself,
subjecting it to its own categories. ‘Sense, that suffers from external objects, lies at it
were prostrate under them, and is overcome by them: wherefore no sense judges either
of its own passion, or of the passion of any other sense, but judgement or knowledge is
the active energy of an unpassionate power in the soul.’110 In response to the empiricist
notion of the soul as a passive ‘Abrasa Tabula’, the Cambridge Platonists instead choose
to endow it with ‘some innate Notions and Ideas’ which it possesses prior to all sense
experience.111 The erroneous empiricist conception of knowledge arising solely from
sense impressions from without, rather than conceptual reasoning from within is
traced back to its proponents’ failure to distinguish ‘betwixt extrinsecall Occasions,
and the adequate or principal Causes of things’.112 Opting for the former, rather than
the latter epistemological model, Cambridge rationalism reveals human cognition to
be the soul’s participation in God’s own creative activity which it mimics and aspires to
in every cognitive act, however minute and insignificant. The object known is not the
‘adequate or principal cause’ of knowledge, but merely the ‘occasion’ for the rational soul
to exercise the pure ‘active vigour’ of its own innate a priori concepts and categories.
According to the two chief Cambridge Platonists’ epistemological occasionalism,
therefore, the occurrence of a possible object of cognition acts as a catalyst for the soul
to make use of its own rich conceptuality to acquire and create knowledge, thereby
exercising its highest capacity of participating in God’s own creative power. But for
its own categorical and conceptual resources, the soul would be as unable even to
engage in cognition in the first place as a person would be to identify an unknown
person amidst a crowd of people. While rejecting the concomitant dogma of the pre-
existence of souls,113 Cudworth, therefore, subscribes to the time-honoured concept
of knowledge and learning as recollection delineated in Plato’s Meno and the Phaedo.
Knowledge, on his account, is not imposed upon a passive subject from without, but
acquired by the latter’s own conscious activity from within. The Cartesian ‘adventitious
ideas’ are likewise revealed to be ‘innate’ ones instead:

So when foreign, strange and adventitious forms are exhibited to the mind by sense,
the soul cannot otherwise know or understand them, but by something domestic
of its own, some active anticipation or prolepsis within itself, that occassionally
reviving and meeting with it, makes it know it or take acquaintance with it. And
114 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

this is the only true and allowable sense of that old assertion, that knowledge is
reminiscence, not that it is the remembrance of something which the soul had
some time before actually known in a pre-existent state, but because it is the mind’s
comprehending of things by some inward anticipations of its own, something
native and domestic to it, or something actively exerted from within itself.114

The mind’s ‘inward anticipations of its own’ are not ideas of all the things which
a soul may come to know in its lifetime. In fact, More ridicules the very idea of a
crude innatism which posits ‘a certain number of Ideas flaring and shining to the
Animadversive Faculty, like so many Torches or Starres in the Firmament to our
outward Sight’.115 Instead, the a priori of the soul’s ‘inward anticipations’ by which it
knows external objects as ‘something native and domestic to it’ is strictly formal in
character. The ‘inward anticipations’ upon which the soul, whenever ‘occasioned’ to do
so by sense and perception, draws are several kinds of abstract concepts and categories,
notably those that define its own practical and theoretical cogitation and those that
constitute an object qua object such as ‘cause and effect’ and ‘means and end’.116 The
discursive knowledge emerging from the soul’s ‘recollection’ throughout bears the
imprint of its original intuition of the all-oneness of divine goodness as its intellect
exercises its ‘unitive, active and comprehensive power’117 upon the manifold contents of
sensual perception. Hence, it views each particular object as a structured whole (totum)
defined by its form and function (ratio) to which its every single part is actively judged
to be subservient in purposeful cooperation with all the others.118 In a memorable
three-part comparison, Cudworth likens the levels of epistemic ascent and activity to a
watch reflected by a mirror, seen by a mindless animal and understood by the rational
human mind. Whereas there is no perception or intellection on the part of the mirror,
the animal clearly perceives the artefact and its different components. Only in human
intellection, however, is the watch understood as a watch, that is, as a functional whole
of parts constructed with the purpose of indicating the time of the day. Guided by the
boniform faculty as its formal and final cause, the rational mind, therefore, knows
an object, whether natural or artificial, as one whole ‘formed’ or composed of many
different parts with a view to fulfilling a ‘good’ or a purpose. Not only does the abstract
nature of the first categories of ‘form’ and ‘good’ and the many subsequent related ones,
without which there could be neither a subject knowing nor an object known, rule out
their origin in perception or imagination, but Cudworth, like Descartes, also cites the
analogue of the ‘universal and necessary truth’119 of geometrical theorems to highlight
the sui generis quality of the categories shaping human intellection.
The soul’s innate power of acquiring knowledge by actively making use of abstract
concepts to transform prima facie chaotic multiplicity into unified objects of rational
functionality finds its logical upshot in the holistic vision of the cosmos at large. In its
most comprehensive of insights, iconic intellection can be seen to approximate the
soul’s original boniform intuition which throughout acts as its first moving principle,
its chief criterion and its final objective. More’s definition of ‘reason’ reveals the close
tie between the soul’s initial universal boniform vision and its subsequent particular
iconic intellection. Drawing upon the formal a priori of its concepts and the a posteriori
of sense perception and secular and religious tradition, the mind acquires knowledge
 
Cogitatione Attingere 115

by placing a part into a coherent whole for the sake of rational scientific enquiry into
and ethical and political action in the world. The iconic intellect, according to the
Cambridge Platonists’ distinction between intuitive vision and discursive reasoning, is

a Power or Facultie of the Soul, whereby either from her Innate Ideas or Common
Notions, or else from the assurance of her own Senses, or upon the Relation or
Tradition of another, she unravels a further clew of Knowledge, enlarging her
sphere of Intellectual light, by laying open to her self the close connexion and
cohesion of the conceptions she has of things, whereby inferring one thing from
another she is able to deduce multifarious Conclusions as well for the pleasure of
Speculation as the Necessity of practice.120

Invoking the ‘greatest kinds’ of Plato’s Sophist, More views the relationship between
discursive human reason and intuitive divine intellect as that of an ever-changing
partial understanding to a comprehensive vision at eternal rest: ‘And what is this
but Ratio stabilis, a kind of steady immovable reason, discovering the connection of
all things at once? But that in us is Ratio mobilis, or reason in evolution, we being
able to apprehend things only in successive manner one after another.’121 Hence, the
mind’s inner conceptual fecundity displayed on the occasion of each object known
as an intelligible structure, whether artificial or natural, testifies to its deeper longing
for an absolute ideal of a consummate whole of which each object known forms
an integral part. The iconic intellect, as Cudworth puts it with another neologism
of Cambridge Platonist epistemology, possesses ‘a potential omniformity’. It is ‘all
things intellectually’ or ‘in a manner all things’, as Plato and Aristotle concur.122 Man’s
intellect is a universal icon potentially encompassing in itself the representations or
images of the whole of the outer world which it, as it were, gradually paints and
recreates upon the canvass provided in its original vision of God’s all-encompassing
creative goodness. In so doing, it throughout re-enacts God’s primordial act of
creative and self-diffusive kenotic goodness of which its every cognition and action is
an imperfect image: ‘The mind being a kind of notional or representative world, as it
were a diaphanous and crystalline sphere, in which the ideas and images of all things
existing in the real universe may be reflected or represented.’ The analogy between
the creator’s one archetypal and the creatures’ many minds is twofold and links
the latter to the former both in theoretical vision and creative action. The human
soul, for one thing, participates in the divine intellect in all subjectivity and self-
knowledge: ‘For as the mind of God, which is the archetypal intellect, is that whereby
he always actually comprehends himself, and his own fecundity, or the extent of his
own infinite goodness and power – that is the possibility of all things – so all created
intellects being certain ectypal models, or derivative compendiums of the same.’123
For another, the soul’s metaphysical vision driving its every conscious act is both
aesthetic and ethical in character. Its ‘idea of God’, which it inevitably forms in its
reflection upon the principle of its own ‘unitive’ or ‘comprehensive’ reasoning power,
is that of ‘a mind infinitely good and wise’ as the active source and principle of the
archetypal perfect unity of utmost complexity of which all of its cognition is a faint
image:
116 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

But the intellect doth not rest here, but upon occasion of those corporeal things thus
comprehended in themselves, naturally rises higher to the framing and exciting
of certain ideas from within itself, of other things not existing in those sensible
objects, but absolutely incorporeal. For being ravished with the contemplation
of this admirable mechanism and artificial contrivance of the material universe,
forthwith it naturally conceives it to be nothing else but the passive stamp, print,
and signature of some living art and wisdom, as the pattern, archetype, and seal
of it, and so excites from within itself an idea of that divine art and wisdom. Nay,
considering further, how all things in this great mundane machine or animal (as
the ancients would have it) are contrived, not only for the beauty of the whole, but
also for the good of every part in it, that is endued with life and sense, it exerts
another idea, viz. of goodness and benignity from within itself, besides that of art
and wisdom, as the queen regent and empress of art, whereby art is employed,
regulated, and determined.124

Like all ideas, the idea of God is not one inscribed into the soul’s mind from the outset,
but one freely and creatively, yet necessarily and inevitably, framed in autonomous
cognitive activity of which it is shown to be the formal and final cause. God is the
transcendent ideal and unity of all of multiplicity, whether artificial or natural, to which
the soul ascends as the principle and aim of its own ‘unitive, active and comprehensive
power’.125

5 Living images of God: The contemporary significance

of Cambridge Enlightenment epistemology
At the heart of Cambridge Platonist epistemology is the intuition of God as universal
goodness. Not only does it furnish a first ground of indubitable certainty to which the
soul cannot but assent in intuitive practical insight, but it also serves as the principle
of unity informing all of human cognition and action alike. As such, it cannot but
surpass all intellection of which it is the principle. The Cambridge Platonists’
notion of the soul’s intuitive insight into God’s love and goodness can be seen as a
reimagining of Descartes’s notion of a God ‘touched in thought’ as the transcendental
first principle of all the modes of the I’s thinking substance and the transcendent first
ground of the extended world. Like Descartes, More and Cudworth espouse a theism
of divine goodness as the source of the soul’s trust in its own cognitive powers and
the world around it. In response to what they perceive as shortcomings of Descartes’s
foundationalist project, however, the Cambridge Platonists view practical ethical
insight as the chief means whereby the soul may acquire indubitable knowledge about
the first principle of thought and being.
The boniform vision is an intuitive first insight into God’s universal and disinterested
creative goodness which, as the ‘superessential cause’, chooses to share with all of reality
the riches of its own fullness in sacrificial self-communication. Hence, Cambridge
Platonist subjectivity, by its very nature, is not one either of intellectualistic or of
 
Cogitatione Attingere 117

solipsistic self-reflection. For one thing, the sui generis epistemic power postulated
by More and Cudworth is not a power distinct from the soul’s cognition and volition,
but, on the contrary, the unifying principle and form of all expressions of the finite
mind. Its every cognition, volition and passion are shown to be an imperfect image
approximating consummate archetypal divine goodness which the soul intuits and
embraces in the intellectual love for creator and creation stirred by the highest of
its epistemic powers. For another, the original intuition of God’s ungrudging self-
communication is deeply practical and universal in character. The soul is called upon
to participate in the self-sacrifice of creation and salvation which God undergoes
for its sake, not shutting itself off from reality in petty ‘self-will’, but, on the contrary,
converting towards it in universal charity and generosity: ‘The spiritual life is one of
participation in a reality greater than the self; however it can only be interpreted and
appreciated through self-consciousness. The self that rises to the Divine is the product
of conversion not replacement.’126
Iconic intellection, defined as the knowledge of a phenomenon as a structured unity
and whole, is shaped by the soul’s original boniform vision which acts as its principle
and purpose as well as its truth criterion. The universality of the divine perspective
adopted in the original contemplative vision of and concomitant active assent to God’s
goodness as the beginning and end of all reality defines all of human cognition. While
the twin doctrines of sacrificial goodness and divine emanation clearly go back to
the ancient theology of pagan and patristic Platonism, as revived by Giordano Bruno
and Nicholas of Cusa at the dawn of the early modern age, the Cambridge Platonists’
epistemological line of argument is clearly that of the new ‘way of ideas’ championed
by Descartes, Hobbes and Locke. Subjecting human consciousness to in-depth
transcendental analysis, More and Cudworth are careful to distinguish between
its subjective perception of reality, its many secondary qualities, and the objective
characteristics of reality, its primary qualities, in order to arrive at a notion of sensation
as inherently active. The Cambridge Platonists’ distinct version of the British ‘way of
ideas’ is, hence, that of the ascent of the soul as it engages in autonomous moral and
cognitive activity in embracing its original vision of the infinite space of creative divine
goodness of which it is an image and likeness. More’s and Cudworth’s doctrine of the
soul’s ‘boniform’ or ‘superintellectual’ vision of God’s creative goodness as the principle
and purpose of all of thought and reality continues to be one of the most compelling
epistemologies of the Divine.
118 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Response by Douglas Hedley

Christian Hengstermann’s beautiful account of the Cambridge Platonist notion of
the soul’s ‘boniform’ or ‘superintellectual’ vision of Divine goodness elaborates the
profoundly ‘modern’ aspect of these thinkers. To read the Cambridge Platonists
often seems like an exercise of pursuing the recondite interests and obsessions
of erudite but anachronistic scholars. Hengstermann’s chapter bolsters the thesis
of Charles Taliaferro in his magisterial work Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and
Religion since the Seventeenth Century, that the Cambridge Platonists constitute
the beginning of the Philosophy of Religion in modern thought, especially in their
kinship with Descartes. Hengstermann’s exposition of the notion of cogitatione
attingere or touching in thought the Divine infinity as an instance of the proximity
between the Cambridge men and the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’ is a case
in point. Yet he also demonstrates with great power the stress upon the ethical
component in the leading lights of the Cambridge school, who conceive of love
as a prolepsis of true Divine knowledge, as a practice of ‘affectionate’ religion. The
Cambridge Platonists develop a vision of the subject that combines intellect with
feeling and ethical seriousness.
For the Cambridge Platonists, the term ‘imagination’ is usually employed
in a negative way. Henry More uses the word in order to explain the errors of the
enthusiasts like Boehme. Such enthusiasts, according to More, confuse the dark
materials of finite fancy with intelligible realities and, thus, confuse God and world. Yet
I think Hengstermann is correct to see the ‘Divine Sensations’ in figures like More as
instances of a purified and truly contemplative imagination as the soul relishes contact
with the presence of the goodness of God in the world. The analysis of the boniform
faculty in Henry More deserves particular attention in this context. Yet it is striking
that Hengstermann notes the dimension of sacrifice in these figures. These are writers
living in a turbulent and brutal age. Notwithstanding their recognition of the goodness
of God, they are conscious of costly ethical self-sacrifice as the true archetype of the
sacrificial ceremonies. Hengstermann is correct to highlight the contrast between the
static Cartesian attribute of Divine perfection and the dynamic self-communication of
Goodness in the God of the Cambridge Platonists.

Notes
1 Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons, in The
Cambridge Platonists, edited by Constantinos A. Patrides (London et al.: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 127.
2 See the most recent interpretation of Cudworth’s sermon as a theology of the divine
image deeply influenced by Meister Eckhart’s mysticism of the birth of Christ in
the midst of the faithful heart in Douglas Hedley, ‘Image, Idol and Likeness: Ralph
Cudworth’s Sermon before the House of Commons 1647’, in Origenes Cantabrigiensis.
Ralph Cudworth, Predigt vor dem Unterhaus und andere Schriften, edited by Alfons
Fürst and Christian Hengstermann (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2018), 51–62.
 
Cogitatione Attingere 119

3 ‘Cambridge Enlightenment’ is the most recent designation of the group of

philosophers and theologians commonly known as the ‘Cambridge Platonists’, as
suggested in Sarah Hutton, British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 136–59. As is shown in the essays collected in Alfons
Fürst and Christian Hengstermann (eds), Die Cambridge Origenists. George Rusts
Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions (Münster:
Aschendorff Verlag, 2013), ‘Cambridge Origenists’ may be as fitting a designation as
‘Cambridge Platonists’ considering the general Christian outlook of their Platonism
and their concern with divine goodness and human freedom in a rational theodicy.
The original sobriquet was coined by John Tulloch in his classical exposition of
their thought in his Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the
Seventeenth Century. Vol. 2: The Cambridge Platonists (Edinburgh and London:
William Blackwood and Sons, 2nd edn, 1874). The identity of the Cambridge
Platonists as a distinct group of philosophers and latitudinarians is also established
and explored in great detail in the important essay collection by Alan J. Rogers, Jean-
Michel Vienne and Yves Ch. Zarka (eds), The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical
Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion (Dordrecht et al.: Springer, 1997). The
existence of a group of Cambridge Enlightenment thinkers or Cambridge Platonists
has recently been called into question by Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age
of the New Science (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 126–38. The
author’s altogether feeble argument rests solely upon the allegedly divergent concepts
of the history of philosophy held by the representatives of the group. He fails to take
into account the historical constellation around the committed university teacher
Ralph Cudworth and, most surprisingly, any of the school’s shared deeply held
philosophical convictions such as God’s goodness and man’s freedom. A compelling
rebuttal of Levitin’s ill-founded claim is provided in Douglas Hedley, ‘Gods and
Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and his Ancient Theology’, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 25 (2017): 932–53, esp. 949–50.
4 The term itself is one which the philosopher preacher went on to coin alongside
several other philosophical key words in the philosophical vernacular in his
monumental, albeit unfinished and fragmentary, principal work of 1678 entitled The
True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Printed for Richard Royston, 1678),
‘The Preface’.
5 Cudworth, Sermon Preached before the House of Commons, 93.
6 Ibid., 92.
7 See Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’ (see n. 3), who throughout interprets Cambridge
Platonism against the backdrop of the celebrated dichotomy of Plato’s Sophist.
8 Besides the expositions of the ‘theological’ third and fifth Meditations in the
classical monographs by Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry
(New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978), 130–62, and Margaret D. Wilson, Descartes
(London and New York: Routledge, 1978), 100–38, and the important article by
Jean-Marie Beyssade, ‘The Idea of God and the Proofs of His Existence’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Descartes, edited by John Cottingham (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 174–9, the following outline is indebted to the
sympathetic rereading of Descartes’s theistic foundationalism from the vantage
point of religious philosophy offered in the magisterial historical account by Charles
Taliaferro, Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57–109.
9 Regulae 4 (AT 10, 368; CSM 1,14).
120 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

10 Meditationes 3 (AT 7, 50; CSM 1, 34).

11 Ibid. (AT 7, 45; CSM 1, 31).
12 Ibid. (AT 7, 51; CSM 2, 35).
13 Primae responsiones (AT 7, 113–14). My translation.
14 Quintae responsiones (AT 7, 365; CSM 2, 252).
15 Meditationes 3 (AT 7, 48–9; CSM 2, 31).
16 Descartes’s Conversation with Burman, translated with introduction and commentary
by John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 13.
17 Ibid.
18 Meditationes 4 (AT 7, 54, CSM 2, 38).
19 Ibid. (AT 7, 57; CSM 2, 40).
20 Ibid., 6 (AT 7, 81; CSM 2, 56).
21 Cf. this Cambridge Platonist critique levelled at Descartes in Taliaferro, Evidence
and Faith (see n. 8), 73, on which the following exposition of Cambridge Platonist
epistemology builds: ‘But there is not in Descartes’ extant publications the fuller
Cambridge Platonist understanding of inquiry that is anchored in broader moral
precepts, a tradition of inquiry that prizes reverent practice.’
22 The Cambridge Platonists’ elective affinity with Descartes runs deeps and bears
upon nearly every tenet of their philosophy of religion. On their general reception of
Cartesianism, its historical background and its philosophical topics, see the survey by
Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Early Stage of Cartesianism in England’, Studies in Philology
26 (1929): 356–74. There are several detailed studies devoted to Descartes’s thought
in the two major Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. For More,
see, above all, the classic article by Alan Gabbey, ‘Philosophia Cartesiana Triumphata:
Henry More (1646–1671)’, in Problems of Cartesianism, edited by Thomas M.
Lennon, John M. Nicholas and John W. Davis (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1982), 171–249, and the more recent special issue of Les
Études Philosophiques 2014/1: Descartes et More. For Cudworth, see the book-length
study on his relationship to Descartes by Lydia Gysi, Platonism and Cartesianism
in the Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1962), to which the
subsequent exposition is indebted throughout.
23 On Smith’s appropriation of Descartes, which differs from that of his fellow Platonists
in a number of crucial regards, see J. E. Saveson, ‘Descartes’ Influence on John
Smith, Cambridge Platonist’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 258–63.
Cf. the analysis of Smith’s important treatise on the school’s practical religious
epistemology in Ernst Cassirer, Die platonische Renaissance in England und die
Schule von Cambridge, Gesammelte Werke, edited by Friederike Plaga and Claus
Rosenkranz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 242–9, who
credits Smith’s first discourse with putting forth ‘the really pivotal principle of their
[i.e. the Cambridge Platonists’] doctrine’. See, above all, ibid., 243–4: ‘Wie sehr dieser
Gedanke von der gesamten Schule von Cambridge als das eigentlich entscheidende
Prinzip ihrer Lehre empfunden wird: das geht mit besonderer Deutlichkeit daraus
hervor, daß sie selbst ihn als methodischen Grundsatz vor allen inhaltlichen Sätzen,
die die Bestimmung und nähere Ausgestaltung der Religionsphilosophie betreffen,
unterscheiden.’
24 Besides Cassirer, Derek Michaud, Reason Turned into Sense: John Smith on
Spiritual Sensation (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), and Mario Micheletti, Il Pensiero Religioso
di John Smith, Platonico di Cambridge (Padua: La Grangola, 1976), 207–46, provide
the most thorough and most philosophically satisfactory expositions of Smith’s
 
Cogitatione Attingere 121

religious epistemology. While the former defends the systematic significance of the
Cambridge Platonist’s vision, the latter contains a plethora of illuminating historical
materials which link the author’s notion of God’s salvific immanence in the soul to
the Puritan teaching and preaching of his day. A convincing systematic reading of
Smith’s notion of spiritual sensation is offered in Hedley’s trilogy on the religious
imagination, notably in Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York:
T&T Clark, 2008), 81–2, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred
(New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 14–16. 51–3, and The Iconic Imagination
(New York et. al.: Bloomsbury, 2016), 46–7, 166.
25 John Smith, Select Discourses, 4th edn, corrected and revised by Henry G. Williams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1859), 2.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 2–3.
28 Ibid., 14.
29 Ibid., 17. Cf. the systematic exploration of the relationship between ethical
transformation and metaphysical cognition as well as that between incorporeal
and corporeal sensation in Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 24), 254, in which
the author cites the aforementioned passage in support of his own imaginative
epistemology: ‘On the view we have been exploring, this is fundamentally because a
transformation in the person, as they approach the condition of enlightenment, or as
they develop spiritually, will make for a reciprocal transformation in the appearance
of the sensory world – and accordingly far from being simply a movement “upwards”
or “inwards”, enlightenment, or spiritual awakening can also be an opportunity for,
and will be partly constituted by, a movement “outwards” and into the realm of the
senses. As the Cambridge Platonist John Smith notes: “When reason once is raised
by the mighty force of the Divine Spirit into a converse with God, it is turned into
sense.”’
30 The following depiction of the soul’s highest epistemic power builds upon the
important research articles by David Leech, ‘Does Henry More’s Conception of a
“Divine Life” Bear Traces of Origen’s Influence?’, in ‘That Miracle of the Christian
World’: Origenism and Christian Platonism in Henry More, edited by Christian
Hengstermann (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2020), 125–40, and ‘Cudworth on
Superintellectual Instinct as Inclination to the Good’, British Journal for the History
of Philosophy 25 (2017): 954–70. A first overview of the two major Cambridge
Platonists’ theories of cognition is provided in the classical monographs by
Aharon Lichtenstein, Henry More: The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 31–95, and J. A. Passmore,
Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951),
29–39. The first principle of More’s and Cudworth’s ethics and epistemology has
sparked off one of the most philosophically fruitful discussions about Cambridge
Platonist thought. Cudworth’s doctrine of ‘love’ in particular has been hailed both as
a precursor of Kantian internalism and Humean sentimentalism. See the differing
accounts of the foremost Cambridge Platonist’s system of ethics by Stephen Darwall,
The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 109–49, and Michael B. Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature
and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
38–57. While Leech generally offers a middle path, the following account views both
thinkers as deeply original representatives of a practical rationalism based upon
the doctrine of eros as put forward in Plato’s Symposium, Plotinus’s On Beauty and
122 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. On the profound elective affinity between
Plato and Kant, see Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 24), 148–51.
31 Henry More, Discourses on Several Texts of Holy Scripture (London: Printed by J. R.,
1692), 62–3.
32 The correspondence was published as an appendix to John Norris, The Theory and
Regulation of Love: A Moral Essay (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre for Hen. Clements,
1688), 188.
33 More, Enchiridion Ethicum I 2,5 (Opera Omnia III /1, 12; Account of Virtue, 6). The
bibliographical references given are those of the 1679 complete edition of More’s
Latin works and the early modern English translation by Robert Southwell, An
Account of Virtue or Dr Henry More’s Abridgement of Morals, London: Printed for
Benj. Tooke, 1690. More’s highly successful Enchiridion Ethicum may be the single
most important work on the subject. A first helpful, yet overly critical, survey of
More’s principal ethical concepts of the ‘boniform faculty’ and ‘right reason’ is
provided by G. N. Dolson, ‘The Ethical System of Henry More’, The Philosophical
Review 6 (1897): 593–607, who wrongly judges More’s attempt at the said ‘system’ to
be contradictory.
34 More, Divine Dialogues, 2nd edn (London: Printed and sold by Joseph Downing,
1713), 170.
35 Id., Enchiridion Ethicum II 9,16 (Opera Omnia II/1, 61; Account of Virtue, 157).
36 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 375.
37 More, Enchiridion Ethicum II 9,16 (Opera Omnia II/1, 61; Account of Virtue, 157–8).
38 More, Cupid’s Conflict, in The Complete Poems of Dr Henry More, collected and edited
by Alexander B. Grosart(Printed for private circulation, 1878), 171.
39 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 315.
40 Id., Sermon before the House of Commons, 126–7.
41 More, Enchiridion Ethicum, I 5,1 (Opera omnia II/1, 24; Account of Virtue, 28).
42 More, Second Lash of Alazonomastix (Cambridge: Printers to the University of
Cambridge, 1651), 43.
43 Id., Praefatio Generalissima VII (Opera Omnia II/1, V–VI) = Richard Ward, The Life
of Henry More. Parts I and II, edited by Sarah Hutton et al. (Dordrecht, Boston and
London: Springer, 2000), 15.
44 See More‘s two short poems tracing his conversion in his Complete Poems, 182.
45 More, Second Lash, 43. Daniel Fouke, The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More.
Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion, Leiden/New York/Cologne: Brill
1997, 124–5, overlooks the emphatically ethical character of More’s early vision of
the Divine which, despite all verbal resemblances, clearly sets Cambridge Platonist
mysticism apart from Vaughan’s alchemistic variety of Hermeticism and Platonism:
‘More inadvertently displayed the value of ecstasy and extroversive mysticism (or
nature-mysticism) as elements of his own spirituality. More’s language was suggestive
of the very pantheistic tendencies he found in Vaughan.’
46 Id., The Preface Generall, in: A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, 4th
edition, London: Printed by Joseph Downing, 1712, viii.
47 Id., Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, 39).
48 See, for example, id., Enchiridion Ethicum I 3,11 (Opera Omnia II/1, 16–17; Account
of Virtue, 19) I 3,11: ‘Wherefore, if men will abide by the Judgment of Aristotle or
Pythagoras, or others of the most celebrated, they must own that the Measure of Right
Reason is to imitate the Divine Wisdom, and the Divine Goodness, with all our Might.’
49 Ibid., II 9,16 (Op. Omn. II/1, 61; Account, 157).
 
Cogitatione Attingere 123

50 Ibid., II 9,15 (Op. Omn. II/1, 61; Account, 156–157).

51 Ibid. (Op. omn. II/1, Account, 158). More could in fact have replaced the ‘either or’
with a ‘both and’ as the form of the good is both the divine principle beyond and the
highest cognitive power in man.
52 More, Discourses on Several Texts, 479.
53 Ibid., 483.
54 More provides the most detailed treatment of his trichotomy of lives and virtues in
his principal theological work The Grand Mystery of Godliness (The Theological Works
of Henry More (London: Printed and sold by Joseph Downing, 1708), 28–30).
55 More, Discourses on Several Texts, 484–5.
56 More, Grand Mystery of Godliness, 37.
57 More, Divine Dialogues, 131.
58 Cudworth, Sermon before the House of Commons, 99.
59 Ibid., 125, where the preacher uses a plethora of synonymous terms to extol the soul’s
permanent participation in divine love as the archetypal principle of freedom.
60 In his major exposition of his concept of freedom in A Treatise Concerning Eternal and
Immutable Morality With A Treatise of Freewill, edited by Sarah Hutton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 196–7, Cudworth expressly excludes contingent
choice from the ‘true liberty of a man’: ‘I have now but one thing more to add, and
that is to take notice of a common mistake which learned men have been guilty of,
confounding this faculty of freewill with liberty as it is a state of pure perfection,
for what is more common than in writings both ancient and modern, to find men
creaking and boasting of the ἐξουσία τῶν ἀντικειμένων, the liberty of contrariety, i.e. to
be in an indifferent equilibrious state to do good or evil, which is too like the language
of the first tempter, “Thou shalt be a God knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Whereas
the true liberty of a man, as it speaks pure perfection is when by the right use of the
faculty of freewill, together with the assistances of Divine grace, he is habitually fixed
in moral good, or such a state of mind, as that he doth freely, readily, and easily comply
with the law of the Divine life, taking a pleasure in complacence thereunto; and having
an aversation to the contrary; or when the law of the spirit of life hath made him free
from the law of sin, which is the death of the soul.’
61 While in agreement with More in general intention and argument, Cudworth
provides the most philosophically satisfactory doctrine of divine and human double
agency.
62 Cudworth, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, in The True
Intellectual System of the Universe, A new Edition by Thomas Birch (London: Printed
by J.F. Dove, 1820), IV, 377.
63 Cudworth, Treatise of Freewill, 173.
64 Ibid., 174. The passage in A Treatise of Freewill is remarkable for the density of
metaphorical expressions ranging from technical Aristotelian language and the
vocabulary of spiritual sensation to words and images borrowed from Hellenistic
ethics and early modern alchemy: ‘But above all these, and such like things, the soul
of man hath in it μάντευμά τι, a certain vaticination, presage, scent, and odour of one
summum bonum, one supreme highest good transcending all others, without which,
they will be all ineffectual as to complete happiness and signify nothing, a certain
philosopher’s stone that can turn all into gold.’
65 Ibid.
66 On Cudworth’s doctrine of the ἡγεμονικόν, which amounts to a major early
modern theory of human self-consciousness and agency, see Jean-Louis Breteau,
124 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

‘Un grand espace pour la liberté? Le dilemme du libre arbitre dans la pensée
de Ralph Cudworth’, Archives de Philosophie 58 (1995): 421–41, and ‘Origène
était-il pour Cudworth le modèle du philosophe chrétien?’, in ‘Mind Senior to the
World’: Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica del Seicento inglese, edited
by Marialuisa Baldi (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1996), 127–47, esp. 140–4. See also the
most recent depiction by Oscar M. Esquisabel and María Griselda Gaiada, ‘Le libre
arbitre et “le paradoxe des facultés”. Suárez, Hobbes et Leibniz selon le jugement
de Cudworth’, Studia Leibnitiana 47 (2015): 162–85, and Christian Hengstermann,
‘Platonismus und Panentheismus bei Ralph Cudworth’, in Persönlich und alles
zugleich. Theorien der All-Einheit und christliche Gottrede, edited by Frank Meier-
Hammidi and Klaus Müller (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2010), 192–211. Hedley
provides a historical and systematic reading of Cudworth’s momentous Origenist
concept of the practical unity of the self in: ‘Cudworth on Freedom: Theology, Ethical
Obligation and the Limits of Mechanism’, in Fürst and Christian (ed.), Cambridge
Origenists (see n. 3), 47–58, and Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 24), 113–19, respectively.
See, above all, the précis of Cudworth’s Christian Platonist view of hegemonic moral
action in the second volume on the religious imagination (113–14), in which the
author, using Morean terminology, highlights its connection with the Cambridge
Platonist mysticism of the boniform vision of the kenotic Deity: ‘Insofar as the finite
will is conformed to, contemplates and participates in, its transcendent source,
boniform, as it were, right action follows. The goal is not the coordination of will
and intellect as “that which is properly we ourselves.” Cudworth uses the term
“hegemonikon” (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν) to mark his distinctly Christian philosophy. The
ruling self is not oblivious to the suffering, misery, and misfortune of the humble
and the unlettered like the great Stoic or Platonic sages. Following Origen, Cudworth
thinks that love fulfils the Platonic ideal of Goodness.’
67 Cudworth, Treatise of Freewill, 178.
68 Ibid., 179. Cudworth does not eschew deliberate paradox in his description of unified
hegemonic agency which must possess both intellectual and volitional traits: ‘And
thus may it well be conceived that one and the same reasonable soul in us may both
will understandingly, or knowingly of what it wills; and understand or think of this
or that object willingly.’
69 Cudworth, Sermon before the House of Commons, 126–7.
70 Cudworth, Sermon Preached to Lincoln’s Inn, 37.
71 This is the title of the seminal chapter on Neoplatonist anthropology in Werner
Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer
Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 73–113.
72 Cudworth, British Library, Ms. Add. 4982, 50.
73 ‘True Life’ is the titular concept of the important monograph by Werner Beierwaltes,
Das wahre Selbst. Studien zu Plotins Begriff des Geistes und des Einen (Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klostermann, 2001).
74 British Library Ms Add. 4979, 39.
75 British Library Ms. Add. 4982, 40.
76 British Library Ms. Add. 4980, 83.
77 Ibid., 10.
78 George Rust, ‘God Is Love’, in The Remains of that Reverend and Learned Prelate, Dr.
George Rust, Late Lord Bishop of Dromore, in the Kingdom of Ireland, collected and
published by Henry Hallywell (London: printed by M. Flesher, 1686), 7.
79 Ibid., 5.
 
Cogitatione Attingere 125

80 More, Complete Poems, 36.

81 Ibid., 146.
82 Rust, ‘God Is Love’, 5.
83 Smith, Select Discourses, 159. Cf. the analysis of the Cambridge Platonists’ notion
of sacrifice in terms of the Neoplatonist dialectic of archetype and image in Hedley,
Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 24), 16: ‘If we are to think of sacrifice as the reigniting of
the spark of the soul, then we need to consider this idea of a soul center kindled at
the Divine altar, and its return to its source – transformed into the “likeness” of God.’
84 Cf. the in-depth analysis of Cudworth’s neglected early work in Hedley, Sacrifice
Imagined (see n. 24), 203–11.
85 Cudworth, The True Notion of the Lord’s Supper (True Intellectual System, IV, 231).
86 Ibid., 268.
87 Ibid., 271.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., 283.
90 See Hedley’s speculative Christological interpretation of Cudworth’s early treatise
in Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 24), 207, which revolves around the latter’s ‘concern to
show the legitimacy of the link with the Passover Festival in Christus Consummator’:
‘The Christian sacrifice can symbolize the sacrificial energy that finds expression in
much human culture. Anthropology and revelation touch. Christ is a way of seeing
the invisible world. He is the great High Priest who opens the veil of the Temple and
reveals the Divine essence. As the blood-stained Logos, he opens the Heavens.’
91 More, Several Texts of Holy Scripture, 315.
92 Ibid., 316.
93 Ibid., 320.
94 More, Grand Mystery of Godliness, 28.
95 Norris, Theory and Regulation of Love, 187. Cf. also More, Divine Dialogues, 164,
where the author puts forth this notion against the backdrop of his soul-making
theodicy of adversities as the sine qua non of the providential flourishing of human
virtue and humility.
96 More, Several Texts of Holy Scripture, 323.
97 Ibid., 342.
98 Ibid., 340–1.
99 Ibid., 340.
100 Ibid., 344.
101 Ibid., 355.
102 Ibid., 351.
103 Two Choice and Useful Treatises: The One Lux Orientalis; The Other, A Discourse
of Truth, By the Late Reverend Dr. Rust Lord Bishop of Dromore in Ireland. With
Annotations on them Both (London: Printed for James Collins, 1682), 179.
104 Rust, ‘God Is Love’, 14.
105 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Reality (see n. 60), 141.
106 Cudworth, Lord’s Supper, 217.
107 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Reality, 138.
108 Ibid., 51.
109 Ibid., 53.
110 Ibid., 54.
111 See More’s succinct juxtaposition of empiricism and rationalism in An Antidote
Against Atheism (London: printed by Roger Daniel, 1653), 13, which is virtually
126 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

identical with Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality, 84. On the Cambridge
Platonists’ innatism, see Robert L. Armstrong, ‘Cambridge Platonists and Locke on
Innate Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 187–202.
112 More, Antidote, 13.
113 Although Henry More does subscribe to the dogma of pre-existence, he never makes
use of it in the context of his rationalist epistemology. Instead, his is a thoroughly
Origenist, rather than Platonist doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, which he posits
not on the grounds of a priori knowledge, but rational theodicy alone.
114 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality, 74.
115 More, Antidote, 13.
116 Contrary to the overly lavish praise bestowed upon the Cambridge Platonists by
Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Kant and the English Platonists’, in Essays Philosophical and
Psychological: In Honor of William James by His Colleagues at Columbia University
(New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), 265–302, who credits Cudworth with
virtually anticipating all of subsequent German critical thought, the lists of categories
provided in the author’s Eternal and Immutable Morality, 80, 84, lack the systematic
coherence of the later Kantian doctrine. However, a distinction between the most
fundamental categories of thought as thought and an object as object appears to be at
work in the first survey of categories cited earlier.
117 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Reality, 93. Cf. ibid., 90, where Cudworth
attributes to man’s intellect ‘a logical unitive, comprehensive power and activity as
can frame out of them [i.e. relative ideas] one idea of the whole.’
118 Ibid., 92.
119 Ibid., 121.
120 More, Grand Mystery of Godliness, 51.
121 More, Conjectura Cabbalistica or A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of
Moses in a Threefold Cabbala (London: Printed by James Flesher, 1653), The Preface
to the Reader.
122 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality, 77.
123 Ibid.
124 Ibid., 96.
125 Ibid., 93.
126 Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 24), 151.
 5

Aids to reflection and imagining God

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of the imagination
Friedrich A. Uehlein

1 Introduction
How can we begin and make sure that ‘imagination’ does not lose half its meaning and
the reality meant? Coleridge’s aid to reflection is to fall back on principles. ‘Whatever
may have been the specific theme of my communications, and whether they related to
criticism, politics, or religion, still Principles, their subordination, their connection,
and their application, in all divisions of our tastes, duties, rules of conduct and schemes
of belief, have constituted my chapter of contents’ (LS 125–6).1 According to his aid,
the attempt to tackle the investigation of the imagination, what it is and what it does,
directly would not lead far. Its foundation in the principle I am and the eduction from
it has to be undertaken.2
The final question touched on in this chapter, which is whether the imagination
is able to evoke and transform things of the experiential life, so that they become
translucent symbols of an encompassing reality, presupposes this foundation and
eduction.

2 Foundation

2.1 The principle I am

The thought I am manifests ‘that which affirms its own existence and whether mediately
or immediately that of other beings’ (Lects Phil 371). ‘In the Sum or I AM’, Coleridge
writes in the twelfth chapter of the Biographia Literaria,

and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each
involving and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes a
subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an
object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject.
(BL I 272–3)
128 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

The I, the subject-object, does not exist apart from this original act. The truth of this act
of self-consciousness is original, immediate and independent.3
But when the I grasps and knows itself as the self-constructing subject-object, does it
not remain undetermined and inane? The object determined is the determining subject,
the determining subject, however, is to determine itself, since ‘by constructing itself
objectively to itself [. . .] it becomes a subject’. And yet, this unity (unification and even
identity) of subject and object, thought and being, is the principle of knowledge ‘of itself and
of other beings’. In case there should be other beings, they must be for the I am. They cannot
be given to the I somehow, from somewhere: an unnameable, unknowable no-thing. To
become something – objects – the principle of knowledge must produce them for itself.
Furthermore, how could there be an outside somewhere, an ‘Outness’, unless the I had not
produced for itself such a sphere beyond itself? The principle of knowledge is consummate
knowledge.4 The subject-object cannot rest in the self-evidence of its original act, in which
it is and is for itself. In the original act it is and has itself in an open, incomplete and still
indefinite form: in the dynamical process of Self-seeking and Self-finding.5
I repeat the last step of the argument by means of another quotation from Coleridge’s
Notebooks:

The I = Self = Spirit is definable as a Subject whose only possible Predicate is itself
– Ergo, a Subject which is its own Object, i.e., a Subject-Object. But Object quoad
Object is necessarily [. . .] self-capable of no Action but only the Object of the
action. The Spirit therefore cannot be an Object, [. . .] it is a being it – (nicht seyn,
sondern werden). It becomes an Object thro’ its own act – But whatever is ipso
termino and in its essence finite, is essentially an object.6

The object under consideration so far, however, has neither been incapable of action
nor been essentially finite. The object determined has been the determining subject,
the finite has been the defining. For this very reason, the act I am does not lead to
any definite contents of self-knowledge. And still, it does not lack determination; its
determination is to produce and to encompass all finite determinations. To know itself,
it must limit itself in finite objectifications and cannot terminate in any:

Is it then infinite? [. . .] it can neither be infinite without being at the same time
finite, nor can it be finite (for itself) without being at the same time infinite. – It
is therefore neither the one nor the other, alone, but [. . .] the primary Union of
Finity and Infinity – and this is the third characteristic, or form of development.
(CN III 4186)

It ‘cannot be an Object, it is a being it’ in its self-development7 through the history of its
Self-seeking and Self-finding.

2.2 The self-development of the principle

Coleridge pursues this history in a subtle dialectical chain of arguments. (On the whole
he follows Schelling.8) I follow him, though not in full details. My aim is to find the
position of the imagination within the course of the development of the I.
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 129

The I am is ‘the most original union’ and ‘originally the identity of both’, subject
and object (BL I 280; CN III 4186). It neither exists before this union – it originates
in it – nor does it result from it and is left behind, a dead end. What remains after
constructing itself objectively to itself still is the most original union and identity
giving origin to further objectifications. ‘Most original union’ and ‘original identity’
express the actuality (taken literally) of the I am. Subject and object neither part nor
neutralize each other. Their opposition does not drive them apart; neither can it be
settled nor can it vanish: ‘In the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this
contradiction consists the process and mystery of production and life’ (BL I 280–1).
‘Identity’ in Coleridge’s philosophy neither means a fact nor depends on a solid
thing or a core of stillness; it consists in the process, production and life of the principle.
In the entry of his notebook just quoted, Coleridge interrupts the string of arguments
and anticipates a later stage of the development. He speaks about the individual person
and her essence: ‘In this absolute Co-presence of the Infinite and the Finite lies the
essence of an Individual Nature, of the Self (der Ichheit)’ (CN III 4186 f33v). When we
think and begin to reflect, we are already single cases of the Ichheit. But we do not know
it yet. We are essentially I am and encompass the stages of development which we have
passed through so far unconsciously. The self ‘then is no other than this activity and
this limitation, both conceived as co-instantaneous’ (ibid., f34v). How can it reconcile
its boundless (subjective) activity with the bounds of (a determinate) objectification?
It limits itself:

It is Power self-bounded by retroition on itself, and is only for itself –. –But in

Self-limitation is implied the co-existence of Activity & Passivity – The Spirit is at
once active & passive, and as this is a condition sine quâ non of our Consciousness,
this union, this absolute Oneness of the Active & the Passive must be another
characteristic of an individual Nature – i.e. a new development of the original Self-
predication [I am]. (ibid)

‘Passivity’ does not suggest that the I is affected by something unknowable, from
the outside. It can only be conceived in the co-existence – or strictly speaking – the
‘absolute Oneness’ with activity: ‘Passivity = negative Action’ (ibid). In the union of
activity and passive activeness, the spirit limits itself, constructs itself objectively to
itself, but does not lose itself in the bounds of objectivity. The ‘Power self-bounded’
transcends them by re-introition on itself: it beholds itself within its limitations.
The co-existence and wavering between being active and being passive, and the
union and absolute oneness of both within the self-bounded power, is termed by
Coleridge ‘imagination’. Coleridge reads the German equivalent – ‘Einbildungskraft’ –
as ‘In-eins-Bildung’ and consequently understands the imagination to denote the power
of ‘shaping into one’. The I am at this stage of self-development, unifying (ineinsbildend)
activity and passivity, and beholding itself (sich selbst anschauend) is ‘Imagination’,
‘Einbildungskraft’, ‘In-eins-Bildung’, ‘Eisenoplasy’.9 Imagination, Coleridge adds, is not
only actualized in this ‘development of the original Self-predication’ but in different
potencies: ‘In philosophical language we must denominate this intermediate faculty
in all it degrees and determinations, the Imagination. But in common language, and
130 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of this
faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it’ (BL I 124–5). To sum up:

a. Imagination is the ‘eisenoplasy’ (εἰς+ἔν+πλάσσω), In-eins-Bildung, unity and

oneness of activity and passivity.
b. It is a certain stage in the self-development of the principle.
c. It is a characteristic of an individual nature.
d. It is realized in different degrees and determinations or potencies. Coleridge
resumes this distinction in his famous definition of ‘the primary Imagination’,
that is, the original potency as touched on in a.–c., and ‘the secondary
Imagination’(BL I 304).

2.3 The systematic position of the imagination

The position of the imagination is determined by its origin in the principle and by the
development that arises from it.
In the union of activity and passivity, the spirit limits itself and beholds itself
within its limitation. The object or presence beheld is the intuiting spirit. The present
beholding and the presence beheld coincide. They are one and indistinct since it is still
the original self-production of the I am that has developed into this intuition or simple,
direct beholding. Therefore the spirit does not rest (and lose itself) in this intuition
and the presence beheld. Even in this immediate vision it is still the intuiting subject:
the I am. It transcends the limitation of the direct intuition and the presence beheld
by going back to what it has been and is through all moments of its process. Coleridge
calls this ‘retroition on itself ’.10 The spirit reflects the direct intuition and its presence
beheld, so that it becomes visio visa: ‘Anschauung des Angeschauten [i.e. primary
intuition, visio] und Anschauung der Anschauung des Angeschauten [i.e. visio visa].’11
The reflection does not leave the intuition alone, as it were; it does not let it be what
it is. By re-introition on itself the I am proves to be the very beginning and pervading
force of the process – ‘the Spirit snatches it self loose from its own self-immersion, and
self-actualizing distinguishes itself from its Self-realization’ (CN III 4186 f 35 v). The
moments of the direct, simple intuition differentiate into the intuited (the limited self),
the intuition (the act of limitation and beholding) and the intuiting and reflecting self.
The I distinguishes itself and feels its own self-realization, feels its own state of being.
In order to explain the specific meaning of ‘feeling’, Coleridge refers repeatedly to its
German equivalent: ‘the German word for (. . .) feeling is Empfindung, i.e. an inward
finding’ (C&S 180). ‘A sensation, a Feeling is what I find in me as in me – Emp = intra
euphonicè for Ent; – finde’12 (CN III 4443). ‘A Sensation = a Feeling referring to some
Thing, and yet not organized into a definite Object nor separated from the sentient
Being’ (CN II 3605).
No more immersed in its immediate visio, but reflecting it by retroition on itself,
the I finds in itself some ‘Thing’, neither separated nor organized into a definite object.
What is found is not a feeling, but something felt. The I grasps its own state of being.
In this new objectification, it has developed a new self-consciousness. Feeling itself,
it becomes a sentient, percipient consciousness which finds and discerns for itself
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 131

something different from itself. What is perceived is not a perception, but something
perceived: ‘In every act of conscious perception, we at once identify our being with that
of the world without us, and yet place ourselves in contra-distinction to that world’
(Friend I 497). In the union of activity and passivity, that is, the ‘primary Imagination’,
originates the course of objectifications and stages of self-consciousness that will lead
eventually to the temporal, individual, embodied person in the common interpersonal
world.13

3 Finite and infinite I am

3.1 Principium Cognoscendi et Essendi

‘I AM (. . .) In this and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical’
(BL I 272–3). The question whether the subject-object is does not make sense. The
I am is in its own act and knows itself to be. The act affirms its existence (BL I 251).
Coleridge compares this ἐνέργεια αὐτόνομος (CN ΙΙΙ 4265 ΙΙΙ) of self-production with
the contemplation (θεωρία) of Nature (φύσις), discussed by Plotinus in the third Ennead
(III 8,4). The lines which bound the bodies come to be through her contemplation.
‘Plotinus (. . .) speaking of the geometricians and then of Nature as acting geometrically
(. . .) says θεωρουσα θεωρηματα ποιει, her contemplative act is creative and is one with
the product of her contemplation’ (Logic 74). The analogy seems obvious but needs
further discrimination. Nature beholds the boundaries not as already existing. In her act
of beholding ὑφίστανται αἱ τῶν σωμάτῶν γραμμαί, Coleridge translates ὑφίστανται with
‘rise up into existence’: the act of contemplation makes the things contemplated; in her
contemplation the forms of things rise up into existence.14
Is the original act of the subject-object such a creative beholding? Does the I in its
‘realizing intuition’ in which it affirms its existence bring itself forth into existence?
Nature – dramatized into a person – says that she does not stem from her own realizing
intuition. She rises into existence out of the θεωρία of ‘greater rational principles, and
as they contemplate themselves I come to be’ (Enn III 8,4,12). In order to know herself,
she has to turn inward upon herself and to return to the higher principles in which
she has her ground and from which she came to be. At this point of his theses on
transcendental philosophy (BL I 274 scholium; cf. also CN III 4265,I–V; Logic 84–5),
Coleridge distinguishes the I am and the individual person who, actualizing the
absolute act, knows herself to be. In this spontaneous, free act she becomes what she
essentially is, a self-conscious being, but does not rise into existence. The principle of
knowledge – principium cognoscendi – and the principle of being – principium essendi
– are set into relief:

If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer, sum quia sum.
But if (the absoluteness of his certainty having been admitted) he again be asked,
how he, the individual person, came to be, then, in relation to the ground of his
existence, but not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply,
[. . .] sum quia in Deo sum. (BL I 274)
132 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

The man asked – the individual person, ourselves doing philosophy here and now – is
and is self-known. He is (a case of the) I am, a transcendental subject, and therefore
principium cognoscendi, but, nevertheless, does not come to be from his own free act,
but from ‘another’: ‘I know that I am because I am and am self-conscious; but that I am
and know myself to be, there is but one assignable reason – the Being and Will which
we express by the word ‘God’ (Logic 84–5).

3.2 The absolute I AM

And yet, the one in which he exists and is a transcendental subject cannot be different
from him. It cannot be an object, since objects depend on his objectifying acts. Neither
can it be another self equally indigent of being. The ground in which he is and from
which he came to be is no other thing or self but the non aliud: the absolute self:

But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I AM,
then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea and reality; the ground of
existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical,
Sum quia sum; I am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be because
I am.15

The individual person elevates her thought to the eternal I AM. The moment of being
that cannot be posited by the transcendental subject – I exist and am a self-developing
subject-object – manifests the absolute self: ‘We begin with the I Know myself, in
order to end with the absolute I am. We proceed from the Self, in order to lose and
find all self in God.’16
The individual person has become conscious and Self-conscious within the
process of Self-seeking and self-finding, that is, through the subconscious history
and her experiencing, thinking and practical life. She knows herself and still loses
herself since she does not exist through the original act I am. By a deliberate act of
reflection, she snatches herself loose from her still ungrounded existence and elevates
herself to the eternal self-finding of the absolute self (CN III 4351). Nothing remains
to be objectified and mediated in further steps of self-seeking. And yet, there is no
final act and fixed state. The self-finding does not terminate, but wells up in itself in a
processio intercircularis (CN IV 400). It is the eternal act of the inner-Trinitarian life
of the absolute: ‘I am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be because I
am’ (BL I 275). The absolute self is grounded in itself and for itself: causa sui.17 Causa
sui therefore means the ‘Antecedent of Being [. . .] the absolute Will, the ground of
Being – the Self-affirming Actus purissimus’ (CM II 287) and the life of the absolute
self. Both aspects express one and the same thing. (What grounds itself cannot be a
result, it lives in itself; what lives by and in itself cannot have a cause apart from itself.)
Coleridge endeavours to grasp causa sui as the intrinsic self-disclosure of ‘the One and
the Absolute’ (LS 32). He conflates the Neoplatonic Ἕν and Νοῦς, the One and the
Spirit. Ἕν and Νοῦς, the ὑπερούσιον, that is, the One beyond being, and the Spirit, that
is, the principle of reflexive rationality and fullness of being (pleroma), the One beyond
any relation and the consummate relationship of all into one, are thought together.18
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 133

The absolute self is ‘the only One, the purely and absolutely one’ (CN I 1680). Before all
alterity and anterior to the unity and opposition of subject and object, it has disclosed
itself into its inner-trinitarian life. It contains in itself the ground of its own nature, and
therein of all natures (LS 32), and can be the ground of other beings.

3.3 Creation
Pantheism and Spinoza’s concept of God have been attacked by Coleridge almost
throughout his whole career.19 How does the processio intercircularis of the Trinity
include and bring forth the creation of the contingent world? Coleridge’s critique pivots
on the freedom of ‘the abysmal Ground of the Trinity’. It is free, that is, not limited
by conditions and alternatives, and is beyond the bounds of decision. He therefore
conceives it as the absolute Will: I shall be in that I will to be (CM II 287). The causa
sui is beyond any relation and therefore not the necessary cause of the world. Causality
would relate it to the contingent world and make it dependent on it. It is cause in and for
itself and not through the causal interrelation with the world. That the abysmal ground
permits contingent beings (including the finite I am) to exist and to become what they
are in the process of the universe is not necessary to it. But neither can it be a random
act, since there is nothing erratic and accidental in the absolute. Creation is the free
resolution ‘of a self-comprehending Creator. These two words, “self-comprehending”,
and “Creator” involve the (. . .) Trinity, and the essential distinction between the (. . .)
eternal generation of the Logos [νοῦς, pleroma] and the creation of the universe of
finite Beings’ (CN III 3878).

3.4 Corollary
With his turn to the individual person, Coleridge parts company with pure
transcendental philosophy that does not search for an absolute principle of being,
but an absolute principle of knowledge. He cannot accept its claim to absoluteness
because the finite self, still considered to be the principle of knowledge, is grounded
in the absolute self. Transcendental subjectivity as the principle of philosophy is
limited and transformed into the philosophy of the finite mind,20 and at the same time
universalized: the principle of knowledge and the principle of being are identical in the
One and the Absolute: ‘We begin with the I know myself, in order to end with the
absolute I am’ (BL I 283). Transcendental philosophy loses its claim to absoluteness,
is enclosed, as it were, and sublated in ‘a total and undivided philosophy’ (ibid. 282).
A similar metamorphosis can be observed in Schelling. In his Philosophy of Identity
– with the end of the System (1800) and onwards – transcendental philosophy proper
becomes obsolete. When it reappears later on, for example, in the Freiheitsschrift, it has
lost its original status. Like Schelling, though not to the same extent and in a different
style, Coleridge endeavours to grasp all and everything as an ordered and graduated
universe, grounded in the One and Absolute. The elaboration of this total and
undivided philosophy raises and provides answers to central questions of metaphysics
and the Platonic tradition in particular.
134 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

4 Imagination

4.1 Primary imagination

‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of
all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM’ (BL I 202). ‘Perception’ means the feeling and finding,
the act of receiving and taking possession of, the awareness, apprehension and
sensation and even comprehension, understanding and notion of something. When
Coleridge speaks of ‘all human Perception’, he implies the whole spectrum. But why
can the imagination be called the ‘living power and prime Agent of all Perception’?
He has conceived of imagination proper as the unification of passivity and activity
in the incipient self-development of the I am. In the ‘eisenplastic’ power originate
the course of objectifications and the stages of our subconscious, conscious and
practical life. All human perceptions arise from it and are activated by it. Thus,
the first part of the definition of the imagination goes back to the transcendental
structure of the I. The second resumes the manifestation of the absolute in the finite
person. We need not read and neglect this completion as an excessive assertion. It
does not come unheralded. On the contrary, Coleridge has good reasons to speak
of the imagination ‘as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in
the infinite I AM’.
Creation does not originate in the imagination. The One beyond being actualizes
the processual universe in a free act out of the fullness of being. Each existent is
determined by the ideas, that is, the differentiated and unified ‘distinctities’ of being.21
By participation in them it is something, does appear, and can be felt and found,
perceived and understood. Through them it is intelligible. The finite mind repeats the
eternal act of creation. In the process of Self-seeking and Self-finding, it objectifies
a world for itself. The creation and the construction of the objective world show
traits of an analogy. The temporal process of self-development is conceived of as an
image of the eternal self-finding; the free act in which the universe comes to be is
seen as the paradigm of the objective construction. Imagination and its product are
‘a dim Analogue of Creation, not all that we can believe, but all that we can conceive
of creation’ (CL II 1034). Being a finite I am in the eternal I AM, he repeats the
eternal act in the primary imagination and what originates in it, that is, the temporal
acts of self-development, in which the common world becomes objective. Without
this repetition there could be nothing for us, nothing felt and found, sensed and
perceived. The primary imagination repeats the creation insofar as we construct the
world objectively to us.
Insofar as we become subjects in the very same process, the analogy breaks.
The dissimilarity of the image breaks through. The process of objectification is
the counterpart of self-development. None does exist without the other. Between
the absolute and the universe, however, there consists no correlation, let alone a
development of the absolute I AM. The world rises into existence by the free act of its
will. The term ‘repetition’ captures the similarity and the categorial difference between
the infinite and the finite self, the paradigm and the dim analogue.
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 135

4.2 Secondary imagination

Not only in the original In-eins-Bildung of activity and passivity, but in all its degrees
and determinations (BL I 124) the imagination remains a repetition of the eternal act:

The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with

the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,
and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its Operation. It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet
still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. (BL I 202)

The secondary imagination differs in two characteristics. It is not the prime agent
and it co-exists with the conscious will. It is not the life and agent of all human
perception, but presupposes it. It receives its materials from it. But it still echoes the
primary imagination insofar as it recreates what it receives. The materials received
obviously consist of the perceptions of the subconscious and conscious life of man.
The second difference appears to be even more important. How can the conscious will
be brought together and mediated with the imagination? The I am is and knows itself
unconditionally, in a free act. It is not apart from it. It is no thing, nor does it depend
on anything. It is in this act that it constructs itself objectively to itself and ‘becomes’
the self-grounded subject-object:

the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve
this identity, in order to become conscious of it: fit alter et idem. But this implies
an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible
except by and in a will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom
must be assured as a ground of philosophy and can never be deduced from it. (BL
I 279–80)

Transcendental philosophy conceives of the I am as the aboriginal will of self-

production. This still unconscious will pervades the primary imagination. The
objectification of the world, however, remains incomplete as long as it is not realized in
the practical interpersonal life. In its process the self eventually develops into a conscious
and self-conscious individual person within the objectified common world shared
with other persons. The aboriginal will becomes conscious, conscious will, moral
will and conscience in their practical lives.22 The materials received from the primary
imagination and the later stages originating in it comprise the results of our perceptive
and practical life, namely, what we construct subconsciously in passive activity and
active passiveness, what we feel, sense and desire, what happens to us, what we
experience and live through, what we suffer and do, wish and intend, bring to pass and
miss. Commending Cervantes, Coleridge sums up in a deceptively simple statement
what the secondary imagination receives and what it does to it: ‘his imagination was
ever at hand to adapt and modify the world of his experience’ (Literary Remains I 131).
How can it be creative? Is it not fettered by the particular items of experience? There
exists indeed such a power of spontaneous receptivity which ‘has no other counters to
136 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

play with, but fixities and definites’ (BL I 305). Coleridge calls it ‘fancy’. Fancy retains
the perceptions when the acts of perception and volition and their correspondent
objects pass out of their present beholding and presence beheld. Detached from their
immediate presence, they are re-presented and reproduced according to the law of
association. ‘The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the
order of time and space’ (ibid.).23 Without retention, representation and reproduction
‘there would be no fixation, consequently, no distinct perception and conception’ (CN
III 4066). The continuous mental life would disintegrate into an atomic multiplicity.
Strictly speaking, it would not even have come to pass at all. The mind could not come
back to what it has perceived and conceived. Experience, sustained thought, language
and any kind of anticipation would be rendered impossible. In the present context,
Coleridge is less interested in the epistemological function of the fancy than in the
service it does to the secondary imagination, notwithstanding their difference.24 The
secondary imagination receives its materials mediated through the fixation of fancy.
Like the primary one it is vital, whereas the products of fancy, the ‘objects (as objects)
are essentially fixed and dead’. They can be remembered and fancy seems to be ‘a
mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space’. Imagination does
not remember and associate the fixed items of the empirical life; it recollects them:
‘It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’ (BL I 202). The particulars are
released from their fixation. They become disponible. They pass away in the process
of recreation and unification into new wholes. When the imagination fails to succeed
in this process, when it cannot help keeping close to single occurrences and items of
the empirical life, even then – and it could not be expressed more emphatically – it
struggles to idealize and unify, at all events. It recreates with regard to an idea, idealizes
with a view towards a specific form of being that unifies the many into one. In the last
resort it looks to the ideas or ‘distinctities’ in the fulness of being.

4.3 The symbol

‘I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle that poetry is essentially ideal, that it
avoids and excludes accident’ (BL II 45–6). The world of experience as presented by fancy
and memory is full of accidents and fringes out in loose ends. The poetic imagination
recollects what it receives and unifies it into a meaningful whole: the unifying idea
shines through the sensible appearance. The poem and the world it creates come to be
in the process of re-creation and idealization. The imagination directs the conscious
will during the labour of writing and – when it succeeds – embodies the idea ‘in Images
of the Sense, and (. . .) gives birth to a system of Symbols’. The famous passage reads in
full: the imagination ‘that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the
Reason [i.e. the power of viewing ideas] in Images of Sense, and organizing (as it were)
the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of Reason, gives
birth to a system of Symbols, harmonious in themselves and consubstantial with the
truths, of which they are the conductors’.25
However, is the poem and what it creates not undervalued when it is reduced to a
system of symbols? Does it mean something different from itself? Is it degraded to a
set of arbitrary signs which are noticed, superficially, and can justly be forgotten, when
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 137

they have done their job? The term ‘symbol’ does not imply such an anti-climax. On the
contrary, it is an abbreviation of the whole argument. The sensual-symbolical world of
the poem does not vanish in pointing to something that it is not. It is neither a metaphor
nor an allegory, but tautegorical: ‘a Symbol ὁ ἔστιν ἄει ταυτεγόρικον’ – a symbol is
always what it expresses (SM 30). It embodies what it means and ‘always partakes of
the Reality which it renders intelligible’ (ibid.), namely, the idea which determines and
unifies and appears in it: Forma formans in formam formatam translucens (BL II 215).

5 Imagining God
What appears and shines through the symbols of the re-creation of the natural and
human world? In the first instance the specific ideas of each poem. All those individual
forms of being, however, do not rest in splendid isolation. Each form relates to each other.
They are mediated by virtue of their identity and alterity.26 What shines through are the
companionship of human persons, the community with nature and the connectedness
in an ordered universe, the ‘inbeing of all in each’ (LS XXX). Fundamentally, in the
last analysis, it is the creation, the fulness of all forms of being (pleroma), and the
free will of the absolute that shine through the symbolical re-creation. The human
world, imagined symbolically, might mirror the inherence of the finite I am in the
absolute I AM. ‘a Symbol (ὁ ἔστιν ἄει ταυτεγόρικον) is characterized by a translucence
of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or the Universal in
the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal’
(LS 30). This characterization, formulated in the neutral indicative mood, invites a
simplistic reading. ‘Translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal’, however,
and the participation of the symbol in the reality symbolized name a dialectical
relationship which cannot be flattened to an easy, undistinguished transition from one
to the other. The sensuous symbol, by virtue of its ontological relationship to the reality
it makes visible, mediates in a ‘visionary gleam’27 infinity and finitude.
In the margin to Schelling’s System (1800) (p. 410), Coleridge notes ‘that the I
itself in the absolute Synthesis [i.e. the subject-object I am] supposes an already
perfected Intelligence, as the ground of the possibility of its existence, as it does exist’
(CM IV, 460). The I am cannot posit its own existence and that it is what it is: a self-
developing subject-object. What it is has to be realized. What poetry is and does,
what the poet (in ideal perfection) is capable of28 has to be fulfilled. It may fail. The
perfected Intelligence, in contrast, is the absolutely identical ground of existence and
the knowledge of existence, of idea and reality.29 In the elevation to it, the finite person
presupposes her own ground in and from whom she exists and is a finite I am. She is
similar in dissimilitude, finite mind from the perfected intelligence, grounded from
and in the groundless (causa sui). This contrast, the ontological difference, deeper
and yet more indifferent than any other, determines the work of the imagination
and the symbol in particular. Imagination, imaging God, at the same time carries
with it and even exhibits the sphere of finitude in which it operates: the writer, his/
her (sympathetically imaginative) readership, their life, their language and historical
138 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

situation.30 Imaging God in the sphere of dissimilitude, therefore, cannot ‘Defecate[s]

to a pure transparency / That intercepts no light and adds no stain’.31 Therefore the
translucence of the eternal will often be realized only in ‘dark fluxion, all unfixable
by thought’32 dark images and almost blind mirrorings. In the darkest poems, poems
of loss, the visionary gleam weans into the imageless flight to the Absolute: ‘Ignore
thyself, and strive to know thy God!’33
For Coleridge and his compeers in this respect, like Wordsworth, Schelling, Hegel,
Hölderlin, Shelley and others, all specific ideas and their embodiment in sensual-
symbolical works are enveloped by the horizon of the absolute. This horizon of the
imagination seems to fade in the course of history. Yet there survives the most intense
yearning that at least the arts might allow the last metaphysical activity and open up
the other state, the moment of fulfilment and an ecstasy transcending the human
condition. What then shines in and through the works and actions of art?
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 139

Response by Douglas Hedley

Friedrich Uehlein’s magisterial chapter on Coleridge’s concept of Imagination expounds
one of Coleridge’s most influential and complex theories. The imagination functions as
an isthmus between the finite and the infinite. It furnishes a means of avoiding the Scylla
and Charybdis of either a crudely literalistic materialism or a Gnostic escape from the
real. Like Uehlein, I see Coleridge as a thinker in the Platonic–Idealistic tradition rather
than the eclectic and essentially unsystematic thinker favoured by many commentators,
an English Victor Cousin, one might say. The imagination is unintelligible without
an explication of the finite ‘I AM’ and ultimately the great ‘I AM’ of Exod. 3.14. The
philosophical exploration of subjectivity generates theological reflection upon the
co-presence of the infinite I AM in self-consciousness, not as totaliter aliter but, in the
language of Nicholas of Cusa, as non aliud. ‘We begin with the I Know myself, in order
to end with the absolute I am. We proceed from the Self, in order to lose and find all self
in God.’ Coleridge is pursuing an absolute principle of being, and not simply an absolute
principle of knowledge. In this manner, Coleridge moves beyond transcendental
philosophy that mirrors Schelling in some respects, and yet is different in others.
Coleridge’s theory of the Imagination culminates in a theophanic metaphysics in which
the translucence of the symbol in nature and art provides the culmination of the work of
Imagination, both primary and secondary. The development from the more preliminary
questions in Living Forms of the Imagination to the metaphysics of the image in The Iconic
Imagination is certainly inspired and informed by the work of Coleridge.

Notes
1 Coleridge’s writings are quoted according to the following abbreviations (taken
from Frederick Burwick [ed.], The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), x–xii): Biographia Literaria (BL), Collected
Letters (CL) On the Constitution of the Church and State (CCS) The Notebooks of S.T.
Coleridge (CN), Lay Sermons (LS), Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy
(Lects Phil). In the case of Coleridge’s Notebooks, the manuscript page of an entry is
also occasionally given.
2 An allegedly simpler direct approach in the name of ‘phenomenology’ forgets that
any phenomenological description and investigation leads back to the transcendental
Ego and its passive and active life. Notwithstanding their differences, both kinds of
philosophy do not undertake an immediate inquiry.
3 Following Coleridge’s (and Lord Shaftesbury’s) example, I take the liberty of using the
I for the subject-object, instead of the ambiguous term ‘the Ego’. Coleridge’s synonyms
in various contexts are Sum, self, spirit, mind, self-consciousness, personeity, das Ich, die
Ichheit, etc.
4 See, for example, CN III 4351: ‘Το απειρον νοητον, (πᾶν ἀλλα καὶ ἕν,) intellectual (i.e.
unal) Infinity.’
5 See, for example, CN III 4351.
6 CN III 4186 and Thesis VII and VIII, BL I 276–9. See Schelling, System des
transcendentalen Idealismus (1800), in Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, edited by K. F. A.
140 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Schelling (Stuttgart et al.: Cotta, 1856–1861), vol. I/3, 380, and his Abhandlungen zur
Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. I/1, 366–8.
7 BL I 286; CN III 4265 viii and note. See, for example, Schelling, System (1800), 431–2.
8 Coleridge’s debt to Schelling and others has been known since the first appearance
of BL, since he himself drew the attention to it. Sarah Coleridge provided a selection
of her father’s borrowings and comments in her edition of Biographia Literaria,
2 vols (London: Pickering, 1847), vol. I, 293–323. The literal transcriptions, parallels,
variations and free appropriations have been documented by James Engell and W.
Jackson Bate in their edition of Biographia literaria or Biographical Sketches of My
Literary Life and Opinions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 1983), and in Kathleen Coburn’s annotations on Coleridge’s
Notebooks, volume 3, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
9 The imagination, or esemplastic power as ‘the living principle [. . .] in the process of
our self-consciousness’ is treated in BL I, ch. 13 (299–306). Further elucidations of
‘esemplastic’ in BL I, 168–74 with concise annotations by the editors on Coleridge’s
appropriation of the German debate pertaining to the imagination. See also CN III
4176, III 4244 f164v.
It is hardly necessary to mention that the self-development of the I am does not
depend on the rather bold etymology ‘In-eins-Bildung’ and ‘Eisenoplasy’. On the
contrary, the concept of the I am reached so far allows the expressive ‘etymology’.
10 ‘“The spirit” is Power self-bounded by retroition on itself and is only for itself ’ (CN
III 4186 f34v). ‘Whatever in the strict sense of the word is, all that possesses actual
Being, is only in consequence of the Direction upon itself, or act of Introition’ (ibid).
Equivalent terms are ‘self-introition’’ and ‘turn inward upon oneself ’’.
11 Notes on Schelling, in Henri Nidecker, ‘Notes Marginales de S. T. Coleridge’, Revue
de littérature comparée 7 (1927): 130–46, 336–48, 521–35, 736–46, here 533 (my
additions in brackets).
12 Coleridge follows Fichte and reads ‘empfinden’ and the rare form of the word
‘entfinden’ – which does not please the ear, as he thinks – as an inward finding.
‘Die abgeleitete Beziehung heißt Empfindung (gleichsam Insichfindung. Nur das
fremdartige wird gefunden; das ursprünglich im Ich gesetzte ist immer da.) . . .
Hier zuerst löst sich, dass ich mich so ausdrücke, etwas ab von dem Ich; welches
durch weitere Bestimmung sich allmählig in ein Universum mit allen seinen
Merkmalen verwandeln wird.’ Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre
(Fichtes Sämmtliche Werke, edited by Immanuel H. Fichte (Berlin: Mayer & Müller,
1845/1846), vol. I, 339).
13 We have to refrain from the admittedly difficult task of reconstructing this
evolutionary process. For a more detailed account see my essay Die Manifestation des
Selbstbewußtseins im konkreten ‘Ich bin’. Endliches und Unendliches Ich im Denken S. T.
Coleridges (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982), 33–52. For the rôle of the body in the temporal,
embodied person, see my note ‘The Medium. S. T. Coleridge’s Concept of the Human
Person’, Glimpse. Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media 13 (2011):
1–7.
14 See Coleridge’s translation of Ennead III 8,4,6–10 in BL I 251–2.
15 BL I 275. Cf. Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Deus est esse – Esse est Deus. Die onto-
theologische Grundfrage als aristotelisch-neuplatonische Denkstruktur’, in
Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2nd edn, 2004), 5–82.
16 BL I 283; cf. also CN III 4265; Logic 85, § 31. The footnotes to these passages show
that Coleridge distinguishes ‘the empirical “I’” (das empirische Ich) and the absolute
 
Aids to Reflection and Imagining God 141

“I am”‘ (. . .) in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Logic 85 § 31 note).
The ‘followers of Kant’ (ibid.), in striking contrast, distinguish the empirical I from
the transcendental subject: ‘Transcendental philosophy does not talk of an absolute
principle of being (. . .) but of an absolute principle of knowledge’ (Schelling (1800),
System (see n. 6), 354 passim).
17 C&S 182; On the Trinity, SW&F 1510-1512; LS 32; CM IV 400 (a note on Schelling’s
Philosophie und Religion); CM II 287: ‘I that shall be in that I will to be – the absolute
Will, the ground of Being – the Self-affirming Actus purissimus.’; CN III 4427
(Τὸ ὑπερούσιον – the One beyond being); CN IV 5413 and in many other places.
Cf. Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion. Aids to Reflection and the
Mirror of the Spirit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 65–87. For a
systematic exposition of causa sui, see Werner Beierwaltes, Das wahre Selbst. Studien
zu Plotins Begriff des Geistes und des Einen (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001),
123–60. For the Trinity and the inner-Trinitarian life, see my essay Manifestation des
Selbstbewußtseins (see n. 13), 94–131.
18 Cf. Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie
und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985),
65: ‘In der christlichen Theologie werden die zwei Aspekte der philosophischen
All-Einheits-Lehre: das In- und zugleich Über-Sein des Einen und die Einheit
der reflexiven Rationalität – das Prinzip ‘Geist’ – in der Einheit des Ersten
zusammengedacht.’ The νοῦς, the ‘Prinzip Geist’, is the absolute alterity of the One
beyond being, ‘the Supreme being, (. . .) whose Definition is, the Pleroma of
being, whose essential poles are Unity and Distinctity (. . .) The Distinctities in the
pleroma are the Eternal Ideas, (. . .) each considered in itself, an Infinite in the form
of the Finite; but all considered as one with the Unity, (. . .) they are the energies
of the Finific’ (On the Trinity, SW&F 1511–12). The rare word ‘finfic’ – perhaps
Coleridge’s own coinage – points forward to the creation of the universe of finite
beings. Their definiteness and distinction originate in the eternal ideas. Cf. Uehlein,
Manifestation des Selbstbewusstseins (see n. 13), 120–31. These all too short and poor
allusions to the Trinity and the inner-Trinitarian life are, nevertheless, necessary.
Without this perspective, Coleridge’s famous definition of the imagination remains
incomprehensible.
19 Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969). Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crises of Reason (London:
Macmillan, 2007).
20 Cf. CN V 5581: the twofold finiteness of the human I am; CN V 5670: mind in the
universal idea and in the individual I.
21 On the Trinity, SW&F 1511–1512.
22 I can only hint at the decisive rôle of will and conscience in Coleridge’s philosophy. He
has not worked it out in the context of the imagination. When it becomes prominent
in his later philosophy, it is intimately connected not with the imagination, but with
reason.
23 The faculty of fancy has been treated by philosophers and critics under various names
and certainly in different contexts. John Locke, for example, speaks of ‘the faculty of
laying up, and retaining the Ideas’ (Essay II, x, § 10). It enables us to form complex
ideas and consequently all higher forms of human understanding. The reproductive
Einbildungskraft in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason allows us to have representations
(Vorstellungen) when the object is not present. It combines those representations
associatively. James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism
142 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), has written a history
of this concept.
24 The distinction of imagination and fancy is his constant theme. As a rule, he devalues
fancy and its indispensable achievement. The reason for that is obvious. The blindfold
estimation of fancy and its products, the allegedly solid facts of reality, leads to a split
between the subject and its objectifications, the subject and object, the res cogitans
and the res extensa, man and nature, and to the mechanical-empirical philosophy he
strives to overcome. In a similar way he criticizes literary works, fanciful products
that do not create something new, but select and combine representations from the
stock of fixities and definites. The discussion of imagination and fancy has produced
a wealth of literature. Cf., for example, Ivor A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 3rd edn, 1962); Owen Barfield, What Coleridge
Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), chs 6 and 7; Günther H.
Lenz, Die Dichtungstheorie Coleridges (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1971), ch. IV and
V; James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, ‘Introduction’, to BL I, LXXXI–CIV. Cf. also
Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perpektiven literarischer Anthropologie
(Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991). In particular the chapter ‘Die Imagination
als Vermögen (Coleridge)’. Professor Iser writes from a strictly anthropological
perspective. Central tenets of Coleridge’s argument, for example, the absolute I Am,
the One beyond being and the one ground of being and thought, the Trinity, the free
and eternal act of creation and its similar-dissimilar reiteration in the finite mind, in
short, Coleridge’s speculative elaboration of transcendental and idealist philosophy
and its transition to or at least affinity with metaphysics, are missing. Iser’s selective
interpretation centres round the groundlessness (Grundlosigkeit) and the play or
wavering (Spielbewegung) of the imagination within changing contexts.
25 LS 29. For a short introduction see Nicholas Halmi, ‘Coleridge on Allegory and Symbol’,
in Burwick (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see n. 1), 345–58. Joel Harter, Coleridge’s
Philosophy of Faith: Symbol, Allegory, and Hermeneutics (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2011). In particular chs 3–5 and pp. 151–5: ‘Symbol, Allegory, and Irony’. See also
Douglas Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York: T&T Clark,
2008), 115–43, and The Iconic Imagination (New York et al.: Bloomsbury, 2016), 105–46.
26 Plato, Sophist, 249–59.
27 Wordsworth, Immortality Ode, l. 57.
28 See BL I 304 (secondary imagination); BL II 16-18 and CN III 3827 f115, f115v (table
of the primary faculties of man).
29 BL I 275. See above III 1 and 2.
30 ‘It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every
subject which can interest the human mind’ (Lyrical Ballads [1798], Advertisement).
31 Cf. the end of Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State (C&S 184).
32 See Coleridge’s poem Self-knowledge (1832), line 7.
33 Self-knowledge, last line. John Beer writes in his selection of Coleridge’s Poems
(London: Everyman’s Library, 1974, 337): ‘the philosopher who had in Biographia
Literaria written in praise of the Greek maxim “‘Know Thyself ”, now crosses out
those words and writes instead the poem Self-knowledge.’ I read the poem not as a
crossing out but as a repetition of the Know Thyself in the sphere of dissimilitude.
Only a person – I am – can produce such a self-reflexive monologue. It repeats the
impossibility of self-production, the failing knowledge and lack of self-possession,
and echoes the elevation to the ‘great eternal I AM’ in the flight to the Absolute. Cf.
Manifestation des Selbstbewußtseins (see n. 13), 55–6.
 Part III

The religious imagination in

contemporary philosophy of religion
144
 6

God in the world and ourselves in God

Panentheistic speculation in the early Karl Rahner
Klaus E. Müller

1 Methodological preface
The starting point of the following analysis of Karl Rahner’s thought is the striking
fact that his two principal works on religious philosophy, that is, Spirit in the World
and Hearer of the Word, were written at about the same time as a plethora of spiritual
texts which have only recently been made accessible in their entirety again in the newly
completed Sämtliche Werke (Complete Works).1 When reading texts of both genres
alongside one another, one cannot help but wonder how one and the same author
could at the same time write down both such extraordinarily intense speculations in
transcendental Thomism (in his Spirit in the World) and Maurice Blondel’s programme
of immanence apologetics with its equally Thomistic grounding (in his Hearer of the
Word) and such overtly panentheistic thoughts in meditations and prayers of existential
spirituality. As we shall point out, Rahner, in fact, never in his life gave up writing texts
in the latter genre. If we enquire about the systematic and speculative point of contact
between the two which may help account for Rahner’s twofold approach to theology,
we come across the rather short third part of Spirit in the World which is entitled ‘The
Possibility of Metaphysics on the Basis of the Imagination’.2 This chapter provides a
dense summary of Rahner’s comprehensive reading of the few texts of Aquinas’s
devoted to the question of knowledge. At its heart is the indissoluble link between
sensual knowledge and the Vorgriff or the ‘pre-apprehension’ of being as such (i.e.
God) which has always already occurred prior to our knowledge of concrete beings of
which it is the condition of the possibility:

For strictly speaking, the first-known, the first thing encountering man, is not the
world in its ‘spiritless’ existence, but the world – itself – as transformed by the light
of the spirit, the world in which man sees himself. [The world as known is always
the world of man, is essentially a concept complementary to man.] And the last-
known, God, shines forth only in the limitless breadth of the pre-apprehension,
in the desire for being as such by which every act of man is borne, and which
146 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

is at work not only in his ultimate knowledge and in his ultimate decisions, but
also in the fact that the free spirit becomes, and must become, sensibility in order
to be spirit, and thus exposes itself to the whole destiny of this earth. Thus man
encounters himself when he finds himself in the world and when he asks about
God; and when he asks about his essence, he always finds himself already in the
world and on the way to God. He is both of these at once, and cannot be one
without the other.3

In a way, the passage quoted encapsulates everything that we nowadays discuss under
the labels of ‘panentheism’ and ‘panpsychism’.
There is no doubt that Douglas Hedley is the leading author on the imagination
today. Both in the range of its topics and in the depth of its argument, his trilogy4 is
quite easily on a par with the oeuvre of a Hans Urs von Balthasar (with the author’s
knowledge of the details of modern German intellectual history in particular being
nothing short of awe-inspiring). While Aquinas only plays a marginal role in the
trilogy, there is a short sentence in the first volume of the trilogy which may be read as
a programmatic outline of an intellectual dynamic that leads us straight into the very
centre of Aquinas’s philosophical thought: ‘Psychologically or morally, the imagination
is a necessary route to reality.’5 To my mind, the adverbs could actually be omitted
altogether. The exciting topic confronting us is the way imaginings may lead us to
reality or, in other words, how fictions may be true.

2 Introduction
Karl Rahner’s influence upon twentieth-century Catholic theology surpasses everyone
else’s. He took up his work in a twofold role, namely as a philosopher of religion and, at
the same time, as an author of spiritual texts which he himself viewed not as by-products
of his academic career, but as entirely on a par with his academic publications. It is highly
revealing that towards the end of his life Karl Rahner actually expressed the wish that ‘the
prayers scattered throughout his works be collected and put together into a kind of dogmatic
of prayer’.6 The dimension of religious philosophy was all the more prominent at the start of
his intellectual career. While his 1936 theological thesis entitled E latere Christi: An Enquiry
into the Typological Meaning of Jn. 19:347 failed to make any lasting impression, the opposite
is true of his philosophical thesis Spirit in the World: On the Metaphysics of Finite Knowledge
in Thomas Aquinas, which was turned down by his Freiburg supervisor Martin Honecker.8
Completed in 1936, this book was published by Rahner in 1939 regardless, causing quite
a stir. The reasons for its rejection as a thesis are, for one thing, connected to the then
situation at the Department of Philosophy in Freiburg. For another, however, it was a major
factor that this work on Thomas already evidenced Rahner’s later lifelong commitment to
the early modern notion of the subject. In an introduction to Spirit in World, which he later
attached to the original work, he writes:

Not as though it were a question here of the author’s own view, as though
consciously or unconsciously he wanted to read his own opinions into Thomas.
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 147

But he does not think that the danger of this is greater for him than for anyone else,
because for him Thomas is not a master who forbids his students to disagree with
him. However, the direction of the questions which are posed to Thomas are given
in advance by a systematic concern of the author, especially when these questions
are trying to drive the finished propositions in Thomas back to their objective
problematic.
Such an objective concern, which the author here explicitly acknowledges, is
(or certainly should be) conditioned by the problematic of today’s philosophy. If in
this sense the reader gets the impression that an interpretation of St. Thomas is at
work here which has its origin in modern philosophy, the author does not consider
that such a criticism points to a defect, but rather to a merit of the book. And this
because he would not know of any other reason for which he could be occupied
with Thomas than for the sake of those questions which stimulate his philosophy
and that of his time.9

Karl Lehmann has made a strong case for viewing at least the theologian Rahner’s
Spirit in the Word as propounding a completely independent philosophical approach,
which cannot be reduced to the reception of its Thomistic, Kantian or Heideggerian
aspects.10 If this is true, and I think it is indeed, then his second major work is not
very likely to be uninfluenced by this approach, even though Rahner himself remarked
once that his philosophy had been wholly subservient to his theology since this second
book.11 However, the one thing does not rule out the other. Obviously, this second
work is the most interesting one from the vantage point of religious philosophy. Its
title reads: Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion,12
published in 1941.

3 To be all ears
In Hearer of the Word, Rahner, to put it in a nutshell, seeks to spell out the essential
and aprioric inclination of man towards a possible revelation. His endeavour is not
entirely new, however. Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) had undertaken the very same
task several decades previously. His thesis L’Action of 1893 is devoted to it, and so is
his Lettre sur apologétique of 1896. It is Blondel’s overriding concern that revelation
must be a necessary aspect of man’s being, while also being entirely indisposable or, in
theological parlance, given to man entirely freely:

If Christianity were only about some conviction or action randomly added to

our nature and our reason; if we were able to realize ourselves to the full without
this addition; and if it were possible for us to exempt ourselves freely and without
punishment from the importunity of this superhuman gift, then there would be no
comprehensible communication whatsoever between these two levels the one of
which would, from the perspective of reason, continue to exist as if it did not exist at
all. Not to ascend would not mean to fall. To forego the honour of a higher vocation
148 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

would mean to remain at a median level, to which man can rise by his own power.
One could not raise any problem whatsoever for philosophy in the face of revelation.
However, once this revelation reaches us in ourselves, as it were, pursuing us into our
innermost being; once it views a neutral or negative attitude towards it as a genuine
act of apostasy and as a kind of culpable enmity; once the poverty of our finite being
is capable of such a sin that eternity must pay for it, then there will be an encounter.
The difficulty will have been expressed and the problem will have been raised. For
if it is true that the demands of revelation are well-grounded, we cannot any longer
say that we still are with ourselves. And of this defect, of this incapability and of this
demand there must be a trace in a human being solely qua human being or an echo
even in the most autonomous of philosophies.13

Blondel’s thrust, however impressive, came to naught, arousing suspicion on the part of
the church instead. Only decades later, which is not to the credit of the Catholic tradition
at all, did Karl Rahner start from scraps again. A true appreciation of Rahner’s merit,
however, is hampered in a complex way by the process of the revision of the second
editions both of Spirit in the World and Hearer of the Word which Johann Baptist Metz
conducted on his behalf.14 Hence, a reappraisal of Rahner’s early work has been called
for and rightly so.15 It is to be done with regard to Hearer of the Word on the following
pages. Before that, however, we need to explain against which background Rahner
adopted his transcendental approach.
One must be wary of summarily dismissing ‘neo-scholasticism’. The term designates
the attempt at a renewal of scholasticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Such a philosophy, which was based primarily, but not exclusively, upon St Thomas
Aquinas, was deemed an urgently needed bulwark against idealism and materialism
from a Catholic perspective. However, one of the problems that it faced was in how
far the teachings attributed to Aquinas had actually been held by him. In fact, this
project amounted to an intensified version of the officially decreed disregard for the
whole of early modern thought since Descartes. Among the few who broke free of this
ghettoization was Joseph Maréchal. He engaged in a dialogue with Kant to enquire into
the possibility of a metaphysics after Kant, while also making use of other authors for
the sake of a transformation of Kant, including Johann Gottlieb Fichte. This attempt at
a reconciliation between tradition and the early modern notion of the subject appealed
deeply to Rahner and exerted decisive influence upon him.
Moreover, there is another source of Rahner’s approach besides his taking up a
philosophical challenge which he viewed as essential. This second source is Ignatian
spirituality or, to be more precise, the experience of the religious exercises, as first
conceived by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). In moving biographical struggles,
Ignatius furnished the individual with a way by which she was able to find God’s will
for herself or, in other words, by which she was led to the discovery of her own God
immediacy. Conceptually, the theological reflection upon this spiritual process must
to a certain degree address both the individual person as a person and her ability to
find the truth, thus sharing with early modern philosophy its fundamental questions.
In a fictitious ‘Speech of Ignatius of Loyola to a Modern-Day Jesuit’ written by the later
Rahner, this fact is pointed out succinctly. The text says that it is a key part of Ignatian
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 149

spirituality, as well as a point of contact with Luther and Descartes, to reckon with
the possibility of the experience of divine immediacy.16 It is on the basis of these two
sources, viewed by him as inextricably intertwined, that Rahner puts forth his theology
as a mystagogy, that is, an introduction to that experience. The project itself is based
upon what may be called an original explication of the early modern notion of the
subject, effected, however, in an appropriation in which the concept is redefined in the
recourse to classical metaphysics.
The point of departure17 is the question of being. Every human being enquires about
the ultimate whence and whither of all beings and, at the same time, about being as
such, thereby inevitably being engaged in metaphysics. The ‘inevitably’ is not meant
rhetorically, as those who either fail to ask the question or expressly reject it have
likewise adopted a stance on the question of being. They are indifferent to beings as
beings and to being as such. However, that upon which the answer to the question,
once it has been posed, hinges cannot itself be called into question again. Hence, only
the question itself can be claimed as the starting point for an answer to the general
question of being and as the means to the end of an indubitable certainty. As the
possibility of enquiring into being is peculiar to the being called man, the metaphysical
question of being is also the question of the nature of that very being who is able to
raise this question in the first place: ‘Hence human metaphysics is also always and
necessarily an analytic study of human being. We may be assured, therefore, that we
are not looking away from ourselves when, at first, we seem to be concerned only with
the most general principles of metaphysics.’18 It is in this connection of the metaphysics
of being and the analytic of man that the turn to early modern philosophy gradually
becomes apparent. According to Rahner, the question as the starting point of the
question about being implies three things:

●● That it enquires about all being as such

●● That there must be an enquiry about it
●● That this enquiry must be conducted in such a way that we must distinguish
between being and beings

However, the fact that the question, from the outset, aims at the whole of being
implies a first provisional general knowledge about it, since there could not be an
enquiry about something entirely unknown. This, in turn, means that the very fact
of the metaphysical enquiry about being implies the assumption that being as such is
knowable. In the act of knowing, being and knowledge do not come together as two
completely unrelated entities. Instead, they constitute an original unity evidenced in
the essential tendency of each being towards being as a potential object of knowledge.
The inextinguishable origin of this unity, for Rahner, is the necessary correlation of
being and knowledge. Consequently, Rahner deems a being that is unknowable per se
a contradiction in terms. Hence it follows:

(4) Therefore being and knowing are related to each other because originally, in
their ground, they are the same reality. This does not imply anything less than that
being as such, to the extent that it is being, is knowing; it is knowing in original
150 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

unity with being, hence it is a knowing of the being who the knower is. Being and
knowing constitute an original unity, that is: to the nature of being belongs [and
now follows the salient point; K.M.] a relation of knowing with regard to itself.
And the other way round: the knowing that belongs to the essential constitution
of being is the self-presence of being. The original meaning of knowing is self-
possession, and being possesses itself to the extent that it is being.19

In this way, Rahner has progressed from a classical metaphysical starting point to the
core concept of modernity. Interestingly enough, he had already expressed this more
clearly in the first edition of his Spirit in the World than in Hearer of the Word where
he says: ‘Knowing is the being-present-to-self of being’,20 which is the innermost core
of transcendental philosophy. Rahner frequently speaks of being as ‘self-presence’ or
‘self-reflection’. One could also say that being is essentially self-consciousness, although
the early Rahner made only sparse use of this concept.
Using the concept of ‘self-presence’, however, Rahner makes a certain kind of
being, that is, knowledge, the original form of being instead of only providing an
analysis of either knowledge or one finite being among others, which again raises
an alarming problem. The starting point of the whole concept is the question of
being which man must pose by necessity. And yet, man must ask this question
because, for one thing, he both already knows about being and is being himself.
For another, he is also not-being at the same time. Otherwise he would not have
to enquire about being at all. As a consequence, man does not possess perfect
‘self-presence’. Hence, if there are beings who enquire about being, there must be
various degrees of self-presence. Only to the extent that it has being can a being
have self-presence and vice versa. Obviously, this amounts to the classic notion of
analogy, to which Rahner refers at this point for two reasons. Firstly, the concept
of analogy allows him to create a scale between the ontologically primary self-
presence and the other kinds of being, including material beings. Secondly, on
the basis of this thought, he can attribute a privileged rank to man. Man is a being
that is both spiritual and material in nature. He is the only material being in which
the ontic structure of self-presence is given a complete articulation, as opposed,
significantly, to ‘self-presence’ per se (in which case man, as we have said, would
not have to enquire about being at all).
True to his turn to early modern thought, Rahner also enquires about the condition
of the possibility of finite self-presence. Man, he points out, experiences his subjectivity
when judging and acting towards worldly things as ‘being in himself ’ vis-à-vis those
opposite himself. A closer analysis of the act of judgement reveals the condition of
the possibility of being in oneself to be the process of abstraction. When I distinguish
myself from a thing, it is by my subsuming it under general concepts. What abstraction
does becomes apparent in the experience that the quiddity or ‘whatness’ of a sensual
thing, because of its sensuality, is encountered as something finite. If it were not for our
abstraction, it would, therefore, be defined by its ‘in-finity’. And if this is true indeed,
then the act of knowing an individual thing cannot but always be beyond it. If there is
to be no infinite regress, no individual thing of the same kind can be the goal of this
‘beyond’, from which Rahner concludes:
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 151

This ‘beyond’ can only be the absolute range of all knowable objects as such.
[. . .] Human consciousness grasps its single objects in a Vorgriff that reaches for
the absolute range of all its possible objects. That is why in every single act of
knowledge it always already reaches beyond the individual objects. Thus it does
not grasp the latter merely in its unrelated dull ‘thisness’, but in its limitation and its
relation to the totality of all possible objects. While it knows the individual object
and in order to know it, consciousness must always already be beyond it. The
Vorgriff is the condition of the possibility of the universal concept, of abstraction.
The latter in its turn makes possible the objectivation of the sense datum and so
human knowing self-subsistence.21

It is in keeping with this line of arguing that, according to Rahner, this Vorgriff, as the
condition of all knowledge and action, implies the recognition of an absolute being
or an absolute self-presence, that is, God, since everything whatsoever that is within
the range of the Vorgriff is objectively possible. Only an absolute being fills this range
entirely. It, thus, corresponds to the Vorgriff by its very essence. However, as an absolute,
it must not be understood as a merely possible entity alone, but, as a reality, a line
of reasoning that is close to Anselm’s ontological argument. In his conception of our
knowledge about God, Rahner himself comes very close to traditional proofs of God’s
existence. However, he views his own argument as a metaphysical-epistemological
reformulation, since the notion of a real finite being that requires an infinite being
as the condition of its existence is replaced by another: ‘The affirmation of the real
finiteness of a being demands as condition of its possibility that we affirm the existence
of an absolute being. We do this implicitly in the Vorgriff toward being as such, since
only through it do we know the limitation of the finite being as such a limitation.’22 For
all its structural parallels – the differences strike me as greater than Rahner himself
assumes – it is a knowledge of God in the medium of the judgemental act. It is, thus,
drawn completely into the perspective of subjectivity, whereas the traditional proofs of
God’s existence are firmly situated in a context of ontological objectivity.
Anyway, Rahner believes that his deductive line of reasoning up to this point has
established the fundamental possibility of revelation, since revelation is possible only if
its addressee possesses a horizon that is adequate for it. Moreover, this horizon must be
strictly infinite if it is not to be restricted a priori by any contents of revelation. Hence,
the transcendence of human knowledge towards the whole of being as such must be
the foundation of an ‘ontology of the obediential potency for a possible revelation . . .
[and] an essential part of a Christian philosophy of religion’.23 ‘Obediential potency’ is
the keyword of Rahner’s philosophy, which might fittingly be rendered as the ‘ability to
be all ears’. It is not difficult for Rahner to then proceed to the dimension of word and
language, into which the hearing of God’s reality is placed. From the outset, Rahner
follows Heidegger in using the term ‘luminosity’24 as a synonym for ‘self-presence’ or
‘self-reflection’ to express the identity of being and knowledge. However, insofar as
being is light, it must be conceived of as determined by the ‘logos’. As such, it is a
potential object of revelation.25
From the vantage point of religious philosophy, however, this raises an entirely new
problem. If man is absolute openness to all being, then he has access to all being by
152 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

himself. Why, then, should there be a possible revelation at all?26 It is from a highly
audacious continuation of his metaphysical-epistemological deduction up to this point
that Rahner manages to infer the necessity of revelation. As he goes on to explain,
revelation is necessary, because being, despite its luminosity, is also the most hidden
thing. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, God’s infinity can only be known as the
outer margin of the knowledge of a finite entity, as it were. The Vorgriff does not
present us with the infinite as itself, but as something that is affirmed in the process
of knowledge alongside finite objects. For this very reason, it is concealed from us in
its own nature so that a possible revelation can be meaningful. However, the meaning
of revelation, in this case, would be due to the factual nature of the human mind only.
As this factualness could be different, that is, one with incomparably more width, the
necessity of revelation, as it has been established up to this point, would be relative and
could, as a consequence, be overcome. In the strict sense of the word, this necessity can
be attained only if the hiddenness of the infinite in itself vis-à-vis man can be proved.
Rahner effects this radicalization of his concept by, secondly, referring to the
scholastic convergence of verum and bonum, that is, of knowledge and will. ‘Self-
presence’ necessarily implies an affirmation of oneself, affirming meaning ‘assenting’
and having the character of a volitional act. Only in the horizon of such a self-affirmation
is the question of being posed. By enquiring about being, man affirms his finiteness,
and by having to enquiry about being, he affirms it by necessity. Thus, his existence,
for all its contingency consequent upon his finiteness, is deemed unconditioned.
However, something contingent can become unconditioned only by an act of will: ‘The
fact that being opens up for human existence is brought about by the will as an inner
moment of knowledge itself.’27 Against the background of the identity of being and
knowledge, it follows from the connection of man’s self-affirmation and the luminosity
of being that human self-affirmation can only be seen as the participation in a freewill
making contingent being unconditioned. Otherwise, human existence viewing itself
as unconditioned by its very nature, while necessarily affirming itself as contingent,
would have to proceed from an impenetrably dark origin, which would contradict the
principal openness of being as such. In other words, man is in a volitional relationship
with himself to which belongs a knowledge about both his own contingency and
the latter’s necessity. Hence, he must conceive of himself as founded in a being that
not only exists but is a free power at that. However, this also means that the space of
possible actions of the infinite towards man is not restricted to the fact of his existence
(or his being willed). Apart from the fact of his createdness, man can and must in
principle reckon with further initiatives on the part of that free power, which again
implies two things. Firstly, man, as is testified by his openness for being as such, faces
a God of revelation who acts in history. Only on this condition can one sensibly talk of
incommensurable initiatives. And, secondly, if man, thus, seeks to listen for a possible
revelation by nature, he necessarily listens to such a revelation, which can come in two
shapes,

namely, the speaking or the silence of God. And we always and naturally hear the
word or the silence of the free absolute God. Otherwise we would not be spirit.
Our being spirit does not mean a demand that God should speak. But, should God
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 153

not speak, the spirit hears God’s silence. [. . .] As spirit we stand before the living,
free God, the God who speaks or the God who keeps silent28

Only now, with the possibility of God’s silence established in deductive reasoning, has
Rahner, as he claims, ensured that God’s possible self-communication is not identical
with the insights man may by himself gain into the first causes and final ends of reality.
As has been shown, it is by virtue of his recourse to will that he manages to establish
this. Notwithstanding, far from being only a strategic operation that is meant to
stabilize the starting point of the deduction, this step further bridges the gap between
scholasticism and an early modern form of the question of God, as in scholasticism this
free deed is nothing but love. In that way, the finite and contingent can be viewed as an
expression of God’s love. Thus, human self-affirmation, understood as a participation
in God’s constitution, implies the love of God as its integral part. Hence it follows:
‘[We] listen for God’s word or God’s silence to the extent that we open up in free love
for this message of the word or of the silence of God.’29 Thereby, the openness to God is
made a problem of man’s ‘moral self-determination’, another early modern term amidst
scholastic concepts. The place where this self-determination is realized is already
known, namely history. If, as has been shown earlier, only history can be the medium
of God’s possible initiatives which go beyond the finite spirit’s status as a creature, the
discovery and the acceptance or rejection of the message conveyed in these initiatives
cannot but be historical in nature. History, in Rahner, implies that a possible revelation
of God, if it occurs, occurs in the medium of the human word as it is only in the word
that, thanks to its capacity for negation, transcendent being can be perceived.30 Hence,
the early Rahner’s project of religious philosophy is encapsulated in the following
result: ‘We are the beings of receptive spirituality, who stand in freedom before the free
God of a possible revelation, which, if it comes, happens in our history through the
word. We are the ones who, in our history, listen for the word of a free God. Only thus
are we what we should be.’31 Rahner was well aware that there were many unanswered
questions in the draft of Hearer of the Word, perhaps more than he himself would have
been prepared to admit. It would certainly be worthwhile to pursue them further. For
our question, I see four key merits:

(a) Rahner connects the topic of religious philosophy with the sphere of subjectivity
and reason in the strictest possible way, which is questioned by some every now
and then.32 In terms of philosophy of religion, his achievement is twofold. He
provides religion with an existential foundation, while also keeping it at the level
of the public discourse, that is, effecting both an enlightenment and a religious
individuation. Perhaps, we need to enquire about the philosophical character and
contents of that connection once again.
(b) Rahner’s theory has transferred the question of God into the interior, linking it
with the rational modes of question and judgement. Moreover, he has also given
it a critical turn as the knowledge of God is conceived of solely as being affirmed
alongside finite things and as being solely won via the latter reality.
(c) On the basis of a transcendental approach, the question of God is also
transformed into something practical. Thereby, Rahner has defined the subject’s
154 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

moral self-determination as the medium of the experience and knowledge of

God in such a way that any ostensible moralization of transcendence is eschewed
from the start. The moralization is based not on duties and imperatives, but on
the love of God which precedes either of them.
(d) Rahner views the obediential potency as a tendency towards a speaking or silent
God. In that way, we are prevented from drawing any conclusions about the
contents of a possible revelation from our tendency towards it, let alone impose
a criterion on historical claims to revelation. Nevertheless, I do not consider
Rahner’s view of a God who may remain silent a shortcoming with unacceptable
effects made necessary only by his conceptual scheme. On the contrary, this
notion, in my view, is one of those of Rahner’s intuitions which show him to have
been well ahead of his time. His conception allows him to engage in a dialogue
with a possible post-theistic mindset, which Rahner not only deemed possible
but also, in astonishingly far-sighted anticipation, described as early as 1965:
The God of the beyond of the world is suspected to be a non-verifiable ghost
which must be laid aside, since he does not exist there where we experience,
achieve and suffer ourselves and where we suffer ourselves in solitude as the
only real bottomless abyss. One tries by thought and action to demythologise
everything and to destroy taboos in everything until the only thing left is what
seems to survive all this: the incomprehensible something which is experienced
as the absurd something which one would like to honour by shocked silence,
or as the honest and bitter minimum of everyday duty in the service of others,
if one is still inclined to act on and talk about an ‘ideal’ at all.33
In an astonishingly concrete fashion, this well-nigh prophetic potential that is evident
in Rahner’s early philosophical thoughts and that is reflected in theoretical passages
like the one cited recurs in his spiritual texts, especially in his prayers. Time and
again, these texts bring home to their reader how far our traditional dogmatic and
doxological formulas fall short of what they are meant to say when we talk about or
to God. They show, moreover, that the relationship between God and the world and
between God and man must be defined in a far more complex and intimate fashion
than our usual formulas of faith do. Hence, I do not hesitate to attribute to Rahner a
deeply panentheistic conceptual framework critical of traditional theism, which is to
be found in his writings from his earliest publications to his very last public lecture.

4 Ourselves in God and God in us: Rahnerian panentheism

I have long wondered how one may possibly hope to understand that God’s self-
communication and the creatures’ autonomy increase, rather than decrease, to a
proportionate extent without allowing for a monistic dimension to Rahner’s hypothesis
or, as Rahner himself puts it:

This self-bestowal of God, in which God bestows himself precisely as the absolute
transcendent, is the most immanent factor in the creature. The fact that it is
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 155

given its own nature to possess, the ‘immanence of essence’ in this sense, is the
prior condition, and at the same time the consequence, of the still more radical
immanence of the transcendence of God in the spiritual creature. [. . .] The
conceptual models which are constructed on the basis of the difference between
‘inner and outer’ break down at this point. The orientation towards the self-
bestowal of God as most radically different from the creature is the innermost
element of all in it, and it is precisely this that makes the immanence of that which
is mot external of all to it possible.34

The exact meaning may be gauged from literally countless passages in Rahner’s texts,
especially those in which speaking about God turns into silence towards God, that
is, into the genre of prayer. In a very early text which dates from the 1920s and was
first published in 2013, the mutual immanence of God and man is adumbrated in the
connection of themes from the mystical tradition of Johannes Tauler, which always
played a key role in Rahner, and Ignatius, the founder of his order:

He dwells in the deepest ground of the soul. God. It is to Him that the soul speaks
about its longing for eternal life, [. . .] for home. [. . .] It wants Him and Him alone.
Everything else being too small and too poor, it has no problem parting with it. If it
is entirely poor, naked and stripped of everything, then it can lift its hands to Him
and ask Him: come! Then it waits for the day of the Lord, for the day when God
who is concealed in the soul will reveal Himself to it, giving Himself entirely to it.
Then God will no longer be with the soul in the country of banishment. Instead,
the soul will be with Him in eternal life.35

The outlined dialectic of ‘God in us’ and ‘ourselves in God’, which constitutes the
defining characteristic of what is termed ‘panentheism’ today, is the theological key
criterion in the young Rahner’s very first book publication, the famous little volume
Encounters with Silence which counted among his most celebrated writings. Probably
written in 1937 and first appearing in print in 1938, the meditations contained in it
were meant by the publishing house to make up for a work which it deemed less likely
to be successful, namely Spirit in the World, which it went on to publish in 1939.36
This means that Encounters with Silence was written at the very same time as Spirit
in the World and at the same time when Rahner was preparing Hearer of the Word,
a series of lectures which he wrote in 1937 and published in 1941. The equal value
that Rahner, as he himself emphasized, attached to his theoretical-theological and his
spiritual writings is confirmed in a remarkable fashion by another great twentieth-
century German-speaking theologian, who was to become one of Rahner’s fiercest
opponents and severest critics (although his critique was only partially justified). In a
review, Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote:

For a full comprehension of Spirit in the World, one also has to consider the little
book of stylized literary prayers entitled Encounters with Silence, which restate the
fundamental insight of the theoretical works at the level of religious experience.
This insight is that of man standing between God and the world, before the void
156 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

and silence of the infinite which discloses itself only in God becoming man and
within the Christian context of everyday life in the world (conversio) and the
mystical turning towards the God beyond the world (abstractio).37

In a nutshell, one has to read the texts on religious philosophy and spirituality side by
side. If one chooses to do so, one is sure to gain a host of new insights. Throughout
Encounters with Silence, one comes across passages which both stress the greatest
possible union of God and man only to reject every concrete predicate in close kinship
with Nicholas of Cusa. Thus, the author exults that ‘Your Life [has] become my life
through grace’,38 while writing only a few lines later:

Are there any titles which I needn’t give You? And when I have listed them all,
what have I said? If I should take my stand on the shore of Your Endlessness and
shout into the trackless reaches of Your Being all the words I have ever learned in
the poor prison of my little existence, what should I have said? I should never have
spoken the last word about You.39

No name is adequate for God and we could not talk about him if we were not
‘surrounded by Your distant Endlessness’,40 in which alone man may live. About God
he says:

You are all in all, and in everything that You are, You are all things. [. . .] All that is
cramped and confined, oppressed and imprisoned in the narrowness of my finite
being, becomes in You the one Infinity, which is both Unity and Infinity combined.
Each of Your attributes is of itself Your whole immeasurable Being; each carries in
its bosom the whole of reality.41

And a few lines later he adds:

Your Infinity, O God, is thus the salvation of our finiteness. And yet I must confess
that the longer I think about You, the more anxious I become. Your Awful Being
threatens my security, makes me lose all sense of direction. I am filled with fear
and trembling because it often seems to me that your Infinity, in which everything
is really one and the same, is meant for You alone. [. . .]
You must make Your infinite word finite, if I am to be spared this feeling of
terror at Your Infinity.
You must adapt Your word to my smallness, so that it can enter into the
tiny dwelling of my finiteness – the only dwelling in which I can live – without
destroying it. [. . .] If You should speak such an ‘abbreviated’ word, which would
not say everything but only something simple which I could grasp, then I could
breathe freely again.42

And this ‘abbreviated word’ refers to no other event than the incarnation as only the
Logos become flesh makes God’s infinite all-oneness both bearable and intelligible for
man. This panentheistic notion of God can remain orthodox only if it is forced through
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 157

the narrow confines of Christology, as it is in Rahner. It is against this backdrop that

even man’s own death, willingly accepted, can serve as a way to happiness or at least the
first beginnings of a reconciliation with himself:

Then will begin the great silence, in which no other sound will be heard but You, O
Word resounding from eternity to eternity. Then all human words will have grown
dumb. Being and knowing, understanding and experience will have become one
and the same. [. . .]
No more human words, no more concepts, no more pictures will stand between
us.43

One could quote countless more passages to this effect from Encounters with Silence.
Rahner’s equally celebrated homilies The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, originally
delivered in bomb-devastated Munich and thereafter printed in many editions from
1949 onwards, provide a sequel. Again, I shall restrict myself to a few significant
passages. The very first page states: ‘When man is with God in awe and love, then
he is praying. Then he doesn’t perform everything at once, because it will never be
possible for him, the finite, to do that in in this life. But he is at least with him who is
everything, and therefore he does something most important and necessary.’44 Then,
there are passages that are downright reminiscent of Spinoza as when he says in a
passage entitled ‘The Helper-Spirit’:

If we pray, then what we say and what we notice in our so-called I is only like the
last echo, coming from an immeasurable distance, of the shouting in which God
calls himself, of the exultation in which God himself is blissful about the splendour
of his infinity, of the self-assertion with which the unconditional founds itself in
itself from eternity to eternity. [. . .]
[H]e hears the unspeakable groaning of his own Spirit who intercedes with
God for his holy ones. He hears it as our groaning, as those sounds that come
from the chaotic dissonances of our heart and life and form a hundred-voiced
symphony to the praise of the Most High.45

And in his Little Church Year, another widely read text of 1954, he consoles a man who
despairs of God and his faith in the emptiness of his heart:

Which God is distant from you in this emptiness of your heart? It is not the true
and living God, for he is no other than the incomprehensible and nameless One
so that He can really be the God of your boundless heart. Only that God has
become distant from you who does not exist: a comprehensible God [. . .], a very
venerable – idol. [. . .] While all that is happening in your heart, do allow despair to
apparently take everything away from you [. . .]. For if you hold on [. . .], then you
will suddenly realize that your grave and prison only tries to withstand the empty
finiteness, that its deadly emptiness is only the width of God’s affection, that this
silence is filled with a word without words, with the One who is above all names
und who is all in all. This silence is His silence: He is telling you that He is there.46
158 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

If Rahner senses in man’s despair God’s vastness to which the latter need not find
ways since God is already there; if he understands the experience of emptiness as an
aspect of God’s incomprehensible infinity that turns to man, even though this God may
appear to his cramped heart to be nothing, because he is both present and everything;
and if, finally, I also consider his concomitant explicit critique of idolatry, then I
cannot but hear in Rahner’s words the whisper of all those others from Lessing via
Karl Leonhard Reinhold, William Warburton and Ralph Cudworth to Nicolas of Cusa
and even Hermes Trismegistus whose thought is pervaded throughout by that current
of mysterious thought encapsulated in the symbol of hen kai pan. It is only in passing,
moreover, that I should like to point to the presence of this notion in his theology
of the symbol and the sacraments, which must suffice here. It is Rahner’s key thesis
that the sacraments are not to be conceived of as only transient ‘individual incursions
of God into a secular world, but as “outbursts” (if we can express it in this way) of
the innermost, ever present gracious endowment of the World with God himself into
history’.47 Tellingly, Rahner himself called this insight ‘something like an application of
a Copernican approach to the general conception of the sacraments’,48 which needs no
further comment in this place.
Unsurprisingly, this panentheistic mode of thought is also present in the above-
mentioned ‘Speech of Ignatius of Loyola to a Modern-Day Jesuit’,49 first published in
1978 and called by Rahner himself a ‘sum of my theology as a whole and the way I sought
to live’ or, later, even his ‘spiritual testament’.50 A passage entitled ‘Immediate Experience
of God’51 says that Ignatius wanted to tell people something ‘that was meant to redeem
their freedom into God’s freedom’52 or into a God of ‘modeless incomprehensibility’.53
Rahner then goes on to present an impressive image of the relationship between
subjective experience and the religious institution, which is closely connected with
his view on the sacraments cited above. As regards the institutional character of the
church, he makes use of the metaphor of ‘irrigation systems’54 conducting water
to the heart’s ground from without. In that, it is certainly significant for the heart’s
fertility. Besides that, however, ‘there are, as it were, deep drillings in the land itself
so that amidst that very land the water of the living spirit may spring from such a
source, drilled open in this way, towards eternal life. [. . .] [T]he image is misleading.
There is no ultimate opposition between one’s own source and the ‘irrigating system’
from without.’55 And while being beyond speech and comprehension, this God, in
his ‘modeless incomprehensibility’, remains an addressable ‘thou’56 as he has already
promised himself to us in the word

in which the Father has pronounced himself in His fullness and which was in the
beginning with God. And because this Word is spirit, it knows itself und it knows
itself as the Word of the Father, hearing the Father’s self-pronunciation which it is
itself. And this Word which has heard everything from the Father has spoken itself
into our heart.57

Again, the Christological criterion is at the fore with the leitmotifs of Spirit in the World
and Hearer of the Word being clearly alluded to.
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 159

In his last speech before his death entitled Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,58
Rahner emphasizes the principle of analogy which postulates the ‘revocation of the
affirmative conceptual contents of a positive statement’,59 reminding the reader of the
fact ‘that the theologian is a true theologian only as long as he does not purport to
speak clearly and transparently, but is terrified by the analogical floating between “yes”
and “no” above the abyss of God’s incomprehensibility, experiencing it and bearing
witness to it at the same time’.60 The talk ends in a passage which can only be read or
listened to in awe and which, in its own special fashion, outlines the way all creatures
return to God and remain encompassed in him:

When the angels of death have removed all the meaningless garbage which we call
our history from the recesses of our spirit (even though the true essence of realized
freedom will remain, of course); when all the stars of our ideals with which we
had, in our pretension, adorned the heavens of our own existence, have burned
up and lost their light; when death has set up an emptiness of terrible silence and
when we have in faith and hope accepted this silence as our true being; when our
earlier life, however long, seems to be but one little explosion of our freedom at
that time, even though it struck us as being extended in slow motion, an explosion
in which question turned into answer, possibility into reality, time into eternity
and freedom offered to us into freedom realized; and when, amidst this utter terror
of unspeakable joy, it turns out that this emptiness of terrible silence which we
deem death is in reality filled with the primordial secret that we call God, with
his pure light and with his all-taking and all-giving love; and when from this
modeless secret the face of Christ, the holy one, emerges, glancing at us; and when
this concreteness is the divine surpassing of all our true assumptions about the
incomprehensibility of the modeless God, then, perhaps, I do not really describe
what is coming, but stammer and hint at what one may expect that which is coming
to be like, as one already experiences the end of death itself as the beginning of
that which will come. 80 years is a long time. However, the lifetime meted out to
everybody is that short moment in which that which is to be comes into being.61

It is passages like this that confirm Karl Lehmann’s view that Rahner’s quest for
ever more sublime and more adequate ways of speaking of God, in its deep sense of
transcendence, reveals a ‘scepticism vis-à-vis the presently-given and presently-offered
which wants to leave the last word to God himself ’62
(translated by Christian Hengstermann).
160 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Response by Douglas Hedley

Klaus Müller’s limpid discussion of Karl Rahner may seem anomalous in this volume.
As he notes, the links between my project and von Balthasar would seem more obvious.
Yet Rahner’s idea in Spirit in the World is entitled ‘The possibility of Metaphysics on
the Basis of Imagination’ and his idea of a Vorgriff, or ‘pre-apprehension’, is a vision
of a religious a priori closely akin to the imagination trilogy. In Hearer of the Word
Rahner, following in the footsteps of Blondel, develops this theme of a predisposition
to revelation. Müller shows how Ignatian spirituality fed into the thought of Rahner
and how his spiritual writings should not be divorced from his more theoretical
compositions. There is a longing for the whence and wither of our existence that is
ineluctably metaphysical. At the same time, Müller stresses that Rahner eschews any
nominal or abstract transcendence. The exploration of subjectivity in Rahner’s thought
and the dialectic of God in humanity and man’s life in God, the hen kai pan that links
the tradition of Eckhart and Cusa through the Cambridge Platonists to German
Idealism, and thereby to the transcendental approach. The extent of my ‘panentheism’
is an ambiguity in the project that Müller rightly highlights.

Notes
1 Karl Rahner, Sämtliche Werke, 32 vols, edited by Karl Lehmann et al. (Solothurn and
Düsseldorf: Benziger; Freiburg, Basel and Vienna: Herder, 1995–2018). References
will throughout be given to this authoritative edition (abbreviated SW). Whenever
possible, existing English translations have been made use of. If no reference is given,
the translation is by Christian Hengstermann.
2 Rahner, Geist in Welt, SW 2, 285–300. Translation: Rahner, Spirit in the World.
Foreword by Johannes B. Metz. Translated. by William Dych, S.J. (New York:
Continuum, 1994), 385–408.
3 Ibid., 299. Translation: ibid., 406. The sentence in square brackets is not by Rahner
himself, but has been added by J. B. Metz in the second edition.
4 Douglas Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York: T&T
Clark, 2008); Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (New York
and London: Continuum, 2011); The Iconic Imagination (New York and London:
Bloomsbury, 2016).
5 Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 4), 39.
6 Karl Lehmann, ‘Karl Rahner, ein Portrait’, in Rahner, SW 1, XII–LXVII, here XXIX.
7 Rahner, E latere Christi. Der Ursprung der Kirche als zweiter Eva aus der Seite Christi
des zweiten Adam. Eine Untersuchung über den typologischen Sinn von Joh 19,34, in
SW 3, 1–84.
8 Rahner, Geist in Welt, SW 2, 3–300.
9 Ibid., 14. Translation: Dych, Spirit in the World, lii (italics in the original).
10 Cf. Karl Lehmann, ‘Philosophisches Denken im Werk Karl Rahners’, in Karl Rahner in
Erinnerung, edited by Albert Raffelt (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1994), 10–27, here
12–16.
11 Cf. Rahner, ‘Gnade als Mitte menschlicher Existenz. Ein Gespräch mit und von Karl
Rahner aus Anlaß seines 70. Geburtstages’, Herderkorrespondenz (1974): 79.
 
God in the World and Ourselves in God 161

12 Rahner, Hörer des Wortes. Zur Grundlegung einer Religionsphilosophie, in SW 4, 1–281.

Translation: Hearer of the Word. Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion.
Translation of the First Edition by Joseph Donceel. Edited with an Introduction by
Andrew Tallon (New York: Continuum, 1994).
13 Maurice Blondel, Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1997), Vol. II: 1888–1913, 126–7.
14 For more details, see Klaus Müller, Glauben – Fragen – Denken, 3 vols., vol 3:
Selbstbeziehung und Gottesfrage (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2010), 482–6.
15 Hansjürgen Verweyen, ‘Glaubensverantwortung heute. Zu den “Anfragen” von
Thomas Pröpper’, Theologische Quartalschrift 174 (1994): 288–303, here 289.
16 Rahner, ‘Rede des Ignatius von Loyola an einen Jesuiten von heute’, in SW 25,
299–329.
17 On the following, see Hörer des Wortes, I, chs 3 and 4 (SW 2, 48–88/Translation:
Donceel, Hearer of the Word, 23–44).
18 Ibid., 48. Translation: ibid., 27.
19 Ibid., 52. Translation: ibid., 29–30.
20 Geist in Welt, SW 2, 62. Translation: Dych, Spirit in the World, 69.
21 Hörer des Wortes, SW 4, 76–7. Translation: Donceel, Hearer of the Word, 47 (slightly
modified).
22 Ibid., 83. Translation: ibid, 50.
23 Ibid., 86. Translation: ibid, 54.
24 Chapter 3 (ibid., 50–70/Translation: ibid., 23–34) is entitled ‘The Luminosity of Being’.
25 Ibid., 86.
26 Cf. ibid., 88–92. Translation: ibid., 45–7.
27 Ibid., 108. Translation: ibid., 68.
28 Ibid., 114. Translation: ibid., 72–3.
29 Ibid., 136. Translation: ibid., 88.
30 Ibid., 194. Translation: ibid., 106–7.
31 Ibid., 209. Translation: ibid., 142.
32 Cf., for example, Rüdiger Bubner, ‘Wie wichtig ist Subjektivität? Über einige
Selbstverständlichkeiten und mögliche Mißverständnisse der Gegenwart’, Merkur 49
(1995): 235–46.
33 ‘Über die Einheit von Nächsten- und Gottesliebe’, in Schriften zur Theologie 6/2
(Einsiedeln, Zurich and Cologne: Benziger, 1968), 277–8, here 279 (= SW 12, 76–91,
here 77–8). Translation: ‘Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbour and the Love
of God’, in id., Theological Investigations 6, translated by Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1969), 231–49, here 233 (slightly modified).
34 Rahner, ‘Immanente und transzendente Vollendung der Welt’, in Schriften zur
Theologie 8 (Einsiedeln, Zurich and Cologne: Benziger, 1967), 593–609, 601 (= SW 15,
544–556, 550). Translation: Rahner, ‘Immanent and Transcendent Consummation of
the World’, in id., Theological Investigations 10, translated by David Bourke (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), 273–89, here 281.
35 ‘Innenleben’, in SW 1, 351–2, here 351.
36 On that, see Andreas R. Battlog, ‘Editionsbericht’, in SW 7, IX–XLIV, here XVIII.
37 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Rev. Geist in Welt, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 63
(1939): 371–9, here 378.
38 Rahner, Worte ins Schweigen, in: SW 1, 3–38, 4. Translation: Encounters with Silence.
Translated by James M. Demske, S. J. (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1960), 4.
39 Ibid. Translation: ibid.
162 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

40 Ibid., 5. Translation: ibid., 6.

41 Ibid., 8. Translation: ibid., 13.
42 Ibid., 9. Translation: ibid., 14–16.
43 Ibid., 26. Translation: ibid., 32–3.
44 Von der Not und dem Segen des Gebetes, in SW 1, 39–116, here 40. Translation:
Karl Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer. A Revised Edition of On Prayer,
translated by Bruce W. Gillette, introduction by Harvey D. Egan (Collegeville: The
Liturgical Press), 1.
45 Ibid., 56–7. Translation: ibid., 22–3.
46 Ibid., 148–9.
47 ‘Zur Theologie des Gottesdienstes’, in Schriften zur Theologie 14 (Zurich, Einsiedeln
and Cologne: Benziger, 1980), 227–37, here 230 (= SW 29, 391–398, here 393).
Translation: Rahner, ‘On the Theology of Worship’, in id., Theological Investigations
19, translated by Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984), 141–9,
here 143. On that, cf. also ‘Zum Verständnis des Weihnachtsfestes’, in Schriften zur
Theologie 16 (Zurich, Einsiedeln and Cologne: Benziger, 1984), 336–47, here 340–1
(= SW 29, 169–77, here 172). Translation: ‘Understanding Christmas’, in ibid., 140–8,
here 143–4.
48 He did so first in: ‘Überlegungen zum personalen Vollzug des sakramentalen
Geschehens’, in Schriften zur Theologie 16, (Zurich, Einsiedeln and Cologne: Benziger,
1972) (= SW 18, 458– 476, 458). Translation: Rahner, ‘Considerations on the Active
Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event’, in id., Theological Investigations 14,
translated by David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976), 161–78,
161.
49 Rahner, ‘Rede des Ignatius von Loyola’ (see n. 16).
50 See the references in: Battlog, ‘Editionsbericht’,XLI–XLII.
51 Rahner, ‘Rede des Ignatius von Loyola’ (see n. 16), 299.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 301. Cf. also ibid., 302.
54 Ibid., 304.
55 Ibid., 303.
56 cf. ibid., 308.
57 Rahner, ‘Freunde Gottes. Homilie zu Joh 15, 12–16’, in SW 4, 294–5, 294.
58 Rahner, ‘Erfahrungen eines katholischen Theologen’, in SW 25, 47–57.
59 Ibid., 49.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 57.
62 Lehmann, ‘Karl Rahner’ (see n. 6), XXXIX.
 7

René Girard and Douglas Hedley on

violence, sacrifice and imagination
Per Bjørnar Grande

According to René Girard, the main problem among humans is violence. If people
could solve the problem of violence, most other problems would also be solved.
Mimetic theory localizes the problem in rivalistic desires. Every time imitation turns
into severe rivalry between human beings, violence, either physical or psychological,
seems to get the upper hand. Before long the rivals will have forgotten what they were
rivalling about. They have become doubles, preoccupied mostly with subverting the
other. This is the human dilemma which seems absolutely insoluble – despite an ever-
increasing focus on the devastating effects of violence.

1 Sacrifice
Sacrifice is the main outcome of man’s desire to imitate each other. In the mimetic
delirium which arises when a society is afflicted or in crisis, a frenetic activity arises
whereby someone has to be found who is responsible for this terrible situation,
someone who, by being sacrificed, can restore peace. In other words, sacrifice has to
come about in order to prevent a disintegrating society from dissolving into violence.
In the Prologue of Sacrifice Imagined, Hedley writes that ‘this book does not try
to answer the problem of evil, but endeavors to explore some aspects of the inherited
topics of suffering, violence, and atonement as sacrifice imagined’.1 Despite that
sacrifice is not Hedley’s main endeavour throughout his three books. It is, especially in
his second book of the trilogy, a main focus. Thus, I will try to see if Sacrifice Imagined
may give us a fruitful insight into the violence which threatens every community and
modern civilization as such.
Essential concepts in Hedley’s trilogy are ‘imagination’, ‘image’ and ‘sacrifice’.
Hedley is eager to use and connect the same primary concepts from Living Forms of
Imagination (2008) in his two latter books. Sacrifice, for Hedley, is both real and a part of
our cultural imagination. The latter means that sacrifice has a capacity for analogy.2
Even though the reader might feel uncertain about how to understand imagination
in sacrifice, the discussion on sacrifice as a life-giving phenomenon of existence,
164 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

gradually, through Sacrifice Imagined, becomes more essential and important in order
to understand both religion and culture in general.
In Sacrifice Imagined, sacrifice is seen as something positive, especially in
theological terms and especially when it is connected to atonement. Sacrifice is the
core of existence. Either its meaning is violent or it means sacrificing oneself for the
benefit of others. A sacrificial understanding of life enables us to delve into the deepest
and most profound areas of existence, something which a purely rationalist view on
life can neither fathom nor uncover. In Sacrifice Imagined, Hedley delves into Greek
tragedy, trying to give tragedy and myth a more positive significance than, especially,
what is the case in Girard’s early interpretation of sacrifice – even seeing sacrifice and
conversion as things dependent upon one another. However, there are only minor
differences between the late Girard’s and Hedley’s understandings of sacrifice. Both
would wholeheartedly agree with Simone Weil that the false God changes suffering
into violence while the true God changes violence into suffering.3
Hedley’s view that man cannot avoid partaking in the sacrificial is in accordance
with Girard – although Girard first and foremost sees sacrifice in the light of violence.
Hedley expands the discussion on sacrifice in order to understand both its theological
meaning and its contemporary impact on culture. Thus, sacrifice is located both in
the modern and in the secular, as well as in shaping history. Hedley seems to expand
the territory of sacrifice in order to come to grips with its nature in its totality, that is,
both with its negative and positive effects. Sacrifice, in Sacrifice Imagined is, at the end
of the day, basically seen as something positive and renewing, despite all its violent
connotations.
From a historical point of view, one can see that sacrifice was able to protect a
group from dissolving. However, sacrifice also contains lynching and bullying, the
most despicable acts of modern culture. There is a direct link between cult sacrifice
and lynching, making it impossible to understand the word and phenomenon as only
regenerating. Hedley’s understanding of sacrifice somewhat lacks an ethical overview.
The aesthetical gets prominence and seems to lead to a veneration of sacrifice, despite
its violence. A Neoplatonic view on culture can, because it contains an anti-mimetic
understanding of order, lead to a certain blindness to the violence and chaos in a
society, from where there actually is no refuge. If one omits imitation for the sake of a
world of ideas, it becomes easier to see sacrifice in society as only positive.
However, the truest and most advanced form of sacrifice is a non-violent response
to violence, an act created by a loving and forgiving God. From such a viewpoint,
Hedley is right in criticizing Otto for laying too much emphasis on tremendum and
too little on fascinans.4
If sacrifice is seen as atonement, it is easier to see its positive function. Hedley’s
understanding of atonement emphasizes the logical and loveable. With the help of
the analytic philosopher Richard Swinburne, Hedley convincingly argues that man’s
repentance and apology are insufficient ‘tools’ for atonement, and that ‘reparation and
repentance can only be offered by man through Christ’.5 In certain passages of Sacrifice
Imagined, Hedley turns out to be a Christian Platonist with a rather sombre view of man.
It seems that it is partly through the influence of Joseph de Maistre, himself a Christian
Platonist, that Hedley attempts to give a profound and unsentimental understanding
 
René Girard and Douglas Hedley on Violence, Sacrifice and Imagination 165

of the human condition as deeply imbued by original sin. However, I find this less
emphasized in The Iconic Imagination. In his last book, Hedley understands images
somewhat in the sense you find in Platonic and Jungian archetypes. They point to a
transcendent reality: the good, the true and the beautiful. Hedley seems to withdraw
from the discussion on violence and imagination is seen as caused within a more
sheltered realm of ideas. Thus, seen against a background of a community’s chaos and
conflicts, the Neoplatonic world of ideas seems to me to be a shaky starting point.

2 Hominization
Hedley emphasizes the imaginative as something unique to man. However, this
uniqueness, compared to animals, is rather in degree than in kind. The great leap
forward is due to the symbolic and imagination. Becoming human means a shift from
the biological to the symbolic. It is by imagination that man gradually becomes the
dominant species. Despite such a culturally dominated theory, Hedley’s anthropology
is seen against a Darwinian backdrop: ‘We are forged of the same stuff as all other
creatures and, as such, share the similitude of the created order with the author of all
things.’6 However, Hedley wishes to counter any Darwinian objections to there being
any link between image and imagination. From my reading of Sacrifice Imagined, I
find it curious that in his later attempts to make sense of the doctrine of the imago Dei
sacrifice is not considered the fundamental factor. Probably, due to an expansive view
of imago Dei, Hedley views all life as a part of God’s image.
While Girard sees evolution as related to heightened imitation, imagination, in
Hedley’s work, replaces the mimetic, changing desire into something more orderly and
harmonious. In Sacrifice Imagined, Hedley emphasizes original sin but does not see it
as stemming from rivalry, which makes it less impossible to view human action as idea-
directed. While in Hedley’s case the shift from animal to human is caused by the growth
of the brain (and this makes it possible to create a symbolic world), Girard emphasizes
imitation and scapegoating as decisive for hominization and culture-building. Hedley
doubts that Girard’s theory, however illuminating, provides a universal mechanism for
the understanding of the move from hominids to humanity.7 However, both emphasize
the symbolic among early hominids, but Girard’s narrative, which initially is in tune
with a Darwinian evolution, changes dramatically after the introduction of the
scapegoat, after which time the survival of the fittest becomes indirect and symbolic.
The scapegoat changes the whole scene, from instinctual killings to survival through
sacrifice, and, gradually, through the veneration of the victim. Thus, at a certain time
in history the victim becomes the source cementing a group and thereby becomes the
saving element in order to preserve the group. In this way, evolution seems to shift
from the biological to the cultural. It is after such a time in history that one can talk
about the strength of the weakest link. Religion expresses this birth of culture. In order
to prevent a community from being destroyed in violence, one establishes a surrogate
victim capable of creating peace. In this way religion upholds society. And because
the victim is capable of bringing peace, he/she/they is/are often divinized. Sacrificial
166 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

religion is therefore a force capable of bringing order to a society, an order which is

peace-oriented, yet requires violence. In this respect, the community does not worship
the killing, but the peace which is a consequence of the killing. One might say that
Girard defines religion as the attempt to prevent violence with the help of the surrogate
victim.
In ‘Mimetic Paradox and the event of Human Origin’, Eric Gans seems to indicate a
theory in which Girard’s original scapegoat scene is mingled with imagination. Gans’s
theory is initially Girardian as he claims that any kind of origin is connected with
mimesis. He sees the intensification of mimesis as a developing and evolutionary force
in both animalistic and prehuman life, which, at a certain time in history, sparks off
culture and humanizing projects.8 But Gans seems to part ways with Girard when
claiming that language and culture began with the deferral of violence.9 There is some
sort of (probably awkward) gesture which arises, and, in a way, points to a less violent
development. While Girard argues that culture has its origin in the actual violence
of spontaneous scapegoating, Gans claims that culture started with a deferral of the
same violence. The view that culture arises from an existence mired in violence and
from some sort of alternative gesture that is different from reciprocal violence seems to
support Hedley’s thesis of imagination. Blunt, primitive violence suddenly is met by a
response which is not reciprocal and produces a different outcome, and, at some later
stage in history, regulates culture through the scapegoat mechanism.

3 Myth
If one considers myth in relation to hominization, Hedley sees it as something
specifically human which enriches culture in all its diversity. Symbolic violence seems
to moderate and change sacrifice into less violent representations. Myth, which also
stems from violence, clearly enriches a culture with imagination. Hedley sees myth as
a cultural process of transfiguring history, in which all the myths in the world express a
sense of participation in the sacred.10 Girard, on the other hand, with his more critical
understanding of myth, claims that all myths originate in collective violence.11 ‘All
myths . . . have their roots in real acts of violence against real victims.’12 According to
Girard, myths try, in different ways, to hide violence, often by transforming this same
violence. The last thing a writer of myths will admit to is the guilt and wrongdoing
of the community's violence. Myths are written from the community’s point of view,
meaning the sacrificers’ point of view. In this respect myths have a legitimizing effect
on society. But usually the immolation is transformed into something fantastic and
heroic. The victim is very often divinized, which indicates that the community cannot
bear its own violence. Myths try to cover up violence. But, at the same time, myths can,
when interpreted rationally and from an anti-sacrificial and de-mythologized point
of view, be read as texts of victimizing. Myths, in a hidden way, usually refer to some
sort of violent origin. It is on the basis of such a suspicious reading that Girard uses
mythical texts to uncover hidden layers of meaning. By uncovering the violence in
mythical texts, Girard discovers the hiding and editing process in the making of myths.
In this way myths can be seen as an attempt to hide reality. Myths both displace and
 
René Girard and Douglas Hedley on Violence, Sacrifice and Imagination 167

refer to violence in a society. According to Girard, violence is the force which displaces
and mythologizes reality. Seen from this perspective, violence is the birth of culture,
since expulsion creates difference and division, an inside and an outside, an us and
them, a society.
This view of myth as both revealing and concealing is solely worked out in order to
understand the violent formation of culture. Hedley thus avoids such a reductive view
by insisting on imagination, both in myths and in rituals, thereby providing a much
broader understanding of how they function. As myths stem from imagination and
imagination shapes history, myths are therefore part of a great cultural enhancement.
Hedley’s inclusive understanding of myth is radically different from Girard’s. Girard
sees the passion, the killing of God, as revealing the violence of humankind as such,
and by doing this demythologizes culture:

The Spirit is working in history to reveal what Jesus already has revealed, the
mechanism of the scapegoat, the genesis of all mythology, the nonexistence of all
gods of violence. (. . .) The Paraclete is the universal advocate, the chief defender
of all innocent victims, the destroyer of every representation of persecution. He is
truly the spirit of truth that dissipates the fog of mythology.13

Girard’s extreme deconstruction of myth in order to discover true Christianity is very

different from Hedley’s all-inclusiveness in nature and scope. Girard’s anthropology
builds on the premises that we want what other people want. Our desires are always
caught up in someone else’s desires. A culture’s rationality and truth are therefore a
part of this basis of human interaction, mingled by our desires and therefore far from
obvious. Hedley, on the other hand, basically seems to trust different cultural positions
worldwide, even though the greatest obstacle against such broadmindedness seems to
be history itself.

4 Logos
Imagination is both the central word and theme in Hedley’s trilogy. By emphasizing
images and imagination, there is an inherent critique of modern ‘logocentrism’
where not only the spoken word but also the written word reduces the richness of
imagination.14 Hedley’s understanding of truth seems to convey that art in its Platonic
manifestations is transcendent. His concept of truth is expansive and goes beyond any
dogmatic or confessional ramifications. Everything true, good and beautiful points
to God. This seems to be in accordance with St Paul, but the thinking around it is
less ethical, as in St Paul’s case, and more intellectual and aesthetic. Because of his
broadminded theology, Hedley wishes to combine (if not unify) the Greek Logos with
its Christian counterpart. The emphasis lies both on the Greek paideia and rationality
and on the Christian understanding of agapé – which shows that violence and expulsion
is not regarded as the prime problem either in the concept of the Logos or in culture
as such. Hedley sees Athens and Jerusalem as more or less organically interconnected.
Their worldviews are different, but there is no fundamental ontological difference.15
168 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Girard sees both the modern (such as in the case of Heidegger) and the pre-
Socratic understanding of the Logos as fundamentally violent, while the Johannine
understanding emphasizes the expulsion of the Logos, the violent manner in which
Jesus was treated. The Johannine understanding of Christ as the Logos, despite
borrowing the concept from Greek philosophy, marks a break with the Greek meaning
of the word.16 Hedley stands in between Girard’s emphasis on the non-violent Christian
Logos and the violent Logos of Heidegger. The latter, clearly inspired by Nietzsche
and Hegel, saw both the Greek and the Christian Logos as violent. The difference,
according to Heidegger, therefore, is not manifested as a totally different approach to
violence. Heidegger differentiates the Greek and Johannine Logos in a slave-master
context where the Greek Logos is conceived by free men and the Johannine Logos is
violence visited upon slaves. Girard’s attempt to differentiate the two concepts of Logos
is partly an attempt to reveal the difference between a sacrificial and a non-sacrificial
world view.17 With hindsight, one might call this fundamental difference a mimetic
struggle between a Greek and a Christian world view. The Christian Logos, as the
Gospel of John describes it, is perceived through expulsion. The divine Logos was not
received by his own: ‘He came to his own and his own people received him not’ (Jn. 1.10-
11). The Greek Logos, on the other hand, initiates expulsion by its violence. Different
approaches to the Logos will necessarily, according to James Williams, bring about a
very different attitude when dealing with victims.18 Clearly, Girard sees the life of Jesus
and the Johannine Logos as one and the same.19 Both were expelled, both represented
God and both incarnated love. The Greek Logos, on the other hand, expels the victim.

5 Imagination
Can imagination be the fundamental factor in order to assume a predominant role
in civilization or even the factor which shapes history? Despite a wealth of references
in Hedley’s trilogy, there is a challenge and difficulty in coming to terms with how
to understand ‘imagination’. Initially, it stands for the opposite of fantasy. It builds
on inherited imagery and, instead of ritual slaughter, refers to participation in life.20
Imagination is not a specific faculty or a module in the brain, but an activity of the
mind.21 In Living Forms of Imagination, imagination, according to Hedley/Collingwood,
generates knowledge and helps children to function. It unifies experience into a set of
stable objects. It evinces freedom beyond sensation, and it converts sensations into
ideas.22 Both image and imagination point to something transcendent. It consists of the
good, the true and the beautiful. Its truth is expansive and points beyond any dogmatic
or confessional ramifications. Imagination is seen as something intuitive, the fascinans
which re-enchants the world. Thus, the imagination is not something which one can
label as correct or false, it can be seen more as a vision. It points to God.
Not only does imagination originate in God, but art is also seen as transcendent. Against
the backdrop of a Platonic ideal of order and harmony, art is seen as something which
enables us to grasp the essential.23 Seeing this in the light of art experiences in the twentieth
century and onwards, transcendence not only consists in works of art but also in the artist
whose imaginative temperaments and intuitive insights reveal some sort of divine truth.
 
René Girard and Douglas Hedley on Violence, Sacrifice and Imagination 169

The experience of art somewhat replaces Christianity, and, both in art and political life,
transforms men into gods.24 When Christianity is no longer seen as the torchbearer of truth
among the majority, varied forms of Gnosticism replace the classic ideals of humility, ideals
such as love for one’s neighbour and concern for victims. The modern artist, romantic in his
artistic role, bohemian in lifestyle, dogmatic in his relativism, deeply individualistic, where
love of one’s neighbour is replaced by the ongoing intensity of metaphysical rivalry, can be
seen as a new kind of prophet. In lack of religion, the world of art creates new ideals and
idols, which often consist in self-centredness, pride and lack of concern for others. From
such a viewpoint, I see no reason to replace religious belief with a belief in art. It will only, in
the long run, degrade one’s personality. Neither art as such, nor Platonic ideas, I think, are
really able to grasp the essence of the confused minds of people in the twenty-first century.
Religion, in certain instances, is.
Theology today needs to be related more closely to anthropology. The Kingdom
of God and the Christian emphasis on compassion need, by its imitative and non-
metaphysical nature, to be located right in the centre of people’s daily challenges.
Today’s anti-mimetic approach, in order to understand both the mind and the artistic
expressions, has made Platonism, outside the universities, a limited tool for making
sense of modern life. The modern intellectual climate does not favour the world of
ideas. A shift towards thought based on imitation, desire and a stronger commitment
to historical references should affect clear-sighted Platonists, who, otherwise, may risk
ending up in chains, in the same cave designed for others, staring into a fake world.
According to Hedley, Girard’s inspiration is not biology but imaginative literature.25
In this way Hedley and Girard draw on many of the same sources. However, Girard
mostly draws on novels from realism, and is critical of literature he sees as being built
on ‘the Romantic lie’.26 People wish to live with the illusion of spontaneous desire and
believe that they do. It is this illusion concerning one’s autonomy which, according to
Girard, some novelists have, with great difficulty, been able to reveal. The difference
between the romantic novelist and the romanesque or realist novelist is based upon their
different approaches to the mediator.27 The romantic writer will show and propagate
the model or mediator’s presence, often as a rival. But he will not reveal the mediator’s
role in mediating his own desire. The romantic writer believes in the autonomy of the
characters, and, according to Girard, is himself governed by a desire for autonomy. The
romantic lie consists in seeing desire as spontaneous and linear. The realist novelist
both presents and reveals the role of the mediator. The mediator is revealed as the
decisive factor in the protagonist’s desire. The realist novelist is, according to Girard,
the most trustworthy explorer of desire, a desire which Girard labels ‘desire according
to the other’. And by admitting the influence of the Other, one can, through a personal
conversion (closely related to apocalypse), attain religious truth.

6 Conclusion
Hedley’s trilogy establishes a Christian theism. It is broadminded and it is learned, and
its emphasis on imagination is, loosely speaking, an attempt to build a coherent theory
of imagination as the main source of our understanding of human nature, culture and
170 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

religion. Hedley does an excellent job in showing the similarities of myths in different
cultures. Since he views human nature as tainted by original sin, Hedley’s romanticism
is balanced. It consists in praising the beautiful and the uplifting, and it does not act
as a tool for any kind of self-glorification. For Hedley all religions seem to be good in
the way that they help people to live a life of imagination. Girard begins by locating
the prime motivation in imitation, and, gradually, comes to see that Christianity turns
myth and sacrifice around by purging them from violence. Art, for Girard, can, in
certain instances, reveal the structure of a Christian conversion, but in most cases
art is caught up in fake desires. Hedley gives art a certain priority as it mediates the
transcendent. My own hesitancy and refusal to see art and artists as conveying the
transcendent can, admittedly, be seen as puritan, but it also saves us from turning art
and artists into new ‘gods’.
From my point of view, Christian theology becomes most useful when it starts
with Christology. By that I mean that any notion of God in Christianity starts with
reflections on the stories about Jesus. Natural theology originates in our subconscious:
our fear and dreams. The subconscious is, in sum, our encounters with others. In this
way, when trying to think one’s way to God, all our violent experiences play along in
the process. It is therefore understandable that most people and most cultures believe
in a legalistic and violent god.
Hedley does a marvellous job in revealing the relevance of Platonism in today’s
theological thinking. Imagination is shown to be something life-giving and capable of
reinvigorating our cultural life. However, would not Hedley’s argument have been even
stronger if Occam’s razor had cut deeper into human misery and religious intolerance,
and his argument had thus been given greater urgency?
 
René Girard and Douglas Hedley on Violence, Sacrifice and Imagination 171

Response by Douglas Hedley

Per Bjørnar Grande reflects upon the significance of the work of René Girard for my
Sacrifice Imagined. He also considers the possible ramifications that Girard’s work
might have for other works in the trilogy. The profound achievement of Girard as a
seminal thinker needs little emphasis and his interest in anthropology and science as
well as literature is exemplary and instructive. Girard addresses the intellectual giants
of the nineteenth century with great vigour and develops a remarkable, powerful
and unique vision of the origins of human culture. Grande notes that I do not follow
Girard’s notion of mimetic rivalry, even if I do (unremarkably) accept the general
significance of mimesis. Nor do I see mimetic rivalry as the ground of original sin and I
do not accept the idea of religion as the bid to hinder savagery through the instrument
of the proxy victim, with the stability of society relying upon the scapegoat mechanism
and subsequent veneration of the victim.
Grande notes that for Girard sacrifice is essentially negative. Sacrifice has ‘to prevent
a disintegrating society from dissolving into violence’. My stress upon the symbolism of
sacrifice is related to the polyvalence the symbol. Sacrifice can refer to bloody sacrifices
such as egregious barbaric practices of human sacrifice, yet it can also refer to delayed
gratification, the rather humdrum ‘sacrifices’ of self that are part of the rational agent.
Grande is correct to note that I have a different model of the mythical. I agree that
myths are often violent, sometimes dire: the Titan Cronos castrating his father Uranus
with a sickle or Agamemnon executing his daughter Iphigenia are evident instances of
brutality. The mythic location of the great vision of Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad
Gita before the confrontation of the Pandavas and the Kauravas is on the battlefield.
Yet I cannot accept Girard’s diagnosis of myth as both a concealing of violence and a
form of societal justification. In a sense, much hangs upon the conception of violence.
Violence is a fact of the natural world, whether in the behaviour of carnivores or the
establishment of hierarchies or the securing of a mate against competition. Much play
among mammals or sport among humans is a sublimated form of violence. Much that
is valuable in cultures is inspired and driven by aggressive instincts. The question is
usually to whom is the act violent and why. The eating of meat is an unacceptable
form of violence for the vegetarian or the Hindu; the engaging in war for the pacifist;
euthanasia for its opponents.
My fundamental disagreement with Girard is over the logos.28 Here Girard exhibits
his deep debts to Nietzsche and Heidegger when he claims that ‘Heidegger recognises
that the Greek Logos is inseparably linked with violence’.29 My own work is a return to
the logos of the Alexandrians.30 The blood-stained logos of Origen is still the expression
of the mind of God.

Notes
1 Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined, Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (New York
and London: Continuum, 2011), 6.
2 Ibid., 38.
172 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

3 Ibid., 171.
4 Ibid., 36.
5 Ibid., 165.
6 Hedley, The Iconic Imagination (New York et al.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 35.
7 Cf. ibid., 87.
8 Eric Gans, ‘Mimetic Paradox and the Event of Human Origin’, Antropoetics I/2 (1995)
(no page numbers given).
9 Eric Gans, ‘The Unique Source of Religion and Morality’, Contagion 3 (1996): 51–65,
here 52.
10 Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 6), 206.
11 For a systematic overview of Girard’s understanding of myth, see chapter 3 (‘What is
a Myth?’) in The Scapegoat, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986), 24–44, and chapter 5 (‘Mythology’) in I See Satan Fall Like
Lightning, Maryknoll, translated by James G. Williams (New York: Orbis Books,
2001), 62–70.
12 Girard, Scapegoat (see n. 11), 25.
13 Ibid., 207.
14 Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 6), 4–6.
15 Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 1), 57–60 and 137–60.
16 See Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, translated by Stephen
Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 263–80.
17 Ibid.
18 See James Williams, ‘Foreword’, in Girard, Satan (see n. 11), ix–xxiv.
19 Girard, Things Hidden (see n. 16), 270–6.
20 Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 1), 11.
21 Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 6), xii.
22 Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York: Continuum, 2008),
42–8. Robin G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Clarendon Press, 1938),
197, 215.
23 See Hedley, Iconic Imagination (see n. 6), 82–6.
24 Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (eds), Personality Cults in Stalinism (Göttingen: V&R
Unipress, 2004), 19.
25 Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 1), 84.
26 Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by
Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1965).
27 The difference between romantic and realist literature is not a difference according to
epoch. The difference is based on an approach to desire. There is, however, in Girard’s
work, a preference for novels written in the realist tradition.
28 René Girard, ‘The Logos of Heraclitus and the Logos of John’, in Things Hidden
since the Foundation of the World, translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer
(London: Athlone Press, 1987), 263–80.
29 Ibid., 265.
30 Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined, 137.
 8

Perceptions of God
Reflections on William P. Alston’s
theory of religious experience
Margit Wasmaier-Sailer

1 Functionalizing religious experience

for the justification of faith
Contemporary and 20th century philosophical treatments of religious experience
are greatly influenced by William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902). James (1842–1910) treated religious experience in observational terms,
documenting cases in which individuals report an encounter with an unseen
supernatural or spiritual reality. While James treated these experiences as
ostensible cognitive apprehensions with evidential significance, his conclusions
about the nature of this ‘spiritual reality’ remained unsettled in his published work.
Fluctuating between personal theism (in which God is encountered as a person)
and what he called pluralistic pantheism (in which God turns out to be a ‘higher
self ’), James seemed more convinced of a negative thesis: religious experiences
provide some reason to believe there is more to reality than is disclosed in
contemporary, scientific naturalism. Subsequent philosophical, and to some extent
psychological inquiry has often taken shape in either denying James’s conclusion
and demonstrating that naturalism can fully account for religious experience,
or in a defence of the cognitive value of such ostensible experiences that can, in
principle, vindicate a non-naturalist, religious world view.1

The Oxford Companion to Consciousness very accurately describes the poles between
which contemporary theories of religious experience oscillate with these theories
deriving their contours from the tension between naturalism and theism. While
naturalistic theories reduce religious experiences to psychological, sociological or
physiological factors,2 theistic theories argue that such experiences actually point to
a divine reality. Opposition to naturalism is indeed what unites the various theories
in the theistic camp. Whether God is understood as a person according to classical
theism, whether as nature according to pantheism or whether as an all-oneness
174 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

according to a panentheism seems to be of secondary importance. Even William James

focused on the phenomenology of religious experience and not on the metaphysical
question of the nature of the God encountered in these experiences. James was content
with asserting a ‘wider world of meanings’.3 The struggle with naturalism that can
already be seen in James’s theory is all the stronger in the theories that succeeded it.
This is particularly true, though, when it comes to the theories of religious experience
that emerged in analytical philosophy of religion in the second half of the twentieth
century: naturalism seems to be not only its opponent but almost its only interlocutor.
This fixation on naturalism has led representatives of the analytical philosophy of
religion to fall under the spell of scientistic patterns of thought, despite their clear
opposition to naturalism. If everything points to the fact that religious experience is in
no way inferior to its sensory counterpart in terms of cognitive content, then sensory
experience has long been implicitly recognized as a yardstick of experience.4
Through this struggle for recognition, analytical philosophy of religion has
forgotten to regard religious experiences in terms of their own internal dynamics.
It seems to be interested in experiences of God only insofar as they serve to justify
religious beliefs. What such justification addresses is the scientistic world and perhaps
also the scientistic alter ego of the philosopher of religion. However, if experiences of
God are no longer considered for their own sake, then what is lost sight of is actually
the very thing that distinguishes these experiences. Thus, the proprium of religious
experience is often not even recognizable any longer in the theories under discussion.
Douglas Hedley’s theory of religious imagination is a promising attempt to get the
nature of religious experience back on track. The confrontation with naturalism is
always present in his writings, too, but his roots in the Platonic tradition allow him
nonetheless to put up some opposition to naturalism.
I want to strengthen my thesis – that analytical philosophy of religion loses the very
phenomenon that it is trying to protect with such epistemological vigour – through
the example of William P. Alston’s theory of religious experience. His approach shows
particularly well how the object itself that is in question visibly evaporates through
the epistemic safeguarding of religious experience and its functionalization for
justifications of faith. I do not wish to diminish Alston’s merit in epistemology here.
Rather, I would merely like to draw attention to the fact that religious experience in
the context of a philosophy of religion that focuses one-sidedly on justifying faith is
in danger of being reduced to the status of a mere substitute.5 This requires that we
first outline Alston’s theory of mystical experience and then determine the process of
evaporation according to three points in order finally to put forward Hedley’s theory
as a possible alternative.

2 An outline of William P. Alston’s

theory of religious experience
In Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience,6 Alston presents an
argumentatively adept epistemological theory of religious experience. That this
 
Perceptions of God 175

epistemological theory is dedicated to the justification of religious belief is unmistakable

from the very first line:

The central thesis of this book is that experiential awareness of God, or as I shall
be saying, the perception of God, makes an important contribution to the grounds
of religious belief. More specifically, a person can become justified in holding
certain kinds of beliefs about God by virtue of perceiving God as being or doing
so-and-so. The kinds of beliefs that can be so justified I shall call ‘M-beliefs’
(‘M’ for manifestation). M-beliefs are beliefs to the effect that God is doing
something currently vis-à-vis the subject – comforting, strengthening, guiding,
communicating a message, sustaining the subject in being – or to the effect that
God has some (allegedly) perceivable property – goodness, power, lovingness. The
intuitive idea is that by virtue of my being aware of God as sustaining me in being
I can justifiably believe that God is sustaining me in being.7

Alston is here concerned with the epistemological status of personal experiences of

God: he argues for the recognition of such experiences as a genuine source of religious
beliefs. For Alston, if someone becomes aware of the presence of God, then that person
has every reason to believe that God actually is present. Behind this epistemological
thesis is the defence against sceptical objections to the reality content of religious
beliefs. For Alston, the presumption of innocence must apply to beliefs that the believer
obtains from his or her personal experiences of God. The burden of proof, therefore,
lies not with the person who has a religious experience, but, instead, with the person
who denies the reality of this experience.
Drawing on the reports that many mystics provide of their experiences, Alston
reconstructs religious experiences as perceptions of God. Alston deliberately focuses
on a particular type of such experiences: he is concerned with experiences that
he describes as direct perceptions. For Alston, direct perceptions of God are to be
distinguished from mystical experiences of oneness on the one hand and from indirect
perceptions of God on the other. While in experiences of oneness, Alston argues, a
person’s own state of awareness can no longer be distinguished from the awareness
of God’s presence, in direct perceptions of God the subject is still aware of his or her
own state of awareness. In the first case, God reveals himself to the subject directly,
whereas in the second case, he reveals himself to the subject by means of the subject’s
state of awareness. On the other hand, Alston urges us to distinguish between direct
and indirect perceptions: while God presents himself exclusively by means of a
person’s own state of awareness in the former, he presents himself by means of an
object of perception in the latter. For Alston, an indirect perception is when a person
experiences God in the beauties of nature, when a person hears God’s voice in the
words of the Bible, in sermons or in the demands of his or her own conscience, when a
person becomes aware of the providence of God in the events of his or her own life or
when a person perceives God’s activity in the history of salvation.8
Alston’s focus on experiences in which the subject becomes aware of God’s presence
in a direct manner already signals the operation of empiricist criteria in Alston’s theory.
These experiences can in fact be best described according to the model of sensory
176 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

perceptions and sensory perception is, as we know, the measure of all knowledge in
empiricism:

I will suggest and defend a ‘perceptual model’ for the experiences under
consideration. That is, I shall argue that if we think of perception in the most
general way, in which it is paradigmatically exemplified by but not confined to
sense perception, putative awareness of God exhibits this generic character. Thus
it is properly termed (putative) perception of God. Any such argument will have
to employ some particular account of sense perception, and this is a notoriously
controversial topic.9

Alston builds his perceptual model in the following way: he first distils from the
empiricist concept of perception a purely formal concept of perception and then
applies it to the experiences of God in question. Drawing on the ‘Theory of Appearing’,
a perceptual theory of common sense put forward by George D. Hicks,10 Harold A.
Prichard11 and Winston H. F. Barnes12 in the first half of the twentieth century, Alston
defines perception as follows: ‘For S to perceive X is simply for X to appear to S as
so-and-so. That is all there is to it.’13 Since this concept of perception is completely
abstracted from the phenomenal content of experience, Alston can apply the concept
without further modifications to non-sensory experiences. The theory of appearing
provides Alston with a concept of perception that on the one hand corresponds
to common sense and on the other is not limited to sensory perceptions. It allows
him to identify mystical and sensory perceptions as two types of the same genus.14
Parallelizing mystical and sensory perception, Alston does not forget to point to the
differences between the two types of perception: while in our waking state we cannot
escape sensory perception, he points out, mystical perception is usually a very rare
phenomenon. While our sensory perception, and especially our visual perception, is
active, detailed and highly informative, an experience of God, he argues, is dark, sparse
and obscure. While the capacity for sensory perception is shared by every human
being, mystical perception is by no means universal.15 Despite these differences, Alston
argues, experiences of God of this type can nonetheless be categorized as perceptions:
‘despite these differences I want to claim a generic identity of structure.’16
Reconstructing mystical perceptions according to the model of sensory perception
leads us to imagine God like an object in the outside world. Alston is aware of this
danger – one identified by among others Paul Tillich17 – and adopts an explicit position:

Using Tillich’s terminology, I am thinking of God as an object of perception only in

the ‘logical’ sense. A term like ‘object’ may have connotations that are inappropriate
in this context, but these connotations do not constitute any part of its meaning.
In thinking of God as an ‘object’ of experience, I am not suggesting that God is
simply ‘one being alongside others’ (He is quite a special being), much less that
He is a lifeless, inanimate thing that passively allows Himself to be scrutinized.
On the contrary, He is a supreme personal being with Whom we are in personal
interaction and Who is eminently active in our lives. Nor does speaking of God as
an object of experience (or even as an ‘item’ in the phenomenal field) imply that
 
Perceptions of God 177

He is there alongside others. [. . .] That may or may not be the case. He could be
an object of experience in the basic sense in question even if He is the only thing
of which we are aware when we are aware of Him. In short, to say that God is
the object of some experience implies no more than that some people sometimes
experience God, are experientially aware of Him, that sometimes God presents
Himself to our experience.18

For Alston, if we speak of God as an object of perception, then we are saying neither
that he is just one being among many nor that he is a being that exists alongside other
beings. Even less are we reducing him to an inanimate object that can be investigated
and explored. Rather, for Alston, God is a supreme personal being with whom we
have personal contact, a being that itself exercises a large influence on our lives. Alston
makes clear that, in describing God as an object of experience, he simply wishes to
point out that some people occasionally experience God, that God presents himself
to them in these experiences. He uses the notion of object in a logical sense, a move
that is above suspicion even for Tillich: ‘In the logical sense everything about which
a predication is made is, by this very fact, an object. The theologian cannot escape
making God an object in the logical sense of the word.’19 If Alston speaks of God as an
object of perception, then this is not to be understood as if he saw no other linguistic
option, but ultimately considers this means of expression to be totally inappropriate.
By talking of God as a perceptual object, Alston is explicitly taking on ontological
commitments: ‘My talk of God as an object of experience does definitely presuppose
that God exists as an objective reality, indeed that He is maximally real.’20 This very
conception of God as an identifiable object of perception shows that Alston’s notion
of mystical perception is strongly influenced by the paradigm of sensory perception.
That Alston proposes a model of perception for the religious experiences that he
investigates is, on the one hand, due to the fact that the reports provided by many
mystics suggest that we should understand experiences of God as non-sensory
perceptions.21 On the other hand, though, this model corresponds to Alston’s
metaphysical realism, that is, the view that reality is the measure of our knowledge,
and not that our knowledge is the measure of reality.22 That perception gives us direct
access to reality distinguishes it, in Alston’s view, from other forms of knowledge. With
the sources of mystics in mind, Alston characterizes their experiences as follows:

The awareness is experiential in the way it contrasts with thinking about God,
calling up mental images, entertaining propositions, reasoning, engaging in overt
or covert conversation, remembering. Our sources take it that something, namely,
God, has been presented or given to their consciousness, in generically the same
way as that in which objects in the environment are (apparently) presented to
one’s consciousness in sense perception. The most fundamental fact about sense
perception, at least as far as its intrinsic character is concerned, is the way in which
seeing my house differs from thinking about it, remembering it, forming mental
images of it, reasoning about it, and so on. It is the difference between presence
(to consciousness) and absence. If I stand before my house with my eyes shut and
then open them, I am suddenly presented with the object itself; it occupies part of
178 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

my visual field; it appears to me as blue and steep roofed. People who report being
experientially aware of God take this to contrast with thinking about God in just
the same way.23

According to Alston, perceiving something is something different from thinking,

forming images, balancing propositions, reasoning, engaging in conversations and
remembering. The specificity of perception, for Alston, lies in its direct contact to
experienced reality. It is this direct contact that is best reflected in the perceptual
model. Alston can invoke Francis de Sales, who sees in the awareness of God’s presence
what distinguishes an experience of God:

‘Now it fares in like manner with the soul who is in rest and quiet before God:
for she sucks in a manner insensibly the delights of His presence, without any
discourse. [. . .] She sees her spouse present with so sweet a view that reasonings
would be to her unprofitable and superfluous. [. . .] Nor does the soul in this repose
stand in need of the memory, for she has her lover present. Nor has she need of the
imagination, for why should we represent in an exterior or interior image Him
whose presence we are possessed of?’24

Alston differentiates perceptions not only from thoughts, memories and ideas but also
from feelings. Feelings, for Alston, may be experiences, but they are purely subjective
experiences without objective reference.25 While feelings may well be the medium of
religious experiences,26 he argues, they have absolutely no cognitive content themselves.
For Alston, a theory that identifies religious experiences as emotional experiences
therefore has no persuasive force epistemologically:

The treatment of ‘religious experience’ as essentially consisting of ‘feelings’ or

other affective states is very common. Thus in Schleiermacher, the fountainhead
of concentration on religious experience in the study of religion, we find the basic
experiential element of religion treated as a ‘feeling of absolute dependence’. Rudolf
Otto and William James also concentrate on feelings. It must be confessed that
in all these cases the theorists also characterize religious experience as cognitive
of objective realities in ways that seem incompatible with the classification as
affective. I doubt very much that any consistent account of religious experience
can be found in the works of any of these people. Nevertheless, it remains true that
their concentration on affect has frequently been taken out of context and as such
has powerfully influenced succeeding generations.27

Having so far examined the classification of religious experiences as non-sensory

perceptions, I would now like to indicate briefly how Alston’s reconstruction of religious
experiences fits into his project of building a religious epistemology. Starting from the
observation that sensory perception enjoys great confidence as a source of knowledge,
while mystical perceptions are often denied any cognitive value, Alston evaluates
philosophical attempts to designate sensory perception as a reliable source of knowledge
against sceptical objections. Alston concludes that any argument for the reliability of
 
Perceptions of God 179

sensory perception is circular.28 What is true for sensory perception, he points out, is
true for all other sources of our knowledge, for memory, for introspection, for deductive
or inductive reasoning: any attempt to designate a form of knowledge as reliable already
avails itself of this form of knowledge.29 This stems from the fact that, with regard to our
practices of building beliefs – Alston calls them ‘doxastic practices’30 – we can adopt no
external position that allows us to assess its reliability in an objective manner.31
Nevertheless, for Alston, we have every reason to trust our doxastic practices,
and this precisely because they are deeply embedded in our lives.32 After his sceptical
assessment of theoretical attempts to designate our doxastic practices as reliable, Alston
resorts to a pragmatic response: ‘what alternative is there to employing the practices
we find ourselves using, to which we find ourselves firmly committed, and which we
could abandon or replace only with extreme difficulty if at all?’33 But, for Alston, if
we recognize that in a practical sense it is rational to follow the doxastic practices
deeply rooted in the psyche and in society, then we are committing ourselves with
this recognition through pragmatic implication to the assumption that it is rational
to consider these practices as also being reliable sources of knowledge.34 According
to Alston, there is now in Christianity a well-established practice of forming religious
beliefs from mystical perceptions – Alston refers to this as ‘Christian mystical
perceptual doxastic practice’35 or ‘CMP’.36 Why should it not be rational to follow such
a practice?37 It is along these lines that Alston, therefore, defends Christian mystical
doxastic practice from the fifth chapter of Perceiving God:

My main thesis in this chapter, and indeed in the whole book, is that CMP is
rationally engaged in since it is a socially established doxastic practice that is not
demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance. If CMP is,
indeed, a socially established doxastic practice, it follows from the position defended
in Chapter 4 that it is prima facie worthy of rational participation. And this means
that it is prima facie rational to regard it as reliable, sufficiently reliable to be a source
of prima facie justification for the beliefs it engenders. And if, furthermore, it is not
discredited by being shown to be unreliable or deficient in some other way that
will cancel its prima facie rationality, then we may conclude that it is unqualifiedly
rational to regard it as sufficiently reliable to use in belief formation.38

To defend Christian mystical practice, Alston uses an argument of parity: the same is
to be treated the same. If there is an established practice in Christianity of moving from
experiences of God to religious beliefs, he argues, then there is no reason to classify this
practice in an epistemically different manner to other doxastic practices. However, since
there is a long tradition in Christianity of building beliefs and theories on the basis of
religious experience, this tradition should not be denied its rational recognition. Alston
is initially concerned only with prima facie recognition. For him, Christian mystical
practice can, like any other well-established practice, lay claim to unlimited recognition
only when it demonstrates a high degree of internal and external consistency, and is
confirmed by its output to a significant extent.39 This distinction returns again at the
level of individual beliefs: according to Alston, from an experience can always emerge
only a prima facie justification. For a belief derived from an experience to be justified
180 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

fully, it should not be refuted by assumptions of the understanding of reality at work in

the respective doxastic practice.40

3 The price of building a theory on the

basis of opposition to naturalism
I share Alston’s sympathy for Christian mysticism, and I also share his plea for a
rational recognition of this practice. I also believe that his epistemology enables him to
circumnavigate various cliffs with great skill. But I question whether he does justice to
the phenomenon of religious experience. It is his opposition to naturalism that shapes
how he builds his theory. On the one hand, he considers religious experience only
insofar as it is open to question by the naturalist; and, on the other, he uses scientistic
strategies of argumentation to defend it epistemologically. For Alston, naturalism,
with its empiricist criterion of reality, is both counterfoil and yardstick at once. In
his effort to ensure the cognitive value of religious experience, Alston loses sight
of the phenomenon as such. That this also affects the sustainability of his religious
epistemology should be noted here only in passing.
That ensuring the cognitive content of religious experience is bought at the expense
of a narrow vision of the phenomenon in Alston’s work can be seen first of all in its one-
sided localization in the perceptive faculty. By interpreting religious experiences as non-
sensory perceptions, Alston can ensure them a place alongside sensory perceptions and
therefore allow them to share in their claim to reality. By doing so, however, he loses sight
of the holistic character of these experiences. Religious experiences usually lay claim to
the whole person. If we believe the reports provided by mystics, then an experience of
God involves all the powers of the person – the senses, the will, the intellect, the emotions,
the imagination, the memory. Although not all the capacities of the person need be
affected to the same extent, to describe religious experiences simply as perceptions does
seem to reduce them enormously. That does not mean that perceptions play no role in
the experience of God. It means rather that perceptions are at best part of a much broader
spiritual dynamics that penetrate the deepest layers of the human being.
Second, Alston’s underdetermination of religious experience caused by his
epistemological interest can be seen in the lack of context that he provides for the
experiences that he outlines. Alston isolates from his underlying sources the moment in
which the believer becomes aware of the presence of God. A more accurate description of the
essential moments of this experience is missing. Now I would not deny that the becoming
aware of the presence of God can be the highest or actual moment of an experience of God.
But, contrary to Alston, I do want to point out that experiences of God cannot be reduced
to this moment. Mystics agree that the human being has to traverse a path in order to
reach God: the soul has to become like God. Alston ignores this development of the soul
completely. But what justifies his focus on the moment of encountering God? Should we
not see the progress of the soul as also being a stage in the experience of God?
Third, that Alston’s theory is deeply indebted to an empiricist way of thinking is
shown in his focus on the so-called direct perceptions of God. On account of this focus,
 
Perceptions of God 181

he gambles away the opportunity not only to integrate experiences of oneness and the
so-called indirect perceptions into his theory but also to question experiences of God
in their very essence. But this is massively at the expense of a substantial determination
of what actually distinguishes an experience of God in the first place. If Alston is barely
able to make plausible his classification of religious experiences according to the types
mentioned, then he is even less able to make plausible how the transcendent God can
present himself to the believer in a direct manner. Mediation between natural and
supernatural reality is missing from Alston’s approach – but why should it be provided
where the reality of God can be deduced directly through our non-sensory perception?

4 Douglas Hedley’s theory of religious

imagination as an alternative?
We have seen that Alston’s theory is deficient with regard to the phenomenon of religious
experience. First, through its one-sided focus on perception, it does not do justice
to the holistic character of religious experiences. Second, it disregards the internal
mental conditions of religious experiences. Third, the theory cannot explain how the
transcendent God can present himself within the world. I would like to conclude by
evaluating the extent to which Douglas Hedley’s theory of religious imagination can
clear these hurdles. Like Alston, Hedley is also concerned with the question of how the
human being can become aware of the Divine reality. Like Alston, he also emphasizes
the importance of religious experience for every theology: ‘Any serious theology must
be able to provide examples of the experience of God.’41 Nevertheless, his approach
differs fundamentally from Alston’s attempt to explain the experiential dimension of
Christian belief philosophically:

Rather than appeal to the great tradition of inferential proofs of divine existence,
or even the claim of distinguished philosophers and theologians that the Divine
can be experienced directly, the present work reflects upon those indirect
apprehensions of transcendent reality: the forms of imagination. This means the
irreducible creativity of human beings that distinguishes them in kind from the
rest of the animal kingdom. Through the ‘inner eye’ of imagination, finite beings
can apprehend eternal and immutable Forms.42

For Hedley, it is the inner eye of imagination that enables us to apprehend transcendent
reality. In contrast to Alston, Hedley believes that we can always only apprehend the divine
reality indirectly – namely, through the general forms of imagination. Hedley follows
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thesis that an idea in the highest sense of the word can always
only be mediated by a symbol.43 However, for Coleridge, the symbol is ‘characterized
[. . .] above all by a transcendence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always
partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole,
abides itself as a living part in that unity, of which it is the representative.’44 According to
Hedley, the knowledge that we can attain about God by using our imagination is always
182 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

symbolic. But, for Hedley, the symbol is more than just an image: it shares the reality
that it represents.45 For him, God can therefore be experienced through the power of
imagination to transcend the visible to attain the invisible:

The experience of God is neither to be construed in terms of a quasi-objective

presence nor a purely figurative fiction. Imaginative apprehension of the Divine
is pre-eminently the awareness of that reality which is pressing and proximate
for the soul and yet hard to grasp or articulate in the categories appropriate for
the physical domain. For human beings the tension between the material and
the spiritual, between inward and outward worlds, is resolved in the imaginative
vision of their underlying unity.46

Imaginative visions are, therefore, in a sense the medium of religious experience. The
divine reality is opened to us through the symbolic; we can perceive it through the
symbolic. If, like Hedley, we understand the entire cosmos as a theophany, then the
cosmos is a single symbol of the reality of God.47 To perceive God, ‘we have to see
through this physical image as in a glass darkly’.48 Like the mystical tradition, Hedley
assumes that the soul must first be enabled to perceive the divine reality. The soul must
be reborn in the Holy Spirit to be able to reach God:

Because the proper perception of the world as sacred requires the soul as well as the
senses, the soul must be purified so that it can receive the light of Divine wisdom.
[. . .] It is the imagination reborn that can perceive the sacred: in Christian terms
the rebirth of the soul through the Holy Spirit. Sacrifice reveals the Divine nature.49

Even this brief sketch indicates that Hedley can solve the above problems much more
convincingly than Alston. This applies particularly to the third point, the mediation of
inner-worldly and divine reality. In Hedley’s theory, this mediation is performed by the
symbol as representative and as a medium of the divine. In contrast to Alston, and this
brings me to the second point, Hedley does not succumb to the risk of reducing religious
experiences to the moment in which the subject becomes aware of God’s presence.
Hedley assumes that the soul has to undergo a process of purification in order to perceive
the transcendent reality. He describes this process using the category of the sacrifice.
Now I come to the first point. If we ask whether Hedley’s theory can describe
experiences of God as a holistic process, I would answer in the negative against the
background of one interpretation, but in the affirmative against the background of
a different interpretation. If we consider imagination as one faculty among others,
then the reproach levelled at Alston’s theory can be levelled at Hedley’s theory as well:
religious experience can then be seen no longer as an event involving the whole human
being. In the case of Hedley’s theory, religious experience seems to play only at the
level of imaginations; in the case of Alston’s theory, only at the level of perceptions.
However, if we regard the imagination as a mental force of a higher order, as a capacity
for transcendence that gives all mental capacities access to the divine,50 then this
maintains reference to the human as a whole.
 
Perceptions of God 183

Response by Douglas Hedley

The discussion of religious experience in Rahner is complemented by the rich and
subtle discussion of William Alston’s theory of religious experience in Margit
Wasmeier-Sailer. The debts and obligations to Coleridge, William James and Otto
in all three volumes of the trilogy are manifest. The analysis of religious experiences
as non-sensory ‘perceptions’ of God, that is, as direct encounters with the Deity
furnishes particular problems, which are trenchantly analysed by Wasmeier-Sailer.
The formidable epistemological powers of Alston and his speculative audacity provide
an oddly truncated account of a spiritual tradition that he wishes to defend. I agree
that perception is the wrong model for mystical experience for the basically Platonic
reason that the itinerarium mentis in Deum is a process of ascent and transformation.
Yet I also criticize the radical apophaticism of my erstwhile colleague Denys Turner
and his The Darkness of God. If Alston offends by assimilating the ‘mystical’ vision
to perceptual experience, Turner’s God becomes radically inaccessible. Both of these
extreme positions seem to me implausible for the viability of theology as a subject. The
stress upon imaginative apprehension is precisely intended either as an alternative to
a deity of untenable immediacy or as the most remote of inferences. Schelling writes
of the vision Divine:

From time to time, every physical and moral whole needs, for its preservation, the
reduction to its innermost beginning. Human beings keep rejuvenating themselves
and become newly blissful through the feeling of the unity of their being. It is
in precisely this that especially those seeking knowledge continually summon up
fresh power. Not only poets, but also philosophers, have their ecstasies.51

Notes
1 Charles Taliaferro, ‘Religious Experience’, in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness,
edited by Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 562–3.
2 Cf. ibid., 562.
3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(London: Longman Green, 1915), 428.
4 In addition to naturalism, analytical theories of religious experience also deal
especially with the plurality of religions. See Friedo Ricken, ‘Introduction’, in Religiöse
Erfahrung. Ein interdisziplinärer Klärungsversuch, ed. Friedo Ricken (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2004), 9–14, 9.
5 Since Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne and William L. Craig
follow a similar line of reasoning to William P. Alston’s, the problems described apply
to their theories as well.
6 William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).
7 Ibid., 1.
8 See ibid., 20–8.
184 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

9 Ibid., 9.
10 George D. Hicks, Critical Realism: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind and Nature
(London: Macmillan, 1938).
11 Harold A. Prichard, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press,
1909).
12 Winston F. H. Barnes, ‘The Myth of Sense Data’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
45 (1945): 89–118. Alston refers to Hicks, Prichard and Barnes in ‘Back to the Theory
of Appearing’, Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 181–203 n. 1.
13 Alston, Perceiving God (see n. 6), 55.
14 See ibid., 54–9.
15 See ibid., 36.
16 Ibid.
17 See ibid., 30–1, where Alston refers to Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols., vol. 1:
Reason and Revelation. Being and God (London: Lisbet & Co., 1953), 191–2.
18 Alston, Perceiving God (see n. 6), 31.
19 Tillich, Systematic Theology (see n. 17), 191–2.
20 Alston, Perceiving God (see n. 6), 31.
21 See ibid., 12–14.
22 Cf. ibid., 4: ‘In the present intellectual climate it would be well to make it explicit
that this discussion is conducted from a full-bloodedly realist perspective, according
to which in religion as elsewhere we mean what we assert to be true of realities that
are what they are regardless of what we or other human beings believe of them, and
regardless of the “conceptual scheme” we apply to them (except, of course, when
what we are talking about is our thought, belief, or concepts). I take this to be a
fundamental feature of human thought and talk. Thus, in epistemically evaluating the
practice of forming M-beliefs I am interested in whether that practice yields beliefs
that are (often) true in this robustly realist sense – not, or not just, in whether it yields
beliefs that conform to the rules of the relevant language-game, or beliefs that carry
out some useful social function. [. . .] what I am interested in determining, so far as in
me lies, is whether the practice succeeds in accurately depicting a reality that is what it
is however we think of it.’
23 Ibid., 14–15.
24 Franz von Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, book VI, ch. ix, quoted in: Anton
Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer, translated by Leonora Yorke Smith and Jean
Vincent Bainvel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1950), 75–6.
25 See Alston, Perceiving God (see n. 6), 37.
26 See ibid., 50–1.
27 Ibid., 16.
28 See ibid., 102–45, esp. 102–3.
29 See ibid., 146.
30 See ibid., 153–65.
31 See ibid., 150.
32 See ibid., 168–70.
33 Ibid., 150.
34 See ibid., 178–80.
35 Ibid., 184.
36 Ibid.
37 See ibid., 184–5.
38 Ibid., 194.
 
Perceptions of God 185

39 See ibid., 184–5.

40 See ibid., 72, 159.
41 Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (London and
New York: Continuum, 2011), 22. Cf. also the author’s own comprehensive critique of
Alston’s theory of Perceiving God ibid., 94–106.
42 Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 1.
43 See Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 41), 48. Hedley refers to Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and
Opinions, 2 vols, edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), II, 80.
44 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, edited by Reginald J. White (London: Princeton University
Press, 1972), 28.
45 See Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 42), 5.
46 Ibid., 37.
47 See Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 41), 59. ‘The uncreated and the created realms
are not strict opposites but are correlated: they form a dialectical unity in which the
Divine is bodied forth in the finite realm. The world is a theophany in Schelling’s
sense of the world as the Gegenbild or counterimage: the icon of the Divine. In
creating the world, God makes himself in another mode: the created order is a symbol
of the Divine. Thus an image is not simply an index of Divine transcendence, but
includes and reveals it.’
48 Hedley, Living Forms (see n. 42), 106.
49 Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined (see n. 41), 60.
50 Some statements that Hedley makes go in this direction: see Hedley, Sacrifice
Imagined (see n. 41), 38–40.
51 Friedrich W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, translated by Jason N. Wirth (New
York: State University of New York Press, 2000), XXXVIII.
 9

From Cambridge to Calcutta

The presence of Indian thought in Douglas
Hedley’s Christian Platonism
Daniel Soars

The uncreated and the created realms are not strict opposites but are correlated: they
form a dialectical unity in which the Divine is bodied forth in the finite realm. . .
. Thus the cosmos is the Divine sacrifice: the metamorphosis of God’s identity
in difference.1

It might not seem obvious why there needs to be an essay on Indian thought in a
collection like this one. References to Hindu iconography and Indian philosophy are
scattered throughout Douglas Hedley’s three-volume opus on the religious imagination
but, apart from a few extended sections on resonant parallels between East and West,
such references are generally brief and seemingly ornamental to his core argument.
Oriental allusions might simply occupy a place in Hedley’s mental library and indicate
nothing of particular note beyond the impressive erudition that marks his systematic
philosophical theology as a whole. Indeed, casting an eye down the indices of his
trilogy, one is struck by the almost bewildering panoply of themes and thinkers: from
Aztec sacrifice to Palaeolithic cave paintings, from Beethoven to Joyce, it is perhaps
hardly surprising to find that Krishna and Sankara also appear in such a rich and wide-
ranging vision of the human and divine.

1 Why India?
I wish to show, however, that Indian thought is more than merely peripheral to Hedley’s
central concerns and motivations, and that, in fact, this interest has emerged organically
out of themes which form the warp and weft of his sacramental conception of reality.
While it would be overstating the case to suggest that Indic materials explicitly form
a key plank of Hedley’s system, I will argue that they are present in spirit, if not in
letter, throughout his work, and are particularly evident in the sorts of figures and
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 187

themes to which he is drawn. As such, we would do Hedley a disservice if we mistook

his interest in India (which becomes more obvious as the trilogy goes on) simply as
that of a Renaissance polymath, let alone as that of an Orientalist dilettante. After all,
Hedley is part of a venerable group of Indologists who have been invited to deliver the
prestigious ‘Teape’ Lectures which were instituted in honour of one of his forebears in
the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge – Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901).2 Named
after Westcott’s student, William Marshall Teape (1882–1944), the lectures have been
exploring the relationship between Christian and Hindu thought since their inception
in 1955.3 Indeed, Hedley draws liberally on such a wide range of intellectual and artistic
resources, East and West, in order to develop his concept of the religious imagination –
from philosophy and theology to music and poetry – that Westcott, who dreamed of a
new Alexandria on the banks of the Yamuna, would surely have seen him as a kindred
spirit.
While I would, then, want to reject any accusation that what follows is an
idiosyncratic eisegesis of Hedley’s texts, some degree of creative extrapolation from his
core concerns is needed to make sense of the otherwise relatively unsystematic nature
of his references to Indian thought. As such, I would like to suggest that we picture
Hedley’s system of religious philosophy as a triangular interconnection of two major
influences which have given rise over time to his interest in India at the apex. The ‘base’
of his religious philosophy is formed from a combination of (Neo)-Platonism and
Christian mysticism, on the one hand, and the twin movements of Romanticism and
Idealism (especially German and British), on the other. For ease of argument, then,
we can picture ‘Platonic Mysticism’ and ‘Romantic Idealism’ as the two interrelated
poles which prop up Hedley’s imaginative argument against naturalistic materialism.4
Explaining the role played by these two points will give us the conceptual foundation
of Hedley’s vision, and will, therefore, be the first part of my exegesis. I will then argue
that an interest in Indian thought is an organic outgrowth from these starting points
and its place in his work can be understood as a natural coming together of the twin
themes which form the base of his system. In other words, I want to show not only
why Hedley is particularly drawn to Platonic mysticism, Romantic Idealism and India
but also how the latter interest is related to the first two, and indeed how all three are
interconnected.5
In order to strengthen the case for interrelatedness, I will highlight three concepts
and three individuals that might helpfully be pictured as the ‘lines of force’ which run
between the points of our triangle, appearing, as they do, as leitmotifs in Hedley’s work.
Given their ubiquity, I will not seek to dislodge these themes and figures from their
contexts in Hedley’s broader narratives, since that would risk losing a sense of how
they fit into his overall vision. Rather than treating them each separately, then, I will
indicate how these themes and individuals find their place within the whole. The three
conceptual vertices of our triangle, which run between (Neo)-Platonism-Christian
mysticism, Romantic Idealism and India are the concepts of Being, participation and
Divine Ideas; conversion and subjectivity; and immanence and transcendence. I will
suggest that all three conceptual tropes naturally (I do not say ‘necessarily’) lead to an
interest in Indian thought. We will also see how the points of our thematic triangle
– namely, (Neo)-Platonism/Christian mysticism, Romanticism/Idealism and India –
188 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

come together in the lives and works of three key figures who all, to greater or lesser
extents, shared Hedley’s interconnected interests: William Jones (1746–94), Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Rudolf Otto (1869–1937). It is no coincidence that
Hedley finds himself drawn to these individuals and that their thought looms large in
his intellectual hinterland.
Finally, having sketched out our heuristic triangle, with the points which form the key
thematic influences in Hedley’s religious philosophy (Platonism/Christian mysticism,
Romanticism/Idealism and India), the conceptual lines which connect them (Divine
Ideas/participation, conversion/subjectivity and transcendence-and-immanence) and
three figures whom Hedley favours as his cross-generational conversation partners
(Jones, Coleridge and Otto), I want to suggest that these thematic influences, linking
concepts and personalities can all be seen to coalesce in Hedley’s interpretation of a
pregnant biblical passage to which he returns again and again: the ‘I AM WHO I AM’
of Exod. 3.14. We might picture his reading of the divine name revealed to Moses as the
centre of our triangle where, as it were, Israel, Greece and India come together.

2 From (Neo)-Platonism to Christian mysticism

Hedley’s interest in the influence of Greek philosophical thought on Christian theology
is evident throughout his work, not least in his earliest published monograph on Samuel
Taylor Coleridge – a figure whom he sees as belonging to a ‘Christian Platonic tradition
stretching from John Scotus Eriugena (815–877) to Hegel (1770–1831)’.6 Here, Hedley
makes clear that the Platonism he has in mind ‘is not that of Plato’s dialogues, or the
“unwritten doctrines” of the Academy, but the allegorising metaphysics of Middle and
Neoplatonism which, indeed, formed such a crucial component of Christian theology,
and the stream of “Christian Platonism” which was so potent in the early modern
period in Florence and Cambridge’.7 The broader argument for the use of Greek
thought as a conceptual vehicle for expressing Christian beliefs – particularly Platonic
concepts as developed and structured by key pagan figures in the early centuries of the
Christian era, like Plotinus (204–70), Porphyry (232–305), Iamblichus (245–326) and
Proclus (412–85) – has been made persuasively elsewhere,8 so it is not my intention to
enter into this conversation here, but simply to note that ‘the allegorising metaphysics
of Middle and Neoplatonism’ is the primary conceptual lens through which Hedley
views Christian theology, not least in the Renaissance Florentine (e.g. Marsilio Ficino
and Pico della Mirandola)9 and seventeenth-century Cambridge (e.g. Ralph Cudworth
and Henry More) figures to whom he alludes.10 It is this Neoplatonic lens which draws
Hedley towards the ‘allegorising metaphysics’ of subjectivity/conversion, immanence/
transcendence and, especially, the doctrines of Divine Ideas and participation.
Given its fullest early treatment by Augustine in the forty-sixth of his Eighty-
Three Different Questions,11 and taken up as a significant theme by Thomas Aquinas,12
the concept of the Platonic ideas existing in the mind of God as exemplar causes of
the sensible world provides, for Hedley, a theologically defensible metaphysics of
‘connection’ or even continuity between divine and human reality.13 The primary
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 189

motivation for his recourse to the doctrine is to avoid a naturalistic bifurcation of

reality into two hermetically sealed compartments of divine and mundane, and to
argue, rather, for the role of the religious imagination in perceiving the spiritual in
the material – not least, in nature and in the rich imagery and symbolism provided by
music, art and poetry. Indeed, it is not difficult to see how this sacramental conception
of the world inevitably draws Hedley towards (and is, no doubt, shaped by) precisely
the sort of Romanticism we find in figures like Coleridge, for it is surely this ontological
continuity between divine and human that allows his fellow Lake poet, Wordsworth,14
to feel

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.15

Such an imaginative vision is possible because it is precisely by participating in

these eternal and immutable Ideas that created realities exist at all, and so the whole
cosmos comes to be seen as theophanic. These related doctrines (of Divine Ideas and
participation) have important implications for Hedley’s understanding both of God
and of world, and of the human creature in particular.
When it comes to God, Hedley sees the doctrine of Divine Ideas as the best
philosophical means of avoiding a dualistic separation between Creator and creation
– a separation which ends up leading to domesticated conceptions of transcendence
as spatial distance and an emphasis on the divine will, as opposed to the divine nature,
as the ‘connection’ between God and world. In contrast, the ‘allegorical metaphysics’
of Divine Ideas ‘implies a real connection, however mysterious, between God’s
essence and the created world, the necessary and the contingent. This, in turn, is
tied to the rejection of an arbitrary deity. . . . The tenet of Divine ideas forms a way
of insisting upon God as goodness itself, the culmination of being, rather than a
continent and wilful being.’16 While the origins of the concept are clearly Platonic,
Hedley does not want to suggest – any more than did Augustine or Aquinas – that
the realm of Ideas is some sort of inferior hypostasis or intermediate emanation
between the divine source and the physical world, but simply is the mind of God.17
This, indeed, is one of the key differences between a strict Neoplatonic henology,
which will countenance no hint of multiplicity in the One, and the Christian
assimilation of Neoplatonism in figures like Victorinus and Augustine, which can
allow for an element of difference within the divine unity (not least, of course, as
this relates to the Christian understanding of God as triune).18 ‘It is the fusion of
supreme principle with the intellect and the vision of the supreme principle as
consubstantial with the intelligible paradigm of the sensible world which provides
190 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

the metaphysical foundations for a Platonic Christian.’19 We will return presently

to Hedley’s conception of God, but it is important to note how this ‘vision of the
supreme principle as consubstantial with the intelligible paradigm of the sensible
world’ (‘however mysterious the connection’) also has consequences for how we see
the world and our relation to the divine.
Ontological continuity between transcendent cause and particular effects is the
(Neoplatonic) metaphysical architecture Hedley requires to underpin his vision of
the physical cosmos as mirror of the Divine,20 but it is by holding the doctrine of
Divine Ideas together with the doctrine of participation that he is able to rebut
potential misrepresentations of his system as pantheistic.21 Far from arguing for any
kind of numerical or qualitative identity between God and world, Hedley’s point
is that creatures exist by sharing finitely in the infinite fullness of divine Being,
which is, therefore, both immanent in and yet transcendent to the created order.
Indeed, the doctrines of Divine Ideas and participation entail more than just an
intellectual model of an immanent God and a sacramental cosmos; they are, for
Hedley, a clear ‘summons to conversion’,22 in that they invite us to realize the active
presence of God within: ‘Since the ideas were placed within the divine mind in the
second century AD, Platonists identified the idea with God’s creative intellect, and
saw philosophy as the journey or ascent of the finite mind towards the absolute
intellect; part of a struggle to become “like God”.’23 As he points out, it is for this
reason that many Neoplatonic texts take the form of meditative treatises, designed
to lead the reader out of the cave into the divine light, and why Coleridge is so
fond of appealing to the Delphic oracle, ‘Know Thyself!’.24 Turning within in order
to discover God becomes the quintessential task of the Neoplatonic philosopher
and it is this conception of philosophy – as a spiritual exercise of contemplative
introspection – which makes it so attractive not only for the sorts of intellective
metaphysical reasons we have been discussing (i.e. Divine Ideas and participated
being) but also for the imaginative–experiential goal of realizing our union with the
divine (i.e. conversion/subjectivity). This is why Hedley can say: ‘The central idea
[viz. philosophy as the journey or ascent of the finite mind towards the absolute
intellect; part of a struggle to become “like God”] is Platonist, or, to employ a
dangerous but pertinent term, “mystical”.’25
Hedley does not need to spell out exactly why the term ‘mystical’ might be both
‘dangerous’ and ‘pertinent’, or precisely why he seems to be using it as a tentative
synonym for ‘Platonist’, for the implications of this pregnant sentence to be clear.
Surely, the term ‘mystical’ is ‘dangerous’ because of the way it tends to be used, at least
in conventional discourse, to connote a broad and imprecise range of loosely related
ideas, which make it prone to ambiguity and misunderstanding. Indeed, it was only
in the early modern period that ‘mysticism’ started to be used as a noun to denote
a specific conceptual or experiential category of Christian spirituality. Nevertheless,
it is ‘pertinent’ to Hedley’s argument because mystikos (as an adjective) was present
from the beginnings of the Christian tradition as an epithet used to refer to what is
‘hidden’. This could be, for example, the ‘mystical’ meaning of the sacraments – what
is ‘hidden’ within or beneath the material elements of bread, wine and water – or,
most often, the ‘hidden’ meaning of scripture.26 The idea of a ‘mystical theology’ tout
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 191

court was not coined as a term until Dionysius’s fifth-century treatise by the same
name, and, in the Pseudo-Areopagite’s insistence that the theologic (i.e. manner
of speaking about God) he is espousing is as much a spiritual practice as it is an
intellectual exercise,27 we can start to see how, over centuries, a term originally used
to denote the ‘real’ or ‘deeper’ meaning of divine self-revelation in texts also came
to signify something closer to what Hedley has in mind – namely, to a ‘mystical’
experience of union with God. In other words, in the (Neo)-Platonic understanding
of philosophy as an ascent of the finite mind towards the absolute intellect, coming
closer to the ‘hidden’ meaning of the sensible world does not involve merely rational
thought, but a wholehearted attempt to draw closer to the God who is simultaneously
revealed and hidden there.
That the word ‘mystical’ did come to acquire connotations of union with ultimate
reality, and that it did so in the Christian tradition at least partly via the mediating
thought of Pseudo-Dionysius (c. late fifth to early sixth century CE) is not a
coincidence, but precisely one of the reasons why Hedley can suggest a connection
between the ‘Platonist’ conception of philosophy as ascent towards God and this
‘dangerous but pertinent term’. It is why, alongside Plato, Plotinus and Proclus,
Hedley is so manifestly drawn to ‘mystical’ figures in the Christian tradition who
have been influenced by the ‘allegorising metaphysics of Middle and Neoplatonism’.
From Augustine to Aquinas, from Eckhart to Boehme, Hedley sees kindred spirits
in these ‘philosophical mystics’28 and their deep sense of the presence of a God who
is interior intimo meo. This is not to claim that every individual whom the Christian
tradition would tend to recognize as a ‘mystic’ has also been a Neoplatonist29 (at least
not self-consciously) or that the metaphysical-experiential notion of ‘union’ with
the divine must necessarily always be parsed in terms of Neoplatonic philosophy,
but simply to suggest that for many Christian mystics in the early and medieval
periods, their vision of the physical world and the forms of religious experience they
cultivated were deeply influenced by Platonic themes and insights.30 If Hedley’s focus
on the Neoplatonic doctrines of Divine Ideas and participation draws him towards
mysticism, and ‘Neoplatonic mysticism’ helps to explain his focus on subjectivity
and the gnōthi seauton of the Delphic oracle, the case is starting to build for seeing
this conceptual matrix as one densely connected ‘angle’ of the triangle which is
his systematic vision of religious philosophy. This matrix shapes his sacramental
conception of the world, his spiritual anthropology and his understanding of God. In
short, it is a core building-block of his ‘Platonic’ or ‘mystical’ monotheism,31 which
stands in opposition both to a materialistic atheism which would seek to explain
consciousness in purely naturalistic terms and to a ‘monarchical theism’ which
would stress such a gulf between God and world that the latter can reveal little to
nothing of the former.
It was in order to revive the idea of divine immanence in the world that, according
to Hedley, the founder of the Romantic movement in England – Samuel Taylor
Coleridge – turned to the philosophical tradition of German Idealism and thus became
in his own right the first of the nineteenth-century British Idealists.32 Just as Hedley
belongs, like Coleridge, to the ‘Christian Platonic’ tradition, his vision of the religious
imagination is also deeply Idealist and Romantic.
192 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

3 From (Neo)-Platonism and Christian

mysticism to Idealism and Romanticism
Not unlike ‘mysticism’, the terms ‘Idealism’ and ‘Romanticism’ can be notoriously
polyvalent and imprecise. By ‘Idealism’, Hedley simply means a philosophical position
which would deny that reality at its most profound can be accounted for purely in
terms of material objects, and which affirms, rather, the ontological priority of mind,
consciousness, spirit or personality ‘behind’ the physical world.33 In this sense,
he is surely correct to assert that ‘[m]any theists are idealists in that they claim the
dependency or derivation of the material realm upon or from the spiritual’.34 Clearly,
this position does not have to entail the subjectivism of a Bishop Berkeley (for Hedley,
it certainly does not), nor, Hedley is at pains to stress, should it be confused with
pantheism – that is, that ‘God-is-all’ in a sense which equates God with the world.
Again, this is where the doctrine of participation is so helpful: while a philosopher like
Spinoza thought that God’s infinity had to entail pantheism since there can be only one
Absolute and, therefore, no beings could exist ‘outside’ God (which is why ‘God’ and
‘world’ become coterminous – deus sive natura), a Neoplatonic mystic like Plotinus or
Augustine will affirm the ontological priority of spirit but explain the multiplicity of
the physical world in terms of a ‘sharing in’ this one, unified reality: ‘For the Christian
Platonic tradition, the one true being is God and all other beings participate in this
supreme being. As finite beings are limited, they are only partially real. God is the
only entirely adequate object of intellection.’35 Indeed, the sort of Idealism Hedley
chiefly has in mind is that found in German universities like Jena and Munich in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was, in part, a response to the
pantheism of Spinoza a generation earlier. This was an Idealism already deeply imbued
with Christian theology (Hegel and Schelling both originally trained as theologians)
and which drew upon what Hedley calls the ‘intellectualist strand’ of Neoplatonism.36
By this, he means the emphasis on the possibility of a return to the One through direct,
intuitive knowledge. By drawing on the early Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Augustine,
rather than the increasingly apophatic theology found in later figures like Proclus and
Pseudo-Dionysius, German Idealism moved in the opposite conceptual direction –
rejecting the starkly apophatic epistemology of Kant, who had denied any possibility
of knowledge beyond the phenomenal, and towards an emphasis on the Absolute as
radical subjectivity.37
In other words, knowledge of the ultimate source was, according to the post-
Kantian German idealist tradition, possible precisely through self-knowledge.38 Hedley
sees this idea of absolute being as subjectivity as the key philosophical development
of German Idealism,39 one which had its roots in the so-called Pantheismusstreit of
1783 when F. H. Jacobi revealed Lessing’s alleged pantheism. By 1795, Schelling was
able to claim that ‘[t]he I contains all Being, all reality’,40 which is why Hedley helpfully
suggests that Schelling’s philosophy can be described as ‘objective idealism [because
reason is thought of as an objective structure rather than as the capacity of finite beings
for thinking] of absolute subjectivity’ (because the ‘I’ contains all being).41 It is this
‘objective idealism of absolute subjectivity’, which we have already found present in
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 193

certain forms of Neoplatonism, that has such an influence (via Schelling and German
Idealism) on Coleridge and, as is evident to any reader of his Imagination trilogy, on
Hedley.42 Many of the complex ways in which this mystical Neoplatonic Idealism
shape Hedley’s vision of God, the world and the individual subject can be seen in the
following summative analysis he makes of the same set of interrelated issues in the
work of Coleridge, his Romantic muse:

The Idealist move (which influenced Coleridge) was the attempt to preserve both
the idea of the infinity and of the personality of God by combining the Spinozistic
(ultimately Neoplatonic) idea of ‘hen kai pan’ or all-unity with the concept of
absolute subjectivity. Whereas Spinoza saw God as the absolute object, Schelling
(and Hegel) wanted to see God as the absolute subject: as the great I AM. On this
model the world is not ‘outside God’ but participates in God. Hence the younger
Schelling employs the concept of ‘intellectual intuition’ for knowledge of the
absolute in order to suggest a knowledge which is not a knowledge of an object but
which is rather participation in the absolute subjectivity.43

Here we can see how many of the themes which we have discussed so far come
together. If Neoplatonic mysticism and its metaphysics of Divine Ideas and participated
being form one point of the conceptual triangle which represents Hedley’s religious
philosophy, the base of his system is completed by a form of Idealism which draws
on and develops the insight so central to thinkers from Socrates to Plotinus, from
Augustine to Eckhart – that to know God, we need only turn inward. It is for this
reason that Hedley suggests that ‘the highest forms of religion are those where the
Godhead is perceived and encountered as absolute subjectivity: I AM THAT I AM’.44
We will return to this daring characterization of the divine in our sections on
Indian thought and Exodus, but firstly we need to complete the basic building blocks of
Hedley’s system by turning to the influence of Romanticism – seen most obviously in
the unifying focus in his trilogy on the concept of the religious imagination. Hedley’s
rejection of scientistic materialism and his willingness to utilize the resources of art,
music and poetry in his philosophical theology make him an enthusiastic inheritor of
the cultural and intellectual movement which flourished in Europe during the first half
of the nineteenth century as a response to perceived threats from an Enlightenment
and Industrial modernity. The ‘Romanticism’ of Hedley’s ‘Romantic Idealism’ is most
apparent in his argument for the centrality of a supra-rational religious imagination as
a cross-cultural means of apprehending the divine:

The Romantic extolling of Imagination was often the rearguard action of those
who lamented the loss of a vital cosmos reflecting the Divine creative energy; the
sigh of those who insisted upon viewing art as the perception of the infinite in the
finite, or as Coleridge says so memorably, ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the
eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am’.45

Hedley’s objection is not to rational natural theology, but to the sort of intellectualism
which ignores the role of emotions in the human encounter with God in and beyond
194 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

the physical world, which is why aesthetic experiences (especially of the ‘sublime’)
take such prominence in his trilogy. We have already seen how many of Hedley’s
conceptual and thematic influences draw him to the figure of S. T. Coleridge, but the
nature of his interest in Rudolf Otto, the German scholar of comparative religion, is
also illuminative.
Otto is discussed in various places in the trilogy,46 but Hedley’s most detailed
treatment of this ‘great sage of Marburg’ comes in a recent article written to mark the
centenary of the publication of his seminal work Das Heilige (1917).47 Hedley (perhaps
unfashionably) argues that Otto’s Das Heilige is one of the great theological works
of the last century and warrants renewed attention for its continuing philosophical
and theological relevance.48 We need only look to its subtitle to see why it has been
such an influence on Hedley: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und
sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen49 – Otto’s exploration of the numinous is no more
a denigration of the place of reason in theology than is Hedley’s conception of
the religious imagination. The case Otto and Hedley both want to make is for the
importance of the supra-rational dimension of our encounter with the sacred and
its relation to the rational. Both appeal to a human religious experience that goes
not only beyond reason but also beyond any specific social and cultural contexts,
which is why Hedley credits Otto with seeing that ‘the sacred’ is more appropriate as
a category in philosophical theology than ‘theism’.50
The shared roots of their conception of the sacred as the mysterium tremendum et
fascinans run deep and bring us to the end of our exploration of the ‘base’ of Hedley’s
religious philosophy, formed, as we have seen, from a combination of (Neo)-Platonic
mysticism and Romantic Idealism. Otto, like Hedley, sees the Platonic tradition, in
particular, as maintaining a sense of the limits of rationality within Christian theology
and of serving as a powerful reminder of the supra-rational aspect of the Holy, which
can only be accessed via imagination and feeling (love, above all) and indicated
by means of art and myth.51 This is why Hedley suggests that ‘Otto is perhaps best
thought of as the inheritor of the German Romantic tradition, including Goethe and
Schleiermacher. He does not wish to deny the importance of the Enlightenment but
he wishes to criticise its narrow focus.’52 He then goes on a few lines later to propose
that ‘[u]ltimately, Otto is perhaps best seen within the German Christian mystical
tradition of Meister Eckhart and his followers’.53 Like Otto, Hedley is also deeply rooted
in the Platonic tradition, an inheritor of German (and English) Romantic Idealism,
and perhaps best understood within the Anglo-Celtic and German Christian mystical
traditions of Eriugena, Eckhart and others. It is within this context that Hedley’s
interest in Indian thought makes sense, and can be seen as a natural outgrowth of
his fundamental influences. Indeed, where Hedley speculates that ‘it not accident that
Otto exhibited a rare and sophisticated awareness of the mystical traditions of the
Indian subcontinent and the Far East’,54 I would venture to say that Hedley’s interest is
no accident either. In order to substantiate this, we will have to look back through the
strata of Hedley’s conceptual influences in reverse chronological order – to see how
his Romantic Idealism is perhaps the proximate cause of his turning towards Indian
philosophy, but that the more profound resonances are with his deep roots in (Neo)-
Platonism.
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 195

4 Platonic Idealism on Indian soil

There is little explicit mention of Indian thought in the first volume of Hedley’s trilogy
(Living Forms, 2008), but by the time of Sacrifice Imagined (2011), there is a short
section on William Jones and the following fascinating aside on ‘Brahmanic theology’
found in one of Jones’s letters:55 ‘The doctrine is that of Parmenides and Plato, whom
our Berkley [sic] follows, and I am strongly inclined to consider their philosophy
as the only means of removing the difficulties which attend the common opinions
concerning the Material world.’56 The ‘Brahmanic theology’ to which Jones refers is the
systematic tradition of interpreting the Upanishads, known as Vedanta: ‘a tradition of
textual exegesis and commentary, as well as philosophical reflection, which has been of
immense importance in Brahmanical Hindu religious thought and practice, becoming
the central ideology of the Hindu Renaissance in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.’57 In other words, Jones is comparing Vedantic teachings with those found
in Parmenides and Plato and suggesting that there is something of fundamental
philosophical importance in the Greek and Indic traditions which may be ‘the only
means of removing the difficulties which attend the common opinions concerning the
material world’. His allusion to Berkeley would imply that the means he has in mind –
and which he claims to find in similar form in India and in Greece – is some kind of
philosophical idealism. The question of how far any of the different Vedantic schools
which developed in India during the second millennium of the Common Era – each
offering distinctive accounts of the metaphysical world view found in the Upanishads58
– neatly map on to what a Western philosopher is likely to understand by ‘idealism’ is a
complex one, not least given the conceptual diversity of the term even within Western
traditions.59 With this proviso in mind, however, it is true to say that the ‘Brahmanic
theology’ Jones would have encountered certainly is ‘idealist’ in Hedley’s minimal
sense of claiming ‘the dependency or derivation of the material realm upon or from
the spiritual’.60
The dominant school of Vedanta (in the sense that it became the archetype against
which doctrinal opponents would, explicitly or implicitly, set their own arguments)
became the non-dual or ‘advaita’ (literally, ‘not-two’) form as found in its most
celebrated exponent, Sankara (c. 788–820 CE).61 Typically taken to be a reading of
scripture which holds that there is, transcendentally speaking, only one changeless
ground of being (Brahman) and that the manifold world of experience is, from an
ultimate perspective, merely an ‘appearance’ of this simple and undivided reality,
Advaita Vedanta is usually seen as a form of monistic idealism.62 In the period after
Jones, during the ‘Hindu Renaissance’ which emerged in Calcutta (the imperial
capital until 1911) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘neo-Hindu’ figures
like Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–1907), Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902)
and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) sought to counter Christian missionary
polemic against a ‘polytheistic’ and ‘idolatrous’ popular Hinduism by promoting
Advaita Vedanta as the intellectual and spiritual heart of ‘true’ Hinduism.63 Part of
the effect of this was to arouse a sense of affinity in nineteenth-century European
idealist philosophers for a system based on a metaphysical oneness grounded in the
fundamentally spiritual nature of reality. German thinkers, especially, ‘were greatly
196 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

attracted to the Upanishadic teaching (as they understood it) that the world as we
know it through our ordinary senses is not the “real” world, but only appearance, even
an illusion (māyā), and that the goal of life was the realisation of the self – ātman –
through its identification with the absolute – brahman’.64 In other words, the ontological
monism ostensibly at the heart of the Upanishads resonated with the post-Kantian
idealist tendencies of certain nineteenth-century European thinkers.65
This philosophical interest in Vedanta as a form of Idealism was reinforced in
Germany and England by an artistic and literary attraction to an idyllic Orient which
seemed to be the very antithesis of cold Enlightenment Europe. India, in particular,
became a focal point of the German and English Romantic movements, which were
central to what Raymond Schwab has famously identified as Europe’s ‘Oriental
Renaissance’.66 Motivated by what they perceived to be Europe’s own problems, and
disillusioned with prevailing European modes of thought (i.e. Judeo-Christian
‘dogmatic’ theology, on the one hand, and the anti-religious materialism of the
Enlightenment on the other), many Romantics wanted to see India as the source of
pristine wisdom and the fount of civilization. As Schwab points out, the metaphysical
speculations and ostensibly ‘mystical’ inclinations of Indian thought were obviously
at odds with the Enlightenment project, but it was precisely these aspects which were
so appealing for the Romantics, whose desire for renewal (i.e. for spiritual wholeness;
for a rejection of urban industrialism; for a valorization of rusticity; for oneness with
nature; for a reunification of religion, philosophy and art) acted as the conceptual and
experiential filters through which they would view India: ‘Mirroring the philosophical
preoccupations of the time, Indian thought became selectively identified in the minds
of European intellectuals with the monistic and idealist philosophy of the Vedānta, an
attitude which inevitably gave rise to the myth of the exalted spirituality of India by
contrast with the materialist West.’67 There is much evidence of the appeal of this idea
of deep metaphysical unity in the works of J. G. Herder (1744–1803)68 and Goethe
(1749–1832) and in the Naturphilosophie of F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854).69 While they
saw the Vedas as pointing to the primitive, unfragmented and uncorrupted unity of the
human race, it was chiefly to the Upanishads that these and later German thinkers
turned to discover Eastern wisdom at its most profound. In part, at least, they found
what they wanted to, as ‘[t]he appeal of the Upanishads to Goethe, Herder, and to the
great philosophers of the Romantic period, lay in what was perceived as that scripture’s
monistic idealism’.70 An idealized India appealed to the Romantic imagination and
the metaphysical system at the heart of the Upanishads resonated with the post-
Kantian tendencies of certain German idealist philosophers.71 Often via these German
conduits, Oriental imagery and Indian philosophy came to influence the Romantic
movement in England and (though less explicitly) British idealist philosophers as well.
In turn, some later understandings of Vedanta, developed in locations such as Calcutta
and Madras, were influenced by this series of ‘German-Indian-English’ feedback loops
of interpretative readings. Especially after the introduction by the British of Western
philosophical curricula in India, modern Vedantins like Radhakrishnan would read
Sankara’s doctrines through a comparative engagement with British Idealists such as
T. H. Green, E. Caird and F. H. Bradley, who had themselves creatively appropriated
certain aspects of German Idealism.72
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 197

Indeed, it was largely thanks to pioneering British Indologists like Jones (as well as
missionary journals and travelogues) that European access to Indian thought was made
possible at all.73 Owing to the founding by Hastings and Jones, in 1784, of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal, ground-breaking translations of Indic texts barely known until then
in the West started to appear: Charles Wilkins produced the first English translation of
the Bhagavadgītā in 1785, and Jones’s 1789 translation of Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā would
go on to influence Goethe’s Faust. Indeed, Jones’s writings on India and translations of
key texts were widely disseminated in Europe, and his influence on seminal thinkers of
the age extended via personal friendships with figures as varied as Benjamin Franklin
and Joseph Priestley. He was also a poet in his own right, and the interest in India of
later English Romantic poets like Shelley, Byron and, especially, Coleridge can, in part,
be attributed to their knowledge of Jones’s work.74
The argument for seeing Hedley as an inheritor of this Anglo-German tradition
of admiration for and creative appropriation of Indian thought is surely a persuasive
one. Like Coleridge, Hedley is attracted both to German Idealist philosophy and to
the Romantic sense for the importance of what lies beyond or outside the grasp of
reason alone, and, like Schelling and Schlegel, he is drawn to echoes of this Romantic
Idealism in the ‘Brahmanic theology’ encountered by Jones. To be sure, his reading of
Vedanta leans far more towards Plato than it leans towards Schopenhauer (or, indeed,
Berkeley) – what appeals to Hedley is the strong conviction in the Upanishads that
the material realm ‘derives from or is dependent on’ the spiritual, not that the two
are metaphysically identical.75 As we have seen in Hedley’s focus on the doctrines of
Divine Ideas and participation, his is a vision of ontological continuity between the
One and the many, not of pantheistic identity, and this is precisely what he claims
to find in Vedanta: ‘Such a monotheism posits an ultimate transcendent source of all
being- the principle of all but which is different from all (and hence distinct from
any monism of strict identity). While emphasising difference or separation like the
Abrahamic theist, the Indian theist nevertheless flinches from making the division into
rupture.’ Ultimately, it is probably not Hedley’s interest in Idealism and Romanticism
which led him to Indian thought, so much as a set of deeply held philosophical and
religious convictions which, at various stages in his intellectual and spiritual journey,
have found their natural home in certain places – whether the idealist Romantic poetry
of Coleridge, the mystical sense of the sacred in Otto, or Jones’s enthusiasm for the
Sanskritic philosophical traditions of India. The roots of these core philosophical and
religious convictions are deeply embedded, in Hedley’s case, in Platonism, and it is, I
would suggest, the echoes of ancient Greek thought in India which can provide the
fullest explanation for Hedley’s ‘Orientalism’.76 For a commentary on the thought-
provoking comparison between ‘Brahmanic theology’ and ‘Parmenides and Plato’
drawn by Jones, and for Hedley’s fullest direct treatment of Indian thought, we have to
look to the eighth chapter – on ‘Mythology and Theogony’ – of his final volume, Iconic
Imagination (2016). Here, Hedley suggests that what he calls ‘speculative theology’
emerged in Greece and India at around the same time (c. sixth century BCE) and he
claims, like Jones, that the same ‘ultimate concern’ of the Hellenic tradition stretching
back to Parmenides and Plato can also be found in the Upanishads.77 The aspect of
this ‘ultimate concern’ upon which Hedley focuses is a conception of the Absolute
198 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

as supreme Being, or the sat-cit-ananda of the Upanishads.78 Simmering beneath the

surface of these comparisons made by Jones and Hedley is a long-standing question
of the possible relation between some forms of Greek and Indian idealistic monisms –
specifically, between (Neo)-Platonism and (Advaita) Vedanta.
There are two distinct issues at stake here: an empirical one of historical cross-
fertilization between the two traditions and a hermeneutical philosophical one of
structural and conceptual analogies which may or may not result from actual instances
of historical encounter.79 We cannot know from Hedley’s trilogy where he stands on the
historical question, but given his sympathy for Otto’s appeal to a human religious sense
that goes beyond social and cultural contexts, the likelihood is that he would side with
R. T. Ciapola and J. R. Mayer in seeing parallels between Neoplatonism and Vedanta
as pointing towards a ‘perennial philosophy’.80 In other words, such parallel insights
which transcend history and culture may well have been reached independently
because they result not from actual historical interaction, but from a preconceptual
human sense of the ‘sacred’. The most interesting question for our purposes is the one
of precisely which philosophical and conceptual themes have drawn scholars to ask
in the first place about possible Eastern influences in Neoplatonism – for it is these
themes which we would expect to find in Hedley’s work if there really is a connection
between his Hellenism and his interest in Indian thought.
The most detailed full-length study of the issue of philosophical convergence
specifically between Neoplatonism and Advaita Vedanta provides strong support for
our hypothesis that there is indeed a profound connection between the two systems in
Hedley’s work.81 Notwithstanding important and significant differences between the
two traditions, J. F. Staal argues that there are deep conceptual resonances to be found in
certain doctrines – not least, in the focus in both systems on the Absolute as unlimited
Being and on union through self-knowledge.82 While it might be objected that the
Absolute in Plotinus’s Neoplatonism is ‘beyond being’,83 Staal sees no contradiction
between this and Sankara’s affirmation that Brahman is sat, for both intend the same
thing – that the Absolute is beyond qualified and intelligible being. Both Plotinus and
Sankara, moreover, would agree, Staal insists, that the physical world is a-dvaita with
the Absolute: ‘Nothing is separated, which originates from the One, but nothing is
identical with it either.’84 This is precisely the kind of mystical idealism (in which the
material derives from and is dependent on the spiritual) that we find in Hedley’s work.
Indeed, in a famous comparative essay on the concept of ‘spirit’ in Neoplatonism and
Vedanta (i.e. cit and noûs),85 P. Hacker argues for the vital importance to any religious
philosophy of

the Platonic concept of Idea, which Neoplatonism has incorporated into noûs,
thus preparing the way for classical Christian cosmology. If theistic metaphysics
is to survive, if the doctrine of God is not to degenerate into an ideology ancillary
to anthropology, it is indispensable that we should uphold this heritage of
Platonism and Neoplatonism. In monistic Vedāntism, monism, with its corollary,
illusionism, made it indeed hard to explain the origin of the perishable world from
the Absolute; all the more notable is the fact that even in this system there emerges
an adumbration of Platonic Ideas.86
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 199

As we have seen, Hedley too sees the doctrine of Divine Ideas as the lifeblood of his
theistic metaphysics, necessary precisely to avoid ‘the doctrine of God degenerating
into an ideology ancillary to anthropology’. If similar conceptions of the Absolute
and its relation to the physical world can be found in Neoplatonism and Vedanta –
conceptions which seem conducive to the sacramental view of the world we find in
Hedley’s trilogy, as well as his understanding of a non-contrastive dialectic between
immanence and transcendence – then it is also true to say that the implications of this
non-dualism between the One and the many are similar in both ancient systems and
central to Hedley’s vision: that is, that we find God/Brahman by ‘turning inward’:

Leave the thus-ness of saying: ‘I am thus’, and you become the all; for also
previously you were the all. . . . But in as far as you were something different and
extra beyond the all, you became, though it is due to a surplus, less: for this surplus
is not due to being (nothing could be added to it), but to non-being. You have
become ‘somebody’ because of non-being: you are the universal entity, when you
abandon this non-being.87

This vision of ontological continuity between my ‘I’ and the divine ‘I AM’ leads us
to the end of our exploration of the presence of Indian thought in Douglas Hedley’s
philosophical theology. Having begun in Greece, and travelled to India, we will finish
our journey in Israel because it is here that, in a sense, all the angles and vertices of our
conceptual triangle come together. In the divine name revealed to Moses in Exodus,
we find not only a leitmotif of Hedley’s work but also the sacred ground on which key
aspects of his philosophy of the religious imagination coalesce.

5 I AM THAT I AM
From his early work on Coleridge and throughout the Imagination trilogy, Hedley
follows the lead of his academic mentor, Werner Beierwaltes, in exploring the question
of ‘God-Being’ in Christian Platonism – specifically, as this onto-theological trope is
manifested in the long and varied interpretation history of a single scriptural verse and
its hidden, or ‘mystical’ meaning.88 Hedley returns again and again to the enigmatic
divine name revealed to Moses on Mount Horeb (Exod. 3.14, ‘I am he who is’ / ’ehyeh
‘asher ‘ehyeh)89 in order to show that the readings of the particular figures he chooses
(especially Augustine, Aquinas and Eckhart) are both Platonist and Christian.
In Living Forms, Hedley focuses on Augustine’s reading and, in particular, on
the idea that God as the great ‘I AM’ is true Being. Just as previous figures like Philo
and the church fathers had seen in this pivotal verse a confirmation of God’s eternal,
simple and unchanging nature, so Augustine follows these Platonic themes in his
interpretation and emphasizes the relative ‘non-being’ of creatures apart from their
participation in God.90 In a remarkable passage in the Confessions, the then bishop
recounts his discovery of God’s nature as Being itself by means of a ‘conversion’ or
turning inward of his gaze:
200 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my
guide I entered into my innermost citadel. . . .When I first came to know you, you
raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not
yet Being . . . and I found myself far from you ‘in the region of dissimilarity’ and
heard as it were your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow
and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your
flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.’ . . . And you cried from far away: ‘Now,
I am who I am.’ (Exod. 3.14)91

It was thanks to these ‘Platonic books’ that Augustine was able to leave behind his
Manichean dualism and gradually ‘seek for immaterial truth’92 and find God as Spirit,
as He who ‘truly is’. Augustine’s subsequent commentaries on Exod. 3.14 confirming
God as ‘Being’ itself helped to establish ‘He who is’ as ‘the main divine name in the Latin
West’.93 The stage had been set for Augustine by the Platonism of figures like Plotinus,94
Porphyry and Marius Victorinus,95 but his reading is also distinctively Christian, as we
can see in the Eucharistic ‘feeding’ imagery he uses96 and parallels he draws between
the Ego sum qui sum of Mount Horeb and the ‘I am’ sayings in John’s Gospel.97 While
the ‘Platonists’ books’ had shown him the vision of ‘what truly is’,98 they could not take
him there. This ‘way’ he came to find in the Christian scriptures and, in particular, in
the mediatory figure of Christ.99
In Iconic Imagination, Hedley turns to Aquinas and, in particular, Eckhart. While
Augustine focuses on the connotations of Exod. 3.14 in terms of divine eternity and
immutability, Aquinas’s emphasis rests on God as the pure activity of Being – the ‘I
am’ by which all creatures are sustained and in which they reside. In his focus on God
as the ‘self-subsistent act of existence’,100 through which all things ‘are’, Aquinas turns
to Neoplatonic concepts in order to explain the sui generis nature of the causation
involved in creation – that is, the very causing-to-be of creatures.101 The implications
are that:

As the cause of all creatures outside of whom nothing would exist, one cannot
take up a position ‘outside’ of the relationship between cause and effect, Creator
and creature. Rather, the human intellect can know anything about God only by
participation in God’s wisdom itself. We must ‘enter into’ God’s wisdom or Word
in order to understand it, just as we must ‘enter into’ the light in order to see the
light.102

Eckhart takes this notion of ontological continuity between creature and Creator
to its metaphysical extreme. In the ‘AM’, Eckhart sees the identity of existence and
essence in the divine Being – the sui generis equivalence which is precisely what
allows God to be both immanent in and transcendent to all created beings, both
distinct and indistinct at the same time. This is not for Eckhart, any more than it is
for Hedley, a pantheistic continuum. The relation between creature and Creator is
neither one of simple identity nor of straightforward difference. In his Latin sermon
on grace, it is possible to hear an echo of Exod. 3.14 when Eckhart says that it is
‘by God’s grace [that] I am what I am’ (his rendering of 1 Cor. 15.10)103 – the pure
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 201

being (istichkeit) in which we are enjoined to participate through grace in Christ

and apart from which we are ‘pure nothing’.104 The more ‘indistinct’ we can become
through material and spiritual detachment, the more we come to realize our non-
difference from Being as such: ‘When my “is” and “God’s is”, my “I am” and God’s
“I am” are one and the same “I am Who am”, then there is one being, one knowing,
and one working that is ‘greatly fruitful’ like grace.’105 As Hedley points out, the
distinctively (Neo)-Platonic aspect of the interpretations of Exod. 3.14 we find in
Augustine, Aquinas and Eckhart builds on Aristotle’s conception of God as ‘thought
thinking itself ’ and ‘is intensified by the Christian reception of the Neoplatonic idea
of the νοῦς as the identity of being and thought’.106 The implications of this identity
are precisely the sorts of implications we have seen in Hedley’s religious philosophy –
namely, creaturely being as a participation in divine Being; God as subject, not object;
knowledge through introspection; and a sacramental vision of reality mediated not
only through reason but also through the imagination. It is not difficult to see why
Idealists and Romantics seized upon this verse and various patristic and medieval
philosophical interpretations of it.107 Given the key influences on Hedley’s religious
philosophy already outlined, we would have expected to find these themes central
to his vision in Christian thinkers whose indebtedness to (Neo)-Platonism is well
attested, but it is revealing that this verse (Exod. 3.14) is also one which Vedantins
commonly point to in support of an advaitic understanding of the Christian doctrine
of God and world.108
The connections between Neoplatonism and Vedanta which have drawn figures
from both of these thought-worlds to the same verse are the parallels which, I have
argued, help to explain the presence of Indian thought in Douglas Hedley’s religious
philosophy – not merely as erudite ornamentation, but as a fertile meeting point of
many of Hedley’s most deeply rooted motivations and convictions. The resonant
echoes he finds in Vedantic philosophy and Hindu iconography of his own moorings
in Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism, on the one hand, and German Idealism
and English Romanticism, on the other, are ones he has become more consciously
aware of (as suggested by the increasing references to India from Coleridge in 2000 to
Iconic Imagination in 2016), but the echoes have been there all along. In his most
recent article, Hedley agrees with Otto that these convergences between East and
West are the result of ‘an astonishing conformity in the deepest impulses of human
spiritual experience, which – because it is almost entirely independent of race, clime
and age – points to an ultimate inward hidden similarity of the human spirit’.109
Indeed, in his examination of the parallels between Sankara and Eckhart, Otto draws
specifically on the Rhinelander’s interpretation of Exod. 3.14 in order to substantiate
his case that these two mystics, separated by time and geography, are working with ‘an
almost identical metaphysic’.110 It is a metaphysic of continuity between the One and
the many which can be found in Christian Neoplatonism and Hindu Vedanta, and
which has been central to the philosophical and cultural movements of Idealism and
Romanticism. It is also a metaphysic which is present, if perhaps underemphasized, in
certain dimensions of the Christian traditions – as we have seen in Augustine, Aquinas
and Eckhart. Indeed, it is why Bede Griffiths is able to say, in a near echo of the citation
from Hedley with which we began this chapter, that
202 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

The created world is a ‘reflection’ of the uncreated archetypal world. Like an image
in a mirror, it has only a relative existence. Its existence is constituted by this
relation to God. It is in this sense that we can say with the Hindu school of Advaita,
that God and the world are ‘not two’ (advaita).111

Hedley’s work, when looked at through the conceptual lenses we have been utilizing,
points towards a tantalizing fusion of Platonic Christian mysticism and Vedantic
idealism. Indeed, his wide-ranging religious philosophy suggests not that ‘East
is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, in the too-often-quoted
sentiment of that iconic Anglo-Indian, Rudyard Kipling, but, in fact, as Kipling wrote
in the following couplet, that ‘there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor
Birth, [w]hen two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of
the earth’.112 Hedley offers us a rich and challenging vision of the human and divine
unhindered by such physical and conceptual borders.
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 203

Response by Douglas Hedley

Christian theology was often conducted in the twentieth century in splendid isolation.
This is no longer sustainable in the ‘global village’ of the digital age. Comparative
religion is an important aspect of contemporary theology in the West, and rightly so.
The interest in Indology in the trilogy is part of the tradition of Ancient Theology.
There is an interest in ‘religion’ and a human a priori and in common tenets shared by
great religions that goes back to the church fathers of Alexandria, Nicholas of Cusa,
Ficino, the Cambridge Platonists, Sir William Jones and Friedrich Creuzer. Some of
the pivotal figures of the study of religion in the twentieth century, such as Rudolf
Otto, Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin and Ananda Coomaraswamy, were Platonists and
inheritors of the prisca theologia.
Soars is quite correct to see the project as emerging out of Alexandrian Platonism,
through an Idealistic and Romantic prism. Sir William Jones, S. T. Coleridge and
Rudolf Otto are formative influences upon the theophanic view of the created realm
as a ‘dark glass’ of the Divine: nam et creatura in deo est subsistens, et deus in creatura
mirabili et ineffabili modo creatur, se ipum manifestans, invisibilis visibilem se faciens.113
I would be wary of designating this as ‘perennialism’ in any strict sense. I would
rather see it as the extension of the principle of the ‘continuity of esteem’ and the
Alexandrian principle of the spermatic Logos.

Notes
1 Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (New York
and London: Continuum, 2011), 59.
2 Hedley was the appointed Teape lecturer in 2006 and spoke in Delhi, Bangalore and
Calcutta on the theme of ‘The One and the Many’ in Indian and Western philosophy.
I will not be drawing on these lectures in this chapter for two reasons: firstly, I wish
to keep the focus on Hedley’s published work – especially on his ‘Imagination’
trilogy – to which this collection is primarily devoted; secondly, and more
importantly, because he explored in the lectures themes and ideas which only came
to fuller fruition in the trilogy and whose significance to his broader philosophical-
theological outlook is, therefore, best understood in the context of this later work.
3 Westcott was the regius professor of Divinity at Cambridge, bishop of Durham and
one of the founders of the (Anglican) Cambridge Mission to India (now known as
the Cambridge-Delhi Christian Partnership) in 1877. In 1881, the Mission led to
the establishment of what would become one of Delhi University’s most prestigious
institutions – St Stephen’s College. Hedley discusses Westcott in the final book of his
trilogy, The Iconic Imagination (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 188–9. I
will refer to this simply as Iconic Imagination from here on.
4 It is not my intention to conflate Platonism and mysticism, on the one hand, or
Romanticism and Idealism, on the other. In Hedley’s work, however, we will see that
each ‘pair’ is closely related, which is why I have suggested grouping them together in
our heuristic triangle.
204 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

5 These are obviously all complex and open-ended themes in their own right. Lest I
be accused of painting in brushstrokes which are unforgivably broad, I should point
out from the start that my focus (as with the linking themes and figures I come on to
discuss) is on their place within Hedley’s work.
6 Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 6–7. Elsewhere, it is clear that Hedley sees this tradition
going much farther back than Eriugena, to the early church fathers.
7 Ibid.
8 See, for example, Dominic J. O’Meara (ed.), Neoplatonism and Christian Thought
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).
9 Ficino (1433–99) led the fifteenth-century Platonic Academy in Florence, which
aimed at reviving Neoplatonism through the translation into Latin of the works of
Plato, Plotinus and other Neoplatonic figures. Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) was
one of the members of the Academy and founded the tradition of Christian kabbalah.
10 Both members of a group of theologians who would later become known as the
‘Cambridge Platonists’, Cudworth (1617–88) was Regius Professor of Hebrew and
Master of Clare Hall (now Clare) and then Christ’s College, where More (1614–87)
was also a fellow.
11 Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII, q. 46.2
12 For studies of the doctrine in Thomas, see John F. Wippel, Thomas Aquinas on the
Divine Ideas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993), Vivian Boland,
Ideas in God According to Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: E. J. Brill, 1996), and
Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington,
DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014).
13 The doctrine appears throughout Hedley’s trilogy, but see, in particular, Iconic
Imagination, 126.
14 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 2.
15 William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. 13 July 1798.
16 Iconic Imagination, 142.
17 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 59–65.
18 Ibid., 64.
19 Ibid., 65.
20 Iconic Imagination, 139. Despite the popularity of this kind of imagery, I think that a
better metaphor is to see creation as a window – since it is not so much that we see
in the world ‘reflections’ of the divine (as in a mirror), as that, with our imaginative
faculties, we can see the divine always and everywhere already present in and through
the created order.
21 Ibid., 139–40.
22 Ibid., 148.
23 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 8.
24 Ibid., 9.
25 Ibid.
26 In a related etymological and semantic field, Hedley notes the closeness of the
English terms ‘sacred’ and ‘mystery’, since the Latin sacer (which also gives us
‘sacrament’) is the root of both (obviously in the case of ‘sacred’ but less obviously
in the case of ‘mystery’, where sacer was used to translate the Greek mysterion).
‘Sacrifice’ is, therefore, a ‘making holy, sacred’ or perhaps even a ‘making mysterious’
(sacra facere). See Sacrifice Imagined, 11 and 26.
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 205

27 Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 997B-1000A: ‘with your understanding laid

aside . . .strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond
all being and knowledge. By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself
and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the
divine shadow which is above everything that is.’
28 A phrase he uses of Coleridge by which he means ‘exactly this temper of mind in
Plotinus that veers between a strongly contemplative rationalism and an emphasis
upon that which resists conceptual analysis: will; life; experience; God’ (Coleridge,
Philosophy and Religion, 11).
29 Obviously, not every Neoplatonist was a Christian.
30 A far more detailed case is put in Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical
Tradition: From Plato to Denys, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
31 In Living Forms of the Imagination (London and New York: Continuum, 2008),
89, he describes the Platonic monotheism transmitted to Augustine and Eckhart
as ‘[t]hat form of monotheism [which] was a via media between the unrelenting
transcendence of the God of Aristotle and the materialism and pantheism of the
Stoics’. In a similar way, he uses the phrase ‘mystical theism’ to mean a form of theism
that has been ‘nourished by Neoplatonism’ (Iconic Imagination, 138). For a detailed
exploration of this concept, see John Peter Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in
Ancient Platonic Theology (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2010).
32 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 10. While British Idealism did more than just
accept the doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Hegel et al. wholesale, the movement was deeply
indebted to and influenced by aspects of German culture and philosophy. For more
on this, see W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), esp. Ch. 2: ‘Beginnings and Influences’.
33 Ibid., 23.
34 Ibid.
35 Living Forms, 101. It is for this same reason that ‘Plotinus’s monism does not mean
the extinction of individuality but the realization of the true self – which is “the One
in us”’ (cf. Enneads V.7, I.1.7, III.8.9), quoted in Living Forms, 92–3.
36 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 11–16.
37 Ibid., 65.
38 Ibid., 59.
39 Ibid., 66.
40 Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. I: 1794–1800, 76, cited by Hedley in Coleridge,
Philosophy and Religion, 68.
41 Ibid.
42 For a recent study of the concept of God as both unitary and personal ground of
Selfhood, see Cia Van Woezik, God – Beyond Me: From the I’s Absolute Ground in
Hölderlin and Schelling to a Contemporary Model of a Personal God (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
43 Ibid., 70.
44 Sacrifice Imagined, 37.
45 Ibid., 58.
46 See especially Sacrifice Imagined, 26–37.
47 Douglas Hedley, ‘Affective Attunement and the Experience of the Numinous:
Reflections on Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige’, International Journal of the Study of the
Christian Church 17 (2017): 33–45 (the ‘great sage of Marburg’ designation is
Hedley’s, ibid., 42). He takes the title of his article from Otto’s phrase ‘numinose
206 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Gemüts-gestimmtheit’ which Hedley renders as ‘affective attunement by the

experience of the numinous’.
48 Ibid.
49 An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to
the Rational.
50 Cf. ibid., 39: ‘Otto’s attempts to convey or evoke the pre-linguistic experience of the
holy that he proposes as a generic and transcultural feature of humanity is also what
made his work unfashionable against reductionist accounts of religion such as those
of Marx, Mauss, or Durkheim. ’
51 Ibid., 34, and Sacrifice Imagined, 29.
52 ‘Affective Attunement’ (see n. 47), 34.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Along with Charles Wilkins (1749–1836) and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–
1837), William Jones (1746–94) is widely recognized as one of the most important
Orientalists of the Company era in India. Supported by the then governor-general,
Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the pioneering work of these civil servant scholars
opened up Indology as an academic discipline for future generations. For more on
this period, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The
Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1835 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1969).
56 Sacrifice Imagined, 183. The citation comes from William Jones in Garland H.
Cannon (ed.), The Letters of Sir William Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970),
669–70, and is taken by Hedley from Urs App, ‘William Jones’s Ancient Theology’, in
Sino-Platonic Papers 191 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 18.
57 Martin Ganeri, Indian Thought and Western Theism: The Vedānta of Rāmānuja
(London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 4.
58 For a comprehensive overview of these different interpretations of the Upanishadic
revelation, see Eric J. Lott, Vedantic Approaches to God (London: Macmillan, 1980).
59 To follow up this question of how far different Indian philosophical systems can be
considered ‘idealist’, and what precisely this might mean, see Uma Pandey, Śankara:
A Realist Philosopher (Jalandhar: Kautilya Prakashan, 2015), 26–44.
60 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 23.
61 Hedley discusses Sankara and his later opponent, Ramanuja, in Iconic Imagination,
194–5.
62 For a survey of different interpretations of Advaita Vedanta (from realist to idealist),
see Bradley Malkovsky, The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Sankaracarya
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), 46–50.
63 Hedley discusses these figures and their role in the nineteenth-century ‘Bengal
Renaissance’ in Iconic Imagination, 189–191. For more detailed analyses of how and why
Advaita Vedanta came to be the focus of the Hindu Renaissance, as well as of nineteenth-
to early twentieth-century European receptions of Indian philosophical thought,
see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988), and Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-
Colonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
64 J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western
Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 61.
65 Perhaps the most obvious example of a European idealist philosopher who was
drawn to the Upanishads was Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). See, for example,
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 207

the preface to his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1818). Hegel
also wrote at length on Indian thought, especially in his Lectures on the Philosophy
of History (1837) where he drew on the work of Colebrooke, Jones and James Mill.
He also studied and responded to W. von Humboldt’s essays on the Bhagavadgītā
– see his review, On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad
Gita by Wilhelm von Humboldt, edited and translated by H. Herring (New Delhi:
Indian Council of Philosophical Research), reproduced in Aakash Singh Rathore
and Rimina Mohapatra, Hegel’s India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 87–140.
66 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the
East, 1680–1880 (New York and Guildford: Columbia University Press), 198. One
of the leading German Romantics influenced by Indian thought was F. Schlegel
(1772–1829).
67 Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, 56. This predilection for Vedanta has dominated
Western academic engagement with Hinduism until relatively recently.
68 Herder is usually thought of as a forerunner of the Romantic movement, rather than
belonging to it proper. For more on the influence of Indian material in Herder, see
Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (see n. 64), 61–3; Halbfass, India and Europe, 69, and
Herder’s own Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774).
69 Cf., for example, Schelling’s concepts of ‘absolute identity’, the illusory nature of the
finite world, pantheism, the ‘world-soul’ as well as his interest in Indian mythology.
70 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (see n. 64), 63.
71 For a detailed examination of these cross-cultural currents, see Joanne Miyang Cho,
Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds), Transcultural Encounters between
Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London and New
York: Routledge, 2014).
72 See Ankur Barua, ‘The Absolute of Advaita and the Spirit of Hegel: Situating Vedānta
on the Horizons of British Idealisms’, Journal of the Indian Council for Philosophical
Research, Springer, 2016.
73 For an explanation of where German Romanticism was getting its images of
India from, see A Leslie Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German
Romanticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964).
74 For more on Jones and these wider connections, see Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment
(see n. 64), 58–9. For a fascinating overview of Coleridge’s engagement with the East,
see David Vallins, Kaz Oishi and Seamus Perry (eds), Coleridge, Romanticism and
the Orient: Cultural Negotiations (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2013), esp. the essays by D. Coleman, ‘Coleridge and William Hodges’ Travels in
India (1793)’, A. Warren, ‘Coleridge, Philosophy, Orient’, D. Vallins, ‘Immanence and
Transcendence in Coleridge’s Orient’, and N. Tal Harries, ‘“The One Life Within Us
and Abroad”: Coleridge and Hinduism’.
75 Metaphysical identity is perhaps the more traditional reading of Advaita Vedanta.
Again, see Malkovsky, The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Sankaracarya
(n.62) on this.
76 John H. Muirhead puts this argument forward in respect of British Idealism in his
Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin LTD;
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 13–16 – that is, that British Idealism
owed as much to an indigenous revival of Platonism, as it did to German Kantian
and post-Kantian philosophy.
77 Iconic Imagination, 184.
208 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

78 Ibid., 185.
79 The first issue has tended to centre on the question of whether the similarities
between elements of Neoplatonism as found in Plotinus and aspects of Indian
thought are merely the result of coincidental osmosis or evidence of more direct
influence. This historical debate captured the imagination of certain scholars in
the twentieth century. Some, like the French philosopher Emile Bréhier, advocated
a strong ‘Oriental hypothesis’, while others, like A. H. Armstrong and John Rist,
pointed to significant divergences between Plotinus’s Hellenistic theism and
Upanishadic monism. For an overview of the scholarship on this question, see
Albert M. Wolters, ‘A Survey of Modern Scholarly Opinion on Plotinus and Indian
Thought’, in Neoplatonism and Indian Thought, edited by R. Baine Harris (Virginia:
State University of New York Press, 1981), 293–309. On Plotinus’s failed attempt to
get to India, see Paulos Gregorios, Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002), 13–17.
80 See R. T. Ciapola, ‘Bréhier and Rist on Plotinus’, and John R. A. Mayer, ‘Plotinus and
Sri Aurobindo’, in Gregorios, Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, 71–9 and 164–72.
81 J. F. Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism: A Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy
(Madras: University of Madras, 1961).
82 M. Just sees Plotinus’s focus on subjectivity and mystical union, in contrast to a
more typically ‘Hellenic’ emphasis on rationality, clarity and objectivity as the reason
to suppose that Plotinus might have had ‘Eastern’ influences. See Michael Just,
‘Neoplatonism and Paramadvaita’, Comparative Philosophy 4 (2013): 1–28, here 3.
83 Ennead V 5,6, from ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας in Republic 509b.
84 Ennead V 3,12.
85 Paul Hacker, ‘Cit and Nous, or the Concept of Spirit in Vedantism and Neoplatonism’,
in Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedānta,
edited by Wilhelm Halbfass (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995),
211–26. It should be noted that Hacker sees the three hypostases of One – noûs –
soul as subordinative in Plotinus, whereas the sat-cit-ananda of Vedanta are identical
designations of the one reality.
86 Hacker, ‘Cit and Nous, or the Concept of Spirit in Vedantism and Neoplatonism’, 225.
87 Ennead VI 5,12.
88 See W. Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1972).
89 New Jerusalem Bible translation. Clearly, this verse raises all sorts of philological,
exegetical and theological questions, which I do not pretend to solve in this chapter.
90 Hedley discusses, in particular, Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 38: ‘Anyone
who takes the road away from him who truly is necessarily goes toward non-
being’ (Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, Exp. Ps. 38, §225, translated by M.
Boulding (New York: New York City Press, 2000), vol. 2, 193) quoted in Living
Forms, 202.
91 Conf. VII. x (16).
92 Conf. VII. xx (26).
93 Emilie Zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness (New York: Paragon House,
1988), vii.
94 Plotinus’s influence can be seen overtly in the passage from Augustine’s Confessions
quoted above – not least in the idea of ‘re-turning inward’ (cf. Ennead V 1,1) and the
physical world being a ‘region of dissimilarity’ from the One (cf. Ennead I 8,13, from
Plato, Statesman 273d).
 
From Cambridge to Calcutta 209

95 Conf. VIII. ii (3).

96 For more on Augustine’s (and Aquinas’s) Christological interpretations of Exod. 3.14,
see Janet Soskice, ‘Aquinas and Augustine on Creation and God as “Eternal Being”’,
New Blackfriars 95 (2014): 190–207, here 203.
97 See, for example, In Iohannis evangelium 2, 2. For more on the correspondences
Augustine draws between Exod. 3.14 and Gospel passages like Rom. 1.20, cf. Zum
Brunn, Being and Nothingness (see n. 93), 110–11.
98 Conf. VII. xx (26).
99 Ibid., VII. xx (27).
100 ST I.4.2.
101 Hedley discusses the influence on Aquinas and Eckhart of the Neoplatonic Liber de
Causis in Iconic Imagination, 137.
102 Robert J. Dobie, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart on Exodus 3:14: Exegesis or
Eisegesis?’, Medieval Mystical Theology 24 (2015): 124–36, here 126.
103 Eckhart, Sermon XXV, n.257, in Meister Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, edited by
Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 218.
104 Eckhart, In agro dominico art.26: Omnes creaturae sunt unum purum nihil: non dico,
quod sint quid modicum vel aliquid, sed quod sint unum purum nihil.
105 Dobie, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart’ (see n. 102), 134–5 (cf. Sermon 83,
Colledge and McGinn, trans., Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries,
Treatises and Defense (London: S.P.C.K., 1981)).
106 Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 76.
107 Hedley looks at how the verse is interpreted, for example, by Berkeley, Cudworth,
Donne and Coleridge, and discusses in some detail the central role it plays in
Schelling’s speculative theology – see ibid., 75–87 (this section is, in fact, Hedley’s
most detailed treatment of the verse).
108 The well-known twentieth-century Advaitin, Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950),
claimed that the whole of Vedanta is contained in two biblical passages: ‘Be still and
know that I am God’ (Ps. 46.10) and ‘I am that I am’ (Exod. 3.14) – cf. Talks with
Ramana Maharshi, Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 1984, 307, quoted in J.
Glenn Friesen, Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux): Christian Nondualism and Hindu
Advaita (Calgary: Aevum Books, 2015), 35.
109 Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of
Mysticism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932), v., discussed by Hedley in ‘Affective
Attunement’ (see n. 47), 39.
110 Otto, Mysticism East and West, 4–10.
111 Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West: A Sequel to The Golden String
(London: Fount, 1982), 85, cited by Hedley in Iconic Imagination, 198. Griffiths
(1906–73) was a Benedictine monk, who, in 1968, took over the Saccidananda
ashram in Tamil Nadu from Henri Le Saux.
112 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’, The Works of Rudyard Kipling, edited
by R. T. Jones (Hertfordshire: Wordsword Editions Limited, 1994), 245.
113 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 678c. ‘For both creation (creatura), by subsisting, is in
God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates
Himself in creation, the invisible making Himself visible.’
 10

Imagination and religion

Some Shakespearian reflections
Douglas Hedley

The trilogy was not conceived as an exhaustive ‘history of ideas’. The history of the
term ‘imagination’ in the West was a part of my brief, but it was not my objective.1
Nor was it a definitional exercise to examine the concept of ‘imagination’. Certainly,
we were not committed to a faculty psychology, whereby the mind is a gathering of
distinct faculties, each entrusted with distinct mental functions. There is a distinct
range of mental activities where the mind does not perceive, and yet nevertheless
one encounters phenomena, for example, dreams, daydreams and fantasies. ‘If one
wants to talk about anything religious, some kind of relation has to be established with
the invisible.’2 Religion and art employ the stuff of imagination to convey a world or
worlds other than some quotidian res extensa. The philosophical paradox that I explore
throughout the trilogy is that we need imagination to escape fantasy. This is linked to
the most ancient challenge of the (Hellenic–Western) philosophical tradition: Know
Thyself.
One might distinguish for a moment the aesthetic imagination from the moral and
the epistemological. Let us consider the moral imagination as the capacity to envisage
the world from the perspective of other agents and their interests. The epistemological
imagination allows us to form hypotheses about the world that are underdetermined
by the data. Newton’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s of relativity are complex theories
or conjectures about the world that cannot be simply inferred from experience, even if
such theories are corroborated by evidence. The aesthetic imagination is rather distinct
from the moral or epistemological. It can furnish a world that is neither true nor false.
The great artist facilitates the operation of the imagination in an audience. Consider
what Coleridge aptly names the ‘suspension of disbelief ’. When we are in the theatre,
we can imagine ‘the cloud-capped towers’ and ‘gorgeous towers’ (The Tempest 4.1.152).
Shakespeare dwells upon the phenomenon of imagination and the mysterious capacity
of the mind to suspend disbelief. He often does this in a humorous manner as when
the mechanicals explain to their aristocratic audience that there is no need to fear the
lion since the lion is, in fact, Snug the joiner (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.861).
We might be tempted to distinguish between the problem-solving or ‘instructive’
 
Imagination and Religion 211

dimension of the imagination and the transcendent.3 Perhaps it is the latter that
propels us to escapism and fantasy. The former, by contrast, is a healthy tool to cope
with the ‘hic et nunc’.
There are two reasons why that account does not work. One is psychological and the
other is political. If the human subject is in Freud’s celebrated terms ‘nicht einmal Herr
. . . im eigenen Hause’, ‘not master in its own house’ but subject to pressures and forces
of which it is barely or inchoately aware, those often dark landscapes of the human
psyche, then the role of the imagination in its more venturesome aspects should not
be undervalued. Perhaps the mythopoetic figure of King Lear is a particularly potent
instrument for perceiving the perils of vanity or some of the agonies of parenthood that
remain otherwise submerged or ignored. The outlandish-primordial mythic Britain of
King Lear is a world which contains certain assumptions about family relations. It is
not just about age, frailty or violence. It presupposes assumptions and tenets about the
closest human bonds and their betrayal. Its exploration of vanity and self-deception
requires the notion of the father. But this has to be understood for the tragedy to work.4
There is a cognitive component to the play, and this is the root of its aboriginal power,
the very whence of its alchemy.
The second reason is political. One of the greatest European poets, the great silver
age Russian poet Mandelstam perished in a Gulag for comparing Stalin’s moustache to
cockroaches: the poetic depiction of the sadism of the dictator is all the more effective
for its imaginative extravagance. He gives voice to a horror that millions suffered
through his imaginative powers. The poets are the lamp bearers. They give testimony
and bear witness.
The rich imaginative life of the Greeks cannot be divorced from their political
innovations. And poetry was never more important than in some of the cruel and
repressive regimes of the last century. But in the trilogy, I am employing a transcendent,
and one might say playful, imagination. Human subjectivity is, upon reflection,
mysterious to itself and self-knowledge is arduous and oblique. In art we are presented
with characters as unified and luminous, whereas our own experience of the world
and ourselves is often opaque. The vanity of King Lear is transparent in Shakespeare’s
play. Such images as Lear are constructed unities of a kind that one cannot encounter
directly in experience.
A lack of self-knowledge is, however, ethically perilous. In Living Forms of the
Imagination, I explore the idea that the proper functioning of imagination is key to a
healthy psyche and ethics. The self that cannot imaginatively engage with other centres
of consciousness is much diminished; it is literally ‘autistic’ or narcissistic. A properly
ethical agent must be able to imagine the needs and concerns of others. By analogy, if
imagination is requisite for the proper functioning at this psychological and ethical
level, why not at the religious?
My predecessor in the Cambridge Divinity Faculty, Don Cupitt, could be seen as
making very similar claims in his non-realist philosophy of religion. Religion can be seen
as a way of living as if there were metaphysical substances or beings such as God or the
soul or the Son of God, but these are imaginative constructions with no metaphysical
basis. More recently, the secular anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari in his Sapiens: A
Brief History of Humankind (London: Harper, 2014) has made remarkably similar
212 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

claims, albeit with very different aims. He argues that after the cognitive revolution
of around 70,000 BC mankind is able to cooperate particularly effectively through
the working of a collective imaginary, especially after the agricultural revolution in
12,000 BC and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
Europe. These constructions of the human imagination such as gods, money, nations
and legal institutions, or more recently social welfare and human rights, have been a
key to human success. I concur that the imagination is key to the distinctive capacities
of humanity; I take issue with the claim that this capacity should be thought of as a
motor of useful fictions. The weakness of Harari’s account is due to the absence of a
theological dimension. The German philosopher Schelling notes:

Allein die göttliche Imagination, welche die Urache der Spezification der
Weltwesen ist, ist nicht die menschliche, daß sie ihren Schöpfungen bloß
idealistische Wirklichkeit ertheilt. Die Repräsentationen der Gottheit können nur
selbständige Wesen sein; denn was ist das Beschränkende unsrer Vorstellungen als
eben daß wir Unselbständiges sehen? Gott schaut die Dinge an sich an. An sich ist
nur das Ewige, auf sich selbst Beruhende, Wille, Freiheit.5

The work has a central theological element. It is not that the phenomena of the world
provide a basis for inferring to a first cause. It is rather that religion provides a way of
seeing the facts of the world. C. S. Lewis draws an analogy between Christianity and the
sun in this respect: you see the world through it.6 Such an imaginary is not irrational.
And it can provide support for science that some of its naturalistic competitors do not.
Theism furnishes some account of why human beings have an instinct for discovering
truths, whereas if the cause of our beliefs is oblivious to truths, it is not clear, for
example, why natural selection should exhibit any preference for truth over falsehood.
The trilogy is an exploration of a particular vision of the religious imagination,
inspired by and drawing from S. T. Coleridge and the Cambridge Platonists. I take the
influence of the Cambridge Platonists upon Coleridge and Wordsworth as an instance
of the way in which aesthetics and religion need to be viewed in conjunction. Henry
More observes in his Enchiridion Ethicum:

And it is the most perfect state of Life, to love good things, and to hate the bad,
at least; to bear them with indignation, whenever they are obtruded on us. For
this gives testimony, that the inferior part of the soul submits, and is overawed by
the superior; and that the whole man is as it were in the firy [sic] Chariot of his
Affections, Elias-like, carried up towards God and Heaven.7

Like Henry More, I used the same emblem of the chariot as an image of the transforming
power of the imagination.
Platonism has a special relationship to the aesthetic. If Platonism is primarily
concerned with the sovereignty of the Good, its expression is frequently perceived as
beauty. The influence of Platonism has often been felt most powerfully outside the
university and outside ‘philosophy’ in the narrow sense. In particular, Plato’s dialogues,
especially Symposium and Phaedrus, and Plotinus’s seminal theory of art have exerted
 
Imagination and Religion 213

an enormous impact upon Western art, poetry and aesthetics. Dante presents himself
in the Purgatorio 9 as Ganymede, the boy seized by Zeus in the shape of an eagle to
Mount Olympus as a cupbearer to the gods. This is an image for Dante, as later for
Landino, of the contemplation of the Divine Being. In the dedication to his father of
The Philosophical Poems (1647) More recalls his father reading The Faerie Queene of
Spenser, ‘a Poem as richly fraught with divine Morality as Phansy’.8
Plato deployed myths philosophically, and myth is an imaginative form. Griffiths
notes of Plato’s myths: ‘The Myth is the reflection in the human imagination of these
archetypal ideas, these cosmic principles and powers, which were known in the ancient
world as the gods or angels.’9 The ‘ideas’ of Plato were subsequently fused with the
angelic powers of Hellenic church fathers, Iranian-Arabic thought, the schoolmen and
the Renaissance. Shakespeare is an inheritor of such Neoplatonic lore. Shakespeare’s
religion is a contentious issue. Nor is he often thought of as a poeta doctus, especially
since Milton’s arresting picture of Shakespeare ‘warbling his native woodnotes wild’.10
Yet Shakespeare, like his creation Prospero, is a bookish man. The fashion for a sceptical
Shakespeare (e.g. parallels with Montaigne and the early modern sceptical tradition),
reinforced by post-structuralist scepticism, tends to occlude the deeply religious and
realist aspects of the plays. I think that Shakespeare is talking about facts through his
dramatis personae. He draws upon Renaissance ideas of the artist:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.12–17)

Shakespeare draws upon the theory of Platonic beauty in Ficino as we find it in the
Elizabethan form of Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry 1579 or Edmund Spenser’s
Faerie Queene of 1590. An obvious instance of the legacy of Platonic love is in Berowne’s
words to his friends in Love’s Labour Lost:

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world. (Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.344–347)

Erotic love becomes, as in the Phaedrus or Symposium, a vehicle of religious transport.11

Shakespeare’s work was a retelling of stories/myths in his plays. Even the historical
or quasi-historical plays have mythic dimensions and structures. Shakespeare presents
true fictions: imaginative depictions of humanity poised between good and evil, sin
and salvation.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
214 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.4–8)

Shakespeare, I think, was – however ironically – claiming that the imaginative force
of a great poet, in making ideas sensuous, supplies more ‘than cool reason ever
comprehends’. We might say today that the poet can offer a narrative vision of human
experience that eludes the natural sciences toto caelo.
Hamlet is a good example of a quasi-historical work that deals with perennial
themes, and especially the sacred and desecration. Consider the passage where
Claudius tries to pray after murdering his brother:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go. (Hamlet 3.3.97–98)

The new King of Denmark, Claudius, has just told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
take the troublesome Hamlet to England. Polonius says that he will hide and observe
Hamlet with his mother. Claudius kneels to pray: not out of remorse and for forgiveness
(he has killed his brother), but for divine aid. Hamlet sees him at prayer and refrains
from killing him. Claudius, unaware of Hamlet, rises and expresses his recognition that
his own prayer is worthless. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is full of the sacred and desecration.
Hamlet is outraged by the desecration wrought by his wicked and cunning uncle.
Can we still understand this side of Shakespeare? Max Weber raised the issue of the
disenchantment of the modern world (Entzauberung), the inexorable loss of the sacred,
the eclipse of ritual and cosmic order. Is the realm of the sacred a world ‘well lost’, an
archaic and atavistic burden upon modern civilization? There is a widespread hostility
to science that is lamentable and irrationalist. Much, if not all, of this hostility is fuelled
by religious fundamentalism, ignorance and superstition. Donne’s lament that the ‘new
philosophy calls all in doubt’ and as a result ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’,12 is
shared by many sophisticated critics of modern society like Alasdair MacIntyre. Henry
More, like Coleridge later, was not hostile to empirical science. On the contrary, he
openly uses Bacon’s criticism of the eidola of the cave in his polemic with the wild
fancies of the enthusiasts. The strictly empirical methods of science, however, have
their limits. For example, beauty and art are widely considered to be not merely life-
enhancing but consoling and healing. Evolutionary psychologists have reductive
explanations. One reads that landscape painting is reminiscent of human prehistory in
the African savannah, etc. Yet the explanatory range of biological concepts like natural
selection and random mutation seems unduly taxed in the aesthetic just as much as in
the ethical. The reason for this lies in the capacity of beauty in art and nature to convey
a sense of the sacred.
What is the Holy? Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) provides a seminal (and unfairly
maligned) theory of religion as grounded in the human experience of the mystery of
the divine presence that is ‘numinous’. It is the numinous (modelled on ‘ominous’).
This is the experience of mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The Holy is both terrifying
(tremendum) and attractive (fascinans). Homo sacer precedes homo faber and enhanced
 
Imagination and Religion 215

material well-being or technology can never supplant the need for the sacred. One
can see that in the arts. In The Iconic Imagination, we considered those ancient cave
paintings such as those of Chauvet in France. In Sacrifice Imagined, we explored the
roots of tragic drama in the sacrificial festival of Dionysus.
What does the experience of the sacred described so eloquently by Otto tell us? It
says that we cannot reduce religion to social structures (Durkheim) or psychological
needs (Freud). The human need for the sacred persists, and it requires mediation
through poets, priests and prophets. Bede Griffiths observes: ‘The language of myth
and poetry, of the concrete imagination, engages the senses, the feelings, the affections
and the will as well as the reason, and so leads to the transformation of the whole
man.’13
One advantage of the language of the holy is that it allows for a consideration of
non-theistic religion. While the emphasis in the trilogy is upon the Western Christian
tradition, I have tried to consider other perspectives, especially Hinduism. Many of
the leading theorists of imagination in the twentieth century were scholars of Islam,
Hinduism or Buddhism. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Mircea Eliade, Henry
Corbin constitute striking examples of this phenomenon.14
Secularization as the historical process by which religion is replaced by secular
institutions and values (Marx, Durkheim) has been acutely problematized by Charles
Taylor in his enormous work A Secular Age, where he critiques ‘the subtraction thesis’
– and his own sophisticated account calls this the modern ‘cosmic imaginary’.15 The
crisis of modernity is in part a narrowing of the perspective. Since the seventeenth
century, there has been an increasing reliance upon the literal truth conditions of
utterances. For the highly specific and abstract concerns of the natural sciences, this is
usually appropriate (although even here at the quantum scale this seems to break down
with wave-particle duality). The polyvalence of the symbolic and the poetic is more
attuned to the ambiguities of human experience than the rigidly scientific. The great
enhancement of effective technological control has been associated with increasing
disenchantment and a diminished sense of affective involvement with the world.
Yet living with ambiguity and polyvalence is arduous. The longing for unambiguous
certainties is intelligible and reinforced in our highly technocratic societies.16
One of the most baneful illusions of recent human history has been the idea that
science and technology can provide a form of salvation. This apparently optimistic
view of human nature has in fact produced some of the cruellest forms of persecution
from eugenics to the mass deportations and savage cultural revolutions of ideologues
since the French and Russian Revolutions. This illusion has been less cruel in our own
cultural world, but I think it is the source of one major challenge to the humanities.
Those great texts that spoke to our longings and anxieties in this region of unlikeness
(regio dissimilitudinis of Confessions 7,10, 16) seem out of place in the utopian world of
technology and sovereign rights, best practice and institutional transparency.
In Macbeth, the eponymous Scottish thane says to Lady Macbeth:

But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?

I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’
Stuck in my throat. (Macbeth 2.2.30–32)
216 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Macbeth cannot say ‘Amen’, the Hebrew word that the Christian says as an affirmation
or a response to a blessing. Macbeth cannot say the word ‘amen’ after murdering
Duncan. He cannot pray. And there is a perverse reflection of Christ at the crucifixion.
Macbeth is forsaken like Christ. Yet unlike Christ, Macbeth is not innocent: he is
stunned by guilt. Lady Macbeth says to him:

Get some water,

and wash this filthy witness from your hand. (Macbeth 2.2.46–47)

There may well be reference to Pilate washing his hands of his guilt. Ironically, it is
Lady Macbeth who is haunted by images of blood. When sleepwalking, she is trying to
rub away a spot of blood.
Shakespeare is fascinated by the difference between regret and remorse. I might regret
going to the cinema rather than the opera, but I will not feel remorse about it. Macbeth is
speaking of guilt, not shame, remorse, not regret. I feel remorse about an injury done to a
person. Words such as punishment, sin and guilt are out of favour in the contemporary
world; they can seem crude and lacking in psychological sophistication, perhaps
even cruel and atavistic. Is this merely the introjection of social mores, reinforced by
the traumatic lessons and punishment of early childhood? And is this not morbid or
pathological? Perhaps not. As human beings, even if we have not committed egregious
crimes like Macbeth, we know and experience guilt. It is the psychopath or the narcissist
who seems guilt free, but the healthy psyche is troubled. It is an acute consciousness of the
Holy that leads St Paul to say: ‘Who will deliver me from this body of death?’ (Rom. 7.24).
Do we not have in Macbeth a vision of someone who cannot say ‘amen’ to life? Macbeth
has chosen separation from God. Consider the words of approach to communion in the
solemn beauties of Cranmer’s prayer book in the prayer of Humble Access: ‘We do not
presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness,
but in thy manifold and great mercies.’17 Joseph Pieper, in his illuminating little book
called Death and Immortality, considers and defends the ancient view of death as a
punishment for sin, that is, the conscious turning from God. This may seem archaic-
mythic, but Pieper notes that punishment, properly understood, is a correction, a
remedy and a making good. Death so construed is much more gladdening than in its
secular versions. The English word ‘end’ can mean both cessation and fulfilment. Unlike
the existentialist resoluteness about the inevitability of death which masks a view of the
cosmos as grim absurdity (Heidegger) and quasi-heroic-fatalistic resolute ‘being toward
death’, the Christian view is the witness to the commitment to ultimate goodness as the
ground of being. And to speak of the belief in that ultimate and transcendent good means
that death is not just an end as termination but end as telos and goal, to find communion
with the source of our aspiration and longing. Lear says to Cordelia:

Upon such sacrifices . . . .

The gods themselves throw incense. (King Lear 5.3.20–21)

Lear has struck many as a post-Christendom play set in a pre-Christian era. Yet it
is clearly about good and evil. The themes of foolishness and wisdom are clearly
 
Imagination and Religion 217

Christian. Lear is an image of vanity, taken in by the flattery of Goneril and Regan and
misusing his power and wealth.
The Fool says to Lear: ‘Thou had’st little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest
thine golden one away’ (1.4.155–156). The dead Cordelia has sometimes been likened
to an inverted pieta. She says: ‘O dear father, / It is thy business I go about’ (4.4.2),
recalling Christ’s remarks to his parents in the Temple: ‘Wist ye not that I must be
about my Father’s business?’ (Lk. 2.49). Or when a man says to Lear: ‘Thou hast one
daughter who redeems nature from the general curse which twain have brought her
to’ (4.6.2).
There may be classical associations. A father losing his daughter has obvious
parallels in Greek tragedy. Aeschylus’s Oresteia is a paradigm: Agamemnon has upset
the goddess Artemis and the goddess insists that he must sacrifice his daughter for his
ships to sail to Troy. Upon his return from Troy, Agamemnon is killed by Clytemnestra,
who is in turn killed by her son Orestes. This paradigmatic circle of violence becomes
for centuries the model of tragic drama, and the reflection upon revenge and justice
in its wake.
In Sacrifice Imagined, I considered the oddness of the phenomenon of ‘sacrifice’.
Sacrifice is a feature common to the great religious cultures and yet it is puzzling.
Its wastefulness is bewildering given that human evolution is largely a battle with
scarcity. For us creatures of scarcity, why the waste? After all, the object of sacrifice
is usually precious. The Christian image of sacrifice is one of dreadful pain and
suffering. The shocking cruelty of the cross in the ancient world was meant to shock
and deter hardened and cynical criminals as well as resolute and reckless patriots. It
also expresses the demonic dimension of the psyche. There is a sickness of the soul
which is not mere dysfunction but perversion. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) was
an influence at this stage of the work. No philosophy that ignores the violence and
cruelty in the world ‘saves the phenomena’. I initially encountered Maistre through
an essay by Isaiah Berlin and was repulsed by the plausible account of the proto-
fascist Savoyard. Yet Isaiah Berlin had a blind spot with regard to religion, and when
I came to read and study the works of Maistre, I discovered a dimension ignored by
the Oxford savant’s portrait, that of Maistre’s Origenism and his link to the Cambridge
Platonists. Maistre is a profoundly interesting figure within the Platonic tradition. He
took Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe over the Alps when the French
Revolutionary Army descended upon Chambery in Savoy. It seemed to me that there
is phenomenological truth in Maistre’s unflinching depiction of relentless cruelty
and violence. Bede Griffiths notes that ‘in every great religious tradition, it has been
recognised that to reach the final truth one must pass through death. It is the meaning
behind Aeneas’s descent into the underworld in Virgil, and of Dante’s descent into hell
in the Divine Comedy. It is, of course, the meaning of the Christian baptism.’18
In Sacrifice Imagined, I considered René Girard’s scapegoat theory, especially
in his seminal work Violence and the Sacred (1972). For Girard, sacrifice should be
understood as a process of scapegoating. The ‘scapegoat mechanism’ is the basis of all
ancient religions. If Girard is correct about the violent potential of mimetic rivalry,
this imitative rivalry surges and will explode unless the rivals can agree to direct their
violence upon a scapegoat. The diversion of violence towards the victim-scapegoat
218 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

secures peace and the scapegoat attains holy status. We find this in all cultures, and
it was finally exposed by Christianity.19 Jesus is the scapegoat who recognized the
nature of his death and forgave the perpetrators. On Girard’s view, Christianity is the
ultimate antidote to sacrifice understood as scapegoating. It unveiled the scapegoating
mechanism by insisting upon the innocence of the victim.
There are various problems with Girard’s theory. Firstly, on imitation. Imitation for
Girard is largely negative. Mimetic rivalry fuels violence in society. But Christianity
stresses a form of imitation that is positive, beneficial and productive: the imitation
of Christ. Only in an Evelyn Waugh novel satirizing Anglo-Catholic foibles in an
Oxonian biretta belt can one imagine this being a competitive activity in the Girardian
sense. The profound sense of the imitation of Christ is grounded upon the doctrine
of sanctification as the pith and kernel of our faith. Sonship is imparted, not merely
imputed. The deeper meaning of St Paul’s doctrine of sonship in the new creation
wrought by the death and resurrection of our Lord is grounded in the doctrine of
the imitation of Christ. Secondly, Christ is more properly seen as the Christus
consummator. He is the crowning and culmination of sacrifice rather than the ultimate
repudiation of sacrifice. If the lives of Christians are meant to be ‘living sacrifices’
(Rom. 12.1), it is because they reflect the great sacrifice of our high priest Christ that
redeems and fulfils the sacrificial practices of the ancient Hebrews. Note the etymology
sacra-facere, ‘making holy’. We referred to Otto’s subtle explication of the primordial
sense of the holy. There is a profoundly human longing for the Holy: it is not a need for
psychotherapy, for mutual reassurance, the aesthetics of ancient language and ritual or
disquiet about the social ills of the contemporary world. These may all be explanatory
factors in the pilgrimage. But to encounter the transcendent sacred in broken profane
lives is to confront this renewing transformative power in the beauty of holiness. We
come to encounter the Holy as Christ, victim and priest.
The English word ‘Imagination’ has the word ‘image’ in it, and its Christological
connotations are buried in the etymology of the world. The claim of the Christian
church, from the evangelists to the Councils, is that Christ has revealed the divine
nature. Christ is the εἰκών or image of God (2 Cor. 4.4, Col. 1.15). Here Christ is no
contingent likeness, but is an essential derivation. The genius of Stoic and Platonic
philosophy was fused with the prophetic insight of the ancient Hebrews into the
personal and transcendent dignity of the Godhead in the great doctrine of the Logos.
St Paul tells us that this Logos is the ‘εἰκών of the Invisible God’ (Col. 1.15): ‘Through
him are all things’ (cf. Rom. 11.36) and he is ‘all and in all’ (Col. 3.11). Christ is the
‘life-giving Spirit’ (1 Cor. 15.45) and it is the vocation of Christians to transform
themselves into his image (cf. 2 Cor. 3.18). Thomas Traherne is drawing upon this
when he writes:

O give me Grace to see thy face, and be

A constant Mirror of Eternitie
Let my pure soul, transformed to a thought,
Attend upon thy Throne and as it ought
Spend all its time feeding on thy love,
And never from thy sacred Presence move.20
 
Imagination and Religion 219

This is not the perversion of pristine Rabbinic Judaism with convoluted Greek
metaphysics. The upshot is intensely practical and theologically challenging. When
faced with the harrowing problem of evil and suffering in the world, many theologians
retreat into the language of analogy. We cannot properly worship a Being who is not
univocally good. John Stuart Mill was right to say: ‘I will call no being good who is not
what I mean by good when I apply the word to my fellow creatures.’21
The world cannot be moral mayhem. Yet the ‘ought’ of the ethical is suspended in
this world between failure and success. Christians are encouraged to believe in the
process of the gradual transformation of the world, the slow impact of the leaven,
while repudiating any false optimism or repression of hard realities. The manifest evils
in the world point to deep-seated intuitions of goodness (otherwise they would be
experienced as brute facts).
The Divinity is revealed in the affront and scandal of the cross. In the exquisite
performance of the Passion of St John, one hears those opening words:

Zeig uns durch deine Passion,

daß du, der wahre Gottessohn,
zu aller Zeit,
auch in der größten Niedrigkeit,
verherrlicht worden bist.22

Not shame but glory attends the death of Jesus: the Divine suffering and abasement
on the cross is not merely seen as an isolated aspect or incident within the economy
of redemption, but the revelation of the divine love overcoming evil. Meeting evil with
goodness is to accept suffering: ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’
(Is. 53.4). Divine self-sacrifice and suffering is part of the good news. The duchess of York
says to her son: ‘Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end’ (Richard III 4.4.195).
There is little reference to the historical Jesus; indeed, why is the Jesus of history
important? We might consider an analogy with a figure from one of Shakespeare’s
great dramas. There is a long tradition of scepticism about the historical accuracy of
Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard III, attributing the bulk of this image of the rank
tyrant to the imagination of the great Bard. Of course, on such a view Shakespeare
was evidently a propagandist of the Tudors: that is precisely why (on this view) he
would present Richard III as a man deformed both spiritually and physically. Quite
recently, an enthusiast for the dead king tried to find his grave. It was, quite remarkably,
discovered someway from the Battle of Bosworth where Richard fell in 1485 in what
is now a car park in Leicester (and was a Grey Friars Church). With carbon dating
and DNA it was discovered to be the remains of the 32-year-old monarch. To the
astonishment of the archaeologist (and disappointment of the Richard III society), the
bones revealed not only the expected battle wounds but the curved spine. The poet was
correct: not quite a hunchback but very close. The imaginative construction of the king
was not fanciful. This is relevant for the problem of the historical Jesus.

Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end.

Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend. (Richard III 4.4.195–196)
220 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Tellingly, it is Richard’s mother who says this to him, the woman who bore him into
the world. The force of Shakespeare’s narrative lies in its depiction of evil. Even though
he is writing much later after the event than our evangelists about Christ, there are
historical truths there. Yes, in a way, the death of Richard is a perverse reversal of
Christ’s. He dies in the midst of the will to power. Like Macbeth, who uses the same
imagery of blood:

For mine own good,

All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (Macbeth 3.4.134–137)

Shakespeare presents Richard as consummate evil, violence engendering its own

demise through wicked designs, bloody to its own end, just as the evangelists present
Jesus as goodness embracing and overcoming evil through great personal cost. Yet
neither is Richard’s death nor that of Jesus merely poetic or imaginative:

Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults. (The Tempest, Epilogue 13–18)

Here is Prospero at the very end of The Tempest, a play about revenge and forgiveness.
It is about a bookish man who has been outmanoeuvred by wily and scheming
relatives, but who gets the last word. Prospero has been controlling the Island, but he
is now returning to his home. Prospero has been using magic to produce good and
reconciling effects. Now this great Renaissance magus is appealing to God.
Prospero has been injured since his kingdom has been wrested from him by
Antonio, his own brother, together with Alonso, King of Naples. This play is not
only about the punishment for this usurpation but also about forgiveness and
reconciliation. Forgiveness, like sacrifice, constitutes a real problem. We are used to
thinking of forgiveness in positive terms. Yet who has the right to forgive? And when?
What about justice? Here we get into the thorny question of punishment. Many think
of retributive justice as merely atavistic and claim that the only purpose of punishment
can be deterrence or rehabilitation. We need to understand the profound link between
punishment and justice which the great philosophers from Plato to Hegel insist upon.
Hegel, for example, says that the breaker of a law is as a rational being possessing free
will honoured by appropriate and just punishment. Punishment is the ‘restoration of
freedom’.23 Forgiveness cannot be condoning or a lazy collusion with sin:

But I say to unto you which hear, love your enemies, do good to them which hate
you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despiseth you. . . . For
if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? For sinners also do even the
 
Imagination and Religion 221

same. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again.
(Lk. 6.27-35)

We have a reflection of this command in Prospero’s

the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. (The Tempest 5.1.28–31)

Here Prospero is claiming that it is better to forgive than to hate one’s enemies. The
play is about redemption and the restoration of order and harmony. Too often it is
claimed that Prospero does not fully forgive, but that is to overlook the subtlety of the
Bard. Shakespeare, no less than Plato or Hegel, has a deep sense of cosmic and spiritual
justice.
Is not talk of sacrifice the crude and violent language of a bygone age? We discussed
briefly the theory of Girard and I offered two reasons why we might reject Girard’s
account. The kingdom of God is necessarily a social structure, but the reverence for
the individual is immensely important. Christianity forbids the idea that lives can or
should be sacrificed for instrumental reasons. Even Kant’s view of a person as an end
in itself comes out of this Christian perspective and tradition. Pagan Greek ethics is
characterized by ‘tough love’; and we find little patience for Christian sympathy. If one
compares Clement or Origen with their pagan contemporaries, there is a much deeper
emphasis upon compassion. Origen presents us with the wonderful image of the blood-
stained logos. He has a much keener sense of human vulnerability than Plotinus or even
Seneca, who can say that only weak eyes weep in sympathy. Still others might say, is this
not the violence that religion engenders? Christ is both the great high priest and the
victim. The image of the lamb is very central in the Book of Revelation as a revelation of
Jesus Christ. The lamb in Revelation is both redeemer and judge. The lamb is not a witless
scapegoat. Our divine model is, as Plato prophesied in the Republic, one who did right
and suffered injustice until he was crucified.24 As C. S. Lewis says, ‘only a Man who . . .
served in our sad regiment as a volunteer . . . could perform this perfect dying.’25
In the context of Christus consummator, we should remember that ancient sacrifices
were not just killings but feasts. Christianity recognizes the fact of evil. But it also
encourages a sense of joy. Yet it is a joy that confronted, rather than ignored or
repressed the facts of evil or suffering. The sacrifice is a feast on the work of Christ in
which we participate. And contemplating Christ’s heavenly priestly work and knowing
our forgiveness, this should free us to earthly service. Knowing that we are loved,
Christians are freed from hate and resentment and exhorted to live in joy and charity.
Why do we contemplate a story of first-century Palestine repeated, this remote ancient
history? Even the most beautiful worship can mask complacency and idolatry. The
recondite English poet Geoffrey Hill writes of the Crucified Lord bound to the ‘judas-
kiss of our devotion, bowed beneath the gold’.26 This is the blindness to the one for
whom the heavens have opened. Sight can be an idol; yet vision can also unite us to the
object of our aspirations.
222 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

The schoolmen spoke of the status viatoris or the pilgrim status of mankind: we are
properly understood as in a process of transition. Viator means ‘wanderer’ or ‘pilgrim’.
For the Neoplatonists and their medieval and Renaissance offspring, humanity
dwells in two orders: the holy and the eternal and the profane and historical, and it
is on account of this tension that mankind is dissatisfied with the merely profane and
historical order. Humanity’s restlessness and anxiety emerges out of this fact, and this
has been explored by all the great spiritual writers. In the Epistle to the Heb. 11.8-10,
15-16, Abraham is seeking a new dwelling place. The poetry of the Psalms is suffused
with this longing for transcendence.
There is an experience of the Divine – of an invisible but known world, and there is
a cloud of witnesses: prophets, poets and priests. As William Law says, we have a ‘key
to the treasures which heaven has to bestow on us’.27 The Holy shows that the world is
not primarily an arena of power conflicts or a realm to be exploited for human benefits,
but a Temple of the Divine, a forecourt of the sacred. In this ambiguous and perplexing
world, we encounter the divine presence. Rudolf Otto was a great scholar of the mystics
in East and West, especially Meister Eckhart. Eckhart held to the existence of a soul
centre, a spark from the heavenly altar.
Of course, there is the anxiety that this communion is just fantasy: a worst
projection of some disturbing part of the psyche or at best an ethical idealization. John
Damascene says that prayer is the ‘elevation of the mind and the heart to God’.28 The goal
of prayer is union with God. We are considering the ascent of the mind to the supreme
reality, the ‘soul’s citizenship of the eternal world’. Augustine in the Confessions says
that ‘he entered the secret chamber of my soul, and beheld the immutable light soul,
transcending his intelligence’.29 Different from any earthly illumination, it is superior
to him: it is his creative source.
Contemporary philosophers of religion talk about divine hiddenness. But are we
hiding from God? The great mystics insist that it is not God who hides his countenance.
We must recognize that it is we who are in exile and it is we who must knit our centre
to that centre that is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It is what we all
possess but few use.
Contemplation properly precedes praxis. One has to contemplate one’s own real self
before one can act appropriately in the world. The pursuit of goodness is an exploration
of the foro interno, a journey within as it were, rather than measuring outward data,
predicting actions or modelling patterns of behaviour. I think that when Kant writes of
the good will as the sole good without qualification, his is – like Eckhart’s before him – a
version of the true self doctrine, a rendering of the Delphic Oracle’s ‘Know Thyself ’!
With Prussian scrupulosity, Kant seems to assume that we will readily recognize the
difference between inclination and duty, between some instrumental or prudential
good and that which is absolutely and purely good. The task is, in fact, much harder.
In the words of the General Confession for Morning Prayer in Book of Common Prayer
in the Church of England: ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have
done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is
no health in us.’30
In ethics, however, it does not suffice to distinguish between instrumental goods
and what is bad but we need to account for good and evil. Again, Kant reveals his
 
Imagination and Religion 223

colours in his avowal of ‘radical evil’. For a metaphysician like Spinoza, everything that
exists is rational and necessary. For the great theistic tradition of the West, good and
evil are constitutive elements of reality and ethics hinges upon the recognition of the
‘facts’ of good and evil. The God of Spinoza’s Ethics is not a moral being. And Spinoza
is opposed to Western morality in his refusal to recognize evil. For all the differences in
the metaphysical apparatus and content, Spinoza’s Ethics is as radical as Hume’s ethics
of approbation and disapproval. Spinoza’s God is not a lawmaker or a judge, Spinoza’s
substance is beyond ‘good and evil’, and even more radical in his anti-moralism (look
at what he says about pity, sadness and remorse). Indeed, our habitual and inchoate
sense of good and evil is, for the great rationalist philosopher, the product of our all too
human ‘inadequate ideas’. One might compare this with Hume’s functional account of
value. Good and evil emerge from attributions of praise and blame. Somewhat ironically,
these tough-minded philosophers have limited conceptual resources to deal with the
egregious fact of evil. Both philosophers wrest an exiguous fare from the ‘immanent
frame’ in their forlorn attempt to give an account of human behaviour on the same
plane as inanimate objects, machines or animals. Perhaps we have to move outside the
‘immanent frame’ to account for the spiritual capacity of rational free beings to counter
evil with goodness, to forge beauty in art and to engage in disinterested intellectual
inquiry. Both Spinoza and Hume lacked the categories to provide a satisfying rationale
for human ethical and the aesthetical endeavours. For both, ethics is essentially about
relative and proximate ends, for example, the increase of pleasure and the diminishing
of pain. Good and bad only make sense in terms of a causal relation to specific ends.
Hume and Spinoza seem highly pertinent for an age inclined to view values as neural
constructs, and the Good as mere flatus vocis. Behind Hume and Spinoza we find the
bête noir of the Cambridge Platonists: Thomas Hobbes. It is in the genius of Hobbes
that the seeds of game theory and evolutionary psychology lie.
Through the surpassing glass of Shakespeare’s vision we encounter images of life in
the shadows of a being who is identical with absolute goodness; the bard imparts an
imaginative vision of the beauty of that goodness, a realm within which agents have
a vocation to try to realize something of that supreme goodness and to avoid the evil
that is essentially ruinous and divisive. King Lear is supposed to be the most pagan and
tragic of Shakespeare’s works:

Restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips. (King Lear 4.7.26–27)

Lear is mad and the doctor is trying to help him with music, and Cordelia kisses Lear.
There is no bitterness or gratification in her father’s self-wrought misery, remarkable
given Lear’s cruel treatment of his daughter. What are signs of restoration and
reconciliation in the play? Lear initially fails to recognize his own folly: ‘I am a man
more sinned against than sinning’ (King Lear 3.2.56). Lear still views himself as a victim
at this stage. There is a real amendment, conversion more accurately, in his joy when
reunited with his daughter, notwithstanding the fact that he is a prisoner. In King
Lear, Shakespeare presents the capacity to love as a window into a deeper reality, the
truths that the myopic interests and proximate obsessions of the bustling busybody
224 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

me, embodied in Lear’s cantankerous vanity and blindness, cannot see. The capacity
to love is a sign of health. ‘He prayeth best who loveth best,’ says Coleridge’s Mariner.31
If we are fortunate, we see this best in home and friendship. Friendship and love as
depicted in King Lear between Father and daughter are portals into the appreciation of
what Charles Williams calls ‘co-inherence’, linked to Williams’s conviction that it is a
distinctive human vocation to bear each other’s burdens. The Christian journey is not a
‘flight of the one to the One’, to quote the theology of great Platonic Alexandrian pagan
Plotinus. Yet there is a wonderful passage in Plotinus:

All is transparent: no shadow there obstructs the view; all spirits see each other
and penetrate each other to the depths. Light is recognized by light. Every spirit
comprehends in itself the whole world of spirits, and beholds it in its entirety in
every spirit. All things there are everywhere; everything is all, and all is each, and
infinite is the glory.32

Consider how in estrangement and sadness one feels ‘singular’ and at odds with those
we love. We feel alienated and remote from the interpenetration that Plotinus describes
in his inspired depiction of transcendence, his great model of a manifold and rich unity
in the divine Intellect, an interpenetration and communion that Christianity envisages
as the Heavenly Jerusalem. A sanctified imagination is a means to communion.
Earlier in this chapter I wrote of the status viatoris, but if we are pilgrims and if we
live as a community, we are called to share joy and also to bear each other’s burdens.
Charles Williams uses the Trinitarian language of co-inherence. Sometimes he speaks
of ‘exchange’, sometimes ‘substitution’, sometimes ‘Romantic love’. The basis of the
theology of Williams lies in the Christian mystical tradition and the interpretation of
Gal 2.20: ‘Not I but Christ in me.’ It is a doctrine of the true self, from the surface ‘I’
to the depths of our being and that joy in Christ that can withstand the sorrows and
sadness of the world. There is an exchange between the poor, sinful and sorry self and
the new being in Christ that Paul preaches. Yet this metaphysical and psychological
new being is social not atomic: the idea of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12). The
city is deliberately a central image of this exchange for the Londoner Williams.
There is a further metaphysical dimension here. There is a co-inherence of flesh
and spirit. Flesh and spirit are not opposites but mutually linked through the via
affirmativa. The positive way of affirming images of the Divine rather than merely
denying them. That is why, by the way, the real Gnostics are indifferent to those sins
of the flesh that are degrading and desecrating within the Christian tradition. This
mutuality of flesh and spirit is the basis of both the symbol and the sacrament. In the
sacrament, nature becomes a vehicle of the spiritual and the foundation for real joy,
transformation and healing.
St Paul says: ‘Therefore if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has
passed away; behold all things have become new’ (2 Cor. 5.17). The Cambridge
Platonists liked to insist that virtue is a power rather than a habit. Habit has a role,
but is subordinate to power. Henry More means that it requires freedom and the
ability to recognize the good and to act through love. He speaks of the ‘boniform
faculty’, that part of us (almost godlike in More) that is able to relish goodness.33 The
 
Imagination and Religion 225

cross and resurrection of Christ working in us, our participating in his life, can be
a source of great transformative power and energy. This is Christianity at its most
simple, re-creation into the image of Christ and participating in his life through the
spirit:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth
had passed away. . . . And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down
. . . and I heard a great voice from the throne saying: Behold, the dwelling of God
is with men . . . he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no
more, for the former things have passed away . . . Behold, I make all things new.
(Rev. 21.1-5)

Shakespeare presents in his dramas worlds of destruction and renewal. The Temple
is the place of the sacred, devoted to the holy, the isthmus of the finite and the
infinite. The Temple is where one encounters the holy and the drama of renewal.
The sense of the numinous described by Otto is most evident in the dread of Good
Friday, the scandal, awe and terror of divine suffering. The Temple curtain, the
reminder of sins, is torn. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews presents the
Temple as pointing to the great high priest Jesus, where the sacrifices and offerings
in the earthly Temple are types and images of the heavenly counterpart (cf. Heb.
8.5). At his baptism, the heavens open. At his crucifixion the curtain is rent asunder
and we can see God in him. Just as the transfiguration becomes the revelation of
Christ, where the disciples can contemplate Christ in his heavenly glory. In words
of the Prayerbook of the Church of England, at the point of the liturgical drama
of the sanctus:

Therefore with angels and archangels,

and with all the company of heaven,
we proclaim your great and glorious name,
for ever praising you and saying
Holy, Holy Holy.

Those approaching the altar – as it were – enter the heavens to encounter and participate
in the life of the great high priest.
Contemplation antecedes praxis. The awareness of the arbitrary destructive
potential of the human psyche and the redemptive possibilities of creative work and
love are aspects of the religious significance of the ethical. The etymology of the notion
of contemplation is linked to the word ‘Temple’. Contemplation might be thought of
as going into the Temple, perhaps inspired and uplifted by the drama of a fine liturgy,
voices and exquisite music. Music has a special role in opening the human heart and
sustaining the spirit to imagine the invisible. We encounter beauty, truth and goodness
that we perceive in the world enigmatically. But here in the Temple the veil of familiarity
is lifted. Faith is not, as the cultured despisers of Christianity have sneered throughout
the centuries, the believing of impossible propositions; it is fidelity to our own being
renewed and reborn in the power of transcendent divine Love.
226 The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism

Notes
1 Murray W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1927); Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination:
Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). There is a vast
literature. Cf. the useful collection of essays edited by Amy Kind, The Routledge
Handbook of the Philosophy of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 2016).
2 Roberto Calasso, Ardor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015), 336.
3 Amy Kind and Peter Kung (eds), Knowledge Through Imagination (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 2.
4 Robin G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 294–5.
5 Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit
und der damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Reutlingen: Enßlin 1834), 20–1.
Translation: F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human
Freedom. Translation by James Gutmann (LaSalle: Open Court, 1936), 20: ‘However,
divine imagination, which is the cause of the differentiation of the world’s beings,
is unlike human imagination and never gives to its creations a merely ideal reality.
The products of divine imagination must be independent beings, for wherein does
the limitation of our imagination consist than precisely in our seeing things as
dependent? God beholds all things in themselves. Only the Eternal exists in itself, as
Self-secured, Will, Freedom.’
6 Cf. ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, in The Weight of Glory, edited with an introduction by W.
Cooper (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 116–41, 140: ‘I believe in Christianity
as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see
everything else.’
7 Enchiridion Ethicum. The English Translation of 1690: An Account of Virtue, translated
by Edward Southwell (London, 1690), 40.
8 A Platonick Song of the Soul, ed. with an Introductory Study by Alexander Jacob
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998),
139.
9 Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West (London: HarperCollins), 46, 69.
10 ‘L’Allegro’, l. 134, in The English Poems of John Milton, introduction and notes by
Laurence Lerner (London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2004), 24–7, 27.
11 The key Renaissance text is Ficino’s De amore of 1484.
12 John Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary’, ll, 205, 214, in The
Major Works, edited by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 463.
13 Griffiths, Marriage of East and West (see n. 9), 103.
14 Morny Joy, ‘Images: Images and Imagination’, in The Encyclopaedia of Religion, edited
by Mircea Eliade, 16 vols (New York : Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1987),
vol. VII, 104–9.
15 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007), 322–51.
16 See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009).
17 Charles Hefling and Cyntia Shattuck (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common
Prayer: A World Wide Survey (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),
25.
18 Griffiths, Marriage of East and West (see n. 9), 65–6.
 
Imagination and Religion 227

19 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, translated by Stephen
Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Athlone Press, 1978).
20 Thomas Traherne, ‘Thoughts IV’, ll, 95–100. For the full poem, see Selected Poems and
Prose, edited by Alan Bradford (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 73.
21 John Stuart Mill, ‘An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, and of the
Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings’, in Collected Works 9,
edited by John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge
& Keegan Paul, 1979), 103.
22 Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannespassion I,1. Translation: ‘Show us, through Your
passion, / That You, the true Son of God, / Through all time, / Even in the greatest
humiliation, / Have become transfigured!’ (Text and translation: http:​//www​.bach​
-cant​atas.​com/T​exts/​BWV24​5-Eng​3.htm​ (last accessed on 10 July 2018)).
23 Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (South
Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), 72.
24 Plato, Republic, II, 360–1; cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 12.
25 C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 172.
26 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Lachrimae Antiquae Novae’, l, 4, in G. Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems
from 1952–2012, edited by Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, 2015),
124.
27 William Law, The Spirit of Prayer; Or the Soul Rising Out of the Vanity of Time into the
Riches of Eternity, 3rd edn (London: Innys ad Richardson, 1816), 5.
28 John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa, 24.
29 Augustine, Confessions, VII 10,16: intravi et vidi qualicumque oculo
animae meae supra eundem oculum animae meae, supramentem
meam, lucem incommutabilem . . . ita erat supra mentem meam.
30 Hefling and Shattuck, Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer (see n. 17), 140.
31 Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, l, 614, in The Major Works,
including Biographia Literaria, edited with an Introduction and Notes by H. J. Jackson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 48–68, 68.
32 Enn. V 8,4.
33 Cf. Henry More in his Enchiridion Ethicum/Account of Virtue (see n. 7), 6, 156–7.
228
 Index of names

Abraham 68, 197, 222 Buber, Martin 51

Aeschylus 14, 36, 217 Bulgakov, Mikhail 40
Alighieri, Dante 11, 213, 217 Burke, Edmund 34–5
Alston, William P. 58, 173–85 Burkert, Walter 34–5
Ammonius Saccas 9 Burnet, Gilbert 8
Anaximander 7 Byron, Lord 197
Anselm of Canterbury 64, 151
Aquinas, Thomas 9, 51, 145–6, 148, Caird, Edward 196
188–9, 191, 199–201, 204, 209 Caird, John 51
Aristotle 3, 6–7, 9, 30, 40, 48, 115, Calvin, John 39, 65
122–3, 126, 140, 184, 201, 205 Caterus, Johannes 96
Armstrong, Arthur H. 126, 208 Cecilia 44
Augustine 10, 22–3, 46, 48, 51, 64–6, Chalmers, David 18
68–70, 188–93, 199–201, 204–5, Charles I 94
208–9, 222, 227 Ciapola, R. T. 198, 208
Ayers, Michael 14 Clement of Alexandria 61, 75–6, 90,
221, 227
Bacon, Francis 214 Coakley, Sarah 74, 88–9
Balthasar, Hans Urs von 74–5, 88, 90, 91, Colebrooke, Henry Th. 206
146, 155, 160–1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3–4, 7–8, 11,
Barnes, Winston H. F. 176, 184 13, 15–18, 20–25, 27, 47–8, 55–60,
Barth, Karl 12, 51 62, 65–8, 70, 99, 127–42, 181, 183,
Baxter, Richard 8 185, 188–91, 193–5, 197, 199, 201,
Beaumont, Joseph 6–7 203–12, 214, 224, 227
Beethoven, Ludwig van 186 Coleridge, Sarah 140
Beierwaltes, Werner 55, 61, 67, 69, 124, Collingwood, Robin G. 57, 168, 172,
140–1, 199, 208 226
Berkeley, George 3–4, 14, 19–20, 56, Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 203, 205
141, 192, 195, 197, 209 Copernicus, Nicolaus 158
Berlin, Isaiah 217 Corbin, Henry 203, 215
Blackburn, Simon 22 Cornford, Francis M. 10, 16
Blondel, Maurice 145, 147–8, 160, 161 Craig, William L. 183
Bloom, Harold 16 Cranmer, Thomas 216
Boehme, Jacob 7, 118, 191 Creuzer, Georg, F. 25, 55, 59, 69, 203
Boethius 3, 48 Cudworth, Ralph 4–12, 9, 14–17, 22, 30,
Bonaventure 74, 88–9 37–8, 44, 47, 49, 57, 63, 65–7, 94–6,
Bradley, Arthur C. 57 100–1, 105–9, 111–26, 158, 188,
Bradley, Francis H. 10, 196 204, 209
Bramhall, John 22 Cupitt, Don 211
Bréhier, Emile 208 Cusa, Nicholas of 4, 48, 67, 117, 139,
Bruno, Giordano 117 156, 158, 160, 203
230 Index of Names

Darwin, Charles 13, 29, 165 Hauck, John 79–80, 91

Dawkins, Richard 36 Hebblethwaite, Brian 12, 57
Descartes, René 12, 31, 94–126, 148–9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 14,
Dietrich von Freiberg 51 38, 57, 138, 168, 188, 192–3, 205,
Dillon, John 74, 77, 84–5, 88–90 207, 220–1
Dionysius the Areopagite 102, 191–2, Heidegger, Martin 13, 55, 59, 147, 151,
205 168, 171, 216
Donne, John 209, 214, 226 Herder, Johann G. 196, 207
Dostoevsky, Fedor M. 12, 33 Hermes Trismegistus 158
Durkheim, Émile 206, 215 Hick, John 12
Hicks, George D. 176, 184
Eckhart, Meister 4, 24, 51, 63, 69, 118, Hobbes, Thomas 7–9, 13, 19–20, 22, 38,
160, 191, 193–4, 199–201, 205, 209 56, 95, 112, 117, 124, 223
Einstein, Albert 28, 60, 210 Hölderlin, Friedrich 138, 205
Eliade, Mircea 203, 215, 226 Honecker, Martin 146
Epicurus 7 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 207
Eriugena, John Scotus 4, 48, 61, 69, 188, Hume, David 3–4, 22, 32, 46, 52, 66, 68,
194, 204, 209 121, 223
Euripides 36 Hunt, John 8, 15
Ezekiel 26–7, 43
Iamblichus 188
Farrer, Austin 43, 51, 57, 64, 70 Ignatius of Loyola 148, 155, 158, 161–2
Fichte, Johann G. 140, 148, 205 Isaac 68
Ficino, Marsilio 4, 8, 188, 203, 204, 213, Isaiah 34, 75, 91
226
Findlay, John N. 10, 16 Jacobi, Friedrich H. 192
Flasch, Kurt 66 James, William 23, 58, 63, 173–4, 178,
Francis de Sales 178 183
Franklin, Benjamin 197 Jansenius, Cornelsen 65
Freud, Sigmund 13, 25, 211, 215 Jerome 91
Jesus Christ 75, 81, 83, 100, 109, 167–8,
Galilei, Galileo 8, 38 170, 218–21, 225
Gandhi, Mahatma 12 John Damascene 222
Gans, Eric 166, 172 John of Patmos 26–7, 43–8, 52, 65, 68,
Gaspers, Jan Baptist 7 99, 168, 200, 219
Gassendi, Pierre 95 John the Baptist 37
Gavrilyuk, Paul 74, 88–9 Jonas, Hans 31, 56, 61
Gibbon, Edward 3, 14 Jones, William 188, 195–8, 203, 206–7,
Girard, René 9, 34–5, 163–72, 217–18, 209
221, 227 Joyce, James 186
Goethe, Johann W. von 99, 194, 196–7 Jung, Carl G. 25, 59, 165
Green, Thomas Hill 5–6, 10, 196
Griffiths, Bede 201, 209, 213, 215, 217, Kant, Immanuel 7, 15, 19, 30–2, 35–7,
226 41, 43, 46, 56, 61–3, 121–2, 126,
141, 147–8, 192, 196, 205, 207,
Hacker, Paul 198, 208 221–2
Hallywell, Henry 6, 14, 124 Kekulé, August 28
Harari, Yuval N. 211–12 Kenney, John P. 205
Hastings, Warren 197, 206 Kierkegaard, Soren 12, 68
 
Index of Names 231

Kipling, Rudyard 202, 209 Occam, William of 170

Krämer, Hans J. 67 Origen 4, 9, 15, 22, 37, 41–2, 45–6, 49,
Krishna 171, 186, 195–6 57, 61, 64–6, 69, 73–94, 99, 118–19,
121–2, 124, 126, 171, 217, 221
Landino, Cristoforo 213 Otto, Rudolf 11, 24, 34, 55, 58–9, 106,
Law, William 222, 227 164, 178, 183, 188, 194, 197–8, 201,
Lehmann, Karl 147, 159–61 203, 205–6, 209, 214–15, 218, 222,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 3, 28, 41, 225
124 Parker, Samuel 6
Lessing, Gotthold E. 158, 192 Parmenides 26, 95, 197
Levitin, Dimitri 5–6, 8, 14, 119 Pascal, Blaise 12
Lewis, Clive S. 55, 212, 221, 227 Paul 22, 35, 52, 59, 75, 83, 100, 107, 167,
Lewis, Marilyn A. 14 216–18, 224
Locke, John 3–4, 14, 117, 126, 141 Philo the Jew 29, 87, 110, 199
Louth, Andrew 82, 92, 205 Pico della Mirandola 204
Luther, Martin 65, 149 Pieper, Joseph 216, 227
Pilate, Pontius 216
MacIntyre, Alasdair 214 Plantinga, Alvin 183
Mackinnon, Donald 15, 40, 64 Plato 3–4, 6–8, 10, 14–16, 31–2, 36, 54,
Mackintosh, James 7 60–1, 63, 73, 86–7, 91–3, 115, 122,
Maharshi, Ramana 209 142, 191, 195, 197, 204–5, 208, 213,
Maistre, Joseph de 34, 41–2, 46, 64–5, 220–1, 227
164, 217 Plotinus 4, 8–10, 18, 25, 30, 32, 37, 46,
Mandelstam, Ossip M. 211 49, 58–9, 62, 66–70, 73–4, 76, 83–8,
Maréchal, Joseph 148 91–3, 99–100, 102, 121, 131, 188,
Marx, Karl 13, 206, 215 191–3, 198, 200, 204–5, 208, 212,
Maurice, Frederick D. 8, 15 221, 224
Mauss, Marcel 206 Plutarch 99
Mayer, John R. 198 Porphyry 188
McGinn, Colin 17–18, 209 Prichard, Harold A. 176, 184
McInroy, Mark J. 74, 77, 88–90 Priestley, Joseph 197
Mendeléev, Dmitri 28 Proclus 4, 188, 191–2
Metz, Johann B. 148, 160 Pröpper, Thomas 161
Mill, James 207 Proust, Marcel 23, 58
Mill, John Stuart 219, 227 Ps.-Longinus 35
Milton, John 213, 226–7 Pythagoras 44, 100, 122
Montaigne, Michel de 213
More, Henry 5–9, 12, 14–15, 17, 22, 38, Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 195–6
43, 49–50, 55, 57, 65, 68, 95, 98, Rahner, Karl 145–62
100–5, 107–10, 112, 114–18, 120–6, Ramanuja 206
204, 212–14, 224, 227 Raphael 44, 65
Moses 59, 110, 126, 188, 199 Reid, Thomas 3
Muirhead, John H. 5, 14, 207 Reinhold, Karl L. 158
Murdoch, Iris 15 Rist, John 208
Rust, George 6, 46, 66, 98, 107, 111,
Newton, Isaac 3, 11, 210 124–5
Nietzsche, Friedrich 13–14, 55, 59, 168,
171 Sankara 186, 195, 198, 201, 206
Norris, John 100, 122, 125 Sartre, Jean-Paul 55, 61
232 Index of Names

Saux, Henri Le 209 Taylor, Alfred E. 10, 15–16

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 7, 25, Taylor, Charles 215, 226
52, 59, 70, 128, 133, 137–41, 183, 185, Teape, William M. 187, 203
192–3, 196–7, 205, 207, 209, 212, 226 Thorndike, Herbert 6
Schiller, Friedrich 11, 37 Tillich, Paul 38, 63, 176–7, 184
Schlegel, Friedrich 197, 207 Tolkien, John R. R. 55
Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. 178, 194 Traherne, Thomas 39, 63, 218, 227
Schopenhauer, Arthur 36, 62, 197, 206 Tulloch, John 119
Schwab, Raymond 207 Turner, Denys 58, 183
Scruton, Roger 61
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 3 Upadhyay, Brahmabandhab 195
Earl of 3, 139
Shakespeare, William 20, 22, 31–2, 37, Vaughan, Thomas 122
45, 50, 52, 57, 63, 66, 69–70, 93, Verweyen, Hansjürgen 161
210–27 Vico, Giambattista 25, 52
Shelley, Percy B. 138, 197 Victorinus, Marius 189, 200
Sidney, Philip 213 Virgil 217
Simeon the New Theologian 74 Vivekananda, Swami 195
Smith, John 7–9, 15, 17, 22, 57, 73,
98–100, 108, 120–1, 125 Warburton, William 158
Socrates 7, 10, 30, 62, 168, 193 Waugh, Evelyn 218
Solomon 79 Weber, Max 214
Spenser, Edmund 213 Weil, Simone 164
Spinoza, Baruch de 7, 9, 13, 15, 38, 40, Westcott, Brooke F. 187, 203
46–9, 51–2, 64, 67–8, 70, 133, 157, White, Robert 7
192–3, 223 Wilkins, Charles 197
Staal, J. F. 198, 208 William of Auxerre 74, 89
Stalin, Joseph 211 Williams, James 168, 172
Stenzel, Julius 10 Williams, Rowan 15
Stewart, Dugald 7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 58
Strato of Lampsacus 7 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 183
Swinburne, Richard 164, 183 Wordsworth, William 17, 21, 138, 142,
189, 204, 212, 226
Taliaferro, Charles 14, 64, 118–20, 183
Tauler, Johannes 155 Xenophanes 14
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