Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus by Gregory Shaw

Author:Gregory Shaw [Shaw, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621380726
Amazon: 1621380637
Publisher: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis
Published: 2014-09-11T22:00:00+00:00

III

The Liturgy

of the

Cosmos

145

Theurgy and the Soul

146

12

Cult and

Cosmos God is the leader of these things…

amblichus believed that theurgy was entirely compatible with

Plato’s teachings on the soul and that it provided a practical

Isolution to the problem of embodiment. Yet Iamblichus’s apol-

ogy for theurgy did more than address the philosophical problem of

the soul’s embodiment; more generally, it provided a defense of reli-

gious ritual against well-known arguments brought forward by Por-

phyry in his letter to Anebo and his treatise On the Abstinence of

Animal Food. Far from being a mere propaideia to philosophy, Iamblichus argued that the concrete performance of ritual was the cul-

mination of one’s philosophical development. Theurgy tied soter-

iology to cosmogony and allowed the soul to share in both.

Up to this point Iamblichus’s Platonism has been considered

with respect to his metaphysical positions. In Part I, matter and

embodiment were examined and absolved of the pejorative conno-

tations given to them by Iamblichus’s predecessors. In Part II, the

embodied soul was examined, the most problematic aspect of Iam-

blichus’s metaphysics. Yet Iamblichus’s paradoxical definition of the

soul as “self-change” is crucial for a proper understanding of Pla-

tonic theurgy. The anatropic condition of the embodied soul was

tied to the mysteries of creation and salvation. Far from being

denied, the inversion of the soul was seen by Iamblichus to be nec-

essary to complete the cosmogonic cycle, and embodied experience,

progressively incorporated by theurgic activity, put the soul in place

despite the prima facie fact of its being out of place, i.e., anatrope.

Iamblichus’s metaphysical solutions to the problems of matter

and the embodiment of the soul form an essential background to

147

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.