Abstract A hexameter text of ‘Dionysiac’ subject, recently discovered in a late-antique palimpsest in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai, and arguably the first fragment of direct transmission of the famous Orphic Rhapsodies, offers a very remarkable story. Aphrodite raises a divine child on Mt Nysa; the child disappears during an absence of the goddess, who looks for him through the whole universe. She eventually finds him in the Underworld, where he is in the charge of Persephone, who relates an oracle about him and his offspring. Aphrodite and the child remain in the Underworld until he grows to puberty, and they beget Hermes Chthonios. Many features of this tale find parallels in various versions of the story of Adonis. The child of the new poem, though, is identified as Dionysus. In this article, making use also of previously neglected Neoplatonic sources, I show that the identification between Dionysus and Adonis was an important feature of the last chronological stage of the Theogony narrated in the Orphic Rhapsodies, where Adonis was one of the ‘images’ of Dionysus, which played a key part in the creation of the mortal world.

The author of the Summa Halensis claims that the human body is maximally composite and argues for this using a proof strategy that intends to deduce the body’s composition from the human soul’s immateriality. This study examines that claim and argument, which is given both in a shorter and a longer form. The core of the article consists in a careful reconstruction of both forms, along with an enquiry into its Jewish Neoplatonic sources (first and foremost the Fons vitae) and its appearance in zoological commentaries contemporary to the Summa written by Peter of Spain and Albert the Great. It emerges that the argument brings into play various features of the Summist’s hylomorphic theory, especially a pluralism about substantial forms.

Abstract In this study I examine key conceptual parallels between J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary imagination and a Neoplatonic mythopoetic. Specifically, I discuss how Tolkien’s Silmarillion deploys a transcendental conception of Beauty that, I argue, suggests similarities with the notion of Beauty discussed by Plotinus in his Enneads. Following the scholarship of Lisa Coutras (2016) and Michael John Halsall (2020), this study analyzes key sections from Tolkien’s work to demonstrate a Neoplatonic influence. This influence, I argue, is best understood via an incarnational logic that understands musical harmony and tonal beauty to be signs that signal an ultimate transcendent source in Tolkien’s legendarium. Falling short of arguing for a direct influence of the Neoplatonic tradition on Tolkien, this study seeks to demonstrate only a plausible link between Neoplatonic sources and Tolkien’s work.

This research delves into the influence of St. Augustine on the construction of the Gothic cathedral of Tortosa. The canonical cathedral of Tortosa underwent re-establishment in 1155, which was carried out by Bishop Godfrey who was the abbot of Saint Rufus of Avignon and was governed by Beati Augustini rule. The presence of St. Augustine in the Capitular archives with De Civitate Dei (ACTo-20) from the XII century is examined. This, coupled with a spatial analysis of the liturgical space using laser scanning (TLS), serves to validate the historiographical thesis put forth by Wilhelm Worringer, Erwin Panofsky, and Otto von Simson for understanding the construction of the apse of the Gothic cathedral (1346–1441). This methodology establishes a bijection between patristic and Neoplatonic sources and the interpretation of the liturgical space’s dimensions using statistical systems. This approach addresses the construction of the apse through the incorporation of a heptagon, a geometric figure that is absent in Euclid’s Elementa and Ptolemy’s Almagest. In conclusion, it is determined that both the imagery and metrics employed in the design of a radial heptagonal apse, as well as its cross-section, are influenced by both St. Augustine and the metrics of the Neoplatonics, which remain present in the Chapter Archives.

Abstract This article seeks to compare two of the most significant mystical corpora of Judaism and Islam, Zoharic literature and the oeuvre of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240) respectively. Following a few pioneering studies on relations between Jewish and Islamic mysticism in the medieval Iberian Peninsula from recent years, this article intends to contribute further to the understanding of such relations. It compares one motif or concept shared by both corpora, that of the spiritual garment, according to which the different realms of creation are divine “garments” that cover the Godhead or veil the primordial divine light. It suggests that the similarities between Zoharic literature and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings can be explained by their shared roots, which can be traced to the tradition of Arabic Neoplatonism. Some possible Neoplatonic sources for the similarity between the two corpora are also discussed.

This essay explores circular compositions in medieval and early modern art. Delving into the intersection of religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas, the text examines the prevalence of circular depictions in medieval and early modern aesthetics. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the author draws from primary Hermetic and Neoplatonic sources, providing four reasons for this preference. Firstly, this essay explores the scientific understanding of the shape of the universe, planets, and stars. The second reason delves into the psychological, symbolic, and geometric aspects associated with circular compositions, connecting them to Christian cosmological diagrams and symbolism in the visual arts. Furthermore, the essay investigates the conceptualisation of the universe as a mirror reflecting the divine, emphasising the role of beauty in religious art. The essay concludes by examining the visual culture of medieval and early modern periods, tracing the evolution of circular representations from Roman coins and shields to illuminated manuscripts and paintings. The article sheds light on a hitherto underexplored aspect of medieval and early modern cultures, despite its significance in shaping symbolism and organizing iconographic programs within these periods.

In the beginning of book XIII of the Confessions, Augustine interprets the first verses of the Genesis as an entanglement of narratives on the creation of the world, on the emergence of consciousness, and on the history of conversion. To this end, he resorts to Neoplatonic sources as well as to a Christian tradition almost consolidated at that time. One of his sources could have been Mario Victorinus’ Trinity Treatises.

ABSTRACT This article examines the definitions of place or location (topos) and as a consequence, space, in Byzantine philosophy, from Maximos the Confessor to Photios. These philosophers draw, on one hand, on the Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic sources, and on the other hand, on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Firstly, Maximos the Confessor sets out a novel definition in which place is conceptually inseparable from time, is needed for substances to exist, and in which place is the boundary between the created and uncreated. In Anastasios of Sinai’s writing, God is the archetypical place for all things and is likewise necessary for substances. John of Damascus, in contrast, extends Aristotle’s definition of place in the Physics in new directions, by investigating the place of angels, which is determined by their incorporeal limits. Finally, Photios produces a systematic and astute account of how the properties of the containing and contained bodies come together to make places. The article concludes with an evaluation of these theories, and briefly considers their relationship to theories of place and location in modern physics.

The paper presents evidence that Roger Bacon was endeavoring to structure what he considered as a “new metaphysics”. Moreover, it identifies the Opus maius as Bacon’s new preliminary text in metaphysics and morals. The evidence is found in the Communia naturalium and in the Communia mathematica, in which one finds a reference to the Opus maius as a sketch for a new metaphysics. From part seven of the latter work, namely, the Moralis philosophia, one can see that Bacon views the latter work as closely connected to his new metaphysics. In fact, the material in the Communia mathematica connects his studies on languages to the communication of his moral vision. I present a review of the sources for the different parts of the Opus maius. This is followed by an account of Bacon’s philosophical sources. It becomes clear that Bacon was acquainted with Plato’s Meno, Phaedo and part of the Timaeus with Calcidius’s Commentary. The variety and significance of his Neo-Platonic sources are outlined. It turns out that Bacon was not an Avicennian substance-dualist. Moreover, the paper demonstrates the extent to which Bacon’s criticism of Averroes was based on his natural philosophy. Bacon presents an account of human intellectual knowledge which is clearly based on and refers to his account of human perceptual knowledge in his Perspectiva. He uses his account of an integrated perceptual and intellectual human individual being to question the Latin Averroist’s claim that there is one possible intellect for all human beings.

This paper examines the use made by Michael Psellos and John Italos of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics together with Neoplatonic sources (in particular Porphyry’s Sentences) on the subject of virtue. Examining chapters 66-81 of Psellos’ De omnifaria doctrina and Essays 81 and 63 of Italos’ Problems and Solutions, I argue that both philosophers have a coherent theory of virtue which integrates Aristotelian ethical virtue in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of the virtues.

This contribution examines two related points in relation to Aquinas’s understanding of contemplation, which is a sorely neglected topic in scholarship. First, after having outlined that the final act of contemplation culminates in an intellective, simple apprehension of the truth, I will examine how this act relates to the three operations of the intellect (grasping of quiddity, judgement, and reasoning) Aquinas identifies in a number of places. Second, I argue that his view of contemplation as simple insight is significantly indebted to Neoplatonic sources; therefore, we must pay attention to the way he introduces Neoplatonic elements into his Aristotelian framework. I conclude this contribution by suggesting some reasons—of a theological nature—why Aquinas would have been drawn towards a non-discursive or “intuitive” notion of contemplation.

We will analyze the influence of hermetic philosophy in New Spain secular Ana de Zayas’ religious heterodoxy. The neoplatonic sources from she fed her thought pervaded the documents she addressed to some priest in seventeenth-century Puebla de los Angeles. Such texts caused that in 1694 she was charged of alumbradismo. Her trial occurred within a milieu in which hermeticism was cultivate for some intellectuals such as Carlos de Siguenza and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Behind her literary style, Ana de Zayas is a good example of how those philosophical currents had a direct effect in the heterodox ways to conceive and life the religion.

Benedictus Pererius as a 16th-century Jesuit integrated Platonic and Neo-Platonic sources in his philosophical and theological works as long as they were compatible with Catholic theology. His commentary on Genesis and his theological disputations on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans gave occasions to calibrate philosophy against theology. Pererius judges that pagan thinkers may be laudable for acknowledging the existence of God but cautions Christian readers as to the orthodoxy of such findings. Against the Protestant literalist interpretation of the Bible at the expense of philosophical theory of nature Pererius dealt with the questions of immortality and of the pagan notions of divinity and examined the role of philosophical heroes like Socrates and Hermes. Thus he welcomed philosophy as a potential source of religious thinking.

The heptagonal shape and its geometric layout have been the subject of a great deal of speculation. Because some apses in Gothic cathedrals are heptagonal, there must be a methodology implicit in the layout of the geometric shape. Two particularly important sources help us arrive at an understanding: the exceptional of the capitular archive of the Cathedral of Tortosa, which contains the main neo-Platonic sources among its codices dating from thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the parchment known as la traca de Guarc (c.1345-1380), which shows the layout of the non-constructed cathedral. These sources show a heptagonal apse with an arithmetical and geometric dimension, based on a metrological and tonal musical proportion of 9/8, which is perfectly compatible with the bases of the quadrivium. The lateral and radial chapel, as the basic unit and feature element in fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral design, can be used as a pattern, and its measurement established as the basic unit for the overall proportions of the cathedral.

The principate of Augustus coincided with a surge of interest in the short Aristotelian treatise which we now entitleCategories, contributing to its later installation at the outset of the philosophical curriculum and its traditional function as an introduction to logic. Thanks in part to remarks made by Plutarch (Sulla26.1–2) and Porphyry (Vita Plotini24.7), the origin of this interest has often been traced to Andronicus of Rhodes: his catalogue (πίνακɛς) and publication of the Aristotelian corpus began with theCategoriesand may have drawn fresh attention to a previously obscure treatise. But the later Neoplatonic sources name several other philosophers who also discussed theCategoriesand played an important role in crafting its interpretation during the first centuries of our era. For example, the Neoplatonist Simplicius discusses the views of Stoics and Platonists who questioned theCategories' value as a treatment of grammar or ontology, while others defended its usefulness as an introduction to logic. These early debates, as these later sources suggest, exercised a lasting influence on the shape of subsequent philosophy and philosophical education within and beyond the Aristotelian tradition.

Reviewed by: Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes Pablo Fabián Baler Laguna, Ana María G. Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2009. Pp. 175. ISBN 978-0-8387-5727-7. The complex relationship between visual arts and literature in the time (and works) of Cervantes is a topos of Cervantine criticism. Some critics have studied the interaction between specific paintings and literary passages, others were interested in underlying issues of representation, yet others have focused on the aesthetic debates surrounding the expressive scope of painting in relation to writing. Ana María Laguna contends that her book, Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination, "differentiates itself from these preceding efforts by exploring Cervantes's pictorial imagination within the context in which it was forged. [Exploring] the author's relationship to his surrounding visual culture" (14). Thus, the main thrust of this book is to supersede the pervasive scholarly approach to Cervantes as an exclusive result of High Italian Renaissance, exploring the ways in which his writing connects to the singular world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain as influenced by both Flemish and Italian art. To be sure, Laguna explores this unique combination of Flemish "realist" and Italian "idealist" influences that constituted the artistic horizon of Cervantes, in the hopes of articulating a more nuanced understanding of three aesthetic and iconographic anxieties of the period: the construction of Dulcinea's beauty in connection with Cinquecento aesthetics, the dismantling of the Neoplatonic pairing of virtue with beauty as found in El coloquio de los perros, and the overlapping of history with fiction in Don Quijote as a parody of the artistic and historical ambitions of the Habsburgs. The extent to which Laguna's investigation is, in fact, a fundamental departure from over three centuries of multitudinous scholarship could be a point worth arguing. What is more interesting, however, is to assess whether Laguna manages to formulate meaningful questions as a result of this interdisciplinary approach that brings together aesthetic, historical, and literary investigations. As it relates to the first "anxiety," Laguna explores the dyad Dulcinea/Aldonza in the context of the aesthetic debates of the sixteenth century surrounding the concept and "practice" [End Page 763] of beauty. Although the conflict between conventions and reality may very well be one of the backgrounds against which Dulcinea and Aldonza play their complicated metaphorical roles, I think the paradox relates to a broader issue of baroque aesthetics that is not quite developed in this book: the most consistent and far-reaching deconstruction operated by the novel in its double thrust to dismantle any illusions of transparency in language and to construct a grammar of the ineffable. Laguna makes a similar point in regards to the second "anxiety," the "deconstruction" of the Neoplatonic episteme. Even though Cervantes's approach to "beauty" has been traditionally linked to the idealized archetypes of Italian, Neoplatonic sources, Laguna reads El coloquio and El casamiento engañoso from a perspective that reveals the grotesque undercurrent connected to Northern aesthetics and its "distrust of the outward idealization of beauty" (68). In contrast to these previous studies on the power of images, the last chapter of the book (chapter 4) is clearly a study on images of power, since Laguna reads Don Quijote not only as a parody of a genre but also of the very representational apparatus of the Spanish empire. Here, Laguna tries to decipher a comparison, allegedly coded in Cervantes's novel, between the self-glorifying Emperor Carlos V and the pseudo knight Don Quixote. This comparison, however, although deftly articulated, can be seen more as an accumulation of poetic licenses and coincidental echoes than a scientific record of historical or literary lineage. Yet, if we suspend academic disbelief, Cervantes's novel does emerge through these associations, as "a multifaceted critique of imperial ideals and representational paradigms that 'telescope together nearly 150 years of Spanish history'" (102). Indeed, the interdisciplinary perspective of this book offers, in the final analysis, a wider and deeper perspective on two fundamental works...

Transposing World HarmonyDonne's Creation Poetics in the Context of a Medieval Tradition Sarah Powrie Cosmology and poetry share a long history of mutual association. Each celebrates the mystery of the creative process, whether this be natural generation or artistic creation, and each summons the power of myth to probe and conceal the mystery behind the mythographic veil. In his Glosses on Timaeus, the twelfth-century commentator William of Conches explains how the order of nature's operations is secretly signified in the mythical god Pan. The name "Pan" signifies "all" as William notes, and just as the etymology of the god's name reveals that he signifies "all things" in the universe, so too the imaginary tableau of Pan making music on his pipes represents the perfect proportions ordering the heavenly spheres. William interprets Pan's desire for the nymph Syringa as representing nature's desire for concord and harmony among the elements. Pan/Nature desires Syringa/Concord in part for her beauty and in part for the fecundity that her beauty promises. Pan's pipes celebrate the tempered harmony that sustains and perpetuates life within the universe. Without concord, William notes, disorder and discord among the elements would arise, and the world would certainly dissolve.1 William's glosses reveal how closely aesthetics and cosmology can inform each other. His perfectly proportioned world system both reflects the medieval preference for order and proportion and demonstrates the period's appropriation of Neoplatonic natural theory. The cosmological system described in the Neoplatonic sources of the late ancient [End Page 212] period presented a carefully crafted cosmos with humanity featuring as an integral part of that system. The medieval period learned of this cosmology from Calcidius's translation of and commentary on Plato's Timaeus, which introduced the micro-macrocosm analogy and articulated the structural affinities linking the human figure and the world. Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram baptized the mathematical architecture of the Neoplatonic cosmos by reaffirming that "God made everything in measure, number and weight" within the six days of biblical creation.2 In his De Institutione Musica, Boethius described the world order in musical terms. The orderly motions of the planetary rotations, of seasonal changes, and of the four elements together expressed a common musica mundana. A similar harmony united the soul and body in the microcosm. Like the Timaeus, Boethius's tract illustrates a symmetry between human and cosmos that reaffirms a purposefully crafted, coherent world system. The impact of the Copernican hypothesis on these mythologies of nature has been of perennial interest to early modern scholars. The rupturing of the Ptolemaic cosmology and the religious turmoil of the Reformation both signaled that the medieval universe, with an astral system centered upon the earth and a religious society centered upon Rome, was already becoming a historical artifact. The Copernican thesis threatened the Timaean universe of structural affinities. If the world system is heliocentric, as Copernicus claimed, then humanity is peripheral, perhaps even irrelevant, to the larger universe. If the world system is made of undifferentiated infinite space, then divine immanence is extracted from creation and jettisoned into outer space, leaving a vacuum of infinite regress. Yet, even while the new science called all into doubt, early modern thinkers continued to speculate about hidden harmonies and symbolic patterns within the architecture of the universe. Johannes Kepler never waned in his admiration of the Timaeus, and when his own observations of the heavens contradicted the Pythagorean proportions, he simply redesigned the harmonies to accord with those observations.3 Sharing Kepler's interest in Neoplatonic cosmology, Robert [End Page 213] Fludd devised a complex network of correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm in a four-volume encyclopedia, Utriusque cosmi historia.4 Using diagrams of the human figure and the Ptolemaic universe, he mapped parallels between the soul's powers and the celestial spheres. Thus, the Neoplatonic cosmos and its celestial harmonies were not silenced by the new science but rather transposed to accord with early modern fascinations. The scholarship investigating the early modern response to Neoplatonic cosmology has stressed either its continuity with late ancient and medieval sources or its singularity in rejecting and demythologizing this tradition.5 In...

The work of Jabès calls to be read in a tradition of apophatic discourse that reaches back to Neoplatonic sources on the ineffable One, as well as to the tradition of reflection on the Name of God as the Ineffable par excellence that one finds in the Kabbalah. Such modes of thinking and writing prove to be key to the significance of Jabès's project as a whole. His oeuvre is exemplary of new forms that this type of discourse can assume in its revival underway today. Jabès contemplates ineffability in language in the first instance in the Name of God. But all language is engendered by the divine Name, and consequently language in general proves in Jabès's work to be inhabited by a silent instance that it cannot name or say. The Name of God thereby emerges as the vanity of language in the heart of every word.

Abstract Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae, which rely on Stoic and Neoplatonic sources, constituted an important, although quite neglected, link in the chain of transmission of ancient philosophy in the Middle Ages. There is, in particular, a passage where Priscian discusses the vexed claim that common names can be proper names of the universal species and where he talks about the ideas existing in the divine mind. At the beginning of the 12th century, the anonymous Glosulae super Priscianum and the Notae Dunelmenses, which heavily quote William of Champeaux (as master G.), interpret the passage in the context of a growing interest in the problem of universals, raising semantic as well as ontological questions, and introducing a Platonic view on universals in the discussions on the signification of the noun. Moreover, this same passage will be used by Abelard to elaborate one of his opinions about the signification of universal or common names—that they signify "mental conceptions".

Abstract The notion of 'symbol' in Eriugena's writing is far from clear. It has an ambiguous semantic connection with other terms such as 'signification', 'figure', 'allegory', 'veil', 'agalma', 'form', 'shadow', 'mystery' and so on. This paper aims to explore into the origins of such a semantic ambiguity, already present in the texts of the pseudo-Dionysian corpus which Eriugena translated and commented upon. In the probable Neoplatonic sources of this corpus, the Greek term symbolon shares some aspects of its meaning with other words inherited from the ancient tradition, such as synthēma , eikōn , homoiotēs. Some of them, such as eikōn and homoiotēs, belong to the field of images and are associated with linguistic semantics in the Neoplatonic commentaries not only to Plato but also to Aristotle's logical works. Among the late ancient Neoplatonists, particular attention is paid to Proclus and to his use of the term agalma. In fact, the textual history of this word seems to be a privileged perspective from which to reconstruct the Neoplatonic semantic blending of symbol and image, as well as the main role played by linguistic issues in this conflation.