"Neoplatonic Voyaging" by Jonathan Egid (Keywords: Cross-cultural philosophy; Intellectual history; Syncretism; Cosmopolitanism; Non-western philosophy)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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There are ideas and then there are Ideas. For Plato, Ideas or Forms are something rarified and ethereal: non-physical, absolute, and immutable. Residing ‘up there’, somewhere, outside of space and outside of time in the Realm of Ideas that was the only true reality, they bestowed a shadowy secondary reality upon the tangible things of this world. When we speak of the history or even the marketplace of ‘ideas’ today, we don’t quite mean what Plato did by Ideas, but we do nevertheless tend to hold onto the notion that ideas are something immaterial: the idea of liberty is something above and beyond its invocations in books and speeches, the idea of socialism cannot be reduced to its historical instantiations.

This can make it difficult to understand the movement of ideas through the world in the same way that we might understand the global trade in consumer goods like tea, or spices, or silk. Being ethereal, ideas are not easy to buy or sell. Neither are they consumed: an idea that is ‘used’ in the work of one philosopher is not thereby ‘used up’ – it remains for another philosopher to use this idea, and if an idea is used enough, it is not exhausted but rather transformed.

This essay traces one such transformation: the journeying of Neoplatonism between Africa, Asia, and Europe. It aims to show one example of how ideas are subject to change in transit, how in the process of their transportation they are themselves transformed. In doing so, I hope to make a case of the significance of travel to philosophy. At its best, the journeying of philosophical ideas renews their vitality by transgressing linguistic, religious or intellectual-historical boundaries.

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Neoplatonism, sometimes known as ‘late Platonism’, is characterised by its focus on the primacy of nous – often translated as ‘thought’ or ‘intellect’ – over the physical world, and the idea that all of reality in its inexhaustible diversity must somehow proceed from this single, immaterial principle. Everything in the world is to be understood and explained in terms of this indivisible and divine cause, which Neoplatonists refer to variously as ‘the First’, ‘the One’, or ‘the Good’. The One stands atop a ‘hierarchy of being’ in which the less real, more tangible things of this world sit lower than the abstract principles from which they ultimately derive. But how? The fundamental problem faced by Neoplatonist philosophers was to explain how the diversity and multiplicity that characterises our experience of reality arises from a singular principle: how does a divine mind produce an imperfect physical world? How does the one produce the many?

According to the Enneads of Plotinus, the greatest classical Neoplatonist, it is by a process of ‘emanation’. Emanation has been described as ‘the process of spillage from the One’, of how the multiplicity of reality ‘pours out’ of the One without ever diminishing or even changing its timeless nature. For Plotinus, there are three hypostases (or layers) of emanation: first is nous, the realm of ideas; second the soul, which is divided into the ‘world soul’ that bridges the sensible and the supersensible worlds, and the ‘individual soul’ that animates each of our bodies; third the material world, the ‘lowest’ aspect of reality that Plotinus sees as the antithesis of the true reality of the One.

At its best, the journeying of philosophical ideas renews their vitality by transgressing linguistic, religious or intellectual-historical boundaries.

In the Enneads – known to much of posterity through the misnomer of Theology of Aristotle – and in the works of his student Porphyry, this account of the ‘descent’ of reality through emanation by the One, through nous, to the soul, all the way down to the world of the senses is developed into an incredibly rich and intricate philosophical system, full of explanatory power and exceedingly rich in imagery and metaphor. In insisting on the fundamentality of the intellect, and deriving material reality from it, Neoplatonism is a kind of idealism. It is a form of philosophy often described as ‘mystical’ or ‘religious’, and, as we will see on the coming journey, it is difficult to disentangle the religious from the mystical from the philosophical. They are such close travelling companions.

Although, as the name suggests, Neoplatonism’s core ideas reach back further into Greek philosophy and religion, to Plato and beyond, the system itself as we understand it today traces its origins to the writings of Plotinus and his student Porphyry in third century AD Alexandria. Neoplatonism itself can be understood as something of a grand synthesis of all Greek philosophy up until that point – combining elements of Plato, Aristotle, and the pre-Socratics, as well as elements of Hellenic culture that had often been seen as marginal to the philosophical enterprise, such as religion and poetry. As Christian Wildberg has put it, Neoplatonists “absorbed, appropriated, and creatively harmonized almost the entire Hellenic tradition of philosophy, religion, and even literature”.

The Alexandria of Plotinus and Porphyry was one of the great cities of the world and one of the most fertile intellectual environments of all time, in large part owing to its position between the Hellenic and Abrahamic worlds. In the first century AD, Philo of Alexandria effectively created Jewish philosophy, including a remarkable work which synthesised Jewish religion and Greek philosophy by means of an allegorical reinterpretation of the Book of Genesis. As he writes in his Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis 2:

The story of the creation of Eve, we are told, is not meant to be taken literally. It is a “Myth,” showing forth the origin of Sense-perception, which becomes active when Mind is asleep (Gen. ii. 21). The bringing of Woman to Man is the introduction of Sense-perception to Mind, which hails it as its own.

This creative synthesis of Abrahamic faith and Greek philosophy was to provide a blueprint to a millennium of philosophers from late antique Ethiopia to mediaeval Persia and Renaissance Florence.

The fundamental problem faced by Neoplatonist philosophers was to explain how the diversity and multiplicity that characterises our experience of reality arises from a singular principle

By the time Plotinus and his student Porphyry were active in Alexandria, it was not Judaism but Christianity that offered the major challenge to the traditional Hellenic worldview. Porphyry, who may have been born a Christian, was an indefatigable opponent of the young religion, writing a work entitled Against the Christians and promoting traditional polytheistic worship. Nevertheless, there was a great irony in store for both sides. Over the coming centuries, Christianity was to become ‘Neoplatonised’, and Neoplatonism was to spread to a significant extent by means of Christian expansion. Early church fathers across the Mediterranean were educated in an intellectual world shaped by Neoplatonism: Augustine of Hippo was deeply immersed in the study of Plotinus and Porphyry as a young man, and Origen may even have been taught by the same teacher as Plotinus in Alexandria. Indeed, the very language in which Christian theologians couched their discussions of transubstantiation, the nature of the Trinity, and the question of the divinity of Christ, drew heavily on the conceptual vocabulary of Neoplatonism.

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Alexandria lies at one of the many mouths of the Nile, where the longest river in the world empties into the Mediterranean Sea. The question of its source was a great mystery to ancient writers, and generations of European adventurers through the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries ventured to find it. It is impossible to traverse the Nile, owing to the great cataracts that prevent a prospective traveller from ascending from the desert-fringed lowlands of the Nile valley in Egypt and Sudan up into steep, lush canyons of the Ethiopian highlands, where the Blue Nile finds its source in a marsh close to Lake Tana.

Neoplatonic ideas arrived here with Christianity. The missionaries traditionally known as the ‘Nine Saints’ fled persecution in the Levant, enduring the long, suffocatingly hot journey south along the Red Sea coast, arriving in the coastal cities of the Aksumite empire that spanned modern day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. The empire converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD, while debates between Christians and Neoplatonists were still ongoing in Alexandria. Neoplatonic terminology infiltrated Gə’əz, the language of the Aksumites and the language of Ethiopian Christianity to this day, initially through the translation of Christian scripture. Greek-speaking Christians had long found it useful to use the Neoplatonic term hypostasis – often translated in philosophical contexts as ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ – to mean ‘person’ (as in the three persons of the Trinity), and this term was translated into Gə’əz as bähri lit. ‘pearl’, suggesting the ‘essence’, ‘nature’ or ‘character’ of a thing that underlies change. This notion was of crucial importance to Ethiopian and Egyptian ‘monophysite’ Christians who profess (against Eastern Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant churches) that the Human and Divine physis (‘natures’) of Christ are married into one hypostasis “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (The Chalcedonian Creed).

In the centuries after conversion to Christianity, Aksumite armies would burst across the Red Sea into South Arabia, conquering large parts of Yemen. But it was a journey in the opposite direction, from the city of Medina to Aksum that would have important consequences for the global journey of Neoplatonism.

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In the early seventh century, the followers of Mohamed sought refuge with the Nejashi (an Arabic interpretation of the Gə’əz negus), the Aksumite emperor, who offered them shelter and refused to hand them over to the Quraysh tribe that pursued them. Having survived as guests of the Nejashi, the followers of Mohamed embarked on one of the most daring and impressive campaigns of conquest in human history, expanding the Islamic realms from Arabia to Morocco and Al-Andalus in the West to Khorasan in the East. In only one hundred years, Arabic had gone from a language written very rarely, to express the poetry of a nomadic people, to one of the great cultured and literary languages of the world. From the eight century, Abbasid elites engaged in a massive project of translating scientific and philosophical materials, a project which was so successful that by the tenth century an educated resident of Baghdad could read almost all surviving works of Aristotle in Arabic. 

In only one hundred years, Arabic had gone from a language written very rarely, to express the poetry of a nomadic people, to one of the great cultured and literary languages of the world.

Greek texts flooded into Arabic, bringing with them a huge host of words (one example would be hāyūlā from Greek hyle, which remains a term for ‘matter’, as well as the term falsafa itself from philosophia). Many philosopher-translators would transcribe or calque significant technical terms, sometimes providing an Arabic near-equivalent to make the meaning clear. And perhaps the most abidingly important influence on the contours not only of Arabic-language philosophy, but Islamic theology in general, was Neoplatonism.

Almost all the major figures of philosophy in the Islamic world wrestled with Neoplatonism in some way or other. Al-Kindi, often seen as the father of Islamic philosophy was perhaps the first to seriously engage Neoplatonism as part of his great scheme of harmonising Greek science with Islam. But it is in the system of Ibn Sina, the greatest of all Islamic philosophers, indeed the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, that this process achieves its fullest articulation. Ibn Sina adapted the Neoplatonic theory of emanation by making a distinction between God and the Creation, so as to avoid the tendency of Neoplatonists towards pantheism – the idea that God and nature are one and the same. His picture of emanation is also far more complex: unlike Plotinus, he has not one intellect or nous but ten. The First Intellect, the al-‘aql al-awwal, is like God/The One, immaterial and undivided, but unlike God is contingent, existing only because God brought it into being. From this first intellect is derived a second intellect, down to the tenth, each of which is associated with a heavenly body.

There were also differences between those who rejected Neoplatonism. The great Andalusian commentator on Aristotle, Ibn Rushd, thought Neoplatonism philosophically erroneous and much inferior to his favoured Aristotelian system, whereas his more theologically orthodox near-contemporary al-Ghazali opposed Neoplatonism because he opposed philosophy quite generally. When al-Ghazali attacked Neoplatonism in his The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Ibn Rushd responded to this critique in his Incoherence of the Incoherence.

Within this tradition of Islamic philosophy, ideas travelled over a huge area: from Ibn Rushd and Al-Arabi in modern-day Spain at the Western edge of the Islamic world, to Ibn Sina in central Asia. A second trajectory would take it further still. The Ismai’lis were perhaps the most thoroughgoing Neoplatonists in mainstream Islam, holding onto a strong form of ‘apophatic’ theology, denying all ‘positive’ ascriptions of qualities to God (for to attribute qualities to God is to claim to know him somehow, impinging on his transcendence) in favour of promoting what they saw as a more defensible ‘negative’ description – God is not in time or space, not ignorant, not limited in any way. This approach to understanding the divine emphasises the total oneness of God, and his total transcendence, and explains the variety of God’s creation in terms of the by-now familiar notion of emanation from the One. Persecuted for their radical theological-philosophical views, various Ismai’li communities fled in various directions: some to the traditional home of Neoplatonism in Alexandria, others to Yemen, and yet others to Western India. Here they would meet with currents of Neoplatonically-inspired Sufi mysticism that would produce one of the most remarkable cross-cultural encounters of the early modern world.

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In 1656, a large number of Sanskrit scholars gathered together in Varanasi on the Ganges, urgently summoned by the prince Dara Shukoh, heir to the Mughal throne. Dara Shukoh demanded from them a Persian translation of the Upanishads, a feat which the scholars completed in the near-miraculous timespan of just six months. This speed pleased Dara Shukoh. He was determined to find proof for the unity of all religions, or rather, proof that all religions expressed the same truths, truths perfectly expressed only in Islam. He was not to be disappointed. When the translations were complete, he composed an introduction to this collection of Upanishadic writings that he would title the Sirr-i akbar, “The Great Secret,” proclaiming that he had discovered the Upanishads to be the textual source of monotheism (tawhid) itself.

But while he was a political failure, Dara Shukoh was a patron of an astounding intellectual success, one of the greatest ingatherings of philosophical travellers in human history

His philosophical and religious boldness was to be his downfall. Just months later, his brother Aurangzeb deposed Dara Shukoh and had him arrested on charges of heresy and apostasy from Islam. These charges cited some of the more provocative claims he made in his introduction to Sirr-i akbar. He was executed on the ninth of September, while his conservative and military-minded brother went on to rule for almost fifty years, making the Mughal Empire into the world’s largest economy and expanding its borders to their largest extent.

But while he was a political failure, Dara Shukoh was a patron of an astounding intellectual success, one of the greatest ingatherings of philosophical travellers in human history. Dara Shukoh’s personal ‘guru’ was a Sufi named Sarmad Kashani of Armenian-Jewish origin, who studied with the greatest of the post-Avicennan Islamic philosophers Mullah Sadra and translated the Torah into Persian. Sarmad claimed in his poetry to be neither Jewish, nor Muslim nor Hindu, instead preaching a form of perennialism – the idea that all religions express the same original and unchanging truth – an idea that would cost the young heir to the Mughal throne his head.

Dara Shukoh had an impressive range of religious and philosophical traditions upon which to draw. In addition to Muslim Sufis and Hindu pandits, Christian Jesuits were present at the royal court, at this stage already part of a global network of philosophical transmission and exchange; we find them mentioned in works of philosophy by seventeenth century Ethiopian scholars, engaged in discussions with Japanese philosophers, and everywhere trying to convince (usually unsuccessfully) their interlocutors using the logical arsenal of late-scholastic philosophy.

This was by no means the only European intellectual tradition represented at the Mughal court. Serving as a physician at the court was one François Bernier, a French traveller and an ardent follower of the atomist thinker Pierre Gassendi. Bernier provided not only cutting-edge medical treatment but the very latest in the ‘new science’ being developed by Gassendi, Descartes, and others in Western Europe. Indeed, one of his hobbies, between providing cures to the courtiers and debating metaphysics with the pandits, was translating Descartes. At the court of the Mughal emperor, arguably the most powerful man on the planet, a rich, already-globalised philosophical discussion was underway in which Sufi-transmitted Neoplatonic ideas mingled with the latest developments in Western European anatomy and philosophy, and traditional Catholic theology encountered Hindu philosophy.

The Islamic and Ethiopian engagement with Neoplatonism thought was not an adoption but rather a creative reworking of these formerly foreign ideas.

In a fascinating paper, Jonardon Ganeri has suggested that in staging the encounter between Sufi Islam and the Hinduism of the Upanishads, “what Dārā has done, in effect, is to discover within Sufism the archaic remnants of another migration […] it is possible that the translation of the Upaniṣads into Persian in 1657 was not the first time that they journeyed on an easterly wind.”

It has often been noted that Plotinus, the great founder of Neoplatonism, joined the military expedition of Emperor Gordian III to Persia in 243AD, supposedly out of an interest in studying Indian philosophy. It is an unfortunate gap in the scholarly record that we have no real idea how much of Indian philosophy Plotinus was able to learn, either in Egypt or on campaign in the East. Nevertheless, many scholars have noted striking similarities between the ideas of the Upanishads and the central tenets of Neoplatonism. Dara Shukoh himself describes the motif of the ascent and descent of souls, with the ‘descent’ of the souls describing the movement of emanation from The One, through Nous (‘intellect’), to Psyche (‘soul’), all the way down to the world of the senses, and the ‘ascent’ describing the movement in the opposite direction back up in a process of ‘contemplation’.

Is it possible that in staging this dialogue between Islam and Hinduism, between the teachings of the Upanishads and of the Sufis, Dārā Shukoh had somehow perceived an ancient genetic link between the two systems? Was something in the core of Neoplatonic philosophy finding itself drawn back to its ultimate historical origins? If it was, then, as Jonardon Ganeri remarks, “how appropriate for him to name his comparative masterpiece after the place in Khartum where two tributaries of the Nile rejoin: majma-ul-bahrain, ‘the meeting-place of the two waters.’” Our journey, from Egypt to Ethiopia, Iraq, central Asia and India, has come full circle.

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What are we to learn from this journey? First that ideas travel. Indeed they travel very widely, and often very quickly. Neoplatonism was forming the vocabulary of Ethiopian Christianity less than a century after its invention, and an intellectual at the court of Dara Shukoh could, before the end of the seventeenth century, read Descartes, the Upanishads, and Thomas Aquinas. The second is that ideas travel by quite ordinary means, accompanying missionaries, doctors, armies, rolled up in scrolls or tucked away in codices that can be bought and sold, condemned or exalted, copied, burnt or left to rot. The point is obvious, but we forget it nevertheless. Third, ideas are transformed in transit. The Islamic and Ethiopian engagement with Neoplatonism thought was not an adoption but rather a creative reworking of these formerly foreign ideas; not appropriation but reinterpretation. Nobody has a greater claim to these ideas simply by virtue of belonging to a particular national or linguistic culture; the legacy of Neoplatonism belongs to those who have kept it vital over the past centuries: to the anonymous Ethiopian scribes, to al-Kindi and Ibn Sina, to the Dārā Shukoh and to his Armenian-Jewish Sufi master. In fact, it belongs to anyone who in translating, challenging and wrestling with these ideas lend to them a new life and energy.

Jonathan Egid is a Lecturer in Philosophy at SOAS, University of London. His first edited volume (with Lea Cantor of Cambridge and Fasil Merawi of Addis Ababa), In Search of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob was published by De Gruyter in September, and his podcast series ‘Philosophising In…’ is available wherever you get your podcasts. He is a BBC New Generation Thinker for 2024, and his essays on philosophy, art and politics appear regularly in the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, and elsewhere. Website: www.jonathanegid.com

First published online on 19th October 2025

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