One of the most interesting recent attempts to interpret the peculiarities of Plotinus's philosophy is that of Bréhier in his ‘La Philosophie de Plotin’. His thesis, contained in the last four chapters of the work, is that Plotinus, instead of being simply the continuator of the Greek rationalist tradition, is the founder of modern European Idealism, or, perhaps more accurately, Pantheism. ‘Avec Plotin nous saisissons done le premier chatnon d'une tradition religieuse qui n'est pas moins puissante au fond en Occident (...) que la tradition chretienne …’. He is the spiritual ancestor of Spinoza and Hegel. It is interesting in passing to compare this view with that of Dean Inge, for whom Plotinus is the spiritual begetter of S. Thomas Aquinas. The divergences of modern interpreters of the Plotinian metaphysic are often both amusing and suggestive. (shrink)

The Bhagavad-Gītā is the most important text in the smrti literature of India, as distinct from the śruti literature which is traditionally regarded as ultimately authoritative. The Bhagavad-Gītā has been assigned a date ranging from the fifth century B.C. to the second century B.C. The Indian religious tradition places the Gītā at the end of the third age of the present cycle of the universe and the beginning of the fourth, namely the Kali Yuga to which we belong.

"The studies collected in this book are all concerned with aspects of the Platonic tradition, either in its own internal development in the Hellenistic age and the period of the Roman Empire, or with the influence of Platonism, in one or other of its forms, on other spiritual traditions, especially that of Christianity." [Book jacket].

1. A recent writer, who would have it that Biblical history is not so much an impartial or purely factual account of events as a series of edifying proclamations, protests that the objective writing of history is never feasible, since the historian who testifies to some event invariably reflects his own particular standpoint; the further away he is from the event, and the more personally interested he and his generation are in the issue, the more subjective his account is apt (...) to be. This attempt to gather dogmatic figs off skeptical thistles rests upon the mistaken idea that what is called historical knowledge is a residual awareness of once present doings, growing ever fainter and more garbled as the transmission lengthens. Actually it is an acquired awareness of past doings. The historian’s task is not the clerkly compilation of pieces of tradition, i.e., reminiscences of outstanding events handed down orally, and excerpts from memoirs, i.e., an author’s written recollections of his own actions and experiences, of people whom he met, and of affairs to which he was close, if not a party. The historian treats tradition and memoirs not as history but as evidence of history, evidence being anything lying to hand from which the past can be reconstructed. Historiography was set on the path of a systematic and critical study when Herodotus of Halicarnassus made bold to scout some traditional tale and ended his own account of the affair with the words “These, then, are the facts as they appear to me.” If the historian could only serve up, spiced or unspiced, reports that had reached him, his fare would indeed be suspect, and even the agreement of historians would not wash away the taint of fabrication, but, as Napoleon Buonaparte suggested, would merely render history a fable convenue. The past which the critical historian unfolds, however, is what he has come to think for himself really happened. (shrink)

Christianity stands out among the three great Abrahamic religions in its willingness to make extremely precise dogmatic statements about God. The Christians who make these statements have generally regarded them as universally and absolutely true, since they are divinely revealed, or divinely guaranteed interpretations of revealed texts. Of course from the beginning there has not been universal agreement among Christians about what statements should be so regarded and how they should be worded: and the seriousness with which this need for (...) dogmatic precision has been taken is shown by the way in which the inevitable disputes did not only involve theologians but the general body of Christians, and have led to divisions of churches, long continuing and flourishing mutual hatreds, and an overwhelming amount of theoretical and, where opportunity offered, practical intolerance. Two areas of Church history which seem to me to provide particularly clear evidence of the incompatible verbal precisions demanded in dogmatic statements and the serious consequences of these demands are the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries and the Filioque dispute between East and West. In both of these, theologians with a real and deep sense of the mystery of God often seem to an outside observer, in spite of their passionate assertions that this is not at all what they are doing and the rhetorical reverence of their language, to be arguing as if the God-Man or the Trinity were small finite objects which they had pinned down firmly in their theological laboratories and were examining under the microscope. (shrink)