Christian Neoplatonism

I'm enjoying your well written posts.

Thanks for your kind words.

Maybe you can clear something up for me. I was at a party some time ago and the guests were evangelical Christians in the most positive sense of the term. I have a problem with evangelicals. I made some small talk with a guest and she said I was a neo-Platonist. It was a thinly disguised insult to a Christian as I learned later.

Use as a prejorative, I think it means that you are a mystic to the exclusion of anything real or rational that might inform that mysticism. Neoplatonism also rejected the afterlife as well as the existence of evil and posited "the Source" or "the Absolute", from whence all things spring and all things return. It might be contrasted to materialism, empericism, and pragmatism. (William James: "Damn the Absolute!") It was popular in the middle to late 1800s, and was influential in the thought of Hegal, Goethe, Emerson, and others.

We should make a distinction between Christian Neoplatonism, which is essentially Christian Theosophy and Christian Platonism, which runs through much of orthodox Christian theology . An example is CS Lewis in which he suggests that the afterlife is more real than this life, and this life is the a mere image-- a copy of a copy-- of what is real, somewhat equivalent to Plato's cave metaphor. We see this rather poignantly in his Narnia Chronicles, the kids in the last chapter are transported to Narnia as they die in a train wreck:

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose withi them.

"There was a real railroad accident" said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are-- as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands-- dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."