Fe a t u r e s
Ne o p l a t o n i c Fl o re n t i n e Ac a d e m y. Do m e n i c o Gh i r l a n d a i o c . 1 4 8 5 - 1 4 9 0 ; Fl o r e n c e , Sa n t a Ma r i a Nov e l l a
rose from beneath the ground to pursue and haunt us were “the mechanomorphic collective representations which constitute the Western world to-day.” Barfield was a poet as well as a philosopher - when he referred to a now-obscure figure like Simplicius he did so with the artist’s touch. His book’s title placed him in the Neoplatonic lineage, what his friend the poet Kathleen Raine called the “ancient springs,” that fed Renaissance Neoplatonism, Rosicrucianism, Jacob Boehme, the Romantic impulse in art and philosophy, and even Anthroposophy itself. What happens when we apply Plato’s three levels of knowledge not to astronomy but to language? What is it to rise from words to the Word? Several things immediately become clear. For the literalist, there is only the first level: Words are nothing more than phenomena, appearances. When we use them to point at a dog by saying “dog,” the word exhausts itself in the phenomenon. When we point them at each other, they disappear altogether. But if we think about them with Plato’s three stages in mind, something different happens. Recall, for example, the theory of knowledge that Rudolf Steiner describes in The Philosophy of Freedom and elsewhere. The sphere of percepts that he describes corresponds to Plato’s first stage, which left to itself is a blooming, buzzing confusion. The unified realm of concepts that Steiner describes is Plato’s third level, accessible via sense-free thinking by means of initiation. And between concept and percept, 28 • b e i n g h u m a n
perpetually unifying them and saving the appearances in our lived moment-to-moment experience is the middle sphere - not of geometry in this case, but of words themselves. The word “dog” is neither a thing, like a dog, or a concept of a dog; it is the middle space where percept and concept join as one. Words are mercurial, elusive messengers, neither quite things nor quite ideas. This is one reason why Sir Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet inf luenced by the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy that did so much to shape the Italian Renaissance, said that poets, who are closest to the essence of language, cannot lie because they “nothing affirm.” They cannot lie because they do not make literal truth claims; instead, the creative speech of poets mimics, in a small way, the continual act of creation that underlies the cosmos. A pair of analogies may help to bring out the liminal mysteriousness of language. Here is one: Among the most famous episodes of twentieth-century physics
We rise to the Word by means of words, only to discover the redemptive presence of the Word in the words that led us there.