Course XXV - Teaching 2: Ammonius Saccas and Neoplatonism

Greek culture penetrated the Christian world first through Neoplatonism and later through an adaptation of the latter to Christian dogmas and teachings.
In second century, Alexandria was not any more the flourishing city of the Ptolomei.
The Academy of Philosophy, founded by Aulethes, had enormously declined and intellectual luminaries in those days did not visit it any more.
Romans that conquered every country and crashed every relic had converted Greek philosophy into their tributary by putting aside the Egyptian religion.
But in their efforts to adapt philosophies to their respective creeds, Jewish immigrants and new Christians had contributed to a revival in the study of philosophies.
This movement gave life to the eclectic school to which illustrious men belonged, such as Clement of Alexandria, Saint Justine Martyr and Athenagoras.
The emerging Christendom had arranged a special dogmatic plan to counteract numerous heretic ideas and started mistrusting this movement, though outstanding figures of its creed belonged to it: finally, the final separation occurred.
This favored the flourishing of Neoplatonism.
Ammonius Saccas, born in second century in Alexandria from Christian parents, from his childhood revealed extraordinary abilities. On the divine offices he was unable to follow vocal prayers and remained ecstatic, he says, absorbed by a luminous idea. This habit of being absorbed from material things would give him later the nickname “Theodidaktos” (Taught by God).
Being very young yet, her entered the Clement of Alexandria’s School, and from him he learnt a very intense love for the academic school that he would not abandon during the rest of his life.
In those days, Christians had openly declared to be contrary to cultural Greek ideas. The Bishop of Alexandria gave the first cry: “With Christ or with the Greek”. The most fanatic invaded schools, devastated libraries, and writings were consumed by fire. Ammonius was so angry that broke up definitely with Christendom.
In those days he had an admirable vision: a mountain crowned by a perennial fire and a woman in while clothes leading him toward a crater showed him, over the flames, different images reflected on the fire. The whole history of the world passed by; he would see lost civilizations, diverse religions, and old peoples coming into being, emerging and disappearing. Just fire continued to shine more and more. From those days Ammonius Saccas’ mission was traced forever; the fire is one, and many are the shadows projected by its flames; and he considered Christendom as a great human-religious ideal, but not the only one.
Great men gathered around him, admired by his inexhaustible wisdom and willing to be led by him. This gathering decided him to found the Neoplatonic school that he called “Philalethea” and that later he divided into analogical and theurgical.
From these school the ecstatic Plotinus, the divine Porphyry, the insuperable Jamblichus, the tenacious Origen and the devout Herennius would emerge. For two centuries Neoplatonism triumphed, but the iron hand of Christendom waited for the opportune moment in order to own its essence and destroy it later.
The Neoplatonic Hypatia would lead then the Neoplatonic School; she was daughter of Theon, a mathematician, and had learned from his father algebra of numbers and that algebra of the universe. It was she who taught the eternal doctrine to the Bishop Sinnesius, conveyed by him in the admirable “Book of philosopher’ stone”. But Hypathia had a terrible enemy, Cyrilius, nephew of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria. He was a man severe, fanatical and very zealous of his dogma; later he would be famous in the Council of Ephesus.
In vain, Cyrilius had tried to convince the young woman to become Christian. The fanatical felt that God had sent years of misery as scourge and Cyrilius blamed Hypathia because she was reluctant to abjure her beliefs.
They went to her, rent her white robe of a pagan virgin, dragged her out of the city and ignominiously stoned her to death.
Thirteen centuries had to pass before the foundation of the Scholar Academy, in Florence, by Marsilius Phicinus, which marked the revival of Neoplatonism.
Herennius was Ammonius Saccas’ disciple. We only know a trait about him, told by Porphyry in his “Life of Plotinus”.
Ammonius Saccas had made him the gift of initiating him in the most secret part of his doctrine, the same as he did with Plotinus and Origen. The three promised each other never to divulge the teachings of their master. When Herennius did not honor his word, the two others felt exempted from their oath. Origen, a Christian, belongs to the time of the theological illumination after the preaching of the Gospel. The new notions about God and the world, which Jesus’ teachings contained, needed to be developed, written and built as a body of doctrine.
Thence the immense, painstaking efforts made with certain works, such as those of Redemption, Trinity, Grace, Incarnation, et cetera.
In the beginning, these dogmas just appeared behind obscure, confused and, therefore, hesitant forms. It is likely that Origen had been the first to understand the need for reuniting and systematizing them; but the support of philosophy was indispensable to achieve so painstaking work.
Very knowledgeable about ancient philosophies, and by using the whole power of his genius to join the double authority of faith and reason, he is particularly conspicuous in the intellectual history during the first centuries of the Church.
Born in Alexandria about the year 185 from Christian parents but educated in Greek sciences, Origen revealed from his childhood a vivid intelligence. As he had to learn by heart passages of the Scriptures and could not be content with their sense ad litteram, he was always looking for a higher interpretation. His teachers were Saint Clement and Saint Panthenus, who were the first to teach Christian philosophy in Alexandria. Saint Clement initiated him in Platonism and Saint Panthenus in Stoicism.
In the times of persecutions ordered by the emperor Septimus Severus against Christians of Alexandria, Leonidas, Origen’s father was arrested. Only his mother’s entreaties could impede the young man to follow his father’s steps facing the martyrdom suffered by his father suffered in 202. Origen was then 17 years old.
In order to sustain his mother and six brothers, he devoted himself to teaching grammar. In Alexandria, the free exercise of Christian religion had stopped. Threatened by his persecutors, Saint Clement had taken refuge in Cappadocia. Without religious teachings, Christians gathered around this young master who restarted his theological studies with renewed eagerness. He converted conspicuous people, and Demetrius, Bishop of Alexandria, established him, at the age of 20, on the chair of Saint Clement and Saint Panthenus.
Then his time of labor, intellectual activities and austerities starts.
He adhered to Eastern ideas about the body as an enemy; so, he exhausted himself by dint of fast and mortification, and finally even mutilated his own hands to subdue his carnal temptations. This action, of which she would repent later, should be emphasized because it is the first cause of his subsequent misfortunes and also an obvious sign of his doctrine that saw the body as an enemy of the soul. Later he recognizes that the spirit must fight our senses with energy, and that passions must be tamed in our heart without any attempt against the body.
His main work, “Principles”, is an effort to consider the Christian doctrine as a whole and to base it upon general and scientific principles.
Most of his works reached us through a Latin translation made by Rufinus that altered and made more orthodox certain bold passages, first of all, the text about the Trinity. It is there where one discovers Origen’s bold purpose for his time: to introduce and systematize the fundamental principles of Christendom as a whole. Likely this essay was eventually aborted because of its boldness. Because of it he was branded as an heretic and had many enemies.
The most important characteristic of Origen’s doctrine is the fusion that he tries between ancient philosophy and Christendom.
He reveres Plato, but puts him aside when he sees that the theories of Epictetus can be practically used in a better way.
He is accused of heresies that later divided the Church; but though certainly Origen could not establish with clarity the symbol of the Christian faith in connection with dogmas about the Trinity, Grace and Incarnation, in those days and in the whole Church these dogmas were still dubious and immature, and those days were not propitious for their development. Subsequent works of Athanasius, Saint Basil, Saint Augustine, Cyrilius and others had to give a sufficient and accurate solution to these dogmas, which Origen had just outlined.
Also Origen aims at reconciling the notion of the inalterable unity of God, such as it appears in Plato, with the idea of energy where Aristotle places the essence of God.
According to him, the Platonic notion is entirely in the notion of God the Father; on the other hand, the Aristotelian idea is contained in the idea of the Son of God. At the same time Origen introduces a God as the substance pervading the whole world and living the same life of the rational mind. In Origen’s system, the death of Christ redeems all beings, even Satan and souls condemned.
Demetrius, who protected him so much in the beginning, became his declared enemy.
Excommunicated and exiled from Alexandria, after Demetrius’ death, his successor, the Bishop Heraklas continued to persecute him for fifteen years. And when Heraklas died, Denys, Origen’s friend did not dare to bring him back from the exile.
It was a true war of dogmas, in which Origen would represent the Christendom synthesized by Plato’s school, and Demetrius the Christendom of Saint Mark’s Jewish school; this was a war that would last three centuries and that started when it rejected his priestly ordination by alluding he was a mutilated man who would outrage mankind.
Later in the Council of Nicaea, the special cannon declared that sexual integrity was indispensable to be ordained as a priest.
Origen stayed for a while in Athens and the rest of his days in Caesarea and Tyre. He still lived 24 years more, and continued developing his ideas, but without any school. His authority disappeared in the West and increased in the East. He was the oracle of Palestine, Phoenicia, Cappadocia, Arabia and even Acadia.
He was in Palestine when Decius’ persecution burst and he was one of the first victims. Thrown to a dungeon, at the age of 69, crippled, his feet and neck in chains, he endured tortures with courage, and died in Tyre shortly afterwards his liberation in 255 at the age of 70.