There is an obvious paradox in any attempt to map the topography of Paradise, for Paradise, theologians assure us, is outside of space as well as time. Yet mapping Paradise is what Dante's poem, the Paradiso, attempts to do. For the two preceding realms of the afterlife, hell and purgatory, Dante provides numerous finely articulated descriptions of rigorously ordered regions. And again for Paradise, the variegated states of the souls making up the spiritual order of the realm are expressed very (...) precisely by a topographical scheme, one in this case based on Ptolemy's system of the heavens. The seven planetary spheres are followed by the sphere of the fixed stars and the primum mobile, the whole finally bordering on the completely nonspatial heaven of the Empyrean. But this last “sphere” alone is Paradise in the full and strict sense. As Dante has Beatrice explain in canto 4.28–48, the whole poem attempts to describe this totally nonspatial order in terms of the array of the nine physical heavens as metaphorical correlatives for the successive degrees of beatitude experienced by the souls “in” the Empyrean. Paradise in this sense—as the Empyrean—is thus utopic, if any place is: it is literally “no place” at all. (shrink)

In the times preceding the emergence of Neo-Platonism, the philosophers now known as Middle Platonists elaborated an extensive reflection on the possibility of knowing God, and the ways that could lead to acquiring knowledge about the transcendent. According to Plato, “To discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered Him, to declare Him unto all men were a thing impossible” ​​. The Middle Platonists believed that God, whom they sometimes identified with the Platonic (...) One and Good, is possible to know but not possible to express. Even though the knowledge of God is accompanied by all the difficulties associated with the process of intellectual and ethical improvement, and although what one comes to know in this process is ultimately impossible to express in human language, gaining knowledge of God and becoming like Him is nevertheless the goal of all Platonic philosophy. Jewish and Christian thinkers working at this time came to similar conclusions. These include Philo of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, who are themselves sometimes deemed Middle-Platonic philosophers. Unlike their pagan colleagues, they believed that man’s process of coming to know God would go on forever. They thought that the finite human mind would never be able to contain the infinite, and they held that the essence and power of God are indeed infinite. The goal of this article is to expose the relationship between the infinity and the unknowability of God, and at the same time to point out the differences in the theses put forward on this question by pagan Middle Platonists and those who accepted Judeo-Christian revelation. (shrink)

The paper is a study of the logic of existence, negation, and order in the Neoplatonic tradition. The central idea is that Neoplatonists assume a logic in which the existence predicate is a comparative adjective and in which monadic predicates function as scalar adjectives that nest the background order. Various scalar predicate negations are then identifiable with various Neoplatonic negations, including a privative negation appropriate for the lower orders of reality and a hyper-negation appropriate for the higher. Reversion to the (...) One can then be explained as the logical inference of hyper-negations from mundane knowledge. Part I develops the relevant linguistic and logical theory, and Part II defends Wolfson and the scalar interpretation against the more traditional Aristotelian understanding of Whittaker and others of reversion as intensional abstraction. (shrink)

Riassunto Attraverso le pagine di Celso e di Origene vediamo delinearsi due Weltanschauungen contrapposte. La prima esclude un intervento attivo di Dio nel mondo, ipostatizza l’ordine di cose esistente, privilegia rigorosamente la cura dell’anima, nega che l’uomo possa far affidamento sul corpo per raggiungere la meta cui deve tendere, irride come irragionevoli e blasfeme sia la credenza nell’incarnazione sia quella nella resurrezione. La seconda è decisamente più sfaccettata. Il corpo per un verso sembra costituire un gravame, se è vero che (...) le creature razionali cadono in un soma a seguito della trasgressione originaria cui le conduce l’esercizio del libero arbitrio; per l’altro è anch’esso un portato della creazione divina e dall’inizio il Figlio pervade il mondo nella sua consistenza materiale, sino a che si produce il decisivo evento dell’incarnazione; alla fine dei tempi avrà luogo senza dubbio la resurrezione che chiama in causa una volta di più il corpo, in quanto l’esistere creaturale sembra inseparabile da una dotazione corporea. A partire da questo quadro complesso e almeno in parte aporetico si profila – all’interno della seconda Weltanschauung qui considerata attraverso la lente di Origene – una linea di tendenza, che cerca di sciogliere i nodi problematici persistenti negando essere la materia causa del male e rivendicando al corpo nato dalla vergine la capacità di salvare l’umanità. (shrink)