I’ve posted four chapters from the Sacred History of Being,
two of them fairly technical. The first, which I discuss here, is a discussion
of the philosophical outlook of George Berkeley, the late 17th/early
18th century Divine, as it emerges from a conversation between two
characters in a dialogue, Hylas and Philonous. This comes to a rather eastern
flavoured conclusion, that the reality of the world involves cosmic mind, and
that its physical nature is of very little importance. Bertrand Russell
summarised part of this dialogue in his History
of Western Philosophy, but lost interest in the argument when it became an
argument about theology, and about the divine. Russell was famously atheistic,
and positivist in his understanding of what was important in philosophy and
thought.
He was after all writing a history of western philosophy,
and not a history of all varieties of philosophy. But I’m interested in the
relationship between philosophy and theology in the west, and also the relationship
between western philosophy and eastern philosophy. And Russell’s book won’t
tell you much about either of those, because he wasn’t interested, and it wasn’t
important.
Of course there is a strong connecting thread between
philosophy and theology in the west, since Christian theology is largely built
on the back of Greek and Roman ideas and discussions. So he had to deal with
various theological writers in the course of his history, where they made
important philosophical points, or where they were otherwise active in the
history of philosophy. The second book of his history is therefore titled ‘Catholic
Philosophy’, since there was no other philosophy around in the West, from
around the time of Plotinus until the Renaissance, with the exception of
Islamic philosophy, which is relatively briefly discussed.
Ancient philosophy is discussed in the first book, from the
presocratics up until Plotinus. Altogether the discussion for this period runs
to around 265 pages. It’s been an area of interest for me for a very long time,
and over the years I’ve found that there is much that we might identify as
eastern in the philosophy of Greece from the Milesians onwards, and that
therefore it is actually very difficult to do justice to their work without an
understanding of eastern philosophy and theology.
This is one of the reasons why there remain so many problems
with our understanding of presocratic philosophy, classical philosophy, and
also, more spectacularly, neoplatonism. When Heraclitus says ‘all things are
full of gods’, who knows what he could possibly mean?
