LEIBNIZ AND RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISM [n.1]

The term ‘Neoplatonism’ has become part of the Reserve Currency of the world of Renaissance scholarship. Members of history departments who retain an interest in the history of ideas; members of English and other language departments who are concerned with the conceptual milieu which informed the literature they study; historians of science delving into the world-view of embryonic scientists; historians of art exploring the symbolism of paintings — all such scholars, when dealing with the Renaissance, seem inexorably drawn at some time or other to the concept of Neoplatonism for the formulation and exchange of their ideas. Whatever might be said about any difficulties over defining Neoplatonism, it is evident that it is an extremely useful label for a cluster of ideas which really did frequently coexist during the Renaissance. Taken in a purely descriptive and externa1 way, it is inevitably a pivotal term for the interpretation of the Renaissance.

On the other hand, it must never be forgotten that the concept of Neoplatonism is primarily a philosophical one; and in the demarcation of areas of academic activity, it is indisputably the job of the philosopher to examine the internal validity of the concept. The conclusion of this paper will be negative in the sense that I shall argue for the abandonment of the term ‘Neoplatonism’, not merely in philosophical contexts, but in every other context as well, since all its uses are ultimately parasitic on its philosophical meaningfulness. However, this is not to question the reality of what we now call ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’, but merely to recommend a return to the older practice of referring to it simply as ‘Platonism’.

But before embarking on a critique of the concept, it will be necessary to say something about its nature and its historical origins. And as a philosophical concept, it is not enough to treat it merely qua convenient label for a certain set of beliefs, as if it were a wrapped parcel capable of being passed from one person to another without being opened. We must consider its content, which essentially involves reference to its intended and actual relationship with genuine Platonism. As we shall see, it is this intensional correlativity of the concepts of Platonism and Neoplatonism that causes most of the trouble.

The word ‘Neoplatonism’, and its cognates in English and other languages, was coined only in the 1830s, [n.2] and took some decades to take root. Before then, historians made do with the single concept of Platonism for all philosophical systems of a broadly Platonic type, as contrasted with other types of system, such as Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, or Stoicism. This terminological simplicity did not prevent people from recognising that different Platonists interpreted Plato differently, nor from discussing which interpretation was correct. However, in the historically conscious nineteenth century, most historians of philosophy wanted to give a definitive shape to their discrimination between the philosophy of Plato himself, and the accretions and misinterpretations of subsequent ‘Neoplatonists’, such as, in antiquity: Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus; in the Dark Ages: the pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Erigena; in the Renaissance: Plethon, Ficino and Patrizzi; and later: Fludd, Cudworth, Henry More, Berkeley and others.

According to this nineteenth-century approach, genuine Platonism might not have been ultimately true, but at least it was a noble and reasonable attempt at the truth, and it played an essential role in the development of philosophy. Plato believed, broadly, that there are absolute values; that the abstract and ideal are prior to the concrete and particular; that we can have knowledge that transcends the limitations of place and time; that our life is not bound to this mortal coil; and that there is ultimately one, and only one, God. The Neoplatonists distorted these positions into grotesque parodies which did not deserve serious consideration as philosophical at all. They wove fantasies about whole hierarchies of beings between the One and pure matter, and populated the world with all sorts of pagan deities and lesser demons; they strove after purification of the soul through mystical experience; they believed in magical powers over the material realm; they advocated superstitions such as astrology, spiritualism, theurgy and the curing of diseases by charming; and they believed in the transmigration of souls from one body to another. In short, nineteenth-century historians of philosophy generally projected onto Plato himself the image of the rational, idealist, even almost Christian philosopher; and onto his Neoplatonist successors, the image of the wildly mystical, superstitious and cranky pagan.

I shall now raise four objections to this distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism. The first two can be made briefly; the third needs more explanation; and the fourth will take up the rest of the paper, and involve a detailed consideration of Leibniz’s relationship with Renaissance Neoplatonism.

The first objection to the distinction is that it is completely unnecessary for the classification of post-Platonic philosophical schools. In some cases, a comparable distinction is necessary. For example, during the Renaissance it is essential to distinguish between two co-existing styles of Aristotelianism: the scholastic Aristotelianism of university philosophy departments, and the back-to-the-original Aristotelianism of the Humanists. But later Platonism gave rise to no such contrast. After Plotinus, all Platonism is called Neoplatonism, with the single exception that the Neoplatonists of seventeenth-century Cambridge are conventionally allowed the courtesy title of ‘The Cambridge Platonists’, but without implying any special contrast with the Neoplatonists of, say, Florence. The distinction has no particular work to do, except, perhaps, to remind us that we are not talking about Athens of the fourth century B.C.

The second objection is that the distinction is intrinsically evaluative. ‘Neoplatonism’ is a pejorative term: the ‘Neo’ implies not only a misinterpretation of genuine Platonism, but degeneration into an inferior, superstitious system. The contrast reeks of Victorian seculocentricity. The objective historian should, at least at the descriptive and classificatory stage, avoid value-laden terminology as far as possible. Given that there is nothing to be gained by making the distinction in any case, it would be far better simply to talk of ‘Platonists’, and consider separately the evaluation both of their interpretation of Plato, and of their philosophical system itself.

The third objection is that the distinction presupposes objective criteria for drawing the line between Platonism and Neoplatonism. The usual nineteenth-century view was that rationality and superstition were polar opposites: Plato was one of the founders of Western European rationalism; therefore he must be interpreted as basically rational, as contrasted with the superstitious character of the Neoplatonists. Such absolutist distinctions were already called into question during the nineteenth century itself. In particular, the Hegelians made an alternative contrast within the Platonic tradition, between mythical and scientific meaning. But by a suitable adjustment of the borderline between what was to be taken as myth, and what as literal truth, Plato’s writings could be harmonised with almost any metaphysical position, not excluding effective atheism and materialism. For instance, J.A. Stewart, in his book The Myths of Plato, [n.3] wrote:

It could still be said that Neoplatonists were those who made the mistake of taking Plato’s myths as literally true; but they too could equally well be interpreted as speaking only mythically. Stewart takes just this line in the final section of his book; [n.4] and since he sees no real contrast, he has no use for the term ‘Neoplatonist’ as distinct from ‘Platonist’, and studiously avoids it.

It has to be admitted that Plato is exceptionally open to extremes of conflicting interpretation, and that this is to a certain extent his own fault. Not only did he habitually use myths, allegories and metaphors, but by warning that he was speaking in myths he positively invited people to take him as meaning less, even much less, than he said. Equally, his hints of an unwritten philosophy have encouraged others to take him as meaning much more than he actually said. This position was argued for in a paper delivered in this university by Konrad Gaiser three years ago [n.5]. However, there is a general problem about interpretation, of which the Platonic problem is paradigmatic. If we abandon assumptions such as the implicit nineteenth-century one that Plato must have been closer to our ways of thinking than other philosophers, what grounds can we have for interpreting him one way or the other? — as a proto-Neoplatonist, as a reasonable theist, or as virtually an atheist? Without such grounds, there can be no valid distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism, since the terms are correlative.

During the twentieth century, an increasing number of philosophers and historians have abandoned the search for an objective criterion, and have tended towards a sort of conceptual anarchism. They maximise conceptual disagreement between different individuals, cultures and ages by interpreting as many differences as possible in language, imagery and belief as conceptual differences. So, the Warburg school of conceptual historiography, that is, Frances Yates, Daniel Walker and their followers [n.6], seems almost to rejoice in searching out ideas and beliefs which appear absurd and irrational to people still suffering from nineteenth-century hangovers. For these scholars, the Renaissance Neoplatonists meant all that they said literally, and they were far more influentia1 than has hitherto been realised. A parallel instance of the same movement of thought is that, whereas the Victorian historian David Brewster despaired at Isaac Newton’s evident obsession with alchemy and his religious heterodoxy [n.7], there is now what has been dubbed a ‘Newtonian Industry’ [n.8] devoted largely to emphasising and publicising precisely those and other such aspects of his thought. The same is also true in areas such as anthropology, the sociology of knowledge, and semiology and related movements in Continental philosophy [n.9]. Applied to Plato, this style of historiography emphasises the differentness of Plato’s world-view from our own by taking the myths and images very literally, and finding a rich ontology of souls, spirits, gods, self-subsistent abstract realities, mystical illuminations, magical connections, and so on. But by doing this, it tends to narrow or even abolish altogether any gap between Platonism and Neoplatonism. Thus the scholar of Hermeticism, André Festugière, writing in 1936 [n.10], gave a remarkably literalist and almost Plotinian account of Plato’s metaphysics; again, there has been controversy as to whether or not Plato might have located the Ideas in the mind of God, even though previously the most unshakable absolute difference between Platonism and Neoplatonism had been just this point [n.11]; and more recently, C.J. de Vogel has written a paper with the title ‘On the Neoplatonic character of Platonism and the Platonic character of Neoplatonism’ [n.12].

The opposite tendency has been towards finding better grounds for minimising conceptual disagreement. Or, to conceptualise this tendency rather differently, towards finding more sophisticated justifications than the Victorians ever dreamed of for interpreting past philosophers as really in agreement with ourselves. One approach is the aggressively objectivist one of denying the conceivability of alternative conceptual schemes. In particular, Donald Davidson [n.13] has argued that since we can ultimately know what a sentence means only if we know how it relates to reality, it follows that our ability to understand people from a different culture presupposes a common world of experience. If they can make themselves intelligible to us at all, they must share the broad features of the way we experience the world. In other words, our most important concepts must be the same.

The other approach towards minimising conceptual disagreement is fundamentally relativistic and sociological, or even anthropological. It is derived from Wittgenstein as interpreted by the so-called Swansea school, though it differs little in its conclusions from the results of a Hegelian exegesis. The Swansea approach is based on the theory of meaning according to which, if you want to know what someone means, his actions speak louder than his words — in Wittgenstein’s own words: ‘Don’t think, but look!’ [n.14] That is, the meaning of language is its observable use in social interactions, and does not depend on some relation to any intellectually apprehensible absolute standard. One might compare this with the contemporary discovery that the value of money is what people will accept it in exchange for, not its representation of an external standard, such as gold. In the case of metaphysical, religious and moral beliefs, these can have no content beyond what can be acted out in a form of life. If someone says, ‘I believe in God,’ he means the same as a sociologist who, on the basis of careful observation, says of him, ‘He is deeply religious.’ Any mythology, metaphor or imagery is mere illustration, and not part of the meaning itself. Applied to Plato [n.15], this mode of interpretation has the effect of making him read almost as a modern positivist. The Swansea approach radically demythologises his talk of the pre-existence of the soul and its survival after death; of the memory, from a previous, other-worldly existence, of independently subsistent abstract realities; and of the dependence of the world on the divine Form of the Good. These are metaphors necessitated by the limitations of language. What Plato really meant was just that truths about a person’s moral character achieve the status of eternal truths when he dies, since they can no longer be falsified; that certain aspects of our knowledge cannot be given in experience; that values transcend purely material and utilitarian considerations; that talk of God, while not referring to any extra-terrestrial existence, does have meaning in the context of the religious life. Whether or not this version of Plato creates a gulf between himself and the Neoplatonists is not, as far as I know, a question that the Swansea Platonists have ever considered. Perhaps the Renaissance Platonism of Florence and Cambridge is too far West even of Swansea to be intelligible. Or perhaps at heart everyone really agrees with Plato.

Given the two extremes of interpreting almost everything and almost nothing as Neoplatonic, together with the range of possible intermediate positions, it is difficult to see any useful purpose being served by retaining such a contentious term as ‘Neoplatonism’ for the description of post-Platonic philosophies of an intensionally Platonic style.

This brings me to the fourth and last objection to the distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism, which is that it is liable to generate confusion and paradox because of a cross-over between observer-language and object-language. As long as the philosophers who are our objects of study talk of themselves and each other only as Platonists, then there is no special problem if we, as historical observers, label them as Neoplatonists. But what if one of them himself acquires the concept of Neoplatonism? There seems no reason in principle why this should not happen. But if it does, our Neoplatonist cannot categorise himself as a Neoplatonist, since that would amount to committing himself to a certain interpretation of Plato, and at the same time holding that the interpretation was incorrect. We can say that of him, but he cannot say it of himself. Consequently, his conception of Neoplatonism will necessarily be different from ours; and in discussing his philosophy we will be in the seriously confusing position of having to operate with the term in two different senses simultaneously. This can, and in some cases has to be done; but, where possible, it is much better to avoid the conceptual acrobatics involved, by refraining from using a loaded term like Neoplatonism in our observer-language, and leaving it to our subjects. We don’t need it in order to discuss the correctness or otherwise of historical interpretations of Plato.

The rest of this paper will be devoted to showing how this sort of problem arises in the particular case of the philosopher Leibniz, assuming the traditional concept of Neoplatonism. It may seem strange that I take Leibniz as an example in the context of the Renaissance, since he did not start writing till the latter part of the seventeenth century. I am not claiming that he himself was a Renaissance philosopher, even though, as it happens, there is much to be said for categorising at least his early work as Renaissance humanist. What I do wish to argue, however, is both that he was a Neoplatonist, and that he had an explicit concept of Neoplatonism. This raises precisely the problem of self-reference I have set out to analyse. So I must now start by explaining why I believe Leibniz can properly be classified as a Neoplatonist in the conventional sense.

There are two types of justification for this. Firstly, Leibniz himself frequently claimed that he was more a Platonist than anything else; that many of his most basic doctrines were to be found in Plato; and that the reading of Plato had a profound influence on the development of his thought. All this will be amply supported by passages I shall be quoting later in this paper; and it should also become obvious that the Leibnizian versions of the doctrines he saw as Platonic are mostly different enough from what would generally be recognised as genuine Platonism for them to be called Neoplatonic.

The second justification for describing Leibniz as a Neoplatonist is that independent analysis of the content of his philosophy yields a wide range of broadly Platonic positions; and in most cases he is much closer to typical Neoplatonists than he is to Plato himself [n.16]. Examples of the relevant sort of doctrine are that all substances are fulgurations of the divinity; that created beings differ from God in that their being is compounded with nothingness; that ideas struggle for realisation in the mind of God; that reality is perfection, and evil privation; that all substances are animate; that there is a universal conspiration of substances; that souls are simultaneously unities and totalities, and are mirrors of divinity; that animals are immortal; that there are infinite hierarchies of lower and higher beings; that nature is organic in all its parts; that knowledge depends on divine illumination. Of course, there is also much in Leibniz that is neither Platonic nor Neoplatonic. He owed a considerable debt to Aristotle, and to the new mechanical and corpuscularian philosophy; and he was also an unusually original thinker in his own right. But if he can be fitted into a conventional philosophical pidgeon-hole at all, it is to the Neoplatonic school that he belongs.

I now move on to evidence that Leibniz himself was conscious of a sharp distinction between genuine Platonism, and later Neoplatonism. This hinges on a contrast he drew between Platonism and what he called ‘pseudo-Platonism’, which looks like a remarkable anticipation of the nineteenth-century distinction. The principal source is a posthumously published draft, presumably written in the early 1670s when Leibniz was in his mid-twenties, which his editor called the Specimina Initiis Scientiae generalis addenda [n.17]. That it so say, particular case-studies appended to his draft project for an encyclopaedia of true knowledge; but I shall call it the Specimina for short. In this, his general purpose was to demonstrate the importance of all humanistic studies; in the case of philosophy, he claimed that each ancient school had some aspect of the truth, even though its merits may have been obscured by later misinterpretations. As is well known, it was a commonplace of Renaissance Humanism that Aristotle had been corrupted by the Scholastics; Leibniz’s originality lay in applying the same formula to Plato, and in including Renaissance Humanists themselves among Plato’s corruptors. He complained that the ‘Pseudo-Platonists’ had ignored what was best in Plato, and had twisted his meaning into superstition and mysticism: [n.18]

He then outlines what he sees good in Plato, and concludes:

So, in this text Leibniz unambiguously criticises the Neoplatonists for distorting and adding to Plato. We now have the problem of reconciling that with the fact that Leibniz’s own philosophy was a distinctly Neoplatonic brand of Platonism. How could a Neoplatonist roundly condemn Neoplatonism? I shall consider four possible solutions, each of which, I believe, à la Leibniz, has some truth to it.

The first solution is to dismiss the above passage, and a few other similar ones [n.19], as mere rhetoric, and hence as not an expression of what Leibniz genuinely believed. Such a suggestion is not as outrageous as it may seem to those who study past philosophers only sub specie veritatis, since the Specimina as a whole is indeed a characteristic Renaissance rhetorical exercise. The only question is whether it is mere rhetoric; and there are grounds for supposing it might be. In the Specimina, Leibniz’s attack on the Pseudo-Platonists was included for the sake of its role in his rhetorical device of seeing some truth in every school, the true aspects of Platonism being revealed by exposing the absurdities of Neoplatonism. But on other occasions he used precisely the same rhetorical device, only now to show that the Neoplatonists themselves had a share in the truth. For instance, he praised Parmenides and Plotinus for their concept of a unity which was also a whole, and the Cabalists and Hermeticists (that is, broadly those of the Renaissance Neoplatonist tradition) for their universal vitalism [n.20], and ‘The Platonists, Fludd, and similar philosophers’ for saying that God made everything, and that his creatures are his instruments [n.21]. However, the fact that he expressed his opinions in accordance with the requirements of rhetorical symmetry does not show that he was being in any way insincere. There is no reason why he should not have believed that the doctrines just mentioned were both true and genuinely Platonic [n.22], and that those singled out for criticism in the Specimina were false and unplatonic. As for his admiration for Plato himself, there can be no doubt whatever about his sincerity. It was a persistent theme in his writings from all periods [n.23], and has been carefully documented by a number of scholars, in particular Foucher de Careil, Brunner and Schrecker [n.24].

The second solution to the conflict between Leibniz’s being a Neoplatonist and his rejection of Neoplatonism is to say that Leibniz was mistaken about his own philosophical position: that his admiration for Plato, together with his realisation that Plato had been misinterpreted by the Neoplatonists, blinded him to other, more important ways in which his own philosophy was of the same type as theirs. This would mean that Leibniz was subject to the same failing as John Locke, who, as Leibniz himself had pointed out [n.25], was really an Aristotelian, even though his obsessive hostility towards Scholasticism made him think of himself as above all an anti-Aristotelian: Locke’s self-image as a leading member of an identifiable ideological group had prevented him from assessing his own position analytically. It may be that similar factors played some role in Leibniz’s case; but they cannot provide a complete answer, partly because Leibniz was far more aware than Locke of his own position in the history of philosophy, and partly because there is a more convincing solution which I shall come to shortly.

The third solution is to say that Leibniz was consciously dishonest about his relations with Neoplatonism, or at least that he deliberately exaggerated the extent to which he disagreed with it. He certainly did have a strong motive for distancing himself from other Neoplatonists. During his formative period, there was a growing divergence between two movements within the New Philosophy. On the one hand there were the mechanists, who insisted that nature was to be explained solely in terms of quantifiable factors, and who tended towards materialism and empiricism; on the other hand there were the spiritualists, including the Neoplatonists, who insisted that natural phenomena could not be explained without recourse to vital principles, and who tended towards rationalism and mysticism. Leibniz, as always, believed that both were partly right, and that his philosophical system offered a perfect compromise: the mechanists must recognise the deeper reality of the spiritual realm, but the spiritualists must allow mechanistic science complete autonomy in the physical world. He therefore rebuked Neoplatonist spiritualists, in particular Fludd, Cudworth and Henry More, for hindering scientific progress by extending spiritualism beyond its proper realm [n.26]. However, he was generally far more outspoken in his attacks on materialism and empiricism; and, despite his efforts to be seen as an impartial mediator, his spiritualism put him in danger of being ridiculed by the new scientific establishment. But although he had this motive to underplay his connections with Neoplatonism, it is still insufficient to solve our problem, since Leibniz was in fact perfectly open about the metaphysical positions themselves which constitute the grounds for categorising him as a Neoplatonist. He didn’t advertise himself as a Neoplatonist, but he certainly didn’t hide his Neoplatonism.

This brings me to the fourth and last solution, which is to reject the initial assumption that Leibniz was drawing the same distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism as the nineteenth-century commentators to whom we owe the distinction. At the beginning of the passage I quoted from the Specimina, Leibniz leads us to expect the later distinction by describing Plotinus and Ficino as making ‘constant efforts to say things that would be miraculous and mystical.’ This disposes us to interpret the rest of the passage as contrasting the mystical meanings read into Plato’s writings by the Neoplatonists with a more straightforward and literal meaning of the historical Plato himself: i.e. to believe that in order to arrive at the genuine Plato, we have to demystify the Neoplatonic versions. However, there is good evidence that this is not what Leibniz meant. Already in the Specimina itself, when he expounds his interpretation of the real Plato, he qualifies his account by talking of how the ideal reader would interpret Plato himself [n.27]; and then he says that Plato’s doctrines are all very true if you interpret them correctly [n.28]. He makes similar qualifications in other writings: ‘This is of great importance, if expounded correctly,’ [n.29] and ‘It is something which Plato dealt with particularly well . . . provided one takes him the right way.’ [n.30] Such phrases suggest that for Leibniz the correct interpretation of Plato was not after all the straightforward one, but the difficilior lectio. That this is indeed what he intended is confirmed by other passages where he was more explicit. In a letter to Bierling of 7th July 1711, he wrote that there was more hidden away in Plato than ordinary people could see [n.31], and in his Principium quoddam generale of 1687 he said that the basis of his own, Platonic, philosophy was most evident to those most versed in esoteric philosophy [n.32]. On other occasions he contrasted the esoteric or ‘acroamatic’ nature of what he saw good in Platonism with the exoteric nature and common-sense intelligibility of Aristotle and Locke. Thus he wrote to Hansch on 25th July 1707: [n.33]

And in paragraph 27 of the Discours de Metaphysique of 1686: [n.34]

The implication of all this is that the Neoplatonists were led into superstition through interpreting Plato too superficially, and that they failed to perceive an underlying esoteric meaning. This seems highly paradoxical in the light of the Neoplatonists’ own emphasis on esoteric wisdom, and on the tradition of a prisca theologia, of which Plato was supposed to be an integral part. So I shall now consider, first: why Leibniz might have believed that superstitions arose from too superficial a reading of Plato; and then: what esoteric wisdom Leibniz thought the Neoplatonists had missed.

The answer to the first question is relatively straightforward. Leibniz remarks that Plato sometimes tried to make his ideas more comprehensible to a contemporary audience by means of fables [n.35]; and that, when he was in a poetic or self-indulgent mood, his writing was sometimes ambiguous or exaggerated [n.36]. In this he was echoing Plato’s own warning, of the Phaedo 61E and elsewhere, that he was speaking in myths (mythologein), no doubt intending us not to take what he said literally, but as clues to a deeper truth. As Leibniz wrote to Remond on 14th March 1714: [n.37]

In the Specimina, Leibniz gave some examples of Platonic metaphors which the Neoplatonists had taken literally, corrupted and embroidered: ‘The World Soul, self-subsistent ideas, purification of souls in the River of Fire, the shadowy Cave of images, and other such things.’ [n.38] He did not specify how the Neoplatonists had gone wrong, but it seems pretty clear that he was anticipating the approach of the Hegelians and the Swansea Wittgensteinians. For example, the Soul of the World should not be understood as an entity distinct from God and standing in relation to the world as we do to our bodies, but as a metaphor for the truth that the world is full of life and governed by intelligence. So, in general, the Neoplatonists’ fantasies and superstitions arose not from a mystical interpretation of Plato, but from a literal interpretation of his myths. Genuine Platonism was to be discovered not by demystification, but by demythologisation.

I now move to the second question, namely: what, according to Leibniz, was the esoteric Platonism which the Neoplatonists ignored? There is a puzzle here, in that most of the Platonic doctrines he mentioned explicitly are relatively uncontroversial as interpretations of Plato. His favourites were the importance of final causes [n.39], innate ideas [n.40], and the unreality of matter [n.41]; though on a few occasions he gave longer lists [n.42]. But none of these are particularly esoteric. So is there any evidence of Leibniz attributing something more mystical to Plato? I believe there is, and that the clue to it lies in Leibniz’s attitude to Pythagoras. He did not refer to Pythagoras very often; but when he did, he treated him in the same way as he treated Plato, claiming that he had an esoteric philosophy which had been corrupted by superficial interpreters. In an undated letter (possibly of about 1680) he wrote: [n.43]

Furthermore, in two highly significant passages, Leibniz wrote as if the essence of Platonism and of Pythagoreanism formed a single philosophy. In his Eclaircissement of 1698, he specified this as the reduction of everything to harmonies, or numbers, ideas and perceptions [n.44]; and in the letter to Bierling of 7th July 1711, he wrote: [n.45]

But what is this reference to a Mystical Theology’? As it happens, there survives a document by Leibniz entitled von der wahren Theologia Mystica (‘On the True Mystical Theology’) [n.46], written, unusually, in German, probably around 1696 [n.47]. Its contents, as far as they concern us here, may be summarized as follows: God is pure being; his creatures are compounded of being and nothingness, that is, of spirit and matter. All knowledge is of spiritual reality, and hence ultimately of God, and depends on divine illumination (this is ‘the way of light’ — der Lichtweg). Experience tells us only of matter, which, being unreal, is a shadow-world (thus empiricism is ‘the way of shadows — der Schattenweg). The wise man can discern spiritual realities hidden within the shadows; and these realities are like numbers, which are themselves generated from being and nothingness — the 1 and 0 of binary arithmetic.

Here at last is something which is at once mystical, recognisably Leibnizian, Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean. The mystical insight is that number, which is essentially a spiritual or metaphysical reality, is also the ultimate source of the material world, the science of which is mechanics. At the time of writing the von der wahren Theologia Mystica, this insight acquired a new dimension of significance for Leibniz. Plato himself had an untidy system in which the Ideal Numbers two to ten were immediately subordinate to the One. Leibniz thought he could simplify the Platonic metaphysics by replacing the decadic with binary numerals. This is why he was so excited by his discovery of binary arithmetic (though in fact, as with the differential calculus, he was not its first discoverer — it had already been thought of by Thomas Hariot, 1560–1621 [n.48]). Leibniz even designed a medal commemorating the event, including the slogans: ‘The model of creation,’ and ‘One is enough for deriving everything from nothing.’ [n.49] For Leibniz, the fact that number was the principle of all things was the mystery which had to be grasped if due recognition were to be given to what was right in both spiritualism and mechanism. As he wrote to Remond on 10th January 1714: [n.50]

For Leibniz, the trouble with the Neoplatonists was that their ignorance of mechanical science prevented them from grasping Plato’s insight that the whole physical realm depended on spirit [n.51]. Instead, they were misled by a literal interpretation of his myths into superstitions about fantastic spiritual beings involved in the material world itself.

As a grumble about the two cultures, this position has a very modern ring. As an interpretation of Plato, it is much less modern than one would have expected from a casual reading of the Specimina. But its presence in history should serve as yet another reason for foreswearing such a chameleonic term as ‘Neoplatonism’.

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