“... the Platonists of late antiquity believed that Plato was “divine and Apollonian.” For them “philosophy was conceived as a sacred rite” and Plato a hierophant that revealed the world as theophany. They recognized divine power throughout all of nature. Before dualist theologies blinded us to that world and before materialist science erased it altogether, the supernatural was not elsewhere but here, in nature. Gods were everywhere: in plants, in rocks, in animals, in temples and in us. And it was precisely the aim of the later Platonists to insure that this integration of the supernatural and the natural, of the divine and the human remained alive. Plato’s teaching was a divine revelation that preserved this integration. It was a revelation of a specifically hermetic kind; that is, its secrets were fathomed through noetic reflection, and the philosophers of his school saw themselves as links in a Golden Chain connecting heaven to earth.
Divinization for Neoplatonists meant that thinking remained rooted in the unthinkable: the ineffable One. They did not aim to articulate a true doctrine or dogma; rather their written reflections and teachings functioned as mystagogic vehicles into an ineffable identity. For theurgical Platonists particularly, Plato was a mystagogue who outlined the matrix of this revelation in the Timaeus. As Plato explains, it is the mysterious maternal receptacle (hupodochē) and space (chōra) that allows the Forms to come into existence. This cosmogonic chōra, which Plato says cannot be thought, has—according to the later Platonists—its correlate within us and is the receptacle for every act of theurgy. The goal of philosophy, then, is not conceptual knowledge but cosmogonic activity: to become divinely creative. As Diotima tells Socrates in the Symposium, it is not beauty, ultimately, that you want, but to “give birth” in beauty, to participate in creation.”
~ Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Platonist’s Luminous Body
(from Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichaean and Other Ancient Literature. Essays in Honor of Birger A. Pearson)
