I was obliged to see the self-destruction, the self-castration of my people. In the ochlocracy, among the cowardly and venal adulators, spread in all the classes, there is no place anymore for an old man, who will never betray his honour of a Prussian—no God, no man will ever obtain that from me. I just have to die. But the kingdom of the eternal Forms, which has been disclosed by Plato, is indestructible. We, with our science, are at its service. The miasma of putrefaction does not penetrate into the pure ether. … I will fight under the sign of Plato, until my last breath …
- Platon (1920) Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
November 1648 was a trying time for Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law and Parliamentarian general. He had tried being moderate, he had argued for a constitutional monarchy, but Charles just kept trying to escape from the Isle of Wight, and now the monarch’s correspondence had been intercepted, showing that Charles saw every concession and negotiation as a means to buy time and get back to his followers. With grim determination, Ireton put forward his Remonstrance of the Army and watched as Parliament refused to discuss it - then his troops adopted it. Ireton and his men subsequently undertook the only successful coup d'état in British history, using soldiers to physically block unsympathetic members of the Commons from entering the chamber, creating a hand-picked Parliament which would agree to do the unthinkable and execute the king. While this turmoil raged, the scholar and future librarian of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Thomas Smith had written to a friend complaining about his colleagues
most men of parts here have their thoughts so taken up with Platonisme, or other high aery speculations of Divinity or Philosophy that they will scarce vouchsafe to cast a glance on such a new invention for any thing which is not in their way or in their aime
It might seem a ridiculous triviality to quibble about academics reading Plato during a brutal civil war, military intervention and regicide - but Smith was writing to man named Samuel Hartlib, and Smith’s irritation was that Platonism was suffocating the nascent experimental philosophy movement, and Hartlib was a man poised to change the world forever.
We’ll return to Hartlib and Cambridge shortly, but not before we’ve established our aims here. In my last essay we explored the influence of Plato throughout history, specifically his influence on what we could call subversive politics - assassinations, secret conspiracies and societies, utopian plans and schemes. This time I want to continue on this theme, but looking at how Plato’s ideas have been used to stabilise, support the status quo, enact genuine real world change and form the bedrock of state power and authority in multiple different ways.
Act One - Steering the Ship. Chartres, Calvinism and Cambridge
If Eriugena had ruffled feathers with his Christo-Platonism in the ninth century, one could be forgiven for thinking Plato was not a welcome sight within the various bloomings of medieval philosophy. Renaissances aplenty appear all over the place - the Carolingian Renaissance, the Ottonian, Northumbrian and Visigothic Renaissance and the 12th-century Renaissance, to name but a few - the latter associated with Gothic architecture and the transmission of Aristotle and Euclid from Islamic Spain and Byzantium. Aristotelian philosophy would eventually be digested by Christian Europe through the heroic scholasticism of Aquinas, although this story is vastly more complicated than it appears. Neither Aristotle nor Plato had been preserved since antiquity with strict and rigorous boundaries, both had blurred one into another through the entanglement of Neoplatonic thinkers, Syriac Christians, anonymous texts translated into Arabic and then into Latin, Byzantine monks and the Muslim conquests of Egypt and Spain.
Only one of Plato’s texts, Timaeus, was available in Europe through the medieval period. This dialogue had been translated into Latin first by Cicero, then by one Calcidius in the 4th century AD, a scholar of formidable intellect but no biography. We still today have no idea who he was. Calcidius’ Timaeus is truncated, stylised and complete with a heavy commentary of his own
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Calcidius’ work on Plato’s Timaeus, which consists of a partial Latin translation and commentary. So many links in the extensive commentary tradition of the Timaeus are no longer extant. We have snippets from Crantor, a mere allusion to a possible commentary by Posidonius, part of a translation by Cicero, allusions to Adrastus’ commentary, a commentary by Theon of Smyrna that deals only with the mathematical issues, and a mere shadow of Porphyry’s commentary, to name but some …
… Moreover, Calcidius presents one of those very rare cases of a Latin philosophical commentary. As the knowledge of Greek started to wane at the end of Antiquity, Calcidius became one of the main channels through which Plato’s legacy was transmitted to the Middle Ages. Indeed, his work is one of the four master-texts of that era, together with Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy, Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, and Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury.
-Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus (2020) Gretchen Reydams-Schils
We already saw in the last article how Eriugena’s Platonism was received by the church authorities, but by the 12th century scholarly networks were much wider than royal courts. What has become known as the ‘Chartres School’ (ca. 1114-1150), a circle of innovative translators and proto-scholastics founded by Bishop Fulbert at Chartres Cathedral, can today claim the mantle of leading Plato’s first proper synthesis into medieval theology, cosmology and science. The school boasted such luminaries as Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches and Bernardus Silvestris - men who tutored future kings, conducted diplomacy for the Pope, wrote books which synthesised all the available knowledge of the time and met the challenge of pagan cosmology and newly available Greco-Arabic texts head-on.
In short, the Chartrians used the Timaeus to argue that the created world is a rationally ordered, mathematically proportioned cosmos that human reason can progressively understand. Thierry’s Hexaemeron reads Genesis through the Timaeus, identifying the Holy Spirit with the Platonic world-soul, whilst Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia used classical allegories and metaphors to explain the creation of the universe, drawing on Plato’s metaphysics. The thinkers at Chartres took from Plato some crucial principles - the visible universe is a unified, undivided whole, this universe is a copy of an ideal form, the creation of this universe demonstrates the goodness of its maker. Rather than subversion and heterodoxy, Plato functioned at Chartres and in the subsequent spread of its ideas, as a stabilising, order-discovering metaphysical authority, capable of armouring Medieval Christendom against the threats of pagan antiquity and the contemporary Caliphate.
To Cambridge and Calvinism then, some 500 years or so after Chartres. The war to see either King or Parliament triumphant is not where anyone would expect to find Plato, but by the 1640’s we already see scholars complaining of his influence. We know the victors of history by their spoils, names like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke and Isaac Newton fly the flags of liberal individualism and the new scientific method. We are less familiar with names like Henry More, Benjamin Whichcote, George Rust, Ralph Cudworth, Viscountess Anne Conway or Joseph Glanvill - not because they ‘lost’ per se (there was anything but two clear sides), rather because of the tendency of historians and chroniclers to retroactively create simple narratives.
Plato was already available to English scholars through the humanistic and Renaissance channels of European universities and intellectual circles. His rise in philosophical discourse came primarily through thoughtful Puritans, in particular those reared and nurtured at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The college functioned as both a shelter and a breeding ground during its first century, having been established by Sir Walter Mildmay in 1584 - Elizabeth’s Chancellor of the Exchequer - who intended it to be an Anglican-Puritan training centre: “I have set an acorn, which when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof”. Emmanuel’s Puritan children moved to adopt Plato as the battles of the 17th century raised the stakes for the nation. Charles’ defeat at the hands of Parliamentary forces encouraged all factions to press home their advantage, crystallising into the dogmatic Calvinist wing of Westminster Assembly at one pole and the amorphous, shifting blob of antinomian radicals, mystic prophets, Familists, Behmenists, Legatine-Arians and other nonconformists we could dub ‘enthusiasts’ (to use a term from the period) at the other.
In this febrile atmosphere it was Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith, More and their circles who saw the dangers of their own theological position and reached for Plato to grab the reigns. The Calvinist position of an arbitrary sovereign who consigned souls to salvation or damnation via an inscrutable decree looked unjustifiable and Plato offered a step down - a cosmos ordered by an innate rational goodness rather than by raw will alone, with divine reason lit in every receptive mind - the ‘candle of the Lord’. Against predestination they found and explicated moral striving, against unknowable judgement they put forth the eternal and immutable truth grounded in God's own nature. Plato provided an ancient balm to temper the heat of dogma and zeal, looking across years of iconoclasm, violence and fraternal bitterness the philosopher offered the cool of reason. In the fevered 1640’s Platonism functioned as a genuine steadying force, a plea for tolerance and a few rational fundamentals against both Calvinist certainty and radical enthusiasm.
To understand what happened to the Cambridge Platonists is to dive into the outrageously complex theological and philosophical discourses of those years. With hindsight there are roughly two positions which ‘win’ out - the experimental movement, anachronistically the ‘Scientific Method’, culminating in the Royal Society, and the more theologically tolerant stances (sensu lato) of Anglican latitudinarianism deriving from Richard Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists. This tolerance fed into the functioning of the Restoration era Church of England such that Cambridge ‘latitude’ was the dominant mood for the next century or so, helping keep an even keel between hard-line Calvinism and the passionate inner light of the enthusiasts. Platonism as a doctrine was easily attacked from every angle, and only Henry More ever dared call himself a Platonist - it was ‘airy’ speculation to the Baconian-Hartlib experimenters and a form of Pelagian heresy, crypto-papist Arminianism to the Calvinists. Some Platonists were also fascinated by the nascent scientific approach, just as they were devout Christians. More’s 1653 treatise An Antidote Against Atheism exemplifies their gathering rearguard position, in which he presents ‘hard evidence’ of divination, sorcery, magical powers within the English populace, whilst also condemning excessive enthusiasm. I’ll end with a wonderful footnote on the matter I found in the essay Reconciling Theory and Fact: The Problem of ‘Other Faiths’ in Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists by David Pailin:
Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism (1653) refers, among other matters, to reports of ‘Coskinomancy’ (or divination) and charms, ‘supernatural effects’, bewitchings and sorcery, and happenings at meetings of witches. According to More, the Fellows of Queens’ College, Cambridge preach an annual ‘Anniversary Sermon’ at Huntingdon to keep fresh the memory of the discovery of witchcraft at Warbois. I gather that this sermon is no longer preached.
Act Two - Shaping Souls. Tory vs Prussian Hellenism.
The two previous examples of Chartres and Cambridge were cases of politico-theological disputes leaning on Platonic philosophy. The next two are far more concerned with the actual process of shaping and moulding human souls, in line with a new vision. These are questions of who gets to rule, how to rear those guardians and how should they be identified.
Plato’s influence in England could not have fallen further than during the 18th century. The Cambridge scholars passed, one by one, into history and left behind no institutional Platonism, no mechanism for generational preservation. More dies in 1687, Cudworth in 1688, the philosophical faculty of the English-speaking world is swiftly claimed by Locke. Cambridge itself pivots to mathematics and Newton, whilst Oxford stays Aristotelian. The excesses and violence of the Civil War tarnishes Neoplatonism, which now reeks of mysticism and sinister priests. The deists and Unitarians then blame Plato for the state of contemporary Christianity. Joseph Priestley’s An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) attempted to perform a radical surgery on the whole edifice and excise Plato entirely, diagnosing the Trinity, grace, body-soul dualism and much else as Platonic cancers. This line of thought became highly influential in the Enlightenment years, probably best summed up by Plato’s greatest enemy - Thomas Jefferson - who described his version of Priestlean-rational-deism as the ‘euthanasia of Platonic Christianity’.
Priestley did not invent this critique though, in Germany Lutheran orthodoxy had already moved to condemn Plato’s influence a century prior. The theologian Ehregott Daniel Colberg had written the two-volume Das Platonisch-Hermetisches Christenthum (1690-91) in which he identified in the contemporary mystical movements such as the Rosicrucians, Quakers, Anabaptists, followers of Jacob Böhme (amongst others), a strain of Schwärmerei or fanaticism/enthusiasm ultimately derived from Alexandria and Pythagoras and Plato. The philosopher’s star would wane in Germany until the publication of Johann Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae in 1744, setting Plato on his rehabilitation arc through the Göttingen school, Christian Gottlob Heyne and Johann Winckelmann - the direction of German Hellenism cast against the French love for stately Roman classicism.
Jumping to Britain, 1840. The economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that the nation had two great thinkers - Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and founder of Romanticism. Few today know Coleridge as a political Platonist, but in 1829 he had written On the Constitution of the Church and the State, arguing that Britain’s parliamentary monarchy contained an ideal form of government. Coleridge represented a now-forgotten form of British idealism, dubbed ‘Germano-Coleridgian’ by Mill, concerned with the deep, spiritual roots of the nation as represented by “Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth” and opposed to the cold calculating machine-logic of the progressives (Bentham, Locke, Hume, Paley, Pitt). Coleridge saw a role for a national clerisy, a secular and broad community of learned individuals like philosophers, poets, scientists and scholars. They would be tasked with cultivating the minds, morals and spiritual connection of the people. Unfortunately, no such class formally existed in the early 19th century, but there was a man determined to make one.
Benjamin Jowett was an extraordinary scholar. He took up his undergraduate studies at Oxford’s Balliol College in 1836, two years later - before he had even graduated - he was appointed a Fellow of the university. He went on to became Regius Professor of Greek in 1855, working on St Paul’s Epistles and his lifelong project of translating Plato. He became Master of Balliol in 1870 and published his translation of the dialogues the following year, establishing his version of Plato as the standard English text for the next century. Jowett was not content with simply reading Greek in private, as he wrote to Florence Nightingale in 1873 (despite a failed proposal of marriage to Nightingale, they maintained correspondence for many years):
I should like to govern the world through my pupils.
The 1850’s saw the confluence of several thorny political issues in Britain, in particular the questions of how to govern at home (including Ireland), how to govern their colonial subjects - especially in India - and how to select for the most capable men. To cut down an otherwise interesting story, Jowett became a crucial lobbyist during the 1850-54 years which saw the reformation of the Indian civil service (ICS) and the introduction of a public exam to select new candidates for the job. Jowett and Charles Trevelyan pushed for Oxford to become the major source of young men, and worked for the exams to skew towards the classics. As one recent thesis noted:
many famous later-Victorian colonial figures educated at Oxford (especially Jowett’s Balliol), from Charles Henry Pearson and Alfred Milner to Cecil Rhodes and George Curzon, would see themselves as ‘a quasi-platonic set of guardians at home and abroad.’ Clearly then, Kent’s cursory argument that after the Republic was introduced to the Greats curriculum ‘the Noble Lie, with its classic reconciliation of elitism and egalitarianism, became part of the intellectual furniture of the “men of gold” sent out by Jowett’s Balliol to govern the Empire,’ is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In this context and that of the evidence discussed throughout this article, it is unlikely that the Noble Lie, such a potentially useful concept for ruling elites, did not at least have some influence on the Oxford and ICS curriculums.
-Meritocratic Claims, Elitist Intentions: Oxford and the Indian Civil Service Examinations, 1853-55 (2014) Daniel Roberts
These Balliol students, through Jowett’s moulding of the college as a training centre for Anglican-Platonic ‘Guardians’ or ‘benevolent rulers’, certainly came to see themselves in that vein many decades later:
It is the opinion of Philip Mason that in our period the men of the ICS ‘were chosen and trained on Plato’s principles as Guardians who would rule in the light of their own vision of the Good and the Beautiful’. And the Oxford Greats course, with its broad approach and its particular emphasis on philosophy certainly went some way to bringing these principles to life…
…the lifestyle and ethos of Indian civil servants, with their elite sobriquet of ‘the heaven-born’ and their tendency to live apart, not only from the Indian population, but also from other Britons in India, may, in some ways, have resembled those of the Guardians
-The Indian Civil Service, Classical Studies, and an Education in Empire, 1890–1914 (2023) Heather Ellis
As Plato became useful for the expanding British empire and her governance, so the philosopher once again reappeared in Germany, this time during the disruption of the First World War. Winckelmann’s decision to graft Greece onto German culture had been a fork in the road, and the downstream ramifications of Schleiermacher, Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Bildung educational philosophy and especially Kant - led to three versions of Plato on the eve of Alfred von Schlieffen’s fateful manoeuvre: Paul Natorp's Platos Ideenlehre, a form of neo-Kantian argument that Plato’s philosophy anticipated modern idealism and scientific epistemology; the pedagogical Plato of the Stefan George circle (which we covered in the last article) and the increasingly political Plato from the brilliant mind of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Wilamowitz for short).
Wilamowitz was one of the most important classical scholars of all time (Prussian, born 1848 - died 1931), publishing works on Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristotle. He ran the still-extant Inscriptiones Graecae project to translate and publish all the known epigraphs and inscriptions across the Hellenic archipelago, as well as famously feuding with Nietzsche after the publication of the latter’s work The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Wilamowitz produced a two-volume work on Plato in 1919, written in German rather than Latin or Greek - a precise, scientific book that nonetheless thinly disguises the author’s own personal identification with Plato, moving between remorse and anger that contemporary scholarship is so dry and bloodless, then claiming Plato as a stymied politician who turned to philosophy as a means to explore his ambitions further. Platon was attacked by members of the George circle, although their differences were not that great. However, Wilamowitz’s personal and psychological Prussian aristocratic lament was far from the only mode in which Plato was put to use during those years. As Jowett had his Balliol pupils, so Wilamowitz had his disciples, one of whom was poised to take his Berlin professorship in 1921.
Werner Jaeger was one of those men, like many great Russian composers, who was born into old, aristocratic Europe and died in the new, democratic United States after the Second World War. A student of Wilamowitz, Jaeger was also a superlative scholar of the Greek world, and also believed (like Stefan George, like his old teacher) that Greece and Plato was the tonic for a society being torn apart by factionalism, ideology and conflict. He went beyond writing angry books though, founding his own movement - Der dritter Humanismus, the Third Humanism - so named the third after the Italian Renaissance and die Goethezeit, the Age of Goethe. This ‘new’ humanism had self-aware ambitions from the very beginning, principally seeking to rear New Germans within an ideal polis through the Platonic framework of paideia. Jaeger was not shy about melding this whole process into the State, an ‘ethic’ of the State - complete with Hegelian undertones - as he clearly said during a 1924 lecture:
Die griechische Staatsethik im Zeitalter des Plato
I would translate this as ‘Greek political spirit/ethic in the age of Plato’. Crucially both Jaeger and Wilamowitz, despite differing in certain aspects of their interpretation, emphasised Plato as a political thinker. The more abstract Neo-Kantian Plato gave way to a Weimar-era Plato who sought to push back the disintegrating forces of modern liberalism, atomisation and strife. This Plato looked for political solutions to cultural disunity - even as blood was flowing on the streets and new forms of art were being birthed, adherents of an older Prusso-German Hellenism hatched plans to shape future souls in the name of the polis.
I don’t want to dwell too long on the Nazi period, the foil of every political article ever - but we should mention that the Weimar Plato was succeeded not by a Third Humanism Plato, but a Third Reich Plato. Stefan George’s circle of thinkers and artists generated at least 26 monographs of Plato during his time, one of which - Kurt Hildebrandt, a doctor and Hellenist - went on to write multiple, idiosyncratic works on Platonic philosophy and modern political revitalisation. In his 1933 book Platon. Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (Plato: The Struggle of the Mind/Spirit for Power), Hildebrandt attempted to fuse Plato with Nietzsche, combining a kind of ‘spiritual racism’ and eroticism with the George circle’s intense passion for Plato as a founder, leader and political visionary. The book had a mixed reception even amongst the circle, with its complex, strange arguments triangulated between himself, Nietzsche and Plato:
Callicles represents the Herrenmoral (Master Morality), and some are happy to argue that he shares the same thoughts as Nietzsche. After all, one finds Callicles is a “a man all along.” A bad sign of how Germans treat their great Men! … As it turns out, the best of this Herrenmoral is approved by Socrates-Plato, whereas Callicles, far away from Nietzsche’s mind (Geist), sought Power as mere means to satisfy bestial cravings.
-Hildebrandt 1933, 134
Ultimately the view that the Greeks and Germans shared a special bond, an argument laid out over centuries, combined with the esoteric racial and vitalistic philosophies of Hildebrandt and his friends, Jaeger’s desire to create a new kind of German soul in the fire of Hellenic humanism and Wilamowitz aristo-psychological despair at the state of German modernity all looked like suspicious Nazi nonsense to a thinker like Karl Popper. Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies buried the use of Plato as a political thinker for several generations, even into the present. He assessed Plato’s thought as totalitarian, elitist and a seedbed of dangerous ideologies which pushed for social engineering and class stratification. The dust of the Second World War was not just physical, but the metaphysical destruction of Plato as a serious political and religious thinker. Germany had been under the spell of irrationalism, Hegelianism, Marxism and Platonism, and the results spoke for themselves - no more, thus spoke Popper.
Act Three - There is no God but God, and Plato is his philosopher-king
Al-Farabi and the Ayatollahs
Up until this point we’ve seen some fairly shadowy and minor, not unimportant, but not world altering instances of Platonic philosophy in action. In this section we’re going to briefly trace the history of Plato and Islam, then to see how it all came together in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Some have written that while Christendom always looked to Aristotle for its classical inspiration - the Islamic world looked to Plato. The Abbasid Caliphate (AD 750-1258) inherited an empire with numerous Hellenised minorities, the intellectual firepower of the Sassanian Gondishapur Academy and no rival Academy in the Greek world. From the mid-eighth to the late-tenth century Baghdad became the centre of a huge state-sponsored translation movement, aimed at assimilating Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac and Persian texts into Arabic thought. Very little of Plato was translated, none directly, but what was had no political opponent, since Aristotle’s Politics never arrived in Baghdad. Later Neoplatonic Greek works were better known - and Neoplatonism seemed to fit well into a theological system defined by its insistence on an absolute singularity of divinity: a pure, whole, oneness of being - tawhid or توحيد.
Muslim Neoplatonists like Al-Kindi borrowed from later Greek thought, despite numerous textual errors (Plato arrived through Galen; the so-called ‘Theology of Aristotle’ turned out to be Plotinus, and nobody to this day knows who actually wrote the highly influential Liber de causis - perhaps Proclus, but the text arrived in the West as an Arabic translation of Aristotle, Albertus Magnus decided it was written by a Jewish author named Ibn David). Another supposed Neoplatonist was the Persian Abu Bakr al-Razī, an esteemed physician but sadly a philosopher largely lost to history, his beliefs exist today almost entirely through his enemies’ descriptions of him.
The pivotal figure though is Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (roughly AD 870 - 950), an Islamic polymath of such power that he became known to posterity as the ‘Second Teacher’, the first being Aristotle. Al-Farabi took the Republic‘s philosopher-king concept and refitted him onto the structure of Islamic thought, producing the idea of a virtuous city ruled by a supreme figure who could combine perfect reason with prophetic insight. Interestingly he never explicitly named Mohammed as an example of this figure, but it became an assumption amongst Islamic scholars that he surely meant God’s last messenger to be the exemplar.
Where al-Farabi managed to build this virtuous city from the accessible-yet-second-hand Plato, another Plato circulated alongside Galen and certainly reached more readers: today he is called the ‘Pseudo-Platonica’, the misattributions, forgeries and mistakes which were more influential than the real deal, including wisdom literature, alchemy and magic. One fantastic example is the 9th century Book of Laws or Kitab al-nawamis:
The reception of the Arabo-Islamic Mediaeval world to The Laws of Plato ‒ the title of one of the later and most complex of Plato’s dialogues ‒ took two very different paths. On one side, the Arabic version or adaptation of Galen’s synopsis of Plato’s Law (Kitāb al-Nawāmīs li-Aflāṭun); on the other, Plato’s Laws became a way to label a certain form of ‘natural magic’ (sīmāʾ) that involves the manipulation of natural substances to obtain mesmerizing special effects.
-Hallucinations and Smoke Screens: The Pseudo-Platonic ‘Laws of Nature’ (Nawāmīs) and Their Transmission (2023) Lucia Raggetti
To be absolutely clear, the Arabic world did not receive any Plato directly. Galen’s summaries and descriptions of Platonic works were the building blocks, along with later Neoplatonic Greek thought - but the Pseudo-Plato took on a life of its own. This Book of Laws likely came from a polytheistic astral cult based in the city of Harran, long associated with magic, Abraham, Marduk, Cyrus and moon worship. The preface of the book contains a falsified lineage, claiming to be a translation of Galen’s Plato by the Arab Nestorian Hunayn al-Ibadi. The book was then anonymously translated into Latin in Spain sometime during the 12th century, circulating under the name The Book of the Cow. The scholar and bishop William of Auvergne noticed in 1220 that the book was not a faithful rendition of Plato, as did the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - who described it as
full of detestable dreams and nonsense ... no less alien to Plato than these dreadful things are alien to Plato's decency and wisdom
-The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages (2002) Dag Nikolaus Hasse
I emphasise this text only as a good example of the process of Plato’s reception into Islam. The pseudo and occultic Plato became a sage in an ancient line of revealed wisdom alongside Hermes and Pythagoras, gaining the honorific ‘divine Plato’ which fitted him better than it fitted Galen’s dialogues. In the 12th and 13th centuries these two forms of Plato merged. Scholars have described the result as a new ‘Arabic Platonism without Plato’. The Persian mystic Suhrawardi is a clear example: he placed Plato among those blessed with divine illumination, those who had walked the path of inner light - a roster which included Zoroaster and practitioners of Islamic and pre-Islamic esotericism. Suhrawardi was executed by a son of Saladin, Al-Malik, for heresy and blasphemy.
Yet again, as in Europe, esoteric movements found Neoplatonism useful - this time it was the structure which appealed to those occultic and mystical strains of Islam. Since the Neoplatonic cosmos descends from the ‘One’ through Intellect and Soul in graded stages, and access to the truth is graded in the same way - this lends itself easily onto a community organised around initiation and hidden knowledge. Ismaili thinkers from al-Sijistani to al-Kirmani tried to link the cosmic hierarchy to the hierarchy of the imam and his missionaries, and interpreted scripture looking for an inner meaning (batin) that only the initiated could reach. The Brethren of Purity’s (Buyid Dynasty secret society located in Basra) epistles also used the same approach as a course of instruction for their system of anonymous fellowships. Later the mystical philosophy running from Ibn Arabi to Mulla Sadra absorbed the concept of emanation and the ‘perfect human being’ and introduced it into Sufi and Twelver Shi’ist thought.
The arguments over Neoplatonism within Islam aren’t the main focus here - by and large, those attempting to provide a rational, metaphysical account of Islam have fallen back on Neoplatonic thought, even when trying to throw it out (see Al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya). Anyone who asserts that God is one, singular, unchanging, everywhere, unlike anything else, and creator of everything - that person must either use the most developed and sophisticated philosophical system available to explain the logical consequences or something else. Neoplatonism offered the most developed vocabulary for holding transcendence and presence together, hence why Aquinas, Maimonides and Avicenna all drew on it independently.
Political Platonism however certainly quietened down as philosophers and scholars worked through internal disputes, then managed the external disaster of the Mongol invasions. After Averroes, few writers ever tried to design a city. Instead, the philosopher-ruler survived as the ideal prince of handbooks and guides, a line that runs through Tusi’s Nasirean Ethics, Davani's Akhlaq-i Nasiri, Kınalızade’s Ahlâk-ı Alâî and others, spread out as they were through Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal polities. Plato provided the foundational archetype of a well-ordered soul and its mirrored well-ordered city, virtues and concepts which merged comfortably with Islam’s external, legalistic sharia vision of the Good.
After the 13th century Neoplatonic ideals and politics became concentrated in the Persianate world. Its Shi’i theology was a natural fit - the Imam mediates between God and the world, and Shi’ism already examined scripture for secret inner meanings. Tusi’s Avicennian philosophy was integrated into Twelver theology and the Sunni world moved on without it. The Safavids made Iran Twelver Shi’i after 1501, building institutional educational networks that ensured Islamic Neoplatonism never faded into obscurity - Sadra was retained in the curriculum well into modernity, something of a fateful decision for the country.
Tehran, 1979. Over a thousand years had passed since Al-Farabi attempted to merge Plato and Islam. Ruhollah Mostafavi Khomeini was just shy of 80 years old, but he was a man who personified in his every action the severity and intellect required to become a marja-e taqlid (a model for imitation) for the Shia world. Khomeini had done his time in the seminary at Qom, emerging with a novel solution to the problem of Shi’ite political power: Twelver Shi’ism holds that the twelfth imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi, is hidden from the faithful until the End Times - requiring Shias to decide for themselves how to relate to earthly authority. For Khomeini it was clear that a millennia of quietism had led the faithful into an intolerable position, one where the Pahlavi Shahs were undermining clerical authority, enfranchising women and redefining what public life looked like in the secular image of the West.
Khomeini was exiled for his outspoken opposition to the Shah. In Najaf he lectured on his solution - wilayat al-fiqh - the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist.
the ruling jurist in the thought of Khomeini mirrors the philosopher-king mystic of the Neoplatonic tradition who achieves the necessary qualifications of rule from his contact with the divine intellect through contemplation and mystical practices. For instance, Vanessa Martin underscores the importance of mystical elements in Khomeini’s political doctrine, and Abbas Amanat claims that Khomeini’s thought has “an unmistakable mystico-philosophical core that was colored by Shi’ite legal trappings.” In the same vein and more forcefully, Hamid Dabashi describes the ruler of Khomeini’s regime as the “philosopher king in the Platonic understanding of the term”
-Ayatollah Khomeini: From Islamic Government to Sovereign State (2019) Rasoul Namazi
His lectures in exile were compiled into a book called Islamic Government: Jurist's Guardianship (Ḥokūmat-i Eslāmī Wilāyat-i Faqīh). This text was only shared with his inner circle until after the Revolution was secured, Khomeini insisted beforehand that he and his followers were fighting for democratic reform. In reality what Khomeini was building went far beyond reform, or even a simple reactionary theocracy.
When he devised the Islamic Republic of Iran, he constructed something with a distinctly Platonic architecture: a Supreme Leader, the man considered most learned in divine law, who was placed above the ordinary functions of the state, alongside a Guardian Council of jurists who could vet every candidate and scrutinise each proposed law against the ideal. Plato’s philosopher-king was twisted into a real theological and political office. The Nocturnal Council of the Laws, a body of elders who guarded the regime’s foundations, became a true committee with the power to disqualify. Very few if any ancient political philosophers have a claim on shaping a modern state so directly.
Of course, Khomeini’s Platonism was one strand amongst many, which included the Marxist energy to confront and revolt; Islamic modernism’s willingness to reinterpret scripture in the face of the world as it is; Islamic militant ideologies such as Qutbism and Navvab Safavi’s Fada’iyan-e Islam, and global Third Worldism, from Algerian independence to Latin American liberation theology. Scholars have pointed out the intense contradiction within Khomeinism, that the revolutionary spirit of politicised Shi’ite absolute jurism represents a profound break with a thousand years of Shia history - in the name of preventing blasphemous innovations within Islam, and creating a purified, traditional vision of Islamic life in Iran.
Khomeini knew philosophy, and his ideal of Islamic government under the ulama relied heavily on the Platonic notion (probably meant ironically by the original Platonic Socrates of The Republic) of a specially educated “guardian” class led by a “philosopher-king” wise enough to know transcendent truth and able with that knowledge to produce and maintain a perfect government that would safeguard all national and spiritual interests. This was Shiism reduced to a strange (and, as it would turn out, violent) parody of Plato.
-The Shia revival : how conflicts within Islam will shape the future (2006) Vali Nasr
Of all the political movements we’ve seen so far, the impact of Plato in 1970’s Iran (however small relative to the theology) was probably the most profound for world history. Shi’ite and wider Islamic history has been forever changed, geopolitical events such as the horribly brutal Iran-Iraq War, the American invasion of Iraq, the current Iran-American conflict, the Salafi-Wahhabi Saudi axis reaction, the position of Afghanistan and Pakistan-India relations are all testaments to the Ayatollah and his vision.
Postscript
In April 2022 CBS News published an online editorial, aiming to show their readers ‘behind the curtain’ on the Ukraine-Russia War. Their focus was on the Russian writer and thinker Aleksandr Dugin, a figure who slots nicely into the role of Rasputin-Wormtongue-King’s Advisor - a bearded man often called something like ‘Putin’s brain’ or ‘Putin’s philosopher’. Despite the breathless panic of CBS, Dugin is nothing of the sort and would be better described as a marginal esoteric writer with a talent for online self-promotion. Through his dozens and dozens of books Dugin has developed a syncretic philosophy of geopolitics, drawing on names like Evola, Carl Haushofer, Heidegger and Alain de Benoist to build his ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ position - a stance defined in opposition to the Anglo-American Atlanticist world order, as he sees it.
Amongst his list of influences, Dugin counts a French scholar called Henry Corbin (1903-1978). Corbin was a philosopher and theologian who turned to Islamic Neoplatonism and Iranian Shi’ite esotericism as a means of escaping the oppressive materialism of the West, in particular the work of al-Suhrawardi and the Illuminationism of ancient Persia. Dugin has made great use of Corbin’s Neoplatonic thought, re-interpreting and raising it from its original individual perspective to one of geopolitics - especially Corbin’s mundus imaginalis (a world of intermediate imagination) and ‘existential-semantic time’: the former a metaphysical realm between the spiritual and reality, the latter a conceptual description of how civilisations approach time differently. Dugin has used these and other Neoplatonic ideas to help promote and defend his vision of a Russian state which ascends far above the profane West, with ambitions verging on the apocalyptic, intertwined with dreams of a Third Rome, Byzantium, a Neo-Mongolian collective, Orthodox priests blessing tank shells and drones, Islamic Neoplatonism as the ‘Light-Logos’ Apollonian alternative to Western nihilism.
Dugin is indeed a great admirer of Iranian Neoplatonic philosophy, particularly the Illuminationist (isharqi) philosophy of Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191), several of whose works Dugin has translated from Persian (Persian is the only Eastern language he can read fluently)…
… He posits that Iranian civilization, rooted in an Aryan ethos characterized by a metaphysics of light and a struggle against darkness, fundamentally differs from the Semitic civilizations, which include both Arab–Islamic and Judaic traditions. He argues that the Iranians subtly transformed Arab Islam by infusing it with their “solar” Aryan spirit, primarily through the esoteric dimensions of Shi‘ism and Sufism…
… In Iran, the group of intellectuals who express interest in Dugin and see him as a Heideggerian philosopher—including Hojjat al-Islam Abdol Hossain Khosrowpanah and Gholamreza Avani—inherit a much older Heideggerian legacy. Iranian twentieth-century intellectuals like Ahmad Fardid (d. 1994) and Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969) used Heideggerian categories to coin the influential notion of gharbzadegi (“Westoxication”)…
… Dugin refers to Fardid and his disciple Reza Davani Ardakani, emphasizing how they successfully integrated Heideggerian philosophy into the framework of Shi’i Neoplatonism. He highlights their synthesis in which Heidegger’s concepts of Ereignis (“event of appropriation”) and Der letzte Gott (“the Last God”) were reinterpreted through Shi’i eschatology.
-Eurasia and eschatology. Dugin’s antiliberal resonances in the Muslim world (2025) Gasimov & Laruelle
Dugin is in some way the perfect end to our story here, not because he embodies a new Ayatollah or Stefan George or Benjamin Jowett, but because his relentless energy for synthesising, lumping and integrating areas of esoteric thought joins together Western and Islamic Neoplatonism, neatly wrapping up where we started. Political Plato has never been as popular or as influential as his philosophical and religious variants, but I hope these three case studies have shed some light on three very different times, places and motivations - Chartrian theology, Calvinist statecraft, imperial management, civil identity and conflict, revolution, social engineering and secret societies - medieval France, early modern and modern England, Imperial to Weimar Germany and contemporary Persia.
Reading List
Kaldas SM. The Cambridge Platonists and Early Modern Philosophy: Inventing the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge University Press; 2024.
Reydams-Schils, G. Calcidius on Plato's "Timaeus": Greek philosophy, Latin reception, and Christian contexts. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Hedley, D and Hutton, S (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, Springer, 2008
Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Gasimov, K., Laruelle, M. Eurasia and eschatology. Dugin’s antiliberal resonances in the Muslim world. Stud East Eur Thought 78, 377–399, 2026.
Namazi, Rasoul. Ayatollah Khomeini: From Islamic Government to Sovereign State. Iranian Studies, vol. 52, no. 1-2, 2019.
Gutas, D. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʻAbbāsid Society, London and New York: Routledge, 1998
Das, Aileen R. Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Bonazzi, M. Towards Nazism: On the Invention of Plato’s Political Philosophy. Comparative and Continental Philosophy 12:3, 2020.
Hutton, S. British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2015.