Sound, hearing and magic names in ancient neoplatonism. Part 2: gods and theurgy

Annotation

Both Christian theologists and pagan philosophers of early Alexandrian tradition (2–4 cent. AD) took great pains to substantiate magic efficacy of names and speech. Linguistic conceptions of Plato’s Cratylus, Aristotelian De interpretatione and that of Stoics were reconsidered. One of the major difficulties of that time was the possibility for a human to communicate with gods and the intellectual realm, which hardly agrees with Platonic metaphysics. However, Neoplatonists manage to prove that incorporeal gods can produce speech and perceive sounds without any material intermediaries. Musical sounds, both artificial and natural, are symbolically related to the harmony of the intelligible realm. Similarly, among words of human languages there are particular ones of a symbolic nature that substantiate the theurgic communication with intelligible gods.

Keywords

word, sound, name, Aristotle, Proclus Lycius, Ammonius Hermiae, philosophy of language

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The research was carried out with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 21-011-44078 "The Word of God and the Book of Nature in the focus of human cognition (Interaction of Christian theology and Science at different historical stages)".