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5
some RemaRks on the Meaning of EsoteRicism
and Plato’s UnwRitten DoctRines
Francesco Coniglione
Plato’s work, which has always played a central role in the history of
Western esotericism, has recently attracted the attention of the Tübin-
gen-Milan School for the so-called “unwritten doctrines”, to which an
esoteric nature has been attributed. However, the scholars of esoteric
Plato have not always been fully aware of the true meaning of eso-
tericism in the past. In this essay, after a presentation of this theme in
the light of the most up-to-date research, I have analysed the sense in
which esotericism concerns Plato. I have argued that Platonic esoteri-
cism cannot be interpreted as a kind of protological doctrine of the
rst principles, but should be seen in a symbolic-anagogical way that
in fact retrieves the experience of traditional mystery-cults, which in
Plato is framed and governed within a philosophical discourse. Finally,
I conclude that Plato is central to European culture because he linked
together three fundamental aspects: the dialectical-argumentative di-
mension, thereby establishing the Western canon of philosophy; the
allegorical-narrative aspect, expressed in the narrative of the myth in
the popular dimension of religiosity; and nally the esoteric-initiatory
one, found in the oral teaching of the unwritten doctrines and which is
typical of Gnosis, aiming at a spiritual elevation and contemplation of
the True, understood as absolutely ineable.
Keywords: Plato, Esotericism, Gnosis, Unwritten doctrines
Plato’s work has always played a central role among the practi-
tioners of western esotericism, to the point that there are those
who have stated that «esoteric ontology and anthropology
would hardly exist without Platonic philosophy» (Von Stuckrad
2005: 13). Even in the academic world and among the scholars
of philosophical thought, attention has long been drawn to the
esoteric aspects of his thought, particularly in relation to the
so-called “unwritten doctrines” (Richard 2008: 23-53). However,
in order to better understand the sense of this interest and pro-
vide a more accurate assessment of the subject, it is necessary
Mondi 1-2018 (April 2018): 5-51 – ISSN 2533-1450 // ISBN 978-88-6496-183-5
© 2018 by Gruppo Editoriale Bonanno. All right reserved
6
to make some preliminary clarications on the meaning of es-
otericism in general, especially in the light of the most recent
studies that have removed it from the popular notions of the
occult and superstition. In fact, Western esotericism has always
been a very controversial and suspicious subject, which has
only recently been seriously and scientically accredited, free-
ing it from the mistrust due to the misuse that is often made of
it. We refer, in particular, to the period beginning with Frances
Yates’s pioneering study on Giordano Bruno (1964). However,
it was decades before the breakthrough in the eld of esoter-
ic studies occurred, which began to produce results with An-
toine Faivre (1994) and other high-ranking scholars and nally
reached substantial scientic and conceptual maturity at the
Amsterdam School (Hanegraa & Pijnenburg 2009; Faivre
2009), the founder of which was Wouter J. Hanegraa (2012;
2012b). Thanks to them, the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Eso-
tericism (Hanegraa 2006) was produced, written by illustrious
specialists of the subject and currently one of the most relia-
ble and complete sources for everything related to the themes
of esotericism. This collection of works, together with those of
many other scholars in a literature that has grown exponential-
ly over the last twenty years, has led many to say that a new
paradigm has been introduced in the study of Western esoteri-
cism, especially concerning contributions provided by Wouter
J. Hanegraa, Kucko von Stuckrad and Christopher Partridge
(Asprem & Granholm 2013: 23-24; Granholm 2014: 26-30). In this
context, we believe it is useful to rethink the subject of “Esoter-
ic Plato”, and in particular to give an assessment of what has
been produced by the so-called Tübingen-Milan School. This
should avoid a general and often inexact conception of esoteri-
cism, which frequently ends up focusing its attention mainly
on the character of secrecy of its doctrines without a clear no-
tion of its fundamental meaning.
1. The Sense of Esotericism. Some Short Remarks
It is not easy to give a precise denition of esotericism, also be-
cause the substantive term (esotericism) is recent and has not
been used historically by its followers to dene themselves;
rather, it has been used by scholars from time to time to iden-
7
tify its traits (Hanegraa 2006b: 337). Indeed, there are very
dierent characterizations among scholars, at least since it has
become an academically accredited subject of study in the last
15-20 years and a specic area of the history of religions, to the
point that an identity marker has been seen in it that takes on
specic contents from time to time, and therefore it cannot be
characterized by a stable and well-dened content over time
and in dierent places (Bergunder 2010).
This is not the place to discuss this issue, which is still be-
ing debated. If we want to give a negative characterization, “by
contrast” or by dierence, and hence a minimal denition, we
can also accept the proposal made by Hanegraa in the intro-
duction to the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, which
picks up the one provided at the time, controversially, by James
Webb, a pioneer in this eld (1989: 13; 1990: 191-192): esoteri-
cism is all that belongs to the so-called “rejected knowledge”
where «we store away everything we do not want to accept be-
cause it diers too much from our ideal image of ourselves and
our cherished values.» (Hanegraaf 2012d: vii); we can also say,
with Helmut Möller and Ellic Howe (1986), that it is part of the
“Western undergrounds”. In this way, we want to highlight how
esotericism (and the disciplines related to it or that are part of
it) is the historical product of a polemical narrative, the origins
of which were identied by Hanegraa (2005: 226 and passim)
in the birth of monotheism, and which has served to build the
identity of the West as we know it. As we shall see, this polem-
ical discourse is not extraneous to Platonic intentions, and in
our view must therefore date back to the constitution of philos-
ophy as a discipline of the logos, to the origins of Greek thought.
However, if we do not want to limit ourselves to merely neg-
ative characterization, we can – according to the latest and ac-
credited studies – share the point of view that a typical aspect
of esotericism is its claim to absolute knowledge, that is, a total
view of the truth that responds to all key issues of mankind and
which escapes the possibility of empirical control, although it
is open to the control of anyone who wants to go down this road
(von Stuckrad 2006: 609). Esotericism is also generally associ-
ated with the attribute of secrecy which, as we shall see, may
mean dierent things.
In the context of this “positive” sense, perhaps the most
widespread way in which esotericism has been understood is
8
as a set of doctrines that has been part of a Tradition since time
immemorial, and which has been dierently presented in dis-
parate places and eras by thinkers who have been placed in it
in one way or another. This is the typical position of “perenni-
alism”, that is of the current of thought that claims that there
has always been a “perennial philosophy” or “prisca theology”
and therefore an independent and self-sucient “esoteric tra-
dition” with characteristics that have remained constant over
time. These are symbolically expressed in dierent ways, and
it is the task of the scholar to rebuild them in a unitary frame-
work. This is an idea that has its origins in the Renaissance cul-
ture and has subsequently been revived by many authors in the
context of Traditionalism (Yates 1964; Quinn 1997; Faivre 1999;
2010; Oldmeadow 2005; Holman 2008). Although it is not pos-
sible to identify perennialism (or Tradition) with esotericism
tout court, since the former is a specication of the latter, nev-
ertheless, this assimilation is signicant as it serves to identi-
fy a widespread way of understanding esotericism, which we
will call “substantive” (or “characterized by its contents”): those
who believe in it support this or that organization of the world
and the relationship between this and the “ultramondo”, or be-
tween the mind incarnate in the body and the one independ-
ent of it and so on. There are some doctrines that, according to
Antoine Faivre (1994: 10-15), recur in all esoteric currents and
which can be summed up in four points:
1. The idea of the relationship between microcosm and
macrocosm, according to which the various levels or
classes of reality (minerals, plants, animals, humans and
superhuman entities) as well as the visible and invisible
components of the universe are linked together, i.e. they
are “in correspondence”, through a series of symbolic
correspondences, so the universe is like a sort of hall of
mirrors, where everything is reected in something else
and the changes in one part necessarily have their re-
percussions on another one.
2. The idea of a living nature, which conceives the universe
as being endowed with a soul, permeated by a continu-
ous stream of energy, in a pantheistic, monistic and ho-
listic vision that would allow, among other things, the
exercise of so-called magia naturalis, that was so well-de-
veloped in the Renaissance.
9
3. The idea that these connections and this living nature
require a cognitive approach based on symbolism,
which is mediated and allowed by spiritual authorities
(angels, spiritual masters), and through which it is pos-
sible to decipher the “hieroglyph of Nature”.
4. The idea that there is a parallelism between action on
nature and inner action, so that esotericism allows the
renement and growth of the human being through
operations and transmutations in the external world,
as claimed by the esoteric alchemical currents, and that
would reach its peak with the ultimate transformation
achieved when absolute knowledge is reached through
enlightenment.
Corollaries of these fundamental principles are the theses,
often but not always present in esoteric traditions, according
to which (a) there is a substantial concordance between the
various teachings insofar as their meaning can be penetrated
beyond the forms they assume because of the historical con-
tingencies in which they are placed; (b) that initiation should
be transmitted through the teachings of masters endowed with
spiritual authority as they have already achieved perfection
and gained absolute knowledge.
However, as von Stuckrad rightly warns, esotericism is a
complex and multilayered system in which a core of traditional
teachings, or those considered such, comprises several “elds of
discourse” dependent on historical-cultural contexts. Therefore,
there are dierent discursive regimes articulated on the basis of
a core of teachings that can transmigrate from one current to an-
other, and from one thinker to another, assuming dierent nu-
ances of meanings depending on the context, and contributing
to constituting the various religious and esoteric identities (and
dierences) that have evolved over time. Some examples of these
discourse elds are the doctrine of the Great Astral Conjunction,
the concept of meditation, the idea of the spiritual master, the
conception of relationships between body and soul, and so on
(von Stuckrad 2005: 6-11). This gives rise to a vision of many lay-
ers of esotericism in which the dierent “elds of discourse” are
intertwined in dierent ways and transmigrate from one tradi-
tion to another as if they were memes (Dawkins 2006: 189-210).
This line of thought was then revived and further developed by
10
Kennet Granholm (2013; 2014: 36-39); on the basis of a series of
cultural suggestions from sociological and psychological con-
structivism, he proposed the “discourse analytical approach”
which analyses esoteric currents as “discursive complexes”, or as
“collections of distinct discourses in specic combinations”. In
this way, attention is focused on the importance of individual dis-
courses, which are aggregated to form such “discursive complex-
es”, typically dened, which in turn enter into reciprocal inter-
action, modifying each other and generating new ones over the
course of history. In a certain way inspired by the same need, Egil
Asprem (2015) also believes that esotericism belongs to the kind
of complex cultural concepts for which a deconstructive analysis
is necessary to identify the “building blocks”, according to the
proposal put forward by Ann Taves (2011).
The latter approach is interesting because, by making use of
the most up-to-date studies of academic historiography on es-
otericism, and using the most advanced encyclopaedic instru-
ment currently available on the subject – the aforementioned
Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism – Asprem made an
important discovery. Thanks to a careful analysis of the way in
which the most recent scholars have understood esotericism,
he managed to identify one of its most important and recurrent
constitutive blocks, namely that «‘esotericism’ concerns special
kinds of knowledge, and the social formations, material means,
practices, and experiences through which this knowledge is de-
veloped, taught, implemented, and transmitted» (Asprem 2015:
12 – author’s italics). This “speciality” of esoteric knowledge can
be identied in some of its typical characteristics, which have
been dened in the literature in various ways: the fact that it is a
secret or hidden form of knowledge, held in the margins of o-
cial knowledge and refused by it, having an absolute character,
higher than that considered profane, justied in reference to a
particular and peculiar experience and so on (Asprem 2015: 14).
However, in my opinion, all these “speciality” markers are
centred around a way of understanding esotericism not as being
characterized by its contents, by the stories narrated, but more
clearly symbolic. In this way, we want to emphasize not the ma-
terial substance (or contents) of the statements made in the var-
ious currents representing it, taken in their descriptive way, but
the function they have taken on in the overall economy of human
thought and for the total personality of man, understood in a ho-
11
listic way and therefore without neglecting either his rational or
emotional aspect. In this case, the fundamental problem when
studying esotericism is not so much to identify the object in a
unique way (i.e its specic “doctrines”) but to understand the way
in which it is thought, no matter how it is identied - its “form
of thought” or “way of thinking” (Asprem 2015: 14), thereby de-
veloping the original Faivre approach, which placed the contents
of esotericism within a particular “form of thought”. In this way,
we may avoid the limit of the content classication that he made,
which reects – as he himself warns – modern esotericism, es-
pecially the Renaissance one, excluding non-Western traditions
and also ancient and medieval ones. Moreover, it is even easier to
explain, thanks to a typological analysis, how it may happen that
very similar esoteric motifs and currents have developed without
mutual contact, or that they could have merged with each oth-
er, albeit coming from historical contexts with nothing in com-
mon (Granholm 2014: 37-38). From this point of view, the fact that
Hanegraa (2008), inspired by Gilles Quispel’s studies on Gnosis,
drew attention to three distinct ways of gaining knowledge in the
culture of the West – which can typically be indicated as claims
to knowledge based on reason, faith and gnosis – leads us in a di-
rection that is close to the object of our study, that is, the nature of
Platonic esotericism and the meaning of its unwritten doctrines.
Indeed, as Pierre Riard (1998: 3) argues, it is important to ask
the question: «Un ésotériste pense-t-il comme un théologien, un
scientique, un philosophe ou un poète? Je ne me demande pas
s’il pense le meme objet, mais s’il pense de la même manière».
This is a question that leads one to question the ‘logic’ of eso-
teric thinking, without letting oneself be captured by esoteric
doctrines, or by the objects one thinks one has discovered and
knows. In short, it is about understanding esotericism – or rather
the various doctrines that are part of it – only for their anagog-
ical function, for the objective they aim to attain. This can only
consist of a path of elevation to Self and Totality, thus reaching
«fullness, perfection, and complete harmony with the cosmos»
(Bonvecchio 2007: 211). From this point of view, it makes little
sense to talk about doctrines that, for example, draw from a “pri-
mordial source of knowledge”, to a “Tradition”, understood as a
corpus of knowledge of a ‘positive’ type, which have their value
for what they say, and that from time to time dierent authors
imagine with the most fantastic entities and the most diverse re-
12
lationships between them, with the world, and with mankind1.
Only in this way is it possible to avoid seeing esotericism as «the
academy’s dustbin of rejected knowledge» (Hanegraa 2012c:
127), in which all the superstitions and the ideas that mankind
has produced over the course of the long journey towards ration-
al enlightenment are thrown. In order to do this, we must grasp
the most authentic sense of esotericism as it is understood by one
of its accredited interpreters, René Guénon, when, regarding the
so-called “initiatic secret”, he argues that it is not so much a list
of doctrines and theses of a philosophical or historical nature,
but «is itself such by the very nature of things and consequently
could never be betrayed in any way since it is of a purely interior
order and […] lies strictly in the “incommunicable”». In fact, «this
secret is of such a nature that words cannot express it» (Guénon
1946: 83, 85).
It is in this overall picture that the so-called ‘secrecy’ of es-
otericism should be framed. It refers to a concealed, hidden
truth, which only a few can access, as opposed to the knowl-
edge available to everyone that does not require any initiatory
itinerary or any special spiritual Master to be known, but only
the application of normal and ‘profane’ human reason. This
contrast has been strongly emphasized by those who saw in it
one of the fundamental dierences between the magical-her-
metic knowledge that was widespread in the Renaissance, and
modern science that in the meantime arose from its ashes, with
Galileo and its other protagonists (Rossi 2006). If, however, it is
true what we have said regarding the meaning of esotericism,
then it follows that the “initiatic secret”, representing the high-
est level of knowledge, must be understood as the place where
one accesses that Truth which cannot be disputed, since «the
initiatic reticence does not refer to a doctrinal content that can
be communicated or untold» (Muscato 1996: 17). All the vari-
ous doctrines that comprise – in a myriad kaleidoscopic vari-
ety – the dierent schools and esoteric currents, have a rela-
tive, contingent value: they only indicate “footholds” with the
only function of facilitating the adept to walk along a path. The
same symbolism, which is the basis of esoteric knowledge, has
1 A rich anthology of such fantasies is contained in the novel Foucault’s
pendulum by Umberto Eco, who however misses the deepest meaning of this
extraordinary eorescence of theories, entities, demons, angels, and so on.
13
no value because it identies gures, phenomena and entities
as uniquely and exclusively indicating a certain metaphysical
or initiatic content, conveyed exclusively by them. Indeed, to
quote Guénon again, «every event or phenomenon, however in-
signicant it may be, can always be taken as a symbol of a high-
er reality of which it is as it were a sensible expression by the
very fact that it derives from it as a consequence derives from
its principle; and in this respect, however lacking in value and
interest it may be in itself, the event or phenomenon can have a
profound signicance for one who is able to see beyond imme-
diate appearances» (Guénon 1946: 167)2. Therefore, the paths of
symbolism are many, although the aim is unique nevertheless.
This point of view is quite clear to the Hindu spirituality that
in the six traditional Darshana of the Brahamanic schools, de-
rived from the Vedas, sees only dierent ways that allow us to
reach liberation and therefore enlightenment, meaning that
these are not closed, denitive “doctrines”, but only “points of
view”, “visual angles”, each of which helps us to see some aspect
of the truth (Guénon 1992: 16; Radhakrishnan 1948, II: 18; Steven-
son 2000: 79). This is also reected in the conception of the su-
preme being, understood by some Hindus as transcendent and
by others assimilated in nature, but in any case having the aware-
ness that it can be revered “in many forms” (like a young man,
like a king, etc.): «The transcendent is mediated through temple
icons, through natural phenomena, or through saints and living
masters. Hinduism is often considered a polytheism, [....] [and]
many Hindus consider these divinities as the dierent aspects or
manifestations of the same sacred power» (Flood 2006: 12). The
Vedic universe, populated by a multitude of supernatural, benev-
olent and malevolent types and beings – in many ways similar to
those in Greek mythology – is reinterpreted from the subsequent
philosophy of the Upanishad as a manifestation of a single force
(Flood 2006: 57-8). This is also the position, well expressed by
Senator Simmaco, in the twilight of the pagan world: in 384 AD,
taking inspiration from the neo-platonic conception of religion,
2 Obviously, this does not exclude the fact that there are phenomena or
material entities (or signs) that, by their nature, can better acquire a symboli-
cally superior character than others. So, the sun indicates the light more eas-
ily than a piece of coal, hence the knowledge and the enlightenment which
the initiate enters at the climax of his spiritual itinerary.
14
he made the following address to the Emperor Valentinian, in
defense of paganism and in favor of the relocation of the altar
of the goddess Victoria in the Senate of Rome: «Eadem spect-
amus astra, commune coelum est, idem nos mundus involvit;
quid interest qua quisque prudentia verum requirat? Uno itinere
non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum»3. However, the
characteristic of the multiple faces and thousand names of the
divinities that manifest a single, identical divinity is also evident
in the initiation of Apuleius and Lucius into the cult of Isis. The
believer can turn to the goddess «by invoking her with the name
most familiar to him, without however losing the universalistic
vocation of this feminine dimension [in reference to Isis] of the
divine» (Filoramo 2011: 39). Therefore, it was quite natural to ad-
mit the existence of a plurality of cults, because – as the pagan
Temistio argued in addressing the emperor Valens when urging
him to repeal the edicts against the Christians – «God himself
plainly shows that he wishes various forms of worship; there are
many roads by which one can reach him» (quoted in Bury 1913:
55; see also Filoramo 2011: 256). This vision, which is typical of
the neoplatonic approach, can also be found expressed in a phil-
osophically articulated way by a thinker strongly inuenced by
it: Nicholas Cusanus. He gives the example of a portrait of a face
whose eyes follow the viewer from all angles, so he or she always
feels as if someone is looking at them. As stated by Cassirer (2012:
35), the contemporary discoverer of Cusanus as philosopher,
«[…] even the diversity of rites no longer constitutes an obstacle,
for all institutions and all customs are merely sensible signs for
the truth of faith; and whereas the signs are subject to change
and to modication, what they signify is not. There is no form
of faith so low, so abominable, that it cannot nd its relative jus-
tication from this point of view. Even polytheism is not exclud-
ed. For wherever gods are honored, the thought, the idea of the
divine must be presupposed. It is evident that for Cusanus the
cosmos of religions is equally near and far from God, and that
it shows the same inviolable identity and the same inevitable
3 See Filoramo 2011: 278-280 regarding this episode and the gure of
Sant’Ambrogio who was a supporter of the opposite conception based on the
only Truth univocally transmitted in the sacred texts. To demonstrate how time
changes even the most consolidated traditions, this episode is reported, in sup-
port of tolerance, also by Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) (2003: 185).
15
otherness, the same unity and the same particularization that
we encountered earlier in the depiction of the physical cosmos»
(Cusanus 1944: 30-31). In the context of the three mosaic religions,
this is an attitude that is not foreign to Islam: after praying on Mt
Zion in 1961 for peace in the world with a Catholic priest and a
rabbi, the Muslim Amadau Hampâté Bâ said: «There is just one
summit on top of a mountain, but the paths to reach it may be
dierent. I regard Christianity, Judaism and Islam as three broth-
ers of a polygamous family, where there is only one father, but
where each mother has raised her child according to her own
customs. Every wife speaks of her husband and child according
to her own conception» (quoted in Aime 2006: 50).
We could make many more examples, but what has been said
is enough to underline the fact that, in this way of conceiving the
divine, a clear cognitive relativism is associated with the absolut-
ism and uniqueness of the True, which is reached only at the end
of the journey: relativism resides in the dierent doctrines that,
insofar as they are expressed through human discourses, are
subject to the many variations and declinations typical of the ar-
gumentation and of the dierent human situations, of the social
and historical condition of those who support them; absolutism
is what is obtained at the end of the spiritual elevation itinerary,
in which man achieves “vision” (the ἐπόπτεια, to use the term of
ancient Greek mysteries), or “illumination”.
Moreover, while in the world of theory, of philosophical sys-
tems or of esoteric doctrines, to the extent that they are assumed
in their substantive value, there is conict, oppression, orthodoxy,
and hence heresy, the darshana or “points of view” cannot be in
conict with each other or be contradictory – as Guénon (1965:
199, 205) clearly explained – because they represent, despite their
rich diversity (King 1999: 46), only dierent ways of approaching
the Absolute, ways that each person can follow according to his
or her personal disposition, character, and the culture and tradi-
tion in which he or she was born and raised. The syncretic and
tolerant character of this approach is then clear: to the extent that
each perspective provides a particular “glimpse” of reality, the
dierent “visions” are considered complementary to each other,
and not only can each person choose one of the many means of
achieving the Absolute, but he or she also prots from the others
oered by dierent perspectives; likewise, heresy becomes im-
possible because no belief or doctrine can be regarded as being
16
absolutely true or absolutely false (Koller 1982: 8-9). The same
goes for the dierent esoteric schools if you follow a proper way
of understanding them, as claimed by a contemporary scholar,
Gerhard Wehr (2002: 22): «The symbol is the “clay” vessel, so
to speak, (2Cor 4, 7), which ultimately contains something that
cannot be expressed, i.e. a certain content of inner experience.
If one stops at the clay jar only, taking literally what is said, as
the fundamentalists do, one falls into error.». A similar discourse
applies to the Mysteries of Classical Greece: we can respond to
the fact that many scholars are amazed that the secrets of Eleusis
have been so well preserved by stating that nothing has been re-
vealed because there was nothing objectively to reveal: «In other
words, the real secret was a subjective mystical experience that
not only would not have found credit but also no way to commu-
nicate to others. This experience remained valid, as a secret to
be preserved, as long as people believed in it» (Sabbatucci 1965:
143). For this reason, it can be said that esotericism constitutes the
outer casing, covered with symbols and gurative objects, of a
pure intellectual vision in which there is complete transparency,
the perfect t between knowledgeable subject and known object,
and in which the One Truth concerning the eternal and immuta-
ble “rst principles” is manifested. This is the “metaphysics” un-
derstood not as a rational and discursive discipline in the Aristo-
telian sense, but as access to a truth that is achievable by way of a
pure and superhuman Intellect, in which man only participates4.
It is the sophia, or even gnosis, envisaged by the ancient sages, and
provides not knowledge so much, but sapientia (Schuon 1983)5. As
such, metaphysics is indenable «car dénir, c’est toujours lim-
4 «L’intellect transcendant, pour saisir directement les principes univer-
sels, doit être lui-même d’ordre universel; ce n’est plus une faculté individu-
elle, et le considérer comme tel serait contradictoire, car il ne peut être dans
les possibilités de l’individu de dépasser ses propres limites, de sortir des
conditions qui le dénissent en tant qu’individu. La raison est une faculté
proprement et spéciquement humaine; mais ce qui est au-delà de la raison
est véritablement “non-humain”; c’est ce qui rend possible la connaissance
métaphysique, et celle-ci, il faut le redire encore, n’est pas une connaissance
humaine» (Guénon 1993: 11).
5 It has been stated that the corpus of Schuon’s metaphysical writings
«ranks among the most clear, profound, and gifted ones produced by any sim-
ilar author in the 20th century» (Quinn 2006: 1043). Regarding this meaning of
metaphysics, see also Guénon’s point of view, which is one of the most impor-
tant sources of inspiration for Schuon (Di Vona 1993: 114-116, 129-130 and passim).
17
iter, et ce dont il s’agit est, en soi, véritablement et absolument
illimité, donc ne saurait se laisser enfermer dans aucune formule
ni dans aucun système» (Guénon 1993: 10).
However, further clarication is needed here, which will
help us better understand Plato’s specic position. It is ap-
propriate to distinguish esotericism from mysticism (Godwin
2002: Rousse-Lacordaire 2006): the former deals with initiatory
practice (Guénon 1996: 18-19, 31-32, 149-150) which presupposes
a path, often long and tedious, in which the single individu-
al, without the support of a grace from a providential divinity,
but only with his own means and with the help of a Master,
through the hard work of renement and purication of the
self, acquires intellectual intuition, that is, the transparent and
immediate vision of the True, without any discourse mediation,
and in some cases ghting argumentative and propositional
reason, even by using paradoxical arguments.
In the case of mysticism, however, it is often a feeling or a
strong emotion that leads to the sudden break of normal con-
sciousness, and mostly to the beatic vision of Divinity; in this
case, no initiatic itinerary or Master is required, but merely a
strong individual meditative commitment and an attitude of
passivity, of openness, usually waiting for God’s grace (and this
is precisely what is considered in Catholicism to be the seal of a
true and “orthodox” mysticism) or the manifestation of the Ab-
solute, which bursts and overwhelms the mind of the mystic6.
Thus, in the case of esotericism we have a “lay” approach, where
a personal deity is not always assumed (as is typically the case
with Buddhist, Vedantic, or Taoist esotericism) and in addition,
the self-suciency of those who undertake the path is stressed
– so that the Gnostic component is very important; instead, in
mysticism the presence of a deity and its support is usually im-
portant, so that illumination can occur at any time, unexpectedly
and suddenly, even during the course of a daily activity. However
– and here is the reason why there are those who see mysticism
embodied within esotericism, even if this has a wider domain,
6 This is the reason for the condemnation of the Catholic Church against
the New Age (contained in the document of the Pontical Council for Culture
and Pontical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, titled “Jesus Christ the
Bearer of the Water of Life. A Christian reection on the New Age”), which is
opposed to the authentic sense of Christian mysticism.
18
including Magic (Versluis 2007: pos. 61-98), the nal moment at
which both the esoteric and the mystic arrive has common fea-
tures of immediacy, true certainty, self-transparency and sense of
fullness and realization. So, while the esoteric reaches a mystical
vision at the end of the hard path, the mystic, however, does not
come to it through an esoteric initiatic itinerary. As we shall see,
it is precisely in terms of esotericism that we can speak of Plato,
especially in reference to unwritten doctrines.
This also allows us to grasp the meaning with which the “se-
crecy” of esoteric thought is to be understood. In fact, esotericism
can be distinguished – according to the suggestion of Leo Strauss
(Lampert 2009) – in what I would call an esotericism of necessity
and an esotericism of impossibility. The former is imposed by the
conditions of the historical period (censorship, persecution, re-
pression, and misunderstanding on the part of “profane”), espe-
cially with the advent of Christianity which – based on the trans-
mission of a Holy Text and the concept of faith – barely tolerated
the typical Gnostic attitude present in every esoteric tradition.
So, for example, since it came from the Arab world centuries ago,
alchemy has served as a sort of connection point of all western
esoteric traditions under whose inoensive umbrella (the search
for gold, perhaps in favor of the poor) presented a path of trans-
formation and elevation of the human spirit and therefore had
to try to conceal its purposes with a symbolic-cryptic language
and through an oral transmission of its teachings (Godwin 2002:
1416). The esotericism of Dante and his poet friends belonging
to the stilnovo movement would also have been of this kind; they
concealed their strong anti-papal spirit (even within Christiani-
ty) with «an encrypted, allegorical and anagogical language that
could be understood by the aliates but not by the inquisitors»
(Ciavolella 2010: 230-231). However, there is – besides this and far
more importantly – an “esotericism of impossibility”, that is, the
one linked to the ineability of Truth that comes at the end of an
itinerary of spiritual elevation. It is precisely what we rst talked
about as the Absolute which comes through a darshana and is
found in every process of spiritual elevation. To this end, a sup-
port may be served by myths and symbols that, by means of t-
ting narratives or images, suggest a content which is impossible
to express in words and that then goes right out of the eld of
investigation of rational thought and becomes the subject of an
“intellectual intuition”. It is not by chance that esoteric thinkers
19
have always underlined a clear opposition between philosophy,
which is conned to purely human discourse and is therefore
purely rational, and «the immense superiority of symbolism»,
typical of the initiatic journey (Guénon 1946: 126-127).
The Truth to which we come is similar to that which Dante
reaches at the end of his initiatic itinerary of the Comedy, when
in the last Canto of Paradise he states (XXXIII, vv. 55-63):
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che’ parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.
Qual è colüi che sognando vede,
che dopo ’l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa
mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla
nel core il dolce che nacque da essa7.
It is not by chance that Dante compares his condition to that
of those who want to nd the squaring of the circle – that is, they
want to reach through rationality a reasoned and proven solution
of a geometric problem – and he realizes that it is not possible to
understand the Divine Trinity in this way (Purg., III, verses 34-36):
Matto è chi spera che nostra ragion
Possa trascorrer la innita via
Che tiene una sustanza in tre persone8.
Consequently, this also applies to the conjunction between
human nature and divine nature: only a mystical, ineable intui-
tion allows us to reach its “vision” (Parad., XXXIII, verses 139-141):
7 «From that time forward [after the prayer of St. Bernard to give him the
grace of contemplation of God] what I saw was greater / Than our discourse,
that to such vision yields, / And yields the memory unto such excess. / Even
as he is who seeth in a dream, / And after dreaming the imprinted passion /
Remains, and to his mind the rest returns not, / Even such am I, for almost
utterly / Ceases my vision, and distilleth yet / Within my heart the sweetness
born of it» (Transl. by H.W. Longfellow).
8 «Insane is he who hopeth that our reason Can traverse the illimitable
way, Which the one Substance in three Persons follows!» (Transl. by H.W.
Longfellow).
20
ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
se non che la mia mente fu percossa
da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne9.
2. Plato and the Places of Esotericism in Greece
After these essential clarications, let us return to our main top-
ic, that is, to Plato. To appreciate the way in which esotericism
was understood among its followers, one can refer to a famous
popular work by Edouard Schuré (1921). In it, Plato’s esotericism
is understood as a particular way of interpreting an ancient form
of wisdom (the prisca theologia), revealed in the Corpus Hermetic-
um by Hermes Trismegistus, which in the Renaissance (when the
rediscovery took place) was deemed to be older than the birth of
philosophy. This wisdom had been kept alive by “great initiates”,
such as Zoroaster, Orpheus and Pythagoras, from whom Plato
would have drawn – as maintained by Platonic and Neopitago-
ric Numenio of Apamea (Guthrie 1917: 64-66) – his fundamental
teachings and the backbone of his philosophical conception, giv-
ing a dialectical and argued vulgarization of what is contained
in the doctrines of a “great initiate” like Pythagoras10. However,
a pact of secrecy – signed when Plato met the Pythagoreans of
southern Italy, where he bought a manuscript of the Master with
gold coins – and the fear of incomprehension would have pre-
vented Plato from teaching the doctrine of Pythagoras in an ex-
plicit and open form. Thus, in his dialogues he presents the Py-
thagorean esoteric doctrine, «mais dissimulée, mitigée, chargée
d’une dialectique raisonneuse comme d’un bagage étranger,
travestie elle-même en légende, en mythe, en parabole» (Schuré
1921: 416). In this approach – also linked to the widespread opin-
9 «But my own wings were not enough for this [that is, to obtain such an
understanding], Had it not been that then my mind there smote A ash of
lightning, wherein came its wish [that is, it realized its desire to understand
the dual nature of Christ, human and divine]» (Transl. by H.W. Longfellow).
10 Pythagoras is a central gure for all schools and followers of esoteri-
cism, and constitutes, along with Orpheus, the cornerstone for understand-
ing the Greek culture and Plato himself. See e.g. Mallinger 1999; Jacquemard
2004; Kingsley 2007; Barresi 2014; Godwin 2016, etc. In turn, Pythagoras
would have borrowed his views from the shamanic gure of the hyperboreal
Abaris (Kingsley 2010).
21
ion in ancient sources, which narrate in a mythical way Plato’s
life, and his initiatory journeys in Egypt11 to meet other philoso-
phers and wise men of Eastern origin – esotericism is conceived
as a set of substantial doctrines (the stars and the cosmos under-
stood as living beings, the existence of symbolic correspondenc-
es in the universe, and the doctrine of the soul that survives the
body and is understood as the authentic center of man, which
was to have so much inuence on the subsequent thought, both
profane and otherwise, and so on) (von Stuckrad 2005: 13-4), usu-
ally underlined by all acionados of esoteric thought when re-
ferring to the great Greek philosopher, particularly highlighting
some of his works (such as the Timaeus or the Phaedo).
To these quite general theses, cultivated in the esoteric con-
text, the more specic ones of the supporters of the existence of
“unwritten doctrines” in Plato were added, the content of which,
diused only within the Platonic Academy, would radically dif-
fer from what is contained in the Dialogues. This point of view,
proposed at the beginning of the century by J. Burnet, A.E. Taylor
and L. Robin, was resumed at the end of the 1950s by those who
thought it could be supported thanks to the implicit indications
and references in the Dialogues and indirect sources on Plato’s
teaching, consisting mostly of passages of Aristotle and then of
Theophrastus, Hermes, Speusippo and Senocrates, all belonging
to the ancient Academy (see Richard 2008: 275-463). We refer in
this case to well-grounded and well-qualied philological schol-
ars such as those of the School of Tübingen (Krämer 1990; Gaiser
1994; Szlezák 1988) and, in Italy, those of the School of Milan led by
Giovanni Reale (1998; 2010) and his disciples (including M. Migli-
ori and G. Movia). Also in this case, the term “esotericism” is used,
but it has little to do with what we have outlined in the previous
paragraph; in fact, the “esotericism” consists essentially of the fact
that the doctrines related to it were intended for oral teaching,
reserved for the more “internal” disciples of the Academy. These
scholars thus shared in essence Hegel’s criticism of esotericism,
11 Let us not forget that for the followers of esoteric thought, Egypt occupies
a special place, inasmuch as «pendant un laps de plus de cinq mille ans, the
Egypte fut la forteresse des pures et hautes doctrines, dont the ensemble con-
stitue la science des princes et qu’on pourrait appeler the orthodoxie ésotéri-
que de l’antiquité» (Schuré 1921: 114). It follows that both the monotheistic
religions (with Moses and then with Christ) and the polytheistic religions of
Greece (with Orpheus) derive their last sources from the Egyptian mysteries.
22
that he understood as «a doctrine destined to remain covered by
a mysterious secrecy, almost like a sort of metaphilosophy for in-
itiates» (Reale 2010: 132). This orality is eventually explained – in
the development of this hypothesis – on the basis of historical cir-
cumstances and not as being intrinsically necessary from the the-
oretical point of view. In fact, it is believed that “esoteric” teaching
consists – from a substantive point of view – in a sort of protology
based on the One and the Dyad and on a twofold movement of
reduction to them and of deduction from them of the real, which
results in a «mixture of unity and multiplicity» (Trabattoni 2005:
12-13). It is clear that in this reconstruction, the thought of Plato is
inuenced by the image ltered by the subsequent late Ancient
and Renaissance Neoplatonism with its need to bridge the gap
between the sensible world and ideal forms through a series of in-
termediations (Brisson 1993: 492-493) and consequently it is, also
in this case, actually brought back to that of Pythagoras. So, in
the end, the distinction among the scholars between the esoteric
and the anti-esoteric interpreters of Plato is due to attributing the
doctrine of the principles of Plato directly to his oral teaching (as
done by Tübingen School) or instead to an interpretation elabo-
rated in the Ancient Academy, strongly steeped in Pythagorean-
ism, to which the few passages of Aristotle do refer (Brisson 1993:
495; Isnardi Parente 1984; 1989, on which, see Fronterotta 2014).
The negative consequence that can generally be attributed to
the esoteric approach is to make Plato not a protagonist of phi-
losophy, or rather its founder in the sense that was then transmit-
ted to all Western thought, but a minor episode of a universal es-
oteric teaching, whose doctrines are, at most, better expounded
or maintained by Pythagoras or by subsequent esotericists (Late
Anti-Neoplatonic, Corpus Hermeticum, Renaissance platonists,
etc.): all the works of Plato transmitted to us would have no other
function than to allude to and indicate a teaching that not many
can know; they thus are weakened in the theses and in the knowl-
edge brought and inherited from the philosophical culture.
Plato’s esotericism thus interpreted is characterized by the
“substantive” modality previously referred to as one of the ways
in which it is possible to understand esotericism: there is an un-
written doctrine in it that goes beyond what is contained in the
known works and handed down to us; this doctrine consists of
a series of theses that can be reconstructed in a discursive form
(as done with undoubted hermeneutic expertise by the scholars
23
indicated above) and then set out as true “rst metaphysics”. Fur-
thermore, the doctrines contained in public and exoteric works,
to the extent that they are written, have a value that goes beyond
their literal meaning and which is grasped authentically only
by people who have been introduced into doctrines transmitted
merely orally. And these doctrines, in keeping with what was
previously said in general about esotericism, are kept secret and
are not made known outside the narrowest circle of the disciples;
this is not due to an aristocratic, exclusive or sectarian will, or
for prot or power, but only because they can only be accessed
by people who have an interior predisposition and are willing
to undertake an initiatory itinerary in which the “Master” has a
central role: he is the dispenser of knowledge and the adminis-
trator of the journey who gradually leads the adept to the full un-
derstanding of these doctrines. The centrality of the gure of the
“Master” is a constant of all the initiation practices, both Western
and Eastern, which aim at liberation through a gnostic type of
illumination (Pasqualotto 2003: 73-98).
To appreciate this point, it is necessary to make clear that
when I use the locution “doctrinal content” I refer to the typically
Greek “specialty” of knowledge that has taken the forms of sci-
ence or philosophy, as opposed to wisdom and myth, from which
they are believed to have been liberated like a buttery from its
cocoon. This is the standard image of Greek philosophy and cul-
ture, synthesized in a march “from mythos to logos” – as exempla-
rily indicated by the title of Wilhelm Nestle’s work (1940)12 – from
12 Along the same lines as Nestle, there is much of historiography that
has had its major representatives in great gures of scholars of ancient Greek
culture and philosophy. Just to provide an example, for the more strictly phil-
osophical sector, let me mention the names of B. Snell, W.K.C. Guthrie, G.S.
Kirk, J.E. Raven, M. Frede, and J. Barnes. More recently, the passage from
myth to logos is explicitly recalled in the work of Vernant & Vidal-Naquet
2011, in which, while admitting multiple forms of rationality, they neverthe-
less «s’inscrivent toutes dans un même champ d’épistémè, avec ses lignes de
force et ses limites» (p. 9). However, we could also mention other scholars who
have been interested in more specic areas, such as historiography, medicine,
zoology and so on. For a brief review see Buxton (1999: 1-14). Finally, let me
point out – I cannot expand on this question here – that the same rhetorical
movement is repeated when we speak, for the modern age, of the passage
«from magic to science» and underline the magical and apocalyptic interests
of Newton, the esoteric inuences on Copernicus, the cultivation of magic in
Bruno and so on (see Rossi 2006: 31-3).
24
manía to reason, so that the logos ends up triumphing after hav-
ing “gradually disintegrated” the myth, so that it can be armed
that: «the fact that the evolution of Greek thought, from its most
remote origins to the sophistic movement, could be dened as a
gradual transition from myth to logos can be now considered a
clear achievement» (Unterstainer 1972: 8-9); or it is even believed
that rational thought arose suddenly with the naturalistic phi-
losophy of the Ionians (the so-called “Greek miracle”)13 and that
it has thus passed from the pre-logical stage to a completely ra-
tional one, from the “narrative” explanation of natural facts and
actions/events that occur in human aairs to a naturalistic and
rational framework that characterizes them as natural phenom-
ena with purely earthly etiologies. This new cognitive way would
be the fruit of the logos, of that reason discovered and theorized
for the rst time in classical Greece and which was embodied
in philosophical rationality as canonized in crystalline form by
Aristotle in his Organon. This is the new path that shaped West-
ern civilization and was the inspiring principle of all its rational
achievements, until the advent of the modern science of nature.
This is an image of knowledge characterized above all by a
concept of truth inscribed and perimetrated within a discourse,
a propositional apparatus, which is proposed to other subjects
as a device acting through the intersubjectivity implied by the
practice of the discussion, during which one thesis or position
can legitimately prevail over another. There are men who argue
with each other and who use their own discourse to support dif-
ferent theses; and they try to make their point of view prevail not
by punching the interlocutor or by laying claim to an authori-
ty deriving from a privileged access to the True – as happens in
Greek culture with initiates, mystics or seers with a charismatic
personality and a particular familiarity with the divine, often due
to a family tradition (Flower 2008: 70-71) – but rather in the con-
viction that one’s own speech (logos), made of words, phrases and
their concatenations, is able to show one’s greater “goodness”
compared to that of others, that one is “stronger”, i.e. in posses-
sion of a logical necessity that cannot be taken away. Moreover,
this also means believing that the thesis does not stand up for
itself by the mere fact of having been pronounced, nor for the
13 The rst to criticize this perspective was Cornford (2002: 49-54), whose
fundamental theses were also taken up in id. (1952).
25
“quality” of the person who says it, but it needs a support which
only an argument can provide. There is no doubt, therefore, that
«the Western concept of objective and rational truth emerged
historically from Greek thought» and that philosophical thought
«became organized around a central concept […] that concept
was Alētheia, or “truth”» (Detienne 1996: 36).
Yet an image of Greek thought that encloses it in such a frame
would be incomplete. It is now quite clear that in classical Greece
«in reality, myth and logos are intertwined throughout the histo-
ry of this culture, like reason and madness» (Guidorizzi 2010: 16),
so that, as has been eectively claimed, «What we tend to sepa-
rate, ancient thought – be it mythical or philosophical – tends
to see as a whole» (Seaford 2006: 119); «In Greece, what we now
would call “mythic” and “scientic” outlooks were not always as
far apart as they are today» (Iles Johnston 2008: 57). It is then a
matter of formulating the sense of this interweaving of logos and
anti-logos – let us call it so, for the moment – to understand its
specic plot, to grasp what it is an expression of, and whether
it illuminates us or indicates a way to better understand human
reality and history as a whole14. We owe to Eric R. Dodds’ mas-
terpiece The Greeks and the Irrational (1962), a clear rst indication
in this direction. Taking up and expanding on what Francis M.
Cornford has already done, he makes us further aware of how the
manifestations of the anti-logos are not conned to the peripher-
al areas of Greek culture, mostly linked to the forms of manifes-
tation of popular religiosity, to collective behaviors or even attrib-
uted to the pathology of people who are sick in the mind and
soul, according to the opinion that came to be consolidated with
the emergence of Greek rationalism and the new secular knowl-
edge, such as scientic Hippocratic medicine (Guidorizzi 2010:
21-31); nor are these manifestations of anti-logos only represented
in the literary forms of high culture, such as tragedy, lyric or epic,
and thus at a safe distance from the citadel of rationality repre-
sented by philosophy. Instead, these manifestations are embed-
ded in its body, of which they represent not residual waste, from
which we have not succeeded in freeing ourselves, but rather a
functionally important aspect, sometimes even prevalent, with-
out which we cannot understand the thought of many philos-
14 I have given a more general picture of this issue, including it in the context of
a general interpretation of man and his evolutionary history, in Coniglione (2017).
26
ophers. The “champions of the logos” are also possessed, prey
to enthusiasm – which means etymologically “being in God”,
being possessed by the divine – and so «l’hypothèse qu’une
certaine folie philosophique accompagne le déploiement de la
pensée rationnelle, tout en lui conférant dynamisme et enthou-
siasme, étant entendu que la froide raison analytique n’est pas
de nature à en susciter énormément» (Périllié 2006: 4) is not ex-
cessive. Besides, the Ionic thought of Thales and Anaximander,
usually seen as the armation of the naturalist paradigm in the
knowledge of nature, highlights a substratum that is not at all –
as claimed by Aristotle – «la cause matérielle, qui ne pouvait être
conçue abstraitement à cette époque, mais serait bien plutôt une
vision mystique de la nature […] Cela veut dire que la philosophie
naissante se présente à la fois comme l’apparition d’un premier
discours scientique, et comme célébration de la puissance vitale
de la nature, fondamentalement théologique […]. L’avènement
de la philosophie ne s’apprécie donc pas seulement d’après la
seule causalité matérielle et structurale obéissant à la temporal-
ité selon le mode de l’avant et de l’après: comme elle est élan,
dynamisme, vision enthousiaste, elle se comprend autant, sinon
plus, par l’après (par ce qu’elle annonce) qu’elle ne s’explique
par l’avant (ce qui la détermine)» (Périllié 2006: 16-17).
Therefore, the intellectual and cultural history of Greece is
not just about logos: in the same period in which the logos was
constructed, in the Greek spiritual world the alter-ego of this
logos can also be found - that which could be dened as its per-
manent enemy, the adversary against which it has always had
to ght and from which it has had to continuously and period-
ically distinguish itself. This anti-logos has taken on dierent
names in the course of history and assumed unusual and of-
ten unexpected guises, but in the dawn of the birth of Euro-
pean knowledge it was basically mythos, traditional religiosity,
initiatic vision, panic transport, manìa, ekstasis, mystèria, incu-
bation or divination through dreaming, and magic, and most
often required priestly mediation. These are the conditions of
“exceptionality” in which those aspects of human life are con-
densed, which are often generally attributed to the dimension
of the “holy”, as opposed to the “profane”. It is a residue that
seems to escape reason, even if it can be obliquely bound to its
deployment: if the logoi cannot grasp the blind spot where in-
tuition and the ineable dwell, they may nevertheless possess
27
an allusive value, the character of a reference to something that
transcends them and which cannot fully be revealed in them:
indeed, they have an anagogical value.
This is the space in Plato’s work that is occupied by the
myth: despite the fact that the Platonic myths have been re-
covered many times from pre-existing traditional material – as
with the myth of the “two earths” contained in the nal part of
the Phaedo, derived from orphic-pythagoric sources (Kingsley
1995: 96-111) – they are often modied in their contents, stripped
of “scandalous” references to traditional divinities, but nev-
ertheless still retain their powerful analogical and persuasive
function at the service of philosophical truth, so that Vernant
could write that in Plato «la pensée mythique se perpétue au-
tant qu’elle se transforme» (Vernant 2007: 358). However, due to
their content and function in the context of the thought of the
dialogues, his unwritten doctrines are even more representa-
tive than the myth of non-discursive, a-logical wisdom.
This is the “wisdom” – not the “knowledge”, as is well-known
to all the supporters of esoteric thought – which in the Greek
world was accessed through an alternative path both to that of
the logoi, and to that of the traditional myth, in which the ocial
and institutional religiosity of the polis was presented. The an-
cient sages refer to this “wisdom” as a dimension of being that
cannot be reduced to rationality, and indeed with the latter in
antithesis, at least to the extent that ratio is judged as the power to
articulate logoi. Plato refers to it in Phaedo (79d)15 when he argues
that as long as the soul remains in the state in which it enters
when it comes into contact with the Forms, then its intense expe-
rience (πάθημα) can be called “wisdom” (φρόνησις) (Bussanich
2005: 12-13; 2013: 276; Kazanas 2014: 22)16. Moreover, it is also from
the madness, «given as a gift of the god» (Phaedrus 244a), that the
best things come to us. However, the “divine frenzy” – warns the
Socrates “philosopher” already steeped in the logical mechanism
of Platonic rational dialectics and no longer the “sapient” rooted
15 Unless otherwise indicated, all Plato’s textual quotations are taken from
Plato (1997).
16 Note the association between πάθημα and φρόνησις, where the rst
term stands for the strong aection that one experiences or suers when one
has the direct vision of the True and therefore it does not indicate a generic
“condition” or “state”, while φρόνησις does not generically indicate “intelli-
gence” or “understanding”, but exactly “wisdom”.
28
in the oral and religious tradition of the Mysteries – is only a mo-
ment that needs to be overcome in order to reach a higher form
of dialectical rationality, because «there is no greater evil one can
suer than to hate reasonable discourse» (Phaedo 89d), becoming
misologues, believing that one’s own incapacity and lack of skill
is attributable to reasoning as such and that therefore rational
activity, which is articulated in the logoi, is in itself defective and
insuperably limited (Phaedo 90e). Otherwise, if we want to be
wary at all costs of our argumentative capacities and our ability
to reach the True by their means, we can only hope to «sail upon
some rmer vessel, some divine revelation [λόγου θείου τινός],
and make that voyage more safely and securely» (Phaedo 85d; Au-
thor’s translation).
3. The Sense of Esotericism in Plato
It is at this point that Plato’s philosophical reection begins.
This is done rst of all by the role he assigned to the myth and
to the unwritten doctrines, which are representative of that
non-discursive and alogical “wisdom” in which his thought is
rmly rooted.
In fact, Plato has a clear awareness of the contrast between
philosophy and wisdom. This is unequivocally witnessed by a
passage from the Phaedrus (278d-e), in which the “wise man”,
who already knows because he has the truth written directly in
his soul and is therefore similar to a god, is opposed to the one
who instead is only a “lover of wisdom”, a philosopher in its et-
ymological meaning. There must be no confusion between the
“real vision” [ἀγνοεῖν ὕπαρ] (which belongs to those who have
arrived at the contemplation of ideas and therefore of discourse
that only germinates in the soul, and cannot be transmitted
through writings) and the “dream-image” [ὄναρ] of those who
wander among the shadows that are generated by written
works (Phaedrus 277d). This “vision” is precisely that modality of
access to the true of which Plato speaks in the famous Letter VII
(341-342): «this knowledge is not something that can be put into
words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse
between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, sud-
denly, like light ashing forth when a re is kindled, it is born in
the soul and straightway nourishes itself»; so the dierence be-
29
tween knowledge that can be communicated to everyone and
knowledge that must be kept “hidden” is made. These two texts
(Phaedro and Letter VII) essentially constitute Plato’s “self-testi-
monies”, used by the supporters of unwritten doctrines and the
esoteric interpretation of the Athenian thinker (Krämer 1990:
55-62; Reale 2008: 263-277, 295-303; Hanegraa 2015: 64). So, also
those who place themselves at the forefront of anti-esotericism
acknowledge that «il faut bien admettre que Platon croyait en
l’existence de vérités dénitives, mais qu’il était convaincu que
de telles vérités n’étaient pas à la portée de l’être humain en
général et à la sienne en particulier» (Brisson 1998: 9).
However, it is important to underline that Plato, in referring
to this type of knowledge, that is to the “visions” of those pos-
sessed by God, maintained that this was possible on some con-
ditions: that the initiate is not “master of his thoughts”, nor does
he linger on reection; or on condition that «his power of under-
standing is impeded by sleep or sickness» (Timaeus 71e), so that
it cannot interfere with what comes from above, from God, from
whom the individual is possessed, lled like a “vase” (such is the
sense of the term “enthusiasm”: ἐνθουσιασμός) (Perillié 2006: 3).
With the mouth of the Pythias, it was Apollo himself who spoke
and gave orders on the most varied subjects. This was a condi-
tion that – again according to Plato – was highly regarded among
the ancients, who did not consider it an object of blame or shame
(Phaedrus, 244b), unlike what would eventually happen.
The later Neoplatonic Iamblichus (about 250-330 AD), tak-
ing up in essence this line of thought and inserting it in his
particular predilection for magic and theurgy, would say that
the “divine madness” «sends forth words, but not with the
understanding of the speakers; on the contrary, it is said that
they utter them with a “frenzied mouth” while wholly serving
and surrendering to the unique activity of the one controlling
them» (Iamblichus 2003: 137). “Excellence” is not the fruit of the
eort of reason, which proceeds slowly and with an uncertain
pace, topic after topic. There is therefore a contrast between
rationality and excellence; and only those who dismiss reason
succeed in “grasping the sign”, in the same way as only those
who do not need to learn and to memorize the rules through
their verbal explanation really know how to play a “linguistic
game”, according to Wittgenstein.
But even the nal moment when the philosopher gains ac-
30
cess to the truth is characterized, according to Plato, by that “vi-
sion” of the soul which is properly congured as “theoria”, liter-
ally as a “seeing” that is analogous to the experience of one who
goes to another polis as ocial representative of his polis to
“see” the religious festivals celebrated there, or as many visitors
who came to Athens to attend the great Panhellenic religious
festivals. Similarly, the philosophical vision reached through a
long process of preparation that passes through purely intellec-
tual disciplines – such as numerical computation, geometry, as-
tronomy and nally dialectics (here lies the dierence from the
poet or the “possessed”) – must not only rely on the narrative
forms typical of myth (the path leading to the contemplation of
sunlight is illustrated by Plato through the myth represented in
the Allegory of the Cave), leaving unexplained the true nature
of the “forms”, and in particular of the Good which is reached,
but – as pointed out by Andrea W. Nightingale – this “vision”
emerges from the discursive activity of dialectics, which was
also the vehicle that led to it.
Even if the philosopher comes to a partial view of the Forms,
because of the imperfection of his soul they are not produced or
constructed by the subject during his cognitive process. Besides,
this “vision” is basically nothing more than the theory which the
itinerant faithful enjoy when attending religious festivals, and is
therefore in its essence a kind of contemplation that has the typ-
ical features of those forms of “vision” of the Sacred of archaic
religiosity: «[…] we must acknowledge that, for Plato, the activity
of theoria takes as its model a cultural practice that was essential-
ly religious, i.e. theoria at religious sanctuaries and festivals. Plato
could have focused on the third, more secular, kind of theoria, in
which the traveler goes abroad to see the world. However, while
this kind of theoria does inform Plato’s account of philosoph-
ic theorizing, it is the theoria at religious festivals that plays the
leading role in his discussions of philosophical contemplation.
The “sacralized visuality” that characterized theoria at religious
sanctuaries oered the most direct model for the philosophic vi-
sion of “divine” realities» (Nightingale 2004: 112-113). In an even
more decisive way, one could argue according to the Allegory of
the Cave, that the nal moment of the spiritual vision of forms is
merely the transposition, on the narrative plane of myth, of the
mystery traditions «in which the initiates were known as epoptes:
those who have seen» (Versluis 2007: 15).
31
This vision is closely linked to poetry and prophecy, and it
characterizes the “seer”, regardless of the availability of a func-
tioning organ of sight: the blind poet – for example Homer, as
he was depicted in tradition, along with many others – sees with
the “eyes of the mind” in the same way as the shaman sees with
mystic eyes and in analogy with the Pythia and the Sybil, who
are represented with their heads veiled (Seppilli 1971: 194-198).
The all-human blindness attributed to prophets and poets, the
blindness of the physical eyes, is the condition to open the eyes
of the inner mind, which can reach the contemplation of the
Absolute only when it is no longer distracted by the vision of
sensible things. The poet thus, inasmuch as he enjoys the priv-
ilege of “seeing” Aletheia, is a “master of truth” (Detienne 1996:
50-52) and the language of the poetry he composes is that of
the gods: in all the great traditional cultures – in Mesopotamia
as in Egypt, in India as among the Jewish prophets – the gods
speak to man in verse (Jaynes 2000: 361-364; Book III, chapter
III); and the poet – in all archaic societies and also in docu-
mented historical times, for long periods – not only composes
evocative aesthetic works destined to move the feelings, but is
also a prophet, a seer and with his art aims to act on the world:
póiesis is action, enchantment, ritual drama, and magical opera-
tion that puts people in touch with a supra-reality (Seppilli 1971:
10-1, 347-348; Guénon 1946: 117).
This is precisely the reality indicated by Plato: «You know,
none of the epic poets, if they’re good, are masters of their sub-
ject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all
those beautiful poems. [...]. For a poet is an airy thing, winged
and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes in-
spired and goes out his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.
As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he
will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. [...]
You see, it’s not mastery that enables them to speak those verses,
but a divine power [...]. That’s why the god takes their intellect
away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does
prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know
that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such
high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is
the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us» (Ion,
533e-534d). This poetic ability allows access to a dimension other
than episteme, that is to an exclusive sophia not available to other
32
common mortals. In fact, in addressing Ion, who practices poetic
art, Plato points out: «Surely you are the wise men [σοφόι], you
rhapsodes and actors, you and the poets whose work you sing.
As for me, I say nothing but the truth, as you’d expect from an
ordinary man [ἰδιώτην ἄνθρωπον]» (Ion, 532d-e).
There are therefore two types of access to the Aletheia: the rst
is carried out by poets and by those who are inspired by the god;
they are the true wise men, who come to the “vision” (ἐπόπτεια)
allowed only to the members’ narrow circles, of mystery com-
munities and based on oral transmission, of which the “esoteric
Socrates” (Périllié 2016) is the exponent; the second one is pur-
sued through humble and laborious rational investigation, car-
ried out by the rationalist and dialectical Socrates in the course
of his long, tortuous, sometimes exhausting dialogues, at the
end of which we reach a modest, simple truth, which can also be
reached by the profane, the common man, even the slave, that is
he does not have the gift or the possibility of entering the sacred
space, where he can come into contact with the Divine.
This vision is the object of unwritten doctrines; but it is a vi-
sion in which the discourse is silent and the adept nally reaches
the absoluteness of that truth, otherwise always concealed and
alluded to in all human discourses of the profane sciences. This
nature of the True justies the fact that in the VI book of the
Republic (509c-511e) there is not a fth section of the line, high-
er than the νόησις, that is dialectical reason, since the line as a
whole concerns knowledge and this can only be proposition-
al, that is, it can only have the form of philosophy: in the third
section of the line it uses a deductive-consequentialist method
(which is typically the mathematical one) (διάνοια) and the dia-
lectic one in the fourth (νόησις); neither of these methods corre-
sponds to a distinction based on the respective ontological fur-
niture (respectively the objects of mathematics and ideas) (Chen
1992: 99-111), but on the type of knowledge specic to them (Fron-
terotta 2001: 105). The idea that noetic-philosophical knowledge
can be considered as a holistic, intuitive, synthetic vision, equat-
ed to a “vision”, to an experience that we have had by contact
with the Truth, brings together characterizations that are in
radical contrast. As mentioned above, philosophical knowledge
arises and unfolds in its power – even with Plato – precisely to
the extent that it is discursive and therefore propositional knowl-
edge. Everything that does not have such features cannot be con-
33
sidered philosophy, just as it is quite clear for those who have a
minimum familiarity with the history of esoteric thought, which
has indeed made the contraposition between philosophy and es-
otericism a key element of its identity. As Ferrari (2006: 428-429)
argues, the distinction between διάνοια and νόησις can be as-
similated to the dierence between mediated-discursive thought
and intuitive-immediate knowledge (as claimed by Fronterotta
2001: 102-107, in interpreting the theory of the line). In short, «the
two forms of knowledge active in the intelligible sphere [διάνοια
and νόησις] are not distinguished because the rst is discursive,
while the second is intuitive; each of them expresses a method-
ical, relational and propositional knowledge in its essence. [...]
Dialectical and noetic knowledge is therefore inscribed within
the space of discursive reason, of which the rational accounting,
conceptual separation and refutation constitute the fundamen-
tal theoretical dimension» (Ferrari 2006: 433-435).
Nevertheless, the fact that in the last part of the line we reach
a rst Principle that is no longer hypothetical, in the form of the
Good, which represents the most fundamental principle, which
cannot – on pain of regressing to innity – be further justied
dialectically, leads to the conclusion that this section leads to a
“vision” that has no propositional character and that is essen-
tial to guarantee the discursive and propositional knowledge
of both the third section (thanks to its ability to support the
hypotheses before only admitted or accepted on the basis of
their explicative but unfounded capacity) and the fourth sec-
tion, which is lacking in the sensible support. It is this “vision”
therefore that guarantees, in the last instance, the explanation
of all the forms subordinated to it (Fine 2004: 113-114; Bussanich
2016: 98-99). And yet it does not properly belong – insofar as it
is not discursive – to the fourth section, and therefore strictly
speaking it is not a section of the line, nor is it a fth section, but
rather a dimensionless point, i.e. the act of vision, the terminal
moment, which becomes part of the journey only to the extent
that it is paradoxically out of it; this is the place, as we have said
before, of the mystery view. In short, the entire path that leads
to knowledge is subjected to the regime of propositional argu-
mentation, and the subject that carries out the entire dialectical
process is the logos, except for the nal point in which we come
to grasp the rst Principle that represents the keystone that can
guarantee all the knowledge. Plato has thus rationalized what
34
in mystery practices was given to rituality and to all forms of
purication of a religious nature, but has left intact the nal
moment of the Vision, which therefore possesses the same na-
ture of ἐπόπτεια, even if its object is laically represented by the
Good, not of course by a deity appearing to the adept.
Plato’s contempt for knowledge without rational justica-
tion is understandable, precisely because it cannot be knowl-
edge, that is, it cannot be put on the same level as that which
forms part of the “line”. Both in the case in which we are sat-
ised by a form of knowledge understood as “true justied be-
lief” (ἀληθὴς δόξα μετὰ λόγου) (Trabattoni 2012) – as is dened
by the contemporary handbooks of epistemology and whose
rst formulation dates back to Plato (Teeteto, 208b ss) – and in
the case in which it is possible to reach a real ἐπιστήμη, i.e. a
dialectical knowledge of the ideas (νόησις) to which the phi-
losopher can access, and which is characterized by its infalli-
bility, certainty and irrefutability (Ferrari 2013b: 411-414), in any
case, argumentation is indispensable, that is the ability to link
together opinions or ideas, and to justify them by means of a
discourse. What goes beyond argumentation and justication,
claiming to be able to dispense with them, is not knowledge,
but falls within the anti-logos or in a kind of approach to the
real which, in order to be possible, must get rid of knowledge.
In essence, this is the basic idea not only of the esoteric
tradition, but also of inuential sectors of Western thought –
like the aforementioned Cusano, but also many others, such
as Wittgenstein (Coniglione 2002) – and Eastern Wisdom. In
this perspective, philosophia is not sophia, that is “wisdom”, but
can only be useful as a preparation for the latter, allowing us
to approach it (Guénon 1999: 159n.); it takes us to the edge of
an abyss in which we must have the courage to jump in, with-
out any further assistance: and as this is done, we can see that
hitherto invisible bridge that leads us to the other side. This is
represented by a poignant scene in the lm “Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade”, signicantly called “the leap of faith”: the
protagonist steps forward on the abyss and discovers that he is
supported by a bridge, previously invisible and that he can now
see. When he gets to the other side, he sprinkles the nal part of
the bridge with dust so that it is also visible to those who follow
him. Thus, Indiana Jones makes his own initiatory journey in
search of the Holy Grail (another typical traditional symbol of
35
esoteric enlightenment), the discovery of which is all the more
valid as it cannot be communicated. And in fact, those who
try to possess the sacred chalice for profane purposes perish,
while Indiana returns without it, having understood that the
purpose of the risky, life-endangering journey is not to bring
home something material, like a chalice, to use for profane pur-
poses (the immortality of the body), but to have achieved that
spiritual perfection which was the true purpose of his journey:
possession of the material chalice is only the tangible symbol
of the enlightenment. It is not possible to take the chalice back,
as it is not possible for the initiate who has attained enlighten-
ment to take back what he has seen, and therefore tell people
about it, because at this point speech is silent and the silence is
lled by absolute contemplation.
However, unlike what the school of Tubinga and Giovan-
ni Reale claimed (2010: viii-ix and passim), these “unwritten
doctrines” are not really “doctrines”, in the plural, because
the plural presupposes the possibility of a discursive articula-
tion which takes place in time and space, while the wisdom to
which Plato alludes is out of time and space. The “unwritten
doctrine” is not exactly a “doctrine,” precisely because it does
not have the typical structure of the logos, but stands on the lev-
el of the anti-logos, of what is absolutely beyond it. It is not a
form of knowledge that can be systematically exposed, in the
form of a “Protology”, as this would fall back into the Babel of
discourses, and esotericism would end up being understood in
its most supercial and insignicant form, i.e. as a requirement
of secrecy and of non-disclosure to spiritually unsuitable and
unprepared men. In short, in the “unwritten doctrines” Plato
did not want to propose a form of metaphysics that is superior
and of higher quality than that presented in the dialogues, a
knowledge of rst principles that could be articulated in a sys-
tem of statements. The truth which we reach in this way does
not reside in the place of origin of the logos, where the logos
still does not inhabit, and therefore there is nothing that can
be falsied (Trabattoni 2004: 136-138); the truth – in my opinion
– resides precisely in that non-place which is reached by the
mysteric vision of the initiates, and which lies not before the log-
os, but at its peak, to which we arrive thanks to philosophy and
dialectics, according to Plato, and thanks to the initiatic rites
and practices of a symbolic nature, according to esotericism. It
36
is nevertheless true that this place represents an inexhaustible
reservoir from which it is always possible to draw new logoi: all
those who have practiced this path know this well, as we have
illustrated in delineating some of the characteristics of esoteri-
cism. With Pierre Hadot, we could say that rather than a body
of doctrines, in the Platonic academy it was about learning to
live philosophically, to transform one’s own soul through the
contemplation of Forms, so gaining the true meaning of philos-
ophizing: «True philosophy is neither an oral discourse nor a
written discourse, but a way of being: philosophizing does not
consist in speaking or writing, but in being; it is necessary to
transform oneself completely into one’s own soul in order to
contemplate the Idea of Good. And here the limits of language
are reached» (Hadot 2008: 15; see also Brisson 1993: 480).
However, can we say that the reconstruction of the content of
unwritten doctrines, as exposed by Reale (2010, Part Four), is to-
tally unfounded? Not at all. Nevertheless, the complex articula-
tion of the protology he proposed – with the supreme genres of
the real (limitless, limit, mixture, and demiurgical intelligence)
the indenite Dyad, the One, the geometrical structure of the
soul, the deductive connection, etc. – by no means constitutes
a sort of systematic metaphysics (current or to be developed),
with the consequences that derive from it (Ferrari 2012: 371-376),
but it realizes that form of symbolic, allusive presentation, well
known to all esoteric teachings, which is dierent from both
rational and mythical-religious discourse. From this also fol-
lows the lack of relevance of the decision about the monism or
dualism of the nature of the theory of principles contained in
the unwritten doctrines. In eect, the dierent solutions, with
the multiplicity of metaphysical options that can derive from
them, conrm how the descent from the plane of ineability to
that of human discourses entails that multiplicity and relativity
of possible interpretations, admitted in esoteric doctrines only
as dierent symbolic ways that can and must lead to the same
result (which is certainly not the uniqueness of a philosoph-
ical-metaphysical system). The unwritten doctrine, therefore,
should not be assumed in a substantive way – as we made clear
at the beginning – that is, it must not be fetishized, ending up
by mistaking for real entities, or for authentic descriptions of
a superior reality, what instead are simple symbols, points of
support, help or means for a spiritual elevation that leads to
37
that vision, the achievement of which can no longer be the ob-
ject of any doctrine. To this regard, we can share what Hadot
said about the Timaeus (one of the pivotal works to enter the
Platonic protology): «In the case of the Timaeus, it is a credi-
ble fable that imitates the event of the birth of the God-World.
And Plato repeatedly emphasizes the fact that we must not
take this game too seriously» (Hadot 2008: 18). In short, what
is important to understand is that the esoteric interpretation
of Plato can only be made by placing him within the tradition
linked to the Mysteries, and so we cannot at the same time hold
together and reconcile two radically distinct plans: unwritten
tradition and esotericism on the one hand, and the exposition
of a protology with entities (the One, the Dyad, etc.) that takes
on a discursive course, on the other. To mix these two categor-
ically dierent plans is, in my opinion, a fatal error not only
in the interpretation of Plato, but for human knowledge in
general. Plato’s “reuse” of the tradition channeled by Myster-
ies – called by Dodds (1962: 207-224) the Platonic reform of the
“Inherited Conglomerate” – does not lead to its complete re-
moval, but rather to its connement within a mode of access
to the Truth, which is clearly dierent from the truth which is
reached with philosophical knowledge, founded in its auton-
omy and guaranteed by the fact that the contents of the Soul’s
knowledge do not have a purely subjective value, but possess
an objective consistency provided by the World of Ideas (Fer-
rari 2013: 27). In short, with his work Plato wanted to place a
barrier to the “pervasiveness” of traditional knowledge; for this
purpose, it was necessary to “kill Parmenides” and his idea of a
truth which is reached through a guaranteed itinerary allowed
by the Goddess; for without this murder, «the West as we know
it would never have existed» (Kingsley 1999: 45). It was there-
fore essential to enclose this modality of access to the Truth
in a small space, concerning only particular and special mo-
ments of human life to which only the elect, the initiated, could
access thanks to oral teaching only. Alongside it, and for the
rest of mankind, the supremacy of discourse, of the logos, was
valid, which reached authentic knowledge through the dialec-
tics, guaranteed by the World of Ideas and therefore worthy to
found the human community and the polis. As Ferrari (2013:
37) states regarding a typical esoteric theme – that of the im-
mortality of the soul to be achieved through rigorous initiation
38
and personal asceticism – «It is dicult not to see in all this
the presence of a precise design, consisting in the transforma-
tion of immortality from mythic-religious practice into a phil-
osophical strategy: the (ἀπο)ἀθανατίζειν ceases to be a ques-
tion of priests and shamans, as happened with Zalmoxis and
his followers, to become a profane and a purely philosophical
subject». However, this neutralization, this «strategy aimed at
establishing a continuity between the archaic tradition and the
new philosophic knowledge» (Ferrari 2013: 38n.), concerns only
the process that leads to the vision of Truth, which is ultimately
only the object of a ἐπόπτεια, about which it is not possible to
speak, and which is indicated by what has usually been called
“unwritten doctrines”. In fact, those who want to underline the
continuity between Plato and Pythagoreanism (and between
the latter and the Egyptian wisdom), do not fail to note how
in the Symposium the priestess Diotima describes man’s as-
cent to the contemplation of ideas, led by Eros, «in terms bor-
rowed from the Eleusinian mysteries, because essentially it is
the same ascent, consistent with all religious experience. It is
a gradual elevation and illumination comparable to the stages
of an initiation where the culminating revelation or the nal
vision (epopteia) transcends discursive thought and reason alto-
gether» (Uždavinys 2004: 68).
This leads to further comments on the characteristics of the
unwritten doctrines. First, they are not linked to a particular
phase of Plato’s philosophical reection, the late maturity (Sz-
lezák 1999: 47-48) (in this way it would be possible to identify the
moment of their birth or “elaboration”), since they transcend
his own person and have their roots in a tradition and in an ex-
periential mode pre-existing Platonic theorization. Nor should
such doctrines be understood as a complement, a further and
superior justication of the Theory of Ideas provided by the
supposed “First Principles”, which would thus be on the same
level as the philosophical argumentation underlying the doc-
trine of Ideas. Moreover, the unwritten doctrines do not serve
at all to better understand the philosophical thought of Plato,
overcoming the otherwise partial formulation of the dialogues
(Reale 2008: 10-11, 20), for the simple fact that they are placed on
a dierent plane from the philosophical one, a plane that pre-
supposes precisely the cessation of the latter, which is instead
perfectly autonomous in its scope (Schleiermacher’s opinion is
39
correct in this aspect) and entirely intelligible discursively, in
spite of its unavoidable and insurmountable shortcomings and
aporias17. Furthermore, the “secrecy” mentioned in the school
of Tübingen-Milan must be understood both as being aimed at
the fear of misunderstanding, and as the rm belief of access-
ing the dimension of ineability, thus explaining the oscillation
that has been detected in this perspective (Ferrari 2012: 369). It
is in the esoteric tradition that these two moments (together
with the third, the one dened as “secrecy of necessity”, which
is however the most supercial and contingent) have always
been joined: the necessary symbolic representation of esoter-
ic knowledge can easily lead those who are not appropriately
guided by a “Master” to understand images and metaphors in
a purely material sense, that is as the description of metaphys-
ically existing entities, endowed with an ontological consist-
ency, not only as means or instruments, to reach the “vision”
or “enlightenment”, thus, for example, exchanging alchemical
gold for the base metal with economic value.
Finally, the fact that it was possible for Plato to hypothesize a
particular phase of spiritual maturation through meditation on
the unwritten doctrines indicates his conception of the itiner-
ary that leads to the non-propositional Truth not as the sudden
illumination that can be reached by emotional impulse (in the
manner of the Bacchae and of many manifestations of Greek
mysticism in his time), but rather as an initiatory path, which is
the typical expression – as we have seen before – of the esoteric
thought inherited by his successors. For this reason, it would
be a mistake to speak of Platonic mysticism as it is done in the
context of its intuitionistic interpretation where it is interpret-
ed according to the exclusive perspective of the “noetic intelli-
gence” or even of the “eidetic intuition” in a phenomenological
style, but rather of “esotericism”, understood in the terms that
we tried to specify earlier.
17 For this reason, however paradoxical it may seem, I share the positions
of those who, like Luc Brisson (1993: 486), oppose an esoteric reading of Plato,
such as that sustained by the school of Tübingen and Milan, at least insofar
as it is claimed that this reading is not a necessary (or even useful) condition
for the “authentic” interpretation of the Platonic dialogues.
40
4. The Everlasting Success of Platonic Thought
At the heart of Plato’s pure philosophical theory, therefore, lies
a mode of representation of knowledge that is rooted in the an-
ti-logos, in the doctrines of theologians and mysteries. So, the
followers of Eleusis ask for katharsis, the ‘inner death’ by which
the soul needs to free itself from the encrustations deriving from
its permanence in the body and in the world of matter (Rohde
1925: 468-72). This allows us to better understand the undying
success of Plato’s thought, deriving from having been able to
hold together three dierent levels of “knowledge”: the dialecti-
cal-argumentative one, in the context of which philosophy takes
on an autonomous form of discipline, thus beginning its fortune
along the course of European thought, and is dened the ide-
al of knowledge and truth that has become part of the Western
Canon; the allegorical-narrative one, which has its admirable
expression in the great myths contained in Plato’s dialogues and
which constitutes the rm base on which the ocial Greek re-
ligiosity is built and which would be common to the religions of
all times, in whose narrative and exemplary procedure spiritual
teaching and popular accessibility merge and nd a synthesis;
and nally, the esoteric-initiatory one, found in the oral teaching
of the unwritten doctrines, which unfolds through a symbolic
path (that of esotericism) to nally result in the ineable, in a
vision that cannot be communicated through the everyday lan-
guage of reason and argumentation: this is the basis of both the
mystical experience and the esoteric disciplines that have passed
through the culture and the Western religious approaches as a
subterranean and alternative karst current. These are essential-
ly the three dimensions detected by Quispel and valorized by
Hanegraa (2008), but they are also present in Frithjof Schuon
(1997: 9-14), a contemporary esotericist who makes a distinction
between philosophy, religion and esoteric knowledge (that he
refers to as “metaphysics”). It is easy to see how the dialectic-ar-
gumentative plane corresponds to science (or philosophy, that is,
to the purely rational dimension), the allegorical-narrative one to
faith (even if this term was not yet used by Plato and we must wait
for the nal phase of Neoplatonism and the advent of Christian-
ity) and the esoteric-initiatory one to gnosis18.
18 As Hanegraa writes (2008: 133), «Quispel’s grand thesis was that – in ad-
41
Only for the last two aspects – which have an eminently sym-
bolic nature, even if in dierent forms – is it true, in my opinion,
what Hadot states (2008b: 121-2) about the function of Plato’s dia-
logues, namely that they aim more to form than to inform; it would
be indeed reductive to think that in Plato there was not an adequate
cognitive tension for “how things are”, for a universal and perma-
nent denition of the fundamental values and laws that govern
the human community (good, virtue, right state and so on). It is
not a correct approach to dene philosophy in Plato in a narrow
sense, that is totally aiming at self-realization and to a contempla-
tive dimension pointing at the divinization of man, with the con-
sequence of arguing that «philosophy has little to do with science»
(Kazanas 2014: 21). Of course, it is true that in Plato knowledge also
implies a transformation of the self into a process of liberation and
purication from ignorance and from the bonds with the body,
which has many similarities to the analogous path indicated in
Yoga (Gold 1996; Bussanich 2016), as can be seen in certain behav-
iors of his Master Socrates (Muscato 2014). However, it cannot be
denied that in any case knowledge has its own autonomy, subse-
quently enhanced by making philosophy and science the most
signicant activities of mankind; instead, knowledge as a practice
of spiritual exercises – which in the Neoplatonic tradition would
take the form of mental concentration or contemplation of nature
and the order of the cosmos, with a parallel process of ascent and
renunciation of mundane reality (Hadot 1987: 47) – regards more
properly the last aspect of the Platonic teaching, which represents,
to use the words of Quispel (2008: 39), «the third component of
the Western cultural tradition»19, which was not by chance subse-
dition to the established churches and theologies with their emphasis on faith,
and the philosophical and scientic traditions based on rationality, or reason
– there had always been a third component of the European cultural tradition
[…] grounded in gnosis. This tradition of gnosis, or so he argued, had always
been suppressed and marginalized by the representatives of reason and faith,
including modern historians, who had sorely neglected the role played by gno-
sis in the history of Western culture or had presented it in a very negative light».
19 «Gnosis is, in fact, the third component of European culture. There has
always been faith, which goes back to Sinai and Golgotha. There has always
been rationalism, which can be traced back to Athens and Ionia. There have
always been people who had inner experiences and expressed themselves
in imaginative thinking. […] Gnosis originated in Egyptian Alexandria at the
beginning of our era. Three cities, therefore, Alexandria, together with Jeru-
salem and Athens, determined the history of the West.» (Quispel 2008: 143).
42
quently developed in Neoplatonism20 and Gnosticism; yet it also
belongs to every esoteric and initiatic tradition, both internal and
external to the institutionalized forms of religion.
Finally, if we wanted to dare to make an intercultural compar-
ison21, we could say that Plato’s philosophical work – analogous to
an Indian “philosopher” – consisted in giving a rational formula-
tion and a discursive paraphrase to the Truth gained through a di-
rect, immediate and incommunicable experience (Cognetti 2015:
128-9). The originality of Plato consists in the aforementioned tri-
ple articulation of his message, which allowed him to found not
only the very notion of “philosophy” in its discursive aspect, as
we know it in the West, but also to be the inspirer of the Western
esoteric tradition, as would be witnessed by the subsequent vicis-
situdes of Neoplatonism (not to mention its inuence on Chris-
tianity). It is no coincidence that Plato’s thought would always be
the breeding ground from which esotericism would later nd
expression, so that its scholars would sooner or later come across
the Platonism which inspired the original and founding text of
modern Western esoteric tradition, i.e. the Corpus Hermeticum.
Regarding this, it is surely true that «The safest general character-
ization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists
of a series of footnotes to Plato» (Whitehead 1979: 39).
20 So, we nd in Porphyre both the poetic vein that reuses and reinterprets
classical mythology, the philosopher who develops the Platonic metaphysics
giving it an epoptic outlet, and nally the hierophant, follower of the mystery
cults, theurgist and interpreter of the role that magical practices have within
the esoteric character of the initiatic path (Girgenti 2011: xviii-xix). However,
these three components, still in equilibrium in Plato, in Porphyre receive a
decisive and clear twist in the mystical-esoteric-mysteric sense, so that even
philosophy is seen exclusively as preparation for the nal and conclusive mo-
ment, in which the epopteia is realized and accomplished.
21 Obviously, this theme cannot even be touched upon here, as it concerns the
much-debated question of the supposed oriental inuences on archaic Greek
thought, which extend to the evaluation of possible analogies, in a comparative
point of view, between Plato and some aspects of Indian philosophy (Upanishad,
Yoga and Vedanta). This theme is little practiced in the eld of Italian antiquities
studies, but has known the remarkable work of Thomas McEvilley (2002), on
which several scholars have intervened in n. 9 of 2005 of the International Journal
of Hindu Studies, as J. Bussanich, N.J. Allen, N.P. Sil, G. Thompson. Other key
points of reference for this problematic horizon are the previous works of West
1971 and above all Burkert 1995 and, more recently, Kingsley 2010. See also in
Italian the essays by Kazanas (2014), Gold (1996) and Muscato (2014).
43
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