Humanities Center, Works-In-Progress: Jed Wyrick, "What does it mean to refer to a religion as Neo-Platonic?" Friday, December 6th, 12:00pm, PAC 113

Friday, Dec. 6, 2024 noon

Humanities Center, PAC 113

Works-in-Progress: Jed Wyrick, "What does it mean to refer to a religion as Neo-Platonic?" Friday, December 6th, 12:00 PM, PAC 113

Neoplatonism refers to the systematic approach to the philosophy of Plato achieved beginning in the 3rd century CE by Plotinus and his successors. Their worldview was influential on early and medieval Christianity as well as on Islamic philosophy and Islamic religious movements, including Sufism, Shi'ism, and numerous Shi'i sectarian offshoots. Through Islamic philosophy and Sufism, it came to Judaism and again to Catholicism and later helped inspire Deism. Finally, Neoplatonism "reinfected" several American Protestant religious movements in the 19th century. The influence of Neoplatonism is commonly regarded as limited to the process of achieving union with the divine practiced by a few isolated mystics. But Neoplatonism is arguably a key ingredient in familiar religious views on the soul and its fate, in a persistent view of the structure and origins of the cosmos, and in widespread practices that attempt to influence the divine and bring down its bounty.

Jed Wyrick is a Professor of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico. He holds a B.A. in Classics at Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and is the author of The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution, Textualization, and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Harvard University Press, 2004). Dr. Wyrick teaches courses in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Antisemitism and Islamophobia, Ancient and Medieval Art and Literature, and Religion and the Arts.

Humanities Center

Director: Erin K. Kelly

ekkelly@csuchico.edu