How does Irish Platonism speak across the island’s religious divide?
Looking back to the scholarship of pre-schism Irish intellectuals – both at home and on the Continent – this project will examine authors from both Protestant and Catholic traditions.
Platonism has long roots in Irish culture. From the very beginnings of Irish literature, the Platonic doctrines that were inherited from late antique authorities played a pivotal role, across genres, in the ongoing development of ideas. The most remarkable example of medieval Irish Platonism is famously the Periphyseon of the ninth-century theologian and philosopher, Eriugena, the influence of which was to be felt throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Its relationship to the more implicit development of Platonism in Ireland itself remains unclear. Nevertheless, by the eleventh century, we find compositions demonstrating the kind of Platonism which has traditionally been associated with the School of Chartres in Ireland itself. Here, Scéla na esérgi, an anonymous sermon on the universal resurrection, is a notable example. Into the modern era, Platonism increasingly becomes a common language which is shared by Irish intellectuals of many different interests, political ideals and religious commitments. In this way it would come to have a decisive influence on the writings of such disparate figures as the Anglican bishop George Berkeley, the devout Catholic translator, Stephen MacKenna, the hermeticist poet, W. B. Yeats, and the post-religious philosopher, Iris Murdoch, to name a few. The potential of Platonism to transcend sectarian divides will be central to this project’s exploration of the part it has played in Ireland’s intellectual history.
