The Appeal of NeoPlatonism to the Irish

After Yeats’ death I bought for a Jesuit library some of his fine volumes of Classical texts and secondary literature in Greens bookshop in Kildare Street. I do not remember if Stephen MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus On Beauty (1.6), which Yeats used extensively in his discourses to duchesses in London, was among them. […]
[Sean O’Faolain] was frustrated however, by his inability to “lay his hands”, so to speak, on Plotinus and neoPlatonism, for the very good reason that, apart from MacKenna’s inspired but not wholly reliable translation, modern scholarship had not yet done its duty to them. Padraic Colum had already told me of how moved he was by what he gleaned of Neoplatonism from my “Young Augustine” (which treated of the influence of the Neoplatonists on Augustine’s conversion): the mystic in him wanted more. Since the times of Yeats, Colum and O’Faolain both a reliable Greek text and an English translation have become available, and there is now much secondary work on Neoplatonism – some of it done by scholars connected with Ireland. And the interest in Neoplatonic themes endures – as is to be seen, for example, in Thomas Kinsella’s “Out of Ireland”. I have myself been curious about the appeal of Neoplatonism for the Irish throughout the centuries, and notable since the very Neoplatonist Irish scholar, John Scottus Eriugena in the ninth century.

John J. O’Meara (1915-2003), “On the Fringe of Letters”, Irish University Review (Vol. 27, No. 2, 1997, pp. 310-324) available on JSTOR (limited free access on registration).

John O’Meara, one of the great scholars of St. Augustine of Hippo and an early translator of Gerald of Wales muses on the appeal of neoPlatonism to the Irish, focusing on anecdotes about writers O’Meara encountered.

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