Thomas Taylor

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In a small house in London, through the closing decades of the eighteenth century, a self-taught man without a university degree set himself to put the whole of the late-antique Platonic library into English, and held the gods of that library to be real. Thomas Taylor was an English translator and philosopher whose versions of Plato, Plotinus, and the later Neoplatonists were the first to make the full range of that tradition readable to those without Greek. He worked through the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, largely outside the universities, and earned the nickname “the English Pagan” — a phrase the poet Coleridge applied to him — for treating the pagan philosophy he translated not as a dead curiosity but as a creed he held.

A clerk’s apprenticeship

Taylor was born in London on 15 May 1758, the son of Joseph Taylor, a staymaker, and his wife Mary. He was schooled at St Paul’s, where he fixed on the classics and on mathematics, and he came to Greek philosophy not through a faculty but on his own. For a time he prepared for the dissenting ministry, studying under a tutor at the Salters’ Hall meeting-house — the dissenting congregations of London, outside the established Church, were the milieu of his family — but he did not take up a pulpit. He married young, kept a school for a while at Paddington, and then took a clerkship at Lubbock’s bank, translating in whatever hours the ledger left him. The arrangement held for years: the philosopher of the One spent his days counting another man’s money and his nights with Proclus.

What freed him was patronage. A public lecture on Platonism in 1784 brought him to the notice of William Meredith, a man of means who undertook to support him, and in 1806 Taylor resigned the bank on the strength of an annuity Meredith settled on him. From that point he was a full-time scholar. He never held a university post, never read for a degree, and never learned his Greek in a lecture hall; the whole apparatus of his learning was assembled by his own effort, against the grain of an age that did its serious classical work through Oxford and Cambridge. That outsider’s standing colored everything — the freedom of his readings, the confidence of his paganism, and the unevenness of his Greek that the universities would later hold against him.

The output was enormous and, in places, underwritten by friends: the five-volume Works of Plato of 1804 — the first complete English Plato, carrying the nine dialogues that Floyer Sydenham had earlier rendered, revised, alongside Taylor’s own — and a complete English Aristotle in nine volumes (1806–1812), printed in an edition of only fifty sets at Meredith’s expense. The Plato of 1804 was organized not chronologically but by the Neoplatonic curriculum, the dialogues arranged as Iamblichus and Proclus had taught them to be read, and its footnotes import whole stretches of the ancient commentators — Proclus above all — so that the reader holds in hand not Plato alone but Plato as the late Platonic schools had received him. This was deliberate. Taylor did not believe there was a more authentic Plato lying behind the one his masters had expounded; the chain of teachers from the Academy down to Proclus was, to him, a single transmission of one truth, and he set out to render it whole.

The work

The translations, taken together, amount to a one-man transmission of a philosophical civilization. Taylor rendered the dialogues of Plato; a large part of the Enneads of Plotinus; the commentaries and theological treatises of Proclus; the works of Iamblichus and Porphyry; the Orphic and Pythagorean fragments; the Chaldean Oracles; and the short pagan catechism of Sallustius, On the Gods and the World. Much of it appeared in English for the first time and has never been done again outside scholarly editions. His Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato (1816) carried into English the most ambitious systematic theology the ancient world produced; when a book of the original was found wanting he supplied one of his own composition to complete the scheme. His Iamblichus On the Mysteries (1821) and his Porphyry On the Cave of the Nymphs (1823) opened the theurgic and allegorical wing of the tradition to readers who would otherwise have had no door to it. The first is Iamblichus’s great defense of ritual against Porphyry’s doubts — the argument that the soul does not ascend to the divine by thought alone but is raised by acts the gods themselves have established; the second reads Homer’s cave in the Odyssey as a veiled diagram of the soul’s descent into body and its passage home, the kind of allegory in which a poem becomes a map of metaphysical reality. His earliest publication, The Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus (1787), set the tone for everything after: a sacred poetry addressed to the gods, rendered by a translator who meant the address.

One precision matters here, because it is often blurred. Taylor produced the first complete English Plato, but he did not produce a complete English Plotinus. He translated roughly half of the fifty-four treatises of the Enneads — across Concerning the Beautiful (1787), the Five Books of Plotinus (1794), the Select Works of Plotinus (1817), and later pieces — and that partial corpus was, for more than a century, the largest body of Plotinus available in the language. The first complete English Enneads would not appear until Stephen MacKenna’s five volumes of 1917–1930. What Taylor offered was not completeness but reach: a whole library of late-antique thought put within a reader’s grasp at a moment when no rival existed.

His renderings are now regarded as dated and at points loose, and the judgment is not new. Henry Davis called them uncouth and obscure; Coleridge, who admired the man, complained that the difficult Greek had come out as incomprehensible English; the Victorian translator Benjamin Jowett dismissed him. The defense, made most carefully by Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper, is that Taylor’s awkwardness was the price of fidelity to a worldview he refused to smooth into modern idiom — that he kept the technical vocabulary of essence, procession, and reversion intact rather than naturalize it away, and so preserved the spirit of texts that more fluent hands would have secularized. What the translations lacked in precision they supplied in fidelity of intent; both verdicts have proved durable.

A living creed

Taylor did not present himself as a neutral scholar, and this is the heart of the matter. He understood Platonism as true philosophy and the Neoplatonic theology of the One, Intellect, and the descending orders of being — the great chain of emanation by which all things proceed from and return to their source — as a living account of reality. He honored the old gods as real powers and the polytheism of late antiquity as a true theology rather than a superstition outgrown. In the Neoplatonic scheme he professed, the gods are not competitors of the One but its first unfoldings — henads, divine unities through which the single source pours itself into the manifold — so that polytheism and the strictest monism are, properly understood, the same doctrine seen from two distances. The reverence he felt for Iamblichus and Proclus was the reverence of a believer, not an antiquarian; the theurgy those authors taught, the ritual ascent of the soul through the orders of divinity, he took to be a real architecture of the world and not a curiosity of a credulous age. Where the Renaissance Platonists and the Christian Cambridge men had read the same texts as a propaedeutic to the Gospel — wisdom anticipating revelation — Taylor read them as the revelation, and refused the Christian gloss. The introduction to his Plato describes the philosophy as a luminous pyramid rising to Deity; the metaphor is exact, for he understood the whole descending series of being, from the One through Intellect and Soul to the world of bodies, as a real hierarchy down which divinity flows and up which the philosopher, by contemplation and by rite, returns.

That stance set him sharply apart from the temper of his time and drew both ridicule and devotion. A satirical story long attached to his name — that he once tried to offer a bull to Jupiter in a back room, only for the animal to bolt through a window — circulated as proof that the man took his paganism too literally; whether or not it ever happened, it captures how his contemporaries saw him. He stood in a long English line that had taken the ancient Platonists with religious seriousness: the Cambridge Platonists of the previous century, Henry More among them, and behind them the Florentine revival of Marsilio Ficino, who had first restored Plotinus and Proclus to the Latin West. Taylor carried that lineage into English and pressed it further than any of them, declining the Christian frame his predecessors had kept and professing the pagan one whole.

The Romantic inheritance

Among the devoted were poets. William Blake knew Taylor — probably through their mutual friend the sculptor John Flaxman, at whose house Taylor is said to have given private lectures on Platonism — and owned a copy of Taylor’s Hymns of Orpheus, identified among Blake’s books only in recent decades. The Plotinian architecture of descent and return, of the soul falling into generation and laboring homeward, runs through Blake’s prophetic books, and Blake’s “Emanations” — Enitharmon, Vala, Jerusalem — answer to the Neoplatonic sense of the word, the female correlates projected from the masculine powers as soul proceeds from intellect. How deep the debt runs has been argued for a century: George Mills Harper and Kathleen Raine pressed Taylor as a primary source for the prophetic books, mapping Plotinian epistrophe, the return of the soul, onto Blake’s geography of Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro; later scholars have moderated the claim, noting that Blake denounced the Platonic contempt for the body even as he borrowed its descent-and-return structure. The architecture, in any case, is no longer in dispute, and it reached Blake through Taylor’s pages. Coleridge read him with the irritated attention of a fellow metaphysician. Shelley reached the Symposium and the Ion through Taylor before making his own versions. A strand of English Romanticism reached Plotinus through Taylor’s pages rather than the Greek, and the channel ran across the Atlantic. The New England Transcendentalists — Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott chief among them — read Plato and the Neoplatonists in Taylor’s translations, seeing the dialogues, as one historian put it, through Procline spectacles. For the Concord circle Taylor was very nearly the sole English conduit of Neoplatonic thought.

The doctrine Taylor carried was itself old. The tradition he translated traced back through Plotinus to forerunners like Numenius of Apamea, the second-century Pythagoreanizing Platonist who had read Plato and Pythagoras as one teaching and gathered the wisdom of the nations behind the Greek — an instinct that Taylor, sixteen centuries later, shared entirely.

The Theosophical afterlife

His longer afterlife ran through the occult revival of the late nineteenth century. When Helena Blavatsky and the early Theosophists reached for a Western philosophical pedigree to set beside the Eastern sources of their synthesis, Taylor’s translations and his frank Platonic paganism were ready to hand. His Select Works of Plotinus was reissued in 1895 by G. R. S. Mead — Blavatsky’s secretary and a scholar of the Hermetic and Gnostic texts — and later esoteric writers cited Taylor steadily, so that a good deal of what twentieth-century readers took to be ancient wisdom reached them already shaped by his conviction that it was wisdom at all.

Editions and scholarship

The standard scholarly account of Taylor is Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper’s Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings (Bollingen Series LXXXVIII; Princeton University Press, 1969), which gathers representative translations and essays and frames Taylor as the bridge between the Cambridge Platonists and the Romantic–Transcendentalist reception of Plato. The earlier biographical and bibliographical foundation is William E. A. Axon’s Thomas Taylor, the Platonist (1890), supplemented by the Dictionary of National Biography tradition of nineteenth-century notices and, for the modern scholarly debate over his philosophical commitments, the International Journal of the Platonic Tradition. The case for Taylor’s role in Romanticism was made in Frank B. Evans’s Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period (PMLA, 1940), and George Mills Harper’s The Neoplatonism of William Blake (1961) and Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition (1968) established his place in the Blake question.

A distinction that modern scholarship insists on, and that Taylor himself would have rejected, is the one between his Plato and the historical Plato. The fourth-century-BCE Athenian writing aporetic dialogues, reconstructed by philological criticism, is not identical to the systematic theologian the Neoplatonic schools built from him and Taylor faithfully relayed; Taylor’s Plato is openly Plato-through-Proclus, the dialogues read in the light of a theology written eight centuries later. This does not discredit him — the Neoplatonic reading is itself a major historical fact, one that shaped Ficino, the Cambridge men, Blake, Emerson, and the whole later esoteric stream — but it means his versions are best read as a particular and powerful interpretation rather than a transparent window. Taylor would have answered that there is no other Plato; that the interpretation is the philosophy, handed down unbroken from teacher to teacher. The two readings are not enemies, but they are not the same, and the difference is the substance of his legacy.

Because Taylor died in 1835, his entire corpus is in the public domain, and his translations remain the only English version of several Neoplatonic works. The Prometheus Trust’s Thomas Taylor Series has reset the texts for print; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the first English translation of Plotinus was Taylor’s, and that until well into the nineteenth century Platonism was largely understood through its Plotinian expression — the expression Taylor had carried into English.

For the better part of a century, the Neoplatonists spoke English in Taylor’s voice. A reader who came to Plotinus in that voice met a philosopher who was also, in the translator’s own mind, a priest of a true theology; and Taylor’s labor was always, at bottom, an act of devotion — the work of a man who believed the texts he copied out described the way things actually are.

→ In the library: Taylor — Iamblichus on the Mysteries (1821) · Taylor — Porphyry: On the Cave of the Nymphs (1823)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Platonism · The One · Theosophy · Emanation · Plato · Proclus · Iamblichus · William Blake · Helena Blavatsky · Pythagoras · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Henry More · Numenius Of Apamea · Theurgy · Marsilio Ficino · Cambridge Platonism