Thomas Taylor

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Thomas Taylor was an English translator and philosopher whose English 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” for treating the pagan philosophy he translated not as a dead curiosity but as a creed he held.

Born in London to a modest dissenting family, Taylor took no university degree and supported himself for years as a bank clerk, translating in whatever hours he could find. Patrons eventually freed him to work full time. The output was enormous: the dialogues of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus, commentaries by Proclus, the treatises of Iamblichus and Porphyry, the Orphic and Pythagorean fragments — much of it appearing in English for the first time. His renderings are now regarded as dated and at points loose; what they lacked in precision they supplied in reach, putting a whole library of late-antique thought within a reader’s grasp at a moment when no rival existed.

Taylor did not present himself as a neutral scholar. He understood Platonism as true philosophy and the Neoplatonic theology of the One, Intellect, and the descending orders of being as a living account of reality, and he defended the old gods as real powers. That stance set him apart from the antiquarian temper of his age and drew both ridicule and devotion. Among the devoted were poets: William Blake knew his work, and Coleridge, Shelley, and the American Transcendentalists read him, so that a strand of English and American Romanticism reached Plotinus through Taylor’s pages rather than the Greek.

His longer afterlife ran through the occult revival. When Helena Blavatsky and the early Theosophists reached for a Western philosophical pedigree, Taylor’s translations and his frank Platonic paganism were ready to hand, and later esoteric writers cited him steadily. The reading on which his reputation rests is contested: critics from his own day onward have judged his Greek unreliable and his enthusiasm a distortion, while admirers have held that he grasped the spirit of the texts where more careful hands missed it. Both verdicts have proved durable. What is not in dispute is the scale of the transmission. For the better part of a century, the Neoplatonists spoke English in Taylor’s voice, and a good deal of what later readers took to be ancient wisdom reached them already shaped by his conviction that it was wisdom at all.

→ 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