Proclus

Proclus Lycius

In 1268 the Flemish Dominican William of Moerbeke finished a Latin translation of a Greek book called the Elements of Theology, and Thomas Aquinas, reading it, made an awkward discovery. A treatise the universities had been citing for a century as the Book of Causes, and treating as the crown of Aristotle's metaphysics, was not by Aristotle at all. Proposition after proposition matched the Greek on Moerbeke's desk. The Book of Causes was an Arabic digest of the Elements of Theology, and its real author was Proclus, the devout pagan who had led Plato's school at Athens in the fifth century, no friend of the empire's new religion. Nor was that the only mask. The mysterious Dionysius the Areopagite, supposedly Paul's first Athenian convert and an authority second only to scripture for medieval mystics, writes in Proclus's exact technical vocabulary, triads and all; at the end of the nineteenth century scholars traced the dependence line by line. For roughly a thousand years, in other words, Christian Europe was absorbing one of its most determined philosophical rivals under two borrowed names, and building theology on his proofs. The man behind both masks is the most influential philosopher most readers have never opened.

The geometry of the sacred. The Elements of Theology is the only complete metaphysical system ever written in the strict form of Euclid: two hundred and eleven propositions, each stated in a single sentence and then demonstrated, each demonstration drawing only on what has already been proved. Proposition 1: "All multitude participates in a certain respect of the one." From that bare claim about plurality the chain runs upward and outward, through causation, eternity and time, soul and intellect, until the whole architecture of reality stands derived, ending at proposition 211 with the descent of individual souls. There are no myths in it, no visions, no appeals to authority, not one quotation; if you grant each step, you are carried by argument alone from the idea of the many to the threshold of the One. Nothing else in the ancient world looks like this, and almost nothing since: Spinoza's Ethics, twelve centuries later, is the only famous rival in form. The standard cartoon paints late Neoplatonism as incense and twilight, a mysticism that had given up on argument. The actual book is as dry as a geometry text and proud of it. Proclus's wager is that the mystical ascent can be axiomatized, that rigor and rapture are not rivals but the same motion of the mind.

Abiding, procession, reversion. The engine of the system is proposition 35: "Every thing caused, abides in, proceeds from, and returns, or is converted to, its cause." Three moments, in Greek mone, proodos, epistrophe: remaining, going-forth, turning-back. These are not stages in time but the permanent anatomy of dependence. An effect must remain in its cause, or it would share nothing with its source and could not come from it; it must proceed, or it would simply be its cause and not a distinct thing at all; and it must revert, or it would be cut off from its own good, since the good of anything is the source it came from. Everything real is therefore a circle in motion: light pouring out and bending back, each level of the world generated by the one above it and turning toward it in desire. Readers who know Hegel will feel the floor tilt here, and the connection is not an accident. Hegel, lecturing on the history of philosophy, named Proclus the culminating point of Neoplatonic philosophy, and his own dialectic, spirit going out of itself and returning to itself enriched, is this triad set into historical time. The difference is that Proclus's circle is eternal and already closed; Hegel made it a story with a beginning. Between the two stand fifteen centuries of trinities, hierarchies, and exits-and-returns, most of them running on Proclean machinery.

The gods as theorems. Proclus's most original doctrine answers the hardest question his tradition faced: how does irreducible plurality arise from an absolutely simple One? Plotinus had let Intellect emanate directly from the One, and the gap gaped. Proclus, following his teacher Syrianus, inserts between the ineffable One and the realm of Being a plurality of what he calls self-perfect unities, in modern scholarship the henads. Proposition 114: "Every God is a self-perfect unity, and every self-perfect unity is a God." Each henad is not a person in the sky but a face of unity itself, the One as participable, the absolute considered as this or that providential character. Apollo and Athena are argued into the structure of reality as theorems. It is the most philosophical defense polytheism ever received, built precisely while the temples were closing, and its fate is the great irony of the book's afterlife: when the Christian author writing as Dionysius absorbed the system, the henads became the divine names, Goodness, Being, Life, Wisdom, the many names of the one God. The same proofs, rebadged, served the religion they were written to resist. Readers of Cusanus, who had the Platonic Theology translated for his own shelves and annotated his Proclus closely, will recognize how durable the rebadging proved.

What this room reads. The corpus is Thomas Taylor, the self-taught London Platonist who translated nearly the whole of late Greek philosophy while the universities looked away, and whose versions fed Blake, Coleridge, and Emerson. The room carries his 1816 Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato (the Platonic Theology), printed with his translation of the Elements of Theology, the small treatise On Providence and Fate, and extracts from Ten Doubts Concerning Providence and On the Subsistence of Evil; and his 1820 Commentaries on the Timaeus of Plato, five books in two volumes. All of it is public domain. Two honesty notes. Taylor composed a "seventh book" of the Platonic Theology from his own pen to stand in for Proclus's lost conclusion, and the chat here treats Book VII as Taylor, never as Proclus. And Taylor's English is gloriously archaic: he writes "self-perfect unities" where modern scholars say henads, "the unical," "imparticipable," "hyparxis." E. R. Dodds's 1933 Oxford edition of the Elements is the modern standard and remains in copyright, so what you read here is the Proclus the Romantics read. Citations follow the conventional schemes: the Elements of Theology by proposition (prop. 35), the Platonic Theology by book and chapter, the Timaeus commentary by book and the passage of Plato under discussion. The Parmenides commentary, the Republic and Alcibiades commentaries, the Euclid commentary, and the hymns are not in the corpus; ask about them and the chat will say so and answer from general knowledge.

Providence, prayer, evil. The system is not cold. Book II of the Timaeus commentary preserves the richest ancient discussion of prayer, reporting Porphyry's view that prayer especially pertains to worthy men and pressing further: prayer is not lobbying a god to change course, it is the creature's reversion enacted, the turning-back of proposition 35 performed rather than proved. In a short essay on the hieratic art Proclus points to the heliotrope tracking the sun as a kind of hymn, each thing praying according to its nature; on his account the universe is saturated with chains of kinship that link every stone, plant, and soul upward to its god, which is why ritual, rightly understood, is applied metaphysics rather than superstition. Evil gets the complementary treatment. In the treatises translated in this corpus Proclus denies evil any principle of its own: it is a parhypostasis, a parasitic by-product subsisting on the good it deforms, real in its damage but with no engine and no home in the causes of things. Darkness, in this system, is always borrowed light failing. Augustine was teaching Latin Christians a kindred privation doctrine in the same decades, which is one reason the two traditions could later fuse so quietly.

The Successor. Proclus was born in 412 AD in Constantinople to a prosperous Lycian family of Xanthus and was groomed for the law, the family trade. Sent to Alexandria for rhetoric, he swerved to philosophy, studying Aristotle's logic and mathematics there, and arrived in Athens at about nineteen, where the aged Plutarch of Athens, founder of the revived Platonic school, took him in and read the Phaedo with him personally. Under Plutarch's successor Syrianus he absorbed the whole curriculum, Aristotle as the lesser mysteries, Plato as the greater, and by about 437, still in his twenties, he held the chair himself. His standing epithet is simply Diadochus, the Successor. His pupil Marinus records the regimen: five classes and some seven hundred lines of prose in a day, evening hymns, vigils for the holy days of every nation, since the philosopher, Proclus said, must be the hierophant of the whole world rather than of one city. He kept this up for nearly fifty years from a grand house on the south slope of the Acropolis, within sight of the theater of Dionysus, whose excavated foundations visitors to Athens can stand over today. Paganism made him a marked man; once, when the pressure turned dangerous, he withdrew to Lydia for a year and came back. His students carried the method outward, Ammonius above all, whose Alexandrian classroom passed the commentary tradition onward until it reached the Arabic philosophers.

When Justinian closed the Athenian school in 529, the event this site uses to mark the end of the ancient era, the system had already escaped under its two pseudonyms, and the rest of its history is a series of unmaskings. Aquinas wrote a commentary disentangling the Book of Causes from Aristotle. Cusanus mined the Platonic Theology for the coincidence of opposites. Berkeley's late Siris reaches for Proclus again and again; Taylor's translations put him in the hands of poets; Emerson dosed himself with Proclus the way other men took stimulants, and said so in his journals. Hegel gave the triad a history, and through Hegel it reached Marx upside down. The reader who opens this room can now do what medieval Europe never could: read the man under his own name. Start with the Elements of Theology, proposition 1, and let the demonstrations carry you; somewhere around proposition 35 the static diagram starts to spin, and you are inside the oldest working model of a universe that pours out and turns back, still turning.