Changing fates of Platonism

The direction of influence in ancient philosophy went predominantly from East to West. Figures writing in Greek were commented by Latin writers, while Latin writers, even if they might have been original, were rarely considered by Greek thinkers. Indeed, Latin philosophers often seemed to be out of sync with their Greek contemporaries, following trends that had become somewhat old-fashioned in the other part of the Roman empire.

Calcidius can be taken here as a good example. His work - a translation and a commentary of Plato’s Timaeus - is itself an expression of the interest Latin culture showed in Greek philosophy. Furthermore, his commentary shows almost no indication of the ideas of Plotinus and his school - the latest step in the development of Platonism. Instead, Calcidius relies more on discussions on Plato from a time preceding Plotinus (the so-called Middle Platonism).

The aim of Calcidius is to show that Plato’s dialogue is a respectable attempt in describing the physical world. Calcidius tries to argue that some of Plato’s statements have a clear mathematical precedent. For instance, when Plato says that fire and earth as solid bodies need to have two other type of bodies (air and water) to link them, Calcidius suggests Plato is just referring to a fact of geometry that just like two similar parallelograms can be linked with one similar parallelogram, which combines length of one parallelogram with the width of the other, similarly two parallipedes can be linked with two parallipedes, one sharing two sides with first and one side with the other extreme and the second sharing one side with first and two sides with the other.

One might justifiably ask how Calcidius’s explanation fits with Plato’s idea that the four elements consist of differently shaped figures, all of which are not parallipedes. In a move cancelling his previous geometrical explanation, Calcidius explains the link as being qualitative, air resembling in its properties fire more than earth and water resembling earth more than water. He perhaps wants to connect Plato’s idea of four elements with Aristotelian notions, where the four elements were linked by such common qualitative characteristics.

Calcidius is indeed quite anxious to make Plato’s ideas compatible with later philosophical currents. While Plato describes a divinity creating the world in time, Calcidius explains this as a mere metaphor. World, he says, is eternal and eternally changing, although it is dependent on an unchanging paradigm, which the temporal world resembles. Furthermore, while Plato had not considered any further level above the divinity, Calcidius assumes a common idea of later Platonists that divinity is dependent on an indescribable primordial unity.

The world, Calcidius says, is governed by an indivisible entity, that is, a world soul, which still can be linked with the divisible world, perhaps through the mediation of lower forms of soul, more resembling material entities. Calcidius compares Plato’s account here with the Biblical story of God infusing the body made out of clay with a divine breath to control it.

Calcidius also calls the world soul fate. By this he does not mean that all things in the world would be fated to happen in a precisely determined fashion. Instead, he says, this fate is like a law determining what happens from different types of conduct. Thus, humans still have a liberty to decide how they would act, and world soul then performs the role of a judge determining whether this conduct is to be rewarded or punished. Because of these limits of determinism, Calcidius notes, divination is only partially possible and can reveal of contingent matters that they are contingent. Even the creator divinity cannot know all the future things, because some events are determined by free decisions - but the creator does know what is the destiny of a person making certain types of decisions.

Plato already had an interest in Pythagorean number theories, and he had suggested a complex account, in which world soul was like a group of numbers flowing from original unity. Pythagoreanism had continued to interest Platonists, and Calcidius continued this tradition by finding obtuse explanations for various numbers in Plato’s account of world soul. For instance, Plato chose seven numbers, Calcidius suggested, because seven is the only number smaller than 10 (excluding 1), which was both indivisible and not a divisor of other numbers smaller than 10. A more meaningful linking of Timaeus and Pythagoreanism was Calcidius’ suggestion that the numbers constituting the world soul were same as those constituting musical harmonies, making the world soul also harmonious.

In addition to arithmetic and music, Plato’s Timaeus provided Calcidius also with a clear link to astronomy. The world soul with its numerical relations moved the outermost layer of the world with a strictly regular movement, while the more inner layers of planets moved more and more irregularly. The connection with the soul, Calcidius says, makes the world alive, while the ordered and ultimately cyclical movement of the planets makes it an image of eternity.

Just like the whole world, Calcidius continues, so are the stars and planets also alive, and indeed, what the traditional polytheistic religion had called gods. While the stars and planets are, he says, living beings made of fire, there are also living beings made of air and moisture, namely, the demons or angels, who serve as intermediaries between gods and earthly living beings.

Like all these superior living beings, Calcidius notes, human beings also consist of two elements, soul and body. Human souls, he says following Plato, have their origin in the creator divinity, but they also have some affinity with some star or planet, to which they will eventually return, if they live their earthly lives well. Human bodies, on the other hand, have their origin in the celestial divinities and consist of all the four material elements. Body as such would move errantly, and while partially the soul remains untouched by concerns of the body, partially it is affected by them, thus making it difficult for the human soul to govern the body.

Calcidius considers various theories about the nature of soul. He is extremely critical of Epicurean theory that soul is just a special sort of atom, which would make soul no different than body - a mutable, mortal being. Similar deficiency Calcidius sees in Stoic idea that soul is a continuous material substance, like breath - then soul and body would never truly combine, but soul would merely lie in the holes of the body.

Aristotelian notion of soul as the activity specific to natural, living bodies Calcidius regarded more positively. This activity is not body as such, but something received by body and permeating it through and through, although it is centered around human heart as the crux of all processes of life. Yet, Calcidius is not fully satisfied with this account, because such an activity is still too closely linked to the body and dies with it. Indeed, Aristotelian soul, Calcidius suggests, is just a projection of the true soul, which can exist even without a body. This soul is, he says, immaterial and indivisible, but it does have different activities, centered around different parts of human body: reason governs head, emotions enliven the heart, while earthly desires lie in lower parts of body.

Following Plato’s account, Calcidius next turns to the question of how sense organs serve to make humans aware of world around them. He is especially interested of the question of vision - a problem widely discussed in his own time. The main point of contest was whether sensation of vision was produced by light coming out of the eye external light coming from sun or from coloured object and pinging on eye. Calcidius suggests that the truth, already known by Plato, is that all three take part in visual sensation - warmth of human body is transferred to rays of light in eyes, and when these rays are strengthened by the light radiated by warm sun and come in contact with coloured light emanating from an object, we see the colour of the object.

Calcidius also considers another pet question of ancient philosophy, namely, that of the origin of dreams. He again takes a sort of middle position and accepts no single source for dreams. Generally, he says, dreams arise from sensations, emotions, thoughts and other mental states lingering in our soul and arising again in the mind during sleep. During different phases of sleep, different faculties of the soul are more active than others, thus, some dreams are of more earthy nature, while others are more intellectual. Some - although definitely not all of them - might even be generated by the more divine levels of reality.

Although dreams can then tell us something about the divine, Calcidius thinks that vision is still our main connection to higher levels of the hierarchy of being - seeing the movement of planets and stars we come to an idea of something on the basis of this movement. The road to theology or the knowledge of divine, Calcidius says, goes then through physics or knowledge of nature. In addition to these two branches of philosophy, the knowledge of ways of reasoning, which Calcidius identifies with mathematics, is also revealed to us through vision, because we learn to measure and count through looking at the alternation of days and night. In addition to these theoretical disciplines, vision is important also for the practical branches of philosophy, teaching how to guide one’s personal life, life of a household and life of the whole society.

The harmonious order of sensible world, Calcidius notes, is the work of divine source, which imposes on the variable world stable structures, which form the content of divine mind and which we humans could also get to know through non-sensuous thinking. These two principles - God and ideas - are then required for the existence of ordered cosmos, but is that enough? Calcidius notes that many philosophers have assumed also the existence of yet another principle, that is, matter, although they are not unanimous about its properties. Perhaps farthest from the truth, Calcidius appears to imply, are the Jewish traditions that suggest matter to be just another creation of God, depriving from it the status of a true principle. Even among the philosophies which accept the uncreated nature of matter Calcidius finds quite many unsatisfactory views, such as the atomistic idea that matter is divided into distinct units: such atomic bodies are still not the ultimate matter.

Among the philosophers who believe matter to form a continuity, there are various opinions, such as the Ionian idea that all bodies consist of a single kind of moving matter with its own distinct characteristics, for instance, air of Anaximenes. Others, like Parmenides, deny that matter could move, while some, like Empedocles, suggest that matter could appear in many unrelated kinds. The problem with all these suggestions, Calcidius insists, is that they believed matter to have some characteristics of its own, while simple considerations show it could not have such. Calcidius upholds particularly a notion of matter he thinks can be found in Plato’s Timaeus - although it is not certain whether it really was what Plato thought.

Calcidius asks us to consider a process in a sense opposite to what happens when we discover divinity behind the order of cosmos. In effect, we are not combining perceived things into a regulated whole, but stripping away all their characteristics - where they are, what they do, what they are like, how big they are, how they relate to each other. Even their very substantiality or their capacity to take on various characteristics is meant to be thought away. Even after all of these things are stripped from perceptibles, we have an obscure feeling that something remains. Plato called this indefinite something place, which suggests that he was thinking about space, but Calcidius, probably following later philosophical traditions, calls it matter. In any case, it is meant to be like a featureless canvas, on which God projects his ideas or eternal paradigmatic structures of existing things. The projections of the ideas are then like active forces shaping the matter into distinct shapes or perceptible things, which come and go.

Calcidius had written his account of Timaeus at an instigation of a Christian, but his own attitude toward the religion was more ambivalent - clearly his insistence that God had not created matter contradicted the current Christian majority view. Yet, some thinkers were more willing to bridge the gap between Christianity and Platonism. A good example is Marius Victorinus, who was a teacher of rhetorics, and for instance, made commentaries on Ciceronian works on the art. Just to give an idea what his rhetorical works were like, in his book on definition, Victorinus noted how definitions were, on the one hand, based on finding the essential qualities of objects, and on the other hand, how they were the first step in delineating the world of objects that we can speak about. In addition, Victorinus discussed various types of definitions, the paradigmatic one being that where the thing to be defined is separated from a wider genus through a differentiating principle. Victorinus translated also Porphyrius’ works into Latin, being thus aware of more recent trends in Greek Platonism than Calcidius. Furthermore, he converted into Christianity and wrote some of the first Latin commentaries on Paul’s letters.

Victorinus did not compartmentalise his interests, but used his knowledge of Platonist ideas for elucidating such intricacies of Christian teaching as the relationship between the prime source of everything - Father in Christian parlance - and Logos, the only Son of this Father. Victorinus suggests that by Father Christians mean an original abundance of all possibilities, which in a sense is the primary instance of being, but in another sense is so beyond all other beings that it should not be called even being - Father is the light, or as we might say it, energy with the power to create and activate everything. The first among true beings, then, are for Victorinus ideal prototypes, which other beings can at most resemble. Material world, particularly, is for Victorinus just a shadow of these ideal prototypes, shown by the tendency of material bodies to deteriorate after a while. Human soul, then, lies between these two extremes of true, ideal being and apparent, shadowy bodies.

What is the role of Logos in this Platonic sounding hierarchy? Victorinus suggests that Logos means the process of actualising all the possibilities inherent in the primary source. Compared to source, Logos is more active than the quiet repose of Father - indeed, one might say Logos is the prime example of activity. This activity of Logos is based on the abundant source of energy or Father and its activity consists of turning the possibilities within Father into beings or of creating them - it is, as it were, the will of Father. As a source of prime activity, Father can also be called active in a sense, although it is primarily characterised by a quiet repose staying always within itself, just as Logos in all its action is in a sense always same and in repose. Indeed, what is always same in Logos is its stable substance, which is just this eternal abundance of energy or Father - active Logos and quiet primary source are in a sense just phases of the same divinity, Logos being the image or form showing what God is.

Victorinus emphasises more the underlying sameness of Father or source and Son or Logos. There are clear historical reasons for this choice - Victorinus wanted to oppose especially the Arians, who considered Logos to be just the first creation of and similar to God. Yet, there are also more essential reasons for this choice - like world of ideas in Plotinus is dominantly a unity, in which ideas are just different facets of a one self-thinking intellect, similarly God of Victorinus is dominantly a unified substance or energy flowing through different, but connected phases. In comparison, sense world is dominantly a multiplicity or just a combination of essentially separate entities. Then again, Victorinus does admit that Father and Son are in a sense different from one another. Thus, he insists, we cannot say that Father was incarnated, because incarnation belongs to the active aspect of divinity.

Victorinus concentrates his attention to the relation between Father and Son, but he does also consider the third element of the trinity or Holy Spirit. In a sense, Holy Spirit is for Victorinus just an aspect of Logos. Logos as such is the activation of divine potentialities, in other words, it makes these potentialities alive. Victorinus thus calls Logos feminine: it is the mother of all life. Yet, Logos contains also another movement, which is in a sense a return to the original unity or Father - and therefore deserves to be called masculine, Victorinus says. This returning movement is the moment of understanding, when Logos looks upon what it has made alive and finds the divine reflected in its works. This aspect of understanding or wisdom is what is usually called Holy Spirit, Victorinus concludes.

The trinitarian form of divinity, described by terms being, life and understanding, is reflected in the things Logos actualises. An important link in this regard is soul. Souls, Victorinus says, also contain the aspects of being, life and understanding. Just like Logos works as a link of potential power in the Father and created entities, similarly soul transmits divine trinity to the sense world.

If Victorinus was keen to reconcile Neo-Platonic hierarchy of beings with Christian notions, his contemporary Julian wanted to eradicate all signs of Christianity and reinstate Platonically interpreted polytheism as the official religion. Being the current emperor, he had the means to do so, but the project did not last beyond his lifetime and he was then later branded as the Apostate - a betrayer of Church. This was, undoubtedly, a one-sided view, and in Julian’s surviving personal letters, we find a thoughtful person, who worries how he can keep calm in the absence of his friends and who thinks philosophising about the affairs of state is far more rewarding and praiseworthy than actual governance.

Julian claimed that Platonic cosmology, as presented in Timaeus, was simply closer to the truth than the account of creation in Genesis. For instance, the world created and sustained by the Platonic divinity was instantly perfect, while God of Genesis had to make the world in a piecemeal fashion, one day at a time.

Even more imperfections Julian found in the behaviour of biblical God toward his human creations. Why did God want to restrict human knowledge about the difference between good and evil, and how could he condemn them for an act committed before they understood that difference? Similarly immoral was God’s commandment given to Moses that Jews should not worship other divinities, if they did not wish for retribution. Stories like these, Julian suggested, draw a picture of a jealous and petty divinity, who is unsure of his own status.

Biblical God, Julian concluded, was nothing but a divinity appointed to Jewish nation, although they had confused it with the ultimate source of all existence. In addition, Julian implied, it appeared not to be a very good divinity, since Jews had achieved nothing great in comparison with the Greeks - no great philosophers, no great poets, no great mathematicians, no great statesmen.

Christians, Julian thought, were even worse than Jews, since they had created a mongrel of Greek and Jewish cultures, choosing the bad and ignoring the best in both. Firstly, they had rejected the Hellenistic culture of their forefathers and adopted some Jewish manners instead. Then again, they had not emulated Jews in their ritualistic complexity and moral purity, which was most original and noteworthy in that culture. Christians had even ignored the command to keep no other gods and had raised their prophet, Jesus, into a status of second god.

Julian’s own sympathies lie with the whole tradition of pagan Greek philosophy, which, he insists, forms a unified whole, even if individual philosophers might have deviated from this ideal. The main principle of this single philosophy, Julian insists, has been from the start to know oneself and one’s place in the universe. Even such a philosopher like Diogenes the Cynic followed it, in his quest to live a life as close to nature as possible, although his followers had perverted his ideas into a shallow disrespect of all civilized customs. Julian was especially critical of cynics of his time, who used mythical form in their philosophising in a manner disrespectful of the traditional polytheistic religion.

Julian himself was very appreciative of traditional divinities, especially as they were incorporated in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of entities. He was particularly interested of Sol or Helios, god of sun, to whom his family had been dedicated, before turning into Christianity. For Julius, Helios held a sort of dual place in the hierarchy. The physical sun was the counterpart or manifestation of the central entity in immaterial realm, which Julian also identified with Cybele, the mother of gods: physical sun gives life to the physical world, just like its immaterial or divine analogue radiates its power to all immaterial entities. Furthermore, this immaterial Helios was an image of the primordial unity beyond all existence and thus held a mediating position also between the source of and the rest of existence.

This mother of gods, Julian notes, radiates its power to the sensible world and especially to the aetherial realm, which moves forever in a circle. Julian likens aetherial realm to Attis, the mythical beloved of Cybele. According to the myth, Cybele was enraged by Attis being wedded to a mortal and made him go mad and castrate himself. This story, Julian suggests, is a symbolic account of the imperfection of sense world, where even the relatively stable aetherial sphere is characterised by constant change and yearning.

Julian's attempt to turn the tide of history didn't have a lasting effect: Christianity had become too strong. This still did no mean the end of Platonism, since it continued its existence within Christianity.