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Elements of Theology, Proposition 38
Sep. 11th, 2024 10:38 amEvery thing which proceeds from many causes returns through as many, and every conversion is through the same causes which produced the progression.
COMMENTARY
Here again we have what was known in later times as the Great Chain of Being. Everything proceeds from the First Cause. For Proclus, the Gods come first, but these too unfold in a series of progressions. First there are the Intelligible Gods, then the Intelligible-Intellectual Gods, the Intellectual Gods, the Liberated Gods, the Supermundane Gods, and the Mundane Gods, and I'm probably forgetting a few. From the Gods are suspended angels, spirits (daimones), heroic souls, and ordinary souls, and so on on down to animals, plants, and minerals. (In the tradition of the Kaballah, this was simplified by placing in order the unknowable Ain Soph, the Names of God, the Archangels, the Choirs of angels, the astrological planets, and on down to types of people and the other things of our everyday experience).
In the Phaedrus, Plato wrote that each of our souls is like a charioteer which naturally follows in the train of one of the Twelve Olympian Gods. But the Twelve are not the summit of creation, either for Plato or his successors. At the end of an age of the world, every soul is gathered back to the God in which it has its origin, and follows the God to the realms beyond.
Proclus is telling us here that for all of us below the very highest of the hierarchies of gods, our process of conversion goes first to the powers immediately above us, and from there up the grades of being, to the One.
For since both progression and return become through similitude, that indeed which passes immediately from a certain thing likewise immediately returns to it. For the similitude here is without a medium. But that which requires a medium in proceeding requires also a medium in returning. For it is necessary that each should be effected with reference to the same thing. Hence the return will be first to the medium, and then to that which is better than the medium. Therefore the causes of being to each thing are equal in number to the causes of well-being, and vice versa.
COMMENTARY
Here again we have what was known in later times as the Great Chain of Being. Everything proceeds from the First Cause. For Proclus, the Gods come first, but these too unfold in a series of progressions. First there are the Intelligible Gods, then the Intelligible-Intellectual Gods, the Intellectual Gods, the Liberated Gods, the Supermundane Gods, and the Mundane Gods, and I'm probably forgetting a few. From the Gods are suspended angels, spirits (daimones), heroic souls, and ordinary souls, and so on on down to animals, plants, and minerals. (In the tradition of the Kaballah, this was simplified by placing in order the unknowable Ain Soph, the Names of God, the Archangels, the Choirs of angels, the astrological planets, and on down to types of people and the other things of our everyday experience).
In the Phaedrus, Plato wrote that each of our souls is like a charioteer which naturally follows in the train of one of the Twelve Olympian Gods. But the Twelve are not the summit of creation, either for Plato or his successors. At the end of an age of the world, every soul is gathered back to the God in which it has its origin, and follows the God to the realms beyond.
Proclus is telling us here that for all of us below the very highest of the hierarchies of gods, our process of conversion goes first to the powers immediately above us, and from there up the grades of being, to the One.
