readoldthings

The Elements of Theology is one of the great works of Proclus, the last great pagan philosopher of antiquity. Like most of Proclus's works, it's dense, difficult, and very hard to read unless one has a grounding (as did Proclus himself) in the work of Plato and Aristotle both, as well as the later philosophers in the tradition, such as Plotinus and Porphyry. Unlike Proclus's other works, however, the Elements is divided into brief, manageable chunks. The work consists of 211 propositions, which, taken together, are intended to constitute the whole of Platonic philosophy. As Thomas Taylor tells us in the introduction to his 1792 English translation of the work,

They begin from super-essential Unity, and proceed gradually through all the beautiful and wonderful progressions of divine causes, ending in the self-motive energies of the soul. They possess all the accuracy of Euclid, all the subtlety and sublimity necessary to a knowledge of the most profound theology, and may be considered as bearing the same relation to the Pythagoric and Platonic wisdom, as Euclid's Elements to the most abstruse geometry.

As Taylor's introduction suggests, Proclus's way of reasoning can seem backward to the modern mind, as it is always his method to begin with the highest and most abstract concepts and only from there descend, one degree at a time, to the world of our experience. Starting today and concluding, let us hope, 211 days or more from now, I'm going to work through Proclus's propositions one at a time, beginning, as Taylor says, in the super-essential Unity, and proceeding to the self-motive energies of the soul.

Proclus wrote in Greek, which is a language that I can read only with great difficulty. Rather than trying to bang my head through the original text, I'm going to make use of multiple English translations. Thomas Taylor's 1792 translation is online here; Thomas Johnson's 1909 translation is here; and a more recent translation by the Noetic Society is here.