readoldthings

 Every thing which is able to return to itself is self-subsistent.


COMMENTARY

This is the straightforward corollary to the previous proposition. We're still discussing the Henads, the Unities or Gods. These are self-subsistent, meaning they are their own cause, and they return to themselves, because they are themselves the source of their own good. Last time we learned that self-subsistent things are converted, or return, to themselves; this time we learn that things that return to themselves are self-subsistent. This is the process of "epistrophe" or reversion, the third term in the triad Mone-Prohodos-Epistrophe, or Abiding-Proceeding-Returning, which, as we have seen, underlies the whole of Neoplatonic metaphysics. 

 Of all things which proceed from another cause, those which exist from themselves, and which are alotted a self-sufficient essence, are the leaders.

COMMENTARY

Proclus's commentary on this proposition is, as is often the case, a mouthful, but it will turn out to be simpler than it looks once we break it down a bit. 

What is self-sufficient? That is to say, it causes itself, rather than being caused by another.

It can't be the One. Why? Because the One is radically simple, above every sort of cause. It needs nothing. It does not even cause itself, because it is not caused but precedes every cause. 

In our usual way of thinking, it would seem that the first beings after the One would be beings which are caused by the One. We're used to thinking this way, but it isn't Proclus's view. After the uncaused One come those beings which are most similar to the One and participate in the One, and therefore cause themselves. These are, of course, the Gods or Henads, the Unities.

It's interesting to think what happens if we accept Proclus's proposition, but insist on retaining the Holy Trinity within  Christianity. The Trinity is three and one, an Undivided Unity. How can God be radically simple if God is also three? 

The answer is that the theory of the Holy Trinity says that God is one in substance but three in person. 

But how can this be? The three cannot be radically simple, and so that which they share must be radically simple, and that is their common substance. 

What, then, is this substance?

It is nothing other than God, the Good, the One. 

But how, if it manifests as three?

The only possible way to understand it as a substance in which three participate is that it consists in Relation. 

It is impossible for one thing to relate to itself or for two things to relate to one another. The moment there are two things in existence there are also three. Those three are the first thing, the second thing, and whatever they share which allows them to relate to one another. 

For Proclus the One is the Good, and is beyond every being. But it is not inert or dead; it is rather more like an overflowing fountain of life. At once everywhere, and yet nowhere at all. If we consider that the One is mere relation, then the first manifestation of the One will be a triad, or Trinity. And it must be noted that this is the case in Proclus as well. 

Every 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.

 Every thing caused abides in, proceeds from, and returns to, its cause.


COMMENTARY

There really isn't very much to say about this one. Basically, Proclus is summarizing the last several propositions and stating explicitly the threefold movement of abiding, proceeding, and returning. 

If you encounter this quotation from Chief Black Elk, it is invariably accompanied by a certain feeling which I think might be unique to the Western mind. It's a sense of encounter with wisdom, and with people who were wise; a sense of loss, nostalgia, regret; an admiration for a wisdom which has passed from the world; a certainty that we are not wise in this way, but only knowledgeable, only powerful; and yet, hidden beneath this, a re-affirmation of our own power. 

One frequently encounters this combination of feeling. Sometimes other American Indians play the role that Chief Black Elk does here; sometimes, white writers masquerading as Indians; sometimes the wisdom is attributed to some other, sufficiently far away, people, such as the Tibetans or the Chinese Taoists or the Ancient Celts. 

But here is Proclus, teaching us that all things move in a circle, proceeding in endless circles from the First Principle of All Things. 

It must be so. All things abide in their cause; and proceed from it; and if they did not continuously return to it, they would be all together cut off from it. The three movements, abiding, proceeding, and returning, all happen together.

The Power of the World always works in circles. This is the sacred tradition of the Western world. Never fail to see this. Proclus is no outlier and his ideas were never lost. He himself is not an originator but a synthesizer of a tradition rooted in the ancients, in Pythagoras and Parmenides; Euclid and Empedocles; Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. His pagan faith may have faded-- it never really died-- but his philosophy endured in Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings were treated nearly as scripture. In the West, these ideas were carried on by Eriugena, Aquinas, Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa; in the East, by Maximos the Confessor and many others. 

And what of America, the child of the heretical and Protestant branch of the West, the limb that cut itself off from the tree that birthed it? Didn't we, at least, lose the tradition? 

We never did. American culture was shot through with the old tradition from the beginning, or near enough. Look into the ideas of the early Quakers, who founded Pennsylvania and governed Delaware and Southern New Jersey. In their doctrine of the Inner Light and in their beliefs around reincarnation you see the echo of Plotinus. Pennsylvania became a refuge for Rosicrucians, occultists whose ideas were entirely rooted in Neoplatonism. In the 1700s, the Druid Revival itself was rooted in Neoplatonism, and Druids were found on both sides of the Atlantic. After the Revolution, the translations of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts by Thomas Taylor swept through the English-speaking world. The very words we read here were read also by Ralph Waldo Emerson-- Emerson, who was one of the founders not only of American letters but of American culture generally. This is our sacred wisdom.

Yes, there are fools who reject these ideas, and the worst by far are the supposed "Christians" who seek to purify their faith of "pagan" influence; and the worst by far of these, among our contemporaries, are adherents to the Catholic or the Orthodox churches. One well-known Orthodox convert YouTuber is found of regular panic attacks about the influence of Neoplatonism and the related Hermetic tradition in Holywood, apparently unaware of its influence on his own faith. One author on the "traditionalist" Catholic fringe spends his time railing about how the Church has been captured by the "Neoplatonic-Hermetic Gnosis," with this supposed to have happened in the Renaissance, seemingly unaware that the very text we are reading was also in the possession of Thomas Aquinas. A young convert to the Orthodox Church (an "Orthobro," as the current parlance has it) once told me that I ought to reject Platonism and instead look to such Orthodox thinkers as Maximos the Confessor. I ignored him until I'd finished reading through Plato's works, then took a look at Maximos, out of fairness. And found the ideas of Plato and Aristotle on every single page. 

All things move in a circle, proceeding from the One Principle of All, and returning to it. This is our sacred wisdom. 

For if it should proceed, indeed, but should not re­turn to the cause of this progression, it would not desire its cause. For everything which desires is converted to the object of its desire. Moreover, every thing desires good, and to each thing the attainment of it is through the proximate cause. Every thing, therefore, desires its cause: and the cause of being to any particular thing is likewise the cause of well-being (good) to it. But desire is primarily directed to the cause of well-being: and con­version or return is to that to which desire primarily tends.

 COMMENTARY

For Proclus, all things are subject to a threefold movement, viz. abiding, proceeding, and returning (mone, prohodos, epistrophe). In the previous Proposition he discussed remaining and proceeding. He now discusses the third movement, returning or conversion. 

We have seen that all things must both abide in and proceed from their cause. Everything must be united to its cause in some way, or it can't be caused by it; therefore, it remains in its cause on some level. But everything must also proceed from its cause-- otherwise, we wouldn't be able to call it a separate thing. This is somewhat alien to our usual way of thinking, but easy enough to grasp. 

But what about returning? 

Proclus tells us that everything must return to its cause, because otherwise "it would not desire its cause." This is a little less familiar even than the idea of abiding while proceeding. They key to it lies in Plato's understanding of the Good. The Good, Plato tells us, is "that which all things desire." As human beings, we are sometimes mistaken about what our good actually is. We are hungry; we think that a cookie will satisfy our hunger. We eat the cookie, desire three more, eat them, and wind up with a crash in our energy and an upset stomach, followed in short order by inflammation and weight gain. We mistake an apparent good for our actual good. Learning, we have a steak salad instead of a cookie; our body becomes stronger, our energy increases, we feel better. Rising still further, we refuse our hunger entirely for an hour or for a day, seeking instead to discipline our appetites by fasting. 

 The Good, which is God Himself, is both our source and our end. Proclus discusses this in a very beautiful passage from his commentary on Plato's Timaeus: 

That all things desire God is not a doctrine limited to pagans, or even to professed Platonists. Thomas Aquinas was generally hostile to Plato himself, but his thinking was so shaped by Dionysius and Augustine-- and by Aristotle, who could never escape his master's way of thinking, no matter how hard he tried-- that his work is filled with Platonic ideas and is incomprehensible without them:

On Prayer

A great help in our reversion to the gods is prayer. This also Proclus discusses at length in the Timaeus commentary: 


Nor is prayer limited to human beings. As all things desire the Good, for Proclus, all things pray. Even a flower or a stone, by its very nature adores the Gods who are the source of its existence. 

But perhaps this is better expressed, again, by Proclus himself, in his hymn to the One: 

COMMENTARY

Here we continue our discussion of the fine details of the unfoldment of being from the One. This may only be a peculiarity of my psyche, but I find it easiest to see this in terms of colors. Red leads to orange before it leads to yellow, and yellow descends to green before blue. Of course, colors as such are arranged horizontally-- neither red nor blue nor yellow is ontologically prior to the other two. In the Platonic cosmos, this same idea applies to the vertical as well as the horizontal. Being brings forth Intellect before Soul. To get into the details of Proclus's pagan theology, the Solar Zeus constitutes the Sun, and Apollo proceeds from him, and from Apollo, Apollonian angels, daimones, heroic souls and ordinary souls-- the former category, of course, includes the souls both of Pythagoras and Plato himself; solar animals such as lions and roosters, solar plants such as marigolds and sunflowers, down to solar gems and minerals, like gold. 

Of course, the Christian version of this simply substitutes a Name of God and an appropriate archangel of the Sun for Zeus, Helios and Apollo; typically this is YHVH Eloah Veh Da'ath and either Michael or Raphael. But the idea is the same, and for all we know, the beings involved are the same as well. 

COMMENTARY

I think that we have here a subtle point of Platonic metaphysics.

How are the succeeding levels of existence created? The One itself gives subsistence to everything, but after the one we have the whole series of Henads, and after the Henads, the Intellectual forms. Does the One change when it creates the universe? Or does the One become the universe? If it creates from itself, is there less of it afterward, in the way that a child might take half of the play-dough out of a bucket? 

No. 

Creation, in this account of the universe, is a consequence of perfection. To be Good, or to be Perfect, which is to imitiate the Good, is to be productive. God and the Gods are always actively creating and upholding the universe, by their very nature. As Proclus tells us, "that which is produced is not a distribution into parts of the producing cause," like the play-dough being taken from the tub and divided in half. "Nor is it a transition of one nature into another." The color Red isn't divided into the red cup, the red candle and the red lighter. If you wanted to add a red crayon, you wouldn't have to check and see if enough red was left over in the universe. For Proclus, everything is like this, even the very highest things.  "Everything which produces remains such as it is, and in consequence of thus remaining that which is posterior to it proceeds into existence." It is from the One that all things come to be. Remaining perfectly what it is, the One causes Being; Being causes Intellect; Intellect causes Soul; Soul causes Body.

On the Perfect


For as the one Principle by reason of its own good­ness is unically constitutive of all beings, — for The Good and The One are the same, so that the boniform is the same with the unical, — thus, also, those things which are posterior to the First Principle, on account of their perfection, hasten to generate beings inferior to their own essence: for perfection is a certain part or quality of The Good, and the perfect so far as it is perfect imi­tates The Good. But The Good is constitutive of all things: so that the perfect is likewise productive accord­ing to its nature of those things which it is able to pro­duce. And that indeed which is more perfect, the more perfect it is the more numerous are the progeny of which it is the cause. For that which is more perfect partici­pates in a greater degree of The Good. It is therefore nearer to The Good, is more allied to the cause of all, and is the cause of a greater number of effects. That, however, which is more imperfect, the more imperfect it is the less numerous are the effects of which it is the cause; for, being more remote from the producer of everything, it is the cause of fewer effects. For to that which constitutes, or adorns, or perfects, or connects, or vivifies, or fabricates all things, that nature is most allied which produces a greater number of each of these; but that is more remote which produces a less number of each.

Corollary.— From the premises it is evident that the nature which is most remote from the Principle of all is unprolific and is not the cause of anything. For if it generated a certain thing, and had something posterior to itself, it is evident that it would no longer be the most remote, but that which it produced would be more re­mote than itself from the Principle of all things; it would therefore be nearer to productive power, and, in addition, would imitate the cause which is productive of all beings.

COMMENTARY

As promised, today we have a discussion of the Perfect, and what is meant, in Proclus's system, by "perfection." 

We should take a minute to remember that the word "perfect" in its traditional sense means "complete." This is important because we tend to use it in common English to mean something like "super duper good." But, while I don't have access to the Greek, our original translators would not have selected the word "perfect" unless they intended the original meaning of the word. Something which is perfect is something which is complete. 

This has important implications before we even get into the rest of the proposition. Last time, we learned that Participants "receive their perfection from" that which they Participate. That is, to be a Participant is also to be completed by something else-- by that which is Participated. 

Furthermore, we learn:

To be complete is to be productive. To be complete or perfect is not to cease, but to produce, "in imitation of the First Principle of All." 

Therefore, the Perfect is not the same as the One Itself. Perfection, rather, "is a certain part or quality of The Good." And to be perfect is to imitate the Good. As the Good is the cause of all things, therefore, everything perfect is productive of natures inferior to itself.

Bearing in mind what we learned last time, we can now add another term to our hierarchy. It's worth reviewing what we've seen so far. Our levels of being are:

• The Immovable     The Imparticipable    The One           The Good            The Cause            Superessential (Above Being)

• The Self-Motive     The Participated        The Unities      The Perfect          The Concause     Being

• The Alter-Motive    The Participants        The United       The Perfected      The Caused         Becoming

In this Proposition, we are introduced, finally, to a level of being lower than these. Proclus tells us, "the nature which is most remote from the Principle of all is unprolific and is not the cause of anything." This is the Last of Things, the extremity which effectively forms the bottom of reality. This Last is distinguished from other things in that it is not perfected. How do we know this? Because if it were to be perfected, it would then become productive. Being productive, it would not longer be the last of things-- something else, which it had caused, would become the last. Therefore, there must be a final level which, in these terms, we could call the imperfect or, better, the Unperfected. If we then add this fourth level to the series, we come up with:

• The Unmoved    The Unparticipating   The Disunited     The Unperfected   The Uncaused   Nonbeing

Being most remote from the One, we can also call it the Chaos; being most remote from the Good, we can also call it Evil. Evil, then, is identical with Nonbeing. 

Speculation

Those of us who are in contact with matter and live in the world of time are necessarily part of the world of Becoming. As all of these terms are identical to one another, or different ways of talking about the same thing, we are also part of the world of the Perfected, and, as the Perfected, we receive our perfection from outside of ourselves. From what? The Perfect, as concauses with the Good Itself. The Good, remember, is that which causes all things, and that which all things desire. As members of the group of All Things, our ultimate desire is for the Good. And how do we achieve the Good? We become Perfect, which is the same as becoming United. And we do this not, or not entirely, through our own efforts, but by the activity of the Perfect. "Activity" or "Act" is another way of saying "energy," or, to put it in Christian terms, Grace. What is, in the Christian religion, called sanctity, sainthood or divinization, is precisely this perfection. Moreover, all this being the case, it is also the case that what Christians call a saint is made so by participation in God. Every saint, therefore, becomes productive in the same way that the Good Itself, or God, is productive.

In Greek terms, we could substitute the word "Hero" for saint. The same is also what is meant by the word xian in Chinese and Boddhisattva in the Buddhist tradition. All these are beings who have become perfected, and now participate in the creative process which unfolds the universe.

It's easy to prove to ourself that this is true. One of the effects of a new saint is a new cult, which is to say, a new set of activities appearing here in the world of Becoming that were not to be found prior to this particular saint's the attainment of sainthood. Here, for example, is a shrine to St. Therese of Lisieux. Therese lived from 1873 to 1897; she was canonized in 1925. Prior to this, there were no shrines to her, and the particular devotions, images, and motifs associated with her cult did not exist. We had a large chapel dedicated to her near where I grew up in Pennsylvania; when I was a boy I was taken there on her Feast Day and afterwards given rose petals blessed by a priest. This could not have happened prior to her canonization, an event in time which signifies her perfection, which is her ascension to a world beyond time and becoming. 

According to many Christians, the world of becoming will come to an end, and the dead will be reunited with the bodies left behind on Earth. This idea isn't original to Christianity. The same idea is found in Plato's Politicus, where it appears as a myth. Many of Plato's dialogues contain myths, but these are never to be read as literal descriptions of historical events but rather as sacred teaching stories. According to the myth of the Politicus, the day shall come when the Sun will reverse his course in the Heavens. And on that day Time will begin to turn backward. Jupiter will step down from the rulership of the Universe and return his throne to his father, Saturn. And on that day the Dead will rise from their graves, the Earth will give up her fruits without struggle, and the Golden Age will come round again.  

In his Platonic Theology-- a different volume from this one, I should mention-- Proclus discussed this myth, which is so similar to the Final Judgment in Christian tradition. But he explained that it is not an event in time. Rather, those who rise from their graves have returned to an existence outside of time, restored to the kingdom of the Father, Saturn, who preceeds the universe of becoming. 

It's my view that this is precisely what the saints are. They aren't sanctified souls waiting in Heaven for a pro-forma judgment; they aren't lawyers who can plead your case before God if you get to know them. They are the perfected souls, who now abide outside of time, participating in the government of the Universe.  

Taylor notes in his translation that the text is somewhat garbled in the original. Still, it's easy to see what Proclus is talking about here.

Previously we were introduced to the concept of movement through three terms:

• The Immovable

• The Self-Motive

• The Alter-Motive

The Immovable does not move, but moves others. The self-motive moves itself and others. The alter-motive is only moved. These three exist in a hierarchy, beginning with the immovable, proceeding through the self-motive, ending in the alter-motive.

Now we are being introduced to the same sort of structure, but this time it's being applied to the concept of participation. And so we have:

• The Imparticipable

• The Participated

• The Participants

To understand what he is talking about, we need to return to our whole picture of the universe, which consists, as we have seen, of several different levels. First we have the level of Being. After Being, we have Intellect. After Intellect, Soul. After Soul, Body. Actually, there are two more levels which we can fit in there, but that's a subject for another time. Let's stick with four for now:

• Being

• Intellect

• Soul

• Body

At every level, there is that which is participated, and that which is imparticipable. To be participated means that it has contact with the level beneath it. To be imparticipable means that it does not.

It might be easiest to understand this if we start form the lowest levels. Your body participates in soul; we know that because you're alive and reading these words. Your body is a participant; your soul, participated. But there are souls which are not in bodies, and which never descend to the level of body; moreover, Soul Itself is not a body of any kind. These are imparticipable.

Moreover, of souls, some reach upward to the level of Intellect, but others do not. Intellect or nous is a faculty which seems to be peculiar to human beings, and perhaps to some animals-- Today, we'd probably assume that means dolphins or elephants, but the only animal which Plato mentions as having a nous is the crane! Our souls participate in Intellect, but there are Intellects prior to soul which are not participated.

Finally, at the level of Being, we have the One, which is imparticipable, and the unities, which are participated. These are also called the First God and the particular Gods. Note that the One is actually prior to Being and to every particular being. As Thomas Taylor says, "imparticipable being, is that which participates nothing of being, but is the source of being to others."

An easy way to understand it may be to think of colors. On my desk there is a red lighter, a red box, a red cup, and a text-message on my phone bordered in red. All of these objects can be said to participate in the color red. The color red itself is not a red object-- and, what's more, you can never actually encounter it, because any specific instance of red you encountered wouldn't be Red Itself, but another red object. And so Red Itself is participated. But prior to Red Itself is Color Itself, which is even further removed from the world of our experience. Color Itself is not participated; you can see a white wall or a black cat, but never a color wall or a colored cat. Every color you encounter is particular. These are akin, on a very different level, to the One and the Unities. The One is like Color Itself, prior to every color; Red Itself and Blue Itself and Green Itself are like the Unities (Henads or Gods), which can be participated. Make sense?

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