Damascius

← Encyclopedia

Damascius (c. 458 – after 538) was the last head of the Neoplatonic school at Athens, and so, by the usual reckoning, the final teacher in the long line that ran from Plato through Plotinus to the closing of the pagan academies. He presided over the school when the emperor Justinian, in 529, forbade pagans to teach — the conventional end-date for the ancient philosophical tradition, and the event that frames almost everything written about him.

He was born at Damascus, from which the name comes, and trained first in rhetoric before turning to philosophy under the successors of Proclus at Athens. What survives of his work is uneven. His major treatise, usually titled Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, is an extended inquiry into whether the ultimate source of all things — the One that the school placed beyond being — can be spoken of or known at all; he pressed the school’s negative theology harder than any of his predecessors, arguing that the first principle is not merely beyond knowledge but beyond even the words “ineffable” and “one.” A commentary on Plato’s Parmenides survives, along with material on the Phaedo preserving the lectures of his teachers. His Life of Isidore, a philosophical biography that doubled as a history of the late pagan schools, comes down only in fragments quoted by the Byzantine patriarch Photius and the Suda — the chief source for what is known of the school’s last generation.

The most-told episode of his life is its aftermath. When the Athenian school could no longer operate, Damascius and several colleagues, the commentator Simplicius among them, traveled east to the court of the Persian king Khosrow I, apparently hoping to find a ruler who would shelter philosophy. They were disappointed, and returned under terms of the peace treaty Persia and Rome concluded in 532, which is reported to have included a clause guaranteeing their freedom to live unmolested. Where Damascius spent his final years is uncertain; an inscription suggests he was at Emesa in Syria.

Scholarship treats Damascius as both an end and a summit. His metaphysics is the most rigorous and the most self-questioning the school produced — a system that turns its sharpest instruments on its own foundations and finds them giving way, which some readers take as exhaustion and others as the tradition’s most honest moment. Whether 529 truly ended Greek philosophy or only scattered it is a matter of long debate; teaching and commentary continued elsewhere, in Alexandria and beyond. What is not contested is that with Damascius the line of named heads of Plato’s Academy, however reconstituted across the centuries, runs out. He spent his last energy asking whether the first thing of all could be named, and concluded that it could not.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Proclus · Iamblichus · The One · Nous · Emanation