Proclus

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Proclus (412–485), called Proclus Lycaeus, was the philosopher who brought the long tradition of Neoplatonism to its most thorough systematic form: the last great head of the Platonic school at Athens, and the mind that arranged nearly a thousand years of Greek thought into a single deductive order.

Born in Constantinople and raised in Lycia, he came to Athens as a young man and entered the school then led by Plutarch of Athens and, after him, Syrianus, whom Proclus regarded as his true master. On Syrianus’s death he became diadochus — the successor, the office that traced its lineage in principle back to Plato himself — and held it for some four decades. He never married; he kept the old festivals of gods whose public worship the Christian empire was steadily closing down; and he wrote, by the report of his pupil Marinus, almost without pause. The biography Marinus left, the Life of Proclus, is one of the fullest portraits of any ancient philosopher, and frames its subject less as a thinker than as a man perfected through the scale of the virtues.

What sets Proclus apart is method. Where Plotinus had written in bursts of concentrated vision, Proclus argued in propositions. His Elements of Theology lays out the whole metaphysical universe as a chain of two hundred and eleven theorems, each demonstrated from those before it, in deliberate imitation of Euclid. The structure descends from the One through ranks of unities, intellects, and souls, every level mediated by triads and by the principle that what proceeds from a cause must also return to it. Beings come forth, abide in their source, and turn back: monê, proodos, epistrophê — remaining, procession, reversion — the rhythm on which his entire system turns. The result is the most fully articulated map of reality the pagan schools produced, and the most populous; where Plotinus had three primary realities, Proclus filled the descent with graded multitudes of gods and intermediary powers.

He held, with Iamblichus before him, that thought alone could not complete the soul’s ascent — that theurgy, the ritual work that engages the divine orders directly, was, in his own phrase, a power higher than all human wisdom. He revered the Chaldean Oracles as scripture and wrote at length on Plato’s dialogues, above all the Timaeus and the Parmenides, which he read as a coded theology of the One.

His influence outran his world. The treatise that circulated in the Latin Middle Ages as the Liber de Causis, long ascribed to Aristotle, was drawn from the Elements of Theology; the Christian writings of the pseudonymous Dionysius the Areopagite carry his architecture into the heart of medieval mysticism, often verbatim and unacknowledged. Through these channels a pagan systematizer shaped Christian and Islamic metaphysics for a millennium. Whether that systematizing was the work of a great organizer or of an original mind is a question scholarship still weighs: the older reading of Proclus as the consummate compiler retains its force, while much recent work finds in him a rigorous and inventive thinker, the one who made of Neoplatonism a science. Within his own lifetime the school he led was nearing its end; it was closed by imperial order in 529, a little over forty years after his death.

→ In the library: The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892) · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908)

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