Synesius of Cyrene

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A man with seventeen centuries of inscribed ancestry behind him, who could trace his name in the public registers of Cyrene back to Eurysthenes the Heraclid who led the Dorians into Laconia, found himself near the end of his life writing to a pagan philosopher in Alexandria as the one who had been to him mother, sister, teacher, and everything good. He was by then a Christian bishop. She was Hypatia, and the letters he kept sending her after his ordination — the last dictated from a sickbed — are the cleanest evidence anywhere of what it cost, and what it did not cost, to carry a Platonist’s whole interior across the threshold of the new faith. Synesius of Cyrene is the man caught in that crossing, and his small uneven corpus is the most candid first-person record we have of Alexandrian Neoplatonism in the years just before it was absorbed.

Hypatia, the Alexandrian mathematician and Platonist whose lecture circle Synesius joined and never left, in an 1885 oil painting — Charles William Mitchell (1854-1903), Laing Art Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A landed house of the Pentapolis

He was born around 370 to 373 near Cyrene, the old Greek city of the African plateau, into the rural aristocracy of the Cyrenaican Pentapolis — the league of five towns strung along the Libyan coast. The family was wealthy in the unportable way that lasts: estates inland, herds, hunting on horseback across the high country, a household that kept the manners of a Greek gentleman three generations into the Christian Roman Empire. He took the pedigree seriously enough to deploy it as a weapon. When he later denounced a corrupt governor, Andronicus, Synesius set against the upstart the bare fact of his own descent from Eurysthenes, whose line down to his own father was written in the city’s registers — a claim Gibbon would call a purer and more illustrious pedigree than any other in the history of mankind. The point is not vanity. It fixes the standpoint from which Synesius saw everything: from inside an inherited order, old, particular, and provincial, looking out at an empire that was changing under him.

The Sanctuary of Apollo at Cyrene, the old Greek city of the Libyan plateau where Synesius was born into the rural aristocracy of the Pentapolis — David Stanley, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Around 393 he went down to Alexandria with his brother Euoptius to finish his education, and there the decisive event of his life took place. He entered the lecture circle of Hypatia, the mathematician and Platonist who held the leading philosophical chair in the city, and he never left her orbit. Of the roughly 156 letters that survive under his name — the largest and most personal late-antique letter-collection after Libanius — several are addressed to her, and they are unlike anything else he wrote: not the polished public Synesius but a pupil still reporting in. His instruments came from her workshop or were built to her design — an astrolabe for the stars, a hydroscope for the weight of liquids — and the curriculum she ran through them, geometry and astronomy first as the discipline that trains the mind to climb, then philosophy, is the architecture his own thought would keep for life.

The Platonism he was given

What Hypatia taught was the Neoplatonism descending from Plotinus, the third-century founder, refined by Porphyry and contested by Iamblichus. Its frame is a single descent and a single return. All things proceed by emanation from the One, beyond being and beyond name, through Nous, the divine Intellect where the Forms are the thoughts of God, and through the world-Soul, down to the body and matter at the rim of reality. Every soul is a fragment of that outflow, fallen into a frame of flesh, carrying in itself the memory and the appetite of its source; the whole work of philosophy is the soul’s anabasis, its climb back up the chain it came down. Because the One is beyond every predicate, the highest knowing is a knowing by negation — the apophatic approach that strips away each name until what remains is union past speech. This is the scaffold Synesius received in Alexandria, and he never dismantled it. He only had to find out whether it would hold a different God at the top.

Hypatia’s own version of the school was austere and mathematical, closer to Plotinus than to the ritual turn that Iamblichus had given the tradition — the doctrine that the soul, fully sunk in matter, cannot climb by thought alone but must be raised by sacred rites the gods themselves established, the practice called theurgy. Synesius stands at the seam between the two. His debt to the ascent-by-contemplation is total; his interest in the answering tokens of a sacramental cosmos, in dreams and signs and the soul’s subtle body, runs straight toward the theurgic stream. He is the rare witness who lets us see both currents alive in one Alexandrian head.

The three-year embassy

Around 397 the Pentapolis sent him to Constantinople. The cities were crushed by taxation and exposed to raiding from the desert tribes, and Synesius — young, well-born, articulate — was the natural ambassador to lay their case before the throne. The embassy stretched to roughly three years, into 400 or beyond, a long stranded sojourn in the eastern capital during the convulsion that followed the death of Theodosius, when the boy-emperor Arcadius reigned and the real power was fought over by his ministers and the Gothic general Gainas, whose federate troops nearly seized the city.

Out of those years came two works that show how a philosopher used the language of the schools on the hardest public ground. The first is De regno, the address On Kingship delivered before Arcadius himself: a Platonic mirror for princes that tells a seated emperor, to his face, that a king is made by virtue and not by purple, that he must be a working shepherd of his people and not a hidden idol behind curtains, and — most pointedly, in a court swollen with Gothic soldiers — that the realm should not arm the barbarian against itself. The second is De providentia, the Egyptian Tale, a political allegory dressed as Egyptian myth: the good brother Osiris and the violent brother Typhon contend for rule of a kingdom, the just order overthrown and at last restored by providence. Behind the masks stand real men of the Constantinopolitan crisis — the good minister against the faction of Gainas — and behind the masks behind the masks stands the Plotinian conviction that providence governs even the wreck of states, that disorder is privation and not a power in its own right. The treatise is at once a roman à clef of a coup and a theodicy in the key of the Platonizing Isis-and-Osiris reading of Egyptian myth.

A manuscript page of Synesius’s De regno (On Kingship), the Platonic address delivered before the emperor Arcadius — Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On Dreams and the vehicle of the soul

The most original thing he wrote is the shortest road into his cosmology. De insomniis, On Dreams, composed around 405, is a treatise on dream-divination built on a single Neoplatonic doctrine: the soul possesses a pneuma, a fine luminous body — the ochēma, the vehicle or chariot of the soul — interposed between the immaterial rational soul and the gross flesh. This subtle vehicle is, in his phrase, the first body of the soul and the most general organ of sense; it is what the soul rides down through the planetary spheres into birth, gathering a coat of matter at each descent, and what it must purify and lighten to rise again. In waking life the pneuma is dulled by the body’s noise. In sleep, the outer senses fall quiet and the imaginative faculty, the phantasia seated in this vehicle, becomes a clear surface — a mirror in which the soul can receive impressions from above, images cast down from the order of Nous and the world-Soul.

From this Synesius draws a conclusion with a startling reach: divination by dreams is open to everyone. The other arts of foreknowledge demand instruments, lore, priestcraft, or the apparatus of theurgic rite; the dream needs nothing but the dreamer asleep, no temple and no fee, the most democratic of all the ways the divine speaks to a soul. The architecture is squarely the Neoplatonic doctrine of the subtle body, the same ochēma that Iamblichus and later Proclus systematized and that the Chaldean Oracles had charged with their teaching on the soul’s ascent through the spheres. But Synesius gives it a gentler, more interior turn: the discipline is the cleansing of the imagination, the keeping of the inner mirror polished, so that the pneuma grows light enough to lift. The treatise would have a long downstream life — Marsilio Ficino built his Renaissance theory of the spiritus and the vehicles of the soul partly on it — but its first force is as the clearest single statement of how a late Platonist thought the divine reached a sleeping mind.

A fifteenth-century illuminated Latin translation of De insomniis (On Dreams), from the Corvinian library — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dion, baldness, and the defended life

Two lighter works guard the same position from another flank. Dion, named for Dio Chrysostom, is a defense of the cultivated philosophical life — letters, eloquence, the liberal study that ascends through beauty — against two opposite enemies: the sophists who make eloquence an end in itself, and the harsh monks and would-be ascetics who would burn the books and despise learning as a snare. Synesius argues that paideia, the long Greek education in word and number, is itself a road of ascent and not a distraction from it; one does not reach God by becoming a boor. The Encomium calvitii, In Praise of Baldness, from around 402, is the same argument turned to comedy — a mock-eulogy of the bald head answering Dio Chrysostom’s lost Praise of Hair, a virtuoso paignion that proves, with deadpan Platonic logic, that the smooth bald skull is the more divine because the more spherical, the sphere being the figure of Nous and the heavens. It is a joke that only a serious Platonist could build, and it shows that for Synesius wit and philosophy were never at war.

The bishop who set his terms

Around 410 or 411 the people of Ptolemais, the leading see of the Pentapolis, acclaimed Synesius their bishop. He was a landowner of weight, a trained mind, a man the cities trusted; that he was not conspicuously devout, and not even certainly baptized in the full sense the office assumed, weighed less than his standing. He did not want it, and he did the most remarkable thing in his record: he wrote out his conditions in advance, in the long Letter 105 to his brother Euoptius, meant to be shown to the patriarch and the congregation, so that no one could later say he had concealed himself.

He would keep his wife, openly, and go on having children by her; he would not pretend to a celibacy he had not chosen. And on three points of doctrine he stated where he stood and refused to move. He could never persuade himself that the soul was later in origin than the body — the Platonic pre-existence of the soul against the church’s teaching of a soul created with each birth. He could not bring himself to hold that the world and its order would one day perish — the eternity of the cosmos against the Christian end of all things. And the resurrection of the dead, which the crowd believed in its literal form, he could receive only as a sacred and ineffable mystery, an allegory, far indeed from the opinions of the many. He would teach the received doctrine in public, he said, while keeping the truth of the matter to himself in private — the philosopher’s reservation made explicit and, astonishingly, made a condition of office. He took the bishopric on those declared terms, and Theophilus, the formidable patriarch of Alexandria, consecrated him anyway. The church wanted the man more than it wanted the creed entire, and got him whole.

The crossing held in one corpus

The episcopate was brief and bruising. He buried his sons; he quarreled with a brutal governor and laid him under the great penalty of excommunication; he organized the defense of the Pentapolis against the Austuriani raiders sweeping the countryside, the bishop turned captain of a militia, and left in his Catastases a soldier’s elegy for a province coming apart. He seems to have died around 413 or 414, not long after Hypatia herself — and the dark turn that took her, torn apart by a mob in the same Alexandria he had loved, he was spared seeing.

A Roman-era floor mosaic from the House of Jason Magnus at Cyrene, from the prosperous province Synesius defended against the Austuriani raiders — David Stanley, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Hymns are where the whole crossing finally fuses. Nine of them survive, in the old Dorian dialect and the meters of Greek cult-song, and they are unmistakably the prayers of the same soul that wrote On Dreams. The motion is the Plotinian anabasis: the soul on the earth straining upward, begging the King to kindle the lights that lead aloft, climbing past the spheres toward the source. The vocabulary is the school’s — the One beyond being, the well-spring of the worlds, the Intellect, the descent and the return. And the figure at the summit is now Christ, the Son of the Virgin of Solyma, the Word through whom the worlds are made, set in the seat the Plotinian First Principle had held. The Logos of the philosophers and the Logos of the Gospel are sung as one, the Trinity mapped onto the Neoplatonic hypostases, the ascent of the Phaedrus turned into a Christian’s longing for God. No seam is hidden; both vocabularies are spoken at once, and they do not cancel. That is the achievement and the strangeness of the man — that a Platonist could become a bishop without ceasing to be a Platonist, and leave the proof of it in verse.

Texts and study

The corpus survives nearly whole, an unusual gift for a figure of this date. The standard public-domain English remains Augustine FitzGerald’s two-volume Oxford translation — The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene (1926) and The Essays and Hymns (1930) — through which the Hymns, the treatise On Dreams, Dion, the Eulogy of Baldness, and Letter 105 with its conditions can all be read in English; the texts are hosted in that translation on Livius. The philosophical scaffold underneath them is available directly in the hosted Enneads of Plotinus in Stephen MacKenna’s version and in the On the Mysteries of Iamblichus, the two poles — pure contemplative ascent and ritual theurgy — between which Synesius’s own practice falls. The modern reconstruction begins with Jay Bregman’s Synesius of Cyrene: Philosopher-Bishop (California, 1982), still the fullest study of the conversion held within an unbroken Platonism; Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long’s Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (California, 1993) anchors the embassy, the De regno, and the Egyptian Tale in the documented politics of Constantinople; and the collaborative volume edited by Donald Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insomniis (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), is the gateway to the dream-treatise and its doctrine of the pneumatic vehicle.

He is best read as a hinge, and the hinge is a person, not a doctrine. In Synesius the Alexandrian school that ran from Plotinus through Hypatia does not end and does not survive intact; it passes through a single educated soul into the Christianity that was about to inherit the Mediterranean, keeping its map of the One and the ascent and surrendering only the name at the top. The letters to his teacher, sent to the last from a man who had taken the cross and refused to give up the soul’s pre-existence to get it, are what the crossing sounded like while it was still being made.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna) · Iamblichus — On the Mysteries (Taylor)

→ Related: Hypatia · Cyrene · Neoplatonism · Plotinus · Porphyry · Iamblichus · Proclus · Ammonius Saccas · The One · Nous · Soul · Emanation · Apophatic Theology · Theurgy · Christianity · Platonism · Logos