 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King Scholars London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Georgia on my mind – Petritsi and the Proclus Revival. Those who reject philosophy are doomed to engage in it. If you tell a philosopher that philosophy is a waste of time and can't possibly prove anything, the philosopher will brighten up and say, what an interesting philosophical claim that is. What's your argument for it? Hence the fate of the numerous figures in the medieval age who attacked philosophy and for their pains have become the object of intense study by historians of philosophy. As I observed a while back when covering one such critic, Ibn Taymiyya, this is in large part because the critic's arguments are inevitably philosophical. Disputation over the art of logic drew Ibn Taymiyya into detailed analysis of theories of proof and knowledge going back to Avicenna. Avicenna was the obvious target for any polemic against philosophy in the Islamic world, already identified by Ughazali as such within a few generations of his death. Similarly, in Latin Christendom, anti-philosophers like Manigold of Lautenbach attacked Plato in the early period when he was the dominant figure, but once Aristotle became central to the university curriculum in the 13th century, he and his followers were in the firing line, as we can see with the condemnations issued at Paris in the 1270s. So who would a Byzantine critic of philosophy take as their antagonist? You might expect it to be Aristotle in this case too, given all those commentaries that scholars were devoting to his treatises, but remember that the Byzantines knew ancient Greek literature much better than did those who were dependent on Arabic or Latin. They could read everything we can read today, and more. And, whatever the bishop of Paris may have thought, there were ancient philosophers who were far more problematic from a Christian point of view than Aristotle. None more so than Proclus. Working in the 5th century AD, he resisted the rise of Christianity with a vigorous defense of paganism. His lengthy commentaries on Plato were written from an explicitly religious point of view and allude frequently to the traditional pantheon of gods. A more popular, and in some ways more provocative, text was his Elements of Theology. As the title indicates, it was inspired by the axiomatic method of Euclid, and presents Neoplatonism as a deductive system. This rational reconstruction of paganism is all the more powerful for not mentioning the pagan gods by name. They instead appear as principles of unity, or henads, surrounding the highest one, which is the principle of all things, and as abstract intellects whose existence and nature is established through Proclus's ironclad argumentation. As a result, signaling an interest in Proclus was an eloquent way for a Byzantine intellectual to display open-minded appreciation for pagan Hellenic culture. And no Byzantine intellectual was more eloquent than Michael Pselos. As we saw in the episode introducing him, his Chronographia singles out Proclus as Pselos's most valued philosophical authority. Elsewhere, Pselos draws on the Elements of Theology in various works of philosophical compilation, though not always without criticism. He even dismisses some of what he finds in Proclus as obviously absurd. Nevertheless, Pselos uses Proclus when expounding Christian theological doctrine, and even speaks without criticism of the henads that stand in for pagan deities in Proclus's Elements. A safer way to make use of Proclus would have been to deal with him indirectly, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, an anonymous Christian author of late antiquity who lived after Proclus and borrowed his ideas. As in Latin Christendom, in Byzantium this author was taken to be an authority of the Biblical era, Saint Dionysius. So his works already repackaged Platonism in irreproachably Christian form. But rather than discarding Proclus in favor of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Pselos actually says that Proclus, who he wrongly assumes wrote later than Dionysius, made the latter's teaching more precise. This is in sharp contrast to what we find in the Latin West with Thomas Aquinas. His commentary on a version of Proclus's Elements called the Book of Causes misses no chance to show how Dionysius's teaching is superior to that of Proclus, representative of the pagan Platonists. How typical was Pselos's affection for Proclus? It's hard to say. Pselos's student, Italos, and Italos's student, Eustratius, both make use of his ideas, and an author named Isaac Sebasto Kratu revised treatises by Proclus to make them more Christian. But the best evidence for a Proclus renaissance comes in authors who complain about his popularity. These include George Tourniquet's, whose encomium of Anna Komnene makes a point of saying that unlike some, she much preferred Dionysius to Proclus. And then there was Nicholas of Metone. Writing around the middle of the 12th century, Nicholas was the author of several theological works and a lengthy blow-by-blow refutation of Proclus's Elements. In a prologue to this frontal assault on the ultimate systematic presentation of paganism, Nicholas suggests that he is motivated by Proclus's popularity among his own contemporaries. But it's conceivable that he's really thinking of Proclus's enthusiastic reception back in the 11th century in the works of Pselos and Italos. The same goes for Tourniquet's remarks about Anna's resistance to Proclus's siren song. Rather than Christianizing Proclus, as the Pseudo-Dionysius and Isaac Sebasto Kratu had done, Nicholas of Metone correctly sees the Elements as a philosophical rationale for polytheism. He finds something to criticize in nearly every one of its many propositions, which he compares to bricks built into a new Tower of Babel. So, despite the official title of the refutation, which calls it an unfolding of the Elements, this is not a commentary in the style of the circle around Anacomnena. Actually, Nicholas does take pains to understand Proclus, and at one point even hypothesizes a correction to the manuscript he's reading, but he only wants to get Proclus right so that he can then show that Proclus is wrong. In place of Proclus's first principle, a pure unity that necessarily gives rise to a complex hierarchy of immaterial principles, Nicholas defends a Christian understanding of God as a freely creating cause who directly brings all other things into being. His approach is unmistakably theological. He piously insists that his doctrine is based entirely on the Scriptures, since there can be no other source for human knowledge of God. On this basis, he complains of Proclus's temerity in attempting to lift the gaze of his mind beyond even his own intelligible principles to the first principle itself. Yet, Nicholas cannot avoid doing some philosophy. Actually, he doesn't even want to. Like other Byzantine thinkers, he values the title philosopher and thinks that the pagans failed to live up to it. He also realizes that he needs to do more than point out the inconsistency of Proclus with Christianity. He has to show that the axiomatic project of the Elements is a failure. After all, if Christianity is in conflict with indisputable demonstrations offered by a pagan, then that's bad news for Christianity, not for paganism. So, Nicholas attempts to defeat Proclus on his own ground, identifying his opponent's logical failings and imprecise terminology. Nicholas's defense of a freely creating Trinitarian God emerges in part from an internal critique of Proclus's philosophical theology. The Neoplatonic One is meant to be an all-powerful source of everything, so why would it need the henads as supplementary causes? Either God can create everything, in which case the henads are superfluous, or he cannot, in which case he lacks the perfection and majesty Proclus pretends to ascribe to him. Furthermore, we must envision a God that has some kind of internal dynamism or motion, since otherwise we will have an inert principle that cannot initiate anything on its own. Hence the need for divine will and more fundamentally for the dynamic interrelations of the Trinity. For this idea, Nicholas cites a much quoted line from the Greek Church father Gregory Nazianzus, From the start, the monad moved toward a dyad until halting at the triad. And it is not only the henads that Nicholas wants to eliminate. Proclus postulated a number of principles like being, limit, unlimited, and intellect which were meant to explain the various features of the things that come after them. This was a kind of theological, hierarchical reworking of Plato's theory of forms. Nicholas argues that such general features of things are not existent in their own right. Here, he's appealing to what had become the standard view of universals within Aristotelianism, according to which general concepts are just that, concepts in the mind, rather than objectively existing things. When we speak of something that has being in itself, this has nothing to do with a Platonist principle called Being with a capital B, but just means that some created things are substances as opposed to accidental properties. With scarcely concealed delight, Nicholas also quotes Aristotle, who was himself quoting Homer, in support of monotheism, This elimination strategy is one way that Nicholas chops Proclus' hierarchy down to size. Another is to identify Proclus' various principles with aspects or names of God himself. He is even willing to accept the term henad as a way of referring to the divine, so long as we remember that there is only one such deity and that this henad, or unity, is also three persons. Likewise, if we do accept a principle called Being, that is the source of all being, then this is just to be identified with God himself. The same goes for intellect, life, and so on, just many names for one God. Thus, the various sources of determination of reality that, for Proclus, were spread across numerous levels become concentrated in one creating principle. In light of this, it's ironic, not to say unfair, that Nicholas also charges Proclus with being too confident in his ability to describe God. Nicholas throws in his lot with Dionysius, who he assumes was Proclus' source, for the occasional good ideas that are mixed in with the prideful errors strewn throughout the elements. Following Dionysius, Nicholas believes that God is beyond our mental grasp and beyond our language. But with that qualification, he still allows himself to transfer positive attributes from created things to God. In short then, Nicholas of Methonay saw Proclus as a dangerous figure, one who could lead his fellow Christians into error and could in fact be associated with a number of real heresies. But it's worth emphasizing again that Nicholas was not rejecting philosophy as a whole, or suggesting that philosophy is incompatible with Christian belief. To the contrary, he thinks Proclus fails on his own terms, and Nicholas claims superiority in argument as well as faith. What we have here then is a conflict between two thinkers who were both using philosophy to establish the truth of their respective religions. But there was another strategy for dealing with this pagan thinker. Other Byzantines saw Proclus more positively, as a resource for expounding Christianity in philosophical terms. This was evidently the view of the Pseudo-Dionysius, and of Psilos, and of one other figure we need to discuss, Ioane Petritsi. Like James Brown and the world's best peaches, Petritsi hailed from Georgia, though in his case we're dealing with the Georgia located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Petritsi was in fact the leading figure of medieval philosophy in Georgian. Among other works, he produced a surviving translation and commentary for Proclus's Elements of Theology. Unfortunately, Petritsi's chronology, like a Georgia peach, is a little fuzzy. One intriguing hypothesis is that he was actually a student of John Italos, who we know wrote a letter to a Georgian scholar, who some assume must have been Petritsi. But linguistic studies of Petritsi's writings have suggested that he may have worked in the second half of the 12th century, which would be too late for him to have studied with Italos, who died in the 1080s. Either way, it seems clear that Petritsi studied in Constantinople and shared the Neoplatonic proclivities of Psilos, Italos, and whoever else was annoying Nicholas of Metone by admiring Proclus. He was expert on Greek philosophy in general, and Proclus in particular. For Petritsi, Proclus was the greatest of the pagan philosophers because of his masterful unfolding of ideas that were expressed less clearly in Plato's dialogues. Petritsi's commentary thus makes a perfect contrast to that of Nicholas. Where Nicholas tirelessly attacks Proclus's polytheism, Petritsi mostly sticks to exposition of the Neoplatonic system and avoids the question of whether that system may be in conflict with Christianity. But when he does address the issue, he is outspoken in his defence of Proclus. Rather implausibly, he simply rejects the charge that Proclus was, strictly speaking, a polytheist. The series of principles that descend from the highest one do not share the lofty status of the true god, even if Proclus calls them gods, and the word divine is applied to such things as the heavenly bodies simply to mark their relative superiority to other creatures. Though he criticizes Aristotelian philosophers for failing to recognize god as a creating cause, Petritsi does not go as far as Nicholas would want in asserting that all things are made to exist through a gratuitous and free act on god's part. Instead, he is happy to retain the Neoplatonic idea that the first principle emanates its effects. These flow forth from it like light from a source or water from a spring. Still, it would be wrong to speak of god as necessarily causing things to exist since god is in fact transcendent above necessity. In general, he would agree with Nicholas, and for that matter with Proclus, that god is exalted beyond his effects. Some of these effects are eternal in the sense of being timeless, but god, or the one, is placed even higher than that, too exalted even to be called eternal. How can Petritsi, as a good Christian who believes in the Trinity, accept Proclus's account of a first principle that is utterly without multiplicity? By finding Trinitarian patterns in Proclus's own thought. In the commentary, and especially in an epilogue, he added at the end, Petritsi suggests that the Trinitarian persons can be associated with features of Proclus's system, with the sun, or logos, being identified either with the principle called limit, or with the first intellect that descends from the one. At one point in his commentary, he speaks of a series of three ones in Proclus, and just in case we didn't get the point, a gloss in the margin of the manuscript says that this is to be understood as the Trinity. Petritsi goes so far as to trace this pagan intuition of the Trinity back to Plato himself. Apart from the epilogue though, it does not seem that Petritsi's primary goal is to establish the harmony between pagan Neoplatonism and Christian Orthodoxy. As I've said, the commentary itself mostly skirts that issue, with Petritsi apparently seeing exegesis of Proclus as a worthwhile end in itself. He seems more worried by the difficulty of expressing Greek ideas in Georgian language. He admits the difficulty of rendering Greek terms like dea noia, or discursive thinking, introduces a passage from Plato in Greek before then translating it into Georgian, and even refers to the etymology of Greek words. With his head full of pagan material and the Bible, he describes the soul's sojourn in the physical realm both in terms of an image from Plato's Phaedrus, in which the soul must regain its wings to return to a heavenly abode, and with an image from the Book of Genesis, comparing the human body to the animal skins donned by Adam and Eve. Petritsi has no real peer in the Georgian philosophical tradition, even if he has been convincingly located within a more general cultural flowering made possible by the reign of the Georgian king David the Builder around the turn of the 12th century. But we can find analogies in other language groups among the Christians of the East. An obvious comparison would be to David the Invincible, who back in the 6th century translated Aristotelian logical treatises into Armenian, on which point it's worth noting that Petritsi's version of Proclus became the basis for an Armenian translation made in the 13th century. And, as you'll remember, Georgian and Armenian were not the only languages for doing philosophy. Christian philosophers wrote in Arabic and also in Syriac. We have yet to discuss the greatest medieval exponent of philosophy in that language. To do so, we'll have to look beyond the confines of the Byzantine empire as we did when discussing John of Damascus. This will give us an opportunity to resume the question of intellectual exchange between the Greek-Christian and Islamic worlds. So, join me next time as we consider the Syriac writings of Bar Hebraeus and discover that not all was quiet on the Eastern front. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. E K E K O D A N A P O D A N A P O