Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 117 - Born Again - Latin Platonism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Born Again, Latin Platonism. The curtain is about to come down on the classical drama that is ancient philosophy. It began in the 6th century BC with Thales. It will end in the 6th century AD or so, with the last generations of the Platonist school at Alexandria and Boethius in the fading Western Empire. Then it will be time to take our seats for Act II, Medieval Philosophy. Actually, as I've admitted before, you can draw the line earlier or later. We've already examined one thinker who lived into the mid-7th century, the Byzantine theologian and philosopher Maximus the Confessor. Especially for the Greek-speaking East, we need to think of the medieval era as continuous with antiquity. In the West where Latin dominates, there was a greater degree of social collapse. Yet we can still find a degree of continuity, thanks in no small part to a handful of thinkers who preserved ancient philosophy, especially Platonism, in attractively packaged Latin. Here, the most important figure is the aforementioned Boethius. But before we get to him, I want to consider some Platonic friends who are not so widely loved. We could call them collectively the Latin Platonists. Relatively obscure today, they were among the thinkers of antiquity most avidly studied by readers of Latin in the medieval era. The importation of Hellenic philosophy into Latin is nothing new. Back in the 1st century BC, we saw Cicero and Lucretius laboring to convey the subtleties of the Hellenistic schools to a Latinate readership. Then came Seneca, one of the greatest of the Stoics. But in medieval times Lucretius was not known at all, while Cicero and Seneca exerted influence mostly through Augustine. With these giants lost in the midst of history, medievals had to make do with authors of lesser stature. If you think that two of the indispensable philosophical authors of all time are Calcidius and Marcianus Capella, you are probably a monk living in the 10th or 11th century. In which case you most likely aren't listening to this podcast. But knowing about the medieval legacy of the Latin Platonists can be misleading. They weren't trying to save philosophy by setting it down in Latin just before the clock struck midnight and a new day began in total darkness. To the contrary, the texts we'll be looking at are erudite and even playful treatments of Greek knowledge aimed at an elite late antique audience. Accordingly, they are a lot of fun, which helps explain their historical influence. Along with the misconception that the medievals didn't read books for fun, I'd like to dispel the notion that they refused to read non-Christian authors. There is overt and sincerely held paganism in some of these Latin Platonist works. Even Christian authors like Boethius and his fellow translator Calcidius gave little or no sign of their religious affiliation when they wrote about Hellenic thought. Boethius is a particularly striking case. As we'll see, his philosophical treatises look as if they could have been written by a pagan, yet he also used philosophical ideas to expound the trinity. Boethius was following in the footsteps of Marius Victorinus. Augustine tells us that Victorinus began as a bitter opponent of Christianity, perhaps inspired by the anti-Christian polemics of the Platonist philosopher Porphyry. All the more reason to celebrate Victorinus's dramatic conversion to Christianity, which Augustine recounts in the Confessions. Within a few pages, we see Victorinus go from militant paganism to lukewarm Christianity, which doesn't include attendance at church—do wolves make Christians, he asks—and then to enthusiastic adoption of the new faith. As a Christian, he had to give up his chair as a teacher of rhetoric under the pagan policies of Julian the Apostate. Victorinus wrote theological works, including commentaries on the Bible and treatments of the trinity. But his greatest contribution to the history of philosophy was his translation of what Augustine calls the Books of the Platonists, works by Plotinus and Porphyry which, once rendered into Latin, were a formative influence on Augustine. As we know, Augustine had studied some Greek but far preferred to read Latin. This explains his dependence on Victorinus, and also his extensive use of Varro in works like The City of God. Like Cicero, Varro wrote extensively and informatively about Hellenic philosophy, and he did it in Latin. Augustine speaks also of Apuleius, who qualifies as the earliest Latin Platonist. He wrote in the 2nd century, making him a contemporary of so-called middle Platonists, like Numenius, and putting him before the groundbreaking synthesis of the Platonist tradition offered by Plotinus. In The City of God, Apuleius is mocked for his views on the subject of demons. This was a matter of some interest to Apuleius, because the warning voice who spoke to Socrates was identified as a demon. He wrote a philosophical treatise on this subject, in which he followed Plato by making demons intermediaries between the gods and humans. Augustine turns his characteristic wit and sarcasm against all this, but Apuleius was more cherished by later Latin pagan authors. Especially valued was another work of his called The Metamorphosis. This features a main character who is turned into an ass, which makes The Metamorphosis the midsummer night's dream of late antiquity. Had Augustine read that play, he might well have quoted it with reference to Apuleius and other pagan philosophers, Lord, what fools these mortals be! His contemptuous attitude is directed not only at long dead figures like Apuleius, but also near contemporaries, which reminds us that paganism was still a going concern in the early 5th century. Indeed, our next two Latin Platonists were pagans who lived at this time. One wrote about a dream, the other about a wedding. Macrobius' commentary on the dream of Scipio uses Platonist philosophy to expound a text written by Cicero. It appears at the end of Cicero's Republic, which does not survive completely today. As the title indicates, Cicero was taking inspiration from Plato, and the passage being commented upon by Macrobius makes that still more obvious. You'll remember that Plato ended his own republic with a myth in which a man named Ur has a vision of the cosmos and the fate of souls in the afterlife. Cicero accordingly ended his own republic with a cosmic vision in the form of a dream. He doesn't mention whether the dream came on a midsummer's night. The dreamer is Scipio, grandson of the famous Scipio Africanus who led Rome against Hannibal in the Punic War. In the dream, Scipio Africanus appears to his grandson and shows him a panoramic view of the heavens and earth. The main point of this is to put earthly things in perspective, by revealing to young Scipio the tiny scope of even the Roman Empire in comparison to the cosmos as a whole. Towards the end of the dream, Cicero also includes a summary of an argument for the immortality of the soul taken from Plato's Phaedrus. The argument is based on the notion that the soul is the principle of motion and change, both for other things and for itself. Nothing else moves it or causes it to change, for instance by bringing it into existence, which shows that it is eternal. If you aren't impressed by this argument, you're in good company. Aristotle, for one, dismissed it on the basis that souls are not really self-moving, but are moved by things they perceive and desire. But this passage of the Phaedrus became one of Plato's best-known arguments. Its popularity is shown by the fact that it turns up here in Cicero. Given Cicero's overt use of Plato, it's no surprise that an ancient Platonist like Macrobius would be attracted to the dream. His commentary on it often reads like a discussion of frequently asked questions regarding the Ciceronian source. Why do both Cicero and Plato end their works with myths? What are dreams, and how should we classify the dream Scipio is having? What is the overall point Cicero is trying to make with this dream? What is the significance of the numbers mentioned in Cicero's cosmology? And so on. Along the way, Macrobius gives us plenty of hints as to his own philosophical outlook. He is, of course, keen to emphasize the meeting of minds between Cicero and Plato, or Plato as read by ancient dogmatic Platonists. One would never know from this commentary that Cicero was actually sympathetic to the skeptical academy. Unlike some other ancient Platonists, Macrobius seems to have no allegiance to Aristotle. He mentions him mostly to defend the Phaedrus argument about souls' immortality against Aristotle's refutation. We can be a bit more specific about which kind of ancient Platonism Macrobius adopts. He seems to know both Plotinus and Porphyry well, and, unlike Apuleius, inhabits their cosmic worldview rather than that of the so-called middle Platonists. Thus, Macrobius recognizes a highest god who is ineffable, and who is followed by second and third principles called intellect and soul, just as in Plotinus. He also accepts Plotinus' views on ethics, holding that the goal for mankind should be a life of intellectual contemplation, withdrawn from things of the body. He justifies the use of myths by both Cicero and Plato by saying that this is an appropriate way for them to present ideas about the soul and its cosmic fate. As I mentioned when discussing the ending myth of the Republic, many readers nowadays find it troubling that Plato depicts the afterlife as a place of reward and punishment rather than sticking to the story that virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment. To say that this does not bother Macrobius would be an understatement. For him, the prospect of reward and punishment is vital, and is the fundamental point we should take away from Cicero's dream. Yet Macrobius is no less enthusiastic to expound on Cicero's relatively brief remarks about cosmology. He shows off his knowledge of philosophical lore by discussing mathematical aspects of the heavens as discussed in Plato's Timaeus. Macrobius is well-informed also on such topics as the Milky Way. He cites a number of philosophical theories for this celestial phenomenon, including one from Aristotle's student Theophrastus, that it is a kind of seam where the sky is joined together. He also mentions the opinion of the atomist Democritus, who gets it pretty much right by suggesting that the Milky Way is the light of many stars blurred together. Macrobius fails, however, to mention the widespread view that the Milky Way is a candy bar. His treatment of scientific subjects also extends to the earthly realm. You may remember Lactantius ridiculing the notion that people could live on the far side of a spherical earth since they would fall off. Australian listeners of a nervous disposition will be relieved that Macrobius refutes such concerns. He points out that things fall not in some single downward direction but towards the center of the earth. Otherwise, rain would fall sideways at the equator instead of towards the ground. So much for the dream, now it's time to go on to a wedding. This will quite literally be a match made in heaven, since the groom is the god Mercury, who will wed a human woman named Philology. The story is told by Marcianus Capella. I know what you're thinking, but unfortunately the answer is no, he did not invent a capella singing. He did, however, invent this extravagant allegory which goes by the self-explanatory title The Marriage of Mercury and Philology. The first section of the book weaves Platonist teachings into a description of the divine wedding ceremony. After this exuberantly pagan opening section, seven bridesmaids representing the seven branches of ancient education give speeches in which they present the arts they symbolize. The edifying narrative is punctuated by distinctly unedifying interludes, in which the gods complain that they are bored, or try to persuade Mercury to call a halt to the speeches so he can get Philology into bed more quickly. It's all presented in torturous Latin festooned with obscure vocabulary, so much so that medieval readers had difficulty making sense of it. What we have here, in other words, is a strong late entry for the title of ancient philosophical work most likely to have been written well under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. No less a reader than C.S. Lewis said, and I know this seems too good to be true but I'm not making it up, quote, This universe, which has produced the orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Marcianus Capella. Marcianus would have loved my podcast. He tries to mention not only every god he can think of, but also every philosopher. Some of them, like Plato and Pythagoras, are deified and made to appear alongside other gods at the wedding. The possibility of reaching godlike status through learning is perhaps the point of the entire allegory, since we have here a symbol of human learning, philology, wetting the god Mercury. Alternatively, or additionally, Mercury may represent eloquence, and Marcianus's own work is an example of what it symbolically represents, erudition married to literary style. Of course, the idea of attaining godlikeness through philosophy is a well-worn Platonic theme that goes back to Plato himself, but Marcianus could draw on more recent ideas to explain how this might be possible. He identifies Mercury as nous, using the Greek word for mind, while philology seems to represent not humans generally, or even the human soul, but more specifically the rational soul. Even her name might be taken to indicate this—philology is a lover of logos, of reason and speech. So Marcianus was indeed under the influence when he wrote this, the influence of Neoplatonists. Marcianus drew, for instance, on Porphyry's now-lost commentary devoted to the sacred pagan writings known as the Chaldean Oracles. Of course, medieval readers cherished Marcianus not because of his overt and Platonist-flavored paganism but in spite of it. However much they may have enjoyed the elaborate narrative frame, the real usefulness of the work for them lay in the speeches of the Seven Bridesmaids. These speeches covered the disciplines that would later be called the liberal arts. The seven disciplines were divided into two groups, the so-called trivium on linguistic topics, namely grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, and the mathematical quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony. Marcianus provided medieval authors with a textbook for all seven arts, valuable not only for the information it preserved but also for its relative brevity and introductory character. But none of this would have mattered had the work not been in Latin. Marcianus himself repeatedly draws attention to the fact that he is transmitting Greek learning into a new tongue. Dialectic and geometry both mention how unusual it is to present their arts in Latin, and nous is not the only Greek technical term to show up in Marcianus' text. The Greek origins of the very names of the arts are also highlighted. Especially significant is the etymology of geometry as land measurement, which explains why this speech deals at length with what we would call geography. Though Marcianus' marriage was thus highly useful for Latin readers, it is not a translation and gave medievals no access to the words of Plato himself. For that, they depended entirely on a single, incomplete translation of one dialogue, the Timaeus. The translator was Calcidius, who also supplied a commentary that is deeply influenced by middle and neo-Platonism. We do not know much about him, our main clue being a preface which addresses the commentary to a clergyman in Spain named Osius. This suggests a date in the first half of the 4th century, and also that Calcidius was a Christian. Yet, though he does occasionally refer to the Bible, Calcidius makes no effort to Christianize Plato or the Platonists. Mostly, he simply ascribes later Platonist ideas directly to Plato. Again, an example is Plotinus' doctrine that the highest god is followed by a second intellective principle called nous. A more complicated example of his use of Platonist ideas is his treatment of providence. The middle Platonist drew a distinction between fate and providence. Fate was effectively the sort of divine mastery recognized by the Stoics, which is to say an imminent principle within the natural world. Fate is a sort of law laid down for the physical cosmos by a more exalted providence, which proceeds from divine, immaterial principles. All things are subject to providence, but only things within the physical, natural world are subject to fate. Now, because human souls have an immaterial part, the part with which they reason and can achieve virtue, humans are not necessarily bound by fate. Insofar as we live in accordance with reason alone and focus on pure contemplation, we effectively exempt ourselves from the law of fate. But as soon as we act within the physical world, we submit ourselves to those laws. Thus, to take an example I mentioned quite a while ago, when Oedipus killed a man who happened to be his father at a crossroads, his action was one performed within the physical realm. Fate governs such actions in the sense that it apportions reward and punishment in keeping with the laws laid down by providence. So we can say that it was fated that Oedipus would go on to marry his own mother, bring a plague upon his city, and tear his own eyes out. This sounds fairly stoic, except for the crucial Platonist caveat that Oedipus had a rational soul that was not controlled by fate. If he had chosen an accordance with reason, he could have avoided giving in to his angry impulse at the crossroads, a sure sign that his lower, spirited soul was in charge. These ideas about providence were first devised by middle Platonists, and they reappear in Neoplatonists including Plotinus, Porphyry, and Hierocles. Calcidius brings the theory into Latin though, and in the context of a commentary on the Timaeus that would be read for many generations to come. One of his allusions to the Bible even brings the Platonist theory of fate together with the Old Testament. He quotes a statement in which God promises that reward and punishment will be sent for the things we do, an indication that fate is a divinely appointed law triggered by our actions in this world. The texts I've discussed in this episode have much in common. Most obviously they are all in Latin, and self-consciously so. Like Cicero before them, they comment on the task of bringing Greek culture into a new language. Yet, the impact of Latin culture is also felt throughout their writings. Macrobius and Marcianus Capella knew and used Varro, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, and Virgil. In fact, Macrobius wrote another work called the Saturnalia that presents Virgil as a consummate philosopher. He would be annoyed with me for failing to devote a podcast to the Aeneid. Another commonality is that the Latin Platonists frequently drew on the same relatively narrow range of sources. Plato's Timaeus looms larger than other dialogues, though they do refer to favorite passages from elsewhere in Plato, such as that argument for the soul's immortality found in the Phaedrus. I mentioned that it was defended by Macrobius, and Calcidius also weaves it into his commentary on the Timaeus. As for late antique philosophers, it's striking that the one who seems to influence the Latin Platonists most was not a church father or even Plotinus, but Porphyry. I've already mentioned Porphyry's impact on Victorinus, Macrobius, and Marcianus Capella, but I haven't told you that his commentary on the Timaeus was likely an important source for Calcidius. The only Latin Platonist not influenced by Porphyry was Apuleius, which only stands to reason since Porphyry lived quite a bit later than he did. Our later Latin Platonists furthermore adopt Porphyry's interest in Aristotelian logic, without exploring Aristotle much further. Victorinus translated Porphyry's Isegogae and Aristotle's categories and On Interpretation, which are also the basis for a long portion of the speech of dialectic in Marcianus Capella. In all these respects, our Latin Platonists anticipate what we will find in the last ancient philosopher to be covered in this series of podcasts, Boethius. He was an expert on Aristotelian logic, and drew heavily on Porphyry. Like Calcidius, he translated Greek philosophy into Latin and had an enormous impact on medieval culture. In fact, both Boethius and Macrobius were enthusiastically read and used by Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet, like Victorinus before him, Boethius did not let his interest in pagan thought stop him from writing about the Trinity. Meanwhile, Marcianus Capella's Marriage partially anticipates Boethius's greatest work, an allegory which likewise personifies an intellectual discipline, in this case, Lady Philosophy herself. But the occasion is a less festive one. Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy while under a death sentence, and the consolation Lady Philosophy offers him is needed because he faces imminent execution. We've had the marriage, next time it will be a funeral, as I come not only to praise ancient philosophy, but also to bury it. Here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.