The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus

Abstract

The Platonic Theology is the culminating work of Proclus' long career and one of the defining works of late antiquity, but it has had few modern philosophical admirers. The exception, and an important one, is Hegel, who clearly drew inspiration from the Platonic Theology for his Science of Logic, and who draws his admiring account of Proclus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy largely from his reading of this work. Nevertheless, the Platonic Theology has received far less attention from philosophers than it might have. A key reason for this neglect, I suggest, has been the inability to perceive in the procession of the divine orders as presented in the Platonic Theology a unifying logic akin to that in the Science of Logic. Such is the judgment of Hegel himself, who, despite his overall high praise of Proclus in the Lectures, characterizes the dialectic of the Platonic Theology as "external".If the procession recounted in the Platonic Theology is, fundamentally, simply the multiplication of an hypostatized One, then Hegel would be correct, and Proclus' system lacks an inner logic. Moreover, on such an interpretation, causality in Proclus' system as a whole would be mystified, which would contribute to the perception of this grand edifice of Neoplatonic thought as little more than a highly developed form of irrationalism. The present essay, however, offers an interpretation of Proclus' system in which the procession of Being begins not from an hypostatized One, but in the manifold of individual, supra-essential henads, treating this procession not as a simple passage from unity to multiplicity, but as a transition from one mode of unity to another. In a previous essay, 1 I have discussed the difference between the modes of unity of the henads and of beings; the present essay argues that the Platonic Theology exhibits the emergence of the latter mode of unity from the former.The beginning of the procession of Being cannot be from "the One", because there is, in a most important sense, no such thing: the first principle is not, in itself, a cause. The beginning, rather, is from the henads. This is why the Platonic Theology is a theology. The Gods constitute Being, and do so simply by virtue of being-Gods. The Platonic Theology is not therefore about the creation of the Gods, but about their nature, and how this nature determines the nature of Being. The aspect of the Gods from which the procession of Being begins, and which drives it throughout its several stages, I argue, is their individuality. That is, the meaning I propose for the statement that the procession of Being begins 1 "Polytheism and Individuality in the Henadic Manifold," Dionysius 23 (2005), 83-104.

Algunas notas sobre la tríada ser-vida-intelecto en Plotino y en Proclo

“…23 Cabe aclarar que Proclo, como explica Chlup (2012: 19), considera al "Intelecto" en dos aspectos: tanto en el que designa lo que viene de lo Uno, afín a la segunda hipóstasis plotiniana, cuanto en el de aquel que designa el subnivel que funciona como tercero, después de la vida y del ser, al interior del plano intelectual. Por otra parte, como afirma Butler (2008), el ser se entiende, a su vez, en dos sentidos, uno estrecho y uno amplio: "En el sentido amplio, refiere a todo lo que es, excluyendo solo la privación y los dioses porque son superabundantes". En el sentido estrecho, se refiere al subnivel que funciona como primero en tanto es los inteligibles distinguidos del intelecto que los capta y de la vida.…”

Bhakti and Henadology

“…20 On the sense in which the Gods form a "(quasi-)class," one which does not conform to the rules of Platonic class-logic as laid out, e.g., at Elements of Theology prop. 21 and 66, see Butler (2008c). latter forms the paradigm, much as the paradeigma of cosmic formation in Plato's Timaeus, the autozōion or "Animal Itself," is at once monogenēs, sole of its kind, and also the paradigm for the paradigms of individual lives which are the objects of irreducible existential choice in Plato's Republic.…”