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1.1. Interpretations of Plato's Timaeus Our Text 1 is, of course, one of the key passages in all of Western philosophy, and it's hard to overestimate its impact and influence. Leaving aside for the moment the fundamentally important question of whether Plato intends us to understand this text literally, metaphorically, or in some other sense, let's note a few important points at the outset. First, as Cornford pointed out in 1937, “ Plato is introducing into philosophy for the first time the image of a creator god ”. Whatever his precise ontological status — and Plato's successors were to expend vast quantities of ink and papyrus on this question — the Demiurge appears, in the Timaeus, to be an anthropomorphic divinity who thinks, has motivations, and has a will. His motivation for creating the universe is clear: it is his goodness, equated here with his lack of phthonos or jealousy. As subsequent commentators did not fail to point out, there seems to be an implicit reductio ad absurdum underlying Plato's argument. If the Demiurge is powerful enough to create a world, but then fails to do so, his only reason for failing to do so would seem to be jealousy, stinginess, or just plain spite. But since the Demiurge is good, there can be no evil in him. Therefore, he cannot fail to create the world, therefore he creates it. Second, we note that although the Demiurge “ framed ” (Greek sunistêmi) the world, he did not create it out of nothing. There was already something present when he began his creative activity: something that was visible and was moving in a disorderly way. The Demiurge does not create these elements, whatever they may be, but “ takes them up ” (Greek paralambanein) and brings them from a state of disorder into one of order. A little later in the Timaeus (Text 2), Plato declares that although the world is generated, it will have no end to its existence, owing to the will of the Demiurge. Plato's position as set forth in the Timaeus was rather unusual. As Aristotle points out, it was common, if not universal among Plato's philosophical predecessors, to make the universe arise out of some eternally preexisting element and be dissolved back into those elements: this was indeed the standard Presocratic view, at least as interpreted by the later Greek philosophers who transmitted their fragments. But Plato seemed to teach that the world both had a beginning and was eternal, or rather everlasting. This view seems to have been both extraordinary and innovative, so much so that it immediately sparked debate over whether Plato really meant what he had said. This is illustrated by our third text, from Aristotle's On the Heavens. We see from this text that according to Aristotle, although all previous philosophers agreed that the world had a beginning, in other words, was generated (Greek verbal form genomenon, adjective genêtos) out of some pre-existent material, Aristotle distinguishes between those who, like Empedocles and Heraclitus, believed the world periodically emerged from and dissolved back into that element, and Plato, who believed that although the world had been generated out of pre-existing elements, its existence would henceforth have no end in time. We also learn from the text of the De Caelo that “ some people ” argued that Plato's description of the generation of the world in the Timaeus was not intended to be taken literally, but was merely for pedagogical purposes. We know from other sources that this was the view of such first-generation members of Plato's Academy as Speusippus3 and Xenocrates4, as well as the early commentator Crantor.5 It became the standard, athough not universal view among Middle- and Neoplatonists.6 1.2. Hellenistic and Neoplatonist interpretations As time went by, Plato's statement in the Timaeus that the world was generated (Greek genêtos)7 continued to be a source of embarrassment to the commentators, whose attempts to explain what Plato meant became increasingly sophisticated, not to say sophistic. We should bear in mind that Greek adjectival form ending in -tos is inherently ambiguous. Generally speaking, it indicates capability or potentiality, and can be assimiltaed to the English ending -able: what is kinêtos (derived from the noun kinêsis) is what is movable. But the Greek ending leaves open the question of whether or not that potentiality is realized: hence the adjective genêtos can mean both what is generated and what can, could, or might be generated.8 Partly in order to take account of this ambiguity, the Middle Platonist Calvinus Taurus9 (fl. c. 145AD) distinguished four meanings of the world generated (genêtos). As we can see in Table 1, these meanings include (1) what is not generated but has the same genus as generated things; such things are generable in the sense that an object hidden in the center of the earth can still be visible (Greek horaton), even if it will never actually be seen. The second meaning (2) covers what is notionally but not actually composite: things, that is, that can be analysed in thought into their component parts. The third meaning (3) of genêtos concerns what's always in the process of becoming; that is, according to Platonic philosophy, the whole of the sublunar world, which is subject to constant change. Finally (4), genêtos can mean what derives its being from elsewhere; that is, from God: similarly, the moon's light may be said to be generated by the sun, although there has never been a time when this was not the case. Slightly more than a century later, the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry (c. 234-c. 310) added additional meanings of genêtos (Text 4 and Table 2): these include (5): what has the logos of generation, i.e. what can be analysed in thought. It must be admitted that it's not terribly clear what the difference is between this meaning and Taurus' meaning no. 2, except that Porphyry adds the crucial example of what is composed out of matter and form. Meaning (6) covers sensible objects like houses, ships, plants and animals, which obtain their being through a process of generation. Finally, the seventh and last meaning (7) of genêtos is what begins to exist in time after not having existed. It's this last meaning of ‘generated’ that Porphyry denies is applicable to Plato's creation story in the Timaeus. Later in the fragments cited by Philoponus, Porphyry reveals that he himself believes that “constituted of form and matter” is the most appropriate interpretation of genêtos in Plato's Timaeus. I'd like to call your attention to the part of our Text 4 where Porphyry claims that phenomena such as lightning, snapping of the fingers, and anything that comes into and out of existence suddenly (exaiphnês) is not said to be generated: instead, these are things that come into being without a process of generation (genesis) and pass into not being without a process of destruction (phthora). He is quite right to claim there is a good Aristotelian pedigree for such notions,10 as we shall see later. What will turn out to be especially crucial for the problems that interest us here is that Porphyry – unless Philoponus is putting words into his mouth here – seems to draw an analogy between these processes of instantaneous generation or change and God's creation of the universe. As in the case of these examples, the world did not have to undergo a process of generation in order to come being, but God brought it into substantification (ousiôsis) simultaneously with his thought (hama noêmati). We will look more closely into this question shortly below. Simplicius, writing some two and a half centuries after Porphyry, was to follow the Tyrian's lead.11 According to Simplicius, by ‘generated’ Aristotle means what earlier does not exist, but then later does (i.e., meaning no. 7). Plato, in contrast, means by ‘generated’ what has its being in becoming (meaning no. 6) and derives its being from another cause (meaning no. 4). It was, Simplicius claims, because Philoponus was too dumb to realize that Aristotle and Plato did not mean the same thing by the term ‘genêtos’ that he wrongly maintained that Plato and Aristotle held opposing views on the question of whether the universe is generated or created. This, of course, is precisely what most scholars believe today, so that we are today, at least on this point, the heirs of Philoponus rather than Simplicius. Since we have already mentioned the Neoplatonists, the school of Greco-Roman thought usually considered to have been founded by Plotinus (c. 204-270 AD), it seems appropriate give a sketch here of the historical background to the debate between Philoponus and Simplicius. 2.1. The Historical Background The mid-6th century was an interesting period in the history of philosophy. By this time, the triumph of Christianity was pretty well complete in the Roman Empire, where it had been the official religion, if not since the time of Constantine I, then certainly since 380 under Theodosius I. In 529, the emperor Justinian sealed the fate of pagan philosophical education by ordering the closure of the Platonic Academy at Athens, forbidding pagans to teach anywhere within the Empire.12 By the sixth century, philosophy in the Roman Empire had acquired a fixed set of characteristics. The reigning philosophical tendency, since the time of Plotinus, who died in 270 AD, and his successors Porphyry and Iamblichus, was Neoplatonism. The members of this school considered themselves to be faithfully carrying on the teachings of Plato, but their teachings were in fact the result of a long process of combining Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, and perhaps even some Gnostic elements and elements from the Hellenistic Mystery religions. Neoplatonism had grown increasingly more refined and complicated in the course of the 250 years since Plotinus, who had come up with an emanative system in which the ineffable supreme principle, the One, gave rise to two other hypostases, the Intellect and the Soul. The lower part of the hypostasis soul, otherwise known as Nature, then gave existence to the sensible world in which we all live. Following certain tendencies already present in Plato, this sensible or phenomenal world was considered less real and less valuable than the world of intelligible Platonic forms that constituted the Intellect (nous). The human soul, intelligible in its origin, was considered to have fallen into the body as the result of some pagan equivalent of Original Sin, and the goal of human life was held to be the reversal of the process of emanation: we are to separate our souls and our intellects from our material body, and make them rise back up to the intelligible world whence they came.13 By the time of Simplicius and Philoponus in the early sixth century AD, many more levels of reality had been inserted between the sensible world and the ultimate principle, which was variously known as God, the One, or even simply the Ineffable. The First Principle became utterly unapproachable and distant from the material world, while the intermediate levels of reality – intelligible, intellective-and-intelligible, intellective, and so on – became associated with a host of strange divinities taken from such Orientalizing sources as the Orphic Poems and the Chaldaean Oracles. As far as the nature of philosophy itself was concerned, it had changed since the time of Plato and Aristotle, as Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot have shown.14 No longer the direct transmission from master to disciple of a philosophy conceived as a way of life, it had become primarily a matter of the meticulous commentary on a canonical series of texts by the Founding Fathers of the school. In the case of Neoplatonism, these founding Fathers were primarily Plato and Aristotle. Most historians of philosophy consider that Plato and Aristotle, the Founding Fathers of Western thought, were about as opposed as it’s possible to be. After all, Plato believed in separate intelligible Forms or Ideas; Aristotle did not, but believed that forms are inherent in and inseparable from the bodies they inhabit. Plato believed in reincarnation: the human soul had contemplated the Intelligible Forms before being incarnated in a body, and had thereby obtained a direct vision or intuition of absolute Truth or Reality, a vision which has become obscured by life in the body and which it is philosophy's task to reawaken via anamnêsis or recollection. For Aristotle, the soul is the actuality or entelechy of a physical body endowed with organs, and it probably doesn’t survive after death (Aristotle doesn’t really seem to much concerned about this point). For Plato, as mentioned, all learning is recollection: we possessed all knowledge before our souls became incarnated in our material body, and learning and study are simply the gradual recovery of that lost knowledge. For Aristotle, our minds are a clean slate when we are born, and we acquire knowledge by means of sensation, perception, memory, and experience. Things get a bit more complicated when it comes to the questions that concerned Simplicius and Philoponus in the writings under consideration here, that is, the question of whether time, motion, and the world are created or eternal. Aristotle clearly maintained that both time and motion were not created but eternal, as was the world: no matter what moment in time, or what motion in physical space you choose, there will always have been a moment or motion before it, and there will always be one after it. In this sense, because there is no first or last moment of the world’s existence, the world is eternal15 (Greek aidios: we will see below that this term takes on a different meaning in Neoplatonism). Plato’s position was harder to pin down. In his most famous and influential dialogue, the Timaeus, he talks as though a creative divinity, which calls the Demiurge or craftsman, created the world, time, and the human soul at a specific moment, fashioning them out of a chaotic hodgepodge of wildly moving elements, or rather proto-elements.16 Yet Plato had presented this account in the form of a myth, and there was considerable debate in Antiquity over whether it should be understood literally, or merely in some kind of a symbolic or allegorical way.17 Probably as early as the end of the third century AD, the Neoplatonic philosophical curriculum had become systematized, if not by Porphyry,18 then certainly by Iamblichus, his student. Beginning philosophy students started off with Aristotle, reading, in order, first Porphyry’s Introduction or Isagoge, and then Aristotle’s works on logic (in the order Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistici elenchi), physics, and psychology, culminating with the Metaphysics. They then read a selection of Plato’s dialogues, culminating in the Timaeus and especially the Parmenides, considered to be the summa of all metaphysical speculation.19 This partly explains how the Neoplatonists could reconcile Plato and Aristotle: the study of Aristotle was considered as an introduction to the study of Plato. Aristotle was considered as a fairly reliable guide to the sensible world and to the disciplines that enable us to understand it ; but one had to turn to Plato to understand intelligible reality, the world of the Forms or Ideas, and then, if possible, God or the First Principle. Thus, if one wondered why Aristotle did not discuss the Forms or Ideas that play such an important part in Plato’s thought, the answer lay ready to hand: Aristotle was writing for beginners, who lived on the level of sense-impressions and appearances. Such beginners had no reason to clutter their minds with metaphysical or theological notions, which they would, at any rate, be unable to understand. By the mid-sixth century, two main centers of the teaching of pagan philosophy had developed: one in Alexandria and the other in Athens. Modern scholars are divided over whether there were important doctrinal differences between these schools. What is certain is that in the Greek writings that happen to have come down to us, those by authors from Alexandria (Ammonius, Philoponus, Olympiodorus and so on) tend to be commentaries on Aristotle’s treatises on logic and natural philosophy, while those from the Athenian school (Syrianus, Proclus, Damascius, and so on) tend to be metaphysical treatises and/or commentaries on the works of Plato. As early as Antiquity, it had been claimed that the Alexandrian school under Ammonius had reached an agreement with the local Christian authorities to abstain from metaphysical speculation,20 and/or topics that might be contrary to Christian orthodoxy, which would explain the relatively “sober” character of the Alexandrian philosophical works. For instance, to judge by their extant works, the Alexandrian commentators seem to have considered that the highest metaphysical principle was not the One or the Ineffable, but the Demiurge. Other modern scholars, led by Ilsetraut Hadot, have claimed that the Alexandrian emphasis on Aristotle, and the Athenian preference for Plato, are merely the result of historical accidents of transmission. It just so happens that what has come down to us of the Alexandrian writings are those from the earlier stages of the philosophical curriculum, where professors abstained from metaphysical speculation simply because their students were not yet prepared to understand them.21 Likewise, the Aristotelian commentaries of the Athenian philosophers have been lost, but some of their Platonic commentaries and metaphysical treatises have survived, thanks to historical accidents.22 Pagan education at Athens thus effectively ended in 529, when, as we saw, Justinian closed the Platonic Academy, ordering that no pagan philosopher could teach within the Empire. As a result, Simplicius, Damascius, and five other Neoplatonic philosophers fled to the court of the Persian king Chosroes I, who, they had heard, was interested in philosophy. But the exiles were soon disillusioned with their Persian hosts. Once again, scholars disagree about what happened next. For Michel Tardieu, followed by I. Hadot, Simplicius and Damascius continued to Mesopotamia and settled in Harran, near the current border between Turkey and Syria. Here they founded a Neoplatonic school, or rather joined one that already existed in that location, a school that was to play a part in the transmission of Greek philosophical and scientific thought to Islam.23 Other scholars find this scenario unlikely, and suppose that Simplicius and his colleagues returned to either Athens or Alexandria.24 According to Ilsetraut Hadot, at any rate, it was at Harran that Simplicius wrote his Commentary on the Physics, some time after 538.25 |
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