Podcast episode
September 11, 2024
Episode 193: All from Nothing: Sara Rappe on Damascius
We are delighted to speak with Sara Rappe about the great Damascius, final scholarch of Athenian Platonism. While we do our usual basic due diligence at the beginning of the episode, much of our discussion centres around the question of what Damascius’ goals as a writer of philosophy were. There is a thoroughgoing apophatic dismantlement of Proclus’ higher metaphysics, particularly in the first section of the Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles; Rappe reads this as a call to embracing aporia as an aspect of lived philosophy meant to take the philosopher outside the strictures of conceptual thought and belief. She’s not wrong.
Interview Bio:
Sara Rappe is Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. She has published widely and innovatively on ancient Platonism and related subjects; her works include the wonderful Reading Neoplatonism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000) and a translation of Damascius’ Problems and Solutions Regarding First Principles (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010).
Works Cited in this Episode:
Primary:
Agathias on the ‘pilgrimage’ from the Academy to the court of Khusrau: Histories II.30.3-4 Frendo: ‘Not long before Damascius of Syria, Simplicius of Cilicia, Eulamius of Phrygia, Priscian of Lydia, Hermes and Diogenes of Phoenicia and Isidore of Gaza, all of them, to use a poetic turn of phrase, the quintessential flower of the philosophers of our age, had come to the conclusion, since the official religion of the Roman empire was not to their liking, that the Persian state was much superior. So they gave a ready hearing to the stories in general circulation according to which Persia was the land of “Plato’s philosopher king” in which justice reigned supreme …. 4 Elated therefore by these reports which they accepted as true, and also because they were forbidden by law to take part in public life with impunity owing to the fact that they did not conform to the established religion, they left immediately and set off for a strange land whose ways were completely foreign to their own, determined to make their homes there.’
Damascius:
- ‘Philosophy’s brittle old age’: Damascius Philosophical History 150a Athanassiadi.
- On the ‘hieratic’ type of philosopher: Damascius Philosophical History 4a-c Athanassiadi = Suda II 613, 14 (s.v. ἱερατική) + Photius Bib. cod. 232.
Secondary:
For the statues concealed in the well in ‘House C’ on the Areopagos, see Alison Franz. The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Late Antiquity: A.D. 267-700. Vol. XXIV. Princeton American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton, NJ, 1988, pp. 44, 87-88. P. 88: ‘… all the sculpture was evidently a collection made by a lover of classical art. None of this is ordinary debris such as is commonly found in wells. All was in an excellent state of preservation and was obviously placed in the wells for purposes of concealment. Consideration of the time and the condition of the sculpture leads to the conclusion that the two events,the action of Justinian and the concealment of the sculpture,are closely related.The occupants either left Athens or disappeared from sight, while still keeping the hope that their fortunes would be reversed and that they would return to their old surroundings.’
The difficult-to-use edition of the fragments of Damascius’ Life of Isidore: Clemens Zintzen, editor. Damascii vitæ Isidori reliquiæ. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 1967.
Polymnia Athanassiadi. Damascius: The Philosophical History. Text with Translation. Apameia, Athens, 1999.
Jonathan Greig. The First Principle in Late Neoplatonism: A Study of the One’s Causality in Proclus and Damascius. Brill, Leiden/Boston, MA, 2021.
For Vlad and Métry-Tresson, see Recommended Reading.
The two books on Damascius’ philosophy of time: Pantelis Golitsis. Damascius’ Philosophy of Time. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, MA, 2023; the other book referred to isn’t actually on Damascius, but is rather a study of Plotty: Gheorghe Paşcalău. Zeit und Ewigkeit. In Christian Tornau, editor, Plotin Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, pages 43142. J.B. Metzler, 2024.
Recommended Reading:
The De Wulf – Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy maintains a great online bibliography of important primary texts and studies of Damascius. It’s a great first stop. We have put together a selected bibliography, found below, which focuses on the topics discussed in the episode.
SHWEP Damascius Recommended Reading
Themes
Apophatic Writing, Christianity, Damascius, Iamblichus, Interview, Isma‘ilism, Late Platonism, Polytheism, Proclus, Shihab al-Dīn Suhrawardī
William A Welton
September 12, 2024
Thanks to both of you! Really wonderful!
Gregory Esteven
September 13, 2024
I wonder whether, had the West had maintained a pluralistic spiritual ecosystem post-late antiquity, the various Platonisms would have evolved into something like the schools of Vedanta, Yoga, etc. Not necessarily doctrinally analogous to them, but analogous in the sense of the total sort of disciplines available to the seeker.
What’s the source text of this quotation, “the earth is a desert without its gods?” I want to read that.
Earl Fontainelle
September 13, 2024
Gregory,
Depending on exactly what you mean, I think that Platonist philosophy already did provide such a range of spiritual techniques, no evolution needed. But you are right, I think, that the available options were massively bottlenecked by the rise of Orthodox hegemony.
As for the desert, I believe the quote comes from the Divine Iamblichus:
De myst. I.8, trans. Clarke Dillon Hershbell: ‘And indeed, speaking generally, this doctrine constitutes the ruination of sacred ritual and theurgical communion of gods with men, by banishing the presence of the higher classes of being outside the confines of the earth. For it amounts to nothing else but saying that the divine [τὰ θεῖα] is set apart from the earthly realm, and that it is does not mingle with humanity, and that this realm is bereft of divinity …’.
Peter Brown (World of Late Antiquity, p. 101) translates the final ὡς ἔρημος αὐτῶν ἐστιν ὁ τῇδε τόπος as
‘… that this lower region is a desert, without gods’, which I’m guessing is where this particular translation enters our world of discourse.
Gregory Esteven
September 15, 2024
Right, Earl, I agree that the spiritual technologies were there. I’m thinking of this in terms of a history cut short by the rise of the hegemony of Christian orthodoxy. On the other hand, people did find a way, down through every period. These periodic re-emergences of the esoteric seem fairly regular.
My understanding is that in India, there never was this kind of centralized, creed-based religious structure. So — not to mention competing religions like Buddhism and Jainism existing alongside Hinduism (the term may be somewhat anachronistic) — even within the broad outline of Vedanta, you could have different schools with radically different theologies and metaphysics.
In Christendom after a certain point you couldn’t really have that. In the Middle Ages you couldn’t have a Christian sect that rejected Trinitarianism, for example. Not without being labeled heretical. But the equivalent could happen within Hinduism, I think.
So, I’m wondering whether, had there been more pluralism, there might have been, I don’t know, Iamblichean schools in Florence with relatively unbroken continuity. . By schools I’m meaning some thing like a Vedantic lineage, in the sense that Advaita Vedanta is a relatively distinct trend.
I’m thinking that the Islamicate world was a bit different because less religiously centralized. So maybe Sufis are something that couldn’t have had an equivalent in the far West.
Thank you for tracking down the source of that reference! This whets my appetite.
Fotis Panagoulias
September 16, 2024
There was a turning point where the Church-State relationship in the first centuries AD fused together, which led a) to the persecution -violent or not- of the lesser creeds (Theodosius onwards) and b) the construction of a religion that used mass rituals/liturgies that can only take place in certain establishments as an exhibition of power and of signifia of people’s fidelity to the creed. Therefore, personal practices and personalized teachings were set aside, if not marginalized. Faith in Christianity was bound to faith to the Emperor and had to be declared publicly or else… The Hesychast controversy in the 13th century was just about that….
Fotis Panagoulias
September 15, 2024
Another excellent, moving episode!
Daniel Comito
September 27, 2024
Hole hell! That was awesome. Earl, as I’ve been on this journey at the SHWEP, I’m often struck by the infuriatingly similar yet dissimilar relationship platonic thought seems to share with Advita Vedanta. Throughout the podcast I’ve asked myself: but this sounds so similar, only Plotinus, Porphyry, Ilambclus, haven’t done first things first and addressed in an Advitic sense, with proper due diligence, who is asking the questions. The self is always held separate from the one, without examining if there is a self to begin with, and yet, especially Plotinus flirts with the idea of non duality. Such a lovely conundrum. In any case it was a delight to hear you and Sara Rappe talk about this.
Do you have any thoughts about Adivita and Platonic thought? Do you think Plato would have tossed Adivita out as a naïve philosophy?