Middle Platonism and its relation to Stoicism and the Peripatetic tradition
Middle Platonism is a name that, since Praechter, has been conveniently assigned to the period spanning the first century BCE and the beginning of the third century CE that witnessed the long transition (beginning with Antiochus of Ascalon) from the so-called sceptical phase of Plato’s Academy to a more systematic kind of Platonism represented by Plotinus and his successors (Praechter 1909: 524; Dillon 1996a; Sharples & Sorabji 2007; Bonazzi & Opsomer 2009; Männlein-Robert & Ferrari forthcoming). Despite its usefulness, the label also constitutes a challenge for scholars because it covers such a wide range of authors, methodological approaches and views. Even the chronological boundaries of this period are fluid. For instance, the work of Porphyry, Plotinus’ pupil, harks back to a number of features typically associated with this earlier strand of Platonism (Zambon 2002), and that of Calcidius, a fourth-century Latin author of a commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, adopts a perspective that reflects a similar mode and owes a special debt to Numenius. And although a very important anonymous commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus can be dated to this period with some confidence, the date of the anonymous commentary on Plato’s Parmenides is much more contested, though it is often associated with Porphyry (Bechtle 1999) or with late Neoplatonism (Linguiti 1995).
The range of authorial voices during this period is extremely diverse. The Jewish-Greek writer Philo of Alexandria (c.30 BCE-c.50 CE) is steeped in views derived from Plato (Runia 1986). Authors such as Eudorus, Numenius and Calvenus Taurus (the last one of whom we learn about mostly through the writings of Aulus Gellius) are associated with Pythagoras (hence they are also called Neopythagoreans) and indicate a renewed interest during the period in potential connections between Plato and Pythagoras. Also included are philosophically trained “rhetoricians” such as Apuleius of Madaura and Maximus of Tyre, who are commonly considered as belonging to the Second Sophistic, and Galen, who weaves elements of Platonism into his medical works. The writings of this period include manuals, or succinct overviews, of Platonic doctrines, such as Alcinous’ Didaskalikos and Apuleius’ de Platone et eius dogmate; introductory works, such as the Prologos of Albinus; and some extant evidence of commentaries, as with the anonymous commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus. During this period, the most widely used form of commentary1 focused on specific passages or themes, such as Plutarch’s On the Generation of the Soul in Plato’s Timaeus, dedicated to the interpretation of a single passage about the World Soul; Galen’s commentary on the medical parts of the Timaeus; Aelian’s commentary on the musical parts of the Timaeus; and Taurus’ commentary on genesis in Timaeus. (The prominence of Plato’s Timaeus is a point to which we shall return.) And an author such as Plutarch of Chaeroneia (46–120) is in a class of his own, given the range of interests within and the volume of his extant work.
In general, it is fair to say that after the sceptical phase in the history of the Academy, Middle Platonism represents a range of attempts to cull a more systematic set of doctrines from Plato’s writings. Unfortunately, there are a number of crucial missing links in the extant evidence, and in some cases, earlier scholars have posited missing links, such as “a school of Gaius”, for which we have little or no evidence (Dillon 1996a: 266–7). It is particularly unfortunate that we have so little information about Eudorus of Alexandria, who appears to have played an essential role in the transition to Middle Platonism (cf. Bonazzi 2005; Chiaradonna 2009a). Moreover, we do not have much information about school activity as such, and a number of texts hence appear to stand in something of a vacuum (Glucker 1978; Donini 1982).
But in spite of these lacunae, a careful examination of the extant texts reveals much about how Middle Platonist authors attempted to develop a philosophical system. As this chapter will show, Middle Platonists treated Plato and his works as highly authoritative and provided a unified reading of the Platonic corpus as a whole. To preserve this unity of Plato’s thought, however, they also had to resolve dissension in the ranks of the Platonist tradition and reconcile the divergent interpretations that had occurred over time. Once this unity was secured, however, a further step was required to preserve truth claims, which entailed co-opting rival systems of thought as much as possible. Whereas Platonist responses to Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition have received plenty of attention from scholars, much work remains to be done to understand the exact nature of the relationship between Platonism and Stoicism in this period, and to that end this chapter will examine three instances of such crossovers in greater detail. Finally, the chapter will turn to Plato’s Timaeus as the focal text for Middle Platonism and reflect upon how this strand of Platonist thought anticipated later developments in so-called Neoplatonism.
If, as is claimed here, this phase in the history of Platonism is very much characterized by its attempt to come up with a more systematic “Platonism”, this attempt rested on several developments. First, the authoritative status of both Plato and his works increased considerably in this period (Sedley 1997; Boys-Stones 2001), and ultimately this status was transferred to Platonist philosophical teachers, as can be seen in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus. The increasingly authoritative status of texts, as exemplified in the surging importance of commentaries, led to a performative use of such accounts, which implied that the very act of studying Plato’s words amounted to engaging in the philosophical life and its turn to the life of the mind. Not all philosophical schools in this period adopted this mode, however. The Stoics, by contrast, posited a very different model for the relation between teacher and pupil, endorsing a less authoritative role for founders and teachers and relying on a more instrumental use of texts as merely pointing the way (Snyder 2000; Reydams-Schils 2011).
Second, the body of Plato’s works had to make sense as a whole, and a highly unitary reading developed in which individual texts were interpreted in light of one another and potential contradictions were explained away. The Middle Platonists, following the principle Platonem ex Platone saphenizein (“to clarify Plato on the basis of Plato”), held that Plato’s philosophy was coherent and systematic. This method of interpreting Plato had two important corollaries: it created groupings of Plato’s works and an order in which the texts should be read. Attempts to produce such groupings were recorded by both Diogenes Laertius and Albinus. In his life of Plato, Diogenes (third century) paid witness to the division of those works into groups of three texts (Diogenes Laertius 3.61–2) and of four texts, the latter attributed to Thrasyllus (3.56–61) and still used today (Tarrant 1993). Moreover, both Diogenes (3.49) and Albinus (Intr. chs 3 & 6) presented a diaeretic grouping based on Plato’s alleged method of which traces also survive, as when we discuss the so-called aporetic works of Plato.
In conjunction with these groupings, both Diogenes Laertius and Albinus offered advice on the best order in which to read Plato’s works. Diogenes Laertius recorded (3.62) that “some start with the Timaeus”, and Albinus reported considerable debate about this matter. Taurus described the course of study that “Pythagoras” had devised (Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.9) before admitting any pupils, Pythagoras would examine their physiognomies to find out whether they were suitable for philosophy; after an initial period of at least two years of silent listening to expositions, in which they would be mere auditors (akoustikoi), pupils would embark on a more active course of study as adepts of the sciences (mathematikoi); and they would end with physics, as the study of the world (mundi opera) and the principles of nature (principia naturae). Both the diaeretic division and the reading order involved a systematic approach: all of Plato’s works were viewed as part of one and the same project, and as all contributing to the construction of a philosophical system (F. Ferrari 2010).
In addition to its advice on curricula for different types of students, the anonymous commentary on the Theaetetus (1.1–4.27) also attests to the tradition of so-called prolegomena schemata; that is, preliminary issues to be settled before one embarks on a detailed study of one of Plato’s works, such as the purpose of the work, its division into chapters, and the reasons for choosing certain characters as spokespersons (Mansfeld 1994). In Theon of Smyrna’s work (second century), we find another type of preliminary work, a survey of mathematical knowledge (Expositio rerum mathematicarum ad legendum Platonem utilium) that Theon claims to have written on behalf of those who had not been trained since childhood in the mathematical sciences necessary to understand Plato’s work and to gain access to other forms of knowledge.2
It was, however, not merely the unity of Plato’s works that needed to be established, but also a unity within the tradition of interpreters of Plato and in philosophical truth. The sceptical phase of the Academy, with Arcesilaus and Carneades as its main representatives, posed a major challenge to both of these projects. The attempts of these “Academics” to undermine dogmatism, and Stoic doctrine in particular, could be seen as having overreached, leaving no room for any truth claims. As a result, any return to a more systematic interpretation of Plato would have had to come to terms with this phase of the Academy as a potential major break in the tradition. A central aspect of Plutarch’s work consists precisely of an attempt to keep “Academics” and “Platonists” together as belonging to one and the same tradition, and to maintain the continuity of Platonism (Opsomer 1998; Bonazzi 2003). In a lost work titled “On the Unity of the Academy Since Plato” (n. 63 Lamprias Catalogue), Plutarch tried to demonstrate that the Platonic tradition is unified and that the sceptical approach, if rightly interpreted, could be considered a part of this tradition. A prevalent strategy of the period was to limit the application of scepticism to just one area that all Platonists considered problematic for truth claims, that of sense-perception. In his de E apud Delphos, for instance, Plutarch tried to demonstrate that a sceptical attitude towards the validity of sense-perception is compatible with the metaphysical assumptions about the nature of Being and God.
But not everyone adopted this approach. Numenius, for instance, used the image of Pentheus’ body being torn limb from limb to attack Plato’s successors in the Academy (the generations of Platonists whose quarrels, according to Numenius, ruined his legacy) in a treatise called, should we miss the point, “On the Stand-Off between Plato and the Academics” (frags 24–8 [des Places]). In this invective, Numenius also emphasized the connections between Plato and Pythagoras, lampooning the shameful behaviour of other schools and trying to shame earlier Platonists by pointing to the unity in the Epicurean ranks. Numenius, however, still had some respect for the first generations of Platonists, notably for Speusippus and Xenocrates, and if Nemesius’ rendering of Numenius’ views is accurate, he could even bring himself to cite Xenocrates (frag. 4b [des Places] = Nemesius 2, 8–14 [Morani]).3
The very notion of philosophical truth was at stake in the struggle to produce unity among Plato’s followers. The sceptical Academy had notoriously exploited the disagreement among different schools of thought to recommend a suspension of judgement. To escape this deadlock, thinkers had to establish as much common ground as possible between the different systems in a dynamic of co-optation. That is, they tried both to integrate aspects of rival systems and to subjugate those to their own dominant frame of thought. Antiochus of Ascalon has traditionally been credited with the first major attempt of this kind, but similar attempts had been made in the Stoic camp by, for instance, Panaetius (Sedley 2012) and Posidonius (Reydams-Schils 2013). Their integration of Platonic elements, as that by the later Seneca, should not be seen as a kind of thoughtless “eclecticism” or as a major concession to Platonic thought, but rather as part of a strategy against sceptical attacks that was intended to preserve a rich sense of truth. Similarly, Middle Platonist attempts at integrating views from rival schools of thought do not diminish the originality of these attempts. On the contrary, the many variations among these attempts demonstrate that considerable ingenuity was required to create a more or less seamless fabric of thought.
In Plotinus’ work, we can see a highly advanced mode of such co-optation that leaves the Epicureans as the main outsiders. Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition rank second after Plato, and their presence is felt most strongly in Plotinus’ analysis of the function of intellect (nous). As Karamanolis has put it, “Platonists used Aristotle as a means of accessing Plato’s thought” and
did so in three main ways: (a) Aristotle’s reports on Plato’s views were taken as preserving Plato’s teaching; (b) those views of Aristotle which were found also in Platonic dialogues were taken as recasting doctrines of Plato in a more systematic form; (c) Aristotle’s developments, mainly in logic, were often thought to be pre-figured in Plato.
(2006: 28)
Compared to Aristotle, according to Plotinus, the Stoics rank lower; as metaphysical chickens, and in their version of the categories of reality, they are the target of considerable scorn by Plotinus because they radically reject any notion of transcendence and consider their active divine principle to be corporeal (Enn. V.9[5].1; VI.1–3[42–4]). Nevertheless, in his own analysis of the more dynamic aspects of soul, the universe and nature, Plotinus co-opted major traits from Stoicism, too.
In the period before Plotinus, as is to be expected, this hierarchy of co-optation was still much more fluid and contested. (We should also recall that although we know very little of their authors, major commentaries on Aristotle’s work had also been composed during that time, the most important being the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias.) Most of the extant fragments of Atticus, for instance, are devoted to a polemic against the Peripatetic tradition, and indirectly against those Platonists who wanted to posit a harmony of thought between Plato and Aristotle. (Lucius and Nicostratus are two other examples of a critical attitude towards Aristotle.)
Similarly, an ongoing polemic against Stoicism allowed for different degrees of co-optation. The Stoics were suspect to Platonists for four principal reasons. First, as alluded to earlier, their immanent physics posited a divine active principle that is completely intertwined with matter and the kosmos, with its cycles of ordering and destruction, and thus denied the independent existence of any higher intelligible reality. Second, they held the view that anything that has real being, including the active principle and the soul, has to be corporeal (with the corollary that, according to them, the soul is mortal). Third, they proposed a monist view of the human soul as opposed to psychologies that posited a range of semi-independent conflicting powers (as in Plutarch’s de Virtute Morali). And fourth, they viewed providence and fate as determining not only all aspects of the kosmos but as controlling human beings as well (Reydams-Schils 1999).
That Platonism co-opted elements from other systems of thought has been amply studied and documented. However, much more work remains to be done, especially regarding Stoicism, to understand more fully how the co-opted Stoic traits ended up transforming Platonic thought from within, like stowaways not that carefully stowed away after all. That is, scholars still have a tendency to take the polemical language of cooptation too much at face value. Given that Plato’s Timaeus in particular helped to shape Stoic thought in its earliest phase, the influence of the Early Academy in that process has been much overestimated in recent scholarship (Reydams-Schils 2013). Furthermore, the philosophers of the Middle Platonist era had to put considerable effort into reclaiming a cosmology onto which major Stoic accretions had grafted themselves (Reydams-Schils 1999; Köckert 2009; F. Ferrari 2012). Given that in antiquity, reading a text implied reading it together with its interpretive tradition, there could be no complete return to Plato’s own account as such. Cicero’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus, for instance, betrays the influence of debates among the schools of Hellenistic philosophy that were so central to his thought that they coloured his very reading of the Timaeus (Lévy 2003). Similarly, Philo of Alexandria’s use of the Timaeus itself shows many traces of a Stoic influence (Reydams-Schils 1999: 135–65).
That this influence could be pervasive and transformative and yet easy to overlook can be demonstrated by the following three examples.
A first example is taken from psychology (Reydams-Schils 2006: 187–91). Instead of focusing on the polemics about the structure of the soul, and in spite of establishing a clear hierarchy (in ascending order) between the Stoics, Aristotle and Plato, Calcidius uses a doxographical schema that was also quite common in antiquity: a kind of master list of rational and irrational soul functions that tried to accommodate as many Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic elements as possible. Despite variations in the manner in which different authors compiled such lists, the basic underlying approach was the same: to use the dual distinction of rational and irrational soul components in order to establish a common ground between different schools of thought, and thus to avoid the need for a suspension of judgement on this crucial topic. By the time Porphyry became interested in this model (see, for instance, frag. 253 [Smith] = Stobaeus 1.49.25a [Wachsmuth & Hense]), it already had a well-established tradition of its own. We can also find this approach in the work of Philo of Alexandria, for instance (Reydams-Schils 2002; see also Alexander of Aphrodisias, de An. 94.7–100.17).
The presence of such a master list can be detected in Calcidius’ work in that the lists of soul functions attributed to the different thinkers throughout the commentary regularly combine elements of different origins. Thus Calcidius uses the Stoic connection between soul and “natural” pneuma (by which Chrysippus may have actually meant pneuma sumfuton, not the so-called “nature” level in the Stoic scale 773–89) to highlight that the soul, with its ruling part and seven instrumental parts, also directs the vital pneuma as well as nutrition, growth (adolendo) and motion (these latter functions gesture towards Peripatetic accounts: Comm. ch. 220). The Peripatetic list of soul functions under the heading of the appetitive soul includes “anger” and “desire”, which were, of course, key notions in Platonic psychology. And to close the circle, in Calcidius’ account of the Platonic soul functions, the senses have been promoted considerably: their headquarters, so to speak, are right next to the rational principle, because they are its “companions and messengers” (comitesrationis et signi<feri>, Comm. ch. 331, 245.7–8), in a precise echo of the Stoic passages Calcidius has chosen. According to this reading,4 the senses largely take over the auxiliary role of spirit as the natural ally of reason. In this manner, Plato’s epistemology is transformed to allow more room for doxastic reason and to yield a fruitful and harmonious cooperation between sense-perception and reasoning (which, to say the least, would be called into question by many Platonic passages), and thus more in line with Peripatetic and Stoic perspectives.
Another harmonizing feature in the treatise is Calcidius’ attempt to prepare the ground for the view he ends up endorsing: there are two principles in a human soul, one that he calls id ipsum animantis, which we have in common with other living things, and another that he calls the principle (part or power) of the “rational soul”. Even in his rendering of the first view in his doxography, which according to him assigns no specific location to the soul’s principal part, Calcidius already draws his reader’s attention to a distinction between the contributions of the heart and the head (Comm. ch. 214). The Hebrews’ position, he goes on to argue, could have been salvaged if they had paid attention to a distinction embedded within their own views: that between the rational and the irrational soul, with the latter containing the appetites. The Stoics, according to Calcidius, also distinguish between a “natural” principal soul power in animals and a “rational” ruling principle in humans. According to other Stoic sources pneuma allegedly manifests itself as “cohesion” in lifeless things, as “nature” in plants, as “soul” in animals, and as “rational soul” in human beings. Thus Calcidius’ distinction, if it were genuinely Stoic, would create problems for the difference between “nature’ and “soul” in the Stoic system (compare this to Comm. ch. 54, 102.19–20). From one perspective, cohesion, nature, soul and rational soul are all manifestations of nature in its most general Stoic sense, but in that case it would not make sense to contrast “rational” with “natural”, as Calcidius does, because the “rational” would be “natural” too. From another perspective, “nature” is a specific Stoic usage for plants, but, unlike Calcidius here, Stoics distinguish between “nature” and “soul”, and so the notion of a non-rational, natural soul principle would become problematic. Stoic usages of the label “nature” would thus be either too general or too specific to fit Calcidius’ purpose, and he is thus blurring Stoic distinctions in this passage. By planting traces of Plato’s alleged position within other views, the doxographer here sends an implicit message, made explicit elsewhere in the commentary, that Plato had managed not only to find the truth, but also to retrieve the insights of other thinkers so as to come up with the most complete account.
Calcidius’ version of the master list runs through his entire commentary. In the treatise on fate, for instance, he renders the scale of being as follows:
Therefore, because they partake in corporeality, there is between men and beasts and other things lacking life, a fellowship and participation in bodily phenomena, and if humans have birth, nourishment and growth in common with others, sense-experience (sentire) and impulse (appetere), finally, are common only to humans and animals lacking speech and reason. Now desire (cupiditas) and spirit (iracundia), in the case of animals, whether wild or tame, are irrational impulses (appetitus inrationabilis est, Latin uses singular here), in the case of a human being, however, whose characteristic it is to devote his mind to reason, they are rational [impulses]. The impulse (appetitus) to reason, to understand, and to know the truth is proper to a human being, who is at the greatest distance from desire and spirit; for the last-mentioned qualities can also be seen in mute animals, even to a much sharper degree; however, the perfection of reason and intellect is proper to a human being and god alone.
(Comm. ch. 182, 209.16–210.4, trans. Den Boeft, modified; see also Comm. ch. 137)
This scale of beings clearly combines Stoic, Peripatetic and Platonic features. The first level consists of corporeality, which humans also share with lifeless things; the next level, presumably that of plants, includes birth, nourishment and growth; animals and humans share sense-perception and “impulse” (appetitus, more on this below), with the latter also covering spirit and appetite; and finally, unique to human beings and the gods is reason (which here is also a kind of appetitus).
Let us take a closer look at Calcidius’ attempt to read the distinction between rational and irrational into Stoic psychology and its doxographical ancestry:
He [Chrysippus] defines the inner deliberation of the mind as follows: “The rational power is an inner motion of the soul.” For even mute animals have a principal power of soul, by the means of which they discern food, imagine, avoid traps, overcome obstacles and emergencies, and recognize necessity, but this is not a rational power, rather, it is a natural one; of mortal things only a human being has the use of the good principle of mind, that is, of reason, as the same Chrysippus says … [next quotation].
(Comm. ch. 220, 233.13–19)
The lines in this passage between the two quotations from Chrysippus are Calcidius’ interpretation, and the wording of the section as a whole also indicates that he sees a connection between what he calls the natural soul principle in animals and the lower vital functions, which for a Stoic would fall under the “nature” heading in the scale of being. What falls under the non-rational or natural soul principle in the quoted passage is what the Stoics would have called “representation” (phantasia) and impulse (horme), which an adult human being, according to the Stoics, would have in common with pre-rational children and irrational animals; in adult human beings, another function, assent, manifests itself with the advent of reason.
The alignment between human and animal perception and impulse, leaving out reason and assent, appears to have figured in polemics against the Stoics (as in Plutarch Adv. Col. 1122C–D, with the Academic claim that we do not need assent to explain human action). Both Alexander of Aphrodisias (de Fato 181.13–182.20 = LS 62G) and Nemesius (291.16 = LS 53O) also try to erase the differences between human and animal psychology that appear in Stoicism, this time by attributing assent to both. But such an alignment by no means remained confined to polemics; as we see in Philo and Calcidius, it also became a doxographical tool wielded to harmonize different psychologies.
In a passage from Cicero, it has to be noted, a Latin phrase such as appetitus impellit ad agendum is ambiguous enough to refer both to Stoic impulse and Platonic desire (epithymia), glossing over the fact that impulse’s “obedience” to reason in Stoicism is fundamentally different from Platonic desire’s submission:
Souls’ movements are of two kinds: one belongs to thought, the other to impulse. The sphere of thought is principally the investigation of truth, while impulse is the stimulus to action. So we must take care to use thought for the best possible objects, and to make impulse obedient to reason.
(Off. 1.132, included among fragments of Panaetius, frag. 88 [van Straaten]; see also Off. 1.101)
Calcidius makes good use of the same ambiguity in his master list and tells us that for him both spirit and desire are types of appetitus (244.14) (even though he assigns an appetitus even to reason).
Yet such a harmonizing move did not need to come at the expense of the important realization that, according to the Stoics, human representation and impulse do not merely co-exist with reason, but are transformed by it: whatever adult human beings do falls under the reign of reason, whether it is used correctly or not. Calcidius’ entire claim about the importance of doxastic reason rests on such a realization. And he transposes this realization even onto his rendering of Platonic psychology, as when he claims that spirit and appetite are of a higher order in humans than in animals, precisely because in human beings, these are meant to serve reason and hence are rationalized to some extent (Comm. ch. 182, quoted above, and Comm. ch. 187, 212.10–14).
A second example of co-optation pertains to the divine principle. Alcinous’ account of divine agency has many Peripatetic traits.5 The Forms are said to be the thoughts of God (that is, God thinks himself, and the product of his thought are the transcendent Platonic Ideas); this divine agency is said “to act on [the intellect of the whole heaven] while remaining itself unmoved … as the object of desire moves desire” (Intr. 164.23–6), and Alcinous posits an eternal universe (Reydams-Schils 1999: 199–201). Clearly reflected in this view is Aristotle’s notion of the highest god as an Unmoved Mover who thinks himself. Yet Alcinous also describes his highest god in strongly relational terms, as “caring” for the universe. One feature of his description of the divine stands out in particular: “by his own will he has filled all things with himself” (Intr. 164.42–165.1, trans. Dillon). This is a rather odd description of a transcendent divinity, and a wording that would seem more appropriate for the Stoics because of their highly developed notion of divine Providence. The Timaeus itself mentions only that the Demiurge “wanted everything to be as much alike to himself as possible” (Ti. 29e3) and keeps the universe together by his will (Ti. 41b4). Some parallel passages from other authors focus on the account of God holding the universe together through his will (cf. Philo, Her. 246 and Atticus, frag. 4, 67–71; 93–5). Others place the claim in a Stoic context by connecting it primarily to Providence (cf. Pseudo-Plutarch, de Fato 572F; Calcidius, Comm. ch. 205.3–5 and Marcus Aurelius, Noctes Atticae 6.40; 9.1). And the prominence of the theme of Providence in later Platonist writers, which goes much beyond what the Timaeus itself has to offer on this score, was largely due to a Stoic influence. The “will of God” remains but a touch of the brush in the overall picture presented by this Middle Platonist handbook, yet it is unmistakably there, to the point of creating an unresolved tension in Alcinous’ views of the divine (see below).
PLUTARCH ON MATTER
A third example comes from Plutarch and concerns the principle of matter (Reydams-Schils 1999: 193–6). Whereas other Platonists vehemently rejected the Stoic notion of a corporeal matter, Plutarch fully integrated this notion into his ontology. In his de Animae Procreatione in Timaeo (1013C), he distinguishes implicitly between three levels of matter: (a) matter as “corporeal substance” (sōmatikē ousia, de An. Procr. 1014C, E, 1017A, 1023A); (b) matter as sensible “straightaway”, tangible and visible when “by participating in and simulating the intelligible it has got shape”, which happens in the pre-cosmic phase (de An. Procr. 1014C; 1016E); and (c) matter as acquiring motivity (and imagination, de An. Procr. 1014C; 1017A; 1023D; 1024A) through soul inhering in it (an irrational, disorderly soul, in the pre-cosmic phase, a view that assumes that all self-motion requires a soul).
Plutarch’s distinction between matter’s corporeality and its sensibility – if somewhat ambiguous because features under (a) arguably could be related to (b), or vice versa – acquires its full meaning from the perspective of Stoic doctrine. Given that sensible features such as visibility and tangibility result from a rudimentary participation in the intelligible, accounting for matter as body without these features would be difficult without making a connection with the Stoic view of the principle of matter qua body as passivity and being without quality (apoion). Furthermore, just as the Stoics claimed that the passive and the ordering principles always concur in reality, so Plutarch could posit a distinction between matter as corporeal and as sensible and yet claim that in reality matter always has sensible features that result from its participation in the intelligible, however minimally (this, we take it, is the force of “straightaway”, at de An. Procr. 1013C). The intelligible realm, however, unlike the Stoic active principle, remains essentially transcendental, which leads to the quandary of participation.
The notion of a corporeal matter occurs not only in contexts in which Plutarch engages in a polemic against the Stoics but runs through the entire treatise of de Animae Procreatione in Timaeo. Furthermore, Plutarch restates the same view in the Quaestiones Platonicae (3, 1001D–E). Finally, it becomes clear why Plutarch used only one side of a type of regress-argument against the Stoic view of corporeal principles: because he himself accepts some form of corporeal matter, he tackles only the notion of a corporeal active principle, implying that it too would contain matter, but does not use the matching argument against a corporeal matter qua matter (de Communibus Notitiis, 1085Cff.). Other Platonists, such as Alcinous (as in Intr. ch. 8) or Calcidius (as in Comm. chs 294, 311, 319), do not fail to accuse the Stoics of creating a contradiction in terms by positing matter as a body without quality (soma apoion), because for them to be a body implies a forming principle that bestows the quality of corporeality. It is striking that in his extant works, Plutarch does not use this argument of self-contradiction against the Stoics, not even in the de Stoicorum Repugnantiis. To Plutarch, matter as body has qualities not because to be body necessarily entails being qualified, but because matter as body is always also sensible owing to its participation in the intelligible. Positing an intrinsically corporeal matter is a genuine and fundamental concession to the Stoic theory of the principles.
The three examples cited above – Calcidius on the structure of the human soul, Alcinous on divine agency, and Plutarch on matter – reveal a very complex interplay between Platonic, Peripatetic and Stoic elements. To say merely that a certain common language of philosophy had been developed by this period, in which many terms were integrated without necessarily carrying all the connotations that they had in their original context, is hermeneutically naïve: on the contrary, thinkers’ ongoing polemical exchanges counted on the persistent presence of such connotations even while engaged in attempts at co-optation. Similarly, to posit that for Platonists “Platonic doctrines” constituted the dominant frame of reference, while true enough in itself, can underestimate the transformative effect of co-opted notions from other currents of thought.
In Platonism from Plotinus onwards, and especially in the fully developed philosophical curriculum that Iamblichus devised, the pinnacle of Platonism is arguably constituted by the Parmenides and a reading of that dialogue that increasingly focuses on a hyper-transcendent level of reality. In the earlier phase of Platonism, as we have seen, the role of focal text around which many of the debates centred was reserved for the Timaeus. Alcinous, for instance, structured his handbook around the divisions first between practical and theoretical philosophy and dialectic as covering the art of reasoning, with the category of practical philosophy further divided into ethics, household management (“economics” in its ancient, etymological sense) and politics, and of theoretical philosophy into mathematics, physics and theology (P. Hadot 1979). His expositions on theology and especially on physics are dominated by the framework provided by the Timaeus.
The Timaeus, however, had left its readers with many puzzles that demanded answers. Is the “beginning” of the ordering of the world by the Demiurge to be taken literally (as Atticus and Plutarch did), or is it merely a metaphor that Plato uses for pedagogical purposes to convey a causal, atemporary dependence, as the majority of the Platonists appear to have held? How are the different “ordering” forces represented by the Demiurge, his model in intelligible reality, the lower gods, and the World Soul related to one another (Opsomer 2005)? Another very important question concerned the relationship between the Demiurge, his model, and the idea of the Good, to which the Middle Platonists presented a range of solutions. According to Plutarch (and Atticus), the Demiurge of the Timaeus and the Good of the Republic are identical, whereas according to Numenius (and perhaps Alcinous), Demiurge and Good are two different principles: the idea of the Good (identified with the One) is the First God, the principle of Being (i.e. of the world of Forms), whereas the Demiurge is the second God, the principle of the sensible cosmos (frags 16; 17; 19; 21 [des Places]). Also left unanswered was how such notions as Monad and Dyad, Limit and Unlimited, fit with the Timaeus account.
To what extent, if any, has the World Soul in the Timaeus been affected by a connection with matter (the tradition’s designation of the “receptacle” from Aristotle onwards)? Given that matter as a principle is co-eternal with God, a view that was put into question from Plotinus onwards, how does this dualism affect the existence of evil? The most interesting solution to the problem of the origin of evil may be that of Plutarch and Atticus, both of whom think that matter cannot be the principle of evil because it is devoid of all quality: “What is without quality and of itself inert and without propensity Plato cannot suppose to be cause and principle of evil” (Plutarch, de An. Procr. 1015A). Thus the cause of evil (that is, disorder) must be found in the principle of a pre-cosmic chaotic movement of matter (i.e. in the irrational pre-cosmic soul; see also the above discussion of Plutarch’s notion of matter). According to Plutarch, matter and pre-cosmic soul are two different principles: “In fact, while Plato calls matter mother and nurse, what he calls the cause of evil is the motion that moves matter”; that is, the irrational soul (de An. Procr. 1015E). In addition to the complex issue of matter, during this period several other central concerns arose from Plato’s Timaeus, including how human freedom relates to divine Providence and fate and how the lower, irrational and mortal soul parts affect the human being as a whole.
Given the complexities that arise in defining the strand of Platonism predating Plotinus, the exact relationship between Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism is difficult to establish, but the category of Vorbereitung (“preparing the way”) may be of some use here (cf. Theiler 1934). Middle Platonist authors seem to have anticipated several principal features of Neoplatonist tendencies, including (a) the rediscovery of transcendence (world of Ideas and Demiurge); (b) the establishment of a hierarchical structure of reality, which is represented as a succession of ontological levels (One or first God, transcendent Forms, Demiurge, immanent Forms, Soul, demons, sensible bodies, matter, and so on); (c) the rejection of the Hellenistic (Stoic) conception of apatheia and a renewed interest in the Platonic–Aristotelian theory of metriopatheia; and (d) the formulation of the telos as assimilation to God (homoiōsis theōi). Nonetheless, acknowledging that Middle Platonism prepared the ground for what is now commonly referred to as Neoplatonism should not obscure the original contributions of this current of thought, in all its multifaceted variety.
1. For a list of commentaries, see Dörrie & Baltes (1987–2008: vol. 3, §§77–81).
2. Petrucci (2009). For the Neoplatonic development of mathematics in relation to metaphysics, see Slaveva-Griffin (Chapter 13), below.
3. The image is also used by Atticus, frag. 1 [des Places], Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1.13.57.1–6 [Migne], and Calcidius, Comm. ch. 246, 256.14–16 [Waszink]. The latter, unlike Numenius, rejects the Old Academy, too.
4. This reading, which is also present in Philo of Alexandria’s works, could have derived some support from Plato Lg. 964e–65a.
5. On this section, see now also the detailed discussion with bibliography in Dörrie & Baltes (1987–2008: vol. 7.1, §188.1).