Few issues interested late ancient philosophers as much as providence and its relation to fate and human freedom. Already in the generations leading up to Plotinus, Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote treatises entitled On Fate and On Providence. In this same period various “Middle” Platonists articulated a distinction between fate and providence that was still used by some of the latest pagan Neoplatonist thinkers. Plotinus wrote treatises that Porphyry saw fit to title On Fate (Enn. III.1[3]) and On Providence (Enn. III.2–3[47–8]), not to mention the treatise called On the Voluntary and the Will of the One (Enn. VI.8[39]), one of Plotinus’ greatest works. Comments on the Republic by Porphyry have come down to us with the title On What is Up to Us. His student Iamblichus wrote letters on the subject of fate, preserved only as fragments, and discussed the topic in On Mysteries. Proclus, known above all for his commentaries on Plato and his Euclidean treatment of Neoplatonism, the Elements of Theology, also wrote two independent works on providence (three if one counts On Evil, which belongs to the same group). At about the same time, the Alexandrian Neoplatonist Hierocles also wrote a treatise On Providence. This is without even delving into the treatments of providence found in ancient Christian authors, which are of course influenced by Hellenic philosophical sources.
Thus we have plenty of material to work with in asking the questions of the present chapter: how did Neoplatonists conceive of providence and fate? What role did they leave for human autonomy in light of their commitment to providence? What conditions did they think needed to be satisfied for humans to possess autonomy? Along the way, we will also get a sense of why late ancient Platonists were so obsessed with these issues. Part of the reason is that providence and determinism had already been hotly debated in the preceding Hellenistic era. To take up these questions was, in particular, to position oneself relative to the Stoics. This is an explicit motive of Alexander’s On Fate. Even as Stoicism faded into history, astrological determinism remained a threat to human autonomy. Plotinus worries about this in several treatises, and Proclus’ On Providence is aimed at a determinist interlocutor, Theodore the Engineer, who may have been influenced by Stoicism and astrology (Steel 2007: 2, 14). But the Platonists’ continuing fascination with providence and fate suggests that there was more at stake here than refuting determinist opponents. Rather, the issue proved to be a useful way to explore central difficulties inherent to Neoplatonism itself. One of these was the difficulty of how the gods relate to the physical cosmos. Are they to blame for evils found in the sublunary world? Do they even pay attention to particular events in that world? Another was the problem of whether embodied human souls are entirely trapped within the physical realm. As we will see at the end of this chapter, both of these puzzles were made more pressing still by passages in the dialogues of Plato, especially that locus classicus for the Platonic view of providence and freedom, the Myth of Er.
FATE AND PROVIDENCE
The god is superior to necessity.
(Iamblichus, Myst. 3.18, trans. Clarke et al. 2003)
A range of “Middle” Platonist authors, including Alcinous, Apuleius and Pseudo-Plutarch, distinguish fate (heimarmenē) from providence (pronoia).1 Providence is a higher cause than fate, and embraces fate within its scope. Pseudo-Plutarch (On Fate) further distinguishes providence into three types, exercised respectively by the creator god (the Demiurge of the Timaeus), the heavenly gods, and daimones.2 But as this subdivision shows, the basic notion is that providence proceeds from divine or other superhuman entities. The providence exercised by the highest divinities influences and bestows beneficial order not only on the physical cosmos, but also on lower supernatural beings. Fate, by contrast, is limited to the physical world. The other main claim about fate in Middle Platonism is that it is conditional. A “fated law” (cf. Ti. 41e) has the form: anyone who does X will undergo Y. This is meant to ensure that human actions are subject to fate, in the sense that even remote and unforeseen consequences of our actions are ineluctably fated. On the other hand, the account attempts to leave room for human autonomy, because the initial action that leads to the fated consequences is “up to” the human agent. A classic (in every sense) example might be Oedipus’ sorry end, which is initially triggered by his decision to kill a man at a crossroads.
In his treatise On Fate, Alexander of Aphrodisias likewise restricts fate to the physical realm, but he does not adopt the idea of fate as a conditional law.3 For Alexander, fate must be an efficient cause, which acts for the sake of something, and is operative always or for the most part (§4–5). In fact, fate ought to be characterized by immutability and necessity. Alexander proposes that we can satisfy these demands by identifying fate with nature. It is fate, for example, that ensures the propagation of all eternal species through generations of forebears and offspring. Alexander’s conception of fate is in sharp contrast to that of the Middle Platonists. Whereas they saw fate as being concerned with the consequences of human action, Alexander argues that human actions (along with chance events, §8) constitute a different kind of event entirely. This is shown by the fact that nature or fate acts always or for the most part, whereas human actions are “up to” or “in the power of” human agents. We cannot presume that a given human agent in a given situation will perform a given action (e.g. the virtuous action rather than the vicious action, or even a minor movement like raising the eyebrows: §9, and for the point more generally, §12), the way we can presume that a pregnant horse will give birth to a foal, or that fire will give rise to heat.
On the other hand, Alexander agrees again with the Platonists in distinguishing fate from providence, and seeing fate as causally posterior to providence. His On Providence, lost in Greek but extant in two Arabic versions, argues that providence is exercised by the divine movers of the heavenly spheres, using these spheres as instruments to bring about a well-ordered sublunary world.4 This idea has clear affinities with astrology, something exploited by philosophers writing in Arabic who drew on the treatise (Adamson 2007: 181–206). But Alexander’s objective in On Providence is not to show that particular events in our world are intended by the gods. To the contrary, he believes that it would be impossible and inappropriate for the gods to direct their concern to multiple events in our world (Fat. 17–21; 65). Rather, the heavenly gods exercise providence universally, guaranteeing a world order in which natural species are eternally preserved, but not bestowing their attention on particular members of those species (Fat. 67). To put this point another way, providence brings about nature or fate, but not the individual events or substances that fall under the scope of nature or fate.
Something else the Middle Platonists and Alexander have in common is a desire to refute the Stoics. This is made especially explicit in Alexander’s On Fate, which criticizes the Stoics at length. Different though they may be, the Platonist and Peripatetic theories share an advantage over the Stoic conception of providence. The Stoics see divine providence as a force immanent within this world, and reduce all things to this single cause. The anti-Stoic views instead allow providence to govern all things (albeit only in a general way, in the case of Alexander) without making all other causes mere instruments of providence. This is possible in part because both Alexander and the Platonists, rejecting the physicalism of the Stoics, postulate immaterial causes. It is noteworthy that Alexander, no less than the Platonists, wants to associate providence with the divine, and fate with physical things. Because the Stoics trace all causation back to the single divine source, they can be accused of saddling God with the blame for evils and imperfections. Avoiding this is clearly in Alexander’s mind when he distances the gods from particulars. The Platonist conception of fate avoids blaming the gods by making suffering the well-deserved consequence of human actions. Furthermore, the Stoic “single-cause” theory supposedly provides no basis for distinguishing human action from the workings of fate or providence. As Plotinus will later put it when criticizing the deterministic theories of Stoics and astrologers (Enn. III.1[3].5), they make humans to be nothing more than stones that have been set rolling. The anti-Stoic theories, by contrast, give human actions a special status to ensure that, even if our actions are within the realm of fate, they are not determined by fate.
The contrast between fate and providence was remarkably durable in the Platonist tradition. In his great treatise On Providence Plotinus sounds very like a Middle Platonist when he says that the providence of all things is one: “but it is fate starting from what is worse, whereas up above it is just providence” (Enn. III.3[48].5, my trans.). One letter Iamblichus wrote on fate says that “fate exists by virtue of the existence of providence, and it derives its existence from it”.5 Proclus in his own On Providence (extant in Latin) similarly remarks that “providence is to be distinguished from fate (providentia differat a fato), as god differs from what is divine”.6 He also provides an etymological account in support of the contrast. The word pronoia indicates that providence comes from the highest principle, the Good, which is prior (pro) to intellect (nous), whereas heimarmenē relates fate to the idea of heirmos, that is, the “connection” between things in the corporeal world (Steel 2007: 44, 46). The same etymology is offered by Hierocles.7
Among these authors it is Hierocles who most clearly operates with the Middle Platonist idea that fate is the meting out of punishment (or “justice”: dikē) for previous human actions. Providence meanwhile ensures the distribution of fated punishments (Prov. codex 214.4; 251.6, 14). This is not to say that fate is restricted to the consequences of human action. It also includes all things that happen to irrational animals,8 and in general fate is simply the good order of the cosmos (On the Golden Verses 11.27). But Hierocles is most interested in fate as applied to human actions, actions which are not themselves caused by fate. Rather, as Hierocles puts it, “choices are in our power, while the just consequences of our choices lie with the ethereal beings” (Prov. 251.11). He gives the analogy of a murderer, who willingly chooses to commit murder but certainly does not willingly choose the punishment given him by a judge (On the Golden Verses 11.11–12).
Hierocles here makes the point that the judge’s punishment is “primarily” handed down to the murderer, but only “accidentally” directed at this individual man. For the judge punishes him in so far as he is a murderer, not in so far as he is this individual. This may seem to suggest that the judge – and by analogy, divine providence – pays no heed to individuals and only cares about general laws, like Alexander’s divine causes. But elsewhere Hierocles says explicitly that “providence among men is directed to each individual” (On the Golden Verses 11.33, trans. Schibli). The apparent contradiction can be resolved in light of Hierocles’ use of the word “primarily”. “Primarily” providence is directed towards the satisfaction of universal laws. Only “secondarily” does it affect certain people who subject themselves to the laws of fate through their choices.9 Thus the gods can punish them without being arbitrary.
As I say, Hierocles is unusually explicit among Neoplatonists in describing fate as (in part) a kind of conditional necessity regarding human actions. But the idea did not disappear between the second and fifth centuries. Plotinus, for instance, writes that no one can escape the “law of the universe” and that when souls fall into error “justice (dikē) follows” (Enn. III.2[47].4). Plotinus’ student Porphyry gives us an analogy that works in much the same way as Hierocles’ case of the murderer (On What is Up to Us, frag. 271 [Smith]). He wishes to illustrate that “fate is like the prescriptions of laws, it itself being a law” (trans. Wilberding). Porphyry’s example is a thief, who is not forced by the law to steal but must suffer punishment if he does. On the other hand, we just saw that Hierocles associates fate not only with the results of human actions, but also with the cosmic order in general. This is only one example of the close connection drawn by Neoplatonists between nature and fate. In one passage Proclus actually identifies the two, writing that fate is “the nature of this world, an incorporeal substance … it moves bodies from the inside and not from the outside, moving everything according to time and connecting the movements of all things that are dissociated in time and place” (Prov. 12, trans. Steel).10 Iamblichus is more nuanced when he says, in the only surviving fragment from one of his letters on fate, that “the substance of fate is entirely within nature (sympasa estin en tēi physei)”.11
This brings us to another central Neoplatonic idea about fate: it is limited to the natural, corporeal world, unlike divine providence which governs all things.12 So although humans are always entirely within the care of providence, we exist beyond the scope of fate with that part of ourselves that is immaterial. Only in so far as we have bodies and bodily existence do we fall under fate. Unfortunately, most humans are benighted enough that they live only at the level of the physical world. Their limited perspective means that they are in effect entirely within fate, whereas wiser people who are cognizant of immaterial reality are subject to it only by virtue of their lower, bodily selves. Plotinus thus writes:
We must flee from here and separate ourselves from additional accretions (tōn prosgegenēmenōn), not being the composite, an ensouled body in which the bodily nature is more in control (kratei)… but the other soul, which is outside, has a movement towards what is higher and towards the noble and divine, which nobody can control (kratei). … Otherwise, deprived of this soul, one lives within the scope of fate (zēi en heimarmenēi).
(Enn. II.3[52].9.19–28, my trans.)
This is a radical version of earlier attempts to safeguard a role for human autonomy, while also accepting that fate is without exception efficacious within its proper sphere.
FREEDOM FROM NECESSITY
The immaterial is the free.
(Plotinus, Enn. VI.8[39].6)
The Neoplatonists are thus committed to what may seem a surprising view, namely that one has a choice about whether or not one will be entirely subject to fate.13 The wrong path is to identify oneself with the lower soul and the body, in which case one surrenders to determination by external causes. Proclus describes this option succinctly: “when rendered corporeal, we are necessarily led by fate (corporati ex necessitate a fato ducimur)” (Prov. 21). The other option is of course to liberate oneself from body and thus from necessity and fate. Different Neoplatonists give different accounts of how such liberation can occur. Plotinus, notoriously, thinks that a part of every soul remains always attached to intellect. For Iamblichus, by contrast, souls (or perhaps only impure souls14) require the intervention of theurgy to achieve liberation. In On Mysteries 8.7, he speaks of this theurgic process in terms of the gods “freeing us from fate”.
The Neoplatonist account has several virtues. It integrates the earlier accounts of fate with fundamental Neoplatonist ethical precepts. It also explains and critiques the link between determinism and materialism in Stoicism: the Stoics were always bound to wind up as determinists, since they mistake their bodies for their true selves. Another advantage, never one to be overlooked in Neoplatonism, is that it makes good exegetical sense of Plato, in this case offering an account of the Timaeus’ contrast between intellect and necessity (cf. in Plotinus, e.g. Enn. III.2[47].2). The passage from On Mysteries just mentioned alludes to the Timaeus, when Iamblichus writes that only the gods, “ruling over necessity (tēs anangkēs archontes) through intellectual persuasion, release us from evils laid in store for us from fate” (Myst. 8.7). Proclus makes the point still more explicit when, in a gloss on Timaeus 48a, he aligns Plato’s contrast with the traditional distinction between fate and providence (albeit that providence is strictly seen as transcending intellect):
Plato calls “necessity” the moving cause of the bodies, which he calls “fate” in other texts. … There is no choice (electio) in bodies. … Thus Plato set necessity to preside over the coming to be of bodies … but he removed intellect from it, ordering it to rule over necessity. If, then, providence is above intellect, it is evident that it rules over (principatur) intellect and over all those things that fall under necessity, and that necessity rules only over the things that fall under it.
(Prov. 13, trans. Steel, modified)
Notice that, like the Middle Platonists and Alexander, the Neoplatonists have managed to link fate to necessity while also insisting that we retain autonomy in the face of this necessity. For the Middle Platonists, the necessity was qualified by being only conditional on original choices. For Alexander, human choices are simply outside the framework of fate, which is natural necessity. For Neoplatonists, our freedom from necessity lies in a life of immaterial, intellectual activity achieved through philosophy (or theurgy).
Now we must confront an objection. The Neoplatonist account explains that we are exempt from necessity (anangkē) in so far as we are souls that transcend body, and hence transcend nature, fate and necessity. But what good does it do us to transcend fate, if we are still subject to providence? We have just seen Proclus, for instance, saying that providence even “rules over” intellect. This fits well with his aforementioned etymology of pronoia (“before intellect”). But it also shows that we humans inevitably fall under the rule of providence, given that we are ourselves below intellect or, at best, at the level of intellect. The difficulty emerges nicely in the following passage from Hierocles: “There are three possibilities in what concerns us: that everything is the result of necessity, that nothing is, that everything happens with or without necessity alternatively. … They are equally absurd and equally destructive of all providence” (Prov. 251.11). Surely, if divine providence rules all things and fate does not, then it is divine providence and not fate that threatens to make all things necessary. Hierocles tries to solve the problem by insisting that our choices are up to us, with providence merely guaranteeing that these choices will be punished or rewarded appropriately through the mechanism of fate. But if providence includes all things, it is hard to see why the original choices themselves should escape necessitation – not by fate, but by providence itself.15
Neoplatonists might hope to solve this problem by exploiting the notion that the soul is, as Plotinus puts it, “on the horizon” of the sensible and intelligible realms (Enn. IV.4[28].3), and “amphibious” (IV.8[6].4), capable of living in both. The soul is by its nature neither doomed to succumb to body and “necessity” nor to fly upwards to intellect – it has a choice between the two. This point is made with particular emphasis by Proclus:
The intellectual life must be opposed to sense perception, as it is immaterial, separate and self-activating. To this life we must attribute choice (electio), which may tend to both sides, upwards and downwards, towards the intellect from which it originated and towards sense perception which it generated. Sense perception, however, and all forms of life together with the bodies are without choice.
(Prov. 44)
The gist of this response is that in so far as we are separate from body we have a choice (a power for “self-activation”) which is irreducibly in the power of the chooser. It is determined by neither providence nor fate. When we choose to identify with the body, to go downwards rather than upwards, we are thenceforth deprived of choice and subject to fate. This is comparable to the original, un-fated choice in the Middle Platonic theory, which once made subjects the chooser to necessary consequences. We will explore this response further when we look at Neoplatonic treatments of the Myth of Er.
But first, let us dwell on the irony of the situation just envisaged. It seems to be tantamount to the following: you are given the opportunity either to (a) submit to the control of an external agent (here, the body and its necessity) or (b) unswervingly devote the rest of your life to intellectual contemplation. Would you really say, in this situation, that you would be “free” in choosing option (b)? After all, the only other alternative is option (a), which involves giving up one’s very capacity for choice. Looked at from this point of view, the choice facing the amphibious soul hardly looks like a choice at all, because one of the options brings with it utter slavery. Even the other, preferable option looks like merely submitting to the rule of providence, which is what we originally worried would compromise our autonomy. Arguably, the situation described by Proclus is a choice between enslavement by the body and rule by the gods. The only choice is which master to serve.
A powerful answer to this difficulty is offered by Plotinus in Enn. VI.8[39] (see Chapter 26, by Collette-Dučić). His goal is to explain the sense in which anything is “up to” the gods or “in their power”. Characteristically, though, he begins lower down in the system by considering what it means for something to be “up to us (eph’ hēmin)” in the case of human souls.16 Plotinus provides a careful and lengthy analysis of the meaning of this phrase, and how it relates to terms like “self-determination (autexousion)”, “wish (boulēsis)”, “freedom (eleutheron)” and the “voluntary (hekousion)”. I will not pretend to give an adequate recounting of his analysis here, but make only a few points germane to our difficulty. First, Plotinus seems to hold consistently throughout VI.8[39] that something is “up to me” only if I am “in charge (kyrios)” with regard to that thing. Thus he says, right at the outset, that when we are subject to “opposed fortunes and necessities” we judge these things to be our “masters (kyria)” and ourselves “enslaved (douleuontes)” to them (Enn. VI.8[39].1.23–30). Tellingly, when he alludes to the conditions Aristotle requires for an action to be voluntary – it must be done not under compulsion (bia) or out of ignorance – Plotinus adds that we must “be in charge of what we do (kyrioi praxai)” (VI.8[39].1.34).
Plotinus elucidates this notion of being “in charge” by contrasting it to the situation where we are influenced by “what is outside”. As he says, “how can we be in charge when we are being led?” (Enn. VI.8[39].2.19). Plotinus worries that even our own desires and wishes could threaten to take away our control – the paradigm case being an action performed in thrall to bodily appetites. Correspondingly, an action that is wholly “up to” the agent would be one where the agent was entirely free from external compulsion. This has the significant consequence that Plotinus’ notion of autonomy (the “up to us”, “being in charge”, etc.) does not require the presence of alternative possibilities. He makes this point when he worries that a higher principle, like intellect, will lack freedom (eleutheron) if it always performs the same activity by its very nature. He responds:
Where there is no compulsion to follow another, how can one speak of slavery? How could something borne towards the good be under compulsion, since its desire for the good will be voluntary if it knows that it is good and goes to it as good? For the involuntary is a leading away from the good and towards the compulsory. … It is for this reason that slavery is ill spoken of, not where one has no power to go to the bad, but where one has no power to go to one’s own good but is led away to the good of another.
(Enn. VI.8[39].4.11–22, trans. Armstrong)
Here again, in the last phrase, we have the idea that autonomy or freedom is compromised not by the absence of multiple options, but by the threat of determination from outside.17 This conveniently sets up Plotinus to argue that the One itself has “self-determination (to autexousion)” in the strongest possible sense, because nothing influences it in any way whatsoever (e.g. VI.8[39].7.42–5).
This seems a good response to the objection that the option of enslaving oneself is not a genuine one – Plotinus can simply say that the absence of genuine options need not impair our freedom. But is there not still the difficulty that in choosing the right path of intellectual life, the soul would merely submit to a better, but still external, master – the source of divine providence? Plotinus has an answer ready here too: the divine is not really external to the soul, but is the soul’s true identity. Thus, at least in Enn. VI.8, Plotinus does not identify soul’s freedom with a choice between “up and down” that is available to it because of its immateriality. Rather, he says that the soul becomes free (ginetai eleuthera) when it rises upwards towards the Good, by means of intellect (VI.8[39].7.1–2). For Plotinus, we become free by becoming truly ourselves.18
One might speculate that this position is available to Plotinus in a way that it is not to later figures like Iamblichus and Proclus. After all, they reject the doctrine of the undescended soul. They might therefore be more reluctant to say that the source of providence simply is the soul’s true self. In fact it is even worse than this, because, as we saw, Proclus says that providence (pro-noia) comes from before intellect; that is, from the Good itself. So to avoid the idea that soul is determined “from the outside” by providence, we might need to contemplate the prospect of identifying the soul, or some aspect of soul, with the Good. Here we are in danger of wading into deep metaphysical waters. For current purposes, I will simply note that Iamblichus’ rejection of the undescended soul does not prevent him from agreeing with Plotinus that soul is fully free, not in so far as it can choose between body and intellect, but in so far as it chooses the latter option:
[The substance of soul] contains within itself self-determined and independent life. And insofar as it gives itself to the realm of generation and subjects itself to the motion of the cosmos (tēn tou pantos phoran), thus far also it is drawn beneath the sway of fate and is enslaved to the necessities of nature (douleuei tais tēs physeōs anangkais). But insofar, on the other hand, as it exercises its intellectual activity, activity that is really left free from everything and independent in its choices, thus far it voluntarily “does its own” and lays hold of what is divine.
(Letter 8, frag. 2, trans. Dillon & Polleichtner, modified)
NEOPLATONISTS ON THE MYTH OF ER
Virtue has no master … god is blameless.
(Plato, R. 617e, my trans.)
The Neoplatonists have a mostly well-deserved reputation for being selective readers of Plato. In part because of their philosophical concerns and in part because of their school curriculum, they concentrate more on certain dialogues, and on certain passages within those dialogues, at the expense of others. When it comes to fate, providence and freedom, the Timaeus is seen as a particularly important text, as we have seen already. Book X of the Laws is also central to Neoplatonic discussions. But in this final section I want to look at a third favourite text related to these themes: the Myth of Er, which concludes the tenth and final book of the Republic (614b–621d).19
The Myth recounts a vision of the afterlife seen by a man named Er, who came back from the brink of death after falling in battle. He sees souls returning from their thousand-year sojourns, either below the earth where they have received recompense (dikē, 615a) for misdeeds, or in heaven where they have been rewarded for good deeds. He proceeds with these souls to witness the structure of the cosmos, which revolves on a spindle seated in the lap of the goddess Necessity (Anangkē, 617b). The three daughters of Necessity, the Fates, are also in attendance, and the system regulating the apportionment of earthly lives to the souls is explained by the representative of one of the Fates, Lachesis (617d–e). The souls randomly receive lots which set the order in which they will choose their next lives. The representative informs them that they will be bound to their chosen lives by necessity (ex anangkēs, 617e) through the offices of a guardian spirit or daimon. Still, the choice of life itself is up to them. He later adds that even those who choose last will still have good lives available to them (619b). Thus, despite the element of necessitation, “virtue has no master (adespoton); each person has it more or less depending on whether he honors it or not. The blame belongs to the chooser; god is blameless (aitia helomenou, theosanaitios)” (617e, my trans.).
Er then watches as the souls make their choices. The first rashly picks a life distinguished by its tyrannical power, not noticing the tragedies that will befall him: in accordance with fate (heimarmenē), he will eat his own children. Souls that were humans become animals, and vice versa. The representative’s promise that the holder of the final lot can still choose well is borne out by the soul who was Odysseus. He goes last and carefully selects a quiet and peaceful life (620c). Many of the choices, including this final one, are explained with reference to the souls’ previous experiences. But, as Socrates makes clear in a speech of his own (618b–619b) that he dramatically inserts into his account of the rules governing the choice of lives, it is philosophy that provides the surest preparation for choosing well. For philosophy teaches us to value a life for its degree of justice – to “honour virtue”, in the words of the representative. This is the preferable choice both while we are alive and in light of the prospect of punishment in the hereafter (618e).
One does not need to be a Neoplatonist to think that this Myth is of great importance for the themes of providence, fate and freedom. It seems to anticipate several of the ideas we have seen above; for instance, that suffering in this life is requital for earlier bad choices. Of course, this is no coincidence. The Middle Platonist idea of fate as a conditional law was always intended, in part, as an interpretation of this passage in the Republic.20 Many of the tendencies we have observed in Neoplatonist authors are likewise anticipated in the Myth. For instance, the Myth can provide a basis for integrating astrology with philosophical accounts of providence, given that Necessity presides over heavenly motion as well as the dispensation of lives. The Myth also upholds three ideas dear to our Neoplatonist authors: there is divine oversight of all things that happen to humans; despite this, humans are autonomous and hence responsible (“the blame belongs to the chooser”); therefore, the gods are blameless.
Another striking implication of the Myth, bound to fascinate any Neoplatonist, is that the power of choice is exercised above all when the soul is disembodied. In fact, the Myth might well be read as saying that souls only get a chance to choose how their lives will go at this moment before they have been reborn into bodies.21 Once this choice has been made, a daimon will make sure that the chosen life unfolds as foreordained, for good or ill. Thus the rash soul who goes first and chooses the life of the child-eating tyrant can no longer avoid this fate once he is born. Neoplatonists who engage with the Myth – and pretty well all of them do – have mixed feelings about this implication of Er’s vision. On the one hand, it fits nicely with the idea we explored in the previous section: embodiment is linked to necessitation, and freedom of choice to freedom from the body. On the other hand, they tend to balk at the suggestion that choice, or morally significant choice, can only occur prior to birth. Indeed, that would undermine their insistence that we can, even during our embodied lives, wrench ourselves away from bodily concerns and choose a life of philosophical contemplation.
Among the authors we have been considering, Hierocles seems most attracted to the idea that significant choice occurs solely before birth. Photius, the Christian author who is our source for On Providence,22 in fact summarizes Hierocles’ position as follows:
The great argument on which [Hierocles] counts most is human souls’ existence before this life and interchange of bodies (probiotē kai metensōmatōsis)… he thinks that through it he can confirm divine providence, establish the “up to us” and self-mastery (to eph’ hēmin kai autodespoton), and so actually serve the [idea of] fate (heimarmenē) that is so dear to him.
(Bibliotheca 214.6)
The word autodespoton is presumably a reminiscence of the Myth of Er’s claim that virtue is adespoton. If so, it is one of several allusions to the Myth scattered throughout the evidence concerning Hierocles. The allusions are particularly dense in the last part of Photius’ summary of On Providence:
Each one of us obtains by the decision of our judicial daimones the life deserved on the basis of our previous lives. In this life everything (panta) has been included: ancestry, city, father, mother, the moment of conception, such-and-such a body, the modes of behaviour and various fortunes (tychai) that belong to life, the manner and appointed hour of our death. And there is a daimon whose role it is to guard and fulfil these things. … The ordinances of providence, the judgements of the daemons, the lots of our lives, the requitals for ancient sins, and other factors determine both the moment and manner of our death. Thus both chosen actions and apparent chance events are connected to the fate of each of us and fulfil the recompense that is deserved. … Human choices are corrected by the laws of fate which the Demiurge has ordained for our souls.
(251.29, 31)
Elsewhere, Hierocles also emphasizes the Myth’s theme that the gods are blameless for what we suffer.23
There seems to be a tension between Hierocles’ talk of choice (prohairesis) and his emphasis that our lives unfold in a way that is preordained, and guaranteed by daemonic action. Hierocles seems almost to revel in the apparent paradox when he remarks, “we say that even as one is allotted (klērousthai) one’s life, one chooses it” (251.15). In light of Photius’ claim that the cycle of reincarnation was pivotal in Hierocles’ account, the difficulty might be resolved as follows. Our present lives are indeed preordained, perhaps even down to the smallest detail (note Hierocles’ use of the word panta – albeit that this could perhaps mean the entire context in which we choose). But in line with the Middle Platonist doctrine of fate, all this is divine recompense for previous choices. Those choices were made freely, and if we chose badly we are punished justly for it. Hence we and not the gods are to be blamed for what we suffer, as stated in the Myth. One might object that if the relevant choices were made in previous lives that were also subject to fate, then those choices too should have been preordained, so that the puzzle remains unsolved (a complaint made by Schibli [2002: 135–6]). But Hierocles may be adhering more closely to the Myth, and thinking of a choice of lives that occured after our previous earthly incarnation and before the present one. This is suggested by Photius’ phrase “existence before this life and interchange of bodies” in the quotation from 214.6 above. On the other hand, Photius presents Hierocles as speaking of “the life deserved on the basis of our previous lives” in the quotation from 251.29. Still, if Hierocles does think that souls choose their next lives before being embodied, that would fit nicely with the Neoplatonic conviction that we exercise choice above all before birth, when we are free of the body.
Other Neoplatonists, though, would be unhappy about locating all significant human freedom at a moment of disembodiment. A particularly clear case is Porphyry, whose treatment of the Myth of Er is preserved by another Christian anthologist, John Stobaeus, and given the title On What is Up to Us.24 Porphyry squarely addresses the threat posed to human autonomy by Plato’s teaching in the Myth. He writes that the Myth “seems at risk of doing away with the ‘up to us (to eph’ hēmin)’ and in general with our so-called self-determination (to autexousion)”. He then explains: “Since these things have been assigned (epikeklōsmenōn) as well as necessitated and ratified by the Fates and Lethe and Necessity, with a daimon accompanying them and standing guard over their fate, of what could we be in charge (kyrioi)? And how is it still the case that ‘virtue has no master’?” (frag. 268). Porphyry’s question shows that he will not be satisfied by saying that our lives have been chosen in advance by us, before we were born. For the necessitation of the Fates, the guarding of the daimon, and so on are subsequent to that choice of lives. Rather, he worries that we will be deprived of control during this chosen life.
His solution is an innovative one. There are two kinds of choice available to the soul. The first, and more significant, choice is made prior to embodiment when the general form of existence – the “first life” – is selected by the soul. At this stage the soul decides whether it will be a human or a non-human animal, for instance, and whether it will inhabit a male or female body. But there remains scope for control within this life:
The whole meaning of Plato’s theory seems to be something like this: souls, prior to falling into bodies and different lives, have the power of self-determination for choosing (helesthai) this or that life, which they are to live out with a certain life-form and a body appropriate to that life-form. For it is up to them to choose the life of a lion or of a man. That power of self-determination, however, is hindered as soon as they fall into one of these kinds of lives. Once they have gone down into bodies and become souls of living things instead of unconfined souls, they bear [only] the power of self-determination that is appropriate to the constitution of that living thing.
(Frag. 270)
The “constitution (kataskeuē)” of the soul removes some of the soul’s power of self-determination, especially if it comes to reside in a non-human animal body which will force it to live “along a single track (monotropon)”. But souls in human bodies retain “more range of movement (polykinēton)”, and apparently every soul has at least some residual power of self-determination, except for those humans who are totally given over to vice (frag. 268). Despite this twofold complexity in Porphyry’s account, he anticipates Hierocles in associating the Myth with the standard teaching on fate as divine retribution for the soul’s choices.25
It is worth pausing to consider how Porphyry’s position compares to what we saw in Plotinus, for whom self-determination and to eph’ hēmin are to do with causal control, and not the presence of multiple possibilites. It is striking that Porphyry too initially formulates the difficulty in terms of being kyrios (“in charge”), which suggests that his concerns are the same as his master’s. On the other hand, both the first and second choices of lives have to do with selecting from among alternatives. (Lion or man? If man, then virtuous or vicious?) It would seem, however, that the choice between alternatives matters to Porphyry not as such, but because it is an indication of causal control. This is suggested by his remarks on the stars and their relation to our chosen lives. He is enough of a believer in astrology that he thinks our lives can be predicted, at least in part, using our natal horoscopes. But Porphyry insists that the stars’ positions at our births only “signify”, and do not “necessitate”, the events of our future lives (frag. 271). This is not because he wants to say that the stars leave open multiple possible futures. To the contrary, as this fragment goes on, Porphyry says explicitly that the choice of first life is immutable once it has been made. Rather, the contrast between signification and necessitation is intended to preserve the point that it is the souls, not the stars, that are to be identified as the causes of the first lives.26 Furthermore, thanks to the possibility of a “second choice” the souls remain causally efficacious even after they have been born.
Porphyry’s meticulous exegesis of the Myth of Er suggests that it was read carefully in Plotinus’ school. This is confirmed by the fact that Plotinus devoted a short treatise to it: Enneads III.4[15], titled by Porphyry On Our Allotted (eilēchotos) Daimon. The opening chapter already raises a key theme of the treatise, namely “being in control” or “being dominant” (kratein). In humans, soul generates the faculty of growth but “controls” or “dominates” it, whereas in plants, the growth faculty “is in control, because it has become, as it were, alone (kratei hoion monē genomenē)” (Enn. III.4[15].1.5). Plotinus moves from plants to animals in chapter 2, quoting Plato’s Phaedrus to the effect that soul appears in different forms (en allois eidesin, Phdr. 246b) as a way of introducing the topic of human–animal transmigration. In humans there is a struggle between the lower aspects of growth and sense-perception, and a better aspect which is rational. Again Plotinus describes this struggle as one over “control”, but adds that the rational aspect of soul needs not only to control the lower parts but to “flee upwards”. Those who live rationally become human in their next incarnation; others will receive animal forms or even plant forms as appropriate to the way they have lived this time around (Enn. III.4[15].2.16–30).
All this provides a natural introduction to a discussion of the Myth of Er, which itself becomes dominant in the rest of the treatise. As suggested by the title chosen by Porphyry, Plotinus is particularly interested in the status of the guiding daimon mentioned in the Myth. He identifies this as whatever is immediately superior to the operative aspect (to energēsan) of each soul – in other words, whichever aspect has dominated the soul in its previous incarnation. For instance, if someone lives by sense-perception, the rational aspect of the soul (to logikon) will be his daimon. By choosing our life during this incarnation (e.g. by choosing to live a life devoted to sensation), we also choose our daimon. Plotinus’ view is characteristically optimistic: each of us, no matter how debased, has a higher aspect which is leading him or her on to improve their rank within the order of things. But the lower aspect can refuse to be led. It too is a daimon – after all, there can be bad daimones as well – and if it “takes control” it can lead a human down into the life of a beast. Hence the soul can become anything from bodily to divine, depending on whether it is led by its lower or upper daimon; that is, the worse aspect that has dominated the soul in the past or the better aspect that would lead it to higher things (Enn. III.4[15].3.5–16).
This brings Plotinus to what seems the critical question of the treatise, and indeed the critical question for any interpretation of the Myth (cf. Porphyry’s similar puzzle in On What is Up to Us): “if [the soul] chooses the daimon there [before entering the body], and chooses its life, then how could it still be in charge (kyrioi)?” Plotinus gives an explicitly de-mythologizing answer:
The so-called “choice (hairesis)” there is a riddle (ainittetai) for the soul’s universal and ever-present will (prohairesis) and disposition (diathesis). If, however, the soul’s will is in charge (kyria), and that part has control (kratei) which is ready from the previous lives, then the body is in no way to blame (aition) for evil [that comes] to him.
(Enn. III.4[15].5.2–6, my trans.)
In other words, the (descended) soul is already good or bad when it comes into the body, because its previous lives have prepared it either to succumb to the body or to resist it. For this reason, even a substandard body will not thwart the soul if it is good. The point of the Myth is not – as it might seem – that souls are somehow deprived of control in this life. Rather, Plato’s message is precisely that souls always have mastery (to kyrion). The daimon which is leading or supervising the soul is not controlling it from the outside – which would, as we recall from Enn. VI.8[39], compromise the soul’s autonomy and freedom – and this for two reasons, both of which were established earlier in the treatise. First, the daimon is not actually “operative (energōn)”, but is the aspect superior and adjacent to the operative aspect of soul. Second, the daimon is not in fact outside the soul completely, since it too belongs to soul, albeit not to the soul in so far as it leads this or that life (Enn. III.4[15].5.19–22).
To spell this out in more concrete terms, the man who is living a life dedicated to sensible pleasure is to be held responsible for that life, both because he has “chosen” it by living in a similar way in previous incarnations, and because he ought to avail himself of the influence of his better daimon (which in his case is the rational aspect of his soul). By contrast, the sage (ho spoudaios) is the one who allows his higher aspect to become active (energei); the daimon is not an external force “acting in concert with him (synergounta)” (Enn. III.4[15].6.1–3). Again, this would compromise the sage’s autonomy. The upshot is that the soul’s current disposition has been chosen by the soul in previous lives and is still being chosen all the time. This is not to say that everything is up to the soul, or even that everything that comes to the soul is necessarily deserved. Plotinus does not, like Hierocles, seem wedded to the thought that suffering in this life is a punishment for what has come before. He does speak of dikē (Enn. III.4[15].6.17), but only as something that occurs between death and rebirth (in fact he contrasts dikē to bios – punishment is not the same thing as incarnated life).
Regarding the turns of fortune that do befall us in this life, Plotinus instead offers a masterful (and very Greek) analogy. Perhaps thinking of the “ship of state” image in the Republic, Plotinus says that the spindle of Necessity places us into the cosmos as if in a boat. A passenger will be moved along with a boat when it is tossed by a storm, yet one can also move about “by oneself (par autou)” even on a storm-tossed boat. Likewise, each soul experiences threats to its autonomy, but remains responsible for itself. Plotinus concludes his treatise with an almost comically lapidary summary of the way various souls react to bodily events in various ways: “Different things, then, happen to different people, either because the same things befall them, or different things. Or the same things happen to people who are not the same, even if the things that befall them are different. That’s how fate is (touiouton gar hē heimarmenē)” (Enn III.4[15].6.57–60, my trans.).
Elsewhere (in the much later On Providence), Plotinus does suggest that events in our lives may be recompense for deeds “in previous cycles (pros tas prosthen periodous)” (Enn. III.2[47].13.2–3). He illustrates this with chilling examples: matricides will be born as women so that they can be killed by their sons, and rapists will be born as women so that they may be raped. But here in Enn. III.4[15], Plotinus tends to shrug off earthly events as being nothing to us. This difference is more one of emphasis than doctrine. When divine providence is in focus, he is keen to show that the gods send no evils without justification. When he considers human autonomy, he is keen to show that bodily evils do not impair that autonomy. These are really just two sides of the core lesson of the Myth: responsibility lies not with the gods, but with us.27
The numerous tensions that beset Neoplatonic treatments of freedom, providence and fate are, then, already prefigured in the Myth of Er. Among these tensions, the most philosophically interesting one concerns the very question of how to conceive freedom or autonomy. Sometimes Neoplatonists depict freedom as something the soul achieves by turning away from body and towards intellect (as at Enn. VI.8[39].7, quoted above). At other times, freedom appears to belong to the soul by its very nature, because it has a choice whether to turn towards body or soul (as at Proclus, Prov. 44; for a classic statement of the choice, see Enn. V.1[10].1). The first of these two conceptions, with its assimilation of freedom to secure rational commitment, owes more than a little to Stoic compatibilism. The second, with its emphasis on a genuine option that confronts the soul, is more libertarian. The Myth of Er, with its dramatic vision of a choice between many possible lives, can support this libertarian view of freedom.28 Yet as we have seen, it depicts the choice as occurring before birth – rather cold comfort, now that we are embodied. On the other hand, in his speech within the Myth Socrates claims that it is still within our power here and now to change our long-term fate by living a life of philosophy. This is hard to square with the all-encompassing choice made by the souls before birth. So if the Neoplatonists sometimes seem conflicted in their understanding of freedom, that may just show that they were good Platonists after all.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful for helpful comments from the editors, an anonymous referee, and Chris Noble.
1. On this see e.g. Dillon (1996a), Dragona-Monachou (1994), Mansfeld (1999), Boys-Stones (2007b).
2. On daimones or demons in Plato and his heirs, see Timotin (2012).
3. For this work see Sharples ([1983] 2003), and for discussion D. Frede (1982), Sharples (2007). Cited by section numbers from Sharples ([1983] 2003).
4. Arabic text with German translation in Ruland (1976). Also available in French: Thillet (2003) and Italian: Fazzo & Zonta (1998). For discussion see Fazzo & Wiesner (1993), Sharples (1982). Cited by page number from Ruland.
5. Fragment 4 of Letter 8 (To Macedonius, the most extensively preserved letter on this topic); translation from Dillon & Polleichtner (2009). See further Taormina & Piccione (2010).
6. Translation from Steel (2007: 48). For the text and French translation see also Isaac (2003).
7. On Providence, codex 214.5, text and English translation in Schibli (2002). On Hierocles see also P. Hadot (2004).
8. On Providence 251.13, 30; Commentary on the Golden Verses, also in Schibli (2002: 11.28–32). Cf. Schibli’s discussion at ibid.: 143.
9. See Schibli (2002: 229 n.18). Cf. Aristotle’s example of the builder who accidentally produces health, because he also happens to be a doctor (Metaph. 6.2).
10. This may seem to bring Proclus’ view into line with that of Alexander, but the two authors are separated by their different conceptions of nature. Proclus in fact criticizes Alexander for assimilating fate to nature when the latter is conceived of as the nature of individual animals and plants. See Proclus, in Ti. 3.272, cited by Schibli (2002: 153 n. 79).
11. Letter 12, To Sopater on Fate, ed. in Dillon & Polleichtner (2009), my translation and emphasis.
12. This relates to the idea that providence is universal, and fate particular, in so far as it is only at the corporeal level that we have multiple particulars that fall under the same kind. The position of souls here is rather ambiguous, in so far as each soul relates to a particular body, yet the souls themselves are incorporeal and, especially for Plotinus, keep a foothold in the intelligible realm. This helps to explain why they are able to submit to the particular workings of fate or to be guided by the universal rule of providence.
13. By contrast the Stoic view was that we are subjected to fate in any case, and either go along gladly or not. This is illustrated with the analogy of a dog tied to a cart, which either trots along obediently behind or is dragged unwillingly (see Long & Sedley 1987: 62A).
14. For this debate see van den Berg (1997) and Finamore (1997).
15. Schibli (2002: 135) likewise worries that Hierocles cannot really explain how it is that human souls are able to initiate causal sequences.
16. On the previous history of this concept and its meaning in Plotinus, see Eliasson (2008).
17. We can summarize this result by saying that for Plotinus, modal necessity (the lack of alternative possibilities) need not impair freedom; what impairs freedom is “necessity (anangkē)” in the sense of a requirement that was not of the agent’s choosing, or that the agent might have reason to regret. I have explored this sense of “necessity”, which can be traced back to Plato, in Adamson (2011).
18. The same holds at the level of intellect, except that it is eternally identical with its own objects and thus free of any need to seek itself. In this respect the intellect has permanently the sort of autonomy soul is trying to achieve – albeit that it remains dependent on the One, and thus lacks the One’s utter autonomy and self-sufficiency.
19. On this and other eschatological myths in Plato see Annas (1982), Halliwell (1988), Partenie (2009).
20. See e.g. Alcinous, Didaskalikos 26, which explicitly connects the conditional theory of fate to the choice of lives made by a soul, and then paraphrases the Myth by adding that “the soul has no master (adespoton)” (trans. Dillon).
21. Socrates’ interpolated speech seems to support this reading: he begins by saying that “the entire risk for mankind occurs here (entha … ho pas kindynos anthrōpōi)” at the moment of the choice of lives (618b, emphasis added). Translators tend to avoid this implication by rendering pas more figuratively. Shorey has “the supreme hazard” (Hamilton & Cairns 1961), and Grube & Reeve have “the greatest danger of all” (J. M. Cooper 1997), both of which suggest that there remains scope for other significant choices, albeit not ones that are of such momentous importance.
22. Translations taken from Schibli (2002), with some modifications.
23. On the Golden Verses 9.8.19–20.
24. Translations taken from Wilberding (2011), with some modifications, and cited by fragment number from A. Smith (1993).
25. Cf. his example of the thief (frag. 271), already discussed above.
26. Indeed, with his contrast between signification and necessitation, Porphyry presumably has in mind the same contrast made by Plotinus when he says, at the beginning of Enneads II.3[52], that the stars merely signify (sēmainei) but do not actually cause (poiei) events in our lower world. On this see Adamson (2008), and for the contrast more generally Long (1982).
27. Unfortunately I do not have the space here to deal with the longest and most complex treatment of the Myth of Er in the Neoplatonic corpus – Proclus’ sixteenth essay on the Republic, which is devoted entirely to the Myth. But see note 28 for one interesting passage.
28. For instance, Proclus says explicitly that if the soul can select only one life it will not have genuine choice, since choice requires preferring one object over another (in R. 16.262).