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Liber XII · Hermeticism

Liber XII · Hermeticism · Chapter V: Neoplatonism & Theurgy

Proclus: Last Great Neoplatonist of Athens and His Theurgy

Proclus (412–485), last great head of the Athenian Platonic school: the Elements of Theology, the henads, theurgy, his hymns and his influence on mysticism.

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Proclus (412–485 CE) was the head of the Platonic school at Athens and the most systematic philosopher of late Neoplatonism. In works such as the Elements of Theology and the Platonic Theology he set out an ordered hierarchy of being descending from the One through divine henads, Intellect and Soul to the physical world, and he defended theurgy, the ritual art of uniting the soul with the gods. His death in 485 is often taken as the end of the great age of pagan philosophy, yet through Christian and Islamic readers his ideas remained influential for a thousand years.

The Life of Proclus: From Lycia to Athens§

The main source for Proclus's life is the Proclus, or On Happiness by his pupil and successor Marinus of Neapolis, an encomium delivered a year after his death. Marinus describes him as a man who possessed every virtue in its highest degree and includes his horoscope, from which his birth in Constantinople is usually dated to February 412, though some scholars have argued for 411. His parents were from Xanthus in Lycia, in south-western Asia Minor, and he was raised there.

Proclus studied rhetoric, Latin and law in Alexandria, intending to follow his father into a legal career, but turned to philosophy, studying Aristotle with Olympiodorus the Elder and mathematics with Heron. Around 430, before he was twenty, he went to Athens and joined the Platonic school led by Plutarch of Athens and Syrianus. Plutarch read Aristotle's On the Soul and Plato's Phaedo with him; Syrianus became his principal teacher and lifelong model. On Syrianus's death in about 437, Proclus succeeded him as head, or diadochos ("successor"), of the school, and he held the position until his death on 17 April 485.

Marinus portrays a demanding life of study and devotion. Proclus taught several classes a day, wrote some seven hundred lines a day, observed the sacred days of Egyptian, Phrygian and Greek religion, kept monthly purifications in honour of the Mother of the Gods and prayed to the sun at its rising, noon and setting. He never married. In the 440s, under pressure from Christian authorities, he spent a year in Lydia, where he studied local religious customs.

The Athenian School in a Christian Empire§

By Proclus's time the Roman Empire was officially Christian, and pagan cults had been banned. The Athenian school survived as a private institution funded by endowments, operating in a house south of the Acropolis. Proclus lived beside the sanctuary of Asclepius and close to the theatre of Dionysus. Marinus describes the distress of the school when the statue of Athena was removed from the Parthenon, probably in the later fifth century, and says the goddess appeared to Proclus in a dream to ask that she be received in his house.

The school was a place of philosophical teaching, prayer and ritual. Students worked through a set curriculum: Aristotle's logical, ethical and physical works first, as "lesser mysteries", then a sequence of Plato's dialogues culminating in the Timaeus and the Parmenides. Proclus believed that Plato, Pythagoras, the Orphic poems and the Chaldean Oracles all expressed one divine wisdom. Marinus says he would have wished to keep only the Timaeus and the Chaldean Oracles if he could have chosen which ancient books survived.

The school continued after his death under successors including Marinus and finally Damascius, until the emperor Justinian's measures in 529 restricted pagan teaching. Damascius and other philosophers travelled to the Persian court for a time, an episode often treated as the end of the Platonic Academy, although the details are debated.

The Elements of Theology and the Hierarchy of Being§

Proclus's best-known work, the Elements of Theology, presents Neoplatonic metaphysics as a series of 211 propositions, each followed by a demonstration, in a style modelled on Euclid's geometry. A text is available in the catalogue as The Elements of Theology. The larger Platonic Theology, in six books, sets out the orders of gods found in Plato's dialogues.

Procession, Remaining and Return§

Proclus took Plotinus's picture of reality emanating from the One (see Plotinus) and analysed it with great precision. Every effect, he argued, remains in its cause, proceeds from it and returns to it. This triad of remaining, procession and reversion describes every level of reality and gives the cosmos a rhythm of outflow and return.

The Henads and the Orders of Gods§

Proclus inserted between the One and Intellect a series of "henads", or unities, each a god in its own right. The traditional gods of Greek religion were thus placed within a philosophical system: each god heads a "chain" (seira) of beings that share its character, reaching down through angels, daimons and heroes to souls, animals, plants and stones. The sun, for instance, governs a chain that includes Apollo, solar daimons, the lion, the cock, the heliotrope and the sunstone.

This doctrine of chains of sympathy is one of the deepest roots of the later theory of correspondences. It explains why certain plants, stones and symbols were believed to carry divine power: they belong to a god's series and can recall the soul to it.

Theurgy and the Hieratic Art§

Following Iamblichus, Proclus held that philosophy alone cannot unite the soul with the gods. He wrote in the Platonic Theology that theurgy is a power higher than all human wisdom, since it includes the blessings of divination, purification and the operations of divine possession. Theurgy uses the divine "tokens" (synthemata) sown by the gods in nature, the names, sounds, plants and stones of their chains, to make the soul like the gods and open it to their presence.

A short treatise, known in a Renaissance Latin version by Ficino as On Sacrifice and Magic and in Greek as On the Hieratic Art, explains these ideas through the example of the heliotrope, which turns towards the sun as if praying to it. Ancient priests, Proclus writes, observed such sympathies and used them to draw down divine powers into statues and rites. Marinus credits Proclus himself with bringing rain to Attica during a drought, with protective rites and with healing a sick girl by prayer to Asclepius. As with Plotinus's biography, such accounts reveal how the school wished him remembered; they are not evidence of the events themselves.

Proclus also composed hymns to the Sun, the Muses, Aphrodite, Athena and other gods, seven of which survive. They express the same theology in verse: the gods are asked to lift the soul upwards and grant purification and wisdom.

Commentaries on Plato and Euclid§

Much of Proclus's work survives in commentaries on Plato, delivered as lectures and written up for publication. Those on the Timaeus, Republic, Parmenides, Alcibiades I and Cratylus are extant in whole or in part. They are invaluable sources for earlier philosophy because Proclus cites and discusses many lost authors, and they show how the Neoplatonic schools read Plato as a theological text.

His Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements is the main ancient source for the history of Greek geometry before Euclid, and his Outline of Astronomical Hypotheses presents Ptolemy's astronomy critically. He also wrote on providence, fate and evil. The three short treatises on providence and evil survive mainly in a medieval Latin translation by William of Moerbeke.

Influence of Proclus on Later Thought§

Proclus's influence was immense but often hidden. The Christian author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, around 500, adapted Proclus's hierarchies and negative theology so closely that some passages follow him nearly word for word; see Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian mysticism. Through this author Proclus's model of ordered angelic hierarchies shaped medieval theology and mysticism.

In the Islamic world, an Arabic adaptation of the Elements of Theology became the Book on the Pure Good, known in Latin as the Liber de causis. Attributed to Aristotle, it was studied in medieval universities until Thomas Aquinas, using Moerbeke's translation of the Elements (1268), recognised that it derived from Proclus.

In Byzantium, Michael Psellus admired him; the twelfth-century bishop Nicholas of Methone wrote a refutation of the Elements. Renaissance Platonists, especially Marsilio Ficino, drew on his theory of sympathy for their natural magic, and Thomas Taylor's English translations around 1800 made him a source for Romantic poets and later occultists. Hegel praised him as a dialectician, and modern scholarship from E. R. Dodds's edition of the Elements (1933) onwards has treated him as a major philosopher in his own right.

Frequently asked questions§

What is Proclus best known for?§

He is best known for the Elements of Theology, a systematic presentation of Neoplatonic metaphysics in 211 propositions, and for his commentaries on Plato. He also gave the fullest philosophical account of theurgy in antiquity after Iamblichus.

How did Proclus differ from Plotinus?§

Proclus kept Plotinus's One, Intellect and Soul but multiplied the levels between them, adding the divine henads and many orders of gods. Unlike Plotinus, he held that the soul needs theurgic rites as well as contemplation to reach the divine.

Did Proclus influence Christianity?§

Yes, indirectly. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius adapted his metaphysics and negative theology, and the Liber de causis, derived from his Elements, was studied by medieval scholastics.

Why is Proclus's death a landmark?§

He was the last great head of the Athenian Neoplatonic school, and the school declined in the decades after him until Justinian's restrictions on pagan teaching in 529. His death is therefore often used to mark the end of classical pagan philosophy.

Sources and further reading§