The Lost Works of Proclus

The most comprehensive list of Proclus' known original works is contained in the third chapter of Laurence Jay Rosán's text The Philosophy of Proclus - The Final Phase of Ancient Thought.  Out of the 45 items listed, only 28 are extant, the fact that the lost ones did exist at one point is inferred either from Proclus' own other writings, the vita by Marinus, later commentators such as Simplicius, or the Suda.  To say that Proclus was a prolific writer is a vast understatement, as the Proclean Corpus, the term Rosán uses, constituted a veritable encyclopedia of Hellenistic learning.  The following passage from Proclus' biographer Marinus has been cited many times as a testament to Proclus' enthusiasm for the written word:

He had an unbounded love of work; sometimes he would teach five or more classes a day, write on the average about seven hundred lines of prose, visit with other philosophers and then in the evening give lectures that were not based on any text; in addition to all this he would sleeplessly worship the gods every night, and bow in prayer to the sun when it arose, at midday and when it set.

Proclus

 
This of course begs the question: what happened to the lost works of Proclus?  How were they lost?  Let's take into consideration that he was the head of the Academy in Athens for almost fifty years and carried an enormous influence on leading thinkers of later generations.  Here is what Hegel says about Proclus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

[...] in Proclus we have the culminating point of the Neo-Platonic philosophy; this method in philosophy is carried into later times, continuing even through the whole of the Middle Ages. […] Although the Neo-Platonic school ceased to exist outwardly, ideas of the Neo-Platonists, and specially the philosophy of Proclus, were long maintained and preserved in the Church.

One would think that with such enormous influence, his complete oeuvre would have a great desire to be preserved.  What happened to these lost works?  Here is the list of Proclus' writings that Rosán cites specifically as "lost":

• On How to Live
• Commentary on the Philebus
• Commentary on the Theaetetus
• Commentary on the Sophist
• Commentary on the Phaedrus
• Commentary on the Phaedo
• Clarifying Investigation of Plato's Doctrines
• On the Mother of the Gods
• On the Theology of Orpheus
• On the Agreement between Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato
• On the Gods in Homer
• Letter to Aristocles
• Commentary on Homer

The discrepancy between the 13 listed here and the total of 45 accounted by Rosán is not clear.  It is probably due to other writings listed as "fragmentary".

It had been hard for me to believe that these texts were literally "lost" or simply forgotten due to neglect.  The problem of what happened to these lost writings has never been dealt with by scholars.  It would be a great treasure especially to have the lost commentaries on Plato.  This had been a great mystery to me for quite some time, until I started into Opsomer and Steel's translation of Proclus' On the Existence of Evils.  In the introduction there is a discussion of Proclus' other essay On Providence, where Proclus is refuting his friend Theodorus' position that "the good is what is pleasant for each individual" by stating that "I would be ashamed if, to a man who is my friend, I did not write clearly what I think, namely that such a view is unworthy of my choice of life and of my age."

Opsomer and Steel, commenting that not only is this a clear indication that the Tria Opuscula (three minor works) were written towards the end of his career, but also that Proclus obviously put more value in the immaterial goods of knowledge and virtue over material possessions.  Reading through the following passage on p. 3, which at first glance is not in any way related to the topic of this article, my eyes immediately lit up on the bodface section:

If a young man had indeed formulated such a hedonistic view, Proclus would not have been surpassed, for the young usually adhere to the opinions of the many.  But an old man who gives authority to the intellect should think differently.  The fact that Proclus considers this view as unworthy of his old age is adequate proof that this work-- and probably the two other treatises as well-- was written towards the end of his career.  In ch. 22 [of On Providence], the reader comes across a highly personal comment: Proclus alludes to a dramatic event in his life, whereby his house and its furniture were destroyed by fire.  But, as he confesses, this disaster damaged external goods only and could not take away the wisdom and calmness of his soul.  As L. Westerink has argues, Proclus is probably alluding to some religious persecution.  Maybe the destruction of the temple of Asclepius, which was adjacent to the school, caused serious damage to his private residence.  Or the event could have been related to the persecution that drove Proclus into exile in Asia.  This may be another indication for putting the composition of the treatises [the Tria Opuscula] on providence and evil in the later period of Proclus' life.

Now we can state what I conjecture with this article: that Proclus' "lost" works were not lost, but were destroyed in the fire.  Whether it was accidental or had something to do with the events Westerink refers to, can only be speculation.  Considering that everything had to be hand written in the manuscript form, it could be a miracle that we have any of Proclus' writings at all.  It all very well could have been destroyed in his house fire.  It seems unlikely that it was an act of vandalism related to Proclus' period of exile.  For why then do we still have so much that is extant?  Perhaps it was vandalism, and what remains was students' copies of his manuscripts.  This is all wholly speculative but also very interesting.

Library of Alexandira being burned

But what exactly does Proclus say in this passage from On Providence?  Here is the relevant text:

Let us, therefore, say farewell to those things to which we are attached and consider the strength of virtue and the fact that fate cannot do anything to us, but only to the things around us.  For also the accidents that, as you mentioned, recently came over us from outside, have only deprived us of walls and stones, my friend, and have reduced wooden beams to ashes, all of which are mortal and inflammable things, and have ruined our wealth: these are external things and for this reason may fall sometimes under the power of others.  But no one is so powerful as to be able to take away something of what depends on us, even if he had all human power.  For if we are self-controlled, we shall remain so when all these possessions have departed, and if we love contemplation of beings, we shall not be deprived of this disposition either.  And when those most terrible losses that you mention have occurred, we for our part will go on praising the rulers of all things and investigating the causes of events.

It may sound as if the reference to "walls and stones" and "wooden beams" would have to exclude the possibility that some of Proclus' manuscripts were destroyed in the fire.  But this is actually a reference to Plotinus' Ennead I 4: "If he thought that the ruin of his city were a great evil [...] there would be no virtue left in him if he thought that woods and stones, and the death of mortals, were unimportant."  If the fire had destroyed any manuscripts, it would have caused Proclus to feel that the true knowledge had not been lost.  The true knowledge subsists permanently in the world of real Being, and not in the form of a manuscript here in the world of Becoming, where everything is always changing and nothing lasts, according to his Platonic thinking.

Did the events of the house fire have something to do with the writing of the Tria Opuscula?  These three works, On Providence, Ten Problems on Providence, and On the Existence of Evils, have a very different style than that of the commentaries on Plato's dialogues or the geometrical style of the Elements of Theology.  Not only that, but their relatively short length us quite uncharacteristic of Proclus' usual fashion of writing treatises that run hundred and hundreds of pages.  The commentaries were meant to serve as instructional texts in Proclus' school, and had to conform to the metaphysics and theology of Plato.  In the Opuscula we find a very free form of discourse that can address a much larger philosophical audience than the elite members of the Academy.  Why did Proclus deviate from his usual style to write on these particular topics?

I think that Proclus commenced the writing of the Opuscula as a kind of retribution over the (conjectured) loss of his writings.  He is trying to resolve the conflict that he felt about what he clearly stated was an accident.  How could the fire, an act of fate, have taken place if there is providence?  The event did not get him down but only got him fired up (literally) with his passion for philosophy.  Were the questions dealt with in the Opuscula his way of coping with the sadness in his soul as a result of this loss?  The problems about providence, fate, and evil had already been thoroughly discussed in the Neoplatonic tradition.  Why the sudden shift away from metaphysics and theology to look at these again?

I will end with Proclus' words from the Opuscula as tantalizing clues in support of this thesis:

Although these problems have been discussed and examined a thousand times, my soul still wants to talk and hear about them, and return to herself, and wishes as it were to discuss with herself and not only receive arguments about them from the outside.

The Tria Opuscula have been recently translated into English and are available through Cornell University Press.  An older translation by Thomas Taylor, included in the volume Essays and Fragments of Proclus, is still valuable but more difficult to follow.

Books mentioned in this article:

Video - Proclus - Hymn to The One

Here was a video I shot a few weeks ago where I recited Proclus' Hymn to The One.  I also gave a brief introduction to Proclus, so this is a great video to get started with.

Nonduality in the Thought of Proclus and its Parallels in the Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero

When one compares the systematic thought of the great Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus with the writings of the medieval Kabbalist, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, one is astounded by the uncanny similarities to the point that one sees no real difference.  Perplexity results because Proclus (5th century C.E.) wrote in Greek and Rabbi Cordovero (16th century C.E.) wrote in Hebrew.  There is no way that Proclus could have been read by Rabbi Cordovero and influenced his thinking.  In this article I will present two quotations that show such an unbelievable correspondence in their thought that we are forced to concede some occult spiritual connection between these two great souls.

First let's examine a quotation from Rabbi Cordovero that appeared in Daniel C. Matt's popular work The Essential Kabbalah.  The quotation is from Cordovero's massive Zohar commentary, Or Yaqar volume 15.

If we believe that Ein Sof emanated the emanation and does not clothe itself within, then everything that enamated is outside of it, and it is outside of everything.  Then there are two.  So we must conclude that nothing is outside of God.  This applies not only to the sefirot but to everything that exists, large and small--they exist solely through the divine energy that flows to them and clothes itself in them.  If God's gaze were withdrawn for even a moment, all existence would be nullified.  This is the secret meaning of the verse: "You enliven everything" (Nehemiah 9:6).  So divinity flows and inheres in each thing that exists.  This is the secret meaning of the verse: "The whole Earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3).  Contemplating this, you are humbled, your thoughts purified.

Or Yaqar - "A Percious Light" by Rabbi Moshe Cordovero
Only 9 volumes shown here, the complete work is 22 volumes!

I have highlighted a portion of this text because we see almost the exact same thought contained in Proclus!  First I should say that "Ein Sof" is a Kabbalistic technical term for God as the Cause of Causes, the ineffable root of existence, and means "The Infinite" but its more literal translation is "without limit".  It holds the same position as The One in the structure of Neoplatonic metaphysics.

When we equate Ein Sof with The One we learn how to translate Kabbalistic terminology into abstract ideas more familiar to Western minds whose basic categories of thought stem from Platonic and Aristotelian concepts.  What results is a kind of 'dictionary' allowing for Neoplatonism to enlighten the Kabbalah and vice-versa.  By examining the writings of Proclus and Rabbi Cordovero, we will see the best examples of this parallelism which gives students of both systems of thought a great opportunity for cross-fertilization for the germination of new insights.

Let's now examine a strikingly similar quotation from Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Timaeus (2008 Cambridge University Press, volume 2):

For the divine does not stand aloof from anything, but is present for all things alike.  For this reason, even if you take the lowest levels of reality, there too you will find the divine present.  The One is in fact everywhere present, inasmuch as each of the beings derives its existence from the gods, and even though they proceed forth from the gods, they have not gone out from them but rather are rooted in them.  Where, indeed, could they 'go out', when the gods have embraced all things and taken hold of them in advance and still retain them in themselves?  For what is beyond the gods is That which is in no way existent, but all beings have been embraced in a circle by the gods and exist in them.  In a wonderful way, therefore, all things both have and have not proceeded forth.  They have not been cut off from the gods.  If they had been cut off, they would not even exist, because all the offspring, once they were wrenched away from their fathers, would immediately hasten towards the gaping void of non-being.

Proclus, 410-485 C.E.

Compare now the highlighted portions of this quotation with the earlier quote.  Do they not say the same thing, albeit in their own colors, but nonetheless it is really the exact same idea.   Now when we consider that Rabbi Cordovero could not have read Proclus, we are dumbfounded by how their thought could line up so perfectly.  We must conclude that either they were drawing from the same stream of spiritual inspiration; or if you can push this to the occult limit, that Rabbi Cordovero and Proclus are the same soul, one a reincarnation of the other.

Cordovero's grave in Safed Cemetery
Where is his soul today?

That being said, it is very interesting for students of Neoplatonism or Kabbalah to study the writings of these two giants simultaneously.  Both Proclus and Rabbi Cordovero had intense religious devotion as well as scholarly aptitude, both produced voluminous writings and were the heads of esoteric schools.  What is more, both were masters of the commentary tradition on sacred writings--Proclus' commentaries on Plato are the deepest are richest of such, while Cordovero's commentaries on Sepher Ha-Zohar the most extensive and penetrating.  Consider the analogy:

Proclus is to Plato as Rabbi Moshe Cordovero is to Rabbi Shim'on bar Yochai

Not only that but the biographies of both Proclus and Cordovero tell how they changed the direction of their lives to the dedication and pursuit of mystical philosophy, at the exact same age of 20 years old!  How can we hear about all of this and not share my conclusions about the spiritual link between them?

This article intended to simply generate interest in two great thinkers who are very dear to my heart, as well as point out similarities for scholars of either tradition to see that Neoplatonism and Kabbalah share such a similarity of thought that we should wonder about a hidden stream of tradition that connects the two over a long period of time, suggesting a common heritage and unity.

Books mentioned in this article: