readings, one book at its own scale — the last
reading’s frame put into proof, two hundred and eleven propositions from
a first principle to a soul that comes down whole, and a system with
nothing in it that performs anythingTwenty-first of the readings, and the fourth case of
the same system. The Orphic Hymns
perform a cosmology and assert nothing. The Chaldean Oracles assert one and
station no one. Proclus’ Theology
of Plato argues one at length, in prose, in a ranked hierarchy of
mediation, and leaves an office at the top of it. This is the same frame
in its last available form: not argued, proved. Two
hundred and eleven propositions, each stated once and then demonstrated
out of the propositions before it, from a first principle that is not
being to a last proposition about what happens to a soul when it comes
down. Nothing in this series has claimed so much, nothing in this series
has shown so much of its working, and nothing in this series has offered
so little to do.
Status. This post reads two editions of one work, and names the edition each time. The primary text is Thomas Taylor’s 1816 English translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, printed in the same volume as his translation of the Theology of Plato and the treatises that follow it; the second is E. R. Dodds’ Proclus: The Elements of Theology, a revised text with translation, introduction and commentary (Oxford, Clarendon, 1963), Greek and English facing. Taylor’s translation is cited by Proposition and roman numeral as his volume prints them — “Proposition VII”, “Proposition CCXI” — and Dodds’ translation as “Prop.” with an arabic numeral — “Prop. 7”, “Prop. 211” — with Dodds’ Introduction cited by its section. The two numberings are the same work’s two hundred and eleven propositions, and are never the chapters of the Theology of Plato; the sibling reading of that work is a different text in a different part of a different edition. Every quotation below is checked character for character against a copy of the edition named, and every one carries its Proposition address. Because both editions are nineteenth- and twentieth-century printings reproduced by machine reading, each does damage to its own text; nothing is repaired, and nothing is spliced in from anywhere else. Taylor’s line-break hyphenation is undone and its spacing collapsed where a quotation crosses a line; its typographic quotation marks are rendered here as straight ASCII, and its curly apostrophes, dashes and ellipses are normalised. Dodds’ are treated the same way. Where either printing is corrupt, the quotation stops rather than being mended, and where a sentence is damaged partway through, only its clean part is quoted. Taylor’s Greek and his Latin notes are not quoted, and neither is Dodds’ Greek, Latin or French. Elisions are marked with a bare ellipsis. The reading of this material through the blog’s model is an inference, offered as one. Nothing here claims the One exists and nothing here claims it does not; nothing here claims the henads, the gods, the orders of intelligence, or the descent of the soul are real, and nothing here claims they are not. Proclus’ claims are reported as his, Taylor’s and Dodds’ as theirs. No living or dead person is diagnosed. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
Where the Theology of Plato argues, discursively and at length, that reality is a graded hierarchy of mediation, the Elements takes the same hierarchy and derives it: two hundred and eleven propositions, each with an enunciation and a demonstration, in the order the demonstration requires rather than the order a reader might want. This reading begins inside the last one’s frame, because this is the other half of the same system, and the half the series had only ever seen from outside.
Dodds opens his study of the book by saying what makes it worth reading at all, and his justification is a fair statement of the object: he credits the Elements with being “the one genuinely systematic exposition of Neoplatonic metaphysic which has come down to us.”1 The Enneads are occasional pieces written for a school that already shared the doctrine; the manuals of Sallustius and Porphyry are for a general readership; neither is a structure. The Elements is the structure, stated as a structure, and the only one of its kind to survive. Dodds says elsewhere that it is “a purely academic and theoretical work, containing little or nothing that appears to be directed either to spiritual edification” — which is not a compliment, and which is also the finding this post will spend its length on.1
The book’s form is the thing to describe first, because the form is the claim. Dodds describes it as a method of pure a priori deduction, “known to the ancient mathematicians as synthesis and familiar to us from Euclid and Spinoza”, and calls it “the Platonic method of hypothesis”.1 Proclus, he adds, found a model for it in the hypothetical argumentation put into Parmenides’ mouth in the dialogue of that name — where the first hypothesis denies everything of the one and the later ones unfold what follows. So the Elements is not a treatise that happens to be arranged as theorems. It is an attempt to put a whole metaphysics in the form of a demonstration, so that its authority rests on the derivation rather than on the teacher.
That attempt has a price and Dodds names it at once. “Ingenious as Proclus is, too often his ‘demonstration’, though formally correct, in fact merely repeats the ‘enunciation’ at greater length” — that is the reader’s complaint about a proof-form in the hands of a schoolman.1 But the form also buys something. Because each proposition is stated before it is proved, a reader can locate every step; because the steps run in one direction, a reader can name the point at which the system is not derived from anything. A rite does not offer that. A revealed text does not offer that. A discursive argument offers it only intermittently, because a discursive argument can change the subject. A chain of two hundred and eleven propositions cannot change the subject, and that is the first thing the form does for a reader: it makes the system’s weakest joint findable.
The two editions make the findability a comparison. Taylor’s 1816 volume prints the Elements among the works that follow the Theology of Plato and begins immediately with the first proposition: no preface, no statement of method, no editorial note. The translation runs each enunciation and its proof together into one continuous archaic paragraph, so that the scaffolding is visible only in the recurring connectives with which each proof opens. Dodds’ 1963 edition does the opposite: it prints the Greek with an apparatus, faces it with a translation, and adds the two things Taylor’s volume does not have — an Introduction that places the work among Proclus’ other writings and reconstructs the text’s history, and a section-by-section Commentary. That asymmetry is the whole reason this reading uses two editions: for the propositions Taylor will do, and for their place, their method, the state of the text they arrive in, and the practice missing from them, only Dodds has anything to say.
The Elements begins with the smallest possible object and does not begin with God. Its first proposition is about a manifold and the one, and Taylor renders it:
“All multitude participates in a certain respect of the one.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition I.2 That is the first of the two hundred and eleven, and the whole system is downstream of it: everything that follows is either an elaboration of what “participates in a certain respect” can mean or an application of it to a new order of being. The proof that follows is the shape every later proof repeats. If the manifold participated in no respect of the one, Taylor writes, “neither will the whole be one whole, nor each of the many of which the multitude consists” — each part would again be a manifold, and “this will be the case to infinity”, and an infinite regress of parts is impossible.2 The system’s first move is therefore an exclusion: the alternative to unity is an infinite divisibility that cannot be stated, and so unity is admitted by default. Dodds makes the same move visible from the other side, in his translation:
“Every manifold in some way participates unity.”
— Dodds’ translation, Prop. 1.3 And in the Commentary he says exactly what kind of argument that is: “This prop. is placed at the head of Pr.’s system in order to exclude the assumption of a world of pure quantitative plurality” — an alternative that the argument rules out before anything has been proved about the One.4 He adds that the proof “does not occur in Plato, nor, I think, in Plotinus”: the cut against pure plurality is Proclus’ own, and it is made by demonstration rather than by citation.4
Then the system lays the first principle down, and it does so in four lines, in Taylor:
“All multitude is posterior to the one.” (Proposition V) “Every thing which becomes one, becomes so through the participation of the one…” (Proposition III) “Every thing productive of another is more excellent than the nature of the thing produced.” (Proposition VII) “All beings proceed from one first cause.” (Proposition XI)
— Taylor’s translation, Propositions V, III, VII and XI.5678 These four, taken together, are the axioms of the whole book, and they are not derived from anything before them. Proposition V rules out the priority of the many; Proposition VII establishes the ranking principle — the producer is better than the produced — by which every later order will be graded; Proposition XI ties the whole series to a single first cause, on the ground that the alternatives (no cause, a circle of causes, an infinite ascent) are all impossible. By Proposition XI the system has its shape: one first cause, everything else posterior to it, ranked by the principle that what makes is more excellent than what is made. The Elements has stated its premises and has done so in plain sight, in the first eleven propositions.
That is the honesty the form affords, and Dodds gives it in one sentence: “Although no authorities are directly quoted in the Elements of Theology, its pages are haunted by the ghosts of authorities.”1 What is being excluded — infinite divisibility, a circle of causes, an infinite regress — is the check, and what takes its place is the postulate. The first principle is not proved. It is named, and the cost of naming it is that everything after it is proved from it.
And the name is not a neutral one, which is the second thing the form lets a reader see. The first principle is not “being”, because being is what participates in it. Taylor’s Proposition VI shows the ladder’s bottom rung — “Every multitude consists either of things united, or of unities” — and its heading is two words: Concerning Unity.9 Proposition XX then puts the grades in a single ascending sentence:
“The essence of soul is beyond all bodies, the intellectual nature is beyond all souls, and the one is beyond all intellectual hypostases.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition XX.10 Body, soul, intellect, the one: the sentence is the whole cosmos in one line, and it is a hierarchy of transcendence, which is to say of successive subtraction. Each term is “beyond” the one below it, and the last term is beyond all of them, so the top of the ladder is named by being set outside the world it tops. Dodds makes the same point structurally in his Introduction, dividing the book: “The book falls into two main sections. The first of these (props. 1 to 112)”, he says, “introduces successively the general metaphysical antitheses with which Neoplatonism operated”; “The remaining part (props. 113 to 211) expounds in the light of these antitheses the relations obtaining within each of the three great orders of spiritual substance, gods or henads, intelligences, and souls ; and the relations connecting each of these orders with the lower grades of reality.”1 The first half is pure structure, stated once and, in principle, checkable; the second half is the structure being populated — with gods, with intelligences, with souls. The axioms carry the whole thing, and the axioms are where a reader can see them.
Read as a demonstration, the Elements is a machine for assigning rank, and the assignment runs the same way at every level. The propositions of the second half do not argue that there are gods and souls; they argue where each thing sits once the axioms are granted. Taylor’s Proposition CIII states the rule for how the grades relate:
“All things are in all, but appropriately in each.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CIII.11 The formula is the system’s answer to the problem of hierarchy: the lower orders are not impoverished copies but contain everything the higher orders contain, in their own mode — being, life and intellect all present at every level, but in being the mode is being, in life it is life, in intellect it is intellect. It is also the system’s insurance. Nothing is lost in the descent, because nothing left the top.
Then the series closes over the top with two propositions about the gods, and their language shows the system doing what the blog’s frame-instrument has been tracking since the owned cosmos:
“Every divine number is unical.” (Proposition CXIII)
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CXIII.12 Prop. 113 in Dodds renders the same thesis in the plural — the gods’ number “has the character of unity” — and the difference between the two renderings is the whole matter of §4.13 The point here is what Taylor’s word does: the number of the gods is unical — one, whatever its count — and so a multitude of gods is asserted without multiplicity being admitted at the top. Proposition CXIX then states what a god is, and it is a statement by subtraction:
“Every God subsists according to superessential goodness, and is good neither according to participation, nor according to essence, but superessentially…”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CXIX.14 A god is not good by participation and not good by essence; it is good superessentially, which is a mode of being one grade above the distinction the sentence has just drawn. The ladder grades everything by moving the top term outside the distinction it is used to grade with. And Proposition CXXIX runs the same operation down the grades, in a sentence that is a summary of the whole second half:
“Every divine body is divine through a deified soul. But every soul is divine through a divine intellect. And every intellect is divine through the participation of a divine unity. And unity indeed is of itself a God; intellect is most divine; soul is divine; but body is deiform.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CXXIX.15 Body is deiform — god-shaped — not divine; soul is divine; intellect is “most divine”; and union with the one is a god. Four grades, each naming the grade above as the cause of its divinity, and the top term as itself a god.
What this series of propositions is for is stated, and it answers the blog’s own instrument. In the Theology of Plato the same system stations a hierarchy of mediation and an office at its head; in the Elements the highest propositions are about what the divine orders are, and their practical interest has been put in a separate group entirely. Dodds says of the propositions on material substances and their properties that their purpose “is to provide a philosophical basis for the practice of theurgy.”16 The system grounds a practice in one part of itself and performs no practice in any part of it. That is the finding of §5, and it is the reason this is the most useful book in the series for a reader who wants to see a frame with everything left in it except the operator.
But before the operator is removed, the ladder is climbed. The last propositions of the book handle the soul, and they handle it going both ways. Taylor’s Proposition CCVI states the round trip:
“Every partial soul is able to descend infinitely into generation, and to ascend from generation to real being.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CCVI.17 Descent and ascent are both possible, both unlimited, and both the soul’s own — the Elements ends with mobility, not with surrender or with a technique. And the final proposition, Proposition CCXI, states the one thing about the descent that a reader who has followed the climb would not have predicted:
“Every partial soul descending into generation descends wholly; nor does one part of it remain on high, and another part descend.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CCXI.18 The proof runs the same structure as Proposition I: assume the opposite — that some part of the soul remains in the intelligible — and the assumption generates either an intelligence rather than a soul, or a single substance with contradictory properties, and is therefore impossible. Taylor’s proof closes by restating the enunciation, and the restatement is the thing to notice:
“Every partial soul, therefore, wholly descends.”
— Taylor’s translation, Proposition CCXI.18 That is the form’s signature move, and Dodds makes it explicit: “The final proposition is directed consciously”, he writes in the Commentary, “against the well-known theory of Plotinus that a part of the human soul remains ‘above’”.19 And Dodds’ own translation of the same proposition says “Every particular soul, when it descends into temporal process, descends entire”, which is the same claim in a vocabulary less archaic and a shade more philosophical.20 So the book closes not by opening a route upward but by closing a route that Plotinus had left open: there is no hidden summit of the soul that never came down. The ascent of Proposition CCVI is real, but it is an ascent out of a total descent.
This section is a measured comparison, and it makes no claim beyond the loci it checks.
Proposition I is the cleanest case, because both editions render the same Greek and the difference is total. Taylor: “All multitude participates in a certain respect of the one.”2 Dodds: “Every manifold in some way participates unity.”3 Three substitutions, and each is a doctrine. Taylor’s multitude is a substantive — the name of a stuff, a collection of things — and Dodds’ manifold is an adjective used as a noun, a quality of things; Taylor’s the one is a substantive that can be participated of, and Dodds’ unity is a quality that can be participated; and Taylor’s “participates of” keeps the Greek genitive — participation of something — where Dodds’ bare “participates” makes unity a predicate a manifold can simply have. The three substitutions move the whole opening proposition from a claim about two kinds of entity to a claim about a quality every entity has. That is not a stylistic difference. It is the difference between a cosmology of substances and a description of structure, and it is on the first line of the book.
Proposition VI shows the same slide on a proposition about composition. Taylor: “Every multitude consists either of things united, or of unities.”9 Dodds: “Every manifold is composed either of unified groups or of henads (units).”21 Taylor’s “things united” is a phrase about things; Dodds’ “unified groups” is a phrase about aggregates; and on the second term Taylor’s plain “unities” is done over by Dodds into “henads (units)”, carrying the technical word in front of the plain one. Here the two translations are not merely saying the same thing differently; Dodds has added a term of art and Taylor has not. A reader who has only Taylor never learns that the Elements has a doctrine of henads at this point, because Taylor has translated the Greek word instead of importing it. A reader who has only Dodds never sees how plainly the claim can be stated.
Proposition XXI is a third locus, and it moves the other way. Taylor: “Every order beginning from a monad, proceeds into a multitude co-ordinate to the monad, and the multitude of every order is referred to one monad.”22 Dodds: “Every order has its beginning in a monad and proceeds to a manifold co-ordinate therewith; and the manifold in any order may be carried back to a single monad.”23 Both are close to the Greek here, and the divergence is small — “multitude” against “manifold”, “one monad” against “a single monad” — but the comparison is worth having because it shows the pattern is not an artefact of proposition I. Where the Greek offers a substantive, Taylor takes the substantive and Dodds takes the adjective; where the Greek offers an adjective, they agree. The rendering follows the ontology, and Taylor’s ontology is the more thing-like of the two.
There is a documented reason for the divergence, and citing it is part of the measurement. In Dodds’ list of the work’s translations, the entry for Taylor names what it was made from: “English, T. Taylor 1816 (based on Patrizzi)”.24 Patrizzi’s Latin was itself, Dodds says, translated from “renaissance copies of the second family” of manuscripts — a derivative of a derivative.24 And Taylor’s own notes to the Elements confirm the direction of travel from the volume’s own side: at Proposition CLVII he writes, “The words within the brackets are wanting in the original, which I have supplied from the version of Patricius”, and at the final proposition he notes, “From the version of Patricius, it is here necessary to supply the words” — supplying a gap in the Greek out of a Latin translation of a later manuscript tradition.2526 So Taylor’s English is a reading of a Latin reading of a Greek text, and where he needed the Greek he reached for the Latin. That does not make the translation wrong; it makes the words multitude, unities and the one a layer further from the Greek than the reader of an English Elements would assume, and it explains why the series has been quoting a Taylor whose vocabulary is broader, flatter and more concrete than the philosophical text behind it.
The last part of the comparison is not a word but a division, and it belongs in the body because it is a finding about the text’s shape. Taylor’s Elements has headings. Some propositions carry a title — Proposition VI is “Concerning Unity”, Proposition VII “Concerning producing causes and things produced”, Proposition CLXXXIV “Concerning Soul” — and those titles group the two hundred and eleven propositions into named topics, which is how a reader of Taylor’s volume finds their way around.97 Dodds’ translation carries no such titles: it numbers the propositions and prefixes group headings of its own — one for the One and the Many, one for Causes — and in a note he says why. “I have thought it convenient to indicate in my translation by means of headings the natural grouping of the propositions. In doing so I have followed no manuscript authority.”27 The titles Taylor prints, Dodds says, “are relegated to the apparatus criticus”, because “they are inserted quite arbitrarily and sporadically” — and he lists the propositions they precede, a list that covers the propositions Taylor’s volume titles, adding that some of them “clearly betray the hand of a medieval reader”.27 So the topical architecture a reader takes from Taylor’s volume — this proposition is About Unity, that one is About Soul — is not in the text. It is an editor’s or a scribe’s convenience laid over the axiomatic sequence, and Dodds’ translation is an argument against it. The measured comparison therefore ends not with a word but with a frame: one edition presents the Elements as an ordered handbook with subjects, the other as a bare sequence of numbered steps.
This is the reading the series has been heading towards since it took the Chaldean Oracles whole, and it is delivered by the editor in one sentence. Dodds, in the Introduction’s second section, at the end of a paragraph about the work’s relation to the rest of Proclus, writes:
“Finally, all direct reference either to personal mysticism or to theurgy is absent from the Elements.”
— Dodds, Introduction §2.28 The sentence is not an aside; it is part of his argument about the book’s date and character, and it comes with the qualification that makes it usable: “that Proclus in fact believed in theurgy when he wrote it can hardly be doubted” — and he refers the reader to the Commentary on Props. 39 and 145 for the evidence.28 What is absent from the Elements is not a belief. It is the reference: the ritual, the operator, the act.
The measurement supports the sentence, and the blog ran it. In the text printed under the heading of the Elements — the two hundred and eleven propositions and their proofs, together with Taylor’s own notes to them — the word “theurgy” and its derivatives do not occur at all. Neither does “ritual”, “initiation”, “priest”, “sacrifice”, “prayer”, “worship”, “divination” or “telestic”. The word occurs sixteen times elsewhere in the same volume, in the Theology of Plato and the treatises that follow the Elements — “theurgic power, which is more excellent than all human wisdom”, “the theurgic art through certain symbols calls forth… goodness of the Gods” — and the ritual material survives once inside the Elements, in a note to Proposition CXL, where Taylor quotes Plotinus on the ancient wise men “who wished to procure the presence of the Gods, by fabricating statues and performing sacred rites” and calls what they practised “the magic cultivated by the ancient philosophers”.29 That note is the exception that proves the rule: the ritual material the propositions lack survives in the translator’s footnotes, and even there the word theurgy is not used.
What the Elements has instead is the theory the theurgy needs, and Dodds shows where it sits. The propositions on material sympathy and the virtues of stones and plants — propositions about the lowest grades of being — exist, he says, “to provide a philosophical basis for the practice of theurgy”, and their “purgative” and other virtues “are not medical but magical”.16 So a system that performs nothing still carries, in its propositions, the warrant for a practice performed elsewhere — by a school, with a manual, in the same author’s other books. The absence is an absence of reference, not an absence of use: the frame was built to underwrite a rite and it does not mention the rite.
What that does to the blog’s instrument is a sharpening, not a confirmation. The blog’s marker, from the owned cosmos and the cosmos that refuses onward, is the seat: does the frame name an endpoint and station someone at it. The Elements stations no one and does nothing — no mediator who acts, no practitioner, no rite, no route that can be pointed to, not even an addressee. It is the frame at its most complete and its emptiest: an entire cosmos derived, and nothing in it performing, teaching, or admitting anyone in particular.
And that is the wrong reading, as Dodds’ apparatus makes clear. The seat is not absent; it is elsewhere in the same system: the author who derives the cosmos without mentioning theurgy is the author of the theurgic theology, and the school that read the Elements as its textbook also practised the rites its propositions underwrite. The Elements is what the frame looks like when the operator has been taken out of the text and left standing beside it — and the reason the operator is beside the text rather than in it is stated by Dodds in the next sentence of the same paragraph: the reference may have been omitted as out of keeping with the book’s rationalist character, or as an infringement of its a priori method of argument — a suggestion he records without settling it.28 The operator was removed so that the proof would look like a proof. That is the honest description, and it is not an accusation: a school that holds a rite and writes a geometry is not hiding the rite — it is showing the geometry, and the geometry is the part the ritual could not supply. But a reader who takes the Elements as the whole of the frame, which is exactly what a reader of this book is invited to do, will look for a seat inside a proof and will not find one, because the seat was never a proposition.
The ritual-versus-frame axis the series has been running since the Chaldean Oracles therefore closes inside a single author, and Dodds states it in the shortest form, in §3 of the Introduction, quoting Iamblichus against the rationalist method:
“that links the theurgist to the gods: else what should hinder the theoretical philosopher from enjoying theurgic union with them? The case is not so. Theurgic union is attained only by the perfective operation of the unspeakable acts correctly performed, acts which are beyond all understanding ; and by the power of the unutterable symbols which are intelligible only to the gods.”
— Iamblichus, De mysteriis I. 11, quoted in Dodds’ Introduction §3.30 Read beside the Elements it is an argument against it: the theoretical philosopher — the man whose method is theoria, demonstration, reason — does not attain union by thought, and what attains it is an act “beyond all understanding”, performed correctly, on unutterable symbols. That is the ritual pole of the series stated by a Neoplatonist, and a straight denial that a deductive frame reaches the top. Dodds adds the other half of the contrast in the same section: Plotinus, he says, “left to his successors a dialectical instrument of matchless power and delicacy and a vivid tradition of personal mysticism in the proper sense of that term, as the actual experience of the merging of the self at certain moments into some larger life” — and within two generations that had “become a pious formula on the lips of professors”.30 So the Elements sits at the junction the whole series has been reading: the doctrine of the theurgists, written in the form of the philosophers, by a man who practised the one and published the other, in separate books, with the joint between them left unstated.
The last reading said that the frame which argues is the largest claim the series had met, and it said something the blog has been carrying since: the marker of a frame is the claim rather than the seat, and a claim about the whole is a claim about every being’s place. The blog took from that a working rule for reading frames: an asserted cosmology tells you what is the case, and the more complete the assertion, the more of the world it has already answered for.
The Elements adds the thing that rule was missing, and it is the correction this post owes. A frame in the form of a proof does not assert less than a frame in the form of a revelation, and it does not make its claim more checkable. It moves the uncheckable part to the front and then proves everything from it. The axioms are the revelation. The difference is that they are labelled as propositions instead of as scripture, and that the label is what makes them look like something a reader may inspect.
The evidence is Dodds’, and it is the sharpest thing in the whole apparatus. In the footnote to the sentence about the method of hypothesis, he writes:
“It may be doubted, however, whether Pr. fully realized the hypothetical character of his postulates, to which centuries of unquestioned tradition had given the appearance of self-evidence.”
— Dodds, Introduction §1, note.31 That is the editor of the text saying, in a single sentence, that the axioms of the Elements are hypothetical — and that the author did not treat them as hypotheses, because the tradition had given them “the appearance of self-evidence”. The form presents the premises; the author did not experience them as premises. The axiomatic form relocates the uncheckable part to the axioms; it does not remove it, and it does not label it — it labels it “proposition” and lets two centuries of school doctrine supply the missing “self-evident”. A reader who takes the deduction at face value is reading a demonstration whose foundation is a consensus, and the consensus is not on the page.
Dodds reinforces the point from two more directions in the same Introduction. First, the method: he notes that “no authorities are directly quoted in the Elements of Theology”, and that “its pages are haunted by the ghosts of authorities” — the acknowledgment that the derivation is full of things arrived at elsewhere and never cited.1 Second, the honesty of the derivation itself: “Ingenious as Proclus is, too often his ‘demonstration’, though formally correct, in fact merely repeats the ‘enunciation’ at greater length” — and worse, “A more serious fault is Proclus’ trick of confusing the accidental with the essential”, by which doctrines “which owe their form, and even sometimes their being” to a phrase met elsewhere enter the chain “in the guise of” deduction.1 And Dodds’ closing verdict on the form is a verdict on all formal systems: “the coherence of a body of philosophical thought cannot be fully expressed in a chain of logically flawless syllogisms.”1
So the correction, stated plainly:
The blog has been treating a frame that states its premises as safer than one that reveals them, and the Elements shows the mistake from inside the strongest available example. Its premises are stated before anything is proved, so a reader can put a finger on the joint — and they are not demonstrated, because centuries of tradition had given them “the appearance of self-evidence”. The formal frame has the same uncheckable part as the revealed one, and it is at the front, wearing the label of the thing that proved everything else.
And the consequence lands on the blog’s test, which is the same three questions it has been asking since the owned cosmos. The blog can now add a fourth, because the Elements names it: does the frame present its first principle as a postulate, or as a self-evident fact? The Orphic Hymns had no premises to inspect, which was its own answer. The Elements has its premises in plain sight and does not inspect them, which is a different answer, and a harder one, because the plain-sight premises are exactly what makes the rest of the book look like knowledge. The advantage of the axiomatic form is not that it checks anything. It is that it shows a reader where to check — and Proclus’ book shows it, and does not do it.
The gap in this reading is not in Proclus. It is in the text the blog could read, and it is larger here than in the previous reading, which had one translator’s reconstruction to account for and this one has an editor’s as well.
Dodds’ edition is not the Elements; it is a text established for it. He collated the work against some forty-five manuscript copies, arranged them into three families, and concluded that four sources — two families’ archetypes, one manuscript of the second family, and the medieval Latin version of William of Morbecca — are mutually independent witnesses to a lost archetype he calls [X].32 His account of his own work is exact:
“The chief part of my work has been in removing corruptions of late origin, attempting the reconstruction of [X], and endeavouring to introduce a system of punctuation which shall not needlessly obscure the author’s thought.”
— Dodds, Introduction §3.33 And he is honest about the limit of the whole enterprise: “The stemma codicum facing this page makes no claim to complete accuracy”.33 One of his chief manuscripts, he records, “has been much tampered with, and many of the original readings have been wholly or partially erased; but most of these can be recovered with greater or less certainty” — recovered, by inference from the copies made before correction.32 A third family’s readings are, he says, often “due to deliberate and reckless ‘correction’ of the tradition”.32
So the text this post calls “Dodds’ translation” is a hypothesis about a text. Every punctuation mark in the facing Greek, every choice between admittedly erased readings, every decision that a passage is to be read with a comma or without one, is the editor’s — and the editor says as much. The reading a modern reader has of the Elements is mediated by a scholar’s judgement at every line, and the scholar is the first to put that in print.
Then the headings, which is the sharpest form of the same point. As §4 recorded, Dodds’ translation prints group headings for the propositions and says in a note that they are his: “In doing so I have followed no manuscript authority.”27 The topical titles a reader of Taylor’s volume sees — Concerning Unity, Concerning producing causes and things produced — are, Dodds says, insertions into “certain MSS. and in the printed texts of Portus and Creuzer”, made “quite arbitrarily and sporadically”, some of them clearly the work of “a medieval reader”.27 So the division of the axiomatic sequence into named subjects is a frame laid over the frame, and the two editions lay different ones. Both are printings of the same propositions, and neither is the sequence as the author left it — because nobody has that.
Taylor’s side of the gap is the one the previous reading described and this one inherits. His translation was made, as Dodds records, from Patrizzi’s Latin, out of a manuscript tradition further from the Greek than the one Dodds collated, and he supplies the text’s gaps from the same Latin — his notes to Propositions CLVII and CCXI say so in his own words, and a note to Proposition CL simply records, “There is a chasm here in the original.”252634 So Taylor’s Elements is a text with chasms mended from a translation of a translation, and Dodds’ is a text with no chasms and a punctuation its editor invented. Neither is “the text”. Both are readings of a work that survives in some forty-five manuscript copies, in three families, with the archetype lost, and which every edition since 1618 has reconstructed by judgement. There is no such reader’s text to want: the Elements reaches a modern reader already argued about, at the level of its own punctuation.
The second half of the gap is structural, and it is the honest counterweight to §6, so it belongs in the body rather than in a note. The axiomatic form’s failure to label its premises as premises is real, and it is not the same failure as a rite’s. A rite also hides its premises — it performs them, and a performer need never say “the gods exist”. A revealed text hides them at the top, in a voice that is not the author’s. The Elements states them, in the first eleven propositions, in the author’s own voice, and then derives everything from them. Nothing in it is unstated; everything in it is under-labelled. That is a smaller failure than the alternatives, and the blog’s instrument should hold both facts at once: this is the frame in which a reader can most nearly find the joint, and also the frame in which the joint is presented as self-evidence. The form is not a safeguard against uncheckable premises; it is a disclosure of them, and that is the most a formal frame can honestly offer.
One. The Elements of Theology is the same system as the Theology of Plato in its other form: not the frame that argues, but the frame that proves. Two hundred and eleven propositions, each stated and then derived from the ones before, from a first principle that is not being to a last proposition about the descent of a soul. It is the most complete frame this series has read and the first whose authority is its deduction rather than its revelation or its rite.
Two. The form does what it appears to do and it does not do what the blog half-suspected. It shows a reader where the system’s first principle enters and how everything after it is derived. It does not demonstrate the first principle, and its editor records that the author did not hold it as a hypothesis at all: “centuries of unquestioned tradition had given the appearance of self-evidence”. So the correction: the axiomatic form relocates the uncheckable part to the axioms and places it in plain sight without labelling it. The blog’s test gains a fourth question — does the frame present its first principle as a postulate or as a fact? — and the Elements answers it wrongly while being the book that makes the question askable.
Three. The theurgy is gone, and the absence is measurable rather than interpretive. The word and its derivatives do not occur in the Elements at all; nor do ritual, initiation, priest, sacrifice or prayer. The editor says it outright: “all direct reference either to personal mysticism or to theurgy is absent from the Elements.” What survives is the theory the rite needs, in the propositions on material sympathy, which exist “to provide a philosophical basis for the practice of theurgy”. So the seat is not absent from the system; it is absent from the text, and it is standing beside it in the same author’s other books and the same school’s practice. The operator was taken out of the proof so that the proof would read as a proof.
Four. The terms carry the ontology, and the two editions differ measurably. Taylor’s multitude, unities and the one are substantives; Dodds’ manifold, unified groups and unity are qualities; and the difference is on the first line of the book. It is explained in part by provenance: Taylor’s English is based on Patrizzi’s Latin, itself made from a later manuscript family, and Taylor’s own notes supply the Greek’s gaps from the Latin. And it is explained in part by editing: the topical headings Taylor’s volume carries are not in the text, and Dodds’ translation is built to reject them.
Five. The counterweights, in the body, and there are two. There is no reader’s text of the Elements: both editions are frames laid over the frame — Dodds’ with a punctuation its editor invented and a stemma that “makes no claim to complete accuracy”, Taylor’s with chasms mended from a translation of a translation. And the form’s honesty is real but partial: the book states its premises and does not call them premises. Neither counterweight is a verdict on anyone.
What the blog takes from the twenty-first reading is the completion of an arc it began when it took the Orphic Hymns whole. The Hymns perform a cosmology and state nothing. The Oracles state one and station no one. The Theology of Plato argues one and gives every being its place. The Elements proves one, and proves it with nothing in the proof that does anything — no rite, no operator, no mediator who acts, no route a reader could be shown, and an editor who can say where the rites went. The frame at its most complete has no seat and no practice in it, and the reason is the form: a proof cannot perform, and a school that wants a practice to go with its proof writes the practice somewhere else. And the book that says so most clearly is not Proclus’. It is the sentence a twentieth-century editor wrote to describe what is missing from it.
Marking: a reading, and a measured comparison. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from one of two named editions of the Elements of Theology: Thomas Taylor’s 1816 English translation, cited by Proposition and roman numeral as that volume prints them, and E. R. Dodds’ 1963 revised text with translation, Introduction and Commentary, cited as “Prop.” with arabic numeral and by Introduction section, checked character for character against a copy of the edition named. Attributed to Dodds, not to Proclus — the whole Introduction apparatus: the work’s uniqueness and academic character, the method of hypothesis and its “appearance of self-evidence”, the “ghosts of authorities”, the two-part division, the absence of theurgy and the note that Proclus believed in it, the Iamblichus quotation and the Plotinus characterisation, the manuscript families and the reconstruction of the lost archetype, the count of collated copies, the rejection of the traditional headings, the provenance of Taylor’s English in Patrizzi, the Commentary’s account of Prop. 1’s argument, of the propositions that ground theurgy, and of Prop. 211’s target. Attributed to Taylor, not to Proclus — the translations themselves as his, his printed headings, and his notes to Propositions CXL, CL, CLVII and CCXI. Attributed to this post — the counting of the words absent from the Elements and present elsewhere in Taylor’s volume (§5); the reading of the three rendering-differences as a substantive-versus-quality divergence (§4); the finding that the operator was removed from the text to protect the method (§5); the correction that the axiomatic form relocates the uncheckable part to the axioms (§6); and the two counterweights in §7. The gap is real and is not resolved here: there is no reader’s text of the Elements — the archetype is lost, both extant editions are reconstructions, and Taylor’s is a translation of a Latin translation. The cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims the One, the henads, the gods, the intelligences, the descent of the soul or the ascent from generation are real, and nothing here claims they are not; no one is diagnosed; and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.
Dodds, Introduction §1 — his chapter on the character and purpose of the book, pp. ix–xii. The quotations attributed to Dodds in §1, §2 and §6 — on the work’s uniqueness, its academic character, its method, the “ghosts of authorities”, the “demonstration” that repeats the “enunciation”, the “accidental … essential”, the syllogism that cannot hold a philosophy, and the two-part division of the book — are all from that section.↩︎
Thomas Taylor’s translation, Proposition I, enunciation and proof.↩︎
Dodds’ translation, Prop. 1. The rendering of the enunciation and the opening of the proof are both quoted from it.↩︎
Dodds, Commentary on Prop. 1 (pp. 188–9).↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition V.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition III.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition VII, with its printed heading.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition XI.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition VI, with its printed heading.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition XX.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition CIII.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition CXIII.↩︎
Dodds’ translation, Prop. 113.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition CXIX.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition CXXIX.↩︎
Dodds, Commentary on the propositions concerning the magical properties of natural substances (p. 276).↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition CCVI.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition CCXI, enunciation, proof, and its closing restatement.↩︎
Dodds, Commentary on Prop. 211 (p. 309).↩︎
Dodds’ translation, Prop. 211.↩︎
Dodds’ translation, Prop. 6.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, Proposition XXI.↩︎
Dodds’ translation, Prop. 21.↩︎
Dodds, Introduction §2, “Translations”, items 6 and 7: Patrizzi’s Latin printed at Ferrara in 1583, and the list of later translations, in which Taylor’s English is entered as “based on Patrizzi”.↩︎
Taylor’s note to Proposition CLVII.↩︎
Taylor’s note to Proposition CCXI.↩︎
Dodds, Commentary, note 2 to p. 187 — the note on his own headings and on the headings that the manuscripts and the older printed texts carry.↩︎
Dodds, Introduction §2 — his chapter on the book’s place in Proclus’ work, p. xvii. The sentence about theurgy’s absence and the sentence that Proclus “in fact believed in theurgy when he wrote it” are both from the same paragraph; the suggestion about the book’s rationalist character is from the paragraph that follows.↩︎
Taylor’s note to Proposition CXL, where he quotes Plotinus on statuary and sacred rites.↩︎
Dodds, Introduction §3 — his chapter on Proclus and his predecessors, pp. xx–xxi. The Iamblichus quotation is given by Dodds with its source, De mysteriis I. 11; the Plotinus passage is Dodds’ own characterisation in the same section.↩︎
Dodds, Introduction §1, note 2 to p. xi.↩︎
Dodds, Introduction, Chapter II §1 (“Manuscripts”, pp. xxxiii–xli), including the Marcianus that has been “tampered with” and the third family’s “reckless ‘correction’”.↩︎
Dodds, Introduction §3, “Editions, &c.”, item 5 (pp. xlv–xlvi).↩︎
Taylor’s note to Proposition CL.↩︎