readings, one book at its own scale — the frame that
argues, a hierarchy that gives every being its place, and the negations
the blog had filed as a refusal, which turn out to be the largest claim
in the systemTwentieth of the readings. The last two readings
were the two poles. The Orphic Hymns
perform a cosmology and assert nothing; the Chaldean Oracles assert a
cosmology and station no one. This is the case that had to come next,
because it is neither: a system that argues — in public, at length, with
its sources named and its opponents answered — that reality is a graded
hierarchy of mediation, that the ascent through it is real, and that the
whole of it can be demonstrated. It carries the gods, the mediators, the
operator, and the claim. It is the largest frame this series has read
whole, and it is the first one that required the blog’s own instrument
to be re-set rather than applied.
Status. This post reads one source: Thomas Taylor’s 1816 translation of The Six Books of Proclus … on the Theology of Plato, with the seventh book Taylor supplied in place of a lost one, his translation of the Elements of Theology, and the shorter treatises printed with them. Every quotation below is checked character for character against a complete digital text of that edition and cited by book and chapter, using the headings the translation itself prints — Taylor divided the chapters himself where the Greek is unmarked, and says so in a note. Because the edition is a nineteenth-century printing, its line-break hyphenation is undone and its spacing collapsed where a quotation crosses a line, and the spaces it sometimes leaves before a comma or a semi-colon are closed up; its typographic quotation marks are rendered here as straight ASCII, and its curly apostrophes, dashes and ellipses are normalised. Where the printing damages its own closing quotation mark into another glyph, the stray glyph is not reproduced. Its Greek is not quoted, and its Latin notes are not quoted. Where the printed text is corrupt, the quotation stops rather than being repaired, and nothing is spliced into a quotation from anywhere else in the edition. A quotation that stops short of the source — because the passage continues, or because the printing has damaged the mark it stops at — is closed with a period, and no word of it is altered. The reading of this material through the blog’s model is an inference, offered as one. Nothing here claims the gods of this system exist and nothing here claims they do not. Proclus’s claims are reported as his claims; Taylor’s are reported as Taylor’s. Two claims about the state of the editions are documented at 1. No living or dead person is diagnosed. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
The blog has named Proclus sixteen times and read him never, and the shape of that neglect is specific. All sixteen occurrences fell in two posts — the Chaldean Oracles and two esoteric tarots — and every one of them is Proclus inside somebody else’s sentence: his commentaries listed among the lost, Psellus’ commentaries “inspired by Proclus”, the theurgists “such as Proclus”.2 The single exception is one line of his commentary on the Parmenides, carried in a footnote, and that line is where the blog happened to be standing when it read about the ascent being safe.
So the debt is not that Proclus was unmentioned. It is that he was the authority behind two books the blog had just read without reading him. The Chaldean Oracles reports, in §6, that Iamblichus’ theory of prayer, on which Proclus depends, “may ultimately go back to Chaldean doctrine” — a transmission the blog reported and could not test, because it had not read the dependent text. And the tradition the blog has been reading all along — the Golden Dawn, Quareia, Agrippa’s sources, the Florentine Academy — is downstream of the school that produced this book, and of this man as its most complete surviving voice.
This is the situation that has produced the series’ best readings, and so the method is the usual one: take it whole, and ask what the blog has to change.
But this book is not the same kind of object as the last two. The Hymns are eighty-seven poems. The Oracles are fragments recovered from quotation. This is six books of continuous argument, in a schoolroom voice, by a head of a school, defending a reading of Plato against named rivals, and it carries a second text — an appendix — on the side. And behind the whole thing stands a third: a book Proclus wrote which is lost, and which someone else wrote for him.
The Theology of Plato opens by telling the reader where it came from, and the answer is not “Plato”.
“I am of opinion that the whole philosophy of Plato was at first unfolded into light through the beneficent will of superior natures, exhibiting the intellect concealed in them, and the truth subsisting together with beings, to souls conversant with generation (so far as it is lawful for them to participate of such supernatural and mighty good);”3
The doctrine is transmitted from above and then re-illuminated; the text’s opening move is to place the source outside the text. It is followed immediately by a genealogy, and the genealogy is short and exact: Plato, then Plotinus and his immediate heirs, then Iamblichus, then the man Proclus credits with having “been our leader to every thing beautiful and good” — his teacher Syrianus, whom Taylor’s footnote is careful to identify by name.3
What is striking is not that the chain is claimed. It is that the chain is ranked, and that the rank is argued for. Plato is “the primary leader and hierophant of those true mysteries, into which souls separated from terrestrial places are initiated” — which makes the Academy a mystery cult with a founder.3 The successors are not equals but a succession, and the succession passes into an office: the edition’s second volume carries on its title page the words the tradition gave him, “PROCLUS, THE PLATONIC SUCCESSOR”.4
Then comes the work’s own statement of proceeding, and it is worth pausing on, because a blog that reads frames should notice it:
“The present discourse, therefore, will first of all be divided by me into three parts.”5
Three parts: the common conceptions about the gods delivered in Plato; the total orders of the gods and their peculiarities; and the gods celebrated in particular dialogues, each referred back to its order. It is a plan, stated in advance, and the whole work is the execution of it — which is already unlike anything else this series has taken whole.
The claim is not only that the account is true. It is that the account is a science, and that one dialogue contains it. The Parmenides, Proclus says, is not a logic exercise but the complete theology, and he knows what he is doing when he says so:
“I shall perhaps assert a paradox, and which will alone be apparent to our familiars.”6
The paradox is that all of the divine orders, and every axiom of the theological science, are present in one dialogue if you know how to read it:
“all the axioms of the theologic science, appear in perfection in this dialogue, and all the divine orders are exhibited subsisting in connexion.”6
That is the largest claim the series has yet met, and it is worth being precise about what kind of claim it is. It is not a claim about a rite, a remedy, or a route. It is a claim that the structure of reality is knowable, that Plato stated it, and that Proclus can demonstrate it. What the dialogue gives, he says, is “the whole and perfect light of the theological science.”6 Taylor, in his own Introduction, states the same thing in the vocabulary of a later century:
“The peculiarity indeed, of this theology is, that it is no less scientific than sublime; and that by a geometrical series of reasoning originating from the most self-evident truths, it developes all the deified progressions from the ineffable principle of things, and accurately exhibits to our view all the links of that golden chain of which deity is the one extreme, and body the other.”7
Sublime and scientific, in one breath, as one praise. The chain has two ends, and the claim covers both of them.
The system’s first term is beyond the system, and the text says so plainly: the one is prior to being, and being is what participates it. The Elements of Theology is a series of theorems, each stated and then proved, and the first are as bare as arithmetic:
“All multitude participates in a certain respect of the one.”8
“Every thing productive of another is more excellent than the nature of the thing produced.”9
Read as a series of propositions rather than a narrative, the Elements is a machine for assigning rank. Everything downstream of the one is more composite, more multiplied, and lower, and the text will not leave a gap anywhere in the descent: every level is generated, every level is connected, every level returns. The one thing the system cannot do is leave a term unplaced.
The placing is then done in detail, and the detail is the point. In the first book Proclus sorts out what it means to be a god, and the sorting is a taxonomy with five entries:
“with respect to a God, one thing is simply a God, another according to union, another according to participation, another according to contact, and another according to similitude. For of super-essential natures indeed, each is primarily a God; of intellectual natures, each is a God according to union; and of divine souls, each is a God according to participation. But divine daemons are Gods according to contact with the Gods; and the souls of men are allotted this appellation through similitude.”10
The daimones are placed. The souls of men are placed. There is no order of being in this cosmos that is left outside the account, and no rank in it that is ambiguous: each is a god in a specified mode, and the modes are enumerated. The same book, in the course of that enumeration, gives the series its own boundary condition:
“And thus all things are full of Gods, angels, daemons, animals, and mortal natures.”11
That is the whole of the ladder in one line, from the highest to the mortal, with nothing omitted between the daimon and the animal — and the ordering of the sentence is the ordering of the world.
And the ladder is climbed by a faculty, which the text names. This is where the blog’s last two readings run into this one. The Chaldean Oracles tell the reader to extend an empty mind towards the highest god, and Majercik identifies the organ as the “flower/flame of mind”. Proclus, describing how a divine nature can be known at all, uses the same figure for the same place in the person — and it is the faculty, not the intellect, that reaches the top:
“the summit, and, as they say, flower of intellect and hyparxis, is conjoined with the unities of beings, and through these, with the occult union of all the divine unities.”12
The blog noted when reading the Oracles that it must not claim a lineage it cannot show, and it will not claim one here either. What can be said is what is on the page: the same image, at the same joint of the same structure, in the text that sits between the fragments and the Christian writers who used the vocabulary after them.
The hierarchy does not stop at the top of the person. It reaches into language. Proclus’s last chapter on the gods’ names ends with the claim that naming is itself a theurgic act, and the simile he reaches for is a statue:
“it generates every name as if it were a statue of the Gods.”13
“the theurgic art through certain symbols calls forth the exuberant and unenvying goodness of the Gods into the illumination of artificial statues, thus also the intellectual science of divine concerns, by the compositions and divisions of sounds, unfolds the occult essence of the Gods.”13
A name is a statue: a thing made by someone, out of sound, into which the god’s goodness is called. The doctrine of divine names is not lexicography in this system. It is fabrication, by an art, and the art has practitioners.
Everything the series has read recently has had an operator, and this one is explicit about him. Proclus’s account of how the soul actually arrives at the first principle is the passage the blog had been quoting from second hand, and in its own place it is more specific than the footnote suggested. It is not knowledge that unites the soul to the good. Proclus gives the faculty a name and puts it above intellection:
“giving ourselves up to the divine light, and closing the eyes of the soul, after this manner to become established in the unknown and occult unity of beings.”14
The gesture is deliberate and it is the opposite of inspection: you close the eyes of the soul, you give yourself up, and the union is called faith — “the faith of the Gods” — which ineffably unites “all the genera of the Gods, of daemons, and of happy souls to the good.”14 And the same chapter then names the routes, in a sentence that is the most interesting thing in this reading for anyone carrying the owned cosmos:
“some things indeed, through the amatory mania, others through divine philosophy, and others through theurgic power, which is more excellent than all human wisdom, and which comprehends prophetic good, the purifying powers of perfective good, and in short, all such things as are the effects of divine possession.”14
Three routes, named in one sentence. By the blog’s own diagnostic — the one written for open against closed mediation — that is the signature of an open frame: there are other ways through, and the text says so without being asked. It is the same sentence that closes the case, though, because the three are ranked: theurgic power is “more excellent than all human wisdom,” which makes the top of the ladder an art, and an art has holders. And the book has already told the reader who they are:
“just as in the mysteries, those who are skilful in concerns of this kind, previously prepare receptacles for the Gods, and neither always use the same inanimate particulars, nor other animals, nor men, in order to procure the presence of the divinities;”5
The hearer is a receptacle prepared by the skilful. The phrase Proclus uses for the readers who will follow him into the Parmenides is “our familiars” — the word a school uses for its own.6 And the life of him printed in the same volume gives the office its name: he was called “the Platonic Successor”, Taylor notes, “by way of eminence.”4
So here is the honest structural description, and it is neither accusation nor acquittal. This cosmos stations no person at the endpoint — the endpoint cannot be occupied, because nothing can be said of it, and the text says that too. What it does instead is station everyone else, and put a graded set of techniques between them and the top, with the highest technique held by a school that knows the order. The open route and the ranked route are the same route seen from two ends.
This is the part of the reading the blog did not expect, and it is the part that changes something.
The cosmos that refuses named a fourth arrangement among frames — a correspondence with no endpoint, whose highest term is not nameable, and whose safety was supposed to consist in exactly that. It is the frame the blog has been tracking backwards through the holy heretics and the Chaldean Oracles towards whatever came first. Proclus is nearer that origin than anything the blog has read, and a whole book of the Theology of Plato is about how to say nothing about the one — correctly.
He states the method as a two-mode system, and the pairing is exact. The first principle is unfolded “through analogy, and the similitude of secondary natures” at one time, and at another by “its separation from the whole of things, through negations.”15
The Republic supplies the analogy — the good and the sun. The Parmenides supplies the negations. Then Proclus says what the negations are, and the sentence is the hinge of this entire post:
“As the first hypothesis, however, demonstrates by negations the ineffable supereminence of the first principle of things, and evinces that he is exempt from all essence and knowledge,—it is evident that the hypothesis after this, as being proximate to it, must unfold the whole order of the Gods.”16
And then, a few lines later, the characterisation that no reader should skim:
“the most wonderful of all, the highest negations are only enunciative, but some in a supereminent manner, and others according to deficiency. But each of the negations consequent to these is affirmative;”16
Read that twice. The highest negations are statements, and every negation theologically consequent to them is an affirmation. This is not a refusal to speak. It is a technique of speaking, in the register called supereminent: you say what the first principle is not, and the saying asserts transcendence. And in the tenth chapter of the second book Proclus makes the mechanism explicit, and it turns out to be generative:
“generative of things which are as it were their opposites. For because the first principle is not many, the many proceed from it, and because it is not a whole, wholeness proceeds from it, and in a similar manner in other things.”17
The negation is the productive statement about everything else. Because the one is not many, the many come from it — the refusal is not a silence that leaves the cosmos unclaimed. It is the claim from which the cosmos proceeds. And Proclus immediately guards the guard, in a move that is the most fastidious thing in the book:
“who thinks it proper to abide in negations, and to add nothing to the one. For whatever you add, you diminish the one, and afterwards evince that it is not the one, but that which is passive to [or participates] the one.”17
“having attributed such a mode as this to the first God, again to exempt him from the negations also. For neither does any discourse, nor any name belong to the one, says Parmenides.”17
Every step further up is another subtraction, including the subtraction of the negations themselves. The text’s own word for what happens when language meets the ineffable is that it “has no cessation, and opposes itself.”17
And the disposition that the method requires is described, in the eleventh chapter, as a piece of staging rather than an argument:
“let the air be still, and the universe itself be still.”18
“with nearly closed eyes adoring as it were the rising sun,”18
The soul approaches as one approaches a sunrise — nearly closed eyes, so as not to be blinded. And what it approaches is named by what it exceeds:
“as more ineffable than all silence, and more unknown than all essence,—as holy among the holies, and concealed in the intelligible Gods.”18
More ineffable than all silence — that is the via negativa, in the register it had before it was a refusal, written by a man who holds an office in a school and has just spent a book proving that the structure of reality is knowable down to the last daimon.
The Orphic Hymns §7 narrowed the blog’s test: the marker of the dangerous frame is the claim rather than the seat. The Chaldean Oracles §7 had already widened the cosmos that refuses: the refusal is broader than the withholding of a name, and it works on a named endpoint as readily as an unnamed one. Proclus is the text between them, and it forces the next step, which neither of those readings could reach from where they stood.
The blog has been treating the apophatic as the refusal to claim. Proclus shows it as a way of claiming — and the largest claim available, because it is the one made about everything at once. The negations are enunciative; the highest ones assert by supereminence; each one consequent to them is an affirmation; and the one negation that matters most on this page — not many — is the proposition from which the many proceed. In the same work whose second book denies that any name belongs to the one, the first book explains that “it generates every name as if it were a statue of the Gods.”13 The refusal and the completeness are one machine.
So the correction, stated plainly:
The cosmos that refuses described the apophatic as a fourth frame — a correspondence with no endpoint, safe because its highest term is not named. In the text nearest the origin of that technique, the negations are not the absence of a claim. They are the system’s strongest statement, and they are generative: the denial of the one is where the named orders proceed from. The blog’s fourth frame is not a fourth frame. It is the top storey of the third. A reader cannot use unnamedness as a safety property, because one text holds the most extreme unnamedness this series has met — “more ineffable than all silence” — and the most complete assignment of every being to its place, daimones and mortal souls included, in a single argument.
The consequence lands on the test. The owned cosmos §7 ended on three questions — does the frame name the endpoint, is it checkable by someone who does not benefit, does it leave a seat — and the first of those was doing more work than it could bear. Proclus answers “no” to it in the strongest possible terms and still staffs the whole ladder and still leaves the top of the ladder to an art with practitioners. Unnamedness does not remove the seat; it relocates it, from a place at the endpoint to a technique for approaching one. The blog should amend its table: the column it marked “unnamed” is not a structural property of a cosmology. It is a move inside one.
And the narrowing from the last reading survives, sharpened rather than softened. The claim is the marker, and Proclus is the strongest confirmation available: a text that claims the maximum has a seat, and the seat is not smuggled in but entailed, because a claim about the whole is a claim about every being’s place, and a claim about every being’s place has already said who can read it. What Proclus adds is that the claim and the seat are not two markers but one, and that the claim can arrive dressed as its own opposite.
The gap in this reading is not in the text. It is in the text the blog read.
The seventh book is not by Proclus. The title page says so without embarrassment: “A SEVENTH BOOK IS ADDED, IN ORDER TO SUPPLY THE DEFICIENCY OF ANOTHER BOOK ON THIS SUBJECT, WHICH WAS WRITTEN BY PROCLUS, BUT SINCE LOST.”19 Taylor then writes that book himself, at the point where Proclus’s argument reaches the celestial gods, and he says what he is doing in the body of the thing, in the first person:
“Owing to the loss of a seventh book On the Theology of Plato, written by Proclus, copious information respecting the peculiarities of all the Celestial Gods is unfortunately not to be obtained. All that can be procured, however, on this subject, and which I have diligently collected from Platonic writings,”20
A reader does not have to hunt for the seam. The seventh book opens by quoting its own author in the third person — “as we are informed by Proclus in the preceding book” — and Taylor says in his Introduction that he compiled it from Proclus’s other writings.21 So the edition is six books of Proclus and a seventh of compilation, and the compilation is the part that handles the visible heavens.
The six books are Taylor’s reading of Proclus, not a neutral display of him. He tells the reader how much he changed: “The Greek text of Proclus abounds with errors,” and the emendations and supplied deficiencies “amount to more than four hundred.”7 He is contemptuous of the only Latin version he had — “And the Latin translation of Portus is so very faulty, as to be almost beyond example bad.”7 And in his own Introduction he does not translate a tradition so much as prosecute an argument, in a voice that is entirely of 1816:
“I have laboured to disseminate the philosophy and theology of Plato, as highly favourable to the interests of piety and good government, and most hostile to lawless conduct and revolutionary principles;”7
That is a single sentence from the Introduction, and in it the translator tells the reader exactly what he is doing with Proclus: disseminating a philosophy, as a position in his own political moment, against “lawless conduct and revolutionary principles”. He is not a neutral conduit, and he says so. He also defends the material apparatus of pagan worship in the same Introduction, at length, against the charge that the statues were the gods — and he ends that Introduction on a Pythagorean precept applied to himself: “Do those things which you judge to be beautiful, though in doing them you should be without renown; for the rabble is a bad judge of a good thing.”7
This is the frame-inside-the-frame again, and it is sharper here than in Black Abbot, White Magic, because there the enclosing text was a cipher and here it is a mind. Taylor is not reporting a system he has examined. He is restoring a tradition he belongs to, in a century he thinks has forgotten it, and he is willing to write the missing book himself rather than leave the structure incomplete. A reader gets Proclus’s argument and Taylor’s judgement of what Proclus must have meant, fused, without a mark on the page.
What that costs is easy to state. Proclus wrote in Greek; the reader of this edition cannot check a word of him; the argument arrives already interpreted by a man with a stake in its truth, and already repaired by a man who found the received text defective in four hundred places. The modern standard edition is a Greek text with a French translation, and the current reprint of Taylor’s English is described by its own publisher as still the only complete one — which means the reader who wants the text rather than a tradition’s reading of it has to choose between a believer’s English and a French critical edition of a work that is itself partly lost.1
The second gap is structural, and the blog should state it without pretending it is a verdict.
A system that assigns every being its place has no position outside itself. That is the same structural fact the owned cosmos described, and Proclus is its most complete ancient case, because the assignment is exhaustive by design. Not merely the gods and the daimones and the mortal souls: evil is placed too. The treatise on the subsistence of evil, printed with this translation, gives the system’s answer in two sentences, and the answer is a demotion:
“Good has an hypostasis, but evil a parhypostasis or a deviation from hypostasis. Good is form, but evil is without form, and is as it were privation.”22
Evil is not a rival principle. It has no standing of its own; it is a deviation, and it borrows its power from the good it opposes — “of itself evil is neither adapted to act, nor to possess power; for all power is good.”22 Every objection is absorbed the same way. A cosmos that can place everything, including the thing that seems to escape placement, is a cosmos with no outside from which it could be checked — and that is not a defect peculiar to Proclus. It is the shape of any complete account, and the blog has read three in a row: a liturgy that makes no claim, a revelation that stations no one, and now a science that has an answer for evil.
What the blog must not do here is diagnose. Nothing in this post says Proclus, or Taylor, or anyone who reads them, is in a closed seat. The owned cosmos §6 said the seat is legitimate and everyone is mediated, and that the distinction that matters is a seat that closes. This system names three routes to the top and ranks them, stations no one at the endpoint, and hands its highest technique to an art rather than to one man — and then, in its own framing, hands the whole thing to an office and calls its founder a hierophant. Which reading a person takes is not something this post will settle. The honest form of the finding is a shape, not a charge: the more complete the account, the fewer the questions it cannot already answer.
And the second half of the gap is this: the completeness is what makes the text readable. The Orphic Hymns could not be contested, because there was nothing in them to contest. Proclus can be contested, and is — he names the position he is refuting, on the Parmenides, on daemons, on the immortality of souls, and answers it. A frame that says this is how it is has handed the reader the only thing a reader can work with, and of the three this is the one that leaves a reader something to think with rather than only something to do or something to stand inside.
One. The blog had been carrying Proclus as an authority without reading him, in exactly the way the Chaldean Oracles and the Orphic Hymns had been carrying their subjects. This is the twentieth reading, and it is the last of the immediate debts: the man who stands behind both of the last two.
Two. The Theology of Plato is the frame that argues — a claim of maximum scope, stated in advance, executed across six books, with a named chain of authority behind it and a demonstrable method inside it. It is the largest claim the series has read, and it is the first that arrives already knowing what it will say about everything.
Three. In this system the apophatic move is not a refusal. The negations are enunciative, the highest ones assert by supereminence, and the one that matters is generative — not many, therefore the many. So the correction: the cosmos that refuses’s fourth frame is the top storey of its third, unnamedness is not a structural safety property, and the same text that says “more ineffable than all silence” places every daimon and every mortal soul.
Four. The counterweights, in the body, and there are two. The complete English translation is a Romantic reconstruction by a man inside the tradition, with a lost seventh book written by the translator himself — so the reader who wants Proclus has to want him through Taylor. And a system that gives every being its place, evil included, has no outside from which to be checked. Neither is a verdict on anyone.
What the blog takes from the twentieth reading is not a cosmology and not a practice. It is the confirmation of the thing the last reading found, stated by its opposite: the claim is the marker, and a claim about the whole is the largest one there is. But the claim can arrive wearing the refusal’s clothes — and the blog spent a whole frames post filing the via negativa as the countermeasure, when the man nearest its origin was using it as the ceiling of a science.
Marking: a reading. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from Thomas Taylor’s 1816 translation of The Six Books of Proclus … on the Theology of Plato, with the seventh book he supplied, his translation of the Elements of Theology, and the treatises printed beside them; checked character for character against a complete digital text of the edition and cited by book and chapter, as the translation prints them, with Taylor’s own chapter divisions noted as his. Attributed to Taylor, not to Proclus — the “geometrical series” and the “golden chain,” the defence of the statues and of pagan worship, the verdict on the Latin translation, the count of emendations, the seventh book and what it was compiled from, and every judgement in his Introduction. Attributed to this post — the two claims about the state of the editions at 1. Inferred, as this post’s — §3’s reading of the Elements as a machine for assigning rank; §4’s reading of the three routes as an open frame with a ranked top; §5’s finding that the negations are enunciative, generative, and re-absorbed; §6’s correction to the cosmos that refuses that its fourth frame is the top storey of its third, and the amendment to the three-part test; §7’s reading of Taylor as the frame inside the frame; and §8’s structural point that a complete account, evil included, has no outside. The gap is real and is not resolved here: the seventh book is not by Proclus, the translation is a believer’s reconstruction of a text whose Greek this reading did not consult, and the standard edition of that text is in French. The cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims the one, the henads, the gods, the daimones, the ascent through theurgy, or the golden chain are real, and nothing here claims they are not — no one is diagnosed, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.
Proclus, Théologie platonicienne, texte établi et traduit par H. D. Saffrey et L. G. Westerink, 6 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968–1997) — the Greek text with a French translation. The current publisher’s description of the reprint of Taylor’s translation reads: “Taylor’s translation is, unbelievably, still the only one available in English,” with “the Saffrey–Westerink pagination” added. Reported here as a claim about the state of the editions; this reading used the 1816 translation.↩︎
Counted across the two posts that name him: eleven times in the Chaldean Oracles — including Majercik’s “extensive commentaries of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, however, are lost” and Psellus’ later commentaries “inspired by Proclus” — and five times in two esoteric tarots, which quotes an account of the Florentine Academy in which “theurgists, such as Proclus” work by the “influence of higher order energies, or deities.” The single line quoted rather than named is Proclus’ context for fr. 136, from In Parm. 990, 27-37, in a footnote of the Chaldean Oracles post.↩︎
Book I, chapter I.↩︎
Volume II title page, which sets the name “PROCLUS, THE PLATONIC SUCCESSOR” above the title. The phrase is used of him “by way of eminence” in the life by Marinus printed in Taylor’s Introduction.↩︎
Book I, chapter II.↩︎
Book I, chapter VII: on referring the whole theology to the Parmenides, said “against our opponents.”↩︎
Taylor’s Introduction to the first volume.↩︎
Elements of Theology, Proposition I.↩︎
Elements of Theology, Proposition VII.↩︎
Book I, chapter XXVI: the common dogmas in the Phaedo — the five modes of being a god.↩︎
Book III, chapter XXVII: what Parmenides’ one being and being which is one constitute.↩︎
Book I, chapter III.↩︎
Book I, chapter XXIX: divine names, from the Cratylus.↩︎
Book I, chapter XXV: what unites us to the good.↩︎
Book II, chapter V: the two modes of ascent to the one, through analogy and through negations.↩︎
Book I, chapter XII: the intention of the hypotheses of the Parmenides.↩︎
Book II, chapter X: the first hypothesis and negations.↩︎
Book II, chapter XI: the disposition of the soul suited to such discussions.↩︎
Title page of the second volume, which prints the words undamaged.↩︎
Book VII, chapter XV.↩︎
Book VII, chapter I, opening: Taylor’s book, not Proclus’s. His Introduction states plainly that he compiled it out of Proclus’s other writings and especially the commentaries on the Timaeus — which is why the note is addressed to Taylor and not to Proclus.↩︎
“Of the Subsistence of Evil,” preserved in Fabricius and printed with this translation — sections 4 and 5.↩︎