Throughout this study we have attempted to illuminate various factors contributing secondarily to the formation of Proclus’s positions.  Such are the reactionary mentality of Athens and particularly of the Academy, the emphasis on arithmology in science and on theurgy in religion, and the Neoplatonic attitudes towards Plato and Aristotle.  Nevertheless, our main interest has been in pointing out the development of the Proclian positions from an initial, strictly philosophical analysis of what may be termed the human situation with respect to reality.  We have also been less concerned with Proclus’s teaching on the causality of the One or on the natures and order of the hypostases- -on his ontology in general- -then with the consequences of his initial opinions for the understanding of the nature of human existence.  We are aware that this approach has led us to run counter to some accepted interpretations of Proclus’s philosophy in our insistence on its very real a posteriori character, but here we believe that we are faithful to Proclus’s own intentions as evidenced in those works subsequent to the Elements of Theology.  It is true, we admit, that Proclus is himself more interested in the divine hierarchy than in man, but it is also as true that he arrives at this knowledge of the divine only through an attentive consideration of the human and moreover that this preoccupation with the divine is itself an inevitable result of these original considerations.

In summary, Proclus’s fundamental outlook on the mystery of human existence, as conditioned by the attitude of purification and abstraction from the material world, is to view man as identical with his soul alone.  This is in accord with the initial discrimination made between sensation and intellection in terms of Being and Becoming.  Sensation is an activity of the soul recognizing the images of the really real in the constant flux of sense data, and as such involves no passive determination of the soul itself.  Intellection is the attention of the soul to its innate ideas and again involves no determination received from the external world.  The soul knows itself in its own rational activity in an act of perfect reflection proper to a spiritual substance, and moreover in knowing itself is converted to the source of its intelligence, which is the same Intellect responsible for the imaged intelligibility of the material world.  In the process of recollection the soul contemplates the paradigms of its own innate ideas in the Ideas or Forms constituting the essence of Intellect.  By means of the contemplation of the association or distinction of these pure Ideas as imaged in its innate ideas, the soul through the process of dialectic at length arrives at a knowledge of the entire hierarchy of true Being, just as by means of the consideration of the relations of itself to the body and to Intellect, and of all material things to their eternal exemplars, it has come to know that Being stands to Becoming as paradigm to image.  Finally it attains to a complete metaphysics describing the emanation of all things from the One in an eternal system of procession and return.

Man is seen in this metaphysics as an eternal hypostasis whose temporal personality is meaningful only as a product of generation and whose eternal destiny is the ceaseless mediation of the worlds of Being and Becoming.  Specific human existence is significant merely as a factor in an eternal process and individual human existents are but eternal, radically impersonal unities constituting the plentitude of their order.

It would be difficult to gain a hearing for the Proclian teaching in modern times in that the conclusions reached in the doctrine itself are noticeably uncongenial to the thought of all contemporary schools of philosophy, the theosophists excepted.  Even apart form the denial of the substantial identity of body and soul in the composition of human nature and the consequent depreciation of mundane human existence, there are two points in particular with respect to which both the Christian and “post-Christian” outlooks differ considerably from that of Proclus’s Hellenistic paganism.  The first is the eternity and necessity of the soul following upon the radical discrimination between the objects of sensation and of intellection.  Proclus, as all the Platonists, is predisposed to consider the material world only under the aspect of its incessant mutability.  If the soul comprehends itself as essentially immaterial, then in its sense cognition it knows that it cannot be corporeally affected as is the body, and mindful of material mutability, it is led by the fact that it comes to form fixed images to believe that it recognizes colors, sounds, and feelings by reason of a power which no more than “compassionates” the body.  Yet if sensation attends too the purely phenomenal aspects of the material world, intellection attends to those intelligibilities which are only imaged in the world and is similarly undetermined by the world itself.  In considering the eternal essences in themselves, the soul further understands that a soul and the contemplation uniting it to the thoughts of a divine Mind are related to a body and the soul’s sense activity within it in the proportion of Being to Becoming, of the spiritual to the material, the necessary to the contingent, the eternal to the mutable.  As a spiritual substance the soul is therefore both eternal and necessary, a position which allows of no possible compromise with a doctrine of emergent evolution, much less with the Christian affirmation of free and immediate creation.

The second point, which follows from the Neoplatonic idealism, is the multiplicity of “absolute” causes of the material world.  The objects of intellection are recognized as subsisting in the ideal world, in Intellect.  After distinguishing between the creative thoughts of the Demiurge and the objects of his contemplation subsisting prior to himself- -the distinction between the two orders of paradigms- -it is possible to speak of these latter “transcendent” Ideas, those pertaining to metaphysical, mathematical, and moral concepts, as included in our related to the hierarchy of divinities extending from the One to the Demiurge and to the “junior gods” proceeding fro him.  To be a transcendent essence is thus to be not only eternal and necessary but to be divine as well.  Proclus’s understanding of intellection compels him to conceptualism, and his conceptual or logical stratification of reality becomes a medium for reinterpreting Hellenistic polytheism.  There again can be no compromise with any position maintaining unicity and simplicity in the absolute cause of “being”.

Nonetheless, the methodology leading to these presently unacceptable positions does have a counterpart in modern thought and in fact represents two of the most persistent tendencies in the history of philosophy: idealism and rationalism.  For this reason it seems to us to be insufficient to present even a summary evaluation of Proclus’s thought only in terms of its possibly unacceptable conclusions.  Let us return to the basis of the Proclian method in the twin analysis of sensation and of intellection, and in particular let us concentrate on what we have termed the idealist conviction resulting from the psychological fact of “complete return."

Proclus constantly utilizes the principle that anything which is a spiritual substance returns upon itself in its cognitional act, i.e. that it is always aware of itself as the subject of its own immanent activity, and conversely that anything so returning upon itself is a spiritual substance.  There are levels of return, however.  The soul, in the Proclian interpretation, knows itself as rational, identifying itself in thought with the Ideas only through the medium of its own innate ideas and therefore knowing itself as not responsible for the existence of the ideals world, while a “pure” intellect knows itself as the complement of the very existence of he Ideas.  In the contemplation of the eternal essences, the soul ascends above itself to Intellect in order to perfect its own proper operation of reasoning in moments of pure intellection- -moments which may even attain to a sort of ecstasy.  Proclus can thus argue from “complete return” to the distinction between soul and Intellect.  Nevertheless, we wish to maintain that this distinction does not of itself follow from the fact of “complete return’ except in so far as it is required to explain the unavoidable reference of human ideas to a world beyond the self once the interpretation of a determination derived, at least in part, from the material world has been excluded from consideration.  If this is the case, i.e. that the Proclian interpretation of “complete return” and the consequent conceptualism are inevitable only on the hypothesis that the soul is not in any way determined in knowledge by the material world, it now becomes our task to examine the validity of this hypothesis.

All schools of thought, we believe, would agree that regardless of how he may come to explain it, man is confronted in every immediate act of knowledge of the material world with a certain duality present in both the object known and the activity of the subject knowing.  The first duality is between the character of “universality” had in the mental comprehension of any material thing and the character of “particularity” had in the sensation (and/or imagination) accompanying this comprehension; the second is between the activity of the mind and the activity of the senses.  Moreover, regarding the mind itself,, there is given a certain self-awareness accompanying its operation by which it distinguishes itself as the personal subject of the entire complex of mental and sensational activity.

The Platonic analysis of these fundamental data of cognitional experience emphasizes the characteristic of the particular object known in sensation as being its mutability, its imperfection in comparison with the immutable universal characteristics attended to by the mind.  The contrast of the perfect with the imperfect then leads the Platonist to the denial of the imperfect- -the sensed particular- -as in any way causing the existence of the perfect- -the intelligibility or universal characteristic.  Following on this denial is the affirmation of two distinct worlds- -the intelligible and the sensible- -required to explain the duality of the known object.  What has happened here?  The Platonist, struck by the contrast between two modes of knowledge, has posited two distinct objects within the framework of a “confrontation” theory of knowledge.  His sensibility to the beauty of an intelligible order has led him peremptorily to exclude the possibility of any determination of the higher by the lower- -of the mental comprehension by the sense perception- -within the framework of an “assimilation” theory of knowledge.

The prime difficulty with this interpretation is that it runs counter to the tendency of the mind to regard conceptualization as an activity of its own which it exercises in conjunction with the powers of sensation.  This tendency- -which we may regard as the basis of an assimilation theory of knowledge- -is disquieting unless the origin of ideas can be explained in such a way as to save their apparently objective reference, their intentionality.  On the basis of the analysis of sensation the Platonist has excluded any further consideration of determination by the material world.  However, given in conjunction with the activity of intellection is the fact of a self-awareness through which the mind is inclined to judge of itself as “other” than the material world.  This fact of “complete return” must now be utilized as the explanation of intellection in terms of a “recollection” and a conversion to a cause of intelligibility above and yet somehow still immanent to the mind.  The mind’s ideas are participations in the eternal thoughts of another Mind; we are now allowed the distinction between the soul and Intellect.  With this concept of a subsistent Mind the Platonist may now also satisfy his love of intelligible order by reducing the very existence of the world and of himself to an eternal order of rational necessity.  Nonetheless, we must note that the Platonist’s right to certitude in the development of his dialectic is no stronger than his right to affirm a confrontation theory of knowledge, and this, we repeat, is a right already put in question by the mind’s inclination to regard the activity of conceptualization as indeed an activity of its own exercised in a true dependence on the material world.  The Platonic smothering of this inclination and the extension of “complete return” into an anamnêsis to substitute for it we may now regard as in truth “a primary misreading of the experiential evidence."²⁸

Nevertheless, remembering the criticism of Aristotle’s epistemology voiced by Syrianus and echoed by Proclus, we have still to face the Neoplatonic objections to an assimilation theory of knowledge.  The Academicians’ argument against the sufficiency for real knowledge of an abstraction resulting in hysterogenê centers that the point that science is a knowledge through causes but it is absurd to speak of material objects causing their own causes to be present to the mind.  Ultimately, it seems to us, this objection may be reduced to the Neoplatonists’ prior acceptance of the formal cause of the existence of material reality as necessarily lying beyond that reality, a position which in turn originates in the now suspect idealist conviction.  The exact point of Aristotelian abstraction is the supposed cognition of all forms as existing only in the material composites- -the knowledge of material being as belonging to the universe of Being as well as of Becoming and thus deserving predication in the order of truth and science and well in that of probability and opinion.  If we are to speak of a distinctive Aristotelian conviction fundamentally opposed to idealism, we find its proper note to be the judgment that man is of his nature interested in the actualities of the things about him, in nature as actually existent in the material universe precisely as objects of both his speculative and his practical judgments and of his affectivity in the world of here-and-now.

Nonetheless, we would admit, here following the insights of Christian philosophy and especially of Thomas Aquinas, that the difficulties with Aristotle had by the Neoplatonists were owing to certain insights which were rather hastily dismissed by the Stagirite.  This, we believe, is above all the insight that material composites do not exist of themselves; beyond dependence on their intrinsic principles there is given a dependence on an ultimate efficient, final, and exemplary cause which is the bonitas divina. In other words, material objects do cause the mind to know their causes inasmuch as these are intrinsic principles actually less perfect than the objects themselves, and yet the mind through its own more perfect operation of intellection is able to induce the further necessities leading to a demonstrable a posteriori knowledge of the First Cause.

What is implied in this view is an understanding of existence which, unlike the essentialist views of Platonism, does not consider a hierarchy of distinct, subsistent Forms ordered in a logical structure, but which, also unlike “pure” Aristotelianism, considers the known actualities of material creation as directly dependent on the causality of a subsistent act of existence:  the Ipsum Esse or Ens Infinitum of Scholasticism.  “To be” in an absolute sense is not one property of a creature to which other properties, such as life and intelligence, may be added, but it is the very perfection of all the perfections of the creature.  With respect to the human soul, “to be” is of itself “to be living and intellectual” and it is ultimately a contradiction to speak of this “to be” as though it did not in its own act grant these other essential perfections.  Moreover, in this non-conceptual view of existence, God or the First Cause is recognized as the source of all participated existence, and unity and goodness are seen as present in his nature by reason of his unlimited act of existence, and not as transcending it in some relation of all created existence to a principle beyond Being.  Thus for a Christian there is no longer question of an anamnesis through which the philosophical dialectic is limited to Ideas and to conceptual patterns- -to reality only in so far as it is known “abstractively”- -but of a dialectic dealing with the structure of reality as known by the operation of judgment attending to what is of its nature not subject to the operation of abstraction:  the fact of existence.

Allowed a different approach to human reality, one which goes contrary both to idealism and to rationalism, we are provided with an entirely different understanding of its significance.  For Proclus, the idealist conviction is elaborated into a conceptual stratification of existence according to the originally grasped master relation of paradigm and image.  The principle of analogy is conscripted into explicating an absolute, entirely necessary system of procession and return, and at length we find the meaning of man reduced to a horizon-like function in the universal process.  Man is his eternal soul, essentially proceeding to the government of a body and essentially returning to the contemplation of the eternal intelligibilities, and as such he is essentially impersonal.  But we say that, to the contrary, we may utilize the Aristotelian conviction of the philosophical relevance of material creation in order to reach an understanding of human existence which finds it immediately derived form the free and loving act of a persona creator, temporally perfected in the utilization of the material world, and destined, pending on the use man makes of his liberty, to an eternal fulfillment in the perfect beatitude which is the vision of the divine essence.

Proclus, who together with his city lived a recluse from the ferment of the new Byzantine civilization, set man in contradiction to matter and ultimately found the only meaning for man’s temporal activity in the impersonal, unwilled perfection of matter.  We would instead seek the harmony of persons and things in that ordination of man to God for which the remainder of material creation is but an instrument.  Proclian man is a-historical, a pawn of the unending dual between Providence and Fate, an apt product of a philosophy which disregards the sensible and the historical.  “Christian” man is a new creation inserted into the framework of a definite history and allowed the exercise of freedom in order to decide his eternal destiny as either a friend or an enemy of his Creator.  The human person for Proclus is unimportant:  all that matters in the return of his eternal soul to an ideal world from which it must once more inevitably proceed.  The human person in the Christian outlook is the reason for all the rest of material creation, the image of God created to find perfect and eternal happiness in the society of a personal God.

Thus, as we have see, the perfect reflection or “complete return” which may be said to constitute immediate evidence of human spirituality can also be made the foundation for a complete idealism.  Nevertheless, we maintain that this can be done only after the philosophical rejection of what appears to us as another immediately known factor of human knowledge; the known determination of both sense and intellect by the material world, that awareness of human references to material substances as they exist and not merely in their intelligible features considered in isolation which we have described as constituting the Aristotelian conviction.

Conceptualism, the development of an ontology according to conceptual distinctions alone, is one manner in which an idealism may evolve; for a Platonist it is the only manner.  The recollection of eternal Ideas- -which we are inclined to regard as the apotheosis of human concepts- -allows a dialectic of these Ideas resulting in the discovery of their system.  The deficiency of such a conceptualism, we believe, is in the fact that a concept as such is a precision of the field of the actually intelligible, a somewhat inexact expression of a feature of intelligibility by the mind which corresponds to the inexact expression of sensible features possible to the imagination.  The perfection of the intellect itself, however, is not in conceptualization but in the immediate meeting wit the intelligible, an enlarging of itself rather than a constricting of the intelligible, a vision of the existent and not of “the possible”.

Why did Proclus fail to appreciate what we have taken to be serious defects in his approach?  Perhaps the answer is to be found in the fact that the intellect may always consider “the possible” inasmuch as it is given a certain mode of existence in the concept:  the intellect may prescind from actuality to view the world of its own creation, to derive a satisfaction from its truth analogous to the satisfaction which is given in the intellectual vision of the actually existence.  So strong may this satisfaction become that the mind may quite easily come to prefer this truth to that other had in the judgment of actuality, to consider all reality as dependent upon its own creative activity.  If we are correct, this is the experience confirming the idealist in his position and eventually it becomes his very criterion of truth.

What is it that Proclus has fond in his anamnesis and dialectic?  We are suggesting that it is nothing else than that same experience of beauty which many writers have exalted as the intrinsic compensation of pure mathematics.  And we should remember that Proclus, while preeminently a philosopher, was also both mathematician and poet.  We have already emphasized that his philosophical demonstrations are not a mere extrapolation of his mathematics, but here we wish to note the common affective origin of both forms of knowledge in the satisfaction of aesthetic experience.  Proclus, entranced by the beauty of his own concepts, believed that these concepts were in fact his vision of eternal Forms, since certainly such beauty was not accessible to sensitive but only to intellectual appreciation.  It is no wonder, then, that Proclus felt not the slightest uneasiness in speaking of the eternally subsistent Forms of numbers and figures or in organizing the ideal world in accord with the mathematical concepts of limit and infinity and of proportionality.  It was thus possible for him to preach a mystique that would alone bring him many auditors in the later ages of philosophy.  As one historian has noted:

"A doctrine so elaborate and so bold in its flights of constructive imagination was naturally destined to attract in all ages those who had the temperamental bias toward mysticism and aimed to construct some ontology of the intellect.  For all work of that kind Proclus becomes the archetype."²⁹

These aesthetic feelings are not, of course, in themselves a rational demonstration, but it seems to us that they do certainly underlie these demonstrations which have been our concern in the body of this study.  It is even tempting to consider Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus- -the three greatest figures of ancient Platonism- -as philosophizing artists.  But that would be untrue:  all three in point of fact disregard what we consider the ordinary expressions of the fine arts, even to the point of condemning them as mere illusions.  What is true, it seems to us, is that all three are artistic philosophers allowing an unsuspected adequacy to beauty as the criterion of truth.

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