This book is the result of a three-year study for my doctoral dissertation, completed in October, 2017, and it forms a major benchmark to a years-long interest in the nature of first principles—and in turn, the basic notion of causality—from both a philosophical and theological context. As I realized early on, any discussion of what constitutes a good framework for the first principle—if or whether one philosophically maintains such a position—goes back to the history of philosophy: in this case, the foundation laid by Plato and Aristotle and the philosophical discussion that stretched from them into late antiquity and, what John Marenbon (2015) has called, the ‘Long Middle Ages’ up to the 18th–/19th-centuries a.d. Although the perennial issue of the first cause has motivated my interest in this general time period, what led me to the Neoplatonists was the result of an earlier interest in the afterlife of Aristotle’s first unmoved mover—and my great surprise that Platonists enthusiastically embraced much of Aristotle’s framework, while maintaining their basic affiliation with Plato (for instance in holding to unity, rather than intellect, as the defining characteristic of the First). The Neoplatonists’ appropriation of Aristotle, in both his method and much of his metaphysics, thus led me to consider the questions and tensions that arose in their framework as the result of synthesizing Aristotle and Plato—and, of course, much of the ensuing tradition after the two.
An additional interest has been seeing to what degree the Neoplatonists’ differing positions found their way into the ‘Long Middle Ages’ across the Latin, Byzantine, and Arabic worlds. Although ‘Aristotle’ is directly cited in many figures of this period, often this is ‘Aristotle’ (or the ‘Platonists’) as filtered through multiple developments in early and late Neoplatonists. Thus understanding philosophical discussions on the first cause in this period ends up necessitating a strong understanding of the Neoplatonists and the crux of the issues that they, in turn, face with their first cause, i.e. the One. It is in this light that this study, with its focus on Proclus and Damascius on the One, came to be.
Now for some brief technical notes. Throughout the book I will follow the general convention of Platonic and Neoplatonic scholars to refer to principles and transcendent (Platonic) forms in the uppercase—thus, ‘Form’ or ‘Intellect’, for the transcendent version; ‘form’ or ‘soul’, either for the particular, immanent form (i.e. the form, ‘man’, in Socrates), or the particularized principle or entity. There may be certain variations in some places, such as in the translations, but I attempt to follow this general convention throughout.
Additionally, in including the Greek for all primary text passages quoted, I also follow the standard conventional textual marks given by the editions of the texts:
- –[…] —for English (translations and quotes)—indicates either paraphrasing, skipped section, context provided.
- –[…] —for Greek—indicates a deletion or ignoring in the edition.
- –⟨…⟩ indicates conjectural additions in the Greek, usually following the edition.
- –(…) —for English—indicates terms/phrases for clarification.
- –Numbers in primary source quotations, especially in italic or bold, are mine unless noted.
Abbreviations for primary texts cited may be found in the Bibliography and Index Locorum below.