Nicholas of Methone’s Refutation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology primarily interests two fairly distinct modern audiences. On the one hand, it attracts the attention of scholars of Proclus who are interested in the interpretation and critical examination of his arguments, as well as his reception by later authors.¹ On the other hand, it engages the attention of scholars who study the intellectual currents of the middle Byzantine period, especially the period extending from Michael Psellos’ career in the 11th century until Nicholas’ death in the mid-12th century. These intellectual currents include both philosophical discussions that owe much to Psellos’ revival of philosophical learning, and also theological disputes, some concerned with issues purely internal to the Greek-speaking church, and some concerned with the errors of the Latins.² The second audience thus finds in Nicholas’ polemic against Proclus echoes of theological concerns in his other works, which themselves reflect the prevailing theological discussions of his time. Readers of Proclus, however, are likely to be disappointed with Nicholas, for while his work takes the form of a commentary, it seldom illuminates the many difficulties of Proclus’ thought; while Nicholas does make arguments intended to refute Proclus, the informed reader of Proclus will generally find these arguments unpersuasive, since they so often rely on misunderstandings of Proclus or on theological premises that Proclus did not share.

While one certainly can examine Nicholas alongside Proclus, looking for insights into Proclus’ text and for refutations of his arguments (or, instead, for Nicholas’ failure to deepen our understanding of Proclus or to show flaws in his logic), and there are undoubtedly insights to be gained through such an approach, in this paper I propose a different and, in some ways, more fruitful approach. Instead of attempting to measure Proclus against Nicholas’ specific arguments at the local syllogistic level or, conversely, to measure Nicholas’ critique by the internal standards of Proclus’ thought, i.e., to evaluate his arguments on Proclus’ own terms, it is possible to inquire after the internal logic of Nicholas’ own theological vision, and to attempt to indicate the systematic features of this vision. Elsewhere I have discussed aspects of Nicholas’ interpretation of Proclus, as do other contributions within this volume.³ Nicholas is clearly an unsympathetic reader, and frequently misinterprets Proclus. Here, however, rather than evaluating Nicholas’ interpretation and criticism of Proclus in the light of Proclus’ own thought, my aim instead is to elucidate certain central and systematic features of Nicholas’ thought and to show how we can understand him as having a more or less coherent system whose principles largely determine his response to each of Proclus’ propositions. My hope is that a clear exposition of how Proclus and Nicholas diverge in their most basic assumptions and intuitions will better equip us to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their respective visions and, by extension, of Neoplatonic and Christian thought more generally.

One may say, of course, that Nicholas simply opposes Proclus with Christian doctrine, and this is true. Yet he does so with his own specific emphases, emphases that are not uniformly shared by other patristic and Byzantine sources. It is these distinctive emphases, or some of them at least, that I would like to highlight here. If we think of Nicholas as implicitly having a “counter-Elements”, we may to some extent simply identify this with the Christian creed. Yet important aspects of Nicholas’ response are not explicable in such generic terms. The distinctive emphases of Nicholas’ Refutation represent a creative development and reworking of various patristic themes, and thus I devote a portion of this paper to situating Nicholas’ thought in relation to the patristic sources that, whether acknowledged or not, seem to contribute something to his thought.⁴

I have elsewhere shown how one of Nicholas’ prominent strategies is to invoke Dionysius’ emphasis on divine mystery and transcendence as a way of defending the doctrine of the Trinity against Proclus’ system (with its apparently unitarian first principle), which he regards as an exercise in rationalistic hubris.⁵ While the role of Dionysian apophaticism for Nicholas remains prominent in this exposition, I focus here on Nicholas’ ideas about divine motion and fecundity (or fertility = γονιμότης). Nicholas signals the particular importance of these ideas by placing them at the end of his prologue to the Refutation, which is a fitting starting point for our inquiry.

Nicholas’ prologue can be divided into five sections. In the first section, Nicholas expresses his astonishment that some of his fellow Christians are fascinated by Proclus and have thereby fallen into heresy. “For this reason”, he announces,

I took care lest many of our contemporaries suffer that fate (as many, that is, as deem worthy of study the chapters by Proclus of Lycia called Theological Elements), and I knew that I must indicate, after diligently fixing my mind on them, the opinion in each chapter that is contrary to the divine faith, providing also some refutation so as to unmask the elaborate lie that eludes most people, hidden as it is in elegance.⁶

After a second section (2.13–31) in which he invokes divine aid for his endeavor, contrasting divine wisdom with the foolishness of merely human wisdom, Nicholas develops an elaborate typology in the third section (3.1–4.2), according to which Proclus’ Elements of Theology is like a new Tower of Babel, with propositions for its bricks and logic for its mortar. In the fourth section (4.3–18), Nicholas comments on a few specific features of Proclus’ text, beginning with the first proposition, which he regards as an attack on the Christian Trinity.

In the fifth and final section, Nicholas begins to articulate some of the main themes of his response to Proclus. This section merits close attention, for it expresses concisely several of Nicholas’ fundamental themes. We will consider this fifth section now in two parts. The first subsection (4.19–5.3) introduces the Dionysian aspect of Nicholas’ critique, and the second subsection (5.3–15) integrates the themes of divine fecundity and self-movement into this Dionysian framework, connecting both themes to a famous statement in Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oration 29:

For one must know that the things demonstrated by him concerning one and multitude do not at all give offense to us in regard to the doctrine of the highest Trinity, since, to speak as does the great Dionysius, that which is worshipped by us is both one and three and neither one nor three, since it is beyond every one and every multitude, seeing that it is in fact even superior to number, and transcends every word and every concept.⁷ For, truly, that which is revered would not be beyond us if it were captured by our intellect and reason; yet it escapes not only our intellect, but even all the supercelestial beings, which are also intellects, since they are also named “intellectual substances”.⁸ We confess therefore that the divinity is a Trinity and that the same is a monad and the One; its being three does not negate its being the One, nor does its being the One negate its being three, but rather, from both it is confirmed to be both. For it is three, not as being measured by number, but as what gives substance to every three and measures every number; for this reason it is not a countable three, so that it could also be called a multitude, but is the one and only Trinity, and not by participation in the One (for such a three is countable and belongs to the same order as the multitude), but as being itself the One.⁹

Again, it is the One, yet it is not sterile nor by any means unmoved; rather, since it itself is the cause of all fecundity and motion, for this reason it is the fecund-in-itself and the unique and very first self-moved, lest it be deprived of the best things that are derived from it. For if it is sterile, whence comes fecundity for others, and if it is unmoved, whence comes motion? For otherwise one must grant that something else is the cause of these qualities, and in this case the cause of all things would not be one; but if, on the contrary, the cause of all things is both one and fecund, then it must also be self-moved. Because of this, says Gregory the Theologian, the monad from the beginning moved toward a dyad and at the trinity came to a halt. Since then, this one is both fecund and self-moved, for this reason it is also three, and since it is three (though not in a countable way, but as the ground of all number), on account of this it is also one; or rather, let us say that the unique and supersubstantial Three itself is the same as the One itself.¹⁰

Nicholas thus argues that since motion and fecundity are positive features of the created order—that since they are among “the best things that derive” from the One, they must, in a transcendent manner, be “precontained”, in the One itself. If the One, by what we might call a “creative fecundity”,¹¹ brings into being creatures that themselves possess fecundity, then the One must itself possess not only a creative fecundity, but also a “natural fecundity”, i.e. a fecundity internal to itself that is the paradigm or transcendent pattern of the natural fecundity in creatures and that is, it would seem, the foundation of the creative act itself.¹² Likewise, if the One by its own creative movement is the source and cause of creatures that are capable of movement, then it must somehow originate and prefigure this movement by containing motion within itself as “self-motion”. In the climactic line of the prologue Nicholas binds together these two ideas of divine fecundity and divine self-motion with the words of Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 29: “Because of this, the monad from the beginning moved toward a dyad and at the Trinity came to a halt.” According to Nicholas, the divine fecundity made manifest in the begetting of the Son and the proceeding of the Spirit may be understood as an eternal self-motion, the principle and paradigm of all creaturely motion, and especially of creaturely self-motion. I will return shortly to the particular significance of creaturely self-motion.

Whereas Nicholas began the final paragraph of the prologue by enlisting Dionysian apophaticism in defense of the Trinity, contending that the Trinity transcends our concepts of oneness and threeness, he ends the prologue with a kind of analogical argument for the Trinity as the transcendent source or paradigm of all created fecundity and motion. Nicholas’ appeal to Gregory is situated within a Dionysian dialectic between the apophatic and cataphatic approaches that Nicholas, like Dionysius, always sees as complementary modes of thinking about God. Not content with employing the apophatic side of this dialectic to safeguard the Trinity against the encroachments of what he regards as Proclus’ rationalism, Nicholas pairs this negative argument with a positive argument for the superiority of Trinitarian doctrine over what he regards as the sterile pagan alternative, the unmoved monad.

The stark contrast between this idea of divine self-motion and Proclus’ way of seeing things is made quite clear in Nicholas’ comments upon Prop. 14, where Proclus presents a hierarchy in which the “unmoved” has the highest rank, followed by the “self-moved” in the middle (the level of soul), and the “other-moved” at the bottom (the level of body). Whereas Proclus, following a long tradition, placed the “unmoved” at the top of the hierarchy, Nicholas argues that the predicate “unmoved” does not, strictly speaking, apply to anything that exists: only what does not exist at all can be described as entirely without movement. Unlike Proclus, who divides reality into the unmoved and the moved, with a further subdivision of the latter into the self-moved and the other-moved, Nicholas instead places the fundamental division between the self-moved and the other-moved. The category of “self-moved” applies in the strict sense to the Trinity alone, and thus the category of “other-moved” extends to everything else, i.e. to everything that God has brought into being and that is thus “other-moved” in its origin.¹³ Within this latter category Nicholas makes a further division between what is “secondarily” or “relatively” self-moved (τά δευτέρως αὐτοκίνητα), namely angels and rational souls presumably, and what is exclusively other-moved, namely bodies:

(…) the entirely unmoved is, according to the precise and true account, that which in no way at all exists; all bodies whatsoever are other-moved, and the bodiless substances [i.e. angels and rational souls] are participants in the self-motion that we call self-determination, receiving this from the first self-moved and self-subsistent substance, which, according to Gregory the Theologian, as Monad from the beginning naturally moved toward a dyad and at the Trinity came to a halt. Creatively moving by excess of goodness, [this first self-moved substance] produces all beings, both those which are self-moved in a relative fashion, and those which are other-moved. One must in all cases qualify movement in accordance with the things that are moved: just as one must speak naturally of natural things, so also one must speak super-naturally of super-natural things.¹⁴

One can detect the Dionysian way of thinking in this last statement, which emphasizes the ambiguity or polyvalence of terms relating to motion. Nicholas goes on to criticize Proclus for lacking such nuance, appealing to Aristotle along the way:

He understands “motion” without distinction, although this is said in various ways,¹⁵ and he understands “unmoved” without distinction, though this too is said in two ways: as superior to motion, and as inferior to motion, in the sense of privation. In this way then, although he wished to beguile through equivocal words, we show that he overturns himself rather than others.¹⁶

Nicholas is here rather unfair to Proclus, who of course was able to make and grasp fine distinctions, to say the least. Nicholas does avail himself of the two ways in which “unmoved” may be said, for while in this chapter he denies that the first cause is unmoved, in later chapters he is prepared to apply the predicate “unmoved” to God, provided it be understood in the superior sense. Thus, in chapter 16, he states,

And from these things it is clear, in fact, that the divine moves and reverts all things to itself, insofar as it is named the highest object of desire and longing. And moving all things, but moved by nothing else but itself alone, perhaps it alone may be called both unmoved and self-moved.¹⁷

So, it turns out that Nicholas admits a sense in which God is “unmoved”, namely, that he is not moved by anything else. And, of course, for Nicholas God’s proper self-motion has nothing to do with locomotion. But he has told us that the terms “motion” and “unmoved” both have more than one meaning, and so we also find that he sometimes applies the term “unmoved” to bodies, using the word in a lower sense simply to mean that they cannot move themselves.¹⁸ Later in the same chapter Nicholas summarizes his position again:

we confess that [the first being] is, properly speaking, self-existent and self-moved. It moves and makes and preserves all the other beings, transforming them as it pleases, granting to some, after being other-moved, also to be self-moved, but assigning to others only to be other-moved.¹⁹

Thus, only the creator is self-moved in the proper sense. All creatures are fundamentally other-moved, but some creatures are also self-moved in a derivative or qualified sense. Self-motion in a creature is ontologically posterior to its original “other-motion”, i.e. its being brought into existence. “Self-moved” in the proper sense coincides with “unmoved” in the sense of “unmoved by anything else”. “Other-moved” coincides with “unmoved” in the sense of “not able to move itself”,²⁰ and “entirely unmoved” applies only to the non-existent.

Gregory’s famous statement in Oration 29, “the Monad from the beginning moved toward dyad and at Trinity came to a halt”, is probably Nicholas’ primary source and inspiration for conceiving of the Trinity in terms of motion. Yet several passages in Dionysius must also have contributed to Nicholas’ interest in the ideas of divine motion generally and of divine self-motion in particular. Thus, in chapter 4 of the Divine Names, he quotes the following passage from the Hymns of Yearning by Hierotheos:

Come then, and gathering these [two powers] together again into one, let us say that there is a single power that, in order to produce a unifying mixture, of itself moves from the good all the way to the last among beings, and returns from there again through all things in sequence to the good, cycling from itself and through itself and by itself, revolving always identically toward itself.²¹

A little earlier, having posed the question, “What do the theologians mean, calling him at one time yearning and love, and at another time yearned-for and beloved?”, he answers, “He is a simple, self-moved, self-active desiring motion, pre-existing in the good and flowing out to beings from the good and returning again to the good.”²² In Letter 9, Dionysius says that by uncovering the more extraordinary scriptural symbols so as to “see these naked and pure in themselves”, “in this way we would revere the ‘source of life’ flowing into itself, also seeing [it] stable in itself and a certain single power, simple, self-moved, self-active, not abandoning itself, but being knowledge of all knowledges, and always contemplating itself through itself.”²³ So, as these citations show, one can find precedents in Dionysius for speaking of God as self-motion.²⁴ Nowhere, however, does Dionysius seem to suggest that divine self-movement is inherently Trinitarian, an association of ideas that is clearly present in Gregory’s Oration 29.

Nicholas’ interest in the notion of divine fecundity, however, clearly does derive from Dionysius, who is the first Christian author to associate the term fecundity (γονιμότης) with the Trinity.²⁵ In Divine Names 1.4 Dionysius writes, with allusion to Eph. 3:15, that God is hymned “as triad because of the tri-hypostatic manifestation of the super-substantial fecundity, from which ‘all fatherhood in heaven and on earth’ is and ‘is named’ ”.²⁶ This text is surely one of Nicholas’ chief inspirations: like Dionysius in this passage, he not only thinks of the Trinity in terms of fecundity, but also repeatedly speaks of divine fecundity as the source of creaturely fecundity.²⁷

Maximos the Confessor seems to be the first patristic writer to have explicitly related Gregory’s statement in Oration 29 to the Dionysian theme of divine fecundity (γονιμότης). We will come to this in a moment. In his scholia on Dionysius, however, John of Scythopolis had already alluded to this passage in relation to Dionysius’ discussion of the Trinity. Commenting on Dionysius’ discussion of “unions and distinctions within the unutterable Union and sustaining Source”,²⁸ John writes,

He now theologizes concerning the procession of the unspeakable Triad to three hypostases, that the God and Father, moving timelessly, beneficently and lovingly proceeded to a distinction of hypostases, remaining super-unified and super-simplified in his own wholeness, without parts and without diminishment, his own radiance proceeding into existence as a living Image, with also the all-Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father everflowingly and in a manner worthy of worship, as the Lord mystically teaches. And by goodness the cause and fount of all things is multiplied to a tri-hypostatic thearchy. And these things Gregory the Theologian says in his discourses against Eunomius [i.e., Oration 29].²⁹

While the term γονιμότης does not appear in this passage, the idea is clearly present when John speaks of the “cause and fount of all things” being “multiplied by goodness”.³⁰

Maximos, however, in his Ambigua to John, is the first to offer an interpretation of Gregory’s statement that explicitly relates it to divine fecundity. Unlike Nicholas, however, who in his Refutation of Proclus assigns a central role to divine self-motion, Maximos seems chiefly concerned to explain away Gregory’s apparent claim that God moves; Maximos understands the movement subjectively, as taking place in our progressive understanding of God’s triune character:

(…) the Monad from the beginning moved toward dyad and at Triad came to a halt. For it is moved in the intellect receptive to it, whether angelic or human, that through it and in it makes investigations concerning it. And, to speak more clearly, he teaches the intellect indivisibly in the first approach the principle concerning monad, lest division be introduced into the first cause, but spurs it to receive also its divine and unspeakable fecundity (γονιμότητα), saying to it in a hidden and mysterious manner that it should not think that this Good is ever ungenerative (ἄγονον) of Word and Wisdom or of sanctifying Power, which are consubstantial and hypostatic, lest the divine be conceived as composed of these as of accidents and not be believed to exist eternally as these.³¹

To summarize, then, it seems that Dionysius was the first Christian writer to have associated the Trinity with the term “fecundity” (γονιμότης), John of Scythopolis then brought Gregory’s text into a Dionysian context, and Maximos made an explicit connection between Trinity and fecundity in his explanation of the same text from Gregory. Nicholas’ actual formulations, however, strongly suggest that he also has John of Damascus in mind, as I will show shortly.

Not only in Nicholas’ prologue, but throughout his Refutation, the theme of divine fecundity is central. In nearly half of his twenty-two uses of the term “fecundity”, he qualifies it with the adjective “natural”. His purpose in specifying a “natural fecundity” (φυσική γονιμότης) is to emphasize what he regards as a crucial distinction between three different kinds of “procession” (πρόοδος), to use Proclus’ term. Proclus himself uses the term “fertile” or “fecund” (γονιμός), to characterize the productive capacity of principles at various levels within his system, but whereas Proclus’ emanative doctrine suggests a seamless continuity in the productive procession of the One into Being, into Life, into Intellect, into Soul, etc., Nicholas strictly distinguishes between three different processions. The fundamental and framing distinction is constituted by the “creative procession”, God’s free and unmediated production of all things from not being. This creative procession is never described in terms of “natural fecundity”, and in fact the word “fecundity” (γονιμότης) is not even usually applied to the creative procession. Only once, in Chapter 7, Nicholas explicitly distinguishes “demiurgic and creative” (δημιουργικὴ καὶ ποιητική) fecundity from “natural fecundity”,³² and later, in Chapter 151, Nicholas speaks of God’s creative capacity as a “knowing fecundity”, (ἐπιστημονική γονιμότης) and a “productive fecundity” (παρακτική γονιμότης). “Natural fecundity”, however, is strictly distinguished from this creative capacity, and designates, in the first place, the Father’s role as begettor of the Son and “projector” of the Spirit, and in the second place, reflections of this begetting and procession within the created order. Whereas the products of the creative procession are different in species from their cause, the characteristic feature of natural fecundity is that it brings about “offspring” that are of the same species and nature.³³

Nicholas’ specification of “natural fecundity” (φυσική γονιμότης) suggests the influence of John of Damascus, for in the De Fide Orthodoxa John writes, “It is impossible to say that God is lacking in the natural fecundity (φυσική γονιμότης); and fecundity is to beget from oneself or from one’s own substance offspring similar in nature to oneself.”³⁴ In another text John further specifies this notion as applying to the generation of both the Son and the Spirit:

(…) Christ the truth says: “The sower went out to sow”. And who is the sower? God and father and creator and farmer; God according to nature; father according to the natural fecundity by which he is Father of a Son and projector of a Spirit; creator, for by will he framed this universe from not being; farmer, for from his super-substantial existence he cultivates each of the things that come into being, distributing the substantial grace and power that are analogous and appropriate to the nature of each, as well as the persistence and stability of their natural state.³⁵

In this latter text from John, we see not only the specification of “natural” fecundity that is typical in Nicholas, but also the explicit identification of this fecundity with both the begetting of the Son and the projecting of the Holy Spirit, what Nicholas will designate as the “two-fold mode of natural fecundity” (τὸν διττὸν τρόπον τῆς φυσικῆς γονιμότητος). Thus, in responding to Proclus’ Proposition 64, Nicholas writes,

It is not the case that many self-perfect henads or monads proceeded from the one and only and all-perfect Father, but only two, according to the twofold mode of natural fecundity: the one and only Son by begetting, and the one and only Holy Spirit by proceeding (…).³⁶

Later, when commenting upon Proposition 151, Nicholas uses the same phrase, but with an addition:

(…) the One is fecund by nature, and begets the Son, not simply similar to itself and equal in nature, but super-naturally and ineffably from its own substance and nature, and brings forth likewise the Spirit, according to the twofold mode of natural fecundity beheld also among us, and thus the super-principle Monad, super-principially moving, came to a halt in Trinity; and the same is both monad and triad.³⁷

Nicholas’ phrase, “the twofold mode of natural fecundity beheld also among us” is puzzling at first sight, for it is not obvious what mode of fecundity might be intended besides begetting. The meaning becomes clear, however, in Chapter 18 of the Refutation, where Nicholas suggests the fountain and the sun as images of the “projection” of the Spirit:

although the Father is hypostatic cause (ὑποστατικὸν αἴτιόν) of both the Son and the Spirit, he is not the productive or creative cause, but rather, he is the begetting cause of the former, and the bringer-forth or projecting (προακτικὸν εἴτουν προβλητικὸν) cause of the latter, as Father and projector. And everything that thus begets and brings forth according to its own nature begets and brings forth something similar to itself. And so a man begets a man, and a horse begets a horse, and a fountain gushes forth water and the sun gives forth light with its ray, and these begotten and projected things are similar to what begot or brought them forth.³⁸

Thus, for Nicholas the divine fecundity that is distinctly expressed in both the begetting of the Son and the projecting of the Spirit is also reflected in a two-fold manner within the created order.

Let us return now to the theme of divine self-motion. Just as God’s natural fecundity is reflected in the natural fecundity of creatures, so also, according to Nicholas, divine self-motion (αὐτοκινησία) is reflected in the motion of creatures, and preeminently in the self-motion of angelic minds and rational souls. Of course, the association of self-motion with soul is an old one going back to Plato. Precisely this association is what we see in the hierarchy that Proclus outlines in Proposition 14. Nicholas, however, extends the application of self-motion beyond the level of Soul, on the one hand, so as to include both angelic intellects³⁹ and God, and on the other hand restricts the meaning of self-movement so that only rational souls, not all souls, are considered to be self-moved.⁴⁰ This restriction is made clear by his consistent association of self-movement with self-determination (αὐτεξουσιότητος).⁴¹ For example, in his commentary on Proposition 14, which we have already considered, he states that “the bodiless substances [i.e. angels and rational souls] are participants in the self-motion that we call self-determination, receiving this from the first self-moved and self-subsistent substance”.⁴² In other texts Nicholas assigns self-determination to “the rational soul and the super-cosmic intellects” (Refutation 19), or to “rational and intellectual [beings]” that are governed “by both nature and choice” (Refutation 43), and he makes it clear that self-determination is the power of choosing freely between moral alternatives. In chapter 185, he again identifies self-movement and self-determination, stating that “the soul is agreed to be self-determined, or at any rate the soul that is called rational, according to which especially it is also self-moved”.⁴³ In other words, it is designated as self-moved with respect to its rationality in particular. In chapter 186, he speaks of the animal that “is rational and because of this free and self-determined to do what it wishes, not being governed by nature alone, as the irrational animals are”.⁴⁴

There is nothing novel in this meaning of self-determination (αὐτεξούσιότης), which could be illustrated from many patristic sources. Both in prior authors and in Nicholas, however, αὐτεξούσιος typically applies only to angels and men rather than to God, though on one occasion, in one of his anti-Latin treatises, Nicholas does speak of the Holy Spirit as αὐτεξούσιος. Thus, αὐτοκίνητος and αὐτεξούσιος are not strictly interchangeable for Nicholas, since he more readily speaks of God as self-moved than as self-determined. Even so, the two terms are closely associated for Nicholas; this is unusual, and, as I have already noted, Nicholas’ understanding of self-moved in terms of self-determination is a restriction of the traditional sense of self-motion as a characteristic of soul in a broader sense.⁴⁵ When we investigate the sources for precedents for Nicholas’ usage, a familiar pattern emerges. In two passages of Gregory of Nazianzus, we find the terms αὐτοκίνητος and αὐτεξούσιος in close proximity in lists of attributes of the Son and the Holy Spirit.⁴⁶ And John of Scythopolis, in two scholia on Dionysius’ On the Divine Names, glosses “self-moved” as meaning “self-determined”, explicitly excluding the more generic sense of motion:

We should understand that by ‘self-moving’ he means those endowed with self-determination and those who rule themselves. He does not mean things that move themselves, e.g., animate beings, in opposition to immobile things, e.g., houses and mountains, rocks and wood.⁴⁷

Gregory and Dionysius are Nicholas’ two most important authorities in the Refutation, and we have seen already how Nicholas also seems to be influenced by John of Scythopolis’ scholia on Dionysius. It therefore seems quite likely that his conception of self-motion in terms of rational self-determination owes something to the influence of these earlier passages in Gregory and John.

What seems to be entirely unprecedented in Nicholas’ Refutation, however, is that he not only ascribes self-movement to God, but he specifically associates self-movement with God as Trinity, and interprets Gregory’s famous line, “the monad moved to dyad and at triad came to a halt”, in these terms. Unlike Maximus the Confessor, who in his interpretation of this passage takes pains to deny that God moves, Nicholas emphatically affirms that God is self-moved, or self-moving. Given that Nicholas all but identifies self-movement (αὐτοκινησία) with self-determination (αὐτεξουσιότης), by affirming divine self-motion he thereby maintains the divine freedom and, by extension, the freedom of rational souls made in God’s image. The logic is as follows: God as Trinity is paradigmatic self-motion, which is paradigmatic self-determination, or freedom. All creatures are fundamentally “other-moved” and therefore not free, yet some creatures, namely men and angels, are given a measure of self-motion, and thus have a relative self-determination or freedom. For man this is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, and thus it follows that human freedom is an image of the divine freedom that is the Trinity.⁴⁸

Nicholas’ conception of the Trinity as self-moved and therefore free is doubtless linked to his concern to oppose Proclus’ emanationist conception whereby all lower levels of reality are produced “by the mere being” of the first cause. If, as Proclus maintains, the first cause is unmoved, then it seems it must produce “by mere being”. If, however, one maintains that God creates freely, then he must create by will, not by being; he is thus not unmoved, but self-moved. Consider Proclus’ Prop. 76 and Nicholas’ response:

Prop. 76: Everything that comes to be from an unmoved cause has an unchangeable existence; everything that comes to be from a moving cause has a changeable existence.

For if the maker is entirely unmoved, then it produces what is second after it not through motion but by mere being; and if this is so, then it has what derives from it concurrent with its own being; and if this is so, then so long as it exists, it produces. But it always exists, and so it always causes what is after it to subsist. This implies that the latter is always coming into being from it and always exists, attaching its own “always” according to procession to the maker’s “always” according to activity (…).⁴⁹

Refutation 76: That whose being is incomprehensible, of this the power and activity are also incomprehensible, so that both the creation and its manner are incomprehensible; foolish is he who investigates “the how” and who tries to subject this to demonstration. But that the divine is incomprehensible is agreed upon by all.

What comes to be is not unchangeable, for assuredly it comes to be, formerly not existing, but being changed from not being into being, and developing, according to its nature, to be changed from being into not being, unless the goodness of the creator holds it together and preserves it in being. We should therefore attribute the manner of the creation, and the persistence or change of things that have come into being or have been created, to the purpose of the Creator, who defines according to his will the manner of the creation, the measures of its persistence, and the order and change into one another of the things made, […] But Proclus, rejecting the divine will, and determining by the mere existence of the Creator the production of what comes into being, seems to introduce the creation as involuntary for the Creator; for this reason, furthermore, he does not call it creation, but production. […] And God produces nothing among beings by mere being, i.e., without willing, so as to have his product concurrent with his own being, but all things are posterior to his unoriginate existence; only his begetting of the Son and “projecting” of the Spirit is by mere being, and for this reason these are co-unoriginate and co-eternal and con-substantial with the Begetter and Projector. “Involuntary” has no place there, but [God produces beings] by one will that is common to the three Persons, insofar as the goodness of the Begetter and Projecter, of the Begotten, and of the Projected, is one and common.⁵⁰

While Nicholas does not explicitly claim here, as elsewhere, that God is self-moved, he clearly must reject the premise of the unmoved mover, for only thereby can he reject the production “by mere being” that in his view denies the freedom of the first cause. Quite possibly this concern is the philosophical motivation for his earlier rejection of the more traditional teaching that God is unmoved. He does not seem to have considered that one might, with John Philoponus, reject the inference rather than the premise.⁵¹

I turn now to another issue that merits investigation, and this is the question of the original meaning and context of the famous line in Gregory of Nazianzus that Nicholas repeatedly quotes: “the monad from the beginning moved toward a dyad and at the trinity came to a halt”. This text appears near the beginning of Gregory’s Oration 29.

The highest beliefs about God are three: anarchy, polyarchy, and monarchy. The first two were played with by children among the Greeks, and let them play. For anarchy is without order; and polyarchy is factious, and in this way anarchic, and in this way without order. So both lead to the same result, namely disorder, and this leads to destruction; for disorder is a preparation for destruction. But monarchy is what is honored by us—not the monarchy that one person circumscribes, for even one person, if at odds with himself, can become many, but the monarchy that is established by equal honor of nature, by agreement of opinion, by identity of motion, and by the tendency toward the one of those that derive from it (which indeed is impossible for the created nature) so that, even if they differ in number, they cannot be divided in substance. Because of this (διὰ τοῦτο) the monad, moved from the beginning to dyad, came to a halt at triad. And this is for us (καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν ἡμῖν) the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; the first, begettor and projector, impassibly of course, and without time or body; and the others, the begotten one and the projection, or I do not know how someone might call these, abstracting in every way from visible things. For we do not dare to say “overpouring of goodness”, which one of those who philosophized among the Greeks dared to say, like some cup overflowing, clearly saying this, in the chapters where he [i.e., Plotinus] philosophizes concerning first and second cause, lest we ever introduce the begetting as unwilling, like some natural and unrestrainable secretion, most unfitting for our conceptions regarding divinity. Because of this, establishing our own definitions, we introduce the unbegotten, and the begotten, and the one who proceeds from the Father, as somewhere God the Word himself says.⁵²

One might easily assume that the words Nicholas loves to quote were simply Gregory’s own words. Nicholas himself presumably thought so and cited them on Gregory’s authority. On closer examination, however, Gregory appears to be quoting or alluding to someone else’s text. The clue lies in the word ἡμῖν (‘for us’). διὰ τοῦτο (‘because of this’) signals the logical connection between the first part and the statement about the motion of the monad. But after this statement, the “for us” signals that the previous line is not Gregory’s own words. Rather, he is quoting or paraphrasing another source (unidentified) to make a Trinitarian point.⁵³

There is not space here to consider at length the various neo-Pythagorean parallels to this language, and so I limit myself to citing the most impressive parallel that I have so far been able to identify. It is found in a fragment from a historical work by Eunapius, who is best known for his Lives of the Philosophers:

Receiving this one as an ally, he kept him by his side; and then another was added, and there was a multitude; and just as, according to the Pythagoreans, a monad, when it is moved to dyad, is no longer deprived of the nature of the numbers, but is dispersed and flows into many, in this way, when Charietto took up Cercio, their achievements increased, and the number of their allies grew in proportion to their achievements.⁵⁴

Eunapius’ use of the numerological analogy here seems rather strained, since he is speaking about the arrival of reinforcements in a military campaign. But the fragment shows very clearly the Pythagorean (or neo-Pythagorean) character of the idea that the monad moves into the number series.

While neither Maximus nor Nicholas seems to have realized it, Gregory was not directly asserting that God is moved, but instead was using a Pythagorean motif to make a Trinitarian point. Maximus, on the one hand, by interpreting the passage in purely subjective terms, obscures Gregory’s objective point about the Trinity. Nicholas, on the other hand, by interpreting this motion of monad to triad as a Trinitarian self-motion, and thus an affirmation of divine self-determination, probably reads far more into the passage than Gregory intended. Further investigation is needed to understand the Neopythagorean and Plotinian background of Gregory’s thought, and its implications for understanding him. Probably the unmoving ‘motion’ of numbers seemed a fitting way of gesturing toward the paradoxes of intra-Trinitarian causality.