A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

 

2.    Iamblichus.

 

Iamblichus, who was regarded as the next after Porphyry in the Neo-Platonic succession, had been his pupil at Rome. He was a native of Chalcis in Coele-Syria, and his own later activity as a teacher was in Syria. He died in the reign of Constantine, about 330. Eunapius describes him as socially accessible and genial, and as living on familiar terms with his numerous disciples. Though he is often described as having given to the Neo-Platonic school a decisive impulse in the direction of theurgy, the one well-authenticated anecdote on the subject in his biography does not lend any particular support to this view. A rumor had gone abroad that sometimes during his devotions he was raised in the air and underwent a transfiguration. His disciples, fearing that they were being excluded from some secret, took occasion to ask him if it was so. Though not much given to laughter, he laughed upon this inquiry, and said that the story was prettily invented but was not true. Eunapius was told this by his teacher Chrysanthius; and Chrysanthius had it from Aedesius, who bore a part in the conversation. The biographer certainly goes on to relate some marvels on hearsay, but he mentions distinctly that none of the disciples of Iamblichus wrote them down. He records them, as he says himself, with a certain hesitation; but he did not think himself justified in omitting what was told him by trustworthy witnesses.

The literary style of Iamblichus, Eunapius allows, has not the beauty and lucidity of Porphyry's. Not that it altogether fails of clearness, nor that it is grammatically incorrect; but it does not draw the reader on. As Plato said of Xenocrates, he had not sacrificed to the Hermaic Graces. An interesting account is given of the way in which he was stirred up to reflection on political topics by Alypius, an acute dialectician of Alexandria. A public disputation having been arranged between them, Alypius put to him a question from which he at first turned away with disdain. The query was: "Whether a rich man is necessarily either unjust or the heir of one who has been unjust." According to the traditional philosophic view that poverty and wealth, in comparison with the goods of the mind, are alike indifferent, the question seemed frivolous; but further thought modified the impression, and Iamblichus became an admirer of Alypius and afterwards wrote his life. The composition, Eunapius thought, was not successful; and this he ascribes to the author's want of aptitude for political discussion and of real interest in it. It conveyed a sense of Iamblichus's admiration for Alypius, but did not succeed in giving the reader any clear idea as to what he had said or done.

Eunapius himself was not by special training a philosopher, but a rhetorician. He was an adherent of the party attached to the old religion. Commonly, he is described as an indiscriminate panegyrist of all the philosophers of his party; but, as we see, he was not wanting in candor. While looking back with reverence to Iamblichus as the intellectual chief of the men whose doctrines he followed, he does not in the least understate his defects of style. And on no one does he lavish more praise than on his Athenian teacher in rhetoric, Prohaeresius, who was a Christian. Iamblichus was one of those who are placed higher by their own age than by later times. His reputation had probably reached its greatest height about the time of Julian, who spoke of him as not inferior in genius to Plato. Still, he remains a considerable philosopher. He modified the doctrine of Plotinus more deeply than Porphyry; and the changes he made in it were taken up and continued when it came to be systematized by the Athenian school. If he does not write so well as Porphyry or Proclus, he succeeds in conveying his meaning. And, while professedly expounding the tradition of a school, and freely borrowing from his predecessors, he always has a distinctive drift of his own.

The surviving works of Iamblichus belonged to a larger treatise in which the Pythagorean philosophy was regarded as the original source of the tradition he expounds. Of the separate works, the first in order is a Life of Pythagoras. The second is mainly ethical in content, and is a general exhortation to the study of philosophy. The remaining three are mathematical. The best notion of the individual tone of Iamblichus's thought will be given by an abstract of the second book—the Protrepticus. But first a word must be said on the kind of modification he made in the doctrine of Plotinus.

From the references in later writers, it is known that he attempted a more systematic analysis of the stages of emanation by resolving them into subordinate triads. As there are traces of this already in Porphyry, and as Proclus carried the method much further, the interest of Iamblichus here is that he illustrates the continuous effort of the school towards completeness and consistency. He dwelt with special emphasis on the position that the causal process from higher to lower is logical, and not in time; and thought it not without danger to suppose a temporal production of the world even as a mere hypothesis. More explicitly than Plotinus or Porphyry, he insisted that no individual soul can remain permanently in the intelligible world any more than in Tartarus. It is the nature of every particular soul to descend periodically and to reascend in accordance with a law of universal necessity. The point where he was most original was, however, his affirmation, as against Plotinus, that when the soul "descends" it descends wholly. The whole soul, and not merely a kind of effluence of it, is in relation with this world so long as it is here at all. There is no "pure soul" that remains exempt from error while the "composite nature" is at fault. If the will sins, how can the soul be without sin? This correction in what seemed Plotinus's over-exalted view was almost universally allowed, and was definitively taken up by Proclus. It certainly does not bear out the notion that Iamblichus was a thinker who deserted all sobriety in order to turn a philosophic school into an association of theosophic adepts.

The Protrepticus is in considerable part made up of excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, and Neo-Pythagorean writings, but it is at the same time consistently directed to the end of showing the importance of theoretical knowledge both for itself and in relation to practice. Contemplation is put first; but, of all the school, Iamblichus dwells most on the bearing of knowledge upon practical utilities. At the beginning he brings out the point that general scientific discipline must be communicated before philosophy, "as the less before the greater mysteries". We are to regard the constancy of the stellar movements, so that we may be prepared to adapt ourselves to the necessary course of things. From scientific knowledge we are to rise to wisdom as knowledge of first principles, and finally as theology. We need knowledge to make use of "goods," which without the wisdom to use them are not goods, or rather are evils. Things in use have reference to the body, and the body is to be attended to for the sake of the soul and its ruling powers. Each of us is the soul, and knowledge of the soul is knowledge of oneself. The physician as such does not know himself. Those who practice arts connected not with the body directly but with things that are for the body, are still more remote from self-knowledge, and their arts are rightly called mechanical. We must exercise the divinest part of the soul by the appropriate motions. Now to what is divine in us the movements of the whole are akin. In the part of the soul that has rational discourse is the intellectual principle, which is the best that belongs to the soul. For the sake of this, and of the thoughts with which it energizes, all else exists.

While without philosophy practical life cannot be well regulated, the theoretic life is yet not finally for the sake of practice. Rather, mind itself and the divine are the ultimate end, the mark at once of the intellectual eye and of love. It is by the power of living the life of theory that we differ from other animals. Of reason and prudence there are in them also some small gleams, but they have no part in theoretic wisdom; whereas in accuracy of perception and vigor of impulse many of them surpass man. Since, however, we are discoursing with men and not with gods, we must mingle exhortations bearing on civic and practical life. Now philosophy alone, in relation to the other kinds of knowledge, can judge and direct. And philosophical knowledge is not only possible but is in one way more attainable than other knowledge, because it is of first principles, which are better known by nature and are more determinate. It is of the highest degree of utility, because it definitely makes its object the insight by which the wise man judges and the reason which proceeds from insight and is expressed in law. And that it is not inaccessible is shown by the eagerness with which students devote themselves to it. Unlike other scientific pursuits, it demands no special appliances or conditions of time and place.

After further elaborating this argument, Iamblichus proceeds to infer from "common notions" that insight is most to be chosen for itself, and not for the sake of other things. Suppose a man to have everything else and to suffer from a malady in the part of him that has insight, life would not be for him a gift to choose, for none of its other goods would be of any use to him. Insight, therefore, cannot be a mere means to gaining other things. The way too in which death is shunned proves the soul's love of knowledge; for it flees what it does not know, the dark and the unapparent, and by nature pursues what is plain to sight and knowable. And although, as they that declare the mysteries say, our souls are bound to our bodies to pay the penalty of some antenatal offence, yet, in so far as human life has the power of sharing in divine and immortal intellect, man appears as a god in relation to the other things that are on earth.

Iamblichus next argues on Aristotelian grounds that man has a natural end, and that this end is that which in the genetic order, fulfilling itself as this does continuously, is the latest to be perfected. Now in human development mental insight is that which is last attained. This then is the final good of man. For we must at length stop at something that is good in itself. Otherwise, by viewing each thing in turn as a means to some extraneous end, we commit ourselves to a process to infinity. Yet, though insight is not properly a utility, but a good to be chosen for itself, it also furnishes the greatest utilities to human life, as may be seen from the arts. Just as the physician needs a knowledge of nature, so the lawgiver and the moralist need theoretical knowledge, though of another kind, if they are to regulate the social life of man. The relation of this knowledge to the whole of life is like that of sight to physical action. In itself it simply judges and shows, but without it we could do nothing or very little.

Those who enjoy the pleasure of insight enjoy most the perfection of life in itself; an enjoyment which is to be distinguished from incidental pleasures, received while living but not springing essentially from the proper activity of life. The difficulty of living the theoretic life here, comes from the conditions of human nature; for now we have to be constantly doing things that have relation to needs. This is most of all the lot of those deemed happiest by the many. If, however, we prepare ourselves by philosophizing, we may hope, having returned whence we came, to live in untroubled contemplation of divine truth. Thus Iamblichus is led from the Aristotelian ideal of the contemplative life to the thought of the Phaedo, that philosophizing is a kind of dying; death being nothing but the separation of the soul from the body to live a life by itself. Our soul can never perceive truth in its purity till it is released. To prepare it for such knowledge, and to approach that knowledge as near as possible while we live, we must purify the soul from all that comes to it from the body—from common desires and fears, care about needs, and the hindrances thrown in the way by external sense. The genuine virtues of courage, temperance and justice proceed from the insight reached by philosophic purification; the virtues that result from a balancing of pleasures and pains are a mere adumbration of virtue. When a distinction is drawn between the lot in Hades of the uninitiated and of the initiated, we may understand by the truly initiated no other than those who have become purified through philosophy. Those who do not arrive in Hades as purified souls, quickly become subject to rebirth in new bodies. Therefore, since the soul is immortal, there is for it no escape from ills and no safety except to acquire as much goodness and insight as possible.

The character of the philosopher is next set forth by an excerpt of the celebrated passage in the Theaetetus. An account of the ideal philosophic education is adapted from the seventh book of the Republic. The Platonic view is enforced that the special function of philosophy is to remove from the soul the accretion that comes to it from birth, and to purify that energy of it to which the power of reason belongs. The argument of the Gorgias is then taken up, that the intemperate soul, which would be ever getting and spending, is like a "leaky vessel," while orderliness in the soul resembles health in the body. After some further development of this topic, Iamblichus returns to the point that philosophy is the most directive of all the arts.

Hence most pains ought to be spent in learning it. An art of dealing with words, indeed, might be learned in a short time, so that the disciple should be no worse than the teacher; but the excellence that comes from practice is only to be acquired by much time and diligence. The envy of men, too, attaches itself to rapid acquisitions of every kind; praise is more readily accorded to those that have taken long to acquire. Further, every acquirement ought to be used for a good end. He that aims at all virtue is best when he is useful to most. Now that which is most useful to mankind is justice. But for anyone to know the right distribution of things and to be a worker with the true law of human life, he must have acquired the directive knowledge that can only be given by philosophy.

Iamblichus then goes on to argue that even if one were to arise exempt from wounds and disease and pain, and gigantic of stature, and adamantine of body and soul, he could in the long run secure his own preservation only by aiding justice. An evil so monstrous as tyranny arises from nothing but lawlessness. Some wrongly deem that men are not themselves the causes of their being deprived of freedom, but are forcibly deprived of it by the tyrant. To think that a king or tyrant arises from anything but lawlessness and greed is folly. When law and justice have departed from the multitude, then, since human life cannot go on without them, the care of them has to pass over to one. The one man whom some suppose able by his single power to dissolve justice and the law that exists for the common good of all, is of flesh like the rest and not of adamant. It is not in his power to strip men of them against their will. On the contrary, he survives by restoring them when they have failed. Lawlessness then being the cause of such great evils, and order being so great a good, there is no means of attaining happiness but to make law preside over one's own life.

The Protrepticus concludes with an interpretation of thirty-nine Pythagorean "symbols", or short precepts which are taken as cryptic expressions of philosophic truths. In their literal meaning, Iamblichus says, they would be nonsensical; but, according to the "reserve" inculcated by Pythagoras on his disciples, not all of them were intended to be understood easily by those who run. Iamblichus proposes to give the solutions of them all, without making an exception of those that fell under the Pythagorean reserve.

The interpretations contain many points of interest. If the precepts were ever literal "taboos", not a trace of this character is retained. The last given, which was generally understood to command abstinence from animal food, is interpreted simply as inculcating justice with fit regard for what is of kindred nature and sympathetic treatment of the life that is like our own. The absence of any reference to the literal meaning seems to indicate that Iamblichus did not follow Porphyry on this point. In interpreting the "symbols" relating to theology, if the whole of what he says is fairly considered, he seems to give them a turn against credulity; his last word being that that which is to be believed is that which is demonstrable. One of them runs, "Mistrust nothing marvelous about the gods, nor about the divine opinions." After pointing out generally the weakness of man's faculties, which should prevent him from judging rashly as to what is possible to the gods, Iamblichus goes on to explain more particularly that by "the divine opinions" are meant those of the Pythagorean philosophy, and that they are proved by cogent demonstration to be necessarily true.

The precept therefore means: Acquire mathematical knowledge, so that you may understand the nature of demonstrative evidence, and then there will be no room for mistrust. That is also what is meant in reference to the gods. The truth about the whole, Iamblichus says in another place, is concealed and hard to get hold of, but is to be sought and tracked out by man through philosophy, which, receiving some small sparks from nature, kindles them into a flame and makes them more active by the sciences that proceed from herself. Many of the sayings are interpreted as commending the method of philosophizing from intelligible principles setting forth the nature of the stable and incorporeal reality. The "Italic" philosophy—which had long since come to be regarded as a doctrine of incorporeal being—is to be preferred before the Ionic. The precept, not to carve the image of a god on a ring is interpreted to mean, "Think of the gods as incorporeal." The model of method for the discovery of truth about divine things is, as has been said, that of mathematics. Thus the precept is turned against the method of search by a series of dichotomies, and in favor of a process which leads directly to truth without ambiguity because each step of the way is demonstratively certain as soon as it is taken. The special bearing of the Pythagorean philosophy, with its appeal to equality and proportion, on the virtue of justice is dwelt one. Then, in nearing the end, Iamblichus points out as one incitement to philosophies, that of all kinds of knowledge philosophy alone has no touch of envy or of joy in others' ill, since it shows that men are all akin and of like affections and subject in common to unforeseen changes of fortune. Whence it promotes human sympathy and mutual love.