Neoplatonic Virtue: Fate, Providence, and the Soul | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

Neoplatonic Virtue: Fate, Providence, and the Soul | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

In this session we begin Proclus’ On Providence, a philosophical letter addressed to an engineer named Theodore who holds a strict mechanical determinism: the cosmos is a single machine, the celestial spheres are its interlocking gears, and souls are simply what the gears move. Against this, Proclus argues for a more layered view of reality — one in which fate and providence are two distinct causes at different levels, and in which the soul has two modes of existence that stand in radically different relations to necessity.

The session opens with two threads left over from the previous class. The first is a proposed refinement of the translation of aretē: instead of “virtue” or “excellence” or even “vital power,” we consider “dimensions of greatness” — individual virtues as axes along which a soul’s greatness can be measured. The second is a new interpretation of telestic madness, the Dionysian form of divine inspiration that corresponds to the purificatory virtues. Rather than understanding it as the gift of prescribing purificatory rites, the session proposes that it is properly a theatrical madness: the capacity to fully inhabit a character in a ritual performance, and through that identification to realize oneself as the immortal soul that can play any role — thereby loosening one’s grip on a misaligned life.

The bulk of the session works through Proclus’ three preliminary distinctions: between providence and fate as two distinct causes (not cause and effect, but two causes at different levels, with providence governing everything and fate governing only bodies and externally moved things); between the separately existing soul and the soul implanted in the body (with freedom belonging to the former and necessity to the latter); and between two kinds of knowledge (one bound to material conditions and one independent of them, grounding the possibility of genuine truth). Along the way, a sustained excursus explores the common notions underlying both terms — what ordinary speakers mean by “fate” and “providence,” tracing the Hebrew vocabulary (mazal, goral, hashgacha) and examining how these concepts relate to the problem of evil and to medieval debates about grace and nature.

Part of an ongoing graduate reading group working through Proclus’ On Providence.

Transcript