Damascius

Damascius
Born462
Damascus
Diedafter 538
Alexandria

Damascius (/dəˈmæʃəs/; Ancient Greek: Δαμάσκιος; c. 462 – after 538) was the last scholarch of the Neoplatonic Athenian school. He was one of the Neoplatonic philosophers who left Athens after laws confirmed by emperor Justinian I forced the closure of the Athenian school in c. AD 529. After he left Athens, he may have sought refuge in the court of the Persian King Chrosroes, before being allowed back into the Byzantine Empire. His surviving works consist of three commentaries on the works of Plato, and a metaphysical text entitled Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles.

Life

Much of what is known about Damascius's life comes from his semi-autobiographical work The Philosophical History, or Life of Isidore, and from a work called Vita Severi written by the 6th-century bishop and historian Zacharias Scholasticus. Damascius, as his name suggests, was born in Damascus in c. AD 462, and travelled to Alexandria in the 480s to study rhetoric at the coeducational school of the late 5th-century Alexandrian professor Horapollo, where students of different religions and philosophies studied together. Zacharias reports that there was a close relationship between the Neoplatonic communities of Athens and Alexandria, as Agapius of Athens and Severianus of Damascus, students of Proclus' Neoplatonic school in Athens, also studied in Neoplatonic schools in Alexandria. Damascius may have travelled to Athens shortly before Proclus died in AD 485, to teach rhetoric, and travelled back to Alexandria before 488.

6th-century mosaic of Justinian I in the Basilique San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. Damascius was head of the last Neoplatonic school in Athens when the laws of Justinian I forced its closure.

Late 5th-century Alexandria was a tumultuous place: there were conflicting factions of pro-Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians, and a growing hostile sentiment towards Neoplatonists and people of other non-Christian religions and philosophies that sometimes led to rioting and arrests of leaders of non-Christian schools, resulting in students having to flee and go into hiding. Damascius's account of these times paints a picture of a circle of intellectuals that was under siege, facing arrest and interrogation. They were sometimes courageous, but at other times capitulated. Horapollo, the head of the school at which Damascius had studied and taught rhetoric for nine years, was arrested in AD 489, causing Damascius and the Neoplatonic philosopher Isidore of Alexandria to flee Alexandria and start on a journey to Athens with the aim of studying in the Neoplatonic school there.

That journey took eight months, and during that time Damascius writes that he lost interest in pursuing a profession as a rhetorician. When they finally arrived in Athens, Damascius and Isidore became students of the 5th-century Neoplatonist Marinus of Neapolis, Proclus's successor, at the Neoplatonic school of Athens. By AD 515, Damascius had become head of the Neoplatonic school in Athens, succeeding Marinus's successor Isidore. He continued Isidore's path of steering the school back to the philosophical studies of Aristotle, Plato, Orphic theogony and the Chaldean Oracles, and away from theurgy and rituals, which had previously been favoured, most likely due to the increasing external pressure on the school's philosophical teachings. Damascius was still the head of the school in AD 529, when the Byzantine emperor Justinian I confirmed his Codex Justinianus and administrators, enforcing the new laws, closed it down.

According to the 6th-century historian Agathias, soon after the school closed, Damascius, Isidore and the 6th-century Neoplatonic philosophers Simplicius of Cilicia, Eulamius of Phrygia, Priscianus of Lydia, Hermias and Diogenes of Phoenicia left Athens and travelled to Persia, where they had heard that the intellectual climate might be more suited to them, under the refuge of the Persian King Chosroes. It is not known if Damascius and his retinue of philosophers arrived in Persia, although late 20th- and early 21st-century scholarship by the French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot, French scholar Michel Tardieu and German historian and philosopher Ilsetraut Hadot advanced the establishment of a Neoplatonic school in Charrae (present-day Harran, Turkey) in the Persian Empire, a view that is disputed by other 21st-century scholarship. The last known trace of Damascius is an epigram carved on a stele in Emesa, which confirms that Damascius returned to Syria in AD 538; this is also the year scholars say he died. Damascius composed a number of works, and a significant number of them survive fragmentarily, the more complete works being the literary work Life of Isidore, or Philosophical History, preserved by Photius, and the philosophical works Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, Commentary on the Parmenides, Commentary on the Phaedo, and Lectures on the Philebus.

Writings

Damascius' Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles is an intensely aporetic examination of late Neoplatonic metaphysics. Beginning from problems in Proclus' account of the One as transcendent cause, Damascius asks whether an absolutely transcendent principle can coherently be called a cause, a One, or indeed anything at all. He consequently distinguishes the causal One from an utterly Ineffable principle beyond it, while repeatedly questioning whether even this language is legitimate. The work then investigates the One, procession and reversion, henads, Being and the intelligible orders, critically comparing Plotinus, Iamblichus, Syrianus and Proclus and drawing extensively on Platonic, Pythagorean, Chaldean, Orphic and other theological traditions.

The rest of Damascius' writings are for the most part commentaries on works of Aristotle and Plato. Surviving commentaries include:

Lost or fragmentary works include:

Damascius and the Corpus Dionysiacum

Starting from an article published in 2006, Byzantine philologist Carlo Maria Mazzucchi has argued that Damascius was the author of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus, the "last counter-offensive of Paganism" (l'ultima controffensiva del paganesimo). Mazzucchi's theory, which faced some criticism, was later improved with more arguments.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Westerink, L. G. (2009). The Greek Commentaries on Plato's Phaedo, Volume II: Damascius (Revised Second ed.). Wiltshire, UK: The Prometheus Trust. p. 7. ISBN 978-1-898910-47-3.
  2. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 3, 423 (note 4).
  3. ↑ Remes & Slaveva-Griffin 2014, p. 35, The Alexandrian classrooms excavated and sixth-century philosophy teaching by Sorabji.
  4. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 3, 423.
  5. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 3, 423 (note 6).
  6. 1 2 Remes & Slaveva-Griffin 2014, p. 36, The Alexandrian classrooms excavated and sixth-century philosophy teaching by Sorabji.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 4, Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Damascius.
  8. ↑ Remes 2008, p. 29, Introduction.
  9. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 4-5, Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Damascius.
  10. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 424 (note 17), Notes to Pages 4-7.
  11. ↑ Smith 1870, p. 667, Justinianus.
  12. ↑ Lang, Macro & McGinnis 2001, p. 4 (note 9), Introduction.
  13. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 424 (note 18), Notes to Pages 4-7.
  14. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, pp. 5–6, Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Damascius.
  15. 1 2 Remes 2008, p. 30, Introduction.
  16. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 423 (note 3), Notes to Pages 3-4.
  17. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 6, Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Damascius.
  18. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 8, 425.
  19. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 3, 8, Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Damascius.
  20. ↑ Ahbel-Rappe 2010, p. 3-4, 10-12, Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Damascius.
  21. 1 2 Giovanni Reale, John R. Catan, 1989, A History of Ancient Philosophy: The Schools of the Imperial Age, page 546. SUNY Press.
  22. ↑ Simplicius, fol. 189, b., 153, a., 183, b.
  23. ↑ Photius, Cod. 242, comp. 181; in volume 6 of the edition by Rene Henry.
  24. ↑ "Ammonius". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2017.
  25. ↑ Polymnia Athanassiadi (ed.), Damascius. The Philosophical History. Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999. Pp. 403. ISBN 960-85325-2-3.BMCR review
  26. ↑ Photius, Cod. 130
  27. ↑ Mazzucchi, Carlo Maria (2006). "Damascio, autore del Corpus Dionysiacum, e il dialogo ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗΣ ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ" [Damascius, author of the Corpus Dionysiacum, and the dialogue ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗΣ ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ]. Aevum (in Italian). 80 (2): 299–334. eISSN 1827-787X. ISSN 0001-9593. JSTOR 20861842.
  28. ↑ Mazzucchi 2013, p. 249–250.
  29. ↑ E.g. Fiori, Emiliano Bronislaw (2008). In Adamantius (in Italian). 14: 670–673; Napoli, Valerio (2008). Ἐπέκεινα τοῦ ἑνὸς. Il principio totalmente ineffabile tra dialettica ed esegesi in Damascio. Catania – Napoli: CUECM – Officina di Studi Medievali: 124, n. 217; and Curiello, Gioacchino (2013). "Pseudo-Dionysius and Damascius, an impossible identification". In Dionysius. N.s. XXXI: 101–116.
  30. ↑ Mazzucchi, Carlo Maria (2013). "Iterum de Damascio Areopagita" [Again on Damascius the Areopagite]. Aevum (in Latin). 87 (1): 249–266. eISSN 1827-787X. ISSN 0001-9593. JSTOR 26453874.
  31. ↑ Mazzucchi, Carlo Maria (2014). "John of Scythopolis' marginal commentary on the Corpus Dionysiacum". Trends in Classics. 6 (1): 170–175. doi:10.1515/tc-2014-0009. S2CID 170313964 – via De Gruyter Online Journals.
  32. ↑ Mazzucchi, Carlo Maria (2017). "Impudens societas, sive Iohannes Scythopolitanus conscius Areopagiticae fraudi" [An insolent coven, or: John of Scythopolis being aware of the Areopagite fraud]. Aevum (in Latin). 91 (2): 289–294. eISSN 1827-787X. ISSN 0001-9593. JSTOR 26497004.
  33. ↑ Mazzucchi, Carlo Maria (2020). "Areopagitica nova" [News on the Areopagite]. Aevum (in Latin). 94 (1): 209–214. doi:10.26350/000193_000069. eISSN 1827-787X. ISSN 0001-9593.
  34. ↑ Mazzucchi, Carlo Maria (2023). "Areopagiticum novissimum" [Further news on the Areopagite]. Aevum (in Latin). 97 (1): 175–178. doi:10.26350/000193_000159. eISSN 1827-787X. ISSN 0001-9593 – via Torrossa.

Sources