Project
Abstract:
NeoplAT offers a fresh and thoroughly documented account of the impact of Pagan Neoplatonism on the Abrahamic traditions. It focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the Elements of Theology of Proclus (fifth century) which occupies a unique place in the history of thought. Together with its ninth-century Arabic adaptation, the Book of Causes, it has been translated, adapted, refuted and commented upon by Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across centuries, up to the dawn of modernity. Despite a renewed interest in Proclus’ legacy in recent years, one still observes a tendency to repeat conventional hypotheses focused on a limited range of well-studied authors. This project radically challenges these conservative narratives both by analysing invaluable, previously ignored resources and by developing an innovative comparative approach that embraces a variety of research methods and disciplines. Specialists in Arabic, Greek and Latin history of ideas, philology, palaeography and lexicography develop an intense interdisciplinary research laboratory investigating the influence of Proclus on the mutual exchanges between the scriptural monotheisms from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries.
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In ninth-century Baghdad and in the circle of the philosopher al-Kindī (c. 870), the nascent tradition of Arabic Peripateticism integrates the Platonic metaphysical work of Proclus into a corpus of writings, which it regards as Aristotelian. This coincides with the emergence of the transmission of a portion of Plotinus’ Enneads under the title The Theology of Aristotle; the Elements of Theology were translated and afterwards adapted to Islamic Mu‘tazilite theology into a new work bearing the title Kitāb fī Maḥḍ al-ḫayr (Discourse on the Pure Good), famously known as the Book of Causes. The author deliberately selected a series of propositions from the Elements of Theology and in some cases he combined several of them, thus compressing the 211 chapters of Proclus’ work into 31[32] in the Book of Causes. There are also significant doctrinal modifications, due to the adjustment of the emanatist Proclean metaphysics to an Islamic monotheist environment. Two of these changes are especially noteworthy: Proclus’ idea of emanative causality from the One to the Many is replaced with the idea of creation and the doctrine that a Supreme Being is cause of all beings. A second version of the Book of Causes has recently been identified and discussed, but its influence was extremely limited and never reached beyond the Middle East.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Elements of Theology were read by major figures within the Byzantine philosophical tradition (Michael Psellos, John Italos, Eustratios of Nicaea). Joanne Petritsi (d. 1125), who studied in Constantinople, possibly under Psellos, translated the Elements of Theology from Greek into Georgian and wrote an extensive commentary to accompany it. Concerned that certain thinkers in Byzantium were confusing Proclus’ thought with Christian doctrine, Nicholas of Methone (d. ca. 1166) wrote a lengthy Refutation of the Elements of Theology.
By the end of the twelfth century, the Arabic text of the Book of Causes was translated into Latin as the Liber de causis. In 1268, William of Moerbeke translated the Elements of Theology from Greek into Latin. Of all the traditions mentioned above, the Latin reception of the Elements of Theology and of the BoC is the most extensive, judging by the number of manuscripts transmitting the text and the number of commentaries addressing it. The standard literature mentions six thirteenth-century Latin commentaries on the Book of Causes (Roger Bacon, Ps.-Henry of Ghent, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and Giles of Rome) and a fourteenth-century commentary on the Elements of Theology by Berthold of Moosburg. Two sixteenth-century commentaries on the Book of Causes, by Chrysostomus Javelli and Jacob Gostynin have been almost constantly and inexplicably ignored by scholars. A single narrative has thus gained predominance through a range of highly influential studies. It claims that, after the 1280s, Neoplatonism was forgotten in Paris, and was taken up in Germany as an alternative to Parisian teaching. Henry Bate, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola would complete the list of rare authors who, from the end of the thirteenth century onwards, read either the Elements of Theology or the Book of Causes. The result, ultimately, is a desolate picture: interest in the Book of Causes declined after the Latin translation of the Elements of Theology in 1268, since medieval authors generally avoided confrontation with Proclus’ metaphysics. Until recently, these views have either been repeated or only cautiously questioned.
In Hebrew, there exist four known translations of the Book of Causes and three commentaries. Three translations are made from the Latin version (Hillel of Verona in 1260; Jehuda Romano in the fourteenth century; ‘Eli Ḥabilio in 1477) and one from the Arabic version (Zeraḥiyah Hen in 1280). These have been published and studied. Hillel of Verona wrote an original commentary (edited and translated into French by Rothschild 2017); Jehuda Romano partially translated the commentaries by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, providing a fascinating witness to the cross-cultural influence of the Latin and, ultimately, Arabic traditions.
NeoplAT integrates the progress accomplished by the academic community, and builds on the recent identification of a large corpus of Latin manuscripts previously overlooked. It continues continues the search for new material and facilitates a much wider analysis enabling a broad comparative analysis of the reception of the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes in the Abrahamic traditions. It gathers a large international team with experts in various disciplines. On the basis of comparative interpretations, the project develops an innovative method, which combines lexicographical, codicological and palaeographical studies with philosophical and theological analyses in Arabic, Greek and Latin. It aims to forge essential tools for extending the understanding of the dialogue between Abrahamic traditions, and to proffer a new reflection on this unconventional history of metaphysics.
The project is structured around four interrelated and fundamental questions that will be addressed through nine manageable specific tasks.
1. Where and when were the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes read, taught and copied? Arabic philosophy is consigned to hundreds of thousands of manuscripts since, as we know, these works continued to be published in manuscript from the ninth to the nineteenth century. The networks of transmission between the lands of Islam and the Christian West are largely unexplored. These gaps in our understanding are due to a lack of a systematic examination of the immense manuscript collections in which these texts are preserved. Indeed, no methodical and extensive research has been undertaken in order to explain why, when and where Proclus arabus and the Book of Causes were copied in the lands of Islam. Similar difficulties beset scholars of the Latin tradition. The two lists published by Taylor (1983) mentioning Latin manuscripts containing the text of the BoC and commentaries on the work, while useful for a brief panorama, are neither descriptive nor exhaustive. Thus, at present, it is impossible fully to understand the modalities of the diffusion of the BoC in the Latin West: was it copied as a part of the corpus Aristotelicum? Was it more popular in the ‘traditional’ universities of Western Europe (Paris, Oxford) or rather in the newer universities of Central Europe (Prague, Krakow, Erfurt)? How many more remain undisclosed in the libraries?
2. What versions of the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes were known in each tradition? Recent studies on Petritsi’s Georgian translation of the Elements of Theology seem to indicate that in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium the text was considerably different from the version used from the thirteenth century onwards, on which is based the standard edition. Nicholas of Methone therefore read and refuted a version of the Elements of Theology which differs from the latter; the current critical edition containing numerous faulty transcriptions, omits the text of the Elements of Theology transmitted in the manuscripts of the Refutation.
The situation is comparable with the Western tradition of the BoC. Thomas Aquinas in 1270 and Giles of Rome in 1289/1291 observe in their exegeses on the BoC that the text they comment upon seems corrupt, and they check it across several manuscripts. How can one explain this deplorable state of the text less than one century after its initial translation and entry into the West? In what condition was the text transmitted to authors over subsequent centuries? Recent publications have shown that from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, the text of the BoC had considerable variations. How can these be accounted for? Which version had the widest readership? These questions, although extremely important, have never been envisaged before since the current edition of the Book of Causes fully collates only ten out of two hundred and seventy known manuscripts, and thus does not do justice to the complex Latin tradition.
3. Who read the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes? And what is their impact on the history of thought? The quantity and distribution of the manuscripts of these two works are certainly the most important witnesses to the interest they received across the centuries and in different intellectual milieus. While their presence in the lands of Islam requires further extensive investigation, the Western tradition has begun to be uncovered in recent publications. In order to grasp their enduring influence on the history of thought, one needs to analyse the exegeses of them that span over three hundred years. In the majority of cases, these exegeses are the results of lectures, since the Book of Causes was included in the curricula of various institutions across Europe. These authors, although today they are less known or anonymous, had a considerable influence on generations of students: they provided conceptual tools to reflect both on pagan texts and on their Christian tradition; gradually, their ideas have been integrated into Western models of rationality, even if these distant origins are often unacknowledged today (e.g. the notion of “first” and “secondary causes” used in modern philosophy, elaborated mainly in the Book of Causes). However, the majority of these commentaries are still unedited. To edit and to study these texts is the only way to access the uninterrupted tradition of instruction and commentary on the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes and to attain a better understanding of the dynamics of mutual exchange between scriptural monotheisms.
4. How and why were the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes assimilated into these various traditions? For each cultural milieu, one notices different modes of interpretation at the level of form and literary genre: translation and transformation in the lands of Islam; commentary and refutation in Byzantium; translation and teaching in the West. To what extent do these reflect the institutional and doctrinal contexts which give rise to these commentaries? What are the mechanisms of exchange that enable both the encounter of these scriptural monotheisms with a system of thought originating in Greek polytheism (through the Elements of Theology), as well as the unwitting assimilation of Islamic Mu‘tazilite theology into Christian contexts (through the Book of Causes)?
Within the circle of the philosopher al-Kindī, the decision to attribute the Book of Causes to Aristotle witnesses to the search for harmony between Platonism and Peripateticism. To what extent does it reflect a certain vision of Islam? Latin authors inherit the same misattribution and spread this view throughout the universities. Was it the case that the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes were regarded as Christian (or potentially Christian) versions of Aristotle’s metaphysics? These similar situations seem to indicate that the direct or indirect confrontation with Proclean metaphysics stimulates reflection on the central themes of the Abrahamic traditions. These topics interrogate the history of thought from yet another angle, for in each of these traditions, for several centuries, the relations between theology and philosophy, reason and faith was particularly complex and porous, as well as the boundaries between the Latin Christian and Greco-Arabic intellectual culture.
By answering these questions, the project’s intention is to forge a broad comparative approach that enables a thorough understanding of the reception of Proclus in the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West.