Analogia: Byzantine Aristotle

editorial

Although the existence and the specificity of Byzantine Philosophy are widely recognized today, it is nonetheless true that we might still need a series of explorations in order to get closer to its ultimate importance, not only for the construction of Greek Patristic theology, but also for a deeper interpretation of Greek Philosophy as such. Most of the Byzantine philosophers are not just slavish interpreters of the latter, but also creative thinkers, sometimes even able to correct or transform the philosophical data.

In an attempt to engage with the modern understanding of such a fertile enterprise as Byzantine Philosophy, Analogia offers this first collection of distinguished essays written by promising experts of the younger generation, which comprise a good part of the essays received by the Journal once the invitation for a Byzantine Aristotle volume was extended to the academic community.

In her learned and accurate ‘Themistius on Prime Matter, Aristotle, and the Unwritten Doctrines ascribed to Plato’, Elisa Coda pertinently shows that Themistius was inspired by a loose harmony between Aristotle’s conception of matter and Plato’s interplay of determination and indetermination, in order to explain ‘prime matter’ as the principle of indetermination—thus showing, once again, the philosophical creativity of the great commentator.

Pantelis Golitsis, in his highly documented ‘Aristotelian attraction and repulsion in Byzantium’, offers a brilliant short history of the reception of Aristotle in the Byzantine intellectual world. While rightly claiming that neither Aristotle nor Plato were ever received as an organic and indispensable part of doing theology, he nonetheless shows that ultimately, not only were Aristotle’s Logic or Physics positively accepted, but even his metaphysical monotheism was highly praised by an intellectual of the status of Scholarios, and the philosopher’s capability of instilling the right convictions about the knowledge of God in this world was acclaimed by an intellectual of the status of Pachymeres. Of course, this does not mean that the suspicions about his deeper theological convictions were ever silenced.

Melina Mouzala in her excellently elaborated ‘Simplicius on the principal meaning of physis in Aristotle’s Physics II. 1–3’, which shows a deep familiarity with her research area, shows how original, multi-leveled, and fertile Simplicius’ understanding of the Aristotelian physis is. I think that no student of the history of such an influential concept for the very articulation of theology and medieval thought in general, like that of physis, can afford not to read this article. Simplicius final understanding of physis as escate zoe, is utterly important for the history of both Christian Philosophy and Theology.

Sotiria Triantari, an expert in Byzantine rhetoric, in her ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Manuals of Byzantine Rhetoric’ shows successfully to what extent—and despite some criticism by prominent Byzantine intellectuals—the Aristotelian Rhetorics, along with the philosopher’s theory of language, became the foremost source of inspiration for the Byzantines.

Ilias Vavouras, finally, in his insightful ‘Visions of political philosophy in the Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics by Michael of Ephesus’, brilliantly shows how the Byzantine intellectual not only accepts, but also christianises the Aristotelian perspective, by closely connecting governance with virtue and especially justice.

– Nikolaos Loudovikos, Senior Editor

table of contents

e

ditorial

Themistius on ‘Prime Matter’, Aristotle, and the ‘Unwritten Doctrines’ ascribed to Plato

Elisa Coda

Aristotelian attraction and repulsion in Byzantium

Pantelis Golitsis

Simplicius on the principal meaning of physis

Melina G. Mouzala

Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Manuals of Byzantine Rhetoric

Sotiria A. Triantari

Visions of political philosophy in the ‘Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’ by Michael of Ephesus

Ilias Vavouras

b

ook

r

eviews

The Christian Liturgical Papyri: An Introduction

by

á

gnes

t

.

m

ihálykó

Gregory S. Paulson

Themistius on ‘Prime Matter’, Aristotle, and the ‘Unwritten Doctrines’

ascribed to Plato

Elisa Coda

Dipartimento di Civiltà e Forme del Sapere

Università di Pisa

On close inspection, Themistius’ rephrasing of two passages in Physics IV 2, in which Aristotle compares Plato’s Timaeus and the ‘unwritten doctrines’, suggests that he was guided in his understanding by a loose association with the account of Plato’s Ideas in the Metaphysics. Themistius also interprets Aristotle’s remarks about ‘place’ in Timaeus as pointing to the main feature of ‘prime matter’, namely indetermination.

I

Themistius¹ was a prominent figure in education and government in fourth century Constantinople, where he also ran his philosophical school.² He authored both rhetorical works (Orationes) and paraphrases of Aristotle’s treatises³ and was even in his lifetime considered a key personality in the philosophical education of the cultured segment of the capital.⁴ Themistius set for himself the task of explaining Aristotle,⁵ offering an approach that has been presented as general enough⁶ and ecumenical enough⁷ to avoid the issue of a specific philosophical allegiance.⁸

Themistius was a careful reader not only of Alexander of Aphrodisias⁹ but also of Plotinus.¹⁰ It appears from several idiosyncratic elaborations scattered in his paraphrases that he combines Peripatetic and Neoplatonic readings of Aristotle’s doctrines.¹¹ This is one of the most interesting and least studied aspects of his work, and the cross-pollination of different sources in his understanding of Aristotle’s tenets in Metaphysics, De Anima, De Caelo, and also in Physics becomes even more interesting considering that, in a paraphrase, the distinction between the doctrines of the main author—in our case, Aristotle—and that of the ‘commentator’ is predictably less evident than in a commentary sentence by sentence, where the authorial sentence and its exegesis are clearly distinct from one another.¹² In Themistius’ paraphrases, the personal elaborations—at times in the form of digressions, but more often as explanatory sentences interspersed in the account of Aristotle’s doctrines—occur within a context of general fidelity to the original wording. This plain and apparently non-committal stance made Themistius’ paraphrases widespread among pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors, not to mention the European Humanists.

This paper is devoted to a minor point in Themistius’ exegesis of the Physics, but one which in my opinion effectively exemplifies his paraphrastic approach, with its didactical purposes, but also its flaws. In what follows, I will discuss Aristotle’s reference to Plato’s ἄγραγα δόγματα in Physics IV 2, 209 b 11–17 as it is understood in Themistius’ paraphrase (pp. 106.18–23 and 107.24–27 Schenkl).¹³

II

Aristotle’s notion of matter, set out as a result of his analysis of becoming (Phys. I, 7–9), is also involved in the account of place (Phys. IV 1–2). The analysis of ‘place’ opens with a series of apories (Phys. IV 1) and the criticism of the confused assumptions of those who identify place either with form or with matter (Phys. IV 2, 209 b 2–212 a 2). Aristotle also criticizes Plato’s position (209 b 11–17; b 33–210 a 2).

A summary of Phys. IV 2, 209 b 1–17 will serve as the background to Aristotle’s account of the Platonic position and of Themistius’ understanding of both Plato and Aristotle. After a first passage where ‘place’ in the broader sense is distinguished from ‘proper place’ (Phys. IV 2, 209 a 31–b 1), and the latter is defined as ‘the immediate envelope’ (τὸ πρῶτον περιέχον, 209 b 1–2) of a thing, Aristotle mentions the twin possibility for ‘place’ to be either form or matter. Being a kind of limit (ὁ τόπος […] πέρας τι ἂν εἴη, 209 b 1–2), ‘place’ bounds each body as well as the quantity of matter comprised in its magnitude. Taken in this sense, ‘place’ might involve the form and shape of each body (τὸ εἶδος καὶ ἡ μορφὴ ἑκάστου, 209 b 3). If, on the other hand, one means by ‘place’ the inner dimensionality of the magnitude of a given body (τὸ διάστημα τοῦ μέγεθος, 209 b 6–7), one would rather say that it is matter (ἡ ὕλη, 209 b 7). Even though he does not argue his point here, Aristotle disagrees with both. This becomes clear shortly after, when he claims that it is easy to see why ‘place’ is neither form nor matter (211 b 6–212 a 6)—chiefly because these cannot be separated from the thing lest the thing be annihilated whereas ‘place’ can, as movement proves beyond any doubt. In considering the reasons that may suggest the overlap between ‘place’ and the thing’s inner dimensionality,¹⁴ Aristotle points to the indetermination that characterises matter as the feature that matter shares with place. Both matter and place are bound by limits. Imagine, says Aristotle, a sphere whose limits are taken away: only matter is left. Thus, place and matter have in common that they are determined by their boundaries. It was, Aristotle continues, because of this that Plato identified ‘room’ (χώρα) and ‘matter’:

διὸ καὶ Πλάτων τὴν ὕλην καὶ τὴν χώραν ταὐτό φησιν εἶναι ἐν τῷ Τιμαίῳ· τὸ γὰρ μεταληπτικὸν καὶ τὴν χώραν ἓν καὶ ταὐτόν. ἄλλον δὲ τρόπον ἐκεῖ τε λέγων τὸ μεταληπτικὸν καὶ ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἀγράφοις δόγμασιν, ὅμως τὸν τόπον καὶ τὴν χώραν τὸ αὐτὸ ἀπεφήνατο. λέγουσι μὲν γὰρ πάντες εἶναί τι τὸν τόπον, τί δ’ ἐστίν, οὗτος μόνος ἐπεχείρησεν εἰπεῖν.¹⁵

That is why Plato, too, says in the Timaeus that matter and space are the same thing (for ‘the participative’ and space are one and the same thing. Though he gave a different use to ‘the participant’ in what are called his ‘unwritten doctrines’ from that in the Timaeus, he still declares that place and space were the same thing. While everyone says that place is something, he alone tried to say what it is).¹⁶

The fact that Aristotle credits Plato with the identification of ὕλη and χώρα¹⁷ and of these two with both τόπος and the μεταληπτικόν¹⁸ has attracted much attention in both ancient and modern commentaries. While modern scholars wonder whether Aristotle misrepresented Plato’s position and, if so, to what extent and for what purpose, the ancient commentators, in particular the Neoplatonic commentators, try their best to read into this passage some sort of agreement with Plato. In the relevant passage of his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Simplicius offers an interpretation of the relationship between the Forms and the χώρα in Timaeus that, in his eyes, is apt to counter Aristotle’s criticism. Then he lays emphasis on the fact that Aristotle, notwithstanding his disagreement with Plato, praises him as the only one to have provided an account of what ‘place’ is in reality: a concept, not something corporeal that sense-perception could grasp.¹⁹

In the passage above Aristotle incidentally alludes to a discrepancy between Timaeus and the ‘unwritten doctrines’²⁰ about the name of Plato’s receptive principle. This too has attracted scholarly attention, because shortly afterwards Aristotle provides the key to identifying the name, and by the same token the function, of the receptive principle in the ‘unwritten doctrines’. At 209 b 33–210 a 2, he explains why he disagrees with Plato, saying that on the one hand the latter claims that the ‘participant’ is the ‘place’ of the Forms, but, on the other, Forms for him are not in a place.²¹ In this context, he repeats, insisting that this is a little digression from his main point, that Plato’s labels for the receptive principle vary:

Πλάτωνι μέντοι λεκτέον, εἰ δεῖ παρεκβάντας εἰπεῖν, διὰ τί οὐκ ἐν τόπῳ τὰ εἴδη καὶ οἱ ἀριθμοί, εἴπερ τὸ μεθεκτικὸν ὁ τόπος, εἴτε τοῦ μεγάλου καὶ τοῦ μικροῦ ὄντος τοῦ μεθεκτικοῦ εἴτε τῆς ὕλης, ὥσπερ ἐν τῷ Τιμαίῳ γέγραφεν.

If a parenthetic remark may be allowed, we should ask Plato why the Forms and numbers are not in place, if place is ‘the participative’, whether ‘the participative’ is the great and the small or whether it is the matter, as he writes in the Timaeus.²²

Leaving aside the question of whether or not Aristotle’s criticism misrepresents Plato’s doctrine, lets us focus on the terminological point: while at 209 b 11–17 Aristotle limited himself to saying that, in the ‘unwritten doctrines’, Plato labelled the receptacle in a different way (ἄλλον ... τρόπον) compared with Timaeus, now he goes back to the main point, and specifies this different way. The name of the participative (τὸ μεθεκτικόν in this passage), or the receptacle (τὸ μεταληπτικόν in the aforementioned passage), given by Plato in his ‘unwritten doctrines’ is the Indefinite Dyad ‘large-and-small’. This passage is beyond doubt linked to that quoted above²³ and as such it has been quoted time and again in the inventories of the accounts about the ‘unwritten doctrines’ by or attributed to Plato. However, it was P. Aubenque who called special attention to this couple of passages in his seminal article on the ‘intelligible matter’ in Aristotle and its roots in the discussions in the Early Academy. According to Aubenque, the reason why Aristotle saw a connection between the ‘place’ of Timaeus and the Indefinite Dyad of the doctrine of the principles lies in the fact that both are instances of the indetermination that, once determined by the opposite principle of unity and definition, gives rise to the realities issued from this interaction. As Aubenque has it,

Ce point est largement confirmé par les nombreux témoignages d’Aristote selon lesquels les doctrines non écrites affirmeraient l’existence de deux principes (archai ou stoicheia): l’Un d’une part, la Dyade indéfinie d’autre part, dont les termes sont souvent présentés comme étant le couple du Grand et du Petit ou de l’Excès et du Défaut.²⁴

The twin passage in Physics is thus linked to the account of the doctrine of the principles in Metaphysics A and elicits a consistent account on Aristotle’s part of the ἄγραφα δόγματα. All in all, for Aubenque, Aristotle in Metaphysics ‘traduit dans son langage la doctrine platonicienne en disant que l’Un agit en tant qu’essence (A 2, 987 b 21–22) ou encore forme (A 6, 988 a 2–3) et que la Dyade indéfinie du Grand et du Petit agit comme matière ou cause matérielle (A 6, 988 a 10)’.²⁵ Following the same course of reasoning, in Physics he puts on equal footing the two labels for the principle of indetermination, which, although given other names in Timaeus and in the ‘unwritten doctrines’, performs the same role as the counterpart of the principle of determination. While in Timaeus, which deals with the visible world, indetermination is determined by the Forms and the outcome is visible beings, indetermination in the realm of principles is the Indefinite Dyad or ‘intelligible matter’, and the principle of its determination is the One; the Forms are the outcome of their interplay.

It is along these lines that the Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle’s Physics developed their own exegeses, as attested by Simplicius²⁶ and Philoponus.²⁷ They notoriously disagree with one another on many points, but for both of them Aristotle faithfully reports Plato’s doctrine of the principles, which implies that, for both of them, Aristotle saw in Plato the interplay of a principle of determination and a receptacle that is determined at work as a general rule for the production of beings—be they intelligible beings or visible ones. It is time, now, to see how Themistius deals with this passage.

III

As we have just seen, at 209 b 11–17 Aristotle points to Plato’s different accounts of the ‘participant’ in Timaeus and in the ‘unwritten doctrines’ (ἄλλον δὲ τρόπον ἐκεῖ τε λέγων τὸ μεταληπτικὸν καὶ ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἀγράφοις δόγμασιν). This sentence is remarkably transformed by Themistius, notwithstanding the fact that his paraphrase of this passage is prima facie a literal quotation, merely made redundant by the repetition of some expressions. In order to highlight this point, the words taken literally from Aristotle are underlined.

In Phys. 106.18–23 Schenkl

Πλάτων τὴν ὕλην καὶ τὴν χώραν ταὐτόν φησιν εἶναι ἐν τῷ Τιμαίῳ· τὸ γὰρ μεταλαμβάνον τῶν εἰδῶν (ὅπερ ὕλη) καὶ τὴν χώραν (ὅπερ ἐστὶν ὁ τόπος) ταὐτὰ λέγει. καίτοι τὴν ὕλην ἄλλως μὲν ἐν Τιμαίῳ φησὶ δέχεσθαι τὰ εἴδη, ἄλλως δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἀγράφοις δόγμασιν· ἐκεῖ μὲν γὰρ κατὰ μέθεξιν, ἐν τοῖς ἀγράφοις δὲ καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν. ἀλλ’ ὅμως, ὅπερ εἶπον, δόξειεν ἂν ταὐτὸν ἀποφαίνεσθαι ὕλην καὶ τόπον· λέγουσι μὲν γὰρ ἅπαντες εἶναί τι τὸν τόπον, τί δ’ ἐστὶν μόνος οὗτος ἐπεχείρησεν ἀποδοῦναι· ἀλλ’ ἔοικε μεταφορικῶς κεχρῆσθαι τῷ ὀνόματι· οὐδὲν γὰρ διασαφεῖ περαιτέρω.

Plato actually says in the Timaeus that matter and space are identical: i.e., he speaks of the participant in forms (namely matter) and of space (namely place) as identical. Yet in the Timaeus and in the unwritten doctrines he says that matter receives the forms in different ways: by participation (methexis) in the Timaeus, by assimilation (homoiōsis) in the unwritten works. But still, as I said, he would seem to be claiming that matter and place are identical. For while everyone was saying that place was something, he alone tried to explain what it was. (But he seems to have used the term metaphorically, for he offers no further clarification).²⁸

As I have previously mentioned, at first sight the passage seems to follow closely in Aristotle’s footsteps, but an alarming shift in meaning appears at closer inspection. According to Themistius, Aristotle is pointing here to two ways in which matter for Plato receives the forms: τὴν ὕλην ἄλλως μὲν ἐν Τιμαίῳ φησὶ δέχεσθαι τὰ εἴδη, ἄλλως δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἀγράφοις δόγμασιν. However, this is far from being true; as we have just seen, Aristotle is speaking of the different names of the receptacle and by no means of two different ways of reception. This means that a reader of Themistius with no access to Aristotle’s genuine passage would get the impression that Aristotle’s claim is that Plato had two different doctrines about participation, one expressed in Timaeus and another one in the ‘unwritten doctrines’. Themistius goes on to illustrate ‘Aristotle’s’ clause ἄλλως μὲν […] ἄλλως δέ—in itself a faithful rendition of the genuine ἄλλον δὲ τρόπον—by means of a distinction, totally absent in Aristotle’s passage, between receiving the forms (1) by participation (κατὰ μέθεξιν), and (2) by assimilation (καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν). He specifies, this time following in Aristotle’s footsteps, that way (1) features in Timaeus and way (2) features in the ‘unwritten doctrines’. The non-Aristotelian words that crop up in Themistius’ rephrasing lead the reader to believe that ‘Aristotle’ detected two ways for the receptacle to receive the Forms.

Themistius’ passage is included in the various collections of testimonies about Plato’s ἄγραφα δόγματα from Gaiser onwards.²⁹ Truth be told, the passage had attracted attention even before, but Eduard Zeller was sceptical about it and saw in these words a mere conjecture on Themistius’ part.³⁰ On the contrary, according to L. Robin³¹ and K. Gaiser³² the report is genuine and the doctrine here stated can be traced back to Plato, even though it remains unclear