Damascius’ Theodicy: Psychic Input of Disorder and Evil into the World
(2018) 16th Annual ISNS (International Society for Neoplatonic Studies) Conference — Location: Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (12.June.2018)
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- Abstract
- In the same way as their Christian opponents, Neoplatonists cannot avoid the problem of evil. They must answer the following question: whether all the processive continuum comes from the Good-One in total accordance with the syntactic laws of procession (like the Principles of Continuity and of Plenitude), then how the semantic scandal of evil can be explained? The heavy lines of the Neoplatonic answer can be found in Plotinus, Proclus and Simplicius, but also in Philoponus who forcefully criticizes it. In few words and very schematically: albeit there are various kinds of evil from the lack of order into the bodily mixture to the inversion of the hierarchy between the psychic faculties, all evils are inadvertently caused, in such a way that, from a metaphysical point of view, evil in itself is not a real being, but a παρυπόστασις. Evil has a parasitic existence that is produced derivatively in the course of the runoff of goodness from the Good itself. This parasitic and adventitious by-product is due to the limited receptivity of some beings that fail to fill up all the divine light and its goodness, and that are produced despite their essential deficiency in accordance with the universal validity of the Principle of Plenitude. God thereby wants neither imperfection nor evil, even more insofar as they appear surreptitiously during the production of last diacosms, they participate in spite of themselves to the total goodness of this production (in such a way that evil only exists from the perspective of parts, but not that of the whole). As it were, evil is a kind of legal loophole occurring during the very ordered distribution of goodness, that is to say an unintentional production of the best legislation possible. Albeit all Neoplatonists share this general scheme of Theodicy, they are sometimes at variance in its detail. For instance, Plotinus puts the accent rather on the material origin of evil, while Proclus and his followers highlight the freedom and the weakness of the soul. Anyway, a satisfying mechanism for the Neoplatonic Theodicy, I shall argue, can only be found in Damascius, more precisely into his physics. The aim of this presentation is to provide some acquaintance with the originality of Damascius. All Neoplatonists have claimed that the moral evil – the true evil by contrast with the bodily evil and the essential deficiency which are beyond our self-control – is linked to the irrationality of the soul, therefore to its lesser and sensitive faculties which are acquired by the soul in the course of its fall into the bodily infraworld. Although Damascius supports this framework, he is the only one to have seen that the irrationality is not only the opposite of the psychic reason, namely a kind of discursive mistake. The intimacy between rationality and order, between irrationality and divisibility, actually are based on mathematical underpinnings that are mirrored into the cosmic structure. Indeed, by virtue of his explanation of the composition of the continuum, Damascius is in position to link together the coming of evil into the world, and the emergence of both infinite divisibility and irrational magnitudes. Damascius’ quantum kinematics actually explains the fact that irrationality is circumscribed below the moon – kingdom of utmost divisibility – by means of the phase difference between the heavenly and the sublunary activities. That way, Damascius, better than his predecessors, rediscovers the meaning of the Theodicy of Plato, for which the emergence of evil relies on mathematical theses, namely the relationship between irrationality and infinite division that is specific to Theaetetus’ algorithm called ἀνθυφαίρεσις. Furthermore, in a pure Neoplatonic point of view, Damascius is able to emphasize in the highest degree the usual Neoplatonic concordance between evil, irrationality, descent of the soul and divisibility, and this without using the intimacy of divisibility with the bodily diacosm as an explanatory postulate. Damascius, the last ring of the golden chain, seeks to offer the most consistent Platonic worldview, that obviously differs from Plato and from Proclus in many points. Hence, he hardens the systematic facet of Platonism by justifying physically and mathematically – and not only in a theological way – the classic Theodicy of Plotinus’ heirs.
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Citations
Marion, F. (2018). Damascius’ Theodicy: Psychic Input of Disorder and Evil into the World. 16th Annual ISNS (International Society for Neoplatonic Studies) Conference, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.