‘A Mixing Cup of Piety and Learnedness’: Michael Psellos and Nicholas of Methone as Readers of Proclus’ Elements of Theology

Joshua M Robinson

doi:10.1163/9789004440685_005

Abstract

‘A Mixing Cup of Piety and Learnedness’: Michael Psellos and Nicholas of Methone as Readers of Proclus’ Elements of Theology

Highlights

This man [Origen] delved into our sacred courts from the perspective of Platonic and Aristotelian idle talk and dragged in from there all sorts of superfluous and pretentious discourse; and by wishing to seem to comprehend what is against and what is consistent with Christian teachings, and for this to be considered clever by the many, he corrupted and confused the holy Scripture in its entirety
In a well-known article by Gerhard Podskalsky,3 Nicholas of Methone’s Refutation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology served as indirect evidence that the interest in Proclus so abundantly evident in the works of Michael Psellos in the eleventh century had persisted into the time of Nicholas, who died around 1166.4 Surely, the argument goes, such a refutation demonstrates a contemporary fashion for Proclus in Byzantium; Nicholas would scarcely have gone to such lengths to refute Proclus had he not regarded his influence as a continuing and contemporary problem
That we do not grasp the discourse in a careless way,52 and so that we interpret the wise things wisely, the discourse must be referred to the canons of philosophy, and from there must be contributed the solution to the problems under investigation; and I do not mean the philosophy that is involved in nature—nature with which place, time, body and motion co-subsist, nor do I mean that philosophy which has as its object the unmoved forms that lie in conceptual thinking, which they call mathematical, but I mean this philosophy of what lies above, which is unhypothetical and foundational,53 which exists in pure and unmoved and dimensionless forms; to it we who have geometrized must go, according to the divine inscription of Plato.54. Whereas he [Plato] sends the theologizer to it through the mathematical objects, Proclus, who received Plato’s teachings, going beyond the mathematical itself,55 composed another Elements pertaining to theology

Summary

Introduction

This man [Origen] delved into our sacred courts from the perspective of Platonic and Aristotelian idle talk and dragged in from there all sorts of superfluous and pretentious discourse; and by wishing to seem to comprehend what is against and what is consistent with Christian teachings, and for this to be considered clever by the many, he corrupted and confused the holy Scripture in its entirety.

Results

Conclusion