Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus: Greek Philosophy, Latin Reception, and Christian Contexts by Gretchen Reydams-Schils

Abstract

Reviewed by: Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus: Greek Philosophy, Latin Reception, and Christian Contexts by Gretchen Reydams-Schils Sara Ahbel-Rappe REYDAMS-SCHILS, Gretchen. Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus: Greek Philosophy, Latin Reception, and Christian Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. 232 pp. Cloth, $99.99; paper and eBook, $29.99 This carefully written study is the first to address in its entirety the fourth-century Latin commentary on Plato’s Timaeus by the otherwise unknown Calcidius. The commentary appears together with a partial translation of the dialogue (“The translation goes up to 53c and the commentary covers the section from 31 to 53c”). In framing this work as part of the Platonic commentary tradition, Reydams-Schils moves us beyond the misunderstanding that the work is a paraphrase of now lost sources (primarily Porphyry and/or Nemesius). She treats the commentary as an original composition by an independent thinker steeped in middle Platonic, stoic, and even Aristotelian philosophy. As such, the work, alongside that of Cicero, Boethius, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella, is one of the crucial conduits for the transmission of Platonism to the Latin West. Reydams-Schils offers an evenhanded assessment of the text’s central arguments. Her immense erudition and meticulous research, together with fine-grained readings of the text in the original Latin, are everywhere in evidence. The book also relies on two decades’ worth of her own writing about and exploration of the intellectual world of this dialogue in concert with other scholars. The book falls into three parts: part 1 gives us a roadmap of the commentary; part 2 assesses the importance of its philosophical themes; and part 3 places Calcidius’s work alongside his reading of stoic, Peripatetic, middle Platonic, and Christian sources. By the end of the volume, we come away with a rich knowledge of Calcidius’s project together with a deeper understanding of what has been called eclecticism in the context of middle Platonic philosophy. As Reydams-Schils shows, [End Page 396] this work should not be taken as sharing in the late antique Neoplatonic milieu that characterizes Proclus or even Boethius, for example. Instead, Calcidius’s commentary develops as an original interpretation of the meaning of Platonism and especially of Plato’s doctrines of creation. The heart of the commentary, as Reydams-Schils unfolds it, relates to the theme of universal providence, an emphasis that has Calcidius reading the Timaeus primarily as an ethical work. In his articulation of how providence works in the world, Calcidius transgresses in fundamental ways the root division that runs through the original dialogue, between the works of intelligence and the works of necessity, between the intelligent cause and the errant cause (Timaeus 47e). Reydams-Schils writes, “the notion [of providence] is so important for Calcidius that he in effect rewrites Plato’s account in crucial passages to make room for it.” She pays attention to how Calcidius (deliberately?) mistranslates Plato’s Greek and thus insinuates his own version of the creation story to accord with a doctrine that borrows a great deal from the Stoic understanding of divine providence. Thus, for example, Calcidius has prouidae mentis intellectus instituit for the Greek “τὰ δία νοῦ δεδημιουργημένα,” where the original Greek entirely lacks any mention of providence. The longest and most theoretically sophisticated section of the commentary forms a subtreatise on the topic of matter (a word that Calcidius admits does not occur in Plato’s text). Reydams-Schils neatly connects the philosophy of providence that Calcidius earlier weaves together through his understanding of the function of the world soul with his philosophy of matter. She shows how Calcidius leans heavily on the stoic delineation of matter as a passive substance in order to circumvent the resistance or even recalcitrance of Plato’s receptacle, by describing matter as “a providential form of obedience in necessity found upon reason.” Strange words for a Platonist, indeed. The third part of the book is a judicious review of previous scholarship on Calcidius’s sources, his dependence on (actually, to a great extent, Reydams-Schils demonstrates, independence from) them, together with a survey of issues surrounding the possible religious identity of Calcidius. (There is no reason to think he is Christian, according to Reydams...