Chapter 5 - Nicomachus of Gerasa and the Arithmetic Scale of the Divine

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Nicomachus of Gerasa. Nicomachus of Gerasa, who lived in Palestine in the first half of the second century, was a major figure of the Neopythagorean movement. His presence was at the crossroads of mathematical traditions dating back to the oldest Pythagorism and ontological speculations about ideas and numbers coming from Academic Platonism. Nicomachus' work had a great impact on Boetius, who was largely influenced by it in his De institutione arithmetica libri II, as well as on the Neoplatonists Jamblichus and Proclus. In his arithmetic theology, Nicomachus did not consider the natural properties of whole numbers (even and odd numbers; perfect numbers; linear and flat numbers, triangle numbers, tetragonal numbers and pentagonal numbers; and arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic medians). The question was to relate “the nature of things” to “the hypostasis of numbers”. In other words, the number would be a kind of springboard for reaching God at once without the mathematician caring to look back. Mathematics would not be worth an hour of effort for the initiate who is now one with his God.