A Few Thoughts on Predecessors

A few weeks ago, Academia.edu sent me a notification to tell me that I hadn’t ever read Edward Watts’ “The Lycians Are Coming: The Career of Patricius, the Father of Proclus,” a paper that speculated about Proclus’ family and how it shaped his youth. Unbeknownst to Academia.edu, I had actually read that paper a few years ago after following citation trails to it. But it was a nice gesture for the website to remind me of the paper, so I read it again.

Proclus and I are different sorts of people. Athena was his gateway to Hermes; Hermes was my gateway to Apollon. (An oversimplification in service of sentence symmetry. I was devoted to Apollon and then crashed with the Informationist for a few years in my mid-20s before going back to the Far-Shooter.) Proclus and I come from different time periods, cultures, social classes, and we’re judged against different gender norms. Yet, reading speculations about his life circumstances, I feel a warm kinship or relatability. There is enough similar in our encounters with Christianity as children to tangibly grip. I would also actually love to sit in on his classes, if ever there were a time machine to take me — or a trove of well-preserved lecture note texts found just-so-suddenly.

I say all of that without dreaming of a Late Platonism version of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Late Antiquity had its flaws, such as the political system that enabled a new kind of exclusivist, evangelical totalitarianism to emerge; slavery; the treatment of women; and the lack of basic sanitation and absence of vaccines and antibiotics. But — Proclus had the Orphic Rhapsodies to hand and was directly grounded in teachers who could, with minor disruptions in place and institution, be placed in a line leading back a thousand years. The rites and rituals, and his own philosophical school, were ancient by the time he was even born. Daydreaming and fantasizing about the advantages of living in a particular time is how many people fall into a historical escapism trap: somewhere, somewhen, things were “better” than they are here.

The Gods and our guardian daimons, however, guided us to where we are, and when we are, for a reason — for all of the opportunities and challenges that these times bring. Whenever I remind others that it’s the mid-2020s, and when I talk about the lived contexts of predecessors, it’s never about dismissing them or claiming that we today are somehow superior. (And I also mean “predecessors” in a relaxed, not-at-all-inflated way.) Humanizing them is important because it undermines the tendency that so many have towards cultishness, where some human beings are seen as infallible and never to be touched. When someone is correct, too, hashing the topic out in conversation and interrogating it is a useful way to actually learn from them.

If what the predecessors bring (or brought) to the conversation is their connection to the rites, the immersion in an intellectual culture very different to us now, and their set of lived experiences and particular personal merits, then what we can offer to continuing the conversation — beyond our own particular personal merits — is the specific perspective of persons who have been spun around and pulled apart and uprooted, we who now have the collective task of getting the conversation back on track. This means that, when looking at polytheistic theology, interpreting myths or maxims or dialogues or commentaries on commentaries, we can bring our unfamiliarity and difference as a positive contribution. We can contrast that with the analogies in the texts written by our predecessors, and from there, we can grasp at the underlying principles that they are discussing. That is enormously helpful to the entire polytheistic theological effort, as it has a similar effect to research done on the efficacy of homogenous vs. heterogeneous project groups; heterogeneous teams outperform homogenous ones. It also may be part of why Late Platonism itself is so rich and vibrant even only having the sparse assortment of texts that we do have, as intellectuals came into the tradition from a wide array of local traditions and backgrounds, from all three Mediterranean-touching continents, to learn and grow together in the major educational centers.

I find Plotinus to be very difficult when he makes astronomy analogies because part of my background involves modern astronomy — Proclus, too, sometimes. Currently, I’m re-reading Proclus’ essays on mousikē (Republic essays 5 & 6), where there are some, um, interesting statements about gender roles and believable, good-for-us characters.

Here is a process that loosely corresponds to what is going on in my head when I’m reading things from the ancients:

(0) Assume good intentions.

(1) What type of lived context is the author drawing from?

(2) What theological principles is the author establishing a relationship with?

(3) How could one describe the theological principle without recourse to the specific language that was used? Iterate through a few alternative ways to describe the underlying claim. Does the claim still work?

(4) Does the new way of thinking about this rely too uncritically on our own current circumstances and our own shortcomings?

Mental processes like these are behind how I developed an analogy for something I read in Iamblichus some years ago. It’s also behind why I describe spacetime as behaving like a spin glass as a way to get at some of what Proclus says on providence. And there’s an entirely different vocabulary for thinking about what “manliness” means in commentators like Proclus because such things rely so heavily on cultural expectations and how he and other commentators read those expectations into divine relationships — which we all do with our Gods to some extent.

Maybe someday, someone reading the Internet Archive about early 21st century polytheism will come across our various and varied writings and need to do similar mental crosswalking about something we are not even thinking of as a problem now. Thomas Taylor, who lived closer to us in time than to them, wrote a lot of very moving and energetic and delightful notes and footnotes and introductions and poems and wonderful translations, but then there’s his response to Mary Wollstonecraft, which he wrote when he was 34. (I can think of positions that I myself had when I was 34 that, in retrospect, were ill-informed.) And I know that, sometimes, many of us have sometimes indulged in harsher-than-merited speech about people living a century or two ago, individuals who have likely already reincarnated and are now getting to address whatever gaps they had in a new life with (likely) no memory at all of what happened to land them in the thick of it.

Those are simply a few quick thoughts. It’s all been on my mind for a bit now, and I hope I began to do justice to the topic and to our predecessors of all sorts.

I’d like to close by offering up some Ayla Nereo — it has a catchy beat, water-themed lyrics, and a river-y sensibility that makes me smile because it reminds me of some of the passages in Hermias’ Phaedrus commentary.

Have a good weekend!