E. The Meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey 4 page

, is clearly taken to depend upon her intermediate status in the procession. As a soul she participates in Menelaus's mode of perception and so is able to instruct him on what he will experience and how to respond (Od . 4.383-93), but as a soul of the highest order, contiguous with

, she is also capable of grasping the whole of Proteus's identity, and therefore of communicating it to Menelaus on a theoretical level.

This Odyssey passage is rejected by Socrates only in the most general terms, and without any discussion. It is striking, then, that only a generation before Proclus's commentary was written, it had been taken up by Augustine (Civ. Dei 10.10), who quotes its Virgilian adaptation (Georg . 4.411) and goes on to observe that such transformations and deceptions come exclusively from Satan, not from the true God. Thus the issue of the immutability of the divine had a currency in Proclus's time that makes of his explanation of the Proteus episode something more than an exercise in the reconciliation of ancient texts.

The other important Odyssey exegesis is that of Demodocus's song of Ares and Aphrodite, and this forms an exceptionally complete and structured interpretive essay.^[260] Proclus begins, not with the text, but with the gods, and with the fundamental principles that they and their processions represent. Ares is the separator of the opposites in the uni-

^[258]

[259] In Rep . 1.113.7-8.

[260] In Rep . 1.141.1-143.16.

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verse: thanks to him, the cosmos is perfect and the forms are maintained separate from one another and filling it. One is reminded of Empedocles' "strife" (brought, as it were, into balance with

so that the oscillation is brought under control and periodic catastrophes are averted). Hephaestus, as we have seen, is the demiurge, projecting the physical

into matter and establishing the order of the material world.

The union of Ares and Aphrodite creates "harmony and order for the opposites";^[261] that of Hephaestus and Aphrodite creates in this world beauty and radiance "to make the world the most beautiful of all visible things."^[262] The hypercosmic nuptial embrace and the encosmic adultery are, in fact, simultaneous and eternal, but the mythoplasts have distorted the account according to the familiar pattern. If the cuckolded husband observes the encosmic goings-on from his hypercosmic perch and binds the couple together, the truth behind the screen is that this world has need both of the power of separation (Ares) and of that of combination (Aphrodite),^[263] and if he subsequently breaks the chains (at the urging of Poseidon, whose preeminent role it is to preside over the cycle of coming to be and passing away), it is because a static union of the two would bring the process to a standstill—Hephaestus's act simultaneously destroys the physical universe and (since eternal destruction and eternal coming to be are the life of that universe) creates it anew.

Having sketched out the model lying behind the fiction, Proclus establishes first that the teaching is in line with that of Plato, on the basis that the Timaeus uses the image of "chains" for the demiurgic

(Tim . 43a). The connection is not, in fact, obvious from a reading of the Timaeus passage and one must admit that this is another instance where Proclus's intense need to refer a concept to a higher authority has led him to distort the apparent meaning of the text.^[264] After establishing to his satisfaction that Homer is in harmony with Plato, he proceeds to the second goal of establishing that Homer is in harmony with "the nature of

^[261][262]

[263] Again, the Empedoclean model is visible behind this account of the maintenance of the world-order.

[264] Cf. E. R. Dodds's comments in the introduction to his edition of Proclus's Elements of Theology (p. xi), on Proclus's "constant appeals to authority—now to Plato now to 'Orpheus' or to the Chalclaean Oracles —which irritate the reader of the major works and confuse him by their ingenuity of misinterpretation."

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things."^[265] The bonds of the physical universe are breakable, and it is not, according to Proclus, a breach of realism for Hephaestus to smash them after creating them.

When he has made these two points, the ones essential to his defense of the passage, he recapitulates its true meaning, reintroducing the elements of the Homeric myth as imagery to enrich the abstract statement:

The universal demiurge, in bringing the cosmos to be out of opposing elements, and through proportion working attraction into it, seemed to be uniting the actions of Hephaestus, Ares, and Aphrodite into one: in producing the opposition of the elements, he was creating according to the Ares in him; in contriving attraction, he was acting by the power of Aphrodite; and in bonding together the Arean and the Aphrodisian, he had taken the craft of Hephaestus as his model. For he is all things and acts with all the gods.^[266]

The formulation echoes many others, in a tradition at least as old as the tragedians, of attempting to distill from the polytheism of the myths a unified concept of the divine.

Throughout the discussion, the distance from the language as well as from the tone of the Homeric passage has been very great. There is not a single citation of the passage under discussion—one feels that the words of Homer would only get in the way. More important, the whole emotional texture Of the Homeric passage is lost, the rage and bitter frustration of Hephaestus, the comic impatience of Ares to jump into the trap, and the laughter of the gods. In a sense it is unfair to demand that Proclus respond to these elements of the passage; they have nothing to do with what he is seeking in the myths. But at the same time the fact that they have been so utterly ignored, and that Proclus's interpretation is so often at odds with them, is a serious factor in discrediting his interpretations as representations of the intentions of the poets (as he would claim them to be).

The relationship of Proclus's levels of discourse is demonstrated in its complexity in the passage quoted above. This abstract, partially demythologized, statement is the interpreter's attempt to indicate the meta-

^[265][266]

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language of "secret doctrine" that resolves the problems inherent in the Homeric myth. Yet the myth itself, here reintroduced for the sake of clarifying its relationship to the doctrine, is superior to its exegesis. It, after all, is the inspired utterance. The interpreter, building on what Proclus took to be the technique of Plato, merely tries to establish its meaning and to demonstrate its truth, simultaneously fragmenting it and pointing beyond it to the "more unified" level of truth previous to it.

If Proclus's defense of Homer entirely ignores the colorful episodes of the middle books of the Odyssey , the reason is surely to be found in Socrates' indifference to them in his indictment. They were dear to the allegorists, as we have seen, and indeed their affinities with folktale and fairy tale make them particularly appropriate subjects for allegorical interpretation. However, when Proclus discusses the Sirens (the only myth in the series he treats in any detail), his approach has little to do with the simple moral allegories of the fables. The passage occurs in the commentary on the Republic during the discussion of the myth of Er, and it is only the necessity of explaining Plato's Sirens that leads Proclus back to those of Homer.

Proclus's demonstration proceeds systematically, building from a paraphrase of the passage in Homer. We may not simply identify the Sirens with the Muses, because there are only eight Sirens (in the myth of Er) and we have no right to meddle with the numbers (In Rep . 2.237.16-25). The fact that they are carried along with the rings of the model of the universe shown to Er in the other world is an indication that they are souls that stand over bodies (In Rep . 2.237.26-28). Returning to his understanding of the mythic distortion of reality, Proclus at this point depicts the "mythoplasts" as decidedly perverse: "If it were not a myth, it would say the rings were borne along by the Sirens, but since the mythoplasts love to turn things around, it says the Sirens are borne along by the rings."^[267] That is, the Sirens are the souls, the life principles, that animate the spheres, rather than the reverse. The circular movement indicates affinities with mind, for (paraphrasing Laws 10. 897c) "circular movement is an image of mind"^[268] Their harmony indicates access to

which reside in

. The fact that each produces a single, unchanging tone is emblematic of the unified perception they direct toward

, contrasting as it does with our own fragmented perceptions,

^[267][268]

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and their unvarying harmony is related to their dance around the world-soul (In Rep . 2.238.9-20). This brings us finally to the relationship between these Sirens of Plato's and Homer's Sirens:

He called them "Sirens" to indicate that the harmony they impart to the rings is always bound to the material world, but he called them "celestial Sirens" in order to distinguish them from the Sirens within

, which he himself elsewhere agrees that Odysseus sailed past, as in Homer's story [Phdr . 259a]. These last Sirens, however, proceed from the dyad, for the poet uses the dual to refer to them as if there were two of them. These, however, proceed from the monad, for the one that presides over the circle of the One, the outermost circle, leads the rest. Thus it is entirely fitting that an appropriate quantity be spread below this dyad, and if the celestial monad is followed by seven, then the dyad that generates the universe of change must have twice seven, and often in the theologians the zones of heaven are said to be doubled in the sublunary zones. There are likewise Sirens in Hades, which he clearly mentions in the Cratylus [403d], saying that they will not leave Hades because they are bewitched by the wisdom of Pluto.

Thus there are three classes of Sirens by Plato's own account: the celestial ones belonging to Zeus; the ones that function in this world, belonging to Poseidon; and the chthonic ones belonging to Pluto. All three produce a physical harmony, tied to matter, for the Muses are specifically granted the noetic harmony. This is why they are said to conquer the Sirens and crown themselves with their feathers, for they draw the Sirens up into contact with them and fasten the Sirens' own unruly powers to their wisdom.^[269]

^[269]

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Though this text is not primarily concerned with the interpretation of Homer, it provides a valuable capsule history of the evolution of a Homeric image by way of Plato into an element in an essentially medieval model of the structure of the universe. Proclus's progression of concentric spheres, with their ever-increasing numbers of attendant souls, probably did, in fact, have a great influence on the development of medieval angelology. It seems certain that the author of the influential Celestial Hierarchy attributed to St. Dionysius the Areopagite and translated into Latin in the ninth century by John Scotus Eriugena, was in fact an Athenian Neoplatonist, and he may well have been a Christian student of Proclus himself.^[270]

Proclus is thus a crucially important link between the spiritualized mythology of late antiquity, much of which he draws directly from Homer, with frequent reference to Plato, and the Christian mythology and iconography of the Latin West. His initial goal in the present passage is to elucidate Plato, though a point of agreement between Plato and Homer is always worthy of his notice. The synthesis he offers, as he emphasizes, draws all its data from passages in Plato himself. Examination of the Platonic passages does not increase one's confidence in Proclus's conclusions: the references to the Sirens, except for that in the myth of Er, are quite casual and have no more substance, no more reference to the subject at hand, than the references to bards in the Odyssey from which Proclus spins the myth of Homer's portraits of the various "levels" of poetry. Clearly, the focus of Proclus's attention lies far beyond the text, whether Homer or Plato is before him. He has convictions regarding the structure of the universe and its hierarchies of meticulously subdivided, mutually dependent entities that find illustration in virtually any authoritative text.

[270] See Wallis, Neoplatonism , pp. 160-61, and ch. 6C below. This is not to join the group, scorned by Stephen Gersh (From Iamblichus to Eriugena, p . 10 and passim) who make Ps.-Dionysius "simply a Proclus baptized." The sources of the Dionysian corpus are complex and Gersh has made great strides in elucidating them. There is, however, no precedent for Ps.-Dionysius's interpretive efforts more obviously relevant than Proclus.

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Date: 2015-12-17; view: 648