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Happy New Year!
It’s fitting to start with a phrase from the book of (new) beginnings for this one, especially since the beginnings always join with the end. At least, I think this is why I suddenly find the aptitude to read of Matthew Vanderkwaak’s dissertation, named “Matter and the One in Proclus”[1] just after the New Year started. I suggest you do too, if you can. It’s pretty short and rather fun (in a nerdy sort of way). I think some of the things said there are pretty mind blowing when thought about in this direction, especially when you combine it with Edward Butler’s own explanation of what “Matter” is in Proclus. Here’s Vanderkwaak:
“To summarize, far from being simply the dregs of being, or the result of the God’s dwindling power at the end of procession, matter is a way of talking about the receptive side of the progressive resolution of the super-essential tension between divine power and existence which makes being. This conclusion, that matter is ‘a way of talking’ about divine necessity, might be surprising, for it implies that matter itself has no ontological status. But however surprising the conclusion may be, this is entirely in accord with what we receive from Plato’s Timaeus: the receptacle must be nothing in itself, and it only receives as it ‘shares’ in intellect.”[2]
How does one understand this “necessity” in polycentric terms? Here’s Butler:
“Matter, we read in the essay on evil, is “neither good nor evil” but necessary (DMS 75). “That which is necessary is all that is for the sake of good, has a reference to it, and whatever has a generation subsists on account of it,” and matter, specifically, is “produced by divinity as necessary to forms, which are incapable of being established in themselves” (76). Forms can never possess the integrity of the supra-essential individual; hence the further a given deity seeks to extend their formal hegemony through cognizing the other deities – that is to say, lending more and more of their own nature to the activity of illumination – the more focused the resistance, the sharper the alterity that must finally emerge.”[3]
Why is it necessary? Because “forms can never possess the integrity of the supraessential individual”, because to be “one” is not to “be”; the former “structures” the latter, and is therefore “prior”:
“The matter upon which the demiurge works is the other Gods themselves, not as co-emergent with the demiurge, not, for example, as the other Gods in the Hellenic pantheon are in relation to Zeus, but in their radical refusal of relation. Even the deities who are co-emergent with, e.g., Zeus, possess nevertheless their pre-existent autonomy in respect of which they too are “matter” in relation to the demiurge’s formative activity. Indeed, even Zeus himself is matter to himself, insofar as he himself, as a henad, trancends his function as demiurge.
The other Gods, in their absolute refusal of relation to the demiurge, represent the surplus of productivity in the First Principle over any regime of forms. This surplus or excess, although manifesting only negatively in the system itself, provides the capacity to escape the system in the moment of its greatest rigidity, namely the moment at which the system is rendered no longer “indefinite and common” but determinate and particular by the fixing of all the monadic positions to the members of a single pantheon.”[4]
This “refusal of relation” is not atomism, as even separated atoms are related to each other by the separation itself. This is instead another way of saying that the unity of all Gods in each is beyond the economy of form and matter, such that the relation produced from the Gods does not totalize them like members of a set that contains them. Instead, relations, forms, etc can only incompletely express the individuality of each God, and infact each individual. This is how the infinitude of Being works, as Being is an eternal pouring forth of each God’s infinite power and the eternal revelation of their persons. This is only possible due to Being’s “secondariness”[5], which does not just apply to the highest beings or Being itself, but also beings in general, since “the many which is being made one must be, at bottom, composed of unities that are indivisible and completely one. As Dodds explains, every plurality “must consist either (a) of indivisible units, or (b) of unified groups ultimately analysable into such units.” In the end, that pure unity is not just the source of all plurality, but that all plurality is also composed of pure unities and this arrangement of unity belongs necessarily to what it is.”[6]
This is the difference between ontology and henology explained in another form. While, ontologically, hypostases depend on their ontological priors for being, these hypostases themselves, considered in themselves as individuals – in the positive sense of unities of all they are, not just (although it might include) the sense of indivisible atoms – are irreducible to any ontological structuring, and this is so henologically. This is why there are multiplicities in the first place, lest we risk an irresolvable dualism between Being and an improperly reified “material” to individuate things. The “effects” of this irreducibility is what we use to name the principles “One”, when talking about its fecundity, and “matter”, when talking about the inability of this fecundity to be exhausted by its products as it reaches its “local” limits:
“But the incompleteness or undecidability of something with respect to its essence, in addition to being its providence or peculiar destiny, is also its matter, as that which simply expresses the point at which formal specification exhausts itself.”[7]
But then, a question arises. If each God is manifest as Being itself, and if Being’s secondariness is tied to the “matter” corresponding to it, how does matter implicate the Gods qua Intelligible, or intellective, or Psychic? The answer to that, I think, comes from seeing what it means for a God’s activity to be more “universal” and detached from particular bodies: The “higher” you go, the more body and more “matter” you assume.
II
To begin to explicate this, we have to take a look at “Being itself” and free ourselves from the rigid way we understand it:
“The "intelligible" order of Gods, then, which is treated in the third book of the Platonic Theology, which corresponds to and constitutes Being Itself, Being qua Being, expresses not a disposition of Gods relative to each other but the characteristics inherent in each and every God. Every God is, by default and even if manifesting him/herself at no subsequent level, an intelligible God.”[8]
This is quite radical, and a bit hard to understand. We normally take the “chain of being” image a little bit too seriously, with “Being itself” as the imposing sovereign. But, as useful as that image is, it is incomplete, as we can see here. The reified single “Being itself” does not capture the sense in which “Being itself” is each God manifest, and thus does not explain in what sense it “receives a multiplicity of henads and of powers and mingles them into one essence” (Pl. Theo. III 9). Instead of the reified single monad, we should think of potential monads for any possible world that requires them, and to think of these monads, we must think of them not as externalized “points”, but the “centre”, in the particular sense of the “inward” vanishing point of the self. “Being” is the first self-manifestation of the Gods, and as such “Being” can only be the character of this or that God expressed in the highest terms, that of the simple quality of Being. The triads of Proclus follow a particular logic, one that makes perfect sense in the abstract, and can help us break the inflexibility of “chain of being” logic. The intelligible triads establish Being itself as the manifestation of each God to themself. Each God is manifest as Intelligible Being, whose “whole” power is channelled through Intelligible Life and received and cognized by Intelligible Intellect. The God manifests as Being to themselves. Since “To be a henad is to be a way of being a multitude of henads”[9], the God’s manifestation to itself is also a manifestation of the way that God is the unity of all others, and this is the special purview of Intelligible Intellect, cognizing this multiplicity qua Intelligible, not qua supraessential. As this self-manifestation is “occult”, hidden in the depths of the God’s highest activity of self-reflection, we have no access to it in any “chain of being” (although it may be known about), instead it is the “centre” of the activity of any God on any ontological structure, whether psychic, material or intellectual. The procession of the Henads qua activity from “the One” is the “motion” and fecundity of the Henads from themselves, and this fecundity is not restricted to any hierarchy. Limited as Being in its “secondariness”, it still escapes any hierarchy. Such hierarchies come with a further determination of divine activity. At the most basic level, the highest activity of a God is simply self-cognization, something fundamentally unshareable in any ontological sense, and can only be “known” in an “unknowing”, a henosis approaching the “all in each” it expresses. Yet, in all of this, Being cannot exhaust the Henad, the infinitude of which can be considered from “centre to periphery” and “periphery to centre”. The latter corresponds to the unific power of the Henad as such, the power to unify, to establish Being. The former corresponds to the incompleteness of this unification, such that Being is eternally expressed in its “secondariness”, this incompleteness expressed as the pure receptivity of “prime matter”. Indeed the highest manifestation of the God has a “body”, but this body is no body, and yet, this receptivity is every possible body. We see here the inverse image of the God qua Being expressing “all in each”. The God qua Being is exempt from all secondary natures in order to embrace them, and this embrace is secured by its very “secondariness”, expressed in the pure “receptivity” that receives everything it gives out. In the establishment of positive intra-individual ontological “space”, especially that (Intelligible Life) between object (Intelligible Being) and subject (Intelligible Intellect), we have established the potentiality for the God to be manifest in any established space and participate in the establishment of any ontological plane it desires. This “potentiality” is its “matter”.
It’s essential to see the kaleidoscopic fractal here: In a theological ontology, with Gods (qua activity) in a more familiar hierarchical disposition towards one another, we do not see “Being itself” as above them in the same hierarchy, instead, each God has as the absolute centre – even if we admit of “proximate centres” – of its Intellectual activity an intelligible centre that belongs to no hierarchy, similar to how in organizations in mundane life, each person has a intellectual and personal centre of their own beyond any external organizational structure among them. In the special case where one God might be the “paradigm” of the entire Cosmos – the “Paradigm” for Proclus corresponding to Intelligible Intellect – that relationship is a relationship of desire that establishes the kind of ontically restricted hierarchical relationships in the first place. This is not the post to explain the details of this special case, but we can say that the “inmost” manifestation of the God is the assumption of all potential bodies.
III
All “subsequent” determinations of divine activity are ever more specifications of bodily assumption. The intelligible-intellective emergence of the pantheon expresses an unlimited power with respect to the possible “life-worlds”[10] that particular pantheon can “construct”, which is necessarily less than the possible worlds each God can belong to. Thus, as Proclus says “the potencies of the more universal terms are more infinite, being themselves more universal and nearer in rank to the primal Infinity”[11] (Prop 98). We can see here the way infinity and matter are coupled, and are infact two ways of viewing the same principle. Less “universal” activities are “less infinite” – meaning less powerful – and are correspondingly coupled with less “universal” and more specific “matter”. From the pure receptivity coupled with Being itself, we get to the pure receptivity of the “discordant and disorderly” matter coupled with the Intelligible-Intellective activity of the Pantheon as a whole. While the former concerns receptivity as such, the latter concerns a particular kind of receptivity. The former concerns the infinite possibilities in being a manifest God, considered as a pure reception of this God in whatever way the God can be received, the latter concerns the possible orderings a particular collection of Gods can bring about, hence why the “matter” here is disorderly, as no particular order among the possible options has emerged on this level. To move from “centre to periphery” here, in the Intelligible-Intellective, is to simply give themselves as a collective whole, the “limits” of this giving being the fact that this giving is indefinite as to which particular way of organizing this whole is being given; all possibilities here are given, and thus this juxtaposition looks “disorderly” in the periphery of this perspective, just as the indefinitude of the God’s endless gift looks like a pure receptivity when looked at from the same “centre to periphery” perspective. Vanderkwaak works through the various stages and “levels” of matter that ascends just as the “stages” of being descends, with Soul as the centre that holds them together. More particular “matter” concerns more specific activity, as the “limits” of this activity, but an interesting consequence of the coupling of the highest essential activity with the lowest receptivities/matters is that “since the prior [causes] is active before (πρὸ) the later [causes], it will also go on producing more effects after (μετά) the lower reach the limit of their power (§ 57)”[12]. Hence, “Rocks are the products of fewer causes than a human being, and matter again, of even fewer than rocks. The last terms are once again simple, the product of fewer and fewer causes. And for this reason, the last are arranged in an order that reflects the first. The simplest terms are both superior (κρεῖττόν) and inferior (χεῖρον) to the complex life of what resides in the middle (§ 59), where soul and the world of becoming live in a complexity that draws together the diverse effects of the simple.”[13]. This is why the Demiurge, in whom the Paradigm is present – the Paradigm’s “forms” being the elemental “habitats”[14] or “ecosystems”[15] – forms the elements from the “disorderly” matter[16]. The matter corresponding to the Demiurge is the indefinitude of the possible ways the elements can be combined in meaningful “ecosystems”. His gift is these elements, whose order is still “disorderly” with respect to higher orders, just as the “disorder” this elemental matter was formed from is still “receptive”. The properties of this “matter” compound with levels, inverse mirroring the levels of being, going from simple to complex. Subsequent demiurgic entities build upon that, until we get a world in its full glory.
IV
Proclus was brilliant and complicated, I admit that this might be a lot to understand in one go. I am still working through this myself. The point of all of this is to illustrate the point mentioned near the beginning, that “matter” is the inverse perspective of the “process” of unification, such that the unity that unifies can never be totally expressed and exhausted by the unified. The most basic of receptivities, that of “prime matter”, which is the receptivity to Being as such, becomes the basis by which more particular receptivities can emerge. This is the meaning of “matter” itself having “levels”. There must be a receptivity to Being as such for there to be a receptivity to wholes of beings. There must be a receptivity to being as such and the wholes of beings for there to be a receptivity to parts and ultimately pieces of beings. The effects of prior causes are only completed by the prior receptivity to being as such, and other receptivities prior. Matter is thus a way of describing unific power. But as “Being as such” is not an imposing sovereign but the interiority of the Gods expressed to themselves, so to we much view these things are as “internal”, as the various structures of the “self”, such that even the chain of being is seen as a “chain of interiority”. Athena proceeding and reverting on Zeus is Athena having Zeus as a “proximate” interiority. From Athena as a centre of perspective, and in this ontology as a middle term (following Prop. 148), “links the whole together” with herself “as mediator”; Zeus, and all prior Gods are “in her” and “Athenaic”[17] in this particular way and activity of transmitting “the bestowals of the first members of its order”, an expression of “all in each”; all Gods after her are also “in her” in another way and in the activity of drawing “upward the potentialities of the last” and is also an expression of “all in each”, both apart from (but included in) the supraessential sense of this unity. She “implants in all a common character and mutual nexus—for in this sense also givers and receivers constitute a single complete order, in that they converge upon the mean term as on a centre.”[18]
At this “centre”, there is Athena, who is still here the direct manifestation of Being itself attenuated to a particular activity in whatever place she has on this chain, her interiority as Being itself escaping this determination and being present in whatever place she appears in, and this is so for every God, who at the centre of everything they instantiate are “unities that are indivisible and completely one”[19]. “Matter” for Athena is thus the inconsumerability of her person as it is considered from the perspective of the limits of the unified, and the “scale” or “level” of this “matter” is proportional to how “universal” the “Athenaic” activity we are considering is. To generalize, and conclude, insofar as any single entity either has participants or is participated or both, it in its own way “existentiates” everything it is connected to in this way. It is a centre to which all of those proceeding from it or preceding it, or both, are peripheral. Insofar as this “existentiation” is considered centre to periphery, it is “the One”; insofar as it is considered periphery to centre, it is “the Good”. Insofar the “potency” of this “existentiation” is considered periphery to centre (i.e. in its activity of unification), it is called “Infinity” or “Unlimited”; insofar as it is considered centre to periphery (i.e. in its receptivity to unification), it is called “matter”. This is how the “vertical” and “circular” aspects of Neoplatonic “emanation” meet, how all things “return” to “the One” no matter where they are placed ontologically, spatially, or otherwise.
[1] Matthew Vanderkwaak, “Matter and the One in Proclus” (2018), https://DalSpace.library.dal.ca//handle/10222/74145.
[2] Vanderkwaak. Pg. 71.
[3] Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), Pg. 343-344. https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/dissertation-revised-copy1.doc.
[4] Butler. Pg. 342.
[5] “To say that the One produces being, then, is not to posit the One as a prior monad which causes being, but is rather simply to describe the dependence, the secondariness, of being.” - Eric D. Perl, “‘The Power of All Things’: The One as Pure Giving in Plotinus,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 3 (1997): 301–13, https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq199771331.
[6] Vanderkwaak, “Matter and the One in Proclus.” Pg 32
[7] Edward P. Butler, “The Nature of the Gods (VII): Providence and Powers,” Polytheist.Com (blog), October 3, 2016, http://polytheist.com/noeseis/2016/10/03/the-nature-of-the-gods-vii-providence-and-powers/.
[8] Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus.” Pg. 9.
[9] Steven Dillon, Pagan Portals - Polytheism: A Platonic Approach (Alresford: Moon Books, 2022).
[10] Edward Butler [@EPButler], “Hence There Are Many Whole Life Worlds, but the Closure of Totality, of the ‘All’, Is *internal* to Each.,” Tweet, Twitter, October 22, 2020,
[11] Proclus and E. R. Dodds, The Elements of Theology (Oxford University Press, 1971).
[12] Vanderkwaak, “Matter and the One in Proclus.” Pg. 38.
[13] Vanderkwaak. Pg 38
[14] “Accordingly, in the Timaeus the forms, εἶδη, within the cosmic paradigm are not, e.g., discrete species, but instead habitats astral, aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial (Tim. 39e–40a).” (Pg. 314-315) - Edward Butler, “Animal and Paradigm in Plato,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 2 (2014): 311–23, https://doi.org/10.5840/epoche2014193.
[15] “prior to the demiurgic utterance and the precipitation of matter, the essence of the third intelligible triad as "the paradigm of this universe now possessing life," lies rather in an animal consciousness which we might characterize, indulging ourselves in an anachronism, as an intelligence corresponding to those organizations we know as "ecosystems," that embody a pre-reflective interdependence and a lived totality which would be the complement of the purely formal totality of Allness Itself.” - Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus.” Pg. 238
[16] “Accordingly, the creator-father endows matter with the elements, which are corporeal universals, those constituents of all bodies composed from parts.” - Vanderkwaak, “Matter and the One in Proclus.” Pg. 67
[17] “a god of purity does not have purity as a virtue (even in a maximal way) nor is its essence somehow pure, rather it just is the standard “purity.” Of course, gods are usually more complex than this, so the values are not so much like “purity” and “protection” and the like but things such as “Apollonianess” and “Dionisiacality”. -Antonio Vargas, “An Henadological Find,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), December 5, 2022, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/an-henadological-find?utm_medium=email
[18] Proclus and Dodds, The Elements of Theology.
[19] Vanderkwaak, “Matter and the One in Proclus.” Pg. 32