Time is a God

Review and Thoughts on Antonio Vargas’ “Time’s Causal Power: Proclus on the Natural Theology of Time”

0

What is for many a dissipative, diminutive, and destroying force, is a positive force of theophany and intelligibility for Proclus. This is one partial way of explaining Proclus’ theory of Time in Antonio Vargas’ Time’s Causal Power: Proclus on the Natural Theology of Time¹. That is, we know the divine “by discovering the causes of ordered change” (p. 1), and for Proclus this means that Time is itself a God, one of the many Gods that order the Cosmos. So while, for us, the inquiry into time might be “an inquiry not into the restricted phenomena of the measure­ment of changes and the passage of past, present and future”, for Proclus it is instead “an inquiry into the causes of change” (p. 7). It is important to note that “Chronos” and “Kronos” are not identical for Proclus. “Chronos” is Time as a God, embodied in a participated Nous/Intellect, while “Kronos” is the God who constitutes the first unparticipated Nous, whose activity is “In itself and In another”, prior to Noetic Time.

So far, this is pretty much classic Proclus. His system is often thought to be unnecessarily complex, but I’d say he is one example of someone who follows the “anti-reductionist” streak of Platonism to many of its natural conclusions. Understanding this is one way you might be able to penetrate the logic of the system, a system that explicates how, in many ways, we impatiently simplify phenomena we ought to stick with to the end. This is best seen in how the complexity of the other Neoplatonists is simplified for ease of understanding and appropriation. Plotinus is famous in this regard, especially in Christian theological circles, where he is often reduced to a kind of Arian theologian; the Gods often do not figure in explications of his thought. Part of this might be attributed to Plotinus’ less systematic and more fluid system, although this is no excuse. Proclus, on the other hand, forces you to confront the issue of the Gods in Neoplatonism, and if you read enough, to rethink your appraisal of his predecessors.

In this book, Antonio focuses on Time in itself and not the higher principles beyond Time as a principle. This means that he does not go into detail about principles like the Intelligible-Intellective Life, Intelligible Being, and Unity as such (or “The One”). Antonio has an interesting short overview of this in a different essay², while you can consult Butler’s dissertation for a detailed account³. Due to the intellective context of Time as a principle – where “intellective” means that which pertains to “Nous”, the eternal “Mind” insofar as it is in the position of the knower rather than the known – he does have to specify in places the structure of intellective for Proclus. This focus on Time and not the prior principles is specified in the introductory chapter, along with the distinctive features of Proclus’ account and the structure of the book.

One of those distinctive features is Proclus’ stricter categorization. For instance, whereas for Plotinus, the boundary between Psyche and Nous (Soul and Intellect respectively) is quite fluid, up to the point that Plotinus argues that the highest part of the Soul is its “unfallen” Nous, Proclus has a sharper distinction between has a sharper distinction between Nous and Psyche. For Proclus, there is no part of the Psyche or Soul that remains in the heavens when it descends. If any soul has constant Noesis, then it is a constant participation in a Nous that is separate from it rather than simply being its highest part. This is the case for divine souls, rather than ours, which do not participate Nous directly. We participate Nous by participating in divine souls who have unbroken participation in Nous. We can see here how Proclus’ stricter categorization encourages the multiplication of classes of being to make up for it. Indeed Proclus is famous for his emphasis of mediating terms. Power mediates Unity and Being; Life mediates Being and Intellect; Soul mediates Intellect and Body; Nature mediates Soul and Body; Angels, Daimons and Heroes mediate Gods and Mortals. The implications for anti-reductionism are clear: Soul is not just fallen Nous, Being is not just fallen unity, Body is not just fallen Soul, etc. To the extent he can take it, Proclus wants to see as many things as possible to be a result of superabundant Value and individuating integrity, rather than diminution and a failure to approximate perfection.

This carries over into his account of Time. Rather than reducing time to a feature of the world, one that is a result of entropy, or even the cause of dissolution in things, he understands Time as ultimately a unique Presence of Divinity. There is a “Time Itself” for Proclus, and it embodies a God. It is separate from the sensible cosmos, but it is the cause of ordered change in the sensible cosmos, the cause of time as a phenomenon. The form of Time, or the “Order of Time” as Antonio put it, refers to this eternal cause, and he capitalizes it, as he does all other eternal principles in the book; the Order of Time is also “Time”. The phenomenon of time, time in the sensible cosmos or world, is not capitalized. It is “time”. This means that the inquiry into time is not a subject of Physics for Proclus, but a Metaphysics. Antonio also explains the differences between this Proclean understanding of “Physics” (which is basically Platonic cosmology) and Aristotle’s understanding of “Physics” which is a lot more abstract, dealing with categories and types. This carries over into the issue of what the “world” is for Proclus, for whom there is only “one world” (or that the world is unique):

“Proclus’ thesis about the uniqueness of the world is not, then, the thesis of the absence of a multitude under the concept “world,” but a thesis about what it is to be perceptible, i.e., about nature. Thus, nature has necessarily the total order that we indicate when we call it a “world.”” (pp. 15)

That is, it is not about whether or not there is a “multiverse” (vaguely defined), but that even if there is a “multiverse”, that are all included in “the world”, the structure of appearance that is invariant with respect to every one of these “universes”. This structure is why “physics” is “cosmology”, the “cosmos” here is the phenomenological structure of appearance.

The structure of the book is also given in the introduction. Antonio approaches Proclus’ theory of time by considering its major influences. The first chapter deals with Proclus’ interpretation of Plato. The second deals with Proclus’ interpretation of Aristotle and the differences Proclus has with him. The third chapter deals with the Stoic influences of Proclus’ theory of time. The fourth chapter deals with Proclus’ appropriation and critique of Plotinus, after which he concludes.

I

The first chapter, as mentioned earlier, focuses on Proclus’ interpretation of the Platonic texts he sees as giving the nature of time. Antonio focuses on two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Republic. The Timaeus takes the lion’s share of the analysis. What is important to note here is that Time is a product of the Cosmic Demiurge – here called the Cosmic Engineer, for interesting reasons Antonio gives in the chapter (pp. 24) – in their activity of engineering a world in the image of the cosmic paradigm, the Eternal Living Being. That is, Time is a product of the Engineer and the Paradigm. Also of interest in the dialogue is how Proclus understands interprets the Timaeus as revealing a principle of time that is prior to even Soul:

“Proclus divides the narrative of the engineering of the world into ten sections, each of which deals with one “gift” or perfection given by the Engineer to the world.” (pp. 27)

Each gift improves upon the previous one, meaning this is an ascent to more transcendent principles. Time is the eighth gift, improving on the seventh gift which is Soul. This is one example of the hermeneutic strategy of Proclus, where the Platonic dialogues are treated like a kind of scripture. For Proclus, “Plato not only always wrote the truth, but also expressed it in the best possible words set in the best possible word order, such that even the ordering of words could signify important claims of priority in metaphysi­cal, ethical or epistemological registers” (pp. 20).

This brings up for me the question of philosophical method and the value of such a method of hermeneutics as a method of doing philosophy. The default response today to the idea that Plato, for instance, holds so much truth even in the ordering of words would be disbelief. Imagine Heideggerians doing exegesis on Being and Time the way Philo does exegesis of Genesis, with the intense attention to detail where the fact that he uses this term and not that term is the difference between delusion and true opinion; or maybe Spinozans treating Spinoza’ Ethics the way Ibn ‘Arabi read the Quran, where every word has every possible meaning it can contain as truth. The Protestants would term this “Eisegesis”, reading into the text meanings the authors didn’t intend. Surely, the writings of humans do not have a necessary correspondence to the nature of existence, right? Well, if you are religious, chances you already believe that there is such correspondence. Whether it is oral myth, performed ritual, or written scripture, chances are you have a long history of people reading the world out of these revealed stories.

So how do we understand this method? The first thing to let go of is any idea that this begins properly in the text or in the philosophy we “impose” on the text. Infact we need to loosen our understanding of “text” and “philosophy”. The error of Sola Scriptura lies precisely in this restriction of what a text is and the origin of our methods of knowing. Our encounter with the world is not a passive reception of meaning obfuscated by our biases. Our encounter with the world is always already an interpretation of it. This is an aspect of Demiurgy that is often lost in the focus on the manipulation of a reified entity named “matter”: The Demiurge is interpreting the Paradigm. The result of that interpretation is the ensouled world. The World Soul is also interpreting the Paradigm through the Demiurge and its own Nous, and the result is the world’s motion. Demiurgy is thus many levels of interpretation of the total world, and we are not exempt from this activity. Our bodies, the texts handed down to us, our experiences, these are all results, direct or indirect, of divine interpretations of the Paradigm. In short, they are results of providence. Insofar as the parts can reveal the whole – and so in some sense contain it – so too do texts, and all that can be interpreted, such as liturgies and the movement of stars, serve as revelations of the whole of things, the totality of beings in the divine providence. This is all the more so for texts specially given or recognized as a kind of revelation. It would not really matter here if there is little historical basis for the “write” of the text. If the text “works”, or is seen to work, that is, it produces the effects it is supposed to, then it retains this position as revelation. I am of the opinion that there are a whole lot more texts that can serve roles like this if one is in the correct “receptive” or rather “creative” state, but that’s a question for another time. The point here is that for Proclus, Plato is a unique source of divine revelation, of the “scientific” kind, “Where “science” involves the use of demonstration and “dialectic” names the highest science”⁴. Rather than read Proclus as cynically constructing his own system using Plato as an authoritative cover, we should take him seriously as actually expounding Plato, not as just another extremely insightful human being, but as the conduit for higher agencies. To read beneath and between the lines in Plato’s dialogue is to read beyond Plato into the agents who reveals through him. It is to participate in Demiurgy.

So what theory of time does Proclus glean from Plato? As mentioned earlier, Time is one of the perfections gifted by the Demiurge/Engineer in the Timaeus. It is what perfects the soul of the world, and thus is considered superior to the soul of the world. Time is here an eternal Number, prior to the Soul in which it is expressed. This “Time”, or “Order of Time”, is what is then studied as the “true astronomy” in the Republic, beyond the sensible objects which we usually call “astronomical”.

II

The second chapter deals with the Aristotelian sources of Proclus’ theory of time. The most prominent Aristotelian aspect to Proclus’ theory of time is that for Proclus Time is a kind of Intelligence, that is, a kind of Nous. As Antonio himself says, this is Aristotelian “not because Aristotle himself held it, but because Proclus employs an Aristotelian analysis of Intelligence as a prin­ciple of change within it” (p. 46). Antonio explains the role of Aristotle in post-Iamblichean Neoplatonic thought as a kind of daimonic “steppingstone” towards Plato’s “divine” insights. He then explains in more detail the differences between Aristotle and Proclus on Time, Nous, activity, etc., while showing the ways in which Proclus stills draws from Aristotle. What is incredibly interesting in this chapter, in a theme that continues in the next, is that it can serve as a very good textbook worthy introduction to Aristotle’s theory of change and activity. Having to think of it in terms of differences with another philosopher in the wider tradition only serves to make the explanation clearer, and it does this without the very common problem of simplistic strawmen of Platonic positions that Aristotelians tend to use when trying to bring Aristotle’s positions into relief. This is possible precisely because Antonio here does not take Proclus’ own interpretations (or misinterpretations) of Aristotle for granted, and separates Proclus’ interpretation from Aristotle himself, as far as this is possible. Whatever issues there are in both philosophers are then more easily noticed.

The importance of Time as a kind of Nous for Proclus is that it makes Time a positive feature of the world, a kind of providence, a paradigm and a cause of good things, rather than a cause of corruption. That Time is the Nous of the World means that it in some sense takes the role of Aristotle’s Prime Mover. It is generally true that the whole of Nous simpliciter in Neoplatonism takes on the role of unmoved mover, and Unity itself or “The One” can be thought of as the unmoved mover insofar as it is the first cause, but these are all indirect for Proclus. The paradigm of ordered change in the world, that Nous for which it is Nous at all, is Time itself. To understand the peculiarity of this formulation, you have to remember that there are so many Noes (plural of Nous) in Proclus that they are basically uncountable for us. There are 49 Unparticipated Noes, the rest being participated, their number unknown by us. Every divine soul has its Noes, and just off the fact that each star in the fixed heaven has its own divine soul, the number of the Noes of those entities are enormous enough to overwhelm us. This is not to think about the many other Angels, Daimones (including the Daimones for each individual animal) and Heroes, each of which have their peculiar Nous⁵. Each Nous thinks all of being from the perspective of a particular form, and thus that form contains all other forms according to its peculiar providence. The higher the Nous, the more universal the forms in which it thinks through. The Unparticipated Noes think through the most universal forms. For instance, the Second Intellectual Father (Rhea) thinks the whole of Being through “Motion and Rest”. The Demiurge (the Third Intellectual Father) thinks all of Being through “Sameness and Difference”, which is why he divides the World Soul’s activities into a circle of “Same” and a circle of “Different” in the Timaeus. It is surprising then that the Demiurge is not cosmic intelligence for Proclus. It is Time that is cosmic intelligence. Time is cosmic intelligence because it is the intelligence of the World Soul i.e. Time is the agent of the World Soul’s activities. For Proclus, the agent of a divine soul’s actions is its Nous. The divine Soul does not merely contemplate Nous, Nous determines its actions. The demiurge gives the eternal being of the World through its demiurgic “interpretation” of the Paradigm, but it is Time itself that contemplates it into activities that the World Soul uses to order the world’s movement. The idea that time is the Nous of the world exegetes the idea that Time is a perfection of Soul, and is thus higher than it, while being the agent that directs its actions. The issues with this formulation will be clearer later, but for now let us consider an interesting effect of the idea that Time, not Space, is the Nous of the World.

III

In what might be a surprising twist, Antonio in the next chapter considers the Stoic sources of Proclus’ theory of time. Similarly to the chapter on the Aristotelian influence, Antonio gives a textbook worthy introduction to Stoic physics here. This Stoic influence seems indirect, through other Platonists, rather than through Proclus directly encountering Stoic texts. What the Stoics contribute to the Proclean theory of time is their idea that the world shares one life. A simple analogy would be to consider your own body. Whatever time scale of its components, they are all parts of one life of your body. The Stoics saw the world similarly, as one body, with a life cycle. Unlike most Platonists, the Stoics saw the entire world as mutable. Every “body” is in the midst of some chemical process of transformation. Since all things are bodies for the Stoics, all things are in the midst of some chemical process of transformation, including the celestial bodies. The world was thought to cyclically end and begin in a conflagration. In a move that Antonio rightly calls “un-Aristotelian” (p. 193) in the subsequent chapter on Proclus’ Plotinian influences, Proclus also argued that all bodies are processes, since all bodies are measured by time (Prop. 50):

“In a physics where every perceptible substance is a process, one cannot say that a potential sculpted shape has become fully actualized when the sculptor’s work is done, for even once it has been sculpted, there are future parts, future states of the statue pre-determined by its rational structure and these remain potential.” (p. 193)

Proclus, like the Stoics, argued for one life of the world. It is necessary that if there is a unified time that measures the whole world like the way the heterogenous processes of our body all connect to the process of the body as a whole becoming in its lifespan, then there must also be a life of the world that connects all its internal processes and parts, even if this life is not identical with the flow of time. This difference between the flow of time and the life of the world is the difference between Proclus (and Plotinus) and the Stoics. Even though Proclus and Plotinus agreed that there has to be a life of the world, they disagreed that this life is what explains the flow of time. Another disagreement is the obvious one, which is that the Platonists are not materialists. This life of the world, for them, is not reducible to a material substance. The sympatheia between the many parts of the world is not secured materially. As Antonio says an another article:

“I suggested that if we take seriously the idea that the world is narratively coherent—not just a series of brute facts—then we might think of sympathy in those terms. It’s not just about resonance between forms; it’s about symbolic significance, the kind of coherence that would matter in a novel. If a character opens a locked door at work and also opens a sealed drawer at home on the same day, that means something in a narrative. The world of magic, I proposed, is structured like that: not mechanical, but literary.”⁶

This is consistent with the fact that the Platonic conception of the World Soul’s activity can be thought of more in terms of narrative than in terms of mechanics. The World is a “Play”. These resonances, the coherence of the world, cannot be for Proclus the source of the flow of time, because he accepts Aristotle’s critique that time is not straightforwardly a change, since change already presupposes time as its measure.

IV

This is where the next chapter comes in clutch, in its analysis of the Plotinian influences on Proclus’ theory of time, as well as the interesting differences. In the previous chapter on Aristotle’s influence on Proclus, the conclusion was that the absolute flow of time “cannot be a change from one state A to another state B, for there will be the question of why it is a change from A to B and not from B to A”, but “must be a “change” from a state A to another state A going through only the same state A and only differing with respect to quan­tity, an ever-greater duration of the very state A” (pp. 67). This is the motion of the outermost celestial sphere, the circle of “same”. Given that, for Proclus, the greater does not behold the lesser, this circle of Same in itself does not experience time as we do. It is one “everlasting day”. It is we, who look up, and see difference between the differing celestial bodies and the differing seasons, that measure a “great year” – the universe itself completing a great cycle. This everlasting, purely uniform motion, is considered by Plotinus to be rooted in the mental motion of the World Soul. Plotinus sees time as the life of the world soul – note: not the life of the world, but of the world soul, which is immaterial. It is here Antonio says something that requires a bit of clarification, given his other words on the relationship between Nous and divine Souls:

“it seems that ultimately Proclus and Plotinus can be brought to agree that (1) the sequential life of the world soul is what constitutes time, and (2) that life depends on an eternal intellectual sub­stance. For Proclus this substance is a Kind of Intelligence existing separately from the world soul, whereas for Plotinus it is an eternal intellectual Self of the world soul.” (pp. 171)

Remember I mentioned before that the Nous is the true agent of a divine Soul’s activity. I should clarify what I meant by quoting Antonio’s article on Proclus’ theoretical philosophy (note that “Spirit” = Divine Soul here):

“Spirits thus are souls that belong to Kinds of Intelligence in the way that human bodies can belong to transmigrating souls: since the whole mental activity of a spirit consists in intelligization and the principle of its intelligization is the inherent intelligization of a Kind of Intelligence, the true agent in a spirit is not its soul, but its Kind of Intelligence.”⁷

The footnote to this reads:

“An analogy might be perhaps the poor mode of explanation that explains the actions of individuals due to their being possessed by an ideology or worldview of some kind. Thus the true agents of these actions cease to be individual men and women but come to be abstractions like „Nazism“, „Islam“, or „Fundamentalism“. This is poor history, but approximates how Proclus understands spirits: the true agents of their actions are indeed their Kinds of Intelligences, their specific ways of knowing reality”⁸

The difference between Proclus and Plotinus here is that Proclus makes a very sharp distinction between Soul and Nous. For Plotinus, Nous is also the highest part of a Soul, the part that is undescended. For Proclus, Nous is not the highest part of the Soul. Nous is completely beyond it. The Nous being the true agent of a divine soul’s actions is Nous instrumentalizing something that is ontologically distinct from it. The analogy with souls possessing bodies is rather exact. The Soul is not the highest part of the body, but a different substance from it that instrumentalizes the body in its enlivening it. Similarly, Soul is not Nous, but divine souls are possessed by Nous at all times, such that Nous is the true agent without abolishing the fact that Soul is a different substance. There is a distinction between “agent” and “subject” here, understood in a particular way, that will be useful when we consider the issues this brings up concerning Proclus’ understanding of Gods, but this is not the focus of the chapter, even if we will consider it soon. The virtue of this framing, and Antonio says this explicitly, is that it shows how similar Proclus and Plotinus’ understanding of the World Soul and Time are in certain important aspects, particularly how Nous is still in some sense a cause of time in both. For Plotinus, this is insofar Nous is a cause of thinking in Soul, while for Proclus it is because Time itself is a Nous, a separate substance that is the providence of ordered change in the World Soul. After the details of these differences and similarities are worked out, the book concludes.

V

Proclus’ theory of time, at least as Antonio presents it here, is certainly one of the most interesting I have encountered. As mentioned at the beginning of this review, I see Proclus as one of those who pushes the “anti-reductionism” of Plato to new places. This is one source of his manifestly complicated system. It is a common opinion that it is too complex. But I disagree. Once you share this penchant for non-reductionism and follow it thoroughly, you find that it might not even be complex enough. You might see the internal logic of the system and unfold some of the consequences yourself. The world is complex, far more complex than any system can capture. I find that Proclus’ refusal to reduce that complexity – at least, when he succeeds (unfortunately, he does not succeed all the time) – to be precisely the attitude a Platonist needs today, to confront and live in the absolute humongous stores of knowledge we have today about the world. This is how I feel about Proclus account of the Gods. The virtue of the account of the Henads today is that it can take a historical contingency (the fact that any God can become the all for the worshipper), and gives it a metaphysical basis. Proclus’ account of time as presented here, however, brings up several questions about his understanding of the Gods. For Proclus, the core of all Gods is the Henad, the “participated unity” beyond being. Antonio mentions that Proclus knew of a cult of Chronos/Time (pp. 9). The problem comes from the fact that the World Soul for Proclus is Dionysos⁹ . If the World Soul is Dionysos, and Chronos is the Nous of the World Soul, does that mean Dionysos is Chronos? Vice versa? Both? Or something else. I could not make sense of this, so I asked Antonio myself, and his response was rather interesting (he gave permission to share). He referenced his interpretation of Proclus to the effect that a God = Unity + Participants:

“This distinction is possible because “god” is not synonymous with “unity” in Proclus: a god is a self-complete unity together with the beings that incorporate (μετέχει) it. So it would be wrong to point to the sun and say “Look, a divine unity!”, but it is correct to point to it and say “Behold, a god!”. It makes sense, therefore, that the god qua god is a unity, since it is the divine unity that makes all that is incorporated divine, whereas what incorporates it merely has “the character of unity.””¹⁰

The implications are interesting. Here are his own words¹¹:

Unity of the world + Nous of the world = Chronos

Unity of the World + Nous of the World + Soul + Body = Dionysos

We should call these formulas T1 and T2 for Chronos and Dionysos, respectively. This might be hard to understand because we are thinking of Gods as some kind of restricted subject. But a God can animate many subjects, many substances. The question is, in the above example, is the “Unity of the World” – the unity that “possesses” the Nous of the world – the same in both instances? Remember I referenced Antonio’s words about the true agent of a divine soul. Well, in the case of a God, the true “agent” with reference to the entire series is actually a supraessential divine unity. With respect to the Soul of a Psychic God, it is the Nous that is the agent, but the Nous itself of the psychic God is also possessed by something prior, the participated/incorporated unity. This is the difference between divine souls like Angels and Daimons, and Gods. The ultimate agent of a Daimon is its Nous. The God, no matter the extent of the chain of incorporation, ends at the participated unity. They inaugurate unique strata of being. The head of the class of Angels is an Angelic God. The angels are “piloted” by their Nous, the Angelic God is “piloted” by a participated unity through a participating Nous. Antonio’s theory here is that where you stop in this chain can drastically change which God you are referring to. If you begin at the unity of the world and stop at the cosmic intelligence, you are referring to Chronos. If you begin at the unity of the world and stop at the World’s Body, you are referring to Dionysos. Note that “unity of the world” refers to a particular unity or henad through that which first incorporates it, which in this case is first and foremost cosmic intelligence. It is not referring to the first principle as such, but the particular unity this Nous incorporates. It is naming the cause (unity) via the effect (unifying the world qua ordered change)

Personally, it is very hard to square this with my current understanding of the Henads. This is one of those things Antonio and Edward have been discussing in their debate on shared divine domains. Nevertheless, I have thoughts as to their reconciliation. This is my own attempt at reconciliation and not really Antonio’s or Edward’s. My method here is to accept Antonio’s basic schema while modifying Antonio’s formula by changing what is the first participant of any unity. Now, instead of a Nous, I’d say that the first participant of any Henad is Being itself. This is me applying Butler’s interpretation:

“Being is said in a wider and a narrower sense, as I remarked above, and Being in the narrow sense, Being Itself, is the ground of Being in the wider sense and is explicated in it. The richnessof content which provides for this explication is the presence to Being and for Being of the manifold of the Gods, which is present in the first place and in its greatest intensity not as a manifold, but as each God's one-to-one relation to all of Being. The ground of Being is therefore that which is in immediate contact, not with a class of Gods, like the subordinate hypostases which are not Being-qua-Being, but with each God, as a unique individual existence (huparxis). In this fashion the polycentric manifold of the Gods is present to Being and grounds it to its furthest reaches.”¹²

Thus, the identity of Being, which God Being itself is, is polycentrically constituted. Each God (Limit), through the presence of other Gods in it, which is its Power (Unlimited), constitutes Being itself (Mixture). Here, we sidestep the problem of whether the two elements “unity of the world” in T1 and T2 are the same. It is irrelevant and unanswerable on any first principles basis. Only a revelation can tell you that. However, even if a revelation tells you that, “Sameness and Difference” is a determination of the Intellective orders, of the Demiurge in particular. Such a synthesis of two deities could easily be read as a demiurgic act, an interpretation of the Gods’ activities. It is safe to say that such questions of identity are pretty much meaningless beyond the intellective, and especially at the level of Being itself, where every God is pretty much present in each God as a supraessential potency, and so any identity between can be posited and is actual in each. We cannot count Henads as such, only beings that incorporate them. Their “identities” are a question of revelation and of hermeneutics, which has no end. But what does this mean for our issue?

Being unable to answer whether it is the “same” henad that is present in the formula for Chronos and Dionysos, we must instead talk about the idiotês of these Gods, their “peculiarity”, which is not really negatively constituted, but positively encountered. You do not know who Dionysos is by knowing what he is not. You encounter Dionysos and often see signs of his presence. Butler speaks of the idiotês or “peculiarity” of each God in his dissertation, which indicates the uniqueness of the Henad. We must then speak of the idiotês of Dionysos and the idiotês of Chronos, which somehow include each other. It is in the idiotês of Dionysos to be possessed qua Soul by Chronos qua Nous. It is in the idiotês of Chronos to be the Nous of Dionysos qua World Soul. This is another manifestation of the old principle of “all things in all things”. Gods include each other. By tracing the beginning of this procession not to the Nous, but to Being itself polycentrically constituted by the manifold of Henads, we do not need to answer what philosophy by itself cannot answer, but we can trace the root of this impossibility of a philosophical answer to the henadicity of Being itself, where the unique is still blindingly present, and simple identities break down for opposite reasons to what a friend calls “blob mysticism”¹³

There are indeed other questions to ask of Proclus’ theory of time, notably how one could appropriate it for use today, but these are questions worthy of their own essays, and even their own books. I recommend this book primarily for the metaphysics nerds, as it is not an easy read for beginners. However, if you are willing to sit with it for a while, I think it is a book worth reading through.

Vargas, Antonio Luis. Time’s Causal Power: Proclus and the Natural Theology of Time. Philosophia Antiqua, volume 158. Brill, 2021.

1. Antonio Luis Vargas, Time’s Causal Power: Proclus and the Natural Theology of Time, Philosophia Antiqua, volume 158 (Brill, 2021).

2. Antonio Vargas, “An Introduction to Proclus’ Theoretical Philosophy,” n.d., accessed June 13, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/44084940/An_Introduction_to_Proclus_Theoretical_Philosophy.

3. Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/edward-butler-the-metaphysics-of-polytheism-phd-thesis.pdf.

4. Vargas, Time’s Causal Power. Footnote 4, Chapter 1.

5. I would like to thank Antonio for helping me clarify this in our conversations when I was getting confused as to the place of Time as a Nous when I only really knew about the 49 unparticipated Noes.

6. Antonio Vargas, “Beyond Sympathy: Plotinus, Iamblichus, and the Hidden Power of Ritual,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio, June 26, 2025, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/beyond-sympathy-plotinus-iamblichus. pp. 10-11

7. Vargas, “An Introduction to Proclus’ Theoretical Philosophy.” pp. 27.

8. Vargas, “An Introduction to Proclus’ Theoretical Philosophy.” footnote 47, pp. 27-28.

9. “Endymions_bower | Proclus on Dionysos,” accessed January 22, 2023, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/21233.html.

10. Antonio Vargas, “An Henadological Find,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio, December 5, 2022, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/an-henadological-find.

11. I would like to thank Antonio again for his lovely clarifications.

12. Edward P Butler, “The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus,” Méthexis, no. 21 (2008): 131–43. pp. 138

13. Halam [@parhypostates], “Upon further reflection, I’ve concluded that blob mysticism is not only stupid but flat-out evil. Good day. 👍,” Tweet, Twitter, September 15, 2025, https://x.com/parhypostates/status/1967609816400154903; he defines it in a comment below this - Halam [@parhypostates], “@orthodionysius ‘Multiplicity and difference are evil and the source of imperfection and we need to return to the original monad’ etc etc.,” Tweet, Twitter, September 15, 2025, https://x.com/parhypostates/status/1967611728067514663.