Elements of Theology 8: On Monads

After On Motion and On the Levels of Reality, this is the third and final subsection of Dodds' section titled "Of the Grades of Reality." We've established that the structure of reality itself consists of a series of levels, and now we're going to talk about how those levels are structured.

On Monads: Every level of being begins in a transcendent Monad, which is the cause of all the various things in its level; these things are what are participated in by the next level of being.

XXI. Every level of being begins in a Monad; every many within a level of being may be traced back to a Monad.

Every level of being is distinguished by some quality, the cause of which essentially possesses that quality [XX]. [We will call this cause a "Monad."]

Each of the things within a level of being, similarly, exist in a causal chain: one thing causes another, repeated many times, ultimately determining how each of the things relate to each other and to the whole; but since all at least in potential carry the same quality, all of them derive from the Monad which essentially possesses that quality [XX], even if a thing proximately has additional causes as well.

This specifically means that the One is the Monad of Henads, and that the Henads come from and return to the One; that the Intellect is the Monad of intelligences, and that the intelligences come from and return to the Intellect; that the Soul is the Monad of souls, which come from and return to the Soul; and that Nature is the Monad of natures, which come from and return to Nature.

XXII. There is exactly one Monad in each level of being.

Suppose there are many Monads in a level of being. These must differ in some respect, or else they would be one rather than many; therefore, the quality by which they differ is not their essential quality [XIX], and there must be a thing prior to them that essentially possesses the quality by which they are distinguished [XVIII]; but then the Monads are not Monads at all, but rather the thing prior to them is and we have simply misidentified the defining quality of a level of being. So the supposition must be false, and there can only be only one Monad in a level of being.

XXIII. Every Monad is transcendent, but produces things that can be participated in; those participated things are drawn back towards their transcendent.

We have already established a Monad is prior to the nature of the next level of being [XX]. But it is not possible for that Monad to be divided amongst them all, since then the Monad would be many (but it cannot be) [XXII], and anyway would require a unifying principle (but cannot have anything prior on its level of being) [XXI]. Neither is it possible for there to be a single participant in the Monad, since then the nature of a level of being must be common to all (not merely one) [XIX]. So the Monad must be transcendent.

So we must suppose that the Monad produces participable things out of itself, which things from the next level of being participates in. [(That is, the Intellect must produce intelligibles, which are the things that souls participate in; similarly, Soul must produce souls, which are the things that bodies participate in; but Soul does not directly participate in Intellect, neither the universal Body in Soul.)]

XXIV. A Monad is better than its participle products, which in turn are better than the things that participate in them.

A participating thing is incomplete without its participation: it is only made complete by the participation in some other thing. Therefore it is dependent on that thing, and worse than it.

But any participated thing is only participated by some number of participants, while the transcendent is common to all. Therefore, the transcendent is better than every participated thing.

Boy, Proclus sure is disagreeable today! There's quite a few apparent differences from Plotinus in this section, and trying to make sense of them made it very difficult for me to work my way through. I doubt I've properly grasped the implications of what Proclus is getting at, here, and I apologize if I've made mistakes.

I dislike the term "Monad" for the same reasons I dislike the term "Henad." Oh well: Proclus distinguishes the two, so I follow him. I was wondering how Henads and Monads differ, since my reading of Plotinus was that they were the same—but skipping ahead a bit, it seems that what Plotinus called a Henad (that is, the Intellect, Soul, Nature) is being called by Proclus a Monad; Proclus' Henads are something else entirely—they are the gods that exist above (!?) the Intellect. I haven't the slightest idea what that might mean: to Plotinus, the beings we call gods exist at the level of Soul; the Intellect is something far too great to be called a god (he and Porphyry call it "the father of the gods"), and only the One is above the Intellect. (I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm pretty confident that these are all what Plotinus said!) So it seems that Proclus insists on a very different cosmology than Plotinus did! I didn't dig very deeply into what Proclus does with Henads: we'll just have to see what it means as we proceed.

Proclus says in XXI that Nature produces natures (and that bodies are suspended from natures); my read of Plotinus was that Nature is the Monad of bodies (e.g. Nature, itself, is the visible cosmos of which bodies are parts). I'll need to reread Enneads III viii with this in mind to see if I misread Plotinus the first time through or if Proclus is disagreeing with him.

In his corollary to XXII (which I did not summarize), Proclus gives examples of things things which exist primitively in each level of being. First is Being, which must refer to the One, even though the One transcends Being; but this was a bit of a technicality even with Plotinus, so we'll let that slide. Next is the Intellect, fine. Next is the Soul, fine. But after that he starts listing various intelligibles: Beauty, Equality, Animal-ness, Human-ness. I think it's reasonable to assert that there is an original, unique thing possessing any given quality; but I don't see how we get there from the argument he employs, which hinges on a thing being the first cause within a level of being. Dodds notes the disagreement with Plotinus, but I don't even think it rises to the level of "disagreement" as it doesn't even appear to be self-consistent: I wonder, rather, if the text we have is corrupt.

Finally, while the discussion of "transcendence" in XXIII isn't really a disagreement between Proclus and Plotinus (Dodds notes that the dilemma of reconciling transcendence with imminence goes back to Plato), it does seem to reflect a difference of approach and emphasis. To Plotinus, deductive reason is a property of the soul, since deduction is a sequence and the world above soul is nonsequential. So, it is impossible to try and logically reconcile the super-logical (see also Tarski): if you want to understand realities higher than soul, then you can only do so through mystical experience. But Proclus is determined to take everything step-by-step! He's obviously doing so knowing full well that it's impossible, since he understands Plotinus backwards and forwards, so he must have felt it was important to make the attempt anyway. (Dodds notes that later authors criticize Proclus for inconsistency on the basis of this proposition, but as Gödel tells us, this is the necessary consequence of the attempt at completeness.) The question in my mind is, "why attempt the different approach?"—but I suppose such a thing is unknowable; maybe it's simply that Plotinus was an Aphrodite sort of person, while Proclus was under the guiding hand of Athena.

(A tip of the hat, by the way, to Thomas Taylor for his footnote to XXIII, which I have more-or-less reproduced. I wouldn't have followed it otherwise.)