Wondering About Aphrodite

Plato (in the Symposium) and Plotinus (in III v "On Love" and VI ix "On the Good") made a pretty big deal of the distinction between vulgar love and heavenly love, treating the former as being of the sensible world and the latter as being of the intelligible world, and therefore capital-B Better. But I'm not so sure this is so: is it not the case that the nature of the sensible world is separation, while the nature of the intelligible world is unity?

This would lead me to expect that while there are many kinds of love here in the sensible world, all of them should blend together into a harmonious whole There in the intelligible world. Here we speak of physical sex, emotional affection, imaginal devotion; but There, Love is all of these at once and more. Here, we have Aphrodite Pandemos and Aphrodite Ourania; but There, there is only Aphrodite.

Two Months of Greek

As I mentioned, I'm studying ancient Greek. Most of the vocabulary my textbook has been giving me so far consists of farm animals, so the exercises I'm working on right now are translating silly things like, "we sleep all the time because we are cats," or "he has horses because he is a farmer," or "the pigs are chasing the farmer."

I figure that makes sense, though, since that's the kind of vocabulary we teach to children, too. But that got me wondering... is there an ancient children's book I could attempt to read?

Wait a minute, of course there is!—that's what Æsop's Fables is for! So I dug up a critical edition of the earliest version we know about—written by Babrius c. AD 200—and tried to see what I could parse. I can't read any of it yet, but I can make out enough words to mostly guess which fables are which, and even recognized one of the titles—"The North Wind and the Sun"—at a glance.

I suppose that's not bad for two months of work at maybe 15–20 minutes a day. If you're monolingual, curious about studying another language, and are interested in a gauge of how far you can expect to come in that time, there's at least a stake in the ground.

Elements of Theology 17: Power and Participation

After Power and Complexity and Power and Unity, this is the third and final subsection of Dodds' section titled "Of the Grades of Causality." In this subsection, Proclus jumps back to the material we discussed way back in On Monads and fleshes it out with respect to the nature of participation of the things produced by each Monad.

Power and Participation: We have already stated that each level of being begins with a transcendent Monad, continues with things that can be participated, and finally with participants. We add that the first of these subsists within it's cause; the second of these is participated always, is self-complete, and is self-subsistent; the last of these is participated sometimes, is incomplete, and subsists only in reflection upon a lower level of reality.

LXIII. Transcendent things produce two grades of things that can be participated in: those that are always participated in, and those that are only sometimes participated in.

It is self-evident that there are things which are only sometimes participated in. [(For example, the form of Beauty is always participated in by some things, like angels, but only occasionally by other things, like human bodies.)] Recall that things which can be participated are produced by a transcendent Monad [XXIII]. However, something which is only sometimes participated in differs from its transcendent cause in two ways: first, that it can be participated in; and second, that it is temporal. Because causes produce effects as like to themselves as possible [XXVIII], we must suppose that there is an intermediate term which varies from each in only one way. Therefore, there must also be things which are always participated in.

LXIV. Every Monad produces two grades of things: one which is self-complete in substance, and one which is dependent on external substance.

It is self-evident that some things depend on an external substrate for their completeness. [(For example, some souls inhabit bodies.)] In this, they differ from their transcendent Monad [XXIII] in two ways: first, that it can be participated in; and second, that it is incomplete. By similar reasoning to LXIII, we must suppose there to be an intermediate term which can be participated in but which is complete.

Therefore, per XX, we may assert that the One produces both self-complete Henads and to lesser unities that merely give completion to intelligences; Intellect produces both self-complete intelligences and to lesser intelligences that merely give intellection to souls; Soul produces both self-complete souls and lesser souls that merely animate bodies.

LXV. Everything either subsists within it's cause; within itself; or without itself as if by reflection.

We assert that there are three ways a thing may be given substance:

1. Since every cause possesses the character it lends to its effects [XVIII], if this character is "existence," then a thing may have its subsistence within its cause.

2. If a cause has too tenuous a character to be apparent on its own, it may be seen in its effects for the same reason; therefore, we say that it subsists in those effects, since it is unable to act without them.

3. Since we have just supposed that some things subsist above themselves, and others subsist below themselves, then surely there must be some things that subsist within themselves to complete the set.

Proclus is really leaning on the "principle of mean terms" today, which he uses to "prove" each of the today's three propositions. Each of them outline independent, threefold models based on the model already sketched in XXIII. (As noted, Proclus departs pretty widely from Plotinus in On Monads, consequently he is here as well.) Proclus doesn't say so anywhere, but I assume that all four are linked:

Proposition	Top	Middle	Bottom
XXIII	transcendent	participated	participant
LXIII	transcendent	always participated	sometimes participated
LXIV	Monad	self-complete	dependent
LXV	subsists within cause	self-subsistent	subsists as a reflection

So if my assumption is right, it seems like all the Monads are somehow the same, as if all the lower ones are actually what the higher ones are potentially. (That is how everything works to Plotinus, but it seems Proclus limits it to Monads.) After that, they give rise to a self-complete series that exists strictly within it's level of reality, and to an incomplete series that is merely an image or phantasm and depends on a thing in a lower level of reality to reflect off of. (That is to say, a "lower soul" is a reflection of a "higher soul" off of the "mirror" of a "body.") This would all clarify at least some of how Proclus is (re-)interpreting Plotinus, but it is nothing if not fantastically complicated! In addition, it opens up a number of questions that haven't yet been answered: what are unities? what are intelligences? where do forms, which Proclus treats separately from unities and intelligences and souls, fit in?

Hopefully he'll get into those questions later on, but even as it stands, I think it'll take me a lot of thought to make sure I've got all the pieces straight...