Damascius ' onMouseout='HidePop("59762")' href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Damascus">Damascus
Damascus is the capital and largest city of Syria. It is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world and its current population is estimated at about 1,669,000...
ca. AD 458, died after AD 538), known as "the last of the
NeoplatonistsNeoplatonism is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, founded by Plotinus and based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists...
," was the last
scholarchA scholarch is the head of a school. The term was especially used for the heads of schools of philosophy in ancient Athens, such as the Platonic Academy, whose first scholarch was Plato himself...
of the School of Athens. He was one of the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the
PersianThe Sassanid Empire or Sasanian Empire, known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr, was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty who reigned from 224 to 651 CE...
court, before being allowed back into the
empireThe Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on the capital of Constantinople, and ruled by Emperors in direct and de jure succession to the ancient Roman Emperors...
. His surviving works consist of three commentaries on the works of
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...
, and a
metaphysicalMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
text entitled
Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles.
Life
Damascius was born in Damascus in Syria, whence he derived his name: his Syrian name is unknown. In his early youth he went to
AlexandriaAlexandria , with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport, serving about 80% of Egypt's imports and exports...
, where he spent twelve years partly as a pupil of Theon, a rhetorician, and partly as a professor of
rhetoricRhetoric is one of the arts of using language as a means to persuade. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public...
. He then turned to
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and science, and studied under
HermiasHermias was a Neoplatonist philosopher who was born in Alexandria c. 410 AD. He went to Athens and studied philosophy under Syrianus. He married Aedesia, who was a relative of Syrianus, and who had originally been betrothed to Proclus, but Proclus broke the engagement off after receiving a divine...
and his sons,
AmmoniusAmmonius Hermiae was a Greek philosopher, and the son of the Neoplatonist philosophers Hermias and Aedesia. He was a pupil of Proclus in Athens, and taught at Alexandria for most of his life, writing commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers.-Life:Ammonius' father, Hermias, died...
and
HeliodorusHeliodorus of Alexandria was a Neoplatonist philosopher who lived in the 5th century. He was the son of Hermias and Aedesia, and the younger brother of Ammonius. His father, Hermias, died when he was young, and his mother, Aedesia, raised him and his brother in their home city of Alexandria until...
. Later on in life he migrated to
AthensAthens , the capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the world's oldest cities, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years....
and continued his studies under
MarinusMarinus was a Neoplatonist philosopher born in Flavia Neapolis , Palestine in around 450 AD. He was probably a Samaritan, or possibly a Jew....
, the mathematician,
ZenodotusZenodotus was a Neoplatonist philosopher who lived and taught in Athens. He was described as "the darling of Proclus." Zenodotus served under Marinus of Neapolis when Marinus succeeded Proclus as the head of the school . He was a teacher of Damascius when he came to Athens to learn philosophy...
, and
IsidoreIsidore of Alexandria was an Egyptian philosopher and one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He lived in Athens and Alexandria toward the end of the 5th century AD. He became head of the school in Athens in succession to Marinus, who followed Proclus....
, the dialectician. He became a close friend of Isidore, succeeded him as head of the School of Athens in ca. 515, and wrote his biography, part of which is preserved in the
Bibliotheca of Photius.
In 529
Justinian IFlavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus ; AD 483 – 13 or 14 November 565, known in English as Justinian I or Justinian the Great, was the second member of the Justinian Dynasty and Eastern Roman Emperor from 527 until his death...
closed the school, and Damascius with six of his colleagues sought an asylum, probably in 532, at the court of Khosrau I of Persia. They found the conditions intolerable, and when the following year Justinian and Khosrau concluded a peace treaty, it was provided that the philosophers should be allowed to return. It is believed that Damascius returned to Alexandria and there devoted himself to the writing of his works.
Among the disciples of Damascius the most important are
SimpliciusSimplicius of Cilicia, lived c. 490-c. 560 AD, was a disciple of Ammonius and Damascius, and was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He was one of the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being...
, the celebrated commentator on
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
, and Eulamius. We have no further particulars of the life of Damascius; we only know that he did not found any new school, and thus Neoplatonist philosophy ended its external existence. But Neoplatonist ideas were preserved in the Christian church down to the later times of the Middle Ages, notably by means of the tremendous influence exerted by the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus.
Mazzucchi (2006) identifies Damascius himself as the author of the Pseudo-Dionysian writings, the "last counter-offensive of the pagan" (
l'ultima controffensiva del paganesimo).
Writings
His chief treatise is entitled
Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles . It examines the nature and attributes of God and the human
soulThe soul, in many religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies, is the spiritual and eternal part of a living being, commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; distinct from the physical part. It is typically thought to consist of ones consciousness and personality, and can be...
. This examination is, in two respects, in striking contrast to that of certain other Neoplatonist writers. It is conspicuously free from Oriental
mysticismMysticism is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture those experiences or...
, and it contains no polemic against
ChristianityChristianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented by the revelations in the New Testament....
, to the doctrines of which, in fact, there is no allusion. Hence the charge of impiety which Photius brings against him. In this treatise Damascius inquires into the first principle of all things, which he finds to be an unfathomable and unspeakable divine depth, being all in one, but undivided. His main result is that God is infinite, and as such, incomprehensible; that his attributes of goodness, knowledge and power are credited to him only by inference from their effects; that this inference is logically valid and sufficient for human thought. He insists throughout on the unity and the indivisibility of God. This work is, moreover, of great importance for the history of philosophy, because of the great number of accounts which it contains concerning former philosophers.
The rest of Damascius's writings are for the most part commentaries on works of
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
and
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...
. The surviving commentaries are:
- Commentary on Plato's Parmenides.
- Commentary on Plato's Phaedo. This work has been erroneously ascribed to Olympiodorus of Alexandria
Olympiodorus the Younger was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astrologer and teacher who lived in the early years of the Byzantine Empire, after Justinian's Decree of 529 A.D. which closed Plato's Academy in Athens and other pagan schools...
.
- Commentary on Plato's Philebus. Also erroneously ascribed to Olympiodorus.
Among the lost works there were:
- Commentaries on Plato's Timaeus, First Alcibiades, and other dialogues.
- Commentaries on Aristotle's de Coelo, and other works. The writings of Damascius on Time, Space, and Number, cited by Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle's Physica, are perhaps parts of his commentaries on Aristotle's writings.
- Life of Isidore. Damascius's biography of his teacher Isidore
Isidore of Alexandria was an Egyptian philosopher and one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He lived in Athens and Alexandria toward the end of the 5th century AD. He became head of the school in Athens in succession to Marinus, who followed Proclus....
(perhaps a part of the philosophos historia attributed to Damascius by the SudaThe Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly wrongfully attributed to an author called Suidas. The text belongs to the Byzantine Empire and was written in Greek...
), of which Photius has preserved a considerable fragment. The text has been reconstructed and translated recently.
- Logoi Paradoxoi, in 4 books, of which Photius also gives an account and specifies the respective titles of the books.
Sources
- P. Athanassiadi: Persecution and Response in late Paganism. The evidence of Damascius. In: Journal of Hellenic Studies 113 (1993), pp. 1–29.
- Raban von Haehling: Damascius und die heidnische Opposition im 5. Jahrhundert nach Christus. In: Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 23 (1980), pp. 82–85.
- Udo Hartmann: Geist im Exil. Römische Philosophen am Hof der Sasaniden. In: Udo Hartmann/Andreas Luther/Monika Schuol (eds.), Grenzüberschreitungen. Formen des Kontakts zwischen Orient und Okzident im Altertum. Stuttgart 2002, pp. 123–160.
- John R. Martindale, John Morris: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire II. Cambridge 1980, pp. 342f.
- Carlo Maria Mazzucchi, Damascio, Autore del Corpus Dionysiacum, e il dialogo Περι Πολιτικης Επιστημης. In: Aevum: Rassegna di scienze storiche linguistiche e filologiche 80, Nº 2 (2006), pp. 299-334.
- S. Rappe: Scepticism in the sixth century? Damascius’ ‘Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles’. In: Journal of the History of Philosophy 36 (1998), pp. 337–363.
- Cosmin Andron: “Damascius on knowledge and its object,” Rhizai 1 (2004) pp.107–124
- Cosmin Andron: Knowledge and Reality in Damascius, PhD dissertation, University of London
See also
- Iamblichus
- Plotinus
Plotinus was a major philosopher of the ancient world who is widely considered the founder of Neoplatonism . Neoplatonism was an influential philosophy in Late Antiquity. Much of our biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads...
- Simplicius of Cilicia
Simplicius of Cilicia, lived c. 490-c. 560 AD, was a disciple of Ammonius and Damascius, and was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He was one of the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being...
- Decline of Hellenistic polytheism
The Greco-Roman religion at the time of the Constantinian shift mostly consisted of three main currents,*Greco-Roman Polytheism,*the official Roman imperial cult,*various Mystery religions....