The Lost Works of Proclus

The most comprehensive list of Proclus' known original works is contained in the third chapter of Laurence Jay Rosán's text The Philosophy of Proclus - The Final Phase of Ancient Thought.  Out of the 45 items listed, only 28 are extant, the fact that the lost ones did exist at one point is inferred either from Proclus' own other writings, the vita by Marinus, later commentators such as Simplicius, or the Suda.  To say that Proclus was a prolific writer is a vast understatement, as the Proclean Corpus, the term Rosán uses, constituted a veritable encyclopedia of Hellenistic learning.  The following passage from Proclus' biographer Marinus has been cited many times as a testament to Proclus' enthusiasm for the written word:

He had an unbounded love of work; sometimes he would teach five or more classes a day, write on the average about seven hundred lines of prose, visit with other philosophers and then in the evening give lectures that were not based on any text; in addition to all this he would sleeplessly worship the gods every night, and bow in prayer to the sun when it arose, at midday and when it set.

Proclus

 
This of course begs the question: what happened to the lost works of Proclus?  How were they lost?  Let's take into consideration that he was the head of the Academy in Athens for almost fifty years and carried an enormous influence on leading thinkers of later generations.  Here is what Hegel says about Proclus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

[...] in Proclus we have the culminating point of the Neo-Platonic philosophy; this method in philosophy is carried into later times, continuing even through the whole of the Middle Ages. […] Although the Neo-Platonic school ceased to exist outwardly, ideas of the Neo-Platonists, and specially the philosophy of Proclus, were long maintained and preserved in the Church.

One would think that with such enormous influence, his complete oeuvre would have a great desire to be preserved.  What happened to these lost works?  Here is the list of Proclus' writings that Rosán cites specifically as "lost":

• On How to Live
• Commentary on the Philebus
• Commentary on the Theaetetus
• Commentary on the Sophist
• Commentary on the Phaedrus
• Commentary on the Phaedo
• Clarifying Investigation of Plato's Doctrines
• On the Mother of the Gods
• On the Theology of Orpheus
• On the Agreement between Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato
• On the Gods in Homer
• Letter to Aristocles
• Commentary on Homer

The discrepancy between the 13 listed here and the total of 45 accounted by Rosán is not clear.  It is probably due to other writings listed as "fragmentary".

It had been hard for me to believe that these texts were literally "lost" or simply forgotten due to neglect.  The problem of what happened to these lost writings has never been dealt with by scholars.  It would be a great treasure especially to have the lost commentaries on Plato.  This had been a great mystery to me for quite some time, until I started into Opsomer and Steel's translation of Proclus' On the Existence of Evils.  In the introduction there is a discussion of Proclus' other essay On Providence, where Proclus is refuting his friend Theodorus' position that "the good is what is pleasant for each individual" by stating that "I would be ashamed if, to a man who is my friend, I did not write clearly what I think, namely that such a view is unworthy of my choice of life and of my age."

Opsomer and Steel, commenting that not only is this a clear indication that the Tria Opuscula (three minor works) were written towards the end of his career, but also that Proclus obviously put more value in the immaterial goods of knowledge and virtue over material possessions.  Reading through the following passage on p. 3, which at first glance is not in any way related to the topic of this article, my eyes immediately lit up on the bodface section:

If a young man had indeed formulated such a hedonistic view, Proclus would not have been surpassed, for the young usually adhere to the opinions of the many.  But an old man who gives authority to the intellect should think differently.  The fact that Proclus considers this view as unworthy of his old age is adequate proof that this work-- and probably the two other treatises as well-- was written towards the end of his career.  In ch. 22 [of On Providence], the reader comes across a highly personal comment: Proclus alludes to a dramatic event in his life, whereby his house and its furniture were destroyed by fire.  But, as he confesses, this disaster damaged external goods only and could not take away the wisdom and calmness of his soul.  As L. Westerink has argues, Proclus is probably alluding to some religious persecution.  Maybe the destruction of the temple of Asclepius, which was adjacent to the school, caused serious damage to his private residence.  Or the event could have been related to the persecution that drove Proclus into exile in Asia.  This may be another indication for putting the composition of the treatises [the Tria Opuscula] on providence and evil in the later period of Proclus' life.

Now we can state what I conjecture with this article: that Proclus' "lost" works were not lost, but were destroyed in the fire.  Whether it was accidental or had something to do with the events Westerink refers to, can only be speculation.  Considering that everything had to be hand written in the manuscript form, it could be a miracle that we have any of Proclus' writings at all.  It all very well could have been destroyed in his house fire.  It seems unlikely that it was an act of vandalism related to Proclus' period of exile.  For why then do we still have so much that is extant?  Perhaps it was vandalism, and what remains was students' copies of his manuscripts.  This is all wholly speculative but also very interesting.

Library of Alexandira being burned

But what exactly does Proclus say in this passage from On Providence?  Here is the relevant text:

Let us, therefore, say farewell to those things to which we are attached and consider the strength of virtue and the fact that fate cannot do anything to us, but only to the things around us.  For also the accidents that, as you mentioned, recently came over us from outside, have only deprived us of walls and stones, my friend, and have reduced wooden beams to ashes, all of which are mortal and inflammable things, and have ruined our wealth: these are external things and for this reason may fall sometimes under the power of others.  But no one is so powerful as to be able to take away something of what depends on us, even if he had all human power.  For if we are self-controlled, we shall remain so when all these possessions have departed, and if we love contemplation of beings, we shall not be deprived of this disposition either.  And when those most terrible losses that you mention have occurred, we for our part will go on praising the rulers of all things and investigating the causes of events.

It may sound as if the reference to "walls and stones" and "wooden beams" would have to exclude the possibility that some of Proclus' manuscripts were destroyed in the fire.  But this is actually a reference to Plotinus' Ennead I 4: "If he thought that the ruin of his city were a great evil [...] there would be no virtue left in him if he thought that woods and stones, and the death of mortals, were unimportant."  If the fire had destroyed any manuscripts, it would have caused Proclus to feel that the true knowledge had not been lost.  The true knowledge subsists permanently in the world of real Being, and not in the form of a manuscript here in the world of Becoming, where everything is always changing and nothing lasts, according to his Platonic thinking.

Did the events of the house fire have something to do with the writing of the Tria Opuscula?  These three works, On Providence, Ten Problems on Providence, and On the Existence of Evils, have a very different style than that of the commentaries on Plato's dialogues or the geometrical style of the Elements of Theology.  Not only that, but their relatively short length us quite uncharacteristic of Proclus' usual fashion of writing treatises that run hundred and hundreds of pages.  The commentaries were meant to serve as instructional texts in Proclus' school, and had to conform to the metaphysics and theology of Plato.  In the Opuscula we find a very free form of discourse that can address a much larger philosophical audience than the elite members of the Academy.  Why did Proclus deviate from his usual style to write on these particular topics?

I think that Proclus commenced the writing of the Opuscula as a kind of retribution over the (conjectured) loss of his writings.  He is trying to resolve the conflict that he felt about what he clearly stated was an accident.  How could the fire, an act of fate, have taken place if there is providence?  The event did not get him down but only got him fired up (literally) with his passion for philosophy.  Were the questions dealt with in the Opuscula his way of coping with the sadness in his soul as a result of this loss?  The problems about providence, fate, and evil had already been thoroughly discussed in the Neoplatonic tradition.  Why the sudden shift away from metaphysics and theology to look at these again?

I will end with Proclus' words from the Opuscula as tantalizing clues in support of this thesis:

Although these problems have been discussed and examined a thousand times, my soul still wants to talk and hear about them, and return to herself, and wishes as it were to discuss with herself and not only receive arguments about them from the outside.

The Tria Opuscula have been recently translated into English and are available through Cornell University Press.  An older translation by Thomas Taylor, included in the volume Essays and Fragments of Proclus, is still valuable but more difficult to follow.

Books mentioned in this article: