B. Language as a System of Meaning
As we have already seen, interpretations of literary texts of the sort we are accustomed to call "allegorical" in the context of antiquity depend on certain preconceptions about the nature of the text as a system of meaning, and these, in turn, depend upon a broader philosophical perspective that comprehends the representative value of language itself. All of the thinkers considered here located themselves in a tradition that could be traced back to Platonic idealism. In any such philosophical tradition, the function of language will be viewed as a complex one.
[5] See Ansgar Josef Friedl, Die Homer-Interpretationen des Neuplatonikers Proklos , James A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm , and most recently Anne D. R. Sheppard, Studies on the 5th and 6th Essays of Proclus' Commentary on the Republic . The last work appeared after the completion of my doctoral dissertation and has rendered much of the material examined in this chapter far more accessible and clarified many obscure aspects of Proclus's contribution to the Neoplatonists' reading of Homer. As revised for publication, this study owes many corrections and insights to Sheppard's book. Especially helpful is her elucidation of the close dependence, in many instances, of the metaphysical allegories of Syrianus and Proclus on Stoic physical allegories (e.g., Studies , pp. 56, 81).
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Without attempting to analyze in detail the complex and often playful ironies of the Cratylus —and at the risk of importing into what has been called an early dialogue concepts more appropriate to Plato's mature thought and to that of his successors[6] —we may say that there Socrates attacks the recurring problem of the relationship of the human, along with other mortal things, to the absolute, those objects of intellection that lie outside the world of the senses and do not change or cease to exist, and that he does so by focusing on language as a human activity that must incessantly confront that paradox.
The word is a tool and like any tool it derives its form from its function.[7] The function here is "naming"
, and, broadly speaking, the word must somehow represent what it names.[8] Language as we know it is found to be, at best, an imperfect tool, not susceptible of definitive analysis (Crat . 425a-c). Yet the fact that language is capable of representing things, notions, and qualities one after another already indicates that the relationship in which a linguistic sign stands to the reality it represents is both variable and complex. It is significant that in this dialogue we find what David Ross has described as "the first appearance in Plato of the argument from the existence of knowledge to the existence of unchangeable, non-sensible objects."[9]
Even here, then, we have at least a foreshadowing of the idea that language is a human activity relating on the one hand to the flux and characteristic fragmentation of experience in this world and on the other hand to a reality that transcends that flux and knows no change. In the Republic it becomes specific that the application of a single name to a group of particulars is the indicator by which we determine that a single form
lies behind that group (Rep . 596a). The world of forms is thus "co-extensive with language."[10]
We have already examined the
doctrine of Plotinus in assessing his attitudes toward language and human utterance.[11] Working both from Plato and from Plotinus, Proclus characteristically generates a system of greater complexity by repeatedly dividing and subdividing the
[6] See Paul Shorey, The Unity of Plato's Thought , pp. 54-56 and 75, and David Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas , pp. 4-5, for summaries of the problems relating to the dating of the Cratylus .
[7] Cf. I. M. Crombie, An Explanation of Plato's Doctrines , vol. 1, pp. 475-86.
[8] The idea that words imitate what they describe is likewise found in the Timaeus (29b).
[9] Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas , pp. 20-21.
[10] J. E. Raven, Plato's Thought in the Making , p. 186 (and cf. p. 24).
[11] See ch. 3A above.
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traditional categories. His understanding of the nature and function of language is based upon an extensive elaboration of the function of language as mediator between the world of sense experience and the higher realities.[12]
Language is peculiarly human in that it exists uniquely on the level of soul
. In the second hypostasis, the
, it is no longer required and no longer has functions that make it readily identifiable as language in our sense; yet that is precisely where it acquires its power, since the ability of the gods to create by naming underlies the human use of language, in the relationship of archetype to sensible copy.[13] Proclus himself accepts the idea, which he attributes to Cratylus and to Socrates, that there is a natural relationship between things and their names.[14] The linguistic sign, then, is in no sense arbitrary: Proclus's distance from twentieth-century thought on the nature and function of language is indicated by this denial of one of the most fundamental tenets of modern linguistics. His faith in etymology is no different from that of the earlier interpreters, but it is characteristic of him that he provides an explicit intellectual framework for that belief, whereas the others do not.
Proclus is extremely careful not to make the mistake of believing that we can proceed from the phenomenon of language directly to an understanding of the structure and nature of reality. The information language gives us concerning reality is distorted, and the most characteristic form that this distortion takes is fragmentation. The process of fragmentation is, of course, typical of relationships encountered repeatedly in Proclus's ontology as we proceed from the unified, ineffable, and transcendent One on the far side of reality, through beings that are increasingly "more
[12] In the following analysis, I have followed the perceptive discussion of the question in Jean Trouillard, "L'Activité onomastique selon Proclos."
[13] Trouillard has formulated the two apparently conflicting concepts central to Proclus's understanding of language referring to the Cratylus commentary, 71, p. 33.12-13, as follows: "1) Le langage au sens strict n'appartient qu'aux âmes rationnelles et discursives. 2) Pourtant il a son fondement dans la puissance unifiante et génératrice de la divinité" ("L'Activité onomastique selon Proclos," p. 239).
[14]
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partial"
, down to the "diversity"
of existence in this world, in contact with matter which stands just beyond the limits of reality at the lower end of the scale. Hence the fragmented image must not be assumed to provide an adequate or easily decipherable representation of the realities concerned. As Jean Trouillard formulates the problem: "La diversité de nos notions n'implique pas la diversité de leurs objets . . . le mode figuratif de nos representations ne doit pas être êttribué I'être representê."[15]
On the contrary, just as there are various modes of perception that correspond to the successive modes of being, extending from the total, unified perception exercised by a god down to the passivity of our sense-impressions in this world, so there are different levels of language that correspond to these modes of perception—a hierarchy of systems of meaning, of kinds of utterances—that extend from a creative, divine "language" (not, presumably, recognizable as such by us) down to the "language" that exists on the final fragmented level of the senses.[16]
In a passage of the Timaeus commentary to which Trouillard refers,[17] but which he does not discuss in detail, a model of the perceptive and expressive functions of the soul is elaborated that does a great deal to explain the preconceptions behind Proclus's allegories. (The entire passage has been translated as Appendix 2.) It is an extraordinarily vivid presentation of the hierarchy of faculties that Proclus understood to make up the soul. Proclus's conception of the perceptive faculties was probably not uniform throughout his long productive life, and the model offered in this passage should not be regarded as the only possible one.[18] Nevertheless, it is an important key for our purposes.
The hierarchy here described may be conceived (in terms of the Plotinian model of reality) as lying between the second hypostasis
and the world of matter. The important point for our purposes is that each
[15] Trouillard, "L'Activité onomastique selon Proclos," p. 240. Trouillard at this point in his analysis is preparing to examine In Tim . 1.352.11-19, a passage on the diverse levels on which a single (unchanging) entity can be experienced. The passage is paraphrased very closely at In Rep . 1.111. 16-27, where Proclus is attempting to defend Homer's mythic attribution of change, and specifically of metamorphoses, to the gods. In the latter passage he develops an analogy to theurgic practice.
[16] Cf. Trouillard, "L'Activité onomastique selon Proclos," p. 241.
[17] Proclus In Tim . 1.341.25-343.15. Cf. Trouillard, "L'Activité onomastique selon Proclos," p. 241.
[18] Cf. Henry J. Blumenthal, "Plutarch's Exposition of the De anima and the Psychology of Proclus," p. 145 and passim.
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level of experience is a mode of consciousness, of perception, and has its own
(which one is tempted here to translate as "mode of discourse") attached to it. There exist, then, a perception and account of reality on the level of the senses, followed successively by perceptions and accounts on the levels of imagination,[19] opinion, and
, or systematic wisdom, which are followed in turn by the normally inaccessible perception and account on the level of
.
The
above the level of
would not constitute language in the usual sense of the term. Those of the gods (located in the realm of
) are the creative emanations that structure our universe, associated particularly with the demiurgic Hephaestus, whose physical
organize his creation.[20] We are concerned at this point, though, only with the successive strata of language recognizable as such.
The overall pattern is suggestive of the problem of "metalanguages" in logic, though in the latter situation no hierarchy of modes of perception is postulated. Put very simply, a series of statements (a language we shall call A ) may at one or more points contain inadequacies in the form of contradictions or gaps that make it impossible to deduce from it the sorts of conclusions sought. In this case a "metalanguage," B , capable of testing the truth or falsehood of the statements in A , is imposed in order to resolve difficulties existing within A , but which A is incapable of resolving by itself.
This seems to be the sort of thing Proclus has in mind when he talks about the
that correspond to the various faculties of the soul. Each, viewed from its own level, has a certain coherence normally adequate to perception on that level. That coherence will never be perfect, however, and the ultimate contradictions and inadequacies of the
corresponding to experience on the level of imagining, for instance, will never be resolved within that sphere—the metalanguage of opinion will be required to separate truth from falsehood and to build a new and more coherent account of reality, which will in turn be succeeded by others.
None of these accounts, then, has any ultimate truth value. Each mode of discourse implies its own metalanguage, in that it is incapable of resolving its own internal contradictions. If we extrapolate, according to the same principles, through the second hypostasis to the upper limits of reality, we encounter an ultimate silence.[21]
[19] On the imagination as mediator within the soul in Proclus, see the important study by Trouillard, "Le Merveilleux dans la vie et pensée de Proclos," esp. pp. 447-52.
[20] See p. 228 below.
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Proclus speaks in the Timaeus commentary of a
of the
that refutes all human
, but it is an important difference between the pagan and Christian modes of exegesis that the former regards all texts, and indeed all discourse, as ultimately unreliable (in spite of the fact that such material as the Chaldaean Oracles is sometimes treated as direct divine utterance). Direct expression on the part of a god in human language is finally an impossibility, though perhaps as early as Xenocrates demonology had developed to the point where "divine" utterance could be understood to mean the use by a lowly providential
of human speech in order to express in fragmented form for our discursive perceptions truths emanating from a higher plane.[22] Likewise, as we shall see, the highest form of poetry comes close to communicating experience on this level.
The implications of this model for the reading of literature are far-reaching. Extending the metaphor, any discourse may be regarded as a language whose very existence implies that of a metalanguage beyond it, and the process of elucidation of meaning might take the form of attempting to generate that metalanguage and so resolve the inner shortcomings of the text under consideration. In fact, however, this is an inversion of the conceptual model of Proclus and the other Neoplatonic commentators. Each lower language is actually the "interpreter"
of the higher one, in that it renders it Comprehensible at a lower level, at the expense of its (opaque, inaccessible) coherence.[23] Proclus would not presume to place his own discourse above that of Plato or of Homer—on the contrary, his role is conceived with the greatest humility.
The relationship becomes clearer if we consider the larger development. Proclus believed that Homer and Plato were each in touch with the highest truth. This is perhaps the most important point, that the ultimate structure of reality beyond all the inadequate accounts is static and
[21] In a different context within the discussion of Trouillard's paper, Werner Beierwaltes made the point with moving simplicity: "Das Eine spricht nicht." (Trouillard, "L'Activité onomastique selon Proclos" [discussion], p. 254.) The paradox of the inadequacy of language in Proclus's system is one aspect of the larger problem of the status of truth in Neoplatonism. Strictly speaking, there is no absolute truth in Plotinian Neoplatonism, since the absolute lies beyond the sphere of knowledge, and all that is known is already fragmented. Cf. Trouillard, "Le Néoplatonisme," p. 895.
[22] Augustine uses a Platonizing model to explain how God expresses himself in human speech, but he insists that it is finally the voice of God that reaches us through the angels (Civ. Dei 10.15). The passage is discussed in ch. 6D below.
[23] See ch. 3A, with n. 25, above on similar ideas in Plotinus (Enn . 1.2).
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eternal. Homer's account of that truth is inspired—it is the product of divine
—and its value is therefore enormous, though its expression is correspondingly obscure. Plato came later to the same truth, often in fact starting from Homer's account of it,[24] and demonstrated it more systematically. In other words, Plato elaborated a commentary on the Homeric discourse that pointed back beyond that discourse to the metalanguage capable of resolving its internal confusions, and, though further removed from the initial inspiration, gave a more useful account of reality. Plato of course did not always start from Homer, nor is it clear that his own account is always secondary to (or inferior to) Homer's. Proclus is not concerned to rank them.[25] At an even greater remove, Proclus conceives his own undertaking as analogous to Plato's, and to the extent that he humbly constructs an explicatory discourse around the Homeric myths, he most frequently takes Plato's more accessible account as his guide. If the text appears to violate known truths believed to be represented in it, then the failure must lie in the inadequacies of the fragmented account itself, and the text is easily twisted and even ignored in favor of a synthetic effort to go beyond it and demonstrate the correspondences between myth and reality.
This model, based on the analogy of Proclus's description of the modes of perception and discourse in the soul, need not be applied rigorously to Neoplatonic exegesis—indeed, if it were, it would doubtless prove to contain numerous flaws. Nevertheless, the pattern is a revealing one, not only for the understanding of Proclus's analysis of Homer, but with regard to much of the literature of Neoplatonism after Plotinus, for one of the most striking and characteristic aspects of that literature is its frequent recourse to the form of commentary.[26] The practice of indirect expression in the guise of explication of an existing text is a part of Neoplatonism from the time of Porphyry and is responsible in part for the scholastic and medieval flavor of that tradition.[27]
The salient characteristic of the image of reality projected by lan-
[24] See In Rep . 1.154-59 and 163-72.
[25] Sheppard (Studies , p. 194, n. 91) corrects Coulter's claim (Literary Microcosm , p. 109) that Proclus places Plato himself no higher than "the middle rank of poets." The problem, as she shows, grows out of the lack of clarity of Proclus's account of didactic poetry in relation to myth.
[26] Cf. Dalsgaard Larsen, "Jamblique dans la philosophie antique tar-dive," p. 5.
[27] See ch. 2B, with n. 64, above.
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guage as we know it is, then, fragmentation. In speaking of reality (that is, of what Proclus understands as reality: the suprasensory world characterized by permanence), language must inevitably do violence to the truth by presenting sequentially what is in fact simultaneous. A sentence could not possibly be a true representation of a fact concerning the divine, for the obvious reason that the sentence has no existence outside the sublunary world characterized by change and by time, whereas the divine transcends both.
This limitation of language (and, consequently, of myth) is one that attracts attention again and again in Neoplatonic thought. Plotinus mentions the problem,[28] and it is summed up succinctly by Sallustius when he says with reference to mythic statements and their meaning, "These things never happened: they exist eternally. Mind sees all things simultaneously, but words express first some, then others."[29] At a distance of nearly a millennium, when Dante in the Paradiso confronts the problem of expressing in language things outside the universe of change and time, his frequent protestations of the inadequacy of language to the task are reminiscent of the Neoplatonic formulation.[30] On the verge of the final vision, when Dante observes,
Omai sarà piú corta mia favella pur a quel ch'io ricordo, che d'un fante che bagni ancor la lingua alla mammella, (Par . 33.106-8)
Proclus's model of a hierarchy of languages and modes of perception is called to mind. Dante is saying, in effect, that his poem has now reached the point where his account, his language, can bear no more resemblance even to what his memory can retain of the experience of that
[28] See ch. 3A, with n. 31, above.
[29]
[30] E.g., Par . 4.40-42, 31.136-37, and, in addition to the passage quoted below, 33.121-23. Much of the imagery of the later portions of the Paradiso makes it explicit that the major problem involved in the communication of the experience of ultimate reality in language is one of translating the absolute and eternal into a medium characterized by process and change. See, for example, the Argo comparison of Par . 33.94-96. A detailed examination of Dante's ideas about language in the light of the thought of the Neoplatonists would be quite interesting. See, for example, Francis Fergusson's comments (Dante , p. 64) on the "double nature" of language as described in the De vulgari eloquentia .
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highest, suprasensory reality than a babbling infant's pseudolanguage bears to reality as normally experienced.
The problem of the mythoplasts' distortion of reality through expression in time is mentioned repeatedly in Proclus's defense of Homer. Just after we have been told that apparitions of gods in various forms to different people imply no change in the gods themselves, but must be understood to mean only that different observers or "receivers"
, according to their capacities, experience different images of them,[31] Proclus goes on to say,
This, then, is one mode in which poetry presents polymorphic transformations of that which knows no change, but there is also a second mode in which the divine itself, because of its multiple powers and because it is filled with forms of all sorts, extends diverse visions to those who observe it. Here, in effect, the poem is showing the diversity of the powers and again says that that which contains all these powers itself changes into many forms, projecting first one then another, though in fact the being in question is always acting according to all its powers, but because of the multiplicity of the powers it encompasses it is constantly changing for the discursive perceptions of souls.[32]
The example that follows immediately is the interpretation of the story of Proteus (Od . 4.351-582), but the same principle finds numerous other applications in defending Homer against the Socratic accusation (Rep . 2.380d-381e) that Homer's myths attribute change to what by its very nature cannot possibly change.[33]
The general principle is again enunciated with regard to the episode of the deception of Zeus, which, as one might expect, poses serious problems for Proclus.[34] Since in that passage there is mention of several sexual encounters between Zeus and Hera, separated in space and time, and of a change in Zeus's state of consciousness from waking to sleep,
[31] Proclus In Rep . 1.112; cf. n. 15 above.
[32]
[33] Cf. In Rep . 1.109-14.
[34] See pp. 208-15 below.
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Proclus indicates that, here again, the poets have adapted eternal truths to the needs of language and storytelling by representing events that are in fact simultaneous as if they succeeded one another: "For these things that exist simultaneously with one another the mythoplasts have separated, disguising the truth."[35]
The image of ultimate reality that may be constructed using the tool of language, then, invariably fragments that reality by introducing process, which properly has no place there. But, Proclus tells us, the image is not to be rejected utterly on that account. Any given sphere of human discourse, whether the poems of Homer, the dialogues of Plato, or the Elements of Euclid, has its limitations, which cannot be resolved internally. Each implies a previous, more coherent discourse, a metalanguage still more remote from us. And each requires the elaboration of an ancillary discourse of commentary for its meaning to unfold in a completely satisfactory way.
With regard to the Homeric poems, as we shall see, Proclus will conclude that the metalanguage of what he calls a "secret doctrine"[36] is essential to their complete understanding, and that, if they are not understood "according to the secret doctrine"
but rather "according to the apparent sense"
,[37] then they do indeed have the potential, which Socrates feared, of imparting a pernicious and inaccurate model of reality.
[35][36]
[37] In Rep . 1.1440.11-13.
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