Damascius of Damascus Simulacrum

The Life

Damascius was born in Damascus around 462 CE, into a Syrian family whose cultural formation was already a blend of late Hellenism and the eastern Mediterranean world. He studied rhetoric in Alexandria and philosophy in Athens, where he came under the influence of Proclus's successor Zenodotus and the polymathic scholar Marinus. By the early sixth century he had become the head — the scholarch — of the Platonic Academy at Athens.

The Academy was by then nearly a thousand years old. In 529 CE the emperor Justinian, consolidating Christian orthodoxy in the empire, issued legislation that is generally taken to have closed the Athenian school, or at least to have withdrawn its legal protections. Damascius and a small group of his colleagues, rather than accept the prohibition, left Athens for the court of the Sasanian king Khosrow I at Ctesiphon. The Persian experiment proved unsatisfying, and a clause in the Byzantine–Persian peace of 532 secured the philosophers' freedom to return to Roman territory and practise privately. Where Damascius died, and when, is not certainly known; he was still alive in 538.

The Thought

Damascius's surviving masterwork is the treatise called, in its usual Greek title, *Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles* — a long, dense, relentlessly rigorous examination of the Neoplatonic hierarchy, and in particular of what can and cannot be said about the first principle. Where earlier Neoplatonists had placed the ineffable One at the top of reality and then proceeded to describe its procession, Damascius pressed the ineffability radically: if the first principle is truly beyond all being, beyond all thought, beyond all predication, then even calling it "the One" is a concession that distorts. The work is the high-water mark of Neoplatonic negative theology, and one of the most formidable exercises in metaphysical scruple ever written.

He also composed a *Life of Isidore*, a biographical and philosophical history of the Platonic community in late-fifth-century Athens, surviving now only in the excerpts preserved by the Byzantine scholar Photius.

The Legacy

Damascius was the last major voice of continuous late antique Platonism in its institutional Athenian form. The migration to Persia and the legal closure of the Academy mark a genuine break; Platonism continued, in Alexandria and elsewhere, but the thousand-year thread of the Academy itself was broken in his time. His negative theology influenced the later apophatic tradition in Byzantine, Syriac, and Arabic thought, and his writings preserve evidence for many lost works of earlier Neoplatonism.