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Deuteros Logos Eimi
Feb. 8th, 2007 05:26 pmI was pleasantly surprised today to learn that I am, officially, secondary literature! My article for Dionysius is cited in an article to appear in a collection coming out later this year from Brill. It's a fairly meaty citation, too. Find it here.
The author finds persuasive my argument that the Gods are primordially distinct from one another in a manner fundamentally different from the way in which, e.g., Ideas differ from one another. He finds less persuasive my attempt to dissolve the One Itself into the henads altogether, but that's okay. What matters is that the thesis that Proclus was essentially what we would call today a "hard polytheist" is, so far, not being rejected by the community of Neoplatonic scholars. Needless to say, the final verdict will not be in for a long time. There will be those who will push back, and some may even push back hard, if their religious sensibilities are affronted (I'm hopeful that the pushback will not be so intense, because for now at least I'm only talking about Proclus, who is already generally perceived as ultra-pagan. Touch Plotinus, on the other hand, or, a fortiori, Plato and Aristotle, and the monotheists will surely bite… ). On the other hand, I know that I will have allies, already have some, and as more of the material from my dissertation gets out to the world in the form of articles, the later parts of the argument will tend to bolster the earlier and vice versa, hopefully.
The author finds persuasive my argument that the Gods are primordially distinct from one another in a manner fundamentally different from the way in which, e.g., Ideas differ from one another. He finds less persuasive my attempt to dissolve the One Itself into the henads altogether, but that's okay. What matters is that the thesis that Proclus was essentially what we would call today a "hard polytheist" is, so far, not being rejected by the community of Neoplatonic scholars. Needless to say, the final verdict will not be in for a long time. There will be those who will push back, and some may even push back hard, if their religious sensibilities are affronted (I'm hopeful that the pushback will not be so intense, because for now at least I'm only talking about Proclus, who is already generally perceived as ultra-pagan. Touch Plotinus, on the other hand, or, a fortiori, Plato and Aristotle, and the monotheists will surely bite… ). On the other hand, I know that I will have allies, already have some, and as more of the material from my dissertation gets out to the world in the form of articles, the later parts of the argument will tend to bolster the earlier and vice versa, hopefully.
