Bacchic Philosopher of the Ineffable: Damaskios Part 2

Damaskios' Dionysian Life and Platonic Initiation

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This is Part 2 of a series dedicated to the last scholarch of the Platonic School of Athens, Damaskios, who studied under Horapollon at the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria in the 5th-6th century.

Part 1 featured an excerpt from my new translation of Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica - currently at the printers’!

Today’s offering is part-excerpt, and part new material exclusive to Thyrathen that goes beyond the scope of the book. I expand on Damaskios’ philosophy and what he represents in the evolution of Neoplatonism.

This week I’m also delighted to have given an interview - just aired - to Jeffery Mishlove of New Thinking Allowed. I talk all about the Hieroglyphica and the Alexandrian School, putting much of this in context; watch here:

My new critical translation of Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica is on presale, find out more about it here.

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Who was Damaskios

Damaskios (c. 458–after 538 CE), the last scholarch of the Athenian Neoplatonic school, is often portrayed as a philosopher of endings. He is relatively neglected in the scholarship, partly on account of the fragmentary nature of his work, partly because he is considered somewhat abstruse. If Iamblichos is the showman rockstar, Damaskios is a prog-rock drummer who builds in rhythms that stand the test of time.

His work represents a continuation of the Neoplatonic tradition, adapting and extending its principles in response to the evolving philosophical and theological landscape, and potentially building in the tools for its survival. He also represents a valuable bridge between Alexandria and Athens precisely when pagan thought was at its most vulnerable.

Damaskios did not oversee a radical break with tradition, nor was he simply a melancholic philosopher of decline. Like his predecessors, he represents a phase in Neoplatonism’s continuous adaptation. From Plotinos to Proklos, each major thinker in the tradition had reworked core concepts in response to shifting philosophical and religious contexts—and Damaskios is no exception.

I am often quite adamant that we cannot understand these traditions without a clear sense of the social and historical context from which they emerged: examining them in isolation or in the modern context distorts understanding considerably, for the ideas they contain represent direct responses to the shifting world around them. Before we interpret them for our purposes, they deserve to be understood for what they stood for in their time.

Pluralities in Neoplatonism

The efforts to systematise pagan and philosophical thought that began in the early Christian era and climaxed in the lifetimes of Horapollon and Damaskios are the result of the polysemous entanglements with Christianity: confrontational and stimulating; existentially threatening and ontologically regenerative.

The Neoplatonic attempts at preservation of tradition via synthesis, rejuvenation, concealment, or outright defiance, ensured that by the fifth century: “contrary to a deep-seated tendency to view paganism as moribund, considerable vitality [remained] in the religious traditions of Hellenism, both in its rural and its philosophical form.”¹

This was neither consistent nor internally coherent, since Neoplatonists disagreed amongst themselves and it is doubtful that:

…it is possible to speak of a “Neoplatonic philosophy” understood as a systematic and coherent body of doctrine, which each so-called Neoplatonic author endorsed, let us note that Porphyry’s philosophy is not that of Iamblichus, Plotinus’ philosophy is not that of Proclus. Late ancient Neoplatonism is a multifarious reality. It would be excessive to see in it a constraining doctrinal unity, despite fundamental common tendencies, such as the theological interpretation of the Parmenides.²

This is also true of early Christianity - one might argue, modern Christianity too.

Defining God

Plotinos had defined “the One” as an absolute, ineffable source beyond being and intellect. Porphyrios systematised his ideas and added an ethical framework aimed at spiritual purification. Iamblichos introduced theurgical ritual as essential for the soul’s return to the divine, arguing that intellect alone was insufficient. It is he who grafted in the Chaldean Oracles, Hermetic thought, and a range of folk traditions of the day. Proklos refined the metaphysics further by introducing the “henads”—a structured pantheon of divine unities mediating between the One and the cosmos. Each of them built on what had gone before, responding to the trends, currents, and pressures of their time, and Damaskios was no exception.

Nevertheless, all this systematising of late pagan philosophical and religious thought ‘produced a doctrine and an identity.’”³ Group, cult, and community identity aside, we should not overlook the individual agency that may be present in the production and transmission of each text that has built our understanding of late antiquity.⁴

The Ineffable and the limits of thought

Confronting what he saw as the internal limits of Proklos’ system and possibly in response to a number of contextual factors, Damaskios posited an even more ineffable first principle—the ἄρρητον (the Ineffable)—a source beyond even the One. In his Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles, Damaskios explores the limits of philosophical speech itself, adopting a radical apophatic stance that extends the Neoplatonic commitment to divine transcendence to its furthest expression.⁵

This intellectual evolution did not occur in isolation. Damaskios studied Ploutarkhos and led a school still active in ritual and linguistic traditions linked to Egyptian religion. He remained immersed in a world where hieratic knowledge was alive, if embattled. His portrait of Heraiskos (uncle of Horapollon, among the last pagan leaders of the Alexandrian School), a man who embodied both ritual purity and philosophical insight, offers Damaskios’ ideal: not the theurgist alone, nor the dialectician, but a synthesis of both.

Philosophy as Initiation

It is in this light that we must understand Damaskios’ broader project: to recast philosophy itself as initiatory, mapping Platonic virtues onto the stages of the mystery rites, and this within a grander still project of developing a Platonic Orthodoxy with which to counter Christianity. This was not a rejection of ritual, but a philosophical transposition of its structure and aims—a move that parallels, interestingly, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

Parallel Lives

Writing in the same era, also deeply influenced by Proklos, Pseudo-Dionysius also adapted Neoplatonic principles—especially the apophatic method and the metaphysical hierarchy—but reoriented them within a Christian theological framework. His Mystical Theology echoes Damaskios’ language of ascent and negation, but instead of culminating in the Ineffable beyond the gods, it leads to the unknowable Christian God. Like Damaskios, he is part of a tradition that continually reinterprets its own foundations.

What distinguishes the Dionysian path, however, is that while Damaskios halted before the Ineffable, embracing aporia as the endpoint of philosophical ascent, pseudo-Dionysius mapped that same apophatic discipline onto a mystical Christian liturgy—moving through angelic hierarchies not toward a void, but toward the silent fullness of the unknowable God. Both inherit Proklos’ metaphysical scaffolding, but each transfigures it for a different soteriology: one philosophical, the other sacramental. This question of non-Christian soteriology is begging for more exploration, and will be the topic of a future offering.

The Problem of Memory

Far from signaling an end, Damaskios represents Neoplatonism’s ability to adapt and a stark reminder that this was never a cohesive tradition. This matters because in our sometimes overzealous efforts to reconstruct its principles, we pit it against Christianity as if it were one cohesive whole.

Nobody saw the need for that more clearly than Damaskios and his project to consolidate a “Platonic Orthodoxy.” His reconfiguration of first principles, his initiatory model of philosophy, and his tension with the figure of Horapollon show a thinker at the edge of a tradition—not dissolving it, but transforming it one last time. It is testament to the fickleness of our time that he is not better remembered, nor his project better understood.