Numênio de Apaméia

Numenius (fl. c. mid 2nd century ad)

Numenius was a Platonist philosopher. He came from Apamea (Syria) and wrote in Greek. His work – now lost – is usually considered Neo-Pythagorean in tendency, and exercised a major influence on the emergence of Neoplatonism in the third century. A radical dualist, he postulated the twin principles of god – a transcendent and changeless intellect, equated with the Good of Plato’s Republic – and matter, identified as the Pythagorean Indefinite Dyad: god is good, matter evil. In addition to this supreme god, he added at a secondary level a creator-god, one of whose aspects is the world-soul, itself further distinguished into a good and an evil world-soul. He had a strong interest in Oriental wisdom, especially Judaic, and famously called Plato ‘Moses speaking Attic’.

 

1 Life, work and influence

Nothing is known of Numenius’ life, but he can be dated with reasonable accuracy by the fact that he is attested as the teacher of one Harpocration, who was also influenced by the Athenian Platonist Atticus, who in turn flourished in the ad 170s. He is often mentioned in conjunction with a ’companion’, Cronius, who was presumably associated with his school, and who may possibly be the addressee of Lucian’s treatise on Peregrinus.

Of his works none has survived, but some extracts of his dialogue On the Good are preserved by Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel, as also are some considerable passages from a lively polemical work, On the Apostasy [‘Diastasis’] of the Academics from Plato, which helps to clarify Numenius’ own position, while providing some useful data on the New Academy. Alongside this, we know of the works On the Indestructibility of the Soul and On the Secret Doctrines of Plato, treatises On Numbers and On Place, and a work called Epops, or ’The Hoopoe’, which probably embodies a pun on epopteia (mystical vision). We also have an extended account of his doctrine on matter preserved by the late Roman commentator on Plato’s Timaeus, Calcidius, who may well be more extensively indebted to him than he acknowledges.

His philosophical importance is considerable. He was a major influence, through the mediation of Ammonius Saccas (not to be confused with Ammonius, son of Hermias), on the father of Neoplatonism Plotinus and his followers Amelius and Porphyry, as well as the Christian theologian Origen (see Neoplatonism §1; Porphyry §4; Origen). His Pythagoreanism consists of presenting Plato as a disciple of Pythagoras (see, for example, fragments 7, 24.57), although without derogating from Plato’s greatness (as was done by more extreme Pythagoreans, such as Moderatus of Gades).

Numenius was much interested in the wisdom of the East and in comparative religion. He attracted the interest of Church Fathers by his references to Jahveh, Moses and even Jesus (fr. 1). Indeed, he described Plato as ‘Moses speaking Attic’ (fr. 8), which seems to imply an acceptance of something like Philo’s wholesale allegorization of the Pentateuch (see Philo of Alexandria §1). There has been speculation that he was himself of Jewish stock – his hospitality to the Jewish tradition is certainly notable – but this is not a necessary inference. Numenius may simply be reflecting the syncretistic religious and philosophical milieu in which he lived.

 

2 Metaphysics

Numenius’ views on ethics and logic are not known (although his ethical stance may be assumed to be austere), so we may confine ourselves to his metaphysics and psychology. He is at odds with previous Pythagoreans in maintaining a radical dualism between the first principles of god (the Monad, the Good) and matter (the Dyad), instead of subordinating the material Dyad to the all-generating Monad, as is done by his Pythagoreanizing predecessors from Eudorus through Moderatus to Nicomachus of Gerasa. Numenius’ dualism allies him rather with Plutarch and Atticus, and leads him, like them, to postulate an evil world-soul, derived from a reading of Plato (Laws X) to balance the beneficent world-soul (see Plutarch of Chaeronea§§3–4).

Numenius proffered a system of three levels of spiritual reality: a primal god (the Good, or the Father), who is almost supra-intellectual; a secondary, creator-god (the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus); and a world-soul. In this he anticipates to some extent Plotinus, although he was more strongly dualist than Plotinus in his attitude to the physical world and matter, and does not take the radical step of declaring his first principle to be above intellect – although his intellect is an intellect at rest, as opposed to the secondary intellect, which is in motion (fr. 15). Numenius does seem to have felt the awkwardness of attributing both intellectual and creative activity to a first principle which is utterly transcendent and completely unitary (in fragment 12, he is insistent that the first god is ‘inactive in respect of all activity’), but he was no more willing than his predecessors to declare it to be ‘beyond being and intellection’. Indeed, mindful of Plato (Sophist 248e) he is even unwilling to deny it a form of motion, speaking of the ‘rest’ (stasis) of the first god as ‘an innate motion’ – ancestor of the ’spiritual motion’ of intellect in later Neoplatonism.

The distinction between his second and third gods is rather subtle, and has led to confusion. In fragment 11 he declares that the second and third gods are ’one’, but a division results from the demiurgic activity of the second god with regard to matter. This difference splits the god into two aspects, similar to the ’transcendent’ and ’immanent’ aspects of the logos of god in the philosophies of Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch (at least in the latter’s treatise On Isis and Osiris). The ’lower’ aspect of the demiurgic intellect may be viewed as a ’third god’, and constitutes a rational world-soul, which bestows form on the chaos of matter to create the physical world at the price of suffering multiplicity itself.

Numenius is, like any later Platonist, concerned with basing his doctrine on suitable Platonic proof-texts. His doctrine of three gods he derives primarily from the Platonic Second Letter, which he would have naturally taken as genuine, but he derives confirmation also from a well-known passage of the Timaeus, where he takes the ‘essential living being’ (auto ho esti zōon) as the primal god (equated in turn with the ’Good’ of the Republic). This essential living being the demiurgic intellect contemplates, thus bringing into being the world of Forms, while also ‘discursively intelligizing’ (dienoēthē) the physical world, thus constituting itself, or a lower projection of itself, as the world-soul (fr. 22). The fact that the Timaeus myth presents the demiurge as creating the world-soul may have led Numenius to describe his third god as a ‘creation’ (poiēma), as Proclus alleges (fr. 21) it is certainly an active principle.

Adumbrated in this fragment is his doctrine of proschrēsis (‘calling in the help of… ’) which, although obscure, may anticipate Neoplatonic doctrines of the interaction between hypostases (see Plotinus §3). Each level of being (the primal god, the demiurge) performs its proper role only by proschrēsis of the level of being below it. This serves to link up the entire spiritual world into a dynamic whole. It may be behind the rather bombastic imagery of ’grandfather, son, and grandson’, which Proclus criticizes (fr. 21), and which Numenius seems to have used to characterize the relations between the three principles.

It is in his doctrine of matter (Calcidius, fr. 52) that Numenius’ dualism emerges most strongly. Matter, as the Pythagorean Indefinite Dyad, is coeval with the primal god, and is a positively evil force. Numenius is scornful of his predecessors’ attempts to derive the Dyad from the Monad by one formula or another (fr. 52.15–). He discerns the postulation of a maleficent, ‘material’ soul in Plato Laws (X 896e), which, like Plutarch before him, he sees as represented also by the ‘disorderly cause’ of the Timaeus (see Plutarch §§3–4). This can be brought to order by the demiurgic intellect, but never completely neutralized.

This ’evil’ soul is represented in each individual also (frs 43–4), although how exactly its functions are distinguished from those of the rational soul is less than clear. It is not a simple distinction between rational and irrational soul, since Numenius also envisages the rational soul as picking up a series of ’garments’ as it descends through the heavenly spheres to incarnation, some of which are irrational. But later evidence from Porphyry and Iamblichus indicates that Numenius’ psychology was regarded as distinctive and strongly dualist. Finally, Numenius, like Middle Platonists in general, had no objection to postulating transmigration into animals if a soul became excessively corrupt.