Nicholas of Methone (d. after 1160 AD), while showing up sporadically in surveys of Byzantine philosophy, has had very little attention devoted to him in recent and current scholarship.* Little is unfortunately known about Nicholas’ life, except that he became bishop of Methone around 1150 AD, while he was a theological adviser and panegyrist of the Emperor Manuel I Komnenos. Among other things, Nicholas is most well-known for writing the only complete commentary in Greek on Proclus’ Elements of Theology, titled the Explication [or Refutation] of the Elements of Theology of Proclus of Lycia the Platonic philosopher (full title in Greek:
Nicholas was also known for writing a series of theological treatises, mainly against the Latins in defending against the doctrine of the Filioque. The little work that has been done on Nicholas has been focused around the Refutation, yet little attention has been paid to Nicholas’ engagement with Proclus and Neoplatonism, more broadly, either within the context of Proclus’ own thought or the general intellectual context of middle-period Byzantium in which Nicholas was involved. Additionally, a common criticism is that Nicholas’ engagement with Proclus is purely polemical and possesses no value, implying that a study of Nicholas is fruitless and not worthy of pursuit.
This volume puts this latter claim entirely to rest by providing the first full study of Nicholas’ thought across 14 chapters, examining Nicholas as a key witness to a central period of the reception of Neoplatonism, especially Proclus, in 12th-century AD Byzantium. We divide the volume between three themes in which we consider Nicholas: (1) Nicholas of Methone in his contemporary intellectual context; (2) the Refutation and Nicholas’ other works; and (3) Nicholas of Methone’s reception and legacy.
1 Nicholas of Methone and his Contemporary Intellectual Context
An analysis of Nicholas of Methone by himself, especially as representative of the 12th-century Byzantine attitude toward Proclus, would be incomplete without a close look at his 11th/12th-century Georgian parallel, Ioane Petritsi, to which Chapters 10–12 are devoted. One striking feature of Petritsi, in contrast to Nicholas, is how the former sees Proclus in harmony with a Christian framework—such that Proclus’ metaphysics can be taken with little to no adjustment—in sharp juxtaposition to Nicholas’ view.
In Chapter 2, István Perczel, in collaboration with Levan Gigineishvili, aims to locate Petritsi’s thought in the circle of Proclus scholars in the 11th and 12th centuries, between John Italos, Eustratios of Alexandria, and Nicholas himself. Among various highlights in his chapter, Perczel notes how Petritsi and Italos differ in ways that one would not expect from previous scholarly consensus: for instance, whereas Italos is often critical of Proclus and typically turns, rather, to Plotinus and Origen (a position which, as we will see, Ficino also finds himself in: cf. pp. 441–442 in Stephen Gersh’s chapter), Petritsi is much more supportive of Proclus, both in the latter’s figure and structurally closer in his metaphysics (pp. 27–29). This implies that Petritsi could not have been a student of Italos, but rather was more likely a student of Eustratios of Nicaea (pp. 42–54) who rejects Italos’ subordinationist Trinitarianism and shows a more positive attitude to Proclus—aspects which become more manifest in Petritsi’s interpretation of the Trinity, as articulated within his commentary on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. This helps to contextualize Nicholas’ polemic against his heretical opponents who use Proclus: put together with Petritsi, in connection with Eustratios, Proclus is very well used in the Patriarchal School, even while Nicholas and Petritsi had access to different manuscript traditions of Proclus’ Elements, as Perczel argues (pp. 54–57). From this, we can see that Petritsi himself may be a representative, if not one of the main, explicit figures of the circle of Proclus readers that Nicholas attacks in the Refutatio’s Preface.
In Chapter 3, Lela Alexidze looks at the principle of Intellect and the intelligibles between Nicholas of Methone and Ioane Petritsi. Just as Gigineishvili (below) shows in other aspects, Petritsi follows Proclus’ position on Intellect and the Forms closely, oftentimes articulating Proclus’ framework within a Christian context: for instance, Petritsi compares the soul to Adam, insofar as both depart from their respective “father”—either the soul from its source, Intellect, or Adam from his source in God—yet both can return to their respective “father”, i.e. Intellect, by attaining an intellectual way of life (p. 78). This lies in contrast to Nicholas, who disagrees sharply with aspects of Proclus’ framework: for instance, unlike Petritsi who places Being (as the first Intellect) below God, Nicholas identifies Intellect and Being with God alone (p. 79), and distinguishes between God’s thinking, as Intellect, and God’s making, as Being (pp. 83–84). In turn, Nicholas rejects the identification of the intelligible with Intellect, where Proclus and Petritsi identify the two. Both shifts from Proclus and Petritsi likely reflect Nicholas’ explicit concern to safeguard a creationist account of God, while Petritsi, strikingly, lacks such concern. In turn, Nicholas argues that Intellect (as God) is self-moved, rather than unmoved, as Proclus and Petritsi maintain instead: a case where we find Nicholas following the earlier Byzantine theologian Gregory Nazianzen (as Joshua Robinson discusses below in Chapter 9), whereas Petritsi adheres to the pagan Platonist Proclus.
This contrast in theme becomes further developed in Levan Gigineishvili’s Chapter 4, where he compares Petritsi and Nicholas of Methone on the first principle. One can see how Petritsi closely adapts Proclus’ first principles to the Christian Trinity: for instance, Petritsi accepts Proclus’ notion of the One, and identifies the Trinitarian person of the Father with Proclus’ One (while the Son and Spirit are respectively identified with Proclus’ principles of the Limit and Unlimited, posterior to the One: pp. 101–102). This lies in contrast to Nicholas, for whom Proclus’ One is an attack on the Christian Trinity: instead Nicholas denies Proclus’ One and follows Ps.-Dionysius when he establishes that God is both “one” and “three”, as expressing the one essence and the Trinitarian persons (respectively), and God is simultaneously beyond “one” and “three”, as beyond the created distinctions implied in saying “one” and “three” (pp. 97–99). In addition, where Nicholas emphasizes a distinction between the production of Trinitarian persons and that of created beings below the Trinity, for Petritsi there is no concern for such a distinction, such that “there is a kind of terminological indifference between the production of things by the One and the production of things by other, intermediary causes” (p. 102). Petritsi is, thus, more of a faithful Proclean, which one can see in his emphasis on the harmony between Proclus and the Christian framework. Yet, as Gigineishvili recognizes at the end of his chapter (pp. 104–105), Petritsi’s harmonism elides certain, important differences between Proclus and a Christian framework—for instance, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo which becomes marginalized in Petritsi’s account. By contrast, Nicholas recognizes the underlying tension in this approach, an issue that Stephen Gersh, as we will see, also detects in both Nicholas and Marcilius Ficino.
In Chapter 5, Michele Trizio extends on the previous surveys on Proclus’ reception in the 12th century with an analysis of Nicholas’ contemporary, Eustratios of Nicaea (d. after 1120 AD). Although described as a mere “scholar” or summarizer, Eustratios’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the Posterior Analytics show clearer signs that he enthusiastically embraces Proclus’ metaphysics and language. For instance, Eustratios argues that syllogisms which explain the “reason why” (
2 The Refutation and Nicholas’ Other Works
Considering Nicholas’ intellectual environment, especially with contemporaries like Eustratios and Petritsi, helps us to understand better the content of Nicholas’ work—both his critical interpretation of Proclus and the positive responses he attempts. These chapters conduct a studied analysis of particular aspects of Nicholas’ thought in both the better-known Refutation as well as the lesser known, but equally important, theological treatises that he also wrote.
In Chapter 6, Jan Opsomer takes Nicholas’ objective in the Refutation seriously as a critique of Proclus in the Elements of Theology, moving beyond the standard scholarly quips on Nicholas as a polemical writer in the Refutation and addressing the philosophical issues of Nicholas’ argumentative strategy in contrast to Proclus’. Opsomer notes how Proclus presents the starting points of his demonstration in the Elements, unlike Proclus’ other texts (such as the commentaries or the Platonic Theology), as common notions (koinai ennoiai) “introduced in a manner that is both subtle and implicit”, whereas Nicholas “states his starting points unambiguously”, either from revelation or what he takes (mistakenly) to be common sense beliefs, such as the Christian position of the possibility of two natures present in one hupostasis (pp. 147–148). Where Nicholas often appeals to authorities in his critiques—and assumes Proclus would be vulnerable to such counter-authorities—the Elements noteworthily avoids depending on external authority or arguments as much as possible. Opsomer takes Nicholas’ critique of the One in the first five propositions of the Elements as an example of his argumentation, where Nicholas sees Proclus’ articulation of the One as an attack on the Christian Trinity: Nicholas instead redefines the terms of the dispute and “refutes” Proclus this way. Although this furthers his own program of defending Christian orthodoxy, through his use of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicholas’ strategy against Proclus ends up being critically faulty.
Arthur Oosthout in Chapter 7 expands on Opsomer’s critical assessment of Nicholas’ attack on Proclus by looking at the consequences of Nicholas’ claim that God, alone, is the only subsistent transcendent whole. One result from this is that the parts in part-whole relations are merely relations: in critiquing Proclus’ principle of intermediaries, insofar as this leads to polytheism, Nicholas does away with the notion of a subsistent whole-of-parts; instead, the parts reflect the wholeness of God as the first, and only, whole-before-parts, while they relate to each other, as parts, only per accidens. This leads to a radically nominalist view of universals, against an Aristotelian realist position, where the different species or genera belonging to any set of individuals (such as the kind “tree” pertaining to particular trees) are “mere concepts” (
In Chapter 8, Jonathan Greig discusses Nicholas’ conception of the divine ideas, highlighting how Nicholas articulates his notion in the context of a response to Proclus on causality. For Proclus, all causes produce by virtue their own, mere being (
In Chapter 9, Joshua Robinson discusses the notion of divine fecundity and motion in Nicholas, picking up on Nicholas’ claim that God is self-moved rather than unmoved, as Proclus maintains for the divine intellect. For his claim, Nicholas draws on a well-known line from Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 29 which states that “the monad from the beginning moved toward a dyad and at the trinity came to a halt”. Nicholas takes this to imply the procession of persons within the Trinity, which embodies in a paradigmatic way the motion seen in creation, which, by contrast, always implies being other-moved rather than being properly self-moved. Whereas Maximus the Confessor (one of Nicholas’ patristic sources) takes the phrase to describe God from a subjective perspective, though God remains unmoved in himself, Nicholas takes self-motion, or particularly self-determination, as an ontological characteristic of God’s being.
In Chapter 10, Lydia Petridou and Christos Terezis discuss Nicholas’ use of analogy in his arguments critically responding to Proclus’ framework. Petridou and Terezis argue that Nicholas’ thought ultimately has a systematic character, even though Nicholas’ Refutation lacks an explicit structure, merely following the Elements’ order of propositions. One of the main factors in that systematic aspect is Nicholas’ use of analogical reasoning from lower to higher principles in refuting Proclus’ framework, which Petridou and Terezis point out in various observations throughout their chapter.
Although most of the contributions in this volume are oriented around Nicholas’ engagement with Proclus in the Refutation, Alessandra Bucossi in Chapter 11 sheds insightful light on Nicholas’ lesser-researched corpus on the procession of the Holy Spirit (notably the Ad magnum domesticum, the Adversus Latinos de Spiritu Sancto, the Refutationes theologicae doctrinae Latinorum, and the Memoriae contra Latinos), which illuminates the broader strategy of Nicholas’ polemic in the Refutatio. Across these texts on the Spirit, Bucossi notes how Nicholas is well-versed in Aristotle’s logic, especially from the late antique commentators on Aristotle (pp. 327, 332–334), in the construction of his critical arguments against the Latin Filioque position (i.e. that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son). As Michele Trizio and István Perczel note in this volume, the case of Nicholas shows that the Byzantine ecclesial authorities did not condemn the use of syllogisms in theological arguments, as such, but only the misuse of syllogistic reasoning in specific contexts (as in the case of Eustratios of Nicaea). Of greater interest is Bucossi’s discussion of Nicholas’ employment of Proclus’ terminology in the texts on the Spirit, especially in his arguments for speaking more precisely about the Trinitarian persons in their distinct properties and relations (pp. 307–317). One can then see Nicholas’ Refutation not just as a direct critique against Proclus, but also as the theoretical background behind Nicholas’ anti-Latin arguments in his texts on the Spirit—the main, dominant concern of 12th-century Byzantines, as Bucossi notes well. Once more we can see how Nicholas’ concern in addressing Proclus is guided by the more dominant intellectual and theological concerns that marked this period, and continued to hold sway afterward.
Carmelo Benvenuto in Chapter 12 follows up the theme of Bucossi’s chapter with an overview of the philological history of Nicholas’ theological works. As Benvenuto shows, Nicholas’ reputation from the 19th century “silently shifted to that of an insignificant compiler, or even a plagiarist” (p. 350), thanks in part to the forger Constantinos Simonides who published an edition of Nicholas’ texts, which made known Nicholas’ name for a modern audience. A better appreciation of Nicholas—both his theological texts as well as in his own figure—ultimately necessitates understanding the history of the texts better, which includes understanding how Simonides assessed the earlier manuscripts from which he constructed his editio princeps. Benvenuto insightfully argues that Nicholas’ polemical works should be rightfully considered as witness to the broader twelfth-century disputes, and that they should still be considered “within a wider discussion about literature in Byzantium” (p. 350). This ties in with Bucossi’s own point that Nicholas’ philosophical arguments, as in the Refutation, should be read together with the theological texts in the background to better understand Nicholas’ broader project.
3 Nicholas of Methone’s Reception and Legacy
Although Nicholas’ Refutation, perhaps surprisingly, had little major influence in later Byzantine thought or in other intellectual contexts (such as Latin medieval scholasticism), these chapters, as we find out, reveal notable instances of Nicholas’ implicit influence, especially in the use of and response to Proclus in the later 14–15th centuries AD.
Carlos Steel in Chapter 13 examines the question of the participation of the One in three contexts: a series of anonymous marginal notes, Nicholas of Methone and the Palamite controversy. The paper focuses mainly on the scholia which are here, for the first time, edited and translated: they are preserved in three manuscripts, of which one is the oldest known witness of the Elements of Theology (Marciana, gr. 512). Some of the scholia arguably date back to Michael Psellos’ time and school. Among the scholia, some affirm that the One is both participated and unparticipated. In order to resolve this apparent paradox, the scholiast argues that participation indicates a relation, and distinguishes between two senses of the term: a radical sense (i.e. something cannot be participated and it is not participated) and a weaker sense (i.e. something is out of the range of what participates it, but participation is not excluded). Proclus uses the term in this latter, weaker sense. Nicholas of Methone agrees that the One is both participated and unparticipated, but does not provide any explanation for it; it seems that Nicholas ignored the scholia and the latter do not present any influence on the former. Palamas distinguishes between the unparticipated supersubstance of God and his power, or activities, which can be participated by created things. Nikephoros Gregoras is surprised to observe that someone who is steadfastly against the influence of pagan philosophy could be so close to Proclus’ views.
Börje Bydén in Chapter 14 continues and deepens the reflection proposed by Carlos Steel (and confirmed by other scholars) on the presence of Proclus within the Palamite controversy. Bydén considers that Nikephoros knows the Refutation of Nicholas of Methone, even if it is not yet possible to provide convincing philological evidence. He also shows that Nikephoros Gregoras modifies his interpretation of Proposition 24 of the Elements of Theology between the second volume of the Roman History and his Sixth Dogmatic Oration (which is a response to Synodal Tome of 1351 stating the triumph of Palamas). However, in both texts, Nikephoros considers that Palamas postulates, like Proclus, on the one hand, an unparticipated and superordinate God and, on the other hand, a second and third rank of beings. In the second volume of the Roman History, Nikephoros considers that Proclus’ second rank is composed of participated and subordinate divinities, whereas in the Sixth Dogmatic Oration, the second rank is filled by entities both participating and participated (which is surprising with respect to Proclus’ views). Bydén suggests that Nikephoros might have changed his interpretation to render it more like Palamas’ system, whose uncreated light is also described in the same passage as both participating and participated. The only major difference, according to Nikephoros, is that Proclus does not qualify the entities in the second and third ranks as uncreated and unoriginated.
Stephen Gersh in the final Chapter 15 notes that in the commentaries on Plato’s Parmenides and on Plotinus’ Enneads (V.3 and V.6), Marsilio Ficino refers explicitly to his (fifteen) notes written in the margins of the Refutation of Nicholas of Methone transmitted in manuscript BnF gr 1256 (which are translated into English in this article). Methone’s name does not seem to play a minor role in Ficino’s system of cross-references. These notes reveal the thematic knots that preoccupy Ficino around the Trinity: the similarities and differences in relation to the one-many position in Platonism; the relationships between the persons inside and outside (i.e. towards creation) of the Trinity; the dissimilarities with the false trinity of the Platonici who postulate first being–first life–first intellect. Ficino, unlike Nicholas, seeks to prove that Platonism and Christianity can be considered not so much from the point of view of opposition as from that of dissimilarity, which makes it possible to envisage a path of rapprochement. The central idea, which Ficino finds in Plotinus, is that the Trinity must be considered from the point of view of the unitary act, and not as a compounding mathematical number, which is rightly denied in both Christianity and Platonism. Gersh concludes that Ficino finds in Nicholas an authority that comforts him in his preference for Plotinus over Proclus within the Platonic tradition.
These contributions underline (once more) that Proclus’ reception in the 12th-century Byzantium is greatly varied: contemporaries of Nicholas, such as Eustratios of Nicaea and Ioane Petritsi, embrace Proclus’ framework in full harmony within a revealed Christian framework, with little or no modification. Nicholas, in this respect, represents a polar opposite as someone who raises a number of difficulties in accepting Proclus uncritically, especially in juxtaposition with the authority of the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Although Nicholas’ argumentative strategy bears a number of great difficulties, the themes that Nicholas investigates show an attempt to articulate a Christian response to basic issues of metaphysics, such as causality, creation, participation, the nature of divine thought, and so on. The repercussions of Nicholas’ thought stretch out into the later 14th and 15th centuries. It became obvious that a study of Byzantine philosophy is severely deficient without a study of Nicholas of Methone’s thought, which this volume seeks to address.
This volume gathers the contributions of the conference Nicholas of Methone between Neoplatonism and the Byzantine Tradition organized online (due to COVID-19 restrictions), on April 12–13, 2021, by Jonathan Greig, Joshua Robinson, and Dragos Calma, with the participation of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The conference, the publication of this volume and the purchase of digitized images of manuscripts were supported by the ERC project NeoplAT (CoG_771640) directed by Dragos Calma.