Sweeney L., Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval Thought, 1992.pdf

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Foreword
by
Denis O'Brien
PETER LANG
New York' San Francisco' Bem
Frankfurt am Main' Berlin' Wien ., Paris
PETER LANG
New York· San Francisco' Bern
Frankfurt am Main· Berlin' Wien • Paris
>.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sweeney, Leo.
Divine infinity in Greek and medieval
thought / Leo Sweeney.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1.
God-History of doctrines. 2. Infinite-
History.
1.
Title.
BT98.S84
1992
212'.7-dc20
91-30855
ISBN 0-8204-1178-7
CIP
Contents
Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Sweeney, Leo:
Divine infinity in Greek and medieval thought /
Leo Sweeney.-New York; Berlin; Bern;
Franldurt/M.; Paris; Wien: Lang, 1992
ISBN 0-8204-1178-7
Foreword
Denis O'Brien,
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Preface and Acknowledgments
vii
xiii
Part I
Hellenic and Hellenistic Philosophy
PoIl~.czone
Biblioteki
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UW. IFiS PAN
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Cover Design by George Lallas.
~
1. Infinity: An Overview
2. Are
Apeiria
and
Aoristia
Synonyms?
3. Plato's "Safe" and "Cleverer" Answers:
3
15
Phaedo,100B-107B
31007367000000
29
>tiG
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for
("
Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
U
I
8
©
Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 1992
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in the United States of America.
4.
Participation in Plato's Dialogues:
Phaedo,
Parmenides, Sophist
and
Timaeus
5. Plato According to Henry Jackson
6. Leon Robin's Interpretation of Plato
7.
A.
E. Taylor on Socrates and Plato
8. Aristotle's Infinity of Quantity
9. Infinity in Plotinus
10. Another Interpretation of Plotinus'
Enneads,
VI, 7,
32
11. Basic Principles in Plotinus' Philosophy
12. Participation and Structure of Being in
Proclus'
Elements of Theology
47
69
95
119
143
167
223
243
257
Part II
Medieval Authors
13. Doctrine of Creation in the
Liber de Causis
14. Research Difficulties in the
Liber de Causis
15. Divine Infinity: 1150-1250
16. Medieval Opponents of Divine Infinity
17. Lombard, Augustine and Infinity
18. Divine Infinity According to Richard Fishacre
19.
Bonaventure and Aquinas on the
Divine Being as Infinite
20. Summa
de Bono
(Codex Vaticanus Latinus 4305):
An Anonymous Amalgam of Alexander
of Hales, Aquinas and Bonaventure
289
309
319
337
Foreword
365
385
413
"God is a supreme being, who alone exists of himself, and is
infinite in all perfections." Half a century or more has passed since,
as a small boy at a Catholic primary school in Harrow, I learnt to
recite those words in answer to the catechism question 'What is
God?" I wish I could recapture now what
(if
anything) those words
meant to me then. Certainly I could have had no inkling at the time
that those three seemingly simple phrases-a
supreme being, alone
exists of himself, infinite in all perfections--issued
from two and a half
millenia of extraordinarily complex religiOUS and philosophical
speculation. Nor could I have had any idea that at least one of the
words in my catechism answer went back to the very beginnings of
Greek philosophy, in Ionia, in the sixlth century
B.C.
For the word
which Cicero later translated as
infinitas
<-to
a7t£tpov) was very likely
the word used by Anaximander, in a short prose work perhaps
written in 547/6
B.C.,
to describe the stuff from which, he claimed,
our world originated.
Admittedly, even in that briefest of brief statements about
Anaximander's "infinite," mysteries and puzzles abound. Did Anaxi-
mander himself use the word, or is
to apeiron
perhaps only a para-
phrase adopted by Theophrastus, or even by Aristotle, to show that
Anaximander's originating matter was not to be identified with any
one of Aristotle's own four elements (earth, air, fire and water)?
And if Anaximander himself did use Ithe word, what did he mean
by it? Merely that "the infinite" was indeterminate in relation to the
opposites that would be separated out from it, or also that (as we
learn elsewhere) the source of the opposites was "deathless" and
"ageless,,?l
The relevant texts will be found in H. Diels and Wo Kranz,
Die
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Griechisch und Deutsch,
3 Bande, 5th ed.
(Berlin: Weidmann, 1934-37). For Anaximander, see Band
i,
ch. 12,
1
439
Part HI
In Retrospect
21. Gregory of Nyssa on God as Infinite Being
22. John Damascene on Divine Infinity
23. Surprises in the History of Infinity:
Anaximander to Cantor
473
505
539
Indices
Greek and Medieval Authors
Modern and Contemporary Authors
567
571
viii
Foreword
Foreword
ix
Even supposing that we could be sure that Anaximander himself
had written of "the infinite," and even
if
we could be certain of the
meaning which he himself would have given to the word, what are
we to make of uses of the same word and of related words found in
texts of Parmenides and later Presocratics? For example, Parme-
nides' one being is CL'tEAEO"'tOV (fr. 8.4). Look up that word in Liddell
and Scott, and you will find the meaning there given as "endless.,,2
But a few verses later (fr. 8.32) Parmenides says that the one being is
OUK
CL'tEAEt)'tTl'tov. Look up that expression in the same dictionary,
and you will find that Parmenides' one being is "not without an
end." Something has gone badly wrong somewhere. But where?3
No less confusing and no less puzzling is Plato's use of the word.
Is
"the infinite" of the
Philebus
the same as "the otherness" of the
Sophist
and the
Timaeus?
Plotinus perhaps thought it was. But
Plotinus' use of Plato is far from being the innocent repetition of
ideas that Plotinus himself, with charmingly deceptive naIvete,
would sometimes have us believe it is. Quite the contrary: the
infinity of the
Philebus
has become in the
Enneads
the infinity of
matter, and the infinity of matter is a sign of its utter evil.
Not that matter is the only "infinity" which Plotinus recognizes.
Soul and intellect are also "infinite," though in different ways, and
so too is the One. But what is the meaning which attaches to
Plotinus' use of "infinity" when he speaks of his first principle, and
how does Plotinus think to pass, as he apparently does at one point
(Enn.
VI 7 [38] 32. 23-30), from the "infinity" of our love of the One,
to the "infinity" which attaches to the object of our desire?
Certainly Plotinus cannot mean that his first principle is an
"infinite being," as the God of Aquinas will be, for Plotinus' first
principle, the One, is not "being" at all. How is it, then, that, for
Aquinas, "being" has become "infinite," and why is it that, for some
of Aquinas' near contemporaries, the supreme being is not infinite
at all, but finite?
pp. 81-90. (The pagination and the numbering of the chapters are
the same in the later so-called editions of this work.)
2 I refer to Liddell, Scott, Jones,
A Greek-English Lexicon,
9th ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).
3 The obvious error in Liddell and Scott,
A Greek-English Lexicon
(see the preceding footnote) has not been corrected in the
Supplement,
ed. E.
A.
Barber, "with the assistance of P. Maas, M. Scheller and M.
1,
We~~"(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968).
This is the topic and these are some of the questions which have
occupied Father Leo Sweeney since his doctoral dissertation, pre-
sented at the University of Toronto in 1954 under the direction of
Etienne Gilson and entitled "Divine Infinity in the Writings of
Thomas AqUinas," with introductory chapters on infinity in Aris-
totle, Plotinus, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius and the
Liber de Causis.
The present volume contains revised and updated accounts of
Father Sweeney's researches into all these authors, and into other
later Greek and Latin medieval philosophers and theologians, while
for the earlier period Father Sweeney has already made the results
of his
resear~hes av~il~ble
in.a most useful work entitled
Infinity in
the Presocrattcs: A BtbllOgraphtcal and Philosophical Study.4
From Anaximander to Aquinas and beyond: few modem schol-
ars could hope to rival Father Sweeney in attempting to embrace so
large a period. But what makes Father Sweeney's studies so enlight-
ening and so refreshing is not merely their unusually impressive
sc~pe,
but the
~nsight
they show into what it is to study the history
of Ideas: That
18
not at all something that can be taken for granted.
The artIcles and books that tumble in such profusion from the
p~ting
presses of the academic world are all too often shot through
With a wholly unconscious naIvete as to what it is that makes the
history of philosophy an independent discipline, distinct from ei-
ther simple history or "pure" philosophy.
Father Sweeney's chapters on the place of Henry Jackson, Leon
Robin and
A.
E. Taylor in the history of Platonic scholarship make
sobering reading for anyone who doubts the truth of that last
statement. Those three writers were leading figures in the academic
world of their day, and yet the interpretation which each has to offer
of Plato is dominated by a philosophical bias which, a century and
less later, we can already see is blatantly and blazingly anachronis-
tic, whether it be Jackson's vapid Hegelianism, Robin's own curious
brand of quasi-Eleatic idealism, or Taylor's extraordinary convic-
tion that in the
Timaeus
Plato attributes to an otherwise unknown
fifth-century Pythagorean theories which quite miraculously coin-
cide with the views expressed by Taylor's own contemporary,
A.
N.
Whitehead.
And are the successors of Jackson and of Taylor any better
eqUipped to read the history of philosophy except as a hat stand for
their own ideas? Father Sweeney has been too charitable to devote
4
Published at The Hague (Martinus Nijhoff) in 1972.
x
Foreword
Foreword
xi
similar chapters to the cult figures of our own day. With notable
exceptions, the results, I believe, would not have been any more
heartening.
Admittedly the modernistic anachronism rampant in the writ-
ings of Jackson, Taylor and their present-day
epigones
is hardly less
repellent than the ham-fisted syncretism still to be found in the
attitude adopted by some continental writers toward the history of
philosophy. Only the other day, in
Le
Figaro litteraire,
I happened to
come across the answer given by a revered French academician to
the question ''What is your philosophy?" I winced when I read:
"C'
est la philosophie dite spiritualiste, la
Filosophia
[sic]
perennis,
une philosophie eternelle, celle de Pythagore, de Socrate, de Platon
et d' Aristote; celie qui a ensemence Ie Moyen Age, qui s' est reveillee
avec Descartes, avec Kant; celle de Bergson ...
,,5
How could one
possibly hope to make any serious comparison of Kant or of Descar-
tes with the meager details which are all that we can now hope to
recover of the beliefs of Pythagoras or of the historical Socrates?
And to what meaningless triviality we should be reduced if we
attempted to extract some common denominator from such a com-
parison, even if such a comparison were possible at all.
.
But rest assured: Father Sweeney has none of all this nonsense.
Instead, the grateful reader will find in his pages the clash of ideas
which alone can bring philosophy to life and which alone can give
clarity and precision to the ideas of the past. Thomas Aquinas'
definition of God's essence as infinite is not at all the same as
Bonaventure's conception of the divine essence as infinite. Thomas
does have as a predecessor Richard Fishacre (an English Dominican
who taught at Oxford for some twelve years until his death in 1248),
but although Thomas had wanted to have copied for him, and had
presumably read, the writings of his English confrere, the link is a
doctrinal and not merely an historical one. For the conception
which both Dominicans have of God's infinite essence is a conse-
quence of their shared conception of creation, a conjunction of ideas
which Richard Fishacre had perhaps initially worked out in the
context of a dispute over whether knowledge is possible of a God
who is infinite, a dispute which led other theologians of the mid-
thirteenth century to claim that God, if he is to be known, must be
finite, or, if infinite, then only in his power and not in his essence.
As Father Sweeney guides his reader with masterly ease through
these intricate conflicts, not only does the whole complex and
5
shifting world of thirteenth-century philosophical theology come
alive beneath his pen; the anachronisms which bedevil and obscure
the study of later Antiquity melt away as mists in the morning
sunlight. The historian who solemnly assures us that, for Plotinus,
the One is "infinite being" stands at once confuted as having (obvi-
ously all unwittingly) confused Plotinian with Thomist metaphys-
ics.
6
For not only would "infinite being" have been a contradiction
in terms for Plotinus, insofar as "being," for the Neoplatonist, is
identified with form and with definition; no less devastatingly, the
attribution of an "infinite being" to Plotinus collapses the whole
history of the distinction between emanation and creation. The One
which "overflows" to become, for Plotinus, source of all being (and
even, ultimately, of the nonbeing which is matter) is a principle
"beyond being"; whereas for Thomas Aquinas and for Richard
Fishacre, the difference between created and creator is a difference
between finite being and being which is infinite.
7
But to summarize these distinctions is in part to trivialize them.
As it is, nothing in this volume could be further from the simple-
minded contrasts, which still loom large in the handbooks, between
See J. M. Rist,
Plotinus: The Road to Reality
(Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1967), p. 25 ("in view of the general Greek use of 'Being'
to mean 'finite Being,' the
prima facie
meaning of the phrase 'beyond
Being' should be 'infinite Being"'). Rist's error is noted by Sweeney,
chapter 10 below. See also the following footnote.
7
Rist's constant reference (without any textual authority at all)
to the "infinite Being' of the One in the pages following that quoted
in my preceding footnote (see
Plotinus: The Road to Reality,
pp.
25-37) is the source of endless confusion and misunderstanding. In
particular, Rist appears to misunderstand (pp. 26-27) the conclud-
ing sentence of
Enn.
VI 8 [39] 19, where the point is that the One does
not have to
be
to produce
being.
In fact, just the opposite: the One
produces being because he is ''beyond being." I have added above,
in a parenthesis, that in the
Enneads
even the nonbeing of matter
derives "ultimately" from the One, since I believe that matter, for
Plotinus, is produced through the intermediary of a lower soul. This
feature of Plotinus' philosophy has been much contested recently,
notably by H.-R. Schwyzer, who holds that matter, for Plotinus,
exists independently of the products which flow from the One. I
have considered this question in an article entitled "Plotinus on
Matter," included
in
a collection of essays shortly to be published in
honour of Father Leo Sweeney.
6
See p. 8 of
Le Figaro litteraire
for 17 December 1991.

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