Eusebios of Myndos

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Eusebios of Myndos was a late antique philosopher of the Neoplatonic direction. He lived around the middle of the 4th century.

Life

Eusebios is only known from the writing biographies of the philosophers and the sophists , which Eunapios of Sardis wrote. Eunapios was a student of Chrysanthios of Sardis , a fellow student of Eusebius.

Eusebios came from the city of Myndos in Caria on the southwest coast of Asia Minor ; today the village of Gümüşlük is located there . Nothing is known about his family and childhood. He studied in Pergamon with the respected Neoplatonic philosopher Aidesios . Aidesios, a student of the famous neo-Platonist Iamblichus , had opened his own school after his death. Eusebios' fellow students in Pergamon included Chrysanthios as well as the philosophers Maximos of Ephesus and Priscus .

In 351 the future emperor Julian came to Pergamon to take lessons from Aidesios. After a while, the elderly Aidesios transferred the task of instructing Julian to his students because of his advanced age. Since Maximos was then in Ephesus and Priskos in Greece, Eusebios and Chrysanthios became the teachers of the prominent philosophy student. Eusebios impressed Julian with his extraordinary didactic skills.

In contrast to most of the Neo-Platonists of the time, Eusebius rejected the religious practices of theurgy , which sought to magically and ritually seek divine assistance, purify the soul and establish a connection with the world of the gods. He thought that the effects of magic and theurgy were not of divine origin, but were hallucinations produced by material forces; this is a wrong path that does nothing to purify the soul, but leads to madness. Just like Plotinus , the founder of the Neoplatonic direction, and in contrast to Iamblichus, Eusebius was convinced that the ascent of the soul and its return to the spiritual world could not be accomplished through external acts within the framework of cult practice, but only through purely spiritual purification which is accomplished by means of reason. He did not believe that he was dependent on divine intervention, but trusted in the ability of the soul to redeem itself through philosophical knowledge. Eusebios therefore warned Julian about his former study colleague Maximos of Ephesus, who placed theurgy at the center of his endeavors. With this, however, Eusebios achieved the opposite of what was intended; Julian broke off his training in Pergamon and went to Ephesus to Maximus, whose direction he followed.

Nothing is known about the later fate of Eusebius. It is also unknown whether he wrote any scriptures. Under the name of Eusebios , several moral sayings (in the Ionian dialect) have been passed down by Stobaios , which Daniel Wyttenbach and Friedrich Wilhelm August Mullach ascribed to Eusebios of Myndos for no compelling reason. Eduard Zeller pointed out, however, that there is no trace of Neoplatonic ideas in these moral sayings, which is why the identification of these two Eusebioi is generally rejected.

Source edition

  • Giuseppe Giangrande (Ed.): Eunapii vitae sophistarum , Istituto poligrafico dello stato, Rome 1956 (7th chapter, pp. 40–56)

literature

  • Richard Goulet: Article Eusèbe de Myndos . In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques . Volume 3, CNRS, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-271-05748-5 , p. 367.
  • Paweł Janiszewski: Eusebios. In: Paweł Janiszewski, Krystyna Stebnicka, Elżbieta Szabat: Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-871340-1 , p. 120
  • Robert J. Penella: Greek Philosophers and Sophists in the Fourth Century AD Studies in Eunapius of Sardis . Francis Cairns, Leeds 1990, ISBN 0-905205-79-0 , pp. 65-67.

Web links

Remarks

  1. For the contrast between Eusebios' attitude and the direction represented by Maximos see Polymnia Athanassiadi-Fowden : Julian and Hellenism. An Intellectual Biography , Oxford 1981, p. 32 f .; Robert J. Penella: Greek Philosophers and Sophists in the Fourth Century AD Studies in Eunapius of Sardis , Leeds 1990, p. 66; Klaus Rosen : Julian. Kaiser, Gott und Christenhasser , Stuttgart 2006, pp. 95–97.