Numenios

This article is about the Greek philosopher. For other people with the same name, see Numenios (disambiguation) .

Numenios of Apamea (Apamea) was a Greek philosopher ( Platonist ). He came from Apamea in the Roman province of Syria and lived around the middle of the 2nd century. Otherwise almost nothing is known about his life. Apparently he lived and taught in his hometown.

Works

The seven works of Numenios, whose titles we know, are all lost; only fragments are preserved. The main work, a dialogue, was called Über das Gute . The other titles were: About the academics' turning away from Plato , About the immortality of the soul , About what Plato left unsaid , About the place , About the numbers and The hoopoe . Nothing is known of the content of the last three works.

Teaching

Numenios is of the opinion that there was an original uniform wisdom doctrine that was known to the Greeks as well as to other peoples (Indians, Egyptians, Persians and Jews). A variant of this idea, which was later widespread among the Neo-Platonists and Neupythagoreans , had already been represented by Aristobulus and Philo of Alexandria , who assumed that the Pentateuch had influenced Greek philosophy . Numenios suggested that the original true philosophy was taught by Pythagoras and Plato , but later philosophers deviated from it. Therefore one should return to the original teaching of Plato as it emerges from his writings. Among the heresies, Numenios counts especially those of the Peripatetic , the Stoic and the skeptical direction of the academics emanating from Arkesilaos .

Numenios assumes three gods (or, viewed differently, three aspects of the deity). The first, supreme God, whom he equates with the good in himself, he imagines as only being and not acting, quite remote from matter, simple and unmoved. Subordinate to him is the second, the Creator God ( Demiurge ), who brings forth the idea of ​​the cosmos through contemplation of the first God. He is good by sharing in what is good; thus he is not good itself, but the good God. In contrast to the first god, he is moved; becoming can be traced back to him, being to the first God. In that the Demiurge also creates, organizes and directs the sensually perceptible world beyond the idea, i.e. deals with matter, he appears as the third god. But this does not mean a temporal beginning of the world; creation is a beginningless process. Numenios regards matter as pre-existing, i.e. not created, but eternal. For him she is the source of all evil. Because of its inadequacy, matter opposes the divine orderly power, but is nevertheless shaped and lifted up by it and even receives beauty. However, this does not remedy their badness. The philosophy of numenios thus proves to be dualistic . He sees matter as an independent principle that cannot ultimately be traced back to the godhead, but is just as original as the godhead.

Because of its self-movement, he even ascribes a soul of its own to matter, which he considers evil; it gives the matter active power. For him, this evil soul is not something that does not exist in the sense of an interpretation of evil as a lack, but a real substance. It is immortal and causes the emergence of the evil soul area in the human being, which accidentally joins the good individual soul from outside when it moves into the material world. Numenios basically regards the descent of the human soul into the physical world as a misfortune.

Numenios deals particularly intensively with Plato's dialogue Timaeus . He interprets the myth of Atlantis told there , which he regards as a poetic fiction with no historical background, as allegorical; the struggle of the original Athenians against the inhabitants of the mythical realm of Atlantis symbolizes for him the conflict between the host of better souls under the direction of the goddess Athena , the representative of reason, and the numerically superior group of the worse souls who face the world of the senses and transience and constant change and subordinate to the sea god Poseidon .

From matches between conceptions of Numenios and teachings of Plato student Xenocrates has Hans Joachim Krämer derived the hypothesis of an influence.

Aftermath

The writings of Numenios influenced Neoplatonism. The famous thinker Plotinus , who headed a Neoplatonic philosophy school in Rome in the 3rd century, dealt with works by the Syrian Middle Platonist, as his student Porphyrios reports. Plotinus studied the writings of Numenios so intensely that philosophers in Greece accused him of plagiarizing them . In response to this reproach, Amelios , a student of Plotinus and an excellent expert on the teaching of Numenius, wrote a treatise on the difference in the teaching between Plotinus and Numenius , which has not survived. A key difference is that, unlike Numenios, Plotinus did not consider evil to be real, but to be a mere defect.

The works on the good and on the turning away of the academics from Plato were used by the church father Eusebios of Caesarea , to whom a large part of the surviving Numenios fragments is owed. The Christians became interested in the doctrine of the three gods or aspects of the deity, since this tripling of the first principle could be related to the doctrine of the Trinity . They also paid attention to Numenios' positive assessment of the Jewish tradition - he compared Plato with Moses.

Text output

• Édouard des Places (ed.): Numénius: Fragments . Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1973 (Greek and Latin texts with French translation)

literature

Overview and overall representations

• Mark Edwards: Numenius of Apamea. In: Lloyd P. Gerson (Ed.): The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity , Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-76440-7 , pp. 115-125
• Franco Ferrari: Numenios of Apamea. In: Christoph Riedweg et al. (Hrsg.): Philosophy of the imperial era and late antiquity (= outline of the history of philosophy . The philosophy of antiquity. Volume 5/1). Schwabe, Basel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7965-3698-4 , pp. 649-657, 701 f.
• Michael Frede : Numenius . In: Rise and decline of the Roman world , Vol. II.36.2, de Gruyter, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-11-010392-3 , pp. 1034-1075
• Pedro Pablo Fuentes González: Nouménios d'Apamée . In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Vol. 4, CNRS Editions, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-271-06386-8 , pp. 724-740
• Gregor Staab: Numenios. In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum , Vol. 25, Hiersemann, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-7772-1318-7 , Sp. 1172–1197

Investigations on individual topics

• Karin Alt : Flight from the world and world affirmation. On the question of dualism in Plutarch, Numenios, and Plotinus . Steiner, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-515-06423-0
• Matthias Baltes : Numenios of Apamea and the Platonic Timaeus . In: Matthias Baltes: Dianoemata. Small writings on Plato and Platonism . Teubner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-519-07672-1 , pp. 1-32
• Myles F. Burnyeat: Platonism in the Bible: Numenius of Apamea on Exodus and Eternity . In: Ricardo Salles (Ed.): Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought . Clarendon Press, Oxford 2005, ISBN 0-19-926130-X , pp. 143-169
• Jens Halfwassen : Spirit and self-confidence. Studies on Plotinus and Numenios (= Academy of Sciences and Literature [Mainz]. Treatises of the humanities and social sciences class , year 1994, No. 10). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-515-06623-3 , pp. 36-57

Web links

• Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Remarks

1. ↑ On the dating of Francisco García Bazán (ed.): Oráculos Caldeos. Numenio de Apamea: Fragmentos y testimonios , Madrid 1991, pp. 197f .; Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and Fall of the Roman World, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1038f.
2. ↑ Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and Downfall of the Roman World, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1040.
3. ^ Gregor Staab: Pythagoras in late antiquity. Studies on “De Vita Pythagorica” by Iamblichos von Chalkis , Munich 2002, pp. 93–100; Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and Fall of the Roman World, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1044-1050.
4. ↑ On the doctrine of gods see Charles H. Kahn: Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans , Indianapolis 2001, pp. 122-130; John Peter Kenney: Proschresis Revisited: An Essay in Numenian Theology . In: Robert J. Daly (Ed.): Origeniana Quinta , Leuven 1992, pp. 217-230; Eric Robertson Dodds : Numenios and Ammonios . In: Clemens Zintzen (Ed.): Der Mittelplatonismus , Darmstadt 1981, pp. 495-499; Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and Decline of the Roman World, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1054-1070.
5. ↑ Karin Alt: Flight from the world and world affirmation. On the question of dualism in Plutarch, Numenios, Plotin , Stuttgart 1993, pp. 29–35, 41f., 105f .; Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and Fall of the Roman World, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1051-1053.
6. ^ Matthias Baltes: Numenios of Apamea and the Platonic Timaeus . In: Matthias Baltes: Dianoemata , Stuttgart 1999, pp. 1–32, here: 7–12.
7. ^ Matthias Baltes: Numenios of Apamea and the Platonic Timaeus . In: Matthias Baltes: Dianoemata , Stuttgart 1999, pp. 1–32, here: 2f.
8. ↑ Hans Joachim Krämer: Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik , 2nd edition, Amsterdam 1967, pp. 75–92; on this in detail Detlef Thiel: The Philosophy of Xenokrates in the Context of the Old Academy , Munich 2006, pp. 424–459; see. Matthias Baltes: Numenios of Apamea and the Platonic Timaeus . In: Matthias Baltes: Dianoemata , Stuttgart 1999, pp. 1–32, here: 3f.
9. ^ Porphyrios, Vita Plotini 14.
10. ↑ Porphyrios, Vita Plotini 17f. See Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and Fall of the Roman World, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1034-1036.
11. ↑ Michael Frede: Numenius . In: Rise and decline of the Roman world, Vol. II.36.2, Berlin 1987, pp. 1034-1075, here: 1036f .; Robbert M. van den Berg: God the Creator, God the Creation: Numenius' Interpretation of Genesis 1: 2 (Frg. 30) . In: George H. van Kooten (Ed.): The Creation of Heaven and Earth. Re-interpretations of Genesis I in the Context of Judaism, Ancient Philosophy, Christianity, and Modern Physics , Leiden 2005, pp. 109–123 ( online ).