Themistius (AD 317-389) is best known for his paraphrases of Aristotle, the impact of which was enormous in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions. And yet, despite the fortune of his paraphrases and their key role in the transmission of a certain idea of Aristotle beyond antiquity, Themistius’s philosophical position has remained difficult to pinpoint. Quite tellingly, there is no consensus on how best to describe his theoretical commitments. While for some, Themistius is a Peripatetic philosopher, for others he falls squarely within the Platonic tradition that has come to be known as Neoplatonism.
Themistius and Aristotle is the first book-length attempt to reconstruct Themistius’s philosophical thought as it emerges from his extant works devoted to the explication of Aristotle. What looks like a blind spot in scholarship can be explained as the result of a combination of at least two factors: the dry nature of the paraphrastic method first adopted and then perfected by Themistius, which makes it difficult to extract his original contribution and ideas, combined with the fact that the extant paraphrases are scattered in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. There are very few scholars who can engage in a close study of these works in their original languages. Elisa Coda is one of them. She is also the right person for this sort of project given that she has been critically engaged with Themistius for many years. She is the person who knows by far the most about Themistius, his activity as a commentator, and the impact of his works in formation of the “Medieval” Aristotle.
What emerges from Themistius and Aristotle can be summarized by saying that Themistius’s main concern was offering a coherent interpretation of what Aristotle said on God and on the relation of God to the cosmos, soul, and intellect. One’s first reaction to these topics is twofold: this is a highly selective reading of Aristotle that leaves a great deal aside; more to the point, its pronounced theological orientation does not do justice to the complexity of Aristotle’s thought, either in natural philosophy or in metaphysics. And yet, the focus on God as the first principle (alias first cause) and what has come to be known as Aristotle’s noetics fits well with the proclivities of authors and thinkers active in the historical period we now call Late Antiquity.
At least in this respect, it is by no mean a chance due to the vicissitudes of the transmission of ancient texts that we only have a paraphrase of Metaph. XII (Lambda), which is lost in the original Greek but preserved in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew translations. More directly, there is no reason to think that what has survived is only a piece of a more sustained attempted to deal with the whole of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In all probability, Themistius wrote only on Metaph. XII (Lambda), and only because he considered this book the most obvious entry point into Aristotle’s views on the topic of God as the first cause of the world.
In her book Elisa Coda shows, with a wealth of details and great precision, that Themistius combined exegetical resources borrowed from the Peripatetic tradition (Alexander of Aphrodisias) and the Platonic tradition (Plotinus) to create his own distinctive reading of Aristotle. In this respect, Themistius was neither a creative thinker nor a faithful interpreter of Aristotle, but he was rather a teacher who developed a set of interpretative tools for the teaching of philosophy in the fourth century AD. This is still a poorly understood century: while we are squarely within the boundaries of Late Antiquity, we should not take it for granted that the authors who were active in the fourth century were committed to the ideas or strategies that we see at work in the sixth and seventh centuries. By returning to Themistius and trying to understand him in his own right, Coda fills a lacuna in our understanding of the formation of a segment of the Aristotelian tradition that is especially important for the transmission of Aristotle beyond antiquity.
A full discussion of how Themistius reads Aristotle through the lenses of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plotinus goes beyond the boundaries of this book review. One example will suffice to give the reader a taste of how Aristotle’s thought is transformed in the Aristotelian tradition. From Aristotle we know that the first principle is a separate intellect (a disembodiednous) engaged in the activity of thinking. Themistius borrows from Alexander and Plotinus the resources to explain what this principle is thinking and how. To begin with, Themistius follows Alexander in conceiving of the divine intellect as being full of intelligible essences (noêta). Moreover, he follows Plotinus in claiming that divine thinking is not an instance of reasoning; rather, the divine intellect is thinking and knowing all intelligible essences all at once. We are very far not only from the letter but also the spirit of what Aristotle says in Metaph. XII 9. Radical emptiness is the first and most obvious feature of the separate nous described in Metaph. XII 9. Populating this emptiness with intelligible essences and making them all at once available to the first principle as thoughts is, to say the least, a creative reading of Aristotle. But there is at least another deviation from the letter and the spirit of Aristotle’s philosophy that is worth recalling. Themistius conceives of the separate nous as a separate form (a separate eidos). As a result, the first principle (alias first cause) is understood by him as the first form. Nothing like this can be found in Aristotle’s writings. Hylomorphism is a theoretical framework that Aristotle develops specifically for the study of the natural world. Its application beyond the natural world is another instance of creative reading, which goes back ultimately to Alexander and his interpretation of Aristotle.
I have here only scratched the surface of the complex question of how the ancient commentators on Aristotle transformed his philosophical thought. Themistius is no exception to the rule, so we want to read Themistius not because he affords new insights into Aristotle’s philosophy, but because he developed a reading that is worth studying in its own right. This is especially true for the idiosyncratic interpretation of nous as the principle of human thought (An. III 4-8). While Themistius knows, and relies heavily on, what Alexander of Aphrodisias says on the topic of nous, his interpretation of An. III 4-8 shows that he feels free to depart from his sources as he sees it fit. Arguably, the key to Alexander’s interpretation of Aristotle’s account ofnous is the identification of the productive principle of thinking introduced in An. III 5 with the divine nous of Metaph. XII. For Alexander, what Aristotle describes as “separate, unaffected and unmixed,” and describes as thinking that is by its very essence active, can only be the first principle discussed in Metaph. XII 9. For Themistius this identification is false. By his lights, the productive principle of human thinking is a human nous. This identification allows him to develop an overall reading of Aristotle’s noetics that results in the immortality of the intellectual part of the human soul.
We do not have to choose between Alexander and Themistius, let alone adopt any one of the exegetical options developed after they worked. Instead, we must return to Aristotle and must try to read what Aristotle says on the topic of nous in An. III 4 An. III 4-8 afresh. Though difficult, this stretch of text does not disappear in the maze of its interpretations. [1] This does not mean, I hasten to add, that the study of what the ancient and medieval interpreters have accomplished becomes redundant or is deprived of historical and philosophical value. It only means that the fruits of their exegetical labor must be studied for their own sake and not for the sake of understanding Aristotle. This is exactly what Elisa Coda has done for Themistius. We must be grateful to her because it is through her work—work that meets the highest standard of scholarship—that we now have a better understanding of the historical and philosophical significance of what Themistius accomplished as an interpreter of Aristotle.
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Note:
1. For such an attempt see K. Corcilius, A. Falcon, R. Roreitner, Aristotle on the Essence of Human Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2024).