Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History
Catherine Michael Chin2015, University of California Press eBooks
Th e art historian Esther Pasztory describes a return from abroad as follows: 1 When I returned my apartment looked all wrong to me. I hated it. Th e morning aft er arrival I got up all exhausted and jet-lagged and before doing anything else, I started taking the pictures and textiles off the walls and moving them. A couple of hours later I found that I had rearranged everything, including the sculptures.. .. Aft er a long absence the apartment did not refl ect me in some way, and I was not comfortable in it until I brought us into accord. Late ancient knowledge of the cosmos documents an intimate discomfort with being out of accord. Th e kosmos, as kosmos, is ordered and beautiful; Latin authors insist that the neatness of mundus is intellectually if not etymologically akin to the beauty of kosmos. 2 Accord is always very close by: late ancient writers on the cosmos follow their predecessors in assuming a general principle of sympathy between all the parts of this visible and invisible world that, in their order, are the cosmos. 3 "All things, " says Plotinus, "must be enchained; and the sympathy and correspondence obtaining in any one closely knit organism must exist, fi rst, and most intensely, in the All. " 4 Th e doctrine of sympathy, moreover, requires Pasztory's "us": I was not comfortable in it until I brought us into accord. It is necessary for most late ancient cosmological thinkers that the cosmos is an agent and contains agents, some of whom are rational, some of whom are human, many of whom we today may choose to call inanimate. 5 Th ese agents correspond with human beings and with each other. Th e late ancient cosmos, as cosmos, insists on a multiplicity of connected parts; action is a process of multiple actors coming into accord: "Man, like a tiny universe, is sustained by the everlasting fi ery movement of the
