kommentierung, Überlieferung, nachleben () || the aristotelianism of eustratios of nicaea

ANTONY C . LLOYD, Liverpool

T H E ARISTOTELIANISM OF EUSTRATIOS OF NICAEA

Eustratios, the Metropolitan of Nicaea, seems to have started a distinguished career as assistant head (proximos) of a Church school in Constantinople that may have been a college of the Patriarchal School.1 He became a protege of Alexios I who used his theological skill in various debates with the Latin Church and with the Armeni-ans (or monophysites), but who fairly obviously double-crossed him, or sacrificed him to political interests, in 1117.2 On one such occa-sion, Nicetas Choniates reports, Eustratios used ill chosen words on the natures in Christ and was called by an Armenian what in Arme-nian means κτηνοβατούμενος; this was applauded by the Emperor's audience who as 'important persons' understood, taking it as tanta-mount to calling Eustratios a heretic.3 There are extant tracts of his on other current theological questions, such as the procession of the Holy Spirit (the Filioque), the use of unleavened bread in the Eu-charist and icons.4 But dates and facts in his life are all but unknown. The unedifying details of his life suspension by a synod of April 1117 are however known.5 It has been plausibly suggested that the work for which he is best known, the commentaries on Posterior Analytics II and Nicomachean Ethics I and VI (CAG XXI, 1 and XX), was done under the active stimulus of the salon of intellectuals established by Anna Comnena after the death of her father, Alex-

1 R. Browning, The Patriarchal School at Constantinople in the twelfth century, in: Byzantion 24 (1962) 173, repr. in Id., Studies on Byzantine history, literature and education, London 1977.

2 Inferable from documents I and II edited by P.Joannou, Eustrate de Nicee: trois pieces inedites de son proces (1117), in: Rev. et. byz. 10 (1952) 24-34.

1 Nicetas Choniates, Thesaurus orthodoxae fidei, PG CXL 137 A. 4 Mostly printed in: A. K. Demetrakopulos, Εκκλησιαστική βιβλιοθήκη, τόμος A

(all publ.), Leipzig 1866; repr. Hildesheim 1965. 5 See chiefly Demetrakopulos, op.cit., Introd. ια'-ις'; V. Grumel, Regestes des actes

du Patriarcat de Constantinople, ser. I, vol.1, fasc. Ill, Chalcedon 1947, 82-83; P. Joannou, loc.cit.

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342 ANTONY C . LLOYD

ios I, and her retirement f rom public life.6 They belong to the most interesting category of Aristotelian commentary, in which ideas and not merely expressions are explained and discussed. N o one ac-quainted with late Byzantine Aristotle commentators will look for originality in their suggestions: such originality as there may be will be found in their style of exposition and their selection f rom tradi-tional points of view. Paul Moraux' contribution over many years to the scholarly understanding of the whole Aristotelian tradition has put every student of it in his debt; and it is a pleasure to offer to him as a mark of respect and affection the present attempt to 'place' one of the less known figures in that tradition.

Eustratios shews himself an able philosopher in the tradition passed on from Psellos to John Italos, whose classes he attended. This consists in the standard combination of Aristotle and Neopla-tonism, in which Aristotle's universals are concepts with a non-men-tal existence or ύπόστασις - the Scholastic fundamentum - in the individual forms of individual substances and their accidents. This nominalist interpretation of Aristotle has often and rightly been as-sociated with the Neoplatonists, but wrongly represented as though it were specially characteristic of them. It would be difficult to find a philosophically trained Byzantine who did not take it for granted; it had the theological authority of John Damascene among others, and in any case goes back to Alexander of Aphrodisias.7 Except for Christian modifications 'the harmony of Plato and Aristotle' had been completed (it was believed) by the Alexandrian School in the f if th century: Ammonius had left philosophy free f rom faction ac-cording to Photios.8 As for the Platonic Ideas, the λόγοι in the De-miurge's intellect, it was usually though not always claimed that Aristotle's strictures on them applied in logic and in physics where 'real' let alone 'separate' universals had no place, but that he recog-nised them in metaphysics. The distinction between what could be said in these and other different contexts is a commonplace in Eu-stratios. But while nearly all Platonists were in a sense Aristotelians,

6 R.Browning, An unpublished funeral oration on Anna Comnena, in: Proc. Cam-bridge Phi lo l .Soc .188 (1962) 1 -12 .

7 See further A. C. Lloyd, Form and universal in Aristotle, Liverpool 1981 ( = ARCA, Classical and Medieval texts, papers and monographs 4).

8 Bibl. VII 191, 36-37 Henry (cited H. Hunger, Hochspr. profane Lit. der Byz., München 1978, 27 η. 89).



T h e Aristotelianism of Eustratios of Nicaea 3 4 3

not all Aristotelians were Platonists; and we shall see in Nicolas of Methone a case of an Aristotelian in logic who rejected the Ideas altogether, the rejection having however a theological motive. For ethics the picture is not quite the same: but here I shall have to omit that.

The lines along which the Neoplatonist commentaries effected the harmony may be familiar, but Eustratios' version of the logico-metaphysical problem is in some respects more subtle than we find it in the Alexandrians, if only because he includes a slightly fuller ac-count of the Neoplatonists' side and one which is more consistent in my view than Ammonius'.9 But it is not always easy to follow; and the same ground is covered in both commentaries, so I shall start with summaries of the relevant passages from each and keep as closely as possible to their own expressions.

In Anal. Post. 195,5 sqq. raises the following problem about II 13, 96 b 23-25:

Aristotle says that the genus is a compound of species which are its simplest parts. On the contrary, species seem to be compounded of genera and differentiae. Moreover in this passage it is coalition of simples (the infimae species) which makes a compound, but that does not seem to be the case with a genus of species: animal is not made by the simple coalition of horse, man etc.

195,14 sqq. proposes the solution:

In the Categories' account, which holds for what they are in themselves, species are compounds of genera and differen-tiae, and individuals of species and matter: but from the point of view of logic, as in this passage, a genus is a whole whose parts are its species, and a species a whole whose parts are the particulars. The relation however which holds between particular and species is not the part-whole relation which holds between a particular and its parts. The former relation implies synonymy of part and whole (man is two-footed animal and so is Socrates), the latter does not.

' John Italos' version of the three wholes or types of universal can be found for com-parison in his Quaestiones Quodlibet. , ed. P.Joannou pp. 7 -8 , 16-17. It contains nothing novel. Both he and Eustratios fo l low the locus classicus, which is Proclus, Inst. 67, more directly than did the Alexandrians.




19^24 sqq. presents the locus communis of three ways of under-standing wholes, (i) ώς προ των μερών, (ii) ώς έκ των μερών, (iii) ώς έν τφ μέρει.

Eustratius explains:

According to Platonists (i) are the imparticipable monads that are the principles of each αριθμός σύστοιχος whose members are called parts of those monads.

(ii) Each collection (άθροισμα) [of properties: cf. 215, 13] or compound made from the particulars of the αριθμός σύστοιχος [i.e. each ενυλον είδος abstracted from the particulars] is a whole from the parts. [Notice we now have Aristotelian abstraction, not Neoplatonic proces-sion. Cf. συναθροίζειν, Hermias, In Phaedr. 171,10 and 15 Couvreur.]

(iii) But each of the monads of these particulars [i.e. the 'collection' seen as a monad] is a whole in the part. E. g. a particular man is a part of man simpliciter but includes the definition of man simpliciter and is a whole in himself; he is a whole in the part qua possessing the whole represented by the definition. But the specific whole (τό είδος δλον) is whole from the parts, viz. the parts which fall under it and of which it is composed [i.e. the individuals/particulars]; similarly the genus is a whole from parts, viz the species. Thus if some species is missing the genus is mutilated, if some particular the species [cf. Alex.Aphr., In Top. 355,14-16; Procl., Inst.67, p.64,7 Dodds], But this mutila-tion is not in respect of their definitions: it is because they are universal by being conceptual and their existence con-sists in their embracing and being predicated of what falls under them. These specific and generic wholes are also wholes in the parts insofar as they are seen, on account of their definitions, as wholes in each of the things which fall under them (particulars or species). For the genus-species and species-individual relation is not that of a man to his hand or foot: the genus is participated by the species and the species by the individual [μεταδίδοντα] and seen as a whole in them.



The Aristotelianism of Eustratios of Nicaea 345

In EN 40,22 sqq. expands a little on the Ideas:

According to Platonists there are λόγοι which are real, di-vine and intellectual, from which and corresponding to which all material things have come into existence. They are neither composed of these material things nor conceived as predicates of them, but are prior in existence to them, exist-ing in the Demiurge's thought. They were called universals and wholes for that reason - universals because they be-longed transcendently to a plurality which corresponded to it [i.e. was an αριθμός σύστοιχος whose members all shared its name], wholes because each plurality and its members stood in a part-whole relation to one of the λόγοι. But they were universals and wholes on the intellectual, not conceptual plane.

Then (40,34 sqq.) follows 'three ways of understanding wholes', in which Eustratios uses some of his material (at 40,37-41,2) less well than in the Anal.Post, commentary (196,14-16)-if he is not plain confused. More interesting is an addition (attributed later, 53,29-30, to Plato himself) of Cappadocian creation theory to the more nor-mal Byzantine account of the Ideas which makes them only exem-plars; but there is no implication (as has been attributed to Psellos and John Italos) of 'Nature' as more than a name for ένυλα είδη. 41,16sqq.:

The Platonic Ideas were said to be not only exemplars for the Demiurge, but active (δραστικά, ουδέν αύτών αδρα-νές) archetypes, each with its own activity directed to the procession of subordinate entities. Nature too is form, but inseparable from matter, working from within, while the Ideas have their own existence, above σώματα και φύσεις. The Ideas according to Platonists are the divine series by which the Demiurge makes the material creation actual.

What Christian modifications do we find? In effect none: only occasional allusions, which are accepted as irrelevant by the com-mentator. Here is one example. Eustratios says (In Anal. Post. 9,19 sqq.) that the opening words of Posterior Analytics II which distinguish questions about 'is '- ' the that', 'the why', 'the whether' and 'the what '-can be explained at a logical, epistemological, intel-




lectual, physical or finally metaphysical/theological level. The first four explanations are in fact Aristotelian; the 'theological' explana-tion consists in a series of complicated but unexplained analogies between the questions and the elements such as Limit and the Unli-mited which Proclus had taken from the Philebus to construct his triads of Being. One such analogy lies between (a) the beauty, truth and symmetry which are contained in being qua mixture and (b) the validity of the figure, the truth of the premisses, and the necessity of premisses and conclusion, which are contained in a proof of 'the why' (10,22-27). Before completing this display of Neoplatonic-Byzantine baroque, he breaks off to add that the first principles may, with the reader's permission, be left in silence like mysteries: these include the One Cause and the things which are revealed and manifested from it, neither created nor brought into being (ού ποι-ούμενα ούδέ παραγόμενα, an orthodox formula for the second and third persons of the Trinity). The exposition can start from created things . . . (10,27-30).

The scholarship is equally unaffected by the Neoplatonic and the Christian commitments.

His nominalism - to be exact, conceptualism - finds confirmation outside Aristotelian commentary, where, it might have been sug-gested, the subject matter often colours the philosophy. There is a difficult, predominantly philosophical text with a theological back-ground and an erroneous Mss. identification as 'the definition of Plato's philosophy'; and what is important about it here is that, un-like the theological tracts printed by Demetrakopulos, it was not a contribution to a public debate. P. Joannou performed a valuable task in editing it.10 But since I think that his interpretation of it is questionable, I confine myself to two points from the text. First, we are told that there is no ύπερεϊναι. God whose existence is eternal did not have τό öv (meaning 'being something existent/real') prior to his είναι (meaning 'existence/reality') nor είναι prior to τό öv. And this holds for everything which exists. Earth, air, fire and water are not prior to existence; for when they acquired τό öv they acquired at the same moment είναι. (Eustratios is objecting to reified properties, as the theological application will shew.) Mary the mother of God was born a mother and a virgin. But these two existing things

1 0 Die Definition des Seins bei Eustratios von Nikaia, in: BZ 41 (1954) 358-368 .




(οντα), namely giving birth and being a virgin (γέννησις και παρθε-νία) are not over and above existence (τό είναι) - they acquired εί-ναι at the moment when they fell under τό öv (which is of course, Eustratios implies, only when Mary came into existence).

Secondly, he takes for granted Aristotelian physics. Everything which exists acts and is acted on and co-exists with other things. This is observed in the behaviour of the four elements (and there-fore, he might have added, throughout the natural world).

What, however, of the theological writings? Do the demands of orthodoxy elicit compromises with the conventional harmony of Aristotle and Plato that we have so far found in Eustratios? Noth-ing, at least until some Ms. evidence to the contrary should turn up, indicates such compromises. In fact his Speech against Tigranes makes, as I shall suggest, an addition to the thesis of the philosophi-cal writings which is vital for his theology but which originates in Aristotle.

A brief word can suffice for the 1117 anathematisation of his twenty-four 'wrongly stated propositions'. They concern the Incar-nation and were objectionable almost entirely because they made Christ a good deal less than equal to his father and denied his moral immutability. The final complaint that (according to Eustratios) 'throughout the gospels Christ makes Aristotelian syllogisms' is more entertaining than philosophically significant. Eustratios did have a liking for polysyllogisms: but so did the bien pensant Nicolas of Methone. Abuse of syllogising was a recurrent feature of Byzan-tine Church behaviour, stemming sometimes from fideistic anti-intellectualism, sometimes from the normal flow of rhetoric. And Eustratios does not take it seriously.11 As for the alternative modern suggestion, of anti-Platonism, I am altogether at a loss to understand Tatakis' remark that among Italos' pupils Eustratios was accused of heresy 'in particular for teaching the same Plotinian doctrine of hypostases that Abelard taught a little later in Paris.'12

I do not know whether the resurgence in the 1080's of an uproar over the sanctity of icons should be classed as theological or polit-ical, for what was at stake was the propriety of their being melted

11 Cf. Confession, Demetrakopulos ιδ', 24-28, the only point at which he does not find it necessary to be polite.

12 B. Tatakis, Philosophie byz., Paris 1949, 216.




down to provide desperately needed cash for the Emperor's wars. But in a polemical essay on the subject we find Eustratios again com-mitted to his Aristotelian logic of universals.

It is said (he argues) that we are not to worship the forms and shapes but rather the species (λόγος) of man conceived per se. But the species or essence (λόγος ουσιώδης) of man is just humanity, that which is seen as common to all men alike; and anyone worshipping that is no more worshipping the man assumed (πρόσλημμα) which exists in the Word of God than he is worshipping each one of the particular men . . . In the second place a species or essence is conceived per se as predicated of all the material objects, but it does not exist outside the particulars. It corresponds to a whole from parts, but in parts qua existing as a whole in each one of them. And anyone who worships the bare species is wor-shipping a thought rather than a thing.13

There is a passage of greater interest in a Refutation of mono-physitism directed against Tigranes. Eustratios first provides an explanation of the orthodox Eastern use of the terms ύπόστασις, πρόσωπον, φύσις and ούσία (Demetrakopulos 163-166). It deserves to be better known, not so much because it is novel as because it is clear and consciously in philosophical, not theological terms. The conceptualism re-appears, and a Third Man regress is briefly used, as by Aristotle in Metaphysics 2 13, against realism (164). On the other hand, he also mentions, but in a non-committal way, a purely Neoplatonic point; he says that one of the reasons for the use of 'hypostasis' by 'the Greek philosophers' was that it con-noted 'third in the order of reality and as it were the bottom reached by each of the forms as it proceeds from the cause' (163 fin.-164 init.). After pointing out in the manner of the Categories that some substance is universal and some not, he says that the pagan philosophers describe the universal or what is common either as (A) what is the head (first in rank) of some individuals or particulars or as (B) what is the result of some individuals or particulars.14

13 Demetrakopulos, op. cit., 157. 14 At 165,20-21 punctuate with a stop after κοινόν and no comma after σοφοί.

Alternatively emend to κοινόν δ οί θύραθεν.




As he continues Eustratios seems to speak in propria persona and no longer merely as the reporter of the pagan philosophers whose views here are in fact those of Proclus. He identifies (A) with the self-subsistent, unitary form which is the active (δραστικόν και ένερ-γόν; cf. p. 345 above) and immediate cause of the hypostases proceed-ing from it in the creation (δημιουργίας) of the realms of being and becoming (165). (B) is the form in the soul, derived from the particu-lars and predicated of them because it embraces (sc. in its definition) the properties seen as common to them. (A) we are now told, is also universal or common, but for a different reason, namely that it is πρώτως öv,-deliberately recalling, I believe, the famous description of ακίνητος ούσία from Metaphysics Ε 1, καθόλου ούτως δτι πρώτη (166).15

This was the standard way of reconciling Aristotelian and Neo-platonic logic (in the broad sense of logic). It was treated, at least by Neoplatonists, as equivalent to the first term of a series which was άφ' ενός or προς εν and therefore did not require-this is all good Aristotle - its terms to be 'synonymous' as they are in a series of standard genera and sub-genera, or Tree of Porphyry. Eustratios be-lieves that it entitles him to tell 'people who are confused by the equivocations' that 'they need not bother their heads' with their op-ponents' slogans of 'the universal is inferior to the particular', 'either nothing or posterior' (the constantly repeated slogan from De anima I 1, 402 b 7) and the like. The opponents of course are schismatic theologians who rely on only one logic, the standard Aristotelian. For Eustratios concludes that either we must say nothing about the Holy Trinity on the grounds that it is beyond all understanding, or we must describe it in our terms as both ούσία and ύπόστασις, uni-versal and individual. All this was to clear the ground for the ortho-dox formula about the Incarnation: 'two natures in one hypostasis.'

But in fact 'universal and particular/individual' was the orthodox account of the term God, found succinctly in John Damascene, who seemed unaware that if it was to avoid tritheism it might be thought ill at ease with his nominalist account of universals.16 Pseudo-Diony-

15 1026 a 30-31. In his Confession for the synod of 1117, Eustratios is perhaps disin-genuous about a statement held against him, 'The Son of God is a universal and first of the particulars.' He says that on the hypothesis that it has any meaning it needs to be investigated whether he wrote it (Demetrakopulos, op.cit. ιε').

16 De fide orth.3 (PG XCIV 967 A-B).




sius had escaped the dilemmas of these Aristotelian categories by describing God as exempt from them because he was ύπερων and above even αύτοεΐναι.17 We have already seen Eustratios objecting to this concept in the 'Definition of being'. And it seems to me that in this anti-monophysite tract we have the effect if not the intention of offering a way between two traditional alternatives - one which, from Eustratios' point of view, accepted too little from Neoplaton-ism and one which accepted too much.

If one had to pick out the chief differences between Eustratios' philosophical position and that of his predecessors (loosely amalga-mated as the Alexandrians) on which it relies, one might start by say-ing that he has his attention more directly on Proclus, as his lan-guage alone conveys. I mentioned this in connection with the 'three wholes' commonplace, but it is not confined to that. Secondly there is a greater concession to the Neoplatonists themselves in his notic-ing, not just the existence of the Ideas as archetypes but their func-tion, explicit in Proclus, as efficient causes.18 But thirdly there is a certain lack of explicitness, not to say candour, which can be paral-leled in Christian Neoplatonists, but not perhaps at the same point: Eustratios leaves it ambiguous in the Refutation of Tigranes whether there is one 'unitary form' (ενιαίος λόγος) or many. Lastly and more generally, his account of universals shews, I believe, a greater sophistication, closer to Scholasticism. This consists in a greater use (which some may judge to his discredit) of the quatenus approach - emphasis particularly on the dual aspect of genus or spe-cies as 'from the parts' and 'in the part'. He shews less inclination to think the problem of a common nature solved by Proclan realism which would posit two genera or species, one existing in one plane, one in another. He seems similarly to treat the Platonic Idea as ambiguous between imparticipable (In EN 40-41) and participated (ibid. 45). His recurrent formula of something 'seen as' (θεωρού-μενον) so and so is characteristic of his approach - which to my mind is not the less Aristotelian for that.

The second and third points, which concern the place of the Ideas in the harmony of Plato and Aristotle enable us to close with a glimpse at the parameters within which a contemporary or near con-

17 De div.nom.ll, 6 (PG III 954 C). 18 Procl., In Parm. 910-911 Cousin.




temporary philosopher-theologian would have worked. Nicolas, bishop of Methone, who wrote a philosophically insignificant but far from unintelligent Exposition of Proclus' Institutes, accepted in the abstract the triad of existence κατ' αίτίαν (eminenter), καθ' ϋπαρξιν (formaliter) and κατά μέθεξιν (prop. 65), which is a cornerstone of Neoplatonism, but would have nothing of a plurality of παράγοντα which goes with it as an addition to the One.19 'For what need for those when this is sufficient?'20 In fact he claimed elsewhere that the existence of the Ideas had been sufficiently refuted by Aristotle.21

But he is also willing to accept a Platonising account of participation that would imply real common natures, even if only in the particu-lars, and to quote objections to the Sail Cloth argument.22 It is prob-able that Eustratios was unusually consistent.

" Refutatio Inst, theol. Prodi Platonici, ed. J.T.Vömel, 39; 47 et passim. The Athens Academy has now published in 1984 a new edition by Dr.A.Angelou as No: 1 of Philosophoi Byzantinoi (in the Corpus philosophorum medii aevi).

20 Ibid. 47, 12-13. 21 Άντίρρησις προς τά γραφέντα παρά Σωτηρίχου, in Demetrakopulos, op.cit.,

324. 22 Refutatio 91, 6 sqq.



kommentierung, Überlieferung, nachleben () || the aristotelianism of eustratios of nicaea

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