In this series we have taken a closer look at Iamblichus’ remarks about the ‘higher kinds’ and what role they play in the scheme of things. For Iamblichus, it is a matter of necessity that there are intermediate kinds of things between Gods and embodied souls, since otherwise there would be a clean break between strata; a sort of coming into being out of nothing from the complete stoppage at the end of one type and total start at the beginning of the other. Types of things must connect fluidly and without gaps.

Iamblichus identifies two intermediate kinds between Gods and embodied souls and calls them Daemons and Heroes.

These ideas are all very much cozy within Platonism, which says not only that all things form a unified whole, but that this whole is seamlessly layered by degrees of unity, from most (the One) to least (matter).

But if the problem is of avoiding clean breaks between types of things, it is not clear why adding more types between them does not just add more clean breaks to try and avoid. So, what we’ll want to do here is get clearer on why there should be any ‘higher kinds’ at all, and if so, how many. In other words, we’re going to try to derive Iamblichus’ conclusions, as he says we can.

To begin, recall in De Myst. 1.5 that Iamblichus says:

“These classes of being [Daemons and Heroes], then, bring to completion as intermediaries the common bond that connects gods with souls, and causes their linkage to be indissoluble. They bind together a single continuity from top to bottom, and render the communion of all things indivisible. They constitute the best possible blending and proportionate mixture for everything, contriving in pretty well equal measure a progression from the superior to the lesser, and a re-ascent from the inferior to the prior. They implant order and measure into the participation descending from the better and the receptivity engendered in less perfect beings, and make all things amenable and concordant with all others, as they receive from the gods on high the causal principles of all these things.”

There is some common bond between Gods and souls that, when brought to its logical conclusions, so to speak, involves these higher kinds. They are the completion of this bond, which contains them implicitly.

These ideas are certainly not original to Iamblichus.

Throughout the Timaeus, Plato describes not only how the Demiurge constructs the cosmos, but why. He says the ‘Constructor’ intended “first, that [the cosmos] might be, so far as possible, a Living Creature, perfect and whole, with all its parts perfect; and next, that it might be One,” (32d) and that because of this reasoning, “He fashioned it to be One single Whole, compounded of all wholes, perfect and ageless and unailing,” (33a).

What is of initial interest for our purposes here is this Platonic vision of All Things as forming a unified whole; a key mereological doctrine of Platonism. But, of even more interest to us are Plato’s remarks on the means of this unity:

“it is not possible that two things alone should be conjoined without a third; for there must needs be some intermediary bond to connect the two. And the fairest of bonds is that which most perfectly unites into one both itself and the things which it binds together; and to effect this in the fairest manner is the natural property of proportion. For whenever the middle term of any three numbers, cubic or square, is such that as the first term is to it, so is it to the last term, and again, conversely, as the last term is to the middle, so is the middle to the first,—then the middle term becomes in turn the first and the last, while the first and last become in turn middle terms, and the necessary consequence will be that all the terms are interchangeable, and being interchangeable they all form a unity.”

Perhaps the way in which an Iamblichean link works is by uniting “into one both itself and the things which it binds together.” In this picture of things, it is not like one sheet of paper overlapping another, which requires that the two remain separate and so that there is a full stoppage between them. Nor would adding more items of the same sort solve anything. For example, I could tape the papers together, glue them, or staple them, etc. But in all such cases, the transition between them would involve the stop and the start that must be avoided.

Kinds must be linked by identity. The floor of one must be identical to the ceiling of another.

This result can be corroborated by recalling that for Iamblichus, the higher kinds are not the same “type” of thing (cf. De Myst. 1.4): they cannot be unified into a common genus or species or whatever, since then they would have a unifying principle; meaning, on the one hand, that they not turn out to be ‘higher’ kinds after all, but also that it is this principle instead which is the ‘higher kind’. Just unnecessary and muddled.

But if they can’t have anything in common… how can there be a common bond between Gods and souls, which contains the other higher kinds implicitly?

It is because they are not linked together by something outside of or distinct from them; some higher term upon which they depend or by which they are determined. Instead, they are each other; not in a reductive sense, as in they are all just the same thing, but in a constitutive sense, as in one is what they other instantiates–requiring their distinctness and unity.

This is the logic of the Iamblichean universe, its engine, its glue: participation. One term is the participation of another, and so on, up to the First Principle itself.

This is why we do not know the Gods or any of the higher kinds of being as objects distinct from ourselves: it is because they are in us, as the “formal” realities in virtue of which we are who and what we are.

Just as, say, there is something in red things which is their redness, so too the Gods and higher kinds are that in us which is our ineffably unique character–of which things like personality are shadows and manifestations.

The great chain of being is linked by participation and mereology, not by imitation and causation.

But why then are intermediate terms needed? Can’t there just be Gods and souls, with the former constituting the latter, as they presumably do anyway? Why would limiting the terms involved to just these two involve a clean break of sort we set out to avoid?

One way of trying to answer this might go like this:

It is because for anything to constitute another just is for there to be a linking term involved! This is part of what it is to be constituted, and so central to the logic of participation. You cannot just have two terms: the one qua participant and the other qua participated. There must also be the thing as it is unparticipated, or as it is in and of itself, lest it be nothing in its own right to begin with; or lack any internal integrity and so fail to be anything whatsoever. It must be around in the first place, logically speaking, in order for it to be participated.

And so we are not stacking sheets of papers on top of each other here. The very fact that there is a participant means there is a participated, which means there is an unparticipated.

But, then, the common bond between Gods and souls that Iamblichus spoke of, which, when filled out, involves Daemons and Heroes, is one term: the Gods qua participated. This does not seem to imply additional terms, or sub-divisions in any immediate or obvious way.

A more promising way of answering why intermediate terms are needed, and one which is not only more straightforward and makes sense of a variety of Platonic texts but also gets us to the very kinds that Iamblichus derives is as follows:

It’s because the sheer difference between Gods and embodied souls means that what souls are participating in directly is not Gods, but something more like them! And isn’t this obvious? This is why Iamblichus contrasts Gods and embodied souls at the end of De Myst. 1.5 and says this should make it clear that there are intermediate kinds.

He says that “Such being the first and last principles among the divine classes, you may postulate, between these extremes, two means: the one just above the level of souls being that assigned to the heroes, thoroughly superior in power and excellence, beauty and grandeur, and in all the goods proper to souls, but nevertheless proximate to these by reason of homogeneous kinship of life; and the other, more immediately dependent upon the race of gods, that of the daemons…”

To get from the extreme loftiness of the Gods down to us, there must be a progression of likeness. We are clearly not direct participants of Them. Hence the need of intermediate terms.

With this, we have reached what we set out to understand.

Stay tuned for future installments where we continue our investigations into the Iamblichean universe and the amazing things it contains.