The gods that guard the poles have been assigned the function of assembling the separate and unifying the manifold members of the whole, while those appointed to the axes keep the circuits in everlasting revolution around and around. And if I may add my own conceit, the centers and poles of all the spheres symbolize the wry-necked gods by imitating the mysterious union and synthesis which they effect; the axes represent the connectors of all the cosmic orders … and the (...) very spheres are likenesses of the perfecting divinities … 1 Proclus’s Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements contains one of the most important discussions of the nature of mathematical objects and preserves a wealth of historical information about mathematics from antiquity. However, large sections of the text have been neglected by scholars since the text’s first publication in the sixteenth century. Proclus expounds at length on correspondences between mathematical objects and the gods. At times he uses the language of “theurgy,” the ritual practices that later Neoplatonists insisted were necessary for the human soul to ascend to the intelligibles. The contention of this article is that the Commentary, taken as a whole, concerns the practice of “inner theurgy,” mental rituals used by advanced students to raise the soul beyond its assigned bounds. This practice can be traced back to Plotinus and the very beginnings of Neoplatonism; however, the particular methods presented by Proclus are his own development. This interpretation of the Commentary is supported by Proclus’s works Commentary on the Parmenides and Platonic Theology. Parts of the Commentary that have been studied carefully by modern scholars, especially the theory of the mathematical phantasia or imagination, will be shown to be crucial elements in Proclus’s theory and practice of inner theurgy. (shrink)

Scholars agree that the imagination is central to esoteric practice. While the esoteric vis imaginativa is usually attributed to the influx of Neoplatonism in the Italian Renaissance, this article argues that many of its key properties were already in place in medieval scholasticism. Two aspects of the history of the imagination are discussed. First, it is argued that esoteric practice is rooted in a broader kataphatic trend within Christian spirituality that explodes in the popular devotion literature of the later Middle (...) Ages. By looking at the role of Bonaventure’s “cognitive theology” in the popularization of gospel meditations and kataphatic devotional prayer, it is argued that there is a direct link between the scholastic reconsideration of the imaginative faculty and the development of esoteric practices inspired by Christian devotional literature. Secondly, it is argued that the Aristotelian inner sense tradition of the scholastics left a lasting impression on later esoteric conceptualizations of the imaginative faculty. Examples suggesting evidence for both these two claims are discussed. The article proposes to view esoteric practices as an integral part of a broader kataphatic stream in European religious history, separated out by a set of disjunctive strategies rooted in the policing of “orthopraxy” by ecclesiastical authorities. (shrink)