Nota exegética a Plutarco, Isis y Osiris 351E ; An Exegetical Note on Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 351E

In this article, I deal with a short but complex sentence at the end of the first chapter of Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris. Plutarch there says that «the happiness of even the eternal life, which God has obtained as his portion, consists in the fact that the things that come to be do not, through knowledge, fail in advance» (351E). This obscure phrase implies, so I argue, that Plutarch’s providential God has a knowledge of particular contingencies and that this knowledge indeed contributes to his eternal blessedness without affecting His essence.

τό om. Laur. 80.5; προαπολείπειν Bernardakis; προαπολιπεῖν manuscripts; τὰ γιγνόμενα manuscripts; τὰ γινωσκόμενα Wyttenbach; τῶν γινομένων Reiske. This is a very important but also a particularly difficult sentence. The problem mainly concerns the precise meaning of the obscure phrase τὸ τῇ γνώσει μὴ προαπολείπειν τὰ γιγνόμενα, which has, as far as I know, as yet never been understood correctly. Basically three alternative interpretations have been proposed thus far.
1) The first interpretation (Meunier, Hopfner, Cavalli) connects the happiness of the eternal life with its knowledge of everything that exists 3 . This interpretation has important advantages from a philosophical point of view, in that it enables to situate the god firmly on his own intelligible realm. And that is indeed what we could expect in Plutarch's Platonic perspective. Elsewhere in Isis and Osiris, we read that Osiris is «far removed from the earth, undefiled, unpolluted and pure from any being that is subjected to decay and death» (382F) and that Zeus' «mind and reason are of themselves fixed amid the unseen and unperceived» (376C). The most important problem with this interpretation, however, which also distinguishes it from the others, is that it interprets τὰ γιγνόμενα as «everything that (really) exists" («was (wahrhaft) existiert» [Hopfner] or «la realtà degli avvenimenti» [Cavalli]). Thus, it actually equates τὰ γιγνόμενα with the following τὰ ὄντα. Such a blurring of ontological levels is quite unlikely for a Platonist like Plutarch and moreover, the interpretation thus seems to ignore the connection between the two parts of the sentence: the particle δέ (instead of γάρ) in fact shows that the second part is not meant as a further explana-tion but rather introduces something new. Opsomer ventured an interesting attempt to both have the cake of this interpretation and eat it, that is, to carefully maintain the distinction between the levels of τὰ γιγνόμενα and τὰ ὄντα while at the same time keeping God in the intelligible realm. He argues that God's knowledge concerns first of all intelligible being, and then also the world to the extent that the latter participates in intelligibility 4 . This is a clever suggestion that succeeds in safeguarding Plutarch's philosophical consistency, but it is difficult of course to read all this in the simple concept of τὰ γιγνόμενα.
2) The second alternative (Babbitt, Froidefond) connects the happiness of the eternal life with God's prescience of events 5 . This interpretation first of all raises some grammatical problems, notably concerning the dative τῇ γνώσει. Among the translations listed in note 5, those of Babbitt, Cilento, Valgiglio, Pordomingo Pardo and García Valdés require a genitive (which is the usual complement of προαπολείπειν; cf. LSJ ad loc.), that of Griffiths an accusative (as the subject of προαπολείπειν). Furthermore, the precise meaning of the verb προαπολείπειν (left untranslated by Froidefond) is not «escape» but «leave before» or «fail before». In this light, all these translations more or less ignore the precise semantic value of the verb προαπολείπειν and its combination in this passage with a dative instead of a genitive. An obvious advantage of this interpretation, as compared to the first alternative, is that it does at least justice to the philosophical sense of τὰ γιγνόμενα, yet it also causes a new philosophical problem. God's absolute prescience of events most likely implies the loss of human free will 6 , and this is utterly unacceptable for Plutarch. 3) The third interpretation (Bernard) is, to my mind, the best one: God's happiness lies in the fact that he, in his knowledge, does not in advance leave behind the things that come to be 7 . This alternative differs from the first interpretation in that it correctly interprets τὰ γιγνόμενα as things that come to be (rather than things that really are), and improves on the second interpretation by avoiding the notion of prescience and by staying quite close to the Greek text. Yet two minor problems may be raised. First, the dative τῇ γνώσει («in der Erkenntnis») should in all likelihood rather be understood as causal, as appears from a perfect parallel in Against the Stoics on common conceptions 8 . Second, Bernard assumes a transitive use of προαπολείπειν («vorher hinter sich läßt»), whereas in the overwhelming majority of cases, Plutarch uses the verb in an intransitive way 9 . As a matter of fact, there are only two instances in the entire Corpus Plutarcheum where προαπολείπειν is apparently used transitively. Both occur in the same section of On moral virtue and since neither of them is unproblematic 10 , it is safe to say that an intransitive sense would be more in line with the Plutarchan style. In this respect, the translations grouped together under the second alternative prove superior.
Apart from these two minor quibbles, Bernard's overall interpretation of the meaning of this passage raises some further questions. He understands the phrase against the background of an opposition between divine and human knowledge. 7 Bernard 1990, p. 206: «daß <Gott> in der Erkenntnis das Werdende nicht vorher hinter sich läßt». 8 De comm. not. 1078F: ἀνίσων γὰρ νοουμένων, τὸ μὲν προαπολείπεται τοῖς ἐσχάτοις μέρεσι τὸ δὲ παραλλάττει καὶ περίεστι, which is translated by Cherniss (LCL) as «when things are conceived as unequal, it is by the ultimate parts that the one leaves off before the other and the other passes it by and is in excess of it». 9 De ad. et am. 74E; De sera num. 558C; An seni 787B, 789D and 797D; De facie 937A; De comm. not. 1078F and 1080A. 10 The phrase προενδίδωσιν ἡ ὁρμὴ καὶ προαπολείπει τὸ καλόν in De virt. mor. 444C is ambivalent and may be understood either way. Most interpretations assume a transitive use here (e.g. Babbitt [LCL] ad loc.: «the impulsion yields too soon and prematurely forsakes the good»; similarly Babut 1969, p. 100: «l'impulsion se relâche prématurément et reste en deçà du bien» and Becchi 1990, p. 91: «l'impulso si rilassa e cede prima di raggiungere il bene»), but an intransitive interpretation is perfectly possible as well: «the impulsion yields too soon and the good prematurely takes its leave». The second occurrence is less ambivalent: ὑπερβάλλοντες τὸ μέτριον ἢ προαπολείποντες (444B). I grant that the most natural interpretation here would probably assume that τὸ μέτριον is the object of both verbs, although I am not sure whether this is the only possible interpretation, or even the correct one. To my mind, it cannot be excluded that even here, the verb is used intransitively, as everywhere else in Plutarch's works, but even apart from this, a note of caution is in place here, since a couple of manuscripts appear to read ἀπολείποντες instead of προαπολείποντες.
Human beings, on the one hand, need to go from τὰ γιγνόμενα to τὰ ὄντα in order to reach true knowledge. God, on the other hand, knows being directly and thus need not follow such a course 11 . This general explanation makes perfect sense from a Platonic perspective, but it does not do away with all interpretative difficulties. For this particular passage simply does not deal with a contrast between human and divine knowledge, and even in the broader context Plutarch never discusses the importance of τὰ γιγνόμενα for human knowledge. The sentence rather concerns divine eternal happiness and the significance of a particular kind of knowledge for this happiness.
It is time now to turn to the sentence as a whole. I first propose a literal translation, which keeps as close to the Greek as possible and tries to do justice to the dative τῇ γνώσει, to the intransitive use of προαπολείπειν, to the significance of the particle δέ and to the Platonic distinction between τὰ γιγνόμενα and τὰ ὄντα: In my opinion, the happiness of even the eternal life, which God has obtained as his portion, consists in the fact that the things that come to be do not, through knowledge, fail in advance. But if one takes away knowledge of what exists and thinking, immortality would not be life but a mere passage of time.
If this literal translation of the passage indeed succeeds in solving the above mentioned problems, it is bought at a high cost. I voluntarily agree that it is quite abstruse and is unlikely to be readily understood. When I still stick to it for the time being, it is because I first want to keep very close to the Greek text, which is far from useless in view of all the interpretative problems mentioned above. Moreover, it may help to see how tantalisingly obscure Plutarch's own phrasing actually is. We may presume that Clea, the dedicatee of the treatise, or any other ancient reader, may have paused here for a moment to ponder on the precise meaning of the sentence.
It is clear, then, that this literal translation is in need of some further comment, unless we would fall into the trap of explaining obscurum per obscurius. Let us thus try to further clarify the sense of this complex argument. As argued above, the connective particle δέ links two different moves in the argument. The second step is the clearest one: thanks to God's knowledge of what really is (τὰ ὄντα), his immortality surpasses the mere lapse of time and becomes true living. This is the intelligible level. God is more than simply τὸ ἄφθαρτον: he is a conscious living being who knows what is. But if we turn to God's happiness, yet another component comes into play, and this is introduced in the tantalising phrase τὸ τῇ γνώσει μὴ προαπολείπειν τὰ γιγνόμενα. It is through his knowledge (causal dative) that God does not leave τὰ γιγνόμενα beforehand, or intransitively, that these γιγνόμενα do not fail in advance. To my mind the prefix προ-is an important key for a correct understanding of what this precisely means 12 . It obviously denotes that something happens «before» something else. But what happens before what? From a general Platonic point of view, we could expect that the intelligible realm a priori excludes any attention to the phenomena. That would mean that these phenomena are left behind «before» one turns to the intelligible world, or, in other terms, that the γιγνόμενα fail «before» one reaches the level of knowledge (γνῶσις). What we get in this passage is exactly the opposite. Plutarch is thinking of a kind of knowledge through which these γιγνόμενα are not a priori left behind. God's knowledge is such that it is not exclusively concerned with the intelligible but also shows a certain openness for concrete events. This is basically in line with a passage from On the decline of oracles, where Plutarch argues that Zeus is not merely focusing on himself alone 13 .
But if this holds true, we risk to fall from Scylla into Charybdis. For we indeed immediately touch upon another philosophical conundrum that was already mentioned above. Is human freedom not directly menaced by this divine knowledge of τὰ γιγνόμενα? Not necessarily. Plutarch nowhere says that he is thinking of prescience. The opposite is rather true: the fact that τὰ γιγνόμενα are not a priori excluded, may well suggest that God only comes to know them at the very moment that they come to be. This implies a quite dynamic conception of God. His knowledge has nothing static, is not limited to real being, to what a Platonist would call ὄντως ὄν, but takes into account contingent events too. Now Plutarch does not go so far as to conclude that this knowledge of particular contingencies also affects God's essence 14 , yet he does argue in this striking passage that it is at least partly constitutive of his eternal blessedness, and even that is quite a radical and remarkable conclusion for a Platonist. I would regard this position as the crystalization of the ultimate consequence of Plutarch's providential thinking of God. For Plutarch's God is a lover 12 One of the referees perceptibly warns against overinterpreting the prefix προ-, as it may, after all, only reflect a tendency that we often find in Plutarch, that is, the fondness for an accumulation of prefixes. This caueat makes sense indeed, yet to my mind, we should prefer, if possible, an interpretation that can do justice to the full (philosophical) relevance of the prefix προ-. 13 De def. or. 426D: οὐδ᾿ ἑαυτὸν ἄλλο δ᾿ οὐδέν, ὡς ᾠήθησαν ἔνιοι, νοῶν; the polemical reference is to Aristotle; cf. the excellent discussion of Ferrari 1999. 14 For Plutarch, God is fundamentally ἀπαθής; see, e.g., De def. or. 419A; cf. De prof. in virt. 83E. of mankind (φιλάνθρωπος) 15 who derives pleasure from the mere act of being gracious and doing good (Friends and Flatterers 63F). To the extent, then, that God's providence contributes to his happiness and that his knowledge of τὰ γιγνόμενα is a necessary condition for his providential working 16 , we may indeed conclude that this knowledge directly contributes to God's eternal blessedness.
If all this is true, it is clear that this passage at the outset of Isis and Osiris raises problems that have to do with the very core of Plutarch's philosophical and theological convictions. It also illustrates important and recurrent characteristics of Plutarch's thinking about God. We saw that he here develops a particularly high-minded and dynamic conception of God that can be reconciled with his fundamental outlook as a Platonist philosopher. And we may finally add that the passage also allows us a glimpse into the heart of Plutarch, the priest of Apollo. After all, if there was one place on earth where it became tangibly clear what it meant that τὰ γιγνόμενα need not προαπολείπειν because of God's knowledge, it was certainly Delphi.