Dans son dialogue Sur le Bien (19 F = fr. 11 dP), Numénius écrit que le dieu qui est « deuxième et troisième est un ». Par là, il désigne un dieu considéré selon deux aspects qui correspondent à la double orientation de son attention. Dans le second, il est tourné vers le monde et joue le rôle de démiurge. Selon la plupart des chercheurs, ce démiurge serait à identifier à l’âme du monde que les fragments parvenus du dialogue ne (...) mentionnent pas. L’article montre que cette interprétation ne rend peut-être pas compte du propos de Numénius. Il indique les raisons théoriques et polémiques expliquant qu’en réalité, même si le démiurge a la fonction de l’âme du monde, Numénius ne l’identifie pas avec celle-ci. Il veut définir les principes qu’il identifie à l’être, conçu comme incorporel. Le mouvement intrinsèque à l’âme et l’immanence qui la caractérise, d’après la tradition platonicienne que suit Numénius et la tradition stoïcienne à laquelle il s’oppose, interdisent de donner à cette âme le statut de pur intelligible – le lui accorder serait précisément céder à l’immanentisme et au corporalisme stoïciens. Enfin, il n’est pas davantage utile de reconnaître dans le second aspect du deuxième dieu, un moment nommé « troisième dieu » dans le dialogue, le troisième dieu que Numénius aurait identifié au monde d’après le témoignage de Proclus (29 T = fr. 21 dP). Ce troisième dieu-là peut réellement correspondre au monde dont Platon fait un dieu, à condition que ce monde soit considéré comme le produit du seul intellect, ordre (κόσμος) qui comporte certes une âme, et même un intellect en elle, mais qui n’est réduit ni à l’une ni à l’autre. (shrink)

Galen's stories about his successes in predicting the development of an illness belong to the best-known anecdotes drawn from his writings. Brilliant pieces of self-presentation, they set Galen apart from his peers, who tried to cover up their ignorance by levelling accusations of magic and divination against their superior colleague. These accusations are usually interpreted as very real threats, as Roman law punished illicit magic and divination. Pointing out that Galen sometimes likes to present himself as a mantis and a (...) prophet, others have suggested that the accusations against Galen and his own self-presentation indicate that the border line between medicine and religion was still fluid. Both approaches correctly draw attention to the social reality that the accusations betray: they suggest that Galen belongs to a group of healers of dubious standing that populated the empire and thus show that medicine did not have a monopoly on healing. Yet such a socio-historical approach may not be sufficient. For one thing, both explanations have their limitations. Regarding the former, it can be said that Augustus' prohibition of divination aimed at controlling prediction about the emperor and one can doubt that a widespread clampdown of all forms of divination ever was intended. A possible objection to the second view is that throughout his oeuvre Galen emphasizes his medicine as a rational undertaking, even as a science . If one takes his self-presentation as a mantis to be more than metaphorical and to indicate the not yet fully crystallized identity of medicine as a separate scientific discipline, then Galen's usual way of understanding his own craft as a ‘science’ is in need of explanation. Besides such possible objections, a different set of questions still needs to be asked: why precisely were accusations of practising magic and divination levelled against Galen and why do they recur so frequently in his writings? Why divination and not, say, poisoning? (shrink)

Numenius is an author who straddles the line between Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. In this contribution, I focus on the differences between the second and the third God, which emerge from analyses of the relevant fragments. Numenius emphasizes, on several occasions, how the second God (i.e., the demiurge) has a dual nature. In this paper, I investigate the role of the demiurge in Numenius and examine in what sense the second and third God are “one.” On the one hand, Numenius (...) seems to be stressing the unity of the second and third levels of reality, but on the other hand, he also appears to be differentiating them. The present analyses concentrate on fragments 19F, 24F, 29T and 30T (respectively 11, 16, 21, and 22 in des Places’ edition). My purpose is to demonstrate that, according to Numenius, the second and the third God are one because they both can be regarded as demiurgic. Thus, Numenius conceives a kind of “double demiurgy,” which preserves the distinction between the second and the third God, who are distinguished from an ontological point of view, but who, at the same time, share a demiurgic function. The second God is then the paradigm, whereas the third God is immanent in matter as a ruling principle of the cosmos, which is similar to the World Soul, as he operates on matter in order to make it rationally ordered. (shrink)

This paper will focus on what is perhaps the most characteristic doctrine of Numenius: that which taking into account what is said in the Second Letter attributed to Plato, affirms the existence of three gods. By analyzing some preserved fragments, I try to offer an overview of numenian theology to thereby specify the particularity of Numenius’ thought in the context of Platonism of his time, fact that makes him one of the most relevant predecessors of Plotinus’s system.