Damascius’ discussion of the Platonic notions of the sudden (to exaiphnēs) and the now (to nun) occurs in the context of his Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. His view is that the Platonic sudden should be identified not with the timeless essence of the individual human soul, as Proclus suggested, but with the cohesive element that holds the individual human soul together through the cycles of reincarnation. For Damascius, the human soul is so thoroughly intertwined with time, when it descends to (...) the realm of Becoming, that its very essence gets altered. Damascius also maintains that the Platonic now is not a dimensionless boundary or temporal limit but an indivisible stretch of extended time. For Damascius, time progresses by ‘leaps’, and those leaps, determined once for all by the Demiurgic Intellect, are the atomic nows. Behind the flowing atomic nows there lies a numerically identical non-flowing now that is their eternal origin and form. The paper addresses the issue of the relationship of the sudden as the cohesive element of the soul to the now as the cohesive element of time, in the context of Damascius’ views about timeless Being and ever-flowing Becoming. (shrink)

Inherited discussions of ‘science and religion’ too much assume an interaction between two historically constant phenomena in terms of stories of ‘progress’ and ‘conflict’. Instead, it is better to recognise long-term and varying modes of tension between three different approaches to nature, pivoted about attitudes to ‘enchantment’ and to transcendence versus immanence. Within such a perspective, it appears that the dominant model of science as ‘disenchanted transcendence’ is a Newtonian one that historically quickly proved inadequate. Alternative and earlier traditions of (...) ‘natural magic’ later returned under new guises and are closer to the essence of the ‘ergetic’ or experimental attitude that lies at the real core of ‘science’. The Newtonian model also implausibly suppressed the realities of motion, time, change, substantial form and secondary qualities. But contemporary physics points towards their restoration and to nature as a vital habit and form-shaping process, as well as to the ‘magical’ character of powers and causes. Magic, rightly understood, is a necessary mediator between religion as theory and science as practice and is a crucial aspect of an ergetic understanding of ‘enchanted transcendence’ which is the most promising perspective for today. (shrink)