Shchukin T.A. Michael Psellus’s Teaching on the Intellect from Outside (θύραθεν νοῦς) in the Late Byzantine Context. Platonic Investigations 2023. Vol. 19. No. 2. Pp. 159-186.

Abstract

The paper deals with the epistemology of Michael Psellus, namely, his specific interpretation of the peripatetic term ‘intellect from outside’ (θύραθεν vοῦς). This teaching illustrates the radical difference that is apparent between the so-called court theology and monastic theology (the main representatives of the latter are Symeon the New Theologian and Niketas Stethatos) in the 11th century. All the texts of Michael Psellus, in which he uses the concept of the intellect from outside, are analyzed, and first of all his treatise Theol. 1.106, which is an interpretation of one of the fragments from Gregory the Theologian. In this treatise, the Byzantine thinker offers the above mentioned teaching in an expanded form. Michael Psellus has developed a version of the concept found in Alexander of Aphrodisias into a triad of the ‘Pythagorean – Platonic – Socratic’ elements, where the first one corresponds to an as yet unmanifested ideal containing a practical imperative, the second, to an abstraction of the ideal from the subject of practice and, thereby, an ‘oblivion’ of the practical, and the third, to an actualization of the ideal in human individuality, so that the ideal once again becomes practical, but this time already manifested, actually existing. The source of this triad, as shown in the paper, is Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, although the interpretation of Michael Psellus is radically different from that observed in Proclus’ text. The analysis of doxographic fragments by Psellus containing the concept of the intellect from outside gives the idea that the term has been borrowed from the commentary by John Philoponus on the Aristotelian treatise On the Soul. Another text, a letter to Leon Paraspondylos, reflects the early stage of Psellus’ reception of this concept.