Proclus gave up a legal career and wrote seven hundred lines a day
Proclus, one of the last great philosophers of the ancient world, quit a successful law practice to study philosophy and ended up running Plato's school in Athens for nearly fifty years. Centuries later Hegel called his Platonic Theology the true hinge between ancient philosophy and the modern, Christian era.
Most of what we know comes from a eulogy by his successor Marinus, written to show that Proclus had reached the summit of virtue and happiness. Born in Constantinople in 412 to a well-placed Lycian family, he grew up in Xanthus and studied rhetoric, philosophy and mathematics in Alexandria, meaning to become a judge like his father. He did well as a lawyer, but practice convinced him he preferred philosophy. Back in Alexandria he read Aristotle under Olympiodorus the Elder, then, unsatisfied, moved in 431 to Athens, where Syrianus, Plutarch of Athens and Asclepigenia taught him. In 437 he succeeded Syrianus as head of the school.
He lived in Athens as a prosperous, generous, vegetarian bachelor, leaving only for a year of exile to escape pressure from Christian authorities. Marinus claims he produced seven hundred lines of writing daily. Pinning down his original ideas is tricky, because Neoplatonists saw themselves as faithful interpreters of Plato rather than innovators, and among their writings only those of Plotinus survive in bulk for comparison. Proclus shared the standard three levels of reality, the One, Intellect and Soul, but unlike Plotinus he did not regard matter as evil.
His signature idea was the henads: a layer of individual unities sitting between the One and the realm of divine intelligence. Each heads a chain of causes and stamps it with a particular character, and he equated them with the traditional deities: Apollo, for instance, would be the henad behind everything Apollonian, and Helios the one behind all that is sunny. Each henad contains all the others in its own way, so any of them can count as the centre.
For Proclus, philosophy freed the soul from bodily passions and prepared it to rise back towards its source. Because embodied souls drift far from that origin, he backed the ritual practice called theurgy, using charged words, acts and objects to draw the soul upward, and he took part in many of Athens's religious cults. Through translators his system shaped Byzantine, early Islamic and scholastic thought, and German idealism. He died in 485.
Source: Proclus
