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The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophy
The goal of the ancient philosophers was to understand how to live in harmony with nature and to transcend the limitations imposed by sense experience and discursive reasoning.
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Algis Uždavinys
25 books86 followers Was a prolific Lithuanian philosopher and scholar.
His research included works on hellenic philosophy , especially Platonism and Neoplatonism as well
a pioneering hermeneutical comparative study of Egyptian and Greek religions, especially their esoteric relations to Semitic religions, and in particular the inner aspect of Islam
His research included works on hellenic philosophy , especially Platonism and Neoplatonism as well
a pioneering hermeneutical comparative study of Egyptian and Greek religions, especially their esoteric relations to Semitic religions, and in particular the inner aspect of Islam
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 11, 2014
Brilliant collection of Pythagorean and Neoplatonic writings, including extended excerpts from Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus. This is a fine survey of the pagan philosophy of late antiquity, a profound influence on Christian mysticism and Islamic Sufism, and an intriguing metaphysical system.
April 24, 2012
Amazing!
March 6, 2023
Antologi av antika och medeltida texter med anknytning till axeln Pythagoras - Platon. Användbar om man är nybörjare.
November 16, 2019
I have found that the thinkers represented here are not for me. My chief objection to their writings is their gnostic hatred of the world. They repeatedly refer to the world as a prison, to the body as a tomb, to the spiritual necessity to develop the philosophical intellect in order to escape all material attachments, to despise everything to do with the world, to hate and drive away all passion, wealth, the joys of the flesh. One even says that "The body is the root of evil". Some people argue that part of the ecological problems we experience today is due to the emphasis Christianity and other religions place on the life to come as opposed to our mortal world, resulting in our world being devalued by this comparison. It's clear from this anthology that this particular mind-set began long before Christianity, and indeed Christianity seems to have inherited it along with a whole lot of other beliefs.
Update to this review (mid-November 2019): my subsequent reading has left me wondering who on earth this Uzdavinys guy is. Given what I now know, he has seriously misrepresented Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy if what I have said in this review is what I got out of his book. Ignore this book. Also, ignore everything else this guy has ever written.
Update to this review (mid-November 2019): my subsequent reading has left me wondering who on earth this Uzdavinys guy is. Given what I now know, he has seriously misrepresented Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy if what I have said in this review is what I got out of his book. Ignore this book. Also, ignore everything else this guy has ever written.
February 28, 2020
Excellent book of deep wisdom and shows the real meaning of ancient Greek philosophy. The book is not an easy one but it's a great one. If you are interested in understanding Pythagoras', Plato' and the Neoplatonic tradition, you might enjoy this book.
July 7, 2026
**The Golden Chain**
The golden chain is Homer's — Zeus dangles it from heaven and challenges the other gods to hang from it, the image later adopted by the Neoplatonists to describe the hierarchy of being descending from the One through Nous through Soul into matter, and ascending back the same way if you know the route. Uždavinys built an entire career mapping that route. He died in 2010, Lithuanian, art critic of the year apparently, also a senior research fellow at the Institute of Culture Philosophy and Arts in Vilnius, which is the kind of biographical detail that makes you wonder what the Lithuanian philosophical scene looked like in the 2000s. Probably more serious than anywhere else.
This is an anthology, not a monograph — Uždavinys curating rather than arguing, selecting from Pythagoras through Plato through the major Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus and Proclus and Damascius, the whole chain of transmission laid out in primary texts with just enough editorial framing to orient you without doing the reading for you. The structure is the argument. What unfolds across the anthology is a single continuous philosophical project spanning roughly a thousand years, each thinker building on the last, the system getting more elaborate and in some ways more strange as it goes, Iamblichus in particular turning Plotinus's relatively clean metaphysics of contemplation into something that involves ritual, theurgy, the animation of statues, divine presence invoked through material practice rather than pure intellection alone. Philosophy as liturgy. The kind of move that gets you dismissed in most contemporary departments and was the actual living practice of serious thinkers for centuries.
Uždavinys has a chip on his shoulder about this, specifically about Protestant scholarship's condemnation of Neoplatonism as the corruption of pure Greek rationality, and the chip is justified and occasionally distracting in equal measure. The introduction goes hard on rehabilitating the tradition against its academic detractors, Thomas Taylor gets mentioned as a lone heroic defender, the rhetoric heats up in ways the primary texts don't need. The sources speak clearly enough without the frame insisting you take them seriously.
After Land and Brassier the tonal contrast is almost comic. Everything those books dismantle — hierarchy, transcendence, the soul's return to its origin, philosophy as a rite of ascent — is here treated as the whole point of thinking, the destination philosophy has always been moving toward. Not competing traditions exactly, more like two different answers to whether the vertical axis exists. Land says there is no vertical axis, the horizontal plane goes on forever and consumes everything. Plotinus says the vertical axis is the only real thing and the horizontal plane is what you escape from. Reading both back to back tells you more about what's actually at stake in either than reading either alone.
Four because the editorial apparatus is thinner than it should be for a collection this dense, the transitions between thinkers occasionally leaving you to fend for yourself when a paragraph of context would've helped, and because Uždavinys's own voice disappears too completely behind the curation in places. His other book, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth, does what this one occasionally wishes it could — the voice fully present, the argument fully his. Still, as a primary source anthology for the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition this is the one to have.
The golden chain is Homer's — Zeus dangles it from heaven and challenges the other gods to hang from it, the image later adopted by the Neoplatonists to describe the hierarchy of being descending from the One through Nous through Soul into matter, and ascending back the same way if you know the route. Uždavinys built an entire career mapping that route. He died in 2010, Lithuanian, art critic of the year apparently, also a senior research fellow at the Institute of Culture Philosophy and Arts in Vilnius, which is the kind of biographical detail that makes you wonder what the Lithuanian philosophical scene looked like in the 2000s. Probably more serious than anywhere else.
This is an anthology, not a monograph — Uždavinys curating rather than arguing, selecting from Pythagoras through Plato through the major Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus and Proclus and Damascius, the whole chain of transmission laid out in primary texts with just enough editorial framing to orient you without doing the reading for you. The structure is the argument. What unfolds across the anthology is a single continuous philosophical project spanning roughly a thousand years, each thinker building on the last, the system getting more elaborate and in some ways more strange as it goes, Iamblichus in particular turning Plotinus's relatively clean metaphysics of contemplation into something that involves ritual, theurgy, the animation of statues, divine presence invoked through material practice rather than pure intellection alone. Philosophy as liturgy. The kind of move that gets you dismissed in most contemporary departments and was the actual living practice of serious thinkers for centuries.
Uždavinys has a chip on his shoulder about this, specifically about Protestant scholarship's condemnation of Neoplatonism as the corruption of pure Greek rationality, and the chip is justified and occasionally distracting in equal measure. The introduction goes hard on rehabilitating the tradition against its academic detractors, Thomas Taylor gets mentioned as a lone heroic defender, the rhetoric heats up in ways the primary texts don't need. The sources speak clearly enough without the frame insisting you take them seriously.
After Land and Brassier the tonal contrast is almost comic. Everything those books dismantle — hierarchy, transcendence, the soul's return to its origin, philosophy as a rite of ascent — is here treated as the whole point of thinking, the destination philosophy has always been moving toward. Not competing traditions exactly, more like two different answers to whether the vertical axis exists. Land says there is no vertical axis, the horizontal plane goes on forever and consumes everything. Plotinus says the vertical axis is the only real thing and the horizontal plane is what you escape from. Reading both back to back tells you more about what's actually at stake in either than reading either alone.
Four because the editorial apparatus is thinner than it should be for a collection this dense, the transitions between thinkers occasionally leaving you to fend for yourself when a paragraph of context would've helped, and because Uždavinys's own voice disappears too completely behind the curation in places. His other book, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth, does what this one occasionally wishes it could — the voice fully present, the argument fully his. Still, as a primary source anthology for the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition this is the one to have.
February 9, 2023
Intellectual buried treasure, so very interesting and very dry. In addition to the obvious Plato and Plotinus, Damascius really made an impression.
February 18, 2025
A good introduction to those familiar with Pythagoras and the Platonists, but haven't read and don't care enough to read all of their literature. It also includes their fascinating lives and maxims.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews