Reference edition:

Calcidius, Commentaire au Timée de Platon, Tome 1, édition critique et traduction française par B. Bakhouche, avec la collaboration de B. Brisson pour la traduction, Paris 2011.

Calcidius is remembered in the history of Platonism as the author of a partial Latin version of Plato’s Timaeus, as well as a commentary, also incomplete, on the dialogue. In effect, the Latin version encompasses only paragraphs 17a-53c, while the commentary deals only with paragraphs 31c-53c.

In Chapter 7 of the commentary, Calcidius presents the 27 themes which, in his opinion, constitute the dialogue, and indicates his intention to treat them all, although he stops once he reaches the thirteenth theme. This has caused scholars to question whether the commentary, as it has survived, is really complete. On this issue, it seems that what has survived is truly all that Calcidius wrote.

The work is structured in two distinct parts. The first part is dedicated to the role of divine providence in the creation of the world (ch. 8-267), and the second to the “substance”, the second necessary principle so that the world can exist (268-355), with long excursuses interposed, like those on stars (59-91), demons (127-136), destiny (142-190), and extensive doxography (275-301), that precedes the part in which the author expresses his opinion (302-320).

Elsewhere in the commentary, the author uses a series of exegetical procedures, which had already been used by Middle Platonic philosophers, those of the katà léxin explanation, that is to say, the explanation of the literal meaning of the text; the Platonem ex Plato explanation, which means to resolve the doubts that a passage of dialogue poses toward another passage taken from another dialogue from the Athenian master; and lastly, the katà zetémata explanation, where the author formulates quaestiones to resolve the doubts posed by the text.

The philosophical content, which some scholars argue as undeniably Middle Platonic, gives enormous importance to the characterisation of God, who is considered as the highest good, possessing full perfection; preexisting this epoch, he also is an intelligible being and the supreme chancellor of the world. At the level below him, providence is identified with the Greek noûs. We can deduce from this divinity’s intelligible character that the ideas which act as models for the demiurge’s fashioning of sensible reality are God’s thoughts. The second major ontological principle, the material substance, which Calcidius calls silua, is for him the principle substance and the primordial substrate of the body — called the container — which does not have any quality, and is not even corporeal or incorporeal, but which, potentially, is and is not a body; this is also eternal, infinite, and non-intellegible. The interpretation of demons is particularly interesting in his philosophy: these are considered as living, rational, immortal beings, subordinated to the passions, whose role is to act like intermediaries between men and the divine.

The author has a refined style in the commentary; he favours long sentences, with supplementary syntactic developments that function as parentheses. Furthermore, he exhibits a skillful mastery of rhetoric, and lexically he uses many terms that are not found elsewhere or which Calcidius uses for the first time; consequently his influence on the creative development of medieval philosophical vocabulary was remarkable.

The latest reckonings of the critics count 198 manuscripts that contain at once Calcidius’ complete oeuvre and the long fragments of the Latin version or the commentary. 40% of these come from the 11-12th centuries, and about 30% are dated to the 15th century. The three earliest manuscripts, from the 9th century, include the codex BAV, Reg. lat. 1068 (Reg₃). To conclude, Waszink, the editor of an important edition of Calcidius (London-Leiden, Brill, 1962, 1975²), hypothesized  in his stemma codicum that all manuscripts derive from one single archetype (Ω), which would be very ancient, not long after the era of the author. Two independent hyparchetypes descended from this archetype: the first (ω), from which we get the codices that transmit Calcidius’ commentary, and another (), from which come the codices that only contain the Latin version of the Platonic dialogue. [Cristóbal Macías, tr. C. Belanger]