1940. Selections from Hellenistic Philosophy. Gordon H. Clark, ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. [Republished in 1978 by Irvington Publishers]
Preface, pgs. v-vii
The present volume undertakes to supply college courses with source material in the Hellenistic age. Such material for the Presocratics is found in Milton C. Nahm’s Selections from Early Greek Philosophy, Fourth Edition.
The problems inherent in such an undertaking vary in degree and kind, and they have been met as they arose.
The first chapter is a condensation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura into one sixth of its original length. Permission have been granted by, and grateful appreciation is addressed to, Basil Blackwell, Publisher, Oxford, for the privilege of using the excellent translation of Thomas Jackson.
To offer adequate selections from the Stoics was a more difficult matter. The well-known translations in the Loeb Classical Library might have been satisfactory for some Stoic fragments had the translators been less willing to sacrifice the technical meaning of the original to the literary ease of the translation.
For example, while one hesitates to criticize the editor of the remarkable edition of Aristotle: De Anime, yet the passage in Diogenes Laertius VII 50, reproduced in Arnim II 55, διαφερει δε φαντασια και φαντασμα, R. D. Hicks translates, “There is a difference between the process and the outcome of presentation.” For this, I have preferred, because of the preceding paragraph in Arnim, the rendering, “There is a difference between representation and illusion.” Again, in Diogenes Laertius VII 66, given in Arnim II 186, the three words, πραγμα ομοιον αξιωματι, are turned into the impossible clause, “whether that to which these terms are applied be a thing or a judgment.” In the next paragraph, however, the translator has felicitously rendered the same three words, slightly rearranged, by the phrase, “a quasi-proposition.” This I have accepted.
From the same
set of translations another example may be taken. In Sextus Empiricus, Adv.
Math. VII 151, or Arnim II 90, R. G. Bury translates the phrase, τρια γαρ ειναι
φασιν εκεινοι τα συζυγοντα αλληλοις, as, “For the latter assert that there are
three criteria.” The word criteria does not occur in the text, and the
paragraph goes on to show that not all three mental states but just one of them
is the criterion. Hence I have translated it, “For they say that three things
are joined together.”
Unwilling to reproduce the faults of existing translations, the present volume offers the opinions of the Stoics in a new rendering. This procedure has the additional advantage that it permits the inclusion of material not hitherto done into English. The numbering of the selections refers to Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta.
The material from Plutarch and Philo, their chronological order inverted because Philo contributes to a new religious development, is taken from the Bohn Classical Library.
Hermes Trismegistus was translated in its entirety by the late William Romaine Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania until his death in 1926, though he never saw it through to publication. Since I was studying it with him at the time of his death, Mrs. Newbold most graciously gave me his copy with its interleaved translation and extensive notes. The four tractates here reproduced and the few notes attached are a belated and wholly inadequate indication of the work he accomplished on this mystic literature.
Mackenna’s translation of Plotinus is practically the only one in English. While it often evinces a clear appreciation of Plotinus’ meaning, its style – the awe-inspiring barbarisms better received by mystics than by more sober persons – and its occasional inaccuracies make a new translation desirable. One illustration may be found in IV vii 10, lines 18-19: αναγκη θειον το τοιυτον ειναι, ατε θειον μετον αυτψ, δια σμλλενειαν και το ομοουσιον. Mackenna has, “What possesses these [qualities of wisdom and virtue] must be divine by its very capacity of the divine, the token of kinship and identical substance.” The excellent French translation of Brehier, if less florid, is more accurate: “Un tel etre doit etre divin, puisqu’il a part aux choses divines, grace a sa parente et a sa communaute d’essence avec ells.” The venture of the present volume in translating this sentence is, “Such a being is necessarily divine, inasmuch as the divine is with it because they belong to the same genus and are consubstantial.” For further remarks on the translations of Brehier and Mackenna, see The New Scholasticism, Vol. XII, No. 1, Jan. 1938. The translation offered here is more literal than either of the other two; its interpretation, like its phraseology, profits them both, but is thoroughly independent.
Epicureanism, pgs. 1-8
The Hellenistic age is clearly marked off from the previous Hellenic period by the significant events both in politics and in philosophy. The long period of seven hundred years which began with Homer, which saw the rise of nationalistic, independent city-states, which have birth to great art and literature, which in its last three centuries developed the first true science and philosophy, and which finally in its decline eclipsed its own grandeur by producing Plato and Aristotle, came to an end with the latter’s death and the extinction of independent, political life under Alexander. The era that followed, ending with the death of the gods under Constantine and their philosophic obsequies is A. D. 529, was of approximately the same duration. In politics it begins with the vigorous expansion of Rome and ends in the barbarian invasions. In philosophy, as the schools of Plato and Aristotle become less important, Epicureanism and Stoicism also evince the vigor of a new life; they then become popular and stagnate, until Plotinus (A. D. 205-270) by gathering together all the strands of the Greek tradition gives late antiquity a philosophic golden age. In the meantime there had come into the world a new religious force which finally ended the Greek schools. It is therefore erroneous to suppose, as is often done, that the years 306 B. C. – A. D. 529 are merely a time of decay. From the standpoint of Greek political history, to be sure, the Roman legions made such a judgment true; from the standpoint of pure Greek culture, the admixture of Roman civilization, and later of eastern religious ideas, made it plausible; but to compare, or, rather, to contrast every philosophic writer with Plato and Aristotle, and cry, “Decay,” is such a harsh procedure that no period of seven or eight hundred years could on that basis be judged otherwise. Surely, decay, to be called such, ought not to speed so slowly. And it is but just to note that while we have complete volumes from Plato and Aristotle, many of the best philosophers of the Hellenistic age are known to us only by fragmentary quotations and polemic criticisms which fail to transmit their true worth.
There is another common misunderstanding of the Graeco-Roman period. This later age is frequently contrasted with the Pre-Socratic interest in science, and with the Platonic and Aristotelian interest in epistemology and metaphysics, as being exclusively occupied with ethics. Undoubtedly the Hellenistic age is dominated by an interest in ethics and religion, and Marcus Aurelius and some others are exclusively so occupied; but it is not true that the age produced no scientists or cosmologists. Rather, as in the cases of Aristarchus and Ptolemy, a science became so specialized that it is no longer to be regarded as philosophy, and yet it is a credit to the age. In medicine, too, there is the discovery that the nervous system centers in the brain and not in the heart; there are collected important observations on special diseases, as, for example, that malaria may cure syphilis; and Galen tried to work out a theory of induction. Within the field more strictly called philosophical, with the Epicureans and with the Stoics, it is not true that everything but the restricted sphere of ethics was regarded as an unnecessary annoyance. While ethical interest was dominant – owing perhaps to the popular diffusion of philosophic discussion beyond the aristocratic isolation of the schools – yet all the better thinkers quite well appreciated the necessity of a unified system integrating all phases of philosophic investigation.
If any school can be charged with a narrow ethical interest, it will be the Epicureans. The following pages will show why. And yet, when one surveys the great amount of scientific detail in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura – the Stoics places still more emphasis on logic and physics – it will be seen that even for the Epicureans ethics, narrowly understood, was not the whole thing. It was, however, the chief thing. Underlying all the teaching of Epicurus, who in the year 306 B. C. came to Athens and founded the school which bore his name, are the practical or ethical propositions that the aim of philosophy is to promote happiness, and its more arresting converse, that all promoting of happiness is philosophy. How Epicurus understood this in detail is preserved for us in Diogenes Laertius’ (A. D. 225) Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book X. This work includes three letters from Epicurus’ own hand and his Principal Doctrines, which are articles used for catechetical instruction in the school; but the poem of Lucretius (94-55 B. C.), reduced to one sixth its size in the following selection, is the most ample source of Epicureanism.
Since no one is likely to achieve happiness without taking thought, some attention must be paid to logic – or perhaps it would be less ambiguous to say epistemology, for there is no such thing as formal logic in the Epicurean system. The epistemology required consists in showing how truth can be extracted from sensation, Because pleasure and pain are sensations, such a thoroughgoing hedonistic system as Epicureanism is virtually forced to base truth on sensation. And to a skepticism which in denying the possibility of truth makes a fixed rule of life impossible, the Epicureans reply that neither reason nor other sensations can overthrow the truth of a sensation. Reason cannot do so because it is founded on sensation. One sensation cannot overthrow the truth of another sensation because each relates to a different object. That which immediately affects the sense is not a book or a tree, but an image, which, thrown off from the surface of the book or tree, traverses the distance to the eye and enters it to produce the sensation. Since the objects of the outer world constantly emit images; since, too, these are modified by the medium through which they travel; no sensation can contradict another. Thus, a firm basis for truth is established. From repeated sensations, by coincidence, analogy, similarity, and some admixture of reason, - not clearly explained – there arise notions or concepts, which as bases of classification are required for any further knowledge. Then come opinions or judgments, and so all knowledge.
The attainability of truth is necessary for a happy life, but beyond proving this point the study of logic is useless. Physics, however, is more closely related to the causes of pleasure and pain, and therefore requires more careful consideration. Yet even in physics there are many detailed questions which do not need definite solutions. The knowledge of the exact motions of the sun and the planets contributes nothing to our happiness; one may suggest several possible explanations of these phenomena, any one of which permits us to live a tranquil life; hence it is unnecessary to determine exactly which explanation is the true one. But while one need not choose from among the various theories that do not disturb our peace of mind, there is one world view which is the cause of more pain and evil than anything else this world boasts of. To the refutation of this view the study of physics must be vigorously directed.
The source of most, if not all, human ills is religion. Religion mainly consists in the belief that the gods reward and punish mankind; these punishments, foreshadowed in this life, are meted out in full severity in the life after death; hence religion begets the fear of death, which in turn makes a happy life impossible.
So serious is this matter that the truth cannot be made a matter of induction or demonstration; the problem can be met only by postulation and assumption. “At the start we must posit this principle, viz. nothing ever comes from nothing by divine power.” To admit a controlling providence would be to destroy the unity of nature; if God governs the world, anything could arise from anything, and all orderly processes would be disrupted. As there is no creation, so too there is no annihilation; and from this Epicurus deduces the indestructability of the atom.
Corresponding, therefore, to the negative postulate denying creation, there is the positive proposition that all phenomena are to be explained in terms of atoms and void. With an infinite number of atoms, of a limited number of shapes, - for if shapes were infinite, sizes would increase until there would be an atom large enough to see* – in an infinite space, the present condition of the world is but one chance arrangement among the infinite arrangements already realized. The system is ateleological.
To justify ethics, however, and to preserve human responsibility, this ateleological system is not strictly mechanical. Man must be free from mechanical law, and since he is composed only of atoms, atoms also must be free. The very fact that there is a world, with its objects compounded of atoms, rather than an army of disconnected atoms all falling separately in a straight downward direction, is owing to occasional, uncaused deviations of atoms from their straight paths. Such deviations or declinations produce collisions and vortices among the falling atoms, and these vortices grow into a world. Similar deviations guarantee freedom for man. Previously the argument was that providence must be denied to maintain cosmic order; now cosmic order, or at least universal causation, must be denied to give man liberty. Developing a science based on these fundamental principles Epicurus attempted to remove the three greatest, perhaps the three only, impediments to a happy life. The first obstacle is pessimism, which can result only in an unhappy consciousness. But freedom from mechanical law, obtained by rejecting uniform causality, gives the feeling that our choices and endeavors count, and that life is worth living. “The wise man,” Epicurus says in his letter to Menoeceus, “does not deprecate life… the thought of life is no offense to him… We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come.” Some pain is inevitable, but our control of conditions is sufficient to rule out pessimism.
Second, by showing, as Lucretius does at length, that all phenomena can be explained without recourse to divine providence, the fear of the gods with its superstition and attendant inquietude is removed. It is under this heading that all the specifically scientific investigations must be placed. But while the ethical motive dominates, and while the extent to which investigation should be pursued is limited by its purpose, still the Epicureans did not regard it sufficient to assert atoms, deny providence, and let it go at that. They recognized that it was incumbent upon them to consider many particular phenomena and to explain each concretely without reference to theology. This involves more detail perhaps than the motive leads one to expect.
The third great obstacle to happiness, strictly related to the other two, namely the fear of death, is overcome by the same methods. Death can cause us the pain of fear now while we are living only if it will cause us pain in an afterlife. Obviously it is unreasonable to fear a future event which will not pain us when it happens. And a thorough study of psychology shows this to be the case. Man is nothing but a collection of atoms; their motions are sufficient to explain animation, sensation, and though. To be sure man has a soul and a spirit but they are neither immaterial nor immortal. Consequently, when death comes the atoms disperse, and man as a sensitive being no longer exists to suffer either the wrath of the gods or any other unknown evil. “Exercise thyself in these and kindred precepts day and night, both by thyself and with him who is like unto thee; then never, either in waking or in dream, wilt thou be disturbed, but wilt live as a god among men. For man loses all semblance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings.”
* This peculiar reasoning is found in Lucretius II 478 ff.
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The Stoics, pgs. 50-61
Zeno of Citium in Cyprus, not to be confused with Zeno the Eleatic, came to Athens about 320 B. C., studied chiefly with the Cynics, and established Stoicism at the same time that Epicurus was commencing his rival activity. Since the two schools are contemporaneous, the only reason for discussing the Stoics after rather than before the Epicureans is that the latter – perhaps because of their method of catechetical instruction, perhaps because of lack of initiative, perhaps because no improvements in their system were necessary – remain in detailed agreement with Epicurus himself; whereas the Stoics – perhaps because they were vigorous, original thinkers, perhaps because Stoicism appealed to a wide variety of temperaments, or perhaps because there were so many loose ends left over from their founders’ philosophy – manifest constant change, if not improvement. This constant change makes the study of Stoicism more difficult than that of Epicureanism. And since the sources are in a much more fragmentary condition, one often wonders whether two Stoics merely disagreed on a certain point or whether there was a harmonization now lost.
A brief statement of the external history of the school is necessary. Zeno, as has been said, founded Stoicism shortly before 300 B. C. He had at first been pleased with the Cynics’ insistence on a life of stern morality. The Cyrenaics, to whom may fitly be given the device, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” had been teaching that the good life consists in enjoying the immediate sensual pleasures. The Cynics, on the contrary. Taught and tried to practice a life of strict virtue. But their teaching was marred by a disregard of technical philosophy, which alone can provide a firm basis for an increasing emphasis on its negative side. In their revolt against the luxurious licentiousness, instead of stressing the positive qualities of social life, they contemned all social custom and degenerated into beggary and bestiality. To avoid such a result Zeno saw that it was necessary to inaugurate a new movement in which personal virtue, social responsibility, and sound learning would be combined.
He successor, the noble poet Cleanthes, who presided over the Stoa from 264 to 232, exemplified personal virtue and social responsibility. But his scholarship was not equal to the task of continuing a philosophic school.
Hence it was fortunate for Stoicism that its next head, Chrysippus, was able, during a term of twenty-six years (232-206), to reorganize the movement, to increase the number of students and disciples, and by systematizing and defending Zeno’s doctrines to place the school on a relatively stable intellectual foundation.
The sources of information for those who directed the Stoic movement after the time of Chrysippus are in a more deplorable state. Not to be passed by without mention, however, are Panaetius of Rhodes (180-110?), who organized Stoicism in Rome and then returned to head the school at Athens, and Posidonius (130-50?), also of Rhodes, who, emphasizing the religious aspect of Stoicism, influenced Philo of Alexandria.
Roman Stoicism, as it developed after this time, was characterized by three closely related factors: an increased proportion of ethical speculation over logic and physics, the popularization of philosophic themes among the educated classes, and the consequent breakdown of Stoic orthodoxy by the adoption of ideas from other schools. From this period many complete works have been preserved. Names worthy of mention are Cicero (106-43), Seneca (4 B. C.-65 A. D.), Epictetus (50-130), and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180).
It may be true that the Epicureans conceived of logic and physics merely as a means to the good life and nothing but a means, but this is not true of Stoicism.*
While the Stoics as well as the Epicureans were chiefly interested in living a good life, the reaction of Zeno to the Cynic position of virtue divorced from thought, and Chrysippus’ recognition that a well-rounded system of philosophy is essential in sustaining a definite way of life, saved the Stoics, so long as they remained fairly orthodox, from that nervous and impatient temperament which prematurely applies each disjointed item of alleged knowledge to practical affairs and disregards everything that does not yield immediate results.
The Stoics, of course, wanted to use knowledge in practical matters; unlike the Epicureans they were willing to engage in political activity; they did not recommend a life of pure contemplation. On the other hand, their conception of virtue was not restricted to honesty and temperance. When such a restriction is in force, science can contribute to morality only as a means to the more effective discharge of one’s obligations. But for the Stoics, the study of physics, far from being merely a means to virtue, is itself a virtue. When they compare philosophy with an animal, representing logic as the bones and sinews, ethics as the flesh, and physics as the soul, or again, when they compare it with an enclosed field, or a walled city rationally governed, they do not represent physics as a means to ethics, but rather they teach that both physics and ethics are indispensable phases of a virtuous life. The same is true of logic and dialectic also.
Were these studies merely means, were they of no intrinsic value, one should expect always to find the order: logic, physics, ethics; whereas the fact is that physics often comes last, “for it is more divine, and requires more profound attention.” This last phrase is all the more convincing because it is quoted from Sextus Empiricus, who lived after the Roman Stoics had written with almost exclusive attention to ethics in its narrower sense.
Very obviously the Stoics were trying to maintain a sane view of life. The pure contemplation of an Aristotelian deity, the unvarnished licentiousness of the Cyrenaics, the Epicurean withdrawal from the obligations of family and state, the excellent aim but insufficient foundation of the Cynics, were all weighed and found wanting. The good life is a life of logic, of physics, and of ethics, all three.
As a substitute for a summary of the actual teaching under these three divisions, which would be impossible in the short space of a small introduction, and intimation may be given of a few chief points which it would be wise to examine in the source material.
In logic, the Stoics, while they did not duplicate the comprehensiveness of Aristotle’s studies, were much more interested in form that the Epicureans were. Their detail includes an elaborate classification of judgments, an examination of validity, an attempt at the sorites, and many purely grammatical distinctions. However, for a common reason, Stoic logic like that of Epicurus, is primarily epistemological. The common reason lies in the previous history. In their examination of Pre-Socratic philosophy, the Sophists, before the time of Plato, had decided that truth was impossible. Plato and Aristotle, undaunted by the physical problem of flux and stability, undismayed by the psychological puzzle of subjectivism, concluded that truth trouble lay in materialism, and that, if the existence of immaterial Ideas or Forms were granted, truth could be established. But not all the disciples of Socrates were willing to abandon Pre-Socratic materialism without a more determined attempt to base truth on sensation. Hence the logic of Epicurean and Stoic may be considered as a reaction against the Ideas and the Forms.
The Stoic solution to the problem centers in the theory of comprehensive representation. An ordinary representation is an image in the brain of the real object which produces it. The image may be very accurate or it may be confused as in a dream. But how tell? If there is no criterion by which one may know which images accurately represent their objects, then all appearances are of equal value and Sophistic skepticism will be the result. To avoid this, the Stoics asserted that some representations are comprehensive, cannot be false, and cannot be mistaken for false images. This true image bears in itself that mark of its real source in such a way that no false image can counterfeit it… No further argument on this point is possible, for it is an appeal to an immediate experience which cannot be doubted.
Some physics may not treat of a great variety of particular problems, but it is interesting because of the originality with which it studies a few major topics. The systems of Plato and Aristotle, involving participation and formal causality, were basically systems of classification, that is, they emphasized the common element in single objects by which they could be grouped together. In reaction – not that Aristotle had ignored genesis – the Stoics returned to the inspiration of Heraclitus and considered mainly the history of each object, its evolution, and the forces it displays. But, in contrast with the Epicureans, they did not explain genesis and destruction in terms of atoms and void. They were materialists in the sense that they believed that nothing is real which does not occupy space; but, on the other hand, in place of the inertia which characterizes atoms there is a force which permeates all that exists so that each thing is a spontaneous being. If a descriptive title were needed, the system could be called dynamic vitalism.
Such emphasis was placed on the spatial and bodily nature of everything real, that, as it became evident that qualities must be real, the Stoics were willing to admit that qualities, for example the virtues, were corporeal. In fact, simple bodies are single qualities; and individuality, which for Aristotle was a negation and strictly unknowable, becomes a positive factor. Aristotle, of course, would have replied that the Stoics destroyed individuality and substituted infimae species.
The force which activates bodies is the spirit, corporeal as all else, and its mode of operation is called tension. But if a corporeal spirit permeates bodies in a system which is not atomistic, the it is possible for two bodies to be in the same place at the same time, and impenetrability must be denied. The Stoics, therefore, advanced the theory of “complete mixture.” Such a view, which at first seems so peculiar, for it also denies the law of action and reaction, becomes a little more intelligible when it is recalled that the corporeal universe instead of being an aggregation of atoms is a continuum – the primeval fire of Heraclitus in its various modifications. To construct an illustration, which, though somewhat inaccurate, at least uses modern terminology, one may conceive of the world as a vast magnetic field or texture of fields. Each body, its center being a node of a particular degree of tension, extends indefinitely; and the absence of reaction may be considered as the inability of the medium to determine the intensity.
One of the particular problems involved in this world-view, interesting because typical of the Stoic approach, is the theory of space. The modern concept of space, however, unites the two factors which is full of body and is called place; then second there is an empty space or void. Aristotle, of course, denied the existence of void, but argued the necessity of place as the condition for the existence of bodies. As the interior surface of a vase is the place of the liquid it contains, so in general he defined the place of a body as the interior surface of its container. The Stoics disagreed and made the place of a body the interval between its extremities. In both cases there is an underlying reason for the definition. Aristotle, because his celestial mechanics requires each sphere to move the next lower by contact, makes an essential distinction between continuity and contact. In Stoicism, strict contact is impossible and the contents of the world form a continuum. Motion is explained, not mechanically, but rather by a biological analogy. Each particular thing develops as if from a seed, and hence the source of motion is internal rather than external. This accords with their theory of complete mixture. In fact, bodies are individualized only by their seeds, and these seeds are no more than fragments of divinity in particular degrees of tension in the universal reason. Hence, in the most ultimate sense, there is but one body and but one place. Another reason for holding that the world is a continuum, and therefore for excluding void from the world, is the necessity of a continuous medium between the eye and the most distant star if sight is to be possible.
The other aspect of the problem of space, namely the void, now finds an unexpected solution. If the world becomes a continuum, one would at first expect a denial of void. But such is not the case. Within the world there is no void, but beyond it the void stretched out infinitely. Since the world is conceived as a self-sufficient system, and since self-sufficiency excludes vagueness and indetermination, the world must have limits in space as well as limits in qualities. Order requires finitude. Then, one may well ask, why should there be any void at all? The first answer to this question is the common notion that it is absurd to proceed to an assumed end of space and not to be able to advance further. The second answer is more particularly Stoic. The world is composed of first. Its history is one of recurrent cycles. Briefly, all is fire at first, then things begin to emerge until the world becomes as it is now, and finally there will be a general conflagration in which all will again become fire. But in the conflagration the world expands, and therefore there must be a void beyond the present world-limits.
Beneath this simple statement of Stoic opinion lie hidden numerous perplexing puzzles and peculiar paradoxes. Further study of these would leave no doubt as to why questioning minds could not be satisfied with the ipse dixit of a founder. In fact, the fundamental difficult in this world-view is that the Stoics, in attempting to rehabilitate materialism, involuntarily discovered its inherent impossibilities. To surmount these, they strained their conception of body until it approached the notion of spirit. Their polemic opponents were quick to take advantage of their embarrassment, and finally Plotinus used their failures in establishing his spiritualism.
In religion, while some of the later Stoics tended toward a belief in a personal God, the earlier and standard position was that of pantheistic determinism. The primeval fire or ultimate reason controls all existence. Not only their physics, but a considerable portion of their logical theory contributed to this view. An example may be taken from Chysippus. “If there is a motion without a cause, not every proposition will be either true or false. For that which does not have efficient causes is neither true nor false. Every proposition, however, is either true or false. Therefore there is no motion without a cause.” Although popular opinion is naturally averse to determinism, it was exactly this phase of Stoicism which won for its adherents a welcome that cultured Romans denied to the Epicurean libertarians. For if the theory of determinism be correct, the practices of divination – an integral part of the popular religion – are scientifically justifiable. The entrails of an animal, to be sure, do not cause a future event, but since both are phases of one system, the former are indicative of the latter. In harmony with this, no one would say because of this, the Stoics conformed to the common religious ritual and, further, took a serious interest in Roman government. Thus on the whole they were much more conservative than the Epicureans and made a much better impression on their contemporaries in spite of their determinism.
The import of many of the statements relative to determinism is obscured by the suspicion that Cicero may not have completely understood the Stoic position. However, no doubt can be cast on the Stoic’s strong assertion of moral accountability. Distinction were drawn between the doctrine of necessity, the doctrine of fate, and the certainty of the future; responsibility was based on volition rather than absolute freedom; and to this day the Stoic school enjoys the reputation of being the most virtuous of the ancient groups.
Special Index to the Stoic Fragments
Zeno (Vol. I)
2. Zeno’s opinions
A.
Logic
Epistemology
B. Physics
I. The Principles
II. The World
III. The Human Soul
IV. Theology
Chysippus (Vol.
II)
Prolegomena:
What is Philosophy?
Logic
I. Epistemology
1.
Representation
2.
Sensation
3.
Notions
4.
Comprehension
5.
The Criterion
II.
Dialectic
A. Things Signified: Sound
B. Things Signified: Meaning
2.
Incomplete Meanings
4.
Propositions
6.
Signs
9.
Solutions of Sophisms
Physics
I. Basic Physical
Theory
1.
The Two Principles: Matter and Cause
3.
Causes
6.
Qualities
10.
Spirit, Tension, and Habit
11.
Mixture
V. The Human Soul
1.
The Substance of the Soul
2.
The Soul is Corporeal
5.
The Soul is not Immortal
7.
The Chief Part of the Soul
VI. On Fate
1. Definitions
of Fate
3. A Single
Force Moving Everything
5. An
Infinite Series of Causes
6.
Every Proposition is True or False
7.
The Confatal: The Lazy Argument
8.
Fate and Possibility
10.
Fate and Free Will
Note: This table is taken from Von Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta.
* Zeller III, I, p. 52, writes, “selbst die Physik… ist doch nach Chrysippus nur desshalb nothwendig, weil sie uns die mittel an die Hand gibt, um uber die Guter und die Uebel, dad, was wir thun und meiden sollen, zu unterscheiden.” And he refers to Plutarch Sto. Rep. 9, 6. None the less it seems to be a mistaken opinion.
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Pg. 65
1. Arnim says: ultimum enuntiatum non intelligo. And Ludwig Stein Erkenntnisttheorie, p. 293, makes a similar confession. I suggest that the εννοηματα are the common notions which everyone has, and their modifications are the specific knowledges resulting from individual experience.
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Pg. 69
1. Arnim’s
notes are: μιξιν seclusi, μιξιν < και > κρσαιν Diels|| γινεσθαι - μεταβολη
vix sana; nam κρσαις non potest fieri αλληλα τη εις μεταβολη. Fortasse επιγινεσθαι.
2. It would seem better to bracket κρσαιν or with Diels insert και. The vix sana can be alleviated by considering the phrase as referring to the complete mixture. In this case μεταβολη should be understood as the generic term for motion, clumsily expressed perhaps, but elucidated by the following clause
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Pg. 73
1. The order, logic, physics, ethics, if often given.
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Pg. 77
1. A pun in
Greek.
2. More accurately: the fact of being predicated.
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Pg. 82
1. Sometimes translated the expressible; the fact that an object is designated by a given term. Contrary to the title chosen by Arnim, meaning is not one of the things signified. Cf. Brehier, La Theorie des Incorporels, p. 15.
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Pg. 87
1. The text Von Arnim uses reads ασωματους instead of σωματα as in B P F. The preceding context, included below as II 300, shows that the principles are matter and God. They are therefore corporeal, but formless as contrasted with the elements we perceive. Cf. II 408, Galen.
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Pg. 95
1. Both Philo
and Galen report a difference of opinion of this subject
2. Arnim:
seclusi lectoris notam, quae in margine inrepsit.
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Plutarch, pgs. 106-118
When Stoicism became the predominant philosophic movement, the Academy founded by Plato and the Peripatetic school of Aristotle did not forthwith cease to exist. Though in eclipse the Academy in particular continued its activity and finally regained sufficient vigor seriously to challenge the Stoic system.
The Old Academy, by which is meant the Academy from Plato’s death to 268 B. C., made no essential change in Platonic teaching. Speusippus, head of the Academy from 348 to 339; and Xenocrates (339-315) showed tendencies toward metamathematical speculation; and Polemo and Crantor were more interested in ethics; they all felt the need of systematizing the results of Plato’s free investigation; and the changes they introduced were at worst those of a rigid, artificial schematism, rather than a substitution of non-Platonic principles.
The New Academy may be said to have been founded by Arcesilaus, who presided over the school from 268 to 241. The Academy was called new because Arcesilaus, with little enthusiasm for dogmatism, re-established dialectic and argued against the Stoic criterion of truth. In attacking the possibility of a psychological test of truth, such as the comprehensive representation of the Stoics, he advocated suspension of judgment. And thus a type of skepticism was introduced into the school of Plato.
The skepticism continued until about 100 B.C. It may be argued that Arcesilaus was not a skeptic in the technical sense. Plato in the Theaetetus had disposed of psychological criteria of truth, and Arcesilaus may be going no further. He was not opposing the general possibility of truth, perhaps, but was engaged in a polemic against Stoic empiricism.
It is more difficult, however, to defend Carneades against the charge of technical skepticism. Head of the Academy from 156 to 129 he denied that a criterion of truth could be found either in sense or in reason. Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. VIII 159, reports that his arguments apply not only to the Stoics but to all his predecessors. Briefly, he taught that there is absolutely no criterion of truth; and if there were, it would necessarily be psychological, testifying both to the object which produced it and to itself as well; but since there is no state of consciousness that cannot be deceptive, a criterion in sensation is impossible. No more can a criterion be found in reason, for reason is derived from sensory elements in consciousness and cannot of itself furnish a test of truth.
On the other hand complete suspension of judgment would render impossible the activities of daily life. Unless one held to some opinion as to what was better, how could one decide whether to doze in the sun of drive in a chariot race? Arcesilaus had previously posited the reasonable as the norm of action; Carneades argued that while nothing is certain, many things are clear. If, then, life must forego the certainties of dogmatism, skepticism must co-operate by admitting a theory of probability.
Whether this is strict skepticism, and how far it deviates from Plato’s own views, became a subject of controversy between two later scholarchs. Philo (110-85) began, and Antiochus (85-69) continued, a trend away from skepticism toward eclectic dogmatism. The latter taught the Arcesilaus and the New Academy had denied the doctrines of Plato; that Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno were in essential philosophic agreement; and that he, Antiochus, was restoring true Platonism to the Academy. Philo, on the other hand, claimed that the previous skepticism was merely an attack on Stoicism, and that the Academy had never deviated from the pure doctrines of Plato. It may not be possible completely to settle this controversy. However, in support of Philo’s less plausible opinion of the school’s orthodoxy, one may not that the resumption of dialectic by Arcesilaus is a return to Plato himself after the relative sterility of Xenocrates. In the second place, it is improbable, in view of the Neo-Pythagorean literature and Plutarch’s interest in Plato, that the oral tradition had completely died out. And finally, if Antiochus can be called Platonic with his extreme eclectic proclivities, Carneades ought charitably to be granted the same honor in spite of his extreme views in the opposite direction.
The next development leading on to Plutarch is the resuscitation of Pythagoreanism. The exact date is not known. During the fourth century, that is, during Plato’s lifetime, the old Pythagorean school, as a school, is lost from view. Orphic Pythagorean mysteries continued to exercise some religious influence, and their asceticism and vegetarianism provided a standard gag for comedy.
In Italy the memory of Pythagoras was kept alive and from the mystery cults writings attributed to Pythagoras began to appear. There is a story that Petillius in 180 B. C. dug up the skeleton and books of Numa. Since Numa is made out to be a disciple of Pythagoras, this seems to be an attempt to introduce Pythagoreanism into Roman religion. Unfortunately the Roman Senate had the books burned, and while one may be sure they were religious, there is no certainty that they were Pythagorean.
There is no doubt, however, that Pythagoreanism had become active by 100 B. C. About this time Alexander Polyhistorius reports the doctrines with which he came in contact. For three centuries following this the literature multiplied, as did also the details of the teaching; and it is to the credit of Diogenes Laertius that he regarded the later developments to preserve what was probably the earliest source he know.
According to Alexander the Pythagoreans taught that the unit or monad is the principle of all things. From the monad comes the indeterminate dyad, which serves as matter. These two then give rise to numbers and geometrical figures, and from solid figures sensible bodies are produced. Earth, air, fire, and water, each of which can change into any other, combine to form a spherical, intelligent, geocentric universe. Since the heat of the sun, moon, and stars is the source and substance of life, they are to be regarded as goods. Because gods and men belong to the same genus, God exercises providence over man. The soul of man is divided into passion, intelligence, - both of which animals also enjoy – and reason, which is not shared by the lower animals. The seat of the soul extends from the heart to the brain – passion in the heart and intelligence and reason in the brain. Reason is immortal, the rest of man perishes. Hermes, since he guides the soul after death, is called the steward of souls. Pure souls are taken to the uppermost region, but impure souls are bound by the Furies in unbreakable bonds. The souls of those who have died, now properly designated as demons or heroes, fill the atmosphere and bring men dreams and premonitions. To enjoy a happy future life one must be careful to purify himself by virtuous living, baptism, avoidance of all deaths and births, abstinence from the flesh of animals that have died and from eggs and beans, and to perform all the mystic rites.
Since what Alexander reports contains elements from Stoicism, it is not the old Pythagoreanism but a Neo-Pythagorean school to which he bears witness. The absence from Alexander’s account of later elements, such as the incomprehensibility of God, and the rigid opposition between the corporeal and the incorporeal, indicates that this represents the beginning of the development. The journey of the soul after death and the demons are included, but the asceticism is less pronounced than it became later, because he forbids neither marriage nor the eating of meat.
The first Neo-Pythagorean whose name is known was P. Nigidius Figulus, a Roman, Cicero’s friend, who died in 45 B. C. Cicero refers to him and the renovator of Pythagorean philosophy. From the reign of Augustus another name is preserved, that of Sotion, who defended vegetarianism by basing it on the theory of transmigration of souls. Other authors wrote under the name of Pythagoras himself or of some early member of the school, frequently that of Archytas, but what each author added of original thought cannot be determined.
Neo-Pythagoreanism, like all the other schools of this period with the exception of the Epicureans, was strongly eclectic. The number theory and the religious asceticism develop out of the old Pythagoreanism, but some of their tenets are derived from Stoicism, more from the Peripatetics, while the greatest number are Platonic.
A philosophy is called eclectic if its several propositions are taken from various other systems and combined without sufficient attention to consistency. On the contrary, when a philosopher adopts promising material from different systems and organizes it by some pervasive, dominating principle, he is no longer called eclectic; he is an original thinker and a genius. Eclecticism occurs when men grow tired of careful and detailed thinking, when schools lose their early orthodoxy, and when accurate distinctions are deprecated as hairsplitting. For example, it should be obvious that only a weak mind can assert the essential identity of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. And on any age in which this phenomenon occurs, history will pronounce the judgment that it represents a trough and not a crest.
A decline, however, is sometimes followed by a rise; and it may be not only more charitable but also more accurate to regard Neo-Pythagoreanism and the Platonism of Plutarch as a preparation for Neo-Platonism.
None the less Neo-Pythagoreanism was eclectic and its members, while adhering to a core of doctrine, wandered in many directions.
The unit and the dyad, identified as form and matter, were the basic principles; but some taught that the unit was the moving cause of God, the Platonic demiurge; while others, in some anticipation of Plotinus, placed the One above any moving cause. Again, Platonic-Aristotelian transcendence and Stoic immanence were mixed rather than harmonized. In one author God is superior to all thought, reason, and being, and would be degraded by contact with matter; in another, God is identified with the heat of the sun or is regarded as an omnipresent, immanent spirit.
Plato, late in life, connected the Ideas with a number-theory. Numbers and mathematics had always been congenial studies for the Pythagoreans, and with the stimulus from Plato it is not surprising that an increasing emphasis was placed upon these topics. But although serious attention was paid to mathematics, the ulterior interest lay in metamathematics. The Noe-Pythagoreans claimed that the old school by using numbers as symbols had concealed its true views; now the new school will explain the esoteric doctrine to anyone who will first study the symbolism.
For example, one is God, reason, good, and harmony; it may be called Apollo or Atlas; but in so far as One is the source of all, it is also matter, darkness, chaos, or Tartarus. Because of this double aspect, the one is odd-even and male-female. Two or duality is the principle of dissimilarity, opposition, and change; but because twice two equals two plus two, it is the principle of similarity as well. It is matter, nature, Isis, Artemis, Demeter, and Aphrodite. Since the chief musical relationship is the octave, which consists of the relation of one to two, two is the source of all musical chords. To be brief, three is the first real number, for it has a beginning, a middle, and end; hence it is the number of completion and perfection. And so on.
In this system of though, the numbers, unlike Plato’s Ideas, were not independent entities which God used as a model for this world. At this point the Neo-Pythagoreans made an innovation, adopted or more likely independently thought out by Philo Judaeus, which was not only accepted by Neo-Platonism, but without which Platonism could never have been so well received of the Christian theologians. Monotheism was so strong in Philo, and in paganism monism had developed to such a degree, that the picture in the Timaeus of a world of Ideas above the demiurge was unacceptable. Hence the Ideas of number, as the case may be, are derived from God – more explicitly they are the thoughts of God, the contents of his mind, and so unity is preserved.
Another part of
the Timaeus also received serious attention. On the surface the Timaeus
seems to teach that the world came into existence at a definite point of time
in the finite past. Before the world’s first moment, the matter out of which it
was formed had been in chaotic motion. This interpretation of Plato, Aristotle
had accepted in order to attack it; Plutarch later accepted it in order to
defend it. But Xenocrates, most of the Platonists, and all the Neo-Platonists
considered Plato’s language a pedagogical device, putting into terms of time
what is really a matter of logical relationship. The Neo-Pythagoreans generally
followed this latter view; Ocellus early argued that the universe is unbegotten
and imperishable, and by 50 B. C. this was recognized as the standard
Neo-Pythagorean view. By an everlasting universe they did not mean a cycle of
worlds such as is found in Stoicism, but rather the permanence of present
conditions. Involved in this is the notion that men have always inhabited this
planet, from which follows, in the historical situation, the Aristotelian
theory of the fixity of species. They likewise preserve the Aristotelian
division between the supra-lunar and the sub-lunar regions.
In anthropology the Neo-Pythagoreans were Platonic and opposed Stoic
materialism. The soul, as Xenocrates had said, is a self-moving number, and
like God is incorporeal. The transmigration of souls, however, is treated as a
myth; it has a practical value in encouraging people to avoid an evil life, but
there is no literal truth to it. On the other hand, the doctrine of demons,
derived from old Orphic and Pythagorean thought, grows in importance. After men
die, their souls wander in the region between the earth and the moon, and it is
through these disembodied souls or demons that God to a large extent exercises
the providential administration of the world.
The Hellenistic age as a whole was chiefly interested in ethics. The Epicureans neglected logic because they thought it did not contribute to a good life; the Stoics emphasized physics because they held it to be of practical importance. Similarly, the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Academy desired a good life now and blessedness hereafter. Beginners in philosophy may be delighted with the subtleties of dialectic and the learned investigations of physics, but the serious, and more advanced student, seeks greatness of character. Mankind is sick, and philosophy, properly understood, is the medicine. The aim of the good life, the aim of religion, Plato had defined in the Theaetetus as likeness to God. Plutarch (A. D. 50-120), a representative man of his time, carries on this ethical and religious task with fervor. Although more widely known for his Lives, he also wrote an important group of ethical and religious essays. All schools, perhaps with the exception of Epicureanism, contributed to form his views. From Stoicism, which he attacked in general, he accepted some points in particular; even skepticism had its influence, in that mysticism and dependence on revelation are often the counterparts of distrust in reason. Plato, however, is the chief source of his thought, and so he may be properly described as an eclectic Platonist. Of course, he is not always consistent.
Philosophy as medicine to sick mankind: ethics as a way of becoming like God: and it is obvious that philosophy to be properly understood requires completion by theology. Since man’s relation to God is thus fundamental, one must first obtain a correct concept of God.
Plutarch’s concept of God comes chiefly from the Neo-Pythagoreans. God is true Being, the eternal naturel he is unitary and includes no plurality. To identify him with the world, as the Stoics do, is scarcely distinguishable from atheism. Immutable and transcendent, God has no direct contact with the world, and while we may know that he is, we cannot know what he is. But of all God’s attributes, the chief one is his goodness. His transcendency is not to be understood as excluding a providential ordering of the world for the best. Whatever else may be said, God is good.
But if God is good, then Plato was correct when he said that God is not the cause of everything in the world. He cannot be the cause of evil, and therefore, to explain the world, one must posit with God an independent, evil principle. Not only in the Republic did Plato assert that God is the cause of comparatively few things; in the Laws, as Plutarch interprets it, Plato argued for the existence of an evil world-soul. Such a dualistic explanation of the world is all the more plausible, and the genius of Plato is signally supported, because the more or less successful endeavors of previous philosophers and the unconscious wisdom of mankind preserved under the mythical forms of eastern religions point in this direction. When to old Pythagoreans constructed their table of opposites with the One and Dyad at its head, when the various religions spoke of Ahriman, Typho, or Hades, they used different names, but they all bore witness to an independent, evil principle.
A large segment of Plutarch’s philosophy is given in his essay De animae procreation in Timaeo, and nowhere else does he more clearly show his attachment to the text of Plato. In the Timaeus Plato had described how the demiurge mixed the Same, the Other, and the Essence, rolled the mixture out like dough, cut it into two strips, and formed the celestial equator and the ecliptic. Thus a good world=soul was formed to impose order of the pre-existing chaos. With this description goes a piece of number-theory that has suffered many varieties of exegesis. To this paragraph in Plato Plutarch devoted the entire essay, in which he preserves for us, not only his own interesting views, but also a valuable fund of information on the history of the Academy. The De animae procreation opens with the admission that its explanation of the mysterious passage is at variance with that of most Platonists from Xenocrates on down. After offering some worth-while criticisms of his predecessors, Plutarch introduces his own views by demanding what is the horror of a temporal creation. Does not the refutation of atheism depend on it? God, he says, is the author of nature, although he did not create the material out of which he fashioned the world. This chaotic material contained body, motion, and an irrational soul. The matter or body in motion is not itself the principle of evil. Matter should be considered as completely neutral or even as having a slight tendency toward the good. Plato definitely states that matter has no power at all and compares it with the odorless base which the manufacturers of perfume must use to produce an unmixed fragrance. Obviously a passive matter cannot put the world in reverse, as Politicus expresses it, nor can evil have arisen from a neutral source any more than it can have arisen from the good or God.
Therefore, the principle of evil is a soul, the irrational soul which is definitely alluded to in the Laws, and which must be identified with the necessity in the Timaeus that requires persuasion to follow rational, scientific law.
By making the
irrational soul a good world-soul, God imposed numerical relations on the
chaotic motions of matter and reduced it to order. This action of God by which
the world was formed took place at a given moment. Xenocrates’ interpretation
that the world is eternal is impossible, because if the world had no literal
beginning, soul would not be prior to body, nor would God be prior to the
world.
The more the transcendency of God is emphasized, and the more he must be separated from a world in which evil forms a part, the more is it necessary to posit mediators between God and man. Hence Plutarch includes in his system lesser Gods and demons. To be sure he speaks of God as being not merely an artists separate from his work, but also as pervading the universe in the form of the world-soul. The more usual and the more consistent view, however, is that of demon-mediators. And by means of these Plutarch is able to implement his sympathy with the popular religions of all nations. The normal abode of the demons is at the boundary between the sub-lunar and supra-lunar regions. Through them God sends premonitions and revelations to men. By means of the demons, Plutarch, with a desire to defend the doctrine of providence, attempted to follow a middle path between Epicureanism and Stoicism. The former philosophy destroys providence altogether, while the latter transmutes it into a fatalism that rules out freedom, makes evil necessary, and with great impiety calls God its source.
The demons, or at least some of them, were once men. Men now living on this earth are not merely compounded of soul and body as popular opinion holds. Man is tripartite, composed of body, soul, and reason. When a man died, his soul, still combined with his reason, journeys to the moon, there to be a demon. But the reason is as superior to the soul as the soul to the body. Accordingly in the moon there occurs a second death by which the reason is loosed from the soul, and leaving the soul in the moon, the reason returns to its source and home, the sun.
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Pg. 119
1. Here follows the myth of Isis and Osiris with its variations, an attempt to identify the gods of different religions, and several naturalistic explanations of the myth. – Ed.
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Pg. 124
1. Respectable antiquity considered Epicureans, Christians, and Atheists equally absurd.
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Pg. 127
1. When the moon takes the form of a crescent. -Tr.
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Pg. 139
1. These figures do not make astronomical sense. – Ed.
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Pg. 141-142
1. 3,750 miles
English. – Tr.
2. Fifty-two
miles. – Tr.
3. Ireland,
probably, which lies at this distance from Rutupiae, the only British port
known to Plutarch. The Romans had marched across the island as far as Anglesea
in Nero’s reign. – Tr.
4. The three other islands may be the Shetlands, since for one month the sun is below the horizon less than an hour each day. Interest in this passage has been aroused by identifying the great continent surrounding the sea with America, an identification made possible by supposing the distance five myriads of stadia instead of five thousand. But the description of the sea as muddy, difficult of passage because of the currents, and the fact that it calls to mind the Maeotis, or the sea of Azov, are indications that the sea is the Baltic and the continent which surrounds it is Scandinavia. The Caspian Sea may have been connected with the Maeotis, though the difference in levels would render unlikely any navigable waterway. More probably the Caspian was open to the Artic Ocean, a hypothesis which would explain the existence of seals in the Caspian alone of all inland seas. (Cf. also Chapter XXIX near the end.) The religious exercises mentioned are thought to be Druidic. – Ed.
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Pg. 144
1. “Sensation” must be the world lost here; as plainly appears from what comes next. – Tr.
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Pg. 145
1. Perverted
into an active sense, as “begotten of one.” – Tr.
2. The spiritus of the good rest above in a fearful hope, for from their place of rest they can see the ghosts of the wicked repelled by the circumference of the moon, tossed about, and falling headlong, as they fancy, into the abyss below. – Tr.
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Pg. 147
1. Appearing as
the twin star, St. Elmo’s fire, upon the ship’s mast. – Tr.
Pg. 149
1. This
doctrine explains a curious gem (Matter, “Hist. Crit. Du Gnosticisme,” Pl. I.
F., No. I), exhibiting the Mithraic Lion copulating with a woman, quadrupedum
ritu, in a cartouche placed over an outstretched corpse. – Tr.
Philo Judaeus, pgs. 150-159
Philo was a Jewish scholar who, at the beginning of our era, lived in Alexandria. This great city, having eclipsed Athens in learning and not yet superseded by Rome, accounts for many elements in Philo’s philosophy; but his zeal and his motives, his literary style, and not a little of the contents of his system come from devotion to his ancient Israel.
Although for many years the Jews, as a result of the plans of Alexander the Great for a cosmopolitan city with religious toleration for all, had enjoyed civil protection and religious immunity, a persecution connected with emperor-worship overtook them toward the end of Philo’s life. As a venerable and distinguished member of their community, he was chosen to head a delegation to obtain alleviation from Caligula. The date (A. D. 39) of the mission, which unfortunately met with no success, is the only accurate date known of Plato’s life. Since his fame must have been earned prior to his selection for this important, although distasteful position, it follows that his thought and writings could not have been influenced by Christianity; nor is it probable that he influenced the writers of the New Testament. The similarities are to be explained by the common Hebrew background.
For nearly three centuries there had been a Jewish community in Alexandria, and during these years a semi-conscious syncretism was in progress. Even the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, contains slight traces of Greek influence. For example, many of the anthropopathisms were modified; in one or two places the concept of creation was made to approximate the Platonic picture of formation; and in at least one case the influence of Stoicism is discernible in the choice of a technical term. While these peculiarities cannot be explained as the normal result of translating, on the other hand, there is no good reason to suppose that the translators knew and intentionally promoted the later Alexandrian philosophy.
An apocryphal writing, The Wisdom of Solomon, advances the progress of syncretism. In the Old Testament, particularly in Proverbs, wisdom is personified and closely related to God. With this personification, together with “the angel of the Lord,” and the use of the word Logos, a person inclined toward Platonism could find comfortable material to develop. The Wisdom of Solomon, accordingly, went a step further in understanding creation as a formation of chaotic material. The role of the Logos in framing the world, whether he is a person or whether it is an Idea, is still not clear. The transcendence of God is somewhat emphasized and the method of allegorical interpretation, so characteristic of Philo, begins to make its appearance.
The culmination of the fusion of Hebrew theology and Greek philosophy is precisely the work of Philo. His writings may be divided roughly into three groups. First, there are some early writings that come directly from his study of Greek philosophy and contain nothing Jewish. De aeternitati mundi and De providentia are such. Second, he wrote commentaries on the Pentateuch. Under the general title of Allegorical Commentary on Genesis there are particular pieces, such as, De cherubim, De sacrificus Abelis et Caini, Quod Deus sit immutabilis, and others. In addition to other commentaries, he wrote, in the third place, several historical essays; for example, De vita Mosis, Contra Flaccum, and Legatio ad Gaium.
In order to harmonize the revelation from God in the Old Testament with the clear, rational Greek philosophy, Philo made large use of the allegorical method of interpretation. Egypt i a type of Greece, and as the Israelites at their exodus asked jewels of the Egyptians, so the people of God living in Alexandria are justified in appropriating the precious philosophy of the Greeks.
Philo defended his method of allegorizing on the basis of the anthropomorphisms included in the Old Testament. Scripture itself teachers that anthropomorphism is not to be taken literally. Inclusion of such forms of speech, however, indicates the presence of a hidden meaning, not merely a hidden meaning in the anthropomorphic verses alone, but throughout the text. The literal history is of course true; the Israelites without question escaped from Egypt. The moral lessons are more important than the bare history. But the deepest sense of the revelation, the sense that is truly philosophical, is discovered only by the allegorical method. Out of the many problems which Philo discusses, it may be wise to select two of the most important, viz. his conception of God and his Logos doctrine.
That God exists and rules the world should be evident to anyone who considers the excellence and artistry of its appointment. But Philo was less inclined than Aristotle to trust the standard cosmological and teleological arguments; his favorite approach was more Platonic in retrospect and Augustinian in prospect. The world reveals God in his works, but an examination of the mind of man, of his faculty of spiritual discernment, will eventually reveal God himself. Certain conditions must be fulfilled before one has the intuition of God. Solitude and freedom from bodily distractions are necessary because God himself is a solitary being, and one must try to resemble him in this point at least. After instruction and meditation the vision of God in varying degrees of clarity may be experienced. There is no assurance that any given man will be granted a clear vision, but in any case the search for God is worth while.
However, since our knowledge of God is obtained by introspection, by an analogy between our mind and the universal mind, since we are limited to our own faculties, it follows that we can form no adequate conception of God. The analogy is not strict, because while God, the mind of the universe, formed the universe, it was not our mind that formed our body. Limited as we are, we must use, even the Scripture must use, language that is not philosophically justifiable. Especially for the uneducated, anthropomorphisms are necessary; but God is transcendent.
The dangers of anthropomorphism are in reality slight. Reflection leads one to deny of God any attribute characteristic of a created being, such as wrath or anger. But one should not refuse to ascribe reason to God, for human reason is divine.
A more serious danger than anthropomorphism is man’s inability to know his own mind. Just as the eye cannot see itself, the mind, contrary to what Plotinus later argues, cannot know its own essence. How, then, can one know God? “God has shown his nature to none, and who can say either that the Cause is body or that it is incorporeal, or that it is of a certain quality, or that it is destitute of quality, or in general express himself with certainty about his essence, or quality, or habit, or motion?”*
This quotation is perhaps one of Philo’s most extreme statements, for ordinarily, while he says we cannot know what God is, he is certain that God is not corporeal of other ignoble quality.
In any case the transcendence of God is emphasized. He is without qualities, that is, God is superior to all classification. Classification is possible only when two or more objects have a common quality by means of which they can be included in one genus. Therefore, since there must be an object, which is one thing, and a quality, which is second, it follows that all objects capable of classification are compounds and are capable of dissolution. Obviously God is not subject to dissolution or classification. God no doubt has properties: he is omnipotent. But his omnipotence, and his other properties likewise, far from making him similar to other objects, make him superior to all classes. This superiority holds, not only for the objects of this world, but also for the Ideas that Plato would regard as the highest. “God, then, has been ranked according to the one and the unit; or rather even the unit has been ranked according to the on God, for all number, like time, is younger than the cosmos, while God is older than the cosmos and its creator.”**
When the unity and transcendence of God are maintained without qualification, difficult problems arise with regard to God’s relation to the world. In Neo-Platonism the supreme term is so unitary that multiplicity receives barely a plausible explanation. In Plutarch and in many other authors transcendence, particularly in respect to goodness or holiness, not only involves the question of the origin of evil, but also the problem of how a good God can come into a contact with imperfect things, a contact apparently degrading or contaminating. These problems plague Philo also.
As for the origin of evil, Philo take the easy way out and posits an eternal dualism. Although it is completely inconsistent with the Hebrew background, Philo asserts the eternity of matter. Then, as God forms the world out of matter, it is discovered that even if matter is not positively evil or wicked, it is none the less too imperfect and recalcitrant to receive the perfect goodness and order God wishes to bestow. The other phases of the problem, contact with matter and the existence of multiplicity, are to be satisfied by the theory of the divine powers under the inclusive Logos.
The sun and the moon, for example, are the results of forces impressing matter. Were the forces withdrawn, the bodies would lapse again into formless matter. Dependent on God, and thus inferior to him, the powers are still too great to be explained in human language. They are as infinite as God himself, independent of time, and unbegotten. In short, they are the Platonic Ideas.
“It is only one of the forms of error maintained by impious and unholy men to say that the immaterial ideas are an empty name without participation in real fact. Those who affirm this, remove from things the most necessary substance, which is the archetypal pattern of all the qualities of substance, in accordance with which everything is ideally formed and measured. Thus, the opinion which destroys ideas confounds all things, and reduces them to that formlessness which was prior to the elements. Now, what could be more absurd than this? For God generated everything out of matter, not touching it himself, for it was not fitting for the Wise and Blessed to touch indefinite and confused matter, but he made use of the immaterial powers, whose real name is ideas, in order that the suitable form might engage each genus. But the opinion in question introduces great disorder and confusion; for by destroying the things through which qualities arise, it destroys at the same time qualities themselves.***
The first and most universal of all the powers or ideas is the Logos. As the thought of God the Logos is the place of the cosmos and comprehends the whole intelligible world. Sometimes Philo’s wording seems to imply that the Logos is a thinking soul rather than the world of Ideas. Apart from the literary device of personification, this mode of expression can be explained in virtue of a contrast between God and men. An architect, for example, has many plans, his human logos thinks many thoughts, and accordingly it is easy to distinguish between his reason and one of his thoughts. But God has one plan only, and hence reason or soul in God becomes identical with its product. In this way reason or the Logos can be both a power and the world of Ideas. God originally existed in perfect solitude. His first act of creation, therefore, could not have required an agent or mediator. Thus the Logos or universal reason is, while dependent on and inferior to God, a most faithful image of God. Other things are expressions of thought, but thought is an expression of God alone.
Because Philo uses the term Logos, because he spoke of the Logos as the image of God, the first begotten Son of God, because of the repeated use of personification, Christians have at times believed they have discovered in Philo an anticipation, if not of the Trinity completely, at least of the second Person of Trinity. And perchance an inability on the part of Philo sharply to distinguish between Platonic Ideas and Hebrew angels made the divine powers as a solution of the problem of mediation more plausible at that stage of the history of philosophy than now.
At the risk of making Philo a little more clearheaded than he may have been, it seems justifiable to understand the powers and the Logos as Ideas. For although the Logos is the Son of God, on the other hand, Laughter is the Son of God, God is the husband of Wisdom, Wisdom is the daughter of God, Wisdom is the mother of the Logos, and Wisdom is the father of instruction. The number seven is also an image of God and a motherless virgin, sprung from the head of Zeus. If the logoi are called angels, Sarah is virtue and Hagar is education. Philo’s use of allegory and personification. In De cherubim Philo explains the statement that God “drove out Adam.”
“Why,” asks Philo, “does the writer now say ‘drove out when he had previously said ‘sent out’? The word are carefully chosen; for he who is sent out may return, but he who has been driven out by God incurs an eternal exile. Thus we see that encyclical education Hagar twice went forth from the ruling virtue Sarrha. The first time she returned, for she had run away, and had not been banished, and she was brought back to he master’s house, ‘an angel, who is divine Reason, having met her’; but the second time she was driven out never to come back. The reason was that in the first instance Abram, ‘the high father,’ had not yet changed into Abraham, ‘the elect father of sound,’ that is, had not ceased to be the natural philosopher and become the wise lover of God, and Sara had not been changed into Sarrha, specific into generic virtue; and therefore Hager, encyclical education, though she might be eager to run away from the austere life of the virtuous, will return to it again; but when the change takes place, the preliminary branches of instruction called after Hagar will be driven out, and her sophist son, called Ishmael, will be driven out also. What wonder, then, if, when Adam, the mind, became possessed of folly, and incurable disease, God drove him out forever from the region of the virtues, when he banished even the sophist and his mother, the teaching of the preliminary branches of education, from wisdom and the wise, whose names he calls Abraham and Sarrha?”
In view of passages like this, it is extremely difficult to prove that Philo has abandoned the realm of abstract Ideas to anticipate a second Person in the Godhead. His language may be extreme, but his thought is fairly sober; and while the Neo-Pythagoreans and Plutarch took their demons seriously, Philo with his divine powers remains a relatively pure Platonist.
* Leg. All. VI
73.
** Leg. All.
II I.
***
Sacrificantibus 13.
Hermes Trismegistus, pgs. 184-191
The legendary
literature written by Hermes was in ancient times optimistically estimate as
running into thousands of volumes. Today one is interested in fourteen
tractates to which the name Poimander or Poemandres is sometimes given. More
properly the title Poimander belongs to the first of the fourteen. Published
with these there are also two other pieces, one a small collection of
fragments, the other, The Definitions of Asclepius to Ammon the King.
The entire collection bears the name of Thrice Greatest Hermes because of the idenitification of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god whose name is variously spelled Tat, Thot, or Theuth. The mythology is not consistent, however, for Hermes is given as the father of Tat, and Tat is a descendant of Uranus and Cronos. And further, the identity of Asclepius is obscured because he is said to be the grandson of the inventor of medicine.
In general the tractates claim to be, and until modern times were frequently thought to be, a revelation of Christian truth to the ancient Egyptians. Although, of course, this claim and this opinion are mistaken, it cannot be denied that some ideas from Egyptian theology, and some Persian influence as well, may have been incorporated in several of the chapters. The significant sources of its philosophy, however, are to be sought in popular Platonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and Stoicism. The religious note, which is dominant throughout, is colored by the mysteries, both Greek and Eastern, and to a noticeable degree by Judaism and Christianity.
The corpus as a whole is not the work of a single author, and attempts to formulate a consistent system of theology or cosmology from its teachings must result in confusion. The critical problems are difficult. None of the tractates was written before the Christian era and they were not collected into a single group much before A. D. 300. The dates of the separate parts cannot be fixed with any accuracy, for Kroll considers Poimander the latest, while Zielinski asserts that it is the earliest. Zeller, in order to account for the similarities with Neo-Platonism makes the interesting assumption that Hermes as well as Plotinus studied under Ammonius Saccus. But Zeller here seems to have overemphasized the similarities. Without sufficient evidence to warrant greater exactitude, the safest thing to do is to consider the tractates as having been produced sometime during the second and third centuries.
It is even possible that a Semitic origin underlay the Greek text, or parts of it. For example, the last phrase of Poimander, paragraph five, makes no sense as it stands in Greek. The phrase “which had leaped into it,” is an emendation for the words “unto hearing.” But one may suppose that a Greek translator confused the Semitic (Syriac or Coptic) roots meaning hearing and heaven; in which case the author would have said, “the pervading Spiritual word in heaven.” Another illustration is found in the peculiar statement of paragraph eighteen that love is the cause of death. If the author of the Greek text is translation a Syriac original, he may have mistaken darkness for love. Other examples could be listed.
Another critical problem, and a very interesting one, is the relation between this literature and the New Testament. Reitzenstain, in his effort to prove that the theology of the Pauline epistles is derived from Hermes, asserts that Poimander was written in the first century of our era. This date is now generally rejected, and the alleged influence of any Hermetic theology on Christianity is inherently improbable. Two points among others destroy Reitzenstein’s theory. First, the salvation which Poimander offers is deification procured by a cosmological revelation; but for Paul salvation is not deification and the message by which salvation is mediated, instead of being cosmological, is an account of recent historical facts – the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Second, in the two religions the roles of soul and spirit, on which Rietzenstein places so much emphasis, are in direct conflict.
Corroborating the later date usually assigned Poimander, the internal evidence favors an influence of Christianity on Hermes. The text of Poimander betrays verbal similarities with the Septuagint, and, while the case is not so clear, there seem to be phrases taken from the New Testament also. Furthermore, the prayer which closes Poimander is found in a collection of Christian prayers – a fact which indicates that someone mistook this tractate for a Christian production. Such a mistake requires the confusion of mind, characteristic of the second century, in which recent converts from paganism could not well distinguish which of their old ideas could be harmonized with the new religion. Consequently one must judge that the Hermetic literature is a less popular form of Gnosticism, showing Christian influence in its phraseology, but even more pagan in its philosophy than the better known Gnostic systems.
Poimander opens with a mystic vision induced, not by corybantic frenzy, but, as in Plotinus, by a study of metaphysics or cosmology. In this vision, the human subject expects to receive scientific information; and while the bodily senses are to be held in abeyance the blank consciousness of quietism is nowhere held to be the method or the goal.
In the beginning was God, the Intellect. A part of God becomes chaotic nature. Then a holy Logos from God descends upon nature with the result that the four elements separate and assume their proper places. The Father God, represented by light in the vision, consists of countless powers arranged in a cosmos. Undoubtedly this means that Plato’s world of Ideas has been definitely identified with the mind of God. The elements of nature came into being because the mind of God, in conjunction with the Logos, imitated itself and constructed a world from its own elements. If the Stoics has encountered difficulty in defending materialism, Poimander has learned the lesson only too well, for here the stuff out of which the world is made is nothing else than the mind of God.
The Intellect God next produced, with the aid of the Logos, a demiurge, also an intellect. This third God is the maker of the planetary spheres, and these in the guise of Fate govern the sensible cosmos. The Logos and the demiurge then bring forth the various living beings which inhabit the earth; but the original God alone, who Is Life and Light, begat man equal with himself. Man, then, in the image of God, contemplating the work of the demiurge his brother, obtained from the Father authority to do some creating of his own. Therefore he broke through the sky, which held the element fire in its place, and exhibited himself to nature below. Nature, entranced with the beauty of this image of God, loved him; he, too, seeing his form reflected in the water and his shadow on the earth, embraced it and her and so came to inhabit an irrational form. For this reason, man today is partially mortal because of his body and partially, in fact essentially, immortal because of his origin. If, therefore, a man understands this account of the origin of the world and of himself, if he learns that he has come from Light and Life, and consists of them, he shall proceed back to Life. In the attempt to return, men who are holy and good receive aid from the Intellect God. He aids them in understanding, in turning from sensation and the body, and in in cutting off thoughts which tempt. The description of the ascent to God is that type of celestial geography, also found in Plutarch, which pictures psychological purification. Finally the pilgrim comes to be in God; “this is the good end for them that have acquired gnosis – to be deified.”
The thirteenth tractate is closely related to Poimander. While there are differences between them, the latter expands the general view of salvation presented in the former. There is a vision in which one passes beyond the body into a sort of dreamlike existence. Man in this state is no longer corporeal, but colorless, formless, shining, immutable – in other words, a pure spirit. In this tractate it is not so clear that this state is induced by rational study in the ordinary sense of the words; it is more mystical and moral – “Withdraw into thyself and it will come; will, and it will come to pass; make idle thy body’s senses and it will be the birth of the Divinity; cleanse thyself of Matter’s irrational Avengers.” The Avengers are vices, such as avarice and anger. Thus the tone of the discourse is more moral than cosmological. In Poimander the gnosis by which salvation is accomplished is a knowledge both of the universe and of the self, for in fact this knowledge is one; but here knowledge of self on a relatively superficial level receives practically all the emphasis. The new birth produced by self-knowledge does not affect the natural body, for the aim of salvation here, as it was in Poimander also, is deification. “Knowest thou not that thou art in thy nature God?”
The tractate ends with a hymn that is not devoid of devotional charm. Contrary to the teaching of Poimander, the new birth is to be kept a secret and not divulged to the mass of men.
With this summary of Poimander and its companion piece, the question of their relations to the New Testament may again be raised. Both chronology and content prevent them from having influenced Paul/ It may be possible to connect Poimander with the Prologue of John’s Gospel and with his first Epistle. The connection, however, it not one of dependence, in either direction, but of opposition. For Poimander the Logos was not in the beginning, as John asserts; for John, “all things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made,” and this Poimander denies. While the more popular forms of Gnosticism at least made some mention of Jesus Christ – an almost indispensable requirement for a work to be Christian – Poimander not only ignores him, but the nature of the system and the conception of salvation by a cosmological gnosis, tacitly excludes the Christian idea of an historical Incarnation according to which “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Because these points are not merely differences but pointed contradictions, it may not be too improbably to assume that John included the Prologue in his Gospel for the purpose of opposing prevalent notions similar to those in Poimander; for even though the tractate cannot be placed in the first century, it may in more systematic form reflect the opinions of an early fringe of semi-Christian thought.
The title of tractate six, In God Alone is the Good and Nowhere Else, might lead one at first to expect a negative theology and an emphasis on God’s transcendence. However, the teaching turns out to be an insistent pantheism. When the author says that God is the reality or substance of motion and genesis, he may not completely identify God with the processes of the world, for later he distinguishes between God and “this living being which is greater than all” particular things; but at most he implies that God is the abiding form of the world. In a certain sense the theology may be called negative – in the sense that all the qualities, activities, and attributes common in the phenomenal world involve evil and limitation, and hence all that can be said of God is that he is Good. In this predication nothing concrete is signified – it means merely that God has no needs, desires, pain, or jealousy.
If the pure Good of God remains negative and without content, the good in the cosmos is not less so. The processes of generation in some way participate in the Good, but it is more proper to speak of degrees of Evil. “Only the name of the Good is found among men, the thing itself nowhere.” In fact the Cosmos is a pleroma of evil.
The ninth tractate, apparently written later, and probably an excerpt from an Asclepius-corpus not now known, directly attacks this view. Here it is blasphemy to call the Cosmos a pleroma of evil. To be sure no part of the Cosmos is empty of a demon, and demons plant evil thoughts in the minds of men. Yet the Cosmos is an instrument of God’s will and is the son of God as also the things in the cosmos are sons of the cosmos. More profoundly, God not merely contains all existent objects, he is himself all things, producing them, presumably by emanation, but at least producing them out of himself.
Whether these tractates represent a merely literary religion, as some have suggested, or whether they came from some small sect, as is more probable, they form one stage, an early and very incomplete stage, in the fusion of Hebrew-Christian views with Hellenistic philosophy. Gnosticism included more of Christianity, and Plotinus admitted none of it.
---------------------------------
Pg. 193
1. Or, the
pervading Spiritual Word in heaven.
2. i.e., the planetary spheres. This cosmology is purely Stoic; its prototype is outlined as from Zeno by Diogenes Laertius VII 134ff.
---------------------------------
Pg. 194
1. i.e., the Valentinian Horos.
---------------------------------
Pg. 196
1. Or, Spirit.
2. Corresponding
to the fall of Adam; the “spoiling” of Valentinus.
3. Or, and the cause of death-love; i.e., the love of man for his image, which imprisoned him in matter.
---------------------------------
Pg. 197
1. Poimander’s instruction has already furnished the disciple with some knowledge of himself, and so the ascent is already begun.
---------------------------------
Pg. 198
1. Or, organs.
2. The first
zone is that of the Moon. Craft is given to Mercury, the second zone; Lust to
Venus; and so on. Note the implied hostility to the popular religions; this is
not Stoic. Cumont, After-Life in Roman Paganism, p. 107, attributes a
similar scheme to Numenius.
3. In XIII 13, Hermes is told not to betray the secret of the new birth to the many.
---------------------------------
Pg. 199
1. Berlin Klassikertexte, Heft VI, Altchristliche Texte, bearbeitet von C. Schmidt u. W. Schubart, Berlin 1910, pp. 110-114, contain six Christian prayers, of which the fourth is taken direct from Poimander, a fact nor observed by the editors.
---------------------------------
Pg. 200
1. Apparently the opening paragraphs of this tractate have been lost.
---------------------------------
Pg. 206
1. Possibly, the immediate emanations of God.
---------------------------------
Pg. 207
1. This tractate reflects Stoic and Platonic theses: God as demiurge, an animate cosmos, salvation by Gnosis. There is no allusion to Ideas; no connection with Poimander; the author obviously knows and attacks tractate six.
---------------------------------
Pg. 208
1. Lactantius
II 15 quotes this phrase.
2. This is a polemic against VI 3-4.
---------------------------------
Pg. 211
1. This
tractate is clearly by another than Poimander, for, whereas Poimander
promulgated as a revelation which Hermes the recipient is to proclaim to all
men, the same doctrine of rebirth is here represented as the secret privilege
of the few initiated. Hence the title, taken from the language of the
mysteries. The author also aims to supplement the revelation of Poimander.
Poimander represents man as a divine mind incarcerated in a material body; it
is surrounded by evil passions which have been conferred upon it, during its
descent from heaven, by the planets through whose spheres it passed, and which
it must return to them after death, while ascending. There is an allusion to an
Avenging Spirit who punishes the wicked, and to the Powers of the Ogdoad, but
no further details. Here instead of seven, there are twelve evil passions; they
are not the same as the seven, they are not implanted in or wrapped about the
spirit while descending, but are evil spirits which enter into the body during
life. They are in fact the Avenging Spirit. They must be expelled by the influx
of the Ten Powers, which are here named. Clearly this is an expansion and
modification of Poimander. Moreover the author refers to Poimander, and claims
to have received the additional revelation there promised. He is, then, a later
claimant to honors already given Poimander.
2. i.e., just before Hermes’ ascension to heaven. With this tractate compare Philo, The Migration of Abraham, XXXI, 168-175, where mind ascends to God accompanied by the powers at first, led by the Logos, but finally keeping pace with his guide.
---------------------------------
Pg. 212
1. An emendation. The text reads: man was begotten. – Ed.
---------------------------------
Pg. 213
1. Intended to
exclude the conception of God as space, this passage is important as a clear
formulation of spirit.
2. Or, It requires only mind to apprehend the Birth in God.
---------------------------------
Pg. 214
1. i.e., as shown by his ability to articulate the secret hymn (?).
---------------------------------
Pg. 215
1. Perhaps a
pun, for the zodiac is meant.
2. In the text
the sentence ends here. The emendations do not seem necessary. Twelve elements
constitute the zodiac. The following phrase begins the next sentence. Newbold
wrote: “I have done the best I can with this corrupt passage, but am not sure
of the results.” – Ed.
3. In Plutarch’s vision of Timarchus, De. gen. Soc., there are four powers, Life, Motion, Generation, and Dissolution. The unit unites the first and second in the Invisible, φνοις the second and third in the Sun, and νους the third and fourth in the Moon.
---------------------------------
Pg. 216
1. Note how incompatible with Poimander.
---------------------------------
Pg. 217
1. He is now in the Ogdoad and receive the Blessing from the Aeon just outside the Ogdoad.
---------------------------------
Plotinus, pgs. 219-230
Pg. 219
Neo-Platonism is the culmination of all Greek philosophy. The problems that had arisen during the previous seven or eight centuries, the antagonisms of conflicting solutions, the commendable desire of the eclectics – however poor their practice – to choose the best from all thinkers, are, within the world of Greek thought, in large measure satisfied.
From Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, Plotinus (205-270) received his philosophic instruction, inspiration, and perhaps the chief principles of his system. However, the extent of this indebtedness cannot be ascertained with accuracy, since Ammonius refrained from publication. When Plotinus was about forty years of age he made Rome his permanent residence and addressed himself to the establishment of a school. In addition to his seminars, where he developed his views by explicating the ancient texts, he wrote fifty-four tractates, which Porphyry after his death collected, edited, and rearranged into six groups of nine, for which reason they are called Enneads.
Porphyry, of course, was a disciple of Plotinus. Because of his introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, translated into Latin by Boethius, Porphyry both kept alive logical discussion through the Dark Ages and in conjunction with other factors caused the Middle Ages to view the world in Neo-Platonic perspective. Although Plotinus attacked Gnosticism, he does not seem to have been familiar with the main current of Christianity. Porphyry and later Neo-Platonists could not escape it. Porphyry himself argued that several books of the Bible were spurious; and Julian the Apostate, besides being an emperor, was a Neo-Platonic philosopher, and an opponent of the growing religion in both capacities. While Plotinus and Porphyry repudiated the superstitions of idolatry and were rationalistic in their approach to religious questions, Julian, although he considered the Homeric religions fabulous or allegorical, interested himself, along with the Neo-Platonic school in Pergamum, in theurgy and mystery religions. The formal history of Neo-Platonism and of Greek civilization ends with the mathematical school of Hypatia ( - 415) in Alexandria, and with the great Proclus (410-485) who with dignity closed Plato’s Academy in Athens, and with some obscure Latin remnants in the west.
To be a culmination of a philosophical development, a proposed system must satisfy at least two conditions. First, there must be a dominating, integrating principle, for otherwise an attempt to sum up the history of opposing schools is mere eclecticism. There is no doubt that Plotinus had such a principle. But this is not all. Hegel, in his Preface to his Phenomenology of Mind, criticizes Schelling’s “ecstatic enthusiasm which starts straight off with absolute knowledge, as if shot out of a pistol, and makes short work of other points of view simply by explaining that it is to take no notice of them” Hegel complains that this type of philosophy is but “the shapeless repetition of one and the same idea, which is applied in an external fashion to different material, the wearisome reiteration of it keeping up the semblance of diversity.” The avoidance of monotonous formalism, therefore, requires not merely a dominating, integrating principle, but also a content of concrete detail to be integrated. Plotinus has this too.
As an illustration of careful attention to minutiae, mention might be made of the penetrating analysis of Aristotle’s system of categories and their rejection in favor of the five categories of Plato’s Sophist. Or, to turn to another field of investigation, mention might be made of the medium presupposed by the transmission of light. Aristotle had argued for such a medium, the transparent, which, though not strictly visible in itself, was so by reason of extrinsic color; unaware, however, that light has a finite velocity, he used the principle of actualization to explain the change from the potential state of the medium, darkness, to its actuality, light. The theory of Plotinus does not admit a medium for sight. To be sure the universe is a continuum and there is no empty space: in this sense there is a medium between the eye and an object, but the medium is not essential to the explanation of vision. When a stone falls, it falls through the air, but no one would argue that air is a medium essential to the stone’s fall. If a medium is required in the sense that the object first affects the air with which it is in contact, and this portion of air affects the contiguous portion, and so on until the portion of air in contact with the eye affects, the eye, then three impossible consequences follow: we would not see the object by only a portion of air; the sensation would have occurred by contact, and, therefore, the object if placed on the eyeball would be all the more visible, a conclusion factually untrue; and third, if successive portions of the medium were affected, then at night a distant fire or star, seen clearly, would illumine the air and dispel the darkness. The first of these three considerations betrays a fundamental motivation. Plotinus was, in the ancient sense of the word, a realist. The intellect and even the senses grasp their objects; no image stands between to prevent real knowledge of the objects themselves. To defend the possibility of knowledge against skepticism Plotinus therefore rejected not only the crude Epicurean form of image-transmission, but also the more refined theory of Aristotle, and even the theory of Plato whom in general he followed. The explanation he accepted is that of the sympathy of similar parts of the same universe. As Plato taught in the Timaeus, with a few modifications adopted from Stoicism, the universe is a living being with a soul. Certain groups of parts in an animal, although relatively far apart in distance, are by reason of their similarity sympathetically affected. The parts in the intervening distance do not ordinarily suffer the same affection. Therefore they are not properly a medium of transmission. The two similar parts act the one on the other at a distance, and in some such way sensation is to be explained.
The theory of imagination, which may serve as a third illustration of Plotinus’ attention to detailed investigation, comes still closer to the general principles which integrate and systematize all his thinking.
While in general Plotinus wishes to re-establish Platonism, and in the analysis of categories rejects Aristotle’s ten for Plato’s five, yet on the subject of imagination, concerning which Plato’s remarks are distressingly brief, Plotinus does not hesitate to make good use of Aristotle’s extended discussion. But it is a good use that Plotinus makes. Unlike Aristotle with his clean-cut distinctions, with his hard and fast line between one faculty and its inferior and superior, Plotinus because of his basic metaphysics tends to merge each faculty with its neighbors, or, perhaps more accurately, views all mental activity from the highest to lowest as a continuous process.
Plotinus had also to take account of the Stoics. With their materialism they had defined both memory-images and sense-presentations either as impressions with elevations and depression in the waxy substance of the soul or at least as qualitative, chemical changes. Guarding against Stoic materialism and the traces of behaviorism in Aristotle, Plotinus argued that sensation is an activity of an immaterial soul and not an affection, passion, or imprint in matter. The analogy of imprints on wax leads to many impossibilities both with respect to sensation and all the more with respect to imagination, memory, and thinking.
Although an untiring opponent of materialism, although an advocate of a form of spiritualism foreign to the twentieth century, he is by no means bling to the physical conditions of mental activity. A certain bodily organization inclines one to anger; and sick people are more irritable than the healthy. The soul causes fear, shame, and blushing, but it is the body and not the soul that experiences these effects. Emotion and imagination are frequently linked. The imagination of immanent death causes fear; so closely connected with bodily conditions that it is not in our power, and hence those who act under the influence of imagination and emotion are not free moral agents.
Consequently, and parenthetically, from Plotinus’ ethical and mystical standpoint, imagination involves pollution and necessitates purification.
Each organ of the body is animated by the soul and receives power according to its fitness for work. The origin of the activity of this power is in the brain. The work of the organs and of the motor and sensory nerves belongs strictly to the body; but without the soul and without its participation in the higher principle of reason the power would be lacking.
It cannot be denied, therefore, that Plotinus pays serious attention to the physical conditions of mental activity; but the question of imagination, once this more general view of the soul is accepted, becomes the question whether memory and imagination are functions of sensation. There are reasons for answering this question in the negative. In the first place, if one remembers concepts as well as sense objects, and if memory is the function of the faculty of sensation, it would seem that concepts would have to be sensed. In the second place, those who have the keenest sensation and those who are most brilliant in reasoning do not necessarily have the best memories.
But if memory is a separate function, must it not sense what it is to remember? Not exactly. The sense-perception becomes, as in Aristotle’s, theory, a representation-image, so that memory belongs to the faculty of imagination, which is a distinct faculty.
If, however, images are the objects of memory, is it possible to remember conceptions and reasonings? This problem had confronted Aristotle and had not received a complete explanation. If every act of thinking produces an image, then memory of thought is as easily explained as memory of sense objects; but if not, another explanation must be sought. Concepts are strictly indivisible; an image of them is hard to imagine. Furthermore, since the mind is active, it always thinks even though we are not conscious of its activity. Therefore, so long as the concept remains indivisible and internal, it escapes our notice. To remember it, it must first be externalized, made discursive, and reflected as it were in a mirror. This is accomplished by expressing the thought in words, and it is the verbal formula accompanying the concept that is received into the imagination.
The notion of a verbal formula’s unfolding a concept and substituting for an image deserves to be signalized. For Aristotle memory depended on the preservation of a sensible affection, and the continuance of the affection results, not from the activity of the soul, but from the physical condition of the organ. Sense objects are properly objects of memory, but concepts are objects of memory per accidens. The insistence by Aristotle that “recollection is a searching for an ‘image’ in a corporeal substrate,” and that the effort to remember, if at first unsuccessful, frequently persists involuntarily by its own momentum, apparently did not satisfy Plotinus as an explanation of the memory of concepts. Certainly when one remembers the proof of a theorem, one does not see the chalk marks on a blackboard. Modern psychologists, in order to retain the general proposition that no thought is possible without imagery, have not only added auditory, gustatory, etc., to visual images – quite properly – but have also extended the term imagination to kinaesthesia when other forms of imagery failed to sustain the proposition. Rather than use the phrase kinaesthetic images, in which the term image has lost all its original flavor, Plotinus prefers to explain the memory of concepts by the retention in the imagination of a verbal formula. That this is not merely a change in terminology that Aristotle might lightly have granted, may be argued from the fact that for Aristotle all images are natural and are the same for all men, while language is conventional and differs from nation to nation.
Underlying all these matters of detail is the basic position of Neo-Platonism. Reality is not reducible to inanimate atoms and void, but all the gross corporeal phenomena are reducible to a fundamental spiritual life. The most important levels of this life are three: the soul, not a passive recipient of impression, but essentially active; above the soul, the mind, whose unceasing activity we perceive only when the bodily organs are properly disposed; and finally, above mind is the One, the ultimate source of all.
Obviously Plotinus opposes materialism. To say that determinate proportions of material substances produce life is to ignore the fact that the prerequisite of determination is an intelligent agent to decide the proportions and to supervise the mixing. It is still more difficult for materialism to account for sensation. The perception of an object requires the presence of the whole object in the entire soul, not a part of the object on one end of the soul and another part on the other end; therefore the soul must be unitary and unextended. The unity, and hence the immateriality, of the soul is also required for the synthesis of disparate sensations. With these and many other arguments Plotinus attacks the atomism of Democritus, the materialism of the Stoics, and the refined behaviorism of Aristotle.
While all these arguments apply to the souls of individual men, it is not in individual men that the soul in its purity is seen. In ordinary men the soul is sullied by irrational desire; in a wise man passion has been defeated, a measure of purification has been attained, and the soul’s divine nature, which links it with the higher world, shines forth more clearly. And the more virtuous a soul it is that we study, the more obvious is it that the soul is a divine and immortal reality. The more obvious is it also that the individual souls are parts of, or derive from, a higher, purer soul, the world-soul, which, unlike the souls of men, never experience any evil.
Since the individual souls are products of the world-soul and always remain in contact with it, they are mediately united with each other. This raises the question how one human soul can have an experience or sensation without every other soul’s being aware of it. The solution is not difficult. Although the same soul pervades the universe, its combination with one body is not identical with its combination with another body. As in the case of Ideas, humanity moves when one person moves and remains at rest in another person, so also the same soul may have a sensation in one body and be unconscious of it in another body. Or, to use another illustration, when one burns the left hand, the right hand experiences no pain. And further, while the world-soul affects its parts – the individual souls, some individual experiences no more affect the world-soul than subliminal stimulation affects the individual person.
If the soul, however, even the world-soul, were the only principle, it would be impossible to account for even ordinary human intelligence. Soul of itself, brought to perfection, is the producer of life, but life does not automatically produce intellect. Whenever there exists a soul displaying intelligence, it is clear that a higher principle has been at work. The potential never becomes actual by chance; there must always precede an effective principle to induce actualization. Therefore, above soul one must posit the Divine Mind or, what is the same thing, the world of Ideas. To appreciate the identification of the mind and the objects of thought is difficult for the untutored in any age; to those who are tutored in modern idealism it may be confusing. One should particularly guard against using one’s own mind as an illustration of the Divine Mind and a sense object as an illustration of an object of thought. In Neo-Platonism the objects of mind are not sense objects by concepts, and since the essence of mind is thought, since the Divine Mind is always actual, there cannot be, as in the case of a human mind and a sense object, any separation of the mind from the objects which completely characterize it. Or conversely, suppose that the mind and its objects were not the same, and that the essence of the mind were separable from its thought. On such a supposition the mind would be only potentially intellectual, while in itself it would be unintellectual. Therefore the Divine Mind and its objects, the Ideas, are inseparable. In modern idealism the mind alone is ultimate and its ideas are its creations. But Plotinus writes, “Not by its thinking movement does movement arise. Hence it is an error to call the Ideas intellections in the sense that, upon an intellectual act in this principle one such Idea or another is made to exist.” It is true that the thoughts of the mind are Ideas, but it is untrue that the Ideas exist because the mind thinks them.
These Ideas, however, this Divine Mind, is still not the highest principle of all. For in this realm, duality remains. Since the Ideas are distinct from each other, there is multiplicity. In knowledge there is always a subject and a predicate, a knower and an object known, and hence duality. But duality is secondary to unity. Therefore is still remains to climb the step ascent of heaven to the source, the One. The climbing of the ascend and the resting on the summit, let it be noted, are not the same thing. The rational processes of philosophic dialectic demonstrate the necessary existence of the One. He who has felt the urge to unity can never rest in plurality, and is forced to posit a source superior to all diversity. But if we are to know that source and not just infer it, we must experience the One is mystic vision. Four times during the six years of Porphyry’s study under him, Plotinus enjoyed this communion. Of the many persons who have experienced trances, visions, or states of exaltation, some deliberately induced by self-hypnotization or even by violent physical frenzies. Such methods were alien to Plotinus; indeed he did not seek the vision at all, he studied and the vision was graciously vouchsafed to him. Then the ordinary conditions of consciousness are suspended and, having become oblivious of self and the world, the soul sees the One alone. The soul no longer knows whether it has a body, and cannot tell whether it is a man, or a living being, or anything real at all. In this happiness the soul knows beyond delusion that it is happy; delusion there cannot be, because Truth has revealed itself and nothing is truer than the True. The vision is a direct contact with the One, a divine illumination. All knowledge is rather like our sight of sense objects on a cloudy day; in the vision we see the Source of the light which made knowledge possible, and we see it directly in all its brilliance. No other light illumines the Source, but, as in the case of the sun, so here we see it by its own light, directly and immediately. This experience is not abnormal, it is but the exercise of a faculty which all have though few use. He who has seen, says Plotinus, knows what I mean.
During the vision there is neither time nor power for reasoning and reflection, but afterwards one may talk and make judgments about the experience. The experience itself cannot be written down, it can only be experienced; the place of the experience, and the position of the One in philosophy, can none the less be designated. And that place is at the apex of the whole system.
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Pg. 232
1. The shade or
ghost of Hercules in Hades, while his spirit at the same time is with the gods.
2. Concepts
could then be perceived by sensation.
3. The two souls are either the ghost in Hades and Hercules with the gods, or the soul in the body and the soul detached and purified. The latter pair is more in keeping with the general context. The two which precedes and the four which follows must be faculties, and not memories, as Brehier supposes.
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Pg. 233
1. Brehier translates: “The memory of sense objects belongs, therefore, to imagination.” It is true that so far only sense objects have been mentioned; the emphasis, however, is not on sensation, but rather on images. Therefore, the word such refers, not to sense objects, but to images, and the question of the memory of concepts is left open for discussion in the following chapter.
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Pg. 235
1. Chapters 2-8 criticize in detail all opposing theories, including that of Aristotle, which views the soul as form or entelechy.
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Pg. 238
1. Mackenna translates this, Farewell, etc., as if “I” were leaving this world and its associations. The verse comes from Empedocles, D. L. VIII 62, where the sense is that Empedocles walks among and ministers to his patients like a god. The greeting therefore is not Farewell, but Hail, or Rejoice. Plotinus probably meant that even now we are gods.
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Pg. 240
1. In Greek philosophy knowledge had regularly been explained by a comparison with sight; but if this is basic there can be knowledge only of external objects. Yet, since Socrates, the center of all good philosophy was self-knowledge. Note that this is not a question of being conscious that one sees a tree; the question is, how can one “see” his self?
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Pg. 241
1. Brehier: we are the thoughts. Zeller, p. 577, n. I: we are the faculty of discursive reason. TO the question, Do we reason in a similar manner, Brehier answers “Yes.” Mackenna answers “No.” The more indefinite “Well” of this translation seems to follow the text more closely, and the lines which follow clarify the hesitant answer.
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Pg. 242
1. Mackenna
translates this purpose clause, “And gives the man, once established There, the
power to appropriate what he has seen.” This interpretation is very doubtful,
because once established There, we have no more need of what we have seen Here.
2. Mackenna
gives the quite possible translation: “which it [discursive reason] has no need
to seek, but fully possesses.” Lines 20-30 might be understood so as to support
Mackenna’s interpretation.
3. And since it knows its own functions, it must have self-knowledge.
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Pgs. 243-244
1. Lines 17-28 give an excellent statement of the realistic theory of knowledge. Truth is the possession of the objects themselves, not the possession of their impressions, which act as a veil between knower and object. Sextus Empiricus, as a true skeptic, had assumed a division between knower and known. Plotinus, like any true realist, attacks the unexpressed basis of skepticism.
1, Or, he who has an impression will have an object different from real objects.
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Pg. 244
1. Or, he who has an impression will have an object different from real objects.
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Pg. 245
1. i.e., the Platonic Ideas.
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Pg. 246
1. By
etymology.
2. i.e.,
Because it is a reason, it grasps reasons.
3. The line of argument in lines 18-35 Brehier summarizes as follows: La connaissance discursive consiste, on l’a vu, a rapporter les traces des intelligibles en nous aux intelligibles eux-memes: attenuez, puis supprimer la distance qui separe ces traces de leur modeles; au lieu de la connaisance affaiblie de l’intelligence par la pensée discursive, vous aurez la connaisance de l’intelligence par elle-meme.
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Pg. 247
1. To this point Plotinus’ argument against the religiously oriented arguments which emphasize the vision of God more than self-knowledge is clear: if one knows God, he must know himself. Breheir understands the remainder of the argument, to line 25, in the same way. But this would concede too much to the opposing view. Let us, therefore, divide the argument into two parts, (a) if we see God, we know ourselves – the ad hominem argument, - and(b) if we do not see God, since what we see is our seeing all the more we must know ourselves, if truth is to be possible.
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Pg. 251
1. For a
discussion of lines 7-18, cf. The New Scholasticism, Vol. XII, No. I,
January 1938, pp. 66-68.
2. Brehier understands this to mean both potential and actual sensation.
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Pg. 252
1. There are many verbal reminiscences of Plato in Plotinus. Here cf. Philebus 64 c.
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Pg. 258
1. Or: for the separating intellect is one thing; but the indivisible intellect which does not separate is reality and all things.
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Pg. 259
1. The remaining few pages of this tractate are omitted.
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Pg. 261
1. Brehier notes that the Stoics identified soul and the unit; Aristotle the intellect and the unit.
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Pg. 265
1. Compare the anti-intellectual mysticism which for different reasons became prominent in the post-Kantian period.
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