For his followers, Socrates had become an incarnation of divine beatitude, a symbol of the wisdom to which his whole life was directed. Henceforth each school of Greek philosophy would revere its founding sage as an avatar of a transcendent idea that was natural to humanity but almost impossibly difficult to achieve.49 The Greeks had always seen the gods as immanent in human excellence; now the sage would express in human form the rational idea of God that had left the old Olympian theology far behind. Despite his humanity— and Alcibiades makes it clear that he was all too human—Socrates’ unique qualities pointed beyond himself to the transcendence that informed his moral quest. This became especially evident in the manner of his death. Socrates admitted that his conflict with the polis was inevitable. He had approached each of the magistrates of the city personally, trying to persuade him “not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible; not to care for the city’s possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way.”50 This advice would not have appealed to many politicians. Before he drank the hemlock, he washed his body to spare the women, thanked his jailer courteously for his kindness, and made mild jokes about his predicament. Instead of destructive, consuming rage, there was a quiet, receptive peace as he looked death calmly in the face, forbade his friends to mourn, and lovingly accepted their companionship.
The execution of Socrates made a lasting impression on Plato, who became so disillusioned that he abandoned his dream of a political career and traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, where he became acquainted with Pythagorean spirituality. When he returned to Athens, he founded a school of philosophy and mathematics in a grove dedicated to the hero Academius on the outskirts of the city. The Academy was nothing like a department of philosophy in a modern Western university. It was a religious association; everybody attended the daily sacrifice to the gods performed by one of the students, who came not only to hear Plato’s ideas but to learn how to conduct their lives.51
Plato regarded philosophy as an apprenticeship for death,52 and claimed that this had also been the goal of Socrates: “Those who practise philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.”53 At the moment of death the soul would become free of the body, so Plato’s disciples had to live out this separation on a daily, hourly basis, paying careful attention to their behavior, as if each moment were their last. They must constantly be on their guard against pettiness and triviality, thus transcending the individualized personality that they would one day leave behind, and strive instead for a panoptic perspective that grasped “both divine and human as a whole.”54 A philosopher must not be a money lover, a coward, or a braggart; he should be reliable and just in his dealings with others.55 A man who consistently behaved as if he were already dead should not take earthly affairs too seriously, but should be calm in misfortune. He must eat and drink in moderation, feeding his rational powers instead with “fine arguments and speculations.” If he applied himself faithfully to this regimen, the philosopher would no longer resent his mortality; it would be quite absurd for a man who had lived in this way to be upset when death finally arrived. If he had already set his soul free of the toils of the body, he could “leave it alone, pure and by itself, to get on with its investigations, to yearn after and perceive something, it knows not what.”56
Like the Pythagoreans, Plato regarded mathematics as a spiritual exercise that helped the philosopher to wean himself from sense perceptions and achieve a level of abstraction that enabled him to view the world in a different way. Geometry was the hidden principle of the cosmos. Even though a perfect circle or triangle was never seen in the physical world, all material objects were structured on these ideal forms. Indeed, every single earthly reality was modeled on a heavenly archetype in a world of perfect ideas. Plato departed from Socrates in one important respect. He believed that we did not arrive at a conception of virtue by accumulating examples of virtuous behavior in daily life. Like everything else, virtue was an objective phenomenon that existed independently and on a higher plane than the material world.
Plato’s “doctrine of the forms” is an extraordinary notion to us moderns. We regard thinking as something that we do, so we naturally assume that our ideas are our own creation. But in the ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to them. It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the “Known” drew one to itself. People said, in effect, “I think— therefore there is that which I think.”57 So everything that was thought about had an objective existence in an ideal world. The doctrine of the forms was really a rationalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy, in which every earthly object or experience here below had its counterpart in the divine sphere.58 For Plato, the forms were in a realm apart. Numinous and timeless, they became manifest in the imperfect realities of our world but were not themselves involved in the endless process of change. The philosopher’s task was to become vividly aware of this superior level of being by cultivating his powers of reason.
Plato’s vision of the transcendent forms seems to have been influenced by his experience of the Mysteries, which, like his philosophy, helped people to live creatively with their mortality. In the Phaedrus, he has left us one of the fullest—albeit discreetly veiled—accounts of the Eleusinian experience. Most people, he explained, were unable to see the forms shining through their earthly counterparts because “the senses are so murky.” But during their initiation, the mystai had all glimpsed their radiant beauty when,
along with the glorious chorus … [we] saw that blessed and spectacular vision and were ushered into the mystery that we may rightly call the most blessed of all: And we who celebrated it were wholly perfect and free of all the troubles that awaited us in time to come, and we gazed in rapture at sacred revealed objects that were perfect, and simple, and unshakeable and blissful. That was the ultimate vision, and we saw it in pure light because we were pure ourselves, not buried in this thing we are carrying around now, which we call a body, locked in it like an oyster in its shell.59
Plato’s pupils were not required to “believe” in the existence of the forms but received a philosophical initiation that gave them a direct experience of this vision.
Plato did not impose his ideas on his pupils or expound them systematically, like a modern academic, but introduced them playfully and allusively in the course of a conversation in which other viewpoints were also expressed. In his writings we find no definitive account of the “doctrine of the forms,” for example, because each dialogue was addressed to a different audience with its own needs and problems. His written work, a mere teaching aid, was no substitute for the intensity of an oral dialogue that had an emotional aspect that was essential to the philosophical experience. Like any ritual, it was extremely hard work, requiring “a great expense of time and trouble.” Like Socrates, Plato insisted that it must be conducted in a gentle, compassionate manner so that participants “felt with” their partners.
It is only when all these things, names and definitions, visual and other sensations, are rubbed together and subjected to tests in which questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice that finally, when human capacity is stretched to its limit, a spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out and illuminates the subject at issue.60
If the argument was spiteful and competitive, the initiation would not work. The transcendent insight achieved was as much the product of a dedicated lifestyle as of intellectual striving. It was “not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter.”61
In The Republic, Plato’s description of an ideal polis, he described the process of philosophical initiation in his famous allegory of the cave.62 He imagined a grou
p of men who had been chained up all their lives in a cave; turned away from the sunlight, they could see only shadows of objects in the outside world cast on the rocky wall. This was an image of the unenlightened human condition. We are so inured to our deprived vision that, like the prisoners, we assume that the ephemeral shadows we see are the true reality. If the prisoners were taken into the upper world, they would be bewildered and dazzled by its light, brilliance, and vibrancy; they would find it too much and would want to go back to their twilight existence. So they must be initiated gradually into this new mode of being. The sunlight was a symbol of the Good, the highest of the forms, source of knowledge and existence. The Good lay beyond anything we could experience in ordinary life. But at the end of a long apprenticeship, enlightened souls would be able to bask in its light. They would want to linger in the upper world, but had a duty to go back to the cave and enlighten their companions. They would be able to assess the problems of their shadowy world far more clearly now, but they would get no credit for it. Their former companions would probably laugh at them. They might even turn on their liberators and kill them—just, Plato implied, as the Athenians had executed Socrates.
Toward the end of Plato’s life, as the political situation in Athens deteriorated, his vision became more elitist and hard-line. In The Laws, his last work, which described another utopian republic, he even introduced an inquisitorial mechanism to enforce a theological orthodoxy that took precedence over ethical behavior. The first duty of the state was to inculcate “the right thoughts about the gods, and then to live accordingly, well or not well.”63 This was an entirely new development, alien to both ancient religion and philosophy.64 A “nocturnal council” must supervise the thinking of the citizens, who were required to submit to three articles of faith: that the gods existed, that they cared for human beings, and that they could not be influenced by sacrifice and worship. A convicted atheist was allowed five years to recant, but if he persisted in his heresy, he would be executed.65 It is sobering to note that the inquisitorial methods that the Enlightenment philosophes castigated in the revealed religions made an early appearance in the Greek rational tradition they so much admired.
In his later work, Plato’s theology also became more concrete and prepared the ground for the religious preoccupation with the physical cosmos that would characterize a great deal of Western religion. In the Timaeus, he devised a creation myth—not, of course, intended to be taken literally—that presented the world as shaped by a divine craftsman (demiourgos), who was eternal, good but not omnipotent. He was not the supreme God. There was a higher deity who was virtually unknowable, so removed from us that he was basically irrelevant. “To find the maker and father of this universe is hard enough,” Plato remarked, “and even if I succeeded, to declare him to everyone is impossible.”66 This was no creation ex nihilo: the craftsman merely worked on preexistent matter and had to model his creation on the eternal forms. The point of the story was to show that the universe, based as it was on the forms, was intelligible. The cosmos was a living organism, with a rational mind and soul that could be discerned in its mathematical proportions and the regular revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Participating in the divinity of the archetypal forms, the stars were “visible and generated gods” and Earth, the mythical Gaia, was the principal deity. So too the nous of each human person was a divine spark that, if nourished correctly, could “raise us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven.”67 Plato had helped to lay the foundations of the important Western belief that human beings lived in a perfectly rational world and that the scientific exploration of the cosmos was a spiritual discipline.
Aristotle (c. 384–322), Plato’s most brilliant pupil, brought philosophical rationalism down to earth. A biologist rather than a mathematician, he was intrigued by the process of decay and development that so disturbed Plato, because he saw it as the key to the understanding of life. Aristotle spent years in Asia Minor dissecting animals and plants and writing detailed descriptions of his investigations. He had no interest in leaving Plato’s cave but found beauty and absorbing interest in the fascinating design that he saw everywhere in the physical world. For Aristotle, a “form” was not an eternal archetype but the immanent structure that determined the development of every single substance. Aristotelian science was dominated by the idea of telos: like any human artifact, everything in the cosmos was directed toward a particular “end” and had a specific purpose, a “final cause.” Like the acorn that was programmed to become an oak tree, its entire being was devoted to achieving this potential. So change should be celebrated, because it represented a dynamic and universal striving for fulfillment.
Aristotle’s writings are often inconsistent and contradictory, but his aim was not to devise a coherent philosophical system, rather to establish a scientific method of inquiry. His writings were simply lecture notes, and a treatise was not meant to be definitive but was always adapted to the needs of a particular group of students, some of whom would be more advanced than others and would need different material. In the Greek world, dogma (“teaching”) was not cast in stone once it was committed to writing but usually varied according to the understanding and expertise of the people to whom it was addressed. Like Plato, Aristotle was chiefly concerned not with imparting information but with promoting the philosophical way of life.68 His scientific research was not an end in itself, therefore, but a method of conducting the bios theoretikos, the “contemplative life” that introduced human beings to the supreme happiness. What distinguished men—Aristotle had little time for the female—from other animals was their ability to think rationally. This was their “form,” the end for which they were designed, so in order to achieve eudaimonia (“well-being”) they must strive to think clearly, calculate, study, and work things out. This would also affect a man’s moral health, since qualities such as courage or generosity had to be regulated by reason. “The life according to reason is best and pleasantest,” he wrote in one of his later treatises, “since reason, more than anything else, is man.”69
Like Plato, Aristotle believed that human intelligence was divine and immortal. It linked human beings to the gods and gave them the ability to grasp ultimate truth. Unlike sensual pleasure or purely practical activity, the pleasures of theoria (the “contemplation” of truth for its own sake) did not wax and wane but were a continuous joy, giving the thinker that self-sufficiency that characterized the highest life of all. “We must, therefore, in so far as we can, strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us,” Aristotle insisted. Theoria was a divine activity, so a man could practice it only “in so far as something divine is present in him.”70 His biological research was a spiritual exercise: people who were “inclined to philosophy” and could “trace the links of causation” would find that it brought them “immense pleasure”71 because, by exercising his reason, a scientist was participating in the hidden life of God.
Aristotle thought that the universe was eternal. So his God was not the Creator, the First Cause of being, but the Unmoved Mover that set the cosmos in motion. Aristotle’s cosmology would determine Western ideas about the universe until the sixteenth century: the earth was at the center of the cosmos, and the other heavenly bodies, each in its own celestial sphere, revolved around it. What had set the stars and planets in their unchanging revolutions? He had noticed that the motion of an earthly object was always activated by something outside itself. But the force responsible for celestial motion must itself be immobile, since reason demanded that the chain of cause and effect have a starting point. In the animal kingdom, movement could be sparked by desire. A hungry lion would stalk a lamb because he wanted to eat. So perhaps longing had set the stars in motion. They were themselves so perfect that they could only yearn toward a still greater perfection, impelled by an intellectual love of the entirely self-sufficient God that was absorbed in the supreme activity of noesis noeseos (“thinking about thinking”), the ceaseless contemplation of
itself.
For Aristotle, theologia, “discourse about God,” was the “first philosophy” because it was concerned with the highest mode of being, but Aristotle’s God was utterly impersonal and bore no resemblance to either Yahweh or the Olympians. It had no appeal for ordinary folk.72 Aristotle was convinced, however, that a philosopher who exercised his reasoning powers to the full would be able to experience this remote deity. Like any Greek, Aristotle believed that when he thought about something, his intellect was activated by the object of his thought, so it followed that when he was engaged in the contemplation of God, he participated to a degree in the divine life. “Thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought,” he explained,
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