Reviewer Notes for 'The Sacred History of Being' (2015)

Notes on Part One:

The Preface gives an outline overview of the book and its parts, and something of the context. One way to look at the book and its subject is as an extension of A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being, which examined the idea of Plenitude from the Classical Greeks onwards. SHB provides an extra nine hundred years to the history of the idea of Being, taking it back into the 14^th century B.C.E.

The first chapter explains something of the authors background, and how he came to approach the past from the point of view of the history of the idea of Being, and came to study ancient languages and history in London.

Historians of philosophy treat the 5^th century B.C.E. as the proper start of sophisticated philosophical thought, as we now understand it, with figures such as Parmenides, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle as the principal figures. It comes as shock to find Plato recounting the immense age of philosophy in his dialogue The Protagoras. This is the subject of ‘How Old is Philosophy?’, and ‘The Arrival of the Idea of Being’

‘The West and the Other’ explores the way western modes of thought are inverted from those in the east.  ‘The Golem’ is about how it is possible for things present in bodies of evidence to remain invisible. When the SHB project began, I expected it to be difficult to find supporting evidence. In fact it is present in vast quantities both in ancient texts and in the archaeology. But two centuries of scholarship have glided past this evidence, as if it is not there.

‘Change and what is Permanent’ looks at some of the ideas which are present, but which are not much studied. These are abstractions, which are normally associated with the philosophical explosion of the 5^th century B.C.E. in Greece, but are major components in thought from earlier periods. The human capacity to deal in abstractions is, as a corollary of the notion of cultural progress, assumed to have developed first in Greece. This a poor frame in which to try to understand ancient thought.

The discussion which occupies the rest of Part One of SHB concerns the Ontological Argument, which has been the mainstay of the understanding of the nature and reality of God in the west, since Anselm. The point of this extended discussion of this argument is to show that it isn’t really about the nature of the divine at all, but about the properties and attributes of the divine. In other words, it is loosely argued, and assumes that the frame of time, space and the underlying reality of the world (whatever that might be), is something which exists apart from the nature of God.

This isn’t how divinity was understood or discussed in the ancient world. To argue in this way puts an insuperable barrier between ourselves and the possibility of an understanding of the divine in antiquity, and makes it impossible for us to understand the relationship between religion and philosophy.

The chapters are:

A Sense of the Past.
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the Idea of Being.
The West and the Other.
The Golem.
Change and what is Permanent.
The Ontological Argument.
The Ontological Argument in Anselm.
The Ontological Argument in Descartes.
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley.
Hume and Kant on Reality.
The End of the Ontological Argument.

Notes on Part Two:

Part two explores ancient Greek ideas about the Divine, and the arguments which were used. It looks in detail at argumentation which appears in Plato’s work, and also at ideas which are reputed to have been part of the doctrines of Pythagoras.

‘The Sweet Song of Swans’ examines the nature and history of the scholarship around the work of Plato, which is contained mainly within the period of the past two centuries. The Platonic corpus is problematic. It appears to be inconsistent. Plato was still writing at 80 years of age, and so it seems possible that Plato changed his views over time, and this is reflected in half a lifetime of writing. On the other hand, there is no evidence that Plato’s Academy was a research institution, and so there is no reason to assume that his views changed during that half a lifetime. Those modern scholars who take this view have a problem however, since they have been unable to dig out the consistent doctrine (hoary with age) underpinning the weaving discourse of the dialogues.

The late neoPlatonic philosopher Olympiodorus gives us some clues as to the reasons for the form of Plato’s discourse. Further clues come from close analysis of some parts of Plato’s dialogues, particularly in the Timaeus and the Sophist.

Plato often refers to looking to the ‘one true thing’. That ’one true thing' is Being itself, which he characterises as ‘The Good’. It never changes, it is entirely itself, and it is the goal of the philosopher to rise through the forms to the form of the good, and to return again, with knowledge of beneficial things.

J.G. Frazer once said that nothing useful could be said of the idea of Being. This was flying in the face of the whole of antiquity, whose civilizations articulated many aspects of the nature of Being as part of their understanding of the world. ‘Eleven attributes of Being’ discusses these, and why they had such importance in antiquity.

‘Pythagoras on Totality’ concerns a doctrine which was understood both in Mesopotamia and in ancient Greece. The idea can be traced back to the middle of the second millennium in Mesopotamia. Pythagoras is said to have learned of it in a lecture at Babylon after its fall to the Persians. Plato knew of it, and mentions the doctrine in his Timaeus. Once again, it is the idea of the ‘all’ being the location of all knowledge. It is the principal goal of the philosopher to access the totality of all reality. The distinction we customarily imagine to exist between philosophers and priests in antiquity, more or less breaks down at this point.

‘Solon in the court of Croesus’ is a re-examination of one of the most famous stories from antiquity, as told by Herodotus. There are details in the story which do not make sense without some analysis. In fact he is telling us about the importance of completion in understanding whether something is good or bad. He also connects the life of man with the cosmos using an unusual selection of numbers.
 

If we look closely at Homer’s Iliad (Book Eighteen in particular), we can see ideas in the text which are later reflected in Plato’s writing, which suggests strongly that Plato was writing about a body of ideas which was present in the late Bronze Age (discussed in the chapter 'Being in Homer').

The chapters are:

The Sweet Song of Swans.
The Academy.
The Platonic Theory of Being.
Plato’s Theory of Vision.
The Paradox of Knowledge.
Eleven attributes of Being.
Pythagoras and Totality.
Solon in the court of Croesus.
The Complexion of the Dead.
Being in Homer.

Notes on Part Three:

Ideas about water and ocean are held in common around the Mediterranean in the first and second millennia B.C.E. These ideas are associated with creation and the generation of life. They are also associated with the idea of abundance, which features in the Babylonian creation myth, performed each year by the King and the priests. The liturgy tells us about the intellectual frame of their world, as they understood it.  The physical world is a place of refuge, created by the gods to ensure the well-being of human life. The King is the earthly embodiment of the King of the gods, Marduk, whose character is described in detail. Each of his qualities enables him to maintain the good order of the world. Which tells us important things about how the gods were understood.

Israel suffered from the Assyrian addiction to war and cultural depredation. The Hebrews also spent some time in exile in Babylon, which gave them an insight into Mesopotamian thought about the Divine. Or was that insight garbled by the Hebrews, because they were engaged in a political and military struggle with their neighbours? ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’ considers this question.

The close connection between Hebrew and Assyrian thought was demonstrated by Simo Parpola in the early nineteen-nineties,  who showed that the Jewish Kabbalah is a close analogue of the Assyrian sacred tree. The Assyrian sacred tree is never described in detail in texts, though it is ubiquitous in Assyrian iconography. However if the principal Assyrian gods are placed within the structure of the Kabbalistic tree, with their associated god numbers, the fit is perfect. Formerly the Kabbalistic tree was understood to have been devised sometime in the early middle ages, possibly drawing on gnostic thought. If it is as old as the Assyrian sacred tree, then the history of intellectual thought as we have it is wrong.

The final part of the book concerns the installation of statues of the gods in both Assyria and Babylon. The revelation of close examination of the texts is that they are not talking about installing images of the gods, but the gods themselves. The rituals are described in detail, which gives an extraordinary insight into the minds of the scholars in the royal courts of Assyria and Babylon, and suggests we need to alter our perceptions of how divinity and the gods were understood in the first and second millennia B.C.E.

The postscript summarises how we might now understand the concept of Being, and the meaning of the representation of the gods, in both ancient Mesopotamia, and in ancient Greece.

The chapters are:

Ocean and the Limit of Existence.
Creation.
The Fifty names of Marduk.
The Idea of Being in Israel.
Understanding Creation as a Sacred Tree.
Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree.
The Making and the Renewal of the Gods.
The Ritual sequence and its purpose.
The Nineveh ritual.
The Babylonian ritual.
Finding the Name of the Sacred Tree.
Postscript.

Notes on the Appendices:

It is a strange fact that neither of the two premier universities in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, managed to get the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the neoPlatonists into English translation before a private individual did, at the cusp of the two centuries. The work was done by a scholar of great gifts, Thomas Taylor, supported by a private benefactor. He chose to undertake the translation of Plato and Aristotle, and the neoPlatonists, because he did not recognise the notional division between them which has taken root in western academia since the Enlightenment. Post-Enlightenment scholars like to understand Plato outside of a theological context, which doesn’t at all square with the focus of his writing. Plato would have been utterly dismayed to be read in this way, but the neoPlatonists are clearly talking theology, and so they need to be kept apart for the purposes of an academic and untheological understanding of Plato. I’ve included a mildly redacted piece by Thomas Taylor, which explains why Plato’s discussion of the one and the ineffable is a theological matter of some importance.

The appendix on the story of the first sage in Babylonia is included to amplify what we know of the Babylonian understanding of how knowledge is acquired. It is acquired from Being itself, represented by the ocean and the ocean depths, because Being is the all, and all knowledge is necessarily already there. So a conversation with eternity, which is what the all is, is the principle source of knowledge of good and beneficial things.

The extract from the annals of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal on the exercise of kingship shows the importance attached to the idea of excellence in ancient Assyria, and that a concern with excellence was not an invention of the Greeks. Ashurbanipal lived in the seventh century B.C.E. Before now this significant passage had not been retranslated since the late nineteenth century. The Assyriologist Simo Parpola was kind enough to provide a new translation for me in 2005.

The appendices are:

Thomas Taylor on the Ineffable principle.
Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind.
Ashurbanipal on the exercise of Kingship.
Select Bibliography.
Abbreviations



Thomas Yaeger, April 10, 2018. Chapters added, September 2018.