Excellence and the Knowledge of Divine Things

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

There is a telling passage in the seventh section of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Alexander’, concerning esoteric thought. It is couched in interesting terms, which we rarely associate with things which are hidden because they are associated with divine things. Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon,

seeing that his son was easily led, but could not be made to do anything by force, used always to manage him by persuasion, and never gave him orders. As he did not altogether care to entrust his education to the teachers whom he had obtained, but thought that it would be too difficult a task for them…. he sent for Aristotle, the most renowned philosopher of the age, to be his son's tutor, and paid him a handsome reward for doing so. He had captured and destroyed Aristotle's native city of Stageira; but now he rebuilt it, and repeopled it, ransoming the citizens, who had been, sold for slaves, and bringing back those who were living in exile. For Alexander and Aristotle he appointed the temple and grove of the nymphs, near the city of Mieza, as a school-house and dwelling; and there to this day are shown the stone seat where Aristotle sat, and the shady avenues where he used to walk.

Plutarch opens his life of Alexander with a cheerful complaint about the sheer extent of the materials available to him to write on Alexander, and defends some of the necessary omissions by saying that he is writing a biography, and not a history. So the details which are in his essay are there because he regarded them as important in showing Alexander’s character, his disposition, and the content of his mind. On the basis of his sources he says:

It is thought that Alexander was taught by him not only his doctrines of Morals and Politics, but also those more abstruse mysteries which are only communicated orally and are kept concealed from the vulgar: for after he had invaded Asia, hearing that Aristotle had published some treatises on these subjects, he wrote him a letter in which he defended the practice of keeping these speculations secret.

Plutarch references and quotes from several letters from Alexander, and from a diary, so it is likely that there were such things in circulation in Plutarch’s time, as well as the writings of his companions. Here he mentions Aristotle’s doctrines of morals and politics, which we would expect, given that he wrote extensively on these subjects (there is a volume on politics; he and his students compiled the constitutions of each Greek polis, only one of which has come down to us; and there are three different works on ethics extant, which are probably lecture notes compiled by his students); but he also references an esoteric level of teaching which Aristotle imparted – ‘those more abstruse mysteries… communicated orally and kept concealed from the vulgar’.

The esoteric is the opposite of the exoteric, or surface meaning of a doctrine. Plato’s teaching was also conducted at two levels, the inside and the outside, referred to as ta eso and ta exo in the Theatetus.

Plutarch however suggests by his wording that there is an esoteric level to an understanding of Aristotle’s teaching on both morals and politics, but the teaching of those mysteries are less abstruse.

How could we ever know what those abstruse mysteries might be? It would seem to be impossible. But the clue is in Alexander’s letter sent from Asia to complain about Aristotle’s publication of some treatises on these subjects. The letter is quoted as follows:

"Alexander to Aristotle wishes health. You have not done well in publishing abroad those sciences which should only be taught by word of mouth. For how shall we be distinguished from other men, if the knowledge which we have acquired be made the common property of all? I myself had rather excel others in excellency of learning than in greatness of power. Farewell."

This is a revealing answer. The objection is connected with the idea of excellence in learning and knowledge, and excelling in that knowledge, in order to be distinguished from other men. We can take from this statement, which places temporal greatness as a poor second to knowledge of abstruse things, that Alexander is referring knowledge of divine things, and consequently the principle of excellence itself.

This adds a whole new level to the endless references in the contemporary literature on Alexander to the question of whether or not he was divine by birth, whether he thought himself to be divine, whether or not he should receive divine honours, or if he was in pursuit of actual divinity.  In modern times the details and significance are not discussed as they were in antiquity, since scholars have no sense of how important such questions were at the time. We flatten everything into a discussion of the pursuit of power, status and political ideology. We have a glimpse here of the real context of Alexander’s understanding of what was important.

Plutarch gives the import of Aristotle’s reply to Alexander, saying that:

To pacify him…. [he] wrote …. that these doctrines were published, and yet not published: meaning that his treatise on Metaphysics was only written for those who had been instructed in philosophy by himself, and would be quite useless in other hands.

The emphasis is mine. So again, we have the assertion, this time from Aristotle, that there is an inside and an outside understanding of his doctrine, and accepts that details of both are in the text. He excuses this on the grounds that it was ‘only written for those who had been instructed in philosophy… and would be quite useless in other hands’.

So the clue is in the teaching of philosophy. Philosophy, at least when taught at an esoteric level, gives useful knowledge of what is excellent, and what is divine. Without philosophy, such knowledge is not to be had. This is a clear indication that philosophy and philosophical questions and puzzles were understood to lie behind doctrine and teaching concerning the divine.

Plutarch then goes on to illustrate Alexander’s interest in excellence, by suggesting that Aristotle:

… more than anyone else implanted a love of medicine in Alexander, who was not only fond of discussing the theory, but used to prescribe for his friends when they were sick, and order them to follow special courses of treatment and diet, as we gather from his letters. He was likewise fond of literature and of reading, and we are told by Onesikritus that he was wont to call the Iliad a complete manual of the military art, and that he always carried with him Aristotle's recension of Homer's poems, which is called 'the casket copy,' and placed it under his pillow together with his dagger. Being without books when in the interior of Asia, he ordered Harpalus to send him some. Harpalus sent him the histories of Philistus, several plays of Euripides, Sophokles, and Æschylus, and the dithyrambic hymns of Telestus and Philoxenus.

Again, Plutarch reinforces the importance of excellence to Alexander, saying that when he was a youth:

… used to love and admire Aristotle more even than his father, for he said that the latter had enabled him to live, but that the former had taught him to live well.

And living well is a main focus of Aristotle’s published work. Though the relationship later cooled,

he never lost that interest in philosophical speculation which he had acquired in his youth, as is proved by the honours which he paid to Anaxarchus, the fifty talents which he sent as a present to Xenokrates, and the protection and encouragement which he gave to Dandamris and Kalanus.

Philosophical speculation of course implies a degree of conjecture in discussion, and the fact that not everything is known or knowable by the merely mortal. Knowledge of the importance of excellence is however one way in which the divine can be approached, and that appears to have been an important component in Alexander’s mission.

This idea can be traced in Plato’s writing also. In the Protagoras, he suggests (through Protagoras) that the practice of philosophy is very ancient among the Greeks, and not something relatively newly invented. He suggests that it is widespread,

and particularly in Crete and Lacedaemon; and there are more sophists there than in any other country. 

Echoing Alexander’s view that philosophy, at least at an esoteric level, should be communicated only by oral teaching, in order that those who have studied philosophy should excel others in the knowledge of excellence, Protagoras says that:

They dissemble, however, and pretend that they are unlearned, in order that it may not be manifest that they surpass the rest of the Greeks in wisdom (just as Protagoras has said respecting the sophists); but that they may appear to excel in military skills and fortitude; thinking if their real character were known, that all men would engage in the same pursuit. But now, concealing this, they deceive those who laconize in other cities. [Protagoras 342a-b]

So the Cretans and the Spartans wished not only to conceal knowledge of excellence, but to conceal that they excelled in knowledge of excellent things. 

To us Plato’s admiration of the Spartans has always seemed rather improbable, since we have followed the account of the Spartans written by Xenophon which reveals nothing which supports the idea that the Spartans were superior in philosophy – nor even that they were interested in the practice. 

What advantage could they gain for themselves by restricting public understanding of their practice of philosophy? The exchange between Aristotle and Alexander gives us the clue. It is about the knowledge of excellence, and of divine things which is attained through the practice of philosophy. The use of the word ‘wisdom’ in connection with the Spartan practice of philosophy is significant: we are accustomed to keeping philosophy and religion apart in the study of the past; however ‘wisdom’ is a concept which appears in ancient sources in the context of both philosophy and religion. If the practice of philosophy among the Spartans was in some way connected with their religion, and perhaps their model of reality, this would supply an explanation of their reticence, and the general reticence of Greeks in discussing religious matters.

 

Plato’s Protagoras tells us that the Lacedaemonians have imitators, who imitate only surface details because they have no knowledge of their real interests and skills.

But the Lacedaemonians, when they wish to speak freely with their own sophists,… expel these laconic imitators, and then discourse with their sophists, without admitting any strangers to be present at their conversations. Neither do they suffer any of their young men to travel into other cities, as neither do the Cretans, lest they should unlearn what they have learnt. But in these cities, there are not only men of profound erudition, but women also. And that I assert these things with truth, and that the Lacedaemonians are disciplined in the best manner in philosophy and discourse.

Protagoras also tells us that:

…if any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedaemonians, he will at first find him, for the most part apparently despicable in conversation, but afterwards, when a proper opportunity presents itself, this same mean person, like a skilled jaculator, will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short, and contorted; so that he who converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a boy. That to laconize, therefore, consists much more in philosophising, than in the love of exercise, is understood by some of the present age, and was known to the ancients; they being persuaded that the ability of uttering such sentences as these is the province of a man perfectly learned. Among the number of those who were thus persuaded, were Thales the Milesian, Pittacus the Mitylenaean, Bias the Prienean, our Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian, Miso the Chenean, and the seventh of these is said to be the Lacedaemonian Chilo. All these were emulators, lovers, and disciples of the Lacedaemonian erudition.’ [342b-343a]

Protagoras reminds us that the Spartans…’assembling together, consecrated to Apollo the first fruits of their wisdom, writing in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi those sentences which are celebrated by all men, viz. “Know thyself”, and “Nothing too much”’. He tells us this in order ‘to show that the mode of philosophy among the ancients was a certain laconic brevity of diction’  [343b]

Of course it is always possible that this is an elaborate jest on Plato’s part: attributing a philosophical inclination to a people famous for a disinclination to the mental life. Yet many Spartan pronouncements are very famous (those in the preceding footnote included), and of course the Cretans are memorialized in the philosophical conundrum ‘All Cretans are liars: I am a Cretan’.

Socrates was forced to drink the poison Hemlock after being found guilty of both corrupting the youth of Athens and of atheism. The first charge is related to the second in that he was sowing doubt among the youth of Athens about the existence of the gods. In other words, the sin of Socrates was seen among his peers as one committed against the religion of the Athenians. 

If so, it would appear that we owe our knowledge of the practice of philosophy in Greece to the fact that in Attica, in the middle years of the first millennium B.C.E., the practice of philosophy was somehow prised free from its religious context, in that we have a very public show of philosophy from the presocratics onwards. That philosophy was understood to be, however, not entirely beyond the scope of the arbitration by the religious authorities, is shown by the charges brought against Plato’s master Socrates, and the severity of the judgement against him. 

[Text uploaded May 27, 2017]

Before Anthropology

[This is a short chapter from my forthcoming book, The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion]

***

Much of the discussion of ancient religion is from an anthropological perspective, so it makes sense to look first at the development of anthropological writing. The first chapter of Eriksen and Nielsens, A History of Anthropology (2001) gives a general account of what they call ‘proto-anthropology’, covering the period from Herodotus up to the European Enlightenment.

It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as the

science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly refer to

as ‘the West’, notably in four ‘Western’ countries: France, Britain,

the USA and Germany. Historically speaking, this is a European

discipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences,

occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.*1

Eriksen and Nielsen begin their account of the history of anthropology with Herodotus, who is the earliest writer on other societies whose work is mostly still extant. They know that Herodotus is sometimes unreliable as a witness to the nature of foreign cultures, so they don’t spend a lot of time discussing his work, or the possible reasons some of his accounts are untrustworthy. Herodotus was constructing his history according  to a number of precepts. Apart from his concern with the nature of fame, the one everyone knows about is the long conflict with the Persians, which continued after his death. His stated purpose was to write the story of the conflict, and to provide a background to the conflict. Another one is his presumption that the nature of people and cultures is geographically determined. People in the north, south, east and west are different from each other on that account. If it is hot in one place and cool in another, they will be different from each other. Those somewhere in the middle (i.e., Greece) possess a more balanced nature as individuals, and also in cultural terms.

We could ask where this geographic determinism comes from. The question is rarely asked. The answer to the question, which will be discussed later, is very revealing.

 The Greeks are singled out as being conscious of foreign peoples and societies as something ‘other’, which is a term which often appears in anthropological writing. There are two ways to approach something which is ‘other’ however:

Many Greeks tested their wits against a philosophical paradox

that touches directly on the problem of how we should relate to

‘the Others’. This is the paradox of universalism versus relativism.

A present-day universalist would try to identify commonalities and

similarities (or even universals) between different societies, while

a relativist would emphasise the uniqueness and particularity of

each society or culture. The Sophists of Athens are sometimes

described as the first philosophical relativists in the European

tradition….

This is true not only for anthropologists, but true for most human beings. It is possible to look in two opposite directions – to what is universal, and to what is particular. And sometimes to see-saw between them, according to circumstances. We function within mental paradigms, open to some categories of what is important and can be understood, and closed to some others. What we see is what it is possible to see with the mental and cultural apparatus we have. And none of these apparatuses are universal in the human population.

The authors conjure a scene, drawn from two famous dialogues by Plato (427-347 BCE), the Gorgias and the Protagoras, in which Socrates is in argument with the Sophists:

We may picture them in dignified intellectual battle, surrounded by 

colourful temples and solemn public buildings, with their slaves scarcely 

visible in theshadows between the columns. Other citizens stand as spectators,

while Socrates’ faith in a universal reason, capable of ascertaining

universal truths, is confronted by the relativist view that truth will

always vary with experience and what we would today call culture.

Which is not the way either Plato or Socrates would have characterised the conflict between their view and the view of the Sophists. The Sophists were interested in the money that their rhetorical skills could bring them, and Plato said they argued to make the worse cause appear the better.  From the point of view of Plato and Socrates, the choice between addressing universals and particulars was not a valid choice at all. The pursuit of what was universal was the way to knowledge of what was true; the opposite was to separate one thing from another, and as a consequence, nothing true could be discovered. Eriksen and Neilsen point out that:

Plato’s dialogues do not deal directly with cultural differences.

But they bear witness to the fact that cross-cultural encounters

were part of everyday life in the city-states.

And they are done with Plato. Aristotle’s contribution to the development of anthropology is not quite so brief, but it is clear that though Aristotle 384-322 BCE) sought to describe and understand difference in the world, his interest is also in universals. The Greeks were always concerned with both however, since the philosophical process known as dialectic was based on the identification of what was the same, and what was different. The process is illustrated very clearly in the early part of Plato’s Sophist.

In his philosophical anthropology he (Aristotle)

discusses the differences between humans in general and animals,

and concludes that although humans have several needs in common

with animals, only man possesses reason, wisdom and morality.

He also argued that humans are fundamentally social by nature. In

anthropology and elsewhere, such a universalistic style of thought,

which seeks to establish similarities rather than differences between

groups of people, plays a prominent role to this day.

 However they concede that:

it seems clear that anthropology has vacillated up through history

between a universalistic and a relativistic stance, and that central

figures in the discipline are also often said to lean either towards

one position or the other.

Which is perhaps an admission that there is something problematic in the discipline of anthropology. Or perhaps there is something problematic and troubling in the human engagement with the world in general.

After a brief interlude after the collapse of the ancient world, and a few remarks about Arab scholarship during the long dark ages in Europe, the authors pick up their narrative in the early fifteenth century CE:

The ‘Age of Discovery’ was of crucial importance for later

developments in Europe and the world, and – on a lesser scale

– for the development of anthropology. From the Portuguese

King Henry the Navigator’s exploration of the West coast of

Africa in the early fifteenth century, via Columbus’ five journeys

to America (1492–1506), to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the

globe (1519–22), the travels of this period fed the imaginations of

Europeans with vivid descriptions of places whose very existence

they had been unaware of. These travelogues, moreover, reached

wide audiences, since the printing press, invented in the mid-fifteenth

century, soon made books a common and relatively inexpensive

commodity all over Europe.

Of course these expeditions were not scientific, but about power money and resources. They were also about fame, which could easily come from such expeditions. It is hard to write truthfully when you are writing a testament to your own glory, and to the glory of the king who paid for the expedition. Even if you could grasp some aspects of the nature of the culture around you. And so:

Many of the early travelogues from the New World were full

of factual errors and saturated with Christian piety and cultural

prejudices. A famous example is the work of the merchant and

explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose letters describing his voyages to

the continent that still bears his name were widely circulated at the

time….  Occasionally, Vespucci seems to use the Native Americans

as a mere literary illustration, to underpin the statements he makes

about his own society. Native Americans are, as a rule, represented

as distorted or, frequently, inverted reflections of Europeans: they

are godless, promiscuous, naked, have no authority or laws; they are

even cannibals! Against this background, Vespucci argues effectively

for the virtues of absolutist monarchy and papal power, but his

ethnographic descriptions are virtually useless as clues to native

life at the time of the Conquest.

Not all of the accounts were bad, however. They point out that:

…contemporaries of Vespucci, such as the French

Huguenot Jean de Léry and the Spanish clergyman Bartolomé de

las Casas, who gave more truthful and even sympathetic accounts of

Native American life, and such books also sold well. But then, the

market for adventure stories from distant climes seems to have been

insatiable in Europe at this time. In most of the books, a more or less

explicit contrast is drawn between the Others (who are either ‘noble

savages’ or ‘barbarians’) and the existing order in Europe (which

is either challenged or defended).

The philosopher John Locke collected and read many of these more sympathetic books about the New World. He was opposed to the ideas of his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, who famously described human life as ‘nasty. Brutish, and short’. He preferred the idea of the noble savage to the barbarian. Though he did not discuss any of these accounts in his public writing. The books were found in his study after his death.

Eriksen and Neilsen concede that:

the legacy of these early, morally ambiguous accounts still weighs

on contemporary anthropology, and to this day, anthropologists

are often accused of distorting the reality of the peoples they write

about – in the colonies, in the Third World, among ethnic minorities

or in marginal areas. And, as in Vespucci’s case, these descriptions

are often denounced as telling us more about the anthropologist’s

own background than about the people under study.

The authors discuss the responses of European philosophers to the discovery of the New World, including Montaigne, Descartes, and John Locke. Some of their ideas have connections with anthropological thought from a later period. But they concede that anthropology is still some way beyond these important figures. It had been the case since antiquity that:

Exotic peoples had been described normatively (ethnocentrism) or

descriptively (cultural relativism). The question had repeatedly been

raised whether people everywhere and at all times are basically the

same (universalism) or profoundly different (relativism). There had

been attempts to define the difference between animals and humans,

nature and culture, the inborn and the learned, the sensual body and

the conscious mind. Many detailed descriptions of foreign peoples

had been published; some were based on meticulous scholarship.

In spite of these continuities, we maintain that anthropology as a

science only appeared at a later stage, though it is true that its birth

was a more gradual process than is sometimes assumed. Our reasons

for this are, first, that all the work mentioned so far belongs to one

of two genres: travel writing or social philosophy. It is only when

these aspects of anthropological enquiry are fused, that is, when

data and theory are brought together, that anthropology appears.

Fair enough. Though I regard social and cultural anthropology as arts subjects for the most part, rather than science (though in physical anthropology and archaeology there is a great deal of actual science). And then Eriksen and Neilsen make an extraordinary statement, which I’ve italicised.

Second, we call attention to the fact that all the writers mentioned

so far were influenced by their times and their society. This is of

course true of modern anthropologists as well. But modern anthropologists

live in a modern world, and we argue that anthropology

makes no sense at all outside a modern context. The discipline is a

product, not merely of a series of singular thoughts such as those

we have mentioned above, but of wide-ranging changes in European

culture and society, that in time would lead to the formation of

capitalism, individualism, secularised science, patriotic nationalism

and cultural reflexivity.

What on earth does that mean? Is this meant to imply that because anthropologists live in a modern world, they are more capable of detachment and objectivity than those who lived in earlier times? Or are they saying that it has a function in the modern world, which it did not and could not have had when thoughts were largely singular and could never become part of a consensus view and an agreed reality?  They say a little later:

…we have seen that the encounter with ‘the Other’ stimulated European

intellectuals to see society as an entity undergoing change and growth,

from relatively simple, small-scale communities, to large, complex

nations. But the idea of development or progress was not confined

to notions of social change. The individual, too, could develop,

through education and career, by refining his personality and finding

his ‘true self’ …  Only when the free individual was established as

‘the measure of all things’ could the idea of society as an association

of individuals put down roots and become an object of systematic

reflection. And only when society had emerged as an object to be

continuously ‘improved’ and reshaped into more ‘advanced’ forms

could the independent, rational individual change into something

new and different, and even ‘truer to its nature’. And without an

explicit discourse about these ideas, a subject such as anthropology

could never arise. The seeds were sown in early modern philosophy,

important advances were made in the eighteenth century, but it

was only in the nineteenth century that anthropology became an

academic discipline, and only in the twentieth century that it attained

the form in which it is taught today.

It is worth seeing it spelled out as clearly as that. In the minds of the authors the modern world is only possible because anthropology (as they understand it) is an explicit discourse about ideas of the improvement of the free individual, who is ‘the measure of all things’. As the authors said earlier, sometimes anthropologists are denounced for what they write, on the basis that it tells us more about the anthropologist’s own background, than about the people under study. 

1.Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen A History of Anthropology Second Edition, 2001

Unwritten Doctrine, Ancient Silence

[This is an extract from  'Unwritten Doctrine, Ancient Silence',  one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Plato was quite explicit in the Timaeus that it was not possible to tell all men about ‘the Father of the Gods’. It follows from this that if, as in Plato’s case, doctrine comes from an understanding of the divine, then there must be an unwritten doctrine beneath the written texts which contains at least what makes sense to Plato himself, and perhaps an inner circle of peers or advanced students.*[1]

It is often assumed by students of antiquity that there is no special importance to be attached to remarks that certain items of information are to be kept secret and not imparted to the unworthy, and to the ordinary mortal. This assumption is based on the presumption that there was, and is not, anything about which it is impossible to speak of, before those not used to dealing with information about religion and the divine. This is a curiosity of modern times, in that the ignorance of theology among the moderns makes it impossible for them to credit the importance of theology in antiquity -  both to those who understood its subtleties and and those who didn’t.

In other words, it is assumed that what is proclaimed secret is not something which, within the culture in question, must necessarily remain secret (otherwise dire consequences might follow), but is something local to a particular cult or religion, and is an artificially created object of mystification, created for the benefit of the cult, to increase the aura of that cult, and to promote its ideology.

There is another possibility which should be considered, if only to clear up the scope of the phenomena we are looking at: if the priests in antiquity proclaimed that the secrets pertaining to the gods should necessarily remain secret, what might be the nature of such secrets?

Naturally it is not being suggested that all religious structures and institutions in antiquity would subscribe to what we might call ‘rational circumspection’ and a necessary element of secrecy. But it is important to explore the possibility that sometimes, and perhaps for the most part, as it might turn out if we look closely enough, these structures and institutions had what they understood as very good reasons for this way of operating. It is too easy to write off this aspect of ancient life on the grounds that of course they would say this kind of thing about themselves and their institution even if there were no rationality at all in the practice. Certainly ancient religious belief was as subject to political manipulation and machination as in the modern world, but it does not follow that there was nothing more substantial to the religions of the ancient world than a purely ideological tool for a power elite who believed in absolutely nothing (though it might be perfectly fair to suggest that modern power elites believe in nothing but power itself). 

If we presume the  ancients did not believe in the rational sense of their religion and their cultic practices, at least at some level, then a whole raft of other questions would need to be answered, We would have no way, for example, of fathoming why the story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to gain a fair wind for Troy, was credible to an ancient audience, and made some kind of sense.

Clearly the truth is likely to lie somewhere in between the two extremes of belief and disbelief in the tenets and imperatives of ancient religion. But if we do not explore belief and its reasons in antiquity, we can never know detail of the level of rationality in ancient religion. This is not a problem, if, as is implicit in many modern studies of ancient religion, we assume that religion is at root an irrational response to the complexity of both nature and human society. The argument that there may be a rational component in ancient religions therefore can be understood as an attempt to elucidate the extent to which this might be true, and to challenge the conventional view that there is nothing of  the sort to be found there.

Plutarch gives some interesting information about Alexander’s intellectual background in his account of Alexanders career. He wrote that: ‘It would appear that Alexander received from [Aristotle] not only his doctrines of Morals, and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse and profound theories which these philosophers, by the very names they gave them, professed to reserve for oral communication to the initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with. For when he was in Asia, and heard Aristotle had published some treatises of that kind, he wrote to him, using very plain language to him in behalf of philosophy, the following letter’:

Alexander to Aristotle greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel in others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.*[2]

This is generally taken to be a reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. However at the time Plutarch was writing, perhaps the late 1^st century C.E., or the early 2^nd century,  it is likely that Aristotle’s Metaphysics had not surfaced as a published work. *[3] It is unlikely on this account to be a genuine letter. Nevertheless, the passage reflects the ancient perception of an agrapha, an unwritten and orally communicated doctrine underlying the public work of both Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Plato’s Academy.

What could possibly be of such importance to withhold, and from whom? The story of the prisoners in the Cave in the Republic of Plato gives the general outline of the problem. The simile involves a group of men whose only means of apprehending reality in a darkened cave is the shadows of things cast on the wall by the flames of a fire. For these men, there is no other reality. Were they to become aware of the fact that they were not seeing real objects, but only shadowy two-dimensional representations of real objects, this would cause them to have to restructure their picture of reality. The problem would be so much worse if they were released from the cave into the sunlight. Plato invokes the strength of the sun’s light as part of the simile, and suggests that the prisoners would have to look at the image of the sun via darkened pools of water, before attempting to gaze on the light of the sun directly (as if one would ever want to advise this).

In the story of the Cave, the sun is the image of the Good, the Form of Forms, and the ultimate source of all representation and experienced reality. Plato, by means of the story of the Cave and its inhabitants, is illustrating his view that reality is an extremely complex phenomenon, and that it cannot be understood easily without preparation. Were the complexity of reality, or rather its understanding, to be introduced baldly to men unprepared for what they were about to hear and see, they would be unable to comprehend it for what it was, and might attack those who were leading them out of the Cave into the sunlight.*[4]

Anyone who has explained technical or abstract information - which is to some extent counterintuitive in nature - to someone who has a narrow and concrete understanding of the world and its parts, will understand something of the problem which Plato is addressing here. Explaining to an untutored musician that (for example) the modern piano keyboard has actually been detuned to make the full range of polyphonic composition possible, is likely to produce an adverse reaction, despite the fact that it is quite true. The reaction is likely to  be complete disbelief, so used have we become to the tuning of the equal-temperament keyboard.

This of course is a relatively trivial example. The Good in the writings of Plato is a transcendent concept, beyond any earthly exemplar, and extremely difficult to communicate even to an educated and informed audience. Plato is clearly signalling that, beyond the simple difficultly of explaining the nature of reality to those who, for whatever reason, have been brought up with a weak and threadbare account of it, there is a necessary and unavoidable difficulty in understanding the concept of the Good and that the difficulty inheres in the nature of the Good.

The Good, as defined in the work of Plato, is taken to be Plato’s own conception. Clearly it has something to do with the nature of the divine, though Plato is often read as if he is speaking purely philosophically, whatever that might mean in the context of ancient Greece. The Good is, as Plato discussed the concept, not something which we expect to find in earlier contexts. The remark of Christ in the Gospels that none should be called ‘Good,’ but God is of course made several centuries later, and in a milieu where Greek philosophy was familiar, *[5] but when, in the book of Genesis, God looked upon his handiwork at the end of the first week of creation, ‘he saw that it was good.’*[6] Genesis represents a redaction of earlier texts, probably compiled in the fifth century B.C.E., in the time of the Persian domination of the near East. Scholars blink at this reference, and do not see what is there in the text.*[7] No rational philosophical concept is involved.

The only public lecture Plato ever gave was on ‘the Good’. It was not a great popular success, and treated the subject in such a mathematical way that the audience had great difficulty in understanding what he was talking about.*[8] We might be on the right track by suspecting that Plato had no intention of being understood by the bulk of his audience, and that the matter of his talk was not intended for the ears of the multitude, in the same way that, contrary to popular opinion, the public utterances of Christ as reported in the Gospels were not intended to be understood to those who did not have the ‘ears to hear’. 

As already mentioned, Plato explicitly said in the Timaeus that it would be impossible to explain the ‘Father of the Gods’ to men. This was partly for the reason that the transcendent nature of the divine is beyond our capacity to put adequately into words, but also because, as illustrated in the story of the Cave in the Republic, the uninitiated individuals who cannot apprehend the nature of the Good directly live in a world of phantoms and illusions. Their reason is necessarily clouded because of that fact, since it must be impossible to come to sound judgements on the basis of a procession of phantoms bearing no constructive and causal relationships with one another. 

So Plato’s attitude to the ordinary citizens of Attica, of Greece, and of the wider world, was dismissive: they had no constructive contribution to make to the elucidation of the nature of reality, and it would be hazardous to give them details of the nature of the Good, since there could be no way of predicting what they would do with that information. They might even wish to imprison or kill those who might be foolish enough to wish to release them from their prison world of dreams and false opinion.

We know that secrecy was an important part of Greek cult, though much of religious life in Greece seems very open in comparison with other parts of the ancient world. Exclusion was an important aspect of religious practice in Greece as it was anywhere else – certain groups would not be allowed to attend religious worship, or at certain times, just as in Attica certain groups were excluded from participation in the political life of the polis. Yet the rites of the Olympian Gods have not come down to us, which makes discussion of Greek religious life very difficult for scholars, who are reduced to talking in the most general terms about the meaning of the Olympians to the Greeks. We do know about civic responsibilities in connection with the cults of the Gods, often from later periods than the classical, and from Greek cities in Anatolia during Hellenistic times, in the form of liturgies which had to be paid for by prominent individuals within the community, in order to cement their participation in both the cult and the life of the city. 

From the point of view of a purely sociological analysis of ancient Greek culture, this information is perhaps more valuable that the detail of the liturgies themselves – however here we are looking at the ideas which form the basis of religious life. We do have hymns to the gods which were an important part of ritual in the mystery cults. These mostly come from Roman Egypt, and have late features, as might be expected. But otherwise they tell us something of the likely importance of a wide range of Gods in cults which were well established in the early history of Greece, say from the time of Pythagoras to Herodotus. 

Pythagoras’ own doctrines were taught as part of the life of an exclusive cult, and Herodotus mentions various cults in the course of his history. However, each time he makes reference to an important piece of cultic practice of some significance for his narrative, he makes it clear that he is not divulging that practice in the text, but is relying on the reader (or listener, if the text was being read in public, as it seems to have been at the time of its composition). He says something like: ‘those who are familiar with the mysteries of the Kaberoi at Samothrace will know what I mean’. This is of course extremely annoying for modern scholars, who at one and the same time know that there is some interesting reference being made, and that they have no idea what it is. So there is (or rather was), an esoteric reading of the text possible, as opposed to the surface reading which we now have to make, except in the rare cases where we can supply the deficiency.

Clearly the esoteric reading of the Histories of Herodotus made sense to his readers, and made the work richer in antiquity than it is now.

If we move forward in time to the neo-Platonist Porphyry, who was a pupil of Plotinus, and look at his work on the images of the Gods, we can see that the same imperative of secrecy operates. Porphyry uses the conceit of a discourse within the precincts of a temple, in order to explain something of the import of images within a sacred context. Those who have only profane knowledge are asked to leave, which says loud and clear that there is another level of understanding, a sacred understanding of religious imagery beyond that available in the world of common opinion.*[9] Of course Porphyry is delivering this imaginary discourse in the form of a written text, which is not subject to the kind of restrictions possible in the context of a guarded temple. So Porphyry’s text has to do two things at once: it has to reveal and not reveal at the same time. Going back briefly to the supposed letter from Alexander to Aristotle, found in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, it is interesting to read Aristotle’s supposed answer to Alexander, in which he defended his action in publishing the esoteric doctrines of the Lyceum in the full light of day by saying precisely that they were ‘published, but not published.’ In other words, Aristotle was claiming (in Plutarch’s text) that though the text of the Metaphysics or whichever work it was) contained information relating to the esoteric doctrines of the Lyceum, communicated formerly in person to Aristotle’s pupils, it did not publish the doctrines in a form in which they were to be properly understood.

The question might be asked in that case (if this exchange of letters was real, rather than being a way in which Plutarch could make clear his attitude to the nature of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and a supposed esoteric level of Alexander’s imperial mission), why were the doctrines published at all? The same question might be asked of Plato’s writings, since he makes it very clear within the corpus that the invention of writing as a means of communicating important information was a great disaster, since formerly memory had been cultivated, and memory was of great importance to the understanding of the world.

Our natural response to esoteric levels of meaning is, in the absence of clear and overt information about these levels of meaning, to pass over these levels as absent, and of no consequence to us and our understanding. Both Plato and Aristotle published their texts as an aide-memoires of sorts,*[10] principally for those who already had an understanding of the doctrines being alluded to in the course of Aristotle’s text.  We do not have this kind of intimate association with the doctrines at the heart of these texts, and so it would seem to be utterly impossible to penetrate whatever these doctrines might be. *[11]

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[1] That Plato had an unwritten doctrine is not itself an unusual view among Plato scholars – over the past hundred years a large proportion have taken this view – Paul Shorey being an example. However reasons for holding that Plato had an unwritten doctrine vary. Mostly the view arises because otherwise it is difficult to find coherence in the Platonic corpus. So the idea of an agrapha arises as something which contains the missing pieces in the structure.

[2] Plutarch Lives: Alexander.

[3] There is an excellent account of the progress toward publication of Aristotle’s manuscripts in the Penguin edition of his Nicomachean Ethics. Like almost all of Aristotle’s works which we possess, this work appears to be constructed out of notes made by Aristotle himself, or by his students. At least one passage in the Nicomachean Ethics clearly duplicates the content of another, if not in the same words, which suggests strongly an imperfect collation of notes by several hands by a student editor.

[4] This is a clear allusion to the fate of Plato’s teacher Socrates, who was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens.

[5] Christ may allude to the story of Socrates and the cup of Hemlock in the Gospel of John.

[6] Book of Genesis.

[7] Of course the determinant of what meaning is intended by the reference to what is Good is the context. And the context of a creation by the separation of waters and the creation of a vault of heaven does not immediately suggest the presence of a philosophical level.  Near eastern kingship employed both the concept of the Good in terms of a final cause with which the King sought to be identified, and the mastery of the forces of chaos and order, symbolised by the disposition of the waters of the Apsu.

[8] Cherniss, Harold.

[9] Though there are important differences in the doctrines of Plato and the neo-Platonists which it is important to observe in discussion, both Plato and the neo-Platonists were at one with respect to the idea that understanding was a property of the divine, and that lesser mortals, the uninitiated and merely common, were lesser beings precisely because of their greater distance from understanding.

[10] Plato’s account of the importance of memory makes it clear that any unwritten doctrine would be unlikely to be committed to writing, and therefore written documents must make sense as allusive texts.

[11] The Cambridge History of Early Medieval Philosophy mentions this difficulty, referring particularly to the works of the Neoplatonists. The presence of an esoteric background is acknowledged, but since there seems to be no way in to this background in the absence of a key, the only course of action is to evaluate the material in terms of the surface text. A.C. Lloyd, The Cambridge History of Early Medieval Philosophy.

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