I Go To Die (The Death of Socrates)

Written in response to Socrates speech to his accusers, on being found guilty of the charges of moral corruption and impiety to the gods. Performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. [Almeida Theatre, ‘Figures of Speech’ series, published September 25, 2017].

The text of the speech (the edit used) is available here. Bettany Hughes' populist take on Socrates, 'A Man For Our Time', is here. Hughes has also written a book on Socrates, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (review by Tom Holland).

Thanks to Stephanie Papadopoulos.

[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]

This is one of the most famous speeches in the world. But is also one of the most difficult to comprehend fully, since two and half thousand years stand between ourselves and its original cultural context.

We do not know for sure what Socrates said when he was condemned to death: what we have is mediated through the writing of his pupil Plato. And it reads very much as the sort of speech he might have given if he had been unfortunate enough to find himself in similar circumstances. Socrates was also written about by Xenophon, but the Socrates who appears in his pages is sometimes difficult to recognise as the Socrates that Plato writes about. So there is an element of fiction in the portrait which Plato gives. This is not uncommon in ancient writing: Thucydides relates many speeches in his history of the Peloponnesian War which he could not have heard, and which were mostly not recorded in any detail. Instead, he relates what should have been said on the occasion, by those historical figures he was writing about. Plato was present at the time of Socrates’ trial, and did know what Socrates actually said. But unlike Socrates, he was often greatly circumspect, and by that means avoided conflict with the civic authorities in Athens. He is being circumspect here, and so the speech requires some decoding. 

In replying to his judges, Socrates does not explicitly refer to the content of the charges, which were that he showed disrespect for the gods, and that through his conversations with the young, which were sometimes about the gods, he corrupted them. His objection to their judgement is based on two things – their misunderstanding of what Socrates was doing with his life, and their lack of regard for truth.

Socrates does refer to God however, at the end of his speech, and without irony. Only God himself knows whether what Socrates says about being dead and living forever in eternity is true, or not. His impiety was to the gods of the Greeks, whose existence and reality he sometimes doubted in public, rather than ‘God’ in the singular. Plato likewise sometimes spoke of the Divine in the singular (ho theos) in his dialogues, but when talking about the plurality of the gods, he defers all questions of whether or not they are real to members of those Athenian families who claim to be descended from them, on the grounds that they should know the truth or otherwise of the claim better than anyone else.

It may seem slightly puzzling that, in the midst of a thoroughly polytheistic culture in Athens, with its plethora of gods, its many cults and priesthoods in the service of those gods, that both Socrates and Plato could speak of ‘god’ in the singular. Our difficulty here is the result of a modern understanding of the significance of polytheism, which sees the phenomenon as the inevitable precursor to monotheistic belief, which excludes other gods from consideration, or credibility. For modern scholars, polytheistic belief in ancient Greece was something which developed, higgeldy-piggeldy, out of a plethora of local and tribal deities, much embellished with myths about their lives and actions, which served important social functions, but which had no universal meaning, and were not rooted in a model of reality which embraced consideration of what the nature of reality itself might be, or what constitutes ‘truth’.

In this modern model of what polytheism was in Greece, gods could be moved from place to place because their functions and significances were adaptable to local social, ideological and political circumstances, and changes of fortune among noble families. They also could have many birthplaces, as Zeus did.

Yet a close reading of several of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates makes several appearances, often as the main protagonist, shows that two of the main concerns in these dialogues is the nature of reality itself, and what constitutes ‘truth’. The routes taken in each of the dialogues, and the language used to discuss these subjects, is different, but the same underlying theme is present. Socrates is addressing both of these issues in his final speech.

What is the nature of ‘reality itself’ as discussed in Plato’s dialogues? Scholars often represent Plato as having no doctrinal and unchanging beliefs in the course of his writing: however, we are told of the nature of reality in several places, and reality itself is described by Plato as the goal of those who ‘love wisdom’ (which is of course the literal translation of the term ‘philosophy’). It is given a name, ‘The Good.’ It is to be approached very gradually, in the mind alone, through many imperfect representations of what it is, until eventually it becomes possible to apprehend its nature. The philosopher then descends via the same chain of imperfect images, which possess less reality than reality itself (since they are by definition imperfect). Only by approaching what is ultimately real, and what is ultimately true, can true knowledge be acquired.

This is the ultimate source of the charge of impiety: for Socrates, the plethora of gods simply were imperfect representations of the singularity of the transcendent God. They might serve as approaches to the Divine, but he would be guilty of untruthfulness if he accorded them the same honour as he gave to the transcendent God.

We are told by Socrates himself, in one of Plato’s dialogues. that the nature of that ultimate reality has ‘no size, colour or form’, and is beyond all physical representation. It is not located anywhere in the physical world. Despite the inevitable difficulty in accessing it, Plato refers to it several times as ‘the one thing’ which should be the focus of human attention. By characterising it in this way, Plato is making an equation between death, the afterlife, the nature of reality, God, and eternity. They all transcend the world of the here and now.

When Socrates speaks of ‘eternity’, we read the use of the word as a literary convention, and as a metaphor, because we have no real understanding of the meaning of eternity in modern times. It is based on the concept of the plenum, which was once an important idea in philosophy.  It is the idea that behind the world of appearances, there exists a primordial fullness, which transcends day to day reality, and which is the ultimate source of all kinds of abundance, and all good things.

Scholars for the most part don’t associate this idea with Plato and Socrates, though they concede it is a key idea in later forms of Platonism.  But it is there. The concept of eternity used to have this technical substratum, which sees the physical world as being drawn from a level of reality where all things are possible, and all things which might exist, already exist as possibilities.

So when Socrates speaks of future conversations with the great men and the heroes of Greece, he is talking about travelling to a place where these heroes always live, because everything which can come to be is already present in eternity. Socrates does not know whether this understanding of eternity is true, but in any case, once he is dead he will be beyond the travails of earthly existence. 

The hardest thing for us to understand about this is that Socrates thought of his death in terms of a return to health, and consequently, that he regarded his physical existence as a form of ill-health.  For him, real existence is something which is elsewhere, and not here. Return to that transcendent existence he understood as a form of release from the tribulations of physical life. This is why he asked his followers to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, to mark his passing. 

Thomas Yaeger, September 30, 2017.

Writing to Alvin Plantinga

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. There it appears as 'Contra Plantinga'. 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]

I wrote to Alvin Plantinga on Sunday, 2nd of July 2017, concerning the ontological argument, which he has done so much to promote.

I imagine ... that you would be interested to see alternative arguments for the reality of the divine, were these to exist.

And they do exist. I spent many years assembling the arguments for the understanding of the divine in the ancient world. These are quite different arguments from those offered from St. Anselm onwards.

You are under no obligation at all to read my book, but it may be worth a look, if only to dismiss the arguments as threadbare, or even completely baseless. And in short order.

If you are interested in reading the book, I will send it to you either as an ebook or a pdf, according to your choice. You are under no obligation at all to respond, if you accept the book.

I didn't get a response from that, so I wrote again on 18th of July, 2017 

The ontological argument has obviously been important and highly influential over the past thousand years. But I argue that, in any of its instances, it is not sound, and does not resemble argument about the divine in the ancient world. I've written about this issue in detail in The Sacred History of Being, which was published in 2015. 

I think we have come to the end of a road with the ontological argument, which has profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, theology, and the development of anthropology. Ancient discussion of the divine was based on logical argument about the nature of a transcendent reality, which gave rise to space and time, rather than the more constrained question of whether or not God exists in a pre-existing and unexplained frame. Mesopotamia provides the intellectual background for the development of public philosophy in Greece. I will send you my book by email if you are interested in reading an alternative view.

Professor Plantinga was kind enough to accept the offer of a copy of my book, and a PDF was sent by email the next day. 

I followed up on the exchange on the 19th of September:

Some useful things can be taken away from the arguments in The Sacred History of Being. First of all, if the Divine and Reality are not artificially separated from each other (they are usually coterminous in eastern thought), then atheism is unreasonable and almost unthinkable. This separation is a characteristic of western philosophy, after the closure of the schools. Plato does not argue like this. Neither do the Neoplatonists. 

The importance of belief is less important when the Divine and Reality itself are not understood to be separate. In ancient religion (if we insist on referring to the phenomenon with that term, rather than using Cicero's more appropriate phrase 'cultus deorum'), belief was mostly beside the point, being subordinate to observance, if you understood the basis of what was being discussed. Belief is a phenomenon which assumes importance when a population does not know the traditional arguments concerning what is Divine, and the speculative and conjectural conclusions which might be drawn from those arguments.

This was the case by the time Anselm put together his version of the ontological argument. Faith is slightly different, since it isn't the same as blind belief, but signifies an understanding of why certain arguments are made, and an acceptance of the scope of what they suggest. The possibility of conjecture and discussion remains.

How does Plato argue about the nature of the Divine? He understood the Divine to be beyond physical space, and the dimension of time. Without shape and colour, or any other characteristic which could be easily understood by the human mind. However, and paradoxically, the Divine was capable of participation in the world, because some aspects of the Divine have exemplars on earth. Such as totality, greatness, perfection, completeness, etc. The  nature of the Divine emerges from a number of philosophical questions, such as: if the Divine is one, how is the many possible? If the Divine is one and beyond change, but God needs to make a copy of it in which movement is possible, has the integrity of the nature of the ur-reality been fatally compromised? If the one thing which we should all look to is, by definition, one and unchanging (see the self-description of God in the 3rd book of Malachi, where God says: 'I do not change'), how is participation in the world of movement and change possible? 

And so on. Frazer wrote these arguments off as 'popular questions of the day', with no more significance than that. A rational basis for belief, is I think, a contradiction in terms. If it is rational, then belief is unecessary. A key conclusion of The Sacred History of Being, is that the basis of ancient religion was the acquisition of knowledge of the Divine, and as a corollary, the acquisition of knowledge itself, since it was understood to be already present in the Divine (an idea most clearly expressed in Mesopotamian literature and liturgy).   

We lost almost all of that in the west, except in rhetorical and literary terms. But the evidence from antiquity does not support either the necessity of belief in religion, or the necessity of God possessing the property of existence within an unexplained and inexplicable pre-existence of space and time, The evidence from antiquity *does* support the reality of God, and the importance of the reality of the Divine in every aspect of human existence.

Of course if the Greeks did invent philosophical argument and sound logic, and no-one else around the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East was able to think about the Divine in such terms as far back as the middle of 2nd Millennium B.C.E., when they were building their accounts of the nature of reality, then this argument would be impossible to support. I would suggest instead, that the argument be reversed, as it can be, however much the classicists and the historians of philosophy would object to the loss of Greek intellectual primacy which would result.  

Best regards,  

Thomas Yaeger

Babylon the Great (fourteen articles)

I've written much about Babylon and Mesopotamia over the years, and some of the essays appear on my blog, either as extracts or as full text. I thought it would be useful to pull most of these together for convenience in a single post. Collected here are fourteen articles, which amounts to a small book of material, even if some of the articles are just extracts. All of the full text can be found either in The Sacred History of Being, or Understanding Ancient Thought.

I've been using Babylonian and Assyrian cultures as a contrast with ancient Greek civilisation, and many cultural continuities can be detected, though classicists and historians still discuss Greece largely in autocthonous terms, as if the Greeks are entirely self-made, and therefore no meaningful comparisons between Greece and Mesopotamia are possible. This inability to see what is in front of them, and their unwillingness to read about Mesopotamian parallels, won't continue forever, because it is ridiculous. But a ridiculous state of affairs can continue for a very long time, particularly in academia, and particularly when a discipline is more of a worshipful church than a place of discovery and exploration. 

TY, September 20, 2017. 


The Fifty Names of Marduk  #An #Babylon #EnumaElish #Marduk #Mesopotamia #NewYearFestival  

An extract from 'The Fifty Names of Marduk', a chapter in The Sacred History of Being, published November 2, 2015, which explores the significance of Marduk, head of the Mesopotamian divine pantheon, on the basis of his description in the Babylonian New Year Festival liturgy.

....The relevant passage of the Enuma Elish begins by announcing ‘Let us proclaim his fifty names…. He whose ways are glorious, whose deeds are likewise.' The first name is of course Marduk. His first description identifies him as An, the Sumerian king of the gods, and describes An as his father, who ‘called him from his birth…’. This refers to the fact that Marduk was not present in the first chaotic creation, before reason and order was imposed. 

Shar Kishati, and the Cult of Eternity #Mesopotamia #Philosophy #Abstraction #Cult  

This is a discussion of the hypothetical core of the ancient understanding of Reality as something which might be separated from everything else (in a Husserlian sense), though it does not mean that such a hypothetical core was separable from the rest of the religious and theological implex of ideas which constituted Greek and Mesopotamian religion. The point of the exercise was to explore what was actually essential to that implex of ideas, and to get a better understanding of why it was important to the functioning of the ritual universe, in both Greece and Mesopotamia.

'Creation' (extract)   #Abyss #Belus #Berossus #Chaos #Creation #Heidel #Timaeus 

From The Sacred History of Being, which explores the Babylonian account of the Creation of the World. In both Babylonia and Assyria, plenitude could be represented by the waters of ocean. Before ordered generation arose from these waters, there was a primal chaos, which Mesopotamian scholars understood in terms of undifferentiated possibility. The Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived and wrote in Greek most probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, describes this primal chaos in terms which emphasise that it is a plenitude. 

The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual #Babylon #Divinity #Installation #MisPi #Palm #Quay #Ritual #Rivers #Statues #Tamarisk 

An extract from 'The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual', a chapter from The Sacred History of Being, It is a critical analysis of one of the most fascinating aspects of Babylonian culture - the inauguration of divine statues, and their endowment with divine powers.

'The new god is seated in the orchard, in the midst of the reed-standards on a reed-mat placed on a linen cloth. His eyes are turned toward sunrise. You go to the river and throw mashatu-meal into the river; You libate mihhu beer. You lift up your hand; and you recite three times each in front of the river the incantation, 'Apsu-temple, where fates are determined,' (and) the incantation 'Quay of the Apsu, pure quay;''

Mention of the 'Apsu-temple, where fates are determined,' and 'Quay of the Apsu, pure Quay,' represents a poetic reduplication of a single idea, which is the idea that both of them point to the ground of Being, of totality, where fate and destiny can be determined, since all knowledge is present in the Apsu, and that proximity to the Apsu is to be had at the river bank, since all rivers in Mesopotamia were accorded divine status, and therefore prefixed with the Sumerian determinative sign 'Dingir'.... 

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind #Berossus #Telos #Origins #Civilisation #Apkallu   

The Babylonian writer Berossus (possibly a Greek form of the name Bēl-uşur), took up residence in Athens, after having been a priest of Bel in Babylon in the late 4th century/early 3rd century B.C.E. He wrote a three volume work, Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost, which was a study on the culture and history of Babylonia. Alexander Polyhistor made an abridgement of this work in the first century B.C.E., also lost. However this abridgement was available to the christian writer Eusebius (4th century C.E), and also Josephus in the first century C.E. The passages which they quoted from Polyhistor and a few other authors survive. As Black and Green write, “Akkadian mythological and historical texts found in modern excavations have largely confirmed the authenticity of the tradition represented by Berossus.” [1] This includes the tradition of the Seven Sages, preserved in the account by Berossus (in his first book) of the eight creatures, beginning with Oannes and concuding with Odakon, which emerged from the sea bringing to man the civilising arts, including agriculture. His second book covered the history of Babylonia from the ‘ten kings before the flood’, through the Flood itself. 

Standing in the Place of Ea: The Adapa Discipline and Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire.  #Ashurbanipal #Assyria

This extensive article (10k words) explores the role of the King in ancient Assyria, as the vizier of the god Assur. He was trained in the Adapa discipline, which is related to the myth of Adapa. He was required to be skilled in crafts, spear-throwing, scholarship, mathematics, divination, etc., and to excel other men, as chosen for the role by Assur. Thus he would emulate the knowledge and power of Ea, the divine sage whose home was the Abzu, the abyss at the root of creation.

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology
#Cuneiform #Structuralism #Philosophy 

'Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia - Marc Van De Mieroop. Princeton University Press, October 2015.

Marc Van De Mieroop’s book is an exploration of how the Babylonians understood and processed their reality in the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE, long before the Greeks developed the apparatus of logical thought which we now associate with philosophy in the 5th century BCE. Van De Mieroop chooses to call the Babylonian understanding of reality, which he describes in detail, ‘philosophy’. However what he is describing is, as he describes it, so far removed from what is understood in the west as philosophy, that it may be perplexing for the reader looking for the wider context of the development of the discipline in antiquity. It does not take Greek philosophy as its starting point, which might have seemed to be the obvious starting point. Instead, it proceeds with a phenomenological analysis of a variety of scribal processes, found in legal, omen and literary texts. The subtitle of the book is ‘The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia’, so it will seem to someone picking up the book that we must be in cultural and intellectual territory familiar to us. We are not.

'The Idea of Being in Israel'. #image #religion #philosophy #theology #aniconism #Tertullian 

A sample chapter (in draft) from the Sacred History of Being:This chapter looks at the body of Mesopotamian ideas about the gods and the divine through the extensive commentary on these ideas present in the books of the Old Testament.... The chapter also explores how Old Testament ideas about images were understood by the christian writer Tertullian, in the early second century of the common era.

….within the hierarchy of Mesopotamian ritual, the lengthy performance of washing the mouth of the temple statue is the most solemn, most sacred and most secret of rituals. This conclusion is reached from consideration of the special circumstances of the performance of the mis pi, the investment of time and resources, and the goal of the ritual. This ritual calls upon all the knowledge and spiritual know-how of the ritual specialists to transfer the deity from the spiritual world to the physical world. It requires the most expertise in ritual matters and accomplishes the epitome of ritual possibilities actualising the presence of the god in the temple.

The introductory remarks on the cult Image are prefaced with a quotation from James Preston, which is worth repeating here:

Through the study of icons and their construction we are able to perceive some of the most vital impulses underlying religious experience. Sacred images are products of the human imagination – they are constructed according to systematic rules, and then they are infused with sacrality and kept “alive” by highly controlled behaviours intended to retain the “spirit in matter”. An analysis of this process of constructing sacred images, and the corollary process of the destruction, reveals to us something paradoxical and intriguing about human religion. 

The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon  #Babylon #AncientHistory #Plenum #Creation    

This article argues that the description of Marduk in the Babylonian New Year Festival liturgy (The Enuma Elish) and the fact that the described creation was two-fold (it began before Marduk appeared, and was subsequently destroyed), indicates that their creation was understood to emerge from a plenum, in which all things potentially exist. This is an abstract conception which is not supposed to be present in Mesopotamia in the early 1st millennium B.C.E.

Who Will Appear Before the City? (Divination in Sargonid Assyria)
#Assyria #Divination #SunGod #Haruspicy 

Twenty divinatory texts from Ancient Assyria, assembled for the purposes of a commentary on the logic and purposes of ancient divination, and the parallels with the installation of divine images in Mesopotamia. All of these texts are drawn from The State Archives of Assyria, vol 4 (Queries to the Sun God), by Ivan Starr.

The texts, where we have them near complete, are generally in two parts. The first specifies the query, with a precision that some readers may find startling. The inquirers wanted clarity in the responses, not a vague intimation of the future. The second describes the reading of the condition of the liver, entrails and whatever other organs were inspected by the haruspex (diviner), but rarely gives an interpretation of the reading. This absence of interpretation of the inspection changes around the time of the reign of Ashurbanipal, as does the standard text in which the inquiries were couched.

The commentary for 'Who Will Appear Before the City' is in preparation, and is likely to appear in 2019.

What is Sacred, and what is Profane?  #Holy #Divine #Finitude #Infinity #Creation #God #Gods #EnumaElish #Religion 

Ancient accounts of the creation of the physical world however suggest that the created world was in chaos at its beginning. What does this mean? It means that, by whatever means the plenum gives rise to the physical world and its realities, by itself it cannot give rise to a rational creation. Its creations are not defined by anything approaching reason.

Ancient cosmogonies reflect this. The Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia has two distinct levels of divine beings. The first group is present during the initial creation, and the second group is responsible for the second and rational creation. The first group of gods are not gods after the pattern of the second group. The king of heaven does not have a name in Mesopotamia, or rather his name is his description (Anshar). It is two words joined together – ‘heaven’ and ‘king’. In the Mesopotamian context both heaven and the king were understood as representations or images reality itself – representing some of the properties of the plenum.

In a sense therefore, the initial gods are simply gods which must be latent in the nature of reality itself, whether or not there is a rational creation underway. There must be a heaven, and there must be a king of it, if there is to be anything else. And somehow the first creation has to be destroyed, if there is to be a rational creation. The gods who are present during the first creation are there to serve the purpose of making it possible for there to be a rational creation.

Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree #Assyria #Kabbalah #Abstraction #Mesopotamia 

Ann extract from the chapter 'Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree' in The Sacred History of Being.

Stylised trees were part of the iconography of religion in ancient Mesopotamia, as far back as the fourth millennium. The symbol, as it interests us here, dates from around the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. At about that time there is a new development of the symbol of the tree. The Late Assyrian form of the Tree appeared during the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, of the thirteenth century B.C.E. The rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the first millennium spread the symbol throughout the Near East, and it survived until the end of the millennium. This form of the tree is the one most familiar to students of Assyriology and those who have visited the Assyrian galleries in the British Museum, with its garland of cones, pomegranates, or palmates surrounding either the crown of the tree, or its trunk. The importance of this symbol is made clear by the fact that it appears on royal garments, jewelry, official seals, as well as the royal wall paintings and sculptures found in the royal palaces. Indeed in the famous throne-room of Ashurnasirpal II (now in the British Museum), it is the central motif, standing directly behind the throne.

Parpola argues that the Tree symbol in Assyria had a dual function in Assyrian Imperial art. As well as symbolizing the divine world order which the Assyrian king maintained, it could also relate to the king, resulting in his portrayal as the Perfect Man. This would account for the prominence of the Tree as an imperial symbol, providing legitimation for the rule of Assyria, and justification of the king as absolute ruler. 

Concerning Cult Images (Porphyry)  #Cult #Religion #Philosophy #Images #Interpretation #Thought #TheGods #Porphyry 

Some informative texts from antiquity (such as this one) survive in part as quotations by other writers. In this case the original author was Porphyry, and it was quoted in an extensive work (the Preparation for the Gospel) by the industrious christian apologist Eusebius in the 4th century C.E. As I've shown elsewhere, Porphyry knew about the doctrine of wholes and totalities also understood by Pythagoras and Plato and others, and so he was well informed, and so gives an insight into the real significance of the practice of idolatry in the ancient world.

Eusebius' purpose in quoting the text was to show that much of the nature of earlier religion was a mere foreshadowing of the Christian revelation. By contrast, my purpose in including the text as an appendix was to show that there was still much known of the nature of 1st millennium idolatry up until the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 C.E., and that their knowledge pointed to quite a different understanding of polytheism than the one we commonly associate with the history of Israel and its religious struggles, and the later Christian objections to the 'abomination' of polytheism.

Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria #Forms #Idolatry #Philosophy   

This is a discussion of the argument and significance of The Sacred History of Being. The essential argument of the book is that, in both Greece and Assyria, knowledge was conceived to exist in Being itself, and as a consequence, all true knowledge was knowledge of the Divine. The cultural apparatus of both states can be understood to have been built on that conception.