However, for those who accept the western
convention that the abstract conception of Being as the foundation of reality
itself was first broached by the Greeks in the middle of the 1st
millennium BCE., the very idea of its earlier presence in human consciousness
is an absurdity. The Western convention explains very little, is not supported
by the available evidence, but it serves the purpose of closing off from our
consideration even the possibility of a much longer history of the idea of
Being. And for the gigantic, sprawling edifices of Western philosophy and
religion, this is, for the most part, a comfort.
Yet the evidence for
a much earlier presence of the idea of Being in civilization is far from
invisible, except to those for whom (prima facie) the idea of an earlier
existence for the concept can have no reality. Historians are disabled in their
critical understanding of antiquity by the fact that the contemporary episteme
– the intellectual frame in which ideas can be thought and discussed - excludes
the possibility that the idea of Being is truly ancient.
It was suggested in
the late 19th century that the idea of Being was of no importance,
since it was not possible to say anything about the nature of Being with any
certainty: it was beyond having anything predicated of it. That alone made it
possible for scholars to ignore the question of Being, whatever role it might
have had in ancient cultures. The modern west had reached the point where
ancient ideas made so little sense in terms of a modern understanding, that the
idea of Being was simply passed by.
In antiquity the
conception of Being was understood to be coterminous with reality itself. Hence
the suggestion in the Babylonian ‘Enuma Elish’ that the dimensions of physical
reality were stretched out of this primal and transcendent reality. In such
terms, it is impossible to dismiss Being as an idea which does not need to be
addressed. However, the idea of a reality beyond physical and sensory reality
was effectively dismissed in the 19th century. What we could see,
measure and weigh was the only reality we could engage with. What might lie
beyond the scalar and vector values was not something which could be rationally
addressed. In fact the conception of a transcendent reality disappeared
altogether from the range of things which might be known and understood, at
least in terms of real knowledge. If divines and mystics still wanted to talk
about these things, they were free to do so. But their discussions were treated
as so many varieties of nonsense, and were not worthy of consideration.
In antiquity, the
infinite, or Being itself, was not seen as inaccessible. That is clear from the
texts we have. But it does not mean that connection with the Infinite and Being
was regarded as unproblematic. The difficulty was the result of a collision
between the logic of the immanence of the divine, and earthly logic. According
to the latter, it is impossible for the divine to intersect with physical
reality, since something cannot be other than it is. At least according to
Aristotelian logic. Plato can not be interpreted the same way.
As we cannot know
the origins of monotheism, we cannot know the origins of polytheism. We have to
accept that. It is too far in the past. And indeed, there may have been no
single origin for polytheism; no identiable path by which the human mind and
human experience shaped man’s encounter with a plurality of gods. Generally we imagine
how polytheism came to be: as the result of political and social struggles in
antiquity, with the creation of pantheons of gods, whose existence mirrors in
large part, earthly experience of powers, exalted into entities who have their
existences somewhere quite remote from human experience. They are in some way
in notional control of all aspects of ancient life, and are often deeply unfathomable
in both their natures and in their behaviour. Therefore
they give rise to a sense of awe and sometimes terror in the human mind.
This way of looking
at the origins of polytheism assumes that there is no transcendental aspect to
polytheism, and that polytheism is a phenomenon which precedes both the first discussions of the idea of Being, and the
idea that there is a transcendental reality which was understood to stand
behind the world of appearance.
These two
propositions stand behind the modern interpretation of the meaning and function
of the gods in antiquity, and both propositions were occasionally entertained
in antiquity itself, particularly from Hellenistic times onwards. We assume
that this way of seeing and understanding the gods, which is our modern
understanding, was as correct then as it is now, even if other ideas were current
about the gods, and how the human race might engage with them, as though they
were truly real. For the anthropologist and classicist James Frazer, the idea
of discussing Being, now as well as in antiquity, is nonsensical. It is an
abstraction about which it is not possible to say anything. For Frazer, Being
is an unattainable abstraction, and for all practical purposes, it does not profit
us to discuss it in any way.
And yet… Frazer himself
noted that the idea of Being was clearly regarded as a proper subject for
discussion by some of the earliest
Greek philosophers – Anaximander, Hesiod, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras, for
example, as well as for later figures, such as Parmenides and Plato. If the
discussion of Being is a corollary of the emancipation of the human mind from
irrational patterns of thought, normally imagined to be a major landmark in
Greek civilization, the fact that there is a continuity of discussion around
the idea of Being long before the development of the Athenian intellectual
hegemony - via Plato’s Academy, and Aristotle’s Lyceum – is something which requires
an explanation.
There is no such
explanation available to be considered as long as we persist in the presumption
that there is no conception of the ultimate abstraction of Being before the 5th
century BCE, which even the Greek evidence contradicts. Greek genius? I cannot
write that without a sense of irony. It is an explanation which explains nothing,
but draws attention to the fact that either we have nothing useful to say about
the intellectual achievement of the Greeks, or that we choose to remain within
our modern episteme.
We also need to
escape the notion that the intellectual achievement of the Greeks owed nothing
to contact with other cultures – again a view based on the presumption that
there was no concept of the ultimate abstraction of Being anywhere else before
the Greeks. Isocrates credited the Egyptians with the discipline of philosophy.
Aristotle indirectly referenced the Egyptians by suggesting that philosophy may
have begun with a professional class with time to think, by which he clearly
had in mind the Egyptian priesthoods. And we know something of the cultural
contacts (both intellectual and commercial) that the Greeks had with Egypt.
Solon visited Egypt and talked with the priests. Pythagoras did the same, and also spent time in Babylon. The
historian Herodotus wrote extensively (if often inaccurately) about Egypt, and went
so far as to claim that the names of some of the Greek gods came from Egyptian
sources.
We also know now of
the cultural impact of the empire of Assyria on Greece, partly through the
close proximity of Ionia with the kingdom of Lydia, a client state of the Assyrians,
and through the direct capture of Athens by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, some
time around 700 BCE. There was a temple to Assyrian gods built in Athens,
according to the Greek writer Abydenus, and so there would have been Assyrian
temple personnel present for a significant period of time, during which there
was the possibility of a significant exchange of ideas. We have long known that
many notions of the presocratic philosophers echo similar Mesopotamian ideas.
Thomas Yaeger, January 10, 2018
