What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died

[Extract from correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy, on the question of why it is we are so disengaged with the concerns of the ancient world.] 

[....]

Thanks for your substantial mail, which I will work through in order, for clarity.

The day of the equinox was quite spectacular, with the full moon rising over the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh. The weather has been very unsettled in the past couple of weeks, so I was not expecting to see anything.

[...]

...binding and loosing was important in Egypt also. In fact it seems to have been an idea universal in ancient civilisations. Though the basis of the idea is likely to have been the preserve of the educated, and the personnel of the divine cults (mostly, but not always exactly the same people). The core idea underlying binding and loosing is that our physical existence is, however it might look to us, a subjective perception of reality. And a subjective perception of reality is a subjective perception of Being itself.

That is why it is so difficult for scholars to understand what is going on. They see the practices and ‘beliefs’ which survive in the literary and archaeological record, but they have no frame in which to understand these things. They do not expect to find anything subtle and sophisticated, because they (they think) are dealing with forms of primitive stupidity, no matter how refined the cultural remains might appear to be.

The figure I gave for the number of offering tables recently turns out to be well out of date. The archaeological exploration of ancient Akhetaten (Tell El Amarna) continues, and the current figure is more than 790 offering tables. That is a staggering number.

You can term the perception of the cosmos which largely eludes modern scholars ‘a shamanic world view’. It is a world view which is extremely old. There were always people around who could see and think beyond the here and now. But the term ‘shaman’ is relatively modern, and fills a gap in the arsenal of modern anthropology. But supplying a name for a phenomenon does not explain what is behind the shamanic practices, and the associated patterns of understanding.

Once the inextricable link between the physical world and the reality beyond became part of the ancient mindset (probably from an immemorial time), it becomes obvious that what happens in Heaven has an effect on Earth, and vice versa. This explains a lot about Buddhist thought, which I’ve spent some time studying over the years. Recently I wrote an article on the possible influence of Buddhism on the philosophy of David Hume. The article explores the logic involved in Theravara Buddhism in some detail.  Theravara Buddhism isn’t a close analogue with with Mesopotamian and Egyptian thought, but it arises from a similar perception of what Reality itself is. The article also discusses ideas prevalent in the European Enlightenment (mainly in the context of Diderot’s Encylopedia, which explain much about negative attitudes to ancient thought in the eighteenth century). The Enlightenment of David Hume.

How was the ancient perception of the nature of the cosmos lost, and why? That’s two very large questions! Asking about the consequences of that loss is another big question. You know lots of stuff about that already, I know. But a discursive triangulation on this question between us, is likely to be useful for us both. This may take some time.

I’ve been writing about that loss for a long time, since it became obvious early on that it was necessary to understand the trajectory, the context, and the mechanics of the loss (in some detail), if we were to be able to (properly) understand what was actually lost.

As far as the savants of the European Enlightenment were concerned, the entire history of the human race before the eighteenth century was a morass of irrational thought – mythology, folklore, magic, legions of superstitious beliefs, a general credulity in the human race, and in earlier times, murderous ritual. They thought they could get clear of all of that by the rigorous application of common sense. That was the basis of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. So, the enoblement of common sense is one of the factors in the loss of the ancient world view.

It is hard to entirely blame the savants, given the limited information that they had. To them the past seemed to be a grim and dark place. They understood that even the crafts were wrapped around in superstition. But the crafts remained important for the wellbeing of the human race. So the crafts were described in the Encyclopedia, but shorn of anything which wasn’t entirely practical.

The savants often did not read and know ancient literature. So they did not know much that was worth knowing. That’s one of the problems with common sense: if the solution is common sense, that is already in your head. Reading is irrelevant. 

Common sense of course, when you are dealing with something which is transcendent of human experience and understanding, is entirely inappropriate. Common sense dictated that the transcendent did not exist, and served no purpose in understanding our world.

The loss of understanding has been going on for a very long time, and was already under way in the 2^nd Millennium BCE. This island is dotted with stone circles as you know, but the ancient Britons stopped building them around the 14^th century BCE. So something, some conception was lost, which removed the motive for building them.

I read a chapter of your writing about the esoteric recently, which was essentially sound. But it isn’t the case that esoteric knowledge in the ancient world was not deliberately kept as a secret. The various priesthoods and sages might have wished that every living person should know what it is, but because esoteric knowledge is often puzzling and counterintuitive in nature, it is easy for what it is to be misunderstood, and then reconstituted as something else. Knowledge which is misunderstood is worse than no knowledge at all. 

I think that is the general pattern of the loss of understanding. Some insight into the nature of reality itself is achieved by an individual, and that insight is taught. An entire culture is developed on the bedrock of that insight. Then it is taught badly, or taught to those who cannot understand what they are being told. The insight becomes something other than what it actually is, and then serves some other cultural or social function. Once a culture is on that slope, it is hard to put the slide into reverse.

I can give some examples here, plus pointers to articles in which I’ve discussed the disconnects between ancient and modern understanding.

First, the ontological argument, which constitutes a huge obstacle to an understanding of ancient thought about the divine. The principal problem with the modern ontological argument is that, for the past seven or eight centuries or so, the argument has been formulated on the basis of the notion that the property of ‘existence’ indicates that something is real. Which is why the argument attempts to provide credible grounds for saying that God exists, and is therefore real. Which is tantamount to a denial of transcendent reality, or the transcendent nature of god. There are other issues with the argument.

I discussed both Anselm’s and Descartes’ versions in The Sacred History of Being, and an extract from the article on Descartes is at: The Ontological Argument In Descartes.  

How did the Christian church, and the philosophers, make this mistake? Probably because they were afraid of the unbounded, the limitless, and the concept of infinity. They wanted an omniscient and perfect entity as their god, but not one that was necessarily beyond human fathoming, and wrapped around in puzzles and paradoxes. They were making God in their own image, rather than the other way around.

I’ve written about the history of the idea of infinity in mathematics, religion and philosophy, via a critical review of Adrian W Moore’s BBC radio series on the subject, broadcast in 2016. My review identifies what is missing from Moore’s tendentious argument.  A long read, but worth the time, I think. It shows just how much pain and intellectual difficulty the idea of the infinite can cause the human mind: ‘Evading the Infinite’

They still had the notion that God lay somewhere behind the physical world, but that notion was not a very sophisticated one. They didn’t need a sophisticated version of God any more, since the main function of religion in the West, from sometime before the fall of Rome, was to support temporal power. 

Divines in the early modern period ended up splitting into two major factions. The Theists saw the world as the creation of God, and that God could be petitioned by Man. Though they had by this time lost all understanding of the mechanism which might make this connection possible. The other major faction was the Deists, who conceived that God had created the world, but that God was the prime mover, and once the world and the cosmos was set in motion, he did not interfere. This view took hold particularly after Descartes and Newton, and the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies was then taken to be evidence of the existence of God (this view became known as uniformitarianism, meaning that the forces which were in play in the past, are the same ones which are at play now. The implication is that everything can be calculated).

Much of this is down to early modern misreadings of Aristotle from the 12^th century CE onwards, and his notion of ‘substance’ (ousia). When is Aristotle talking about matter, or about Being, and/or Reality itself? In the Middle Ages they weren’t very sure. The earlier Arian controversy in the 4^th century CE also revolved around substance (is God one or Triune? They decided that God was Triune – ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ - but the component parts ‘were of the same substance.’ (homousia) What that common substance actually was, was never established in Christian doctrine (and the trinitarian view of God is still not accepted by all Christians). The triadic nature of the divine in Christianity is something which has its origins in Egyptian religion. It’s a feature of Christian theology because the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ are mentioned in the Old Testament. Just without the political fudge of the homousia, which is the legacy of the Council of Nicaea, held in 325 CE.

   

Reliance on Aristotle as a guide always was an error of judgement among scholars. He sometimes argues something other than what he actually thinks (he wrote a book on rhetoric, the Sophistical Refutations), and clearly sometimes actively intended to mislead his students. A case in point is his Nicomachean Ethics, the argument of which proposes that the Gods, by their nature are wholly contemplative, and cannot engage in the world.  Which is an odd and essentially heretical kind of argument to make in the late 4^th Century BCE. The book is a series of lecture notes, probably by different hands (there is an obvious duplication in the text in Book 8). We know that Aristotle held different classes in the morning, and in the afternoon. In the morning he taught exoteric knowledge, in the afternoon he taught esoteric knowledge. The notes on ethics must come from his exoteric teaching, since the argument arrives at, what was at the time, a nonsensical conclusion.

Why would Aristotle do this? The point of spending time building a painstaking argument that leads to a nonsensical conclusion is to find out who the intelligent students are in your class: the intelligent ones are those who pick at the inconsistencies and absurdities of your argument. Those are the ones who you allow to move on to study esoteric thought. Something like this procedure is still used by tribal elders in Africa: you ask a question about the gods, and they give you what sounds like a plausible reply. But it isn’t the real one. The student will only get the real reply once he has shown he is no fool. And that takes a lot more questions on the subject.

Aristotle’s greatest and most dangerous legacy to us also comes ultimately from his exoteric teachings, and is a main cause of our intellectual exile from antiquity. These are his Laws of thought. These Laws became the basis of formal logic as we understand it in the modern world, and they are also the basis of much theological argumentation from the middle ages onwards. Aristotle did not write a treatise on the laws of thought – the various component parts are mentioned and described in his Metaphysics. Put in the most simple way, The first is the Law of Identity (a thing is itself, and not something else), the second is the Law of Non-Contradiction (a thing cannot be one thing and another thing at the same time); the third is the Law of the Excluded Middle (a thing cannot be halfway between what it is and something else).

You can see that the laws revolve around the idea of identity. But it is a purely secular conception of identity, not at all applicable to something which is transcendent.  If you accept the universality of these laws, you cannot discuss the transcendent in any meaningful sense, even if you have academic tenure in a theological seminary. And it is entirely impossible to understand anything useful about ancient religion and ritual, except in purely phenomenological terms.

I have pointed out however that an alternative logical modality has come down to us in the pages of Plato (in the Timaeus), and it is this one which illuminates ancient religion and philosophy. The Neoplatonist writers referenced it. The account of this modality in Plato is rarely discussed by specialists, in terms of what it is and what it means, though it is often read, since Plato’s Timaeus is a text often set for students. Detail available in: Logical Modality in Classical Athens. You might find it interesting then to read The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.

Though the idea of Being was discussed in classical Greece, by Parmenides and Plato, as well as the Presocratics, the idea was not much discussed in late antiquity, except by the Neoplatonists from the third century CE onwards (Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Olympiodorus and Plotinus, and some others). But very few outside of their circles were paying attention at the time. Their moment came as late as the Italian Renaissance. And then they were lost sight of once again after the Newtonian revolution.

So the ideas of the Divine as coterminous with Reality itself, and that Reality itself was entirely transcendent in nature, dropped out of philosophical discourse within the Church. It was not picked up again by philosophers in the early modern period. Hence the endless and vacuous discussions about whether or not God could be said to have the property of existence.

With the advent of the European Enlightenment, the history of human thought began to be written about again in detail, for the first time since Diogenes Laertius wrote his Lives of the Philosophers. But the rewriting was done on the basis of certain presumptions. It was axiomatic that abstract ideas,  such as Being,  were difficult things to discuss, and it was agreed that the Greeks had been the first to do this, during the middle of the first millennium BCE. Why was this decided? The evidence for the Greeks was unquestionably in the surviving texts. Whereas it was decided that there was no evidence that other cultures had ever risen to such levels of discussion.

At the time, it could be argued, it would have been difficult to have come to any other conclusion. Several ancient writers however, had suggested that philosophy was an immensely old discipline, including Plato and Clement of Alexandria. Clement even gave a list of the cultures who practised the discipline. Both Diogenes Laertius and Aristotle suggested that it might have had an origin elsewhere. Aristotle suggested that it required a relatively leisured professional class to emerge, by which he probably had the Egyptians in mind. Isocrates (a rival to Plato, and actively opposed to Plato’s outlook) mentioned the Egyptians in connection with philosophy four times. These statements were (and still are) dismissed.

The European Enlightenment marks the point where the Egyptians ancient reputation as philosophers was systematically downgraded by German scholars (documented in detail in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena). In the end it was agreed that the Egyptians dealt in terms of concrete ideas (whatever that means), and consequently were not capable of abstract thought, and were not capable of contemplating ideas of a wholly transcendent level of reality. Even now, Egyptologists refer to ancient Egyptians as ‘pragmatic’ (as opposed to philosophical) in the way they thought about their religion and rituals.

All this was done in order to preserve the Enlightenment fiction of a stupendous achievement of the Greeks in the middle of the 1^st Millennium BCE, by isolating and downgrading contemporary cultures which might have influenced their development.

Over the past 170 years, an enormous amount of evidence has come out of the ground, and quite a lot of it suggests (to those who are awake at least) that philosophy, transcendental thought, and a sophisticated concept of Being was at the root of a number of cultures around the Mediterranean and the Near East. However Egyptologists (in particular) just ignore this evidence as irrelevant to their profession. Most classicists do too, but with some of them, the dam is starting to break.

That’s the short answer to your question…. There is much more, however, which I will skip for the moment. Where are we going on this long trajectory? I had an exchange of mails with a friend in San Francisco in 2015, where we discussed this question.  I took out personal stuff from the exchange, anonymised her, and turned it into an article which is on my website. I will point you at that.  Locke, Newton, and the Rejection of Reality.

I entirely agree with you that the materialistic paradigm necessarily results in the denial of the possible non-locality of consciousness. If you think that thought and consciousness itself are the products of biological processes in the brain, the idea that consciousness is not localised in the human head just sounds like so much nonsense.  The non-locality of consciousness has been a subject for a few philosophers over the years, but is not discussed in terms of the paradigm which we clearly have in common. P. F. Strawson was one, Wittgenstein was another (Strawson was influenced by Wittgenstein’s thought). Among philosophers it is generally referenced as the ‘no-ownership’ model of consciousness. Usually the argument is along the lines of: “we are constricted to think as we are about identity, perception, experience, physicality, location, etc., by the limitations of (apparently) being physical entities in space and time. Which may not actually be the case”. Not much fun to read, but at least they understand that a materialist interpretation of human existence is problematic.

I also agree that there is a lot of evidence which suggests that consciousness is not localised in the brain, or associated with matter at all. Consciousness may interact with matter, and have some kind of interface with the material world, but that is not the same as being a phenomenon which is entirely localisable. There is a two-way traffic, as you said earlier in your mail.

For me I understand this to be possible because things which are apparently in different places, are actually together in one place, which I reference as the plenum. Which is a place which is not localisable. It is also the key idea we have lost, which makes it impossible to understand both reality itself, and the representations of it, in which we live.

The implication of the concept of reality being a plenum (as it was understood in antiquity) is that both God and gods are necessarily real. This is the consequence of the way they were defined. Each of them has an excellence special to them. That excellence is what makes them real. The plenum is itself real because it is complete and perfect in itself [...]. This fundamental idea is what underpins Greek and Assyrian conceptions of the importance of excellence in thought and activity. It is also why excellence in craft skills was venerated in antiquity. Excellence is what connects everything with everything else. It is why the perfect  execution and observance of a ritual or ceremony was regarded as the most important thing to achieve. This pattern of ideas served as a model among the Greeks for the human soul, and to the organization of society, discussed at: Justice and the Harmony of the Soul. Excellence was also what gave access to the divine: Excellence and the Knowledge of Divine Things.

So I accept that consciousness can be understood as a bridge between ourselves as we are in the form of finite representations, and what we are in that place (which is paradoxically no place) which is filled with the complete and the perfect.  And I agree with you that an important aspect of ritual is about facilitating traffic between the worlds. As you suggest, the traffic is a bit constricted now, since many fewer people have any conception of this purpose…. However, it is necessary for ritual to be performed, and observance to be made, but not essential for the process to be fully understood for it to have an effect. There are still people performing rituals and observances.

   

I read somewhere (in what I’ve read of your work so far), that myth is often about travelling to that other place, either by ascending to Heaven, or descending to an underworld (actually the same place, the plenum, just dressed differently). I agree. [...] The creation of a myth, and the telling of it, can be understood as performative also, particularly if rituals are associated with it: it is ritual made visible. Placing myths in the sky, to descend into the earth, and to rise from it once again, as part of a regular cycle, like a rotating Tibetan prayer wheel, is performative and served the same function.  

Best, Thomas

Did the Greeks Invent Philosophy?

In addition to many non-specialist readers here who (I think) find the heretical line of argument in my posts interesting, there are also readers of this blog who are specialists in relevant fields, including classicists, archaeologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, etc. I’m grateful for their interest, and the often well-informed comments and exchanges, both here and via email. But sometimes specialists are more interested in defending academic turf, than in the elucidation of their subject. I’ve recently had such an experience.

I chose to publish first in ebook format, via my own imprint, the Anshar Press. Partly because I anticipated a grim slog trying to find a publisher or an agent willing to take on a project which rejects several scholarly constructs which we use to make sense of our intellectual history. The most important of these constructs is the notion that the Greeks invented philosophy. The corollary of this is that there is no intellectual history worthy of the name before the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

This construct is a notion, and not a fact. It is not a fact because the evidence does not support it. If it is not supported by the evidence, why do people believe it?

Such a long tale to tell! So many interlocking reasons! I unpicked much of this construct in The Sacred History of Being (2015). A close reading of both Plato and Aristotle shows that the Greeks had a quite different understanding of what knowledge is from ourselves. They also had a quite different notion of how knowledge is acquired from ourselves, and Plato and Aristotle broadly agree about how it is done. It has nothing to do with the human senses, and physical experience. All knowledge was understood to exist in a supersensible and wholly transcendent realm. The soul was thought to mirror that transcendent realm, and therefore to offer connection with it. The upshot of this way of looking at things is that knowledge is accessed directly by the mind rather than the senses.

In the modern world we have turned this upside down entirely. We assume (and that is all that it is, an assumption) that all knowledge is necessarily mediated through sensory experience. It is understood through the categories of thought employed by the human reason, which (we imagine) reflect (in some way) the structure of the objectively real physical reality which exists outside our minds. This is a scholarly construct (one might even describe it as a scholarly compact) which has become a given since the European Enlightenment.

So we read Plato and Aristotle upside down, and effectively reject those parts of their writings which do not fit with our own way of understanding things. Our understanding of the main components of classical philosophy is therefore quite different from the understanding of philosophy in the Athenian Academy, and so scholars study classical philosophy outside its proper context. Worse, scholars have no idea what the proper context is, or why it might be important. As a result, many aspects of classics and the history of philosophy are necessarily problematic.

Something happened in addition to the development of a post Enlightenment over-reliance on common sense ideas about how we know things, and make sense of them. We lost a key ancient idea. That idea is the idea of the plenum. The plenum is that state of reality, conceived to exist beyond space and time, which stands behind the generation of space and time. Though it embraces the reality of space and time, it has no existence in space and time. It has no size, no location, and no properties other than being the wholly transcendental reality in which physical reality can exist. It does not move, it is not subject to change, it does not think in any way we could properly comprehend. It is what it is.

This is the idea behind Plato’s discussion of the form of the Good, and of a transcendental reality. It is an idea which has been understood (by some) for much of European history, and since classical times. But it has been much less understood since the Enlightenment. This is because it is an idea which runs counter to common sense, and which cannot make sense to us in terms of the realities of the world of things which have physical existence. Even if such a thing did exist, and was conceived to exist, it has been imagined that it would have no impact on the world of the senses and physical existence. As a consequence, it is, for the most part, treated as a matter of no importance.

This view is a mark of the poverty of the modern mind, even among the intellectually able. As I said, the plenum is that state of reality, which was once conceived to exist beyond space and time, which stands behind the generation of space and time, in which we have our existence. We may not be able to measure it, weigh it, discuss its form, etc., but if such a thing is responsible for the generation of the physical world, the concept deserves our attention. It was Plato’s principal concern. He was always looking to the ‘one thing’. And that one thing could be apprehended by the mind.

The Plenum can spoken of in different ways. It can be called transcendental reality, reality itself, Being, The One, Totality, etc. When I came to write The Sacred History of Being, I chose to use the term ‘Being’ through much of the text, because that was one of the terms Plato used. But I explored the different ways in which Being can be referenced. So a major purpose of writing the book was to explore the scope of a key idea in classical philosophy in something like its original context, and to restore its understanding. It remains a difficult concept to master, but we do ourselves no favours in not knowing what it means, and why it was such an important concept.

That restoration by itself makes the book potentially a valuable contribution to making sense of classical philosophy, and its actual origins. Provided of course that I have done the job properly, and not littered the text with misunderstandings and errors. Altogether, I spent nearly twelve years on constructing the text. I took the task seriously.

My background is unusual, in that in addition to my interest in Greece, philosophy and the history of ideas, I also studied Mesopotamian languages, history and culture. I was struck very early on in my studies by the range of evidence which suggested strongly that the Assyrians and Babylonians had a clear conception of the Plenum, and the idea of Being, and that there was a connection with their religion. One king even included the title ‘King of Totality’ in the string of epithets which described his importance. I realised that there was a level of cultural continuity between Greece and Assyria in particular in terms of ideas of the nature of reality, and also in terms of an understanding of moral action.

So, not only was The Sacred History of Being restoring clarity to our picture of classical philosophy, it provided something of a comparative cultural context for the emergence of philosophy in Greece. A comparative context which could be followed in Assyria back to the 14^th century B.C.E.

Occasionally I send off letters to publishers offering to submit work which they might be interested in publishing. Sometimes they say yes, and ask to see the manuscript. That’s fine, whether they accept the manuscript for publication or not - they bothered to look at the work. You might think that a book such as The Sacred History of Being would generate a lot of interest among academic publishing houses which focus on philosophy, classics, religion, ancient history, etc. I noticed in April that a major academic publishing house had on their list a book which covered some of the later territory of The Sacred History of Being.  I drafted a letter describing my book and its scope, and included a commendation of the work from an eminent scholar (I’ve edited that out). I sent this mail to the appropriate editor at the publishing house on the afternoon of the 2^nd of May this year, and offered to send the manuscript to them in PDF.

What happened? I got an email the very next afternoon, declining to look at the book, after consultation with other list managers. My work ­– possibly the most interesting manuscript they could receive in a month of Sundays – was rejected, sight unseen, by three people (specialists in classics, religion and philosophy). What was the reason given? The book did not fit the list. Which is standard code for ‘we don’t want your book’. What the real reasons were for the rejection I am afraid to imagine.

The point of posting the exchange is not to embarrass anyone, so I’ve blurred names and other information which would identify the publishing house. The point is that it is extremely difficult to get a hearing for radical scholarship from major publishing houses. And that manuscripts can be (and sometimes are) rejected without being looked at at all. Rejecting books with radical arguments without even a cursory review suggests that defending existing scholarly turf is a major part of the game. That’s not what it is supposed to be about. 

[click to expand the images].

I did expand on what some of the difficulties facing my project might be as far back as 2005. I drafted, slightly facetiously, a publishers internal memo outlining why such a book should not be published. You might want to take a look at that, since not much has changed since then. Keeping the Enlightenment Agenda Alive.

'I and Thou'. Anthropology and the Presumption of Primitive Intellectual Error in Antiquity.

[This is a section from Thomas Yaeger’s book J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published by the Anshar Press in April 2016.]


4.1. The problem of the authentic Socrates may reside mainly with ourselves: we make a clear distinction between ethical issues and matters of ontology. A proper reading of Aristotles's Ethics however, shows quite clearly that ethical issues were not distinguished in this way by Plato's pupil. The anabasis of the soul described in that work implies at the least a metaphorical emulation of the condition of the divine*[37]. The whole universe is conceived by Aristotle as a moral hierarchy from insect to the Good, and we do well to recall the passage in the Timaeus where Plato speaks of a similar hierarchy, ascended and descended according to the moral worth of the individual in life:

...by virtue of necessity... their bodies are subject to influx and efflux, [and] these results would necessarily follow, - firstly sensation that is innate and common to all proceeding from violent effections; secondly, desire mingled with pleasure and pain; and besides these, fear and anger and all such emotions as are naturally allied thereto, and all such as are of a different and opposite character. And if they shall master these they will live justly, but if they are mastered unjustly. And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star, and shall gain a life that is blessed and congenial; but whoso has failed therein shall be changed into woman's nature at the second birth; and if, in that shape, he still refraineth not from wickedness he shall be changed every time, according to the nature of his wickedness, into some bestial form after the similitude of his own nature...*[38].

 4.2. It has been argued, essentially following the Frazerian model of antiquity, [Before Philosophy, Henri Frankfort, et al.] that, among ancient cultures the world was conceived as a place populated entirely by entities, so that relation with the things in the world was essentially understood in terms of "I" and "Thou": subject and object, whether animate or inanimate, were understood to belong to the same generic category. But this presumes - for reasons which seem quite sound to us - that in fact the subjective and objective worlds are generically different. Thus, it would seem that to parallel epistemological processes with ontological ones must be to make an error. The implication of this view is that, at best, the ancients failed to formalise the difference between the two realms, and, at worst, that such a distinction never occurred to them.

4.3. If it is true that the ancients never came to grips with the distinction between the realms of the subjective and the objective, and therefore the distinction between the animate and inanimate, then it must follow that the ancient perception of the nature of the world must have been altogether in error (to which Wittgenstein objected), and the earliest part of human history may be legitimately characterized, with Frazer, as a childhood. The supposed failure to distinguish between the processes of the subjective and objective realms means that we can read the past as a struggle for the acquisition of the skill to do so: all arguments form part of an unplanned sequence, a blind upward groping toward the light of understanding. Whereas if the yoking of the subjective and objective realms owes its origin to the reasoned idea of the final cause, the concept of a final completeness of the world in which everything has its place and function, then we cannot with confidence interpret dialectical arguments or the evidence of human activity in antiquity as part of a blind anabasis, an improvised ascent to a rational understanding. This for the simple reason that these arguments and actions took place within a context in which the basic rational frame was already taken for granted. The importance of this is hard to overstate.

4.4. For now, the attempt to disinter the evidence for the unwritten history of the final cause as an idea is close to impossible: for, though the idea of the final cause might be admitted in the writings of earlier authors (Herodotus, Histories, Bk. I.30-33, already quoted, much of Homer, etc.), it is not understood to be intimately bound up with the view of reality which emerges from the Platonic corpus. Hence, evidence of the earlier history of the idea of the final cause is not of itself evidence for Platonism as a body of work emerging from an older pattern of ideas. Instead, the final cause is treated by critics as a traditional element within a radical programme of inquiry. By contrast, I argue that the Platonic teaching was not an exploration of reality by means of dialectical enquiry involving the use of traditional elements; but that Plato crossed well-rehearsed territory, probably with arguments more or less of his own construction.

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[37] interestingly, in defining the action of the gods as passive contemplation, Aristotle reproduces the extreme Parmenidean form of Plato's Ideal theory, in which the Form of the Good is unchanging and unchangeable. In Bk. X of the Ethics Aristotle characterizes the activity of the divine as contemplation. The gods are living beings from whom all forms of activity have been removed. "...if a being lives, and action cannot be ascribed to him,... what remains but contemplation? It follows, then, that the divine life, which surpasses all others in blessedness, consists of contemplation". (Nic. Eth. X. 8. 7., F. H. Peters trans.) [38] Tim. 42a-c

Eleven articles on Plato and Socrates

I've gathered these 11 items together, since they are scattered through the blog. The chapter extract concerning 'The Platonic Theory of Being' is from The Sacred History of Being, published in 2015. The text  of 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens', along with some others, forms a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought published by the Anshar Press in August 2017.  There are three extracts here also from J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published in 2016. 

Justice and the Harmony of the Soul

explores the idea of Justice discussed in Plato’s Republic, which argues that the pursuit of special excellences by individuals, in terms of skills, and moral and intellectual virtue, without reference to the activities of other individuals, was understood to result in a harmonious arrangement of society. They are joined together as a consequence of the fact that each of the virtues is complete and perfected. 

Plato's Point of View

Plato’s main concern was what was truly real, which remained necessarily unchanging and itself, and therefore could not be present, at least as itself, in the world of the here and now. This is not however, how Plato is understood or represented by modern philosophers. There are two main schools of thought: the first is that his position is consistent throughout his work, but his work is shaped by an unknown agrapha (unwritten esoteric doctrine). The second is that his work represents a discursive exploration of philosophical questions, which comes to no firm conclusion.

Sameness and Difference in Plato 

is a discussion of the idea of the Plenum in Plato. Philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up with a plenum during the Middle Ages, and as a result, philosophical argument about the divine, all the way up to the present day, deals poorly with certain issues, and no longer resembles the kind of argument about the divine found in ancient literature. It also makes it difficult to understand what Plato means. 

The Significance of the Chapter on The Platonic Theory of Being

Though the chapter is a difficult read, it is not that difficult to explain. In conversation with a reader recently, I provided a short explanation of the nature of the chapter, and its significance for the overall argument of The Sacred History of Being. It concerns the belief that divinity could be present in inanimate objects, and whether reality itself is necessarily one. And the consequences which necessarily follow from such discussion.

The Platonic Theory of Being (chapter extract) 

Plato argues that, by systematic dialectical enquiry, we can rise from the realms of likelihood and opinion, where we encounter only similitudes, to the realm in which certain knowledge is possible. This is to be achieved by passing through the similitudes, on account of their similitude, to their ultimate origin, the Form of the Good.

Logical Modality in Classical Athens

Though we have recognised only one logical modality for more than two millennia, there were in fact two. One of them was appropriate to earthbound existence; the other supplied a rational basis for contact with the divine.

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.


Post Enlightenment Plato, and That which Cannot Move

The Plato we have we look at differently from the way he was understood in antiquity. For most of the middle ages all that was available to scholars was the first part of the Timaeus. So it is not the case that a way of understanding Plato has been handed down to us, except via the neoplatonists. But the neoplatonist understanding of Plato is deprecated as a way of understanding his work, with the consequence that modern scholars approach Plato virtually naked, with a very modern set of intellectual baggage. This can be a problem.


Excluding Parmenides

This is an extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being, published April 4, 2016. In Frazer's early essay, Plato's Parmenides is scarcely discussed at all. This is particularly surprising, for the Parmenides contains criticism of Plato's doctrine by Plato himself; criticisms not adequately answered either in that dialogue or elsewhere in the canon. The chronological position of this dialogue is thus immensely important if we consider the work of Plato as a development. The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Running Folklore to the Death

An extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being. The ultimate "disappearance" of the Ideal theory as an explanatory device of any worth is read as Plato's rejection of his own theory; lingering in his work for a time, just as the Ptolemaic account of the Cosmos lingered on (in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example) after the work of Copernicus and Galileo rendered it theoretically outmoded.The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Is Plato's Ontology False?

An extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being.If we summarise Plato's view of the nature of the ultimate reality, we might say that it is always beyond understanding, unchanging, yet participates in the world of change - a paradoxical matrix. Is this a problem of epistemology? Is there no distinction between epistemology or ontology (since the world of change is what can be known)? Plato's ontology is shown to be beyond the mere projection of the categories of knowledge, since it is known at the point where the epistemology breaks down in contradictions. It is beyond all human categorisation. The Idea of the Good in the dialogues is simply part of the armoury of likelihoods employed by Plato - one of the assumed positions on the path to knowledge of Reality. The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Thomas Yaeger, October 7, 2017.

Five articles on Plato

I've gathered these together, since they are scattered through the blog. The chapter extract on the Platonic Theory of Being is from 'The Sacred History of Being'. The others are free-standing blog posts. The text  of 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens' will form part of a chapter in 'Abstract Conception in Greece and Assyria'.

Justice and the Harmony of the Soul

Plato's Point of View (and why we think he doesn't have one) 

Sameness and Difference in Plato 

The Platonic Theory of Being (chapter extract) 

Logical Modality in Classical Athens

'Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity

This is part of a chapter from the draft of The Sacred History of Being which was under way in 2004. The chapter did not make it through to the final version which was published in November 2015, though I did write about the same things in the published version, in slightly different terms. I had moved on considerably in those eleven years.

Trying to separate out key aspects of Greek and Mesopotamian models of Reality, as I did here,  was something of a methodological conceit, and the discussion of the hypothetical core of the ancient understanding of Reality as something which might be separated from everything else,  doesn't mean that such a hypothetical core existed apart 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.

So this text should be understood as a snapshot of how I was approaching the ancient data, and the different points of view I was exploring, as part of the study in 2004.

Essentially what I called in this text the 'Cult of Eternity' revolves around the 'Doctrine of Totalities', which is mentioned in connection with Pythagoras, is described by Plato, mentioned by the Neoplatonists, and is also referenced in a Nag Hammadi text. We know the doctrine was known in Babylon, and it is possible that Pythagoras learned of it while he was there. It is in fact a logical modality, though currently it is not recognised as such. It can be argued that this logical modality underpins the entire intellectual edifice of Mesopotamian thought, and much of the philosophical thought in ancient Greece, from Pythagoras onwards.

I have taken the liberty of re-Englishing some of the text, but the argument is as it was.

Thomas Yaeger, October 17, 2016

Defining the Cult

Why characterise the beliefs of some elite groups in Greece and
Mesopotamia as cultic, rather than considering them simply as elite groups
functioning within the social and institutional structures of these cultures?

The reason for this is quite simple: the belief system of these elite groups is at variance
with aspects of the more broadly based belief system of the culture in which the cult is
embedded. The cult in question enshrines a pattern of belief which is shared by a small
and influential group; it has great meaning for that group, and it informs
almost every aspect of their lives. It has all the characteristics of
individuated cults – liturgy, ritual, festival, sacred objects and images, etc. It
also has a secret at its core, which is often a feature of individuated cult*1.

It is not strictly a secret society however – or at least we have no reason to
believe that it functioned entirely in secret. This does not mean that it functioned in
public – rather that it functioned as an elite club, occasionally admitting new members,
according to merit. Thus, it would be possible for individuals outside the group to
know something of its existence, and perhaps to know individuals who belonged to the
group, as well as perhaps knowing the time and place of ritual, etc. But these individuals
would not know any significant detail of the cult, either in terms of practice or belief.*2
 It is a secret society however in terms of it having secret aims and beliefs, and a
restricted membership.

Its function was religious. The detail of what was involved and the belief
system which underpinned this activity is the focus of this study.
In essence what we have uncovered is a way of thinking of some
importance in history. It underpins the historical development of many
ancient religions, even if it is not itself older than these religions, or is not
native to the region in which the religions grew up.

It needs a name, if we are not always to be returning to the details of its nature
and influence in order to indicate its involvement. I have decided to call this
phenomenon the ‘Cult of Eternity’, since it is clear that emulation of the nature
of eternity is the principal goal of this school of thought: the source of the cult is
the understanding of the importance of invariance above all else, and the members
of the cult are focussed on eternity. Eternity is a concept which all important
religions - of which we have knowledge - have.

We are not talking here about an organisation with physical and intellectual
continuity across both time and the geography of the ancient world when
we talk about the ‘Cult of Eternity’: what we are talking about is a way of
thinking which might have been transmitted by contact between elite groups
over large geographical distances, but which, alternatively, might as easily
come to exist at a certain place and time whether or not such actual contact
has occurred. If it can arise as a notion spontaneously in the mind of one
man, then it has arrived within the culture in question.*3

If it subsequently informs the theological and religious structures of that culture,
then that form of cultic belief is of importance to the understanding of that culture,
and its dynamics.

It must be understood as a cult in the sense that it involves a shared set of beliefs,
understandings, and practices belonging to a small group within ancient cultures.*4
The true nature of these cultic beliefs were not understood – and perhaps not even
 suspected outside of members of the royal court, and some parts of the priesthood.

Notwithstanding the fact that we can often trace the ideas of the cult in the
art and literature and language of a culture, where elements associated with
the cult have shaped the outward form of the institutional religion, the
nature of the core ideas of the cult, then as now, make it very unlikely that
any but a small group of people with control of the political and religious
hegemony could hold these beliefs.

The Pattern of Belief

What is the essential nature of this cultic belief? It can be stated quite
simply, though its difficult passage through history has been as a
consequence of the fact that its essential nature it is so easy to miss, and to
lose, without any sense that something important has been lost.

It is lost when the understanding that the doctrine enshrines images which
are understood as recollections of the ur reality, turns into the notion that the
images themselves, whether in ritual or narrative or poetic form, represent
the matter of the cult, rather than pointers and paths to the real goal of the
cult.

In essence the central belief of the cult is that reality itself is utterly
transcendent of all the characteristics and properties of earthly existence.
The divine, as a consequence of this understanding, is understood as
entirely beyond our human ability to grasp, except in terms of a crude
inversion of the categories normally employed in our understanding. This
idea of reality is conveyed and referred to by means of a number of images
– these may be actual images, through descriptions of images, through
ritual, through narrative, and through mythic and poetic constructs.

One of the key concepts of this cult is the distinction between the secular
and the eternal. Most of the desirable (and as Robert Graves might say,
‘nostalgic’) characteristics of reality are imaged in the idea of the eternal. It
does not move, does not participate, but simply is itself. The moving image
of eternity, which we have seen is of central importance in the Greek
version of the doctrine of the cult, is the one which does participate in
generation, which does move. Significantly, it is itself described as an
image, since it, along with all the elements of secularity within the moving
image, is an approximation, a metaphor to the all but indescribable and
unreachable.

The second aspect of this pattern of belief in a completely transcendent ur
reality, is that there are certain areas of earthly reality which are closely
connected with the ur reality. These areas are the limits or boundaries of
things. A characteristic of a limit or a boundary is that it is the place where
something passes into something else. In this place, the utter limit of
something is no longer what it is, but is the place between what that thing
was (whatever it was) and the thing which is beyond. In other words, the
boundary or limit is a no-man’s-land in terms of categorical understanding.
In consequence, it resembles very strongly the nature of the divine.

Why this Pattern?

Why do these properties of both the ur reality and of boundaries and limits
have such importance for those involved in the cult? Because the ur reality
is the place of generation, the place of the ur decisions – the principal
separations and divisions of eternity, the place of ultimate completion – the
ur of all and everything. Like the soil of the original home of a tribe, packed
into its ritual altar, its ‘first earth’, eternity is the place and condition of
resort when change, joining, sundering, enhancement, and judgement are
required. The devotee of the cult can, by means of its rituals and discipline,
both travel there, and bring eternity to the here and now.

The tribe need not have a theory of being to know the importance of ‘first earth’,
and it is not necessary for there to be a theory of being behind the existence and
importance of the practice. However it is clear that the concept of an ur
reality has abstracted to the nth degree many of the simpler notions which
occur to man, and brought them together, as Solon suggested to Croesus, ‘to
arrive at the proper time and agree’.*5 Where we find many clues to the
existence of this abstracted and rarified vision of the other in one or several
cultures, we cannot ignore these clues without damaging our capacity to
understand the cultural processes at work.

One of the problems which historians face in studying the ancient world is
the problem of studying patterns of belief which, are full of the practice of things
which have become reprehensible or meaningless - magic, witchcraft, divination
and sacrifice. To the modern scholar, these are credulous beliefs, without
foundation in anything which makes sense to the rational mind, and so the
historian is expected to have no sympathy wth the patterns of thought involved -
beyond that necessary to explore the social and cultural dynamics of these beliefs
in the material under examination. It is of course perfectly possible to write an excellent
study of a belief system without the writer sharing that belief system, but, for the
sake of professional credibility, it is important that objectivity – the ‘not sharing’ in
the belief system under study – is visible and public. Hence there is a tendency for
historians to avoid as far as possible discussion of beliefs and the intellectual undertow
of ancient practice, and where they find it necessary to engage with it, they usually
describe rather than analyse.

The difficulty of a historian is therefore very great, if we attempt to bring in
from the cold the common practice of the ancient world, and its intellectual
origins within a pattern of cultic belief and ritual. If it is more like what we understand
 than we (formerly) understood, and belongs to the known tradition of understanding
the world in terms of the relationship between being and the world of becoming,
then a danger emerges that the work involved might seem like a rehabilitation rather
than an objective study.*6

Who would be safe? The objectivity of a discipline can mean that the object of
study is preferred lying dead on the dissecting table, rather than as something whose
whole nature requires study as a living thing: the object is studied as an ‘it’ rather than as
 a ‘thou’. Where its dynamics are explored, these are often framed within modern
models of the forces at work in social structures, since these are the product of rational
discussion over many decades, and give us the tools and approaches to understand social
dynamics.

But is this really adequate as an approach? The cultures of the ancient world once lived,
and it is important to look at them as living things, driven by by their own will and
concerns. Looking at these cultures as supported and vivified by the powerhouse of a
theory of Being allows us to understand what it is that shapes them, and to understand
the connections between that powerhouse and more distributed and diffuse practices and
phenomena.*7

The cult itself is sustained by the inner logic of its belief system. Based on the
understanding of the importance of the concept of the eternal, it shares
serveral features with the religion in which it functions as the intellectual
core, supplying access to the functional aspects of the ur reality. Serving in
this way, it has a technical language, and technical logic. Much of this, particularly in
the fine detail, is lost to us within Mesopotamian culture, and we must also use non-textual
evidence as part of the recovery technique. But sometimes it peeps out at us, utterly
 inexplicable within the now traditional modes of interpretation which are applied to
near eastern  civilisations.

One example of this is the Akkadian phrase ‘Shar Kishati’, which was applied to Assyrian
Kings in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. The phrase literally means: ‘King of
Totality’. This makes very poor sense outside of the context of a cultic model
for the importance of the king – the phrase does not specify the nature or context of
the totality – whether it is to be understood as a totality of nations, of peoples, or even of
the world.

Within the context of a cult which has the pursuit of eternity at its core, the epithet
makes perfect sense: totality is one of the ways in which eternity may be
spoken of, since the eternal is the undivided and undifferentiated ur reality,
before the creation, the moving image of the same. The phrase ‘King of the
Four Quarters’ similarly does not refer (except where made explicit) to
earthly power and hegemony. The ‘four quarters’ refer to a division of the
ur reality or totality made by the cult, in which the properties of kingship
are defined in terms of different images of his transcendence over the
world.

These images are connected with the bull, the ram, the eagle, and
man. Other combinations of images are possible, and  found, but these
four are the principle ones. Very often aspects of these animals are brought
together in images of the King and of the sages, so that the leg of the king is
overmuscled to invoke the strength of the bull; his cloak is feathered in
order to invoke the power and clarity of vision of the eagle*8, and he wears
a torque around his arm whose ends are marked with ram’s heads, a
favoured animal for the purposes of enquiry by divination. The human part
of the quartet represents intelligence and the rational part of the soul.

That this totality of the four quarters is something to which limits and
borders are closely associated is clear from the fact that the quartet of
images is often combined in the sacred winged bulls, found situated within
the limits of palaces and temples, marking the gateway between the
precincts of the palace or temple, and the outside secular world of movement
 and change.

Notes -

1 We are familiar with the existence and importance of the indivuated Greek cults,
which eventually assumed an enormous importance in the later Roman Empire.
Herodotus sometimes mentions these cults, but makes offhand references to the
nature of the rites performed in thse ceromonies, saying ‘those who have experienced
 them will know what I mean’. The details were secret from the uninitiated. We do not know
about the details of the cult of the Great Gods, the Kabiroi at Samothrace, on account of
this reticence on the part of Herodotus. As for Mesopotamian cults, we know that the whole
religious edifice functioned more or less as an assemblage of individuated cults. Those in
the lower levels ofsociety were simply not admitted to cult buildings at all, far less being
admitted to worship or to participate in ritual. So far however, it has not been considered as a possibility that the whole thing was held together by a cult which might be restricted to an
even smaller group, initiated into a cult whose ideas reflect a different kind of
intellectual picture of the world

2 Of course there are exceptions to this rule. The journalist Richard Carlile gained access to
Masonic ceremonies and documents in the early years of the 19th century, and wrote
extensively about this cult. Though he was pilloried for his efforts at the time, it was not
long before his ‘Manual of Masonry’ was being used in preference to official texts by the
members of the craft – indeed, one of the two copies I own has clearly been marked by
someone learning the rites of the craft.

3 The question of the routes by which the ideas of the cult have moved around is
nevertheless interesting, and in some instances it is possible to point at likely nodes
of contact and exchange. However this question is beyond the scope of this book.

4 I have defined the belief in the importance and efficacy of eternity as a cult for two
principal reasons. The first is that this belief is clearly necessarily confined to a small
group or network of individuals, for the simple reason that the nature of some of the
beliefs belonging to the cult would be anathema to the wider population. Talking of a
divine nature which has none of the properties of earthly existence could easily be
misunderstood as atheism. The second reason for defining this pattern of belief as cultic is
that, during the first millennium B.C. E., the belief system was more often than not
accompanied by cult ritual.

5 Those who invite for example the pre-eminent anthropologist of the ancient
world, Walter Burkhert, as keynote speaker to a conference on the subject, are perhaps
 unconsciously exhibiting similar behaviour to tribal elders who place ‘first earth’ at the
core of their cultic life.

6 We are familiar with the Platonic tradition, which, through a number of twists and
turns, is more or less continuous as a body of ideas in the west during the past two
and a quarter millennia. It isn’t a tradition which is continuously active, in that it is not always worked within, and sometimes it has lain fallow. However we can trace a continuous tradition
based on the original Platonic corpus all the way from classical Greece to modern times.
And sometimes this tradition has actively shaped institutions and patterns of belief.

Examples of the powerful influence of this tradition include the neo-Platonist writings, the
take-up of Platonic ideas within the court and intellectual life of the Italian Renaissance,
and its particularly fertile influence in the English Renaissance of the late sixteenth
century. What is being suggested here is that a similar pattern of tradition existed in the
ancient world before Plato, and that the Platonic writings, rather than instituting something
entirely new, refashion an existing tradition of arcane cultic ideas, passed on largely
through oral means, within small and select groups within institutions which offer a
conducive and receptive environment for these ideas. Plato therefore is one highly important
node in the tradition, particularly because he is deliberately trying to pass on a body of ideas being threatened by a wholly secular view of the world.

7 If it is faulty to approach ancient societies which are replete with magical practice as
supported by a theory of being which informs much of the detail of its belief and practice,
then we will find out our error soon enough: we will find no evidence to support the claim
which is not inexplicable by other means. Some of the key pieces of evidence in this book
have no explanation in terms of existing interpretative schema: they are not treated as
evidentially significant, even when they clearly absorbed much of the ancient economy, as
well as the time and intellectual focus of the elite of the society in question.

8 Most probably the feathered cloak also is intended to conjure the idea of the king
functioning in another world, as the eagle can exist on land, but has its true existence
 in the air

Beyond Being: Thomas Taylor on the Ineffable Principle

An extract from the writings of the English Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was a contemporary of Coleridge. I have modernised the paragraphing of this text, for clarity, since the subject matter is difficult enough by itself. Otherwise the orthography of the original is unchanged. This text forms one of the appendices to The Sacred History of Being (2015). 

Taylor's translations were originally issued in very short print runs. However they were occasionally reprinted during the nineteenth century, according to no particular plan, and all survive. All Taylor's works were republished in a uniform edition at the beginning of the 21st century by the Prometheus Trust. 

Thomas Taylor, from his additional notes to the Select Works of Plotinus, note to p122 ,“On Eternity and Time”, sect. IV and V. – Sect. V contains: “Because, however, such a nature as this, thus all-beautiful and perpetual, subsists about the one, proceeding from and with it, and in no respect departing from it, but always abides about and in the one, and lives according to it, hence I think it is beautifully and with a profundity of decision, said by Plato, that “eternity abides in one,” that he might not only lead it to the one which is in itself, but that he might also in a similar manner lead the life of being about the one. This, therefore, is that which we investigate, and that which thus abides is eternity.”

Taylor comments in footnote 2 that “Plato, however, does not by the one in this place, mean the ineffable principle of things, but the one of being, or the summit of the intelligible order, as is shown by Proclus....” 

'Hence there is something even beyond the one. – The most sublime of the arcane dogmas of the Platonic Theology is this, that the ineffable principle of things is something even beyond the one, as is demonstrated by Proclus in his second book “On the Theology of Plato,” and particularly by Damascius in his MS. Treatise [Gk. peri archon], “On Principles.” See my translation of the former of these works, and of an extract from the latter in the Additional Notes at the end of the third Volume of my Plato, and in my “Dissertation on the Philosophy of Aristotle.” From this extract, the following observations are selected.'

 “The one is not the one as that which is smallest, but is the one in all things. For by its own simplicity it accedes to all things, and makes all things to be one. Hence all things proceed from it, because it is itself all things prior to all. And as that which has an united subsistence is prior to things which are separated from each other, so the one is many prior to the many. All things, therefore, are from the one, and with reference to the one, as we are accustomed to say. 

If then according to a more usual manner of speaking, we call things which consist in multitude and separation all things, we must admit that the united, and in a still greater degree the one, are the principles of these. But if we consider these two as all things, and asume them in conjunction with all other things, according to habitude and co-ordination with them, we must then investigate another principle prior to all things, which it is no longer proper to consider in any way as all things, nor to co-arrange with its progeny. For if some one should say that the one, though it is all things which have in any respect a subsistence, yet is one prior to all things, and is more one than all things; since it is one by itself, but all things as the cause of all, and according to a co-ordination with all things; - if this should be said, the one will thus be doubled, and we ourselves shall become doubled, and multiplied about its simplicity. For, by being the one it is all things after the most simple manner. At the same time also, though this should be said, it is necessary that the principle of all things should be exempt from all things, and consequently that it should be exempt from the most simple allness, and from a simplicity absorbing all things, such as is that of the one. 

Our soul, therefore, prophesies that the principle which is beyond all things that can in any respect be conceived, is unco-ordinated with all things. Neither, therefore, must it be called principle nor cause, nor that which is first nor prior to all things, nor beyond all things. By no means, therefore, must we celebrate it as all things, nor, in short, is it to be celebrated, or recalled into memory. We may also add, that the one is the summit of the many, as the cause of the things proceeding from it: and that we form a conception of the one according to a purified suspicion extended to that which is most simple and most comprehensive. But that which is most venerable must necessarily be incomprehensible by all conceptions and suspicions; since also in other things, that which always soars beyond our conceptions is more honourable than that which is more obvious; so that what flies from all our suspicions will be most honourable. But if this be the case, it is nothing.

 Let however nothing be twofold, one better than the one, the other posterior to sensibles. If also we strive in vain in asserting these things, striving in vain is likewise twofold; the one falling into the ineffable, the other into that which in no respect whatever has any subsistence. For the latter also is ineffable, as Plato says, yet according to the worse, but the former according to the better. If, too, we search for a certain advantage arising from it, this is the most necessary advantage of all others, that all things proceed as from an adytum, from the ineffable, and in an ineffable manner. For neither do they proceed as the one produces the many, nor as the united things separated, but as the ineffable similarly produces all things ineffably. 

But if in asserting these things concerning it, that it is ineffable, that it is no one of all things, that it is incomprehensible, we subvert what we say, it is proper to know that these are the names and words of our parturitions, daring anxiously to explore it, and which, standing in the vestibules of the adytum, announce indeed nothing pertaining to the ineffable, but signify the manner in which we are affected about it, our doubts and disappointments; nor yet this clearly, but through indications to such as are able to understand these investigations. We also see that our parturitions suffer these things about the one, and that in a similar manner they are solicitous and subverted. For the one, says Plato, if it is, is not the one. But if it is not, no assertion can be adapted to it: so that neither can there be a negation of it, nor can any name be given to it; for neither is a name simple. Nor is there any opinion nor science of it. For neither are these simple; nor is intellect itself simple. So that the one is in every respect unknown and ineffable.

“What then Shall we investigate something else beyond the ineffable? Or perhaps, indeed, Plato leads us ineffably through the one as a medium, to the ineffable beyond the one which is now the subject of discussion; and this by an ablation of the one, in the same manner as he leads us to the one by an ablation of other things. But if having ascended as far as to the one he is silent, this also is becoming in Plato to be perfectly silent, after the manner of the ancients, concerning things in every respect unspeakable; for the discourse was indeed most dangerous in consequence of falling on idiotical ears. Hence that which is beyond the one is to be honoured in the most perfect silence, and prior to this, by the most perfect ignorance, which despises all knowledge” [As that which is below all knowledge is an ignorance worse than knowledge, so the silence in which our ascent to the ineffable terminates, is succeeded by an ignorance superior to all knowledge. Let it, however, be carefully remembered, that such an ignorance is only to be obtained after the most scientific and intellectual energies].

And in another part of the same admirable work, he further observes: “Ascending therefore to the one, shall we meet with it as that which is known? Or wishing to meet with it as such shall we arrive at the unknown? May we not say that each of these is true? For we meet with it afar off as that which is far known; and when we are united to it from afar, passing beyond that in our nature which is far known; and when we are united to it from afar, passing beyond that in our nature which is gnostic of the one, then are we brought to be one, that is to be unknown instead of being gnostic. This contact, therefore, as of one with one, is above knowledge, but the other is as of that which is gnostic with that which is known. As, however, the crooked is known by the straight, so we form a conjecture of the unknown by the known. And this indeed is a mode of knowledge. 

The one, therefore, is so far known, that it does not admit of an approximating knowledge, but appears afar off as known, and imparts a gnostic indication of itself. Unlike other things, however, the nearer we approach to it, it is not the more, but on the contrary less known; knowledge being dissolved by the one into ignorance, since as we have before observed where there is knowledge there is also separation. But separation approaching to the one is inclosed in union; so that knowledge also is refunded into ignorance.

This, too, the analogy of Plato requires. For first, we endeavour to see the sun, and we do indeed see it afar off; but by how much the nearer we approach to it, by so much the less do we see it: and at length, we neither see other things nor it, the eye becoming spontaneously dazzled by its light. Is therefore the one in its proper nature unknown, though there is something else unknown beside the one? The one indeed wills to be by itself, but with no other; but the unknown, beyond the one, is perfectly ineffable, which we acknowledge we neither know, nor are ignorant of, but which has about itself super-ignorance. Hence by proximity to this the one itself is darkened: for being very near to the immense principle, if it be lawful so to speak, it remains as it were in the adytum of that truly mystic silence. 

On this account, Plato in speaking of it finds all his assertions subverted: for it is near to the subversion of every thing, which takes place about the first. It differs from it however in this, that it is one simply, and that according to the one it is also at the same time all things. But the first is above the one and all things, being more simple than either of these.”