[This is a full chapter from The Sacred History of Being, published in 2015 by the Anshar Press].
We do not have anything from ancient Greece which resembles
a formal ontological argument. We might expect such an argument to be absent
from the record owing to the polytheistic character of Greek religion. If that
is, that we accept the notion that polytheism represents a state of cultural
development which precedes the kind of intellectual precision which is
necessary to undertake discussions about Being, the nature of existence, and
the nature of reality.
Among the philosophical works which survive, there are of
course arguments about the nature of Being, of existence, and explorations of
the nature of reality. These arguments are almost always conducted in a way
which avoids any association of these arguments with the gods and their
natures, whether these be Greek or foreign. Thus Plato speaks of the ‘Good’,
and does not discuss God or the gods in the context of Being. The ‘Good’ has
however many of the properties and characteristics that later theologians would
explicitly associate with God. And Plato had good reason for avoiding public
discussion of the nature of the gods: we have already mentioned the likelihood
that an esoteric and unwritten doctrine was taught in the Academy. The
part-time priesthood of the Greeks jealously guarded their knowledge of the
gods, and regarded public and critical discussion of the gods as a form of
impiety, which was a charge which could bring the penalty of death. There were
ways of dealing with the gods in discourse however, and Plato steered a fine
line during his career. He was likely to have been a priest at Athens, which
would mean that other members of the religious establishment would have known
that he knew what he was talking about, and so he would have a certain
dispensation to write, provided he observed the rules.
Plato does explicitly talk about inner and outer knowledge,
so his status as at least an initiate into the mysteries of religious doctrine
will be taken for granted from here on. [1] It is likely
therefore that an esoteric doctrine taught in the Academy would have been about
the gods and the nature of Being.
We do not know anything about the formal transmission of
esoteric religious doctrine in Greece in classical times. It may not have been
a terribly formal process in earlier times: in tribal societies in Africa, it
used to begin as a matter of priests engaging in conversation with anyone who
was interested in asking questions about tribal and religious lore. The answers
were graded carefully, so that a casual question would receive a plausible
answer, which however, did not really answer the question. In this way it would
be possible to isolate future candidates for the priesthood; these would be the
ones who would not be fobbed off with glib and superficial answers, and who
were persistent in their questioning and interest. These candidates would then
be instructed more privately, and be given more insight into the religious
doctrines. Should they have the intelligence and critical ability to last the
course, they would then begin the business of a formal initiation into the
priesthood.
It is likely to have been the case that initiation into the
priesthood in Greece followed a similarly informal process up until the
foundation of the Academy. In Athens, the preliminary discussions may have
taken place in the Athenian Agora. [2] Plato sometimes
depicts Socrates as engaging in discussion in the Agora. The specific charge
against Socrates by the magistracy was that he was corrupting the youth of
Athens and that he did not believe in the gods of the state. [3] Plato depicts
Socrates as speaking of God rather the gods, which was a dangerous thing to do,
since it implied impiety toward the gods. When he referred to the gods it was
often to indicate that he found them to be fictions. Socrates was engaging in
informal discussion in the Agora in the same way an African priest might do in
the context of a village, and he was talking to the young, as they would also
do. He was not a fringe figure in Athenian society as he is sometimes
represented – he served on the Boule (the Athenian Council), and fought in the
army three times, however he later made himself into a nuisance and an
embarrassment to the authorities through two things: he was careless about who
he talked with, and he did not grade his answers in accord with the level of
discussion. He may have become careless because of the judgement of the oracle
at Delphi, which declared that he, Socrates, was the wisest of men.
In the Apology, Plato
depicts that Socrates became the gadfly of the Athenians after his friend
Chaerephon submitted a question to the Delphic oracle. He asked if there was
anyone who was wiser than Socrates. The response of the oracle was that none
was wiser. Since Socrates believed that he did not possess wisdom, he regarded
the judgement as paradoxical: if he was the wisest of men, it must be because
he had not pretentions to wisdom, unlike those who thought themselves wise. His
fatal move was to begin to question those Athenians considered wise, perhaps to
test the oracle’s judgement and to refute it. However Socrates came to the
conclusion that those that he questioned were very far from wise, and in fact
knew nothing at all. Attempting to show that the wise are void of wisdom is not
at all the proper activity of someone genuinely interested in improving the
level of intellectual culture around himself. Plato’s account of his mentor’s
career is a warning, not a celebration.
We do not have much detail on how Plato’s students came to
be enrolled at the Academy, but, we know that the Academy in later years was
well-endowed with funds. It is likely that the sons of the great and the good
in Athens were enrolled by their fathers, on deposit of a sum of money, in
order to receive an education which was superior to what could be had elsewhere
from itinerant teachers, and local priests. The formalization of an institution
like the Academy was probably a response to the growth of Athens into a large
city with around 50,000 male citizens with voting rights. The fabric of society
required a body of priests to perform those operations necessary to the good
functioning of ritual, the worship of the gods, and to deal with liturgical
matters. Since this was a part-time activity, a priest might also be a
magistrate, or hold some other official position. So those with means within
the voting population would have an interest in being equipped to perform a
variety of functions.
We can tell a certain amount about the discussion of Being
in the Academy from the published works of Plato, and comments by Aristotle and
others. The writings of Plato were written under the restrictive conditions
already mentioned. We know that they discuss matters of interest to Plato
(obviously), but that they are written in such a way as to avoid offending the
laws of Athens and the sensitivities of Athenians. We also know that the
published works refer to esoteric matters in various ways – by allusion, by the
use of an alternative (and varying) terminology, through the use of myth,
metonymous reference, and so on. The principal point of publishing these
works, can only be to provide an aide-memoire, useful to the initiated. The works might also
serve a secondary purpose of attracting interested students to the Academy. The
obscurity of the treatment of some of the questions discussed would not be
off-putting to these.
These texts, together with our knowledge of beliefs
fundamental to philosophy in Greece (the teleological model of the world for
instance), actual discussion of the idea of Being in Plato’s dialogues,
together with our knowledge of the form of the ontological argument in the
Middle Ages and beyond the European Renaissance, should be sufficient to allow
at least a tentative reconstruction of the argument that might lie behind them.
The Greek priestly lore did not enshrine the idea that the
‘existence’ of God, or the supremely perfect Being, was subject to proof. This
would have been anathema to them, as it would also have been to other priestly
groups around the Mediterranean, and across the ancient Near East, for the
reason that the very concept of the divine is inevitably beyond the capacity of
the human mind to understand, or to frame. It is possible to say something
about the divine, but that is all. Saying that the supreme perfect Being has a
property ‘perfection’ is fine, but the meaning of this perfection is strictly
limited in its human understandability. To attribute the property of
secular‘existence’ to this Being would have been regarded as absurd. Yet it
would be granted that one could argue that, without the property of existence,
the perfection, or the completeness of God, was compromised. But for it to be
in the world of change and corruption would also be understood as compromising
the perfection of the supreme Being. At least in terms of public discussion. [4]
Thus the Greek view of reality and the divine was that there
was a paradox at the root of reality and the gods, and that it was not possible to define the nature of
the divine without exposing that definition to contradiction. The corollary
of this is that it is not possible to establish by logical argument the reality
or otherwise of the divine. At one and the same time therefore the divine is
arguably both real and unreal.
The great cultural advantage of this otherwise unfortunate
position is that the enlightened enquirer into the nature of the divine is
spared further pointless argument about the nature and the very existence of
God. Both are conceivably true. But the true nature of the divine, being a
paradox, rises beyond our capacity to argue about that nature. It remains a
matter of conjecture.
Our human experience tells us we live in a world in which
change is possible, and inevitable. The definition of the divine on the other
hand, tells us, as we might (as priests) choose to believe for the purpose of
logical consistency, that the divine reality beyond this illusion is a place of
eternal invariance. This bipolar view brings its own problems. It suggests that
at the apex of reality, it is not possible for the divine to act in any way, or
to participate in the world of change. Again there is a difficulty if we hold
that the greatest and most perfect Being can do nothing without contravening
its essential nature. A whole range of properties would clearly be missing from
the divine nature.
It would seem that the Greek solution to this problem was to
argue, as Plato and the neoplatonists did, that the world of reality was in
fact invariable, as the theory requires. And it did not at any time change. But
a copy was made. As a copy it was less than perfect, and this imperfection
created the possibility of change, action, and corruption. This copy is
eternally partnered by the original, which stands behind it, unchanging and unchanged
by anything which happens in the copy of the original divine model. As a copy
it is the same, but as a copy it is different.
An alert priest hearing this would have argued that one of
the properties of the supremely perfect Being would be that he was one and not
two. In the creation of a copy two things have happened: a conception has
occurred, and an action has happened, breaching the invariability of the
divine, and secondly, the divine is now two, not one.
This is a serious objection. In fact two, not one, would
seem to be a fatal objection. Firstly the copy is a representation of the
original, and not the original itself. The copy is imperfect, and through the
act of representation, it has become different. The original continues complete
in its original nature, with its original properties and characteristics. [5] Plato hints at
territory beyond this contradiction, but does not venture into it overtly.
This is the key mystery of ancient thought. To understand
the full significance of this problem, and its implications for ancient models
of reality, we need to look closely, as they would, at what a copy of Being
actually means. This is an issue which would have been key to the progress of
priestly education, and would have been conducted entirely in private and never
committed to writing. To say it was copied is at the least a way of speaking (a
mere likelihood, as Plato would say), but the creation of any kind of copy
unavoidably would make Being two rather than one. So there can be no copy, at
least not in an objective sense. And if there is no objective copy, then the
world which moves and which has existence, must
be a subjective view of Being.
That is a strange idea. The implications are enormous, and
not at all obvious. But it is obvious that many things must be framed
differently from our current understanding if objective reality is a species of
illusion.
Apart from anything else, if the world is a wholly
subjective experience, occurring (if we dare to use that word) within Being
itself, then the change and motion which is apparent to us, and which
contradistinguishes the world of existence from Being, which is itself and only
itself, must be illusory. The illusion may be convincing, but ultimately it
remains as an illusion, however persuasive it is to us, that there is an
objective reality which is subject to change and movement.
An objective world which is essentially an illusion, subject
as it is to change and movement, which are unreal, is one which offends most
human understanding, now as then. But, if Being is one, and therefore we are
not separated from it except in terms of a subjective perception of its
attributes and its reality, then the perception of the illusion of change and
movement is necessarily a property of Being itself. That is to say that there
is no objective reality which we are observing from the outside, so that we
might frame our world as a poor copy of Being which stands alone, but rather
that Being enshrines the illusory world of existence as an aspect of itself, and,
from a particular point of view, this illusion can be understood as a copy of
Being.
The result of the essential subjectivity of Being is a
paradox. It is what it is, yet there is an alternative form of reality
(existence) associated with it. Being is complete in itself, as Plato described
the Living Animal in the pages of the Timaeus.
It wants for nothing. Yet it can contain within its nature the appearance of
fullness and privation, motion and change, and all the other opposites which
are part of the world of existence. It is likely that it contains more
opposites than those of which we can be aware. Though itself it is not a
plenitude, which would imply the reality of the opposite, it has the capacity
to represent plenitude within itself. It is this representation of plenitude
which gives the illusion of the world of opposites reality. Out of this
potential plenitude, the world of appearance can come into existence.
This is the highest level of understanding which was
available to the priestly classes around the Mediterranean, and the principal
secret obscured from the multitude. Many other things were held from them, but
this one was, by its very strangeness and improbability, relatively easy to
withhold. There could be many mysteries, but this one, as well as being hard to
fathom, is equally hard to approach.
This idea, that the world is apprehended subjectively, and
framed by us in the mind, is not however unknown to historians of philosophy,
and to modern philosophers. We have seen in an earlier chapter that something
like it was discussed by Bishop Berkeley in the late seventeenth century, and
by Kant later on, and it has, in a mutated form, been part of philosophical
discussion in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first century.
[1] In Plato’s Alcibiades, he uses the expression ta esô meaning "the
inner things", and in the Theaetetus he
uses ta exô meaning "the outside things". Aristotle
referred to his own work in this way too. The students of Pythagoras were also
divided into two groups, according to their proximity to the core of the
Pythagorean doctrine.
[2] We know that the Stoics used the
Stoa Poikilos, a colonnade in the Agora, for the teaching of their doctrine.
[3] See Plato’s Apology.
[4] As we shall see it was understood to
be possible that things in the world could have at least a temporary divinity,
in which case they also have a temporary existence.
[5] This is a complex point, which is
difficult to hold in the mind. Clearly the One, the supremely perfect Being is
also potentially a multitude, in that it gives rise, through a subtle process,
to the many. So at its root this is a paradoxical doctrine. But this is not the
end of the matter. By using both epistemological argument and also argument
about the nature of the divine, and braiding them together, we find that as
long as we are still able to discuss and conceive of the divine or the One, we
fall far short of an understanding of reality. The famous early nineteenth
century Platonist Thomas Taylor goes as far as to say that even the One itself
does not stand alone, but that at the root of reality stands a wholly ineffable
principle, dangerous to ‘idiotical ears.’ Though the style of English is
difficult, I’ve included Taylor’s discussion of this in the appendices.
