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The Meaning of Orpheus’ Myth…

Orpheus as Priest of Apollo…

As Sun God…

Music, the Harmony of the Spheres, and Orphic Withdrawal…

Orpheus as Resistor to Dionysian Religion…

As Dionysian Priest…

The authority claimed by the Orphic writings was presumed to flow, as I have said, from Orpheus himself, as their semi-divine author or inspirer. That Orpheus, if such a man ever lived, cannot have been either, is of course obvious, since the doctrines of Orphism belong manifestly to the climate of thought of the sixth century B.C., and most particularly to that of sixth-century Southern Italy, the home of Pythagoreanism and of the writers of the funereal inscriptions I’ve already mentioned.

Why, then, we must ask, was Orpheus chosen as the patron or prophet of this movement? To answer this question we must return to his myth, bearing in mind that all myths are aggregates of autonomous elements of different provenance and meaning, often in mutual contradiction, each of which must therefore be interpreted separately.

Looking at his myth in this way, the most obvious reason for the election of Orpheus, according to most scholars, is his connection with his patron Apollo, whom in many ways he resembled. There is, first of all, Orpheus’ musical skill, which reminds us immediately of the lyre-god. Both, moreover, were said to have made wild beasts gather around them in docile fashion. And if his myth tells us besides that Orpheus was Apollo’s priest, we may take this as significant: for the priest, as we’ve seen in the case of Dionysus, is also the earthly manifestation and human representative of the god.

The mythic Orpheus, then, is preeminently a sun-god, or at least the earthly incarnation of the solar deity. This explains, amongst other things, his descent into the underworld and his resurrection, a death and rebirth that the sun reprises every evening when it sets in the western sky and descends into the kingdom of the dead beneath the earth, arising every morning from the same realm of night and death, above the eastern horizon. It explains, by the same token, Orpheus’ relationship with Eurydice, who (like Persephone in her aspect as crone) is both goddess of the moon and the night and thus also a queen of the dead.

 

If Orpheus’ music had the power to pacify the breasts of wild beasts, and induce even inanimate stones to follow him, it must have been because these beings, like all things, were filled with soul. This was indeed the view of the Orphics, who taught a form of pantheism or hylozoism, according to which the entire material world was enlivened and alive with the one Soul-Substance, God in fact, which underwent an endless series of metamorphoses and yet remained the same.

Music, moreover, was the most potent way of reawakening the indwelling soul to an awareness of its celestial origins, nature, and unbroken connection with the Divine, since, in its original home amongst the stars, the pre-embodied soul heard the otherworldly harmony of the spheres (which Pythagoras so famously describes) as its birthsong. Since the sensual din of the world and the physical senses inevitably drowns out this transcendental harmony, the duty of the Orphic is to stop up his outer ears, to mortify and anesthetize his physical senses, and nurture instead the inner senses with which alone the heavenly music can be heard. The Orphic way of the salvation of the soul is thus, as Socrates describes the life of the philosopher in the Phaedo, a withdrawing of the soul from the world and the body into the stillness of the Divine that resides in its own depths.

 

The music of Orpheus, like that of Apollo, is thus the calm, rational, orderly, and soothing note of the lyre. It has apparently nothing to do with the riotous din of Dionysian flutes or tympana.

As such Orpheus’ devotion to Apollo and ostensible aversion to Dionysus is a prominent motive in his myth, and finds early illustration in the plot of Aeschylus’ lost play the Bassarids, which records the dismembering of Orpheus by the Maenads at the instigation of their god.

This story seems at first to fall into the pattern of a whole class of legends about the resistance to the introduction of the cult of Dionysus on the part of a Hellene and the subsequent vengeance exacted by the god (of which Euripides’ Bacchae is the most famous example). Except that Orpheus is a Hellene living in Thrace, supposedly offering opposition to Dionysus, accordingly, in his native land.

Orpheus’ calm and civilized demeanour, his resemblance to and championship of the Hellenic Apollo, and his opposition to the Thracian religion seem to make it impossible that he should have been imagined as an eastern barbaros; and yet this Hellene lives in the wild homeland of the Dionysian revels.

 

In fact, more than just his Thracian habitat associates Orpheus with Dionysus. As early as the end of the archaic period, he was regarded in some circles as the actual founder of the Dionsyian mysteries.

Dionsysus is mysteriously devoted to the Muses at the foot of Mt. Olympus, and so too Orpheus seems to be the leader of a retinue of Muse-mothers. As dying and reviving gods, both Orpheus and Dionysus journeyed to Hades and returned to life in the upper world, Dionysus to rescue his mother Semele and Orpheus his wife Eurydice. Like the Eleusinian triad Kore-Demeter-Persephone, the holy mother Semele too was one manifestation of the triple goddess, her crone persona being identified with Hecate, another famous queen of the dead. That Eurydice was originally a goddess of the underworld is suggested by the etymology of her name, “the all-judging one”. And finally, just as Dionsysus-Zagreus was torn to pieces by the Titans, so is Orpheus dismembered by the Maenads of Thrace.

One senses that the mythological tradition of Orpheus as a kind of missionary of Apollo to the Dionsysian wilds of Thrace suggests something important about the nature of the Orphic movement. The manner of Orpheus’ death, recapitulating as it does the sparagmos that was the culminating rite of the Dionysian cult, suggests paradoxically that before he became a disciple of Apollo, he was in fact a priest of Dionysus.

Orpheus’ dismemberment at the hands of the Maenads certainly recalls the central sacrament of the Dionysian mysteries, in which the god is torn apart and eaten in his animal or human manifestation in a sacramental ritual in which the god’s divine mana is assimilated by his votaries; and as I said, in ancient religion, the human incarnation of the god was his priest. The priest, as the god incarnate, had the privilege of dying with his god, and so also rising again in perfect identification with him. The rite was almost certainly mimetic, but the symbolism was clear nonetheless.

Thus the lost tragedy of Aeschylus seems to have two meanings: Orpheus suffers the fate of his god Dionysus, and yet he is assimilated to Apollo.

The Myth of Orpheus…

Orpheus’ Music…

Orpheus and the Argonauts…

And Eurydice…

His Descent into the Underworld…

Orpheus as Priest of Apollo…

His Rejection of Dionysus…

His Murder by the Maenads…

His Resurrection…

Since all religious movements must have a great charismatic founder, the Orphics attributed their sacred writings, for reasons that will soon become clear, either to the authorship or the inspiration of the legendary Orpheus, who was presumed to have lived — like all the mythic gods and heroes — in the epoch long before the Trojan War, though the Orphic texts clearly bear the marks of their sixth-century origin. Here follows the barest outline of Orpheus’ myth:

Orpheus was, in the usual manner of Greek mythology, a demigod, half-mortal and half-divine, the son of a Thracian King and his queen Calliope, one of the sacred Muses. As his parentage would suggest, he was a great musician: the culture hero, in fact, who was the first to bring the civilizing arts of poetry and music to the rude Greeks of the prehistoric age.

Orpheus was not of course the originator of music; that title belonged to the gods. Athena had invented the flute, although she refused to play it lest in doing so her face should become unpleasantly contorted. Pan is credited with the manufacture of the reed-pipe, and Hermes the shepherd’s pipe. Hermes also invented the lyre, and presented it to Apollo, who drew from its strings sounds so entrancing that when he played, the gods of Olympus forgot all else; indeed, even Zeus paused from his philandering for a time.

Of mortals, Orpheus was certainly the greatest musician, and for good reason. Apollo himself presented him with a lyre, his Muse mother and her sisters instructed him in its use, and his fortuitous upbringing in Thrace (one of the ancient homes of Dionysus) inevitably nurtured his young musical talent. So accomplished did it become that it was said that when Orpheus played his lyre on the Thracian mountainsides, its sweet sound uprooted trees, caused rocks to move, deflected the courses of rivers, and pacified the wild beasts, all of which left their wonted habitats to follow him. All of nature, animate and inanimate, sensate and insensate, seemed to be affected by his bewitching melody.

Following a visit to Egypt, Orpheus joined Jason’s Argonauts, and on several occasions saved the expedition from imminent disaster. When the sailors became weary, he would strike his lyre and inspire them to row with renewed zeal. If a quarrel threatened, he would play so tenderly that the most aggrieved spirits would be tranquilized and forget their anger. Orpheus saved the Argonauts from the Sirens, as well. Knowing that the sailors would be tempted to listen to the Sirens’ enthralling song, he took up his lyre and played a melody so beautiful that it drowned out the sound of the sisters’ fatal voices.

 

On his return from the quest for the golden fleece, Orpheus met and married Eurydice; but their joy was brief. After the nuptials, while promenading with her bridesmaids and picking flowers in a pleasant meadow, Eurydice was accosted by one of the wedding guests, Aristaeus, who tried to force her. Fleeing her attacker, she trod on a serpent and died of its bite.

Overwhelmed with grief, Orpheus determined to go down to the world of death to bring Eurydice back. To enter where no mortal may, he struck his lyre and charmed both the ferryman Charon and the ferocious canine guardian of hell’s gates, the three-headed dog Cerberus.

As he passed through Tartarus, his music gave temporary respite to the suffering sinners: for a moment, Ixion’s wheel ceased to revolve, Sisyphus sat peacefully upon his stone, and Tantalus listened, forgetting his hunger and thirst. For the first time, too, the faces of the dread Furies were wet with tears, and even Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld, were moved to pity.

With unwonted tears flowing down his cheeks, the implacable King of the Dead could not refuse Orpheus’ request, which he granted on one condition: that he not look back at Eurydice as she followed him, until they both reached the upper world. The condition accepted, Orpheus re-ascended with Eurydice behind him, guided through the darkness by the sound of his music. But Orpheus was all the while desperate for some assurance of her safety, and when, upon reaching the sunlight, he looked anxiously backwards, she was still in the cavern. Thus, Orpheus lost her forever. Though he tried to rush back after her, he was prevented. Though the exemption had been granted on a few occasions — to Hercules, Theseus, and now Orpheus himself — , once was the limit. The gods would certainly not allow a mortal to enter the world of the dead a second time, while he was alive.

 

In utter desolation, Orpheus was forced to return to earth alone. There he forsook the company of men, and in fidelity to his dead wife, brusquely rebuffed the advances of the women who hoped to replace her. He wandered through the wild solitudes of Thrace, comfortless save for his lyre, playing for the rocks, rivers, trees, and beasts which were his only companions.

One day, when the mysteries of Dionysus were being celebrated, Orpheus in his grief and anger neglected to honour the god. Indeed, some say that he taught other sacred mysteries to the inhabitants of Thrace. Every morning he was said to rise to greet the dawn on the summit of Mt. Pangaeum, preaching that Apollo, the sun, was the greatest of gods.

Affronted, Dionysus set the Maenads upon him. Offended not only by Orpheus’ insult to Dionysus but also his general rebuff to womankind, the Maenads waited until their husbands had entered the temple of Apollo, where Orpheus served as chief priest; then they murdered their husbands and tore Orpheus limb from limb.

Orpheus’ head was unceremoniously thrown into the river Hebrus; but it floated, still singing, down to the sea, and was carried to the isle of Lesbos. Eventually it was recovered by the Muses, and along with his limbs which they tearfully collected, it was buried at the foot of Mount Olympus, where to this day the nightingales sing sweeter than anywhere else in the world. But the earth could not hold him, and Orpheus’ resurrected spirit was assumed into heaven, where he reigns as a god.

The Orphics…

The Evidence…

Their Sacred Logoi…

Roughly contemporary with Pythagoreanism, Orphism is the name given to a religious movement that arose in Greece in the sixth century B.C., and whose teachings continued to flourish in Western thought for over two millennia. (As late as the fifteenth century, the great Florentine Christian Neoplatonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola still regarded their own philosophical and religious systems as versions of “the Orphic theology”.)

The Orphics were preachers who possessed a body of sacred texts, few of which, unfortunately, have survived (except in fragmentary citations by other authors). We have, most importantly, certain gold plates dating from the third century B.C., discovered in the nineteenth century in graves in Crete and Southern Italy. The plates are inscribed with ritual verses and hymns (probably originating in the sixth century) that outline aspects of the Orphic eschatology, or doctrine of the afterlife, and which were thus obviously intended to help the deceased in their passage into the other world.

Beyond these, we possess a certain body of doctrine, also largely eschatological, recorded or promulgated in various writings of the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C., of which the following are the most significant examples: first, the writings of the Pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles (see below) and Pythagoras, whose cosmological and eschatological doctrines show probable Orphic influence; more important, some of the great myths of Plato (specifically, those that record the experiences of the soul in the afterlife in the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Gorgias, and the allegory of Er in the Republic). Also in the classical period, there are certain “Orphic” passages from the poet Pindar, as well as from the tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides and the comic playwright Aristophanes.

From Hellenistic times, we have evidence from Aristotle and from the third-century follower of Aristotle, Eudemos. We have a brief reference to the Orphic cosmogony in the third-century Argonautica (the epic recounting the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece) by Apollonius of Rhodes.

Finally, in the new era, we have the generally antagonistic evidence of the Christian Apologists of the second century A.D., particularly Athenagoras and Clement of Alexandria. And then we have an abundance of references to the Orphics by the Neoplatonists who found Orphic doctrines so congenial to their own: especially the third century A.D. Porphyry and Iamblichus, Macrobius (writing in Latin, c. 400), and the late-fourth or early-fifth-century Proclus.

The broad agreement amongst these writers suggests strongly that there was some common source of Orphic doctrine upon which they all relied, but what it was, and what precisely it contained, we don’t know. It can hardly be denied, in any case, that a body of writings under the name of Orpheus was already well known to the classical authors. Aristotle, for instance, refers to the “Orphic verses”, Euripides knows him as the author of certain teletai, or theological tracts, and Plato speaks of a mass of books attributed to Orpheus and his legendary disciple Musaios, which encapsulate, as he calls it, a hieros logos, a “sacred word” or “revelation”.

 

In all such references to the Orphic hieros logos, the same complex of doctrines and beliefs is always assumed: the idea of the pre-existence of souls in a pure, disembodied state in the celestial aether; the doctrine succinctly expressed by the Greek formula soma sema (body tomb)–that is, the idea of birth in the world and the body as a fall, death, burial or imprisonment of the soul; the necessity therefore of the soul to purify itself of the contaminating taints of the body and the senses both in this world and the next if it is to be saved; its expectation of a retributive afterlife in which the just will be rewarded with bliss and the unjust punished; the belief in transmigration of souls, metempsychosis, according to which the soul must undergo a series of incarnations in this world and purgations in the next before it may finally escape the weary wheel of births and deaths and fly back into the aether whence it came.

We’ll have to return later to discuss these doctrines in somewhat more detail, but to the Orphics, in any case, the “sacred logoi” of which Plato and others speak must have been a Bible of sorts. Their great epic hymn of creation, known as the “Orphic Rhapsodies”, was finally fixed at twenty-four books, a number meant obviously to coincide with that of Homer’s epics whose unique authority they were meant to relativize. In this regard, the Orphic writings represented yet another novelty in Greek civilization. For, while it is true that the two great epics of Homer were often referred to as the “Greek Bible”, Homer’s epics were not expressly written as sacred literature. They were grand mythic narratives, and like all myths, they explained to their Greek audience much about themselves as a people, including the origins of their gods and religion; but they were not didactic, and claimed no divine authority, which the Orphic writings assuredly were and did.

The Mathematical Principles of Music…

 Of Everything…

 The Pythagorean Foundation of Modern Science…

The (Macrocosmic) Harmony of the Spheres…

The (Microcosmic) Harmony of the Soul…

     Even more momentous for Western thought was Pythagoras’ discovery of the mathematical basis of musical intervals.

It was made, as Diogenes Laertius explains, by the experimental use of the “monochord”–an instrument, as its name implies, in which a single string is stretched across a soundboard which supports a movable bridge.  By stopping the string at a certain point along its span, Pythagoras realized that the pitch that it produced was directly related to the length of the vibrating portion of the string.

Stop it at the exact centre, pluck the string, and it produces a note precisely an octave above.  Stop it so that the ratio of the vibrating to the non-vibrating portion is 3:2, and you produce a major fifth.  Stop it so the ratio of the vibrating to non-vibrating lengths of string is 4:3, and the result is a major fourth.

What Pythagoras realized, then, was that the octave, fourth, and fifth–the “major consonances” of Greek music—were produced as a function of certain fixed numerical proportions, and that the sciences of acoustics in particular, and music in general, have an invisible mathematical structure.

 

It was but a small step for Pythagoras to infer that the physical laws of not only sound but of the entire natural world were informed by hidden mathematical proportions and principles.  As Aristotle relates,

The Pythagoreans…thought that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things….Seeing that the properties and ratios of the musical consonances were expressible in numbers, and that indeed all other things seemed to be wholly modeled in their nature upon numbers, they took numbers to be the whole of reality, the elements of numbers to be the elements of all existing things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.

Rather than seeking a unifying and unchanging physis or nature of the cosmos in the material elements—water, air, fire, or “the infinite”, as the Ionian philosophers had done—Pythagoras maintained that the elements themselves, material or quasi-material as they were, were secondary phenomena, necessarily reducible to the primordially elemental, immaterial concepts of mathematics.

 

One can hardly overestimate the significance of Pythagoras’ insistence upon mathematics as the foundational principle of cosmic order for later science.  Within two hundred years it gave rise, in the work of Archimedes, to the science of mechanics.  Even Galileo, at the dawn of the modern age, took it as the starting point of his own investigations:

Philosophy is written in the great book which is ever before our eyes—I mean the universe–; but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.  This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.

Upon this Pythagorean foundation the whole structure of classical physics was erected.

 

From his conception of “the whole heaven as a musical scale and a number” arises, finally, another of Pythagoras’ celebrated doctrines–and another ongoing topos of Western thought–, that of the so-called “harmony of the spheres”.  As Aristotle explains, Pythagoras reasoned that the heavenly bodies, being of immense size and moving at correspondingly vast speeds, must produce sounds in their peregrinations, indeed, much louder sounds, necessarily, than those of the relatively smaller and slower-moving objects we can hear on earth.  If the revolutions of the heavens are inaudible to us, it is only because their music has filled our ears since birth, so that we are unable to distinguish it from silence.

The pitch of these celestial sounds, moreover, must be directly proportionate to their velocity, which in turn is a function of their distance from the earth–that is, the radius of their orbit.  The fixed stars, on the periphery of the heavens, and revolving at the fastest speed, make the highest sound; the moon, closest to the earth, with the shortest orbit, and moving at the slowest speed, makes the lowest.  What’s more, since these distances are in the ratios of the musical consonances, the sounds produced by the planets and stars blend together in a vast cosmic “harmony”.

The grandeur of this conception ensured, as I say, that it would become a perennial theme in Western poetry, theology, and philosophy.  It explains, amongst other things, why music was from Plato to Castiglione so central a discipline in the moral education of the philosopher-prince.  As Shakespeare’s Lorenzo puts it, two thousand years after Pythagoras, in the Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears:  soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholds’t
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it…

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.

For Shakespeare, Plato, and all latter-day Pythagoreans, the harmony of the spheres is in immortal souls because it was the soul’s birth-song, which it heard when it still lived in the celestial aether, before its unfortunate fall into the body and the world.  If ordinary men can’t hear it, it’s not for the reason Aristotle imagines, but because the noise of the world—the distractive din that floods in through the body’s physical organs of sensation—drowns it out.  Such men are deaf to the harmony of the spheres, because, as Plutarch explains, “The ears of most souls are blocked and stopped up, not with wax, but with carnal obstructions and passions.”

To hear that harmony requires, on the contrary, that the soul stop up her outer ears; that she mortify the senses by turning her attention away from external earthly and material objects and desires, and cultivating instead the inner incorporeal senses of reason and intelligence through which we alone apprehend reality and truth—truths that like those of mathematics are invariably “immaterial and conceptual”.

By pursuing a life of contemplation and introversion, and through the ascetical regimes already mentioned, the Pythagorean wise man creates the stillness that allows him to hear the celestial music resonating faintly in the interior depths of the soul; hearing it, he is reminded of his celestial birth and reawakened to his own divinity.

With the Pythagorean teaching in the background, later writers and thinkers referred to the wise or virtuous soul as “musical”, “harmonious”, or tonos, attuned. In the musical soul, the discordant and cacophonous carnal appetites and passions have been composed by reason in order and harmony,  and so composed, the microcosmic psyche imitates and participates in the greater order and harmony of the macrocosm.

Pythagoras the Teacher of a Way of Life…

His Doctrine of Transmigration of Souls…

 “Philosophy” as a Methods for the Salvation of the Soul…

  Pythagoras and Mathematics…

Deductive Geometry and the Ascent of the Soul to the Divine…

     As Plato reports, Pythagoras taught “a way of life”, and it becomes apparent what that was:  a life “in accordance with what is highest in us”, in accordance, that is, with the soul whose divine origin and nature must be remembered and fully realized, and in detachment from the body and world in which it is a prisoner and exile.

One of the methods by which the Pythagoreans nurtured the soul at the expense of the body was a kind of purgatorial regime, including an abstention from meat. This was clearly enough connected with Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmigration of souls.  As his contemporary Xenophanes records,

They say that once when a puppy was being whipped, Pythagoras, who was passing by, took pity on it, saying, “Stop!  Do not beat it!  It is the soul of a friend; I recognize his voice!”

The doctrine of transmigration of souls may have been borrowed by Pythagoras from the Orphic cult, which also flourished in southern Italy in the sixth century; or it may have been imported by Pythagoras directly from the East, if the tradition according to which he traveled eastward as far as Babylonia, before returning to Croton, is true.  Whatever its origins, Pythagoras’ belief that the soul undergoes a series of incarnations throughout the various ranks of the animal kingdom meant, amongst other things, that the killing of animals for food was a sin akin to murder.

But the Pythagorean taboo against eating meat seems to be part of a broader ascetical regime.  As Diogenes Laertius reports, Pythagoras restricted himself to the most meager diet of honey, bread, and vegetables, rarely drank wine, and never enjoyed carnal relations with a woman.  These abstinences were clearly meant to detoxify the soul, the highest and divine element of the human person, of the body’s contaminating influence.

Such ideas, as we’ll see, became salients of Platonism, as did Pythagoras’ conception of philosophical inquiry itself as a method for the purification and salvation of the soul.  Thus Diogenes Laertius says that Pythagoras was the first to use the word “philosophy”, and to call himself a philosopher, that is, a lover of wisdom:  “For no one, he said, is wise except god.”  For Pythagoras, then, as for Plato after him, the life of philosophy was essentially a religious vocation, whose purpose was the salvation and deification of the soul, or rather, the restoration or repristination of its original nature, which was divine.

Above all, philosophical inquiry for Pythagoras meant the investigation of the first principles of mathematics.  Pythagoras’ many and seminal geometrical, algebraic, and arithmetical discoveries include far more than merely the famous triangle theorem named for him, but we don’t have the space (nor do I have the expertise) to consider them here.

The major point to be noted about Pythagorean mathematics is the way it accorded with Pythagoreanism as a soteriological method, by emancipating the rational intellect from its reliance on the world of matter and the senses.  As the fifth-century A.D. Neoplatonist Proclus explains in his commentary on Euclid, geometry was first discovered by the Egyptians, who used it to measure the areas of farmers’ fields whose boundaries were annually obliterated by the flooding of the Nile.  Geometry was, as such, an entirely practical “art”, and as applied by the Egyptians to the land, it remained purely inductive and empirical.  But “Pythagoras transformed this study into a form of liberal education, examining its principles from the beginning and tracking down the theorems immaterially and conceptually”.  In this way, continues Proclus, geometry “elevates the soul and does not allow it to descend to objects of sense in order to satisfy the common needs of mortals, and so neglect the turning of the soul to things above”.

By liberating geometry from the practical necessity of measuring the land through a kind of inductive trial and error, and discovering the universal conceptual principles upon which any area could be ascertained in theory, Pythagorean mathematics becomes a deductive method (where “deductive” retains its primary sense of “leading out of”) by means of which the soul abstracts itself from its dependence upon the entire material order.  The fact, that is, that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides is not determined by what happens when any three sticks are laid in a closed figure on the ground by surveyors, but by a rational inference from first principles.  Mathematics proceeds, then, not from the uncertain testimony of the senses, but, as Proclus writes, “immaterially and conceptually”.  In this way, as Socrates would later put it in the Phaedo, the soul withdraws from the body and the world into itself, and lives as if by itself and alone.  Unencumbered by the material order and the sensory organs by which it is perceived, it rises, through the contemplation of mathematical concepts, to the invisible spiritual world in which such concepts, in communion with the Divine, eternally reside.

Pythagoras…

The Immortality and Divinity of the Soul…

 The Controlling Images of Pythagoras’ Myth…

 Birth in the Body as Death, Imprisonment, Exile…

 Immortal Thoughts for Mortal Men…

     Pythagoras is probably the most important, and certainly the most influential of the Pre-Socratics, if only because Plato’s thought depends so heavily upon his, and Western thought depends so heavily upon Plato’s.

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, just off the Ionian coast and slightly north of Miletus.  Tradition has it that he left Samos because of his disgust with the tyranny of Polycrates, and like Xenophanes before him, fled westward.  C. 530 B.C., when he was forty years old, Pythagoras settled at Croton, a Greek settlement on the east coast of southern Italy, where there soon gathered around him a large number of devoted disciples.  The community at Croton was less a philosophical school, in fact, than a religious cult, and indeed, as in the other mystery religions of Greece and the Ancient Near East, the Pythagorean initiates were bound by oath not to divulge the doctrines taught them by their master.

Fortunately, many of Pythagoras’ later disciples broke their oaths, including Philolaus, an important Pythagorean thinker who lived in the 5^th century B.C., and who enumerates some of the basic teachings of the founder as follows:

First, he said that the soul is immortal; second, that it migrates into other kinds of animals; third, that the same events are repeated in cycles, nothing being new in the strict sense; and finally, that all things with souls should be regarded as akin.

 

That the human soul is immortal, indeed, an inhaled portion of the divine “breath” that suffuses and animates the entire universe, had already been taught by Anaximenes.  But Pythagoras was the first Greek thinker to address the fundamental ontological, anthropological, and moral problems that inevitably follow from such a conception.

First, if the soul is immortal, how is it related to the human body, and to all material things in the universe, which are so obviously subject to decay, disintegration, and death?  Pythagoras’ answer was momentous for later Western thought.  Soul and body, he maintained, are ontologically opposite, belonging to entirely different orders of existence.

As Philolaus reports, Pythagoras taught that the soul is “buried in the body as if in a tomb”.  Birth in the body spells a kind of death for the soul, whose real life is in the other world, where it was born and pre-existed in a disembodied state before its incarnation, a condition which it naturally hopes to resume after the body dies.

This explains those other conventional Pythagorean metaphors, according to which the material body is the soul’s prison, that life in it on earth is a kind of “slavery”, “captivity”, or “exile” from the soul’s native realm and true home.  That home, where the soul was originally born, to which it belongs by right and nature, and whence it fell by a kind of sin, is the celestial world, the abode of the Divine. Thus nascent already in Pythagoreanism is that distinction that Aristotle was later to make famous, between the translunary order, made of a kind of super-rarefied fire called aether–absolutely pure, immutable, imperishable, eternal, and divine–, and the sublunary, where everything is grossly material, and thus subject to corruption and decay.

For Pythagoras, the human soul was, as Diogenes Laertius reports, “a detached portion of that celestial ether”, which is to say a deracinated particle of the Divine, as Anaximenes had also conceived it.  Thus, as Diogenes goes on to say, Pythagoras insisted that “soul is distinct from life and immortal”.  It is not affected by the corruption which overtakes the body, but stands apart from it even in life, preserving its affinity with the Godhead throughout its exile in the world.  At the same time, of course, the soul is oppressed by a palpable sense of alienation, yearning to be released from its carnal prison-house, and to return to that upper region whence it came, reunited forevermore with the Divine.

 

The effect of Pythagoras’ emphasis on the innate and essential divinity of the soul was to fatally undermine the traditional Greek view of the place of man in the world-order.  We’ve already encountered a number of expressions of the idea of the unbridgeable gulf between mortal and immortal, between a life subject to misfortune and vicissitude, and one lived in eternal and unchanging bliss.  Here are three more, from the fifth-century poet Pindar:

No man can win to happiness complete….
In brief space the joy of mortals waxes;
In brief space it falls to the ground,
Stricken by an adverse fate.
We are but creatures of a day.
What is a man?
Man is a dream of shadows…

If a man having wealth surpass all others in beauty,
Displaying his strength by victory in the games,
Let him remember the limbs he arrays are mortal,
And that he will come to the end that all men come to,
Clothing himself with earth…

Mortal thoughts befit mortal men.

But Pythagoreanism completely overturns this view; as Aristotle describes the moral imperatives of Pythagoras’ followers:

We are not to obey those who tell us that a man should think a man’s thoughts, and a mortal the thoughts of a mortal.  On the contrary, we should endeavour as far as possible to become immortal, and to do all that we can to live in accordance with what is highest in us.

Xenophanes…

 His Critique of the Mythic Gods of Homer…

Of Religious Anthropomorphism…

Of the Immorality of the Gods of Myth…

 Of Regional Religious Forms as Cultural Projections…

His (and Greek) Monotheism…

Xenophanes as the Source of the Tradition of the Allegorical Interpretation of Myth…

Of Pagan Religious Universalism…

Of “Negative Theology”…

     The brilliant Pre-Socratic philosopher and poet Xenophanes was born c. 561 B.C. in Colophon, a city some forty miles north of Miletus; but when Colophon, along with many other Greek cities along the Ionian seaboard, fell to the Persians, Xenophanes fled westward, making his way eventually to Sicily.

The great innovation and importance of Xenophanes’ thought is not in cosmology or physics, but rather in theology, the understanding of the nature of the Divine.  But then the immediate relevance of theology to cosmology need hardly be stated, since for the Greeks, the essential problem was the relation between the Divine and the material world.

Xenophanes was in fact the first in a long line of reforming critics and expositors of traditional Greek religious and mythological idioms.  Here are two of his most famous dicta on this theme:

Mortals believe that the gods are begotten, and that they wear clothing like our own, and have a voice and a body.

The Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black; the Thracians make theirs gray-eyed and red-haired.  And if oxen and horses and lions had  hands, and could draw…, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own.

Xenophanes here states explicitly for the first time what intelligent Greeks must long have understood:  that the mythological gods, as described by poets such as Homer, are created in the image of their human worshipers; that they look and behave like men only because their worshipers have projected upon them their own form and habits; and that the incidental differences one observes amongst the various national and ethnic gods and their cults is the result of similar projections, each the consequence of the inability of men to conceive of the Divine except through images derived from their own immediate human and culturally specific experience.  Rather, as Xenophanes affirms, there is only

One god, …in no way similar to mortals either in body or mind.

 

The transcendent supremacy of Zeus, acknowledged from the beginning in Homer and Hesiod, suggests that the strict monotheism of Xenophanes is the development of a tendency in Greek thought already long underway:  a tendency, in fact, to define the Divine as a kind of Being that utterly negates and transcends all categories of human experience, understanding, and expression.

God, as Xenophanes insists, has no body or organs of sense, though by means of some super-sensual and super-intelligent mode of cognition, he “sees all, thinks all, and hears all”.  Having neither arms nor legs, he is motionless; yet he sets all in motion merely “by the thought of his own mind”.

Unlike men, in fact, the being of God is “totally of mind and thought”, and is eternal.  By contrast, above all, to the “innumerable world-orders”, which successively come into being and pass away, God is without beginning or end.

Spatially conceived, his being is “spherical”, but only in the sense in which it is co-extensive with the world-order, able to act everywhere in it without moving, because he suffuses it throughout as the active and living principle of order.

This cosmic order, or justice as Anaximander had called it, means that the world-order is once again a moral order, and that justice, therefore, must be of the nature of the Divine.  But if this is true, the stories told by the poets must be lies, since, as Xenophanes laments,

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things which in men are a matter for reproach and censure:  stealing, adultery, and mutual deception.

This is the most scandalous effect of the primitive propensity to project human traits upon the gods, whose moral behavior must surely be better than that of at least the worst of mankind, if the term “Divine” is to mean anything.

Xenophanes thus lays the foundation for a long tradition of moral criticism of artists and poets in general, and Homer in particular, in which, at one extreme, they are accused of being professional “liars” and blasphemers who should be banished forever from decent society (as Plato purports to banish them from his Republic).  Such a view was to fecundate throughout history periodic outbreaks of puritanism and iconoclasm.  Fortunately, however, it did not prevail; for the Greeks (as indeed for the Christians of Middle Ages and the Renaissance), the poets were to be defended as the writers of mythological allegories that were never intended to be read literally.

If their mythic narratives are “fictions”, it is because approximative images and provisional analogies are the only means by which the sensual and finite human imagination can approach the ineffable Divine; understood figuratively, however, the fictions of the poets conceal beneath their literal surface profound philosophical and theological truths.

 

Xenophanes was in any case the first Greek thinker to recognize the inherent problem of coming to know and represent a Godhead that is by definition beyond all human categories of apprehension and language.  The gods, he says, have hidden the knowledge of the Divine from mortals, who must apply themselves to discover it through assiduous study and effort.  Even so, no one man or sect will ever discover or reveal the final and exhaustive truths of religion, but at best a semblance of them.  As Plato (in the Timaeus) was to formulate this foundational principle of what was later to be called “negative theology”, “The Father and Maker of this universe is beyond knowing or expressing”.  For this reason, too, the various local myths and cults tended to be relativized in Greek thought, as merely partial and imperfect revelations of the Divine, just as their differences were understood as secondary regional inflections of a universal religion of the One Unknown God.