The Hebrews arrived late upon the scene and settled in a country pervaded by influences from the two superior adjacent cultures. One would expect the newcomers to have assimilated alien modes of thought, since these were supported by such vast prestige. Untold immigrants from deserts and mountains had done so in the past; and many individual Hebrews did, in fact, conform to the ways of the Gentiles. But assimilation was not characteristic of Hebrew thought. On the contrary, it held out with a peculiar stubbornness and insolence against the wisdom of Israel's neighbors. It is possible to detect the reflection of Egyptian and Mesopotamian beliefs in many episodes of the Old Testament; but the overwhelming impression left by that document is one, not of derivation, but of originality.
The dominant tenet of Hebrew thought is the absolute transcendence of God. Yahweh is not in nature. Neither Earth nor sun nor heaven is divine; even the most potent natural phenomena are but reflections of God's greatness. It is not even possible properly to name God:
And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me: What is his name? what shall I say unto them?And God said unto Moses: I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you (Exod. iii, 13-4).
The God of the Hebrews is pure being, unqualified, ineffable -- incapable of being described. He is holy. That means that he is sui generis -- unique. It does not mean that he is taboo or that he is power. It means that all values are ultimately attributes of God alone. Hence all concrete phenomena are devaluated. It may be true that in Hebrew thought man and nature are not necessarily corrupt; but both are necessarily valueless before God. As Eliphaz said to Job (and we use the Chicago translation):
Can a mortal be righteous before God
Or a man be pure before his Maker ?
Even in his servants he does not trust,
And his angels he charges with error.
How much less them that dwell in houses of clay,
Whose foundation is in the dust ... (Job iv, 17-l9a).
A similar meaning lies in the words of Deutero-Isaiah (lxiv, 6a): "We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags." Even man's righteousness, his highest virtue, is devaluated by the comparison with the absolute.
In the field of material culture such a conception of God leads to iconoclasm; and it needs an effort of the imagination to realize the shattering boldness of a contempt for imagery at the time, and in the particular historical setting, of the Hebrews. Everywhere religious fervor not only inspired verse and rite but also sought plastic and pictorial expression. The Hebrews, however, denied the relevancy of the "graven image"; the boundless could not be given form, the unqualified could but be offended by a representation, whatever the skill and the devotion that went into its making. Every finite reality shriveled to nothingness before the absolute value which was God.
The abysmal difference between the Hebrew and the normal Near Eastern viewpoints can best be illustrated by the manna in which an identical theme, the instability of the social order, is treated. We have a number of Egyptian texts which deal with the period of social upheaval which followed the great era of the pyramid builders. The disturbance of the established order was viewed with horror. Neferrohu said:
I show thee a land in lamentation and distress. The man with a weak arm (now) has (a strong) arm.... I show thee how the undermost is turned to upperrnost.... The poor man will acquire riches. [Note 5]
The most famous of the sages, Ipuwer, is even more explicit. For instance, he condemns as a disastrous parody of order the fact that
gold and lapis lazuli are hung about the necks of slave girls. but noble ladies walk through the land and mistresses of houses say: "Would that we had something to eat.... Behold they that possessed beds now lie upon the ground. He that slept with dirt upon him now stuffeth for himself a cushion.
The upshot is unmitigated misery for all: "Nay, but great and small say: I wish I were dead." [Note 6]
In the Old Testament we meet the same theme -- the reversal of established social conditions. When Hannah, after years of barrenness, had prayed for a son, and Samuel was born, she praised God:
There is none holy as the Lord: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.... The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They that were full have hired themselves out for bread; and they that were hungry ceased.... The Lord maketh poor and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up. He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the Earth are the Lord's and he hath set the world upon them (I Sam. ii, 2-8).
Notice that the last verses state explicitly that God created the existing social order; but, quite characteristically, this order did not derive any sacredness, any value, from its divine origin. The sacredness and value remain attributes of God alone, and the violent changes of fortune observed in social life are but signs of God's omnipotence. Nowhere else do we meet this fanatical devaluation of the phenomena of nature and the achievements of man: art, virtue, social order -- in view of the unique significance of the divine. It has been rightly pointed out that the monotheism of the Hebrews is a correlate of their insistence on the unconditioned nature of God. [Note 7] Only a God who transcends every phenomenon, who is not conditioned by any mode of manifestation -- only an unqualified God can be the one and only ground of all existence.
This conception of God represents so high a degree of abstraction that, in reaching it, the Hebrews seem to have left the realm of myth-making thought. The impression that they did so is strengthened when we observe that the Old Testament is remarkably poor in mythology of the type we have encountered in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But this impression requires correction. The processes of myth-making thought are decisive for many sections of the Old Testament. For instance, the magnificent verses from the Book of Proverbs (viii, 22-31) describe the Wisdom of God, personified and substantialized in the same manner in which the corresponding concept of macat is treated by the Egyptians. Even the great conception of an only and transcendent God was not entirely free from myth, for it was not the fruit of detached speculation but of a passionate and dynamic experience. Hebrew thought did not entirely overcome myth-making thought. It created, in fact, a new myth -- the myth of the Will of God.
Although the great "Thou" which confronted the Hebrews transcended nature, it stood in a specific relationship to the people. For when they were freed from bondage and roamed in "a desert land ... the waste howling wilderness ... the Lord alone did lead (them) and there was no strange god with (them)" (Deut. xxxii, 10-12). And God had said:
But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend. Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the Earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away (Isa. xli, 8-9).
Thus God's will was felt to be focused on one particular and concrete group of human beings; it was asserted to have manifested itself at one decisive moment in their history and ceaselessly and relentlessly to have urged, rewarded, or chastised the people of its choice. For in Sinai, God had said, "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation" (Exod. xix, 6).
It is a poignant myth, this Hebrew myth of a chosen people, of a divine promise made, of a terrifying moral burden imposed -- a prelude to the later myth of the Kingdom of God, that more remote and more spiritual "promised land." For in the myth of the chosen people the ineffable majesty of God and the worthlessness of man are correlated in a dramatic situation that is to unfold in time and is moving toward a future where the distant yet related parallels of human and divine existence are to meet in infinity.
Not cosmic phenomena, but history itself, had here become pregnant with meaning; history had become a revelation of the dynamic will of God. The human being was not merely the servant of the god as he was in Mesopotamia; nor was he placed, as in Egypt, at a pre-ordained station in a static universe which did not need to be -- and, in fact, could not be -- questioned. Man, according to Hebrew thought, was the interpreter and the servant of God; he was even honored with the task of bringing about the realization of God's will. Thus man was condemned to unending efforts which were doomed to fail because of his inadequacy. In the Old Testament we find man possessed of a new freedom and of a new burden of responsibility. We also find there a new and utter lack of eudaimonia, of harmony -- whether with the world of reason or with the world of perception.
All this may help to explain the strange poignancy of single individuals in the Old Testament. Nowhere in the literature of Egypt or Babylonia do we meet the loneliness of the biblical figures, astonishingly real in their mixture of ugliness and beauty, pride and contrition, achievement and failure. There is the tragic figure of the problematical David; there are countless others. We find single men in terrible isolation facing a transcendent God: Abraham trudging to the place of sacrifice with his son, Jacob in his struggle, and Moses and the prophets. In Egypt and Mesopotamia man was dominated, but also supported, by the great rhythm of nature. If in his dark moments he felt himself caught and held in the net of unfathomable decisions, his involvement in nature had, on the whole, a soothing character. He was gently carried along on the perennial cosmic tides of the seasons. The depth and intimacy of man's relationship with nature found expression in the ancient symbol of the mother-goddess. But Hebrew thought ignored this image entirely. It only recognized the stern Father, of whom it was said: "he led him (Jacob, the people) about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye," (Deut. xxxii, 10b).
The bond between Yahweh and his chosen people had been finally established during the Exodus. The Hebrews considered the forty years in the desert the decisive phase in their development. And we, too, may understand the originality and the coherence of their speculations if we relate them to their experience in the desert.
The reader will remember that preceding chapters took great care to describe the Egyptian and Mesopotamian landscapes. In doing so, the authors did not succumb to an unwarranted naturalism; they did not claim that cultural phenomena could be derived from physiographical causes. They merely suggested that a relation between hand and culture may exist, a suggestion we can accept the more readily since we have seen that the surrounding world confronted early man as a "Thou." We may ask, then, what was the natural setting which determined the Hebrew's experience of the world around him. Now, the Hebrews, whatever their ancestry and historical antecedents, were tribal nomads. And since they were nomads in the Near East, they must have lived, not in boundless steppes, but between the desert and the sown, between the most fertile of lands and the total negation of life, which, in this remarkable corner of the Earth, lie cheek by jowl. They must, therefore, have known through experience both the reward and the cost of existence in either.
The Hebrews craved to settle for good in the fertile plains. But characteristically they dreamed of lands overflowing with milk and honey, not lands of super-abundant crops like those the Egyptians imagined for their hereafter. It seems that the desert as a metaphysical experience loomed very large for the Hebrews and colored all their valuations. It is, perhaps, the tension between two valuations -- between a desire and a contempt for what is desired -- that may explain some of the paradoxes of ancient Hebrew beliefs.
The organized states of the ancient Near East were agricultural; but the values of an agricultural community are the opposites of those of the nomadic tribe, especially of the extreme type of nomads of the desert. The settled peasant's reverence for impersonal authority, and the bondage, the constraint which the organized state imposes, mean an intolerable lack of personal freedom for the tribesman. The farmer's everlasting preoccupation with phenomena of growth and his total dependence on these phenomena appear to the nomad a form of slavery. Moreover, to him the desert is clean, but the scene of life, which is also the scene of decay, is sordid.
On the other hand, nomadic freedom can be bought only at a price; for whoever rejects the complexities and mutual dependencies of agricultural society not only gains freedom but also loses the bond with the phenomenal world; in fact, he gains his freedom at the cost of significant form. For, wherever we find reverence for the phenomena of life and growth, we find preoccupation with the immanence of the divine and with the form of its manifestation. But in the stark solitude of the desert, where nothing changes, nothing moves (except man at his own free will), where features in the landscape are only pointers, landmarks, without significance in themselves -- there we may expect the image of God to transcend concrete phenomena altogether. Man confronting God will not contemplate him but will hear his voice and command, as Moses did, and the prophets, and Mohammed.
When we compared the lands of origin of Egyptians and Mesopotamians, we were concerned, not with the relation between group psychology and habitat, but with profound differences in pristine religious experience. The peculiar experience which we have just described seems characteristic for all the most significant figures of the Old Testament. It is important to realize this, not because it enables us to understand them better as individuals, but because we then recognize what colored and integrated their thought. They propounded, not speculative theory, but revolutionary and dynamic teaching. The doctrine of a single, unconditioned, transcendent God rejected time-honoured values, proclaimed new ones, and postulated a metaphysical significance for history and for man's actions. With infinite moral courage the Hebrews worshipped an absolute God and accepted as the correlate of their faith the sacrifice of a harmonious existence. In transcending the Near Eastern myths of immanent godhead, they created, as we have seen, the new myth of the will of God. It remained for the Greeks, with their peculiar intellectual courage, to discover a form of speculative thought in which myth was entirely overcome.
In the Greek mystery religions we meet well-known oriental themes. Demeter was the sorrowing mother-goddess searching for her child; Dionysus died a violent death but was resurrected. In some of the rites the participants experienced an immediate relationship with the divine in nature; and in this respect there is similarity with the ancient Near East. But it would be hard to find antecedents for the individual salvation vouchsafed to the initiates. A possible parallel would be the Osiris cult; but, as far as we know, the Egyptian did not undergo an initiation or share the god's fate during his lifetime. In any case, the Greek mysteries show several features which were without precedent. These generally amount to a diminished distance between men and gods. The initiate of the Orphic mysteries, for instance, not only hoped to be liberated from the "wheel of births" but actually emerged as a god from his union with the mother-goddess, "queen of the dead." The Orphic myths contain speculations about the nature of man which are characteristically Greek in their tenor. It was said that the Titans had devoured Dionysus-Zagreus and were therefore destroyed by the lightning of Zeus, who made man from their ashes. Man, in so far as he consists of the substance of the Titans, is evil and ephemeral; but since the Titans had partaken of a god's body, man contains a divine and immortal spark. Such dualism and the recognition of an immortal part in man are unknown in the ancient Near East outside Persia
It is not only in the mystery religions that the Greeks placed man closer to the gods than the Egyptians or Babylonians had ever done. Greek literature names many women who had gods for lovers and bore them children, and it has been pointed out that the typical sinner in Greece was the man who had attempted to do violence to a goddess. [Note 8] Moreover, the Olympian gods, though they were manifest in nature, had not made the universe and could not dispose of man as their creature with the same unquestioned right of ownership which the ancient Near Eastern gods exercised. In fact, the Greek claimed a common ancestry with the gods and, consequently, suffered the more acutely because of his own disabilities. Pindar's Sixth Nemean Ode, for instance, starts as follows:
Of one race, one only, are men and gods. Both of one mother's womb we draw our breath; but far asunder is all our power divided, and fences us apart; here there is nothingness, and there, in strength of bronze, a seat unshaken, eternal, abides the heaven. (After Cornford.)
The spirit of such poetry differs profoundly from that of the ancient Near East, even though, at this time, Greece still shared many beliefs with the Orient. The common mother of gods and men to whom Pindar refers is Gaea, the Earth; and the Earth, as Ninhursaga, was often regarded as the Great Mother in Mesopotamia. Homer still knew of the primeval waters: "Okeanos from whom the gods are sprung." [Note 9] Yet more important than such echoes of Near Eastern beliefs is the similarity between the Greek and the oriental methods of interpreting nature: an ordered view of the universe was obtained by bringing its elements in a genealogical relationship with one another. In Greece this procedure found monumental expression in Hesiod's Theogony, written probably about 700 B.C. Hesiod starts his account with Chaos and proclaims Sky and Earth the parents of gods and men. He introduces numerous personifications which recall Egyptian macat or the "Wisdom of God" in the Book of Proverbs. "... Next he (Zeus) wedded bright Themis who bare the Horai, even Eunomia (Good Government) and Dike (Justice) and blooming Eirene (Peace) who care for the works of mortal man" (ll. 90I-3). [Note 10]
Associations and "participations" typical of myth-making thought appear often. A particularly clear example is: "And Night bare hateful Doom; and black Fate and Death and Sleep she bare, and she bare the tribe of dreams; all these did dark Night bear, albeit mated unto none" (ll. 211 ff.). The natural process of procreation thus supplied Hesiod with a scheme which allowed him to connect the phenomena and to arrange them in a comprehensible system. The Babylonian Epic of Creation and the An-Anum list use the same device; and we meet it in Egypt when Atum is said to have begotten Shu and Tefnut (Air and Moisture), who, in their turn, brought forth Geb and Nut (Earth and Sky).
And yet Hesiod is without oriental precedent in one respect: the gods and the universe were described by him as a matter of private interest. Such freedom was unheard of in the Near East, except among the Hebrews, where Amos, for instance, was a herdsman. In Egypt and Mesopotamia religious subjects were treated by members of the established hierarchy. But Hesiod was a Boeotian farmer called by the Muses, "which time he tended his flocks under holy Helicon". He says: "(The Muses) breathed in me a voice divine that I might celebrate the things that shall be and the things that were aforetime. They bade me sing the race of the Blessed Ones that are for ever" (11. 29 ff.). Thus a Greek layman recognized his vocation and became a singer who took the gods and nature as his theme, although he continued to use the traditional forms of epic poetry.
The same freedom, the same unconcern as regards special function and hierarchy, is characteristic for the Ionian philosophers who lived a century or more after Hesiod. Thales seems to have been an engineer and statesman; Anaximander, a map-maker. Cicero stated: "Almost all those whom the Greeks called the Seven Sages, you will see to have been engaged in public life" (De Rep. i. 7). These men, then, in contrast to the priests of the Near East, were not charged by their communities to concern themselves with spiritual matters.
They were moved by their own desire for an understanding of nature; and they did not hesitate to publish their findings, although they were not professional seers. Their curiosity was as lively as it was unhampered by dogma. Like Hesiod, the Ionian philosophers gave their attention to the problem of origins; but for them it assumed an entirely new character. The origin, the "arch" which they sought was not understood in the terms of myth. They did not describe an ancestral divinity or a progenitor. They did not even look for an "origin" in the sense of an initial condition which was superseded by subsequent states of being. The Ionians asked for an immanent and lasting ground of existence. "macat" means "origin", not as "beginning", but as "sustaining principle" or "first cause".
This change of viewpoint is breath-taking. It transfers the problems of man in nature from the realm of faith and poetic intuition to the intellectual sphere. A critical appraisal of each theory, and hence a continuous inquiry into the nature of reality, became possible. A cosmogonic myth is beyond discussion. It describes a sequence of sacred events, which one can either accept or reject. But no cosmogony can become part of a progressive and cumulative increase of knowledge. As we said in our first chapter, myth claims recognition by the faithful, not justification before the critical. But a sustaining principle or first cause must be comprehensible, even if it was first discovered in a flash of insight. It does not pose the alternative of acceptance or rejection. It may be analyzed, modified, or corrected. In short, it is subject to intellectual judgment.
Yet the doctrines of the early Greek philosophers are not couched in the language of detached and systematic reflection. Their sayings sound rather like inspired oracles. And no wonder, for these men proceeded, with preposterous boldness, on an entirely unproved assumption. They held that the universe is an intelligible whole. In other words, they presumed that a single order underlies the chaos of our perceptions and, furthermore, that we are able to comprehend that order.
The speculative courage of the Ionians is often overlooked. Their teachings were, in fact, predestined to be misunderstood by modern -- or rather, nineteenth-century -- scholars. When Thales proclaims water to be the first cause, or Anaximenes air; when Anaximander speaks of the "Boundless," and Heraclitus of fire; when, moreover, Democritus' theory of atoms can be considered the outcome of these earlier speculations; then we need not be astonished that commentators in a positivistic age unwittingly read familiar connotations into the quasi-materialist doctrines of the Ionians and regarded these earliest philosophers as the first scientists. No bias could more insidiously disfigure the greatness of the Ionian achievement. The materialist interpretation of their teachings takes for granted what was to be discovered only as a result of the labors of these ancient thinkers -- the distinction between the objective and the subjective. And only on the basis of this distinction is scientific thought possible.
In actual fact the Ionians moved in a curious borderland. They forfeit the possibility of establishing an intelligible coherence in the phenomenal world; yet they were still under the spell of an undissolved relationship between man and nature. And so we remain somewhat uncertain of the exact connotations of the Ionian sayings which have been preserved. Thales, for instance, said that water was the "macat," the first principle or cause of all things; but he also said: "All things are full of gods. The magnet is alive for it has the power of moving iron." [Note 11] Anaximenes said: "Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the whole world."
It is clear that Anaximenes did not consider air merely as a physical substance, although he did consider it, among other things, a substance whose properties changed when it was either condensed or rarefied. But at the same time air was mysteriously connected with the maintenance of life itself: it was an agent of vitality. Anaximenes recognized in air something variable enough to make it seem possible to interpret the most diverse phenomena as its manifestations. Thales had preferred water, but he, too, did not consider his first cause merely as a neutral, colorless liquid. We must remember that seeds and bulbs and the eggs of insects lie lifeless in the rich soil of Eastern Mediterranean lands until the rains come -- remember, also, the preponderant role of watery substances in the processes of conception and birth in the animal kingdom. It is possible that the ancient oriental view of water as a fertilizing agent had retained its validity for Thales. It is equally possible that he endorsed the oriental conception of a primeval ocean from which all life came forth. Homer, as we have seen, called Okeanos the origin of gods and men. Thales' pupil, Anaximander, stated explicitly: "the living creatures came forth from the moist element." There are many other symbolic meanings which we can impute to Thales' theory; for, after all, the sea exercises its magic even today. Thus it has been supposed (by Joel) that Thales regarded the sea as the epitome of change, as many poets since have done.
Now to claim, on any or all of these analogies, that water is the first cause of all things is to argue in the manner of myth-making thought. But observe that Thales speaks of water, not of a water-god; Anaximenes refers to air, not to a god of air or storms. Here lies the astonishing novelty of their approach. Even though "all things are full of gods," these men attempt to understand the coherence of the things. When Anaximenes explains that air is the first cause, "just as our soul, being air, holds us together," he continues to specify how air can function as such a sustaining principle: "It (air) differs in different substances in virtue of its rarefaction and condensation." Or, even more specifically:
When it (air) is dilated so as to be rarer it becomes fire, while winds on the other hand, are condensed air. Cloud is formed from air by felting; and this, still further condensed, becomes water. Water, condensed still more, turns to Earth; and when condensed as much as it can be, to stones.
There is nowhere a precedent for this type of argument. It shows a twofold originality. In the first place, early Greek philosophy (in Cornford's words) "ignored with astonishing boldness the prescriptive sanctities of religious representation." [Note 12] Its second characteristic is a passionate consistency Once a theory is adopted, it is followed up to its ultimate conclusion irrespective of conflicts with observed facts or probabilities. Both of these characteristics indicate an implicit recognition of the autonomy of thought; they also emphasize the intermediate position of early Greek philosophy. The absence of personification, of gods, sets it apart from myth-making thought. Its disregard for the data of experience in its pursuit of consistency distinguishes it from later thought. Its hypotheses were not induced from systematic observations but were much more in the nature of inspired conjectures or divinations by which it was attempted to reach a vantage point where the phenomena would reveal their hidden coherence. It was the unshakeable conviction of the Ionians, Pythagoreans, and early Eleatics that such a vantage point existed; and they searched for the road toward it, not in the manner of scientists, but in that of conquistadors.
Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, made an important new advance. He realized that the sustaining principle of all determinate phenomena could not be itself determinate. The ground of all existence had to be essentially different from the elements of actuality; it had to be eteraf six- of another nature -- while yet containing all contrasts and specihc qualities. Anaximander called the macat the "Infinite" or "Boundless." It is reported by Theophrastos that Anaximander "said that the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite.... He says it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements but a substance different from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them." [Note 13] Notice that Anaximander submits to the substantializing tendency of myth-making thought by calling the apeiron a substance -- or, in the following quotation, a body: "He did not ascribe the origin of things to any alteration in matter, but said that the oppositions in the substratum, which was a boundless body, were separated out."
The opposites which Anaximander found in actuality were the traditional ones: warm and cold, moist and dry. When he stated that these opposites "separated out" from the "Boundless," he did not refer (as we would expect) to a mechanistic process. He put it as follows: "And into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is meet; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time." In the winter, cold commits an injustice to heat, etc. Again we meet the marvelous blend of imaginative, emotional, and intellectual vigor which was characteristic of the sixth and fifth centuries 8.C. in Greece. Even that most abstract of notions, the Boundless itself, is described by Anaximander as "eternal and ageless" words which serve as a stock phrase in Homer to characterize the gods. Yet Anaximander, like Thales and Anaximenes, describes the universe in purely secular terms.
We happen to know a good deal of his cosmography. Let us quote, as characteristic samples, his statement that "the Earth swings free, held in its place by nothing. It stays where it is because of its equal distance from everything." The heavenly bodies are described as "wheels of fire": "And there are breathing-holes, certain pipe-like passages, at which the heavenly bodies show themselves." Thunder and lightning are blasts of the winds -- a theory broadly parodied in Aristophanes Clouds -- and, as to living beings, we find this curious anticipation of phylogenetics: "Living creatures arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun. Man was like another animal, namely, a fish in the beginning." Again, Anaximander presents a curious hybrid of empirical and myth-making thought. But in his recognition that the ground of all determinate existence could not itself be determinate, in his claim that not water nor air nor any other "element" but only the "Boundless" from which all opposites "separated out," could be the macat he showed a power of abstraction beyond anything known before his day.
With Heraclitus of Ephesus philosophy found its locus standi. "Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things." [Note 14] Here, for the first time, attention is centered, not on the thing known, but on the knowing of it. "Thought," (which may also be translated "judgment," or "understanding"), controls the phenomena as it constitutes the thinker. The problem of understanding nature is moved once more to a new plane. In the ancient Near East it had remained within the sphere of myth. The Milesian school of philosophers had moved it to the realm of the intellect in that they chimed the universe to be an intelligible whole. The manifold was to be understood as deriving from a sustaining principle or first cause. but this was to be looked for in the phenomena. The question of how we can know what is outside us was not raised. Heraclitus asserted that the universe was intelligible because it was ruled by "thought" or "judgment," and that the same principle, therefore, governed both existence and knowledge. He was conscious that this wisdom surpassed even the loftiest conception of Greek myth-making thought: "The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus." [Note 15]
Heraclitus calls this wisdom Logos, a term so heavily laden with associations as to be an embarrassment whether we translate it or not. "Reason" is perhaps the least objectionable rendering. "It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to the Logos and to confess that all things are one." [Note 16] All things are one. Things that are distinct from one another, or qualities that are each other's opposites, have no permanent existence. They are but transitory stages in a perpetual flux. No static description of the universe is true. "Being" is but "becoming." The cosmos is but the dynamics of existence. The opposites which Anaximander saw "separating out" from the "Boundless" are for Heraclitus united by a tension which causes each of them ultimately to change into its opposite. "Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre." [Note 17]
But if the universe changes continually according to the tensions between opposites, it is senseless to ask for its origin in the manner of myth. There is no beginning and no end; there is only existence. Heraclitus states magnificently: "This world (kosmos) which is the same for all, no one of the gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out." [Note 18] Fire is the symbol for a universe in flux between tensional opposites. As Burnet says: "The quantity of fire in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same, the flame seems to be what we call a "thing." And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its place is always taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it." [Note 19]
Heraclitus takes pains to stress that it is only the total process that is lasting and, hence, significant: "The way up and the way down is one and the same," [Note 20] or "it rests by changing," [Note 21] or, more metaphorically, "fire is want and surfeit," [Note 22] or one "cannot step twice in the same river, for fresh waters are forever flowing in upon you." [Note 23]
No momentary phase in this perpetual change is more important than any other; all opposites are transitory: "Fire lives the death of air and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of Earth, Earth that of water." [Note 24] This fragment might startle us, for here fire appears as one of the "elements" on a par with Earth, air, and water; and we would seem to be back on the level of Thales and Anaximenes. Heraclitus is using fire here as one of the traditional four elements in order to insist on the impermanence of the distinction among them. In another fragment the emergence and resorption of all determinate things in the one lasting flux of change is expressed as follows: "All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, even as wares for gold and gold for wares." [Note 25] Here the symbolical significance of fire is obvious.
In the writing of Heraclitus, to a larger degree than ever before, the images do not impose their burden of concreteness but are entirely subservient to the achievement of clarity and precision. Even for Thales and Anaximenes, water and air are no mere constituents of the material world; they also possess a symbolical connotation, if only as agents of vitality. But for Heraclitus fire is purely a symbol of reality in flux; he calls wisdom "to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things."
Heraclitus gives the sharpest and profoundest expression to the Ionian postulate that the universe is an intelligible whole. It is intelligible, since thought steers all things. It is a whole, since it is a perpetual flux of change. Yet in this form the doctrine retains one contradiction. Mere change and flux cannot be intelligible, for they achieve not cosmos but chaos. Heraclitus solved this difficulty by recognizing in the flux of change an inherent dominant measure. We remember that the world was "an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling and measures going out." The continuous transition of everything into its opposite was regulated by this measure. It was, as we have also seen, "an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and of the lyre." For this reason Heraclitus rejected the doctrine of Anaximander according to which the opposites had to make reparation to one another for their injustice. He held that it was in the nature of things that they should be continually replaced by their opposites:
We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice and that all things come into being and pass away (?) through strife. [Note 27]War is the father of all and the king of all, and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free. [Note 27]
Homer was wrong in saying "Would that strife might perish from among gods and men. He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe, for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away. [Note 28]
Heraclitus did not mean to equate existence with a blind conflict of opposing force, but he called war the dynamics of existence which necessarily involved "the hidden attunement (which) is better than the open." [Note 29] This attunement is of the essence of existence; it is valid in the same manner in which we claim the laws of nature to be valid: "The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does the Erinyes, the handmaids of justice, will find him out." [Note 30] This reference to the sun indicates, perhaps, that the regularity of the movements of the heavenly bodies suggested to Heraclitus that all change was subject to a "hidden attunement." If this surmise were correct, it would link him appropriately with both myth-making and Platonic thought.
The philosophy of Heraclitus shows both parallels and contrasts to that of his older contemporary Pythagoras. According to Pythagoras, also, a hidden measure dominated all the phenomena. But, while Heraclitus was satisfied with proclaiming its existence, the Pythagoreans were anxious to determine it quantitatively. They believed a knowledge of essentials to be a knowledge of numbers, and they attempted to discover the immanent proportionality of the existing world. The starting point for their enterprise was a remarkable discovery by Pythagoras. Measuring the lengths on the string of the lyre between the places where the four principal notes of the Greek scale were sounded, he found that they had the proportion 6:8:12. This harmonic proportion contains the octave (12:6), the fifth (12:8), and the fourth (8:6). If we attempt to regard the discovery naively, we shall admit that it is astonishing. It correlates musical harmonies, which belong to the world of the spirit no less than to that of sensual perception, with the precise abstractions of numerical ratios. It seemed legitimate for the Pythagoreans to expect that similar correlations would be discovered; and, with the truly Greek passion for following up a thought to its ultimate consequences, they maintained that certain arithmetical proportions explained every facet of actuality. Heraclitus said contemptuously: "The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras." [Note 31]
Moreover, the Pythagoreans were far from sharing Heraclitus' views. While he had said proudly, "I have sought for myself," [Note 32] the Pythagoreans endorsed much traditional lore. While Heraclitus stated that all being was but a becoming, the Pythagoreans accepted the reality of the opposites and shared the common preference for the light, static, and unified aspects of existence, assigning the dark, the changing, and the manifold to the side of evil. Their dualism, their belief in the transmigration of souls, and their hope of liberation from the "wheel of births" connected the Pythagorean doctrine with Orphism. In fact, the teachings of Pythagoras belong preponderantly to the sphere of myth-making thought. This can be explained if we remember his orientation. Pythagoras was not concerned with knowledge for its own sake; he did not share the detached curiosity of the Ionians. He taught a way of life. The Pythagorean society was a religious fraternity striving for the sanctification of its members. In this, too, it resembled the Orphic societies; but its god was Apollo, not Dionysus; its method comprehension, not rapture. For the Pythagoreans, knowledge was part of the art of living; and living was seeking for salvation. We saw in the first chapter that man, when thus involved with the whole of his being, cannot achieve intellectual detachment. Therefore, Pythagorean thought is steeped in myth. Yet it was a member of the Pythagorean society, who after his apostasy, destroyed the last hold of myth on thought. This man was Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic School.
Parmenides once more interpreted the Ionian postulate that the world forms an intelligible whole. But, as Burnet puts it, "he showed once and for all that if you take the One seriously you are bound to deny everything else." [Note 33] Parmenides saw that not only each theory of origin, but even each theory of change or movement, made the concept of being problematical. Absolute being cannot be conceived as coming into existence out of a state of non-existence.
How, then can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it, if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. [Note 34]
Parmenides' conclusion that this is so is a purely logical one, and hence we may say that the autonomy of thought was definitely established by him. We have seen that Heraclitus went far in this direction, claiming the congruity of truth and existence when he said: "Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things."
When Parmenides restated this thesis, he eliminated the last vestige of mythical concreteness and imagery which had survived in the "steered" of Heraclitus' saying and also in his symbol of fire. Parmenides said: "The thing that can be thought, and that for the sake of which the thought exists, is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered." [Note 35] But since Parmenides considered "becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of," he assumed an entirely new position. The Milesians had attempted to correlate being (as the static ground of existence) and becoming (observed in the phenomena). Heraclitus had declared being a perpetual becoming and had correlated the two concepts with his "hidden attunement." Now Parmenides declared the two to be mutually exclusive, and only being to be real.
Come now, I will tell thee -- and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away -- the only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of conviction, [Note 36] for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not, and that it must needs not be -- that, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all. For thou canst not know what is not -- that is impossible -- nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be. [Note 37]
And again:
One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what IS is uncreated and indestructible for it is complete, immovable and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. For what origin for it wilt thou look for? In what way and from what source could it have drawn its increase ? ... I shall not let thee say nor think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not. [Note 38]
Here, in what Parmenides calls "the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth," we meet a philosophical absolute that reminds us of the religious absolute of the Old Testament. In the strictly idealistic position of Parmenides the autonomy of thought is vindicated, and every concrescence of myth is stripped off. Yet Parmenides is strongly connected with his predecessors in one respect. In his denial of the reality of movement, change, and distinctiveness, he reached a conclusion which, like theirs, was oddly at variance with the data of experience. He was aware of this and appealed to reason in defiance of the testimony of the senses: "But do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry, nor let habit by its much experience force thee to cast upon this way a wandering eye or sounding ear or tongue; but judge by reason [Note 39] the much disputed proof uttered by me." [Note 40]
This same attitude was, implicitly or explicitly, adopted by all Greek thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. For neither their basic assumption-that the world is an intelligible whole -- nor their further explanation -- that it unfolds in opposites -- nor any of their other theses can be proved by logic or by experiment or by observation. With conviction they propounded theories which resulted from intuitive insight and which were elaborated by deductive reasoning. Each system was based upon an assumption held to be true and made to bear a structure erected without further reference to empirical data. Consistency was valued more highly than probability. This fact in itself shows that throughout early Greek philosophy reason is acknowledged as the highest arbiter, even though the Logos is not mentioned before Heraclitus and Parmenides. It is this tacit or outspoken appeal to reason, no less than the independence from "the prescriptive sanctities of religion," which places early Greek philosophy in the sharpest contrast with the thought of the ancient Near East.
As we have said before, the cosmologies of myth-making thought are basically revelations received in a confrontation with a cosmic "Thou." And one cannot argue about a revelation; it transcends reason. But in the systems of the Greeks the human mind recognizes its own. It may take back what it created or change or develop it. This is true even of the Milesian philosophies, although they have not entirely shed the concrescence of myth. It is patently true of the doctrine of Heraclitus, which established the sovereignty of thought, rejected Anaximander and Pythagoras, and proclaimed an absolute becoming. It is equally true of the teaching of Parmenides, who confounded Heraclitus and proclaimed an absolute being.
One question remains to be answered. If myth-making thought took shape in an undissolved relationship between man and nature, what became of that relationship when thought was emancipated ? We may answer this question with a quotation to balance the one with which we began this chapter. We saw that in Psalm xix nature appears bereaved of divinity before an absolute God: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork." And we read in Plato's Timaeus, in Jowett's translation (47C):
..had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time- and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.