I. A day or two ago, dear Serapion, I met with some [Sidenote: 384 D]
rather good lines, addressed, Dicaearchus thinks, to Archelaus by
Euripides:[51]
_No gifts, my wealthy friend, from humble me;
You’ll think me fool, or think I did but beg._
He who out of his narrow store offers trifles to men of great
possessions, confers no favour; no one believes that he gives something
for nothing, and he gets credit for a jealous and ungenerous temper. Now
surely as money presents fall far [Sidenote: E] below those of
literature and learning, so there is beauty in giving these, and beauty
in claiming a return in kind. At any rate, I am sending to you, and so
to my friends down there, some of our Pythian Dialogues, as a sort of
first-fruits; and, in doing so, confess that I expect others from you,
and more and better ones, since you enjoy a great city and abundant
leisure, with many books and discussions of every sort. Well then, our
kind Apollo, in the oracles which he gives his consultants, seems to
[Sidenote: F] solve the problems of life and to find a remedy, while
problems of the intellect he actually suggests and propounds to the born
love of wisdom in the soul, thus implanting an appetite which leads to
truth. Among many other instances, this is made clear as to the
consecration of the letter ‘E’. We may well guess that it was not by
chance, or by lot, that, alone among [Sidenote: 385] the letters, it
received pre-eminence in the God’s house, and took rank as a sacred
offering and a show object. No, the officials of the God in early times,
when they came to speculate, either saw in it a special and
extraordinary virtue, or found it a symbol for something else of serious
importance, and so adopted it. I had often myself avoided the question
and quietly declined it when raised in the school. However, I was lately
surprised by my sons in earnest discussion with certain strangers, who
were just starting from Delphi; it was not decent to put them off with
excuses, they were so anxious to receive some [Sidenote: B] account. We
sat down near the temple, and I began to raise questions with myself,
and to put others to them; and the place, and what they said, reminded
me of a discussion which we heard a long time ago from Ammonius and
others, at the time of Nero’s visit, when the same problem had been
started here in the same way.
II. That the God is no less philosopher than he is prophet appeared to
all to come out directly from the exposition which Ammonius gave us of
each of his names. He is ‘Pythian’ (The Inquirer) to those who are
beginning to learn and to inquire; ‘Delian’ (The Clear One) and
‘Phanaean’ to those who are already getting something clear and a
glimmering of [Sidenote: C] the truth; ‘Ismenian’ (The Knowing) to those
who possess the knowledge; ‘Leschenorian’ (God of Discourse) when they
are in active enjoyment of dialectical and philosophic intercourse. ‘Now
since’, he continued, ‘Philosophy embraces inquiry, wonder, and doubt,
it seems natural that most of the things relating to the God should have
been hidden away in riddles, and should require some account of their
purpose, and an explanation of cause. For instance, in the case of the
undying fire, why the only woods used here are pine for burning and
laurel for fumigation; again, why two Fates are here installed, whereas
their number is everywhere else taken as three; why no woman is allowed
to approach the place of the oracles; questions about the tripod, and
the rest. These problems, [Sidenote: D] when suggested to persons not
altogether wanting in reason and soul, lure them on, and challenge them
to inquire, to listen, and to discuss. Look again at those inscriptions,
KNOW THYSELF and NOTHING TOO MUCH; how many philosophic inquiries have
they provoked! What a multitude of arguments has sprung up out of each,
as from a seed! Not one of them I think is more fruitful in this way
than the subject of our present inquiry.’
III. When Ammonius had said this, my brother Lamprias spoke: ‘After all,
the account which we have heard of the matter is simple enough and quite
short. They say that the famous Wise Men, also called by some
“Sophists”, were [Sidenote: E] properly only five, Chilon, Thales,
Solon, Bias, and Pittacus. But Cleobulus, tyrant of Lindos, and, later
on, Periander of Corinth, men with no wisdom or virtue in them, but
forcing public opinion by influence, friends, and favours, thrust
themselves into the list of the wise, and disseminated through Greece
maxims and sayings resembling the utterances of the five. Then the five
were vexed, but did not choose to expose the imposture, or to have an
open quarrel on the matter of title, and to fight it out with such
powerful persons. They met here [Sidenote: F] by themselves; and after
discussing the matter, dedicated the letter which is fifth in the
alphabet, and also as a numeral signifies five, thus making their own
protest before the God, that they were five, discarding and rejecting
the seventh and the sixth, as having no part or lot with themselves.
That this account is not beside the mark may be recognized by any one
who has heard the officials of the temple naming the golden “E” as that
of Livia the wife of Caesar, the brazen one as that [Sidenote: 386] of
the Athenians, whereas the original and oldest letter, which is of wood,
is to this day called that “Of the Wise Men”, as having been the
offering of all in common, not of anyone of them.’
IV. Ammonius gave a quiet smile; he had a suspicion that Lamprias had
been giving us a view of his own, making up history and legend at
discretion. Some one else said that it was like the nonsense which they
had heard from the Chaldaean stranger a day or so before; that there
were seven letters which were vowels, seven stars that have an
independent motion and [Sidenote: B] are unattached to the heavens;
moreover that ‘E’ is the second vowel from the beginning, and the sun
the second planet, after the moon, and that all Greeks, or nearly all,
identify Apollo with the sun.
‘But all that’, he said, ‘is pernicious nonsense. Lamprias, however,
has, probably without knowing it, made a move[52] which stirs up all who
have to do with the temple against his view. What he told us was unknown
to any of the Delphians; they used to give the regular guides’ account,
that neither the appearance nor the sound of the letter has any
significance, but only the name.’
[Sidenote: C] V. ‘No, the Delphic Officials’, said Nicander the priest,
speaking for them, ‘believe that it is a vehicle, a form assumed by the
petition addressed to the God; it has a leading place in the questions
of those who consult him, and inquire, _If_ they shall conquer; _If_
they shall marry; _If_ it is advisable to sail; _If_ to farm; _If_ to
travel. The God in his wisdom would bow out the dialecticians when they
think that nothing practical comes of the “_If_” part with its clause
attached; he admits as practical, in his sense of the word, all
questions so attached. Then, since it is our personal concern to
question him as prophet, but [Sidenote: D] a general concern to pray to
him as God, they hold that the letter embraces the virtue of prayer no
less than that of inquiry; “O, If I might!” says every one who prays, as
Archilochus,[53]
If _it might be mine, prevailing, Neobule’s hand to touch_!
When _If-so-be_ is used, the latter part is dragged in (compare
Sophron’s “Bereaved of children, I trow”, or Homer’s “As I will break
thy might, I trow”[54]). But _If_ gives the sense of prayer
sufficiently.’
VI. When Nicander had finished, our friend Theon, whom I am sure you
know, asked Ammonius whether Dialectic might [Sidenote: E] speak freely,
after the insulting remarks to which she had been treated. Ammonius told
him to speak out on her behalf. ‘That the God is a master of Dialectic,’
Theon said, ‘is shown clearly by most of his oracles; for you will grant
that the solution of puzzles belongs to the same person as their
invention. Again, as Plato used to say, when a response was given that
the altar at Delos should be doubled,[55] a matter requiring the most
advanced geometry, the God was not merely enjoining this, but was also
putting his strong command upon the Greeks to practise geometry. Just
so, when the God puts out ambiguous [Sidenote: F] oracles, he is
exalting and establishing Dialectic, as essential to the right
understanding of himself. You will grant again, that in Dialectic this
conjunctive particle has great force, because it formulates the most
logical of all sentences. This is certainly the “conjunctive”, seeing
that the other animals know the existence of things, but man alone has
been gifted by nature with the power of observing and discerning their
sequence. That “it is day” and “it is light” we may take it that wolves
and dogs and birds perceive. But “if it is day it is light”, is
[Sidenote: 387] intelligible only to man; he alone can apprehend
antecedent and consequent, the enunciation of each and their connexion,
their mutual relation and difference, and it is in these that all
demonstration has its first and governing principle. Since then
Philosophy is concerned with truth, and the light of truth is
demonstration, and the principle of demonstration is the conjunctive
proposition, the faculty which includes and produces this was rightly
consecrated by the wise men to that [Sidenote: B] God who is above all
things a lover of truth. Also, the God is a prophet, and prophetic art
deals with that future which is to come out of things present or things
past. Nothing comes into being without a cause, nothing is known
beforehand without a reason. Things which come into being follow things
which have been, things which are to be follow things which now are
coming into being, all bound in one continuous chain of evolution.
Therefore he who knows how to link causes together into one, and combine
them into a natural process, can also declare beforehand things
_Which are, which shall be, and which were of old._[56]
Homer did well in putting the present first, the future next, and the
past last. Inference starts with the present, and works [Sidenote: C] by
the force of the conjunction: “If this is, that was its antecedent”, “If
this is, that will be.” As we have said, the technical and logical
requirement is knowledge of consequence; sense supplies the minor
premiss. Hence, though it may perhaps seem a petty thing to say, I will
not shrink from it; the real tripod of truth is the logical process
which assumes the relation of consequent to antecedent, then introduces
the fact, and so establishes the conclusion. If the Pythian God really
finds pleasure in music, and in the voices of swans, and the [Sidenote:
D] tones of the lyre, what wonder is it that as a friend to Dialectic,
he should welcome and love that part of speech which he sees
philosophers use more, and more often, than any other. So Hercules, when
he had not yet loosed Prometheus, nor yet conversed with the sophists
Chiron and Atlas, but was young and just a Boeotian, first abolished
Dialectic, made a mock at the “_If the first then the second_”[57], and
bethought him to remove the tripod by force, and to try conclusions with
the God for his art. At any rate, as time went on, he also appears to
[Sidenote: E] have become a great prophet and a great dialectician.’
VII. When Theon had done, I think it was Eustrophus of Athens who
addressed us: ‘Do you see with what a will Theon backs Dialectic? He has
only to put on the lion’s skin! Now then for you who put down under
number all things in one mass, all natures and principles divine as well
as human, and take it to be leader and lord in all that is beautiful and
honourable! It is no time for you to keep quiet; offer to the God a
first-fruits of your dear Mathematics, if you think that “E” rises above
[Sidenote: F] the other letters, not in its own right by power or shape,
or by its meaning as a word, but as the honoured symbol of an absolutely
great and sovereign number, the “Pempad”, from which the Wise Men took
their verb “to count”.’ Eustrophus was not jesting when he said this to
us; he said it because I was at the time passionately devoted to
Mathematics, though soon to find the value of the maxim, ‘NOTHING TOO
MUCH‘, having joined the Academy.
VIII. So I said that Eustrophus’ solution of the problem by number was
excellent. ‘For since,’ I continued, ‘when all number is divided into
even and odd, unity alone is in its effect [Sidenote: 388] common to
both, and therefore, if added to an odd number makes it even, and vice
versa; and since even numbers start with two, odd numbers with three,
and five is produced by combination of these, it has rightly received
honour as the product of first principles, and it has further been
called “Marriage”, because even resembles the female, odd the male. For
when we divide the several numbers into equal segments, the even parts
asunder perfectly, and leaves inside a sort of recipient principle or
space; if the odd is treated in the same way, a middle part is always
left [Sidenote: B] over, which is generative. Hence the odd is the more
generative, and when brought into combination invariably prevails; in no
combination does it give an even result, but in all cases an odd.
Moreover, when each is applied to itself and added, the difference is
shown. Even with even never gives odd, or passes out of its proper
nature; it wants the strength to produce anything different. Odd numbers
with odd yield even numbers in [Sidenote: C] plenty because of their
unfailing fertility. The other powers of numbers and their distinctions
cannot be now pursued in detail. However, the Pythagoreans called five
“Marriage”, as produced by the union of the first male number and the
first female. From another point of view it has been called “Nature”,
because when multiplied into itself it ends at last in itself. For as
Nature takes a grain of wheat, and in the intermediate stages of growth
gives forms and shapes in abundance, through which she brings her work
to perfection, and, after them all, shows us again a grain of wheat,
thus restoring the beginning in the end of the whole process, so it is
with numbers. When other numbers are multiplied into themselves, they
end in different numbers after being squared; only those formed
[Sidenote: D] of five or of six recover and preserve themselves every
time. Thus six times six gives thirty-six, five times five twenty-five.
And again, a number formed of six does this only once, in the single
case of being squared. Five has the same property in multiplication, and
also a special property of its own when added to itself; it produces
alternately itself or ten, and that to infinity. For this number mimics
the principle which orders all things. As Heraclitus[58] tells us that
Nature successively produces the universe out of herself and herself out
of the universe, bartering “fire for things and things for fire, as
goods for gold [Sidenote: E] and gold for goods”, even so it is with the
Pempad. In union with itself, it does not by its nature produce anything
imperfect or foreign. All its changes are defined; it either produces
itself or the Decad, either the homogeneous or the perfect.
IX. ‘Then if any one ask “What is all this to Apollo?”[59] Much, we will
answer, not to Apollo only but also to Dionysus, who has no less to do
with Delphi than has Apollo. Now we [Sidenote: F] hear theologians
saying or singing, in poems or in plain prose, that the God subsists
indestructible and eternal, and that, by force of some appointed plan
and method, he passes through changes of his person; at one time he sets
fire to Nature and so makes all like unto all, at another passes through
all phases of difference—shapes, sufferings, powers—at the present time,
for instance, he becomes “Cosmos”, and that is his most familiar name.
The wiser people disguise from the vulgar the change [Sidenote: 389]
into fire, and call him “Apollo[60]” from his isolation, “Phoebus[61]”
from his undefiled purity. As for his passage and distribution into
waves and water, and earth, and stars, and nascent plants and animals,
they hint at the actual change undergone as a rending and dismemberment,
but name the God himself Dionysus or Zagreus or Nyctelius or Isodaites.
Deaths too and vanishings do they construct, passages out of life and
new births, all riddles and tales to match the changes mentioned. So
they sing to Dionysus dithyrambic strains, charged with sufferings and a
change wherein are wanderings and dismemberment. [Sidenote: B]
_In mingled cries_ (says Aeschylus)[62] _the dithyramb should ring,
With Dionysus revelling, its King._
‘But Apollo has the Paean, a set and sober music. Apollo is ever ageless
and young; Dionysus has many forms and many shapes as represented in
paintings and sculpture, which attribute to Apollo smoothness and order
and a gravity with no admixture, to Dionysus a blend of sport and
sauciness with seriousness and frenzy:
_God that sett’st maiden’s blood
Dancing in frenzied mood,
Blooming with pageantry!
Evoe! we cry._
‘So do they summon him, rightly catching the character of either change.
But since the periods of change are not equal, that [Sidenote: C] called
“satiety” being longer, that of “stint” shorter, they here preserve a
proportion, and use the Paean with their sacrifice for the rest of the
year, but at the beginning of winter awake the dithyramb, and stop the
Paean, and invoke this God instead of the other, supposing that this
ratio of three to one is that of the “Arrangement” to the
“Conflagration”.[63]
X. ‘But perhaps this has been drawn out at too great length for the
present opportunity. This much is clear, that they do associate the
Pempad with the God, as it now produces its own [Sidenote: D] self like
fire, and again produces the Decad out of itself like the universe. Now
take music, which the God favours so highly, are we not to suppose that
this number has its share here?
‘Most of the science of harmonies, to put it in a word, is concerned
with consonances. That these are five and no more is proved by reason,
as against the man who is all for strings and holes, and wants to
explore these points irrationally by the senses; they all have their
origin in numerical ratios. The ratio of the fourth is four to three, of
the fifth three to two, of the octave two to one, of the octave and
fifth three to one, of the double octave four to one. The additional
consonance which writers of [Sidenote: E] harmony introduce under the
name of octave and fourth, does not merit admission, being
extra-metrical; to admit it would be to indulge the irrational side of
our sense of hearing, and to violate reason, or law. Passing by then
five arrangements of tetrachords, and the first five “tones”, or
“tropes”, or “harmonies”, whichever name is right, by variations of
which, made higher or lower, the remaining scales, high and low, are
produced, is it not true that, though intervals are many, indeed
infinite, the principles of melody are five only, quarter tone,
[Sidenote: F] half tone, tone, tone and a half, double tone? In sounds
no other interval of high and low, be it smaller or greater, can be used
for melody.
XI. ‘Passing over many similar points, I will’, I said, ‘produce
Plato,[64] who, in discussing the question of a single universe, says
that if there are others besides ours, and it is not alone, then the
whole number of them is five and no more; not but that, if ours is the
only universe in being, as Aristotle[65] also thinks, even this one is
in a fashion composite and formed out of five; one of earth, one of
water, a third of fire, and a fourth of air, [Sidenote: 390] while the
fifth is called heaven or light or air, or by others “fifth substance”,
to which alone of all bodies circular motion is natural, not due to
force or other accidental cause. Therefore it is that Plato, observing
the five perfect figures of Nature—Pyramid, Cube, Octahedron,
Eicosahedron, and Dodecahedron—assigned them to the elements, each to
each.
XII. ‘There are some who appropriate to the same elements our own
senses, also five in number. Touch, as they see, is [Sidenote: B]
resistent and earthy. Taste takes in properties by moisture in the
things tasted. Air when struck becomes audible voice or sound. There
remain two: smell, the object of our olfactory sense, is an exhalation
engendered by heat, and so resembles fire; sight is akin to air and
light, which give it a luminous passage, so there is a commixture of
both which is sympathetic. Besides these, the animal has no other sense,
and the universe no other substance, which is simple and not blended. A
marvellous [Sidenote: C] apportionment of the five to the five!’
XIII. Here, I think, I paused, and after an interval I went on: ‘What
has happened to us, Eustrophus? We have almost forgotten Homer,[66] as
if he had not been the first to divide the universe into five parts,
assigning the three in the middle to the three Gods, while he left
common and unapportioned the two extremes, Olympus and earth, one the
limit of what is below, the other of what is above. “We must cry back”,
as Euripides says.[67] Now those who exalt the number four as the basis
of the [Sidenote: D] genesis of every body, make out a fairly good case.
For every solid body possesses length, breadth, and depth; but length
presupposes a point as an unit; the line is called length without
breadth, and is length; the movement of a line in breadth produces a
plane surface, and that is three; add depth, and we get to a solid with
four factors. Any one can see that the number four carries Nature up to
this point, that is, to the formation of a complete body, which may be
touched, weighed, or struck; there it has left her, wanting in what is
greatest. [Sidenote: E] For that which has no soul is, in plain terms,
orphaned and incomplete and fit for nothing, unless it be employed by
soul. But the movement or disposition which sets soul therein—a change
introducing a fifth factor—restores to Nature her completeness, its
rational basis is as much more commanding than that of the Tetrad as the
animal is above the inanimate. Further, the symmetry and potency of the
whole five prevails, so as not to allow the animate to form classes
without limit, but gives five types for all living things. There are
Gods, we know, and [Sidenote: F] daemons, and heroes, and after these,
fourth in all, the race of men: fifth, and last, the irrational order of
brutes. Again, if you make a natural division of the soul itself, the
first and least distinct principle is that of growth; second is that of
sense, then comes appetite, then the spirited part; when it has reached
the power of reasoning and perfected its nature, it stays at rest in the
fifth stage as its upper limit.
XIV. ‘Now as this number five has powers so many and so great, its
origin is also noble: not the process already described, out of the
numbers two and three, but that given by the combination of the first
principle of number with the first square. The first principle is unity,
the first square is four; from these [Sidenote: 391] as from idea and
limited substance, comes five. Or, if it be really correct, as some
hold, to reckon unity as a square, being a power of itself and working
out to itself, then the Pempad is formed out of the first two squares,
and so has not missed noble birth and that the highest.
XV. ‘My most important point’, I went on, ‘may, I fear, bear hardly on
Plato, just as he said that Anaxagoras “was hardly used by the name
Selene”, when he had wished to appropriate the theory of her
illumination, really a very old one. Are not [Sidenote: B] these Plato’s
words, in the _Cratylus_?‘[68] ‘They certainly are,’ said Eustrophus,
‘but I fail to see the resemblance.’ ‘Very well then; you know, I
suppose, that in the “_Sophist_”[69] he proves that the supreme
principles are five: being, identity, difference, and after these, as
fourth and fifth, movement and position. But in the _Philebus_[70] he
divides on a different plan. He distinguishes the unlimited and the
limited, from whose combination comes the origin of all being. The cause
of combination he takes to be a fourth. The fifth, whereby things so
mingled are again parted and distinguished, he has left to us to guess.
I [Sidenote: C] conjecture that those on the one list are figures of
those on the other; to being corresponds that which becomes, to motion
the unlimited; to position the limited, to identity the combining
principle, to difference that which distinguishes. But if the two sets
are different, yet, on one view as on the other, there would be five
classes, and five modes of difference. Some early inquirer, it will
surely be said, saw into this before Plato, and consecrated two “E’s” to
the God, as a manifestation and symbol of the number of all things. But
further, having perceived that the good also takes shape under five
heads, firstly [Sidenote: D] moderation, secondly symmetry, thirdly
mind, fourthly the sciences and arts and true opinions which relate to
soul, fifthly every pleasure which is pure and unmingled with what
causes pain, he there leaves off, merely suggesting the Orphic verse,
_In the sixth order let the strain be stayed!_
XVI. ‘Having said so much’, I went on, ‘to you all, I will sing one
short stave to Nicander and “his cunning men”.[71]
‘On the sixth day of the new moon, when the Pythia is introduced into
the Prytaneum by one person, the first of your three castings of lot is
a single one, namely the five: the three [Sidenote: E] against the two.’
‘It is so,’ said Nicander, ‘but the reason may not be disclosed to
others.’ ‘Then,’ I answered with a smile, ‘until such time as we become
priests, and the God allows us to know the truth, this much and no more
shall be added to what we have to say about the Pempad.’ Such, so far as
I remember, was the end of our account of the arithmetical or
mathematical reasons for extolling the letter ‘E’.
XVII. Ammonius, as one who himself gave Mathematics no mean place in
Philosophy, was pleased at the course the conversation was taking, and
said: ‘It is not worth our while to answer our young friends with too
absolute accuracy on these points; I will only observe that any one of
the numbers will provide not a few points for those who choose to sing
its praises. [Sidenote: F] Why speak about the others? Apollo’s holy
“Seven” will take up all one day before we have exhausted its powers.
Are we then to show the Seven Wise Men at odds with common usage, and
“the time which runs”[72], and to suppose that they ousted the “Seven”
from its pre-eminence before the God, and consecrated the “Five” as
perhaps more appropriate?
‘My own view is that the letter signifies neither number, nor [Sidenote:
392] order, nor conjunction, nor any other omitted part of speech; it is
a complete and self-operating mode of addressing the God; the word once
spoken brings the speaker into apprehension of his power. The God, as it
were, addresses each of us, as he enters, with his “KNOW THYSELF”, which
is at least as good as “Hail”. We answer the God back with “EI” (Thou
Art), rendering to him the designation which is true and has no lie in
it, and alone belongs to him, and to no other, that of BEING.
XVIII. ‘For we have, really, no part in real being; all mortal nature is
in a middle state between becoming and perishing, and presents but an
appearance, a faint unstable image, of itself. If you strain the
intellect, and wish to grasp this, it [Sidenote: B] is as with water;
compress it too much and force it violently into one space as it tries
to flow through, and you destroy the enveloping substance; even so when
the reason tries to follow out too closely the clear truth about each
particular thing in a world of phase and change, it is foiled, and rests
either on the becoming of that thing or on its perishing; it cannot
apprehend anything which abides or really is. “It is impossible to go
into the same river twice”, said Heraclitus;[73] no more can you grasp
mortal being twice, so as to hold it. So sharp and so swift is change;
it scatters and brings together again, nay not again, no nor afterwards;
even while it is being formed it fails, [Sidenote: C] it approaches, and
it is gone. Hence becoming never ends in being, for the process never
leaves off, or is stayed. From seed it produces, in its constant
changes, an embryo, then an infant, then a child; in due order a boy, a
young man; then a man, an elderly man, an old man; it undoes the former
becomings and the age which has been, to make those which come after.
Yet we fear (how absurdly!) a single death, we who have died so many
deaths, and yet are dying. For it is not only that, as Heraclitus[74]
would say, “death of fire is birth of air”, and “death of air is birth
of water”; the thing is much clearer in [Sidenote: D] our own selves.
The man in his strength is destroyed when the old man comes into being,
the young man was destroyed for the man in his strength to be, so the
boy for the young man, the babe for the boy. He of yesterday has died
into him of to-day; he of to-day is dying into him of to-morrow. No one
abides, no one is; we that come into being are many, while matter is
driven around, and then glides away, about some one appearance and a
common mould. Else how is it, if we remain the same, that the things in
which we find pleasure now are different from those of a former time;
that we love, hate, admire, and censure [Sidenote: E] different things;
that our words are different and our feelings; that our look, our bodily
form, our intellect are not the same now as then? If a man does not
change, these various conditions are unnatural; if he does change, he is
not the same man. But if he is not the same man, he is not at all; his
so-called being is simply change and new birth of man out of man. In our
ignorance of what being is, sense falsely tells us that what appears is.
XIX. ‘What then really is? That which is eternal, was never brought into
being, is never destroyed, to which no time ever brings change. Time is
a thing which moves and takes the fashion of moving matter, which ever
flows or is a sort of leaky vessel which holds destruction and becoming.
Of time we use the words “afterwards”, “before”, “shall be”, and
[Sidenote: F] “has been”, each on its face an avowal of not being. For,
in this question of being, to say of a thing which has not yet come into
being, or which has already ceased from being, that “it is”, is silly
and absurd. When we strain to the uttermost our apprehension of time,
and say “it is at hand”, “it is here”, or “now”, a rational development
of the argument brings it all to nothing. “Now” is squeezed out into the
future or into the past, as though we should try to see a point, which
of necessity passes away to right or left. But if the case be the
[Sidenote: 393] same with Nature, which is measured, as with time which
measures, nothing in it abides or really is. All things are coming into
being, or being destroyed, even while we measure them by time. Hence it
is not permissible, even in speaking of that which is, to say that “it
was”, or “it shall be”; these all are inclinations, transitions,
passages, for of permanent being there is none in Nature.
XX. ‘But the God IS, we are bound to assert; he is, with reference to no
time but to that age wherein is no movement, or time, or duration; to
which nothing is prior or subsequent; no future, no past, no elder, no
younger, which by one long “now” has made the “always” perfect. Only
with reference to this that which really is, is; it has not come into
being, it is [Sidenote: B] not yet to be, it did not begin, it will not
cease. Thus then we ought to hail him in worship, and thus to address
him as “Thou Art”, aye, or in the very words of some of the old people,
“Ei Hen”, “Thou art one thing”.[75] For the Divine is not many things,
in the sense in which each one of us is made up of ten thousand
different and successive states, a scrap-heap of units, a mob of
individuals. No, that which is must be one, as that which is one is.
Variety, any difference in being, passes to one side to produce that
which is not. Therefore the first [Sidenote: C] of the names of the God
is right, and the second, and the third. “Apollo” (Not-many) denies
plurality and excludes multitude. Ieïus means one and one only; Phoebus,
we know, is a word by which the ancients expressed that which is clean
and pure, even as to this day the Thessalians, when their priests pass
their solemn days in strict seclusion outside the temple, apply to them
a verb formed from Phoebus. Now The One is transparent and pure,
pollution comes by commixture of this with that, just as Homer,[76] you
remember, says of ivory dyed red that it is stained, and dyers say of
mingled pigments that they are [Sidenote: D] destroyed, and call the
process “destruction”. Therefore it is the property of that which is
indestructible and pure to be one and without admixture.
XXI. ‘There are those who think that Apollo and the sun are the same; we
hail them and love them for the fair name they give, and it is fitting
to do so; for they associate their idea of the God with that which they
honour and desire more than all other things which they know. But now
that we see them dreaming of the God in the fairest of nightly visions,
let us rise and encourage them to mount yet higher, to contemplate him
in a dream of the day, and to see his own being. Let them pay honour
also to the image of him and worship the principle of increase which is
about it; so far as what is of sense can lead to what is of mind, a
moving body to that which abides, it allows presentments and appearances
of his kind and blessed [Sidenote: E] self to shine through after a
fashion. But as to transitions and changes in himself, that he now
discharges fire, and so is drawn up, as they put it, or again presses
down and strains himself into earth and sea, winds and animals, and all
the strange passages into animals and also plants, piety forbids us so
much as to hear them. Otherwise the God will be a greater trifler than
the boy in Homer,[77] for ever playing with the universe the game which
the boy plays with a pile of sand, which is heaped together and sucked
away under his hand; moulding the universe when there is none, and again
destroying it when it has come into being. The opposite principle which
we find in the [Sidenote: F] universe, whatever its origin, is that
which binds being together and prevails over the corporeal weakness
tending to destruction. To my thinking the word “EI” is confronted with
this false view, and testifies to the God that THOU ART, meaning that no
shift or change has place in him, but that such things belong [Sidenote:
394] to some other God, or rather to some Spirit set over Nature in its
perishing and becoming, whether to effect either process or to undergo
it. This appears from the names, in themselves opposite and
contradictory. He is called Apollo, another is called Pluto; he is
Delius, the other Aidoneus; he is Phoebus, the other “Skotios”; by his
side are the Muses, and Memory, with the other are Oblivion and Silence;
he is Theorius and Phanaeus, the other is “King of dim Night and
ineffectual Sleep”.[78] The other is [Sidenote: B]
_Of all the Gods to men the direst foe._[79]
Whereas of him Pindar[80] has pleasantly said:
_Well tried and mildest found, to men who live and die._
so Euripides[81] was right:
_Draughts to the dead out-poured,
Songs which our bright-haired lord
Apollo hath abhorred._