By this time you should have seen, rather than any picture of
Greece and Athens in their heyday, an indication of certain
universal historical laws. As thus (to go back a little): an
influx of the Spirit is approaching, and a cycle of high
activities is about to begin. A great war has cleared off what
karmic weight has been hanging over Athens;--Xerxes, you will
remember, burnt the town. Hence there is a clearness in the inner
atmosphere; through which a great spiritual voice may, and does,
speak a great spiritual message. But human activities proceed,
ever increasing their momentum, until the atmosphere is no longer
clear, but heavy with the effluvia of by no means righteous
thought and action. The Spirit is no more visibly present, but
must manifest if at all through a thicker medium; and who speaks
now, speaks as artist only,--not as poet--or artist-prophet. Time
goes on, and the inner air grows still thicker; till men live in
a cloud, through which truths are hardly to be seen. Then those
who search for the light are apt to cry out in despair; they
become realists struggling to break the terrible molds of
thought:--and if you can hear the Spiritual in them at all, it is
not in a positive message they have for men, but in the greatness
of their heart and compassion. They do not build; they seek only
to destroy. There seems nothing else for them to do.
So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry;
coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or
less clearly through it his message from the Gods. You hear a
like radiant note of hope in Shelley; and something of it in
Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from
the Poet-Artist. Then you come to the ascendency of Tennyson,
whose business in life was to be the latter. He tried the role of
prophet; he lived up to the highest he could: strove towards the
light much more gallantly than did Sophocles, his Athenian
paradigm. But the atmosphere of his age made him something of a
failure at it: no clear light was there for him to find, such as
could manifest through poetry. Then you got men like Matthew
Arnold with his cry of despair, and William Morris with his
longing for escape; then the influence of Realism. So many
poets recently have an element of Euripides in them; a will to
do well, but a despair of the light; a tendency to question
everything, but little power to find answers to their questions.
Then there were some few who, influenced (consciously or not) by
H.P. Blavatsky, that great dawn-herald, caught glimpses of the
splendor of a dawn--which yet we wait for.
Euripides, with the Soul stirring within and behind him, "broke
himself on the bars of life and poetry," as Professor Murray
says. He was so hemmed in by the emanations of the time that he
could never clearly enunciate the Soul. Not, at any rate, in an
unmixed way, and with his whole energies. Perhaps his favorite
device of a _Deus ex Machina_--like Hercultes in the _Alcestis_
--is a symbolical enunciation of it, and intended so to be.
Perhaps the cause of the unrest he makes us feel is this: he
knew that the highest artistic method was the old Aeschylean
symbolic one, and tried to use it; but at the same time was
compelled by the gross emanations of the age, which he was not
quite strong enough to rise above, to treat his matter not
symbolically, but realistically. He could not help saying:
"Here is the epos you Athenians want me to treat,--that my artist
soul forces me to treat; here are the ideas that make up your
conventional religion;--now look at them!" And forth-with he
showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody;--
and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round
to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord
not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss
rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to
take its place. The truth was that the creative forces had
flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no
longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the
higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer
act as efficient channels for the light.
To turn to England again: Tennyson was, generally speaking, most
successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in
words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher;
because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific
stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet
of Mid-Victorian England. Carlyle, who was a far greater poet
essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself
to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed
poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew
it also. In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield.
They are called realists because they work on the plane which has
come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the
realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in
all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair. Such
men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the
ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the
Soul;--its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the
mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality;
and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing
are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;--its
temporary blindness, not its essential glory. But the true
business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the
inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.
Just when things were coming to this pass H. P. Blavatsky went to
England; and though she did not touch the field of creative
literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and
beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it. She
was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and,
curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or
when _his_ century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did
not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that
light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since
all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to
exchange even for the light of Aeschylus. If one of the two were
about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should
be, we should have to cry, _Take Aeschylus, but leave us this!_
--Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain!--But
to return to the man born in 469.
He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter
in a small way of business; his mother a midwife. He himself
began life as a sculptor,--a calling, in its lower reaches, not
so far above that of his father. A group of the Graces carved by
him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred
years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one
may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias. But, successful
or not, he seems soon to have given it up. Of his youth we know
very little. Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and
also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of
terrible passions: anger hardly to be governed, and vehement
desires; "though," he added, "he never did anything unfair." *
By 'unfair' you may understand 'not fitting'--a transgression of
right action. He set out to master himself: a tremendous and
difficult realm to master.
------
* Gilbert Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature_
------
We hardly begin to know him till he was growing old; and then he
was absolute monarch of that realm. We do not know when he
abandoned his art; or how long it was before he had won some
fame as a public teacher. We catch glimpse of him as a soldier:
from 432 to 429 he served at the siege of Potidaea; at Delium in
424; and at Amphipolis in 422. Thus to do the hoplite, carrying
a great weight of arms, at forty-seven, he needed to have some
constitution; and indeed he had;--furthermore, he played the
part with distinguished bravery--though wont to fall at times
into inconvenient fits of abstraction. Beyond all this, for the
outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating,
extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor;
that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself;
an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you
cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect
in which he does not call for love.
And men did love him; and he them. He saw in the youth of
Athens, whose lives so often were being wasted, Souls with all
the beautiful possibilities of Souls; and loved them as such,
and drew them towards their soulhood. Such love and insight is
the first and strongest weapon of the Teacher: who sees divinity
within the rough-hewn personalities of men as the sculptor sees
the God within the marble; and calls it forth. He was wont to
joke over his calling; his mother, said he, had been a midwife,
assisting at the birth of men's bodies; he himself was a midwife
of souls. How he drew men to him--of the power he had--let
Alcibiades bear witness. "As for myself," says Alcibiades, "were
I not afraid you would think me more drunk than I am, I would
tell you on oath how his words have moved me--ay, and how they
move me still. When I listen to him my heart beats with a more
than Corybantic excitement; he has only to speak and my tears
flow. Orators, such as Pericles, never moved me in this way--
never roused my soul to the thought of my servile condition: but
this man makes me think that life is not worth living so long as
I am what I am. Even now, if I were to listen, I could not
resist. So there is nothing for me but to stop my ears against
this siren's song and fly for my life, that I may not grow old
sitting at his feet. No one would ever think that I had shame in
me; but I am ashamed in the presence of Socrates."
Poor Alciabes! whom Socrates loved so well, and tried so hard to
save; and who could only preserve his lower nature for its own
and for his city's destruction by stopping his ears against his
Teacher! Alcibiades, whose genius might have saved Athens...
only Athens would not be saved... and he could not have saved
her, because he had stopped his ears against the man who made him
ashamed; and because his treacherous lower nature was always
there to thwart and overturn the efficacy of his genius;--what a
picture of duality it is!
Socrates gave up his art; because art was no longer useful as an
immediate lever for the age. He knew poetry well, but insisted,
as Professor Murray I think says, on always treating it as the
baldest of prose. There was poetry about, galore; and men did
not profit by it: something else was needed. His mission was to
the Athens of his day; he was going to save Athens if he could.
So he went into the marketplace, the agora, and loafed about (so
to say), and drew groups of young men and old about him, and
talked to them. The Delphic Oracle had made pronouncement:
_Sophocles is wise; Euripides is wiser; but Socrates is the
wisest of mankind._ Sometimes, you see, the Delphic Oracle could
get off a distinctly good thing. But Socrates, with his usual
sense of humor, had never considered himself in that light at
all; oldish, yes; and funny, and ugly, by all means;--but wise!
He thought at first, he used to say, that the Oracle must be
mistaken, or joking; for Athens was full of reputed wise men,
sophists and teachers of philosophy like Prodicus and Protagoras;
whereas he himself, heaven knew--. Well, he would go out and make
a trial of it. So he went, and talked, and probed the wisdom of
his fellow-citizens; and slowly came round to the belief that
after all the Delphic Oracle might not have been such a fool. For
he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without
knowing it. This was his own way of telling the story; and you
can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;--and yet, too,
he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance;
and you all know his solemn way of doing it. He drew them on
with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew
them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few
sound ethical truths.
He took that humble patient means of saving Athens: by breaking
down false opinions and instilling true ones. It was beginning
quite at the bottom of things. Where we advertise a public
lecture, he button-holed a passer-by; and by the great power of
his soul won a following presently. To rouse up a desire for
right living in the youth of Athens: if he could do that,
thought he, he might save Athens for the world. I wonder what
the cycles of national glory would come to, how long they might
last, if only the Teachers that invade to save them could have
their way. Always we see the same picture: the tremendous effort
of the Gods to redeem these nations in the times of their
creative greatness; to lift them on to a spiritual plane, that
the greatness may not wane and become ineffective. There is the
figure that stands before the world, about whose perfection or
whose qualities you may wrangle if you will; he is great; he is
wonderful; he stirs up love and animosity;--but behind him are
the Depths, the Hierarchies, the Pantheons. Socrates' warning
Voice, the Daimon that counseled him in every crisis, has always
been a hard nut for critics to crack. He was an impostor, was
he? Away with you for a double fool! His life meets you so
squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that
knew how to fear or lie.... Well, no; but he was deluded; he
mistook--. Man, there is more value in the light word of
Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence
denying, of such maunderers as you! See here; he was the most
sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;--a mind no
mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control,
either towards passion or ecstasy. One explanation remains--as
in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;--he was neither
deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear;
and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not
appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a
greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might
have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we
pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a
crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?
It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one
would say, by the attraction of opposites. He must have owed
some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things
familiar. Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was
comically ugly. The Athenians were one of the best-educated
populations of ancient or modern times--far ahead of ourselves;
and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher. He was
hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very
subordinate and submissive one; and he was the butt of all
joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all.
And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges,
for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood
alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in
404, disobeying them at peril of his life. But Strip him of the
"thing of sinews and muscles," as he called his outer self;
forget the queer old personality that appears in the _Clouds_ of
Aristophanes, or for that matter in the _Memorabilia_ of
Xenophon--and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see?
The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has
been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the
veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you
should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face. So the humor
would remain; and with it there would be ... something calm,
aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the
Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or
fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of "the
peace which passeth understanding"; native to "the eternity that
baffles all faculty of computation";--something that drew all
sorts and conditions of Athenians to him, good and bad, Plato and
Alcibiades, by "that diffusive love, not such as rises and falls
upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by
undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some
mystery of endless dawn."--In point of fact, to get a true
portrait of Socrates you have to look at the Memnon's head. The
Egyptian artists carved it to be the likeness of the Perfect Man,
the Soul, always in itself sublime, absolute master of its flesh
and personality. That was what Socrates was.
Well; the century ended, with that last quarter of it in which
the Lodge makes always its outward effort. Socrates for the Lodge
had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally.
The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a
moderate in politics. And the democracy was conventional-minded
in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a
disturber and innovator. And the democracy was still smarting
from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides,
understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the
treacheries of Alcibiades, another. And there were vicious
youths besides, whom he had tried and failed to save; they had
ruined themselves, and their reputable parents blamed and hated
him for the ruin, not understanding the position. And he himself
had seen so many of his efforts come to nothing: Alcibiades play
the traitor; Critias and Charmides, the bloody tyrant;--he had
seen many he had labored for frustrate his labors; he had seen
Athens fallen. He had done all he could, quietly, unfailingly
and without any fuss; now it was time for him to go. But going,
he might yet strike one more great blow for the Light.
So with quiet zest and humor he entered upon the plans of his
adversaries, accepting his trial and sentence like--_like
Socrates;_ for there is no simile for him, outside himself. He
turned it all masterfully to the advantage of the Light he loved.
You all know how he cracked his grand solemn joke when the death
sentence was passed on him. By Athenian law, he might suggest an
alternative sentence; as, to pay a fine, or banishment. Well,
said he; death was not certainly an evil; it might be a very
good thing; whereas banishment was certainly an evil, and so was
paying a fine. And besides, he had no money to pay it. So the
only alternative he could suggest was that Athens should support
him for the rest of his life in the Prytaneum as a public
benefactor. Not a smile from him; not a tremor. He elected
deliberately; he chose death; knowing well that, as things
stood, he could serve humanity in no other way so well. So he put
aside Crito's very feasible plan for his escape, and at the last
gathered his friends around him, and discoursed to them.
On Reincarnation. It was an old tradition, said he; and what
could be more reasonable than that the soul, departing to Hades,
should return again in its season:--the living born from the
dead, as the dead are from the living? Did not experience show
that opposites proceed from opposites? Then life must proceed
from, and follow, death. If the dead came from the living, and
not the living from the dead, the universe would at last be
consumed in death. Then, too, there was the doctrine that
knowledge comes from recollection; what is recollected must have
been previously known. Our souls must have existed then,
before birth. . . .
Why did he talk like that: thus _reasoning_ about reincarnation,
and not stating it as a positive teaching? Well; there would be
nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks. They knew of
it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries:
that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans. But it
was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except
among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired
its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge. (So scientific
discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality
now of Christian presentations of ethics.) So that to have
announced it positively, at that time, would have served his
purpose but little: men would have said, "We have heard all that
before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from
the Mysteries or Pythagoras?" What he wanted to do was to take
it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had
bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that
familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness.
So once more, and as ususal, he assumed ignorance, and approached
the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus: I do not
say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma.
Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or
fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or
any authority may tell you. But as reasoning human beings, does
it not appeal to you?
And the very spirit in which he approached it and approached his
death was precisely the one to engrave his last spoken ideas on
the souls of his hearers as nothing else could. No excitement;
no uplift or ecstasy of the martyr; quiet reasoning only; full,
serene, and, for him, common-place command of the faculties of
his mind. The shadow of death made no change in Socrates; how
then should they misunderstand or magnify the power of the shadow
of death?--"How shall we bury you?" asks Crito. Socrates turns
to the others present, and says: "I cannot persuade Crito that I
here am Socrates--I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse.
He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and
by, a corpse."--So the scene went on until the last moment, when
"Phaedo veiled his face, and Crito started to his feet, and
Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out
into a loud and angry cry which broke down everyone but Socrates."
Someone has said that there is nothing in tragedy or history so
moving as this death of Socrates, as Plato tells it. And yet its
tragic interest, its beauty, is less important, to my thinking,
than the insight it gives us into the methods and mental workings
of an Adept. Put ourselves into the mind of Socrates. He is
going to his death; which to him is about the same as, to us,
going to South Ranch or San Diego. You say I am taking the beauty
and nobility out of it; but no; I am only trying to see what
beauty and nobility look like from within. To him, then, his
death is in itself a matter of no personal moment. But the habit
of his lifetime has been to turn every moment into a blow struck
for the Soul, for the Light, for the Cause of Sublime Perfection.
And here now is the chance to strike the most memorable blow of
all. With infinite calmness he arranges every detail, and
proceeds to strike it. He continues to play the high part of
Socrates,--that is all. You might go to death like a poet, in
love with Death's solemn beauty, you might go to her like a
martyr, forgetting the awe of her in forevision of the splendor
that lies beyond. But this man broadly and publicly goes to her
like Socrates. He will allow her no fascination, no mystery; not
even, nor by any means, equality with the Soul of Man. . . . And
Apollodorus might weep then, and burst into an angry cry; and
Crito and Phaedo and the rest might all break down--_then;_ but
what were they to think afterwards? When they remembered how they
had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how
the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting
between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the
Athenian _agora?_ And when Death should come to them, what should
they say but this: 'There is nothing about you that can impress
me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I
saw you pay your respects to Socrates.'
Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its
real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any
glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical
ecstasy endued--with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable
success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose
actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap
to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime: these are
but the appearances they assume as we look upwards at them. What
they are in themselves is: (1) Compassionate;--it is the law
of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2)
Impersonal;--there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we
have our passions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires.
They are, in the Chinese phrase, "the equals of Heaven and Earth";
"Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they
Endure while they shall be to be."
So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens,
entered with some gusto on that great _coup de main_ of his
death: to make it a thing which first a small group of his
friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that
thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it
royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine
in man, it might be worth.
And look! what is the result? Scarcely is the 'thing of muscles
and sinews' cold: scarcely has high Socrates forgone his queer
satyr-like embodiment: when a new luminary has risen into the
firmament,--one to shine through thirty centuries certainly,
"Brighter than Jupiter--a blazing star
Brighter than Hesper shining out to sea"
--one that is still to be splendid in the heavens wherever in
Europe, wherever in America, wherever in the whole vast realm of
the future men are to arise and make question and peer up into
the beautiful skies of the Soul. A Phoenix in time has arisen
from the ashes of Socrates: from the glory and solemnity of his
death a Voice is mystically created that shall go on whispering
_The Soul_ wherever men think and strive towards spirituality.
--Ah indeed, you were no failure, Socrates--you who were
disappointed of your Critias, your Charmides, your Alcibiades,
your whole Athens; you were not anything in the very least like
a failure; for there was yet one among your disciples--
He says, that one, that he was absent through illness during that
last scene of his Teacher's life. I do not know; it has been
thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic
convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his
marvelous prose:--for it was he who wrote down the account of the
death of Socrates for us: that tragedy so transcendent in its
beauty and lofty calm. But this much is certain: that day he was
born again: became, from a gilded youth of Athens, an eternal
luminary in the heavens, and that which he has remained these
three-and-twenty hundred years: the Poet-Philosopher of the
Soul, the Beacon of the Spirit for the western world....
He had been a brilliant young aristocrat among the crowd
that loved to talk with Socrates: the very best thing that
Athens could produce in the way of birth, charm, talent, and
attainments;--it is a marvel to see one so worshiped of Fortune
in this world, turn so easily to become her best adored in the
heaven of the Soul. On his father's side he was descended from
Codrus, last king of Athens; on his mother's, from Solon: you
could get nothing higher in the way of family and descent. In
himself, he was an accomplished athlete; a brilliant writer of
light prose; a poet of high promise when the mood struck him--
and he had ideas of doing the great thing in tragedy presently;
trained unusually well in music, and in mathematics; deeply
read; with a taste for the philosophies; a man, in short, of
culture as deep and balanced as his social standing was high. But
it seemed as though the Law had brought all these excellencies
together mainly to give the fashionable Athenian world assurance
of a man; for here he was in his thirty-first year with nothing
much achieved beyond--his favorite pursuit--the writing of
_mimes_ for the delectation of his set: "close studies of little
social scenes and conversations, seen mostly in the humorous
aspect." * He had consorted much with Socrates; at the trial,
when it was suggested that a fine might be paid, and the hemlock
evitated, it was he who had first subscribed and gone about to
raise a sum. But now the death of his friend and Teacher struck
him like a great gale amidships; and he was transformed, another
man; and the great Star Plato rose, that shines still; the
great Voice Plato was lifted to speak for the Soul and to be
unequaled in that speaking, in the west, until H.P. Blavatsky came.
------
* Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature:_--whence all this as to
Plato's youth.
------
But note what a change had taken place with the ending of the
fifth century. Hitherto all the great Athenians had been great
Athenians. Aeschylus, witness of eternity, had cried his message
down to Athens and to his fellow-citizens; he had poured the
waters of eternity into the vial of his own age and place. I
speak not of Sophocles, who was well enough rewarded with the
prizes Athens had to give him. Euripides again was profoundly
concerned with his Athens; and though he was contemned by and
held aloof from her, it was the problems of Athens and the time
that ate into his soul. Socrates came to save Athens; he did not
seek political advancement, but would hold office when it came
his way; was enough concerned in politics to be considered a
moderate-one cause of his condemnation; but above all devoted
himself to raising the moral tone of the Athenian youth and
clearing their minds of falsity. Finally, he gave loyalty to his
city and its laws as one reason for rejecting Crito's plan for
his escape. What he hoped and lived for was, to save Athens; and
he was the more content to die, when he saw that this was no
longer possible.
But Plato had no part nor lot in Athens. He loathed her doctrine
of democracy, as knowing it could come to no good. He had
affiliations, like Aeschylus, in Sicily, whither he made
certain journeys; and might have stayed there among his fellow
Pythagoreans, but for the irascible temper of Dionysius. But much
more, and most of all, his affiliations were in the wide Cosmos
and all time: as if he foresaw that on him mainly would devolve
the task of upholding spiritual ideas in Europe through the
millenniums to come. He dwelt apart, and taught in the Groves of
Academe outside the walls. Let Athens' foolish politics go
forward as they might, or backward--he would meddle with nothing.
It has been brought against him that he did nothing to help his
city 'in her old age and dotage'; well, he had the business of
thousands of coming years and peoples to attend to, and had no
time to be accused, condemned, and executed by a parcel of
obstreperous cobblers and tinkers hot-headed over the petty
politics of their day. The Gods had done with Athens, and were to
think now of the great age of darkness that was to come. He was
mindful of a light that should arise in Egypt, after some
five hundred years; and must prepare wick and oil for the
Neo-Platonists. He was mindful that there should be a thing called
the Renaissance in Italy; and must attend to what claims Pico di
Mirandola and others should make on him for spiritual food. He
must consider Holland of the seventeenth century, and England:
the Platonists of Cambridge and Amsterdam;--must think of Van
Helmont; and of a Vaughan who 'saw eternity the other night';
of a Traherne, who should never enjoy the world aright without
some illumination from his star; of a young Milton, _penseroso,_
out watching the Bear in some high lonely tower with thrice-great
Hermes, who should unsphere his spirit,
"..... to unfold
What worlds and what vast regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshy nook";
--no, but he must think of all times coming; and how, whenever
there should be any restlessness against the tyranny of
materialism and dogma, a cry should go up for _Plato._--So let
Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent,'--let a many-worded not
unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the
God-world--attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer
greatly interested;--the great Star Plato should rise up into
mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite
apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of
his culture, but the light and substance from that which was
potent in her no longer.
I said Greece served the future badly enough. Consider what might
have been. The pivot of the Mediterranean world, in the sixth
century, was not Athens, but in Magna Graecia: at Croton, where
Pythagoras had built his school. But the mob wrecked Croton, and
smashed the Pythagorean Movement as an organization; and that, I
take it, and one other which we shall come to in time, were the
most disastrous happenings in European history. Yes; the causes
why Classical civilization went down; why the Dark Ages were
dark; why the God in Man his been dethroned, and suffered all
this crucifixion and ignominy the last two thousand years.
Aeschylus, truly, received some needed backing from the relics of
the Movement which he found still existent in Sicily; but what
might he not have written, and what of his writings might not
have come down to us, preserved there in the archives, had he had
the peace and elevation of a Croton, organized, to retire to?
Whither, too, Socrates might have gone, and not to death, when
Athens became impossible; where Plato might have dwelt and
taught; revealing, to disciples already well-trained, much more
than ever he did reveal; and engraving, oh so deeply! on the
stuff of time, the truths that make men free. And there he should
have had successors and successors and successors; a line to
last perhaps a thousand or two thousand years; who never should
have let European humanity forget such simple facts as Karma and
Reincarnation. But only at certain times are such great
possibilities presented to mankind; and a seed-time once passed,
there can be no sowing again until the next season comes. It is
no good arguing with the Law of Cycles. Plato may not have been
less than Pythagoras; yet, under the Law, he might not attempt--
it would have been folly for him to have attempted--that which
Pythagoras had attempted. So he had to take another line
altogether; to choose another method; not to try to prevent the
deluge, which was certain now to come; not even to build an ark,
in which something should be saved; but, so to say, to strew the
world with tokens which, when the great waters had subsided,
should still remain to remind men of those things it is of most
importance they should know.
This is the way he did it. He advanced no dogma, formulated no
system; but what he gave out, he gave rather as hypotheses. His
aim was to set in motion a method of thinking which should lead
always back to the Spirit and Divine Truth. He started no world-
religion; founded no church--not even such a quite unchurchly
church as that which came to exist on the teachings of Confucius.
He never had the masses practicing their superstitions, nor a
priesthood venting its lust of power, in his name. Instead, he
arranged things so, that wherever fine minds have aspired to the
light of the Spirit, Plato has been there to guide them on their
way. So you are to see Star-Plato shining, you are to hear that
voice from the Spheres at song, when Shelley, reaching his
topmost note, sang:
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity";--
and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that:
"Songs they can stop that earth found meet,
But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme;
Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet,
But the Stars keep their Spring sublime,
Actions and agonies control,
And life and death, but not the Soul."
In a poetic age--in the time of Aeschylus, for example--Plato
would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to
invent another class of poets, one above the present highest;
and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato. Because
Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry. But he came,
living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry: as who
should say: "God pity you! I give you the Way, the Truth, and the
Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely
poetic is your prose!'" So his bitterness against poetry is
very natural. Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest
truth; spiritual truth is poetry. But the world in general does
not know this. Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of
pleasurable lying. Plato went through the skies Mercury to the
Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was,
and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets. But Homer and
others had lied loudly about the Gods; and, thought Plato, the
Gods forbid that the truth he had to declare--a vital matter--
should be classed with their loud lying.
He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great
Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively,
landing his splendid shells at every ganglionic point in the
history of European thought since. Let a man soak his soul in
Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall
spring up there presently and bloom. He prepares the soil:
suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the
high teachings. The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage
has been twofold: on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your
soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all
his teachings--even Reincarnation--as hypotheses,--and men do not
as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis. On the
other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and
heretics to deal with him? He was not to be stamped out;
because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship,
no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of
thought. No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries;
because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen.
Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as
Theosophy. The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he
did: the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had
failed of its greatest success. What we owe to him--his genius
and inestimable gift to the world--is precisely that matchless
camouflage. It has been effective, in spite of efforts--
That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and
studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the
intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as
colts do their mothers. A youth, it is said, who revered Plato
always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as
a Platonist. But he never could have understood the inwardness
of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to
scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and
the illumination of the Soul. He adopted much of the teaching,
but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist,
either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of
the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize
it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.
I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from
the Encyclopedia suffice: "Philosophic differences" it says "are
best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism
is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a
philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us
think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven,
Aristotle of the natural and the whole world."
Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato's inspiration,
and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the
Brain-mind. The most famous of Plato's disciples, he did what he
could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato's message.
But Plato's method had guarded that, so that for mystics
it should always be there, Aristotle or no. But for mere
philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted
it. It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists--who
turned it back Plato-ward--to the Moslems: through Avicenna, who
Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from
him to Europe; where Bacon presently gave it another twist to
out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the
Stagirite--and passed it on as the scientific method of today.
According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist
or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.
And meanwhile, though the huge Greek illumination could die but
slowly, Greece was growing uninteresting. For Pheidias of the
earlier century, we have in Plato's time Praxiteles, whose carved
gods are lounging and pretty nincom--- well, mortals; "they
sink," says the Encyclopedia, "to the human level, or indeed,
sometimes almost below it. They have grace and charm in a supreme
degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."--We
have an Aphrodite at the bath, a 'sweet young thing' enough, no
doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree,
and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard." A certain natural
magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and
contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements
with it.--And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus
eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite
expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what
remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one
little wink of sleep over.