Greeks rested on the same mental basis as mystical knowledge. We only
understand the great philosophers when we approach them with feelings
gained through study of the Mysteries. With what veneration does Plato
speak of the "secret doctrines" in the _Phædo_. "And it almost seems,"
says he, "as though those who have appointed the initiations for us
are not at all ordinary people, but that for a long time they have
been enjoining upon us that any one who reaches Hades without being
initiated and sanctified falls into the mire; but that he who is
purified and consecrated when he arrives, dwells with the gods. For
those who have to do with initiations say that there are many
thyrsus-bearers, but few really inspired. These latter are, in my
opinion, none other than those who have devoted themselves in the
right way to wisdom. I myself have not missed the opportunity of
becoming one of these, as far as I was able, but have striven after it
in every way."
It is only a man who is putting his own search for wisdom entirely at
the disposal of the condition of soul created by initiation who could
thus speak of the Mysteries. And there is no doubt that a flood of
light is poured on the words of the great Greek philosophers, when we
illustrate them from the Mysteries.
The relation of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 B.C.) to the Mysteries
is plainly given us in a saying about him, to the effect that his
thoughts "were an impassable road," and that any one, entering upon
them without being initiated, found only "dimness and darkness," but
that, on the other hand, they were "brighter than the sun" for any one
introduced to them by a Mystic. And when it is said of his book, that
he deposited it in the temple of Artemis, this only means that
initiates alone could understand him. (Edmund Pfleiderer has already
collected the historical evidence for the relation of Heraclitus to
the Mysteries. _Cf._ his book _Die Philosophie des Heraklit von
Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee_. Berlin, 1886.) Heraclitus was
called "The Obscure," because it was only through the Mysteries that
light could be thrown on his intuitive views.
Heraclitus comes before us as a man who took life with the greatest
earnestness. We see plainly from his features, if we know how to
reconstruct them, that he bore within him intimate knowledge which he
knew that words could only indicate, not express. Out of such a temper
of mind arose his celebrated utterance, "All things fleet away," which
Plutarch explains thus: "We do not dip twice into the same wave, nor
can we touch twice the same mortal being. For through abruptness and
speed it disperses and brings together, not in succession but
simultaneously."
A man who thus thinks has penetrated the nature of transitory things,
for he has felt compelled to characterise the essence of
transitoriness itself in the clearest terms. Such a description as
this could not be given, unless the transitory were being measured by
the eternal, and in particular it could not be extended to man without
having seen his inner nature. Heraclitus has extended his
characterisation to man. "Life and death, waking and sleeping, youth
and age are the same; this in changing is that, and that again this."
In this sentence there is expressed full knowledge of the illusionary
nature of the lower personality. He says still more forcibly, "Life
and death are found in our living even as in our dying." What does
this mean but that it is only a transient point of view when we value
life more than death? Dying is to perish, in order to make way for new
life, but the eternal is living in the new life, as in the old. The
same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When we grasp
this eternal, we look upon life and death with the same feeling. Life
only has a special value when we have not been able to awaken the
eternal within us. The saying, "All things fleet away," might be
repeated a thousand times, but unless said in this feeling, it is an
empty sound. The knowledge of eternal growth is valueless if it does
not detach us from temporal growth. It is the turning away from that
love of life which impels towards the transitory, which Heraclitus
indicates in his utterance, "How can we say about our daily life, 'We
are,' when from the standpoint of the eternal we know that 'We are and
are not?'" (Cf. _Fragments of Heraclitus_, No. 81.) "Hades and
Dionysos are one and the same," says one of the _Fragments_. Dionysos,
the god of joy in life, of germination and growth, to whom the
Dionysiac festivals are dedicated is, for Heraclitus, the same as
Hades, the god of destruction and annihilation. Only one who sees
death in life and life in death, and in both the eternal, high above
life and death, can view the merits and demerits of existence in the
right light. Then even imperfections become justified, for in them too
lives the eternal. What they are from the standpoint of the limited
lower life, they are only in appearance,--"The gratification of men's
wishes is not necessarily a happiness for them. Illness makes health
sweet and good, hunger makes food appreciated, and toil rest." "The
sea contains the purest and impurest water, drinkable and wholesome
for fishes, it is undrinkable and injurious to human beings." Here
Heraclitus is not primarily drawing attention to the transitoriness of
earthly things, but to the splendour and majesty of the eternal.
Heraclitus speaks vehemently against Homer and Hesiod, and the learned
men of his day. He wished to show up their way of thinking, which
clings to the transitory only. He did not desire gods endowed with
qualities taken from a perishable world, and he could not regard as a
supreme science, that science which investigates the growth and decay
of things. For him, the eternal speaks out of the perishable, and for
this eternal he has a profound symbol. "The harmony of the world
returns upon itself, like that of the lyre and the bow." What depths
are hidden in this image! By the pressing asunder of forces, and again
by the harmonising of these divergent forces, unity is attained. How
one sound contradicts another, and yet, together, they produce
harmony. If we apply this to the Spiritual world, we have the thought
of Heraclitus, "Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the
death of mortals, dying the life of the Immortals."
It is man's original fault to direct his cognition to the transitory.
Thereby he turns away from the eternal, and life becomes a danger to
him. What happens to him, comes to him through life, but its events
lose their sting if he ceases to set unconditioned value on life. In
that case his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he were
from the so-called seriousness of life able to return to his
childhood. The adult takes many things seriously with which a child
merely plays, but one who really knows, becomes like a child.
"Serious" values lose their value, looked at from the standpoint of
eternity. Life then seems like a play. On this account does Heraclitus
say, "Eternity is a child at play, it is the reign of a child." Where
does the original fault lie? In taking with the utmost seriousness
what does not deserve to be so taken. God has poured Himself into the
universe of things. If we take these things and leave God unheeded,
we take them in earnest as "the tombs of God." We should play with
them like a child, and should earnestly strive to awaken forth from
them God, who sleeps spellbound within them.
Contemplation of the eternal acts like a consuming fire on ordinary
illusions about the nature of things. The spirit breaks up thoughts
which come through the senses, it fuses them. This is the higher
meaning of the Heraclitean thought, that fire is the primary element
of all things. This thought is certainly to be taken at first as an
ordinary physical explanation of the phenomena of the universe. But no
one understands Heraclitus who does not think of him in the same way
as Philo, living in the early days of Christianity, thought of the
laws of the Bible. "There are people," he says, "who take the written
laws _merely_ as symbols of spiritual teaching, who diligently search
for the latter, but despise the laws themselves. I can only blame
such, for they should pay heed to both, to knowledge of the hidden
meaning and to observing the obvious one." If the question is
discussed whether Heraclitus meant by "fire" physical fire, or
whether fire for him was only a symbol of eternal spirit which
dissolves and reconstitutes all things, this is putting a wrong
construction upon his thought. He meant both and neither of these
things. For spirit was also alive, for him, in ordinary fire, and the
force which is physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in
the human soul, which melts in its crucible mere sense-knowledge, so
that out of this the contemplation of the eternal may arise.
It is very easy to misunderstand Heraclitus. He makes Strife the
"Father of things," but only of "things," not of the eternal. If there
were no contradictions in the world, if the most multifarious
interests were not opposing each other, the world of becoming, of
transitory things, would not exist. But what is revealed in this
antagonism, what is poured forth into it, is not strife but harmony.
Just because there is strife in all things, the spirit of the wise
should pass over them like a breath of fire, and change them into
harmony.
At this point there shines forth one of the great thoughts of
Heraclitean wisdom. What is man as a personal being? From the above
point of view Heraclitus is able to answer. Man is composed of the
conflicting elements into which divinity has poured itself. In this
state he finds himself, and beyond this becomes aware of the spirit
within him,--the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. But the spirit
itself is born, for man, out of the conflict of elements, and it is
the first which has to calm them. In man, Nature surpasses her natural
limits. It is indeed the same universal force which created antagonism
and the mixture of elements which is afterwards, by its wisdom, to do
away with the conflict. Here we arrive at the eternal dualism which
lives in man, the perpetual antagonism between the temporal and the
eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite definite,
and out of this, he is to create something higher. He is both
dependent and independent. He can only participate in the eternal
Spirit whom he contemplates, in the measure of the compound of
elements which that eternal Spirit has effected within him. And it is
just on this account that he is called upon to fashion the eternal
out of the temporal. The spirit works within him, but works in a
special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of
the human soul that a temporal thing should be able to work like an
eternal one, should grow and increase in power like an eternal thing.
This is why the soul is at once like a god and a worm. Man, owing to
this, stands in a mid-position between God and animals. The growing
and increasing force within him is his daimonic element,--that within
him which pushes out beyond himself.
"Man's daimon is his destiny." Thus strikingly does Heraclitus make
reference to this fact. He extends man's vital essence far beyond the
personal. The personality is the vehicle of the daimon, which is not
confined within the limit of the personality, and for which the birth
and death of the personality are of no importance. What is the
relation of the daimonic element to the personality which comes and
goes? The personality is only a form for the manifestation of the
daimon.
One who has arrived at this knowledge looks beyond himself, backwards
and forwards. The daimonic experiences through which he has passed are
enough to prove to him his own immortality. And he can no longer limit
his daimon to the one function of occupying his personality, for the
latter can only be one of the forms in which the daimon is manifested.
The daimon cannot be shut up within one personality, he has power to
animate many. He is able to transform himself from one personality
into another. The great thought of reincarnation springs as a matter
of course from the Heraclitean premises, and not only the thought but
the experience of the fact. The thought only paves the way for the
experience. One who becomes conscious of the daimonic element within
him does not recognise it as innocent and in its first stage. He finds
that it has qualities. Whence do they come? Why have I certain natural
aptitudes? Because others have already worked upon my daimon. And what
becomes of the work which I accomplish in the daimon if I am not to
assume that its task ends with my personality? I am working for a
future personality. Between me and the Spirit of the Universe,
something interposes which reaches beyond me, but is not yet the same
as divinity. This something is my daimon. My to-day is only the
product of yesterday, my to-morrow will be the product of to-day; in
the same way my life is the result of a former and will be the
foundation of a future one. Just as mortal man looks back to
innumerable yesterdays and forward to many to-morrows, so does the
soul of the sage look upon many lives in his past and many in the
future. The thoughts and aptitudes I acquired yesterday I am using
to-day. Is it not the same with life? Do not people enter upon the
horizon of existence with the most diverse capacities? Whence this
difference? Does it proceed from nothing?
Our natural sciences take much credit to themselves for having
banished miracle from our views of organic life. David Frederick
Strauss, in his _Alter und Neuer Glaube_, considers it a great
achievement of our day that we no longer think that a perfect organic
being is a miracle issuing from nothing. We understand its perfection
when we are able to explain it as a development from imperfection. The
structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors
to have been primitive fishes which have been gradually transformed.
Let us at least submit to accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit
what seems to us to be right in the domain of nature. Is the perfect
spirit to have the same antecedents as the imperfect one? Does a
Goethe have the same antecedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents of
an ape are as unlike those of a fish as are the antecedents of
Goethe's mind unlike those of a savage. The spiritual ancestry of
Goethe's soul is a different one from that of the savage soul. The
soul has grown as well as the body. The daimon in Goethe has more
progenitors than the one in a savage. Let us take the doctrine of
reincarnation in this sense, and we shall no longer find it
unscientific. We shall be able to explain in the right way what we
find in our souls, and we shall not take what we find as if created by
a miracle. If I can write, it is owing to the fact that I learned to
write. No one who has a pen in his hand for the first time can sit
down and write offhand. But one who has come into the world with "the
stamp of genius," must he owe it to a miracle? No, even the "stamp of
genius" must be acquired. It must have been learned. And when it
appears in a person, we call it a daimon. This daimon too must have
been to school; it acquired in a former life what it puts into force
in a later one.
In this form, and this form only, did the thought of eternity pass
before the mind of Heraclitus and other Greek sages. There was no
question with them of a continuance of the immediate personality after
death. Compare some verses of Empedocles (B.C. 490-430). He says of
those who accept the data of experience as miracles:
Foolish and ignorant they, and do not reach
far with their thinking,
Who suppose that what has not existed can
come into being,
Or that something may die away wholly and
vanish completely;
Impossible is it that any beginning can come
from Not-Being,
Quite impossible also that being can fade into
nothing;
For wherever a being is driven, there will it
continue to be.
Never will any believe, who has been in these
matters instructed,
That spirits of men only live while what is
called life here endures,
That only so long do they live, receiving their
joys and their sorrows,
But that ere they were born here and when they
are dead, they are nothing.
The Greek sage did not even raise the question whether there was an
eternal part in man, but only enquired in what this eternal element
consisted and how man can nourish and cherish it in himself. For from
the outset it was clear to him that man is an intermediate creation
between the earthly and the divine. It was not a question of a divine
being outside and beyond the world. The divine lives in man but lives
in him only in a human way. It is the force urging man to make himself
ever more and more divine. Only one who thinks thus can say with
Empedocles:
When leaving thy body behind thee, thou
soarest into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, not
subject to death.
What may be done for a human life from this point of view? It may be
introduced into the magic circle of the eternal. For in man there must
be forces which merely natural life does not develop. And the life
might pass away unused if the forces remained idle. To open them up,
thereby to make man like the divine,--this was the task of the
Mysteries. And this was also the mission which the Greek sages set
before themselves. In this way we can understand Plato's utterance,
that "he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below
will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation
and purification will dwell with the gods." We have to do here with a
conception of immortality, the significance of which lies bound up
within the universe. Everything which man undertakes in order to
awaken the eternal within him, he does in order to raise the value of
the world's existence. The fresh knowledge he gains does not make him
an idle spectator of the universe, forming images for himself of what
would be there just as much if he did not exist. The force of his
knowledge is a higher one, it is one of the creative forces of nature.
What flashes up within him spiritually is something divine which was
previously under a spell, and which, failing the knowledge he has
gained, must have lain fallow and waited for some other exorcist. Thus
a human personality does not live in and for itself, but for the
world. Life extends far beyond individual existence when looked at in
this way. From within such a point of view we can understand
utterances like that of Pindar giving a vista of the eternal: "Happy
is he who has seen the Mysteries and then descends under the hollow
earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows the beginning promised
by Zeus."
We understand the proud traits and solitary nature of sages such as
Heraclitus. They were able to say proudly of themselves that much had
been revealed to them, for they did not attribute their knowledge to
their transitory personality, but to the eternal daimon within them.
Their pride had as a necessary adjunct the stamp of humility and
modesty, expressed in the words, "All knowledge of perishable things
is in perpetual flux like the things themselves." Heraclitus calls the
eternal universe a play, he could also call it the most serious of
realities. But the word "earnest" has lost its force through being
applied to earthly experiences. On the other hand, the realisation of
"the play of the eternal" leaves man that security in life of which he
is deprived by that earnest which has come out of transitory things.
A different conception of the universe from that of Heraclitus grew
up, on the basis of the Mysteries, in the community founded by
Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. in Southern Italy. The Pythagoreans
saw the basis of things in the numbers and geometrical figures of
which they investigated the laws by means of mathematics. Aristotle
says of them: "They first studied mathematics, and, quite engrossed in
them, they considered the elements of mathematics to be the elements
of all things. Now as numbers are naturally the first thing in
mathematics, and they thought they saw many resemblances in numbers to
things and to development, and certainly more in numbers than in fire,
earth, and water, in this way one quality of numbers came to mean for
them justice, another, the soul and spirit, another, time, and so on
with all the rest. Moreover they found in numbers the qualities and
connections of harmony; and thus everything else, in accordance with
its whole nature, seemed to be an image of numbers, and numbers seemed
to be the first thing in nature."
The mathematical and scientific study of natural phenomena must always
lead to a certain Pythagorean habit of thought. When a string of a
certain length is struck, a particular sound is produced. If the
string is shortened in certain numeric proportions, other sounds will
be produced. The pitch of the sounds may be expressed in figures.
Physics also expresses colour-relations in figures. When two bodies
combine into one substance, it always happens that a certain definite
quantity of the one body, expressible in numbers, combines with a
certain definite quantity of the other. The Pythagoreans' sense of
observation was directed to such arrangements of measures and numbers
in nature. Geometrical figures also play a similar rôle. Astronomy,
for instance, is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. One fact
became important to the thought-life of the Pythagoreans. This was
that man, quite alone and purely through his mental activity,
discovers the laws of numbers and figures, and yet, that when he looks
abroad into nature, he finds that things are obeying the same laws
which he has ascertained for himself in his own mind. Man forms the
idea of an ellipse, and ascertains the laws of ellipses. And the
heavenly bodies move according to the laws which he has established.
(It is not, of course, a question here of the astronomical views of
the Pythagoreans. What may be said about these may equally be said of
Copernican views in the connection now being dealt with.) Hence it
follows as a direct consequence that the achievements of the human
soul are not an activity apart from the rest of the world, but that in
those achievements the cosmic laws are expressed. The Pythagoreans
said: "The senses show man physical phenomena, but they do not show
the harmonious order which these things follow." The human mind must
first find that harmonious order within itself, if it wishes to behold
it in the outer world. The deeper meaning of the world, that which
bears sway within it as an eternal, law-obeying necessity, this makes
its appearance in the human soul and becomes a present reality there.
THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE IS REVEALED in the soul. This meaning is
not to be found in what we see, hear, and touch, but in what the soul
brings up to the light from its own unseen depths. The eternal laws
are thus hidden in the depths of the soul. If we descend there, we
shall find the Eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the world, is in
the human soul. The soul-element is not limited to the bodily
substance which is enclosed within the skin, for what is born in the
soul is nothing less than the laws by which worlds revolve in
celestial space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality
only serves as the organ through which the order which pervades cosmic
space may express itself. There is something of the spirit of
Pythagoras in what one of the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: "It is
said that human nature is something small and limited, and that God is
infinite, and it is asked how the finite can embrace the infinite. But
who dares to say that the infinity of the Godhead is limited by the
boundary of the flesh, as though by a vessel? For not even during our
lifetime is the spiritual nature confined within the boundaries of the
flesh. The mass of the body, it is true, is limited by neighbouring
parts, but the soul reaches out freely into the whole of creation by
the movements of thought."
The soul is not the personality, the soul belongs to infinity. From
such a point of view the Pythagoreans must have considered that only
fools could imagine the soul-force to be exhausted with the
personality.
For them, too, as for Heraclitus, the essential point was the
awakening of the eternal in the personal. Knowledge for them meant
intercourse with the eternal. The more man brought the eternal element
within him into existence, the greater must he necessarily seem to
the Pythagoreans. Life in their community consisted in holding
intercourse with the eternal. The object of the Pythagorean education
was to lead the members of the community to that intercourse. The
education was therefore a philosophical initiation, and the
Pythagoreans might well say that by their manner of life they were
aiming at a goal similar to that of the cults of the Mysteries.
IV
PLATO AS A MYSTIC