Platonism and Hellenistic Spirituality

[Zhongyongdaoist]

One of the conclusions that I that I came to after decades of study was that in the general population, Platonism was one of the single most under appreciated influences in the formation of Hermeticism, Christianity, Esoteric Judaism and other movements that developed during the Hellenistic period. Granted that this position is more or less scholarly orthodoxy it is generally dismissed by people who don't know enough about Plato to see the influence of his Gorgias in the "Sermon on the Mount" or who who don't realize enough about the technical language of Greek philosophy to see that Hermes Trismegistos was kind enough to speak to the barbarous Greeks in their own technical language and address issues in terms that they had formulated.

 

I am not a person who believes in the "Greek Miracle", as if there was something special about the Greeks, but some of the ideas discovered by a few of their thinkers are so powerful that they changed the way people thought about almost everything.

 

I don't intend to enter into long arguments about the sources of Plato's thinking, but I will post some ideas about them that most people will find surprising, such as the proposal of E. R. Dodds that Plato was attempting to defend a position that was derived from Shamanism. This many years before the supposedly ground breaking work of Peter Kingsley.

 

I will put forward Ideas, directions and sources. In particular I will not engage in discussions with people who have not read a jot of Plato and who cite secondary sources that line up with their own personal prejudices, but are unwilling to open their mind to alternatives.

 

My first post after this will be about my personal journey to my understanding of Plato, which involved a great deal of rethinking and open minded examination.

 

Edit: Italisized Gorgias and put quotes around Sermon on the Mount.

Edited September 7, 2013 by Zhongyongdaoist

[Apech]

You have generated a healthy level of anticipation already.

[ralis]

Please continue. I will brush up on Plato this week.

[Seth Ananda]

I am also looking forward to this eagerly _/\_

[ralis]

Still waiting.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Still waiting.

 

Sorry about the delay. Thanks to everyone who has expressed interest in this thread.

 

I have been posting some information which I consider important on another thread and as I noted in my post in the Christian Mysticism thread:

 

One of the reasons why I haven't posted more in this thread, after giving it an enthusiastic welcome, was I noticed a tendency to treat Platonism as a late and extraneous interpretation of the Gospels. As far as I am concerned this is basically Protestant mythology, created as part of Reformation anti-Catholic rhetoric. I started to review my research in the 70s and 80s that lead me to this conclusion and to collect material to correct this, but did not have time to organize and post them. As my thinking evolved and this thread grew, I decided to put that material in its own thread, one which also addresses wider issues.

 

That is why I started "Platonism and Hellenistic Spirituality', which I hope to get back to shortly. I am also posting on Confucian qigong in the General Discussion Forum and so my time has to be split between them. (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

I consider my posts on Confucian self-cultivation to be extremely important as I noted here:

 

I have more that I intend to post in this thread to take advantage of the opportunity to present aspects of Confucian teaching which are part of the metaphysics and cosmology of Confucian qigong. I have started another thread on a subject dear to my heart, in the Hermetic and Occult Discussion Forum, called 'Platonism and Hellenistic Spirituality'. I will be dividing my posting efforts between this thread and that one, so if there seems to be a lag between my posts here, that is the reason. Anyone who finds the idea of my other thread interesting is invited to follow both of them.

 

Right now I am working on a post of two Mencius quotes that I think people will find interesting and I will apply them to the Zhongyong. (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

I have finished up with the aforementioned post on Mencius and having given people something to think about in that thread will be working here for a while in order to get things going.

 

I extend an invitation to anyone here who might find the idea interesting to visit my posts on Confucian self-cultivation.

 

On a philosophical level I call my basic position Confucian Neo-Platonism, for want of a better term, so as far as I am concerned these threads are linked on a very profound level. I will be devoting my posting time here for the next several days.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

My first post after this will be about my personal journey to my understanding of Plato, which involved a great deal of rethinking and open minded examination.

 

rethinking and open minded examination: There are several reasons for this, not the least of which was that my first encounter with Plato was so negative that I could hardly imagine how anyone could take him seriously, but more of that in moment.

 

my personal journey to my understanding of Plato:

 

I think about myself forty-five years ago and I know that if someone had come to me and said, "I am a great seer and I will tell you your future, mmmm... in your late twenties you will make a serious study of Plato, around thirty, you will adopt Platonism as your fundamental worldview ...."

 

I would have looked at my copy of Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice in one hand and the Tao Te Ching in the other and I would have burst out laughing so hard that I would have been bent over with laughter.

 

"...hold it, don't laugh too hard, there is more...further around the age of fifty you will read a book that will have a profound influence on you. You will suddenly see the value of Confucianism and more importantly create a profound synthesis of Platonic and Confucian teachings..."

 

That would of been it, I would have rolling on the floor. If I could have organized my thoughts long enough I might have been reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes (senior, the poet, not Junior, the jurist) charming poem 'The Height of the Ridiculous' (Curious? Read it here: http://elfinspell.com/WitandHumor1Holmes.html), but I don't think I could have composed myself enough for several hours at least.

 

Obviously I was not your average seventeen year old science nerd of the late sixties, though my understanding of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and my emerging model of what science was did contribute to my acceptance of the Tao Te Ching.

 

So, how did Plato fail to make the cut? Part of it was an encounter with Book One of The Republic. The rest was a set of culturally accepted memes about reason and irrationality and how mysticism and magic were irrational. Untangling these memes was to be an important part of the journey, but one that is too complex for one posting, saying why I thought the First Book of The Republic was ridiculous is easy. Here were these two sock puppets one named "Thrasimokus", that's how I pronounced it at the time, and another named "Sockratease" and Thrasimokus was saying that Justice was the advantage of the strong, which everyone knows it isn't and Sockratease was saying no it isn't and pointing out how silly Thrasimokus was for saying so. In the end Socktratease says well maybe Justice is the advantage of the strong anyway. Hmmmm . . . seem terminally lame to you? It sure did to me.

 

Years later I was to realize that Thrasymachus, probably probably pronounced more like Thra-sim-ah-khus, and Socrates (sorry, not So-crates, but not Sock-anything either, on the authority of one of Plato's dialogs, it would be something like So-cray-teez, but the tease is in there somewhere.) were not talking about Justice at all, but 'Dike' (to avoid embarrassment it's pronounced dee-kay.) and the reason why it seemed so silly to me was because Plato had won the argument that was raging in Athens at the time, so that the word Justice now means pretty much what Plato thought it should. What Dike really was had become very controversial at the time and traditionally meant something to the effect of "the way of things". Everyone knew what "the way of things" was, if you were bad the Goddess Dike would be offended and bad things would happen to you. The new view was that "the way of things" is that the strong rule to their advantage to exploit the weak. The goddess Dike, either didn't exist, didn't care enough to do anything, or didn't have the power to do anything, even if she did care. Today we might say that Thrasymachus idea is the sad reality, but it is not justice. That sure is what I thought and I thought it because, like I said Plato's idea of Justice has become the accepted view, so much so, that looked at in that light, Thrasymachus just seems like a clown for saying what he does. Socrates' lame sounding ending is why his opponents called him, "Socrates of Foxtown", because what he really meant by saying that Justice is the advantage of the strong, is that it is to the real benefit of the strong to rule justly, to create a society in which the real needs of all citizens are met and there is no exploitation. Such a society would be to the real advantage of the strong, not to the false appearance of advantage which greed and foolishness present to the "strong", but I didn't know any of that at the time, so Plato was out.

 

The realization above was a long way off, though I started part of the journey that summer of 1968 when I began to read Mouni Sadhu's Tarot.

 

I have realized that this personal part may take too long, so I will intersperse it with what this thread is really all about, Platonism and Hellenistic spirituality. So my next post will be how to find Plato's Gorgias in the 'Sermon on the Mount'.

 

Until then, I do hope that I have made it perfectly clear how stupid I thought Plato was, until I was forced by circumstance to study and understand him.

[xor]

I liked reading some Plato when I was a teen and later felt like I reached a dead end with him. I did like what you wrote on Mencius enough that I'll explore his writings soon so I'm wondering what you can do with Plato...

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Väinä

 

Thank you for your interest.

 

Had I read something other than the first book of the Republic my response to Plato might have been different, but as I have said the position of Thrsymachus appeared so absurd, and the whole business so ludicrous, that it did not seem worth pursuing further. If I had read something like the Gorgias my response might have been different, but in general I prefer expository prose. Now I understand that Plato had in mind a type of initiatory drama, even following the arguments and thinking about the speakers tends to awaken one to new levels of insight. The Gorgias, for example, when I started actually reading the dialogs quickly became a favorite and helped me understand Plato's dramatic quality and his comedic one too, in a way that other dialogs did not. It was to help me to understand the functions of the dialogs in Plato's overall plan.

 

As for what one can do with Plato, well, one can understand Plotinus. There is a regrettable tendency among occultist and other spiritually minded people today to view Plotinus as the Great Mystic and Plato as a mere philosopher, no better than an Athenian Kant. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is really impossible to follow Plotinus and his reasoning without a thorough grounding in Plato and a familiarity with Aristotle and the Stoics. Then you can see that Plotinus is writing an internal dialectic in which he puts forward arguments from the Stoa or Aristotle or both and then refutes them, to follow them with what he considers the true position, that of Plato. If you have read the dialogues you can go through and say as you read, 'Oh, that's the argument from the Gorgias and this one from Repulic Book 7'. Suddenly what seemed meandering and confusing is lucid and informative. Plato and Plotinus should be read together. It is definitely not like Zhuzi's 'Four Books', where you can almost ignore the Analects as too bound to a time and culture long past, no, Plato still speaks to the present and has a great deal to say on his own, when his more secret doctrines are expounded with the skill of Plotinus, the two of them speak a rhapsody of the mind.

 

More along this line will be forth coming. I hope that this is helpful.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I am going to quote the last three paragraphs of Plato's Gorgias. I would like to say more about it, because it became a personal favorite of mine, but I will keep things to a minimum. In the dialog the participants examine rhetoric and its uses, in particular as a source of power, because of its ability to sway people or its use in the law courts to save one from being punished for wrongs which one may have committed. The final interlocutor is Callicles, a prominent citizen of Athens who chides Socrates that he had better not disdain rhetoric because he might find himself in court someday and not be able to defend himself. Plato's Dialog's The Apology, The Critio and The Phaedo deal with Socrates trial, his reasons for refusing to escape and the discussion that he had with his friends and students the day of his execution up to and describing his execution. The drama and irony of some of the Gorgias within this context is very powerful, as Socrates over and over returns to the idea of practicing virtue, maintaining justice and keeping oneself unsullied, because it is a greater evil to commit an injustice than to be the victim of one.

At the end Socrates addresses Callicles as follows:

Now I, Callicles, am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in that day. Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. And, in return for your exhortation of me, I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict. And I retort your reproach of me, and say, that you will not be able to help yourself when the day of trial and judgment, of which I was speaking, comes upon you; you will go before the judge, the son of Aegina, and, when he has got you in his grip and is carrying you off, you will gape and your head will swim round, just as mine would in the courts of this world, and very likely some one will shamefully box you on the ears, and put upon you any sort of insult.

Perhaps this may appear to you to be only an old wife's tale, which you will contemn. And there might be reason in your contemning such tales, if by searching we could find out anything better or truer: but now you see that you and Polus and Gorgias, who are the three wisest of the Greeks of our day, are not able to show that we ought to live any life which does not profit in another world as well as in this. And of all that has been said, nothing remains unshaken but the saying, that to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things, as well in public as in private life; and that when any one has been wrong in anything, he is to be chastised, and that the next best thing to a man being just is that he should become just, and be chastised and punished; also that he should avoid all flattery of himself as well as of others, of the few or of the many: and rhetoric and any other art should be used by him, and all his actions should be done always, with a view to justice.

Follow me then, and I will lead you where you will be happy in life and after death, as the argument shows. And never mind if some one despises you as a fool, and insults you, if he has a mind; let him strike you, by Zeus, and do you be of good cheer, and do not mind the insulting blow, for you will never come to any harm in the practice of virtue, if you are a really good and true man. When we have practiced virtue together, we will apply ourselves to politics, if that seems desirable, or we will advise about whatever else may seem good to us, for we shall be better able to judge then. In our present condition we ought not to give ourselves airs, for even on the most important subjects we are always changing our minds; so utterly stupid are we! Let us, then, take the argument as our guide, which has revealed to us that the best way of life is to practice justice and every virtue in life and death. This way let us go; and in this exhort all men to follow, not in the way to which you trust and in which you exhort me to follow you; for that way, Callicles, is nothing worth.
(http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/greek/plato/gorgias.html)

Not your typical philosophy 101 stuff is it?

Let's look at some lines from Matthew 5 and see what they indicate:

'Sermon on the Mount', Matthew, Chapter 5

20: For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed [the righteousness] of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.

38: Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
39: but I say unto you, resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
40: And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

47: And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more [than others?] do not even the Gentiles the same?
(http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(American_Standard)/Matthew#5:20)

Certainly Matthew's 'but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek' has a correspondence to Plato's '. . . if he has a mind; let him strike you, by Zeus, and do you be of good cheer, and do not mind the insulting blow, for you will never come to any harm in the practice of virtue', though Matthew perhaps being in 'cheeky' mood suggests offering the other cheek also.

Someone might say that this is not enough to link it to the Gorgias, but as I said the Gorgias deals with law courts and trials and the passage about turning the other cheek immediately talks about lawsuits. Also it is important to remember what precedes these texts:

Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth

A statement which is an Old Testament rule of Justice. It is here explicitly rejected in favor of a text that echoes an important theme of the Gorgias, lawsuits and legal issues.. 'And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat', Again Matthew must go further and says: 'let him have thy cloak also.'

Having lawsuits and tolerating physical abuse so closely linked can certainly be taken to reinforce the reference to the Gorgias, but why the extra of turning the other cheek and giving up ones cloak as well as ones coat?

Let's go back to two lines which bracket the text in question:

20: For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed [the righteousness] of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.

And

47: And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more [than others?] do not even the Gentiles the same?
(http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(American_Standard)/Matthew#5:20)

In other words one needs to exceed both the regular Jews and the Gentiles. The Sermon on the Mount is trying to 'one up' both their rivals. This theme of one upping the competition is a recurring one to which I will return.

So that is how you can find Plato's Gorgias in the 'Sermon on the Mount'. If it was the only mention of Platonic themes in the Gospels it could be dismissed, but it isn't and also the fact that two Platonic themes occur in two lines, that Matthew specifically mentions what 'even the Gentiles' do and that one must exceed it and the echoes of Plato are juxtaposed to a standard Old Testament pronouncement on justice all taken together cannot easily be dismissed.

An overview of the Hellenistic influence on Judaism and its influence in the Gospel period can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_Judaism

I will be examining this in more detail in future posts.