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The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Time and Narrative Collected Volume Three episodes
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The Dephic Podcasts Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth, Collected podcasts
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The Delphic Podcasts on Youtube
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The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 10 Conclusion
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Campbell continues to discuss the issue of the rise of Islam in some detail noting that there is an assumption of the infallibility of the group or community (Page 436), and also that the Mind of the Community and the Mind of God are identical. To be clear, this is not in the Socratic spirit of seeking justice in the soul writ large (in the polis,) but rather something more radical, something more in line with Marxist Culture which denies the existence of the philosophical , transcendental and metaphysical realms, whilst simultaneously claiming a form of transcendence for the words of Marx-the prophet. Islamic poets/philosophers such as Mohammed Iqbal also expressed a criticism of Europe in the following words:
“Believe me, Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the way of mans ethcal achievement. The Muslim, on the other hand, is in possession of these ultimate ideas on the basis of a revelation, which, speaking from the inmost depths of life, internalises its own apparent externality……and in view of the basic idea of Islam, that there can be no further revelation binding on man.” (Pages 438-9)
We now know that for a number of Islamic societies there are radical conseqences for the freedom of the individual citizen of such Republics, but there are also consequences for an entire segment of the Islamic community, namely women, who are not treated equally in the spirit of European democracies. The birthplace of democracy, Ancient Greece, provided us with institutions and laws that grew naturally and organically from the lives of the citizens. These institutions and laws became part of the matrix from which both equality and freedom grow. The meanings of the terms arché, areté, diké, logos, psuché, aletheia,and epistemé were also critically interpreted in terms of many Aristotelian principles including the principle of the Golden Mean.
Campbell notes the challenges to Islamic logic from both the ShiÃtes and the Whirling Dervish Order. The former became prominent in the drama-filled attempts to find a successor for Mohammed after his death. Other significant events in the growth of the power of Islam included the shift of the Capital from Mecca to Baghdad, the city of pleasure, in 750AD, when the Umayyadi were removed from power. This period of Persian influence lasted until 1258 AD when the Mongols put the city to the sword brutally, allowing a resurgence of European influence.
Campbell discusses St Patrick of Ireland and his controversial contemporary Pelagius, who confronted the Church with the uncomfortable doctrine of the free will which probably had its origin in Ancient Greece, in particular, the work of “The Philosopher” of the period, Aristotle. This doctrine seriously questioned the thesis of Original Sin, which saw the will only in terms of the disobedience of Satan. The Neoplatonism of Erigena (815-877AD) was also condemned by Rome (Page 467).
The Celts, Cambell argues worshipped the mother of God, Mother Earth, and in the North the Vikings were roaming much of Europe and beyond, but especially harassing the Christians of Europe, embodying the hero-type of the warrior, at home in the killing-fields of war.
Pope Innocent III(1198-1215), the “greatest of the Popes, according to the Historians and Campbell, reinforced the opposition to Pelagianism and other heresies attributed to the Gnostics and Donatism. Pope Innocent himself became an object of suspicion but was never formally charged with any offence until he was moved by his own people into a state of retirement. In the context of this discussion, Campbell, referring to the avarice of the clergy, claimed:
“It is hardly to be wondered, then, why, in the course of the 12th century there should have developed throughout Europe a deep trend not merely of anti-clericalism but of radical heresy.”(Page 495)
Manichaeism, a form of Gnosticism, was also subject to the scrutiny of the Church authorities, and its leaders were burned at the stake. Campbell claims that these heresies were signs that European individuals had begun to think for themselves and cast off the yoke of the Church, refusing to believe in an “absolute Levantine consensus”. Anti-Papal polemics began to circulate and were promoted by various individuals, including Joachim of Flores, who appealed to many of the Fransciscan order who had postulated “The Age of the Holy Ghost” which involved amongst other things, a reduction in the role of the Church in everyday affairs. The Papacy entered a “time of troubles” when in 1377 there were suddenly two Popes because of a dispute between Italy and France, each excommunicating the other (Page 503), until the council of Pisa elected a third Pope. In the wake of these events John Huss (1373-1415) was burned at the stake for suggesting “Reforms of the Church”, thus preparing the way for Luther and the “Reformation”,one century later (Page 504)
Cambell has the following to say on the issue of the rise of the influence of the Europeans:
“In the broadest view of the history of world mythology, the chief creative development in the period of the waning Middle Ages and approaching Reformation was the use of the principle of individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority. This marked the beginning of the end of the reign of the priestly mind, first over European thought, and then as today, we see, in all the world.” (Page 504)
One could also characterise this period of European History in terms of a reawakening of the critical spirit and love of freedom that came down to us from the Ancient Greeks. This is a possible reading emanating from the History of world Philosophy. There would then be a possible continuous cultural thread leading to both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. An Ancient non-European spiritual system based on revelation and miraculous happenings was never going to undermine the fundamental theoretical and practical rationalism of the Ancient Greeks. Rationality, moreover, could be widely communicated in a University system searching for the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful, provided that the principle of specialistaion did not play the leading role in the organisation of university faculties. The University, then, was the institution best equipped to provide a life of eudaimonia, a life in which ruin and destruction could be overcome if ones knowledge was broad and deep enough and if one could also achieve the awesome task of “knowing” oneself.
Campbell also notes that a number of troubadours were connected with the Allbigensian heresy. These “popular” people spoke of Amor and the mystical rapture associated with such passion. This popular movement of course competed with the calm, collected contemplative life of the University, which appeared to concern itself more with matters of the soul than matters of the justice of the polis. Campbell notes,, however, the following:
“There is, in short, between the pagan past and High Middle Ages of Europe an impressive continuity of spirit and development. over which, for a time, the overlay of an Oriental type of spiritual despotism was heavily spread only to be disintegrated, assimlated and absorbed. In courtly and poetic circles the ideal of individual experience prevailed over that of the infallible authority of men whose character was supposed to be disregarded.” (Pages 509-510).
Such a state of affirs eventually resulted in three interesting European ages in Europe, Firstly, the Renaissance, secondly the Enlightenment and thirdly, the Romantic period in which even the authority of the rationality of the Classical and Enlightenment ages was questioned. We are now entering the “Modern Age” which, according to Arendt, began already with the Philosophers Hobbes and Descartes, who both in sceptical mood, raised doubts about the work of Aristotle which Kant attempted to dismantle in his critical Philosophy, only to have his own work partially dismantled by the “Spiritual” Philosophy of Hegel, which concluded with the Age of Romanticism that, in turn, detached us from our anchors in a stormy sea. The 20th century, according to Arendt was a “terrible century, with two world wars, the use of weapons of mass destruction upon civilian populations, a cold war, and the threat of mass-extinction hanging over us like a dark atomic cloud. All that is now needed is for a number of tyrannical “new men” to acquire power in power centres for this story of humanity to end mythologically instead of rationally.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology” Season 9 Episode 9
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“The Truth will set you free” are familiar words from the New Testament Bible (John 8:32) and they ought to be interpreted in the light of both what Christianity is, in its essence, namely a spiritual faith based movement and also in terms of what it did for the people who felt like slaves under the laws of their societies. So Truth and Faith can perhaps find each other in the spiritual rather than the academic domains, in the name of freedom.
Campbell, in a section entitled “The Age of the Great Beliefs” begins by examining the relations of the Levant and Europe, claiming,that “The Pantheon is the earliest of all Mosques”, a paradoxical claim that is not fully defended. The Greek Temple with its columns(inside and out) had no interior, whereas, Campbell argues, the Mosque appeared to be all interior, thus, on certain views, modelling the mind. Campbell also points out that :
“for Classical man the Temple of the Body”, too, had no interior”.(Page 397)
As if the organs of our body, including the brain, were not inside our Temple. He continues:
“The cognate views of the individual in this world is not that of an individual at all but of an organ or part of the great organism:—as in Paul or Augustine’s view of the Living Body of Christ.”(Page 398)
Aristotles view of parts and wholes requires that parts must in a sense be partially defined in terms of the characteristics of the whole they constitute, if we are dealing with living organisms such as human psuché. Aristotles view of psuché, therefore is that of a constellation of specific organs including that of the brain:—a constellation that allows Aristotle to define the essence of man in terms of the essence-specifying definition of “rational animal capable of discourse”. Aristotles definition assumes that what man does, is much more important to his Existence and Being, than what happens to him, because he is capable of knowledge informed choices that assume a will striving for the Good.
The relation of Aristotle to Levantine Culture is well documented and begins with al-Kindi in the ninth century, continues with al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averoes. Avicenna in particular eleborated upon Aristotle in ways that were not completely in accord with the central tenets of hylomorphic theory. It was, however, clear from these Arabic translations and commentaries that Aristotle appeared more concerned with Logos in the sense of Logic, than Logos in the Christian sense of the Word of God. Averoes was perhaps the commentator that best represented the spirit of Aristotelian Philosophy , but what he claimed in relation to the soul or psuché did not appear to be Aristotelian.
Encyclopedia Britiannica on-line, reports that Jewish Aristotelianism developed through the medium of the Arabic language and spread to the regions of North Africa, Mesopotamia and Spain. All translations of this period, whether Latin or Arabic did not meet the high standards of current linguistic scholarship, which really began to emerge with the work of Robert Grosseteste. Adequate tanslations of the most influential works were, of course, of vital importance, once the first universities were established, partly because they could form an important platform for the communication of Aristotelian ideas to a broader audience.
The University system, however, as both Kant and Spengler have observed, followed a principle of specialisation which did not appreciate the universal intentions of Aristotelian Practical Science. Studying Aristotle at University, however, must have left no doubt in the students minds in relation to the problematic doctrines pertaining to “revelation-through-miraculous happenings”. Yet, there were countercurrents carrying us in the opposite direction, when the metaphysical writings of Aristote were characterised as “dangerous” in spite of the fact that in Aristotle,there was no anthropomorphised alternative figure, competing for the term “God”, merely an abstract theoretical entity he called “pure Form which had the power of thinking about thinking. Form is an Aristotelian term for “principle” and his work on Metaphysics is only about the search for “first principles”, a search which was deemed sufficiently “dangerous” to result in a Papal Bull being issued at Paris University in 1210: lectures were banned and Aristotles texts were burned.
Aquinas, however, was more sympathetic to Aristotle and stayed within the orbit of Aristotles ideas in most of his commentaries, but when it came to the soul of human psuché, Aquinas could do no other than follow the dogma of the church and insist upon the separation of the body and the soul: a position Aristotle would have objected to. Condemnations of heresy in 1270 and 1277 did not specifically cite Aristotle, but his views on Psuché or the soul were anathema to many Christian scholars. The organisation of the teaching faculties contributed to the tension over Aristotles ideas because certain faculties defined “Truth” in terms of “revelation” rather than in terms of the more rigorous Aristotelian logos based- account.
Aristotelian Hylomorphism, and his Philosophical Psychology, thanks largely to the Universities and their faculties of the Arts, survived until the Renaissance and thereafter emerged as authoritative in various contexts in the succeeding centuries: for example, via the works of William Harvey, Francis Bacon, and Charles Darwin.
During the 20th century a small group of university based scholars existed which could be regarded as Aristotelians and Kantians. During this period the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, especially the later retreat from logical atomism, to the more social view of language based on instinct, and embedded in the hurly burly forms of social life, was an important influence in neutralising both materialistic and dualistic accounts that were circulating in the name of empiricism and Cartesian rationalism.
Ancient Greek democratic ideas and governmental infrastructure, which included an independent legal apparatus that focussed on the unity of the citizens of the polis in a spirit of diké and areté, continued to play important roles in the progress of civilisations in Western and Northern Europe. Freedom or “Eleftheria” had, since the Kantian Enlightenment, become more and more important as time went by. Campbell quotes Spenglers view that there were also difficulties with the correct interpretation of the significance of the Magian Culture:
“The Magian Culture geographically and historically is the midmost of the group of higher Cultures:—the only one which, in point both of space and time, was in touch with practically all the others. The structure of its history as a whole in our world-picture depends, therefore, entirely on our recognising the true inner form which the outer molds distorted. Unhappily that is just what we do not yet know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and even more to modern tendency of overspecialisation which has unreasonably subdivided Western Research into a number of spearate branches:–each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking:–and so prevented the big problem from being seen. In this instance the consequences of specialisations have been greater perhaps than in any other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of classical philology and made the Classical Language frontier their eastern horizon, hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of development on both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no existence. The result is a perspective of “Ancient”, “Medieval”and “Modern” history, ordered and defined by the use of the Greek and Latin languages. The Persian world fell to the student of Iranian philology….and so disappeared absolutely from the field of vision of Chistian Theology.” (Pages 399-400)
Spengler does not mention in this context the “Ancient Greek Philosophers” and the “Philosophical and Cultural Revolution” that found voice in the historical figures of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle etc. The issues of knowledge (epistemé) justice (diké) and freedom (eleftheria) were certainy neutralised in the process of “cultural overlay” that occurred with the Romans and their engineering/military language which translated many Greek terms such as aletheia(truth), psuché (soul/life) and edudaimonia (good spirited flourishing life) problematically.
What had been established via the work of the above three Great “Ancients” was an “academic psychical distance” to the object of study that has been the hallmark of University study ever since. One of the consequences of the collapse of this “objectivity” was to compromise the very idea of objectivity itself via a bipolar view of the terms “subjective-objective”, reducing the former to a psychological state of mind and the latter to the sensory apprehension and manipulation of material objects. Not even the Philosophy of Kant would be able to mitigate the effects of “subjectivising” many important regions of knowledge.
Heidegger, in his writings, pointed to this phenomenon, claiming that Western Culture had been “weakened” by what he called a “forgetfullness of being”, which he mistakenly attributed partly to Aristotle. The Romanisation of Greek Culture and the Latinisation of the Greek Language strengthened processes of “overspecialisation”, resulting in the Empiricism of Hobbes, Hume etc, and the dualism of Descartes that paradoxically rested on the material substrate of the brain. Kant stemmed the tide somewhat, but the faculty specialisation of Universities, quickly neutralised via Hegel, his Enlightenment attempt to restore the Philosophical heritage of Ancient Greece.
The Aristotelian formula for a unified and prosperous polis which referred to a large middle class formed by, and following, the principle of the golden mean, also demands a Greek-style governmental infrastructure This infrastructure fell apart perhaps during the reign of Alexander the Great, but definitely afterwards as Zoroastrianism and Christianity vied for cultural supremacy. Campbell cites the work of Professor R C Zaehner (“The Dawn and Twiight of Zorastrianism”) In which it is claimed that other cults were not given sufficient freedom to express themselves owing to a sociological principle which:
“only grows in force and terror as the violated coerced factions become increasingly intractable through the operation of a second law, namely that gods become demons;which is to say, that psychological and sociological factors neither assimilated nor recognised by the consciously controlled system become autonomous and must ultimately break the system apart.” Page 405
This is the bipolar phenomenon referred to earlier which tore the polis asunder. Without the democratic and Philosophical infrastructure of the Greeks, no sociological principle or law could prevent the polis splitting into fragments. This might even have been true of Alexander the Great’s Empire.
Campbell, in his sub-chapter, “Byzantium”, illustrates well the cultural similarities and differences between Ancient Greece and the Levant during the period up to the 6th century AD, when he notes that the Roman Emperor Justinian (who closed all the Philosophical Schools and Academies) was experiencing the same kind of problems which threatened the existence of the Sassanian Empire of Chosroes I (531-579). Both rulers believed in the sociological principle of Absolute Rule, rather than the Aristotelian Principle of the Golden Mean.
Campbell alsonotes that the key mythological/religious questions of the two Cultures differed significantly with Zoroastrianisms concern focussing on the relation between darkness and light and the problem of evil, whilst the concern of Christianity focussed upon the relatively abstract problem of the nature of Jesus’ Incarnation. It is certainly no exaggeration to claim that this question of Incarnation split the Church. This recalls another academic question, namely, whether the Kingdom of God was coming in the future, or whether the Kingdom existed as the Gnostics claimed, right here and now and within us..
For Aristotle Noos was the home of Logos which the Christians identified with the Word of God. If, then, the Kingdom of God was within, as many Christian determinists doubted, given the doctrine of the freedom of the will, there followed the problem of the possibility of refusing to heed the word of God. Both Aristotle and Kant believed that the freedom of the Will was the real determiner of ones life,and if this was the case, then knowledge (epistemé) of the future Kingdom to come would be relevant in this context only if, as Aristotle claims, the will aims at the Good in all human activity: a thesis that of course runs contrary to the doctrine of Original Sin. Both Aristotle and Kant, claimed that the good will was the fundamental condition of all ethical action that is in accordance with the categorical imperative which amongst other things demands that we treat each other as end-in-themselves.
Moving forward in History it was this categorical imperative that became one of the foundation stones of Human Rights, which became the focus of the United Nations, the institution Kant suggested at the end of the 1700’s. We can see, then, a line of continuity running from Ancient Greece, to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to the formation of the United Nations. The concern for our individual spiritual development that we find in Mythology and Religion then, appears to be less relevant in the above secular context where the burning question seems rather to be, how to avoid repressing the desires and activities of those that wish to concern themselves with their spiritual lives. We seem to have inherited the Socratic approach to The Good in the soul, searching for it instead in the soul writ large, namely the polis.
Mary, the mother of Jesus was also drawn into the clerical dispute over the issue of incarnation: a dispute that Campbell notes spanned over 4 phases lasting hundreds of years. This timeline takes us to the rise of Islam which Campbell claims is a continuation of Zorastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity, mythologially speaking. Abraham, it is noted, was the common ancestor of both Judaism and Islam. Islam was a religion of both revelation and revolution. Mohammed was an illiterate prophet that claimed to have visions whilst meditating in a cave. In one revelation Mohammed is informed that it was the Lord who taught man to use the pen. Apparently Mohammed was pondering the mortality of man when a vision intruded, described by Campbell as follows:
“Its author was God, its subject man, Gods creature; and its instrument, the pen, the sanctified Book, which men were to read, study, recite and treasure in their souls.” Page 424)
This is a curious vision for a man who, tradition has it, could not read, but was nevertheless proclaimed by family and friends to be a chosen apostle. Very soon afterward Mohammed was calling upon priests in Mecca to eliminate all pagan images from places of worship such as the Kaaba. Both Allah and Yahweh were Gods of semitic desert communities. One crucial difference, as Campbell points out is that whilst Yahweh was a specifically ethnic divinity, Allah was proclaimed with universalistic intentions, turning to all Humanity with his messages. For, as Campbell claims,
“in Mohammeds day the Alexandrian vision of humanity had reached even the peoples of the desert.” (Page 433)
There was, as Campbell points out, however, a problem with the laws proposed by Mohammed. These so-called divinely inspired laws did not grow naturally out of a particular society at a particular period in time, but rather had its source in revelations and visions occurring to Mohammed in a trance-like state. Universalising these visions to include commuities living in deserts, in the mountains, coastal communities, and communities in the rest of the world, some perhaps with long common-law traditions, was always likely to meet with insurmountable difficulties. Communities with a long tradition of common law focussed upon a universal idea of justice that was founded on the free will, a critical spirit, and people getting what they deserved. The first and second of these factors of course, were not reflected in the revelations and visions of the prophet. The critical spirit in particular was accustomed to evaluating divinities in terms of philosophical partly secular criteria such as the Principle of the Golden Mean exercised in the spirit of psuché and eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishng life). Given the typical attitude of critical minds to phenomena such as revelations and visions, it is not surprising that Islam was not successful in recruiting such communities to their cause. Also, given the Islamic conviction that once instituted laws were immutable, this added another dimension of difficulty to the mission of broadening the horizons of the Islamic Religion.Campbell quotes Spengler on this issue:
“Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men….the authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name they bear.” (Page 435)
There is of course a difference between commuities with traditions of common law based on the precedents of individual judges in a well educated core of judges, and laws passed by rulers who may or may not have had the appropriate education and may or may not have the ability to recruit those who have had the appropriate experience and education. Recall also that Mohammad could not read and therefore was probably not familiar with the History of the World that was available to scholars at the time. The History of Philosophy and Science may also have been provincial given that Mohammed relied on an oral tradition of communication of ideas. Just these facts may also have limited both the content and form of the “visions” he experienced.
Spenglers “burghers” were not of course an infallible standard by which to measure the efficacy and virtue of laws but, depending upon the inherited humanistic/democratic infrastructure, these burghers may be a far more reliable source of justice and the good life, then the visions of an illiterate man meditating in a cave. These burghers were, given their obvious relation to Ancient Greek conceptions, also a more reliable source of justice and eudaimonia then many literate Christian scholars.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 8
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The Introduction to the Celtic Iron Age was mythological, a fact symbolised in the Arthurian legend of the sword being extracted from the mother-stone. Blacksmiths of this period were seen to be wizards/shamans possessing special powers. The time of the Celts was a time of druidic rituals, sacrifice in forest retreats, learning by rote a number of verses, and fantasy-laden belief in an after-life (“otherworld”). An example of the latter is given in a tale from Celtic mythology relating to a hero who is approached by a strange beautiful girl singing about the “otherland” over the seas and far away. They both sail away and the hero returns after what seems to him to have been a short period only to find that he has been away for hundreds of years and all the people he knew were dead. This is a 8th century tale from Ireland and we find similar romantic tales 4 centuries later connected to Arthurs Knights of the Round Table. Encyclopedia Britannica on-line claims that the word “Druid” means “knowing the oak tree”. Caesar is reported to have claimed that the Druids neither paid taxes nor engaged in manual labour. They were priests without temples . Caesars Gallic wars began circa 58BC and succeeded in limiting the power of the Celts who had been waging war in southern Europe. There were two centres of Celtic Culture, one in the Alps and one in Southern Germany during the early Iron Age. Campbell refers to the scholar Professor Mircea Eliade:
” a fascinating study of the rites and myths of the Iron Age has shown that a leading idea of this mythology was of the stone as a mother rock and the iron, the iron weapon as her child brought forth by the obstetric art of the forge. Compare the saviour Mithra born from a rock with a sword in his hand.”(Pgae 292)
Mithra was originally, one of the more important gods from the Persian Pantheon , equated by some scholars to the Ancient Greek demiurge. Encyclopedia Britannica on-line links Mithra with the Platonism of the Timaeus:
“As in the Timaeus, the human soul came down from heaven. It crossed the seven spheres of the planets, taking on their vices (e.g. those of Mars and Venus) and was finally caught within the body. The task of human life is to liberate ones divine part (the soul) from the shackles of the body and to reascend through the seven spheres to the eternal unchanging realm of the fixed stars. This ascent to the sky was prefigured by Mithra himself when he left the earth in the chariot of the sun-god.” (www.britannica.com/topic/Mithraism/Mythology-and-Theology)
We dont find such talk of the disembodied soul in Aristotle or Kant, both of whom would have seriously questioned the supernaturalistic content in the above mythological account: a supernaturalism that was so dear to the superstitious Roman mind. Campbell argues, concerning the History of the Celtic Culture, that:
“The earliest locus of the culture was Bohemia and South Germany, but it spread in its final century as far as to Spain, Brittany, Scandinavia and the British Isles, to furnish a base upon which the subsequent Celtic flowering of the La Téne period then appeared, circa 550-15 BC.” (Page 293)
This was the period in which the Celts besieged Roman territories and entered Asia Minor. In the early 4th century BC, the Celts crossed the English Channel. Julius Caesar in his work “Gallic War” described the Celts as follows:
“There are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing nothing of themselves, never taken into counsel. The greater part of them, oppressed as they are by debt, by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongs of the more powerful, commit themselves in slavery to the nobler, who have, in fact the same right over them as masters over slaves. Of the two classes above mentioned, one consists of Druids, the other of Knights. The former are concerned with divine worship, the due performances of sacrifices, public and private, and the interpretation of ritual questions: a great number of young men gather about them for the sake of instruction and hold them in great honour.”(Pages 293-4)
Part of the attraction of the young that joined the Druid movement was exemption from military service, taxes and other liabilities. The Celtic Knights believed in the” lex talionis” form of justice : If a life was taken by someone that person ought to lose their life. Almost all the information we have relating to Celtic Culture comes down to us courtesy of secondary sources (Cicero, Pliny, Siculus) because Celtic cultural objects have not been preserved. Campbells points to the literature comparing mystical Druidic thought with Hinduism.
This romantic fairy-tale Culture peristed right up to the founding of Rome as is evidenced by the legend of Romulus and Remus being nurtured by a Wolf. Romulus we know from the legend eventually slew Remus and the city founded becomes Rome rather than Reme. The Romans developed a number of local sacred divinities. The home and the hearth became sacred, being associated as they were with both Vesta and Janus(the god of the door-threshold). Otherwise the Romans embraced the Greek Pantheon of Gods. Romans, like Plato, believed that the character of the soul was determined by the metal related to it. They believed a Golden Age and a Golden Rome would follow the Bronze and Iron Ages and their associated races. Virgil in his writings prophesied the coming of a wonderful Golden Boy which would signify the return of the Golden Age (Campbell Page 323).
The Roman Spirit was, of course, essentially a military spirit requiring faithful devotion to the Republic in contrast the Oriental spirit of dissociation from all worldly things (Page 328). And yet there is a belief in the afterlife in Cicero’s claim that warriors will have:
” a special place prepared for them in the heavens, where they may enjoy an eternal life of happiness” (Di re publica, Loeb Classical Library, Cmbridge, 1928, 6.13)
Campbell points out, however, that the tone of the Roman combination of duty and detachment is very different to that of the Orient. The implication of this is that the warrior knows hmself to be a God and this sets the stage for the veneration of the Roman Emperor as a God.(Campbell, Page 330). A parallel doctrine to this, namely the divine right of Kings to rule, was, of course a Christian based dogma used by a number of rulers throughout English History. The dogma often referred to the authority of the Bible which contrasts itself to the above Roman dogma based on Roman Mythology. The divine right of kings was never as closely associated with warrior-heros. The palaces of British Kings were never temples. This Roman doctrine may, of course have emboldened Pontius Pilate to give permission for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Both Roman Emperors and British Kings were in a certain sense miraculous beings but as Campbell points out on Page 344:
“If miracles are required India wins every time”.
Indeed what could be more miraculous than a universe created by a dreaming serpent. We, followers of Philosophy and Science dismiss miracles on good grounds with the resultant judgement “This is not the way in which the world works”. Campbell also helps to cast doubts on these miraculous claims when he points out that different mythologies produce different miracles, but the miracles of other mythologies are never recognised as genuine miracles, sometimes regarded as frauds, fabrications or witchcraft. The miracles associated with Christ, must, then be subject to doubt if we are to take New Testament accounts literally which we would seem required to do by the Christian Church. Later “interpretations” however rely on construing some of the books of the Bible as “literary texts”, and claim that the accounts of miracles must be taken metaphorically: intended to help unbelievers enter the realm of the sacred. Christ’s resurrection would seem in this context to be the most wondrous miracle. For the Philosopher, then, if the text relating to this event could not be taken literally then the only realistic alternative is to postulate that that the text is intended to be read metaphorically.
Paul, early on in Christianity, warned us not to be taken in by the “illusions” of Philosophy and perhaps he was thinking in particular of Gnostic challenges to many central teachings, but he may also have been referring to the authoritative influence of Aristotles principle based Hylomorphism. For a long period of history these Gnostic texts were not available to scholars for evaluation purposes. Relatively recently, however 48 works were discovered in an earthern jar near Nag Hammadi. Whether it was these texts which were the target of Pauls concern, or whether Paul was more concerned over powerful Aristotelian arguments against supernaturalism, is not known. The documents discovered contained reference to a doctrine of immantism which the Church for centuries had condemned: “The Kingdom of God is not coming, it is here”. Campbell believes immantism is well expressed in the following:
“I am the light that is above them all
I am the All
The All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me
Cleave a piece of wood, I am there
Lift up the stone, you will find me there.”(Campbell Page 367)
Campbell notes that the source of all of the material for the Gospels was:
“a common stock of sayings (logia) preserved and passed about, at first orally, among the communities of the faithful, which then become fixed in various ways in various writings.” (Campbell, Page 368)
The Gnostic position reminds one of the Aristotelian objection to the Platonic eternal Forms, which could not be found in the external physical world. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas claims that the sacred Kingdom is not the Kingdom to come but rather that which is both here and now and within you. The Gospel of Thomas dates from circa 140AD which is approximately the time during which all the Gospels were being formed. The “authenticated Gospels of the Bible” were, Campbell, argues, fixed in Rome during the 4th century AD.
Campbell also refers to the Gospel of John in which God is praised thus:
“Glory to the Father!
Glory to thee, Word!
Glory to thee, Holy Spirit!” (Campbell Page 373)
This, Campbell argues cannot be the Father of either the OT or the NT but rather more closely resembles what we can find in Persian Myth, where the saviour “like Zoroaster descends from the sphere of Light; but unlike Zoroaster, partakes only apparently of the nature of the world”. (Page 373)
The Gospel of John characterises the crucifixion in unusual terms, thus:
“And in that cross of light there was one form and one appearance. And upon the cross I saw the Lord himself, and he had no shape, but only a voice: and a voice not such as was familiar to us, but one sweet and kind, and truly of God, saying to me: “John it is needful that there be one who hears these things from me, for I have need of one that will hear. This cross of light is sometimes called the Word by me for your sakes, sometimes Mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ, sometimes Door, sometimes Way, sometimes Bread, sometimes Seed, sometimes Resurrection, sometimes Son, sometimes Father, sometimes Spirit, sometimes Life, sometimes Truth, sometimes Faith, sometimes Grace. So it is for man. But what it is, in truth, as conceived in itself, as spoken between us, it is the marking off of all things, and the firm uplifting of all things, fixed, out of things unstable and the harmony of wisdom–of the wisdom that is harmony.” (Pages 373-4)
The contrasting of form and appearance , truth and appearance which God calls Word or Mind, does align with the Aristotelian position of Ancient Greece, especially if one considers the transition from Platonic to Aristotelian Philosophy which regards God as a Pure Form that thinks about thinking. For Aristotle, contra Plato, the forms are in the external world, which would seem to imply the thesis of immantism cited above by Campbell. Socrates in the Republic, we recall, praised the thesis of Anaxagoras that “All is Mind” which caused Socrates to completely change the emphasis of his philosophical investigations, from exploring the external world, to seeking Knowledge and Truth about the realm of Psuché.
Johns Gospel continues with:
“but what I am, I alone know, and no man else. Suffer me then to keep what is mine, but what is yours behold through me; and see me in mine essence, not as I have said I was but as you, being akin to me, know me.” (Page 375)
The text ends with John claiming to laugh at the multitude because, he held on to one thing in himself, namely:
“that the Lord carried out everything symbolically, for the conversion and salvation of man”
Symbolically? Metaphorically? We know the Gnostic view of the primacy of Knowledge was not shared by Pauls position that man is Justified by Faith alone. History apparantly has sided with Paul since his teaching appeared to have had the greatest mass-appeal. Paulianism claimed that Gnosticism fostered the multiplication of cults at the expense of the one true universal religion. Was this conversation between God and John something John hallucinated, or was it a metaphorical account of a thinking process that must have been a result of contradictions in the “sayings” witnessed by many different disciples and bystanders? The Aristotelian principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason were part of the authority of his Philosophy at this time. Campbell, with considerable insight, sides with both Gnosticism and the Paulian Justification by Faith-thesis on the following grounds:
“Moreover, the paramount concern of a popular religion cannot be, and never has been “Truth” but the maintenance of a certain type of society, the inculcation in the young and refreshment in the old of an approved “system of sentiments” upon which the local institutions and government depend. And, as the documentation of our subject shows, the history of society itself has been marked over the milleniums by a gradual-ever so gradual—enlargement of group horizons: from the tribe or the village to the race or the nation, and beyond that, finally with Buddhism and Hellenism, to the all-embracing concept of humanity—which is, however, not a governable but a spiritual unit of individuals. And in such a unit there have to be many mansions, as there were in Gnosticism. (Page 378)
Wise words, indeed, but everything then hangs on how we construe Hellenism, whether in terms of a mythology or philosophy or alternatively in terms of the Aristotelian Golden Mean of Philosophical Mythology.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 7
Views: 58
In Campbells opening to Chapter 6, entitled “Hellenism (331BC —324 AD”),he argues that:
“Greek Mythology declined from the status of religion to literature because of the highly critical Greek mind, which was already turned against it in the 6th and 5th centuries BC.” (Page 237)
This is an interesting and complex claim, perhaps resting on an assumption that religious texts were somehow differently structured than poetic or literary texts. There is one obvious difference relating to the events that are represented in these texts which in the case of poetry and literature might be known by the artist to be impossible in actuality, whereas in the case of certain fantastic Biblical representations we are expected to believe that these events actually occured when we know that as depicted they were impossible, given our knowledge of how the world is, and works. Religious texts are claiming actuality, reality (about real places, real people, real, events), whereas literary/poetic texts are merely claiming to be, at best, imitations of reality, laden with symbolic intention and referring to a latent content related to the aesthetic ideas of the artist.
The purposes of religious and literary texts certainly to some extent appear to be different. Adrian Stokes, the Kleinian Art Critic, compared Art and Love (Eros) in his essay on Michelangelo(The Critical Works of Adrian Stokes, Volume 3,London, Thames and Hudson, 1978), claiming that there is both an enveloping intention in Art as well as the singular idea of the essence of the object that is loved/appreciated. The art object, it is argued possesses a holistic self sufficiency which is embedded in the pulsing life of the world .The audience of literary performances often bring with them a wish to escape from the everyday life-world which Kant described as “melancholically haphazard”, containing as it does, violence, disease and many other forms of misery. The genius of the artist identifies with this spirit and uses this knowledge skillfully, in accordance with Kantian subjectively universal and necessary principles. In the middle of the constellation of such affects and effects, many have pointed out the resemblance of the appreciative state to the hypnotic state, which we know was of interest to Freud in the early days of psychoanalysis.
Now it is not out of the question that some religious texts aim at a similar hypnotic state in order to accomplish their mission of installing faith in the masses. Freud, refers to this process of envelopment as “the oceanic feeling”, claiming that it alone cannot account for our experiences of the sublimity of religious experience because of its initimate resemblance to the fantasy world of the imagination. The poet and the Philosopher have pedagogical intentions involving teaching the members of their audience something important about the world and themselves via in the former case the character and plot of the work. In the case of a Shakespearean play it is often the case that the 4 underlying questions(“What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, What can we hope for?”, “What is man?”, posed by Kant defines the domain of Philosophy and these are often featured as underlying themes of Shakespearean plays, conveyed via his aesthetic ideas. There is clearly, then, in both poetic texts and Shakespeare plays, both a manifest and a latent content constructed from these underlying aesthetic ideas. The Greek term Aletheia, (Unconcealment), which Heidegger claims was the Ancient Greek equivalent of Truth is also important in this aesthetic process of moving from the manifest to the latent content.
The key difference between religious and literary/aesthetic works is that the latter are not intended to be representations of actual events and people, and while they are not exactly fantasies of the kind we find in fairy-tales, they are nevertheless symbolic imitations of reality designed to refer via their manifest content to rational ideas of the good, true, beautiful, sublime, sacred, (latent content). Often poems or Shakespearean speeches have a “confessional” intention which hopes to reveal (aletheia) the state of the speakers soul/life.. One of the most important discoveries of Freud relates to the central agency of the Ego which he claimed was formed of the precipitate of lost objects. The losing of the the loved object demands at the very least a long mourning process with perhaps brief excursions into the psychoanalytic domain of the melancholic. The artis/genius knows this about himself and all other human beings and puts this truth to work in the organisation of his aesthetic ideas. In Shakespeares case we can also bear witness to the manifestation of other psychotic processes and defence mechanisms at work in furtherance of the plot of the work, for example, in Macbeths hallucination of a dagger and the ghost of Banquo, the man he killed earlier.
The world the artist is intent upon revealing the essence of, is not the melancholically haphazard world of everyday life but rather that world which contains a Kantian “hidden plan” for a hopeful future. This plan is not a utopian fantasy but rather the more down to earth hope that men in the future will treat each other with respect, in other words, treat each other as ends-in-themselves.
Religious texts are often about actions that occur “because of each other” and the correct understanding of their meaning necessitates an understanding of a complex non-linear idea of causation resembling the Aristotleian schema of fourfold causation. Ancient Greek Philosophy and Poetry both embraced the dualistic oracular proclamations:
“Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”
and
“Know thyself!”
Both of these proclamations are causally related. It is necessary to know thyself if one is to minimise the human ruin and destruction that attend mans creations. This transcendental truth formed the background of Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, and Wittgensteinian thought. Macbeths lack of self-knowledge, to take one example, led him to misinterpret the prophecy of the three sisters at the beginning of the play, thus leading to the desruction of both hmself and Lady Macebeth. These three sisters remind the classics student of the Ancient Greek Erinyes which were, together with Eros, replaced by the more temperate pantheon of divinities led by Zeus.
We ought to recall that oracular proclamations were received by their audience in a spirit of awe and wonder: their incantations, therefore, might have seemed hypnotic. More often than not these “messages from Apollo” (latent content) were delivered by females who claimed that the “sacred water spoke” (manifest content). It is reported that the Delphic Oracle , for example, often went into a trance-like state before delivering the incantatory proclamation. Whether or not this was a pretended state, or merely the posture needed for delivering incantatory proclamations, is not entirely clear. If the former was the case a Freudian explanation may explain why pretence was needed. The Oracle may be encouraging the natural learning mode of imitation in the audience , thus using the defence mechanism of identification. Perhaps poetry with its incantatory tone might have originated from this phenomenon, and thereafter inventively created other mechanisms to achieve its semi-hypnotic effects. The Poem, of course, is also a self sufficient object containing symbolic language and metaphors that are organised by aesthetic ideas and while not exactly sacred (a status claimed for religious texts), are certainly candidates for the status of the good, the beautiful and the sublime(a state intimately related to the human power of moral agency and the Good in General)
Cambell then claims that the critical mind of the Ancient Greeks pushed them to reject polytheism for monotheism which, of course, if true, would leave us with no option but to accept the thesis that we humans too, are self causing entities with a free will which, if used wrongly, results in evil. There is no reason to doubt that the Greek Philosophers believed that human willing was the issue behind the Oracles warning that “Everything created by man leads to ruin and destruction. Aristotle, we ought to recall in his essence specifying definition claimed that we are only “potentially” rational, and in practical contexts this means–under the condition of possessing a good will (which is the central issue of Kantian Ethics). Such a move to a conception of a will causing itself to choose or not to choose the Good necessitates a shift from the religious demand that we obey God, to the Philosophical demand that we understand what the divine Logos expects from us. Individual Responsibility thus supplamts faith in the Divine Being.
The fact that we possess such long childhoods (when compared to the animals) means that responsibility can only be expected fully from those that have left their childhoods and adolescence and are thereby free to exercise their rationality. This monotheistic conception with space for a self-causing free will was then overridden by the so-called Christian Truth, which Campbell expresses thus:
“The One God in three persons, with his pantheon of angels, counter pantheon of devils, communities of saints, forgiveness of sins, and resurrection of the Body, as well as the multiple presence of the dead and resurrected Son of God–true God and true Man—who was born miraculously of the Virgin Mother Mary.” Page 237
There are at least two supernatural events contained in this Campbellian version of the essence of Christianity—a life after death and a virgin birth, both of which would not have seemed realistic to Aristotle and other Greek Philosophers. By the time we get to Aristotle the Philosophical focus was on the universal and necessary characteristics of Being qua Being, a focus Campbell describes in terms of the Great Mother of the Pantheon and the different forms these pantheons took at different points in time. These different forms manifested the underlying power of her Being.
Campbell notes that it was Alexander the Great that put an end to the world order of divided kingdoms and Regions in the name of a universal idea/telos. Tutored by Aristotle, Alexander undoubtedly heard philosophers (perhaps even Aristotle) claiming that Greek ideas could rule the world. Alexander, in certain circumstances used Aristotles principle of the Golden Mean in his conquest of Persia, refusing to destroy the temples and shrines of conquered territories (thus refusing to follow the example of the Persians). The Persians may have been charitable to the Jews, but they did not extend this charity to the Greek territories they conquered. Campbell claims that Alexander created a new world order but in reality the principles he largely followed were both oracular and Philosophical. He announced to the Orient the substantial presence of a European spirit in the world. This new Spirit Camobell claims had 4 aspects: firstly:
“..we note not merely respect for the gods of all religions, but an almost scientific effort to recognise analogies: so the specific deities of the various lands began to be identified and worshipped as equivalent to each other” Page 240
Secondly, concerning the role of both Philosophy and Science in the interpretation of myth:-
“In the 6th and 5th century Greece, the philosophers had recognised a relationship of the Dionysian-Orphic complex to philosophical thought, and in the cults of the Orient they now discovered analogous possibilities.” (Page 241)
Thirdly,
“the breakthrough of the Greek inquiring intellect with Alexander into India, where a totally unforeseen species of philosophic inquiry had been developed in the various yogic schools of the Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanic centers. A far deeper understanding of the practical psychological—as opposed to the cosmological—relevancy of mythology was represented in those disciplines, than anything the West was to achieve until the century of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung.” (Page 241)
Campbell also notes in this context that this practical psychological understanding included a good deal of what he called “psychosomatic mystic love”. Fourthly,
“after about two centuries of European influence upon Asia, the tide began to turn, until presently a powerful surge of reaction developed, which culiminated with the victories of Christianity over the gods and philosophies of Classical antiquity.” (Page 241)
Campbell eleborates upon this last point by claiming that the civilisation of the European West collapsed for seven centuries. There is much to unpack and clarify in the above 4 aspects but let us begin with the claim that we encountered a deeper understanding of the relation of practical Philosophy to Mythology in the Orient. It is not clear what Campbell means here. Freudian Psychology was Kantian to the core, and Kant certainly preceded Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. We have argued in earlier reviews of Campbells work that Kantian Philosophy and Philosophical Psychology does not contradict the often vague comments upon Being qua Being (Brahman?) we encounter in Hindu texts. We also noted that Kantian Philosophy is sympathetic to much that can be found in the Bible, but probably not to the postulation of events such as a virgin birth and resurrections. We pointed out that the insights Kant brought to the field of religion were very much influenced by Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy. European History manifests a very clear line of development stretching from the Golden Age of Greece to the Art of the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment and Kant’s important contributions (and elaborations upon many different European ideas). There is also an imprtant Cosmopolitan thread linking Alexander the Great and Kants vision of a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends. In other words the links between Kant and Freud to Ancient Greece were far stronger than the links to any Oriental conception of the relation of practical psychology to Mythology.
Insofar as Campbells fourth aspect is concerned, we also question the claim that Christianity triumphed over the Philosophies of Classical Antiquity. We are aware that all Philosophical schools were closed by Justine, a Roman Emperor, but this did not prevent Aristotle from being revered as “The Philosopher” throughout this period of so-called “collapse”. His influence upon both the European and Arabic World was considerable until the establishment of the First Universities when his influence was further sedimented in World-Philosophy and World-History. Indeed it is also important to point out that even Aquinas felt forced to confront and comment upon the works of Aristotle, translating the Greek into Latin in acknowledgment of “The master of those that know”. Aquinas claimed in Aristotelian spirit that all human life(psuché) is sacred because there is a spark of the divine within, and this certainly resembles the hylomorphic account of Noos. Yet there are tensions between these two thinkers on a number of issues including the notion of a free will undetermined by Gods natural and eternal law. It certainly appears to be problematic to project upon Aristotles Philosophy the Christian of Original Sin. Indeed, in this context, Campbell concludes with a remark on the Origin of Christian Mythology, claiming that it could be interpreted:
“as a development out of Old Testament Thought under Persian Influence, with nothing, as yet particularly Greek—unless the emphasis on love” (Page 290=
This confirms that European Culture was formed principally by journeys along two different roads: the roads leading from Athens and Jerusalem. Aquinas, then, can be admired for his attempt to reconcile these two very different accounts of man and his world, but in doing so he may well have diminished the importance of our Greek heritage which may well have pleased him. Fixating upon Love given the ambivalent nature of man does appear somewhat arbitrary, preparing the way for Romanticism and a “Modernist World.”
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology” Season 9 Episode 6
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Campbell claims that Zoroastrianism has not left a great heritage possibly because of the :
“ravages of Alexandra the Great(331BC) and then, after painful reconstruction of the zealots of Islam.” (Page 201)
The Persian work, the Bundahish(“The Book of Creation”)was written between the years of 226-881AD, and the resultant creation contained both earlier and later content. The assumption of two primeval spirits, one better and one worse, is essentially dualistic and dialectical, leaving us with a bipolar attitude toward the Divine. In the context of this debate it also ought to be pointed out that Greek Mythology had its two Freudian Giants, namely Eros and Thanatos, working toward Ananke (fate), thereby essentially resolving a potential dialectical opposition with a Good telos. Greek Philosophy built upon this foundation by ackowledging a free will in relation to the concepts of areté(doing and saying the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké(justice) both of which regulated by arché (principle).The matrix of Greek Mythology and Greek Philosophy provided the conditions necessary for the emergence of the Great Trio of Philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all of whom contributed to the creation of the meta-Discipline of Philosophy. The task of this discipline was to discover the myriad of principles associated with the Aristotelian Theoretical, Practical and Productive Sciences. Aristotle in his work “Metaphysics” (The study of First Principles) focussed on what he called “first Philosophy” which used the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to explore the aporetic questions relating to Being qua Being..
There is in Persian Mythology, Campbell claims, a creative narrative relating to trees, animals and humans. Ahura Mazda, the Lord of the Light, upon seeing man said:
“You are Man, the ancestry of the world, created perfect in devotion. Perform the duties of the law, think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds and do not worship demons.” (Campbell, Page 205)
An antagonistic spirit caused the first two humans, who cannibalised their children, to quarrel but it is important to recognise that in this mythology, evil is conceived of as antecedent to the fall of Man, in direct contrast to the Biblical account in which a flaw in mans character is assumed, manifesting itself in disobedience in relation to the commandments of God. The Greek Philosophers thanks to thinkers like Anaxagoras, did not, like the Israeli prophets, see any relation betwee natural catastrophes such as volcanic explosions, floods or large meteor strikes and man-made catastrophes due to mans ill-will or ignorance. Anaxagoras, we recall, claimed that the moon, at the time conceved of as a divine entity, was constituted of material substance, and as such, had no influence upon the affairs of men. Campbell suggests that this problem of relating the conditions of the external world to the conditions of the human psuché, was not a serious problem for the Greeks, whose polytheistic pantheon could embrace all the nuances of physical and psychical existence. Believing in monotheism as the Jews and the Christians did, left them facing the problem of evil. Where did it originate? In God or in man? We know the choice was made to postulate that the being of man was fundamentally flawed.
The narrative of the Bundahish speaks of heaven, hell and resurrection in imaginatively dramatic terms, and also refers to a great meteor falling upon the earth, killing the serpent-divinity and purifying hell of its stench. Turning to man-made catastrophes, Cambell refers to the “strategies” of the Assyrian dynasty which included massacring entire populations or enslaving them. This occurred during the “Persian Period”(539-331 BC) which was largely a time for man-made ruin and destruction:
“Populations were being tossed from east the west, west to east, north to south and south to north, until, not a vestige of the earlier ground-in rooted sense of a national continuity remained.”(Page 214)
He elaborates upon the historical consequences for the period:
“The world-historical role of the Kings of Assyria can be described, therefore, as the erasure of the past and the creation of a thoroughly mixed, internationalised, interracialised Near Eastern Population that has remained essentially that ever since.” (Page 214)
It is fascinating to read about these tumultous upheavals, and the cosmopolitan consequences, as well as the total annihilation of the Assyrian Peoples. This pattern of annihilation and servitude was finally broken by Cyrus the Great, King of Kings, when a period of “restoration” began: a period that included restoring the people of Judah to Jerusalem. Cyrus restored Persian mastery of the region after overthrowing the Greeks. The Jews, in admiration, claimed that Yahweh himself spoke to Cyrus:
“I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am Yahweh, who do all of these things.”(Campell, Page 216)
After a period of intensive warfare Darius ascended the throne to become the King of Kings, ruling from 521-486BC. It is said that in status he rivalled both Buddha(563-483BC) and Confucius(551-478 BC). Campbell points out that it was Oswald Spengler who claimed that the turmoil of this period was not caused by geographically situated nations but rather various sects and their churches:
“Such a group, as I have already said, is not a geographical nation but a church, a sect, the company in possession of a magical “treasure”;and the functioning of its treasure is conditioned by certain fairy-tale laws, which are the statutes of the group. Membership, therefore, is not a matter of either time or place, but of the knowledge and execution of the statutes, which are at once secular and religious, revealed, not invented by man; and categorical, not subject to review. When obeyed, they produce boons beyond anything the world has ever known—fairy-tale boons; however, when violated, even accidentally, they produce a magical catastrophe against which the force and will of the individual–or even of the now unfortunate group of which he is an organ–is as nought. Hence, finally, the weal and woe, virtue and value of all of each lie not in creative individual thought and effort, but in participation in the customs of the group: so that as far as the principle of free will is concerned, which is generally argued for in this culture, its effect is only to make the individual responsible for his decision either to obey or disobey. It is not his province to decide what is good and what bad.”(Page 223)
It is precisely at the inflection point of free will and responsibility that the Greeks saw the importance of knowledge (epistemé), and especially knowledge of oneself. Epistemé and arché form a synthesis which allow us insight into The Form of the Good and the Form of Truth (aletheia). For the Ancient Greek Philosopher, like Aristotle, the individual is embedded in his family constellation insofar as responsibilities are concerned, and to that extent, is not a completely free agent. The family can provide more than individuals without any social connection, but, as Socrates predicted, when groups grow large, desires multiply, desires which can only be fulfilled by being embedded in larger groups where responsibilities too increase in number. The Village is initially formed of a constellation of families and villages too can form the constellation of the polis. In such large constellations of people and institutions knowledge of areté (doing and saying the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké (justice–getting what one deserves), become important values, and manifest powers of mind that are not confined to obeying a divinity or King of Kings. This knowledge embraced by the Greeks in relation to the goods of the body, the goods of the external world, and the goods of the soul, was not by any means an individual affair, but rather a universal and necessary endeavour resting on principles (arché). Here we need to undrstand what Socrates meant when he claimed that we need to search for justice and areté in the Polis, where the soul is writ large, and because of this fact requires a form of thinking that relates to the particular via universals and principles. Knowledge in this wider context, then, becomes the necessary condition of using ones will to achieve and appreciate the “Forms” of “The Good”, “The True” and “The Beautiful”. Eros, of course , was part of the Ancient Pantheon of Gods(Prior to the pantheon led by Zeus), forces and demiurges,and is present in all forms of life which, as Spinoza claims strives to maintain itself in its existence. Campbell claims that in the Greek Polis of Pericles, Eros becomes:
“the deity whose presence was the best support of law as well as life.” (Page 227)
This position, however, was specifically rejected by Diotima, the teacher of Socrates who we know so little about, and also by Socrates himself, as articulated in his speech in the dialogue, “The Symposium”. The Symposium pictures Eros with very human parents who conceive him during a drinking party. These parents are ,however, not individuals, but representative of the general characteristics of Poverty and Resourcefullness, and Eros is pictured as a poor figure padding barefoot through the streets of Athens in search of something not specifie,d but related to the desire each of us possesses, to find a soul-mate ( in Greek mythology both soul mates were united but split apart because of the fear of the gods that such a united entity would be too powerful)
This is a Freudian image of love in which once this soul mate has been found there is considerable fear that the soul-mate will be lost. Freud, in this context, charts the emotions of mourning and melancholia, locating the presence of the death instinct in the latter. Such imaginative narratives were of course sublimated by both Plato and Aristotle, who placed the “Forms”(principles) at the cente of Rationality, thereby replacing divinities with something law-like, that is a condition of all forms of activity (natural and human). In other words, love is not a God for the Philosophers, but rather a social means enabling man to overcome his natural anatagonism toward his neighbours and strangers, thereby facilitating communal forms of existence larger than the family. Love, therefore, may be more a function of mans “Spirit” than his rationality, which is in its turn connected to thought defined in terms of thinking about thinking, rather than our typically human form of thought which must think something about something. Freud points out in the context of this discussion, that marriage is the institution which formalises the end of our search for a soul-mate, but society places sometimes artificial regulations upon whom one may, or may not marry, thus causing a general sense of discontentment with ones civilisation.
The Bible contains passages claiming that God is Love and the two commandments of the New Testament are:
“Love God above all”
and
“Love thy neighbour as thyself”
If God is love, then Noos, that divine part of mans mind must also be a source of love, a source of The Good. Insofar as Kant and the Enlightenment were concerned, the first commandment requires more articulation, because, for Kant, it is the idea of freedom of the will that is a fundamental idea, perhaps more important than the idea of God, which Kant embraces strictly in accordance with his critical Philosophy, and not in the spirit of blind worship. Campbell quotes the speech of Agathon from the Symposium:
“all serve him of their own free will, and where there is love as well as obedience, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city, say, is justice.”
The Symposium too, had its Enlightened thinker, Socrates, present, questioning the premises of Agathons speech, attempting to make space for Platos Theory of Forms. Later, Aristotle would see in Eros the spirit that can give rise to excesses which the Principle of the Golden Mean is meant to regulate with the help of the human power of rationality. Aristotle, however, also refers to Eros in his work on Metaphysics as being involved in the motion of the cosmos that moves regularly, he claims, for the love of God, the unmoved mover. It appears, then, that thought and desire are fused into one in the Philosophical idea of God, but separated in huan psuché. Insofar as Eros is operating in the Instincts, it resembles Platonic Spirit, which can be difficult to control in human life. Control of the instincts, for Freud, requires various powers such as Consciousness, Repression, Identification, and Sublimation. Once under control we are presented, by Aristotle with a vicissitude of Eros, namely friendship, a milder, less impulsive, more rational, form of human relationship between men living in a polis. So Eros is not in itself a divinity but rather an important counterweight to the influence of Thanatos as well as a human power that requires integration with other powers of mind, for example, practical rationality in the form of areté, used by the Phronimos to provide laws for the polis.. The Will, solely influenced by Eros(the “melter of limbs”) is not free but rather, for Aristotle, Kant, and Freud, to some extent in servitude. In the Symposium, Eros is also associated with an original loss of ones “other half”, which motivates a sometimes lifelong search for the lost loved-half, thereby providing us with a melancholic view of what has been lost and its possible restoration. In such contexts, Freud speaks of the importance of the Agency of the Ego and the Reality Principle which assists us in a final acceptance of the loss of a loved object, in the spirit of discontentment. Such is the power of the pleasure-pain principle in the life of human psuché. Friendship, then, on Freudian theory may well involve the defence mechanisms of both identification and sublimation, resulting in the Aristotelian telos of treatng the friend as en end-in-itself, wishing everything for the friend that one wishes for oneself.
Sublimation is an important element of the learning process of creative artists: one in which instinctive impulses are sublimated in the process of the learning of ones Art. Campbell notes in this respect that Greek Art and Hindu Art differed in their derivations:
“Greek Art was derived from experiences of the eye; Hindu from those of the circulation of the blood.” (Page 229)
This Hindu preoccupation with inner processes would have been puzzling for the Greeks for whom the aesthetic journey began with the love of the beauty of the body, ascended to love of the beauties of the soul, and thence to the love of the beauty of the laws and institutions of the polis, culminating in a love for the beauty of every kind of knowledge which included a love for Philosophy. The experiences of the senses were, of course of singular importance for Greek artists, as is evidenced by their construction of beautiful temples and sculptures of Appollonian nudes. Campbell points to Hesiod’s Theogony in defence of his claim that Eros is the god of Love, and a member of the four original deities; the other three being Chaos, Gaea (mother earth) and Tartarus (the pit of hades). Hesiod clearly attributes the characteristic of immortality to Eros but also, paradoxically, a power that can overcome the rational powes of intelligence and planning. Campbell acknowledges that Eros does not appear in the writings of Homer because he belongs t the older pantheon of Greek deities. According to Hesiod, Eros is the son of Aphrodite but there are a number of different accounts of his parentage, including the anthromorphic account from the Symposium which claims that he was conceived at a drinking party by a father called Resourcefulness and a Mother called Poverty.
Campbell also claims that Greek Mythology distinguishes itself by a shift on the value-scale from the impersonal to the personal—the norms of the individual, he claims, were conceived to be more important than the norms of the group (Page 136). This claim, however, may ignore the extent to which the norms of the group were consciously and intentionally formed by the process of sublimating without repressing the norms of the individual. The common element of the norms of the individual and the norms of the group is arché, (principle), e.g. the freedom to live as one wishes on the condition that there is respect for others and ends-in-themselves. This would be part of essence of areté and diké, so important to Greek life.
Eros, if not a God, must, then, on the Philosophers view be some sort of principle that in the best case cooperates actively with the rational powers of human psuché, but it is the human pantheon of human rational powers that best assists in the building of the character of the individual in accordance with the universal criteria for “The Good.” Whether it is useful to characterise these matters as a move on the value scale from group norms to individual norms, is, of course, questionable.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 5
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In the Chapter entitled “Gods and Heroes of the European West”, Campbell provides us with his interpretation of the meanings of Homers Works, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. He has the following to say about the Iliad:
“The patron God of the Iliad is Apollo, the god of the light world and of the excellence of heroes. Death, on the plane of vision of that work, is the end; there is nothing awesome, wondrous, or of power beyond the veil of death, but only twittering helpless shades. And the tragic sense of that work lies precisely in its deep joy of life’s beauty and excellence, the noble loveliness of fair women, the real worth of manly men, yet it recognises the terminal fact, thereby that the end is all ashes.” Page 162)
Campbell contrasts this with his interpretation of the tale of the Odyssey:
“In the Odyssey, on the other hand,, the patron God of Odysseus’s voyage is the trickster Hermes, who guides souls to the underworld, the patron also of rebirth, and the lord of the knowledges beyond death, which may be known to his initiates even in life. He is the god associated with the caduceus, the two serpents intertwined; and he is the male traditionally associated with the triad of goddesses of destiny—Aphrodite, Hera, and Athene—who, in the great legend caused the Trojan War.” (Page 162)
We know from Homers narrative that Odýsseus killed over 100 men during the course of his Odyssey. We also know, from other sources, that Hermes was the prodigy of Zeus and the nymphe Maia, the protector of journeymen, thieves and a guide for wandering dead souls. Recognised by his winged sanadals, hat, and staf,f and carrying the carvings of gods and two intertwined serpents. This staff was wielded by both Pythagoras and Cassandra, and reputedly contains the power of immortality for its owner. The Consciousness of Aletheia is reputed to have been embedded in the staff with memories of the secrets of Altantis, which were eventually divulged to Cassandra, partly through a hallucinated reincarnation. The Odyssey is a journey in search of Aletheia, the source of the mystery of humanity. Diké is only present in the form of lex talionis: “revenge, thyself!” Areté follows this latter divine imperative rather than its philosophical essence which demands the presence of the golden mean principles (arché) which guide one to do the right thing in the right way at the right time. The form of Aletheia is also modified by its intrenchment in the matrix of psuché, logos, epistemé, and eudaimonoa.
Prior to the philosophical revolution begun with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we experienced a democratic revolution began by Pericles, who perhaps set the stage for all political Philosophy in the future. Campbell quotes Pericles´ famous essence-specification of democracy:
“Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institution of others.”
The Persian Wars and the Peloponesian War were fought essentially over the democratic life style which athough wishing to live in peace with others, was nevertheless prepared to fight ferociously to defend a state where men obey the law and are otherwise free to live as they wish. This democratic legal state provided the stability necessary for leisure-time pursuits such as religion, poetry and Philosophy. Democratically inspired Athens then produced three of the Greatest Philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) in a relatively short period of time (470BC to 322BC), all sharing that sanctified relation of teacher-pupil. Socrates was the teacher of Plato and Plato was the teacher of Aristotle. We would have to wait a myriad of centuries until the Renaissance for a reawakening of the slumbering Ancient Greek Spirit and its love of wisdom and freedom in all its theoretical, practical and productive forms. There is no doubt that Aristotles conviction that the forms (arché) are to be found in the external world if one knew how to think about this world. His grasp of the importance of experimentation (dissecting animals) and observation in relation to all formsof psuché laid the foundations for Darwinian biological science, Newtonian and Kantian Science, and Freudian Psychoanalysis. One can indeed argue that Aristotelian hylomorphism is largely assumed in the Philosophy of Kant which embraces both empirical realism and critical idealism. Kantian Critical Philosophy is a Philosphy of Freedom as an idea of Reason. Kant is not plagued by medieval theoretical difficulties of proving the existence of God, preferring as he did to postulate a practical reason to believe in God: a practical reason based on the premise of a good will striving to live a good spirited flourishing life.
Hylomorphism and Critical Philosphy is committed to the matrix of values which includes that of areté which Pericles embraced in his Political Philosophy:
“We do not copy our neighbours but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised: and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege but as the reward for merit. Neither is poverty a bar but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor agry with our neighbour, if he does what he likes…..In doing good, again, we are unlike others, we make our friends by conferring not by receiving favours. Now he who confers a favour is the firmer friend, because he would fain by kindness keep alive the memory of an obligation; but the recipient is colder in his feelings because he knows that he, in requiring anothers generosity, he will not be winning gratitude but only paying a debt. We do good to our neighbours not upon calculation of interest, but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit.”(Thucydides: Pelopennessian War II, 37-40, Trans Jowert, B.,)
The Greeks, then, were very dissimilar to the Persian servants of the gods and self proclaimed tyrants. Campbell ponts out in this context that the Greeks were proud of having defeated the Persians four times and also of having found the best way for human psuché to live. (Page 179). One issue of importance for Democracy was the fact that during the era of Pericles and forward, only males could participate in affairs of state. Pericles, however rebuilt the agora and encouraged a number of poets playwrights and philosophers to fill Athens with their reflections. Thucydides claims that after the death of Pericles from the plague that devastated Athens, the generals and rulers thereafter made a chain of unfortunate bad decisions which eventually led to the loss of the Peloponessian War.
The Time of Pericles was a time for challenging absolute ideals and dogma,s whether they be theoretical or practical. Anaxagoras, a friend of Pericles, challenged the position that the sun and moon were divinities, claiming they were made of material substance following laws of the cosmos.He was exiled from Athens for his controversial views, but later Socrates would acknowledge an intellectual debt to Anaxogoras by giving up his investigations into the laws of the cosmos and “turning” to more abstract matters such as the True and the Good and the laws of the mind (human psuché) in accordance with the Noos-principle of Anaxagoras.
Aristotle, importantly differentiated further this view of the world by giving us an account of human psuché: a view which produced the essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. Anaxagoras continued the philosophical journey begun by Heraclitus and Parmenides, a journey that sought not to placate imagined diviities, but rather sought the Truth in the spirit of Aletheia, however uncomfortable the results of such philosophical investigations might be. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would also embark on these investigations, forming a unique trio of thinkers bound by a teacher-pupil relation: in marked contrast to the trio of Kant, Hegel, and Marx who sought to differentiate themselves from their predecessors. Kant was of course philosophising in the spirit of the Enlightenment which was inspired by the Spirit of Ancient Greece, both culturally and philosophically. Kant distinguished himself because of his historical insight and also because he provided us with an elaboration upon Aristotelian Hylomorphism which could then be used by Freud in the spirit of Anaxagoras. Neither Hegel nor Marx claim to be Enlightenment thinkers in the sense referred to above. Dialectical thinking, of course, has a history that takes us back to Heraclitus but dialectical reasoning leves us with major oppositions between science and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion, Science and Art, etc which had previously been integrated in the thought of Aristotle and Kant in the spirit of Parmenides and Plato.
An important background influence on Ancient Greek Culture was that of the Orphic mythology that manifested itself in cultural rites as well as more spiritual activities such as song and lyre-playing which distracted believers from the more bloody activities of sacrifice. These more spiritual activities certainly influenced Pythagoras who, Campbell claims, was an Orphic follower as well as a thinker who believed that numbers could be heard in music, e.g. the ratios 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3. Pythagoras also believed that numbers are present in the “music of the spheres” and knowledge of these numbers was important to leading a satisfying life.
The Persian Prophet, Zoroaster is discussed in the Chapter entitled “Gods and Heroes of the Levant”. Oriental Mythology/Religion, Campbell claims, stands in contrast to Occidental mythology because in the case of the former:
“No attempt was ever made to bring into play in the religious field any principle of world reform or renovation.” (Page 190)
Zoroasters mythical Project builds upon the assumption that the world is not corrupt by design but rather had become so by a series of accidents connected to the activities of the human will. According to Zoroaster, what had been caused by the human will could be remedied by the human will under the condition of an engagement in the world which Oriental thnkers thought to be egoistic. Zoroasters teachings included appeals to the “archangels” of “Good Mind and Righteous Order” (Page 192). These “forces” engage with the powers of “Evil Mind and False Appearance”, e.g. Cowardice, Hypocrisy, Misery, and Extinction. Campbell claims that these beneficent and malevolent powers were subsequently transformed into the Christian orders of angels and devils. He argues that it is here where the ideas of free will and decision are born that would reemerge at different periods of clerical history. Such a position required too, a further appeal to a “day of judgement” in which these so-called “free actions and decisions” will be judged by the Will and Logos of the Divine Power. “Good Mind and Righteous Order” are related to thought, word and deed, and it is these that will be judged (P.196). These are the means which enable us to find our way to the Kingdom of the Divine along the “road of Zoroaster”. The evil, false form of life leads to a different destination, described as folllows:
“I saw the greedy jaws of hell; the most frightful pit, descending in a very narrow, fearful crevice and in darkness so murky that I was forced to feel my way, amid such a stench that all whose nose inhaled that air, struggled, staggered, and fell, and in such confinement that existence seemed impossible.”(Page 198)
We can see clearly here the work of the sensations, emotions and the imagination in contrast to the more abstract appeals to principles of Good we find in Greek Philosophy. The imagination has a bipolar capacity to picture conrete opposites. For the Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophers such bipolar alternatives are extremes which require the application of the principle of the Golden Mean or an account of human psuché embedded in the matrix of arché, areté, diké, aletheia, logos, epistemé, eros, thanatos, ananke, and eudaimonia. The above mythical operation of the imagination eleborated upon a vision of Arda Viraf: a vision that was adopted and transcribed and “more vividly described” by Dante (Page 199).
The above “visions” or “images” substantially influenced both Judaism and Christianity, and assisted by the emotions of fear and terror, contributed to limiting the more calm contemplative rational approaches to the realities experienced by the human form of psuché. Zoroaster may well have been a hero of the Levant but a prophet is not a Philosopher, and however wide his appeal may have been during his time, the day of this kind of hero were numbered. It was the Platonic account of the life and times of Socrates (including his death) that would introduce a new kind of hero onto the world-stage. Socrates believed in the examined life as did Plato, but it was Aristotles broad panoramic view of Philosophy and human psuché that settled the matter in favour of “The Philosopher”. It was this conceptually and rationally oriented “spirit” that inhabited the Philosophy of Kant during the time of the Enlightenment which preserved the influence of the Ancient Greeks upon our European Culture, that would remain relatively stable for the next 140 years until the First World War broke out. Hannah Arendt’s work “The Origins of Totalitarianism charts the “causes” of both the First and Second World Wars in a way that reminds one of the Platonic and Aristotelian opposition to tyrants, whose unnecessary and unlawful desires led to such ruin and destruction.
Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre
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Final proofs sent away today. Published early next year
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 2
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Miss Jane Ellis Harrison has the following to say on the theme of Western Heroic Mythology, contrasting it to underlying older mythological forms, which centre around the serpent and powerful cosmic forces:
“A worship of the power of fertility whch includes all plant and animal life is broad enough to be sound and healthy, but as mans attention centres more and more on his own humanity, such a worship is one divine source of danger and disease.”(Harrison, Themis, Cambridge, CUP,1927, Page 459.
Mythology, we have argued earlier, gave birth to a form of reflection and argumentation that abandons or sublimates the narrative plots of the deeds of warriors like Achilles, or prophets like Moses, in favour of the words of men who use their reason to understand and pass judgement on matters of universal importance for humanity. The introverted form of the narratives relating to Achilles and his forerunners and descendants do not, for Aristotle, connect with that part of the mind of human psuché he called noos, the part of the mind that he thought was intimately related to the divine. Physical courage as displayed by Achilles is, of course, important in particular environments involving war, but it is important to note that insofar as Achilles uses rationality at all (in his willingness to die for a perspectival cause), this use is instrumenta,l and locked onto aggressive self serving ends that the Greek oracles warned lead humanity down spiralling paths of ruin and destruction.
Ancient Greek Philosophy, but especially Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, provided us with some of the text to what Campbell refers to as “the deeper song” of ancient mythology sung by human psuché: a song that engages with the eternal silence of outer space and time in a spirit of worship. The song of the Philosophers, on the other hand, was neither a lamentation nor a joyous celebration of the human which, in their eyes, left a lot to be desired.
Classical Art, inspired by Philosophy, changes form from the Art that was inspired by Mythology, and contributed to singing this deeper song, especially during the period of the Renaissance where we saw a Greek holistic humanistic spirit and transcendence, revived in relation to the human psuche and linked in turn to the metaphysical realm of the sacred.
Campbell misses the philosophical deeper song and compares the song of ancient mythology with what he regards as the more superfical song of Western Mythology, which he claims is :
“something forced, and finally unconvincing about all the manly moral attitudes of the shining righteous deedsmen, whether of the Biblical or of the Greco-Roman schools.” (Page 25)
The deeper song of ancient non-Western mythology may be better represented by Kuli of India who is both life and death, womb and tomb of the world, and for whom the opposites of right and wrong, male and female were not absolute, where each opposite annihilates the other. Certainly the Greek Pantheon (inspiration for Western “balance of mind”), at least insofar as the earlier deities were concerned, did not seek ahhihilation of opposites, but rather engaged in the more balanced synthesising behaviour of, for example, having gods and goddesses marry each other , thus preserving the power of the mother earth representatives, rather than expelling them from the Pantheon. They were not cursed but regarded as ends-in-themselves, worthy of similar status and embraced in friendship. When they were the focus of sacrifices there was no dark intent lurking, namely, the hope that the transcendental divinity will depart and become deus absconditis.
The challenge that Campbells mythological reflections presents us with, is the challenge to synthesize the deeper song of mythology with the deeper song of Philosophy: this latter song is, of course, still in the process of composition, but one can clearly see in the initial movements of the composition, a kind of worship of the Truth and The Good. This is a very different proposition to that of worshipping individual heros, however powerful they may be.
Campbell discusses the Minoan Culture which we know, contained many goddesses and female cult leaders and it has therefore been classified as matriarchal in type. There were no walls around the cities and little evidence of weapons. The “atmosphere” of the culture is gentle with a commodious life-style in which social interaction extends broadly across class boundaries. The Minoan cults surrounding the goddesses could be both benign(involving cattle) and terrible (involving lions,) and central to these, was a tree of life and death, often associated with a Bull and the ritualistic practice of regicide. We referred earlier to Zeus and the primacy of the heavens over the sea (Poseidon), and the earth(Hades), which is also indexed in the developmental stages of the monument Stonehenge in England. The first Stonehenge monument consisted of sacrificial pits and an earth goddess cult, an evolutionary process ending with erect stones paying homage to the sky and solar divinities. Campbell claims that :
“The British dates match the Cretan perfectly.” (Page 67)
Contacts between Britain and the Mediterranean, the evidence suggests, occurred much earlier than previously thought. This was during the period when architects and poets were “wandering souls”, wandering from city to city, region to region and across various land-masses. Late Stonehenge may well have been created by a Mycenean architect. The Greek Pantheon, we know, began with Zeus, Poseidon and Hades dividing up the Universe between them: no female presences were involved directly in this process, and in spite of the Greek compromises with previous female divinities, earthly divinites gradually became occluded, as did their central symbol, the Tree of Life. As a consequence we see in the Garden of Eden Myth, that another tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil begins to occupy the centre of concern for the deities. Knowledge, we know, also became a central concern for Philosophy: both knowledge of the external world and knowledge of the self.
Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst, was concerned with the psychology involved in the myth of the hero which, it is argued, resembles the structure of a neurotic naracisstic day dream:
“where the individual dissociates himself from his true parents by imagining for himself: 1. a noble or divine higher birth, 2. infant exile or exposure, 3. adoption by a family much more lowly than himself(namely, that of his actual parents), and 4. a prospect, ultimately, of return to his “true” estate with a wonderful humbling of those responsible for the exile, and a general sense of great achievement all around.” (Page 74)
The dissociation of oneself from the categorical relation we all have to our parents, and the categorical relation we also have to the world of sky-life, sea-life, and the life of the earth, uses the defence mechanisms of denial and splitting to alleviate a weak ego from anxiety and depression. Freud reports a case of psychotic dissociation, a case of paranoia in which the patient “(Shreber) feels that his own physical body is being dissolved into the infinite matter of the universe. Spinoza is in no doubt that we humans are an individual form of infinite substance intimately related to the substantial attributes of thought and extension. We strive to maintain ourselves in existence like all forms of substance, but inadequate ideas of our self, other selves and the universe hinder us from striving to fulfill our rational potential. Inadequate ideas, Spinoza argues, produce passive emotional states of mind that are not conducive to the classical Ancient Greek ideal of living a good-spirited flourishing life, a life of eudaimonia. Freud’s case, Schreber, is a more serious case of disssociation, more akin to the psychotic breakdown of the mind, than the neurotic accommodations the mind makes to a reality it is still in tenuous contact with. Campbell elaborates upon this theme:
“Indeed, it might be asked whether the morbid state of mind is not a function of the legend rather than its cause;for, as it stands, the beyond represents the descent from the cosmological plane to individual reference. It therefore, produces an inferior meditation, namely, instead of an extinction of ego in the image of a god(mythic identification) precisely the opposite: an exaltation of ego in the posture of a god (mythic inflation); which has been a chronic disease of rulers since the masters of the art of manipulating men contrived to play the role of incarnate god and yet save their necks from the double ax.”(Page 74)
Campbell argues that this state of affairs contributed to the transformation of the state/polis from a religious entity to a political entity. The human attribute of being a tyrant can be seen early on in History in the case of Hammurabi who likened himself to the sun that illuminates all the land and is charged with the duty of providing both justice and piety for his people. The sun sublimates the moon in this changing of the guard of the gods and fundamental differences of psychic attitude follow from such mythic transformation:
Whereas the aim of the earlier mythology has been to support a state of indifference to the modalities of time and identification with the inhabiting non-dual mystery of all Being, that of the new was just the opposite: to force action in the field of time, where subject and object are indeed two separate and not the same–as A is not B, as death is not life, virtue is not vice, and the slayer is not the slain.” (Page 78)
Thus, the womb of the narrative is about he who must overcome his opposite, the villain, or alternatively overcome a hostile world with strange and various life-forms in order to find peace of mind. The narrative is, then structured in accordance with a dialectical logic of thesis and antithesis, which in the best of all worlds, produces the synthesis, and names it as a kind of victory, instead of the more psychoanalytically tempered synthesis of a balanced rational adaptation to the hostile forces encountered. In its extreme form, when the image becomes more powerful than the word, images of a man walking on the surface of the moon is far more interesting than our mundane earthly journeys. This image of modern man is an image of an ego that must master the external world , the id, and the superego, whose Kantian task is to treat every other ego as an end-in-itself.
In the dramatic world of the hero there is no Greek synthesis of the opposites which is clearly not heroic enough for our Western Kings or Gods whose egos demand mastery, conquest, and victory for the drama to be complete. We can wonder whether such egos are also related to the Age of Adam and Eve who exercised their wills so positvely and dramatically in the sacred Garden. Such egos clearly no longer belong in the post Socratic world which is built on a categorical framework of epistemé, diké, arché, and areté (all forms of rationality). In this world, forms and principles constitute and regulate mans relation to his fellow man and the external world. For both Plato and Aristotle, the political sphere was not immune and it too, was constituted and regulated by the “Form of the Good”— a form that was both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences: situated in a space that allowed the harmonious coexistence of the categorical universal ideas of justice, and the realm of the sacred.
The BiblicalCreation Myth relating to Yahweh was a late-stage patriarchal myth where the heros were “prophets and saviours”. The evolutionary development of the forms of creation-myth stretched, according to Campbell over 4 stages:
“1. The world born of a goddess without consort; 2. The world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort; 3. The world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male-warrior god; and 4. The world created by the unaided power of a male God alone.” (Page 86)
The Bible is, of course, to the extent that it is a pre-historical, mythological document, but it is also an attempt to structure the time of this later phase of myth historically. Imaginative narrative is thus sublimated by historical narrative, charting the chronology of Kings and Prophets, as the figure of God successively recedes into the background to become Deus absconditis. The narrative of the life and teachings of the son of God, Jesus, becomes, then, an important focus and precedes the Age of the Holy Ghost to come, in which, on some accounts, the Church no longer needs to take the respnsibility for communicating the holy message that the Kingdom of Heaven is now, here on earth, and inside of everyone who will search for it.
This historical narrative record in its turn gives rise to the emergence of Ancient Greek Philosophy as well as the replacement of Myth and Religion by an overarching form of rational universal argumentation which could still find a role for the Holy or the realm of the sacred in the philosophical mansion of The Forms of the Good. Spinoza and Kant eleborated upon the Forms of Plato and the Hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle with firstly, a monistic ontological account of infinite substance, and secondly, a metaphysical dualism, namely, the Metaphysics of Nature, and the Metaphysicsof Morals. This latter domain involved the controversial practical idea of a being whose freedom consisted in an ability to cause itself to independently act and take responsibility for this action. 20th Century followers of Aristotle and Kant, such as Freud and Wittgenstein and their followers presented us with further elebaorations that can be added to the Canon of previous Philosophical works which, to some extent can be interpreted mythologically.
The question these two competing forms of account raise is whether both can be categorised as “the deeper song”: a song sung using the Philosophical faculties of sensibility(imagination), understanding, and reason.
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The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R DJames, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology, Season 9 Episode 1
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We are all familiar with the proposition that perspectives can differ, whether that be in terms of attitudes toward some object, or in terms of the sensory conceptualisation of an object. What is, for one thinker, a rational animal capable of discourse, is for another thinker, the worst of the animals. In the former case, we obviously can share in the Logos that belongs to divinities, and in the latter case, the divinities might at best just abandon us (Deus absconditis) or in the worst case scenario, curse mankind for the rest of his days. Many of us have lived with this curse for millennia and some in modern times believe either that God is dead or that the divine has permanently absented itself from our lives.
Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals found a place for the divine and the realm of the sacred: a place in which the good will can become the holy will by, firstly, willing that ones maxims of action become universal law,s and secondly, by treating all human and divine psuché as ends-in-themselves. Following the threads of civilisation from the different regions of the Occident and the Orient, is a complex affair and testifies to the picture Aristotle painted many millennia ago, of the “Many Meanings of Being”.
Kantian Metaphysics of Mind elaborated upon the hylomorphic metaphysics of Aristotle by providing us with a relatively modern Philosophical Psychology capable of supporting the major concerns of thinkers throughout the following centuries. Kants theory assumes the essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse” in his divisions of the major faculties of mind into three: sensibility, understanding and reason. These faculties are capable of generating a number of cognitive and aesthetic powers, one of which was, of course, the imagination, which poets and religious thinkers alike, used in their various narratives of gods and goddesses, kings and queens.
One important thread leading from the Ancient Greek Philosophers, appeared during the periods of the Renaissance and Reformation, which in turn led to the Enlightenment and the emergence of the Kantian idea of the primacy of the will of man for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Primacy of the Being of God in the Metaphysics of Nature. Aristotle we recall, spoke of the role of noos in the context of the relation of human psuché to the realm of the sacred or the holy. Kant elaborates upon this by relating the noumenal self to the realm of the sacred or the holy.
Campbell, in his work, “Occidental Mythology”, points to the differences between Occidental and Oriental Mythology, in terms of topographic location, the enigma of transcendental experience, and the introverted and extraverted relation of man to the universe. He argues, paradoxically, that it is the Occidental self that is inward looking, and the Oriental Self that has an extraverted relation to Being. This difference may have been recorded in Freud’s judgement that our Western relation to religion is essentially pathological, reflecting the presence of infantile wishes and fears.
Kants relation to religion is, however, more sound, grounded as it was on the transcendental noumenal world that lay beyond all categories of thinking. Kant believes, like Aristotle, that self-knowledge is crucial to leading the examined contemplative life, but it was equally important to maintain a Philosophical relation to God if a good-spirited flourishing life was to be possible for the human forms of psuché possessing a good/holy will.
The Greek philosophical view of religion also focussed upon the ethical actions of human psuché, not as an individual causa sui, but rather as a necessarily social animal, ,which at their best, lived in a polis and democratically followed wise laws made by wise men. The Platonic dialogue “Euthyphro” testifies to this relation between justice and the sacred via the arguments of Socrates, namely, that the Just is a more embracing category than the sacred, and must, therefore, take precedence in the lives of man, the social animal. The role of rationality in this process was obvious, given the Socratic and Aristotelian claims that the best form of life was the examined or contemplative life, which, of course, presupposed rationality in its different practical, theoretical and productive forms. Knowledge of the Form of the Good was, for both Plato and Aristotle, the most important form of knowledge: a life based on knowledge was an examined contemplative life. It was this balanced relation to their world and themseves that allowed the more philosophically inclined Greek thinkers to sit in judgement on the character of the Gods and even question, as Socrates did, the primacy of the sacred over that of a form of reflection they called Philosophy, which Socrates named, in the course of his indictmen,t as one of the Children of the Gods. It did not, of course, end well for Socrates or Aristotle, but Plato managed somehow to avoid the persecution of the agents of religion. This challenge to religious authority was partly responsible for elevating abstract universal knowledge above concrete myth, which we know was not universal, but necessarly perspectival. One could not, for example, imagine Plato or Aristotle going to war with Socrates in relation to a difference in opinion over the “Form of the Good”. Individual heros or Gods and Goddesses, were being replaced, not by other heros, gods and goddesses, but by argumentation in accordance with logical principles and categorical conceptual distinctions. Freud would certainly have viewed the Ancient Greek Philosophy of Religion in terms of a healthy non pathological extraverted relation to the divine, free of hubris, infantile narcissism and its wishes and fears.
Both Spinoza and Kant argued for a Religion within the Bounds of Reason, insisting, for example, that reference to certain kinds of supernatural events in the Bible must not be interpreted literally but rather, metaphorically. The idea, for example, of a disembodied soul dwelling in a divine Kingdom of Heaven is, on such a view, a kind of Metaphor for the continued existence of the universal psuché.
Neither Aristotle nor Kant would deny therefore that although the enigma of Beings was difficult to decipher, the masks of these Beings did in fact reveal, for example, the presence of such Beings in Thought and in the extended world of Nature. Spinoza is the Philosopher that comes to mind in the context of this discussion, maintaining as he did that God or Substance has an infinite number of attributes, only two of which, namely, thought and extension, are accessible to mortal human psuché (an individual mode of Being). Kant, in his work, “The Critique of Judgement” referred to an inscription on a statue located at the Temple of Isis which claimed that no mortal had ever lifted the veil over the face of divine beings. This phenomenal account of the beings dwelling in the realm of the sacred comes to the attention of the individual mode of mortal human psuché via the attributes of thought and extension (only two of a possible infinity of attributes).
Now whilst Spinoza conceived of his Divine Substance in terms of the immanent cause of everything that occurs in the universe, his monistic ontology was questioned by Kant who conceived of a trinity of faculties of mind (sensibility, understanding, and reason) and a dualistic metaphysics of Nature and Morals, demanding different categorical frameworks to explain/justify natural events and moral actions. Spinoza invokes the notion of the knowledge of adequate ideas in a deterministic world-system, claimig that they play an important part in achieving amour intellectualis Dei–the joyous love of God, the infinite source of self-causing power in the universe, of which we, the human form of psuché, are a finite form, striving to maintain ourselves in existence using our finite power of reason and our inadequate and adequate ideas of the causes of our conscious experiences of the world.
Freedom for Spinoza, as it is for Kant is an idea of reason which uses its power to transcend inactive emotions and passions which are always based on inadequate ideas. It is not clear exactly, to what extent Kant agrees with this monistic ontological characterisation of God given his metaphysical dualism and his insistence upon a categorical framework of its own to characterise free human moral action, which, of course, presupposes knowledge of the operative causes of phenomenal events in the universe. Both Kant and Spinoza, however, are rationalists who are sceptical of religious texts promoting unrealistic desires and hopes and depicting supernatural events for which there could be no adequate ideas of the causes.
Kants Critical Philosophy, like the Philosophy of Spinoza allows us to conceive of the eternal in terms of its transcendence and immanence both here and now but also everywhere and for all time. Spinozas God is, of course, infinite and therefore beyond the here and now, whilst simultaneously being present here and now. God is also beyond but present in the true and the false , the right and the wrong. Critical Philosophy, however, prefers to view God as the moral guarantor for the good spirited flourishing lives of those worthy souls possessing good/holy wills. We have, Kant argues, more access to this infinite holy Being via our practical reason and our wills, than our theoretical judgements relating to Gods form of existence.
Aristotle, in his work on Metaphysics, chooses to conceive of God only through the attribute of Thought, yet transcending thought via the infinite power of thnking about thinking, whilst conceiving of the human form of psuché and its power of noos, to “participate” in this “first principle” or “form of the mind”.
Campbell claims that Art engages with both immanence and transcendence and various themes important to mythological thinking. For Kant, we know that Art engages aesthetically with life, and reference is made to the “form of finality” of the Art-object which the Art Critic, Adrian Stokes claims is a good object aiming to both envelop us in its constructed work, whilst simultaneously putting truth to work by standing transcendentally unconcealed for something good in life that gives rise to an intellectual pleasure that is perhaps related to the love one has for God via ones adequate ideas. Cambell expresses this by pointing to what he believes to be the metaphysical significance of art and its capacity to take us on a journey to:
“the shores of experience beyond the categories of thought.”(Page 3)
We appear on the above accounts to be in a realm beyond knowledge , a realm of Wisdom that incorporates both knowledge and the “form of the good” in accordance with different categorical frameworks. These categorical frameworks, for Kant, play a more decisive role, and have given birth to major criticisms of consequentialist ethical theories which invoke a theoretical linear cause-effect framework for the evaluation of what is good. Stating as these theories do, that it is good consequences that constitute the goodness of an ethical action, ignores the convoluted history of the opposition to this claim, which began by Glaucon demanding of Socrates’ theory of justice, that it be both, good-in-its-consequences, and good-in-itself. Plato produced his theory of Forms in The Republic, in response to this demand which helped to form the categorical framework for ought-statements (One ought to keep promises)–as opposed to is-statements describing a state of affairs. The modern rendition of the conflict between these categorical frameworks is the claim that one cannot derive an ought conclusion from a set of is-premises, on pain of being accused of the naturalistic fallacy. “Promises ought to be kept”, on this account, becomes a kind of justificatory principle: a constitutive condition governing the action of promising
Kant would refer to the “shore of experience” Campbel points to, in terms of a “feeling of life”, which can be described as a boundless outlook onto a future of happiness. This feeling of life is also accompanied by the pleasure at the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding, which arises either firstly, because of the potential for the experience to be conceptualised in the case of the experience of the beautiful, or, secondly because of the potential for the experience of the sublime to associate itself with the moral idea of a moral agent possessing a moral will.
Art-objects created in the Greek spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and aletheia (truth being put to work in the object for the telos of unconcealment) are using the symbolic structure of transcendental analogy referred to by Kant in his work “Prolegomena”:
E.G., A is to B as C is to X
“For instance, as the promotion of the welfare of children (=a) as to the love of the parents (=b), so the welfare of the human species (=c) is to that unknown in God(=x). which we call love….But the relational concept in this case is mere category, viz., the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with sensibility.” (Page 98)
Another important form of the transcendental analogy occurs in relation to Art. Kant has the followng to say in a footnote:
“I may say that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same place with regard to the world that human reason does with regard to its works of art. Here the nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains unknownto me: I only compare its effects(the order of the world), which I know, and their conformity to reason to the effects of human reason, which I also know….”(Page 100)
The above is obviously a more complex structure than the use of metaphor we encounter in the poets use of this linguistic instrument, for example, in the expression “Man is a wolf” where human psuché is positioned in an epistemological structure of genus and species: thereby placing human psuché in the wider category of psuché as such and animal psuché in particular, perhaps simultaneously making the Aristotleian point that man can be the worst of animals.. Transcendental analogy, on the other hand, transports us further up the scale of rationality, to man at his best, striving via the power of noos toward possessing a divine sacred/holy will. It is in this region of Being that the Kantian idea of a boundless happy outlook onto the future, comes into play. as long as the outlook belongs to a man of moral worth and dignity. Kant’s vision is that the only viable practical argument for the existence of God is as a Supreme Cause of the “Kingdom of Ends”: an end state in which men treat each other as ends-in-themselves and as a conseqence rewarded with a good-spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia).
Campbell claims in this work that in occidental mythology the final terms God and Man stand opposed to one another, as contradictions, and therefore, pose a problem for the resolution of the problem of the opposition of the two contradictories. The Old Testament Book of Job demands absolute obedience to a jealous and angry Yahweh who chooses the tribe of the Israelites to be “his” people. Greek mythology, in contrast, prizes the judgement and dignity of man to such an extent that it is even capable of judging the character of the gods of the Greek Pantheon. The rational animal capable of discourse values his own form of human psuché almost as much as the form of God which he experiences via the proclamations of the prophets and holy men, who claim to have some kind of special access to the being behind the proclamations, or aternatively some kind of special access to, or use of, noos, the divine part of the mind of human psuché. Oriental Mythology, on the other hand, views this occidental perspective of Man as a possible equal and judge, at least insofar as his own life is concerned, as heretical, and the work of the devil.
We, in the West, communed with God in the Garden of Eden until the serpent and Eve colluded to persuade Adam to go in search for the Truth by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in contravention of the divine proclamation forbidding the act in question. The Serpent, Campbell claims, in Chapter One of hos work “Occidental Mythology” (New York, Viking Press, 2001, Page 9), was a divinity in the Levant for at least 7000 years before the book of Genesis. The Serpent symbolises death and rebirth and was a Lord of the Waters of the Earth whose activities are both constituted and regulated by the Moon. The serpent is, popularly speaking for modern men, a primitive form of life symbolising danger and the ruin of ones hopes. Previously, of course, the serpent was both a phallic symbol and a symbol for female genitalia, and we ought to recall in the context of this discussion, what whilst Buddha was sitting at the immovable spot beneath the tree of Enlightenment, he was approached in a threatening manner by Kama- Mara the creator of the world we think we know, and symbol of the desire for life and the fear of death, and it was Mother Earth who came to the rescue with the proclamation. “I bear you witness!”. This event was followed by Buddhas Enlightenment, whereupon a serpent enveloped the Enlightened one as a protective measure.
This is the Serpent the Old Testament Yahweh cursed upon learning of its role in the defiance of the divine proclamation. The female Eve, too, was cursed and the first couple were expelled from Eden and the promise of divine immortality was withdrawn, along with the company of God, who, at this point was well on his way to becoming a Deus Absconditis. The scene of the crime was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and this tree became the centre of a plot very different to that of Buddhas Tree of Enlightenment. This experience of Enlightenment for Buddha was a transcendental experience, transcending amongst other things the illusions of the world we think we know, which may well present as knowledge of the world and knowledge of human psuché.
Greek Mythology, however, had they imagined a Garden of Eden, would not have placed the first couple in such a state of subservience to the divinity of the Garden, and certainly would not have condemned the serpent and Eve for searching for the truth and placing the divine proclamation in brackets, whilst they satisfied their dpistemological curiosities. Campbell refers, in the context of this discussion to icons from the Near East, e.g. “The Garden of Immortality”, in which all the human figures are female (two of which are related to the underworld dvinity Gula-Bau, and one of which was a mortal woman grasping a branch of fruit:
“Thus we perceive that in this early mythic system of the nuclear Near East—in contrast to the latter, strictly patriarchical system of the Bible—divinity could be represented as well under feminine as under masculine form, the qualifying form itself being merely the mask of an ultimately unqualified principle, beyond, yet inhabiting all names and forms. Nor is there any sign of divine wrath or danger to be found in these seals. There is no theme of guilt connected wit the Garden.” (Page 13)
Campbell refers also to an inversion of sense in the legacy of Greek Mythology described by Jane Ellen Harrison in relation to the field-festivals and mystery cults. An earth goddess in various forms( e.g. the Erinyes?) reigned over the living and the dead:
“Her consort was typically a serpent form; and her rites were not characterised by the blithe spirit of manly athletic games, humanistic art, social enjoyment, feasting and theatre that the modern mind associates with Classical Greece, but were in spirit dark and full of dread. The offerings were not of cattle, gracefully garlanded, but of pigs and human beings, directed downward, not upward to the light: and rendered not in polished marble temples, radiant at the hour of rosy-fingered dawn, but in twilight groves and fields, over trenches through which the fresh blood poured into the bottomless abyss: “The beings worshipped”, Miss Harrison wrote, “were not rational human law abiding gods, but vague irrational, mainly malevolent spirit-things, ghosts and bogeys, and the like, not yet formulated and enclosed into god-head.” (Pages 17-18)
Campbell elaborates upon this theme by claiming that the spirit of the above sacrificial rituals was not that of giving in order to receive, but rather, of the giving of something in the hope that something unwanted will depart. Campbell also refers to the multifarious forms of the divinities by commenting on the icon “Zeus Meilichios”, expressing his amazement, given that this form originally belonged to a local daemon who was the son/husband of the Mother Earth Spirit(s). Such cults of fertility and sacrifice continued and became well documented by Sir James G Frazers work “The Golden Bough”. Frazer describes a sacred grove in which an ominous Priest-King roams with sword in hand ready to murder, perhaps setting the tone for Royal rule for centuries to come. In one Pre-Hellenic ritual scene from Epirus there is a sacred grove in which a maiden priestess without clothing brings swarms of snakes reputedly descended from the Python of Delphi, their food. How the snakes behave portends the spirit of the coming year, whether it will be fruitful and healthy, or riddled with disease and starvation. At the centre of this Greek idyll featuring a garden at peace, were women and serpents living harmoniously together. This idyll was disrupted by the nomadic Aryan cattle herders/warriors from the North and the Semitic sheep/goat herders/warriors from the South. These were people for whom “honour” was associated with prowess in battle and the conquest of desired territories.
Zeus, in fact, was a warrior God of this kind and his presence rapidly overshadowed that of the religiously inclined goddesses. Women, who were the givers and supporters of life were usurped by these new warrior-heros from the North ad South with their furious fires and swords. In the Old Testament this shift in the form of the divinity was characterised by Yahwehs slaying of the sea-serpet, Leviathan. The Greek equivalent of this symbol was the victory of Zeus over the younger child of Gaia, Typhon.
The Serpent symbol, we know, retained its hold over the Oriental Vedic Gods, thereby questioning the spirit of the warrior-hero which became the enduring symol of all occidental mythology: The Greeks, Romans, Germans and Celts. The slaying of monster serpents of the earth, celebrated the superiority of the Gods of the Heavens over the Goddesses of the Earth which were, over time, demoted to local daemons (Page 24)
The Garden of Eden Myth is clearly not as ancient as the monster/serpent myth, and is perhaps interpreted too anthropomorphically. The serpent that could talk was certainly a divinity, as must have been both the characters of Adam and Eve, even if here too Adam was the superior being, giving up a rib for the creation of Eve. Both of these characters, living as they did in the Garden, had access to the Tree of Immortality. The plot of Eve tempting Adam with earthly desires and subsequent exile from Paradise along with the serpent did not set out to praise the character of man, as might an Aristotleian-Kantian reinterpretation of these events. The Philosophical perspective would not focus upon the sin or flaw of mankind, but rather upon the act of will by both Adam and Eve to freely acquire knowledge from this mysterious Tree.
The Tale of the Old Testament is, of course, designed to warn all of mankind of the possible ruin and destruction that might follow from mans hubris, from turning ones back on ones God, but if, it is the case, as both Aristotle and Kant claim, that human psuché can only experience God via noos, the divine part of their minds, then the human psuché also becomes a causa sui, a cause of its own potential for Being rational and approaching the divine form of Being. For these Philosophers, the Garden of Eden myth becomes a celebration of the moment man freely chose the human form of life.