Olympianism and Platonism

[sdi]

A while back—I want to say it was on sanepolytheism, but I can't find it now—some folks were talking about Greek religion, and I made the point that it seemed to me like Olympianism and Platonism were completely different religions and that Socrates really was killed for "introducing foreign gods" (rather than it being a empty accusation). (Part of the reason I felt like this is the case is that Ælius Aristides—a worshipper of the Olympians in general and Asclepius in particular—is quite hostile to philosophy, despite being a very smart cookie himself.)

Well, I'm currently reading Journey in Truth and Pathways of Philosophy by Manly P. Hall, which together form a whirlwind tour of Western philosophy (particularly idealist philosophy) from Orpheus to Emerson. (Spoiler alert: Hall is a hardcore Neoplatonist.) In contrast to most scholars I've seen—who say that Platonism grew out of and was a mature form of Greek folk religion—he emphasizes that it's a different religion entirely, like I intuited.

His claim is that Orpheus was a real person (or a mythic aggregation of several real persons) of Asian extraction—Orpheus means "dark," as in "dark-skinned"—who introduced a cult to Greece some generations before Homer. This cult was never large, but it was immensely influential through Pythagoras, who was initiated into it by Pherecydes of Syros and introduced many of its doctrines, such as metempsychosis, into the Pythagorean cult. (Pythagoras also imported a great many other foreign influences, including Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Vedic.) The Pythagoreans were under heavy political persecution and also remained underground, until Plato—obsessed with philosophy thanks to Socrates—was initiated into the the tattered cult and incorporated what remained of its doctrines into the Academy.

Consequently, despite sharing a geographic region, Hall claims that Platonism is descended from Orphism and various other Asian spiritualities and adapted to Greek culture, rather than being descended from Greek folk religion proper.

Let me hasten to note that I don't say this to start a this-is-better-than-that argument—all divine revelation is divine, doofus—but simply to say that there seem to be very real distinctions between Greek paganism and the more spiritual end of classical philosophy, despite a lot of crossover, and those distinctions should be kept in mind lest confusion result.

Comments

[sdi]

Along similar lines, the last time I was at the library, I came across an essay by Werner Jæger, "Origin of the Doctrine of the Soul's Divinity" in The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, which makes the similar point that the entire notion of a divine, immortal soul in it's modern form is not to be found in Homer or Hesiod. (In fact, it's earliest expression is Anaximenes, who antedates Pythagoras.) The Homeric notion of the shade, he argues, is a completely separate one and unrelated to the soul.

(I'm still working on understanding how the shade fits into Plotinus and Porphyry, but I think it's the same thing as the spirit which connects the soul to the body: the body is mortal, personal, and passive; the shade is semi-mortal, semi-personal, and semi-active (lacking volition); the soul is immortal, impersonal, and active. Consequently it's assumed, I think, that in the common form of death (when the soul is still focused downwards), the body dies but the shade lingers for some time until it finally dissolves and the soul reincarnates.)

But anyway, this also seems to suggest core doctrinal differences between the Olympian religion (as championed by Homer and Hesiod) and the philosophers.

[boccaderlupo]

Margaret Barker argues that Pythagoras may have derived some of his ideas, in turn, from the Jews—which would thus make Platonism's eventual "merging" with later Christian thinkers a kind of grand circuit. Whether one believes this to be the case or not, it's intriguing, and the mere fact that one could mount such an argument suggests the strong discrepancy between the early mythic religion and later incarnations.

[sdi]

What a fascinating theory! Let me add that to my reading list and get back to you once I've had a chance to digest it...

[causticus]

This makes a ton of sense. I do wonder where the true geographic origin of the Orphic cult might have been and if it really predated Pythagoras by all that much time.


btw, thanks for the links!

[sdi]

The cult was traditionally held to have centered in Thrace (e.g. the Balkans northeast of modern Greece, figure roughly modern Bulgaria). More modern interpretations assume he was from further east and Thrace was merely the location of contact with the Greek world, in the same way Aphrodite is said to have first come ashore in Cyprus but that's merely because that's where the Greek world would first had contact with Ishtar (by way of Phoenician Astarte).

Traditional sources give a date for Orpheus of "several generations before Homer," and assume that he's of the same generation as Heracles, Jason, Laertes, and all the rest of the Argonauts, which I'd take as a "cast of characters" remembered from the Mycenaean Age (which is, I would assume, the correct timeframe). Hall suggests c. 1200 BC, which is at least in line with the fall of Troy. In any case, we're talking about a minimum of 600 years before Pythagoras.