Quote for the Week

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul; on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful.

–Plato, The Republic, Book 3; courtesy of Wikiquote.

The Gnostic Mythos

I’ve been thinking about looking at how the Gnostic mythos is expressed in many contemporary movies.  Upon reflection, I realized that despite having written an entire series on Gnosticism, I have never written a post specifically outlining the Gnostic mythos.  Some have touched on parts of it; but I’ve never discussed it as a whole.  Therefore, I decided to remedy this oversight–hence, the current post.

Of course an expression such as “Gnostic mythos” assumes that there is such a thing as a standardized, “official” Gnostic mythos in the first place.  In fact, it has been argued that the term “Gnosticism” itself is problematic at best, and useless at worst.  I wouldn’t go as far as that.  Nevertheless, it is true that there were a lot of very different groups which are often in modern times lumped together as “Gnostic”, with varying degrees of justification.  For the purposes of what I’m going to discuss here, I will specifically look at the mythos of the best-known and most famous Gnostic group, the Sethians.  The side benefit of this is that there is evidence, according to scholar David Brakke (which I discussed here) that the Sethians actually used the term “Gnostic” of themselves.  I tend to agree with Brakke on this.  Thus, by discussing the Sethian mythos, it’s perfectly accurate to describe what I’m doing as discussing the Gnostic mythos.

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and Why We Shouldn’t Misbehave

 

In discussions on universalism, the question is sooner or later raised by the non-universalist in the dialogue, “If all are ultimately saved, then why be moral?  Why not live it up and do whatever you want?  After all, you’ll be saved anyway–so why not get the best of both worlds?”  I’m often perplexed as to how to respond.  On the most fundamental level, this argument, as I’ve noted in the past, misses the point altogether.  Whether belief in universalism persuades people to become debauched libertines or not has no bearing on whether it’s actually true.  You might as well say that the tax code is a mess and has all kinds of bad results, and that therefore it must not exist!  Universalism may have negative moral implications, or it may not; but to say that it is invalid because of these purported implications is just as silly as saying the tax code doesn’t exist because I don’t like it.

Another approach would be to question the moral development of of the person who asks this question.  In Kohlberg’s well-known stages of moral development, the higher levels of morality are increasingly less concerned with a fear of punishment or a conniving attempt to get away with whatever one can get away with.  The concern as to the behavior of believers in universalism seems to betray a lower developmental stage on the part of the person making the anit-universalist argument, or an assumption on her part that humans in general are at a lower stage of moral development.  In fairness, though, such a counter-argument smacks of the genetic fallacy, as well.  After all, a person’s stage of moral development is no more relevant to the truth of non-universalism than the supposed behavior of universalists is relevant to the truth of universalism.  Thus, this is probably not the best way to go in responding to this question.

Sometimes, feeling flip, I want to answer the question, “Why be moral if all are saved?” by saying, “Why not?”  Nevertheless, there is a serious intent behind this question, and I will try to deal with it seriously.  I will try to give at least a partial reason why we should be moral even if we all eventually end up in heaven.

Confucius and Socrates

I’ve mentioned the term “Rectification of Names” before.  The term in Chinese is  正名, or in Pinyin transcription, Zhèngmíng.  This is a very important concept in Confucius’s philosophy, and in my view it is universally applicable.  The basic idea is that one has to have a clear understanding of the world as it is and to use this understanding to call things what they actually are.  In short, we are enjoined to be honest, and in order to be fully honest we must not only not lie, but we must describe things as they really are.  To this end, we must dispense with cant, jargon, obfuscation, propaganda, and so on.  We should call things what they are because only in so doing can we understand how we should behave in any given situation.  The paragraph below gives a succinct description from the Analects (courtesy of here):

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

— Confucius, Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4-7, translated by James Legge

Rectification of Names is a Confucian term, but the idea behind it, as I said, is universal.  One of the greatest proponents of this concept, though he didn’t use that term, was the great Greek philosopher Socrates.  The “Gadfly”, as he called himself, was so important in the history of Western philosophy that all Greek philosophers prior to him are lumped together as the “Pre-Socratics”.  Socrates himself never wrote anything–our knowledge of him comes from his portrayals in the dialogues of his greatest disciple, Plato.  In his earlier dialogues, Plato is considered to have portrayed Socrates fairly accurately, though later on he uses him more as a mouthpiece.  In any case, I want to focus here on Socrates’ discussion of what is known as the Euthyphro Dilemma, named after the dialogue in which it is discussed.

Quote for the Week

Coming to the fair land of Cecropia
he piously founded an altar of holy friendship
for a man whom the wicked may not properly even praise;
he, alone or the first of mortals, showed clearly
by his own life and by the courses of his arguments
that a man becomes good and happy at the same time:
but now none can grasp this any more.

–Aristotle, Altar Elegy, in which he speaks of his mentor and teacher, Plato

How to Make a Universe

It occurs to me that during the course of the various religious and philosophical musings I’ve posted here, there are some concepts which I have used very frequently, but which I haven’t really elaborated.  In short, I’ve just tossed them out with a link, if that, and plowed on.  One such example in particular is the concept of emanation.  Emanation is a highly important concept in both Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, in which they both differ from orthodox Christianity.  The mode in which the universe came into existence has implications for one’s theology, cosmology, and philosophy, so I think it’s worth revisiting these different views on the origin of the cosmos and looking at them in greater depth.

First, it’s important to look more generally at how the universe came into being.  First, one might maintain that the universe did not come into being at all, since it has existed and will exist eternally.  Both some atheists and some theistic systems assume this model.  The universe may change or go through cycles (which may or may not repeat), but it has no discrete origin.  It’s worth pointing out that even this perspective doesn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility of creation.  As Mortimer Adler pointed out in his book How to Think About God, one can still think of God “exnihilating”–holding in existence–a cosmos without linear beginning or end.  As I’ve explained in more detail here, God, properly understood, is completely outside of time and space in the sense in which we use those terms.  A linear infinity of time–going infinitely into the past and likewise into the future–is still far “smaller” or “less” than the true atemporal eternity of God.  To re-use the image I used in the earlier post consider:

Eternity, in this depiction, really shouldn’t be a separate sphere, but the entire plane–or better, the entire space–within which the comparatively tiny line of time lies and by which it is supported.  Thus, God can easily be thought of as creating spacetime in all its linear infinity as a mere drop in the higher-order infinity proper to Him.

Neoplatonism

In order meaningfully to discuss reincarnation in a Christian context, we’ll have to look at Origen.  However, to understand him, and the overall milieu, we’ll have to look at the philosophical system that moderns refer to as Neoplatonism.  And so the posts multiply….

To use the term “Neoplatonism”, and to describe it as a philosophy is doubly misleading.  None of its followers would  have called it “Neoplatonism–for them it was just “Platonism”, the teachings of the great Plato.  It is we moderns who distinguish the various phases and gradual changes in the philosophical system that began with Plato and lasted for nearly a millennium–arguably longer than that.

Also, “philosophy” didn’t mean the same to the ancients as it does to us.  Philosophy–“love of wisdom”–did not mean abstract speculation on the nature of reality, or metaphysics, or such.  It meant an integrated way of life that sought wisdom as a way for finding out how humans should live, behave, and prepare for death.  What the ancients called philosophy was closer to what we’d term “religion”.  The main difference is that as products of a Judeo-Christian background, we tend to view religion as bodies of dogmatic teachings that are more or less incompatible.

Greek philosophical schools were more like modern religions such as Buddhism or the Vedanta schools of Hinduism in that they were more concerned with developing practices and attitudes that would guide followers in this life and the next than with pantheons or revelations.  Thus, a Neoplatonist, or Stoic, or Epicurean might take various elements of other belief systems that seemed useful, and might participate (or not participate) in public worship of any pantheon, or none.  Thus, while each philosophical school had distinct beliefs and attitudes, none were exclusivist.  Just as modern Japanese might combine Shinto, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist beliefs and practices into their lives–belonging to more than one religion at once–a Neoplatonist might worship Greek or Roman or Syrian gods, or none, or even be a Christian.   This despite the fact that Christians and Neoplatonists often argued against each other!

Anyway, I’d like to give a very brief outline of Neoplatonism as background to upcoming posts. 

I’m a Dualist–Except When I’m Not

After finishing my “Athens or Jerusalem” post, I still wasn’t satisfied that I’d conveyed what I intended to.  I felt I was leaving stuff out, or not nuancing it, despite the fact that the post in question ran to nearly 2500 words!  This post is a slight tangent from that one, but I hope that it will be a little clearer in getting across my frame of mind in regard to the earlier one.

As I’ve discussed at greater length here, I have, by temperament, by inclination, and by deep gut feeling been strongly Platonist all my life.  I didn’t have the language to express that concept until I got to college, and didn’t think about it in regard to my worldview until much later.  It also wasn’t until later that I realized that my mathematical intuitions further coincided with my longstanding perspective in this area.  To make this more concrete in speaking of myself, it would be easiest to say that I have always strongly favored the abstract and universal over the concrete and particular.

Much of this is probably somatic.  I have, on a couple of occasions, taken the Baron-Cohen Autism Spectrum Quotient test online.  This is the standard test for diagnosing Asperger’s Syndrome.  The threshold at which there is considered to be a high likelihood of Asperger’s is 32–if I recall correctly, I got 28 on one try and maybe 26 or 27 on another.  That seems intuitively correct–on the fringes of borderline autism, but not quite into it.  I had an friend once who was diagnosed with Asperger’s, and though his eccentricities were much greater than mine, and his functionality was marginal whereas I get by fine, there were scary similarities.  I don’t doubt that there is some of the Aspy wiring in my brain.

Asperger’s individuals typically find things and ideas more interesting that people, emotions, and relationships.  This is very much a description of me when I was growing up.  It still rings true in many ways.

In short, like it or not, I am a dualist.

Plato or Aristotle?

There’s a pop-culture game you see now and then, the name of which I’m unsure, but which you could call “this or that”. You name a certain pop-cultural category in which there are (or are perceived to be) two different major choices, and the players pick which one. For example: “Coke or Pepsi”; “Chevy or Ford”; “PC or Mac”; “Marvel or DC”. You get the idea. If one played this game with ancient philosophy, one might say, “Plato or Aristotle”.

The two giants of Classical Greek philosophy are an appropriate “this or that” for various reasons. Theirs are the last two major schools of Classical Greek philosophy–after Aristotle comes the Hellenistic age. Hellenistic philosophy (some characteristic examples of which are Cynicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism) is generally thought to be less ambitious, more inwardly directed, and more pessimistic than Classical philosophy. On the other hand, the towering genius of Plato has had the result that we have only fragments of the pre-Socratics. Many of them probably weren’t systematists; but even of those, such as Pythagoras, who probably were, we have little that remains. Thus, for Greek philosophy at its height, the choices are Plato and Aristotle.