The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

III. Philosophical Developments—Tonic, Eleatic, and Pythagorean Positions

1. IONIAN SCHOOL: “AIR,” “WATER,” “FIRE,” “INFINITE.”

As stated, Greek philosophy, which developed from the Greek poets, began as an attempt to find natural causes for the phenomena of the world and the universe. The earliest school of Greek philosophy was founded at Miletus, the Ionian capital. It is therefore called both the Milesian and the Ionian School. The Ionian view was materialistic, in that it sought to reduce the baffling cause of all things to one underlying substance with mathematical ratios and proportions. CFF1 540.2

THALES (c. 640-546 B.C.), the first Greek philosopher and one of the “seven sages,” ¹⁹ was the first to attempt a scientific explanation of the world by seeking the unifying principle of existence. ²⁰ Believing the world to be a unit, and beginning with physical speculation (possibly influenced by Egypt and its fertilizing Nile), Thales sought in water the source of life and the first principle of all things. To him “soul” was the synonym of life and the cause of motion. ²¹ CFF1 540.3

But three rival views soon proposed other solutions. ANAXIMENES (c. 500-c. 428 B.C.) asserted that the human soul consists of atmospheric “air” (airlike), and material life consists of inhaling and exhaling it. When that process stops, death comes. He also held that “air” is the “soul” of the world, and the Universal Being was identified with the air we breathe. But ANAXIMANDER (c. 611-547 B.C.), of Miletus, held that all things arose by separation from a universal mixture of all, which basic substance he called “The Infinite,” characterized by internal energy and absolute unchangeability ²² On the contrary, HERACLITUS (c. 544-c. 484 B.C.), of Ephesus, held the first principle to be “fire.” CFF1 540.4

With some the “soul” took on new meaning, being completely identified with the mind, the human powers of thought and will. Its individual existence after death was inconceivable. With such, the soul was merely a function of the various elements of the body—a transient individualism that terminated at death. These are all speculative philosophies. CFF1 541.1

2. ELEATIC SCHOOL: PHILOSOPHY BECOMES PANTHEISTIC

The polemic of the Eleatic School (named from Elea), and founded by Xenophanes and Parmenides, with Zeno, was against the popular polytheism. It was ostensibly searching for the permanent and indestructible amid the perishable and evanescent. The Eleatics taught that all things were a unit, and that unit was God—and so the view was definitely pantheistic. They stressed the unity and continuity of the world, as touching God and man. They held to eternal and changeless reality of being and the unreality of change—change being only apparent and delusive. Everything that is exists; therefore “being” is indestructible. Souls go from light to darkness and back again. ²³ But the pantheistic concepts of this school left “no room for the future individual existence of the soul.” ²⁴ CFF1 541.2

XENOPHANES (c. 570-475 B.C.) put his doctrines into practical forms, differing from Homer and Hesiod. He proclaimed God an all-powerful Being, existing from eternity. Yet his was not a monotheistic position. His was a philosophical pantheistic god. The one principle, or power, was the same as the one immutable, material universe, the substance of which, having existed from eternity, must be identical with God—otherwise there would be two Omnipresents. CFF1 541.3

To him, God was the world of nature, underived and imperishable. Thus he abandoned the pursuit of visible nature and turned to an investigation of “Being” and of God. ²⁵ Zeller observes, “Xenophanes is the first philosophical representative of the pantheism, which also underlies the system of Heracleitus.” ²⁶ CFF1 542.1

PARMENIDES (c. 540-c. 470 B.C.), stressing unity and permanence of “Being,” taught the pre-existence of the soul and its survival after the death of the body ²⁷—a holdover from the Orphic and Pythagorean schools. His pantheism appears in the declaration that the All of the cosmos is thought and intelligence. And by placing “thought” and “being” in parallelism with each other, and contending that it is for the sake of being that thought exists, he sets them forth as one. ²⁸ CFF1 542.2

He also associates light with “Being,” and night with “Non-Being,” and seems to have conceived the beginning of the human race as a development from primitive slime, brought about by the heat of the sun. And he insistently derived the life of the soul from the mixture of substances in the body. ²⁹ Such were his curious concepts. CFF1 542.3

ZENO of Elea (fifth century) boldly defended his predecessors’ doctrine of the “motionless All-One.” And in dealing with the origin and nature of the soul he too held it to be the “resultant of a material mixture,” not an “independent substance.” Nevertheless, the Eleatics inconsistently held that the “deity that rules the world ‘at one time sends it [the “preexistent”] out of the Invisible into the Visible, and at another time back again.’” (By “Visible” is meant the life in the body.) And this process, it is added, is “several times repeated, in those two worlds”—an alternating life. That too, of course, is straight “Orphic-Pythagorean theosophy.” ³⁰ CFF1 542.4

3. HERACLITUS: SOUL IS IMMORTAL SPARK FROM ETERNAL FIRE

Opposing Thales’ position on “air” as the unifying principle of existence, HERACLITUS (c. 544-c. 484 B.C.) held everliving, divine “fire” to be the animating principle of the universe. And of this infinite fire the soul is a spark or portion ³¹—and the purer the fire, the more perfect the soul. Consequently, the perishable body was despised. The soul of man is an emanation from the universal fire, or soul, which comprises everything and sustains all, and is imperishable. Thus man and the gods are said to be akin. “The very birth of man is ... a birth into death,” but the soul lives on. CFF1 543.1

Picture 3: Heraclitus:
Heraclitus Held the Soul to Be an Emanation From the Universal Soul Which Comprises Everything and Is Imperishable.
Page 543

Ritter cites Heraclitus as saying that “death is in our life, and life in our death.” Again, “Men are mortal gods, the gods immortal men, living in man’s death, and dying in man’s life.” The heaven of the Ionic was “reabsorption into the divine reason.” ³² CFF1 543.2

In opposition to the Eleatics, Heraclitus denied that permanence exists. He insisted on the changeability of all things, everything being in a state of “continual flux,” of movement and flow, with continuing growth and decay and balance in these changes. Zeller stresses Heraclitus’ belief in the preexistence of the soul and its continuance after death. While there are periodic conflagrations of the world, the soul survives them all. Life is preserved by the renewal of the divine fire. Souls enter bodies because they require a change. They become weary of the same state. And the universal soul is simply this “divine animating fire.” Souls enter the human body from a higher existence. ³³ CFF1 544.1

Here are key expressions from Rohde’s highly documented, masterful survey: “Living is becoming, changing, becoming something different without cessation.” “Fire and psyche [soul] are interchangeable terms.” ³⁴ “A portion of his [god’s] universal wisdom is living in the soul of man.” The soul is “a portion of the universal Fire.” “It absorbs fresh fire from the living Fire of the universe that surrounds it.” Moreover, the soul does not “maintain itself as a single person,” but “is in reality a series of souls and personalities, one taking the place of another and ousting and being ousted in turn.” ³⁵ CFF1 544.2

“There is no such thing as death in the absolute sense—an end followed by no beginning.” For man, death is “only a point where one condition of things gives way to another ... involving death for one but simultaneously bringing birth and life for another.” ³⁶ And finally, “The soul of man has a claim to immortality only as an emanation of the universal Reason, and shares the immortality which belongs to it.” ³⁷ CFF1 544.3

That is the gross pagan concept held by Heraclitus, derived from the Mysteries, with rank pantheism, emanation, transmigration, and reabsorption with its loss of continuing personality. CFF1 544.4

4. PYTHAGORAS: ETERNITY OF SOUL AND SUCCESSIVE TRANMIGRATIONS

The teaching of PYTHAGORAS (C. 582-496 B.C.), founder of the Pythagorean society, or brotherhood, was characterized by a pronounced metempsychosis, derived from the Orphics. In fact, Pythagoras simply philosophized the Orphic theosophy. Pythagoras taught that God was the great fountain, or immortal mind, whence the minds or souls of all intelligent beings emanated; that the soul existed as an entity before it animated the body; that it will transmigrate successively through different bodies until it returns to God, its original source, and is reabsorbed into His essence. He held the soul to be material, not pure spirit. CFF1 545.1

Picture 4: Pythagoras:
Pythagoras Likewise taught the Eternity of the Soul and Successive Transmigrations.
Page 545

Souls are said to be confined to bodies because of previous sins, and are released through the death of the body. Pythagoras thus affirmed the continued “being” of the soul, ³⁸ each soul returning to an earthly life. ³⁹ Thus the soul is an “imperishable essence,” as no real entity is ever either made or destroyed. CFF1 545.2

Pythagoras emphasized the harmony of the spheres, with mathematics as the basis of his speculative system. Numbers were the substance of things, and the harmony of the celestial spheres was based on the assumption that they were separated by intervals, corresponding to various lengths of instrumental strings, and thus produced harmony. The universe is in an “eternal flux,” with persons, as well as events, repeated in “regular cycles.” The Pythagoreans laid much stress on opposites, a concept likewise found in contemporary Gnosticism. Embracing these tenets, aristocratic secret societies, or brotherhoods, were formed, adhering to a rigorous code. CFF1 545.3

According to Rohde’s researches, Pythagoras taught that the soul of man is the “double” of the physical body, cast down from the heights for punishment, and thus confined to “custody” of a body. But a soul has no real or necessary connection with the particular body in which it dwells, but may possess any body. When death separates the soul from the body there is first a period of purification in Hades, and then a return to earth, to be reborn into another body. This is repeated many times. Finally, after a sequence of transmigrations it is released from its earthly pilgrimage and is restored to a divine existence. CFF1 546.1

The Pythagorean goal of the soul was this ultimate restoration to the divine state with the gods—an “emancipated existence as a bodiless spirit.” ⁴⁰ Thus the chain of deaths and rebirths is broken, with escape from the cycle as the ultimate benefit. ⁴¹ That was the sole hope of escape. CFF1 546.2

To put it another way, Pythagoras held that “number is the essence or first principle of things”—“All comes from one,” and “God embraces all and actuates all, and is but one.” This, of course, is sheer pantheism, doubtless derived from Egypt and India. ⁴² “So long as the soul is in the body it requires the body ...; separated from the body it leads an incorporeal life in the higher world” ⁴³—a view later embraced by Plato. Pythagoras likewise held the theory of the “music of the spheres,” and the soul as the harmony of the body, like the melody of a lyre. CFF1 546.3