PLUTARCH

 

A Greek philosopher and Priest of the temple at Delphi, Plutarch carried on the tradition. In the second century C.E. he wrote,

“Whereas Heraclitus said, as of some great and lofty achievement, ‘I searched myself out’; and “Know Thyself” was held to be the most god-like of the Delphic inscriptions...”[1]

 

If any Pagans, Lord, Thy grace shall save

From wrath divine, this boon I humbly crave,

Plato and Plutarch save: Thine was the cause

Their speech supported: Thine, too, were the laws

Their hearts obeyed: and if their eyes were blind

To recognize Thee Lord of human kind,

Needs only that Thy gift of grace be shown

To bring them, and bring all men, to the Throne.[2]

 

 

Plutarch On Self-Knowledge.

 

Colotes was an Epicurean who wrote a tract against the Philosophers in about 263 B.C. and Plutarch is writing a refutation to it, about 100 A.D.[3]

 

“Now of these matters Colotes will give us occasion to speak again, as he has brought these charges against many. We pass to the downright derision and scurrility of his attack on Socrates for seeking to discover what man is and ‘Flaunting’ (as Colotes puts it) the boast that he did not even Know Himself. In all this we can see that Colotes for his part had never given himself to the problem. Whereas Heraclitus said as of some great and lofty achievement ‘I searched myself out’; and ‘Know Thyself’[4] was held to be the most godlike of the Delphic inscriptions, being moreover the command that set Socrates to wondering and inquiring so,[5] as Aristotle has said in his Platonic writings. Colotes, however, finds the question absurd. Why then does he not deride his master, Epicurus, too, who did this very thing as often as he wrote or spoke about the constitution of the soul; and the ‘initiation of the aggregate’ [body and soul]? For if (as they themselves hold) the combination of the two parts, a body of certain description and a soul, is man, then one who seeks to discover the nature of soul is seeking to discover the nature of man, starting from the more important source.

 

And that the soul is hard to apprehend by reason and cannot be discerned by sense let us not learn from Socrates, that ‘sophist and charlatan’, but from these sages, who get as far as those powers of the soul that affect the flesh, by which it imparts warmth and softness and firmness to the body, when they manufacture its substance by combining their own varieties of heat, gas and air, but quit before they reach the seat of power. For that whereby it judges, remembers, loves and hates - in short its thinking and reasoning faculty - added to these, they say, from a quality ‘that has no name’.[6] This talk of the thing ‘that has no name’ is, we know, a confession of embarrassed ignorance; what they cannot make out they assert that they cannot name. But let this too be excused,’ as they say. For the thing is evidently nothing ordinary, nor is its understanding easy and a matter for common capacities; it has burrowed into some impenetrable nook and lies most cunningly concealed, if indeed no word in the whole range of language is suited to express it.

 

Then Socrates was not a fool in this endeavour to discover who he was; the fools are all those who take it into their heads to give priority to some other question over this, to which the gnawer must be found, and yet it is so difficult to find.[7]

 

For no one can hope to attain to the understanding of anything else when knowledge of that, which of all he owns comes first and foremost, has eluded his grasp. Still, conceding to him that nothing is so frivolous or cheap as the quest for knowledge of oneself, let us ask him how it can lead’ to the collapse of this life of ours’, or how a man ‘cannot continue to live’ who at some moment or other falls to reasoning with himself. Let me see now, what I am in fact, this thing called I? Am I a blend, the combination of this soul with the body? Or am I rather my soul using my body, as a horseman is a man using horse, not a compound of horse and man?[8]

 

Or is each of us not the soul, but the chief part of the soul, by which we think and reason and act, all the other parts of soul as well as of body being mere instruments of its power? Or is there no substance of soul at all, and has the body unaided acquired by its composition the power of thought and life?’ But it is not with these questions (you say), to which all students of natural philosophy seek an answer, that Socrates abolishes the possibility of living; it is the enormities in the Phaedrus* that make a chaos of our lives, where he believes that he ought to consider himself to see whether he is a beast more intricate and puffed than Typhon, or whether by nature he enjoys a lot that is divine and free from the fumes of infatuation.’ But he did not surely by these reflections made life impossible; he cleared it rather of the crack-brained vapourings of folly and delusion - of the ponderous load of silly conceits and noisy boasting. For this is what Typhon signifies, and your master has implanted plenty of him in you with his war against the gods and godlike men.”[9]

 

*Appendix:: Plato; Phaedrus, 229e- 230a

 

“If our sceptic, with his somewhat crude science, means to reduce everything to the standard of probability he will need a deal of time for it. I myself have certainly no time for the business, and I will tell you why, my friend. I can not as yet “Know Myself,” as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I do not bother about such things, but accept the current beliefs about them, and direct my inquires, as I have just said, rather to myself, to discover whether I really am a more complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a simpler, gentler being whom heaven has blessed with a quiet, un-Typhonic nature.”[10]

 

 

On Soul and the Universe

 

But it seems to have evaded all these philosophers in what way each of us is truly two-fold and composite. For that other two-fold nature of ours they have not discerned, but merely the more obvious one, the blend of soul and body. But that there is some element of composition, some two-fold nature and dissimilarity of the very soul within itself, since the irrational, as though it were another substance, is mingled and joined with reason by some compulsion of Nature - this, it is likely, was not unknown even to Pythagoras, if we may judge by the man’s enthusiasm for the study of music, which he introduced to enchant and assuage the soul, perceiving that the soul has not every part of itself in subjection to discipline and study, and that not every part can be changed from vice by reason, but that the several parts have need of some other kind of persuasion to co-operate with them, to mould them, and tame them, if they are not to be utterly intractable and obstinate to the teaching of philosophy.

 

Plato, however, comprehended clearly, firmly, and without reservation both that the soul of this universe of ours is not simple nor uncompounded nor uniform, but that, being compounded of the potentialities of Sameness and Otherness, in one part it is ever governed in uniformity and revolves in but one and the same order, which maintains control [the fixed stars], yet in another part it is split into movements and circles which go in contrariety to each other and wander about, thus giving rise to the beginnings of differentiation and change and dissimilarity in those things which come into being and pass away on earth [the planets]; also that the soul of man, since it is a portion or a copy of the soul of the Universe and is joined together on principles and in proportion corresponding to those which govern the Universe, is not simple nor subject to similar emotions, but has as one part the intelligent and rational, whose natural duty it is to govern and rule the individual, and as another part the passionate and irrational, the variable and disorderly, which has need of a director. The second part is again subdivided into two parts, [the two are the appetitive and the spirited, or desire and anger.] (Plato; Phaedrus)[11]

 

 

Thou Art

 

But God is (if there be need to say so), and He exists for no fixed time, but for the everlasting ages which are immovable, timeless, and undeviating, in which there is no earlier nor later, no future nor past, no older nor younger; but He, being One, has with only one ‘Now’ completely filled ‘For Ever’; and only when Being is after His pattern is it in reality Being, nor having been nor about to be, nor has it had a beginning nor is it destined to come to an end.

 

Under these conditions, therefore, we ought, as we pay Him reverence, to greet Him and to address Him with the words, ‘Thou Art’; or even, I vow, as did some of the men of old, ‘Thou Art One.’[12]

 

But this much may be said; it appears that as a sort of antithesis to “Thou Art” stands the admonition “Know Thyself” and then again it seems, in a manner, to be in accord therewith, for the one is an utterance addressed in awe and reverence to the god as existent through all eternity, the other is a reminder to mortal man of his own nature...[13]

 

See the Hermetica on the prayer Thou Art; also in the section on Apollo Worship in Ancient Egypt above, the references to ‘Thou Art’.

 

Thou Art

 

And wherewith shall I sing to Thee?

Am I my own,

Or have I anything of my own?

 

Am I other than Thou?

 

Thou art whatsoever I am;

Thou art whatsoever I do,

And whatsoever I say.

 

Thou art all things,

And there is nothing beside Thee,

Nothing that Thou art not.

 

Thou art all that has come into being,

And all that has not come into being.

 

Thou art Mind, in that Thou thinkest;

And Father in that Thou createst;

And God, in that Thou workest;

And Good, in that Thou makest all things.[14]