Sacred Symbology part 2. Modern Origins of the Bad Symbol
Sacred Symbology: A Short History of Symbolism
Symbolism is our subject of concern, but it is easy to read history without this in mind. Any belief is a symbol of its attendant and abstract predicates, its informational grounds, and therefore any talk of the history of a form of thought and faith is a talk on symbolics.
The 4th century’s impact on Christianity was far more reaching than historians claim, and this is a big statement considering that it is universally believed to be, with the Reformation, its formative turning point. What characterized the Church before this time as expressed by the Patristic Father’s was clearly a means of understanding the world and God through the simple prophetic revelation of the Hebrew prophets fulfilled in Christ, the Bible thought to still contain innumerable un-mined treasures of knowledge awaiting exploration and discovery. The apologetic started with those such as Justin and Iraneaus as a defense of the truth of Christianity against pagan and Jewish antagonists by demonstrating that Christianity was demonstrably true by the record of oracular promise/fulfillment through time, and this was enough reason to jettison the past and go on with a real evidence of God instead of relying on tradition, imagination, and philosophy. As time when on and the church grew, it no longer had to defend itself as it did before because it was growing its own tradition and depth of feeling toward its doctrines that became its means of attraction. When the church was solidified in the 4th century as the state religion, philosophy, feeling, and imagination came back in to take the forefront in what was to maintain the numbers and the power of the new church, with a back-glance at what made it true in the first place.
The 16th century could have been a chance to turn things back as they were, and this was Luther’s stated intention, but it did not turn out that way at all.
[i] Aristotle and Plato, who wrote extensively on themes of political philosophy, never experienced the kind of spiritual hemorrhaging that occurred in the modern age brought on by the worldwide failure of an age-old knowledge paradigm because they were operating under that ancient paradigm. What was different of the time during and after the Reformation was the moving of philosophy and theology systemically out of secular politics and the new science where “facts,” “evidence” and “truth” were becoming their own revelatory concepts that became the new ground of truth-mining, and where religion in turn reformed the idea of the theological concept, or symbol, into the new sacred object of faith which is regressive, replacing the former catholic symbol in a carnal object, person or office.
The Catholic Church, which was, and had been for over a thousand years, the most powerful and ubiquitous political and religious institution in the western world. It was primarily the perceived abuses of the Church and the offense taken by those who were more interested in revealed truth, not mere pronouncements and claims from a presumed human authority that ran rationally and evidentially counter to facts, which were moving the change represented by the Reformation and science, one biblical and the other empirical. When the reformation came, it became clear that the “spiritual” function of the church should be separated from its integrated political one, but more important that “spiritual” matters, matters of “faith,” should be separated from those which are demonstrated and matters of a kind of “truth” that was forming separately from that of the biblical.
This split did not only redefine political structures but redefined until the present day the idea that truth could be more meaningful if we could only change a symbol’s outer and superficial aspect and this will, in turn, change its inner signification.
Here is what was happening thinking in terms of the symbolic. A symbol is properly an appearance, a discursive and superficial token or image that is to represent meaning, which is not visible and much more complex. A belief is a symbol with the same hidden aspect of meaning. A belief in minimally a word, a sound of speech, an action, that is expected to reflect a wide range of motivational and purely spiritual or mental pretexts. These are essentially informational, logical axioms, history, lines of argumentation, memories, much like a premise to a conclusion. For the whole of human history leading up to Christ, it operated on the assumption of the hopeless mystery and ineffability of meaning. It had no sure, demonstrated and established temporal example, so if one had a belief one was on one’s own. This loss was compensated for my investing and faith in the unknown in an outer, physical representation, hence idolatry. The representation has solidity and sureness to meaning, no matter how hopeless.
The time of the Greek philosophers saw the rise of meaning as being exposeable and comprehensible, at least that a proposition, a symbol of mind, can be revealed as truth, as having demonstrated meaning through deduction. The Greek Gods came to be thought of as philosophical principles of the universe and their de-anthropozation became acute in philosophy in the Roman era. Therefore, the trend was that of the attempt to rehabilitate the naive pagan symbol into a kind that was spiritual, not carnal, and allow it to shift into the same realm as the reasons for one’s belief, which lies in the mind and spirit.
The problem with this is that it’s still regressive. In a universe that is temporal, which designed to represent a spiritual one, there is no hope for proof for one’s belief if proof relies only on the mind’s insular and autonomous ability to come up with one. It must first be outwardly expressed, it must be concretized as much as an idol of faith must be supported spiritually by the real information of spiritual realms and entities. You need a symbol which is ultimately a public, perspicuous, measurable and apparent example of transcendence which is also tightly bound to an equally exposable and confirmable set of abstract reasons and meanings for it. It must be a miracle, a divine symbol, of a comprehensible operation of the same divinity, together with both symbol and meaning merging to form a single unadulterated spiritual phenomenon in the mind that then requires neither reason or a symbol to make it of supernatural origin and evidence of God. Faith is the result then of experience of symbol meeting an equally apparent meaning, overwhelming both symbol and meaning.
This is the real phenomenon of Christianity. Christ brought the symbol of historical fulfillment in perfect alignment with the meaning of the prophetic promise. The satisfaction with inner cause to outer effect was for the first time realized with respect to God. Faith in God could now be truly spiritual and righteous if founded upon these historical phenomena which conclusively proved the Hebrew God the only God and Christ, the symbol of his Word, his only example. If one had a faith conclusion, such as “God,” then it is righteous if that faith is an exclusive dependency of what God is in fact, not fancy, and that fact is the historical phenomena of the Messiah.
Not to say that the Catholics did not revere and preserve the Bible. They did, but its power was an alternative to that of the Church. The lawful container of the Bible symbol [ii], its abstract authorities in facts that supports the content as its signification, had slowly become before-the-fact the “God” concept or tradition or the word of the local ordained priest that sins were forgiven. As the visible church became increasingly established, or, in other words, the symbol became so, its meaning regressed from one single powerful fact and revelation of scripture to religious feeling around the concepts “God,” “Christ,” or “Mary” or “church.”
The history of the catholic church up to the 16th century is then characterized as an attempt to rehabilitate the pagan symbol up to the high standard of biblical informational proof of God by trying to make it equal with it through what is essentially force, while those original spiritual reasons for it became increasingly lost. The paganism of the naive idol not reformed by Plato in an era when no proof of a real God existed and the paganism of the idol was not made a legitimate religious paradigm in an area when the revelation of God came into the world and faith needed to man-made temporal authority to prove it.
But with the one spiritual ground of Christian faith essentially blasted into a myriad of temporal and humanly engineered proofs, what would happen if we instead tried to move faith to the rightful place entirely inside the spirit, yet instead of forming our smybolics exclusively upon the miraculous facts of revelation but again into what is essentially pagan religious feeling and religions concepts as their symbols? The symbol of faith in the outward authority of Catholicism failed as a representation of the true reasons for spirituality, and now the representation of the true reasons for an expressed confession of faith statement will now prove as regressive if they do not return again to the one single miraculous fact of scripture.
The Bible had been objectified in the visible Church into the ordained power of the Church as the final and defacto authority over it, but with the reformation and the enlightenment, this container of power was to be shifted now to the natural world and through a long slog of trial and error and experimentation by the qualified scientist or theologian who in one way was committed to tearing it apart to find something valuable, since there was nothing left to find in scripture. For both the scientist and the theologian, the “natural world” would mean inducted truth from a general external, universal source in distinction from men touting blind commandments from a “supernatural world.” Catholicism badly objectified faith and now Protestantism will badly subjectify it.
This is generally the story of the hole that was opened to energize men to think about the abuses of the idea of truth only through bad proclamation, the symbolization of faith, and not bad fundamental scriptural premises for the symbols. Luther would strenuously deny this and maintain that that Catholicism was indeed wrong because of bad scriptural premises, but his scriptural premises were faith axioms, concepts and principles gleaned from Scripture and not the messianic revelation itself.
It must be remembered this “science” had not it’s inspiration from the secular world, but in the religious world, a world that was seen intruding into matters where it had no jurisdiction. Pronouncements about the shape of the world being flat by the church, or that the earth was the center of the universe, and punishing those who dared contradict, made symbols of heroism out of Galileo and Copernicus and heaped scorn on and bred the disillusionment of Christianity in general, becoming the main catalyst for a new epistemological paradigm shift where the new intrusion into unauthorized areas that would continue Christianities decline is by revelationally uninterested church leaders into the whole notion of 1st-century faith itself, which is as far as apostasy can go.
The icons of the Catholic Church, for example, were a major issue. They were sold as imbued with spiritual power that one could obtain by his mere physical association; by touching them or using them as an indispensible means of focusing on its transmitted truths. These icons were, therefore, realist symbols, not idealist symbols. Realist symbols are container weighted, idealist symbols are content weighted.
Realist symbols are an attempt to establish the authority of their declared truths through influencing or changing the abstract container, with the church this container being their concept of God, by giving it an appropriate form in something carnal to which it can permanently reside: the visible church. Believers access the truth and the essence of the invisible container, god, through the visible content of the Church, such as a statue, a crucifix, Eucharistic bread and wine, relics, the priestly confessional, the ex-operato baptismal rite, and the infallible pronouncements of the Pope.
Idealist symbols, or the historical response to Catholicism in the 16th century, is an attempt to establish the authority of their truth claims through influencing or changing the subjective, invisible content of faith, by de-emphasizing the outer symbol.
With science, this visible content of their symbol was their inducted facts of nature. But it must have an appropriate symbolic signifier in something. Believers access the full benefits of the visible content, its facts or technology, through the invisible container, which is essentially a tacit faith in no empirically reliable supernatural revelation and matter alone. The Protestants were also scientific in the same way pertaining to the Bible: believers access the full benefits of the plain meaning of scripture, especially the moral passages, through its invisible container, which is essentially a tacit faith in a heavenly, mysterious, providential, conceptual, non-empirical supernatural revelation except through faith.
Before you shout “no, no, NO!,” please read on. I do not mean they did not believe that the Bible was an empirically confirmable supernatural revelation through such as fulfilled prophecy; I mean that creed and concept were alone sufficient containers of faith, not prophecy.
On the theological side in this change in protest to the bad realist symbol, we can see that the reaction was appropriately fed through what the sins of which Catholic Church was guilty of through what was considered a sin of realist symbolic doctrinal content. Our question was whether the reformers, in assuming a correction of content, chose the right and original one to replace it.
It was clear to Luther and all the reformers that the moral dissolutions of the Catholic hierarchy were unbiblical and disqualified them for the offices to which they claimed a right, as well as their equally unbiblical doctrinal innovations such as Mariolatry, the Ascension of Mary, the emerging doctrine of the immaculate conception, prayers for the deal, the veneration of relics, and a host of others. This gave the Protestants an unlimited amount and justifiable kind of ammunition for dissent. The actions of the priests and the doctrinal conclusions here are first understood by the reformers as being a primarily and wrongly a visible content against an inaccessible abstract container: the God of mysterium. Secondly, it is understood by the reformers as bad doctrinal content for a symbol of God. Being first content of their symbol, we must keep in mind that a doctrinal conclusion is something different from a doctrinal premise. A conclusion, such as “Mary is mediatrix” or “transubstantiation is true” refers to a symbolic content because it is visible/audible and a short clarification of a host of various and often complex evidence which are out of direct view. Realist doctrinal symbols, such as the Catholic ones, are focused on the importance of the hidden premise, the ones that are strong but not open to a precise enumeration and examination, causing their expressions in various conclusions to be weak. Idealists focus on the importance of the conclusion, making their premises weak. The fight between them will be one about one side pointing out self-evidently absurd conclusions (the idea of humanly authoritative declarations leading truth), supported by a proof found in un-confirmable bad premises (the god who is found only in irrational faith, lack of biblical support), and the other pointing out supra-evidently impractical premises (inhuman “proof” the leading authoritative voice), supported by the of supra-evidently bad conclusions that can’t be realized (god believed to be found, if at all, only through the revelation of nature or objective evidence, lack of rational support).
A lot of this was then about who or what was in authority, or what or who the knowledge source would be for believing in a truth claim, but both authorities they conceived were false ones.
Back to science, the problem was that when the natural world was critically examined as to its own source of knowledge it rendered knowledge differently from what we simply wanted to believe or believed by unsystematic thinking. It was more reliable, and the results could be duplicated by the experiment. For the reformers, when the bible was inductively and critically examined as to its own source of knowledge, it rendered knowledge differently than that of the catholic tradition. It had the same ability of positive and certain confirmation as science that all men could be equally subject without a bad conscience.
It was clear that the old authorities of man in his pronouncements of truth through whim and fancy, or through an appeal to an un-confirmable oral tradition for both secular truth and religious truth could be held accountable to higher authorities divined through verifiable and reliable sources. The assumption is a good one.
But the reformers were realists becoming idealists, coming out of the Catholic Church, who were trying to modify the old realist symbols by new idealistic assumptions. Therefore their new icons would combine elements of the two.
If the “authority” of the Reformers was going to be shifted to that which was changed into one external of man but contained its own dispassionate authorities open to all, against and for the replacement of the Catholic example, it was then predictable what the outcome would be if this “authority” was conceived mainly as having a realist symbolic tinge in the new idealist paradigm, but taking on the idealist insistence on truth being found strictly only in the visible or logical.
“Authority” in the realist way is an authority of the general instead of the particular: the god of mystery, of wrath and judgment, or the god who gives law without any certain way of knowing within that law exactly why he prefers that law or some other law he could have demanded us to follow. As a realist, it is important that we follow authority instead that we know why we follow. Through the action of following, and with an appropriate icon representing it, we will know the truth without having to know why all the benefits of the signified divine substance to which it bound. But the new idea was to keep the unimpeachable authority of God but remove His mystery and bring Him closer to man by new icons: not human symbols or icons that speak for God as of old, but the symbol of the doctrinal or dogmatic icon taken from a general supernatural revelation that speaks for God. We can now know the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of all doctrine, removing the mystery, bringing us close to the divine through understanding, conviction, evidence, and reason, not through realist icons but through the idealist icons of pure information, inner work, experience, and religious feeling.
Therefore, the perfect reaction to the bad realist symbol is a bad idealist symbol, but this idealist one stressing the importance of a general theme of an instant, rather than progressive theological freedom (“believe and you will be saved”). A freedom gained through the same haze of future uncertainty, only this one through the haze of a general view of scripture instead of a general view of the Church.
It was the birth of what we know today as liberalism. Christianity became more egalitarian, less focused on law and more on grace, more on knowing one is saved instead of earning salvation, the priesthood of all believers instead of a few, the casting off of inanimate relics of the dead that were to be believed infused with supernatural power by blind faith. It was a shift to the biblically empirical from the divinatory, the knowledge source now being the plain words of the universally accessible, spiritually signified spiritual authority of all scripture instead of the plain words of the universal, carnally represented the spiritual authority of all ordained Christendom.
But what makes the idealist symbol the same as the realist symbol is the emphasis is not on all scripture or all the Church but on the word all. They are both invested in removing the same authority: for Catholics the authority of inhuman facts and for reformers the authority of “ordained” humans. For Catholics, the all was toward general church tradition that runs their great pronouncements, a generalization that the Protestants chaffed against, and for the reformers toward a general, not any one particular biblical fact that run its supreme pronouncements from all scripture, that the Church hated.
“Authority” was torn down and set up again, only the authority of the uncertainty of single authorities. And we will find that, of course, authority which is not visible can be even more cruelly tyrannical than one that is carnal if this inhuman source is not properly identified, reflected now in the present state of Christianity and science. The search for the external, inhuman, but quintessentially not anti-human source knowledge to which all men become instantly subject and all questions are forever put to rest is the holy grail of all philosophy but, as we will see, it can’t be represented in a general source category. If it is not taken as supreme and controlling over its corroborating authorities, it has no power at all, and a singular scriptural power then falls to the all.
The symbolic analogy to all this is to say that, as we will recall, one main thing. The material symbolic type that science represents is a belief that the source knowledge of authority is the natural world and the immaterial type that religion deals in draws on the mental world of thought and language. What characterizes them from the original, Christ centered transcendent symbolic type is that they are displaced of an ultimate container to their symbols, taken together, and are focused on the immediate general content of what they produce in allegiance only to their types, when what they produce can only be true, by type, materially or immaterially. What characterizes them is the showing of a belief in truth which is most certain only of its righteous resistance to a single factual authority reigning over them that is a product of the other type; for the materialists a factual authority which is from the mouth of a man which he can tout as supernatural, for the immaterialists a factual authority which is from the mouth of the world which they can tout as only locally grown, for both against the factual authority of a single supernatural fact or class of facts found in the world and which can reside equally in the soul to bring man to fulfillment.
You can also say that symbolically the new liberal movement and the old guard establishment were both invested in taking their beliefs as material symbols. With the material, symbol objects are assumed to give our insight into the hidden realities we seek. Nature, or Scripture, or feelings are objects. They are the things we can put our hands-on and take apart to find within the catechism, letter or sentiment something unsurpassably valuable. But the material symbol which can be produced by humans alone can’t show this value, whether is it driven by naturalistic assumptions or religious ones, because a material symbol only indicates another thing… it does not reveal or explain it, or satisfy the demands of a true immaterial symbol. A material object signifies its parts, a feeling symbolizes a stimulus, scripture symbolizes words and sentences of various meanings. When a belief is treated as a material symbol, we assume that if we form accurate conclusions those conclusions will, if they are taken as static objects that we can put our hands-on and tear apart, reveal and explain those hidden mysteries that have such value. But they never do, because the assumption underlying the belief symbol is that not of a supreme or supremely accurate conclusion injecting meaning into the mysteries, it is a supremely dominant premise demanding that only it be represented in a confession of faith.
Scripture in a revelatory belief symbol, not in a material symbol. It’s only valuable when we know and base our belief in it, or make our mental symbol of it, because of one or one kind of overriding and unimpeachable evidence communicated by God through that vehicle. No feeling or faith that comes in response to it can be real or ideal if it is assumed that this faith or feeling both reactively represents and explains this grounding signification of scripture.
The overall thrust of the movement was toward the displacement of people to spout an-attested truth claims and a shift to finding more reliable authorities in those external of Man himself. We then find that all men, even those who assume top authority to pronounce truth claims, are rendered as something smaller and more equal against external, sharply inhuman forces (scripture or matter), to which all are held responsible. This became reflected in the same historical period in the concept of the new democracy that was emerging in the form of representative government.[1]
For both camps of the emerging inductive revolution of science and Protestantism, we have Man and we have the knowledge source to which he will become subject, through which we become subject to God. It is established that this source knowledge is not human but is at the same time agreeable with and convicting of Man’s sense of justice and reason as general moral and intellectual faculties. Again, it is a fascinating and rarely reflected upon fact that reformation Christianity distilled from scripture its authority not in a single, supreme empirical, inhuman (not spirit or a biological creature, but knowledge) fact, but made an egalitarian epistemology led by general philosophical authorities in “God,” “grace,” “law,” “faith,” “Sola Fida,” that were assumed universally convicting by definition. These were to be taken as a whole. Science did the same in such concepts as “cosmos,” “reason,” ”fact,” “proof,” “evidence” and “evolution.” We then have the symbolic fragmentation of the single authority of man, and then the creation of the symbol of an inhuman but universally applicable authority of “justice,” “impartiality,” “equity,” “rights,” “equality,” “inclusiveness” and “liberty,” “referendum,” “election,” that rules them. We then have reduced man to a general body and substantiated his ruler as an inhuman and general group of presumably universally attestable founding philosophic principles distilled from scripture and the natural world within which supremacy is a matter of only personal vote, whether by belief or by practice, to the truth of such supremacy.
This is reflected in a historically evolving modern and post-modern conception of truth. It was clear that external human authority represented by the mass of people, against the autocratic model, was a necessity for a government that would distribute his powers equally. This removed the structural burden of the old system. But the ultimate symbol of truth, whatever it is, was assumed not be a counterpart to that negative blend of a destroyed and dislocated authority, but a positive blend of all truth pronouncements that would come from them, shown in various conceptual idols that all men could agree are axiomatic and universally known.
This was a truly positive trend for government for the next few centuries, that the authority of general, inhuman facts should guide the impulses of man, but not for Christianity.
An authority that was human was now dissolved in the people as a whole in the political structure. The human power broker in government was to be a symbol of the opinion of a local collective. Power should be divided between various offices, one being unable to intrude upon the other. In this system, the power of private desire and opinion was never again to be concentrated in a few individuals to control the masses. That unfortunate but un-excisable human instinct to uncritically examine and pronounce truths was to be diluted and tamed by the now superior desire of the present need to see “political truth” as coming mostly from purely inducted corrective judgments to effect a present state of peace between the forces of feeling and carnal necessity.
This conception of the authority of inhuman, general facts to guide the outcome of our policies on truth was translated into the political as the authority of a collective of individuals, each with one vote despite their race, creed or class, to pronounce political truth in elections. This has proven to be an effective kind of government far superior to those that had come before for the purpose of peace.
However, this does not work so well for the cause of spiritual truth because it gratuitously generalizes both man and truth. The offense at authority compelled the notion of “authority” to be fragmented one way or another within its applied conceptions. Man still is an autonomous wielder of power, and his destiny is in his own hands inasmuch as the exercise of his free will to deny or affirm truth is not diminished. Truth is also still singular and objective. But the new idea was that inhuman authoritative facts or man collectively are not to be centered on any one authority of facts or individual within them, and man and truth as well is thought to be most meaningful as swallowed up in the collective, where the major common similarity between those facts and man is their relationship to a general external anti-type. Within science, facts are generally facts of the natural world. Within Christianity, facts are generally facts taken generally from the Bible. Again, the factual leading authorities in a single fact or narrow category of facts within the group have been stripped.
Once more, this is a great benefit to politics because to favor any one group or person would deny the principle of equal authority between individuals, being bad for a business that relies upon appealing to as many different kinds of people as possible. But the problem is that the Christian, scientific or “truth” business of our day agrees. They have become certain that when we make any one biblical fact or set of facts within the group dominant, we limit the number of people that will ascribe to our system to only those that like them, excluding all others. Epistemological egalitarianism is the one shared and most fervently believed creed of our corrupt truth business.
Political philosophic styles are unique to democracies, where power is invested in a voting public who appoint representatives to speak for their interests in government. This representative, of course, must appeal to a wide range of people to get their vote, and it is expected that he would espouse the values and beliefs of the community that elected him, where each region of a country leans collectively toward one worldview or another.
But the collective opinions of the people are always going to fall into one of two categories: one, in favor of the old ways, of law and order, or tradition, or what has proven itself, or the authority of single men or founding principles, and the other in favor of freedom from abstract authority in favor of the authority of the group, the physical or emotional condition effected by abstract authority, and launching out and innovating something new to continue the separation from abstract authority in all its forms. This is conservatism and liberalism.
This split is not a split between two exclusively alternative truths, only political truths, and it is crucial that we don’t use them applied to Christianity the same way we apply them to politics: Biblical truth is not split between the general principle of authority over innovation, where we are obliged to pick one or an admixture of the two[iii].
Liberalism and Conservatism is a sign that democracy is working as it should. It is also a symbol of the schizophrenia that eventually occurs in a time when you never cease to try to apply solutions to problems that can’t be fixed, only managed. Ravi Zacharias said that the greatest disappointment in life comes when you have just experienced the ultimate, and it has let you down.[2] The greatest disappointment of history is having come to the realization that management of problems is the only fulfillment of a once vibrant but misguided dream of perfection, and disillusionment is our lot in it. If you call yourself a liberal Christian or a conservative Christian, you are a symbol of Christian schizophrenia, that sees imaginary things he thinks are real or sees real things about Christianity that are useless, not one of righteousness.
By definition, something that can’t be fixed is something that has a condition that makes it in some way un-examinable, or when its problem is unidentifiable as to the nature of its specific cause. When something can be fixed it is at least open to some clear path to the reason why it is not working. The problem can then be quickly identified, repaired and forgotten. When a problem can’t be fixed, and we are not inclined to throw away that bad problematic object, we have to learn how to be emotionally preoccupied primarily in managing the resulting split between our hatred of the problem in the object from our love and need of the object itself in our lives. You become bipolar between wanting something you should not want and accepting something that you should not accept, without any emotional capital left over for the middle.
No better example is found than in the dance of conservatives and liberals as symbolic overall of the human solution to the problem of truth, and certainly its false notion that religious liberalism and conservatism is a good way to represent oneself as a transcendent symbolic type who speaks to Him by a transcendent symbolic type.
[1] This blending of the Reformation and the scientific revolution is not favored by most historians to my reading. Most separate them on their own tracks with no cross-influence occurring. More certain is that church historians, many of which who agree that the Reformation influenced the scientific revolution, do not see a cross-correlation between the conception of knowledge shared by the two groups. I leave it to the reader to accept or deny my conclusions at face value.
[2] (Zacharias n.d.)
[i] Greek philosophy came from the Ionians. What those philosophers sought was the “materialist principle of things, and the middle of their origin and disappearance.” They sought material foundationalist grounds for all things. To Thales this was water. This is the material symbolic type, that seeks to extract truth only from what can be seen. Tahles of Miletus (640) is generally recognized as the father of Greek philosophy.
The first writer on philosophy was Anaximander of Miletus who looked for the undefined substance without qualities, out of which is the antitheses of hot/cold, moist/dry, which were un-differentiated. To Then Heraclitus of Ephesus which was the ethereal fire.
The connection to practical life was were philosophy evolved to. We then proceed from basic material principles that are abstract to practical, human material principles would influence the mind to harmony and wisdom. We then have proceeded through the first set of material type, and now from the material to the immaterial-material.
This was Pythagoras of Samos. The world represented harmony represented by a number, which is the example that humans should follow.
Then the elastic doctrine of One, by Xenophones of Colophon, the father of Pantheism. God was this eternal unity and the world represented his thoughts. His successors tried to conceive of god through a becoming appearance, multitude, and change in the world, such as with Zeno. These substances of the world have an unchanging nature, and to Empedocles of Agrigentum, he saw them as earth, water air, and fire. Thus there was a material ordering principle as well as a materiel substance.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae thought that there were an infinite variety of symbolic material substances of the divine mind that were perishable, and divine reason ordered them. He established Athenian Greek philosophy. The world was created out of chaos by divine reason. God was impersonal and passionless in this process.
Socrates abandoned with the Sophist’s physical speculations and made the subjective thoughts of men his starting point. But again, as the sophists kept this as abstract speculation (realists), Socrates sought to apply it to practical life and exact an objective rule (idealist). He sought ethical principles.
Plato brought all this together into a system. He made an unstated threefold division of philosophy into dialectic, physical and ethics to found a theory of ideas (Heraclitus’s perpetual flux and Socrates’ method of concepts). That the world was only an imperfect copy of the divine forms, Virtue is the supreme knowledge of the Good, and the highest ideal of the Good is the goal. This can only be found by the soul working within itself apart from the troubles and distractions of sense.
[ii] Strong/McClintock says the “personal degradation and servility of the Romans under the empire provoked the revival and ardent advocacy of stoicism. The repugnance to Islamism, and the dialectical needs of Christendom, gave birth to medieval scholasticism. The antagonism which issued in the English commonwealth furnished the hotbed in which germinated the philosophy of Hobbes. Locke and the encyclopedists were the prophets and guides of the French revolutionary spirit, and the materialism of the current years has received form as well as vitality from the predominance and achievements of the physical sciences, and the enormous fascinations of material interests and gratifications.”
[iii] The distinction has to be made of politics and political philosophy in its purest form, that really are metaphysical propositions and no longer bear on only practical things. This bleedthrough of eternally useless things into eternal things is emblematic of bad religion.
