The View from Delphi
Rhapsodies on Hellenic Wisdom &
An Ecstatic Appreciation of Western History
by Frank Marrero, Enelysios
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PrefaceAcknowledgments Introduction: The Forms of Delphi
Mythological and Historical Accounts of Delphi, the Center of the World
The Ecstatic Dance of Apollo and Dionysus
Rhapsodies on the Ancient Sacred Understanding: The Oracle at Delphi
The Caduceus, “Temple Sleep,” and the Religious Origins of Western Medicine
Orpheus, The Katha Upanishad, and the Secret Way Beyond Death
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Plato’s Inheritance: A Survey of the Pre-Socratics
It was said by Alfred North Whitehead, and often repeated, that Western philosophy is the footnotes of Plato. The issues he discussed, the broad-minded style and depth of his critical eye, and his height of awe and beatitude are the currents throughout the stream of Western thought. So if Western philosophy is the footnotes of Plato, the generation of Socrates and the pre-Socrates are his bibliography.
Nietzsche emphasized the depth and magnificence of the wisdom tradition that preceded Plato when he boasted that Plato had not one original thought. Let us therefore look at the streams of thought that became confluent in Plato, let us appreciate the philosophers, theologians, bards, poets, and playwrights before him. If Plato is the Giant, let us appreciate the Titans upon whose shoulders he stood.
Outside of Hellas, Plato inherited the deep fount of Africa, the Egyptians and their spirituality; moving East, he gathered developed Babylonia and mystic India as well as the wilder extreme northeast, Hyperborea. The Hellenes harvested the precepts of the Mediterranean and matured them into concepts.
Intrinsic to the Hellenes, Plato was imbued with the elegance of Minoans, with Homer-Hesiodic mythology, and with the cosmogony and theology of Orpheus. At home, Plato was an Athenian, absorbing radical politics and the genius of newborn theater. And he was a Hellene, that is, a citizen aligned to Hellas, the province of Delphi and its Oracular sayings. Plato, like everyone who called themselves a Hellene, knew that upon Apollo's Temple at Delphi were the most famous of all maxims: "Know Thyself" and "Nothing in Excess".
Plato was his nickname, Aristecles was his given name. Described as broad-shouldered and broad-minded, the nickname "broad" or "Plato" stuck. Aristecles began his insightful and thoughtful career as a tragedian, writing plays for the sacred performances on the hillside beneath the Parthenon.
We would probably celebrate Aristecles as a minor tragedian, but, according to legend, he met Socrates and promptly burned everything he had written up to then. Socrates was Plato's greatest inheritance and his greatest gift to succeeding generations.
Socrates was one year old when Sophocles produced his first play. Socrates' life was a golden time of intellectual and spiritual giants. Herakleitos and Pythagoras had passed away only a generation before, and Parmenides, Zeno, and Empedocles were carrying the mystic torch of the One Being. The Oracle at Delphi was in full power -- as were the mysteries of mystic Eleusis and healing Epidavros. The theater was alive with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides -- in a polis where Pericles received the votes of the people and Pindar sang heavenly odes. Hippocrates crystallized the medicine and healing arts of the Asklepians, and Anaxagoras proclaimed the sun was not a god, but a fiery rock (and probably larger than the Pelopponese). Leucippus and Democritus, in devotion to the Master Parmenides, proposed that Being Itself indeed is One and Indestructible, but extremely minute -- allowing for movement of the Unmoving, un-split-able One, the a-toms (un-split-able) which make every (seemingly) different thing. All of this, and more, was flourishing aloud in the generation of Socrates -- it was the "sixties" of the ancient world.
Into this golden age, brilliant Aristecles was born and matured. As Plato, he witnessed the Hellenic miracle and watched it pass. And he saved all that was before him with an embrace and complexity that matched the magnificence of his inheritance.
Plato's mindful climax unified and preserved the brilliant thoughts of the Ionians, the Eleatics, and the Athenians. Therefore, let us look in detail at the landscape between Plato and Orpheus, between Italy and Asia Minor, between theology and philosophy.
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Science, theology, philosophy, and metaphysics find common ground in physis. Usually translated through the Latin natura or "nature," physis is a extremely broad word and deserves to remain untranslated. Commonly, physis has been used in to describe "things" and the natural or physical world. This would, of course, include "physics", but physis' etymological, theological, and philosophical essence describes a "blossoming emergence"1 which appears, lingers, and passes away. Indeed, before the word "philosopher", humans who contemplated divine living and eternal principles were called, "physiologoi" and "physikoi" -- those attentive to physis.
Peri Physis was the title given to most of the pre-Socratic works (usually translated "On Nature"). Physis was the stuff of reality, blossoming emergence everywhere lingering and passing. The common presumption of the ancient Hellenes was that reality itself, physis, was a living and divine process--commonly felt through the mythic interpretation. To inquire into this "hylozoism" or "living reality" or physis was the obligation of every one who desired to understand and harmonize with it. Logos not only governed physis, it was how one understood it. In the apprehension of this divinity, the theologoi transformed into the physiologoi.
[Plato suggested four ways to know theos (or physis): by epagoge, the inductive scrutiny (think Socrates); by analogia, comparisons (think Herakleitos and Pythagoras); by aphairesis, or intelligent negatives (like the "Neti neti" "not this, not this" of the Indian sage) (think Parmenides); and by ekstasis, or ecstasy (think the mysteries).]2
Experiencing the inherent, formless joy of unitive integration was the goal of the great inquirers and lovers of wisdom. And from the experience of the formless, remarkable persons posited the first form, the arche. To understand the first form, or archetype, was to understand the bridge between heaven and earth, between the formless joy and the all the things of the earth. But while the theologoi cast images in poesy or rhapsody, the physikoi spoke mainly in a new style: prose.
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Beginning with the prosaic clarity of the Milesians, a rational cosmology began to augment and replace the theological cosmogony. Aristotle's historical view was that physis replaced theology ("and thinking along these lines") with Thales. Thales (~624-546) was the one of the famous "Seven Wise Men" and was given the title, "Sophos" or Sage.3 He posited water as the arche, the first form at the root of all living reality -- prosaically restating a mythological or cosmogonical assessment of the kosmos. This rational positing of a primeval archetype began a stream that has been called the fountainhead of Western thought. But Thales was said to have written nothing, leaving that task to his younger friend and genius student, Anaximander, who was far more a sage than a scientist.
Anaximander (~610-546) was purported by Themistius to be the first man "bold enough to publish a treatise on the nature of things."4 Anaximander's appreciation of the arche was not an element such as water, but the apeiron, the "not-bounded", the unlimited. This was not a void or gap, but substantial, living, and open-ended fullness. The unity of the universe that could be realized in personal terms must somehow translate to the intellect and the world, and by this urge, logos and science was born. Science was not originally different from theology, but was its spiritual fruit.
Anaximander wrote in prose about the nature of reality, arching a bridge between theological rhapsody and beginning science. (Here, in the interest of academy, let us bear the caveat: most of what we know about all of these characters is through reference and inference of later writers. Certainty of attribution from within these cloudy historical times is at best an educated deduction. However, the oldest fragments we have today of any of the ancient philosophers is a fragment from Anaximander.)
Out of that whence all things have their origin, into that they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.5
Arche, genesis, necessity, destiny, justice, ordinance, the physis of appearance, lingering, and disappearance, all of these are profound matters. In Anaximander, we can clearly see the influence of Orphic theology with its concerns of necessity, justice, and the unlimited divine Source of all and All. But Anaximander spoke this Orphic wisdom into prose and followed Thales' example of attempting to translate the metaphysical vision or rapture into the everyday interactions, and show the unitive presence in the logical nature of things. Indeed, to posit apeiron, that which is both undefinable and invisible as the primary substance of each and every thing clearly is a communication between two worlds: the sacred and the scientific.
We know from many other sources that Anaximander posited a theory of evolution, both of the cosmological and biological variety. "Man was once a fish" is attributed to him, and he was credited as being the first to suggest the world was suspended in the cosmos by the equality of everything around it. Supposedly, he was the first to make a geographia, a map of the earth, and the first to construct a sphaira, a sphere. If Aristotle is the father of the sciences, Anaximander is the grandfather. Indeed, Aristotle himself proclaimed that it was clearly Anaximander "who first entered the realm where philosophy and science in their Western forms became possible."6
After Thales and Anaximander opened the realm of the scientific, a new body of representation quickly emerged, creating epistemology, linguistics, philosophy, logic, teleology, and science. The proceeding discussion of the differences in representation and the coming to grips with the limits of language, representation, and knowledge occupied an inordinate amount of conversation-especially when the conversation is about the unitive realization.
We think of Anaximander as a "scientist", but he was equally a theologian, a deeply religious man with a mature and penetrating mind. Our mistaking early prosaic speech for profane talk in the early scientists is a common one. It is our common myopia of scientism projected onto the ancients. We focus on their science as if there were not also brilliant theologians and philosophers.
Physis sometimes emphasized what we call physics or science and sometimes metaphysics, but in any case, the reason for the inquiry into the nature of things was for the realization of the unitive principle which makes the cosmos a universe. A tradition of this unitive realization was being carried by the Orphics and their theology as well as the physiologoi and their science.
After Anaximander came the contemporaries, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, the great Pythagoras, and "Obscure" Herakleitos.
Anaximenes, like all the pre-Socratics, wished "to discover a natural explanation of the manifold variety of physical phenomena consistent with a monist view of reality."7 Anaximenes followed his teacher Anaximander in most ways -- differing in his thesis by positing aether as the arche of existence. To this arche, he added the complementary ideas of "rarefication" and "condensation" which affect the arche -- thus describing how quantitative changes could produce qualitative ones.8 Perhaps his greater contribution was his "plain" scientific language. He made Anaximander look poetic.
Xenophanes (~570-470!) is often remembered as the man who cast aside mythological and anthropological conceptions of the divine with the brash statement: "Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed, Thracians as blue-eyed and red-haired ... And if oxen and horse or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do; horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the bodies of the gods resemble their own forms."9
While famous for his satirical and sharp tongue, Xenophanes was both a scientist and a deeply spiritual man. He criticized Anaximander's position that all stuff has a divine origin as not strong enough in emphasis on the divinity of existence. He countered: the whole universe is divine, without origin, without genesis or destruction.10 His "One God" made him the spiritual father of all the Eleatics philosophers -- according to Plato and Aristotle.
When Xenophanes was twenty five, his home city of Colophon fell to Harpagus the Mede after Cyrus's conquest of Lydia in 546.11 Loss of liberty drove Xenophanes and the many of the brightest from Ionia to southeast Italy to found the great religious and philosophical cities of Elea and Crotona. The shift from Ionia to Italy marked a new phase of the new consciousness.
About 540, in the great city of Epheseus, the great great great? grandson of Androclus (founder and King of the city) was born. He was in line to inherit the "kingdom,"12 and was given every advantage. Most of all, however, young Herakleitos was impressed by the wise man, Hermodorus.
When Hermodorus' truth-telling penetrated the political status-quo, the men of the Epheseus drove Hermodorus out of town. (He went to Rome and assisted in drawing up the laws of the Twelve Tables.) Herakleitos railed, "Every grown man of the Ephesians should hang himself, and leave the city to the boys; for the men banished Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying, 'Let no one of us excel, or if he does, be it elsewhere and among other'."13
Herakleitos gave up his aristocracy and inheritance -- ceding it to his brother -- and renounced the common world. Found playing dice with children in the streets, the elders of the town reproached him. He scathed back, "Why are you surprised, you good-for-nothings? It's better than playing politics with you!"14
But Herakleitos' exposure to the wisdom tradition vaulted his inquiry to the realization of radical understanding. Supposedly, he retreated from Ephesus into the hills and lived as a renunciate hermit. Like his contemporary Gautama to the East, Herakleitos retreated into a life of contemplation. "I searched myself."
Coming to a radical understanding, he supposedly wrote a treatise on physis, and left it one day at the Temple of Artemis in the city's center. We have fragments, mainly from others' recitations. "Human nature has no insight, but divine nature has it." "Fools are those who are not in constant intercourse with their own divine nature."
Instead of the new dialectic style of prose, Herakleitos deliberately spoke in the ancient style of prophetic maxims as he rendered reality (physis) to an eternal fire, governed by logos and understood by the same.
Logos is the harmonic gathering of opposites, the resolution of paradoxes, common to all and universal, ever-lasting, all-pervading, governing all movement, and comprehendable by the open mind and relaxed consciousness wherein all things appear. "The way up and down is one and the same." "God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger; things taken together are wholes and not whole, something which is being brought together and brought apart, which is in tune and out of tune; out of all things there comes a unity, and out of a unity all things."15
"For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem ignorant when they experience such words and things as I set forth, distinguishing each thing according to it nature and tell how it is. Although this Logos is as I describe, men prove as unable to understand it when they hear it as before they hear it. Though the Logos is common to all, men live as if they had a private understanding of their own. They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself, there is a back-stretched connexion, as in the bow and the lyre."16
Herakleitos' embrace of the contradictions was brilliant beyond any previous conception. Only intellectual giants understood him and Plato loved him. Herakleitos' thesis that logos governed and understood physis blended the wise mind into the source Brightness (Zeus). "The Wise is One Only, it does and does not consent to be called by the name, "Zeus" "If you have not heard me by all of this but the Logos, then I can say, 'All is One." This unitive logos also was not lost on broad Aristecles.
Herakleitos' thesis that the kosmos was "an ever living fire, which is being kindled in measures and extinguished in measure, but it always was and is and shall be" has taken on renewed revelance in the last century. In the 1950's, Heisenberg wrote extensively on the Fire of Herakleitos in the light of modern physics, suggesting Herakleitos put forth the first principles with founding force. And his "Pantoi Rhei", "Everything Flows", placed eternity with the logos, certainly not the all-pervading fire.
Herakleitos' psychological wisdom found in two fragments must be reviewed, even in a survey such as this. The first is ethos anthropos daimon, usually translated as "A man's character is his fate." More than suggesting a godless relationship between personality and destiny, the entire Orphic cosmogony about the Fates, one's daimon, and Necessity are summarized in prophetic prose. An in-depth study of ethos and anthropos and daimon would reveal the fuller translation: "The spirit who guides me is myself as I authentically am." 17
This authenticity exceeds the "Spindle destiny", exceeds all the threads that make up the fabric of one's life. One ceases to be subject to the stars or mysticism or mother, father, and culture. Herakleitos' "Do not be the child of your mother and father" suggests a maturity that is not-dependent, non-passive, and non-subjective. Herakleitos remains a fount of wisdom that needs to be drunk every generation.
But for the most part, "after the Medes", the Ionian brilliance went west to Italy, where new colonies could live freely outside of tyranny. Here, ideas flourished.
Pythagoras was born about 570 and was clearly influenced by the Indian-inspired Orphic teachings and mysteries. To argue the One was not his passion, it was to personally realize the harmonies of that mystic divinity, understand it even mathematically, and teach others to reap the fruits of divine devotion. Therefore, he did not found a philosophical school, but a religious community.
We commonly remember Pythagoras for "the square of the sides equals the square of the hypotenuse" and for his discovery of the mathematical relationships in music. But Pythagoras was unabashedly religious in intent, even as he made significant mathematical and harmonic advances amidst the "ashram" atmosphere at Crotona. Instead of positing a substance at the origin of things, Pythagoras' thesis was that numbers and mathematical relationships were the key to understanding. So potent were his findings and assertions that over entrance to the Academy in Athens were the words, "Let no one enter here who is not a student of geometry."
So powerful was the religious impact of Pythagoras, mystic knowledge after him came to be described as "Pythagorean-Orphic". He confessed that he was not wise but "a lover of wisdom" and was thus the first to be called a "philosopher". Much could be said about his religious teachings, his community, his life, and his lineage. For now, let us state that Pythagoras was a powerful force in the mind of Plato, and let us follow Pythagoras' direct lineage through an obscure devotee, "a poor man of fine character," Ameinias.
Ameinias is not important to us for what he taught but whom. He passed on the mystic embrace of the Living One that he had received from Pythagoras to a student of Xenophanes, a giant named Parmenides.18 In an age where attribution of lineage was all-important, Parmenides built a temple to upon his death. In Parmenides, we have the "One God" of Xenophanes together with the transmission of mystic realization from Pythagoras.
Parmenides (~515-?) rocked the free world, not by positing the perfect arche or datum's origin, but by asking "What is Truth and how is it different from Illusion and the world of appearances?19 What is Is? What is Being? In Parmenides, we find again the comparison of the aesthetic against the nous, the trust in reason over trust in the senses, the seniority and superiority of noeton over aistheton, and how the datum of the eyes and ears is given to dreamy illusion and how the logos awakens one to the Real.20
Plato called Parmenides "a reverend and awe-full figure" and it was (supposedly) the elder Parmenides who inspired young Socrates. While his personal presence was certainly an initiation (telete) into the realization of unitive consciousness, his words preceded him. By the gods, we have much of his famous poem, written in the ancient style of Homer and Hesiod in hexameter metre.21
In the poem, the Truth (Aletheia) is a goddess (thea) who calls Parmenides to look (thea) at the differences between appearances and the truth, and experience the differences between the opinions of mortals and the formless joy of inherent being. "It is necessary for you (who are now entering on the path to being) to experience everything, the untrembling heart of well-rounded unconcealment (aletheia) as well as the views of men, in which there dwells no reliance of the unconcealed."22 "But only the legend remains of the Way; how it stands with being; on this (way) there are many indications: how being, without genesis, is without destruction, complete, alone there without tremor and not still requiring to be finished; nor was it before, nor will it be in the future, for being present it is entirely, unique, unifying, united, gathering itself in itself from itself (cohesive, full of presentness)."23
"Come, I will tell you: heed well the words that you hear (as to) which ways of inquiring are along to be considered. The one: how it is (how it, being, is) and how non-being is impossible. This is the path of justified confidence, for it follows unconcealment (aletheia).24
Looking (thea) where the goddess (thea) of Truth pointed, Parmenides journeyed beyond Night into Day, saw the revelation, merged into the Truth beyond the opinion mind of mortals, and was thus subsumed by the One that can be seen in every thing. By following Truth, we pass through dualisms to the One Being, we go beyond temporal considerations of Becoming and motion to the unchanging truth of real existence.
That reality is One and demands that nous is that Same One. "(Clear) Thinking and Being are the Same."
"This metaphysical concept of immutable being, and the epistemological contention that knowledge is only explicable as a contact of the mind with an actual stable and non-sensible object of knowledge, are cornerstones of Plato."25 Indeed, in his Timeaus (27d), we read pure Parmenides: "In my opinion we must first of all make the following distinction: what is it that always is and has no becoming, and what on the other hand becomes continually and never is? The one comprehensible by the mind with reasoning, the other conjectured by opinion with irrational sensation, coming to be and passing away, but never really being... it now is, all together, one and continuous... It is and always was and always shall be."
Parmenides is said to have fathered all the Eleatics and philosophy proceeded as angles upon his absolute standing in unchanging being. In defense of Parmenides and his supporters, the proclamation of One Being is worth the loudest of trumpets. His presence was strong and by legend and report awesome. However, there is a problem with Parmenides' idealizing the eternal Unity as unmoving, unchanging, and indivisible: a problem that came to be called, "saving the phenomena". Into this solution stepped the last "pre-Socratic" figures in our survey.
Zeno (490-?), a contemporary of Anaxagoras, was a disciple/student of Parmenides and took up the shout of unitive vision. He spoke his logoi, his arguments, in terms of hypothesis versus hypothesis, not only arguing his point, but also making parody of the limitations of conventional mind. His compelling koans and playful paradoxes were logical devices to support his masters adamant defense of the One unmoving Being that Is Truth and Consciousness. Zeno's arrow never reaches the target because every instant the arrow is located somewhere in Being. Of course, arrows reach their mark often, but the enquiry in support of the One Being remained.
Other pillars on the temple of Plato's mind were Empedocles (492-432), the scientist and mystic, the one who personified the union of rational thought with mystical exaltation, applying his spiritual power to philosophy, mysticism, medicine, politics, and poetry, showing (off) how a higher intelligence can flow into different fields. Indeed, Aristotle held his words in such high regard that he credited Empedocles with the invention of the art of rhetoric. He too tried to "save the phenomena", attempting to unite Being and Becoming. "In some way, things do come to be and perish, in another they are for ever."
Empedocles was most highly regarded for his "man of all worlds" personae. That he could be a most outrageous Orphic mystic and Eleatic philosopher and equally powerful in medicine and politics made him a giant in the minds of those who knew of him.
"Friends, I bid you hail. I an immortal god, no longer a mortal, go about among you all, honored as is proper for me, crowned with fillets and blooming garlands. When I come to flourishing cities, I am an object of reverence to men and women. They follow me in their thousands, asking whither leads the way to profit, some desiring oracles, whereas others seek to hear the word of healing for every kind of disease, long time transfixed by sore anguish.
Friends, I know that the truth is in the words which I shall speak, but hard and painful is the entry of understanding into the minds of men."55
Empedocles' cure for the "saving the phenomena" was to see the One in terms of primary psychology: Love and Strife. The lens of strife saw the duplicity of the world, whereas love is more intimate with the dike-logos right understanding and the resultant happiness that is the transcendental and everlasting One. While the gradual transformation of the seer into the philosopher had begun with Anaximander, in Empedocles both worlds were at their acme. He was a double-peaked mountain.
In contrast to the mystic idealism of passionate Empedocles was the mindful realism of calm Anaxagoras (500?-428BCE). Like Herakleitos, he gave up political and social power and wealth to lead a contemplative life, theoria metaphysikoi kai physikoi, meditating on philosophy and science. When reproached for neglect to his fatherland, Anaxagoras is said to have replied, "You are wrong, I do indeed care for the my fatherland," as he pointed and looked heavenward.
Anaxagoras, like Galileo, is known for being charged with denying the divinity of heavenly bodies and exiled. ("The sun is not a god, but burning rock.") But his following was wide and amongst his students were Archelaus (teacher of Socrates), Euripides, and Pericles. Like Anaximander, Anaxagoras was a genius of perspective, and according to Plutarch, he "produced the first and clearest explanation in writing of the illumination and shadow of the moon"; and by Hippolytus, he "figured the sizes and distances of the sun and moon and recognized the marks on the moon as shadows caused by mountains."
Anaxagoras addressed the One of Parmenides by identifying things with becoming and being with Nous. "The Greeks have a wrong conception of becoming and perishing. Nothing comes to be or perishes, but there is mixture and separation of things that exist. They they ought properly call generation 'mixture' and extinction 'separation'... The rest have portion of everything, but Mind (Nous) is something infinite and not dependent, and is mixed with no thing, but alone and by itself. Mind sets everything in order... There are many portions of many things, and no one thing is completely separated or divided from another save Nous. Nous is all alike, both the greater and the smaller... the finest and purest of all things, and has all knowledge of everything and greatest power." Instead of debating "philosophical" theory, Anaxagoras was known for bringing the discussion to the efficacy of wisdom over folly. A-theistic consciousness instead of emanationistic divinity was the emphasis of Anaxagoras.
Anaxagoras' pupil, Archelaus, was the teacher of Socrates. This is the lineage whereby Socrates inherits his salience of human efficacy. Archelaus, "the physicist", continued the archai of Anaxagoras, Nous, Consciousness. He argued that right and wrong were not absolutes of deities, but conventions of human ideas. He is said to have pioneered the antithesis between nature and convention. With thought such as this, being human replaced the kosmos as the focus of interest and human interest began to take center stage.
Democritus is associated mostly with the creation of atomic theory. He is said to have created vast volumes on many sciences, and was compared in this accomplishment to Aristotle. Unfortunately, none have survived. Democritus also tried to "save the phenomena" by agreeing with Parmenides that Being indeed in One and indivisible -- but composed of extremely minute, uniform particles that were indeed in-divisible, the a-tom. While we think of Democritus as if he were an empirical scientist with an electron microscope, he too was a sacred physicist, arguing for the unitive vision that makes the kosmos a universe.
Diogenes, "the natural philosopher", of Apollonia (formerly known as Eleuthernae) proposed that the origin of all things was air, but not air as we think of it, but of conscious space, the divine intelligence. Or as he plainly wrote, "And I hold that that which has intelligence is what men call air. All men are guided by it, and it master all things. I hold that this same is God, and that it reaches everything and disposes all things and is in everything."
All of these giants, along with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides affected Plato, and were personae, arguments, and revelations to whom he would have to answer and incorporate, along with the mysteries and Orphic Initiators of spiritual force.
Let is be stated that in this brief survey of Plato's inheritance, none were yet blinded by doubt, and so all contemplated (theoria) their view (thesis) to encompass the entire universe and the divinity (theion) of its nature. Doubt eventually occluded the Real One in a relativistic deconstruction, assigning the divinity of reality to the sentiments of a subjectivist projecting illusions into a world of things. As we make a rational reconstruction of the trans-rational spectrum of illumination, we may once again appreciate the sacred work of the early physilogoi, reintegrate the awe and clarity of the pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato, and let all things return to the One Brightness.