Course XXVII - Teaching 16: Arts and Philosophies

With the exception of the Greek people, in arts and philosophy no people reached such high level, which is difficult to surpass.
This civilization, born between pillars of the seven sciences, touched and deepened any knowledge, discovered and synthesized any beauty, and gave a new sense to life by means of poetry, literature and philosophy.
It is impossible to name every artist of the archaic period, because they are very numerous; among them one may remember Solon that been also a poet, gave laws to Athens, and was one of the seven sages in those heroic times. Even one cannot forget Sapho, a wonderful poetess, who chanted to pleasures of living through such delicate lines that very few could do after her.
Pindar was the greatest Greek poet, but just fragments of his poems came to our days, and the same happened with many of them, i.e., Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Epicharmus and Aristophanes.
Even Aesop, an author of satirical prose, or Herodotus, a historian, should not be forgotten.
But Greek knowledge really increases thanks to that legion of scholars and lovers of the truth –the philosophers.
That pillar of wonderful sages begins with Xenophanes. As early as in his time he wrote authoritatively about the origin of the Universe and the concept of Divinity.
But it is in the Attic period that philosophers flourish.
Thales of Miletos, who based his philosophy on the study of physics, geometry and astronomy, is the oldest thinker. He considered water as the first original principle of every natural thing.
Anaximander and Anaximenes belong to his school, both of them from Miletos, who considered the universe, besides its physical composition, as result of a more subtle and unknown element, which they named “Infinite concrete mass”.
Also Heraclitus of Ephesus belonged to the physical school and attributed a divine spirit to elements. In those days, Xenophanes, a monotheistic philosopher, hated images and seemingly was a predecessor of iconoclasts.
But the most outstanding philosophical school was the Italic school, under Pythagoras. First of all, he was a great mathematician that applied foundations of mathematics and algebra to the universe and to metaphysical laws. He is one of the first to express the idea of metempsychosis or reincarnation. Leucipus of Elea founded an atomistic school and held the human soul is a causal and energetic result of an atomic cell agglutination.
Empedocles wants to synthesize spirit and matter. So he imagines the universe like two great currents that, as they mix, create manifested life.
Anaxagoras was the first to divide elements into groups, and Hippocrates, a philosopher and physician, did the same.
But Greek philosophies had declined and were more and more materialistic, until the sophists and their school.
Then Socrates emerged –the great philosopher of the spirit.
Plato, his disciple, completed Socrates’ work; he was the founder of the Academy, and left very numerous writings in which one can perceive clearly his deep spiritual and esoteric spirit.
Since then, philosophers begin to fly through spaces of the mind and to look for subtle questions related to imponderable things.
Aristotle is philosopher of ideas, of the mind, of spiritual conceptions, of the static sense of life, and founder of the peripatetic school.
As these spiritual schools expanded, other two centers had come into being in Athens: the Epicurean school and the Stoic school.
Epicurus, founder of the former, taught his disciples that gods do not deal with human matters, and man came into being to enjoy wisely pleasures of life, meeting in a right balance his desires, rejecting pain and anguish, and that one should not fear death because it is just the dissolution of the body. Zeno of Cippo founded the Stoic school; in his view happiness of man consists just of virtue and complete control of passions. The entire Christian moral is based on this school, and in its view the human soul is not an emanation of the divinity but a part of this divinity, and the summum bonum consists in being able to help our neighbors.
The last Greek philosophers, called “of the Roman period”, quite influenced by the greatness of Rome, were Iamblichus, Heliodorus, Dyionisius and many others. Among them there are certain Christians belonging to the Neo-Platonic school, such as Justin, Origen, Basil and Eusebius.
Ammonius Saccas deserves an especial mention; he was founder of the Neo-Platonic esoteric school and teacher of the virgin Hypatia, that great woman from Alexandria stoned to death by a crowd of uneducated Christians.
Also Basilides belonged to this school; we can conclude that the excellent legion of Greek philosophers has perished with her; they were founders of every school that still are in force in the world.