Plato
Aristotle
Comparison between Plato and Aristotle
Platonism and Christianity
Poems
Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, "reason" is synonymous with "intellect": reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration.
The Augustinian idea that the good tends by its very nature to communicate itself, is at bottom Platonic: this idea is self-evident since, according to Plato, the Absolute is by definition the "Sovereign Good," the Agathón; and to say "Good," is to say Radiation or Manifestation.
It would be futile to believe that Plato drew everything from himself, or that a Shankara had no need of the Upanishads, although in principle such a thing is not inconceivable.
It should be noted that Meister Eckhart called Plato “ the great priest”, and that Jili had a vision of him “filling the whole of space with light”; also, that the disciples of Rumi see in Plato (Sayyid-na Aflatun) a kind of prophet. Moslem authors in general see in him an eminent master of music, like Orpheus charming wild beasts with his lute in virgin nature whither he had withdrawn after a disagreement with Aristotle, which is full of meaning. It may be added that Plato, like Socrates and Pythagoras, was the providential spokesman of Orphism.
Some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets.
Since Plato, Virgil and St. Augustine have existed, it can no longer be said of man that he is a goat or an ant.
For Socrates, in Plato's dialogues, the "true philosopher" is one who consecrates himself to "studying the separation of soul from body, or the liberation of the soul," and "who is always occupied in the practice of dying"; it is one who withdraws from the bodily — and therefore from all that, in the ego, is the shadow or echo of the surrounding world — in order to be nothing other than absolutely pure Soul, immortal Soul, Self: "The Soul-in-itself must contemplate Things-in-themselves" (Phaedo). Thus the criterion of truth — and the basis of conviction, this reverberation of Light in the "outer man" — is Truth in itself, the prephenomenal Intelligence by which "all things were made" and without which "nothing was made that was made."
Plato is sometimes included under the heading of rationalism, which is unjust despite the rationalistic style of his dialectic and a manner of thinking that is too geometrical; but what puts Plato in the clearest possible opposition to rationalism properly so-called is his doctrine of the eve of the soul.(1) This eye, so he teaches, lies buried in a slough from which it must extricate itself in order to mount to the vision of real things, namely the archetypes. Plato doubtless here has in mind an initiatic regeneration, for he says that the eyes of the soul in the case of the ordinary man are not strong enough to bear the vision of the Divine; moreover, this mysterial background helps to explain the somewhat playful character of the Platonic dialogues, since we are most probably dealing here with an intentional dialectical exoterism destined to adapt sacred teachings for a promulgation which had become desirable at that time.
However that may be, all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things. This Essence is the “Idea” and it confers on things all their perfection, which coincides with beauty.(1)
1. The opinion linking Plato not only with Pythagoreanism but also with the Egyptian tradition is perhaps not to be disregarded; in that case, the wisdom of Thoth will have survived in alchemy and partially or indirectly in Neo- Platonism as well, within Islam no less than in Christianity and Judaism.
In Plotinus the essence of Platonism reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas—the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities— and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world—this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin. With Aristotle, we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone.(1) And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent.(2)
1. Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.
2. Kantian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.
For Plato, the terminal point of the cosmogonic projection is matter, whose role is to make concrete the principle of centrifugal coagulation; for Christians, this “matter” becomes “flesh” and, with it, pleasure, whereas for Islam, as for Judaism, evil is polytheism, idolatry, and disobedience, and thus, finally, duality which, at its ontological root, has no connection—to say the least—with what we call sin. The same is true of Plato’s “matter” and the “flesh” of the Christians when we trace them back to their respective roots, which are Substance and Beatitude.
Plato has been reproached for having had too negative an idea of matter, but this is to forget that in this connection there are in Plato’s thought(1) two movements: the first refers to fallen matter, and the second to matter in itself and as a support for the spirit. For matter, like the animic substance that precedes it, is a reflection of Maya: consequently it comprises a deiform and ascending aspect and a deifugal and descending aspect; and just as there occurred the fall of Lucifer — without which there would not have been a serpent in the Earthly Paradise — so also there occurred the fall of man. For Plato, matter — or the sensible world — is bad in so far as it is opposed to spirit, and in this respect only; and it does in fact oppose the spirit —or the world of Ideas — by its hardened and compressive nature, which is heavy as well as dividing, without forgetting its corruptibility in connection with life. But matter is good with respect to the inherence in it of the world of Ideas: the cosmos, including its material limit, is the manifestation of the Sovereign Good, and matter demonstrates this by its quality of stability, by the purity and nobility of certain of its modes, and by its symbolist plasticity, in short by its inviolable capacity to serve as a receptacle for influences from Heaven. A distant reflection of universal Maya, matter is as it were a prolongation of the Throne of God, a truth that a ‘‘spirituality’’ obsessed by the cursing of the earth has too readily lost sight of, at the price of a prodigious impoverishment and a dangerous disequilibrium; and yet this same spirituality was aware of the principial and virtual sanctity of the body, which a priori is “image of God” and a posteriori an element of “glory”. But the fullest refutation of all Manicheism is provided by the body of the Avatara, which is capable in principle of ascending to Heaven — by ‘‘transfiguration’’ — without having to pass through that effect of the “forbidden fruit” which is death, and which shows by its sacred character that matter is fundamentally a projection of the Spirit.(2) Like every contingent substance, matter is a mode of radiation of the Divine Substance; a partially corruptible mode, indeed, as regards the existential level, but inviolable in its essence.(3)
1. By “thought” we mean here, not an artificial elaboration but the mental crystallization of real knowledge. With all due deference to anti-Platonic theologians, Platonism is not true because it is logical, it is logical because it is true; and as for the possible or apparent illogicalities of the theologies, these can be explained not by an alleged right to the mysteries of absurdity, but by the fragment ary character of particular dogmatic positions and also by the insuffi ciency of the means of thought and expression. We may recall in this connection the alternativism and the sublimism proper to the Semitic mentality, as well as the absence of the crucial notion of Maya—. at least at the ordinary theological level, meaning by this reservation that the boundaries of theology are not strictly delimited.
2. The “Night Journey” (isra, mi ‘raj) of the Prophet has the same significance.
3. All the same, the biblical narrative regarding the creation of the material world implies symbolically the description of the whole cosmogony, and so that of all the worlds, and even that of the eternal archetypes of the cosmos; traditional exegesis, especially that of the Kabbalists bears witness to this.
The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite.2 This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of “sensible consolation” the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that “it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance.”3 This passage states the crucial principle of the almost magical relationship between the conforming recipient and the predestined content or between the adequate symbol and the sacramental presence of the prototype. The ideas of Plotinus must be understood in the light of those of the “divine Plato”: the latter approved the fixed types of the sacred sculptures of Egypt, but he rejected the works of the Greek artists who imitated nature in its outward and insignificant accidentality, while following their individual imagination. This verdict immediately excludes from sacred art the productions of an exteriorizing, accidentalizing, sentimentalist and virtuoso naturalism, which sins through abuse of intelligence as much as by neglect of the inward and the essential.
Likewise, and for even stronger reasons: the inadequate soul, that is to say, the soul not in conformity with its primordial dignity as “image of God”, cannot attract the graces which favour or even constitute sanctity. According to Plato, the eye is “the most solar of instruments-’, which Plotinus comments on as follows: ‘‘The eye would never have been able to see the sun if it were not itself of solar nature, any more than the soul could see the beautiful if it were not itself beautiful.” Platonic Beauty is an aspect of Divinity, and this is why it is the “splendour of the True”: this amounts to saying that Infinity is in some fashion the aura of the Absolute, or that Maya is the shakti of Atma, and that consequently every hypostasis of the absolute Real — whatever be its degree — is accompanied by a radiance which we might seek to define with the help of such notions as “harmony”, “beauty”, “goodness”, “mercy” and “beatitude”. “God is beautiful and He loves beauty”, says a hadith which we have quoted more than once: Atma is not only Sat and Chit, “Being” and ‘‘Consciousness” — or more relatively: “Power” and “Omniscience” — but also Ananda, “Beatitude”, and thus Beauty and Goodness; and what we want to know and realize, we must a priori mirror in our own being, because in the domain of positive realities we can only know perfectly what we are.
2. According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.
3. This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect — works of perversion and subversion being excluded — through pure mercy and by virtue of the ‘exception that proves the rule”.
Platonic recollection is none other than the participation of the human Intellect in the ontological insights of the Divine Intellect; this is why the Sufi is said to be ‘arif bi-’Llah, “knower by Allah”, in keeping with the teaching of a famous hadith according to which God is the “Eye wherewith he (the Sufi) seeth”; and this explains the nature of the “Eye of Knowledge”, or of the “Eye of the Heart”.
For Plato’s Socrates, the ‘true philosopher’ is he who consecrates himself to ‘studying the separation of soul from body, or the liberation of the soul’, and ‘who is always occupied in the practice of dying’; it is he who withdraws from the bodily — and therefore from all which, in the ego, is the shadow or echo of the surrounding world — in order to be no more than absolutely pure soul, immortal Soul, Self: ‘The Soul-in-itself must contemplate Things-in-themselves’ (Phaedo). Thus the criterion of truth — and the basis of conviction, this reverberation of Light in the ‘outer man — is Truth in itself, the pre-phenomenal Intelligence by which ‘all things were made’ and without which ‘was not anything made that was made’.
Plato in his Symposium recalls the tradition that the human body, or even simply any living body, is like half a sphere; all our faculties and movements look and tend towards a lost centre—which we feel as if “in front” of us—lost, but found again symbolically and indirectly, in sexual union. But the outcome is only a grievous renewal of the drama: a fresh entry of the spirit into matter. The opposite sex is only a symbol: the true centre is hidden in ourselves, in the heart-intellect. The creature recognizes something of the lost centre in his partner; the love which results from it is like a remote shadow of the love of God, and of the intrinsic beatitude of God; it is also a shadow of the knowledge which consumes forms as by fire and which unites and delivers.
If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism.” The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be — and in this case it would be related to the “Hindu miracle” — is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites.
According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great received from Aristotle not only the doctrines concerning morality and politics, but also "those enigmatic and profound" theories that certain masters intended to "reserve for oral communication for initiates, without allowing many to learn about them." Having heard that Aristotle had published some of these teachings, Alexander reproached him in a letter; but Plutarch assures us that the books of Aristotle treating of metaphysics are "written in a style that renders them unusable for the ordinary reader, and useful only as memoranda for those who already have been instructed in this subject." Let us add however that according to the Kabbalists, "it is better to divulge wisdom than to forget it"; this is perhaps what Joachim of Fiore thought of when foreseeing an "age of the Spirit."
The evolutionist rationalists are of the opinion that Aristotle, being the father of logic, is ipso facto the father of intelligence become at last mature and efficacious; they obviously are unaware that this flowering of a discipline of thought, while having its merits, goes more or less hand in hand with a weakening, or even an atrophy, of intellectual intuition. The angels, it is said, do not possess reason, for they have no need of reasoning; this need presupposes in fact that the spirit, no longer able to see, must "grope." It may be objected that the greatest metaphysicians, hence the greatest intellectual intuitives, made use of reasoning; no doubt, but this was only in their dialectic — intended for others — and not in their intellection as such. It is true that a reservation applies here: since intellectual intuition does not a priori encompass all aspects of the real, reasoning may have the function of indirectly provoking a "vision" of some aspect; but in this case reasoning operates merely as an occasional cause, it is not a constitutive element of the cognition. We will perhaps be told that reasoning may actualize in any thinker a suprarational intuition, which is true in principle, yet in fact it is more likely that such an intuition will not be produced, as there is nothing in the profane mentality that is predisposed thereto, to say the least.
In the preceding considerations, we do not have Aristotle in mind, we blame only those who believe that Aristotelianism represents a monopoly of intelligence, and who confuse simple logic with intelligence as such, something which Aristotle never dreamed of doing. That logic can be useful or necessary for earthly man is obvious; but it is also obvious that logic is not what leads directly and indispensably to knowledge — which does not mean that illogicality is legitimate or that the suprarational coincides with the absurd. If it were objected that in mysticism and even in theology there exists a pious absurdity, we would reply that in this case absurdity is merely "functional" — somewhat as in the koans of Zen — and that it is necessary to examine the underlying intentions in order to do justice to the dialectic means; in this domain, there is a case for saying that "the end justifies the means."
Man must "become that which he is" because he must "become That which is"; "the soul is all that it knows," said Aristotle.
Every language is a soul, said Aristotle; that is to say a psychic or mental dimension. There are languages that are parallel, such as French and Italian, as there are those that are complementary, such as French and German; it could also be said that there are linguistic families, hence genera, that on the one hand include and on the other exclude.
God is both unknowable and knowable, a paradox which implies — on pain of absurdity — that the relationships are different, first of all on the plane of mere thought and then in virtue of everything that separates mental knowledge from that of the heart; the first is a “perceiving,” and the second a “being.” “The soul is all that it knows,” said Aristotle; it is necessary to add that the soul is able to know all that it is; and that in its essence it is none other than That which is, and That which alone is.
From the standpoint of integral rationalism, Aristotle has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To Aristotle’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If Aristotle is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a tendency toward exteriorization, a tendency which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics. Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves Aristotle’s deviation from the epistemological principle. The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated Aristotle in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism—or rationalism in principle—which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational.(1) The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that Aristotle deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing tendency with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the modern world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man.
1. It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose Aristotle and not Plato or Plotinus, hut the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as “mysteries.”
A man such as Aristotle provides a classic example of a qualification that is exclusively intellectual and, by this very fact, unilateral and necessarily limited, even on the level of his genius, since perfect intellection ipso facto involves contemplation and interiorization. In the case of the Stagirite, the intelligence is penetrating but the tendency of the will is exteriorizing, in conformity moreover with the cosmolatry of the majority of the Greeks; it is this that enabled Saint Thomas to support the religious thesis regarding the “natural” character of the intelligence, so called because it is neither revealed nor sacramental, and the reduction of intelligence to reason illumined by faith, the latter alone being granted the right to be “supernatural.” Not that Saint Thomas thereby excluded direct intellection, which would indeed have been impossible for him, but he enclosed it to all intents and purposes within dogmatic and rational limits, whence the paradox of an interiorizing contemplativity armed with an exteriorizing logic.
Contrary to too widespread an opinion, the moral doctrine of Aristotle, who advocated the golden mean inasmuch as this is situated between two excesses, is not an invitation to mediocrity, nor is it responsible for the secular bourgeois respectability that it may have occasioned. However, this moral doctrine is to be distinguished from Christian morality which sees in morals a spiritual means—whence its sacrificial character—whereas for the Greeks, as for most Orientals, moral equilibrium is spiritually a basis and not a means.
Comparison between Plato and Aristotle
For Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them.
The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more "concrete" and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved.
Aristotelianism is a kind of exteriorization of Platonism, that is to say of the doctrine represented by the line Pythagoras- Socrates-Plato-Plotinus. The Middle Ages showed at times an awareness of the superiority of Plato over Aristotle; it is thus that Saint Bonaventure attributes "wisdom" to the former and "science" to the latter.
For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being "proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle" and: "what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial" (Sein und Zeit). Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have "discovered" their ontology by dint of "thinking"; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite "indicative" and "provisional" role of "thinking" in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a "thinker," misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: "It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology. As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently" (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued?
A certain underlying warrior or chivalric mentality does much to explain both the theological fluctuations and their ensuing disputes(1)— the nature of Christ and the structure of the Trinity having been, in the Christian world, among the chief points at issue — just as it explains such narrownesses as the incomprehension and the intolerance of the ancient theologians towards Hellenism, its metaphysics and its mysteries. It is moreover this same mentality which produced, in the very bosom of the Greek tradition, the divergence of Aristotle with regard to Plato, who personified in essence the brahmana spirit inherent in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition,(2) whereas the Stagirite formulated a metaphysics that was in certain respects centrifugal and dangerously open to the world of phenomena, actions, experiments and adventures.(3)
1. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the same causes produce the same effects in all climates — albeit to very varied extents and that India is no exception; the quarrels of sectarian Vishnuism are a case in point.
2. It goes without saying that in the classical period — with its grave intellectual and artistic deviations — and then in its re- emergence at the time of the Renaissance, we have obvious examples of luciferianism of a warrior and chivalric, and therefore, kshatriya type. But it is not deviation proper that we have in mind here, since we are speaking on the contrary of manifestations that are normal and acceptable to Heaven, otherwise there could be no question of voluntarist and emotional upayas.
3. But let us not make Aristotelianism responsible for the modern world, which is due to the confluence of various factors, such as the abuses — and subsequent reactions — provoked by the unrealistic idealism of Catholicism, or such as the divergent and unreconciled demands of the Latin and Germanic mentalities; all of them converging on Greek scientism and the profane mentality.
Platonism, which is as it were "centripetal" and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is "centrifugal" and separative, tends to sever the world — and with it man — from its divine roots. This can serve theology inasmuch as it needs the image of a man totally helpless without dogmatic and sacramental graces; and this led St. Thomas to opt for Aristotle — as against the Platonism of St. Augustine — and to deprive Catholicism of its deepest metaphysical dimension, while at the same time immunizing it — according to the usual opinion — against all temptation to "gnosis." Be that as it may, we could also say, very schematically, that Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, "reason" is synonymous with "intellect": reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration.
In a relative sense and without wishing to underestimate Aristotle's merits, it could be said that this philosopher "carnalized" the "divine" Plato by putting forward a metaphysics turned towards earthly experience. However, the Stagirite cannot be accused, as regards the essential, of any false idea; limitation is not error.
The importance of this idea of the degrees of the Real, is linked to the fact that it indicates totality of knowledge. In Hinduism, as is known, this totality is represented by Shankara, whereas for Ramanuja, as for the Semitic exoterisms, the Real does not comprise extinctive degrees; among the Greeks , we encounter the awareness of these degrees in Platonic idealism, but scarcely so in Aristotelian hylomorphism, which accentuates or favors the “horizontal” perspective; whence its utility for scientism on the one hand, and for a theology more cosmological than metaphysical on the other hand; science being centered upon the world, and religion upon the eschatological interests of man.
As for Aristotelianism, we can limit ourselves here to the following consideration: on the one hand the Stagirite teaches the art of thinking correctly, but on the other hand he also induces one to think too much, to the detriment of intuition. Assuredly, the syllogism is useful, but on the express condition that it be necessary; that it not be superimposed as a systematic luxury upon a cognitive capacity which it smothers and the impossibility of which it seems to postulate implicitly. It is as if, through groping continually, one no longer knew how to see, or as if the possession of an art compelled its being used, even abusively; or again, as if thought were there for logic, rather than logic for thought.
There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas — not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia — were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd.
In reality, the philosophia perennis, actualized in the West, though on different levels, by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the Fathers and the Scholastics, constitutes a definitive intellectual heritage, and the great problem of our times is not to replace them with something better — for this something could not exist according to the point of view in question here — but to return to the sources, both around us and within us, and to examine all the data of contemporary life in the light of the one, timeless truth.
The cosmological proof of God, which is found in both Aristotle and Plato, and which consists in inferring from the existence of the world that of a transcendent, positive and infinite Cause, finds no greater favor in the eyes of those who deny the supernatural. According to these people the notion of God merely compensates, in this case, for our ignorance of causes, a gratuitous argument, if ever there was one, for the cosmological proof implies, not a purely logical and abstract supposition, hut a profound knowledge of causality. If we know what total causality is, namely the “vertical” and “descending” projection of a possibility through different degrees of existence, then we can conceive the First Cause; otherwise we cannot do so. Here again we observe that the objection arises from ignoring what is implicit: rationalists forget that “proof,” on the level in question, is a key or a symbol, a means of drawing back a veil rather than of providing actual illumination; it is not by itself a leap out of ignorance and into knowledge. The principial argument “indicates” rather than “proves”; it cannot be anything more than a guideline or an aide-mémoire, since it is impossible to prove the Absolute outside itself. If “to prove” means to know something by virtue of a particular mental stratagem—but for which one would perforce remain in ignorance—then there are no possible “proofs of God”; and this, moreover, explains why one can do without them in symbolist and contemplative metaphysics.
Aristotle, in erecting his table of categories — substance, quantity, quality, relation, activity, passivity, place, moment, position, condition — seems to have been more concerned about the rational classification of things than about their concrete nature.(1) Our own standpoint* being closer to cosmology than to Peripatetic logic — although the boundaries fluctuate — we give preference to the following enumeration: object and subject, space and time, which are container-categories; matter and energy, form and number, which are content-categories; quality and quantity, simplicity and complexity, which are attribute categories; the first term of each couple being static, and the second, dynamic, approximately and symbolically speaking. This being granted, we cannot exclude other possible angles of vision, whether they be more analytic, or on the contrary more synthetic; and always prefigured by some symbolism of nature.(2)
1. The Greek word kategoria, "argument," means in the last analysis: an ultimate form of thought, that is to say a key-notion capable of classifying other notions, or even all the notions having a bearing on existence.
2. Let us mention this fundamental enumeration: space, time, form, number, matter — fundamental because of its relation to the symbolism of the pentagram, the human body, the hand, the five elements. There are some who put "life" in place of matter, thinking no doubt of energy, which penetrates everything.
It is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned — Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well — but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit.
One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks “attained” to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates—Plato—Aristotle represents the summit of an entirely “natural” thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms. There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of “humanism” more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic— and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual “pedagogy” and have something of the provisional in them— this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a “natural” character to intellections that are “supernatural” by definition, or “naturally supernatural”. On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profane—profane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind—whereas Aristotle placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and “humanistic” plane. The originality of Aristotle and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a “two-edged sword” precisely be-cause truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms. The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense.(1) What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity.
The moderns have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers—and all the sages of the East as well—with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already—for it alone could conceive of any such idea—and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? But the present purpose is not to prolong this subject; it is simply to call attention to the parallelism between the pre-Socratic—or more precisely the Ionian— wisdom and oriental doctrines such as the Vaisheshika and the Sankhya, and to underline, on the one hand, that in all these ancient visions of the Universe the implicit postulate is the innateness of the nature of things in the intellect(2) and not a supposition or other logical operation, and on the other hand, that this notion of innateness furnishes the very definition of that which the sceptics and empiricists think they must disdainfully characterize as “dogmatism”; in this way they demonstrate that they are ignorant, not only of the nature of intellection, but also of the nature of dogmas in the proper sense of the word. The admirable thing about the Platonists is not, to be sure, their “thought”, it is the content of their thought, whether it be called “dogmatic” or otherwise. The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists—not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus— Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out.
1. With Pythagoras one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East—in reality neither “Eastern” nor “Western”, that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe—but neither is one wholly in the West; whereas with Aristotle Europe begins to become speci fically “Western” in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East—or a particular East—forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean West finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both Aristotle and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all modern theological attempts to “surpass” the teaching of Aristotle can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary “ scientism”, before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before modernism in all its forms—that modernism which is less and less a “humanism” since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The moderns, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of Aristotle.
2. In the terminology of the ancient cosmologists one must allow for its symbolism: when Thales saw in “water” the origin of all things, it is as certain as can be that Universal Substance—the Prakriti of the Hindus—is in question and not the sensible element. It is the same with the “ air” of Anaximenes of Miletus, or with the “ fire” of Heraclitus.
The body invites to adoration by its very theomorphic form, and that is why it can be the vehicle of a celestial presence that in principle is salvific; but, as Plato suggests, this presence is accessible only to the contemplative soul not dominated by passion, and independently of the question of whether the person is an ascetic or is married. Sexuality does not mean animality, except in perverted, hence sub-human, man; in the properly human man, sexuality is determined by that which constitutes man's prerogative, as is attested, precisely, by the theomorphic form of his body.
Thus it is not surprising that from the strictly theological point of view, gnosis is the "enemy number one." By its recourse to intellection it seems to make Revelation redundant and even superfluous, which in theological language is called "submitting Revelation to the judgement of reason"; this confusion — which is not disinterested — between reason and intellection is altogether typical. Plato's anticipated retort is the following, and it is all the more justified in that religious sentimentalism has had extremely serious, if providential, consequences since "it must needs be that offenses come": "All force of reasoning must be enlisted to oppose anyone who tries to maintain an assertion and at the same time destroys knowledge, understanding and intelligence." (Sophist, 249).
Thus it is illogical, to say the least, to wish to contrast the "wisdom of Christ," whose purpose is to save and not to explain, with the "wisdom of the world" — that of Plato for example — whose purpose is to explain and not to save; besides, the fact that the Platonic wisdom is not dictated by an intention to save does not imply that it is of "this world" or "of the flesh," or even that it does not contain any liberating virtue in the methodic context required by it.
It is said nowadays of Plato, Aristotle and the Scholastics that they have been “left behind”; this means, in reality, that there is no longer anyone intelligent or normal enough to understand them, the acme of originality and emancipation being to mock things which are evident.
For it is evident that if certain philosophers deny God — those precisely who detach reason from its roots — it is not because reason obliges them to do so, otherwise atheism would be natural to man, and otherwise a Plato or an Aristotle, who are nonetheless accused of rationalism, would not have taken the trouble to speak of God; the very structure of reason would have dispensed them from it.
One can be a Christian and at the same time a Platonist, given that there is no competition between mystical voluntarism and metaphysical intellectuality, leaving aside the Semitic concept of the creatio ex nihilo.
When one speaks of Christian esoterism, it can only be one of three things: firstly, it can be Christly gnosis, founded on the person, the teaching and the gifts of Christ, and profiting in certain eventualities from Platonic concepts, a process which in metaphysics has nothing irregular about it;(1) this gnosis was manifested in particular, although in a very uneven way, in writings such as those of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Denis the Areopagite — or the Theologian or the Mystic, if one prefers — Scotus Erigena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Jakob Boehme and Angelus Silesius.
1. In a general manner, intertraditional influences are always possible under cert ain conditions, but without any syncretism. Unquestionably Buddhism and Islam had an influence on Hinduism, not of course by adding new elements to it, but by favouring or determining the blossoming of pre-existing elements. 20. In other words, one finds elements of esoterism in orthodox gnosticism — which is prolonged in the theosophy of Boehme and his successors — then in the Dionysian mysticism of the Rhinelanders, and of course in Hesychasm; without forgetting that partial element of methodic esoterism constituted by the quietism of Molinos, traces of which can be found in St Francis of Sales.
The sacred rights of the Intellect appear besides in the fact that Christians have not been able to dispense with the wisdom of Plato, and that later, the Latins found the need for recourse to Aristotelianism, as if thereby recognising that religio could not do without the element of wisdom, which a too exclusive perspective of love had allowed to fall into discredit.(1) But if knowledge is a profound need of the human spirit, it is by that very fact also a way.
1. The ancient tendency to reduce sophie to a ‘philosophy’, an ‘art for art’s sake’ or a ‘knowledge without love’, hence a pseudo-wisdom, has necessitated the predominance, in Christianity, of the contrary viewpoint. Love, in the sapiential perspective, is the element which surpasses simple ratiocination and makes knowledge effective; this cannot be insisted on too much.
From the point of view of the Platonists—in the widest sense—the return to God is inherent in the fact of existence: our being itself offers the way of return, for that being is divine in its nature, otherwise it would be nothing; that is why we must return, passing through the strata of our ontological reality, all the way to pure Substance, which is one; it is thus that we become perfectly “ourselves”. Man realizes what he knows: a full comprehension—in the light of the Absolute—of relativity dissolves it and leads back to the Absolute. Here again there is no irreducible antagonism between Greeks and Christians: if the intervention of Christ can become necessary, it is not because deliverance is something other than a return, through the strata of our own being, to our true Self, but because the function of Christ is to render such a return possible. It is made possible on two planes, the one existential and exoteric and the other intellectual and esoteric; the second plane is hidden in the first, which alone appears in the full light of day, and that is the reason why for the common run of mortals the Christian perspective is only existential and separative, not intellectual and unitive. This gives rise to another misunderstanding between Christians and Platonists: while the Platonists propound liberation by Knowledge because man is an intelligence(1) the Christians envisage in their over-all doctrine a salvation by Grace because man is an existence— as such separated from God—and a fallen and impotent will. Once again, the Greeks can be reproached for having at their command but a single way, inaccessible in fact to the majority, and for giving the impression that it is philosophy that saves, just as one can reproach the Christians for ignoring liberation by Knowledge and for assigning an absolute character to our existential and volitive reality alone and to means appropriate to that aspect of our being, or for taking into consideration our existential relativity and not our “intellectual absoluteness”; nevertheless the reproach to the Greeks cannot concern their sages, any more than the reproach to the Christians can attack their gnosis, nor in a general way their sanctity.
1. Islam, in conformity with its “ paracletic” charact er, reflects this point of view—which is also that of the Vedanta and of all other forms of gnosis—in a Semitic and religious mode, and realizes it all the more readily in its esoterism; like the Hellenist, the Moslem asks first of all: “What must I know or admit, seeing that I have an intelligence capable of objectivity and of totality?” and not a priori “What must I want, since I have a will that is free, but fallen?”
The Augustinian and Platonic doctrine of knowledge is still in perfect accord with gnosis, while Thomist and Aristotelian sensationalism, without being false on its own level and within its own limits, accords with the exigencies of the way of love, in the specifi c sense of the term bhakti. But this reservation is far from applying to the whole of Thomism, which identifies itself, in many respects, with truth unqualified — It is necessary to reject the opinion of those who believe that Thomism, or any other ancient wisdom, has an effective value only when we ‘recreate it in ourselves’ — we, ‘men of today!' —and that if St. Thomas had read Descartes, Kant and the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he would have expressed himsel f differently; in reality, he would then only have had to refute a thousand errors the more. If an ancient saying is right, there is nothing to do but accept it; if itis false, there is no reason to take notice of it; but to want to ‘rethink’ it through a veil of new errors or impressions quite clearly has no interest, and any such attempt merely shows the degree to which the sense of intrinsic and timeless truth has been lost.
It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all others. They are accessible, intuitively and infallibly, to the "gnostic," the "pneumatic," the "theosopher" — in the proper and original meaning of these terms — and they are accessible consequently to the "philosopher" according to the still literal and innocent meaning of the word: to a Pythagoras or a Plato, and to a certain extent even to an Aristotle, in spite of his exteriorizing and virtually scientistic perspective.
It is in fact the Logos which directly rules the world, and thus It coincides with the Demiurge of Plato and of the Gnostics, and no less with the Hindu Trinity of the efficient Gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
It has been said and said again that the Hellenists and the Orientals—the “Platonic” spirits in the widest sense—have become blameworthy in “arrogantly” rejecting Christ, or that they are trying to escape from their “responsibilities”—once again and always ! —as creatures towards the Creator in withdrawing into their own centre where they claim to find, in their pure being, the essence of things and the Divine Reality; they thus dilute, it seems, the quality of creature and at the same time t hat of Creator with a sort of pantheistic impersonalism, which amounts to saying that they destroy the relationship of “obligation” between the Creator and the creature. In reality “responsibilities” are relative as we ourselves are relative in our existential specification; they cannot be less relative—or “more absolute”—than the subject to which they are related. One who, by the grace of Heaven, succeeds in escaping from the tyranny of the ego is by that very circumstance discharged from the responsibilities which the ego implies. God shows himself as creative Person in so far as—or in relation to the fact that—we are “creature” and individual, but that particular reciprocal relationship is far from exhausting all our ontological and intellectual nature; that is to say, our nature cannot be exhaustively defined by notions of “duty”, of “rights”, nor by other fixations of the kind. It has been said that the “rejection” of the Christie gift on the part of the “Platonic” spirit constitutes the subtlest and most Luciferan perversity of the intelligence; this argument, born of an instinct of selfpreservation, wrong in its inspiration but comprehensible on its own plane, can easily and far more pertinently be turned against those who make use of it: for, if we are to be obliged at all costs to find some mental perversion somewhere, we shall find it with those who want to substitute for the Absolute a personal and therefore relative God, and temporal phenomena for metaphysical principles, and that not in connection with a childlike faith that asks nothing of anybody, but within the framework of the most exacting erudition and the most totalitarian intellectual pretension. If there is such a thing as abuse of the intelligence, it is to be found in the substitution of the relative for the Absolute, or the accident from the Substance, on the pretext of putting the “concrete” above the “abstract”; it is not to be found in the rejection— in the name of transcendent and immutable principles—of a relativity presented as absoluteness. The misunderstanding between Christians and Hellenists can for the greater part be condensed to a false alternative: in effect, the fact that God resides in our deepest “being”—or at the extreme transpersonal depth of our consciousness— and that we can in principle realize him with the help of the pure and theomorphic intellect, in no way excludes the equal and simultaneous affirmation of this immanent and impersonal Divinity as objective and personal, nor the fact that we can do nothing without his grace, despite the essentially “divine” character of the Intellect in which we participate naturally and supernaturally.
From a certain point of view, the Christian argument is the historicity of the Christ-Saviour, whereas the Platonic or “Aryan” argument is the nature of things or the Immutable. If, to speak symbolically, all men are in danger of drowning as a consequence of the fall of Adam, the Christian saves him-sell by grasping the pole held out to him by Christ, whereas the Platonist saves himself by swimming; but neither course weakens or neutralizes the effectiveness of the other. On the one hand there are certainly men who do not know how to swim or who are prevented from doing so, but on the other hand swimming is undeniably among the possibilities open to man; the whole thing is to know what counts most in any situation whether individual or collective.6 We have seen that Hellenism, like all directly or indirectly sapiential doctrines, is founded on the axiom man—intelligence rather than man— will, and that is one of the reasons why it had to appear as inoperative in the eyes of a majority of Christians; but only of a majority because the Christian gnostics could not apply such a reproach to the Pythagoreans and Platonists; the gnostics could not do otherwise than admit the primacy of the intellect, and for that reason the idea of divine redemption meant to them something very different from and more far-reaching than a mysticism derived from history and a sacramental dogmatism. It is necessary to repeat once more—as others have said before and better—that sacred facts are true because they retrace on their own plane the nature of things, and not the other way round: the nature of things is not real or normative because it evokes certain sacred facts. The principles, essentially accessible to pure intelligence—if they were not so man would not be man, and it is almost blasphemy to deny that human intelligence considered in relation to animal intelligence has a supernatural side—the universal principles confirm the sacred facts, which in their turn reflect those principles and derive their efficacy from them; it is not history, whatever it may contain, that confirms the principles. This relationship is expressed by the Buddhists when they say that spiritual truth is situated beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and that it derives its evidence from the depths of Being itself, or from the innateness of Truth in all that is. In the sapiential perspective the divine redemption is always present; it pre-exists all terrestrial alchemy and is its celestial model, so that it is always thanks to this eternal redemption— whatever may be its vehicle on earth—that man is freed from the weight of his vagaries and even, Deo volente, from that of his separative existence; if “my Words shall not pass away” it is because they have always been. The Christ of the gnostics is he who is “before Abraham was” and from whom arise all the ancient wisdoms; a consciousness of this, far from diminishing a participation in the treasures of the historical Redemption, confers on them a compass that touches the very roots of Existence.
77
Philosophy Sophists
were
the creators of wrong thinking --
False philosophers,
insolent
And vainglorious.
In the world of Greece
The chosen one was Plato, the most wise;
Before him was Pythagoras, mysterious, deep --
The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.
Not philosophers,
but misosophers,
One should
call the inventors of false doctrines --
Those who follow their ambition and their pride
And are stubborn in their mad ideas.
Plato and Aristotle,
and later Plotinus:
They radiate over a thousand years
And more. What they wished, and partly achieved,
Was that humanity should rally round the Truth.
XXIX
The dignity of
a noble man is not superficial;
It is based on a profound reality:
The immovable Center amidst the circular movement
Of the world; the wheel of existence is consecrated to God.
As Aristotle taught:
silent
Is the cause of all things.
Nobility Is participation in
Pure Being;
This lies
deep in the blood of the noble man.
The principle of
dignity should resound in the heart --
Dignity means:
to bring Being into our
existence.
XCI
Plato's thought
looked towards Heaven,
Aristotle's thought looked towards the earth;
Similar is the relationship that we find between Shankara
And Ramanuja in India; both spiritual edifices
Had to be built, each one to shape a specific world.
Greece and India
are not on the same level;
Hellas cannot be the Sanâtana Dharma.
CXLIX
All too often
psychology replaces logic --
And even Truth itself --
And thereby, in our decadent age,
Has robbed many people of all support.
If one had remained
with Aristotle,
One would not have swallowed every false idea --
But psychomania twists everything according to its wishful thinking.
CXXXII
Some scholars say
"That stories, plays and fables
Should be understood symbolically";
Nevertheless: what stories tell us must have a meaning on its own plane,
Otherwise symbolic interpretation is but jest and shimmering illusion.
One can never excuse
stupid puzzles by spiritual interpretation;
Give us beauty
and truth, not wild yarns and lies.
Because the purpose of tragedy,
As Aristotle said, is catharsis;
If one is offered only chaotic action, the seeker after Wisdom will find nothing.
Mytho-poetical story-telling is a widespread human weakness --
The wise man, Deo juvante, is able to perceive the nature of things.