Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

His own ideas, outlined in The Symposium and elsewhere, were to show how love of a particular beautiful body, for example, could be ‘purified and transformed’ into an ecstatic contemplation (theoria) of ideal Beauty. Plato thought that the ideal forms were somehow hidden in the mind and that it was the task of thinking to discover and reveal these forms, that they could be recollected or apprehended if one considered them long enough. Human beings, remember, were fallen divinities (an idea resurrected by Christianity in the Middle Ages) and so the divine was within them in some way, if only it could be ‘touched’ by reason, reason understood as an intuitive grasp of the eternal realm within. Plato didn’t use the word nirvana but his pattern of belief is recognisably similar to that of the Buddha, leading men back within themselves. Like Zarathustra, for Plato the object of the spiritual life was concentration on abstract entities. Some have called this the birth of the very idea of abstraction.

The ideas of Aristotle (384–322 BC) were no less mystical, even though he was a much harder-headed scientist and natural philosopher (aspects of his thought which will be considered in the next chapter). He realised there was an emotional basis of religious belief, even though he thought of himself as a rationalist. This is why, for example, Greek theatre, in particular its tragedies, started life as part of religious festivals: theatrical tragedy was for Aristotle a form of purification (he called it katharsis) whereby the emotions of terror and pity were experienced and controlled. Whereas Plato had proposed a single divine realm, to which we have access via contemplation, Aristotle thought there was a hierarchy of realities, at the top of which was the Unmoved Mover – immortal, immobile, in essence pure thought though he was at one and the same time the thinker and the thought.¹²² He caused all the change and flux in the universe, all of which stemmed from a single source. Under this scheme, human beings were privileged, in that the human soul has the gift of intellect, a divine entity, which puts man above the animals and plants. The object of thought, for Aristotle, was immortality, a kind of salvation. As with Plato, thought was itself a form of purification but again theoria, contemplation, did not consist only of logical reasoning, but of ‘disciplined intuition resulting in an ecstatic self-transcendence’.¹²³

Confucius (Kongfuzi, 551–479 BC) was by far the least mystical of all the prophets/religious teachers/moral philosophers to emerge in the Axial Age. He was deeply religious in a traditional sense, showing reverence toward heaven and an omnipresent spiritual world, but he was cool towards the supernatural and does not seem to have believed in either a personal god or the afterlife. The creed he developed was in reality an adaptation of traditional ideas and practices, and was very worldly, addressed to the problems of his own times. That said, there are uncanny parallels between the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Plato and the Israelite prophets. They stem from a similarity in the wider social and political context.

Even by the time of Confucius’ birth, the Chinese were already an ancient people. From the middle of the second millennium BC, the Shang dynasty was firmly established and, according to excavations, appears to have comprised a supreme king, an upper ruling class of related families, and a lower level of people tied to the land. It was a very violent society, characterised, according to one historian, by ‘sacrifice, warfare and hunting’. As with ancient Hindu ideas, sacrifice underlay all beliefs in early China. ‘Hunting provided sacrificial animals, warfare sacrificial captives.’¹²⁴ Warfare was itself considered a religious activity and before battle there took place a ritual of divination, prayers and oaths.