Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Ancient Cultures, Greek Poets (Part 3)

Well, we welcome you to the second day of the history of Western philosophy. We're going to get underway with a word of prayer. We come before you, our Heavenly Father, and bow before you as the one who is worthy of all praise. You alone are God, the living and true God. You are high and holy. You are exalted and lifted up. We honor you as one who is incomprehensibly great, who transcends all of our weakness, who transcends all of our limitations, who transcends the created order itself, the one that we bow before as the Creator of heaven and earth. But above all, we bow before you because you are Heavenly Father. We thank you for not only giving us life and breath and all things necessary that we might exist, but we thank you that you have loved us, that you've shown us your compassion, that you have been gracious and merciful toward us for the sake of Jesus Christ, your own Son. We thank you that you have adopted us as your own for his sake, that we too can be sons and daughters of the Most High. We ask that we will conduct ourselves in that manner today, that we would work diligently into your glory. For we pray in Jesus name. Yesterday was an introduction to philosophy and to the history of philosophy. And I know a lot was really packed into there that it'll take a long time for you to really appreciate. We're going to kind of flesh out those questions that became, that we gave attention to at the end of class yesterday, the enduring questions of philosophy. You'll understand them better as well as the dialectical tensions and unbelieving thought as we go through and look at specific illustrations. So today we're going to leap right into the history of Western thought. And I keep saying we're going to get to the Greeks, but actually we have Roman numeral 2 in our outline before we get there. Leading up to the Greeks, I think some passing attention ought to be given to the ancient cultures preceding Greece. I have taken the biblical history and the presentation of a biblical worldview somewhat for granted in you that you already are exposed to that. And so I'm not so much wanting to look at the history of the Jews, but the surrounding culture, such as Egypt or the Mediterranean tribes that were in Palestine, or the great empires of Assyria and Babylon and Persia. They too did philosophy. That doesn't mean they had courses in philosophy. It doesn't mean necessarily that they had people that they called philosophers. They were usually called something more religious or mystical than that. But those cultures do give rise to a Certain, the expression is zeitgeist, you understand the German zeitgeist, the spirit, the ghost, the zeitgeist of the zeit, which is the time, the spirit of that time. And we can look back at those cultures and say something about their philosophical perspective. And I want to cover that just in a few opening remarks here this morning. The first ancient culture that we should be aware of is Egypt. Egypt had a mighty empire. It didn't have only but one spokesman. It had many teachers, it had many pharaohs that existed for a number of years. And so I know, at best, I'm distilling into an over simple summary the philosophy or outlaw the outlook of the Egyptians. The word that comes to mind when we think of ancient Egypt is Monophysitism. Monophysitism. I'll write that on the board. Mono meaning one phusis, from the Greek one nature. Monophysitism. The Egyptians believed that there was one nature for everything. Monopusis, Monophysite, the gods as well as creatures were all part of one reality. Now they were not. Pantheists, that's a different notion. The pantheist says that everything is God. And so the grass and the trees and rocks and the seas and so forth, just like human beings are part of the divine nature. If you're a pantheist, the monophysite is moving in the direction of pantheism, to be sure. But on the Monophysite view, you have one kind of reality, one kind of reality. And the gods and men partake of the same reality, though they are different. The gods have evolved out of nature. If you have the natural world down here, represented by this thick line on the board, and everything that is real has that basic nature, but it's an evolving nature. And what happens is that the gods develop out of this evolving nature. Remember, not everything is a God. There are fewer gods than there are creatures. And so you have a oneness or a narrowness at the top of this one nature, and a manyness and a broadness at the bottom of this one nature. And I've tried to be real obvious here, but what kind of structure does this look like now on the board? Like a pyramid. Exactly. You have the one basic nature out of which the gods rise to an apex. The gods have evolved out of nature and this gives us something of a hierarchy of being. The gods have a higher being, a more rarefied elite being than the common being of all people. But it's the same kind of being. Now the next thing you need to realize is that in ancient Egypt, since everything has one nature, it's only natural that the state would come to reflect the perfect and final order of reality. The state is to reflect the perfect final order of reality. Now, if reality is all of one nature, but with the gods evolving out of it, then likewise the state will be a hierarchy, which is symbolized by the pyramid. So you have the common man at the bottom, and then who do you get at the top? Egypt. The pharaoh. Exactly. You have probably seen pictures of the pharaohs, not just in movies, but the actual paintings we have of them. Ever wondered why it is that the pharaoh's head was bald, but he wore a huge gold, what we call a necklace or a yoke around his neck. He had this gold necklace or yoke and a bald head. What does that look like? No, no, not a pyramid. Try again. What has kind of an orbed shape and has golden rays descending from it? The sun. Exactly. Ra, the sun God. And so the pharaoh, you see, was the sun. The pharaoh was the mediator between heaven and earth. His head was bald. He's the sun. The rays extend downward. He is at the top of the hierarchy. He is the mediator between heaven and earth. He is the highest human, and thus in touch with the gods, because then that's the next step of development. They worshiped him as a God. Yes, he was the sun God. The physical appearance of it. He was the physical manifestation or representation of the sun on earth. Now, if you're a Monophysite, then, and you have this view that everything has a common nature, but some things develop to the top of the hierarchy, then what kind of view will you have of the state? Is this going to be a constitutional democracy? No, this is going to be an absolute despotism, isn't it? Because Ra, the sun God, who talks back to the sun God, by the way, if you understand a little bit of this cultural and philosophical background about Egypt, I think you can appreciate all the more the story of the Exodus. Moses goes in, who is at best an adopted son. I mean, some castaway that his daughter picked up. Moses goes into the Pharaoh. Let my people go. Whose people? Who are you talking about? Moses. Pharaoh rules with a mighty hand over everything. Okay? Now, since gods permeate nature, and then the sun God is the highest God, and that is represented by the pharaoh. What do you think is going on? When Moses goes in and he makes his rod into a snake, he goes out and he curses the Nile river, which was a God to the Egyptians, and turns it to what? Blood. He turns Their God of life into a God of death. We have frogs and lice and so forth. What's Jehovah showing? He's mocking the Monophysite claims of Egyptian culture and the deified claims of the pharaoh and so forth. And eventually Pharaoh has to say, all right, get out of here with the death of the firstborn. That's too much. He can't take it. But, you know, philosophical convictions are hard to eradicate. Hard times may cause people to kind of give in and say, all right, maybe I'm wrong. I'll let you go. But how long did that last? Yeah, I mean, as soon as the Hebrews were gone, you know, he started thinking about, who is this? He comes in and talks to me like this. They can't defy me. So Pharaoh and his army pursue the Jews out into the desert, right? And of course, it's amazing. You see the wonder of God's wisdom, how he works this. The Jews, on the other hand, are out at the Red Sea, boxed in. And they look at Pharaoh and his army pursuing across the desert in their chariots, of all things. And what did they say to Moses? You're in collusion with Pharaoh. You brought us out here and ambushed us. You brought us out here to die. And what's God do? He opens the Red Sea and they walk through, not sloshing through mud. You know what the bottom of a lake is like. They go through on dry ground. And as soon as Pharaoh, the sun God, follows them into the sea, God says, that's fine. And then he kills them all in the midst of the Red Sea. I mean, it's not just high drama that you can get, you know, a wonderful movie like the Ten Commandments out of. When you think of it, this actually happened. Here's God dealing with the philosophical and, of course, moral and spiritual error of Egyptian culture, its Monophysitism with its deification of the pharaoh and so forth. Well, we need to move on. As the Jews move into the Promised Land, they're not going into a place that is unoccupied. There are other cultures there. We have the Phrygians and the Philistines and the Hittites and any number of other tribes like them in the land of promise. What I'm going to call on my outline, the Mediterranean towers the tribes that occupy Palestine in that area of the world. Now, when did philosophy begin? Did it begin with the Greeks? No. Began with Adam and Eve. Right? All people, all human beings do philosophy. And that means all cultures are going to have some kind of a Zeitgeist, some kind of spirit of their day that exemplifies their philosophical outlook. So just as the Egyptians had a philosophical outlook, so the Mediterranean powers do as well. And I suppose if we were going to generalize across diverse cultures, not. They didn't agree on everything, obviously, the Phoenicians and the Canaanites and so forth. The one thing that we see over and over again, though, in the Old Testament account of these peoples is their Baalism, you know, the baal. I'm just putting ism at the end of it to exemplify the kind of religious perspective they had. It was a Baalist. A Baalist perspective on life. Baalism brought a fertility cult mentality to these people, especially among the Amorites. The Amorites worshiped the powers of nature. And above all, if you're going to worship nature, you're going to worship those things that you find most potent and helpful. And that meant fertility. If you want to live, we don't think about this. We just go to the store, go down to Kroger, and we buy what we want, right? But if you were a farmer, fertility is very important. You want to make sure you have good crops. If you're a rancher, you want your cattle to be fertile. And especially in that day and age, you wanted large families and children to support you and help. So fertility was very important. Naturally, then the God or goddess of fertility would come to be worshipped. Among the Amorites and others, the Philistines were known for their iron tools. In the ancient world, they had forged tools of iron and had cultural advantages. For that reason, they had learned something about dominion in this world. But was it dominion for the glory of God or dominion for the excesses of men and power over others? Other men? Obviously it was the unloving and rebellious kind of dominion that they were interested in, not the dominion that God had ordained men to have. In Phrygia P H Y R G I A Phrygia, revolution was the first form of salvation. When things were going poorly, if there was social unrest, if the blessings of nature were not being experienced, then the people resorted to revolution. We need to change our political order. Now. We think of these people as kind of ancient pagan barbarians. But you see, they had the idea that when things aren't going well, throw out the political order. We need to have an overturning of the political order so things can be worked out. Pretty ancient, pagan and barbarian, right? Unless you watch the Today show this morning or the news any night during this political campaign that we're in the midst of in 1992. And you see the same an outlook. If we're not experiencing blessing in our lives, if the economy isn't working out for us. I cannot believe this. I actually saw on the TV a woman complaining because when she wanted to go to get a job, she had to get further certification. I think she wanted to do nursing or something like that. And she was required to get further certification so that she would know my modern techniques and so forth. And this was her complaint. So hard for her to get a job. You know, how she can take care of her kids and so forth. And that's why she's angry at the administration in Washington. And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, somebody show me the connection between all these things. She needs a job. She wants to work in an area she's not trained in, and she has to have the oppressive educational requirement met. And so she's angry at the President of the United States. Now, people in this room know better. And so we smile and we think, that's really ridiculous, but that typifies our culture. It may not come to the point of political revolution in the communist sense of overthrowing the wealthy classes and so forth in order to get a dictatorship of the proletariat, but we have the same mentality as the ancient Mediterranean powers. Or how about Baalism? I put that up on the board. I left that there. Do we have any examples of Baalism today? If you think that fertility is important and you're going to make that a really important power or God or goddess, then does it surprise you that the ancient cultures developed the Asheroth and the Asherim? You know what I'm talking about? The Old Testament pagan fertility cults and gods of the people around the Baphan. You know what they were? The Asheroth and Asherim were exaggerated male and female genitals. These people worshiped these things. It was, to put it in modern terms, it was the God and goddess of sex. And they bowed down to this. They saw sex, fertility. This is not only the source of pleasure that ties that together, and the source of power in this world, fertility. And so they exalt sexuality. But of course, in our modern, enlightened age, we wouldn't have a culture that would exalt sexuality and make it the key pleasure or the meaning of life. We actually have cults today. They may not have houses or worship, of course, then maybe again, those houses might be considered houses of worship, but we have cults. Today, people who are committed to the affirmation of sexuality and to freedom with respect to sexuality, there can be a lot of pooh, poohing of this notion of a cultural elite in Hollywood and so forth. But what is Madonna all about if it is not just the glorification of raw sex and there are no boundaries? I mean, here is the material girl. She is unfettered and so forth. Well, we are supposed to be studying ancient culture. But see, my point is I can't help. As a philosopher, when I look at these things in the ancient world, I'm more and more reminded of the world I live in. Let's move ahead from Egypt and the Mediterranean powers. Thirdly, let's look at at Assyria and Babylon, the great empires of Assyria and Babylon. In the Old Testament, of course, these were key enemies and opponents of the people of God. The northern empire, judged by God. The 10 northern tribes eventually went into captivity to Assyria, right? And they were dispersed and never reformed. The southern tribes, Judah and Benjamin, eventually went into Babylonian captivity. And only because of the promises, the redemptive promises of God, were they brought back and restored and redemptive history continues. But these are the great opponents of God's people in the ancient world. Assyria and Babylon represent the zeitgeist, the spirit or mentality or outlook that political might makes right. Political might makes right. You want to know what justice is? You want to know what's right or wrong? That all has to do with the power of the emperor and his imposing very severe penal sanctions on those who disagree with him. It is not a matter of arguing about right and wrong or establishing what is true, eternal and universal justice. It's simply a matter of the raw will of the emperor. The Assyrians were known throughout the ancient world for their cruelty and their terror. They ruled by intimidation so that when some culture, some city would resist the Assyrians, not only would they overtake them with their military might, then they would decapitate the men and put their heads on stakes and line the bridges, the area leading up to the bridges around the city and so forth, with these decapitated heads on stakes. Now, if you're riding in town and you see this gruesome, horrible sight, I mean, it's one thing we've been, in a sense, I think, numbed by horror movies and cartoons and that sort of thing, but we're talking about real human heads. After all, on stakes, you have to ride passes going into town. That gives you a pretty good idea, you know, that you had better submit to the political power that rules this city, or this is your fate too. Might makes right. When all said and done. It would not be an Assyrian tendency to say, let's go to the negotiating table and talk this out, okay? That tongue in cheek understatement. We need to appreciate that Christianity brought to the world the idea that we have to get beyond just force and start talking about the truth of justice and God's will. Assyria and Babylon were characterized by cynical despair on the part of the people. There was obviously a great discrepancy between the ruling classes and the wealthy and the koi polloi, the masses, the many. These great empires had dreams of a one world empire. In one sense, they could have easily propagandized talking about how they want to bring peace to the world. They want to unify all mankind. Will all be well? If not brothers, that's pushing it too far. Will all be fellow citizens under the one empire? Isn't that amazing? On the one hand you have this vicious terror and might, military might, and on the other hand, dreams of a one world empire that's going to unify mankind and bring peace to the world. Assyria was so much hated in the ancient world that when the prophet Jonah was called by God to go to Nineveh, Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire and to preach repentance so that the judgment of God would be stayed against Assyria, what did Jonah say? No way. There's no way I'm going to go first to those bloodthirsty people and secondly, certainly not going to go and try to spare them your judgment. When you think about that, this is a prophet of God who is resisting God. Of course God has his way of bringing Jonah back. You know the story of how the sovereignty of God is demonstrated in Jonah's life. But you see, if you understand Assyria's reputation, that story now becomes much more vivid and understandable, doesn't it? Jonah does go and he preaches repentance. And at least the first time around, the people do repent and they are spared the judgment of God. Later, the Old Testament shows us God's judgment on Assyria. In Babylon, we think of the influence of Daniel in the court of Babylon. Of course, it's the Medes and Persians as well. We think about him with Darius and the lines then. But Daniel's influence is felt when Nebuchadnezzar comes to power. Nebuchadnezzar has a dream given to him by God. They thought about dreams differently in those days than we do you know, you would think Nebuchadnezzar would wake up and say, boy, that was a weird nighttime experience. I got to get on with my daily chores. Nebuchadnezzar couldn't shake this dream, so he brings in all of his wise men who are going to tell him the meaning of things. He's going to have this interpreted for him. They can't do it. And it's Daniel, the Hebrew prophet, that explains to him that God has revealed to you Nebuchadnezzar something about the history of mighty empires. Yours is an empire which relative to the ones that are coming, is golden. The next to come into power will be silver. And then as we move down, we finally get to the mixed clay in the feet of the last empire, which will be Rome, as we know from world history. And what Daniel is revealing to Nebuchadnezzar, remarkably, is that there's going to be a divine kingdom, a stone cut without ends. Humans won't devise this. It'll be God's doing. And this stone will come and will crush the world empires and then it will grow to fill the earth. It will become a mountain that grows and fills the earth. And so God will destroy the world empires and will replace them with his own empire, which we know to be the Church of Jesus Christ. In ancient Babylon, astrology was believed pervasively and followed. It was believed that the stars and the construction configuration of the constellations in the skies controlled the destiny of men on earth. So there was a sense in which something transcending our experience controls us. But it wasn't God. It wasn't a personal sovereign God that we answer to. It's rather we answer to the stars. And we have to look to the stars and try to divine from the configuration of the stars what we can expect here on Earth. Almost an environmental perspective that the outward circumstances of nature determine, you know, the quality of our life and where we are going, how well we're going to do. Okay, D Our outline will be Persia. Persia is known for Zoroastrian dualism. Zoroaster was the God, the God of good anyway, the good God that was worshipped by the Persians. But Zoroaster didn't stand alone. There was a corresponding force of darkness and evil and this light, the good and the darkness, evil were always warring with one another. So you don't have an ultimate moral order that is ruled by a sovereign God. You have two ultimate orders, one good and one evil. The Persian emperors, as we read ancient history, obviously had messianic pretensions they looked upon themselves as the saviors of men. They looked upon themselves as the gift of the supernatural to men. I think that makes all the more significant Isaiah's prophecy about Cyrus, the Persian king. God says, will be my Christos and my shepherd. He will be my anointed, my Messiah and my shepherd. Well, that's pretty strong language. And how is it that he will do so? By sending the people back to the land so that the true messiah might come again. This background helps you read the Bible. I think one thing that is positive, I think in the development of Persian culture, though it obviously is not tied to a worldview where it's going to eventually bring the good that it should, is the gradual development in Persia, the notion that the king is subject to the law like everyone else is subject to the law. Rather than having the king above the law and the law between his arbitrary will and the people have got to, for their own good, obey him. The king too stands under the law. Maybe that helps you understand why Darius once he had issued a decree about not praying and anybody who prays, you know, goes to the lines den has got to be punished. Even though Darius respects Daniel and does not want to punish him. Darius says I have to. It's the law of the Medes and Persians. Once the law is given, the king is subject to law as well. Well, here you see, of course, a wicked application of this. But the general principle is a good one, that kings do not rule by fiat. But kings have got to be subject to the same laws that other people are subject to. Alright then, E in our outline is Greece. We look at the empire of Greece and the culture of Greece. Greece develops what is known as classical culture. You're going to see this expression throughout your college days when you read things about classical motifs or classical culture or Harkonne, back to the classical age and so forth. We're talking about the age of Greece and that's where our study of the history of philosophy is going to kick off as well. Let me just say a word or two about the culture of Greece to give some overall themes. Tragedy in drama. The ancient Greeks were known for their tragedies. Can I take it for granted? You all know what I'm getting at when I refer to a Greek drama as a tragedy. You know the difference between tragedy and comedy? You think you do. Comedy doesn't mean haha. When you're talking about Greek drama, does that surprise you? A tragedy is when a person who is basically good or protagonist, without any fault of his or her own suffers in the end. That's a tragedy. A comedy is when a person who is bad gets his comeuppance and a person who is good comes out ahead. See? So comedy is the opposite of tragedy. Tragedy is when because of forces or fates beyond your control, though you are a good person, you suffer or evil people get ahead. Comedy is the opposite of that. And the Greeks were known for their very powerful tragedies in drama at theater. That shows, I think, a prevailing despair in Greek culture. Because the way they saw things is that fate governs everything and you can be a good person and not necessarily work out for you. When we, in a few minutes, turn to Greek philosophy, I'm going to say more about that. That is an overgeneralization, but that is where things end up. The despair of the Greek tragedy and the loss of the Greek empire. A second thing Greece is known for is its humanism. Man becomes the measure of all things, especially among the softest. The sophist were traveling teachers in Greece and being cynical about the ability to know any absolute right and wrong or any ultimate truth about reality, the sophist declared, man is the measure. The way you evaluate everything is according to man's desires. What does it do for man? How does he relate to it? Man is the measure of all things in ancient Greece. Thirdly, you might want to note that tyranny and aristocracy were far more common forms of government than democracy. I say that because in our day and age, we tend to look back to Greece as the great day of democracy. Well, but if you look at the whole Greek period, I think you'd have to grant that there was far more aristocracy and tyranny than there was democracy. And the democracy of ancient Greece failed. And the last thing I want to note is not so much about Greece, but about us. Not only at the Renaissance, but in our own day and age. People glorify the classical era. The Renaissance. As you know, the word means rebirth. The Renaissance was supposed to be the rebirth of man. And so the Renaissance looks back, not like the Reformation looking back to the text of Scripture, you know, and the word of God over against tradition. The renaissance looks back past tradition to another human tradition, that of classical culture. The rebirth of man means man becomes the measure of everything. Humanism, so forth and so on. We have that in our day and age, too. The only thing that really counts is how do things affect man? Man is the judge of everything, right and wrong. And that either means man collectively in his culture or state, or men individually determining right and wrong. For themselves. Like I said, we're coming back to Greece. But let me just complete this whirlwind tour of ancient cultures by putting Rome up on the board. Rome is known for law and order. There can be no doubt about it. The Pax Romana brought certain benefits to the ancient world, brought stability for a period of time, political predictability. It brought an ordered society under law. That was the upside, I guess. The downside, the curse of it all, is that along with the law and order that was imposed by the Romans, they deified their emperors. It wasn't the law and order that comes from Jehovah, the God who created heaven and earth. It's the law and order that's imposed by the emperor. And the emperor is seen as God or as the great liberator and Messiah sent by the gods. This becomes, of course, the great clash between the Roman Empire and the early Christian Church. The emperor wants to be worshipped, and everyone who's a good citizen must put his incense on the bust of the emperor, you know, and say, caesar is Lord. And the Christians refuse to do that. They say, no, Jesus is Lord. I hope this brings to life certain New Testament passages, not just the Book of Revelation where you have the emperor cult actually described. The beast from the land gets people to worship. The beast from the ocean has a bust, has a head that actually speaks, and so forth. You have satanic miracles and so forth associated with this. You see it in Revelation, you see it in the Book of Acts as well. The declaration that there's no other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved is a direct contradiction of the declaration that Tiberius was the name in which people would be saved. Christ alone is that name. In Acts 17, we see the Christians, Paul in particular, although Paul has gone and doesn't get arrested. Jason and his household was attacked for what reason? Because they declared there's another king besides Caesar, one Jesus. So there's this clash because the Roman law and order was tied to the deification of the emperor, and whether people began by saying, the emperor's divine, so let's follow the law and order, or they said this law and order is important, so we need to exalt the emperor. The fact is, those two were symbiotic. They went together and they helped each other. A common theme that we see throughout ancient cultures, from Egypt with its Monophysitism, to Rome with its deification of the emperor. Common theme. I'm sure there's more than one, but I want you to see this one at least, and that is statism. When people will not bow to the living and true God, I think inevitably they're going to exalt something else in the place of God. And that becomes, more often than not, the state. I know this is a real, real broad and ambiguous generalization, but I think that tendency is there. Some people follow the gods of nature, the phallic symbols and so forth. But eventually what binds everything together in some kind of hope for orderliness and peace on earth and so forth is the state having absolute command, being a God of some sort, the pharaoh being the sun God, or the Roman emperor being exalted into the company of the gods because he rules over all. Naturally, Christian philosophy has its own cultural effects too. I'm going to end this portion of my lecture by suggesting that if we saw things from the standpoint of God's word, we understood reality and how we know what we know and how we should live our lives and the way that God presents it, we would be prevented from ever moving towards statism because God alone has that position. God gives his law, and all men, including our statesman, our politician, are under that law. And that law protects the good of people. It prevents the terrorism and the might makes right attitude of the Assyrians. It rejects the idea of astrology controlling our or anything in our environment, controlling our fate and fortune, because we have a personal God, the way out after us, according to his covenant and according to his own sovereign will. So ancient cultures have a philosophical outlook. I can't give you a lot more detail than I have. We're going to move in our lecture now to Greek culture and philosophy, the number three in your outline. But I'm not going to make Greek Philosophy 3 and then have all these subdivisions. So I'm going to violate my outlining order here. And I'm going to bring what would a underneath three would have been and make that number three. We're going to start developing now Greek philosophy in our. So number three will be the Greek poets. And then just so you know where we're going, number four will be the Milesians. I had you read about Thales and Anaximander and Anaxamenes and so forth last night. So that would be number four on our outline. But before we get to them, we need to know something about their cultural background. They were writing in a way that contradicted or tried to advance the method of explanation offered by the Greek poets. So we'll take a brief break and come back for that part of our outline. All right, let's begin our study of Greek philosophy by first of all looking at the Greek poets, the great poets, especially Homer and Hesiod. And then we'll move ahead to look at the Trojans, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The reason why you need to know something about the Greek poets is that they often were the ones who communicated the philosophical outlook or the cultural perspective of their day. It isn't as though there was a university where they had the philosophy department and you can go and consult this, you know, what people have to say about this. Greek culture had communicated to it an outlook on life, a view of reality, man's place in the universe and so forth by its poets, by its writers, especially its dramatists and poets such as Homer. And Homer is thought to have lived roughly the middle of the 9th century BC or let's just say about 850 B.C. to give you something to tie this to and to put it in biblical perspective, that would make Homer about 120 years older than Homer, Isaiah the prophet. Or let's just. We're rounding it off and we're dealing with theology of the Old Testament predates Isaiah going back to David and to Moses and so forth. We can go back to 1400 BC roughly at the time of the Exodus for when the Hebrews first wrote down their outlook on life, if you will, inspired by God. So I just want you to see where this ties in. It's unfortunately, we go through our educational experience and we learn about Old Testament history here and secular history here and we don't see any tie ins. Okay. Homer wrote the epic poem the Iliad. The Iliad is about the Trojan War and it's an attempt to explain the woes numerous that have come upon Greece. Why is Greece undergoing all these problems, all these woes? In general terms, Homer explains it as stemming from human pride and passion, people being governed by their passions and especially by hubris pride. And this is the crucial point from the interference of the gods. The interference of the gods. Homer is a pagan and he teaches Greek culture that what's happening roundabout in large measure has to do do with the interference of the divine. But there are many gods. Zeus is the present ruler over the gods. But Zeus is not anything like Jehovah, the creator of heaven and earth. In fact, Zeus himself was created. Who can help me with my Greek mythology? Where does Zeus come from? He was. That's right. Zeus arises from the God of time. So time gives rise to the gods. If we could put in our literal or vernacular today, isn't that amazing? The gods don't rule over time. Time gives rise to Zeus and to the other gods. But Zeus is the first final authority over these lesser gods. The Greeks look upon nature in every aspect of life having its own particular God. There was a God of the sea and a God of the hills and a God of the farms and fertility, a God for the sun and on and on and on. Zeus is the final authority over these lesser gods within their domains. But he is not omnipresent, omnipotent. We've already seen he's not the creator of all and he's not eternal. Time is more basic than Zeus. He's the final authority, but he doesn't have ultimate power. Moreover, Zeus is impulsive. When you read Homer's Iliad, Zeus is harassed by his relatives, especially his wife. But talk about reading your own experience or your own life into God. I mean, Homer looks around, he sees how women harass their husbands and Zeus has harassing wife, you know, and other relatives as well. And Zeus is subject to the Fates, a dark and mysterious set of powers in Homer, the Fates. However, when you read Homer, he doesn't quite get his theology together. I mean, he's not altogether consistent. Sometimes Zeus has to consult the scales to understand what the fates have determined. And yet at other points, when you read Homer, the God gods apparently can interfere with fate. It said that so and so or such and such wouldn't have happened if the gods had interfered. Even though fate had deter or fates, the Fates had determined it. So it's not quite clear what its relationship is, but for the most part it appears that Zeus and the other gods are subject to fate. Not only is Zeus not omnipotent above everything else, I mean, time and fate are more basic than he is. He's not morally superior to men either. Homer portrays the king of the gods as capricious and impetuous, egotistical, selfish, dishonest. Zeus is nothing more but a human being written large, nothing more but, you know, a man with human passions and so forth, but with a lot more power to mess around with his passions and impetuosity. Why do the Greeks worship the gods? It's very evident in Homer and it's evident from Greek culture. The gods were not worshiped out of respect. They were not respectable, they were venial, they were vain, they quarreled with each other, they were guilty of lust and adultery and dishonesty and lies. So they weren't worshipped out of respect. The gods were worshipped as a business transaction. The gods could be useful to you because they were more powerful. It's not that they are better and it's not that they're all powerful, but the point is they've got more power than you do. And so people would bring their gifts to bribe the gods. Let me just say in passing, is that the Christian, Christian view of sacrifice? Do we bring a gift to God? Or look at Old Testament religion. It's a gift given to God to bribe him into being happy. It's like God's unhappy with us, so we'll give him a gift and that'll cheer him up. No, that is a pagan notion that you can have a business transaction with God, you give him a gift. God says at one point in the old testament, Psalm 50 is our replacement. I were hungry. I wouldn't tell you. I don't need your gifts. I don't need your sacrifices. Sacrifice is made because it represents the sacrificer, and the death of the animal symbolizes the appropriate death of the sinner, because that's the price of sin. The Greeks had no concept of atonement because they had no concept of absolute morality. Furthermore, in Homer, nature is not a system of regularity and predictability. The gods are interfering with the world in which we live. And these gods conflict with each other and they're capricious within themselves. And so irregularities are found in the natural order. Now, what is the outcome of that kind of thinking? That's your worldview, that the irregularities, the discontinuities you find in your experience, are due to the interference of the gods, who are capricious and unpredictable. Then you have no motivation to explore the world and master the world as a cause order. Why bother to go out and try to find out within the natural order why things happen the way they do when it's really beyond your power? Anyway, who knows when these gods who are going to have arguments or are going to get into a fit or be impetuous, are going to interfere. So not only is there a lack of a predictable, ordered nature to study in Homer, there's also no universal moral order, no uniformity in the moral domain. The gods issue their regulations, but the regulations of the God are just the dictates of the overlords. They have nothing to do with essential justice or goodness or love. The gods can issue these orders without rhyme or reason. There need not be a good purpose. It's not as though the gods issue these orders because they know this is what is best for mankind, what will turn out. This is just the will of the gods. And moreover, the gods deal Sometimes with moral defects. But only some moral defects in Homer, like pride in particular. The gods really don't like pride. Hubris is something that's got to be dealt with. But they don't deal with other moral defects all the time. Sometimes adultery, sometimes infidelity is really bad. And other times the gods don't seem to even be aware of it. Sometimes they practice it. What kind of moral order do you get out of this? So there's the notion that the gods do look at moral issues, but not all the time and not consistently. And they themselves don't represent the moral law. And so in Homer, I think we have to conclude there is no real concept of a moral law that's binding upon all men and upon the gods. Now, of course, we wouldn't want to say as Christians that the moral law is binding upon God. We would rather say the moral law reflects the character of God. But the point is, there's no connection between the moral law and gods or a universal obligation binding all men. The gods are completely capricious. And as I've already said, they themselves are immoral, many times. So in Homer, we have no true concept of God's omnipotence. We have no concept of atonement. We have no incentive for science. We have no absolute morality. And finally, learning and knowledge. As you read the Iliad and the other works of the poets, learning and knowledge for the Greeks comes through mindless imitation, a monkey see, monkey do kind of approach to learning. Not by learning the basic principles of things, how they work, why they work, or what they're made of. Not by studying the essence of things. To put it simply, learning is by tradition. The repeating, often the ritual repeating of the tradition, the way the poets had said things. Rather than by conceptual understanding, generalizing and coming to a place where you can get a formula, as it were, for what things are and how they work in this world. Now, before I go on, I've said that rather hurriedly. And I want to make sure that you know what I'm getting at. In Homer, people learn things by watching the actor and then imitating the actor or listening to the bard and then repeating what the bard says. That's learning, imitation. Whereas I think you will all realize for your own educational career that's not what we consider learning. We may consider that the first steps toward mental discipline. But learning is when you understand. And that means you have concepts, you see, generalizations. You can think abstractly rather than just in terms of the particular. The poet is saying this, or the actor is doing that we think of generalizations. This is an example of. And then we start looking for what distinguishes one thing from another in terms of what's essential to it over against what's essential to that. Thinking in terms of concepts is different than imitating in a ritual way the words or actions of someone else. And so what's our conclusion? Look at Homer, the poet, and he was the great teacher of ancient Greece. I mean, there's nothing like the influence of Homer in our day and age that I could even give you as an analogy. All of Greece was taught by Homer. They listened to the Iliad and the Odyssey and they would. That they would just. That's how they saw the world. That was kind of like the framework for everything. The conclusion that we come to is that in Homer there is no universal order that can be known by reason. There is no universal order to be known by reason. If you're really alert this morning, you may be thinking back. That was one of the questions you gave us yesterday, Dr. Monson. One of the basic questions, the enduring issues in philosophy, right? And in Homer, there is no universal objective order to be explored by man's reason. Let's move ahead 100 or more years to Hesiod, the Greek poet Hesiod. And most scholars date Hesiod in the early 7002 BC. And so I'm going to put 725. This is not an exact date any more than Homer's 850. But I just want to give you some perspective. The early 700s B.C. so this would make Hesiod a contemporary, probably of Isaiah. The prophet Hesiod wrote a number of works, two that you might want to remember. Theogony, T H E O G O N Y Theogony. And also a social commentary. Works and days, works and days. In Hesiod we still find an anthropomorphic cosmology. We still have a view of the origin of the universe that is written as though human beings are active doing things. You have the gods and the history of the gods being parallel to what is really the history of the universe, its origin. So he's not much better than Homer cosmologically. He's just another pagan who has tried to explain the origin of the world by projecting human traits and events. However, there is a difference in Hesiod's theology and I think it's important for us to see this in Hessian now. 125 years, let's say after Homer, Zeus has become a ruler who is now just and predictable. Hesiod has a much more noble view of Zeus than did Homer. Zeus has moral integrity. In fact, Zeus is one who can be counted on to lift the downtrodden up. And Zeus has the power to enforce the rule of law. No longer do we find Zeus being quite as harassed or impetuous. Zeus can bring things about and will bring the rule of law to fulfillment. Zeus is not quite as weak and wimpish and impetuous. And you can count on Zeus for justice. Fate or the Fates in Hessian are no longer the wild, unpredictable fate that even the gods have to look up to in Homer. But fate becomes for Hesiod. Now, I'm really mixing cultures when I say this, but I think it'll be helpful to give an analogy. Fate becomes much more like karma, much more like karma than the portrayal of fate or the Fates in Homer. Fate is not indifferent to human concerns. And Homer, the Fates just dictate. And it's kind of like to hell with human nature. Whatever suffering comes, who cares? But in Hesiod, it's not that way. Fate is concerned about human needs and feelings. And for him, there is a certain and a predictability, a regularity. In the pervasive, active moral law that operates throughout nature. That's why I said it's kind of like karma. It's pervasive, it's moral, but it's active. The law is at work in the world and it's everywhere. So that if you mistreat a poor person, it's going to come back to haunt you. It's going to, you know, karma is going to catch up with you. It's not so much a cold, indifferent fate beyond this world just dictating what's going to happen, but it's a fate that is part of this world, like a moral law operative in nature. Moreover, in Hesiod, we see that man is not seen as like the rest of nature. Man lives in the natural world, but he's not just natural. Man isn't just an animal. Man, in fact, should live up to his responsibilities as a man. Animals may governed by passion and be wild and so forth, but men are not supposed to. Men are to be displaying self control. They are to be governed by inner restraint. Or the word moderation might be good here. And so in Hesiod, we now have a universal order in nature. We didn't really have that fully developed, Homer, but nature now shows an orderliness and it's a moral order. And yet nature is not, in Hesiod, open to human reason because he has that anthropomorphic cosmology. Nature still has in some degree the interference of the gods. And so human reason cannot explore and find out ultimate reality. But ultimate reality is characterized by a universal order that is moral and character. In my lecture yesterday, I told you to look for dialectical tensions. I said it will take some time, but as you look at these things, you'll more and more be able to pick out these, these trance. In Hesiod, do you see any kind of dialectical order or disorder, any dialectical tension? You have a pervasive moral law. Right runs through nature. But man is not part of nature. Well, he is part of nature, but he's not part of nature. Now how do you get this together? Man is part of this universal moral order that we call the natural world, where karma or fate is operative. And yet man has a higher calling than to act like a natural animal. Which is it? Man is not subject to the same generalizations and laws as animals, so in some sense is not part of nature. And nor are the gods part of nature. And yet Hesiod is struggling toward an idea of a universal order in nature. Let's move ahead to the great Greek Trajan, Aeschylus. Aeschylus was born roughly 525 B.C. so as you can see, we're jumping ahead 200 years. Dr. Bonson's survey is not calculated to be systematic and even handed. I want to touch some high points here. Homer, Hesiod and now Aeschylus. Aeschylus is the Greek word writer who is responsible for the trilogy the Orestia. O R E S T E I A In the outlook of Aeschylus, religion following of the gods and so forth has become a benign and enlightening influence on human affairs. In Homer we had capricious gods unpredictability. In Hesiod we have a more universal moral order. In Aeschylus the gods have an enlightening and benign influence on human affairs. A good example is as part of his trilogy we have of Orestes, O R E S T E S the character who is guilty of murdering his own mother. And the Furies are pursuing Orestes to kill him to bring vengeance. But Apollo and Athena intervene to protect this guilty man. And according to the story, justice which is due, I mean this man is guilty, but justice must be tempered by mercy. This is Aeschylus way of saying that the Furies, which represent that irrational wild part of man's nature, must be tamed. In the story, the Furies are taken away by Athena and locked up in a cave. Man's wild side must be tamed. There must be a benign and enlightened approach to human affairs. And this is what the gods show us by intervening against the Furies. Let's move ahead a few years to about 495, which is the date assigned for the birth of Sophocles. Again, that's a date of birth, not a date of flourishing. Sophocles expresses a great serenity and confidence in his writings because as he sees that the world is well ordered, every part of the world harmonizes into a perfect picture. And even the discordant and ugly parts of the world, those things which seem very unpleasant, they fit into a universal order as well. For Sophocles, man has over him a divine law to which appeal can be made. How many of you are familiar with the play Antigone? You know the story. Antigone has a relative that's been killed in war. And because the relative was defying the king, the king, as a form of punishment and humiliation, decrees that this relative of Antigones that has died is not to be buried. His corpse is to be left out, which is the highest form of humiliation, really, given the Greek understanding of death and so forth. Antigone defies the king's order to obey. I don't want to overly Christianize this conception, but to obey the higher law. She does what is right, defiance. Now she suffers for it. That's the tragedy. Here's Antigone who's going to suffer. But she suffers as what we call a righteous or a just person. And so for Sophocles, there is a divine law over all that realizes man's ideals and strivings, and against which, or to which a person might appeal against the injustice and unrighteousness in this world. Why does tragedy come into this world? For Sophocles, it comes through man's character defects, the self will of the king who refuses to allow Antigone, or who has forbidden Antigone or anybody to bury the corpse. That's where tragedy comes through the defect in character, the pride, the self will of man. So what do we see? Now, we've seen a development from Homer through Hesiod and Aeschylus. Now when we get to Sophocles, we have the universal order. There is a divine, well, let's call it a moral or divine law above the affairs of men. And men are in a sense controlling their fate. If they're guilty of moral defect, pride and excess and passion, then they get themselves into their own difficulties with the coming of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek outlook changes again. And now away from the optimist or the self confidence of Sophocles to a much more despairing and tragic outlook. Just a word about the Peloponnesian War. The war raged for a generation from 431 BC to 404 BC. The war was between Athens and Sparta. Athens was a commercial democracy, did a lot of trading. It had almost a town meeting democracy form of government. Any citizen of Athens could come any day that the government was open and could, you know, set things before the populace and votes could be taken and so forth. Sparta, on the other hand, was a stern and warlike oligarchy ruled by a few wealthy and powerful people. And the cultural outlook was extremely stern. You bore children only during certain times of your life. And during the year there was an emphasis upon, if you will, soldier like qualities. Being able to take commands, being able to get by with a small amount of food and sleep, being tough, going to the gym, working out. In our day and age that's all recreational and fun and so forth. But in that day, I mean, it was considered just part of the discipline that was necessary to be a good citizen. Well, Athens and Sparta. Sparta suspected that Athens was trying to dominate everyone through their. We do know that Athens did try to play games at what we call in the market. They excluded Corinth, you know, and really brought Corinth to its knees economically through unfavorable trade practices and so forth. Sparta suspected that's what Athens wanted to do to everybody. Athens had the feeling that if Sparta or anybody else resisted their attempt to spread their goodwill, their commercial prosperity and their democratic habits, that that would be the death of Athens. And so they had this notion that one or the other had to be dominant in Greek culture. So they went to war. I mean, politicians, historians and politicians can give you a better account of the actual trigger and so forth. But from the mindset of the Athenians and the Spartans, one of them had to be dominant. However, the war didn't go well. It brought internal class tension and warfare among the Athenians. In fact, because the war went poorly. When you have a democracy, you have to understand everybody gets together and from one day to another has his own view of how the war is going and what we should do about it. I mean, democracy is horrible in time of war. Well, that's why you'll find you study history for the most part. Even those cultures that tend toward a democratic or. Yeah, well, let's just call it a more democratic form of government, the participation of the many in the political process will curtail that in times of emergency, for the sake of being able to make efficient and consistent decisions. Athens didn't have that. And so the lower classes and the economically superior classes were very suspicious of each other. They argued with each other, do we continue the war? Do we not? Do we prosecute it this way? Whatever. And so this distrust destroyed the political unity of Athens. And on top of this, barbarous tactics were sometimes practiced. The Athenians sent a delegation to one of the Greek islands that had tried to remain neutral in the war and tried to persuade them to come over to Athens side that it was to be in their best interest to support them in the war effort. When the policy of persuasion didn't work, the generals butchered the people. That didn't go over. Well, we're not in ancient Assyria now where people just say, oh my. I mean, here's this violence. I better get in line, lest I be next. People had begun to think in terms of a universal moral order. And this idea of butchering, even though it would have been advantageous to the Athenians for that island to throw in their cause with them, just kind of turned the stomachs of many people to see the barbarous tactics. And there was this internal class warfare intention. Anyway, about this time, a poet by the name of Aristophanes writes a number of plays that express an anti democratic cynicism about what's going on. First of all, Aristophanes is cynical about democracy. HE LAUGHS this to scorn seeing democracy as nothing more but demagoguery. You may all pride yourselves in that you rule the culture round about you, but you're really just the pawns of whoever stands up and offers you the bribes and the demagogues and their speeches and so forth. You really aren't making intelligent decisions. You're just being pulled about by your emotions. So forth. As far as Aristophanes was concerned, the only way to get away from the veniality of the demagogues was to have a communist order, what we would call a communal order in society. The most important thing, though, is that you put down in your notes the cynicism toward democracy that Aristophanes expresses. So we go from Sophocles through the Peloponnesian War experience and. Peloponnesians. And the example that I gave from Aristophanes. And we end up finally in our whirlwind tour with Euripides. Euripides was born in 480 B.C. so roughly 50 years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, he's getting on in years. But the war brings not just cynicism to Euripides, but a real sense of despair. If you want to do some reading on your own, you should look at the plays by Euripides. Helen, Media or Medea, M E D E A and the Trojan Women. Those are three separate plays. Early in the war, Euripides was very patriotic and supported the Athenian effort. But after he saw the cruelty of the war and the futility of the war, he turned against it. He believed that the moral order of nature was being violated and that would inevitably bring destruction for everybody. But for Euripides, it isn't as though you can appeal to the gods, like in Antigone or Sophocles. He explicitly says it is useless to appeal to the gods. They're helpless to improve things. On the other hand, he wasn't willing to give up the notion that there are gods. For him, a world without religion would have seemed very meaningless. And yet it also didn't do him any good. He didn't think the gods could intervene to help. And so for Euripides, where is man in the universe? He's a passive victim. He's a passive victim. There is a moral order, but inevitably we are destroyed by it. And we would all be better off with a callous indifference to life rather than trying to hold out ideas. War had really destroyed idealism for Euripides. What we have in Euripides is the development of despair because the higher law has been spurned. The noble ideal of the earlier generations of an ordered world and reason. The noble ideal of order and reason has now been destroyed by self interest, the egoism and egotism about us and the atrocities of war. Man's passion. This is what he seems to be metaphorically or parabolically expressing in his plays. Man's self interest and war's atrocities destroy the noble ideal of order and reason. Sophocles shows confidence and serenity about the world. Euripides, despair. Ironically, even in Euripides, however, you may notice this, that salvation, man's salvation is going to be internal. What's wrong with man? Passion is ruling over reason. Egotism is taking away a desire to help others. Self interest is interfering with doing the right thing, being just. And so man needs an internal ethical switch in order to be saved, rather than looking to God's intervention and the need for atonement and so forth. So for the Greeks, what you see is progressive development of get away from the gods and the transcendent bring everything down to nature and then finally into the internal nature of man. But in the process, because especially of the Peloponnesian War, that appeared to be an optimistic sort of thing, it ends up being a matter of the. Brings despair to people that man can't control his environment. And man's defects, his internal defects are going to lead to destruction. All right, the poets are not the greatest of philosophers, but I think you can appreciate what the Greek philosopher philosophers, the Milesians and the Pluralists and Heraclitus and others were trying to accomplish, and you can appreciate the direction of their thought. Again, we're moving away from any dependence upon the transcendent or the supernatural. And we want to have a natural understanding of the world and a natural morality and everything to be know in one sense, under the control of man, his way of seeing things, the way he makes decisions and so forth. Please don't have the idea that the first of the philosophers we're going to look at after we take a break, Thales follows Euripides in historical order. I just wanted to give you a unit on the Greek poet so you have some concept of what's happening most generally in Greek culture, the mentality of the Greek world in terms of which these philosophers worked. The date for Thales is actually about 600 B.C. people argue about when he flourished, about 580 B.C. he may have been born as early as 625, but we'll just use the figure of 600 to give us some idea of where he is. So as you can see on the board, the dates that I've given you for Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus and so forth. We have Thales intervening between the days of Hesiod and the days of Aeschylus as Greek poets. He's right about here, between B and C on the outline. All right, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, then we'll finally start looking at the Greek philosophers themselves.