Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.

Contronyms

     Contronyms, that is, words which are their own opposites, have been given such a rich variety of names that there can be no mistaking they engage the interest of those for whom words may be attractive playthings. They have been called contranyms, Janus words, auto-antonyms, autantonym, antagonyms, enantiodromes, self-antonyms, antilogies, or addad (Arabic, singular did). For all the Greek and Latin roots, these terms are recent. A great number of websites provide lists of such words.
     The range of names parallels the range of phenomena they describe; a variety of paths can end in a contronym. The purest form might be that in which two originally separate words developed identical forms, so that their opposition is in a way accidental. This is the case with cleave, for instance, with its meanings of “hold together” and “split apart” and let in the common sense of “allow” and the nearly obsolete one of “bar” or “prevent.” Such apparent self-contradiction is in fact a mere coincidence, words which look the same, but which turn out to have developed from entirely different etymological roots. The verbal usage of rock is derived from a Germanic word meaning “to yank or pull” while the noun is derived from a medieval Latin word for stone. Clip in the sense of cutting has a different root than clip in the sense of fasten together.
     Such accidental similarity is, of course, hardly confined to the realm of the lexicon. I know a poet named George Wallace who has very little in common with the one-time presidential aspirant with whom he shares a name. A ball bearing has the same shape but a different function than a child’s marble. Parallel evolution is familiar to biologists, for instance, in the development of similar animals – litopterns and horses, European and South American saber-toothed tigers, moles, and others -- among marsupial and placental groups since they diverged a hundred million years ago. In these cases, though, the similarity reflects a similar purpose, whereas the verbal appearance is identical but the function altogether different.
     Some contronyms are born of transactional words that indicate a relationship instead of a particular action. To consult, for instance, might mean either to seek or to give advice, and one who leases might be either a landlord or a tenant. In some languages the same word can be used for borrow or lend (e.g. German ausleihen), while In English etymologically guest and host are derived from the same word and simply happen to have developed distinct uses over time. Here the contradiction is resolved simply by defining the word as “to enter into a relationship” rather than to take a specific action. This process, too, has non-linguistic parallels. A merchant may be either buying or selling, and, if an individual is said to be “into sm,” it remains undetermined whether he or she favors the first or the second of those letters.
     A variety of other circumstances can also produce contronyms. Meaning, like plants, can form branches which grow independently. Fast, for instance, from a root meaning of “firm and solid,” acquired an intensive meaning that eventually developed into the more common modern definition “speedy,” in such usages as to run fast. In an analogous way outside the realm of words, the associations of tobacco have mutated from the original ceremonial and sacred uses through suggestions of sophistication and conviviality to the present connotations of addiction, illness, and death.
     However they arose, such words cast a light on the imprecision inherent in all signifying. A modern critic contemplating contronyms will think of Derrida and the recognition that meaning is “always already erased.” A polemicist could declare them the only honest words in that they admit their utter ambiguity.
     If one were to imagine an entire language made of such words, what would any utterance really mean?  Would all statements be substantially the same? Would every statement be both trivial and profoundly meaningful? Perhaps the linguistic system would then more closely mirror the subatomic realm in which positives and negatives balance and, in the end, cancel each other. It certainly seems as though matter and antimatter should also similarly balance, though at present physicists say they do not.
     Long before Deconstruction, the revelation of the limits of duality was common to many of the most lofty of thinkers. The old man Lao Zi was at home amid such cosmic speculations which seem indeterminate as they founder with the burden of vast implications. He repeatedly insisted “is and is-not come together.” Hard and easy, long and short, high and low, beauty and ugliness. (poem 2) ‘The heavy is foundation for the light. (26) “What is to be shrunken is first stretched out.” (36) “Bad fortune will promote the good.” (58) To have an original thought, one must not shrink from self-contradiction.
     The rishis who declared the Advaita revelation that the individual and the godhead are identical knew the explosive potential of paradox and mystery. Christ spoke in paradoxes. Nagarjuna saw in every statement its opposite. Blake wrote “Without contraries is no progression” and knew that body and soul were one.
     So it may happen (to the leximaniacal at any rate) that contronyms lift a bit of the curtain of maya, providing a glimpse beyond, a chance to see all things new. They remind one of how slippery the words that we use to package and contain our flowing perceptions bear no guarantee but their own unreliability. Reflecting on such words, if it provides little progress toward certainty, will perhaps remind the thinker of the unstable ground beneath everybody’s conceptual feet.

The Greeks Meet the Yogis

I collect here most of the significant references to ancient Indian philosophers in Greek authors. Rather than proposing new ideas about these encounters, my goal is simply to bring these records together for the convenience of the general reader and to provide suggestions for further reading. I realize my title sounds flippant with its overgeneralized “yogis,” but I am little worse in this way than my Greek authorities.



     Knowledge of India in the West was, until the last few hundred years, fragmentary and often fabulous.  Even when a European writer did speak of the East, Asia, or the Orient it was most often with the Near East in mind.  The 1785 publication of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins marked the first translation directly from a Sanskrit text into a European language. [1]  Still, as some find they have a wandering and a curious disposition, there have been contacts, including trade, between Europe and South Asia since ancient times.
     It is likely that Herodotus had heard something of Indian sadhus when he wrote “there are other Indians, again, who kill no living creature, nor sow, nor are wont to have houses; they eat grass, and they have a grain growing naturally from the earth in its calyx, about the size of a millet-seed, which they gather with the calyx and roast and eat.  When any one of them falls sick he goes into the desert and lies there, none regarding whether he be sick or die.” [2]
     More or less reliable accounts of meetings between ancient Greeks and Indians are recorded in historical and geographical treatises in both Greek and Sanskrit.  Some Greeks were actively curious about the new philosophies they encountered and sought out and questioned those considered wise men among the Indians.  More speculatively, Indian thought appears to have influenced some Greek philosophers, particularly Pythagoreans, Cynics, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists.
     The practices of Indian ascetics impressed many outsiders, most of all those of a similar sensibility.   Philostratus quotes the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana as saying “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the riches of all men.”  Apollonius indeed thought their wisdom surpassed that of the Greeks, saying somewhat gnomically, “I consider that your lore is profounder and much more divine than our own; and if I add nothing to my present stock of knowledge while I am with you, I shall at least have learned that I have nothing more to learn.” [3]
     Doubtless the most substantial report of India was the Indika of Megasthenes who had been an ambassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander’s Diadochi, to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in Pataliputra.  The book is lost, but portions are preserved by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian. Megasthenes accepts fantastic tales such as mouthless people, those with their feet backward, and others with great ears extending to the ground in which they wrap themselves to sleep.  He is, however, quite clear about the distinction between brahmins and sramaṇas, or ascetics. With the casual cosmopolitanism of the Greeks, who considered that divinity was universally the same, followers of Shiva are called Dionysians and those of Vishnu followers of Zeus. [4]  The Greeks themselves were probably ignorant of Indian sects, and the thinkers they encountered may have been Buddhists, Hindus, or Jains, and all three groups might have been called Brahmins or gymnosophists.
     In his life of Alexander Plutarch relates a story of the king’s own interaction with such sages. He had been wounded by an arrow while fighting the Malli in the Punjab. Blaming religious leaders for fomenting rebellion against him, he suppressed the resistance violently, including killing numerous holy men. Plutarch’s narration takes the form of a folktale.  Alexander summons ten gymnosophists and poses them difficult questions.  He threatens to kill them if they answer poorly but appoints one of their own number as judge. [5]
     They acquit themselves well, and the general import of the anecdote is simply to establish their credentials as wise men.  Some resemble riddles with a pleasantly unexpected answer, such as the question as to which animal is the most cunning, to which the response was “that which man has not discovered.”  The Greeks likely admired the forthrightness and attachment to virtue of the man who, when asked why he had supported Sabbas’ revolt, replied “Because I wished him either to live nobly or to die nobly.” Several of the answers seemed to be common sententiae such when declaring that the most loved man would be he that is most powerful, yet does not inspire fear.
     Perhaps the most subtle answers are those that to undermine dualities.  When asked whether the earth or the sea produced larger animals, the gymnosophist answered that earth did, since the sea was but a part of the earth.  Thus the apparent opposites are folded together harmonically. Similarly, the responses seem to harmonize life and death, day and night, god and man, while making no reference to the philosophic or theological underpinnings of their attitudes.
     The story ends with three turns of a fine dialectical wit.  “The judge declared that they had answered one worse than another."  Alexander says that, for delivering such an opinion, he must be the first to die, whereupon the sage responds, “That cannot be, O King,” said the judge, “unless thou falsely saidst that thou wouldst put to death first him who answered worst.”  Pleased, Alexander then pardons the lot and sends them off laden with gifts.  Thus the gymnosophist surprises the reader by, in effect, condemning his colleagues; Alexander turns the tables once more by saying that he must be executed; and finally, the gymnosophist uses the king’s own words to provide a happy ending.
     Arrian paraphrasing Megasthenes, tells that the Indians indicate no sign of respect but only stamped their feet when he appeared.  When asked the meaning of their action, they did not hesitate to chasten the conqueror’s ambition.  “King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’ surface as this we are standing on.  You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, traveling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others.  Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you.” [6]
     It was not the end, apparently, of Alexander’s inquiries.  Having heard that the very wisest remain in their hermitages, he sends Onesicritus, a Cynic and follower of Diogenes, [7] to interview these wisest if the wise. The one reputed wisest of all, Dandamis would have nothing to do with the Greeks, asking only “Why did Alexander make such a long journey hither?”  Onesicritus sought then to interview another of the gymnosophists, Calanus, only to find him unwilling to speak until the Greek removed his clothes to match the Indian’s state of undress.  Calanus did accompany the Greeks for some time, though he took ill and, realizing his death was approaching asked that a funeral pyre be built whereupon he calmly reclined to be burnt. [8]
     The Indian philosophers impressed not only pagans, but Jews and Christians as well.  Philo Judaeus, the Jewish neoplatonist, who sought to harmonize Jewish and Hellenistic thought by interpreting both symbolically, observes with admirable cosmopolitanism, “And among the Indians there is the class of the gymnosophists, who . . .make their whole existence a sort of lesson in virtue.” [9]
     According to Eusebius an Indian asked Socrates about his philosophy and when he answered that he studied human life, “the Indian laughed at him, and said that no one could comprehend things human, if he were ignorant of things divine.” He does not record Socrates’ response, but he does treat Socrates as a righteous if non-Christian theist, superior to the materialist Greek thinkers.  He approvingly notes that Plato sought to make “the divine” the basis for his thought.” [10]
     Clement of Alexandria, with more understanding than many an orthodox Christian divine since, said with regard to pagan philosophers “all [peoples], in my opinion, are illuminated by the dawn of Light.”  His ethnocentrism destabilized by attachment to Christianity, he argues that much of Greek philosophy was derived from “barbarians,” including Jews, Egyptians, and others. He mentions Buddhists as well. [11]
     Indians clearly had acquired a reputation for asceticism, non-materialism, and utter devotion to philosophy.  It is less evident that the specific tenets of Indian religio-philosophic thought influenced Greek writers, though Indian influence has been traced by some scholars as early as pre-Socratics. [12]   With evidence varying from the highly speculative to the highly likely, scholars have discerned South Asian concepts in a number of schools of later Greek thought.
     Pythagoreanism with its teaching of reincarnation and vegetarianism seems obviously reminiscent of similar Hindu and Buddhist doctrines.  Apollonius thought that the philosophers of the East has a Pythagorean air about them. [13]  According to Philostratus’ account the Indians specifically claimed to have influenced Pythagoreanism.
     Plotinus, according to Porphyry’s biography, wished to study with the Persian magi and the Indian gymnosophists.  The neoplatonic monad Nous has seemed to many to resemble the Atman of Advaita thought. [14] Plotinus had set out to study he teaching of the Persian and Indian sages, but the military expedition of Gordian III with whom he traveled, proved a failure and he did not reach India proper, though he may have met with Indian philosophers.
     Some see Indian influence in Diogenes whose ascetic practices were rare in pre-Christian Greece [15], though Pythagoreans and others had advocated simple, if not ascetic, life. Diogenes famously met Alexander – the encounter is one of the most well-known anecdotes of antiquity – and Diogenes’ disciple Onesicritus was selected to by the king to investigate the gymnosophists, perhaps due to a similarity of thought.
     Probably the best case for Indian influence is that of Pyrrho of Elis’s Skepticism.  Not only is Pyrrho known to have traveled to the East and conferred with philosophers there; he is also reported to have had a sort of conversion experience. “This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy, to quote Ascanius of Abdera, taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement. He denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that.” Upon his return to Greece his radically skeptical teachings included a virtual duplication of the quadrilemma that had been used for centuries by Sanskrit thinkers. [16] The Buddhist concept of avyakrta or insoluble problems according to Buddha is comparable as well, though Pyrrho’s skepticism is more thorough.
     By the third century of the Christian era Hippolytus of Rome included the Brahmins in his Refutation of All Heresies. [17]  He says, oddly, perhaps referring to mantras, that “to them the Deity is Discourse.”  Yet he also more or less accurately describes the austerities of the “Brachmans.”  Though Westerners only gained access to reliable texts of the Sanskrit masterpieces in the nineteenth century, many hundreds of years earlier Europeans had caught sight of glints and shadows of philosophical and spiritual systems from the other side of the world. In spite of imperfect transmission such news from other cultures exercised an outsize influence even in ancient times, suggesting a broader sense of what it is to be human, opening the possibility of new directions and fertilizing European thought.




1. Translations into French and German followed, and the book proved an influence on Romanticism. Blake celebrated its publication with a picture The Bramins, unfortunately now lost, which showed Wilkins and his Indian collaborators.

2. III, 100.

3. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.16. An early example, perhaps, of a late antique trend that persists today, the Westerner infatuated with “the wisdom of the East.”

4. See the account in Strabo XV, I, 39 ff.. Chandragupta himself married a Greek, daughter of Suluva. Bhavisya Purana edited by P. 18 According to the Pratisarga Parva , he “mixed the Buddhists and Yavanas [Greeks].” Other Greek embassies to India were led by Deimachus, ambassador to Bindusara, and Dionysius, ambassador to Ashoka. Ctesias was also the author of an Indika, but he relied on second-hand information, having himself gone no further than Persia.

5. Plutarch 65 ff. Curiously, the story finds its way into the Mishnah transformed into Alexander questioning the elders of the Negev. See Luitpold Wallach, “Alexander the Great and the Indian Gymnosophists in Hebrew Tradition,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Vol. 11 (1941), pp. 47-83. He notes as well that a number of ancient Greek sources claim that Jews were descended from Indian philosophers. Plutarch had earlier noted (59) that Alexander did have many gymnosophists killed for their part in fomenting rebellion.

6. Arrian, Anabasis, VII.1.5 ff.

7. Though Onesicritus’ volume How Alexander was Educated (Πῶς Ἀλέξανδρος Ἤχθη) is lost, it was known to many ancient authors and seems to have combined much factual information with a measure of myth, legend, and good story.

8. Plutarch reports (69) that the same self-sacrifice was performed by “another Indian who was in the following of Caesar at Athens; and the ‘Indian's Tomb’ is shown there to this day.”

9. Quod omnis probus liber sit (Every Good Man is Free), 74. Philo specifically praises the judgement of Calanus in sections 92-93.

10. Praeparatio evangelico 11.8. The story in Aristocles is thought an attack on a materialist or at any rate humanistic Socrates perhaps from Pythagorean critics. Many early Christian regarded Socrates as something of a proto-Christian, for instance, Justin Martyr’s First Apology 46. Augustine says he was taught by the Platonists to seek spiritual truth. Confessions 7. 20.

11. Stromata 1.15 and 1.13. Eusebius likewise Preparatio evangelico 10.5 says that the Greeks owed their philosophy to barbarians.

12. See George P. Conger’s “Did India Influence Early Greek Philosophies?” in Philosophy East and West Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1952), pp. 102-12 and Thomas C. McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. General treatments include K. Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature.

13. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.19.

14. See Ananda Coomaraswamy Vedanta and Western Tradition, Bréhier’ La Philosophie de Plotin (1928), P.M. Gregorios (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, R.B. Harris (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy. For an up-to-date survey, see Joachim Lacrosse’s “Plotinus, Porphyry, and India: A Re-Examination,” Le philosophoire 2014/1, No 41, and J.F. Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism: a Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy. Coomaraswamy (see, for instance,) and others have noted the similarities between Plotinus' teachings to the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta,. Though some have denied or downplayed Indian influence. See A. H. Armstrong’s The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus: An Analytical and Historical Study.

15. See J. Romm, Dog Heads and Noble Savages: Cynicism before the Cynics.

16. Diogenes Laertius IX.61. See Christopher I. Beckwith Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia and E. Flintoff, “Pyrrho and India,” Phronesis 25 (1980), 88-108. The story of the gymnosophists’ answers to riddle-like questions was thought to be Skeptic by Philip R. Bosman in “The Gymnosophist Riddle Context (Berol. P. 13044): A Cynic Text?” in Richard Kalmin Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context which also discusses various retellings of the story.

17. Ch. 21. Jean Filliozat with Jean Renou in L’Inde Classique argues that Hippolytus was familiar with the teachings of the Maitreya Upanishad. See "La doctrine brahmanique à Rome au IIIè siècle" in Les relations extérieures de l’Inde, vol. 2.

Walking the Via Negativa

     The believer in nothing may find that nothing can be as substantial a deity as old Jehovah or bright Apollo. Though many sensibilities seek the warm (but sometimes frightening) anthropomorphic god provided by myth, others, miraculously, perhaps, find a secure foundation in a lack.
     For the spiritually inclined unbeliever to whom the deity of childhood is inconceivable and indeed who cannot even understand how any contemporary educated person can continue loyal to institutional religion, the data reporting mystical experience retain a different sort of truth value. There can be no denying experiences of unity with the divine throughout history and around the world. Apart from the mystics, some theologians have laid out a theoretical basis for a faithless faith. The skeptic will take particular interest in the apophatic tradition, the via negativa, which eschews positive assertions about god, describing the divine in terms of what the godhead is not and basing an authentic spirituality in what we do not know.
     Hinduism and Buddhism have been more hospitable to apophatic theology than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. In Asia the phrase “neti, neti” (“not this or that”) is the definition of Brahman in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Avadhuta Gita. [1] For the eighth century philosopher Adi Shankara the highest concept of the divine was Nirguna Brahma, a Brahma without qualities. In general Advaita (non-dualistic) schools of Vedanta and Jnana Yoga employ such language. Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism, have in fact no god, though devotees have not been slow to invent quasi-divine figures such as the Jain Tirthankaras and the many godlings of popular Buddhism and Daoism. Though the Abrahamic religions are by comparison resistant to a truly agnostic theology, their more philosophic and mystical practitioners have regularly condemned anthropomorphism.
     Buddhism is notoriously receptive to agnostic or atheist ideas. When the Buddha was asked about the nature of the divine and the afterlife, he responded that one should attend no more to such matters than a man injured by a poisoned arrow need learn all the details about his attacker before tending to his wound.


And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me. [2]


     Likewise in the works of Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, all phenomena, including acts of cognition, are empty. Even the deity is a sort of Kantian noumenon inaccessible to the human mind. The Aïguttara Nikàya and the Jataka stories both deny a personal all-powerful god. [3]
     Buddhism regularly teaches, in contrast to the notion of a savior, that one must not look for aid from some supernatural being. In the pursuit of Ultimate Reality one can depend only on individual effort.


By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path:
Buddhas only show the way. [4]


For Buddhism what is significant is ridding oneself (and for Mahayanists other sentient beings as well) of suffering. Inquiries about the afterlife, the eternity and infinity of the creation and other issues are dismissed as “the fourteen unanswerable questions” (though the numbers differs in different texts) which are fruitless to pursue. [5]
     The most significant source of apophatic theology in Christianity is pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in particular his Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Dionysius built on his Platonic and neo-Platonic predecessors [6] when he concluded that the description of Ultimate Reality is impossible. For Dionysius the contemplation of God leads to “a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing.” The truths about God are "unspeakable and unknowable,” they surpass "our logical and intellective power and activity" Thus one may not predicate anything whatever of the deity without falling into error. Dionysius did make allowances for some scripturally based epithets and nodded to tradition, saying "we must praise the providence of divine dominion, the source of goods, [in terms taken] from all the things that are caused.” According to Dionysius human reasoning which takes place in time cannot access the divine, while what he called our “intellective” faculty can grasp truth in an instant. This sort of knowledge, similar to what Augustine called illumination and Boethius “intelligence” is capable of a vision of God.
     The notion that God may be apprehended in a transformative realization leads naturally to an openness to the experiential data of mystics: those who enter into union with it [God], "according to the ceasing of all intellectual activity, . . . praise it best of all by denying all beings of it.” [7]
     For Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth century bishop, a necessary consequence of the infinity of God is his belief that God, as limitless, is essentially incomprehensible to the limited minds of created beings. To him “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes a idol of God and does not proclaim God."
     This concept of the divine, with its close links to Plato and Proclus, was brought forward in a tradition including Maximus the Confessor and Johannes Scotus Eriugena to the high Middle Ages when it proved fundamental to the mystics of the fourteenth century such as Richard Rolle and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Later Meister Eckhart declared, citing Dionysius, “God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught.” For him “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.” [9]
     Likewise, while popular Judaism can be thoroughly anthropomorphic, more sophisticated thinkers have outlined an apophatic deity as well. To Philo Judaeus the anthropomorphism of a literal reading of the Bible was impious as well as mistaken. He considered it manifestly absurd to ascribe to God purely human attributes. [10] His most distinguished successor was Maimonides who in his Guide for the Perplexed insists that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.” [11]
     This smattering of theologians of widely varying views is hardly meant to indicate that I accept the view of godhead proposed by any one of them or even that I fully understand their positions. Rather it is excellent evidence that I and perhaps you are not wholly idiosyncratic in the attempt to save spirituality from the supernatural. The experience of people as far back as records exist has included experiences of what Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Freud, called "oceanic feeling." [12] Whatever one may make of it, the records of such sensation s are clear and consistent throughout human culture. There can be no doubt that people, often using one of a variety of mind-altering techniques such as fasting and meditation, have through the cultivation of cosmos-connected consciousness, achieved an enviable level of serenity and satisfaction. These empirical data carry far more weight than the theories of thinkers seeking to justify such spiritual endeavors, yet they imply the need for each individual to pursue enlightenment anew. The words, even of Gautama Buddha, are, "like a man pointing a finger at the moon to show it to others who should follow the direction of the finger to look at the moon. If they look at the finger and mistake it for the moon, they lose sight of both the moon and the finger." [13] And this orientation to the lunar sphere, which is to say to the sublime, persists in spite of the fact that the liberated mind perceives the hollowness of all phenomena, “all construings, all excogitations, all I-making & mine-making & obsessions with conceit.” [14]



1. See the Avadhuta Gita 1.25 and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6.

2. Majjhima Nikaya 63 MN 63, called the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta.

3. Aïguttara Nikàya A.I.174, Jataka VI,208.

4. Dhammapada 165, here in Paul Carus’ translation.

5. Of course, many Buddhists reverted to the Hindu belief in reincarnation as well as to the apotheosis of Buddha and other figures.

6. See Timaeus 28c.

7. All references to pseudo-Dionysius may be found in Mystical Theology I, 1-3 and Divine Names cols. 585-588, and 593 and in Harrington and Corrigan’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

8. The Life of Moses; translation, intro. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson ; pref. by John Meyendorff , p. 81.

9. The Divine Being, Sermon XV.

10. De Confusione Linguarum, 27 [i. 425].

11. In Chapter 58.

12. Discussed by Freud in Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).

13. Surangama Sutra trans. by Charles Luk.

14. Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta: To Vacchagotta on Fire, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.