by Bo Williams
In the intensely evocative and paradoxical fragments of his work which survive, the enigmatic Ephesian pre-Socratic Heraclitus articulates a comprehensive insight into the order of nature, its details and particularity, as it functions in both the world and the soul. Even though his work has come down to us in sorry fragments and quotations in other authors, it nevertheless still manages to convey a great deal which is of the first interest.
'Nature loves to hide', the philosopher says, displaying a characteristic, sobering awareness of humanity's very limited ability to perceive reality as it is. Heraclitus' thought turns on the relationship between the whole and the particular, the baffling tension human beings perceive between the intuited unity of the universe and its ineluctable particularity. How do the constituent parts, continually becoming, being, and passing out of existence again, fit together and form such a whole? Wholeness, oneness (which he identifies with Wisdom) is, for Heraclitus, a mysterious over-harmony of separate, mutually-interopposing forces, which possess their very meaning and identity by virtue of their opposition, and yet whose discord mysteriously gives rise to a deeper concord. (His statement that 'We know health by illness, good by evil, satisfaction by hunger, leisure by fatigue' is proto-structuralist -- meaning inheres in things by virtue of their location within a system of gradations and oppositions.) Heraclitus sees deeply into the paradox thatchange is the one constant -- his never-ending flux of opposites -- and yet the universe seems to consists of a plethora of discrete, self-existent items. He emphasises that what we see as identity is in fact merely contingent and temporary. In this you may detect faint hints of Buddhist thought, though Heraclitus may well have been born before the Buddha, or have been his contemporary. Sometimes his aphorisms sound very Buddhist indeed: 'I have looked diligently at my own mind', for example, or 'One ought not to talk or act as if he were asleep'.
Humanity for Heraclitus is thus trapped between a sense of our inviolable selfhood, our uniqueness, and the necessary acknowledgement that all things are continually being transformed. Accordingly, genuine insight is very difficult for us to achieve from our circumscribed standpoint. 'Men are not intelligent. The gods are intelligent', he trenchantly tells us. And yet, and this is what I think is perhaps most valuable in the fragments for Pagans, he emphasises the necessity, despite the difficulty, of the continual practice of insight-seeking, astuteness, and discrimination. He advocates a more careful and a more disciplined habit of thought, not less. As he says, 'Knowledge is not intelligence'. Although he emphasises the elusiveness of truth and the limitedness of human expectations, he does not thereby excuse us from trying to move beyond our conditioned ignorance. Heraclitus is a sterling corrective to the irrationalist tendency within modern paganism: his emphasis is always on the indispensibility of rational discourse even as it is held in tension with the difficulty of understanding. We must try harder and with ever-subtler discriminating intelligence, he says, rather than giving in to a superficially seductive but ultimately subhuman irrationalism. He dismisses the siren urge to junk rationality and logic, even in the sacred arena of the Mysteries: 'To one who does not know what's happening, the religious man at his rites seems to be a man who has lost his mind.' Indeed, 'All men should speak clearly and logically, and thus share rational discourse'. But he also says, in a less hopeful mode, 'Many people learn nothing from what they see and experience, nor do they understand what they hear explained, but imagine that they have.' He also emphasises the sheer unexpectedness of metaphysical truth: 'In death, men will come upon things they do not expect, things utterly unknown to the living.'
To me, Heraclitus seems to be an advocate of a kind of implicate spirituality, a yoga of intelligent and unswerving inquiry which by its nature is unending, and which will be undertaken only by an elite, even a philosophical aristocracy. As he says:
I honour what can be seen, what can be heard, what can be learned.
Inquiry into the nature of the gods, the soul, and the world is not just something that is nice to do, that makes us feel connected, sociable, or important: it is a metaphysical imperative, a clarion call to the sanity of excellence. He maintains the existence of a transfiguring and transcendent divine order, quite separate from human religion and its frivolous vulgarities. This divine order is wholeness, unity -- and is thus intrinsically beyond the conditioned dualisms of our perception: 'To a god, all is beautiful, good, and as it should be. Man must see things as good or bad.' 'Only wisdom is whole', he tells us, and yet even here Heraclitus is paradoxical and wily: this unitary wisdom -- which elsewhere he calls the Logos, the 'makes-sense-ness' of things -- 'is both willing and unwilling to be called Zeus.' The divine order thus both embraces and is identical with the mysterious unity behind the co-operating opposites of the universe's flux:
God is day night winter summer war peace enough too little, but disguised in each and known in each by a separate scent.
The metaphor of scent is a striking one -- the idea here is of different resins being cast onto a brazier and giving off different odours. Myrrh is bitter, frankincense uplifting, benzoin sweet: yet all are ultimatelyburning. (Fire is one of Heraclitus' favourite images for the ineluctable universal flux, of course, as Hopkins reminded us.) Personally I take this to mean that, say, Hades is dreaded, Apollo revered, and Aphrodite desired, but that all these individual gods are ultimately merely flavourings, playful disguises worn by the universal fire (i.e. divine Wisdom), and which appear cacophonous and contradictory only to our limited, chronically-befuddled perceptions. Their apparent strife really forms a deeper, unified, and harmonious economy, which is Wisdom, and also Justice. This congenital mental confusion Heraclitus usually represents metaphorically as sogginess ('A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue'), though he sees 'psyche' itself is a kind of vapour arising from wetness, which becomes increasingly dry and sublimated. (I often think of this as logic and rationality arising from the wet, organic mush of our brains.)
'Smell' in fact, in another of Heraclitus' favourite metaphors for psychic, or what we would call 'spiritual', perception--that is, the soul's ability to sense the unseen, implicate, and yet utterly omnipresent spiritual order. The concept is reminiscent of the esoteric idea, ubiquitous in popular culture since the sixties, of 'spiritual vibrations' which are perceptible to the sensitive. The psyche itself, Heraclitus tells us, is a 'smoke-like substance of finest particles', and when shorn of our bodies, 'In Hades, psyches perceive each other by smell alone.' What he means by 'smell' is the pure perception of psychic reality, wonderfully dramatised in ancient narratives of the theoxenia, stories in which gods appear in disguise to humble mortals who feed them and make much of them as honoured guests. (The lovely story of Baucis and Philemon in Ovid's Metamorphoses is the most famous.) At some point in the theoxenia-narrative, one of the humble mortals suddenly realises that their guest is a divinity, usually because of the performance of a miracle: they normally fall on their knees in fear and trembling. This perception of the terrifying, holy vibration of divine numen is what I think Heraclitus means by smell.
Further reading
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.