Plutarch and
the E of Delphi (Part 2)
I would like to conclude my look at Plutarch’s essay ‘The E of Delphi’ (pronounced EI) by looking at the final pages of the essay which are given over to his teacher AMMONIUS, the Platonist philosopher. (Remember we are referring to ‘Plutarch of Chaeronea’ (circa 46 to 120 CE), a respected philosopher and writer throughout Greece and Rome, who was a high-ranking priest here in Delphi before the destruction of the Temple of Apollo some 300 years after his death. (Surely he is a good place to look to begin to understand what Delphi was really all about…..)
May I remind Greek members of the group that in my previous post there is a link to Plutarch’s essay on this subject in ‘modern Greek’ for people to read easily. In the meantime, here are a few of the things Ammonius says about the E at Delphi, as recorded by Plutarch.
I will be discussing Plutarch’s other 2 essays about Delphi (‘Why Oracles at Delphi Are No Longer Given in Verse’, and ‘The Obsolescence of Oracles’) in due course…..probably over a coffee with anyone who is interested, since I feel the material is too sacred for discussion via social media…
[James’
selected Quotes – The E at Delphi - Part 2.
Ammonius the teacher of Plutarch concludes the conversation
and gives his own deep opinions on the subject…… ]
AMMONIUS,
the Platonist philosopher, Plutarch’s teacher.
LAMPRIAS,
Plutarch’s brother.
PLUTARCH.
THEON,
a literary friend.
EUSTROPHUS,
an Athenian.
NICANDER, a priest of the temple.
XVII. Ammonius, as one who himself gave Mathematics
no mean place in Philosophy, was pleased at the course the conversation was
taking, and said: ‘It is not worth our while to answer our young friends with
too absolute accuracy on these points; I will only observe that any one of the
numbers will provide not a few points for those who choose to sing its praises.
Why speak about the others? Apollo’s holy “Seven” will take up all one day
before we have exhausted its powers. Are we then to show the Seven Wise Men at
odds with common usage, and “the time which runs”, and to suppose that they
ousted the “Seven” from its pre-eminence before the God, and consecrated the
“Five” as perhaps more appropriate? ‘My own view is that the letter signifies
neither number, nor order, nor conjunction, nor any other omitted part of
speech; it is a complete and self-operating mode of addressing the God; the
word once spoken brings the speaker into apprehension of his power. The God, as
it were, addresses each of us, as he enters, with his “KNOW THYSELF”, which is
at least as good as “Hail”. We answer the God back with “EI” (Thou Art),
rendering to him the designation which is true and has no lie in it, and alone
belongs to him, and to no other, that of BEING.
‘For we have, really, no part in real being;
all mortal nature is in a middle state between becoming and perishing, and
presents but an appearance, a faint unstable image, of itself.
“It is impossible
to go into the same river twice”,
said Heraclitus; no more can you grasp mortal
being twice, so as to hold it.
Hence becoming never ends in being, for the
process never leaves off, or is stayed. From seed it produces, in its constant
changes, an embryo, then an infant, then a child; in due order a boy, a young
man; then a man, an elderly man, an old man; it undoes the former becomings and
the age which has been, to make those which come after. yet we fear (how
absurdly!) a single death, we who have died so many deaths, and yet are dying.
For it is not only that, as Heraclitus would say, “death of fire is birth of air”,
and “death of air is birth of water”; the thing is much clearer in our own
selves. The man in his strength is destroyed when the old man comes into being,
the young man was destroyed for the man in his strength to be, so the boy for
the young man, the babe for the boy. He of yesterday has died unto him of
to-day; he of to-day is dying unto him of to-morrow.
No one abides, no one is; we that come into
being are many, while matter is driven around, and then glides away, about some
one appearance and a common mould. Else how is it, if we remain the same, that
the things in which we find pleasure now are different from those of a former
time; that we love, hate, admire, and censure different things; that our words
are different and our feelings; that our look, our bodily form, our intellect
are not the same now as then?
Time is a thing which moves and takes the
fashion of moving matter, which ever flows or is a sort of leaky vessel which
holds destruction and becoming. Of time we use the words “afterwards”, “before”,
“shall be”, and “has been”, each on its face an avowal of not being. For, in
this question of being, to say of a thing which has not yet come into being, or
which has already ceased from being, that “it is”, is silly and absurd.
All things are coming into being, or being
destroyed, even while we measure them by time. Hence it is not permissible,
even in speaking of that which is, to say that “it was”, or “it shall be”;
these all are inclinations, transitions, passages, for of permanent being there
is none in Nature. XX. ‘But the God IS, we are bound to assert, he is, with
reference to no time but to that age wherein is no movement, or time, or
duration; to which nothing is prior or subsequent; no future, no past, no
elder, no younger, which by one long “now” has made the “always” perfect. Only
with reference tot his that which really is, is; it has not come into being, it
is not yet to be, it did not begin, it will not cease. Thus then we ought to
hail him in worship, and thus to address him as “Thou Art”, aye, or in the very
words of some of the old people, “Ei Hen”, “Thou art one thing”. For the Divine
is not many things,…..
Therefore the first of the names of the God,
and the second, and the third. “Apollo” (Not-many) denies plurality and
excludes multitude. Ἴητος means one and one only; Phoebus, we know,
is a word by which the ancients expressed that which is clean and pure,…..
Now The One is transparent and pure, pollution
comes by commixture of this with that, just as Homer, you remember, says of
ivory dyed red that it is stained, and dyers say of mingled pigments that they
are destroyed, and call the process “destruction”.
But now that we see them dreaming of the God
in the fairest of nightly visions, let us rise and encourage them to mount yet
higher, to contemplate him in a dream of the day, and to see his own being. Let
them pay honour also to the image of him and worship the principle of increase
which is about it; so far as what is of sense can lead to what is of mind, a
moving body to that which abides, it allows presentments and appearances of his
kind and blessed self to shine through after a fashion.
To my thinking the word “EI” is confronted
with this false view, and testifies to the God that THOU ART, meaning that no
shift or change has place in him, but that such things belong to some other
God, or rather to some Spirit set over Nature in its perishing and becoming,…..
Anyhow, the phrase “KNOW THYSELF” seems to stand in a sort of antithesis to the letter “E”, and yet, again, to accord with it. The letter is an appeal, a cry raised in awe and worship to the God, as being throughout all eternity; the phrase is a reminder to mortal man of his own nature and of his weakness.’
Source: Plutarch. Delphi Complete Works of
Plutarch. (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 13) .
