Divinity and Immortality in Aristotle: A “De-Mythologized Myth”?

DIVINITY AND IMMORTALITY IN ARISTOTLE: A " DE-MYTHOLOGIZED MYTH" ? IT HAS BEEN said that " the Olympian gods, though they were manifest in nature, had not made the universe and could not dispose of man as their creature with the same unquestioned right of ownership which the ancient Near Eastern gods exercised." 1 Knowing their gods as they did and believing that they themselves were also of divine origin, the Greeks were prompted to harbor feelings which bordered on disrespect and jealousy. It is in this mood that Pindar complains in his Sixth Nemean Ode that common ancestry with the gods does not translate itself into equal power and equal rights: Of one race, one only, are men and gods. Both of one mother's womb we draw our breath; but far asunder is all our power divided, and fences us apart; here there is nothingness, and there, in strength of bronze, a seat unshaken, eternal, abides the heaven. (After Cornford .) 2 Such a lack of awe for the deities was bound to have repercussions on Greek philosophy, the most important being perhaps the admirable serene and philosophical approach to death which characterized most of the Greek thinkers. One might even say that the basic premise of all Greek arguments concerning the immortality of the soul is based on their belief in its divinity, a belief which is found also at the root of their lack of awe. In this sense, the basic premise of the soul's divinity depends on the Orphic myths, as interpreted by the Hellenes, which was taken seriously by all Greek philosophers. The Frankforts' commentary goes like this: i H. and H. A. Frankfort, "The Emancipation of Thought from Myth," in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 374. • Op. cit., p. 374. 217 ~18 FRANCISCO L. PECCORINI The initiate of the Orphic mysteries, for instance, not only hoped to be liberated from the 'wheel of births' but actually emerged as a god from his union with the mother-goddess, ' queen of the dead.' The Orphic myths contain speculations about the nature of man which are characteristically Greek in their tenor. It was said that the Titans had devoured Dionysus-Zagreus and were therefore destroyed by the lightning of Zeus, who made man from their ashes. Man, in so far as he consists of the substance of the Titans, is evil and ephemeral; but since the Titans had partaken of god's body, man contains a divine and immortal spark.8 I. De-mythologizing the Myth. Aware of the force of the Orphic myth in their culture, even the most dedicated philosophers would take seriously the myth of the Titans' destruction and recognize a necessary relation between an immortal substance and a sort of participation in the divine Being; this would be done by taking the explanatory nucleus of the myth and incorporating it into the description of those natures which are supposed to be immortal, such as the one of the" mind" or" Nous." The greatest representative of " empiricist " philosophy in Greece, the Stagirite, seems to guarantee with his authority the scholarly value of such a procedure; he writes in Bk. XII of his Metaphysfos the following confession on the occasion of his dealing with the first substances: Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to their posterity a tradition, in the form of a myth, that these bodies are gods and that the divine encloses the whole nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expediency ; they say these gods are in the form of men or like some of the other animals, and they say other things consequent on and similar to these which we have mentioned. But if one were to separate the first point from these additions and take it alonethat they thought the first substances to be gods-, one must regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished...