Hercules In Olympus And The Shade In Hades

Hercules in Olympus and the Shade in Hades Julio Cesar Assis M.A. History of Ideas University of San Paulo, Brazil [email protected]

“And I caught sight of mighty Heracles (that is to say, his shade; for he himself rejoices in the feats of deathless gods)”[1] Odyssey XI, 602-2 “The first man Adam was made a living soul [psyche], the last Adam a life-giving spirit [pneuma]”. 1 Corinthians 15:45 When the classical world was reaching its end, philosophy and religion degrading in antinomianism and magic, someone raised up whose writings would shine with a philosophical light only comparable to Plato and Aristotle, the sublime Plotinus. "We might say that as Plato is to Socrates, Plotinus is to Plato. He is the man who understands the Master's intentions even better than the Master himself."[2] Concepts that were formulated in philosophical Greek during the classical era may have had parallels in another civilization that elaborated them in a poetic form during Homeric times. Biblical scholar Margaret Barker[3] suggests that essential elements of the Abrahamic tradition that researchers have often concluded were imported from the Hellenic environment actually may have been aspects of an ancestral doctrine that the Greeks themselves could have received from Southeast, as with their alphabet and so on. The first temple of Jerusalem was built with technical assistance from Phoenician architects and artisans during the reign of king Hiram I of Tyre (980-947 BCE). Pythagoras (580-500 BCE), who was born in coastal Anatolia as the son of a merchant from Tyre, visited Phoenicia and Syria, where he could have learned an ancestral spirituality. The presence of this ancient wisdom in Greek thought would be later reworked by philosophers like Plato and Plotinus.

But is it relevant at all if Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus were or not directly influenced by any discernible ancient tradition, since each one of them “may not have been a philosopher in the modern sense, but rather one in the highest ancient sense, according to which the veritable teacher is one who understands and transmits a doctrine of immemorial antiquity and anonymous divine origin.”[4] During the lifetime of Plotinus (205-270), he and the Christians seems to have ignored each other[5], but this changed with the council of Nicaea in 325 and “it will be through Platonism, especially in its Neoplatonic form, that philosophical intellectuals may most readily be led to Christianity.”[6] As wrote Augustine (354430) referring to Marius Victorinus: “…when I mentioned to him that I had read certain books of the Platonists which Victorinus - formerly professor of rhetoric at Rome, who died a Christian, as I had been told - had translated into Latin, Simplicianus congratulated me that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, which were full of fallacies and deceit, ‘after the beggarly elements of this world,’[7] whereas in the Platonists, at every turn, the pathway led to belief in God and his Word.”[8] After Nicaea, “one result of that Council, then, was to ensure that negative theology, doctrines of asceticism and of the mystic way, combined with the general structure of cosmic rest, procession and return, not the schema of hypostases itself, were to be the Plotinian themes most apparent in subsequent Christianity.”[9] The Plotinian metaphysical teaching postulates three hypostases: the absolute or first hypostasis is formless and nameless, but may be called the One. This first irradiates the second hypostasis, Nous, the spirit or intellectual principle. The irradiation of this is Psyche or soul, which originates the cosmos or physis, a quasihypostasis, which limit is matter, the point where irradiation ends. Universal soul, the third hypostasis, limiting and particularizing itself, is present in human beings as three phases or images. The intellectual intuition, always contemplating Nous, is the “Soul of the soul”[10] or Spirit in man. The second phase or image is the reasoning soul, specific to the human being[11]. The last is the unreasoning soul that conjoined with body is the animate entity or psychosomatic compound. This resembles the apostolic anthropological triad pneuma, psyche, soma: “and may your whole spirit [pneuma] and soul [psyche] and body [soma] be kept sound and blameless.”[12] The passage of the Odyssey when Odysseus visits Hades and sees the shade of Hercules, which is not the true hero, was honored by Plotinus with a significant exegesis.

“The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing in the two realms at once, he gives a twofold Hercules. It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of him remains below.”[13] The explanation for the twofold Hercules is that he is worthy of his empyrean state “by his noble serviceableness.” However, the civic virtues, those of the social order like prudence, courage and rectitude, which would turn certain men or heroes divine do not suffice, they are active virtues that leave behind them a “residue,” the shade. Only contemplation[14] “would place him unreservedly in the higher realm.” Each Plotinian level or degree contemplates that immediately above it: nature contemplates Soul that contemplates Nous that contemplates the One. The process of irradiation or spiration has as correlative an aspiration or reversion to the source and all that flows from the Absolute strives to return to it and there remain. Since Hercules was a “hero of practical virtue,” with a warlike nature, his contemplation was not perfect: “Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions - this ‘Shade’, as I take it, being the characteristically human part remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career was mainly of the hero’s personal shaping.”[15] The shade of Hercules, “being the characteristically human part,” may be subjected to metempsychosis[16]: “The soul which still drags a burden will tell of all the man did and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the lives lived before, some of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the body, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of one body after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and will remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.”[17] The Orphic-pythagorean-platonic doctrine of metempsychosis should not be confused with fantasies about “reincarnation.”[18] Nineteen-century spiritualists and occultists spread the belief that “spiritual” essences of deceased human beings would “reincarnate,” returning recurrently to the same bodily state. The true meaning of metempsychosis is that in the same way corporal remains may be assimilated by the soil and subsequently by plants, which later would be absorbed by animals and even human beings, it is possible that something similar could perhaps occur in the case of psychic elements. However, this may happen with the

“characteristically human part” of soul, that is not the intellectual intuition or Spirit in man, whose source is not specifically human in a biological sense.[19] If the shade of Hercules is in Hades and may suffer the metempsychosis process, what about the Hercules who “rejoices in the feats of deathless gods”? The passing of the true Hercules to a superior level of being is explained by another doctrine which some also confound with “reincarnation,” the teaching of transmigration or noetic change of state. “The Hercules of the heavenly regions[20] would still tell of his feats: but there is the other man to whom all of that is trivial; he has been translated to a holier place; he has won his way to the Intellectual Realm; he is more than Hercules, proven in the combats in which the combatants are the wise.”[21] The higher soul of Hercules, the intellectual intuition, has transmigrated and now abides in Nous or Intellectual Realm. However, this is not enough; Hercules reached Olympus and will never come back, but paradisaical places are still conditioned states. The Neoplatonic master relates an unmistakable personal experience employing classical temple imagery: “This is the purport of that rule of our [Greek] Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme [god] is not to be made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see [the One]. There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man formed of this mingling with the Supreme must – if he only remember – carry its image impressed upon him: he is become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the very self: caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns neither to this side nor to that, not even inwards to himself; utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to the order of the Beautiful; he has risen beyond beauty; he has overpassed even the choir of the [civic] virtues; he is like one who, having penetrated the inner sanctuary [of the temple], leaves the temple images [of gods] behind him – though these [images] become once more the first objects of regard when he leaves the holies [of the temple]; for There [in contemplation] his converse was not with [an] image [of a god], nor with [any such] trace, but with the very Truth in the view of which all the rest is but of secondary concern.”[22] Plotinus quotes Homer to emphasize that the ultimate attainment implies the contemplation of the One. “‘Let us flee to the beloved Fatherland’[23]: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How we are to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso - not

content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is the Father. What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.”[24] [1] The Odyssey of Homer. New York, Bantam, 1991. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. [2] Rist, J.M. Plotinus. The Road to Reality. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 24. [3] Barker, M. “Temple and Timaeus”, The great high priest: the temple roots of Christian liturgy, chapter 11. [4] Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947). “Measures of Fire”. Metaphysics, Princeton, 1987, p. 160. [5] The only possible exception been Enneads VI.8. [6] Rist, John. “Plotinus and Christian philosophy”. The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Cambridge, 1996, p. 408. [7] Colossians, 2:8. [8] Augustine, Confessions, VIII. 3-6. www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.xi.html. [9] Idem p. 396. [10] Philo (30 BCE-40 CE), “Who is the heir of divine things.” www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book17.html. [11] Man is gifted with mind, Sanskrit manava and manas. [12] 1 Tessalonicenses 5:23. [13] Enneads I.1.12. Plotinus. The Enneads. London, Penguin, 1991. Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page. [14] Contemplation, Latin contemplum, with or at the temple. [15] Enneads IV.3.27. [16] Also called metensomatosis and palingenesis. The concepts of metempsychosis and transmigration were clarified by Ananda Coomaraswamy, “On the one and only transmigrant”. [17] Enneads IV.3.27. [18] Marco Pallis, “Reincarnation”, www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/browse.aspx?ID=12. [19] “And God formed man, dust from the earth, and breathed into his face a breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Hebrew adamah, Latin humus (earth), adam and homo (born of the earth). Genesis 2:7, LXX, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/01-gen-nets.pdf. [20] Another translation ascribes the boasting to the Shade: “The Hercules of Hades is able still to speak of his bravery. But he esteems it a small thing now that he has passed into a region more sacred and has arrived in the intelligible realm: he is now endowed with strength more than Herculean for those battles which are the battles of the sages.” O’Brien, Elmer. The Essential Plotinus. New York, Mentor, 1964, p. 160. A. H. Armstrong avoids the point: “And Homer’s Heracles might talk about his heroic deeds; but the man who thinks these of little account and has migrated to a holier place, and has been stronger than Heracles in the contexts in which the wise compete...” Plotinus IV. Loeb Classical Library, London, 1995, p. 135. [21] Enneads IV.3.32. [22] Enneads, VI.9.11. [23] Iliad II, 140; Odyssey IX, 29ff. and X, 483-4. [24] Enneads I.6.8.