Books
Between intellect and spirit
Christopher Booker
Pythagoras: A Life Peter Gorman (Routledge £6.25) One of the most extraordinary moments in the history of mankind was that sudden emergence between 600 and 450 BC of a wholly new state of consciousness about the nature of man and the universe, variously expressed in the East by Lao-Tse and Buddha, and rather more fragmentarily in the West by the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers. Bathed in the strange dawn light of a new age, the thinkers and teachers of the Greek world, from Thales to Heraclitus, produced a kind of headline summary of almost every major idea that was to preoccupy the minds of men over the next two and a half thousand years. Naturally our eyes are caught today by their startling 'scientific previsions', such as the notion that man had evolved via fishes and animals from the primeval slime, that the universe was composed of atoms, that the earth was round and not the centre of the universe. But lurking behind these speculations was a much more profound impulse, seeking to synthesise the nature of existence under laws which wove together body and soul, inner and outer life, man and creation — and here, looming over all the other preSocratics, is the mysterious figure of Pythagoras.
An indication of how great and how elusive the sixth-century sage of Samos was may be gleaned from the difficulty Bertrand Russell had in placing him in perspective in The History of Western Philosophy. Although Russell describes him as 'intellectually one of the most important men who ever lived', 'one of the most interesting men in history', and even claims 'I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as he was in the sphere of thought', the chapter on Pythagoras remains tantalisingly short and vague, simply because so little is directly known about him. None of his writings survive; he insisted on secrecy about his teachings (his pupils had to serve a long initiation, including five years of 'silence' before they could be exposed to the essence of Pythagorean doctrine); and most of what we know about Pythagoras can only be pieced together from a mass of references to him in later centuries, and from his colossal 'hidden' influence through Plato on the Whole later evolution of Western thought.
It is for these and other reasons that most of us have such a fragmentary, even seemingly contradictory, picture of the man who supposedly invented the very term 'philosopher' (for Russell he was like a 'combination of Einstein and Mrs Eddy'). On the one hand, he was an astronomer, an outstanding musician (on the lyre of Apollo — he distrusted the flute because of its association with Dionysiac frenzies), and the founder of mathematics who invented the terms 'square' and 'cube', greatly influenced the first six books of Euclid, and with whom we associate the famous theorem about the right-angled triangle. He was the man who first perceived the connection between music and number (e.g. that a string halved in length produces a change of exactly an octave). His teachings on medicine influenced Hippocrates. On the other hand, he was also a great religious teacher, best-known for his belief in reincarnation and that all life is one, a passionate vegetarian who has often been mocked for his taboo against the eating of beans. If to our disjointed twentiethcentury minds, this seems to convey little more than a slightly dotty, if versatile confusion, at least one thing is certain — that to Pythagoras himself all these aspects of his life were intimately related. For that reason alone, at a time when men are once again almost desperately seeking a sense of synthesis and meaning in the riddle of existence, a sympathetic study piecing together all we know about this great man would be more than welcome.
Mr Gorman, an Australian writer, has tried to put together such a book, largely based on the three most substantial surviving biographical accounts of Pythagoras, those of Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus. All of these date from the second to the fourth centuries AD — seven to nine centuries after Pythagoras's death — and such an exercise might therefore be compared with an attempt to reconstruct the historical life of St Francis on the basis of writings of G.K. Chesterton, Paul Johnson and Lord Longford. Mr Gorman is not a scholar (far too many statements are made unsupported, such as that the theorem concerning the square on the hypotenuse was 'certainly known in Babylon long before his birth'). Nevertheless, taking these inadequacies into account, he has managed a reasonable synthesis of the three versions, reconstructing Pythagoras's life from his birth on the rich island of Samos between 570 and 558 BC, through his probable sojourn in Egypt for a decade or more in his twenties (where he imbibed the mysteries of the 'death and rebirth' Osiris religion), to his captivity in Babylon following Kambyses's invasion of Egypt in 525 (where he came into contact with Eastern religious thought). Pythagoras returned to Samos where he began teaching, was then exiled to Croton in Southern Italy, where he set up his famous 'communistic' community and taught for many years until the Pythagoreans were forcibly dispersed (mystery surrounds the exact circumstances and date of the master's death, although it was probably around 460 and there are legends that he lived to an age of around 100).
Mixed in with these somewhat laboriously argued chronologies are considerations of the main outlines of Pythagoras's teaching, including chapters on his belief in the divinity of number, and music; and the book concludes with a brief summary of the enormous later influence of Pythagoreanism, mingled with Platonism, in the classical world — in which Mr Gorman obviously sees his subject rather as an embattled Romantic hero, plagiarised by the inferior Plato, taken up by the 'frivolous' Ovid, and remaining a central, hidden influence on Graeco-Roman culture, until with the triumph of Christianity in the sixth century, 'the doors finally closed on free thought'.
What is conspicuously lacking from all this, despite Mr Gorman's rather ominous claim in the blurb that he has 'an intuition into the psyche of the ancient Greeks', is any real sense of how Pythagoras's view might have formed a living unity — of such power that, through Platonism, it was to infuse the whole subsequent development of Western thought. It was not for nothing that Pythagoras's followers were divided into two groups — the akousmatikoi or beginners, who remained on the outside, contemplating a disjointed series of moral instructions and almost koan-like precepts, and the real initiates, the mathematikoi, who served their long apprenticeship precisely because to begin to understand what lay at the heart of Pythagoras's teaching required a profound shift in consciousness which was not to be won lightly.
It seems certain that what bound together all Pythagoras's teaching was that sense, familiar from Plato (e.g. the parable of the cave), that behind the apparently chaotic world of our epiphenomenal existence, caught up in the endless clash and interplay of 'opposites', lies a harmony in which all those oppositions are reconciled — the harmony which binds the universe together, expressed in the 'music of the spheres', and with which the chief end of man is to harmonise himself. This harmony is above all governed by the relations of number, the One which becomes the two of division and conflict, which is reconciled through the three, which leads to the divine four, the tetraktys. It was this profound sense of the need to re-establish our lost psychic harmony which united all the aspects of Pythagoras's thought, from his use of music as 'therapy' to his medical teachings on the need to harmonise body and psyche. Even 'evil' itself is not an absolute, but part of 'the good', because looked on from a correct perspective it can be seen to be a part of that ultimate harmony in which all oppositions are reconciled.
These are very deep waters indeed, running through Platonism, neoPlatonism, much of the world's philosophical and religious thought, up to the writings of Jung in our own time – indeed they are the foundations of what Leibniz called `the Perennial Philosophy'. The greatness of Pythagoras is that, standing as he did in that crucial phase of man's spiritual evolution at a kind of confluence of Egyptian, Hellenic, Judaic and Zoroastrian influences, he perceived how on such a level of consciousness those two great 'opposites' which have since left our poor world so tragically divided, intellect and spirit, 'science' and 'religion', might be reconciled. As Bertrand Russell recognised, the influence which this had on the foundations of Western thought right up to the time of the great Cartesian 'split' and even beyond, can scarcely be overestimated. But I fear that the true significance of all of this is lost on Mr Gorman. He remains one of the akousmatikoi – and as a result his book, though full of desire to revere, is sadly dead.
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