Pythagoras: His Life and Teaching, a Compendium of Classical Sources (40 page)

Heat, seems to consist of rare parts, and disintegrates bodies; Cold, of more dense parts, and binds the pores. The Taste resembles the Touch in concretion and discretion, and in penetration of the pores, and in its objects, which are either harsh or smooth. Those which have a cleansing or scouring faculty stupify the tongue and are bitter. Those which are moderately purgative, salt. Those which inflame and pierce further into the flesh, acid. Contrary to these, are smooth and sweet. The kinds of odor are not distinct for they insinuate through narrow pores which are too solid to be contracted and dilated by putrefaction, and concoction of earth and earthly things. They are sweet or stinking.

Voice is a percussion in the air passing to the soul through the ears, whose pores extend to the liver. In the ears is a spirit whose motion is Hearing. Of voice and hearing some are swift, the sharp; some slow, the flat; the mean are incommensurable. Again, one is much and diffused, the loud; another small and contracted, the low;
one is ordered according to proportions, the harmonious; another disorderly and unproportionate, the inharmonious.

The fourth kind of Sensibles is most various and multiform—termed Visibles—comprising all colors, and innumerable colored things. The primary colors are four: White, Black, Bright, Purple. The rest are made by mixing these together. White disperses the sight. Black contracts it, as hot diffuses the touch. Cold contracts it. Bitter contracts the taste, and sweet dissipates it.

The bodies of creatures that breathe air are nourished by aliment, distributed by the veins through the whole frame defluxively, as by channels, and irrigated by the spirit which diffuses it to the utmost bounds. Respiration is made (there being no vacuity in nature) by influxion, and attraction of the air in the room of that which issued forth at invisible vents, out of which also sweat evaporates. Now something of it being wasted by the natural heat, it is necessary something be introduced to supply that which was consumed. Otherwise there would be a vacuity, which is impossible. For a living creature could not be restored by perpetual fluxion and entire, if the body were disjoined by vacuity. The like composition of organs is likewise in inanimate things with an analogical respiration. A cupping-glass and amber are resemblances of respiration. For the spirits evaporate through the body and enter again at the mouth and nostrils by respiration; then again, like Euripus, it is brought round into the body which by these effuxions is extended. The cuppingglass, the air being consumed by fire, attracts moisture; the amber, by emission of spirits, attracts the body that is like to it.

All aliment is taken into the body from the root of the heart, and the fountain of the ventricle; if the accession be more than the flowing down, it is termed Growth; if the contrary, Decay. The Acme consists in the confine between these two, and is conceived to be the equality of accession and emanation. When the ligaments of the constitution are dissolved, so as there is no passage for the breath, or distribution of aliment, the animal dies.

There are many things which are pernicious to life and cause death; whereof one is termed Sickness. The origins of sickness are the disproportions of the primary faculties. If the simple faculties—
Heat, Cold, Humidity, Dryness—abound, or are deficient, then follow mutations and alterations of the blood by corruption, and deprivations of the consumptive flesh. If according to the changes into Sharp, or Salt, or Acid (humours) the turnings of the blood, or consumptions of the flesh be caused; for hence are generated Choler and Phlegm. Unwholesome
Chyles
and putrefaction of Humours are inconsiderable except they be deep; but those whose causes lie in the bones are not easily cured; those which arise out of the marrow are painful. The extremities of Diseases are Wind, Choler, Phlegm, increasing and flowing into places not proper to them, or into the vital parts. For then obtaining a better place, they expel their neighbors and settle there, and afflicting the bodies, they resolve them into themselves.

These are the diseases of the body. Out of these arise many sicknesses of the soul, several of several faculties. These are: of the sensitive, stupidity; of the reminiscent, forgetfulness; of the desiderative, loathing and excessive appetite; of the pathetic, wild passions and furious frenzies; of the rational, indocility and indiscretion. The forces of vice are pleasures and griefs, desires and fears, raised out of the body, mingled with the soul, and expressed by various names: loves, desires, dissolute affections, impetuous angers, deep malices, various longings, inordinate delights. In a word, to behave ourselves amiss as to passions, or to subdue them, is the bound between virtue and vice. For to be excessive in them, or too hard for them, puts us in a good or bad condition.

To these inclinations, the temper of the body may contribute much. If vehement, abject, or anyway extraordinary, it transports us to melancholy and extravagant lusts. For the parts being overflown by these emanations make the constitution of the body rather turgid than sound, whence arise sadness, forgetfulness, folly, and consternation. The customs also whereunto a man has conformed himself in the city or family where he was born and bred, conduce much. This is also true of the daily course of life, whether softening or corroborating the soul. For living abroad, diet, exercise, and the manners of those with whom we converse, greatly avail to virtue or vice. And these occasions are derived rather from our parents and elements,
than from ourselves. For they are not ineffectual; we are ourselves so easily receding from those actions which are good.
⁹⁶³

To the well-being of an animal, it is requisite that the body have the virtues competent to it: Health, perfect Sense, Strength, and Beauty. The principles of Beauty are a symmetry of the parts amongst themselves and with the soul; for nature made the body as an instrument, obedient and accommodate to all the businesses of life. In like manner, the soul must be ordered to virtues answerable to those: to Temperance, as the body to Health; to Wisdom, as the body to perfect sense; to Fortitude, as the body to strength; to Justice, as the body to beauty.

The principles of these are from Nature; their means and ends from industry. Those of the body are attained by exercise and Medicine; those of the Soul by Institution and Philosophy. For these faculties nourish and strengthen both the soul and body by labor, exercise and pureness of diet—these by medicaments; those instituting the soul by chastisements and reprehensions. For they strengthen it, by exhortation, by exciting the inclination, and enjoining those things which are expedient for action.

The gymnastic art, and its nearest ally Medicine, are designed for the cure of bodies—reducing the faculties to the best harmony. They purify the blood and make the spirits flow freely, so that if anything unwholesome settle, the vigors of the blood and spirits being thus confirmed, overmaster it. Music, and its director Philosophy—ordained by the gods and by the laws for reformation of the soul—inure, compel and persuade the irrational part to obey the rational, and in the irrational mollify anger, and quiet desire; so they neither move nor rest without reason, the mind summoning them either to action or fruition.

The bound of temperance is obedience and fortitude. Now science and venerable philosophy, purifying the mind from false opinions, bring her to knowledge. And reducing her from great ignorance, raise her to contemplation of Divine things; wherein if a man be conversant with contentedness as to human things, and endeavor in a moderate way of living, he is happy. For he to whom God has allotted this estate is undoubtedly guided to a most happy life.

But if a man be stiff and refractory, he shall be pursued by punishment according to the laws and those discourses which declare things Celestial and Infernal. For irremissible punishments are prepared for the unhappy dead and many other things; for which I commend the Ionic poet, who makes men religious by ancient fabulous Traditions. For as we cure bodies with things unwholesome when the wholesome agree not with them, so we restrain souls with fabulous relations when they will not be led by the true. Let them then—since there is a necessity for it—talk of these strange punishments: as if souls did transmigrate: those of the effeminate into the bodies of women given up to ignominy; of murderers into those of beasts for punishment; of the lascivious into the forms of swine; of the light and temerarious into birds; of the slothful, and idle, unlearned, and ignorant into several kinds of fishes. All these in the second period Nemesis decrees, together with the vindictive and Terrestrial Daemons, the overseers of human affairs to whom God, the disposer of all things, has committed the administration of the World—replenished with gods, men, and all other living creatures. All of which are formed after the best image of the ungenerate and eternal Idea.

An Explication of the Pythagorean Doctrine By John Reuchlin
⁹⁶⁴

CHAPTER 1

O
F
P
YTHAGORAS
: H
IS
W
AY OF
T
EACHING, BY
S
ILENCE AND
S
YMBOLS

T
he incommunicable and abstruse tradition of Mysteries and Symbols is not to be investigated by acuteness of human wit (which rather affects us with a doubtful fear than an adherent firmness). It requires ample strength of thinking and believing, and above all things, faith and taciturnity.
⁹⁶⁵
Whence Pythagoras taught nothing (as Apuleius says) to his disciples before silence; it being the first rudiment of contemplative wisdom to learn to meditate, and to unlearn to talk.
⁹⁶⁶
As if the Pythagorean sublimity were of greater worth than to be comprehended by the talk of boys. This kind of learning (as other things) Pythagoras brought into Greece from the Hebrews. That the disciple intending to ask some sublime question, should hold his peace; and being questioned, should only answer
, “He said.”† Thus the Cabalists answer
, “The wise said”; and Christians, pioteuoov, “Believe.”†

Moreover, all the Pythagorean philosophy (especially that which concerns divine things) is mystical, expressed by Riddles and Symbols.
⁹⁶⁷
The reasons are these: First, the Ancients used to deliver wisdom by Allegories. All their Philosophers and Poets are full of Riddles, avoiding by obscurity contempt of the vulgar. For the most apt interpreter of things not perceptible by human infirmity is Fable. That befits Philosophers which is declared under the pious veil of fictions, hidden in honest things, and attired in honest words. For what is easily found is but too negligently pursued. Secondly, it sometimes happens that we cannot express abstruse things without much circumlocution, unless by some short Parable. Thirdly, as generals use watch-words to distinguish their own soldiers from others, so it is not improper to communicate to friends some peculiar Symbols as distinctive marks of a Society. These, among the Pythagoreans, were a
chain of indissoluble love. Pythagoras was studious of friendship; and if he heard of any that used his Symbols, he presently admitted him into his Society.
⁹⁶⁸
Hereupon all became desirous of them—as well thereby to be acceptable to their Master as to be known as Pythagoreans. Lastly, symbols may serve as memorial notes. For in treating of all things divine and human, the vastness of the subject requires short Symbols as conducing much to memory.

CHAPTER 2

T
HE
T
RIPLE
W
ORLD

T
he Pythagoreans reduce all Beings, subsistent or substantive, immediately to Ideas which truly are; and those to the Idea of Ideas.
⁹⁶⁹
Hereupon they asserted three Worlds—whereof the third is infinite, or rather not-finite—and that all things consist of Three. The Pythagoreans (says Aristole) affirm that the whole and all things are terminated by three. Some are bodies and magnitudes, others keep and inhabit bodies and magnitude, others are the rulers and origins of the inhabitants. This we understand of the three Worlds: the Inferior, the Superior, and the Supreme.

The Inferior contains bodies, and magnitudes, and their appropriate Intelligences, movers of the Spheres, overseers, and guardians of things generable and corruptible, who are said to take care of bodies, each according to the particular task assigned him. By the Ancients, they are named sometimes Angels, sometimes gods, and (in respect of the anxious solicitude of things whereto they are confined) Daemons.

Next over it immediately shines the Superior World. This contains the superior Powers, incorporeal essences, divine exemplars, the seals of the inferior World, after whose likeness the faces of all inferior things are formed. These Pythagoras calls “Immortal Gods,”
⁹⁷⁰
as being the principles of things produced out of the Divine Mind, essential
. They are the causes of those forms which dwell in bodies, and inform the compounded substances of the lower World. There are also other gods, incorporeal beings, individual, differing not by material, but by formal number. These are spirits, void of matter, simple, unmixed, seated beyond the sensible Heaven, confined neither to time nor place, neither suffering age nor transmutation much less any alteration. In a word, not being affected with any passion, they lead a self-sufficient excellent life, and inhabit Eternity, which is
, always being, because it always was, is, and shall be intemporally in the Divine Mind. Yet by the energy of God it was created and placed beyond the convex of the visible Heaven, as being the lucid mansion of the blessed spirits (whom the Pythagoreans
believe gods), placed in the highest region of Aether, of everlasting duration, invested in the immortal Eternity.

The third World, Supreme, containing all other Worlds, is that of the Deity, consisting of one divine Essence, existent before Eternity. For it is the Age of Ages, the preexistent entity and unity of existence, substance, essence, nature.

These three Worlds are called “Receptacles” in different respects: the first, of Quantity; the second, of Intelligences; the third, of Principles. The first, circumscriptively; the second, definitively; the third is not received, but receives, because it is everywhere, and is called a replenishing receptacle.

Through the Superior World is communicated—from the Tetractys to the inferior—life, and the being (not accidental, but substantial) of every species; to some, clearly; to others, obscurely. This the Pythagoreans collect from those words of their Master:

—The Tetractys to our Souls did send,
The Fountain of Eternal Nature—
⁹⁷¹

The Tetractys is the Divine Mind communicating. The Fountain is the exemplar Idea communicated. And eternal Nature is the essential Idea of things received. Idea, considered as to God (say they), is his knowledge; as to the sensible World, exemplar; as to itself, Essence.

Now as in the Sensible World the Superior sphere has an influence on all the Spheres beneath it, so in the Intelligible World. Not only every superior Chorus of Angels has an influence upon all the inferior, but the whole superior World has an influence upon the whole inferior. Whereby all things are reduced according to their capacities as far as possible: momentary to Eternal, inferior to superior. But to the third World, nothing that is merely a creature can be reduced, incapable in its own nature of that sublimity which is proper only to God.