Chater One of Algis Uždavinys book "Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism"

I. A Model of Unitive Madness

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues paradoxically that “our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness” (ta megista ton agathon hemin gignetai dia manias: Phaedr. 244a). The four kinds of divine inspiration, or madness, are viewed as a divine gift provided by the Muses, Dionysus, Apollo and Aphrodite (or Eros) respectively. In the same dialogue, the “divine banquet” is depicted as a metaphysical place of contemplation and vision. For Plato, the contemplation ( theoria) of the eternal Ideas transcends our rational ability to comprehend and analyse these Ideas discursively.

The desperate longing for this paradigmatic contemplation is imagined as a yearning for wings and the regained ability to ﬂy to the divine banquet. Accordingly, this pressing desire is the desire for wholeness, for noetic integrity, and for one’s true divine identity provided by dialectical searching, philosophical recollection and erotic madness. The hierarchically organized troops of gods are led by Zeus. They lack both jealousy and passion, being involved neither in plots, nor in heavenly wars:

“The gods have no need for madness, let alone erotic madness; hence the gods are not philosophers. It is not surprising, then, that the gods seem to have no need for logos (let alone for rhetoric). Although there is a certain amount of noise in the heavens, there is no reference whatsoever to there being any discourse among the gods or between gods and men.” 3

Therefore the Platonic philosopher, as the madman who nurtures wings, is the dialectically transformed “speaker” (the fallen soul encharmed by the magic of logos) whose apparently mad desire and erotike mania are not so much directly sent from the gods as sparkling from within as a desire for the divine banquet and for wisdom. But the three other kinds of madness discussed in Plato’s Phaedms, namely, poetic (poi etike mania) telestic ( telestike mania), and prophetic or mantic madness (manlike mania) indeed are sent by the gods.

The Muses are speciﬁed as the source of the poetic inspiration and of the three forms of madness; “the poetic sort seems to be the closest to Socratic-Platonic philosophizing and hence to be its most complex antagonist,” as Charles Griswold remarks/

The telestic madness is anagogic, and leads the soul to its forgotten origins through the theurgic rites of ascent or other sacramental means of puriﬁcation. The inspired telestic liturgies (telestike, hieratike telesiourgia, theophoria) are not necessarily to be regarded straightforwardly as “operations on the gods”, thus deliberately and incorrectly equating the animated cultic statues located in the context of particular ritual communications with the invisible metaphysical principles themselves. Otherwise, tacitly or not, the polemical premises for a certain iconoclastic bias are maintained. And so H.J. Blumenthal puts too much weight on the verb theourgein, supposing that one who does theia erga is one who operates on the gods, thereby making theurgy a nonsense. 5

The mantic inspiration, or prophetic madness, which allegedly produces countless beneﬁts, is evoked and evidenced, ﬁrst of all, by the prophetesses at Delphi, thus recalling the close connection between the Apollonian shrine at Delphi and the philosophical self-knowledge required by Plato’s Socrates. According to Griswold, “Socratic prophecy seems to combine the human techne of division or dissection with the divinely given techne of madness; that is, it somewhat combines . . . madness and sophrosyne.” 6

The Apollonian prophecy is inseparable from philosophizing and, hence, from rhetoric in its expanded general sense, showing and leading souls by persuasion or imperative—like a sacriﬁcial priest, using the dialectical art of deﬁnition, divi-sion and collection. Yet neither is the sacriﬁcer to be viewed as a paradigm of theological understanding, nor the user of the art of rhetoric made subject to his own enchanting pow¬ er of persuasion. However, they may become types of selfduped “believers” or acquire the ideologically tinctured, and therefore very “orthodox”, ability to talk about “truth”—or virtually any subject—and so become “diﬃcult to be with”.

As Griswold correctly observes, Plato’s Socrates

“seems to fear the canonization of a bibbs. That is, the written word lets us persuade ourselves too easily that we are in irrefutable possession of the truth, while in fact we are not. It facilitates our tendency to become dogmatists or zealots rather than philosophers. . . . Under these conditions philosophy can have the same corrupting inﬂuence that sophistry does or worse.” 7

However, academic paranoia diﬀers from prophetic madness. The so-called prophets ( theomanteis , manteis theoi, or Aristotle’s sibullai kai bakideskai hoi entheoipantos-. Probl. 954a.36) fall into enthusiasmos , the state of a particular “inspired ecstasy”, and utter truths of which they themselves presumably know nothing. Hence, being entheos means that the body has a god or a daimon within, just as the Egyptian animated statue has a manifestation ( ba ) of a god ( neter ) within. Similarly, empsuchos means that both the physical human body and the cultic body (the hieratic statue or the entire sanctuary, itself full of images, statues and hieroglyphs) have an animating, life-giving and self-moving principle—namely, a soul (jjsuche ) —inside them.

Orpheus is an example of one who has all these four kinds of inspiration or madness according to Hermeias the Alexandrian Neoplatonist, whose commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus reﬂects the views of his master Syrianus. 8 Since these four ma-niai assist the soul in its ascent and return to its noetic fatherland, Hermeias maintains that poetry and music are able to bring the disordered parts of the soul into order. The hieratic rites and sacramental mysteries of Dionysus make the soul whole and noetically active. Subsequently, the prophetic in¬ spiration (manlike mania ) is provided by Apollo and gathers the soul together into its own unity.

Hermeias regards the charioteer in the Phaedrus myth as the noetic part of the soul and the charioteer’s head as the “one within the soul”, or the soul’s ineﬀable henadic summit which alone may be united with the One. Thus, ﬁnally, as Anne Sheppard explains, “the inspiration of love takes the uniﬁed soul and joins the one within the soul to the gods and to intelligible beauty.” 9

References:

1. The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, introduced and edited by Thomas Moore (London: Routledgc, 1994), pp. 212 & 215.

2. Plato, Parmenides 166b. tr. F. M. Cornford, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, cd. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 956.

3. Charles L. Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 97.

4. Ibid ., p. 77.

5. H.J. Blumenthal, “From ku-ru-so-wo-ko to thcougos: word to ritual,” in Soul and Intellect: Studies in Plotinus and Later Platonism (Aldershot: Ashgatc, Variorum, 1993), XI, p. 6.

6. Charles L. Griswold, ibid., p. 76.

7. Ibid., pp. 207 & 208.

8. Anne Sheppard, The Inﬂuence of Hermeias on Marsilio Ficino’s Doctrine of Inspiration, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43, 1980, p. 105.

9. Ibid., p. 106.

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