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Acanthus: Greek Culture

8th June 2011, hej

 

3) Greek thinking

Greek ideas are present in their texts. Academic analysis suggest that early Greek texts used the word soul as Hebrews did, merely for a person's life. It then came to mean also character so that at the time of Hippocrates as he speaks of 'body and soul'. But

Pythagorean speculation (beginning around mid-sixth century), contributed to the semantic expansion of ‘soul’... Pythagoreanism was concerned with, among other things, the continued existence of the person (or something suitably person-like) after death.
Empedocles and, apparently, Pythagoras (cf. Bremmer 1983, 125) thought that plants have souls, and that human souls, for instance, can come to animate plants. (Note, though, that Empedocles, in extant fragments, rarely uses the word ‘soul’, preferring the word daimôn.) Empedocles in fact claimed to have been a bush in a previous incarnation, as well as, among other things, a bird and a fish
Plato appears to think that plants do have minds in this sense, because he takes them to exhibit desire and sense-perception (Timaeus 77b) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/


Greek theorizing apparently went beyond this with Socrates,

Socrates says not only that the soul is immortal, but also that it contemplates truths after its separation from the body at the time of death. Needless to say, none of the four main lines of argument that Socrates avails himself of succeeds in establishing the immortality of the soul.. (As above)

Aristotle goes further and develops a theory of “soul”. By the time of the Hellenistic world there were a few schools of thought,

Epicurus thinks that the soul is dispersed at death along with its constituent atoms, losing the powers that it has while it is contained by the body of the organism that it ensouls (L&S 14A6). The Stoics agree that the human soul is mortal, but they also take it that it can and does survive the person's death — that is, its separation from the perceptible body. (As above)

The academics added to their conclusion a remarkable point,

Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa were heavily indebted to philosophical theories of soul, especially Platonic ones, but also introduced new concerns and interests of their own (As above)

Why were these so called Christian writers interested in pagan ideas?


Paul had rebuked his generation, regarding that very Greek philosophy,

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments (stoicheion) of the world, and not after Christ. (Colossians 2:8)

The use of the Greek word 'stoicheion' directly rejects Plato's ideas. Paul, a Hebrew, was warning people about and outright rejecting Greek philosophy.

Topics: Greek, acanthus
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