Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

OUR CHANGING PARADIGMS: THE NEW AXIAL ERA

We have not updated our changing paradigms/dialogue with science page for some time, and I would like to begin a discussion about what I call the new axial era. I have used this expression many times in broadcasts and lectures, and it is time to develop this idea more fully. In order to do this successfully it would seem necessary to discuss the first axial era and explain its meaning.
    The concept of an axial era was given to us by the philosopher Karl Jaspers. In examining the monumental transformation of human thought and culture that took place between approximately 800 BC and 400 or 300 BC, Jaspers noted that this period of time developed profound changes in the way humans thought, developed culture and formed societies. We do not know all of the dynamics that drove this transformational era, but we do know that one of the generators of this new religious and philosophical thought was the question of permanence and change. It was this question, or rather series of questions, that laid the foundations of modern science.
    In this discussion about the concept of an axial era, and my suggestion that we have entered into a second axial era, we should begin with the Greeks, although they do not form the oldest part of this transformational eon. Beginning with the school at Miletus, the Hellenic thinkers had the greatest impact on non-Eastern thought, and on the development of science.

    Let us briefly outline the idea of a second axial era, and we will develop these ideals further as our discussion proceeds. During the first axial era philosophy and sometimes a vague theology developed. While the ordinary people were not immediately touched by these developments in philosophy, they were certainly impacted upon by the development of law codes, systems of ethics and the reshaping of religious concepts and principles. The thought and the concepts of the philosophers gradually trickled down to the broader levels of societies. Over decades and centuries these concepts slowly transformed human thought. The American Constitution, for example, was profoundly influenced by the humanist/deist philosophers of the 16-17th centuries (and earlier). In the latter half of the 18th century a new development began to unfold. Science began to replace philosophy as the motor of evolutionary change in human thought. At the same time the industrial revolution with the passage from merchantilism to capitalism to consumer-capitalism had already been replacing older structures of society and culture. This latter dynamic also collapsed the traditional family structure and created the new nuclear family. Beginning with Albert Einstein and his transformational theories, more and more people became aware of developments in the physical sciences. The birth of quantum mechanics, biological and neurobiological sciences and a greater awareness of the universe coupled with the explosion of technology, has reshaped human thought over the past century. By degrees the philosophers and their influence began to recede and be replaced by the physicists and developers of new technology. The new axial era that we have been discussing is essentially driven by physics and technology. These elements have produced often immense changes in the worldview and the conceptual anthropology of an ever increasing segment of the human population. It is this process that we wish to converse about, beginning with a review of four major elements of the first axial era; all of which deal with questions of permanence and change. These include the powerful influence of the great Azeri prophet Zoroaster (who taught just on the cusp of moving into the axial era), the development of new religious paradigms in India, China and Israel, and the development of Hellenic philosophy and proto-science. As mentioned above, we will begin with the Hellenic developments in the pre-Socratic Epoch because they most clearly define the question of permanence and change as the driving force of the first axial era.

I

(This chapter of our discussion of the Axial Era is from a series of classes which Archbishop Lazar gave at St Sava Seminary, Grayslake, Il.)

A DISCOURSE ON THE IDEA OF
PERMANENCE CHANGE
AND FIRST PRINCIPLE (PROTA ARCHAI)
AMONG THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS

    by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

    INTENT

    There is a concern of the pre-Socratics that echoes so clearly down to the Scholastic era in a problematic way. This matter, in a unique and powerful way, undermined Western Christian theology and set it on a false course. This concept is that of a "First Principle" or "First Cause."
    We will discuss the developments and changes in the concept of what constitutes the "First Principle," but let us jump ahead a few millennia. The crises that would follow from the dogmatization of this concept in the Scholastic era is one demonstration of the wounding of Western theology by Platonism and Aristotelianism. This Western theological development redirected the Christian concern for the meaning of life to a concern about the correct system of abstract proofs — a doctrinal position based on claims of the validity of "First Principle." These proofs, being essentially philosophical abstractions, seek after truth as if truth is captured by the work of reason, or is an historical or scientific "fact"— an object of some sort. We will discuss in another work why this was so destructive to Western theology (and the philosophy that was shaped by it). This development reached its zenith with the rise of nominalism and the movement into pure science, and the Scholastic reaction to it.
    The main safeguard that kept Orthodox Christian theology from degenerating into philosophy was the refusal to speculate about a "First Principle" or "First Cause." Orthodoxy refused to subject God to human reason and avoided the fall into rationalism. Rationalism must shape itself according to philosophical tradition and thus the rationalism of the scholastics became dependent on Plato and Aristotle.
    The apophatic theology of Orthodox Christianity avoids this completely. Reason is purified by faith rather than negated by it, while faith is substantiated by experience, not by reflective reasoning. Faith, like Orthodox theology, recognises the reality of things that are beyond and above reason, and are concluded in a mystery. As we approach the divine, the syllogisms of Aristotle collapse and the "Forms" of Plato evaporate. We enter into a cloud of unknowing and incomprehension, in which reason ceases and we apprehend by means of ineffable experience. In such a state, reason is regenerated by faith, and we begin to appropriate the reason of the "New Man.".
    For now, let us trace the rise of these concepts of First Principle/First Cause in the period of Greek philosophy before Socrates.

 A NOTE ABOUT MOTION AND MOVEMENT

    Before we continue it seems useful to say something about motion and movement at this point. We use the term "motion" rather than movement in all the in part because it is translated that way in the all the various translation of fragments that we are using. From a metaphysical point of view "movement" was defined as passing from the potential to the actual, where later science would define "movement" as matter in motion. The Eleatics and Atomists are speaking of matter in motion. The Eleatics would deny the motion of matter, at least of the First Principle or underlying essences of Being. The Atomists insisted upon it. However, part of the contradiction lies in the fact that "motion" was little understood at the time. Even in Zeno's paradox of the Arrow, we see this lack of understanding. It is doubtful if any of the pre-Socratic philosophers would have ascribed movement to a prota archei either.
    The breakthrough in the concept of motion (the gradual passage through the idea of impetus to the theory of inertia) is pivotal in the development of modern science. The term impetus seems to have appeared in the scholastic era, however the theory of impetus originated with the 6th century Byzantine scientist/philosopher John Philiponos, in his critique of Aristotle's theories relating to the motion of projectiles. Aristotle taught that the speed of a moving body is proportionally related to the force that moves the body. Consequently, he said, no object can be moving unless it is forced to. This approach, since it attributed to what on the surface appeared obvious, the validity of a natural law, became practically doctrinal and cast a shadow over physics until the appearance of Newton's Principia, where Newton correctly related the force to the acceleration instead of speed. Actually, Aristotle would suggest that a rock thrown into the air falls back to earth because earth is its natural home. The rock, he held, will fall faster (rather, with more exuberance) as it nears the earth, because it is being drawn back to its natural place. The theory of gravity was yet a long way off. The Eleatics could never have guessed that momentum is the measure of a body's motion that is equal to its mass times its velocity. They might have guessed that a body is at rest unless acted upon by some force, but they could not have fathomed a force that might act upon a First Principle (whether defined as an uncaused causer or not) in such a way. Thus, the First Principle could have neither motion nor movement. It could not be set in motion, nor could it be passing from the potential to the actual..

    1
    THE ROOTS OF THE CONCEPTS

        We can now perceive the universe in ways undreamed of less than a century ago. As we learn more about the cosmos
 with these new tools that expand the range of our senses, our "internal model" of the universe inexorably changes.
 Our inner vision of reality grows into a new shape in response to the new knowledge (Joel Davis)

    Karl Jaspars, the existentialist philosopher, delineates the era of approximately 700-500 B.C. as an "axial period." He suggests that in this era a radical change in social thinking developed worldwide — or at least in the area of civilisation stretching from Egypt to China. This dramatic series of developments took place in the areas of religion and ethics, and in many basic elements of the ideas of interhuman relations. This era saw the appearance of Zoraster with his dualistic religious-ethical system, of Lao Tse and Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, the great prophets such as Isaiah in Israel and the dawn of philosophy in the Hellenic world. All these movements sought to come to grips with the great existential problems that faced mankind: "being," meaning, freedom, bondage, becoming, dissolution, etc.
    The contradictions between change, continuity and permanence and the apparent contradiction between matter and spirit (which would form a basis of Gnosticism), have so dominated man that they generated the natural religions, philosophy and science. Change, the nature of change and its causes, was certainly a mystery in ancient times. The difficulty in treating cancer today reveals that it is still somewhat of a mystery. It was not only the apparent contradiction between change and permanence, of winter and summer that occupied the minds of the thinkers of the era. The problem of the co-existence of good and evil had concerned human beings since the beginnings of intelligent thought. Seeking solutions to these problems was the driving force of the axial period.
    More primitive cultures dealt with change by means of rituals which often imitated it, and with myths (cosmogonies and cosmologies) which sought to explain it. The first school of authentic rationalists we encounter sought to deny it. The ultimate solution to a lack of understanding is denial.
    Why, precisely, the question of change should have dominated the foundations of philosophy, is an interesting question. We must note, though, that it also dominated much of the cultural and religious patterns that preceded the birth of authentic philosophy, and resurfaced so profoundly in the early 1800s with Hegel.
    Earlier contemplation of change resulted in the birth of magic — an attempt to control change, in rites of passage — an attempt to celebrate or guide it, and in religious rituals aimed at influencing the Cause of the changes. Change was, however, simply accepted as the profound inevitability of "being." Existence was seen as a constant stream of change, a flux of being and becoming. All the ancient cosmogonies and cosmologies addressed the apparent cyclical nature of change, typified and amplified first by the seasons and then by observations of the heavenly bodies. Each cosmogony established a model of reality for its own culture, however many similarities there might have been among them. It has occurred to me that the establishment of the "divine monarchy" was an attempt to have more "local" influence on the often chaotic and frightening changes that took place. We have only to recall that the city of Nippur in Chaldea once flourished on the banks of the Euphrates. Now, its ruins rise like a nondescript massif in a barren, windswept desert. The Euphrates had changed her course and abandoned the city, leaving death and decay where once life had flourished in green gardens. Even the rise of empires may have been driven in some small part by the desire to control the unknown, to gain some little dominion over change and that which was "different."
    When and in what manner the first antithesis between change and permanence was posed in likely beyond speculation. Just as uncertain is the circumstance and era in which the question of the conflict between good and evil, spirit and matter arose. The philosophy regarding these contradictions would blend with mysticism to form the Gnostic sects that were to bedevil Christianity for centuries.
    The religious movements of the axial era focused more on the paradox of good and evil, while in the Hellenic world we witnessed the rise of philosophy, which concerned itself largely with the question of change and Being — that is, the coming into existence and passing out of existence of things, while there was so evidently both continuity and permanence. The Gnostic systems that arose in this era and later sought to combine both philosophy and religion in solving the quandary of good and evil. They developed schools which I would describe as mystical rationalism, and intertwined the questions of change in the material world with the problem of good and evil.
    In the course of their deliberations, the Hellenic philosophers developed methods of thought and fundamental ideas that would be sometimes an aid and sometimes a hindrance to future philosophy, and ultimately to Western Christian theology.
    We are not going to discuss the rise and systems of the great religions or of the developments in Judaism of this era. We are concerned here only with the pre-Socratic Hellenic philosophers. Moreover, we are concerned especially with those elements of speculation among these thinkers that would eventually distort Christian theology, particularly in the scholastic era.

   2
    THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

        Empedocles:    It is impossible to find a truly wise man.                                                        
        Xenophanos:    That is likely true, for only a wise man would know a wise man if he met him.

    The paradox we have mentioned may be described in a manner which will be a bridge for us between the various schools that arose. I would like to suggest that, so far as the Hellenic philosophers are concerned, the impetus was provided by the discovery of mathematics as a system.
    There must be a permanent principle, since the universe is permanent. This is further proved by the immutability of the laws of mathematics. If there is change, then there must be a permanent principle underlying change; for, paradoxically, if there were nothing permanent, there would be nothing to change. Only what has Being can change; non-being has nothing to change, either sporadically nor in a continuous manner.
    Since we are in the realm of speculation, and since Thales of Miletos, who began the quest for a First Principle, and Pythagoras of Samos were contemporaries (6th century B.C.), let us conjure the notion that the paradox of immutability and change, of dissolution and permanence arose from the discovery of mathematics and the awe of its mysteries. Geometry and mathematics are proof of a permanent world. Their laws never change no matter how abstract they appear. We will come back to this thought later, as a bridge between Parmenides and Zeno in Elea of Sicily.
    The quandary of change and permanence lies also at the root of medicine and the physical sciences. Anthropologists and ethnographers may look at change over mere decades or centuries or millennia, evolutionary biologists and geologists over millions of year, physicists over billions of years. For medicine, it is much more pressing. Birth, growth, maturity, illness, aging, death and dissolution are changes which shape the immediate awareness of every individual. Change and permanence can be urgent and vital matters.
    If the rationalism with which the pre-Socratic philosophers approached these questions seems crude, sometimes ludicrous, we will do well to remember that fifteen hundred years later, the Scholastics became mired in the same bog of rationalism. We would also do well to reflect on some of the startling insights that the pre-Socratics hit upon by means of pure intuition, and to observe that Zeno's four paradoxes were profound enough to occupy some notable minds up to the 20th century. Zeno could give us such paradoxes and construct dialectic, the ultimate realist Heraclitus of Ephesus could presage Hegel and the Atomists could hint, however vaguely, at quantum mechanics. We still use Pythagoras' odd and even numbers, squares and cubes of numbers, etc. It seems to me, at least, that we ought not to lightly dismiss the pre-Socratics with their groping in the dark toward knowledge that we can now take for granted. We now have some understanding of the inexorable force of entropy, and the first two laws of thermodynamics, which the Milesians and Eleatics appear to have suspected was out there some place. Imagine what a Thales or a Zeno would have done with our advantage and the tools now at our disposal.

    Democritos
    (early 400s)

  "In truth, we know nothing about anything, but everyone shares the currently prevailing opinion" (Democritos, Fragment 7).

    Democritos was the most remarkable of the Atomists. He was a materialist/empiricist. His striking intuitions account for the different properties of materials by positing differing shapes of the atoms that make up the material. While his corpuscular atoms may bear little resemblance to what is known of atoms today, his insight is startling. We now know that it is the arrangement (rather than the shape or size) of atoms that make elements differ, and that the number of electrons determine the chemistry.

    In a further remarkable insight, Democritos observed that the cohesion of atoms made objects solid while a looser association of atoms formed liquids. Atoms in rapid motion, he said, produced gases.. The "elements," the four fundamental building blocks of reality recognised by the Greeks, all consisted of atoms.

    Democritos had no tools with which to correctly understand atoms, but his intuitive concepts of the nature of things is astonishing. We need not discuss his errors here because it is only with access to the instruments of the 19th and 20th centuries that he could have avoided them.

    Democritos held that the soul (ψυχύ) and reason/intellect/mind (νους) are one and the same thing. This entity belongs to the class of primary and indivisible bodies and has the capacity of motion both because of its minute size and its spherical shape. The most mobile of shapes is the perfect sphere, and it is the shape of reason/intellect and of fire. This soul is the principle of movement, understood here as motion.

    As noted, the Atomist were convinced of the movement of atoms and of matter. Democritos proposed that ether fills all of space, making space a plenum. He believed that it was the ether that carried the heavenly bodies in their circuits. If this seems primitive, we should remember that Descartes in his own time would suggest that heavenly bodies move because they somehow contact each other and created movement by their contact. We should also recall that, in the 1800's, when Maxwell's theory of light as an electromagnetic wave was proved, the idea of the ether was reborn since it was thought that the wave must move through some substance. Moreover, it was felt, this motion could not be measured except relative to something substantial. This newer concept of ether persisted until Einstein's theory of relativity finally dispelled it in 1905. Nevertheless, the theory of "dark matter" and "dark energy" is still reminiscent of Anaxagoras' and the Atomists' theory of ether.

    AN EPILOGUE
    TO THE PRE-SOCRATIC PERIOD

    The student of the pre-Socratics will undoubtedly have noticed the pre-occupation with the perfection of the spherical shape. The same will be true with Aristotle, who passed the idea on to the Scholastics and into Latin cosmology and theology. We will have occasion to focus on this fact later, when we reach the era of the Scholastics. In all likelihood, this idea either arose from or was promoted by the Pythagoreans.
    The Atomists, like the Sophists were more empiricists than rationalists. The Eleatics, indeed, wore themselves out attempting to rationalise all experience, and that is perhaps, what exhausted the school. The Atomists rejected the peculiar ontologism of the Pythagoreans and the Eleatics. They defended the Milesian (Ionian) notion of the indestructibility of matter, which the Eleatics also held, in their own way. Unlike the Eleatics, the Atomists accepted the empirical aspect of knowledge. Atomic theory was quite materialistic. The atoms were unchanging material elements, consistent with the view of Parmenides, but they combined this idea with the doctrine of local motion, consistent with the assertions of Heraclitos. This motion, they believed, accounted for change.
    The Atomists understood matter to be the only reality, and this reality is manifested in the three modes or accidents (understood as a mode which is not relevant to the definition of the thing) of matter — form, order and position. These modes are determined, they said, by motion.
    We are not discussing the contributions of the pre-Socratics to the understanding of mathematics, as that would be the subject of a different study. We will not leave it unmentioned, however, because it indicates both the impressiveness of their intuition and the significance of their contribution (which is too often dismissed). As an example, we know from Archimedes that Democritos recognised that the volume of any pyramid is one-third that of a prism having the same base and height, and that the volume of any cone is one-third that of any cylinder having the same base and height. Democritos also moved away from mathematical ontologism and toward logical formalism.
    The influence of the pre-Socratics did not vanish. Aside from the example given above, we might recall that, in the early 1600's Pierre Gassendi, the Epicurean philosopher, would reexamine the atomist theories. He advocated them, not in any metaphysical sense, but in a more scientific sense. In turn, John Locke would be influenced by Gassendi's representation of the ancient atomist's concepts. Locke, who was essentially and empiricist with a primary interest in the epistemology, in the theory of knowledge, had the idea of molecules made up of atoms. He believed that atomist theory was useful in the understanding of the construction of ideas and knowledge. We could cite far too many other example to continue with.

    Reason has its limits. The history of Western Philosophy repeats itself because of those limitations. Metaphysics deals with being (permanence) and becoming (change). The treatment of these principles is found everywhere in the Hellenic or pre-Socratic period, while Plato and Aristotle become the point of departure for all those examining metaphysics thereafter. Alfred North Whiteheads says that all philosophy after Plato and Aristotle is but a set of footnotes to them. The "universals controversy" in the Latin Middle Ages (the Scholastic era) has its roots in their philosophies. The realists are a kind of Platonists and nominalism is a variety of Aristotelianism (or, perhaps materialism). Aquinas tried to mediate the extremes. The same problems that vexed the ancient and medieval periods are repeated in modernity. We cannot escape the limitations of reason by any means other than faith, however, the medieval Scholastics would attempt to rationalise faith, and in that manner, transfer the natural limitations of reason to faith.

    Another unfortunate development in Scholasticism is the application of the principle of Being to God. We read in some catechisms that God is the "supreme Being." From an Orthodox Christian point of view that is a clearly heretical statement. The Scholastics would propose that as everting has "being", God is the Supreme Being; He has being, but is the "highest being." Orthodoxy would proclaim that God is hyperousios — beyond being.

    The Scholastic concept of God as "supreme being" would certainly refer back to criteria and concepts established by the Eleatics. It is a logical development ofthe effort to define a First Principle in the context of being/becoming.