Revealing Wisdom: Convention and Mysticism in Parmenides and Plato

Dissertation, Brown University (1993)
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Abstract

This dissertation explores the interplay of mysticism and metaphysics in early Greek philosophy, suggesting that images and language of the Eleusinian mystical experience played an important role in forming the structures and metaphors of Parmenides and Plato. The first chapter places mysticism in the context of Greek sacrificial cult, and discusses Eleusinian mysticism as a mystical cult in contrast to the Orphic and Pythagorean mystical movements. "Mystical" experience is defined as the religious experience of the private initiatory cults any Greek-speaking individual could choose to become a member of, regardless of gender or civil status, in order to improve his or her status after death. Greek mysticism redefined the distance between human and divine as found in the conventional religious expression of sacrifice. ;The second chapter examines the fragments of Parmenides' poem, and interprets the proem and its images as a mythic precursor for the ontology developed in fragment 8. The context of the proem is religious, but Parmenides extends religious theologia so that it includes ontologia. Plato continues this movement from theologia to ontologia in the Symposium . Diotima's birth imagery is considered as a religious statement that makes a claim about mankind, as defined against the gods, similar to the promises made by the Eleusinian cult. With this in mind, the specific language of Eleusinian mysticism found in the Ascent passage is analyzed. The fourth chapter turns to Plato's Phaedrus to discuss how a theory on love, which uses Eleusinian images and language, also challenges conventional notions of the divine. ;The conclusion suggests that since Parmenides and Plato were writing in the context of a culture that had Eleusinian mysticism in the mythic and cultic background, it made sense that they borrowed the images and language of Eleusis to redefine being as that which really was divine. Greek mysticism and philosophy both sought to refigure the relationship between human and divine. Recognition of the religious and mystical background that prefigures the development of these theories reveals a cultural continuity unseen by traditional analyses of early Greek philosophy

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