The Secret Teachings of All Ages · 234 of 236

Conclusion

Conclusion PHILIP, King of Macedon, ambitious to obtain the teacher who would be most capable of imparting the higher branches of learning to his fourteen-year-old son, Alexander, and wishing the prince to have for his mentor the most famous and learned of the great philosophers, decided to communicate with Aristotle. He dispatched the following letter to the Greek sage: "PHILIP TO ARISTOTLE, HEALTH: Know that I have a son. I render the gods many thanks; not so much for his birth, as that he was born in your time, for I hope that being educated and instructed by you, he will become worthy of us both and the kingdom which he shall inherit." Accepting Philip's invitation, Aristotle journeyed to Macedon in the fourth year of the 108th Olympiad, and remained for eight years as the tutor of Alexander. The young prince's affection for his instructor became as great as that which he felt for his father. He said that his father had given him being, but that Aristotle had given him well-being.

The basic principles of the Ancient Wisdom were imparted to Alexander the Great by Aristotle, and at the philosopher's feet the Macedonian youth came to realize the transcendency of Greek learning as it was personified in Plato's immortal disciple. Elevated by his illumined teacher to the threshold of the philosophic sphere, he beheld the world of the sages--the world that fate and the limitations of his own soul decreed he should not conquer.

Aristotle in his leisure hours edited and annotated the Iliad of Horner and presented the finished volume to Alexander. This book the young conqueror so highly prized that he carried it with him on all his campaigns. At the time of his triumph over Darius, discovering among the spoils a magnificent, gem-studded casket of unguents, he dumped its contents upon the ground, declaring that at last he had found a case worthy of Aristotle's edition of the Iliad!

While on his Asiatic campaign, Alexander learned that Aristotle had published one of his most prized discourses, an occurrence which deeply grieved the young king. So to Aristotle, Conqueror of the Unknown, Alexander, Conqueror of the Known, sent this reproachful and pathetic and admission of the insufficiency of worldly pomp and power: "ALEXANDER TO ARISTOTLE, HEALTH: You were wrong in publishing those branches of science hitherto not to be acquired except from oral instruction. In what shall I excel others if the more profound knowledge I gained from you be communicated to all? For my part I had rather surpass the majority of mankind in the sublimer branches of learning, than in extent of power and dominion. Farewell." The receipt of this amazing letter caused no ripple in the placid life of Aristotle, who replied that although the discourse had been communicated to the multitudes, none who had not heard him deliver the lecture (who lacked spiritual comprehension) could understand its true import.

A few short years and Alexander the Great went the way of all flesh, and with his body crumbled the structure of empire erected upon his personality. One year later Aristotle also passed into that greater world concerning whose mysteries he had so often discoursed with his disciples in the Lyceum. But, as Aristotle excelled Alexander in life, so he excelled him in death; for though his body moldered in an obscure tomb, the great philosopher continued to live in his intellectual achievements. Age after age paid him grateful tribute, generation after generation pondered over his theorems until by the sheer transcendency of his rational faculties Aristotle--"the master of those who know," as Dante has called him--became the actual conqueror of the very world which Alexander had sought to subdue with the sword.

Insight

Hall's framing — that Aristotle conquered the world Alexander could not, by enlisting reason rather than overpowering bodies — is one of the great recurring themes of philosophical literature, from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations through Boethius's Consolation through Petrarch's Secretum. It is also the perennialist's standard read on history: empires rise and fall in centuries, but Plato's Republic is still being read 2,400 years later in every literate culture on earth. The deeper point Hall is closing on, and that the closing chapters return to repeatedly, is that the philosophic life — what Pierre Hadot called Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) — is the only form of human achievement that compounds across generations rather than dispersing. The other achievements (territory, dynasty, fortune) all have to be rebuilt every century. Reason transmits.Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995)

Thus it is demonstrated that to capture a man it is not sufficient to enslave his body--it is necessary to enlist his reason; that to free a man it is not enough to strike the shackles from his limbs--his mind must be liberated from bondage to his own ignorance. Physical conquest must ever fail, for, generating hatred and dissension, it spurs the mind to the avenging of an outraged body; but all men are bound whether willingly or unwillingly to obey that intellect in which they recognize qualities and virtues superior to their own.

That the philosophic culture of ancient Greece, Egypt, and India excelled that of the modern, world must be admitted by all, even by the most confirmed of modernists. The golden era of Greek æsthetics, intellectualism, and ethics has never since been equaled. The true philosopher belongs to the most noble order of men: the nation or race which is blessed by possession of illumined thinkers is fortunate indeed, and its name shall be remembered for their sake. In the famous Pythagorean school at Crotona, philosophy was regarded as indispensable to the life of man. He who did not comprehend the dignity of the reasoning power could not properly be said to live. Therefore, when through innate perverseness a member either voluntarily withdrew or was forcibly ejected from the philosophic fraternity, a headstone was set up for him in the community graveyard; for he who had forsaken intellectual and ethical pursuits to reenter the material sphere with its illusions of sense and false ambition was regarded as one dead to the sphere of Reality. The life represented by the thraldom of the senses the Pythagoreans conceived to be spiritual death, while they regarded death to the sense-world as spiritual life.

Insight

The Pythagorean rule Hall mentions — that a member who left or was expelled from the brotherhood was treated as dead, and a stone tomb was set up bearing his name — is reported in Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras 73 and Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras 17. Whatever its historical accuracy, it captures the Pythagorean conviction that the philosophic life was the actual life and that everything outside it was a kind of death. The same intuition runs through the contemplative literature east and west: Plato's allegory of the cave (Republic VII), the Bhagavad Gita's distinction between the eternal and the perishable (II.12-30), Eckhart's distinction between the inner and outer man, the Sufi distinction between the soul of the lower self (nafs) and the soul of the heart (qalb). The philosophic life is consistently figured as the awakening from a sleep that the unawakened mistake for waking.Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 73

Philosophy bestows life in that it reveals the dignity and purpose of living. Materiality bestows death in that it benumbs or clouds those faculties of the human soul which should be responsive to the enlivening impulses of creative thought and ennobling virtue. How inferior to these standards of remote days are the laws by which men live in the twentieth century! Today man, a sublime creature with infinite capacity for self-improvement, in an effort to be true to false standards, turns from his birthright of understanding--without realizing the consequences--and plunges into the maelstrom of material illusion. The precious span of his earthly years he devotes to the pathetically futile effort to establish himself as an enduring power in a realm of unenduring things. Gradually the memory of his life as a spiritual being vanishes from his objective mind and he focuses all his partly awakened faculties upon