andrewcriddle

(with some hesitation I've started a new thread for this rather than putting it in one of the current related ones.)

I have no competence to comment on the subtleties of meaning of KATA so I won't. However I've ben trying to decide whether or not a Middle Platonist is likely to have used SARX and derivatives when speaking about the sub-lunar world.

The first issue is that secular greek philosophers don't seem from my limited investigations to have used SARX much as a technical term in this or any related way. However even if I'm right (and I emphasise the provisional nature of my findings here) I don't think this is in itself an important point.

What Doherty et al IIUC seem to be suggesting is that SARX flesh is being used by Paul as more or less synonymous with SWMA body and that the sub-lunar region is regarded as the region or sphere of embodied souls.

Using SARX as synonymous with SWMA in this way seems IMHO entirely plausible. The question is whether or not a Middle Platonist would have considered the sub-lunar realm as the region of embodied souls. I think that in order to do so he (or she) would have to belief in succesive embodiments, ie that the sould becomes embodied on entering the sub-lunar realm and embodied again on taking a material body.

Now such views were held by some Middle Platonists although they become more important in Neo-Platonism. There is a good discussion of these ideas in Appendix II to Dodds great edition of Proclus' 'Elements of Theology' pps 313-321 'The Astral Body in Neoplatonism' . The technical term for this 'soul body' in later writers is OChHMA and the soul acquires this (or acquires this in full rather than rudimentary form) in descending through the lower heavens into the sub-lunar realm.

We find this idea clearly present in Galen, in Gnostic writers such as Basilides, in the Hermetic writings, and in (pseudo)-Plutarch de vita et poesi Homeri.

However we don't seem to find it earlier, despite the attempts by Iamblichus to find support for these ideas in the c 200 BCE astronomer Eratosthenes. Plutarch's idea (found in eg 'On the face in the moon') of the double death of a human' once in the body on earth and once in the soul on the moon, although superficially somewhat similar is dealing with different issues in a different way with a different vocabulary.

Hence although 2nd century Middle Platonism might well regard the lower heavens in general or the sub-lunar realm in particular as the region of embodied souls; it seems much more doubtful whether this type of philosophical language goes back to the 1st century CE.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle

Are you arguing Paul is second century?

andrewcriddle

No I think Paul is 1st century and that according to the flesh in Paul refers to the sphere of human affairs NOT the sub-lunar region.

What I was suggesting is that it would be considerably easier for a 2nd century writer to use SARX in the way Doherty suggests than for a 1st century writer. IE if Paul is (as I believe) 1st century then it is probably unlikely that he is using SARX to refer to the sub-lunar region.

Andrew Criddle

krosero

Andrew, in your findings, is there any indication whether these writers were responding to a popular belief, or introducing their own ideas among the literate elite, or proposing ideas that later became popular among nonliterate masses? Any indications of what religious commoners, like Paul's audience, believed in the first or second centuries?

Thnxx

FreezBee

Try to read this:

http://www.bede.org.uk/price7.htm#According


- FreezBee

andrewcriddle

According to Dodds what these writers are trying to do is reconcile the Stoic idea that the soul daemons Gods are material because all concrete things are material, with the Platonic idea of the genuinely immaterial transcendent soul. This also serves as an answer to the problem of how the immaterial soul can act on material bodies and be acted on by them (answer it has become quasi-embodied itself on entering the lowar heavens).

These ideas plausibly helped link the transcendent soul of the Platonic philosophers with the religion and superstition of the masses, but how far they were explicitly known about by the non-literate of the day is difficult to guess. However we find these ideas in a wide enough range of writings to suggest that, by the end of the 2nd century or early 3rd century, the literate and educated minority in general, and not just people with an education in philosophy, would have known about them.

Andrew Criddle