(...but if this is ALL you read of the assignment, you are cheating yourself). In the chapter preceding the reading for today, Nibley says this as partial introduction to the series of talks on mantic and sophic:
The theme of these talks is that the Greeks (like the Christian church that later followed in their footsteps), passed from a primoridal "Mantic" order of things to the "Sophic," and lost their original mood of expectation, putting something else in its place. It passed from the Mantic to the Sophic, and thence in its attempts to combine the two, arrived at the Sophistic. The Greeks passed through the same three stages before the Christians did, and it was their particular brand of Sophic and Sophistic that the Church accepted. It is time to define these terms, Sophic and Mantic.
Josephus, citing Manetho, describes an Egyptian king who was obsessed with a yearning to possess the prophetic gifts and enjoy the heavenly visions of his ancestors as a
sophos kai mantikos aner—" a Sophic and a Mantic man";
12 and Theophrastus observes this significant dualism when he points out that the Egyptians are the most rational people alive (
logiotaton genos), inheriting and inhabiting the most religious of environments (
hierotaten . . . choran).
13 These are the two basic human attitudes, the rational and the religious. It was the age-old struggle between hardheaded realism and holy tradition that produced the bedizzening subtleties and endless elaborations of Egyptian theology from Heliopolis and Thebes to Alexandria. And it was at that last and latest center of holy thought—a city built, literally, with funds contributed in hot competition by rival priestly schools and factions
14—that the basic theological concepts of the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem doctors with all their sublime, incomprehensible, and insoluble contradictions took their life.
Dio Chrysostom, in his
Discourse on the Knowledge of God, describes his own skill and training—the degenerate education of his own day—as being "neither mantic, nor sophistic, nor even rhetorical"
15—(those being the three natural levels of education). The Greek word
Mantic simply means prophetic or inspired, oracular, coming from the other world and
not from the resources of the human mind. Instead of Dio's
Sophistic to describe the operations of the unaided human mind, we use the much rarer
Sophic here, because, as is well known, in time Sophistic came to be identical with Rhetorical, that is, a pseudothought form which merely imitated the other two in an attempt to impress the public. The Mantic is the equivalent of what Professor Goodenough designates as "vertical" Judaism, i.e., the belief in the real and present operation of divine gifts by which one receives constant guidance from the other world, a faith expressed in varying degrees among such ancient sectaries as the Hasidim, Karaites, Kabbalists, and the people of Qumran.
16 The Mantic accepts the other world, or better, other worlds, as part of our whole experience without which any true understanding of this life is out of the question. "It is the Mantic," says Synesius, "which supplies the element of
hope in our lives by assuring us of the reality of things beyond."
17 Mantic, hope, and reality are the key words. What is expected is not as important as the act of expectation, and so those who share the Mantic conviction are a community of believers, regardless of what it is they expect.
The Sophic, on the other hand, is the tradition which boasted its cool, critical, objective, naturalistic, and scientific attitude; its Jewish equivalent is what Goodenough calls the "horizontal" Judaism—scholarly, bookish, halachic, intellectual, rabbinical. All religions, as Goodenough observes, seem to make some such distinction.
18It is when one seeks to combine or reconcile the Sophic and the Mantic that trouble begins.
"True reason," according to Empedocles, "is either divine or human; the former is not for discussion, the latter
is discussion";
19 and recently Charles Kahn has argued that Empedocles himself is two distinct thinkers, a Sophic and a Mantic, "a split personality whose two sections are not united by any essential link."
20 Since Empedocles' career is a unique and impressive attempt to combine Sophic and Mantic, his case illustrates the important fact that the two are totally incompatible. Whoever accepts the Sophic attitude must abandon the Mantic, and vice versa. It is the famous doctrine of Two Ways found among the Orientals, Greeks, and early Christians—if you try to compromise between them you get nowhere, because as one of the Apostolic Fathers points out, they lead in opposite directions. Those who share the Mantic hope of things beyond, whatever those things may be, are in a very real sense a community of believers, just as Christians, Jews, and Moslems form a fellowship of "the People of the Book," because of their belief in inspired books—even though they may not agree as to which books are the inspired ones.
21 On the other hand, the Sophic society unitedly rejects the Mantic proposition, and it too forms a single community, as is strikingly and amusingly demonstrated in a 1954 study of Professor Enslin, who, while branding the teachings of Clement of Alexandria as "rubbish, . . . pathetic nonsense, . . . triple-A nonsense,"
22 at the same time hails Clement as a true gentlemen and a scholar after his own heart, because, even though his method produces nothing but balderdash, it is at least not contaminated by any supernaturalism—here was "a man who prized brain and insight, who preferred the voice of reasoned conviction to the braying of Balaam's ass."
23 Better false teaching from a true intellectual than the truth from a prophet. So fiercely loyal and uncompromising are the Sophic and Mantic to their own.
