Jananz
26th March 2010, 08:05 PM
MANTIS: relating to, or having the power of divination; prophetic. From Greek mantikos, from mantis (prophet), from mainesthai (to rage). Ultimately from Indo-European root men- (to think) that is also the source of words such as mind, mental, mention, Sanskrit mantra, automatic, mania, money, praying mantis, monument, music, and amnesia.
Excerpts from:
Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic*
http://farmsnewsite.farmsresearch.com/p ... chapid=955 (http://farmsnewsite.farmsresearch.com/publications/books/?bookid=76&chapid=955)
The Greek word Mantic simply means prophetic or inspired, oracular, coming from the other world and not from the resources of the human mind. 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.
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 Sophic or “wisdom†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.18 It is when one seeks to combine or reconcile the Sophic and the Mantic that trouble begins.
The "hierocentric" concept that all good things have been conveyed to mankind from above through divinely appointed operations of holy shrines and persons is immensely appealing, even in the abstract. But transcending all theory is the fact, obvious enough to the ancients if not to us, that all the basic institutions of civilization—political, economic, artistic, literary, military, and scientific—did take their rise at the Temple.
Over against this, the Sophic presented a theory of the evolution of man from his primitive beginnings, following "natural laws," a theory which armies of dedicated researchers have failed to make even momentarily watertight to this day; not that it might not be true, but if the old forgotten doctrine of the divine plan, conveyed to men in a primordial revelation and since confirmed from time to time by heavenly messengers, were to be given equal time or even one percent of equal time, the opposition would be hard-pressed indeed.
It was the Greeks who decided to go to the root of the baffling problem of who has a right to govern his fellows: that question became the theme of much of their most enthusiastic discussion and profound research in even more significant phenomena than the tyrants in the appearance of the so-called Seven Wise Men. "The sixth century, the most critical period in the mental development of the Greeks, came to be known afterwards as the age of Seven Sages."87 These were the original Sophoi, from whom we have taken our word Sophic. To the ancient mind the apex of human success, the highest prize to which any man could attain, was to be a Sophos, one of those heroes of the mind, typified by the Seven Sages, who, after giving wise laws and examples to their own cities, wandered free of earthly passions and attachments through the universe, selfless and aloof, as spectators of God's works, seeking only knowledge and carrying with them the healing blessing of true wisdom, especially of statesmanship, for all who sought or needed it. Hailed by adoring multitudes—who often saw the aura of divinity around them—humbly petitioned by great cities and magnificent potentates, these incorruptible wise men represented the pinnacle of real human attainment. They represent indeed the peak of human excellence, but for all that they are purely human—that is their significance.
Like the tyrants, the Sophoi represent a sort of experimental phase; they were an attempt at compromise between the Mantic and Sophic on the principle that a very high order of human wisdom has something divine about it, making the true Sophos the equivalent of an inspired leader. But the Sophoi had no successors—only imitators, the notorious Sophists, a very different order of men. What set the Sophoi apart from their fellows was not a peculiar type of wisdom but simply a higher degree of intelligence—they had an extra large amount of what everybody has more or less of, but that was all. They lay no claim to Mantic powers—Pythagoras himself, the most "Mantic" wise man of his time, was charged with quackery for trying to preempt the glory of a prophet instead of being satisfied to shine as a thinker. For all the veneration they received from a world yearning for guidance and starved for the comfort of the Mantic order, the Seven Wise Men represent a true Sophic revolution, a deliberate renunciation of the Mantic. By their own confession their complete humanity is their glory and their tragedy.
We know that the great men who like Sophocles took the side of the Mantic in his showdown were very much in the minority, and that the Sophists, the self-appointed successors of the Sophoi, won the game hands down—Longinus and Tacitus state the case clearly enough. It was not the Sophoi who raised a victorious banner in all the cities of the ancient world, but their diligent imitators the Sophists. Both, however, were able to capitalize on the Mantic image.
But, having displaced the prophets, the Doctors naturally aspired to their honors, supplanting not only the inspired men in the popular esteem but God himself! If everything happens "without any guiding mind," which, according to Plato, "everybody believes today," then the human mind must be the only mind we can believe in—and who can doubt among human minds which are the greatest? The unabashed self-glorification and sublime conceit of the schoolmen becomes one of the main themes of ancient and medieval literature. A favorite maxim of the Doctors was that the knower is greater than the known, and where they are the knowers and all the rest of the universe is the known, or at least the object of their contemplation, where does that leave us?
As successors to the seers of old, the schoolmen willingly received and encouraged the veneration once accorded divinity; the critic henceforward is himself the Great Sublime he draws. Plato chooses as the representative type of the most vicious and dangerous order of Sophists the clever and charming Gorgias—utterly cynical and opportunistic. And this Gorgias merchandised his wares by addressing the holy national assembly of all the Greeks at Olympia clothed in priestly robes, cleverly imitating the solemn and ringing measures of oracular utterance in the new rhetorical style of which he was one of the inventors; his golden statue stood in the Temple of Delphi, where during the holy season he had "thundered his Pythian speech from the altar."
Excerpts from:
Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic*
http://farmsnewsite.farmsresearch.com/p ... chapid=955 (http://farmsnewsite.farmsresearch.com/publications/books/?bookid=76&chapid=955)
The Greek word Mantic simply means prophetic or inspired, oracular, coming from the other world and not from the resources of the human mind. 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.
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 Sophic or “wisdom†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.18 It is when one seeks to combine or reconcile the Sophic and the Mantic that trouble begins.
The "hierocentric" concept that all good things have been conveyed to mankind from above through divinely appointed operations of holy shrines and persons is immensely appealing, even in the abstract. But transcending all theory is the fact, obvious enough to the ancients if not to us, that all the basic institutions of civilization—political, economic, artistic, literary, military, and scientific—did take their rise at the Temple.
Over against this, the Sophic presented a theory of the evolution of man from his primitive beginnings, following "natural laws," a theory which armies of dedicated researchers have failed to make even momentarily watertight to this day; not that it might not be true, but if the old forgotten doctrine of the divine plan, conveyed to men in a primordial revelation and since confirmed from time to time by heavenly messengers, were to be given equal time or even one percent of equal time, the opposition would be hard-pressed indeed.
It was the Greeks who decided to go to the root of the baffling problem of who has a right to govern his fellows: that question became the theme of much of their most enthusiastic discussion and profound research in even more significant phenomena than the tyrants in the appearance of the so-called Seven Wise Men. "The sixth century, the most critical period in the mental development of the Greeks, came to be known afterwards as the age of Seven Sages."87 These were the original Sophoi, from whom we have taken our word Sophic. To the ancient mind the apex of human success, the highest prize to which any man could attain, was to be a Sophos, one of those heroes of the mind, typified by the Seven Sages, who, after giving wise laws and examples to their own cities, wandered free of earthly passions and attachments through the universe, selfless and aloof, as spectators of God's works, seeking only knowledge and carrying with them the healing blessing of true wisdom, especially of statesmanship, for all who sought or needed it. Hailed by adoring multitudes—who often saw the aura of divinity around them—humbly petitioned by great cities and magnificent potentates, these incorruptible wise men represented the pinnacle of real human attainment. They represent indeed the peak of human excellence, but for all that they are purely human—that is their significance.
Like the tyrants, the Sophoi represent a sort of experimental phase; they were an attempt at compromise between the Mantic and Sophic on the principle that a very high order of human wisdom has something divine about it, making the true Sophos the equivalent of an inspired leader. But the Sophoi had no successors—only imitators, the notorious Sophists, a very different order of men. What set the Sophoi apart from their fellows was not a peculiar type of wisdom but simply a higher degree of intelligence—they had an extra large amount of what everybody has more or less of, but that was all. They lay no claim to Mantic powers—Pythagoras himself, the most "Mantic" wise man of his time, was charged with quackery for trying to preempt the glory of a prophet instead of being satisfied to shine as a thinker. For all the veneration they received from a world yearning for guidance and starved for the comfort of the Mantic order, the Seven Wise Men represent a true Sophic revolution, a deliberate renunciation of the Mantic. By their own confession their complete humanity is their glory and their tragedy.
We know that the great men who like Sophocles took the side of the Mantic in his showdown were very much in the minority, and that the Sophists, the self-appointed successors of the Sophoi, won the game hands down—Longinus and Tacitus state the case clearly enough. It was not the Sophoi who raised a victorious banner in all the cities of the ancient world, but their diligent imitators the Sophists. Both, however, were able to capitalize on the Mantic image.
But, having displaced the prophets, the Doctors naturally aspired to their honors, supplanting not only the inspired men in the popular esteem but God himself! If everything happens "without any guiding mind," which, according to Plato, "everybody believes today," then the human mind must be the only mind we can believe in—and who can doubt among human minds which are the greatest? The unabashed self-glorification and sublime conceit of the schoolmen becomes one of the main themes of ancient and medieval literature. A favorite maxim of the Doctors was that the knower is greater than the known, and where they are the knowers and all the rest of the universe is the known, or at least the object of their contemplation, where does that leave us?
As successors to the seers of old, the schoolmen willingly received and encouraged the veneration once accorded divinity; the critic henceforward is himself the Great Sublime he draws. Plato chooses as the representative type of the most vicious and dangerous order of Sophists the clever and charming Gorgias—utterly cynical and opportunistic. And this Gorgias merchandised his wares by addressing the holy national assembly of all the Greeks at Olympia clothed in priestly robes, cleverly imitating the solemn and ringing measures of oracular utterance in the new rhetorical style of which he was one of the inventors; his golden statue stood in the Temple of Delphi, where during the holy season he had "thundered his Pythian speech from the altar."