Neoplatonic Virtue: Ancestral Fault and the Inspired Poet

Neoplatonic Virtue: Ancestral Fault and the Inspired Poet

We move fully into Hermias of Alexandria’s word-by-word commentary on the Phaedrus, working through the passage on divine madness from 244a to 245a.

The session opens with a puzzle: the prophetesses at Dodona and Delphi led apparently ordinary lives — not particularly holy, not particularly philosophical — yet were vessels for divine inspiration. Hermias’ answer appeals to previous lives: the gods, who know the full arc of a soul’s history across incarnations, assign this honor on the basis of merits accumulated in lives we cannot see. This leads into a digression on the Sibyls and the phenomenon of souls who repeatedly choose the same name and vocation across incarnations — Hermes Trismegistus (born three times in Egypt), the three Orpheuses, the many Sibyls — suggesting a class of souls so strongly aligned with a divine function that they return to it across lives.

We then work through Hermias’ formal analysis of Socrates’ three arguments that mantic madness is a genuine good: from its essence (it is bestowed by the gods, who give only the greatest goods), from its activity (its track record of benefiting Greece), and from its name (the original name-givers called the art manic, weaving madness into it — later, timid generations added a tau and made it mantic, hiding the divine gift). The etymology of oiōnistikhē (technical divination from birds, entrails, and omens, built from thought + intellect + observation) confirms the distinction: the two different names for inspired and technical divination show they are genuinely different in kind.

The heart of the session is a long discussion of telestic madness and the justice of ancestral guilt. Hermias offers four arguments for why descendants may legitimately bear the consequences of their ancestors’ sins: they have inherited stolen estates; the ancestors suffer through their descendants; providence places deserving transmigrant souls into cursed families; and — the most philosophically rich — the family across generations is a single living organism, whose chronic ancestral sin is like a disease that the divine physician waits to cure at the right moment. We discuss what the purification ritual actually accomplishes: not just ceremony, but a change of identity — a disidentification from the particular self toward the universal. Two concrete mythological examples follow: the man who felled a nymph’s oak tree and was hounded by furies until a priest prescribed the remedial rite, and the matricide told by the oracle to seek “land other than what exists” — a river island, liminal between land and sea.

We close with the beginning of Hermias’ commentary on Muse-engendered madness: his defense of Homer against the Republic’s ban (inspired poetry is entirely different from technically-produced verse; the Republic bans the second, the Phaedrus celebrates the first), the image of inspired poets “kicking in the gates of the Muses” versus technical poets who only reach the gate, and the structural question of why Plato gives no “technical telestic” to contrast with inspired telestic — answered by Hermias with the principle that imitative causes bear likeness to genuine causes, so that even the tables of occult correspondences work only as frozen reflections of the original inspiration that created them.

Transcript