EP 54: The Faith of the Ancients, pt. 1
Today we are led to believe that the fight between religion and science is something new. We are told that it is a radically new idea that the earth originated through spontaneous causes. And we are taught that ancient people only believed in God because they couldn't explain natural phenomenon. NOTHING could be further from the truth! These ideas were prevalent in many civilizations, including Ancient Greece. The Greeks not only believed in a God that revealed truths to mankind and an afterlife where we would be held accountable to Him for our choices, they understood the need for worship and holy places to make us more virtuous and pure. This two-part podcast series first introduces you to the key words and ideas that clarify these religious debates, then it takes you into ancient writings to explore them and see how the religious debates we see around us are nothing new--they are actually very old. Listener's Guide: Use the time stamps below to skip to any part of the podcast. 2:42 Mantic defined 5:35 Sophic defined 9:05 "Harmonizing" them 14:47 Civilizations "created by God" 17:05 Mysteries of Eleusis 19:55 Musaeus 24:40 Religion was institutionalized 25:45 Creation as an act of God Quotes from this episode: All quotes from “Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, Sophistic” by Stephen D Ricks, Donald W. Parry and Hugh Nibley found in The Ancient State: The Rulers and the Ruled MANTIC “The Greek word Mantic simply means prophetic or inspired, oracular, coming from the other world and not from the resources of the human mind.” “‘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.” “It supplies the element of hope in our lives by assuring us of the reality of things beyond.” “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.” “None is more insistent on the need for revelation than Plato. Plato was the greatest champion of the Mantic.” *Revelation, supernatural, duality, what’s to come SOPHIC “The Sophic, on the other hand, is the tradition which boasted its cool, critical, objective, naturalistic and scientific attitude; its Jewish equivalent is called ‘horizontal’ Judaism—scholarly, bookish, halachic, intellectual, rabbinical. All religions seem to make some distinction.” “On the other hand, the Sophic society unitedly rejects the Mantic proposition, and it too forms a single community.” *Reason, materialism, here and now, naturalistic SOPHISTIC “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.” “HARMONIZING” SOPHIC AND MANTIC “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.” “It is when one seeks to combine or reconcile the Sophic and the Mantic that trouble begins.” MANTIC IN HISTORY “Each great civilization thought of itself as having been carefully planned in the beginning, all its rites and patterns handed down from above, a complete, perfect structure, planned in detail from the beginning as the faithful reflection of a heavenly prototype present in sacred books of great antiquity.
