“In the beginning, heaven and earth… were brought forth by the Spirit from within itself.”
-Virgil, Aeneid VI. 724-6
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus lived around 500 BC, at Ephesus in Asia Minor; he is known as ho skoteinos, ‘the obscure’, because his writing was thought to be difficult, both in its prose and in the ideas it expressed.
I first heard about him while reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair – one of the books that Scottish schoolboys are given in English class, in between the Dickens and the Shakespeare. In this, the passing of the old peasant society in the early twentieth century is presented as an expression of Heraclitus’ philosophy, panta rhei, or “everything changes”.
The reality is rather more complicated: the real mainspring of A Scots Quair is the unresolved, unacknowledged tension between the author’s traditional rural childhood and the urban social reformer he’d become as an adult. Like Of Mice And Men in America, A Scots Quair is deliberate socialist propaganda, every fictionalized detail worked for ideological value – and rather than its real literary merit, the pervasive political subtext is probably what earned its place it on the school curriculum (as opposed to, say, Old Mortality or A Prince of the Captivity).
More importantly, “everything changes” isn’t a reliable quotation from Heraclitus – it first appears as Plato’s summary of his views a century later; the idea of him as “the weeping philosopher”, depressed by the permanence of change, is also a later image, perhaps a product of Plato’s pupil Theophrastus.
From the surviving fragments of his writing, it seems that Heraclitus did something unexpected with the fact of change: he used it as a means to infer an underlying principle causing change, which he called the logos. This logos, innate in all things, must thus be infinite and universal; if everything changes, the logos is eternal.
This use of seeming paradox is another thing that Heraclitus thought was important: “how a contrast agrees with itself, unified through divergence, like the bow and the lyre”.
Commentators generally explain “unified through divergence” as something to do with the physical construction of bows and lyres – the joining of materials that bend in opposite directions to produce a flexible S-curve, or the tension between the curved body and the straight string that holds it together, or the sound and motion produced when the string is plucked.
They’re right – all three aspects are probably implied by the one tight phrase – but there’s more to it than that.
The bow and the lyre are the emblems of Apollo, paired symbols of war and peace: the innate, contrasted relationship between them is exactly the sort of thing that Heraclitus was describing: there are intimations here of holiness and moral truth, and a sense that this sort of combination is inherrently beautiful.
This was recognized by the artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who adopted the bow and the lyre as the flag of Little Sparta, his demi-paradise in the Border hills – replacing the bow with the Oerlikon gun, to add another layer of productive contrast, between idyllic nature and hard-edged modern technology. When the light shines through the fabric of the flag, the barrels of the gun on one side become the strings of the lyre on the other.
It seems almost deceptively simple to say that Heraclitus' philosophy was about the eternal logos and all things being “unified through divergence” – in truth, his prose is so complex, and his work survives in such fragments, that it is difficult to draw clear conclusions; even where he seems to be saying something straightforward, he may be implying the reverse in a paradox. As head of the ancient royal dynasty of Ephesus, anecdotes tell that he rejected conventional judgements, resigning the sacred kingship, and playing dice with children in the temple when the citizens came to him for advice.
But even if we don’t understand him, Heraclitus is important: his influence leads beyond Greek philiosophy to Jewish thought, and ultimately to one of the most majestic and mysterious statements ever written, the opening passage of the Gospel according to St John:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word dwelled with God; and God was the Word…”
