Pythagoras, the First Theologian

Pythagoras (piTHAgeres) lived from around 582 to 507 and was another Greek from Asia Minor. From there he migrated to Croton, a Greek city in Italy. He believed in the magic of the gods and was influenced by the cult that worshiped the god Dionysus. He believed that the dust one can see floating about in sunlight was pulled about by a spirit. But he was also a philosopher and the first to label himself as a philosopher.

He believed in self-examination. He was interested in astronomy and mathematics and wanted to apply observation and reason toward understanding the universe. "Plumbing the mysteries of nature had always been a religious quest," wrote the historian Eugene Weber, and so it was with Pythagoras. He wished to combine his ideas on religion, astronomy and mathematics into a coherent view that would create a way of life beneficial to others.

Pythagoras founded a religious brotherhood, which followed a life of strict asceticism. They believed in the transmigration of souls: that after death the soul, temporarily in Hades, loses memory of its previous life and then moves (transmigrates) into another human form and is reborn. Believing this, Pythagoras saw the possibility of animals having a human-like soul. Therefore, he saw the eating of animals as possibly cannibalism and an abomination. Pythagoras and his followers became vegetarians. But they forbade the eating of beans, which they thought harmful to the soul.

He and his followers advanced astronomy by examining the movements of celestial bodies. They observed the shadow of the earth on the moon, and they made some calculations and concluded that the earth was a sphere. They also concluded that the earth was one of a group of planets. They blended these observations with Greek religion, concluding that the sun reflected light from a great fire at the center of the universe, which they called the throne of Zeus, around which, they believed, all else revolved.

Pythagoras was over-confident about his ability to know. He did not understand what mathematics was. One can establish rules regarding relationships between numbers, but numbers are abstractions in people's imagination. Numbers have no independent essence. Each number represents an arbitrary unit of measurement. But Pythagoras gave to numbers an essence. He believed that it was mathematics that held the universe together rather than physical forces. And he believed that math's harmony created a kinship between the gods and humankind.

But without understanding the nature of mathematics, he advanced geometry from practical measurements to new geometric theorems. He found harmony in geometry and arithmetic, and in the harmonics of sound he found mathematics -- that the tone of a vibrating string depends upon its length. He concluded that mathematical harmony was a part of the perfection of the heavens.

Like the Sumerians and others, he believed that the heavens moved in cycles and were essentially unchanging, as permanent, he thought, as the realities of mathematics.

Having described mathematics as divine, Pythagoras searched for signs of divinity within numbers. With much theorizing he found what he was looking for. With theological certitude he concluded that the number 1 embodied reason, 2 was female, 3 was male, 5 (2+3) was marriage, and 6 (marriage plus 1) was creation. The number 4 (the first number greater than 1 that can be the square of any two numbers) he concluded contained the divinity of justice.

Not understanding his own capacity for faulty reasoning, he described knowledge through sense perception as faulty compared to his ability to grasp unchanging mathematical principles. If reality was unchanging, the changes that one saw on earth had to be an illusion, and this is what he claimed.

In his later years, according to his followers, Pythagoras searched for the significance of his own brilliance and concluded that he was semi-divine. After his death, some of his followers described him as having been capable of miracles. Some claimed that he was the son of Apollo. But, whatever he was, he had created a school of philosophy that would influence other Greek philosophers, especially Plato, who echoed him as an opponent of the belief in the validity of reason tied to sense perception.

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