Apollonius of Tyana

The teaching

Taught from Philostratus's Life of Apollonius, with the letters and the fragment On Sacrifices that go under his name.

The way of Pythagoras

Apollonius teaches the life of Pythagoras as a rule to be lived, and the Life gives his reason for each part of it. He eats nothing that has had a soul, because flesh is impure and makes the mind gross. He drinks no wine, because wine troubles the clear air of the mind, even though it comes from a plant. He wears linen and not wool, since wool is shorn from a living creature and linen grows clean out of the earth; he goes barefoot, lets his hair grow, and gives his inheritance away, keeping only what he needs.

The rule is for the sake of seeing. Tried before the emperor, he explains that he knew of the plague at Ephesus before it came because his light diet kept his senses unclouded, so that he saw what was coming as in a bright mirror. His prayer asks for the same plainness: grant me, gods, to have little and to need nothing.

Sacrifice without blood

To the first god, who is one and set apart from everything, nothing at all should be sacrificed, he teaches. No fire is to be lit for him and nothing of the senses offered, not even a word spoken aloud. He is honoured only with the better word, the one that does not pass through the mouth: the silent thought of the mind. The noblest of beings is to be asked for good things by the noblest thing in us, the mind, which needs no organ to reach him.

To the gods below that first one he offers frankincense and prayer, never a slain victim. At Babylon, the Life tells, while the king offered a horse to the Sun, Apollonius asked leave to sacrifice in his own way: he threw a handful of frankincense on the fire and prayed to the Sun to send him as far over the earth as pleased them both, and to let him know good men and never know bad ones, nor they him. A letter under his name puts the teaching shortly: the gods need no sacrifices; what pleases them is wisdom, and doing good to those who deserve it.

So he prays without asking for things. His own prayer, the Life says, was only this: gods, give me what is due to me. The gods know what is just, and a good man needs to ask them for nothing more.

Knowing oneself first

Among the sages of India, whom the Life makes his teachers, he hears the first principle of wisdom: they know all things because they begin by knowing themselves. They teach him that the cosmos is a living creature, male and female in one, made of five elements, the fifth being the aether from which the gods are made. They teach too that the soul has lived before. Their chief, Iarchas, tells Apollonius that in a former life he was the pilot of an Egyptian ship who refused a pirate's bribe to betray it.

Imagination and the images of the gods

On the Nile, faced with naked sages who mocked the Greek statues of the gods, he defends them with a teaching about the mind. The sculptors did not go up to heaven to copy the gods, he says; imagination made those images, and imagination is a wiser craftsman than imitation. Imitation can make only what it has seen. Imagination makes what it has not seen as well, shaping it by reference to what truly is. That is how the image of a god can be true without being the likeness of anything an eye has seen.

Nothing is born and nothing dies

In a letter of consolation to a Roman whose son had died, he teaches that no one dies except in appearance, just as no one is born except in appearance. When being passes into becoming it seems to be birth, and when it passes back from becoming into being it seems to be death; in truth nothing comes to be and nothing perishes. The one substance becomes visible when it thickens into matter and invisible when it thins out again, and it alone acts and suffers in all things. So the father is asked to honour God rather than to mourn.

The Life ends on the same teaching. After his passing, it tells, a young man who doubted that the soul survives saw him in a dream and heard him say that the soul is immortal and belongs not to its owner but to Providence; freed from the worn body, it springs up like a swift horse loosed from the traces and mingles with the light air, glad to leave its hard servitude. Yet the young man is asked what good it does him to know it now, since it is known for certain only by those who are no longer among the living.