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APRIL, 1967
hand, who were interested in scientific studies and there were the more conservative members of the school, on the other, who concentrated on the moral or religious precepts and were therefore called akousmatikoi. The Pythagoreans as a philosophical school disappeared about the middle of the 4th century B.C.
Pythagoras was eminent in the field of mathematics and astronomy wherein his interest was both scientific and mystical. He discovered the mathematical bases of music and music constituted an integral part of spiritual training of his disciples. It was Pythagoras again who coined the word philosophia. He taught the divine origin of the human soul, the notion of immortality of the soul, a pervading harmony of the spheres, the transmigration of the soul and the kinship of men and beasts. "Do not hurt him," he once said to a man who was beating a puppy, "it is the soul of a friend of mine. I recognised it when I heard it cry out." We have it on the authority of Sextus Empiricus that "these philosophers (i.e., the Pythagoreans) appealed to men to spare creatures having a living soul; they said, it is an evil act when men 'stain the altars of the Divine with warm blood'. But if a man led a pure life, they taught, his soul might be released from all flesh. Pure life consisted in obeying precepts. By one such precept, the Pythagoreans avoided conversation in the morning until they had prepared the mind and attained some sort of inner serenity. For this purpose, they took long walks in solitude, to temples or groves or other sacred places. As an alternative, they listened to music specially composed for the purpose. More strictly moral were the three questions which had to be put to oneself every evening, viz., (1) In what have I failed? (2) What good have I done? (3) What have I not done that I ought to have done ?
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Quoted below is a brief passage from a biography of Pythagoras written by an unknown author but preserved by Photius :
"Man gains improvement in three ways. First, he conversed with God--and to approach Him he must have stamped all evil out of the self, he must have followed the course of imitating the divine, he must even have identified himself with God. Second, he lives a life of good deeds, for all goodness binds one to divinity. Third, he will be finally improved in dying; for if by discipline of the body he has been able to lift the soul away toward God in life, how much more certain and rapturous will be the cleaving to God when the soul leaves the body altogether at death ! "
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