Justified True Belief

(●) The Ionian who carried philosophy to Athens and said that Mind set the world in order. + Before Anaxagoras, philosophy happened somewhere else. It had started on the Ionian coast of what is now Turkey, at Miletus, and it had a second home among the Greek cities of southern Italy. Athens had poets, playwrights, lawcourts and an empire, and no philosophers at all. Then a rich young man from Clazomenae, a harbour town up the coast from Miletus, gave away his inheritance, moved to Athens, and stayed about thirty years. Socrates was a boy in the city while he taught there. What he brought was one sentence that the West has never quite put down. Every thinker before him had answered the question "what is everything made of" with some kind of stuff: water, air, fire, or the boundless, which was one Milesian’s name for a stuff with no limit and no character of its own. Anaxagoras asked a different question, "why is any of it arranged," and he answered that one with Mind. Aristotle, who thought he had not gone nearly far enough, still said that beside the men before him he seemed like a sober man among people talking at random. Every argument since that reasons from the order of the world back to an ordering intelligence stands somewhere downstream of that book. He wrote one book, and it is lost. It was cheap enough that Socrates could tell an Athenian jury the young could pick it up for a drachma at most, roughly a day’s wage for a skilled workman. What survives of it is about twenty-two quoted scraps, something like a hundred and twenty lines of Greek, kept alive almost entirely because later writers copied sentences out of it in order to argue with him.

(●) c. 500 BC: Born rich at Clazomenae on the Ionian coast, and handed the estate to his relatives. + Clazomenae sat on the gulf of Smyrna, in the stretch of coastline where Greek philosophy had begun a lifetime earlier with Thales of Miletus, a few days’ sail to the south. It had been under Persian rule since Cyrus’ general swept through Ionia around 546 BC, and it would revolt, fail, and be ruled again within Anaxagoras’ lifetime. Diogenes Laertius, who wrote lives of the philosophers some seven centuries later and is the main source for the life, says he was the son of Hegesibulus, or of Eubulus, and that he was "eminent for wealth and noble birth, and furthermore for magnanimity, in that he gave up his patrimony to his relations." Land in Ionia meant standing, votes and obligations; handing it over was a way of resigning from public life before he had begun it. Someone later reproached him for taking no interest in his own country. He answered, "Gently, I am greatly concerned with my fatherland," and pointed at the sky. Every date in this life hangs from two ancient reckonings, and both of them reach us through Diogenes. The first is from Apollodorus, a chronicler of the second century BC, who put the birth in the 70th Olympiad and the death in the first year of the 88th. An Olympiad is the four-year span between one Olympic games and the next, counted from the first games in 776 BC, which is how Greek chroniclers numbered the years when they wanted a scale that held good outside any one city; so the 70th Olympiad runs from 500 to 497 BC, and the first year of the 88th is 428 BC. The second reckoning Diogenes takes from another source, and it says that Anaxagoras was twenty when Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BC and that he lived seventy-two years. Do the arithmetic on that and you land in the same place. Two independent reckonings agreeing is worth something, and it is why the figures are usually trusted. It does not make them a record. The round 500 BC is a reconstruction, and every other date in his life is measured off it.

(●) c. 480 BC: He moved to Athens, a city that had never had a philosopher, and stayed about thirty years. + Demetrius of Phalerum, an Athenian writer of the generation after Aristotle, reported that Anaxagoras began to study philosophy at Athens at the age of twenty, in the archonship of Callias. The archon was the chief magistrate at Athens, and he held office for a single year, so the Greeks dated events by naming him, much the way people still say that something happened the year Kennedy was president. The archonship of Callias would put the move in 480 BC, the year of Xerxes’ invasion. Modern historians are not sure, and it is that name that starts the trouble. The man in office in 480 BC was Calliades, not Callias, and a Callias did hold the office, but in 456 BC. One letter, and a gap of twenty-four years opens under the date. Proposals for the arrival run anywhere from 480 to 456 BC, and the thirty years at Athens that Diogenes reports have to be fitted between two disputed ends. What the sources agree on is that the stay was long, that it covered the years when Athens was building the empire and the Parthenon, and that it ended badly. Athens in those decades was the most exciting city in the Greek world and the least philosophical. Aeschylus was writing tragedies. The citizens met to vote on the Pnyx, the bare hill west of the Acropolis where the assembly gathered in the open air. The fleet was collecting tribute from a hundred islands. What the city did not have was anyone asking what the world is made of, and so wisdom about the nature of things arrived the way everything else arrived at Athens in those years, as an import. Anaxagoras was the importer. The book he brought with him was not a rarity. Two generations later, defending himself in court, Socrates told the jury that the man who said the sun is a stone and the moon earth was Anaxagoras and not him, since "the books of Anaxagoras the Clazomenian are full of such utterances," and that the young could buy them "for a drachma in the orchestra" (Apology 26d to 26e, Fowler’s translation). A drachma was about what a skilled craftsman earned in a day. That is how a book travels: not by being rare, but by being cheap.

(●) c. 467 BC: A stone fell out of the sky at Aegospotami, and he was already teaching that the heavenly bodies are burning stones. + A meteorite came down near the river Aegospotami on the Hellespont, in daylight, and it was large enough that visitors were still being shown it centuries afterward. To the Greeks who saw it fall, a rock arriving from heaven was a portent, a message, something a god had thrown. Anaxagoras had been teaching that it was nothing of the kind. On his account the heavenly bodies are stones, torn loose from the earth and set ablaze by the speed of the whirl that carries them round; the sun, in Diogenes’ summary of his doctrine, is "a mass of red-hot metal and to be larger than the Peloponnesus," and the moon is earth, with hills and ravines on it, and dwellings. Diogenes also passes on a story that he predicted the fall of the stone. It is a story and not a record, and it is the sort of thing that attaches itself to a famous name afterwards; but the doctrine it attached itself to was genuinely his, and it was already in circulation. Take the claim slowly, because everything that happened to him later runs out of it. If the sun is a burning stone, then the sky is made of the same material as the ground under your feet, and the difference between the heavens and the earth is a difference of temperature and distance rather than a difference of kind. That is either the beginning of astronomy or blasphemy against Helios, and the Athenians eventually decided it was both.

(●) c. 450 BC: Pericles kept him close, and Athens nicknamed him Mind. + Pericles ran Athens for thirty years, and Plutarch, writing his life five centuries later, says that the man who shaped him most was "Anaxagoras of Clazomenae; whom the men of those times called by the name of Nous, that is, mind, or intelligence." The nickname is a joke and a compliment at once: he talked about Mind so much that the word stuck to him. Plutarch tells one scene that catches the whole moment, and it starts with a farm animal. A ram was born on Pericles’ land with a single horn growing out of the middle of its forehead, and somebody thought the head worth carrying to the master of the house. Lampon was there, a diviner by trade, one of the men a Greek city paid to read what the gods were saying through oddities like this one, and he read the single horn as a sign that power in Athens, at that moment split between two men, would come to rest with the one on whose land the creature had appeared. Then Anaxagoras took the skull and split it open, and "showed to the bystanders that the brain had not filled up its natural place," having been drawn out long and gathered to a point just where the horn grew. Here is the part a modern reader does not expect: Plutarch says the crowd admired both men, and that in the event both of them turned out to be right. The skull was malformed exactly as Anaxagoras said it was, and power in Athens did in the end come to rest with Pericles alone, exactly as Lampon said it would. A city that could hold a diviner and a naturalist in the same head at the same time was not yet the city that would put one of them on trial. The friendship had a bleaker chapter, which Plutarch reports without telling us when it happened. Pericles was busy with the city, as he always was, and the old man went unvisited long enough to draw his own conclusion from it. Anaxagoras lay down, covered his head, and set about starving himself to death. Word got to Pericles and he came running, appalled, and told him that he was lamenting not the philosopher but himself, if he were to lose such a counsellor. At that the covering came back, and the answer Anaxagoras gave him was as dry as anything in Greek: "even those who have occasion for a lamp supply it with oil."

(●) c. 437–430 BC: Athens tried him for saying the sun was a stone, and the ancient accounts of the verdict disagree. + Plutarch records that a seer named Diopeithes brought in a decree that "public accusations should be laid against persons who neglected religion, or taught new doctrines about things above." The second clause is the point: teaching astronomy was now a prosecutable offence, and everyone knew whose astronomy was meant. Anaxagoras was the friend of the most powerful man in Athens, and hurting him was a way of reaching Pericles. What happened next is genuinely unclear, and Diogenes Laertius, to his credit, sets three incompatible reports side by side rather than quietly picking the one he likes. The charge in all of them is impiety, which at Athens was not a matter of private belief but a public offence: failing to give the city’s gods the honour the city owed them, which was thought to put everyone at risk and not only the offender. Sotion says Cleon prosecuted him for impiety over the sun as red-hot metal, that Pericles spoke for him, and that he was fined five talents and banished. Five talents was thirty thousand drachmas, which is to say thirty thousand days of a skilled man’s wages, a fine no working Athenian could have paid in a lifetime. Satyrus says the prosecutor was Thucydides, a political rival of Pericles, that the charge was treason as well as impiety, and that he was condemned to death in his absence. Hermippus says he was jailed awaiting execution, that Pericles came before the assembly and asked whether anyone had a complaint against his own conduct, that the people said no, and that Anaxagoras was released but killed himself out of the indignity of it. Modern historians place the trial anywhere from about 450 to 430 BC, most often in the years just before the Peloponnesian War, when the attacks on Pericles’ circle came thickest, and a few doubt that it happened at all. Underneath the disagreement two things hold. He left Athens and did not come back, and Plutarch, whatever the legal outcome, says simply that Pericles feared how it might go with him and "sent him out of the city." When word reached him that the Athenians had condemned him, Diogenes reports his reply: "Long ago nature condemned both my judges and myself to death." If it went as the sources report, it is the earliest trial in the West known to have turned on an opinion about the natural world. It happened a generation before another Athenian jury handed Socrates the hemlock, and the charge, impiety, was the same word.

(●) 428 BC: He died at Lampsacus, and the city gave the boys a holiday every year in the month he died. + Lampsacus was a Greek city on the Hellespont, on the strait where Europe and Asia are close enough to see across. Anaxagoras taught there for the last years of his life and gathered a following that outlasted him. Two of the sayings Diogenes collected belong to these years, and both of them are answers he gave when the people around him expected a man to break. Someone near him was distressed that he should die in a foreign country, and got the reply, "The descent to Hades is much the same from whatever place we start." Then news was brought to him that his sons were dead. What he said to that was, "I knew that my children were born to die." A reader is entitled to hear that as coldness. It is at least as likely to be a man holding himself together with the only thing he had, which was the thought that nothing had happened to his sons that was not going to happen. When the magistrates asked whether there was anything he would like done for him, he did not ask for a monument. Diogenes says "he replied that he would like them to grant an annual holiday to the boys in the month in which he died; and the custom is kept up to this day." That last phrase came to Diogenes from an older source, so the holiday outlasted the man who asked for it by centuries at the least. Lampsacus buried him with honours and cut an epitaph over the grave: "Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest / Of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest." He died in 428 BC, at about seventy-two. Plato was born the year after, or thereabouts, and would spend a lifetime working on the question Anaxagoras had opened and, in Plato’s judgment, walked away from.

What He Taught

(T1) Nothing is ever born and nothing ever dies; what looks like birth and death is mixing and separating. + Stir a spoonful of sugar into a cup of tea and the sugar is gone. Nobody thinks it has stopped existing. It has been distributed, and if you boil the cup dry you can get it back. Anaxagoras proposed that all coming into being and all perishing is like that, right down to a person and a tree. He was answering a challenge, and it helps to know whose. Parmenides of Elea, older by about fifteen years, had argued that what is cannot have come from what is not, since there is no "what is not" to come from, and had concluded that change is an illusion and reality is one unchanging thing. That argument was hard to answer and impossible to live with, because the world plainly does change. Anaxagoras took the argument seriously and paid the price it asked. He agreed that nothing new ever comes into existence. Then he said that the Greek habit of speaking about birth and death is simply a loose way of talking about ingredients being brought together and taken apart again. The Greeks had two heavy words for it, genesis, coming into being, and phthora, passing away. He said the honest words are mixture and separation. Christian readers can take a great deal of this and must not take all of it. That the stuff of the world is not created or destroyed by ordinary processes is simply true, and physics has since made it precise. What Anaxagoras does not have is a beginning. His "all things were together" is where his account starts, and the mixture is never made; it is only sorted. Scripture starts one step further back (Genesis 1:1).

(Q) "The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation." + Source: Anaxagoras, fragment 17 in the numbering of Diels (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy). "The Hellenes" is what the Greeks called themselves. The sentence is preserved by Simplicius, a commentator on Aristotle writing in the sixth century AD, who still had a copy of the book in front of him.

(T2) There is a portion of everything in everything, which is how bread becomes hair and flesh. + Here is the puzzle that drove him, and it is a kitchen puzzle. A man eats bread and drinks water, and out of the bread and the water his body makes bone, blood, sinew, fingernail and hair. Where did the hair come from? Bread is not hair. If nothing comes from nothing (T1), the hair cannot have been manufactured out of non-hair. His answer was as bold as the question was simple: it was in the bread all along. Every portion of matter contains some portion of every kind of matter, in quantities far too small to notice. Bread looks like bread because bread-stuff predominates in it, the way a bucket of water with one drop of ink in it still looks like water. Digestion does not create the hair; it separates out the hair that was there. He backed this up with a claim about smallness that took mathematics two thousand years to get comfortable with: there is no smallest piece. "Nor is there a least of what is small, but there is always a smaller; for it cannot be that what is should cease to be by being cut" (fragment 3, Burnet’s translation). Aristotle, cataloguing his predecessors, gave these ingredients a name: homoiomere, "things whose parts are like the whole," meaning stuff like flesh or gold or bone, any piece of which is still flesh or gold or bone. The name has stuck to Anaxagoras ever since, though it is Aristotle’s word and not his.

(Q) "How can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?" + Source: Anaxagoras, fragment 10 in the numbering of Diels (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy). This one comes down by an odd road. It survives in a scholion, a note written in the margin of a manuscript by a later scholar, on the works of Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century bishop the Eastern church calls "the Theologian." A pagan’s question about hair was kept for posterity in the margin of a Christian’s sermons. The words sit inside the scholiast’s own summary of the argument, so some editors take them as a close report rather than a word for word quotation; the doctrine behind them is attested elsewhere and is not in doubt.

(T3) One thing is mixed with nothing else: Mind, which knows all things and started the world turning. + A judge with money in the case has to step down, and nobody takes that for an insult to the judge. It is simply that something in the case now has a hold on him, and a man with something holding him cannot rule freely. That is the exact reason Anaxagoras gives for the one exception in his whole system. Everything contains a portion of everything (T2), with that single exception, and the exception is the whole point of the book. Mind, nous in Greek, the ordinary word for the thinking part of a person, is "alone itself by itself." He does not simply assert the exception, either. Anything mixed into Mind would give the other ingredients their hold on it, and a thing with something else mixed into it cannot govern freely. What Mind did, on his account, was start a rotation. At one small point the mixture began to turn, and the turning did the rest: dense separated from rare, warm from cold, bright from dark, dry from moist, the way a spun bucket throws the heavy things to the rim. The whirl is still spreading, and it will spread further. So the world is not a heap that happened to fall into shape. Something knew what it was doing and set it going. Both of the men who came after him and mattered most complained about the same thing: he found Mind and then hardly used it. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates describes hearing someone read from a book of Anaxagoras "that mind was the disposer and cause of all," and being delighted, because if Mind is the disposer then Mind would dispose everything for the best, and he would at last be told why each thing is as it is. Reading on, he found his philosopher "altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water," and the hope collapsed (Phaedo 97b to 98c, Jowett’s translation). Aristotle made the same charge more bluntly, and he made it with a joke from the theatre. Anaxagoras, he said, "uses reason as a deus ex machina for the making of the world," dragging it in when he is at a loss and putting events down to anything else the rest of the time (Metaphysics 985a, Ross’ translation). A deus ex machina, a god from the machine, is what an Athenian audience saw when a playwright had tangled his plot past untangling and lowered a god onto the stage on a crane to sort it out in the last five minutes. Aristotle is saying that Mind is that crane: wheeled on when the explanation runs out, and ignored the rest of the play. The complaint is fair. It is also a backhanded measure of the size of what he had proposed, since you can only be disappointed by an idea that promised that much. In the same book Aristotle paid him the compliment that has followed him ever since, that beside the men who had gone before him he "seemed like a sober man in contrast with the random talk of his predecessors" (Metaphysics 984b).

(Q) "All other things partake in a portion of everything, while Nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself. ... For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength ... And Nous set in order all things that were to be, and all things that were and are not now and that are, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon, and the air and the aether that are separated off." + Source: Anaxagoras, fragment 12 in the numbering of Diels (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy), abridged at the marked points. The longest surviving stretch of the book, and the passage everything else about him is measured against. Simplicius quotes it in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. The aether at the end of it is the Greek name for the bright upper air, the clear stuff high above the ordinary air a person breathes; Aristotle complains that Anaxagoras used the word for plain fire, the hot dry material the whirl threw to the outside (On the Heavens I.3, 270b). Read the passage slowly and a good deal of the Christian language for God is already sitting in it: infinite, self-ruled, mixed with nothing, knowing everything, strongest of all. Then there is the one word that is not. Mind here is "the thinnest of all things," and thinnest of all things is a place on a list. It puts Mind on the same shelf as the air and the aether, only finer than either.

(T4) The senses are too weak to reach the truth, and what appears is a glimpse of what is hidden. + Add one drop of white paint to a can of black, then another, then another. At no single drop does the can visibly change, and yet somewhere along the line it becomes grey. Your eyes never registered the moment, because your eyes are not fine enough. That is the argument of a man whose whole physics depends on ingredients too small to see (T2), and he was honest enough to draw the consequence: if the portions are that small, then sight and touch are simply not instruments of the right size, and "from the weakness of our senses we are not able to judge the truth." This is not the despairing conclusion it can sound like. He is not saying nothing can be known; he is saying the senses do not settle the matter by themselves and reason has to finish the job. What the eye gives you is a genuine clue to what the eye cannot reach, and the sentence he wrote to say so was admired and repeated for centuries afterwards. Sextus Empiricus, who preserved it, adds that Democritus praised it. Democritus came a generation later and built the whole world out of atoms too small for anyone to see, so he had every reason to want a rule that let reason travel where the eye could not follow. Greek medicine was already working the same way. The doctors in the tradition of Hippocrates of Cos read the signs on the outside of a patient, the colour, the breathing, the sweat, and reasoned from those to the disease going on inside where nobody could look. Christian readers meet the same shape of argument in Paul, reasoning from the visible creation to the invisible God who made it (Romans 1:20), and in the older instruction to lift up your eyes and ask who made these (Isaiah 40:26). Anaxagoras is not saying that. But he is among the first on record in the West to put the principle in a sentence: what you can see is evidence about what you cannot.

(Q) "What appears is a vision of the unseen." + Source: Anaxagoras, fragment 21a in the numbering of Diels (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy). Preserved by Sextus Empiricus, a physician and sceptical philosopher of the second century AD, who collected the opinions of earlier thinkers in order to weigh them against each other. It stands at Against the Logicians I.140, where Sextus adds that Democritus praised the saying. The companion sentence, fragment 21, is the sober half of the same thought: "From the weakness of our senses we are not able to judge the truth."

(Q) "To study sun and moon and heavens." + Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers II.10 (Hicks translation). His answer when he was asked to what end he had been born. It is the whole man in six words, and it is also the reason a jury eventually wanted a word with him.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church fathers put him at the head of the line where mind comes before matter. + Early Christian writers had to explain the Greek philosophers to their readers, usually in order to disagree with them, and in doing so they sorted them. Anaxagoras came out near the top of the sort, and for one reason. Clement of Alexandria, teaching in Egypt around the year 200, ran through the schools in his Exhortation to the Heathen and grouped "Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, and the Athenian Archelaus, both of whom set Mind above Infinity." Hippolytus, a Roman churchman of the same generation, opened his Refutation of All Heresies with a survey of Greek philosophy, and his summary of Anaxagoras has "mind being the efficient cause, whereas matter that which was being formed." The efficient cause is Aristotle’s term, borrowed here, for the one that does the work: of a wooden table the efficient cause is the carpenter, not the timber and not the shape. Hippolytus is saying that in this system Mind is the carpenter and the mixture is the timber. He also preserves the sun as fiery stones and the moon with its plains and ravines, in the course of refuting them, which is how a good deal of Greek philosophy has reached us at all. Two centuries later Augustine, laying out the Ionian school in the City of God, wrote that "Anaxagoras, however, who was his pupil, perceived that a divine mind was the productive cause of all things which we see, and said that all the various kinds of things, according to their several modes and species, were produced out of an infinite matter consisting of homogeneous particles, but by the efficiency of a divine mind." Behind that welcome lies what theologians call general revelation: the knowledge of God available to anyone through the created world and the conscience, as distinct from the special revelation of Scripture. Paul assumes it on the Areopagus in Athens, telling philosophers in that same city nearly five centuries later that God made the world so "that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him" (Acts 17:27). Anaxagoras is what feeling your way looks like when the mind doing it is first-rate. The line he began ran on through Socrates, through the good craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus, through Aristotle’s Mind that moves the heavens, and into every Christian argument that reasons from an ordered world back to the one who ordered it.

(†) Saying the sun was a stone made him a criminal at Athens; Israel had been told as much long before. + The specific sentence that got Anaxagoras prosecuted was that the sun is a red-hot lump of metal and the moon is earth. In Athens that was not a scientific error but a religious one. Helios was a god, Selene was a goddess, and calling them rocks was the sort of thing a city could fine you five talents for. The opening page of Genesis had made the same move a long time earlier, and quietly. Every other creation story in the ancient Near East names the sun and the moon as gods; Genesis declines to name them at all. "And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars" (Genesis 1:16). They are lamps, hung up on the fourth day, useful for telling the time. Israel was then warned specifically against the reflex Athens still had: do not lift your eyes to the sun and moon and stars and bow down to them (Deuteronomy 4:19). And Isaiah turns the stars into evidence of somebody rather than into somebodies: "Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name" (Isaiah 40:26). So the thing that made Anaxagoras a criminal in Athens was something Jewish and then Christian readers had no reason to flinch at. This matters more than it looks. A sky full of gods cannot be investigated, only placated. A sky full of creatures can be measured. When Christian Europe eventually built observatories, it was working with an assumption Anaxagoras had been fined for and Genesis had simply taken for granted.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a Mind made of the finest stuff, that starts the world turning and then lets it run. + The fathers praised him for what he saw. Honesty asks for the other column too, and it can be drawn entirely from his own surviving sentences rather than from anything anyone later did with them. - His Mind is still a thing. Fragment 12 calls it "the thinnest of all things and the purest." Thinnest of all things is a comparison, and it puts Mind on the same list as air and aether, at the fine end of it. The God of Scripture is not the most rarefied item in the universe; he is the reason there is a universe to contain items (Genesis 1:1; John 1:3). - He starts it and steps back. Mind sets the rotation going and the rotation does the separating from there. That is the whole complaint Socrates makes in the Phaedo (T3), and it leaves the world running on its own momentum. What Christians claim is not a first push but a continuous holding: "And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). - The mixture was always there. "All things were together" is the first sentence of his book, and it is where his account begins. Nothing made the mixture. Genesis begins a step earlier, with a God who is there before anything else is (Genesis 1:1). - It knows everything and says nothing. Fragment 12 gives Mind all knowledge and the greatest strength, and then stops. There is no word from it, no name for it, nothing owed to it and nothing it owes. Anaxagoras never suggests that a person might pray to it, and on his own account there would be no point. The God Paul preached in Athens speaks first, and can be sought and found (Acts 17:27). None of that is a small failure, and none of it is stupidity. He was reasoning about the origin of order with no Scripture on the shelf and no one before him to borrow from, and he got as far as an infinite, self-ruled, all-knowing Mind that set the cosmos going on purpose. Athens fined him for it and ran him out of town. It took nearly five hundred years more, and a different kind of revelation, for anyone in that city to be told the Mind had a name.