Apollonius of Tyana Comforts a Bereaved Father

Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana, F.C. Conybeare · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

Epistle 58 of Apollonius, to Valerius, from Philostratus in Conybeare's translation. It is a letter of condolence which offers no consolation of the ordinary sort, but a metaphysical claim: that there is no death of anyone save in appearance only, even as there is no birth or becoming except in appearance. When a thing passes from essence into nature we consider that there is a birth; when it passes from nature into essence, a death; but in truth nothing comes into being at any time nor is destroyed.

What changes is only visibility. A thing is apparent at one time through the density of its material and invisible later through the tenuity of its essence, that essence remaining always the same and subject only to differences of movement and state — change caused not by anything outside but by a conversion of the whole into the parts and a return of the parts into the whole, owing to the oneness of the universe. Each genus of things, when full, is apparent to us because its density resists our senses, and unseen when emptied of matter, the matter being shed abroad and flowing away from the eternal measure that confined it, while the measure itself is neither created nor destroyed. The question the letter then puts to itself is why an error of this scale has passed unrefuted, and the answer given is that some men imagine they have themselves brought about what in fact they only witnessed.

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