Chapter 1
Why Believe without Revelation?
The Evidences of Greek Religion
The great fourteenth-century philosopher of history Ibn KhaldĂťn, arguing against the view of âthe philosophersâ that prophecy is a natural human quality, observed that âpeople who have a (divinely revealed) book and who follow the prophets are few in number in comparison with the Magians [i.e., pagans] who have none.â The Greeks, it is a commonplace to observe, were among the many peoples who lacked a book and prophets in Ibn KhaldĂťnâs sense. The Greeks will not have perceived this âlackâ as anything of the kind, and to that extent the negative characterization is a bad starting point. But it can be taken as a stepping-stone toward investigating those positive features of their religious system on account of which there was, indeed, no lack. Three questions naturally arise. First, if the basis for sacrifice, dedications, processions, festivals, and all the other apparatus of Greek worship was not a book or prophecy, then what was it? What reason had the Greeks, unenlightened by revelation, to believe in their gods? The second question follows closely from the first. Given, again, the absence of revelation, how could the Greeks know what was pious or impious, what pleasing or unpleasing to the gods? And third, if Greek religion was not a religion of the book, then what was the role of all those texts that, beginning as Herodotus noted (2.53) with Homer and Hesiod, evidently played some part in it, without which indeed we moderns could scarcely approach the subject at all?
This chapter will treat those three questions in turn. I will then address two further issues that follow from them. The Greeks lacked sacred books, but they certainly did not lack myths; the role of those myths in religious life needs to be considered. Second, myths imply certain conceptions of the godsâ capacities and attitudes, what we might be tempted to term âbeliefsâ about the gods, were âbeliefâ not a term that has often been declared inapplicable to ritual-centered ancient religions. Yet surely even a ritual is performed in the belief that there is some purpose in doing soâŚ. Some way needs to be found of reconciling the evident truths that, on the one hand, the fixed and regulated elements of Greek religion were ritual acts, and on the other that volumes could be filled with Greek stories about the gods, speculations about them, appeals to them, criticisms of them. One way of mediating between those for whom Greek religion is a matter of things done at or near an altar, and those for whom it is rather the sum of the stories, speculations, and appeals just mentioned, is to argue that, though beliefs were held, only acts were subject to control. That mediating proposal, however, calls for two footnotes or riders: philosophers laid claim not to mere belief but to sure knowledge about the divine, on the basis of a priori postulates as to what a god should be like; and a few incidents, chief among them the prosecution of Socrates, may bring into doubt the notion that thought was free and only action policed. The chapter will therefore move a considerable distance from its starting point. But all the topics discussed are consequences, or qualifications, of the central absence noted by Ibn KhaldĂťn.
Evidences
Two of the most influential books in the nineteenth century, still in print, were William Paleyâs A View of the Evidences of Christianity, of 1794, and his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, of 1802. The first question posed above could be reformulated anachronistically as an attempt to establish what Sophoclesâ or Pindarâs âEvidencesâ might have looked like. In a sense there is a single, simple answer to that question, and one evidence that easily outweighs all others, even if Greeks did not often formulate the matter in quite this way. When Nicomachus was charged in 399 with impiety for altering the traditional sacrificial calendar of Athens, the prosecutor argued: âOur ancestors, who only made the sacrifices prescribed in Solonâs code, bequeathed to us a city which was the greatest and happiest in all Greece; and so we ought to make the same sacrifices as them if for no other reason, for the good luck that they brought.â In the past, when sacrifices were performed more regularly, the weather too was more regular, says Isocrates. Every dedication set up by a Greek in fulfillment of a vow is testimony that the prayer accompanying the vow has been fulfilled. The greatest evidence then for the existence of the gods is that piety works: the reward for worshipping the gods in ways hallowed by tradition is prosperity. The converse is that impiety leads to disaster; and, though the piety-prosperity nexus is not often used as a proof of the existence of the gods, the afflictions of the wicked are indeed a much-cited evidence. âFather Zeus, you gods still exist on high Olympus, if the suitors have really paid the penalty for their reckless insolence,â says Laertes in the Odyssey; âThe gods exist,â delightedly exclaims the chef in Menanderâs Dyskolos when his enemy, whom he regards as impious, falls down a well. We seem to catch here the tones of excited colloquial speech.
When fair weather and flourishing crops are seen as a reward of piety, the argument rests implicitly on the assumption that the natural environment is under divine control. Here then potentially is another evidence: if every shower of rain comes from Zeusâand âZeusâ or âgodâ âis rainingâ was used more or less interchangeably in Greek with an impersonal âit is rainingââthen direct contact with divine power is an everyday experience. It surely will not have felt like that, even for the pious: rain for them was rain, part of normality, as it is for us, not an epiphany. But when rain declined to fall, it could be prayed for; thunderbolts were embodiments of âZeus who descends,â storms could be caused by human pollution, winds could be summoned or averted by sacrifice, an untimely earthquake or eclipse could cause a general to be replaced, military activity to be abandoned or delayed. According to the messenger in Aeschylusâs Persai, when an unseasonable storm froze the Strymon in the face of the retreating Persian army, âpeople who hitherto paid no regard to the gods (Î¸ÎľÎżá˝şĎ Î´Î ĎÎšĎ / Ďὸ ĎĎ὜ν νοΟὡΜĎν Îżá˝Î´ÎąÎźÎżáżŚ)â then turned to prayers; though ascribed to Persians, the psychology is also perfectly Greek.
This was the level at which pre-Socratic philosophy, with the premise of a rule-bound natural order, came into conflict with popular religious assumptions; and, for those educated in the philosophical schools, storms and eclipses ceased necessarily to convey any message about the divine. (But there was always the possibility of a both and/or âdouble determinationâ explanation, whereby god worked through the natural order.) Even for the less educated, such messages were only intermittently audible; this was the religion of crisis situations. Nature was ...