The Devil's Tabernacle

The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought

Anthony Ossa-Richardson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400846597
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

The Devil's Tabernacle is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. Anthony Ossa-Richardson shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery of ancient religion, confessional polemics, Deist and libertine challenges to religion, antiquarianism and early archaeology, Romantic historiography, and spiritualism. Ossa-Richardson examines the different views of the oracles since the Renaissance--that they were the work of the devil, or natural causes, or the fraud of priests, or finally an organic element of ancient Greek society. The range of discussion on the subject, as he demonstrates, is considerably more complex than has been realized before: hundreds of scholars, theologians, and critics commented on the oracles, drawing on a huge variety of intellectual contexts to frame their beliefs.
In a central chapter, Ossa-Richardson interrogates the landmark dispute on the oracles between Bernard de Fontenelle and Jean-François Baltus, challenging Whiggish assumptions about the mechanics of debate on the cusp of the Enlightenment. With erudition and an eye for detail, he argues that, on both sides of the controversy, to speak of the ancient oracles in early modernity was to speak of one's own historical identity as a Christian.

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PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

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Authorities

Delos ubi nunc, Phoebe, tua est, ubi Delphica Pytho?

Tibullus, Elegies II.3, l. 27

WITH THE REVIVAL OF PAGAN antiquity came a revival of interest in its religions. The humanist movement, in full swing at the outset of the sixteenth century, put itself to setting out and interpreting the classical and patristic sources on the many aspects of these religions, among which the oracles of ancient Greece held a prominent place. By this process the oracles became an object of historical knowledge: in context, individual sources could contribute to the rounded picture of an institution with its own cultural contours.

With the reading of the Church Fathers, however, the pagan oracles could also be incorporated into the narrative of Christianity, a narrative in which they stood as symbolic antagonists. Two things above all marked out the oracles to the humanist scholar. First, as was obvious from Cicero and the Greek historians, their answers had been ambiguous and deceitful. ‘Among the ancients’, one writer noted, ‘nothing was more trite than the ambiguity of the oracles’.¹ It was not for nothing that Apollo had been called ‘Loxias’, the crooked one. To a mind impressed with the virtue of clarity in language, this was a grave fault, and stood in diametric contrast to the perspicuity of Christian prophecy. Since the nineteenth century, the famous riddling oracles have been largely rejected as literary or mythical, in favour of more prosaic instances. Before this, only a few had looked past the traditional examples. Sir Thomas Browne, carefully examining a range of oracles from Herodotus, acknowledged the variety of Delphic utterance:

Sometimes with that obscurity as argued a fearfull prophecy; sometimes so plainly as might confirm a spirit of difficulty; sometimes morally, deterring from vice and villany; another time vitiously, and in the spirit of bloud and cruelty.²

For most, however, oracular ambiguity was assumed. The second fact about the oracles, of still greater significance, was their cessation—an idea spanning pagan as well as Christian literature of antiquity. The humanists knew, of course, that the cessation of the oracles had occurred with the miraculous dawn of their own faith. The false, obscure, and immoral had given way to the true. It was an excellent image for the poet, popular well into the seventeenth century, and again among the Romantics of a later age. Painters had long depicted the Nativity in the ruins of a pagan temple, but verse, an oral medium, favoured the silencing of the Pythia, herself a poet—even the inventor of poetry.³ Students of English literature best know the motif from Milton:

The Oracles are dumm,
No voice or hideous humm
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.⁴

It was already present, however, in a snatch of lines from Joannes Baptista Mantuanus:

The gods, who, deprived of majesty,
Now yielded their altars to our own rites,
And, bearing Christ’s yoke on their unwilling necks,
No longer gave oracles openly.⁵

Beyond these two points—deceptive ambiguity and cessation—lay specialist knowledge and theology. As the full richness of ancient sources, and especially the Greek, came into view, the oracles could be situated with more precision in developing genres of learned endeavour: history, religious ethnography, demonology, scholastic philosophy, and so on. Scholars could begin to debate exactly how the oracles had worked, or if they had worked at all. But for this to occur, the sources had to be identified, edited, translated, published. This chapter deals with those sources, and with their transmission from antiquity to early modern thought; the foundations will thus be laid for the more sophisticated discussions of the next two hundred years.

If an early modern reader wanted to know about the pagan oracles, he could pick up a book like Conrad Gesner’s enormous encyclopaedia of commonplaces, the Pandectae, and rummage around for its section on that topic.⁶ There the sources on the oracles were laid out neatly, and the reader was directed in turn to the earlier miscellanies of the Italian humanists, especially those of Alessandro Alessandri and Caelius Rhodiginus.⁷ With these the range of available material had become standard, and they continued to be cited until the eighteenth century.

In conversation, Alessandro and Rhodiginus would have disagreed about little relating to Delphi and the other oracles, but in print they presented different aspects of the subject. Alessandro was more interested in pagan lore, neutral with respect to Christianity, while Rhodiginus included patristic material and drew parallels with the religious phenomena of his day. In each case, the debts are not always clear, and mediaeval tradition is occasionally substituted for reliable classical data, which itself was often already commonplace in antiquity. Thus, when Alessandro describes Delphi as totius orbis umbilicus, he could have had it from anywhere, while his claims that Parnassus was in Boeotia, and that its two peaks were dedicated to Dionysius and Apollo, are incorrect and suppositious respectively.⁸ His sources, however, must have included Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pausanias, Plutarch, and Justinus.⁹ Rhodiginus drew openly on Plutarch, Cicero, and Diodorus Siculus, but his key source, Eusebius, is unnamed.

Both compilers chose a moment to break off from paraphrasing their pagan sources and sound instead a note of Christian censure. Of Delphi, Alessandro comments:

When wicked religion, by which men’s own vanity ruined them, had been instilled, important men, eminent in dignity, frequently came here for counsel from all over the world, and these oracles were held to be true and by far the most famous of all.¹⁰

Alessandro’s reader would have thought nothing of his remark about prava religio—it was obvious. Obvious too was Rhodiginus’s opinion of Delphi that

the oracle was conducted there by the vain superstition and ignorance of men, and much more by the cunning of unclean spirits.¹¹

From the beginning, Christians had thought of pagan religion as an evil perpetrated both by supernatural spirits or demons, and by human credulity and immorality. Delphi was no different. The problem for Rhodiginus’s early modern readers came in another passage:

I seem to have discovered, by continual reading, that [the oracles] were not established and propagated by gods or demons, but founded from the start by crafty profiteers.¹²

When later scholars came to blows over whether the oracles had been the work of demons or only of cunning priests, this passage proved contentious. Both sides understood Rhodiginus to have espoused the latter idea, although both acknowledged his ambiguity—an oracular fault.¹³ This indicates the dangers of humanist practice, heaping up sources without clear arrangement. Rhodiginus in this passage was paraphrasing Eusebius, who in turn was quoting a Cynic named Oenomaus. The interaction between the Church Father and the pagan, intrinsically unstable as an analysis of the oracles, would resonate through the early modern discourse on that subject, as we shall see. The distinction between human and demonic cunning was not so apparent to Rhodiginus or his contemporaries as it would be to his later readers. The principal fact for him, as for Alessandro, was that the oracles were part and parcel of a false religion. Both read the pagan sources through Christian lenses more than a thousand years old. We may now examine how those lenses came to be fashioned—that is, how the oracles were established as a major battleground between the old and new religions competing in antiquity.

• • •

To early modern Christians, the authority of Apollo was worth nothing.¹⁴ But in ancient Greece, Apollo, via his oracular mouthpiece at Delphi, was the very highest authority, at least in theory, and his arbitration was accepted by kings, generals, and colonists in the most important matters of state. As the traveller Richard Chandler later put it,

The influence of [Delphi’s] god has controlled the councils of states, directed the course of armies, and decided the fate of kingdoms. The antient history of Greece is full of his energy, and an early register of his authority.¹⁵

This authority was embodied in the adages Erasmus collected from Athenaeus and Theocritus.¹⁶ It was also reflected in the pagan histories; neither Livy nor Herodotus, for instance, shows any doubt that Delphi was a genuine institution of Apollo. This is not to say that it could not be corrupted at a human level, as we learn from occasional stories.¹⁷ The oracle itself, however, was certainly divine. One of the best-known stories in Herodotus, that of Croesus, is representative. According to the tale, Croesus, the king of Lydia, sent out messengers to all the famous oracles in Greece and Africa, instructing each to wait exactly one hundred days before asking the god what Croesus was then doing. The words brought back from Delphi proclaimed that the king was boiling a lamb and a tortoise in a bronze cauldron—the improbable but correct answer. Croesus did reverence to Apollo and plied Delphi with costly gifts. Subsequently, when C...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Conclusion: Les lauriers sont coupés
• Bibliography
• Index