Ancient Philosophy of Religion

The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1

Graham Oppy, N. N. Trakakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844652204
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317546504
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The origins of the Western philosophical tradition lie in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This volume provides a unique insight into the life and writings of a diverse group of philosophers in antiquity and presents the latest thinking on their views on God, the gods, religious belief and practice. Beginning with the 'pre-Socratics', the volume then explores the influential contributions made to the Western philosophy of religion by the three towering figures of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The chapters that follow cover the the leading philosophers of the major schools of the ancient world - Epicureanism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism and the early Christian Church. "Ancient Philosophy of Religion" will be of interest to scholars and students of Philosophy, Classics and Religion, while remaining accessible to any interested in the rich cultural heritage of ancient religious thought.

1

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: AN INTRODUCTION

George Boys-Stones

The ‘philosophy of religion’ is unusual as a branch of philosophy in foregrounding the question of whether it has a legitimate object of study to start with.¹ At the same time, this question makes it programmatic for philosophy as a whole. Either philosophy will be, in the end, opposed to religion, and defined in some measure by that opposition (as a rational or scientific outlook is opposed to, and defined by its opposition to, fideism, perhaps), or else it will turn out that religion is what frames and gives meaning to the human pursuit of knowledge.

Both of these outlooks have their adherents; and (what is evidence for the programmatic force of the question) on each is built a foundation myth for philosophy as a whole. The most potent and influential is surely the version based in the essential antagonism of religion and philosophy. According to this view, ‘philosophy’ finds its origins in a historical movement premised precisely on the rejection of ‘religious’ ways of thinking, a rejection traced to sixth-century Ionia and the revolutionary figure of Thales.

There is no denying the powerful appeal this narrative makes to the imagination. But it is by no means obviously right. An equally strong body of opinion holds that one can see far greater continuity between ‘religious’ thought and the origins of ‘philosophical’ thought: that the philosophical tradition never set out to construct itself in opposition to religion at all. Indeed, in some versions of this view, the very idea that it might have done so is unintelligible; ‘religion’ was not then, even if it is now, the kind of thing to which philosophy could have objected. If this second kind of view is right (as I shall go on to argue), then instead of asking from the beginning about the tools developed by philosophy to handle religious claims, the first question a study of the philosophy of religion in antiquity has to address is how philosophy ever came to have a critical interest in religion at all. This, I shall argue, is the question that provides the context for discussing the development of the particular themes, arguments and strategies that have come to characterize the subject.

PHILOSOPHY VERSUS RELIGION?

One of the main reasons for doubting that philosophy was born in the rejection of religious belief is the well-established fact that pre-Christian religion was not defined in terms of belief to begin with. Religion was constituted for its participants not by dogma, but by involvement in rituals and customs (and these were prescribed more by time and place than by personal or tribal affiliation): by a life lived within certain systems of imagery and iconography. Ancient religion has been aptly described, then, rather as a language of sorts than as a creed (e.g. Gould 1985; cf. Burkert 1985: 54): a way of referring to the world (or some aspect of the world, or the world under some particular description), not of specifying in terms that could be translated into secular language what one has to think about it. This is not to deny that particular views about how the world operated could be associated, more or less commonly, with particular aspects of religious behaviour (although Most [2003: 303] does deny it; cf. by way of contrast Harrison [2008]). But it is to deny that the panoply of ancient religion included any mechanism to determine such associations. The ancient world knew no scriptural revelation, no line of prophets, no Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Priests, whose function was largely confined to the performance of ritual, claimed no authority as intermediaries for the divine; while Oracles, which did, were careful to avoid any comment on ‘theological’ questions such as what ‘gods’ were, or how they were to be conceived (cf. evidence in Fontenrose [1978]). Homer and Hesiod achieved wide currency in Greece as reference points for the subsequent mythological tradition, and were even credited with establishing the standard Greek pantheon, along with the genealogy and iconography of its members (Herodotus, Histories 2.53; cf. Burkert 1985: 120–22). But if they were important sources of imagery, they were not taken to be ‘biblical’ authorities for its use. In any case, the continued existence and tolerance of variant accounts ensured that people were quite capable of making the distinction between what one had to think about the gods and what Homer or Hesiod said about them.

None of this is, as it happens, especially controversial for historians of religion. Its consequences, however, are uncomfortable for many historians of philosophy. For if Greek religion does not determine the beliefs of its participants, then it is hardly meaningful to talk (as, recently, did e.g. Hussey [2006]; cf. Roochnik 2004: 12–17) about religious ‘patterns of thought’ or ‘patterns of belief’ put to bed by the philosophical revolution conventionally associated with Thales in the sixth century BCE. Thales and his successors might have developed new models of analysis, and attempted to explore more critically the basis for received assumptions; they might have used these approaches and models to suggest new explanations for phenomena previously thought inexplicable. One might – one should – consider their work foundational for philosophical methodology. (This is, as I mean it, a trivial truth: for it is only to rehearse the fact that it is in this work that the self-consciously philosophical tradition of later centuries identified its intellectual roots.) But to see them as rejecting a specifically ‘religious’ outlook is to project back onto them a debate that no one had any thought – or motive – to formulate.

It might be objected at this point that my original characterization of the difference between ancient and modern religious belief suggests too sharp a division: that, just as the average modern Christian is less bound by conciliar edict, so the average ancient Greek was more heavily influenced by Homer than I have suggested. Even if I am right to say that we should not talk of ancient religious belief as something sanctioned and defined, according to such an objection, it is enough to allow that particular views were more or less commonly associated with particular religious expression (as I have done) to make it legitimate to talk about a religious ‘way of thinking’. It is this that people have in mind when they talk about a worldview that is inherently ‘chaotic’ (in the manner apparently envisaged by Hussey [2006: 12]) or unstable (cf. discussion in Rowe [1983]), or which surrenders the world to irrational forces (e.g. Vlastos 1975: ch. 1). It is this that is challenged by the work of Thales and his successors.

As a matter of anthropology, the nuance is welcome. But the objection misses its mark if the ‘religious way of thinking’ identified by it fails to attain normative status in the culture. As long as it remains merely a way of thinking with the language of religion, there will be (and it will be understood that there is) clear distance between what one says of the thought and what one says of religion, considered as the language that happens to be used for the expression of that thought. And we know that the supposedly ‘chaotic’ form of religious thinking failed to attain normative standing: we know this because the thinkers supposed (under this very theory) to be on the attack employ the same language without hesitation or question themselves (cf. Burkert 1985: 306). Until the atomists, all of the early cosmologists used such language to characterize the principles of a world that remained for them, as it famously was for Thales, “full of gods” (11 A 22 DK [= Diels & Kranz 1951–2]).² Nor is there anything to suggest that their use of this language is ironic or polemical, for its use is untempered by anything that could seriously be taken as criticism of the religious context from which it is drawn. Occasionally, it is true, reservations are expressed about particular religious practices; but even these presuppose the perspective of the religious insider. Far from attacking religion, they question activities and attitudes that risk bringing it into disrepute.

My claim can be mostly clearly illustrated by considering two figures who might seem to be the most obvious counter-examples to it: Xenophanes and Heraclitus. These thinkers are often characterized in the literature as critics, at least of traditional Greek piety, and perhaps of religion in general. But a closer look will show that such a stance can only be found in them by systematic application of the prejudicial assumption that ‘religion’ (or anyway Greek religion) is incompatible with rational thought about the world. That this is a prejudicial assumption in the case of Heraclitus at least is clear from the fact that the evidence is amenable to a precisely contrary interpretation. Adomènas (1999), for example, has argued that, so far from setting himself up as a critic of traditional religion, Heraclitus actually sees it offering support to his own metaphysics. What is certainly true is that we should not confuse Heraclitus’ negative attitude towards the views held by the ignorant in their approach to religion with his attitude towards religion itself. For it is precisely personal attitude, not religious practice, that Heraclitus most often has in his sights: “They pray to these statues: one might as well converse with houses, as long as one knows nothing about the gods and heroes” (22 B 5 DK [part]; cf. 27, 86, 128). What is under attack here is not prayer to statues, but ignorance. The thought is exactly paralleled by B 107, where Heraclitus speaks of eyes and ears as things that are similarly said to be no good without intelligence, which is, of course, not an invitation to think that Heraclitus disapproved of eyes and ears in general.

Heraclitus does occasionally – but very occasionally – address particular religious practices: “If it was not for Dionysus that they held their procession and sang in praise of the genitals, it would be a most shameless thing” (22 B 15 DK; cf. 5, 127; perhaps 14). But the qualification here is all-important: if it was not done for Dionysus. Sardonic remarks about how bizarre we would consider such practices in any other than their proper context cannot be taken as a criticism of them when performed in the appropriate time and place. If they could, then, again, by parity of reasoning we should have to conclude from B 58 that Heraclitus disapproved of the medical art tout court as well: for it is perverse, as he says there, to pay physicians for cautery and surgery when we would normally do anything to avoid getting burned or cut.

Finally, it needs to be acknowledged that Heraclitus is capable of expressing himself in terms of conventional piety, with which he obviously feels completely at home (e.g. B 24, 79, 83, 92, 93). Indeed, what might really strike us about even the so-called ‘critical’ pronouncements is the religious justification he gives for the criticism (esp. e.g. B 14, 27, 86).

The same can be said for Xenophanes. His negative remarks are far fewer than one would believe from the attention they have attracted, and far more carefully circumscribed. Like most of the supposedly ‘critical’ fragments of Heraclitus, they attack individuals, not their religion (21 B 1, 11, 12 DK, with Graziosi 2002: 60); like all of them, they are themselves concerned with upholding standards of piety. Xenophanes’ famous remarks on the cultural relativity of religious iconography, which are frequently adduced as damning indictments of traditional religion, are in fact perfectly neutral in tone: “If oxen or horses or lions had hands, if they could draw and make things with their hands as men do, horses would make images of gods like horses, oxen like oxen. They would fashion for them the bodies that they themselves had” (B 15 DK; cf. 14, 16). Such fragments do no more than point out that other peoples do, and other species might, depict their gods in other ways. They no more imply a criticism of traditional religion than if they had observed that the Greeks talk about the gods in Greek while Thracians and Ethiopians (who figure in B 16) use different languages for the purpose, namely their own. (If horses and oxen had the power of speech they would, of course, talk of them in Horse and Ox.) Commentators can turn these fragments into criticism only on the back of an assumption that the Greeks allowed no gap between the nature of divinity and the possibilities for its artistic representation. This would in any case be a bold assumption. The fluidity of the gods’ representation within the Greek tradition makes it wholly untenable.

In general, then, there is no evidence at all that philosophy began with a movement opposed to ‘religious’ ways of thinking: none that it was, at least through the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, even an option. The continuity of language, on the other hand – and, one might add, of topic (the Milesians thematized the ‘origin’, archë, of things and their generation just as much as Hesiod or the Orphic cosmogonies; cf. West 1983: chs 3–4; Clay 2003: 2–3) – suggests that there might be a way of understanding the new cosmology as a development of religious expression.

But this, now, might seem an odd claim to make, even on my own account. For I have been careful to divorce religious forms, conceived as a kind of language, from opinions that might or might not have been associated with them in the minds of religious practitioners. The language of cosmology, on the other hand, more clearly does express particular views about the cosmos. What sense does it make, then, to connect the latter with the former? To answer this question, I take my cue from Plato and Aristotle, to whom we owe the self-conscious construction of philosophy as a distinct intellectual tradition. For they ask a pertinent question when they ask why it is that human beings engaged in (what they are defining as) ‘philosophy’ to begin with. It was not because there was any compelling need for it: “That it is not a productive art is clear right from the first philosophers. For then as now men began to do philosophy from a sense of wonder …” (Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2, 982b11–12; cf. Plato, Theaetetus 155d, with Snell 1953: 38). Both Plato and Aristotle do, as a matter of fact, believe in the practical benefits of philosophy, which both make essential to happiness. But neither traces his intellectual roots to the early students of human well-being (Solon, for example, or Theognis). Both rather trace them to the ‘physicists’, the students of nature; both explain the characteristically philosophical impulse as a response to the wonder of the universe.³ And what is really striking about the word that both use in this context – thauma – is its conventional association precisely with religious experience.⁴

It seems to me entirely credible, and much more consistent with the evidence than any alternative, that archaic Greek religion had a role to play as a ‘language’, not least because, whatever else it expressed for the individuals who engaged with it, it expressed a sense of ‘wonder’ at the world, a sense (of ‘awe’?) not captured for its users in the quotidian language of opinion and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Introduction
• Contributors
• 1. Ancient Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction
• 2. Pythagoras
• 3. Xenophanes
• 4. Socrates and Plato
• 5. Aristotle
• 6. Epicurus
• 7. The Stoics
• 8. Cicero
• 9. Philo of Alexandria
• 10. The Apostle Paul
• 11. Plutarch of Chaeroneia
• 12. Sextus Empiricus
• 13. Early Christian Philosophers: Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian
• 14. Origen
• 15. Plotinus
• 16. Porphyry and Iamblichus
• 17. The Cappadocians: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa
• 18. Augustine
• 19. Proclus
• 20. Pseudo-Dionysius
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index