Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  And just at the wrong moment, 451, when the empire most needed some sense of common purpose, Pericles proposed a new law that would make it a requirement of Athenian citizenship that both parents be Athenians. This at a time when inter-polis marriages had been common and only Athenian citizenship of the father had previously been necessary to guarantee the citizenship of the child. It was now clear to the subject cities that they would never be Athenians.95 The contrast with Rome, which, in its hour of need, extended Roman citizenship to its allied cities, could not be clearer.

  If Sophocles was more somber than Aeschylus, the younger Euripides at moments verges on the morbid or hysterical. Euripides is particularly vivid in showing the horrors of the enslavement of Trojan women after their men have been killed, as in his Hecuba, for example, where Hecuba has to bear the sacrifice of her daughter, whom Odysseus has refused to save. Given that the Athenians had sporadically killed the men and enslaved the women of recalcitrant cities in their empire, again we can see the mirror turned on the people, but the people not learning what their teachers were saying. When Pericles precipitated the war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War (430-404), a war that may well have been inevitable, but did not live long enough to ensure that his cautious strategy would continue, the seeds of catastrophe were sown. The end was punctuated by two brief periods of tyranny, the oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 and the rule of the Thirty Tyrants in 404.

  It is more than poignantly apt that the last surviving Greek tragedy was Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonos, written not long before his death in 404 but first produced by his grandson in 401, a fitting marker of the end of an era. The blind and aged Oedipus, accompanied by his daughter Antigone, comes to the Athenian town of Colonos to die. At first the townspeople, careless of his great suffering, want to drive this polluted man away, but Theseus, the Athenian king, welcomes Oedipus, believing that his tomb in Attic territory would be a blessing to the city. Through his life of wisdom and folly, power and suffering, he had truly become a hero, that is, one who would live on after his death. The astounding achievements of fifth-century Athens have indeed lived on after the fall of the Athenian empire; it was truly a golden age, but also an age of great suffering, suffering inflicted and suffering undergone. Greek tragedy has been one of our greatest resources for dealing with suffering ever since, though its lessons are no easier to learn now than ever.

  Wisdom and the City

  We have followed the history of the Greek poleis, and, from the sixth century, Athens in particular, politically, religiously, and through poetry, beginning with Homer and Hesiod and continuing through the poetic drama of fifth-century Athens.96 We have observed axial intimations at several points so far, but they have remained at the level of the mimetic and the narrative, though sporadically, as with Hesiod, Solon and certainly with the tragedians, we have seen something like mythospeculation. But if Greece is above all the birthplace of theory, of philosophy and science, we need to backtrack a bit to look at the beginnings of anything that could adequately be called theory or seen as pointing to it. Surely the place to begin is with wisdom, sophia, that we have already alluded to in the discussion of Hesiod and Solon. From the earliest times poets, diviners (or interpreters of oracles), and, as we saw in Hesiod, “kings,” were counted among the A tradition that originated probably no later than the fifth century, and was noted by both Plato and Aristotle, referred to a group of Seven Sages or Wise Men around the beginning of the sixth century, of whom, although the list varies in later tradition, Solon was almost always one. As an indication of what wisdom meant in a period later than Hesiod, it would be well to look a bit more closely at these Seven Sages.98

  If we think we will find among them the beginning of Greek “philosophy,” we will be largely disappointed, for among them only Thales has later been considered in that category. The list as we have it is, on the face of it, curious. It most commonly included Solon, Thales, Pittakos, Bias, Chilon, Kleoboulos, and Periander, and the only thing they have most obviously in common is an involvement in political life. Pittakos was said to have been aisymnetes, a term Aristotle defined as an “elected tyrant,” of Mytelene. He was supposed to have been elected for a period of ten years to put the city in order, and was, similar to Solon, a moderate reformer. Chilon was a high official in Sparta, and Periander was tyrant of Corinth, variously described as brutally oppressive and as wisely moderate. Bias was known for his work in arguing legal cases, and Thales, whom we primarily consider as a thinker, played an active role in the politics of his home city, Miletus. Of the seven, only Kleoboulos of Lindus on the island of Rhodes seems to have had no involvement in politics. It appears, therefore, that wisdom was in early Greece primarily practical and political rather than theoretical.

  As to the content of their teaching, almost all that we have from the sages are short gnomic statements with ethical intent. From Solon we have, of course, quite a bit of poetry, but his teaching was often summed up with such a phrase as “Nothing in excess,” complemented by a phrase attributed to Kleoboulos, “Moderation is best.” It would seem that politically the sages represented on the whole (Periander is a problem here) the “third position” of Solon, between the nobility and the middling, and by emphasizing moderation (sophrosyne), originally a middling value hardly shared by aristocrats, were helping to make this virtue central for all Greeks, so that it became a noble virtue as well as a popular one. Still Richard Martin finds that the political was only one of the roles of the sages and not necessarily the most important. He finds three features defining them as a type: “First, the sages are poets; second, they are involved in politics; and third, they are performers.“99

  Poetry was the normal form of expression in early Greece, so it is not surprising that the sages were poets, although it is only Solon’s poetry that has survived. Martin gives the evidence that Thales wrote in poetry, even though none of it survives, and the accounts of the poetic achievements of the others, even Periander.10° The significance of poetic expression for us is that it is more apt to be used for mythospeculation than for theory. Martin’s emphasis on the sages as performers is of especial interest to us, as it indicates the continued importance of mimetic culture in the way they influenced their fellow citizens. He defines performance as follows: “By performance, I mean a public enactment, about important matters, in word or gesture, employing conventions and open to scrutiny and criticism, especially criticism of style.“0’ Martin gives many examples of exemplary actions of the sages, often, though not always, combined with some brief verbal statement. One example, from Solon, will suffice: “Thus when the tyrant Peisistratos at Athens was already established in power, Solon, unable to move the people against him, piled his arms in front of the generals’ quarters and exclaimed, `My country, I have served thee with my word and said this, he promptly left Athens for Egypt.

  Because the sages were known for their gnomic wisdom, often set in a performative context, Martin reminds us that Roman Jakobson once remarked that proverbs and sayings are “the largest coded unit occurring in our speech and at the same time the shortest poetic compositions.“103 Gnomic sayings, then, could be called one-line poems, often set in the context of Zen-like actions that underline the point being made. These sages could surely speak and argue, but they taught not so much with their words (Solon is here a considerable exception) but with their lives (here Solon is no exception). The performative dimension is, thus, not so much another dimension, as one that sums up the practical-political and the poetic and gets to the heart of what the sage was doing. These considerations drive Martin to add still a fourth feature: because the actions that the sages performed so often had explicit or implicit religious undertones, we must add to the other three features “religious importance.” 104 Because the religious dimension consisted mainly in ritual activity, sacrifice or the interpretation of sacrifice, the dedication of gifts to Apollo, and so on, we can say that the overriding element of performance includes religion together with polit
ics and poetry. This should hardly come as a surprise; throughout this chapter we have seen that religion and politics are so deeply intertwined that they resist separation in terms of our categories, and that Greek religio-political life was expressed above all in poetry and performance.

  Martin argues that Greek thinkers after the time of the Seven Sages, up to and including Socrates (though he makes a significant qualification for Socrates) showed the same dominantly performative quality and therefore cannot be treated as disembodied “thinkers” as we are wont to do. I would make two significant additions to Martin’s argument. One is the tragic poets, usually not treated as thinkers, though they were remarkable thinkers, who, if Sourvinou-Inwood is right, stood themselves initially in the role of protagonist in the earliest drama, directly addressing the people in their own words,105 but who, even when they slipped behind the screen of skilled actors (who were also, we must remember, skilled singers), were still very much involved in creating a performance that would move an audience on many levels, of which the verbal, crucial though it was, was only one.

  The other addition I would make is to add one more character to Martin’s list, that is, not to stop with Socrates, but to add Plato as well. Was Plato not also a dramatist, and does he not seek to convince not only by argument but by example, above all the life and death of Socrates, but through the subtle human interplay of the dialogue as well?106 The fact that Plato’s dialogues were never, to my knowledge, performed, is not enough to remove them, in my view, from the category of the performative-in principle they could be performed.107 One further point about Plato as performative: his suspicion of writing relative to the spoken word. Plato’s point in the famous discussion of this issue in the Phaedrus is that real learning can occur only in face-to-face interaction, and that writing can only serve as a “reminder” of what one already knows, and may even serve to weaken memory. Here Plato is recognizing writing as a form of “external memory,” to use Donald’s term, but balanced on the cusp between oral and literate cultures as he was, he didn’t seem to recognize the powerful resource such external memory could be. But here I want to emphasize the point that through the distinction between the written and the oral, Plato makes the performative, the enactive, primary:

  Socrates: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse [besides writing], a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how much better and more capable it naturally is?

  Phaedrus: Which one is that? How do you say it comes about?

  Socrates: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows to whom it should speak, and with whom it should remain silent.

  Phaedrus: You mean the living, breathing discourse of the man who knows, of which the written one can fairly be called an image. (Phaedrus 276a)108

  Although Aristotle also wrote dialogues, we don’t have any of them, and the treatises we do have could never be performed except as professorial lectures, though even that remnant of performance suggests that the performative category, like so much in human culture, is never lost.

  The Beginnings of Rational Speculation

  The discussion so far can be seen as preparatory for the consideration of what are usually referred to as the “Presocratic Philosophers,” where, if anywhere, we should be able to discover the beginning of theory in ancient Greece, and therefore locate the axial moment. We might remind ourselves what we are looking for when we speak of theory. Following Merlin Donald, we have argued that human consciousness has developed sequentially, as the episodic culture that we share with higher mammals has been augmented, first by mimetic culture, and then by narrative culture-augmented, not replaced. Theoretic culture, which was not caused by literacy (it may have been the cause of literacy), but probably required literacy as a condition of its continuing development, is the most recent form of consciousness, and, like its predecessors, augments rather than replaces previous cultural forms, so that human consciousness is, as Donald puts it, a “hybrid system.“109 Donald characterizes the “fundamental change” that the emergence of theoretic culture involves as follows: “The human mind began to reflect on the contents of its own representations, to modify and refine them. The shift was away from immediate, pragmatic problem solving and reasoning, toward the application of these skills to the permanent symbolic representations contained in the external memory sources.“110 Surely the emergence of “philosophy” should fit the bill. We should, however, remember Donald’s admonition that human consciousness is a hybrid system, and the axial transition may therefore involve more than simply the appearance of theory.

  Right off the bat we have a problem with terminology. “Philosophy” is not a term we can take for granted: it emerges only in the fourth century BCE and was applied only retrospectively to earlier thinkers. It is not even clear if the term means the same thing in the modern world-that is, since the seventeenth century-as it did in antiquity. The Seven Sages were not (except for Thales of Miletus, and he only much later) referred to as philosophers, either in ancient Greece or in modern usage; rather the term “sage” translates sophos (pl. sophoi), literally “wise man,” or the virtual synonym, sophistes, the term that will later be translated as “sophist” and that Plato so harshly criticized. Indeed, the term sophos could be used of one skilled in any craft or art.

  The notion of wisdom (sophia) and of wise men in pursuit of it was for a long time quite vague and general, including poets and lawgivers along with those who speculated about the beginnings of things, as Thales was supposed to have done.‘1’ We have evidence that his possible disciple, at any rate his fellow Milesian of the next generation, Anaximander, certainly did engage in such speculation, as we have a fragment of his writing, among the very first Greek texts to be written in prose. But although, according to Aristotle, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes (a third generation Milesian thinker) compose the Milesian school of natural philosophy, the very term “philosopher,” as noted above, did not come into common usage until the time of Plato or just before, so not for 200 years after Thales. The meaning of the term “nature” (physis) from which “natural” philosophy is derived, cannot be taken for granted either.

  Part of our problem is that much that we know of the Presocratics is contained in the writings of Aristotle, who, if anyone, was indeed a theorist. Was it not Aristotle who essentially created logic as we know it? Was it not Aristotle who reflected on the meaning of our representations in just about every field of knowledge? But it is just Aristotle’s own achievements that bring into question his account of a series of Presocratic philosophers, emphasizing as he does the theoretical implications of their thought, and viewing them primarily as predecessors to himself. While using cautiously what Aristotle says about them, remembering that this is often all we have, we must remember also that they were religio-political performers, often writing in poetry, as close to the seven sages as to what will later be thought of as philosophers. And although we can see some kinds of development in their thought over two centuries, they don’t line up in any neat succession.

  Martin emphasized the competition between the seven sages-that’s one reason there had to be seven of them. Competition (agon) was a feature of Greek culture from the earliest times-Hesiod mentions having taken part in a poetic competition-so it should not surprise us to see the “Presocratics” competing and criticizing each other. Though often active in their own cities, they tended to move around a lot, often ending up in places far from where they were born. Their freedom to think and criticize was due in part to the competitive culture and regard for “free speech” within the Greek polis, but also in part to their ability to move elsewhere when conditions for them became uncomfortable where they were. They were the ancient version of something like “free-floating intellectuals.” These conditions both within the polis and from the fact that Greece was a multi-polis society undoubtedly have something to do with the remarkable diversity and creativity th
at we find in their thought.”’

  The conventional view has been that Thales, in the early sixth century, was the first philosopher, the one who threw off the cloak of myth and began the tradition of rational inquiry. But this view not only of Thales but of his Milesian followers, Anaximander and Anaximenis, requires more than a little qualification. The three Milesians, in the accounts we have of them, were in search of beginnings, of the arche of the universe, but that search was based neither on observation nor on deduction, but on speculation, indeed, seeing how close their thought was to Hesiod on the one hand and to Persian and Mesopotamian ideas on the other, their thought was at best midway between mythospeculation and theory.113 After all, as Francis Cornford pointed out, Hesiod too began his Theogony with a cosmogony based on natural entities, not the gods. In the beginning there was Chaos, a “yawning gap” as Cornford translates it, and from Chaos came Earth and Eros, a god to be sure, but in this early context more like the principle of generation than an Olympian When Thales said the world began with Water”I or Anaximenes, with Air, or Anaximander with the Unbounded (or the Indefinite, Apeiron), had they really moved so far from Hesiod? Geoffrey Lloyd has argued that Anaximander’s astronomy was based on observation and began a tradition of gradually improving observation and analysis, but that the Milesian cosmogonies had no such basis or cumulative In short, Anaximander contributed to early Greek science, but the Milesians as cosmogonists were doing something else, moving beyond, but not very far beyond, myth and toward, though not very near to, theory.

  The evidence for the thought of the Milesians, given how little we know of their own words, is slight, and we are heavily dependent on much later texts for what we know of them. Nonetheless Charles Kahn has managed to reconstruct an account of the thought of Anaximander that is worth considering. At first glance he would seem to be very far from Cornford, or even Lloyd: “What the system of Anaximander represents for us is nothing less than the advent, in the West at any rate, of a rational outlook on the natural world. This new point of view asserted itself with the total force of a volcanic eruption, and the ensuing flood of speculation soon spread from Miletus across the length and breadth of the lands in which Greek was spoken.“17 On closer inspection, however, we find Kahn insisting that the “cosmological ideas of the old poets,” primarily Homer and Hesiod, provide the indispensable background for the emergence of Milesian thought. Given the difficulty in interpreting the evidence for this early period of Greek thought, Kahn says: “It is only by placing the Milesians in between the two regions of light provided by archaic poetry on the one hand and classical philosophy on the other-by thus illuminating them, as it were, from above as well as from below-that we may have any hope of seeing a bit deeper into this dark period of transition and creation.””’