Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  Balbus’s version of the ontological argument (which he takes from the philosopher Zeno) goes basically like this: (1) The universe itself is necessarily greater and better than anything contained in it. (2) To have life and reason is better than to lack these attributes. (3) But men have life and reason. (4) Therefore, if the universe is greater and better than anything contained in it, then the universe must have life and reason as well; otherwise, the universe would be less than the men it contains—which would be absurd. On this basis, Balbus proceeds to the seemingly pantheistic conclusion that “the universe is god”29—though he does not expound or embrace pantheism in any overt or systematic way.

  The argument from design is probably even more familiar: it reasons that the orderliness observable in the universe can be accounted for only by supposing some Mind or Intelligence that creates and maintains such order. A familiar modern instance is Voltaire’s clock maker argument: a clock is an intricate thing that could not come into existence through mere accident; therefore, if there is a clock, there must be a clock maker.30 For the same purpose, Balbus invokes the example not of a clock—there is nothing especially intricate about a sundial—but of “a large and beautiful house.”31 And he enthusiastically elaborates on “the uniform movement and undeviating rotation of the heavens, the individuality, usefulness, beauty, and order of the sun and moon and stars, the very sight of which is sufficient proof that they are not the outcome of chance.”32 Observing these facts, he asks: “What can be so obvious and clear, as we gaze up at the sky and observe the heavenly bodies, as that there is some divine power of surpassing intelligence by which they are ordered?”33 His position in this respect closely resembles the kind of view later associated with natural theologians like William Paley.34

  If these arguments are persuasive, they might seem to demonstrate the existence of gods, or perhaps of a god, but how would these gods or this god square with the personified deities of Roman religion—with Jove, Venus, Minerva, and company? How does the philosophical approach allow Balbus to escape the dilemma that suggested that it was necessary either to affirm mythic and civic religion together (which Balbus could not honestly do) or to reject them both together (which he also was not inclined to do)?

  Here Balbus displays the second part of his philosophical strategy. More specifically, he proposes an elaborate account, supported by ingenious etymologies, of how the Greek and Roman gods can be understood as symbolic representations of the divine reality, so that “behind these sacrilegious fables lies a scientific explanation which is quite sophisticated.”35 Consequently, “though we reject these stories with contempt, we shall be able to identify and grasp the nature of the divinity pervading each and every natural habitat, as Ceres on earth, as Neptune on the seas, and as other deities in other areas; and we shall acknowledge the significance of the names which custom has imposed on them. These are the deities which we are to revere and worship; our worship of the gods is best and most chaste, most holy and totally devout, when we revere them with pure, sincere and untainted hearts and tongues.”36

  In short, the gods are real, after all—not in a popular and crudely literal sense, though, but in a deeper philosophical or spiritual or even “scientific” sense. In this respect, Balbus can be seen as practicing a kind of nonliteral hermeneutics similar to that later profusely employed by religious Neoplatonists,37 by early Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine and their numerous followers, and even by modern “demythologizing” theologians like Rudolf Bultmann.38 In this way, Balbus reconciles (at least to his own satisfaction) rejection of the mythical gods, understood literally, with continuing support for the gods of the city, understood more philosophically and metaphorically.

  The Consecration of Philosophy

  But Balbus’s elaborate defense of the gods was not merely an arid philosophical exercise. His account served to support and amplify the function of pagan religion in beatifying and consecrating the Roman world, and the Roman city. We have noted the similarity of Balbus’s proffered proofs to what in the later Christian tradition are sometimes called the ontological argument and the argument from design. But this description fails to capture the full force of Balbus’s presentation, which is more poetic and beatifying than dryly philosophical.

  Thus, over and over again Balbus emphasizes not merely the orderliness of nature but its “beauty,” its “harmony,” its capacity to inspire “wonder.”39 (Here he sounds not so different from Abraham Heschel, discussed in chapter 2.) “All things are subject to nature, and are most beautifully administered by her” (2.81, p. 75). Balbus waxes rhapsodic for pages on end about “the beauty of the things which we declare have been established by divine providence,” resorting to lengthy quotations of poetry as the only way of conveying his admiration (2.98–118, pp. 82–90).

  This beautiful orderliness, evident in the sun and moon and stars, extends to and indeed achieves a kind of culminating perfection in human beings, providentially endowed with “mind, intelligence, reason, prudence, and wisdom” (2.147, p. 100).

  Humans, in turn, use these providential endowments, “by the work of our hands . . . striv[ing] to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature” (2.152, p. 102). This “second nature” would outstandingly include the human city with its various arts and occupations. The city is thus a sort of image of the cosmic order, and vice versa. “The universe is, so to say, the shared dwelling of gods and men, or a city which houses both, for they alone enjoy the use of reason and live according to justice and law” (2.154, p. 103).

  In Balbus’s position, we see a kind of philosophical paganism that was not identical to the mythic religion (which it scorned), but that nonetheless served to preserve the gods (understood in a more sophisticated, nonliteral sense), and thereby to support the consecrating religion of the city.

  Civic Fideism

  Balbus’s philosophical paganism, however, provokes contempt from Cotta, the Skeptic—a disdain that is intellectual but also patriotic, or civic. Cotta thinks Balbus’s arguments fail from a philosophical standpoint. But he also thinks the philosophical arguments threaten rather than sustain the civic religion that both Balbus and Cotta affirm, and on which the city depends.

  On the intellectual level, Cotta not only rejects but also systematically deconstructs and ridicules Balbus’s arguments and etymologies. He sarcastically disparages Balbus’s experiential evidence. “As for the utterances of a Faun,” Cotta comments mockingly, “I myself have never heard one, but I am willing to believe you if you say that you have, even though I have no idea what a Faun is” (3.15, p. 113). He argues that the same logic deployed in Balbus’s ontological argument (the universe is greater than anything it contains; humans have life, which is good; therefore, the universe must have life as well) could as easily be used to prove that the universe is “adept at reading a book,” or that the universe is a “musician” (3.22, p. 115). The orderliness that Balbus observes in the cosmos should be attributed not to gods but to “nature” (3.26–28, p. 117). And with respect to Balbus’s effusive praise of the cosmos’s beauty and usefulness, Cotta retorts: “What benefit . . . can be observed in mice or cockroaches or snakes, all of them troublesome and destructive to the human race?” (3.65, p. 132). He goes on to press the familiar argument from evil:

  Either God wishes to remove evils and cannot, or he can do so and is unwilling, or he has neither the will nor the power, or he has both the will and the power. If he has the will but not the power, he is a weakling, and this is not characteristic of God. If he has the power but not the will, he is grudging, and this is a trait equally foreign to God. If he has neither the will nor the power, he is both grudging and weak, and is therefore not divine. If he has both the will and the power (and this is the sole circumstance appropriate to God), what is the source of evils, or why does God not dispel them? (3.65, p. 133)

  But Cotta protests as well, in a more apparently pious vein, that Balbus is actually undermining the civic religion. “
By deploying all these arguments for the existence of gods, you succeed in casting doubt on what is in my view crystal-clear” (3.10, p. 111). And before beginning his aggressive debunking of Balbus, Cotta unapologetically affirms that he is a priest, and he insists that “I shall indeed defend [the gods], and I have always done so; no words from any person, whether learned or unlearned, will ever budge me from the views which I inherited from our ancestors concerning the worship of the immortal gods” (3.5, p. 109).

  This fervent declaration of faith seems in tension with Cotta’s exercise in deconstruction, and it is hard to square with his own admission, earlier in the dialogue, that “many troubling considerations occur to me which sometimes lead me to think that [the gods] do not exist at all” (1.61, p. 24). So, how to reconcile Cotta’s vigorously expressed skepticism with his equally vehement professions of belief?

  One obvious possibility is the one suggested by Gibbon (and one, incidentally, used by modern thinkers in the tradition of Leo Strauss in interpreting a whole variety of important philosophers).40 Cotta, the priest, is “conceal[ing] the sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes.” He does not believe in the gods, but for personal or public purposes he pretends to believe. So he is willing to confess his skepticism in “a conversation conducted between friends,” as he says, but he agrees that the existence of the gods should never be questioned “in public” (1.61, p. 24). Cotta, of course, does not explicitly confess to holding this position; on the contrary, he protests that he does believe in the gods. He avows that “I have never regarded any of these constituents of our religion with contempt,” and he even affirms that “Rome could never have achieved such greatness without the supreme benevolence of the immortal gods” (3.6, p. 109). But Gibbon (and Leo Strauss) would respond, probably, that this is what Cotta, the prudently and patriotically dissembling priest, has to say: for civic and public purposes, he has to pretend to believe in the gods.

  And yet the interpretation does not quite fit. After all, it is in the “conversation among friends,” not in public, that Cotta expresses both his doubts and his support for the gods.

  Still, is there any other way to understand Cotta’s seemingly conflicting and conflicted utterances? Perhaps there is. Here is a possibility. Perhaps Cotta thinks that the world—and hence our knowledge of the world—is divided into different epistemic domains that have their own proper truths and rules of belief. There is the natural world, perhaps, and the philosophical world; and then there is the civic world. Operating under the epistemic criteria proper to the natural and philosophical worlds, Cotta finds Balbus’s arguments for the gods profoundly deficient. But in the civic world, different rules of truth and belief apply, and these lead to different conclusions. In that world—in the civic world—the gods are real. Speaking as citizen and as priest, Cotta can accordingly assert that truth in complete good faith and without hesitation.

  Cotta affirms the existence of the gods in public, in other words, not because he needs to dissemble, but because in the world of the city, the gods are real. And he strenuously resists Balbus’s effort to import philosophical reasoning to bolster the civic religion, because the importation reflects—and effects—a corruption of categories that can only be harmful, both to philosophy and to the city (3.5–10, pp. 109–11).

  On this interpretation, Cotta is proposing and practicing what might be called civic fideism: the gods should be affirmed in the civic realm based on epistemic criteria appropriate to that realm, and should not be supported or judged by the kind of reasoning appropriate to other domains. Whether this interpretation accurately captures Cotta’s meaning is uncertain, but everything he says seems consistent with it. Moreover, if this is how Cotta is negotiating the problem of civic religion, he would be employing a strategy that has been used repeatedly in other contexts.

  In the Middle Ages, for example, a group of thinkers sometimes known as the Latin Averroists seem to have resisted suspicions of heterodoxy by proposing a “two truth” position under which what was true in one domain—philosophy—might be different from what was true in another—in particular, theology.41 More recently, drawing on a Wittgensteinian perspective that understands knowledge and truth in terms of “language games,” the philosopher Norman Malcolm has argued that religion is a distinctive kind of “language game” with its own rules that need not track the rules used in other epistemic contexts. Religion is “a form of life; it is language embedded in action.” In this view, religious discourse needs no justification outside itself. And God can exist in and for the language game of “religion” even if he does not exist in other such games—philosophy, for example, or science.42

  In a similar vein, the scientist and popular writer Stephen Jay Gould famously proposed that science and religion should be viewed as “nonoverlapping magisteria”;43 each could be true in its own realm and according to its own proper criteria. Contemporary legal philosophers have likewise proposed very similar strategies for defending the legitimacy of constitutional discourse,44 or of legal discourse generally.45 And although ordinary lawyers might find these theories overly subtle, these same lawyers instinctively act on a similar premise when they argue in court; they understand that in the courtroom they must limit themselves to “legal” reasoning, and that such reasoning may lead to conclusions that are taken to be true—true in law—that would not be adopted and would not be true in other domains based on other kinds of reasoning.46

  In a similar way, it seems, Cotta wants to treat civic religion as a distinctive and valuable practice with its own epistemic rules and answerable only to itself. True, the priests and the augurs might not be able to satisfy the philosopher, but then, who appointed the philosopher to be the boss of the priests and augurs in the first place? Civic religion is its own domain, and it is safe and beyond challenge so long as it remains within its proper sanctuary.

  This at least seems a plausible interpretation of Cotta. Moreover, it is unlikely that Cotta was the only ancient practitioner of this mode of believing. In his searching examination of the “modalities of belief” by which ancient pagans maintained their myths, Paul Veyne invokes the notion of “mental balkanization,”47 and he attempts to identify and describe different “programs of truth”48 in which the nature of reality and the criteria of truthfulness differ. “A Greek put the gods ‘in heaven,’ ” Veyne observes, “but he would have been astounded to see them in the sky. He would have been no less astounded if someone, using time in its literal sense, told him that Hephaestus had just remarried or that Athena had aged a great deal lately. Then he would have realized that in his eyes mythic time had only a vague analogy with daily temporality.”49 It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that the accounts of the gods were merely lies, or even “fictions,” and thus unreal.

  Veyne offers an intriguing illustration from his own experience: “For my part, I hold ghosts to be simple fictions but perceive their truth nonetheless. I am almost neurotically afraid of them, and the months I spent sorting through the papers of a dead friend were an extended nightmare. At the very moment I type these pages I feel the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Nothing would reassure me more than to learn that ghosts ‘really’ exist. Then they would be a phenomenon like any other, which could be studied with the right instruments, a camera or a Geiger counter.”50

  So Cotta may have been not a dissembling skeptic after the manner of Gibbon but rather a civic fideist who in his mode of belief anticipated the Latin Averroists and the neo-Wittgensteinian “language game” theorists. And what about Cicero himself? Cicero begins the dialogue by identifying himself with Cotta’s philosophical school.51 And he gives Cotta the last word in the debate. But then he concludes the book by declaring that “Cotta’s argument seemed to Velleius [the Epicurean] to be more truthful, but in my eyes Balbus’ case seemed to come more closely to a semblance of the truth.”52 So Cicero professes to be a religious believer in the philosophical sense, not a civic fideist (or, if that interpretation see
ms unpersuasive, a Straussian skeptic) like Cotta.

  What to make of this? Is Cicero being disingenuous? Perhaps. He was, after all, a politician, and knew not to say things that would make political trouble for himself. In other writings Cicero ties moral duties closely to the good of the state, or of the public, arguing that while it is never permissible to dissimulate for private advantage, prevarication may be permissible if it serves the public good.53 He also believes that worship of the gods is good for the state; thus, early on in the book about the gods, Cicero reports with seeming approval the view that “without devotion to the gods all sense of the holy and of religious obligation is also lost. Once these disappear, our lives become fraught with disturbance and great chaos. It is conceivable that, if reverence for the gods is removed trust and the social bond between men and the uniquely pre-eminent virtue of justice will disappear.”54

  So perhaps Cicero fits Gibbon’s (and Augustine’s) interpretation; perhaps he is lying—or dutifully dissembling—out of timidity, or for the public good. And yet, as with Cotta, this interpretation does not quite fit, because in the dialogue itself Cicero both expresses uncertainty and indicates that he is drawn to a belief in the gods. If the dialogue was private enough to allow for sincerity, in other words, why would a skeptical Cicero have professed belief in the gods; if it was public enough to require such a (disingenuous) profession, why did he openly acknowledge his doubts?

  It seems, as James O’Donnell observes, that Cicero “was believer and skeptic, both at once.”55

  The Precarious Tenacity of Pagan Faith

  Believer and skeptic, both at once. It was a precarious position—but not an uncommon one. Then or now.

  Balbus’s philosophical paganism and Cotta’s pagan civic fideism might be seen as complementary in the sense that they both served, or at least sought, to sustain the civic religion that functioned to support and consecrate Roman life and the Roman city. Educated Romans who found it impossible to take the mythic religion at face value might choose one or the other of these alternatives. Some Romans surely did follow Balbus’s path: later Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus would be outstanding examples. We will notice them again, briefly, in a later chapter. Gibbon remarked in a disdainful tone on the efforts of “new Platonicians” and “fashionable philosophers” who “prosecuted the design of extracting allegorical wisdom from the fictions of the Greek poets” and who “recommended the worship of the ancient gods as the emblems or ministers of the Supreme Deity.”56