The Greeks and the Irrational

by E R Dodds

  We have seen that the need for some such askesis was implicit from the first in the shamanistic tradition. But the archaic guilt-culture gave it a peculiar direction. The vegetarianism which is the central feature of Orphic and of some Pythagorean askesis is usually treated simply as a corollary to transmigration: the beast you kill for food may be the dwelling-place of a human soul or self. That is how Empedocles explained it. But he is not quite logical: he ought to have felt the same revulsion against eating vegetables, since he believed that his own occult self had once inhabited a bush.120 Behind his imperfect rationalisation there lies, I suspect, something older—the ancient horror of spilt blood. In scrupulous minds the fear of that pollution may well have extended its domain, as such fears will, until it embraced all shedding of blood, animal as well as human. As Aristophanes tells us, the rule of Orpheus was "shed no blood"; and Pythagoras is said to have avoided contact with butchers and huntsmen—presumably because they were not only wicked, but dangerously unclean, carriers of an infectious pollution.121 Besides food taboos, the Pythagorean Society seems to have imposed other austerities on its members, such as a rule of silence for novices, and certain sexual restrictions.122 But it was perhaps only Empedocles who took the final, logical step of the Manichee; I see no reason to disbelieve the statement that he denounced marriage and all sex relations,123 though the verses in which he did so are not actually preserved. If the tradition is right on this point, puritanism not only originated in Greece, but was carried by a Greek mind to its extreme theoretical limit.

  One question remains. What is the original root of all this wickedness? How comes it that a divine self sins and suffers in mortal bodies? As a Pythagorean poet phrased it, "Whence came mankind, and whence became so evil?"124 To this unescapable question Orphic poetry, at any rate later Orphic poetry, provided a mythological answer. It all began with the wicked Titans, who trapped the infant Dionysus, tore him to bits, boiled him, roasted him, ate him, and were themselves immediately burned up by a thunderbolt from Zeus; from the smoke of their remains sprang the human race, who thus inherit the horrid tendencies of the Titans, tempered by a tiny portion of divine soul-stuff, which is the substance of the god Dionysus still working in them as an occult self. Pausanias says that this story—or rather, the Titans' part in it—was invented by Onomacritus in the sixth century (he implies that the rending of Dionysus is older).125 And everyone believed Pausanias until Wilamowitz, finding no clear and certain allusion to the Titan myth in any writer earlier than the third century b.c., inferred it to be a Hellenistic invention.126 The inference has been accepted by one or two scholars whose judgement I respect,127 and it is with great hesitation that I differ from them and from Wilamowitz. There are indeed grounds for discounting Pausanias' statements about Onomacritus;128 yet several considerations combine to persuade me that the myth is nevertheless old. The first is its archaic character: it is founded on the ancient Dionysiac ritual of Sparagmos and Omophagia,129 and it implies the archaic belief in inherited guilt, which in the Hellenistic Age had begun to be a discredited superstition.130 The second is the Pindar quotation in Plato's Meno, where "the penalty of an ancient grief" is most naturally explained as referring to human responsibility for the slaying of Dionysus.131 Thirdly, in one passage of the Laws Plato refers to people who "show off the old Titan nature,"132 and in another to sacrilegious impulses which are "neither of man nor of god" but arise "from old misdeeds unpurgeable by man."133 And fourthly, we are told that Plato's pupil Xenocrates somehow connected the notion of the body as a "prison" with Dionysus and the Titans.134 Individually, these apparent references to the myth can at a pinch be explained away; but taking them together, I find it hard to resist the conclusion that the complete story was known to Plato and his public.135

  If that is so, ancient like modern puritanism had its doctrine of Original Sin, which explained the universality of guilt-feelings. True, the physical transmission of guilt by bodily inheritance was strictly inconsistent with the view which made the persistent occult self its carrier. But that need not greatly surprise us. The Indian Upanishads similarly managed to combine the old belief in hereditary pollution with the newer doctrine of reincarnation;136 and Christian theology finds it possible to reconcile the sinful inheritance of Adam with individual moral responsibility. The Titan myth neatly explained to the Greek puritan why he felt himself to be at once a god and a criminal; the "Apolline" sentiment of remoteness from the divine and the "Dionysiac" sentiment of identity with it were both of them accounted for and both of them justified. That was something that went deeper than any logic.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER V

  VI

  Rationalism and Reaction in the Classical Age

  The major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

  A. N. Whitehead

  In the previous chapters of this book I have tried to illustrate within a particular field of belief the slow, age-long building up, out of the deposit left by successive religious movements, of what Gilbert Murray in a recently published lecture has called "the Inherited Conglomerate."1 The geological metaphor is apt, for religious growth is geological: its principle is, on the whole and with exceptions, agglomeration, not substitution. A new belief-pattern very seldom effaces completely the pattern that was there before: either the old lives on as an element in the new—sometimes an unconfessed and half-unconscious element—or else the two persist side by side, logically incompatible, but contemporaneously accepted by different individuals or even by the same individual. As an example of the first situation, we have seen how Homeric notions like ate were taken up into, and transformed by, the archaic guilt-culture. As an example of the second, we have seen how the Classical Age inherited a whole series of inconsistent pictures of the "soul" or "self"—the living corpse in the grave, the shadowy image in Hades, the perishable breath that is spilt in the air or absorbed in the aether, the daemon that is reborn in other bodies. Though of varying age and derived from different culture-patterns, all these pictures persisted in the background of fifth-century thinking; you could take some one of them seriously, or more than one, or even all, since there was no Established Church to assure you that this was true and the other false. On questions like that there was no "Greek view," but only a muddle of conflicting answers.

  1 For notes to chapter vi see pages 195-206.

  Such, then, was the Inherited Conglomerate at the end of the Archaic Age, historically intelligible as the reflex of changing human needs over many successive generations, but intellectually a mass of confusion. We saw in passing how Aeschylus attempted to master this confusion and to elicit from it something which made moral sense.2 But in the period between Aeschylus and Plato the attempt was not renewed. In that period the gap between the beliefs of the people and the beliefs of the intellectuals, which is already implicit in Homer,3 widens to a complete breach, and prepares the way for the gradual dissolution of the Conglomerate. With certain consequences of this process, and of the attempts that were made to check it, I shall be concerned in the remaining chapters.

  The process itself does not, in its general aspect, form part of my subject. It belongs to the history of Greek rationalism, which has been written often enough.4 But certain things are perhaps worth saying about it. One is that the "Aufklärung" or Enlightenment was not initiated by the Sophists. It seems desirable to say this, because there are still people who talk as if "Enlightenment" and Sophistic Movement were the same thing, and proceed to envelope both in the same blanket of condemnation or (less often) approval. The Enlightenment is of course much older; its roots are in sixth-century Ionia; it is at work in Hecataeus, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus, and in a later generation is carried further by speculative scientists like Anaxagoras and Democritus. Hecataeus is the first Greek who admitted that he found Greek mythology "funny,"5 and set to work to make it less funny by inventing rationalist explanations, while his contemporary Xenophanes attacked the Homeric and Hesiodi
c myths from the moral angle.6 More important for our purposes is the statement that Xenophanes denied the validity of divination :7 if this is true, it means that, almost alone among classical Greek thinkers, he swept aside not only the pseudo-science of reading omens but the whole deep-seated complex of ideas about inspiration which occupied us in an earlier chapter. But his decisive contribution was his discovery of the relativity of religious ideas. "If the ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox":8 once that had been said, it could only be a matter of time before the entire fabric of traditional belief began to loosen. Xenophanes was himself a deeply religious man; he had his private faith in a god "who is not like men in appearance or in mind."9 But he was conscious that it was faith, not knowledge. No man, he says, has ever had, or ever will have, sure knowledge about gods; even if he should chance to hit on the exact truth, he cannot know that he has done so, though we can all have our opinions.10 That honest distinction between what is knowable and what is not appears again and again in fifth-century thought,11 and is surely one of its chief glories; it is the foundation of scientific humility.

  Again, if we turn to the fragments of Heraclitus, we find a whole series of direct assaults on the Conglomerate, some of which concern the types of belief we have considered in previous chapters. His denial of validity to dream-experience we have already noticed.12 He made fun of ritual catharsis, comparing those who purge blood with blood to a man who should try to wash off dirt by bathing in mud.13 That was a direct blow at the consolations of religion. So was his complaint that "the customary mysteries" were conducted in an unholy manner, though unluckily we do not know on what the criticism was based or exactly what mysteries he had in mind.14 Again, the saying "dead is nastier than dung," might have been approved by Socrates, but it was a studied insult to ordinary Greek sentiment: it dismisses in three words all the pother about burial rites which figures so largely both in Attic tragedy and in Greek military history, and indeed the whole tangle of feelings which centred round the ghost-corpse.15 Another three-word maxim, "character is destiny," similarly dismisses by implication the whole set of archaic beliefs about inborn luck and divine temptation.16 And finally, Heraclitus had the temerity to attack what to this day is still a leading feature of Greek popular religion, the cult of images, which he declared was like talking to a man's house instead of talking to its owner.17 Had Heraclitus been an Athenian, he would pretty certainly have been had up for blasphemy, as Wilamowitz says.18

  However, we must not exaggerate the influence of these early pioneers. Xenophanes, and still more Heraclitus, give the impression of being isolated figures even in Ionia,19 and it was a long time before their ideas found any echo on the Mainland. Euripides is the first Athenian of whom we can say with confidence that he had read Xenophanes,20 and he is also represented as introducing the teaching of Heraclitus for the first time to the Athenian public.21 But by Euripides' day the Enlightenment had been carried much further. It was probably Anaxagoras who taught him to call the divine sun "a golden clod,"22 and it may have been the same philosopher who inspired his mockery of the professional seers;23 while it was certainly the Sophists who set him and his whole generation discussing fundamental moral questions in terms of versus Physis, "Law" or "Custom" or "Convention" versus "Nature."

  I do not propose to say much about this celebrated antithesis, whose origin and ramifications have been carefully examined in a recent book by a young Swiss scholar, Felix Heinimann.24 But it may not be superfluous to point out that thinking in these terms could lead to widely different conclusions according to the meaning you assigned to the terms themselves. Nomas could stand for the Conglomerate, conceived as the inherited burden of irrational custom; or it could stand for an arbitrary rule consciously imposed by certain classes in their own interest; or it could stand for a rational system of State law, the achievement which distinguished Greeks from barbarians. Similarly Physis could represent an unwritten, unconditionally valid "natural law," against the particularism of local custom; or it could represent the "natural rights" of the individual, against the arbitrary requirements of the State; and this in turn could pass—as always happens when rights are asserted without a corresponding recognition of duties—into a pure anarchic immoralism, the "natural right of the stronger" as expounded by the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue and by Callicles in the Gorgias. It is not surprising that an antithesis whose terms were so ambiguous led to a vast amount of argument at cross-purposes. But through the fog of confused and for us fragmentary controversy we can dimly perceive two great issues being fought out. One is the ethical question concerning the source and the validity of moral and political obligation. The other is the psychological question concerning the springs of human conduct—why do men behave as they do, and how can they be induced to behave better? It is only the second of these issues which concerns us here.

  On that issue the first generation of Sophists, in particular Protagoras, seem to have held a view whose optimism is pathetic in retrospect, but historically intelligible. "Virtue or Efficiency (arete) could be taught": by criticising his traditions, by modernising the Nomos which his ancestors had created and eliminating from it the last vestiges of "barbarian silliness,"25 man could acquire a new Art of Living, and human life could be raised to new levels hitherto undreamed of. Such a hope is understandable in men who had witnessed the swift growth of material prosperity after the Persian Wars, and the unexampled flowering of the spirit that accompanied it, culminating in the unique achievements of Periclean Athens. For that generation, the Golden Age was no lost paradise of the dim past, as Hesiod had believed; for them it lay not behind but ahead, and not so very far ahead either. In a civilised community, declared Protagoras robustly, the very worst citizen was already a better man than the supposedly noble savage.26 Better, in fact, fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. But history has, alas, a short way with optimists. Had Tennyson experienced the latest fifty years of Europe he might, I fancy, have reconsidered his preference; and Protagoras before he died had ample ground for revising his. Faith in the inevitability of progress had an even shorter run in Athens than in England.27

  In what I take to be a quite early dialogue, Plato set this Protagorean view of human nature over against the Socratic. Superficially, the two have much in common. Both use the traditional28 utilitarian language: "good" means "good for the individual," and is not distinguished from the "profitable" or the "useful." And both have the traditional29 intellectualist approach: they agree, against the common opinion of their time, that if a man really knew what was good for him he would act on his knowledge.30 Each, however, qualifies his intellectualism with a different sort of reservation. For Protagoras, arete can be taught, but not by an intellectual discipline: one "picks it up," as a child picks up his native language;31 it is transmitted not by formal teaching, but by what the anthropologists call "social control." For Socrates, on the other hand, arete is or should be epistēmē, a branch of scientific knowledge: in this dialogue he is even made to talk as if its appropriate method were the nice calculation of future pains and pleasures, and I am willing to believe that he did at times so talk.32 Yet he is also made to doubt whether arete can be taught at all, and this too I am willing to accept as historical.33 For to Socrates arete was something which proceeded from within outward; it was not a set of behaviour-patterns to be acquired through habituation, but a consistent attitude of mind springing from a steady insight into the nature and meaning of human life. In its self-consistency it resembled a science;34 but I think we should be wrong to interpret the insight as purely logical—it involved the whole man.35 Socrates no doubt believed in "following the argument wherever it led"; but he found that too often it led only to fresh questions, and where it failed him he was prepared to follow other guides. We should not forget that he took both dreams and oracles very seriously,36 and that he habitually heard and obeyed an inner voice which knew more than he did (if we can believe Xenophon,37 he called it, quite simply, "the voi
ce of God").

  Thus neither Protagoras nor Socrates quite fits the popular modern conception of a "Greek rationalist." But what seems to us odd is that both of them dismiss so easily the part played by emotion in determining ordinary human behavior. And we know from Plato that this seemed odd to their contemporaries also; on this matter there was a sharp cleavage between the intellectuals and the common man. "Most people," says Socrates, "do not think of knowledge as a force , much less a dominant or ruling force: they think a man may often have knowledge while he is ruled by something else, at one time anger, at another pleasure or pain, sometimes love, very often fear; they really picture knowledge as a slave which is kicked about by all these other things."38 Protagoras agrees that this is the common view, but considers it not worth discussing—-"the common man will say anything."39 Socrates, who does discuss it, explains it away by translating it into intellectual terms: the nearness of an immediate pleasure or pain leads to false judgements analogous to errors of visual perspective; a scientific moral arithmetic would correct these.40

  It is unlikely that such reasoning impressed the common man. The Greek had always felt the experience of passion as something mysterious and frightening, the experience of a force that was in him, possessing him, rather than possessed by him. The very word p&thos testifies to that: like its Latin equivalent passio, it means something that "happens to" a man, something of which he is the passive victim. Aristotle compares the man in a state of passion to men asleep, insane, or drunk: his reason, like theirs, is in suspense.41 We saw in earlier chapters42 how Homer's heroes and the men of the Archaic Age interpreted such experience in religious terms, as ate, as a communication of menos, or as the direct working of a daemon who uses the human mind and body as his instrument. That is the usual view of simple people: "the primitive under the influence of strong passion considers himself as possessed, or ill, which for him is the same thing."43 That way of thinking was not dead even in the late fifth century. Jason at the end of the Medea can explain his wife's conduct only as the act of an alastor, the daemon created by unatoned bloodguilt; the Chorus of the Hippolytus think that Phaedra may be possessed, and she herself speaks at first of her condition as the ate of a daemon.44