The Greeks and the Irrational
Page 13
But for the poet, and for the educated part of his audience, this language has now only the force of a traditional symbolism. The daemonic world has withdrawn, leaving man alone with his passions. And this is what gives Euripides' studies of crime their peculiar poignancy: he shows us men and women nakedly confronting the mystery of evil, no longer as an alien thing assailing their reason from without, but as a part of their own being— Yet, for ceasing to be supernatural, it is not the less mysterious and terrifying. Medea knows that she is at grips, not with an alastor, but with her own irrational self, her thumos. She entreats that self for mercy, as a slave begs mercy of a brutal master.45 But in vain: the springs of action are hidden in the thumos where neither reason nor pity can reach them. "I know what wickedness I am about to do; but the thumos is stronger than my purposes, thumos, the root of man's worst acts."46 On these words, she leaves the stage; when she returns, she has condemned her children to death and herself to a lifetime of foreseen unhappiness. For Medea has no Socratic "illusions of perspective"; she makes no mistake in her moral arithmetic, any more than she mistakes her passion for an evil spirit. Therein lies her supreme tragic quality.
Whether the poet had Socrates in mind when he wrote the Medea, I do not know. But a conscious rejection of the Socratic theory has been seen,47 I think rightly, in the famous words that he put into the mouth of Phaedra three years later. Misconduct, she says, does not depend on a failure of insight, "for plenty of people have a good understanding." No, we know and recognise our good, but fail to act on the knowledge: either a kind of inertia obstructs us, or we are distracted from our purpose by "some pleasure."48 This does look as if it had a controversial point, for it goes beyond what the dramatic situation requires or even suggests.49 Nor do these passages stand alone; the moral impotence of the reason is asserted more than once in fragments from lost plays.50 But to judge from extant pieces, what chiefly preoccupied Euripides in his later work was not so much the impotence of reason in man as the wider doubt whether any rational purpose could be seen in the ordering of human life and the governance of the world.51 That trend culminates in the Bacchae, whose religious content is, as a recent critic has said,52 the recognition of a "Beyond" which is outside our moral categories and inaccessible to our reason. I do not maintain that a consistent philosophy of life can be extracted from the plays (nor should we demand this of a dramatist writing in an age of doubt). But if we must attach a label, I still think that the word "irrationalist," which I once suggested,53 fits Euripides better than any other.
This does not imply that Euripides followed the extreme Physis school, who provided human weakness with a fashionable excuse by declaring that the passions were "natural" and therefore right, morality a convention and therefore a shackle to be cast off. "Be natural," says the Unjust Cause in the Clouds; "kick up your heels, laugh at the world, take no shame for anything."54 Certain characters in Euripides follow this counsel, if in a less lighthearted manner. "Nature willed it," says an erring daughter, "and nature pays no heed to rules: we women were made for this."55 "I don't need your advice," says a homosexual; "I can see for myself, but nature constrains me."56 Even the most deeply rooted of man's taboos, the prohibition of incest, is dismissed with the remark, "There's nothing shameful but thinking makes it so."57 There must have been young people in Euripides' circle who talked like that (we are familiar with their modern counterparts). But I doubt if the poet shared their opinions. For his Choruses repeatedly go out of their way to denounce, without much dramatic relevance, certain persons who "slight the law, to gratify lawless impulse," whose aim is "to do wrong and get away with it," whose theory and practice is "above the laws," for whom aidos and arete are mere words.58 These unnamed persons are surely the Physis men, or the pupils of the Physis men, the "realist" politicians whom we meet in Thucydides.
Euripides, then, if I am right about him, reflects not only the Enlightenment, but also the reaction against the Enlightenment—at any rate he reacted against the rationalist psychology of some of its exponents and the slick immoralism of others. To the violence of the public reaction there is, of course, other testimony. The audience that saw the Clouds was expected to enjoy the burning down of the Thinking Shop, and to care little if Socrates were burnt with it. But satirists are bad witnesses, and with sufficient good will it is possible to believe that the Clouds is just Aristophanes' friendly fun.59 More secure deductions can perhaps be drawn from a less familiar bit of evidence. A fragment of Lysias60 makes us acquainted with a certain dining-club. This club had a curious and shocking name: its members called themselves a profane parody of the name which respectable social clubs sometimes adopted. Liddell and Scott translate it "devil-worshippers," and that would be the literal meaning; but Lysias is no doubt right in saying that they chose the title "to make fun of the gods and of Athenian custom." He further tells us that they made a point of dining on unlucky days , which suggests that the club's purpose was to exhibit its scorn of superstition by deliberately tempting the gods, deliberately doing as many unlucky things as possible, including the adoption of an unlucky name. One might think this pretty harmless. But according to Lysias the gods were not amused: most of the members of the club died young, and the sole survivor, the poet Kinesias,61 was afflicted with a chronic disease so painful as to be worse than death. This unimportant story seems to me to illustrate two things rather well. It illustrates the sense of liberation—liberation from meaningless rules and irrational guilt-feelings—which the Sophists brought with them, and which made their teaching so attractive to the high-spirited and intelligent young. And it also shows how strong was the reaction against such rationalism in the breast of the average citizen: for Lysias evidently relies on the awful scandal of the dining-club to discredit Kinesias' testimony in a lawsuit.
But the most striking evidence of the reaction against the Enlightenment is to be seen in the successful prosecutions of intellectuals on religious grounds which took place at Athens in the last third of the fifth century. About 432 b.c.62 or a year or two later, disbelief in the supernatural63 and the teaching of astronomy64 were made indictable offences. The next thirty-odd years witnessed a series of heresy trials which is unique in Athenian history. The victims included most of the leaders of progressive thought at Athens—Anaxagoras,65 Diagoras, Socrates, almost certainly Protagoras also,66 and possibly Euripides.67 In all these cases save the last the prosecution was successful: Anaxagoras may have been fined and banished; Diagoras escaped by flight; so, probably, did Protagoras; Socrates, who could have done the same, or could have asked for a sentence of banishment, chose to stay and drink the hemlock. All these were famous people. How many obscurer persons may have suffered for their opinions we do not know.68 But the evidence we have is more than enough to prove that the Great Age of Greek Enlightenment was also, like our own time, an Age of Persecution—banishment of scholars, blinkering of thought, and even (if we can believe the tradition about Protagoras)69 burning of books.
This distressed and puzzled nineteenth-century professors, who had not our advantage of familiarity with this kind of behaviour. It puzzled them the more because it happened at Athens, the "school of Hellas," the "headquarters of philosophy," and, so far as our information goes, nowhere else.70 Hence a tendency to cast doubt on the evidence wherever possible; and where this was not possible, to explain that the real motive behind the prosecutions was political. Up to a point, this was doubtless true, at least in some of the cases: the accusers of Anaxagoras were presumably, as Plutarch says, striking at his patron Pericles; and Socrates might well have escaped condemnation had he not been associated with men like Critias and Alcibiades. But granting all this, we have still to explain why at this period a charge of irreligion was so often selected as the surest means of suppressing an unwelcome voice or damaging a political opponent. We seem driven to assume the existence among the masses of an exasperated religious bigotry on which politicians could play for their own purposes. And the exasperation must have had
a cause.
Nilsson has suggested71 that it was whipped up by the professional diviners, who saw in the advance of rationalism a threat to their prestige, and even to their livelihood. That seems quite likely. The proposer of the decree which set off the series of prosecutions was the professional diviner Diopeithes; Anaxagoras had exposed the true nature of so-called "portents";72 while Socrates had a private "oracle"73 of his own which may well have aroused jealousy.74 The influence of diviners, however, had its limits. To judge by the constant jokes at their expense in Aristophanes, they were not greatly loved or (save at moments of crisis)75 wholly trusted: like the politicians, they might exploit popular sentiment, but they were hardly in a position to create it.
More important, perhaps, was the influence of wartime hysteria. If we allow for the fact that wars cast their shadows before them and leave emotional disturbances behind them, the Age of Persecution coincides pretty closely with the longest and most disastrous war in Greek history. The coincidence is hardly accidental. It has been observed that "in times of danger to the community the whole tendency to conformity is greatly strengthened: the herd huddles together and becomes more intolerant than ever of 'cranky' opinion."76 We have seen this observation confirmed in two recent wars, and we may assume that it was not otherwise in antiquity. Antiquity had indeed a conscious reason for insisting on religious conformity in wartime, where we have only unconscious ones. To offend the gods by doubting their existence, or by calling the sun a stone, was risky enough in peacetime; but in war it was practically treason—it amounted to helping the enemy. For religion was a collective responsibility. The gods were not content to strike down the individual offender: did not Hesiod say that whole cities often suffered for one bad man?77 That these ideas were still very much alive in the minds of the Athenian populace is evident from the enormous hysterical fuss created by the mutilation of the Hermae.78
That, I think, is part of the explanation—superstitious terror based on the solidarity of the city-state. I should like to believe that it was the whole explanation. But it would be dishonest not to recognise that the new rationalism carried with it real as well as imaginary dangers for the social order. In discarding the Inherited Conglomerate, many people discarded with it the religious restraints that had held human egotism on the leash. To men of strong moral principle—a Protagoras or a Democritus—that did not matter: their conscience was adult enough to stand up without props. It was otherwise with most of their pupils. To them, the liberation of the individual meant an unlimited freedom of self-assertion; it meant rights without duties, unless self-assertion is a duty; "what their fathers had called self-control they called an excuse for cowardice."79 Thucydides put that down to war mentality, and no doubt this was the immediate cause; Wilamowitz rightly remarked that the authors of the Corcyraean massacres did not have to learn about the transvaluation of values from a course of lectures by Hippias. The new rationalism did not enable men to behave like beasts—men have always been able to do that. But it enabled them to justify their brutality to themselves, and that at a time when the external temptations to brutal conduct were particularly strong. As someone has said in reference to our own enlightened age, seldom have so many babies been poured out with so little bath-water.80 Therein lay the immediate danger, a danger which has always shown itself when an Inherited Conglomerate was in process of breaking down. In Professor Murray's words, "Anthropology seems to show that these Inherited Conglomerates have practically no chance of being true or even sensible; and, on the other hand, that no society can exist without them or even submit to any drastic correction of them without social danger."81 Of the latter truth there was, I take it, some confused inkling in the minds of the men who charged Socrates with corrupting the young. Their fears were not groundless; but as people do when they are frightened, they struck with the wrong weapon and they struck the wrong man.
The Enlightenment also affected the social fabric in another and more permanent way. What Jacob Burckhardt said of nineteenth-century religion, that it was "rationalism for the few and magic for the many," might on the whole be said of Greek religion from the late fifth century onwards. Thanks to the Enlightenment, and the absence of universal education, the divorce between the beliefs of the few and the beliefs of the many was made absolute, to the injury of both. Plato is almost the last Greek intellectual who seems to have real social roots; his successors, with very few exceptions, make the impression of existing beside society rather than in it. They are "sapientes" first, citizens afterwards or not at all, and their touch upon contemporary social realities is correspondingly uncertain. This fact is familiar. What is less often noticed is the regressiveness of popular religion in the Age of Enlightenment. The first signs of this regression appeared during the Peloponnesian War, and were doubtless in part due to the war. Under the stresses that it generated, people began to slip back from the too difficult achievement of the Periclean Age; cracks appeared in the fabric, and disagreeably primitive things poked up here and there through the cracks. When that happened, there was no longer any effective check on their growth. As the intellectuals withdrew further into a world of their own, the popular mind was left increasingly defenceless, though it must be said that for several generations the comic poets continued to do their best. The loosening of the ties of civic religion began to set men free to choose their own gods, instead of simply worshipping as their fathers had done; and, left without guidance, a growing number relapsed with a sigh of relief into the pleasures and comforts of the primitive.
I shall conclude this chapter by giving some examples of what I call regression. One instance we have already had occasion to notice82—the increased demand for magical healing which within a generation or two transformed Asclepius from a minor hero into a major god, and made his temple at Epidaurus a place of pilgrimage as famous as Lourdes is to-day. It is a reasonable guess that his fame at Athens (and perhaps elsewhere too) dated from the Great Plague of 430.83 That visitation, according to Thucydides, convinced some people that religion was useless,84 since piety proved no protection against bacilli; but it must have set others looking for a new and better magic. Nothing could be done at the time; but in 420, during the interval of peace, Asclepius was solemnly inducted into Athens, accompanied, or more probably represented, by his Holy Snake.85 Until a house could be built for him, he enjoyed the hospitality of no less a person than the poet Sophocles—a fact which has its bearing on the understanding of Sophocles' poetry. As Wilamowitz observed,86 one cannot think that either Aeschylus or Euripides would have cared to entertain a Holy Snake. But nothing illustrates better the polarisation of the Greek mind at this period than the fact that the generation which paid such honour to this medical reptile saw also the publication of some of the most austerely scientific of the Hippocratic treatises.87
A second example of regression may be seen in the fashion for foreign cults, mostly of a highly emotional, "orgiastic" kind, which developed with surprising suddenness during the Peloponnesian War.88 Before it was over, there had appeared at Athens the worship of the Phrygian "Mountain Mother," Cybele, and that of her Thracian counterpart, Bendis; the mysteries of the Thraco-Phrygian Sabazius, a sort of savage un-Hellenised Dionysus; and the rites of the Asiatic "dying gods," Attis and Adonis. I have discussed this significant development elsewhere,89 so shall not say more about it here.
A generation or so later, we find the regression taking an even cruder form. That in the fourth century there was at Athens plenty of "magic for the many," and in the most literal sense of the term, we know from the first-hand evidence of the "defixiones." The practice of or was a kind of magical attack. It was believed that you could bind a person's will, or cause his death, by invoking upon him the curse of the underworld Powers; you inscribed the curse on something durable, a leaden tablet or a potsherd, and you placed it for choice in a dead man's grave. Hundreds of such "defixiones" have been found by excavators in many parts of the Mediterranean world,90 and indeed similar practice
s are observed occasionally to-day, both in Greece91 and in other parts of Europe.92 But it seems significant that the oldest examples so far discovered come from Greece, most of them from Attica; and that while exceedingly few examples can be referred with certainty to the fifth century, in the fourth they are suddenly quite numerous.93 The persons cursed in them include well-known public figures like Phocion and Demosthenes,94 which suggests that the practice was not confined to slaves or aliens. Indeed, it was sufficiently common in Plato's day for him to think it worth while to legislate against it,95 as also against the kindred method of magical attack by maltreating a wax image of one's enemy.96 Plato makes it clear that people were really afraid of this magical aggression, and he would prescribe severe legal penalties for it (in the case of professional magicians the death penalty), not because he himself believes in black magic—as to that he professes to have an open mind97—but because black magic expresses an evil will and has evil psychological effects. Nor was this merely the private fussiness of an elderly moralist. From a passage in the speech Against Aristogeiton98 we may infer that in the fourth century attempts were actually made to repress magic by drastic legal action. Taking all this evidence together, in contrast with the almost complete silence of our fifth-century sources,99 I am inclined to conclude that one effect of the Enlightenment was to provoke in the second generation100 a revival of magic. That is not so paradoxical as it sounds: has not the breakdown of another Inherited Conglomerate been followed by similar manifestations in our own age?