The Greeks and the Irrational

by E R Dodds

  In the light of these and other passages I think we have to recognise two strains or tendencies in Plato's thinking about the status of man. There is the faith and pride in human reason which he inherited from the fifth century, and for which he found religious sanction by equating the reason with the occult self of shamanistic tradition. And there is the bitter recognition of human worthlessness which was forced upon him by his experience of contemporary Athens and Syracuse. This too could be expressed in the language of religion, as a denial of all value to the activities and interests of this world in comparison with "the things Yonder." A psychologist might say that the relation between the two tendencies was not one of simple opposition, but that the first became a compensation—or overcompensation—for the second: the less Plato cared for actual humanity, the more nobly he thought of the soul. The tension between the two was resolved for a time in the dream of a new Rule of the Saints, an élite of purified men who should unite the incompatible virtues of (to use Mr. Koestler's terms) the Yogi and the Commissar, and thereby save not only themselves but society. But when that illusion faded, Plato's underlying despair came more and more to the surface, translating itself into religious terms, until it found its logical expression in his final proposals for a completely "closed" society,44 to be ruled not by the illuminated reason, but (under God) by custom and religious law. The "Yogi," with his faith in the possibility and necessity of intellectual conversion, did not wholly vanish even now, but he certainly retreated before the "Commissar," whose problem is the conditioning of human cattle. On this interpretation the pessimism of the Laws is not a senile aberration: it is the fruit of Plato's personal experience of life, which in turn carried in it the seed of much later thought.45

  It is in the light of this estimate of human nature that we must consider Plato's final proposals for stabilising the Conglomerate. But before turning to that, I must say a word about his opinions on another aspect of the irrational soul which has concerned us in this book, namely, the importance traditionally ascribed to it as the source or channel of an intuitive insight. In this matter, it seems to me, Plato remained throughout his life faithful to the principles of his master. Knowledge, as distinct from true opinion, remained for him the affair of the intellect, which can justify its beliefs by rational argument. To the intuitions both of the seer and of the poet he consistently refused the title of knowledge, not because he thought them necessarily groundless, but because their grounds could not be produced.46 Hence Greek custom was right, he thought, in giving the last word in military matters to the commander-in-chief, as a trained expert, and not to the seers who accompanied him on campaign; in general, it was the task of rational judgement, to distinguish between the true seer and the charlatan.47 In much the same way, the products of poetic intuition must be subject to the rational and moral censorship of the trained legislator. All that was in keeping with Socratic rationalism.48 Nevertheless, as we have noticed,49 Socrates had taken irrational intuition quite seriously, whether it expressed itself in dreams, in the inner voice of the "daemonion," or in the utterance of the Pythia. And Plato makes a great show of taking it seriously too. Of the pseudo-sciences of augury and hepatoscopy he permits himself to speak with thinly veiled contempt;50 but "the madness that comes by divine gift," the madness that inspires the prophet or the poet, or purges men in the Corybantic rite—this, as we saw in an earlier chapter, is treated as if it were a real intrusion of the supernatural into human life.

  How far did Plato intend this way of talking to be taken au pied de la lettre? In recent years the question has been often raised, and variously answered;51 but unanimity has not been reached, nor is it likely to be. I should be inclined myself to say three things about it:

  a) That Plato perceived what he took to be a real and significant analogy between mediumship, poetic creation, and certain pathological manifestations of the religious consciousness, all three of which have the appearance of being "given"52 ab extra;

  b) That the traditional religious explanations of these phenomena were, like much else in the Conglomerate, accepted by him provisionally, not because he thought them finally adequate, but because no other language was available to express that mysterious "givenness";53

  c) That while he thus accepted (with whatever ironical reservations) the poet, the prophet, and the "Corybantic" as being in some sense channels54 of divine or daemonic55 grace, he nevertheless rated their activities far below those of the rational self,56 and held that they must be subject to the control and criticism of reason, since reason was for him no passive plaything of hidden forces, but an active manifestation of deity in man, a daemon in its own right. I suspect that, had Plato lived to-day, he would have been profoundly interested in the new depth-psychology, but appalled by the tendency to reduce the human reason to an instrument for rationalising unconscious impulses.

  Much of what I have said applies also to Plato's fourth type of "divine madness," the madness of Eros. Here too was a "given," something which happens to a man without his choosing it or knowing why—the work, therefore, of a formidable daemon.57 Here too—here, indeed, above all58—Plato recognised the operation of divine grace, and used the old religious language59 to express that recognition. But Eros has a special importance in Plato's thought as being the one mode of experience which brings together the two natures of man, the divine self and the tethered beast.60 For Eros is frankly rooted in what man shares with the animals,61 the physiological impulse of sex (a fact which is unfortunately obscured by the persistent modern misuse of the term "Platonic love"); yet Eros also supplies the dynamic impulse which drives the soul forward in its quest of a satisfaction transcending earthly experience. It thus spans the whole compass of human personality, and makes the one empirical bridge between man as he is and man as he might be. Plato in fact comes very close here to the Freudian concept of libido and sublimation. But he never, as it seems to me, fully integrated this line of thought with the rest of his philosophy; had he done so, the notion of the intellect as a self-sufficient entity independent of the body might have been imperilled, and Plato was not going to risk that.62

  I turn now to Plato's proposals for reforming and stabilising the Inherited Conglomerate.63 They are set forth in his last work, the Laws, and may be briefly summarised as follows.

  1. He would provide religious faith with a logical foundation by proving certain basic propositions.

  2. He would give it a legal foundation by incorporating these propositions in an unalterable legal code, and imposing legal penalties on any person propagating disbelief in them.

  3. He would give it an educational foundation by making the basic propositions a compulsory subject of instruction for all children.

  4. He would give it a social foundation by promoting an intimate union of religious and civic life at all levels—as we should phrase it, a union of Church and State.

  It may be said that most of these proposals were designed merely to strengthen and generalise existing Athenian practice. But when we take them together we see that they represent the first attempt to deal systematically with the problem of controlling religious belief. The problem itself was new: in an age of faith no one thinks of proving that gods exist or inventing techniques to induce belief in them. And some of the methods proposed were apparently new: in particular, no one before Plato seems to have realised the importance of early religious training as a means of conditioning the future adult. Moreover, when we look more closely at the proposals themselves, it becomes evident that Plato was trying not only to stabilise but also to reform, not only to buttress the traditional structure but also to discard so much of it as was plainly rotten and replace it by something more durable.

  Plato's basic propositions are:

  a) That gods exist;

  b) That they are concerned with the fate of mankind;

  c) That they cannot be bribed.

  The arguments by which he attempted to prove these statements do not concern us here; they belong to t
he history of theology. But it is worth noticing some of the points on which he felt obliged to break with tradition, and some on which he compromised.

  Who, in the first place, are the gods whose existence Plato sought to prove and whose worship he sought to enforce ? The answer is not free from ambiguity. As regards worship, a passage in Laws iv provides a completely traditional list—gods of Olympus, gods of the city, gods of the underworld, local daemons and heroes.64 These are the conventional figures of public cult, the gods who, as he puts it elsewhere in the Laws, "exist according to customary usage."65 But are they the gods whose existence Plato thought he could prove? We have ground for doubting it. In the Cratylus he makes Socrates say that we know nothing about these gods, not even their true names, and in the Phaedrus, that we imagine a god without having seen one or formed any adequate idea of what he is like.66 The reference in both passages is to mythological gods. And the implication seems to be that the cult of such gods has no rational basis, either empirical or metaphysical. Its level of validity is, at best, of the same order as that which Plato allows to the intuitions of the poet or the seer.

  The supreme god of Plato's personal faith was, I take it, a very different sort of being, one whom (in the words of the Timaeus) "it is hard to find and impossible to describe to the masses."67 Presumably Plato felt that such a god could not be introduced into the Conglomerate without destroying it; at any rate he abstained from the attempt. But there was one kind of god whom everyone could see, whose divinity could be recognised by the masses,68 and about whom the philosopher could make, in Plato's opinion, logically valid statements. These "visible gods" were the heavenly bodies—or, more exactly, the divine minds by which those bodies were animated or controlled.69 The great novelty in Plato's project for religious reform was the emphasis he laid, not merely on the divinity of sun, moon, and stars (for that was nothing new), but on their cult. In the Laws, not only are the stars described as "the gods in heaven," the sun and moon as "great gods," but Plato insists that prayer and sacrifice shall be made to them by all;70 and the focal point of his new State Church is to be a joint cult of Apollo and the sun-god Helios, to which the High Priest will be attached and the highest political officers will be solemnly dedicated.71 This joint cult—in place of the expected cult of Zeus—expresses the union of old and new, Apollo standing for the traditionalism of the masses, and Helios for the new "natural religion" of the philosophers;72 it is Plato's last desperate attempt to build a bridge between the intellectuals and the people, and thereby save the unity of Greek belief and of Greek culture.

  A similar mixture of necessary reform with necessary compromise may be observed in Plato's handling of his other basic propositions. In dealing with the traditional problem of divine justice, he firmly ignores not only the old belief in "jealous" gods,73 but (with certain exceptions in religious law)74 the old idea that the wicked man is punished in his descendants. That the doer shall suffer in person is for Plato a demonstrable law of the cosmos, which must be taught as an article of faith. The detailed working of the law is not, however, demonstrable: it belongs to the domain of "myth" or "incantation."75 His own final belief in this matter is set forth in an impressive passage of Laws x:76 the law of cosmic justice is a law of spiritual gravitation; in this life and in the whole series of lives every soul gravitates naturally to the company of its own kind, and therein lies its punishment or its reward; Hades, it is hinted, is not a place but a state of mind.77 And to this Plato adds another warning, a warning which marks the transition from the classical to the Hellenistic outlook: if any man demands personal happiness from life, let him remember that the cosmos does not exist for his sake, but he for the sake of the cosmos.78 All this, however, was above the head of the common man, as Plato well knew; he does not, if I understand him rightly, propose to make it part of the compulsory official creed.

  On the other hand, Plato's third proposition—that the gods cannot be bribed—implied a more drastic interference with traditional belief and practice It involved rejecting the ordinary interpretation of sacrifice as an expression of gratitude for favours to come, "do ut des " a view which he had long ago stigmatised in the Euthyphro as the application to religion of a commercial technique But it seems plain that the great emphasis he lays on this point both in the Republic and in the Laws is due not merely to theoretical considerations; he is attacking certain widespread piactices which in his eyes constitute a threat to public morality. The "travelling priests and diviners" and purveyors of cathartic ritual who are denounced in a much-discussed passage of Republic ii, and again in the Laws,80 are not, I think, merely those minor charlatans who in all societies prey upon the ignorant and superstitious. For they are said in both places to mislead whole cities,81 an eminence that minor charlatans seldom achieve. The scope of Plato's criticism is in my view wider than some scholars have been willing to admit: he is attacking, I believe, the entire tradition of ritual purification, so far as it was in the hands of private, "unlicensed" persons.82

  This does not mean that he proposed to abolish ritual purification altogether. For Plato himself, the only truly effective catharsis was no doubt the practice of mental withdrawal and concentration which is described in the Phaedo:83 the trained philosopher could cleanse his own soul without the help of ritual. But the common man could not, and the faith in ritual catharsis was far too deeply rooted in the popular mind for Plato to propose its complete elimination. He felt, however, the need for something like a Church, and a canon of authorised rituals, if religion was to be prevented from running off the rails and becoming a danger to public morality. In the field of religion, as in that of morals, the great enemy which had to be fought was antinomian individualism; and he looked to Delphi to organise the defence. We need not assume that Plato believed the Pythia to be verbally inspired. My own guess would be that his attitude to Delphi was more like that of a modern "political Catholic" towards the Vatican: he saw in Delphi a great conservative force which could be harnessed to the task of stabilising the Greek religious tradition and checking both the spread of materialism and the growth of aberrant tendencies within the tradition itself. Hence his insistence, both in the Republic and in the Laws, that the authority of Delphi is to be absolute in all religious matters.84 Hence also the choice of Apollo to share with Helios the supreme position in the hierarchy of State cults: while Helios provides the few with a relatively rational form of worship, Apollo will dispense to the many, in regulated and harmless doses, the archaic ritual magic which they demand.85

  Of such legalised magic the Laws provides many examples, some of them startlingly primitive. For instance, an animal, or even an inanimate object, which has caused the death of a man, is to be tried, condemned, and banished beyond the frontiers of the State, because it carries a "miasma" or pollution.86 In this and many other matters Plato follows Athenian practice and Delphic authority. We need not suppose that he himself attached any value to proceedings of this kind; they were the price to be paid for harnessing Delphi and keeping superstition within bounds.

  It remains to say a few words about the sanctions by which Plato proposes to enforce acceptance of his reformed version of the traditional beliefs. Those who offend against it by speech or act are to be denounced to the courts, and, if found guilty, are to be given not less than five years' solitary confinement in a reformatory, where they will be subjected to intensive religious propaganda, but denied all other human intercourse; if this fails to cure them, they will be put to death.87 Plato in fact wishes to revive the fifth-century heresy trials (he makes it plain that he would condemn Anaxagoras unless he mended his opinions);88 all that is new is the proposed psychological treatment of the guilty. That the fate of Socrates did not warn Plato of the danger inherent in such measures may seem strange indeed.89 But he apparently felt that freedom of thought in religious matters involved so grave a threat to society that the measures had to be taken. "Heresy" is perhaps a misleading word to use in this connection. Plato's proposed theocra
tic State does in certain respects foreshadow the mediaeval theocracy. But the mediaeval Inquisition was chiefly concerned lest people should suffer in the next world for having held false opinions in this one; overtly, at any rate, it was trying to save souls at the expense of bodies. Plato's concern was quite different. He was trying to save society from contamination by dangerous thoughts, which in his view were visibly destroying the springs of social conduct.90 Any teaching which weakens the conviction that honesty is the best policy he feels obliged to prohibit as antisocial. The motives behind his legislation are thus practical and secular; in this respect the nearest historical analogue is not the Inquisition, but those trials of "intellectual deviationists" with which our own generation has become so familiar.

  Such, then, in brief, were Plato's proposals for reforming the Conglomerate. They were not carried out, and the Conglomerate was not reformed. But I hope that the next and final chapter will show why I have thought it worth while to spend time in describing them.