The Greeks and the Irrational

by E R Dodds

  NOTES TO CHAPTER VII

  VIII

  The Fear of Freedom

  A mans worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

  T. H. Huxley

  I must begin this final chapter by making a confession. When the general idea of the lectures on which this book is based first formed itself in my mind, my notion was to illustrate the Greek attitude to certain problems over the whole stretch of time that lies between Homer and the last pagan Neoplatonists, a stretch about as long as that which separates antiquity from ourselves. But as material accumulated and the lectures got themselves written, it became evident that this could not be done, save at the price of a hopeless superficiality. Thus far I have in fact covered about one-third of the period in question, and even there I have left many gaps. The greater part of the story remains untold. All that I can now do is to look down a perspective of some eight centuries and ask myself in very general terms what changes took place in certain human attitudes, and for what reasons. I cannot hope in so brief a survey to arrive at exact or confident answers. But it will be something if we can get a picture of what the problems are, and can formulate them in the right terms.

  Our survey starts from an age when Greek rationalism appeared to be on the verge of final triumph, the great age of intellectual discovery that begins with the foundation of the Lyceum about 335 b.c. and continues down to the end of the third century. This period witnessed the transformation of Greek science from an untidy jumble of isolated observations mixed with a priori guesses into a system of methodical disciplines. In the more abstract sciences, mathematics and astronomy, it reached a level that was not to be attained again before the sixteenth century; and it made the first organised attempt at research in many other fields, botany, zoology, geography, and the history of language, of literature, and of human institutions. Nor was it only in science that the time was adventurous and creative. It is as if the sudden widening of the spatial horizon that resulted from Alexander's conquests had widened at the same time all the horizons of the mind. Despite its lack of political freedom, the society of the third century b.c. was in many ways the nearest approach to an "open"1 society that the world had yet seen, and nearer than any that would be seen again until very modern times. The traditions and institutions of the old "closed" society were of course still there and still influential: the incorporation of a city-state in one or other of the Hellenistic kingdoms did not cause it to lose its moral importance overnight. But though the city was there, its walls, as someone has put it, were down: its institutions stood exposed to rational criticism; its traditional ways of life were increasingly penetrated and modified by a cosmopolitan culture. For the first time in Greek history, it mattered little where a man had been born or what his ancestry was: of the men who dominated Athenian intellectual life in this age, Aristotle and Theophrastus, Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus were all of them foreigners; only Epicurus was of Athenian stock, though by birth a colonial.

  And along with this levelling out of local determinants, this freedom of movement in space, there went an analogous levelling out of temporal determinants, a new freedom for the mind to travel backwards in time and choose at will from the past experience of men those elements which it could best assimilate and exploit. The individual began consciously to use the tradition, instead of being used by it. This is most obvious in the Hellenistic poets, whose position in this respect was like that of poets and artists to-day. "If we talk of tradition today," says Mr. Auden, "we no longer mean what the eighteenth century meant, a way of working handed down from one generation to the next; we mean a consciousness of the whole of the past in the present. Originality no longer means a slight personal modification of one's immediate predecessors; it means the capacity to find in any other work of any date or locality clues for the treatment of one's own subject-matter."2 That this is true of most, if not all, Hellenistic poetry hardly needs proving: it explains both the strength and the weakness of works like the Argonautica of Apollonius or the Aetia of Callimachus. But we can apply it also to Hellenistic philosophy: Epicurus' use of Democritus and the Stoic use of Heraclitus are cases in point. As we shall find presently,3 it has likewise some bearing on the field of religious beliefs.

  1 For notes to chapter viii see pages 255-269.

  Certainly it is in this age that the Greek pride in human reason attains its most confident expression. We should reject, says Aristotle, the old rule of life that counselled humility, bidding man think in mortal terms for man has within him a divine thing, the intellect, and so far as he can live on that level of experience, he can live as though he were not mortal.4 The founder of Stoicism went further still: for Zeno, man's intellect was not merely akin to God, it was God, a portion of the divine substance in its pure or active state.5 And although Epicurus made no such claim, he yet held that by constant meditation on the truths of philosophy one could live "like a god among men."6

  But ordinary human living, of course, is not like that. Aristotle knew that no man can sustain the life of pure reason for more than very brief periods;7 and he and his pupils appreciated, better perhaps than any other Greeks, the necessity of studying the irrational factors in behaviour if we are to reach a realistic understanding of human nature. I have briefly illustrated the sanity and subtlety of their approach to this kind of problem in dealing with the cathartic influence of music, and with the theory of dreams.8 Did circumstances permit, I should have liked to devote an entire chapter to Aristotle's treatment of the Irrational; but the omission may perhaps be excused, since there exists an excellent short book, Mile Croissant's Aristote et les Mystères, which deals in an interesting and thorough manner, not indeed with the whole subject, but with some of its most important aspects.9

  Aristotle's approach to an empirical psychology, and in particular to a psychology of the Irrational, was unhappily carried no further after the first generation of his pupils. When the natural sciences detached themselves from the study of philosophy proper, as they began to do early in the third century, psychology was left in the hands of the philosophers (where it remained—I think to its detriment—down to very recent times). And the dogmatic rationalists of the Hellenistic Age seem to have cared little for the objective study of man as he is; their attention was concentrated on the glorious picture of man as he might be, the ideal sapiens or sage. In order to make the picture seem possible, Zeno and Chrysippus deliberately went back, behind Aristotle and behind Plato, to the naive intellectualism of the fifth century. The attainment of moral perfection, they said, was independent both of natural endowment and of habituation; it depended solely on the exercise of reason.10 And there was no "irrational soul" for reason to contend with: the so-called passions were merely errors of judgement, or morbid disturbances resulting from errors of judgement.11 Correct the error, and the disturbance will automatically cease, leaving a mind untouched by joy or sorrow, untroubled by hope or fear, "passionless, pitiless, and perfect."12

  This fantastic psychology was adopted and maintained for two centuries, not on its merits, but because it was thought necessary to a moral system which aimed at combining altruistic action with complete inward detachment.13 Posidonius, we know, rebelled against it and demanded a return to Plato,14 pointing out that Chrysippus' theory conflicted both with observation, which showed the elements of character to be innate,15 and with moral experience, which revealed irrationality and evil as ineradicably rooted in human nature and controllable only by some kind of "catharsis."16 But his protest did not avail to kill the theory; orthodox Stoics continued to talk in intellectualist terms, though perhaps with diminishing conviction. Nor was the attitude of Epicureans or of Sceptics very different in this matter. Both schools would have liked to banish the passions from human life; the ideal of both was ataraxia, freedom from disturbing emotions; and this was to be achieved in the one case by holding the right opinions about man and God, in the other by holding no opinions at all.17 The Epicureans made the same arrogant claim as
the Stoics, that without philosophy there can be no goodness18—a claim which neither Aristotle nor Plato ever made.

  This rationalist psychology and ethic was matched by a rationalised religion. For the philosopher, the essential part of religion lay no longer in acts of cult, but in a silent contemplation of the divine and in a realisation of man's kinship with it. The Stoic contemplated the starry heavens, and read there the expression of the same rational and moral purpose which he discovered in his own breast; the Epicurean, in some ways the more spiritual of the two, contemplated the unseen gods who dwell remote in the intermundia and thereby found strength to approximate his life to theirs.19 For both schools, deity has ceased to be synonymous with arbitrary Power, and has become instead the embodiment of a rational ideal; the transformation was the work of the classical Greek thinkers, especially Plato. As Festugière has rightly insisted,20 the Stoic religion is a direct inheritance from the Timaeus and the Laws, and even Epicurus is at times closer in spirit to Plato than he would have cared to acknowledge.

  At the same time, all the Hellenistic schools—even perhaps the Sceptics21—were as anxious as Plato had been to avoid a clean break with traditional forms of cult. Zeno indeed declared that temples were superfluous—God's true temple was the human intellect.22 Nor did Chrysippus conceal his opinion that to represent gods in human shape was childish.23 Nevertheless, Stoicism found room for the anthropomorphic gods by treating them as allegorical figures or symbols;24 and when in the Hymn of Cleanthes we find the Stoic God decked out with the epithets and attributes of Homer's Zeus, this is more, I think, than a stylistic formality—it is a serious attempt to fill the old forms with a new meaning.25 Epicurus too sought to keep the forms and purify their content. He was scrupulous, we are told, in observing all the usages of cult,26 but insisted that they must be divorced from all fear of divine anger or hope of material benefit; to him, as to Plato, the "do ut des" view of religion is the worst blasphemy.27

  It would be unwise to assume that such attempts to purge the tradition had much effect on popular belief. As Epicurus said, "the things which I know, the multitude disapproves, and of what the multitude approves, I know nothing."28 Nor is it easy for us to know what the multitude approved in Epicurus' time. Then as now, the ordinary man became articulate about such things only, as a rule, upon his tombstone—and not always even there. Extant tombstones of the Hellenistic Age are less reticent than those of an earlier time, and suggest, for what they are worth, that the traditional belief in Hades is slowly fading, and begins to be replaced either by explicit denial of any Afterlife or else by vague hopes that the deceased has gone to some better world—"to the Isles of the Blessed," "to the gods," or even "to the eternal Kosmos."29 I should not care to build very much on the latter type of epitaph: we know that the sorrowing relatives are apt to order "a suitable inscription" which does not always correspond to any actively held belief.30 Still, taken as a whole, the tombstones do suggest that disintegration of the Conglomerate has gone a stage further.

  As for public or civic religion, we should expect it to suffer from the loss of civic autonomy: in the city-state, religion and public life were too intimately interlocked for either to decline without injury to the other. And that public religion had in fact declined pretty steeply at Athens in the half-century after Chaeronea we know from Hermocles' hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes:31 at no earlier period could a hymn sung on a great public occasion have declared that the gods of the city were either indifferent or nonexistent, and that these useless stocks and stones were now replaced by a "real" god, Demetrius himself.32 The flattery may be insincere; the scepticism plainly is not, and it must have been generally shared, since we are told that the hymn was highly popular.33 That Hellenistic ruler-worship was always insincere—that it was a political stunt and nothing more—no one, I think, will believe who has observed in our own day the steadily growing mass adulation of dictators, kings, and, in default of either, athletes.34 When the old gods withdraw, the empty thrones cry out for a successor, and with good management, or even without management,35 almost any perishable bag of bones may be hoisted into the vacant seat. So far as they have religious meaning for the individual, ruler-cult and its analogues,36 ancient and modern, are primarily, I take it, expressions of helpless dependence; he who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal. It was, I think, a related sentiment that gave rise to another characteristic feature of the Early Hellenistic Age, the wide diffusion of the cult of Tyche, "Luck" or "Fortune." Such a cult is, as Nilsson has said, "the last stage in the secularising of religion";37 in default of any positive object, the sentiment of dependence attaches itself to the purely negative idea of the unexplained and unpredictable, which is Tyche.

  I do not want to give a false impression of a complex situation by oversimplifying it. Public worship of the city gods of course continued; it was an accepted part of public life, an accepted expression of civic patriotism. But it would, I think, be broadly true to say of it what has been said of Christianity in our own time, that it had become "more or less a social routine, without influence on goals of living."38 On the other hand, the progressive decay of tradition set the religious man free to choose his own gods,39 very much as it set the poet free to choose his own style; and the anonymity and loneliness of life in the great new cities, where the individual felt himself a cipher, may have enforced on many the sense of need for some divine friend and helper. The celebrated remark of Whitehead, that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness,"40 whatever one may think of it as a general definition, describes fairly accurately the religious situation from Alexander's time onwards. And one thing that the individual did with his solitariness in this age was to form small private clubs devoted to the worship of individual gods, old or new. Inscriptions tell us something of the activities of such "Apolloniasts" or "Hermaists" or "Iobacchi" or "Sarapiasts," but we cannot see far into their minds. All we can really say is that these associations served both social and religious purposes, in unknown and probably varying proportions: some may have been little more than dining-clubs; others may have given their members a real sense of community with a divine patron or protector of their own choice, to replace the inherited local community of the old closed society.41

  Such, in the broadest outline, were the relations between religion and rationalism in the third century.42 Looking at the picture as a whole, an intelligent observer in or about the year 200 b.c. might well have predicted that within a few generations the disintegration of the inherited structure would be complete, and that the perfect Age of Reason would follow. He would, however, have been quite wrong on both points—as similar predictions made by nineteenth-century rationalists look like proving wrong. It would have surprised our imaginary Greek rationalist to learn that half a millennium after his death Athena would still be receiving the periodic gift of a new dress from her grateful people;43 that bulls would still be sacrificed in Megara to heroes killed in the Persian Wars eight hundred years earlier;44 that ancient taboos concerned with ritual purity would still be rigidly maintained in many places.45 For the vis inertiae that keeps this sort of thing going—what Matthew Arnold once called "the extreme slowness of things"46—no rationalist ever makes sufficient allowance. Gods withdraw, but their rituals live on, and no one except a few intellectuals notices that they have ceased t,o mean anything. In a material sense the Inherited Conglomerate did not in the end perish by disintegration; large portions of it were left standing through the centuries, a familiar, shabby, rather lovable facade, until one day the Christians pushed the facade over and discovered that there was virtually nothing behind it—only a faded local patriotism and an antiquarian sentiment.47 So, at least, it happened in the cities; it appears that to the country folk, the pagani, certain of the old rites still did mean something, as indeed a few of them, in a dim half-comprehended manner, still do.

  A prevision of this history would have surpr
ised an observer in the third century b.c. But it would have surprised him far more painfully to learn that Greek civilisation was entering, not on the Age of Reason, but on a period of slow intellectual decline which was to last, with some deceptive rallies and some brilliant individual rear-guard actions, down to the capture of Byzantium by the Turks; that in all the sixteen centuries of existence still awaiting it the Hellenic world would produce no poet as good as Theocritus, no scientist as good as Eratosthenes, no mathematician as good as Archimedes, and that the one great name in philosophy would represent a point of view believed to be extinct—transcendental Platonism.

  To understand the reasons for this long-drawn-out decline is one of the major problems of world history. We are concerned here with only one aspect of it, what may be called for convenience the Return of the Irrational. But even that is so big a subject that I can only illustrate what I have in mind by pointing briefly to a few typical developments.

  We saw in an earlier chapter how the gap between the beliefs of the intellectuals and the beliefs of the people, already discernible in the oldest Greek literature, widened in the late fifth century to something approaching a complete divorce, and how the growing rationalism of the intellectuals was matched by regressive symptoms in popular belief. In the relatively "open" Hellenistic society, although the divorce was on the whole maintained, rapid changes in social stratification, and the opening of education to wider classes, created more opportunities of interaction between the two groups. We have noticed evidence that in third-century Athens a scepticism once confined to intellectuals had begun to infect the general population; and the same thing was to happen later at Rome.48 But after the third century a different kind of interaction shows itself, with the appearance of a pseudo-scientific literature, mostly pseudonymous and often claiming to be based on divine revelation, which took up the ancient superstitions of the East or the more recent phantasies of the Hellenistic masses, dressed them in trappings borrowed from Greek science or Greek philosophy, and won for them the acceptance of a large part of the educated class. Assimilation henceforth works both ways: while rationalism, of a limited and negative kind, continues to spread from above downwards, antirationalism spreads from below upwards, and eventually wins the day.