Religion and Rationality, Poetry and Philosophy: In Search of the “Axial Breakthrough” in Ancient Greece

 Hugh Bowden Religion and Rationality, Poetry and Philosophy: In Search of the “Axial Breakthrough” in Ancient Greece, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Aug 2016 , 2016, Vol.9(4), pp.543-554.

Notes

Axial age theory suggests that a major transformation of thought occurred across several civilisations, including ancient Greece, in the period 800–200 BCE. This paper questions whether any such transformation can be identified in ancient Greece. It focuses on texts associated with “mystery religions” and the works of Presocratic philosophers as potential evidence for transformation. It demonstrates that there was a continuity of thought throughout the period, and that “rationality” was never seen to be in conflict with “traditional religious ideas”.

P 543 Interest in the idea of the ‘‘axial age’’, and the associated notion of ‘‘axial breakthrough’’ occurring at some point in the first millennium BCE, has been growing in the work of comparative historians and scholars of religion in recent years (Wittrock 2015; Morris 2010, 2015; Bellah 2011). As originally developed by Jaspers (1953), the idea is descriptive rather than explanatory: he argued that between c. 800 and c. 200 BCE parallel intellectual developments could be seen in Greece, Israel, Persia, India and China.

P 544 One important contribution to the debate is that of Elkana (1986), who identified ‘‘the emergence of second-order thinking’’ as what characterised the axial breakthrough in Greece. Second-order thinking is ‘‘thinking about thinking’’, and although he acknowledges that this must have existed in all societies, Elkana proposes that systematic second-order thinking was rarer. He makes the point that not all ‘‘philosophy’’ counts as second-order thinking, while some non-philosophical thought may do so. Cosmology, the intellectual area associated with the earlier Presocratics in Greece is best considered as ‘‘thinking about the world’’ and is therefore first-order thinking; on the other hand, considering the range of possible forms of society can be considered to be systematic second-order thinking. It follows from this that whereas the Milesian Presocratic philosophers did not generally engage in second-order thinking, Hesiod, in the myth of the Ages of Man in Works and Days (ll. 109-201), did (1986, 48). However, Elkana identifies as the key moment of breakthrough the later part of the fifth century BCE, when, he suggests: Greek sophists, mystics, and some philosophers discovered more or less simultaneously that man does not have a complete theory of the physical world nor of human society, nor even of man himself, and that all ‘‘rational’’ knowledge had to be complemented by ‘‘irrational’’, i.e. mystical and religious, elements. The resulting tensions between these complementary parts and the ensuing critical dialogue between them – second-order thinking – brought about the important breakthroughs (1986, 62–63). We will return to these issues, but it is important to note at this point that the works of the sophists, and of those he calls ‘‘mystics’’ (whom he identifies as Orphics, and those associated with mystery cults), do not survive and are reported to us by mainly hostile later writers.

For Robert Bellah (2011, 324), ‘‘ancient Greece would seem to be the easy case when it comes to the axial age’’. His major book, Religion in Human Evolution, offers its own grand theory, in which the axial age plays only a part—albeit the climactic part: he claims to offer an evolutionary history of religion from the earliest humans to the axial age. Bellah bases his work on Merlin Donald’s scheme of the evolution of human culture, which is made up of three stages, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic (Donald 1991).Bellah is to some extent indebted to Elkana for his understanding of axial breakthrough, but the main theoretical underpinning of his approach is a particular view of evolution, referred to as ‘‘emergentism’’. ‘‘Emergentism’’ is a metatheoretical notion rather than a theory itself. As one recent account puts it: Emergentism offers fresh ways to think about contingency… In the history of life, and indeed the history of the planet and the universe, things happen in the context of what has gone on before and the opportunities thereby generated … Crystals build on crystals, traits build on traits, ideas build on ideas (Goodenough and Deacon 2006, 866). Its value to Bellah is that it seeks to offer ways of making sense of historical phenomena like human consciousness: Human minds, deeply entangled in symbolic culture, have an effective causal locus that extends across continents and millennia, growing out of the experiences of countless individuals. Consciousness emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing, a process continually transcending itself. To be human is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening (Deacon 2003, 306).

p 547  We must start by recognising that throughout Greek literature, and by extension throughout Greek culture more widely, the relationship between mortals and gods was characterised above all by ignorance. Writers from Homer onwards emphasised that the gods were invisible to mortals; prayers addressed to gods ‘‘whoever you might be’’, are expressions of a genuine uncertainty about what the supernatural powers were like. It was sometimes possible to receive information from the gods, most obviously through divination, but the gods were parsimonious in what they would divulge, and divination was not used to ask questions about the nature of the gods, but to seek advice for immediate concerns (Bowden 2004; Johnston and Struck 2005). This ignorance extended to the issue of what the gods looked like: anthropomorphism was not a belief, but rather a provisional way of talking about the gods. Furthermore, there was no undisputed source of religious authority in the archaic and classical Greek world: it was a world of small autonomous communities, and those communities were generally led not by monarchs, but by numbers of aristocratic individuals,

p 547

In this world, the depictions of the gods in Homer and Hesiod need to be understood as poetic interpretation rather than as any kind of ‘‘orthodoxy’’. Even though Homer and Hesiod, sometimes alongside Orpheus and Musaeus, were credited in antiquity with special knowledge or wisdom

The close relationship between parts of Hesiod’s Theogony and the Bronze Age Hittite Song of Kumarbi has long been recognised

This does not rule out the possibility of distinctive religious innovation, a phenomenon claimed to be significant by both Elkana and Bellah. These scholars all identify ‘‘mystery religions’’ as the source for innovation, while remaining rather vague about what they are referring to. The term ‘‘mystery cult’’ tends to refer to two more or less distinct phenomena. First there are festivals associated with certain gods (in particular Demeter) that involved rites of initiation (Burkert 1987; Bowden 2010). Although our information about many of these festivals is limited, the most famous, the Eleusinian Mysteries, was of considerably antiquity. The rituals involved annual secret nocturnal rites held in the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, near the edge of Athenian territory with possibly several thousand initiates taking part. The most recent scholarship suggests that it is unlikely that this would have been an occasion for the transmission of specific doctrines (Bowden 2010). Of possibly similar antiquity was the ecstatic cult of Dionysus, which involved groups of women (and possibly men) going out from cities to the uncultivated parts of their territory and honouring Dionysus with ecstatic dancing. Again, these are not circumstances which would encourage the transmission of innovative religious notions. The phenomenon that might be closer to Elkana and Bellah’s notion of ‘‘mystery religions’’ as a source for religious ideas is the presence in Greek cities, in particular in the fourth century, of what might be described as ‘‘private initiators’’. We have negative depictions of such men provided by Demosthenes (18.259-60), and at greater length by Plato: Itinerant priests and seers go to rich men’s doors and make them believe that they by means of sacrifices and incantations have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods that can expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors … And they produce a babble of books of Musaeus and Orpheus, the offspring of the Moon and of the Muses, as they affirm, and these books they use in their ritual, and make not only ordinary men but states believe that there really are remissions of sins and purifications

p 548 for deeds of injustice, by means of sacrifice and pleasant sport for the living, and that there are also special initiations, which they call teletai, that deliver us from evils in that other world, while terrible things await those who have neglected to sacrifice (Republic 364b-e).

It is generally thought that the word orpheotelestes, meaning ‘‘Orphic initiator’’, refers to similar men and that this group of initiators can be associated with two interesting texts surviving from the fourth century BCE: the Derveni papyrus (Betegh 2004; Kouremenos et al. 2006) and the so-called Orphic gold tablets (Bernabe´ and San Cristo´bal 2008; Edmonds 2011; Graf and Johnston 2013). These can be described as excavated texts—found in graves in Greece and Southern Italy and Sicily—and although they are not as significant as Chinese excavated texts, they are valuable in being contemporary witnesses for Orphic writing in the fifth or fourth century BCE, that is, texts attributed to the mythical Greek poet Orpheus. The gold tablets have been described as ‘‘ritual texts for the afterlife’’ or ‘‘instructions for the netherworld’’: they consist of shorter or longer texts written on small pieces of gold leaf that presumably were supposed to guarantee those buried with them a better post-mortem experience. Some of the longer texts may be extracted from a katabasis—an account of a journey to the underworld, presumably attributed to Orpheus. Most deal in one way or another with the encounter with underworld powers. The phrase most commonly found on them was the words that the dead souls had to say before they were permitted to drink from the pool of memory, ‘‘I am the child of earth and starry heaven’’. This turns out to be adapted from a line in Hesiod’s Theogony (106), describing the race of the Titans as ‘‘born from Earth and starry Heaven’’. Other passages in the Gold Tablets show similarities to ideas in the poetry of Pindar, written in the early fifth century BCE. The Derveni Papyrus is a commentary on another Orphic poem, which is in part at least a theogony. The author of the commentary expresses disappointment with people who seek initiation in state cults (such as the Eleusinian Mysteries) as well as criticising rival initiators. He cites Heraclitus at one point (col. 4), and his arguments show familiarity with the thought of other early philosophers, as well as having verbal echoes of Greek tragedy, but the text is too fragmentary for one to identify any clear innovative thought.

This discussion suggests that ‘‘mystery religions’’ are not a good place to find signs of innovative thinking. The texts that we have are not evidence of any esoteric learning, but rather build on the work of preceding poets (Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides) and share the ideas of contemporary thinkers. This should not surprise us. Burkert identified a series of misconceptions about mystery cults that characterised scholarship of an earlier period:

The first stereotype is that the mystery religions are ‘‘late’’, that they are typical of late antiquity, that is the Imperial or possibly later Hellenistic period, when the brilliance of the Hellenic mind was giving way to the irrational… The second stereotype is that the mystery religions are Oriental in origin, style, and spirit… The third stereotype is that the mystery religions are spiritual, that they are indicative of a basic change in religious attitude, one

p 549 that transcends the realistic and practical outlook of the pagan in a search for higher spirituality (1987, 2–3). One could sum these stereotypes up by saying that ‘‘mystery religions’’ were cast as ‘‘other’’—they were taken to be whatever it was considered Greek public cult was not, and thus could be claimed as the source of anything new, whether that was the transition to the Middle Ages, or the rise of Christianity, or ‘‘axial breakthrough’’. Burkert goes on to demonstrate that none of these stereotypes helps us understand what mystery cults were and that they should be rejected. We will come back to ‘‘mystery cult’’ in our consideration of Presocratic philosophy, but as part of ‘‘traditional’’ Greek religious experience, not as something separate or new.

Geoffrey Lloyd has pointed out that the whole notion of an identifiable group of thinkers whom we refer to as ‘‘Presocratic philosophers’’ is the creation of Aristotle:

I want therefore to turn to the earliest surviving complete prose work in Greek literature, Herodotus’ Histories, to explore what Greek thought in the fifth century BCE actually looked like

At the same time, Herodotus engages with the work of poets, most obviously Homer, but also Hesiod and the lyric poets of the early fifth century, Simonides and Pindar (Marincola 2006). He does not suggest that there is always a distinction between the ideas of poets and the ideas of other writers. After describing an experiment carried out by the Achaemenid king Darius I concerning attitudes of different nations to the treatment of the dead, Herodotus concludes, ‘‘That is how strongly custom determines these things, and it seems to me that Pindar was correct to write in his poetry saying that custom is the ruler of all things’’ (3.38). Here Pindar is apparently being used as an authority in an ethnographic discussion. It is clear, however, that Herodotus draws a distinction between his work, as one of prose writing, and those of his poetic predecessors. This is visible in the opening chapters of his Histories, where Herodotus takes stories known to him from poetry (in particular epic), and ‘‘demythologises’’ them, removing all miraculous and divine elements (1.1-4). He thus makes them suitable stories for a work of prose. He is not explicit that this is his purpose, but his successor Thucydides does characterise poets as prone to exaggeration (1.21) and engages in similar exercises in demythologisation (e.g. 1.9-12). There is more that can be said about the complex relationship between the early ‘‘historians’’ and their epic poet predecessors (Rutherford 2012).

p 551 Indeed, it is not clear what distinguishes the ‘‘philosophical’’ from the ‘‘traditional’’ in this period. We find the same combination of the religious and the philosophical in the work of Parmenides. On the basis of the surviving fragments, we can see that Parmenides’ ‘‘philosophy’’ is presented through a poem which describes the poet’s encounter with an unnamed goddess. It is this encounter that enables him to understand the true nature of the world, hidden from most people behind the world of appearances (Tor 2015, 22–29). And the encounter is presented as similar to the experience of initiation at a festival like the Eleusinian Mysteries: it is a life-transforming event, that gives a new perspective on the world.2 Such lifetransforming encounters are the stuff of other poems, most obviously the Homeric Hymns, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in particular, where the goddess eventually reveals to the leaders of Eleusis the rites that will secure them a privileged life. Parmenides’ poem has parallels with Hesiod too. He describes at the start of his Theogony (25-8) how the Muses spoke to him, saying that they could show him the truth, just as the Goddess says that she can show the truth to Parmenides (Fr. 1. 52). Xenophanes and Parmenides, like many of the writers grouped together by later tradition into the category of ‘‘Presocratic philosophers’’, were poets and are best understood in this light. They stood alongside Homer and Hesiod, Musaeus and Orpheus, as writers offering accounts of the world. As poets they could claim divine inspiration for what they wrote, but at the same time they could be claimed to be prone to exaggeration and fantasy.