Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  What from our point of view is most interesting is that religious practice not only made possible the idea of a different social reality than the one existing, but helped to actualize it as well. Although the capacity to imagine alternative social realities is part of what we have described as the axial transition, it is interesting that in this case it does not involve anything explicitly theoretical. Indeed, Connor writes: “The festival helps us understand why our texts contain no elaborate statement of Athenian democratic theory … The ancient Greeks did not write theory; they enacted it. They enacted it in particular through the City Dionysia.“77 We will have more to say about the role of the City Dionysia, to be sure, but what is interesting in this example is how far mimesis and narrative can prepare the way for the axial transition. Of course the Greeks did, as we will see, write theory, though not much in the way of democratic theory. But theory too, as well as democratic reform, arose from indispensable mimetic and narrative foundations.

  Greek Tragedy

  Because it was during the City Dionysia that tragedies were first performed, the uncertainty about the early history of the festival implies uncertainty about the origins of tragedy as well. The earliest tragedies, or something like them, must have been performed in the sixth century, and probably the contest in which three playwrights presented three plays on successive days was already in place. All surviving tragedies, however, date from the fifth century.

  Aeschylus (ca. 525-456) produced his first tragedy in 499, won his first victory in 484, and his Persians, the earliest surviving Greek tragedy, was produced in 472. Sophocles (ca. 495-404) wrote the last of the surviving tragedies, Oedipus at Colonos, produced posthumously by his grandson in 401, having barely outlived his younger colleague, Euripides (ca. 485-407). Thus we have records of plays by the three great tragedians from virtually all of the fifth century and surviving plays from its last seventy years. The age of tragedy, therefore, almost completely overlaps with what has often been called the golden age of Athens: its move toward radical democracy; its remarkable victories in two wars with the greatest empire of the day, the Persians; the rise of the Athenian empire; extraordinary cultural achievements in many spheres of which tragedy was perhaps the pinnacle; the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, ending in complete and disastrous defeat in 404. Tragedy thus accompanied and commented on the political and cultural rise of Athens, its inner corruption, and its disastrous fall, including at the end two brief periods of tyranny. To say that tragedy was an intrinsic part of fifth-century Athens is in no way an overstatement, but we need to consider more closely how it was part of the very substance of the city.78

  By the end of the sixth century the great festivals of the Panathenaea and the City Dionysia were in place and the reforms of Cleisthenes had greatly extended the participation of the people in running the city, when Athens had to meet an extraordinary challenge. The Persian Empire, which played such an important role in the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem beginning in 538, was in the 490s extending its control to western Anatolia and gradually conquering the Greek cities there. Athens, already the greatest naval power in Greece, annoyed the Persians by assisting the cities in Ionia to resist wherever possible. Therefore the great king Darius decided to conquer the whole Greek peninsula in order to consolidate the western provinces of the now huge Persian Empire by eliminating Greek interference. In 490 Darius invaded Greece and was defeated, mainly by the Athenians, at Marathon. In 480 his son Xerxes tried again, and was decisively defeated by the Athenians in the great sea battle of Salamis. In 479 a combined force including Athenians and Spartans defeated the Persians in a land battle at Plataea, putting an end to any further Persian incursion. Consequently the Athenians organized the Delian League, including most of the cities on the coasts and islands of the Aegean, as a defensive alliance against the Persians. As the Persian threat subsided, Athens turned the League into what was in effect an Athenian empire and became the strongest military power in Greece, thus rousing the envy of Sparta, which had long laid claim to that role.

  It was in this context of increasingly radical democracy and growing imperial power that the flowering of Athenian culture occurred. Nor were these two aspects unrelated. As the Athenian navy, the backbone of Athens’s military power, grew, so did the need for rowers; the lowest stratum of Athenian citizens, the unpropertied thetes, supplied these rowers. Previously when most battles were fought on land it was the hoplites who formed the infantry phalanx that composed the most significant non-noble group among the warriors, and the hoplites, coming mainly from prosperous farmers who had sufficient income to arm themselves, never lost their symbolic importance. But as the navy became ever more important, the thetes were increasingly drawn into the governance of the city. Because military pay was no small part of the income of the thetes, their democratic inclusion was complemented by their support of Athenian imperial power. Josiah Ober has argued against Moses Finley that Athenian democracy did not depend on the growth of the Athenian empire, but some linkage was certainly there.79 Thus the great tragedians were faced with the double development of democracy and empire and their complex interrelation and had to help the Athenians make sense of their rapid historic rise.80

  Greek tragedies from the fifth century are performed not infrequently in our theaters today, and occasionally in films as well, so it is difficult for us to imagine how differently they appeared at the time of their origin. For us going to the theater is a purely private decision to enjoy a certain kind of “entertainment.” For the ancient Greeks, drama was part of one of the greatest annual festivals, the City Dionysia, and was performed in the Theater of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis: it was simultaneously a form of worship and a civic obligation. Simon Goldhill has described it as follows: “The festival ran for four days at the end of February, beginning of March. Each day began at dawn. The audience was the biggest collection of citizens in the 14,000 and 16,000 people regularly the Assembly, the most important political body of democracy, regularly had around only 6,000 in attendance, and courts fewer still, the Great Dionysia was closer to the Olympic Games in scale.”” On each of the first three days, three tragedies by one of the three playwrights was presented, plays of often nearly unbearable intensity, but the day was capped by a fourth, satyr play, about which we don’t know very much except that it was cruder and perhaps reflected the kind of Dionysiac play out of which tragedy had developed, and though not necessarily comic, may have relieved the tension of the three previous plays. For a day beginning at dawn, this would have been quite an experience, especially because one would have to return at dawn for the next three days as well-not exactly like an evening at the theater. On the fourth day five comic plays were presented, often involving sharp political and cultural criticism, which both continued the selfreflection of the tragedies and relieved their seriousness with laughter.

  Goldhill recounts how, before the plays were performed, a series of rituals defined the religious and political meaning of the event. Shortly before the beginning of the festival a procession brought the statue of Dionysus to the theater. The first day began, as we might expect, with a sacrifice: piglets were killed and their blood was scattered around the playing area and libations of wine were poured to the gods. The ten generals, the most important military and political leaders of the city, performed these sacrifices. There followed a reading out of the names of civic benefactors of the city in the preceding year, and their presentation with an honorific crown. The third ritual of the morning was the “parade of tribute,” in which, in the days of the empire, bars of silver from the subordinate cities were paraded around the playing area. Goldhill quotes Isocrates saying in retrospect that this ceremony seemed to be “a precise way of being hated by everybody.” Finally there was a parade of war orphans, young men who were being educated at state expense and who were expected to follow their fathers in battle for the sake of the city, reminding us that Athens, even in the time of its greatest glory, was a warrior ci
ty in which every male citizen was expected to play his part in military life.82 When the plays began, the religio-political nature of the event was clear in everyone’s mind.

  What is truly remarkable is what the plays that followed were about: they were neither patriotic propaganda, nor bland moralistic tales; rather they called into question everything in heaven and on earth.81 As Vernant puts it, “tragedy could be said to be a manifestation of the city turning itself into theater, presenting itself on stage before its assembled citizens,” and doing so without fear or favor, showing its self-destructiveness as well as its grandeur.84

  It has been asked, what has Greek tragedy to do with Dionysus, when almost none of the surviving plays (Euripides’s Bacchae being the great exception) has explicit Dionysiac content. Vernant provides a suggestive answer:

  I have written elsewhere: “A consciousness of the fiction is essential to the dramatic spectacle; it seems to be both its condition and its product.” A fiction, an illusion, the imaginary: Yet, according to Aristotle, this shadow play that the illusionist art of the poet brings to life on the stage is more important and true for the philosopher than are the accounts of authentic history engaged in recalling how events really occurred in the past. If we are right in believing that one of Dionysus’ major characteristics is constantly to confuse the boundaries between illusion and reality, to conjure up the beyond in the here and now, to make us lose our sense of self-assurance and identity, then the enigmatic and ambiguous face of the god certainly does smile out at us in the interplay of the theatrical illusion that tragedy introduced for the first time onto the Greek stage.85

  Among the remarkable things about Greek tragedy, so attuned to its immediate context, yet so relevant to us today, is how demanding on the audience their enigmatic and ambiguous quality was. Again, Vernant is helpful: But the tragic message, when understood, is precisely that there are zones of opacity and incommunicability in the words that men exchange. Even as he sees the protagonists clinging exclusively to one meaning and, thus blinded, tearing themselves apart or destroying themselves, the spectator must understand that there are really two or more possible meanings. The language becomes transparent and the tragic message gets across to him only provided he makes the discovery that words, values, men themselves, are ambiguous, that the universe is one of conflict, only if he relinquishes his earlier conviction, accepts a problematic vision of the world and, through the dramatic spectacle, himself acquires a tragic consciousness.86

  And it is perhaps the tragic consciousness of the depth and confusion of the self and the need for self-understanding, however difficult, that is the axial moment provided by Greek tragedy, one almost completely missing in Homer, where things are, by and large, what they seem. It is here that Eric Voegelin finds the tragic “leap in being,” his terminology for what I am calling the axial moment.87 If so, it is an axial moment that is still almost entirely mimetic and narrative, only latently theoretic.

  Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood gives us a somewhat more specific anchoring of Greek tragedy in Dionysiac ritual in what she calls the “ritual matrix” of tragedy.88 Based on inference from fragmentary evidence, she argues that the City Dionysia began in the sixth century as a celebration of the return and residence of Dionysus Eleuthereus to Athens, an event that occurred in mythic time but which became present again in the ritual. On the first appearance of Dionysus Eleuthereus (Dionysus from Eleutheria), bringing wine and revelry, he was rejected as causing disorder in the city. There followed afflictions, particularly to male sexual organs, and the realization that such afflictions could be overcome only by accepting Dionysus into the city as a resident deity. Due to the nature of the affliction, the presence of erect phalloi as a prominent feature in Dionysiac processions indicates that the malady had been cured.

  At a deeper level the meaning of the ritual is that, in Sourvinou-Inwood’s words, “It turned out that only by surrendering control and embracing disorder in the service of Dionysos can men ultimately maintain order and avoid catastrophic loss of control.“89 This paradox involves the very nature of Greek religion, which pushes the limits of human rationality. It also provides a paradigm or matrix for the exploration of religious paradoxes in general, not only Dionysiac ones. The “tensions, problems, and human limits articulated in these myths of resistance to Dionysus” were “especially conducive to religious exploration,” explorations that could be extended to other myths and to the problematic nature of human life in general.90

  Thus the ambiguity and ambivalence that characterize Greek tragedy and raise it to a level of transcultural human relevance, is rooted in a willingness, indeed a necessity, to face the problematic nature of human life not obvious in earlier Greek culture. In Homer, for example, Orestes was unambivalently celebrated as a great hero for avenging his father’s murder by killing his mother’s lover, Aegisthus. The fact that Orestes killed his mother, Clytemnestra, as well, is never explicitly mentioned, but only once hinted at. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, however, it is Orestes’s moral obligation not to kill his mother that clashes with his moral obligation to avenge his father that is at the center of the action, and it is his guilt as a matricide that finally needs absolving, without ever obliterating the horror of the deed. It is this that leads Sourvinou-Inwood to argue that Greek tragedy is continuously involved in “religious problematization.” She demonstrates the “ritual matrix” of the plays of Euripides as much as of those of Aeschylus, and argues that Euripides, far from being an Enlightenment freethinker, was pushed to the limits to make sense of what the gods, in whom he continued to believe, were up to in a dark time.91

  But if the tragic poets were involved in religious exploration, they were simultaneously involved in political exploration, those being two sides of the same coin, and the fact that tragedy and radical democracy in Athens coincide is no accident, as they say. If Sourvinou-Inwood is right, from the very beginning the chorus in the early Dionysiac rite represented both the Athenians in the myth of origin who rejected and then accepted Dionysus, and also the Athenians of the day, who were once again welcoming Dionysus among them; the chorus never lost this double role throughout the history of tragedy. So if, as Vernant said, in tragedy the polis turned itself into a theater, but a theater in which the people were both actors and spectators, then the people were looking at themselves, however far away in mythic time or geographic space the action of the play took place. It is surely the sustained capacity of the city to endure such searching self-examination for a century that is so remarkable.

  Christian Meier complements Sourvinou-Inwood in giving us a political reading of the plays to go along with her religious one. They turn out to be two sides of a single whole. It is not possible in this chapter to give a reading of individual plays in their specific historical context, but we might consider briefly the first surviving play, Aeschylus’s Persians.92 It was produced in 472, less than a decade after the great Athenian victory of Salamis in 480 and the Greek victory at Plataea in 479. It is the only surviving tragedy to be placed in real rather than mythic time, but the locus of the play is the far away capital of the Persian Empire, Susa. The play is set in 480 when the chorus of Persian elders is anxiously waiting news of events on the western front. The queen, widow of Darius who had led the invasion of Greece in 490 and mother of Xerxes who is still at the front, appears in order to express her profound anxiety and, after the first news of disaster has arrived, her wish is to consult the shade of her dead husband. Sourvinou-Inwood shows how much of the play is taken up with the ritual of the raising of Darius’s ghost, and his subsequent appearance and utterances, an example of the importance of ritual in almost all surviving tragedy. Only near the end of the play does Xerxes himself appear, ragged and bloody, to describe the full measure of the defeat.

  Aeschylus does not fail to have the Persians marvel at how the much smaller Athenian forces defeated their great armada, or to show their recognition of the undying love of the Greeks for freedom. But the play does not
display hatred of the Persians. On the contrary, the audience is drawn into the dignity and suffering of the Persians, the experience of a great city in defeat. Darius’s ghost explains the defeat in terms of hubris, of a lack of moderation, of crossing boundaries (the Hellespont) that ought not to have been crossed. But the effect is to turn the mirror on the Athenians, in 472 busily engaged in extending their power throughout the Aegean.

  Meier finds Aeschylus speaking to his fellow citizens, saying that “the Athenians too would have to stay within their limitations … Darius’ warning ,that man is mortal and must learn to curb his pride’ (420) was meant for their ears too … The powerful experience of defeat … must have brought home to them the dangers of combat, as must Aeschylus’ great lament on the pity of war.“93 Even Sourvinou-Inwood, who usually confines herself to the religious meaning of the tragedies, writes of Persians that “the overweening pride and overstepping of human limits was not only relevant to the Persian kings … [T]he exploration of this overconfidence and transgression, here distanced to, and located in, the enemy other, was of direct relevance to Athens.“94

  If there were space it would be interesting to look at other of the great tragedies for their religious/political meaning both in their own time and for us. Instead we must sum up this extraordinary conjuncture of city and poet. Probably only a democratic city could subject itself to such searching selfexamination, and we must remember that the city never faltered in its pride and respect for its tragic poets, but the city did not heed what they were attempting to teach. Athens did gradually turn a self-defensive alliance into an oppressive, at moments brutal, empire. Though insisting on justice at home, it willingly behaved tyrannically to its subject cities. Pericles, or Thucydides speaking through him, justified brutality in the name of survival. As far as other cities were concerned, justice was the rule of the stronger. The voice of Plato’s Thrasymachus was the voice of imperial Athens.