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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Kahn makes still another point worth noting. It is probably no accident that Greek cosmological speculation emerged in Miletus, an important commercial port on the west coast of Anatolia, which the Greek inhabitants called Ionia. Ionia was the closest part of the Greek world to the world of the East: to Anatolian kingdoms long in contact with Mesopotamia, and even tually to the Persian Empire that extended over almost the entire Middle East. It was a natural point of entry for the advanced astronomy and mathematics that had long been developing in Mesopotamia. This external stimulus was so significant that Kahn gives it a vivid characterization: “The maternal soil of Hellas was fertilized by Mesopotamian seed.””’ This Mesopotamian stimulus is particularly important if Lloyd is right that it was the Milesian contribution to astronomy that laid the foundation for a genuine science in this field.

  Two important features link the new natural philosophy with the past: a fundamentally narrative framework and a belief that the cosmos is alive. Anaximander, like Hesiod, was intensely interested in the beginnings of things. Indeed: “The arrangement of Anaximander’s treatise followed an order which was essentially chronological. The life history of the world was described as a process of gradual evolution and differentiation out of the primordial apeiron [boundless] … This presentation of natural science as a kind of epic poem, with beginning, middle, and end, is characteristic of early Greek It is true that Anaximander’s account appears to be both naturalistic and rational: everything is explained by impersonal forces, not only the origination of the universe, but the workings of the heavenly bodies, the weather, and other natural phenomena. The Olympian gods are nowhere mentioned. But we are still in the realm of narrative; the links back to Hesiod’s Theogony can still be detected.

  If we look more closely at the apeiron, the “scientific” nature of the thought of Anaximander becomes even more problematic. The apeiron, which, when translated as “the Boundless,” might appear to be an abstraction, turns out to be a huge, inexhaustible mass totally surrounding the world. It is imperishable and ungenerated, itself the beginning (arche), both in space and time, of everything else, through the emission of a “seed,” from which the heavens, the earth and all things gradually differentiated out. Summing up, Kahn makes it clear that although the apeiron may be a principle of nature, it is at the same time, a new kind of divinity:

  We see that, in addition to being the vital source out of which the substance of the world has come and the outer limit which encloses and defines the body of the cosmos, the apeiron is also the everlasting, godlike power which governs the rhythmic life cycle of this world. Thus it is not only the idea of the well-regulated cosmos which Greece owes to Anaximander, but also that of its regulator, the Cosmic God. And the two ideas belong together. For the conception of the natural world as a unified whole, characterized throughout by order and equilibrium, gave rise to the only form of monotheism known to classical antiquity.121

  Surely Anaximander did not yet differentiate science and theology, but we will probably want to bracket the word “monotheism” in this quotation, as it raises more problems than it solves. It might be better to think of the Apeiron as a kind of god above the gods, or the divine ground of a universe that is in some way or other divine altogether (Thales is reported to have said, “All things are full of Though Anaximander distributes most of the cosmic functions of the Olympian gods to “natural” forces, he nowhere denies the existence of the gods. His successor, Anaximenes, whose first principle was “air” in a sense too complicated for us to go into, said that “infinite air was the principle, from which the things that are becoming, and that are, and that shall be, and gods and things divine, all come into being.” 123 In this way of thinking, because air is the source and origin of the gods, it could be considered “more divine” than the gods, but the existence of the gods is not in question, nor was it through most of the history of Greek thought, including in Plato and Aristotle. This is not to say that the Homeric gods did not receive criticism-we will need to consider that issue below-nor even that no one in ancient history denied the gods altogether, only that that was not the inevitable or even the very common result of the emergence of Greek “naturalism.” Thus if we can speak of a Greek “monotheism” at all, it was very different from the Israelite one: the Cosmic God was no jealous God denying the existence of other gods. Even more important, the Cosmic God did not require the rejection of the cult of the Olympian deities, which continued to be performed, with hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, by the wise and the foolish alike, throughout antiquity.

  I have put “naturalism” in quotes because what nature, physis, meant is not to be assumed as identical with the meaning of “nature” in contemporary English usage. Physis, a central term in the subsequent history of Greek thought, came to mean “the essential character of a thing,” but it never lost its other meaning of development, of the idea that we “understand the `nature’ of a thing by discovering from what source and in what way it has come to be what it is.“124 Paul Ricoeur reminds us that it is dangerous to translate physis by “nature,” because physis is “not some inert ‘given,’” but rather physis is alive. We will not understand Aristotle’s idea that art is the imitation (mimesis) of nature (physis), Ricoeur says, if we think that through art we are imi rating “that-thing-over-there,” when rather we are actualizing something that is alive.125 Perhaps another way of putting it would be to say that Greek thought lacked our strong dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, so that nature is something one lives with, something one is part of, not something “over

  All the qualifications I have been trying to make to the idea that the Milesian cosmology marks “the advent of a rational outlook on the natural world,” by arguing that it is also a reformed mythology, do not mean that I want to downgrade its importance, or, indeed, its significance for almost all later thought. It did not mark a complete break with poetry, myth, and the Olympian gods, but it did usher in a whole new world of speculation that would open up many lines of development. The world of the wise was subject to many influences-political, economic, religious-but never again would a concern for “the essential character of things” cease to preoccupy the Greek mind.

  The Axial Transition

  It has been widely accepted that by the time of Plato and Aristotle “rationality” in something like the modern sense of the term, had clearly appeared in ancient Greece, although even this assumption is one that we will need to examine closely. Agreement as to how much earlier such rationality can be discerned, and who among the Presocratics most clearly expressed it, is much less general. If we can get clear about the emergence of rationality, or theory as Donald defines it, we may consider the role this emergence played in the Greek axial transformation. But we must always keep in mind the larger historical landscape of the efflorescence of ancient Greek culture during the 500 years from about 800 to about 300 BCE. Before looking at particular thinkers and movements it might be useful to survey briefly the background features of the period that might help account for the axial transition.

  The emergence of the polis itself, usually dated to the eighth century, with its emphasis on the participation of all citizens in the assembly, even when political office was monopolized by a few, and the development of an inclusive polis religion, centering on sacrificial rites performed at ever more imposing temples devoted to the patron deities of the poleis, have been seen as the essential preconditions for the development of Greek rationality. With the development of ever more widely participatory political and judicial institutions, especially in the sixth and fifth centuries, there was a growing emphasis on argument in the assembly and in the law courts, which made argument and evidence matters of explicit concern. The very intensity of political participation in these developing poleis has been seen by a number of scholars as the indispensable precondition for the innovations in thought.127

  It is worth remembering that literacy, once given significant causal status in this process, though now se
en more as a necessary than a sufficient cause, closely accompanied the rise of the polis: the first writing, the poems of Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns, dating from the late eighth or the early seventh centuries, and the beginning of prose texts, of which we have only fragments, from the early to middle sixth century.128

  A third factor besides political developments and literacy, the invention of money, occurred in the late seventh or early sixth century in Asia Minor and so accompanied the beginning of Milesian speculation. Richard Seaford has argued forcefully for the importance of the world’s first money economy as a stimulus to abstract thought in his 2004 book Money and the Early Greek Mind. Seaford moves the whole discussion of money beyond the usual haphazard treatment that applies the term to anything used as a measure of value, to a precise definition of what money, in fact, really is, a discussion too technical to repeat here, but which comes down to money as a circulating currency accepted on trust in the issuing authority.129 Seaford argues for the Ionian Greeks as the inventors of money and as to its date of origin he says, “coinage spread in Greek Asia Minor from the late seventh or early sixth century and in the mainland from about the middle of the sixth century.“130 Seaford illustrates the influence of money on the Greek capacity for abstraction by citing the work of the Milesians and gives a number of specific examples such as the well-known saying of Heraclitus, “All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things just as goods are for gold and gold for Whether money can play as dominant a role as a stimulus to early Greek thought as Seaford believes, is open to argument. That it was an important background factor is very likely true. It is also important to remember that money was issued by the polis, so was as much a political as an economic development.

  A fourth factor in the increasing rationalization of Greek thought has been suggested by Robert Hahn: technology, particularly architectural technology.132 Hahn points our that in the first half of the sixth century in Ionia, just when the Milesian teaching was taking shape and Anaximander was trying to formulate the structure of the cosmos, the first monumental stone temples in Greek history were being built there: the temple of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the temple of Hera at Samos.133 Hahn argues that, though much of the basic technology for building massive stone structures was learned in Egypt, whose ties with Ionia were close at the time, the Greek architects had to work out a number of problems to meet their own needs. Although they were building sacred edifices to the gods, they were also solving complex problems of geometry and engineering using human reason alone. Hahn believes that Anaximander’s model of the universe used temple construction, particularly the structure of massive columns composed of large circular drums stacked on top of one another, as a kind of paradigm. We know that Anaximander thought the earth was cylindrical in shape, with a ratio of 3:1 for diameter and height, like the drum of a column, possibly implying an infinite column connecting all parts of the cosmos, of which the earth is only one segment, what Plato will later describe as a kind of axis mundi.134 Hahn interprets the thought of Anaximander as involving the “rejection of supernatural explanations” and the “promotion of rational discourse,” which may be true, but should not be taken to label Anaximander as a premature “secularist.” His use of the religio-cosmological meaning of the temple column as the paradigm for his world picture would suggest that he was still living, in good part, in a mythological world, however much he learned from the rational reflections of the architectural engineers. Finally, if literacy and money seem to be closely correlated with the rise of the polis, so is monumental temple architecture, the very symbol of the solidarity of the polis.131

  These four suggested background features of the rise of something like rational reflection in ancient Greece are all more or less closely tied to the rise and efflorescence of the polis itself and of a larger society composed of a number of independent poleis. Because the polis society was unique, it is perhaps not surprising that it gave rise to unique cultural developments. In our introductory reflections to the problem of the axial age we suggested that breakdown was a usual precipitating factor to the axial transformation. So far we have viewed polis society as largely successful. It is true that in the first half of the sixth century, according to the scant historical information that we have, Miletus suffered several foreign invasions and severe internal conflict. We simply don’t know enough to say whether these difficulties were related to the Milesian innovations in thought. The issue of breakdown will return when we consider later developments. It remains to discuss some developments in the sphere of religion, not all of which can be encompassed in what we normally think of as polis religion.

  We have mentioned above the importance of the cult of Olympian deities as the focus of the solidarity of the developing polis. But we also noted another strand of the Greek religious tradition, the Dionysiac, as having increasing importance in sixth-century Athens. There was no unified, certainly no centralized, Greek religion; Delphi served as a transpolis religious center but its focus on Apollo and his oracles meant that it represented only one of many religious cults, practices and devotions. A variety of religious movements and/or charismatic figures appear fitfully in the very partial records we have from the sixth century throughout the Greek world. The best documented movement, and that not very well documented, is that of Pythagoras and his followers in Sicily and southern Italy.136 Pythagoras, a shadowy figure from whom no writings survive, was of Ionian birth, and probably cognizant of Milesian thought, but he migrated to Sicily and began a movement there that was simultaneously religious and political.137 Although his followers sought political control in several cities, his teaching, at least for the initiated, was secret and concerned with individual religious needs.

  Mystery religions, of which the best known is the cult of Demeter at Eleusis near Athens, were also concerned with individual religious well-being (“salvation” would probably be too strong a word). These religious currents, which we can only discern with difficulty, were another significant influence on the developing wisdom tradition, one that, perhaps surprisingly to us, overlaps with the development of rationality. Aspects of the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides have been traced to the influence of “mystery” religions. Shaman-like figures, often described as having magical powers, go back at least to Epimenides at the time of Solon (early sixth century), Pythagoras a generation or two later, Empedocles, who lived in the middle fifth century and who made significant contributions to Greek speculation, but who is also alleged to have dressed himself in extravagant garments, holding himself to be divine, and Socrates. If we look at the Socrates described by Alcibiades in the Symposium, we will find a man who could lose himself in standing meditation for 24 hours, who could walk barefoot comfortably on ice whereas his fellow soldiers had difficulty walking in boots, who was immune to alcohol, and who did not need sleep.

  One primary difference between these religious currents and what Michael Morgan calls “Delphic theology,” is that the Delphic theology emphasized the dramatic distance between gods and men, immortals and mortals (the Delphic motto, “Know thyself,” was an admonition to remember that you are human and that it would be hubris to try to compete with the gods), whereas the mystery religions, with their emphasis on ecstatic rites, possession cults, and initiation rituals, saw the divine-human boundary as permeable, and divinization as a human possibility.138 If one looks at the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus, one might well consider Plato to be in the latter camp.

  We noted above that the Milesians ignored or accepted the existence of the Olympian deities, but did not criticize them. But the fact that they could build their cosmogonies with little but implicit reference to their predecessors, together with the fact that they felt free to modify drastically the views even of their own teachers, tells us something important about the Greek intellectual world. Lloyd, in a book comparing ancient Greek and Chinese science, points out the striking “lack of great authority figures for t
he writers of the [Greek] classical period,” and contrasts “the famously agonistic Greeks” with “the less famously irenic Chinese,” who normally sought ancient authority for their assertions.139 Lloyd shows that even in the Hellenistic period, when schools attached to founders and their texts formed in Greece, the intensity of debate within schools, the tendency of later heads of schools to criticize their founders and for new divergent schools to form, as well as for individuals to shift from one school to another, was not mirrored in China, even though various forms of debate and argument can be found there as well.

  Homer never lost his hold on the Greek mind, being the text that every literate Greek learned first, and efforts to allegorize his poems to bring them into conformity with later thought began surprisingly early, but Homer’s influence was more as a kind of subtext even in writers who overtly criticize him (Plato in the Republic, for example) than as an external authority. If one thinks of Israel, the Greeks also stand in marked contrast. As a thought experiment in what might have been we can think of the close connection of Zeus and justice (dike) beginning, tentatively, in Homer, becoming quite explicit and central in Hesiod, powerfully applied to his immediate situation by Solon, and reiterated once again in the tragedies of Aeschylus. But although the concern for justice remains central for those we call the Presocratics, the connection with Zeus loosens drastically. We saw in the case of Israel that Yahweh emerged gradually from being one among other gods, even the greatest god, to the status of the one and only true God. Zeus never underwent that fate, even though the possibility was never entirely lost: witness the Hymn to Zeus of the early third century BCE Stoic Cleanthes.140