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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Xenophanes, who left his native Colophon (in Ionia) at the age of 25 probably after the Persian conquest of the city in 545 BCE, and lived for many decades in various cities in Sicily and southern Italy, is the first figure we know of to openly criticize the Olympian gods. He wrote poems that he recited himself in public in the various cities to which he traveled and was a “true sophistes or sage, prepared to turn his intelligence upon almost any His importance rests primarily in the fact that he drew a conclusion from Milesian speculation that the Milesians themselves had not drawn, namely, that traditional views of the Olympian deities were false: “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other.“142 It was not only the actions attributed to the gods that were “unseemly,” but even their appearance, as if the gods were born, and had clothes and speech and bodies just like mortals. Xenophanes pressed his attack on anthropomorphism with a cultural relativist argument that “the Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.” He even argued that if horses and cattle could draw, their gods would look like horses and cattle.143

  Xenophanes developed a positive theology that may have been his extrapolation from the teachings of the Milesians:

  One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals in body or in thought.

  Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.

  All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears.144

  Here we have an elaboration of the Greek Cosmic God that Kahn found to be implicit in Anaximander, but “One who is greatest among gods and men,” not the only god. Xenophanes was fully conscious that Homer was the man “from whom all men have learned from the beginning,” so that his criticism of Homer was tendentious indeed. 141 At least among the educated, the Homeric gods, though not rejected, would never be entirely secure again.

  Heraclitus and Parmenides

  In the next generation after Xenophanes, the two most important and original thinkers were Heraclitus and Parmenides, living at roughly the same time, the late sixth and early fifth centuries, one in Ionian Ephesus, the other in Italian Elea, who very probably did not know of each other’s work. Unlike Xenophanes, whom we can see as simply developing the implications of his Milesian predecessors, both Heraclitus and Parmenides were struggling to turn an inherited poetic language into a language that could move beyond narrative to penetrate the timeless truth about self, society, and the cosmos. Although on the surface the two thinkers would seem to be utterly different, with Heraclitus believing the ultimate truth of the cosmos to be continuous change, and Parmenides believing it to be unmoving and unchanging being, the fact that both of them sought to describe a reality that differed from appearance made them, in the eyes of some, the cofounders of reason or theory and thus pivotal figures in the axial transformation.146

  Of Heraclitus we have fragments of his “book,” which was known for many centuries in antiquity, but which must have been a short collection of aphorisms of which we have perhaps a third to a half surviving. He was Nietzsche’s favorite Greek thinker, and with Heraclitus’s emphasis on paradox and conflict, it is not hard to see why.147 He wrote in prose, but his aphorisms have the power of Jakobson’s one-line poems. They probe the depths of person, society, and cosmos and the profound and conflictual relations between them, but they do not consist of sustained logical argument.141

  Havelock emphasizes that Heraclitus, indeed, the Presocratics generally, were still living in a largely oral culture: Heraclitus speaks of hearing and speaking, not of reading and writing. Although, Havelock says, the aphorism is as old as poetry, the complexity of Heraclitus’s condensed sayings would not have been as easy to remember as if they had been written in dactylic hexameters, even though they were often cadenced to the point of verse and used the devices of repetition, assonance, antithesis, and symmetry.149 Heraclitus uses certain key terms repeatedly, but gives them unfamiliar meanings, words such as logos (whose many meanings range from “language” to the “cosmic order of the universe”), the wise (to sophon), and even such apparently obvious words as war and fire. Havelock says, “Out of a total of some one hundred and thirty sayings, no less than forty-four, or some thirty-four percent, are preoccupied with the necessity to find a new and better language, or a new and more correct mode of experience, or are obsessed with the rejection of current methods of communication and current experience.“50 Nevertheless Havelock also believes that Heraclitus provided “the prototype and ancestry for the achievement of the first philosophical prose.” 151

  Kahn deepens Havelock’s argument when he holds that Heraclitus expresses his profound philosophy with a literary artistry that is essential to understanding his meaning. It is not that there are no “arguments” in Heraclitus-Kahn reminds us that from Plato to the present he has been taken seriously as a thinker-but that his thought requires literary as well as logical interpretation if we are to make as much sense of it as we can.152

  There is no space here for anything like an adequate exposition of the teaching of Heraclitus. I will only mention those aspects, though they are central ones for him, that have to do with what we would call the religious dimension. The idea of “the wise” (to sophon) is a central one, as in his saying that “the wise is one, knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all.“153 Kahn quotes Reinhardt as being right when he says, “Heraclitus’ principle, what corresponds in his case to the apeiron of Anaximander and the on [Being] of Parmenides, is not fire but to sophon.“154 And in one place Heraclitus plays with the possibility of thinking of Zeus as central: “The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.“155 But, and here one must be cautious because there is little consensus among the experts, there are a number of terms that Heraclitus uses that seem to point to ultimate reality: logos, fire, war (“the father of all”), god (theos), but all of which can perhaps be subsumed in the idea of “unity in opposites.” Opposites, according to Heraclitus, need each other, but also need to fight each other, so strife and unity belong together, in instances that may seem strange to us: day and night, the way up and the way down on a mountain road, the sea as nurturing to some (fish) but deadly for others (humans), and so forth. Heraclitus wants to insist both on the eternal change that involves all things, but also in their ultimate unity (“all things are one”; D. 50).

  Edward Hussey in his valuable summary of the teachings of Heraclitus helps us keep the various levels straight: “We must then take the wise [to sophon, with which we began our discussion of the thought of Heraclitus] as something that stands above and apart from both cosmic opposites and cosmic unity, yet manifests itself both in the cosmic god and in individual souls.“156 Heraclitus believes that the truth (logos) is common and available to all, something shared between gods and humans, but that you have to be awake to know it and most people “are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep.“157 As it was put elsewhere, people have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear. As Heraclitus put it, “Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf: absent while present.“158 Yet the possibility of our waking up, of our genuinely listening, is still there, otherwise why would Heraclitus write a book? Is it only that we must see the light of reason, or do we, as in the mystery religions, have to awaken from the dead? When, as with Heraclitus, we are on the cusp of mythospeculation becoming philosophy, probably both.

  With Parmenides we find something different. At first glance he seems to belong to the realm of mythospeculation along with the earlier Presocratics; he wrote in poetry, Homeric dactylic hexameters to be exact, and his one surviving poem (one of the most extended writings we have of these early thinkers) begins with a prologue recounting an ascent to heaven and an approach to an unn
amed goddess who reveals to the youth (kouros), who probably stands in for Parmenides, the Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion. The Way of Opinion turns out to be a cosmogony not dramatically different from those of his predecessors. The Way of Truth, however, introduces something radically new in the history of Greek thought. The goddess tells Parmenides that there are only two ways of inquiry and that one is thinkable, the other not. Eric Voegelin translates, “The one way, that Is and that Not it cannot be, is the path of Persuasion [Peitho] which is attendant upon Truth [Aletheia].“159 For Voegelin the revelation of “Is!” could only have come through some kind of experience of transcendence. He argues that to translate this passage as “It is,” or “Being is,” is to miss the ecstatic apprehension of the “Is!” which Parmenides at first hesitates even to call “Being.” He writes:

  That which comes into grasp through the Nous [mind] does not come into grasp in the manner of an object for discourse. The progress on the way toward the Light culminates in the experience of the supreme reality that can only be expressed in the exclamatory “Is!” When the philosopher is confronted with this overpowering reality the “Not is” becomes devoid of meaning for him. With the exclamation “Is!”, we come closest to the core of the Parmenidean experience. The propositional expressions “Being is,” and “Nothing cannot be,” are already “clumsy” circumscriptions.160

  For Nietzsche, too, Parmenides’s discovery is of a sudden sort, but quite different from Voegelin’s idea, that is, not an ecstatic experience but a logical revelation:

  Can something that is not, be? For the only form of knowledge which we trust immediately and absolutely and to deny which amounts to insanity is the tautology A=A … [Parmenides] has found a principle, the key to the cosmic secret, remote from all human illusion. Now, grasping the firm and awful hand of tautological truth about being, he can climb down, into the abyss of all things.161

  Both Voegelin and Nietzsche recognize that Parmenides does not (Nietzsche would say cannot) link the Being revealed as the Way of Truth to any worldly experience. Voegelin sees the logical argument that Parmenides develops to prove that Being is and Not Being is not as simply a defense of the transcendental experience that cannot be translated into empirical language. For Nietzsche it is an effort to create an absolutely logically consistent but completely dead sphere of pure Being out of which indeed nothing can come. In a sense they are merely recapitulating the different ways in which Parmenides was understood from his earliest successors to the present. But what they both would agree on, I think, is that Parmenides has delivered the first example in ancient Greece of an extended, tight, logical argument, and that all his successors will have to come to terms with that, either accepting it as the absolute road to truth, even while arguing for flaws in Parmenides’s own argument, or placing logical argument as only one way of approaching the truth as the late Plato will do. 112

  Without in the least minimizing the logical achievements of Parmenides, it is still worth seeing him with at least one foot in the older mythic world. Alexander Mourelatos, intensely aware of the philosophical relevance of Parmenides’s arguments, nonetheless reminds us of the poetic richness of the poem, its constant Homeric resonances, and its use of language and imagery especially from the Odyssey to make its philosophical point. Like Kahn’s work on Heraclitus, Mourelatos’s work on Parmenides shows that literary analysis can richly supplement philosophical analysis in helping us understand what the text is saying. The very title of his book, The Route of Parmenides, suggests the nature of his approach. What he calls “route” others have translated as “path” or “way,” but Mourelatos is calling our attention to the fact that the young man making the ascent to heaven in the Prologue of the poem, is, like Odysseus, following a route, guided by the goddess, that will lead him “home,” that is to a determinate end, the truth, but there is the danger of following a false route that will not be a route at all, only an endless wandering (the way of opinion or seeming). Mourelatos argues that Parmenides’s use of epic material throughout his poem “involves rhetorical effects which give poetical force to his argument,” through the use of metaphor, for example. And he makes a general point that will be applicable not only to the Presocratics but to philosophy generally: “But Parmenides’s suc cess in poetry need not be unrelated to his success as a philosopher. As modern literary criticism has taught us, a great deal of poetry-from all agesshares common ground with philosophical analysis to this extent: in both approaches we find close attention, almost at the microscopic scale, paid to the implicit pictures, the aura, the suggestiveness, and the multiple meanings of

  Here we have space for only a little of Mourelatos’s suggestive analysis. He points out that Parmenides speaks of a divinity who controls the identity and coherence of the what-is as having four faces: Anangke (Constraint), Moira (Fate), Dike (Justice), and Peitho (Persuasion), but the goddess who addresses the young man is “no other than Peitho, Persuasion, herself.” What Peitho relies on is “the bond of fidelity,” pistis, trust. What the metaphor of Peitho is saying is that the rightness of the what-is is “internalized: a necessity of autonomy,” but the trust, though mutual, is not equal, for it is from “reality” (the what-is) that the trust comes and it pulls us toward it, almost with the force of eros, love, as Plato will later put it.l6’ At an even deeper level, Mourelatos argues, we are beings attuned by nature to what-is, that our thinking is really “about, because of, for the sake of, what-is,” but that most of the time we get lost in the what-is-not, we lose the true route or path, we don’t see what it is our inmost nature to see.165 Parmenides in his own way is as lonely as Heraclitus, trying to hold up a light, but not finding many who see. Mourelatos reminds us that the images and metaphors are not the ontology, which stands on its own logical rigor, but they point to real aspects of it. Nietzsche’s notion that the what-is is a dead abstraction, a pure tautology, would seem to be very far from the truth, perhaps a symptom of his own wandering on the path of what-is-not.

  In any case, if we are looking for the place where theory begins in ancient Greece, this would seem to be it, even more clearly than in the case of Heraclitus. Parmenides is not only giving a theory of truth, he is defining the form of argument that could lead to truth-he is thinking about thinking, he is giving a method (etymologically related to hodos, Greek for path or way) for finding the truth. Is this the axial breakthrough? The enigmatic nature of Parmenides’s poem, its combination of mythic imagery, divine revelation, and rational argument, its lack of any connection between the “Is!” and the world we live in, would seem to limit its axial implications. But of this we can be sure: Parmenides has supplied tools that will be indispensable for the axial breakthrough, even if we have to reserve the completion of that breakthrough for the work of Plato and Aristotle.

  But even though the word “philosophy” is relatively late, and, with our emphasis on theory, we may be inclined to consider Parmenides to be the first real philosopher in ancient Greece, we must remember that the transition from a practical/performative understanding of wisdom to what has been called, at least since Plato, philosophy, was a gradual one, and that Greek philosophy itself never lost a practical/performative side, not even in the work of its most self-conscious theorist, Aristotle. As Michael Frede puts it:

  If, because of our focus on the pursuit of theoretical understanding of the world, we do not see that those engaged in this pursuit felt committed to a much more broadly understood wisdom with at least a strong practical component, we will find it difficult to understand how Socrates could see himself, and be seen by others, as part of a tradition going back to the Milesians … From Socrates onward all philosophers in antiquity thought of philosophy as being practical in the sense of being motivated by a concern for the good life and as involving a practical concern for how one actually lives and how one actually feels about

  Crisis and Breakdown

  If Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Parmenides could be seen as responses to the Milesian cosmogo
nists, they in turn stimulated an ever-widening series of responses in the second half of the fifth century. Parmenides, in particular, led some to develop further his own position and others to try to reconcile being and change with as rigorous a logic as he had used to deny that possibility. There is no space here to describe what happened, except to say that the emergence of argument itself allowed the very form of argument to be used in many ways, not all of them rooted in an ethical ontology like that of the predecessors. Parmenides even lent himself to parody, as when Gorgias, the famous sophist, in his “On Not Being,” held that “for anything you might like to mention: (1) that it is nothing, (2) that, even if it were something, it would be unknowable, and (3) that, even if it were knowable, it could not be made evident to others.“167

  In retrospect and under the influence of Plato we tend to distinguish the philosophers from the sophists, but at the time no such distinction was made. The wise and the skilled were denoted by the same term and, as usual in Greece, the aim was most often to refute the others and show oneself as truly wise. But in Athens in the last decades of the fifth century there was a growing sense of breakdown, something never far from the often-pessimistic Greek mind even in normal circumstances, but that had become all too real under the conditions of the protracted Peloponnesian War. Ancient Greece was a world of more than a little orthopraxy, that is, a sense of the right way to act, but very little orthodoxy, as we have seen. One could hardly appeal to the Iliad for help in a situation of bitter and seemingly interminable warfare. So a sense that everything could be called in question affected not only those who professed wisdom, but a tragedian like Euripides and a historian like Thucydides. The latter commented on the anomia, lawlessness, that made normal life nearly impossible in a period during the war when the plague was ravaging Athens: “No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. As for offenses against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to justice.””’