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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Fernanda Caizzi describes one kind of sophistic response to such situations, that of Antiphon. Those we have come to call sophists, who applied the work of such thinkers as Parmenides not to questions of ultimate reality but to ordinary human life, sometimes concluded that nomos, the ethical and legal code governing ordinary life, varied so much from one place to another that it could not be identified with physis, nature. Indeed, existing moral codes might be contrary to nature. As Caizzi puts it:

  Numerous of Antiphon’s points seem to reflect experience of Athenian social life, perceived from the position emphasizing the inadequacy of its rules to answer the individual’s needs, and confirmed by evidence that stared everyone in the face. The recourse to nature, in terms of life and death, as the only criterion of advantage and disadvantage; the linkage between useful and pleasurable, on the one hand, and between harmful and painful, on the other; the observation that law cannot protect individuals even when they adhere to it, and even less so when they are the innocent party; the reference to court proceedings and to persuasion’s being much stronger than truth or falsehood-all imply a morality that is primarily egoistical and self-protective, skilful in justifying itself by pointing out the shortcomings of justice and law to give human beings security.l69

  Although Plato never mentions Antiphon, we can perhaps see him behind such figures as Thrasymachus and Callicles, men who believed that justice is the rule of the stronger and that conventional norms should not restrain them.

  If, under the conditions of breakdown in Athens in the late decades of the fifth century, things actually came to this, we should not ignore-Plato does not ignore-earlier and influential sophists who never endorsed such amoralist views, even if their cultural relativism left the door open to such views. Indeed, at least since Hegel there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate the sophists, even to show them as the creators of a form of education that continues to this day, and the inventors of the idea of culture, both in the sense of common culture and of high culture. The speculative thought of the late sixth and early fifth centuries, although never replacing the poetic tradition or the popular religion among the people, did create new needs among the elites, particularly in democratic poleis where the old aristocratic education no longer made sense. Neither Athens nor any other democratic city consciously created a civic education appropriate to its needs, but, according to the great authority on these matters, Werner Jaeger, it was the sophists who supplied what was missing, replacing the poetic education of the past with a rational, logical, and, above all, rhetorical education. Jaeger uses the Greek word Paideia, variously translated as “education,” “culture,” even “civilization,” as the title of his three-volume magnum opus, and he gives pride of place to the sophists as the first to use paideia in the sense of “culture,” the very idea that we still find indispensable. 170 Jaeger sees the sophists as the inventors of the trivium, the first three of what will later be the seven liberal arts, that focuses on language-namely grammar, dialectic (logic), and rhetoric-usually also adding mathematics.171

  In a self-governing city, speech was essential to any who aspired to leadership. The services of sophists as teachers were needed especially by those who wanted to speak persuasively in public, so it was rhetoric above all that the sophists taught, though they did not neglect other subjects. Not only in Plato’s mind but also in public opinion, it was rhetoric that made the sophists suspect. Could not one use rhetoric to make the worse cause appear to be the better? Aristotle would rescue rhetoric from its Platonic exile (though Plato was a great rhetorician), and it would be central not only to all education in antiquity, but right up into the nineteenth century in the West.

  The views of the sophists with respect either to the traditional beliefs or the cosmic theology of the Presocratics is complex. There is the possibility that some of them were atheists, but on the whole they preferred to refrain from judgment on religious issues. They thus contributed to an incipient “secularization” of culture, for the first time in Greece, but also raised another issue for popular suspicion. They can be seen as the forerunners of the kinds of psychological, sociological, and anthropological views of culture in general and religion in particular that would explain them primarily in terms of their usefulness. Further development of such views in these fields had to wait until the nineteenth century, when secularization was once again on the agenda.v2

  There are those who want to make the sophists heroes, defenders of democracy and liberalism as against the supposedly reactionary views of Plato, and Plato does put “progressive” views into the mouth of Protagoras in the latter’s Great Speech in the dialogue of the same name, though it can be argued that Plato actually agreed with much he attributed to Protagoras, improving his views in the retelling.173 In any case, not all the sophists were democrats-Antiphon was executed for being the planner of the oligarchical revolution in Athens in 411 BCE.174 Hegel perhaps gives us the best way to place the sophists in the development of Greek thought. He sees the earlier Presocratics, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus, as discoverers of objective being, reality in itself as against appearance.175 The sophists borrowed their methods of thought for subjective ends, as providing “good judgment,” in Protagoras’s words, in both private and public life, but without any clear commitment to objective validity.176 But it is the very faintness of their hold on truth that has called into question their status as philosophers. Yet, for Hegel, the sophists are the necessary precondition for the next turn in the history of Greek thought. It was not for nothing that popular opinion considered Socrates a sophist. For Hegel it is in and through subjectivity that Socrates (or Plato following him) was able to return to objective reason, but this time, because of incorporating the subjective moment, in a much richer form.

  Socrates

  Socrates and Plato, so difficult to separate one from another, signify the completion of the axial transition in ancient Greece. Dealing with them at all is enormously challenging because the scholarship is immense and the disagreements major. The following necessarily brief treatment must be restricted to those aspects relevant to the argument of this book.

  The breakdown that preceded their breakthrough actually engulfed Socrates, who was executed in 399 BCE at the age of 70 after being tried and convicted for impiety (not recognizing the gods of the city and introducing new gods, daimones) and leading the youth of Athens astray. He is one of the most extraordinary figures in history, leaving an impression, not only on Plato but on many others, that changed the course of Greek and subsequently Western culture. In his lifetime (469-399) Socrates experienced the rise and fall of the Athenian empire and lived amid the currents that we now separate as philosophical and sophistic. Aristophanes in his play Clouds depicts Socrates as a typical sophist and teacher of rhetoric, but his portrait gives every evidence of comic distortion. That Socrates was a teacher no one doubts, but a new kind of teacher. The typical sophist claimed to be wise in all things, to be able to answer any question asked of him. Socrates claimed to know nothing, to be a seeker of wisdom, not a purveyor of it.

  In his speech to the jury at the trial that would cost him his life, Socrates recounts the visit his friend Chaerephon made to Delphi to ask if any man was wiser than Socrates, and the answer he received, that none was. Socrates was perplexed by this reply (from Apollo, no less), because he knew that he was not wise at all. But on seeking wisdom from those who claimed to be wise, he discovered that none of them really was either, so that his superiority lay not in his own wisdom, but in his knowledge of his lack of it (Apology 21a-e). Socrates claimed not to know the answers but to know the questions: How can we care for our souls? What is the goodness or virtue that will lead our souls in the right direction? Socrates’s questions were in a sense subjective, they were concerned with the self or soul, but not in the sense of the sophists, who made everything relative to the individual or the culture, for Socrates was searching for the truth not only of his own soul but of everyone’s. In his def
ense he refers to his Daimonion, that “divine voice that made itself heard every time it wished to hold him back from an But his quest for wisdom was in the end demanded by something greater than a spirit, it was demanded by god.178 In his often-quoted answer to the possibility that the jury might acquit him if he would promise no longer to practice philosophy, Socrates tells the jury that he would say:

  Gentlemen of the jury, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? [And then he goes on to say:] I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger, and more so the citizens for you are more kindred to me. Be sure that this is what the god orders me to do, and I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the god.‘79

  Heraclitus had said that most people are asleep while awake (absent while present; D. 34), and Parmenides that most people are wandering in the wilderness of what-is-not because they haven’t found the path of what-is, and Socrates seems to have been doing much the same in confronting the people of Athens fairly directly with the fact that they had no idea about the truth. Apparently doing this day after day in the agora was more annoying than doing it in the privacy of one’s own study.

  It is also the case that Socrates really was calling into question the accepted answers to his questions and so calling into doubt the beliefs and practices of his fellow citizens. Execution was an extreme penalty for such behavior, but the period after the fall of the thirty tyrants was unsettled, and, though Socrates had refused to collaborate with them, some of their leaders had been his students. The paranoia that Eli Sagan has found democracies prone to was part of the atmosphere that led to the strange trial and conviction of Socrates)” But even more than the trial and the conviction, what made this event become paradigmatic for the whole history of philosophy was Socrates’s willing acquiescence to his sentence, his belief that it was his duty to obey the laws of his city, as recounted in the Crito. A willing death in accordance with the laws of the city, but even more “in the service of the god,” of a man who, while living, had already had life-changing effects on many of his students, completed the picture that would be indelible ever after, leading Erasmus to place him among the saints when he wrote, “Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis!“181

  That Socrates marks a great transition in Greek history is evident from the fact that we call his predecessors “Presocratics,” but it isn’t evident in the quality of his thinking what was so new-surely it was not his “rationalism,” for rational argument had flourished in Greece at least since Parmenides. Of the efforts to account for his pivotal significance, several might be considered. Hegel believed that Socrates really was guilty as charged, for his idea of divinity was new, and he was trying to lead his students to a way of life different from that of traditional Athens. And for Hegel it was Socrates’s radical subjectivity, but one given an objective turn in the search for the good and the true themselves, that put him at odds with his city. Yet, Hegel says, the city was already guilty of the very things it accused Socrates of-wasn’t it already rife with subjectivity and subversive ways of life?-and so repented of Socrates’s death sentence almost as soon as it was carried out. Yet Socrates’s death was in a critical sense the conclusive sign of the death of Athens-the bloom had wilted-for Athens could not find the objective political form to fulfill Socrates’s new understanding of the soul. The old form of the polis could neither absorb it nor reject it, and so it was reduced to a shadow.182

  Werner Jaeger, without mentioning Hegel in this regard, offers a somewhat similar interpretation. He sees Socrates as prefigured by such great Athenians as Solon and Aeschylus, each of whom in his own time led his fellow Athenians to a deeper understanding of their ethical calling. But Socrates was speaking in a new register, and the Athens of his day was not the Athens of old: “Was he the last embodiment of a harmony which, even in his lifetime was in process of dissolution? Whatever the truth may be, he seems to stand on the frontier between the early Greek way of life and a new, unknown realm, which he had approached more nearly than any other, but was not fated to enter.””” Later Jaeger puts it only a little differently: “Socrates was one of the last citizens of the type which flourished in the earlier Greek polis. At the same time, he was the embodiment and the finest example of the new form of moral and intellectual individualism. Both these characters were united in him, without impairment of either. The former pointed back to a mighty past; the latter looked forward to the future. Thus, he was a unique event in the history of the Greek This summary is to the point, but we must be careful of the word “individualism.” Socrates was searching for the truth of the soul, his soul and that of those with whom he conversed, but that truth was not, to quote Heraclitus, private: it was common (D.2). If this be individualism, it was a very different species from that of Antiphon. Perhaps Hegel’s cumbersome idea of subjective spirit reaching for objectivity puts it better than the single term “individualism.”

  We will give Eric Voegelin the last word. He writes, In the Apology we have seen the multiple levels of action. On the political level Socrates is condemned by Athens; on the mythical level, Athens has been condemned by the gods. The dialogue is itself a mythical judgment.“185 For Voegelin, what this judgment meant was that the order (kosmos) of the polis was transferred to the soul of Socrates, who became the new order-bearer, and from Socrates this order of the soul once again, through Plato, became, potentially at least, the order of (a new kind of) society.

  The Greek word kosmos, order, an important one for Plato, works equally well at the level of self, society, and universe. Gabriela Carone has argued that in the late dialogues of Plato, such as the Timaeus and the Laws, the idea was expressed that humans can take the order of the universe as the model for their own souls, so that every human, at least potentially, is a citizen of the universe, an idea usually attributed only later to the Stoics.186 Kahn has shown that we know Socrates best only in the Apology, written soon after the trial and giving a picture that would have been unconvincing if far from the historical reality, but that even in the Crito we find elements that Plato may have added to the historical picture, and that in the early aporetic dialogues it is no longer safe to take the words attributed to Socrates as simple expressions of his actual views.117 On the other hand one might ask, however far from the historical Socrates Plato wandered, did he ever abandon his spirit? Terry Penner has shown recently that, whatever discontinuities one can find between “Socrates” (the quotes signaling that anything we know of him is in the end conjectural) and Plato, there are also significant continuities right up to the late dialogues.”’ This is not the place to get into “the Socratic question,” but to me it seems clear, however unknowable the details, that without Socrates there would have been no Plato. Plato, however, with his enormous range of interests, the living quality of his thought, and the vast corpus of his writings, which rival the Bible in length, completed an axial transition that had been long in the making and moved toward the institutionalization of an axial culture that would have enormous long-term consequences.

  Plato

  Plato’s work is a shoreless sea, touching on almost every subject (even on natural philosophy in the late dialogues), and the touchstone for Aristotle and all later ancient (and modern) philosophy. I shall confine myself to only a couple of issues having to do with the theoretical concerns of this book.

  If one of the defining aspects of axial culture is the capacity to imagine things different from what exists, Plato would seem to be the banner bearer of all axial thinkers.”�
� The idea of Plato as a conservative, so widespread that it includes such diverse thinkers as Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, seems wildly off the mark if conservatism involves any kind of devotion to a traditional social order. Malcolm Schofield points out that “there is little Republic would preserve either of existing political structures or of conventional moral beliefs and practices.“190 Could insisting on radical gender equality, so that women as well as men participate in the guardian class and even in warfare, expropriating the property of the ruling class, so that they live an austere life, forbidden even to touch money, without families and without private dwellings, be called conservative? For Plato over and over again it is clear that the worst regime is tyranny, and that the tyrant is the worst human being. The utopia of the Republic is full of draconian rules, but it is not designed to allow one or a few tyrants to make the life of the populace miserable. The firmest discipline is directed to the guardians, to combine fierceness in defense of the city with gentleness toward the population as a whole. They are a kind of monastic order, taking the vow of poverty (significantly, the guardians have no slaves, nor does anyone else in the good city), obedience (to the philosopher king), and, if not the vow of chastity-breeding arrangements are indeed strange in the Republic-at least being saddled with the most profound consequences of the vow of chastity, namely the lack of a spouse or children of one’s own. None of these restrictions apply to the rest of the population. Of the cardinal virtues, the philosopher king is above all capable of wisdom and the guardians of courage, but the whole city is to exemplify moderation and justice. Furthermore, though at first glance the Republic appears to be a caste system, Plato insists it is a meritocracy: if children of farmers or artisans appear to be exceptionally bright and spirited, they will be elevated to the guardians, and if the children of guardians prove to be slow, they will be sent to more menial jobs.