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

by Robert N. Bellah

  73. Connor, “Civil Society,” 222.

  74. Ibid., 223.

  75. Ibid., 224.

  76. Parker, Athenian Religion, 69, 75, notes the uncertainty of the dates of the founding of the City Dionysia, holding that it could have been founded under the Pisistratids, but could also have been founded around the time of Cleisthenes’s reforms, the data being uncertain. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood in her Tragedy andAthenian Religion (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 103-104, challenges Connor’s dating and argues for the period 540-520 for the founding of the City Dionysia, although she accepts the idea of a major reorganization of the festival around the time of Cleisthenes.

  77. Connor, “Civil Society,” 224.

  78. Meier, Athens, is the best account of fifth-century Athens that I know of. It combines political, social, and cultural history in an integral way, and it uses tragedy to illuminate its argument at many points. Meier shows Athens at its wisest and most foolish, at its truly ethical and its disgracefully unethical, and all with an even hand, never forgetting the greatness he is recounting or apologizing for the terrible lapses; he is a model for historians.

  79. Finley argued that though most Greek cities from the middle of the sixth century increased the participation of the poor, they did so through “compromise systems” that allowed the rich “greater weight in decision-making. Athens eventually shifted that weight, and the only variable that was unique in Athens was the empire, an empire for which the navy was indispensable, and that meant the lower classes who provided the manpower for the navy. That is why I hold the empire to have been a necessary condition for the Athenian type of democracy. Then, when the empire was forcibly dissolved at the end of the fifth century BCE, the system was so deeply entrenched that no one dared attempt to replace it, difficult as it was in the fourth century to provide the necessary financial underpinning.” M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 49-50. Josiah Ober holds that the continued vitality of Athenian democracy in the fourth century creates more problems for Finley’s argument than he admits, but goes on to say, “Perhaps there never would have been a full-blown `radical’ democracy at Athens without the empire to buffer the financial strains of its development.” Josiah Ober, Mass andElite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 24. There is a parallel argument as to whether slavery was a necessary prerequisite for radical democracy, the argument being that the kind of direct democracy in Athens requires so much of the time and energy of the citizens that only if they had slaves to attend to day-to-day business would they have been able to sustain their high rate of participation. Ober argues against this view as well, indicating that many citizens were not slaveholders. See Ober, Mass and Elite, 24-27. Of course, a similar argument could be made about women-without them to run the oikos the men would not have had time to be citizens.

  80. Because my analysis focuses on the cultural level, and then on the religious and political institutions that underlie it, I have necessarily neglected the economic structure of ancient Greece, about which so much has been written. Let me say just a word here about matters I cannot consider in this chapter. The classic Marxist characterization of the ancient economy as a slave economy has been pretty well abandoned, even though the importance of slavery is not denied. A good treatment of the relatively marginal importance of slavery in the lives of the peasant-citizens of ancient Athens is given by Ellen Meiksins Wood in her Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1988). Mohammad Nafissi sums up the evidence for a relatively modern market economy in ancient Athens in his article “Class, Embeddedness and the Modernity of Ancient Athens,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 2 (2000): 207-238. For a full discussion of the argument over the nature of the ancient economy, see Mohammad Nafissi, Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology: Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2005).

  81. Simon Goldhill, Love, Sex and Tragedy: How theAncient World Shapes Our Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 223.

  82. Ibid., 224-226. The Isocrates quotation is from 226.

  83. Ibid., 227.

  84. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988 [1972]), 185. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion, 50-53, argues that the chorus, out of which tragedy perhaps initially evolved and which was never absent in any tragedy, represented the people of Athens worshipping Dionysus in the present, as well as whatever role they had within the drama. If she is right, the chorus linked play and audience in a way no modern play can do. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy interestingly anticipated this view: “What must be kept in mind in these investigations is that the audience of an Attic tragedy discovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra. Audience and chorus were never fundamentally set over against each other: all was one grand chorus of singing, dancing, satyrs, and those who let themselves be represented by them … An audience of spectators, such as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks” (54; italics in the original).

  85. Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, 187-188. For Aristotle on poetry as more philosophical than history, see Poetics 1451bff. Nietzsche holds that “Dionysos remains the sole dramatic protagonist … all the famous characters of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are only masks of that original hero.” Birth of Tragedy, 66, italics in original.

  86. Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, 43. Goldhill gives a remarkable example of how a Greek tragedy can speak to a contemporary audience. He describes a performance of Sophocles’s Electra in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1990, during a week in which eight people had been killed in sectarian violence, that was so stunning that the audience refused to leave the theater after the end of the play without discussing the traumas that the passion for revenge creates. Goldhill, Love, Sex and Tragedy, 215.

  87. Voegelin, The World of the Polis, 251: “The leap in being does not assume the form of an Israelite revelation of God, but of the Dionysiac descent into man, to the depth where Dike [Justice] is to be found.”

  88. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Greek Religion, 197-200.

  89. Ibid., 153.

  90. Ibid.

  91. Ibid., 291.

  92. I was privileged to attend a splendid performance of the Persians at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley, California, in 2005. The play was necessarily somewhat “adapted,” but the writers carefully avoided obvious references to the American invasion of Iraq, which could be seen as a kind of reverse West invades East to Aeschylus’s East invades West. The Auora auditorium is so small that the audience is virtually inside the play, and I think we all felt, quite powerfully, that the play was about us.

  93. Christian Meier, The PoliticalArt of Greek Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1988]), 78.

  94. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Greek Religion, 226.

  95. Near the end of the Peloponnesian War, at a moment when defeat had become palpable, the island of Samos demanded and received Athenian citizenship, an example of what was desired but denied earlier, and which came too late by then.

  96. Lyric poetry from the seventh century on was of no small importance in Greek cultural history, but the highly condensed nature of the present treatment precludes giving it serious attention.

  97. On these early developments, see especially Detienne, Masters of Truth.

  98. I have found Richard P. Martin’s article “The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom,” in Dougherty and Kurke, Cultural Poetics, 108-128, especially helpful and will rely on it for much of the following discussion of the sages.

  99. Ibid., 113.

  100. Ibid., 113-115.

  101. Ibid., 115-116.

  102. Ibid., 117.

  103. Ibid., 118. The Jakobson quote is from Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 4, Slavic Epic Studies (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 673.

  104. Martin, “T
he Seven Sages,” 122.

  105. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Greek Religion, 154ff. Sourvinou-Inwood goes on to suggest that the poet, as the original “actor,” impersonated Dionysus.

  106. See Sitta von Reden and Simon Goldhill, “Plato and the Performance of Dialogue,” in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 257-289. Von Reden and Goldhill choose passages from the Charmides, the Laches, and the Lysis, not only to show the subtlety of Plato’s dramatic depiction, but to illustrate moments where Socrates himself is “performing” before an audience, often largely of boys, in the gymnasium.

  107. For the centrality of the dialogue form in Plato’s thought, see especially Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also the chapter on dialogue in Paul Friedlander, Plato: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958 [1954]), 154-170.

  108. This point was suggested to me by Bernard Williams in his “Plato: The Inventor of Philosophy,” reprinted in The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 [1998]), 150-151. The translation is Williams’s. For Plato, “image” means a copy rather than an original-second best, that is.

  109. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); for “hybrid system,” 368ff.

  110. Ibid., 335. By “external memory sources” Donald means, primarily, written texts.

  111. Stephen White, after critically examining the oral traditions upon which our knowledge of Thales is based, concludes that he was “a pioneer in the very pragmatic realms of commerce and politics, both regional and international, as well as engineering, surveying, and navigation.” In sum, “Thales it seems pioneered the quantitative treatment of empirical data. Call him a philosopher or not, he fully deserves credit as the founder of Greek astronomy.” Stephen White, “Thales and the Stars,” in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honor ofAlexander Mourelatos, ed. Victor Caston and Daniel W. Graham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 3.

  112. On this point see the chapter titled “Tradition and Innovation” in G. E. R. Lloyd’s The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice ofAncient Greek Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 50-108.

  113. M. L. West, in his Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), gives numerous Mesopotamian and Persian parallels, particularly to Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus.

  114. Francis M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1957 [1912]), 66. In his Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 187-201, Cornford gives a more nuanced picture of the background of Ionian cosmogony, tracing the continuities with Hesiod while recognizing the significant abandonment of mythological beings as actors in the story. See also West, Early Greek Philosophy, on the Mesopotamian and Persian influences on the Ionian “philosophers.”

  115. Because our knowledge of Thales’s thought is both sparse and questionable, it is not clear that he really did argue for water as the primal element, but if he did, he was not far from several Middle Eastern creation myths that saw the world beginning with waterGenesis 1:2, for example.

  116. G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin andDevelopment of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); on Anaximander’s contribution to astronomy, see 170; on the Milesian cosmogonies as being primarily contributions to a “new or `reformed theology,”’ see 11. In general Lloyd is skeptical about the sources for the thought of the Milesian philosophers.

  117. Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994 [1960]), 7.

  118. Ibid., 234.

  119. Ibid., 133.

  120. Ibid., 199. The presentation of natural science as a kind of epic poem is still very much alive today, as we saw in Chapter 2.

  121. Ibid., 238-239.

  122. The quote is from Plato’s Laws 899b.9, where it is thought to be attributed to Thales.

  123. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 145.

  124. Kahn, Anaximander, 201-202. Italics in original.

  125. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977 [1975]), 42-43. Ricoeur also expresses doubts as to whether “imitation” is a good translation of mimesis, but that is an issue beyond our present concern.

  126. The ambiguity of “nature” is not entirely lacking in English: the “nature” of natural science is not quite the “nature” of the mountain climber.

  127. For the influence of Greek political life on the development of early Greek thought, see, among others, Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982 [1962]); and Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience, esp. chap. 4. For the influence of Greek legal practice, see Michael Gagarin, “Greek Law and the Presocratics,” in Caston and Graham, Presocratic Philosophy, 19-24. Gagarin notes that Havelock, in The Greek Concept ofJustice, had some time ago noted the importance of the argumentative nature of Greek legal procedure for the development of Greek thought.

  128. Eric Havelock was the most vigorous proponent of the importance of literacy in the development of Greek thought, although he never slighted the continuing importance of orality. See in particular his Preface to Plato and The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

  129. For a full discussion, see Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind, chap. 8, “The Features of Money,” 147-172.

  130. Ibid., 93.

  131. Ibid., 94.

  132. Robert Hahn, Anaximander and the Architects: The Contribution of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

  133. Ibid., 69ff.

  134. On the shape of the earth, see Kahn, Anaximander, 55-56; and Hahn, Anaximander, 177ff. On Plato’s cosmic axis, see Republic 10.616bff.

  135. On the basis of scant and problematic evidence, Hahn argues that the monumental Ionian temples were meant to symbolize oligarchical or tyrannical government, and only inadvertently came to symbolize the solidarity of the whole community, an argument that I find doubtful. See his Anaximander, 219-240.

  136. Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), which draws on and to some degree improves the fundamental work on Pythagoreanism, Walter Burkert’s Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972 [1962]).

  137. Kahn speculates that in the absence of definite information to the contrary, the basic Pythagorean mathematical conception of the cosmos may well have been Pythagoras’s own. He writes, “The notion of cosmic harmony expressed in numerical ratios and conceived as astral music is one of those ideas of genius that has remained amazingly fruitful over the centuries,” and concludes that because there was no other Pythagorean of comparable stature, the idea may well go back to Pythagoras himself. Pythagoras, 38.

  138. Michael L. Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 15. It is worth remembering that in Athens, at least, Dionysiac religion, through the City Dionysia and the performance of tragedy, was integrated into the polis religion, which was not therefore exclusively Delphic, in Morgan’s sense. Also the cult at Eleusis was very much part of Athenian life. Initiation into the cult was open to any Greek speaker who could pay the fee, but Athens considered the cult an ornament to its own preeminence among the poleis.

  139. G. E. R. Lloyd, Adversaries and Auth
orities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21, 24. Italics in the original.

  140. For a translation of the hymn, see A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 326-327. For Cleanthes, Zeus, though “omnipotent” and “prime mover of nature,” is only “the most majestic of immortals,” nor does Cleanthes’s devotion to Zeus become central for all later Stoics.

  141. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 168. See also the respectful treatment of Xenophanes in Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 38-54.

  142. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 168.

  143. Ibid., 169.

  144. Ibid., 169-170.

  145. Jaeger, Theology, 42.

  146. For the argument that Heraclitus and Parmenides were essentially doing the same thing with different means, see particularly Alexander Nehamas, “Parmenidean Being/ Heraclitean Fire,” in Caston and Graham, Presocratic Philosophy, 45-64. Hegel has an interesting take on these two. Parmenides, he says, “began philosophy proper. A man now constitutes himself free from all ideas and opinions, denies their truth, and says necessity alone, Being, is the truth. This beginning is certainly still dim and indefinite, and we cannot say much of what it involves; but to take up this position certainly is to develop Philosophy proper, which has not hitherto existed.” Of Heraclitus he writes, “The advance requisite and made by Heraclitus is the progression from Being as the first immediate thought, to the category of Becoming as the second. This is the first concrete, the Absolute, as in it is the unity of opposites. Thus with Heraclitus the philosophic Idea is to be met with in its speculative form … Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1974), 254, 279. Hegel does not argue that Heraclitus was later than Parmenides; his connection between them is logical, not chronological.