The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  Several passages suggest a further hypothesis: that the Sphere’s transcendent dimension is meant to safeguard divine holiness. In a preamble to the cosmology, Empedocles prays:

  But turn from my tongue, o gods, the madness of those men, and from hallowed lips let a pure stream flow. And I entreat you, virgin Muse, white-armed, of long memory, send of that which it is right and fitting for mortals to hear, driving the well-reined chariot from the place of reverence (B3, tr. Wright [358]).

  Elsewhere too, probably also in the cosmological poem, he begs the muse to help him reveal a “good account about the blessed gods” (B131; cf. B132).11 The intensity of this plea for religious sanity is not surprising if we consider the dual powers, Love and Hate. In fact they are Good and Evil. Utterly unlike Heraclitus’ creative War, father and undisputed sovereign of all things (DK 22 B53), Empedocles’ Hate is “cursed” (DK 31 B17.19), “evil” (B20.4); its products are “deeply dismal at their strife-birth because they were born in anger” (B22.9, tr. Barnes [5]). Yet this horrifying power is divine. Empedocles does not soften the problem by presenting Hate as a neutral force of separation. Presumably he could not accept the corollary: the neutralization of “blameless” Love (cf. B35.13). But in declaring Hate so fundamental to the cosmos that it always tears the Sphere apart in the end and destroys the triumph of Love, Empedocles treads the edge of blasphemy. He is saying that the very existence of the cosmos proves the everlasting presence, as a god among gods, of a being that is accursed. A “good account about the blessed gods” should be both truthful (B17.26) and pious, but how is a good account possible if gods are only cosmogonic principles, the evil coordinate with good? Empedocles’ resolution, it seems, is to postulate a noncosmogonic dimension for the cosmogonic Sphere, and to shift to it the burden of divine holiness.

  The description of the Sphere in B29 (quoted on p. 216) is echoed in another passage:

  For he is not furnished with a human head upon limbs, nor do two branches spring from his back, he has no feet, no nimble knees, no shaggy genitals, but he is mind alone, holy and beyond description, darting through the whole cosmos with swift thoughts (B134, tr. KRS).

  This divinity, however, is not portrayed as spherical but as a mind, and as coexistent with the cosmos. Presumably, this being is other than the sphere from whose destruction the cosmos takes its rise. But the new god too is a perfect unity, only now in cognitive mode: a single grasp of the entire actuality of the cosmos. Like the Sphere’s “joy in its solitude/rest,” this divinity has no discernible cosmogonic function, since its relation to the cosmos is what was later to be called “theoretical”: the cosmos already exists.12

  Despite its mental nature, Empedocles may have ascribed to this being a physical basis realized through the action of Love. Human thinking he held to be an activity of the blood, the most perfectly blended compound (B105, B98; see p. 267). If the same is true of divine thinking, we have another example of Love’s skill in exploiting the effects of Hate. For in addition to creating the living things, Love makes possible a divine intelligence whose activity presupposes Hate in two ways: its physical base is a perfect fusion of Hate-separated elements, and its object is the entire cosmos, which depends for its existence on Hate.

  Whether based on physical reality or not, this intellectual divinity signifies a direction for approximation. Empedocles thinks of the human mind as having a nature that flourishes or fails depending on the thoughts which occupy it. Most people mistake their own narrow experience for the whole of life, and let their minds be taken over by numberless “miseries that burst in, blunting thought” (B2, tr. KRS; cf. B110). Not being properly at home in a human mind, these occupants later depart to the corners of the world where they belong, leaving empty lodgings. But themes such as those of Empedocles’ poem On nature, “if you behold them in the right spirit with pure exercises of attention” (tr. this writer), will stay planted and burgeon with many new thoughts of the same kind (B110). To say, as this passage does, that thoughts about the cosmos as a whole are the proper denizens of the human mind, is as much as to say that the cosmos itself as a whole is the true complement of mind qua thinking (as distinct from the blood that thinks). Love operates biologically to forward this rapprochement between mind and cosmos by maintaining the balance of the thinking blood; but here, uniquely in the animal kingdom, Love also pursues its unifying end through the mind’s deliberate choice to live the philosophical life. And a yet more complete, because more universal, example of the work of Love would be the life of a philosopher such as Empedocles, who opens the way of true philosophy to others. Such figures, he says “arise as gods mightiest in honours, superior even to “prophets, bards, physicians, and leaders of men” (B146). Elsewhere, Empedocles calls such figures “long-lived gods” (B21.12; B23.8); and in the Purifications he dares proclaim himself one of them:

  Friends, who live in the great city of the yellow Acragas [sc. river) … I give you greetings. An immortal god, mortal no more, I go about honoured by all, as is fitting … (B112, tr. KRS).

  For Empedocles, this is not blasphemous raving but a conclusion supported by cosmological reasoning framed with regard for piety.

  Empedocles’ phrase “mortal no more” (which along with “long-lived gods” must have set Xenophanes spinning in his grave) echoes Heraclitus’ “immortal mortals”; but the thought is very different. Heraclitus meant that the coming to be and passing away of mortal things contributes to the immortal life of the cosmos, whereas Empedocles’ immortalized philosopher stands over against the cosmos as knower to known. We can make sense of immortalized if we think of the divinity of Empedocles’ philosopher, and the divinity of his cosmic roots and forces, as belonging to different categories. The roots and forces cannot perform the cosmogonic tasks that qualify them as divine without remaining in existence throughout a cosmic cycle, but the philosophical genius has no need of chronological immortality to achieve the quality of life that places him among the gods.

  4. FIFTH-CENTURY ATOMISM, AND BEYOND

  The emergence of the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus marks a crucial point in the development of theological thinking. As long as the fundamentals of the cosmos were conceived as agencies or powers acting out their own natures, as indefinite presences rather than circumscribed objects, it was not absurd, impersonal though they were, to hold them divine; nor, conversely, to think of the gods as physical principles. But these attitudes had no place in ancient atomism, a theory whose physical ultimates are (1) solid and localized particles eternally colliding to no purpose, so minute as to be of no individual significance; and (2) the void, otherwise known as “No thing” (DK 68 A37), which true to its name does nothing beyond supplying the condition for atomic movement. Although these entities are understood to be ingenerable, imperishable, and ultimate, it would be ridiculous to call the void “immortal,” or to speak of individual atoms as gods. At last we have a truly naturalized natural world.

  With regard to theology, this stark new picture creates a new set of alternatives for those who take it seriously. Either (i) there is no god; or (ii) god is beyond nature and stands in no relation to it; or (iii) god, so called, is a nonfundamental phenomenon within the world; or (iv) earlier tradition was right in holding the origins of nature to be divine, but wrong in failing to understand that nature itself is matter devoid of god; from which it follows that the divine principle’s essence and activity must be entirely nonphysical. A position of this latter kind would be adopted by Plato in the Timaeus, where an extramundane intelligence constructs atomlike entities as primary constituents of the cosmos. The second alternative has been included here merely by virtue of its logical possibility: it was not a live option until a much later period. The third, which many would hardly distinguish from the atheism of the first, was the position taken by Democritus.

  But before we turn to Democritean theology, such as it is, it should be observed that the four alternatives, hackneyed enough to the modern mind, must all have seemed
strange and shocking even to the enlightened among Democritus’ contemporaries, so deeply rooted in their culture was the mythopoeic attitude towards nature. So it is not surprising that natural philosophy, for a time at least, continued to be done in traditional style as for example by Diogenes of Apollonia, who applied the term “god” to his one substance, Intelligent Air. Diogenes may have known the work of Leucippus, but apparently he found no need to argue against it. At the time, the burden of proof lay with the atomists, and Democritus saw that it could not be discharged unless atomism was supplemented by a theory explaining human belief in the gods. Several such theories were about at the time, and Democritus retailed more than one, whether borrowed or his own inventions we do not know. He suggested that the “gods” are physical phenomena, huge images that appear to mankind and sometimes seem to speak (B166; A74). He suggested that belief in gods arose from early man’s terror at eclipses, thunder, and the like (A75). He held that human and animal mind consists of fiery particles and seems to have inferred that what human beings call “god” is a large external conglomerate of these (perhaps they sense it not merely as bright or fiery, but as a vast fellow-mind) (A74).

  In his ethical writings, Democritus spoke of the gods as givers of good, not evil, and said that they only love those who hate injustice (B175, B217). He may have meant to express pragmatic approval for these common beliefs, while at the same time sending messages of purely humanistic import to those in the know: as for instance that hatred of injustice is essential to true happiness. No doubt belief in external divinities is inevitable, even appropriate, for ignorant people whose response to thunder is to set about placating the Thunderer rather than speculate as to its cause. In the same way such belief may be necessary for the ethically stunted who hold back from wrongdoing only through fear of punishment, not because they see morality as the root of happiness.

  This ethical point receives a new twist in a fragment from a contemporary drama, Sisyphus, variously attributed to Euripides and to Critias, an older cousin of Plato. Here god is said to be the brainchild of a human genius who crafted the fiction in order to curb his fellows’ wickedness:

  … when the laws prevented men from open deeds of violence, but they continued to commit them in secret, I believe that a man of shrewd and subtle mind invented for men the fear of the gods, so that there might be something to frighten the wicked even if they acted, spoke or thought in secret … There is, he said, a spirit enjoying endless life, hearing and seeing with his mind, exceedingly wise and all-observing, bearer of a divine nature … If you are silently plotting evil, it will not be hidden from the gods, so clever are they … For a dwelling, he gave them the place whose mention would most powerfully strike the hearts of men … the vault above, where he perceived the lightnings and the dread roars of thunder, and the starry face and form of heaven fair-wrought by the cunning craftsmanship of time … So, I think, first of all did someone persuade men to believe that there exists a race of gods (DK 88 B25, tr. Guthrie [17]).

  On the notion that religion is founded upon a “noble lie” (cf. Rep. III 414b ff.), one can almost hear Plato murmuring that the supposedly mortal soul of mankind’s secret benefactor must itself have harboured more than a touch of divinity for him to invent a skyful of gods ex nihilo, and perpetrate that illusion worldwide from time immemorial. What is more, if there are no gods, the order of the heavens (not to speak of the plant and animal kingdoms) must be an accident. To Plato, this is incredible, as in fact it seems to be to the Sisyphus character, who cannot refrain from speaking of “heaven fair-wrought by the cunning craftsmanship of time,” when his doctrine should be that infinite time merely allows for the eventual chance emergence of a system such as our heavens. To affirm this, though, is like affirming that the order of a well-governed human society “is there” by chance, rather than because men apply intelligence to the management of their affairs, as we see in the case of the legislator and the lofty coiner of noble lies.

  Perhaps what the Sisyphus character really meant was not that god is a myth, if by “god” is meant the source of order in the universe, but that belief in a being both higher than ourselves and morally mindful of us is indeed belief in a fabrication. To which the Platonic answer would be that the order of nature testifies to an ordering intelligence that values order even in the smallest details. How could it be a matter of indifference to such a god whether human beings conduct their lives in a just and orderly manner? (Cf. Philebus, 28c-29a; Laws X 888a-903b.) Here we see Plato in his way, as the archaic Empedocles in his, responding to the theological problem posed by their culture: how to frame a conception of god as more than simply the origin of nature, where “more” means whatever more is required to make sense of that origin as object of worship for beings like us: ethical animals who, though parts of nature, know what it is to be driven to seek to understand themselves and the whole.13

  NOTES

  1 Anaximenes is probably another example; see Cicero, On the nature of the gods (1.10.26, and DK 13 B2) with the discussion of KRS [4], 158–61.

  2 Aristotle may be paraphrasing here, not quoting. But the rest of his language leaves no doubt that Anaximander regarded the archê as divine, and there is no reason (such as there is in the case of Anaxagoras, see p. 206) to suppose that Anaximander avoided using the word.

  3 Translations of Pre-Socratic material are from McKirahan [10] unless otherwise attributed. For further discussion of Anaximander, see Algra in this volume p. 53.

  4 The potential for absurdity is wonderfully exploited in Aristophanes’ Clouds.

  5 See Lesher [189] 132–37, for a survey of the evidence, and Algra in this volume p. 60.

  6 See Most in this volume p. 337.

  7 Or: “One god is greatest among gods and men.”

  8 These are not, or not all, Heraclitus’ words, and some scholars question whether they are even a paraphrase. But the thought in the first clause is clearly implied by B80, for example, which equates Conflict with Justice and says that all things come about in accordance with Conflict.

  9 Although Justice (personified at DK 28 B1.14) = Necessity = Fate is mentioned in both Ways, she occurs as part of the framework rather than as a topic.

  10 This account focuses on Empedocles’ cosmology, with only a side glance at the Purifications (here assumed to be distinct from the poem On nature, although the question hardly affects the present conclusions). It also assumes the general correctness of the interpretation of the cosmology by Solmsen [361]. His most crucial finding from the present point of view is that there is a zoogony of Love, but not of Strife (Hate). For further discussion of Empedocles’ religious thought, see Huffman in this volume p. 75, and for a different interpretation of Empedocles’ cosmology, see Graham in this volume p. 161.

  11 See Kahn [365] 429–30, n. 8, on the grounds for locating B131 in On nature.

  12 On placing B134 in the cosmology, see Kahn loc. cit. It is true that the divinity of B134 could be the cosmogonic Sphere if its knowledge of the cosmos were a plan (better still: a dream, shattered by Hate); but “darting through” (kataïssousa) tends to suggest an actual object.

  13 The writer thanks Charles Kahn, James Lesher, and Tony Long for helpful comments, although this chapter does not necessarily reflect their views.

  J.H. LESHER

  11 Early interest in knowledge

  1. POETIC PESSIMISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPTIMISM

  The Greek philosophers were not the first to reflect on the nature and limits of human knowledge; that distinction belongs to the poets of archaic Greece. In Book XVIII of the Odyssey, for example, the failure of Penelope’s suitors to sense the disaster awaiting them prompts some famous remarks on the mental capacities of the species from the disguised Odysseus:

  Nothing feebler does earth nurture than a human being,

  Of all the things that breathe and move upon the earth.

  For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in the time to come.

  So long as the go
ds grant him excellence and his knees are quick;

  But when again the blessed gods decree him sorrow,

  This too he bears with an enduring heart,

  For such is the mind (noos) of human beings upon the earth,

  Like the day the father of gods and men brings to them. (130–37)

  Here, as on other occasions in the Homeric poems,1 the thoughts

  of mortals reflect only their present experiences; the events that lie

  ahead lie also beyond their powers of comprehension. Conversely,

  when the gods choose to endow an individual with superhuman powers

  of insight, his knowledge is distinguished by its vast range:

  Calchas, the son of Thestor, far the best of diviners

  Who knew the things that were, that were to be, and that had been before.

  (Il I.60–70)

  But far more typical of the species are those “foolish ones, thinkers of the day”-Achilles, Agamemnon, and the suitors-who can neither “think of what lies before and after” nor heed the wise counsel of those who can. The same theme runs through much of early Greek poetry: mortals “think what they meet with” and fail to grasp the larger scheme of things:

  Of such a sort, Glaucus, is the consciousness (thymos) of mortal man, whatever Zeus may bring him for the day, for he thinks such things as he meets with. (Archilochus, fr.70)