The Greeks and the Irrational
Page 3
A second peculiarity, which seems to be closely related to the first, must have worked in the same direction. This is the habit of explaining character or behaviour in terms of knowledge.102 The most familiar instance is the very wide use of the verb "I know," with a neuter plural object to express not only the possession of technical skill and the like) but also what we should call moral character or personal feelings: Achilles "knows wild things, like a lion," Polyphemus "knows lawless things," Nestor and Agamemnon "know friendly things to each other."103 This is not merely a Homeric "idiom": a similar transposition of feeling into intellectual terms is implied when we are told that Achilles has "a merciless understanding or that the Trojans "remembered flight and forgot resistance."104 This intellectualist approach to the explanation of behaviour set a lasting stamp on the Greek mind: the so-called Socratic paradoxes, that "virtue is knowledge," and that "no one does wrong on purpose," were no novelties, but an explicit generalised formulation of what had long been an ingrained habit of thought.105 Such a habit of thought must have encouraged the belief in psychic intervention. If character is knowledge, what is not knowledge is not part of the character, but comes to a man from outside. When he acts in a manner contrary to the system of conscious dispositions which he is said to "know," his action is not properly his own, but has been dictated to him. In other words, unsystematised, nonrational impulses, and the acts resulting from them, tend to be excluded from the self and ascribed to an alien origin.
Evidently this is especially likely to happen when the acts in question are such as to cause acute shame to their author. We know how in our own society unbearable feelings of guilt are got rid of by "projecting" them in phantasy on to someone else. And we may guess that the notion of ate served a similar purpose for Homeric man by enabling him in all good faith to project on to an external power his unbearable feelings of shame. I say "shame" and not "guilt," for certain American anthropologists have lately taught us to distinguish "shame-cultures" from "guilt-cultures,"106 and the society described by Homer clearly falls into the former class. Homeric man's highest good is not the enjoyment of a quiet conscience, but the enjoyment of time, public esteem: "Why should I fight," asks Achilles, "if the good fighter receives no more than the bad?"107 And the strongest moral force which Homeric man knows is not the fear of god,108 but respect for public opinion, says Hector at the crisis of his fate, and goes with open eyes to his death.109 The situation to which the notion of ate is a response arose not merely from the impulsiveness of Homeric man, but from the tension between individual impulse and the pressure of social conformity characteristic of a shame-culture.110 In such a society, anything which exposes a man to the contempt or ridicule of his fellows, which causes him to "lose face," is felt as unbearable.111 That perhaps explains how not only cases of moral failure, like Agamemnon's loss of self-control, but such things as the bad bargain of Glaucus, or Automedon's disregard of proper tactics, came to be "projected" on to a divine agency. On the other hand, it was the gradually growing sense of guilt, characteristic of a later age, which transformed ate into a punishment, the Erinyes into ministers of vengeance, and Zeus into an embodiment of cosmic justice. With that development I shall deal in my next chapter.
What I have thus far tried to do is to show, by examining one particular type of religious experience, that behind the term "Homeric religion" there lies something more than an artificial machinery of serio-comic gods and goddesses, and that we shall do it less than justice if we dismiss it as an agreeable interlude of lighthearted buffoonery between the presumed profundities of an Aegean Earth-religion about which we know little, and those of an "early Orphic movement" about which we know even less.
NOTES TO CHAPTER I
II
From Shame-Culture to Guilt-Culture
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Hebrews 10:31
In my first chapter I discussed Homer's interpretation of the irrational elements in human behaviour as "psychic intervention"—an interference with human life by nonhuman agencies which put something into a man and thereby influence his thought and conduct. In this one I shall deal with some of the new forms which these Homeric ideas assumed in the course of the Archaic Age. But if what I have to say is to be intelligible to the nonspecialist, I must first attempt to make plain, at least in rough outline, certain of the general differences which separate the religious attitude of the Archaic Age from that presupposed in Homer. At the end of my first chapter I used the expressions "shame-culture" and "guilt-culture" as descriptive labels for the two attitudes in question. I am aware that these terms are not self-explanatory, that they are probably new to most classical scholars, and that they lend themselves easily to misconception. What I intend by them will, I hope, emerge as we proceed. But I should like to make two things clear at once. First, I use them only as descriptions, without assuming any particular theory of cultural change. And secondly, I recognise that the distinction is only relative, since in fact many modes of behaviour characteristic of shame-cultures persisted throughout the archaic and classical periods. There is a transition, but it is gradual and incomplete.
When we turn from Homer to the fragmentary literature of the Archaic Age, and to those writers of the Classical Age who still preserve the archaic outlook1—as do Pindar and Sophocles, and to a great extent Herodotus-—one of the first things that strikes us is the deepened awareness of human insecurity and human helplessness which has its religious correlate in the feeling of divine hostility—not in the sense that Deity is thought of as evil, but in the sense that an overmastering Power and Wisdom forever holds Man down, keeps him from rising above his station. It is the feeling which Herodotus expresses by saying that Deity is always "Jealous and interfering," we translate it; but the translation is not very good—how should that overmastering Power be jealous of so poor a thing as Man? The thought is rather that the gods resent any success, any happiness, which might for a moment lift our mortality above its mortal status, and so encroach on their prerogative.
Such ideas were of course not entirely new. In Iliad 24 Achilles, moved at last by the spectacle of his broken enemy Priam, pronounces the tragic moral of the whole poem: "For so the gods have spun the thread for pitiful humanity, that the life of Man should be sorrow, while themselves are exempt from care." And he goes on to the famous image of the two jars, from which Zeus draws forth his good and evil gifts. To some men he gives a mixed assortment, to others, unmixed evil, so that they wander tormented over the face of the earth, "unregarded by gods or men."4 As for unmixed good, that, we are to assume, is a portion reserved for gods. The jars have nothing to do with justice: else the moral would be false. For in the Iliad heroism does not bring happiness; its sole, and sufficient, reward is fame. Yet for all that, Homer's princes bestride their world boldly; they fear the gods only as they fear their human overlords; nor are they oppressed by the future even when, like Achilles, they know that it holds an approaching doom.
1 For notes to chapter ii see pages 50-63.
So far, what we meet in the Archaic Age is not a different belief but a different emotional reaction to the old belief. Listen, for example, to Semonides of Amorgos: "Zeus controls the fulfilment of all that is, and disposes as he will. But insight does not belong to men: we live like beasts, always at the mercy of what the day may bring, knowing nothing of the outcome that God will impose upon our acts."5 Or listen to Theognis: "No man, Cyrnus, is responsible for his own ruin or his own success: of both these things the gods are the givers. No man can perform an action and know whether its outcome will be good or bad. . . . Humanity in utter blindness follows its futile usages; but the gods bring all to the fulfilment that they have planned."6 The doctrine of man's helpless dependence on an arbitrary Power is not new; but there is a new accent of despair, a new and bitter emphasis on the futility of human purposes. We are nearer to the world of the Oedipus Rex than to the world of the Iliad.
It is much the same
with the idea of divine phthǒnos or jealousy. Aeschylus was right when he called it "a venerable doctrine uttered long ago."7 The notion that too much success incurs a supernatural danger, especially if one brags about it, has appeared independently in many different cultures8 and has deep roots in human nature (we subscribe to it ourselves when we "touch wood"). The Iliad ignores it, as it ignores other popular superstitions; but the poet of the Odyssey —always more tolerant of contemporary ways of thought— permits Calypso to exclaim in a temper that the gods are the most jealous beings in the world—they grudge one a little happiness.9 It is plain, however, from the uninhibited boasting in which Homeric man indulges that he does not take the dangers of phthonos very seriously: such scruples are foreign to a shame-culture. It is only in the Late Archaic and Early Classical time that the phthonos idea becomes an oppressive menace, a source—or expression—of religious anxiety. Such it is in Solon, in Aeschylus, above all in Herodotus. For Herodotus, history is overdetermined: while it is overtly the outcome of human purposes, the penetrating eye can detect everywhere the covert working of phthonos. In the same spirit the Messenger in the Persae attributes Xerxes' unwise tactics at Salamis to the cunning Greek who deceived him, and simultaneously to the phthonos of the gods working through an alastor or evil daemon:10 the event is doubly determined, on the natural and on the supernatural plane.
By the writers of this age divine phthonos is sometimes,11 though not always,12 moralised as nemesis, "righteous indignation." Between the primitive offence of too much success and its punishment by jealous Deity, a moral link is inserted: success is said to produce kŏros—the complacency of the man who has done too well—which in turn generates hubris, arrogance in word or deed or even thought. Thus interpreted, the old belief appeared more rational, but it was not the less oppressive on that account. We see from the carpet scene in the Agamemnon how every manifestation of triumph arouses anxious feelings of guilt: hubris has become the "primal evil," the sin whose wages is death, which is yet so universal that a Homeric hymn calls it the thěmis or established usage of mankind, and Archilochus attributes it even to animals. Men knew that it was dangerous to be happy.13 But the restraint had no doubt its wholesome side. It is significant that when Euripides, writing in the new age of scepticism, makes his chorus lament the collapse of all moral standards, they see the culminating proof of that collapse in the fact that "it is no longer the common aim of men to escape the phthonos of the gods."14
The moralisation of phthonos introduces us to a second characteristic feature of archaic religious thought—the tendency to transform the supernatural in general, and Zeus in particular, into an agent of justice. I need hardly say that religion and morals were not initially interdependent, in Greece or elsewhere; they had their separate roots. I suppose that, broadly speaking, religion grows out of man's relationship to his total environment, morals out of his relation to his fellowmen. But sooner or later in most cultures there comes a time of suffering when most people refuse to be content with Achilles' view, the view that "God's in his Heaven, all's wrong with the world." Man projects into the cosmos his own nascent demand for social justice; and when from the outer spaces the magnified echo of his own voice returns to him, promising punishment for the guilty, he draws from it courage and reassurance.
In the Greek epic this stage has not yet been reached, but we can observe increasing signs of its approach. The gods of the Iliad are primarily concerned with their own honour To speak lightly of a god, to neglect his cult, to maltreat his priest, all these understandably make him angry; in a shame-culture gods, like men, are quick to resent a slight. Perjury comes under the same rubric: the gods have nothing against straightforward lying, but they do object to their names being taken in vain. Here and there, however, we get a hint of something more. Offences against parents constitute so monstrous a crime as to demand special treatment: the underworld Powers are constrained to take up the case.15 (I shall come back to that later on.) And once we are told that Zeus is angry with men who judge crooked judgements.16 But that I take to be a reflex of later conditions which, by an inadvertence common in Homer, has been allowed to slip into a simile.17 For I find no indication in the narrative of the Iliad that Zeus is concerned with justice as such.18
In the Odyssey his interests are distinctly wider: not only does he protect suppliants19 (who in the Iliad enjoy no such security), but "all strangers and beggars are from Zeus";20 in fact, the Hesiodic avenger of the poor and oppressed begins to come in sight. The Zeus of the Odyssey is, moreover, becoming sensitive to moral criticism: men, he complains, are always finding fault with the gods, "for they say that their troubles come from us; whereas it is they who by their own wicked acts incur more trouble than they need."21 Placed where it is, at the very beginning of the poem, the remark sounds, as the Germans say, "programmatic." And the programme is carried out. The suitors by their own wicked acts incur destruction,22 while Odysseus, heedful of divine monitions, triumphs against the odds: divine justice is vindicated.
The later stages of the moral education of Zeus may be studied in Hesiod, in Solon, in Aeschylus; but I cannot here follow this progress in detail. I must, however, mention one complication which had far-reaching historical consequences. The Greeks were not so unrealistic as to hide from themselves the plain fact that the wicked flourished like a green bay-tree. Hesiod, Solon, Pindar, are deeply troubled by it, and Theognis finds it necessary to give Zeus a straight talk on the subject.23 It was easy enough to vindicate divine justice in a work of fiction like the Odyssey: as Aristotle observed, "poets tell this kind of story to gratify the desires of their audience."24 It was not so easy in real life. In the Archaic Age the mills of God ground so slowly that their movement was practically imperceptible save to the eye of faith. In order to sustain the belief that they moved at all, it was necessary to get rid of the natural time-limit set by death. If you looked beyond that limit, you could say one (or both) of two things: you could say that the successful sinner would be punished in his descendants, or you could say that he would pay his debt personally in another life.
The second of these solutions emerged, as a doctrine of general application, only late in the Archaic Age, and was possibly confined to fairly limited circles; I shall postpone its consideration to a later chapter. The other is the characteristic archaic doctrine: it is the teaching of Hesiod, of Solon and Theognis, of Aeschylus and Herodotus. That it involved the suffering of the morally innocent was not overlooked: Solon speaks of the hereditary victims of nemesis as "not responsible"; Theognis complains of the unfairness of a system by which "the criminal gets away with it, while someone else takes the punishment later"; Aeschylus, if I understand him rightly, would mitigate the unfairness by recognising that an inherited curse may be broken.25 That these men nevertheless accepted the idea of inherited guilt and deferred punishment is due to that belief in family solidarity which Archaic Greece shared with other early societies26 and with many primitive cultures to-day.27 Unfair it might be, but to them it appeared as a law of nature, which must be accepted: for the family was a moral unit, the son's life was a prolongation of his father's,28 and he inherited his father's moral debts exactly as he inherited his commercial ones. Sooner or later, the debt exacted its own payment: as the Pythia told Croesus, the causal nexus of crime and punishment was moira, something that even a god could not break; Croesus had to complete or fulfil what was begun by the crime of an ancestor five generations back.29
It was a misfortune for the Greeks that the idea of cosmic justice, which represented an advance on the old notion of purely arbitrary divine Powers, and provided a sanction for the new civic morality, should have been thus associated with a primitive conception of the family. For it meant that the weight of religious feeling and religious law was thrown against the emergence of a true view of the individual as a person, with personal rights and personal responsibilities. Such a view did eventually emerge in Attic secular law. As Glotz showed in his great book, La Solidarité
de la famille en Grèce,30 the liberation of the individual from the bonds of clan and family is one of the major achievements of Greek rationalism, and one for which the credit must go to Athenian democracy. But long after that liberation was complete in law, religious minds were still haunted by the ghost of the old solidarity. It appears from Plato that in the fourth century fingers were still pointed at the man shadowed by hereditary guilt, and he would still pay a cathartes to be given ritual relief from it.31 And Plato himself, though he accepted the revolution in secular law, admits inherited religious guilt in certain cases.32 A century later, Bion of Borysthenes still found it necessary to point out that in punishing the son for the father's offence God behaved like a physician who should dose the child to cure the father; and the devout Plutarch, who quotes this witticism, tries nevertheless to find a defence for the old doctrine in an appeal to the observed facts of heredity.33
To return to the Archaic Age, it was also a misfortune that the functions assigned to the moralised Supernatural were predominantly, if not exclusively, penal. We hear much about inherited guilt, little about inherited innocence; much about the sufferings of the sinner in Hell or Purgatory, relatively little about the deferred rewards of virtue; the stress is always on sanctions. That no doubt reflects the juridical ideas of the time; criminal law preceded civil law, and the primary function of the state was coercive. Moreover, divine law, like early human law, takes no account of motive and makes no allowance for human weakness; it is devoid of that humane quality which the Greeks called or The proverbial saying popular in that age, that "all virtue is comprehended in justice,"34 applies no less to gods than to men: there was little room for pity in either. That was not so in the Iliad: there Zeus pities the doomed Hector and the doomed Sarpedon; he pities Achilles mourning for his lost Patroclus, and even Achilles' horses mourning for their charioteer.35 he says in Iliad 21: "I care about them, though they perish." But in becoming the embodiment of cosmic justice Zeus lost his humanity. Hence Olympianism in its moralised form tended to become a religion of fear, a tendency which is reflected in the religious vocabulary. There is no word for "god-fearing" in the Iliad; but in the Odyssey to be is already an important virtue, and the prose equivalent, was used as a term of praise right down to Aristotle's time.36 The love of god, on the other hand, is missing from the older Greek vocabulary:37 appears first in Aristotle. And in fact, of the major Olympians, perhaps only Athena inspired an emotion that could reasonably be described as love. "It would be eccentric," says the Magna Moralia, "for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus."38