The Greeks and the Irrational
Page 4
And that brings me to the last general trait which I want to stress—the universal fear of pollution (miasma), and its correlate, the universal craving for ritual purification (catharsis). Here once again the difference between Homer and the Archaic Age is relative, not absolute; for it is a mistake to deny that a certain minimum of catharsis is practised in both epics.39 But from the simple Homeric purifications, performed by laymen, it is a long step to the professional cathartai of the Archaic Age with their elaborate and messy rituals. And it is a longer step still from Telemachus' casual acceptance of a self-confessed murderer as a shipmate to the assumptions which enabled the defendant in a late fifth-century murder trial to draw presumptive proof of his innocence from the fact that the ship on which he travelled had reached port in safety.40 We get a further measure of the gap if we compare Homer's version of the Oedipus saga with that familiar to us from Sophocles. In the latter, Oedipus becomes a polluted outcast, crushed under the burden of a guilt "which neither the earth nor the holy rain nor the sunlight can accept." But in the story Homer knew he continues to reign in Thebes after his guilt is discovered, and is eventually killed in battle and buried with royal honours,41 It was apparently a later Mainland epic, the Thebais, that created the Sophoclean "man of sorrows."42
There is no trace in Homer of the belief that pollution was either infectious or hereditary. In the archaic view it was both,43 and therein lay its terror: for how could any man be sure that he had not contracted the evil thing from a chance contact, or else inherited it from the forgotten offence of some remote ancestor? Such anxieties were the more distressing for their very vagueness—the impossibility of attaching them to a cause which could be recognised and dealt with. To see in these beliefs the origin of the archaic sense of guilt is probably an oversimplification; but they certainly expressed it, as a Christian's sense of guilt may express itself in the haunting fear of falling into mortal sin. The distinction between the two situations is of course that sin is a condition of the will, a disease of man's inner consciousness, whereas pollution is the automatic consequence of an action, belongs to the world of external events, and operates with the same ruthless indifference to motive as a typhoid germ.44 Strictly speaking, the archaic sense of guilt becomes a sense of sin only as a result of what Kardiner45 calls the "internalising" of conscience—a phenomenon which appears late and uncertainly in the Hellenic world, and does not become common until long after secular law had begun to recognise the importance of motive.46 The transference of the notion of purity from the magical to the moral sphere was a similarly late development: not until the closing years of the fifth century do we encounter explicit statements that clean hands are not enough—the heart must be clean also.47
Nevertheless, we should, I think, be hesitant about drawing hard chronological lines: an idea is often obscurely at work in religious behaviour long before it reaches the point of explicit formulation. I think Pfister is probably right when he observes that in the old Greek word (the term which describes the worst kind of miasma) the ideas of pollution, curse, and sin were already fused together at an early date.48 And while catharsis in the Archaic Age was doubtless often no more than the mechanical fulfilment of a ritual obligation, the notion of an automatic, quasi-physical cleansing could pass by imperceptible gradations into the deeper idea of atonement for sin.49 There are some recorded instances where it is hardly possible to doubt that this latter thought was involved, e.g., in the extraordinary case of the Locrian Tribute.50 The people who in compensation for the crime of a remote ancestor were willing year after year, century after century, to send two daughters of their noblest families to be murdered in a distant country, or at best to survive there as temple slaves—these people, one would suppose, must have laboured not only under the fear of a dangerous pollution, but under the profound sense of an inherited sin which must be thus horribly atoned.
I shall come back to the subject of catharsis in a later chapter. But it is time now to return to the notion of psychic intervention which we have already studied in Homer, and to ask what part it played in the very different religious context of the Archaic Age. The simplest way to answer this is to look at some post-Homeric usages of the word ate (or its prose equivalent and of the word daemon. If we do so, we shall find that in some respects the epic tradition is reproduced with remarkable fidelity. Ate still stands for irrational as distinct from rationally purposive behaviour: e.g., on hearing that Phaedra won't eat, the Chorus enquires whether this is due to ate or to a suicidal purpose.51 Its seat is still the thumos or the phrěnes,52 and the agencies that cause it are much the same as in Homer: mostly an unidentified daemon or god or gods; much more rarely a specific Olympian;53 occasionally, as in Homer, Erinys54 or moira;55 once, as in the Odyssey, wine.56
But there are also important developments. In the first place, ate is often, though not always, moralised, by being represented as a punishment; this appears once only in Homer— in Iliad 9—and next in Hesiod, who makes ate the penalty of hubris and observes with relish that "not even a nobleman" can escape it.57 Like other supernatural punishments, it will fall on the sinner's descendants if the "evil debt" is not paid in his lifetime.58 Out of this conception of ate as punishment grows a wide extension of the word's meaning. It is applied not only to the sinner's state of mind, but to the objective disasters resulting from it: thus the Persians at Salamis experience "marine atai," and the slaughtered sheep are the ate of Ajax.59 Ate thus acquires the general sense of "ruin," in contrast with or though in literature it always, I think, retains the implication that the ruin is supernaturally determined. And by a still further extension it is sometimes applied also to the instruments or embodiments of the divine anger: thus the Trojan Horse is an ate, and Antigone and Ismene are to Creon "a pair of atai."61 Such usages are rooted in feeling rather than in logic: what is expressed in them is the consciousness of a mysterious dynamic nexus, the as Aeschylus calls it, binding together crime and punishment; all the elements of that sinister unity are in a wide sense ate.62
Distinct from this vaguer development is the precise theological interpretation which makes of ate not merely a punishment leading to physical disasters, but a deliberate deception which draws the victim on to fresh error, intellectual or moral, whereby he hastens his own ruin—the grim doctrine that quern deus vult perdere, prius dementat. There is a hint of this in Iliad 9, where Agamemnon calls his ate an evil deception contrived by Zeus (1. 21); but there is no general statement of the doctrine in Homer or Hesiod. The orator Lycurgus63 attributes it to "certain old poets" unspecified and quotes from one of them a passage in iambics: "when the anger of the daemons is injuring a man, the first thing is that it takes the good understanding out of his mind and turns him to the worse judgement, so that he may not be aware of his own errors." Similarly Theognis64 declares that many a man who is pursuing "virtue" and "profit" is deliberately misled by a daemon, who causes him to mistake evil for good and the profitable for the bad. Here the action of the daemon is not moralised in any way: he seems to be simply an evil spirit, tempting man to his damnation.
That such evil spirits were really feared in the Archaic Age is also attested by the words of the Messenger in the Persae which I have already quoted in another connection: Xerxes was tempted by an "alastor or evil daemon." But Aeschylus himself knows better: as Darius' ghost explains later, the temptation was the punishment of hubris;65 what to the partial vision of the living appears as the act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice. In the Agamemnon we meet again the same interpretation on two levels. Where the poet, speaking through his Chorus, is able to detect the overmastering will of Zeus working itself out through an inexorable moral law, his characters see only a daemonic world, haunted by malignant forces. We are reminded of the distinction we observed in the epic between the poet's point of view and that of his characters. Cassandra sees the Erinyes as a band of daemons, drunken with human blood; to Clytemnestra's excited imag
ination, not only the Erinyes but ate itself are personal fiends to whom she has offered her husband as a human sacrifice; there is even a moment when she feels her human personality lost and submerged in that of the alastor whose agent and instrument she was.67 This last I take to be an instance, not exactly of "possession" in the ordinary sense, but rather of what Lévy-Bruhl calls "participation," the feeling that in a certain situation a person or thing is not only itself but also something else: I should compare the "cunning Greek" of the Persae who was also an alastor, and the priestess Timo in Herodotus, the woman who tempted Miltiades to sacrilege, concerning whom Apollo declared that "not Timo was the cause of these things, but because Miltiades was destined to end ill, one appeared to him to lead him into evil"68—she had acted, not as a human person, but as the agent of a supernatural purpose.
This haunted, oppressive atmosphere in which Aeschylus' characters move seems to us infinitely older than the clear air breathed by the men and gods of the Iliad. That is why Glotz called Aeschylus "ce revenant de Mycènes" (though he added that he was also a man of his own time); that is why a recent German writer asserts that he "revived the world of the daemons, and especially the evil daemons."69 But to speak thus is in my view completely to misapprehend both Aeschylus' purpose and the religious climate of the age in which he lived. Aeschylus did not have to revive the world of the daemons: it is the world into which he was born. And his purpose is not to lead his fellow-countrymen back into that world, but, on the contrary, to lead them through it and out of it. This he sought to do, not like Euripides by casting doubt on its reality through intellectual and moral argument, but by showing it to be capable of a higher interpretation, and, in the Eumenides, by showing it transformed through Athena's agency into the new world of rational justice.
The daemonic, as distinct from the divine, has at all periods played a large part in Greek popular belief (and still does). People in the Odyssey, as we saw in chapter i, attribute many events in their lives, both mental and physical, to the agency of anonymous daemons; we get the impression, however, that they do not always mean it very seriously. But in the age that lies between the Odyssey and the the daemons seem to draw closer: they grow more persistent, more insidious, more sinister. Theognis and his contemporaries did take seriously the daemon who tempts man to ate, as appears from the passages I quoted just now. And the belief lived on in the popular mind long after Aeschylus' day. The Nurse in the Medea knows that ate is the work of an angry daemon, and she links it up with the old idea of phthonos: the greater the household, the greater the ate; only the obscure are safe from it.70 And as late as the year 330 the orator Aeschines could suggest, though with a cautious "perhaps," that a certain rude fellow who interrupted his speech at the Amphictyonic Council may have been led on to this unseemly behaviour by "something daemonic"
Closely akin to this agent of ate are those irrational impulses which arise in a man against his will to tempt him. When Theognis calls hope and fear "dangerous daemons," or when Sophocles speaks of Eros as a power that "warps to wrong the righteous mind, for its destruction,"72 we should not dismiss this as "personification": behind it lies the old Homeric feeling that these things are not truly part of the self, since they are not within man's conscious control; they are endowed with a life and energy of their own, and so can force a man, as it were from the outside, into conduct foreign to him. We shall see in later chapters that strong traces of this way of interpreting the passions survive even in writers like Euripides and Plato.
To a different type belong the daemons projected by a particular human situation. As Professor Frankfort has said with reference to other ancient peoples, "evil spirits are often no more than the evil itself conceived as substantial and equipped with power."73 It is thus that the Greeks spoke of famine and pestilence as "gods,"74 and that the modern Athenian believes a certain cleft in the Hill of the Nymphs to be inhabited by three demons whose names are Cholera, Smallpox, and Plague. These are powerful forces in whose grip mankind is helpless; and deity is power. It is thus that the persistent power and pressure of a hereditary pollution can take shape as the Aeschylean and that, more specifically, the blood-guilt situation is projected as an Erinys.75 Such beings, as we have seen, are not wholly external to their human agents and victims: Sophocles can speak of "an Erinys in the brain."76 Yet they are objective, since they stand for the objective rule that blood must be atoned; it is only Euripides77 and Mr. T. S. Eliot who psychologise them as the pangs of conscience.
A third type of daemon, who makes his first appearance in the Archaic Age, is attached to a particular individual, usually from birth, and determines, wholly or in part, his individual destiny. We meet him first in Hesiod and Phocylides.78 He represents the individual moira or "portion" of which Homer speaks,79 but in the personal form which appealed to the imagination of the time. Often he seems to be no more than a man's "luck" or fortune;80 but this luck is not conceived as an extraneous accident—it is as much part of a man's natal endowment as beauty or talent. Theognis laments that more depends on one's daemon than on one's character: if your daemon is of poor quality, mere good judgement is of no avail—your enterprises come to nothing.81 In vain did Heraclitus protest that "character is destiny" he failed to kill the superstition. The words and seem in fact to be fifth-century coinages is as old as Hesiod). In the fate which overtook great kings and generals—a Candaules or a Miltiades—Herodotus sees neither external accident nor the consequence of character, but "what had to be"— Pindar piously reconciles this popular fatalism with the will of God: "the great purpose of Zeus directs the daemon of the men he loves."83 Eventually Plato picked up and completely transformed the idea, as he did with so many elements of popular belief: the daemon becomes a sort of lofty spirit-guide, or Freudian Superego,84 who in the Timaeus is identified with the element of pure reason in man.85 In that glorified dress, made morally and philosophically respectable, he enjoyed a renewed lease of life in the pages of Stoics and Neoplatonists, and even of mediaeval Christian writers.86
Such, then, were some of the daemons who formed part of the religious inheritance of the fifth century b.c. I have not attempted to draw anything like a complete picture of that inheritance. Certain other aspects of it will emerge in later chapters. But we cannot go further without pausing to ask ourselves a question, one which must already have formed itself in the mind of the reader. How are we to conceive the relationship between the "guilt-culture" I have been describing in these last pages and the "shame-culture" with which I dealt in the first chapter? What historical forces determined the differences between them? I have tried to indicate that the contrast is less absolute than some scholars have assumed. We have followed various threads that lead from Homer down into the imperfectly mapped jungle of the Archaic Age, and out beyond it into the fifth century. The discontinuity is not complete. Nevertheless, a real difference of religious outlook separates Homer's world even from that of Sophocles, who has been called the most Homeric of poets. Is it possible to make any guess at the underlying causes of that difference?
To such a question we cannot hope to find any single, simple answer. For one thing, we are not dealing with a continuous historical evolution, by which one type of religious outlook was gradually transformed into another. We need not, indeed, adopt the extreme view that Homeric religion is nothing but a poetic invention, "as remote from reality and life as the artificial Homeric language."87 But there is good reason to suppose that the epic poets ignored or minimised many beliefs and practices which existed in their day but did not commend themselves to their patrons. For example, the old cathartic scapegoat-magic was practised in Ionia in the sixth century, and had presumably been brought there by the first colonists, since the same ritual was observed in Attica.88 The poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey must have seen it done often enough. But they excluded it from their poems, as they excluded much else that seemed barbarous to them and to their upper-class audience. They give us, not something completely unrelated to trad
itional belief, but a selection from traditional belief—the selection that suited an aristocratic military culture, as Hesiod gives us the selection proper to a peasant culture. Unless we allow for this, comparison of the two will produce an exaggerated impression of historical discontinuity.