The Case for God (11 page)

But the Milesians, who had encountered Eastern culture during their trade missions, may have regarded traditional Greek
mythos
more dispassionately than was possible on the mainland. They wanted to show that thunderbolts and lightning were not arbitrary whims of Zeus but expressions of fundamental physical laws. The
phusikoi
were beginning to think differently from other people. Their talent for working things out independently and logically may have been encouraged by the political organization of the
polis
, the city-state, in which every citizen had to participate in the deliberations of the Assembly. Because the polis was ruled by impersonal, uniform laws, the Greeks were learning to ferret out abstract, general principles instead of reaching for immediate, short-term solutions. Their democracy may also have inspired the naturalists to develop a more egalitarian cosmology, so that they saw the physical elements of the universe evolving according to inherent natural principles, independently of a monarchical creator. But we must not exaggerate their egalitarianism. Greek aristocrats led extremely privileged lives. The
Western pursuit of disinterested, scientific truth was rooted in a way of life that depended upon the institution of slavery and the subjugation of women. From the beginning, science, like religion, had its ambiguities and shadows.
⁴

At the same time as it sought to emancipate itself from the older worldview, the new naturalism was also affected by traditional ideas. Thales (fl. c. 580), the earliest of the
phusikoi
, may have been influenced by the
mythos
of the primal Sea when he argued that water was the original ingredient of the universe. The only sentence of his work to have survived is “Everything is water and the world is full of gods.” But unlike the poets and mythmakers, Thales felt compelled to find the reason why water had been the primordial stuff. Water was indispensable to life; it could change its form, becoming ice or steam, and so had the capacity to evolve into something different. But Thales’s scientific naturalism did not lead him to jettison religion; he still saw the world as “full of gods.” In a similar vein, Anaximenes (c. 560–496) believed that the
arche
was air, which was even more fundamental to life than water and had transmuted itself from a purely ethereal substance into matter by coagulating progressively into wind, clouds, water, earth, and rock.

Anaximander (610–556) took another approach. He believed that the naturalist must go beyond sense data and look for an
arche
that was entirely different from any of the beings we know. The cosmos must have emerged from a larger entity that contained all subsequent beings in embryo. He called it the
apeiron
, the “indefinite,” because it had no qualities of its own and was, therefore, indefinable. It was infinite, divine (but not a mere god), and the source of all life. By means of a process that Anaximander was unable to explain satisfactorily, individual beings had “separated out” from the
apeiron
. A seed had broken away and grown into a cold, damp mass that became the earth. Then, like a tree shedding its bark, the
apeiron
had sloughed off rings of fire, each surrounded by thick mist, which had encircled the earth. Without empirical proof, this was little more than fantasy, but Anaximander understood that the scientist could throw light on the unknown only if he laid aside conventional modes of thought.

When Miletus was conquered by the Persians at the end of the sixth century, the scientific capital moved to Elea, a Greek colony in
southern Italy. Here Parmenides developed a radical skepticism. How could we know that the way we analyzed the cosmos bore any relation to the reality itself?
⁵
Were the laws and phenomena that we thought we observed real and objective, or did they merely explain the few aspects of the world that we were able to see? Parmenides became convinced that to attain the truth, human reason must rise above common sense and unverified opinion. The idea of change, for example, was pure convention. The Milesians had been wrong to imagine that the world had developed gradually. Reality consisted of a unified, single, complete, and eternal being. It might
appear
that creatures came into being and passed away, but true reality was unaffected by time. A rational person should not speak of things that did not exist, so we should never say that something had been born, because that implied that there had been a time when it did not exist; for the same reason, we must not say that something had died or moved or changed. But how could one function in such a world? What were we to make of the physical changes we noted in our bodies? How could you say anything without mentioning past or future? One of Parmenides’ disciples was a commander in the navy: How could he guide a ship that was not supposed to move?

Parmenides’ contemporaries complained that he had left them nothing to think about. Leucippus (fl. c. 400) and his pupil Democritus (466–370) tried to soften this austere rationalism.
⁶
They agreed that the world consisted of a unitary, changeless substance but argued that it was not a single being, as Parmenides thought. Instead it took the form of an infinite number of tiny, invisible, and “indivisible”
(atomos
) particles that were ceaselessly in motion in the boundless void of empty space. There was no overseeing creator God: each atom moved at random, propelled mechanically, its direction dictated by pure chance. Periodically, atoms collided, stuck together, and formed the physical phenomena—men, women, plants, animals, rocks, and trees—that we see around us. But these were only temporary conglomerations; eventually these objects would disintegrate, and the atoms of which they were made would mill around in the void until they formed another object.

Even though the naturalists could not prove their theories, some of their insights were remarkable. In attempting to find a simple, first principle as an explanation for the cosmos, Thales and Anaximenes
had already started to think like scientists. Parmenides realized that the moon reflects the light of the sun; Democritus’s atomism would be revived to great effect during the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. But some of their contemporaries were doubtful about the new philosophy, fearing that in seeking to know the mysteries of the cosmos, the
phusikoi
were dangerously guilty of hubris. They were like the Titan Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods and given it to men so that they could develop technology. But Zeus had retaliated by having the divine craftsman Hephaestus fashion the first woman, Pandora, who was beautiful but evil, the source of the world’s sorrow.

The mathematician Pythagoras (570–500), however, took science in a different direction.
⁷
He had been born and educated on the island of Samos, off the Ionian coast, where he became famous for his asceticism and mystical insight, and had studied in Mesopotamia and Egypt before settling in southern Italy. There he established a religious community, dedicated to the cult of Apollo and the Muses, where the study of mathematics, astronomy, geometry, and music were not merely tools for the exploration of the physical world but also spiritual exercises. Apart from his famous theorem of the right-angled triangle, we know very little about Pythagoras himself—later Pythagoreans tended to attribute their own discoveries to the Master—but it may have been he who coined the term
philosophia
, the “love of wisdom.” Philosophy was not a coldly rational discipline but an ardent spiritual quest that would transform the seeker. This was the kind of philosophy that would develop in Athens during the fourth century; the rationalism of classical Greece would not consist of abstract speculation for its own sake. It was rather rooted in a search for transcendence and a dedicated practical lifestyle.

Pythagoras’s vision was in part shaped by religious changes in Greece during the sixth century. The Greeks had a uniquely tragic vision of the world. Their rituals were designed to teach participants to come to terms with the sorrow of life by making them face up squarely to the unspeakable. Every year at the festival of Thesmophoria, for example, they reenacted the story of Demeter, goddess of the grain that provided the economic basis of civilization.
⁸
She had borne Zeus a beautiful daughter called Persephone. Even though he knew that Demeter would never agree to the match, Zeus had betrothed
the girl to his brother Hades, lord of the underworld, and helped him to abduct her. Distraught with rage, Demeter left Olympus and withdrew all her gifts from humanity. Without corn, the people began to starve, so the Olympians arranged for Persephone’s return on condition that she spend four months each year with her husband. When Persephone was reunited with her mother, the earth burst into flower, but when she returned to Hades during the winter, it seemed to die in sympathy. Thesmophoria compelled the Greeks to imagine what might have happened if Demeter’s favors had been permanently withdrawn. Married women left their husbands and, like the goddess, disappeared from the polis. Together they fasted, slept on the ground as people had done in primitive times, and ritually cursed the male sex. The festival forced the Greeks to contemplate the destruction of civilization, which depended upon the institution of marriage, and to appreciate the real antagonism that existed between the sexes. They also meditated on the catastrophe that would ensue if the crops ceased to grow. At the end of the festival, the women went home and life returned to normal, but everybody knew that the alternative was a lurking, fearful possibility.

As the concept of the individual developed in the polis, however, Greeks wanted a more personal spirituality alongside the public cult and developed the Mystery Cult. The word “mystery” needs clarification. The
musterion
was neither a hazy abandonment of rationality nor a self-indulgent wallowing in mumbo jumbo. In fact, the Mysteries would have a profound effect on the new philosophical rationalism.
Musterion
was closely related to
myesis
, “initiation;” it was not something that you thought (or failed to think!) but something that you did.
⁹
The Mysteries that developed during the sixth century were carefully constructed psychodramas in which
mystai
(“initiates”) had a direct and overwhelming experience of the sacred that, in many cases, entirely transformed their perception of life and death.

The most famous of the Mysteries was celebrated annually at Eleusis, some twenty miles west of Athens. When Demeter had stormed off Mount Olympus after Persephone’s abduction, she wandered all over the earth, disguised as an old woman, searching for her daughter. Metaneira, queen of Eleusis, had taken her into the royal household as a nurse for her son Demophon, and to repay her kindness, Demeter decided to make the child divine by burning away his mortal
parts each night in the fire. One night, however, she was interrupted by Metaneira, who was understandably horrified to see her little boy in the flames. Revealing herself in all her glory, Demeter left the palace in a rage but later returned to teach the Eleusinians how to cultivate grain and instruct them in her secret rites. There had probably been some kind of festival at Eleusis since the Neolithic era. But in the sixth century, an enormous new cult hall was built, and for over a millennium the Eleusinian Mysteries would remain an integral part of the religious life of Athens.
¹⁰

Each autumn, a new set of
mystai
voluntarily applied for initiation. What happened inside the cult hall was kept secret because a mere recital of events would sound trivial to an outsider, but the secrecy means we have only partial glimpses of what went on. It seems, however, that the
mystai
reenacted Demeter’s sojourn in Eleusis. Like any ancient initiation, these rituals were frightening. The
mystai
understood that the rites and the myth of Eleusis were symbolic: if you had asked them if there was sufficient historical evidence for Demeter’s visit, they would have found the query somewhat inept.
Mythos
was
theologia
(“speaking about a god”), and like any religious discourse, it made sense only in the context of the disciplined exercises that brought it to life.
¹¹
The fact that the myth could not be understood literally made it more effective. “What is surmised (but not overtly expressed) is more frightening,” explained the Hellenistic writer Demetrius. “What is clear and manifest is easily despised, like naked men. Therefore the mysteries too are expressed in the form of allegory, in order to arouse consternation and dread, just as they are performed in darkness at night.”
¹²
The rites enabled the
mystai
to share Demeter’s suffering. Her cult showed that there was no life without death. Seeds had to be buried in the depths of the earth before they could bring forth life-giving food, so Demeter, goddess of grain, was also a mistress of the underworld. The Mystery would force initiates to face up to their own mortality, experience the terror of death, and learn to accept it as an integral part of life.

But it was a hard, exhausting process. It began in Athens, where the
mystai
fasted for two whole days, sacrificed a piglet in honor of Persephone, and set off in a huge throng on the long, hot march to Eleusis. By this time, they were weak and apprehensive. The
epoptai
, who had been initiated the previous year, walked with them, abusing
and threatening the
mystai
while they called hypnotically on Dionysus, god of transformation, driving the crowd into a frenzy of excitement. By the time the
mystai
arrived in Eleusis, confused, elated, exhausted, and scared, it was evening, and they were herded to and fro through the streets by flickering torchlight until, thoroughly disoriented, they finally plunged into the pitch darkness of the initiation hall. From this point, we have only brief, disconnected glimpses of the rites. Animals were sacrificed; there was a shocking event— a child may have been pushed, like little Demophon, into the fire, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour—and a “revelation.” Something—a sheaf of corn, perhaps—was lifted out of a covered basket. But the Mystery ended joyfully, with tableaux depicting Persephone’s return from the world of the dead and her reunion with her mother.