The Case for God (12 page)

No secret doctrine was imparted in which the
mystai
had to “believe.” The “revelation” was significant only as the culmination of the intense ritual experience. In a superb summary of the religious process, Aristotle would later make it clear that the
mystai
did not go to Eleusis to learn
(mathein
) anything but to have an experience (
pathein
) and a radical change of mind
(diatethenai
).
¹³
The rites seem to have left a powerful impression. No
mystes
could fail to be stunned by a ceremony so “overwhelming in its beauty and size,” wrote the Greek rhetorician Dio of Prusa (50–117 CE); he would behold “many mystic views and hear many sounds of the kind, with darkness and light appearing in sudden changes and other innumerable things happening;” it was impossible that he would “experience just nothing in his soul, and that he should not come to surmise that there is some wiser insight or plan in all that is going on.”
¹⁴
The historian Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE) thought that the initiation was a foretaste of death. It began with the dissolution of one’s mental processes, disorientation, frightening paths that seemed to lead nowhere, and, just before the end, “panic, shivering, sweat and amazement.” But finally a “wonderful light … pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn sacred words and holy views.”
¹⁵

The carefully crafted drama introduced
mystai
to a wholly new dimension of life and put them in touch with a deeper, unconscious level of the psyche so that afterward many felt entirely different. “I came out of the mystery hall,” one recalled, “feeling a stranger to
myself.”
¹⁶
They found that they were no longer afraid of death: they had achieved an
ekstasis
, a “stepping out” of their workaday selves, and, for a short time, had felt something akin to the beatitude of the gods. But not everybody was skilled at these ritual games. The Athenian philosopher Proclus (c. 412–85 CE) explained that some
mystai
were “stricken with panic” during the darker part of the rite and remained trapped in their fear; they were not sufficiently adept in this ritual of make-believe. But others achieved a
sympatheia
, an affinity that made them one with the ritual, so that they lost themselves in it “in a way that is unintelligible to us and divine.” Their
ekstasis
was a
kenosis
, a self-forgetfulness that enabled them to “assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.”
¹⁷

Some Greeks, however, were beginning to be critical of the old mythology. How could anybody imagine that the gods “are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like our own,” asked the Ionian poet Xenophanes (560–480), or that they were guilty of theft, adultery, and deception?
¹⁸
To be truly divine, a god should transcend such human qualities and be beyond time and change.
¹⁹
The naturalist Anaxagoras of Smyrna (508–435) insisted that the moon and stars were just massive rocks; it was not the gods but Mind
(nous)
, composed of sacred matter, that controlled the universe. Protagoras of Abdera caused a sensation when he arrived in Athens in 430 and delivered a lecture in the home of the playwright Euripides (480–406). No god could impose his will on human beings, and as for the Olympians, who could tell whether they existed or not? “There are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.”
²⁰
There was simply not the evidence to pronounce definitively on the existence of the divine, one way or the other.

Athens was still a very religious city and Protagoras and Anaxagoras were both expelled from the polis. But people were looking for a deeper form of theism. For the tragedian Aeschylus (525–456) the ineluctable pain of human life was the path to wisdom. Zeus— “whoever Zeus may be”—had “taught men to think” and reflect on the sorrow of human experience. It was therefore ordained

Euripides wanted a more transcendent god: “O you who give the earth support and me by it supported,” prays Queen Hecuba in his
Trojan Women
, “whoever you are, power beyond our knowledge, Zeus, be you stern law of nature or intelligence in man, to you I make my prayers; for you direct in the way of justice all mortal affairs, moving with noiseless tread.”
²²
Euripides seems to have concluded that “the
nous
of each one of us is a god.”
²³
The philosophers of Athens were about to arrive at the same conclusion.

In the 420s, during the darkest phase of the Peloponnesian War, a new philosopher started to attract a devoted circle of disciples in Athens. The son of a stonecutter and a midwife, an unprepossessing man with protruding lips, a flat, snubbed nose, and a paunch, Socrates (c. 469–399) cast a spell over a group of young men from some of the noblest families in the city. But he would talk to anybody at all, rich or poor. Indeed, he needed conversation to achieve his mission. Socrates was intent above all on dismantling received ideas and exploring the true meaning of virtue. But he was asking the right questions at the wrong time. During this crisis, people wanted certainty rather than stringent criticism, and in 399 Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the young, refusing to honor the gods of the polis, and introducing new gods. He denied the charges, insisting that he was no atheist like Anaxagoras. How could teaching about goodness be corrupting? He could have escaped and was probably expected to do so. But even though the sentence was unjust, he preferred to obey the laws of his beloved Athens to the end: he would die a witness
(martys
) to the untruth currently in the ascendant.

Socrates did not commit any of his teachings to writing, so we have to rely on the dialogues composed by his pupil Plato (c. 427–347) that claim to record these conversations. Socrates himself had a poor opinion
of written discourse. People who read a lot imagined that they knew a great deal, but because they had not inscribed what they had read indelibly on their minds, they knew nothing at all.
²⁴
Written words were like figures in a painting. They seemed alive, but if you questioned them they remained “solemnly silent.” Without the spirited interchange of a human encounter, the knowledge imparted by a written text tended to become static: it “continues to signify just that very same thing forever.”
²⁵
Socrates did not approve of fixed, dogmatically held opinions. When
philosophia
was written down, it was easily misunderstood, because the author had not been able to tailor his discourse to the needs of a particular group. But a living dialogue could transform a person who took part in it, making him “as happy as any human being can be.”
²⁶

It is difficult for us today to appreciate the power attributed to the spoken word in the premodern world. In his conversations Socrates sought not merely to inform but to form the minds of his interlocutors, producing within them a profound psychological change. Wisdom was about insight—not amassing information. To his dying day, Socrates insisted that he had no interest in teaching anybody anything, because he knew nothing at all. At the end of his life, he recalled an occasion when he was attacked by one of the leading politicians of Athens and said to himself, “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”
²⁷
Instead of being aggressively dogmatic about his ideas, Socrates was profoundly and determinedly agnostic and sought to show those who came to him how little they really knew.

This was one of the reasons why he had become impatient with the
phusikoi
. In a dialogue that Plato set in the prison where Socrates had spent his last days, he makes Socrates explain that as a young man he had been “wonderfully keen” on natural science. He thought it would be splendid to know the causes of everything: “why it comes to be, why it perishes, and why it exists.”
²⁸
He discovered, however, that the naturalists were not interested in these matters but concentrated solely on the material explanation of phenomena. He had been delighted to hear about Anaxagoras’s theories of the cosmic Mind but,
to his disappointment, found that “the man made no use of Mind, nor gave it any responsibility for the management of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things.” This concentration on the purely physical left too much out. It would be like saying that the reason he was sitting in jail was because “my body consists of bones and sinews,” and that the “relaxation of the sinews enables me to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent.”
²⁹
But why were his bones and sinews not safely in Megara or Boeotia, “taken there by my belief as to the best course, if I had not thought it more right and honourable to endure whatever penalty the city ordered rather than escape or run away?”
³⁰
Science should, of course, continue, but Socrates felt that the
phusikoi
were not asking the really important questions. If you were interested in morality or meaning, you would have to look elsewhere.

Like the
mystai
at Eleusis, the people who came to converse with Socrates did not come to learn anything but to have an experience and a radical change of mind. The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise. The French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot has shown that unlike modern philosophy, which tends to be purely notional, Athenian rationalism derived its insights from practical exercises and a disciplined lifestyle.
³¹
The conceptual writings of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle were either teaching aids or merely served as a preliminary guide for those looking for a new way of living. Unlike the
phusikoi
, Socrates was primarily interested in goodness, which, like Confucius, he refused to define. Instead of analyzing the concept of virtue, he wanted to live a virtuous life. When asked for a definition of justice, for example, Socrates replied: “Instead of speaking it, I make it understood in my acts.”
³²
It was only when a person chose to behave justly that he could form any idea of a wholly just existence.

For Socrates and those who came after him, a philosopher was essentially a “lover of wisdom.” He yearned for wisdom precisely because he realized that he lacked it. As Paul Friedlander has explained, there was “a tension between
ignorance
—that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words ‘what justice is’—and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine.”
³³
As far as we can tell from Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to have been reaching toward a transcendent notion of absolute virtue that could never be adequately
conceived or expressed but could be intuited by such spiritual disciplines as meditation. Socrates was famous for his formidable powers of concentration. “Every now and then he just goes off,” a friend remarked, “and stands motionless, wherever he happens to be.”
³⁴
Alcibiades, the famous Athenian politician, recalled that during a military campaign, Socrates had started thinking about a problem, could not resolve it, and to the astonishment of his fellow soldiers “stood there, glued to the spot,” all day and all night, leaving his station only at dawn, “when the sun came out and he made his prayers to the new day.”
³⁵
Plato’s dialogues were a model for the type of meditation that Socrates and his followers practiced; it was nothing like yoga but took the form of a conversation with oneself—conducted either in solitude or together with others—that pushed thought to the very limit.

But this type of internal dialogue was possible only if the self that you were conversing with was authentic. Socrates’ mission was to awaken genuine self-knowledge in the people who came to talk to him. He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Consequently a conversation with Socrates could be disturbing. Even if somebody started to talk to him about something quite different, his friend Niceas explained, he would finally be forced to “submit to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And … Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail.”
³⁶
He would discuss only those subjects that his conversation partners felt comfortable with. Laches, for example, as a general in the army, thought he understood the nature of courage and was convinced that it was a noble quality. And yet, Socrates pointed out, relentlessly piling up one example after another, a courageous act could seem stupid and foolhardy. When Niceas pointed out that, on the contrary, courage required the intelligence to appreciate terror, Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future and were unknown to us, so we could not separate the knowledge of future evil from our present and past experience. How could we separate courage from the other virtues when a truly valiant person must also be temperate, just, and wise and good? A single virtue like courage must in reality be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation,
these veterans of the Peloponnesian War, who had all endured the trauma of battle and should have been experts on the subject, found that they did not have the first idea what courage was. They felt deeply perplexed and rather stupid, as though they were ignorant children who needed to go back to school.