The theology of the early Greek philosophers

267 Pages·1947·24.269 MB·English

by  Werner Wilhelm Jaeger

THE
THEOLOGY OF
,
THE EARLY
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS
Oxfwd University Press, Awn Howe, Lodon E.4. q
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W~~LING~BNO YBA~C ILCUTXA BUD- CWE~OIRN
Geof/ry Gumbwlege, Publisirer to the University
THE
THEOLOGY
OF
THE EARLY
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS
THE GIFFORD LECTURES
1936
BY
WERNER JAEGER
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
Translated for the Giwd Lectures,
from the Germatt mamuscri$t,
by EDWARD S. ROBINSON 4
PRINTED IN GREAT BRlTAIN
PREFACE
TH IS book, which might be entitled The Origin of Natrcral
Theology and the Greeks, represents the Gifford Lectures
which I delivered at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland,
in 1936. How this subject is related to the purpose of the
Gifford Lectures has been stated in the first chapter. The pub-
lication of this book has been delayed by other books which I
have had to finish during these past ten years. The lectures
now appear in a greatly improved form and with ilumerous
additions, most of all the extensive notes. Although these have
been printed at the end of the volume, for the conve8ience of
the general reader, they form an essential part of my inquiry.
It is perhaps not unnecessary to state that the present book
does not pretend to give a complete history of the early period
of Greek philosophy with which it is concerned. Rather, I have
concentrated on one particular aspect of this much-discussed
subject, an aspect which has been unduly neglected or mini-
mized by scholars of the positivistic school because in the early
Greek philosophy of nature they saw their own likeness.
Reacting against this one-sided picture, the opponents of this
school have represented all Greek cosmological thought as an
outgrowth of mysticism and Orphism, something quite irra-
tional. If we avoid these extremes, there remains the fact that
the new and revolutionizing ideas which these early Greek
thinkers developed about the nature of the universe had a
direct impact upon their conception of what they-in a new
sense--called 'God' or 'the Divine'. It goes without saying
that the terms 'God', 'the Divine', and 'theology' must not
be understood here in their later Christian but in the Greek
sense. The history of the philosophical theology of the Greeks
is the history of their rational approach to the nature of reality
itself in its successive phases.
In the present book I have traced this development through
the heroic age of Greek cosmological thought down to the time
of the Sophists. In a second volume, against the pre-Socratic
background, I should like to treat the period from Socrates
and Plato down to the time when, under the influence of this
tradition of Greek philosophical theology, the Jewish-Christian
vi PREFACE
religion transformed itself into a theological system in the Greek
manner, in order to force its admission to the Hellenistic
world.
It is my pleasant duty to thank the Delegates of the Claren-
don Press for their generous offer to publish this volume and
for the meticulous care with which it has been printed. I am
greatly indebted to my translator, Professor Edward S. Robin-
son, now of the University of Kansas, and to Messrs. James E.
Walsh and Cedric Whitman of Harvard University for their
kind assistance with the final revision of the manuscript. I owe
many thanks to Mrs. Cedric Whitman for making the indexes
to the book.
W. J.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
.lanzlary, 1947
CONTENTS
THE THEOLOGY OF THE GREEK THINKERS.
.
THE THEOLOGY OF THE MILESIAN NATURALISTS
XENOPHANES' DOCTRINE OF GOD .
THE SO-CALLED ORPHIC THEOGONIES
ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL'S DIVINITY
PARMENIDES' MYSTERY OF BEING
HERACLITUS
.
EMPEDOCLES
THE TELEOLOGICAL THINKERS : ANAXAGORAS AND
.
DIOGENES
THEORIES OF THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF RELIGION
CHAPTER I
THE THEOLOGY OF THE GREEK THINKERS
TH E aim of the Gifford Lectures has been determined once
and for all by their founder, who specified that they should
deal with that group of problems which we designate by the
name of natural theology. Hitherto most of the lecturers have
been philosophers or theologians. If I, as classical philologist
and student of the humanities, have any justification for
ranging my own efforts in this field along with theirs, it lies
solely in Lord Gifford's further stipulation that the lectures
may also deal with the history of these problems.
The venerable chain of tradition by which this history is
linked together spans two and a half millennia. Its value is by
no means purely antiquarian. Philosophical thought is much
more closely and indissolubly bound up with its history than are
the special sciences with theirs. One might perhaps say that
the relation between modern and ancient philosophy is more
comparable to that between the works of the poets of our own
time and the great classical poems of the past. For here again it
is from the immortality of past greatness that the new creation
draws its vital breath.
Whenever we speak of the beginnings of European philosophy
we think of the Greeks ; and any attempt to trace the origins of
natural or philosophical theology must likewise begin with
them. The idea of theologia natzlralis has come to our world
from a work that has long since become classical for the Chris-
tian occident-the De civitate Dei of St. Augustine. After
attacking belief in heathen gods as an illusion throughout his
first five books,' he proceeds in the sixth to expound the Chris-
tian doctrine of the One God and sets out to demonstrate its
thorough accordance with the deepest insights of Greek philo-
sophy. This view of Christian theology as confirming and
rounding out the truths of pre-Christian thought expresses very
well the positive side of the relations between the new religion
and pagan antiquity. Now for St. Augustine, as for any typical
Neoplatonist of his century, the one supreme representative
of Greek philosophy was Plato ; the other thinkers were merely
minor figures around the base of Plato's mighty mon~ment.~
4384 B
2 THE THEOLOGY OF THE GREEK THINKERS
During the Middle Ages this commanding position was gradually
usurped by Aristotle, and it is only since the Renaissance that
Plato has again been his serious competitor. But throughout
this period Greek philosophy-whether Platonic or Aristotelian
-together with a gradually increasing amount of Greek science
in Latin translation, was all that was left of Greek culture in
the West at a time when the knowledge of the Greek language
had vanished in the general cultural decline. If the continuity
of the ancient Greek tradition was never entirely broken in
Europe, it is due to the fact that Greek philosophy kept it alive.
But this would not have been possible had not that same philo-
sophy, a7 theologia naiuralis, served as the basis for the theologia
su$ermaturalis of Christianity.
Originally, however, the concept of natural theology did not
arise in opposition to supernatural theology, an idea which was
unknown to the ancient world. If we want to understand what
natural theology meant to those who first conceived the idea, we
must see it in its genetic context. The concept of natural
theology was, as St. Augustine himself states, one which he had
taken from the Antipzlitates rerum hwmanarum et divinarum of
M. Terentius Varro,3 the prolific Roman writer and learned
encyclopaedist of the last days of the republic (116-27 B.c.).
In the second part of this massive work, which was entitled
Antiquitates revurn divinarum, Varro had built up a theory of
the Roman gods with thoroughgoing consistency and striking
antiquarian erudition. According to St. Augustine he dis-
tinguished three kinds of theology (genera theologiae) : mythical,
political, and natural4 Mythical theology had for its domain
the world of the gods as described by the poets; political
theology included the official State religion and its institutions
and cults ; natural theology was a field for the philosophers-
the theory of the nature of the divine as revealed in the nature
of reality. Only natural theology could be called religion in the
true sense, since a real religion meant for St. Augustine a
religion which is true; the poets' mythical theology presented
merely a world of beautiful make-believe. By Varro's time the
State religion was already beginning to decline ; he hoped to
save it by maintaining that religion derives its own validity
from the authority of the State as the earlier of the two institu-
tions. Religion is to him primarily one of the basic forms in the
THE THEOLOGY OF THE GREEK THINKERS 3
social life of the human community.5 This thesis is one which
St. Augustine stoutly opposes. He looks upon Varro's State
gods as not a whit better or truer than the infamous myths of
the poets. He excuses Varro's reactionary and-as it seems to
him-fundamentally false attitude towards the whole problem
of State religion by pointing out that Varro was living in a time
of scant political liberty, with the old order crumbling about
him, so that his own conservatism compelled him to defend the
Roman national religion as the very soul of the Roman rep~blic.~
But if there be some truth in this observation, yet for the same
reason the old Roman religion, even in its most recent and
strongly Hellenized form, was unable to become the rdigion of
the empire in which so many different nations were united. To
St. Augustine it is inconceivable that any true religion should be
restricted to a single nation. God is essentially universal and
must be worshipped universally.' This, indeed, is a basic
Christian doctrine ; but it is in the universalism of Greek philo-
sophy that St. Augustine finds its chief support. Greek philo-
sophy is genuine natural theology because it is based on rational
insight into the nature of reality itself; the theologies of myth
and State, on the contrary, have nothing to do with nature but
are mere artificial conventions, entirely man-made. St. Augus-
tine himself says that this opposition is the very basis of the
concept of natural theology.* Obviously he has in mind the
old antithesis of +&ur~a nd O~UEL.E ven Socrates' pupil Anti-
sthenes, whose influence upon the Stoic philosophy was pro-
found, had distinguished the one +;GEL Beds from the many
8ku.s~B EO~a,m~ ong whom he included the gods of the poets no
less than those of the official cult. So from the standpoint of
natural theology the gods of the poets and those of the State
were on precisely the same footing. This is a point which St.
Augustine quite properly brings up against Varro.IO Obviously
Varro's threefold division was intended to blur the sharpness
of this antithesis in order that the State gods might be rescued
from the general repudiation of the Oiur~O col and thus be per-
mitted to retain their birthright. The division was really
a compromise. We do not know who first introduced it. At
any rate it must have been some Hellenistic (probably Stoic)
philosopher, for Varro still used for his three genera theo-
logiae the Greek adjectives mythicon, politicon, and 9hysicon.