Ancient scepticism and ancient religion
Julia Annas
Religion figures in the ancient Pyrrhonist claim that scepticism does not lead to conflict with the living of ordinary life. In Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pyrrho we find, among the stories illustrating the idea that Pyrrho lived, consistently with his philosophy, a normal life, the claim that he became a high priest in his home town of Elis.[1] (Also, though I shall not be talking about the Academics, it is interesting that Cicero in his dialogue The Nature of the Gods puts forward, to attack arguments for the existence of the gods, Aurelius Cotta, who is a prominent priest and who says that ‘no words from any person, whether learned or unlearned, will ever budge me from the views which I inherited from our ancestors concerning the worship of the immortal gods.’[2]) Sextus twice gives arguments for and against the existence of the gods, at M IX 11-194 and PH III 2-12, and each time claims that the sceptic, who is led to suspension of judgement on this, will lead an ordinary religious life At M IX 49 he says that perhaps the sceptic will be safer than other philosophers, since ‘in conformity with his ancestral customs and the laws he declares that the Gods exist, and performs everything which contributes to their worship and veneration, but, so far as concerns philosophic investigation, declines to commit himself rashly.’[3] At PH III 2 he says, ‘following ordinary life (bios) without opinions (adoxastos) we say that there are gods and we are pious towards the gods and say that they are provident: it is against the rashness of the Dogmatists that we make the following points.’[4]
Thus for Sextus living an ordinary religious life can be part of the sceptic’s life, one in which he refrains from rash assent to dogmatic claims and lives adoxastos, without opinions. Rather than start by taking a stand on what kind of opinion or belief, if any, the sceptic can have, I want to explore scepticism about religion as a contribution to this issue.
To us it may seem strange to claim that religion of all things can be part of a sceptical life in which you suspend judgement over whether God exists and which is in some way lived adoxastos, without opinions. In a recent discussion Alan Bailey claims that Sextus’ claim is deeply unsatisfactory. ‘If the Pyrrhonist does not have the belief that a divine being exists, then his participation in religious worship would seem to be little more than a piece of hypocrisy and dissimulation.’ Thus Bailey claims that Sextus is misleading: all he means is that the Pyrrhonist ‘can be relied upon, in the right cultural setting, to perform the characteristic actions associated with religious believers.’[5] He will go through the motions; he can’t retain the ordinary religious beliefs.[6]
I think that Bailey’s claim here is too quick, and that if we look at the nature of ancient pagan religion we can see that Sextus’ claim that the sceptic can lead an ordinary religious life has more plausibility than we may at first suspect. I will first set out some distinctive points about ancient pagan religion, and then look at the relation of positive philosophical thought about religion (the ideas of Sextus’ dogmatists) to religious beliefs and practices. Then I will return to scepticism and the impact we can take it to make on religious belief and practice in the light of this.
Ancient pagan religion is pluralist, in more than one way. It is pluralist, obviously, in being polytheistic: there is not just one god, but many, with different functions which overlap and can conflict. But it is also pluralist in a deeper sense: pagans were aware that religions were culturally specific and that theirs was not the only religion, and they did not see different religions as excluding one another. Greeks were aware that different cities had different major gods, and that other peoples had religions of a different form: the Egyptians had theriomorphic rather than anthropomorphic gods, the Persians’ religion was aniconic, and so on. These religions were seen as not just belonging to different people but as not competing: ancient pagans felt no need to proselytize. Worshippers of a foreign religion were not seen as heathen in need of conversion, and members of pagan religions saw no need to suppress or to persecute members of others. Indeed, for pagans the gods of other people were seen as the easiest part of those cultures to understand; they functioned as what Jan Assmann has called ‘a means of intercultural translatability…..The different peoples worshipped different gods, but nobody contested the reality of foreign gods and the legitimacy of foreign forms of worship.’[7] In cases where ancient Greek and Roman pagans did persecute members of other religions the reasons were not religious ones.[8]
From the classical period to the late Roman empire we can notice two developments of this general attitude. One is sycretism, the identification of gods from different traditions, as for example the Romans identified the native British goddess Sul with Minerva when they turned her mineral spring into a Roman spa.[9] The other is that of adding several religions to one’s own, without subtracting any. The most spectacular example of this is illustrated by the funeral inscription of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, who died as consul-designate in 384 AD. He was a member of two of the ancient Roman priesthoods as well as holding a more recent priesthood and being an augur, an expert in interpreting signs from the gods. He had been initiated into the Eastern cult of the Great Mother and the rites of the Greek goddess Hecate and the Persian god Mithras, as well as being a priest of Hercules and of the Egyptian god Sarapis.[10] Less spectacular (and less expensive) examples of this phenomenon are common.
How can different religions not exclude one another? Obviously they compete for the worshipper’s time, energy and money. But do they import a conflict of beliefs? Clearly for ancient pagans they did not, and in their case we can distinguish religious beliefs which are somewhat different from what we might expect religious beliefs to be. They are culturally specific, beliefs about Athena, Mithras and Isis, about animal sacrifice, vows, dedications, temples and so on. They differ from what I shall call theological beliefs, which are beliefs about the gods, God, or the divine (hoi theoi, theos, to theion) where this is taken to be about something universal and cross-cultural. (This is obviously not the only way of distinguishing religious from theological beliefs, and I make no claim for the distinction other than the use of it I make in this paper.)
From the above brief characterization of ancient pagan religion, it might seem that ancient pagan religious beliefs implied one theological belief, namely the belief that there is a divine being, God (ho theos) or the divine (to theion), which different religions give different representations of. But this seems to be overascription: ancient pagan religious belief and practice do not presuppose anything as robust as a commitment to a belief about the divine which is cross-cultural, going beyond the context of a particular religion. Rather, ancient pagans noticed that different religions – to a greater or lesser extent, more or less easily – are inter-comprehensible in a non-exclusive way. They are committed to their own religion, but without excluding others; but this falls short of commitment to claims which hold cross-culturally and explain the inter-comprehensibility. Noticing that different languages are inter-translatable, you might have a vague idea that there is something explaining this, but have no commitment to its nature or indeed to their being any one such item; similarly ancient pagans could hold religious beliefs and note and act on their non-exclusive nature without commitment to a robust claim that God exists and has a certain nature, where this is taken to be a universal, cross-cultural claim.
In later antiquity we can see pagans becoming more self-conscious about cross-cultural claims about God, and thinking explicitly about the idea that different religions are culturally different ways of expressing something which cannot be adequately expressed by any one of them alone. Maximus of Tyre in Oration 2 discusses the different kinds of representation found among different peoples, and concludes that it is indifferent which one uses, since humans cannot understand the nature of God and thus are limited to their own traditions, while recognizing that no tradition on its own is adequate.[11] Plutarch, in Isis and Osiris, makes similar remarks.[12] We should note that this position does not imply relativism about different religions. Particular religions differ about some matters, for example the type of image of the gods they use, and this position in no way implies that each side is speaking within a cultural framework cut off from the other. There can be rational comparative evaluations between religions. Maximus, for example, criticizes Egyptians for animal-worship, as do many Greeks who think that the gods should be shown in human form; and there is a minor competing strain of pagan thought which criticizes this as immature and commends the aniconic worship of the Persians and Jews.[13]
Once Christians enter the debate pagans have to argue even more explicitly. So we find in anti-Christian writers like Celsus and the Emperor Julian the Apostate[14] the claim that religions are non-exclusive because they are all versions of original universal cross-cultural truths about the divine, of which different cultures produce different expressions. As Celsus puts it, there is an original ‘true doctrine’ (alethes logos) of which different religions give different representations, while wise men of every nation have tried to understand the true doctrine itself. Hence ‘it matters not a bit what one calls the supreme God – or whether one uses Greek names or Indian names or the names used formerly by the Egyptians.’[15] This idea certainly does not rule out the position that one or more religions have got things wrong: Celsus uses it to argue against Christianity, and later the tables were turned, with Christian writers arguing that it is Judaism and then Christianity which is the most faithful expression of ancient wisdom, with paganism being a ghastly mistake.[16] By this point it is clear that the defenders of paganism are defending a full-blown theological belief about the divine.
Prior to confrontation with monotheistic religion, however, ancient pagans could live a religious life and have religious beliefs while still not holding beliefs or dogmata as Sextus describes these at PH I 13 – ‘assent to some unclear object of investigation’. His claim at PH III 2 that the sceptic will live a religious life ‘without opinions’ (adoxastos) is joined there and in the M passage by the claim that he will avoid the rashness of the dogmatists and the philosophers. In terms of the above distinction, the sceptic will suspend judgement on theological beliefs, which will be dogmata, but can retain religious beliefs, which will not. Religious beliefs, in the terms of the present distinction, are not about unclear matters; there is nothing unclear about the cult of Athena, say, and the practices and beliefs that go with it. Indeed, since religious beliefs are embedded in a cultural context, they will present themselves to the sceptic less as matters of commitment than as something he just accepts because he belongs to that culture. What is there to question about the cult of Athena, if you are an Athenian? This may be why Sextus presents the religious life as an easy, obvious example of the sceptical life at PH I 24: ‘By the handing down of customs and laws, we accept, from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety bad.’
Does the account just given imply that ancient pagans were insincere or hypocritical in their religious beliefs? Clearly not. Athenian devotion to Athena was not undermined by knowledge that Persians and Egyptians did not worship her. The fact that it did not occur to them to try to convert Persians and Egyptians to the worship of Athena does not mean that they were tepid or unconvinced in their own observances. Indeed, in late antiquity it seems to have been the more, not the less devout who shopped around for more religions all of which were severally satisfying. Sincere pagan religious belief can flourish in the absence of commitment to, or indeed any interest in, specific theological beliefs; this does not turn it into a detached attitude, a mere going through the motions. To assume, as many modern scholars do, that it can only be mindless routine cuts us off from exploring an interesting example of what Sextus takes to be the sceptic’s life ‘without opinions’ and eith no commitment to dogmata.
What is the relation to religious beliefs and practices of positive philosophical thought – the contributions of Sextus’ dogmatists? Most philosophers from the Presocratics onwards theorize about the divine. Presocratic philosophers tend to think that the fundamental principle of the universe, whatever that turns out to be, is divine. Aristotle, the Epicureans and Stoics all discuss God or the divine at great length. It’s clear that in terms of the above distinction they are discussing theological rather than religious beliefs. Moreover, it is striking that the philosophical theology is not directed towards removing or reforming religious beliefs. The Stoics, for example, argue that God is properly to be understood as the active principle in the entire universe, a conclusion which on the face of it would seem to imply that popular polytheistic beliefs are wrong and confused. Yet their theology contains within itself no drive to change popular beliefs. Indeed, they go in for strategies of allegorizing and the use of etymology in order to show that popular religious beliefs are dim and confused versions of philosophical truths about the divine; bizarre myths in Homer and Hesiod are not rejected, but regarded as the best that a dim level of understanding can do.
Philosophers, even when their theological conclusions would seem to conflict with popular religious beliefs and practices, took care to conform to religious practices, seeing no real conflict. Epicurus’ views about the gods centrally include the thought that they are unconcerned with humans, a position which would appear to make prayer and sacrifice a waste of time. Yet Epicurus was personally pious, and his followers took pains to establish that he was in no way trying to undermine any aspect of the worship of the gods.[17]
Aristotle is a particularly revealing example here. Aristotle argues at length that God is properly to be thought of as the unmoved mover of the cosmos, the sustainer of all activity and movement in the universe, but itself moved by nothing further, and so functioning by attraction like an object of love, and thinking only of itself, not of any mundane happenings within the cosmos. This could hardly seem further from popular religious beliefs about many conflicting gods. Indeed Aristotle says that popular beliefs contain a dim grasp of truth only insofar as they count the heavenly bodies as divine. The rest, however, he adds calmly, is just myth to persuade people to behave.[18] This is an extremely detached attitude, and elsewhere we find Aristotle taking an almost sociological approach to the form Greek religion takes. Monarchy, he says, used to be the usual form of human government, and that is why the gods are taken to have a king, since humans ascribe their own ways of life, as well as their human form, to the gods.[19] But it is notable that on the everyday level Aristotle’s engagement with religion seems unaffected. In his will he leaves money for setting up large, expensive stone statues to Zeus and Athena the Saviours in Stagira, in fulfilment of a vow Aristotle made for Nicanor’s safe return.[20] In his ethical and political works religion figures as an important part of civic life, and even in his ideal state he shows no desire to reform or improve people’s beliefs about it.
There is one great exception here: Plato. In the Laws Plato insists that membership in the political community requires correct beliefs about the gods, where this is clearly an implicit or, if challenged, explicit acceptance of some very specific and determinate theological beliefs. All citizens, Plato demands, must have the same, correct theological beliefs. Moreover, these beliefs do require some reform of religious practice; public worship is made uniform and private worship forbidden. All that is relevant here is that this differs strongly from other pagan philosophical thought, and that it is no accident that just this commended Plato to Jewish and Christian thinkers whose view of the relation of religious to theological beliefs was entirely different from that of ordinary pagans.
Apart from Plato, philosophers’ theories about the divine are not taken to undermine, or to demand the removal or modification of, popular religious beliefs and practices. Everyday religious life is taken to be self-standing. This is not just arbitrary insulation of religion from theory. Rather, we have seen that we can make sense of it in terms of the distinction between religious and theological beliefs. Religious beliefs can be sincerely and even intensely held in the absence of theological belief; commitment to theological belief does not produce a direct impact on religious belief. Philosophical theories are seen as attempts to understand and explain theology, the nature of the divine, and are seen as neither supporting nor undermining religious beliefs.[21] Aristotle’s theory that the divine is the Unmoved Mover thus neither supports nor undermines his setting up statues to Zeus and Athena the Saviours. The latter practice is a culturally specific one; the theory makes cross-cultural claims about the divine of which the culturally specific practice is one representation among others. Aristotle did not expect anyone but Greeks to set up statues to Zeus and Athena the Saviours; but he aimed to show, not that God was the Unmoved Mover for Greeks (whatever that might mean) but that God was the Unmoved Mover, something that Greeks and others represent in culturally specific ways. (And in fact the Unmoved Mover idea has been held by not only polytheists but by monotheists in the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions, so it clearly does have very considerable cross-cultural acceptability.)
Since many philosophers produced theories of a theological nature about the divine, usually as part of their cosmological and metaphysical theories, it is not surprising that we find philosophical disagreement about the divine. This is, for Sextus, where the trouble starts. In his two sections on God in PH and M he argues at great length about the conception we have of the divine, and gives arguments for and against the claim that god exists. The arguments are about theological rather than religious issues; God is introduced into the argument, in both works, in the section on physics, under the heading of the active as opposed to the passive cause, and thus in a theoretical framework to begin with. Arguably this is a rather metaphysical way to bring in God, and it certainly reflects Stoic thinking. Many of the positive arguments for the existence of God are Stoic ones, and many of the counter-arguments come from the sceptical Academy. There is considerable overlap between Sextus’ material here and the arguments in books 2 and 3 of Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods. We find especial emphasis on Stoic arguments from the rationally ordered condition of the universe to the existence of active rational ordering, and in the counter-arguments we find ones which use the Stoic forms of argument to come to absurd conclusions. Sextus also, like Cicero, puts in Carneades’ sorites argument. As usual, he makes extensive use of philosophers’ disagreements among themselves.
The people Sextus has in mind here as being victims of dogmatic rashness are people who have started to follow philosophers’ arguments about theological matters, and who thus are worried about whether God is material or immaterial, and whether God is the rational ordering of the universe. Some of them worry even more abstractly as to whether our knowledge of God’s existence comes from something evident, and, if not, where we get it from. Sextus claims, as usual, that the arguments for God’s existence and those against it turn out to be equipollent in force, so that the sceptic who follows them all through ends up suspending judgement about whether or not God exists. As we have seen, he describes the result, at M IX 49, in an interesting way: the sceptic will be ‘safer’ than those who philosophize otherwise. This is because he will live an ordinary religious life, saying that gods exist and doing everything relevant to worshipping and venerating them, in accordance with his community’s customs and laws. He will, however, make no rash commitments with respect to philosophical investigation.
Such a person will not, for example, commit himself to Aristotle’s view that God is the Unmoved Mover. He will be aware of the force of the arguments against this and other theories, and so will reject the claim to truth of any philosophical theory about God’s existence – any claim, that is, to universal, cross-cultural truth about God. He will not, of course, claim that no such account is true – that there are no true claims about God’s existence that are universal and cross-cultural. That would be shutting the investigation down, and that would be premature commitment too. The sceptic is therefore still looking, open-minded as to whether there can be a true universal, cross-cultural claim that God exists. We can see why Sextus thinks that this is a ‘safe’ position to be in. For if the worshipper is antecedently committed to a philosophical claim of this sort about God’s existence, this will produce worry and anxiety about the extent to which his particular cultural religious tradition gives a worthy representation of it, and hence he will start to worry about the status of what he is doing.
Bailey is wrong, then, to take this M 49 passage as showing that Sextus is ignoring a ‘deeper disquiet’, namely the fact that suspending judgement on arguments about God in fact empties out the religious life, leaving only mindless going through the motions. As we have seen, Sextus, as a pagan, is quite entitled here to point to the relative independence of religious beliefs from theological beliefs, and to hold that only the latter are dogmata, involving rash assent to the unclear. Suppose ancient pagan does get interested in the Stoics’ arguments, say, and comes to believe in the Stoic account of God. Then he gets caught up in sceptical counter-arguments to this, and ends up suspending judgement about this and ultimately any philosophical arguments about God. He has gone through the whole sceptical trajectory. What has he lost that he originally had before getting interested in theology? He can now commit himself to no universal, cross-cultural claim about the existence and nature of God; but this is not something he did in the first place. Accepting that the divine is whatever it is that enables us to understand different religions is quite different from commitment to a philosophically argued proof of the existence or nature of God. This acceptance is not a matter of intellectual commitment; it is just what arises in a pluralist pagan context, where ordinary life can be said to force you to make sense of several different religions, even if you have no intellectual interest in the divine, and thus no dogmata about it.
Scepticism about God does not, then, undermine anything that pagan religious belief rested on in the first place; it takes us through philosophical argument back to ordinary life without undermining that. This is, of course, something which is true for Sextus’ pagan audience. It is unlikely to be true for us (hence, probably, Bailey’s response). Sextus’ claim that scepticism in this area leaves you with ordinary life has no application to the two most likely modern replacements for the ancient pagan.
One is the modern secular person. This is the person who simply has no religious or theological beliefs. Either she has acquired no religious beliefs in her upbringing, or she has, but has successfully discarded them. And either she has acquired no theological beliefs in her upbringing, or she has but has successfully discarded them. Such a person is just not troubled by anything which will propel her to start the sceptical trajectory in the first place. In the ancient world this kind of secularism was unknown; it could be generally assumed that every society had some gods, every person took part in some form of worship. Indeed, ancient pagan society lacked our notion of successfully discarding religious and theological beliefs, since for them neither was problematic for living a good life in the way they have been in many modern societies.
The other is the modern religious believer, at least if she belongs to one of the three major monotheistic religions. (Matters are more complicated for religions like Hinduism, which I cannot consider here.) For these religions, religious beliefs do directly imply theological beliefs, in (at least) two ways. One is that they all have a sacred text, which is central to the religion and whose status is based on its being divinely inspired. The other is that they are all credal: religious observance involves making statements of belief in specific theological matters, and commitment to these statements and creeds defines the religious community. In these religions, if I have religious beliefs, these will commit me to specific theological beliefs, in particular accepting specific claims about the existence and nature of God which are universal and cross-cultural. Hence these religions are exclusive; if I accept that one is true I have to believe that all others are false, since they make theological claims which are universal, and which, as a result, compete. Because of this feature, adopting one of these religions requires renouncing any other religion one has; in stark contrast to Praetextatus, with these religions adding requires subtraction.
With these religions, it is clear that suspending judgment on theological matters
will make a direct impact on religious beliefs. You cannot continue to live an ordinary religious life, going along with religious beliefs and observances, if these explicitly involve a commitment to specific theological beliefs which you no longer accept; suspending judgement on beliefs about God, where these are universal and cross-cultural, does deprive particular religious beliefs and observances of support they explicitly claim, and the religious life does get emptied out, leaving the person merely going through the motions. And if those motions include making statements of commitment to creeds, then the person would seem to be involved in Bailey’s ‘hypocrisy and dissimulation’. There is no way that the modern religious believer could think of herself as living without dogmata in Sextus’ sense.
Sextus seems, then, to be right about the effects of his arguments on his own audience, but a modern audience would need a different approach, at least to be persuaded that scepticism about God would leave them living an ordinary life.[22] This is not surprising if we reflect on the difference between ancient pagan religion and modern versions of monotheism; we don’t expect Sextus’ arguments against ancient scientific concepts to work in the modern age either.
There is, however, a complicating factor within Sextus’ approach. As he starts the arguments for and against the existence of the divine in the M passage he comments, as already noted, that the sceptic will carry on with his religious life but make no premature commitments in philosophical investigation. As he finishes the section on the divine, however, he concludes with a rather unexpected addition (191-3). The sceptic will suspend judgement, he says, ‘especially since there is added the disgreement (anomalia) about the gods from everyday life (apo tou koinou biou). Different people have different conceptions of them, and they can’t all be true, because they conflict, nor can a particular one be true, because they balance out to equipollence. This sort of thing is also confirmed by the mythologizing of the people who tell about the gods (theologoi) and the poets, for it is full of all kinds of impiety. We then get Xenophanes’ criticism of Homer and Hesiod: they have ascribed to the gods everything shameful among humans – stealing, adultery and deceiving one another.
This is puzzling because this kind of consideration has been absent from Sextus’ arguments, which have all been abstract philosophical ones about the divine being material or not, finite or not, and so on. Even arguments about the divine having virtue have been abstract Stoic ones centring on the unity of virtue (152-170).[23] It is also puzzling because dissatisfaction with the immorality rampant in myths about the pagan gods was in fact the major source of worry about the gods outside philosophical argument. In Euripides’ play Heracles we find Heracles saying, ‘I do not think, have never believed, and will never be convinced that the gods have illicit love affairs or bind each other with chains, or that one is master of another. A god, if he is truly a god, needs nothing. These are the wretched tales of the poets.’[24] Here we find worry about the nature of the gods arising directly from the myths which form part of religious beliefs, rather than from philosophical worries about materiality and finitude. Sextus throws this point in as though it were a final clincher, but it draws attention to the very restricted nature of the arguments he has actually been using, as well as raising the issue of the force that this kind of consideration actually has.
Everyday pagan worries about the gods seem to come from this source, which one might call the problem of gods behaving badly. These are not philosophical worries about divine causality, materiality or finitude, but more everyday worries about whether we should worship the gods even if we think them more powerful than, but ethically inferior to, humans. These worries are discussed in tragedies like Heracles and Hippolytus, and not surprisingly there is no clear or easy answer to them. This is another way in which ancient pagan religion differs from modern religions, which begin from a moralized conception of the divine.[25] Everyday pagan religious life may, then, contain a source of worry, but it is ethical, not theological; if it creates a problem for living the sceptical life the source of the problem is not the nature of the gods but ethical worries which occur elsewhere as well.
This is not the only place in Sextus where we find material of this kind about the gods. He includes quite a lot of it elsewhere in his works, but not under the heading of God. The examples turn up in the Tenth Mode of Aenesidemus (in PH I) and in a passage in the ethical section of PH III, which shares much of its material with the Tenth Mode and has no corresponding section in the ethical part of the longer work, M XI.
The Tenth Mode (PH I 145-163) ‘is especially concerned with ethics’. Sextus takes five factors: lifestyle, law, custom, belief in myth and dogmatic supposition, and plays them off against one another.[26] Some of the examples use the ethical unacceptability of myths about the gods: thus it conflicts with our customs that Cronus ate his children (154) and that Heracles did feminine things (157); it conflicts with our laws that the gods commit adultery and homosexual sex (159); it conflicts with dogmatic supposition that Zeus had sex with mortal women and wept for Sarpedon (162). We also find that Epicurus’ dogmatic supposition that the gods pay no attention to us conflicts with our custom of asking the gods for good things.
The material in the Mode is not used, however, to get the reader to suspend judgement as to what is good or bad in myths. The conclusion is that we shall not be able to say what each thing is like ‘in its nature, but only how it appears relative to a given lifestyle or law or custom, and so on.’ (163). The conflicts in the Modes thus do not lead us to criticize the mythical material, or even to regard it as one side of a conflict that leads us to suspend judgement on its goodness or badness. We are merely reminded that the gods commit adultery in the myths, but that if we do so it is against the law. Even this might reasonably be thought to lead naturally to a critical attitude to the myths about the gods: how can it be all right for the gods to do what is against the law for us? But it need not: the gods are the gods, after all, and who are we to say that our laws should apply to them? Thus the Tenth Mode touches on material that is ethically worrisome about the gods, but does not use it to undermine religious belief; the stated overall concern of the Mode is ethical value.
The ethical part of PH III contains a section (179-234) which retails the arguments of ‘some people’ to show that nothing is by nature good, bad or indifferent. Fire naturally heats everyone in the same way; but nothing claimed to be good (etc) affects everyone in the same way. One section of this passage (197 –2324), like the Tenth Mode, plays off differences between different factors like customs and ways of life; it adds (235-238) that the sceptic who suspends judgment on things being naturally good or bad in this way will live following ordinary life without beliefs (hepetai de adoxastos tei biotikei teresei, 235). What we find, it is claimed, is a great deal of disagreement (anomalia) about what should and should not be done. Among conflicting beliefs about sex, tattooing, cannibalism and so on we find conflicting claims about the gods and piety (218-228). Most people think that there are gods, while some deny it.[27] Some believe in the traditional gods; others in a variety of philosophical theories about the nature of the divine. Some think that there is one god, others many, and they differ about their form, some even thinking that they have the form of animals. Sacrifical usages differ widely, as do dietary restrictions and taboos, and ways of disposing of the dead. So we conclude that nothing is holy (hosion) or unholy by nature.
Two things are striking about the way Sextus uses this material. Firstly, in both cases it is used to persuade us that nothing is holy ‘by nature’; we are all right as long as we remember that sacrificing a pig to Heracles is all right, but not sacrificing one to Sarapis (220) and so on. Hence it is hard to see what sceptical force this material is supposed to have, since no worshipper of Heracles thought that worshippers of Sarapis ought to do exactly what he did. The points about ancient pagan religion which I stressed at the outset show quite adequately why the sceptical force of this material is weak or outright bogus. (I pass over here, since I haven’t the scope to deal with it, whether this is a problem with material that can be regarded as ‘Aenesideman’.[28])
Secondly, this passage is collecting material to persuade the audience to be led to a sceptical attitude about value. Piety and religious observances come in not in their own right but as examples of things that we consider that we should do, because doing them is a good thing. As with the Tenth Mode, the use of these examples is not critical about them; they are just examples of different ways of doing things, and considering them is supposed to lead us to suspend judgement about this being something which is good ‘by nature’.
Still, what are we to make of the collection of beliefs about the gods (218-219)? Here we find conflict between the philosophers’ claims about the divine, as in PH III and M IX, but also between these and ordinary people’s beliefs about their traditional gods. We also find alleged atheists who claim that the traditional gods do not exist, as opposed to most people who think that they do. These are exactly the kind of conflicts which we haven’t seen so far in Sextus, and which we might expect to lead to suspension of belief about religious and not just theological beliefs, and thus lead to destabilizing the ordinary religious life.
Yet that isn’t their role here; the section ends with the claim that the sceptic’s life will be different and improved because he will lack the belief that things are really good or bad by nature. To fit into the overall strategy of this passage, the material must lead us to suspend judgement on things being what they are by nature. So the claims here will not lead to suspension of judgement about the traditional gods. Rather, we are shown ways in which different views of the gods are held by different sets of people, and this is supposed to lead us to suspend judgement on whether any of them show us what the gods are ‘by nature’ – presumably, universally and cross-culturally. Suppose that this succeeds -we have already seen that this does not make much if any impact on ordinary pagan religion. If I think that Athena, Zeus and so on exist, and am then, as here, confronted by, on the one hand Egyptian animal gods, and on the other, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the Stoics’ divine reason and so on, all that this shows me is that different people have different kinds of gods, and that philosophers try to come up with specific theories about what lies behind all religions. We find different views about the gods among Greeks, Egyptians and the philosophers; if this leads us to see that none of them have discovered what the gods are like ‘by nature’ this may be discomfiting to the philosophers but is hardly going to worry the Greeks and Egyptians, since they did not think in the first place that their gods were the only gods, or that they would be worshipped universally. Nor, for reasons already explained, does this realization tend to undermine their worship of their respective gods.[29]
We find, therefore, a slightly odd situation in Sextus where sceptical arguments about the gods are concerned. In the two passages where the gods are his official concern, he takes account only of intellectual sources of trouble about theological beliefs, discussing only philosophers’ disagreements about a universal, cross-cultural account of the divine. He claims that suspending judgement about these disagreements will leave the ordinary pagan worshipper of the gods with an ordinary religious life, and we have seen that he is, in fact, entitled to claim this: pagan religious beliefs are not dogmata in the sense that worries Sextus, and lacking them does not leave the pagan religious life empty or hypocritical. Sextus also deals with other material which can easily be seen as suitable for leading to sceptical attack on ordinary religious beliefs; of this the most effective is the immorality of the gods in mythical stories. But this material is dealt with under the heading of value, not of the gods, and its obvious potential for attacking religious beliefs is not used.
Sextus does not seem aware of any problem here. As we have seen, he throws in at the end of the M passage a claim about the mythical immorality of the gods, but it has nothing to do with the arguments that he has actually used. And, while being highly aware of material which can be used to create problems for ordinary religious belief, particularly offensive mythical stories about the gods, he uses it under the heading of arguments about value; it forms no part of the arguments which he actually uses when officially setting up sceptical arguments about the gods. Those arguments are philosophical arguments over a universal, cross-cultural conception of the divine, and so, as he notes, are compatible with the sceptic’s living an ordinary religious life.
Why does Sextus not make more use, when arguing about the gods, of material which might, in fact, destabilize ordinary religious belief – material which does, in Greek tragedy, produce problems about the traditional gods of Greek worship? Perhaps he himself had a very intellectual approach to religious issues, so that he concentrates on philosophical arguments about the divine, being uninterested in ordinary religious life except as a source of interesting diversities of practice. (This is arguably Cicero’s view, except that he takes traditional religious practice more seriously for its cultural and political resonances.) Or perhaps by Sextus’ time ordinary religious belief and practice could continue unworried by stories about gods behaving badly, these being regarded as irrelevant to serious arguments about the gods. There had, after all, been centuries to get used to this type of criticism, and mythical materials could by this point be regarded as an imaginative resource for poets and dramatists, rather than a significant part of religious belief and practice.If so, then both the worshippers and the philosophers thinking about the gods could ignore them. Thus Sextus’ approach to religion in the sceptical life may reflect a fact about Sextus or a fact about his audience. As so often with Sextus, this is a matter on which we end up suspending judgement.
[1] Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pyrrho IX, 62, 64.
[2] The Nature of the Gods III 5, translation by P.G. Walsh, Oxford 1997. Cf I, 61.
[3] From the Loeb translation by R.G. Bury.
[4] Translations from PH are from Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism, translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, Cambridge University Press 2000.
[5] Alan Bailey, Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonean Scepticism, Oxford University Press 2002, p 193.
[6] This is also the ‘rustic Pyrrhonist’ interpretation of these passages: see p 85 of Jonathan Barnes, ‘The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist,’ in Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (eds), The Original Sceptics, Hackett, 1997.
[7] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: the memory of Egypt in Western monotheism, Harvard University Press 1997, p 3. The book is very illuminating about the differences made to this attitude by monotheism.
[8] Antiochus’ persecution of the Jews and the Romans’ persecution of the Christians were based on perceived disloyalty to rulers. The Roman suppression of Bacchic rites and Druidism was based on the alleged practices of sexual orgies and human sacrifice. The charge of impiety at Socrates’ trial is disputed, but seems to be based on local political factors. Of course more could be said about all these cases, but they do not illustrate the general religious attitudes of pagans.
[9] See Beard, M., North, J. and Price, S. (edd), Religions of Rome, two vols, Cambridge University Press 1998, 2.9. Aquae Sulis is now Bath.
[10] Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI 1778. See Beard, North and Price 8.9.
[11] Maximus of Tyre, Philosophical Orations, ed M.B. Trapp, Oxford University Press 1997. Cf Dio Chrysostom Discourse 31.11, who argues that honouring one god does not, as with humans, exclude the honour given to others. Cf also Celsus, pp 115-116 Hoffmann.
[12] Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 377f – 378a. Different peoples honour the same governing reason in different ways, just as they have differing names for the sun and moon.
[13] Cicero, The Nature of the Gods II 70-72, on the Stoic view that early humans had a more direct conception of God than people in more culturally developed societies, who have possibly misleading images of and myths about the gods. Cf Dio Chrysostom Oration 12 (who still gives a qualified defence of anthropomorphic images) and Varro in Augustine, City of God IV 31. Varro claimed that for the first 170 of Rome’s history the Romans worshipped the gods without images, comparing the Jews. Whatever the historicity of these claims, it is clear that an idealized past with aniconic worship has great appeal.
[14] See Origen: Contra Celsum, ed H. Chadwick, Cambridge University Press 1953, and, for a reconstruction, Celsus, On the True Doctrine, ed. R.J. Hoffmann, Oxford University Press 1987. Cf M. Frede, ‘Celsus’ Attack on the Christians,’ J. Barnes and M. Griffin (eds) Philosophia Togata II, Oxford University Press 1997, 218-240, and ‘Celsus Philosophus Platonicus’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt II 36.7 (1994), 5183-5213. Julian’s Against the Galilaeans in in vol III of the Loeb edition of Julian, ed. W.C. Wright, Harvard University Press 1923.
[15] Hoffman p. 56.
[16] This idea often takes a chronological form, the oldest version of ancient wisdom being the most authentic. Hence the Jewish and Christian anxiety to produce a chronology proving them to be older than the mainstream classical culture. See G. Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2001, Part II.
[17] Cf Dirk Obbink, ‘The Atheism of Epicurus,’ Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 30 (1989), 187-223, and ‘Epicurus and Greek Religion,’ 1-23 of Obbink, Philodemus on Piety Part I, Oxford University Press 1996.
[18] ‘The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its use in legal and expedient matters; they say these gods are in the form of humans or like some of the other animals.’ Metaphysics XII, 1074 a 38-b 10, from J. Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Oxford/Princeton 1984, with slight alterations. At Nicomachean Ethics X 8 he similarly distinguishes anthropomorphic beliefs from beliefs he takes to be true of the divine, namely that the gods are blessed and active.
[19] Politics 1252b 19 – 27. No other ancient thinker that I am aware of notices the significance of the fact that Aristotle notices a cultural time-lag here.
[20] Diogenes Laertius V 16. He also provides for the setting up of a statue of, or for, his mother, dedicated to Demeter.
[21] The Presocratics Heracleitus and Xenophanes may seem to be exceptions here, since both give apparently debunking accounts of religious practices and ceremonies. (Heracleitus B 5, B 15, Xenophanes B 14 and B 15 Diels-Kranz).We have no indication, however, that they intended to abolish or reform these practices; they are merely pointing to the dim level of understanding of the divine that popular religion expresses, as opposed to their own more profound theological understanding. We have no reason to think that they, as opposed to the Christian writers who retail these fragments, intended their theological claims to undermine actual religious belief and practice. Sextus is happy to retail Xenophanes’ ethical criticisms of the gods (see below).
[22] Assuming that contemporary Jews and Christians were unlikely to be part of Sextus’ audience. I have no scope to follow up the fascinating story, documented by Richard Popkin, of the use made of Sextus’ rediscovered arguments in Catholic-Protestant debates in the seventeenth century, and its degree of success.
[23] In the corresponding passage in PH III there is an argument leading to problems for any view that the gods are provident, which might seem to create problems for the sceptic who still says that the gods are provident (9-12; cf 2). The argument, however, is a theological one; we have an analogous fragment from the third book of Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods (Lactantius, De Ira Dei 13.20-21) ascribed to the Epicureans.
[24] Heracles 1341-1346, translation by David Kovacs in the Loeb edition.
[25] There are analogous modern problems about the interpretation of problematic passages in sacred texts, but these problems are more recondite and easier to avoid for the modern worshipper.
[26] I use The Modes of Scepticism, Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, Cambridge University Press 1985.
[27] It is revealingly difficult to find real atheists about the traditional pagan gods. Of those cited here, the only good example is Diagoras of Melos, who denied the existence of the traditional gods on ethical grounds (they failed to punish a perjurer). Theodorus of Cyrene is often invoked, on hazier grounds. Critias is cited for a debunking speech in a play. Cicero, at De Natura Deorum 2, cites Diagoras, Theodorus and Protagoras, who is (misleadingly) cited for the agnostic opening of his work on the gods. Sextus at M IX 51 ff implausibly claims that there are ‘lots’ of others.
[28] See Richard Bett, introduction to Sextus Empiricus: Against the Ethicists, Oxford University Press 1997, and chapter 4 of Pyrrho, his antecedents and his legacy, Oxford University Press 2000.
[29] Diagoras, the only convincing example of an atheist about the traditional gods, objected to them on ethical grounds; this shows only that these gods should not be worshipped, leaving space in principle for ethical gods. This is different from a theological argument to show that nothing can instantiate our conception of the gods.