Plato’s Euthyphro

Week 6: Religion, authority, and reason

What were the sources of authority in ancient Greek religion?

Appreciating the Euthyphro’s discussion of the gods and their opinions requires a little context. It is easy to be limited by our own thinking of our own religious frame of reference, or (even more difficult) to attribute an overly simplistic understanding of pagan religious thought to the Greeks of the fourth century B.C. While it is certainly valid to apply the questions Socrates and Euthyphro raise to our own faith, there is really no benefit to be gained from misunderstanding the historical reality. The subject, however, is complex It is limited at every point by fragmentary and contradictory sources; it is also impossible to define a single state of belief for a heterogeneous range of populations spread out over a wide geographical area and at least seven or eight centuries. Asking what “the Greeks” (meaning who, exactly?) believed is like asking what the Americans believe, and expecting a coherent single-valued answer that will cover everyone from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620 to the modern progressive atheist. The problem is not so much with the answer as with the question. For similar reasons, this cannot possibly convey a complete picture; it will largely proceed by negation, in hopes that we can at least eliminate the more obvious blind alleys. The accumulation of a positive understanding takes longer.

One of the more difficult things for moderns — especially modern American Protestants — to appreciate is the fact that there is no Bible of ancient Greek religion. Those who are accustomed to seeing their faith largely in terms of what is laid down in a particular text are often puzzled by the amorphous nature of Greek myth. Students often ask me, “What is the real answer?” — What was the real cause for the Trojan War? Who was the real father of Artemis? The answer, deeply unsatisfying as it may be, is that there isn’t a right answer. If we don’t actually believe in these gods and goddesses, moreover, there’s probably no reason to think that there should or could be a right answer.

Modern Catholics or others accustomed to formal hierarchical structures, on the other hand, need to appreciate that there is no central administrative authority for ancient Greek paganism. There are no popes, bishops, ayatollahs, or other single people to whom one can ascribe special authority and who can “lay down the law” or resolve competing narratives or moral restrictions.

Tradition, authority, and belief

What remains is a welter of stories, preserved with greater or lesser fidelity in various sources, sometimes consciously manipulated by their authors, and fundamentally and enduringly inconsistent. The inconsistency means that believers need either to choose among variants or else to consider them all as reasonable contenders that convey some kind of imperfect truth in their narratives, despite surface inconsistencies. Those who hold that the Bible is wholly consistent may find this a bit jarring. Certainly it is a very different approach to religious revelation. The topic has not been ignored: Paul Veyne wrote Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination in 1983; his answer is itself intriguing, but does not come down to a simple yes or no.

These stories are related, moreover, in a number of forms, all having a certain kind of authority. Perhaps the chief among them are the writings of the poets. Those who are most constantly in Socrates’ (and hence Plato’s) range of reference are the epic poets — Homer and the others (there were many, whose work is now lost) of that tradition, as well as the lyric poets of the sixth century B.C., and the tragedians of the fifth, all of whom convey, for their own purposes and in their own ways, material that we could consider mythological — and hence, to those who believe them, religious. It is worth noting here that while Socrates falls back on the narratives of the poets and even quotes a couplet from one of them (a source now otherwise lost), there is in the larger Platonic tradition a deep skepticism about their reliability. In the Republic, Socrates goes so far as to propose banning the poets from his larger culture, since they are purveyors of lies and pernicioius untruths about the gods. How to weigh these contending questions is a matter of some subtlety.

In addition to the tradition embodied in the writings of the poets, there is also an ongoing source of revelation in oracles attached to various temples and shrines. Chief among them was the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Both poems and historical sources are full of stories about people who have consulted the oracle at Delphi: especially in the histories, we read about people who have consulted oracles and acted on their replies, most often with disastrous results. Virtually never is the assumption that the oracle has actually erred: normally the explanation is that they have been misinterpreted. With sufficient rationalization, the pronouncements of the oracles can usually be saved somehow. As he relates in his Apology, Socrates himself wrestles with the Delphic verdict that he is the wisest of all the Hellenes. He explains the whole by saying that it’s not that he knows so much, but that he knows the one thing that the others don’t — namely, that he knows nothing. It’s a bit of a sleight-of-hand exercise, but it has its place in the dialogue.

The ancient tradition does not afford a great deal of room for personal revelation or exploration of belief, and it is in this regard that Socrates differs (at least on the Platonic account) most significantly from his contemporaries. As he explains also in the Apology, he has all his life been attended by what he calls a daimon or daimonion — a term that gives us our modern demon, but in its time was not so biased: it is roughly translatable as “spirit”. This spirit intervenes, he claims, when he is about to do something wrong and so prevents him from doing it. Whether this is an actual voice that he perceives in some auditory or hallucinatory sense, or whether he’s merely personifying his conscience, is hard to say. It is well-known enought that in talking to him, Euthyphro makes some reference to it in this dialogue (3b5).

Weighing tradition, hierarchical authority, personal revelation, and reason is of course part of the spiritual landscape in any religion, be it ancient Greek paganism or contemporary Christianity. Different believers will inevitably come to different conclusions about what the proper balance of these things should be. Modern Christians meet some of the same questions in balancing the Law and the Gospel, to use a traditionally Lutheran formulation.

If you’re reading along in Greek, cover 11e7-13c9.