Theology

Until a Christian Roman Empire sought to prevent it, the Greek and Roman world worshiped many gods. The earliest Greek literature, the epics of Homer and the didactic poetry of Hesiod, dating in the form we have them from around 700 bc, was reckoned by Herodotus (2.53), writing in the later part of the fifth century, to be the source from which the Greeks learned about the gods. The Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, describe the gods as a family, where Zeus is the most powerful but where other gods can act independently of, and to some extent contrary to, his will (Taplin 1992: ch. 5). Hesiod imagines a past where the gods were originally not in the form of men - ‘‘Chaos came to be first, and then broad-chested Earth’’ (Theog. 116-17) - but the children of Earth include some who are in human form, even though others are monsters with a hundred arms and fifty heads, and the subsequent generation, the generation of Zeus and the other Olympian gods, is entirely anthropomorphic.

The Homeric picture was variously reflected in later Greek and Roman literature, but the basic assumptions of plural sources of divine authority incompletely coordinated, of gods who both experience the emotions and reactions of humans and intervene directly in individual human lives but whose own behavior is not constrained by moral rules, and of gods who may be, but cannot certainly be, influenced by human words and actions, continue to lie behind most literary pictures of the gods through Greek tragedy to Virgilian and Ovidian epic and beyond. It was with this literary picture that those concerned to come to a closer understanding of the divine engaged critically, concerned with its plurality, with the relationship between god and man which it laid claim to, and with its immorality.

There is a close correlation between the world of the gods presented in Homeric epic and the political world which that epic portrays (compare Raaflaub, this volume, chapter 3). The multiple sources of authority on Olympus parallel the multiple sources of authority in the Greek camp at Troy in the Iliad, where although Agamemnon is recognized as leader, other Greek chiefs may act independently or in defiance of him. The uncertain claim which seniority gives is further reflected in the Odyssey, where in the absence of Odysseus, his son Telemachus cannot automatically expect to assume power, even when he comes of age. The behavior of political leaders at Troy and in Ithaca directly impinges on the lives of others, who have some, but uncertain, chances of influencing their own fate, and the political leaders’ actions are unconstrained by, although they may be influenced by, moral considerations. When in Iliad 16 Zeus contemplates intervening to save his own son Sarpedon from death,

Hera points out to him that he could do so but that it would set a precedent for other deities. Similarly issues of precedent, and of the effect on relationships between leaders that extraordinary acts create, are at the heart of the Iliad’s exploration of the working of power in the human world.

But the human world and political organization of the Homeric epics is no simple mirror image of the divine world and its power structure. One notion which is repeatedly explored in explanation of the relationship between Agamemnon and the people at Troy has no parallel in descriptions of the relationship between Zeus and the other gods or Zeus and humankind. This is the image of Agamemnon (and to a less extent other paramount chiefs) as ‘‘shepherd of the people’’ (Haubold 2002: 17-32). By contrast to the Judaic tradition, in which the king’s role as shepherd derives from god’s role as shepherd (Philo, Mos. 1.150 f, 2.9), the Homeric king’s shepherding role derives from man's shepherding ofbeasts, not god's shepherding of man. The metaphor of the shepherd implies that the chief has the responsibility for ensuring the safety of the people, but imposes no responsibilities or obligations upon the people toward their leader. When the people perish this is because the leader has failed in his shepherding role. By contrast, the destruction of the people is one of the means by which Zeus achieves his will - answering the prayer of Achilles to protect the honor which Agamemnon has slighted by giving the Trojans the upper hand over the Achaeans (Haubold 2002: 75-8). But if Zeus restores Achilles’ honor he does not answer his every prayer, for despite Achilles’ express request he does not preserve his closest companion, Patroclus, from the more general destruction.

Both the parallelism between the gods and mortal rulers and the limits to that parallelism are important. Neither the gods nor the ‘‘shepherd of the people’’ act in direct response to the actions of those over whom they rule. The shepherd’s responsibilities are regardless of the folly or malice of the flock, and whereas men who receive gifts are obliged to reciprocate appropriately to the giver, the gods' actions are neither constrained by prayers and offerings nor governed by any sense of proportion. Notoriously, in the Odyssey, when Poseidon is unable to destroy Odysseus in revenge for his having blinded Poseidon’s son, the Cyclops, he instead turns to stone the ship and crew in which the hospitable Phaeacians kindly returned Odysseus to his homeland. Not only are political relationships in Homeric epic not based on moral claims, but in a world where ‘‘double motivation’’ is the norm (‘‘since I suffered madness, and Zeus took away my wits,’’ Il. 19.137, emphasis added) no actor is ever in a position to refer his own actions or sufferings exclusively to the gods: ‘‘It is a remarkable paradox that nearly every important event in the Iliad is the doing of a god, and that one can give a clear account of the poem's entire action with no reference to the gods at all’’ (Janko 1992: 4). The poet of the Iliad once (16.384-92) claims that Zeus punishes those who pass unjust judgments, and individual characters express the expectation that oath-breakers, offenders against the laws of hospitality, and so on, will be punished by the gods (Rutherford 1996: 45). This idea that the wicked are finally punished (see Raaflaub, chapter 3) recurs elsewhere in Greek literature (cf. Hes. Op. 24-47), but often, as in the Iliad, the gods themselves are represented as unmoved by such considerations. The way that, in the short term at least, securing justice depends upon human action is nicely illustrated by the award, by men to men, of the prize for ‘‘straight judgment’’ in the scene of a homicide trial on the shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles (18.497-508).

The basic theology of the Iliad was certainly traditional, and much can be traced back to Near Eastern roots. But the particular working out of the relationship between gods and men, and the particular presentation both of divine power and of human relations with the gods, are in various ways particular to this poem and this poet (Kirk 1990: 1-14). The poet of the Iliad tends to exclude the miraculous and the monstrous, and deemphasizes the gods’ appetites - their enjoyment of the savor of burnt sacrifices - although retaining the idea that they enjoy sexual desire both for each other and for humans (Griffin 1977). The particular slant of the Iliad had considerable influence on subsequent thought, and some of the criticism of traditional beliefs about the gods simply makes explicit what is implicit already in the Iliad’s treatment. These criticisms reveal the extent to which the political arrangements of the Greek city-state and republican Rome were built upon the traditional theology.

Criticisms of traditional theology come in two basic forms: that it was simply what men were bound to say about the gods, and, in particular, served the interest of rulers in justifying particular patterns of human behavior; and that it failed to embody the sorts of standards which the absolute must properly embody. So, in the early fifth century, Xenophanes observed that the Ethiopians say that the gods are snub-nosed and black, and that Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all men’s vices. A character in Critias’ Sisyphus, written in the late fifth century, suggests that the gods are merely an invention of men to justify human demands. Plato rejects the Homeric picture of the gods, and insists instead, in book 10 of Laws, upon gods who care for the world and cannot be deflected from justice by anything that humans offer them.

If Xenophanes’ and Critias’ criticisms underline the way in which traditional theology corresponded to, and allowed space for, traditional political arrangements, Plato’s reformed theology goes with a very different political order. For Plato the central religious doctrines are that soul is immortal and controls the whole world under the dictates of reason (Leg. 967d5-e2). The commitment of his gods to absolute values is in accord with Plato's idealist epistemology and the basis for his view that political power should be restricted to those who have proper insight into these absolute values. In book 4 of Laws the connection between divine and human patterns of rule is made explicit, as the fiction of the reign of Cronos becomes part of the means of persuading men of the best political organization for the state. Plato’s version of the reign of Cronos holds that Cronos was aware that humans cannot rule over each other without falling into arrogance and injustice, and he therefore set nonhuman spirits as rulers of humans. From this Plato draws the conclusion that ‘‘we should run our public and our private life, our homes and our cities, in obedience to what little spark of immortality lies in us, and dignify these edicts of reason with the name of‘law’’’ (Leg. 713e8-714a2, trans. Saunders 1984). The essence of Laws is that the laws, not humans, should govern a state, and highest office should be given ‘‘to the man who is best at obeying the established laws’’ (Leg. 715c2).

Plato's theology provided the foundation on which later philosophical theology was built. The theology of both Epicureans and Stoics can be seen to start from

Plato’s questions, and their crucial difference lies in whether or not they agree with Plato that gods care for the world. For the Epicureans gods exist but not only can they not be influenced by men but they have not a care for the world. In consequence, for Epicurus and his followers justice is simply a matter of contract between men, and potentially what is just will vary from society to society (cf. Epicurus, Key Doctrines 33); law is simply provided because men are not able to be mindful of utility (cf. Porphyry Abst. 1.7.4). The Stoics, by contrast, agree with Plato on all three counts, and for the Stoic Chrysippus, ‘‘It is not possible to discover any other source of justice nor any other origin than from Zeus and from universal nature’’ (Plut. Mor. 1035c), while according to the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates gods intervene to secure virtual action (230, 265, 272). Plato thus stands at the head of the tradition of ‘‘natural law’’ which, developed further by Aquinas, will play so important a part in postclassical political theory.

The development of philosophical theology alongside traditional theology led to the invention in the hellenistic period of the doctrine of the ‘‘three theologies.’’ (Feeney 1998: 15-17). Augustine in City of God 4.27 records that Scaevola ‘‘argued that there were three kinds of gods in the Roman tradition; one strand of tradition coming through the poets, another through the philosophers, the third through the statesmen’’ (trans. Bettenson 1972), and in 6.5 he has an extensive discussion of Varro’s exposition of a parallel distinction between ‘‘mythical,’’ ‘‘physical’’ (natural), and ‘‘civil’’ theology (see also Raaflaub, chapter 3). For Augustine ‘‘mythical’’ and ‘‘civil’’ theologies do not merit the name theology, since they are necessarily false, but Roman writers show an ability to sustain the three theologies in a subtle and productive way.

Virgil’s gods in the Aeneid ‘‘are inescapably the gods of Homer, set in the same fundamental laws of epic action’’ (Feeney 1991: 141). Venus says of Jupiter that he rules ‘‘the affairs of men and gods with eternal commands'' and terrifies them with thunderbolts (Aen. 1.229-30), but he is also the god who rapes both boys and women (e. g. Aen. 1.29), and stirs up Mezentius to battle; the morally questionable as well as the morally good is involved in his relationship to the world. But the gods of the Aeneid are not simply part of the epic baggage taken over from Homer, along with elaborate similes and the dactylic hexameter. Jupiter's particular concern in the poem for the well-being of the Roman state links the epic god to Jupiter Optimus Maximus of the triad of gods worshipped on the Roman Capitol. When at the very end of the poem the question is raised of Jupiter's responsibility for the fact that things are other than as they should be, this is a question not about how the gods of epic poetry act but about theodicy: ‘‘did it please you, Jupiter, that peoples who would live together in eternal peace should collide with such vast upheaval?’’ (Aen. 12.503-4).

‘‘The manifestations of a god are necessarily local and contingent’’ (Feeney 1998: 104). Philosophical arguments to prove the existence of divinity, that the divine cares or does not care about humankind, or that the divine can or cannot be influenced by men, provide no practical guidance on how divine care might be bestowed or how men and gods can relate. Epicurean denial of divine interest in man leaves the world to be ruled according to principles of utility, but the Platonic and Stoic traditions leave most men in a world where they cannot comprehend the god’s actions. Plato notoriously resorts to fictions to reconcile men to this lot, offering myths designed keep ordinary people satisfied and obedient to rule by the few who are enlightened. But, as Cicero observed to Atticus (Att. 2.1.8), the real world was the ‘‘faex Romuli,’’ rather than Plato’s Republic, and it was the stuff of myth, rather than the theory of the philosophers, that engaged more directly with the local and contingent. The Aeneid uses the tropes of prophecy, borrowed from Odyssey 11, and of presentation of scenes of life on armor, borrowed from Iliad 18, to present an ecphrasis which is also a history, an allegory which turns out to be an identity parade, as the Story of Rome from Aeneas to Augustus is put on display. The template for the working out of divine power in the world becomes the past of Rome itself, as history is turned into part of a grand plan which both establishes and justifies Rome’s particular position within the world.

Christians were very ready to join in the ridicule of‘‘mythical ’’ religion. The very notion of a multiplicity of gods, or of gods who took a particular interest in one aspect of life, was absurd to those for whom it was a necessary assumption that divine power and knowledge was unbounded (cf. August. De civ. D. 6.9 for criticism, 12.19 for divine omniscience). Augustine exploits the criticism of ‘‘mythical’’ and ‘‘civic’’ religion by Varro and Seneca (De civ. D. 4.31,6.10), only then himself also to criticize ‘‘natural’’ theology (De civ. D. 8), insisting that there has to be contact between men and gods (De civ. D. 9.16). That insistence on the existence of a mediator between God and man, together with the insistence that man was made in God’s image, in fact made Christianity in important ways like ‘‘mythical’’ religion, albeit inverted. Augustine himself observed that ‘‘The Romans made Romulus a god because they loved him: the Church loved Christ because it believed him to be God.’’ Virgil’s investment of past Roman history with the force of destiny is closely parallel to the way in which Christians turned the Old Testament into the story of man’s salvation history working up to the moment when God saves his people through his Incarnation. But where Virgil’s history climaxes with Roman world rule, Christ is the end of a history of personal salvation. But if the end of Christianity is personal rather than political, with Christ as man’s ‘‘only mediator and advocate’’ and peace, not power, the good (De civ. D. 19), the structure of the church, developed to protect that possibility of personal salvation, came to provide, through the specialization of priestly and episcopal mediation, both a theology and a framework for the maintenance of Roman imperial power that quite transformed the relations of politics and religion.