Animals in Ancient Greek Religion by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

7 Philosophers on animals in ancient Greek religion

J. H. Collins

Introduction

As this book shows, animals feature prominently in ancient Greek religion. Religious rituals and practices interpret the movements of animals, read their insides, sacrifice them for consumption and to honour divinity. Theological frameworks capture the natural order of things – not only the place of divinity and our obligations to it but the places of other creatures and aspects of the natural world that also require care and cultivation. And there are stories and songs that involve animals and beasts as otherworldly actors or that draw on animal behaviour in order to explore human capacities and relations. So it makes sense that animals should also feature heavily in the work of intellectuals bent on investigating, rationalising, criticising, supplementing, or even supplanting conventional religious beliefs and practices. These intellectuals target not only popular beliefs but also the positions of their own intellectual peers and rivals; and if their ultimate aims are protreptic, they also consider the personal religious views of the interlocutor at hand. Animals populate every corner of this rhetorical multiverse. And to make matters even more complicated, the religious views of these intellectuals never seem to constitute a separate system of practice, belief, and myth, but rather personal (or sometimes, in a very narrow sense, communal) variations of conventional religious beliefs and practices.1 Even the philosophers can make no unequivocal claims of consistency of beliefs and practices, and would feel no pressure to do so given the relative absence of religious structure and authority.2 In all of these twisting forays into conventional views and personal variations, animals assume different capacities, meanings, and relations, sometimes even among and within the works of a single thinker.

So, how do we begin to tell a story about philosophical views of animals in ancient Greek religion? In this chapter, I offer neither a comprehensive investigation of classical philosophical views on Greek religion nor a full account of classical philosophical understanding of animals and their natures.3 Instead, I focus on the various ways that philosophical thinkers and practitioners rework the roles and natures of animals and beasts within conventional religious frameworks in order to suggest alternative cosmic orders. It will be helpful to draw a distinction between those intellectuals who make relatively direct and substantial challenges to Greek religious conventions (e.g. some Pythagoreans and Theophrastus) and those who disrupt religious conventions in an effort not to supplant them but to supplement and re-centre them with new ways of conceiving and being part of the cosmos (e.g. Socrates and Plato).4 All of these approaches have profound implications for the place of humans in the cosmos and their obligations to other creatures who inhabit it with them. Animals are inserted into or reworked within religious contexts in order to develop our moral capacities and sense of kinship; in some instances, these transformations go a long way towards developing an intrinsic significance of animals (i.e., apart from what they might mean for humans), while at the same time narrowing the gap between human and animal experience.

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