Atheism at the Agora by James C Ford;

Author:James C Ford;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY/Ancient/General, HISTORY/Ancient/Greece, RELIGION/Atheism, RELIGION/Ancient
ISBN: 9781000925494
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The recognition of uncertainty should not be seen as a philosophical failure, but instead as a way of coping with the gods. Half a century ago Jean Rudhardt had already astutely observed that when talking and thinking about the divine ‘the Greeks perceive both its nearness and its distance’.66 Rudhardt believed that unknowability was illustrative of the complexity and not the failure of Greek theological thought. Thomas Harrison has more recently developed this line of thought about unknowability as a healthy feature of Greek religion: for him, unknowability ‘complements rather than [represents] qualifications to a traditional model of Greek religion’.67 Unknowability was a useful idea, not a recognition of the weakness of religious belief (as Nietzsche would later parody it).68

Unknowability was so embedded in Greek religious thought because it had a function: this was the aspect of unknowability as ‘explanation’, through which it served to protect conceptions of the divine.69 Perhaps the fullest and most rewarding account of the explanatory value of Greek religion has been offered by John Gould, also building on the work of Rudhardt.70 Gould emphasised that all religious systems are internally rational and self-justifying, arguing that religious explanation is part of a symbolic language for dealing with the natural chaos of the world. So, he argued, the need for rational explanation of the universe and the nature of the gods drove the ‘fundamentally improvisatory’ nature of Greek religion.71 This improvisatory nature rested on a basic recognition of unknowability. Determining supernatural causality in the Greek world, Gould argued, could never be definitive; the signs are always fundamentally ambiguous, the divinity is always inferred, not revealed, and the motivation for any given divine action is at an even more remote distance from any certain explanation.72 When faced with criticism or scepticism, unknowability allowed for various responses of the type perhaps most elegantly articulated by the Christian theologian Augustine:

So what are we to say, brothers, about God? For if you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you think you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you. So he isn’t this, if this is what you have understood; but if he is this, then you haven’t understood it.

Augustine, Sermon 52.16 (trans. Hill 1991)

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