Kishkumen wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 1:28 pm
Connected with the absence of revelation, of scriptures, and of a professionally divinely appointed priesthood is the fact that a central category of Greek religion is unknowability, the belief that human knowledge about the divine and about the right way of behaving towards it is limited and circumscribed. The perception that the articulation of religion through the particular polis systems is a human construct, created by particular historical circumstances and open to change under changed circumstances, is in my view connected with this awareness of the severe limitations of human access to the divine, of the ultimate unknowability of the divine world, and the uncertain nature of human relationships to it. The Greeks did not delude themselves that their religion incarnated the divine will.
This is Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood in her essay, "What is Polis Religion?" It is her opinion, clearly, but I think she is definitely onto something here. Especially when it comes to a shared sense of the divine will, it seems foolish to me to claim to have a clear idea of what that is, particularly for
other people. But this is exactly what we hear all the time, what God wants, wills, or demands of his children. And, that is one of the things I have a very difficult time buying into.
I have a parallel reaction to claims made of understanding divine will or claims made upon me for my time and money that are couched in terms of divine will, yet I don't think even religious people really think about divine will, and that it is more of a rhetorical relic or sometimes little more than the a fragment of some impotent ritual (like a patriarchal blessing). "God wants you to be happy" or "ask god what you should do" or "god wants you to clean the church on Saturday" are not really how the Greeks understood divine will; it's a question of the human position in the cosmic order. They go to oracles not to ask what they should do but to see whether what they want to do is acceptable to the scheming minds of the gods or not. The assumption is that there is a divine will or wills behind it, and they want to try to see if doing x or y will offend them or not.
I sympathize with the emphasis on the un-knowability of divine will as a counterweight to such claims, but I would not emphasize one over the other here: it's not the un-knowability alone that matters. Greeks felt compelled to search out divine will anyway, or at least to acknowledge it as a substantial fact. It's not just un-knowability that is characteristically Greek; it's the combination of un-knowability tied to an unquestionable assumption that there is a divine will operating in the world.
The first lines of the Iliad, the fount of Greek culture, literally tell us that everything we're about to behold is the unfolding of Zeus's will—and yet none of the characters quite get it until near the end, if at all, a mirror of our own situation. It is gradually apprehended by the most heroic of them. Until then, they're all wondering just what the hell is going on—why this plague? why is Zeus tricking me with deceitful dreams?—but there is no Samides Harristeus or Richardion Dawkinseles to urge anyone to discount or discard divine because of its ultimate un-knowability.
I understand the motivation behind the implicit criticism here of ecclesiastic Christianity, but I myself find little to admire or emulate in an un-knowability that doesn't assume there to be a thing that is actually unknown. It seems hybristic, perhaps incoherent: if there is no divine will, there is nothing that can be "unknown" about it, so let's just think about what we humans can know (e.g. Protagoras), which effectively means we can ignore the rest—quite contrary to Greek thought. The un-knowabilty inherent to Greek religious understanding was not a performative, one-way denial but an extension of the deep conviction that so much of human life was intimately subject to the will of divine forces—Zeus, Tyche, or whoever—though they just happen to be beyond the bounds of full comprehension. That tension is the epistemic situation of tragedy.
The context is inaccessible to me, but I would want to mercilessly probe one thing that I-S writes: "the perception that the the articulation of religion through the particular polis systems is a human construct, created by particular historical circumstances and
open to change under changed circumstances." Whose perception? And it at least depends on the kind of change we're talking about, and which polis. This reads to me as if there is an assumption lurking here, that liberal pluralism is embryonic in Greek attitudes about religion (set up in the obvious opposition to Christianity/Judaism/Islam here), which many people want to believe. I can't help scratching the itch in my mind: which "open to change' polis does she have in mind here? The endless social strife of the only polis she could be seriously attributing this to (Athens) doesn't present a society open to change on the basis of, well, "ultimately we don't know about the gods." Openness to (social) change is a very anachronistic way to describe any pre-modern society, to put it kindly, let alone a Greek polis.
DrStakhanovite wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 6:16 pm
I too sometimes forgot that Aristotle basically started the field of embryology and that his naked eye descriptions of how chick embryos developed, based on hundreds of detailed dissections he did himself, remained in textbooks until the 1800s when microscopes had advanced far enough to replace him. I mean, he basically *invented* the modern practice of taxonomy and organized animals into hierarchies based on their anatomy and behavior.
Not very scientific.
Yes, of course, but did it develop much after Aristotle until the High Middle Ages? That's the issue Physics Guy is raising, if I understand him, not whether there weren't some great scientists in antiquity. It seems like there was a ceiling. There are huge developments even in the short span between Galileo to Newton, but by comparison we have Aristotle and then not much of an advance until the around the early thirteenth century with Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, a bit earlier in the Islamic world (another monotheistic culture). I wouldn't disagree if the response is that Aristotle was just that brilliant. But it was also probably hard to get research grants for most of that period after Aristotle, though not as hard as today, obviously.