Individual and Community in Greek Thought III

Religion

The heroic individual represents one mode of singularity that Greek thought reveals. Another important site could be located in religious experience, but here I would like to restrict myself to merely suggesting some of the problems that one might encounter. There seems little doubt that in a general way the practices of Greek religion in the classical period fell largely into the communal realm. The life of the polis integrated into itself a sequence of religious performances like rituals, festivals and sacrifices. The nature of these rites often hints at dark and obscure histories, but these fall largely into the scope of mythography and anthropology. By the same process of disclosure that transfers secret knowledge into the discourses of the market-place, the cults of the gods too emerge from being the potent and mysterious possession of select individuals and groups to being the benevolent patrons of civic activity. A case in point would be the cult of Dionysus, apparently late entrant into the civic pantheon. Homer knows little of the worship of Dionysus, but subsequently there are many references to the rites of the Bacchantes practicing rites of sparagmos and omophagia, and to their frenzied cultic dances. In Athens in the fifth century however the figure of Dionysus is far more domesticated and benevolent: the god of civic prosperity and dramatic performance. It is the drama however which preserves the alterity of Dionysus in the minds of people: the Bacchae and the Frogs in different ways perform this function. If the normal religious experience as part of civic life does not offer scope of radical singularity, a study of the cults seems more promising. The cults stood on the margins of official religion and offered through membership certain privileges: the promise of a happy afterlife was one of the benefits offered for instance by the Eleusinian mysteries. In a general way the cults promoted a pure life-style, the practice of certain austerities, and very importantly in the case of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans, the practice of vegetarianism and the avoidance of animal sacrifice. Initiation into the cult thus might be thought to operate as conferring certain marks of individuality upon participants, marking them off from the rest of society. It is likely, however, that the cults too operated on the basis of their identity as a group rather than promoting a sense of religious individuality. The later cults, which are studied in a masterly fashion by A.D.Nock, fall outside the scope of our survey. One also needs to mention here the θεοι ανδρες [theoi andres], the prophets or magi, who are seen as having their own ways of life, different from common humanity. They may become the founders of schools of thought or the progenitors of codes of living. The Pythagoreans afford a convenient example. It seems however that the importance or value of these exceptional individuals - to which might be added the givers of constitutions or makers of Laws - is experienced at a social level, rather than affording an new paradigm of individuality.

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See:

AD Nock, Conversion (Oxford, 1933)

WKC Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (London, 1952)

Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard, 1985)