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Doubt: A History
The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson
Chapter One
Whatever Happened
to Zeus and Hera?,
600 BCE -- 1 CE
Greek Doubt When we look for doubt among the ancients, in the West we are going to find the most lively cases in the Hellenistic period -- the few hundred years between the dominance of Classical Greece and that of Classical Rome. It's not surprising that an in-between period is our main focus: human beings define which are the pinnacle moments of history and which are the in-between moments, and we tend to choose moments of certainty as pinnacles. We praise and envy the certainty, dedication, and meaningfulness of such moments, whether we look at ancient Greece or at a small town in early America. In our modern lives, many of us actively cultivate our differences from these unified communities, in defense of privacy and autonomy. Yet we tend to laud them and long for them, because the ideal members of these societies seem to have been so well nourished by them; intellectually and emotionally, they do not seem bereft. We moderns can't cotton to the constraints and gross inequalitiesideal membership is usually limited, having to do with gender, heredity, and/or wealth -- but we marvel at the general ideas of the group, at the rich and jubilant belonging, and at the ideal members' noble and satisfying engagement in civic affairs. Our quickest shorthand for the past is a list of these highly principled moments, their breakdown, and the birth of the next. So the history of doubt looks different than other histories, because it highlights what goes on between periods of certainty: it's like seeing a map upside down -- it takes time for the new contours to take shape. The history of being awake to certain contradictions of our condition is the negative image of the history of certainty.
Hence, while usual histories of the ancient world would linger on the certainty of Classical Greece and then rush through its dissolution over the next few hundred years, I will briefly discuss Greek piety and then linger on the budding of doubt at the end of the Classical age and its blooming in the Hellenistic period that followed.
In the heyday of the ancient Greek polis, or city-state, the gods over-saw a very well integrated society. Although every society has some sense of itself as old, as having seen a lot, this was a society with a primary relationship to its religious ideas, and the strength of each of the many poleis had a lot to do with this primary certainty, this lack of doubt. Ideally, you lived for the polis, you worshiped its particular gods, you knew most fellow members by face, and you took part in its governance and defense. It was the central object of identity, politics, and religion. It was an identity that was bigger than the self and bigger than the family. It was often uncomfortable for people to subordinate themselves thusly, but they were extraordinarily well nurtured in doing so.
The polis assuaged confusion and doubt because it was something midway between the world of humanness and the universe at large, and could serve as a shelter. If humanity's central existential difficulty comes from the fact that we have humanness -- consciousness, hopes, dreams, loneliness, shame, plans, memory, a sense of fairness, love -- and the universe does not, that means that we are constantly trying to wrangle our needs out of a universe that does not tend in such directions. The polis expanded humanness so it seemed longer-lived and larger. The aim of each person's life is to do his or her part in the polis, to serve in a given capacity, to worship the gods of the polis, to fight, to procreate, to keep the thing going.
The Olympian gods were not very remote from humanity. They hadn't created human beings. They were immortal but not eternal. They were often heroic, but they were not particularly honorable in their dealings with one another or with human beings. They were imminent in human life and in the environment: they brought meaningful dreams to sleepers and threw thunderbolts when they were angry. They even lived nearby, on Mount Olympus. They also gave an external cause for human inconsistency or illogic, such as the mystery of why certain people find each other attractive and lovable -- as if struck by an arrow. Along with the gods, there were the even more immediate daemons, vaguely drawn embodiments of occult power. Sometimes they were doing a god's bidding; at other times they were described as the enacting force of the moment, animating someone to heroism, great speed, or tragic error.
At the height of their cult, the Olympic gods of the Greeks were thought of as very real -- not at all the equivalent of parables or half-believed fairy tales. The sun did rise every day, it was indeed the source of all life, it was perfectly consistent in its behavior, and its rising and setting was a vision of spectacular beauty. If we call immense, nonhuman power gods or God, then it is purely descriptive to say that the god Apollo drives his chariot across the sky every day, and perfectly appropriate to express awe at the sight of it. It may be a bit less obvious that Eros is a purely descriptive per-sonification of erotic love, because we don't believe that erotic love exists as a thing outside of human beings. Yet passion can seem to hit us from the outside, and that's how the Greeks saw it.
The great authorities of the culture were Homer and Hesiod, poets who had crafted wonderful praise poems detailing the historical adventures of the gods. In these stories, people were driven in and out of wars, friendships, and adventures because of the whims or ardent desires of gods. Everyone knew these stories, and for centuries upon centuries the lives of ordinary Greeks were interpreted within this engaging and satisfying, if also disturbing, context ...
Doubt: A History
The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. Copyright © by Jennifer Hecht. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.