Diogenes Laertius
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Happy Praise
I recently read this line in the Book of Common Prayer, in the BCP's translation of the Phos Hilaron prayer. The Phos Hilaron is one of the oldest Christian hymns:
I'm preparing a scholarly article on St Paul's response to Epicurean philosophy, one I hope to publish soon. For now, I will summarize one of its points: Christians and Epicureans disagree about the imperturbability of the divine (Christians disagree among themselves about this as well) but they agree that if something can't be praised with gladness at least sometimes, then it's probably not worth praising at all.
This is not just abstract philosophy or theology; it matters for all of life. We are all always engaged in worship, as David Foster Wallace once said. We don't get much choice about that. We do have a choice about what we worship - what we ascribe worth to. We do that all the time when we vote, when we spend and invest our money, when we decide what our laws should be and what our children should learn. We constantly make decisions about ends that should be pursued, and these are all acts of worship.
** Diogenes Laertius, 10.139; from The Epicurus Reader, Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson, translators. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) p. 32.
"Thou art worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices, O Son of God, O Giver of Life..."It needn't be translated that way, by the way. It could be translated as "reverent voices" or "opportune voices." I like this translation, though. The sentiment is positively Epicurean. Consider the opening line of Epicurus's Kuriai Doxai*:
"What is blessed and indestructible has no troubles itself, nor does it give trouble to anyone else..."**In Epicurus's view, a god that is petulant or demanding is a god that is needy and manipulative. Such gods may force us to make sacrifices, but they won't earn our praise so much as our derision and scorn. A god worthy of the name is one that needs and demands nothing for itself.
I'm preparing a scholarly article on St Paul's response to Epicurean philosophy, one I hope to publish soon. For now, I will summarize one of its points: Christians and Epicureans disagree about the imperturbability of the divine (Christians disagree among themselves about this as well) but they agree that if something can't be praised with gladness at least sometimes, then it's probably not worth praising at all.
This is not just abstract philosophy or theology; it matters for all of life. We are all always engaged in worship, as David Foster Wallace once said. We don't get much choice about that. We do have a choice about what we worship - what we ascribe worth to. We do that all the time when we vote, when we spend and invest our money, when we decide what our laws should be and what our children should learn. We constantly make decisions about ends that should be pursued, and these are all acts of worship.
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* We usually translate this "Principal Doctrines." The word "kuriai" or "kurios" means "principal" and has the same breadth of resonances and meanings as that word: princely, first and foremost, primary, authoritative. The word "doxai" or "doxa" has a similar breadth of meanings, ranging from opinion or estimation to reputation and even glory. The Epicurean title kuriai doxai would have sounded familiar to early Greek-speaking Christians, for whom it would have sounded like "Lordly glories." The familiar prayer Kyrie eleison is related to the word kurios or kyrios. ** Diogenes Laertius, 10.139; from The Epicurus Reader, Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson, translators. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) p. 32.
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This week I've been reading and re-reading Howard Wettstein's The Significance of Religious Experience and, at the same time, talking with my friend John Kaag about creativity and wonder in Peirce and the other classical Pragmatists.
At the end of his Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Peirce quoted a phrase from the Book of Acts, ch 17. The phrase is "live and move and have our being." It appears in a speech by St. Paul, the only time the Greek Testament records a Christian conversing with philosophers. Paul quotes two Greek writers in that speech, Aratus and Epimenides.
The citation of Epimenides is relevant to the Areopagus, the place where Paul is speaking, as I have written elsewhere. Paul quotes Epimenides' poem, the Cretica, in which Epimenides says of Zeus. "In him we live and move and have our being."
Epimenides had been summoned to the Areopagus several centuries prior to Paul's visit. The Athenians were suffering from a long plague and none of their sacrifices had ended it. As Diogenes Laertius recounts,* Epimenides suggested that if their sacrifices to the gods they knew were not availing them, perhaps they should sacrifice to an as-yet unknown god.
The difficulty is that if you don't know the god, how do you know what the god wants? What are the proper prayers? What are the right sacrifices? Who should make them?
Epimenides' solution appears to have been to confess ignorance and then to engage in the ritual to the best of his knowledge. In the absence of settled doctrine, he leaned on human practice. As Epicurus once pointed out, (see the very first line in Epicurus's Principal Doctrines) if your god gets angry about that sort of thing, it's probably not a god worth worshiping anyway.
To put a positive spin on that, consider how the Epimenides story ends: he directs the sacrifices, and the plague ends. And the Athenians leave the altars to an unknown god on the slopes of the Areopagus, where Paul finds one centuries later. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to pray without knowing everything about God. And maybe, if there's a God, that God knows we don't know much about God at all, and is okay with that. Maybe religion is, as Wettstein suggests, like mathematics, something we can engage in even in the absence of settled knowledge about the underlying metaphysics. I hope so.
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Epimenides, Or Religion Without Metaphysics
This week I've been reading and re-reading Howard Wettstein's The Significance of Religious Experience and, at the same time, talking with my friend John Kaag about creativity and wonder in Peirce and the other classical Pragmatists.
At the end of his Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Peirce quoted a phrase from the Book of Acts, ch 17. The phrase is "live and move and have our being." It appears in a speech by St. Paul, the only time the Greek Testament records a Christian conversing with philosophers. Paul quotes two Greek writers in that speech, Aratus and Epimenides.
The citation of Epimenides is relevant to the Areopagus, the place where Paul is speaking, as I have written elsewhere. Paul quotes Epimenides' poem, the Cretica, in which Epimenides says of Zeus. "In him we live and move and have our being."
Epimenides had been summoned to the Areopagus several centuries prior to Paul's visit. The Athenians were suffering from a long plague and none of their sacrifices had ended it. As Diogenes Laertius recounts,* Epimenides suggested that if their sacrifices to the gods they knew were not availing them, perhaps they should sacrifice to an as-yet unknown god.
The difficulty is that if you don't know the god, how do you know what the god wants? What are the proper prayers? What are the right sacrifices? Who should make them?
Epimenides' solution appears to have been to confess ignorance and then to engage in the ritual to the best of his knowledge. In the absence of settled doctrine, he leaned on human practice. As Epicurus once pointed out, (see the very first line in Epicurus's Principal Doctrines) if your god gets angry about that sort of thing, it's probably not a god worth worshiping anyway.
To put a positive spin on that, consider how the Epimenides story ends: he directs the sacrifices, and the plague ends. And the Athenians leave the altars to an unknown god on the slopes of the Areopagus, where Paul finds one centuries later. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to pray without knowing everything about God. And maybe, if there's a God, that God knows we don't know much about God at all, and is okay with that. Maybe religion is, as Wettstein suggests, like mathematics, something we can engage in even in the absence of settled knowledge about the underlying metaphysics. I hope so.
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| Foreground: Agora of Athens; Background: Acropolis (L) and Areopagus (R) of Athens. |
I took this photo from the temple of Hephaestus on the West end of the ancient agora of Athens. The ruins in the foreground are the old marketplace and civic buildings. At the top left is the Acropolis and the Parthenon; just to the right of the Acropolis is the Areopagus, which currently hosts no buildings, though if you look closely you can see some tourists walking around on the hill. Presumably Epimenides built his altars on the slope leading up to the Areopagus. According to the story in Acts, St Paul preached first in the agora and then on the Areopagus, walking up past an altar left by Epimenides.
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* We also find reference to the altars erected by Epimenides in Pausanias (I.i.4); and in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. Lucian's Philopatris alludes to it as well, but it is possible that he is referring to Acts 17. Epimenides is quoted more than once in the Greek scriptures; he is also quoted in Titus 1.12.