The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman Read Free Book Online Page B

humanity. For Aristotle, reason suggested that there is a supreme “unmoved mover.” “Since motion must always exist and must not cease, there must necessarily be something eternal, either one thing or many, that first initiates motion, and this first mover must be unmoved.” Others suggested there were no gods at all. The world is totally material, argued the Atomists, with all matter being made up of tiny particles, atoms, literally “that which cannot be cut.” These more extreme forms of atheism did arouse concern. There remained a residual fear, certainly found among the population of Athens, for instance, that if the gods were rejected outright they might retaliate by withdrawing their patronage of the city. Sometimes this fear would erupt into intolerance, as in the case of Socrates, who was executed in Athens in 399 B.C. For the most part, however, Greek religion was undogmatic, its theology ever in flux. Myths and rituals were so interwoven into everyday life that no need was felt for an institutional hierarchy to defend them. 27 Arguments over the divine were never restrained by doctrinal orthodoxy.
    Although the achievement of the Greeks in establishing an atmosphere of tolerance in which considerable intellectual progress proved possible was remarkable, one should not idealize. We have already noted the difficulties in gathering empirical evidence and the way in which this limited what it was possible to know. Interpretation of empirical evidence also takes place within an ideological context. It was easy to rationalize from the observations of the human body that men were the active sex and women the passive, and the Hippocratic texts which concentrate on the diseases of women show how they were classified as “other” and how their organs, their “soft” flesh and their need to menstruate were explored within the context of male superiority. In her
Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece,
Helen King shows how these attitudes persisted in the field of gynaecology (in the sense of a male profession telling women how they should regulate their bodies) well into modern times. 28 Similarly, Aristotle links a hot climate to indolence and goes on to argue that those born in such regions are naturally slaves, available to the more active peoples, such as the Greeks, who have grown up in a relatively temperate environment. And it has to be remembered that even this level of “rational” thought was alien to most Greeks, who, it can be assumed, were oblivious to the sophisticated discussions of their educated peers. Irrationality flourished in the Greek world, much as it does, alongside scientific thinking, in ours.
    The expanding use of rational thought can be seen as a symbol of the self-confidence of the Greeks, yet it was also fully accepted that human self-confidence had to be set within limits—no man should pretend he was a god. One reason, argues Herodotus, why the Persian king Xerxes was defeated when he invaded Greece in 480 was that his attempt to build a bridge across the Hellespont and to cut through a peninsula was an arrogant defiance of the natural order. He deserved his humiliation at the hands of the Greeks. Haughty behaviour (
ate
) or the deliberate humiliation of others (
hubris
) were taboo. Such behaviour deserved the greatest humiliation of all, expulsion from the perpetrator’s native city, in addition to divine condemnation.
    In his play
Antigone,
Sophocles summed it up:
    Wonders are many and none more wonderful than man . . .
    In the meshes of his woven nets, cunning of mind, ingenious man . . .
    He snares the lighthearted birds and the tribes of savage beasts, and the creatures of the deep seas . . .
    He puts the halter round the horse’s neck
    And rings the nostrils of the angry bull.
    He has devised himself a shelter
against the rigours of frost and the pelting rains.
    Speech and science he has taught himself, and artfully formed laws for harmonious