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Greeks and the Irrational

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Dodds introduces his material with an anecdote of a young man he met in the British Museum who confessed his inability to get excited about the Elgin Marbles, because, after all, the Greeks were so "terribly rational." Dodds then poses the question, "[w]ere the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man's experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics?" In answering his own question (the answer is, of course, "no"), Dodds writes an interesting book.

Dodds's chapters (originally lectures) are roughly chronological and thematic, starting (as one must) with Homer's use of "ate" and working down through the increasing rationality of classical Greece to the Hellenistic Return to Irrationality. En route, he deals with perceived shamanistic influences, the notion of divine inspiration, the question of whether man has a soul, etc.

_The Greeks and the Irrational_ is great in itself and may have value, as Dodds indicates in his closing chapter, to moderns seeking to understand their own relationship with Irrationality. It is also enlightening background reading for any student of the classics generally, in particular providing useful commentary on Homer, Plato (lots on Plato) and the tragedians. Because each chapter was originally a lecture, Dodds' style is eloquent and also readable. Each chapter is buttressed with an impressive clump of endnotes (about a quarter of the book must be notes) for further research.

Eric Dodds was sometime professor of Greek at Oxford. This book created a certain amount of a stir in its day both within and outside the arena of classical studies by either addressing, or being believed to address, up-to-date issues of anthropology and psychology. It consists basically of the Sather Classical Lectures that Dodds was invited to deliver at the University of California in 1950, and as it has been reissued in paperback in 1997 it's fair to assume that the publishers intend it to reach a wider readership than the dwindling band of classical initiates.

I very much hope it does that, but a word or two would probably be in place regarding what to expect and what not to expect to find in the book. The author's preface warns us not to look in the book for a history of Greek religion, and more pertinently recognises that modern scholarship is a world of specialists, and Dodds reiterates right at the end that he is `a simple professor of Greek'. Amateurs, dilettantes and bluffers will find plenty of material to suit them I don't doubt, but Dodds is not one of their number. This work is best read as a standard piece of classical scholarship, not as breaking down any moulds or enclosures. The most casual glance at the daunting catalogue of references in the notes appended to each chapter will show what a vast amount of writing on the topics covered here was in situ before Dodds, and how could it be otherwise? Any commentary on, say, Plato or Empedocles or Greek history by and large had to do its best with issues of religion and trends in thought. There are numerous references to other cultures, and Dodds is certainly better versed in such matters than other classics dons that I knew. By my standards he shows wide reading and deep interest in anthropology and human behaviour. On the other hand my standards in these matters are a thing of shreds and patches, and if I wanted to improve that situation this is not where I would look. The focus here is exclusively on Greeks, and any parallels cited are cited from that point of reference. Another thing to be wary of is trying to read this book as any kind of parable for our times. In my own view it is a powerful parable for our times, but that's my own parable only. In the last chapter Dodds alludes to recent history. His date is 1950, which is nearer to the start of the first world war than to 2005. It seems to me that what he has to say about the recrudescence of irrational religion and what he calls `the pathetic reverence for the written word' is very near the bone indeed in 2005, but even if I'm right Dodds could not have known that in 1950, and modern history is invoked by him to illustrate ancient history, not the other way about.

What one does expect and demand from a professor of Greek is knowledge and elucidation of what Greeks said thought and did. This is where The Greeks and the Irrational comes up trumps. There are eight chapters plus two appendices (on maenadism and the semi-magical theurgy). Dodds begins, very reasonably, at the beginning with Homeric terminology for the divine, seeing a culture in which values were a matter of status rather than of morality in any modern sense. He traces the development of the latter together with an analysis of various kinds of `madness', the significance (for Greeks not for Swedenborg or for Kant or for moderns) of dreams, the phenomenon of shamans in the context of trends in religious belief, the rise of rationalism and the counter-reaction that followed it, and the complex issue of Plato's teachings, which are far from unified or consistent. His final chapter is `The Fear of Freedom', and for my money this rings (or tolls) a loud clear bell in the early years of the third millennium. Genuine freedom of thought, much less of expression, is resented widely as being subversive, it seems to me, not least in a culture that likes to pose as embodying liberty by some kind of definition. In this Dodds seems to me to support my own view, but my own view it remains. Dodds is talking about Greeks.

The presentation of the material improves as the book goes along. The early chapters contain too much Greek that should have been reserved for the notes in what was after all lectures, not the printed word, and will not be fully intelligible without help unless you have Greek. For all that they remain readable, and anyone who can recognise a first-class mind and a first-class scholar will recognise it here. In this respect Dodds has not been as adept as his Cambridge opposite number Denys Page, whose History and the Homeric Iliad followed about a decade later in the Sather series of annual lectures.(Curiously, Page was restricted to six lectures, not the eight he seemed to have been expecting.) Dodds has all eight at his disposal, the book is beautifully written, and I ended wishing there had been more. Still a book for a wide reading-public I should say, wherever intellectual curiosity and a wish to understand human thought-processes thrive.

It is not uncommon for major figures of Ancient Greek thought to be deemed 'rationalists', a word often tainted by modern science in its implications. E.R. Dodds' book is fairly difficult to gauge on this. On one hand, it reconsiders the 'rationalist overview' by tracing back various guises of irrationalism that permeated Greek culture - a belief in daimons, the conception of a useful mania, theurgy, astrology, mystery cults. Writing about these elements, Dodds surveys a wide variety of authors and themes and provides a lively compendium. On the other hand, his methodology has shortcomings. The reader soon realizes that the ambivalence of Greek thought between the power of reason and its limitations is not a virtue according to Dodds. This is a legitimate point of view, but it has important consequences on the book's agenda. It is unabashedly teleological: irruptions of irrationalism are usually seen as 'symptoms', as setbacks from Dodds' ideal of positivistic rationalism. This is emphasized by his characterization of 5th century BC as Greece's Aufklarung. The chapter on theurgy is equally representative: while it is well-researched and in-depth, it is also filled with simplifications (the equation 'theurgy = magic', frequent in 1950s and 1960s scolarship, is stated repeatedly) and shows little sympathy for either theurgy or its theorists; this section would color many subsequent studies on the spirituality of late Neoplatonism, until scholars such as H.-D. Saffrey (a pupil of Dodds) favored an approach which was more open-minded and receptive. In spite of this, Dodds' book remains extremely stimulating and should be read by all those who are fascinated by the blurred line between reason and what is out of its reach; but it should not be considered as the last word on its objects of study.

This is a work that can't fail to grip. It's not a work just for the historian or the classicists. It's a book for anyone with an interest in the mind and the civilisation of Europe and America. Our notion of the ancient Greeks as an intensely rational people doesn't begin to do them justice. They too had their deeper, psychic side, on the basis of which their philosophy developed, and which even the modern culture continues to demonstrate. The Greek view of madness (mania),and possession, not necessarily as a curse, is explored from original sources. 'Madness' could be viewed as even a blessing in this ancient culture. So too the 'Sacred Disease' of Hippokrates (i.e. epilepsy). We find his treatment of what may be the first description of an out-of-body experience - in Pindar (c.470 B.C.E.) and the poetic double vision and causation, the Muses' gift. Not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the human mind.

Published in 1951 but still in print, this is one of those books that you read slowly, not because it's difficult, but because each sentence is so well-turned, and so larded with meaning, that you have to savor it. Once you submerge yourself in this book, it will make your hair stand on end. Some people cringe at classical studies because the Greek world often looks like a victory parade of cold rationalism. They would do well to read this book. Dodds applies a psychoanalytical perspective to the neglected flip-side of Greek religion.

He digs right down to the chthonic roots of the rituals, even to symbolic relics of a presumably-once-real cannibalism: "It is hard to guess at the psychological state that he (Euripides) describes in these two words, omophagon charin; but it is noteworthy that the days appointed for omophagia were 'unlucky and black days,' and in fact those who practiced such a rite in our time seem to experience in it a mixture of supreme exaltation and supreme repulsion: it is at once holy and horrible, fulfilment and uncleanness, a sacrament and a pollution -- the same violent conflict of emotional attitude that runs all through the Bacchae and lies at the root of all religion of the Dionysiac type."

Dodds connects ancient Greek ways to cultures far removed from our common conception of the solemn, rationalist mind -- cannibalistic dances in British Columbia, and shamanistic ecstatic rites in Sumatra and Siberia. Whether Dodds mentions snake-handling sects in Perry County, Ky., or whether that was something I thought of while reading him, I don't remember. But it was Dodds who dug a key phrase out of Benedict's "Patterns of Culture": "The very repugnance which the Kwakiutl (Indians of Vancouver Island) felt towards the act of eating human flesh made it for them a fitting expression of the Dionysian virtue that lies in the terrible and the forbidden."

This book describes the complicated history of the concept of the soul. To summarize Dodds: Homer didn't have a comprehensive word for mind. The psyche and the conscious self had not yet been defined. He understood events as repetition of the past, and individual consciousness was not a part of that. By the time of Plato these ideas had taken shape -- the Phaedo and Timaeus are works that demonstrate a conscious separation of the knower from the known, and the dual nature of the body and the soul. Pythagoras and Orphic doctrines all came into play, because Plato was a mystic (in his own Platonic way). The pre-Socratic Naturalists saw things in terms of "stuff," but Plato's Metaphysics showed that this was not enough. An interesting dicussion.

E.R. Dodds' "The Greeks and the Irrational" is based a series of lectures the author gave at Berkeley in 1949 and by his admission "reproduced here substantially as they were composed." I have a fervent wish other scholars in the last half-century have followed up on his work, although as of this writing I'm unaware of the extent to which they've done so.

Through a style and format that could use a little polish, Mr. Dodds annihilates one idea (the ancient Greeks were primarily philosophical purveyors of reason) and strongly suggests another (later-arriving Christianity borrowed liberally from the Greek mystical tradition). Both of these views, I suspect, stunned even receptive academic listeners at this early date.

Consider the origins of gods as agents of justice--an idea strongly favored in Judaism (in a monotheistic setting, and later extended by Christians). Dodds clearly shows the Greeks far ahead with their jealous deities, but adds "religion and morals were not initially interdependent, in Greece or elsewhere." Or try on the notion that "in the Archaic Age the mills of God ground so slowly ... in order to sustain the belief that they moved at all, *it was necessary to get rid of the natural time-limit set by death*". (Italics mine.) So before we get out of the second chapter the good professor (in 1949!) has introduced us to the idea that the Greeks set religious precedents in attributing justice to their gods (fear would be added later) and extending deistic dominion to the afterlife.

Beyond unearthing a treasure-trove of religious antecedents, Mr. Dodds daringly devotes an entire chapter ("The Blessings of Madness") to the rich history of the uncomfortably close association (for some) between supernatural beliefs and ... mental illness. As a reference Julian Jaynes' seminal work "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (1976) also provides a wealth of fascinating data in this area. Indeed, both Dodds and Jaynes raise the non-intuitive yet strangely attractive thesis that schizophrenics (who obviously hear "second voices") might have attained priestly status in many ancient societies.

These ideas and many others (e.g., the application of dreams, the non-originality of afterlife rewards and punishment, and the toxic introduction of a mind ["soul"]/body dichotomy), had me not only furiously underlining, but also footnoting (which Dodds also provides, almost to the point of annoyance) and questioning. As a springboard for digging into other ancient religion sources, "The Greeks and the Irrational" has few rivals even in the present--Joseph Campbell, perhaps, excepted.

Dodds' scope and insights also unintentionally contribute to the book's two minor failings: a lack of full development for many of his ideas and a non-linear and anti-climactic chapter organization. The professor glumly admits these shortcomings in his preface, attributing both to the material's original lecture source.

But these are trifles. As a wonderfully rich vein of ancient religious ideas--culled from the history of a stereotyped "rational" culture--this book is first-rate. That the author points out a myriad of ideas that continue to be claimed as "original" by modern religions was an unexpected and fascinating bonus.

I had seen this book referenced throughout my life, but until I hit Amazon, never seen the book. And now that I've read it, I can't imagine why it's not required reading at every school! Beginning with the earliest European literature, Dodds traces the development of psychological and spiritual concepts we now take as our common heritage, showing the contexts in which they arose, and how the meanings of words such at soul, fate, temptation and others changed over time. The immediate reason I was drawn to this book at this time in my life was my reading of Julian Jaynes' "Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", and it is an excellent companion to that volume. "The Greeks and the Irrational" also can serve as a perceptive guide to further studies of ancient literature, drama, and thought. What a book!

A classic work on the irrational psyche of the Ancient Greek. Dodds gives particular attention to Plato and how he transposed myth and revelation "to the plane of rational argument." A must read for the scholar of Socrates who wants to grapple with the many irrational realities of his deemed rational philosophy.

This book is already a classic, but one must realize what were the circunstances of its composition. _The Greeks and The Irrational_ was, above all, a development of the Sather lectures given by Mr. Dodds in Los Angeles during the 50s - i.e., at the time of McCarthy and the hysteria over the preservation of the supposedly eternal "Rational Values" of Western Civilization. Dodds wants, above all to warn his readers about how fragile the tradition of rational philosophical enquiry is, and how easily it can degenerate, given the power of what he calls the "Inherited conglomerate". The hub of the book, therefore, resides in the fact that Dodds remarks that the Greeks developed their philosophical and scientific tradition between the Vth and the IIIrd centuries BC and that - contrary to what the moderns would expect expectations - that tradition, before an onslaught of mysticism, simply floundered, having to be recovered painstakingly in the Late Western Middle Ages. Having this in mind, one could profit better from this outstanding work.