Ancient & modern
IN last week's column, the Delphic oracle was shown to have acted in large part like a Citizens Advice Bureau, with a strong rational streak to it; stories about a foaming, ranting Pythia were simply not true. But that is not the whole story.
The more thoughtful ancients were indeed drawn to rational accounts of religious belief, since they felt that the physical world had been rationally constructed and therefore the deity who was responsible for it must be able to be rationalised. Ancient Stoics, for example, pointed out that the world obeyed certain predictable physical laws and human behaviour followed certain predictable patterns, all capable of being understood by reason. If the world reflected its Maker, as logically it must, reason must therefore hold sway: reason was the divine in us.
But that is not to deny the legitimate role of the mysterious, miraculous and numinous in ancient and modern religion. Despite Stoic assumptions, there is still much in the world that seems to make no sense, and if the purpose of religion is to confront ultimate mysteries beyond the range of human understanding, it is not surprising if it calls up concepts and images that will not bear strictly rational scrutiny. It has been pointed out here before that religion is like a language. To those who speak it, it makes perfect sense. To those who do not, it sounds like nonsense. The 'language' that is religion is as subtle and delicate as any human language — and just as incomprehensible to those who cannot understand it.
So when the oracle at Delphi did come up with something ambiguous or hard to interpret, no Greek was surprised. This was, after all, a god speaking. The god could also speak (as he did at other oracles) through the flight of birds, the clashing of metal bowls and the murmuring of trees. This is 'speech', but of a different kind — one which communicated not through verbal but through non-verbal means, and therefore needed even more interpretation by fallible humans. As the 6th-century ac philosopher Heraclitus said of the god of the oracle at Delphi, 'He neither speaks nor hides: he uses signs.'
Plato talks of certain types of behaviour as driven by mania: the lover, the artist and the prophet were all subject to it. It does not mean 'madness'. It means 'inspiration'. The Pythia knew all about it; so did J.S. Bach. In other words, some phenomena are beyond explanation, rational or irrational. It is at such points that the ancients tended
to insert the divine. Peter Jones
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