The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought - Hardcover

Ossa-Richardson, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691157111 ISBN 13: 9780691157115

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Devil's Tabernacle is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. Anthony Ossa-Richardson shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery of ancient religion, confessional polemics, Deist and libertine challenges to religion, antiquarianism and early archaeology, Romantic historiography, and spiritualism. Ossa-Richardson examines the different views of the oracles since the Renaissance--that they were the work of the devil, or natural causes, or the fraud of priests, or finally an organic element of ancient Greek society. The range of discussion on the subject, as he demonstrates, is considerably more complex than has been realized before: hundreds of scholars, theologians, and critics commented on the oracles, drawing on a huge variety of intellectual contexts to frame their beliefs. In a central chapter, Ossa-Richardson interrogates the landmark dispute on the oracles between Bernard de Fontenelle and Jean-Francois Baltus, challenging Whiggish assumptions about the mechanics of debate on the cusp of the Enlightenment. With erudition and an eye for detail, he argues that, on both sides of the controversy, to speak of the ancient oracles in early modernity was to speak of one's own historical identity as a Christian.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anthony Ossa-Richardson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.

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"Anthony Ossa-Richardson combines a sharp eye for detail with a sense of the wider significance of these details.The Devil's Tabernacle is written with clarity, grace, good judgment, and flashes of wit. It is a distinguished first book."--Peter Burke, emeritus professor of cultural history, University of Cambridge

"In this powerfully researched, cogently argued, and eloquently written book, Ossa-Richardson traces how humanist antiquarians, philosophers, theologians, and a host of others tried to understand and explain the ancient and patristic accounts of pagan oracles. He opens up rich and uncharted intellectual territories, offering a vast amount of unknown material and some sharp interventions into current historical debates. This is a terrific piece of work."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"Ossa-Richardson deals with a highly interesting yet quite understudied chapter in the early modern reflection on religion in the ancient world. He shows a remarkable knowledge of the broader aspects of his topic, from the Greek oracles via medieval philosophy and theology to Renaissance and early modern thought. Ossa-Richardson writes in the vein of the best contemporary scholarship in intellectual history on early modern antiquarianism."--Guy G. Stroumsa, University of Oxford

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"Anthony Ossa-Richardson combines a sharp eye for detail with a sense of the wider significance of these details.The Devil's Tabernacle is written with clarity, grace, good judgment, and flashes of wit. It is a distinguished first book."--Peter Burke, emeritus professor of cultural history, University of Cambridge

"In this powerfully researched, cogently argued, and eloquently written book, Ossa-Richardson traces how humanist antiquarians, philosophers, theologians, and a host of others tried to understand and explain the ancient and patristic accounts of pagan oracles. He opens up rich and uncharted intellectual territories, offering a vast amount of unknown material and some sharp interventions into current historical debates. This is a terrific piece of work."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"Ossa-Richardson deals with a highly interesting yet quite understudied chapter in the early modern reflection on religion in the ancient world. He shows a remarkable knowledge of the broader aspects of his topic, from the Greek oracles via medieval philosophy and theology to Renaissance and early modern thought. Ossa-Richardson writes in the vein of the best contemporary scholarship in intellectual history on early modern antiquarianism."--Guy G. Stroumsa, University of Oxford

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The Devil's Tabernacle

THE PAGAN ORACLES IN EARLY MODERN THOUGHT

By Anthony Ossa-Richardson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15711-5

Contents

List of Plates.............................................................
ix
Acknowledgements...........................................................
xi
Introduction...............................................................
1
Part One...................................................................
11
Chapter One Authorities...................................................
13
Chapter Two Demons........................................................
46
Part Two...................................................................
83
Chapter Three Nature......................................................
87
Chapter Four Imposture 1..................................................
36
Part Three.................................................................
203
Chapter Five Enlightenment?...............................................
205
Chapter Six Solutions.....................................................
247
Conclusion Les lauriers sont coupés.......................................
285
Bibliography...............................................................
291
Index......................................................................
327

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Authorities

Delos ubi nunc, Phoebe, tua est, ubi Delphica Pytho?Tibullus, Elegies II.3, l. 27

With the revival of pagan antiquity came a revival of interest in itsreligions. The humanist movement, in full swing at the outset of the sixteenthcentury, put itself to setting out and interpreting the classical andpatristic sources on the many aspects of these religions, among whichthe oracles of ancient Greece held a prominent place. By this process theoracles became an object of historical knowledge: in context, individualsources could contribute to the rounded picture of an institution with itsown cultural contours.

With the reading of the Church Fathers, however, the pagan oraclescould also be incorporated into the narrative of Christianity, a narrativein which they stood as symbolic antagonists. Two things above allmarked out the oracles to the humanist scholar. First, as was obviousfrom Cicero and the Greek historians, their answers had been ambiguousand deceitful. 'Among the ancients', one writer noted, 'nothing wasmore trite than the ambiguity of the oracles'. It was not for nothing thatApollo had been called 'Loxias', the crooked one. To a mind impressedwith the virtue of clarity in language, this was a grave fault, and stoodin diametric contrast to the perspicuity of Christian prophecy. Since thenineteenth century, the famous riddling oracles have been largely rejectedas literary or mythical, in favour of more prosaic instances. Before this,only a few had looked past the traditional examples. Sir Thomas Browne,carefully examining a range of oracles from Herodotus, acknowledgedthe variety of Delphic utterance:

Sometimes with that obscurity as argued a fearfull prophecy; sometimesso plainly as might confirm a spirit of difficulty; sometimes morally,deterring from vice and villany; another time vitiously, and in thespirit of bloud and cruelty.

For most, however, oracular ambiguity was assumed. The second factabout the oracles, of still greater significance, was their cessation—anidea spanning pagan as well as Christian literature of antiquity. The humanistsknew, of course, that the cessation of the oracles had occurredwith the miraculous dawn of their own faith. The false, obscure, and immoralhad given way to the true. It was an excellent image for the poet,popular well into the seventeenth century, and again among the Romanticsof a later age. Painters had long depicted the Nativity in the ruins ofa pagan temple, but verse, an oral medium, favoured the silencing of thePythia, herself a poet—even the inventor of poetry. Students of Englishliterature best know the motif from Milton:

The Oracles are dumm,No voice or hideous hummRuns through the arched roof in words deceiving.

It was already present, however, in a snatch of lines from Joannes BaptistaMantuanus:

The gods, who, deprived of majesty,Now yielded their altars to our own rites,And, bearing Christ's yoke on their unwilling necks,No longer gave oracles openly.

Beyond these two points—deceptive ambiguity and cessation—layspecialist knowledge and theology. As the full richness of ancient sources,and especially the Greek, came into view, the oracles could be situatedwith more precision in developing genres of learned endeavour: history,religious ethnography, demonology, scholastic philosophy, and so on.Scholars could begin to debate exactly how the oracles had worked, or ifthey had worked at all. But for this to occur, the sources had to be identified,edited, translated, published. This chapter deals with those sources,and with their transmission from antiquity to early modern thought; thefoundations will thus be laid for the more sophisticated discussions of thenext two hundred years.

If an early modern reader wanted to know about the pagan oracles,he could pick up a book like Conrad Gesner's enormous encyclopaediaof commonplaces, the Pandectae, and rummage around for its sectionon that topic. There the sources on the oracles were laid out neatly, andthe reader was directed in turn to the earlier miscellanies of the Italianhumanists, especially those of Alessandro Alessandri and Caelius Rhodiginus.With these the range of available material had become standard,and they continued to be cited until the eighteenth century.

In conversation, Alessandro and Rhodiginus would have disagreedabout little relating to Delphi and the other oracles, but in print theypresented different aspects of the subject. Alessandro was more interestedin pagan lore, neutral with respect to Christianity, while Rhodiginusincluded patristic material and drew parallels with the religiousphenomena of his day. In each case, the debts are not always clear, andmediaeval tradition is occasionally substituted for reliable classical data,which itself was often already commonplace in antiquity. Thus, whenAlessandro describes Delphi as totius orbis umbilicus, he could have hadit from anywhere, while his claims that Parnassus was in Boeotia, andthat its two peaks were dedicated to Dionysius and Apollo, are incorrectand suppositious respectively. His sources, however, must have includedHerodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pausanias, Plutarch, and Justinus.Rhodiginus drew openly on Plutarch, Cicero, and Diodorus Siculus, buthis key source, Eusebius, is unnamed.

Both compilers chose a moment to break off from paraphrasing theirpagan sources and sound instead a note of Christian censure. Of Delphi,Alessandro comments:

When wicked religion, by which men's own vanity ruined them, hadbeen instilled, important men, eminent in dignity, frequently came herefor counsel from all over the world, and these oracles were held to betrue and by far the most famous of all.

Alessandro's reader would have thought nothing of his remark aboutprava religio—it was obvious. Obvious too was Rhodiginus's opinion ofDelphi that

the oracle was conducted there by the vain superstition and ignoranceof men, and much more by the cunning of unclean spirits.

From the beginning, Christians had thought of pagan religion as an evilperpetrated both by supernatural spirits or demons, and by human credulityand immorality. Delphi was no different. The problem for Rhodiginus'searly modern readers came in another passage:

I seem to have discovered, by continual reading, that [the oracles] werenot established and propagated by gods or demons, but founded fromthe start by crafty profiteers.

When later scholars came to blows over whether the oracles had beenthe work of demons or only of cunning priests, this passage proved contentious.Both sides understood Rhodiginus to have espoused the latteridea, although both acknowledged his ambiguity—an oracular fault.This indicates the dangers of humanist practice, heaping up sources withoutclear arrangement. Rhodiginus in this passage was paraphrasingEusebius, who in turn was quoting a Cynic named Oenomaus. The interactionbetween the Church Father and the pagan, intrinsically unstableas an analysis of the oracles, would resonate through the early moderndiscourse on that subject, as we shall see. The distinction between humanand demonic cunning was not so apparent to Rhodiginus or his contemporariesas it would be to his later readers. The principal fact for him,as for Alessandro, was that the oracles were part and parcel of a falsereligion. Both read the pagan sources through Christian lenses more thana thousand years old. We may now examine how those lenses came to befashioned—that is, how the oracles were established as a major battlegroundbetween the old and new religions competing in antiquity.

* * *

To early modern Christians, the authority of Apollo was worth nothing.But in ancient Greece, Apollo, via his oracular mouthpiece at Delphi,was the very highest authority, at least in theory, and his arbitration wasaccepted by kings, generals, and colonists in the most important mattersof state. As the traveller Richard Chandler later put it,

The influence of [Delphi's] god has controlled the councils of states,directed the course of armies, and decided the fate of kingdoms. Theantient history of Greece is full of his energy, and an early register ofhis authority.

This authority was embodied in the adages Erasmus collected fromAthenaeus and Theocritus. It was also reflected in the pagan histories;neither Livy nor Herodotus, for instance, shows any doubt that Delphiwas a genuine institution of Apollo. This is not to say that it could notbe corrupted at a human level, as we learn from occasional stories. Theoracle itself, however, was certainly divine. One of the best- known storiesin Herodotus, that of Croesus, is representative. According to the tale,Croesus, the king of Lydia, sent out messengers to all the famous oraclesin Greece and Africa, instructing each to wait exactly one hundred daysbefore asking the god what Croesus was then doing. The words broughtback from Delphi proclaimed that the king was boiling a lamb and a tortoisein a bronze cauldron—the improbable but correct answer. Croesusdid reverence to Apollo and plied Delphi with costly gifts. Subsequently,when Croesus wanted to know the outcome of his projected war againstPersia, he inquired of the oracle and was told that if he crossed the riverHalys, demarcating their borders, a great empire would fall. Croesuscrossed, and a great empire did fall. It was his own.

Various legends of the oracle's origin have been handed down, but theaccount in Diodorus Siculus has been the most influential—it is repeatedby Plutarch and Pausanias, and included by Rhodiginus in his Lectiones.Diodorus tells us that a herd of goats stumbled upon a vaporous chasmand began leaping and braying abnormally; when the herdsmen investigated,they grew frenzied and foretold future events. The spot was soondeemed divine, but many in their frenzy fell into the chasm, so the localsdecided to establish a single priestess there and mounted her, for healthand safety reasons, on a tripod fixed over the chasm's mouth.

That the priestess's inspiration came from the earth, and was thereforerooted to a particular place, distinguished her from the roamingSibyls; as Cicero noted succinctly, 'the Pythia of Delphi was stirred bya power of the earth, the Sibyl by a power in her nature'. The specificidea of exhalations at Delphi would be developed in the next century byStrabo, whose succinct description of the oracle was much cited in earlymodernity:

They say that the seat of the oracle is a cave that is hollowed out deepdown in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which arisesbreath that inspires a divine frenzy; and that over the mouth is placeda high tripod, mounting which the Pythian priestess receives the breathand then utters oracles in both verse and prose, though the latter tooare put into verse by poets who are in the service of the temple.

Pliny the Elder offered a similar account, ascribing the prophetic vapoursto a numen inherent in nature and bursting from the earth—an immanentdivinity. Iamblichus, later, wrote of a fiery divine spirit possessing thePythia from below. The Pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo, finally, appliedPeripatetic exhalation theory to the oracles of Delphi and Lebadeia.For Diodorus, Strabo, and De mundo the vapours caused a 'frenzy' (enthousiasmos,pneuma enthousiastikon), while Pliny describes oraculardiviners as temulenti, 'drunk'. These associations—divination, madness,intoxication—were old. Plato, in the Phaedrus (244a–b), had praisedoracular prophecy both as a 'madness' (mania) and as 'a divine gift' (theiadosis). Another Pseudo- Aristotelian work of uncertain date, the Problemata,in a passage much discussed in the Renaissance, treats divinationas a melancholic effect: an overheating of black bile in the body disruptsthe intelligence and causes the sicknesses that make us 'mad or inspired'(manikoi heµ enthousiastikoi), just like the Sibyls and diviners (Bakides),whose condition derives from a natural temperament.

All of these passages constitute naturalistic rationalisations of the oracle.Other devices were later forthcoming: the idea, for instance, that thePythia's divinatory power was contained in the laurel, sacred to Apollo,which she chewed before consultation. By these means, philosopherssought to explain the oracle's efficacy and traditional authority. Plinyassociated oracles with age, wisdom, and tradition. Strabo's approachwas more complex. His description of Delphi is prefaced with the words'They say', indicating its traditional nature, but he was keenly aware ofthe problem of reliable testimony, and especially in relation to the oracle.Ephorus, acknowledged as his principal source, is found to be untrustworthydespite his own claims:

[A]fter censuring those who love to insert myths in the text of theirhistories, and after praising the truth, [Ephorus] adds to his account ofthis oracle a kind of solemn promise, saying that he regards the truthas best in all cases, but particularly on this subject; for it is absurd, hesays, if we always follow such a method in dealing with every othersubject, and yet, when speaking of the oracle which the most truthfulof all, go on to use the accounts that are so untrustworthy and false.

But as Strabo observes, Ephorus pours out every old wives' tale on the oracle:he has confounded myth and history in his account. To use an earlymodern word, he is insufficiently critical. The oracle, for Strabo a modelof truth and authority, deserves better.

At the same time, the image of the oracle became fixed in literature,above all by Vergil and Lucan. Well before they graduated to philosophicalsources, Renaissance schoolboys would have had the Roman poets'depiction of oracular prophecy burned into their memories. Vergil neverdescribes the Pythia but transfers her attributes instead to the Delian oracle,and to the Cumaean Sibyl, in the third and sixth books of the Aeneid:here we see laurel and tripod, frenzy and possession, not naturalised intovapours, but given to the divinity himself.

One of the most important beliefs about the oracles, at least from thefirst century BC, was that they were in the process of falling silent ordegenerating in some way. The idea is first noted in Cicero, and wouldfeature as a trope of Roman poetry, before being discussed at length byPlutarch around AD 100. There was evidently a nostalgia, in the quietorder of the empire, for an age when the gods had spoken to men moreclearly, or more beautifully. It was a natural mood: the Jews, anotherreligious community then in submission, had mourned the loss of theirown prophetic ability since the Second Temple period.

This decline is an essential component in the account of the Delphicoracle found in the fifth book of Lucan's Pharsalia, elaborated froman earlier story. In this book Appius Claudius visits Delphi to learn hisown fate in the civil war. The temple has long been silent, since 'kingsfeared the future, and forbade the gods to speak'—a political explanationunique among the classical sources. At first the priestess, Phemonoe,afraid of prophesying, tries to dissuade Appius from his inquiry. Nextshe feigns inspiration. Appius at last compels her to enter the adytonand receive Apollo's spirit. The resulting process is somewhere betweenrape and possession—'never did Paean invade Phoebas' body with moreforce; he drove out the first and mortal mind, and ordered her breast toyield wholly to his own'. The distracted priestess staggers and dashesthrough the temple like a Romantic heroine—little wonder that Shelleyshould borrow three lines for an epigraph—and at last utters her oracle:'at first from foaming mouth the madness wild flowed out, and groansand breathless murmurs loud emerged'. Finally she rushes outside, collapsesin convulsions, and dies. Lucan's picture of a frenzied Pythia, likeVergil's, proved irresistible to early modern scholars who wanted to paintthe oracle as demonic.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691157111
• ISBN 13: 9780691157115
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
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