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ULUSLARARASI

SAMSATLI LUCIANUS SEMPOZYUMU

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SYMPOSIUM ON LUCIANUS OF SAMOSATA

17-19 EKİM/OCTOBER 200R

EDİTÖRIEDITÖR Dr. Mustafa Çevik

ULUSLARARASI SAMSATLI LUCIANUS SEMPOZYUMU

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON LUCIANUS OF SAMOSATA

17-19 EKİM/OCTOBER 2008

ADIYAMAN ÜNİVERSİTESİ YAYINNO: 2

Editör Mustafa ÇEVİ~

Redaksiyon Yrd. Doç. Dr. Bahir Selçuk Yrd. Doç. Dr. Fatih Alkayış Okt. Ahmet Şahin

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T.C. Başbakanlık Tanıtrn·a Fonu, T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı ve Anı Yayıncılık'a katkılarından öhlrü teşekkür ederiz.

WAS LUCIANUS A DESPISER OF RELIGION?

Mark EDWARDs·

A discussion of Lucianus's views on religion must include a little thought on· the trope that the Greeks called irony, not only because he himself is an acknowledged virtuoso in the deployment of this trope, but because the most tenacious 1ronists in history have often been those who were wriling seriously about religion, or who brought a religious temper to their writing on other maters. To explain this observation, we must begin by poinling out that there is more than one kind of irony. What all of them have in comman is not only the disguise of the speaker's inten­tion, for that would serve equally well as a definition of lying or of alle­gory; the characteristic of irony is that the cloak which the speaker as­sumes is a. transparent one, so that any intelligent member of his audience will be conscious of both a sartarial and a subliminal meaning which do not coincide. In its simplest form, which is often no more than sarcasm, irony is a palemical device which unmasks the frailty- or absur:dity of the opponent's position, generally by appearing momentarily to share it, and then turning his words or premises against him. Tlıere is, however, a rare­faclion of irony, ably diagnosed by some philosophers which consists in the adoption of an ironic posture towards the position of the ironist him­self. Those who apply this trope have carried their scepticism so far as to be wary even of their own incredulity: to reverse Arnaldo Momigliano's epigram, they have lost faith in the theories of their contemporaries with­out acquiring c:ınY faith intheir own. Their irony is not, like the comman species, merely a solvent to any belief that presents an obstacle to their own victory in argument; it is more like the fabled "universal solvent", which is as dangerous to the alcher:nist as to any recalcitrant substrate, and dissolves even the container in which it is stored.

• Theology Faculty, Oxford University, Christ Church Oxford, UNITED KINGDüM (mark.edwards@chch.ox.ac.uk)

.A 'll{usfnmmS< SamsatU Luciaaus s~apO"!funtU Writing on religion is peculiarly prone to this form of irony because

there is no possibility of achieving certitude in the mere affirmation, let alone the definition, of its subject-matter. Any enduring religion has ac­commodated narratives, practices and ordinances which appear to be at odds with its salient articles of belief. In many ancient cults the obscene was inseparable from worship, even where a num.inous character was generally alt:ached to the god or goddess of this devotion; Christianity and Judaism, which maintained that the moral norm is inviolable and that the holy cannot be made holier by profanation, required their ad-

. herents none the less to pass on to their children sacred tales in which their own God appears to be peevish or myopic, punishing multitudes for the sin of one, adapting anthropomorphic guises while prohibiling the manufacture of images, and favouring the younger against the elder on whom his own laws confer the privilege of inheritance. These blem­ishes are purged by allegory or moral casuistry in ecclesiastical litera­ture, in centrast (say) to the pastimes of the god Krishna (Prabhupada, 1984: vol. 1, 6 ete.), which are celebrated rather than explained away by his Indian devotees. The attempt to capture the infinite freedam of God

' in metaphysical categories 1eads the Christian philosopher to assert that vulgar· predicates such as goodness, justice and wisdom are so in.ade­quate that they barely surpass the lewd usages of paganism. I-Us auster­ity can be more troubling to believers than the Saturnalian licence of the scriptures, and all the more so when he turns upon his own logic lest, on the one han d, he .should seem to be making a case for atheism or, on the other, he should be thought to have done no more than substitute nega­tive for positive constraints upon the ineffable. Anather version of irony, exemplified by the philosopher David Hume, is to grant the apophatic theologian h.is premises, to show that they terrn.inate in atheism, and then to discover oneself still so inclined to inclined to faith that atheism appears to be f\O more capable than theism of furnishing an Arehi­medean point for the disinterested exercise of judgment. A thinker in this state of equipoise who stili regards himself as Christian may elect instead, like Kierkegaard (1989), to adopt a number of theatrica1 pos­tures, all sufficiently facelious in their conlradiction of commonplace

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opinions to be called ironic in the elementary sense, but at the same time so mulually inimkal and so apt to consume themselves in the in their own rhetorical pyromania that none of them can be supposed to embody the permanent convictions of the author.

The victim of the irony in such cases is the reader, who is betrayed for a time into thinking that he knows the author's position, perhaps alsa in to believing that he endorses it, and then finds hirnself no wiser than before. Although it isa post-modem device in Lyotard's sense, it is ex­emplified, as any reader of Lyotard will anticipate, in books written long before the modem era. Erasmus's Prnise of Folly personifies the irralion­ality of his contemporaries, making his mouthpiece a witness simultane­ously against herself and against the specious wisdom of her detractors, while intimating throughout the work that there may be a wisdom higher than both folly and the denunciation of folly. Thomas More's Uto­pin is at once a critique of existing societies and asatire on the attempt to construct a belter society in the imagination. lt is fact of more than casual significance that both were admirers and imitaters of Lucianus. For Lucianus and his fellow-Greeks the archetype and fountainhead of irony was, of course, Plato's Socrates, whose deft subversion of lhe positions advanced by his interlocutors seldam results in the supplanting of the rejected view by one that he acknowledges as his own. There are in­stances, indeed, of his arriving at a conclusion diametrically at variance with the one that he seemed initially to hold, as in the Protngorns; of his being outrnatched in eristic disputation, as in the Eıtthydemııs; and even, in the Pnnnenides, of his being forced by dialectic reasoning to surrender a theory thal he appears to have entertained without misgiving. As Alex­ander Nehamas (1998) has argued, it would be shallow to assume lhat the aporetic posture is merely a mask, thal Socrates has a personal belief which he is slily inculcating by his discomfiture of his adversaries; if thal were true of anyone, it would be true of Plato, insofar as he and Socrates can be distinguished. But of course they cannot be distinguished, and it is Plato himself who issues poetic strictures on the poets, decries the in­flexible spcechlessness of books in menumental prose and allows the views apparently defeated in one dialogue to be advanced with every

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mark of cageney in another. The popular view of Plato is that he seeks dogmatic certitude in a realm of Forms which he postulates as arche­types to the transitory objects of the senses; yet the theory of Formsis so little of a dogma with him that it does not even appear in many dia­logues, and in two at least, the Soplıist and the Pnrmenides, it is quoted with suspicion. Where it is asserted or presupposed, it is not a recipe for knowledge in any quotidian sense of that term: to say that the just is that which is absolutely and indefeasibly just, that the Good is the end of all action and existence, is merely to state the conditions for a knowledge thal wc do not possess. Nevertheless, the nescience of the philosopher is of more account, in Plato's view, than the knowledge of things apparent or the unexarnined ignorance which that knowledge purports to dispel.

Plato is the heir to the thought of Socrates; his legatees in conduct are the Cynics, whose prototypes were Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope. We cannot speak of founders, for Cynics constitute no school and live under no comman law: their mission, as Diogenes expressed it, was to debase the currency - that is, expose the vacuity of all civic norms. The Cynic may be abstemious or promiscuous in diet; he may eschew marriage or copulate in the street; he may live like a sybarite or walk the city in a barrel. His sole imperative is that he must not, by set­ting convenlion at defiance, turn his own defiance into a convention. One Cynic tells another, "Herodes, you are no Cynic"; the other retorts, "Peregrinus, you are no man". Evcn his own singularilies are no rule for him: when Diogenes was lampooned by later Cynics because he died of a surfeit of squid, his admirers urged that this was not an act of greed but a calculaled departure from the regimen by which he was known in Athcns. His statements on religion were as fickle as his economies. He spoke for commonsense when he remarked that there would be far more votive offerings to the gods if those who drowned were able to make them; he elimbed on Plato's stilts to ask why souls should secure a better lot in the next life than Agesilaus simply by performing a ceremony that he omitted; he violates the last taboo when he argues that there is no erime in the robbery of a temple. There is more in this aphorism than the spirit of contradiction: on the one hand, it was a philosophical truism,

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already formulated by Antisthenes, that the gods cannot d well in houses, which would imply that we cannot rob them; on the other, the logic of irony entails that, if the gods prescribe obscenities in popular devotion, they will take all the more delight in sacrilege. W e may read here, then, a burlesque on both philosophical and demetic modes of reasoning; at the same time, the inconsistency of the sentiment with the other sayings attributed to Diogenes betokens not so much a failure of consistency as a principled refusal to impart any consistent teaching on religion.

Marie Goulet-Caze (1996) has noted a variety of postures in the theo­logical teaching of the Cynics .. None is quite so mercurial as Diogenes, but even he cannot match the calculated indecorum of the Menippus whom Lucianus portrays in a number of dialogues. Menippus - though often held up as Lucianus's exemplar of the good Cynic, is seldam pic­tured as a denizen of the real world. When he dies he brings no coin to pay for his crossing of the Styx, but Charon is shocked to find that he carries, as his usual viaticum, the food that is offered only to the dead. In the Jcnromenippus he returns - or at least he says so - from a vayage to the moon and thence to the home of Zeus. In the piece which bears his name the living Menippus re-enacts the descent of Heracles to the un­derworld, apostrophising his old home with a couplet from a Euripidean play, The Mndness of Herncles, as though he were now no langer an indi­vidual but the paradigm of all Cynics. He purports to have achieved the descent by digging a trench in imitatian of Odysseus, the prince of per­jurers in saphistic literature. In the middle of this experiment he suspects that the priest and sereerer who is guiding himisa charlatan; but aman is commonly judged by his associates, and the reader who has followed these adventures will be bound to conclude that the man who relates themis either a Munchausen or a Gulliver.

The dialogue called The Cynic, for example, has been declared sup­posititious, on the grounds that the interlocutor Lycinus, who is apt· to represent Lucianus, proves for once the less able in banter. It is not clear how it eases our difficulties to charge the anomaly to an interpolator, rather than to the fertile wit of Lucianus, who is after all the one sophist of the Antonine age to have made a speciality of the dialogue. We may

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... Ufoularoms. Saauatfo Lucianas s~npozgunm reasonably assume that any sophist of this era was familiar with the dia­logues of Plato; and we may therefore regard Lycinus as the Socrates of an author who was aware that Plato's Socrates had deferred to a series of strangers, and had once been put to the blush by the dialectic of the ven­erable Parmenides. This is the same Parmenides who goes on to perform a series of logomachies so abstruse and inconclusive as to leave one wondering whether he is not after all an object of burlesque. Those who award The Cynic to Lucianus may suspect him of trifling with the preten­sions of Lycinus: who but a madman boasts of his lice, denounces every man with a change of clothing asa sybarite and cleaves to a diet of ratten food in order to keep his stomach free of dainties? He is halfway lo buf­foonery when he claims, on his own authority, that Athenians of the heroic epoch went not only unshaven but unshod, and there is some­thing akin to blasphemy, the typical vice of Cynics, in his dosing chal­lenge to name a male god whose image lacks a beard. Lucianus's Eikones, or lmngcs, is labyrinth of irony- an irony denied to the mere iconoclast, who cannal divorce the images from the original. Those who admire and those who deplore the extravagance of the Cynic in this dialogue commit the same error of seeking a utopian purity in a world of hybrids. The Cynic is no paragen and no laughing-stock, but - like Parmenides - a man too serious to be taken seriously, a holy fool like the sage of the Thenetetııs, who has too much of the divine in him to be able to say what is happening in the next street (T1ıenetetıısl74c-176d).

The one Christian who receives a name in Lucianus, however, is the false pilgrim Peregrinus, at once the dupe and the artist of his own cha­rade, who is vulgarly mistaken for a model of Cynic fortitude when he dies al the Olympic games on a pyre of his own construction. The cen­LTepiece is an invective against the Christian co-religionists of Peregri­nus, Lhe earliest piece in this vein to survive and the most acidulous. In chaplcr 13 the ripple of indignation becomes a wave:

These wretches have convinced themselves that they will be entirely immortal and live for ever, in consequence of which they make light of death and the greater part of them willingly give themselves up. Fur­thermore Lheir original lawgiver persuaded them that all of lhem are

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Mark_ T.aıvartfs -~ brethren one of another. When, having once transgressed, they repudiate the other gods and worship that crucified sophist, they also Jive accord­ing to his laws. Hence they despise all things and hold them common, embracing such opinions without any strict ground of belief. And when some charlatan comes to them, some contriver with many artsat his dis­posal" in no time he becomes rich by his overtures to these guileless men. (Peregrimıs 13)

If this were an ebuilition of personal disgust, it would be fair to de­duce that the source of it is Lucianus's attachment to the gods whose cults werc regularly disparaged by the Christians of his era. But there is of course no proof of such attachmenl, and there is countervailing evi­dence of esteem for Christianity in the. Alexander, where Christians only the Epicureans prove to be equally immune to an epidemic of credulity. Neither passage should be taken as evidence of anything but Lucianus's vcrsatilily: the butts of the Peregrinus are not the Christians, but the populace which after the charlatan's death is duped into worshipping him by a subt-erfuge that would never have imposed upon a Christian. The story that Peregrinus joined the Church in the hope of martyrdarn is most probably the satirist's own invention: its function in this narrative is to show that he was dead to shame and probily before he became a Cynic. Yet, even according to Lucianus's account, Peregrinus dies as a mock-philosopher, an infidel to the Christians and a gad to their perse­cutors. Among his adepts are some who, like the superstitious philoso­pher in the Plıilopseudes ought to have known better; but the moral of his death and the adulation that accrues to it is that those who reject one form of irrationality may be all the rnore easily ambushed by another. The Cynic rnakes a spectacle of his life, and has only to lose his balance to become ari impostor: as philosophy herself complains at the beginning of the Rımnways, there are many who suppose themselves to be sages when Lhey have rnerely aped same picturesque concomitant of sage­hood.

Lucianus's essay On Statues is deseribed by the editar of the Loeb edition as a Lypical Cynic diatribe, which is to say that it is by far the most lrite of the works that are customarily ascribed to him. It com-

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A V(usUJmros• SomsatU Ludmu.s s~"pozgwnu mences in style of a wordy moralist who is vexed by the indignjties that the world offers to its gods; then come the familiar anirnadversions on the venal gods of _myth, the bearded children of beardless deities and the grotesque shapes which the Olympians are supposed to have donned in Egypt. The only prop to the lameness of the piece is an exquisite peram­bulanan through the heavens, which ends in comedy when we find the gods sniffing anxiously for the smoke of human altars. A panorarnic survey of Greek temples culminates in a sneer at those who think that in Phidias' statue of Zeus they behold the limbs of the god himself. Of course there were no such people, and the taunt is so inept that the satire turns upon the satirist, whose rigmarole is perhaps conceived as a par­ody of the harangues that Christian zealots were apt to force upon the pagans of this epoch. Lucianus here resembles a good comedian aping the act of a less imaginative riva!; who may none the less retire to polite applause, because he is trying to raise a laugh against phenomena that deserve our ridicule.

In a far more animated piece On Fımernls, the itinerary of Hades is interrupted first by the author's rebuke to the mourners and then by an imaginary speech from the corpse, admonishing his parents that we have no ca use to regret the goods of life once we are released from i ts tribulations. Lucianus here juxtaposes two conventional palliatives to the fear of death, the gaudy promise of a future life and the argument that oblivion cures all ills. The incompatibility of the two exposes the fact that we adıninister lhese consolations only because they are consolalions, and not because we know either to be true.

The treatise On the Syrinn Goddess resurrects the idiom of Herodo­tus. Its quaintness may evoke a smile, but we miss the saline wit that is characteristic of Lucianus in his Attic prose. This is not to say that the camouflage is uncharaclerislic of the author. His irony lies not in mock­ing the goddess or Herodotus, nor in mocking those who mock them; the adoption of a dassic style dissociates the author from his subject, and should warn us against any unilinear reading, whether serious or bur­lesque.

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In Zeus Cross-Examined the king of the gods is questioned by a Cynic, who cannot reconcile his sovereignty with the inexorable powers that are ascribed by some to Destiny and by others to the Fates. Zeus is reduced to bombast, but the inquisitor professes to feel compassian for the fates, who have so much work to do, and concludes that, for all that he now understands about Destiny, he appears to be doomed to ignorance of his own lot. This is not merely flippant, for it is one thing to convict the po­ets of fabling and anather to solve a question which continues to vitiate our sense of fTeedom and our canfidence in the justice of the world. In a companian piece, Zeus at the Theatre, the atheist Darnis worsts the champion of the gods in a staged debate; the reader knows, however,

. that his victory cannot be complete when the epilogue is entrusted to Zeus and Hermes: ·

Hermes. Is it any great evilif a few go away convinced of this? Those who know otherwise are after all much more numerous - the majority of Greeks and all the barbarians.

Zeus. But, Hermes, what a very fine remark it was that Darius made about Zopyrus; I too indeed would rather have that one Darnis as my ally than have l~n thousand Babylons in my possession. (Zeus Trngoedus 53).

We should not ignore the pathas of this conclusion that the philoso­pher's arts would be better spent in defence of the gods than in ridicule. Lucianus is not professing to know, despite all argument, that the gods exist but he does mean to inlimate that the philosopher's conscience ought not to be satisfied when he has laughed down an untenable belief. Darnis is explodes the logic and escapes the menaces of his interlocutor; the human speak in Zeus Cross-Exnmined, however, seems to be guilty of false bravacia when he exclaims that he would not be afraid to suffer the pains of hell if he can enjoy the pleasures of the present life. This is nei­ther the wisdom of Epicurus nor the prudence of the comman man, and the author: who puts this sentiment into his mouth cannot be said to hold unambiguously that humans are better off without their gods. Lucianus does no hold any position unarnbiguously: if there is little ground for belief in the gods, it may be equally true that virtue seldam flourishes in

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the absence of belief. For this reason he carries negation to the point of self-negation, where the shrewd controversialist falls into the toils of his own dexterity.

Thus Lucianus, while he does not fiatter any devotional or discipular communion of his day, does not approach them in a spirit of crude hostil­ity or derision. He can play the indignant moralist, the sceptical inquirer or the creedless infidel, h\.ıt the very ease with which he donsor sheds the mask should warn us never to identify the persona with the man. The postures that he strikes are ironic in the unrefined sense that he entertains an opponent's position only to put the scalpel to its weaknesses; they are cılso ironic, however, in the quintessentially Socratic mode which treats the ironic stance itself as provisional. If we consider him nothing but a sophist, we may conclude that versatility in argument is for him a merely rhetori­cal end, of no didacti.c value; if, on the other hand, we are permitted to credit him with a philosophy, it will not be that of the smug freethinker or the believing innocent, but that of the mercurial dissembler, the diverse and undulant being of Michel de Montaigne, who holds that no other role can be sustained without vacillation and reserve.

Bibliography

M. O. GOtılet-Caze (1996), "Religion and the Early Cynics", in R. Branham, R. Bracht and M.O. Goulet-Caze (eds), Tlıe Cynics. Tlıe Cynic Mavement and ils Legncy (Berkeley: University of California), 47-80.

S. Kierkegaard (1989), Tlıe Concepl of lrony witlı Contin11nf Refereııce to Socrnles, trans. H. Wong and E. Wong (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Originally published 1841.

A. Nehamas (1998), Tlıe Ari of Living. Socrntic Refleclions from Pfnlo lo Foııcmılt (Berke­ley: University of California Press).

Prabhupada, A.C. B. ((1984), Krsnn. Tlıe Sııpreme Personnlity of tlıe Godlıend, 2 vols (Los Angeles: Bhaktivcdanta Book Trust).

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