Inventing Superstition: From The Hippocratics To The Christians

InvEnting Superstition InvEnting Superstition from the hippocratics to the christians DALE B. MARTIN harvard univer sit y press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2004 Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Dale B., 1954– Inventing superstition : from the Hippocratics to the Christians / Dale B. Martin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01534-7 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Philosophy and religion—Greece. 3. Philosophy and religion—Rome. 4. Superstition—Religious aspects—History—To 1500. I. Title. B187.R46M37 2004 398′.41′0901—dc22 2004047407 To Wayne A. Meeks Contents Preface ix 1 Superstitious Christians 1 2 Problems of Definition 10 3 Inventing Deisidaimonia: Theophrastus, Religious Etiquette, and Theological Optimism 21 4 Dealing with Disease: The Hippocratics and the Divine 36 5 Solidifying a New Sensibility: Plato and Aristotle on the Optimal Universe 51 6 Diodorus Siculus and the Failure of Philosophy 79 7 Cracks in the Philosophical System: Plutarch and the Philosophy of Demons 93 8 Galen on the Necessity of Nature and the Theology of Teleology 109 viii Contents 9 Roman Superstitio and Roman Power 125 10 Celsus and the Attack on Christianity 140 11 Origen and the Defense of Christianity 160 12 The Philosophers Turn: Philosophical Daimons in Late Antiquity 187 13 Turning the Tables: Eusebius, the “Triumph” of Christianity, and the Superstition of the Greeks 207 Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of a Grand Optimal Illusion 226 Notes 245 Works Cited 283 Index 301 Preface I n a previous book, The Corinthian Body, I found myself making a statement that seemed to me self-evident. In speaking of certain early Christian beliefs, such as the resurrection of the body, I commented that educated Greeks would generally have rejected these beliefs and even found them to smack of “superstition,” but I added that their reasons for doing so had nothing to do with any rejection of “supernaturalism.” I argued in that book that the category of “the supernatural” didn’t really exist in the classical world, so dependence on “supernatural causation” would not have been the issue in rendering a belief or action “superstitious” in the eyes of an ancient intellectual. After finishing that book, it haunted me that I had not provided any alternative description of what actually counted in the ancient world as “superstition” and why, nor did I know of any study that had done so. I set out to find answers to those questions, and this book is the result. I have attempted to write for a generally educated audience, hoping that more than scholars of antiquity will find my topic in- x Preface teresting. The scholarship on the subjects addressed by this book —ancient and comparative religion, medicine, science, and philosophy—is vast. (And I have limited my treatment to ancient Greek and Roman cultures, leaving out, for instance, the Ancient Near East.) Yet in keeping with my goal of producing a generally accessible book, I have kept the dialogue with other scholarship to a minimum and simply laid out my own case unless there seemed to be a real need to place my ideas within the context of contemporary scholarly debate, and even then, I have tried to relegate most of that comment to the notes. Moreover, the notes and references are