Theology and Philosophy in Early Greek Thought *

WHEN one reads the Presocratics with open mind and sensitive ear one cannot help being struck by the religious note in much of what they say. Few words occur more frequently in their fragments than the term 'god'. ¹ The style itself in certain contexts is charged with religious associations; the rhythm and sentence structure of certain utterances is unmistakably hymnodic. ² In Parmenides and Empedocles the whole doctrine of Being and Nature is put forth as a religious revelation. The major themes of all the physiologoi—the creation of the world, the necessity of its order, the origin of life, the nature of the soul, and even such things as the causes of winds, rain, lightning and thunder, rivers, meteorites, eclipses, earthquakes, plagues—were matters of vivid religious import to their contemporaries. Lightning, thunder, a storm, an earthquake were 'signs from Zeus' (διοσημίαι) that could stop a meeting of the Law Courts or of the Assembly; ³ religious feeling for an eclipse could overrule military intelligence to cause the greatest disaster ever suffered by Athenian arms. ⁴ The philosophers who took the 'natural' view of these things could not be indifferent to the religious bearing of their conclusions. To think of them as mere naturalists, bracketing off their speculations from religious belief and feeling, would be to take a very anachronistic view of their thought.