On the Sacred Disease 65
But I hold that the body of a man is not polluted by a god, that which is most
corruptible by that which is most holy, but that even when it happens to be polluted
or affected by something else, it is more likely to be cleansed from this by the god and
sanctified than to be polluted by him. Concerning the greatest and most impious
of our transgressions it is the divine which purifies and sanctifies us and washes
them away from us; and we ourselves mark the boundaries of the sanctuaries and
the precincts of the gods, lest anyone who is not pure would transgress them, and
when we enter the temple we sprinkle ourselves, not as polluting ourselves thereby,
but in order to be cleansed from an earlier pollution we might have contracted.
Such is my opinion about the purifications.
It seems that if we are looking for the writer’s religious convictions we
may find them here. The first sentence shows that the author rejects the
presuppositions of his opponents, namely that a god is the cause of a
disease; on the contrary, he says, it is more likely that if a man is polluted
by something else (4 , i.e. something different from a god), the god
will cleanse him from it than pollute him with it. There is no reason to
doubt the author’s sincerity here: the belief that a god should pollute a
man with a disease is obviously blasphemous to him; and the point of the
apposition ‘that which is most corruptible by that which is most holy’ (3
#! H3 $ M ) is clearly that no ‘pollution’ (miasma)
can come from such a holy and pure being as a god. As for the positive
part of the statement, that a god is more likely to cleanse people of their
pollutions than to bestow these to them, one may still doubt whether this is
just hypothetical (‘morelikely’) or whether the author takes this as applying
to a real situation.^48 But this doubt disappears with the next sentence
( 1. 45 – 6 ), which evidently expresses the author’s own opinion and in which
his personal involvement is marked by the use of ‘ourselves’ (() and of
the first person plural (8 > > > " > > >
! ). This
sentence shows that the author believes in the purifying and cleansing
working of the divine. I do not think that the shift of ‘the god’ ( !)
to ‘the divine’ (3 ) is significant here as expressing a reluctance to
believe in ‘personal’ or concrete gods, for in the course of the sentence
he uses the expression ‘the gods’ (
).^49 The use ofto theionis
motivated by the contrast withto anthr ̄opinon: cleansing is performed by
the divine, not – as the magicians believe ( 1. 39 , 6. 362 L.) – by human
beings. In fact, this whole sentence breathes an unmistakably polemical
atmosphere: the marking off of sacred places for the worship of the gods was
(^48) ButJ
represents a potential optative rather than an unfulfilled condition.
(^49) Contra N ̈orenberg ( 1968 ) 69 ff. The distribution of !0 / and3 in this context does
not admit of being used as proof that the author does not believe in ‘personal’ gods.