On the Sacred Disease 67
is wrong to regard epilepsy (or any other disease) as a pollution (this seems
to be the point of the words?
in 1. 40 : ‘as if a
disease were a pollution –quod non’). He obviously thinks that no moral
factor (punishment for crime or transgressions) is involved,^53 and that, as a
consequence, one should not believe that it can be cured by the gods alone.
As for the author’s religious notions, we may deduce from these passages
that he believes in gods who grant men purification of their moral trans-
gressions and who are to be worshipped in temples by means of prayer
and sacrifice. It is difficult to see how this conception of ‘the divine’ (to
theion) can be incorporated within the naturalistic theology with which he
has often been credited.^54 If ‘the divine’ mentioned in 1. 45 is to be iden-
tified with the divine Nature or natural laws, it cannot be seen how this
moral purification should be conceived within such a theology (i.e., apart
from the question of what would be the point of the writer making stip-
ulations about ritual and cult if he held such a mechanistic conception
of the divine). But instead of concluding, therefore, that the statements
of the first chapter are merely rhetorical remarks which do not reflect the
author’s own religious opinion (which is apparently the course taken by
most interpreters), I would throw doubt on the reality of this ‘naturalistic
theology’ – for which I have given other reasons as well. It seems better to
proceed in the opposite direction, which means starting from the religious
assertions of the first chapter and then trying to understand the statements
about the divine character of the disease. In this way, the text can be un-
derstood as motivated by two interrelated purposes. First, by claiming that
epilepsy is not god-sent in the traditional sense, the author does not intend
to reject the notion of divine dispensation as such; his statements are to
be regarded as a form of corrective criticism of a traditional religious idea.
The author claims that it is blasphemous to hold that a holy and pure
being like a god would send diseases as a form of pollution; thus his re-
marks may be compared with statements by Plato which aim at correcting
and modifying the traditional concept of divine dispensation (theia moira)
without questioning the existence of this divine dispensation as such.^55 At
the same time – and this is the second, but no doubt more urgent purpose
of the treatise – the author strives to disengage epilepsy from the religious
domain and to put it on an equal level, both in its aetiology and in its
therapy, with all other diseases (an attempt which is easily understood from
(^53) See Jaeger ( 1980 ) 158.
(^54) Cf. the hesitant remarks of Norenberg ( ̈ 1968 ) 76 – 7.
(^55) Cf.Republic 379 a– 380 c (e.g. 380 c 8 – 9 : ‘God is not the cause of everything but only of what is
good’) andPhaedrus 244 c.