CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Greek Religion and Philosophy:
The God of the Philosopher
Fritz-Gregor Herrmann
Von allen Geistern, die verneinen,
Ist mir der Schalk am wenigsten zur Last.
J.W. Goethe,FaustA book on Greek philosophy would not be complete without a chapter on Greek
religion, be it on ‘‘the theology of the early Greek philosophers,’’ on ‘‘God and
Greek philosophy,’’ on ‘‘rational theology’’ or on ‘‘philosophy and religion.’’ But it
is much less clear whether a volume on Greek religion would be similarly incomplete
without a chapter on Greek philosophy or on ‘‘philosophical religion.’’ This is because,
from at least the early fifth century onwards, theological thinking formed an integral
part of philosophical thinking for some of the most influential early, Presocratic
philosophers. By contrast, it is doubtful whether the religion of the many, i.e. that of
the non-philosophers, was influenced in any substantial way by philosophical specula-
tion concerning the divine in the classical or even the hellenistic period.
From a different perspective, few individuals in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries are affected by the Greek gods in their everyday life, but no one in the
Western world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is unaffected by Greek
philosophy. The reason for both these aspects of the modern predicament are, of
course, historical, and they are bound up with the history of the Christian Church in
antiquity and especially in medieval and early modern times. For it was the Christian
Church that released Western philosophy, which it had guarded for a thousand years,
and Western philosophy shapes the life and the world-view of modern man. At the
same time, many of the beliefs of followers of present-day monotheistic religions are
informed by theological speculation initiated by the ancient Greek philosophers,
while they are largely unaffected by the practice of ancient Greek religion.
These are the parameters for this treatment of an aspect of Greek philosophical
theology. The philosopher with whose god, whose views of the divine, whose religion
I shall be concerned is Plato. What came before him – in particular, for our purposes,
the books by Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Empedocles – is available to us in frag-
mentary form only. This may be no accident. For all we know, the scope and depth
of Plato’s philosophical argument as well as those of his speculation about god, the