On the Sacred Disease 69
which simply are not there. This danger is increased when this reading
is guided by modern ideas about what is ‘primitive’ or ‘mythic’ and what
is ‘advanced’ and ‘rational’, so that by labelling an author as advanced or
enlightened we are too much guided in our interpretation of the text by
what we expect him to say. Nowhere inOn the Sacred Diseasedo we find
statements such as that ‘Nature is divine’; nowhere do we find an explicit
rejection of divine intervention in natural processes or of divine dispen-
sation as such.^57 Caution is suggested not only by a consideration of the
plurality and heterogeneity of opinions on religious matters in the second
half of the fifth century,^58 but also by the different forms in which reflec-
tion on these matters has manifested itself. It is important to distinguish
between the corrective, ‘cathartic’ criticism of traditional religious beliefs
and the exposition of a positive theology. It seems that the author ofOn
the Sacred Diseasehas been regarded too much as an exponent of the latter,
and that he has been regarded more as a philosopher or a theologian than
as a physician. Instead, I propose to regard as the author’s primary concern
the disengagement of epilepsy from the religious domain (which implies
claiming it as an object of medicine) and his accusations of impiety as one
rather successful way to achieve this goal; in this way the corrective criticism
of a traditional idea (viz., that diseases are sent by the gods) is subordinated
to a primarily medical purpose.
Even if this interpretation is convincing, it cannot be denied that there
remains a tension between the author’s belief in gods who cleanse men from
their moral transgressions and his statements about the divine character of
the disease. This tension becomes especially manifest when we confront
his categorical rejection of the idea that holy beings like gods send diseases
(which he labels as highly blasphemous) with his assertion, ten lines further
down, that diseases are divine in virtue of having a nature. The problem is
how this ‘being divine’ of diseases is related to the purifying influence of
the gods mentioned in 1. 44 – 6. The author does not explain this, and we
may wonder whether he, if he was aware of this problem, would have been
capable of solving it. Of course, there are several possible solutions which
wemight suggest, and we could speculate about the author’s unexpressed
ideas on theodicy and on the relation between the gods and the world
in terms of providence, deism, determinism, and so on.^59 But I prefer to
(^57) Contra H. W. Miller ( 1948 ) 2. (^58) On this Guthrie ( 1969 ) vol.iii, 226 – 49.
(^59) For such speculations cf. Thivel ( 1975 ) 67 – 8 and Norenberg ( ̈ 1968 ) 75 – 6. Thivel draws an almost
Aristotelian picture of the author’s world-view: ‘ces dieux... sont tropelev ́ ́es pour intervenir dans
les affaires humaines. Tout se passe comme si...l’univers ́etait separ ́ ́e en deux r ́egions qui ne com-
muniquent pas: le monde terrestre (en termes aristot ́eliciens on dirait: “sublunaire”) o`u vivent
les hommes, et qui est r ́egi, y compris les maladies, par le d ́eterminisme (la “nature”, -