Another consequence of the failure to appreciate the complexity of Greek religious
attitudes is the excessive prominence given to views apparently critical of traditional
religion. The expression of criticism of any single aspect of religious practice or
ideology (divination, say, or the unjust man going unpunished) is commonly taken
as a criticism of Greek religion as a whole; if however, we cease thinking of Greek
religious thought as a single inflexible whole, one dent to which is fatally destructive,
such criticism of a single aspect becomes transformed from an ‘‘anti-religious’’ act to
a religious one (see Harrison 2000:13–14). As Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has
underlined repeatedly, ‘‘ ‘exploring’ must not be confused with ‘criticizing’ ’’
(1997:185, 2003; cf. Kearns 1996:513–14); she has consequently declared the
tragedians’ ‘‘alleged challenge to the religious discourse of the polis’’ to be a ‘‘mod-
ern mirage’’ (1998b:55; see now especially 2003:291–458). With the evidence of
non-philosophical literature for Greek conceptions of the divine largely elided, philo-
sophical literature also tends to stand out artificially. So, for example, a common
emphasis on the lack of contact between philosophical developments, or more
broadly ‘‘religious thought,’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘lived religion’’ (i.e., myth and
ritual action) on the other: ‘‘the picture of religion as practised changes hardly at all,
in spite of the deeds of all the intellectual heroes’’ (Burkert 1985:305, cf. 317; Price
1998:126; Bremmer 1982; contrast Humphreys 2004:51–76). It is only, however, by
setting philosophical developments against pre-existing conceptions of the divine that
we can begin to ask (in Parker’s words, of the sophistic movement) ‘‘what in all this
was truly threatening or ‘impious’; what constituted an attack from without rather
than from within the traditional religious framework, that loose and accommodating
structure within which certain forms of doubt, criticism, and revision were, in fact,
traditional’’ (1996:210; cf. C. Osborne 1997).
Challenges to the Principal Tenets of Modern
Scholarship on Greek ReligionFinally, a focus on ‘‘literary religion’’ unsettles some of the principal tenets of
modern scholarship on Greek religion (what Robert Garland has described tellingly
as a ‘‘negative catechism’’ [Garland 1994:ix]; see further Bendlin 2001; Harrison
2000:1–30).
Greek religion is concerned, not with the individual (and his soul), but the commu-
nity. Greek religion, according to Jan Bremmer, for example, ‘‘was ‘‘embedded’’;
it was public and communal rather than private and individual’’ (Bremmer
1994:1; cf. Cartledge 1992:xv; R. Osborne 1994:144); parallel to this is the
position that emotion is not a valid criterion for religious experience (e.g. Price
1984:10; cf. I. Morris 1993:24). This last point is surely right, but not (as is
sometimes held) because it reflects modern ‘‘Christianizing’’ assumptions; it
would be no more adequate as a criterion of modern (Christian) religious
experience (Evans-Pritchard 1965:44; cf. Skorupski 1976:144). At the same
time, Greek literature throws up ample evidence of a ‘‘warm piety’’ towards
the gods which has been passed over or dismissed as exceptional (Bruit Zaidman
and Schmitt Pantel 1992:13–15) – the many references to ‘‘dear gods’’ (Parker382 Thomas Harrison