Did the Greeks Believe In Their Myths?
Belief and Disbelief in a Secular Age
Paul Veyne argues that the Greeks did not believe all the fanciful stuff we read in Herodotus and Homer. Don’t assume that the ancients were naive literalists. Their adherence to myth was, as it were, postmodern. They recognized a meaning and a utility to their stories even if they understood them to be scientifically deficient. They saw with a squint what we can’t see because rationalism has closed both of our eyes entirely.
If Veyne is right, our modern obsession with creed (and our inability to accept it) is a later historical development that says more about us than our ancestors. If you want to be provocative you might say, in a Jewish context, that the rabbis were Kaplanian reconstructionists: their adherence to the Exodus story was based not in their belief in its historical veracity but in its civilization value. If this is so, then there is no theoretical reason why one couldn’t embrace Islam without believing Mohammed to have risen to heaven on a horse, or Christianity without believing in an immaculate conception.
Robin Hanson and other social scientists make the point that much that we think is about X is more primarily about signaling Y. For example, I may enjoy going to art museums, but the function of my attendance is to signal the kind of person I am (sophisticated, sensitive, “cultured,” etc.) more than it is about the art itself. We typically assume that this lens—when applied to religious phenomena—is 1) reductive and 2) antagonistic. For it reveals religious life to be a form of “orthopraxy” rather than “orthodoxy.” Yet if we go with Veyne’s thesis, “We have never been orthodox.” The ancients knew their creedal adherence to various stories was valuable more as a form of “signaling” than as a form of “getting it right.”
On this telling, the ancients weren’t bad scientists or bad historians. They were great storytellers for whom fiction was more truthful than a plain, 19th c. style factual account of things.
One counter argument is that if creed really doesn’t matter as much as we think, why all the inter-religious wars? Why all the heresy-hunting?
A Hansonian answer is that creed is a cipher for other loyalties. Historical religious conflicts were rooted in real, political disagreements—but the fight over signals was a proxy war for other questions of authority. The “map is not the territory.”
If my argument is remotely persuasive, it should contribute a small amount to the person who says, “I would go to Church/Synagogue/Mosque, if only I could believe in God; if only I could believe in miracle Z.” It’s possible that your view of what belief is and what it requires is itself modern, secular, and alienated. Belief is not a precondition for commitment; commitment enables one to understand and refine the nature of belief.
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