Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

On the Sacred Disease 65But I hold that the body of a man is not polluted by a god, that which is mostcorruptible by that which is most holy, but that even when it happens to be pollutedor affected by something else, it is more likely to be cleansed from this by the god andsanctified than to be polluted by him. Concerning the greatest and most impiousof our transgressions it is the divine which purifies and sanctifies us and washesthem away from us; and we ourselves mark the boundaries of the sanctuaries andthe precincts of the gods, lest anyone who is not pure would transgress them, andwhen we enter the temple we sprinkle ourselves, not as polluting ourselves thereby,but in order to be cleansed from an earlier pollution we might have contracted.Such is my opinion about the purifications.It seems that if we are looking for the writer’s religious convictions wemay find them here. The first sentence shows that the author rejects thepresuppositions of his opponents, namely that a god is the cause of adisease; on the contrary, he says, it is more likely that if a man is pollutedby something else (, i.e. something different from a god), the godwill cleanse him from it than pollute him with it. There is no reason todoubt the author’s sincerity here: the belief that a god should pollute aman with a disease is obviously blasphemous to him; and the point of theapposition ‘that which is most corruptible by that which is most holy’ ( ) is clearly that no ‘pollution’ (miasma)can come from such a holy and pure being as a god. As for the positivepart of the statement, that a god is more likely to cleanse people of theirpollutions than to bestow these to them, one may still doubt whether this isjust hypothetical (‘more likely’) or whether the author takes this as applyingto a real situation. 48 But this doubt disappears with the next sentence(1.45–6), which evidently expresses the author’s own opinion and in whichhis personal involvement is marked by the use of ‘ourselves’ () and ofthe first person plural ( ). Thissentence shows that the author believes in the purifying and cleansingworking of the divine. I do not think that the shift of ‘the god’ ( )to ‘the divine’ ( ) is significant here as expressing a reluctance tobelieve in ‘personal’ or concrete gods, for in the course of the sentencehe uses the expression ‘the gods’ ( ). 49 The use of to theion ismotivated by the contrast with to anthrōpinon: cleansing is performed bythe divine, not – as the magicians believe (1.39, 6.362 L.) – by humanbeings. In fact, this whole sentence breathes an unmistakably polemicalatmosphere: the marking off of sacred places for the worship of the gods was48 But represents a potential optative rather than an unfulfilled condition.49 Contra Nörenberg (1968) 69ff. The distribution of and in this context doesnot admit of being used as proof that the author does not believe in ‘personal’ gods.