Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

On the Sacred Disease 67is wrong to regard epilepsy (or any other disease) as a pollution (this seemsto be the point of the words in 1.40: ‘as if adisease were a pollution – quod non’). He obviously thinks that no moralfactor (punishment for crime or transgressions) is involved, 53 and that, as aconsequence, one should not believe that it can be cured by the gods alone.As for the author’s religious notions, we may deduce from these passagesthat he believes in gods who grant men purification of their moral transgressionsand who are to be worshipped in temples by means of prayerand sacrifice. It is difficult to see how this conception of ‘the divine’ (totheion) can be incorporated within the naturalistic theology with which hehas often been credited. 54 If ‘the divine’ mentioned in 1.45 is to be identifiedwith the divine Nature or natural laws, it cannot be seen how thismoral purification should be conceived within such a theology (i.e., apartfrom the question of what would be the point of the writer making stipulationsabout ritual and cult if he held such a mechanistic conceptionof the divine). But instead of concluding, therefore, that the statementsof the first chapter are merely rhetorical remarks which do not reflect theauthor’s own religious opinion (which is apparently the course taken bymost interpreters), I would throw doubt on the reality of this ‘naturalistictheology’ – for which I have given other reasons as well. It seems better toproceed in the opposite direction, which means starting from the religiousassertions of the first chapter and then trying to understand the statementsabout the divine character of the disease. In this way, the text can be understoodas motivated by two interrelated purposes. First, by claiming thatepilepsy is not god-sent in the traditional sense, the author does not intendto reject the notion of divine dispensation as such; his statements are tobe regarded as a form of corrective criticism of a traditional religious idea.The author claims that it is blasphemous to hold that a holy and purebeing like a god would send diseases as a form of pollution; thus his remarksmay be compared with statements by Plato which aim at correctingand modifying the traditional concept of divine dispensation (theia moira)without questioning the existence of this divine dispensation as such. 55 Atthe same time – and this is the second, but no doubt more urgent purposeof the treatise – the author strives to disengage epilepsy from the religiousdomain and to put it on an equal level, both in its aetiology and in itstherapy, with all other diseases (an attempt which is easily understood from53 See Jaeger (1980) 158.54 Cf. the hesitant remarks of Nörenberg (1968) 76–7.55 Cf. Republic 379 a–380 c (e.g. 380 c 8–9: ‘God is not the cause of everything but only of what isgood’) and Phaedrus 244 c.