Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

On the Sacred Disease 69which simply are not there. This danger is increased when this readingis guided by modern ideas about what is ‘primitive’ or ‘mythic’ and whatis ‘advanced’ and ‘rational’, so that by labelling an author as advanced orenlightened we are too much guided in our interpretation of the text bywhat we expect him to say. Nowhere in On the Sacred Disease do we findstatements such as that ‘Nature is divine’; nowhere do we find an explicitrejection of divine intervention in natural processes or of divine dispensationas such. 57 Caution is suggested not only by a consideration of theplurality and heterogeneity of opinions on religious matters in the secondhalf of the fifth century, 58 but also by the different forms in which reflectionon these matters has manifested itself. It is important to distinguishbetween the corrective, ‘cathartic’ criticism of traditional religious beliefsand the exposition of a positive theology. It seems that the author of Onthe Sacred Disease has been regarded too much as an exponent of the latter,and that he has been regarded more as a philosopher or a theologian thanas a physician. Instead, I propose to regard as the author’s primary concernthe disengagement of epilepsy from the religious domain (which impliesclaiming it as an object of medicine) and his accusations of impiety as onerather successful way to achieve this goal; in this way the corrective criticismof a traditional idea (viz., that diseases are sent by the gods) is subordinatedto a primarily medical purpose.Even if this interpretation is convincing, it cannot be denied that thereremains a tension between the author’s belief in gods who cleanse men fromtheir moral transgressions and his statements about the divine character ofthe disease. This tension becomes especially manifest when we confronthis categorical rejection of the idea that holy beings like gods send diseases(which he labels as highly blasphemous) with his assertion, ten lines furtherdown, that diseases are divine in virtue of having a nature. The problem ishow this ‘being divine’ of diseases is related to the purifying influence ofthe gods mentioned in 1.44–6. The author does not explain this, and wemay wonder whether he, if he was aware of this problem, would have beencapable of solving it. Of course, there are several possible solutions whichwe might suggest, and we could speculate about the author’s unexpressedideas on theodicy and on the relation between the gods and the worldin terms of providence, deism, determinism, and so on. 59 But I prefer to57 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 Nörenberg (1968) 75–6. Thivel draws an almostAristotelian picture of the author’s world-view: ‘ces dieux . . . sont trop élevés pour intervenir dansles affaires humaines. Tout se passe comme si ...l’univers était séparé en deux régions qui ne communiquentpas: le monde terrestre (en termes aristotéliciens on dirait: “sublunaire”) où viventles hommes, et qui est régi, y compris les maladies, par le déterminisme (la “nature”,