Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

70 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusappreciate this tension and to accept it as a result of the polemical characterof the treatise or even, perhaps, as one of those paradoxes and ambiguitieswhich are characteristic of religious thought – even the religious thoughtof intellectuals. 60It may be thought that this view amounts, after all, to the positionwhich I rejected at the end of the introduction, namely that we neednot be surprised to find intellectuals holding or expressing religious ideaswhich seem incompatible with each other (either for social or for privatereasons). But it will by now have become clear for what reasons (apart fromthose mentioned ad loc.) I did not accept that position. We have seen thatthe interpretation of the author’s statements about the divine character ofthe disease, as well as the attempt to deduce his theological ideas from thesestatements, involved many problems. We have also seen the difficultiesinvolved in the evaluation of the author’s accusations of asebeia, and I haveshown that it is possible to discern, in spite of the hypothetical characterof most of these accusations, elements of the author’s own conviction.If the results of this discussion (especially my views on the range andon the rhetorical impact of the assertions about the divinity of diseases)are convincing, the discrepancy noted at the beginning of this paper hasdecreased considerably, though it has not disappeared. Yet we are now in amuch better position to formulate the problem more adequately and to lookfor an explanation that is more to the point than the one offered in section 1.4 conclusionIt will by now have become clear why the word ‘theology’ in the title of thischapter has been put between quotation marks. It is certainly wrong to holdthat the author of On the Sacred Disease systematically exposes his religiousbeliefs and his ideas on the nature of divine causation in this text. Yet whathe does show of these beliefs admits of the following conclusions. Thewriter believes in gods who grant men purification of their transgressions), et le monde céleste, séjour des dieux incorruptibles, qui habitent sans doute les astres.Ainsi les phénomènes naturels, pluie et sécheresse, vents et saisons, qui entrent pour une bonne partdans les causes des maladies, sont dus des enchaînements aveugles, où la responsabilité des dieuxn’est nullement engagée.’ But this view is a consequence of Thivel’s interpretation of 18.1–2, whichhe takes as implying that natural phenomena have no divine aspect whatsoever (see n. 25 above). Itwill be clear that I cannot endorse this interpretation. As for Nörenberg see n. 9 above: his accountof the problem is closer to the text, but it is confused because of his failure to distinguish betweeninterpretations (1) and (2).60 Similar ambiguities may be found in the religious thought of, e.g., Plato and Aristotle; see Verdenius(1960); Babut (1974).