From the Beginning to Plato

82 HERACLITUS
altogether. Indeed atheism is effectively unknown in antiquity. 7 The presence of
the divine in the systematic explanations offered by the early thinkers should not
be taken as merely a figure of speech. It suggests a revised account of the work of
the gods, in which what is truly divine is a cause outside and beyond the
humdrum decisions of unpredictable individuals. Hence the conventional picture
of the gods in those terms is being rejected, but that is not to make the gods
redundant, nor to say that the world is independent of any divine influence.
Physics and theology are still closely linked, even in Xenophanes.
Heraclitus’ analysis of religious practice and belief needs to be understood
before we go any further. Perhaps religion is not peculiarly significant for
Heraclitus, but it provides a classic illustration of his account of the complex
significance of things in general. 8 Several of his sayings have been routinely
taken as critical of established religious rites, and of conventional ideas of what
gods are. But although Heraclitus clearly has some point to make about the rites
and beliefs that he mentions, careful attention to his ideas suggests that the
sayings usually taken to ridicule religion are better read as observations about the
significance of the religious context: although these sayings argue against simpleminded
misunderstanding of conventional piety, they do not condemn such piety
in itself. Instead they offer a more sophisticated theological picture, one that
belongs with Heraclitus’ famous commitment to the unity of opposites. 9
We may start by looking at a group of fragments concerned with conventional
rituals. In fragment B5 people (‘they’) who are polluted with blood are said to
purify themselves with blood. 10 Heraclitus compares the procedure with using
mud to wash off mud and observes (quite correctly) that in ordinary life such a
procedure would be thought insane:
Tainted with blood they purify themselves in a different way 11 as if
someone who stepped into mud were cleansed with mud. But any human
who claimed that the person was doing that would be considered insane. 12
This is the first part of an unusually long piece of Heraclitus’ prose. On the
standard interpretation 13 it is taken as a mocking reductio: what good is a
purification of that sort? It can’t work any more than a mud bath! Heraclitus, like
a modern logical positivist, stands for no nonsense: look at the ritual in the cold
light of reason, he says, and it cannot possibly produce the results that it claims
to produce.
But is this right? Heraclitus says that in the ritual purification they ‘purify
themselves in a different way’. The word allo s is ambiguous: its basic meaning
is ‘differently’ (the participants in the religious ritual are ‘differently purified’)
but it can also mean ‘pointlessly’, and that is how it is usually taken when the
saying is read as a reductio of religious practice. The ambiguity, as generally in
Heraclitus, is surely not accidental. 14 The comparison with washing in mud
demonstrates not the absurdity of the rite but the different logic that applies in
the sacred context. Ritual purification is a different kind of washing, a kind that