Eric Robertson Dodds (1893–1979) was an Ulsterman from County Down and a man of many parts. A Fenian, a poet (friend of Yeats and Eliot, intimate with Auden and MacNeice), a lifelong rebel against authority who nevertheless ended by becoming an authority himself, holding the Regius Professorship of Greek at Oxford, 1936–60. From that august chair he taught and wrote for a fascinated audience and readership on Euripides' Bacchae and Plato's Gorgias. Lectures in California made his best known work, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). All these studies were marked by the very modern questions that he put to the ancient texts, influenced by anthropological investigations of shame and guilt. One of his earliest interests remained a lifelong passion – the study of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, with whom some of the best early Christian thinkers found themselves in deep sympathy.

The present book, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, is not only a learned and important study of the things that pagans and Christians of the time shared in common, but also almost a self-portrait of Dodds himself, ironic, austere, humane, illuminating, and of his puzzled reaction to his own age of anxiety. The reader often feels that the unity of the book comes more from the author's mind than from the evidence presented. Another account of the same period might produce far more inconsistencies.

In chapter 1 I described the progressive devaluation of the cosmos in the early Christian centuries (in other words, the progressive withdrawal of divinity from the material world), and the corresponding devaluation of ordinary human experience. In the next two I shall describe some extra-ordinary experiences of which the record has survived from the second and third centuries. For the present chapter I shall take as my text that passage in the Symposium where Plato defines the daemonic. ‘Everything that is daemonic’, says Diotima to Socrates, ‘is intermediate between God and mortal. Interpreting and conveying the wishes of men to gods and the will of gods to men, it stands between the two and fills the gap. … God has no contact with man; only through the daemonic is there intercourse and conversation between men and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep. And the man who is expert in such intercourse is a daemonic man, compared with whom the experts in arts or handicrafts are but journeymen.’ This precise definition of the vague terms ‘daemon’ and ‘daemonios’ was something of a novelty in Plato's day, but in the second century after Christ it was the expression of a truism. Virtually every one, pagan, Jewish, Christian or Gnostic, believed in the existence of these beings and in their function as mediators, whether he called them daemons or angels or aions or simply ‘spirits’ (πνεύματα).

Up to now I have been dealing with attitudes and experiences which were for the most part common to pagans and Christians–at any rate to some pagans and some Christians. But I must not leave the impression that in my opinion there were no important differences between paganism and Christianity in our period. In this final chapter I shall say something about pagan views of Christianity and Christian views of paganism as they emerge in the literature of the time. It is a large and complicated subject: to treat it fully a whole course of lectures would be needed. So I shall have to limit myself to a few dominant themes; and in choosing these I shall have less regard to doctrinal disputes than to those differences of feeling which seem to constitute a psychological dividing line.

We should begin by getting two points clear. In the first place, the debate was conducted at many different intellectual and social levels. It engaged the energies of cultivated scholars like Origen and Porphyry; but it must also have been fought out, frequently and bitterly, in the council-chambers of Greek cities, in the market-places of North African villages, and in thousands of humble homes.

The Wiles Trust, to which this book owes its origin, was established ‘to promote the study of the history of civilisation and to encourage the extension of historical thinking into the realm of general ideas’. In what way the present volume of lectures can hope to serve that aim I can perhaps best indicate by quoting two remarks made by eminent ancient historians. In the last chapter of his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, after examining and criticising the numerous theories, political, economic and biological, by which men have sought to explain the decline of the Empire, Rostovtzeff finally turned to psychological explanation. He expressed the view that a change in people's outlook on the world ‘was one of the most potent factors’; and he added that further investigation of this change is ‘one of the most urgent tasks in the field of ancient history’. My second quotation is from the closing chapter of Professor Nilsson's Geschichte der griechischen Religion. He writes: ‘The study of the syncretism of late antiquity which has been actively pursued in recent decades has concerned itself mainly with beliefs and doctrines, while the spiritual soil from which these growths arose and drew their nourishment has been touched on only in passing and in general terms; yet that is the heart of the matter, its weightiest element.’

The experiences I discussed in chapter II were border-line experiences: their religious status is ambiguous–that is why I called them ‘daemonic’. In our culture visions and voices are commonly treated as symptoms of illness; and dreams are regarded as a channel of communication not between God and man but between the unconscious and the conscious parts of the human psyche. Phenomena of this sort still play an important rôle in the religious life of certain individuals and certain sects, but most of us are inclined to dismiss them as belonging at best to the pathology of religion. I now propose to exemplify and discuss a class of experiences whose nature is indeed obscure and illdefined but whose religious character and religious importance is generally admitted.

All the beliefs and experiences to be examined here are of the kind loosely described as ‘mystical’. But ‘mysticism’ is a dangerously vague term. For the purpose of this chapter I shall adopt the strict definition which Lalande gives in his Vocabulaire de la Philosophie: mysticism is ‘belief in the possibility of an intimate and direct union of the human spirit with the fundamental principle of being, a union which constitutes at once a mode of existence and a mode of knowledge different from and superior to normal existence and knowledge’.

This little book is based on a course of four lectures which I had the honour of delivering in May 1963 in the Queen's University, Belfast, on the invitation of the Wiles Foundation. The lectures are printed substantially as they were spoken, save for a few additions and corrections. They were addressed to a general audience, and I hope that in their printed form they will be of interest to the general reader who has no specialised knowledge of ancient thought or of Christian theology. I have, however, supplemented them with footnotes which specify the evidence on which my statements are based, and develop some additional arguments and speculations.

My thanks are due in the first place to the Wiles Foundation and to all those who took personal trouble to make my visit to Belfast an agreeable experience: in particular to Dr Michael Grant, Vice-Chancellor of the Queen's University, and to Mrs Grant; to Mrs Austen Boyd; and to Professor Michael Roberts. I am most grateful also to those scholars who attended my lectures as guests of the Foundation and discussed them with me at the colloquia which followed, namely A. H. Armstrong, H. Butterfield, Henry Chadwick, R. Duncan-Jones, Pierre Hadot, A. H. M. Jones, A. D. Momigliano, H. W. Parke, Audrey Rich, S. Weinstock and G. Zuntz. Here and there in this book they will, I hope, recognize echoes of their individual contributions.

ERATOSTHENES

The last few sections have attempted to show that in spite of changing ideas of human relationships after Alexander, and in spite of the implications of Stoic theory in particular, there was a wide gap between any conception of mankind in the third century b.c. and the view, primarily Stoic, which was widespread in the first. This later belief that not only the wise but all men, or at any rate all civilised men, are already fellow-citizens of the world city, is very different from anything that we find in Theophrastus, Epicurus, Zeno or even Chrysippus. When did this further development take place towards a wider, though also shallower, vision of humanity? And what were its causes?

It is an oversimplification to suppose that such a shift of thought can be given a date, and the reasons for it were, no doubt, many and various. But if one principal factor is to be singled out, it must be the impact of Rome, beginning in the third century and becoming the dominating feature of the situation in the second, and bringing to the Greeks a broader and more complex picture of the human race. In short, the idea of the unity of mankind in this broader sense was not Greek, but Graeco-Roman.

THE PERIPATETICS

The philosophers were no exception to the general picture of failure to grasp the importance of Alexander' achievements and to draw conclusions from his example. There was much that was new in the outlook and vision of those who taught at Athens round about the turn of the century, but their views of mankind were by no means such a clean break with the past as is sometimes claimed. The same lines of thought on the subject which we have found in the decades before Alexander were still followed after his death, and our few remains of philosophical writing for the period contain no evidence of a striking advance towards any radically new conception of humanity.

Awareness of the new world situation might especially have been expected in the Peripatetic school, which from Aristotle onwards paid so much attention to the collection and study of factual information, including geographical knowledge. In the course of time, as we shall see, the Lyceum' persistent concern with facts became a strong influence in the direction of a new grasp of the idea of mankind as a geographical aggregate; but neither Aristotle nor his immediate followers seem to have given Alexander or his policies or the results of his conquests the consideration they deserved.

THE HOMERIC PATTERN

TheIliad and Odyssey are still our earliest sources of information on Greek thought about man. It is true that archaeological discoveries and the decipherment of Linear B tablets have now enabled us to form an increasingly detailed picture of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation, including some conception of the actual relationships and divisions which existed within society perhaps as early as 1500 B.C. But so far nothing has come to light from which we can discover what ideas these pre-Homeric Greeks held on the human race and its place in the scheme of things. This can be learned only from literature, and therefore-until some fresh discovery changes the situation- from the rich store of evidence that the Iliad and Odyssey contain.

A remarkable feature of the Homeric picture of mankind is its uniformity. I do not mean, of course, that there is any lack of individual variety among the people of the two epics, or that everyone is on the same level in the society which they portray. The picture is uniform-more so, indeed, than most that we find in later Greek literature-in the sense that it depicts a single pattern within which all, or almost all, human beings have a place. There is no explicit statement of this unity in either poem; but as an unconscious assumption it is present throughout both, and provides a basis for that deep understanding of the common human lot which gives them much of their greatness.

Man, anthrōpos, was the centre of the world for the Greeks, and a review of all they thought about him would involve discussion of most of their literature and art. This book has no such wide scope or ambitious aim. Its theme is not the whole Hellenic conception of man, but the development among the Greeks of ideas about one aspect of humanity-the unity of mankind; an aspect which never had more than a minor place in their thought, although it may seem all–important in the twentieth century a.d.

In our own day human unity is generally seen as a practical problem. We take as a self-evident fact the existence of the human race as a distinct species, an aggregate made up of individuals whose present numbers are approximately known; and with almost equal readiness most of us draw the inference that between all these representatives of homo sapiens there is some sort of kinship or fellowship which should influence their behaviour towards each other. ‘One world’, ‘the human community,’ the brotherhood of man', are phrases on everybody's lips, and their theoretical validity is hardly called in question. The crucial issue, as we see it, is the gap between theory and practice: the paradox of a human race acknowledged in theory to be a single family, yet split by divisions of creed and colour which threaten its destruction. The solution is commonly sought not in reconsideration of the basic theory, but in the practical field of organisation, and attempts at practical world co-operation become more and more a characteristic feature of our time.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Although our theme is the history of an idea, it becomes necessary at this point to turn our attention to a figure who was primarily a man of action: Alexander the Great. Alexander' impact on the Greek conception of mankind has been variously assessed. Estimates of him have ranged from the soldier concerned with practical policies for particular ends, to the dreamer who envisaged a world of universal brotherhood, and so must be regarded as the creator and earliest champion of the idea of human unity. It will be best to consider first how far this latter verdict, which would make Alexander the turning point in our story, can be accepted as valid.

The view that Alexander was philosopher as well as man of action, and held a conscious and explicit belief in the unity of mankind, had its supporters in antiquity as well as in modern times. In our extant Greek hterature the chief exposition of it is a short work, De Alexandri Magni Fortuna aut Virtute, attributed to Plutarch and probably an early product of his pen. The treatise is the first of two speeches composed in reply to the claim that Alexander' achievements were the result of fortune; on the contrary, declares Plutarch, his actions and policies sprang from the inspiration of philosophy; moreover, Alexander was no mere theoriser like other philosophers, but went beyond them all in that he put his ideas into practice.