In ancient times, those who favored teleological interpretations of the cosmos, also tended to favor the epistemology of revelation.
In Theory and History Chapter 3, Mises discusses revelation:
Revealed religion derives its authority and authenticity from the communication to man of the Supreme Being’s will. It gives the faithful indisputable certainty.
We might divide revelation into three classes: divine encounter, divination, and inspiration.
In the divine encounter, the deity speaks directly to man, as in Exodus 33:11:
And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.
The diviner, on the other hand, does not receive straightforward messages. Rather, he interprets events and arrangements in nature as coded divine communiques. For example Calchas, the diviner discussed in my recent post on the Iliad, discovers the will of the gods by interpreting the flight of birds (also known as augury or “taking the auspices”). Other object’s of the diviner’s craft have included the entrails of animals (haruspicy), lightning strikes, dreams, and even the rustling of leaves.
In ancient Rome, divination was considered an crucial element in the initiation (thus the word “inaugurate”) of any public enterprise. The Roman historian Livy wrote:
auspiciis hanc urbem conditam esse, auspiciis bello ac pace domi militiaeque omnia geri, quis est qui ignoret?
(“Who does not know that this city was founded only after taking the divinations, that everything in war and in peace, at home and abroad, was done only after taking the divinations?”)
In fact, American presidential inaugurations are the continuation of a tradition that goes back to the Roman practice of “taking the auspices” before the investiture of magistrates. According to Livy, the first official inauguration was that of Numa, the second king of Rome.
He was therefore summoned to the city, and there expressed the wish that the gods should be consulted on his behalf, as in the case of Romulus who at the founding of Rome had assumed power only after the omens had been duly observed. An augur, whose service on the occasion was afterwards recognized by the grant of a permanent state priesthood, escorted Numa to the citadel, where he took his seat on a stone with his face to the south; the augur with veiled head sat on his left, holding in his right hand the smooth, crook-handled staff called the lituus… [He] transferred the staff to his left hand, placed his right upon Numa’s head, and spoke these solemn words: ‘Father Jupiter, if it is Heaven’s will that this man, Numa Pompilius, whose head I touch, should reign in the city of Rome, make clear to us sure signs within those limits I have determined.’ Then he named precisely the nature of the signs he hoped would be sent. Sent they were; and Numa, duly proclaimed king, went down from the hill where the auspices were taken.”
The last form of revelation I will discuss is the kind which Homer himself, as a poet, proclaimed to have been privy to: divine inspiration.
One of the most evocative expositions of inspiration can be found in the Theogony of Hesiod, the other great archaic Greek poet. Hesiod vividly tells the story of his divine inspiration, which can be paraphrased as follows.
One ancient day, at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a lowly shepherd named Hesiod tended his flock. Upon entering a clearing, he found to his astonishment nine unspeakably beautiful goddesses standing before him. These were the Muses, the divine patronesses of the rhythmical arts (that which we call “music” in derivation from their name). It is by the grace of the Muses that the choir sings, the flutist trills, and the dancer twirls. One might call them the stage moms of the universe.
These benificient goddesses impart their own divine abilities upon the mortals they favor. And on that day, they chose to favor a mere shepherd. In an act of “mouth-to-mouth inspiration”, the Muses exhaled their “divine voice” directly into the shepherd’s lungs (the word “inspire” is derived from the Latin word for “to breathe in”).
With the divine voice came not only the ability to sing, but the knowledge of songs themselves. And these were not short songs of love or worship. These were songs that told stories: true stories. Nor were these just brutish tales of kings and wars, but of origins: the genesis of man, the births of the gods, and the dawn of existence itself. Thus did Hesiod the shepherd become Hesiod the poet.
Poetical inspiration might be thought of as a form of divine empowerment, or as Socrates has it in Plato’s Ion a form of possession:
God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.
The Oracle (or Pythia), the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, was said to give her riddling pronouncements after being overcome by the divine “pneuma” arising from a cleft in the earth (which according to the surmise of geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, was actually hallucinogenic ethylene gas).
In all its varieties, the methodology of revelation presents an insurmountable problem for the scientist. As Mises writes in Theory and History:
However, people disagree widely about the content of revealed truth as well as about its correct—orthodox —interpretation. For all the grandeur, majesty, and sublimity of religious feeling, irreconcilable conflict exists among various faiths and creeds. Even if unanimity could be attained in matters of the historical authenticity and reliability of revelation, the problem of the veracity of various exegetic interpretations would still remain.
This post is one in a series entitled A Misesian Perspective on the History of Thought
