Pandemics and conflicts over rules
By historian Matthias Sandberg
Current discussions about precautions and rules for managing the corona pandemic make abundantly clear the disintegrative potential that conflicts over rules have: the fact that individual liberties and personal rights are limited in favour of rational processes of regulation and subordinated to the collective good raises not only explosive political but also complex ethical questions. At the same time, however, the situation also reveals the unconditional imperative for action: society must react to the challenges of the pandemic. No less loud than the protest against the measures taken is criticism of the supposed inactivity of politics during the relatively quiet corona summer slump.
How societies react to catastrophes and crises also depends on worldview and a culturally determined repertoire of underlying ideas of order, and the same goes for the precautions and rules that societies introduce. The Old World and ancient medicine were also familiar with and recommended certain measures as a response to epidemic or even pandemic pestilences, such as isolating and secluding the sick. For example, Hippocratic medicine, which identified pathogenic fumes (μίασμα) as the cause of epidemics, advised people to stay away from areas with contaminated air and to avoid exertion so that they would not become infected through heavy breathing.
Discussions on rules for dealing with epidemics were just as present in the societies of antiquity as they are today, but the focus was different then, the coping strategies of ancient societies being centred much more on contingency. However, ancient societies interpreted conflicts over rules with regard to epidemics not so much as a consequence of the exceptional pandemic situation as its source: catastrophic events not only laid bare the contingency of human existence, but also demanded integration into a particular worldview, with misery and suffering calling for interpretation and explanation.
One manifestation of this need for causality that was almost ubiquitous in the Old World was the interpretation of plague as a divine punishment for people’s wrongdoing, as the work of demonic forces, or the result of evil magic. Deviance and impurity were thus the central objects of interpretation, and the primary focus of collective reactions, which sought to overcome the crisis through cultic purification and the regaining of divine benevolence, or through the combatting of demonic, pathogenic influences.
Many such interpretations have been handed down from the Greco-Roman world as well as from the interculturally entangled societies of the Ancient Near East, which dealt collectively with such situations of crisis in the same way: healing and defence against harm were expected above all from communally performed rituals of purification (κάθαρσις), sacrifice and atonement. In general, the punitive interpretation of epidemics was one of the key explanatory patterns not just in Christian antiquity, but in antiquity as a whole.
Homer’s Iliad reports on the reactions of the Achaeans besieging Troy after Apollo had sent plague arrows into their army camp: when the seer Calchas tells the Greeks that Apollo’s reason for doing so was the sacrilegious behaviour of their leader, Agamemnon, the Achaeans set about their work of atonement, appeasing Apollo with hecatombs (sacrificing cattle, goats and/or sheep) and ritually purifying themselves on the shores of the sea:
Then Atreus’ son [i.e. Agamemnon] ordered all the Achaeans to purify themselves:
And they purified themselves, and cast into the sea the defilement,
Then sacrificed perfect hecatombs of atonement for Apollo
A brave bull and goats on the beach of the desolate sea;
And the fragrance wafted high into the sky in swirling smoke.
[Homer Iliad I, 312-317; my translation]
At the other end of antiquity, we can observe that the same causal interpretations and collective reactions emerged in principle in the Christian perspective, too. As the bishop and historian Martin of Tours (538-594) reports in his Decem libri historiarum, Gregory I (* c. 540, † 12 March 604, pope from 590-604), who had just been elected pope, beheld people’s sinful behaviour during the plague epidemic that struck Rome in 590 AD, admonished them, and urged them to engage in the collective processional ritual of supplication and penance.
And indeed [the plague] broke out in the middle of January [590] and first befell Pope Pelagius, and he died immediately after the disease had seized him. When he was dead, this plague caused a great death among the people. ... And when the time came for him [i.e. Gregory, the new pope] to be consecrated, the pestilence was still raging in the city; he therefore exhorted them to penance with these words: ‘The punishments of God, ¬most beloved brethren, which we already feared before they came upon us, must make us the more anxious because they are present and we experience them in ourselves. The gate of conversion shall be opened to us by pain, and the punishment we suffer shall soften the hardness of our hearts; as it is foretold in the prophet: Behold, the whole nation shall be smitten with the sword of heaven’s wrath, and shall be ¬taken away one by one with a sudden ¬death; and it is not a long infirmity that precedes death, but death, as ye see, takes men before infirmity. Let us therefore, beloved brethren, with contrite hearts, improved in our works, and ready to weep in our spirits, assemble at the dawn of the fourth day of the week, in the order described below, to make a sevenfold supplication, that the stern judge, seeing that we punish ourselves for our sins, may refrain from the sentence of damnation pronounced upon us. ... So let us go forth from the several churches with prayer and tears, and let us ¬assemble in the church of St. Mary, the unwounded Virgin, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¬that there we may persist in praying to the Lord with tears and sighs, and obtain pardon for our sins’.
[Gregory of Tours, History X, 1; my translation]
Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia’s painting above presents this account pictorially: as the procession moved towards the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian (today’s Castel Sant’ Angelo), the archangel Michael is said to have appeared in the sky above the monument, returning his sword (a symbol of divine wrath) into its sheath; according to tradition, the epidemic ended on the same day. We are still reminded of this by the statue on the top of Castel Sant’ Angelo.
We might be inclined to smile from the perspective of a secularized present at collective religious rituals to contain an epidemic, especially against the backdrop of the current pandemic and its demand that we keep our distance from one another. After all, some prayer and penitential processions that the Russian Orthodox Church wanted to hold to overcome the corona pandemic were banned in the spring of 2020 because of the risk of infection. But at the same time, we have also experienced how important collective coping strategies and a sense of agency are in times of pandemic emergency: the hoarding of non-perishable food, the excessive purchases of certain hygiene articles, even the nonsensical recommendation to drink disinfectant – all of this speaks of the unconditional desire in the face of the numerous imponderables and the invisible threat to bring the still largely uncontrollable situation under control.
The need to cope with and overcome pandemic situations of crisis can be observed at all times; the same applies to the ‘need for causality’ – the need that people have to integrate the causes of the crisis into their own worldview. The responses and reactions to the epidemic are also of course based on these patterns of interpretation. The societies of antiquity interpreted epidemics or even pandemics as divine punishment, as an expression of human transgressions against religious norms. To resolve this conflict over rules, they drew on collective rituals of penitence and purification, which they hoped would restore the good order between the divine and human worlds, and thus overcome the crisis.