Five Stages of Greek Religion Part 5

In the working out of these three aims the Olympian religion achieved much: in all three it failed. The moral expurgation failed owing to the mere force of inertia possessed by old religious traditions and local cults. We must remember how weak any central government was in ancient civilization. The power and influence of a highly civilized society were apt to end a few miles outside its city wall. All through the backward parts of Greece obscene and cruel rites lingered on, the darker and worse the further they were removed from the full light of h.e.l.lenism.

But in this respect the Olympian Religion did not merely fail: it did worse. To make the elements of a nature-religion human is inevitably to make them vicious. There is no great moral harm in worshipping a thunder-storm, even though the lightning strikes the good and evil quite recklessly. There is no need to pretend that the Lightning is exercising a wise and righteous choice. But when once you worship an imaginary quasi-human being who throws the lightning, you are in a dilemma. Either you have to admit that you are worshipping and flattering a being with no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, or else you have to invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck.

And they are pretty sure to be bad reasons. The G.o.d, if personal, becomes capricious and cruel.

When the Ark of Israel was being brought back from the Philistines, the cattle slipped by the threshing floor of Nachon, and the holy object was in danger of falling. A certain Uzzah, as we all know, sprang forward to save it and was struck dead for his pains. Now, if he was struck dead by the sheer holiness of the tabu object, the holiness stored inside it like so much electricity, his death was a misfortune, an interesting accident, and no more.[68:1] But when it is made into the deliberate act of an anthropomorphic G.o.d, who strikes a well-intentioned man dead in explosive rage for a very pardonable mistake, a dangerous element has been introduced into the ethics of that religion. A being who is the moral equal of man must not behave like a charge of dynamite.

Again, to worship emblems of fertility and generation, as was done in agricultural rites all through the Aegean area, is in itself an intelligible and not necessarily a degrading practice. But when those emblems are somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropomorphic G.o.d of enormous procreative power and innumerable amours, a religion so modified has received a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften its grossness has resulted in its moral degradation. This result was intensified by another well-meant effort at elevation. The leading tribes of central Greece were, as we have mentioned, apt to count their descent from some heroine-ancestress. Her consort was sometimes unknown and, in a matrilinear society, unimportant. Sometimes he was a local G.o.d or river. When the Olympians came to introduce some order and unity among these innumerable local G.o.ds, the original tribal ancestor tended, naturally enough, to be identified with Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon. The unfortunate Olympians, whose system really aimed at purer morals and condemned polygamy and polyandry, are left with a crowd of consorts that would put Solomon to shame.

Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive G.o.ds.

The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point and meaning. It is curious how near to monotheism, and to monotheism of a very profound and impersonal type, the real religion of Greece came in the sixth and fifth centuries. Many of the philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and others, a.s.serted it clearly or a.s.sumed it without hesitation. Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, in their deeper moments point the same road. Indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is far deeper than that to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to make any particular difference between ?? ?e?? and ? ?e?? or t? ?e???.

They do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions between 'he' and 'it', or between 'one' and 'many', apply to the divine.

Certainly Greek monotheism, had it really carried the day, would have been a far more philosophic thing than the tribal and personal monotheism of the Hebrews. But unfortunately too many hard-caked superst.i.tions, too many tender and sensitive a.s.sociations, were linked with particular figures in the pantheon or particular rites which had brought the worshippers religious peace. If there had been some Hebrew prophets about, and a tyrant or two, progressive and b.l.o.o.d.y-minded, to agree with them, polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped out in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, always sincere and daring, was seldom brutal, seldom ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great period felt their own way gently to the Holy of Holies, and did not try to compel others to take the same way. Greek theology, whether popular or philosophical, seldom denied any G.o.d, seldom forbade any worship.

What it tried to do was to identify every new G.o.d with some aspect of one of the old ones, and the result was naturally confusion. Apart from the Epicurean school, which though powerful was always unpopular, the religious thought of later antiquity for the most part took refuge in a sort of apotheosis of good taste, in which the great care was not to hurt other people's feelings, or else it collapsed into helpless mysticism.

The attempt to make Olympianism a religion of the Polis failed also.

The Olympians did not belong to any particular city: they were too universal; and no particular city had a very positive faith in them. The actual Polis was real and tangible, the Homeric G.o.ds a little alien and literary. The City herself was a most real power; and the true G.o.ds of the City, who had grown out of the soil and the wall, were simply the City herself in her eternal and personal aspect, as mother and guide and lawgiver, the worshipped and beloved being whom each citizen must defend even to the death. As the Kouros of his day emerged from the social group of Kouroi, or the Aphiktor from the band of suppliants, in like fashion ? ?????? or ? ????e?? emerged as a personification or projection of the city. ? ?????? in Athens was of course Athena; ? ????e?? might as well be called Zeus as anything else. In reality such beings fall into the same cla.s.s as the hero Argos or 'Korinthos son of Zeus'. The City worship was narrow; yet to broaden it was, except in some rare minds, to sap its life. The ordinary man finds it impossible to love his next-door neighbours except by siding with them against the next-door-but-one.

It proved difficult even in a city like Athens to have G.o.ds that would appeal to the loyalty of all Attica. On the Acropolis at Athens there seem originally to have been Athena and some Kouros corresponding with her, some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. Then as Attica was united and brought under the lead of its central city, the G.o.ds of the outlying districts began to claim places on the Acropolis. Pallas, the thunder-maid of Pallene in the south, came to form a joint personality with Athena. Oinoe, a town in the north-east, on the way from Delos to Delphi, had for its special G.o.d a 'Pythian Apollo'; when Oinoe became Attic a place for the Pythian Apollo had to be found on the Acropolis.

Dionysus came from Eleutherae, Demeter and Kore from Eleusis, Theseus himself perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozen. They were all given official residences on Athena's rock, and Athens in return sent out Athena to new temples built for her in Prasiae and Sunion and various colonies.[72:1] This development came step by step and grew out of real worships. It was quite different from the wholesale adoption of a body of non-national, poetical G.o.ds: yet even this development was too artificial, too much stamped with the marks of expediency and courtesy and compromise. It could not live. The personalities of such G.o.ds vanish away; their prayers become prayers to 'all G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of the City'--?e??? ?a? ?e?s? p?s? ?a? p?s???; those who remain, chiefly Athena and Theseus, only mean Athens.

What then, amid all this failure, did the Olympian religion really achieve? First, it debarbarized the worship of the leading states of Greece--not of all Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors of the 'Urdummheit', for the most part, to a romantic memory, and made religion no longer a mortal danger to humanity. Unlike many religious systems, it generally permitted progress; it encouraged not only the obedient virtues but the daring virtues as well. It had in it the spirit that saves from disaster, that knows itself fallible and thinks twice before it hates and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in Sophrosyne.

Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling throughout the Greek communities. It is, after all, a good deal to say, that in Greek history we find almost no warring of sects, no mutual tortures or even blasphemies. With many ragged edges, with many weaknesses, it built up something like a united h.e.l.lenic religion to stand against the 'beastly devices of the heathen'. And after all, if we are inclined on the purely religious side to judge the Olympian system harshly, we must not forget its sheer beauty. Truth, no doubt, is greater than beauty. But in many matters beauty can be attained and truth cannot. All we know is that when the best minds seek for truth the result is apt to be beautiful. It was a great thing that men should envisage the world as governed, not by Giants and Gorgons and dealers in eternal torture, but by some human and more than human Understanding (???es??),[73:1] by beings of quiet splendour like many a cla.s.sical Zeus and Hermes and Demeter. If Olympianism was not a religious faith, it was at least a vital force in the shaping of cities and societies which remain after two thousand years a type to the world of beauty and freedom and high endeavour. Even the stirring of its ashes, when they seemed long cold, had power to produce something of the same result; for the cla.s.sicism of the Italian Renaissance is a child, however fallen, of the Olympian spirit.

Of course, I recognize that beauty is not the same as faith. There is, in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving peasants to ma.s.sacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ranks of Olympus; the old liturgy of the dying and re-risen Year-bride still clings to her. If Religion is that which brings us into relation with the great world-forces, there is the very heart of life in this home-coming Bride of the underworld, life with its broken hopes, its disaster, its new-found spiritual joy: life seen as Mother and Daughter, not a thing continuous and unchanging but shot through with parting and death, life as a great love or desire ever torn asunder and ever renewed.

'But stay,' a reader may object: 'is not this the Persephone, the Athena, of modern sentiment? Are these figures really the G.o.ddesses of the _Iliad_ and of Sophocles?' The truth is, I think, that they are neither the one nor the other. They are the G.o.ddesses of ancient reflection and allegory; the G.o.ddesses, that is, of the best and most characteristic worship that these idealized creations awakened. What we have treated hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the fact that they have no roots in any particular soil, little hold on any definite primeval cult, has turned out to be their peculiar strength. We must not think of allegory as a late post-cla.s.sical phenomenon in Greece. It begins at least as early as Pythagoras and Herac.l.i.tus, perhaps as early as Hesiod; for Hesiod seems sometimes to be turning allegory back into myth. The Olympians, cut loose from the soil, enthroned only in men's free imagination, have two special regions which they have made their own: mythology and allegory. The mythology drops for the most part very early out of practical religion. Even in Homer we find it expurgated; in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Xenophanes it is expurgated, denied and allegorized. The myths survive chiefly as material for literature, the shapes of the G.o.ds themselves chiefly as material for art. They are both of them objects not of belief but of imagination. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it twines itself still around these gracious and ever-moving shapes; the Zeus of Aeschylus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of Marcus Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo, all have their long spiritual history. They are but little impeded by the echoes of the old frivolous mythology; still less by any local roots or sectional prejudices or compulsory details of ritual. As the more highly educated mind of Greece emerged from a particular, local, tribal, conception of religion, the old denationalized Olympians were ready to receive her.

The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion to the City itself. It is expressed often in Aeschylus and Sophocles, again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic. It is expressed best perhaps, and that without mention of the name of a single G.o.d, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. It is higher than most modern patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals. It is more fervid because the men practising it lived habitually nearer to the danger-point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, spoke of a thing they had faced last week and might face again to-morrow. It was more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be 'one great City of G.o.ds and men', the only G.o.ds with which Greece could satisfactorily people that City were the idealized band of the old Olympians.

They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories; they are symbols of something beyond themselves. They are G.o.ds of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are G.o.ds to whom doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not G.o.ds in whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion and Superst.i.tion lies exactly in this, that Superst.i.tion degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only an accident--though perhaps an invariable accident--that all the supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are, by the nature of things, inadequate; the truth is not in you but beyond you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this, I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher minds of later Greece. Its G.o.ds could awaken man's worship and strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they knew themselves to be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the G.o.d, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the G.o.d;[77:1] so the G.o.d himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before them. Meantime they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no commands that made man sin against his own inner light.

FOOTNOTES:

[39:1] Hdt. i. 60 ?pe? ?e ?pe????? ?? pa?a?t???? t?? a????? ???e?? t?

????????? ??? ?a? de???te??? ?a? e?????? ??????? ?p???a????? ?????. As to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of h.e.l.lenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me: 'I have often wondered what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.' ?????? ???????

is almost '_Urdummheit_'.

[40:1] See in general Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i; Leaf, _Companion to Homer_, Introduction: _R. G. E._, chap. ii; Chadwick, _The Heroic Age_ (last four chapters); and J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_, chaps. viii and ix.

[40:2] Since writing the above I find in Vandal, _L'Avenement de Bonaparte_, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary soldiers: 'Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates .

. . et ils creaient un type de haute vertu guerriere, quand ils croyaient seulement le reproduire.'

[41:1] Hdt. i. 56 f.; Th. i. 3 (h.e.l.len son of Deucalion, in both).

[42:1] Hdt. i. 58. In viii. 44 the account is more detailed.

[42:2] The Homeric evidence is, as usual, inconclusive. The word ??a??? is absent from both poems, an absence which must be intentional on the part of the later reciters, but may well come from the original sources. The compound a?a??f???? occurs in B 867, but who knows the date of that particular line in that particular wording?

[42:3] Paper read to the Cla.s.sical a.s.sociation at Birmingham in 1908.

[43:1] For Korinna see Wilamowitz in _Berliner Kla.s.sikertexte_, V. xiv, especially p. 55. The Homeric epos drove out poetry like Corinna's. She had actually written: 'I sing the great deeds of heroes and heroines'

(???e? d' e????? ??et?? ?e?????d?? ??d?, fr. 10, Bergk), so that presumably her style was sufficiently 'heroic' for an un-Homeric generation. For the change of dialect in elegy, &c., see Thumb, _Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte_, pp. 327-30, 368 ff., and the literature there cited. Fick and Hoffmann overstated the change, but Hoffmann's new statement in _Die griechische Sprache_, 1911, sections on _Die Elegie_, seems just. The question of Tyrtaeus is complicated by other problems.

[45:1] The facts are well known: see Paus. i. 18. 7. The inference was pointed out to me by Miss Harrison.

[45:2] I do not here raise the question how far the Achaioi have special affinities with the north-west group of tribes or dialects. See Thumb, _Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte_ (1909), p. 166 f. The Achaioi must have pa.s.sed through South Thessaly in any case.

[45:3] That Kronos was in possession of the Kronion and Olympia generally before Zeus came was recognized in antiquity; Paus. v. 7. 4 and 10. Also Mayer in Roscher's Lexicon, ii, p. 1508, 50 ff.; _Rise of Greek Epic_{3}, pp. 40-8; J. A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey (1914), chap. vii, viii; Chadwick, _Heroic Age_ (1911), pp. 282, 289.

[49:1] I do not touch here on the subject of the gradual expurgation of the Poems to suit the feelings of a more civilized audience; see _Rise of the Greek Epic_,{3} pp. 120-4. Many scholars believe that the Poems did not exist as a written book till the public copy was made by Pisistratus; see Cauer, _Grundfragen der Homerkritik_{2}, (1909), pp.

113-45; _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 304-16; Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i, p. xvi. This view is tempting, though the evidence seems to be insufficient to justify a p.r.o.nouncement either way. If it is true, then various pa.s.sages which show a verbal use of earlier doc.u.ments (like the Bellerophon pa.s.sage, _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 175 ff.) cannot have been put in before the Athenian period.

[49:2] In his _Zeus, the Indo-European Sky-G.o.d_ (1914, 1924). See _R. G.

E._,{3} pp. 40 ff.

[50:1] A somewhat similar change occurred in Othin, though he always retains more of the crooked wizard.

[50:2] _Themis_, chap. i. On the Zeus of Aeschylus cf. _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 277 ff.; Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, ii. 6-8.

[50:3] Farnell, _Cults_, iv. 100-4. See, however, Gruppe, p. 107 f.

[51:1] _Hymn. Ap._ init. Cf. Wilamowitz's Oxford Lecture on 'Apollo'

(Oxford, 1907).

[51:2] _Themis_, p. 439 f. Cf. ? ????a???. Other explanations of the name in Gruppe, p. 1224 f., notes.

[51:3] Hdt. i. 147; Plato, _Euthyd._ 302 c: _Socrates_. 'No Ionian recognizes a Zeus Patroos; Apollo is our Patroos, because he was father of Ion.'

[52:1] See Gruppe, p. 1206, on the development of his 'Philistine thunderstorm-G.o.ddess'.

[52:2] Hoffmann, _Gesch. d. griechischen Sprache_, Leipzig, 1911, p. 16.

Cf. Pind. _Ol._ vii. 35; Ov. _Metam._ ix. 421; xv. 191, 700, &c.

[53:1] As to the name, ????a?a is of course simply 'Athenian'; the shorter and apparently original form ????a, ????? is not so clear, but it seems most likely to mean 'Attic'. Cf. Meister, _Gr. Dial._ ii. 290.

He cla.s.ses under the head of Oertliche Bestimmungen: ? ?e?? ? ?af?a (Collitz and Bechtel, _Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften_, 2, 3, 14{a}, {b}, 15, 16). 'In Paphos selbst hiess die Gottin nur ? ?e??

oder ? ???a.s.sa;--? ???? ? G????a (61)--? ???? ? ????a ? p?? ?d????? (60, 27, 28), 'die Gottin, die Athenische, die uber Edalion (waltet)'; '??-??a ist, wie J. Baunack (_Studia Nicolaitana_, s. 27) gezeigt hat, das Adjectiv zu (*?ss-?? 'Seeland'): ?tt-??; ?t?-??; *??-??; also ??-??a = ?tt-???, ??-??a? ursprunglich ??-??a? ??a?.' Other derivations in Gruppe, p. 1194. Or again a? ????a? may be simply 'the place where the Athenas are', like ?? ????e?, the fish-market; 'the Athenas' would be statues, like ?? ??a?--the famous 'Attic Maidens' on the Acropolis.

This explanation would lead to some interesting results.

We need not here consider how, partly by identification with other Korae, like Pallas, Onka, &c., partly by a genuine spread of the cult, Athena became prominent in other cities. As to Homer, Athena is far more deeply imbedded in the _Odyssey_ than in the _Iliad_. I am inclined to agree with those who believe that our _Odyssey_ was very largely composed in Athens, so that in most of the poem Athena is original. (Cf.

O. Seeck, _Die Quellen der Odyssee_ (1887), pp. 366-420; Mulder, _Die Ilias and ihre Quellen_ (1910), pp. 350-5.) In some parts of the _Iliad_ the name Athena may well have been subst.i.tuted for some Northern G.o.ddess whose name is now lost.

[53:2] It is worth noting also that this Homeric triad seems also to be recognized as the chief Athenian triad. Plato, _Euthyd._ 302 c, quoted above, continues: _Socrates._ 'We have Zeus with the names Herkeios and Phratrios, but not Patroos, and Athena Phratria.' _Dionysodorus._ 'Well that is enough. You have, apparently, Apollo and Zeus and Athena?'

_Socrates._ 'Certainly.'--Apollo is put first because he has been accepted as Patroos. But see _R. G. E._,{3} p. 49, n.