The Greek View of Life Part 3

Section 8. Sacrifice and Atonement.

In Homer, we find that sacrifice is frankly conceived as a sort of present to the G.o.ds, for which they were in fairness bound to an equivalent return; and the nature of the bargain is fully recognised by the G.o.ds themselves.

"Hector," says Zeus to Hera, "was dearest to the G.o.ds of all mortals that are in Ilios. So was he to me at least, for nowise failed he in the gifts I loved. Never did my altar lack seemly feast, drink-offering and the steam of sacrifice, even the honour that falleth to our due."

[Footnote: Iliad xxiv. 66.--Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers.] And he concludes that he must intervene to secure the restoration of the body of Hector to his father.

The performance of sacrifice, then, ensures favour; and on the other hand its neglect entails punishment. When Apollo sends a plague upon the Greek fleet the most natural hypothesis to account for his conduct is that he has been stinted of his due meed of offerings; "perhaps," says Agamemnon, "the savour of lambs and unblemished goats may appease him."

Or again, when the Greeks omit to sacrifice before building the wall around their fleet, they are punished by the capture of their position by the Trojans. The whole relation between man and the G.o.ds is of the nature of a contract. "If you do your part, I'll do mine; if not, not!"

that is the tone of the language on either side. The conception is legal, not moral nor spiritual; it has nothing to do with what we call sin and conscience.

At a later period, it is true, we find a point of view prevailing which appears at first sight to come closer to that of the Christian. Certain acts we find, such as murder, for example, were supposed to infect as with a stain not only the original offender but his descendants from generation to generation. Yet even so, the stain, it appears, was conceived to be rather physical than moral, a.n.a.logous to disease both in its character and in the methods of its cure. Aeschylus tells us of the earth breeding monsters as a result of the corruption infused by the shedding of blood; and similarly a purely physical infection tainted the man or the race that had been guilty of crime. And as was the evil, so was the remedy. External acts and observations might cleanse and purge away what was regarded as an external affection of the soul; and we know that in historic times there was a cla.s.s of men, comparable to the mediaeval "pardoners", whose profession it was to effect such cures.

Plato has described them for us in striking terms. "Mendicant prophets,"

he says, "go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them of making an atonement for their sins or those of their fathers by sacrifices or charms with rejoicings and games; and they promise to harm an enemy whether just or unjust, at a small charge; with magic arts and incantations binding the will of heaven, as they say, to do their work.... And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, who were children of the Moon and the Muses--that is what they say--according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amus.e.m.e.nts which fill a vacant hour." [Footnote: Plato's Republic, II. 364b.--Jowett's translation.]

How far is all this from the Puritan view of sin! How far from the Christian of the "Pilgrim's Progress" with the burden on his back! To measure the distance we have only to attend, with this pa.s.sage in our mind, a meeting, say, of the "Salvation Army". We shall then perhaps understand better the distinction between the popular religion of the Greeks and our own; between the conception of sin as a physical contagion to be cured by external rites, and the conception of it as an affection of the conscience which only "grace" can expel. In the one case the fact that a man was under the taint of crime would be borne in upon him by actual misfortune from without--by sickness, or failure in business, or some other of the troubles of life; and he would ease his mind and recover the spring of hope by performing certain ceremonies and rites. In the other case, his trouble is all inward; he feels that he is guilty in the sight of G.o.d, and the only thing that can relieve him is the certainty that he has been forgiven, a.s.sured him somehow or other from within. The difference is fundamental, and important to bear in mind, if we would form a clear conception of the Greek view of life.

Section 9. Guilt and Punishment.

It must not be supposed, however, that the popular superst.i.tion described by Plato, however characteristic it may be of the point of view of the Greeks, represents the highest reach of their thought on the subject of guilt. No profounder utterances are to be found on this theme than those of the great poets and thinkers of Greece, who, without rejecting the common beliefs of their time, transformed them by the insight of their genius into a new and deeper significance. Specially striking in this connection is the poetry of the tragedian Aeschylus; and it will be well worth our while to pause for a moment and endeavour to realise his position.

Guilt and its punishment is the constant theme of the dramas of Aeschylus; and he has exhausted the resources of his genius in the attempt to depict the horror of the avenging powers, who under the name of the Erinyes, or Furies, persecute and torment the criminal. Their breath is foul with the blood on which they feed; from their rheumy eyes a horrible humour drops; daughters of night and clad in black they fly without wings; G.o.d and man and the very beasts shun them; their place is with punishment and torture, mutilation, stoning and breaking of necks.

And into their mouth the poet has put words which seem to breathe the very spirit of the Jewish scriptures.

"Come now let us preach to the sons of men; yea, let us tell them of our vengeance; yea, let us all make mention of justice.

"Whoso showeth hands that are undefiled, lo, he shall suffer nought of us for ever, but shall go unharmed to his ending.

"But if he hath sinned, like unto this man, and covereth hands that are blood-stained: then is our witness true to the slain man.

"And we sue for the blood, sue and pursue for it, so that at the last there is payment.

Even so 'tis written: (Oh sentence sure!) "Upon all that wild in wickedness dip hand In the blood of their birth, in the fount of their flowing: So shall he pine until the grave receive him--to find no grace even in the grave!

Sing then the spell, Sisters of h.e.l.l; Chant him the charm Mighty to harm, Binding the blood, Madding the mood; Such the music that we make: Quail, ye sons of man, and quake, Bow the heart, and bend, and break!

This is our ministry marked for us from the beginning; This is our gift, and our portion apart, and our G.o.dhead, Ours, ours only for ever, Darkness, robes of darkness, a robe of terror for ever!

Ruin is ours, ruin and wreck; When to the home Murder hath come, Making to cease Innocent peace; Then at his beck Follow we in, Follow the sin; And ah! we hold to the end when we begin!"

[Footnote: Aeschyl. Eum. 297.--Translated by Dr. Verrall (Cambridge, 1885).]

There is no poetry more sublime than this; none more penetrated with the sense of moral law. But still it is wholly Greek in character. The theme is not really the conscience of the sinner but the objective consequence of his crime. "Blood calls for blood," is the poet's text; a man, he says, must pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punishment of the guilty, not his inward sense of sin. Orestes, in fact, who is the subject of the drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was not a sinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is true, but only to avenge his father whom she had murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo.

So far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that he constantly justifies his act. He suffers, not because he has sinned but because he is involved in the curse of his race. For generations back the house of Atreus had been tainted with blood; murder had called for murder to avenge it; and Orestes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt, found that his only possibility of right action lay in a crime. He was bound to avenge his father, the G.o.d Apollo had enjoined it; and the avenging of his father meant the murder of his mother. What he commits, then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is regarded by the poet. The tragedy, as we have said, centres round an external objective law-- "blood calls for blood." But that is all. Of the internal drama of the soul with G.o.d, the division of the man against himself, the remorse, the repentance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of grace--of all this, the essential content of Christian Protestantism, not a trace in the clear and concrete vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poets of h.e.l.las, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, is true to the plastic genius of his race. The spirit throws outside itself the law of its own being; by objective external evidence it learns that doing involves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to it only when forced upon it from without by a direct experience of physical evil. Of Aeschylus, the most Hebraic of the h.e.l.lenes, it is as true as of the average Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase he had no sense of sin. And even in treating of him, we must still repeat what we said at the beginning, that the Greek conception of the relation of man to the G.o.ds is external and mechanical, not inward and spiritual.

Section 10. Mysticism.

But there is nothing so misleading as generalisation, specially on the subject of the Greeks. Again and again when we think we have laid hold of their characteristic view we are confronted with some new aspect of their life which we cannot fit into harmony with our scheme. There is no formula which will sum up that versatile and many-sided people. And so, in the case before us, we have no sooner made what appears to be the safe and comprehensive statement that the Greeks conceived the relation of man to the G.o.ds mechanically, than we are reminded of quite another phase of their religion, different from and even ant.i.thetic to that with which we have hitherto been concerned. Nothing, we might be inclined to say on the basis of what we have at present ascertained, nothing could be more opposed to the clear anthropomorphic vision of the Greek, than that conception of a mystic exaltation, so constantly occurring in the history of religion, whose aim is to transcend the limits of human personality and pa.s.s into direct communion with the divine life. Yet of some such conception, and of the ritual devised under its influence, we have undoubted though fragmentary indications in the civilization of the Greeks. It is mainly in connection with the two G.o.ds Apollo and Dionysus that the phenomena in question occur; G.o.ds whose cult was introduced comparatively late into Greece and who brought with them from the north something of its formless but pregnant mystery; as though at a point the chain of guardian deities was broken, and the terror and forces of the abyss pressed in upon the charmed circle of h.e.l.las. For Apollo, who in one of his aspects is a figure so typically h.e.l.lenic, the ever-young and beautiful G.o.d of music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic inspiration, of ecstasy or pa.s.sing out of oneself. The priestess who delivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the G.o.d.

Maddened by mephitic vapours streaming from a cleft in the rock, convulsed in every feature and every limb, she delivered in semi- articulate cries the burden of the divine message. Her own personality, for the time being, was annihilated; the wall that parts man from G.o.d was swept away; and the Divine rushed in upon the human vessel it shattered as it filled. This conception of inspiration as a higher form of madness, possessed of a truer insight than that of sanity, was fully recognised among the Greeks. "There is a madness," as Plato puts it, "which is the special gift of heaven, and the source of the chiefest blessings among men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on h.e.l.las, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.... And in proportion as prophecy is higher and more perfect than divination both in name and reality, in the same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane mind, for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin."

[Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus, 244.--Jowett's translation.]

Here then, in the oracle at Delphi, the centre of the religious life of the Greeks, we have an explicit affirmation of that element of mysticism which we might have supposed to be the most alien to their genius; and the same element re-appears, in a cruder and more barbaric form, in connection with the cult of Dionysus. He, the G.o.d of wine, was also the G.o.d of inspiration; and the ritual with which he was worshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. To suppress for a time the ordinary work-a-day consciousness, with its tedium, its checks, its balancing of pros and cons, to escape into the directness and simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in this no degradation but rather a submission to the divine power, an actual identification with the deity-such, it would seem, was the intention of those extraordinary revels of which we have in the "Bacchae" of Euripides so vivid a description. And to this end no stimulus was omitted to excite and inspire the imagination and the sense. The influence of night and torches in solitary woods, intoxicating drinks, the din of flutes and cymbals on a ba.s.s of thunderous drums, dances convulsing every limb and dazzling eyes and brain, the harking-back, as it were, to the sympathies and forms of animal life in the dress of fawnskin, the horns, the snakes twined about the arm, and the impersonation of those strange half-human creatures who were supposed to attend upon the G.o.d, the satyrs, nymphs, and fauns who formed his train--all this points to an attempt to escape from the bounds of ordinary consciousness and pa.s.s into some condition conceived, however confusedly, as one of union with the divine power. And though the basis, clearly enough, is physical and even b.e.s.t.i.a.l, yet the whole ritual does undoubtedly express, and that with a plastic grace and beauty that redeems its frank sensuality, that pa.s.sion to transcend the limitations of human existence which is at the bottom of the mystic element in all religions.

But this orgy of the senses was not the only form which the worship of Dionysus took in Greece. In connection with one of his legends, the myth of Dionysus Zagreus, we find traces of an esoteric doctrine, taught by what were known as the orphic sects, very curiously opposed, one would have said, to the general trend of Greek conceptions. According to the story, Zagreus was the son of Zeus and Persephone. Hera, in her jealousy, sent the t.i.tans to destroy him; after a struggle, they managed to kill him, cut him up and devoured all but the heart, which was saved by Athene and carried to Zeus. Zeus swallowed it, and produced therefrom a second Dionysus. The t.i.tans he destroyed by lightning, and from their ashes created Man. Man is thus composed of two elements, one bad, the t.i.tanic, the other good, the Dionysiac; the latter being derived from the body of Dionysus, which the t.i.tans had devoured. This fundamental dualism, according to the doctrine founded on the myth, is the perpetual tragedy of man's existence; and his perpetual struggle is to purify himself of the t.i.tanic element. The process extends over many incarnations, but an ultimate deliverance is promised by the aid of the redeemer Dionysus Lysius.

The belief thus briefly described was not part of the popular religion of the Greeks, but it was a normal growth of their consciousness, and it is mentioned here as a further indication that even in what we call the cla.s.sical age there were not wanting traces of the more mystic and spiritual side of religion. Here, in the tenets of these orphic sects, we have the doctrine of "original sin," the conception of life as a struggle between two opposing principles, and the promise of an ultimate redemption by the help of the divine power. And if this be taken in connection with the universal and popular belief in inspiration as possession by the G.o.d, we shall see that our original statement that the relation of man to the G.o.ds was mechanical and external in the Greek conception, must at least be so far modified that it must be taken only as an expression of the central or dominant point of view, not as excluding other and even contradictory standpoints.

Still, broadly speaking and admitting the limitations, the statement may stand. If the Greek popular religion be compared with that of the Christian world, the great distinction certainly emerges, that in the one the relation of G.o.d to man is conceived as mechanical and external, in the other as inward and spiritual. The point has been sufficiently ill.u.s.trated, and we may turn to another division of our subject.

Section 11. The Greek View of Death and a Future Life.

Of all the problems on which we expect light to be thrown by religion none, to us, is more pressing than that of death. A fundamental, and as many believe, the most essential part of Christianity, is its doctrine of reward and punishment in the world beyond; and a religion which had nothing at all to say about this great enigma we should hardly feel to be a religion at all. And certainly on this head the Greeks, more than any people that ever lived, must have required a consolation and a hope.

Just in proportion as their life was fuller and richer than that which has been lived by any other race, just in proportion as their capacity for enjoyment, in body and soul, was keener, as their senses were finer, their intellect broader, their pa.s.sions more intense, must they have felt, with peculiar emphasis, the horror of decay and death. And such, in fact, is the characteristic note of their utterances on this theme.

"Rather," says the ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in the world of shades, "rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that are no more." [Footnote: Od. xi 489.--Translated by Butcher and Lang.] Better, as Shakespeare has it,

"The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature,"

better that, on earth at least and in the sun, than the phantom kingdoms of the dead. The fear of age and death is the shadow of the love of life; and on no people has it fallen with more horror than on the Greeks. The tenderest of their songs of love close with a sob; and it is an autumn wind that rustles in their bowers of spring. Here, for example, is a poem by Mimnermus characteristic of this mood of the Greeks:

"O golden Love, what life, what joy but thine?

Come death, when thou art gone, and make an end!

When gifts and tokens are no longer mine, Nor the sweet intimacies of a friend.

These are the flowers of youth. But painful age The bane of beauty, following swiftly on, Wearies the heart of man with sad presage And takes away his pleasure in the sun.

Hateful is he to maiden and to boy And fashioned by the G.o.ds for our annoy."

[Footnote: Mimnermus, El. I.]

Such being the general view of the Greeks on the subject of death, what has their religion to say by way of consolation? It taught, to begin with, that the spirit does survive after death. But this survival, as it is described in the Homeric poems, is merely that of a phantom and a shade, a bloodless and colourless duplicate of the man as he lived on earth. Listen to the account Odysseus gives of his meeting with his mother's ghost.

"So spake she, and I mused in my heart and would fain have embraced the spirit of my mother dead. Thrice I sprang towards her, and was minded to embrace her; thrice she flitted from my hands as a shadow or even as a dream, and sharper ever waxed the grief within me. And uttering my voice I spake to her winged words:

"'Mother mine, wherefore dost thou not tarry for me who am eager to seize thee, that even in Hades we twain may cast our arms each about the other, and satisfy us with chill lament? Is it but a phantom that the high G.o.ddess Persephone hath sent me, to the end that I may groan for more exceeding sorrow?'

"So spake I, and my lady mother answered me anon:

"'Ah me, my child, luckless above all men, nought doth Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, deceive thee, but even in this wise it is with mortals when they die. For the sinews no more bind together the flesh and the bones, but the force of burning fire abolishes them, so soon as the life hath left the white bones, and the spirit like a dream flies forth and hovers near.'"

From such a conception of the life after death little comfort could be drawn; nor does it appear that any was sought. So far as we can trace the habitual att.i.tude of the Greek he seems to have occupied himself little with speculation, either for good or evil, as to what might await him on the other side of the tomb. He was told indeed in his legends of a happy place for the souls of heroes, and of torments reserved for great criminals; but these ideas do not seem to have haunted his imagination. He was never obsessed by that close and imminent vision of heaven and h.e.l.l which overshadowed and dwarfed, for the mediaeval mind, the brief s.p.a.ce of pilgrimage on earth. Rather he turned, by preference, from the thought of death back to life, and in the memory of honourable deeds in the past and the hope of fame for the future sought his compensation for the loss of youth and love. In the great funeral speech upon those who have fallen in war which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles we have, we must suppose, a reflection, more accurate than is to be found elsewhere, of the position naturally adopted by the average Greek. And how simple are the topics, how broad and human, how rigorously confined to the limits of experience! There is no suggestion anywhere of a personal existence continued after death; the dead live only in their deeds; and only by memory are the survivors to be consoled.

"I do not now commiserate the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your life has been pa.s.sed amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained most honour, whether an honourable death like theirs, or an honourable sorrow like yours, and whose days have been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life... Some of you are at an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their now lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man's counsels cannot be of equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have pa.s.sed their prime, I say: 'Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.'" [Footnote: Thuc. II. 44.--Jowett's translation.]

The pa.s.sage perhaps represents what we may call the typical att.i.tude of the Greek. To seek consolation for death, if anywhere, then in life, and in life not as it might be imagined beyond the grave, but as it had been and would be lived on earth, appears to be consonant with all that we know of the clear and objective temper of the race. It is the spirit which was noted long ago by Goethe as inspiring the sepulchral monuments of Athens.

"The wind," he says, "which blows from the tombs of the ancients comes with gentle breath as over a mound of roses. The reliefs are touching and pathetic, and always represent life. There stand father and mother, their son between them, gazing at one another with unspeakable truth to nature. Here a pair clasp hands. Here a father seems to rest on his couch and wait to be entertained by his family. To me the presence of these scenes was very touching. Their art is of a late period, yet are they simple, natural, and of universal interest. Here there is no knight in harness on his knees awaiting a joyful resurrection. The artist has with more or less skill presented to us only the persons themselves, and so made their existence lasting and perpetual. They fold not their hands, gaze not into heaven; they are on earth, what they were and what they are. They stand side by side, take interest in one another; and that is what is in the stone, even though somewhat unskilfully, yet most pleasingly depicted." [Footnote: From Goethe's "Italienische Reise." I take this translation (by permission) from Percy Gardner's "New Chapters in Greek History", p. 319.]

As a further ill.u.s.tration of the same point an epitaph may be quoted equally striking for its simple human feeling and for its absence of any suggestion of a continuance of the life of the dead. "Farewell" is the first and last word; no hint of a "joyful resurrection."

"Farewell, tomb of Melite; the best of women lies here, who loved her loving husband, Onesimus; thou wert most excellent, wherefore he longs for thee after thy death, for thou wert the best of wives.--Farewell, thou too, dearest husband, only love my children."

But however characteristic this att.i.tude of the Greeks may appear to be, especially by contrast with the Christian view, it would be a mistake to suppose that it was the only one with which they were acquainted, or that they had put aside altogether, as indifferent or insoluble, the whole problem of a future world. As we have seen, they did believe in the survival of the spirit, and in a world of shades ruled by Pluto and Persephone. They had legends of a place of bliss for the good and a place of torment for the wicked; and if this conception did not haunt their mind, as it haunted that of the mediaeval Christian, yet at times it was certainly present to them, with terror or with hope. That the Greek was not unacquainted with the fear of h.e.l.l we know from the pa.s.sage of Plato, part of which we have already quoted, where in speaking of the mendicant prophets who professed to make atonement for sin he says that their ministrations "are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of h.e.l.l, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us." And on the other hand we hear, as early as the date of the Odyssey, of the Elysian fields reserved for the souls of the favourites of the G.o.ds.