Part 16 (2/2)

Zeus and Apollo.--It is impossible here to enter specially on the wors.h.i.+p of the individual G.o.ds. Two of the G.o.ds, however, the same who even in Homer stand above the level of the rest, still maintain that superiority. Zeus draws to himself more and more all the attributes of pure deity; his name comes more and more to stand simply for ”G.o.d,” as if there were no other. He is the father of G.o.ds and men; goodness and love are natural to him. He is the supreme Ruler and Disposer, whose word is fate and whose ways pious thought feels called to justify; but he is also the Saviour, to whom every one may appeal. He is the source of all wisdom; all revelations come from him. The other G.o.d who occupies a marked position is Apollo, the G.o.d of light and the prophet of his father Zeus. His oracle at Delphi was the most important in Greece; it was held to be the centre of the earth, and was a meeting-place for Greeks from every quarter. His priests exercised through the oracle a great influence on Greek life, and as their G.o.d required strict purity and truthfulness and was the inspirer of every kind of art and of none but n.o.ble purposes, the wors.h.i.+p of Apollo is one of the highest forms of Greek religion.

Change of the Greek Spirit in the Sixth Century B.C.--But the time was at hand when the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds of the poets was to prove, in spite of all that art had done for it, inadequate to meet the spiritual needs of Greece. Civilisation advances in the sixth century B.C. with immense rapidity; the Greeks, no longer prompted by any foreign influence, quickly learn to exercise their own powers, and to apply them in new directions. Life grows richer and deeper, new modes of sentiment appear, the nation grows more conscious of its unity, and at the same time the individual learns to value himself more highly and to a.s.sert himself more strongly. On one side thought awakes to an independent career and traditional beliefs are subjected to criticism; on the other spiritual needs are felt which the old wors.h.i.+p does not satisfy, and for which religion has to find new outlets.

It is far beyond our scope to deal with the religious movements of a people thus pa.s.sing into the self-conscious stage, and unfolding with unparalleled freshness and power all the various activities of the human mind. We can only point out a few of the lines of development which become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the rise of _rationalism_, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and to ask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflecting mind. Reason a.s.serts its right to judge of tradition; the doubter suggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn their attention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment.

This tendency is fatal to polytheism. As reason knows not G.o.ds but only G.o.d, the G.o.ds can only hold their place on condition that they are what G.o.d must be, and so they all tend to become alike in their character; attention is turned most of all to Zeus, the highest G.o.d, and when others are wors.h.i.+pped, it is as his prophets or delegates.

The poets of the fifth century reflect the conviction which all the higher minds of their country were now coming to hold, that the world is under the rule of one G.o.d. From this they are led to take up the questions of theodicy or of the principles of the divine government.

aeschylus and Sophocles, writing perhaps about the same time as the author of the Book of Job, are full of problems of this nature. Why is Prometheus, though the n.o.blest benefactor of the human race, doomed to undergo such sufferings? Why does a curse cleave to a certain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation?

What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in the hearts of all men, and human laws which sometimes contradict these older ones? Thus to the educated Greeks of the fifth century the old religion had in its essence pa.s.sed away. With unexampled rapidity had the journey here been traced which India made more slowly, which Egypt made at a very early period, but was not able to maintain, and which every people starting from polytheism must make if their religion is to prosper.

New Religious Feeling; the Mysteries.--But the conscience as well as the mind of Greece awakes at this period, and Greek religion becomes inspired with a deeper feeling. The simple objectivity of the Homeric spirit is gone in which man could frankly wors.h.i.+p beings like himself and not very far above himself. G.o.d at this time is growing greater and more awful, and man, less certain of himself, is beginning to feel a new sense of mystery and of shortcoming. Whether it was due to the anxiety and depression felt in Greece during the century before the Persian wars, or to foreign influences, or mainly to the natural growth of the Greek mind itself, religious phenomena of a new kind now appear. Sacrifices are heard of, which are not merely social reunions with the deity, but are intended to expiate some guilt or to remove some pollution. The sense of sin has arisen, which the Homeric world knows not, and gives a new colour to man's converse with the deity. Another new feature is the rise into prominence of cults in which man feels himself taken possession of and inspired by his G.o.d.

Some of these belonged to Asia Minor, the great centre of wors.h.i.+ps accompanied with ecstasy and frenzy, but some were of native growth.

In these the common man found a satisfaction which the stately ceremonial of the temples did not afford. The official religion had grown cold and distant; but in the wors.h.i.+p of Demeter or Dionysus, as afterwards of the Phrygian Cybele, the ”Great Mother” whom the Romans imported, the least educated could feel the joy of enthusiasm and of self-forgetting under the influence of the G.o.d, and could be closely identified with the object of wors.h.i.+p by performing acts in which the experience of the G.o.d was symbolically repeated.

The rapid rise of the wors.h.i.+ps of Demeter and Dionysus thus furnishes an instance of the law that a religion of intellect and of art is apt to be confronted, even when it appears to have overcome all obstacles, by a religion of feeling, in which all the fair progress that was made appears to be entirely set at naught. When the wors.h.i.+p of Zeus, Apollo, and Athene was coming to its highest splendour, these cults began to spread rapidly. They were originally peasant rites of unknown antiquity in Attica and Boeotia, in which, after the manner of rustic festivals, the coming of spring or the dying of the year were celebrated amid jest and song, and with certain prescribed actions in which the fortune of the G.o.d, corresponding to the season, was dramatically set forth. In spring Demeter, the mother G.o.ddess, received her daughter Persephone, who had left her for the winter; or in autumn Dionysus, the G.o.d of vegetation, was defeated by his enemies and driven away or torn in pieces. These wors.h.i.+ps, when developed and forming a prominent part of Greek religion, were called ”mysteries,” not because the knowledge of them was confined to few, but because some parts of them were transacted in deep silence, and were the objects of such awe and reverence that they were not spoken of. No one, moreover, could a.s.sist at these rites without being solemnly initiated after a period of probation and purification. Of the Eleusinian mysteries at least, which were the most widely diffused and which formed part of the state religion of Athens, ancient writers agree in their report that the course of training before admission was powerfully elevating and solemnising, so that the period of initiation was the highest point of the religious life.

It was a condition that the candidate should be pure in heart and not conscious of any crime. There was apparently no doctrinal instruction; everything was to be inferred from the spectacle. The mind was kept in a state of intense and devout expectation, knowledge and insight growing, it was held, as the time of admission came near.

Before the final act there came a period of fasting, then a march from Athens to Eleusis along the sacred way, which was studded with shrines; then a search for the lost G.o.ddess in the dark of a moonless night on the plains of Eleusis, and then at last admission to the brightly-lighted building. Here all the arts were enlisted to furnish a spectacle of unparalleled magnificence, during which the candidate was allowed to touch and kiss certain sacred objects of a simple nature, and repeated a solemn formula at his admission.

By partaking in these rites a man was believed to part with his former sins, to form a special union with the deity, in whose nature he was made to partake, and to be started on a career in which he could not fail to grow morally better. It is easy to see the immense superiority of this wors.h.i.+p to the official rites of the temples. The great point is that a new principle of religious a.s.sociation is here introduced. The tie which binds the wors.h.i.+pper to his G.o.d and to his fellow-wors.h.i.+ppers is no longer that of blood or of common political interests, but the higher one of a common spiritual experience. All Greeks were eligible for initiation at Eleusis. A man was not born into this circle, but entered it of his own free will and by means of voluntary effort and self-denial. A community of a higher order thus makes its appearance in Greek history, in which the limits of race and of locality are overstepped, and each is connected with the rest, because all have turned of their own voluntary motion to the same ideal centre. The a.n.a.logies between the community formed on the mysteries and the Christian Church are too obvious to need to be insisted on. The adversaries of Christianity a.s.serted that in the mysteries all the truths and the whole morality of that religion were to be found.

Religion and Philosophy.--But while the mysteries met to some extent the craving for a closer union with deity, another need which had long been growing in the Greek mind was to be satisfied in a very different manner. The Greek religion we have described had very little to offer in the way of doctrine. There are no sacred books in it, there is no theology, there is no religious instruction. When the mind of Greece awoke to intellectual life, and the demand was made for an explanation of the world, and for a view of the origin of things which should explain man to himself, the Greek religion was manifestly little fitted to meet such a demand. But man has everywhere looked to religion to do him this service, and a religion which is incapable of rendering it, or which like Buddhism explicitly refuses to take up the task, stands in a perilous position. If the shrine has no doctrine enabling man to understand the origin and the connection of things, he will seek such a doctrine elsewhere, and religion will have no control over it. Another alternative is that of Buddhism where in default of such a doctrine man is condemned to subside into intellectual apathy.

This, however, could never be the case with the Greeks, and their fate in this respect proved different from that of any other people.

After their intellectual awakening took place, and when they had begun to seek in every direction for a first principle of all things, never doubting that the world was a system of reason, but trying one key after another to unlock its secret, we find that religion itself became aware of the need of the times, and that the attempt was made, late in the day but with deep earnestness and great ability, to construct out of the myths a reasoned account of the origin of things. This was the aim of the Orphic poets. Orpheus, the mythical singer of Thrace, who charmed men and beasts with his songs on earth, had descended into Hades to fetch back his wife, who had been taken from him, and had beheld the secrets of the under-world. The school which was named after him dealt with the deepest problems, and sought to explain both the nature of the G.o.ds and the destiny of the human soul. It insisted strongly on the power and sole heads.h.i.+p of Zeus, in whom Greek religion had possessed from Homer downwards a figure fitted for a monotheistic position. ”Zeus is the head, Zeus the middle, from Zeus are all things made. He is male and female, he is the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven, the breath in all, the strength of fire, the root of the sea, sun, and moon. Zeus is the king, the progenitor of all things.” The G.o.d Dionysus also is placed by the Orphic writers at the head of the whole process of creation. The myth of his dismemberment and of the scattering of his ashes over the whole world is made to symbolise the great thought of the connection of all things with the same source of life.

Descriptions were also given, answering to the growing sense of personal responsibility, of the abodes of Hades and of the fate of souls there, and of the metempsychoses through which the soul must pa.s.s. This teaching had an influence which it is difficult to measure; it acted on the tragedians in their magnificent attempts to reform the beliefs of their country by making them moral; it is to be traced in Plato, it also found expression in the mysteries. In its own development it gave rise to a new phenomenon in Greek religion, that of itinerant preachers who went about appealing to individuals to take thought for the salvation of their souls, and also, strange to say, offering private charms and spells to put them on the right way of salvation.

But Greek religion was not thus to be reformed. It was not from the priests that the growth of the higher faith of Greece was to proceed, but from the philosophers. While much of the teaching of the philosophers was apparently negative and destructive of faith,--for Greece had her religious sceptics who turned the shafts of ridicule on existing beliefs, her Agnostics who considered that nothing certain could be affirmed about the G.o.ds, and even her secularists who held religion to be a mere invention of priests and rulers for their own purposes,--the course of Greek philosophy was, on the whole, constructive, even in matters of faith, and laboured to provide religion with a stable foundation in thought. In this great movement of the human mind the thinkers of Greece--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, to name no more--were working at the same problem which occupied the prophets of Israel, and building up the rule of one G.o.d, a Being supremely wise and good, source of all beauty, and the worker of all that is wrought in the universe, in place of the many fickle and weak deities who formerly bore sway. In many ways the schools of Greece were the forerunners of Christianity. As the Jews, carried far from their temple, form a new principle of religious a.s.sociation and learn to meet for the service of G.o.d, without any sacrifice, in pious mental exercises, so the Greeks, for whom their temples could do so little, form little communities of earnest seekers after truth under some teacher. The philosopher's discourse is held by students of the early Christianity of the West to be the model on which the Christian sermon was formed. Some of the schools even developed a true pastoral activity, exercising an oversight of their members, and seeking to mould their moral life and habits according to the dictates of true wisdom.

Thus there arose on Greek soil, after the temples had grown cold, what may truly be called a second Greek religion. It took possession of the Roman world, and was, when Christianity appeared, the prevailing form of religion among the more educated. Both in its outward forms of a.s.sociation, in its doctrine of G.o.d, which went through later developments very similar to those of Judaism, and in its concentration of thought on ethical problems and on the moral life of the individual, it powerfully prepared for Christianity. It was not a religion, for it had neither any historical root nor any belief and practice definite enough for the guidance of the common people. Yet Christianity could not have conquered the world without it.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, vol. ii., contains the first attempt to deal with Greek religion in the manner now required.

The Histories of Greece of Grote, Curtius, Abbott, and Holm.

Roscher, _Lexikon der griechischen, a Romischen Mythologie_.

Dyer, _The G.o.ds of Greece_.

Gardner and Jevons, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, 1895.

L. R. Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_, 1896-1907.

Nagelsbach, _die Homerische Theologie_.

Williamowitz, _Homerische Untersuchungen_.

G. Anrich, _das Antike Mysterienwesen_.

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