Five Stages of Greek Religion

He is only mentioned here as a standard of that characteristic quality in Hellenism from which the rest of this book records a downfall. One variant of a well-known story tells how a certain philosopher, after frequenting the Peripatetic School, went to hear Chrysippus, the Stoic, and was transfixed. 'It was like turning from men to Gods.' It was really turning from Greeks to Semites, from philosophy to religion, from a school of very sober professions and high performance to one whose professions dazzled the reason. 'Come unto me,' cried the Stoic, 'all ye who are in storm or delusion; I will show you the truth and the world will never grieve you more.'

Aristotle made no such profession. He merely thought and worked and taught better than other men. Aristotle is always surprising us not merely by the immense volume of clear thinking and co-ordinated knowledge of which he was master, but by the steady Sôphrosynê of his temper. Son of the court physician of Philip, tutor for some years to Alexander the Great, he never throughout his extant writings utters one syllable of flattery to his royal and world-conquering employers; nor yet one syllable which suggests a grievance. He saw, at close quarters and from the winning side, the conquest of the Greek city states by the Macedonian ethnos or nation; but he judges dispassionately that the city is the higher social form.

It seems characteristic that in his will, which is extant, after providing a dowry for his widow, Herpyllis, to facilitate her getting a second husband, and thanking her for her goodness to him, he directs that his bones are to be laid in the same grave with those of his first wife, Pythias, whom he had rescued from robbers more than twenty years before.[116:1]

Other philosophers disliked him because he wore no long beard, dressed neatly and had good normal manners, and they despised his philosophy for very similar reasons. It was a school which took the existing world and tried to understand it instead of inventing some intense ecstatic doctrine which should transform it or reduce it to nothingness.

It possessed no Open Sesame to unlock the prison of mankind; yet it is not haunted by that Oimôgê of Kynoskephalai. While armies sweep Greece this way and that, while the old gods are vanquished and the cities lose their freedom and their meaning, the Peripatetics instead of passionately saving souls diligently pursued knowledge, and in generation after generation produced scientific results which put all their rivals into the shade.[116:2] In mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, zoology, and biology, as well as the human sciences of literature and history, the Hellenistic Age was one of the most creative known to our record. And it is not only that among the savants responsible for these advances the proportion of Peripatetics is overwhelming; one may also notice that in this school alone it is assumed as natural that further research will take place and will probably correct as well as increase our knowledge, and that, when such corrections or differences of opinion do take place, there is no cry raised of Heresy.

It is the old difference between Philosophy and Religion, between the search of the intellect for truth and the cry of the heart for salvation. As the interest in truth for its own sake gradually abated in the ancient world, the works of Aristotle might still find commentators, but his example was forgotten and his influence confined to a small circle. The Porch and the Garden, for the most part, divided between them the allegiance of thoughtful men. Both systems had begun in days of discomfiture, and aimed originally more at providing a refuge for the soul than at ordering the course of society. But after the turmoil of the fourth century had subsided, when governments began again to approach more nearly to peace and consequently to justice, and public life once more to be attractive to decent men, both philosophies showed themselves adaptable to the needs of prosperity as well as adversity. Many kings and great Roman governors professed Stoicism. It held before them the ideal of universal Brotherhood, and of duty to the 'Great Society of Gods and Men'; it enabled them to work, indifferent to mere pain and pleasure, as servants of the divine purpose and 'fellow-workers with God' in building up a human Cosmos within the eternal Cosmos. It is perhaps at first sight strange that many kings and governors also followed Epicurus. Yet after all the work of a public man is not hindered by a slight irony as to the value of worldly greatness and a conviction that a dinner of bread and water with love to season it 'is better than all the crowns of the Greeks'. To hate cruelty and superstition, to avoid passion and luxury, to regard human 'pleasure' or 'sweetness of life' as the goal to be aimed at, and 'friendship' or 'kindliness' as the principal element in that pleasure, are by no means doctrines incompatible with wise and effective administration. Both systems were good and both in a way complementary one to another. They still divide between them the practical philosophy of western mankind. At times to most of us it seems as though nothing in life had value except to do right and to fear not; at others that the only true aim is to make mankind happy. At times man's best hope seems to lie in that part of him which is prepared to defy or condemn the world of fact if it diverges from the ideal; in that intensity of reverence which will accept many impossibilities rather than ever reject a holy thing; above all in that uncompromising moral sensitiveness to which not merely the corruptions of society but the fundamental and necessary facts of animal existence seem both nauseous and wicked, links and chains in a system which can never be the true home of the human spirit. At other times men feel the need to adapt their beliefs and actions to the world as it is; to brush themselves free from cobwebs; to face plain facts with common sense and as much kindliness as life permits, meeting the ordinary needs of a perishable and imperfect species without illusion and without make-believe. At one time we are Stoics, at another Epicureans.

But amid their differences there is one faith which was held by both schools in common. It is the great characteristic faith of the ancient world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully intelligible to modern men; faith in the absolute supremacy of the inward life over things external. These men really believed that wisdom is more precious than jewels, that poverty and ill health are things of no import, that the good man is happy whatever befall him, and all the rest. And in generation after generation many of the ablest men, and women also, acted upon the belief. They lived by free choice lives whose simplicity and privation would horrify a modern labourer, and the world about them seems to have respected rather than despised their poverty. To the Middle Age, with its monks and mendicants expectant of reward in heaven, such an attitude, except for its disinterestedness, would be easily understood. To some eastern nations, with their cults of asceticism and contemplation, the same doctrines have appealed almost like a physical passion or a dangerous drug running riot in their veins. But modern western man cannot believe them, nor believe seriously that others believe them. On us the power of the material world has, through our very mastery of it and the dependence which results from that mastery, both inwardly and outwardly increased its hold. Capta ferum victorem cepit. We have taken possession of it, and now we cannot move without it.

The material element in modern life is far greater than in ancient; but it does not follow that the spiritual element is correspondingly less. No doubt it is true that a naval officer in a conning-tower in a modern battle does not need less courage and character than a naked savage who meets his enemy with a stick and a spear. Yet probably in the first case the battle is mainly decided by the weight and accuracy of the guns, in the second by the qualities of the fighter. Consequently the modern world thinks more incessantly and anxiously about the guns, that is, about money and mechanism; the ancient devotes its thought more to human character and duty. And it is curious to observe how, in general, each tries to remedy what is wrong with the world by the method that is habitually in its thoughts. Speaking broadly, apart from certain religious movements, the enlightened modern reformer, if confronted with some ordinary complex of misery and wickedness, instinctively proposes to cure it by higher wages, better food, more comfort and leisure; to make people comfortable and trust to their becoming good. The typical ancient reformer would appeal to us to care for none of those things (since riches notoriously do not make men virtuous), but with all our powers to pursue wisdom or righteousness and the life of the spirit; to be good men, as we can be if we will, and to know that all else will follow.

This is one of the regions in which the ancients might have learned much from us, and in which we still have much to learn from them, if once we can shake off our temporal obsessions and listen.

NOTE

As an example it is worth noticing, even in a bare catalogue, the work done by one of Aristotle's own pupils, a Peripatetic of the second rank, Dicaearchus of Messene. His floruit is given as 310 b. c. Dorian by birth, when Theophrastus was made head of the school he retired to the Peloponnese, and shows a certain prejudice against Athens.

One of the discoveries of the time was biography. And, by a brilliant stroke of imagination Dicaearchus termed one of his books Βίος Ἑλλαδος, The Life of Hellas. He saw civilization as the biography of the world. First, the Age of Cronos, when man as a simple savage made no effort after higher things; next, the ancient river-civilizations of the orient; third, the Hellenic system. Among his scanty fragments we find notes on such ideas as πάτρα, φρατρία, φυλή, as Greek institutions. The Life of Hellas was much used by late writers. It formed the model for another Βίος Ἑλλαδος by a certain Jason, and for Varro's Vita Populi Romani.

Then, like his great master, Dicaearchus made studies of the Constitutions of various states (e. g. Pellene, Athens, and Corinth); his treatise on the Constitution of Sparta was read aloud annually in that city by order of the Ephors. It was evidently appreciative.

A more speculative work was his Tripoliticus, arguing that the best constitution ought to be compounded of the three species, monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic, as in Sparta. Only then would it be sure to last. Polybius accepted the principle of the Mixed Constitution, but found his ideal in the constitution of Rome, which later history was to prove so violently unstable. Cicero, De Republica, takes the same line (Polyb. vi. 2-10; Cic. De Rep. i. 45; ii. 65). Dicaearchus treated of similar political subjects in his public addresses at Olympia and at the Panathenaea.

We hear more about his work on the history of literature, though his generation was almost the first to realize that such a subject had any existence. He wrote Lives of Philosophers—a subject hitherto not considered worth recording—giving the biographical facts followed by philosophic and aesthetic criticism. We hear, for example, of his life of Plato; of Pythagoras (in which he laid emphasis on the philosopher's practical work), of Xenophanes, and of the Seven Wise Men.

He also wrote Lives of Poets. We hear of books on Alcaeus and on Homer, in which latter he is said to have made the startling remark that the poems 'should be pronounced in the Aeolic dialect'. Whatever this remark exactly meant, and we cannot tell without the context, it seems an extraordinary anticipation of modern philological discoveries. He wrote on the Hypotheses—i. e. the subject matter—of Sophocles and Euripides; also on Musical Contests, περὶ Μουσικῶν ἀγώνων, carrying further Aristotle's own collection of the Didascaliae, or official notices of the production of Tragedies in Athens. The book dealt both with dates and with customs; it told how Skolia were sung, with a laurel or myrtle twig in the hand, how Sophocles introduced a third actor, and the like.

In philosophy proper he wrote On the Soul, περὶ ψυχῆς. His first book, the Corinthiacus, proved that the Soul was a 'harmony' or 'right blending' of the four elements, and was identical with the force of the living body. The second, the Lesbiacus, drew the conclusion that, if a compound, it was destructible. (Hence a great controversy with his master.)

He wrote περὶ φθορᾶς ἀνθρώπων, on the Perishing of Mankind; i. e. on the way in which large masses of men have perished off the earth, through famine, pestilence, wild beasts, war, and the like. He decides that man's most destructive enemy is Man. (The subject may have been suggested to him by a fine imaginative passage in Aristotle's Meteorology (i. 14, 7) dealing with the vast changes that have taken place on the earth's surface and the unrecorded perishings of races and communities.)

He wrote a treatise against Divination, and a (satirical?) Descent to the Cave of Trophonius. He seems, however, to have allowed some importance to dreams and to the phenomena of 'possession'.

And, with all this, we have not touched on his greatest work, which was in the sphere of geography. He wrote a Περίοδος γῆς, a Journey Round the Earth, accompanied with a map. He used for this map the greatly increased stores of knowledge gained by the Macedonian expeditions over all Asia as far as the Ganges. He also seems to have devised the method of denoting the position of a place by means of two co-ordinates, the method soon after developed by Eratosthenes into Latitude and Longitude. He attempted calculations of the measurements of large geographic distances, for which of course both his data and his instruments were inadequate. Nevertheless his measurements remained a well-known standard; we find them quoted and criticized by Strabo and Polybius. And, lastly, he published Measurements of the Heights of Mountains in the Peloponnese; but the title seems to have been unduly modest, for we find in the fragments statements about mountains far outside that area; about Pelion and Olympus in Thessaly and of Atabyrion in Rhodes. He had a subvention, Pliny tells us (N. H. ii. 162, 'regum cura permensus montes'), from the king of Macedon, probably either Cassander or, as one would like to believe, the philosophic Antigonus Gonatas. And he calculated the heights, so we are told, by trigonometry, using the δίοπτρα, an instrument of hollow reeds without lenses which served for his primitive theodolite. It is an extraordinary record, and illustrates the true Peripatetic spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

IV

THE FAILURE OF NERVE

Any one who turns from the great writers of classical Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering, and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions; an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve.

Now this antithesis is often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against this exaggeration; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly based on fact. The historical reasons for it are suggested above, in the first of these essays.

My description of this complicated change is, of course, inadequate, but not, I hope, one-sided. I do not depreciate the religions that followed on this movement by describing the movement itself as a 'failure of nerve'. Mankind has not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads to the fuller and deeper knowledge of the world: the patient and sympathetic study of the good citizen who lives in it, or the ecstatic vision of the saint who rejects it. But probably most Christians are inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure, without a contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly attain the religious life. I can imagine an historian of this temper believing that the period we are about to discuss was a necessary softening of human pride, a Praeparatio Evangelica.[124:1]

I am concerned in this paper with the lower country lying between two great ranges. The one range is Greek Philosophy, culminating in Plato, Aristotle, the Porch, and the Garden; the other is Christianity, culminating in St. Paul and his successors. The one is the work of Hellas, using some few foreign elements; the second is the work of Hellenistic culture on a Hebrew stock. The books of Christianity are Greek, the philosophical background is Hellenistic, the result of the interplay, in the free atmosphere of Greek philosophy, of religious ideas derived from Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. The preaching is carried on in Greek among the Greek-speaking workmen of the great manufacturing and commercial cities. The first preachers are Jews: the central scene is set in Jerusalem. I wish in this essay to indicate how a period of religious history, which seems broken, is really continuous, and to trace the lie of the main valleys which lead from the one range to the other, through a large and imperfectly explored territory.

The territory in question is the so-called Hellenistic Age, the period during which the Schools of Greece were 'hellenizing' the world. It is a time of great enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high importance to history. It is a time full of great names: in one school of philosophy alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius. Yet, curiously enough, it is represented in our tradition by something very like a mere void. There are practically no complete books preserved, only fragments and indirect quotations. Consequently in the search for information about this age we must throw our nets wide. Beside books and inscriptions of the Hellenistic period proper I have drawn on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the like for evidence about their teachers and masters. I have used many Christian and Gnostic documents and works like the Corpus of Hermetic writings and the Mithras Liturgy. Among modern writers I must acknowledge a special debt to the researches of Dieterich, Cumont, Bousset, Wendland, and Reitzenstein.

The Hellenistic Age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative Anarchists sometimes long for, a tabula rasa, on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life—what Herodotus would call their 'Historiê'. For, as we have seen in the last essay, it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. Now a religious belief that is scientifically preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life before it. Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshipping. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden.

This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological gods. But the Polis too, as we have seen in the last essay, fell with the rise of Macedon. It fell, perhaps, not from any special spiritual fault of its own; it had few faults except its fatal narrowness; but simply because there now existed another social whole, which, whether higher or lower in civilization, was at any rate utterly superior in brute force and in money. Devotion to the Polis lost its reality when the Polis, with all that it represented of rights and laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot, who might, of course, be a hero, but might equally well be a vulgar sot or a corrupt adventurer.

What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the Polis is not our immediate concern. In the realm of thought, on the whole, the Polis triumphed. Aristotle based his social theory on the Polis, not the nation. Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, and we still use his language. Rome herself was a Polis, as well as an Empire. And Professor Haverfield has pointed out that a City has more chance of taking in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges than a Nation has of making men of alien birth its compatriots. A Jew of Tarsus could easily be granted the civic rights of Rome: he could never have been made an Italian or a Frenchman. The Stoic ideal of the World as 'one great City of Gods and Men' has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the Nation.

What we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from, say, the Peripatetics to the Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history. A soil once teeming with wild weeds was to all appearance swept bare and made ready for new sowing: skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of herbs and plants and tended the garden sedulously. But the bounds of the garden kept spreading all the while into strange untended ground, and even within the original walls the weeding had been hasty and incomplete. At the end of a few generations all was a wilderness of weeds again, weeds rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful, with a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming here and there in the tangle of them. Does that comparison seem disrespectful to religion? Is philosophy all flowers and traditional belief all weeds? Well, think what a weed is. It is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation which the earth sends up of herself, which lives and will live without the conscious labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive with difficulty; the weeds are what conquer us.

It has been well observed by Zeller that the great weakness of all ancient thought, not excepting Socratic thought, was that instead of appealing to objective experiment it appealed to some subjective sense of fitness. There were exceptions, of course: Democritus, Eratosthenes, Hippocrates, and to a great extent Aristotle. But in general there was a strong tendency to follow Plato in supposing that people could really solve questions by an appeal to their inner consciousness. One result of this, no doubt, was a tendency to lay too much stress on mere agreement. It is obvious, when one thinks about it, that quite often a large number of people who know nothing about a subject will all agree and all be wrong. Yet we find the most radical of ancient philosophers unconsciously dominated by the argument ex consensu gentium. It is hard to find two more uncompromising thinkers than Zeno and Epicurus. Yet both of them, when they are almost free from the popular superstitions, when they have constructed complete systems which, if not absolutely logic-proof, are calculated at least to keep out the weather for a century or so, open curious side-doors at the last moment and let in all the gods of mythology.[129:1] True, they are admitted as suspicious characters, and under promise of good behaviour. Epicurus explains that they do not and cannot do anything whatever to anybody; Zeno explains that they are not anthropomorphic, and are only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all-ruling Unity; both parties get rid of the myths. But the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous principle. The general consensus of humanity, they say, shows that there are gods, and gods which in mind, if not also in visual appearance, resemble man. Epicurus succeeded in barring the door, and admitted nothing more. But the Stoics presently found themselves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic school, of more dangerous elements still.

I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most radical schools. On the whole both of them fought steadily and strongly against the growth of superstition, or, if you like to put it in other language, against the dumb demands of man's infra-rational nature. The glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness; the glory of the Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, never to have yielded one inch of ground to the common foe.

The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things—that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.

Let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being influenced by normal human motives. In general, they helped the good and punished the bad, though doubtless they tended too much to regard as good those who paid them proper attention and as bad those who did not.

Speaking broadly, what was left when this conception proved inadequate? If it was not these personal gods who made things happen, what was it? If the Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down by the gods so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people, while letting the good escape, what was the explanation of its falling? The answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You can either say: 'It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense: 'It fell because of a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. It was bound to fall.'

There is no real difference in these statements, at least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them. Both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific view of the world. But in the Hellenistic Age, when Greek thought was spreading rapidly and superficially over vast semi-barbarous populations whose minds were not ripe for it, both views turned back instinctively into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians. It was not, of course, Zeus or Apollo who willed this; every one knew so much: it happened by Chance. That is, Chance or Fortune willed it. And Τύχη became a goddess like the rest. The great catastrophes, the great transformations of the mediterranean world which marked the Hellenistic period, had a strong influence here. If Alexander and his generals had practised some severely orthodox Macedonian religion, it would have been easy to see that the Gods of Macedon were the real rulers of the world. But they most markedly did not. They accepted hospitably all the religions that crossed their path. Some power or other was disturbing the world, that was clear. It was not exactly the work of man, because sometimes the good were exalted, sometimes the bad; there was no consistent purpose in the story. It was just Fortune. Happy is the man who knows how to placate Fortune and make her smile upon him!

It is worth remembering that the best seed-ground for superstition is a society in which the fortunes of men seem to bear practically no relation to their merits and efforts. A stable and well-governed society does tend, speaking roughly, to ensure that the Virtuous and Industrious Apprentice shall succeed in life, while the Wicked and Idle Apprentice fails. And in such a society people tend to lay stress on the reasonable or visible chains of causation. But in a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which is habitually the seat of a war between alien armies, the ordinary virtues of diligence, honesty, and kindliness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape destruction is to win the favour of the prevailing powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter the despot, placate the Fate or Fortune or angry god that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence. The Hellenistic period pretty certainly falls in some degree under all of these categories. And one result is the sudden and enormous spread of the worship of Fortune. Of course, there was always a protest. There is the famous