Christianity and Greek Philosophy / or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles

by B. F. Cocker

[Footnote 149: ][ (return) ] Max Müller, "Science of Language," 2d series, p. 433.

It is an obvious truth, attested by the voice of universal consciousness as revealed in history, that the human mind can never rest satisfied within the sphere of sensible phenomena. Man is impelled by an inward necessity to pass, in thought, beyond the boundary-line of sense, and inquire after causes and entities which his reason assures him must lie beneath all sensible appearances. He must and will interpret nature according to the forms of his own personality, or according to the fundamental ideas of his own reason. In the childlike subjectivity of the undisciplined mind he will either transfer to nature the phenomena of his own personality, regarding the world as a living organism which has within it an informing soul, and thus attain a pantheistic conception of the universe; or else he will fix upon some extraordinary and inexplicable phenomenon of nature, and, investing it with supernatural significance, will rise from thence to a religious and theocratic conception of nature as a whole. An intelligence--a mind within nature, and inseparable from nature, or else above nature and governing nature, is, for man, an inevitable thought.

It is equally obvious that humanity can never relegate itself from a supernatural origin, neither can it ever absolve itself from a permanent correlation with the Divine. Man feels within him an instinctive nobility. He did not arise out of the bosom of nature; in some mysterious way he has descended from an eternal mind, he is "the offspring of God." And furthermore, a theocratic conception of nature, associated with a pre-eminent regard for certain apparently supernatural experiences in the history of humanity, becomes the foundation of governments, of civil authority, and of laws. Society can not be founded without the aid of the Deity, and a commonwealth can only be organized by Divine interposition. "A Ceres must appear and sow the fields with corn." And a Numa or a Lycurgus must be heralded by the oracle as

"Dear to Jove, and all who sit in the halls of the Olympus."

He must be a "descendant of Zeus," appointed by the gods to rule, and one who will "prove himself a god." These divinely-appointed rulers were regarded as the ministers of God, the visible representatives of the unseen Power which really governs all. The divine government must also have its invisible agents--its Nemesis, and Themis, and Diké, the ministers of law, of justice, and of retribution; and its Jupiter, and Juno, and Neptune, and Pluto, ruling, with delegated powers, in the heavens, the air, the sea, and the nethermost regions. So that, in fact, there exists no nation, no commonwealth, no history without a Theophany, and along with it certain sacred legends detailing the origin of the people, the government, the country itself, and the world at large. This is especially true of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Their primitive history is eminently mythological.

Grecian polytheism can not be otherwise regarded than as a poetico-historical religion of myth and symbol which is under-laid by a natural Theism; a parasitical growth which winds itself around the original stem of instinctive faith in a supernatural Power and Presence which pervades the universe. The myths are oral traditions, floating down from that dim; twilight of poetic history, which separates real history, with its fixed chronology, from the unmeasured and unrecorded eternity--faint echoes from that mystic border-land which divides the natural from the supernatural, and in which they seem to have been marvellously commingled. They are the lingering memories of those manifestations of God to men, in which he or his celestial ministers came into visible intercourse with our race; the reality of which is attested by sacred history. In all these myths there is a theogonic and cosmogonic element. They tell of the generation of the celestial and aërial divinities--the subordinate agents and ministers of the Divine government. They attempt an explanation of the genesis of the visible universe, the origin of humanity, and the development of human society. In the presence of history, the substance of these myths is preserved by symbols, that is, by means of natural or artificial, real or striking objects, which, by some analogy or arbitrary association, shall suggest the idea to the mind. These symbols were designed to represent the invisible attributes and operations of the Deity; the powers that vitalize nature, that control the elements, that preside over cities, that protect the nations: indeed, all the agencies of the physical and moral government of God. Beneath all the pagan legends of gods, and underlying all the elaborate mechanism of pagan worship, there are unquestionably philosophical ideas, and theological conceptions, and religious sentiments, which give as meaning, and even a mournful grandeur to the whole.

Whilst the pagan polytheistic worship is, under one aspect, to be regarded as a departure from God, inasmuch as it takes away the honor due to God alone, and transfers it to the creature; still, under another aspect, we can not fail to recognize in it the effort of the human mind to fill up the chasm that seemed, to the undisciplined mind, to separate God and man--and to bridge the gulf between the visible and the invisible, the finite and the infinite. It was unquestionably an attempt to bring God nearer to the sense and comprehension of man. It had its origin in that instinctive yearning after the supernatural, the Divine, which dwells in all human hearts, and which has revealed itself in all philosophies, mysticisms, and religions. [¹⁵⁰] This longing was stimulated by the contemplation of the living beauty and grandeur of the visible universe, which, to the lively fancy and deep feeling of the Greeks, seemed as the living vesture of the Infinite Mind,--the temple of the eternal Deity. In this visible universe the Divinity was partly revealed, and partly concealed. The unity of the all-pervading Intelligence was veiled beneath an apparent diversity of power, and a manifoldness of operations. They caught some glimpses of this universal presence in nature, but were more immediately and vividly impressed by the several manifestations of the divine perfections and divine operations, as so many separate rays of the Divinity, or so many subordinate agents and functionaries employed to execute the will and carry out the purposes of the Supreme Mind. [¹⁵¹] That unseen, incomprehensible Power and Presence was perceived in the sublimity of the deep blue sky, the energy of the vitalizing sun, the surging of the sea, the rushing wind, the roaring thunder, the ripening corn, and the clustering vine. To these separate manifestations of the Deity they gave personal names, as Jupiter to the heavens, Juno to the air, Neptune to the sea, Ceres to the corn, and Bacchus to the vine. These personals denoted, not the things themselves, but the invisible, divine powers supposed to preside over those several departments of nature. By a kind of prosopopœia "they spake of the things in nature, and parts of the world, as persons--and consequently as so many gods and goddesses--yet so as the intelligent might easily understand their meaning, that these were in reality nothing else but so many names and notions of that one Numen,--divine force and power which runs through all the world, multiformly displaying itself." [¹⁵²] "Their various deities were but different names, different conceptions, of that Incomprehensible Being which no thought can reach, and no language express." [¹⁵³] Having given to these several manifestations of the Divinity personal names, they now sought to represent them to the eye of sense by visible forms, as the symbols or images of the perfections of the unseen, the incomprehensible, the unknown God. And as the Greeks regarded man as the first and noblest among the phenomena of nature, they selected the human form as the highest sensible manifestation of God, the purest symbol of the Divinity. Grecian polytheism was thus a species of mythical anthropomorphism.

[Footnote 150: ][ (return) ] The original constitution of man is such that he "seeks after" God Acts xvii. 27. "All men yearn after the gods" (Homer, "Odyss." iii. 48).

[Footnote 151: ][ (return) ] "Heathenism springs directly from this, that the mind lays undue stress upon the bare letter in the book of creation; that it separates and individualizes its objects as far as possible; that it places the sense of the individual part, in opposition to the sense of the whole,--to the analogia fidei or spiritus which alone gives unity to the book of nature, while it dilutes and renders as transitory as possible the sense of the universal in the whole.... And as it laid great stress upon the letter in the book of nature, it fell into polytheism. The particular symbol of the divine, or of the Godhead, became a myth of some special deity."--Lange's "Bible-work," Genesis, p. 23.